by Rudy Rucker
“Here.” I drew a ten-dollar bill out of my handbag and gave it to him. “Now beat it.”
“Thank you, fish angel.”
The windows of Harry’s store were boarded up. There was a shiny black car parked in front. When Nancy and I tried the shop’s door, it flew open, revealing a fit-looking man in a black suit. He held a pistol in one hand. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Susan Gerber and Nancy Fletcher,” I said. “We want to make sure you don’t steal anything from our men.”
“I’m Joseph Fletcher’s wife,” amplified Nancy. “And this is Harry Gerber’s sister. We’d like to get a few personal effects and make an inventory.”
The man gave a sharp whistle and pulled us in. The door slammed shut behind us. Inside was another man in black. He’d been guarding the back door. Both of them were armed. They said they were from the government.
“Why won’t your brother talk?” the first man asked me. “His device has an enormous potential to enhance our national security.”
“Harry never tells me what he’s doing,” I simpered. “Not that I could understand it anyway.”
“And what about you?” the second man asked Nancy. “Where is your husband hiding?”
“I bet it’s somewhere hot and wet,” said Nancy. “My husband loves that kind of place. Some overgrown delta at the mouth of a river. Who knows? You’re the cops, not me.”
“I could use a tropical vacation myself,” said the second man in black. “I’d like to be in the Bahamas.” He turned to his partner. “How about you, Jack?”
“If I had my druthers,” said the first man in black, “I’d be camping out in the Rockies right now.”
They’d fallen for our story and had loosened up a little. I kept giving them nice smiles.
“Can we look around now?” I asked. “We’d like to start upstairs and then check over the workshop.”
“We’ll have to search your purses for weapons.”
“Fine.” I opened my purse. There was my compact in there, the Susan Gerber IDs, some more money, and the magnetic bottle of gluons.
“What’s this?” asked the first man in black, picking up the bottle.
“That’s—that’s my deodorant.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
They let us go upstairs alone; it was the workshop they were really interested in guarding.
“How are we going to get rid of them?” Nancy whispered.
“Maybe we should get knives from the kitchen?”
“No killing, Joe. You’ll just get us in even more trouble. And those men have guns.”
“So what do we do? Seduce them?”
“Why don’t we start a fire up here? They’ll run up to put it out and then we can lock ourselves in the workshop. Does it take long to start the blunzer?”
“Not that long. If we can get ourselves locked in the workshop, we’ll have time before they break in.” We wandered into the bedroom.
“Let’s light Harry’s bed,” suggested Nancy. “It’s nice and greasy.”
“You don’t like Harry, do you, Nancy?”
“Why should I? He doesn’t like me.” She found a half-empty bottle of over proof vodka and poured it out on Harry’s pillow. “This ought to help. Can you find a match?”
I found some matches in the kitchen, and another bottle of vodka. I brought a bunch of newspapers as well. Nancy had a whole plan of action figured out now. It sounded good to me.
We got the bed sluggishly burning. It gave off a lot of smoke. Nancy flew up to the ceiling by the bedroom door. She was holding a thick broom handle.
When the smoke started to trickle down the stairs to the shop, I ripped open my blouse and began screaming. “There’s another Gary-brain up here! Oh, help me!” I stood at the head of the stairs looking desperate.
“I’ll save you!” shouted one of the men in black. He came surging up the stairs, and I pretended to stagger backwards into the smoke-filled bedroom. Nancy was waiting right overhead, broomstick at the ready. When the man in black came in, I embraced him and held him steady so Nancy could whack him on the top of the head. It took three whacks to knock him out.
I got the gun out of his hand, shoved it under my skirt’s waistband, and ran downstairs. I ran right into the other man in black. “One of those brains is loose up there,” I cried. “I think it got Mrs. Fletcher!”
The man pushed past me. I hurried into the shop and locked the door to the stairs. Then I went to open the front door. Nancy was waiting out there. She’d flown down from Harry’s bedroom window.
We ran into the workshop and got that door locked, too. Antie was in the workshop, turned off and lying on her side. I switched her power on and we got to work on the blunzing machinery. You could hear the footsteps of the men in black running around upstairs. They were busy putting out the fire.
“Go lie on that table in the blunzing chamber,” I told Nancy. “Put on the breathing mask and get ready for the shot.”
“I’m scared, Joe.”
“Do you want me to go instead of you?”
“No. I’ll do it.” For the first time today Nancy kissed me. “I’ll make a better world, Joe.”
“The microwave cavity is ready,” called Antie.
“Get the gluons from my purse!” I shouted. “Good luck, Nancy.”
Now Nancy was in the blunzing chamber. I switched on the sheathing field. Antie poured the gluons into the microwave. There was noise out in the shop. I fired a random gunshot through the door. Antie fed the gluons into the vortex coil.
Noise and confusion took over. For the third and final time, someone got blunzed—but not just Nancy.
Everyone got blunzed this time, everyone on Earth. For that was Nancy’s wish: that the Planck length be ten thousand kilometers big for the 2.4 seconds that her gluons lasted. Everyone got to make a wish at once.
28
Earthly Delights
THE guards were gone and it was raining outside—raining fish. The big rain-fish would hit the pavement, flop a little, and then melt into water.
“You really did it,” I said to Nancy. I had my arm around her, and she was leaning against my long, lean frame. I was back to normal.
“Where’s Harry?” asked the old woman behind us. Antie had turned herself into a flesh-and-blood copy of Harry’s dead mother. The blunzing had even affected her. Nancy’s little echowomen had flown out of the chamber and helped each of us make our wish. Antie’s had been to be just like Harry’s mother, I wondered what kinds of wishes everyone else had made. The rain-fish were probably the idea of the crazy old sailor we’d seen. Everyone had gotten what they wanted most. “Where’s Harry?” repeated Antie.
I waited for Nancy to answer, but she seemed too drained. Her feat had taken a lot out of her.
“I don’t know where Harry is,” I told Antie. “He probably got himself out of prison. Maybe he’ll turn up here soon.”
“You ought to hide,” fretted the old woman. “Now that the police can recognize you again.”
“That’s all fixed,” I reassured her. “After I changed my body I got us all pardons from the governor. And I bet Sondra brought those seventeen dead people back to life.”
“That’s right,” murmured Nancy. “And the men in black took their vacations. One to the Bahamas and one to the Rockies.”
A man-sized beetle marched past, the rain of fish beating on his iridescent green back. What a weirdo he must have been. Leaning out the door, I could see that it was sunny down by the railroad station. A fish struck me on the head and splatted onto the sidewalk.
“Let’s find an umbrella and take a walk.” I suggested.
“I’m waiting here for Harry,” said Antie stubbornly. “And I have to clean up the mess in his bedroom.”
“Fine. Nancy and I’ll go out alone.”
We got an umbrella and went outside. There was a startling roar as a race car shot past, its tires throwing up sheets of fish-water. It looked like an Indy 500 racer—which is what it probably was. A
block away from the store I spotted the old sailor, staring up into the sky and catching fish in his mouth. Another block and we were in sunlight. I folded up the umbrella and looked around.
The train station had been transformed into a graceful lacework of metal and glass, a veritable crystal palace of transportation. A fine steam locomotive was just pulling in.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” yelled the engineer, leaning out and waving. “I’ve always wanted to run one of these!” We smiled and waved back.
The Terminal Bar across the street had become a huge old saloon of the same period as the locomotive. You could hear a honky-tonk piano inside. The mustached bartender stood in the door, grinning and holding an inexhaustible schooner of beer. He gave us a happy salute. It was almost like being in Disneyland—except everything was real.
“Did everyone make good wishes?” I asked Nancy.
“Yes,” she smiled. “I made sure they did.”
“But how?”
“I sent out my echowomen. I sent one to watch each person on Earth. If I could see a mean wish in someone’s mind, I reached in and made them change it. And if two people’s wishes conflicted, I made one of them change too.”
Farther down the street was a sidewalk café—formerly a scuzzy German coffee shop. I recognized the owner sitting at one of the tables and eating a roast chicken.
“There’s a buffet inside,” he called to us. “Help yourself. I’ll make out the bill later.”
“Are you hungry?” I asked Nancy.
She nodded and sat down at one of the sunny tables. I went into the café and filled two plates. I brought them out and then fetched some white wine and soda.
We ate in silence for a minute. It was the best food I’d ever tasted. One of the things on my plate was a crisp white veal sausage. I held it up for Nancy to see, remembering the fable.
She laughed and patted my hand. “You see, Joe? It’s not so bad to ask for simple things.”
“Do you know what each person wished?”
“No, not anymore. While I was blunzed I knew, sort of. I sent my echowomen everywhere, like Alwin said I should. I made the Planck length big enough to cover the whole Earth, and I helped everyone make his or her wish.”
“Do people know it was you? You’ll be treated like a queen!”
“No, no. You know how small most of the echoes are. People couldn’t see me. And I wouldn’t want them to know it was me, because then they’d ask me to do it again.”
“Yeah. And we can’t do it again. There’s only three colors of gluon, and each color only works once.” An attractive young couple floated down out of the sky to sit at a table nearby. Glancing up, I could see a number of people flying around overhead. The power of flight seemed to be a fairly common wish.
“I wonder what Harry wished for,” I mused. “Do you know?”
“I meant to check, but he was already gone by the time I got to him. He was like you—he knew right away he’d been blunzed, and he acted on it.”
“He wasn’t in Rahway anymore?”
“He left our space, so far as I could tell. Look at those two!”
Another couple had joined the crowd at the café—a beautiful red-haired woman and a man who was only three inches high. The man was perched in the redhead’s décolletage like a prince on a balcony. It looked like a good place to be.
More and more people were out in the street now, everyone chattering and looking around to see what the others had done. There were many more beautiful men and women than was normal for New Brunswick; beauty was obviously a wish even more popular than flight. Lots of people wore jewels as well, and I noticed several men drawing out big wads of cash.
“All my money’s going to be worthless,” I suddenly realized. “Everybody and his brother must have asked for a million dollars.”
“Yes,” said Nancy. “But we’ve still got our penthouse.”
“But what are we going to live on? I can’t go back to working at Softech.”
“Go back in business with Harry,” suggested Nancy. “If you can find him.”
“Yeah, that’s a thought.” I was distracted again by a passerby, this one a man running at what must have been thirty miles per hour. “Look at that guy go!”
“A lot of beauties, a lot of millionaires, a lot of great athletes,” said Nancy. “Can I have some more wine, please?”
A giant breast rolled past, followed by a man with four arms. Shiny cars—antique and futuristic alike—buzzed this way and that. In a doorway across the street lay a man slumped in some interminable ecstasy. In the distance I heard music playing.
“How about Alwin Bitter? What did he wish for?”
Nancy’s eyes danced above her tilted wineglass. “Alwin—Alwin is an altruist,” she said, setting down her glass. “He wished for this all to happen.”
“But the blunzer made itself. It was a cause-and-effect loop with Harry and me in it.”
“Even so, you and Harry and the loop had to come from somewhere. Alwin wished you into existence.”
“I don’t believe that, Nancy, do you?”
“I don’t know. What’s important is that now everyone will be happy for quite a while, and maybe later—even if the changes all wear off—people will still remember how to be happy. I thought it was worth a try.”
A machine that seemed to be a flying saucer zipped down the street and hovered by our cafe. A hatch opened and family of little green “Martians” hopped out. They talked with New Jersey accents.
“This sure is fun, Nancy. Did you happen to notice what Serena wished for?”
“A pet rabbit and a box of candy.”
“Sweet. Maybe we better fly down to Princeton and pick her up. You can still fly, can’t you?”
“Sure. You’ll feel better to me with all that girl fat gone.” Nancy reached under the table and squeezed my thigh. I drank a little more wine and smiled at her. Everyone in sight looked happy. It was like some magic Christmas party.
I waved the café owner over for the check. “How much?”
“I dunno. You got a lot of money, don’t you?”
“Sure. Here, take a hundred.” I fished the bill out of the purse I’d been using and handed it over.
The café owner looked at the bill with a frown. “Is this real?”
“Was the food?” I countered.
“Okay, a hundred,” grumbled the owner. “But I don’t like it. Why didn’t I think of asking for money instead of a new restaurant?”
“You’re better off with the restaurant,” I assured him. “There’s going to be inflation like you won’t believe.” The whole financial system was going to have to be reworked. It was going to be a mess. People wouldn’t stay happy for long. The café owner stomped off to the lovers from the sky and charged them a cool grand for two cups of coffee. “Maybe you should have tried to change human nature,” I told Nancy as we stood up. “Make people nicer and more generous.”
“Some people did wish that for themselves,” Nancy responded. “There’ll be a lot of saints around.”
A man in the shape of a motorcycle went zooming past with a fur-covered woman on his saddle. Glancing after them, I noticed a building made entirely of meat: a skin-covered orifice building with people plunging in and out of its portals. I was beginning to wish for a less frantic scene.
“Well, come on, Nancy, lie down and—”
Two hands suddenly appeared in front of me. Familiar-looking hands. They grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me into the unknown.
29
Rudy Rucker Is Watching You
YOU could say that everything went black, or you could say that everything went white. I was . . . elsewhere.
But not alone.
“Hey, Fletcher,” came the familiar voice, “you have to help me.”
“Harry? Where are we?”
“Superspace, naturally.”
“What’s superspace?” I felt around for my body and couldn’t find it.
“Thought
land, Fletch, the cosmos. Pure mentation. Abstract possibility. Infinite dimensions. The class of all sets. God’s mind. The pre-geometric substratum. Hilbert space. Penultimate reality. White . . .”
“Cut the crap, Harry. I was having a good time till you butted in. Put me back.”
“You don’t want to rush back there. This is much cooler. This is eternity, Joe, this is the secret of life.”
“Oh come on, Harry. I’m not interested in the secret of life. I just want to go home and be with Nancy. She and Sondra are going to be at Alwin Bitter’s.”
“Hold it.” Contrasts appeared in the black-or-white void around me. Streamers, clumps, hazy patches. “Can you see it now?”
“I can’t see anything. I might as well be looking at clouds.”
“You see clouds? Wait.” The fog folded in on itself. Colors appeared. Definite forms began to congeal. One of them was Harry, and one of them was me.
“That’s better,” I said, tentatively moving my arm. The arm disappeared.
“Your arm’s in another dimension now,” Harry explained. “We’re in a three-dimensional cross section of infinite-dimensional superspace. If you try, you can get your arm back.”
I tried. And then my arm was back, though the hand was still missing. I examined the stub where my arm ended. It looked as if my hand had been chopped right off. I could see the bone and its marrow, the muscle tissues, and the round mouths of the veins. Yet no blood was spurting out.
“Flip your wrist,” urged Harry.
I flipped my wrist some funny way, and suddenly my hand was back. This was pretty interesting. I gave Harry’s head a push, and watched it disappear. Peering down into his neck, I could see the insides of his lungs and stomach. But then his head snapped back.
“Where’s our universe?” I asked Harry. Our two bodies seemed quite definite now, though nothing else did. Everything else was just shifting patterns of colored light.
“It’s that spot there,” said Harry, pointing at a small, egg-shaped blob of hazy white.
“What are all the other spots?”
“Other universes, of course. I’ve been here before. Briefly. When I got blunzed the first time, I came here to find the Looking-Glass World.” Harry indicated a reddish patch of light near the white one that was home.
