Руди Рюкер: Inside Out

There were four strange cars in front of his house. A rusty pickup, a beetle, an MG, and a Jap pickup. Rex knew the MG was Roland Brody's, but who the hell were those other people?

There was a man sitting on Rex's porch steps, a redneck who worked at the gas station. He smiled thinly and patted the spot on the porch next to him.

"Hydee. Ah'm Jody. And Ah believe yore her old man. Poor son. Hee hee."

"This isn't right."

Another man hollered out the front door, a banker platypus in his white undershirt and flipperlength black socks. "Get some brew, Jodih, and we'll all go back for seconds! She goin' strong!"

Laughter drifted down from the second floor. The phone was ringing.

Rex staggered about on the sidewalk there, in the hot sun, reeling under the impact of all this nightmare. What could he do? Candy had flipped, she was doing it with every guy she vaguely even knew! A Plymouth van full of teenage boys pulled into Rex's drive. He recognized the driver from church, but the boy didn't recognize Rex.

"Is old lady Redman still up there putting out?" asked the callow, lightly mustached youth.

Rex put his briefcase down on the ground and took out the cumberquark. "You better get out of here, kid. I'm Mr. Redman."

The van backed up rapidly and drove off. Rex could hear the excited boys whooping and laughing. Jody smiled down at him from the porch. Standing there in the high-noon moment, Rex could hear moans from upstairs. His wife; his wife having an orgasm with another man. This was just so—

"Poor Rex," said Zee. "That Alf is awful. He's not even from Earth."

"Shut up, you bitch," said Rex, starting up the steps.

"You gonna try and whup me?" Jody's hands were large and callused. He was ready for a fight. In Jody's trailerpark circles, fighting went with sex.

Rex spread the cumberquark out to the size of a washing machine, and cut off its rotation. There was a lot of noise in his head: thumps and jabber. Jody rose up into a crouch. Rex lunged forward, spreading the cumberquark just a bit wider. For a frozen second there, the outer sphere surrounded Jody, and Rex cut the hyperflow on.

The surface was opaque fractal fuzz. You wouldn't have known someone was inside, if it hadn't been for the wah-wah-wah sound of Jody's screams, chopped into pulses by the hyperflow. The cumber-quark rested solidly on the hole it had cut into the porch steps.

"You're next, man," Rex yelled to the platypus man looking out the front door. "I'm going to kill you, you preppy bastard!" With rapid movements of his bill and flippers, the banker got in his black Toyota truck and left. Rex turned Jody off to see what was what.

Not right. Edge-on to all normal dimensions, Jody was an annular cut-out, a slice of Halloween pumpkin. Rex eased him through another quarter turn and Jody was back on the steps. The cumberquark had stayed good and steady through all this — everything was back where it had started.

"How did it look, Jody?" Rex's teeth were chattering.

"Unh." For gasping Jody, Rex was no longer a person but rather a force of nature. Jody moved slowly down the steps talking to himself. "No nothin' all inside out mah haid up mah butt just for snatch man god—"

Rex shrank the cumberquark down a bit as Jody drove off. The VW and the MG were still there. How could Roland have done this to him? And who was the fourth guy?

The fourth guy was the real one, the lover a husband never sees. As Rex entered his house, the fourth man ran out the back door, looped around the house, and took off in his bug. Let him go. Rex went upstairs, Roland Brody was sitting on the edge of Rex and Candy's bed looking chipper.

"Damn, Rex! I didn't know Candy had it in her. I mean to tell you!" Roland fished his underpants oft" the floor and pulled them on. He was an old friend, an utterly charming man, tall and twitchy and with a profile like Thomas Jefferson on the nickel. A true Virginia gentleman. He had a deprecating way of turning everything into a joke. Even now, it was hard to be angry with him. The VW's popping faded, and Rex sank down into a chair. He was trembling all over. The cumberquark nestled soothingly in his lap.

Candy had the sheet pulled all the way up to her nose. Her big blue eyes peered over the top. "Don't leave, Roland, I'm scared of what he'll do. Can you forgive me, Rex? Alf made me do it."

"Who's this fellow?" asked Roland, tucking the tail of his button-down shirt into his black pants. "Was he the guy in the VW?"

"You're a bastard to have done it too, Roland," said Rex.

"Hell, Rex. Wouldn't you?"

The room reeked of sex. The jabbering was still in Rex's head — a sound like a woman talking fast. All of a sudden he didn't know what he was doing. He stretched the cumberquark out big and stopped and started it, turning big chunks of the room inside out. Part of the chair, circles of the floor, Candy's dresser-top, a big piece of mattress. Roland tried to grab Rex, and Rex turned Roland's forearm into pulp that fell to the floor. Candy was screaming bloody murder. Rex advanced on her, chunking the cumberquark on and off like a holepuncher, eating up their defiled bed. The womanvoice in his head was coming through Rex's mouth.

"Better get out of her, Alf, better get out or your bod is gone, you crooked hiss from outspace, Alf, I'll chunk you down, man, better split Alf, better go or—"

"Stop!" yelled Candy. "Rex please stop!" Rex made the cumber-quark go matter-transparent, and he slid it up over her legs. Candy's face got that pixie look and Alf spoke.

"I'm only having fun," he said. "Leave me alone, jerk, I'm your wife. I'm in here to stay."

Then Rex knew what to do, he knew it like a math problem. He thought it fast with Zee, and she said yes.

Rex shrank the cumberquark real small and put it in his pocket. Poor Roland had collapsed on the floor. He was bleeding to death. Rex tied off Roland's armstub with his necktie.

"Sorry, Roland. I'll drive you to the hospital, man."

"Damn, Rex, damn. Hurry."

"That's right," said Alf/Candy. "Get out of here and leave me alone."

The hospital wasn't far. Rex dropped Roland at the emergency door and went back home. Instead of going in the front door he went in the basement door to sit in his study. There was no use talking to Candy before he got rid of Alf.

He took the cumberquark out of his pocket and set it down on his desk. Small, fast, flowy. He leaned over it and breathed. Hot bright Zee rode his breath out of his body and into the cumberquark. She could live there as well as in Rex. The little sphere lifted off Rex's desk and buzzed around the study like a housefly. Zee had a way of pulsing its flow off and on to convert some of its four-D momentum into antigravity. Now she stopped the quark's flow entirely and inflated it out through Rex so that it held all of him except his feet. Rex hopped into the air, up into the big light bubble. It stuttered on when he was all in.

Rex's sense inputs became a flicker. His room, his body, his room, his body, his room, his body… In between the two three-D views were two prospects on hyperspace: ana and kata, black and white, heaven and hell. Room, ana, body, kata, room… The four images were shuffled together seamlessly, but only the room view mattered right now.

Zee shrank the cumberquark down to fly-size again. Rex felt the antigravity force as a jet from his spine. Thanks to the way Zee was pulsing the hyperflow, there was plenty of fresh air. They looped the loop, got a fix on things, and space-curved their way upstairs.

Candy/Alf didn't notice them at first. She was lying still, staring at the ceiling. Rex/Zee hovered over her and then, before the woman could react, they zoomed down at her, shrinking small enough to enter her nose.