Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Rex shrank the cumberquark real small and put it in his pocket. Poor Roland had collapsed on the floor. He was bleeding to death. Rex tied off Roland’s armstub with his necktie.

  “Sorry, Roland. I’ll drive you to the hospital, man.”

  “Damn, Rex, damn. Hurry.”

  “That’s right,” said Alf/Candy. “Get out of here and leave me alone.”

  The hospital wasn’t far. Rex dropped Roland at the emergency door and went back home. Instead of going in the front door he went in the basement door to sit in his study. There was no use talking to Candy before he got rid of Alf.

  He took the cumberquark out of his pocket and set it down on his desk. Small, fast, flowy. He leaned over it and breathed. Hot bright Zee rode his breath out of his body and into the cumberquark. She could live there as well as in Rex. The little sphere lifted off Rex’s desk and buzzed around the study like a housefly. Zee had a way of pulsing its flow off and on to convert some of its 4-D momentum into antigravity. Now she stopped the quark’s flow entirely and inflated it out through Rex so that it held all of him except his feet. Rex hopped into the air, up into the big light bubble. It stuttered on when he was all in.

  Rex’s sense inputs became a flicker. His room, his body, his room, his body, his room, his body…In between the two 3-D views were two prospects on hyperspace: ana and kata, black and white, heaven and hell. Room, ana, body, kata, room…The four images were shuffled together seamlessly, but only the room view mattered right now.

  Zee shrank the cumberquark down to fly-size again. Rex felt the anti-gravity force as a jet from his spine. Thanks to the way Zee was pulsing the hyperflow, there was plenty of fresh air. They looped the loop, got a fix on things, and space-curved their way upstairs.

  Candy/Alf didn’t notice them at first. She was lying still, staring at the ceiling. Rex/Zee hovered over her and then, before the woman could react, they zoomed down at her, shrinking small enough to enter her nose.

  Pink cavern with blonde hairs, a dark tunnel at the back rush of wind, onward. No light in here, but Rex/Zee could see by the quark-light of the quantum strangeness. Oh Candy it’s nice in you. Me, kata, you, an, me, kata, you …

  There was an evil glow in one of Candy’s lungs: Alf. He looked like a goblin, crouched there with pointed nose and ears. Rex/Zee bored right into him, wrapping his fibers around and around them, knotting him into their complex join.

  And zoomed back out Candy’s nose, and got big again, and stopped.

  Rex was standing in his bedroom. The ball that was Zee and Alf dipped in salute and sailed out the window.

  Candy stood up and hugged Rex. They were still in love.

  That winter Rex would get a new job, and they would leave Killeville, taking with them the children, a van of furniture, and the memory of this strange summer day.

  ============

  Note on “Inside Out”

  Written in Summer, 1986.

  Synergy #1, HBJ Books, 1987.

  In Lynchburg I rented an office in an empty, crumbling, kudzu-covered house owned by The Design Group, a commercial art office consisting of people who were friends of mine, and I got the notion to set a character into it.

  This is the last of my Killeville stories, although the town does appear again in my alternate history novel, The Hollow Earth.

  Instability

  (Written with Paul Di Filippo)

  Jack and Neal, loose and blasted, sitting on the steps of the ramshackle porch of Bill Burroughs’s Texas shack. Burroughs is out in the yard, catatonic in his orgone box, a copy of the Mayan codices in his lap. He’s already fixed M twice today. Neal is cleaning the seeds out of a shoebox full of maryjane. Time is thick and slow as honey. In the distance the rendering company’s noon whistle blows long, shrill and insistent. The rendering company is a factory where they cut up the cows that’re too diseased to ship to Chicago. Shoot and cut and cook to tallow and canned cancer consommé.

  Burroughs rises to his feet like a figure in a well-greased Swiss clock. “There is scrabbling,” goes Bill. “There is scrabbling behind the dimensions. Bastards made a hole somewhere. You ever read Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space, Jack?”

  “I read it in jail,” says Neal, secretly proud. “Dig, Bill, your mention of that document ties in so exactly with my most recent thought mode that old Jung would hop a hard-on.”

  “Mhwee-heee-heee,” says Jack. “The Shadow knows.”

  “I’m talking about this bomb foolishness,” harrumphs Burroughs, stalking stifflegged over to stand on the steps. “The paper on the floor in the roadhouse john last night said there’s a giant atom-bomb test taking place tomorrow at White Sands. They’re testing out the fucking ‘trigger bomb’ to use on that godawful new hydrogen bomb Edward Teller wants against the Rooshians. Pandora’s Box, boys, and we’re not talking cooze. That bomb’s going off in New Mexico tomorrow and right here and now the shithead meatflayers’ noon whistle is getting us all ready for World War Three, and if we’re all ready for that, then we’re by Gawd ready to be a great civilian army, yes, soldiers for Joe McCarthy and Harry J. Anslinger, poised to stomp out the reds ‘n’ queers ‘n’ dopefiends. Science brings us this. I wipe my queer junkie ass with science, boys. The Mayans had it aaall figured out a loooong time ago. Now take this von Neumann fella …”

  “You mean Django Reinhardt?” goes Jack, stoned and rude. “Man, this is your life, their life, my life, a dog’s life, God’s life, the Life of Riley. The Army’s genius von Neumann of the desert, Bill, it was in the Sunday paper. Neal and I were rolling sticks on in Tuscaloosa, I just got an eidetic memory flash of it, you gone wigged cat, it was right before Neal nailed that cute Dairy Queen waitress with the Joan Crawford nose. She rimmed him and I watched.”

  Neal goes: “Joan Crawford, Joan Crawfish, Joan Fishook, Joan Rawshanks in the fog. McVoutie!” He’s toking a hydrant roach and his jaywrapping fingers are laying rapid cable. Half the damn box is already twisted up.

  Jack warps a brutal moodswing. There’s no wine. Ti Jack could use a widdly sup pour bon peek, like please, you ill cats, get me off this Earth…Is he saying this aloud, in front of Neal and Burroughs?

  “And fuck the chicken giblets,” chortles Neal obscurely, joyously, in there, and then suggests, by actions as much as by words, is he really talking, Jack? “That we get back to what’s really important such as rolling up this here, ahem, um, urp, Mexican seegar, yes!”

  Jack crabcakes slideways on fingertips and heels to Neal’s elbow and they begin to lovingly craft and fashion and croon upon and even it would not be too much to say give birth to a beautiful McDeVoutieful hairseeded twat of a reefer, the roach of which will be larger than any two normal sticks.

  They get off good.

  Meanwhile Bill Burroughs is slacked back in his rocker, refixed and not quite on the nod because he’s persistently irritated, both by the thought of the hydrogen bomb and, more acutely, by the flybuzz derry Times Square jive of the jabbering teaheads. Time passes, so very slow for Sal and Dean, so very fast for William Lee.

  So Doctor Miracle and Little Richard are barreling along the Arizona highway, heading east Route 40 out of Vegas, their pockets full of silver cartwheels from the grinds they’ve thimblerigged and also wallets bulging with the high-denom bills they demanded when cashing in their chips after beating the bank at the roulette wheels of six different casinos with their unpatented probabilistic scams that are based on the vectors of neutrons through six inches of lead as transferred by spacetime Feynman diagrams to the workings of those rickety-clickety simple-ass macroscopic systems of ball and slots.

  Doctor Miracle speaks. He attempts precision, to compensate for the Hungarian accent and for the alcohol-induced spread in bandwidth.

  “Ve must remember to zend Stan Ulam a postcard from Los Alamos, reporting za zuccess of his Monte Carlo modeling method.”

  “It woulda worked even better over in Europe,” goes Little Richard. “They got no double-zero slots on their
wheels.”

  Doctor Miracle nods sagely. He’s a plump guy in his fifties: thinning hair, cozy chin, faraway eyes. He’s dressed in a double-breasted suit, with a bright hulagirl necktie that’s wide as a pound of bacon.

  Little Richard is younger, skinnier, more Jewish, and he has a thick pompadour. He’s wearing baggy khakis and a white tee-shirt with a pack of Luckies rolled up in the left sleeve.

  It is not immediately apparent that these two men are ATOMIC WIZARDS, QUANTUM SHAMANS, PLUTONIUM PROPHETS, and BE-BOPPIN’ A-BOMB PEEAITCHDEES!

  Doctor Miracle, meet Richard Feynman. Little Richard, say hello to Johnny von Neumann!

  There is a case of champagne sitting on the rear seat in between them. Each of the A-scientists has an open bottle from which he swigs, while their car, a brand-new 1950 big-finned land-boat of a two-toned populuxe pink’n’green Caddy, speeds along the highway.

  There is no one driving. The front seat is empty.

  Von Neumann, First Anointed Master of Automata, has rigged up the world’s premier autopilot, you dig. He never could drive very well, and now he doesn’t have to. Fact is, no one has to! The Caddy has front-and-side-mounted radar which feeds into a monster contraption in the trunk, baby cousin to Weiner and Ulam’s Los Alamos MANIAC machine, a thing all vacuum tubes and cams, all cogs and Hollerith sorting rods, a mechanical brain that transmits cybernetic impulses directly to the steering, gas and brake mechanisms.

  The Trilateral Commission has ruled that the brain in the Cad’s trunk is too cool for Joe Blow, way too cool, and the self-driving car isn’t going to make it to the assembly line ever. The country only needs a few of these supercars and this one has been set aside for the use and utmost ease for the two genius-type riders who wish to discuss high quantum-physical, metamathematical, and cybernetic topics without the burden of paying attention to the road. Johnny and Dickie’s periodic Alamos to Vegas jaunts soak up a lot of the extra nervous tension these important bomb-builders suffer from.

  “So whadda ya think of my new method for scoring showgirls?” asks Feynman.

  “Dickie, although za initial trials vere encouraging, ve must have more points on the graph before ve can extrapolate,” replies von Neumann. He looks sad. “You may haff scored, you zelfish little prick, but I—I did not achieve satisfactory sexual release. Far from it.”

  “Waaall,” drawls Feynman, “I got a fave niteclub in El Paso where the girls are hotter’n gamma rays and pretty as parity conservation. You’ll get what you need for sure, Johnny. We could go right instead of left at Albuquerque and be there before daylight. Everyone at Los Alamos’ll be busy with the White Sands test anyway. Security won’t look for us till Monday, and by then we’ll be back, minus several milliliters of semen.”

  “El Paso,” mutters von Neumann, taking a gadget out of his inner jacket pocket. It’s…THE FIRST POCKET CALCULATOR! Thing’s half the size of a volume of the Britannica, with Bakelite buttons, and what makes it truly hot is that it’s got all the road-distances from the Rand McNally Road Atlas databased onto the spools of a small wire-recorder inside. Von Neumann’s exceedingly proud of it, and although he could run the algorithm faster in his head, he plugs their present speed and location into the device, calls up the locations of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, El Paso and Los Alamos, and proceeds to massage the data.

  “You’re qvite right, Dickie,” he announces presently, still counting the flashes of the calculator’s lights. “Ve can do as you say and indeed eefen return to za barracks before Monday zunrise. Venn is za test scheduled, may I ask?”

  “8:00 A. M. Sunday morning.”

  Von Neumann’s mouth broadens in a liverlipped grin. “How zynchronistic. Ve’ll be passing White Sands just zen. I haff not vittnessed a bomb-test since Trinity. And zis is za biggest one yet; zis bomb is, as you know Dickie, za Ulam cascade initiator for za new hydrogen bomb. I’m for it! Let me reprogram za brain!”

  Feynman crawls over the front seat while the car continues its mad careening down the dizzy interstate, passing crawling tourist Buicks and mom’n’dad Studebakers. He lugs the case of champagne into the front with him. Von Neumann removes the upright cushion in the back seat and pries off the panel, exposing the brain in the trunk. Consulting his calculator from time to time, von Neumann begins reprogramming the big brain by yanking switchboard-type wires and reinserting them.

  “I’m tired of plugging chust metal sockets, Richard. Viz za next girl, I go first.”

  Now it’s night and the stoned beats are drunk and high on bennies, too. Neal, his face all crooked, slopes through Burroughs’s shack and picks Bill’s car keys off the dresser in the dinette where Joan is listening to the radio and scribbling on a piece of paper. Crossing the porch, thievishly heading for the Buick, Neal thinks Bill doesn’t see, but Bill does.

  Burroughs, the beat morphinist whose weary disdain has shaded catastrophically with the benzedrine and alcohol into fried impatience, draws the skeletized sawed-off shotgun from the tube of hidden gutterpipe that this same Texafied Burroughs has suspended beneath a large hole drilled in the eaten wood of his porch floor. He fires a 12-gauge shotgun blast past Neal and into Neal’s cleaned and twisted box of maryjane, barely missing Jack.

  “Whew, no doubt,” goes Neal, tossing Burroughs the keys.

  “Have ye hard drink, mine host?” goes Jack, trying to decide if the gun really went off or not. “Perhaps a pint of whiskey in the writing-desk, old top? A spot of sherry?”

  “To continue my afternoon fit of thought,” says Burroughs, pocketing his keys, “I was talking about thermonuclear destruction and about the future of all humanity, which species has just about been squashed to spermacetae in the rictal mandrake spasms of Billy Sunday’s pimpled ass-cheeks.” He pumps another shell into the shotgun’s chamber. His eyes are crazed goofball pinpoints. “I am sorry I ever let you egregious dopesuckin’ latahs crash here. I mean you especially, jailbird conman Cassady.”

  Neal sighs and hunkers down to wail on the bomber Jack’s lit off a smoldering scrap of shotgun wadding. Before long he and Jack are far into a rap, possibly sincere, possibly jive, a new rap wrapped around the concept that the three hipsters assembled here on the splintery porch ‘neath the gibbous prairie moon have formed or did or will form or, to be quite accurate, were forming and still are forming right then and there, an analogue of those Holy B-Movie Goofs, THE THREE STOOGES!

  “Yes,” goes Jack, “Those Doomed Saints of Chaos, loosed on the workadaddy world to scramble the Charles Dickens cark and swink of BLOOEY YER FIRED, those Stooge Swine are the anarchosyndicalist truly wigged submarxists, Neal man, bikkhu Stooges goosing ripe assmelons and eating fried chicken for supper. We are the Three Stooges.”

  “Bill is Moe,” says Neal, hot on the beam, batting his eyes at Bill, who wonders if it’s time to shed his character-armor. “Mister Serious Administerer of Fundament Punishments and Shotgun Blasts, and me with a Lederhosen Ass!”

  “Ah you, Neal,” goes Jack, “You’re Curly, angelic madman saint of the uncaught motebeam flybuzz fly!”

  “And Kerouac is Larry,” rheums Burroughs, weary with the knowledge. “Mopple-lipped, lisped, muxed and completely flunk is the phrase, eh Jack?”

  “Born to die,” goes Jack. “We’re all born to die, and I hope it do be cool, Big Bill, if we goam take yo cah. Vootie-oh-oh.” He holds out his hand for the keys.

  “Fuck it,” says Bill. “Who needs this noise.” He hands Jack the keys and before you know it, Neal’s at the wheel of the two-ton black Buick, gunning that straight eight mill and burping the clutch. Jack’s at his side and they’re on the road with a long honk goodbye.

  In the night there’s reefer and plush seats and the radio, and Neal is past spaced, off in his private land that few but Jack and Alan can see. He whips the destination on Jack.

  “This car is a frontrow seat to the A-blast.”

  “What.”

  “We’ll ball this jack to White Sands, New Mexico, dear Jack, right on time f
or the bombtest Sunday, 8 A. M. I stole some of Bill’s M, man, we’ll light up on it.”

  In Houston they stop and get gas and wine and benny and Bull Durham cigarette papers and keep flying West.

  Sometime in the night Jack starts to fade in and out of horror dreams. There’s a lot of overtime detox dreamwork that he’s logged off of too long. One time he’s dreaming he’s driving to an atom bomb test in a stolen car, which is of course true, and then after that he’s dreaming he’s the dead mythic character in black and white that he’s always planned to be. Not to mention the dreams of graves and Memere and the endless blood sausages pulled out of Jack’s gullet by some boffable blonde’s sinister boyfriend …

  ”…been oh rock and roll gospelled in on the bomb foolishness …” Neal is going when Jack screams and falls off the back seat he’s stretched out on. There’s hard wood and metal on the floor. ”…and Jack you do understand, buckeroo, that I have hornswoggled you into yet another new and unprecedentedly harebrained swing across the dairy fat of her jane’s spreadness?”

  “Go,” goes Jack feebly, feeling around on the backseat floor. Short metal barrel, lightly oiled. Big flat disk of a magazine. Fuckin’ crazy Burroughs. It’s a Thompson submachinegun Jack’s lying on.

  “And, ah Jack, man, I knew you’d know past the suicidal norm, Norm, that it was…DeVoutie!” Neal fishes a Bakelite ocarina out of his shirt pocket and tootles a thin, horrible note. “Goof on this, Jack, I just shot M and now I’m so high I can drive with my eyes closed.”

  Giggling Leda Atomica tugs at the shoulders of her low-cut peasant blouse with the darling petitpoint floral embroidery, trying to conceal the vertiginous depths of her cleavage, down which Doctor Miracle is attempting to pour flat champagne. What a ride this juicy brunette is having!

  Leda had been toking roadside Albuquerque monoxide till 11:55 this Saturday night, thumb outstretched and skirt hiked up to midthigh, one high-heel foot perched on a little baby-blue handcase with nylons’n’bra-straps trailing from its crack. Earlier that day she’d parted ways with her employer, an Okie named Oather. Leda’d been working at Oather’s juke-joint as a waitress and as a performer. Oather had put her in this like act wherein she strutted on the bar in highheels while a trained swan untied the strings of her atomgirl costume, a cute leatherette two-piece with conical silver lamé titcups and black shorts patterned in intersecting friendly-atom ellipses. Sometimes the swan bit Leda, which really pissed her off. Saturday afternoon, the swan had escaped from his pen, wandered out onto the road and been mashed by a semi full of hogs.