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

by Rudy Rucker

  As I worked on the chapters, I went through a bit of a conversion experience. Until I started writing up the notes, I’d thought it quite likely that Frank was perpetrating an out-and-out hoax. But now I no longer suspected that he was deliberately lying. I came to believe that Frank was a little crazy, but fundamentally honest.

  It was the very strangeness of Frank’s stories that gave them their authenticity. In normal conversation, Frank did not seem like a tremendously intelligent or well-informed person. But here he was coming up with these incredible tales. Either he really was talking with aliens, or he was somehow accessing a deep part of the human mind. It didn’t seem possible that he could be just a skillful con-man taking me for a ride.

  For the nonce, it seemed simplest to assume that the tales were generally true, if only because this made it easier for me to write them up.

  Cosmic Road Trip

  Tangled disk, AutoCAD city, Las Vegas, the round room. Baggy space, no clear edges. San Jose in front of me, the aliens behind me.

  “Let me see you!” Yes! I stare at them, they get closer. Inside-out starfish with spinach and fried-egg. Pukeful. Barbara Stanwyck/Gary Cooper from Ball Of Fire. Keep falling apart, globs, they laugh, I’m scared, they’re like boys tormenting a frog. Croak?

  I push back: “What do you want from us?” Brain-etching agony. Donald Duck help help. Grit my teeth and push again. “How do you get here and where do you come from?” Black out from the pain. “I’m writing a book! Everyone will read it!” They consult, stop etching, start talking clear channel. I’m a poking stick.

  Herman a gnome then a Gray then back to a starfish. They’re naturalists, we’re dogs. Tourists on a road trip. There’s three other saucers visiting me: rainbow roaches, ropy worms and some mystery creatures the starfish won’t tell me about.

  The Saucer

  On Wednesday, June 8, 1994 Frank drinks three cups of coffee to help his concentration, and then turns on his TVs and video cameras to attract the aliens again. On his past trips he’s been fairly passive, maybe even a little hypnotized. But this time he wants to be completely focused and aware.

  The triple-video-feedback plus snow-PIP technique covers the TV screens with fractal, organic-looking shapes. Slowly the shapes seem to thicken, to ruck up and buck out from the curved glass of the television screens. Frank keeps tweaking and tuning the circuits, making the shapes fatter and gnarlier. The patterns pull completely loose from the screens and now there’s a cloud of tangled bright shapes floating in front of each of the three TV sets. The dancing knots send tendrils towards each other and link into a single fabulous form, making a domed translucent disk filled with arabesque filigree. The sound of Mary’s radio out in the living-room slows down and stops. The rustling of the wind in the redwoods goes away.

  Frank sets his hand-held video camera down, and the television-screen images collapse down to boring infinite-corridor regresses, but it doesn’t matter, the eldritch shape in the room is autonomous now; the TVs that summoned it are no longer needed. The alien saucer has come again.

  The lens-shaped mass of light floats towards Frank, slowly growing. Soon it will engulf him. Frank forces himself to keep his eyes wide open. The bright lines within the growing saucer twitch like someone shrugging, and fall into a pattern of right angles.

  Frank took a computer drafting class in high-school; the angular drawings within the alien disk remind him of a wire-frame AutoCAD design for a factory—a transparent kind of representation where you just see the edge lines of the walls and ceilings, and the hidden ducts, pipes and wires are all exposed—except that the saucer holds enough dwindling perspective lines to make up, say, the entire island of Manhattan. And—Frank finds this hard to explain—it’s like the lines go in too many directions for three dimensional space; the lines are all at right angles to each other, but there are more than three perpendiculars; the axes slant off in fourth, fifth, seventh, and tenth dimensional directions—but before Frank can begin trying to understand it, the saucer is upon him; his skin crawls and prickles as the shape’s leading edge moves through and past him, and with the lights surrounding him in every direction it feels for a moment as if he’s riding a nighttime convertible down the Las Vegas Strip.

  And then—whoops—it’s like the convertible swerves and Frank tumbles in some inconceivable way out of ordinary spacetime and—whisk—he’s back in the usual dim kind of saucer abductee holding-cell and—whoosh—the saucer flies up through the roof of his cabin, up through the redwoods, and up through the clouds, sloping across the sky to arrive at the saucer’s preferred hovering position half a mile above the San Jose airport down at the southernmost tip of the San Francisco Bay, maybe fifteen miles as the crow flies from San Lorenzo and—whew—there’s Frank sitting there looking down at lichen-like San Ho.

  Or not quite sitting. The cell or room where the saucer carries him has no furniture and no real shape, it’s an amorphous kind of round room made out of force-fields or something. There’s dim light, and the bright “wiring and plumbing” of the saucer is no longer visible. From the vantage point of this round room, Frank sees right out into whatever section of 3D reality the saucer is currently pointing at. No matter which way he turns, the 3D view is always in front of him, as surely as if it were a twin-TV goggle-display strapped to his face. What’s behind him? The aliens.

  Frank’s been through all this before. No matter how fast he turns around, the aliens are always still behind him, as if they were monkeys on his back or goblins on his shoulders. What he sees is apparently some kind of direct brain projection or dimensionally warped illusion, some fixed hyper-periscope to whatever spatial cross-section of the world’s time that the saucer’s currently sipping info from. The aliens are always just out of sight, back there in the reticulations of Frank’s peripheral vision, part of the prickling on the nape of his neck, unnatural forces perceptible only to his atavistic reptile-brain.

  “Let me see you!” yells Frank. His voice sounds flat and funny in the N-space of the round room. Usually the aliens just read and “write to” his mind; they converse with Frank via radiotelepathy. But today he’s got his courage up. Inspired by thoughts of our book project, Frank wants to break through and get some clear-cut answers instead of all the endless shady equivocal ufological bullshitting around, he wants a clear look at the aliens and he wants definite answers to concrete questions.

  The Aliens

  In the past, the aliens have reacted to this kind of request with ravaging, punishing mind-rays, but for the moment they’re quite open, they send Frank a thought like, “All right, you can look at us all you want,” and all of a sudden the locked-in view of San Jose comes loose and for once Frank really can turn his head and see something different. He can see what’s behind him: three, maybe four, aliens—it’s hard to be sure how many, because it’s not clear where one of them stops and the next one begins.

  From all the Hollywood brainwashing, Frank expects them to look like Grays, like big-headed children with stupid little autistic slit mouths and cheesy big schlock-art eyes, but that’s not what he sees. At first he’s happy they don’t look like Grays, but then he’s not. The aliens look like starfish with big quivery red jelly-eggs in their centers, and with green stuff growing on them in patches like moss or grass. They look flayed, inside-out, their flesh is liver-colored and covered with tiny tubules. The force-field barriers between Frank and the aliens drop away, and they come more and more clearly into focus. Frank already feels queasy, and then the final veil drops and he smells the aliens. His stomach cramps up, saliva fills his mouth, and he drops down on all fours vomiting so hard it feels like his stomach is trying to come up out of his mouth.

  Figure 19: Starfish Alien

  The vomit disappears into the spatial ambiguities of the round room’s floor—if you can call it a floor—but the sharp stomach-acid smell lingers, mixed in with the reek of the aliens. Frank has to rack
his brain for words to describe the odor; he comes up with rotten garbage, ammonia, madrone flowers, car-seat plastic, fenugreek, and fresh-baked bread—a combo that adds up to something indescribably loathsome.

  Seeing Frank’s distress, the aliens wriggle their stubby starfish arms like Hindu dancers and—just like that—the smell mutates into a pleasant odor of pipe-smoke and magnolia blossoms, and their bodies change shape to look like—what the hell?!—the actors in the last movie Frank happens to have watched on television, which was a 1941 Howard Hawks movie called Ball of Fire starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper—yes the three or four—or, no it’s five—aliens are shaped like Stanwyck and Cooper, three Barbaras and two Garys, all shimmery and black-and-white and moving with that slangy 1940s dynamism, dancing the rumba or something, only oh-oh, pieces of them keep coming off and floating around, globs of shimmery humanoid film-flesh drifting about the round room, Stanwyck’s hips here, Cooper’s head there, Stanwyck’s hands, Cooper’s back, a few of the pieces bump into Frank and they feel warm and real as live flesh, it’s so fucking weird Frank wants to vomit some more, but his stomach is all empty now and he can only heave and retch.

  Figure 20 Flesh-Glob Aliens

  Just to get the hideous body-part rumba over with, Frank yells out a question, the kind of question he knows the aliens don’t like: “What do you want from us?” so naturally now they start up the brain-etching thing on him: a beam of pink light shines out of the mass of silvery Cooper/Stanwyck bodies, out of a Stanwyck head that’s winking and making a jazzy double click noise as the beam comes out of her open mouth, the beam tearing into Frank’s cortex like a laser into wax it feels like, oh God it’s dentistry on raw nerves, Frank can’t stand it, but it goes on and on.

  Somehow Frank has a sudden saving mental flash of Donald Duck in a Carl Barks comic hanging from a tree-branch over a waterfall and screaming “Help help!” the way D. Duck always does in a crisis, and this makes Frank laugh somewhere deep inside, and in the momentary forgetting of the pain he finds the strength to holler out more questions: “How do you get here and where do you come from?”

  Well, now two more of the brain-beams start up and oh Lord it’s too much and Frank blacks out with the pain, then wakes up and they’re still tormenting him, leaning over him like ghouls or witches or like cruel children torturing a frog—and with nothing left to lose Frank yells out, “I’m writing a book about you! Everyone will read it! Help me write it, and it’ll drive people frantic! My book can be a poking-stick for the human ant-hill!”

  This has a good effect on the aliens. They stop working out on Frank’s brain and consult with each other. As they confer, their shapes drift into other forms, one looks like a tiger prawn, another like an orchid, another like a tornado of sparkling light, another like a quartz crystal, another like a gnome with one single thick leg. Finally they reach a conclusion, and the gnome hops over to Frank. The gnome’s mouth reaches entirely around his head, with circular rows of teeth above and below, and when he talks, the top half of his head jounces up and down, exposing a big mushroom-like disk of a tongue, and with several inches of empty air between the appalling top and bottom circles of dentation.

  “All right, Frank,” says the gnome. “We’ll answer some questions. Casting our reality into your…your categories will be an interesting exercise.” There’s a nasty wet smacking noise each time the top part of the gnome’s head plops down onto the big pillowy tongue.

  “Your mouth,” says Frank, shakily. “I can’t stand it.”

  Figure 21: Gnome Alien

  “I thought you were a little more original than most people,” says the gnome, warping its flesh into the form of a teardrop-faced little Gray. “If it makes you happier, I’ll use a body like this.” The Gray’s short little mouth bends upwards in a sickly sweet E. T. smile. “You can call me Herman.” The other aliens form themselves into Grays as well; they stand off at a remove, quiet and luminous.

  “Not that shape either,” protests Frank. “It makes me feel so stupid and obvious. Can’t you show me your true form? Or did you already do that? Were the starfish shapes the real you?”

  “I’m afraid so,” says Herman. “Would you like to try again?”

  “All right. You just caught me by surprise before. I won’t throw up this time.”

  The alien’s flesh flows and shrinks, and Herman take on a shape like—well actually it isn’t really that much like starfish. He does have five main arms, or legs?, but the limbs are somewhat different from each other. Each arm is carpeted with smaller appendages, and on the different arms the carpeting is different. One arm seems to be lined with glittering little eyes on swaying stalks, another arm has something very much like a starfish’s tube-feet, on another is a fuzz of antennae, another is coated with iridescent undulating slime, and the fifth is covered with grasping little hands. Two of the arms—the hands-arm and the slime-arm—branch into pincers at their ends. The bizarre smell returns, but now Frank is braced for it. If he breathes shallowly through his mouth it is bearable.

  The most unsettling thing about Herman are the three red sacs at the central meeting of his five arms. The sacs bob and dangle like water-balloons, like testicles, like octopus heads, and Frank feels anxious that they might burst.

  “Don’t worry,” says Herman, reading Frank’s mind. He thumps on his jelly-eggs with his hands-arm. The thumping sets off jolly, resonant vibrations like the pounding of bongo drums. “We’re built a lot more solidly than you can imagine. Our race has evolved for ten times as long as yours.”

  “Oh, you’re beautiful,” says Frank ingratiatingly. “The more I look, the more I can see how well you’re made.”

  “Indeed,” says Herman. “So now I’ll tell you some things for your book. It will be amusing to see how your fellow Earthlings react to this information.”

  Why They’re Here

  One of the first topics Herman treats is the question of what the aliens want from us. In short, their main interest in Earth and humankind is simply that of tourists looking at interesting animals. They are like whale-watch cruisers, like safari-goers, like naturalists rambling about in the woods. As far as the aliens are concerned, people are fine just as they are. The aliens have no interest whatsoever in teaching, reforming, recruiting, and/or indoctrinating us.

  In fact it’s considered very poor taste among the aliens to directly influence the worlds they visit. To make a big public appearance on Earth, for instance, would be a cultural barbarism on a par with kicking holes in a termite nest that lots of people are going to want to come and see.

  But it is considered acceptable to now and then pick someone up for a saucer-ride, simply so as to get a closer interaction with a native. Generally the aliens make an effort to only disturb isolated, marginal people whose stories are unlikely to be widely believed.

  Due to the unfortunate contemporary trends in ufology, many of today’s abductees expect to be molested and/or masturbated. Now due to their higher-dimensional abilities, the aliens can see right into a person’s body, so they certainly have no practical need to probe into a person to investigate them. If they occasionally do so, it’s simply to observe the person’s reactions. It’s no different than the way someone might rub the stomach of a dog that lies groveling on its back, or the way a completely vulgar person might go ahead and jack-off the dog—just to see it writhe and whine.

  Although we tend to have the impression that it is one race of aliens persistently visiting Earth, what we are in fact seeing is a small but steady trickle of separate groups of alien tourists. Each alien saucer hangs around Earth for only a limited amount of time—and then goes on to visit other inhabited worlds.

  A complicating factor is that the aliens have control over paratime, so that each group’s visit to Earth ends up being split up into a few dozen or even several hundred events that are dispersed along the human timeline.

  Herman g
oes on to tell Frank that there are but four distinct saucers which have accounted for the several score alien encounters which Frank and Peggy Sung have had thus far. There’s Herman’s saucer of starfish aliens, a saucer of radiant beetles, a saucer filled with creatures who look like coils of manila rope, and a saucer of beings that are—”Well, never mind about them,” says Herman. “I don’t want to confuse you.”

  According to Herman, the aliens who visit Earth come from all over the universe. Herman says that the alien method of travel feels essentially instantaneous, so that the voyagers encounter incalculably many populated planets and stars—as if all at once. Given such a range of choice, there’s no sense in trying to visit every single world—anymore than someone on a car-trip would get off at every single freeway exit. Each group of alien tourists can pick and choose, finding places that look in some way congenial.

  Herman tells Frank that there do exist aliens who are incredibly different from humans; some of them, for instance, are things like sunspots from within stars. But aliens that are so wildly unlike us have no natural interest in our doings—solar vortex rings can’t possibly care about the history of human civilization; instead they would more naturally be attracted to look at what’s going on inside our Sun. This means that UFO experiencers like Frank encounter nothing like the full range of possible aliens. The aliens who visit here are beings who in some respect resemble us.

  “But this doesn’t mean that the aliens who visit Earth are going to be humanoid,” says Herman. “Only a very primitive being would expect creatures from other planets to physically resemble him or even to have a similar biochemistry. When I say that we resemble you, I mean only that my race comes from a planet, not a star, and that our reproduction method is wetware-based, as is yours. The spectrum is so much wider than the average human realizes.”