Mad Professor

by Rudy Rucker

  Wendel made up his mind: he would go after his dad. He leaned forward, pressed his fingers against the navel, thinking of A Pentagon sliding up over the warped neck that led to the sphere of extra space. His hands looked warped, as if they were underwater. They tingled—not unpleasantly. He pushed his arms in after and then, with a last big breath of air, his head. How would it feel to stop breathing?

  It was a while till Wendel came back to that question. The first feeling of being inside the pocket was one of falling—but this was just an illusion, he was floating, not falling, and he had an odd, dreamlike ability to move in whatever direction he wanted to, not that the motion seemed to mean much.

  There was a dim light that came from everywhere and nowhere. Spread out around him were little mirror-Wendels, all turning their heads this way and that, gesturing and–Yes–none of them breathing. It was like flying underwater and never being out of breath, like being part of a school of fish. The space was patterned with veils of color like seaweed in water. Seeing the veils pass, he could tell that he was moving, and as the veils repeated themselves he could see that he was moving in a great circle. He was like A Pentagon circling around and around his bulged-up puffball of space. But where was Dad? He changed the angle of his motion, peering around for distinctions in the drifting school of mirror shapes.

  The motion felt like flying, now, with a wind whipping his hair, and he found a new direction in which the space veils seemed to curve like gossamer chambers of mother of pearl, sketching a sort of nautilus-spiral into the distance. Looking into that distance, that twist of infinity, and feeling the volume of sheer potentiality, he felt the first real wave of bubble-rush. His fatigue evaporated in the searing light of the rush, a rippling, bone-deep pleasure that seemed generated by his flying motion into the spiral of the pocket.

  “Whuh-oaaaah …” he murmured, afraid of the feeling and yet liking it. So this was why Dad came here. Or one of the reasons. There was something else too . . . something Dad never quite articulated.

  The bubble-rush was so all-consuming, so shimmeringly insistent, he felt he couldn’t bear it. It was simply too much; too much pleasure, and you lost all sense of self; and then it was, finally, no better than pain.

  Wendel thought, “Stop!” and his motion responded to his will. He stopped where he was–an inertialess stop partway into the receding nautilus spiral. The bubble-rush receded a bit, damped back down to a pleasing background glow.

  “Dad!” he yelled. No response. “DAD!” His voice didn’t echo; he couldn’t tell how loud it was. There was air in here to be sucked in and expelled for speaking. But when he wasn’t yelling, he felt no need to take a breath. Like a vampire in his grave.

  He tried to get some kind of grasp of the shape of this place. He thought with an ugly frisson of fear: Maybe I’m already lost. How do I find my way back out?

  Could A Pentagon slide back out the neck into the ball? Or would he have to wait for the ball to burn out its energy and flatten back into space?

  There were no images of Wendel up ahead, where the patterns of the space seemed to twirl like a nautilus. It must be a tunnel. If pockets were dangerous, the tunnels from pocket to pocket were said to be much worse. But he knew that’s where Dad had gone.

  He moved into the tunnel, flying at will.

  The pattern haze ahead of him took on flecks of pink, human color. Someone else was down there. “Dad?”

  He leaned into his flying—and stopped, about ten yards short of the man. It wasn’t Dad. This man was bearded, emaciated, sallow . . . which Dad could be, by now, in the time-bent byways of this place. But it wasn’t his Dad, it was a stranger, a man with big, scared eyes and a grin that looked permanently fixed. No teeth: barren gums. The man sitting was floating in fetal position, arms around his knees.

  “Ya got any grub on yer, boy?” the man rasped. A UK accent. Or was it Australian?

  “Um—” He remembered he had two-thirds of a power bar of some kind in a back pocket. Probably linty by now, but likely this ’slug wouldn’t care. “You want this?”

  He tossed over the power bar, and the pocket-slug’s eyes flashed as he caught it, fairly snatched it out of the air. “Good on ya, boy!” He gnawed on the linty old bar with his callused gums.

  It occurred to Wendel that at some point he might regret giving away his only food. But supposedly you didn’t need to eat in here. Food was just fun for the mouth, or a burst of extra energy. Right now the scene made him chuckle to himself—the bubble-rush was glowing in him; it made everything seem absurd, cartoonlike, and marvelous.

  Between sucking sounds, the ’slug said, “My name’s Threakman. Jeremy Threakman. ’ow yer ’doin.”

  “I don’t know how I’m doing. I’m looking for my Dad. Rothman Bell. He’s about . . .”

  “No need, I know whuh ’e looks like. Seen ’im go through ’ere.” Threakman looked at Wendel with his head cocked. A sly look. “Feelin’ the ’igh, are ya? Sure’n you are. Stoned, eh boy? Young fer it.”

  “I feel something—what is it? What causes it?”

  “Why, it’s a feelin’ of being right there in yerself, beyond all uncertainty about where yer might go, and fully knowin’ that yer hidden and on your own. And that’ll get you ’igh. Or some say. Others, like me, they say it’s the Out-Monkeys that do it.”

  “The Out . . . what?”

  “Out-Monkeys,” said Threakman. “What I call ’em. Other’s call ’em Dream Beetles, one ’slug in here used ter call ’em Turtles—said he saw a turtle thing with a head like a screw-top bottle without the cap and booze pouring out, but he was a hardcore alkie. Others they see’m more like lizards or Chinese dragons. Dragons, beetles, monkeys, all hairy around the edges, all curlin’ out at yer—it’s a living hole in space, mate, and you push the picture you want on it. Me and the smartuns calls ’em Out-Monkeys cause they’re from outside our world.”

  “You mean—from another planet?”

  “No mate, from the bigger universe that this one is kinder inside. They got more dimensions than we do. They’re using DeGroot and the nanomatrix—they give all that ta us to pull us in, mate. The Out-Monkeys are drizzlin’ pockets down onto us, little paradise balls where yer don’t have to breathe nor eat an’ yer can fly an’ there’s an energy that stim-yer-lates that part of yer brain, don’t ya see. The Out-Monkeys want us all stony in here. Part of their li’l game, innit? Come on, show yer somethin. The Alef. Mayhap yer’ll see yer Da.”

  In a single spasmodic motion Threakman was up, flying off in some odd new direction through the silvery scarves of the enclosing spaces—leaving a rank scent in the air behind him. Wendel whipped along after him, remembering not to breathe. Soon, if it could be thought of as soon, they came to a nexus where the images around them thickened up into an incalculable diversity. It was like being at the heart of a city in a surveillance zone with a million monitors, but the images weren’t electronic, they were real, and endlessly repeated.

  “The Alef has tunnels to all the pockets,” said Threakman. “Precious few of us knows about it.”

  In some directions, he saw pockets with people writhing together—he realized, with embarrassment, that they were copulating. But was that really sex? He made himself look away. In another pocket, people were racing around one another in a blur like those electro-cyclists in the Cage of Death he’d seen at a carnival. Off down the axis of another tunnel, people clawed at one another, in a thronging melange of combat; you couldn’t tell one from another, so slick was the blood. But the greatest number of the pockets held solitary ’slugs, hanging there in self-absorbed pleasure, surrounded by the endless mirror-images of themselves. And one of these addicts was Dad, floating quite nearby.

  “For ’im, mate,” said Threakman as Wendel flew off toward his father.

  Not quite sure of his aim, he hit Dad with a thud—and Dad screamed, thrashing back from him. Stopping himself in space to glare shame and resentment at Wendel—like a kid caught masturbating.
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  “What are you doing?” demanded Wendel. “You call this research?”

  “Okay, you really want to know?” snapped his father. “I’m looking for Jena. Mom.”

  Wendel peered at his father; his Dad’s face, here, seemed more like the possibility of all possible Dad facial expressions, crystallized. It was difficult to tell whether he meant it. It might be bullshit. What was the saying? How do you know an addict is lying? When his lips are moving!

  But the possibility of seeing Mom made Wendel’s heart thud. “You think she’s still in here? Seriously, Dad?”

  “I think the Out-Monkeys got her. That’s what happens, you know. Some of the pockets float up—not ‘up’ exactly, but ‘ana’—”

  “To the shape above ‘Flatland,’” said Wendel.

  “Right,” said Dad. “We’re in their ‘Flatland’ relatively speaking. And I want to get up there and find her.”

  “But you’re just floating around in here. You’re on the goddamn nod, Dad. You’re not looking at all.”

  “Oh yes I am. I’m looking, goddammit. This happens to be just the right spot to stare down through the Alef and up along the Out-Monkeys’ tunnel. Not their tunnel, exactly. The spot where they usually appear. Where their hull touches us. I’m waiting for them to show up.”

  “The Devil in his motorboat,” said Wendel with a giggle. The bubble-rush was creeping back up on him. Dad laughed, too. They were thinking of the old joke about the guys in Hell, standing neck deep in liquid shit and drinking coffee, and one of them says, “Wal, this ain’t so bad,” and the other one says, “Yeah, but wait till—”

  “Here it comes,” said Dad, and it wasn’t funny anymore, for the space up ahead of them had just opened up like a blooming squash-flower, becoming incalculably larger, all laws of perspective broken, and an all-but-endless vista spreading out, a giant space filled with moving shapes that darted and wheeled like migrating flocks of birds. It was hard to think straight, for the high of the bubble space had just gotten much stronger.

  “The mothership,” said Threakman, who’d drifted down to join them. “Yaaar. Can you feel the rush off it? Ahr, but it’s good. Hello to yer, there, Da.” He gave a deep, loose chuckle. Everything was glistening and wonderful, as perfect as the first instant of Creation; and, as with that moment, chaos waited on the event horizon: chaos and terror.

  “Those shapes are the Out-Monkeys?” asked Wendel, his voice sounding high and slow in his ears. “They look like little people.”

  “Those little things are people,” said Dad. “They’re the pets.”

  “Livin’ decals on the mothership’s hull,” said Threakman. “Live decorations fer the Out-Monkeys. An antfarm for their window-box. Ah, yer’ll know it when you really see an Out-Monkey, Wendel. When ’e reaches out through the hull . . .”

  Then the space around them quivered like gelatin, and the cloud of moving people up ahead spiraled in around a shaky, black, living hole in space, a growing thing with fractal fringes, a three-dimensional Mandelbrot formation that, to Wendel, looked like a dancing, star-edged monkey made up of other monkeys, like the old Barrel of Monkeys toy he’d had, with all the little monkeys hooked together to make bigger monkeys that hooked together to make a gigantic monkey, coming on and on: a cross-section of a higher-dimensional alien, partly shaped by the Rorschach filter of human perception.

  Wendel thought: Out-Monkey? And the thing echoed psychically back at him, Out-Monkey! with the alien thought coming at him like a voice in his head, mocking, drawling, sarcastic, and infinitely hip.

  The Out-Monkey swelled, huge but with no real size to it in any human sense, and the fabric of space rippled with its motions—the Devil’s motorboat indeed—and Wendel felt his whole body flexing and wobbling like an image in a funhouse mirror. Beneath the space waves, a sinister undertow began tugging at him. Wendel felt he would burst with the disorientation of it all.

  “Dad—we’ve gotta go! Let’s get back to the world! Tell, him, Jeremy!”

  “No worries yet,” said Threakman grinning and flaring his nostrils as if to inhale the wild, all-pervading rush. “Steady as she goes, mate. Your Dad and me, we’ve had some practice with the Out-Monkeys. We can ’ang here a bit longer.”

  “Look at the faces, Wendel!” cried Dad. “Look for Jena!”

  Around the Out-Monkey orbited the people imprisoned on its vast bubble. They seemed to rotate around the living hole in space, caught up in the fractals that crawled around its edges: faces that were both ecstatic and miserable, zoned-out and hysterical.

  “There goes George Gravid,” said Dad, pointing. “The original guy from DeGroot.” Wendel stared, spotting a businessman in a black suit. And there, not too far from him were—Barley and Xiao-Xiao?

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Dad was chanting, and then he gave a wild laugh. “Yes! There she is! It’s Jena!” His laughter was cracked and frantic. “It’s Mom, Wendel! I knew I could find her!”

  Wendel looked—and thought he saw her. Looking hard at her had a telescopic effect, like concentration itself was the optical instrument, and his vision zoomed in on her face—it was his mom, though her eyes were blotted with silver, like the faddish contacs people wore in the World. All of those rotating around the Out-Monkey had silvered eyes, mirror-eyes endlessly looking into themselves.

  Torn, Wendel hesitated—and then the fractal leviathan swept closer—he felt something like its shadow fall over him, though there were no localized light sources here to throw shadows. It was, rather, as if the greater dimensional inclusiveness of the Out-Monkey overshadowed the limited-dimensional beings here, and you could feel its “shadow” in your soul. . . .

  “Dad!” Wendel shouted in panic, and his father yelled something back, but he couldn’t make it out—there was a torrent of white-noise crackle upwelling all around him in the growing “shadow” of the Out-Monkey. “Dad! We have to go!” shrieked Wendel.

  And then Dad plunged forward, arrowing in toward Mom, and Wendel felt himself on the point of a wild, uncontrolled tumble.

  “Ol’roit, mate,” said Threakman, grabbing Wendel’s arm and pulling him up short. “Keep yer ’ead now. Ungodly strong rush, innit? It’s ’ard not to go all the way in. But remember—if yer really want, yer can ’old back from its pullin’ field. Let’s ease in, nice and quietlike, and try and snag your Dad.”

  Wendel and Threakman inched forward—Wendel feeling the pull of the Out-Monkey as strong as gravity. Yet, just as Threakman said, you didn’t have to let it take you, didn’t have to let it pull you down into that swarming blackness of the Out-Monkey’s fractal membranes. Jeremy Threakman’s grip on his arm was solid as the granite spine of the planet Earth. Wretched, stinking Jeremy Threakman knew his way around the Out-Monkeys.

  Wendel stared in at Mom and Dad: they were swirling around one another, orbiting a mutual center of emptiness, just as they and the others orbited the greater center of emptiness within the higher-dimensional being. It reminded Wendel of a particular carnival ride, where people whirled in place on a metal arm, and their whirling cars were also whirled around a central axis.

  “Dad!”

  Dad looked at him—if it could be called looking. In the thrall of the Out-Monkey, it was more like he was going through the motions of turning his attention to Wendel, and that attention was represented by the image of an attentive paternal face. “Wendel, I don’t think I can get out! It’s snagging my . . .” His voice was lost in a surging crackle, a wave of static. Then: “. . . purple, thinking purple. . . .” Crackle. “. . . your mom! It wants us!”

  Wendel’s arm ached where Threakman clutched him. “We gotter go soon, mate!” said the scarred pocket-slug.

  Mom turned her attention toward Wendel too now—she was reaching for him, weeping and laughing. He wasn’t sure if it was psychic or vocal, but he heard her say: “We’re pets, Wendel!” Static. “Waterstriders penned in a corner of the pond.” His mother’s face was lit with unholy bliss. “Live bumper stic
kers.” A sick peal of laughter.

  There was another ripple in the space around them, and all of a sudden Mom and Dad were only a few feet away. Close enough to touch. Wendel reached out to them.

  “Come on, Mom! Take my hand! Jeremy and I—we can pull you out! You can leave if you want to!”

  How Wendel knew this, he wasn’t sure. But he knew it was true. He could feel it—could feel the relative energy loci, the possibility of pulling free, if you tried.

  “We can go home, Dad! You and me and Mom!”

  “Can’t!” came his Dad’s voice from a squirming gargoyle of his father with a fractal fringe.

  “Dad don’t lie to me! You can do it! Don’t lie! You can come . . . !”

  His arm ached so—but he waited for the answer.

  Wordlessly, his father emanated regret. Remorse. Shame. “Yes,” he admitted finally. “But I choose this. Mom and I … we want to stay here. Part of the gorgeous Out-Monkey. The eternal fractals.” Static. “. . . can’t help it. Go away, Wendel!”

  “Have a life, Wendel!” said Mom said. Severed versions of her face said it, severed different ways. “Don’t come back. The nanomatrix—you can melt it. Acid!” Huge burst of static. “Hurry up now. It heard me!”

  He felt it too: the chilling black-light search beam of the Out-Monkey’s attention, spotlighting him like an escaped prisoner just outside the wall. . .

  “No, Mom! Come back! Mom—”

  Mom and Dad swirled away from him, their faces breaking up into laughing, jabbering fractals. The white noise grew intolerably loud.

  “Gotter leave!” screamed Threakman in his ear. “Jump!”

  With an impulse that was as much resentment, of running away in fury, as it was a conscious effort, he leapt with Threakman away from the hardening grip of the Out-Monkey, and felt himself spinning out through the dimensions and down the tunnels, he and Threakman in a whirling blur, one almost blending with the other. He thought he caught a glimpse of Threakman’s memories, bleeding over in the strange ambient fields of the place from his companion’s mind: a father with a leather strap; a woman giving him his first blowjob in the backroom of a Sydney bar; working as a sailor; being mugged in London; a stout woman angrily leaving him. All this time Threakman was steering him through the bent spaces, helping him find his way back.