by Rudy Rucker
A pen appeared in Tug’s glowing hand. “We’ll shed the surly bonds of incorporation.”
It didn’t take them long to sign off every interest in Magic Pumpkin. And then the floor of the saucer opened up, dropping Janna, Veruschka, and Kelso onto the street. Over their awestruck heads, the saucer briefly glowed and then sped away, though not in any direction that a merely human being could specify. It was more as if the saucer shrank. Reorganized itself. Corrected. Downsized. And then it was gone from all earthly ken.
And that’s how Janna Gutierrez and Veruschka Zipkinova got rich.
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Note on “Junk DNA” (Written with Bruce Sterling)
Written in December, 2001.
Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, January 2003.
This is the third story I’ve written with Bruce Sterling; the earlier two being “Storming the Cosmos” and “Big Jelly,” both in my anthology Gnarl! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000.) The “Junk DNA” collaboration was tumultuous; I began finally to understand why a synergistic pair like, say, Lennon and McCartney might stop working together—no matter how good were the fruits of their joint efforts.
Although pleasant and soft spoken in person, both Bruce and I are bossy collaborators, capable of being very cutting in our e-mails. When he and I go after each other, it’s like two old guys playing tennis and trying to kill the ball and blast it down the other guy’s throat. Whack! Some of this abrasive energy shows up in the interactions between the pairs of characters in this story: Janna vs. Veruschka and Tug vs. Revel.
But the story is fun, and it rated a cover illustration when it appeared in Asimov’s. The story also appears in Bruce’s collection, Visionary in Residence (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006); although note that while putting together Mad Professor, I slightly re-edited all my stories one more time.
The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane
“and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane” —Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
“Damn this is good crack. How come nobody ever writes about how good crack is?”
“You don’t smoke crack, old fool. That’s a gum-stimulator you’re holding, not a crack pipe.”
“I’m gonna tell you a crack story anyhow. Something that happened to me today, Sunday, January something, in the year Y-fuckin’-two-K-plus-two. I’m sitting on a doorstep next to a crackhead woman at the Powell and Market cable car stop. Me there in my Saks corduroys and my shiny leather jacket, waiting for the cable car. Gray-haired and wearing a beret. It’s a cold day and this stone doorstep is the only spot with sun. I’m sitting there in the sun waiting for my wife to come out of Nordstrom’s so we can ride back to North Beach. A festive lark. We’re up in SF for the weekend.”
“Who cares?”
“Let me tell my story. You’ll care soon enough. There’s this hobbling alky guy talking to the crackhead woman, a guy who moves like a broken toy, maybe he has an artificial leg. He’s being real gentle with the woman. Commiserating with her. He’s like, ‘It’s Sunday, sweetheart. I know that’s hard to believe. I’ve lost a few days that way myself.’ There’s this admirable sense of warmth coming off him even though he’s a guy I’d skirt around on the sidewalk. He’s got this camaraderie going out to the woman. She’s black, maybe thirty years old, sturdy-looking, maybe only a year or two into her addiction. I’m wishing she could detox and get in a program.”
“Were you using your gum-stimulator?”
“Naw, man, I was high on life. Taking things in. Experiencing the now. And standing right in front of me were two homeboys with low pants—they’re as low as I’ve ever seen. The waists are literally at their knees. They could shit or piss without taking those pants off. The pant legs are like eighteen inches long. It’s as if they were midgets. But they’re not midgets, they’re big strong guys. I’d almost like to ask them how the pants stay up; they have long coats and I can’t quite see if there’s suspenders as well as belts. But I’m not gonna say anything. This spot I’m sitting on could be viewed as their turf, and they’re being kind enough to ignore me. There’s a looped line of tourists waiting for their turn to get on the Powell-Hyde cable car, and then there’s the homies, and then there’s the sunny stone stoop with me and the crackhead woman. I’m enjoying the sun. An old homeless woman is playing Christmas carols on a keyboard on her lap, even though there’s no sound from the keyboard and Christmas is long gone. Maybe it’s just a piece of cardboard to give her confidence. She’s singing the songs real loud and getting some money from the tourists. It’s peaceful there in the sun. I’m zoned out. My wife’s still not coming for a while.”
“You’re high on life.”
“It’s the best, man. No rush to do anything. No need to score. A motion catches my eye and I see that one of the homeboys is manipulating a green nylon fanny pack that’s on the sidewalk. He’s moving it around with this short cane he’s got. A cane like to match the length of his pants, maybe two feet long. I don’t know how he got hold of the fanny pack. I assume it came off one of the tourists. The homies are like salmon fisherman standing by a salmon ladder, and this is a fish they’ve pulled out. The other fish aren’t noticing though; they’re calm as ever, inching forward in the line and getting on the streetcars. Evidently the green nylon fanny pack has already been filleted, because the homie with the cane passes it over to the crackhead woman. She’s got nothing, so he’s giving her something. That flash of camaraderie again. The woman fumbles around the fanny pack for a while, getting it open, feeling inside it with her wooden fingers. I don’t watch her opening it very closely. It’s just sad how wasted she is. For sure she’s forgotten about it being Sunday already. She’s losing days at a time, maybe even weeks.”
“Is anything gonna happen in this story?”
“Exactly now is when it gets surreal. I’m looking across the street at Nordstrom’s to see if my wife is coming, and then I hear this kind of xylophone chord next to me. And the crackhead woman is sitting up and she’s pulling all this stuff out of the fanny pack. It’s like four circus clowns coming out of a suitcase. Big cartoony shapes with little arms and legs. There’s an ellipse, a catalog, a meter, and a vibrating plane. They’re all doing stuff to the crackhead woman.”
“How do you mean—an ellipse, a catalog, a meter, and a vibrating plane?”
“They’re like Robert Williams cartoon characters; each of them with little black legs with puffy white shoes and black stick-arms with white gloves for hands, each of these guys about three feet tall. They’re humanoid enough to be like a woman, a man, a man, and a woman. The ellipse herself is a thick black outline like the frame of an oval mirror, higher than she is wide. She has tiny little brown eyes up near the top, and a thin mouth near the bottom. Inside the ellipse is nothing—well, not exactly nothing, something like an energy field. Whenever the ellipse is at the correct angle so that I can look through her, I see that part of the world in black and white. Like a diagram in a physics book, with everything cleaned up and simplified. The ellipse is a window to reality’s blueprint. Now, the ellipse does a detox on the crackhead woman right away. Yep, as soon as the ellipse comes out of the fanny pack, she jumps at the crackhead woman and pushes herself over the woman’s head. The ellipse wriggles her way all down the woman, passing over the woman like a hoop of flame passing over a leaping tiger. That’s the thing that gets the woman clean and sober right off the bat. It’s like she’s been unwrapped from inside of dirty translucent plastic. She’s out from inside of her body bag. Her eyes are alive again, her face is awake.”
“The mighty ellipse. What about the other three?”
“The catalog is a fat, old, cloth-bound book, like a Library of Congress catalog volume. His cover is brown and he has an eye and an arm on both the front cover and on the back cover. His shiny brown eyes notice me watching. But mainly he’s focused on the woman he�
�s helping. What he does, he holds the edges of his cover and spreads them open like a flasher, showing his store of information to the woman. She starts giggling as she looks at the flapping pages of the catalog. Not a rheumy giggle, but a light, clear giggle. Just about then I glance around to see if anyone else is seeing what I’m seeing. But, no, they aren’t. In fact everyone around me has stopped moving. All the world is temporarily silent and frozen: the homies, the tourists, the streetcars, the cars on Market Street. Nothing is moving but me, the crackhead woman, the ellipse, the catalog, the meter, and the vibrating plane. I’m witnessing a secret miracle.”
“You’re living right, man. Tell me more about the catalog. What was the woman seeing inside?”
“Well, I scoot a little closer to her so I can see too. Each page of the catalog is a picture, a picture of the things she’s thought and seen and done. I can see her younger self inside the pictures. She’s eating barbeque, going to movies, laughing with her friends. It’s like a catalog of her life. All the bad stuff is in there too, of course: the rip-offs, the beatings, the hospitals, and the jails. And when I look closer I can see that the pictures themselves are made up of smaller pictures. Like mosaics. And the little pictures are made of even smaller pictures etcetera. There’s this branching fractal catalog thing happening. The pictures in the pictures show other people doing the same kinds of things as the woman. I’m in there too. Everyone’s good things and bad things are inside of everyone else’s catalog.”
“Like we’re all the same.”
“You got it. Now, the meter is the next one out. The meter, he’s like a big voltmeter. He’s got a black dial face with a red needle swinging back and forth and two brown-and-white eyes set into the dial. He reaches his hands out and touches the sides of the woman’s head, and his needle goes swaying back and forth with her feelings. The woman is staring at the needle and watching how her thoughts move her feelings up and down. At first the needle is just slamming back and forth, but in a minute it calms down to where it’s mostly vibrating nice and even in the middle. She’s still watching the catalog, you dig, and now and then she sees something that makes the needle jump. The woman likes it when the needle jumps, and she likes it when it calms down afterward. She’s practicing with this for a long time, but there’s no rush because the world’s time has stopped for us. It’s like the ellipse has detoxed her, the catalog has shown her about her past, and the meter is telling her about peace of mind.”
“Did she notice you watching her?”
“Yeah, she glances over at me and smiles real calm and easy. She’s like, ‘Ain’t this a trip?’ And then the vibrating plane starts doing her thing. The vibrating plane is a vertical disk facing us. Her eyes and arms and legs are attached to her outer edge, and her actual vibrating plane part is her big round stomach. The plane is rushing forward and backward like the head of a bass drum, only with much bigger oscillations. The plane pushes right through the woman and me, and then it pulls back out in front of us, and then it does it again. Over and over. When the plane is behind me, I feel totally merged into the world, and when the plane is in front of me, I feel all separate and observational, the way I mostly do. The plane is vibrating at maybe three pulses per second, and I’m feeling it as this sequence of One / Many / One / Many / One.”
“How do you mean, One and Many?”
“The vibrating plane is showing us the natural rhythm of perceiving things, you wave? You merge into the world and experience it, you separate yourself out and make distinctions; you flow back out into unity, you pull back and remember yourself; you sympathize with everyone around you, you focus on your own feelings—the eternal vibration between Us and Me, between One and Many. The teaching here is to understand the vibration as a natural and organic process of the mind. You can’t stop the vibrating plane. You can’t stay merged, and you can’t stay cut off. You’re flipping back and forth forever and ever, with a frequency of like I say maybe three cycles per second.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, the ellipse, the catalog, the meter, and the vibrating plane all hold hands with each other and start dancing ring-around-the-rosy in a circle around the woman and me. We smile at each other again, and she stands up, all healthy and ready to live. And then the sounds of the tourists and the homeless woman singing and the cars on Market Street start back up. I see my wife across the street coming out of Nordstrom’s. I cross the street and I meet her.”
“What about the crackhead woman?”
“When I look back she’s gone. The vision was true.”
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Note on “The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane”
Written in January, 2002.
Horror Garage #5, 2002.
My cyberpunk pal John Shirley lives fairly near me in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2002 he had this idea of helping someone put together a small press anthology whose earnings would be devoted to a fund for helping drug-addicted mothers and their children.
I don’t normally undertake a story for so abstract a reason as altruism. I write a story for more personal reasons; typically there’s some emotional state or tech problem or odd situation or real-world vignette that I’m obsessed with, and the story is an exploration I feel compelled to carry out. But John shamed me into promising a contribution.
And then I got into it—I realized that, given that this was to be a guaranteed publication, I could really do anything I wanted to, so why not have some fun and write something completely surrealistic. Of course then the fund-raising anthology project fell through, but five of the stories destined for the anthology ended up in a special issue of Horror Garage, an idiosyncratic magazine edited by Paula Guran.
The title and epigraph for my story comes from line seventy-three of line Allen Ginsberg’s epochal 1965 poem, “Howl.”
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
I’ve always loved this long line: those four items makes such a surreal, Dadaist assemblage, and as a mathematician I’m happy to see an ellipse in the seminal Beat poem.
The images of the story came to me in a moment of inspiration as I sat on the sidewalk in the sun at Powell and Market Streets, near where the tourists line up for the trolley. Junkies and con men were going by, and I saw the four items of Ginsberg’s line as characters, as if drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Williams—and thus emerged my story, a gift from the muse.
Although the line from “Howl” appears as I quote it in both Ginsberg’s original Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, San Francisco, 1956) and in his Collected Poems 1947–1980 (Harper & Row, New York, 1984), Allen introduces a 1986 variant to his line in Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Etc. (edited by Barry Miles, HarperCollins, New York, 1995). Allen’s “final” 1986 version of the line goes like this: “and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalog a variable measure and the vibrating plane.” Ugh!
In a footnote of the 1995 Howl volume, Allen says, “‘Ellipse’ is a solecism in the original mss. and printings; ‘ellipsis’ is correct.” In the same footnote he relieves himself of a minilecture on his poetics as derived from Céline, Whitman, Pound, and the divine Kerouac. And at the end of the footnote, he blandly drones, “phrasing in this verse has been clarified for present edition…to conform more precisely to above referents.” (pp. 130–31).
I wish Allen were still around, so I could argue with him about this. I’d insist that his original muse-spurt was of course the correct take, and not some thirty-year-later version that the author has tailored to fit some theories that he’s invented about what he did. I’d argue that he’s mistakenly letting his lit prof side supplant his mad poet side.
I did once have the good fortune to meet Allen, while visiting the Na
ropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, on the 1982 visit that inspired my piece “MS Found in a Minidrive.” I told Allen about how much “Howl” had influenced me in high school, and then I said, “And what I want from you, Allen, after being hung-up on the beatniks all these years, what I want is your blessing.” And real fast he whaps his hand down on my head like a skull-cap or electric-chair metal cap zzt zzt and “BLESS YOU” he yells. I wrote more about this encounter in my memoir All the Visions (Ocean View Books, 1991), which I typed on a ninety-foot scroll of paper, emulating Jack K.
Jenna and Me
(Written with Rudy Rucker Jr.)
George Bush doesn’t sound as mean and stupid as I would have expected. Or maybe I’m just in a frame of mind to cut him slack. There are three armed Secret Service men here in my bedroom-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters.
They’ve been here for about half an hour. I’m mentally calling them the Boss, the Trainee, and the Muscle. The Boss and the Muscle are wearing Ray-Ban mirror shades—they’re living the dream, true Men in Black. They have guns, and if they want to, they can kill me. I’m polite.
The Trainee’s been doing the talking, he’s a guy my age, a fellow U.C. Berkeley graduate, or so he says, not that I ever saw him at any of the places I used to hang, like the Engineering Library, Cloyne Co-op, or Gilman St. His name is Brad. All the SS guys have four-letter, monosyllable names. Dick, John, Mark, Jeff, like that. I’m Wag. My dog made up the name.
Brad starts out by asking me questions about my Web sites, and about the FoneFoon cell phone worm, being vaguely threatening but a little jocular at the same time, the way these field-ops always are. It’s like they try and give off this vibe that they already know everything about you, so you might as well go ahead and roll over onto your back and piss on yourself like a frightened dog.