by Rudy Rucker
“I trust you, Rudy,” said Frank innocently. “You’ll send me twenty-five percent of every single check you get for our book.”
“Twenty. And I don’t have to show you what I write before it’s published.”
“You don’t want my input?”
“I’m going to be getting plenty of input from your notes and our conversations. But I don’t want to hear a bunch of jackass opinions about the way I put it together.”
“You want to be free to make fun of me behind my back, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do! Whatever works. If you want the book to be any good, you have to let me do it my own way.”
Frank suddenly relaxed and smiled. “Fine, fine, fine. Rudy. Do you realize that I already watched us have this conversation yesterday? From the saucer. It’s floating right up there.” He pointed to a spot in the air between us and the carpet where the pirate and the conga man were sitting. Catching Frank’s gesture, they looked up too, so that now all four of us were staring on a spot in the air eight feet above the Jahva House floor.
“What is it, Frank?” called the conga player.
“A little UFO the size of a soft contact lens,” said Frank. “How ya doin’, Spun.”
“Floatin’ oats with Josie Doakes,” said Spun cryptically. He got to his feet and peered up into the air. “I see it. Looks like its got a little wobble in the hyperdrive. Zzzzzzow. Zzzzzzeee. Zzzzzzow. Zzzzzzeee.”
I got up too and peered into the air with Spun. I could almost imagine that I saw a little ripple in the air—but only almost.
“Who you?” said Spun. He had tangled dreadlocks and a long honey-colored beard.
“I’m Rudy. A friend of Frank’s.”
“Rudy’s going to write my book for me,” said Frank. “I had the aliens bring me here in the saucer from yesterday to watch us make the deal. So I’d know how much to ask for.”
The pirate man stood up too; his purple-stockinged mass of hair bouncing. He stared into the air, his eyes squinting. “I can see the saucer; it’s like a little ctenophore jelly with an iridescent sheen on it.” He had a slow, rumbling voice. “And I can see Frank inside of it. If you can see today from yesterday, then that makes a paradox. I mean, Frank,” he turned his head to look at him, “What if now you do the opposite of what you saw yourself do?”
“Why would I do the opposite?” said Frank. “Rudy’s giving me twenty percent worldwide. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you, Guster? Rudy Rucker? He’s a famous science and science-fiction writer.”
“Um, do you publish under your own name?” asked big Guster.
“Sure.” I sat back down with Frank. “You think I’d publish under your name or something?”
“What kind of science-fiction?” pursued Guster. “Are you into Star Trek?”
“I write like literary science fiction,” I said. “Transreal, freestyle, cyberpunk?”
Guster looked blank, but Spun reacted. “Oh, yeah yeah, have you ever heard of that writer, um, he’s really cool, um—”
“William Gibson.” As usual.
“Yeah yeah, you should write a book like him,” counseled Spun, but then a new reggae song came on the loudspeaker, and he and Guster went to sit by the speaker and listen to it, Spun gently tapping on the head of his conga drum.
“How do you know those guys?” I asked Frank.
“I’ve lived around here for over twenty years,” said Frank. “I know everyone. Spun and I used to work for a garden supply shop together, but of course Spun started growing shrooms under the benches in the greenhouse and there was this big bust. You notice how smooth Spun’s face is? I always imagine that these stoner types look that way from flying around in intergalactic space. The steady polishing of the interstellar dust. It’s much better to fly inside a saucer. And as for Guster—he works for Pac Bell a couple of days a week. He’s like a relief worker, he comes in when the regular guys are sick. Or sicker than Guster. He’s also a freelance mechanic, I had him work on my Nissan once, which wasn’t a good idea. He always has parts left over.”
Now I remembered where I’d seen Guster before. He’d been doing something to the phone booth across the street from Carlita’s restaurant while I’d been sitting there waiting for Frank last week. Odd coincidence. I brought my attention back to our conversation, back to Frank’s claim that there was a tiny flying saucer watching us right now.
“I sure don’t see any miniature saucer floating over there,” I said. “You claim you watched this conversation from yesterday? Can you prove it? Like—can you guess what number I’m thinking of?”
“Twenty percent,” said Frank. “But we’re done with that, for God’s sake. Don’t be so materialistic. Did you bring my notes? Spread ‘em out and I’ll go over them with you. And after that, we can look at the new ones! Oh wait, one more thing.”
“What?”
“I found out the title for our book, it’s gonna be called Saucer Wisdom.”
“Saucer Wisdom?” I said slowly. Suddenly I felt very strange. For Saucer Wisdom was the title which I’d whimsically picked for the document into which I’d typed Frank’s notes earlier this week. “Where did you get that name?”
“Well, like I mentioned in my first set of notes, I saw our book in the future, but the aliens were rushing so much I didn’t notice the publisher or the title or anything. But yesterday I was off in the saucer again and I got a closer look at the book. I saw a woman who had a copy of it. Over a century from now. And the title is Saucer Wisdom.”
“Right.” I was still in shock. My mind wasn’t coming up with any rational explanations.
“Saucer Wisdom!” repeated Frank. “What are you looking so uptight for, Rudy?”
“I—I’m just surprised,” I said finally. “I’m surprised because I’d already thought of that title myself.”
“Oh yeah, try and take the credit,” said Frank. “But I guess it’s kind of a natural title, isn’t it? And, oh yeah, of course you’d think of the same title, wouldn’t you? You’d have to. Synchronicity.”
For now I’d just accept the madness. “Did you happen to notice who the publisher was? That could really save me some time.”
“Um, it wasn’t a name I recognized. Maybe they don’t exist yet.”
We spent the whole rest of the day together. We stayed at the Jahva house for another two hours, me typing in all the things Frank told me, and then we went down to the beach and sat there talking some more, with me taking notes by hand. Around five Frank and I needed a break, so I called Audrey, and then Frank and I went to see Endless Summer 2 at the Del Mar theater in Santa Cruz—which was the perfect place to see a surfing movie, as there were lots of surfers in the audience, heartily groaning at the wipe-outs and cheering the big rides. After the movie Frank and I talked some more. I didn’t get home till nine-thirty that evening.
Audrey
“So how was Frank Shook?” Audrey asked me. She was wearing a happy smile.
“Great,” I said. “Crazy. Today I hit pay dirt. I’m bursting with information. Frank told me the most incredible things. It’s going to take me a few weeks to write all this up.”
“You think he really has a book?”
“It’s interesting stuff. People may or may not buy into it as sincere ufology, but I think it could make a nice work of futurism. Somehow our Frank has hooked into a bunch of really wild ideas. Saucer Wisdom.”
“That’s really the title you’re going to use?” Audrey had heard me using that name for my file of Frank’s notes.
“That’s the funny thing. He was already using that title for the book himself. He says he saw people reading it. A century from now.”
“Wait a minute. You hadn’t told him you’ve been using that title at home on your computer, but when you saw him today he already knew? He’s spying on us, Rudy!”
“He doesn’t even know w
here we live. Our address isn’t in the phone book.”
“I bet he found out. He nosed around. Or—or he followed you home after your first meeting. Why did you have to get involved with such a psycho!”
“I don’t think he’s spying on me,” I said, willing it to be true. Could Frank or maybe Mary have followed me home? There’d been a distracting amount of traffic. And I’d been looking at the sunset. I certainly hadn’t been watching my rear-view mirror. But I didn’t want to think that way. “Our coming up with the same title is just a coincidence,” I insisted. “Saucer Wisdom is kind of an obvious title for this kind of book, don’t you think?”
“No. Not to me. But never mind. I don’t want to make myself sick worrying about it. Something really good happened today.” Her smile returned.
“Tell me!”
“They’re going to have a show of my jellyfish paintings in the Los Perros Coffee Roasting next month!”
“That’s wonderful, Audrey! Congratulations.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out prices to put on the pictures. I already have an idea for what to do with the money. But you might think it’s silly.”
“What?”
“I want to set up a salt-water aquarium and keep moon-jellies. They’re the easiest. And if that works out maybe I can try comb-jellies or sea-nettles. Ctenophores, Rudy, the Girdle of Venus! I’ll have to get a special kind of filtration system that’s really expensive. I found out all about it today because after I talked to the guy at the Roasting I went straight to the aquarium shop.”
“Counting your jellyfish before they hatch.”
“I have to entertain myself. With the kids gone and you off spending your days with a saucer nut.”
“Don’t you love summer vacation?”
Peggy Sung
One other thing I should mention about that long Thursday, June 9, 1994, is an afternoon encounter that Frank and I had on the beach.
We were sitting out of the wind in a nook in the rocks to the right of Natural Bridges Beach. Pocked stone sloped down towards the water in front of us; the waves pounded into the rocks and shot up booming sprays of foam. Behind us was a low sandstone escarpment sloping up to a high-tone trailer park. We’d worked our way through all the notes on future communication, and were well into the notes about aliens. I was listening to Frank’s dry, pleasant voice and writing a mile a minute on my notepad.
Suddenly he fell silent. I looked up to see a dark figure standing over us, a small-faced Asian woman wearing a white jogging-suit and enormous silver-framed sunglasses.
“I think maybe you telling him too much, Frank,” she said. “He no pay you yet.”
“Peggy Sung! Are you spying on me again?”
“You know it other way around, Frank. He learn my ideas, Mr. Rudy Rucker. Frank promise to be sharing your money with me, not keep it all himself.”
“Leave us alone!” said Frank.
“Frank, you should remember who first talk to cosmic spirits,” said Peggy.
To my horror, Frank picked up a heavy rock and threw it at the woman in front of us, threw it right at her head with all his might. I threw my hands over my eyes in horror but—there was no thud, no scream. The rock clattered onto the boulders and bumped into the water. Peggy Sung was nowhere to be seen. I jumped to my feet and peered down off the rocks to make sure she wasn’t down in the water. No sign of her anywhere. My mind boggled; I felt dizzy.
A high voice sounded from somewhere above us. I peered up, and there, standing at the top of the fifteen-foot slope behind us was the same woman: Peggy Sung. Could she have simply scampered up there in the moment while I’d covered my eyes? “I’ll be seeing you again, Rudy Rucker,” she called, and then she turned and disappeared behind the skyline. Although this made things even more baffling, seeing the woman whole filled me with relief.
“That wasn’t real,” said Frank. “And don’t ask me about it.”
“You try to kill a woman, she vanishes, she reappears on top of a cliff, and I’m not going to ask about it? Come on. Who is this Peggy Sung? I heard you mention her last week. She’s your big rival?”
“Peggy Sung is the only other person I know of who contacts the aliens the same way I do. She uses the video feedback trick, and the aliens take her off in their saucers, just like me. I don’t know how they can stand spending time with her.”
“I notice you just said ‘the video feedback trick,’ and not ‘my video feedback trick,’” I said. “Does that mean that Peggy invented it?”
“There’s some disagreement on that point,” said Frank ruefully. “We came up with it together, but yes, she does say that she invented it. We were both working at the old Western Appliance store down on Pacific in Santa Cruz about five years ago. I was a stock-boy and she was in bookkeeping. We had to work odd hours and sometimes it was just us two. Somehow we got into playing with the TVs and the video-cameras. Peggy’s very good with machines, though you wouldn’t know it to listen to her. Normally she just talks about money.”
“And the saucers came and got the two of you at Western Appliance?”
“Yeah. Well actually they got Peggy first, and then later she taught me how to get the aliens to come for me. So then Peggy set up shop as a psychic, but I wanted to just keep on exploring. I kind of thought it was a waste for Peggy to be using the aliens to help people see their near future. In fact I thought she would bore the aliens so much that maybe they wouldn’t come at all anymore. I told her not to do it, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“So there was a fairly strong disagreement.”
“Will you stop coaxing me? Yes, we had an argument about it, and I told her I’d tell the aliens not to come for her any more, but she just laughed and said the aliens wouldn’t listen to me. And she was right. If I ask them to do something, they ignore me and go on and do whatever the hell they please. It’s like they think I’m not worth listening to. Even though I told them it’s stupid, they don’t even mind helping Peggy with her psychic readings. Thanks to the aliens she’s quite good at it, and she makes a lot of money. She calls them ‘cosmic spirits’. My big fear is that some day Peggy might tell the aliens to stop talking to me. I bet she could do it. And then all my fun would be over. In fact she even got me to promise—oh, never mind.”
“And what happened just now?”
“Um—that probably wasn’t really Peggy down here. I think it was an illusion. She’s done this to me before. She gets in a saucer and has the aliens project images of her. The aliens are good at that; I’m not sure if it’s a hologram or a direct brain-write. How did she look to you?”
“She was wearing a white jogging-suit and big sunglasses. Her hair was up in a bun. She had on pink lipstick and pink nail-polish. Her shoes were silver.”
“Yeah, that’s what I saw too. But you know how I could tell for sure it wasn’t real? Her hair wasn’t moving in the wind.”
“I thought I did see her hair moving. What if you were wrong and she was really here in the flesh? What if you’d killed her with the rock?”
“It would have served her right,” said Frank angrily.
This callous remark marked a turning-point for me. From this point on I would always think of Frank as being somewhat unbalanced. No matter how friendly our future conversations might be, I would always keep a little reserve of alertness, a background awareness that this man could turn violent at any time.
“I’m so tired of having her lord it over me,” continued Frank, completely unaware of how deeply he’d alienated me. “I could have made the discovery just as well as her. And now that I’m writing this book, she’ll be after me non-stop.”
“Do you think this Peggy Sung might come after me?”
“Oh, she probably won’t.”
“I distinctly heard her say, ‘I’ll be seeing you again, Rudy Rucker.’”
“Well, deal with it
. Peggy’s a burden you’ll have to bear, Mr. Eighty Percent. If worst comes to worst you might have to give her some money.”
“It sounded like you’re the one she’s asking for money, Frank. I’m not giving up another cent.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. If I ever promised her something, then I shouldn’t have. Let’s take a break and go see a movie. Let’s see Endless Summer 2. I was a surfer for awhile, you know. Fifteen or twenty years ago, back when I was working as a groundskeeper at U. C. Santa Cruz. It’s playing at the Del Mar on Pacific.”
So, like I said, we saw the movie and then we went and got supper in the Saturn Café and talked some more, Frank nailing down all the details about his notes on the aliens. We parted on good terms.
On my drive home, I started wondering whether or not I’d really seen Peggy Sung by the ocean. She’d appeared after I’d been sitting there listening to Frank’s voice and the sound of the waves for a long time. It wasn’t impossible that Frank had hypnotized me, if only for a few minutes. On the whole, this hypothesis seemed more likely than that I’d seen a saucerian brain-projection. Yes, hypnosis was a lot easier to believe in. Even easier to believe in was the possibility that there really had been a woman there, and that she had just run up onto the rock slope faster than I’d realized.
I wondered about the nature of Frank and Peggy’s relationship. Were they really enemies? Or old friends? Perhaps the beach encounter had been prearranged. Maybe Peggy Sung was Frank’s confederate in duping me.
Be that as it may, Saucer Wisdom was looking more and more like a really interesting book project. I remained uneasy about Frank’s evident mental instability, but I felt that this was something I could work around. It seemed worth the risk, given that fascinating nature of the material he was giving me.
Chapter Six: Notes On Aliens
I was busy for the next two weeks writing up the “Notes On Communication” chapter and this “Notes On Aliens” chapter. Frank phoned me a couple of times and we had some long conversations to fill in missing pieces. I asked if I could visit him in San Lorenzo again, but he said I should wait until the two chapters were all done. He said if I kept coming to see him I’d just get ahead of myself.