Inside Out

by Rudy Rucker

  Last night's storm had left Killeville gray and steamy. Kudzu writhed up the walls of the abandoned building Rex rented space in. The other renter--the famous Marjorie--didn't usually show up till ten. Rex/Zee's footsteps echoed in the empty space. He walked her up the filthy stairs to his little office. There on his desk sat the Re-verso: a silver-painted, wood box with a hidden trapdoor in the bottom.

  Rex felt foolish showing his crummy trick to a truly magical spirit like Zee. But she insisted, and he ran through the patter.

  "This is a handy little box that turns things into their opposites," said Rex, putting a right-handed leather glove in the chamber. "Suppose that you have two pairs of gloves, but you lose the left glove to each pair. No problem with Reverse!" He lifted the box up and shook it (meanwhile sneaking a hand in through the trapdoor to turn the special glove inside out). He set the Reverse back down. "Open it up, Zee. You see! Right into left." He took out the left glove and put in a fake saltshaker. "But that's not all. Reverse changes all kinds of opposites. What if you have salt but no pepper?" He shook the chamber again. (A hidden curtain inside the "saltshaker" slid down, changing its sides from white to black.) "Open the chamber, Zee--salt into pepper! Now what if you're short on shelf space and your coffee cups' handles keep bumping into each other?" He drew out a (special) coffee cup and placed it in the chamber. "Simple! We use Reverso to turn inside to out and put the handle on the inside for storage!" (He opened the chamber, moving the suctioned-on cup-handle to the cup's inside as he drew it out.) "See!"

  "I know a way to do the first and last tricks without cheating," said Zee. "I know how to really turn things inside out. Look." Rex's hand picked up a pencil and drew a picture of two concentric circles. "See the annular ring between the circles? Think of lots of little radial arrows in the ring, all leading from the inner circle to the outer circle." His hand sketched rapidly. "Think of the ring part as something solid. To turn it inside out means to flip each of the arrows over." Zee stopped drawing and ran a kind of animation on Rex's retina. He seemed to see the ring's radial arrows rotating up out of the paper to point inwards. All of them turning together made a trail shaped like a torus. "Yes, a torus, whose intersection with the plane looks like two circles. Think of a smoke-ring, a torus whose inner circle keeps moving out--like a tornado biting its own tail. A planecutting toroidal vortex ring turns flat objects inside out. What we need for your real Reverso is a hypertorus whose intersection with your space looks like two spheres, a big one and a little one. I know where to get 'em, Rex, closer than you know. These hypertoruses have a fuzzy fractal surface and a built-in vortex flow. You won't believe where ... "

  "Talking to yourself, Rex?" It was Marjorie, come up the stairs to say hi. Rex and Zee, in the throes of scientific rapture, had failed to hear her come in.

  Marjorie was a thin young woman who smiled a lot. She wore her hair very short, and she smoked Gauloises--which took some doing in a chain-store town like Killeville. "I'm making coffee for us, and I wondered if you remembered to bring milk and sugar."

  "Uh, no. Yes, I guess I am talking to myself. This Reverse trick, you know." Suddenly Zee seized control of Rex's tongue. "Do you want to make love?"

  Marjorie laughed and gave Rex a gentle butt with her head. "I never thought you'd ask. Sex now?"

  "No time now," cried Rex, taking back over. "Shut up, Zee!"

  Majorie stepped back to the door and gave Rex a considering look. "Are you high, Rex? Or what? You have some for me?"

  "I have to work," said Rex. "Stay quiet, Zee."

  "I can make you feel like Rex," said Zee through Rex's mouth. "With an Alf. Come back here, honey."

  "Meanwhile on planet Earth," said Marjorie, and disappeared down the stairs, shaking her head.

  "Stop it, Zee, and let's get to work. Where are we supposed to find that hypertoroidal vortex ring you were talking about?"

  "Space's dimensionality depends on the size scale you look at, Rex. From a distance a tree seems like a pattern of one-D lines. Get closer and the bark looks like a warpy two-D surface. Land on the surface and it's a fissured three-D world. Down and down. Hypertoroidal vortex rings are common at the atomic scale. They're called quarks."

  "Quarks!"

  "A quark is a toroidal loop of superstring. Now just hold still while I reach down and yank--"

  There was a sinking feeling in Rex's chest. Zee was moving down through him, descending into the dimensional depths. With her bright "growth tip" gone from him, Rex felt more fully himself than he had since last night. Zee's fractal trail was still in him, but her active self was down somewhere in his atoms. He sighed and sank down into his armchair.

  Interesting how receptive Marjorie had been to that suggestion of Zee's ... but no. The peace of his neutral isolation was too sweet to compromise. But what was Candy up to right now? What was Alf getting her to do?

  Rex's nervous gaze strayed to the shelves of the little novelties that he was ready to mail, once the orders started coming in. He tried to calm himself by thinking about business. Boy's Life might be a good place to advertise, maybe he should write them for their rates. Or--

  "Wuugh!" Zee's heavy catch swelled and stung in Rex's rising gorge and he gagged again, harder. A flickering fur sphere flopped out of his mouth and plopped onto the floor in front of him. It had an aura of frenzied activity, but it didn't seem to be going anyplace. It just lay there on the pine boards, its surface flowing this way and that.

  "I'm back," murmured Zee with Rex's mouth.

  Rex nudged the sphere with his foot. It shrank from his touch.

  "If you're rough with it, it shrinks," said Zee. "And if you pat it, it gets bigger. Try."

  Rex leaned forward and placed his hands lightly on the sphere's equator. It wasn't exactly fur-covered after all. Velcro was more like it. Zee had him rub his hands back and forth caressingly, and then move them apart. The sphere bulged along with his hands, out and out till it was four feet across. Rex felt like a tailor fitting a fat man for a suit. He pushed back his chair and got up to take a better look at the thing.

  At any instant, its surface was fractally rough: cracked and fissured, with cracks in its cracks, and with a tufty overlay of slippery fuzz that branched and rebranched. In its richness of structure, it was a bit like an incredibly detailed scale model of some alien planet.

  What made the fuzzball doubly strange was that its surface was in constant flux. If it was like the model of a planet, it was a dynamic model, with speeded-up time. As if to the rhythm of unseen seasons, patches of the fuzzball's stubble would grow dark red, flatten out to eroded yellow badlands, glaze over with blue crackle, and then blossom back into pale red growth.

  "A quark is this complex?" Rex asked unbelievingly. "And you say this is really a hypertorus? Where's the inner sphere? And how can anything ever get inside it?"

  "It's the hyperflow that makes it impervious," said Zee. "And you valve that down with a twist like this." She made Rex grab the sphere and twist it clockwise about its vertical axis. It turned as grudgingly as a stiff faucet. "If you give it a half-turn, the hyperflow stops." Sure enough, as Zee/Rex's hands rotated the sphere it stopped its flickering. It was static now, with a big red patch near Rex. Frozen still like this, the sphere was filmy and transparent. Peering into it, Rex could see a small sphere in the middle with a green patch matching the outer sphere's red patch.

  "You can still make it change size when it's stopped like this," said Zee, urging Rex's reluctant hands forward. "But now, even better, you can push right through it. Even though it still resists shear, it's gone matter-transparent."

  The outer sphere was insubstantial as a curtain of water; the central sphere was, too. It had been the hyperflow, now halted, that gave the spheres their seeming solidity. Zee now demonstrated that if Rex jabbed or caressed the barely palpable inner sphere, it grew and shrank just as willingly as did the outer sphere. The two could be adjusted to bound concentric shells of any size.

  The region b
etween the spheres felt tingly with leashed energies. Rex could begin to see what would happen if the hyperflow started back up. Everything would turn over. The inside would go out, and the outside would go in. He jerked his hands back.

  "And of course you restart it by turning it the other way," said Zee. Rex dug into the sphere's yeilding surface and twisted it counterclockwise. Insubstantial though it was, the sphere resisted this axial rotation as strongly as before. Slowly it gave and unvalved. The hyperflow started back up. The big outer patch near Rex shifted shades from red through orange to yellow to green to blue to violet. Rex watched for a while and then stopped the flow the next time a green outer patch appeared. Peered in. Yes, now the inner patch was red. They'd traded places. The stuff of the outer sphere had flowed up through hyperspace and back down to the inner sphere. It was just the same as the way the stuff of a donut-shape's outer equator can flow up over the donut's top and down to its inner equator. Like a sea cucumber, the big quark lived to even.

  "Let's call it a cumberquark," said Rex.

  "Fine," said Zee. "Wonderful. I'm glad I showed it to you. Aren't you going to try it out?"

  Rex's eye lit on a glass jar of rubber cement. He halted the cumberquark's flow, jabbed the central sphere down to the size of a BB, squeezed the outer sphere down to the size of a small cantaloupe, and then adjusted the temporarily matter-transparent sphere so that the inner one was inside his jar of rubber cement. The outer sphere included the whole jar and a small disk-section of Rex's desktop. With one quick motion, Rex unvalved the cumberquark just enough for the green patch to turn red, twisted the hyperflow back off, and shoved the cumberquark aside to see what it had wrought.

  Thud floop. A moundy puddle of rubber cement resting in a crater on his desk. Wedged into the hole was an odd-shaped glass object. Rex picked it up. A jar, it was the rubber cement jar, but with the label inside, and rattling around inside it was--

  "That hard little thing is the disk of desk the jar was sitting on."

  The jar's lid was on the top, but facing inwards. Rex pushed on its underside and got it untwisted. As he untwisted it, compressed air hissed out: all the air that had been between the jar and the cumber-quark's outer sphere was squeezed in there. The lid clattered into the jar's dry inside. Peeking in, Rex could see that the RUBBER CEMENT label had mirror-flipped to TNEMEC REBBUR. Check. He jiggled the jar and spilled the shrunken bit of desk out into his hand. Neat. It was a tiny sphere, with a BB-sized craterlet where the cumberquark's inner sphere had nestled. A small gobbet of uneverted rubber cement clung to this dimple.

  Quick youthful footsteps ascended the steps to Rex's office. Marjorie, back for today's Round Two.

  "I want you to meet Kissycat. Kissycat, this is Rex." Marjorie had a sinewy black cat nestled against her flattish chest. She pressed forward and placed the cat on Rex's shoulder. It dug its claws in. Rex sneezed. He was allergic to cats. He had some trouble getting the neurotic beast off his shoulder and onto the desktop. He had a wonderful, awful, Grinchy idea.

  "Will you sell me that cat, Marjorie?"

  "No, but you can babysit him. I'm going down to the sub shop. Want anything?"

  "Just a Coke. I'm going to meet Candy for lunch." He'd been away too long already.

  "La dee da. Where?"

  "Oh, just at home." Rex ran his shaky fingers through his hair, wondering if Candy was still in bed. But dammit, this was more important than Candy's crazy threats. The cat. In just a minute he would be alone with the cat.

  Kissycat nosed daintily around Rex's desktop and began sniffing at the cumberquark.

  "Rad," said Marjorie, noticing it. "Is that a magic trick?"

  "It's a cumberquark. I just invented it."

  "What does it do?"

  "Maybe I'll show you when you get back. Sure, Kissycat can stay here. That's fine. Here's seventy-five cents for the Coke."

  As soon as she'd left the building, Rex dilated the cumberquark to pumpkin size and began stalking Kissycat. Sensing Rex's mood--a mixture of prickly ailurophobia and psychotic glee--the beast kept well away from him. Fortunately he'd closed his office door and windows. Kissycat wedged himself under Rex's armchair. Rex thumped the chair over and lunged. The cat yowled, spit, and slapped four nasty scratches across Rex's left hand.

  "You want me to kill you first?" Rex snarled, snatching up the heavy rod that he used to prop his window open. Candy had him all upset. "You want me to crush your head before I turn you inside out, you god--"

  His voice broke and sweetened. Zee taking over. He'd forgotten all about her.

  "Niceums kitty. Dere he is. All thcared of nassy man? Oobie doobie purr purr purr." Zee made Rex rummage in his trashcan till he found a crust of yesterday's tuna sandwich. "Nummy nums for Mr. Tissytat! Oobie doobie purr purr purr." This humiliating performance went on for longer than Rex liked, but finally Kissycat was stretched out on the canvas seat of the director's chair next to Rex's desk, shedding hair and licking his feet. Rex halted the cumber-quark's flow and moved gingerly forward. "Niceums!"

  Kissycat seemed not to notice as the gossamer outer sphere passed through his body. Cooing and peering in, Rex manipulated the sphere till its BB-sized center was inside the cat, hopefully inside its stomach. With a harsh cackle, Rex unvalved the sphere, let it flow through a flip, and turned it back off. There was a circle of canvas missing from the chair seat now, and the evened cat dropped through the hole to the floor, passing right through the temporarily matter-transparent cumberquark.

  Kissycat was a goodsized pink ball with two holes in it. Rex had managed to get the middle sphere bang on in the cat's stomach. The crust he'd just fed Kissycat was lying right there next to the stomach. The stomach twitched and jerked. It had two sphincterish holes in it--holes that presumably tunneled to Kissycat's mouth and anus. Rex gave the ball a little kick and it made a muffled mewing noise.

  "A little strange in there is it, hand-scratcher?"

  "Rex," came Zee's subvocal voice. "Don't be mean. Isn't he going to suffocate?" She was like a goddamn good conscience. If only Alf had been good, too. He couldn't let himself think about Candy!

  Rex forced his attention back to the matter at hand. "Kissycat won't suffocate for a few minutes. Look how big he is. There's a lot of air in there with him. He's like a balloon!" The ball shuddered and mewed again, more faintly than before. "I'm just surprised the flip didn't break his neck or something."

  "No, that's safe enough. Space is kind of rubbery, you know. But listen, Rex, his air is running out fast. Turn him back."

  "I don't want to. I want to show him to--" Rex was struck by an idea. Moving quickly, he took the tubular housing of a ballpoint pen and pushed it deep into one of the stomach holes. Kissycat's esophagus. Stale air came rushing out in a gassy yowl. The pink ball shrank to catsize. After a few moments of confused struggle, the ball began pulsing steadily, pumping breaths in and out of the pen-tube.

  There was noise downstairs. Marjorie! Rex turned the cumber-quark back into a bright flowing little fuzzball, then put it and the everted cat inside his briefcase. He pounded down the stairs and got his Coke. "Thanks, Marjorie! Sorry to run, I just realized how late it is."

  "Where's Kissycat?"

  "Uh ... I'm not sure. Inside or outside or something." Rex's briefcase was making a faint hissing noise.

  "Some babysitter you are," said Marjorie, cocking her head in kittenish pique. "What's that noise? Do you--"

  Rex lunged for the door, but now Zee had to put her two-cents worth in. "Look," cried Rex's mouth as his arms dumped the contents of his briefcase out onto the dirty hallway floor.

  Marjorie screamed. "You've killed him! You're crazy! Help!"

  Zee relinquished control of Rex and hunkered somewhere inside him, snickering. Rex could hear her laughter like elfin bells. He snatched up his cumberquark and made as if to run for it, but Marjorie's tearful face won his sudden sympathy. She was a pest, and a kid, but still--

  "Stop screaming, dammit. I can turn hi
m back."

  "You killed my cat!"

  "He scratched my hand. And he's not dead anyway. He's just inside out. I wanted to borrow him to show Candy. I wasn't going to hurt him any. Honest. I turned him inside out with my cumberquark, and I can turn him back."

  "You can? What's that plastic tube?"

  "He's breathing through it. Now look. Let's get something that can go in his stomach without making him sick. Uh ... how about a sheet of newspaper. Yeah." Moving quickly, Rex spread out a sheet of old newspaper and set the everted cat on it. Marjorie watched him with wide, frightened eyes. "Don't look at me that way, dammit. Come here and pick up the paper, Marjorie, hold it stretched tight out in front of you." She obeyed, and Rex got the cumberquark halted and in position, more or less. He reached in and took out the pen-tube, then readjusted the cumberquark. Marjorie was shaking. If Rex did the flip with the inner sphere intersecting Kissycat's flesh, this was going to be gross.

  "Hold real still." He steadied himself and unvalved the cumber-quark for a half turn, then tightened it back.

  Mrrraaaow! Kissycat landed on his feet, right on the circle of cloth that had been part of Rex's chairseat upstairs. Marjorie stared down through the hole in her newspaper at him and cried out his name. Spotting Rex, the cat took off down the hall, heading for the dark recesses of the basement.

  Everything was OK for a moment there, but then Zee had to speak back up. "I was thinking, Marjorie, about a wild new way to have sex. I could put the cumberquark's central sphere in your womb and turn you inside out and--"

  With a major effort of will, Rex got himself out the door and on the street before Zee could finish her suggestion. Marjorie watched him leave, too stunned to react.