by Rudy Rucker
“You can still make it change size when it’s stopped like this,” said Zee, urging Rex’s reluctant hands forward. “But now, even better, you can push right through it. Even though it still resists shear, it’s gone matter-transparent.”
The outer sphere was insubstantial as a curtain of water; the central sphere was, too. It had been the hyperflow, now halted, that gave the spheres their seeming solidity. Zee now demonstrated that if Rex jabbed or caressed the barely palpable inner sphere, it grew and shrank just as willingly as did the outer sphere. The two could be adjusted to bound concentric shells of any size.
The region between the spheres felt tingly with leashed energies. Rex could begin to see what would happen if the hyperflow started back up. Everything would turn over. The inside would go out, and the outside would go in. He jerked his hands back.
“And of course you restart it by turning it the other way,” said Zee. Rex dug into the sphere’s yielding surface and twisted it counterclockwise. Insubstantial though it was, the sphere resisted this axial rotation as strongly as before. Slowly it gave and unvalved. The hyperflow started back up. The big outer patch near Rex shifted shades from red through orange to yellow to green to blue to violet. Rex watched for a while and then stopped the flow the next time a green outer patch appeared. Peered in. Yes, now the inner patch was red. They’d traded places. The stuff of the outer sphere had flowed up through hyperspace and back down to the inner sphere. It was just the same as the way the stuff of a donut-shape’s outer equator can flow up over the donut’s top and down to its inner equator. Like a sea cucumber, the big quark lived to evert.
“Let’s call it a cumberquark,” said Rex.
“Fine,” said Zee. “Wonderful. I’m glad I showed it to you. Aren’t you going to try it out?”
Rex’s eye lit on a glass jar of rubber cement. He halted the cumberquark’s flow, jabbed the central sphere down to the size of a BB, squeezed the outer sphere down to the size of a small cantaloupe, and then adjusted the temporarily matter-transparent sphere so that the inner one was inside his jar of rubber cement. The outer sphere included the whole jar and a small disk-section of Rex’s desktop. With one quick motion, Rex unvalved the cumberquark just enough for the green patch to turn red, twisted the hyperflow back off, and shoved the cumberquark aside to see what it had wrought.
Thud floop. A moundy puddle of rubber cement resting in a crater on his desk. Wedged into the hole was an odd-shaped glass object. Rex picked it up. A jar, it was the rubber cement jar, but with the label inside, and rattling around inside it was—
“That hard little thing is the disk of desk the jar was sitting on.”
The jar’s lid was on the top, but facing inwards. Rex pushed on its underside and got it untwisted. As he untwisted it, compressed air hissed out: all the air that had been between the jar and the cumberquark’s outer sphere was squeezed in there. The lid clattered into the jar’s dry inside. Peeking in, Rex could see that the RUBBER CEMENT label had mirror-flipped to TNEMEC REBBUR. Check. He jiggled the jar and spilled the shrunken bit of desk out into his hand. Neat. It was a tiny sphere, with a BB-sized craterlet where the cumberquark’s inner sphere had nestled. A small gobbet of uneverted rubber cement clung to this dimple.
Quick youthful footsteps ascended the steps to Rex’s office. Marjorie, back for today’s Round Two.
“I want you to meet Kissycat. Kissycat, this is Rex.” Marjorie had a sinewy black cat nestled against her flattish chest. She pressed forward and placed the cat on Rex’s shoulder. It dug its claws in. Rex sneezed. He was allergic to cats. He had some trouble getting the neurotic beast off his shoulder and onto the desktop. He had a wonderful, awful, Grinchy idea.
“Will you sell me that cat, Marjorie?”
“No, but you can babysit him. I’m going down to the sub shop. Want anything?”
“Just a Coke. I’m going to meet Candy for lunch.” He’d been away too long already.
“La dee da. Where?”
“Oh, just at home.” Rex ran his shaky fingers through his hair, wondering if Candy was still in bed. But dammit, this was more important than Candy’s crazy threats. The cat. In just a minute he would be alone with the cat.
Kissycat nosed daintily around Rex’s desktop and began sniffing at the cumberquark.
“Rad,” said Marjorie, noticing it. “Is that a magic trick?”
“It’s a cumberquark. I just invented it.”
“What does it do?”
“Maybe I’ll show you when you get back. Sure, Kissycat can stay here. That’s fine. Here’s seventy-five cents for the Coke.”
As soon as she’d left the building, Rex dilated the cumberquark to pumpkin size and began stalking Kissycat. Sensing Rex’s mood—a mixture of prickly ailurophobia and psychotic glee—the beast kept well away from him. Fortunately he’d closed his office door and windows. Kissycat wedged himself under Rex’s armchair. Rex thumped the chair over and lunged. The cat yowled, spit, and slapped four nasty scratches across Rex’s left hand.
“You want me to kill you first?” Rex snarled, snatching up the heavy rod that he used to prop his window open. Candy had him all upset. “You want me to crush your head before I turn you inside out, you god—”
His voice broke and sweetened. Zee taking over. He’d forgotten all about her.
“Niceums kitty. Dere he is. All thcared of nassy man? Oobie doobie purr purr.” Zee made Rex rummage in his trashcan till he found a crust of yesterday’s tuna sandwich. “Nummy nums for Mr. Tissytat! Oobie doobie purr purr purr.” This humiliating performance went on for longer than Rex liked, but finally Kissycat was stretched out on the canvas seat of the director’s chair next to Rex’s desk, shedding hair and licking his feet. Rex halted the cumberquark’s flow and moved gingerly forward. “Niceums!”
Kissycat seemed not to notice as the gossamer outer sphere passed through his body. Cooing and peering in, Rex manipulated the sphere till its BB-sized center was inside the cat, hopefully inside its stomach. With a harsh cackle, Rex unvalved the sphere, let it flow through a flip, and turned it back off. There was a circle of canvas missing from the chair seat now, and the everted cat dropped through the hole to the floor, passing right through the temporarily matter-transparent cumberquark.
Kissycat was a good-sized pink ball with two holes in it. Rex had managed to get the middle sphere bang-on in the cat’s stomach. The crust he’d just fed Kissycat was lying right there next to the stomach. The stomach twitched and jerked. It had two sphincterish holes in it—holes that presumably tunneled to Kissycat’s mouth and anus. Rex gave the ball a little kick and it made a muffled mewing noise.
“A little strange in there is it, hand-scratcher?”
“Rex,” came Zee’s subvocal voice. “Don’t be mean. Isn’t he going to suffocate?” She was like a goddamn good conscience. If only Alf had been good, too. He couldn’t let himself think about Candy!
Rex forced his attention back to the matter at hand. “Kissycat won’t suffocate for a few minutes. Look how big he is. There’s a lot of air in there with him. He’s like a balloon!” The ball shuddered and mewed again, more faintly than before. “I’m just surprised the flip didn’t break his neck or something.”
“No, that’s safe enough. Space is kind of rubbery, you know. But listen, Rex, his air is running out fast. Turn him back.”
“I don’t want to. I want to show him to—” Rex was struck by an idea. Moving quickly, he took the tubular housing of a ballpoint pen and pushed it deep into one of the stomach holes. Kissycat’s esophagus. Stale air came rushing out in a gassy yowl. The pink ball shrank to catsize. After a few moments of confused struggle, the ball began pulsing steadily, pumping breaths in and out of the pen-tube.
There was noise downstairs. Marjorie! Rex turned the cumberquark back into a brightflowing little fuzzball, then put it and the everted cat inside his briefcase. He pounded down the stairs and got his Coke. “Thanks, Marjorie! Sorry to run, I just realized how late it is.”
“Where’s Kissycat?”
“Uh…I’m not sure. Inside or outside or something.” Rex’s briefcase was making a faint hissing noise.
“Some babysitter you are,” said Marjorie, cocking her head in kittenish pique. “What’s that noise? Do you—”
Rex lunged for the door, but now Zee had to put her two-cents worth in. “Look,” cried Rex’s mouth as his arms dumped the contents of his briefcase out onto the dirty hallway floor.
Marjorie screamed. “You’ve killed him! You’re crazy! Help!”
Zee relinquished control of Rex and hunkered somewhere inside him, snickering. Rex could hear her laughter like elfin bells. He snatched up him cumberquark and made as if to run for it, but Marjorie’s tearful face won his sudden sympathy. She was a pest, and a kid, but still—
“Stop screaming, dammit. I can turn him back.”
“You killed my cat!”
“He scratched my hand. And he’s not dead anyway. He’s just inside out. I wanted to borrow him to show Candy. I wasn’t going to hurt him any. Honest. I turned him inside out with my cumberquark, and I can turn him back.”
“You can? What’s that plastic tube?”
“He’s breathing through it. Now look. Let’s get something that can go in his stomach without making him sick. Oh…how about a sheet of newspaper. Yeah.” Moving quickly, Rex spread out a sheet of old newspaper and set the everted cat on it. Marjorie watched him with wide, frightened eyes. “Don’t look at me that way, dammit. Come here and pick up the paper, Marjorie, hold it stretched tight out in front of you.” She obeyed, and Rex got the cumberquark halted and in position, more or less. He reached in and took out the pen-tube, then readjusted the cumberquark. Marjorie was shaking. If Rex did the flip with the innersphere intersecting Kissycat’s flesh, this was going to be gross.
“Hold real still.” He steadied himself and unvalved the cumberquark for a half turn, then tightened it back.
Mrraaaow! Kissycat landed on his feet, right on the circle of cloth that had been part of Rex’s chairset upstairs. Marjorie stared down through the hole in her newspaper at him and cried out his name. Spotting Rex, the cat took off down the hall, heading for the dark recesses of the basement.
Everything was okay for a moment there, but then Zee had to speak back up. “I was thinking, Marjorie, about a wild new way to have sex. I could put the cumberquark’s central sphere in your womb and turn you inside out and—”
With a major effort of will, Rex got himself out the door and on the street before Zee could finish her suggestion. Marjorie watched him leave, too stunned to react.
The three mile drive home seemed to take a very long time. As the hot summer air beat in through the open car window, Rex kept thinking about inside out. What was the very innermost of all—the one/many language of quantum logic? And what, finally, was outermost of all—dead Aristotle’s Empyrean? Zee knew, or maybe she didn’t. Though Zee was not so scalebound as Rex, she was still finite, and her levels reached only so far, both up and down. There’s a sense in which zero is as far away as infinity: you can keep halving your size or keep doubling, but you never get to zero or infinity.
Rex’s thoughts grew less abstract. His perceptions were so loosened by the morning’s play that he kept seeing things inside out. Passing through Killeville, he could hear the bored platypus honking inside the offices, outside the tense exchanges in the Pizza Hut kitchens, inside the slow rustlings in the black people’s small shops, outside the redundant empty Killeville churches, inside the funeral homes with secret stinks, outside the huge “fine homes” with only a widow home, inside a supermarket office with the manager holding a plain teenage girl clerk on his gray-clad knees, outside a plastic gallon of milk. Entering his neighborhood, Rex could see into his neighbor’s hearts, see the wheels of worry and pain; and finally he could understand how little anyone else’s problems connected to his now. No one cared about him, nobody but Candy.
There were four strange cars in front of his house. A rusty pickup, a beetle, an MG, and a Japanese pickup. Rex knew the MG was Roland Brody’s, but who the hell were those other people?
There was a man sitting on Rex’s porch steps, a redneck who worked at the gas station. He smiled thinly and patted the spot on the porch next to him.
“Hydee. Ah’m Jody. And Ah believe yore her old man. Poor son. Hee hee.”
“This isn’t right.”
Another man hollered out the front door, a banker platypus in his white undershirt and flipperlength black socks. “Get some brew, Jodih, and we’ll all go back for seconds! She goin’ strong!”
Laughter drifted down from the second floor. The phone was ringing.
Rex staggered about on the sidewalk there, in the hot sun, reeling under the impact of all this nightmare. What could he do? Candy had flipped, she was doing it with every guy she vaguely even knew! A Plymouth van full of teenage boys pulled into Rex’s drive. He recognized the driver from church, but the boy didn’t recognize Rex.
“Is old lady Redman still up there putting out?” asked the callow, lightly mustached youth.
Rex put his briefcase down on the ground and took out the cumberquark. “You better get out of here, kid. I’m Mr. Redman.”
The van backed up rapidly and drove off. Rex could hear the excited boys whooping and laughing. Jody smiled down at him from the porch. Standing there in the high-noon moment, Rex could hear moans from upstairs. His wife; his wife having an orgasm with another man. This was just so—
“Poor Rex,” said Zee. “That Alf is awful. He’s not even from Earth.”
“Shut up, you bitch,” said Rex, starting up the steps.
“You gonna try and whup me?” Jody’s hands were large and callused. He was ready for a fight. In Jody’s trailerpark circles, fighting went with sex.
Rex spread the cumberquark out to the size of a washing machine and cut off its rotation. There was a lot of noise in his head: thumps and jabber. Jody rose up into a crouch. Rex lunged forward, spreading the cumberquark just a bit wider. For a frozen second there, the outer sphere surrounded Jody, and Rex cut the hyperflow on.
The surface was opaque fractal fuzz. You wouldn’t have known someone was inside if it hadn’t been for the wah-wah-wah sound of Jody’s screams, chopped into pulses by the hyperflow. The cumberquark rested solidly on the hole it had cut into the porch steps.
“You’re next, man,” Rex yelled to the platypus man looking out the front door. “I’m going to kill you, you preppy bastard!” With rapid movements of his bill and flippers, the banker got in his black Toyota truck and left. Rex turned Jody off to see what was what.
Not right. Edge-on to all normal dimensions, Jody was an annular cut-out, a slice of Halloween pumpkin. Rex eased him through another quarter turn and Jody was back on the steps. The cumberquark had stayed good and steady through all this—everything was back where it had started.
“How did it look, Jody?” Rex’s teeth were chattering.
“Unh.” For gasping Jody, Rex was no longer a person but rather a force of nature. Jody moved slowly down the steps talking to himself. “No nothin’ all inside out mah haid up mah butt just for snatch mah god—”
Rex shrank the cumberquark down a bit as Jody drove off. The VW and the MG were still there. How could Roland have done this to him? And who was the fourth guy?
The fourth guy was the real one, the lover a husband never sees. As Rex entered his house, the fourth man ran out the back door, looped around the house, and took off in his bug. Let him go. Rex went upstairs. Roland Brody was sitting on the edge of Rex and Candy’s bed looking chipper.
“Damn, Rex! I didn’t know Candy had it in her. I mean to tell you!” Roland fished his underpants off the floor and pulled them on. He was an old friend, an utterly charming man, tall and twitchy and with a profile like Thomas Jefferson on the nickel. A true Virginia gentleman. He had a deprecating way of tuning everything into a joke. Even now, it was hard to be angry with him. The VW’s popping
faded, and Rex sank down into a chair. He was trembling all over. The cumberquark nestled soothingly in his lap.
Candy had the sheet pulled all the way up to her nose. Her big blue eyes peered over the top. “Don’t leave. Roland, I’m scared of what he’ll do. Can you forgive me, Rex? Alf made me do it.”
“Who’s this Alf fellow?” asked Roland, tucking the tail of his button-down shirt into his black pants. “Was he the guy in the VW?”
“You’re a bastard to have done it too, Roland,” said Rex.
“Hell, Rex. Wouldn’t you?”
The room reeked of sex. The jabbering was still in Rex’s head—a sound like a woman talking fast. All of a sudden he didn’t know what he was doing. He stretched the cumberquark out big and stopped and started it, turning big chunks of the room inside out. Part of the chair, circles of the floor, Candy’s dresser-top, a big piece of mattress. Roland tried to grab Rex, and Rex turned Roland’s forearm into pulp that fell to the floor. Candy was screaming bloody murder. Rex advanced on her, chunking the cumberquark on and off like a holepuncher, eating up their defiled bed. The womanvoice in his head was coming through Rex’s mouth.
“Better get out of her, Alf, better get out or your bod is gone, you crooked hiss from outspace, Alf, I’ll chunk you down, man, better split, Alf, better go or—”
“Stop!” yelled Candy. “Rex please stop!” Rex made the cumberquark go matter-transparent, and he slid it up over her legs. Candy’s face got that pixie look and Alf spoke.
“I’m only having fun,” he said. “Leave me alone, jerk. I’m your wife. I’m in here to stay.”
Then Rex knew what to do, he knew it like a math problem. He thought it fast with Zee, and she said yes.