Mathematicians in Love

by Rudy Rucker

  “I know,” I answered. Over the weeks I’d learned a bit about the habits of cone shell mollusks. Not that the aliens would necessarily behave exactly like South Pacific cone shell snails. But I recalled that, after eating, say, a fish, one of our ordinary cone shells eventually regurgitates any indigestible remains, wrapped in a packet of mucus. “Did you hear the digging in the garden last night?”

  “Yeah,” said Paul. “I guess she’s hiding there.”

  “Under the sand,” I said. “That’s how they like to rest. With a siphon sticking out.”

  “Get dressed,” said Alma, at the mirror brushing her hair into two little pigtails. She wasn’t really listening to us. “Be ready to defend me.”

  “For sure,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here really really fast. Next stop Miller Beach. I’ve got my two surfboards in the squinty whale.”

  “Will you bring your own board?” Paul asked Alma as he pulled on his pants. “So we have three? I want to try this too.” Alma frowned at him. She was all tidy now, with her makeup in place. “I thought you had a big appointment with your chairman today,” she said coldly “You were talking about it all last week. We’ll drop you at the bus station.”

  “You want to get rid of me?” said Paul.

  “Paul, about last night—” Alma shook her head. “That wasn’t the real me talking. That was sexual rhetoric. Actually I’m a prude. I’m trying to make a life with Bela. Get it through your head. Bela’s the one I’ve chosen. The decision is final.”

  “But I have to come along today,” insisted Paul. “Bela and I want to try this experiment with the Gobrane. We’ll be surfing that square natural bridge at Miller.”

  “That’s true, Alma,” I put in. “Paul and I do have a plan.”

  “Please, Alma,” begged Paul. “I’ll be good.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Alma, relishing the attention. “One more day with my two lovers. Do you think I’m horrible?”

  “You’re hot,” I said.

  “You’re the best,” said Paul. “I love you.”

  “Please don’t ever say that to me again,” responded Alma. “And remember, after Big Sur we really and truly split. That’s my board up on the rafters, Paul. You can carry it. And grab my wetsuit off the peg too. And the yellow bikini.”

  “Alma!” Gary Ziff’s voice was right outside.

  “He’s so skeevy,” whispered Alma. “He’s been laid off for a week. Hitting his bug-powder-sinse bong twenty-four/seven. He won’t really do anything to us. He’s probably leading up to asking us for money. I wonder where he got that gold necklace. It almost looks real. What were you guys saying about it?”

  “Your Dad might as well hear the explanation, too,” I said, opening the door. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “You go first,” said Alma, hanging back.

  Gary Ziff was out there alone, his long curly hair hanging down to his shoulders, his bald spot showing in the bright sun. I wondered where his wife and son were. I noticed that both the family vehicles were gone. The neighborhood was very quiet; it was a little past ten A.M. of a dead Thursday morning in June.

  “Are you in a cult?” asked Gary, glaring at me. “Or queer? Is that it?”

  “Of course,” I said, feeling strong and heartless. “I only slept with Alma so I could get at Paul. You like that necklace? Con­sider it Satan’s gift.” I scanned the ground and, yes, there be­neath one of the pumpkin leaves was a pile of bones with a skull on top. The little bundle was slick with mucus. The half­digested rags of Owen’s pants and red tank top lay beneath the bones. The hair on my neck rose, but I kept playing it tough. “You could be next,” I told Gary, pointing at the human re­mains. “Let’s bury this crap, and that’s the end of it. I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

  “No,” said Alma’s father, drawing together whatever dignity he’d once had. “This isn’t right. And I don’t want you seeing my daughter anymore. Murderer.”

  “Oh god,” said Alma, stepping into the yard. “There really is a skeleton?”

  “It’s Owen,” I sighed. “Veeter’s muscleman bodyguard? An alien cone shell ate him and spit him out. And your Dad took the gold necklace off the bone stack. Bad karma, Gary.”

  Gary just looked at me, his eyes tired, bloodshot, sad. It sud­denly struck me that he was, after all, a suffering fellow human. A worried father. Not a knock-em-down inflatable Bozo-the- Clown doll.

  “You need help,” he said quietly.

  “You killed Owen?” echoed Alma. She’d never believed in the cone shell aliens. She took a step forward, a step back, put her hand to her mouth. “That’s what you did to the body? Oh, Bela. Yes, Dad, call the police. Hurry.”

  “The cone shell is right there!” exclaimed Paul, pointing.

  I saw the siphon now, protruding from a dense clump of sunlit pumpkin leaves. It was striped red and white, the size of a man’s arm, gently waving, tasting the air. It knew we were here.

  “I’ll get 911,” said Gary, hustling towards the house.

  “Don’t!” I hissed. “You’ll ruin everything!”

  Perhaps the alien cone shell heard us, for now with a great sliding of gravel, she lifted up from the pumpkin patch, here for real, no longer a mirror-image. Paul gave a low whoop; Alma moaned. The monster was fully ten feet long. Paul had claimed she was female, and somehow this felt right.

  Her shell was a conical spindle, four feet across at one end, and tapering nearly to a point at the other end. The hovering shell was decorated with streamers of overlapping white and reddish-brown triangles, wrapped around it like complex cel­lular automaton patterns. Protruding from the shell was the alien’s snail-like body, irregularly striped in red and white. In front she had an upcurved breathing tube, or siphon. Below the siphon was her mouth tube, with her dark, shiny, watchful stalk-eyes on either side.

  As Gary reached the little concrete slab outside his house’s back door, the cone shell’s mouth opened a bit. A red proboscis emerged like a slender tongue, rapidly growing longer and thinning at its tip. In a flash, the red tendril had stretched a full twenty or thirty feet to find purchase on the back of Gary’s neck. I saw a brief puff of whitish vapor, smelled something bitter. Gary dropped to the ground, twitching.

  The cone shell sped towards Gary, her proboscis withdraw­ing into the recesses of her mouth-tube—which was opening up like a funnel, as if to swallow Gary whole. All of this was happening in silence, everything brightly lit by the June sun. Alma was too shocked to scream. She outran the cone shell and threw her body protectively across Gary’s. I admired that. I had to help my Alma. I pulled out my pistol and ran at the shell, sick at the thought of killing such a remarkable being, but not knowing what else to do.

  “I your friend, Bela,” said the alien as I aimed my gun at a spot between her eyes. “No hurt me.” The sibilant voice was coming from her mouth tube, as if from an elephant’s trunk. She was only a foot or two away from me, floating at my chest level. She smelled of the sea, of decaying meat, and of her alka­loid venom. This was real. I was next to an extraterrestrial. My trigger finger unclenched. I just had to talk to her. Was anyone else watching? I glanced around and saw no neighbors. Everyone in this Cruz neighborhood was at work or surfing or stoned, the tiny lots and houses quietly baking in the mid-day sun.

  “Kill it, Bela,” said Alma, her arms covering her disabled father. Gary Ziff was on his side, curled into the fetal position with his eyes closed. He’d stopped twitching; he almost looked content.

  The cone shell’s mouth tube flexed and whistled. “I your friend, too, Alma. My name Rowena. I help you go La Hampa.” “La Hampa?” said Paul, right at my shoulder. “That’s those islands we saw at the other end of the tunnel?”

  “I live,” said Rowena. “Osckar live. Nataraja live La Hampa. Nataraja jellyfish make your world. You meet jellyfish she make your way.”

  Rowena had saved us from Owen and Gary, and now she wanted to help us pass through the hypertunnel and fix the past!
In other words, the cone shell snail was our ally—although there was still the question of whether she’d caused Cammy’s death.

  “Can you pick up Owen’s bones?” I said to Rowena, not quite ready to talk about Cammy, nor to ask what she meant by a Nataraja jellyfish. I reset the gun’s safety and shoved it in my pocket. “Otherwise we’ll get blamed. Spit them in the ocean or something.”

  “No,” said Rowena, refusing my request. “You come back new world anyhow.”

  “She means that after we go to, um, La Hampa, we’ll return to a parallel world,” Paul remarked to me. “Like I said. The new Earth can have a different past. Calm down, Alma.” He reached down to pat her shoulder, but she ignored him.

  “Bela!” she said accusingly. “That thing killed a man and it poisoned my father!”

  “Father like,” said Rowena. “Conotoxin.”

  Gary had indeed relaxed. He lay sprawled across the low stoop, eyes closed, his face turned to the sun. He was smiling. “Come on, Dad,” said Alma tugging at him. “Sit up.”

  Gary shrugged her off, and settled onto his back. He raised his hands and began slowly moving them back and forth, sa­voring the play of shadows on his eyelids.

  “Oh great,” said Alma once again halfway between laughter and tears. Gary seemed to bring this out in her. “He’s tripping. I hate my family. I hate my life. I hate men.”

  Gary giggled.

  “Let’s go surfing,” said Paul.

  “Yes, yes,” said Alma a little desperately. “Anything to get out of here. Wait, I forgot my bag.” She headed back to the garage.

  I noticed a shovel leaning on the fence. I began digging a hole in the sandy soil of the pumpkin patch to bury the bones. Even if we were out of here, there was no point leaving the problem for poor old Gary. Paul and Rowena watched me dig.

  “What about Cammy?” I asked the cone shell now. “What were you doing to her body?”

  “Sorry you sad,” said Rowena. “I make bet with Osckar. I bet you guys not predictable. He bet you are. So we test. My sister and I learn one human axiom system. We learn Cammy. Peek in her head. Then we look back your past and see if Cammy axiom system make fast predict what she do. I bet no, Osckar bet yes. Osckar right. This Earth is docile.”

  “Axiom system?” exclaimed Paul. “You know about axioms?”

  “I am mathematician. Osckar mathematician. Like you. That why we friend.”

  “Did you make Sandoval kill Cammy?” I demanded. Nudg­ing Owen’s slimy bones into the fresh-dug pit was bringing back the full horror of Cammy s murder. I missed Cammy’s husky voice, her wised-up face.

  “Bad man kill her,” said Rowena. “If we not there he do same. You come La Hampa, you meet Nataraja jellyfish, she make your way.”

  “What’s taking Alma so long in the garage?” said Paul distractedly. “Maybe we should leave without her.” He began scuffing sand into the hole, trying to make my job go faster. "Hey look,” he exclaimed. “My watch was under the bones.” He picked it up with his handkerchief and wiped it off. “It’s still running. That’s terrific.” He slipped the watch onto his wrist, then glanced over at mine. “Seems like it lost two minutes. Hmm. I’d say two minutes is exactly how long it was over there on the other side. Rowena swallowed it with the artichoke and came charging right over to save us from Owen.” A little cau­tiously he reached out and patted Rowena’s shell. It echoed like a drum. “Thanks, Rowena. Our new math pal.”

  “You didn’t see what she and her sister did to Cammy’s body,” I said, shoveling the last of the dirt into the hole. “Cammy’s vlog showed them reflected in her sunglasses, Paul. I didn’t tell you this yet. This creepy man and woman in black showed it to me in a video last night; they said they were from the NSA, but that was bullshit. Kenny Jones and Mary Smith? Come on. I don’t know who they really were. But my point is that in the video, Rowena and her sister were poking tendrils up into Cammy’s neck after she was dead.”

  “Get over it!” exclaimed Paul. “They were studying her brain’s program like Rowena just said. Time to move on, okay? Now we go to La Hampa and undo the murder. I say we leave Alma here and hit the road.”

  Right on cue, Alma appeared at the garage door. She’d re­done her makeup and packed her bag. “Can you carry this for me, Bela?” she called.

  “Okay.” I smoothed out the sand I’d shoveled, then laid some sticks and leaves over the disturbed spot of earth.

  "Can you meet us at Miller Beach?” Paul asked Rowena.

  “I follow,” said the cone shell alien.

  “You’re going to fly right behind us?” I asked the cone shell. “People might—”

  “I fly high,” said Rowena. “Bye.”

  She drifted upwards like a helium balloon, her image dwin­dling to a normal seashell, to a triangle, and then to a dot that hovered above us in the sky.

  I got Alma’s bag and we headed across the yard. Gary Ziff sat up and blinked as we drew even with him. He was still wearing Owen’s gold chain.

  “I better buy that necklace off you, Gary,” I said, hunkering down at his side.

  “Bad karma,” he said, fumbling for it. He couldn’t quite co­ordinate his fingers. I took the necklace off him myself.

  If our trip to La Hampa worked, it could really be that I was leaving this universe for good. And I’d never see this particular Gary again. “Here you go,” I said, taking two hundred dollars out of my wallet and tucking it into his jeans. “Take care of yourself, man. I’m sorry I was ragging on you.”

  “Peace,” said Gary, gently waving his hand.

  “Oh, stop jerking him around,” Alma told me in a sharp tone. “And don't think I didn’t hear what you said to him when you first came out of the garage, you heartless bastard.” She planted a long, fierce kiss on her father’s cheek, then strode out to my squinty-whale station wagon. Paul and I followed, carry­ing Alma’s surfboard, her wetsuit, her bikini, and her suitcase. Alma got in the front seat with me; Paul sat in back. For the moment none of us talked.

  While I was getting the whale turned around, Pete showed up on his motorcycle, his surfboard on the side-rack.

  “Stop,” commanded Alma.

  Reluctantly I rolled down my window so Pete could peer in at us. He had his long wet hair in a ponytail, revealing the hard- weathered planes of his face.

  “Where the fuck you fuckheads goin’?” he asked compan- ionably. “Surf’s down.”

  “We’re gonna try Big Sur,” I said.

  “Hyperspace surfari,” said Paul, trying to be cool. Pete leaned down to get a look at him, then shook his head, as if un­able to come up with a sufficiently profound insult.

  “Keep an eye on Gary,” Alma called across me. "He’s tripping his balls off.”

  “No way. Where’d he score?”

  "I thought you’d know,” said Alma evasively.

  “Laugh a minute, this family,” said Pete. He held out his hand, showing off a loose-fitting vlog ring. “Check this out, I got it for free at the Pleasure Point Monogrub with my break­fast burrito! They’re starting this contest, One in a Million, to find the person with the wildest life. Our Monogrub is the pi­lot project, they just began giving out the camera rings this morning. I’m gonna be a star! I was surfing tubes and vlogging it live, you feel me? I’m on the Web.”

  “The cops are gonna be watching you through that thing, Pete,” I said.

  "And the Heritagist campaign committee,” added Paul.

  “Aw, I can take the ring off if I get into anything sketchy. You two guys want to be worrying about taking good care of my baby sister. Or I’ll waste your ass.” Pete’s hog rumbled onto the concrete driveway as we drove off.

  “We Ziffs may be dysfunctional,” said Alma, settling into her seat with a sigh. “But we look out for each other.” She adjusted her two pigtails. “Maybe everything’s okay. I was waiting in the garage till you were done burying the bones. That was good, Bela. Gary never will sort out what really happened. Give me the gold chain.
”

  What the hell, I handed it to her. She took a tissue from her purse and polished the necklace, examining it in the light.

  “I wake up in bed with two guys, and one of them gives me bling from a murdered thug,” she said, putting the gold chain around her neck. “Evil glamour.” She regarded herself in her compact mirror, looking somewhat mollified. “It’s like a rap video. And I’ve always been such the good girl. Tell me the whole story now. Oh, and let’s pick up some breakfast burritos too. At Monogrub, so we can see about the One in a Million pi­lot project.”

  The south side Santa Cruz Monogrub was indeed handing out vlog rings to all comers. Everyone who wore a Monogrub vlog ring could be accessed on the Monogrub-sponsored One in a Million Web site, and you could vote for whose life was the most interesting to watch, with weekly prizes for the winners. If the project went well, it might soon go all over the Bay Area, and then maybe statewide and even national.

  “This is beyond selling out,” said Paul, regarding the garish, echoing Monogrub dining area as if he were from Mars.

  “Leni is getting some serious money from Monogrub,” said Alma. “Not to mention a grant from the NSA. So do I ask for three rings?”

  “No way,” I said. “What with the weird science we’ve got planned for today, we don’t want to be carrying around surveil­lance cameras! And, you know, Veeter’s gonna be coming after us when he finds out about—”

  “Save it for the car,” said Paul.

  On the way out of Cruz we passed a branch of my bank. I went inside and wired Gyula’s money to his account. And, what the heck, I transferred the rest of the million to my mother.

  As I drove down Route One towards Sur, Paul leaned forward to be part of the conversation, and we told Alma everything we knew, eating our road food as we went along. Paul was talking more than I liked, trying to show off for Alma. It was a drag having to compete with him every second. Finally as we fol­lowed Route One through the strawberry and artichoke fields, he dropped off to sleep.

  “I don’t ever want to share you,” I told Alma. “I hope it doesn’t sound sexist, but I want you to myself. I don’t want to have to worry all the time. Our relationship should be, you know, a safe haven. A port in the storm. A cozy room where we can relax.”