Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  Professional writers have to spend all too much time worrying about how to sell their work. It’s draining. After four years of freelancing, by 1986 I was ready to come in from the cold. And so I started thinking about finding a teaching job again. This time I didn’t have to go through the depressing routine of sending out a bunch of job applications to strangers—I lucked into very nice teaching job at San Jose State in California, thanks to a math friend who was working there.

  We were in Lynchburg from 1980 through 1986. In some ways these years were hard, and in other ways they were exhilarating. But one of the main things is that these were very close years with my family.

  In the mornings, Sylvia and Georgia would head out for Seven Hills, and I’d pack lunches for Isabel and Rudy. Rudy was a crossing-guard and had to leave a little before Isabel. She was a cheerful little thing, with a surprisingly deep voice. I liked singing songs with her at the breakfast table. Combing her hair into ponytails was sometimes an issue, as she didn’t like how the brush pulled at her hair. I’d make a game of it by pretending I was talking to someone else about the job while I did it.

  “Yes, make this pigtail really tight so she’ll squeal!”

  In the summers we’d go stay with Mom in the family cabin near Boothbay Harbor—she’d gotten to keep it in the wake of the divorce. Sometimes Embry’s two children, Embry III and Siofra, would fly up from Louisville, and the five little cousins would hang out together.

  Mom was very capable at running the cabin alone. She kept an easel on the front deck and painted nearly every day—mostly she liked to do landscapes, sometimes incorporating a bit of actual sand from a shoreline she was painting. It was heavenly for all of us in the mornings with the sun slanting through the piney air onto the log porch and the kids in their PJs.

  Meals in Maine were big events. One evening, a riot nearly erupted when Mom served an overly small meatloaf—due to her diabetes, she tended to think of meals as coming in precise and delimited portions. Sometimes Sylvia or I would cook, but it was tough to keep Mom out of the kitchen. And I still hadn’t outgrown the habit of arguing with her when she’d tell me what to do.

  Georgia and her cousin Siofra were around fifteen, and considered themselves a cut above the younger three cousins. They were always designing unsuccessful boy-catching hairdos for themselves. Sometimes they’d put on their best clothes and lug trash bags of our empty beer cans to town for the recycling money, always with the hope of meeting boys, although if that didn’t work out, they could buy maple-flavored fudge or cute souvenirs from the Smiling Cow gift shop.

  One afternoon, the three younger cousins and I rowed a heavily laden dinghy a short distance across the bay to the deserted, woodsy Cabbage Island, bent on spending the night. Georgia and Siofra were currently too mature for such antics. We sat around a campfire in the dark for awhile—me, little Rudy, little Embry, and Isabel—and then we walked down the sloping rocks to the water to look for phosphorescence in the waves. We couldn’t quite see the fire from down there, only the glow. I began telling a scary story.

  “What if we when walk back up there, we see a man and three kids sitting around our fire, and the man turns his head and looks at us—and he’s wearing my face! And then the two boys and the little girl turn and look at us too, and they look exactly like—”

  “Don’t!” cried little Embry. “I don’t want to hear this!”

  We’d brought a tiny tent, and the three kids squeezed into it. I was going to be stoic and sleep out under the open sky right outside the tent. But in the middle of the night I had a nightmare that vermin were crawling all over me.

  “Rats!” I screamed. “Rats!”

  The kids were horrified and delighted. I squeezed into the pup tent with them, and never mind how tight it was. We were mammals in a den, with the kids piled on the downhill side, and Father Pig slightly up-hill.

  It was wonderful to awaken on the misty island and explore the rocky shores and the dense woods.

  At one point I rigged up a canoe with a sail, and I made a keel by attaching two vertical boards to a board lying across the width of the canoe. One memorable day—this would have been in 1983—Rudy Jr. and I sailed out of our cove, around a point and into Boothbay Harbor itself. We ate a pizza there, bought some maple sugar candy, and sailed back. On the trip home, with the wind rising, we heeled over and cut through the water at a marvelous rate. We felt like Vikings, like spacefarers. An epic journey. Years later, in 2003, this trip would serve as a partial inspiration for my intergalactic quest novel, Frek and the Elixir.

  In Lynchburg we’d often head out for the boonies too, which weren’t at all far away. We liked a wide shallow spot further up the James River, where the clear water danced across round boulders and slick stones. Plants with little yellow flowers grew right in the water—people called them trout lilies. What a wonderful name.

  Occasionally nobody would want to go into the boonies except me, and then I could always count on Arf. One day in 1985, he and I floated down the James River from Lynchburg in a rubber raft. Arf spent most of the ride sitting like a person, with his butt down, and with his back leaning against the fat ring of the raft. He raised his noble muzzle to the airs, staring off across the water, cocking his ears, taking everything in, twitching his beautiful black nose. Eventually we fetched up in some shallows and made our way to the highway. An old farmer in a pick-up gave us a ride back into town. This little outing would serve as one of the seeds for my novel, The Hollow Earth that I’d write after we moved away from Lynchburg.

  The holidays and vacations rolled by. Sylvia’s parents would come to us for Christmas, and we’d visit them in the summers. Mom or Pop would visit for holidays, too, but never at the same time. Sometimes we’d have Thanksgiving at Embry’s farm, the jolly kids sitting at their own table.

  A family’s parade of days, with Sylvia and I leading our troupe of three little pigs. It seemed like it would never end, but now, looking back, it didn’t last nearly long enough.

  At the tail-end of our time in Lynchburg, at the end of 1985, I became stoked about writing more science fiction. I always start missing SF before too long—the funky old-school grooves, the wild thought experiments, the idiosyncratic characters with their warped argot, the eternal pursuit of transcendent truth.

  Ace had let Software go out of print, so now Susan Protter got me a deal with John Douglas at Avon Books to reissue Software along with a projected sequel to be called Wetware. Both would appear as mass-market paperbacks. John Douglas proved to be a supportive, companionable editor, and I’d end up selling him several more novels over the coming years.

  Odd as it now seems, it was only with Wetware—my thirteenth book—that I started writing on a computer. The previous dozen manuscripts were all typed, with much physical cutting and pasting. Sometimes, if I couldn’t face typing up a fair copy of the marked-up and glued-together final draft, I’d hire a typist.

  But with Wetware I was ready to change. Sylvia, the kids and I went up to Charlottesville in November, 1985, and visited the only computer store in central Virginia. I ended up with what was known as a CP/M machine, made by Epson, with Peachtext word-processing software, and a daisy wheel printer. The system came with a Pac-Man-like computer game called Mouse Trap that the kids loved to play.

  Although I knew a lot about the abstract computers discussed in mathematical logic, it would be several more years before I grasped how my kludgy, real-world computer worked. The whole schmear about copying software into system memory was a mystery to me. For the moment, all I knew was that I had to run two or three big floppy disks through the machine to start it up.

  While I was gearing up for Wetware, I’d started what I thought was going to be a short story called “People That Melt,” and I sent the story fragment to William Gibson, hoping that he’d help me finish it and, not so incidentally, lend the growing luster of his name.

  He said he was too busy to complete such a project, but he did write a couple of
pages for me, and said I was free to fold them into my mix in any fashion I pleased. As I continued work on my “People That Melt” story, it got good to me, and it ended up as the first chapter of Wetware. As a tip of the hat, I put in a character named Max Yukawa who resembled my notion of Bill Gibson—a reclusive mastermind with a thin, strangely flexible head.

  Once I got rolling, I wrote Wetware at white heat. I wrote the bulk of the first draft during a six-week period from February to March of 1986, although the full process took about five months. I made a special effort to give the boppers’ speech the bizarre Beat rhythms of Kerouac’s writing—indeed, I’d sometimes look into his great Visions of Cody for inspiration. Wetware was insane, mind-boggling, and, in my opinion, a cyberpunk masterpiece.

  A couple of years later, in 1989, it would win me a second Philip K. Dick award.

  This award ceremony would be at the smallish NorwesCon SF convention in Tacoma, Washington. It wasn’t like the artists’ loft in New York at all. It was in a windowless hotel ballroom with a dinner of rubber ham and mashed potatoes.

  By then I’d be working a day job again, and not having time to write as much as before, which put me into a depressed state of mind. Winning the award, I felt like some ruined Fitzgerald character lolling on a luxury liner in the rain—his inheritance has finally come through, but it’s too late. He’s a broken man.

  In my acceptance speech, I talked about why I’d dedicated Wetware to Phil Dick with a quote from Camus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I see Sisyphus as the god of writers or, for that matter, artists in general. You labor for months and years, rolling your thoughts and emotions into a great ball, inching it up to the mountain top. You let it go and—wheee! It’s gone. Nobody notices. And then Sisyphus walks down the mountain to start again. Here’s how Camus puts it in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus”:

  “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

  As so often happens to me, nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. None of my friends were at the ceremony and, despite the award, I had the impression that nobody who was actually at the con had read any of my books. One of the fans invited me to come to his room and shoot up with ketamine, an offer which I declined. Outside the weather was pearly gray, with uniformed high-school marching bands practicing for something in the empty streets.

  One of the last things I did in Lynchburg in 1986 was to join in a riverboat regatta. In 1775, two of my local ancestors, Anthony and Benjamin Rucker, had designed a flat-bottomed wooden boat that could be poled down the James River from Lynchburg to Richmond. They used it to ship hogsheads of tobacco from the local farms to Richmond. In numerous spots, the river becomes a shallow rapids, and you have to slide your boat over stretches of rocks—thus the sturdy, flat bottom. The 1775 Ruckers’ boats were called bateaus. With the help of their friend Thomas Jefferson, they patented the design.

  In 1986, some people in Lynchburg had the idea of getting a bunch of crews to build their own bateaus, and to have a five-day boat race down the river from Lynchburg to Richmond. Henry Vaughan and I joined the rotating crew of the Spirit of Lynchburg for one day—camping out the night before in a pasture by the river.

  It was nice out on the James River. Henry and I wore kerchiefs against the sun, and I started calling him Otha. The only hassle was that our so-called captain was a gung-ho jock who was seeing this event as a serious athletic competition, and he kept exhorting us to pole like crazy, push through the wall of pain, put out a hundred and ten percent, bullshit like that. But our home-made boat was so heavy and leaky that after the first hour, we were in last place, with the other boats out of sight far ahead. Maybe the jock thought he was the captain—but, being a Rucker, I figured I was the Shadow Captain. I mocked and chaffed the tyrant, evoking merriment from the crew. At the end of the day, the jock wanted to slug me, but I slipped out of his reach amid my fellows.

  Back in my Lynchburg office, three young artists from Richmond came to see me, as if sent by that old Richmond reprobate, Edgar Allan Poe, to meet the Shadow Captain. They’d brought me some beautiful drawings of tesseracts unfolding, and of four-dimensional cubes. It was exhilarating to learn that, bit by bit, my ideas were getting out there.

  I’d found my new job in California, and it was time for our family to move. In my rented office, I’d carved into the soft, black, plastic top of my desk the names of the books I’d done over my four years there, along with the dates I’d worked on them and the time I’d spent:

  THE FOURTH DIMENSION

  9/82 - 2/83

  5 mos.

  MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME

  2/83 - 6/83

  4 mos.

  ALL THE VISIONS

  6/83

  2 wks.

  THE SECRET OF LIFE

  6/83 - 6/84

  12 mos.

  MIND TOOLS

  6/84 -12/85

  18 mos.

  WETWARE

  12/85 - 5/86

  5 mos.

  I’d used my time well.

  Moving to California

  I got the formal job offer on my fortieth birthday, March 22, 1986. We were going to California, and I was going to teach math and computer science at San Jose State University.

  Sylvia was up for it, she’d had it with being poor in a small, Southern town. And the kids, though somewhat anxious, were excited too. They were interested in the California things like skate-boarding, beaches and Valspeak.

  We had a huge yard sale. We parted with some big things: the upright piano that we’d tormented our children with lessons on, the slate-bed pool table that I’d bought from Mike Gambone, and, most painful of all, our 1956 Buick. We packed all our remaining goods into a huge rental van.

  Arf was worried that we might leave him behind. While we were packing, he spent as much time as possible in the back of the van, lying next to the furniture, as if to say, “Don’t forget me!” Isabel and I had a running joke that Arf thought the place were moving was called Cowifornia.

  Once we got going, in July, 1986, Sylvia drove our station wagon, known as the Purple Whale, with two of the kids. The third kid would ride in the truck with me and Arf. I rotated to a different kid each day.

  On the first day, Isabel was my passenger. We were listening to the truck’s feeble AM radio, and as we headed through the overgrown hills of rural Virginia near the North Carolina border, a hillbilly evangelist came on the air, preaching the usual farrago of fear, guilt, and resentment. And then, as if he didn’t already sound stupid enough, he began speaking in tongues, slobbering and babbling.

  “I’m so glad to be leaving Virginia,” I told Isabel. “I feel like a Jew leaving Hitler’s Germany.”

  The first big stop was Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee. They had a special parking lot for people driving rental moving vans. We chained Arf in the shade under the van. At Elvis’s grave, I got Georgia to pose by the stone and pretend she was crying. The people behind us frowned that we were treating this as a joke.

  As we got further out west, Isabel and I noticed something. Whenever cows came into sight, Arf would slide off the van’s seat and stand four-legged on the floor next to me.

  “Arfie is a cow detector!”

  I told the kids about Mountain Cows—I’d read about them in a Tales of Paul Bunyan book as a boy. Given that the cows graze so much on steep hills, some of them have evolved to have their left legs shorter than their right legs, so they can comfortably progress along a mountain with the shorter legs uphill. These are the Right-Moving Mountain Cows. There’s also a race of Left-Moving Mountain Cows; they have their shorter legs on the right. It’s almost impossible for Right-Moving Mountain Cow and a Left-Moving Mountain Cow to mate.

  “What happens when they get to the edge of a hill? How
can they get back?”

  “Well, they only pasture the mountain cows on conical hills. They go around and around.”

  There were no cell phones in those days, and we didn’t have a list of the motels up ahead. In order to meet up at the end of each driving day, Sylvia and I relied on—synchronicity. One of us would pull over at a likely looking spot, and wait for the other one to show up. Somehow it always worked.

  It’s been my experience that, more often than seems likely, meaningful coincidences do occur, just as if the world were well-written novel. The fact that the world exists at all is already wildly improbable, so why not suppose that some cosmic forces have arranged events in an artistic way?

  Along these lines, I sometimes like to suppose that our sheet of reality is rigorously deterministic, but that causes and effects flow backwards as well as forward through time. The start of a novel matches its ending; the past matches the future.

  But—and here’s my science fiction writer’s mind at work—suppose that, up in some higher-level time, some force has worked on successive drafts of the novel that is our universe, incrementally nudging it to towards perfection. I like to think that we’re the final, published version, the best of all possible worlds. It’s no accident at all that everything fits. The outfit that put this whole thing together—they really had the budget.

  The trip out West took about a week. Sylvia stopped at each state line and had the kids take her picture under the “Welcome to…” sign. We hardly wanted the drive to end. I kept thinking how cool it would be if the Earth were flat and infinitely big, and you could take a road trip that went on forever, always in transit, never having to reach an endpoint and face the music.