Руди Рюкер - Master Of Space And Time

She laughed and patted my hand. "You see, Joe? It's not so bad to ask for simple things."

"Do you know what each person wished?"

"No, not anymore. While I was blunzed I knew, sort of. I sent my echowomen everywhere, like Alwin said I should. I made the Planck length big enough to cover the whole Earth, and I helped everyone make his or her wish."

"Do people know it was you? You'll be treated like a queen!"

"No, no. You know how small most of the echoes are. People couldn't see me. And I wouldn't want them to know it was me, because then they'd ask me to do it again."

"Yeah. And we can't do it again. There's only three colors of gluon, and each color only works once." An attractive young couple floated down out of the sky to sit at a table nearby. Glancing up, I could see a number of people flying around overhead. The power of flight seemed to be a fairly common wish.

"I wonder what Harry wished for," I mused. "Do you know?"

"I meant to check, but he was already gone by the time I got to him. He was like you — he knew right away he'd been blunzed, and he acted on it."

"He wasn't in Rahway anymore?"

"He left our space, so far as I could tell. Look at those two!"

Another couple had joined the crowd at the cafe — a beautiful red-haired woman and a man who was only three inches high. The man was perched in the redhead's decolletage like a prince on a balcony. It looked like a good place to be.

More and more people were out in the street now, everyone chattering and looking around to see what the others had done. There were many more beautiful men and women than was normal for New Brunswick; beauty was obviously a wish even more popular than flight. Lots of people wore jewels as well, and I noticed several men drawing out big wads of cash.

"All my money's going to be worthless," I suddenly realized. "Everybody and his brother must have asked for a million dollars."

"Yes," said Nancy. "But we've still got our penthouse."

"But what are we going to live on? I can't go back to working at Softech."

"Go back in business with Harry," suggested Nancy. "If you can find him."

"Yeah, that's a thought." I was distracted again by a passerby, this one a man running at what must have been thirty miles per hour. "Look at that guy go!"

"A lot of beauties, a lot of millionaires, a lot of great athletes," said Nancy. "Can I have some more wine, please?"

A giant breast rolled past, followed by a man with four arms. Shiny cars — antique and futuristic alike — buzzed this way and that. In a doorway across the street lay a man slumped in some interminable ecstasy. In the distance I heard music playing.

"How about Alwin Bitter? What did he wish for?"

Nancy's eyes danced above her tilted wineglass. "Alwin — Alwin is an altruist," she said, setting down her glass. "He wished for this all to happen."

"But the blunzer made itself. It was a cause-and-effect loop with Harry and me in it."

"Even so, you and Harry and the loop had to come from somewhere. Alwin wished you into existence."

"I don't believe that, Nancy, do you?"

"I don't know. What's important is that now everyone will be happy for quite a while, and maybe later — even if the changes all wear off — people will still remember how to be happy. I thought it was worth a try."

A machine that seemed to be a flying saucer zipped down the street and hovered by our cafe. A hatch opened and family of little green "Martians" hopped out. They talked with New Jersey accents.

"This sure is fun, Nancy. Did you happen to notice what Serena wished for?"

"A pet rabbit and a box of candy."

"Sweet. Maybe we better fly down to Princeton and pick her up. You can still fly, can't you?"

"Sure. You'll feel better to me with all that girl fat gone." Nancy reached under the table and squeezed my thigh. I drank a little more wine and smiled at her. Everyone in sight looked happy. It was like some magic Christmas party.

I waved the cafe owner over for the check. "How much?"

"I dunno. You got a lot of money, don't you?"

"Sure. Here, take a hundred." I fished the bill out of the purse I'd been using and handed it over.

The cafe owner looked at the bill with a frown. "Is this real?"

"Was the food?" I countered.

"Okay, a hundred," grumbled the owner. "But I don't like it. Why didn't I think of asking for money instead of a new restaurant?"

"You're better off with the restaurant," I assured him. "There's going to be inflation like you won't believe." The whole financial system was going to have to be reworked. It was going to be a mess. People wouldn't stay happy for long. The cafe owner stomped off to the lovers from the sky and charged them a cool grand for two cups of coffee. "Maybe you should have tried to change human nature," I told Nancy as we stood up. "Make people nicer and more generous."

"Some people did wish that for themselves," Nancy responded. "There'll be a lot of saints around."

A man in the shape of a motorcycle went zooming past with a fur-covered woman on his saddle. Glancing after them, I noticed a building made entirely of meat: a skin-covered orifice building with people plunging in and out of its portals. I was beginning to wish for a less frantic scene.

"Well, come on, Nancy, lie down and —"

Two hands suddenly appeared in front of me. Familiar-looking hands. They grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me into the unknown.

29. Rudy Rucker is Watching You

You could say that everything went black, or you could say that everything went white. I was… elsewhere.

But not alone.

"Hey, Fletcher," came the familiar voice, "you have to help me."

"Harry? Where are we?"

"Superspace, naturally."

"What's superspace?" I felt around for my body and couldn't find it.

"Thoughtland, Fletch, the cosmos. Pure mentation. Abstract possibility. Infinite dimensions. The class of all sets. God's mind. The pre-geometric substratum. Hilbert space. Penultimate reality. White…"

"Cut the crap, Harry. I was having a good time till you butted in. Put me back."

"You don't want to rush back there. This is much cooler. This is eternity, Joe, this is the secret of life."

"Oh come on, Harry. I'm not interested in the secret of life. I just want to go home and be with Nancy. She and Sondra are going to be at Alwin Bitter's."

"Hold it." Contrasts appeared in the black-or-white void around me. Streamers, clumps, hazy patches. "Can you see it now?"

"I can't see anything. I might as well be looking at clouds."

"You see clouds? Wait." The fog folded in on itself. Colors appeared. Definite forms began to congeal. One of them was Harry, and one of them was me.

"That's better," I said, tentatively moving my arm. The arm disappeared.

"Your arm's in another dimension now," Harry explained. "We're in a three-dimensional cross section of infinite-dimensional superspace. If you try, you can get your arm back."

I tried. And then my arm was back, though the hand was still missing. I examined the stub where my arm ended. It looked as if my hand had been chopped right off. I could see the bone and its marrow, the muscle tissues, and the round mouths of the veins. Yet no blood was spurting out.

"Flip your wrist," urged Harry.

I flipped my wrist some funny way, and suddenly my hand was back. This was pretty interesting. I gave Harry's head a push, and watched it disappear. Peering down into his neck, I could see the insides of his lungs and stomach. But then his head snapped back.

"Where's our universe?" I asked Harry. Our two bodies seemed quite definite now, though nothing else did. Everything else was just shifting patterns of colored light.

"It's that spot there," said Harry, pointing at a small, egg-shaped blob of hazy white.