Sex Sphere
Page 19
I snatched Sybil and sped away. Babs’s piggy eyes were too far around her curve to see. Noble W. W. poised himself right on ground zero. He made there by his one oblation of himself once offered a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice and satisfaction for my sins. He gave himself as substitute, fooling Babs’s gross mouth.
In a flash I’d landed Sybil in the shelter of the Gesprengter Turm, the Sprung Tower. Babs thought she’d eaten Sybil, but she was looking for me with her eyes and her hypersenses. I used my mental powers to disguise our vibes: Sybils and I would scan as a rabbit and a slug. Babs searched vainly for another minute, then settled down to load the remaining men. Perhaps she thought I’d gone off to grieve.
“Let me go,” said Sybil, waving her Uzi.
“Put that down.”
The Sprung Tower was “sprung,” or blown in two, by the troops of Louis XIV, some three hundred years ago. Half of it still stands, and half of it lies on the ground in one huge piece. Originally it was used as a fortress, with several floors and lots of gun-slits. What remains of the top floor is good and solid. Sybil and I were up there, peeking down at Babs through one of the tower’s loopholes.
“I’m supposed to kill you, Alwin.”
“Be reasonable, Sybil. I haven’t done anything to you.”
“You killed all the women in Heidelberg.”
“Babs did that.”
“You brought her here.”
“I know this looks bad. But Babs is trying to bring freedom and immortality to everyone. You should see how things look from Hilbert Space, Sybil.”
“Help me get rid of that sphere for good. Or else.”
Sybil poked me with her Uzi. The same gun she’d been shooting at me before. With a twitch of my will, I melted the barrel. Sybil dropped the hot weapon with an exclamation of pain.
“There’s only one way I know to stop Babs,” I said. “And it’s not any Uzi or particle-beam laser. You have to realize that she’s infinite-dimensional. Nothing we can do to her in this space can amount to more than a pinprick. But there is maybe a way.”
“Save us, Alwin. It’s your duty.”
“Why should I do listen to you if you’re talking about killing me?”
“Think of the babies, Alwin. The poor children. Having the world disappear is fine for you…you’re bored with it. But the little ones are just beginning. Shouldn’t they have their chance, too?”
“Well…”
“All the children in Heidelberg are alone. Locked up and crying. Is that fair?”
“You don’t realize what a sacrifice you’re asking me to make,” I complained. “Wheelie Willie already died for us, isn’t that enough?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wheelie Willie, the little man I used to draw at Rutgers. He was alive. I found him in the Neckar. And just now he let Babs eat him so she’d think you were taken care of.”
“That’s…impossible, Alwin. You must be going crazy.”
I paused to recall exactly when Wheelie Willie had appeared. I’d been chatting with Huba. Just before that I’d been about to doze off; no, I’d been thinking about Hilbert Space. Moving in it. What must have happened was that I’d shifted the nature of reality. Probably the shift that made Wheelie Willie real had been the same as the shift that had turned all the Heidelberg women into sex spheres.
Enjoyable. It had been an enjoyable afternoon with Wheelie Willie, partying in the old town. Huba had turned back up, not really too pissed-off about his wife, and we’d gone barhopping. The funniest moment had come when we’d passed some really loud and plastic-looking American tourists. “Deine Landsmänner,” Huba had said, nudging me. “Your fellow-countrymen.” Around sunset, all the spheres had flown up to the castle, as if roosting there for the night. We men had followed them up and found that they’d merged into one humongous ass... Crazy? Sure. But I hadn’t questioned it till Sybil came blazing her way in.
Duty. Should. Fair. Wife words. But maybe she was right. There was no rush, really, to destroy reality. In the Zen sense, there’s nothing to destroy anyway.
A gleam of light from a gun-slit lit up Sybil’s face. Wide mouth, deep eyes. A strong face, a good face. She smiled. I kissed her.
“All right. I’ll save the world.”
There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not…alive. Most of them are like possible books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity’s, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternate universe is that we actually live here.
In my trip to Hilbert Space I’d learned how to take hold of human reality and move it. The first thing I’d done was to fix it so that I had superpowers. And then I’d begun shaking things, trying to get our group-mind free, free like Babs. But now I was going to have to undo everything I’d done. More than that, I was going to have to move our group-mind across the dimensions to some other universe where Babs might not find us. Dodging her wasn’t going to be easy.
“How will you do it?” Sybil leaned against me, familiar, intense.
“In a minute Babs will disappear. She’ll take all those sex-fiends up to Hilbert Space. While she’s gone we’ll run away.”
“To Frankfurt?”
I laughed shortly. “To a different layer of reality. I’ll move the human race’s group-mind to a different place and hope that Babs can’t find us.”
We peeped out of our stone loophole. The last man was in Babs now. Her sides swelled out like a hamster’s cheeks. Then she shrank…smoothly sliding off into hyperspace.
“This is it,” I told Sybil. “Say your prayers.”
I let my consciousness flow out. First to Sybil. Her complex self: part bad-girl, part school marm. Past her, to the children down in Heidelberg. Then up and down the Neckar. Fleeting images, snatches of German. I flowed across Europe—holding it all—Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas. The mystical body of Christ, of Brahma, Buddha, Allah, you, me too.
Suddenly I’m thinking of a children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings, Father Duck looking for a place to land. God, the sunset’s bright. Hurry up, the sphere is coming. Down there is a safe spot, a mote in golden light. Hurry. Circle down….
***
We live in Virginia now. I’m sitting at a typewriter. There’s a magnolia outside my window. The kids are in school and Sybil’s in another room, working on a painting. I think I’ll go ask her if she remembers how we got here. One thing: if you see the sex sphere, I don’t want to hear about it.
Afterword
I wrote The Sex Sphere in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1981-1982. This book is what I call a transreal novel, that is, it’s a science-fictional elaboration upon my actual real-life experiences.
In this case, the autobiographical core is that my family and I lived in Heidelberg, Germany, during the years 1978-1980, where I had a grant to do mathematical research on the nature of infinity. And we did indeed make a trip to Rome with our two younger children one Easter, staying at an inexpensive hotel off the Via Veneto. But, of course, in real life, I didn’t get kidnapped, and I didn’t meet the sex sphere.
Where did I get the idea for the sex sphere? I might blandly say that, as I’m interested in the fourth dimension, I wanted to echo the Flatland theme of a sphere that lifts a lower-dimensional being into higher space. But that doesn’t address the real question, that is: Why did I write a book about a giant ass from the fourth dimension?
Visually, I think the sex sphere may have been inspired by the paleolithic Venus of Willendorf sculpture—perhaps I saw a photo of the little statuette in the Scientific American. Less highbrow inputs might have been the drawings in the underground comix I read at the time—I’m thinking particularly of the work of Robert Williams.
Another reason why I wrote about the sex sphere was that, quite simply, I wanted to be outrageous and to flout conventional notions of propriety. I was chafing at the fact that I was living in the preppy home town of a well-known
right-wing television evangelist, while teaching mathematics at a namby-pamby college for women. I was well aware that I was likely to be relieved of my teaching job very soon, and I was singing lead in a half-assed punk band called The Dead Pigs.
In terms of iconography, the sex sphere interested me as she’s an objective correlative for a certain way that men may think of women. And combining her appearance with higher dimensions makes her a male scientist’s image of a love goddess. But it’s important that, in the end, our hero Alwin would rather be with his real, human wife.
My editor for this book was Susan Allison at Ace Books. This week I came across a wonderful letter from her in my files, with one sentence in particular that still warms my heart: “You’ve created a marriage here that for all its looniness is rounded and wonderful, and you may not even be aware how rare it is for a writer to be able to do that at all—to say nothing of doing it with one hand while playing the most unlikely arpeggios with the other.” Thanks, Susan.
—Rudy Rucker
, Los Gatos, California, August 28, 2008
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983, 2008 by Rudy Rucker
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4804-9759-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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