by Rudy Rucker
“Initiate stage two.”
I stepped back from the machinery as Antie devalved the subether wave guide, a heavily chromed duct leading from the microwave cavity to the vortex coil’s rounded summit.
“Brace yourself, Sondra. This is—”
My words were drowned out by the chatter wild scream crash of tortured energy. The vortex coil was tearing into the gluons like a chain-saw hitting railroad spikes in water logs. The whole room went spastic shudder cow-eye thub scree thubby; my mind seized up. Flames, then a heavy sheet of sparks arcing from the coil to Antie’s body. The faithful robot fused into dead smoking junk.
“Oh, poor Antie,” wailed Sondra, starting forward.
“Stay back!” The screaming energy chatter slid up the scale to an insane mantric hum. The windows shattered. The fillings in my teeth were buzzing.
“Turn that knob!” I screamed to Sondra, pointing to the nozzle where the vacuum pump hooked into the blunzing chamber. “This is it!”
All I had to do now was to devalve the meter-long wave guide that led out of the vortex coil and in through the refrigerator wall to the needle at the hotshot table’s head. But the wave guide was glowing hot. I cast about wildly, then spotted a broom. The handle would do the job. Just then there was a heavy thud: chamber at vacuum. Right on, Sondra. I forced myself forward and stabbed that final valve . . .
White light.
An angel was hovering over me, Beva LeClaire with big soft white wings. I was lying on a rustly mattress and the angel was floating over me.
“Are you all right, Joe?”
The voice: Sondra Tupperware! I sat up and looked around. This was Harry’s workshop, same as before, and Antie was all well again, well and busy straightening up the mess we’d made. But Sondra—Sondra was hovering three feet off the floor, her wings gently aflutter. She wore a low-cut white evening dress; her face was a lovely cameo framed by ringlets of purest gold.
“I don’t believe this,” the angel was saying. “All my life I’ve hated women like this, and now I’m one.”
“At least you can fly.” I looked around for my goodies. And there they were, right under me, packs and packs of twenties and hundreds and five hundreds, a whole mattress of them! And next to my money-bed was a small wood box containing, no doubt, a simply reproducible device for turning dirt into food, just like I’d asked Harry for. Harry?
I hurried over to the blunzing chamber and dragged the big door open. “Harry!”
There he was, standing in the middle of the blunzing chamber. The hotshot table was gone. Harry was standing there with a swarm of little Harrys in the air around him. The little Harrys were all sizes, numberless as a column of spring gnats.
“Holy science, Harry! You really did it!”
“I’ve already done the trip back to Friday, and the lizard’s trip, and I made your money and Nancy’s cure for world hunger, and I moved the hotshot table out of the way.” I noticed the table standing off to one side of the room. “And I fixed Antie—”
“What about me?” interrupted Sondra. “Flying milk van. I don’t like it, Harry.”
“Well, I do.” Excitement parted his big lips. He stepped out of the blunzing chamber and looked around. “I like it this way.” The swarm of little Harrys followed him out of the chamber.
“What are those things?” demanded Sondra. “Bugs?”
“They’re little copies of me. There’s infinitely many of them. It has to do with the renormalization problem and the existence of multiple solutions to the Schrödinger wave equation.”
“They’re little people?” said Sondra, stepping closer. She reached out a finger and one of the little Harrys landed on it. “How cute!”
“I can use them as scouts,” said Harry. “That’s what I’m going to do now.” He herded the buzzing school of little Harrys back into the blunzing chamber, closed the door, and stood outside with his head pressed against the door. A minute passed, and another.
“There,” Harry said finally. “It’s done. Six worlds meet. Go on and look.”
He stepped aside and I swung the blunzing chamber’s door back open. What I saw inside was impossible. Somehow each of the cube’s six faces were now an open door. I staggered and almost lost my footing.
Six doors to six places:
1. The room around us: Here and Now.
2. Globs and happy squiggles: The Micro world.
3. An endless meadowed mountain: Infinity.
4. Glowing robots on the moon: The Future.
5. Strange merging shapes: Hyperspace.
6. A room like ours, but upside down and backwards: Looking-Glass World.
From where I stood, Door No. 2 was to the left and Door No. 3 to the right. Door No. 4 was where the blunzing chamber’s floor had been, and Door No. 5 was on the chamber’s ceiling. Straight across the chamber was Door No. 6. Door No. 1, of course, was the original door, the door I stood outside.
The swarm of tiny Harrys buzzed fretfully, darting in and out of the six magic doors.
“Let’s go,” said the big Harry at my side. “Come on, Fletch, I want to jump across to that world on the other side.”
“Forget it, man. I want to take my money back to Nancy before—”
“Oh, you’ve got your five million bucks and that’s it, huh? Only so far and no further, right? What are you going to buy, Fletcher? What’s going to be as good as this?”
I looked to Sondra for support. She was staring into a mirror, running her fingers over the curves of her new face.
I tried again. “Harry, those doors look really exciting. Hyperspace, size change, parallel worlds—it looks really neat. But I’m not going to risk everything just for some crazy science fiction thrills.”
“I can still make your money disappear, Fletcher. I can put you back inside an endless regress like before.”
“You don’t want to do that, Harry. I’m your friend, remember? Just go ahead and enjoy yourself. Sondra and I’ll wait out here.”
Sondra fluttered over to stand next to us. Lord, she was gorgeous.
“Make my wings disappear,” she requested. “I don’t want to be a freak. Surely you can give me flight without wings.”
“Damn!” yelled Harry, suddenly furious. “Here I’m supposed to be the master of space and time and you two are just—” He clenched his eyes shut like an angry baby.
There was a faint whisking sound, and Sondra’s wings were gone. My money and my little box—I noticed sadly—were gone as well.
“Gee, Harry, you didn’t have to—”
“Your money’s safe at home, Fletcher. Right under little Nancy’s homebody bed. And she’s opening her dirt-to-food converter right now.” A sly smile twisted his mouth. “You satisfied?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Now, please, you two, let’s go across the chamber and into the looking-glass world. I’m scared to go alone.”
I looked into Sondra’s clear hazel eyes. I’d never been this close to such a beautiful woman before. “I’ll go if Sondra will.”
“Okay, Sondra?”
“Oh, all right. I’ll help fly Fletcher across. We wouldn’t want him to fall down onto the moon with those robots. But what’s the looking-glass world supposed to be, Harry?”
“It’s where I want to go. I don’t know quite what’s there . . . I just know I reached out and found it.”
“Found it?”
“Each reality is a point in superspace,” said Harry slowly. “I understand everything so much better now! Superspace has infinitely many dimensions, one dimension for each question you might ask about the world. Each universe represents a certain set of answers, a certain location in superspace. I reached out and found the one I wanted, the looking-glass world.”
“What about those four other worlds?”
“They’re—they’re other things I’ve thought about. I understand them pretty well already. Some of my little echomen have already looked them over. But come on now, let’s go to the l
ooking-glass world! And Antie, you make sure that no one disturbs the machinery while we’re gone.”
“Check, Harry.”
Sondra could still fly, even without those hokey wings, and Harry of course had the power of flight as well. Each grabbed me under an arm, and we flew the two meters across the blunzing chamber.
The view from the chamber’s center was just incredible. There was no gravity in there, and the conflicting vistas through the different doors destroyed all sense of up and down. Hypercubes, amoebas, infinite cliffs, space robots—all mixed in with glimpses of Harry’s shop. The room we were headed for was upside down and mirror-reversed relative to the room we’d started in.
I wondered what it was going to be like over there.
9
Looking-Glass World
AS we passed into the looking-glass world, its gravity took over and pulled me up to its floor. I tucked my head under and landed on my shoulders. Regaining my feet, I looked back through the magic door at the world we’d left. Antie was there, standing by the door watching us. It was hard not to feel that it was the robot, and not us, who was upside down.
The little images of Harry flew out after us and nested themselves together like they’d done in my car. Each of them got in the coat pocket of the next larger one. It only took a few seconds. Then the biggest echoman of all darted into the real Harry’s pocket.
“Let’s just close the door,” suggested Harry. “So nothing sneaks back through to our world.”
“Okay.”
I helped him swing the heavy zinc-covered door shut. Although it was late evening in the world we’d left, it looked like midmorning here. Sunlight was streaming in the windows, lighting up the mirror-reversed shop.
“Well!” said Sondra. “Now what, guys?”
“Let’s go to a restaurant,” I suggested. “Get a beer and listen to what people are talking about. I hope time doesn’t run backwards here.”
“Naw,” said Harry. “Look.” He picked up a book and dropped it. It fell to the floor. “If our time didn’t match this world’s, we would have seen the book fly up into my hand.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, leaning over the book. “But look, all the writing’s backwards.”
“Well, that’s no big deal. Everything’s just space-reversed. Once we get outside, we’ll probably find lots of other differences as well. Like Carroll’s Alice did. Let’s go, we’ve got less than two hours!”
We found our way out of Harry’s mirror-reversed shop and hit the street. The streets were clean, that was what struck me first. The whole city was buffed to an unwholesome sheen. Spotless late-model autos hurried past in orderly queues, while spiffed-up pedestrians marched up and down like wooden soldiers. Slovenly Harry couldn’t have looked more out of place. At least the tiny Harrys were stashed out of sight. This town looked nothing like New Brunswick: besides being clean, it felt vaguely Arabian. I didn’t like the fact that nobody smiled.
“Excuse me,” I said, stepping in front of a woman in a stiff-collared blouse. She had gray hair and a dowager’s hump. “Is there a restaurant near here? That sells beer?”
Her thin lips straightened. “I’m going to report you for that, you scum.”
“Beer’s illegal?” I hazarded, hoping to keep the conversational ball rolling.
“Let me pass!”
“Wait,” protested Sondra. “We just got here from another world and—”
“Demons!” screamed the woman in the stiff-collared blouse. Two men in three-piece suits hurried to her aid.
“Let’s fly,” I suggested.
Harry and Sondra grabbed me by the upper arms again, and we shot up into the air. There was a cop on the sidewalk across the street, shouting and pointing a laser rifle.
We whisked off across the building tops and landed in a supermarket parking lot. Fortunately no one saw us land.
“Do you realize what this world is?” I asked Harry.
“Uh . . .”
“It’s the exact opposite of everything you like. Clean streets, uptight women, no beer. Everything’s backwards, you idiot.” I could hear sirens a few blocks off.
“The police are coming,” wailed Sondra. “Do something, Harry!”
“I’m not always good in a crisis,” he whined. “Ask Fletcher what to do.”
“Let’s go in that store,” I suggested. “After things cool down, we can get back to the magic door.”
“Okay.”
Instead of glass doors, the supermarket had air curtains. These were sheets of cool air blown down from a grate overhead to be sucked into a grate in the threshold. We breezed into the store and looked around. Oh, man.
No-cal soft drinks, weight-watcher TV dinners, and diet junk food, all heavily vitaminized. This provender was at a double remove from reality: it was artificially made food that had been further treated in an attempt to make it healthy. There was nothing real in sight: no meat, no veggies, no booze.
I began to lose my temper. “What would you like, Harry? You can bet it’s not here. God, you’re stupid. Who else would go to a world the exact opposite of what he wants? Just look at this crap!” I kicked at a bin of one-calorie cupcakes.
“Watch your language, fella!” A round-shouldered man who must have been the manager poked his head around some shelves to glare at us. His face was coarse and humorless. When he spotted Sondra his cheeks grew red. “And get that slut out of here! She’s practically naked!”
I sprang to Sondra’s defense. Sure she had big breasts and a low-cut dress, but that didn’t make her any less a friend. Far from it. I stepped threateningly toward the manager. “You’re the one who’d better watch his language, jerk. Slug him, Harry!”
No one was watching, so Harry went ahead and punched the man in the stomach. What with Harry’s superpowers, the punch doubled the manager right up. Eager to do my part for Sondra, I reached out and slammed my fist down on the hump between the man’s shoulder blades.
To my surprise the hump was soft. It burst with a muffled plotz, and fluid began seeping through the manager’s coat. The poor man’s body shivered a few times and then he was dead.
“Oh, my God,” I said in horror. “I—I didn’t mean to kill him. I never thought that—”
“I’ll move it out of here before someone sees it,” Harry said tensely. “I can do teleportation. Just. . .”
Harry knitted his brows, and then the body was gone. I felt better almost immediately. This world wasn’t really real, was it?
“That was bad,” said Sondra. “Let’s leave.”
“We might as well get a couple of six packs of soda,” I suggested. “Once we’re outside, Harry can turn them into beer. We’ll steal a car and go cruising.”
“Sound thinking, Fletch. The old water-to-wine routine.”
“That was nice of you two to stick up for me,” mused Sondra. “Being beautiful isn’t always pleasant. Do you think our money’s good here?”
“We’ll see. Be ready for trouble.”
We took our place in the checkout line. A few people stared at Sondra with mingled lust and hatred, but for the moment everything was cool. I watched the checker, trying to anticipate any problems.
The checker was a pleasant-faced blond woman with Burnita on her name tag. She wore a gold chain with a pendant—a little silver chair. She scanned each product with a little light pencil. Everything had a patch of thick and thin lines, a Universal Product Code, just like back home. A cord fed the UPC information into a small console at Burnita’s side. But instead of presenting each customer with a bill, she ran the light pencil across the client’s forehead. Apparently there was some kind of invisible Universal Consumer Code tattooed on each of these people’s brows. An efficient system, to be sure: a central computer could deduct your purchases from your credit holdings on a real-time basis. But, I wondered, what would happen if you let yourself become badly overdrawn?
Just then I found out. The customer in front of us was a ratlike little man with a tube of
cheese food and three bottles of cough medicine. Clearly an unsavory individual, and just the type to let his credit holdings slip deep into the red.
Burnita seemed to feel the same way, and addressed him by name. “Now, Abie, are you sure you’ve got the credit for all this?”
Abie snarled something incoherent and pushed his selections toward the checker. She shrugged, and scanned first the product codes and then the invisible code on Abie’s forehead. Nothing happened, and I breathed a sigh of relief. We were next. I reached in my pocket, feeling for some bills. Surely you didn’t have to use credit. I hoped not, because all our foreheads were blank, which might . . .
FFZZZAAAAAATT!
A great sheet of electricity filled the supermarket entrance. Those two air-curtain grates were electrodes, powerful energy sources programmed to crisp anyone who ran up too high a tab. Abie’s ashes spun raggedly. The floor grate sucked them out of sight.
“Oh, my,” Burnita sighed. “That’s the second one this week. It’s hard for them, you know, since there’s no other way to get food. You folks just want these sodas?” I suddenly realized that the little silver chair hanging from Burnita’s neck was an electric chair.
“Uh, wait.” I drew out some money. “Can we pay cash?”
The checker’s pleasant face grew tense and puzzled. “Is this some kind of joke? Come on, folks, which of you should I bill?” She raised the light pen toward my forehead. God only knew what would happen if they found out we were uncoded.
“Harry! Get us out of here!”
A moment of disorientation and then we were back outside in the parking lot. A harsh alarm bell was ringing.
“As long as you can do teleportation, Harry, why not just take us back to the blunzing chamber?”
“Aw, that wouldn’t be any fun. I want to keep the super-stuff to a minimum. And what’s the big rush to leave? We just got here!”
“Let’s steal a car like Joe said,” urged Sondra. “I’ve always wanted to be a big blond in a stolen getaway car.”
“What are we getting away with?” I asked sourly.
“The soda!” Prettily she raised the two six-packs up like earrings. She looked like Marilyn in The Misfits.
