Surfing the Gnarl (10 page)

Inevitably, some of the Christian Party congressmen tried to have Denny and Silke enjoined from making an XVID broadcast from aboard the space shuttle, which was, after all, government property. But for 5 percent of the gross, a fast-thinking lawyer was able to convince a
hastily convened Federal court that, insofar as
Rapture in Space
was being codecast to the XVID dish and cabled thence only to paying subscribers, the show was a form of constitutionally protected free speech, in no way different from a live-sex show in a private club.

So the great day came. Naked save for a drenching of Space Rapture eroscent, Silke and Denny waved goodbye and stepped into their shuttle-box. It was shaped like a two-meter-thick letter D, with a rounded floor, and with a big picture window set into the flat ceiling. A crane loaded the shuttlebox into the bay of the space shuttle along with some satellites, missiles, building materials, etc. A worker dogged all the stuff down, and then the baydoors closed. Silke and Denny wedged themselves into their puttylike floor. Blast off—roar, shudder, push, clunk, roar some more.

Then they were floating. The baydoors swung open, and the astronauts got to work with their retractable arms and space tools. Silke and Denny were busy, too. They set up the cameras, and got their little antenna locked in on the XVID dish. They started broadcasting right away— some of the
Rapture in Space
subscribers had signed up for the whole live protocols in addition to the ninety-minute show that Silke and Denny were scheduled to put on in …

“Only half an hour, Denny,” said Silke. “Only thirty minutes till we go on.” She was crouched over the sink, douching, and vacuuming the water back up. As fate would have it, she was menstruating. She hadn't warned anyone about it.

Denny felt cold and sick to his stomach. XVID had scheduled their show right after take-off because other-wise—with all the news going on—people might forget about it. But right now he didn't feel like fuffing at all, let
alone getting under. Every time he touched something, or even breathed, his whole body moved.

“All clean now,” sang Silke. “No one can tell, not even you.”

There was a rapping on their window—one of the astronauts, a jolly jock woman named Judy. She grinned through her helmet and gave them a high sign. The astronauts thought the
Rapture in Space
show was a great idea; it would make people think about them in new, more interesting ways.

“I talked to Judy before the launch,” said Silke, waving back. “She said to watch out for the rebound.” She floated to Denny and began fondling him. “Ten minutes, starman.”

Outside the window, Judy was a shiny form against Earth's great marbled curve.
The clouds,
Denny realized,
I'm seeing the clouds from on top.
His genitals were warming to Silke's touch. He tongued a snap crystal out of a crack between his teeth and bit it open. Inhale. The clouds. Silke's touch. He was hard, thank God, he was hard. This was going to be all right.

The cameras made a noise to signal the start of the main transmission, and Denny decided to start by planting a kiss on Silke's mouth. He bumped her shoulder and she started to drift away. She tightened her grip on his penis and led him along after her. It hurt, but not too unpleasantly. She landed on her back, on the padded floor, and guided Denny right into her vagina. Smooth and warm. Good. Denny pushed into her and …
rebound.

He flew, rapidly and buttocks first, up to the window. He had hold of Silke's armpit and she came with him. She got her mouth over his penis for a second, which
was good, but then her body spun around, and she slid toothrakingly off him, which was very bad.

Trying to hold a smile, Denny stole a look at the clock. Three minutes.
Rapture in Space
had been on for three minutes now. Eighty-seven minutes to go.

It was another bruising half hour or so until Denny and Silke began to get the hang of spacefuffing. And then it was fun. For a long time they hung in midair, with Denny in Silke, and Silke's legs around his waist, just gently jogging, but moaning and throwing their heads around for the camera. Actually, the more they hammed it up, the better it felt. Autosuggestion.

Denny stared and stared at the clouds to keep from coming, but finally he had to pull out for a rest. To keep things going they did rebounds for a while. Silke would lie spread-eagled on the floor, and Denny would kind of leap down on her; both of them adjusting their pelvises for a bullseye. She'd sink into the cushions, then rebound them both up. It got better and better. Silke curled up into a ball and impaled herself on Denny's shaft. He wedged himself against the wall with his feet and one hand and used his other hand to spin her around and around, bobbin on his spindle. Denny lay on the floor and Silke did leaps onto him. They kissed and licked each other all over, and from every angle. The time was almost up.

For the finale, they went back to midair fuffing; arms and legs wrapped around each other; one camera aimed at their faces, and one camera aimed at their genitalia. They hit a rhythm where they always pushed just as hard as each other and it action/reaction cancelled out, hard and harder, with big Earth out the window, yes, the air full of their smells, yes, the only sound
the sound of their ragged breathing, yes, now, NOW AAAHHHHHHH!!!!

Denny kind of fainted there, and forgot to slide out for the come-shot. Silke went blank, too, and they just floated, linked like puzzle pieces for five or ten minutes. It made a great finale for the
Rapture in Space
show, really much more convincing than the standard sperm spurt.

Two days later, and they were back on Earth, with the difference that they were now, as Denny had hoped, cashy and starry. People recognized them everywhere, and looked at them funny, often asking for a date. They did some interviews, some more endorsements and they got an XVID contract to host a monthly spacefuff variety show.

Things were going really good until Denny got a tumor.

“It's a dooky little kilp down in my bag,” he complained to Silke. “Feel it.”

Sure enough, there was a one-centimeter lump in Denny's scrotum. Silke wanted him to see a doctor, but he kept stalling. He was afraid they'd run a blood test and get on his case about drugs. Some things were still illegal.

A month went by and the lump was the size of an orange.

“It's so gawky you can see it through my pants,” complained Denny. “It's giga ouch and I can't cut a vid this way.”

But he still wouldn't go to the doctor. What with all the snap he could buy, and with his new cloud telescope, Denny didn't notice what was going on in his body most of the time. He was happy to miss the next few XVID dates. Silke hosted them alone.

Three more months and the lump was like a small watermelon. When Denny came down one time and noticed that the tumor was moving he really got worried

“Silke! It's alive! The thing in my bag is alive! Aaauuugh!”

Silke paid a doctor two thousand dollars to come to their apartment. The doctor was a bald, dignified man with a white beard. He examined Denny's scrotum for a long time, feeling, listening, and watching the tumor's occasional twitches. Finally he pulled the covers back over Denny and sat down. He regarded Silke and Denny in silence for quite some time.

“Decode!” demanded Denny. “What the kilp we got running here?”

“You're pregnant,” said the doctor. “Four months into it, I'd say.”

The quickening fetus gave another kick and Denny groaned. He knew it was true. “But how?”

The doctor steepled his fingers. “I … I saw
Rapture in Space.
There were certain signs to indicate that your uh partner was menstruating?”

“Check.”

“Menstruation, as you must know, involves the discharge of the unfertilized ovum along with some discarded uterine tissues. I would speculate that after your ejaculation the ovum became wedged in your meatus. The slit at the tip of your penis. It is conceivable that under weightless conditions the sperm's flagella could have driven the now-fertilized ovum into your vas deferens. The ovum implanted itself in the bloodrich tissues there and developed into a fetus.”

“I want an abortion.”

”No!” protested Silke. “That's our baby, Denny. You're already almost half done carrying it. It'll be lovely for us … and just think of the publicity!”

“Uh …” said Denny, reaching for his bag of dope.

“No more drugs,” said the doctor, snatching the bag. “Except for the ones I give you.” He broke into a broad, excited smile. “This will make medical history.”

And indeed it did. The doctor designed Denny a kind of pouch in which he could carry his pregnant scrotum, and Denny made a number of video appearances, not all of them X-rated. He spoke on the changing roles of the sexes, and he counted the days till delivery. In the public's mind, Denny became the symbol of a new recombining of sex with life and love. In Denny's own mind, he finally became a productive and worthwhile person. The baby was a flawless girl, delivered by a modified Caesarian section.

Sex was never the same again.

Dennis Poague, a.k.a. Sta-Hi, was the inspiration for this story; he really did spend his inheritance on a phoning machine. I wrote this story shortly after seeing the IMAX movie
The Dream Is Alive,
which featured pictures of the sexy astronaut Judy Resnick sleeping in zero-gee. The
Challenger
shuttle blew up with Judy in it a few months later, definitively deep-sixing whatever slim chance “Rapture in Space” had of getting into a normal SF magazine.

Semiotext[e]
SF was an anthology which Peter Lamborn Wilson and I coedited. Originally we'd planned
to call the book
Bad Brains,
but Peter felt doing this would conflict with the band of the same name. At the time, Peter rented an apartment upstairs from the apartment of my friend Eddie Marritz in New York City, which is how I happened to meet him. Eddie appears in the story “Tales of Houdini,” in the memoir “Drugs and Live Sex—NYC 1980,” and in the novel
Master of Space and Time.

A funny Dennis story. When we moved to San Jose, it turned out Dennis lived here, so we started getting together a lot. I was supposed to give a reading at an annual San Jose SF convention called Bay Con in 1987, and the day before the reading I was in a bicycle accident and had a huge black eye. I didn't want to appear in public looking so bad, so I gave Dennis my manuscript of
As Above, So Below
and told him to do the reading. I figured he would enjoy this free taste of fame, and I was right—remember that one of
Software
Sta-Hi's big obsessions is how to become famous.

Although I'd already made friends with the San Francisco SF writers, none of the fans knew at Bay Con knew what I looked like, so when Dennis appeared in a corduroy jacket and read my story, they assumed he was me. The funny thing was, when I came and did my own reading at Bay Con a year later, several people came up to me and said, “You know, I saw your reading last year and it was wonderful. You made the material so fresh and new … it was like you'd never even read it before!”

RUDY RUCKER INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

Your new book,
Nested Scrolls,
is an autobiography. Does that mean you've run out of ideas?

I feel like I always have new ideas, but certainly some of them are beginning to look a little familiar. I get SF ideas by extrapolating, from speculating, and from imagining surreal juxtapositions.

In 2008, I had a cerebral hemorrhage—a vein burst in my brain and I nearly died. Coming out of that, I decided that I'd better write my autobio while I still had time.

One of my goals in writing
Nested Scrolls
was to get an idea of the story arc of my life—as if I were looking back on a novel. My conclusions? I searched for ultimate reality, and I found contentment in creativity. I tried to scale the heights of science, and I found my calling in mathematics and in science fiction. I was a loner, I found love, I became a family man. When I was a kid, I felt like an ugly duckling, and over the years I grew into grace— thanks in large measure to my dear wife, Sylvia.

Aren't novels a rather messy exercise for a mathematician? Do you have the whole thing in RAM when you start, or do you make it up as you go along?

In some ways mathematics resembles novel-writing. In math you start with some oddball axioms and see what theorems you can deduce from them. You have very little control over the course that your reasoning takes. In novel-writing, you start with an outré scenario and see what kind of plot emerges from the situation. Here again, the details of your work tends to come as something of a surprise.

In science fiction, it's useful to be able to think logically, which is something that comes naturally for a mathematician.

But of course SF novels are more than logical exercises, and that's why I love writing them. I like the possibility of expressing myself at various levels—sometimes it isn't until later that I realize something I've written has to do with some deep obsession of mine.

Frek and the Elixir
has been described as a YA (young adult) novel. Is this because it has a kid as a protagonist, or because only kids can understand it?

Tor didn't actually market this book as YA, although that might have been a good idea. When YA books catch on, they can sell very well. But in
Frek,
I wasn't fully focused on teenage problems, as is usually the case in YA books. Although the thirteen-year-old Frek has some abandonment issues with his father, he's also dealing with the social issue of many species becoming extinct.

In order to give Frek and the
Elixir
a classy feel, I modeled the book on the “monomyth” template described in Joseph Campbell's classic
The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Campbell's archetypal myth includes seventeen stages. By combining two pairs of stages, I ended up with fifteen chapters for
Frek.