Inside Out

  Inside Out

  Rudy Rucker

  Rudy Rucker

  Inside Out

  You might think of Killeville as a town where every building is a Pizza Hut. Street after street of Pizza Huts, each with the same ten toppings and the same mock mansard roof--the same shiny zero repeated over and over like same tiles in a pavement, same pixels in a grid, same blank neurons in an imbecile's brain.

  The Killevillers--the men and women on either side of the Pizza Hut counters--see nothing odd about the boredom, the dodecaduplication. They are ugly people, cheap and odd as K-Mart dolls. The Killeville gene pool is a dreg from which all fine vapors evaporate, a dreg so small that some highly recessive genes have found expression. Killeville is like New Zealand with its weirdly unique fauna.

  Walking down a Killeville street, you might see the same hideous platypus face three times in ten minutes.

  Of course a platypus is beautiful ... to another platypus. The sound that drifts out of Killeville's country clubs and cocktail parties is smug and well-pleased. It's a sound like locusts, or like feasting geese. "This is good food," they say, "Have you tried the spinach?" The words don't actually matter; the nasal buzzing honk of the vowels conveys it all: We're the same. We're the same.

  Unless you were born there, Killeville is a horrible place to live. Especially in August. In August the sky is a featureless gray pizza. The unpaved parts of the outdoors are choked with thorns and poison ivy. Inside the houses, mold grows on every surface, and fleas seethe in the wall-to-wall carpeting. In the wet grayness, time seems to have stopped. How to kill it?

  One can watch TV, go to a restaurant, see a movie, or drink in a bar--though none of these pastimes is fun in Killeville. The TV channels are crowded with evangelists so stupid that it isn't even funny. All the restaurants are, of course, Pizza Huts. And if all the restaurants are Pizza Huts, then all the movie theaters are showing Rambo and the Care Bears movie. MADD is very active in Killeville, and drinking in bars is risky. Sober, vigilant law-enforcement officers patrol the streets at every hour.

  For all this, stodgy, nasty Killeville is as interesting a place as can be found in our universe. For whatever reason, it's a place where strange things keep happening ... very strange things. Look at what happened to Rex and Candy Redman in August, 198-.

  Rex and Candy Redman: married twelve years, with two children aged eight and eleven. Rex was dark and skinny; Candy was a plump, fairskinned redhead with blue eyes. She taught English at Killeville Middle School. Rex had lost his job at GE back in April. Rex had been a CB radio specialist at the Killeville GE plant--the job was the reason the Redmans had moved to Killeville in the first place. When Rex got laid off, he went a little crazy. Instead of selling the house and moving--which is what he should have done--he got a second mortgage on their house and started a business of his own: Redman Novelties & Magic, Wholesale & Retail. So far it hadn't clicked. Far from it. The Redmans were broke and stuck in wretched Killeville. They avoided each other in the daytime, and in the evenings they read magazines.

  Rex ran his business out of a run-down building downtown, a building abandoned by its former tenants, a sheet music sales corporation called, of all things, Bongo Fury. Bongo Fury had gotten some federal money to renovate the building next door, and were letting Rex's building moulder as some kind of tax dodge. Rex had the whole second floor for fifty dollars a month. There was a girl artist who rented a room downstairs; she called it her studio. Her name was Marjorie. She thought Rex was cute. Candy didn't like the situation.

  "How was Marjorie today?" Candy asked, suddenly looking up from her copy of People. It was a glum Wednesday night.

  "Look, Candy, she's just a person. I do not have the slightest sexual interest in Marjorie. Even if I did, do you think I'd be stupid enough to start something with her? She'd be upstairs bothering me all the time. You'd find out right away ... life would be even more of a nightmare."

  "It just seems funny," said Candy, a hard glint in her eye. "It seems funny, that admiring young girl alone with you in an abandoned building all day. It stinks! Put yourself in my shoes! How would you like it?"

  Rex went out to the kitchen for a glass of water. "Candy," he said, coming back into the living room. "Just because you're bored is no reason to start getting mean. Why can't you be a little more rational?"

  "Yeah?" said Candy. She threw her magazine to the floor. "Yeah? Well I've got a question for you. Why don't you get a JOB?"

  "I'm trying, hon, you know that." Rex ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "And you know I just sent the catalogs out. The orders'll be pouring in soon."

  "BULL!" Candy was escalating fast. "GET A JOB!"

  "Ah, go to hell, ya goddamn naggin ... " Rex moved rapidly out of the room as he said this.

  "THAT'S RIGHT, GET OUT OF HERE!"

  He grabbed his Kools pack and stepped out on the front stoop. A little breeze tonight; it was better than it had been. Good night to take a walk, have a cigarette, bring home a Dr. Pepper, and fool around in his little basement workshop. He had a new effect he was working on. Candy would be asleep on the couch before long; it was her new dodge to avoid going to bed with him.

  Walking towards the 7-Eleven, Rex thought about his new trick. It was a box called Reverse that was supposed to turn things into their opposites. A left glove into a right glove, a saltshaker into a pepper grinder, a deck of cards into a Bible, a Barbie doll into a Ken doll. Reverse could even move a coffee cup's handle to its inside. Of course all the Reverse action could be done by sleight of hand--the idea was to sell the trapdoored Reverse box with before-and-after props. But now, walking along, Rex remembered his math and tried to work out what it would be like if Reverso were for real. What if it were possible, for instance, to turn things inside out by inverting in a sphere, turning each radius vector around on itself, sending a tennis ball's fuzz to its inside, for instance. Given the right dimensional flow, it could be done ...

  As Rex calmed himself with thoughts of math, his senses opened and took in the night. The trees looked nice, nice and black against the citylit gray sky. The leaves whispered on a rising note. Storm coming; there was heat lightning in the distance and thundermutter. Buddaboombabububu. The wind picked up all of a sudden; fat rain started spitting; and then KCRAAACK! there was a blast to Rex's right like a bomb going off! Somehow he'd felt it coming, and he jerked just the right way at just the right time. Things crashed all around him--what seemed like a whole tree. Sudden deaf silence and the crackling of flames.

  Lightning had struck a big elm tree across the street from him; struck it and split it right down the middle. Half the tree had fallen down all around Rex, with heavy limbs just missing him on either side.

  Shaky and elated, Rex picked his way over the wood to look at the exposed flaming heart of the tree. Something funny about the flame. Something very strange indeed. The flames were in the shape of a little person, a woman with red eyes and trailing limbs.

  "Please help me, sir," said the flame girl, her voice rough and skippy as an old LP. "I am of the folk, come down on the bolt. I need a flow to live on. When this fire goes out, I'm gone."

  "I," said Rex. "You." He thought of Moses and the burning bush. "Are you a spirit?"

  Tinkling laughter. "The folk are information patterns. I drift through the levels doing this and that. Can you lend me a body or two? I'll make it worth your while."

  The rain was picking up, and the fire was dying out. A siren approached. The little figure's hot perfect face stared at Rex. She reached out towards him beseechingly.

  "I have an idea," said Rex. "I'll put you in Candy ... my wife. Just for a little while. Right now she's probably asleep, so she won't notice anyway. I live just over there ... "

  "Carry me in a coa
l," hissed the little voice.

  Rex tried to pick up part of the burning heartwood, but it was all one piece. On a sudden inspiration, he drew out a Kool and lit it by holding it against the dying flames. He puffed once, getting it lit, and the elfgirl entered him.

  It felt good, it felt tingly, it felt like being alive. Quick thin fractal pathways grew down his arms and legs, spidering out from his chest, where the girl--

  "My name is Zee."

  --had settled in.

  "It's nice in here," said Zee, her voice subvocal in Rex's throat. "No need to introduce yourself, Rex, I'm reading your mind. I'm going to keep your body and give Candy to Alf." Rex's lips moved slightly as Zee spoke. The reality of this hit Rex--he was possessed! He began a howl of surprise, but Zee cut him off toot sweet. She took over his motor reflexes and began marching him home. Rex's nerves felt thick, coated, crustacean.

  "Sorry to do this to you, Rex," said the voice, "but I really don't have a choice. It's the only way I can get rid of Alf, the little spirit who possesses me. He's been insisting I get him a human body. But I like you, so we'll put him in your wife instead of you."

  Candy was stretched out on the couch, softly snoring. Rex put the Kool in his mouth and leaned over Candy so that the ash end was just inside her mouth. He blew as she inhaled. A tiny figure of smoke--a little man much, much smaller than Zee--twisted off the cigarette tip and disappeared into Candy's chest. Gazzzunk. She snorted and sat up, eyes unnaturally bright.

  "So you're Rex?" It was Candy's voice, but huskier, and with a different pronunciation.

  "Rex Redman. And you're in my wife Candy. We're both possessed, me by little Zee and she by smaller who? Who are you? You haven't hurt Candy have you?"

  "Hi Zee. Tell him shut up, Candy's here asleep, and I'm Alf. Let's shake this meat, Zee." Candy/Alf stretched her arms and pushed out her chest. "Hmm." She undid her blouse and bra and examined her breasts with interest. Her motions were open and youthful, and her features had a new tautness. "Do you want to make love?"

  "Yeah," said Rex/Zee. "Sure."

  Up in their second-floor bedroom, the sex was more fun than it had been in quite a while. The only reason Candy kept bugging Rex about Marjorie was, Rex felt, because Candy wanted to be unfaithful herself. Lately she'd been sick of him. Pumping in and out, Rex wondered if this was adultery. It was Candy's body, but Candy's mind was asleep, or on hold, and, for his part, Zee was calling the shots so good Rex wanted them all: come shots, smack shots, booze shots in the sweaty night. Eventually Candy woke up halfway and was happy. It became almost a fourway scene.

  The way Zee told it, flaked out on the mattress there, she came from a race of discorporated beings consisting of pure patterns of information. The folk. They could live at any size scale or, ideally, at several size scales at once. Each of the folk had a physically real ancestor on some level or another, but the originals were long lost in the endless mindgaming and switching of hosts. Before entering Rex's nervous system, Zee had been a pattern of air turbulence up in the sky, a pattern that had wafted out from the leaves of a virus-infested bamboo grove in Thailand. The virus--which had been Zee--had evolved out of a self-replicating crystalline clay structure in the ground, which had been Zee too.

  Alf was a kind of parasite who'd just entered Zee recently. There were folk throughout the universe, and Alf had arrived in the form of a shower of cosmic rays. He'd latched right onto Zee. It had been his idea to get Zee to come down and possess a person--the folk didn't usually like to do that. Alf had gotten Zee to possess Rex so Rex would help put Alf into a person too. Zee was glad to get Alf out of her--she didn't like him.

  Lying there spent, fondling Candy and listening to Zee in the dark, Rex began to think he was dreaming. Dreaming a factual dream of the folk who live in the world's patterns--live as clouds, as fires, as trees, as brooks, as people, as cells, as genes, as superstrings from dimension Z. Any type of ongoing process at all would do. Fractal; the word kept coming back. It meant something that is endlessly complex at every level--like a coastline, with its spits within inlets within bays; like a high-tree habitat where the thick branches keep merging to thicker ones, and the thin ones split and split.

  "Would you really have died if I'd let your fire go out?" Rex asked. It was dawn and this was no dream.

  "No," laughed Zee. "I'm a terrible liar. I would have gone down into the wood's grain-patterns, and then into the sugars of the sap. But I just had to get rid of Alf. And I like you, Rex. I was aiming for you when I rode the lightning down. You smelled interesting and ... thick like extra space."

  "You could smell me all the way up in the sky?"

  "It's not really smelling. For us nothing's so far away, you know. Your whole notion of space and distances is ... a kind of flat picture? The folk are much realer than that. We live in full fractal Hil-bert space. You think like a flat picture, but the paper, if you'll just look, is all bumpy like a moonscape of bristlebushes covered with fuzzy fleas. There's no fixed dimensions at all. Does it feel good when Alf and I do this?"

  "Yes."

  Candy's wordless smiling daze ended when the first rays of the sun came angling in the window. She jerked, rubbed her eyes, and groaned. "Rex, what have you been doing to me? I dreamed ... " She tried to sit up and Alf wouldn't let her. Her eyes rolled. "There are things in us, Rex, it's real, I'm scared, I'm SCARED SCARED OOOOoooo--"

  Her skin seemed to ridge up as Alf's tendrils clamped down. Her mouth snapped shut and then her face smoothed into an icky pixie grin. She got out of bed and dressed awkwardly. Rex didn't usually pay much attention to what women wore, but Candy's outfit today definitely did not look right. A cocktail dress tucked into a pair of jeans. Where did she think she was going so early?

  "I'll call in sick," said Alf through Candy. "Just a minute." She went to the phone and tried to call the school where she worked. Alf didn't seem to realize it was summer vacation.

  "Mommy's up!" shouted Griff, hearing the call.

  "Where's breakfast?" demanded little Leda.

  "LOOK OUT, KIDS!" shouted Rex. "MOMMY AND I HAVE BEEN TAKEN OVER BY--" Zee's clampdown hit him like a shot of animal tranquilizer.

  "Just kidding," called Zee/Rex. The kids laughed. Daddy was wild. Zee/Rex went into the kitchen to look for food and Leda asked for breakfast again. "Feed yourself, grubber," mouthed Rex. Hungry. Zee had him brush past Griff and Leda and fill a bowl with milk, sugar, and three raw eggs. Zee/Rex leaned over the bowl and lapped the contents up.

  "Daddy, you are eating like a pig!" laughed Leda. She fixed herself a bowl of milk and sugar and tried lapping it up like Daddy. The bowl slid off the table and onto the floor. Griff, upset by the disorder, grabbed some bread and headed out the door to play with the dog. Leda cleaned up halfheartedly until she realized that Daddy didn't care, and then she went to watch cable TV.

  "Do you want to fuck your wife some more?" said Zee. The voice was subvocal.

  "Uh, no," said Rex, beginning to wonder what he'd gotten his family into. "Not right now. Do you remember saying that you'd make it worth my while if I gave the use of our bodies, Zee? What kind of payment do the folk give?"

  "As a rule, none," said Zee, making Rex nibble on a stick of butter. "I told you I'm a terrible liar. Isn't having me in you payment enough? Don't you like being part of the Zee fractal?" Rex didn't understand, but Zee helped him and then he did. Folk like Zee were long thin vortices in the fractal soup of all that is. Or like a necklace strung with diverse beads. Rex was a Zee-bead now, and Candy was an Alf-bead. Alf's thread passed up through Zee, too, and up through Zee to who knew where.

  It was dizzying to think about: the endlessness and the weird geometry of it all. To hear Zee tell it, every size scale was equally central, each object just another crotch in the transdimensional fractal world-tree. Zee and Alf were in them, above them, and maybe below them now, too: in their genes and in their memes. Rex's thoughts felt no longer quite his.

  He'd made a terrible mistake picking
Zee up. He kept remembering the desperate expression on Candy's face as Alf made her stop yelling. And the puzzled looks the children had given their terribly altered Dad.

  "Can't you and Alf move on, Zee? Leave your fractal trail in us, but move on down into the atoms? Can I drive you anywhere?"

  "No. It's ugly here in Killeville. I just came down because of you. When I'm through eating, I want to get back in bed with Candy and Alf." Rex watched himself open the fridge, hunker down, and begin using a stick of celery to dig peanut butter out of the jar. Crunch off some celery each time. It tasted good. Whenever he relaxed, the nerve-tingle of Zee's possession started to feel good. That was bad.

  "What was it about me that attracted you so much, Zee?"

  "I said I could smell you. You were thinking about your magic box called Reverse. It makes your flat space get thick, and it spins things over themselves. I told you the higher dimensions are real; you can build up to them with fractals. I bet I could make Reverse really work. I could do that for you, dear Rex."

  "Well, all right." Rex went back in the bedroom and talked things over with Candy, who was busy putting on a different set of clothes. "I think I'll drive down to my office, Candy," said Rex. "Zee says she can help me get the Reverse working. And maybe then they'll leave."

  "I'm going to stay in bed all day," said Candy, making that pixie face. She had taken all her clothes back off, and one of her hands was busy down in her crotch. "I love this body." Her voice was husky and strange. Rex felt very uneasy.

  "Maybe I shouldn't leave you like this, Candy."

  "Go on, go downtown to your Marjorie. I won't be lonely, Rex. You can count on that."

  "Do you mean--"

  Zee cut him off and marched him out of the bedroom and back down the stairs.

  "And take the kids," called Candy in something like her normal voice. She sounded scared. "Get the poor children out of here!"

  "Right."

  Rex rounded up the children and took them over to the Car-randines' house. Luanne Carrandine was a little surprised when Rex asked her to babysit, but after the usual heavy flirting, she agreed to help out. She was a charming blonde woman with a small jaded face. Some of the suggestions which Zee forced out of Rex's mouth made Luanne laugh out loud. If her husband Garvey hadn't been upstairs, Rex and Zee might have stayed on, but as it was, they headed downtown.