by Rudy Rucker
It was about four o’clock. April would be back soon. I resolved to go home after the first pitcher. Stuart had pried the aether ball away from Iris, and was cracking it into pieces preparatory to multiplying it. Any given piece A can be split into two more identical piece A’s…and the same goes for the B’s. Stuart kept at it till he’d put together seven balls of the bloog-stuff.
He pocketed one of them, gave Iris two and me four. I amused myself by poising mine in the air in front of me. It was fun, the way they’d stay wherever you put them. They were too massive to be very sensitive to air currents. I arranged them to make the four corners of a tetrahedron…a pyramid with a triangular base. It looked beautiful.
The afternoon sun was lying like honey on the street outside. I gazed out at the familiar scene with a happy sigh. Things could not be better. Just then Nick brought back the pitcher and Iris’ orange-drink. Mary the barmaid followed him with the glasses.
She gave a sort of knowing smile when she saw me. “I’m surprised your wife still lets you out of the house.”
“Fat Willie said you were in here when I came back on Wednesday?” I questioned.
“Who could forget it,” she said shaking her head. “You had two twenty-dollar bills crumpled up in your hand. It was like the death of Janis Joplin.” Stuart hadn’t heard any of this yet, and was nodding with interest. She addressed herself to him. “Felix comes in like a zombie,” she acted out two or three lurching steps, “puts the money down on the bar and just sits there.”
“You gave him a drink?” Stuart inquired.
“Sure. And he never said a word. He was loaded by the time I went off duty, and Willie said they had to lay him out in the garbage shed at closing time.” This seemed to strike her as particularly funny.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something, Mary,” I cut in. “I won’t get mad if you tell me, so please just tell the truth. Did you put anything in my beer when I came in after lunch on Wednesday?”
“April thinks you dosed him,” Nick explained.
“As if he needed it,” Stuart put in.
“Why would I?” Mary asked, in what seemed like genuine surprise. “If I had any acid I’d take it myself.”
So there was still no explanation for what had started all this off. The shining tetrahedron hovered over our table. This was real, there was no longer any doubt about it. But why me? Perhaps it never would have happened if I hadn’t found that pamphlet, “Cimön and How to Get There, F.R.” But where was it now? Where had it come from?
A customer was calling for service and Mary turned to go. “Wait,” I called to her. She turned back. “One other question…” I began. The guy at the bar kept hollering, “Beer, Mary!” so I stood up and walked across the room with her. “Was anyone with me when I came in?”
She thought briefly, distracted by the drunk bellowing her name. “Yeah. There was a guy who might have brought you in. An old hippie in a robe. But he left right away.” I could hardly hear her over the noise.
I turned to the source of the yelling, a stocky blond guy in jeans, khaki shirt and a hunting vest.
“Could you just be quiet for about ten seconds?” I snapped.
His fat cheeks reddened with anger. “You own this place, buddy?”
I wanted to argue with him, but suddenly something in me crumbled. I patted his shoulder almost tenderly. “All right, all right. Have your beer.”
I went back to our table and sat down. I was a little ashamed of myself for backing down from that fat short-hair so quickly. Something about his face had had a strange effect on me. He was the kind of person I hated on sight. But I’d had an immediate desire to please him, to comfort him. Faugh.
“I was just trying to find out who brought me here,” I said to Nick, sitting down. “I figure it was Jesus.”
“You certainly get around, Felix,” Stuart remarked. “One day it’s Satan, the next it’s our Lord.”
“You haven’t heard the half of it,” Nick said. He stared at his reflection in one of the spheres hanging over the table. “And I’m beginning to think it’s all true.”
“Well, let’s hear it,” Stuart said.
“First a toast.” Nick raised his glass. “To the greatest scientific discovery of the century.”
He and I drank deeply, Stuart less so. “You guys are due for fame and fortune now, I suppose.” He tried unsuccessfully to keep the envy out of his voice.
I could feel Stuart’s emotions as clearly as mine. “Why don’t we cut him in?” I suggested.
Nick didn’t look too thrilled at my suggestion. He started to say something, but Stuart spoke first.
“Wait,” he said. “I just realized. I already am in.” He pulled his aether sphere out of his pocket. “Anyone who has one of these has access to an unlimited supply of the stuff. I made one into seven while you were getting the pitcher.”
Nick winced. I tried to cheer him up. “Look, Nick, we can patent the process. It’s going to be awhile till anyone thinks of using the Banach-Tarski decomposition anyway. In the meantime we’ll keep it secret and dole out the stuff at top prices. Stuart can be our lawyer.”
“Does he have a degree?” Nick asked uncertainly.
“Practically,” Stuart said, refilling our glasses with a flourish. “And I’ll settle for twenty percent. You guys can take forty each. Let’s drink to it.”
“What the hell,” Nick said, raising his glass. “Why not.”
Iris had put her two bloog balls into her drink. She had a big orange mustache and looked happy to be here with the grownups. I smiled at her and she smiled back.
I drained my second beer and opened my mouth to talk. All of a sudden I felt funny, as if I had no control over what I would say. “The way the sparkle glow spreads in the belly giving strength and turning the world from a place of gnash-serious absorption into a gigantic gut joy,” I recited lightly. “That’s Jack K.”
“I didn’t know you read Kerouac,” Stuart said. “As a matter of fact, Felix, I’d always had the impression that your idea of stimulating fiction was Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories.”
“I…I did too,” I said haltingly. Where had that remark about Kerouac come from? I only knew one person who…
“Oh my god!” Nick exclaimed, suddenly jumping to his feet. “I think I left my machine on. It’ll burn out.” He looked panicked at the thought. “They’ll have my ass for this.”
“Relax, Nick, you’re going to be so famous your ass will be all but unhaveable.” An unexpected idea popped into my head. “Look, you’re just going to run down there and find you turned it off anyway. Let me save you the trouble. I’ll split and zap down in my astral body.”
“O.K.” Nick said, sitting down. “I’ll take care of Iris.” Stuart watched with interest. I let my awareness flow out to touch everyone in the room. Tiny Iris, Nick, Stuart, Mary, the blond guy at the bar. That guy was so full of sadness…he had lost someone, someone close to him.
One part of me wondered fleetingly if it was really safe to go so far from my body again, but then I’d already finished the split. My body lolled stupidly in its chair, and I zipped invisibly out the window.
It took only seconds to get to the physics building. Quickly I found the lab and checked Nick’s machine. It was turned off as I had expected. He worried too much. I drifted back up towards the Drop Inn. The sun was low and bloogs streamed out of it. Two blocks away I thought I saw our car turning off Main Street. It was time for me and Iris to go home to April. I went in through the ceiling of the Drop Inn.
Something was wrong. I could see it in Nick’s face. My body wasn’t in the chair where I’d left it. Frantically I looked around the room. To my relief my body was at the bar. But why?
I spread my consciousness out to the Absolute and flipped back to my body, expecting to bond right in. But something jabbed me and I bounced out. My body, I now noticed, was talking to that stocky blond guy again. How could it talk without me in it?
Without botheri
ng to listen to the nonsense it must be spouting, I tried again to get back in. The same jab and bounce. Again. It seemed like something else had taken over my body… some other spirit.
Finally I stopped long enough to register what my mouth was saying.
“Frank. You’ve got to believe me. I’m your same Kathy, only come back in another body. I can prove it to you.”
Frank’s fat face was mixture of sorrow and anger. “You’ve got a pretty peculiar sense of humor, fellow. Now beat it before somebody gets hurt.”
Nick was walking towards the two, a look of concern on his face.
Suddenly my body threw its arms around Frank. “Oh, darling, I’ve missed you so much. I… I could be like a woman for you.”
Frank let out a roar like a wounded elephant. “You Fag,” he trumpeted, shoving my body away. “You sick, twisted pervert!” He sent a fist to my body’s belly, then one to the temple. My possessed form sank to the Drop Inn floor.
Frank was ready to stomp in my erstwhile head in, but Nick quickly separated him from the body. Iris was screaming. My body got up and tried to twist out of Nick’s grip, but he held it tight.
“Come on, Stuart,” he called. “We’ve got to get him home.”
They marched my body up the street, one holding each arm. Nick carried the sobbing Iris in his other arm. Stuart had scooped up our aether spheres, and was carrying them inside his shirt. I floated along after, watching and listening.
“What did you say to that guy?” Stuart asked my body. It didn’t answer, and Nick gave it a little shake.
“Come on, Felix, what happened?”
The lips pursed a few times, then spoke. “I’m not Felix. My name is Kathy. Kathy Scott.”
April came running out of the house when she saw Nick and Stuart leading her husband’s body home. It had taken on an unfamiliar nancing gait, and its features were screwed into an expression I’d never seen before.
“Hello, April,” it said. “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Kathy Scott, the woman who was buried last month.”
April nodded numbly, believing it. “Felix kept talking about you. He said he…”
“He wouldn’t leave me alone,” Kathy said, raising her voice. “First he dragged me away from Earth, and then he tried to throw me into a horrible white nothing. When he came back to Earth I followed him.” Her hands fluttered as she talked.
Somehow none of them doubted her word. “How – how did you get Felix’s body?” April asked.
Kathy smiled without showing her teeth. “He kept leaving it alone. Finally I decided to take over. He can go back to his white light now. It’s all he really wants anyway.”
“No,” I cried, “that’s not all I want. I want my family, my life on Earth!” But none of them could hear.
“Where do you think he is now?” Nick said, looking around. They were standing in our tiny front yard. Iris was dragging her wagon out of the garage. The adults looked at Kathy for an answer.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d have to leave this body to find out. But I’m not leaving it. Ever.”
They had released her arms and she turned as if to go. “Wait,” Stuart said, grabbing her again. “This is crazy. It’s just Felix having a psychotic episode. We can’t let him wander off like this. Nick! Call an ambulance!”
Stuart’s sudden conviction broke the spell. Nick sprinted into our house. April took a step towards my body. “Felix?” she said hesitantly.
Kathy whacked Stuart in the crotch then, and broke loose from his weakened grip. She took off down the street, running with her hands switching back and forth at shoulder level.
Stuart straightened up and took off after her. Nick came out of the house then, breathless with excitement. “They’re coming,” he shouted to April. “Stuart’s right. We’ve got to…” He saw the expression on April’s face then, spotted the two figures running down Tuna Street, and joined the chase.
It was clear to me they’d catch my runaway body. It was running like a girl. It was depressing to see Kathy jerking me around, and I decided not to follow the chase. I hardly even felt like staying on Earth. They’d haul my body off in a straitjacket, lock it up someplace, give it shock-treatments, tranquilizers… and then?
I had a feeling Kathy wouldn’t let go of my flesh till it died. I remembered the way she’d acted when I first met her in the graveyard, the way she’d been just before we hit the White Light at Nothing. As far as Kathy was concerned anything was better than oblivion…even forty years in a nuthouse.
Not that she’d have to stay that long. Sooner or later she would realize that all she had to do was start saying she was Felix Rayman. She wouldn’t have any of my memories, but they’d call it amnesia and put her out on the street.
I could hear a siren drawing closer. There were faint shouts from a block or two away. April heard it too, standing tautly at the edge of our little lawn, her face a mask of strain. Iris was loading dead leaves into her wagon, one by one. I never wanted to stop watching over these two, so dear, so real. I made as if to move closer.
A squealing cut the air. The leaves and April’s face wavered and dissolved. Two faces, frightened ovals, upside down. Burnt rubber, gasoline, my throat filling. A horn blasting, stuck. Broken teeth, sliding pieces, no air. The numbness closing in. The noise rushing away. Legs gone, arms, eyes lost in mist, red to black. just the heartbeat, twitching, once more, still. Rest.
No. 27
(It’s Never Really) the End
“I’m sorry,” Nick was saying, “I just never bothered to read the fine print.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” Stuart said again, “Just ten grand and nothing else?”
“That’s not really all,” Nick said with a nervous tug at his beard. “If we publish anything about the hyper-matter we’ll be charged with high treason.”
“That’s a death rap,” I put in. It was hard for me to talk louder than a whisper.
“You can still write your novel,” April said, squeezing my hand. “Just say you made it all up.”
“Or work for the government,” Nick said. “They’ve already offered me to a position at Los Alamos. They’re hot for Felix to come too, and if you could get a clearance, Stuart…”
“Not me,” Stuart said with a laugh. “Give me my two thousand bucks and I’m out of the picture.” His sly smile gave the lie to this.
“Just don’t try selling those bloog-balls to the first Russian spy you meet,” Nick cautioned. “Because he’s probably going to be from the CIA.”
“Oh, hell, Nick, I wouldn’t do that. I just want to drop out of sight and build my own UFOs. Felix might want to help me.”
I tried to shake my head, but the body-cast made it hard. “I’ll go with Nick,” I whispered. The caps on my front teeth felt funny – numb, and smoother than real teeth. “I’d like to do some more lab-work. There should be a third level of substance, too. Endlessly many. The number of points in space is Absolutely Infinite. It’s just a matter of…”
“Felix,” April cautioned. “You promised me you wouldn’t leave your body again.”
“Till death do us part,” I murmured, meaning it.
“Do you still see things?” Stuart was asking me.
“Not now. But after the accident. I thought I was dead.”
“Everyone did,” Nick said. “That car was doing 45 and you…I mean Kathy…ran right in front of it. It was just lucky I’d already called an ambulance.”
“Who was driving the car?” I asked.
“It was hit-and-run,” Nick said. “They found the car abandoned down on the campus. The horn was still stuck, still blasting. When they traced the plates it turned out the car had been stolen from in front of the McDonald’s a half hour earlier.”
“I want to hear what Felix saw while he was in the coma,” Stuart interrupted.
Nick and April frowned at him, but I began talking. “I was in this big factory, with all kinds of weird machines humming along. They weren’t really ma
chines. I mean some were just electronic patterns. But they were all lined up along the walls of this enormous room. There was a real big white-haired guy…”
“God?” Stuart said, smiling.
“Of course. Not the Godhead, just the Father. He was showing me the machines. Some were ideas…like one was Zeno’s Paradox and one was the Continuum Problem. Others were places…there was our Universe and there was Cimön. And there were little machines, too, that were just a person or an atom. There was one of everything.” This was the first time I’d told anyone about what I’d seen during the coma, and they were keeping still to hear my whisper.
“I noticed that each machine had a wire coming out of it. Like an electric cord. So I asked God what they ran on. He says, ‘Do you want to see?’
“All the wires seemed to lead into a manhole in the middle of the floor, and we walked over there together. While we were walking, I noticed that God and I each had wires running out of us and down into the manhole too.” I paused for a drink of water. My ribs were cracked and it hurt to talk.
A nurse stuck her head in the door. “The two gentlemen will have to leave now. You can stay another half hour, Mrs. Rayman.” I was glad for the interruption. I was too tired to finish.
Stuart and Nick got up to go. “You really mean that about coming to Los Alamos?” Nick said, pausing at the door.
“Didn’t you hear?” Stuart asked him.
Nick looked blank, and April filled in. “We have to leave. At Christmas vacation. They’re firing Felix for not following the official syllabus for the Foundations of Geometry course.”
“He never even covered protractors,” Stuart said accusingly.
Nick gave a whoop of delight. “Jessie and I are leaving in December too. The weather’s beautiful there. No more Upstate sog! We’ll drive out together!”
The nurse reappeared and they left, Nick calling, “I’ll tell them you’re coming.”