Complete Stories Read online

  Complete Stories

  by Rudy Rucker

  Transreal Books

  Los Gatos, California

  http://www.rudyrucker.com/transreal/

  Complete Stories is Copyright © 2012 Rudy Rucker as a volume, and the stories are copyrighted to their authors. First edition, 2012, Transreal Books, LosGatos, California.

  This edition includes Rucker’s short stories written from 1974-2011. The “Introduction” and the “Notes on the Stories” describe the previous publications of the stories. Later editions of Complete Stories may expand to include later stories.

  Cover painting is “My Life In A Nutshell,” by Rudy Rucker.

  These stories are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN-10: 0984758518. ISBN-13: 9780984758517

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Jumpin’ Jack Flash

  Enlightenment Rabies

  Schrödinger’s Cat

  Sufferin’ Succotash

  A New Golden Age

  Faraway Eyes

  The 57th Franz Kafka

  The Indian Rope Trick Explained

  A New Experiment With Time

  The Man Who Ate Himself

  Tales of Houdini

  The Facts of Life

  Buzz

  The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge

  Pac-Man

  Pi in the Sky

  Wishloop

  Inertia

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics

  Message Found in a Copy of Flatland

  Plastic Letters

  Monument to the Third International

  Rapture in Space

  Storming the Cosmos (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  In Frozen Time

  Soft Death

  Inside Out

  Instability (Written with Paul Di Filippo)

  The Man Who Was a Cosmic String

  Probability Pipeline (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

  As Above, So Below

  Chaos Surfari (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

  Big Jelly (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  Easy As Pie

  The Andy Warhol Sandcandle (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

  Cobb Wakes Up

  The Square Root of Pythagoras (Written with Pal Di Filippo)

  Pockets (Written with John Shirley)

  Junk DNA (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane

  Jenna and Me (Written with Rudy Rucker Jr.)

  Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation

  MS Found in a Minidrive

  Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch

  The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club

  Panpsychism Proved

  Elves of the Subdimensions (Written with Paul Di Filippo)

  2+2=5 (Written with Terry Bisson)

  Visions of the Metanovel

  The Third Bomb

  The Imitation Game

  Hormiga Canyon (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  The Perfect Wave (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

  Tangier Routines

  Message Found In A Gravity Wave

  Qlone

  Colliding Branes (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  Jack and the Aktuals or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory

  All Hangy (Written with John Shirley)

  To See Infinity Bare (Written with Paul Di Filippo)

  Bad Ideas

  Good Night, Moon (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  Fjaerland (Written with Paul DiFilippo)

  The Fnoor Hen

  Hive Mind Man (Written with Eileen Gunn)

  My Office Mate

  * * *

  Introduction

  I’ve arranged my stories in the order in which they were composed. On the whole, the later stories are better than the earlier ones, so you might do well to start reading somewhere towards the middle of this collection. Like many professions, writing is something one learns on the job.

  Over the years I’ve published four print anthologies of my stories:

  The 57th Franz Kafka (Ace Books, 1983)

  Transreal! (WCS Books, 1991)

  Gnarl! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000)

  Mad Professor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007).

  The final fifteen stories appearing in this, my new anthology, haven’t appeared in any of those four print anthologies.

  At this point in my career, I thought it would be futuristic to abandon print and to have my story anthology take on the form of an ebook, published by my own Transreal Press. The big win is that, given that I’m working with an ebook, I can make make my new anthology comprehensive. Thus: Complete Stories.

  Probably I’ll go on to write a few more stories in the coming years. So, as time runs on, I’ll simply make new editions of my Complete Stories ebook now and then. Walt Whitman spent his whole life revising and expanding one single book of poetry: Leaves of Grass. Complete Stories is in some sense my final anthology.

  Flipping through these tales, I feel a mixture of nostalgia, pride, and embarrassment. I used to write as if women were wonderful, fascinating aliens—over the years I’ve gotten better at depicting them as people. Intoxication has remained a years-long literary obsession. My politics remain those of the hippies, punks, and grungers. But always the stories have their own wild humor and logic.

  I can characterize my fiction with in terms of six concepts: (1) Thought experiments, (2) Power-chords, (3) Gnarliness, (4) Wit, (5) Transrealism, and (6) Collaboration.

  (1) The notion of fictional thought experiments was made popular by Albert Einstein, who fueled his science speculations with so-called Gedankenexperimenten. Thought experiments are a very powerful technique of philosophical investigation. In practice, it’s intractably difficult to visualize the side effects of new technological developments. In order to tease out the subtler consequences of current trends, a complex fictional simulation is necessary; inspired narration is a more powerful tool than logical analysis. If I want to imagine, for instance, what our world would be like if ordinary objects were conscious, then the best way to make progress is to fictionally simulate a person discovering this. The kinds of thought experiments I enjoy are different in intent and in execution from merely futurological investigations. My primary goal is not to make useful predictions that businessmen can use. I’m more interested in exploring the human condition, with literary power chord standing in for archetypal psychic forces.

  (2) When I speak of power chords in the context of fantastic literature, I’m talking about certain classic tropes that have the visceral punch of heavy musical riffs: blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, immersive virtual reality, clones, robots, teleportation, alien-controlled pod people, endless shrinking, the shattering of planet Earth, intelligent goo, antigravity, starships, ecodisaster, pleasure-center zappers, alternate universes, nanomachines, mind viruses, higher dimensions, a cosmic computation that generates our reality, and, of course, the attack of the giant ants. When I use a power chord, I try to do something fresh with the trope, perhaps placing it into an unfamiliar context, perhaps describing it more intensely than usual, or perhaps using it for a novel thought experiment. I like it when my material takes on a life of its own. This leads to what I call the gnarly zone.

  (3) In short, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story b
ecomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone is lies at the interface between logic and fantasy. I see my tales as simulated worlds in which the characters and tropes and social situations bounce off each other like eddies in a turbulent wake, like gliders in a cellular automaton graphic, like vines twisting around each other in a jungle. When I write, I like to be surprised.

  (4) My early mentor Robert Sheckley was a supremely witty writer. Over the years I got to spend a few golden hours in Sheckley’s presence. And I think it’s safe to say that wit, rather than mere humor, was his primary goal. Wit involves describing the world as it actually is. You experience a release of tension when you notice a glitch. Something was off-kilter, and now you see what it was. The elephant in the living room has been named. The evil spirit has been incanted. Perceiving an incongruity in our supposedly smooth-running society provokes a shock of recognition and a concomitant burst of laughter. Wit is a critical-satirical process that can be more serious than the “humorous” label suggests.

  (5) “Transrealism” is a word that I made up. Early on, I found that using myself and my friends as characters in my science-fiction tales appeals to me very much. My actual life is the real part, and the trans part are the cool things that happen to the characters in my science-fiction stories. In other words, I found that I could use the special effects and power chords of SF as a way to thicken and intensify my material. The tools of science fiction can be a way to add a more artistic shape to the suppressed fears and desires that you inevitably incorporate into your fiction. To my way of thinking, transrealism is a way to describe not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded.

  (6) Regarding collaboration, note that nearly a third of the pieces in Complete Stories were written with other authors. As a practical matter, I get lonely being a writer on my own, and I welcome the chance to get into a collaborative exchange with another writer. One of the remarkable things about science-fiction writing is the level of literary collaboration that it supports. In this respect, we’re like scientists—and like musicians. Science fiction is a shared enterprise. And I’m grateful to be part of it.

  —Rudy Rucker, Los Gatos, California, 2012

  * * *

  Jumpin’ Jack Flash

  It was a hell of a lecture. “Out of Your Mindscape,” Jack had called it on the posters he’d put up all over town. The posters had a picture of a guy thinking a thought balloon of himself thinking a thought balloon of himself thinking etcetera and ad infinitum. Jack Flash was wild about infinite regresses that term.

  I never could see the use of them myself. So my mind has an image of my mind which has an image of my mind and so on. So what. To me the fact that my mind is infinite is about as significant as the fact that human bodies have ten toes. Big Mind doesn’t have anything to do with the finite-infinite distinction. And in terms of my immediate life, what counts in the Pure Land is having two minds instead of one mind…and who cares if they’re infinite.

  At the time I’m talking about, I was an English instructor at the same upstate New York college where Jack taught. People don’t take to me, and I always have trouble keeping jobs on Earth. They were going to terminate my contract even though I’d just had a paper on Invasion of the Body Snatchers accepted by the Journal of Popular Culture.

  I had just gotten the bad news from my chairman at lunch time, and I’d spent the afternoon going through my second to last spore of geezel. That’s a pretty hefty dose for one sitting, so I was kind of lit when I walked into Jack’s lecture.

  Jack had drawn a big crowd, but they were pretty stiff. I was feeling reckless, and decided to loosen things up by laughing and stamping my feet every time Jack said, “infinity.” Before long the place was rocking.

  Jack likes to work a crowd; and once I’d gotten them started he kept bringing them higher…changing the subject, making slips of the tongue, and mixing in side-raps, one-liners, and level changes. It was a pleasure to watch him.

  He was wearing light tan corduroys and a blue flannel Bean’s shirt. He never stopped moving except when he wanted to say something heavy. For that he would lean forward on the desk and manage to look every one of us in the eye. But mostly he’d be writing things on the board, wiping chalk dust off on his corduroys, pushing his long brown hair back from his forehead, or taking his ratty black sweater on and off.

  I couldn’t really tell you what the talk was about. After all, I was pretty high, and I’ve never bothered to master a lot of the standard human concepts. Roughly speaking, it seemed like Jack thought he could prove that every possible universe exists. Considering my background, you’d think I’d be interested in what he might have to say on this topic…but you’d be wrong. I just wanted to lesnerize a couple of people and get the hell back to the Pure Land.

  Without thinking about it too hard, I suspected that most of what Jack said was wrong anyway…but it was fun listening to him rave. Quite a few people came up to him afterwards, and I stuck around.

  After a while it was down to just one chick talking to Jack. I walked up to join their conversation. “That was splendid, Jack,” I said.

  “Thanks, Simon,” he answered. He turned to the girl, “What do you say the three of us go get a beer?” He had already put on his brown leather jacket.

  “All right,” the girl said, and we started out. I’d never seen her before. She reminded me of a Mercedes-Benz…classic features, and a flawless exterior, gliding along on smoothly meshing joints.

  “I’m Si Bork,” I said to her, hoping for a handshake.

  “Helen,” she said nodding, and then picked up the thread of her conversation with Jack. “I mean, how can you be sure that those parallel universe you were talking about really exist? Can you leave your body?”

  Jack hated to answer no to a question like that, so he just shrugged. “How could I ever tell?” And then he was back on his favorite subject, his own ideas. “I’ve got a whole new thing I’m working on now. Did it ever occur to you that black holes and white holes really exist in your Mindscape?”

  Actually he wasn’t far off, but I wasn’t going to start blabbing everything I knew. Not yet anyway. If I played it right Jack would probably go along with me…maybe…and if I could just find someone else …

  Helen was talking quietly to Jack as we went into the bar. I was sure she was already wondering how to get rid of this obvious loser, Simon Bork, so that she and Jack could really rap. But I knew Jack wanted me to stick around, and I started trying to make friends with Helen while Jack got us a pitcher.

  We exchanged a few listless facts about what we did for a living…she was in medical school…and then a silence fell. I had to say something interesting.

  “You remind me of a Mercedes,” I blurted out finally, unable to come up with anything more abstract. She gave me her full attention for a few seconds…sizing me up.

  I know what I look like…hell, I build this body from scratch every morning, including the glasses. Gold-rimmed glasses, set deep into eye sockets with colorless eyes. Prematurely bald, with a few lank strands across the top. Twitchy face with a rabbity mouth. The kind of guy who eats Oreos for dessert after every one of the crummy little meals he cooks in his rented room.

  Helen shook her head, “You look like a Studebaker yourself.” But as she said it she patted my arm, and I could feel a tingle…almost a shock…pass up the arm and into my bodymass.

  She was so beautiful. Teeth, mouth, swelling breasts, her voice. This was as close to a girl this beautiful as I had ever been. If only I could get closer…I closed my eyes to skren her better. It was so relaxing to be near this woman. She seemed so kind…perhaps I could tell her …

  “I have this problem …” I started to say, but a gassy wet vibrato had crept into my voice. I was starting to flow! Beneath my shirt the stiff orange buds were already forming on the transparent hide covering my swirling green bodymass. Helen’s eyes widened as my face sagged.

  I couldn’t stop m
yself from shlubbering out, “I want to lesnerize you.” Why did I have to go and tip my hand like that, a part of my mind wondered bleakly. Helen had jumped to her feet, and when I slid to the floor I could see her shiny black underwear. It took the full force of my will to keep from beginning to rave in the mother tongue.

  Not that she could have any doubts about what I was. In seconds she would begin to scream, and things would get worse until finally I would have to chirp again. I couldn’t figure out how I could have let myself go like this. For two years I had held human shape except when I got into my werble…disguised as the bed in my cheap, but well-locked, boarding-house room.

  But now sitting here with this woman my control had suddenly snapped…and I was flopping around under the table like a sun-ripened manta ray. This would make the third mission in a row I had blown. Any second she would scream.

  I tensed myself and prepared to chirp. When the humans discover a “Venusian,” we always take one of them with us. When forced out of my body, I convert its mass into a single pulse of electromagnetic energy…a chirp…which eventually reaches the Pure Land and is reconstructed there. They’ve got a radio-telescope hooked up to a vat of undifferentiated tissue.

  Just so that the few humans in the know will think twice before attacking a “Venusian,” we always make it a point to beam the chirp through someone’s head on the way out. The energy density hard-boils their brain like an egg in a microwave oven.

  But still no one came…and there was no scream. Something brushed against me. Something soft…it was the girl! Helen had sat down, taken off her shoes, and was gently kneading my bodymass. I grew bristles which slipped between her toes, and she clenched and gently tugged at them. Unmistakable pheromones were drifting down. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Helen was a V-sexual.

  There was still time to save this mission. I forced myself back into human form and crawled out from under the table. Just as I stood up, Jack Flash came back with a pitcher of beer. “Was just talking to a friend,” he explained, jerking his head towards a group of backs at the bar. “And what have you been doing down there, Simon…checking Helen’s oil?”