Reveling in its plenitude, the wave lofts higher and higher—and Del shoots up toward the supernal crest.
“We're a planetary wave in probability space!” murmurs Kaya. “But what happens when it breaks?"
“Maybe it doesn't have to break,” says Zep, working his double-loaded board up the face of the watery slope. “It's the perfect wave, right? We can ride it forever."
“That tiki is so beautiful,” says Kaya, turning her attention to the craggy face just behind them. “She looks green, now, doesn't she? Maybe she stands for Gaia. The planetary eigenvector."
The tiki hears her; she makes just the slightest of funky moves, tottering a few inches further forward on her oversized longboard. The beetle-browed goddess's motions are sheer understated elegance, drawn from the racial memories of Mother Earth.
“Dig it,” says Kaya, sketching invisible energy lines with her fingers. “The tiki's still entangled with me—like by an astral cord around my neck. Everything's gonna work out for the best."
Surfing well above them, Del is happy, knowing he's at the top of the tournament ladder. Indeed, he's somewhere above the topmost rung of any conceivable ladder. The seas and mountains of planet Earth are folding into the perfect wave like rich loam opening up before a plowshare. The planet's mantle and its fragrant, sizzling core flow into the wave; vast whirlwinds suck the planet's atmosphere into the ever-mounting peak of ultramarine blue. So awesome. Only now it occurs to Del that—if this is as real as it seems—they're annihilating everyone on Earth.
A shadow falls over him. The highest edge of the wave has begun to curl over, occluding its face from the full glow of the atmosphere's light. In the nearly transparent sheet of water, shapes are moving, darting, dancing, chirping. They flip into the air, twist, and dive into the wave again, laughing. Dolphins by the thousands, millions, more.
One of them cuts in close to Del, chattering, and as Del speeds up his brain, the sounds congeal into human speech. It's still a simulated dolphin, yes, but it's also a storage module, holding one of the billions of human minds now folded into the flowing mountain, minds waiting for the planetary wave equation to settle into its new configuration so they can don their reborn forms.
“Your fuddy foe has tagged the tiki,” says the dolphin with utterly grave hilarity.
Sure enough, Loach has caught hold of the third board's skeg—the fin that projects down into the water from the base of this board, a board so big that it might have been shaped from a single ancient mahogany tree. Climbing onto the tiki's longboard, Loach doesn't look the least bit intimidated.
His physical form is a churning mixture of Lova Moore and Lex Loach. Huge breasts emerge and wobble away, detached Dali blobs that surround him for a moment, try reattaching to his chest, find it unyielding and merge with the water instead. His lips puff up like botox worms, then shrivel away to show zombie skull fangs.
Loach crawls forward along the board, unable to find his balance. In order to drag himself to his feet, he wraps his arms around the goddess from behind, blinding her lidless eyes. The stonefaced tiki's expression shifts; her tightly pursed lips part in a warrior-woman's grimace. The tiki is enraged by Loach's sacrilege—but armless and legless as she is, she has no way of shaking him free. The great board wobbles.
The loss of poise spreads through the entire planetary wave. A period-doubling quiver of chaos percolates down through the quantum fluid. And now it seems the once-perfect wave is scraping across a subdimensional version of a reef, a crystalline ur-reality that was previously hidden beneath the cozy warmth of the natural world. The dark underlayment sends up the sinister tendrils of degenerate fixed-point computations, threatening to crystallize the entire wave-mountain into something dead and dull.
Del watches helplessly from above. The subdimensional reef is eating into the living water; it's killing the information flow.
Down in the crisis zone, Zep hears a horrible humming sound coming off the water, like brake drum linings peeling metal. It's a harsh scream that no board should make. Sparks are coming off the tail. The instability-fueled spikes of reef matter may snag him soon. And all around, the dolphins are screaming in fear. As he imagines the whole wonderful womany wave crystallizing into the dead fixed-point computations of the senile subdimensions, Zep feels deep grief. He should have loved Kaya while there was time. Marrying her wouldn't have been so bad. Their eyes lock.
“We can't let it set up like this,” says Zep. “We can't let the boring crud win."
“I can help,” says Kaya, solemn beneath her hand-drawn eyebrows. “Me and my tiki."
Standing erect on the rear of Zep's board, Kaya stretches her arms along the curve of an invisible circle whose far perimeter rings the tiki goddess. Kaya undulates her arms with a snaky wriggle and then—she's teleported herself to the longboard, replacing the tiki in the embrace of Lex Loach, with the tiki herself once again an amulet hanging from a bright red thread around Kaya's neck.
With a quick, efficient motion, Kaya elbows Loach in the solar plexus. His hold weakens and just then one of the boob-blobs, hovering like a satellite around its former owner, flattens and goes hard. It catches Loach in the face, rocking him back on his heels. Kaya reaches out and gives Loach a graceful one-finger shove. He slides off the board and hangs in mid-air like cartoon shock personified: a fixed expression of gaping eyes, open mouth, raised eyebrows. And then he begins to fall, not quite touching the face of the nearly vertical wave.
It's up to the three surfers to find a new home for the human race. With a supreme effort of will, Zep morphs his dinky Perfect Wave cave board into his good stick Chaos Attractor. The board's oddly adhesive surface seethes with sharp-cornered cubic waves. With a grim smile, Zep ups the simulation chaoticity yet again.
Feeling the fresh burst of energy, Kaya swings her massive longboard about, sending a square-humped wake toward Del, passing him that last extra bit of force that he needs. And now Del flies up the glassy cliff toward the very peak of the wave, streaking like a shooting star, sliding across the still-living liquid crest.
“Lead the wave, Del!” calls Zep.
Looking down from his vantage point, Del sees Zep and Kaya stuck at the edges of a boring opaque stain that's turning to obsidian, to coal, to black ice. And below that is—something worse. Del hears the crystals forming far below, the dull sound of degenerate matter clanking into place. But he knows better than to dwell on that.
“Tubeleader Aspect!” he cries, his personal war-whoop.
There's still just room for him to ride, a thin, curling edge of dancing water. He crouches, feeling the outlines of the subdimensional reef viscerally through his feet, lowering his center of gravity to shift the moving mass of the wave.
The tipmost wave tube constricts and closes him in. But in a sense, he and his friends have designed this break. He knows what awaits them on the other side, for they've designed that too. Del's creating it even now, sculpting it into being as he carves the planetary wave toward a new solution.
“Surf into the light,” he tells himself, and laughs. And then he's through the final tube.
* * * *
Lex Loach wakes as he always does, with an abrupt twitch that startles him out of sleep with a gasp. It's always the same, the dream of an endless fall that ends the moment he hits the sand. His eyes gape and he chokes back a groan at once again finding himself curled up with a ratty old beach towel for a blanket, groggy under the boardwalk. Same old, same old—the scuffing footsteps of morning joggers overhead, the sand in his eyes and mouth and hair and all the creases of his skin. He drags himself out on hands and knees, squinting at the Inner Sun burning through the glary fog. Sandpipers patrol the wet strip just above the tide.
A cold shower in the public restrooms removes most of the sand. He blots himself with his sandy, sodden towel, then hits the hot air blower three times to dry his pubes, and a fourth time just because it is one of the day's few pleasures.
As he trudges back down the b
each toward his job, he glares at Zep's mural—considers hawking phlegm on it, but he's been caught at this before by the Surf Shack's proprietor, with heavy consequences. The boss is a beast.
Lex rounds the corner of the restaurant, pushes open the back door, takes up the broom propped there and goes out again to sweep the parking lot. The trash bin reeks. Later he'll be cleaning it out. Something to look forward to. As he's brushing sullenly at spilled cornmeal and soda straw wrappers, he hears a commotion down on the beach, and pokes his head around the corner.
There's a platform under construction on a paved stretch near the playground, just above the sand. Giant speakers, a mike stand, and huge banners going up:
“SURF CITY WELCOMES TUBELEADER DELBERT!"
Frikkin’ Delbert, Loach thinks. Frikkin’ hometown homecoming for the hero, back from his epic journey across the interior of the earth, sweeping every tourney. Every night the TV in the Cheezemore Ratt Surf Shack is tuned to Delbert accepting some giant golden cup, or some enormous golden check for a million bucks, with golden babes hanging off his shoulders. While Lex is slaving here, living off discarded crusts and soda dregs, sleeping in the sand.
“Hey, Lex, whatcha doin?” Here she is, bugging him again.
“Hey, Jen,” says Lex with a shrug. Jen makes him nervous. He can't figure out why she's nice to a loser like him. Obviously there's something wrong with her. “I got work to do,” he says. “He'll be all over me if I stop."
“Oh ... okay, well ... you know Delbert's coming by in the afternoon? He's in town for Zep and Kaya's wedding anniversary? There's gonna be a party at their beach cottage on the North End, and I was thinking, maybe, if you wanted to, you know, come with me, I could get you in?"
Lex stops moving, grabs onto the broom handle as if it's a lifeline, a crutch, putting his whole weight into it. What the fuck is going on with him? Are those tears? His belly is spasming. He's a crybaby now, on top of everything else?
“Sorry, Lex, if you don't want to...."
“I don't know, Jen, all right? Let me think about it, okay? Jeez!"
She steps back and if she says anything else, it's drowned out by the sound of the screen door slamming. The boss is coming after him. As usual.
“You done sweeping, Loach? Then get out the bleach and go after the dumpster."
The voice is so harsh it cuts through Lex's general despair and makes his baseline resentments seem like dreams of paradise. But what can he say? The old bastard has legally indentured Lex via some unsavory deal that Loach Senior could never bring himself to speak of—and then Loach Senior died. Lex has no choice but to live with the unbreakable contract. Under the boardwalk.
“Almost, yeah,” he mumbles.
“What's that?” says the Surf Shack's owner, coming in closer, leaning over him, the smell of melted cheese on his breath making Lex wilt away as if from one of the pizza ovens.
“Almost done, sir,” says Lex a bit louder.
“Squeak up, boy!"
Lex draws himself upright, to his full six foot two, from which height he still has to look up another foot or so to meet the black beady eyes of his employer.
“I said yes, sir, Mr. Ratt, sir, I'm almost done with the work,” barks Lex.
“That's the right attitude,” says the shopkeeper, adjusting his tall silk hat. “That's how it's gotta be. Maybe someday, when you've paid off your debt, say five or ten years from now, I'll let you call me Cheezemore. Like my friends do. Till then you're mine, boy. I own you."
The screen door slaps shut. Lex waits a moment, till Ratt is gone for sure, then sags against the broomstick he clutches. Jen comes to him again, gently rubbing his aching back.
Lex looks out at the waves, wishing they could carry him away, but it's hopeless. The ocean curves and up into mist, offering no chance of escape. As far as he might sail, the great seas of the Hollow Earth would wrap around and bring him right back here.
It's Del, Zep, and Kaya's world—at least for now. But perhaps there's hope.
Maybe someday the perfect wave will break.
Copyright (c) 2007 Rudy Rucker & Mark Laidlaw
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Novelette: ALASTAIR BAFFLE'S EMPORIUM OF WONDERS
by Mike Resnick
According to Locus, Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner for short fiction, and most of those stories have appeared in Asimov's. His latest novel, Starship: Mercenary, appeared from Pyr in December, and Sub-terranean Press will be publishing The Other Teddy Roosevelts in February. In his latest tale, he takes a look at the precious gifts that can be found, and lost, at...
* * * *
Gold and Silver—that's us. We've been a team since major league baseball ended at the Mississippi River and the flag only had forty-eight stars. (Looked a lot nicer back then. More regular, sort of, with six rows of eight—or maybe it was eight rows of six. I suppose it depends on whether you were standing or lying down.) Between us we've outlived three wives (one of them his, two of them mine) and two kids (both his), we've stayed friends for more than three-quarters of a century (seventy-eight years to be exact), and we've been living together at the Hector McPherson Retirement Home since ... well, since we couldn't live on our own anymore.
He's Gold—Maury Gold. Me, I'm Nate Silver. I think it was Silverstein until my grandfather changed it back when Teddy Roosevelt was still president. Maury's dad changed his right after World War I, from Goldberg or Goldman or Gold-something-else. Makes no difference what they used to be. We're Gold and Silver now.
We met seventy-eight years ago, like I said. We've always lived in Chicago. It was pretty safe when we were kids. The cops had cleaned up Al Capone and his friends, and the place wasn't crawling with junkies and panhandlers yet, so we were each allowed to take the subway down to the Loop by ourselves, me from Rogers Park on the North Side, Maury from South Shore a couple of miles beyond the University of Chicago, which was overflowing with geniuses and Communists—frequently the same people—back in those days.
One of the things I loved to do was go to the Palmer House, the ritziest hotel in town. The guest rooms started on the third or fourth floor, but the ground floor and the mezzanine were filled with shops that carried the most fascinating things: clocks that glowed in the dark, pianos that played by themselves, clothes and jewels imported from exotic-sounding places like Constantinople and Hong Kong and Bombay.
And the most fascinating thing of all was a tiny store up on the mezzanine. It was called Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders, and it was a magic shop. It carried every trick under the sun (or so it seemed to me). There were boxes where Alastair Baffle would put anything from a coin to an egg, and it would vanish right before your eyes. There were empty hats that suddenly weren't empty any more, but filled with rabbits or flowers or colored silks. There was a full-sized guillotine, and somehow, faster than the eye could follow, the blade would drop and magically miss Alastair Baffle's neck. There were card tricks and rope tricks and magic wands that could fly through the air. There was a clock with the face of a beautiful woman, and just when you lost interest in it she'd smile and speak to you.
And the most wonderful thing of all was the magic show. Oh, he wouldn't perform it for free—but if you promised to buy a trick, and showed him your money (usually fifty cents would do, but if you didn't have it, once in a while he'd agree to sell you a twenty-five-cent trick), he'd spend half an hour showing you all the new tricks that had arrived since your last visit.
I thought only magicians would frequent the store, but the clientele didn't look like the kind of magicians you saw on stage. (No, I'd never seen a magic show on stage when I was a kid, but I saw all the ads for them, and I knew that magicians were long lean guys who looked good in white tie and tails like Fred Astaire, and were always assisted by scantily clad women who made me eager to grow up.)
But the few people who I saw coming and going weren't like that at all. One of them looked just like Paul Muni in
one of those movies where he's on the lam from the law. Another was all decked out in silks and satins, and wore a turban with a glittering jewel on the front of it. There were women, too; not the kind you expected to see on stage, but with elegant hats and veils, exotic make-up, and dark gloves. Those were the days when a lot of women wore wraps that were made from foxes that still had the heads attached. One day I saw Alastair Baffle wave good-bye to a woman who was leaving the store as I was entering. Then he said something, not in English, to one of the fox heads, and I could have sworn it looked up and winked at him.
My allowance back then was a quarter a week. I used to go there whenever I had fifty cents to buy a trick—but since the subway cost a quarter each way, that was about once a month. I kept wondering why no other kid had discovered the almost-free magic show—and then I met Maury.
He'd been going to the store for more than a year, same as me but on different Saturdays, gaping at all the wonders and getting his magic show in exchange for buying a trick.
“Ah! Young Mister Silver!” said Alastair Baffle when I entered his Emporium that Saturday morning. “There is someone here I think you should meet."
I was hoping it was a half-dressed magician's assistant, but it was only another boy, dark-haired, kind of skinny, a couple of inches shorter than me.
“Mister Silver, say hello to Mister Gold."
“Maury Gold,” he said, extending his hand. I took it, told him I was Nate Silver, and we promptly lost all interest in each other when Alastair Baffle began performing the Corinthian Rope Trick, followed by the Vanishing Mouse. But I had an extra dime and we stopped for a soda when we left, and we got to talking, and found that we had all kinds of things in common despite his being a White Sox fan and me rooting for the Cubs. We spent hours there, and finally decided we'd better go home before our parents called the cops, but we made arrangements to meet at the Emporium of Wonders four weeks later.
Asimov's SF, January 2008 Page 5
