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

by Rudy Rucker

  Kotona puts his great work—he calls it Flanders—up on the Net for any wigged-in user to access. Like a renovating God, he watches his users’ movements to find the places where they run into the edges of Flanders, and these are the places where he works to keep adding a bit more, ever working towards his idea of entering the world of Bosch and Brueghel.

  It’s a masterpiece, and other artists are inspired to attempt works of similar scope, which are called superanimations. Someone makes an interactive superanimation of Carl Barks’s Duckburg. Another achieves a superanimation of Picasso’s works. And then come artists able to create wholly original superanimations of their own.

  Figure 18 Kotona and Flanders

  Recording Dreams

  The next big step in uvvy applications is that people start using them to record their dreams. It’s simple. You put on your uvvy, turn on your S-cube recorder, and go to sleep. You can set the uvvy to kick on whenever you get into REM sleep.

  Frank and the aliens watch a boring woman named Nelda trying to get her friends to look at the S-cubes of her dreams. “This is wack, Rhonna, I’m floating down a river full of like lamprey eels and my husband is in this yellow rubber raft with me, he’s on all fours crawling around, only he’s the size of a baby, and then—yow—my teeth start falling out and—” Nobody wants to look at Nelda’s dreams, except for her therapist, of course, who gets paid to. Frank watches Nelda and the therapist sitting there with uvvies on, floating around together inside of Nelda’s most exciting dreams of the week. “That baby-sized thing you say is your husband,” asks the psychiatrist. “I wonder why you think it is him. To me it looks like perhaps a girl child. Or maybe a lobster.”

  Just for the ant-hill-poking fun of it, the aliens give Nelda an intense night-time abduction experience, making sure it gets taped on her S-cube. The aliens zoom in on a time when Nelda’s in bed, and they yank her out into paratime, physically and actually—this is no dream Nelda is having, even though it started while she was asleep.

  “Who are you?” Nelda screams at Frank, and points past him towards the aliens, whom Frank himself is unable to directly see. “What are they?” Nelda’s awake, though she’s so panicked that she isn’t acting like a normal wide-awake person. “Go ahead and examine me!” she cries and throws her not-so-appetizing bod down next to Frank. As always a blind spot seems to cover the aliens, but Frank can make out that one of them is obligingly poking around between Nelda’s legs. Nelda loses control of her body functions and then has an orgasm. The aliens set her back in her bed, soiled and wide awake as she slots back into Earth time.

  The S-cube of Nelda’s abduction gets a lot of play on uvvies worldwide, and Frank and the aliens watch some of it. The aliens in Nelda’s mind-filmed movie look like short bald macrocephalic humans in silver Star Trek clothes. Like Grays. Frank ascribes this to the images having been filtered through Nelda’s ignorant brain, or to a deliberate brain-deception on the part of the aliens. In his opinion it’s too unlikely that any alien would so closely resemble a human being. He asks the aliens if he’s right, and they say yes, but when he asks what they really look like, their answer is a quick image of a luminous scarab beetle—followed by an intense stab of pain to the front of Frank’s brain.

  One very accurate aspect of Nelda’s images is her rendering of Frank’s face. It’s unmistakably him; Frank’s face is on UV shows all over the planet. This makes the second time in this trip that the aliens have caused Frank to be shown to the world: first there was the gnat-cam and now Nelda’s S-cube! According to Frank, not only do people notice the similarity of the two men in the saucer, but in addition they are well aware that these appearances were both predicted by a well-known book which is—as Frank would have it—none other than the book that I’m going to help him write.

  Although he would have liked to linger over the images of people discussing him, the heedless aliens rush on to something else, almost as if to torment him.

  They tell Frank that now they want to look at some more people’s dream S-cubes; they have some theories of about human dreams that they want to test. According to the aliens’ view of things, dreamers can go directly into paratime, and perhaps even beyond that to some kind of heaven. They want Frank—instead of looking for fascinating news about himself and our book—to help them comb through dozens, scores, hundreds of people’s dream S-cubes.

  Frank completely rebels at this. Other peoples dreams are boring. And the saucer stinks from Nelda’s abduction. And he’s exhausted. He screams and hollers until the aliens bring him back home, back to the chair behind his desk.

  Chapter Five: Frank And Peggy

  Jahva House

  As I already mentioned, Frank’s notes on the future of communication were no more than drawings with scrawled words when I brought them home on Thursday, June 2, 1994. Actually the notes weren’t quite like they’re printed above; they were riddled with scores of misspellings. If the truth be told, the first three sentences of the notes went like this: “Lifebox. Big Ad REMEMBR ME! Old man talk, it aks questons.” Frank couldn’t spell at all.

  I read the notes over a couple of times, studied the pictures, showed the stuff to Audrey, and waited for Frank to call. And waited. Just to be doing something, I created a new document in my computer and typed Frank’s notes into it; if we went any further this could serve as a starting point for our book. A week went by, and on Wednesday, June 8, he called me around ten in the evening, right after Audrey and I had gone to bed.

  “So what do you think of my notes, Rudy?” He didn’t bother to say hello, or to introduce himself.

  “This is Frank? The notes are very intriguing. And the drawings are great. I have so many questions. I’ve been wanting to hear from you. You’re going to need to explain what everything means. Should I come back out to your house tomorrow?”

  “You don’t want to get started right now?”

  “I’m in bed, Frank. It’s after ten.”

  Audrey giggled and rolled her eyes as she realized who I was talking to.

  “I thought you cyberpunks were wilder than that! Well, let’s get together in Santa Cruz tomorrow. I have to go down there anyway to pick up some Lotus Lights. We’ll meet at the Jahva House. It’s a coffee shop right off Pacific Avenue, near India Joze restaurant. About eleven o’clock?”

  “Great.”

  “One reason I’m eager to see you now is that I was out in the saucer again today. I finally got some good information about the aliens. And they taught me saucer wisdom. I feel so different. Let me just try and put it in a really compact form for you. Dig this, Rudy, it’s like radio waves are always around you, and if you happen to have a receiver you can turn it on, then bang, there’s news and music. The aliens are all around us too, and they can unzip themselves anytime, but only if they feel like it, they’re like flowers waiting for the right weather to bloom. And God’s all around us too, that’s the big thing. You can tune in on God without any technology at all and God’s always ready to appear. In fact you are tuned in to God all of the time, even if you don’t realize it. Everything is alive, everything is God, we’re eyes that God grows to see Himself or Herself or whatever you want to say.”

  This was pretty heavy stuff to be hearing over a late night phone-call, but I liked it. As I mentioned earlier, I’m comfortable with the mystical mode of thought; I’m used to looking through the flakiness of mystical utterances to see the deep underlying truths. Since Frank was talking about God, I asked him a question about religion. “I’ve been looking over some UFO writings, and some of them say that, all along, religious experiences have been in fact visions of the aliens. What do you think of that idea?”

  “Ask him what he meant about piezoplastic and jellyfish,” put in Audrey, who’d been intrigued by the mention of jellyfish in Frank’s notes. I waved her off.

  “You have it backwards,” said Frank. “The aliens are watered-down visions
of God. Same as you and me. See you tomorrow!”

  So on Thursday, June 9, 1994, there I was, punctual as usual, sitting in the Jahva House waiting for Frank who, as usual, was late. This time I’d brought my laptop as well as a pad of paper.

  The Jahva House coffee shop turned out to be a large old retrofitted garage, a hundred feet square with a high wooden ceiling with old beams showing. There were fans up beyond the beams, stirring the air around. The walls were coarse red construction tiles, and the floor was cracked slabs of polished concrete with a few threadbare oriental carpets. The tables were wooden, with beat-up brass lamps on them, and the chairs were captain’s chairs with wraparound arms.

  The coffee bar itself was half an octagon against one wall, and next to it was a little cooler filled with Odwalla fruit juices. I picked out a “Strawberry C Monster” juice, paid for it, and sat down in a chair that was next to a wall outlet where I could plug my computer in. Laminated onto the tabletop was a map of the Monterey Bay. Sitting on the map was a used cup and saucer with traces of hardened cappuccino foam on the cup. I took the cup over to the counter, then sat back down, sipping my juice and looking things over.

  The windows were translucent pebbled glass reinforced with chicken wire; they had horizontal pivots in their center so that they could be swung horizontal to let the air in. Out one of the open windows I could see a low gray building with ventilation ducts on the top and a satellite dish, and above the building were power-lines and a pale blue sky. In front of one of the closed windows hung a stained glass panel showing a setting sun, a dolphin, and a humming-bird with a flower. Another window showed a green-leafed tree—the window was open, so this was a real tree, not a stained-glass one. The tree’s branches were tossing chaotically in the breeze. Inside the coffee-shop were half-real trees: big potted ficus and dracaena plants, their leaves also moving with the vagaries of the air.

  A big speaker in one corner played reggae music. To pass the time while waiting for Frank, I turned on my computer and began typing in descriptions of the scene around me. This is a writerly pastime I learned from reading Jack Kerouac, who called it “sketching.”

  A pair of young guys in tank tops were playing chess. One, with curly hair and a purple shirt, sat bent over the board with his back to me, the other was bearded and stoned-out looking, with a turquoise shirt and a black baseball cap worn backwards, his dark hair sticking out to the sides like a wig, his face hardworked and weather-beaten.

  Near them sat a dark young man wearing a purple and green plaid shirt, baggy torn-off black khaki pants, blue argyle socks, and black sneakers. A big guy, stout. He had a purple stocking pulled over his hair like a snood. His swarthy bearded pirate face was bent over a picture book from the bookcases that stood along the Jahva House walls. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

  I looked at the other tables. Two young women in granny dresses and no makeup. An old man in a green zip-up shirt reading a paperback. A woman student in polka dot shorts and a T-shirt studying a stack of Xeroxed notes.

  A couple with a little girl caught my eye. He: pony-tailed with an earring; she: big shiny eyes, purple tank-top, flowered maroon skirt, wise straight thin-lipped mouth. The little girl had a pony tail and a T-shirt; she walked around stamping her feet in time to the reggae music playing out of the big speaker. It was Desmond Dekker singing “The Israelites”. The girl began wrestling her father, tugging at his hand and laughing. She had the same intelligent mouth as her mother.

  A man with a complicated wheelchair and a guide dog came in; two kids helped him pull up to a table. A man with sandy-red hair appeared, bobbing his head to the music, his face hidden behind beard and shades. He doctored his coffee at a free-standing condiment bar lined with thermoses of cream and milk, shakers of cinnamon and chocolate, tall glasses holding spoons and straws, and glass jars of brown and refined sugar.

  Nobody, other than the little girl, made eye contact with me, nobody hassled me, it was deeply peaceful. But where was Frank Shook? I checked my watch: 11:27.

  A young woman with her hair piled on top and wearing a T-shirt with scalloped neck and edges came and talked to the brahs playing chess. She was joined by a man with a toothbrush mustache and a seriously ugly baseball cap, the hat small, perched on the top of his head, and bearing a fragment of a large aloha print of flowers and parrots. Ugly-hat got a latte, and scalloped-shirt went to the counter and got an iced tea and a chess set; they began playing chess as well.

  A man with the sun-tanned wind-faired features of a street-stoner walked in carrying a conga drum and sat down on a carpet by the big speaker. The pirate-faced man with the purple stocking cap crossed the room, staggering a little, to join the conga man on the carpet.

  A sparrow found its way in through one of the huge open windows and flew about.

  And then Frank came walking in, wearing dirty white pants and a solid green sport shirt. He was carrying a green flannel shirt of a non-matching shade. He spotted me right away, nodded, came over, sat down. He wasn’t smiling and his demeanor was abrupt. He seemed to have forgotten all about his God-consciousness of the yesterday. I wondered if perhaps he’d been faking a mystical experience just because he knew my interests to lie in that direction? In any case, today Frank was strictly gross material plane.

  “First things first, Rudy. Like I said last time, if you’re going to be working for me on this book, you’re going to have to give me a lot more than two percent of the U.S. royalties. My book is going to be so big. I know for a solid fact that they’re still going to be reading it a hundred years from now. You saw that in my first set of notes didn’t you? This book’s success is a foregone conclusion. I want fifty percent of your worldwide gross. Straight down the middle, half for you and half for me. And you pay your agent out of your half.”

  Although I’d thought I was feeling mellow from sitting there sketching my surroundings, I got so angry at Frank that I lost control of myself.

  “Fuck you,” I heard myself saying. “Write your own book, asshole.” I powered down my laptop and stood up to leave. “I’ve got better things to do.” My blood was pounding in my temples and my hands were trembling.

  Frank looked shocked and upset. “Hold on!” he cried before I could walk away. “Don’t be so hostile. Can’t we negotiate?”

  “Look,” I said. “Writing a book means sitting down and thinking really hard and typing—doing it for a long time every day for a lot of days. It’s not about negotiating. This isn’t some Jackie Collins book-deal on Dynasty, Frank. This is real life. If you’re going to belittle me and jerk me around, I’m not going to do anything with you at all.”

  “You think fifty percent would be too much? But all the ideas are mine. You’ll just work for me to polish them up.”

  “You think I’m going to be working for you? If you’re thinking that way, it means you’re going to try and tell me what to do, you’re going to breathe down my neck, I can’t stand it, I won’t do it. My writing is the one and only thing in this fucking vale of tears which I have any control over at all and I’m not about to give it up. Why would I? To write a UFO book with a zero-EQ nut who can’t even spell? Forget it!”

  The four young chess-players had stopped their game to stare at us. The conga stoner said, “Whoah!” and the pirate wheezingly giggled. I had been talking pretty loud.

  “What does ‘zero-EQ’ mean?” said Frank into the silence.

  “EQ for emotional quotient. Like IQ. ‘Zero-EQ’ meaning no sensitivity to other people’s feelings.”

  Frank made a placating gesture. “Oh sit down, Rudy, and don’t fly off the handle. I’m sorry if I insulted you. God, you’re touchy. Come on and sit down so I can answer your questions about my notes. The lifebox, the dragonflies, the piezoplastic, the radiotelepathy. Don’t you want to hear more?”

  Yes, come to think of it, yes I did. Very much so. I took a big shaky breath to c
alm myself, and sat back down, heavily sighing. “First we’re going to have to try and finish what you just started. If we can’t agree on some split that you won’t want to keep changing then we can’t get anywhere. I’m crazy not to be having my agent do this.”

  “But you do think it could be an interesting book?” Frank drew a folded sheaf of papers out of the pocket of his flannel shirt waggled the sheaf enticingly. “I’ve got another batch of notes for you right here. Like I told you, I was off in the saucer again yesterday.”

  “What…what are the new notes about?”

  “Lots of stuff about the aliens. What they’re like, how they get here, and what other kinds of life there is in the universe—plus that stuff about God. Don’t think it was easy getting this information out of them, Rudy! My head—” He touched his temples ruefully. “They were like attacking me the way they usually do when I ask them things, but then all of a sudden they decided it would be funny to tell everything precisely because we’re writing this book. Not that ‘funny’ is exactly the right word.”

  He was reeling me in. I had to hear more and he knew it. I sighed again. “So all right, Frank, let’s settle our business and get on with the good stuff. I agree that two percent domestic isn’t enough for your cut, but I also think fifty worldwide is way too much. And you can forget that crap about your cut coming off the top before my agent takes hers. This has to be easy for me or I’m not going to do it. The way it’s going to work is that I give you X percent of the checks I actually get. What we need to do is fix the value of X.”

  “How about a fourth instead of a half.”

  “We should put this in writing so you can’t change it again.”