Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker

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Includes collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Paul Di Filippo, Marc Laidlaw, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker Jr., Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn.

Complete Stories is Copyright © 2020 Rudy Rucker as a volume, and the individual stories are copyrighted to their authors. See the introduction and the story notes for info on previous publications. Last updated on April 13, 2020.

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 Paul 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

• Yubba Vines (Writen with Paul Di Filippo)

• Loco (Written with Bruce Sterling)

• I Arise Again

• Apricot Lane

• Where the Lost Things Are (Written with Terry Bisson)

• Laser Shades

• Attack of the Giant Ants

• Water Girl (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

• Totem Poles (Written with Bruce Sterling)

• Like a Sea Cucumber

• The Knobby Giraffe

• Kraken and Sage (Written with Bruce Sterling)

• @tlantis (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

• Fat Stream

• Emojis

• In The Lost City of Leng (Written with Paul Di Filippo)

• Surfers at the End of Time (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

• Juicy Ghost

• The Mean Carrot



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 five 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).

Transreal Cyberpunk (Transreal Books, 2016).

About twenty of the more recent stories in Complete Stories haven’t appeared in any of those five print anthologies. But note that all of my stories with Bruce Sterling through 2016 appear in Transreal Cyberpunk.

Initially 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 the ebook. But, rethinking this, I soon decided to publish Complete Stories as two print volumes as well.

I first assembled this collection in 2012, and what you see here is the 2017 edition. I expect to write a few more stories in the coming years. As time runs on, I’ll continue making new editions of my Complete Stories. 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 becomes 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, 2019





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 myself 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?”

I got back in my chair. “Just dropped some change,” I said with a synthetic chuckle. My feet hadn’t gelled yet, and Helen continued her gentle treading and plucking.

“Si spent the whole time you were gone under the table, Jack,” Helen said, withdrawing her feet. “He was really behaving strangely.” Her eyes bored into me with the twisted hunger of a V-sexual. I loved every minute of it. If I had to, I’d chirp and the hell with it. If not …

Jack looked at me with respect. “Didn’t know you had it in you, Si.” We all drank in silence for a minute. Finally Helen broke the relaxed silence.

“I don’t see how it would make sense, really, to talk about moving from one parallel world to another, Jack. If you were in both of them already, then what would there be to move?”

Jack ran his hand back along the central part of his straight hair. “I am in many of the different parallel Earths…and in each of them I think that’s the only one I’m really in. But there should be some sort of higher consciousness which could …” His voice trailed off. I liked that about Jack, that he couldn’t figure this one out. I knew the answer to Helen’s question. After all, I come from a parallel universe.

A “Venusian’s” mission on Earth is to reproduce by lesnerization, and then return to the Pure Land. Once enough of us have done this, there will be a web of consciousness connecting our universe and yours, and we will be able to draw the two closer together so that even the weak and diseased members of our race can move freely between “Venus” and the Earth. Several members of my swarm have completed successful missions, and they have described to me in detail what it is like to have the sort of multiple trans-universal consciousness which Jack and Helen were puzzling out.

Suddenly I spoke up, “Jack, I know a lot about parallel universes.” Helen gave me a cautioning glance, but I continued, “I have certain connections …”

Jack was laughing. “Connections with who, Si? Galaxy X?”

“Why don’t we go back to my room and talk it over. The three of us.”

Jack still didn’t get it. He thought I wanted to turn them on to some dope. So of course he came along. And Helen…she and I dropped a little behind and she slipped her hand into my shirt. No human had ever touched me there before.

If a “Venusian” is exposed he chirps, and no evidence of his existence is left…save for the mysterious death of one of the people who discovered him. There are thousands of us on Earth now, but few of us are ever detected…and the establishment chooses to ignore whatever fragmentary proofs of our existence arise. But there are rumors and, more important, there is subconscious knowledge. V-sexuals are people who have fallen in love with this subconsciously-sensed other presence in the world. V-sexuality is, for obvious reasons, primarily a latent perversion…but as a few lucky “Venusians” know, a V-sexual can move to intense overtness in the space of a few minutes. I could hardly wait. And if we could get Jack to join in …

It takes a minute to get my door open. I have three locks. Jack began kidding me about it. “What have you got in there Simon, a suitcase of gold?”

“You’ll see,” I said as the door finally opened. Jack went in first, and Helen came in after me, her hand resting lightly on my back. I wanted to triple lock the door behind me, but I feared this might alarm them.

The door opens into the kitchenette end of the room. You can tell it’s the kitchenette because that part of the room has a linoleum floor. Sometimes when I am too tired to cook, I just break some eggs on the floor, pour oil and ketchup on top of them, and then flow around on the linoleum until I have ingested everything.

But now I had company. “Beer?” I inquired. They were sitting on my werble at the other end of the room. The only other place to sit was the chair by the kitchenette table.

“Sure,” Jack said, “But we really can’t stay too long, Simon.” He thought he was going somewhere alone with Helen. Couldn’t he tell that now she only had eyes for me?

I got out three beers and glided over to the werble…my body movements suggestively fluid. Helen couldn’t take her eyes off me. “Tell Jack, Helen,” I said. “Tell him, and then I’ll let you undress me.”

With a visible effort Jack maintained his cool. “What makes you think Helen would want to undress you, Si? And what’s she supposed to tell me?”

“Si is a ‘Venusian,’” Helen said huskily. “I never knew if they were real or not. I’ve always…I’ve always …” her face was working, and she couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out. She slid a hand back under my shirt and fingered a stiff orange bud. Her hand was damp.

Jack jumped up off the bed and began moving towards the door. “You go out that door, and I’ll fry your brain,” I said evenly. Helen was moaning now, running her moist, trembling fingers over my face.

“Flow now while I’m touching you, darling,” she breathed.

I let my head go slack, and it began sinking down through the collar of my shirt. Helen was fumbling frantically at our clothes. I couldn’t see Jack anymore since I’d let my head merge into my bodymass, but I could still skren him. He had stopped near the door and was hesitating…his emotions a mixture of fear and curiosity. Finally curiosity won out.

“I can’t believe this,” Jack said desperately. He ripped the top off another beer from the icebox. He’d left his first one by the werble, and he was scared to get close to me. He sat down on the kitchen chair. “I’ll watch,” he said shakily, “But I’m not going to let you lesnerize us.”

That’s what he thought. I didn’t bother answering…it would have been too much trouble to form a mouth. It didn’t seem like Helen was ever going to get my clothes off, so I reduced viscosity and flowed out of my left pant leg and onto the floor. She had gotten her shirt and bra off, and she lay down to rub her stiff-nippled breasts across me. It felt nice.

For the next half hour or so she sat there kneading and molding me…like a three-year-old girl at the nursery school play-dough table. Only they don’t moan as much in nursery school. Somewhere along the line she got her pants off too, and I grew a few suitable protuberances. I liked that Jack was watching us. He might be smarter than me, he might be human…but I had the girl.

I guess Helen and I made something like the ultimate donkey show. When she finally got off me and lay panting on my werble, Jack was so hot that he pulled down his pants and jumped her. I flowed closer and laid a gentle pseudopod across the back of his thighs.

He twisted away, screaming, “No, Simon, not yet, don’t lesnerize us! Please not yet! I’ve just got to…get to …” He was thrusting in and out frantically, and in a few seconds it was all over.

I should have taken them then and there…but lesnerization goes a lot smoother if the human hosts are completely willing. It’s a simple operation. You just run a pseudopod up the person’s nose, suck out their brain, and fill their head up with part of your bodymass. Over the next year, your offspring slowly absorbs all of the host body, learning how to model it in the process. It’s the way we’ve always reproduced on Earth. When we fission like this, we have to split off two buds…baby “Venusians”…so we always have to lesnerize two people at once.

If I could only get those buds into Jack and Helen’s skulls I’d be free to chirp back to the Pure Land. My mind drifted pleasantly as I thought of rejoining my swarm…a respected and successful colonizer…possessor of trans-universal consciousness.

I formed Si Bork’s body again and lay down next to Jack and Helen. “How would you like to come forever?” I said softly. “That’s what lesnerization feels like…an orgasm that never stops. All I have to do is reach up through your nose and gently touch your brain,” no point telling them about what I’d do next, “and, wham, you’re as enlightened as Gautama Buddha.” Sex and enlightenment. It makes a nice package.

But they both looked a little doubtful. “What do you mean when you say ‘wham,’ hon?” Helen asked.

And then Jack chimed in, “Don’t you think it might be risky to fool around with a person’s brain like that?” He covered his nose defensively.

“Look,” I said, readjusting my features to look fatherly, “No ‘Venusian’ would ever dream of doing anything which might harm a human. We want to be your allies…your partners in a new trans-universal culture. Now I know you’ve heard the rumors about lesnerization. Take it from me, they’re all lies put out by chauvinist reactionaries. Lesnerization is just a way of getting to know each other better. Jack,” I patted his shoulder, “Once you’ve lesnerized with me, you’ll have more new stuff in that skull of yours than you can possible imagine. Lesnerization is simply a way for me to take things that I know and put them into your head.”

They shifted uneasily and looked at each other. Finally Jack spoke. “What do you say we get dressed and go talk about it over a pizza. I can dig where you’re coming from. Brain-to-brain communication. But I’ve got to have some food first.” He pulled his pants back up.

“That’s a good idea,” Helen said, fastening her bra. “I’m famished.” She began buttoning up her blouse. “Where is ‘Venus’ anyway, Si? And why are you all so secretive?”

I couldn’t believe how distant she suddenly seemed. First she’s all over me, and then I ask one little favor, and she starts asking questions like a hick at the freak show. I felt like just chirping the hell out of there and blowing one of them away. But if I went back to the Pure Land without lesnerizing anyone they’d just stuff me in a ship back to Earth…or worse. So I politely answered her question as I dressed.

“Actually, Helen, what you call ‘Venus’ is in one of those parallel universes Jack likes to talk about. In a way it’s in the same place where your Venus is, only ‘Venus’ is a different superspace location. We don’t call it ‘Venus’ though. We call it the Pure Land.”

“But how can the Pure Land be where Venus is without really being there?” Helen responded. Jack interrupted impatiently before I could answer.

“It has a different fourth-dimensional location is all, Helen. You can read about it in that Geometry and Relativity book I wrote.” We were all dressed and on our way out of the apartment. Jack turned to me. “What I want to hear is your answer to her other question, Simon. If you ‘Venusians’ are just here to make friends, then why do you sneak around so that only the nuts believe in you?”

I cleared my throat nervously. “We’re scared, Jack. Scared of small-minded xenophobic bigots. We’re really a very weak race. If we tried to land a ship openly, the pigs would blast us out of the sky. We want to come out in the open, but it’s not time yet. We need to know more about human psychology first, and we need time to spread the right kind of rumors about us.” I smiled self-deprecatingly.

But Jack seemed to be becoming more hostile. He was probably just jealous that I’d gotten more off Helen than him. “You say you’re weak, Simon, but didn’t you threaten to fry my brain just a little while ago?”

I generated a chuckle. “Oh that. Well, I could fry your brain…hard-boil it really…but only by converting my body into pure energy. That’s how we get back to the Pure Land. We call it chirping.” I explained the process to them, meanwhile trying to put my arm around Helen, but she shrugged it off.

Although it was supper time, the restaurant was almost empty. I’d never been there before, but Jack seemed to be a regular. He stopped to chat with the guy making pizzas in the front window.

I steered Helen to a table in the rear…I was hoping to lesnerize them after they’d had a good meal and a few beers. I was prepared to act forcibly if necessary…at the worst I’d lose a pseudopod. I smiled moistly at Helen. “Did you have a nice time in my room?”

“You know I did,” she said haltingly, “But I’m scared of what I could become if I keep seeing you. And I don’t know how I’ll be able to stay away.” She began crying, and reached out to touch my face. “One part of me already wants to do it again…especially with a man watching and thinking I’m the lowest kind of slut …” She hesitated, then resumed in a strained voice, “But if I kept doing that, what would happen to the rest of me…to Helen?” She covered her face with her hands.

Someone had turned the jukebox on, and over a background of moans and abrupt guitar chords a voice crooned, “Well it’s all right now, in fact it’s a gas …” Helen was slipping away from me…but where was Jack? Surely he would listen to reason. I skrenned him walking across the room. I started to turn, but then he was already upon me, and he sank an eight-inch knife into my neck.

That did it. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Jack Flash was going to get it. I relaxed my hold on the knotted spacetime which made up my body and put everything I had into my chirp…carefully beaming it at the spot behind me where he crouched.

But I should have looked first. The bastard had an aluminum pizza pan in front of his face…and I bounced off it and out through the ceiling.

It doesn’t take long to get to the Pure Land from Earth. You get a faster-than-light phase-shift going in your pulse, lock it real, tear loose, and jump spacetime sheets. Once you’re back in the home space, it’s just a matter of a little simple tube-surfing. The only hard thing about it is that the whole trip seems to happen at once…so you have to know just what you’re going to do before you start.

I didn’t get much of a welcome at home when they found out I’d screwed up another mission. They said I could either go back to Earth or spend fifteen years in the tissue fields. I was frantic to revenge myself on Jack, and even more frantic to get back between Helen’s legs, so I would have been perfectly willing to go back to Earth…except that the trip back takes so long.

You can’t chirp from the Pure Land to Earth, since there’s no one waiting on Earth to reconstitute you. You have to go the long way…around the Horn, as it were. That is, you have to take a spaceship out the collapsed star Gouda X-1, fly in, bounce off the ring singularity into a new universe, and fly back to Earth. It’s dangerous and the whole trip takes about ten years proper-time. So the tissue fields didn’t necessarily sound that bad.

I asked for a week to think it over. They gave me two days, and I went out into the plaza promising to be back.

It felt good to be flowing across the intricately grooved stones again with the swarm. We aren’t very big on individual personalities, and before long I’d almost forgotten I’d ever left. A warm hydro-carbon rain drizzled down, and I circled around the plaza in the figures of the swarm’s never-ending dance.

The pimpled hides of my fellow “Venusians” felt familiar and comforting…but still I couldn’t put the feel of Helen’s breasts and thighs out of my mind…she was so smooth…so slippery.

I realized I was horny, and found a willing fellow-citizen…whom you might as well think of as a girl. We flowed away from the plaza together, and our individual consciousness returned. She told me her name was Pasmit.

As we passed through a grove of geezel fungi I paused to pry loose one of the immature spores. I threw it to Pasmit, she digested a little of it and threw it back to me.

We went on for several versts this way, finally stopping when the singing in our tissues could no longer be ignored. We pressed our vents together, guided by the sensitive bristles surrounding them; and then we let our bodymasses mingle for a timeless interval. The hydro-carbon drizzle increased, and the geezel spore rolled stealthily back towards its mother fungus. Finally we stopped pulsing and slid apart. The gamma-radiation is much stronger out in the country, and everything was suffused with a kindly glow.

I must have been mad to want to go back to Earth, I thought. Pasmit and I could build a burrow near the tissue fields. I’d get strong and green working in the fields, and every night we’d go dance with the swarm. It had been good enough for my ancestors; why shouldn’t it be good enough for me? There was just one thing …

“Pasmit,” I vibrated, “Could you do something for me…something special?”

She snuggled closer to me. “What is it, Sibork?”

“Could you form your bodymass like this, and this, and this …” I gestured rapidly, “And then could you rub on me? I’ll show you how I mean.”

She burbled, and started to do it. I sighed and went limp, images of Helen filling my mind. Pasmit leaned over me and began to knead my bodymass with her hands. Quaveringly I pulsed my next request, and extruded the appropriate protuberances. She started to do it …

But abruptly she stopped, and her pulsations became harsh. “But this is human shape! You want me to be like a human, Sibork!” She recoiled and rapidly re-assumed “Venusian” shape. “You’re a filthy H-sexual!” she shrilled, “Don’t come near me!”

Pasmit delivered her parting shot as she began flowing back towards the swarm. “You’re not fit to live in the Pure Land anymore, Sibork. You’re tainted. You’ll have to go back to Earth tomorrow.”

I knew she was right. I couldn’t even blame her for feeling the way she did…I used to feel the same way about H-sexuals.

I spent an uneasy night sleeping under a rock, and the next morning I shipped out for Earth again. Despite what I’d told Jack, we “Venusians” are virtually indestructible. So our spaceships do not need any very complex life-support systems.

My ship consisted, basically, of one hundred kilos of geezel and the shell of a nauton, a sort of gigantic fungus-snail common in the Pure Land. I packed the geezel into the front of the cone-shaped spiral shell, crawled in after, and sealed the back off with a specially thickened section of my hide.

During the trip I would feed off the geezel, and propel the ship by converting some of the food energy into a stream of ions, to be blown out of an aperture in my hide door. In effect, I fart myself through space. Given the steady force and the small mass of my ship, I can reach relativistic velocities rather easily…and once one travels close enough to the speed of light, time dilation sets in. As far as my body’s aging processes are concerned, the one hundred light-year trip to Gouda X-1 takes only five years.

Even five years might seem like a long time to be wadded up inside a nauton shell, but I have the ability to let my individual consciousness go totally dormant…turning the control of my body over to what we call “Big Mind” in the Pure Land.

I spent five years in a trance, pooting along towards Gouda X-1. When I was not too far from it, the intense gravitational radiation jolted me back into existence.

For a few moments I was totally disoriented. I had no idea where I was…for a second I didn’t even know if I was “Venusian” or human. Ahead of me I skrenned a hot bluish star with a huge tufty horn of flame growing out of it. The name Beetroot 322 popped into my mind. The horn fed an immense spiral of brightly glowing gas which was twisted around a region of what seemed to be absolute blackness.

I was falling…at almost the speed of light…down towards the collapsed star which nestled in the center of the spiral of gas it had pulled out of its companion star. The collapsed star was Gouda X-1, and at its very center was the gate which led out of the Pure Land universe.

As I drew closer I could see the ring singularity that lay at the heart of this whirlpool of space and time. If a star such as Gouda X-1 is rotating fast enough when it collapses to form a black hole, then the singularity at its center takes the shape of a ring. Space is infinitely curved at each point of this ring, and to venture too close to it is to be torn apart atom from atom. But if you manage to go through the ring, something quite different happens.

Think of the many parallel universes as being a stack of so many pieces of cloth. Now imagine punching a circular hole through this stack of fabrics, and then sewing all of these spacetime sheets together along the edges of the circles you punched out. That’s what a ring singularity is like…almost.

But I left out what’s inside the ring. Well, when you go through the ring you enter an antimatter, anti-gravity anti-universe…which repels you, spits you back like a squeezed watermelon seed.

When you come back through the ring, you go onto one of those many sheets of spacetime which are sewed together along the ring singularity…and if you’re lucky you come out where and when you wanted to.

Actually it’s not really luck that determines in which universe and at what time in that universe you come out. It’s more like you come out where you expect to come out.

Causality takes a beating when minds and singularities interact. But Big Mind doesn’t need causality anyway…every instant of every universe springs into existence together, and synchronicity is the natural order of things.

Anyway, there I was in a flexible nauton shell being sucked down into the heart of Gouda X-1 at something like the speed of light. And Jack Flash thought he’d been far out. I had to laugh thinking of that jerk sneaking up behind me like that with his knife and pizza pan. When I got to Earth this time things were going to be different. Because I was planning to get back there before I’d left.

The singularity was dead ahead now, a bright ring a few kilometers in diameter. Bright isn’t the word for it, really. You know how a mirror looks when it bounces sun into your eyes?

All of Gouda X-1’s mass had gone into that circle of light and, friend, it was a perfect circle. It was like looking at the ultimate platonic circle in Big Mind, the circle from which all other circles derive their feeble and reflected reality.

As you can imagine, the gravitational force coming off that ring was incredible. I was thin as a needle and I whisked through without even slowing down. But as soon as I’d gone through I was in an anti-universe, and every particle of that universe wanted me out of there. This was the most dangerous part of the trip. If some piece of antimatter happened by and brushed into me I’d be annihilated. If I didn’t steer just right the anti-universe would throw me against the ring and I’d be annihilated. If I panicked and chirped, my energy pulse would be trapped in an endless pendulum orbit around the ring and, for all practical purposes, I’d be annihilated.

There was also the matter of bouncing out into the right space and time. I could already see myself looking in through the pizza-parlor window at Jack Flash getting a knife and pan from his friend behind the counter. Jack looked scared and I felt a little sorry for him. Maybe I shouldn’t suck his brain out after all…but how else could I establish a trans-universal consciousness?

My attention snapped back to the situation at hand. The repulsive force from the anti-universe counterpart of Gouda X-1’s mate, Beetroot 322, had decelerated me from the speed of light to rest, and had already started forcing me back towards the ring singularity. This was the roughest part of the ride. One second you’re going 99.999 percent the speed of light one way, and the next instant you’re going 99.999 percent the speed of light the other way. There weren’t many “Venusians” who could handle the ring singularity bounce-trip. I’d been trained for it from budhood, and even so it must have taken five years off my life every time I did it.

As I zoomed back through the ring, I struggled to keep from blacking out, and I kept my mind fixed on frightened Jack Flash in the pizza-parlor window…and on Helen, across the table from me with her face in her hands…I’m sorry Jack…I love you Helen …

I burst out of the ergosphere of Gouda X-1 traveling so fast that it would have taken a photon a year to gain five meters on me. I had some slowing down to do before I got to Earth…if there was an Earth in this space.

The ship was traveling rear-end first now, and I began absorbing geezel and shooting out the ion-steam again. Five years of this and I would have decelerated back to rest. I had started out with revenge and lust in my mind, but for some reason I was now suffused with thoughts of peace and love. Good old Jack. Dear sweet Helen. Even my department chairman seemed almost “Venusian.” I drifted into a trance and let Big Mind take over.

I was so anxious about missing Earth that I woke up a few months early. Those were peaceful months, hurtling towards the Sun with a speed that I steadily diminished. There was plenty of time to think about what I would do on Earth.

I began to wonder about the wisdom of reproducing by lesnerization. The whole idea of reproducing ourselves on Earth by planting the buds inside people’s skulls went back to Brow, the first “Venusian” who ever survived the ring singularity bounce-trip to any of the inhabited versions of Earth. Disguised as a Dutch mathematician, Brow had advanced the destructive mathematical philosophy called intuitionism, and he had lesnerized dozens, perhaps hundreds of people before chirping back to the Pure Land. Many of the “Venusians” now on Earth are Brow’s descendants, although every year a few new colonizers, such as myself, make the ring singularity bounce-trip to one of the Earths.

But what had made Brow feel that the only safe place to grow a bud was inside a human skull? At home we grow buds in nautons, in geezel plants…sometimes even in the ground. What gave Brow, and the rest of us, our conviction that on Earth we should only reproduce by the murder of innocent human beings?

The power of suggestion, that’s what. A solitary “Venusian” on an alien Earth behaves as humans consciously or subconsciously expect a blob from outer space to behave. As I explain in my article on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, blobs from outer space symbolize the unchecked id. With their natural fear that their lower, more bestial desires will take over their minds, what could be more natural than for people to expect the “Venusians” to reproduce by lesnerization. Nobody had told Jack what lesnerization was…in his guts he knew I wanted to eat his brain…so he’d come after me with the knife.

Why couldn’t I break this cycle? Why couldn’t humans and “Venusians” really be trans-universal allies? But a less idealistic part of me was still wondering how to safely reproduce myself on Earth if not by lesnerizing. Would not the humans hunt out and destroy a bud which was hidden anywhere other than inside a human skull? And if I failed to achieve trans-universal consciousness this time I could never return to the Pure Land.

The topography of the Earth below me looked familiar, so I knew I’d bounced into a universe pretty much like the one where Jack had knifed me. I splashed down in one of the Finger Lakes, formed Si Bork’s body again, and swam ashore. I didn’t feel any special need to rush or to stall. If I was going to show up at the right time, I would.

It was around dusk when I reached the highway and stuck out my thumb. I’d grown my own clothes this time, and I looked like any other hitchhiker. After awhile a pickup truck stopped. The driver was an old farmer, bound for Livingston, my destination.

I told him I was an English prof at the college there, and we talked a little about monster movies. He had a strange way of putting his fingers under his nose and sniffing them when he talked about creatures from outer space. Was he trying to tell me something? When I looked closely, I seemed to see bumps under his faded cotton shirt …

“Are you ‘Venusian?’” I asked him, and then added something that a human would have taken for a cough, but which was really a Pure Land proverb meaning something like, “Once you’re born, the worst has already happened.”

Without answering he pulled the pickup off the road and turned to look directly at me. His features were flowing with joy and we embraced.

We sat there maybe a half hour, pulsing each other’s like stories back and forth. His name was Roon, and he’d come from a bud some “Venusian” had lesnerized into the body of the farmer Roon still impersonated. The farmer and his wife had been UFO enthusiasts willing to go along with anything an alien suggested, and Roon’s sib-bud had agreed that lesnerizing was wrong, and the sib-bud had gone down to the Pentagon, trying to tell them the truth. Roon had never heard from his sib-bud again, and figured he’d either chirped out or joined the CIA.

Roon raised pigs now, and when I asked him why we couldn’t just grow our buds in his pigs’ bodies, he was shocked. “Pigs are lower forms of life, Sibork!”

“So are humans,” I responded. “And for that matter, so are we.” I told him my theory about why Brow had acted as he did. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” I concluded. “If we stop murdering people, we’ll be able to come out in the open and really befriend them. I’ve found it’s almost impossible to lie to a human.” Which reminded me…if I was going to stop Jack from knifing me, I’d better get a move on.

Roon dropped me off near the pizza-parlor, and we agreed to meet again. Now to explain what happened next, I’m going to have to introduce a little notation. Roon dropped me off near the pizza-parlor, right? Now if I had walked down, looked in the window, and seen a “Venusian” talking with Helen at the rear table…who would that be? Me. But to keep things from getting too confusing, let’s call that “Venusian” me*, reserving the word me for the “Venusian” looking in the window.

It was just about night now, maybe seven o’clock, and I walked down the street towards the pizza-parlor. Everything was clicking. I knew that Jack was going to be standing in that window.

And he was. He’d just turned the jukebox on, and was picking up a pizza pan and an eight-inch knife from the counter. At the back of the room I could see my* back and Helen, her face in her hands.

I opened the door and walked in. Jack had paused to exchange a few last words with the counterman and he didn’t see me. I walked over to the jukebox and kicked it so hard that the needle slid across the record and the machine turned itself off. He whirled around, knife at the ready.

“Hi, Jack.”

I was ready for him, and there was no way in the world he could get that knife into me. I could see that realization sink into him, and he mumbled something about getting the knife to cut up the pizza. He hadn’t noticed yet that I* was still sitting at the table.

“Jack,” I began, “I’ve been through a lot of changes since the last time I saw you …”

He laughed nervously, “It’s been all of two minutes, Simon. What kind of …” and then he broke off. I* was walking across the room towards him.

I* was glad to see that I had made it in time…but I* had always known that I would. I wondered how I* had known that, since I didn’t recall having expected anyone to come save me the last time around. I* pointed out that that had been a different universe…and I realized that since things were happening differently here from the last time, it must be that I really had bounced out of Gouda X-1 into a universe just a shade different from the one where I had gotten knifed.

While Jack was staring at me*, I deftly took the knife away from him. I* thought that was nicely done, and we exchanged a smile.

“We’ve got double consciousness,” I and I* said to Jack happily. He looked confused.

“Where did you come from?” he said to me, “Are you Si’s twin brother, or what?”

“Actually I’m the same person as Sibork*,” I answered, “Only I come from a different universe.” And then I began laughing, “I’ve finally got it.”

“Got what?” Jack said, expressionlessly looking from me to me*.

“Trans-universal consciousness,” I* answered, and then , “So I* don’t need to lesnerize anyone anymore. You were right to be scared of it, and I’m* sorry for wanting to do it to you.” Finally Jack broke into a smile.

“Tell me more,” he said. So I* did.

Meanwhile I walked over to Helen. She had stopped crying and was sitting there watching the conversation in amazement. “Helen,” I said, “I love you, I can make you happy. Just because you love a ‘Venusian,’ doesn’t make you bad. You have broader horizons than other people is all.”

She smiled up at me, “And now there’s two of you?”

I smiled back. The Pure Land could wait.





Note on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”

Written in Spring, 1976.

The 57th Franz Kafka, Ace Books, 1983.

This apprentice exercise touches upon some of my favorite SF themes: time-travel, UFO aliens, brain-eating, and sex. It also marks the start of my “transreal” practice of modeling some of my characters on myself, my friends and my long-suffering family. Loosely speaking, I’m Jack Flash and Si Bork was my Geneseo English professor friend Lee Poague. Lee also appears in White Light, and his younger brother Dennis became the Stahn “Sta-Hi” Mooney character of my Ware series of novels. Not that my family, friends or I are really very much like my fiction characters. The distinction is comparable to that between an actor’s real life and the life of the characters whom he or she plays.

The word “geezel” is an homage to the master Robert Sheckley, who once used it to stand for a kind of alien food; and “lesnerize” is from a Golden Age story that used it to mean “sneeze.”





Enlightenment Rabies

His boots looked so perfect. Two dark parabolas in a field of yellow; slight three-dimensional interest provided by the scurf strewn about. Time to act. Bodine took a newspaper the size of a bubblegum wrapper from the stack at the android’s elbow.

“Three dollars.”

Handing over the money, he again forgot where he was. Or entered another spacetime. “The cave and the marketplace” is what he called it. Buying the newspaper was marketplace, and grooving on his boots was cave. This was an old Zen distinction comparable to the One/Many distinction of the Greeks. Bodine tried to live at the interface of complementary world-views; but more often than not he was just really out of it.

He passed through the news-shop’s air-curtain and glanced up at the sky. A shareholder jostled him, then remarked, “They’re saying it’ll rain tonight, uh.”

“I don’t care what they’re saying. I make my own weather,” Bodine snapped.

The shareholder’s face froze behind his stunglasses and began to fade. Bodine elaborated, “If you let those glasses tell you what tomorrow’s weather is today, then you don’t have your tomorrow. You have their tomorrow. Lose the consensus, Jimmy. Wake up, uh.”

The shareholder gave him a cautious but superior smile. “You had your vaccination?” he asked with exaggerated clarity, and walked on.

Bodine fell into a dream looking at the gauzy white clouds against the light and bright November sky. Good day for something. He put some music in his workspace and started walking. The shareholder’s question surfaced in his mind.

Vaccination. Damn. Seemed like they’d just been through all that a few weeks ago. Bodine had nearly been swept that time. He’d caught the disease…“Dirtbug” they’d been calling it…he’d caught it and would have died if he hadn’t been able to score some anti-toxin. Had cost him ten grand, and he’d had to kill a man to get the money. This time he’d do it the easy way and let the state vaccinate him.

Bodine sat down on a bench and took the newspaper out of his packet. It was really a small white-light hologram. He held it up to his eye and looked through to see an old-fashioned newspaper spread out on a table. Social hygiene was page four.

… tragic death of three patients at Veterans’ hospital…ten soldiers at research center…new virus isolated…disease has been named “Enlightenment Rabies” …

Bodine laughed bitterly. There must be more people working the interface than he’d realized. The state invented the diseases and spread them, but it always named them after some perceived social ill. This time it was enlightenment, next time it might be underconsumption or dirty teeth. In any case, the point was that if you were too wasted or stubborn to go get the state-administered antidote you were going to get swept.

… cramps, buboes, and convulsions ending in death by suffocation…crash vaccination program…available November 17–20 at these local centers …

Bodine checked the date on the paper. Today was the 20th. Now where was the nearest center? After a few minutes he knew where to go. Off the interface, brought down in the marketplace, running scared like they wanted.

Halfway down the block Bodine bumped into his friend Ace High. Ace was standing on the sidewalk with his head thrown far back and his arms wrapped around his legs. The Metal Crane position.

Bodine stopped to look at Ace for a minute. Ace’s eyes were aimed at him, but there was nobody home. Bodine was clearly in the presence of an unvaccinated fellow-citizen.

“Hey Ace,” he said, trying to straighten up his friend’s bent body, “Come on, uh, it’s eigenstate time.”

Ace High was infinitely differentiable. He got the message and locked in on the signal. His face split like a melon when he smiled, as he did now, uncleaned teeth glistening in the sun. “Why…does the doctor…have no face?” he crooned, guessing Bodine’s meaning. “Lez go, boss.”

Bodine and Ace High started off for the vaccination center. It was easier to be going together. That way if you forgot where you were going, your friend might still know.

“Let’s get some stunglasses on,” Bodine suggested, feeling through his pockets. He still had his pair. Ace had lost his, so they decided to stop in at the next news-shop to get some.

Bodine was already feeling the effects of his stunglasses. His mind was filled with safety tips, news updates, and new product information. Purposefully he went into the news-shop and bought a pair of stunglasses for Ace High. It was an attractive little shop with a big multiplexed holographic display in the corner. If Bodine looked in just the right direction, the image his stunglasses produced fit right on top of the image displayed in the news-shop. An indescribably beautiful moiré interference pattern appeared, and he was gone again.

Fortunately Ace High had already put on his new stunglasses. As he watched, Bodine slowly assumed the Silent Planet posture, his face turned rapturously to the news-shop’s advertising display. Ace High looked at the floor, not wanting to disturb his friend. The stunglasses were projecting a three-dimensional holographic image in front of everything he looked at. The image was multiplexed, so he couldn’t actually say for sure what it was of. It was a lot things at once, and his brain knew how to sort out and store the information. His trusting brain was soaking it right up.

As he watched the stunglasses’ images, Ace High’s slack exuberance turned to responsible concern. Concern that he had not drawn his paycheck for two months. Concern about what he had been doing for two months. Concern that everyone receive their Enlightenment Rabies vaccination, particularly himself and Bodine. Concern with the fact that more and more young people were turning their backs on the real world, only to go chasing after some kind of crazy half-scientific hopped-up occultist mystagogic blue-dome swizzle, uh.

Bodine was more or less squatting on the floor with his arms between his knees. He was singing or moaning a wavering note. The Music of the Spheres is what the kids called it, and ordinarily if your best friend was singing the Music of the Spheres you left him alone for a few days. But they had to get that vaccination or they’d be swept.

“Are we crazy / are we insanéd / are we zeroes / that someone painted?” Bodine muttered when Ace shook him. Then he shifted phases, the images unlocked, and he was walking out the door with a headache.

“The old bus station, right?” Ace High said. Bodine nodded, and they started down the cold and dry sidewalk, flooded yellow with clear November sun. They were wearing their stunglasses, and each of them had about half of his attention occupied by the multiplex image the stunglasses projected into any part of the visual field not under active scrutiny.

The bus station was a ten minute walk away, but they didn’t talk much. They were absorbed in watching a dinosaur show. They couldn’t even tell that it was multiplex anymore. Their whole conscious minds were involved in the show they were watching, and the incessant messages from all the “sponsors” were being sorted out and stowed away subconsciously.

Soon Bodine and Ace High had joined the long line of waiting citizens that snaked out of the old bus station. Everyone had stunglasses on. Some people were watching sports, some were watching old movies, some were watching sex, some were watching university extension courses. Nobody was watching the November sunlight sliding across the street like nectar from the last flower of the year.





Note on “Enlightenment Rabies”

Written in 1977.

New Pathways, #9, November, 1987.

When I wrote the amateurish “Enlightenment Rabies” I was exercised about the U. S. propaganda tactic of naming diseases after the government’s enemies: the Russian Flu, the Chinese Flu and the like. And, of course, I was filled with hatred for television. From the present-day vantage, the story looks cyberpunk. I sent “Enlightenment Rabies” to the short-lived magazine Unearth in 1978, and they were going to print it, but then they decided to serialize my novel Spacetime Donuts instead. Unearth‘s policy was to print previously unpublished authors. William Gibson and I both had our first SF publications there. I eventually cannibalized the opening paragraph of “Enlightenment Rabies” for Chapter 25 of Software.





Schrödinger’s Cat

“A cat is placed in a steel chamber, together with the following hellish contraption (which must be protected against direct interference by the cat): In a Geiger counter there is a tiny amount of radioactive substance, so tiny that maybe within an hour one of the atoms decays, but equally probably none of them decays. If an atom decays then the counter triggers and via a relay activates a little hammer which breaks a container of cyanide. If one has left this entire system for an hour, then one would say that the cat is still living if no atom has decayed. The first decay would have poisoned it. The wave-function of the entire system would express this by containing equal parts of the living and the dead cat.” —Erwin Schrödinger.

-----

By rights, this should have been an important scientific paper…not a thrilling wonder tale in some lurid, mass-produced edition. But I must cast my net as wide as possible. I am fishing for minds, minds with the delicacy of thought to appreciate the nature of Ion Stepanek’s fate.

Such are the facts: with my assistance, Ion Stepanek was able to build a sort of time-machine. He used this machine to produce a yes-and-no situation, which he tried to observe. As a result, he has split into an uncollapsible mixed state. Due to coupling effects, I suffer his condition, though not yet to the same degree.

It is March 21, 1980, Heidelberg, West Germany. I am sitting in the office Stepanek shared with me, staring out at a white sky. The office is in the Physics Institute. Across the river, the great castle hovers over the misted town like a thought. Such are the facts.

I did my undergraduate work at Stanford, then took my Ph.D. in particle physics at Berkeley. My thesis project helped lead to the first experimental disproof of the Bell inequality. At one time this was a fairly sensational result, although now more and more people have accepted the ultimate validity of the wave-function world-view.

Schrödinger’s though-experiment is paradoxical because, according to quantum mechanics, until the observer opens the door, the cat is not definitely dead or definitely alive, but is rather 50 percent dead and 50 percent alive. The cat is in what is known as a mixed state.

Einstein responded to Schrödinger’s paradox by asserting that this fifty-fifty business was just a measure of the observer’s lack of knowledge, rather than being a true description of the actual state of the cat. But the experimental disproof of the Bell inequality has shown that Einstein was wrong. The unobserved world evolves into truly mixed states. There are no hidden parameters which make things stay definite.

It is thanks, in part, to my own research that this result was proved. But despite this high achievement, I was unable to obtain a good research or teaching post. I make enemies easily, and it may be that one of my letters of recommendation was, in effect, a black-ball.

I postponed the inevitable with a post-doc at Harvard. But after that I had to take a poorly paying job at a state college in Wankato, Minnesota.

Cut off from any real physics laboratory, I was forced to begin thinking more deeply about the experiments I had run at Harvard and at Berkeley. What is it Schrödinger says about his paradox?

“This prevents us from accepting a ‘blurred model’ so naïvely as a picture of reality. By itself reality is not at all unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a blurred or poorly-focused photograph and a picture of clouds or fog patches.”

I had a nervous breakdown during my fourth year at Wankato. It had to do with the television weather reports. Quantum mechanics implies that until someone makes an observation, the weather is indeterminate, in a mixed state. There is, in principle, no reason why it should not be sunny every day. Indeed, it is logically possible to argue that it rains only because people believe it to be raining.

Fact: in Wankato, Minnesota, there is precipitation 227 days of the year.

Before too long I thought I had determined the reason for this. All of the citizens of Wankato…even the faculty members…watch television weather reports every evening. These reports almost always predict rain or snow. It seemed obvious to me, in my isolation, that if the weather reports could be stopped, then it would not rain so often.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to gather signatures for a petition. I went to the TV station and complained. Finally, I forced my way into the studio one evening and interrupted the weather report to state my case.

“Tomorrow it will be sunny!” I cried. “If only you will believe!”

The next day it was sunny. But I was out of a job, and in a mental institution. It was clear that I needed a rest. It had been folly to shift my fellows over so abruptly from one belief system to another. I had neglected the bridge, the mixed state.

That was in March, 1979. A year ago. They let me out after six weeks of treatment. As luck would have it, a letter from a German research foundation was waiting for me when I finally got back to my little furnished room. They had approved my application for a one-year grant, to be spent working with Ion Stepanek at the Physics Institute of the University of Heidelberg. My project title? “Mixed States as Bridges Between Parallel Universes.”

On a typical Heidelberg day it is misty. On the Neckar River the vapor hangs in networks, concentrated at the boundaries of atmospheric pressure cells. The old town is squeezed between the river and a steep mountainside. Some hundred meters up the mountain hangs the huge, ruined castle. In the mist it looks weightless, phantasmagoric.

I got there in early September, during semester break. I found a room outside of town, and on most days, I would ride the stuffy bus from my apartment to Bismarckplatz, the little city’s center.

Strange feelings always filled me on these bus rides. I never seemed to see the same face twice, and the strangeness of it put me at a remove from reality. Never had I tasted alienation in such a pure and unalloyed form.

Half convinced that I was invisible, I would stare greedily at the German women, at their thick blonde hair and their strong features. The women stared back with bold and clinical eyes. I gave my heart a thousand times, without ever saying a word. But I could never muster the courage to approach one of those tantalizing aliens. I am, after all, soft and funny-looking.

On a normal day I would get out at Bismarckplatz and walk over the bridge. Crossing the Neckar always took me a long time. In the middle of the bridge I would stop and watch the fifty-meter-long barges speeding by beneath me. The river is like a highway, with coal and wrecked cars being lugged upstream, and great beams of steel gliding downstream. There are the locks to see, and the hazy old town, and above it all, the great hallucinatory castle.

Other darker thoughts detained me on the bridge as well. Surely you have seen Edvard Munch’s painting, The Cry? Why do you think Munch chose to place this most anguished figure in modern art…on a bridge? On a bridge one is neither here nor there; one is rootless…and anything can happen. Did you know that in the 1800s the most commonly attempted method of suicide was none other than…jumping off a bridge? Out there, in the wind, one need not choose this bank or that. There are other alternatives.

During my first two months in Heidelberg, the Institute was deserted. The sole secretary present showed me my desk in Ion Stepanek’s large office. As I later learned, Stepanek was spending the semester break visiting relatives in Budapest. Both he and his wife, Klara, were Hungarian refugees.

The first time I met Stepanek, he caught me by surprise. I had spent those first lonely months at the Institute by going over various treatments of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. My slow understanding of the solution was expressed in a large, three-dimensional figure, a sort of solid letter “Y,” which I was amusing myself with by drawing on the office blackboard.

“William,” a voice cried suddenly. “What a pleasure to find you here, hard at work!” I turned a bit too abruptly—he had startled me—and we shook hands.

Ion Stepanek was a short, wiry man, given to wearing suede vests and jackets. His hair was thinning, and rather greasy. He had a large nose and a wide, amused mouth. His eyes were very quick, and he had a disconcerting habit of staring me in the eye when he sensed I might be holding something back.

Although he was ten years my senior and, nominally, my supervisor, Ion began by treating me as an equal. He had read my experimental work and my recent, unpublishable theorizings. In return I had read everything he had written, even including a stack of freshly typed pages I had found on his desk.

His sharp eyes took in my diagram of the EPR paradox, and then he turned to gesture at the window. “So, William? Do you like the fog? The indeterminacy?”

I shrugged. “I can live with it. Did you enjoy your vacation?”

“Must it be yes or no?” I didn’t know quite what to answer. Stepanek savored the moment, then clapped me on the shoulder. “Have you read my latest?”

“You mean this?” I pointed to the pages on his desk. “Yes, I took the liberty. But …” I stopped, not wanting to offend him.

He plucked the thought out of my eyes and answered it. “You are wondering why I would waste my energy on a chimera like time-travel.”

I nodded. “Surely you are aware of the paradoxes. One can so easily produce a yes-and-no situation with a time-machine.”

Ion smiled widely, mirthlessly. “Do you not understand your own work? This is just what you want.”

We dropped the matter for then, and went on to discuss the bus routes, my apartment, the restaurants…the minutiae of life in a foreign country.

Ion insisted on taking me home with him for the midday meal. His house was only a few hundred meters from the Institute. His wife, Klara, greeted me like a long-lost cousin.

“Ion has been so looking forward to your visit, William. It is wonderful that you are here!” She had soft eyes and dark, sensual lips. A perfect wife, a perfect mother. How comfortable she made me feel!

I accepted a glass of kirsch before lunch. The clear, dry alcohol went straight to my head, but Ion assured me that Klara’s after-dinner coffee would remedy that. Then the two children, twin ten-year-old girls, came crashing in.

The German school-day ends before one o’clock, and it is not unusual for the whole family to have their big meal together at midday.

“Do you fix such a big supper as well?” I asked Klara as we sat down to our cauliflower soup.

“This is not big,” she said, looking down the loaded table. “This is nothing.”

Besides the soup, there was a roast stuffed with hot sausage, a platter of fried potatoes, creamed spinach, cucumber salad, smoked cheese, two kinds of salami, dishes of pickled peppers, and a large carafe of excellent white wine.

“I have never seen such a magnificent meal in my life!” I exclaimed.

The twins giggled, and Ion laughed appreciatively. “You see, Klara? William is already learning the art of Hungarian exaggeration.”

In the course of many happy hours spent at the Stepaneks’ over the next three months, I was to become very familiar with this sort of conversation. A Hungarian is never happy without being ecstatic, never sad without being suicidal, never your friend without being ready to give you everything he owns, never displeased without being ready to kill. But there was, for all that, a consciously playful element to their exaggerations which somehow kept them from ever being oppressive.

Klara was thirty-five, about halfway in age between Ion and I. Before long I was thoroughly infatuated with her, and flirted shamelessly. Ion must have noticed, but perhaps he welcomed the excitement for Klara. Or perhaps he pitied me too much to object.

I got in the habit of dropping my spoon at most of our frequent common meals. Bent and straining under the table, I would stare at Klara’s legs. She could feel my gaze, and would slowly rub her nylons against each other. When I sat up she would give me a look of dreamy speculation, her full lips parted to show a few of her perfect teeth. I hoped my hopes and dreamed my dreams.

Meanwhile, Ion and I were working long hours on our joint project. His intention was to push the Feynman time-reversal theory of antimatter hard enough to get time-travel. He had the clout to get the necessary components and material—some of them totally new. My job was to assemble the components into a working system.

There is something magical about scientific apparatus. A witch doctor assembles decorated stones, special herbs, pieces of rare animals…and he expects that putting these valued objects together will cause something unusual to happen. Spirit voices, levitation, miracle cures …

The constructions of engineers and physicists are not really so different. Bits of etched silicon, special chemicals, oddly shaped pieces of metal…the experimentalist places them together, and suddenly one has a radio, or an airplane, or an X-ray machine.

Stepanek’s design for a time-machine was a bit more obviously allied to sorcery than is customary. The key components were six of the brand-new “phase-mirrors.” It was only as a result of his years-long friendship with the director of the Max Planck Institute that Ion was able to get these fantastically rare and valuable plates of…what?

The phase-mirrors were made of a completely new type of substance called quarkonium, a hyperstable compound something like metallic helium—but with some of the protons’ component quarks replaced by the newly obtainable “bottom” quarks. Quarkonium is, strangely enough, neither matter nor antimatter. The stuff exists in some fantastically charged tension between the two. The fact that quarkonium is thus hyperstable made it possible that, in certain circumstances, the phase-mirrors could emit or absorb almost their entire mass-energy without disintegrating.

Two of the thin, inflexible quarkonium plates were square, and four were longish rectangles. I assembled the six into a box, setting an evacuation nozzle into the hole with which one plate had been provided. The material was strange to work with, slippery and utterly rigid. Although they were supposed to be a sort of mirror, the plates did not reflect images in any ordinary way…at least not most of the time. But, over and over, as I was assembling the phase-mirrors into a box, I seemed to glimpse isolated images of my fingertips here and there on the mirrors’ surfaces.

We spent forty-eight hours pumping the box out to a state of near-perfect vacuum, and then sealed it off. While the pump was running, Ion instructed me to mount a series of wire loops on the table, loops which could be charged to produce a weakly guiding magnetic field. We set the box in the middle of the loops, and that was about it. A transparent box like an aquarium with a glass top. Ion called the box a time-tunnel, but I found this colorful description misleading.

We ran our first tests with an electron beam. The idea was that a signal could come out of one end of the box before it went in the other. It’s called an advanced potential in quantum mechanics. We got the results Ion had predicted, so we moved up to atomic nuclei, and then to a series of larger and larger iron bullets.

Shooting the bullets into that phase-mirror box made me a little nervous… . I expected the box to shatter. But somehow it didn’t. I assumed it was because the quarkonium plates were, in some sense, liquid, and thus able to close up after a rapid enough object.

I believed that for a while, anyway. But before long I had come to believe something stranger…that the box was able to create and destroy matter/antimatter pairs. But where was the energy coming from? And where did it go?

Ion had an explanation. But I was not ready to accept his description of what we had built. That way lay madness.

“Do you know what your husband and I have done?” I asked Klara at lunch the last day of February. The twins had already left the table to do their homework. I glanced at Ion, and he gave me an encouraging nod. Until now I had been sworn to silence.

Klara looked a bit nervous at my question. Ion was, I had learned, something of a philanderer. What a fool to betray a woman as wonderful as Klara!

“Nothing too depraved, I hope?” Her voice was gay, but with the faintest tremolo of real worry. She drew out a cigarette and placed it between her wonderful lips, waiting for the touch of my lighter…the lighter which I had bought solely so that I could light Klara’s cigarettes. She tilted her head back, away from the smoke, and looked at Ion questioningly.

He smiled his broad, mirthless smile. “William and I have assembled a rather interesting piece of apparatus. It creates and destroys matter, according to William’s way of looking at things.”

Klara arched her eyebrows at me. “Is that true, William? Perhaps you have solved the energy crisis?”

I laughed, a bit exasperated by Ion’s misdirection. “No, no. This is a very expensive machine to build. We have used most of the quarkonium in the world to build it. And really it creates and absorbs matter/antimatter pairs, rather than just matter. But Ion thinks …

Ion was pouring himself a glass of wine, and the carafe clattered against his glass. “I do not think, William, I know. We have built a time-machine.” Suddenly, on some level, we were fighting over Klara.

She blew a thick stream of smoke and put out her cigarette. “I would like a time-machine. Then I could see what the castle looked like in 1400, before the French blew it up. And I’d like to see dinosaurs. And fashions one thousand years from now.” It was clear she didn’t believe Ion. “Dearest, do you think you could bring me back a kitchen-robot from the future? It would be even nicer than that dishwasher you’re always promising to get me!”

Ion was breathing heavily. He had had several glasses of kirsch before lunch. This quarrel had been brewing for three months. I thought his experiment interesting, but I saw no reason to take Feynman’s theory so literally as to assert that we had produced time-travel. Ion could see this in my eyes.

He stood up suddenly, almost as if to attack me. Was he, on top of it all, jealous of my attentions to Klara? New Year’s Eve, after he had passed out, Klara and I, how close we had come! I tried to keep this out of my eyes. I stood up clumsily, and my chair fell to the floor behind me.

“Don’t panic, William,” Ion said, shrugging on his suede jacket. “I only thought we could give Klara a demonstration.”

The twins, attracted by the noise of my chair, had come running in from the study, and insisted that they too be allowed to come see Daddy’s machine. Ion acquiesced, on the condition that they bring a certain toy.

We all bundled into our coats…Klara wore a charming fox coat sewed in herring-bone strips…and we walked the three blocks to the Physics Institute.

The twins ran ahead of us, screaming and trying to slide on the frozen puddles. Klara walked between Ion and me, linking an arm with each of us. The sky was low and grey. The eternal mist seemed to form a circular wall around us, always ten meters off.

“Should we show Klara the bullet series?” I asked Ion, speaking across Klara’s lovely, upturned face.

Ion pursed his lips and shook his head. “Too fast. Klara has to see it to believe it.”

“Believe what?”

“We have a sort of tunnel,” I explained. “The size of a toy train tunnel. And if we shoot a bullet through it, the bullet seems to come out the right end before it goes in the left.”

Klara laughed. “Now that sounds useful. We could use one of your machines in the tunnel under the castle…where those dreadful traffic jams are.”

“Actually,” Ion said, “I thought I would use a little car today—the little three-wheeler that I helped the twins make last night.”

The twins had brought the little car, a bright red-yellow-blue mass of Lego blocks. On the top was a battery-run motor, with a cog wheel linked by a black plastic chain to a gear on the single front wheel.

Klara examined our “time-tunnel” with interest. The core of it was the shoe-box-sized vacuum chamber made of phase-mirrors. You could see in quite easily. The thick loops of the guiding-field wires arched over the box like croquet wickets.

I removed the rifle from its mount on one end of the lab-table, and waited while Ion got the car from the little girls.

Then, bustling a bit, he lined up his three women in chairs against the wall, and set the car down at one end of the table. I cleared my throat, preparatory to telling them what they might expect, but Ion shushed me.

“First let them see, and then we’ll discuss it.”

I taped an iron nail to the bottom of the Lego car, and dialed the guiding-field’s power up to some hundred times the level we had used before. The Lego car made a pretty big test-particle.

In all frankness, I expected the experiment to be a failure. The car would roll up to the phase-mirror box, bump into the side and stop…nothing more. But I was wrong.

As the little car labored across the table towards the left end of the box, something happened at the right end. Seemingly out of no place, an identical Lego car pushed out of the right end of the tunnel and went chuffing on its way! “And there’s one inside now, rolling left!” Klara exclaimed, leaning forward. She was right. For a few seconds there were three Lego cars on the table.

Car (1): The original car, still approaching the tunnel’s left entrance. Car (2): The one moving in the tunnel, from right to left. Car (3): The new one moving away from the right end of the tunnel.

And then car (1) and car (2) met at the left-end mirror. They melted into each other…nose into nose, wheel into wheel, tail into tail. It was like watching a Rorschach ink-blot disappear into its central fold.

One of the twins squealed and ran to catch car (3) before it ran off the other end of the lab table. I took it from her and examined it closely. Car (3) appeared to be identical to car (1). We had already done this experiment with electrons and with small bullets…but one bullet or electron is much like another. Until now I had been unwilling to accept Ion’s interpretation of our experiment. But it certainly looked as if car (3) really was car (1).

Ion stepped to the blackboard and drew a diagram.

“Look,” he said to Klara. “Here’s a spacetime diagram of what happens. If we think of the zigzag line as the history of a particular object, what we have is this: First, car (1) goes forward in time till it gets to the left phase-mirror. Second, inside the tunnel it flips and moves backwards in time, but still left-to-right, and we call it car (2). Third, upon passing through another phase-mirror it flips back to run forward in time again, and is called car (3). By evolving into car (3), the original car (1) manages to come out of the right end a few seconds earlier than it goes in the left.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I interrupted. “But we can read the picture a bit differently. Just think of moving that space-axis upwards through time, and see what happens. First there’s just car (1) moving to the right. Then suddenly something happens at the right end of the tunnel. Car (2) and car (3) come into existence together—by a process called pair-production. Car (3) is matter and car (2) is antimatter. With enough energy present, you can convert zero Lego blocks into plus-forty-nine Lego blocks and minus-forty-nine Lego blocks. You can get something from nothing…as long as you get anti-something too.”

My voice was baying evangelically. At Wankato State the students used to call me “Rover.” Now Klara smiled at me. Politely. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Ion hid a smile by pretending to rub his nose.

I continued, “When car (2) meets car (1), the two disappear into a burst of energy. It’s called mutual annihilation. Matter plus antimatter makes pure energy. The first puzzling thing about the experiment is how the tunnel knows to produce the appropriate matter/antimatter pair in time. But quantum mechanics does allow for action at a distance. Advanced potentials. Presumably an advanced potential from the approaching car (1) triggers the pair-production of …”

Klara looked quite blank by now. I broke off the exposition and made my point. “All three cars are different. Car (2) is antimatter traveling forward in time, not car (1) traveling backwards in time. And car (3) is just a sort of correction term.”

Klara looked from one of us to the other, smiling a bit. “Ion’s right,” she said finally, and with a nod of her head. “Anyone can see that the little car which came out is the same as the one that went in.” She caught my dejected expression and laughed. “Well, what’s the difference anyway? Whether the thing in the tunnel is a particle going backwards in time or an anti-particle going forward in time. It comes to …”

She had to break off and grab one of the twins, who had been about to try to stick her finger into a phase-mirror. A smell was filling the room, and we noticed that the other twin had opened one of the propane gas-valves set in the table.

“I better get these bad children out of here,” Klara exclaimed. “But it’s marvelous, Ion. And William, you must be very clever to have helped Ion build this!” A flash of lips, a swirl of fur, and she was gone.

I picked up the toy car and examined it closely. Even I had trouble believing my description of what had happened. How would the right end know to produce pairs in the right order to build up car and anti-car from nose to wheel to tail? And where would the energy have come from? Granted that a fantastic amount of energy was stored in the fantastically expensive quarkonium, but still …

Ion was sitting at his desk writing, his back to me. Despite what Klara had said, the two descriptions did not come to the same thing. Was this car the same as the original car, or was it only an identical copy? I had to know!

Suddenly I thought of a way to test the difference. I would let the car roll towards the tunnel, and at the last minute I would stop it from going in. A decisive experiment.

Suppose Ion was right. Suppose that car (3) was just a time-traveled car (1). What then? If car (1) did not go in the tunnel, then car (2) and car (3) would not come into existence.

But suppose I was right. Suppose that the whole effect was just advanced potential pair-production, triggered by car (1)’s approach. What then? Car (2) and car (3) would already have been created even if, at the very last second, car (1) did not actually enter the tunnel.

In terms of Ion’s spacetime diagram, what I was going to do was to stop car (1) at the time marked “X.” If car (3) came out anyway, then I was right. If car (3) didn’t come out, then Ion was right.

I started the car and set it down. “Look, Ion.” I didn’t bother saying more…he would understand. I fixed my mind on grabbing the car at the last possible instant before it went through the…looking-glass. I leaned over the table, concentrating. I didn’t dare look away to see if car (3) came out of the other end or not.

I seized car (1) just before its nose touched the phase-mirror. Then I stepped back and looked down the table. There was no car (3) at the other end…and no antimatter car (2) at my end. Ion was right.

I returned the little car to the starting position and let it run through the time-tunnel undisturbed, trying to see it Ion’s way.

A car moving right to left is the same as a car moving left to right and backwards in time. Suddenly I could see the pair-production and the mutual annihilation as corners in time. Ion was right, he really was. We had time-travel, admittedly over just a three-second range, but time-travel nonetheless. Even the strange fact that the phase-mirrors turned things backwards as well as reversing them in time made sense. The fact that the front of the car moved backwards in time as soon as it passed through the left end meant that a normal observer had to see it as disappearing first.

“Well?” Ion was smiling his wide, mirthless smile, his eyes picking my brain.

I nodded. “Okay. But how does the car get through the phase-mirrors? They felt so hard when I was gluing them together.”

Ion shrugged. “How does a reflection get through an ordinary looking-glass? It is the property of a mirror to produce images. But this particular mirror works only when the guiding-field is on.” He pointed to the left end of the time-tunnel.

Time-tunnel. As I said the word to myself, my last remaining question dissolved. If car (1) was car (2) was car (3), then no mass or anti-mass at all was really being created or destroyed. So of course there were no huge energy drains or blasts going on. Looked at differently, the quarkonium plates were a closed system which could pass energy back in time…so the pair-producing drew its energy from the annihilation, even though it happened first.

I nodded again, harder. “Okay. But now what?”

“Aren’t you worried about time-paradoxes anymore?” Ion’s voice was challenging, almost angry. It was as if he hadn’t wanted me to agree with him…hadn’t wanted it to be true. The next question: What if one were to stop car (1) if and only if car (3) has already appeared?

I didn’t say it, but he could see it in my eyes. The fear. Suddenly fatherly, he patted me on the shoulder. “Take the rest of the afternoon off, William. I want to write all of this up before…before I continue.”

I nodded and left him there. I spent the next few hours drinking Schlossquell beer, and then I went to the Eros House, a shabby building full of legal prostitutes. With the lights off, I could almost believe I was with Klara. Later I had more beer.

I slept badly that night. At four in the morning an unpleasant dream woke me up so completely that I couldn’t go back to sleep. It was a scene inspired by Kafka’s The Castle.

In the dream, through some transmutation, the Heidelberg castle is…science. Endless corridors, doors, people to meet. On the white plaster walls there are things like fire-alarms, little hammers mounted over glass plates. Behind the glass is…cyanide, thick gas, swirling, deadly. I hurry down a hallway, a sheaf of papers in my hand. Someone is in front of me, tangible, but invisible. My other self? Somehow the person moves so as to always be in my blind spot. A question is posed, the unspeakable question which the castle itself embodies. My tongue is slow and sticky. Yes and no. A bell is tolling. Yes and no. The hammers quiver… .

The world is clouds and fog patches, a confused smear which no magical apparatus can sharpen up. The cat knows.

That morning I found Ion sitting at his desk. He was asleep, with his head on his crossed arms. One of the phase-mirrors was cracked! Had Ion had some sort of tantrum? I examined the hairline crack. Of course the vacuum was ruined now. I wondered if the quarkonium plate could be repaired. There were some individual Lego-blocks scattered around the floor and table. Apparently Ion had been there all night.

I stood over him for a moment, looking at him with something like affection. I had been worried, too worried to even …

“William?” The voice was blurred. His eyes flickered open, then shut. “Is it raining?”

This struck me as a very odd question. It was, in fact, a marvelously sunny day, the first taste of spring. The sky was a delicate blue and the birds were singing. A square of sunlight was lying on Ion’s desk!

“It’s sunny, Ion.”

“I thought it was. And I thought it was raining.” His voice was muffled, and seemed somehow to come from underneath his head.

“You should get some sleep,” I urged. “Klara must be worried.”

“I’m scared to move.” A long pause. “I might disperse even more.”

Disperse? A strange word to use. Wave-packets disperse, but people …

“Read my notes,” Ion said, “I …” He let his voice trail off, and just sat there, eyes closed, his head resting on his crossed arms. There seemed to be something under his arms, some sort of pillow.

I picked up the lab book lying on his desk. It started with a description of the apparatus and the first experiments we had conducted. Nothing new there. I flipped forward a few pages.

There was a diagram like the one Ion had drawn for Klara. Under it was a sketch of the Lego car and a description of the two experiments, the one where the car comes out of the time-tunnel before it goes in, and my variation, where the car is stopped from going in, and therefore does not come out.

Ion had conducted a third experiment. The car was to roll towards the tunnel while he watched both ends. His plan was to stop car (1) if car (3) appeared, and to let car (1) go if car (3) did not appear. This meant that a car would come out of the right end of the tunnel if and only if no car came out of the right end of the tunnel. Yes if and only if no.

Think about it. Either car (3) appears or it doesn’t. Case I: Car (3) appears. So Ion stops car (1) from entering the tunnel. So car (3) doesn’t appear. Case II: Car (3) doesn’t appear. So Ion lets car (1) into the tunnel. So car (3) appears.

Question: When Ion actually ran the experiment, did car (3) appear? Answer: Yes and no.

I closed the lab book and looked around the room. The scattered bits of Legos…how many?

“What happened, Ion? Did the car come out of the tunnel?”

“Yes,” Ion said, raising his head from on top of his arms.

“No,” Ion said, uncrossing his arms and raising up his other head from under his arms.

The two faces looked at me, each of them a bit translucent, a bit unreal. The two necks merged into his collar, making a solid, tubular letter “Y.”

I gagged and stepped back.

The phone began to ring. The second of Ion’s heads…the no-head…seemed not to hear it, and continued to stare at me with those prehensile eyes. Eyes which reached deep into my mind.

But at the same time, Ion’s head groped up the receiver and held it to the first head…the yes-head…to one of the shimmering ears. I could hear Klara’s tiny voice. She sounded angry, accusing.

“I was working,” the yes-head said.

“Your boyfriend is here,” the no-head said, noticing the conversation. “I’m going to show him something.”

Ion let the phone drop and walked over to the laboratory table. The no-head, the mean one, was doing the talking. Whichever head was talking tended to be bigger. It was as if the silent head corresponded to some part of Ion which was father away…drifting towards some parallel universe.

“I’m in a mixed state, William. I ran the paradox. It had to come out both ways.” He turned the switch to power-up the guiding-field. It was dangerous to be restarting it without a vacuum in the chamber.

The no-head bent down, peering into the cracked phase-mirror. He was still talking to me. “I know how you think I look. But that’s just your projection. Actually it feels…marvelous. You’ll see in …”

“Get out, William,” the yes-head cried. “Before it’s too late.”

Klara’s voice was quacking from the dangling phone receiver. I could feel myself going mad, as surely as cloth tearing. I seized the phone to speak to her. “This is William. Ion’s had a terrible accident. He …”

There was a crash behind me. I whirled around. The time-tunnel was billowing smoke and the phase-mirrors had smashed into pieces. For a second I couldn’t see Ion through the smoke, but then he came at me.

A tangle of twenty or a hundred thin necks writhed out of his open collar, and on the end of each tentacle-like neck rode a tiny grimacing head, and every little head was screaming at me in a terrible tiny voice… .

He dispersed completely after that. As different variants of Ion Stepanek split off into different universes, each corresponding head would shrink…get “farther away”…and a copy of his body would split off with it, twisting and dwindling. I don’t know how long it took; I don’t know how I could have seen it; I wish I could forget it. The horrible squid-bunch of necks, each little head screaming out something different…I hope he’s really gone.

I live with Klara now, and I wear Ion’s clothes. I have taken over his job at the Institute…they think he’s resigned. Klara forged his signature on the letter.

It’s a good life, except for having to cut the buds off my neck every morning. The wart-like little heads. Some look like me, and some look like him. Klara says I only imagine them, and that there’s nothing on my neck but eczema.

I still have the specs for the time-tunnel. Maybe I’ll rebuild it, and observe a yes-and-no, and disperse. I’ll go into the mixed state and come out…who knows…maybe in heaven. But I don’t really need the machine anymore.

Mixed states happen all the time. Say someone asks you whether or not you want to kill yourself. Before they asked, maybe you weren’t really all that much for or against suicide. That’s your original mixed state. But answering the question is like being born. You have to stick out a yes-head or a no-head to answer. And the other one has to get shaved off.

It could be any question. Do you like milk? Who are you going to vote for? Are you happy? Do you understand what I’m talking about?

In a way, mixed states are nice. Not naming things, and not forcing them to be this way or that, but just…letting them go. Satori. There’s a Zen question for it: “What was your original face before you were born?”

My original face. A mixed state. I don’t need a machine, no heap of glass and wire. I’m just going to walk out on the bridge towards the castle. I’ll stop. Out there, in the wind, one needs not choose this bank or that. There are other alternatives.





Note on “Schrödinger’s Cat”

Written in Spring, 1979.

Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, March, 1981.

My family and I lived in Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980. I was there on a two-year grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The grant came through just as I was losing my first teaching job in Geneseo (a.k.a. Wankato, a.k.a. Bata). My formal duties in Heidelberg were zero: I was given a soundproofed office and a typewriter. As well as doing research on Georg Cantor’s theories of infinities, I spent a lot of my time writing science-fiction. At this point in my career I didn’t know that I would be able to complete and sell novels, so I put a great deal of energy into writing stories.

“Schrödinger’s Cat” was inspired by my studies of numerous papers on quantum mechanics and the nature of time in journals like Philosophy of Science. The second diagram for this story seems to suggest an interesting new result: that a time-reversing mirror would have to spatially mirror-reverse objects as well. “By rights this should have been an important scientific paper …”

Analog editor Stanley Schmidt had some doubts about the legitimacy of the mass-energy conversion processes taking place at the surface of the phase-mirrors, but I placated him by saying the phase-mirror was made of “quarkonium.” Since quarks were then at the edge of scientific knowledge, quarkonium was a handy catch-all magic-maker akin to the “radioactivity” used by 1940s SF writers.

The seed for this story was a drawing I made for my cheerfully horrified children of a Santa Claus with a thousand heads, answering phone-calls from every boy and girl in the world at once.





Sufferin’ Succotash

She was big. Fine big legs and white feathers glued all over her head. I had to have a piece of that. She brought me another bowl of slop and I gave her a thousand credit note. “Keep the change, baby.” That made three. She dimpled and sat down across from me.

“You’re beachy.” Looking me over. Charlie and I had only been out of the Regulator for a month, but I was back up to 150 keys already. I had an exoskeleton with gold chasing and rubies at the joints.

“I’m fat and I’m rich,” I said, stating the obvious. “And you’ve got something I want.” I stared at 