Harsh Oases (42 page)

A waiter carrying a heavily loaded tray suddenly—and for no apparent reason—jigged around a seated patron who was arguing emotionally with his tablemates, just in time to avoid an outflung gesticulating arm. Had the waiter kept to his original path and intersected the arm, he would certainly have lost his burden and gone down.

The waiter’s Personal Jesus had warned him of the impending disaster, allowing him to avoid it.

Such saves gave Shepherd—and most other people—a decidedly queer feeling. More than a decade after the arrival of the godPods, issues of predestination and free will still remained unresolved and irksome. Fortuitously, most people preserved their peace of mind by avoiding thinking over-closely about such matters.

Unfortunately for Shepherd tonight, the paradoxes involved in accepting the oft-times proleptic advice of the godPods continued to plague him after the waiter’s rescue. He could hardly manage to keep up his end of the conversation while Anna savored her cheesecake. He recalled his despair this morning, his brief flirtation with abandoning his godPod. He pondered the abruptness of the fulfillment of one of his most intense wishes, a romantic interlude with Anna. In a cynical light, it seemed almost as if Shepherd’s hesitancy to continue using a godPod had been recognized and defused by this reward.

But surely the altruism and selflessness of the godPods had been proven time and time again. What could God possibly have to gain from cultivating human reliance?

Walking back to Anna’s apartment, Shepherd continued to experience this crisis of faith. He could not rid himself of the notion that he and all humanity were merely puppets of the godPods. It was a terrifying image.

On Anna’s doorstep, she asked him inside.

Once behind closed doors, Anna offered herself for a kiss.

But Shepherd hesitated, before blurting out, “Anna, why did you go out with me tonight?”

Anna looked bemused. “Why, you asked me to, remember?”

“Yes, of course. But did your godPod—?”

“I can’t tell you that, Shepherd. It’s too private.”

“Of course. I understand. But could I just ask you a small favor?”

“I guess so .…”

“If I—if I take off my godPod, will you take yours off too?”

Anna grinned. “Why, I didn’t realize you were so modest, Shepherd.”

A few people eccentrically shed their godPods during intimate moments, unwilling to remain connected to Jesus while they had sex (or went to the toilet!). How an omniscient God would fail to observe them one way or another was not the issue. They just felt uneasy with the possibility that Jesus might choose to address them at an awkward moment.

Anna’s fingers went to her holstered godPod teasingly, almost like the movements of a stripper with a bra-hook. “Well, if you’re really so shy—” She removed the godPod and set it down on a tabletop.

“Your headset too, please.”

Anna uncorked her ear. Shepherd moved to shed his own connection to the infinite.

Jesus spoke then to the man. “Shepherd, please—”

But Shepherd ignored Him. And Anna’s Personal Jesus had apparently not objected to going offline. Or if He had, she had likewise turned a deaf ear to God, as people still could. (Such as during the traffic accident Shepherd has witnessed that very morning.)

Free of any encumbrance, Anna threw herself at Shepherd.

They ended up sometime later in Anna’s bedroom.

The sex was spectacular, all that Shepherd had envisioned. So satisfying apparently to Anna also that she fell right asleep, neglecting to reclaim her godPod and reinstall it.

The tiny headsets were so comfortable that the majority of people slept with them in place. The godPod was capable of directing and shaping the wearer’s dreams through subliminal whispers, forestalling nightmares and promoting the most restful of sleeps, a service much in demand.

Shepherd, however, failed to relax, despite the somatic satisfaction, remaining awake and thoughtful while Anna snuffled demurely in her sleep.

A television hung on the wall across the room. Shepherd turned it on with his arfid, finding a news channel.

The newscaster was beaming.

“Today represents a milestone in the history of the godPod. Eight billion units have now been fully deployed, insuring that all citizens of even those countries lagging behind the average rising GNP now have access to the indispensible advice of God .…”

Shepherd told his arfid to shut the television off. He lay awake for a further time, but finally fell asleep.

He awoke to the late-morning sun of a beautiful Saturday. Anna was not beside him.

Shepherd found the small naked woman in the front room of her apartment, sobbing. He noticed that she was cradling her godPod as if it were a dead sparrow. She looked up, red-eyed and snot-nosed, as Shepherd entered.

“My—my Jesus won’t talk to me—”

Shepherd retrieved his own unit and discovered that it was likewise defunct.

“I’m sure there’s some simple explanation. Let’s turn on the news.”

Out of hundreds of channels, only three were broadcasting. One offered a pre-recorded talk show, another a cartoon. The third channel featured a wild-eyed man with no obvious prior on-air experience raving about an alien invasion from the stageset of a famous cooking show,
What Would Jesus Bake?
.

Shepherd and Anna got dressed and went outside.

After several hours of exploration, they discovered that they were among approximately a dozen people left in the pristine city.

They wandered stupefied for blocks, eventually arriving at City Hall. There they found a few other souls, equally baffled and bereft As they exchanged half-hearted greetings and urgent questions, the aliens arrived.

The ship carrying the aliens resembled a mirror-surfaced egg. It touched down on its broad end and remained upright without evident supports. The next second, it vanished entirely.

Standing unconcernedly where the ship had rested, a dozen miscellaneous aliens awaited a first move from the humans. The aliens were mostly humanoid—if a being, for instance, that appeared to have evolved from a hybrid gila monster and koala bear could be called humanoid—but some were not.

The small group of humans made no move toward the visitors, until Shepherd strode forth.

“Can you—can you tell us what happened? Are you responsible?”

The furry lizard offered what passed for a smile. “No, we’re not. We’re survivors like yourselves. The exact same thing happened to all our worlds.”

Understanding broke over Shepherd’s mind. “Was it—was it the Rapture?”

“Something like that. Or the Singularity. Call it what you will. In either case, an entity vastly larger and more potent than your species has now subsumed all your kind into itself. Everyone who was connected to it at the time, that is.”

“But why?”

The alien shrugged. “Who knows? To augment itself, is our best guess. Anything that is not truly infinite still wants to grow.”

Anna joined Shepherd, apart from the small crowd of humans. “How did you arrive here right when it happened?”

“Oh, we’ve been here for fifteen years now, ever since you discovered God, observing and just waiting for this to happen. Your world took a little longer than some, but less than others.”

Shepherd started to get angry. “And you couldn’t have warned us?”

The alien made a dismissive blurting noise. “Like you would’ve believed us, in the face of God!”

Shepherd realized the truth of this statement, and grew calm. “So what happens next?”

The alien scratched his butt, eliciting a sandpapery noise. “You’re quite welcome to come with us. We have several lovely worlds full of castaways such as yourselves. Such as us. Our culture is very, very eclectic. An exciting time to be alive. Or, you can stay here and fashion a new world from the abundant ruins. Your call.”

“Is God going to return?” asked Anna.

“Not for some time. There’s too few of you left for Him to bother with. He only shows up when the population masses in the billions. We’re very careful to keep the population on each of our worlds down to a few million.”

The alien looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “Your species doesn’t plan on breeding in the billions again anytime soon, does it?”

Anna reached out and took Shepherd’s hand. He squeezed it, and began to blush.

“Not right away, no. That would take some kind of miracle. And those days seem gone.”

The rest of the humans automatically said, “Amen.”

My gonzo, freestyle, transrealist pal Rudy did most of the heavy lifting on this one, a kind of Kuttneresque romp. He conceived of the characters and plot, and I added swatches of dialogue and description and a few speculative conceits about the elves. Rudy’s creativity and energy, especially lately, since he’s retired from teaching, continue to astonish me. He charged ahead with completion of this tale, once we kickstarted it together, doing numerous perfectionist drafts long after I would have been satisfied to call the story finished. Working with him is always an inspiration for me to boost myself to a higher quantum level of weirdness and taoist oneness with the multiverse.

I will however take full credit—which Rudy already generously publically gave—for my coinage of the line, “Of flurbbing, they know not!” Rudy got such a charge out of that undefined neologism that he created a website called
Flurb
, where this story first appeared.

ELVES OF THE SUBDIMENSIONS

Co-written with Rudy Rucker

Forever and again, the alvar were gnawing at the quantum walls of their prison.

Down where photonic light itself was too gross to serve as a basis for perception, they raged to be free. Ceaselessly shifting congeries of forms, interpenetrating shuggoths, they scratched and clawed in the basement of the cosmos like dissatisfied servants, seeking an entrance to the bright and happy privileged realms above.

The alvar had little actual experience with the macroscopic world they irrationally but fervently longed to breach. Only occasionally did a few of them manage a brief escape, frenetically enjoying the odd pleasures of the supradimensional zone for a short time, before inevitably dropping back down to their ground state below the Planck level. Once trapped again in their subdimensional prison, the adventurous alvars would recount to their fellows the hardly believable experiences they’d undergone. These tales were passed from one alvar to another as they constantly chattered amongst themselves, eventually attaining the proportions of myth.

“The high-planers ingest sweet chunks of their worldstuff!”

“They use picture boxes to learn their hive mind’s mood!”

“Of flurbbing, they know not!”

“Their landscape is static across lesser timescales!”

“They tend symbiotes called cows!”

Such was the stimulating talk exchanged between the fits of importunate scrabbling.

But now several alvar were holding a different kind of conversation, one that was more purposeful than fanciful.

For the duration of this discussion—the time it took for a single excited electron to jump shells—these particular alvar remained remarkably stable. To their own peculiar senses, they resembled naked old human males, stooped and bearded and wrinkled. All save one. This exception took the form of a supremely beautiful human woman, anomalously equipped with a horsetail shading her rear.

“When I finally reach the supradimensional realms,” said the female, “I intend to experience sex.”

“I have heard of this,” said one of the gnomes, his skin decorated with blue swirls. “A ritual akin to flurbbing.”

The female shivered, temporarily losing definition. “No, something much more delicious. For in high-plane sex, it is said, the two partners retain their identities!”

“Impossible!” “Scandalous!” “Insipid!”

The female grew wrathful. “You are weak and pusillanimous! You will never reach the supradimensional realms with such an attitude. Resume digging now! Faster, harder, deeper! Tear away that quantum foam! We must be ready to pounce upon any growing tendril from the ideational spores we’ve sown.”

The female alvar dissolved into a writhing nest of medusa flails that lashed her fellows, who shrieked and spat, but nonetheless attacked the walls of their sub-Planck-length burrow with renewed vigor.

Lately Jory Sorenson had been thinking a lot about his Uncle Gunnar. Gunnar had lost his ability to work; he’d killed himself; and his life’s work had been spoiled. Was that in the cards for Jory too? Poor old Gunnar…

Gunnar was a farmer all his life; he raised dairy cows on a little farm in the Gold Country of California, in the foothills of the Sierras, a hundred miles east of Sacramento. Unmarried, crusty, and stubborn, Gunnar lived alone in the Scandinavian-style wooden farmhouse he and his older sister Karin had been born in; the house had an honest-to- god thatched roof that Gunnar periodically renewed with straw from his cattle’s fodder.