Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  “Look out, Zep!” exclaimed the smaller of the youths. “It’s her old man! Don’t freak, sir. It was all Bev’s idea. She came flying down here, hopped on the back of Zep’s board out at the break, and—is that a monkey on your shoulder?”

  “I am King Ira,” piped the elf. “My rule extends across a full score of the subdimensions.”

  “And I’m Professor Sorenson,” said Jory. “Not her husband. Her friend. Are you okay, Bev?”

  “Amazed,” whispered Bev, smiling from the tent. “Tired. Zep was very lively. But hush, Una’s asleep again.”

  “Would you like to get rid of her now?” murmured Jory, hunkering down by the tent flap.

  “Oh yes,” said Bev. “This has been a dream come true—but it’s not me. Really, Jory, I’m not that kind of woman.”

  “Yeah she is,” said the smaller surfer. “She wore Zep out. And then she scarfed down every bit of our beer and food; not to mention the pot.”

  “And she made me comb out that goddamn tail of hers like a hundred thousand times,” added Zep.

  -----

  Jory got the surfers to lend him and Bev their fleece jackets. And then he took her in his arms and flew to Elf Circle Farm.

  They landed in the mushroom ring across the creek behind Gunnar’s old house. Following little King Ira’s lead, they began to dance.

  “This is a tail-wiggle move I learned among the squirrels. Think of your spinal marrow as glowing jelly. Raspberry jelly.”

  Around and around they went, the world spinning. More and more alvar appeared, gnomish men and a few gamin girls. The ground within the mushroom ring grew gauzy and faded away. But still Una refused to leave Bev’s body.

  The alvar formed a circle around the two humans in the center of the ring. “You must return home in any case, oh Una,” intoned King Ira. “I regret, Bev and Jory, that you will accompany her.”

  Before Jory or Bev could cry out, Ira and the encircling alvar twitched at the fabric of space, as if manning a blanket-toss. “Zickerzack,” said Ira, and they were all in the subdimensional world.

  The corridors were like those of a mine, but with way too many directions branching off at the intersections. The glistering foamy walls were translucent, filled with melting jellyfish spots like you see when you’re falling asleep, half-familiar and half-unrecognizable, the shapes of thoughts, the fragments of dreams.

  “Set Bev free,” insisted Jory.

  “What will you give me in return?” demanded Una, still speaking through Bev’s mouth.

  Jory felt in his pockets; he had no silver or gold. All he had was his talismanic antigravity device.

  “How about—how about this?” he said, holding it out. “As I understand it, each time you turn it off and restart it, you’ll make a thin spot in the walls between worlds.”

  “Take the trade, Una,” urged King Ira. Ensconced in his native realm, he no longer seemed clownish, but rather haughty and regal. “The high-plane will be ours to plunder as we please. We did well to bring the professor here. Take the trade and I promise you a high post in my court.”

  Colored gems rode out on Bev’s next exhalation, weaving themselves into haughty Una, very nearly the same size as Jory here, and more formidable than ever. Impatiently flicking her tail, she extended her hand.

  As Jory passed over the talisman, he sacrificed his years of research: he keyed in the reset/erase sequence.

  Not yet realizing this, King Ira leapt at Una, trying to snatch the device away from her. They wrestled and snapped at each other, their bodies flurbing together, then separating apart. Finally King Ira emerged as victor. He looked younger and crueler all the time. Holding out the talisman, he pressed the button to—precisely no effect.

  Angrily King Ira declared the mushroom circle portal to be closed. “We’ll excavate no further here,” he cried. “May your prison walls grow ever thicker with quantum foam.” Cackling and screaming abuse, the elves disappeared around an abrupt subdimensional turn in the corridor, which closed off in their wake, leaving the two humans trapped together in a small chamber whose uneven, flickering walls continued to constrict.

  Bev was shocked, tearful, and remorseful although, Jory could tell, she was also more than a little proud of her day’s exploits, if those must be her last. He could understand her so very well. Looking down, he saw that his foot had merged into hers. They were flurbing, losing their identities, fusing into a common wave function in order to fit their information into a dwindling amount of phase space. And soon, to make things worse, they were flurbing into the wall and its alien ideations.

  Jory sank to the tingling floor as everything grew indistinct. Staring up with his eyes like a pair of fried eggs in a puddle, he saw a series of gauzy four-legged forms—the ghosts of the cows who’d disappeared from Gunnar’s farm, eaten by the elves. In their wake limped a two-legged herdsman: the shade of his beloved uncle.

  “How can I escape?” Jory asked Gunnar’s ghost.

  “Love,” whispered Gunnar. “Only love can save you.”

  With his last vestige of energy, Jory pulled his body free of the quantum foam and embraced Bev, long and true. He sensed every cranny of her ego-soul and how it complemented his.

  Their bodies firmed up and, as they broke apart into non-flurbed individuals once more, they found themselves above ground, amid the enchanted mushrooms, beneath the dark sky of a new moon.

  For a time they merely drank in the plain fragrant air of their native domain, feeling rich and drunk on high-plane reality.

  “I’d like to retire here with you, Bev,” said Jory eventually. “I can quit the game now and enjoy my pension. If only the property titles weren’t all screwed up. A fourth of this land is mine.”

  “Elf Circle Farm,” said Bev. “I know all about the case. Like I said, I’m the county clerk. I can shuffle some papers, say a few words, and—zickerzack!”

  So Bev and Jory married, and Jory took possession of his chosen portion of Gunnar’s land: the house, the creek, and the mushroom glen. They fixed the place up, and got a pair of cows for old times’ sake. Once or twice, Jory thought he detected a glitter of subdimensional ectoplasm in the barn where Uncle Gunnar had hung himself, but the shade spoke no more with his nephew. No need: Jory never again contemplated suicide.

  In the evenings, comfortably tired from the light chores, he and Bev would sit around the crackling hearth drinking caraway-seed-flavored aquavit, spinning tales about Elfland, academia, and the Gold Country. Over time, Jory came to see himself as an incredibly wise and fortunate man, as did his new step-grandson Jack, who often came to visit in the summers.

  Dropping the boy off, Jack’s mother Hilda always conversed pleasantly with Jory, realizing she owed him credit for her professional successes extending his rhizomal subdimension theory—not that she was ever able to replicate his antigravity breakthrough.

  As for the alvar, they never returned—at least not to Elf Circle Farm.

  And, oh, yes, Bev’s tail. It was there for good. During the first months of living on the farm, Bev hid the tail by wrapping it around her waist. But then, at Jory’s urging, she began letting it hang out. Her theater group approved.

  ============

  Note on “Elves of the Subdimensions” (Written with Paul Di Filippo”

  Written in March, 2006.

  Flurb #1, Fall, 2006.

  I collaborated with Paul on a story, “Instability,” before I ever actually met him. I think we first met face to face in 1999 when I took a bus through the snow to his house in Providence while on a journey to the East. He showed me H. P. Lovecraft’s grave, we went ice skating together, and we wrote a second story, “The Square Root of Pythagoras.”

  Paul is one of the most prolific short story writers at work these days, with a new anthology of his tales appearing nearly every year. The latest one is Shuteye from the Timebroker (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), and you can learn more at his Web site www.pauldifilippo.com.

  Perhaps my all
-time favorite of Paul’s stories is “Stink Lines,” about the Disney Comics character Gyro Gearloose as drawn by the great Carl Barks, the tale set in a world where nanomachines actually generate dialogue balloons and, yes, graphical stink lines. This tale is in his collection Neutrino Drag (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004).

  As occasionally happens, my inspiration for “Elves of the Subdimensions” was the title itself, which has haunted me for years with no story attached. To me the title seems a perfect coupling of Golden Age power chords, worthy of Thrilling Wonder Tales.

  In order to set the story in motion, I suggested a transreal element: How does a mad professor survive retirement?

  When I myself retired from teaching two years ago, I did find it a bit of a jolt. Retirement is hard, as a part of one’s sense of self consists of the social roles that one plays. To abandon a role is to feel diminished. You’re losing part of your identity. If you’re fortunate, you find new roles, or expand some of your alternate roles, so to make up for the lost role—so as once again feel yourself to be the right size.

  In my case, I’ve been writing more since I retired. And I’ve been putting a lot of time into my Web site www.rudyrucker.com and its associated blog. You might say that these days I’m busy constructing a kind of software lifebox copy of myself.

  2+2=5

  (Written with Terry Bisson)

  Old age is all about killing time. One evening Jack and I walked the quarter mile from our Journey’s End retirement complex to the Hump’s chain coffee shop in the strip mall, traffic whizzing by, everyone but us with someplace to go.

  The shop was just about deserted and a couple of the barrista guys were having a discussion. One was offering the other fifty or even sixty dollars to do something boring. I didn’t catch what the boring thing was, so when the second guy came to wipe our tabletop, I asked him.

  “He was wondering if someone paid me, would I count out loud to ten thousand by ones,” said the boy, fingering the ring in his nose, which was kind of an exotic accoutrement for Harrods Creek, Kentucky. “But it would be too stupid,” he added. He moved across the empty room, straightening chairs.

  I did a quick pencil-and-paper calculation while Jack sipped his chamomile tea. I used to be an insurance adjuster, and numbers are my thing. “I figure I could probably count to ten thousand in the course of a day,” I told Jack in a bit.

  He argued about this, of course—something about holes in the number line—but then he flipped to my point of view and pushed the calculation further, working it in his head. Before they fired him for his nervous breakdown, Jack was a math professor at the University of Louisville. “You could count to ten million in a year,” Jack announced after a minute. “And maybe if a person said the words really fast, they could hit a billion before they died. Assuming they started young. Assuming they didn’t pay very close attention.”

  I called over the barrista with the nose-ring and told him the news, but his mind was already on other things. “We’re about to close,” he said.

  “Maybe I should start counting,” I told Jack as the boy wandered off. “I could set a Winners World Record. My own taste of immortality.”

  “Let’s see about that,” said Jack, hauling out the oversized cell phone he carried in his pants pocket. It was an off-brand model, a Whortleberry that he’d picked out of a sale bin at the Radio Shack in the strip mall near our rest home. He carried it with him all the time, not that anyone ever called him or me, other than telemarketers. Our wives were dead and our kids had moved to the coasts. They couldn’t find interesting work in Kentucky. Jack and I had each other, Nurse Amara, and Hector, the fellow who did the dishes and made up our rooms.

  “See what?” I asked Jack.

  “See if there’s a counting-to-highest-number category on the Winners Web site.” Drawing out his smeared, heavy reading glasses he began pecking at the tiny buttons on the fat cell phone. “I get the Web on this sucker, remember, Bert?”

  “Fuck computers,” I said. “A Java script put me out of my job.”

  “Like I haven’t heard you say that seven hundred times,” said Jack. “Loser. Dinosaur. Old fool.”

  “At least I didn’t go crazy and scare my students,” I said. “Telling them the world is made of holes. Screwball. Nut. Psycho.”

  “Four hundred times for that remark,” said Jack, prodding the minute keyboard with the tip of his pen. “I wasn’t crazy, I was right. The world is like an engine-block gasket, or, no, like a foam. The holes triangulate the universe; they’re the tent stakes, as it were, that keep the whole thing from blowing away. And the big secret is—oh, you’re not ready yet. Here’s Winners.” He set the cell phone on the table so that I could see the screen. What I saw was a blurred flickering smudge. “Your glasses,” Jack reminded me, not unkindly.

  I found my smeared, heavy reading glasses and studied the display. The Winners Web site was an outgrowth of the old Guinness Book of World Records, the difference being that Winners had far more categories. They made their money by harvesting information about the record holders so they could be targeted with ads.

  “Says the Unaided Counting Record is twelve million, three hundred and forty-five thousand, six hundred and seventy-eight,” I said, squinting at the tiny screen.

  “12,345,678,” echoed Jack, just saying the digits. “A tidy place to stop. It took the guy nearly two years. Clyde Burns. Says here he’s a Buddhist monk in Wichita, Kansas.”

  “Closing time, gentlemen,” said the barrista.

  “Okay, okay.”

  Walking back, we discussed the project some more. Cars whizzing by. Low beige buildings in a parking lot. Dark green pastures and trees. A rustling cornfield.

  “The monk counted for two years!” I said. “Two years is a lifetime when you’re my age.”

  “That’s the problem with immortality,” mused Jack. “You never live long enough to get there.”

  -----

  For breakfast we have a choice: oatmeal or powdered eggs. I chose oatmeal. Jack joined me at my table, stirring his eggs.

  He was smiling. “There’s a hole in their rules,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “There’s a hole in everything,” he explained. “The universe itself can be described as a fractal pattern of holes in nonexistence. A temporary but nonetheless …”

  “Never mind your crackpot theories about the universe,” I said. I had the feeling—or was it a hope?—that he was talking about the Winners Web site. “What about their rules?”

  “You’re not required to vocalize the numbers, or even subvocalize. Just count.”

  “You still have to think them,” I said. “It’ll still take me two years to get to where the mad monk left off.”

  “Think biocomputation,” said Jack. “Think auxiliary processing.”

  “Huh?”

  To make a long story short, which is what old age is all about, when you think about it, which I try not to do, Jack said he could hook me up to a computer that would speed up my brain cells.

  “Neurons are just switches,” he said. “Firing or resting: binary. They can interface to a chip. And as long as they’re controlling the counting, it’s legal under the Winners rules.”

  I toyed with my oatmeal. “You want me to swallow a chip? Or get an implant?” As usual the oatmeal was lumpy.

  “Wait till tonight,” said Jack, glancing suspiciously around the dining room. As if anyone were there but Hector and our deaf, senile peers. “I’ll show you tonight.”

  After an evening of watching the McNguyen and the Pootie Party shows, I followed Jack to the room we shared at Journey’s End. I was apprehensive, but eager to achieve immortality.

  “Voila,” he said. He showed me a knit skull cap. It was blue and orange and silver. It was the worst job of knitting I had ever seen, and I told him so.

  “One of my University of Louisville honors students made it for me,” he said. “An extra credit grab. She had a B and she wanted …”

>   “Never mind all that,” I said. “What does it do?”

  “Guess,” he said, showing me the cord with the computer jack. “The silver yarn, clumsily woven, I admit, is a dermo-thalamic web which uploads to the processor inside my Whortleberry to speed up your internal computational sequences. If I hadn’t pissed away so much time grading homework for all those sections of business math, then maybe I would have been able to productize this and …”

  “Never mind that,” I said, sensing immortality. “What do I do?”

  “Put it on,” he said. “Start counting sheep, from one, until you fall asleep. As soon as your consciousness logs off, the Whortleberry’s processor kicks in, and the counting accelerates.”

  “Have you ever tried it?” I said.

  “There was no point,” he answered. “It’s only good for counting by ones. I ended up giving her an A minus, since …”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Plug it in. Give it here.”

  I pulled on the magic beanie and lay down on my bed.

  It was tight. “Should I shave my head?”

  For once Jack looked confused. “You’re bald,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah.” I’d forgotten.

  I closed my eyes and started counting sheep. They were jumping a fence, faster and faster. I dreamed I was herding them up a boulder-studded hill.

  -----

  “Wake up.”

  I sat up. The light through the filthy windows told me it was morning.

  Jack was standing over me, smiling. “What’s the first thing that comes to mind?” he asked. “Don’t think about it, just say it.”

  “Twelve million, three hundred and forty-five thousand, three hundred and twenty-two,” I said. Even though my head was splitting, I counted to the next number. “Twelve million, three hundred and forty-five thousand, three hundred and twenty-three.” 12,345,323 in digits.

  “Voila,” said Jack. “You’re gaining on the monk already. You’ll pass him by breakfast.”

  And I did. Jack uploaded the results to the Winners site and we slapped hands. I was now a world record holder.