Read Online Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rudy Rucker
Tags: Science-Fiction, cyberpunk
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don’t need a machine, no heap of glass and wire. I’m just going to walk out on the bridge towards the castle. I’ll stop. Out there, in the wind, one needs not choose this bank or that. There are other alternatives.
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Note on “Schrödinger’s Cat”
Written in Spring, 1979.
Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact , March, 1981.
My family and I lived in Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980. I was there on a two-year grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The grant came through just as I was losing my first teaching job in Geneseo (a.k.a. Wankato, a.k.a. Bata). My formal duties in Heidelberg were zero: I was given a soundproofed office and a typewriter. As well as doing research on Georg Cantor’s theories of infinities, I spent a lot of my time writing science-fiction. At this point in my career I didn’t know that I would be able to complete and sell novels, so I put a great deal of energy into writing stories.
“Schrödinger’s Cat” was inspired by my studies of numerous papers on quantum mechanics and the nature of time in journals like Philosophy of Science . The second diagram for this story seems to suggest an interesting new result: that a time-reversing mirror would have to spatially mirror-reverse objects as well. “By rights this should have been an important scientific paper …”
Analog editor Stanley Schmidt had some doubts about the legitimacy of the mass-energy conversion processes taking place at the surface of the phase-mirrors, but I placated him by saying the phase-mirror was made of “quarkonium.” Since quarks were then at the edge of scientific knowledge, quarkonium was a handy catch-all magic-maker akin to the “radioactivity” used by 1940s SF writers.
The seed for this story was a drawing I made for my cheerfully horrified children of a Santa Claus with a thousand heads, answering phone-calls from every boy and girl in the world at once.
Sufferin’ Succotash
She was big. Fine big legs and white feathers glued all over her head. I had to have a piece of that. She brought me another bowl of slop and I gave her a thousand credit note. “Keep the change, baby.” That made three. She dimpled and sat down across from me.
“You’re beachy.” Looking me over. Charlie and I had only been out of the Regulator for a month, but I was back up to 150 keys already. I had an exoskeleton with gold chasing and rubies at the joints.
“I’m fat and I’m rich,” I said, stating the obvious. “And you’ve got something I want.” I stared at her hungrily. Those white feathers on the bare scalp were a perfect touch.
She signaled the other waitress to cover for her. I’d set the hook. She rested her big breasts on her folded arms and leaned across the table. “Why you spoon so hard? Soliton flange?”
“I’ve always been hungry, baby. Always. I lost my mother when I was four.”
She cooed sympathetically, and I decided to whip a little more out of it. “She was a juicer. She’d lock me and the dog in and go out for the night. One night she didn’t come back. It was a week before the landlord happened to open up our apartment. There wasn’t much of Poochy left …”
“You poor slogger.” Three thousand credits and she didn’t mind if I’d eaten a live dog. But still, “Why you not dial the food-tap?”
“This was back in 2020, honey. You had to go out to get food. They had stores.”
She made an O of her bright yellow lips, flexing her juicy tongue. “But you’re still mix and match!”
“You’re as young as you feel,” I said vaguely. Right now I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get some meat. I still couldn’t believe I’d gone to so much trouble to end up in a future where there was nothing to eat but processed algae. I had half a billion credits and I couldn’t score anything but veggies.
I looked at the room around us. You could eat for free at home, but people still liked to come out. They had some noise they called music, and
============
Note on “Schrödinger’s Cat”
Written in Spring, 1979.
Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact , March, 1981.
My family and I lived in Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980. I was there on a two-year grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The grant came through just as I was losing my first teaching job in Geneseo (a.k.a. Wankato, a.k.a. Bata). My formal duties in Heidelberg were zero: I was given a soundproofed office and a typewriter. As well as doing research on Georg Cantor’s theories of infinities, I spent a lot of my time writing science-fiction. At this point in my career I didn’t know that I would be able to complete and sell novels, so I put a great deal of energy into writing stories.
“Schrödinger’s Cat” was inspired by my studies of numerous papers on quantum mechanics and the nature of time in journals like Philosophy of Science . The second diagram for this story seems to suggest an interesting new result: that a time-reversing mirror would have to spatially mirror-reverse objects as well. “By rights this should have been an important scientific paper …”
Analog editor Stanley Schmidt had some doubts about the legitimacy of the mass-energy conversion processes taking place at the surface of the phase-mirrors, but I placated him by saying the phase-mirror was made of “quarkonium.” Since quarks were then at the edge of scientific knowledge, quarkonium was a handy catch-all magic-maker akin to the “radioactivity” used by 1940s SF writers.
The seed for this story was a drawing I made for my cheerfully horrified children of a Santa Claus with a thousand heads, answering phone-calls from every boy and girl in the world at once.
Sufferin’ Succotash
She was big. Fine big legs and white feathers glued all over her head. I had to have a piece of that. She brought me another bowl of slop and I gave her a thousand credit note. “Keep the change, baby.” That made three. She dimpled and sat down across from me.
“You’re beachy.” Looking me over. Charlie and I had only been out of the Regulator for a month, but I was back up to 150 keys already. I had an exoskeleton with gold chasing and rubies at the joints.
“I’m fat and I’m rich,” I said, stating the obvious. “And you’ve got something I want.” I stared at her hungrily. Those white feathers on the bare scalp were a perfect touch.
She signaled the other waitress to cover for her. I’d set the hook. She rested her big breasts on her folded arms and leaned across the table. “Why you spoon so hard? Soliton flange?”
“I’ve always been hungry, baby. Always. I lost my mother when I was four.”
She cooed sympathetically, and I decided to whip a little more out of it. “She was a juicer. She’d lock me and the dog in and go out for the night. One night she didn’t come back. It was a week before the landlord happened to open up our apartment. There wasn’t much of Poochy left …”
“You poor slogger.” Three thousand credits and she didn’t mind if I’d eaten a live dog. But still, “Why you not dial the food-tap?”
“This was back in 2020, honey. You had to go out to get food. They had stores.”
She made an O of her bright yellow lips, flexing her juicy tongue. “But you’re still mix and match!”
“You’re as young as you feel,” I said vaguely. Right now I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get some meat. I still couldn’t believe I’d gone to so much trouble to end up in a future where there was nothing to eat but processed algae. I had half a billion credits and I couldn’t score anything but veggies.
I looked at the room around us. You could eat for free at home, but people still liked to come out. They had some noise they called music, and
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