by Rudy Rucker
“This is the first time I’ve heard we’re engaged,” said Audrey, smiling. “Conrad and I came here to see if you still had that crystal.”
“That crystal!” exclaimed Skelton. “If you only knew, Conrad, how the feds have been pestering me. Of course I never even allowed as how I had it back, but they would keep poking around. Yes, sir. I’ve got that crystal hid, and I’ve got it hid good.”
“Well, can I have it?”
“Yes…if you let me watch you use it. You know how much it would tickle me to see another saucer, Conrad, and—”
“No problem. And the sooner, the better. You notice how hazy everything is getting, Mr. Skelton? If my timestream gets too far off of the old reality, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. I want to get that crystal and call the flame-people for help.”
“Okey-doke. The crystal’s hid out in the smokehouse. I wedged her on into one of my country hams. It was my rolling the hams in rock salt that gave me the idea. It seemed fitting, what with you being made of pigmeat and all in the first place, Conrad.”
“Pigmeat?” exclaimed Audrey.
“Didn’t tell you that did he, hey?” chuckled Skelton. “Yep, that’s how Conrad got here. He was a stick of light attached to that crystal. When his saucer landed, he flew on out, stabbed his light into my prize hog Chester, doctored that pigmeat into human form, and walked off to join the Bungers. March 22, 1956. I saw the lights, but all I found was the crystal. Here we are.”
The three of them stepped into Skelton’s old stone smokehouse. Conrad kept one hand on each of his companions, pulling them along in his timestream. The smokehouse had the good familiar smell of fat and hickory. Skelton fumbled at one of the hams till he got it off its hook.
“Let’s go outside where there’s some light.”
They went out and sat down on the grass. The ham was in the middle, and the three people sat around it. The haziness had gotten so great now that everything outside of a small circle around them was gone. No house, no smokehouse, no sun, and no sky. Just raw color, lively specks of scintillating brightness.
Skelton felt around under the ham’s outer hide for what seemed quite a long time. Finally he drew out the crystal, shiny and glistening with fat. It was considerably smaller than the last time Conrad had seen it.
“Here, Conrad. You hold it, and I’ll keep my hand on you.”
The crystal tingled in Conrad’s palm. Where earlier it had been big as a matchbox, now it was no larger than a sugar cube. Even so, it nestled into the curves of his palm in the same tight way it had done back in the Zachary Taylor cemetery.
“This may take a few minutes,” said Conrad. “Let’s just sit tight.” He closed his eyes and concentrated. He could feel his memory pattern flowing down through the crystal and into the subaether transmission channel.
“Now, why did you say the world’s so blurred?” Skelton asked Audrey. “I had a cousin who had glaucoma—the way he told it, glaucoma makes things look something like this. What did you say was the reason?”
“It’s because we’re on another timestream,” said Audrey. “We’re moving farther and farther away from the old world. Like taking a wrong fork in the road.”
The crystal was hot in Conrad’s hand; and his ears were filled with buzzing. Closer. Closer.
Mr. Skelton was getting nervous and impatient. “I sure don’t like having the real world drift away from us like this. If that saucer doesn’t show up soon, I’ve got a mind to—”
ZZZZUUUUUHHHUUUUUssss.
Five bright red lights solidified out of the bright haze, coming into focus as they approached. It was a square-based pyramid, two or three meters on a side. Still buzzing, it hovered closer, then touched down on the grass next to Conrad and the two humans.
For a moment the vehicle sat there like a large tent, and then one of its faces split open. Out came a stick of light with a gleaming parallelepiped crystal at one end. Remembering the fight in the graveyard, Conrad tensed himself for battle. He raised his own crystal up to the nape of his neck and got ready to unsheathe his stick of light.
But instead of attacking, the creature slid its flame into the big country ham that lay inside the circle of Conrad, Skelton, and Audrey. The flame-person’s crystal stayed outside the ham, stuck to its narrow end. The wrinkles in the ham’s skin formed themselves into a facelike pattern, and small feet seemed to stick out from the joint’s wide end. Now the leg of pork got up and made a little bow to Conrad. Conrad returned the bow, not knowing whether to be frightened or amused.
“Hello,” said the ham. “I see you are on your fourth power. We weren’t sure you’d be able to take it this far.” It spoke in a precise, hammy tenor.
“Where’s your-all’s home star?” demanded Mr. Skelton.
“We don’t have one,” said the ham. “We aren’t material beings. The whole stars-and-planets concept is relative to the material condition. I think there’s a human science called quantum mechanics that could express where we come from. Hilbert space? The problem is that none of us knows quantum mechanics!” The ham laughed sharply. “That’s one of the things Conrad was supposed to find out about while looking for the ‘secret of life.’” The ham laughed again, not quite pleasantly. “I must say, Conrad, some of your information is valuable, but on the whole—”
“Well, he’s only just starting,” said Audrey protectively. “I’m sure that sooner or later Conrad can learn everything on Earth that you flame-people want to know.”
“You’re Audrey,” said the ham knowingly. “Conrad’s girlfriend. Of course you stick up for him.”
“How do you know about me?”
“See that crystal Conrad’s holding?” asked the ham. “Besides being a power source, it’s a memory transmitter. Every time Conrad touches it, we get copies of all his prior memories. You’re Audrey Hayes, and Conrad is in love with you.” The ham paused, bobbing in thought. “Love. Most interesting. It’s been a mess from the start, but in some ways this is one of the most interesting investigations we’ve done. It’s just a shame that—”
“Isn’t there some way we can undo it?” asked Conrad. “I know I’ve screwed up—all the humans have heard of us now, and they’re hunting for me. But isn’t there some last power I could use to undo it?”
“‘Fifth Chinese brother,’ you call it?” The ham smiled. “It’s no accident that you thought of that story. Yes, you could be the ‘fifth Chinese brother,’ Conrad. And you could, in a sense, live happily ever after. But—”
“But what?”
“It might deplete your energy too much. You see how small your crystal has gotten. It’s the energy source that keeps your flame going, you know. One more wish and there’ll be next to nothing left. No crystal, and your light will stop burning. It could turn into a kind of death sentence for you: live your seventy-odd years on some version of Earth, and then that’s it. If you come with me now, we can replenish your crystal and you’ll be sure of getting away. There’s plenty of other ‘planets’ to investigate, you know.”
Conrad squeezed Audrey’s hand. “I want to stay. I want to be a person, and I want to keep looking for the secret of life.”
“We knew you’d say that,” said the ham. “That’s why we picked you in the first place. But I had to ask.” Pompously the ham bowed once again and laid itself back on the ground. The wrinkled features began to fade.
“Wait,” cried Conrad. “What do I do? How do I make the humans stop hunting me? What is the fifth Chinese brother?”
“You know where you want to be,” said the ham, its voice muffled and indistinct. “Just go there!”
Then the light-sword slid back out of the meat. The flame-person waved at them in a last salute, and then it whisked back into its scout ship.
ssssUUUUUHHHUUUUUZZZZ.
The red lights faded off into the unfocused blur that surrounded them. “Wh
at’s going to happen if I try to tell people my ham talked to me?” said Skelton after a moment. “Not even UFO Monthly would print a story like that! But you could do a great article, Conrad. Come on out and turn yourself in—hell, they’d let you go soon enough, and—”
“All that’s what I have to get away from,” said Conrad. “I’m not going back to that reality. Didn’t you understand what the ham said? I can pick the reality I want and go there. Here like this with everything out of focus, we’re nowhere in particular. Audrey and I are going to imagine our world all right again, and go there.”
“I liked my world fine the way it was,” groused Skelton. “I don’t want to forget all this, Conrad.”
“Fine,” said Conrad. “Just take your hand off me, Mr. Skelton, and you’ll go back to the old timestream.”
The old man hesitated a moment. “OK,” he said finally. “I believe I will. It’s been a pleasure, Conrad. Nice to meet you, Audrey. I’ll write an article explaining how you all disappeared.”
“Thanks for everything,” said Conrad. “And be sure to tell Hank Larsen that I came back.” Old Skelton nodded and drew his hand away. He froze into stillness and then, slowly, slowly, he dissolved into light.
“Let’s head off that way,” suggested Audrey, pointing out toward where Skelton’s lawn had been.
“OK,” said Conrad. “Here, take my hand like this. We’ll squeeze the crystal in between the two of us.”
“And think of where we want to be.”
“How about Crum meadow?”
“Yes. And you’re starting senior year, Conrad, and everyone’s forgotten about the flame-people and all that.”
“Yes. You’ve come down to visit—it’s Friday afternoon.”
“And Ace is going to let us use the room.”
“I’ll ask you to marry me.”
“You will? So soon?”
As they walked, the haze shifted here and tightened there. Before long it was the Crum, and everything was just the way they’d wanted. They had no memory that it had ever been any other way.
“Audrey?”
“Yes, Conrad?”
“Have you guessed yet what’s in between our hands?”
“Oh, will you finally let me see?”
“Go ahead!”
Audrey drew back her hand and found that Conrad had given her a diamond ring. The diamond was tiny, but very bright.
White Light
—For Sylvia
Part I
To have seen a specter isn’t everything, and there are death-masks piled, one atop the other, clear to heaven.
—Neal Cassady, The First Third
1: In the Graveyard
Then it rained for a month. I started smoking again. Noise/Information…I was outside with a hat on.
Wednesday afternoon, I walked up Center Street to the graveyard on Temple Hill. The rain was keeping the others away, and it was peaceful. I stood under a big twisting tree, a beech with smooth gray hide made smoother by the rain running down it, tucks and puckers in the flesh, doughy on its own time-scale.
In the rain, under the tree in the graveyard, I was thinking about the Continuum Problem. Georg Cantor, father of our country, unearthed it in 1873 and lost his mind trying to solve it.
The light flickered and I could believe that spirits were pressing up to me. Would I sell my soul to solve the Continuum Problem, they wanted to know. Let’s see the solution. Let’s see the soul.
It was hard at first to tell if the deal actually came off. Four years before, I’d had a chance to ask the White Light about the Continuum Problem. It was on Memorial Day during the ’Nam war and there were guys with skinny necks and flags—whew! “And what about the continuum?” I’d asked, serious, pincering up a pencil with triple-jointed fingers. “Relax, you’re not ready,” was the answer—or more the feeling that the Answer was not going to be something I could write down in symbolic logic.
But I’d kept working at it, sharpening my inner eye so I could catch and name most of those bright glimpses—code the idea up in an elegant formulation, a magic spell which could bring the flash back. I was ready in the rain, in the graveyard, hoping to cheat the shades.
There was one stone on Temple Hill I liked particularly. Emily Wadsworth, 1793, epitaph: “Remember that you must die.” I found it refreshing—this welling up of human intelligence, of the reality of existence. I’d first seen the stone a few months earlier, read it, felt happy, but then! A black flyspeck become fly spiraled up from the stone and headed for me, If I land on you, you will die—I ran.
But I was back, there by the beech tree’s flowing trunk, watching the chutes and ladders, the midway of my mind; believing (why not) that the spirits were offering the solution of the Continuum Problem to me. The patters grew more fantastic, and I hung on, naming them quickly and without sinking, afloat on the rising flood…
The rain has picked up, I realize after a time. I look about for better shelter and pick a small mausoleum near the Wadsworth plot. I hurry over and try the door. Double doors, glass with iron grillwork. One opens, and I go in. There is an ordinary wooden door set into the floor. I tear it off the hinges and run down the staircase. More doors, I throw them behind me. Stairs, doors, black light—I run faster, catching up. Soon I hear the coffin, bumping and groaning down the stairs only a few steps ahead of me, I leap! And land in it, red satin, you understand, a clotted ejaculation—
“But this is not mathematics, Mr.—?”
“Rayman. Felix Rayman,” I reply. They are wearing dark suits with vests. Gold watch chains and wingtip shoes. The International Congress of Mathematicians, Paris, 1900.
David Hilbert takes the podium. He’s talking about mathematical problems in general, leading up to his personal list of the top 23 unsolved problems.
He’s little, with a pointed beard and a good speaking style. The first problem on his list is the Continuum Problem, but what catches my attention is the preliminary remark: “If we do not succeed in solving a mathematical problem, the reason frequently consists in our failure to recognize the more general standpoint from which the problem before us appears only as a single link in a chain of related problems.”
I search the crowd for the faces of Klein or Minkowski—I’m sure they’re here. But the faces are indistinct and Hilbert’s German is suddenly incomprehensible. A clod of earth falls on me from the ceiling. I get up and leave.
The exit door gives into a shadowy tunnel. The catacombs of Paris. I walk on, holding a candle, and every twenty paces or so the tunnel branches. I go left, left, right, left, right, right, right, left… My only desire is to avoid falling into a pattern.
Occasionally I pass through small chambers where bones are stored. The monks have built walls out of the thighbones, cords of greasy fuel for the eternal fires; and behind these walls they have thrown the smaller bones. The walls of femurs are decorated with skulls, set into stacks to form patterns—checkerboards, maps, crosses, Latin words. I see my name several times.
Some two thousand branchings into the labyrinth my mind is clear and I can remember every turn I have made. At each branching I am careful to break yet another possible rule for how I am choosing my path. If I continue forever, perhaps I can travel a path for which there is no finite description. And where will I be then? The skulls know.
I blow out my candle and sit in one of Death’s chambers to listen. There is a faint, unpleasant smell and a quiet sifting of dust from the bones’ imperceptible crumbling. In the labyrinth, the city of Death, it is only quiet. “We are sleeping.”
Perhaps I sleep too. It is hard to tell here, but it seems that I did complete that infinite journey through the tunnels; that they drew narrower and I more flexible; and that I traveled a path which cannot be described.
As the trip ended I was an electron moving along a nerve fiber, up the spinal cord and into th
e brain, my brain. It was raining on my face and I tried to sit up. But my body wouldn’t move. It just lay there, cooling in the October rain.
2: How I Got This Way
Being awake in a lifeless body was not an entirely new experience for me. For the last two weeks I had been having strange naps. Naps where I would wake up paralyzed and struggle through layer after layer of illusion before being able to rise. It had all come to a head the day before the graveyard.
I was fresh out of graduate school, and had a job as a mathematics instructor at a state college in Bernco, New York. Some fool or misanthrope had acronymed the college SUCAS. I was the first head to teach at SUCAS, and I felt violently out of place. In the evenings I argued with my wife and listened to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street on my stereo earphones. In the day I slept on my office floor, asphalt tile soft with 1940’s wax.
Of course it would not do for my so-called students or self-styled colleagues to see me sleeping on the floor, so I locked my door. I slept troubled by the fear that someone would use a passkey to catch me lying there, cheek slick with sleeper’s drool. Frequently my mind would snap awake at the sound of a fist, a key or a claw at my door, and I would have to struggle long minutes to rouse my body.
My office-mate’s name was Stuart Levin, and he’d been teaching at SUCAS two years longer than I. We had known each other faintly as undergraduates some eight years earlier—we’d lived in the same dorm at Swarthmore when I was a freshman and he was a senior.
Stuart was one of the last Zen fans and one of the first Maoists. He said he was going to be a Zen socialist playwright, and actually had a couple of odd pieces produced by the campus players. I remembered one in particular, Thank God for Yubiwaza. Apparently it had been based on a comic book ad for some kind of judo, and had lasted 38 seconds. I’d missed that one by stopping in the Men’s Room on my way into the theater, and had regretted the loss ever since.