by Rudy Rucker
“Oh hell,” she said sorrowfully. “It’s come to that? Poor Mulvane and Vulma. And those sweet children. Haut’s gonna pay. And it’s back through the tunnel with you three.”
“Eat Haut,” said Jewelle, her red stinger lolling in her mouth.
“It’s not our fault that Haut’s crazy,” put in Alma. “I’m scared he wants to kill me. That’s why I told you. And Paul here wants Haut to stop me from going back. If I try and go through that tunnel, Haut's going to pop up from the water and shoot me!”
“Good,” said Tanya. “That way we’ll catch him. You’re bait. Get them moving, Osckar.”
“Whaddaya, whaddaya, the bum’s rush,” said Osckar, pointing his antennae towards our surfboards at the edge of the lagoon. “Hop on the boards and start paddling. Right now. Goom-bye.”
“At least let Alma and me talk to our jellyfish before we go,” I begged. “Please, Tanya.”
Tanya and Osckar touched antennae in a quick private consultation.
“Oh, all right,” said Tanya after a bit. “The more the jellyfish deals with you, the sooner she’s likely to become a new sun. And we need that. We’ll give you half an hour. Meanwhile Paul here gets on his board and swims out to the natural bridge to wait. Jewelle, you guard him. And Rowena, you escort these two to Jellyfish Lake and then bring them out to the natural bridge too. And no funny business, Bela. You know what those cone shells can do.”
“Thank you, Tanya,” I said. “See you later, Paul.”
Alma and I hurried up the hill. As we passed the lizards’ tunnel mouth, I noticed a smell of charred flesh.
“Haut never did like number theorists,” I remarked to Alma. “He’s an analyst.”
“There’s rival schools of math?”
"Oh yeah. You could learn math if you wanted to, Alma. Now that you know hierophantics.”
“Why bother.”
Seen from the ridge in the daylight, Jellyfish Lake looked small and turbid. As we scrambled down the rocky path to it, I began seeing jellyfish near the surface, myriads of them softly beating.
“Hello,” I called when we reached the water’s edge. “We’re here.”
There was no visible response.
“Maybe we should swim out,” said Alma. “Do they sting?”
I waded in to knee level and touched a few of the jellyfish. They slid across my fingers as harmlessly as wet Jell-O. “No sting,” I said. “They feel good, actually.”
“Let’s do it naked,” said Alma, slipping out of her bikini and laying her necklace on top of it.
I left my trunks on the shore, and the two of us swam out into the lake. Trees shaded the edges; the gentlest of Nanonesian breezes riffled the surface. The little sun’s rays were angling down the ridge into the greenish-yellow, algae-rich water, warming it to nearly the temperature of a bath. And all around us pulsed the jellyfish, millions of them.
Each jellyfish was a little dome, with four short, dangling arms beneath it like the legs of a table. The domed bells were pulsing in waves that moved out from the center, bounced off the rim and returned to the center, there to begin a new cycle. This meant that the smaller jellyfish were pulsing faster: less distance from center to rim. I pointed this out to Alma; she’d already noticed, hierophantically enhanced as she was.
We dove down to about twenty feet, looking for the big one from last night. My visual field held only sunlit yellow-green water and jellyfish, everywhere and at every angle. It was hard to tell which way was up. There might have been about sixty jellyfish touching my body at any one time, four big guys, eight mediums, sixteen smalls, thirty-two tiny ones, like that. A power law.
“It’s incredible to imagine that each of them keeps creating new versions of some particular world,” I said to Alma when we got back to the surface. Rowena was floating in the air, twenty feet above us, watching. Occasionally I’d feel something smooth touching me and think it was part of Alma and it would just be another jelly.
“It’s incredible that we haven’t found our special jellyfish yet,” said Alma. “They do sting a little bit, you know. I noticed it on my lips when we dove just now. I’m starting to feel itchy all over. I’m about ready to get out.”
Just then we felt a cold flow of water against our feet, an up- welling as something huge moved towards the surface.
“Here she comes,” I said.
Without even slowing down, the giant jellyfish moved into our location, engulfing us. And now Alma and I were inside a damp, echoing body cavity. Somehow the little space loomed as large as a cathedral. The floor was as a glassy sea, and in the center stood an alabaster throne ringed by an emerald rainbow. A figure stepped from the throne and walked slowly towards us, a form like a four-armed Shiva with a woman’s face. Each of her gestures was ideally formed and laden with meaning; each gesture was a novel, a theorem, a cosmic work of art.
“Welcome Bela and Alma,” came the voice in my head. “You are as one flesh, one seeker. I bid you bow before me. I am your God.”
Gladly I knelt. Peace filled my heart. I thought to glance over at Alma; her face was suffused with joy. The jellyfish telepathy was hitting us both. For half an instant I flipped back to a not-so-pleasant image of us squeezed into a sac in the body of an alien coelenterate, but then a tingle ran through my brain and I was again seeing the sacred figure, the holy dancer, the end of every quest.
She danced on, her limbs tracing slow, exquisite paths. Alma and I sat cross-legged, holding hands. Veils streamed from the goddess’s arms, the motion-trails weaving into a glowing cable that led away from the throne, across the sea, dwindling into the distance where a tiny planet Earth floated at the long cord’s end. I could see the ice-caps, the continents, the clouds.
“What do you seek, Bela?” asked the goddess. “Utter your heartfelt wish.”
I found myself unable to speak anything but the truth. “I wish I’d made love with Cammy at my mother’s house after the Washer Drop concert in San Jose,” I said. Abruptly Alma dropped my hand. “And that I hadn’t left Cammy alone in Palo Alto,” I added.
“And the wish of your friend Paul?” said the goddess, gazing at me with endlessly deep eyes.
“Oh, Paul wishes he’d never been on meth or Ritalin,” I said grudgingly.
“Let all this be so,” said the goddess, with a smooth gesture of an arm. “What do you seek, dear Alma?”
“I—it doesn’t matter,” said Alma in a small voice. “I don’t want to go back to Earth with him.”
“Yet you and this man are as one,” said the goddess.
“Let me stay!” cried Alma.
“You will part,” said the goddess. “And join again. Remember the last things.”
She made a final fluid hand gesture and released us. The water rushed in upon us and we were on our own, far below the surface of Jellyfish Lake. It was a long swim up; we emerged coughing and gasping for air.
“Look, Alma,” I said, as soon as I could talk. “The guy who slept with Cammy-2 is gonna be Bela-2, not me. I’m still faithful to you.”
“For how long?” she demanded. “Screwing Cammy was your first wish to God! And there I was feeling like you and I were practically married. I’m such a sucker. You’re on your own now, Bela, I mean it. If I can find a way, I’m not going back to Earth at all. I’ll go find those Stanford people who came through in the helicopter."
Rowena was above us, still standing guard. “Come lagoon now,” she said.
In silence we two walked back over the ridge, got our bathing- suits and wetsuits together, and paddled out toward the natural bridge. It was tougher than it had been paddling in. A tide was running, and the wind had risen enough to make some waves. Alma was sulky and balky, but Rowena kept urging her on, even to the point of threatening to sting her.
We found Paul floating out there with Jewelle watching him. There was no sign of a hypertunnel.
“About time,” said Paul as we pulled up next to him. “Are you going to make a hypertunnel for
us, Rowena?”
“You do,” said Rowena. “Pray jellyfish.”
“Not me,” said Paul. “I already put in a lifetime’s worth of that prayer shit, growing up as a preacher’s son.”
There’d been no religion at all in my family, other than some perfunctory Confucian ancestor ceremonies. But the divine dancer had converted me.
“The jellyfish is God,” I said.
“And Bela couldn’t wait to tell her that his biggest wish in life is to fuck Cammy,” said Alma. “Can you believe that?”
“Did you tell her about getting me off speed?” asked Paul.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “She said okay.”
“Thanks, dog. Now pray for the hypertunnel,” said Paul. Certainly I could imagine praying to the divine jellyfish. But with Alma angry, Paul dubious, the wind rising, and the cone shells no longer so friendly—I found it hard to focus.
“Please make a tunnel back to Earth for us,” I said into the air.
“Let me stay here,” added Alma in a more fervent tone. “I don’t want to go. Help me, jellyfish. Help me, Nataraja.”
“Pray better, Bela,” said Jewelle. “Like magic spell.”
“Tunnel, tunnel, tunnel,” I chanted. “Earth, earth, earth. Please send us back, dear God of Jellyfish Lake.”
No tunnel appeared. The breeze freshened; low clouds scudded by. I heard a rumble of thunder.
“Oh, hell, I better show you how to use the unknown tongue,” said Paul. “Like my Dad. Wah, wah, ooth wun graar umb-umb- umb ka-wheeeel"
And still we got no tunnel. But now the hierophantic part of my brain showed me the special incantation, the precise sequence of sounds that I needed to make.
“Inch’allah tekelili eloi uborka Gaia," I said. As I intoned the formula, I visualized the glowing dancer within the jellyfish. Something wriggled beneath the surface of the sea; swirls eddied the water beneath the arch.
“Look out!” yelled Alma, eager to get away. “There’s a whirlpool! It’ll suck us down!” She paddled off to the side.
Rowena flipped out her long red tongue to pull Alma and her surfboard back into our midst. The cloudy sky began spitting rain. The sluggish eddy beneath the arch wasn’t anything like a hypertunnel yet.
I said the magic spell once more. “Inch’allah tekelili eloi uborka Gaia.” With a sharp crack of thunder, a giant streamer of light pulsed up from the alien mathematicians’ island behind us. I saw the face of the goddess within the fiery pillar. And now the column of light split into branches. Most of the branches went up through the sky—but one arched like a rainbow, alighting upon the natural bridge and bedecking it with a crown of purple flames.
Thunder rolled again and a squall pelted me, stinging my skin. The tongues of flame licked into the space beneath the bridge; the maelstrom in the sea rose up to became a waterspout within the bridge’s arch. The twisting vortices of fire, air, and water wove themselves into a glowing egg: the mouth of a hypertunnel.
“You go,” said Rowena, propelling my surfboard forward with the lip of her shell. The alien mathematician showed no emotion, and she offered no fond good-byes—just a shove. Geek. It was Haut’s fault that the La Hampans didn’t like us anymore. I’d kind of hoped to see him appear by the bridge and get eaten by Jewelle, but that no longer seemed to be in the cards.
I was sliding steadily towards the hypertunnel now; it felt as if I were on rails. As before, the flow of time was distorted near the tunnel’s mouth. The raindrops ahead of me were rapid streaks; the ones behind me hung vibrating in the air. I craned back over my shoulder to see what was happening to my two companions.
“I’m not going back with them!” Alma yelled, trying again to paddle away. From my vantage point, her voice sounded deep and slow. “If you don’t want me at this level, bump me up to Par- adisio!” By way of answer, Rowena propelled her towards the arch in my wake. Alma’s gestures sped up as she came, the mauve glow of the hypertunnel’s mouth glinting off her X-eyed smiley face medallion.
Paul was taking up the rear. “Don’t kill Haut,” he told Jewelle, his voice thick and syrupy. “He’s nuts, but he’s my friend. If you catch him, just send him through the tunnel after us.”
“You go,” said Jewelle, as cold as Rowena. She shoved Paul after Alma and me.
I looked up ahead, making sure I was heading directly into the hypertunnel. In just a moment I’d be in. Down near the core of the egg, I could see a tiny image of the Pacific surf lit by the good old California sun.
Glancing back again, I saw Paul trying to push Alma off to one side so she’d miss the tunnel. For once these two were in agreement. Rowena and Jewelle flew towards them and— Haut shot up out of the water like a breaching whale. He was still in his white robe, with those furiously beating gossamer wings strapped to his back, the wings etching frantic figure eights into the air. In his right hand he clutched his red and yellow ray gun, an anachronistic wonder-weapon with Art Deco fins. The apparition was comical, but Haut was aiming at Alma and preparing to—
Jewelle descended upon Haut from behind, her mouth distended into a hideous floppy funnel, her stinger darting for the math professor’s neck. Haut managed only one shot before he disappeared into Jewelle’s crop. Although he’d aimed well, the hierophantic time-warped Alma managed to roll off her board before the beam hit; the gun’s rays bounced off the water and into the mouth of our hypertunnel, lighting it up like a neon tube.
And then I was well into the tunnel, its hyperspace corridor tight and weird. It was all I could do to stay on my board. I saw Paul, myself, the still-lingering energies of Haut’s blast, the vine-like control cord of the jellyfish—but no Alma.
I heard a low rumble as Paul and I popped out from the Miller Beach natural bridge into the oncoming icy surf. Just ahead of us were three surfers: identical copies of Alma, me, and Paul. The Paul-2 was riding midway between Bela-2 and Alma-2; he was kneeling on his board rather than standing. The three had caught a wave and were heading to my right, on course to avoid the big rock behind me that held the natural bridge. But I just happened to be positioned so as to block their path.
Bela-2 shouted a warning to the others, then veered to my left to keep from hitting me. Paul-2 and Alma-2 followed his lead. As they passed, Alma-2 yelled “Goober!” at me for cutting in on them—and in that split second our eyes met. She was wearing the same yellow bikini, but no gold necklace. She recognized me; her jaw dropped. The wave carried her past me. Again I heard a rumble.
Turning my board around to stare at the natural bridge, I saw no sign of Alma-1 coming out. But the glow from within it meant that the hypertunnel remained open. I was still expecting her to appear.
Paul-1 was closer to the rock, ideally situated to block the Earth-2 surfers from any route save into the glowing square hole. He was paddling hard now, as if trying to leave an escape route for Alma-2. But fate was such that the three whooped and went for it, just as we three would have done. They disappeared into the square hole.
All this time the rumbling had been growing; now it rose to a sharp peak. Dust sprang from the natural bridge; the stones tottered; foam and ripples surged from within the square arch.
I paddled towards it, my stomach hollow with fear. The glow in the door was gone. Though the stones were still shifting, Paul had gone all the way in; a moment later his voice echoed off the stones, shaking with grief.
“Alma! Alma! Alma!”
Paul and I fished her out from the water, pathetically limp, her skin cold, her ankle still leashed to her surfboard. One of the falling rocks had crushed the back of her head.
“Which Alma is it?” I said, feeling unworthy for asking.
“She’s not wearing that necklace,” said Paul slowly. “I guess it’s Alma-2. This was supposed to be my Alma now. All those grandiose maneuvers of ours, Bela, and all we did was kill her.”
“If you hadn’t gotten Haut to come and shoot that ray gun into the tunnel—” I began.
�
�Don’t,” said Paul, his voice low and sad.
Another rock dropped from the arch above us, nearly hitting us. We barely noticed.
“My Alma’s still alive in La Hampa,” I said, feeling desperate. “She stalled Jewelle and Rowena from pushing her through the hypertunnel. I bet they had to settle for carrying her up to Paradisio.”
“Or maybe they did push her through the tunnel and her necklace fell into the ocean,” said Paul. “Maybe this is Alma-1, and Alma-2 is in La Hampa. Either way—we suck.” He wept as he kissed Alma’s pale, cold cheek. “I loved her as much as you did, Bela.”
My shield of denial gave way. This was Alma, and the 1 and 2 business didn’t matter. This beloved woman was dead. I threw back my head and howled.
Paul and I floated Alma to shore on her board, her blood running freely into the sea.
Some of the same people as before were on the beach: the boy with the blonde pompadour, the leathery woman, the shrill little girl. And there, sitting on some towels, was Cammy Vendt, wearing her black jeans and sleeveless T-shirt.
“Is Alma hurt bad?” she cried.
“She’s dead,” said Paul flatly. He turned to me, his face working. “Look who’s waiting, Bela. Lucky you.”
“Don’t,” I said. “We have to stay friends. And maybe—” But now Cammy and the tanned woman had come running out to us.
“Get the ranger, Tyler!” shouted the brown-skinned woman, and the blonde teenage boy sprinted away. As if creepily fascinated, the little girl in the red bathing-suit inched towards Alma’s limp body.
Cammy hugged me. She smelled good; she was lithe and warm in my arms. “Oh, Bela, this is grim. That was an earthquake, you know. And you’re okay? Poor Alma. I’m sorry, Paul. You were a great couple.”
“We could have been,” said Paul distractedly. He walked over to Cammy’s towels and lay down on his side, curling himself into the fetal position.
“Stop that, Ashley,” said the tan woman to the serious-faced little girl, who was holding out her hand towards Alma. I now noticed that the girl was wearing a vlog ring.