White Light (Axoplasm Books)

by Rudy Rucker

  Sitting there in the Drop Inn, I was looking at mental pictures of the alef-one and c and trying to compare them. That day alef-one looked like a whole lot of staircases…each of them steeper than the ones before; and c looked like a barrel. I let the staircases move out from the barrel’s axis and watched to see if they could fill it up. I put lots of things…everything possible… into the barrel, sliced it into cross-sections, and drew concentric circles on the slices. I thought of a thought balloon which never stops growing, of a library with infinitely long books. I was hoping to find a proof that c is bigger than alef-one.

  After awhile I noticed that there was a lull in the rain. I finished my beer, lit a cigarette and went outside. The brim of my hat kept the rain off the cigarette. I walked around town for awhile without really noticing where I was going. I had hit on what felt like a good approach to the Continuum Problem, and tried to stick with it, although my thoughts kept straying to April and to my nightmare about the Devil.

  If I could only make some progress on the problem, I would be able to get a good job. If I could get a good job, April and I would be happy. If I were happy, I wouldn’t keep dreaming about leaving my body.

  April wanted me to go to the American Mathematical Society’s annual job fair again. A hotel ball-room full of creeps behind card-tables. The petitioners were strange, quirky intelligences that had turned themselves into pretzels, adding machines, the Baseball Hall of Fame. The interviewers all wanted applied mathematicians. Whatever that meant, it didn’t mean Set Theory.

  For the first time I asked myself what the Continuum Problem was really about. Comparing two different things: c and alef-one. It seems fair to say that there are c possible thoughts and that alef-one is the first level of infinity which we really can’t think up to. So the problem becomes: Is Everything bigger than Infinity?

  The air around me was soft and luminous. I could feel Cimön and How to Get There in my breast pocket. Both c and alef-one seemed like metaphysical Absolutes. Is there only one Absolute? Is the ultimate reality One or Many?

  I noticed I was walking up Center Street towards Temple Hill. Bernco is on a hill which runs down to a thin gray lake. At the top of the hill is a graveyard, below that the town, below that the college, below that the elementary school, and below that the waters.

  Somehow I fell asleep in the graveyard.

  No. 5

  Donald Duck

  After a frenzied dream of infinite catacombs I woke up with my body paralyzed again. I struggled to scream, to kick, to wave my arms. If I could only grunt, only twitch a finger…but I couldn’t. I gave up and relaxed.

  Although it was raining quite hard, I felt warm and comfortable. I wondered if I was dying. My mind strayed back to the dream. I had picked a perfectly random, utterly indescribable path through the labyrinth. There had been infinitely many choices, no last one, but now I was done with them all. In a way I had dreamed my way past alef-null. I wondered what it would take to reach alef-one, to go on and on through all the levels of infinity, out towards the unattainable Absolute Infinite…

  But I had to wake up! With a superhuman effort I managed to roll over, and that did it. I stood up and began walking unsteadily out of the graveyard, looking around for that mausoleum I’d dreamed about. I didn’t see it ahead, so I turned to look back towards the beech tree.

  My real body was still lying under the tree. I was in my astral body again. The rain was falling right through me and I hadn’t noticed.

  I hesitated there for a time, torn between fear and curiosity. I had never been so far from my physical body before. I was scared it would die, but I was dying to see what my astral body could do out in the open.

  I jumped off the ground and didn’t fall back. I could fly! Maybe I should whip home, see what April was doing, zoom back here, wake up my body, walk home and ask April if I was right. Then I’d know whether or not this was real.

  But that’s how you got into trouble yesterday, I reminded myself. I was hovering some 15 feet off the ground. It was getting dark and I could see people walking home from work. Most of the houses had some lights on. The lit-up windows looked warm and yellow…homey. I thought of April and Iris, wanting only to love and be loved. This madness had to end.

  At a touch of volition my astral body floated over to my inert flesh. The body was lying supine near the base of the beech tree. The rain came down through the bare branches to split into droplets on the greasy face. Fortunately the head was twisted to the side, and the water couldn’t fill the crooked nostrils or the slack mouth. The body looked utterly uninviting, but I began trying to get back into it.

  I had never been out so long before. My astral body had flowed into a blobbier, more comfortable shape, which was hard to fit to my old skeleton. The space occupied by my flesh had a clammy, icky feel to it. It was like the body cavity of a defrosted turkey, full of pimply skin, splintery bones and slippery giblets. But April needed me, and I shuffled on those mortal coils.

  I tried everything then. I put steady pressure on my eyelids…nothing. I waited for minutes, then hit my nerves with a jolt of stored energy…nothing. One by one, I tried every muscle in my body. I tried to hold my breath, to wet my pants, to get an erection. Nothing doing. There was just the rhythmic weaving of my automatic body processes. Maybe I had narcolepsy.

  I withdrew abruptly and hovered again in my wonderfully responsive astral body. “The hell with you,” I thought as I looked down at my old body. “You’ll wake up when you’re ready. Meanwhile…”

  I began testing the capabilities of my astral body…which looked to be made of a sort of glowing greenish jelly. Ectoplasm. I could change my size at will. One instant I towered tenuously above the beech tree, the next I was rumbling along a crack in its bark.

  My light sensitivity extended as far up and down the electromagnetic spectrum as I wanted, and the sensitivity at each level could be adjusted. If I wanted to I could see by the sputtering flicker of cosmic rays.

  But that was not all. I began noticing things that didn’t fit into any theory of physics I’d ever heard of. There were blobs of…of stuff drifting around everywhere. Little pin-point bubbles and big dopey-looking balloons were filtering through the objects around me. With their dark wrinkles and foolish nodding, the big ones made me think of a drawing in one of Iris’s Dr. Seuss books. I decided to call them bloogs like the good doctor had.

  There was an arc-light near the graveyard, and it came on now. Little bloogs poured out of the light like bubbles off a swizzle-stick. Maybe they had something to do with energy. They were almost transparent, and all but imperceptible to the touch.

  Wondering if I could think better now, I turned my attention back to the Continuum Problem. My mind was certainly more active than usual. Instantly I glimpsed three or four new ways of arranging a set of c points in space. But my imagination was too jittery for mathematical thought. My ideas had a life of their own and refused to stand still while I contemplated them. The new arrangements of space grew legs and chased each other around the beech tree. I decided to look at them some other time.

  These thoughts had brought back an unpleasant memory: Earlier I had imagined myself to be selling my soul for a solution to the Continuum Problem. “I didn’t mean it,” I whispered to the empty graveyard. “I didn’t sign anything.” There was no response.

  I felt like doing some flying. Going to April seemed like the best bet. I looked around. It was almost completely dark now and the bloogs were thinning out. For some reason I wasn’t worried that my body would die. But I was worried the police might find it and put it in jail. That had happened to me once back in college.

  That time, I’d been into a fifth of bourbon at the tail end of some weeks of drinking. I was alone and it was dawn. I was sitting on the library steps watching the sun come up, and everything got warmer and lighter. Pastels shading all the way up to white as I ran to meet a being of light. Jesus. We’d talked wordlessly forever, until two cops started loading me in
to a paddy-wagon. “Where’s the other guy?” I’d asked, and they’d exchanged a glance and answered, “He wasn’t drinking.”

  I’d gotten suspended from school that time. Didn’t really mean anything. But it would be different if the police picked me up today. Even if I wasn’t drunk or stoned I looked it. And I wasn’t a student anymore. I was a twenty-seven-year-old professor with, I recalled, a couple of old roaches in my coat pocket. I’d lose my job at the least and go to Attica at the worst. Rockefeller’s bid for the presidency had left New York with the strictest drug laws in the country.

  But it was really dark now, and I was nowhere near the road. The police wouldn’t find me tonight. I hoped the Devil wouldn’t come after me again either. I floated up, right through a big limb of the beech tree. It was partly hollow, and I could make out a pair of squirrels snuggled together in there. I was tempted to shrink down to squirrel size and stay. But I missed April.

  I floated up high above the tree-tops. I could see our house two blocks away on Tuna Street. I sped towards it.

  While I was flying over, I stopped paying attention to the shape of my astral body, and it took on more comfortable lines. I angled through the roof and found myself in our hallway, near the mirror.

  I was about the size and shape of a mushroom. I was hovering near the ceiling, and I could hear April vacuuming in the baby’s room.

  It was bright and cheerful in there, with a cluster of yellow bloogs around the light. Iris was in the crib and April was reaching to vacuum the cobwebs from the ceiling, her face up-turned. She seemed so beautiful there, her generous features relaxed, then smiling at a sound the baby made. Baby could see me. “Bah, ga bah,” she said, gumming and waving her dough-girl arms my way.

  I flew closer to April, and she brushed her hair back, looking through me. Things felt so right, so sane and good here in the nursery. This was where I belonged, this was the world of my heart’s desire.

  Wasn’t there some way to just stay here? Maybe I was really dreaming, asleep on the living room couch. I wished it with all my strength, visualizing exactly how I would look, curled up and snoozing, uncomfortable but tenacious on those purple cushions. I held on to the image and floated out of the baby’s room and down the hall to the living room.

  As I entered, someone lurched out the front door, slamming it behind. April ran into the living room, alarmed by the sudden noise. “Felix?” she said, questioningly, “Felix?” But there was no answer that she could hear.

  She opened the front door and looked out, but apparently it was too dark for her to see anything. When she turned back, she leaned over the hall table with a sudden exclamation of dismay. Her purse had been lying there, and someone had dumped it out and emptied her wallet.

  Floating shapelessly near the ceiling I watched her refill her purse, light a cigarette and sit down. I wondered why she didn’t call the police. She exhaled angrily, looked at her watch, then picked up a section of the paper, losing herself in the print.

  Who had that been going out? A burglar? Or did April have a lover? I could easily have gone out to look, but I hated to leave.

  After a few minutes April put the paper down, lit another cigarette and stared blankly at the dark window. Iris crawled in, smiled up at me, and pulled a stack of magazines off the table. My attention was caught by a new comic book which fell open, and I floated closer to get a better look at it.

  Suddenly I am walking down a beautiful street in a world of simple colors and continuous forms. The sidewalk is smooth and unblemished, the lawn a uniform green besprent with yellow flowers, and my belly is snowy white where it sticks out from beneath my blue and black sailor suit.

  I swivel my head around and admire how my neatly arranged tail-feathers sway back and forth with my purposeful waddle. My blue car with the big balloon tires is parked by the curb. I throw the key high into the air and vault over the door. With a happy, “Wak-wak-wak,” I catch the key in my gloved hand.

  I ease the car out into the street, and instantly I’m parked in front of Unca Scrooge’s money bin. I get a suitcase out of the trunk, muttering things in a high-pitched splutter that even I can’t understand. Something about a yacht.

  Unca Scrooge is sitting behind his desk. “Captain Duck reporting for duty,” I say, bending my beak into a long smile.

  There is smoke around Scrooge’s head, and he jumps straight up into the air. “It’s about time, you lazy loafer!” He takes out his pocket watch and shoves it so close I almost fall over. “You’re two hours late! My rival, McSkinflynt, is going to beat us to the treasure of the Lost Pyramid!”

  “I was trying to finish this crossword puzzle,” I explain, pulling out my puzzle book. “Do you know a nine-letter word, starting with ‘D’, for ‘inference’?”

  Scrooge is madder than ever. “Yes,” he fumes, raising his cane, “de-duck-tion!” He chases me out of the building. I have the puzzle book in one hand and my suitcase in the other. My legs are a circular blur, and Scrooge is close behind.

  Huey, Dewey, and Louie have the ship ready, and soon we’re on the high seas. I’m working on my crossword puzzle, the boys are fishing, and Scrooge is steering and scanning the horizon with his spyglass.

  “What’s a nine-letter word, starting with ‘D’, for ‘airship’?” I call out. “Dirigible,” the boys holler.

  As I continue to work on my puzzle, a blimp hovers over our ship. McSkinflynt leans out to taunt Scrooge. “The weather is lovely in the Yucatan this time of year.”

  Scrooge runs out on deck with a harpoon gun and fires on the dirigible. McSkinflynt has to crawl out of his cabin to patch up the hole. “Ta, ta,” Scrooge calls as we speed off.

  “What’s a nine-letter word, starting with ‘D’, for ‘tasty’?” I ask, finally looking up. Scrooge and the three boys are just staring at me over a pile of X-eyed fresh fish. I remember that I’m the cook as well as the captain, and I get to work. Before long we’re all leaning back from a table covered with perfect fish skeletons. “Delicious,” I observe, taking my puzzle book out of my chef’s hat.

  The next morning we sight land. We anchor offshore and the boys row us in under my direction. I wear my captain’s hat for the ride. Scrooge just sits in the back of the dinghy worrying. As soon as we have beached the dinghy and gotten out, a dog-man comes running full tilt out of the jungle. “Don’t stay here, Mr. McDuck,” he says, breathlessly pushing the dinghy back into the water.

  “Hold it,” Scrooge hollers, “Did you find the pyramid?”

  The dog-man doesn’t answer. He’s already rowing off. An arrow flies out of the jungle, knocking my puzzle book out of my hand. A monkey jumps out of a palm tree, grabs my book and runs off with it. I get angry and charge into the jungle after him.

  Scrooge and the boys are looking at the arrow. “Aztec,” Scrooge says and runs into the jungle at my heels. The boys take out a magnifying glass and look closer. There is a “Made in Japan” sticker on the arrow. “Wait,” shouts Huey. “Unca,” shouts Dewey. “Scrooge,” shouts Louie.

  Meanwhile Scrooge and I proceed to get totally lost in the jungle. Finally we sit down to rest near a stream surrounded by a clutter of vines and roots. “The ocean should be back that way,” Scrooge says, pointing downstream.

  “But I can hear surf over there,” I say, pointing the other way.

  Scrooge cocks his head and listens. Finally he leans very, very close and whispers, “Those are drums, Donald. Aztec ceremonial drums.”

  Just then, glom, a net comes down on us.

  Meanwhile the boys have found a trail and have crept to within a half mile of the Lost Pyramid. They climb a tall tree and watch the goings-on. Some sort of pageant is taking place. As they watch, Scrooge and I are carried up the steps of the pyramid, bound and struggling. At the top the high priest stands behind a blood-stained altar. For some reason he is wearing sunglasses and a Western business suit.

  “What is this blood?” I hiss to Unca Scrooge. “It’s against the Code!”

>   But Scrooge has lost his glasses and can’t see a thing. I try to tell him about the priest standing up there with a long obsidian knife in his upstretched hands, but Scrooge just shushes me.

  “McSkinflynt will save us,” he says confidently. “The boys will lead him to us. Do you see the blimp yet, Donald?”

  The priest’s assistants lay us on the ground behind the altar. There is a sort of drain-hole under my body. I can’t speak because the priest is squeezing my neck with one hand. With his stone knife he slits me open as casually as someone else would open a letter. I can’t stand to look. For some reason it doesn’t hurt.

  When I finally open my eyes, I see my heart raised high and pulsing in the last rays of the setting sun. Rough hands grab me and throw me down the back of the pyramid. I bounce down the steps and come to rest in some ferns at the bottom, lying on my back and unable to move.

  My glazed eyes stare into the darkening heavens. I wonder what will happen to me. I have never known anyone who died. I see a dark silhouette against the dim sky. It’s McSkinflynt’s blimp. The boys have signalled him somehow, and are already aboard. The “Aztecs” run in terror, and Scrooge is hauled up with a rope sling.

  I hear the boys’ sweet voices for the last time. Why didn’t I ever tell them I loved them? “Where’s Unca Donald?” they ask. “We saw him disappear behind that altar.”

  “I didn’t see,” says Scrooge. “But don’t worry about that rascal. He’ll turn up.”

  The blimp drifts off and their voices fade. The nightly jungle rain begins falling, and I lie there on the wet earth as the blackness closes in.

  No. 6

  Jesus and the Devil

  An indefinite interval of time passed. Slowly I remembered I was not really Donald Duck. But this realization brought no change in my surroundings. It was dark and it was raining. I sharpened my senses and cast about. I was next to a cypress, there were gravestones nearby, over there was a muddy fresh grave. I was back in the Temple Hill graveyard.