Complete Stories (27 page)

Hefting the float, Morris finally met her eyes. “They wanted to get away from the Joke. They wanted intellectual adventure.”

“But what is it, Morris? What is the Joke?”

“The code numbers for their library. Their library is coded up as an endless sequence of digits, right?”

“So?”

“Well it just happens …” Morris held up the glass sphere. “You know what pi is, don’t you, Jane? Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, right? In decimals, pi starts out 3.14159265358979. There’s plenty of simple programs to generate the rest of the digits.”

“Three, one, four. Wasn’t that …”

“You got it, Jane. You’ve got the Joke. The library of all Leutian knowledge is coded up by the decimal expansion of pi. There’s no getting rid of it.”

Half happy, half sad, they stood there, looking out past the gulls and dogs, out past the Leutians, out to the living sea. Beyond that lay the sky—so big, so small.

============

Written in Fall, 1981.

The 57th Franz Kafka
, Ace Books, 1983.

“Pi in the Sky” was inspired by a trip that Sylvia, the kids and I took to visit my brother Embry when he lived on Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean. I liked the idea of the regressing fractal encryption, as I'd been wondering how to store a very large amount of data in a physical pattern, this was something I'd been discussing with the science writer Martin Gardner. My story was to some extent inspired by Jorge Luis Borges 1940 tale, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” My notion of pi as a kind of universal library reappears in Carl Sagan's 1985 novel
Contact
.

Jeannie snaked her arm a little tighter around Ricky’s waist. They were surely going to kiss tonight, as soon as it got dark. To her left were gold-plated clouds and a fat ruby sun. The longest day of the year. Too bad there were so many people on the beach.

Just ahead, a knot of idlers watched a fisherman drag something in. Ricky stopped short. Jeannie tugged him to come on, but there he stopped, staring with his mouth open. Anything to do with sports held Ricky in thrall.

“Come on, Ricky, it’s just a rull.”

“Gigundo! Look at the rod bend!”

The rull came slip-slopping out of the surf, a sort of giant skate or manta ray. Rulls were from outer space. People liked to kill them.

“Gigundo!” repeated Ricky. “That devil’s got a three meter wingspan.”

Jeannie sighed. It was a shame that a smart, lively girl like herself had to date idiots. How many Rickys had she known? When would Fall and college ever come?

The rull’s flesh was pale green with filaments of red. Its main body was vaguely reptilian: a fat, sinuous croc shape and a long spiky tail. On the sides of the body were the big slimy wings that flew the rull through the water. The rull had no head to speak of: just a long mouth-slit, some nose-holes, and two little eyes backed by pouches. The mouth was soft and toothless; rulls lived on whatever decayed garbage they could scrounge from the sea floor. This one had a hook set in its mouth. A bad catch.

According to the scientists, the rull spores had drifted down from space to seed the ocean. Why, no one knew. Why do weeds grow? In the last year all kinds of unearthly creatures had appeared. The solar system was drifting through some cosmic cloud of spores, and worthless new species were cropping up all over the place.

“Watch,” Ricky said, taking Jeannie’s arm. “Watch this.”

The fisherman held a long hunting knife poised over the center of the rull’s translucent body. The stupid, harmless creature lay there shivering. Rulls balanced off their low intelligence with some modest psionic abilities. It could feel the humans’ revulsion and see its impending death.

The rull puffed up the two big airsacs behind its smeary eyes. The air whistled back out, clammy and smelly, trying to sound like words.
Fwee-fwet-fwee-fwo
. Please let me go.
Fwee-fwaah-fwa-fwish
. I’ll grant a wish.

Rulls always said this, but people killed them anyway. The fisherman steadied his knife over the fleshmound’s summit. Jeannie felt a sudden burst of sympathy for the poor thing, this poor outcast in a world it never made. She drew free of Ricky and stepped forward to lay her hand on the fisherman’s shoulder.

“Don’t. Let the poor thing go, and take your wish.”

“Rull wishes don’t work out so good,” said the fisherman, glancing up at her. “Or didn’t you know?”

The creature’s muddy eyes stared gratefully up at Jeannie. The hook, she noticed, had fallen out of its mouth. She smiled charmingly at the fisherman, working to keep him distracted.

“What do you mean?” asked Jeannie. “I wish
I
could free a rull and get a wish.”

Just then the ungainly creature made its move. With a huge slurping noise it flopped across the sand and into the breakers. There was a moment of confusion, and then Jeannie got her wish.

She snaked her arm a little tighter around Ricky’s waist. They were surely going to kiss tonight, as soon as it got dark. To her left were gold-plated clouds and a fat ruby sun. The longest day of the year…the longest day ever.

============

Written in Summer, 1981.

San Jose State University Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Newsletter
, December, 1988.

I wrote this on vacation with my family at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. In the Outer Banks, you always see idiots killing skates that they’ve caught. Just to publish this short-short story somewhere, I eventually put in our SJSU departmental newsletter.

Nancy was asleep, avoiding me. I was watching TV. A six-inch butler in there making a pitch for textured paper napkins. Texture equals romance. I was clean broke, and my new wife had stopped loving me.

“Come on,” urges the midget butler, beckoning me into the tube and towards a table. The tablecloth hangs down to the ground like theater curtains. An expectant buzz filters out. I shoulder through the heavy fabric and find myself onstage. A big little audience in here. At last, I have texture, and Nancy’s onstage, too, wearing next to nothing and raring to …

The doorbell rang, waking me. Eleven-thirty Friday night, mild mid-September, Princeton, New Jersey, Nancy asleep beside me, her features all closed up. My unformed bud, my cruel mistress. I went downstairs and answered the door. Harry.

His big white face looked anxious. “I hope I didn’t wake you, I just thought I’d, uh …”

“It’s okay. I was under a table putting on a show for some midgets.”

Harry’s voice dropped. “You were already dreaming?”

“Relax. I’m still dressed. Nancy’s asleep.” I walked into the kitchen and Harry tagged along. We’d had a drink together that afternoon, and he looked like he’d been at it ever since. I took out two beers and handed him one.

“No thanks,” said Harry. He shouldered past me and shambled into the pantry where Nancy kept our liquor supply.

“Tequila, Harry?”

“Uh, yeah, I need.”

I should point out that Harry and I were both getting over a series of nasty shocks and unwanted life-changes. Rude chuckles with a negative charge. Harry’s regular girlfriend had more or less committed suicide, and the next woman he’d loved had rejected him utterly.

I’d gotten married, which seems positive enough, but just then my engineering business had gone down the tubes. “When there’s money worries, love goes out the window,” my Uncle Arpad told me once. Once you get started fighting, it’s hard to stop.

My near-bankruptcy had finished Harry right off: he’d been my research and development department. I was still making a little money with consulting, but I had no work at all for Harry. He was making ends meet by teaching high-school physics. Rumpled genius Harry was teaching at the Collegiate Academy for Young Ladies.

“There’s only a drop left,” Harry observed, holding up the tequila bottle.

“Go on and kill it.”

“I better not. Nancy’ll be mad at me.”

My tidy new wife, Nancy, my slobby old pal Harry—need I say more? Nancy was going to be mad no matter what.

“Frozen daiquiris!” I proposed. I found a rum-bottle with a few shots left. Harry snagged a vodka bottle, and it was back to the kitchen. Harry leaned against a wall, staring at the ceiling. I got ice and a can of limeade concentrate out of the freezer.
You really shouldn’t be doing this
, I thought to myself.

“That’s some ceiling,” Harry remarked. “The way it’s peeling.”

It was an unusual ceiling. The week after Nancy and I had moved in, the kitchen ceiling paint had blistered and burst in seven places. But it was new paint, so no flakes had fallen. Instead, there were seven irregular blobs of white underpaint surrounded by dangling ruffs of peeled-back tan latex.

“Jellyfish,” said Harry. “Invisible space-squid.”

I loaded up the blender and pushed the switch.
Skazz, skazz, fwrrr, tik-tik-tik
. I sampled it. Fuh. Too much limeade.

Harry read my expression. “You put the whole two-quart size in, idiot?”

I added ice.
Skazz, fwrrr, tik
. Pour and pour.

“Too watery.” Harry dumped his drink back in and handed me the vodka bottle. My hand tipped a half-pint in.
Skazz, fwrr, tik
. Perfection.

“I didn’t tell you what I’ve been teaching,” Harry said.

“I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk about it. Action equals reaction? Voltage equals current times resistance? I’m sorry, Harry, believe me I’m sorry. If I can get my business back on its feet you’ll be the first to …”

“It’s interesting to teach in prep-school,” Harry said, smiling strangely. “It stimulates my mind in a way that could be most lucrative.”

My attention level went up about fifteen percent. “You have a new idea?”

“Are you familiar with Mach’s Principle?”

“Heard of it. It’s unproved. Something about absolute space?”

“Mach says there really is no space. There’s no framework at all without matter. If there were only one object in the universe, then motion would be a meaningless concept. No acceleration, no rotation, no inertia.”

“Inertia?”

“Inertia is an object’s tendency to resist changes in motion.” Harry waved his glass. “
Heft
is inertia.” The glass flew out of his hand and shattered on the floor. I heard a fluting call from upstairs.

“It’s all right, Nancy,” I shouted. But already her steps were coming down the stairs, swift and implacable.

“What’s that smell? What are you doing?”

She stood in the kitchen doorway, squinting against the light. She had snub features, bobbed strawberry-blonde hair and a sweet little figure. I loved her with all my heart.

Harry squatted on the floor, picking up bits of broken glass. Seeing him, Nancy stepped back, as if from an open drain.

“Harry just dropped by,” I explained. “We’re discussing inertia.”

“I can see that. You’re going to be in horrible condition for the race tomorrow, Joseph.” My Christian name. She was unhappy—and who could blame her? I’d promised to run the Princeton Ten-Miler with her.

“What nonsense,” put in Harry. “Conspicuous consumption of body-energy. How do you think a black millhand feels when he sees you go prancing by in your seventy-dollar air-shoes?” The guy never knew when to shut up.

“You fat ugly toad, I’d like to step on you.” With that, Nancy turned and stalked upstairs.

There was a minute’s silence. The humming fluorescent light covered everything with stagnant vivacity. The rum hit me. Suddenly the big, lobed paint-peelings on the ceiling looked festive.

“Let’s go down to the basement, Harry.”

He poured some more vodka into our blenderful of daiquiris. I opened the basement door and the cats rushed out.

Downstairs was my happy place. I’d torn some carpet out of my old office and brought it here, also the desk and file-cabinet. I had a good little computer, a daisy-wheel printer and, best of all, half a basement full of offbeat tools and components.

It was the first time Harry had been down here. From the old days he knew most of the equipment by serial number, but seeing it all jumbled up differently was Christmas for him.

“Jeez, Fletch. There’s enough stuff here to build a time-machine!”

“You mean that?”

He gave me a sly look from the corner of his eye. “You got a gyroscope?”

“Sure. Yeah. Got a beauty. Army surplus inertial guidance servo. I’ve even got a transformer for it. Want to see it run?”

“In a minute. First things first.” He sat down on my desk and, no longer having a glass, took a long gulp from the chill and green and possibly protosentient fluid in the Pyrex beaker-top of our blender, a beaker-top, by the way, whose geometry was such that it could not be set down.

“Gimme some.”

Blub, chug, blub.

“Ahhhhh. ‘Sgood.”

Chug, blub, chub, blug. The beaker passed back and forth and was suddenly empty.

“We finished that too fast, Harry. Much too fast.”

“I feel pretty damn good, Fletch. I think I can do something with that Mach’s principle. The point is that gravitational mass and inertial mass are not the same thing. Gravity is like a
charge
, but inertia is a type of
interrelatedness
.”

“You’re going to build a time-machine?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter, Fletcher. I’m going to build an inertia-winder.”

I assumed that he was putting me on. “Why not smelt up some Cavorite instead? You know what I mean? That Jules Verne alloy that was supposed to shield things from gravitational attraction? Or maybe we should put together a Dean Drive and mail it to John Campbell. The gyro’d come in handy.”

“Campbell’s dead, more’s the pity.” Harry sucked a last drop out of the beaker and smacked his lips. “I’m commencin’ to feel
pret
-ty damn good.”

“You learn to talk that way at the prep-school?”

“The Collegiate Academy. Oh, my, yes. Those sweet girls. Bless their hearts. The cardioid curve, dear Fletcher, is, of course, a traditional symbol for pulchritudinous callipygosity, and when I speak of blessing, I think,
selbstverständlich
, of the censer and thurible, the spray of holy anointment, and the fullness of emotion appropriate to such …”