by Rudy Rucker
Reacting faster than thought, I hit Sandoval in the chest with a burst of submachine-gun fire. Hell, yeah. He fell onto his back; his legs beat a tattoo on the ground; he lay still. I got out of the car. I’d killed him, just like I’d wanted to. So why did I feel so bad?
“Good, Bela,” said Gyula, limping into the yard, blood all over his shirt-front. “You’re learning.” And then he pitched forward, dead, the closest thing to a brother I’d ever had. I started crying.
I was pretty sure that Van and Paul were dead, too. Owen and Tito’s voices were coming from the house, Tito’s voice high-pitched and speedy Owen’s low and halting.
Time for me to leave? No, man. I had to see this to the end. I dried my eyes on my shirtsleeves and reloaded my MAC M10. Holding my gun at the ready, I stepped into the house— and faced Owen holding a shotgun aimed at my chest. Fortunately I had my submachine gun aimed directly at him.
“Brother Yuan,” I said in Chinese. "Be my friend.”
"Ugly guy shit crazy,” answered Owen in the mother tongue. His flat moon face was slick with sweat. “Shoot the boss and your friend. Write blood on wall. Shoot Gyula. Run outside. He say blame you or he kill me too.”
“Sandoval’s dead,” I said. “It’s safe now I no shoot, you no shoot. Agree?”
Owen studied me for the longest time and finally, in unison, we lowered our guns. I reached out my left hand and shook with Owen.
“Shanghai,” I said.
“California,” said Owen, with a tentative smile.
“Yo, yo, yo!” came Tito’s voice from the next room. “Help me out. I need a doctor.”
He was stretched out on the floor, wearing a mournful expression and bleeding lightly from a superficial gunshot to his thigh. He said he wanted an ambulance, but he didn’t really look that bad. I took his weapons away, then tore some bath towels into strips and tied them around his wound to fully stop the blood.
In the course of getting the towels, I got a stomach-turning glimpse into the ghastly charnel house of Van’s bedroom. Paul and Van lay dead and naked on the blood-drenched bed, each of them shot in the chest and the head. Oh, Paul. Our long journey together was over. Ramirez had set up the crime to look like an occult sex murder. He’d scrawled my name and a five-pointed star in blood on the wall. Wipe it off? Better idea: get the truth out.
With Tito’s bleeding stanched, I circled around the house looking for a sample vlog ring—and soon I found a whole box of the Monogrub models that Rumpelstiltskin was producing. I opened one of the bubble packs, slipped on a ring, and it went live. Before continuing, I used some voice commands to reroute the ring’s wireless output to Pollinator—lest Monogrub quash the news.
“I’m Bela Kis,” I told the vlog ring then. “I’m at the house of former congressman Van Veeter, who’s just been murdered by Roberto Sandoval.” As I talked, I made my way back into the dining room where Tito lay on the floor. “Sandoval was brought into Veeter’s home as an extra bodyguard by Tito Cruz. Tell us about it, Tito.”
“I can’t,” said Tito, tightening his long lips. “Get me to a doctor, okay?”
“Sit him up and make him talk,” I told Owen.
Owen cracked his knuckles as if preparing for exercise, then hunkered down and propped up Tito, moving him as easily as a rag doll. Owen’s hand was gripping the back of Tito’s neck, the other was poised on Tito’s wound.
“Hurt him now?” said Owen.
“I’m scared,” said Tito, his eyes darting around. “They’ll get me.
“It was Ramirez, right?” I said. “Tell us your story and he’ll go to in jail instead of you. This is going out national, Tito. Ramirez won’t have a place to hide. If you stay quiet, you’ll be the one in prison—and Ramirez will have you killed in the yard.”
“Okay,” said Tito with a long sigh. “Here’s how it came down.” In a few minutes he’d laid out the whole deal. He had some bad debts; his old gang was gonna ice him; he got a call from Ramirez himself that he could clear things if he’d bring a special guy into Van’s staff, a San Jose hit man named Roberto Sandoval. Sandoval’s job was to kill Van and Paul—and to frame Bela for the killing. Tito didn’t like the setup, but what could he do? Nobody could go up against Ramirez. Owen was supposed to play dumb, and Tito was planning to play the unsuccessful hero. He’d shot himself in the leg.
“Just to be perfectly clear,” I said, “You’re talking about Vice President Frank Ramirez?”
“That’s it,” said Tito. “He phoned me or Roberto every day. You could check the phone records.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You still want an ambulance?”
“I don’t want nobody coming in here till the shit storm’s over,” said Tito, awkwardly getting to his feet. “First car to reach our gate’s gonna be Heritagist hit-men, and the second and third ones too. Don’t worry about this scratch on my leg. It ain’t shit. I made it myself, I can fix it myself. Van always kept a bitchin’ medicine cabinet.” He hobbled towards the bathroom, leaning on Owen’s shoulder.
I heard sirens beyond the front gate, stalled for now by the crackling gunfire of the robot guards. I discarded the vlog ring and went out to the patio. The sky was red; I was about done here.
I’d found a world where Cammy still lived, and I’d taken a shot at making her my lover. That hadn’t worked out, but oh well. In a way, I’d avenged her murder, which was good. And on the wider scale, I’d saved the U.S. from a Heritagist dictatorship. And that was even better.
But in this world, Paul and Alma were both dead.
I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to get back to Alma.
I drew my Gobubble, battery and wires from my pocket.
Timing the sparks did the trick. A moment later my Gobubble began pulsing ruby and sapphire colors that merged into vibrant amethyst. It grew to several meters in size, a jewel beyond price. Within its clear center I could see the water worlds of La Hampa. I backed off, took a running start and leapt into the hypertunnel.
This time around, I emerged in midair, amidst water planets bobbing beneath a shiny sky that curved around to make a vast hollow sphere. A bright little sun glared over my shoulder. I didn’t see any planet resembling the one with the alien mathematicians; none of the jiggling orbs seemed to hold an island with a Jellyfish Lake. Up above me, the hypertunnel was already gone.
I was falling towards the nearest of the planets; it boasted a large, curved island with a long beach and a waterfall-bedecked central mountain. I noticed five thatched houses along the beach and some figures sitting in the shade. They showed no sign of noticing me. I strained my eyes against the beating air, trying to see if my Alma might be on the island. But I couldn’t even be sure the figures on the beach were human.
“Give me an easy landing, dear Nataraja,” I said aloud to the distributed Nataraja-being that filled La Hampa. My prayer was answered; I cut into the water as cleanly as a high diver.
Fish schooled around me. I spread my arms to slow my descent towards the dimly gleaming sea floor—which I knew to be the sky of a lower level. I passed a long twisted piece of metal: the blade of the NSA helicopter that had delivered those Stanford mathematicians. This meant I was in Paradisio, the level above the Nanonesia of the cone shells and the cockroaches. I kicked my way back to the sea’s upper surface.
As I emerged, something bright and fast flew low over my head—a butterfly, a hummingbird? No, it was bigger than that, a meter long. It circled back towards me, a cartoony humanoid form with two bell-bottom legs, a lumpy ovoid bottom, a tapering torso chest with tear-drop arms, and a translucent bulb-head with a pair of antennae. Another alien.
The figure hovered above me, glowing in rich neon colors: seaweed-green legs, carroty-red bottom and arms, cobalt torso, robins-egg-blue head-bulb, and lilac antennae. The more I looked at it, the brighter it shone. I smelled ozone, as if from an electrical generator. I hoped the alien wasn’t about to sting me.
"So say something,” I said,
treading water in the warm, clear sea. “I’m a human named Bela. What are you?”
The alien tweeted a word so fast that I couldn’t make it out.
“Come again?” I said.
"Jimbo,” chirped the little figure. “Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo.” It pooted four short-lived cannonballs of light from the funnel-bottoms of its legs, each with an image inside. The result was a crystal-ball comic strip explaining the origin of the Jimbos. Glowing magnetic tornados lifted free from a speckled Sun to float across space. The space eddies touched down on a nearby planet’s atmosphere—was that a future version of Earth? The magnetohydrodynamic swirls came alive with neon colors and took on playful forms: Jimbos. The Jimbos tagged after people like pet balloons, one per person.
“Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo!” said the alien again.
“Bela, Bela, Bela,” I said. “You can be my Jimbo, if you like.”
Vibrating with enthusiasm, the Jimbo flew right through my head; I grunted in fear, but all I felt was a brief tingle. Perhaps it had harvested some of my thought patterns? Fine. I stopped worrying about the Jimbo for now.
Instead I began worrying about drowning. My clothes were seriously dragging me down—I was wearing jeans, an AntiCrystal T-shirt, and leather boots. I got my clothes off, bundled everything inside my jeans, rolled them up, and tied the legs around my waist. With that done, I swam towards the island, with my Jimbo cheerfully buzzing around my head.
The first person I saw as I waded ashore was Paul Bridge. For a crazy instant I thought I was dead in heaven. But then I realized it was the Paul-2 whom we’d bumped to La Hampa when we’d invaded Earth-2.
“Bela?” he said, looking surprised to see me. He was sitting in the shade of a palmy tree, playing chess with a buxom blonde woman, a stranger to me. She and Paul-2 were naked. Two Jimbos hovered above them, shapes painted upon the air with colored light. The music of a sitar and tabla was drifting down the beach. The unseen sitar player was an amateur, repeatedly stopping and starting over.
The blonde woman’s hair was short, dense, and close-cropped like velvet flocking, with the sharply delineated hairdo extending down the back of her neck and onto her spine. She had the face and figure of a movie star. She wore huge diamonds set into the lobes of her ears, a diamond in her navel, and a snake tattooed around her bare waist. A live tattoo: the snake was slowly circling around, moving higher up her torso like the stripe on a barber-pole.
“Pips, Bela,” said the woman, glancing at me. “I thought you were playing with Chockra?”
“I’m a different Bela,” I said, stepping into the shade of their tree. My Jimbo buzzed a loop-the-loop around the other two Jimbos.
Paul-2 cocked his head, examining me, figuring things out. His Jimbo was a winged lime-green barrel with a cubical maroon robot head. “You’re the one who forced us into the tunnel?” asked Paul-2.
“That’s me. And now I came back to La Hampa. I’m glad to see you, Paul. The other Paul is dead now. Paul-1. Ramirez’s hit man got you. Him.”
“That political crap seems so far away,” said Paul-2. “It’s better here. I just wish I could go down to Nanonesia and meet those alien mathematicians I’ve been hearing about. But Duxie says we can find more of them at higher levels. So what happened to Alma?”
“That’s what I was gonna ask you,” I said evading his question. “Isn’t Alma here?”
“Your Alma’s here,” said Paul-2. “But not my Alma. She didn’t make it through the tunnel. We found your Alma here with those Stanford mathematicians—Cal Kweskin and Maria Reyes. We’re working on a generalized theory of the La Hampan cosmology and cosmogony, by the way. Your Alma’s taken up with a man from the future. Nordal. But I was asking you about my Alma back on Earth. Is she okay?”
“Um—” I didn’t want to tell him.
Sensing my discomfort, the blonde woman interrupted. “I’m Duxie,” she said, holding out her hand. She was so beautiful that it was hard for me to look directly at her. Especially naked. “Pips, other-Bela,” she continued. “I’m from a future Earth, year 2204. Three friends and I hypertunneled to La Hampa using Haut’s Paradox on our Jimbos. We just got here. The Jimbos have replaced what you called—was it a Gobubble?” She extended a graceful hand and her Jimbo perched on it unsteadily: a two-legged figure with a pleated skirt, a taffy-twisted torso, and a ball head with a short, cylindrical nose.
“The Jimbos are symbiotic sentient magnetohydrodynamic paracomputers,” put in Paul-2. “The real deal. From the Sun. They feed on our thought patterns, and the odd scrap of excrement now and then. In return they act as computers and cell phones. They love gossip. But tell me what—”
“We came out ten thousand four hundred La Hampan levels higher than Paradisio,” resumed Duxie. She had a vibrant, well- modulated voice, and she liked to talk. “It’s so crowded up there right now? Lots of people like to emigrate here, particularly from our decade. But no matter when someone comes from along our timeline, they show up on the same La Hampa day. Oh, there are some other humans who’ve been in La Hampa a week longer than our crowd; but they’re from what they call the Earth-1 timeline. They think they’re just so prixy. Turns out they’ve been pushing into our timeline and bumping people into La Hampa for two centuries. I hate them so much. They calls us Earth-2, like we’re copies or something. Just to bust free, we four—me and Erman, Chockra and Nordal—we thought it would be flippy to dig down to the La Hampa level with the earliest hampajumpers of all. You guys. The real aristocrats!”
“They’re two couples,” put in Paul-2. “Open marriages.” The halting sitar music had stopped.
Duxie’s Jimbo gave Paul-2’s Jimbo a little kiss—for all the world as if the Jimbos were autonomous thought balloons. “We discovered you!” said Duxie. “I’m proud. It was tricky, because when you swim down through a water-world’s ocean and find ten new planets, well, you have to pick one planet to dive into for the next level down, and so on and on, which makes a lot, a lot, a lot of paths. Erman says that to even write that number, you’d need a one with ten thousand zeroes after it?” She swept her hand over her lovely blonde head, to indicate the complexity of this concept.
“I think La Hampa’s an endless fractal,” said Paul-2. “That reminds me, Bela, your Alma claims that, of all the places to be, we’re exactly one level above some so-called Jellyfish Lake where a giant jellyfish is supposed to be spinning out all the alternate Earths. That sounds a little too pat for me. A coincidence like that is so—”
“She’s right,” I said. “Nanonesia level. It’s where we landed on our first hampajump. It’s no a coincidence at all. It stands to reason the very first hypertunnel from any of Earth’s timelines would lead to Earth’s God.”
“God?” said Paul-2 with a derisive laugh. “Maybe I’m missing something. Anyway, come on, you still haven’t told me about my Alma.”
“I wasn’t done telling the other Bela how we found you,” said Duxie. “So hush, Paul. It was my husband, Erman, he had the idea of using Jimbos to help us find the path, Bela. Before we hampajumped, we already knew a little bit about what to expect, thanks to all those pushy Earth-1 pigs who’ve popped up in our timeline over the years. So Erman had the idea of digging out gobs of info about the famous Bela from the Monogrub archives—everyone knows that he hampajumped after the second American revolution, and since he was such the vlogger there was a lot of info to go on. So we muxed together a special Jimbo personally tailored for Bela. And once we’re in La Hampa, our tailored Jimbo sniffs Bela out like a dog finding his master. And thanks to our rocket-pod fields, it only took us an hour to dive down the ten thousand levels. Whoosh, what a blur. Ta da! Not only did we find Bela, there’s a Paul here, and an Alma, and those three others, and now a second Bela. It’s like discovering the Garden of Eden!” She pointed up at my dancing manikin of light. "See Paul, the other Bela has a Jimbo too. Our Jimbos spawned off helpers for everyone.”
“Hi, other Bela!” exclaimed a fami
liar voice behind me. Could it possibly be—yes. I turned to see: Bela-2. He walked up to me with a coppery-skinned Indian-looking woman at his side, the woman was as movie-star-beautiful as Duxie. They were naked too. Bela-2’s expression was a mirror of mine: recognition, surprise, pleasure, fear. Our Jimbos looked the same. Duplicate people were okay in La Hampa.
“This here is the surf-kook Bela who bumped us over here,” Paul-2 told Bela-2. “He showed up alone just now.”
“What happened to our Alma?” asked Bela-2, glancing past me as if expecting to see her there. I knew that strained, wistful look very well. And now I could see him starting to get angry So predictable.
“She’s dead, okay?” I said, brusque in my rush to finally get this over with. “There was an earthquake and a rock fell on her head. I’m sorry. I miss her. Boo hoo hoo, like that. I came back here to find Alma again, as a matter of fact. She’s here, isn’t she? My Alma?”
“You killed our Alma?” cried Paul-2.
‘‘You killed her,” I said. “You were there steering her into the tunnel as much as I was. The first version of you, that is.”
“Bastard.”
“Let’s be calm,” said the beautiful dark-haired woman with Bela-2. She smiled at me and took my hand. “Pips, other-Bela. I’m Chockra from 2204.”
“Duxie was telling me,” I said, looking her over. If Chockra liked Bela-2, for sure she’d like me. “Is everyone beautiful in the future?”
“Just about,” said Chockra. “Biotech, you know.” Her Jimbo was elephant-like: a pale violet ellipsoid with four short blue legs, a pair of yellow disk-ears, and a long, curved tube-trunk.
“There’s some retroheads who keep themselves old-bio on purpose,” said Duxie. “That can be groasty or prixy. It all depends.” She patted Paul-2 on the cheek. “But the real old-bio is definitely erot, eh Chockra?”
“That’s what we were hoping when we sent our special Jimbo after Bela!” said Chockra, twining her arm around Bela-2’s waist. “And that’s why your Erman’s with that ugly little Maria and my Nordal’s with Alma-the-bitch. Wait till they see me with two Belas!” Chockra smirked and crooked a finger at me, wriggling the finger like a worm on a hook. Her elephant-shaped Jimbo flew over to touch Duxie’s peg-nosed one, exchanging some naughty thoughts. The two women laughed for what seemed an unnecessarily long time. I felt awkward, out-of-the-loop.