Complete Stories (56 page)

Zep stared out at the horizon so long that Delbert thought he was lost in a flashback. But suddenly Zep’s voice was running tight and fast.

“Dig it, Del, I’m not going to say this twice. The ocean is a chaotic dynamical system with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Macro info keeps being folded in while micro info keeps being excavated. In terms of the phase-space, it works by a kneading process, continually doubling the size of a region and folding it over on itself like saltwater taffy with the ribbony layers of color all shot through. Big waves disappear in the chop and the right small ripple can amp on up to make an outsider. If you do the right thing to the ocean, it’ll do whatever you want back. The thing about a chaotic system is that the slightest change in initial conditions produces a big effect—and I mean right away. Like on a pool table, dude, after ten bounces the position of the ball has been affected by the gravity from a pebble in a ring of Saturn. There’s a whole space of dynamic states, and the places where the system settles down are called chaotic attractors. We do right, and the ocean’ll do right by us.”

Del was like: “Chaos attractor? How do we control it?”

“There’s no formula because the computation is irreducibly complex. The only way to predict the ocean is to simulate it faster than real time. Could be done on a gigahertz CA. By the right head. The ocean…Delbert, the ocean’s state is a point in ten-trillion-dimensional surfspace.”

“Surfspace?” Delbert grinned over at his long blond friend with the dark, wandering eyes. When Zep got into one of his head trips he tended to let his cool, slow surfer pose slide. He’d been a punk before a surfer, and a science nerd before that.

“You gotta relate, babe,” enunciated Zep, as he tore on into the rest of his riff. “The wave pattern at any time is a fractal. Waves upon waves upon waves. Like a mountain range, and an ant thinks he’s at the top of a hill, but he’s only at the top of a bump on rock on an outcrop on a peak on the range on the planet. And there’s a cracky crack between his six legs. For our present purposes, it’s probably enough to take ten levels of waves into account.”

“Ten levels of waves?”

“Sure man, like put your nose near the water and there’s shivers on the ripples. The shivers have got kind of sketchy foam on them too. So sketchy foam, shivers, ripples, wads, and slidy sheets, now we be getting some meat to carve, uh, actual waves, peaks—those choppy peaks that look like Mr. Frostee’s head, you wave—steamers and hollow surf, mongo mothers, outsiders and number ten the tide. So the wave pattern at any given spot is a ten-dimensional quality, and the wave patterns at a trillion different spots make a point in ten-trillion-dimensional surfspace.”

“What’s all the trillions for?” Out on the sea, Lex Loach and four other Stoke Pilgrims were riding in from the break. Loach, Mr. Scrote, Shrimp Chips, Squid Puppy, and Floathead, same as usual. They usually came up to the Pup-Tent for lunch. Delbert and Zep usually left before the Pilgrims got there. “Talk faster, Zep.”

“I’m telling you, dude. Say I’m interested in predicting or influencing the waves over the next few minutes. Waves don’t move all that fast, so anything that can influence the surf here in the next few minutes is going to depend on the surfspace values within a neighboring area of, say, one square kilometer. I’m only going to fine-grain down to the millimeter level, you wave, so we’re looking at, uh, one trillion sample points. Million squared. Don’t interrupt again, Delbert, or I won’t build you the chaotic attractor.”

“You’re going to build me a new stick?”

“I got the idea when you hypnotized me last night. Only I’d forgotten till just now. Ten fractal surf levels at a trillion sample points. We model that with an imipolex CA, we use a parallel nerve-patch modem outset unit to send the rider’s surfest desires down a co-ax inside the leash, the CA does a chaotic back simulation of the fractal inset, the board does a jiggly-doo and …”

“TSUUUNAMIIIIII!” screamed Delbert, leaping up on the bench and striking a boss surfer pose.

Just then Lex Loach and the Stoke Pilgrims appeared, up from the beach. Lex looked at Delbert with the usual contempt. “
Ride
that bench, gnarly geek. Been puffing some of Zep’s KJ?”

Lex Loach had been boss of Surf City as long as Delbert could remember. He lived here all year long, except when he went to snowboard at Big Bear in short pants and no shirt. Delbert thought he looked like a carrot. He was tall and thin like a carrot, narrow at the bottom and very wide at the shoulders; and like a carrot, his torso was ribbed and downy.

Loach’s aging sidekick, Mr. Scrote, darted forward and made a vicious grab for Delbert’s balls. Mr. Scrote was wrinkled and mean. He had bloodshot eyes and was half deaf from surfer’s ear, and all his jokes had to do with genital pain. Delbert fended him off with a kick that missed. “Couldn’t help myself,” said Mr. Scrote to the other Pilgrims as he danced back out of reach. “Dude looks soooo killer on his new stick.”

“I am getting a new stick,” cried Delbert furiously. “Chaos Attractor. Zep’s building it.”

“What does a junkie know about surf?” put in Shrimp Chips, a burly young guy with bleached hair. “Zep can’t even stand to take a bath.”

“Zep’s clean,” said Delbert loyally. “And he knows all about surf just from sitting here and watching.”

“Same way you know about girls, right, weenie?” said Loach. “Want to watch me and Jen get it on?”

Delbert leaped off the bench and butted his head right into the middle of the carroty washboard of Loach’s abdomen. Loach fell over backward, and suddenly there were kids everywhere, screaming, “It’s a fight!”

Zep pulled Delbert back before Loach could pulverize him. The Stoke Pilgrims lined up around their chief carrot, ready to charge.

“Wait a minute,” Delbert yelped, holding out his hand. “Let’s handle this like real men. Lex, we challenge you to a duel. Zep’ll have my new gun ready by tomorrow. If you and your boys can close us out, it’s yours. And if we win, you give me your wing squash turbo.”

Loach shook his head and Mr. Scrote spoke up for him, widening his bloodshot eyes. “I doubt Lex’d want any piece of trash you’d ride. No, Delbert, if you lose, you suck a sea anemone and tell Jen you’re a fag.” The Stoke Pilgrims’ laughter was like the barking of seals. Delbert’s tongue prickled.

“Tomorrow by the San Diablo N-plant where the surf’s the gnarliest,” said Lex Loach, heading into the Pup-Tent. “Slack tide, dudes. Be there or we’ll find you.”

Up on the cliff, the N-plant looked like a gray golf ball sinking into a sand trap. The cliff was overgrown with yellow ice plant whose succulent, radiation-warmed leaves were fat as drowned men’s fingers. A colonic loop of cooling pipe jagged down the cliff, out into the sea, and back up the cliff to the reactor. The beach was littered with fish killed by the reactor’s thermal pollution. Closer to the sea, the tide’s full moon low had exposed great beds of oversize sea anemones that were bright, mutated warm-water sports. Having your face pushed into one of them would be no joke.

“Trust me, bro,” said Zep. He was greasy and jittery. “You’ll sluice roosters in Loach’s face. No prob. And after this we stalk the big tournament moola.”

“The surf is mush, Zep. I know it’s a drag, bro, but be objective. Look the hell at the zon.” The horizon was indeed flat. Closer to shore were long rows of small, parallel lines where the dead sea’s ripples came limping in. Delbert was secretly glad that the contest might well be called off.

“No way,” shouted Zep, angrily brandishing the nylon case that held the new board. “All you gotta do is plug in your leash and put Chaos Attractor in the water. The surf will definitely rise, little dude.”

“It’s mush.”

“Only because
you
are. Dig it!” Zep grabbed his friend by the front of his brand new paisley wet suit and shook him. “You haven’t looked at my new stick!” Zep dropped to his knees and unzipped Chaos Attractor’s case. He drew out a long, grayish, misshapen board. Most of it seemed actually transparent, though there were some dark, right-angled shapes embedded in the thing’s center.

Delbert jerked back in horror. For this he’d given Zep two hundred dollars? All his saving for what looked like a dime store Styrofoam toy surfboard that a slushed druggie had doused in epoxy?

“It…it’s transparent?” said Delbert after a time. In the dull day’s light you could see Zep’s scalp through his no-color hair. Del had trusted Zep and Zep had blown it. It was sad.

“Does that embarrass you?” snarled Zep, sensing Delbert’s pity. “Is there something wrong with transparency? And screw your two hundred bucks ‘cause this stick didn’t cost me nothing. I spent your money on crank, mofo, on clean Hell’s Angels blow. What else, Delbert, who do you think I am? Yeah! Touch the board!”

Delbert stroked the surface of the board uncertainly. “It’s rough,” he said finally.

“Yeah!” Zep wanted to get the whole story out, how he’d immediately spent the money on crank, and how then in the first comedown’s guilt he’d laid meth on Cowboy Bob, a dope-starved biker who hung around the meth dealer’s. Zep had fed Cowboy Bob’s head so Bob’d take him out breaking and entering: First they hit the KZ Kustom Zurf Shop for a primo transparent surfboard blank, then they barreled Bob’s chopped hog up to Oakland to liberate imipolex from the I. G. Farben research labs in the wake of a diversionary firebomb, and then they’d done the rest of the speed and shot over the Bay to dynamite open the door of System Concepts and score a Cellular Automaton Machine, the CAM8, right, and by 3:00 A. M. Zep had scored the goods and spent the rest of the night wiring the CAM board into the imipolex-wrapped blank’s honeyheart with tiny wires connecting to the stick’s surface all over, and then finally at dawn Zep had gone in through the back window of a butcher shop and wedged the board into the huge vacuum meat packer there to vacuum-sputter the new stick’s finish up into as weird a fractal as a snowflake Koch curve or a rucked Sierpinski carpet. And now lame little Delbert is all worried and:

“Why’s it so rough?”

Zep took a deep breath and concentrated on slowing down his heartbeat. Another breath. “This stick, Del, it uses its fractal surface for a realtime surfspace simulation. The board’s surface is a fractal CA model of the sea, you wave?”

“Zep, what’s that gray thing in the middle like a shark’s skeleton? Loach is going to laugh at us.”

“Shut up about Loach,” snarled Zep, losing all patience once again. “Lex Loach is like a poisonous mutant warty sculpin choked by a plastic tampon insert at the mouth of an offshore toxic waste pipe, man, thrashing around and stinging everybody in his spastic nowhere death throes.”

“He’s standing right behind you.”

Zep spun around and saw that Delbert was more or less correct, given his tendency toward exaggeration. Loach was striding down the beach toward them, along with the four other Stoke Pilgrims. They were carrying lean, tapering sticks with sharp noses and foiled rails. Loach and Mr. Scrote wore lurid wet suits. The younger three had painted their bodies with Day-Glo thermopaints.

“Gonna shred you suckers!” yelled Loach.

“Stupid clones!” whooped Zep, lifting Chaos Attractor high overhead. “Freestyle rules!”

“What kind of weird joke is this?” asked Loach, eyeing the new stick.

“Care to try it out?”

“Maybe. I’m gonna win it anyway, right?”

Zep nodded, calm and scientist-like now that the action had finally begun. It was good to have real flesh-and-blood enemies to deal with. “Let me show you where to plug it in. This might sting a bit a first.”

He knelt down and began to brush sand from Loach’s ankle.

“What’re you doing?” Loach asked, jumping back when he saw Zep coming at him with a wire terminating in sharp pins.

“You need this special leash to ride the board,” Zep said. “Without human input, the board would go out of control. The thing is, the fractal surface writhes in a data-simulation altered by the leash input. These fang things are a parallel nerve-port, wave? It feeds into the CAM8 along with the fractal wave analyses, so the board knows what to do.”

Mr. Scrote gave Zep a sharp kick in the ribs. “You’re gonna stick that thing in his ankle, you junkie, and give him AIDS?”

Zep bared his teeth in a confused grin. “Just hold still, Lex. It doesn’t hurt. I’d like to see what you can do with it.”

Loach stepped well back. “You’re whacked, dude. You been over the falls one too many times. Your brain is whitewater. Yo, Delbert! See you out at the break. It’s flat now, but there’ll be peaks once the tide starts in—believe it!” Loach and the Stoke Pilgrims hit the mushy warm water and began paddling out.

Zep was still crouched over Chaos Attractor. He glanced slyly up at Delbert. “You ready?”

“No.”

“Look, Del, you and my stick have to go out there and show the guys how to carve.”

“No way.”

“Get rad. Be an adventurist. You’ll be part of the system, man. Don’t you remember how I explained about waves?”

“I don’t care about waves,” said little Delbert. “I want to go home. It’s stupid to think I would ever be a major surfer. Who talked me into this, anyway? Was it you?”

Zep stared out at the zon. Loach and the Stoke Pilgrims were bobbing on the mucky water, waiting for a set. Suddenly he frowned. “You know, Del, maybe it’s not such a great idea for you to use this board.”

“What do you mean? It’s my stick isn’t it? I gave you two hundred dollars.”

“You still don’t have the big picture. At any moment, the relevant sea-configuration is ten trillion bits of analog info, right? Which folds up to one point in the ten-trillion-dimensional surfspace. As the ocean dynamically evolves, the point traces out a trajectory. But Del! The
mind
, Del, the mind is meanwhile and always jamming in the infinite-dimensional
mindscape
. Mindscape being larger than surfspace, you wave. My good tool Chaos Attractor picks up what you’re looking for and sends tiny ripples out into the ocean, pulsing them just right, so that they cause interference way out there and bounce back where you want. The coupled system of board and rider in the mindscape are riding the surfspace. You sketch yourself into your own picture.”