Transreal Trilogy: Secret of Life, White Light, Saucer Wisdom

by Rudy Rucker

  Conrad said goodbye to his two friends outside of Clothier. It was a bright, windy fall day, but the great gray building seemed gloomy as a church or prison. Ace and Platter went in the rear entrance to get their names checked off the attendance list, and Conrad went on down to the stage-door entrance at the front. Dean Potts was right inside the door, waiting.

  “Charlie!” said Dean Potts. “You’re right on time.” Potts was a tall, dough-faced guy—one of these low-empathy American men who never really gets past being a boy scout. Mr. Bulber had been somewhat the same type, so it stood to reason he and Potts would be friends.

  “I’m surprised the kids wanted me to speak,” said Conrad tentatively.

  “That’s ‘cause you’ve been throwing those wild parties, Charlie! The President was a little worried what might happen today, but I told him there’d be no problem. I know the real Charles Bulber, is what I told him; am I right?”

  Was that mockery on Potts’s face? Conrad thanked God he wasn’t stoned, thanked God he’d typed some kind of speech out in advance. This was going to be tough. If only he’d had more time!

  Potts led Conrad out onto the stage, and they took their seats along with the rest of the faculty and staff. The format was that all the students sat down in the auditorium, and the grown-ups sat up on the stage, facing the students. And then the speaker would stand up in front of the grown-ups, facing the students, and talk. Right before the talk, with everyone still sitting down, they always had a minute or two of silence, a legacy of Swarthmore’s Quaker beginnings.

  The students seemed unruly today, messy and buzzing—they’d all heard of Mr. Bulber’s pot party two weeks ago, and they were expecting something bizarre. Settling into his wooden seat, Conrad noticed a small figure darting up and down the Clothier aisle—Tuskman, oh, Christ, Izzy Tuskman with a stocking over his head, tossing out handfuls of joints as fast as his arms and legs could move. One thing about Izzy, he never gave up. When Conrad had given him his one-fifth kilo, he’d explained to Izzy that the handing out of reefers was definitely canceled, but—did Izzy care? No. He had it all figured out—that he’d wear a disguise and take off before anyone could—

  BAM! That was Izzy slamming the rear door of Clothier. Outside you could hear a car peeling out. Da get-away cah.

  Conrad buried his face in his hands and tried to merge into the One. The meditation period had started—oh, it was peaceful here, in this empty time—two minutes is as close to forever as seventy years is, if you look at it the right way, the old finite/infinite distinction…

  In the vast, thoughty silence you could hear matches scratching here and there—people were lighting up. Conrad peeked out between his fingers—yes, there were plumes of smoke everywhere, a faint blue haze percolating up from the crowd. How was he going to convince the President that this wasn’t his fault? Especially since it was…

  ARHMMM. Dean Potts at the mike, the two minutes were over. “Today’s speaker needs no introduction. I give you Charlie Bulber.”

  The space between his chair and the lectern seemed so far. Taking the first step, Conrad flashed on his old high-school rap about the urinals, how it seemed you can never cross a room, but you always do: “We’re going to die, Jim, can you believe that? It’s really going to stop someday, all of it, and you’re dead then, you know?” Right here, right now, death was very close. This was a trap. Something about Potts’s face. Conrad could feel it. And inside himself, he could feel a new power begin to grow.

  Now he was at the lectern. A rifle barked. Without even thinking about it, Conrad stepped outside of time.

  It was like being in a waxworks—all the students frozen with expectant smiles; the plumes of smoke like cracks in ice; and there, hovering just behind Conrad’s head, the bullet.

  He peered up past the bullet and into the scaffolding over the stage. Perched there were two men in black—government agents. They’d been onto him all along. No doubt they’d found him in the first place by tailing Audrey; they’d probably opened her mail. Conrad winced to imagine cops reading the silly drunken first letter he’d written her from Bulber’s. I do want to do some kind of trip on the straights’ heads here.

  This was all a setup. The cable from Paris: a fake, to keep Conrad around. The college’s willingness to let him make this speech: a lure, to get him into the pigs’ gunsights. All a setup, but it hadn’t worked. Fourth Chinese Brother.

  Conrad could feel that his body had gone back to its old shape—his hair was long again; his joints more flexible. It felt good. Getting out of the Mr. Bulber shape was like getting out of an uncomfortable Sunday suit. His shape-changing power was gone, but now he had a new power: the ability to step outside of time.

  He crumpled up his confused, rambling speech about the secret of life and tossed it aside. It hung there in the air, just where he let it go. Time had stopped for everything except Conrad and what he touched. Somehow his personal time-axis had turned perpendicular to the world’s time. He was still in our universe’s space, yet his time had twigged off into a new direction.

  Conrad wondered if he should do something to dough-faced Potts, sitting back there with his finger raised in silent signal to the snipers. Give him the speech, maybe. Yeah. Conrad pried Potts’s mouth open and stuffed his wadded speech inside. Chew on that, man. Do you some good. Potts twitched momentarily into life at Conrad’s touch, just long enough to gag and glare, but then, as Conrad shied away from him, he returned to stony immobility.

  Conrad hopped down from the stage and went over to Audrey, sitting there in the front row between Ace and Platter. A smile still broadened her full mouth, and her hands were held up in applause. He took her by the shoulders and kissed her.

  “Huh?” Audrey jerked in surprise. For her it was as if Conrad had flown over instantaneously. “Conrad? You changed back! But—why’s it so quiet?”

  Conrad made sure to keep his hand on her, towing her along in his altered timestream. “It’s my fourth power. I changed the direction of my time. It’s a little like I’m moving infinitely fast. As long as I touch you, you’ll move along with me. They were going to shoot me up there. I jumped out of time just before the first bullet hit me.”

  Audrey got to her feet and looked around. It was an unsettling sight: row after row of faces caught in random flash-bulb expressions. The overall feeling was of being in front of a great, cresting wave about to break. “It’s creepy, Conrad. Let’s get out of here.”

  Hand-in-hand they walked out of Clothier. Red-and-yellow maple leaves hung suspended in the air. A starling that had just taken wing hovered three feet off the ground. Frozen in time like this, the bird’s body looked strange—like a three-dimensional Chinese ideogram. High overhead, a jet’s contrails marked the sky.

  “They tried to shoot you?”

  “Yeah. The bullet’s still hanging in the air back there.”

  “What would have happened if the bullet had hit you?”

  “My body would be dead, and maybe the rest of me, too. There’s that stick of light in me, but I’m not sure it can live on its own without that crystal I told you about. I was so scared the flamers would home in on me again that I left the crystal at Skelton’s. I shouldn’t have done that.” Staring at the starling’s ragged feathers, Conrad tried once again to understand death. Nothing. In the sudden contrast, Audrey’s face seemed unbearably sweet. They hugged and kissed.

  “Look,” said Audrey, disentangling herself. “Shouldn’t we get going? How long is this going to last?”

  “When I shift back into normal time, it’s probably going to be at the same instant I left. So this isn’t going to last any time at all. It’s an intermission between two reels of the movie. Maybe I’ll decide to be a martyr and go stand by that bullet and step back into real time. Do you think I should do that, Audrey?”

  “Don’t be crazy. I can’t believe they’d want to kill you anyway. All you
ever did wrong was break into that farmhouse. You’ve been here on Earth ten years and never hurt anyone.”

  “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? The government has gotten so paranoid recently. I guess they figured that with all my powers there was no way to capture me alive.”

  “They were right about that,” said Audrey, smiling. “You still didn’t answer my question, though. How long for you is the time-stop going to last?”

  “All my other powers always lasted till I knew that everyone had found out about them. When I saw our picture in the paper in Paris, I couldn’t fly anymore—remember? And then when Skelton’s film of me was on TV, I couldn’t shrink. Just now, with those guys shooting at me, I could tell they knew I’d changed my face, so I got my old Conrad-face back. But now, outside of time like this, it doesn’t seem like they’ll ever know at all. This could last for a long time, Audrey. And for all that time, nothing will move or change except the things that I touch.”

  “Like me. Sleeping Beauty.”

  “And the air we’re breathing.”

  “I wonder if a car would run if you touched it.”

  “What for?”

  “We’ve got to do something, Conrad. We can’t just vegetate.” She tugged at him, and they started walking down the long campus lawn toward the street.

  “Uh…” Conrad was having trouble getting motivated. He’d tried to figure out the secret of life for the speech, and basically he’d failed. Life was life. The feds had almost killed him for trying to explain it. And now here he and Audrey were, together again for the first time in weeks, moving around in the center of an endless stillness. It was like they were the flickering thoughts of some vast, universal jellyfish. Without time, it wasn’t quite real, but how pretty the leaves and sky! Life could end any time, and he still didn’t know what it was all about. “Is there a rush? We’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Conrad.”

  “Why don’t we go to Bulber’s house and make love?”

  Audrey twisted coyly away and briefly froze till Conrad put his hand back on her. She seemed not to notice the hiatus. “But the flame-people,” she protested. “Aren’t they going to come after you? If you can move out of human time, then they can, too.”

  “Oh, Audrey, I don’t know. Maybe I’d be glad to see them. Maybe they could fix it all. I want all this science fiction to be over. I’m tired of trying to be cool, or a genius. I just want to live a regular life with you. Get married, go to grad school, learn stuff, have kids, get old. Is that so much to ask?”

  Audrey put her arm around Conrad’s waist and squeezed. “Actually…we could fuck right here on the lawn. No one can see us. Let’s do it right there, by the tree where we first kissed!”

  So they did.

  And then they went down to the little street of shops at the edge of the campus and filled up a shopping bag with food. It was dreamy, dreamy in the food store and on the sidewalks—everyone still and silent.

  “It’s nice like this, isn’t it, Conrad? Just you and me, and everyone else asleep.”

  “Yes. It’s nice now, but I also know we’re going to get tired of living in a cardboard world.”

  “So what should we do?”

  “Let’s drive to Louisville and get the crystal from Skelton’s. I’ll hold it, and then the flame-people will find me again.”

  “And then?”

  “Oh, shit, let’s just enjoy this while we’re doing it.” The street was filled with cars, frozen cars with frozen drivers. “Do you like that Mustang, Audrey?”

  “Neat! A convertible! I bet you can make it run.”

  “Just wait here a second with our food.” Conrad stepped back from Audrey, and she stood motionless on the sidewalk. He went over to the Mustang and gave the car a tentative pat. At Conrad’s vivifying touch, the car gave a brief jerk forward. So Audrey was right—Conrad could pull machines as well as people into his timestream. Careful to touch the car as little as possible, Conrad reached in past the driver to yank on the emergency brake and turn off the ignition. Then he vaulted over the passenger side to sit next to the driver, a fellow student named Bud Otis. The fully wakened car skidded to a stop, with Conrad reaching over to steer it straight.

  “Bunger!” shouted Otis. “Where the hell did you—”

  Conrad jumped back out and Otis seemed to freeze again. Conrad went around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and grabbed Otis. Under the influence of Conrad’s magic touch, Otis flipped back into Conrad’s time, protesting loudly. Moving quickly, Conrad hustled him over to the roadside, and let him turn back into stone. Then he went and got Audrey.

  Audrey kept her hand on Conrad’s shoulder while he restarted the Mustang. It fired up fine, and he drove out toward the main highway, weaving around all the stopped cars.

  “Look at that,” exclaimed Audrey, suddenly. “Soldiers!”

  Conrad and Audrey were a block past the campus, and there, lined up in a residential street, were hundreds of soldiers, armed to the teeth. They had tanks and bazookas, machine guns and armored cars. A fleet of helicopters hovered over the treetops, frozen en route to Clothier. High overhead, you could make out the black, triangular silhouettes of fighter planes.

  “Wow,” said Conrad. “They were really planning to cream me if those bullets didn’t work. I bet there’s soldiers on the other side of campus, too.”

  “And in the Crum! Aren’t they going to be surprised when their time starts up. You and I’ll have disappeared!”

  “I just hope their time doesn’t start up any time soon,” said Conrad, driving a little faster.

  Soon they were out on the main highway and could breathe a little easier. They began picnicking on the groceries they’d taken. Bread, salami, fruit, and cheese.

  “What happened to your speech, anyway, Conrad?”

  “I stuffed it in Dean Potts’s mouth. That’s what it was written for, really.”

  Chapter 29: “Thursday, September 22, 1966”

  Normally, the drive to Louisville would have taken a day and a half. But with the world’s time effectively stopped, the road was often jammed by motionless cars in every lane, so that Conrad frequently had to pull onto the shoulder to get around the photo-finish speedsters. The tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike were particularly tough. Some cars simply had to be pat-patted out of the way. Two or three times, Audrey and Conrad walked into a motel, took a key to an empty room, and got some sleep. With all this, the trip took something like four days.

  Of course, really, there was no telling just how long it took. Neither Conrad nor Audrey was wearing a watch, and the sun, stuck in the old timestream, forever hung there in its near-noon, September 22, position.

  They ran into a rainstorm west of Pittsburgh, which was interesting. Each raindrop that hit their car would join their timestream and slide down to the road. Looking back, they could see a carved-out tunnel through the rain. It was interesting, but Conrad couldn’t figure out how to put up the convertible roof, and they were getting wet. So they stopped at a Howard Johnson’s, took the keys from the hand of a man about to unlock his Corvette, and proceeded in even better style.

  The ease of taking the man’s keys gave Conrad the notion of robbing a bank, but Audrey talked him out of it. The trip was dragging on longer than they’d imagined, and it was all getting kind of spooky. It was on the last leg—from Cincinnati to Louisville—that it really started to get strange.

  They were weaving along from lane to lane—every now and then skidding out onto the shoulder. Conrad was driving, and Audrey was staring out the open car window.

  “Is it always so hazy in Kentucky?” Audrey asked.

  “Hazy.” Conrad realized he’d been squinting for the last couple of hours. Things were getting harder and harder to see. It was like wearing the wrong pair of glasses.

  “And look at the sun, Co
nrad, it’s gotten all fuzzy!”

  Indeed the sun was fuzzy, and the landscape hazy. The great tapestry of past reality was beginning to fade.

  “That’s not normal, is it, Conrad?”

  “Normal! None of this is normal.” He tried to drive a little faster. Pass a car in his lane, dodge a truck in the other lane, skid around a solid block of three cars either way.

  “We’re getting too far away from the main timestream, Conrad! That’s why the world is getting so vague. It’s out of focus!”

  It got worse and worse—soon nothing was clear beyond a fifty-yard radius around the Corvette. It was like driving through thick fog—with the difference that the fog was bright, not dark.

  “I’m scared, Conrad.”

  “Maybe I should let you go. I could put you out by the roadside, and you’d leave my timestream. You’d be out there with all the regular people.”

  “But it’s you I want, Conrad.”

  “Well, hang on then, Audrey. Once I get that crystal we’ll see the flamers, and maybe they’ll help me out.”

  Fortunately, Conrad remembered Louisville’s roads well, and they were able to find their way to Skelton’s. They pulled up his driveway, and the sun-hazed farmhouse reared up before them like a haystack by Monet. Hand in hand, they left the now-shimmering car and mounted Skelton’s steps. At the touch of Conrad’s feet, the steps grew satisfyingly solid.

  They found Skelton on his back porch, poised over a trout fly in a vise. He was busy wrapping it with yellow thread. Like everything else now, Skelton had the gauzy outlines of an Impressionist painting. Conrad laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder. It took him a moment to get fully solid, and then he looked up.

  “Conrad! How’d you sneak in like that, boy?”

  “I’m outside of normal time. I just pulled you into my timestream. This here’s Audrey Hayes, who I’m engaged to. Audrey, this is Mr. Skelton.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Audrey. Engaged to the saucer-alien, hey? Well, I suppose he can have kids like anyone else.”