Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (36 page)

Neal’s fat Cadillac was only lightly coated with snow—presumably he’d cleared it off and taken it on the road for a drive today. Hopping into the behemoth, Alan fired up the engine and the heater. He sat in plush comfort for a bit, gathering his wits.

He did feel some slight remorse for so ruthlessly killing Hosty. But more than that, he felt pride, and a sense of safety. His greatest enemy was gone.

How he wished that he could do as Ulam had urged, and find a way to expel his skug. Ulam didn’t fully grasp, however, that working on this wasn’t an option for Alan. Not as long as a skug lived within him. Testing the bounds, Alan let himself wonder if some process along the lines of a hush-phone could be of any—

Instantly he felt disoriented and short of breath. His temples were pounding in pain. In another moment he’d be—

Dutifully he switched to his plan for a skugging ray. This was what his skug wanted him to think about, and it wouldn’t do to defy his ever-more-watchful master. Very well then.

Whether or not Ulam took the notion seriously, there was something to Susan’s remark about personal vibrations. She’d grasped the basic principal of skugging rays. It was a matter of nudging the human genomic vibrations to the level of skugger vibrations. And this was something that a V-ray ought be able to do.

Of course there were intricate theoretical details—having to do with a non-commutative quantum-mechanical operator that renormalized the symmetries of the genome kernel in Hilbert space. But Alan had already solved this bit in his head. The issue now was to design the implementation details.

His approach would be to deform the V-bomb’s blast charge in a fashion that he was in fact designing even now, sitting alone in the DeVille, tracing curves in the haze that his breath made on the car’s windows.

At this point Susan teeped the fact that Alan was outside in the Cadillac—and that he’d killed Hosty. She threw on her clothes and rushed out to embrace him.

“You’re a hero, Alan! You avenged Vassar! I’ve had such a broken heart.”

“I teeped what you and Neal were doing in there just now,” said Alan, a little embarrassed.

“Just a game,” said Susan. “A pastime. You men take sex too seriously. Come on in and let’s celebrate the fall of Hosty. You’ll freeze to death out here!”

Back in the granny cottage, Neal was out of bed, cooking a steak and smoking a marijuana cigarette. He’d driven to Santa Fe in the Cadillac that afternoon, loading up on supplies.

“I met with your man Naranjo,” Neal told Turing. “Sniffed him out with my skug-brain. He steered me to some weed.”

“How’s Naranjo faring?” asked Alan.

“Unloaded his stash, flush with cash, wife back at last, and he’s buying a plane,” said the cheerful Neal. “Turning legit. He survived his last deal. In the movies that’s when the reluctant gangster always gets popped. One last bank job, Louie, one last job.
Bam
! But Naranjo’s all dapper and hale.”

Meanwhile Susan and Burroughs were teeping Turing’s thoughts, learning of his plan to create a ray to turn everyone into a skugger—and spotting his forlorn and forbidden hope of expelling his skug from his own body. Alan could sense that these two would have enjoyed getting into a discussion about how to get rid of their skugs, but the parasites were clamping down on them all—more so than ever before. The scent of a final victory was making the skugs less tolerant.

“You’re talking behind my back,” said Ginsberg, sensing the ebb and flow of the teep. “Like I’m the crazy person who
doesn’t
hear voices in his head. So here’s my brainwave feed.” He launched into a Hindu chant.

Susan got into playing acousmatics recordings on her new reel to reel, rather softly and solemnly, as if at a wake. Summoned by the sounds, Vassar’s ghost reappeared, a cheerful, golden manta ray fully six feet across. Everyone could see him but Ginsberg. For Ginsberg’s sake, Neal danced over and sculpted the shape of Vassar, running his hands along the flanks of the twinkling manta.

“Thank you, Neal,” said Ginsberg. “You populate the void.”

In an unexpected gesture of hostility, Vassar now flew right through Neal’s chest.

“Oof,” said Neal aloud. “Here comes the husband.”

“I don’t like you moving in on my wife,” teeped Vassar, banking around for another pass at Cassady. “Bonehead.”

Turing jumped to his feet and waved his hands to distract Vassar. “Come on, Vassar, you and I fought Hosty together just now. Help me some more. Tell me how Ulam’s been physically tweaking the V-bomb. I bet you saw.”

“I bet I did,” teeped Vassar, settling down to a slow ripple of his wide golden wings. “I’m omnipresent, almost. Me and my ghost buddy Xurt.”

“Hemisemiubiquitous,” said Neal aloud.

“Ulam gets
inside
the bomb,” teeped Vassar. “Kinky as that seems. Like a guy inside a clown car.”

“I see a round metal shell resembling a submarine to be lowered into an oceanic trench,” interpolated Burroughs, also speaking aloud. They were running the live commentary for Ginsberg’s sake.

“The bomb is soft like lead and I can see radiation coming out,” continued Vassar’s teep. “Ulam pounds the stuff with a ball-peen hammer. Sculpting it, like. He wears a lead-foil suit, and then he showers off. ”

“I’ll go in there myself tomorrow,” said Turing aloud. “I’ll undo what Ulam did.”

“In where?” said Ginsberg, a few steps behind.

“Inside the V-bomb,” said Turing.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” said Ginsberg.

“Neal has two dicks,” Burroughs told him.

“Side to side or one atop the other?” asked Ginsberg. “Like a whale or like a kangaroo? Show us, Neal.”

“I’m various,” said Neal making magician gestures with his hands above his crotch.

Vassar wrapped his wings around Susan and bid her a last farewell. A final tenderness filled the two. Susan’s face showed a calm that Alan hadn’t seen in days.

And now the parting scene was done. With an odd motion, Vassar withdrew towards heaven. It wasn’t that he went up or down or left or right. He went—elsewhere. When Alan had seen Hosty’s ghost do this, he’d mistaken it for shrinking. But it was something other than that. It was a motion into a higher dimension.

As an elegy, Susan turned up the volume on her machine and put on the tape they’d made in Ulam’s lab—the sounds of higher-order nonlinear feedback.

“I’m getting a fine high buzz off this,” said Ginsberg. “Maybe I feel like a skugger.”

“Here’s an appropriate visual track,” said Alan. Drawing on his experience in the Tangier radio repair shop, he took off the back of the granny cottage’s TV and tweaked the tubes until a wave of outré blips and zags began rolling across the screen.

Burroughs stood by Turing, quite taken by the images.

“Puts me in mind of those glass plates of slime you were experimenting with in Tangier,” said Bill. “Your orgasmatronic all-meat TV.”

“Where it all began,” said Alan. “Our Xanadu.” He gave Bill a hug. “I never thought it would end at a nuclear weapons lab.” His throat tightened. “I—I hate to say this, Bill, but I feel our romance is very nearly at an end.” He held his friend out at arm’s length, then kissed him. “Consider yourself free of me, Bill. No strands of guilt.”

“Dear Alan. Can we win the war against skugs?”

“We’ll skirt that issue, no? Look at this some more.” Turing busied himself in showing Bill how to diddle the TVs adjustment knobs to make the patterns dance with Susan’s sounds.

Perhaps jealous of the lovers’ moment of intimacy, Ginsberg went back to chanting, more insistently than before. For his part, Neal was circling around Susan, tootling a trumpet solo through the spaces of his cupped and reshaped hands.

Bill once again lifted his unlovely voice in his Los Alamos school song:

Far away and high on the mesa’s crest

Here’s the light that all of us love best

Los
Aaallll
—

He broke off abruptly, pressing his hands to his chest.

“What?” said Alan. “Are you all right?”

Bill looked at Alan in silence, locking eyes. Faster than thought, Alan felt an encrypted teep message flit into him. Bill’s expression told Alan not to unpack the message as yet. It was a secret to be used later—and somehow Alan was to know when. Not yet in any case. Don’t think about it.

Alan went to bed early, leaving the others to continue their party. Washing up in the bathroom, he studied himself in the mirror. His face was very like Chris Morcom’s indeed—jaunty, with a narrow head and a crooked smile, with kindness and humor in his eyes. As the long day’s final surprise, a diaphanous copy of the face rose from the mirror and spoke to Alan.

“You’ll be with me soon,” said Chris’s ghost. “I’m glad. It’ll be lovely.”

Before Alan could answer, the apparition had vanished.

He slept soundly, barely waking when Burroughs and Ginsberg tumbled into the bed.

Chapter 17: V-Bomb

In the morning the sky was pale blue, with a new round of potential snow clouds humping on the western horizon. The highway had been plowed, leaving a great wall of snow across their driveway. Sue Stook used a yellow tractor to clear the entrance.

Alan and his friends had a quiet breakfast around the kitchen table. It felt like the end of something. Neal put on a juggling act with a bag of oranges—at one point he had four in the air.

“You lot had best clear out,” said Alan finally. “There’s a slight chance that the V-bomb will kill everyone.”

“Everyone on Earth?” asked Ginsberg. “Our government would risk that?”

“Maybe just everyone in Los Alamos,” said Alan. “Or in New Mexico. I say you get in Neal’s car and drive fast.”

Alan was a little surprised by how readily the others took him at his word. All four of them got up from the table, preparing for flight.

“The rental guy in Albuquerque said I could keep the DeVille for two weeks,” said Neal, pulling on his coat. “Long as Bill pays the daily rate when I bring it back, including tax, wax, and pro-rate denture adjustments. You come too, Turing. We’ll drive to New York and come back here, if here’s still there, now or then. I’m due to make a surprise inspection of Ellen Sue Bonham in the Village.”

“I have to stay,” said Alan, wretchedly alone at the kitchen table. “I have no choice. So do this rapidly, please. Rip off the bandage. Bundle up, grab groceries, go.”

“Greenwich Village is perfect for me,” said Susan, already at the fridge filling a shopping bag. “The one true audience for my acousmatics! I’d like to get some shows and to sell some recordings. Maybe I’ll even teach again, if all else fails. As it usually does. Whatever. I’m ready for a fresh start. Assuming the world doesn’t end.”

“I’d like to go back to Tangier,” said Bill, rummaging through his belongings and pulling on a second layer of clothes. “This whole continent drags me. America isn’t young, you know. It’s ancient and evil. With aluminum siding.”

“Going to Tangier?” echoed Alan wistfully.

“All of our plans being contingent upon the whip and lash and whim of our rulers, the skugs,” added Bill, coming back to the table to lean over Alan. “But maybe the humans can win in the post-V-bomb world.” He shot Alan a heavily significant glance.

“I don’t dare think about rebellion, Bill,” said Alan quietly.

For now he had no choice but to play the role of skugly slave. But later—who knew. He hadn’t forgotten about Bill’s encrypted teep message, whatever it was.

Of course the envious Ginsberg had to stick in his oar with some high-minded verbiage. “People should find their own paths towards the cosmic light. The skugs are essentially corporate. A psychic prison camp.”

“Yas yas,” said Cassady, rushing outside with a broom. He brushed the snow off the Cadillac and jumped inside. Roaring the engine and burping the clutch, he rocked a preliminary launch ramp into the snow. “Susan!” he called. “Come sit in front with me, sweet cakes. We’ll chauffeur the esteemed Beat authors in the back. Ready to roll, boys? You sure you’re staying here, Turing? There’s no real need to go up in gamma ray smoke with the V-bomb blast, is there?”

Alan shrugged and gave Bill Burroughs one last goodbye kiss. He couldn’t voice his many questions lest his skug start nosing in.

“Follow Alph to find the key,” said Bill, subtler and hipper than any mutant parasitic slug would ever be. The kiss came and went, and then Burroughs was in the car with Ginsberg.

“Bless you, Alan,” said Ginsberg, folding his hands at his chest and bowing. “You’re the true hero. Forgive any false steps.”

“I love you, Alan,” Susan told him, blotting at her eyes. “You’re so wonderful. And a hero. More than you even know.”

By the time the four reached the end of the driveway, Burroughs, never loath to play the curmudgeon, was already yelling angrily at Neal for his perceived recklessness in driving. Turing couldn’t help but notice that Bill had taken his unused stash of brown Mexico City heroin along. And then the carnival was gone.