Read Online Spaceland by Rudy Rucker - Free Book Online Page A

or two above the floor. Her arms sprouted from the arms of the shirt and a little head-ball appeared, hovering above the body, not yet connected. No eyes or mouth on the head, just a ball of skin. A neck grew in to fill the gap between body and head. A mouth bloomed in the
bottom part of the head, and then a pair of eyes appeared. It was a child-sized Momo, with a face that was finer and more delicate than before. The tip of Momo, as it were. As yet, she had no hands or feet.
    â€œUnbelievable,” murmured Spazz, nervously touching the stud in his ear.
    I was kind of tuning in and out of my subtle vision while this was happening. When I looked at Momo with my third eye, the successive cross sections were overlaid on top of each other, nested together like Russian dolls.
    Momo’s cross section continued to grow in stature, with the curves of her figure growing more pronounced. Finally her hands and feet appeared. As she continued moving through our space, the shadings of her skin kept subtly changing through different tints of pink. She was wearing lavender pants and a green blouse all the way vinn and vout. Before long she’d reached her greatest size, which was even a bit larger than what she’d shown us before. The maximum Momo was a heavy-featured blonde just a bit under six feet. A statuesque woman. Momo moved on with her passage, shrinking and growing less rounded, and then her arms and legs were gone as well. Her face blanked over with skin, and then her head separated off, shrank and disappeared. Her arms drew back into her shirt, and the striped ball of her shirt and pants dwindled to the size of a bowling ball, an egg, a grape—and stopped at that size.
    â€œUnbe-freaking-lievable,” said Spazz.
    â€œShe’s an angel?” said Jena.
    The grape gave a sudden sharp jiggle, as if something had poked it. It warped, twisted, and split in two. And now, more hurriedly than before, Momo came back through our space. This time she showed us a different sequence of cross sections. It was a disturbing sight.
    It started with two irregular leather shapes hanging in the air,
folding and flexing. The combined feet of all the cross sections we’d just seen. The foot-things were bowed down in the center, just far enough to touch the floor. Like casters. The feet drifted upwards and morphed into lavender balls: pieces of Momo’s legs. The balls rose and merged to become a version of Momo’s butt, big and bouncy, but sculptured in warped planes and twisting curves. Some familiar looking globs appeared beside it: fingertips. The fingers merged and became pieces of hands; a cap of green grew down over the purple butt and it became belly and breasts. The hands turned into sections of arm that drifted in towards the pale green blouse. In an abrupt transition, all this collapsed into the glob of Momo’s neck, which quickly grew out to a head-ball that was, to start with, just blank skin. The skin’s color flowed and morphed through shades of pink and tan, the colors drifting across it like clouds across the Earth. And now the head split and grew a mouth, crooked and uncommonly wide.
    â€œAre you three beginning to understand my power?” said the great mouth. Teeth glittered inside it—far too many teeth. “Do you accept that Joe Cube must build a company to develop the technology of the fourth dimension?”
    The head wagged to one side and warped down to a fraction of its size, becoming a tan cone with a mouth around its rim: a version of the trumpet shape I’d seen last night. A wart on the side of the trumpet bulged out, forming a lumpy projection with an eye in it. And then the lump with the eye crawled over to the other side of the cone. A second eye-lump appeared, then a big beak of a Picasso nose, and the mouth shrank down to a little triangle-shaped corner. A cloud of bright lines began swarming around the nightmarish head. Momo’s hair: brown and blonde.