Rudy Rucker
Inside Out
Rudy Rucker is a mathematician who writes books of popular science and science fiction. His SF swings widely and freely into the surreal and metaphysical upon occasion. In this story, his future is a fantasy land and his science is transformed by metaphor. In direct rebellion against the tradition of fantasy world-building, Rucker doesn't just paint the world of the story with a broad brush; he paints it with a broom. He simultaneously denies the necessity of rationalizing the world of the story while invoking the standard scientific technique of oversimplifying for the sake of mathematical argument (in this case involving topology — an interesting contrast to R. A Lafferty's story (pp.375-88). Fast and loose, wild-and-crazy fantastic, that's Rudy Rucker.
You might think of Killeville as a town where every building is a Pizza Hut. Street after street of Pizza Huts, each with the same ten toppings and the same mock mansard roof — the same shiny zero repeated over and over like same tiles in a pavement, same pixels in a grid, same blank neurons in an imbecile's brain.
The Killevillers — the men and women on either side of the Pizza Hut counters — see nothing odd about the boredom, the dodecaduplication. They are ugly people, cheap and odd as K-Mart dolls. The Killeville gene pool is a dreg from which all fine vapors evaporate, a dreg so small that some highly recessive genes have found expression. Killeville is like New Zealand with its weirdly unique fauna.
Walking down a Killeville street, you might see the same hideous platypus face three times in ten minutes.
Of course a platypus is beautiful… to another platypus. The sound that drifts out of Killeville's country clubs and cocktail parties is smug and well-pleased. It's a sound like locusts, or like feasting geese. "This is good food," they say, "Have you tried the spinach?" The words don't actually matter; the nasal buzzing honk of the vowels conveys it alclass="underline" We're the same. We're the same.
Unless you were born there, Killeville is a horrible place to live. Especially in August. In August the sky is a featureless gray pizza. The unpaved parts of the outdoors are choked with thorns and poison ivy. Inside the houses, mold grows on every surface, and fleas seethe in the wall-to-wall carpeting. In the wet grayness, time seems to have stopped. How to kill it?
One can watch TV, go to a restaurant, see a movie, or drink in a bar — though none of these pastimes is fun in Killeville. The TV channels are crowded with evangelists so stupid that it isn't even funny. All the restaurants are, of course, Pizza Huts. And if all the restaurants are Pizza Huts, then all the movie theaters are showing Rambo and the Care Bears movie. MADD is very active in Killeville, and drinking in bars is risky. Sober, vigilant law-enforcement officers patrol the streets at every hour.
For all this, stodgy, nasty Killeville is as interesting a place as can be found in our universe. For whatever reason, it's a place where strange things keep happening… very strange things. Look at what happened to Rex and Candy Redman in August, 198-.
Rex and Candy Redman: married twelve years, with two children aged eight and eleven. Rex was dark and skinny; Candy was a plump, fairskinned redhead with blue eyes. She taught English at Killeville Middle School. Rex had lost his job at GE back in April. Rex had been a CB radio specialist at the Killeville GE plant — the job was the reason the Redmans had moved to Killeville in the first place. When Rex got laid off, he went a little crazy. Instead of selling the house and moving — which is what he should have done — he got a second mortgage on their house and started a business of his own: Redman Novelties & Magic, Wholesale & Retail. So far it hadn't clicked. Far from it. The Redmans were broke and stuck in wretched Killeville. They avoided each other in the daytime, and in the evenings they read magazines.
Rex ran his business out of a run-down building downtown, a building abandoned by its former tenants, a sheet music sales corporation called, of all things, Bongo Fury. Bongo Fury had gotten some federal money to renovate the building next door, and were letting Rex's building moulder as some kind of tax dodge. Rex had the whole second floor for fifty dollars a month. There was a girl artist who rented a room downstairs; she called it her studio. Her name was Marjorie. She thought Rex was cute. Candy didn't like the situation.
"How was Marjorie today?" Candy asked, suddenly looking up from her copy of People. It was a glum Wednesday night.
"Look, Candy, she's just a person. I do not have the slightest sexual interest in Marjorie. Even if I did, do you think I'd be stupid enough to start something with her? She'd be upstairs bothering me all the time. You'd find out right away… life would be even more of a nightmare."
"It just seems funny," said Candy, a hard glint in her eye. "It seems funny, that admiring young girl alone with you in an abandoned building all day. It stinks! Put yourself in my shoes! How would you like it?"
Rex went out to the kitchen for a glass of water. "Candy," he said, coming back into the living room. "Just because you're bored is no reason to start getting mean. Why can't you be a little more rational?"
"Yeah?" said Candy. She threw her magazine to the floor. "Yeah? Well I've got a question for you. Why don't you get a JOB?"
"I'm trying, hon, you know that." Rex ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "And you know I just sent the catalogs out. The orders'll be pouring in soon."
"BULL!" Candy was escalating fast. "GET A JOB!"
"Ah, go to hell, ya goddamn naggin… " Rex moved rapidly out of the room as he said this.
"THAT'S RIGHT, GET OUT OF HERE!"
He grabbed his Kools pack and stepped out on the front stoop. A little breeze tonight; it was better than it had been. Good night to take a walk, have a cigarette, bring home a Dr. Pepper, and fool around in his little basement workshop. He had a new effect he was working on. Candy would be asleep on the couch before long; it was her new dodge to avoid going to bed with him.
Walking towards the 7-Eleven, Rex thought about his new trick. It was a box called Reverse that was supposed to turn things into their opposites. A left glove into a right glove, a saltshaker into a pepper grinder, a deck of cards into a Bible, a Barbie doll into a Ken doll. Reverse could even move a coffee cup's handle to its inside. Of course all the Reverse action could be done by sleight of hand — the idea was to sell the trapdoored Reverse box with before-and-after props. But now, walking along, Rex remembered his math and tried to work out what it would be like if Reverso were for real. What if it were possible, for instance, to turn things inside out by inverting in a sphere, turning each radius vector around on itself, sending a tennis ball's fuzz to its inside, for instance. Given the right dimensional flow, it could be done…
As Rex calmed himself with thoughts of math, his senses opened and took in the night. The trees looked nice, nice and black against the citylit gray sky. The leaves whispered on a rising note. Storm coming; there was heat lightning in the distance and thundermutter. Buddaboombabububu. The wind picked up all of a sudden; fat rain started spitting; and then KCRAAACK! there was a blast to Rex's right like a bomb going off! Somehow he'd felt it coming, and he jerked just the right way at just the right time. Things crashed all around him — what seemed like a whole tree. Sudden deaf silence and the crackling of flames.
Lightning had struck a big elm tree across the street from him; struck it and split it right down the middle. Half the tree had fallen down all around Rex, with heavy limbs just missing him on either side.
Shaky and elated, Rex picked his way over the wood to look at the exposed flaming heart of the tree. Something funny about the flame. Something very strange indeed. The flames were in the shape of a little person, a woman with red eyes and trailing limbs.