Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (31 page)

“You’re a musician?” exclaimed Tilda. “Sister! I play fiddle in a western band—Diamonds And Spades. We do weddings, funerals, and shitkicker BBQs.”

“I’m more a composer than a performer,” said Susan. “Not that I write out notes and clefs and all that razzamatazz. I do—acousmatics? Means I tape tasty noises and paste them up.”

“This isn’t a coffee klatch, girls,” said Dora, suddenly looming over them. “Punch more tape.”

“Sure thing, boss,” said Tilda. “But tell Polly here what’s going on. Polly punched her first spool of tape, and fed it into the reader, and the whole room went batshit. Why for? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Dora solemnly scanned over Susan’s tape. “This tape told the tabulators and the unit record machines to create a tape that’s a ten-thousand-line model of a hollow ball,” she said. “A spherical shell.” And now she widened her bulging eyes, as if to look more commanding. “Back to work! No lollygagging.”

“I’m, ah, also wondering if the MANIAC can make music,” ventured Susan.

“I’m sure Dr. Ulam can answer that,” said Dora. “When he has time to talk to you. For now please don’t bother him. Dr. Ulam is brilliant, but he’s very distractible.”

“Not that he ever talks to us anyway,” put in Tilda. “He liked to go into the machine room. Warms his hands at the holy vacuum tubes.”

Dora strode across the room to ride herd on the other three. “Pick up the pace, girls. Mankind’s future is in your hands!” The young women met this with jeers and giggles. One of them made a jacking-off gesture. Quietly Susan folded and pocketed the hand-written sheet of instructions that she’d just encoded.

Over in the MANIAC’s room, Alan’s job was slow-paced—until it wasn’t. He was to sit on a stool behind the MANIAC cabinets not doing much of anything until one of the two engineers running the machine would yell something like “Failure in sector Yankee-Foxtrot.”

And then Alan would have to find and replace the bad tube. The MANIAC wasn’t more than ten feet long—and the rear panels on the cabinets were open. He had easy access to the innards. But the thing had over two thousand tubes, and even with the sector advice, Alan would have to decide among at least four or five possible culprits.

The guys running the machine were engineers whom Turing might ordinarily have befriended—one of them was Joe, who’d been helping with the job test yesterday. But they weren’t interested in talking to Alan. He was a pawn, a tool, an inferior. Alan remembered his own inability to properly see the low-ranking techs when he’d been in power at Manchester.

Time dragged as the late afternoon shift wore into night. Alan would have liked to be scheming about how he might meet Ulam and find out the details of the big anti-skug project being set into motion here. But, more so than Susan, Alan was cautious, even paranoid, about thinking his natural thoughts. He kept worrying that Hosty’s skugsniffer might direct his attention inward to the occupants of the lab—and ferret Alan out. Not that there were any signs of that.

Staring blankly at the gently glowing thermionic tubes, awaiting the next circuit failure, Alan drifted into the trance of an invisible man. And that’s when he saw Vassar again.

In the snowstorm on the mesa, Vassar had been a fluttering rhombus, vague at the edges of Alan’s field of perception. But now the ghost was center stage. He resembled a meter-wide manta ray, with lambent wings of the same brightness and tint as the filaments of the vacuum tubes. The long cord of the ray’s tail led deep into the guts of the MANIAC.

“Wake up, spaceman,” teeped Vassar. “I’m back. Can you get me in touch with Susan?”

“Failure in Sector Romeo-Zulu!” called one of the engineers just then, and Alan sprang to work. When he had a moment to think again, Vassar was gone. Perhaps Vassar had by now found Susan on his own.

Alan’s and Susan’s shifts were over at 9 pm. The LANL security was quick to herd them and the other workers out the gates. The two caught a ride to the sketchy, meager core of Los Alamos.

Once they were alone, Alan told Susan about seeing Vassar. Susan hadn’t seen Vassar herself, but she told Alan what she’d heard about Ulam. They grabbed some sopaipillas and chili verde at the Big Bow Wow. Alan was very interested in the instruction sheet that Susan had bagged—he claimed he could reconstruct the system’s whole programming language from these few lines.

“I’ve a knack for these things,” he told Susan. “Like a paleontologist modeling a brontosaurus from a tail bone.”

After their meal, they headed back to the granny cottage, bringing some take-out food for Bill Burroughs, in case he was awake.

Bill was more than awake—he was fully wired, snapping his limbs like a marionette, going full bore on his memoir. He’d set up a typewriter on the kitchen table. His output pages were scattered across the table and the floor.

“I’m a soft machine,” exulted Bill. “A meat teletype from Atlantis.”

Alan found it sexy to see his boyfriend writing. He went over and gave Bill a reckless kiss on the mouth. Delicious. “How far along are you, dear?”

“Jumping around,” said Bill, teeping his pleasure at Alan’s attentions. “One hard pop per page. Right now we’re skugging hicks at nowhere airstrips.”

“And—are you finding your inner skug of use?” asked Alan. He was still trying to decide whether his parasites actually provided a true creative boost.

“The inner light,” said Bill in a sardonic tone. He stretched his hands upward as if towards a blazing sun, then ran trembling fingers across his face. “Wearing the Happy Cloak!” Now he paused and shook his head. “Why do amateurs always think that artists depend on drugs, or demonic possession, or biocomputational implants? It’s all me, Alan, straight or high. But I will grant that my skugs are quite encouraging. It views my chronicle as a gospel.
Exodus
perhaps, or the
Book of
Revelation
.”

“Have you seen Vassar here?” interrupted Susan. “Alan saw him at LANL.”

“I was writing about his ghost today,” said Bill, pointing at some pages that had ended up in the far corner of the kitchen. “In my deathless prose, your man burns more brightly than ever before. Be a dear and put my pages into some kind of order.”

“Kiss my ass,” said Susan amiably.

“We’re ready to bunk down,” said Alan. “And, Bill, if you’d care to join me for a tussle, I’d be more than—”

“No time!” cried Burroughs, leaning over his typewriter like a race-car driver at the wheel. “Further communications incoming.”

“I envy you,” said Alan. “I’m feeling dull as dog meat.” He set the bag of food from the Big Bow Wow beside Bill’s typewriter. “Burnt offerings for the high scribe.”

“You’re kind,” said Bill, looking up, his eyes frank and mild. “I like that.”

Alan felt a pulse of teep harmony. “I’ll sit with you for a bit before bed.”

“But not too long,” cautioned Bill. “I don’t want any sense that you’re silently petitioning for preferential treatment in my Akashic records.”

Alan laughed and got himself a glass of juice.

Alone in her bed, Susan was lulled by the nested rhythms of the typewriter keys, the ding of the bell, the thunk of the carriage return, and the ratcheting swoop when Bill scrolled in a fresh sheet of paper.

All the while, she stayed focused on the idea of Vassar—summoning him, on the verge of of sleep. And then he was before her: a large, translucent manta ray. His tail led to the socket in the wall. His voice in her head was clearer than before, more energetic.

“Hey, babe.”

“Why did you leave me?” teeped Susan. “I thought maybe you’d gone up to heaven. Or that you’d—fallen apart.”

“I’ve been hanging with one of those local cliff dwellers. The ghost of an ancient Tewa Indian. I call him Xurt. He looks like a raven, but with some feathers falling out. He’s been dead for five centuries in those caves. He’s hungry and he’s pissed off. We’re helping each other. I want to get even with Dick Hosty. And he wants to stop those war-pigs from building a monster bomb in his canyon.”

“Bomb?”

“The army calls it a V-bomb. Project Utopia. Xurt and I found a way to follow the war-pigs’ info trails into their sty.”

“You mean the Los Alamos Labs? Where Alan and I are working?”

“Xurt and I made a nest in their giant computer. I’m like Aladdin in his cave. I’m branching out from there, drawing energy from the circuits of all Los Alamos. The computer, the phone systems, even the power lines. Xurt digs the hook-ups. He wants to haunt the whole lab.” Vassar flexed the winged delta of his body. “Me, I’m setting the stage for the takedown.”

“Of Hosty?”

“If Alan has the guts to help me, Dick Hosty is going to die.” Vassar flickered and was gone. And the weary Susan was asleep.

Bill wrote all night, alone in the kitchen. At dawn he gathered up his pages to shuffle and reshuffle them. Gradually a stable configuration emerged. On a whim he wrote
The Apocalypse According to Willy Lee
across the top of the first page.

Bill felt drained and shaky, as if seeing the world through a layer of plate glass. Finishing any project was horrible—like driving off a cliff at a hundred miles per hour. First came the abrupt come-down, and then the immediate worry that the work wasn’t as good as it had seemed while he was
in medias res
.

This come-down was particularly harsh. Bill was was seeing blurs in his perception, like trails and smears when he turned his head. Even the modest sounds of Alan waking up and showering had an unpleasant boom and drag. Should he load up on those soothing endorphins from the Man within? No—that was starting to feel like being given brainwash meds in a psych ward.

Alan strode into the kitchen, chipper in his boyish body and, truth be told, too British to bear. “You look all in, Bill,” he fluted. “Is the masterpiece done?”

“You sound like a magnetic tape that’s being dragged at irregular speeds past the read-head,” said Bill irritably. “Horrible.”

“I suspect you’ve overdosed on your endogenous neurotransmitters,” said Alan, his kind face filled with concern. “You need a nice lie-down, Bill.”

“Don’t try to nurse me!” Bill felt a sudden and deep revulsion with his current status. He’d been mutated by a slug and he’d fallen into a sexual relationship with the parasite’s designer. He’d followed the stooge back to small-town America, and now this new lover was playing footsie with the government pigs.

“Perhaps you’d feel better if you phoned your family in Florida?” said the maddening Turing. “You mother and little Billy would love to hear from you.”

“
Fuck
that sound,” spat Bill. And then he felt ashamed of his coldness. His voice cracked. “Why can’t writing be enough? Why are you physically coming on to me?”

Now Susan was awake too, standing in the door of her room. Susan, Alan and Bill. Three zombies.

“I want out of here!” yelled Bill. He snatched up the phone and dialed Allen Ginsberg’s number in San Francisco. Thanks god he knew it by heart. The phone rang for quite some time, and finally Ginsberg answered, sleepy but alert. It was maybe 4 am out there.

“Make this good,” intoned Ginsberg, right there in the moment. “I’m having a drunken night in my house with a boy.”

“It’s Bill. You have to rescue me.” While saying this, Burroughs shot a hostile look at Turing and Susan. Teaching them a lesson. He felt spiteful as a toad. “I’m in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Imprisoned by religious fanatics.”

“Cultists?” asked Ginsberg, mildly interested. “Any Peyote?”

“No, man, these are mutants. They implanted a new organ in me.”

“Are you high?”

“I’ve been up all night writing a memoir, Allen. Get me out of here today. I’m behind enemy lines.”

“Long road, Bill. Los Alamos where they build the bombs?”

“New bomb on the way. The V-bomb.”

“I’d dig seeing a test,” said Ginsberg. “Intolerable light and radiance, and afterwards the grey world is a ghost, with the juice sizzled away. Maybe I can ask Neal to drive me out. He’s on a tear. Entangled with a madwoman. He needs a break.”

“Cassady? That motor-mouth Okie? Don’t drive, Allen, take a plane. I’ll pay. I’m fat with kale. Gangland deals in Mexico.”

“Neal’s not an Okie, Bill. That’s just an accent he finds amusing. You’re so jealous of Neal. Open your heart.”

“All right, I’ll pay Neal’s ticket too, Mother Superior. Anyway, I’m young now. Irresistible. You lowlifes rent a car in Santa Fe. I’m in Los Alamos in the granny cottage behind the house of Sue Stook the vet’s. She has a statue of horse out front. If you pass the Big Bow Wow, you’ve gone too far.”

“Smallville,” said Ginsberg. “The town where Hiroshima was born! Strange ancient America.”

“I want out of here, Allen. Before they inculcate me into the Higher Mysteries. They’ll trepan my skull, shave my balls, play the thigh-bone trumpets and drag me up the ziggurat. Maybe you bring me a dime bag of junk?”

“We’ll chant, Bill. It’ll fry your hot dog for fair. I’ve learned to overlap the short and the long breaths.” A boy’s voice interrupted Ginsberg, and he ended the call in laughter. “We’re riding to the rescue, Captain Burroughs.”