by Rudy Rucker
Ginnie squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head in silence.
“It’s classic how she keeps repressing her knowledge of how her story ends,” said Ira in a low tone.
“Mister Psycho Shrink here,” said Ginnie, abruptly opening her eyes. “Shut your pie hole.”
“It’s much cooler to die in a surfing accident,” said Ira. His hair was a long black mop, with the beak of his white nose sticking out. “I almost went to college,” he continued. “But then I got all hung-up on Skeeves. I could have been a guy with a head full of symbols. Brains to spare.”
“That’s why I like sculpting sounds with you,” said Ginnie, turning casual again. “Did I tell you that I spirited away some contact mikes from that motor-mouthed guy at the music store? He’s such a freak that he actually notices me.”
“Work your charm, Ginnie,” said Ira. “So now we can sample your tide-pool sounds for the party mix?”
“Exactamente.”
“Let’s go home now,” said Header, showing his teeth.
“And—Jim and Weena are coming to the party too,” said Chang, also standing. He looked to be Header’s physical equal. “My man Jim needs a night out.”
“For sure,” said Ira. “Maybe Jim can open the magic door again. If Weena has her way, Jim might be going through there pretty soon.”
“Yes, bring Jim and Weena,” said Ginnie, her voice as soft as velvet. “It’ll shake things up. It’s time for the next level.” She ran her hand up Header’s arm and smiled, as if cajoling him.
“I’ll be glad to have them,” said Header quietly. Perhaps he knew who Weena was—and he welcomed the chance to have it out.
“So we’re all set,” I said, wondering what I was getting myself into. “You guys have room in your van?”
“In back with the boards,” said Ira. “Where the sarcophagus used to be.”
“This is Skeeves’s old van?” I exclaimed.
“Yeah,” said Ira. “He signed it over to Header when he went underground. He was worried about some murder charges. Right, Weena?”
“You will suffer if you continue harassing me,” Weena told Ira in a low tone.
“The two goobs have to buy us pizza,” announced Header.
“Not a problem,” I said.
“Ginnie, phone in an order so we won’t have to wait,” ordered Header. “Ten pies. One of each flavor.”
“Ten?” exclaimed Ginnie. “Ira and I don’t even eat.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll charge it. I don’t care.” More than ever, I believed that Weena was going to escort me to another world.
We walked to the van, Weena leaning on my arm, Droog at our heels. Weena smiled at Ira like a doting great-great-grandmother, turning on her charm. “It really is very nice to see you face to face,” she said. “And I am sorry for whatever inconveniences you’ve had. What course of study might you have pursued, had you attended a university?”
“Physics,” said Ira. “I never had the money to apply, or a high-school diploma, and I used to be really busy with the surfing—but lately I’ve been drifting into some cosmology lectures up the hill at the university. There’s all this stuff about dark energy—it’s like an invisible kind of matter. But I know it’s real.”
“Of course you do,” said Weena. “Where I come from, in Flimsy, we call it kessence, as you may already know. A soul is but a speck of information, but with luck and effort, it gathers unto itself a kessence form.”
Ira ran his bony fingers down his arms. “That’s what I am these days. A kessence shadow of my former self.”
“Yes,” said Weena in a low tone. “And Ginnie is the same.”
“How about finding the path to the Whipped Vic,” I interrupted, still not quite understanding what Weena and Ira were talking about. “How does that work?”
“The trail changes from day to day,” said Ginnie, about to order the pizza. “The house—or the giant snail that lives in the basement—changes the trail every so often. She’s shy. But she likes me, and I can always vibe her out. It’s like I can find her inside my head. She doesn’t like to be totally alone. She likes having a few of us parasites in her shell. And when there’s a party, Ira texts the latest directions to our friends. It’s great—the cops can never find us.” “Soon your snail’s destiny will be fulfilled,” said Weena softly.
“I love these enigmatic scenarios,” said Ira. “Like we’re in an alternate reality game. We’ll move on to the next level, and—will there be a castle?”
“An enormous castle,” said Weena reassuringly. “It’s shaped like a geranium plant. My friend Charles and I are crafting some remarkable patterns of sound and shape there.”
Ira opened the back door of the primer-patched panel van. It was rank in there, with weird symbols painted on the inner panels. Hieroglyphs. Skeeves’s van for sure.
Weena and I squeezed in among the boards and the damp wetsuits. Droog scrambled in, and wormed around to find a comfortable spot.
Ginnie phoned in the pizza order while Header drove. They were heading for this one particular pizza shop that the surfers liked, a place called Ratt’s. On the way Header made a point of cruising very slowly though the seaside parking lot called Lover’s Bluff.
“Why do you always go by here, Header?” Ginnie demanded. “This is such a depressing place for me. This is where the Graf got burned.”
“I like to see who’s humping who,” said Header robotically. “I come here with my bro Skeeves. We’re tracking the decline of our generation’s purity. The Graf wasn’t the only one due for a hard lesson.”
“And Skeeves lives with you guys right now?” I asked. “In the Whipped Vic? With his golden sarcophagus in your basement?”
“The mysteries of Skeeves,” said Ira, not directly answering my questions. “He hears voices in his head, and some of us pay a stiff price. Right, Weena?”
Ira lit up a joint and passed it around, which was fine with me, although it seemed unfamiliar to Weena. I’d never gotten around to offering her any while she’d been at my house.
“One inhales this smoke?” she asked me, studying the fuming spliff. She looked fully a hundred and thirty years old.
“Hush,” I whispered. “Try to act cool.”
Weena took a toke and had a spasmodic coughing fit that filled the others with glee.
“Can you buy us a keg of beer?” asked Header as he let us out of the van behind Ratt’s. “As long as you’re gonna be our guest. The corner market over there has import brands. We’ll have to buy some cups, too.” He was testing how hard he could push me.
“I’m easy,” I said, letting Droog out of the van too. “Let’s go over to the market and run my card. And then we’ll get the pizza. Weena, why don’t you just rest in the van.”
For the first time, Header smiled at me. Night had fallen. We were standing in a trapezoidal puddle of light from the pizza shop’s back door, the cooks in white hats visible within. Standing in the pizza glow, I felt that everything was going to be okay. I was a mythic hero, reckless in the face of danger, joyfully abandoned to my fate, and righteously buzzed.
We scored a keg of Czechvar beer—and Header picked up a little bag of powder from the grotty clerk too, some kind of hard drug. They charged it on my card as if it were a second keg of beer. I was past caring.
And then we got the pies, piled into the van and drove downtown, sharing another joint. Droog was excited about the pizza—he kept sniffing the boxes and giving me imploring looks.
When we hit Pacific Avenue, Ginnie began issuing instructions—which Ira dutifully keyed into his cell phone, compiling today’s route for the expected party crowd.
“Left here,” intoned Ginnie. “Down that alley to the right, a left here and...”
Now and then she’d pause, holding her lovely face still—as if basking in the light of a hidden sun. During one of these pauses, I heard a scratching on the van’s windowless back door, and Droog stiffened, alert for a fight.
&n
bsp; “The yuel,” Weena breathed into my ear. “Be prepared when we exit. Don’t allow him to seize me.”
“...go two blocks and then do a U-turn,” Ginnie was saying. “Back up through that alley in reverse. Yes, reverse. And now, okay, straighten out and drive towards town. One more left and—home sweet home.”
“I’m messaging the directions right now,” said Ira. The van pulled to a halt.
“Come back here and open our door, Header,” I said. “The pizza’s getting cold.”
“You just want me to be the first out of the van,” said Header looking back at us with a mirthless smile. “Because of the yuel.” So far as I knew, nobody had directly mentioned that word to Header yet.
Actually, I didn’t see the yuel until we were all out of the van. Header and Ira were trundling the keg up the walkway to the porch steps. Weena and I were behind them, me helping Weena with one arm and carrying half the pizzas with the other. Ginnie had run ahead with the other pizzas to make some light in the house. A faint noise made me glance back at the driveway.
Sure enough, the alien blue baboon was perched on the van’s roof. The yuel. His golden eyes glowed in the gloom.
In that moment, I heard the yuel’s voice in my head, a smooth and oily sound. “Nurture bloom grow,” he said. “Kill wallow leech.” Whatever that meant.
“Be gone!” said Weena out loud, trying to make her frail voice sound authoritative. The yuel ignored her. Droog put his paws up against the side of the van and began barking like crazy.
Baring his teeth, the yuel hopped off the van, capered down the driveway and scrambled up the trunk of a eucalyptus tree. I could hear him rustling up there. Ira and Header didn’t seem to notice him—being absorbed in humping the keg up the stairs.
“I don’t know about trying for Flimsy just yet,” I murmured to Weena, propping the pizzas against my side. “You’d better get back your jiva before I try opening that door again. What with the yuel watching us.”
“Quite right,” whispered Weena. “In a few hours my baby jivas will be grown. I’ll summon them and they’ll handily eliminate this yuel. Meanwhile, let us savor the degenerate revel of the surf folk.”
“Come on in, dorks,” yelled Header from the porch. “We want the rest of those pies!” A geyser of foam shot from the keg as he and Ira tapped it.
Glancing around the neighborhood, I noticed that, once again, the nearby houses were but faintly visible—as if seen at a distance, or through a mirror maze of many turns. The sounds of the town were attenuated as well. I was on my own here.
10: Surf Party
I escorted Weena inside and set my pizza boxes on a plastic table in the front room. The very image of alertness, Droog stared raptly at the table. Ginnie had lit the place with candles. For a heartbeat, our eyes locked. In the candlelight, Ginnie’s eyes seemed to glow. Quite enchanting.
“Our house doesn’t have any wiring,” said Ginnie, looking away. “But we do have running water. Very sweet and clear. And there’s a gasoline-powered generator we’ll start up pretty soon.” She flipped open one of the boxes. “Oh, this is Ratt’s veggie Hawaiian, with fresh pineapple, smoked tofu, locally made mozzarella, and coconut shreds on top!” She tore off a drippy slice and offered it to me.
“You eat some, Ginnie,” I urged. “Actually—I haven’t been eating since I moved in here,” she said, looking abashed. “Everything’s so—never mind.”
I had the slice, and then another. Great, great stuff, the hot, greasy flavors burrowing deep into the crevices of my tongue. Ira wasn’t hungry either. I found a sausage pizza in the next box down, gave a slice to Droog, and had a slice of that myself. By now, Header and Weena were feeding too, washing it down with plastic cups of beer. Gut joy.
I looked around the room, littered with cans, bottles, and junkfood wrappers. The house’s pipes seemed to leak, making slick moldy spots on the walls and floors. Some of the wall material had crumbled away. The smooth, dark ribs of the structure’s frame looked more like mother-of-pearl than like bone—which jibed with Ira and Weena’s hints that this house was in fact the shell of an alien snail.
Ira went out the back deck for a minute. With a cough and roar, the gasoline-powered generator sprang to life, ten times louder than I would have imagined possible. Orange extension cords ran from the generator to work-lights hanging here and there in the house.
“Come see my tide pool,” said Ginnie, leading me and the decrepit Weena into the next room—which smelled like the beach, in a good way. She’d set a claw-foot bathtub by one wall, with water dripping into it through a flaky home-made salination system—an orange crate stuffed with beach sand wrapped in ragged clothes. The tub’s steady overflow drained through a pucker-shaped hole in the floor.
Plants grew in the tub water, keeping it fresh. Fat, chunky sea anemones waved their purple-green tendrils. Tiny crabs scuttled, whelks poked along, and ripples criss-crossed the surface from unseen creatures darting among the plants.
“A tiny world,” said Weena. “Clever indeed.”
“I’m their god,” said Ginnie. She picked up a carton of Friskees cat-food and scattered kibble into the tub. “Feast, my pretties!”
Abruptly the surface teemed with hungry translucent tubes sporting dark eyes and bursts of tentacles.
“Squid?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Ginnie. “Plain old calamari. Easy to raise. Supposedly they talk by changing the colors of their skin. Sometimes I can almost understand them.”
“And now we’ll hear their voices,” said Ira, hunched over the tub. “Eeek!” He’d gotten hold of Ginnie’s contact microphones, and he was busily affixing them to the slanting inner walls of the tub—all the while pretending that the squid were biting him.
He ran wires from the mikes to a sound-card jacked into a grungy old laptop sitting on a table by the tub. Tinkling runs of squid squeaks chimed from the room’s large speakers, offset by oozing anemone burbles and the percussive clicks of the crabs. Ira swept his fingers across a digital drawing pad, creating guitar ostinatos that looped into aural eddies.
“Louder!” yelled Ginnie working the laptop’s mouse and keys.
“Thicker!” And now she found the sweet spot, a resonant mode that made the room reverberate like the bones of a psycho punker frying in an electric chair.
“We gotta take this public,” said Ira. “Our sound is so deeply sick.”
“Maybe bring the generator to your concerts,” I remarked. “That heavy roar.”
“And we could get our bass line by sampling the wind,” said Ginnie. “We’d be playing beach parties, I think.”
Ira plucked a pair of live squid from Ginnie’s tide-pool and popped them into his mouth, thrashing his head back and forth with the tentacles showing. The frightened squid voided their ink sacks, turning Ira’s mouth and lips a goth black, a perfect accent to his grunge-fop look.
“I used to play the flute in band,” I said. “When I was in junior high. I never got very good at it—but maybe I could play with you guys too.”
“Screechy squeaks,” said Ginnie. “Why not? The uglier the better.”
Footsteps sounded on the porch. The guests were arriving, one freaky weirdo after the next, materializing from the warped space-maze that surrounded the lot. The guests were pale, awkward, shadowy, with a very few normal humans in the bunch. I knew a couple of them besides Chang. I talked to a very pretty little woman for a few minutes at the pizza table—I was greedily trying to sample a slice from each of the ten boxes. But soon Header swept the woman into his orbit.
The next couple of hours went by at an accelerating rate. Feeling somewhat shy and out of place, I drank rather more than usual. Not all of the guests were drinking beer—some of them had brought along a punchbowl filled with a fuming spicy fluid that seemed like a dense gas. Echoing a word that Weena had used, Ira said the stuff was called kessence. The wispier and less talkative guests clustered around the kessence punch bowl, dipping their hands and even their
faces into it. I tried a little, but it didn’t do much for me.
By now Chang had gone. Weena was out of sight, and Header was busy with some friends at the other end of the big the room snorting powder off the back of his hand. Ginnie and Ira were into their noise-music thing, off in the other room, and lot of the others were in with them.
A creepy guy came down the stairs, heading for the pizza. He was tall and lanky, with his head constantly in motion. His tufty hair looked like he’d trimmed it with nail scissors.
“Skeeves!” I exclaimed. “I saw your gold coffin in basement.” I’d thought the other guests might be surprised to see Skeeves as well, but I guess everyone but me had already known he was living here.
The gnarled old surfer cocked his head, studying me. “Jim Oster. The man who made the hole.”
“Tell me the whole story,” I said.
“You scratched a leak into an electron with the tip that Ira gave you. The other world is inside the electron, you dig.”
“An electron’s a cloud,” I objected. “A probability wave. Not a hollow ball. I already heard this line of bullshit from Weena.”
Skeeves cracked a faint smile. “Ah yes, Weena. She’s up in my room right now. She’s hot, huh? Even though she’s old.”
“I’ve been living with her all week.” I said shortly. It was disgusting to think I was sharing a woman with Skeeves.
“She’s even better when she’s not in a coma,” said Skeeves. He showed his teeth in an crooked grin and recited a limerick. “Skeeves was a surf-monster man / With a comatose chick in his van. / They said shrink his head, she’s practically dead! / He said ‘I just wish she was tan.’ That last line needs work, doesn’t it? Maybe you can help me with it, Jim. You’re supposed to be so smart and everything.”
“How did Weena get back into her body?”
“She was manipulating me from the other side. I heard her like a voice in my head. She set up Ira’s tip for you, and she sent me to your house to take the charred sample with the special electron that you’d poked. By then the electron had healed over a little bit, but it still had a weak spot. I put your sample right next to Weena’s sarcophagus in my van, and her soul found this giant snail to push out through the electron that you’d nicked.”