by Rudy Rucker
I recall a particularly harrowing evening at the 1993 Worldcon in San Francisco, when I was loudly haranguing the very sweet and likable Ellen Datlow for not buying a story of mine for Omni. Ow. I apologized to her and made friends again at the World Fantasy Con in Monterey 1998—my first sober con.
I don’t want to overdramatize my problem. On a day to day basis, I was still keeping myself fairly together. I was working and writing, and our family life was generally happy. But I was beginning to understand that I was on a gradual decline, and that one of these days I’d have to change. The change would in fact come in 1996.
While I was still at Autodesk in 1993, I started work on The Hacker and the Ants, a transreal novel about my experiences as a software engineer who’s working with virtual reality and artificial life programs.
The hero of my tale, a hapless programmer named Jerzy Rugby, becomes embroiled in a plot cooked up by his boss and by an evil realtor. Some virtual ant programs settle into the powerful computer chips embedded in people’s TVs, and the ants turn every TV show into computer graphics. Jerzy Rugby is charged with treason. But in the end he wins out—although he loses his wife.
The boss in The Hacker and the Ants was loosely inspired by John Walker himself. Fortunately Walker has a good sense of humor. He was quite fond of my book, and like many other hackers, he thought it offered a realistic glimpse into the Silicon Valley of the 1980s.
But Walker didn’t like that the boss character dies in my last chapter, so he wrote and posted a phantom extra chapter on his own website, www.fourmilab.ch. In Walker’s version, my boss character turns out to have faked his death, and is now free to explain to the awe-struck Jerzy Rugby what my novel’s machinations were really about. It’s pretty funny piece.
Eight years later, in 2002, I had a chance to revise The Hacker and the Ants for a second edition, and I brought it into line with the changes in computer science that had taken place in the intervening years. Although I didn’t include Walker’s version of the ending, I did have my main character, Jerzy Rugby, get back together with his wife.
Due in part to my consuming obsession with computer programming—and due in part to my drinking and pot-smoking—I hadn’t been getting along with Sylvia very well when The Hacker and the Ants first appeared in 1994. But by 2002, we were happy together again.
Reset
One by one our children finished high school and went off to college. When we drove Isabel to the University of Oregon for her freshman year in 1992, we felt the full impact of the empty nest.
On the drive home, Sylvia and I reflexively stopped for a hamburger in a fast food place. It was a custom we’d picked up from all those years with the kids. But now it was just the two of us, so what the hell were we doing in a McDonald’s? We realized we were done with that kind of food for good.
Sylvia and I soon found that, as empty nesters, we tended to be nicer to each other. With nobody else to turn to, it became very important to get along.
And, by now, there weren’t so many things to argue about. We had enough money, and Sylvia had found a good job teaching English as a Second Language at Evergreen Community College in San Jose. Over the coming years she moved up the ladder there to the point where her salary was about the same as mine—and she even became the head of her department. She was happy to have a career, and she loved working with her students.
Sylvia and I got to go to Japan with Isabel in August of 1993, when some Tokyo marketing guys set up a tour of paid lectures and bookstore signings for me. My science fiction books were very popular in Japan just then—they were all reading The Sex Sphere that year.
One night we went to Roppongi, a hip district of Tokyo, and had dinner with our guides. The meal featured a nice soup of frofuki daikon, which means “steambath radish.” Outside some street repairs were going on. The workers wore white gloves and tidy uniforms. The wall across the street bore a giant video screen showing—Billy Idol’s video of his song, “Cyberpunk.” Billy chest burst open, revealing wires. The men in white gloves gestured, waving us on by. My kind of SF was out in the world for real.
Isabel and I liked playing pachinko in Japan. We’d put a few bills into a machine and get a basket of ball bearings, and then dump them in a hopper and rapidly fire them into a steep, nearly vertical play area studded with nails and with high-scoring input hoppers here and there, and with a zillion lights and sounds. Going into a pachinko parlors was like getting inside a machine. Isabel scored big on a machine named Fever Powerful, and we whooped and yelled.
“Fever Powerful! All right!”
Some of the players looked at us with disapproval—we were noisy people of the wrong race. But most of them didn’t hear us, or didn’t care. The Japanese are into their pachinko machines like Vegas gambling addicts are into the slots.
Another day, the three of us had lunch in a teahouse near the famous Zen rock garden in Kyoto. The lunch was a pot of warm water with slabs of tofu, and a strainer for lifting them out. To spice it up we had a few beans, a piece of eggplant, and a pickled pepper. We sat on cushions on the tatami mat floor by an open paper door. Outside the door was a tiny pond with miniature trees and big carp in the pond. One of the carp jumped halfway out of the water.
“Yes!” said Isabel. “That right there happening was a haiku!”
Even though none of the kids lived at home anymore, they were still around. Georgia had graduated from college in 1991, and she was sharing a San Francisco apartment with three other women. Rudy was still studying engineering at nearby Berkeley. Sometimes we’d be included in the kids’ activities—they might invite us to one of their parties, or take us on an outing.
I recall a Halloween in 1994 when we went to San Francisco’s legendary Castro Street Parade with Georgia and her college friend Bethany. It was epic, with a vast crowd that surged and rippled like the contour lines of a cubic Mandelbrot set fractal. I saw bevies of tall, honking-voiced brides, and a reveler wearing a toilet seat for a necklace.
Georgia, always one for fanciful costumes, was dressed as a supermarket checker. She’d made herself a name tag saying “Lynne. Welcome to Happy Dollar.” Her hairdo included a wide bandeau and a lank pony tail. She’d crafted a little cardboard checkout counter to wear around her waist, complete with a plastic window in the cardboard to represent the scanner. Random boxes of merchandise were glued to the counter: cereal, Tampax, plastic knives, ramen noodles, and a bottle of beer. The cops took the beer away.
Sylvia was a prosperous witch in a pointed velvet hat, and I was a mountain climber from the Hollow Earth, dressed in my old knickers from the Zermatt days, with my face painted green and yellow. Rudy was there too, wearing slitted sunglasses, his yellow Mohawk hairdo, and a fireman’s reflective silver protective jacket.
Rudy had progressed from heavy metal to punk rock, and in those days, you never knew from one time to next what his hair color or style would be. To some extent we’d stopped commenting on it, although every now and then he’d still get a rise out of us—like when he mowed three bald lanes onto his head to create a double Mohawk with blue-dyed clown puffs on the sides.
The night of that Halloween parade in the Castro, Sylvia and I slept on the living room floor of Georgia’s apartment. I’d brought our carved pumpkin along from home, and it was lit on the floor next to us, bathing the room in throbbing orange light. It was a cozy scene. And then Rudy showed up to sleep there too. By now it seemed like a rare and exciting jamboree to have several family members sleeping under one roof.
I’d taken up backpacking, and sometimes Rudy or Isabel would go camping with me, usually in the hills above the Big Sur coast. Rudy and I would conduct intricate, ramifying negotiations—not exactly arguments—about which path to take or where to pitch the tent or how to build the fire. The old father-son thing, and now I was on the other side. I enjoyed the action.
Our family had been admiring some photo books by the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who goes into fields and arranges natural o
bjects into fleeting works of art. On one spring campout, Rudy and I created a two-part Goldsworthy.
Part 1. We pitched our tent on a hilltop with no running water, next to a patch of snow. Rudy made a huge ball out of the snow and flipped it off a cliff, putting a wild spin on the ball that sent fragments of snow flying from its equator.
Part 2. We trekked to a campsite where the Big Sur River runs into the Pacific. We gathered a lot of driftwood beside the river, made a Buddha-sized campfire and we flung a blazing log high into the air above the river. The rapidly twirling log spat off sparks—a perfect match for the spinning snowball.
My parents were on their way out.
A couple of years after we’d moved to California, in 1989, my mother had a stroke while riding up to Maine with a woman friend of hers. Not knowing what else to do, Mom’s friend had left her in a hospital in Hartford, Connecticut.
I flew out to be with Mom for a few days, spending my nights in a room the size of a closet at a nearby hotel. It was oddly relaxing to be there, with nothing to do but care for my mother. I’d sit by her bed, and accompany her to physical therapy. She was somewhat paralyzed on one side.
The other people getting rehab were in terrible shape—a boy with a fresh bandage where his foot had been, a woman learning to walk with an artificial leg, and a man with a cut in his head like the gash of an axe, learning to stand. All of them moved at a snail’s pace—but the human life force was there, never giving up, taking steps to recover from the most devastating wounds.
On my last morning, I was supposed to be at the airport by 6:30, so I got up extra early to see Mom one more time. She was awake, lying there in the faint dawn light, her head on her pillow, her hair just like always, smiling up at me, her face webbed with fine wrinkles. She looked so beautiful, like a Rembrandt, but incalculably more precious.
Pop and I didn’t discuss Mom’s stroke. I think he felt too guilty about the divorce to discuss her. And I was reluctant to start up a conversation that might end with me berating him. I was still angry at him for leaving her. But at the same time, I continued to love and admire him. In short, I was conflicted.
Pop showed up to visit us in California in 1990, and we two went to play golf at Pebble Beach—the first and probably the only time I’ll play there. I paid for it, wanting to give the old man a treat. He was pretty broke by now, and he loved golf.
At first we were grouped as a foursome with a couple of gung-ho pseudo-jocks who’d yell curses whenever they hit the ball and it didn’t fly two hundred yards and land on the green. As if normally that’s what did happen on their first drive off the tee. And they had a caddy who said snotty things to me, duffer that I am.
“Oops, sir, you hooked that ball into the water hazard.” Pause. “The Pacific Ocean, sir.”
I told Pop I didn’t want to play with those three guys, and good old Pop walked over and told them to go ahead without us. It was nice, for that moment, to be a boy again, to have my father protecting me. That was just about the very last time he was able to do that for me.
And then it was just Pop and me on the Pebble Beach course. The rest of our round was all fun. A day to remember. Pop was talking about the meaning of life in the same eager interested way as always, like an overgrown boy.
Mom had some more strokes in 1990 and she had to go around in a wheelchair. And then she went into a nursing home, and in 1991, a final stroke put her into a coma. We flew out there and sat with her for a few days. For awhile she was in the hospital, but there wasn’t much hope of her ever waking up. She’d always said she didn’t want to be kept on life support indefinitely, so we brought her back to the nursing home to die. It was hard.
We’d sit with her and talk to her, not that she was responding. But it seemed like the flow of our voices might comfort her. I remembered being a kid sleeping in the back seat of the family car, with the peaceful murmur of my parents in front.
The last night of Mom’s life, a Saturday night, July 13, 1991, her breathing was irregular. She’d take five or twelve regular breaths and then not breathe for a beat and then take a deep breath and let out a long exhale. Like a big sigh—heartbreaking. She died a few hours later, alone in the middle of the night.
Embry and I went to the funeral home to have a final look at her. We didn’t want to at first, but we realized that we needed to. After some formalities, the funeral director led us downstairs. Mom was on a narrow roller bed that was at an angle to the wall, with a sheet pulled up to her chin. She was so very white. I, the younger boy, the more spontaneous one, stepped forward and touched her cheek and her forehead. Her skin was cold; no living person is ever that cold. She had funny kind of expression on her face, like “See?” or “I told you so.”
“It just ends in tears,” is what Mom used to say when we boys would do something reckless. Life ends in tears.
Her ashes went into an octagonal cherrywood box that we buried in a little corner by two low brick walls right in the lawn of St. Francis in the Fields, the church I grew up in, the church where Mom took me to nursery school, kindergarten, and grades one through three, the church where I was confirmed and Pop was ordained, the church Embry still goes to. A little corner of the churchyard. Mom’s Louisville friends were at the funeral, aged and decrepit.
“Your mother was such an elegant woman,” Niles’s mother told me. “So warm and real.” Niles himself was living in Alabama.
I felt a weariness with being the head of a family. It was so much easier those many years ago when it was only me and Mom, and I would sit on her lap and she would hug me after lunch.
Pop’s health declined over the next three years. He was still with that same woman, Priscilla. He had a couple of strokes and in 1993 he ended up in a nursing home near where he lived in Reston, Virginia. The very last time I saw him, early in July, 1994, we quarreled. He was nagging me to quit drinking, and I got mad at him, pointing out that he’d ruined his marriage with his drinking and unfaithfulness, and he started crying.
And then, on August 1, 1994, he was dead too.
A number of strangers made speeches at Pop’s funeral, but the words went past Embry and me. The people speaking were local politicians, all of them praising Pop, but not the sandy, freckly Pop we knew as our father. No priest officiated, and there were no real prayers. At some point, two undertakers in suits rolled back a piece of Astroturf and they put the box with Pop’s ashes down into a pre-dug hole with a dry clayey pile of Virginia dirt next to it. There were two worn planks by the hole to keep it from crumbling. A little ant was on one plank moving around. A leafy stem of chickweed was waving at the edge of the hole. Then a white woman sang “Amazing Grace” and it was over.
My feelings were all in tangle. I felt lonely, afraid and overshadowed by doom. I felt sorrow over Pop’s mistakes, and regret for my impatience with him. I felt tenderness towards his eternally boyish self, and nostalgia for our happy times.
I remembered Pop having told me that when his own father died, he felt overcome by anger—and now I understood. Anger at who? At the ruthless, invisible reaper who’d taken my parents away—and who’d be back one day for me.
A couple of months after Pop’s funeral, our dog Arf got hit by a car and I buried him in our back yard. While I was digging the four-foot-deep hole I cried a lot. Somehow I hadn’t been able to get the tears out when Pop died, but now I could.
As I buried Arf, at some level, I had to smile too, as I was remembering a story that Pop liked to tell.
One day a little boy comes home from school, and his mother tells him, “Pop’s dead.”
And the boy is crying and crying, and his mother says, “Oh, you poor dear. Just remember this: even though your father’s gone, he’s looking down on us from heaven.”
The boy glances up. “Pop’s dead? I thought you said Pup’s dead! The boy laughs and dries his eyes. “Can Pup and I go out and play?”
For years it bothered me that Priscilla hadn’t arranged to give Pop a proper burial s
ervice out of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer—even though he’d been a minister. Embry and I had been too dazed to think of talking this over with her before the burial.
Finally, twelve years later, in 2006, Embry and I would make a pilgrimage to the gravestone and read the service.
“You were right, Pop,” I’d say after that reading, and Embry would echo me.
“Right about everything, Pop.”
In June of 1995, I got tenure at San Jose State, and was promoted to full professor. It’s too bad Pop didn’t live to see it. All my adult life he’d wistfully been asking me when I was going to get tenure. He’d always ask me that, and whether I was as well-known as Michael Dorris, my high-school friend who’d also become a writer.
I could never quite tell if Pop kept asking about Dorris to bug me, or if he just couldn’t understand how our old driving-group partner had managed to pull ahead of me. Another unanswered question: Could I have gone back to being Mike’s best pal, if only we’d been thrown together more? Could I have possibly cheered Mike up enough to prevent him from killing himself? Some things never get resolved. Life and death roll on.
Anyway—I was really happy about being a professor with tenure. When I was starting out at Rutgers, I’d never expected it would take me nearly thirty years.
For that matter, I’d never imagined how long and arduous my writing career would be. No matter what I tried, my books remained in the so-called midlist zone—they didn’t bomb in such a way as to make me unpublishable, but I wasn’t writing best-sellers. Still, I kept at it. Writing was my first love and my true career.
And what about my other occupations? I’d say mathematics was my higher knowledge, my inspiration. Programming was a hobby or maybe a vice. And teaching was a day job.
In 1995, a year had gone by with no novel even started, and now it was time to get back on the path. I decided to return to the world of Software and Wetware, and began working on Freeware, which would eventually appear in 1997.
