by Rudy Rucker
Suddenly the tent collapsed and the spot of light shot off to the left. Sheets of colors rippled past and angry faces began forming. Another spot of light moved in the distance. Franx slid down from the window and sniffed the wet spot behind him without embarrassment. “She looked like my mate. That dreamer must have been from Praha.”
Cantor nodded. “The dreamers usually seek out visions appropriate to them. But,” he wagged his finger at me, “the dreamers are not creating the visions out there. They observe them, they experience them, but the visions will still be there when every dreamer is gone. Like with sets, is it not?”
Outside the window a circle of mushrooms had grown. They had cruel, mocking faces. A red light moved about uncertainly in their midst.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “All the possible dreams are out there. When someone has a dream he really turns into a spot of red light and comes to Dreamland. By some kind of instinct he picks out a few dreams which are appropriate, experiences them and then goes back to his regular body?”
Just then Ellie came in with the tea. She frowned a little when she saw the shattered table.
“You’ll have to get me another one, Georg. There’s a new antique store in Truckee.”
“Still more?” he sighed. “Is it really so…”
Before he could expand on his objections, Ellie started talking again. “And these are your students? That will be good for you to teach them. You’re almost due for one of your terrible depressions, I can tell.’’
Cantor waved his hand in a feeble dismissive gesture. “No more students, Ellie. Only God can teach. But they are certainly welcome to stay.” He glanced at me questioningly. I nodded and he continued, “Mr. Rayman will be needing a bed.” He frowned at Franx. “And what about you?”
“I’ll use the floor in Felix’s room. No, the wall. I mean the…the ceiling.” He stopped there, apparently having foiled the prophecies once again.
“Will that be in order, my sweet?” Cantor said to Ellie.
“Of course, Georg. It will do us both good to have the company.” She gave me a strange look, holding eye contact longer than felt comfortable. “Would you like some brandy as well?”
“Well sure. That would be nice.”
She left the room again and Cantor turned his attention back to me. “There was something…yes. The spots of light. A sleeping person reaches here with a spot of light he carries in his pineal gland. They are like eyes, these red lights. Eyes that can freely move across the trans-dimensional bridge from Earth to Dreamland. And after death there is only the light and a little more.”
“But this doesn’t feel like a dream,” I protested. “A-a-and the room isn’t changing.”
There was a high giggle in the kitchen, followed by a crash.
“Ellie!” Cantor hollered, “Are you all right?” There was a faint answer. Cantor looked at me again. “Of course this isn’t a dream. If it was my dream I wouldn’t be living in such a woman’s house. The dreams are out there.” He gestured at the window. “As you must know by now, Cimön is like a huge pancake. Mainside, Flipside, and the filling is Dreamland. In most places it’s covered up with dirt and rocks, but around here it reaches right up to the surface. The snowstorms feed the glacier, and the glacier is Dreamland.”
Ellie brought in the brandy bottle and three glasses. She leaned over to pour, and seemed to make a point of bumping me with her withered behind. Could such a woman possibly have sexual thoughts? She seated herself next to me on the couch. I poured some brandy into Franx’s bowl, and we all sipped in silence for a minute.
There was another question bothering me. “It doesn’t seem much different here from Hilbert’s Hotel. I could handle countable infinities then, and I can handle them now. But what about alef-one and c? And the higher infinites? When will I really see them?’
“It depends on what ‘you’ means,” Cantor said. I raised my eyebrows questioningly, but he shook his head. “It would do no good for me to try to explain. You still think like a mathematician. Only trust in God.” He poured himself a little more tea. “Do you play?” he said suddenly.
I didn’t know immediately what he meant, but Franx piped up, “I flute tolerably well. Perhaps we could play a duet?” Cantor smiled at him for the first time.
“A little Scarlatti, Ellie?”
“Oh yes, Georg. One of the concertos.” She walked over to seat herself at the harpsichord, and Franx followed her. She handed him a pamphlet of music which he rapidly scanned through and returned.
“I am at your service,” Franx declared. “Do you prefer the Cimön or the classical style?”
“Oh, give me the overtones,” Ellie said, gaily fingering a chord. She struck with her fingers and the tart notes hung in the air. Franx stretched his head forward and emitted a perfect C, richly rounded and burnished with a light tremolo.
They started playing then. Cantor gave a sigh of contentment and leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed.
Ordinarily my appreciation of music doesn’t go back much earlier than Robert Johnson, but with Cimön ears it was different. Franx was piling endless sequences of overtones into each note, and Ellie was flicking in zillions of extra little grace notes between every beat Scarlatti wrote. The pattern shimmered around us and filled my senses. Good, harmonious thoughts filled my mind.
They played for a long time, maybe forty minutes. Somewhere toward the end Cantor fell asleep. It was easy to notice, since a dull red light oozed out through his closed eyes. For an instant I thought he was bleeding, but then the light formed itself into a ball which hovered near his head. Cantor’s astral dream eye. It winked at me and glided across the room, through the window glass. It hovered there for an instant, then sped off in search of the perfect dream.
PART 3
“Within the context of neo-rock
we must open up our eyes
and seize and rend
the veil
of smoke which man calls order.”
PATTI SMITH
No. 16
Inflatable Love Doll
Cantor’s body was still in the chair, but just barely. Clearly most of him had gone into that dream eye. In his chair there was only a motionless husk, translucent, greenish, unreal. I wondered if he would be gone long. There were still so many questions.
Franx and Ellie finished the duet with a quick arpeggio of alef-null notes, and I clapped lightly. “That was really lovely. But the professor seems to have fallen asleep.” I felt a little stiff, alone with the beetle and this skinny lady.
She seated herself next to me again and poured herself a fresh brandy. Franx held forth at some length on the subtleties of Scarlatti’s composition, and she listened attentively. But even though she seemed to be concentrating only on what Franx said, she was constantly brushing against me in a perhaps unconscious flirtation.
There was no question of making love to a woman like this…she would snap like a stick. But my mindless male instincts urged me to assert myself, to win her attention.
As soon as Franx paused for a breath I seized the reins of the conversation. “It’s too bad he fell asleep. I wanted to ask him more about the Continuum Problem. He suggested that it might be possible to physically test it on Earth.”
Ellie stared into my eyes while I spoke, and my tongue grew thick. What was it about this woman? By any sane standard she was repulsive…almost a freak…but there was some aura of sexuality around her…
“You can’t always take Georg too seriously,” she was saying. “I’ve heard him prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays and that Joseph was Jesus Christ’s natural father. He likes to astound people.”
“He also said that there is a metaphysical approach to the Continuum Problem,” I continued. She had such a lovely smile. “Do you…do you know anything about that?”
“Yes,” she began. “He says you must become the…”
Franx’s harsh chirp interrupted. “I realize I risk the high crime of lè
se majesté, but how can you set-theorists be so sure that c really is larger than alef-null? Surely this is just poetry. All infinities are really the same. Why shouldn’t there be a mapping from the natural numbers onto the points in the continuum… a mapping which has simply been overlooked. To be human is to be erroneous, Felix.” He chuckled condescendingly. I felt almost sure he didn’t believe what he was saying.
But I was glad at the question. I knew just how to answer it, and I was eager to have a chance to shine. I took my book out of my parka pocket. “Look, Franx, this has c pages. To prove that c is greater than alef-null, I need only demonstrate that no matter how you go about picking alef-null pages, I can always carry out a procedure for singling out at least one page which you will miss.”
“Wait,” Ellie said, rising. “Don’t use the book. I have something nicer.” She walked across the room, found a pasteboard box, and came back. She had a mincing walk that made her whole body sway, and I had to remind myself again that she was little more than a skeleton.
“Georg won’t let me take these out when he’s around.” She handed me the box. It was a pack of cards. As I slid out the deck she stared at me, watching hungrily for my reaction. I looked at the top card.
A dark-haired woman with full lips and hair under her arms. The back of a man’s head. My heart beat faster. Franx hoisted himself up on the couch arm and stared. I cut the deck. A full derriere, and up in the corner a face puffed with passion. Cut. A man, a kneeling woman. Cut. Two women standing and… Hmmm.
Franx’s voice broke in. “Is that a seed catalog? We have those too.”
The veins of my neck were engorged and it was a little hard to talk. I nodded and set the deck down on the table. Ellie was still staring at me. Slowly she licked her lips. I couldn’t meet her gaze.
“Are there supposed to be c of them?” Franx inquired blandly. “All right, let’s see your trick for finding a card different from any alef-null cards I pick.”
With an effort I ignored the pictures. I still wasn’t sure what sort of reaction Ellie expected from me. Perhaps this was just some complicated way of ridiculing me.
I cut the deck and set the two halves on the table. “Now Franx, we’ll go into a speed-up. You’ll pick alef-null cards in a row, and when you’re done I’ll have singled out a card which you didn’t pick.”
Franx drew a card from the left-hand packet and I cut the right-hand packet again. “Pick another.” This time he took a card from one of the right-hand packets, and I recut the packet he hadn’t picked from yet. We kept it up like that. I kept recutting the untouched packet, which grew thinner, but never vanishingly so.
After alef-null steps, Franx had picked what looked like every blonde in the deck, and the untouched packet still held a card. A cheeky girl lying demurely on a white bed. For a second I thought it was April.
Before Franx could say anything, Ellie spoke up. “Would you like to go to bed now, Dr. Rayman?” She stood and began unbuttoning the front of her gray dress. There was something funny about her navel. “Look,” she said, fingering it. “I blow up.”
I backed up warily and stepped on Franx, who was pressing forward in curiosity. I slipped and when I had regained my footing, Ellie had pulled an air-hose out of the wall. She fastened it to the valve in her navel. “Say when, Felix.”
She began to swell. First her breasts. They grew and grew so that she had to shed her dress and bra. A sad old pair of cotton drawers hung on her bony hips. The breasts continued to grow, quickly going beyond the attractive and into the grotesque.
She reached out and squeezed the immense milk-bags. Some of the air went down into her hips and legs. She held the breasts down until her lower half had inflated properly. Now the skimpy cotton panties were strained tight by her broad pelvis and full buttocks.
She unhooked the hose and turned to smile brightly at me with those thin lips and withered gums. “Your face,” I said numbly. “You forgot that.”
Ellie giggled and then squatted to compress her body. Slowly her features swelled. The gums crawled back down the teeth, the lips pouted out, the cheeks grew firm…even her hair thickened. She looked like one of the women in her deck of cards. Perhaps she had posed for the pictures.
“I noticed which cards you liked,” she said softly. She took me by the hand. “Come…”
“I shouldn’t,” I said weakly. She pulled me to the bedroom; Franx followed.
Franx watched us from the ceiling, occasionally twittering in surprise. When we had finished I started to drift into sleep, but Ellie shook me awake. “Take me out, Felix. I want to dance.”
“On the mountain? It’s just rocks.” I really didn’t feel like going back through the tunnel.
She gave me another hard shake and pulled some strange clothes out from under the bed. “Not the mountain, the city. Truckee. There’s a nice supper-club I know.”
Ellie was fully dressed in a few minutes. She wore pink toreador pants and a rubber top which looked more or less like a hose coiled around her. I slipped my jumpsuit back on, and Franx crawled down the wall.
Ellie said it was summer outside, so I left my ski-shoes and the parka. But I went back to the sitting room and got my book. After all, there was no telling if we’d be back this way again. Cantor was still resting lightly in his chair. He looked like a dried leaf. I saluted him silently and went out into the hall.
“Don’t show that to anyone out there,” Ellie cautioned, when she saw I had my book.
“Why not?”
“They don’t have many infinities here.” She sounded so cautious.
“Would they be upset if they saw some?”
“A lot of the people in Truckee are…frightened. But it’s not like that at the club.” The three of us stepped outside.
I had half expected to find myself on Mount On or in Dreamland, but the front door gave onto a residential city street lined with beat old parked cars. The city sloped away from us. It was twilight and the yellowish street-lights were on. There were trees, and a warm breeze rustled the leaves. Shadows danced on the pavement and on the stone walls of the houses lining the street. We started off. It was quiet and our footsteps echoed.
“Where’s Dreamland?” I asked Ellie.
She tossed her head, shaking out her long wavy hair. “That’s out the back door. I live here because it’s a triple point. Truckee in front, Dreamland in back, and Mount On right through the tunnel.”
We still hadn’t seen anyone else. It was my favorite time of day…that time when gray light suffuses the city and everything glows with its own luminous significance. Ellie seemed to know her way. We followed her around corners and down the empty tree-lined streets. Here and there a garbage can had overflowed, and Franx snatched up this or that tidbit.
The neighborhood was mostly houses, but there were a few large buildings that could have been temples. They were lit up, and one could hear voices from within. I wondered what sort of religion the citizens of heaven practiced.
I fell into step next to Franx. He was being unusually quiet. “What do you think of this, Franx? Have you seen Truckee before?”
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said somberly. “They’re going to smash my head in. I should do something, but I’m so tired, Felix, the current of history is too strong for me…”
For the first time I believed him. “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’ll see you again.” I started to ask another question, but he cut me off. “There’s not much time left. There’s something you ought to know. You’ll begin to notice it soon. Everything is alive. Don’t forget.” He paused to scoop up a half-eaten sandwich from the gutter.
“What are you trying to tell me, Franx?”
His answer was muffled. “You’ll see. Keep your eyes open. I’m going to fill up while I can.” He darted over to another garbage can.
The light was fading and Ellie kept walking faster. Occasionally a car drove by, leaving a wake of foul exhaust. We passed a few people on the sidewa
lk, but when they saw Franx their faces tightened. Apparently they weren’t used to aliens.
I grabbed Ellie’s arm to slow her down. “What’s the hurry? And how come people look at Franx that way?”
She answered in a low rushed voice. “It’s just around the corner up there,” she said. “Where we’re going. It’s like a speakeasy. I’ll explain there.” She tried to twist out of my grip.
Franx had raised himself onto the rim of a garbage can to examine the contents. The can slipped out from under him now, and rolled into the street. Slowly he moved along the trail of garbage, picking and choosing. A man in an undershirt appeared at a window, frowned at us and picked up a phone receiver.
“Come on” Ellie begged. “We’ve got to get under cover before…”
A ’52 Ford with writing on it turned the corner and pulled up next to us. A spotlight hit me in the eyes, and a rough voice spoke out of the glare. “Godsquad. Let’s see some I.D.”
I heard a hissing sound behind me. Thinking it was Franx, I turned and whispered, “Take it easy. I’ll talk.”
The car door opened, slammed, and a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. Ellie began screaming, and the spotlight moved off my face. I was dazzled and it took me a second to make out the scene.
Franx was on the pavement by the half-empty garbage can, looking up at us with his expressionless faceted eyes. “Don’t worry, I’ll clean it up,” he was saying, but it was hard to hear him over Ellie’s screams.
I looked at her then. She had let the air out of her navel. She looked like any other scrawny old woman. She was pointing at Franx and yelping, “The Evil One! Oh, save me, save me!”
The car door slammed again, and a figure in black ran over to Franx and jumped on him with both feet. I tensed myself for the goosh, but the huge beetle’s resilient exoskeleton just bounced the man off to land in a heap on the sidewalk.