The Big Aha

by Rudy Rucker

  “Sounds like fun,” allowed Weezie. “Kenny can build a fire in the fireplace, once the rats clean the chimney. We’ll all be high on our qwet. And drunk on the wine-cellar. And then—oooh la la. Orgy time! If not today, then maybe on Tuesday. A big party.”

  I repressed a groan. Weezie frowned at me—once again wishing me out of the picture. But then she chattered on.

  “Lennox, let’s go down to the gate house and plan! You can wear my husband’s gray silk tuxedo. And I have some darling outfits to model for you. We’ll be the lord and lady of the manor. And, Junko, I want to reserve the front bedroom on the second floor for Lennox and me!”

  * * *

  8: Funhouse

  Thanks to our budding scene, people all over the world would be qwet in a couple of days. And then Louisville would be hit with a plague of ravenous wormholes—all of them connected to a monster up in Fairyland, a thing that we’d learn to call a myoor.

  But never mind that for now. At the start, everything was good. We called the Roller mansion the Funhouse. The cast of characters included me, Joey and Loulou, Junko, Dad and Weezie, Carlo and Reba, plus Kenny and Kristo.

  We were pretty much high all the time. Life in the Funhouse had the feeling of a joyful waking dream—a three-day dream that seemed to last for weeks.

  On Sunday, our first day there, the fourteen qwet rats helped clean out the house, although we humans did quite a bit of work as well. To help with the lifting, I had Craig Gurky send over two mover golems—none other than Gustav and Bonk. In order to improve communications, we qwetted the two golems right away. They didn’t mind—in fact they decided to hang around the Funhouse for a few more days, whether or not Craig wanted them home.

  The rats gnawed loose the vines and the crap on the ceiling. We pushed the stuff into a heap. Gustav and Bonk hauled it outside, along with a lot of extra crap. The rats were in a kind of cannibal frenzy—they were gnawing on the nurb fragments in the mound. It was kind of disturbing to watch, like a medieval Black Plague scene, especially with those three tattered humanoid sex nurbs on the heap.

  There seemed to be no limit to how much the rats could eat, even though they didn’t seem to get much larger in size. They moved and thought faster, I guess, or radiated off the extra energy in ear-splitting squeaks. And of course they crapped a lot. Weezie kept complaining about the rats, but naturally Joey insisted the qwet rodents were great guys.

  Sunday night, Skungy was the only rat inside the Funhouse with us. Sissa was outside keeping an eye on the two dozen newcomer rats. I let my elegantly crooked nurb dog Jericho come in, also the mover golems Gustav and Bonk.

  “Speaking as nurb, I don’t think you did good job on dog Jericho,” Bonk told me. We were standing in the kitchen.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “I remodded him this morning. He’s crooked on purpose.”

  “You say,” put in Gustav. “Takes practice to get right touch. Nurbs very refined.”

  “I’m the real biomodder around here,” said Loulou. “I could give you more lessons, Zad.”

  “Sure,” I said. Infatuated with Loulou as I was, all her ideas seemed fine.

  “But we can do that later,” said Loulou. We followed the others to the enormous ballroom at the rear of the house, where everyone was running and sliding across the shiny parquet floor, happy as kids.

  Eventually Joey and Carlo banged their heads together, and then sliding didn’t seem like as much fun, so we all settled down in the cleaned-up living room. The Roller mansion looked great, like a millionaire’s hunting lodge, with fine wooden furniture, leather couches and lush, living rugs—as good as it had been when I was boy. I wished Jane were here with us, although I didn’t quite want to call her just now. For one thing I still hadn’t found her oddball. And for another, well…

  Loulou was being very flirtatious, sitting on a soft couch between Joey and me. From the emotions I was teeping, I knew that we three would be having group sex tonight. No doubt about it. I was excited at the prospect—and anxious.

  I’d come close to sharing Reba with Carlo after high school, but we’d never closed that deal, at least not that any of us could remember. I was uneasy about getting in bed with a naked man. Homophobia was still quite real in Louisville, at least for some of us.

  But this time, with all three of us qwet, I felt I could get past my qualms. Turning my teep on Joey, I noticed that, for his part, he was having jealousy problems. The two of us shared an uneasy smile—and an emotive feeling that Loulou was worth it. Yes, yes, we’d rise above.

  The whole gang was sitting around drinking and nodding out, getting deep into cosmic mode. We had a big fire in the hearth—Kristo had done the work for that. Kenny had been busy on the third floor tricking out his new space. Jericho lay near the hearth, and Skungy lolled on the fake dog’s back, as cosmic as the rest of us, quite the beloved pet. Even Weezie was starting to think the qwet rat was cute.

  We were hungry by now. Weezie had gotten bags and bags of live food delivered from a nurb food supplier on River Road. But nobody had the energy to lay out a formal meal on the baronial dining table in the next room.

  “I’ll show you some real biomodding,” said Loulou, about to make her way to the freshly stocked kitchen.

  “Don’t put spit on everything,” said Junko, and handed Loulou her qwetter yam.

  So Loulou qwetted and biomodded the food. The thing about nurb food, it was still alive right up until you chewed it up, like fruit is. But even a nurb loaf of bread or roast chicken was alive. It stayed fresher that way. And you could keep biomodding it up until the last minute.

  Loulou’s concept this time was to jolt the foods into walking around the living room and offering themselves to us. Dad got wind of the plan and went into the kitchen to work with Loulou, regaling her with a description of an old Flemish painting that showed an imagined scene of endless free eats—it was The Land of Cockaigne by Peter Bruegel. Dad had a nice clear image of the painting in his head, old-school painter that he was.

  So—following Dad and master Bruegel, Loulou set a roasted shoat to wandering around the living room with a knife tucked into a flap of skin on his back. The young pig’s butt was a tasty country ham, nicely cured. The pig was trailed by a scarecrow figure with limbs made of skinny loaves of bread. When you broke off a chunk, a new chunk grew in its place. A couple of helium-filled roast chickens flew around the room, flapping their crisp wings, and pausing if you wanted to tear off a leg or a chunk of white meat. Baked yams and apples did choreographed routines on pointy little feet.

  For dessert, Loulou set a nurb prickly-pear cactus to growing from the floor. Its lobed pads were in fact thick pancakes dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Beside the cactus, some living pots of orange marmalade and blackberry jam stood at the ready with spoons in their hands. The pots watched us with bright beady eyes.

  The common room echoed with cheers for Loulou’s craft. She bowed and grinned, her eyes like happy slits.

  “Teach us your trick about breathing out qwetter molecules,” Kenny said to me when the meal was done. “The move you used on me in the jellyfish.”

  So I explained my routine. Wanting to stay in the spotlight, Loulou held forth on her techniques of making things qwet by sharing bodily fluids. And of course Junko insisted on messaging the full gene sequence for qwetter yam to those of us that hadn’t already seen it.

  “I can go all of you one better,” said Joey, after quietly thinking it over for a minute. “I can qwet people and nurbs and animals just by thinking at ‘em. Watch those chairs peeking in at us from the side of the door.”

  Indeed, four of the baby armchairs had been lurking in the shadows of the dining room, peering in at our doings, giggling at the thought that some day humans might be sitting on them. All day they’d been scampering away from us like shy fawns. But now, in the face of Joey’s basilisk gaze, they trooped into the living room and let us pet them. Their little backs were sleek and soft; their flexible legs were nimble
. Via qwet teep, Joey coaxed the four chairs into doing acrobatics for us—balancing in a column, nesting together in a ball, tossing one of their number back and forth. And then, chortling in merriment, the chairs went to hide behind the dinner table again.

  “What you do is make a thought pattern like a loop of ribbon with a quantum twist,” said Joey, broadcasting a copy of his design. “Half the time it’s a plain ring, and half the time it’s a Mobius strip. Call it the Joey twistor. It’s hypnotic, man. You can’t get it out of your mind—even if you’re a nurb or, hell, even if you’re a frikkin’ ant. If you ain’t weird yet—Joey’s twistor is gonna do you.”

  I could see the twistor in my mind’s eye, and it was indeed enthralling. Like a skeleton picture of a cube that keeps flipping perspective—but the twistor wasn’t a cube, it was a ring. Or, no, wait, it was a Mobius strip. Either / Or / And. Loaded with a heavy vibe of quantum weirdness. I could feel the twistor crawling down into my cells and checking things out. Like a night watchman rattling doors. Making sure I was fully qwet.

  “How do you zap someone with your twistor if they’re not qwet yet?” I asked. “It’s not like you can send it by teep.”

  “Everyone has glints of teep,” said Joey. “Remember that regular people are flickering between robotic and cosmic mode at a rate of, say, twenty-four frames per second. Like a movie. You focus your mind’s eye on your victim, key on their vibes, pick the right instant, and zap the elixir in on them real hard. Just a taste. One touch of the twistor and — Today you will be with me in paradise.” Joey was so Kentuckified weird that he liked to drop Bible verses into his conversation.

  “I love this,” exclaimed Weezie Roller, admiring the Joey twistor she had in her head. “And it even works on nurbs? Let me have a go. Abracadabra!”

  She pointed at a silky nurb pillow on the floor. The pillow was an oversized peony flower. As soon as the pillow turned qwet, she gave a twitch, plumped up—and scrunched two of her spotted petals so they looked like sneaky eyes. A big fold in her middle took on the look of a laughing, toothless mouth.

  “Oof,” said Weezie. “It felt funny to do that.”

  “Good hack,” Junko said to Joey. “I’ll post a web tutorial for any of you who’s interested in the physics underlying Joey’s twistor.” No takers on this offer. We were cosmic. We didn’t want to learn. We wanted to play.

  Dad qwetted the living nurb clock on the mantelpiece, and set it to chiming a melody from Bach. Reba shaped a nurb blanket into a boa constrictor snake.

  “We enter this new age of do it oneself,” said Kristo.

  “Wacky nurbs,” said Joey. “Where it’s at. Don’t even need to get high no more. Let your grown home get high instead.”

  “Let’s do an animal,” said Dad.

  A housefly was buzzing around the room, happy to be out of the coming winter. Fixing the fly with a wizardly eye, Carlo zapped him with a Joey twistor, then teeped into his insect mind. Softly buzzing, Carlo lay on the floor, lying on his stomach with his head raised and his eyes closed. The fly perched on the mantelpiece and began grooming himself, rubbing his forelegs together. Precisely in synch, Carlo entwined his extended forearms.

  “Find female,” muttered Carlo. “Make larvae.” He swept his arms behind his back. “Get Reeeba. Buzzz.”

  The fly did some loops and rolls, then spiraled down to land on Reba’s cheek. Without any conscious thought at all, Reba swatted the thing. The fly fell stunned to the stone hearth beside Jericho.

  “Zzzt!” went Carlo. He rolled onto his back and quivered his arms and legs—the very image of a damaged insect fighting for his life.

  Joey leaned over the hearthstone, examining the fly. “Looky here! He’s imitating Carlo.” Sensing trouble, Jericho and Skungy backed away.

  The fly had risen onto his pitifully thin rear legs. Awkwardly balancing himself, he waved his forelimbs and made a grainy buzz that sounded for all the world like—a high, horrible Carlo voice.

  “Save me! Save me!”

  “That’s more than enough,” said Reba, and stomped the fly flat.

  Carlo screamed, went limp. Reba was quite unable to wake him. She burst into tears.

  “Sweets,” suggested Weezie, piqued by the lively goings-on. “Flies love sweets.”

  Reba took a spoonful of preserves from the dancing jam pots and dribbled it across Carlo’s lips.

  “Spawn!” cried Carlo, leaping to his feet. Hard to say how much of his routine had been a put-on. Reba let out a chase-me scream and ran upstairs, with Carlo at her heels, buzzing even louder than before.

  The upstairs was big enough that we had separate rooms. Kenny and Kristo were hogging the third floor and the tower. Dad and Weezie took the front corner room on the second floor, with Carlo and Reba in the room next to that, and hopeful Junko in a tiny maid’s room next to them. Joey, Loulou and I were in a double bedroom along the house’s rear side. Our bed was a plump nurb; we’d tweaked it to be larger than king size. My dog Jericho slept in our room as well.

  The light rays from our nurb candles gave the room a warm glow. But Joey and I were still uncomfortable about sharing a bed. Loulou had an idea.

  “Run a headtrip so you don’t see each other,” she suggested. “Self-hypnosis. Then Joey won’t be jealous, and Zad won’t worry about turning queer.”

  No point trying to appeal Loulou’s judgments—after all, she was reading our minds.

  The invisibility illusion took a minute to get right, but it wasn’t that hard. It was like the way you can ignore the mesh when you’re looking through a screen, or ignore the pink blur of your nose that’s always at the edge of your visual field. Seen through my eyes, Joey Moon was a pink blur too. Conversely, I was hidden from Joey by a smooth mental warp of his own construction.

  Mr. Modesty and Mr. Shy. Two unseen incubi ravishing lady Loulou. She laughed and moaned. Another night to remember. But maybe not such a pleasant memory.

  Somehow Loulou was beginning to get on my nerves. Too tough for me, maybe, or too hip, or too grasping.

  Monday morning, we three drifted down to the spacious kitchen for food. Carlo, Reba, and Junko were already there. Kenny and Kristo were still asleep, and Weezie and Dad were just coming downstairs too. The kitchen had captain’s chairs, a big round table, a couple of couches, and glass doors opening onto the lawn.

  There wasn’t any sense that we had something special to accomplish this morning. Never mind the police, and let Junko worry about distributing qwet. Everything would take care of itself in due time. We were cosmic.

  As it happened, old Weezie Roller had used the web to listen in when Loulou was telling Joey and me about imagining each other to be invisible. And she’d teeped into our emotions when we’d gotten down to our sex. Whatever. Once you and your friends are telepathic, your old notions of privacy drift away.

  Anyway, the point is that Weezie had always been very self-conscious about the shape of her chin. And, having heard Loulou talk about invisibility, she’d formed the idea of biomodding one of her nurb scarves so that its front side displayed images of the room behind it. And she’d wrapped this “cloak of invisibility” around her neck.

  “How we doing, gang?” sang Weezie, bouncing into the kitchen with Dad. She was jazzed about having so many houseguests.

  Everything was fine, if I could let it be that way. I could see bright blue sky out the kitchen windows, and there were shiny baby house jellies bumbling about in the limbs of the trees. Everything was perfect in every detail.

  “What happened to you?” Carlo was asking Weezie. “You’re head’s floating two inches above your shoulders, Mrs. Roller. Like someone guillotined you.”

  “Oh, damn,” said Weezie. Her hair swayed as she tried to look down at herself. And then she gave up and removed the scarf, returning to full visibility, soft chin and all. She glared at Dad. “Don’t you look at me in the morning? Why does a woman even bother about her makeup and her outfits?”

  “I, uh, did notice you�
�re wearing pink,” said Dad. “Seems like you could notice your invisible neck on your own.”

  “I don’t like the mirror in the morning,” said Weezie. “I figured I was perfect now—with one of my ugly parts edited out.”

  “None of you is ugly,” said Dad, finally hitting his stride.

  “Atta boy,” said Weezie. “Let me at the coffee plant.” Maybe Weezie wasn’t so bad. Just another human, after all, a human looking for love. It was hard to hate someone if you kept teeping their emotions. Now Weezie’s eyes happened to meet mine. I could tell she still didn’t like me. Oh well.

  “If I seem distracted, it’s because of what happened in the middle of the night,” Dad announced. “I had a vision.”

  “Tell all,” said Reba, comfortable on a kitchen couch with a plate of ham and eggs, Carlo at her side.

  “I heard thumping,” said Dad. “Like something bouncing up and down beside our bed. Weezie was fast asleep. I sat up, and I saw a ball hanging in midair. Transcendent, crystalline, charged with numinous energy. And—”

  “Jane’s oddball!” I put in. “It swallowed Loulou for awhile at Gaven’s. And it suffocated Gaven to death. I haven’t even told you about all that. Anyway, the oddball followed us to your studio, Dad. And then she must have tracked us to the Funhouse.”

  “You’re talking about the shiny thing Jane found in the woods last year?” said Dad. “Yes, of course. That’s the thing I saw last night. I was wondering why it seemed familiar. But it’s turned very lively.”

  “The oddball is a tunnel to another world,” said Loulou. “I saw dragonfly people over there who watch us. They call their world Fairyland.”