Spaceland (30 page)

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Authors: Rudy Rucker

BOOK: Spaceland
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When I hit the fifth-dimensional bend in the vine, I bent with it. Dronia disappeared. There was nothing left but the taut blue sky and the purplish stalks and green leaves of the vine.
“Drabk!” I shouted. “Wait up! I'm coming.”
A bump in the vine bulged out right in front of me, forming that same knowing, mustached face.
“Keep climbing,” Drabk told me. His breath smelled like cloves. “Climb without thinking.”
“And then you'll get me the patch?” I insisted.
“Not get,” said Drabk. “Be. Climb past thought to Okbra.”
So climb I did, for who knows how long. Every now and then the vine would veer off in a new direction, and I'd follow along with it. The new directions weren't left, right, forward, back or even vinn or vout. They were new dimensions, each one different from all the ones before. I don't know how I could tell exactly, but I could. For one thing, the sky changed from dark blue, to pale blue, and eventually into white. For another, it got harder and harder to see anything except for my own body, and my body was all in streaks and patches. But I kept on climbing, kept on reaching out into the uncertainty and having the next tendril or leaf slap reliably into my palm.
As I labored on, my mind emptied out. I was but a set of pumping legs and arms, an ever-less-significant twitch in the vastness of the All. I no longer had any expectations about what I was doing this for.
And still the vine led onward, taking me up through a seemingly endless series of higher dimensions, the lurching bends coming ever closer together. At some point, time itself became just another dimension I'd passed. And scale as well. Was I shrinking? Was the vine growing as fast as I climbed? Was I even climbing anymore? Not that I was asking myself these questions. Without really meaning to, I'd fully followed Drabk's advice. I'd climbed beyond words and beyond thought.
Some sort of jump-cut discontinuity must have happened around then, for the next thing I remember is being perched on a silvery little cloud. Me and Drabk sitting there facing each other, the two of us with our legs crossed like cartoon hermits atop the Magic Mountain. Not a thought in my head.
“Joe Cube,” said Drabk.
When he said my name I remembered myself. The first thing I thought was that I wanted some grolly.
“Expel your addiction,” said Drabk. He had a body now, a spindly little wiseman body with dark-colored arms and legs. He stuck out a knobby finger and tapped me on the forehead.
I coughed and something loosened in my chest. I coughed harder, and the object moved up my throat, scratching all the way. I spit it out into my hand: a prickly round dark purple thing like a burr.
“The grolly roots,” said Drabk. “Your patch.”
“You—you did it!” I exclaimed.
“You did it,” said Drabk.
I paused to look around. The cloud we were sitting on was like very fine fuzz. It was the tip-top, infinite-dimensional ending of the vine we'd climbed. The air around us was a glowing bright white.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In the Presence,” said Drabk. “As always.”
I understood something deep then, but what it was is hard to say. The world going on all over the place all the time—it is the Presence. And the Presence cares; the Presence loves me. I was surprised.
“I love you,” I told Drabk, not knowing I was going to say this.
Drabk smiled and nodded.
We sat there for another timeless interval and then the burr in my hands caught my eye. I had to go patch Spaceland.
“How do I get back?” I asked Drabk.
“Jump into the void,” he said. “Infinity is zero in Okbra. From here, you'll pass through Pointland to Lineland to Flatland to Spaceland. Your noble heart will be your guide.”
I got to my feet. The cloud of fuzz was soft beneath my naked
feer. Walking was hard: my legs felt like they had a thousand knees and ankles. I made it over to the edge of the cloud and poised myself for a jump, keeping the grolly root burr clenched in my hand.
“Good-bye,” I told Drabk, glancing back at him still sitting there.
He gave a friendly wave and disappeared.
I jumped.
Return To Spaceland
Everything changed
the instant I jumped off of Drabk's infinite-dimensional cloud. My world collapsed to a point. It was just as Drabk had told me; the way home led through Pointland.
In my Pointland, everything was in one place. Me and the grolly root were mashed in there together. But even though the parts of my body were all on top of each other, somehow the parts were different. Yes, I was a point, but I was a point with
structure
.
My eyes were folded in there for instance, and I could see. Well, not exactly
see
; it was more like I had a mental image of my world, because the world was right on top of the eye. My image held every bit of me at once: me inside me inside me inside me. It was cosmic.
Speaking or cosmic, for the little time that I was in Pointland, I was possessed by the notion that the Presence was me. Yes, in Pointland I was filled with the belief that Joe Cube was God. I, you, he, she, it—all of space was Joe! I was everywhere, I knew everything, I could do anything. I said it out loud, the thinking the same as the speaking: “Let every part of creation praise omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Joe Cube!”
And crap like that.
Pointland was about total self-absorption. I was babbling about how great I was, preaching to the choir, and I
was
the choir. Who knows how long it went on.
The way it ended was that I felt a curious stretching, like I was breaking up into pieces. Disturbing. I'd grown used to having all of me in the same spot. My body changed and I started hearing the sound of other voices. A strange, confused chirping. At first I thought it was my subconscious talking, but then,
whammo,
someone barged into me!
 
 
The shock traveled along the length of my body, from my head to my toes. I was a six-foot line segment. I'd graduated from Pointland to Lineland. My height dimension had become real.
I had an eye at my top end and the sole of a foot at the bottom. The grolly root was layered into my midsection. Looking through my eye, I could see—a dot. A bright, inquisitive dot. Another Linelander's eye, staring down at me.
“Velcome, new baby,” said a woman's alto voice from behind the eye. “Sorry I vas bumping into you. You bloomed zo wery fast. I'm Yekaterina. Vat's your Momma's name?”
“Mary,” I said, too surprised to do anything but give a straight answer. My voice vibrated within my body and traveled down the line. “Mary Cube,” I added. “I don't imagine you've ever heard of a cube.”
“No, I don't know dat name,” said the Lineland woman. “How far from here she is, your Momma?”
“Um …”
“Oh, zorry, you're not knowing nothing yet, are you, my new baby boy neighbor. I missed hearing de song dat grew you. Maybe I vas asleep. It's zometimes hard to be noticing at my age.” She raised her voice, and shouted so loud that my body trembled. “Hey, Yitzhak, looky dis new baby boy right between us. Six feet long he is!”
A deep voice responded from beneath my foot. “Good riddance to you, Yekaterina! Going bananas I vas, staring into your eye. Dis much better is. Nice pink foot of a baby boy.” I felt a tickling in the sole of my foot, as of something feeling it. “Zpeak up den, bubbala. Vat's your name?”
“I'm Joe,” I said. I tried sliding back and forth a bit. My eye bumped Yekaterina's eye, and my foot bumped Yitzhak.
“Don't trample into me, baby,” cried Yitzhak, instantly irritable.
“I'm not a baby,” I said. “I'm from another world.”
“From heaven to us you are coming,” said Yekaterina. “And velcome you are.” She nudged me with her eye, then raised her voice to talk through me again. “Don't be a stinker, Yitzhak. De boy needs his exercise to grow. Bounce all you like, baby Joe.”
“Big enough already he is,” bellowed Yitzhak. And then he lowered his voice to talk to me. “Vat you mean, you're not a baby?”
“I'm from Spaceland,” I said. “I won't be here long. Soon I'll be moving on to Flatland. A world with two dimensions.”
“Vat you mean?” rumbled Yitzhak once again.
“A world where people can move past each other,” I said. “Where people don't have to stay exactly where they're born. If we were in Flatland, I could move to your other side.”
“Listen at dis crazy baby,” trilled Yekaterina. “A lovely voice you've got, Joe. You vant to meet my daughter?”
“Um …”
“Tanya!” sang Yekaterina. “Taaaanya.” The three of us fell quiet, listening for an answer. I could make out the voices of dozens, scores, hundreds of Linelanders. As I focused in on the sounds, I
was able to form an image of the world, mentally arranging the voices in the order of the singers.
And here came Tanya's answering call. Listening to it, I could tell that Tanya was some four hundred yards beyond Yekaterina.
“She sounds very nice,” I told Yekaterina. “You and Yitzhak must be proud of your daughter.”
Yekaterina let out a peal of surprised laughter.
“I'm not dat noisy Cossack's husband,” boomed Yitzhak. “We are having no resonance together vatsoever. She's only my neighbor. My vife, half a mile down from here she is.” He raised his voice. “Saaaadie!”
“Here, dear Yitzhak,” came a faint soprano answer.
“If you don't live next to your wife, how do you, um …”
“Harmony is life,” chirped Yekaterina. “The right vibration makes a new baby born. Your voice sounds wery nicely vith Tanya's, I am noticing. Who knows? Maybe ve a nice match can make when you're a little more grown, baby Joe. Vith practice, your voice may someday beat together vith Tanya's and churn up a new segment.”
Once again I felt a shifting within myself. I was spreading out into a second dimension. “I'm on my way out,” I told Yekaterina with relief. “Bye bye.”
Sproing!
I was a full two-dimensional man. It felt so good to have room to stretch out. I could move my flat legs and arms up and down and to the left and right. I did a few jumping jacks, shaking out the kinks. I'd been reconstituted in such a way that I had a flat eye on either side of my head. My retinal images were only patterned lines but, being a Flatlander, I was able to use these images to build up a two-dimensional mental model of my surroundings.
I was on a little patch of grass between two houses, each of them with a tight-shut swinging door. There was a lot of noise coming from the other side of the house on my right, like there was a crowd of people yelling. Somebody climbed over the house's roof and
looked at me. A flat man. His head was weird. He had his eyes on its sides, and his mouth was up on the top. Come to think of it, my mouth was on the top of my head too.
“There he is!” shouted the man on the roof. “The killer!”
Suddenly it hit me. I was back in the Flat Matthewsboro I'd dreamed about the night after we went to Vegas. Two months ago. I hadn't thought about that dream very often, but now the details came hack. I'd accidentally killed a Flatlander named Custer, and a lynch mob of Flatlanders had come after me. Things were starting up right where my dream had left off.
I bent my legs and leapt upwards like a flea. I landed on the roof of the house on my left and scrambled over it. With my left eye, I could see open space up ahead, with greenery rising upwards. I jumped and kicked, moving as fast as I could. With my right eye, I could see the Flatlanders in hot pursuit.
There were some holes in the ground. I jumped over the first five or ten of them, and then I decided to climb down into one. The green stuff underfoot was a giant plant. I wormed down into the runnel; the leaf-stuff was smooth and green and succulent. The leaf crack widened into a round dead end. A bit of water was trapped there. I drank some of it and hunkered down to wait.
There was something clutched in one of my hands, a collapsed-down version of the grolly root that I'd coughed up when I'd been with Drabk. Looking at it, I remembered what I was doing here. I was trying to make my way home to patch a hole in space. Sooner or later, I'd pass on beyond Flatland. I only needed to wait this out. And then I'd be home with Jena again.
I could feel the vibrations of Flatlanders overhead. At first I thought I'd escaped them, that they were passing me by. But then I heard a scraping and slithering. Some of them were coming down into the plant after me. In another few minutes they had me by the arms and legs. One of them was carrying a long stick with spring
clamps on it. They clipped my legs to one end and my hands to the other and they carried me downtown like a captured tiger.
My head was sealed up between my two arms and I couldn't see where we were going. Apparently I was breathing through my skin, so I didn't suffocate. We jounced along roughly for a while, climbing up and down over buildings, and finally we stopped. Someone unfastened my lower arm so that I could see. We were in a large courtyard between two tall, stepped buildings. My captors flipped the carrying stick over and laid it on the ground. I could see Flatlanders perched all up and down the terraces of the buildings, shrieking out their hatred. The only one to speak on my behalf was flat Dad.
“My boy didn't mean nothin' by it,” he said. “Just got a little rambunctious. And who really gave a hoot about Custer anyhow?”
“Shut your crack, Ed,” interrupted flat Mom, who was there too. “This killer's no son of ourn. He's a devil thing! Burn him up before he does magic again!” The crowd hollered their assent.
None other than Custer's widow Mindy had been appointed as my executioner. The Flatlanders attached the back of my carrying stick to a kind of crane, and then they hoisted me a few feet off the ground. Beneath me were lumps of wood and oily scraps of paper. Mindy lit a long match and leaned forward to light the fire. I stared down at it, feeling the heat. The flames had a funny way of rippling across the wood; they'd flare up, run out of air, then drop back down. But each time they rose higher. A flame licked along my left arm, charring it.
“Drabk!” I cried. “Save me now!”
I glimpsed the fuzzy worm of his mustache and then, thank God, my flesh shifted again. I was growing back into the third dimension. The cries of the Flatlanders segued into the faint honking and tweeting of coffee-shop jazz. I'd never heard anything so sweet.
Yes, I was back in the Los Perros Coffee Roasting, with the grolly root clutched in my left hand. Despite all the adventures I'd just been through, not much time seemed to have passed. The cops and firemen were still there, and Jena too. Torrents of rain were coming down outside the broken window. It was late afternoon, still light, almost spring. Jena stood out like a flower in her bright yellow blouse. She was talking on the regular cell phone that she carried as a backup for her Mophone.
“Jena!” I shouted. “I'm back.” I was naked.
She gave me an oddly guarded smile and said something into her phone.
“Stop him before he gets away,” shouted the boss cop with the stubbly roll of fat at his neck. The mustached, volleyball-player-type cop and the pie-faced blonde lady cop stepped towards me, but not very fast. Everyone was nervous about what I might do next.
Quickly I strode over to the hole in space, which was holding steady at six feet across. There were some red Wackle lumps in the room as well, they were guarding the hole and its invisible ropes
from the Kluppers. I tried to use my third eye to peer into hyperspace. But, I now realized, my third eye was gone. I wasn't augmented anymore. I'd grown back into three dimensions, but no further. I couldn't see past the surface of the hole.
Even so, I knew what to do. I fanned out the branches of my grolly root as best I could. The root felt much heavier than it looked. Being four-dimensional, the tendrils twisted and changed shape in an uncanny way. With some effort, I pitched the root towards the center of the black ball of Nothing. It sank in, disappearing from view.

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