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

by Rudy Rucker

  All sorts of pods to live in. The Hieronymous Bosch House made of four seed-cases. Plumbing and wiring included!

  The Green Ball in the surf. Kelp bubbles undersea. Into space. Domes on the Moon.

  Knifeplants

  “Once you get started with wetware engineering, there’s no stopping,” Herman tells Frank. “We use it a lot on our home world S. So far we’ve only looked at examples of things humans will do to your ‘animals’. Now let’s see what you’ll do to your ‘plants’.”

  In the telepathic mind-link, the quotation marks look mauve and wiggly. Kind of hanging there in the air. “Why the quotes?” asks Frank.

  “On S we don’t have your egotistical plant/animal distinction,” answers Herman. “All of our life forms can eat light a little bit—like your plants; and all of us can move—like your animals. And we don’t have the brain/no-brain distinction either. None of us has a ‘brain’.” The snotty mauve quotes again.

  “So how do you think?”

  “With my whole body. Each of my cells is polyfunctional. Multipurpose. You might say that my whole body is a ‘brain.’ Except that it’s also a ‘muscle,’ a ‘stomach,’ an ‘eye,’ a ‘testicle,’ a ‘tube-foot,’ an ‘ovary,’ a—”

  “I get the picture, Herman.”

  The saucer homes in on a farm in Gilroy. A young farming couple named Jose and Amparo Gutierrez are sitting on their porch staring off into space. The saucer flies around their heads, and Frank can see that they’re wearing uvvy patches on their necks. The aliens hook Frank into the radiotelepathic virtual reality which Jose and Amparo are sharing.

  It turns out they’re looking at a seed catalog from a biotechnology company called Giant’s Beanstalk. The catalog has the form of a simulated farm with plants that you can order. “Look over here, Amparo,” Jose is saying. “Knifeplants! I wonder if we can grow these.”

  There’s footsteps on the porch of the virtual farmhouse and a simulated person comes down the steps, an old-timer in overalls who looks—right now, anyway,—Mexican. He’s a simmie who functions as the Giant’s Beanstalk catalog agent. “Buenos dias,” he grins. “Call me Señor Pepita.” Which is the perfect name, what with pepita being Spanish for seed. “I will tell you about knifeplants if you like, my amigos.”

  “Gracias,” says Jose.

  “Knifeplants require a soil that is extremely rich in iron, zinc, aluminum, and other metals,” continues Señor Pepita. His voice is frank and cozy, with a bit of dust in it. He has a big mustache. “Does any of your land happen to be lying over landfill?”

  “Yes, yes,” says Amparo. “All of it. That’s how we could afford it. When we plow we’re always turning up old cans and bottles, rotten wood and nails, sometimes even—”

  “Any sheetrock?” asks the Señor Pepita simmie.

  “I don’t know ‘bout that,” says Amparo.

  “He means the crumbly white stuff,” says Jose. “That’s sheetrock. Yeah, we get plenty of it, Señor Pepita. A lot of construction waste ended up in this landfill I think.”

  “Well that’s excellent,” says the agent. “Because knifeplants need gypsum, and that’s what sheetrock mostly is. I’d say you ought to get into knifeplants big-time, Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez.”

  So they get a loan, place the order, and the Giant’s Beanstalk knifeplant seeds arrive. They’re pointy yellow with a streak of gray. Frank and the aliens skim through the summer, catching about a frame a day, watching the growth in speeded-up time.

  Figure 37: Jose And Amparo With Knifeplants

  The knifeplants shoot up like cornstalks, straight and tall with big floppy leaves. Their roots fan out very widely under the ground, searching out their diverse nutrients. The knifeplants require a huge amount of water, which brings in lots of weeds. Jose and Amparo are out in the knifeplant field every day from dawn till dusk.

  Little green ears appear on the stalks in mid-summer, three to five ears per plant. Jose and Amparo open one up. Within the enfolding leaves is a pale fruit, a tasteless pithy thing like an unripe banana. Jose pushes the meat of the fruit away, and in its center is a gleaming metallic membrane, fragile enough to tear.

  By late summer, the slender fruits are firmer and their flesh has filled with little kernels. The shining blades in the centers are tough and resilient.

  In the fall, Jose and Amparo go out and harvest the crop. Each ear has a woody stock at its base. The dry husks pull away easily, and the ripe, seed-filled fruits fall free. What remains is—a knife, a shining blade growing out of a strong round handle. Some of the knives are only a few inches long, others are up to two feet.

  Jose and Amparo set to work polishing the knives and cutting grips into the handles. The blades are wonderfully sharp and strong; since the metal has grown like a crystal, it has fantastic integrity. And the blade blends inseparably into the wood-like grip. This is only the second year that knifeplants have existed, so Jose and Amparo get a good price for their crop.

  The Giga Gourd

  The saucer jumps three years into the future, and the knifeplants have taken over Jose and Amparo’s farm. The seeds have sprouted all over the place. Unfortunately there’s not enough metals left in the soil anymore, and the new crops produce knives that are weak and brittle, hardly worth bringing to market. Jose and Amparo are no longer careful about harvesting every last knife. Here and there dried stalks rustle, with rusting knives clanking on them. It’s a melancholy sight, and it’s dangerous to walk around in the fields.

  Amparo is pregnant and she’s worried about raising a child amidst all these knifes. The transparent little lens of the saucer follows Jose as he walks his property, deep in thought. Jose finds a slashed-up deer lying by one of the knifeplants. The animal’s furry, weather-rotted body is like a wet, dirty carpet. More knifeplants have taken root in the enriched soil beneath the flesh. “This is no farming,” mutters Jose. “This is no way.”

  The saucer skips further along Jose and Amparo’s timeline. The next year, they go back to growing the traditional Gilroy crop of garlic—and it’s hell keeping the knifeplants from coming back into the fields. In fact by late May, it seems like a losing battle. They hook into the Giant’s Beanstalk catalog and ask Señor Pepita for help. Señor Pepita suggests they try his new wetware-engineered Supergarlic.

  The Supergarlic has cloves the size of soccer balls, and it’s a savagely territorial plant, easily able to overcome the encroaching knifeplants. Though no ordinary shopper would buy such grotesque cloves, the local powdered-garlic factory loves them.

  Of course soon the neighboring farmers are copying Jose and Amparo, and the price of Supergarlic begins to drop. Amparo, pregnant again, is enthralled with the idea of giant food, and at Señor Pepita’s suggestion, Jose puts in an acre of Giant’s Beanstalk’s new Devilberries. The Devilberries are strawberry plants that have been gene-tweaked into gigantism. The berries are the size of human heads; the plants’ leaves are as big as flags. A drawback is that a Devilberry has a shelf life of only two or three days. Also you need to put something under the berries in the field if you don’t want them to have an ugly muddy patch on one side. Also slugs are crazy about them. Amparo uses a flock of geese to keep the slugs away, she keeps fresh straw under each berry, and she ferries the berries to market at just the right time. Nobody else does it so well as she. Amparo’s Devilberries become known far and wide.

  Amparo also finds a use for the huge coarse Devilberry leaves: she dries them in the sun, knocks out the leaf material, and uses the network of dried leaf-veins as a fine-meshed fabric, good for packing the ripe berries.

  Jose and Amparo have done very well in testing and popularizing the Giant’s Beanstalk products they’ve tried: the knifeplants, the Supergarlic, and the Devilberries—not to mention the King Kong carrots and the Pontoon peppers. Upon Señor Pepita’s recommendation, Giant’s Beanstalk Inc. now has a special relationship with Jose a
nd Amparo Gutierrez. Theirs is an official research farm! Amparo’s taste for gargantuan plants is nowhere near satisfied, so Amparo gets Señor Pepita to let her try out a brand new super plant: the Giga Gourd.

  The Giga Gourd seed comes in a big flat cardboard box like an extra-grande pizza. Amparo plants it right next to their house so that she can baby it. Señor Pepita warns that the Giga Gourd requires an enormous amount of water, so Jose runs a pipe to drip right onto the Giga Gourd’s bed.

  That summer, the sprawling vines of the Giga Gourd crawl up the side of Amparo and Jose’s house and completely cover the roof with awning-sized leaves. It’s a good shield against the baking summer sun; inside the house it’s cool and green. The Giga Gourd flowers are huge yellow parasols, so overpoweringly sweet that wasps and bees come by the thousands. Frank and the aliens buzz around in the bees’ midst for awhile; the aliens really enjoy bugging insects. Meanwhile Amparo makes window-screens out of Devilberry leaves.

  Once a dozen of the Giga Gourd flowers have set seed, Jose takes to picking off the other blossoms and drying them in the back yard. How many giant gourds is he going to need, after all? Nobody has any clear idea of a use for them. The dried flowers form tight, nearly transparent yellow domes the size of one-man tents.

  As the summer wears on, the Giga Gourd needs more and more water, a steady hydrant-like flow. Señor Pepita arranges to pay part of Jose and Amparo’s water bill—so curious is Giant’s Beanstalk Inc. to see how the gourds turn out.

  Figure 38: Casas Gordas

  The twelve gourds swell to unprecedented sizes—as big as stoves, as refrigerators, as cars, as trucks—and finally they are as big as houses, or even bigger. Each of the gigundo Giga Gourds is patterned in a different arrangement of green, white and yellow stripes. Some are round, some are long and thin, some are round with thin crooked necks. People come from all over to look at them.

  As it happens, there’s a war going on in Mexico that summer, and thirty-one of Jose and Amparo’s refugee relatives arrive in late September. Where to house them? In the gourds!

  The gourds have gotten nicely dry in the autumn sun. Each of them has a hard outer rind, a two-foot-thick pithy hull, and a few score pizza-sized seeds within. Willingly the refugees set to work fashioning the gourds into dwellings. There’s no shortage of carving-knives at Amparo and Jose’s!

  Each house has a swinging gourd-skin door and a few gourd-flower skylights. Boulders and dirt ramps keep the roly-poly homes from tumbling over. Jose uses a post-hole digger to put in some external pit latrines.

  Of course the dwellings aren’t up to code, but the city of Gilroy classifies them as temporary farm-worker housing, and they’re allowed to stay in place at least through the winter. The fanciful little encampment becomes knows as the Casas Gordas.

  Grown Homes

  Frank and the aliens dart on into the future, watching the UV for news about the Casas Gordas. Bingo, the next summer an architect/developer called Uli Lasser sees the bright fat houses, loves them, and goes into a huddle with Giant’s Beanstalk Inc. But the Beanstalk guys are too food-oriented, they just can’t think housing. So Uli finds some venture capital and lures away two of the Giant’s Beanstalk wetware engineers. The UV announcement of his new company Grown Homes is what catches Frank’s attention.

  The saucer tracks the Grown Homes thread for the next few years, and finds a most remarkable dwelling: the “Hieronymous Bosch House” in Woodside, California, constructed for none other than Biobot founder Saleem Irawaddy. The home’s design is inspired by Bosch’s famous painting The Garden Of Earthly Delights, a work which both Saleem and Uli admire.

  Instead of being a Giga Gourd, the Bosch House is constructed from the seed cases of several giganticized mutants akin to the Chinese lantern plant, or winter cherry. Five seed cases are combined. A four-sided silvery translucent seed-case is the bedroom, an eight-sided clear transparent one is the dining area and living-room, a five-sided shiny bright red one is the kitchen and bath area, and Saleem and his wife Leela’s offices are in a six-sided dun brown seed-case. The four pods are securely mounted on concrete foundations, with springy polyglass tubes connecting them. A herd of snow-white unicorns roams the grounds, as well as a flock of demonic rhamphorhynchi, plus scaled-up songbirds and blackberries.

  Figure 39: The Bosch House

  What truly sets the Hieronymous Bosch House apart from the primitive Casas Gordas is that, thanks to some heroic gene-tweaking, the component seed-pods come with plumbing and wiring already grown in. That is, the actual veins of the pods are just the right size and shape to use for piping, and thanks to a splice with the knifeplant genes, the seed-cases have a nice filigree of metal wires, well-insulated by ribs of pith.

  Beneath the Sea, Upon the Moon?

  The next step is for people to live in giant plants that are still alive. Like insects do! Grown Homes produces a wonderful line of summer cottages which are based on the prickly-fruited springtime vines known as wild cucumbers. The houses are called Green Balls.

  Frank and the aliens watch as a Santa Cruz hotelier called Kip Robinson plants a row of five Green Ball seeds in the lawn of his motel, which is at the edge of a cliff that drops thirty feet down to the waters of the harbor.

  A month later, five big Green Ball pods have appeared, complete with transparent hull-sections that act as windows, great soft pith-beds, and conical absorbent toilet holes. All summer, families come to spend time in the Green Balls. The air within them is fresh and oxygenated; the self-renewing inner surfaces are plump and full of sap.

  Towards the end of the summer, a vacationing couple from Virginia do some wild partying in their Green Ball, and in the course of things the big ripe pod comes loose at three AM—and rolls off the cliff to plop into the ocean. The nosy saucer follows the tumbling Green Ball to watch. Due to the softness of the inner walls—and perhaps to the limpness of the wasted Virginians—the couple aren’t injured. In fact they barely notice the mishap. The woman, Diana, pulls the door flap closed before much water can slop in. She thinks it’s raining. She and her husband Henry feel dizzy and lie down to sleep. The Green Ball floats in the bay until dawn breaks and a fishing vessel spots it, half a mile offshore.

  Far from wanting to sue Kip Robinson for renting them the Green Ball, Henry and Diana are enchanted with their experience. And Kip gets the idea of making houses that belong in the water. He loves the ocean, and this seems like a perfect idea. Kip raises some more money, cuts a deal with Grown Homes, and pretty soon a trial Kip Kelp plant has been developed to provide underwater houses called Sea Homes.

  Just like any kelp, the Kip Kelp has a bunch of roots called a hold-fast that attaches to rocks on the seafloor. Kip Kelp has a long tubular stalk that runs from the seafloor and abruptly bulges out into a beet-shaped bladder that is naturally filled with air by the respiration of the plant. In normal kelp the bladder might be a foot across; the Kip Kelp bladder is thirty feet in diameter.

  Frank and the aliens watch as Kip Robinson himself tries spending a night in the prototype Kip Kelp Sea Home. Getting inside the bladder is a struggle in itself, as it’s floating twenty feet beneath the surface. The wetware engineers have designed a system of interlocking flaps a bit like an airlock, but Kip finds getting through the lock to be a slimy intimate process comparable perhaps to being born. Inside the opaque pod everything is slippery and wet. Just to prove that it can be done, Kip toughs out the night, but in the morning his opinion of his first Kip Kelp Sea Home is starkly concise.

  Figure 40: Kip Kelp Sea Homes

  “It sucks.”

  And then he gets a mild case of the bends and has to go into a recompression chamber for forty-eight hours.

  Frank and the saucer check in a year later, and by then all the bugs have been ironed out. The upper half of the floating Sea Home bladders are transparent. The door has become an easily navigable sphincter. And the lower part of the b
ladder is now pith-covered and dry. The difficulty of swimming down to the pod and having to decompress on the way up is solved by having the Kip Kelp’s stalk length fluctuate on a twenty-four hour cycle: mornings and evenings the floating pod is right at the surface, while nights and middays it’s down low.

  Of course there are still some inconveniences, but a number of people choose to live in Sea Homes, enough of them that submarine zoning becomes quite the local issue.

  Frank is tiring now, but Herman wants to show him more, much more. Trying to turn off the flow of information, Frank focuses on his porringer of gruel, upon his mug of water. Quick glimpses of Grown Homes in space float by, and there are even glimpse of giant green domes growing upon the surface of the moon. Frank wonders where they’re getting their water, but he doesn’t bother inquiring. Instead he asks to go home.

  “I’ve had enough,” says Frank. “This is more than I’m going to be able to remember.”

  “But I still want to show you what people will do to themselves,” says Herman.

  Frank feels a flicker of curiosity.

  “All right, but make it fast,” he sighs.

  “Just a preview,” says Herman

  Morphed Humans

  I’m so tired. Too much. Morphs. Don’t know how they do it. Four boobs, kangaroo tail, ape, flower hand, canyon Batman, polar people, double man, dickhead, tough pod thing—is that a person? Enough enough enough.

  What Frank sees now is a rapid montage of images, some of them seemingly drawn from very far into the future. There is no time to get into the individual stories about the people he sees, or to find out the steps they used to alter their bodies. It’s all that the weary Frank can do to assimilate and remember nine of them.

  •· A woman with four breasts. She wears a dress with a complicated double décolletage. She’s in a nightclub with a short man who has little devil horns growing out of his bald head.