by Rudy Rucker
“It’s beer now,” said Harry. “Let’s take that Cad.”
We piled into a big white Cadillac with black leather upholstery. Sondra got in front with Harry, and I got in back with the beer. It was nice and roomy in there, almost as big as my bedroom back in Princeton. I wondered if Nancy was worried about me yet.
Harry psych-started the car and peeled out.
“There must be a bad part of town,” he muttered, slewing into the traffic. “That’s where we should go. Someone there’ll tell us what’s really going on here. I think we should try and overthrow the government.” Harry dodged some cars and gave a whoop of laughter. We were still accelerating.
“This is neat,” Sondra giggled. “Give me a beer, Joe.”
“You two are getting overconfident,” I warned. “If some cop shoots us from behind, then Harry’s superpowers aren’t going to be worth a damn.” Grudgingly I opened three beers. Ah.
Harry flipped on the radio. It was an evangelist, of course, this being a world of bad choices.
“. . . hatred,” said the radio. “Yes, hatred, my fellow Herberites. Gary came to preach hatred. I know this may sound strange to some of you out there in the radio audience, but it’s not a matter of conjecture. God hates the unbeliever, just as the unbeliever hates Gary Herber. Yes, friends, it’s true. Just look at the facts! On the one hand, we have Seth and Gary Herber bringing the clean wholesomeness of God’s Laws. On the other, we have the unbelievers, with their trumped-up charges and their public electrocution. Seth Herber died, yes, he died for mankind. But thanks to the blessed Scionization, Gary Herber lives with thousands of us, friends, and he’s ready to—”
A laser blast shattered our rear window. Cops behind us, gaining fast. I threw myself down on the seat. “Teleportation time, Harry. Can you handle the whole car?”
“No problem.”
Disorientation again, and then we were coasting down a street of abandoned Moorish-style white stucco buildings with parapets around their flat roofs. Hard, midday sun overhead. The sirens were far away. Harry pulled up onto the curb and we got out. Shadows moved behind the buildings’ broken windows.
“This looks like the right place,” said Sondra, radiant in her white evening dress. She finished her beer and threw the can in the street. “I wonder who that Gary person is.”
A rock flew down from one of the rooftop terraces and crashed through our car’s windshield.
“I wish we had some guns,” I said.
“Look in the trunk,” offered Harry.
The trunk was unlatched, of course, and there were three bright plastic pistols, real sf-looking, with fins and knobs and dials all over them.
“This is a matter disintegrator,” said Harry, handing me the purple one. “That dial up there makes the beam fan out.”
“Thanks.”
“Sondra, you take the pink one. It’s a demotivator. Makes things stop moving.”
“Ooooooo,” she squealed, and snatched her toy. Sondra was really starting to camp it up. She’d waited a long time to be beautiful.
“And I’ll keep this green one.”
“What does the green one do, Harry?”
“It makes time go backwards.”
“Oooooooo!” A toss of her pretty blond hair. Sondra and Harry were having fun. I wished I could relax and enjoy this, too.
Three more rocks came flying down, one at each of us. We raised our pistols and fired.
My rock shattered and was gone. Sondra’s rock stopped falling and hung in midair. Harry’s rock reversed its motion and flew back up to the rooftop it had come from. There was a faint scream.
“Let’s fly up and meet our friend,” I suggested.
10
God’s Laws
ON the roof was a gaunt man wearing a fedora. The rock Harry had sent back was lying at the man’s feet. Sondra froze him with the demotivator and we frisked him. He seemed clean: no weapons, no machinery.
“Check in his hat” Harry suggested.
Sure enough, the hat’s sweatband hid a ring of circuit cards and microprobes. Apparently the hat had been feeding signals in and out of the gaunt man’s brain—probably for pleasure. The guy had the wasted air of a stim-addict.
“Okay, Sondra,” said Harry, “turn off your ray.” Harry was taking chances, too many chances. I decided to break things up.
“Wait a second, Sondra. Just hold it right there. Before this goes any further, I think the three of us had better have a talk. What time is it?”
“It’s ten-thirty,” said Harry, glancing at his watch. “Okay, now, Sondra—”
“Will you just let me talk? It’s ten-thirty. Does that mean we have one and a half hours left?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Thursday noon here matches Sunday midnight in New Brunswick. Everything backward, simple as pie.”
“What?”
“From Thursday noon to Sunday midnight it’s three and a half days either way, so—”
“Will I still be able to fly after twelve?” interrupted Sondra. “And will I still look like this?” I turned away from Harry to watch her talk. The movement of her red lips. Her breathy voice. Her platinum hair. “Because I’m getting used to it, and I think I could do a lot of good for Scientific Mysticism. We have to be sure to go back through that magic door before twelve, Harry darling.” She batted her eyes at him.
“Yeah,” said Harry, slipping his arm around her waist. “The changes will stay, but the magic doors will stop working. Keeping them open is like a constant series of wishes. We could get stuck in this looking-glass world if we’re not careful. But don’t worry, I’ll teleport us all back to the door in plenty of time.”
“How about now?” I demanded. “While we’re still alive and everything.”
“You are so uptight, Fletcher. Don’t you like it here? I’m having fun.”
Something dawned on me then. “This really is the perfect world for you, isn’t it, Harry? Of all the possible worlds in superspace, this is the one you’d pick even if you knew what you were doing.”
“That’s right,” said Harry, grinning broadly. The bright sun made his face look like a black-and-white photograph. The roof was tiled, with a waist-high parapet. There was a staircase set down into the roofs center. “What’s the good of having superpowers if you don’t have a world to save?” Harry went on. “Sometime during the next hour and a half we’re going to get to that God-pig Gary Herber and assassinate him. The people here will thank us forever. I’ve never seen a religion that wasn’t basically evil.”
“Gary Herber?”
“Gary Herber’s the one that preacher was talking about on the car radio. He’s some kind of big prophet here. I figure everything bad here is Herber’s doing.”
Gary Herber. I turned the name over in my mind. Of course. It was all beginning to make sense. “I guess you realize who Gary Herber really is, don’t you, Harry?”
“Harry Gerber!” squealed Sondra. “Gary Herber!”
Harry looked a little unsettled. He hadn’t realized. “Uh . . .”
“It’s your mirror self,” said Sondra. “Your other nature. You’ve objectified the repressed side of your personality so as to do battle with it. How Jungian!”
Harry looked more and more uneasy. “Damn. I hope this Herber guy doesn’t look too much like me.”
It made me feel better to see Harry look so worried. “You know the old line, Harry. Inside every fat man there’s a thin man fighting to get out. Gary Herber’s probably real thin. And clean.” My mouth framed a hard grin.
“Our Harry’s not dirty,” squealed Sondra, slipping back into her blond bombshell routine. “Are you, honey?” She gave a shrill giggle and pinched Harry’s cheek.
“You can turn off your ray now, Sondra.”
Sondra lowered her pretty pink pistol, and the gaunt man started talking. “I need my hat.” His thin-lipped mouth formed a faint, gentlemanly smile. “The sun’s mighty bright up here.”
I held the hat out of rea
ch. “Just wait a minute. What’s all the circuitry in the sweatband for? And why were you throwing rocks at us?”
“I’ve got to have my hat, mister.” His voice was papery and far away. Still I hesitated, and his faint smile twitched into an agonized rictus. His whole body began to shake, though his flat, burnt eyes stayed calm. “I’m not making it too good.”
“He’s a wirehead,” said Harry. “His hat’s a stim-unit. Let him have it back.”
I handed the gaunt man his fedora. With precise, twitching gestures, he got it snugged down on his bony skull. His eyelids dropped and the shaking stopped.
“Seeing with my mouth,” he murmured. “Should take off more often. Running out of lobes.” He got his eyes back open and fixed me with a hard stare. “You’re coming on real tiresome.”
“Can you help us?” asked Harry. “We’re from another world and we think we want to kill Gary Herber.”
The stranger chuckled slowly. “Kicks, man, kicks. But Herber’s awful big. Used to be he was just a yahoo and a brain full of truth. But ever since they electrocuted him . . .” The man in the hat chuckled again, and went off on a tangent. “I had a booth selling pieces of the electric chair. ‘Relics of the Scionization,’ you dig, all splinters smeared with rancid ghee.” He paused to give me a look of unwholesome flirtation. “I threw the rocks because you look so rave.”
I cleared my throat. What kind of guide had Harry dreamed up for us? “I’m Joe Fletcher. And that’s Sondra and Harry.”
“Joe.” He touched my face with his cool fingers. “It’s a rare pleasure to meet an intelligent man. I’m Tad Beat.”
“How about a drink?” asked Harry. “Do you have any whiskey?”
“I have enough to get you boys country drunk. Let’s make my pad.”
We followed Tad downstairs. His apartment took up one very large room on the building’s top floor. His floor and walls were covered with Oriental carpets. A narrow bed, some boxes of food, and a desk with papers and a typewriter completed the furnishings.
“Stap my vitals,” muttered Tad, rummaging under his bed. “Just what the old doctor ordered. Keeps the slugs off, too.” He took out a clear glass bottle of oily liquid.
Harry drank from it, wiped his mouth, then passed the bottle to Sondra. She shook her head and gave the bottle to me. It was moonshine, sharp and with a bitter undertaste. I spit out half the mouthful I’d taken and gave the bottle back to Tad. I didn’t trust wireheads.
“Tell us more about Herber,” I requested. “Did he start a religion, or what? You say they electrocuted him?”
“You’re really elsewhere,” said Tad. “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. Scope this, age levels five through thirteen.”
He handed me a color comic book, the kind of thing that a child might bring home from Bible school. On the cover was a soft giant brain with a halo. That was Gary? Crowded all around the brain were laughing children with humps on their backs. It occurred to me that I’d seen a lot of round-shouldered people on the streets here. Why would being saved make you into a hunchback? Beginning to sense my answer, I sat down and read the comic book frame by frame. The writing was mirror-reversed, but I got used to that soon enough.
1. Gary’s parents were scientists. Two clean-cut people in white smocks. She holds a test tube, he holds a Geiger counter.
2. Their world was full of trouble. Weapons, broken liquor bottles, bloody faces, a background of psychedelic music symbols.
3. And God had been forgotten. A drunk sleeping on the steps of a looted temple.
4. God spoke to Gary’s parents. They stand in a roomful of machines, staring up into streaming light.
5. And told them what to do. She leans over a microscope, while he handles some radioactive material with tongs. Her belly is swollen.
6. Gary Herber was born on June 25. The parents lean over a radiant cradle. The cradle contains a naked brain with a spinal cord.
7. Gary’s brother, Seth, was scared. The brain floats in a tank of nutrient. A dirty, unattractive boy peers at it from around a doorjamb.
8. God told Seth to share. Seth kneeling next to the brain’s tank, his face blank with religious ecstasy.
9. Seth and Gary grew together. Gary is riding the nape of Seth’s neck. Seth is clean and happy-looking, writing answers on a blackboard.
10. They began to teach God’s Laws. Lean and charismatic, Seth is standing on a soapbox preaching to a crowd. The naked brain is hidden beneath Seth’s coat.
11. These are God’s Laws. A stone tablet with three laws chiseled in:
God’s Laws
I: Follow Gary
II: Be Clean
III: Teach God’s Laws
Tad thrust the bottle at me again. Reluctantly I looked up from the comic. The bottle was almost empty and Harry was drunk. He was sitting on Tad’s bed with his arm around Sondra. They were kissing.
“No thanks, Tad.” I turned my attention back to the comic. “Is this all true?”
“They omit to mention where Gary wig and drink all a woman’s spinal fluid. She croaked and the Herbers got the chair.”
I read on.
12. Gary’s disciples shared him. Smiling Seth is setting Gary down on an attractive woman’s naked back. Many cheering faces in the background.
13. But there were enemies. Three swarthy, low browed men sitting at a table with money and whiskey. One shows a legal document to his gloating comrades.
14. Seth and Gary were arrested. Faceless police officers in riot helmets drag humpbacked Seth away from weeping women and children.
15. The public electrocution. Seth is strapped into an electric chair. A special wire leads to Gary, naked on Seth’s back. A crowd is watching.
16. The Blessed Scionization. Seth is dead and smoking. But Gary is much bigger than before. He bulges out like a cauliflower, and pieces of him are splitting off.
17. Soon Gary was everywhere. An army of men, women, and children, each with a naked brain riding on his or her back. They are constructing a palace.
18. Don’t you want to share? The tablet of God’s Laws, the electric chair, and a cheerful brain float together in a space of light.
19. Come to the Palace this Thursday! Two happy children, a boy and a girl, walk up the marble steps of a splendid white building.
I closed the comic and looked up. Tad and Sondra were arguing. Harry was really out of it, and Tad had just given him another bottle.
“Why do you give him so much to drink?” Sondra demanded.
“It’s like the sight of someone about to flip excites me,” Tad said, reaching up to fondle his hatband. “I like to crack them open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that ooze out.”
Sondra looked at Tad with real dislike. “You’re awful! A wirehead, a drunk, a gay—”
Tad leered at her, forming his face into a caricature of heterosexual lust. “What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at those tits sticking out so cute? No, no!” He held his hand as if to shield his face, then sidled over to drape his arms across my shoulders. “You and me could really exist, Joe.”
Harry was taking this all in with drunken relish.
“We don’t have very much time,” I said, fending off Tad’s advances. He was a real old-time degenerate.
Harry chugged from the new bottle and tossed it back to Tad. I didn’t see how they could stomach the stuff. I felt sick from the one taste of it I’d had.
“Just tell us where to find Gary Herber,” said Sondra. “And we’ll be on our way.”
“It’s not going to be as easy as we thought,” I told her. “Herber is all over the place. He’s a sort of parasite that grows on people’s backs. But what was that about a palace, Tad?”
“Gary’s palace,” said Tad, smiling loosely. “Ten blocks east of here. The palace is for the boss slug. The king-size Herber that grows the buds. Granpaw brain. We’ll hold him still with that pink gun and work out. Do it hard TV so’s the citizens down home can share the harvest plenty.�
� Tad seemed almost as drunk as Harry.
Sondra and I exchanged looks of concern. It was well past eleven.
“We really have to get moving,” I repeated.
“Don’t you want to try on my hat, Joe? It has a left-brain/right-brain feedback loop. Feel real wiggy.”
“No!” cried Sondra. “Let’s go before it’s too late!”
We clattered down the stone stairs to the street, Harry leaning heavily on Tad and me. Sondra flew down ahead of us.
“Do you want me to drive, Harry?”
“Naw, naw, I’m shuperman. I’ll shober up when I hafta. You wanna gun, Tad? Look in the glove compartment.”
Tad found himself a heavy .45 automatic. We all got in the Cad. Both of the windshields were broken—the police laser had broken the back, and Tad’s rock had broken the front. Harry gunned the engine up to a chattering scream, and peeled out into a teleportation jump.
11
cushion
WE were speeding down a broad boulevard, a tropical allée with rows of royal palms: tremendous palm trees each with ten meters of bare trunk topped by a luxuriant green frizz-bop of swordy leaves. The pavement was smooth marble. There was quite a bit of traffic: official vehicles, merchants’ vans, tour buses, commuters. But there was no real congestion—everyone drove according to the book. The cars moved like cautious ants, and the pedestrians marched back and forth like windup toys.
Far ahead of us, tiny in the distance, was a cordon of white-uniformed palace guards. Beyond the guards lay bright ornamental gardens leading to the palace itself, a vast, minaretted structure something like the Taj Mahal.
I was in the back seat with Tad Beat. He twitched his head this way and that, keeping a restless eye on things. Harry, in front, lolled drunkenly in his seat, pawing at Sondra’s exposed thighs and protesting in slurred tones each time she slapped his hand away. Our Cadillac lurched through the traffic, narrowly missing several collisions.
“He’s juiced,” Tad said to me, jerking his head toward Harry’s slumping shoulders. Tad kept one hand on his hat, holding it tight against the slipstream of air that whistled through the car’s two broken windshields. “That’s the cool way to be around the palace. The slugs can’t handle juice. You, Joe, you’re nowhere. You’ll end up dead or a Herberite, I’ll tell you now.”
