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

by Rudy Rucker

  It’s incredible to actually be here at Mount Rushmore. So nice to be out of the saucer. It’s a fine sunny day. Frank figures he’ll make his way to the nearest town and get some kind of job. Give Mary a call and see how things are going. Everything will be—and then Frank notices the date on the pamphlet he picked up in the snack bar. June-July, 1996. Two years are gone.

  Chapter Eleven: Notes On Transhumanity

  On the morning of Sunday, June 15, 1997, we rose early and headed straight up through the pine woods towards the Devil’s Tower. We didn’t bother taking a trail, just headed though the woods cross-country. I thought again of the conclusion of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind—of how the hero makes a bee-line for the tower, sure that he’ll find a great alien revelation.

  By ten in the morning we’d come to the Tower Trail that encircles the base of the tower. Happily we walked it, marveling at the great, bundled columns of stone. We circled the tower once, twice, three times, talking all the while. By then too many tourists had started to arrive, so Frank and I left the trail to spend the rest of the afternoon in a little clearing near the base of the tower’s north side, sitting there picnicking and talking.

  One aspect of the transhumanity notes which most readers will find completely unbelievable is Frank’s insistence that people will still be reading our Saucer Wisdom in the year 4004. It would be nice! In reality, Frank had a fairly transparent motivation for adding this embellishment to his tale. He wanted me to believe that our book was going to make a lot of money, so that I’d be willing to give him a few thousand dollars as an advance on his twenty percent of the book’s supposed future earnings. I declined to do so, pointing out that I’d just paid for the plane trip to South Dakota, and that I had a lot of writing and marketing work still ahead of me, with no guaranteed pay-off yet in sight.

  As well as going over the transhumanity notes and asking me for money, Frank discussed various little corrections to my existing manuscript of Saucer Wisdom: the notes on future communication, on aliens, and on future biotechnology. To my relief, he didn’t get into arguing with anything I’d written about my encounters with him.

  Editing The Body

  Helene finally gets sick for a day. I’m alone in the Black Hills High IRC. I fumble the attractor together, the saucer comes. It’s three humans from the future! Goola, Perl and Balaam.

  I want to go back to 1994 to prevent the break-in, I want to keep Mary. They won’t help me. “You have to finish Saucer Wisdom.”

  They want to tell me about transhumanity. Editing, copying, and transcending the body.

  Aug dogs at the juice bar in Rapid. Fingers around a girl’s neck. Tails, a shoulder rose that looks like a nudibranch egg ribbon. A Russian sleaze-ball puts a deer-antler bud in a girl’s head, she gets old and dies.

  A Black farmer with two extra hands, they run along on their fingers next to him. His wife watches him with a Von Dutch eyeball. Back in the house, she’s in a tub of amniotic fluid getting rejuvenated.

  Their son Rize has turned himself into a merman. Phone up and meet his fiancée. It’s lonely to grow old.

  The Human Saucerians

  After Steffi and the rope-aliens drop Frank at Mount Rushmore—the exact date turns out to be June 27, 1996—he makes several efforts to phone up Mary. It take almost a week to track her down, and meanwhile he’s living in a cheap motel near Rapid City, paying his bills with a shit-job as the night janitor at a McDonald’s.

  When Frank finally talks to Mary, he finds out that she’s remarried. She doesn’t want to get back together with Frank at all. The only good thing is that Mary set aside Frank’s share of the money from their joint savings and from the yard sale of their things. She mails Frank a check and he lives a little more comfortably for a few months. He’s scared the police are still looking for him in California. He can’t think of any particular reason to go anyplace just now, so he stays in Rapid. Autumn is beautiful in South Dakota.

  When the winter comes on, Frank gets a job at the Instructional Resources Center at Black Hills High School, just north of Rapid. His boss at the IRC is a skinny woman named Helene Lundy. She has lank colorless hair, and her mouth becomes a disapproving ‘o’ whenever sex is mentioned in her presence, which is not very often. Her pale skin is pink around the nostrils from a perpetual case of the sniffles.

  One of Frank’s reasons for taking the IRC job is that he hopes to use their equipment to contact the aliens. He’s in a state of denial over losing Mary; he feels that if he can just get back in touch with the aliens, his familiar old life will somehow start up again.

  But Helene Lundy is always there in the equipment room, day in and day out, keeping a strict eye on everything, softly blowing her nose into wadded little tissues. Finally on Wednesday, April 9, 1997, Helene fails to report for work. This is Frank’s big chance.

  He locks up the IRC for lunch hour and stays inside. The voices and footsteps of the students echo through the long waxy high-school halls, a tender nostalgic sound that makes Frank ache for his past. Frank makes sure the blinds on all the windows are pulled down, and then he arranges three cameras and TV monitors. The equipment is unfamiliar and Frank’s hands are trembling. It takes him much longer than usual to tune in the right kind of pattern, but finally he gets the proper tangle of bright, smeared blobs and lines.

  A saucer moves out of the TV screens and envelops Frank. He groans with joy. Unlike the other times, the masters of this saucer rotate themselves into Frank’s field of view without even being asked. To Frank’s great surprise, they’re humans, or rather transhumans: our descendants from the fifth millennium.

  There are three of them, a man, a woman, and an androgyne. In physical form they’re very handsome, almost god-like. The woman, named Goola, is dark-skinned and has flowing blonde hair. The man is Perl; he is an Apollo with strong, green teeth. The third is Balaam, a winsome plump figure with a sweet round face and an acid tongue.

  “How now, Frank Shook,” says plump, fey, butch Balaam, seamlessly translating her/is words into an odd, campy dialect. “You look to be even more of a schnauzer than I expected. We’re here because of your little book. ‘Tis our fate to make the prophecies come true. ‘Mektoub,’ as the Arabs say. ‘It is written.’ A cliché, but so is life. I just flew in from California, and boy are my wings tired.”

  Rather than responding to any of this, Frank immediately hollers out his big request. He’s been rehearsing it to himself for the past eight months. “Take me back to 11 PM, June 30, 1994! Rudy Rucker’s house in Los Perros! If I get there in time, I can stop myself from breaking in! And then I won’t have to run off to South Dakota and lose two years. I’ll start up my old life with Mary.”

  “Assume we were willing to help you,” says the inhumanly handsome Perl, who speaks like a British actor impersonating a scientist. “If we helped you change your past, then you wouldn’t be here now. And if you weren’t here now, then we certainly wouldn’t be helping you. And in that case your past wouldn’t change and you would be here now. So if we’re willing to help you, then you’re here if and only if you’re not here. A contradiction. The universe doesn’t allow contradictions. Therefore the initial assumption is false. Meaning that we’re not going to help you. Q.E.D. The a priori is very powerful.” Perl’s green teeth flash in a satisfied smile.

  “How’s the universe going to know if there’s a contradiction?” protests Frank. “Maybe it’s not paying attention.”

  “The cosmos is God’s bod,” says dark-skinned Goola, tossing her long blonde hair. Her mode of discourse is hipster/ecstatic. “All space and all time. Each moment is tweaked to make the greatest harmony across the spacetime dimensions. Reality is like the smooth plastic wrapper around a basket filled with gnarly fruits. Like a silk sheet over a bed filled with phantom lovers. Like the final telling of a perfect tale.”

  “But—what happens if you try and force a contradiction?”
insists Frank.

  “Nothing,” says Balaam a little impatiently, “Because, my dear, no can do. What’s written is the holy writ. We’re going to fill your little brain up with transhumanity and then you’re going to finish the notes for Saucer Wisdom.”

  “You’ve read it?” exclaims Frank.

  “Oh yes,” says Perl, warming up. “It’s quite the classic, on a par with Plato’s Dialogues. I’m dead chuffed to meet you. It’s like meeting Socrates.”

  “Yeah?” says Frank. “Yeah? Well what if I decide to cause a contradiction by changing my book’s name, huh? Teach you a lesson. I’ll call it Frank Shook’s Alien Visions Of The Coming Millennia.”

  “What a tacky, tacky name,” titters Balaam, leaning his/her head on Perl’s shoulder. “Rudy Rucker has far better taste than that.” S/he smirks and shrugs. “You can’t change the future any more than you can change the past, Frank Shook. People don’t do the opposite of what they know they’re going to do.”

  “What about this,” presses Frank, still trying to find a way back to his past. “What if you take me back to June 30, 1994—and then I branch into a different universe! That way there wouldn’t have to be a contradiction. Oh, please take me back. I can be with Mary in an alternate world.”

  “There’s only one universe,” says Perl. “If time branched, then nothing would matter. Everything would always happen irregardless. Instead of a single, wonderfully thought-out line, time would be a stupid pudding of anyhow outcomes.”

  “But I saw alternate futures when I was previewing my meeting with Rudy at the Jahva house,” protests Frank. “Weren’t those real?”

  “Those were virtual futures,” says Perl, idly fondling Balaam. “Mental constructs like dreams. But only one of those futures actually happened. If everything happened, no work would be accomplished by our living out this particular cosmos. There wouldn’t be any reason for us to exist.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Frank.

  “The world is a cosmic work of art,” says Goola, running her hands over her body. “Like a sculpture from a block of marble. If all the worlds existed, you’d just have the virgin block—the same as if no worlds existed. Everything and Nothing are easy; it’s what’s in between that’s hard. There’s only one big aha, and we’re it.”

  Frank still doesn’t understand, but he knows that he’s smitten by Goola. He reaches out towards her and—

  “Let’s be on our merry fairy way,” interrupts Balaam. “We’ll give Frank an inspirational looky-look at the highlights of transhumanity, drop him back to gross-out Helene Lundy, and then we’re for the galactic beyond!”

  The saucer rises up out of Black Hills High School, up into the gusty, wet April sky. A thaw is on; melting snow is everywhere. To the south lies Rapid City and the Black Hills, their dark pines emerging from the winter’s frosting. In the other directions the soggy prairie rolls as far as the eye can see, patches of Easter-green grass peeking through the grayish old snow. The saucer darts towards Rapid’s meager sprawl.

  “What’s transhumanity?” asks Frank.

  “Editing the body, copying the body, transcending the body,” says Perl, extending a perfect finger for each one. “We’re going to show you all about it so that you can write it up. And then people will know the way.”

  “I’ll be your guide to body editing,” says Balaam. “It’s done me a world of good.”

  “And I, as the scion of a long line of clones, will show you how body copying is done,” says Perl.

  “Transcendence is my thing,” says Goola promisingly. “So I’ll be dessert.”

  “He looks confused,” says Balaam. “Let me make it country simple. Transhumanity means being like us! We never get sick, for instance. What’s that like, anyway, Frank? It must be so pukeful to sneeze uncontrollably. A whole chain of them? Does that ever happen to you?”

  “Sure,” says Frank. “There’s a tingling in your nose and then kind of an explosion. It’s really bad for you to try and hold in a sneeze. I did that once when I was bending over, and it threw a crick into my back that lasted six weeks.”

  “You poor man,” says Goola. “I think you’re so brave.” She keeps smiling at Frank, and he’s trying not to stare at her too hard.

  “Find our first stop, Balaam,” says Perl.

  “I’m scanning now,” says Balaam, her/is playful eyes glazing over. “I’m looking for the local aug dogs. Yes, by the late 23rd century they’ll be here in Rapid too. We’ll just scan ahead and—ooh, this scanning through time is a gas, isn’t it Goola?”

  Goola bends over as if too see better, which places her inviting ass right in Frank’s face. Frank can feel the warmth of Goola’s body, can smell the scent of her skin.

  Beyond Goola, the view from the saucer is gray and indistinct, but now Balaam makes an abrupt turn and things snap into focus. Outside it’s a Rapid City summer’s eve, 2297.

  “Now we channel the scene at the High Plains Smoothie stand,” says Balaam. “I’ll interpret the people’s speech into Frank’s kind of English. What with me being such the thespian.”

  The saucer shrinks, grows transparent, draws closer to the juice stand.

  Aug Dogs

  As a building, High Plains Smoothie is a biotechnological marvel. Its exterior is a twenty-foot high transparent dome, organically grown. Frank and the saucerians fly in through one of the dome’s high, arched doorways. Within the dome, seven tough-looking tree trunks rise up to form an umbrella of linked leafy branches.

  The room is filled with teenagers, in some ways not so different from the kids Frank’s used to seeing at Black Hills High. They’re clothed in tank-grown leathers and intricately patterned loom-plant cloths, with belts and vests of flickering piezoplastic. What really sets these 23rd century youths apart is their extensive body augmentations.

  Figure 51: Durleen’s Neck Fingers

  “They’re ‘aug dogs,’” explains Goola, her breath hot against Frank’s cheek. “A slang expression, you wave. This is the Rapid aug dog hang-out.”

  Fruits of all kinds hang up in the branches: strawberries, guavas, peaches, bananas, pineapples, oranges, raspberries, kiwis and more. Each fruit is about the same size; that is, the raspberries are relatively large, while the pineapples are accordingly small.

  One girl is evidently the stand’s manager. Though she mingles with the customers; she stands apart because she wears a starched white jacket, left open so as to show her breasts. The others call her Durleen. She wears a necklace of—fingers.

  Upon closer inspection, Frank sees that it’s not actually a necklace, it’s a permanent body modification. There are thirteen fingers growing out of the base of Durleen’s neck, arranged like spikes in a dog-collar, all pointing out, each finger with its own meticulously painted fingernail.

  The fingers curl and gesture as Durleen animatedly talks with a boy named Stig, a pale blond fellow who looks quite normal until Frank notices that he’s leaning back on what would seem to be thin air. When the saucer circles around behind the boy, Frank sees that Stig has a great, thick lizard tail growing out through a hole in the back of his scaly leather jeans.

  “My Jena’s gonna plant an antler bud by one of her ears tonight!” Durleen is telling Stig.

  “For true?” says Stig. “Me, I’d roar some pig-tusks.” He touches his jaw. “Snarfy!”

  “Wouldn’t match your tail, Stig,” says a boy named Junit. Junit’s skin has a shiny, liverish sheen and is dappled with changeable spots. “I say always aug to one plan.” There are suckers on the backs of Junit’s hands, and his silky sea-green shirt’s openings show scattered little tentacles on his hairless chest.

  “Oh don’t be so desult,” says the girl named Jena. She’s small and blonde, with round gray eyes. “Random has rhythm.” She has a flesh-colored rose attached to one shoulder, an extra tongue in the hollow of her neck, a pair o
f long lobster-like feelers growing out of the left side of her head, a stout penis dangling from one side of her bare midriff, and what look like insect mandibles on the backs of some her knuckles. She laughs knowingly and gives one of Durleen’s neck-fingers a butterfly-kiss.

  An older man named Volga asks Durleen for a kiwi juice. He has a heavy Russian accent and seems a bit stoned. Durleen pulls something that looks like a condom out of her coat pocket, then reaches up to stretch the piezoplastic sac over one of the dangling kiwi fruits. The piezoplastic makes quick, savage kneading motions, then drops down from the tree into Durleen’s hands. She gives it to Volga, who wetly sucks the pulped juice from the sac. Overhead a small kiwi has already formed at the old one’s spot, and is visibly growing to the standard size.

  “How do the fruits come back so fast?” wonders Jena.

  “Desoxy-gibberlin-5,” says Volga. “Is speeding up the biological clock. That’s vhat I use for my augs as vell. Are you ready for zat antler now, Jena?”

  “Sure,” says brave little Jena.

  Volga finishes his juice and tosses the empty husk to Durleen. And then he produces a bloody little gobbet of something—the antler-bud.

  “From a deer I vas killing last night. Lie yourself down, Jena.”

  Jena lays her sweet young head down on a couch. Volga produces a protean piezoplastic tool that seems to convert itself into whatever he needs. It starts as a power-nozzle that sprays an anaesthetic mist above Jena’s ear, becomes a scalpel that snips away a disk of her skin, and then mutates into a abrasive wheel that grinds a little depression into Jena’s bared skull.

  Volga sets the antler-bud into place, patches the hole with the disk of Jena’s skin, and smoothes on a healing ointment. His hands seem clumsy and shaky; it’s painful to watch him work.

  “How fast will it grow?” murmurs Jena.

  “This is depending on how much gibberlin I use,” says Volga, converting his little tool back into a spray-nozzle.