Руди Рюкер: Inside Out

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.

"Please help me, sir," said the flame girl, her voice rough and skippy as an old LP. "I am of the folk, come down on the bolt. I need a flow to live on. When this fire goes out, I'm gone."

"I," said Rex. "You." He thought of Moses and the burning bush. "Are you a spirit?"

Tinkling laughter. "The folk are information patterns. I drift through the levels doing this and that. Can you lend me a body or two? I'll make it worth your while."

The rain was picking up, and the fire was dying out. A siren approached. The little figure's hot perfect face stared at Rex. She reached out towards him beseechingly.

"I have an idea," said Rex. "I'll put you in Candy… my wife. Just for a little while. Right now she's probably asleep, so she won't notice anyway. I live just over there… "

"Carry me in a coal," hissed the little voice.

Rex tried to pick up part of the burning heartwood, but it was all one piece. On a sudden inspiration, he drew out a Kool and lit it by holding it against the dying flames. He puffed once, getting it lit, and the elfgirl entered him.

It felt good, it felt tingly, it felt like being alive. Quick thin fractal pathways grew down his arms and legs, spidering out from his chest, where the girl—

"My name is Zee."

— had settled in.

"It's nice in here," said Zee, her voice subvocal in Rex's throat. "No need to introduce yourself, Rex, I'm reading your mind. I'm going to keep your body and give Candy to Alf." Rex's lips moved slightly as Zee spoke. The reality of this hit Rex — he was possessed! He began a howl of surprise, but Zee cut him off toot sweet. She took over his motor reflexes and began marching him home. Rex's nerves felt thick, coated, crustacean.

"Sorry to do this to you, Rex," said the voice, "but I really don't have a choice. It's the only way I can get rid of Alf, the little spirit who possesses me. He's been insisting I get him a human body. But I like you, so we'll put him in your wife instead of you."

Candy was stretched out on the couch, softly snoring. Rex put the Kool in his mouth and leaned over Candy so that the ash end was just inside her mouth. He blew as she inhaled. A tiny figure of smoke — a little man much, much smaller than Zee — twisted off the cigarette tip and disappeared into Candy's chest. Gazzzunk. She snorted and sat up, eyes unnaturally bright.

"So you're Rex?" It was Candy's voice, but huskier, and with a different pronunciation.

"Rex Redman. And you're in my wife Candy. We're both possessed, me by little Zee and she by smaller who? Who are you? You haven't hurt Candy have you?"

"Hi Zee. Tell him shut up, Candy's here asleep, and I'm Alf. Let's shake this meat, Zee." Candy/Alf stretched her arms and pushed out her chest. "Hmm." She undid her blouse and bra and examined her breasts with interest. Her motions were open and youthful, and her features had a new tautness. "Do you want to make love?"

"Yeah," said Rex/Zee. "Sure."

Up in their second-floor bedroom, the sex was more fun than it had been in quite a while. The only reason Candy kept bugging Rex about Marjorie was, Rex felt, because Candy wanted to be unfaithful herself. Lately she'd been sick of him. Pumping in and out, Rex wondered if this was adultery. It was Candy's body, but Candy's mind was asleep, or on hold, and, for his part, Zee was calling the shots so good Rex wanted them all: come shots, smack shots, booze shots in the sweaty night. Eventually Candy woke up halfway and was happy. It became almost a fourway scene.

The way Zee told it, flaked out on the mattress there, she came from a race of discorporated beings consisting of pure patterns of information. The folk. They could live at any size scale or, ideally, at several size scales at once. Each of the folk had a physically real ancestor on some level or another, but the originals were long lost in the endless mindgaming and switching of hosts. Before entering Rex's nervous system, Zee had been a pattern of air turbulence up in the sky, a pattern that had wafted out from the leaves of a virus-infested bamboo grove in Thailand. The virus — which had been Zee — had evolved out of a self-replicating crystalline clay structure in the ground, which had been Zee too.

Alf was a kind of parasite who'd just entered Zee recently. There were folk throughout the universe, and Alf had arrived in the form of a shower of cosmic rays. He'd latched right onto Zee. It had been his idea to get Zee to come down and possess a person — the folk didn't usually like to do that. Alf had gotten Zee to possess Rex so Rex would help put Alf into a person too. Zee was glad to get Alf out of her — she didn't like him.

Lying there spent, fondling Candy and listening to Zee in the dark, Rex began to think he was dreaming. Dreaming a factual dream of the folk who live in the world's patterns — live as clouds, as fires, as trees, as brooks, as people, as cells, as genes, as superstrings from dimension Z. Any type of ongoing process at all would do. Fractal; the word kept coming back. It meant something that is endlessly complex at every level — like a coastline, with its spits within inlets within bays; like a high-tree habitat where the thick branches keep merging to thicker ones, and the thin ones split and split.

"Would you really have died if I'd let your fire go out?" Rex asked. It was dawn and this was no dream.

"No," laughed Zee. "I'm a terrible liar. I would have gone down into the wood's grain-patterns, and then into the sugars of the sap. But I just had to get rid of Alf. And I like you, Rex. I was aiming for you when I rode the lightning down. You smelled interesting and… thick like extra space."

"You could smell me all the way up in the sky?"

"It's not really smelling. For us nothing's so far away, you know. Your whole notion of space and distances is… a kind of flat picture? The folk are much realer than that. We live in full fractal Hil-bert space. You think like a flat picture, but the paper, if you'll just look, is all bumpy like a moonscape of bristlebushes covered with fuzzy fleas. There's no fixed dimensions at all. Does it feel good when Alf and I do this?"

"Yes."

Candy's wordless smiling daze ended when the first rays of the sun came angling in the window. She jerked, rubbed her eyes, and groaned. "Rex, what have you been doing to me? I dreamed… " She tried to sit up and Alf wouldn't let her. Her eyes rolled. "There are things in us, Rex, it's real, I'm scared, I'm SCARED SCARED OOOOoooo—"

Her skin seemed to ridge up as Alf's tendrils clamped down. Her mouth snapped shut and then her face smoothed into an icky pixie grin. She got out of bed and dressed awkwardly. Rex didn't usually pay much attention to what women wore, but Candy's outfit today definitely did not look right. A cocktail dress tucked into a pair of jeans. Where did she think she was going so early?

"I'll call in sick," said Alf through Candy. "Just a minute." She went to the phone and tried to call the school where she worked. Alf didn't seem to realize it was summer vacation.

"Mommy's up!" shouted Griff, hearing the call.

"Where's breakfast?" demanded little Leda.

"LOOK OUT, KIDS!" shouted Rex. "MOMMY AND I HAVE BEEN TAKEN OVER BY—" Zee's clampdown hit him like a shot of animal tranquilizer.

"Just kidding," called Zee/Rex. The kids laughed. Daddy was wild. Zee/Rex went into the kitchen to look for food and Leda asked for breakfast again. "Feed yourself, grubber," mouthed Rex. Hungry. Zee had him brush past Griff and Leda and fill a bowl with milk, sugar, and three raw eggs. Zee/Rex leaned over the bowl and lapped the contents up.