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

by Rudy Rucker

  •· A man with a big kangaroo tail. He jumps backwards, lands on his tail, uses it to bounce him forward. He is in an Earth city, but the buildings seem impossibly lacy and tall.

  •· A woman with long arms like a gibbon. She swings through trees, musically hooting. On closer inspection, Frank can make out that each of the trees is a home, hollowed out like a fairytale tree-house. Nobody but this one woman has been changed into a gibbon. She peers in the lit windows; her song sounds lonely and disturbed.

  Figure 41: Nine Morphs

  •· A newborn child with an augmented left hand. Each finger branches into five smaller fingers which rebranch, down through four levels for an end result, says Herman, of six-hundred-twenty-five finger-tips. The minute pink fingers stir like the tentacles of a sea anemone. The father is happy and excited, the mother is upset and in tears.

  •· A man who has a tiny shriveled body and huge leathery wings. He hang-glides on thermals rising from the Grand Canyon. Silvery lens-shaped aircraft float in the background.

  •· A couple who are covered with pelts of thick white hair. They are sitting on an ice-shelf, eating a large raw fish. Their feet are webbed and their fingers end in long red claws. Skirling sea-birds wheel above them, hoping for scraps.

  •· A man who is two times normal size in every dimension. His limbs are thick and squat to bear the eight-fold extra weight. He has a ruff of stegosaurus spikes down his back to radiate off his extra heat. His great cow-eyes glitter with intelligence. He is eating a giant apple.

  •· A truck-driver whose head is a wimpled roll shape, like a foreskin, thick meat whorled around sushi-style, with a glistening eye in the center. On second glance, that’s not a truck he’s driving, but some kind of spaceship.

  •· A person who is a tough-skinned spindle-pod floating in outer space. Algae within this person’s flesh provides oxygen. He or she moves about via a finely directed rocket jet of some kind. At the forward end of the spindle is a single thickly-coated eye.

  The parade of freakish morphs make Frank so queasy that he faints. This is enough to finally convince Herman to let him go back home.

  As Frank comes to, he’s looking down at a house in Los Perros, at Rudy Rucker’s house, looking in on me as if the walls of my house were transparent. The aliens show him a few things about me—but Frank won’t say what—and then they zoom over the Santa Cruz mountains and he’s above his dear little house in San Lorenzo. There’s a downwards rush, and at last Frank’s back in his chair with his desk and his three televisions.

  Chapter Eight: The Mondo Party

  I Ask Frank

  I finished writing up the biotechnology notes on Tuesday, June 28, 1994, and on the morning of Wednesday the 29th Frank called me again. I felt a little guilty about the sour note on which our last encounter had ended, so I decided to make a friendly gesture—which would prove to be a big mistake.

  “How would you and Mary like to come to a big party with Audrey and me tomorrow night?” I asked him. “Mondo 2000 is throwing a bash up in Tilden Park near Berkeley. They’ve rented a space called the Brazilian Room.”

  “What’s Mondo 2000?”

  “Man, you’re way up in the mountains, aren’t you? Mondo is this cutting-edge totally hip magazine published by some freaks in Berkeley. Instead of being about acid it’s about computers. It’s cyberpunkadelic.”

  “Computers? What’s hip about them?” demanded Frank, sounding querulous. It was like he had no understanding at all of the “Notes On Communication” material—even though he’d been there with the aliens to see it all coming true.

  “Come on, Frank. Think about Larky’s Brain Concert. Think about sluggies and radiotelepathy. And the next step, the biotechnology, it builds on that whole computer-based technology. That’s where computers are going to lead us.”

  “I wouldn’t call any of those future things computers,” said Frank stubbornly. “Computers are brittle beige boxes. They suck. I hate them.”

  “Computers are a little boring now, Frank, but they’re going to evolve. As you of all people should very well know. Mondo 2000 was the first magazine to see it coming.”

  “Do you work for them or something?”

  “I helped edit an anthology of their best articles called Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide. But I don’t write much for them anymore. If I mail them something, they always lose the manuscript the first time, so I mail it again, and then two months later I get a frantic phone-call from Queen Mu with her voice all weird and she wants me to fax an immediate rewrite because she hates what I wrote and the deadline’s tomorrow, and I do that and she loses my fax, and I fax it again, and then four more months go by and the new issue comes out, but they don’t mail me a copy because they’ve lost my address. And Mu won’t even discuss the subject of paying me. On the up side, Mondo’s gotten me a lot of good publicity, and thanks to my agent, I did get paid for the User’s Guide. In any case, it’s a happening scene, and the Mondoids definitely know how to throw a good party.”

  “When is it again?”

  “Tomorrow; Thursday night. Audrey and I are going to drive up there around eight.”

  “Let me ask Mary.”

  In the background I could hear Frank and Mary talking for what seemed like a long time. While I was waiting, Audrey wandered by and asked me what I was doing.

  “I’m on the phone with Frank Shook. I invited him to come to the Mondo party with us, and he’s asking his wife.”

  “Oh great,” said Audrey. “We’re going somewhere with a person like that? Really, Rudy, that is so lacking. But I’m sure the Mondo people will love him.”

  Just then Frank was back on the line, all enthusiastic.

  “Sounds good, Rudy. We haven’t been to a party in a long time. What if we drive up to Los Perros and catch a ride to Berkeley with you?”

  “Yeah, we could give you a ride. Where should we meet?”

  “Not here!” hissed Audrey.

  “Our house is a little tricky to find,” I said smoothly. “We could meet at the Los Perros Coffee Roasting Company. Right in front there at eight o’clock. Try not to be late!”

  “Can do, chief.”

  I hung up and chuckled. “That was pretty slick how I put him off, eh Audrey?”

  “I hope he’s not chuckling at you right now,” she said. “It would be terrible for him to know where we live.”

  So around eight thirty on Thursday, June 30, 1994, we set off for Berkeley from Los Perros in my Acura Legend, Audrey and I in front, Frank and Mary in back. Although I didn’t tell Frank, I had the manuscript for Saucer Wisdom in my knapsack with my sweater and my extra glasses. I still wasn’t planning to show it to him, but I wanted to have it handy in case something he said would make me want to make a quick correction.

  “Have you lived here long?” asked Audrey as we pulled onto the freeway.

  “I grew up in Santa Cruz,” said Mary. “And Frank’s been here for—is it twenty years, Frank?”

  “Twenty-two,” said Frank. “I grew up in Wisconsin and when I got out of high-school in sixty-eight I joined the Navy. I signed up for a four year tour in the North Atlantic so I wouldn’t have to go to ‘Nam. I worked in the radio shack. Just call me ‘Sparks’. I mustered out in Newport News in seventy-two and headed straight for San Francisco. ‘Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.’”

  “The peak of the sixties,” I put in.

  “Frank and I were in an urban commune together,” said Mary. “In the lower Haight. That’s how we met. We were raising pygmy goats in the backyard and making yogurt. But there was always hair in the yogurt, and nobody would buy it, and we didn’t want to eat it either. Our leader was named Kenny Natur. He was really ugly but he had this great smile. Thick lips and a beard that made him look like a yak. He was always trying to get us to do Tantric orgies with him. Frank was our media director for
about fifteen minutes.”

  “I had a reel-to-reel tape-deck,” said Frank. “And seventeen miles of music. But then it all got ripped off and I blamed Kenny and I did something stupid. I had to go away for awhile, and when I came back I got a job working for a TV-repair shop in the Mission. And a few months later I convinced Mary to move in with me. We had a room the size of a closet. I think maybe it was a closet. There weren’t any windows.”

  “We weren’t really ready to be together yet,” said Mary. “So I moved down to Santa Cruz and got a job at a crafts shop. I was dating a bunch of other guys for quite a few years.”

  “I missed her so much I eventually moved to Santa Cruz too,” said Frank. “At first I worked as a groundskeeper at the University. Sweeping up after the eucalypti. And then I was working with Spun at the garden shop. After Spun and me got busted, I got a job as a tech in the language lab back at UC. And then came Western Appliance. Mary kept refusing to live with me again, but finally I got her to marry me in uh—”

  “Eighty-nine,” said Mary. “It was the same year you and Peggy Sung first saw the saucers. Remember? You said you’d had a vision of us two living by San Lorenzo. And you were right.”

  “That must be exciting to see UFOs,” said Audrey. “I’d like to see one.”

  “Yes, Frank sees saucers all the time,” said Mary. “And they even take him for rides. But not me. I’m too Earth-grounded; I’m a Taurus. Do you think Audrey could see a saucer, Frank?”

  “I don’t know her well enough to say,” said Frank.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you, Frank,” said Audrey. “Are the aliens anything like jellyfish?”

  “None of them that I’ve seen so far are like jellyfish,” said Frank. “But they come from all over, so some of them might be. The ones I’ve seen looked like scarab beetles and like starfish with big red water balloons on them. You didn’t say what’s your astrological sign.”

  “Is this a disco?” laughed Audrey. “I’m Aquarius.”

  “Aquarius is an air sign,” said Mary. “That’s good. Do you ever have dreams about flying, Audrey?”

  “Once in awhile,” said Audrey. “It’s my favorite thing. The best one I ever had, I was flying in the snow. It was so wonderful. It wasn’t cold, it was warm and balmy and I was in my nightgown flying through falling snow. Beautiful flakes flying right towards my eyes. I’d like to paint that.”

  “Audrey’s a great artist,” I said. “She’s having a show of her jellyfish paintings starting at the Los Perros Coffee Roasting starting on Saturday, as a matter of fact. We’re going to hang the pictures up tomorrow night.”

  But Frank and Mary were a little too cloddy, or too redneck, to follow up on that. “Frank has a lot of flying dreams,” said Mary, almost as if Audrey and I hadn’t said anything.

  Audrey and I exchanged a look that spoke volumes. But Audrey politely did her part to keep the conversation rolling. “Are you asleep when you see your UFOs, Frank?”

  “No no,” said Frank. “I’m always wide awake. Hasn’t Rudy told you about how I do it?”

  “I thought you might want to keep it confidential,” I said.

  “We’re planning to publish this, aren’t we?” said Frank. “I’ve been scared to talk all these years, but now I’m talking and nothing bad is happening, so, hey, I’m ready to tell everyone I see. I don’t see why you’re such a tight-ass about showing people what you’ve already written. Will the Mondo editor be there tonight? Maybe you should let them publish one of your chapters in the magazine.”

  “Well—like I said earlier, Frank, I’m not into writing for Mondo anymore. But let’s back up for a minute. I was there with you the other day when the saucer came for you. If it’s real, how come I didn’t see it? Please don’t tell me this has something to do with astrology.”

  “Astrology is a scientifically tested method for classifying personalities,” said Mary.

  “Maybe so, but it has nothing to do with UFOs,” said Frank. “Like I’m always telling you, the aliens come from completely different parts of our galaxy or even from other galaxies entirely. The zodiac, lest we forget, is based on the constellations visible from planet Earth. No, don’t worry, Rudy, I’m not going to turn New Age on you. The reason you didn’t see the saucer is that it was only in the room for about a microsecond of your time. It’s like—don’t blink or you’ll miss it. And you blinked. Most people do.”

  “So how do you manage to see it?” asked Audrey.

  “I see it because the aliens are interested in me—on account of me being such a brilliant stand-up guy—and they bend my timeline off into paratime with them. UFOs almost never let themselves be visible in regular time. Usually the only way you see one is that they bring you into their time dimension. Everything around you stops except for the saucer. It could happen to us right now.”

  There was a silence then, all of us kind of waiting for the aliens to arrive, but nothing happened. For some reason I thought of the Magritte painting of a galloping horse on the roof of a car speeding down a highway.

  “Or we could fall asleep from boredom,” said Audrey. “Just kidding. Did you say you used to work in a garden shop, Frank?” Frank did know a lot about gardening, and he gave us good advice on how to take care of the yucca plants on our deck. From yuccas we moved on to deserts and beaches, with a satisfyingly detailed four-way discussion of the beaches of the world that we’d visited. Then Mary and Audrey got onto the topic of sharks, who Audrey hated just as much as she loved jellyfish, and then we were in Berkeley.

  The Party

  When we got to Tilden park it was just getting dark. The Brazilian Room was deep in the park on Wildcat Canyon Road. It was a long, low wooden hall surrounded by a big patio, perched on the brow of a long meadow rolling down to some woods. It was a “Casbah” party, and a lot of people were wearing odd clothes.

  Wes, the titular editor of Mondo, was dressed as an Arab woman named Amara. The Casbah theme had been Wes’s idea. He felt that we should think of the Web as an arabesque labyrinth. The Mondo editors were big on understanding technology as metaphors—instead of actually learning anything hard. Mondo owner and chief editor Queen Mu was holed up in the kitchen, spaced-out and inaccessible behind starry eyes and rictus-like smile, her voice breathy and brittle, stay away. The Mondo art director, Bart, a saturnine man with a shaved head, was nicely turned out in a tuxedo and an authentic-looking maroon fez. Mondo co-founder R. U. Sirius was slouching around on the patio with his lovably goofy grin, eternally fingering his long hair, simultaneously alert and bemused.

  “Hi, R. U.”

  “Rudy! What’s happening? Hi, Audrey. Glad you guys could make it.”

  “This place is magical,” said Audrey. “I never knew it was up here.”

  “Find your way through the labyrinth,” said R. U. “I think I was at an acid test here a really long time ago. Or maybe it was a wedding.”

  “This is my friend Frank Shook and his wife Mary,” I said. “And this is R. U. Sirius. He’s Mondo’s—I think the last issue’s masthead lists you as Icon At Large?”

  “Very iconic, very large,” said R. U. “Are you a mathematician, Frank?”

  “What an insult,” laughed Mary. “Can you imagine looking like a mathematician? Whoah.”

  “I can imagine it all too well,” giggled Audrey. “You should see some of Rudy’s friends.”

  “I’m a saucer abductee,” said Frank. “Rudy and I are working on a book.”

  “Wow. That’s quite a departure. Do you guys have a publisher?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Rudy doesn’t want to show anyone the manuscript,” said Frank. “Not even me. For all I know he’s not even writing anything.”

  “That’s the best way to work,” laughed R. U., and then someone else came up and started talking with him.

  “Let’s check out the rest o
f the party,” I suggested, and the four of us merged into the throng. There was a good spread of mid-Eastern food, lots of beer and wine, a fair amount of pot out on the fringes of the patio, and who knew what odd chemicals in some of the people’s blood-streams. For entertainment, there was a celestial hippie-dippie storyteller, a cursing poetry performance, and bizarre instrumentless electronic live music.

  Among the guests was an astronomer from U.C. Berkeley; it turned out he’d read one of my science books. I introduced Frank to him, describing Frank as a friend of mine who was interested in extraterrestrial intelligence.

  “Do you think aliens could travel as cosmic rays?” asked Frank, getting right down to it. Some wine sloshed out of the plastic cup he was holding.

  “That is a genial notion,” said the astronomer. He was a professor on a sabbatical visit to Berkeley from his native Rome. “What do you have in mind exactly?”

  “I think—well actually I know, but let’s not get into that,” Frank chuckled mirthlessly. “I think beings all over the universe code themselves up, both mind and body, and send the coded patterns across space as high energy electromagnetic signals. Cosmic rays.” Frank held out his arm and wiggled his fingers, and then drew his fluttering hand down an imaginary line towards his head.

  This being a Mondo party, the professor was primed for weirdness, and he took this happily in stride. “Like Puck who slides down a moonbeam. A most efficient method for interstellar travel. One caveat: most so-called cosmic rays are bits of matter, something like an iron nucleus or perhaps a very energetic proton. A particle like that is not carrying much information. Really just atomic weight and the energy-momentum 4-vector, a few bytes, nothing. But some cosmic rays are energetic gamma rays. These are the signals your extraterrestrials can be modulating with information. Even better are the cosmic GRBs, which stands for Gamma Ray Bursts. Yes, the GRBs are the best candidates for your alien moonbeams. GRBs last about a second and contain, oh, many trillions of gamma ray photons with a widely varied and complex structure.”