by Rudy Rucker
"Get it?" Oily Allie asked. "This lever opens and closes the hole at the top. The air gets sucked in there and the sucking lifts you. That's all there is to it." Allie paused to mount her anti-rocket. "Would you believe those wimps at the factory were using these things to run a fucking ventilation system?"
"How does it work?" Vernor asked, fascinated. "What does the sucking?"
"I've got a tiny black hole mounted in there," Allie explained. "Matter just disappears into it. This little piggie could soak up the whole atmosphere in a couple thousand years."
Vernor wanted to ask more questions, but some roofing robots were approaching them. He mounted his cross-bar. "Easy on that control," Allie shouted, but too late.
In his unfamiliarity with the lever's sensitivity, Vernor had opened the aperture in the top end of the power-tube much too far. He shot upwards to a height of a hundred yards above the roof tops before he managed to stop the aperture down.
Mick was a tiny figure on the roof across the street, and Allie was at the top of a practiced parabola which would land her next to Turner in seconds. Vernor, however, was falling like a stone towards the robot on the roof below him.
He tried to ease the tube's hole open just a little, but again he overdid it, blasting up to a position much higher than his original position. This time, instead of completely closing the opening he managed to leave a hole just large enough to balance his weight.
He was sitting there on his T-bar, hugging the power tube, many hundreds of yards above street-level. Mick and Allie appeared to be doubled over with laughter, though it was hard to tell from so great a distance. Fuck 'em.
His tense muscles relaxed a little and he was able to look around. He had a great view in all directions. Ahead lay the Eastside, factories and warehouses of various shapes jammed together like the tubes in an antique radio. The urban residential districts lay behind him . . . on the left Dreamtown with its high-rises; and on the right the Waterfront district where the factory workers lived.
By craning hard he could make out the ribbon of the river through the buildings of the Waterfront; and beyond the river rose the towers of the business district. There was nothing but air between him and the EM building, some five miles away.
He could make out the bands and patches of tract homes ringed around these urban districts. They stretched on mile after mile . . . a suburban sea dotted here and there with other urban centers. The City.
It was so big. Sure they might be able to organize the Dreamtown of one center . . . but the rest? Let it be, a voice in Vernor's mind seemed to say, you don't have to organize other people's lives. But what if they're assholes? he asked. And what if you are, the voice answered.
A slight breeze had carried him to a position over the block of roofs where Mick and Allie were. Cautiously, Vernor closed the tube opening a little more, and he drifted down.
Chapter 24: Room
Vernor's handling of his anti-rocket . . . actually Oily Allie called it a sky-sucker . . . grew smoother, and soon the three of them were hopping several blocks at a time together.
"What's the highest you've gone?" Vernor asked Allie during one such hop. The sky-suckers operated soundlessly, except for the rushing of the air into the tube, so it was easy to talk.
"Up past the clouds a couple of times," Allie answered. "Gets cold up there, though. Windy, too. One time I got all screwed up inside a cloud and came out headed straight down at top speed." Oily Allie chuckled, "The G's snapped the T-bar off when I pulled back up . . . I was hugging the power tube for what they call dear life. My hands were slipping and I couldn't reach the control—"
Vernor had suddenly lost interest in this conversation, and he began scanning the buildings ahead. "There's the plastics factory, Mick," he shouted.
"Yeah. Let's land there and get our bearings."
They landed on the barrel-vaulted roof of the factory. They could hear robots moving about inside. "There's the street the loach coach was driving us on after our scale trip," said Mick, pointing.
Vernor nodded, and they began hopping along the roofs of the buildings lining the street in question. Soon they were above the spot where Kurtowski's bomb had scarred the street's surface. And there was the alley where they'd crawled through the little hole.
One last hop with the sky-suckers and they were on top of the warehouse containing the Professor's hide-out. "Should we blast in through the front door?" suggested Vernor.
"Better not," Mick answered. "He might want to keep using that door. Let's go in through the roof. Allie?"
Oily Allie hefted her laser doubtfully. "It'll take a lot of power. I'll have to run it continuous for a couple of minutes to cut a hole big enough for us."
"Shit, man, we're not going to have to blast any more robots," Mick responded. "Anything hassles us we just turn on the sky-suckers and we're gone."
"O.K." Allie said, switching on the heavy industrial laser. At full power, it was able to cut a circle through the roof's material in a matter of minutes, although the beam seemed noticeably weaker by the time the cut-out disk of roof crashed down into the warehouse.
They peered in. It was indeed the right place.
"Hey, Professor," Vernor yelled, but only echoes answered him.
"His room's soundproofed," Mick pointed out.
"Oh, yeah," Vernor answered. "Well, let's float down on the sky-suckers."
Moments later the three of them were in the aisles of the gloomy warehouse, lit only by the sun streaming in through the hole in the roof sixty feet above them. The fifty foot mounds of crates surrounded them as before.
"I think it was down this way," Vernor said, heading down one of the aisles. Mick and Oily Allie followed him for about twenty yards, and he stopped, "I don't know, maybe it was—"
He was interrupted by a sudden blare of noise. A gigantic forklift was rumbling down the aisle after them. Allie whirled and blasted at it with her laser, but the machine was so huge, and the laser beam so weakened, that the blasts had no effect. Quickly they rose to the roof on their sky-suckers.
At first it seemed that they were out of the machine's reach, but then the prongs of the colossal forklift reared up to some three feet below the flat ceiling. The machine rushed murderously towards them. There was no hope of out-maneuvering it with the sky-suckers, which were designed for up and down movement in open spaces. Quickly they scrambled to safety on the top of one of the stacks of crates, cutting the sky-suckers' power.
The top of the stack was a fifty-foot square, so as long as they kept back from the edges they were safe from the forklift.
"We got to get back out that hole and wait for them to knock out the microwave towers," Oily Allie said. "Thing to do is jump off the other side of the stack and sneak on around that metal mother."
Almost as if it had heard him, the forklift took three crates from one side of the pile on which they were crouching, backed up to a position under the hole they'd cut and forced the crates up so that the top one became wedged in their exit hole.
"What a fucking drag," Mick said, punctuating their stunned silence. The forklift returned and began methodically demolishing their stack; carrying boxes from it to add to one of the other stacks with tireless, mindless industry.
When their stack of crates had been whittled down to the thickness of a few boxes, they jumped down on the opposite side; cushioning the fall with the sky-suckers, which they then used to pull themselves up to the top of the next stack. The machine finished stowing away the crates that remained in the old stack, and then set to work whittling down their new territory.
"And you see what it's doing?" Vernor asked. "It's going to make a solid block of all the crates at the other end of the warehouse so it can chase us around this end."
"This is just really dumb," Oily Allie complained. "I mean if it was really important to me I could probably blast that crate out of the hole."
"Pretend it's really important to you, Allie," suggested Vernor. She aimed the laser and
pressed the blast button. The corner of the box charred slightly before the laser finally gave out.
The forklift transferred another load of crates—and the badness of the situation became acute. The new gap in the crate-piles revealed Professor Kurtowski, sitting in an armchair reading a book.
"Look out, Professor!" Vernor yelled, jumping down to his rescue. The forklift tooled forward at the same instant and bumped Vernor with one of its prongs. He'd been leaning down to make a daring Douglas Fairbanks snatch-up of the Professor and was consequently knocked off his T-bar. The sky-sucker shot up to the ceiling and Vernor fell into Kurtowski's lap. Triumphantly, the prongs of the forklift came plummeting down at them. Vernor glanced quickly at the Professor's face to see how the wisest man he knew would meet death.
"That's quite enough, Vernor," Kurtowski said, standing up and dumping Vernor onto the floor with a baffled expression.
"Look out!" Vernor screamed, cowering on the floor as he tensed himself for the splat of the prong on Kurtowski's head. But there was no splat.
There was silence, broken finally by Oily Allie shrieking, "Run, Vernor, run!" then breaking into helpless laughter. The forklift had stopped working.
Vernor stood up. "I guess they finally knocked out those microwave antennas," he explained sheepishly to no one in particular. The Professor was standing in front of him looking from Vernor to the forklift to Mick and Oily Allie, fifty feet above them. Finally he smiled at Vernor.
"And you took Phizwhiz for a ride?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Vernor. "We shrank all the way around Circular Scale. What's been bothering me is how did I manage to come back now instead of the future? I mean when we were half the size of the universe, a second of our time was like a billion years Earth time. But here I am."
"That's a good one," said Kurtowski. "What else?"
"I'm wondering about what adding the scale loop might have done to my mind," responded Vernor. "It gave Phizwhiz a soul, or free will, or something. But I can't quite figure out what it's done to me."
"Maybe you should ask Phizwhiz," the Professor replied.
"He doesn't talk anymore," Vernor protested. "He just sends out this sort of loud static. Anyway, you're the one to ask."
Kurtowski shrugged. "We can work on it. You need your own answers, though, not mine." He gathered up some papers, then shouted up to the others, "If the local robots aren't working, out let's go over to my lab. I've been in here for weeks. Every time I try to go anywhere some machine tries to kill me. This represents, in my opinion, only a slight improvement over having them try to jail me for my own safety."
Chapter 25: High Splits
The trip to Kurtowski's lab was without incident. With the coaxial cables and the microwave towers knocked out, the machines on the Eastside were no longer possessed by a malignant intelligence . . . they were simply machines.
The loaches had left most of the apparatus in the laboratory untouched, and Oily Allie was like a kid in a toy store. She soon settled down to fool with the Professor's matter degenerator, a device which made small black holes. You threw whatever was handy into the hopper, switched on the power and WHAM . . . gravitational collapse would hit whatever you'd thrown in. All the props which hold matter "up" would be knocked out, leaving the mutual gravitational attraction of the mass particles as the only operative force.
The end-result of gravitational collapse is a singular point in the spacetime manifold, inevitably veiled by a dark sphere—our friend the black hole. Although the notion of star-sized black holes in outer space was commonplace, it had only been a few years since Kurtowski's experiments had led to the laboratory creation of small and relatively stable black holes, such as those which powered Oily Allie's sky-suckers.
Oily Allie was delighted to have the opportunity to monkey with the machine which produced these small black holes. She was trying to figure out how to turn it into a portable weapon . . . enclosing your antagonists inside a one-way event horizon would certainly be an efficacious way of getting them off your back.
Mick had settled down to another session with the music of the spheres. He'd cranked the galactic signal analyzer to full, and crouched near the machine with the earphones on, occasionally exclaiming when he recognized something he'd seen from the scale-ship.
Vernor and the Professor sat on a battered couch near where the VFG had been before the loaches took it to the EM building. "Vernor," Kurtowski was saying, "I might as well tell you, I have no idea what the VFG really does."
"It makes things shrink," Vernor answered.
"Ja, but what is shrinking? There are many ways of looking at it. A viewpoint which does not seem unreasonable to me is that the shrinking is accomplished by moving in a direction perpendicular to every direction we can point to in our three-dimensional space. You get smaller because you are further away."
Vernor looked puzzled and the Professor tried again. "If you are looking through a window, and you see a man getting much smaller, what do you conclude?"
"That he's walking away from the window."
"Right. My idea is that our three dimensional space is a window on four-dimensional space. When the VFG makes something shrink in our 'window,' it is doing this by moving it away in the direction of a fourth dimension."
There was a peevish moan from Oily Allie, followed by a high singing note that faded into silence. "Shit," said Allie quietly.
The Professor chuckled appreciatively. "What happened?" asked Vernor.
"I dropped one through the floor," Allie responded.
"Dropped what?" Vernor said, going over to see. It looked as if someone had drilled a hole in the floor next to Allie's boot.
"I made this little tiny black hole and tried to move it with the magnetic clamp, but it slipped," she said, running her hand through her tangled hair. There seemed to be nothing which would prevent the black hole from eating its way straight through the Earth and back again. Anything which it touched would disappear into the singularity at the center.
"Is this going to screw things really bad?" Allie called to Professor Kurtowski.
"No, no," said the Professor. "It's got a built-in instability. It'll pop before it eats more than a few kilotons. Try dropping it on your foot next time."
The crisis over, Vernor returned to the couch and Allie began playing again, but this time with an exaggerated caution.
"About what you were just saying," Vernor resumed. "The VFG made me shrink by moving me in a direction perpendicular to our spacetime? That would fit in with Circular Scale if that new direction was bent into a huge circle."
The Professor was quiet for a few minutes, then finally answered, "Look, Vernor, what makes you so sure that you returned to the same Earth which you left from?"
"There's only one Earth, Professor, and this is it," replied Vernor.
"That's only what you think. Remember how the electron cloud looked to you?"
Mick had finished listening to the space music, and had ambled over to sit on a chair near them. "I remember that," he interjected. "It looked like you thought it looked."
"That's right," the Professor responded. "There is, at certain levels, no objective external reality. There is only a probability function which interacts with your brain-states to produce illusions."
"But wait," Vernor protested. "The one thing that I see is what the real thing is. For me anyway." He didn't like this line of thought.
"But imagine that someone was observing you, Vernor. Perhaps you would have the appearance of existing in many simultaneous states." The Professor peered at Vernor comically. "Remember that the world you find yourself in now was found at a level below the atomic level."
"Remember all those different hyperspheres?" Mick put in. "He's saying that each one of them was an alternate universe!"
The Professor nodded. "Floating in Hilbert space. And...since they were shiny, there was an image of you in each of them."
"Hold on," Vernor interrupted. "Are you saying I came back in man
y different universes at once? Why do I just see one?"
"You just think this is the only one," the Professor explained. "But you think that in all the others, too."
Vernor felt confused. "Then what are you guys doing here? I mean if this isn't the same Earth that I left how did you get here?"
"Our brain states, my dear Vernor, are coupled," the Professor responded, waving his hand back and forth between their three heads. "As was borne in upon me when you dropped into my lap back in the warehouse. I was alone in there for two weeks, you know."
"Getting uncoupled," Mick suggested.
The Professor nodded. "I had always believed in principle that I exist in many parallel worlds, but by the end of those two weeks, I . . . " He broke off with a smile, then turned to Vernor. "This is your dream, Vernor, are you ready to wake up?"
A chasm seemed to open up around Vernor. For an instant he forgot the names of the things around him. He lost the internal monologue by which external reality is kept unique. There was no feeling of panic, rather an immense feeling of freedom.
An object moved towards him, and he SPLIT took-it/didn't-take-it, he SPLIT blinked/stared, and he SPLIT talked/kept-silent. Which?
In some world he was saying, "Do you feel this way all the time?" to a Professor Kurtowski who responded with . . . what? Every possible answer.
"How do you ever get anything done?" Vernor continued, and received another infinite response, perfectly tailored to the endless nuances that his question took on.
"It takes care of itself . . . " Mick Turner was saying when SNAP, Vernor was back to single vision. Mick and the Professor were on the couch and he was sitting on a chair near them, holding a reefer. Vernor opened his mouth, then closed it.