by Rudy Rucker
I got out my Gobubble and had a good look at it while I ate some leftover rice and fried grasshoppers. The paracomputer was rubbery, the size of a nectarine, and with a faint organic smell—a whiff of the sea, a sniff of decayed meat.
It would have been an exaggeration to call the Gobubble a perfect sphere. Its shape was continually undergoing minor adjustments: flattening out like a tangerine, bulging out one end like a pear, forming a faintly indented hourglass waist, or all of these at once, leading to wandering patterns of bumps. Nor was the ball totally smooth at the small scale; its surface was alive with goose bumps and shivering ripples. As I nestled it in my hand, I could feel it pulsing and wrinkling like the skin on a bald gnome’s head.
“Can you predict me?” I asked the Gobubble. The pastel shades of its shimmering surface flowed and interlocked to form an image of me sitting at my kitchen table. I set the bubble down and stared into it. “I’m going to raise one of my hands in a second,” I said. “Show me which one.”
The little figure inside the bubble raised his left hand. So I decided to raise my right hand, just to prove the Gobubble wrong. But even before my right hand started to move, the Gobubble caught up with my intentions and changed its image to match. I altered my plan and raised my left hand instead, but by the time my left hand was in the air, the Gobubble had gone back to showing my left hand in the air as well—just like it had predicted in the first place.
I felt within myself, wondering if I still had access to the hi-erophantic mode of thought. Perhaps I’d be harder to predict when I remembered to think in the advanced La Hampan way. After a moment’s introspection, I felt my new techniques kick into gear. I gerrymandered my thought maps into new districts, zoomed out to see higher-order patterns, and began short-circuiting long deductions with lightning-fast jumps.
“Predict what I’m going to write,” I told the Gobubble, then put a piece of paper down in my lap and scribbled a hierophantic conclusion that popped unexpectedly into to my head, to wit: “Cammy is fucking Waclaw.” Geez. Could that be true?
But before dealing with this unexpected content, I wanted to finish my Gobubble test. Holding the paper pressed flat between my two hands, I regarded the iridescent ball. The Bela figure inside had his hands in the same position as mine.
“Show me your paper,” I said. “Predict what I’ve written.”
Obligingly the Gobubble Bela opened his hands and, oh wow, his paper said, “Cammy is fucking Waclaw,” in the exact same handwriting I’d used.
Which meant that the Gobubbles really could predict me, even when I got all hierophantic on their ass. But being unpredictable wasn’t my front-burner issue anymore.
“Show me what Cammy’s doing right now,” I told the Gobubble.
The gleaming ball shuddered, cleared, and there was Cammy, nude and sensual on a king-sized bed with a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge through pink silk curtains. A slender, pale-skinned guy with weird crystal-patterned tattoos and lank, greasy blonde hair was on top of her, his butt dancing, his soft- stubbled face rubbing her smooth-skinned cheek. Cammy’s eyes were slitted with pleasure, with lust, and she was whispering his name, pronouncing it that special way: “Vahkwahv, Vahkwahv, Vahkwahv.”
“Enough,” I told the Gobrane. “And that’s only a prediction, right? Not a videotape or a real-time vlog ring image?”
“Just a prediction,” said the Gobrane, its surface taking on the mottled, live-paisley look that it had when it wasn’t computing much of anything in particular. “But I’m always right. I know from the Grand Hotel hall cameras that she’s in his room.”
I remembered something that Cammy had said to me on the way to our San Jose concert. “Sex isn’t that big a deal to me. It’s like brushing your teeth. I don’t see why everyone gets so bent out of shape.” But, dammit, how could she be up for another lover so soon after sleeping with me? I’d thought only men were like that.
I heard a motorcycle in the street.
“Oh shit, Pete Ziff!” I exclaimed, running to check the lock on my door. “Is he coming here to get me?” I asked the Gobub- ble over my shoulder.
“In less than two minutes,” said the Gobubble, “He’ll kick in your door. Might as well leave it open so you don’t have to repair it.”
“Simulate him for me,” I said, undoing the lock. “Quick. Help me figure out what to say.”
An angry Pete appeared in the Gobubble, facing a cringing Bela.
“I’m really sorry,” I said tentatively into the sphere. “It was an accident. An earthquake.” Pete’s pool cue swung down; the little Bela crumpled.
“Reset,” I said, and the scene returned to the same spot as before.
“It was Paul’s fault,” I essayed. “He steered her into the rocks.” Once again, Pete’s club slammed into the virtual Bela’s head.
I could hear Pete’s real world feet on the Ratvale stairs. I tested a third line on the Gobubble simulation: "You have to help me stop the Heritagistsl” The Pete image paused and—
In the real world my door flew open, and Pete came stalking in like a movie monster, carrying the heavy sawed-off pool cue in his hand. “You have to help me stop the Heritagistsl” I cried. Pete paused and—lowered his club. “Those motherfuckers? Are you sayin’ it’s their fault Alma’s dead?”
“No, dog,” I said, winging it. “But why kill me and go to jail? Listen, I’ve got plans. But first take off that vlog ring. I told you before, you’re wack to be wearing a cop spy camera all the time. Especially if you’re planning murder one.”
I had Pete off-balance now. Almost sheepishly he pulled off the vlog ring and then—being the kind of guy he was—threw it on the ground and stomped it to bits.
“Right on,” I said. “You and me can help save the country, Pete. And talking about fault—if you hadn’t given us those conotoxins—”
Abruptly his face tightened, he flopped down on my couch and burst into tears. “I been thinkin’ that myself. I’m not dealin’ that shit no more. Last night I took all those nasty little snails out of Sarah’s aquariums and—”
“You were milking the venom yourself? No wonder it was so strong. The natural bridge looked enormous to us, Pete, it was like a train tunnel to another world. Even so, we would have slid through fine if it hadn’t been for the earthquake.” Pete’s expression was hardening again. I was talking too much. But I couldn’t stop myself. “Listen, dog,” I blithered, “I’m thinking about ways to bring Alma back. I’m into some weird science like you wouldn’t believe.” As I said this, it struck me that, if Alma returned, it wouldn’t be to this world. The jellyfish god was all done with this world. Any further changes in it were up to the folks living in it now. Up to people like Pete.
He smoothed the planes of his face with his grimy hands, wiping away all traces of the tears. His hand strayed back to his pool cue. “You slushed geek. I oughtta—”
“Look at this ball,” I said, frantic to win him over. “It predicts the future.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a new kind of computer called a Gobubble. The Heritagists are using them to rig the election. They can see what’s coming, so they know what to put in their ads.” The Gobubble was of course reporting on my saying this, but I didn’t care. I was gearing up for all-out war. I picked up the ball and handed it to Pete. “Try it out. Ask it something.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. About whatever you’re planning to do today.” “Planning to kick your ass.”
“Not that. Come on, Pete, we can be on the same side. Ask the Gobubble something useful. Then you’ll begin to understand.” Pete hefted the ball dubiously. “Is Navaho Jack gonna have a good sprocket for my bike at his Oaktown junkyard?” he finally asked.
The ball responded, thank God, showing a scene of Pete talking to a rough character in a sleeveless work shirt. The guy was telling Pete to try Jeremiah’s junkyard over in Bayview.
“Hmmpf,” grunted Pete, just like
Alma would have. “Is Jeremiah gonna have the sprocket?” he asked the Gobubble.
The ball displayed Pete sitting outdoors on a broken-down cloth couch with a rawboned, wild-eyed guy in a straw cowboy hat. Mounds of junk towered all round, with a few beat old camping trailers scattered among them. Resting on Pete’s lap was a large, toothed metal gear: a motorcycle sprocket. The demented-looking virtual hick with the virtual Pete was drinking a long-neck bottle of beer from a cardboard case sitting on the ground beside the couch.
“Good old Jeremiah!” said Pete, hefting the Gobubble with a pleased air. “Of course. Hey, do I have a chance of spending the night with Lizard Girl?”
The scene shifted to show Pete, still in the same junkyard, talking to an alert, pleasant-faced woman with a hard-core beehive hairdo and lizards tattooed on her arms. She was standing by a rounded aluminum trailer with a T. rex painted on its side.
“You can test out different lines that you say to her,” I told Pete. “So you can see how she’ll respond.”
“Fuck me!” he said into the ball, and the Lizard Girl image turned her back and walked away.
“You’re beautiful!” he tried; Lizard Girl laughed and wandered off to drink beer with Jeremiah.
“I’m so unhappy,” said Pete; the virtual Lizard Girl took his hand and led him into her trailer.
“All right,” said Pete, handing back the Gobubble. "Now I’ve planned my day.”
“Hold on,” I said, A full-blown scheme of action for unseating the Heritagists had hierophantically formed in my mind, and this was a plan I didn’t want the Gobubble to overhear. I put the Gobubble back in its case and stashed the case under the pillow in my bedroom.
“I’m serious about fighting the Heritagists,” I told Pete, coming back into the kitchen. “My idea is to pirate thousands of copies of these Gobubbles and give them away at our stadium concert with AntiCrystal tomorrow.” I had a strong suspicion that Veeter had told Paul the recipe right after we’d left yesterday. “The Heritagists will lose their power over us once everyone else has Gobubbles, too. People will be able to look ahead and see what Doakes really plans: the poverty, the pollution, the prison camps, the endless war.”
“What use would I be to you?” said Pete. He looked very open just now. Seeing the sad lines on his troubled face, I realized that he had an innate tendency towards depression and—what had Alma said?—low self-esteem. Poor guy, the sister who loved him had died. I took a chance and hugged him.
“Alma loved you,” I said.
"Her funeral’s on Tuesday,” said Pete, stepping back and regarding me. “We’re gonna scatter her ashes at Pleasure Point. She’d want you there. And that Stanford guy.” He meant Paul.
“I’ll be there,” I said, feeling a sense of déjà vu. Another funeral for a girlfriend. I was a jinx. I had a sudden image of the depression morphon—a teapot whose spout runs out of the pot’s bottom, spilling all the tea on the ground. I took a deep breath and pushed past it.
“You can do something, Pete. Come to the Washer Drop concert at the stadium tomorrow and help spread the Gobubbles around,” I handed him six of the tickets Thuggee had left with me. “Bring some friends.” A Crew badge lay by the tickets, and I gave that to Pete too. “This’ll get you in without having to be searched. It might be that we’ll need some extra security. It’d feel good to know we have a guy like you on our side. Bring weapons.”
“Sweet!” said Pete, actually smiling as he regarded the tickets. “I’ll bring Lizard Girl and Jeremiah and Prescription John and Wrong Wave Jose and—” His face fell again, thinking of his sister.
“We’ll be doing it for Alma,” I said.
After Pete left, my thoughts turned back to Cammy. It didn’t seem likely that our romantic relationship would get all that far. I shouldn’t ask much from her along these lines, lest love-problems break up our band. And then I thought of Roberto Sandoval, Cammy’s murderer on Earth-1. Should I be worrying about him on Earth-2?
I went and fetched the Gobubble again.
“Show me Roberto Sandoval of San Jose, California,” I said.
“No data,” answered the Gobubble in a sulky tone. Its surface was a pattern of blots and loops.
“His sister’s name is Eva,” I said, remembering this from the last time around. “He lives with her on, um, 11th Street.”
“Okay,” said the Gobubble, displaying a visa photo of a dark woman with a crooked face. “I have Eva Sandoval’s cell phone number. Should I call that for you?”
“Yeah,” I said. I had no idea what I was going to say. I was letting my hierophantics do the thinking.
A voice came on, speaking Spanish, then switching to English. Yes, this was Eva Sandoval. I heard noise in the background; it sounded like a restaurant. Just to get something going, I introduced myself as Curt Girdle, a publicist for the band Washer Drop, and said I was interested in talking to her brother Roberto.
“I don’t know where he is.”
“You and Roberto won a pair of free tickets to the Washer Drop show tomorrow night,” I said. “They’re opening for AntiCrystal. It’s at Heritagist Park, the baseball stadium in San Francisco.”
“Washer Drop again?” said Eva in an impatient tone. “You haven’t pay Roberto enough last time. Not his fault that girl left too soon.” Aha. Someone in the background was yelling at Eva in Spanish. “Just a minute, Julio, I’m on the phone, I got business.”
“Can Roberto take the train to the stadium?” I asked. "One of us could meet him at the Willie Mays statue outside it. The train stops right across the street.” I was winging it, waiting to see what developed.
“He don’t never take the train,” said Eva. “Send a driver like last week.”
Oho. “You mean—last Saturday morning?” I said.
“Saturday morning your car came taking Roberto to Palo Alto, no?” said Eva. “And you haven’t pay him his second half. You bring that when you picking him up tomorrow.”
“Where’s Roberto right now?” I asked.
Eva’s voice turned suspicious. “You the same guy, no? Friend of Frank Ramirez?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’ll call again later.”
I stared absently out my window at Haste Street as the scrolls and gliders of my thoughts processed my inputs. Last week Vice President Frank Ramirez had arranged a ride for Roberto Sandoval to Palo Alto so that Sandoval could murder Cammy Vendt. Why? To smear Veeter and the paracomputation technology that was scoring so many points for Veeter in the Heritagist party’s higher circles. Did that mean Ramirez would strike at Cammy again? Not necessarily; his primary target was, after all, Van Veeter. Ramirez’s next hit might come from a different angle.
As for Sandoval—assuming Earth-1 matched Earth-2 in this respect, Sandoval had been a hit man, not a stalker, and all the statements he’d made had been false. But then why the multiple stab wounds on Earth-1? Because making the slaughter splashily sensational had been an essential part of his PR-directed mission. And perhaps he’d been enjoying himself as he stabbed Cammy-1 sixteen times. With the Vice President Ramirez in his corner, Sandoval would have expected early release from prison, regardless of the savagery of the crime—so he’d made the most of his opportunity.
I felt very uneasy now. Again I asked the Gobubble to show me Roberto Sandoval; again I drew a blank. I figured the NSA was masking his data, at least from me. Again I checked on Cammy; she was still in bed with Waclaw. I phoned her cell. “Yeah?” said Cammy.
“Having fun?”
“What’s on your mind, Bela?”
“I wanted to warn you about Roberto Sandoval. The guy Thuggee threw off the stage at the San Jose concert? I didn’t stress this enough last night. Sandoval was, you know, the bad guy in the other world that I was talking about. He’s here, too.”
“Bela—”
“I have some information that makes me think Sandoval might come after you. So please be careful. Don’t be alone.”
&n
bsp; “I’m not alone.”
“I know,” I said. “And ask Waclaw to have one of his roadies give you a ride when you come back. A guy with a gun.”
“Just chill, Bela.” She rang off.
Okay, I’d warned her. But I still couldn’t let go of the Sandoval thing. The fact that his sister Eva had seemed a little surprised by my call meant that Ramirez hadn’t yet asked Sandoval to do a follow-up attempt at a hit. So now I started worrying that my call itself would in fact trigger such a hit. So I called Eva up and told her not to do anything, never mind, forget it, and Roberto should stay home. She hung up on me, too.
Maybe I really was going crazy. Maybe I was one rigorously logical step from fingerpainting the walls with my own shit. Maybe I’d taken conotoxins yesterday, and I’d hallucinated the whole deal about La Hampa and the two Earths. I needed reassurance.
“Show me Paul Bridge,” I told my Gobubble.
“I have weak, fluctuating data for him,” said the Gobubble. "And intermittent interference. The image will have very low reliability.” It showed me a picture of Paul sitting in his back yard sunning himself with his shirt off. That was unreliable all right. Paul hated sunbathing. And then, suddenly the image of Paul switched to showing him bowling, which was also out of the question. I figured he’d found a way to thwart the Gobubbles’ ability to predict him. Good old Paul.
I called him on his phone.
“How’s it going, dog?” he said. “You and Cammy?”
“Okay” I said, not wanting to feed still more info into the phone tap. “Lulu?”
“Gettin’ gooder by the minute. She’s my kind of woman: brilliant and perverse.”
“I’m wobbly, Paul. Was our trip real?”
“Hyper real.” His voice was calm and comfortable.
“I need to see you,” I said. “I’m thinking of the Humelocke math picnic.” At the first departmental math picnic Paul and I attended together, we’d spent a memorable hour blowing soap bubbles.