by Rudy Rucker
I pushed down on the brake pedal. It sank to the floor as if there were nothing behind it. The steering wheel spun as emptily as a wheel of fortune. The radio clicked off then, and in the sudden silence the car said, “GOD KNOWS.” Franx began screaming.
I turned in my seat and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Tell me what you know,” I said, shaking him.
“I forgot,” he babbled. “I didn’t want to remember. So you caught me, you and your tumbrel, just like the book said. I couldn’t face it, and now it’s really happening. Oh no! I don’t want to leave Cimön! I don’t want to go!”
His eyes were glazing over, and white balls of spit had gathered at the corners of his mouth. I shook him again, gently. “Go where, Franx?”
He spoke slowly, painfully. “Into the light. Over the edge and into the light. I didn’t tell you the truth—about why I was sad.”
I thought back to his behavior on the glacier, the things he’d said in the tunnel to alef-one. “You said you were upset because you couldn’t stay in the White Light. But now?”
It took him a minute to answer. The headlights picked out the red eyes of rats by the score. And yellow cat-eyes, and eyes like I’d never seen. Evil-looking fires flickered here and there. Dark forms passed back and forth in front of the flames. The fires seemed to come out of holes in the ground. I thought back to the crack the Devil had opened up in the graveyard.
Franx was talking again. “I’m scared of the White Light. I love myself too much to dissolve like that. None of the people on Mount On wants to get to the top. That’s why they go there. For the people who really want God, there’s an easy way. Beyond the Dump. Off the edge.” His lips were twitching and his hands ran up and down his body like live insects. “I don’t want that, I don’t want that—” He began sobbing. I looked away.
The windows had rolled themselves up, and none of the car doors would open. “What’s going on?” Kathy cried. “What’s supposed to be beyond the Dump?”
“The Desert,” Franx groaned. “The edge.” He fell catatonically silent then. Kathy stared at me with her deep eyes, eyes so like my own. “What does he mean, Felix?”
“The Dump is a strip separating the cities of Mainside from some kind of desert. You saw it from the air. Everyone seems to be scared of the desert. Except this car.”
“Who sent you?” Kathy asked the dashboard. But there was no answer. Was the car a devil or an angel? Or just another pawn like us?
The road was worse than ever, but the ride had gotten smoother. We stopped near a huge fire then. The flames were leaping up from a sort of stone well set into the ground. I wondered if we were going to drive in.
There were a number of cars near the fire. They shifted about with fluid grace. Two rushed up to us and began a conversation with our car. They jiggled their hoods up and down and roared their engines. Occasionally a tire would bulge out to gesture plastically.
More cars crowded around. Some stretched up on tip-tire to peer in at us. They took something out of our trunk. After a final roar of conversation they all drifted off—all except for a sexy red Jaguar, voluptuously curved and with lidded headlamps.
She seemed to be very familiar with our car. They talked for a long time, occasionally stroking each other with their tires. I let the steady purr of their conversation lull me to sleep.
I didn’t have any dreams that I could remember. I was awakened by our car’s violent shaking. We were tilted up at an angle and bouncing up and down. The sky was pink.
For a horrible instant I thought that our car was about to jump into the fire. But then I glimpsed a lusciously curving red fender beneath us.
Kathy had woken up too. “Are we stuck on something?”
Just then our car gave a rapid shiver and slid down off the Jag. They nestled side to side with their tires pressed together. “They’re married,” Kathy exclaimed. “And there’s a baby!”
A soft little Fiat 500 came bounding up. It was only four feet long and its features were not fully developed. Its stubby little trunk and hood barely projected past its bulging windows. It called to us with a short toot.
As the parents caressed it, several other cars came up. There was another session of hood flapping and engine roaring. Finally we backed away from the fire. Most of the windshields were wet, and the wipers were running. A battered old Diesel cab sounded an elegiac note on its airhorn, and then everyone was honking good-bye. With a resigned lurch, our car headed deeper into the Dump.
“The car doesn’t want to go either,” Franx said in a choking voice. The horns had woken him up. “It’s your fault, Felix. You’re dragging us all over the edge with you. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. I was thinking only of—” He moaned and began wringing his hands.
The sky was quite light now, and we could see the Dump all around us. Here and there the Hell fires flickered, still bright in the daylight. Ahead of us the mounds of garbage were smaller, and now I could actually see through to the flat red Desert beyond.
“We’re almost there,” Franx wailed. Suddenly his voice took on a terrible intentness. “I don’t have to go. There’s still a way out for me, there’s still a way—” He smashed one of the beer bottles against the edge of the case and brandished the broken neck.
I assumed he was going to attack us, and moved to put myself between him and Kathy. I held my book up as a sort of shield and braced myself.
But he surprised me. With a quick gesture he pressed the jagged glass against his throat and ripped it open. A sheet of blood flopped out, and he was gone.
I stared out the back window as the green light that had been Franx went twisting away. One of those fires was flaring out of the ground nearby, and a sudden tentacle of flame lashed out, snared him. For a second you could see the feeble green light struggling against the orange flames, and then with a thin tweet of agony it was gone. He’d chanced one too many recorporations. I winced and looked at Kathy.
“Those flames,” she said. “They’re the same color as the fire I saw in the sky.”
I nodded. “I’ve seen them before, too. In the graveyard.”
21: Absolute Zero
The car cut off its engines as soon as we got out of the Dump. A featureless waste spread out ahead of us. Looking back I could see the Dump stretched out in an infinite line from left to right. There were a few figures dotting the landscape here and there. Hermits, holy-men. But a few miles beyond the Dump there was nothing but the blank red Desert. Nothing—as far as the eye could see.
The ground was smooth clay, baked to the consistency of pavement. The gravity vectors must have been slanting away from the Dump, for we kept rolling faster. Our passage kicked up a plume of dust which quivered behind us like a long straight tail.
As always, the light came from every part of the sky, but the horizon ahead was particularly bright. A white line that glared like a crack in a firing kiln.
It was getting hot, and I pushed at the window crank. Abruptly it gave, and I was able to roll down the window. Kathy followed suit, and the hot dry air whirled around us. We were doing about sixty miles per hour and still accelerating. I tested the brakes, the steering, the gear shift—they wagged back and forth unresistingly.
“We could jump out,” I said.
Kathy shook her head. “And end up like Franx?”
“That doesn’t always happen.” The hot wind tore the words out of my mouth and I had to shout. “The odds are very good that you’d just crawl back out of the Dump in your same body.” At the rate the hard ground was flickering past there was no question but that the jump would be fatal.
“Are you going to jump?” she called across the wind.
I shook my head. “No. I haven’t ever died yet, you know.”
“Oh come on, Felix,” she interrupted. “Don’t tell me you still think you—”
“All I know is that I want to get to that white
light up there.” I shouted, drowning her out. The horizon was brighter than ever, and you couldn’t look at it for long. “I’m taking this trip all the way to the end.
She leaned her head and shoulders out the window, tentatively testing the strength of the wind. We were doing a hundred miles per hour now, and the gravity was so steep that I kept sliding forward in my seat. We were the only thing moving in the flat red desert.
Kathy sat back in her seat, then got a beer out of the back. “There’s still time to decide,” she said. I took a beer too and we clinked a silent toast.
“What do you think it would be like?” Kathy asked. “To be safe in heaven dead.”
“Just merged. Merged into the void.”
“Maybe Truckee’s better.”
“For awhile. But not forever.” Even though we were going faster than ever, the wind was slacking off. It was as if there was now less air outside. “But I can’t tell you what to do.”
“You don’t think you’ll have to stay there,” Kathy said suddenly. “You’re counting on the White Light sending you back to your body on Earth.”
“Well…yes,” I admitted.
“I wonder if I could go back,” Kathy mused. “Maybe I could follow you.”
My bottle was empty. I threw it out the window and whipped my head around to see it explode into dust some fifty feet behind us.
“LAST ROUND,” the car said suddenly.
“Are you still here?” I called.
“COUNT DOWN.”
Kathy leaned towards the dashboard and asked, “How much longer till…till whatever?”
“TIME FLIES.”
She looked at me with a shrug. Suddenly the wind caught the cover of my book and riffled it open. The pages seemed more substantial, less densely packed. I checked and it was true. There was no longer a continuum of pages, no longer even alef-null pages—it was just a regular book two or three hundred pages long.
I looked at one of the pages and noticed another change. Back at Ellie’s the book still had alef-null lines per page. As soon as I’d gone out into Truckee the bottom half had become blurred and smeared. But now most of the blurred part had disappeared. There were a few hundred finely printed lines on each page.
I noticed a sort of flicker at the bottom of the page I was looking at. I watched intently for half a minute and then it flickered again. The lines were disappearing one by one! I flipped to the back of the book and pinched the last page between my fingers. Twenty or thirty seconds went by, and suddenly there was nothing between my fingers.
“Our hair is gone,” Kathy cried suddenly.
I ran my hand across my pate and felt mostly skin. I dropped the book and stared at Kathy. She was almost bald. A few hundred long hairs fluttered back and forth on her round, white head.
The pattern came to me in a right-brain flash. “We’re going towards zero, Kathy. Nothing. ON the other side of Cimön this direction leads towards the Absolute Infinite. Zero and Infinity. They’re the same at the Absolute.”
The car hit a little bump then and didn’t fall back to the ground. Some force pushed me out of my seat and pressed me against the dash. The perspective shifted crazily as I tried to orient myself. The flat red desert stretched back to the endless line of the Dump as before, but instead of coasting across it we were somehow falling down it.
Kathy pushed herself violently back from the windshield. The car tilted forwards and whumped. The tires burst and the wheels screamed against the blurred red surface. The rear end raised up then, and the car began slowly to tumble end over end, throwing off showers of sparks every time it scraped the ground which had somehow become a cliff.
The beers fell out of their case and banged around the compartment with us. Kathy was screaming and I managed to wrap my arms around her. The gravity had shifted. We were falling up, or across, or down, the red desert towards that glowing white horizon.
“GOD SPEED,” the car said, and abruptly dissolved from around us. It drew itself together into a ball of white light, circled us once, and then in a motion too fast to follow, it flashed all the way out to the glowing crack ahead.
In a way it was a relief to be in free-fall. The air resistance was negligible and Kathy and I, the book, and twelve beers fell across the landscape together. We were spinning slowly and moving parallel to the ground. Suddenly I felt one of my teeth disappear. We must be under a hundred now.
Kathy and I were still clutching each other. “There’s hardly any time left,” I said to her quietly. Her eyes were wild with terror, and it took her a second to understand me.
Finally it sank in. All except her front teeth were gone and she spoke quickly. “Send me back, Felix. I’m not ready for this.” The horizon was brighter and closer now.
“Are you sure? You’ve got to come here sooner or later—or the Devil will catch you.” All of our teeth were gone now, and the beer bottles around us were winking out one by one.
“Send me back, Felix,” she cried. “Do it fast.”
It was easy. I just waited till we had spun to a position where she was between me and the ground—and pushed. We drifted slowly apart. The ground got farther from me and closer to her. Our eyes were locked together, four deep pools. And then the impact ripped her to shreds.
I didn’t look away. I stared back until I saw the green light flutter up from the ground and circle uncertainly. It was her choice, but I felt guilty for letting her do it. What was it I had promised Jesus? I prayed that she’d recorporate safely.
The beers were all gone, and my book was a thin fluttering pamphlet flying along next to me. The glaring white light shone through the pages. I reached for it with my left hand, but stopped when I saw there was only a stump. All my toes and left-hand fingers were gone. My right hand was still intact, and I used it.
I held my booklet tight. I had five pages left. If there were one more page it would have been…been…I couldn’t think of any numbers higher than five.
Higher than what? My left leg and most of my stomach disappeared. Head, two arms and as leg. That made four. Once I had had something else but what?
My right leg and the rest of my lower body winked out. I squeezed my three pages tight between thumb and two fingers. I wondered what the pages said.
Slowly I brought them up to my face. My left arm was gone. Two. Two things. Me and the book. Head and arm. Thumb and finger. What else had there ever been?
The book covers were long gone and I could see the top page. There were two words on it. I struggled to read the first word.
And read it. One eye. One page. One word. One.
Part IV
I think most persons who shall have tested it will accept this as the central point of the illumination: That sanity is not the basic quality of intelligence, but is a mere condition which is variable, and like the humming of a wheel, goes up or down the musical gamut according to a physical activity; and that only in sanity is formal or contrasting thought, while the naked life is realized only outside of sanity altogether; and it is the instant contrast of this ‘tasteless water of souls’ with formal thought as we ‘come to that leaves in the patient an astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and a common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the absurd are of equal dignity.
—Benjamin Paul Blood, The Anaesthetic Revelation
22: Halloween
The air was filled with a hideous screeching. The bright little figures were moving past me, crowding up to the fountain and circling around it. A man with greasy hair leaned over them, making notes on a clipboard and pressing something into each tiny hand. Why couldn’t I remember his name?
I was upright in a crowd of dark forms topped by nodding white spots. Empty white faces anxiously watching the judge. Sammy.
Blue-white lights hissed overhead. They flickered, and the maskers’ motions wer
e chopped into scores of stills. A wagon with a dog-house. A silver cube with legs sticking out. Colored cloth, rubber, feathers, paint.
A little red devil bumped my leg as he wriggled past. His face was shining with excitement. He carried a hollowed-out head in his right hand. Orange.
The noise wouldn’t stop. It was coming from an electrified horn. Gray metal music of guts and bladders, a voice shouting names. Clicks of static—each just so.
There was muttering around me, words striking each other, sticking together. I needed something to put between. A lump on my chest slid out, opened and my fingers took out a white cylinder. Fire, warm smoke. Between.
They were whispering my name, edging me forward. But I was too fast for them, too rude. I burst out, fought past their angry cries to the ragged fringe of the crowd. I could go where I wanted. I started walking away from the terrible noise.
Footsteps behind me and a hand on my shoulder. “Felix! What happened to you?”
I turned around, breathing smoke between. I studied the face for a minute. Yellowish skin, full lips, intent eyes. It was April.
She took my arm and pulled me back towards the noise. Iris was sitting in her stroller, dressed in a bunny-rabbit suit. Her excited eyes paused on me. “Da-da!” I leaned over to pat her cheek, her stomach. She smiled, then went back to watching the other kids.
April’s expression was a mixture of relief and anger. I gestured weakly. “Let’s move down the street a little, baby. I can’t think with that noise.”
Her face tightened. “Of course, Felix. We mustn’t let anything upset you.”
I tried to put my arm around her, but she drew away. “Are you drunk?”
“I…I don’t know.”
We walked half a block away from the bullhorn mounted over Sammy’s luncheonette, and it was easier to talk. “I was at the Drop Inn…”
April’s eyes flashed. “And last night?”
I ran my trembling hands over my face. My skin was very greasy, and my fingers were shiny with dirt. “They said I slept here. They said I came in with forty dollars at six o’clock yesterday, drank all evening, passed out, woke up at ten this morning, and spent the day watching television. But—”