Read Online Spaceland by Rudy Rucker - Free Book Online

triangle or a hexagon,” put in Spazz. He’d regained his composure. But he still thought we were kidding him. “Great rap, Momo. Where did you really meet her, Joe?”
    Momo stepped towards Spazz, no longer holding herself rigid. A great bulge moved down her arm, and when it reached her hand,
the hand disappeared like a melting ball of wax. She was lifting it vout of our space.
    As I watched Momo in action, I paid attention to the ways in which my new Subtle vision affected my view of her. My third eye projected Momo’s unimaginable four-dimensional shape into a very odd three-dimensional form. I could see a whole solid, just like when I looked at Jena—but I didn’t see innards. Momo was, rather, like the tangled roots of a stump, with her arms and legs and torso seeming to grow through each other. Very gnarly, very hard to describe.
    Momo must have noticed me staring at her, and she answered my unspoken question, even as she continued bearing down on Spazz. “There’s more of me up above your space, Joe, covered with skin just like the cross section in your space. That’s what your subtle vision is showing you. You can see inside Jena and Spazz because your extra eyes up above space peek over the three-dimensional shells of their skins. They are quite open to the fourth dimension, on both their vouter and vinner sides. Unlike you, in your newly augmented form.” As usual, Momo’s explanation didn’t make much sense to me.
    Right about then Spazz made a muffled noise and began trying to spit something out. With my subtle vision I could see one of Momo’s fingers inside his mouth, a pink fingertip resting on his tongue like a stone sausage.
    â€œOh my god,” said Spazz after Momo removed her finger. “The attack of the hyperdimensional dental hygienist.” The guy never let up on maintaining his cool. You had to hand it to him. “Suppose I believe you’re from the fourth dimension,” said Spazz to Momo. “So then what? Are you here to conquer the planet? Eat our brains? Rape us? Or is this just a sightseeing trip?”
    â€œShe wants me to teach about her world,” I said. “She calls it the All. I’m supposed to organize a start-up to develop a new kind
of technology.” The idea was starting to appeal to me. With the proper use of sound business principles, there was no reason I couldn’t start my own dot-com! That was a hell of a lot cooler than cheating at blackjack. “Maybe you could be, like, my assistant,” I told Spazz.
    Spazz guffawed in just the same way that Jena had when I’d mentioned my plans before, the guffaw shading into a long series of wheezy chuckles.
    â€œShut up,” I said. “I could do it. Momo augmented me last night. Vinn and vout. I have subtle vision. I can see the pipe and the bud in your pants pocket, for instance. I could fire you for that. The Kencom campus is a zero-tolerance drug-free zone, in case you’d forgotten. It’s in the contract you signed.”
    â€œUm—” Once again Spazz was at a loss for words. I was loving it. He gathered his wits and changed the subject. “So, Momo, can we see the rest of your cross sections? Can you move completely through our space like the sphere does for A Square in Flatland?”
    â€œIndeed,” said Momo. And then she did it.
    She quickly shrank out of sight—and then she came back, slowly showing us one cross section at a time.
    What did it look like?
    The first thing we saw was a little ball of light purple, hovering in the air at waist level. The silky fabric of Momo’s pants. Her belly. The ball expanded and a cap of light green appeared on top like a polar ice cap. Her shirt. Quickly the pants lengthened and the shirt grew, gently swelled by Momo’s breasts. This was all in miniature to start with; the initial cross section of Momo was no more than three feet tall, hanging there a foot