by Rudy Rucker
“The futurians are airheads,” Bela-2 told me. “Predatory sexual tourists. I figure they’ve had it soft and easy all their lives.”
“Cosseted imperialists exploiting salt-of-the-earth types like you,” I said. “Destroying your moral fiber by teaching you Kama Sutra positions and the sitar.”
“It’s good to have an intelligent conversation for once in my life,” said Bela-2 with a smile that mirrored mine. “With you here, finally I have some hope of being understood.” We gave each other a smooth high-five, our hands moving in unison.
“How long has it been for you since Miller Beach?” I asked him.
“Paul and I just got here today,” he said. “Alma and the Stanford people have been here a week. Cal, Maria, and Rick. They say it’s Thursday in La Hampa. According to the futurians, no matter where on the Earth-2 timeline you hampajump from, you show up in La Hampa on this same Thursday.”
“Sounds right,” I said. “When I left Earth-2 just now, it was Sunday afternoon. Three Earth days after I bounced you. La Hampan time is really independent from the Earth timelines.” “Paul and I have been working out the theory of it,” said Bela-2. “Along with Cal and Maria. You’d think the futurians could tell us this stuff, but they’re not that big on science, any of them. Stop scowling at him, Paul. It’s not like he knew what he was doing.”
“He killed Alma.”
“One Alma,” I said. “On one Earth. And I didn’t kill her. Mainly it was the fault of Paul-1. Your twin. And he’s dead too.” I sighed and rubbed my face. "This could be heaven, if we don’t make it hell.”
“How many Earths are there?” said Paul-2 after a long pause.
“Billions,” I said. “Trillions. Maybe more. Paul-1 claimed he’d proved that every week the divine jellyfish makes a new Earth. She’s revising it, shooting for a perfect world. Hampatime is otherness. Like Duxie says, we called our starting world Earth-1 and your world Earth-2. According to the alien mathematicians I met here, Earth-1 was the first timeline where any humans ever discovered hampajumping. So that means all the human hampajumpers are from Earth-1 or Earth-2.”
“Hampatime is otherness, eh?” mused Paul-2. “I like that. Me, I’ve been focusing on a different slogan. Hampascale is time. The further along one of Earth’s timelines you lie, the higher is the hampascale you jump across to. One level equals about a week. Interesting to see the one-week interval popping up in both contexts. Like how pi turns up in all kinds of math. But I wish you wouldn’t keep saying God is a jellyfish.”
“I tell you, she makes a new Earth every Friday.” It felt good to be arguing with Paul again. So much better than having him dead. “And those are the only times when anyone can hampa- jump back. You can’t jump back into your own timeline because of time-travel paradoxes, you have to jump into the timelines of new Earths. Like I did with Paul-1. And from what Duxie says, it sounds like a bunch of future Earth-1 people managed to hampajump back to Earth-2 at the same time I did, only further into Earth-2’s future.”
“Can I, myself, go back to Earth or not?” asked Paul-2, beginning to look confused. I was happy to be dazzling him, although I knew that before long he’d understand La Hampa better than me. “Not that I want to leave,” he added. “I like it here. Duxie might rocket-pod me to the higher levels where all the futurians live. But could I go back to Earth if I wanted to?”
“The divine jellyfish decides who gets to hampajump into the new versions of Earth,” I said. “When I jumped from La Hampa to Earth-2, I had to pray to the jellyfish for her to open the gate.” I recalled the extra streamers of light that had gone up through the sky. “I think she made gates for future Earth-1 people at the higher levels too.”
“And we’d be jumping to Earth-3,” said Bela-2, right on my wavelength. “Tomorrow. The jellyfish god makes Earth-3 tomorrow, which is Friday in La Hampa time.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I have a feeling that Earth-3 is gonna be her final draft. She might not want to mess it up with any extra people from Earth-1 or Earth-2. Which means we could all be stuck here for good.”
“This all makes perfect sense to me,” said Bela-2. He was only one who understood me at all. “I’m seeing a morphonic heptagon made of seven fish.”
“Dude,” I said. “What I was thinking.” We beamed at each other.
“It’s like listening to Isaac Newton and two Thomas Jeffersons, isn’t it?” said Duxie with a rich giggle. “We studied about you in school, Paul and Bela. About your inventions, and about Bela bringing down the—was it Whig?—dictatorship.”
“Heritagist,” I corrected her.
“Whatever. Erman should be here.” She glanced up at her Jimbo. “Call Erman for me,” she said.
Her Jimbo extruded a glowing bubble from its nose. The bubble hovered before us, displaying a man’s dark, ideally handsome face.
“Come on down the beach, Erman,” said Duxie. “Bring the others, too. Paul and Bela are being profound. And we’ve got a new visitor. No, I’m not going to tell you. Get off that girl and come see.”
“Pips,” said the man. Squeezed in next to his face in the bubble was the face of the Stanford grad student Maria Reyes, aka Mary Smith.
“Everyone paired up instantly,” Bela-2 told me. “Like a freakin’ Club Med. Paul and Duxie. Chockra and me. Erman and Maria. Alma and Nordal. Alma’s mad at Paul and me about some stuff that you other guys did, so all Pauls and Belas are out of the question for her. Oh, and Cal Kweskin hooked up with his helicopter pilot, Rick. How’s my Cammy, anyway? I hope that’s not bad news, too.”
“She’s fine,” I said. “But now she’s with Waclaw Smorynski. We played a reality-altering concert at Heritagist Park Saturday night. We had some killer new Washer Drop songs.”
“God, I wish I’d been there for that,” said Bela-2. “You’ll have to tell me every detail. I don’t know when I’ll get that kind of gig again. Well, maybe after Chockra takes me way up the hampascale to where all the people from the future are moving in. They’re gonna have cities up there. I’m looking forward to it.”
“Is it hard to play the sitar?”
“Yeah,” said Bela-2. “But I love how gnarly it sounds. The Nataraja made me a really good one. Now that you’re here we can jam together. I’d be happy to go electric. And we’ll need drums and a bass.”
“A bass player like Cammy or Jutta Schreck,” I said. “Jutta stood in for Cammy with Washer Drop at Rubber Rick’s back on Earth-1, you know. I’ve still got to tell you about all that. And about the encore jam at the stadium show. We did a song called ‘Hundred Percent Asshole.’ ”
“I can almost hear it,” said Bela-2.
But now I saw the other couples coming down the beach toward us. Cal and Rick. Erman and Maria. Nordal and—Alma. I dropped everything and ran toward her.
“Alma! I came back!”
I guess I’d figured she’d hug me and we’d be right back where we used to be. But my Alma could hold a grudge.
“Hello, Bela,” she said coldly. Her Jimbo was a squat, armless, three-legged figure with a blank onion-head and two pig-tails. “Rowena carried me up here last week,” said Alma. “How was Cammy?” She took a step back lest I try and embrace her.
“Look, Alma, I came all the way back here because it’s you that I—”
“Meet Nordal, Bela,” she said. “My new lover. I met him this morning. Nordal, this is the original Bela.”
“I bet you wish you had one of your horses here to ride,” Nordal said to me, grinning and shaking my hand. His teeth were flawless and white. “Marvelous beach.” With his perfect face and muscular torso we could have been in Malibu.
“I never rode a horse,” I said. "I had a station wagon.”
“Oh, with a team of four horses?” said Nordal.
“With an internal combustion engine,” I said. “It burnt gasoline.”
“Ping!” said Nordal, laughing. His Jimbo was a bowlegged figure with spaghetti fingers and a potato head. It p
oked Alma’s Jimbo with one of its long fingers and Alma smiled.
“Are you getting telepathy through your Jimbo?” I asked Alma. “I don’t pick up a thing.”
“That’s because nobody’s sending to you,” said Alma. Her Jimbo whacked mine with one of its pigtails, and suddenly I heard Alma’s voice in my head. “Nordal’s an idiot,” she said.
I wasn’t sure how to send a message back to her, so I just smiled. There was hope. Or there would have been—but then of course Paul-2 told Alma about us having killed Alma-2 on Earth-2, and that got her angry with me all over again.
As the sun dimmed, we picnicked on a batch of transformed Nataraja sea cucumbers that Erman and Nordal fished out of the water. This time I was careful not to overeat, and my stomach felt okay. The hierophantic clarity kicked in. But it wasn’t much of an evening.
Although talking to Paul and Bela-2 was nice, I pretty much knew what they were going to say. The futurians were bone dull, and didn’t really take anything we said seriously—they acted like we were pets. As for the Stanford mathematicians and their pilot, they were friendly with Paul, but snotty to the rest of us. And Alma was still mind-gaming me.
I ended up sleeping in the cabin with Chockra and Bela-2. When they started making love, Chockra lustily encouraged me to join in, and maybe we two Belas could have gone for it, but I knew Chockra would tell Alma. I didn’t want to tangle things up even more.
What it was, the bloody killings at Veeter’s estate had taken the wind out of my sails. Seeing Gyula die, and then blowing away Sandoval with a machine gun, and then finding Paul and Van butchered—it had done something to my head. I didn’t want any more craziness. I wanted to settle down.
The next morning we all went for a swim in the ocean, me and the five couples: Paul and Duxie, Bela-2 and Chockra, Erman and Maria, Cal and Rick, Nordal and Alma. We were in a cool spot with deep water, paddling around with the eleven Jimbos hovering over us. By now, I’d figured out how to send mental messages to Alma with my Jimbo: it was simply a matter of silently talking to her. My Jimbo would somehow pick up what I said, pass it to Alma’s Jimbo, and she’d hear me in her head. I could tell from watching her face.
“I love you" I told her. “I want to marry you and have a family.”
She knit her brow and shook her head, smiling just a little bit. I swam closer to her. Nordal was talking about horses again.
When something brushed my leg, I thought it was Alma, playfully kicking me, but it was a sharp, abrupt swirl in the water. All at once, Alma and I were spinning in rapid circles about each other, in the grip of a narrow, intense whirlpool.
The thread-like vortex sucked Alma and me through the shiny bottom of the Paradisio sea and popped us into the Nanonesian sky. The Nanonesian sun was nearly dead, but in its faint light I saw the island of the alien mathematicians directly below us. Our Jimbos were gone, either left behind or crushed out of existence by the forces drawing us downward.
Ever-vigilant, Rowena and Jewelle flew up towards Alma and me. But we spun past them, riding the vortex that had pulled us down from Paradisio. Twisting and twirling, haloed by an uncanny cerulean light, we plummeted towards Jellyfish Lake.
The jellyfish god rose from the lake’s dim waters to meet us in midair, level with the island’s ridge. Once again we were inside the jellyfish’s body; once again we saw the divine six-limbed dancer, her face beautiful and terrible to behold.
“My creation is nearly done,” she said, weaving patterns with her arms. “I’ve fashioned a final, perfect, unpredictable world— and now I’ll become a sun.” In the virtual distance I saw a fetal Earth cradled in nets of light.
“What about us?” said Alma. She was holding my hand.
“You must return,” said the goddess. “You were the first couple to tunnel here from any of my worlds and survive—for the sake of symmetry you must close the circuit.”
“I’d feel bad bumping people from Earth again,” I said tentatively.
“If we do go, can we make some special requests about the new Earth?” asked Alma.
“Trust in God,” said the dancer. “I bless you.”
Everything around us melted into white light.
It was Thursday, June 3. Ma was off at her restaurant prepping for lunch. Alma and I were alone in Mas kitchen, eating cereal and looking at apartment ads. I was due to start as an assistant math professor at San Jose State at the end of the summer, and Alma was going to move in with me. Alma was studying the employment ads as well; she was hoping to find a job in public relations.
Suddenly she looked up from the paper and gave me an odd look. “Bela! It’s like I’m waking up. We had other lives before this. The white light—the jellyfish sent over our memories instead of our bodies!”
An image of dead Alma-2 flashed past. I heard a snatch of Washer Drop music against a crowd’s roar. I smelled the sweet breeze of Nanonesia. My two sets of memories were bubbling through each other, oil and water. The goddess had embedded the Bela-1 memories in the brain of Bela-3. I remembered something wonderful.
“Show me your hand, Alma!”
Alma held her left hand out towards me and smiled. Yes, she was wearing a diamond ring. I’d given it to her last week.
"A perfect world,” I said. “You’re going to marry me?”
“Yes, Bela.”
I could end my story there, but I owe you a few what-became-ofs.
In this final Earth, Paul and I had shared an apartment at Berkeley, and he had a crush on Alma, but Alma didn’t leave with Paul on graduation day. And I never hooked up with those kids to start the Washer Drop band. I’m a little bummed about that part. But I can still play the guitar pretty well, and I remember all our songs.
I checked for Cammy Vendt on the Web; she’s in a Redwood City band called Aternal. Alma and I went to see them play at a club one night. They weren’t that great. I hung around afterwards, half-heartedly trying to get invited to jam with them, but they thought I was just a slumming professor.
I remember the Gobubble recipe quite well, and a few weeks ago I managed to make a sick-smelling, long-lived, iridescent bubble. But I don’t have any kind of paracomputational operating system for it—and on this Earth, there’s no Van Veeter, Henry Nunez, or Roland Haut; no Membrain Products and no Rumpelstiltskin, Inc.
Not that a paracomputing Gobubble would necessarily be such a powerful tool here. The thing is, this is a nondocile world. I can see it in the clouds, in the water running from a tap, in the motions of the leaves. The natural computations of this world are truly unpredictable.
And what about Paul? He has a job at Stanford and is living in faculty housing—the same as before. But in this world, Paul and I didn't write theses on universal dynamics; we didn’t even have the same advisor. Paul’s Berkeley thesis was “Noncommutative Spaces Of Chaotic Quivers,” and mine was “A Hypergeometric Theory of Ampleness.”
Before paying my first visit to Paul, I spent a week writing up the Morphic Classification Theorem from memory— reproducing precisely the same paper as the one we’d written with Roland Haut. I figured that if Paul were to become interested, I might take him on as a coauthor; if nothing else, this would help my chances of publication. And in any case, I wanted to see what Paul-3 made of our Earth-1 work.
I found Paul friendly, but a bit distant—he was still peeved that Alma had picked me over him back at Berkeley, even though he’s got Lulu Cliff living with him. She’s taking grad courses and working as a sysop in the Stanford CS department.
I hinted around about the other worlds, but Paul showed no knowledge of them. Only Alma and I have those memories; I think we’re the only extra people whom the jellyfish moved to Earth-3.
When Paul sat down to read my outré paper, he quickly found a large, unfixable hole in the proof. I was very deeply shocked. I’d always imagined mathematical truth to be absolute, the same in every world.
Now, I’m quite positive that I wrote up the paper just
the same as before. And there’s really no chance that Haut and the rest of our thesis committee could have overlooked so big a hole back in Humelocke. The only possible conclusion is that mathematics really can be different in different worlds.
The mathematics of Earth-3 is fierce, nondocile, and gnarlier than the math of Earth-1. The subtle insight that makes our old proof wrong was somehow unthinkable in those other worlds. More things are possible here.
As this sank in upon me during the days to come, I felt a sense of liberation. Did I really want to live in San Jose? No. I realized I want to live in the South Pacific, in a place like the La Hampan Nanonesia.
Fortunately Alma is up for the adventure. We’ll have a Santa Cruz beach wedding in August, and then we’ll leave for the Earthly paradise of Micronesia. I’ve found a teaching position at Palau Community College, and Alma’s landed a job selling ads for the Palau Horizon, a weekly newspaper. She’s thinking of becoming a dive-guide as well. Our future’s unpredictable.
As my last project before leaving California, I’ve been writing up these adventures. I always wanted to write. The other day, I met a retired math prof from San Jose State who might help me get the book published. He says I should call it a science-fiction novel, of course—not a memoir.
I’m liking it on Earth-3. In a nondocile world like this one, it’s as if every single object can have free will. I love the way that feels. And I believe what the jellyfish god said: this is the best of all possible worlds.
There’s still bad news in the paper, of course, and sometimes I quarrel with Alma. But that’s in the nature of things. A rapidly flowing stream has ripples; chaotic motions have sharp turns; societies have pockets of pain; your moods change unpredictably; the old die to make room for the young; whaddaya, whaddaya.