by Rudy Rucker
Wishloop
Jeannie snaked her arm a little tighter around Ricky’s waist. They were surely going to kiss tonight, as soon as it got dark. To her left were gold-plated clouds and a fat ruby sun. The longest day of the year. Too bad there were so many people on the beach.
Just ahead, a knot of idlers watched a fisherman drag something in. Ricky stopped short. Jeannie tugged him to come on, but there he stopped, staring with his mouth open. Anything to do with sports held Ricky in thrall.
“Come on, Ricky, it’s just a rull.”
“Gigundo! Look at the rod bend!”
The rull came slip-slopping out of the surf, a sort of giant skate or manta ray. Rulls were from outer space. People liked to kill them.
“Gigundo!” repeated Ricky. “That devil’s got a three meter wingspan.”
Jeannie sighed. It was a shame that a smart, lively girl like herself had to date idiots. How many Rickys had she known? When would Fall and college ever come?
The rull’s flesh was pale green with filaments of red. Its main body was vaguely reptilian: a fat, sinuous croc shape and a long spiky tail. On the sides of the body were the big slimy wings that flew the rull through the water. The rull had no head to speak of: just a long mouth-slit, some nose-holes, and two little eyes backed by pouches. The mouth was soft and toothless; rulls lived on whatever decayed garbage they could scrounge from the sea floor. This one had a hook set in its mouth. A bad catch.
According to the scientists, the rull spores had drifted down from space to seed the ocean. Why, no one knew. Why do weeds grow? In the last year all kinds of unearthly creatures had appeared. The solar system was drifting through some cosmic cloud of spores, and worthless new species were cropping up all over the place.
“Watch,” Ricky said, taking Jeannie’s arm. “Watch this.”
The fisherman held a long hunting knife poised over the center of the rull’s translucent body. The stupid, harmless creature lay there shivering. Rulls balanced off their low intelligence with some modest psionic abilities. It could feel the humans’ revulsion and see its impending death.
The rull puffed up the two big airsacs behind its smeary eyes. The air whistled back out, clammy and smelly, trying to sound like words. Fwee-fwet-fwee-fwo. Please let me go. Fwee-fwaah-fwa-fwish. I’ll grant a wish.
Rulls always said this, but people killed them anyway. The fisherman steadied his knife over the fleshmound’s summit. Jeannie felt a sudden burst of sympathy for the poor thing, this poor outcast in a world it never made. She drew free of Ricky and stepped forward to lay her hand on the fisherman’s shoulder.
“Don’t. Let the poor thing go, and take your wish.”
“Rull wishes don’t work out so good,” said the fisherman, glancing up at her. “Or didn’t you know?”
The creature’s muddy eyes stared gratefully up at Jeannie. The hook, she noticed, had fallen out of its mouth. She smiled charmingly at the fisherman, working to keep him distracted.
“What do you mean?” asked Jeannie. “I wish I could free a rull and get a wish.”
Just then the ungainly creature made its move. With a huge slurping noise it flopped across the sand and into the breakers. There was a moment of confusion, and then Jeannie got her wish.
She snaked her arm a little tighter around Ricky’s waist. They were surely going to kiss tonight, as soon as it got dark. To her left were gold-plated clouds and a fat ruby sun. The longest day of the year…the longest day ever.
============
Note on “Wishloop”
Written in Summer, 1981.
San Jose State University Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Newsletter, December, 1988.
I wrote this on vacation with my family at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. In the Outer Banks, you always see idiots killing skates that they’ve caught. Just to publish this short-short story somewhere, I eventually put in our SJSU departmental newsletter.
Inertia
Nancy was asleep, avoiding me. I was watching TV. A six-inch butler in there making a pitch for textured paper napkins. Texture equals romance. I was clean broke, and my new wife had stopped loving me.
“Come on,” urges the midget butler, beckoning me into the tube and towards a table. The tablecloth hangs down to the ground like theater curtains. An expectant buzz filters out. I shoulder through the heavy fabric and find myself onstage. A big little audience in here. At last, I have texture, and Nancy’s onstage, too, wearing next to nothing and raring to …
The doorbell rang, waking me. Eleven-thirty Friday night, mild mid-September, Princeton, New Jersey, Nancy asleep beside me, her features all closed up. My unformed bud, my cruel mistress. I went downstairs and answered the door. Harry.
His big white face looked anxious. “I hope I didn’t wake you, I just thought I’d, uh …”
“It’s okay. I was under a table putting on a show for some midgets.”
Harry’s voice dropped. “You were already dreaming?”
“Relax. I’m still dressed. Nancy’s asleep.” I walked into the kitchen and Harry tagged along. We’d had a drink together that afternoon, and he looked like he’d been at it ever since. I took out two beers and handed him one.
“No thanks,” said Harry. He shouldered past me and shambled into the pantry where Nancy kept our liquor supply.
“Tequila, Harry?”
“Uh, yeah, I need.”
I should point out that Harry and I were both getting over a series of nasty shocks and unwanted life-changes. Rude chuckles with a negative charge. Harry’s regular girlfriend had more or less committed suicide, and the next woman he’d loved had rejected him utterly.
I’d gotten married, which seems positive enough, but just then my engineering business had gone down the tubes. “When there’s money worries, love goes out the window,” my Uncle Arpad told me once. Once you get started fighting, it’s hard to stop.
My near-bankruptcy had finished Harry right off: he’d been my research and development department. I was still making a little money with consulting, but I had no work at all for Harry. He was making ends meet by teaching high-school physics. Rumpled genius Harry was teaching at the Collegiate Academy for Young Ladies.
“There’s only a drop left,” Harry observed, holding up the tequila bottle.
“Go on and kill it.”
“I better not. Nancy’ll be mad at me.”
My tidy new wife, Nancy, my slobby old pal Harry—need I say more? Nancy was going to be mad no matter what.
“Frozen daiquiris!” I proposed. I found a rum-bottle with a few shots left. Harry snagged a vodka bottle, and it was back to the kitchen. Harry leaned against a wall, staring at the ceiling. I got ice and a can of limeade concentrate out of the freezer. You really shouldn’t be doing this, I thought to myself.
“That’s some ceiling,” Harry remarked. “The way it’s peeling.”
It was an unusual ceiling. The week after Nancy and I had moved in, the kitchen ceiling paint had blistered and burst in seven places. But it was new paint, so no flakes had fallen. Instead, there were seven irregular blobs of white underpaint surrounded by dangling ruffs of peeled-back tan latex.
“Jellyfish,” said Harry. “Invisible space-squid.”
I loaded up the blender and pushed the switch. Skazz, skazz, fwrrr, tik-tik-tik. I sampled it. Fuh. Too much limeade.
Harry read my expression. “You put the whole two-quart size in, idiot?”
I added ice. Skazz, fwrrr, tik. Pour and pour.
“Too watery.” Harry dumped his drink back in and handed me the vodka bottle. My hand tipped a half-pint in. Skazz, fwrr, tik. Perfection.
“I didn’t tell you what I’ve been teaching,” Harry said.
“I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk about it. Action equals reaction? Voltage equals current times resistance? I’m sorry, Harry, believe me I’m sorry. If I can get my business back on its feet you’ll be the first to …”
“It’s interesting to teach
in prep-school,” Harry said, smiling strangely. “It stimulates my mind in a way that could be most lucrative.”
My attention level went up about fifteen percent. “You have a new idea?”
“Are you familiar with Mach’s Principle?”
“Heard of it. It’s unproved. Something about absolute space?”
“Mach says there really is no space. There’s no framework at all without matter. If there were only one object in the universe, then motion would be a meaningless concept. No acceleration, no rotation, no inertia.”
“Inertia?”
“Inertia is an object’s tendency to resist changes in motion.” Harry waved his glass. “Heft is inertia.” The glass flew out of his hand and shattered on the floor. I heard a fluting call from upstairs.
“It’s all right, Nancy,” I shouted. But already her steps were coming down the stairs, swift and implacable.
“What’s that smell? What are you doing?”
She stood in the kitchen doorway, squinting against the light. She had snub features, bobbed strawberry-blonde hair and a sweet little figure. I loved her with all my heart.
Harry squatted on the floor, picking up bits of broken glass. Seeing him, Nancy stepped back, as if from an open drain.
“Harry just dropped by,” I explained. “We’re discussing inertia.”
“I can see that. You’re going to be in horrible condition for the race tomorrow, Joseph.” My Christian name. She was unhappy—and who could blame her? I’d promised to run the Princeton Ten-Miler with her.
“What nonsense,” put in Harry. “Conspicuous consumption of body-energy. How do you think a black millhand feels when he sees you go prancing by in your seventy-dollar air-shoes?” The guy never knew when to shut up.
“You fat ugly toad, I’d like to step on you.” With that, Nancy turned and stalked upstairs.
There was a minute’s silence. The humming fluorescent light covered everything with stagnant vivacity. The rum hit me. Suddenly the big, lobed paint-peelings on the ceiling looked festive.
“Let’s go down to the basement, Harry.”
He poured some more vodka into our blenderful of daiquiris. I opened the basement door and the cats rushed out.
Downstairs was my happy place. I’d torn some carpet out of my old office and brought it here, also the desk and file-cabinet. I had a good little computer, a daisy-wheel printer and, best of all, half a basement full of offbeat tools and components.
It was the first time Harry had been down here. From the old days he knew most of the equipment by serial number, but seeing it all jumbled up differently was Christmas for him.
“Jeez, Fletch. There’s enough stuff here to build a time-machine!”
“You mean that?”
He gave me a sly look from the corner of his eye. “You got a gyroscope?”
“Sure. Yeah. Got a beauty. Army surplus inertial guidance servo. I’ve even got a transformer for it. Want to see it run?”
“In a minute. First things first.” He sat down on my desk and, no longer having a glass, took a long gulp from the chill and green and possibly protosentient fluid in the Pyrex beaker-top of our blender, a beaker-top, by the way, whose geometry was such that it could not be set down.
“Gimme some.”
Blub, chug, blub.
“Ahhhhh. ‘Sgood.”
Chug, blub, chub, blug. The beaker passed back and forth and was suddenly empty.
“We finished that too fast, Harry. Much too fast.”
“I feel pretty damn good, Fletch. I think I can do something with that Mach’s principle. The point is that gravitational mass and inertial mass are not the same thing. Gravity is like a charge, but inertia is a type of interrelatedness.”
“You’re going to build a time-machine?”
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Fletcher. I’m going to build an inertia-winder.”
I assumed that he was putting me on. “Why not smelt up some Cavorite instead? You know what I mean? That Jules Verne alloy that was supposed to shield things from gravitational attraction? Or maybe we should put together a Dean Drive and mail it to John Campbell. The gyro’d come in handy.”
“Campbell’s dead, more’s the pity.” Harry sucked a last drop out of the beaker and smacked his lips. “I’m commencin’ to feel pret-ty damn good.”
“You learn to talk that way at the prep-school?”
“The Collegiate Academy. Oh, my, yes. Those sweet girls. Bless their hearts. The cardioid curve, dear Fletcher, is, of course, a traditional symbol for pulchritudinous callipygosity, and when I speak of blessing, I think, selbstverständlich, of the censer and thurible, the spray of holy anointment, and the fullness of emotion appropriate to such …”
Maundering on in such fashion, Harry drifted over to my equipment and began hefting this object and now that. Suddenly I didn’t feel so good. I decided to leave him on his own and check out Nancy.
She was pacing up and down the upstairs hall. Seeing her, the moment before she started talking, I knew again why I loved her. Her grace, her aliveness, the way she moved.
“Dammit, Joseph, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Nancy, I was asleep. And Harry showed up, so I let him in. He’s my buddy.”
“You smell like a distillery. Talking to him’s fine, but do you have to drink like him? You’re not built for it.”
A wave of dizziness hit me then. I grabbed the banister for support. Nancy spotted the move.
“Are you going to throw up, Joe? Are you all right?”
I felt a sickening lightness in my stomach. We’d drunk that stuff much too fast. Inertia. A giant’s fist clenched my Adam’s apple. Nancy helped me into the bathroom.
When I was through being sick, she wiped my face off with a washcloth and laid me down on our bed.
“Poor Joey. Poor baby.”
“You don’t really love me.”
“You don’t love me.”
“I do love you.”
“I love you, too, Joey. I love you a lot.”
It was good in bed. Sleep came.
I woke suddenly in the dark, feeling queasy. Three, four in the morning? My mouth was an agony of salt and mucus. Water, I needed water, lots of it. Aspirin. The toilet.
Painfully I eased up onto one elbow. For some reason my body rocked so far forward that my head bumped my knees. I was as wobbly as a Macy’s parade turkey float. I definitely had to get to the bathroom.
I creaked into a sitting position and swung my legs out of bed. Inexplicably, my legs took off across the room, dragging my body behind. WHAM, I crashed into an armchair; SLAM, I hit the floor; CRASH, I bounced across the room. My arms and legs were flying around like Styrofoam cups in a windstorm. Yet none of it really hurt. With sudden sick horror, I decided that I’d suffered some kind of brain damage. I was having a seizure for sure.
Just then there was a scream, and Nancy came bashing into me. I reached out to grab her, but the force of my touch flicked her away like a ping-pong ball. The objects she smashed into took off on their own random trajectories, and now our whole room was filled with dark, crazy bouncing. This was more than brain damage; this was a major breakdown of physical law. What …
I remembered Harry. I’m going to build an inertia-winder. I rose abruptly to my feet. Error. I ricocheted from the ceiling to our bed. I struck the bed at an awkward angle, and its springs catapulted me out our bedroom’s open French windows. I was traveling much faster than it seemed at all reasonable. Our second story porch shot under me, and an instant later I’d crashed. My fall was fortunately broken by the large Spirea bush that I landed on.
For a long minute I just lay there, assessing the damages. As far as I could feel, nothing was broken. Really, I hardly even felt bruised. The night air was mild and pleasant. From where I lay, I could see the lit-up windows of our basement. Harry was down there. Harry had made this happen. But how? Something to do with inertia. He’d taken my inertia away, and now my body could be pushe
d around like a dandelion seed. But if I didn’t weigh anything, why had I crashed to the ground so hard? And why hadn’t it hurt?
It didn’t matter. Right now the only thing that mattered was to go down to the basement and wring Harry’s neck. Slowly, slowly, I eased myself into an upright position. I felt as unsteady as a six-foot pile of plates. When I tried to step forward, my center of gravity shifted and I fell back down. Great progress: an inch per minute.
I decided to take my chances and leap.
Once again, I overdid it. The two stories of our house whizzed past, and then I was looking down at our streetlit roof—looking down at the roof and still climbing. Although I was getting frightfully high, I wasn’t too worried about it. My body had so little inertia that my legs would easily be able to absorb the shock of landing.
Slowly, not wanting to throw myself into a spin, I leaned my head back to look up at the sky. Nothing. There was nothing up there. Low clouds? Not likely; clouds would be reflecting some of the city lights back down at us. But tonight had been a full moon, the Harvest moon. I’d seen it rising earlier when …
Suddenly I could see the moon and stars again. I was high, high in the sky. Forgetting to move slowly, I looked back down. Despite my abrupt head-movement, I didn’t start spinning. The influence of the rest of the universe was acting on me again, and my inertia was back.
Below my feet was a huge black dome, the region that Harry had somehow cut off from the world. It was expanding. The air up here felt thick again. It had inertia; it dragged and beat against me. Rapidly my upward motion slowed, and then I was falling, falling heavily. I prayed that Harry wouldn’t pick this instant to turn off his inertia-winder.
As I tumbled back through the dark dome, my speed increased dramatically. The gravitational mass of my body was the same, so that the gravity of Earth pulled me as hard as ever. Yet in here my inertial mass, the mass which resists motion, was almost zero. The trees, the streetlight, my house—they all streaked past. I tensed my bent legs against the crash.
At just the moment of impact I pushed up, neutralizing the shock. When someone jumps off a building, it’s not the falling that kills them, it’s the sudden stop. But with virtually no inertia to resist changes of motion, a sudden transition from over one hundred miles per hour to complete rest is only mildly jarring.