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Authors: Rudy Rucker

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BOOK: Spaceland
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Eventually Mom died from a series of increasingly debilitating strokes. I used to go see her twice a year in this little nursing home at Centerville, a slightly bigger town near Matthewsboro. Even when Mom was in her wheelchair with half her face paralyzed, I was still a little scared of her pulling a knife, my fear mixed in with heartbreaking pity.
Mom had hated it in the home, the food especially. Raised on a
farm as she'd been, she was very particular about the purity of what she ate. Mom's final stroke came while she was eating. She died choking on a mouthful of canned, over-salted, cut-rate chicken soup. Terrible. It had been five years now.
As for Dad, he drifted down to Denver, where he worked for a ranch supply wholesaler. He still kept up his interest in collecting comics, branching out from Westerns to include Batman and Donald Duck. He lived alone in a rooming house. He had a series of woman friends—some of whom he met at comic book conventions. Women were always interested to meet a cowboy type like Dad. But he never married again, or even moved in with a woman.
In high school, every now and then I'd go down to Denver and spend a couple of nights with Dad, reading his comics and following him to work to listen to the ranchers and cowboys wrangling about feed, horse troughs and barbed wire. In college and after, we'd get together a few times a year to “tie on the feedbag” at some roughneck Denver watering hole near the tracks. He wasn't a bad guy, even though he talked like a dumb cowhand. Part of that was just an act.
It had only been a year now since I'd found out Dad had lung cancer—the news had come on Christmas Day, 1998. He'd gone down fast. I'd only been to see him the one time in the Denver VA hospital before he died. I'd thought he would last longer; I missed my chance to get any last words or final blessings out of him.
“Let's never get old, Joe,” said Jena, who'd been looking at the middle-aged couple, too.
“We won't,” I said, glancing over at her. When Jena was worrying about things, like she was now, her nose got sort of a pointed look to it. Her cheeks a little drawn in. You could see the unhappy young girl right there under her beauty. She worried more than most people realized. I put my arm around her and kissed her. She kissed me back, and for a few seconds it was just us inside the kiss,
the way it's supposed to be. But then I broke the kiss, wanting to start on the task of figuring out which bar to go to.
The middle-aged couple had crossed the street to head for D.T. Finnegan's, the yuppie pub I'd been planning to steer us to. But, hell with that, if Finnegan's was where the bickering geezers were going, it wasn't for Jena and me. We walked on down the block to a dive bar named the Night Watch. It was jammin' inside, with Nirvana blasting on the speakers, colored little Christmas lights tacked to the black plywood walls, loads of happily drunk people our age, and not a suit or a necktie in the bunch. Lots of the women were decked out in sparkly little dresses. Jena and I looked just right. We found a spot to stand in, and I pushed my way to the bar and got us two glasses and a shaker full of margaritas. Let it come down.
When I got back to Jena, there were a couple of people talking to her, a tall, slim-waisted woman and a handsome guy with short bleached-blonde hair, the sides of his head shaved, a T-shirt with a picture of The Finger, and a silver stud in the top of his ear. It took me a second to believe my eyes.
“Spazz? Didn't you just tell me you were in San Francisco?”
Spazz gave me his hoarse laugh. “Sorry, boss, I couldn't resist rattling your chain. Turns out Tulip's like you. She didn't want to chance going into the City. You remember Joe from the Christmas party, don't you, Tulip? He's Jena's husband. Joe Cube.”
“Cube?” said Tulip, laughing a little. She had nice teeth and a merry smile. Three heavy gold hoops in each ear. Her skin was smooth, with a few pimples. A hank of her black hair hung down on one side. “That's not your true name, is it?”
“Yes it is,” said Jena protectively. “And my last name's Bonk, so go ahead and mock that too. Joe and I have odd, short names. We're Americans of Humorous Descent. What's
your
last name, Tulip?” Jena narrowed her eyes, waiting to pounce on the answer.
“Patel.”
“How nice. Does it mean something?” Jena took a quick sip of her margarita. She could definitely get into being bitchy.
Tulip shrugged. I noticed that her skin was unusually dark underneath her eyes. “You'd have to ask my father. It's a common Indian name. Don't worry, be happy. I'm sorry I laughed. I can never tell when Spazz is joking. He has a humorous name too. Let's drink to the new year! To Spazz, Cube, and Bonk! From sea to shining sea!” She had a standard California accent. An intriguing woman and, according to Spazz, one of the best custom-chip designers in the valley. She worked for ExaChip, the company that made our 3Set's ASIC chips.
“Long live Tulip,” I chimed in, and she smiled regally down at me. There was a seriousness around the corners of her mouth. With her heels she had an inch or two on me, though not on Spazz.
The rest of the evening was your typical bar scene. Not really my favorite thing. The music gets louder and people yell
whooo
and there's a line for the bathroom and everyone flirts like mad—except for the guys like me, who usually end up talking to each other about sports or cars or computers or the stock market. Talking about freaking numbers. It's what I do.
I was leaning close into Spazz, going over the performance specs of the 3Set and trying to figure why the display basically looked so crappy. But then Jena got me to start dancing with her. That was good. Jena's fun to dance with, and it made me proud to be shakin' it with a woman that everyone was staring at. Tulip and Spazz were dancing too, and we switched partners for a while, and then switched back again. Tulip smelled exotic, like spices. It was almost like the four of us were friends.
And then, boom, it was countdown time and Jena and I were kissing and we all sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Like all the other New Year's Eves. Even though it was the 21st Century now, it was still
ordinary human people wanting to love and be loved, hoping for the best for themselves and their families, shooting for the same old goals like a place to live, enough to eat, and decent work. I got a little misty there for a minute.
The bar had a computer-driven laser up near the ceiling, with the vibrating green beam writing HAPPY 2000 on the wall. Spazz pointed at the computer and bugged his eyes. “Behold, O Cube,” he said to me in his most portentous tones. “Our Lord and Master liveth!” Whatever.
Jena was wasted by now, out on her feet. Me, I'd switched to no-alcohol beer around ten so I could drive home. “We're gonna bail,” I told Spazz.
“We'll leave too,” he said.
On the street, Spazz gave the lamppost a kick and reeled back a little. “Still real,” he said. “Deep down, I thought there'd be like this instant decay of matter. All the electrons spiraling into their nuclear suns. The advent of the End Times.” He broke into a long, deep fit of coughing.
“I'll drive,” said Tulip, twisting the ropy hank of her hair that hung down across her cheek.
“Okay,” croaked Spazz. He got on the back of his motorcycle and Tulip took the seat up front. She had a helmet and a leather jacket too. With a wave and a roar they were off.
Jena and I passed a gaggle of three blonde girls talking on cell phones. I was glad to see the phones still working. Two of the girls were talking a lot, but the third looked like she was just pretending, trying to be like her friends, trying to blend in.
The girls giggled after Jena and I walked by. I was pretty much holding Jena up; her feet kept turning at the wrong angles. And when we got to our car she puked on the street. I drove slowly and took the back way home.
The 3Set was still on, though the display looked kind of screwy. I helped Jena into bed before going to power it down. There was no way we were going to have sex. Oh well. We'd made a night of it, one way or another. Bottom line? New Year's Eve sucks.
A Visitor From the Fourth Dimension
Jena was
asleep in seconds. I sighed and walked into the living-dining room. There were little pinkish blobs in the 3Set display, jiggly looking things about an inch across, like balls or cocktail sausages. Some kind of glitch, nothing new for the 3Set. The main image showed a newscaster's talking head doing a rundown on the lack of any Y2K bug worldwide. Nothing had happened even in the Third World countries that hadn't done jack about the bug. No airplanes falling out of the sky in Burundi. Spazz was going to be riding me about this all week. At least I knew he hadn't gone to San Francisco either. That Tulip, she seemed like a terrific woman. Attractive, but not so overwhelmingly beautiful that you couldn't talk to her. Approachable. I liked the way her long waist had felt in my hands when we danced. And her exotic, spicy smell.
I turned off the 3Set's power and the announcer went away. But the blobs were still in the tank, lit up by the lamp on my desk. A screen saver Spazz hadn't told me about? I leaned under the desk and pulled the 3Set's power plug out of the wall. The blobs remained, eight or nine or ten of them, bouncing around together, sometimes merging, sometimes changing their size, their colors
drifting from light to dark pink. It was almost like a lava lamp.
“Greetings.” The voice was a woman's low, thrilling whisper, very close by. Jena? looked behind me, but there was nobody there. Turning back, I saw a quick motion beside the tank.
“Joe,” said the voice again. “Joe Cube.” And now I saw the thing floating in the air outside the 3Set. An irregular little trumpet shape, like a soft, empty ice cream cone, just hanging there, flexing a bit as if thinking things over, a fleshy thing of skin and muscle. Dark pink along one edge. Like a lip? I felt sick to my stomach. Could Spazz have dosed me? My heart was going a mile a minute. And then, to make things worse, half the blobs came floating out of the 3Set tank, moving right through the tank's walls. Had the chips poached my brain?
The trumpet shape was talking to me some more, but I was too freaked to listen to it. I reached over to the tank and, yes, the walls were still in place; thick, smooth glass. The rest of the blobs drifted through the tank wall too. They did some odd little jiggly-doo, briefly winking out of visibility right where they would have touched the barrier. And then they came over and nudged my hand. A peremptory touch, firm and insistent. The first bunch of blobs tapped me on the side of my cheek.
“God help me,” I groaned. I could hardly breathe. I was having a heart attack. A stroke. I had to get to the hospital. It wasn't far. I could walk there if I had to. No, better to drive. I looked around the room for my keys. The little blobs kept being near my face. Oh man, this was bad.
My keys, my keys, my keys—I'd left them in my jacket. I walked over to the couch where I'd thrown it. The fleshy globs got there first. They pinched in on my jacket and lifted it into the air. Held it up by the ceiling, waggling it at me. I jumped for the coat; it darted to one side. There was a low laugh.
“You must listen to me.” The crooked little trumpet right in
front of me. It was a kind of mouth, a mouth with no face. I saw a white flash of crooked teeth down inside it. My stomach clenched hard and then I was puking into the waste basket by my desk. The crab, the salad, the champagne, the margaritas, the Kaliber no-alcohol beer.
The globs floated down to poke at my vomit. The mouth thing drifted into view, pointing attentively up at me, flexing and smacking like someone chewing gum. I noticed that the skin beside the lip had a faint fuzz of blonde hair on it. The hairs kept coming and going, sprouting out and disappearing.
“I'm from the fourth dimension,” said the mouth in a gentle tone. “My name is Momo. Fear me not.”
The fourth dimension meant nothing to me. Math, science fiction. Less than nothing.
“Momo,” I murmured, my voice cracking. There was sour puke in my throat. “Wait a minute.” I walked across to the sink and rinsed my mouth out with water. Gargled. Rinsed again. Drank a sip. Splashed my face. The blobs and the trumpet-shaped mouth were right with me. I noticed that some of the blobs had fine ridges on one side, and crescent-shaped patches of hard stuff on the other side. They were clustered together in two groups of five. Fingertips. I reached out and touched some of them. They pushed back against me, unyielding as stone, then jiggled up and down. I was shaking hands with Momo. Was this how it felt to be crazy?
“I'm Joe,” I muttered.
“I know this,” said the trumpet in a low, womanly voice. “Fear not, Joe.”
I dried my face and went to the bedroom door to peek in on Jena. Fast asleep. I threw myself down on the couch. I took a couple of long, deep breaths. Finally my heart rate was slowing down.
“Momo from the fourth dimension,” I said to the trumpet. “Right.” I didn't know what to think. I reached out and touched
the fingerballs again. They felt warm, hard, very firmly anchored in the air. “This is part of you? The rest's invisible?”
“Not invisible,” said Momo's mouth. “Outside of your Spaceland. Do you wish to see more of me?”
“No. Leave me alone. I'm going to bed.” This wasn't happening. I was imagining things. It was time to be safe in the dark bed with Jena. I got to my feet.
Five of the skin-covered balls grew longer, bunched themselves together, and formed a palm-sized blob at their base. A hand. The hand pushed me and I flew back onto the couch.
“Observe,” said the trumpet-mouth. It changed shape and ballooned out to one side. Something like cheeks and a nose and chin appeared. A cloud of hair on one side, partly brown, partly blonde. The blank skin near the top of the face puckered and two eyes popped up, not quite the same size, the eyes shifting about in the face like yolks in eggs. At the same time, a neck had appeared beneath Momo's head, a neck and a lumpy body with arms connecting it to the two hands. She was wearing yellow tight silky material on top, like a fancy T-shirt. Her lower parts were wrapped in something like blue jeans. She was hideously deformed. And she was moving towards me.
I decided then that Momo was a criminal of some kind. She'd broken into our house. She'd been hiding here when we got home, and now she was going to get me. I scooted up over the back of the couch, putting the furniture between us. In the next instant, without even seeming to move, Momo was behind the couch with me, jiggling and shifting, her arms bending at crazy wrong angles, her head an irregular balloon, her eyes rolling and changing size.
“Help!” I shouted. “Wake up, Jena! Help me! Call the police!”
Momo enfolded me, her arms wrapping around me like padded iron bands. Her terrible face was right up against me. I shrieked at the top of my lungs. If Jena wouldn't wake up, there were always
the neighbors. We shared walls with other townhouses on both sides.
“This must not be,” said Momo and lifted me up as easily as a feather. I felt an uncanny pressure on every part of my body,
Momo carried me towards our outside wall, and then, just as we would have hit the wall—something happened. There was a feeling of rotating in some unknown direction. And now my view of our living-dining room was very odd; I was seeing it as if I were looking at a floor plan: the thick lines of the walls, the blob of the couch, a rectangle for the counter. My point of view moved past our outer wall, and I glimpsed what was inside it: the crumbling white of drywall, the yellow fluff of insulation.
We turned and sailed along outside my house, heading towards the park nearby. As we moved, my cross-sectional view of things wobbled up and down. For an instant I thought I glimpsed Jena lying in our bed. It was a very disturbing sight indeed. I could see her insides, her bones and muscles and blood. Oh my God. Had Momo butchered her? I was squeezed too tight to speak.
I saw some wooden circles move by: the cross sections of trees. I craned back towards our condos, but the blueprint-like outline was now too far away to read. I felt another rotation and then a feeling of release. I was standing in a field in the park. Momo had killed Jena and now she'd kidnapped me. I drew in a breath to scream.
“Silence!” said Momo, giving me a rough shake.
“Did you hurt Jena?” I demanded. “I'll kill you if—”
“Calm yourself, fool. I have no business with your wife. She sleep.”
“I saw her blond!”
“Your Spaceland forms lie quite open to the fourth dimension. I've done nothing to your wife. nor do I mean you any harm. But if you scream again—”
“All right,” I said, drawing a deep, shaky breath. Momo was still holding my shoulder.
Being with Momo was better in the dark; it was better not to see her. She had a smell to her, but it was nothing I could pin down. It seemed to change with every breath I took. Shoe polish, pine trees, women's underwear, roses, ham, horses, candle wax, the beach—pleasant odors. I was beginning to accept that Momo was real. “If you cry for help, I'll take you into the fourth dimension never to return,” she continued. “Am I understood? I release you now so that we may comfortably converse. Entertain no plans of fleeing me.”
She moved back from me a bit. My clothes were all twisted and crooked; I had to wriggle around to get my pants resettled on me before I could reach the pocket. And then I took out my wallet.
“I have six hundred dollars on me,” I said. I'd loaded up in case the cash machines went down. “You can have it all. Here.” I pulled out the money, but Momo didn't take it.
“I'm not here to rob you,” said Momo. “I come to bring you knowledge of the fourth dimension.”
I could hear the cars on Route 85 driving by the same as ever. Nothing was happening over at my townhouse complex. Jena and the rest of them were out cold. I was alone here with—what?
“What are you?” I asked.
“I'm a woman from a higher order of reality,” said Momo. “I come from four-dimensional space. We call our world the All.”
“I don't know anything about the fourth dimension,” I said. “I majored in History and I got an MBA. I don't read science fiction. I don't want to hear about any freaking fourth dimension. How did we get out in the park?”
“We traveled through the fourth dimension. I pressed in upon your sides lest you be torn asunder.”
I sighed and put my money away. “What do you want from me, Momo?”
“You must help me change your world,” she said. “You'll speak to your fellows of the fourth dimension, Joe, and with my guidance, you and your adherents will develop a miraculous technology. You will prosper. My mission is to help you change your world—which we call Spaceland. I want to do something very special to inaugurate the onset of your new Millennium. I plan to augment you: to give you four-dimensional skin and a third eye.”
“I heard the Millennium doesn't really start till next year,” I said uneasily. “You're too early.”
“Your planet is most favorably located relative to my city just now,” said Momo. “It's convenient for me to approach you.” She paused for a moment, then took a different tack. “You haven't had sex for many days. If I augment you, it would enhance your abilities to read your wife's moods—and thereby become a better lover.”
“You've been hovering over me all week?”
“Not at all. The first I saw of you was when you returned to your home, although I admit I used my subtle vision to read through your personal papers while I was waiting. If I know that your reproductive reservoirs are rather full, it's because I can see inside your body.”
This was a definite turn-off. It was nasty to think of Momo peering into the crannies of my private parts. Was she maybe talking about dissecting me? I cocked my head, looking for the glint of a knife.
“Your increased heartbeat indicates fear,” said Momo. “Calm yourself. Ratiocinate. I'm trying to tell you about subtle vision. My retina is a solid ball, rather than a flat disk as is yours. In observing you, I form an exact model of your full body inside my retina. An actively working mimicry. I can very easily read your physical signs, although I confess that it lies beyond my abilities to decipher your thoughts from the flickers of your brain.”
“I don't understand how you see inside me,” I said finally.
“You have no skin facing towards the fourth dimension,” said Momo. “I can touch your insides. Behold.”
There was a sudden wriggle in my mouth. Something smooth, the size of a beetle. I tried to spit it out, but I couldn't. In the dim light I noticed that one of Momo's arms was pointing towards my head, but the arm ended in a rounded-off stub. The forearm and hand were invisible, with one of the fingers somehow materializing at just the right spot to touch my tongue.
“Stop or I'll scream again,” I said thickly. The finger went away. I took a step back from Momo. Her lumpy yellow top shone dully, reflecting the lights of Route 85. Her face was still puffed and crooked. But I was slowly getting used to her.
BOOK: Spaceland
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