Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  The notion of finding planets within our atoms is of course something of a cliché—it’s the kind of thing that screenwriters have characters talk about in order to indicate that the characters are stoned. But I was talking about finding our own planet down there. This is a notion that I dubbed “circular scale.”

  Over the years, I’ve found that every possible idea can be found in some pre-existing piece of science fiction—the corpus of SF is our own homegrown Library of Babel. But at the time I imagined I was the first to think of circular scale.

  In one of her journal notes, Susan Sontag says that, in order to be a writer, you need to be a nut and a moron. A nut to be obsessed enough with an idea to spend months writing a book about it, and a moron to think other people will want to read the book! I had these personality traits in place from the start.

  Spacetime Donuts included another element: a cadre of characters able to plug their minds directly into their society’s Big Computer. In some ways this prefigures William Gibson’s epochal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where console cowboys jack their brains into the planetary computer net that Gibson dubbed cyberspace. In proto-cyberpunk fashion, my characters in Spacetime Donuts take drugs, have sex, listen to rock and roll, and are enemies of the establishment.

  I was initially unable to sell Spacetime Donuts. I had no real idea of where to begin, but I noticed that Bantam Books was publishing a series of SF novels labeled as “Fredrik Pohl Selections.” I’d always loved Pohl’s writing—most especially the novels Wolfbane and The Space Merchants that he’d co-authored with Cyril Kornbluth. So I sent him my manuscript in care of Bantam Books. He actually looked at the book and sent back a friendly rejection letter saying something like, “This is a fun read, but it’s not science fiction.”

  I wasn’t entirely discouraged. My hope was that older writers like Pohl simply didn’t realize how drastically SF was about to change.

  A young guy named Barry Caplan ran a bookstore called Sundance Books on the main street of Geneseo. Barry was a rabid fan of the Grateful Dead, he had long blonde hair down to his ass, and he encouraged people to call him Sundance. Even so, he was every inch a businessman, and very competent at running his store. He had a good collection of countercultural literature and science fiction. One day I found a new SF magazine called Unearth for sale on his shelves.

  It turned out that Unearth was printing only stories by previously unpublished SF authors, which seemed like a perfect opportunity for me. At first I was going to sell them a short story called “Enlightenment Rabies,” but then, after some correspondence, it turned out they would be willing to run my novel Spacetime Donuts in three installments, the first of which appeared in the summer of 1978. I think they even paid me a couple of hundred bucks. It was an incredible rush to see my name on the lurid cover of a digest-sized pulp magazine. I imagined I was off and running as a real science fiction writer.

  But Unearth went out of business after only publishing two of the three installments. And I still couldn’t sell the novel as a book.

  I was beginning to grasp how long a row a writer has to hoe.

  My parents had bought a cabin near Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and all through the years 1970 through 1985, we went up there for a couple of weeks in the summer, sometimes with brother Embry turning up with his wife and two children. Pop was still an Episcopal minister in northern Virginia, where he’d taken over his own church in a town called Reston. He still owned his old Champion Wood company near Louisville, Kentucky, and in the early 1970s, the business was doing fine. Pop was prospering. As well as the cabin, we had an old-style varnished wooden motorboat.

  We’d tool along the fractal coast, with its coves within coves and islands beyond islands. A little beach lay near our cabin, and we’d often spend the day there with the kids. The water was unspeakably cold and pellucid. If I dove deep, I’d find striped, snaky brittle sea-stars. Half-inch long baby lobsters scuttled at the water’s edge, little gray fellows, nearly transparent. Their full-grown aunts and uncles were collected by the Maine lobstermen, puttering around in their little boats. At night the water would glow with phosphorescent sea life.

  At our Maine cabin, there was a long flight of slippery wooden stairs leading up from the dock where we tied up our boat. In 1974, I noticed that my father was having trouble on these stairs, he said they made his chest hurt. And then, back in Virginia, at age sixty, he had a heart attack. In order to replace his clogged coronary arteries, his surgeon did bypass surgery on him.

  This operation was still quite new. They opened up his whole chest, leaving a vertical scar at least a foot long. The drugs and the trauma had a bad effect on Pop. He became disoriented—once on the phone he told me that he could see American troops burning Vietnamese huts from his hospital room window, although, near the end of this conversation he said he knew it was a hallucination. When he got back home he had tortuous, freaky dreams that set him to crying out in his sleep.

  He had to return to the hospital a couple of times until his heart condition stabilized. During the Christmas season of 1974, we were visiting my parents with the three kids, and I snuck newborn Isabel into the hospital under my coat to cheer Pop. A half hour later, the night nurse came upon Pop happily cradling the baby.

  She smiled and said, “Congratulations.”

  The brush with death seemed to change Pop. He grew a white beard. He’d show me his scar and run his finger along it like a zipper. “This is where they opened me up,” he’d say in a tight voice.

  His sense that he was living on borrowed time made him unhappy with his lot, and less patient with my mother. He began casting around for some kind of vindication for his career, some dramatic achievement to mark his passage.

  “All my life I’ve had the feeling that something really big was going to happen to me,” Pop told me. “I feel like I have to give it a chance.” I sympathized with this—I knew a little about career struggle from all my job and grant applications over the years, and from my ongoing attempts to get my math papers and my literary writings published.

  In 1976, Pop ran for the bishop of Virginia, and when that didn’t work out, he unexpectedly resigned from the ministry and ran for the Virginia state legislature. We were rooting for him, wanting him to be happy, but that election didn’t work out either. I was sad to see world so incompliant with my aging father’s dreams.

  My brother Embry and his family had moved back to Louisville in 1976. He’d taken over the running of Pop’s Champion Wood Products, which had unexpectedly fallen upon hard times. Embry did a good job at turning the business around. I myself was completely out of the picture as far as the business went—I’d never taken any interest in it.

  At loose ends after his sudden retirement, Pop began putting some of his energy back into his old wood business—not that Embry really wanted Pop to be breathing down his neck. And then in 1977, completely out of the blue, Pop decreed that he and Mom should abandon Virginia and move back to Louisville too.

  Perhaps Mom suspected the real reason, but it would take another year until Embry and I figured it out. Pop was planning to leave Mom, and he wanted to get her situated near my brother so she’d have someone to take care of her. At some level this might have been a price that my father figured my brother owed him in exchange for the family company.

  Mom, Pop and Sylvia’s parents were all at our house in 1977, for what was to be our last Christmas in Geneseo.

  It was a classic holiday—Georgia got a Barbie Townhouse that she’d been longing for, Rudy got a Lionel electric train on a loop of track, and Isabel had a nice red fire-engine that she could pedal. Sylvia’s father bought us a new TV, and when I shorted it out by spilling a scotch and soda through the vent on top, I took it back to the giant discount store it had come from, and they gave me a new one. Sylvia was in a sewing group with the manager’s wife, which must have helped.

  Mom and Pop seemed edgy with each other—no matter what one of them said, the other would bitterly disagree
. I was worried about them. I wanted them to be happy. Pop kept joking about wanting to drink Arpad’s hair tonic. Pop was in fact drinking pretty heavily. Given that I liked to drink, it was convenient to have my father bringing wine and whiskey into the house, but it was also depressing. At some level, we both felt it was wrong to drink together, but we did it anyway.

  Sylvia and I took the grandparents out to go sledding with the kiddies one afternoon, but that wasn’t a big success, as the temperature was fifteen below zero. The breeze coming up from the valley felt like the air from a freezer, or like the fumes from dry ice.

  But in spite of my parents’ tensions, that Christmas was generally cozy. I loved the pleasant physicality of lying on the rug like a dogfather in his den, with the kids crawling on me, poking and wrestling. Little Rudy and I liked to squeeze under the tree, staring up at the wooden figurines and the colored lights. Sylvia was great at assembling presents for us all, wrapping them up like works of art, writing cute labels, arranging them under the tree. By now a number of ornaments had migrated from our parents’ houses to ours.

  Mom was endlessly considerate with the children. She’d relax in their presence, forgetting her worries, reading books to them, handing them toys, smiling and nodding.

  In the spring of 1978, Pop left Mom for Priscilla Ames, the woman who’d managed his campaign for the Virginia State Legislature. We all knew her—she was a pleasant, well-meaning person who’d faced a terrible tragedy. Her teenage daughter had been murdered right outside her house, and the killer had never been caught. Her own marriage had broken up in the wake. Priscilla was a parishioner of Pop’s. He’d counseled her, and they’d grown close. She thought he was a hero, and of course he appreciated that.

  It was now that my brother Embry and I understood the motivation for Pop’s move to Louisville.

  It was a terrible time, with lots of drama. Mom was heartbroken, devastated. She said she’d been thrown out like an old dish. I couldn’t help but hold this against my father and his new woman. Loyal to my mother as I was, I considered Priscilla to be stiff and plastic.

  Meanwhile, Pop and Priscilla were lying low on a prolonged road trip in the Cadillac that Pop had bought himself. He had an eight-track tape system in the car with a bunch of Kenny Rogers tapes. He liked to say that his white beard made him look like Hemingway—or like Kenny.

  The math department at Geneseo was quite dysfunctional, with two power groups sniping at each other during our unbelievably boring departmental meetings, held in the asphalt-tiled basement once a week. Professors can be so petty and vindictive—and the sad thing is how tiny are the stakes that they’re fighting over.

  In 1978, the economy was in a recession, and the Geneseo administrators were talking about eliminating faculty positions. I was coming up for a tenure decision—either they’d have to fire me or they’d have to let me stay forever. It wasn’t looking that good for me, even though I’d published a book and several papers and the students liked me.

  I had the longest hair of any professor on campus. I hung around with the English and philosophy professors. A few of the senior math faculty disliked me. One of them, a guy named Don Trasher, took me to task for using my favorably-reviewed book, Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, in my geometry class—for which my students were giving me top ratings. No good deed goes unpunished!

  “This one particular problem at the end of Chapter Three, it has a calculus symbol in it,” Trasher said reprovingly. “And calculus isn’t a prerequisite for our geometry course.”

  Later he became chairman of the math department—and they went back to teaching the geometry course out of books with no pictures. Feh!

  In the end, I was denied tenure at Geneseo. At age thirty-two, I was out of my first job—although I did have the option of staying on for one final year as a lame duck. But then, miraculously, one of my endless job and grant applications bore fruit.

  Sylvia found out about it one afternoon in June, 1978, when she came back with the kids from the swimming-pool at Letchworth Park. I was on a ladder, painting our weather-peeled white clapboards.

  “We’re selling the house?” she cried. “You got a new job?”

  Yes! On the strength of my math papers about infinity, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany had invited me for a year as a visiting scholar at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Heidelberg.

  Sylvia was happy about the impending change. Although cozy and rustic, Geneseo was also somewhat dull and small. The climate was brutal. There weren’t a wide range of possibilities there, in terms of her finding a career. And she didn’t want to see me zombie-march through a final lame duck year of work at SUCAS Geneseo. We’d seen other professors suffer through this, and it was a demoralizing sight, like seeing someone being pilloried in the stocks.

  Instead we’d be swanning off to Europe. Sylvia had grown up there, and her parents still lived in Geneva. So, fine! The children weren’t as enthused. At this point, all they knew of the world was Geneseo, so it was hard for them to contemplate such a great change. But they, too, felt some excitement and curiosity about the great adventure.

  Everything began happening very fast—and in the space of two months, we’d done the big move.

  We sold our house to some neighbors who’d always had their eye on it.

  A local kid bought our car with the flames. He said he planned to leave my paint-job intact. As he put it, “Someone told me it’s, uh, Pop art?”

  We had a yard sale, and packed our remaining goods into a rented van. Meanwhile, down in Louisville, Embry walled off part of the Champion Wood warehouse for me to store our stuff.

  Sylvia and the kids flew to her parents in Geneva, and I drove the van alone to Louisville before going to join them. Driving that ungainly van away from our emptied house, I burst into tears.

  “I love you,” I said to the old home. “I love you.”

  But then I was free, and out on the road.

  Transrealism

  We felt uprooted in Heidelberg in the fall of 1978, like dust in the wind. Our nine-year-old Georgia was especially sad about leaving her friends and the comfortable world that she’d just begun to figure out. She’d talk about it at night when I tucked her in. Her voice was small, high, anxious, brave.

  “It’s okay,” I’d say, hugging her. “It’s going to be okay.”

  At the start, Germany felt like a maze. I had to make numerous trips to the immigration office to get our visas in order—I’d hang around there for most of a day, waiting for a final orgiastic flurry of paper-stamping. Thock, thock, thump—how good it felt.

  We had some trouble finding our apartment—there was a guy who was counseling arriving scholars from overseas, but my boyhood knowledge of German wasn’t fully restarted yet. I only understood about half of what the advisor said, or less than that.

  If I’d actually understood what the advisor was saying, I would have grasped that the cheapest and best place for us to live would be in the so-called University Guest House, an apartment complex that the university ran for its visiting foreign scholars.

  But somehow we ended up renting the top floor of an ancient stone house on a steep slope overlooking the Nekar river near Heidelberg—and we had to pay some realtor a whole month’s extra rent as commission for having told us the address. In any case, it was an awesome old building with a great view.

  The landlord and his family lived downstairs. He pretended to be nice, but he was stingy. It was tough getting him to turn our radiators on. His wife was an imposing woman named Jutta, with an operatic voice that always seemed ready to break into a scream of fury. I was glad I wasn’t married to her.

  Sometimes we’d find hedgehogs in the garden—cute little beasts who could roll themselves up into something like a spiky croquet ball.

  Trying to find out way into the culture, we tried going to a service at the Lutheran church across the street, but it was as depressing as a Bergmann movie. When it was time for the se
rmon, the minister stared stonily down at the congregation for quite a long time. And then, still in silence, he began reprovingly wagging his finger.

  There was an English language church at the U.S. Army base, but that was worse. The preacher there was an evangelical type, and he interspersed the service with renditions of country-music-style gospel songs, complete with acoustic guitar.

  One song in particular nearly sent our whole family into convulsions of laughter. “Jaaaaysus,” brayed the singer. “Maaaster. Saaavior. There’s just somethin’ about that name.” To keep a straight face, I had to think about hospitals and funerals, not any funerals in particular, as I hadn’t really been to any—just generalized funerals.

  We abandoned that Army version of our home culture and tried to act like Germans. We made frequent trips into downtown Heidelberg via one of the buses that ran along the river—or by driving the rather horrible little used car that we’d bought. The unctuous car salesman had called Sylvia, “Frau Professor Doktor von Bitter Rucker.”

  “Where am I in that list?” she asked me.

  As usual, so far as the outer world was concerned, the main person was the husband with the official job. It was unjust, yes, and Sylvia was indeed as important as me. And she worked just as hard.

  An especially difficult thing for Sylvia was that the German school days only lasted till noon. And then the three kids were home for lunch, with big homework assignments that we had to help them with in the afternoons and evenings. By now I’d remembered the German I’d learned during my year in the Black Forest, but even I found the homework hard.

  Oh well—we were only guest-workers, low-ranking immigrants, and so what if our children didn’t do all their homework. Really, we didn’t worry all that much about the school, or even about my job. It was just a grant, and there were no worries about tenure.