by Rudy Rucker
“I’m going to stay high on cosmic mode for, like, a month,” said Reba, studying herself in a mirror from her purse. “I need sun. And lots of fruit. I’m literally a corpse.”
“It’s a good look on you,” said Craig. “You could host a squidskin channel.”
“Literally means actually,” Jane chided Reba. “If you’re speaking proper English. And you’re not actually dead.”
“What the fuck, schoolmarm Roller,” said Reba in a crabby tone. “You’ve gotten out of practice at being my friend. Keep it giggly.”
“I can get you some nurb silkworms for weaving a wig,” Junko told Reba.
“I’ve got a better idea for—” I began.
“I want a wig too,” interrupted Weezie. “I’ll be trolling for a new man. With Lennox gone. Is he dead, or what? I don’t understand that part, Zad.”
“My parents are still inside the myoor,” I said. “They’re gub embryos. They’re going to hatch out as gods. Gub gods.”
“I sure hope your mother doesn’t hold a grudge,” said Weezie. “If she’s going to be a god. She didn’t always have the best sense of humor. After they hatch out, will the myoor go away?”
“Did anyone make any promises about that?” asked Craig Gurky, turning to Jane and me.
“Those hillbilly dragonflies in Fairyland told us the whole gub life-cycle,” said Jane thoughtfully. “It was like a biology lecture. The Intrepid Liver Fluke. But I don’t remember about the myoor leaving.”
“Ask the gubs,” suggested Loulou.
“They’re too excited,” I said, looking up at the green gub and the spotted gub flying loops around each other. “And they don’t always answer our questions. Compared to them, we’re like germs. Or electrons.”
“All I know is that I don’t feel safe with that myoor around,” said Weezie. “After my clusterfuck of a party, I don’t even feel like going back to my house. But I don’t know where else to live.”
“You can stay in my apartment for a week or two,” said Jane.
“We’d strangle each other,” said Weezie. “And teep only makes it worse. I love you—but.”
“I was thinking that Jane and I might move to my parents’ farm,” I said. “At least part-time. I mean if my parents are—” My voice caught and trailed off.
“I’d like living in your family home,” said Jane, patting my hand. “I always liked it better than my parents’ place. More sincere.”
“My house isn’t sincere?” said Weezie. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” put in Carlo, who’d been drinking whiskey and slowly gathering his forces. “Language is an empty symbol-game. What I do know is that bald is gonna be a big look this fall.”
“I’m trying to tell you guys that I’ve got plans for some wig-hats already,” I said. “It’ll be one of my new Live Art products. When I reopen my business. Need to talk to you about that, Craig. About teaming up in your space?”
“Art nurbs and mover golems,” said Craig. “Feasible match. But you don’t move in with me.”
“Don’t worry.”
Carlo interrupted, holding up his hands like a blind man feeling his way towards a light. “That company we were all working for—what was it even called?”
“Slygro,” said Reba. “I own it. Is that bad?”
“The realtime approval ratings for qwet are quite high,” said Junko, briefly doing her staring-into-the-web thing. “The economy crashed yesterday, but now the news of the Churchill Downs liberation is out. People want to adjust and move on. You know how it is. Even an apocalypse only rates a couple of news cycles.”
“Adjust to being high,” said Joey. “It’s a wonderful world. If we let it be. Why was everyone so uptight for all those centuries? Why did we ever think that anything mattered?”
“I’m still seeing something about a treason charge?” said Reba, mentally scanning through the recent news. “Treason and mass murder?”
“Louisville Socialite’s Grisly Bash,” intoned Weezie, reading unseen headlines. “Glenview Genocide. But, hey, did any people actually die?”
“Not hardly,” I said.
Carlo gestured at the thousands of myoor survivors in the grandstand. “We’re gutsy heroes, right? We spent a day and a half as hostages inside an alien pod. We have post-traumatic stress. Society can’t fault us for anything we’ve done.”
“We might still be blamed for the people having bad reactions to qwet,” said Junko, still sifting data from the web. “Fights and murders. Personality takeovers. Negative feedback loops. I could try pushing out a fix. Qwet 2.0.”
“Don’t water this down because of a few goobs,” said Joey. “Ye have the stupid turds with you always. But a good high ye have not always. Thus saith the Lord.”
“It can be Gaven who takes the blame for anything bad,” I suggested. “The scapegoat.”
“Where is he now?” asked Junko.
Craig and I exchanged a smile. I’d let him watch via my wristphone when we’d had the big fight in the hayloft. “Long story short,” said Craig. “Gaven’s in Fairyland.”
“If I never see that man again it’ll be too soon,” said Reba, returning her attention to her makeup mirror. “Maybe I should grow some nurb lichen on my scalp, Junko, what do you think? Instead of a wig. An Art Deco look. Kind of butch.”
“You’re butch now?” said Carlo, amused.
“Whatever you and Junko like,” said Reba archly. “Remember, we’re a threesome. You like us better than Joey and Loulou, right, Junko? A girl like me needs a lot of attention. Let’s go to my apartment and firm things up.”
The rising sun was putting a nice glow into the myoor’s flesh, but she still had all those toothy mouths.
“I do wish I knew how long we have to keep an eye on the myoor,” said Junko. “I’m worried that if Zad’s Mr. Normals let down their guard, the myoor will slime across the city on another rampage.”
“Remember that the green gub is controlling her,” I said. “And the green gub pretty much wants to be nice to us, now that her myoor is pregnant.”
“Three months till Zad’s parents hatch out as gubs,” added Jane.
“Ta daaa!” said Loulou, and made snorting noises. “I’m a gub!”
“The myoor will get hungry,” fretted Junko. “What if I set up a symbiosis thing? Have a grove of tweaked nurb plants take root on her. The plants can feed the myoor with nodules on their roots. Peanuts, yams, taro, potatoes.”
“Loulou and I can help tweak the flower and leaf designs,” said Joey. “To make the plants look loofy. Really do it right. Everyone’s gonna be watching.”
“Let’s call it a Slygro demo project,” said Reba. “Great PR. It could save my bacon.”
“I want bacon,” said Carlo.
“First you take a shower,” said Reba, tossing her bald head. “You smell like calving day in the cattle barn.”
“I’ll get my Tailthumper skin scent colony going too,” said Carlo, quite unfazed.
“Let’s all three of us go to Reba’s apartment,” put in Junko. “Showers all around. And I’ll fix you up with a new blue blankie nurb, Reba. We can worry about the myoor’s nurb plants tomorrow.”
“Fine with me,” said Loulou, snuggling up to Joey. “We two won’t miss the rest of you at all.” She turned to old Weezie, putting on her sweetest smile. “Do you mind if we two keep living in your house, Mrs. Roller?”
“For a few days,” said Weezie. “Less than a week. Kenny’s still living there, and I’ll be back in January.”
“We might switch to a jellyfish house,” suggested Joey. “Those things are way qrude. Maybe we could anchor ours on Zad’s farm?”
Jane tensed at this—Loulou didn’t want more trouble.
“We’ll take our jellyfish to that new commune downtown,” said Loulou with an easy smile. “Wobble Manor.”
“Perfect,” said Jane.
There’s not much more to tell.
The green gub and spotted g
ub stayed in the sky for three months, waiting for their twins to be born, and vigilant against any harm to the myoor.
Junko, Loulou and Joey planted nurbs all over the myoor, and the plants bloomed into a Boschian jungle, alive with tendrils and translucent spheres. The myoor was happy and well nourished. She let her skin smooth over; her hungry mouths were gone. She was like a memorial garden, with the tombs of my parents near the center, the remains dimly visible through a layer of translucent skin. Not that Mom and Dad looked at all human. They were gubs, with finer details forming on their bodies every day. The Mom gub was a dark warm color, and the Dad gub was a cooler shade with pale spots.
With the myoor at peace, the Mr. Normals no longer needed to fence her in. Far from spreading, the myoor was shrinking. Feeding the substance of her body into the growing gub embryos. Freed of their duties, the Mr. Normals roamed around town, taking on the role of low-key deputies, cooling out any qwet-fueled fights that popped up. Top cop Lief Larson approved. He and I were on good terms now, if not exactly friends.
Jane and I were happy, mostly living on Mom and Dad’s farm, sometimes using Jane’s apartment in the city. Weezie had calmed down, and she’d moved back into the Roller mansion gate house. Jane was running her Jane Says business, doing promo and design. I was making art, gearing up for a big show to relaunch my Live Art gallery and its new annex in Craig Gurky’s warehouse. The DoG had given me permission to re-open.
All through October, Jane postponed finding out for sure if she was pregnant. She didn’t want to push it or jinx it. And then, one crisp morning in November, I woke and the bed was empty. Dawn. I went outside and found Jane on the back deck smiling. The trunks of the trees were lit by the rising sun. Jane’s eyes were soft.
“I’m having a baby,” she told me. “I finally looked inside myself. It’s really true.”
It was one of those moments when I could understand that this is all there is. The here and now. Jane and me in the world together. The big aha.
So, wait, what’s the big aha? Nothing complicated about it. All you have to do is to pay attention. Or not. The big aha comes just the same. It’s everywhere.
As December came on, the myoor’s pregnancy approached full term. And Jane would be having our baby in June. And my parents were inside the myoor. It all fit.
I got into the habit of going downtown to look at the myoor garden every few days, sometimes with Jane along. Other visitors were prone to wandering the myoor’s now-fragrant grounds as well. Some tweaked yam plants on the myoor came into bloom, with masses of white blossoms.
The myoor was much, much smaller by now, ten feet deep and a hundred feet across, with the two big pregnancy bulges in the center. Overhead the spotted gub and the green gub continued their watchful circling, standing guard over their nest.
As it happened, Jane and I were in the myoor garden when the new gubs were born. It was noon on Christmas Day—sunny and bitter cold. A holiday outing.
“Do you hear them?” said Jane as we two reached the center of the garden and its twin mounds. The myoor was shaking, the plants were warbling, and the unborn gubs were cheeping from within the myoor’s flesh.
In the most casual way imaginable, the myoor hide split open, releasing the pair. They wriggled out and floated free. A delicately shaded red gub, and a dark blue gub spangled with yellow stars.
The green gub and the spotted gub dipped down to nuzzle their babes. The four gubs were talking to each other, a chorus of wheenks.
A crowd of onlookers had gathered. Not liking this, the spotted gub prepared to take the little ones to someplace quieter. But it seemed that, at least for the moment, the green gub would remain. The baby gubs piped tremulous farewells to her, and then the spotted gub pushed them into the Nth dimension, nudging them with his snout, prying them up from our space.
I don’t know if the newborn gubs ever noticed me. Certainly they didn’t say goodbye. They weren’t my parents anymore at all.
The green gub didn’t like having her family out of her sight. With quick, smooth motions she did her cleanup work—gathering what was left of the myoor and absorbing it into her flesh.
Jane and I and the others were left on the bare dirt of the Churchill Downs track. The nurb plants that had bedecked the myoor were scattered about like discards from a winter garden.
Drawing very close to us two, the big green gub chirped a farewell. No telling what she said. She dwindled into the sky, then disappeared, joining her family in N-space. Someday, somewhere, she’ll revisit our universe, her universe, returning to spawn her next pair of baby gubs.
And here on Earth we have our qwet. We’ve settled into it; people like it. Jane and I are living with the new baby on Mom and Dad’s farm. She’s a girl. It’s like seeing my life start all over.
* * *
Afterword
In this afterword, I want to tell you a little about the origins of The Big Aha, give some information about the book’s illustrations, say a bit about becoming my own publisher, and inscribe an honor roll of my Kickstarter contributors.
I’m tempted also to include a detailed explanation of the hyperspace wormhole geometry that underlies a myoor’s wormhole mouths, and to explain how the myoor could in fact be siphoned down to out plane of reality via the wormholes. But, wait, you can look that up in my ancillary work, Notes for The Big Aha. The Notes are actually a bit longer than the novel. Look for the March 30, 2013, entry.
You can find free electronic versions of the Notes for the Big Aha on my novel’s website or, if you’re a fanatically completist Ruckeriana collector (bless your soul), you can order a special edition of the Notes as a color-illustrated hardback. The Big Aha website is here:
www.rudyrucker.com/thebigaha
Regarding the origins of The Big Aha, one of my basic inspirations was that I’ve always felt like the psychedelic revolution of the late Sixties and early Seventies didn’t last long enough. I wanted to revive that time’s spirit in the context of an SF novel set in the not too distant future.
My stylistic model was William J. Craddock’s little-known novel of the Sixties, Be Not Content. The book features deeply funny interactions among the early acidheads of the San Francisco Bay area. I first read it in 1972, shortly after its initial publication.
For years I chuckled fondly to myself about Craddock’s masterpiece. But by 2012 the book was all but unfindable. I took it upon myself to republish it—to clean off the master’s grave, you might say—and thus my publishing enterprise Transreal Books was born.
In writing The Big Aha, I wanted to reproduce Craddock’s spaced-out, off-kilter, irresponsible glee. But, these being postmodern times, I didn’t want to do it in terms of drugs. Drugs have been done to death. So I turned to quantum mechanics.
My Boulder Creek friend Nick Herbert was the one who initially hipped me to the psychedelic potential of quantum mechanics. I’ve known Nick since moving to California in 1986. As well as being a freaky, giggling mountain hermit, old Nick is a genuine physicist with degrees, a dusty job resume, and excellent popular-science books to his credit, including his 1985 magnum opus, Quantum Reality.
Nick has a lifelong dream of finding direct ways to experience the paradoxical nature of quantum reality. Nick terms this a quest for quantum tantra. He suggests that one step along this path might be to look into your own mind and to notice that quantum and classical processes are both at work. I ran with this idea, and my Big Aha characters talk about being in the cosmic versus the robotic mode.
In order to make my novel be more of a thrilling wonder tale, I beefed up quantum tantra by tacking on a second SFictional trope, that is, wetware. And thus I arrived at qwet, or quantum wetware, which also gives people telepathy, which is another long-term interest of mine.
I put a kink into my qwet teep by hewing to Nick Herbert’s scientific dictum that, logically speaking, people must forget whatever they learn via telepathy. Otherwise they might be exchanging information faster than light! Obli
vious teep is a nice metaphor for intimate human communication. “Yes we made love, but I don’t remember a word we said.”
In planning The Big Aha, I decided to set it in Louisville, Kentucky. I grew up there, and I wanted to reminisce a little about my youth, and about my parents. My brother Embry lives in Louisville, and I visit him from time to time. I’m always struck by the fact that he’s still seeing the people whom he went to gradeschool or even kindergarten with. After so many years together, they speak to each other very openly and with little concern about being polite. In other words, they’re free to be completely crass and rude. I find such unstilted dialog amusing, and I wanted to write some characters who talked that way.
Why did I publish The Big Aha myself? I probably could have sold the book to a commercial publisher—but that’s been getting less rewarding over the last few years, with longer waits, more anxiety, less actual editing by the publisher, less proofreading and smaller advances. Less fun. Publishing is undergoing a phase shift, a transition from one era to the next. The thuddy dinosaurs are losing ground to the nimble mammals. So I’m morphing into a qwet rat.
As an older writer, I felt hesitant about starting my own publishing enterprise. But survival is a matter of doing whatever works in our continually mutating postsingular world. And once you accept self-publishing, there are some advantages to it.
One nice thing, for instance, is that I can include images of my paintings on the book cover and as illustrations at the heads of the chapters. A commercial publisher might balk at doing that. And I’m free to publish the hardback edition with the illos in color.
Regarding my paintings, a number of them were made especially for The Big Aha. These days I often paint images of what I’m writing about, or of what I’m planning to write about. Previsualizing my scenarios in paint has become part of my creative process. And I’m painting more all the time. Riffing off this, I went ahead and made Zad and his father Lennox be artists.
