by Rudy Rucker
One day in August I came home from work to find Val on the couch, sobbing into her hands. Droog was sitting on the rug, anxiously watching her.
“Oh, Val. What is it, dear?”
“That glowing dot, Jim—that’s what’s inside me.”
“What do you mean?” I said, the hair rising on the back of my neck. I sat down next to her and put my arms around her. “Don’t make yourself crazy, Val. Relax. It’s just the pregnancy wearing you down.”
“It’s not a pregnancy!” she cried, pushing me away. Her voice was loud and harsh, and her face was blotchy from weeping. “That little spark flew inside me, Jim! From your horrible machine. It’s not a baby, it isn’t. I want it out!”
“It’s...it’s been six months, Val. Are you sure that—”
“Take me to the doctor,” she sobbed. “Take me now!”
“Okay, fine. I can phone for an appointment. Or—”
“Now! I can’t stand another minute!”
Our obstetrician was a calm, competent Vietnamese woman who had an office near the hospital. I phoned and told her that we were having a crisis, although I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Dr. Ngyuen told us to come straight to the emergency room.
The aides got Val into a gown and laid her one of those high hospital beds on wheels. A gurney. Ugly word. After a quick moment alone with Val, Dr. Ngyuen came over to me. Something was horribly wrong.
“We’re going into surgery, Mr. Oster,” said the doctor.
“What’s wrong? Will Val be okay?”
Dr. Ngyuen reeled off some medical terminology. And then something about a tumor. My heart was pounding so hard I could hardly understand a word.
“I don’t want to,” Val was sobbing from her rolling bed. “I don’t want to.” An intern was injecting drugs into her arm.
“I love you,” I told Val, my eyes stinging. I leaned over and kissed her. “You’ll make it through this, darling. I’ll be right here.”
“It’s all your fault,” she said.
And then they wheeled her down the hall.
I sat in the waiting room. I’d look away from the clock for as long as I could stand it, and when I looked back, the minute hand wouldn’t have moved at all. I prayed, wanting to connect to the one mind I’ve always imagined to be glowing behind the scenes. But what if Val and the baby died? I looked back at the clock. It still hadn’t moved. Hundreds of people came and went, hundreds of names were called. And then, all at once, it was my turn.
Dr. Nguyen looked shaken, unsure. “I’m very sorry,” she said. “Val’s gone.”
“But—”
Dr. Nguyen led me into a windowless office off the waiting room and got me to sit down.
“It was a very aggressive cancer,” said the doctor, slowly rubbing her hands together—as if wanting to wash them. “A florid pathology.”
“But where’s Val? Can I see her? And what about the baby?”
“Incinerated,” said Dr. Nguyen, pausing after the word. “As a biohazard measure. I’m very sorry, Mr. Oster. I know this is difficult for you.”
“Incinerated? Like trash? Val and our baby?” I was on my feet. “My whole life? Incinerated?”
“Please, Mr. Oster. We’ll get you a relaxant. You should call someone to help get you home.”
I threw back my head and howled.
Three days later, I had a funeral for Val. Chang and Droog helped me dig a hole for Val’s ashes in the sandy soil of a bluff above Four Mile Beach where she and I had camped. One of Val’s friends was studying to be a rabbi, and she said some traditional words. I filled the hole and set a little pyramid-shaped rock on top. And then the mourners came to my cottage for a reception. My landlords, Dick and Diane Simly, stayed away, even though I’d invited them.
I served bread and lentil soup, the same as the meal I’d had with Val the night she’d gotten pregnant. And Val’s friends brought some other stuff, like cold cuts and roast chicken. Funeral meats. I absolutely couldn’t believe this was happening.
We sat in my back yard, drinking and smoking a little pot, with the guests chatting, and me not saying much. Whenever I tried to talk, my voice broke. To try and keep it together, I kept focusing on tiny visual details like a pebble or a twig, imagining that God and maybe Val were hiding inside.
And then Skeeves, of all people, showed up. With the barest of nods, he walked past me, got himself a beer in my kitchen, and started nosing around on the side porch where I kept my defunct scanning-tunneling microscope. I could dimly see him through the screen, touching things, picking things up. Skeeves rarely held still.
A minute later he was back outside, with his beer in one hand and his other hand in the pocket of his baggy shorts.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him in a low voice as he came near. “You didn’t know Val.”
“But I’m involved,” said Skeeves. “I told Ira to get you that sharp tip. Chang told me about the sad outcome.” He turned his head like a bird, fixing me with one of his oddly flat eyes. “Did you get a chance to see the thing that was growing inside her?”
“What the fuck kind of question is that?” I yelled. I didn’t like being reminded that my half-assed experiments might have caused Val’s death. I started up out of my chair, meaning to throttle Skeeves into silence.
“Jim!” Val’s rabbi friend caught hold of my arm.
“Touchy guy,” said Skeeves, and ambled back out to the street.
The guilt train was running in my head, and I couldn’t make it stop. The doctors said the growth in Val was cancer—but I’d seen that glowing dot on the night the lightning had struck. My overamped STM machine had made some kind of hole in the fabric of real-ity—and an evil parasite had drifted through. Val’s last words: It’s all your fault. I’d ruined everything.
That evening I noticed the charred little sample sled was gone from my desk. Poor Val’s zapped DNA. For all these months I’d left it on the corner where I’d put it right after the lightning bolt. Evidently Skeeves had stolen it at the reception, sinister creep that he was.
The next day I made an attempt to find Skeeves and ask him about that sample sled. But nobody around town seemed to know where he was. And Ira had disappeared as well. For whatever reason, they were lying low. Ira had always had a crush on Skeeves—perhaps the two men were together. Never mind, never mind, I needed to let go.
Crying while I worked, I dismantled the scanning-tunneling microscope. I smashed the parts with a hammer and put them all in the trash.
The wheel of the seasons rolled on. I missed Val’s voice all the time, and the way she’d smile at me with her eyes. It was terrible to sleep in an empty bed. And always I had the guilt and remorse, right at my side, every hour of the day. Whether or not it made sense, I was sure that I’d killed Val with my stupid scanning-tunneling microscope.
That winter there was a nasty murder on Lover’s Bluff. Two guys axe-murdered a couple and set one of the victims on fire. They’d burned that body right down to ashes. And the murderers had slipped away. It was one of those stories so sick and strange that even the newspapers didn’t want to talk about it for long.
Actually, in the state I was in around then, I’d feel a twinge of envy whenever I heard about someone dying, no matter how. If you were dead you didn’t need to keep it together anymore. You didn’t need a career. You could rest. You’d be off the hook. Free at last. Gone to a better world. Merged. Not that I felt actively suicidal. I was numb, floating along like a jellyfish.
I could have moved away and looked for a new life. But I couldn’t get it together to do anything that drastic. I had a feeling that—without Val—everywhere I went would feel just as blank and dull.
Around May, the Post Office put me on furlough, which was a sanitized way of saying they were busting me down to a three-day work-week. I didn’t care. If I pinched my pennies, I could still buy pot and pay the rent.
As it turned out, it was good for me to be working less. I finally turned the corner on
my grief and self-loathing. I got back into hiking along the bluffs, taking Droog along. I started reading again, and going out to clubs.
The dog had been sleeping on my bed with me ever since Val died, but now, as a real sign of change, I sent Droog back to his cushion in the kitchen. I was ready to stop being a depressed loner.
4: The Portal
One day that summer I decided to stroll downtown to eat a cup of ice cream. It was one of my numerous days off work. I hadn’t gotten around to having lunch yet, and there wasn’t much in my fridge. I like to think that ice cream is a complete food, what with the sugar, the fat, the milk proteins, and the bits of fruit flavoring.
Val and I could have had an enjoyable debate about this—and I was perfectly capable of imagining it, but I’d learned not to get into long mental conversations with her ghost. I was even starting to think about finding another woman.
Not that I had any good prospects. A big problem with Santa Cruz is that so many of the people who live there are stone cold crazy. They aren’t bad off enough to be in the nuthouse, but they’re crazy just the same.
Take my landlady Diane Simly. Diane liked to sit on her porch every afternoon, waiting to see if any of the high-school kids happened to throw a cigarette butt or a gum wrapper onto her front lawn. That was her idea of what to do with her time—and she was always sure that she was right.
On the crucial summer afternoon that I want to tell you about, I’d finished rummaging around my house for my sandals, my keys, my wallet, my cell phone, and Droog’s leash. As I stepped onto my porch, I heard Diane yelling at a kid.
“Excuse me? Excuse me? I think you dropped something?”
I had a sudden mental image of cutting my landlady into tiny pieces with her electric hedge-clippers and feeding the pieces to the sea lions off the pier at three a.m. Okay, maybe I was a little crazy too—my grief had nearly pushed me over the edge. At least I still had a certain sense of irony. I knew to hold my toxic thoughts in quotes.
But never mind about Diane, I needed ice cream now, the good stuff from Mahalo Gelato on Pacific Avenue. I headed off down the alley. Droog trotted out from under my porch and dogged my steps. My faithful hound. I’d leash him later.
It was a perfect summer day, the first of July. The fog had burned off; the air was cool and salty. The faint roar of the surf floated in— along with the barking of the voracious sea lions beneath the pier.
To tell the truth, sea lions creep me out—I don’t like the way their hind legs are flesh-bound within the blubber of their tapering rears. To me, they look they’re in bondage, inching their ungainly way across a dock. It was easy to imagine that a sea lion would eat human flesh. Dogs eat their owners all the time—that is, they eat friendless owners who die alone with their pets in locked-up homes. Maybe that was in the cards for me.
A palm tree shuddered overhead, sending criss-cross shadows dancing across the alley like switchblades. Smiling at my not-quite-serious thoughts about Diane and the sea lions, I imagined a sound track of dissonant axe-murderer music. Sometimes I still thought of that murder I’d read about in the paper—and about the green-handled axe that Skeeves had shown me years ago. I put a sneaky crouch into my gait, bending my fingers like claws.
Droog sniffed one of my hands—just to see if I was holding food—and he glanced up at me with his alert, hazel-brown eyes.
“Never mind, Droogie,” I told him. “I’m only playing.”
And with that, I forgot about Diane and switched over to a different head game, to wit, the Infinite Paths project that I’d invented over the last few months. My discovery was that, with some thought, I could devise ever-new patterns for traversing familiar routes—without ever running out. It was a good way to stop thinking about Val.
My cottage on the alley behind Madrone Street lay some six blocks from Mahalo Gelato on Pacific Avenue—basically, I had to go three blocks south and three blocks west. I had a knack for planning routes in my head, and I’d worked out that there were twenty distinct ways to make this trip, assuming that I took an efficient route without any detours.
But who said that, as a semi-employed guy strolling to town, I had to be completely efficient? I could open up more possibilities by occasionally walking the wrong way. Suppose, for instance, that I allowed a block of retrograde motion to the east, and a compensatory block of extra motion to the west. According to my calculations, this gave me thirty-five times as many routes, yielding a glorious seven hundred possibilities. And if I added a jog to the north cancelled by an extra block to the south, I could find more than thirty-five thousand routes.
And there was nothing to stop me from detouring through three or even four blocks. Moreover, thanks to numerous alleys and footpaths, I had the option of splitting most Santa Cruz blocks in two, effectively doubling the size of my grid. So there were in fact millions of ways to get to the ice-cream parlor from my cottage—without going very far out of the way. With a certain amount of luck and industry, I planned never to use the same route twice.
Why? To some extent, my Infinite Paths project was just a distraction. But there was a deeper motive for what I was doing. I half-believed the world around me to be a kind of maze. I had a persistent fantasy that, if only I traveled along the right sequence of twists and turns, I might find my way out of my dull labyrinth of woe. Deep down, I thought I might still find Val.
Today, feeling energetic, I decided to try for a really odd-ball path. Like a mail-delivery bot with a program flaw, I trundled to and fro, backtracking some blocks and circling others, recrossing streets I’d already passed, and approaching familiar streets from unfamiliar directions.
Seemingly out of the blue, I hit upon the idea of visualizing my route in terms of synthesizing a molecule. Today’s insight was that I could view the molecule’s atoms as independent axes of variation. So a molecule was like a point in a higher-dimensional space, and synthesizing a molecule was like finding a path through this space. And—here came the punch line—projecting such a path onto the map of Santa Cruz could generate a fresh and never-thought-of route. I stopped walking and just stood there for a minute, letting the new idea sink in.
Perhaps I should have been suspicious of how easily the new insight had popped into my head. Perhaps I should have realized that, as of now, my thoughts were being warped by the will of a ruthless exploiter from a hidden world. But why would I start having sick, weird worries like that? For the first time in ages, I was having fun.
I found myself crafting a wonderfully unexpected route through Santa Cruz. The accumulating turns were wrapping the world in a welcome glow of strangeness. And then—triumph! Only a few blocks from my rental home of several years, I arrived at a street I could hardly recognize. My subconscious quest had reached fruition!
Logically, this had to be Yucca Street, but—there’d always been a vacant lot halfway down the block, and today that lot was filled with a dilapidated Victorian home that looked to have been there for eighty years, soft and dank as a decaying tooth. The Vic was dark green, with patches touched up in streaks of mauve and yellow. Gutters hung loose; some windows had missing panes. Junky overgrown eucalyptus trees crowded the free spaces of the yard. A primer-spotted van rested in driveway, perhaps abandoned. It looked as if someone had used the primer to cover up some earlier decorations on the vehicle.
Very strange. Even stranger, I seemed to be in some kind of spatial backwater. As I approached the dilapidated Victorian house, the other houses in the neighborhood became less clearly visible. I could only see bits and pieces of them, as if I were peering out from the center of a mirrored funhouse maze.
While I was still thinking this over, Droog took off down a narrow walkway beside the squalid Vic. As was his custom, he didn’t look back at me for approval, lest I try to call him back. Nose to the ground, tail wagging, he made his move. And, god help me, I followed him, the litter from the eucalyptus trees crunching underfoot—leaves, twigs, fragrant sheets of bark, and tough seed-pods res
embling oversized buttons.
Close up, the mysterious house seemed almost organic—like a fungus that puffs up overnight, or like a meaty jungle flower. The building was silent and, I hoped, deserted. Droog trotted forward uncowed. Intoxicated by my growing sense of wonder, I continued in his wake. I was telling myself that this passageway was a probably a public right of way—but now, as we passed the rear of the house, our path became a mere sandy track along one edge of the funky Victorian’s back yard. A dozen paces ahead lay the haven of a crossways alley that warped off into vagueness where it led away from this ghostly house.
I paused and looked around, wanting to explore. The hind part of the house supported a deck of warped splintery material with a weathered gas-powered generator on one corner. All the windows were dark and dead. The euc trees rustled, and low branches knocked against the house.
I peered beneath the porch, wondering if there might be something interesting in the cellar. Instead of a regular basement door, the foundation wall had a recessed round opening, like the entrance to a tunnel. The hole was closed off by an odd circular door with a spiral pattern.
The sandy soil sloped invitingly towards this entrance. I took a few steps closer and touched the door. It was slick and iridescent, like something on a high-tech vehicle. A dark violet band spiraled in from the edge. Looking closer, I saw that the band was patterned in a frieze of raised glyphs. Perhaps my over-excited mind was fooling me, but I seemed to see a sloppy baboon, a flying turnip, a dancing mushroom, a plant with windows in its stems, and a naked woman amid rays of light.
Several yards behind me, Droog whined. I heard a thump from within the house. Someone was home! But I couldn’t leave yet. For in the very center of the door, I’d just now spotted a depression in the precise shape of a human hand. I was filled by a sense that this door was meant for me. Quickly I set my right hand into the smooth cradle at its center—and, yes, my hand was a perfect fit. The door had been waiting for me.
