by Rudy Rucker
Paul said, “Five,” and then he showed me why, and then a knock on the door brought us back. Nearly two hours had passed.
It was Alma and her roommate. “Sorry we’re late, we got into watching the election returns. This is Leni Pex. Leni, this is Bela Kis and—you must be Paul?”
“Hi,” said Paul, beaming at her and actually turning off his laptop.
“Is something burning?” asked Alma, an asterisk between her eyes.
“The rabbit!” It had boiled dry. I poured in some water. Great hiss and steam billow. In my present state of mind, I saw it as compound morphon, a cartoon explosion made up of rakes and teapots. I turned on the oven and put in the foil pan of rice balls. A compound of the dish and cake morphons.
“Your interview was good,” said Leni, screwing the top off the half-gallon of red wine she’d brought. She was a slight, clean-cut woman, with her blonde hair in a tight bun. She was pleasant, but by no means flirtatious. Tidy, healthy, confident. “We got so many hits today,” she continued. “I hope you’re not in trouble about that secret demo.”
“How’s the election going anyway?” I asked as I rinsed out some dirty glasses from the sink. Paul was setting the table, aligning each dish and fork just so.
“It’s close,” said Leni. “I guess you heard that the votes from the YWCA polling place are all lost. That’s bad for Barbara.” She seemed content with this.
“You’re Heritagist?” I blurted out unbelievingly.
“Hello? I’m gay. But party lines aren’t everything. Van Veeter’s a smart guy. He could get a lot of good things done. I don’t mind admitting that I support him.”
We were interrupted by a snort of not-quite-laughter from Alma. Paul had just told her one of his Kentucky jokes, this one involving a country boy who has sex with animals.
“Swell icebreaker,” I said. The tasteless joke was like a rake morphon, poking and dragging. Who even told jokes anymore? “Don’t mind him, Alma, he gets weird around women.”
“Bela was so eager to get back here and talk to you,” Alma told Paul. “I expected you to be this, like, genius?” She threw up her hands and shook her head. “Did you two discover anything while you were burning the dinner?”
"Something big,” said Paul. “Times like this it’s better not to check the details for a few hours. Then you can still be happy.” “And you’re from Kentucky?” said Alma. “That’s why you told the—joke.”
“I grew up near Louisville,” said Paul. “In a place called Saint Matthews. My father’s a Pentecostal Charismatic minister.” “Pentecostal?” said Alma.
“It means he rants in gibberish,” I put in. “Real hard-core Kentucky.”
“It’s not necessarily gibberish,” said Paul. “They call it the unknown tongue. To me it always sounds somewhat the same no matter who speaks it. Like a real language, almost.” He made some sounds to demonstrate. “Ungh waah oonk yayaya du bogbog ah smeepy flan. When Pop got going in the pulpit, we’d feel like he was telling us important stuff. His church is still quite successful, you know, even though he had an affair with one of the parishioners and my mother left him. She’s a potter in downtown Louisville now. That’s where I finished high school. They’ve never spoken to each other since she left. It’s sad.”
“Can we eat soon?” said Leni, not sure what to make of Paul. “I need some protein before the wine clobbers me.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll set it out.”
“Raaa-bits?” bleated Paul as I put the food on the table, echoing the punch-line of his lame joke. I guess the wine was hitting him too. Nobody laughed.
“You seem like a colorful character,” Leni said to Paul as they helped themselves. “What color do people mean when they say that? Cerise with flashes of lemon? Maybe I should get you to vlog for Buzz.”
"I still haven’t looked at that news report Alma did today” I remarked, wanting to steer the conversation my way. “That was great surfing, wasn’t it, Alma?” I was sitting next to her. I passed her the food and took some for myself.
“It was a blast,” said Alma. “Better than with Pete and Jose.”
“Your big brother and his friend?” said Leni. “Anything’s better than those two. They know about eight words between the two of them. And six of the words are 'fuck.’”
“Oh yeah?” said Alma. “How about your mom dragging you along for shopping at Brashears-Normandy when she came to visit last month, Leni? And giving you all that lipstick and foundation makeup that she got for free.”
“You don’t want to start on parents with me, Alma,” said Leni. “I’ve met yours.”
“I used to see Alma in Santa Cruz,” I put in hastily. “We surfed some of the same places.”
“I saw you playing in a brewpub once, too,” Alma recalled, smiling at me. “That surf-music trio you were in—you were playing some of the songs in the car today? I keep forgetting the name?”
“E To The I Pi,” I said.
“Which equals minus one,” said Paul, his mouth full. “What a great name. You didn’t tell me about this, Bela. Were the other guys math majors too?”
“Physics on drums, computer science on bass, math on guitar. That’s me. Our drummer was a woman, by the way. She and the bass player got married.”
“He really is cute,” said Leni. “I wish you’d vlogged yourself surfing with him today, Alma. That camera’s shockproof and waterproof, you know. I want to get some people to start vlog- ging everything they do. Real reality TV. I’m getting these special wearable cameras called vlog rings.”
“Vlogging?” said Paul. “That means video blogging?” He shook his head. "That reminds me of this boy Jim Ardmore I knew at church camp in Kentucky a really witty guy, very dry, almost like an English person. I was in a cabin with him and this kid named Randy Karl Tucker from a blue-collar neighborhood called Shively. We could hear Randy Karl beating off every night. And Ardmore would call out, 'Flog it, Tuck.’ He had kind of a lisp, Ardmore did, so it came out more like, ‘Fwog it, Tuck.’ ” Paul smiled, savoring the richness of Ardmore’s wit. “That’s what the word ‘vlog’ makes me think about,” he added.
“I’d let you vlog yourself masturbating if that’s what you really want to do,” said Leni, maneuvering some rabbit onto her rice ball. "Is that what you’re getting at?”
"No!” said Paul, looking surprised. “Not at all.” He tended to have very little grasp of how oddly his utterances came across.
“Tell me more about the vlog ring,” I said, to get my friend off the spot.
“Just like it sounds,” said Leni. “You wear it on your finger, and it has a bulgy little fish-eye lens that pulls in a hemispherical field of view. Looks kind of like those tacky rings they try and make you buy when you’re a senior in high school? My first girlfriend actually wanted to give me one. Ugh.”
“Doesn’t a fish-eye image look warped on the screen?” I asked. “Like those freak-out TV commercials of your parents pushing their faces up against you? Have you done your homework, honey? Did you take your meds?”
"The users download some software that flattens out the image,” said Leni. “And since there’s so much visual information coming from the vlog rings, the users can vary their point of view. Like you’re following a person around and deciding what to look at. It’s the latest tech. What if I gave vlog rings to thousands of people? Today I found a way to get vlog rings very cheap. For free, really.”
“Clever you,” said Alma in an oddly hostile tone.
“You could get a bunch of contestants wearing vlog rings, and have the viewers vote on who’s more interesting to walk around with,” volunteered Paul, wiping up sauce with a rice ball. “Half of the contestants get eliminated every week. And eventually there’s only one left.”
“Start with a thousand and twenty-four people, and after ten rounds, you’re down to one,” I put in. “Call the show One in a Thousand.”
“Or do twenty rounds,” said Paul. “And make it One in
a Million.”
“I can’t believe I’m having dinner with mathematicians,” said Alma with a pleased expression. She poured herself more wine and, beneath the table, she ran her bare foot along the top of mine.
“They seem colorful,” said Leni. “Gray and beige are colors, right?”
“You’re a rhetoric major like Alma?” I asked her. I had my shoe off too now. Alma and I were tapping toes.
“No, I’m in communication,” said Leni. “With a minor in business. I’m gonna start a media empire. I like One in a Million. Normally I hate reality shows. They always tilt towards the most average kinds of people. But this could be the opposite. The whole point of the Web is that we can track the outriders and ignore the flyover zone. No more goobers and jennas.”
“Who?” asked Paul, looking around the table for more food.
“That’s surfer slang for uncool people,” explained Alma. She giggled then, feeling the wine. “Like groovy mathemagicians.” She pulled her foot back under her chair.
“I may not be cool,” blustered Paul. “But I’m going to be rich and famous. Right before you two tough cookies turned up, Bela and I figured out how to prove a big theorem. It’ll change the world.”
“Does it have something to do with Professor Haut’s secret demo?” asked Leni. “The frost crystals predicting the election? That was awesome. Too bad he was probably wrong.”
“If he’s wrong maybe it’s your fault, Leni,” said Alma, giving her a sharp look. “Heritagist robot.”
“Shut up. It’s your fault for smooching Bela and vlogging that demo in the first place. Slut. How are you going to change the world, Paul?”
Paul hesitated, as if waiting to see if Alma or Leni were about to throw something at each other. But they weren’t all that worked up. It was just wine and rhetoric.
“We’ve found a new family of—of cosmic harmonies,” said Paul finally. “A way to see all sorts of processes matching up. The key is that you can emulate anything by hooking together these five morphons that—”
“Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” interrupted Alma giddily. “LeapFrog LeapPad. Newborn Baby Tender Love. Did you ever notice that toy names are strings of trochees? DAH-da DAH- da DAH-da. Designed to be whined.” She made her voice super-nerdy and keened, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
“I had a bunch Power Rangers when I was a kid,” said Paul, accepting the interruption. “I liked them.”
“Growing up in Orange County, I was into G.I. Joe,” said Leni. “I put all my Barbie dresses on him. Joe’s always been my role model. See?” She flexed her biceps. Paul looked, but he didn’t touch.
“Here’s a picture of our morphons,” I told Alma, fetching my drawing of the fish in the teapot on the birthday cake on the dish with the rake wrapped all around.
“Boing boing,” she said, touching the part at the bottom where the rake handle coiled around to hold up the dish. “And this is a model of—what?”
“A universal emulator,” I said. “You can adjust the number of candles, the turns of the rake, the angle of the teapot spout, like that. And you get a thunderstorm or a baby or a crooked election or a barking dog.”
“That’s so poetic, Bela.” She gave me a soft pat on my head, and let her hand stay on my shoulder, gently caressing my neck.
“Minkowski sheaf space is very groovy,” put in Paul, reaching over to align my papers to match the table’s edges. “Meaning that it has lots of attractors. Ruts. Things want to match.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying at all,” said Leni. “But the language is—”
“Colorfull ” said Alma, and she and Leni clinked wine glasses. “The key practical application is that Paul and I can finish our theses,” I said. “And maybe get good jobs.”
“Can I turn on the TV now?” asked Leni. “I want to check the election news.”
“Don’t be a jenna,” said Alma. “Let’s listen to the radio. To KALX.”
“Music," agreed Paul. “Pure undulating form.”
So we flaked out on our long couch, smoking some joints Leni had brought, and listening to the good, thick, electric sounds—a typical college-station playlist of groups you’d never heard before and would never hear again, many of them sounding, in the evening’s context, insanely great. Alma sat between Paul and me, with Leni on the other side of Paul. Paul had to be careful not to sit on the crack between two couch cushions, he couldn’t stand that. He was trying to talk math to Leni again, and I grabbed the chance to have a personal conversation with Alma.
“You seem a little tense,” I said.
“I—this afternoon was so much fun. I’m worried the magic will go away.” She was leaning her cheek against the couch cushion, looking at me. Her chin seemed especially fragile. She was so precious, so finely made, and at the same time so cuddly-looking.
“I know what you mean exactly. I want it to keep it going. A lot of things came together today. Patterns meshing.”
“The mighty morphons.”
“I’m noticing them everywhere. Like—hear that guitar feedback? I love playing that stuff. It’s computationally rich. Those bent notes—they’re a model of what’s in my heart. The first flowering of love. Reaching out, drawing back, turning in on itself, stretching out again—you know?”
“Oh, Bela. Would you like to show me your room?”
Paul was uncouth enough to ask us where we were going.
“Hooking up,” said Alma, keeping a straight face until I’d closed my door behind us.
I actually got out my shiny metallic guitar and played a little for Alma, but then she started kissing me and we lay down together on my bed. We made love twice, the first time fast and fierce, the second time slow and thoughtful. And then lay staring into each other’s eyes, the room lit by a candle in a bottle on the floor beside my mattress, the flame reflecting in the chrome of my guitar.
“Tender Bela,” she said, her voice a perfect flower.
“Sweet Alma.”
“Are you going to keep seeing me? Now that you’ve gotten what you wanted?”
“You wanted it too.”
“Answer the question.”
“Yes, I’d like to keep seeing you.”
“Would you like to see me every night?" asked Alma, running her hand across my cheek.
“I don’t know. Probably. Where are you going with this?”
“I don’t have any money left, and Leni says if I can’t pay rent, I have to move out so she can make my room into a server room. She’s getting free vlog rings and servers and bandwidth from—never mind. She’s creeping me out. Could I stay here with you till graduation? It’s just six weeks.”
“Maybe. If I’m not expelled, I’ll be working on my thesis a lot.”
“I won’t bother you, Bela. Say yes.”
“Yes, Alma.” It felt good to think of myself as her protector. It made me feel like a grown man. And she was adorable.
“Do you mean it?” Her voice was so lovely.
I kissed her. “I mean it.”
And then we had sex again.
I woke early. Alma was already gone. She’d left a note with hearts and Xs on the bottom. The note said she had an early class, that she’d be bringing some of her stuff over later today, and that she could hardly wait to sleep with me again. I kissed the note.
On my way to the bathroom, I spotted Paul with his laptop at the kitchen table, the dirty dishes piled and neatly aligned on the counter. His face was quietly exultant.
“Up all night?” I asked. “Sorry I, uh—”
“Easy life for you,” he said. “The first draft of our paper’s almost done. I scanned in your drawings for the illos. Morphic Classification, by Paul Bridge, Bela Kis, and Roland Haut. Don’t protest. You deserve the credit. We wouldn’t have the result without you. You’re smarter than you seem. For instance, you’re the one who spent the night with Alma.”
“Sure I deserve the credit. But Haut? You really want to give that w
indbag a cut of our action?”
“We tell him he only gets to be co-author if he lets you finish your thesis with him,” said Paul. “We coopt him before he starts trying to get you expelled. We throw him a bone. He’s going to want this one.”
“What a concept!” Paul’s generosity was overwhelming. I’d been scared to even think about what was going to happen to my academic career. And now everything was okay? I leaned over the sink, splashing water on my face while the good news sank in. “You’ll really do this for me?” I said, drying myself.
“I print it out and we go see Roland. The sooner the better. Front and center, Kis.”
“I have to tell you something about Alma.”
“She’s beautiful. I wish she was my girlfriend.”
“Don’t say that, Paul. She wants to move in with me. Probably just till her graduation next month.”
“Sproinng."
“Don’t be hitting on her, horn-dog.”
“I won’t need to. One of these days she’ll drop into my hand like a ripe fruit. I just hope that you and I will still be friends.”
He grinned up from his laptop and adjusted his glasses, snugging them against the bridge of his nose. He was wearing the same see-through white shirt and tank-top undershirt from yesterday complete with a greasy rabbit-paprika stain on the slightly bulged-out belly of his shirt. I really had nothing to worry about. Let him fantasize.
“We’ll stay partners no matter what,” I agreed. “Math first, love second.”
On the way to Pearce Hall, I bought a newspaper, looking it over as we walked along. Thanks to the electronic voting machines, the tallies were already final. Van Veeter had beat Karen Barbara by ninety-seven votes. A mocking mirror image of Haut’s prediction. For sure the YWCA fire had made the difference. The fire was being reported as accidental, caused by defective wiring in the fuse-boxes. I figured that was bullshit.
Paul was uninterested in these issues. He was busy leafing through his print-out, making precise corrections with his fine- point pen as we walked.