Surfing the Gnarl

Two-time winner of the
Philip K. Dick Award

“Rucker is a mathematician bewitched by the absurdity of the universe, and a writer possessed of a brilliantly witty pen.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Rudy Rucker's sense of fun is rare indeed. He has been compared to Lewis Carroll, and the comparison is not presumptuous. Like Carroll, Rucker is a mathematician who not only enjoys paradoxes, but can propagate that enjoyment as pure lunatic humor.”

—Washington Post

“Reading a Rudy Rucker book is like finding Poe, Kerouac, Lewis Carroll and Philip K. Dick parked in your driveway in a topless ‘57 Caddy … and telling you they're taking you for a RIDE. The funniest science fiction author around.”

—Sci-Fi Universe

“Rudy Rucker is an oddity and a treasure.”

—Wired

“Rucker's sensibility is a combination of gonzo humor, fictionalized autobiography in the Kerouacian mode (what Rucker calls ‘transrealism'), and the sheer, bugs-in-your-teeth thrill of scientific extrapolation taken to blitz-punk extremes.”

—Salon.com

“Rucker's writing is great like the Ramones are great: a genre stripped to its essence, attitude up the wazoo…. No one does the cyber version of beatnik glory quite like Rucker.”

—NY Review of Science Fiction

1.
The Left Left Behind

Terry Bisson

2.
The Lucky Strike

Kim Stanley Robinson

3.
The Underbelly

Gary Phillips

4.
Mammoths of the Great Plains

Eleanor Arnason

5.
Modem Times2.0

Michael Moorcock

6.
The Wild Girls

Ursula Le Guin

7.
Surfing the Gnarl

Rudy Rucker

8.
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

Cory Doctorow

9.
Report from Planet Midnight

Nalo Hopkinson

Rudy Rucker © 2012

This edition © 2012 PM Press

“The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club” appeared in
Infinite Matrix,
December 2005, and in
Mad Professor
(Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007). “Rapture in Space” appeared in
Semiotext[e] SF
(Autonomedia, 1989), and in
Gnarl!
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000). Some passages from “Surfing the Gnarl” appeared in
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
(Basic Books, 2005),
Mad Professor
(Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007), and
Nested Scrolls
(PS Publishing and Tor Books, 2011).

Series Editor: Terry Bisson

ISBN: 978-1-60486-309-3

LCCN: 2011927979

PM Press

P. O. Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

PMPress.org

Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan
www.thomsonshore.com

Outsides: John Yates/Stealworks.com

Insides: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org

“The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club”

“Surfing the Gnarl”

“Rapture in Space”

“Load on the Miracles and Keep a Straight Face” Outspoken Interview with Rudy Rucker

Bibliography

About the Author

“Yo, J
ACK,”
SAID
T
ONEL
as they lugged two golf bags apiece toward the men's locker room. It was sunset, the end of a long Saturday's caddying, Jack's last day of work this summer.

“I didn't get a chance to tell you,” continued Tonel, shouldering open the door. “About who I saw sweatin' in Ragland's backyard this morning.” It was fresh and cool in the locker room. A nice break from the heavy, thick August air.

“In Ragland's yard?” said Jack Vaughan, setting down the bags and wiping his brow. “I don't know. His ninety-year-old mother?” Jack suspected a joke. Ragland was the master of the locker room, ensconced behind his counter. Tidily cleaned shoes and piles of fresh white towels sat on the white-painted shelves around him. Although the bare-skulled Ragland's eyes were half-closed, it was likely that he was listening.

“It was the five mibracc,” said Tonel. “Doin' Ragland's yard work. Isn't that right, Ragland? What's the dealio? How you get to slave-driving them Republicans?
I need to know.” Tonel lived right next door to Ragland. The two weren't particularly fond of each other.

“Don't be mouthin' on my business, yellow dog,” said Ragland. Though he cleaned the shoes of popinjays, he insisted on his dignity.

A burst of talk echoed from the little back room beyond Ragland's station. Just like every other morning or afternoon, the mibracc—the caddies' nickname for “men in the back room at the country club”—were in there, safe from women, out of the daylight, playing cards and drinking the bourbon they stored in their lockers.

“Those bagworts do chores?” said Jack. “No way, Tonel.”

“I seen it,” insisted Tonel. “Mr. Atlee was draggin' a plow with Mr. Early steerin' it. Mr. Gupta was down on his knees pullin' up weeds, and Mr. Inkle and Mr. Cuthbert was carryin' trash out to the alley. Ole Ragland sittin' on the back porch with his shotgun across his knees. Did your Meemaw put conjure on them, Ragland?”

“You want me to snapify your ass?” said Ragland. Though gray and worn, Ragland was, in his own way, an imposing man.

Tonel made a series of mystic passes, hoodoo signs, and rap gestures in Ragland's direction.

“I'll ask the men myself,” said Jack, caught up by Tonel's rebellious spirit.

The two boys stepped into the back room, a plain space with a tile floor and shiny green paint on the win-dowless concrete walls. The five old men sat in battered wooden captain's chairs around a table from the club's lounge. Oily Mr. Atlee was dealing out cards to spindly, white-haired Mr. Early, to bald-as-a-doorknob Mr. Inkle,
to Mr. Cuthbert with his alarming false teeth, and to Mr. Gupta, the only nonwhite member of the Killeville Country Club.

“Hi, guys,” said Jack.

There was no response. The mibracc studied their cards, sipping at their glasses of bourbon and water, their every little gesture saying, “Leave us alone.” Mr. Inkle stubbed out a cigarette and lit a fresh one.

“Listen up,” said Tonel in a louder tone. “I gotta axe you gentlemen somethin'. Was you bustin' sod for Ragland today? My friend here don't believe me.”

Still no answer. The mibracc were so fully withdrawn into their clubby little thing that you could just as well try talking to your TV. Or to five spiteful children.

“Scoop,” grunted Mr. Cuthbert, standing up with his glass in hand. Mr. Gupta handed him his empty glass as well. With the slightest grunt of nonrecognition, Mr. Cuthbert sidled past Tonel and Jack, moving a little oddly, as if his knees were double-jointed. His oversized plastic teeth glinted in the fluorescent light. Mr. Cuthbert pressed his thumb to his locker's pad, opened the door, and dipped the two glasses down into his golf bag. Jack could smell the bourbon, a holiday smell.

The mibracc's golf bags held no clubs. They were lined with glass, with tall golf bag—sized glass beakers, or carboys. Big glass jars holding gallons of premium bourbon. It was a new gimmick, strictly hush-hush; nobody but Ragland and the caddies knew. Mr. Atlee, a former druggist, had obtained the carboys, and Mr. Early, a former distiller's rep, had arranged for a man to come one night with an oak cask on a dolly to fill the bags. The mi-bracc were loving it.

Mr. Cuthbert shuffled back past Tonel toward the card table, the liquid swirling in his two glasses. The boy fell into step behind the old man, draping his hand onto the mibracc's shoulder. Mr. Cuthbert paid him no mind. Jack joined the procession, putting his hand on Tonel's shoulder and trucking along in his friend's wake. Tonel was humming the chorus of the new video by Ruggy Qaeda, the part with the zombies machine-gunning the yoga class.

After Mr. Cuthbert dropped into his chair and picked up his cards, Jack and Tonel circled the room two, three, four times, with Tonel finally bursting into song. Never did the mibracc give them a second glance. Odd as it seemed, the liquid in the glasses still hadn't settled down; it was moving around as if someone were stirring it.

Around then Ragland came out from behind his counter, wielding a wet, rolled-up towel. Silly as it sounded, being snapped by the old locker room attendant was a serious threat. Ragland was the ascended kung-fu master of the towel snap. He could put a bruise on your neck that would last six weeks. Laughing and whooping, Tonel and Jack ran outside.

A white face peered out of the window in the clubhouse's terrace door. The door swung open and a plain, slightly lumpish girl in a white apron appeared. Gretchen Karst.

“I'm pregnant, Jack,” said Gretchen, her sarcastic, pimply face unreadable. “Marry me tonight. Take me off to college with you tomorrow.”

“How do you know it's me?” protested Jack. “I'm not the only—I mean even Tonel said he—”

“Tonel is a horn worm. All I gave him was a hand job. And it didn't take very long. Jack, there's a justice of
the peace out on Route 501. Ronnie Blevins. He works at Rash Decisions Tattoo. I found him online. Since it's Saturday, they're open till midnight. I'm off work right now, you know. I started early today.”

“Stop it, Gretchen. You and me—it's not—”

“I'm serious,” said Gretchen, although there was in fact a good chance that she was scamming him. Gretchen had a twisted mind. “You're my best chance, Jack,” she continued. “Marry me and take me with you. I'm smart. I like sex. And I'm carrying your son.”

“Uh—”

Just then someone shouted for Gretchen from the corner of the clubhouse building. It was Gretchen's dad, standing at the edge of the parking lot. He'd trimmed his flattop to high-tolerance precision and he was wearing his shiny silver jogging suit. All set for the weekly meeting at the Day Six Synod's tabernacle.

Gretchen could talk about the Day Six Synod for hours. It was a tiny splinter religion based on the revelation that Armageddon, the last battle, was coming one-seventh sooner than the Seventh Day Adventists had thought. We were already in the end times, in fact, with the last act about to be ushered in by manifestations of Shekinah Glory, this being the special supernatural energy that God—and Satan—use to manifest themselves. The pillar of fire that led the Israelites to the promised land, the burning bush that spake to Moses—these had been Shekinah Glory. The Day Six Synod taught that our Armageddon's Shekinah Glory would take the form of evil UFOs pitted against winged angels.

Karl Karst's jogging suit was silver to remind him of the Shekinah Glory. The Day Six Synod meetings featured
impressively high-end computer graphics representing the Glory in its good and evil forms. Though Mr. Karst was but a county school-bus mechanic, some of the core founders of the Day Six Synod were crackpot computer hackers.