by Rudy Rucker
Franx twittered something I couldn’t make out, something about talking cars. “Fly, Franx!” I shouted. “Get out of here!” The man holding me hit me hard in the stomach. I slid to the ground.
Through the red haze I saw Franx scramble around, lift his wing-covers, and take an awkward hop into the air. His wings began to buzz, and I cheered weakly. The second Godsquad man took out his gun. I shouted a warning. The pistol fired. Franx jerked in the air and fell heavily to the street.
The man who had hit me pulled a short club out of his belt. He hurried around the car into the street. I could hear him pounding Franx’s head in. It crunched, at first.
Then it was over. A patch of green light winged up from the street and across the sky. “He’s gone for now,” the man in the street called with a deep chuckle.
The man with the gun was standing over me. The pistol was aimed at my head. “Hey Vince! How about his friend? The devil lover.” His voice was high-pitched, self-righteous, angry.
“Don’t shoot him against the car,” Vince cautioned.
Ellie spoke up then. “He’s a good boy.” Her voice was old and quavering. “He’s just come here, you know. I’ve taken him under my wing.”
The man with the gun looked down at Ellie with a sneer on his face. He was tall and had short dark hair combed into greasy waves. A high-school bully. “So! You took it on yourself to process a fresher. You alone?” Ellie nodded meekly. “And what if he’s from the Evil One, too? That hell-bug might have been his familiar! I ought to shoot him. I ought to shoot him right now. If he’s human he’ll probably come back through the Dump just the same.” Ellie began sobbing.
“Put the gun away, Carl,” the other man said. He was short and heavy set. Balding. “You can go ma’am.” He grabbed my arm and helped me stand up. “We’ll just check this fellow out for you.”
He shoved me into the back seat of their car. Ellie came over to stick her head in the door. “Now you come back, Felix.” I started to say something, but she cut me off with a frown. Her withered lips silently mouthed a word. Please. Then she stepped back onto the sidewalk.
No. 17
Urban Terror
Vince drove and Carl sat next to him. The back doors had no handles on the inside, and there was a grill between the front and back seats. They hadn’t bothered to look at my book.
I wished there was a gun hidden inside it.
“I haven’t done anything.”
Carl turned and looked at me scornfully. “You didn’t have time, did you?”
I tried a new tack. “This is ridiculous. We’re only here in astral bodies. What are you so scared of?”
“You hear that, Vince? You hear that occult talk?”
Vince grunted. There was more traffic now and the streets were brightly lit. We passed a few stores here and there. All of them seemed to have used, broken-down merchandise. For that matter, the Ford I was in seemed to be at least third-hand. Springs poked through the seat, and there was a bad shimmy in the front wheels. The car didn’t seem capable of going over thirty.
We cruised in silence for awhile. More stores and people. We were near the center of Truckee…if it had a center. I was surprised to see an immense dump where one might have expected a city park. Scores of people were climbing about on the mountains of junk. Some rooted feverishly, and others just looked around expectantly. There were small fires here and there, fires which everyone avoided.
As we drove by, a rusted-out ’56 Chevy suddenly appeared. A handful of people scrambled up the shifting scree to claim possession. It looked like a stocky man in a T-shirt had won, but suddenly a TV set materialized where his head had been. He began running around and waving his arms. Two tough-looking black women elbowed past him to get at the car. He tripped and rolled down a moraine of beer-cans.
We drove along next to the Dump for block after block. It seemed to stretch on forever, cutting Mainside in half like Franx had said. Battered objects were appearing on it constantly. None of the people swarming around the Dump brought anything, but everyone left with something. Occasionally you would see a person come crawling out of the garbage like a maggot squeezed out of a pork chop.
One of these new people came staggering out of the Dump and into the street. He looked like he had died of drink: insult to the brain. Vince ran over him without even slowing down. The wheels thumped one-two over the drunk, and I looked out the back window. A ragged green light was fluttering towards the Dump, folding on itself like a sheet of windblown newspaper.
“I ran that guy down last week, too,” Vince said with a wheezy chuckle.
“Is it bad for him?”
“They say it hurts like hell.”
“And a discorporated spirit like that is easy pickings for Satan,” Carl chimed in. “As if you didn’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“You see those fires? Each one of them goes straight to Hell. You go through the Dump once too often and, brother, that’s all she wrote.”
The car wheeled around a corner and pulled up in front of a white-painted cast-iron building. There was a billboard two stories high on the front of the building. The billboard looked like a car-lot advertisement, with a hyper-real color portrait of the boss. The boss was “Bob Teeter.” The inevitable teeth and checked sport coat. But he wasn’t selling cars.
“God Chose Jesus! Jesus Chose Bob Teeter! Bob Teeter Chose You!” the billboard read. Carl and Vince led me into the building.
It looked like any other police station. “Got a fresher, Sarge,” Vince said to the officer behind the desk. Without looking up, the sergeant held out a form.
“We found him on the loose,” Carl added. “With a giant cockroach.”
The sergeant glanced at me with a flicker of interest. He wore a tie. He had a well-trimmed blond beard and flesh-colored glasses. You could tell he considered himself to be an intellectual. “What did you bring with you?” His voice was low and insistent. His eye fell on the book I was carrying, and he held out his hand. “Let me see.”
“I don’t think…” I began, but Carl gave me a hard shove and wrenched the book from my grasp. He tossed it onto the desk with an illiterate’s contempt for the printed word. One of the corners stubbed, and the book landed face down with some pages folded under.
The sergeant read, “The Lives of Felix Rayman,” from the spine. He scanned a page, squinting as the print got smaller. He flipped and glanced at some other pages. “How come all the pages end up in a blur like that?”
“It’s not a blur,” I protested. “There’s alef-null lines on each page.” They looked blankly at me. “There’s infinitely many lines on each page, and there’s a larger infinity of pages.”
The sergeant’s face clouded over. Too late I remembered Ellie’s warning that infinity was not a homey concept in Truckee. Carl twisted my arm up in a hammer-lock. A pistol dug into my ribs.
“I think you got a live one,” the sergeant said. “Take him upstairs, and don’t hesitate to shoot.”
I was tempted to slug Carl and get it over with. If they killed me here, I’d just reappear somewhere in the Dump. Intellectually I knew this, but emotionally I wasn’t ready to take a bullet in the gut. It would hurt while I died, it would hurt a lot. If my luck was bad it might take days. And if I landed on one of those fires I’d go to Hell. I decided I was curious to see what Bob Teeter would have to say.
As it turned out, Teeter had gone home for the day. They locked me in a cell for the night. I tried to meditate and turn into a white light again, but nothing came of it. After seeing the way Cantor had looked while dreaming, I didn’t really want to fall asleep, but before I knew it I had.
My dreams were the usual kaleidoscopic blur at first, but at some point I snapped into consciousness. I could sense, for the first time, that I was a red ball of light. When I tried the old trick of looking at my hands, the ball obligingly extruded two. I let the hands snap back and began looking around.
The dream I had just bee
n having…of working in a tuna cannery…was still playing all around me. Silver scales, sluices of salt-water. I walked out of the factory and surprised a fellow worker in the act of enjoying homosexual intercourse with a soft-drink machine.
With a twitch I entered a new dream space. People yelling at me. Twitch. A final exam. Twitch. Driving to Florida. I went into a speed-up then, searching all over Dreamland. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it.
It was a drunk lying on a hot summer sidewalk. Spit all over his face. His wallet is lying next to him, inside out. He looks familiar. Another dreamer was already there. Glowing red light as usual, but formed into the shape of a woman’s body, also familiar. April.
She leans over the drunk and tries to wake him. He looks just like me. This was April dreaming that I was hurt and drunk, and that she was trying to help me.
The drunk stands up then and looks at April with bleary hate-filled eyes. Curses drip from his cracked lips, and he pushes April away. He falls and hits his head on the sidewalk. It bounces. She backs off, sobbing.
I went up to her then, touched her. “April, baby, it’s me.”
That wasn’t part of her dream, and she ignored it. I tried to pull her away, but she slipped out of my grasp, leaned over that slob on the sidewalk. Did she really think I could ever sink that low? He’d wet his pants, for god’s sake.
If only I could get a message to her, tell her I was all right. Suddenly I knew how. I began zooming through Dreamland again, looking for the right dream. I didn’t have much time, and had to settle for a rough approximation of what I wanted. I noted where it was and whipped back to April’s dream.
The guy on the sidewalk seems to have died now. A dog noses at him, takes a tentative first nip out of his cheek. Nobody could have nightmares like April. She sobbed broken-heartedly while the dog had lunch.
Finally her nightmare ended, and she drifted away. This was the moment to act. I squeezed up against her and began pushing her along. She didn’t resist, and pretty soon I’d brought her to the dream I wanted her to see.
It is the cockpit of an airplane, World War One style. A guy who looks something like me is flying the plane, his teeth bared in a grin. The Earth has dwindled to a ball far below. The radio crackles. “White lightning, white lightning, do you rrread me?” The voice is zealous, fruity.
The pilot speaks into the microphone. “I’m high all right, but not on false drugs. All I need is a clean windshield, powerful gasoline and a shoeshine.”
The line came from a Firesign Theatre record that April and I had often listened to together. She’d recognize it. Every time she left the dream, I gently forced her back to see it again. I wanted to make sure she remembered.
Pushing her back into the dream over and over, I fell into a light trance. Then I lost control, drifted through endless rickety buildings, and awoke. I was still in my cell.
They brought me some food after awhile. Scrambled eggs on a paper plate. They slid it in under the bars. For the first time since leaving Earth, I ate.
A little later I heard a deep, authoritative voice. Carl and Vince came and took me down the hall. Bob Teeter had an office there with silent air-conditioners plugged into both windows. All the furniture was scratched and wobbly. One leg of his desk was held on with wire.
There were more of the Teeter Chose You posters on the wall, some with four-color Sunday School illustrations of Jesus shaking hands with Bob while God’s glowing eye beamed approvingly in the background. There was a map with pins in it, and a box half-filled with copies of The Heavenly Law, by Bob Teeter.
Teeter was a big white-haired man who looked like he might have once been a bartender in Pittsburgh. His head was enormous. His eyes were the size of hard-boiled eggs. A born leader.
Vince gave him a quick run-down, threw my book on his desk and went back downstairs. I stood in front of the desk, and Carl stood behind me with a .38 against my left temple.
Bob Teeter looked at the book uncomprehendingly, and then turned those huge eyes up at me. “Did you find this on the Dump?”
His voice was deep and melancholy.
“I’ve never been to the Dump.” Teeter looked shocked. Carl cocked his pistol. I’d said the wrong thing again.
“You’re from the Evil One.” It was not a question. The pistol was digging into my temple.
I didn’t answer, and Carl nudged me even harder with the gun. Suddenly I didn’t care if they killed me or not. I snapped my head down to the right and hooked my left arm up, hoping to make a blind catch. I was lucky and grabbed onto the pistol with my pinky jamming the action. I yanked down and continued to turn. The gun came free.
I took a quick step back and Carl rushed me. I just had time to switch the gun to my right hand. He pinned my arms to my sides in a bear hug.
His doughy face looked down at me with a contemptuous expression. “We’re going to kill you slow, devil.”
I pushed my face forward and bit his face as hard as I could. My teeth sank in. Part of his cheek came off.
He screamed and his hug loosened enough so that I could pull up my left hand and push myself loose. I had a good grip on the pistol now, and when he came for me again I shot him between the eyes.
He staggered back, twirled and fell. The back of his head looked like a spaghetti dinner. His body shrivelled and pulled together. In seconds it had turned into a wad of green light, which moved out through the window and towards the Dump.
Teeter was pushing a button on his desk. I levelled the pistol at him. Footsteps were pounding up the stairs. I stepped towards him with a snarl. “You got about ten seconds to live, Bob.”
“Let’s not be hasty!” he cried in his deep voice.
“All right.” I stepped around behind him and locked my forearm against his neck. “Get me out of here alive.”
When they kicked the door in I was crouched behind Teeter with the gun on him. I told him what to say. The Godsquad did it. In ten minutes Teeter and I were in Vince’s Ford. Teeter was locked in back and I was driving. I had two pistols and a machine gun on the seat next to me, not to mention my book and a complimentary copy of The Heavenly Law. It had been easy. The next thing I wanted to do was go white and get out of Truckee.
No. 18
Pig Spit
The Godsquad had promised not to come after me for half an hour. I planned to ditch the car and head out on foot before then. I hadn’t decided yet whether or not to shoot Bob Teeter.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“They need me here,” the sepulchral voice responded. “Before I came…that was twenty-five years ago…there was no city, no centralized authority. I’ve given them that, and more. I’ve given them something to believe in.” Teeter’s voice softened. “Felix…I know you’re scared here…you never thought… you never thought heaven would be like this…”
“This isn’t heaven. Not if there’s police. And don’t call me Felix.”
Teeter chuckled indulgently. “I’m old enough to be your father. You got a tough break coming here so young, and I’m not surprised that you’re feeling bitter and rebellious. And no, this isn’t the real heaven…this is just a way-station, a rest stop.”
We had entered a crummier part of Truckee. There were lots of people hanging around on the sidewalks, most of them old. They looked poor, and I was struck by the fact that no one was consuming anything…no eating, no drinking, no smoking, not even any gum chewing. They were just standing around looking blank, dressed in whatever they’d picked off the Dump. Occasionally someone would recognize Teeter in the back seat and wave frantically.
“If it’s just a way-station, then why have you been here for twenty-five years?”
“These people need me. I built this city for them.”
I was beginning to get the picture. “You mean that when you first came here there was no city?”
“Just the Dump. Where everything goes when it dies.”
The Dump. It wasn’t j
ust people that recorporated there. I had seen cars and TV sets appearing too. “What happened to the people here before you built Truckee?”
“They just wandered off,” Teeter said mournfully. “Off into the wilderness.”
And probably found God, I added to myself. But now Teeter had built this bottleneck, this monument to himself, and people were getting hung up here…possibly forever. I shuddered at the thought of standing around on a downtown Truckee sidewalk in slippers for the rest of time.
Word must have been passing down the sidewalks faster than our ancient Ford could drive, for more and more people were standing at the curb and waving as we cruised past. Teeter beamed kindly out the window and kept his right hand gently oscillating in benediction. You would have thought I was his chauffeur.
“But why do they stay here?” I asked. “What’s in it for them?”
“They’re scared,” Teeter said simply. “Truckee is like home to them. And some day the Lord will take us into his great mansions.”
I was loath to start talking about Jesus with this man. I was sure I had seen Jesus in the graveyard, but maybe Bob Teeter had seen Him too. Who was I to say? Still, there was one thing… “Why do you have the Godsquad? I can’t believe that God would want you to torture and kill people.”
“You killed Carl,” Teeter said accusingly. “He had a wife and four children here. They came here in their Winnebago six years ago, and there wasn’t a finer citizen of Truckee than Carl. Who knows if he’ll recorporate safely?” Teeter sighed sorrowfully.
“That’s not an answer. I killed Carl because he was going to kill me. It was self-defense.”
“But if you kill me, it won’t be self-defense, Felix. It’ll be murder. Can’t you see that I’m your friend? I want to help you.”
The crowds had thinned out again. We seemed to be in a junk and wine neighborhood now. There was a bar on every corner, and what people you saw were either lying on the sidewalk or slowly sliding down the walls they leaned on. Teeter was right. I wasn’t going to be able to kill him. Killing Carl had felt good, but snuffing this old fraud would feel bad.