Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  In the winter, our car’s battery tended to die. If I parked it on a hill, I could start it by putting it in second gear, pressing down the clutch, letting it roll, and then popping out the clutch. But if I was parked somewhere flat, I’d have to beg strangers to push the car up to speed—not always easy. If I couldn’t find anyone to help, I’d lose my temper and kick the car in the side, making dents in its fenders.

  Given that the streets were flat in the vicinity of the Mathematics Institute, I generally used a combination of bus and trolley to get there in the winter. It was okay that it took me a little while. It’s not like there was any big rush. I could think about infinity or science fiction on the street as well as in an office. And it was fun looking at all the Germans, most of them fit and well-dressed. I’d brought my bicycle along from America, and on warm, clear days, I might ride that instead of taking the bus.

  The kids attended a German school near our apartment. They picked up the language quite fast. Georgia did well—she was in third grade and soon she was at the head of her class. Isabel was having fun in the kindergarten, but it was hard for Rudy, as he was starting first grade, and they were learning to read, but with the spoken names of the alphabet letters different all of a sudden. It was so frustrating for him that he’d run around the classroom roaring like a lion. The other kids admired him for this, and before long he’d befriended a number of the other boys.

  Isabel’s kindergarten was like an Eden before the rigors of the strict German elementary school years. Her teachers were cheerful hippie women, always singing, dancing, and playing music. On a warm day, the children would play in the sand in their underwear. In the mornings, I’d give Isabel a ride down the hill sitting on the crossbar of my bike. None of us wore helmets back then.

  One weekend, Rudy’s new friends set up a tent in our landlord’s front yard and they slept out together. The landlord had given permission, but when he saw the tent, he didn’t like it. To add to his outrage, one of the boys broke a branch off a tree for tent stakes. Instantly a hand-lettered warning sign appeared on the tree. At dawn, seized by a fit of impishness, Rudy capered across the dewy grass, hooting the landlord’s name at the top of his lungs. Georgia ran outside and nearly choked him.

  Frustrated at her inability to talk to people or even to do the children’s homework, Sylvia signed up for a beginning German class at the University, and she made friends with some other foreigners there. She usually drove to class with a visiting Israeli woman who felt very conflicted about being in Germany at all. One night the German police stopped Sylvia—they were always looking for terrorists. These were the days of the Baader-Meinhof gang. One of the cops aimed a machine-gun at Sylvia and her friend, while the others looked through our battered little car. You didn’t want to mess with the German cops.

  Georgia’s particular burden at school was an American boy named Chad, whose father was also visiting at the University. Chad arrived about six months after us, and the teacher asked Georgia to be his interpreter. Chad wasn’t a particularly likeable kid. Georgia was just starting to blend into her class but now, to her dismay, she was put into a two-person desk with Chad. As Chad had very poor vision, the desk had to be placed in front of the classroom, only a foot or two away from the blackboard.

  Chad’s parents, who were from Kansas, wanted Ronald Reagan to be president, which seemed very strange to Sylvia and me. We thought they were joking—at that time, in the late Seventies, Reagan’s image was more that of a right-wing clown than of a Great Communicator. We didn’t realize how rapidly the U.S. was changing while we were gone. I was still imagining that the glorious 1960s would return. Little did I realize what the United States was in for.

  The head of the Mathematics Institute didn’t particularly care what I did, which was great. He’d helped me line up the grant, and his group was being reimbursed, and there was nothing more to worry about. In a way, I could do no wrong. He gave me a nice quiet office in the institute’s modern building, with no teaching duties at all.

  I thought about Cantor’s Continuum Problem for a few months, reading most of Cantor’s philosophical writings in German. It made me feel like a real scholar to be studying these obscure essays, which weren’t available in English. Cantor was interested in three kinds of infinity: the mathematical, the physical and the theological.

  Given that mathematical set theory has developed such a precise system for talking about infinities, I had already been thinking it would be nice if set theory had some physical applications. It very often takes decades or even centuries till a mathematical theory finds a use in physics—for instance it was sixty years before Riemann’s 1852 theory of curved space appeared in Einstein’s 1916 General Theory of Relativity.

  It was intriguing that Cantor had talked about physical infinities from the very start, way back in the 1880s. I also found it interesting that Cantor didn’t shy away from discussing the relationship between infinity and God. For the non-mathematician, this seems natural, but academics are—not without reason—squeamish about dragging religion into scientific discussions. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to look for connections between theology and set theory.

  For instance, a theologian might say, “God is greater than anything that we can conceive.” Rather than dismissing this as sheer bombast, a mathematician of a certain stripe might reformulate the claim as, “The class of all sets is bigger than any set we can define.” Each viewpoint sheds light upon the other. In both cases, we’re trying to think about philosophically ultimate concepts. This was just the kind of topic I’d been discussing with Gaisi Takeuti at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, so it was great to read Cantor’s thoughts about it.

  I set up a seminar at the Mathematics Institute, and gave some lectures along these lines. The mathematical logic faculty enjoyed my discussions, even though their real interests lay in more technical work. I began combining my notes for these talks with the notes for the lectures on the philosophy of mathematics that I’d given at Geneseo when I’d been team-teaching with Bill Edgar. I was beginning to see the outlines for the popular nonfiction book about infinity which I would ultimately write—Infinity and the Mind.

  As the fall of 1978 wore on, I finally came to accept that I was never going to make any big technical breakthrough in extending Gödel’s work to solve Cantor’s questions about the different levels of infinity. By the start of 1979, I’d decided to make better use of my time in Heidelberg—and write more science fiction.

  I started by writing science fiction stories, some of them inspired by paradoxical notions from the philosophy of science. I began having some luck selling my stories to SF magazines. Not all of my tales were hard SF—one was about Franz Kafka being reborn in a new body every year. I was reading Kafka’s journals at the time, loving him for being such a desperately romantic fanatic.

  I wrote seven short stories—and then I wrote White Light, a science fiction novel about infinity. Spacetime Donuts had been a fun book, but really it was a work of apprenticeship. With White Light I got serious about being a novelist.

  I began writing the book in longhand one weekend in January, 1979, while I was alone with the kids. Sylvia was visiting her dying grandmother in Budapest. I called my novel White Light, in memory of my memorable acid trip back at Rutgers. And I gave it a subtitle lifted from a paper by Kurt Gödel: What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?

  I’d been corresponding with my college friend Greg Gibson about a new approach to writing science fiction. He’d crystallized the basic idea very clearly: “The cool thing to do would be to write a science fiction novel, but write it about your actual life.”

  The main character of White Light was a math professor, closely modeled on me, and the setting was very much like Geneseo. As I mentioned earlier, the practice of writing science fiction about real life is what I began calling transrealism in the early 1980s.

  In White Light, my life in Geneseo was the real part, and the trans part was that my character in
the novel leaves his body and journeys to a land where Cantor’s infinities are as common as rocks and plants.

  White Light was also influenced by the Donald Duck and Zap comics that I loved so well. One chapter features Donald and his nephews, and in another chapter, objects start talking, as they sometimes do in R. Crumb comic strips. I also used the papers by Cantor that I’d been reading—and I included the man himself as a character.

  Over the years, I’ve often worked by alternating between writing science fiction and writing popular science. So it was fitting that I began working on an early draft of Infinity and the Mind, my nonfiction book about infinity, at the same time that I was writing White Light. Each endeavor was feeding the other.

  I got into a very pleasant and exalted mental state during this period of time. I remember having a magical dream in which I was scrambling up the ridge of a mountain. The stone underfoot was slippery pieces of shale, and among the stones I was finding wonderful polyhedral crystals the size of chestnuts or hedgehogs. Even within the dream, I knew that these treasures represented my wonderful new ideas.

  I finished the manuscript for White Light in the summer of 1979, when I was thirty-three. It would take me a few more years to finish the tome, Infinity and the Mind. I tried sending White Light to the Scott Meredith literary agency. They charged me a couple of hundred bucks to have someone read my manuscript. The anonymous reader disliked the book, and Scott Meredith refused to submit it to any publishers. So then I decided trying to sell the manuscript by myself.

  I sent it off to Ace Books, getting their address from the title page of Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors, a wonderful book written on the same wavelength as White Light. While I was waiting for my book to work its way through the Ace slush pile, I went to my first world science fiction convention, in Brighton, England, August, 1979—taking the train and ferry from Heidelberg.

  The atmosphere at mathematics conferences had always been rather frosty. There weren’t enough jobs to go around, and newcomers weren’t particularly welcome. But the science fiction folks were, like, “the more the merrier.” I loved the vibe.

  Some well-dressed hippies from London got me high on hashish and introduced me to a hipster named Maxim Jakubowski. Maxim was editing a new line of books for the Virgin record company. His first book was going to be about the punk band The Sex Pistols, but he was looking for radical SF novels as well.

  I’d brought along a single Xerox of the White Light manuscript, and I handed it to Maxim on the spot. And a few weeks later he made an offer to buy the British rights for the book. A month after that, in the fall of 1979, the editor Jim Baen at Ace made an offer for the US rights. I felt like a plant pushing out from the soil into the sun and air.

  The word “transreal” that I came to apply to my novels was inspired by a blurb on the back of my copy of A Scanner Darkly, saying that Philip K. Dick had written “a transcendental autobiography.”

  A Scanner Darkly is a hilarious, sorrowful, transreal masterpiece. I got my copy at that SF convention in Brighton—the book was just out, and my new stoner friends had been talking about it, complaining that it was “too anti-drug.” They didn’t seem to understand that the book was funny.

  After that convention, waiting for my train back to London, and thus back to Germany, I was reading Scanner, and I was laughing so hard that I left my suitcase on the platform—which I suddenly realized as the train started to move. I jumped back out in the nick of time. Up until Scanner, I hadn’t fully grasped how close Phil Dick’s novels were to the kinds of books that I wanted to write. I particularly liked the language-with-a-flat tire way that his characters talked in Scanner, and over the years I’d begin to emulate his peculiarly Californian tone. And even more, I liked the sense that Phil was writing about real people.

  I, too, felt that the characters of my novels should be based on actual people. The characters should do more than woodenly move the plot along. They should be sarcastic, miss the point, change the subject, break the set, and do surprising things.

  I find it dull when novels have characters who are supposed to be normal people. My sense has always been that there actually aren’t any normal people. Everyone I’ve ever met is weird at some level. It’s liberating to have quirky, unpredictable characters—instead of the impossibly good and bad paper dolls of mass-culture. As I mentioned above while talking about White Light, lifelike characters are the “real” part of transreal.

  As for the “trans” part—it seemed to me that I could use the special effects and power chords of SF as a way to thicken and intensify the material. The tools of science fiction can be a way, if you will, to directly manipulate the subtext, that is, a way to add a more artistic shape to the suppressed fears and desires that you inevitably incorporate into your fiction.

  Time travel, levitation, alternate worlds, aliens, telepathy—they’re all symbols of archetypal modes of experience. Time travel is memory, levitation is enlightenment, alternate worlds are travel, aliens are other people, and telepathy is the fleeting hope of finally being fully understood.

  I saw transrealism as a way to describe not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded. And I saw transrealism as way to smash the oppressive lie of consensus reality.

  In the summer 1979, my von Humboldt grant was about to run out. Rather than restarting the dreary charade of looking for another teaching job in the US, I managed to get the grant renewed for a second year, which would carry us into 1980. We changed apartments, finally moving into the University Guest House that we’d missed out on before.

  The Guest House was a lively, congenial place, filled with foreign scholars and their families. We found plenty of friends for us and the kids. The only problem was the house manager, with whom Chad’s Reagan-fan Kansas parents had started a feud. His name was Herr Böhm, although the Kansans insisted on calling him Herr Boom.

  Georgia got caught up in a guerilla campaign against Herr Böhm, planting insulting drawings of him around the premises where he or his wife would find them. That Georgia! Eventually the man turned up at our door to yell at us, but nothing more really happened.

  Well, there was one more thing. Herr Böhm’s son had an extra car that he liked to park in my assigned slot in basement lot. So—like any logical mathematician would do—I took my pen-knife and punctured one of his tires. I told my German-Hungarian friend Imre Molnar about about my exploit. He approved.

  “Irgendwie muss der Mensch sich die Freude nehmen,” said Imre, meaning, “A man’s got to grab his joy somehow.”

  The next evening I found that the house manager’s son had punctured one of my car’s tires. Without any discussion, each of us patched our tire—and after that his car stayed out of my slot.

  We liked it in the Guest House. Thanks to Sylvia’s parents, we’d acquired a magnificent stash of Lego blocks—a full bushel basket of them. The kids and I worked with the Legos nearly every day, making castles, spaceships, dolls, playhouses, and cows. Eventually Rudy and I got hold of a battery-operated Lego engine, and we built a foot-long car that we could send tooling through the felt-covered hallways.

  The down side of the Guest House was that there was so much demand for space in this complex that our family could only get a one-bedroom apartment. None of us could sleep very soundly in such close quarters, so after a few months we managed to get an extra room for the kids to sleep in. It was three or four doors down. At night I’d go in there with the kids and tell them stories or read to them before they fell asleep.

  For security, you’d roll down steel window covers at night, just like you’d see on shops in a big city. So after you turned out the light in the kids’ room, it was really pitch dark. Once in awhile—and the kids still talk about this—I’d pretend to leave their room, but in fact shut myself inside with them. There was a slight hallway into the room that kept them from being able to see the door from their beds.

  And then, in the dark, moving ever so slowly and q
uietly, I’d creep across the floor and—all of a sudden—grab one the children by the shoulders, yelling “Kidnapper!” They’d scream like crazy. And then they’d ask me to do it again—or beg me not to. They could never quite decide. Probably I shouldn’t have scared them that way. But it gave us something else to talk about.

  In the winters we’d take plastic sleds to the park at very top of the hill—beyond the woods above the Guest House. One time we were there, climbing back up for another ride, and some boys started yelling at Georgia in German.

  “Get out of the way, girl!”

  She’d mastered the language by now, and she unleashed an impressive tirade against them, calling them silly dumb-heads. I was proud of her. She wasn’t going to let men push her around.

  Mom and Pop completed their divorce in the spring of 1979—and they never spoke to each other again. Mom even had her wedding ring melted into a puddle of gold that she occasionally wore as a pendant. It was awful.

  Pop and his woman friend Priscilla came to visit us in Heidelberg in the fall of 1979. It was a mournful, uncomfortable encounter. Pop was a mess—he was consumed with guilt about leaving Mom, and he was drinking more heavily than ever before. Priscilla was stiff and brittle with us. She disapproved of me, as if I were unworthy of being Pop’s son.

  After a few long days, I put them on a train for Paris. They were planning to stay in a good hotel and live it up. Poor Pop. He’d done his duty all his life. Now Death was stalking him and he was trying to have fun. Seeing his train pull away, I stood there feeling as if my heart would break.

  I wanted Pop to be happy, but just now he seemed totally screwed up. And my poor mother was alone in Louisville, instead of having an exciting time in Europe. Each of them was, in one way or another, difficult to live with—but how I wished they’d found a way to work things out.

  What to do? I started work on another science fiction novel. When faced with life’s intolerable realities, I tend to transmute them into literary art. In this case, I planned to write a transreal novel as before—but without using myself as a character. I sensed that not having any specific Rudy-inspired character would give the other characters more space to develop and to open up.