Surfing the Gnarl

by Rudy Rucker

  The standard salespitch lasted five minutes, and one minute was allotted to the consumer’s responses. If everyone answered, listened, and responded, the phonebot could process ten prospects per hour, and one hundred twenty in a 9 a.m. — 9 p.m. day! The whole system cost nine thousand dollars, though as soon as you bought one and joined the pyramid, you could get more of them for six. Three thousand dollars profit for each phonebot your phonebot could sell! If you sold, say, one a day, you’d make better than $100K a year!

  The electronic directory held all the names and numbers in the city; and each morning it would ask Denny who he wanted to try today. He could select the numbers on the day’s calling list on the basis of neighborhood, last name, family size, type of business, and so on.

  The first day, Denny picked a middle-class suburb and told Phil to call all the childless married couples there. Young folks looking for an opportunity! Denny set the speaker so he could listen to people’s responses. It was not encouraging.

  “click”

  “No … click”

  “ click”

  “This kilp ought to be illegal … click”

  “click”

  “Get a job, you bizzy dook … click”

  “Of all the … click’

  “Again? click”

  Most people hung up so fast that Phil was able to make some thousand unsuccessful contacts in less than ten hours. Only seven people listened through the whole message and left comments at the end; and six of these people seemed to be bedridden or crazy. The seventh had a phonebot she wanted to sell cheap.

  Denny tried different phoning strategies—rich people, poor people, people with two sevens in their phone number, and so on. He tried different kinds of salespitches—bossy ones, ingratiating ones, curt ones, ethnic-accent ones, etc. He made up a salespitch that offered businesses the chance to rent Phil to do phone advertising for them.

  Nothing worked. It got to be depressing sitting in his room watching Phil fail—it was like having Willy Loman for his roommate. The machine made little noises, and unless Denny took a lot of dope, he had trouble relaxing out into the sky. The empty food-packs stank.

  Two more weeks, and all the money, food, and dope were gone. Right after he did the last of the dope, Denny recorded a final sales-pitch:

  ”Uh … hi. This is Phil the prophet at 1801 Eye Street. I eye I … I’m out of money and I’d rather not have to … uh … leave my room. You send me money for … uh … food and I’ll give God your name. Dope’s rail, too.”

  Phil ran that on random numbers for two days with no success. Denny came down into deep hunger. Involuntary detox. If his dad had left much more money, Denny might have died, holed up in that room. Good old Dad. Denny trembled out into the street and got a job working counter in a Greek coffee shop called the KoDo. It was okay; there was plenty of food, and he didn’t have to watch Phil panhandling.

  As Denny’s strength and sanity came back, he remembered sex. But he didn’t know any girls. He took Phil off panhandling and put him onto propositioning numbers in the young working-girl neighborhoods.

  “Hi, are you a woman? I’m Phil, sleek robot for a whippy young man who’s ready to get under. Make a guess and he’ll mess. Leave your number and state your need; he’s fuff-looking and into sleaze.”

  This message worked surprisingly well. The day after he started it up, Denny came home to find four enthusiastic responses stored on Phil’s chips. Two of the responses seemed to be from men, and one of the women’s voice sounded old … really old. The fourth response was from “Silke.”

  “Hi, desperado, this is Silke. I like your machine. Call me.”

  Phil had Silke’s number stored, of course, so Denny called her right up. Feeling shy, he talked through Phil, using the machine as voder to make his voice sound weird. After all, Phil was the one who knew her.

  ”Hello?” Cute, eager, practical, strange.

  “Silke? This is Phil. Denny’s talking through me. You want to interface?”

  “Like where?”

  “My room?”

  “Is it small? It sounds like your room is small. I like small rooms.”

  “You got it. 1801 Eye Street, Denny’ll be in front of the building.”

  “What do you look like, Denny?”

  “Tall, thin, teeth when I grin, which is lots. My hair’s peroxide blond on top. I’ll wear my X-shirt.”

  “Me too. See you in an hour.”

  Denny put on his X-shirt—a T-shirt with a big silk screen picture of his genitalia—and raced down to the KoDo to beg Spiros, the boss, for an advance on his wages.

  “Please, Spiros, I got a date.”

  The shop was almost empty, and Spiros was sitting at the counter watching a pay-vid porno show on his pocket TV. He glanced over at Denny, all decked out in his X-shirt, and pulled two fifties out of his pocket.

  “Let me know how she come.”

  Denny spent one fifty on two Fiesta food-packs and some wine: the other fifty went for a capsule of snap-crystals from a street vendor. He was back in front of his rooming-house in plenty of time. Ten minutes, and there came Silke, with a great big pink crotch-shot printed onto her T-shirt. She looked giga good.

  For the first instant they stood looking at each other’s X-shirts, and then they shook hands.

  “I’m Denny Blevins. I got some food and wine and snap here, if you want to go up.” Denny was indeed tall and thin, and toothy when he grinned. His mouth was very wide. His hair was long and dark in back, and short and blond on top. He wore red rhinestone earrings, his semierect X-shirt, tight black plastic pants, and fake leopard fur shoes. His arms were muscular and veiny, and he moved them a lot when he talked.

  “Go up and get under,” smiled Silke. She was medium height, and wore her straw-like black hair in a bouffant. She had fine, hard features. She’d appliqued pictures of monster eyes to her eyelids, and she wore white dayglo lipstick. Beneath her sopping wet X-shirt image, she wore a tight, silvered jumpsuit with cutouts. On her feet she had roller skates with lights in the wheels.

  “Oxo,” said Denny.

  “Wow,” said Silke.

  Up in the room they got to know each other. Denny showed Silke his phonebot and his sound system, pretended to start to play his guitar and to then decide not to, and told about some of the weird things he’d seen in the sky, looking out that broken pane. Silke, as it turned out, was a pay-vid sex dancer come here from West Virginia. She talked mostly in clear, but she was smart, and she liked to get wild, but only with the right kind of guy. Sex dancer didn’t mean hooker and she was, she assured Denny, clean. She had a big dream she wasn’t quite willing to tell him yet.

  “Come on,” he urged, popping the autowave food-packs open. “Decode.”

  “Ah, I don’t know, Denny. You might think I’m skanky.”

  They sat side by side on Denny’s mattress and ate the pasty food with plastic spoons. It was good. It was good to have another person in the room here.

  ”Silke,” said Denny when they finished eating, “I’d been thinking Phil was kilp. Dook null. But if he got you here it was worth it. Seems I just need tech to relate, you wave?”

  Silke threw the empty foodtrays on the floor and gave Denny a big kiss. They went ahead and fluffed. It seemed like it had been a while for both of them. Skin all over, soft, warm, touch, kiss, lick, smell, good, skin.

  Afterwards, Denny opened the capsule of snap and they split it. You put the stuff’ on your tongue, it sputtered and popped, and you breathed in the freebase fumes. Fab rush. Out through the empty window pane they could see the moon and two stars stronger than the city lights.

  “Out there,” said Silke, her voice fast and shaky from the snap. “That’s my dream. If we hurry, Denny, we can be the first people to have sex in space. They’d remember us forever. I’ve been thinking about it, and there was always missing links, but you and Phil are it. We’ll get in the shuttlebox—it’s a room like this—and go up. We get up there and make vide
os of us getting under, and—this is my new flash—we use Phil to sell the vids to pay for the trip. You wave?”

  Denny’s long, maniacal smile curled across his face. The snap was still crackling on his tongue. “Stuzzadelic! Nobody’s fuffed in space yet? None of those gawks who’ve used the shuttlebox?”

  “They might have, but not for the record. But if we scurry we’ll be the famous first forever. We’ll be starry.”

  “Oxo, Silke.” Denny’s voice rose with excitement. “Are you there, Phil?”

  “Yes, Denny.”

  “Got a new pitch. In clear.”

  ”Proceed.”

  “Hi, this is Denny.” He nudged the naked girl next to him.

  “And this is Silke.”

  “We’re doing a live fuff-vid we’d like to show you.”

  “It’s called Rapture in Space. It’s the very first X-rated love film from outer space.”

  “Zero gravity,” said Denny, reaching over to whang on his guitar.

  “Endless fun.”

  “Mindless pleasure.” Whang.

  “Out near the sun.” Silke nuzzled his neck and moaned stagily. “Oh, Denny, oh, darling, it’s …”

  “RAPTURE IN SPACE! Satisfaction guaranteed. This is bound to be a collector’s item; the very first live sex video from space. A full ninety minutes of unbelievable null-gee action, with great Mother Earth in the background, tune in for only fifty …”

  “More, Denny,” wailed Silke, who was now grinding herself against him with some urgency. “More!”

  Whang. “Only one hundred dollars, and going up fast. To order, simply leave your card number after the beep.”

  “Beep”

  Phil got to work the next morning, calling numbers of businesses where lots of men worked. The orders poured in. Lacking a business-front by which to cash the credit orders, Denny enlisted Spiros, who quickly set up KoDo Space Rapture Enterprises. For managing the business, Spiros only wanted 15 percent and some preliminary tapes of Denny and Silke in action. For another 45 percent, Silke’s porno pay-vid employers—an outfit known as XVID—stood ready to distribute the show. Dreaming of this day, Silke had already bought her own cameras. She and Denny practiced a lot, getting their moves down. Spiros agreed that the rushes looked good. Denny went ahead and reserved the shuttlebox for a trip in mid-July.

  The shuttlebox was a small passenger module that could be loaded into the space shuttle for one of its weekly trips up to orbit and back. A trip for two cost $100K. Denny bought electronic directories for cities across the country, and set Phil to working twenty hours a day. He averaged fifty sales a day, and by launch time, Silke and Denny had enough to pay everyone off, and then some.

  But this was just the beginning. Three days before the launch, the news services picked up on the Rapture in Space plan, and everything went crazy. There was no way for a cheap box like Phil to process the orders anymore. Denny and Silke had to give XVID anther 15 percent of the action, and let them handle the tens of thousands of orders. It was projected that Rapture in Space would pull an audience share of 7 percent—which is a lot of people. Even more money came in the form of fat contracts for two product endorsements: SPACE RAPTURE, the cosmic eroscent for high-flyers, and RAPT SHIELD, an antiviral lotion for use by sexual adventurers. XVID and the advertisers privately wished that Denny and Silke were a bit more … upscale-looking, but they were the two who had the tiger by the tail.

  Inevitably, some of the Christian Party congressmen tried to have Denny and Silke enjoined from making an XVID broadcast from aboard the space shuttle, which was, after all, government property. But for 5 percent of the gross, a fast-thinking lawyer was able to convince a hastily convened Federal court that, insofar as Rapture in Space was being codecast to the XVID dish and cabled thence only to paying subscribers, the show was a form of constitutionally protected free speech, in no way different from a live-sex show in a private club.

  So the great day came. Naked save for a drenching of Space Rapture eroscent, Silke and Denny waved goodbye and stepped into their shuttle-box. It was shaped like a two-meter-thick letter D, with a rounded floor, and with a big picture window set into the flat ceiling. A crane loaded the shuttlebox into the bay of the space shuttle along with some satellites, missiles, building materials, etc. A worker dogged all the stuff down, and then the baydoors closed. Silke and Denny wedged themselves into their puttylike floor. Blast off—roar, shudder, push, clunk, roar some more.

  Then they were floating. The baydoors swung open, and the astronauts got to work with their retractable arms and space tools. Silke and Denny were busy, too. They set up the cameras, and got their little antenna locked in on the XVID dish. They started broadcasting right away— some of the Rapture in Space subscribers had signed up for the whole live protocols in addition to the ninety-minute show that Silke and Denny were scheduled to put on in …

  “Only half an hour, Denny,” said Silke. “Only thirty minutes till we go on.” She was crouched over the sink, douching, and vacuuming the water back up. As fate would have it, she was menstruating. She hadn’t warned anyone about it.

  Denny felt cold and sick to his stomach. XVID had scheduled their show right after take-off because other-wise—with all the news going on—people might forget about it. But right now he didn’t feel like fuffing at all, let alone getting under. Every time he touched something, or even breathed, his whole body moved.

  “All clean now,” sang Silke. “No one can tell, not even you.”

  There was a rapping on their window—one of the astronauts, a jolly jock woman named Judy. She grinned through her helmet and gave them a high sign. The astronauts thought the Rapture in Space show was a great idea; it would make people think about them in new, more interesting ways.

  “I talked to Judy before the launch,” said Silke, waving back. “She said to watch out for the rebound.” She floated to Denny and began fondling him. “Ten minutes, starman.”

  Outside the window, Judy was a shiny form against Earth’s great marbled curve. The clouds, Denny realized, I’m seeing the clouds from on top. His genitals were warming to Silke’s touch. He tongued a snap crystal out of a crack between his teeth and bit it open. Inhale. The clouds. Silke’s touch. He was hard, thank God, he was hard. This was going to be all right.

  The cameras made a noise to signal the start of the main transmission, and Denny decided to start by planting a kiss on Silke’s mouth. He bumped her shoulder and she started to drift away. She tightened her grip on his penis and led him along after her. It hurt, but not too unpleasantly. She landed on her back, on the padded floor, and guided Denny right into her vagina. Smooth and warm. Good. Denny pushed into her and … rebound.

  He flew, rapidly and buttocks first, up to the window. He had hold of Silke’s armpit and she came with him. She got her mouth over his penis for a second, which was good, but then her body spun around, and she slid toothrakingly off him, which was very bad.

  Trying to hold a smile, Denny stole a look at the clock. Three minutes. Rapture in Space had been on for three minutes now. Eighty-seven minutes to go.

  It was another bruising half hour or so until Denny and Silke began to get the hang of spacefuffing. And then it was fun. For a long time they hung in midair, with Denny in Silke, and Silke’s legs around his waist, just gently jogging, but moaning and throwing their heads around for the camera. Actually, the more they hammed it up, the better it felt. Autosuggestion.

  Denny stared and stared at the clouds to keep from coming, but finally he had to pull out for a rest. To keep things going they did rebounds for a while. Silke would lie spread-eagled on the floor, and Denny would kind of leap down on her; both of them adjusting their pelvises for a bullseye. She’d sink into the cushions, then rebound them both up. It got better and better. Silke curled up into a ball and impaled herself on Denny’s shaft. He wedged himself against the wall with his feet and one hand and used his other hand to spin her around and around, bobbin on his spindle. Denny lay on
the floor and Silke did leaps onto him. They kissed and licked each other all over, and from every angle. The time was almost up.

  For the finale, they went back to midair fuffing; arms and legs wrapped around each other; one camera aimed at their faces, and one camera aimed at their genitalia. They hit a rhythm where they always pushed just as hard as each other and it action/reaction cancelled out, hard and harder, with big Earth out the window, yes, the air full of their smells, yes, the only sound the sound of their ragged breathing, yes, now, NOW AAAHHHHHHH!!!!

  Denny kind of fainted there, and forgot to slide out for the come-shot. Silke went blank, too, and they just floated, linked like puzzle pieces for five or ten minutes. It made a great finale for the Rapture in Space show, really much more convincing than the standard sperm spurt.

  Two days later, and they were back on Earth, with the difference that they were now, as Denny had hoped, cashy and starry. People recognized them everywhere, and looked at them funny, often asking for a date. They did some interviews, some more endorsements and they got an XVID contract to host a monthly spacefuff variety show.

  Things were going really good until Denny got a tumor.

  “It’s a dooky little kilp down in my bag,” he complained to Silke. “Feel it.”

  Sure enough, there was a one-centimeter lump in Denny’s scrotum. Silke wanted him to see a doctor, but he kept stalling. He was afraid they’d run a blood test and get on his case about drugs. Some things were still illegal.

  A month went by and the lump was the size of an orange.

  “It’s so gawky you can see it through my pants,” complained Denny. “It’s giga ouch and I can’t cut a vid this way.”

  But he still wouldn’t go to the doctor. What with all the snap he could buy, and with his new cloud telescope, Denny didn’t notice what was going on in his body most of the time. He was happy to miss the next few XVID dates. Silke hosted them alone.

  Three more months and the lump was like a small watermelon. When Denny came down one time and noticed that the tumor was moving he really got worried