Rudy Rucker - Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch.pdf - Rudy Rucker - widez2

Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch

RUDY PUCKER

From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Rudy Rucker (www.rudyrucker.com) lives in Los Gatos, California. He has published fifteen

novels to date, several science non-fiction books, and some software. His collected stories, Gnarl!,

was published in 2000. Rucker is one of the original cyberpunks of the Movement, and later the

inventor of transrealism, a literary mode, not a movement. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for

best paperback original novel in the U.S. twice, for Software and for Wetware. He's now a retired

math and computer science professor and is writing up a storm. His 2006 novel is Mathematicians

in Love.

"Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch" was published in Interzone, which began to settle into a new

commercial look in 2005. Full of true strangeness, it relates how Harna, one of those weird SF

creatures who can travel through time and space using branes, helps Glenda Gomez fulfill her lust

by helping her abduct Hieronymus Bosch. Sound wild? It is wilder than that.

As an unemployed overweight unmarried overeducated woman with a big mouth, I don't have a lot of

credibility. But even if I was some perfect California Barbie it wouldn't be enough. People never want to

listen to women.

I, Glenda Gomez, bring glad tidings. She that hath ears, let her hear.

An alien being has visited our world. Harna is, was, her name. I saw her as a glowing paramecium, a

jellyfish, a glass police car, and a demonic art patron. This morning, when she was shaped like a car, I

rode inside her to the fifteenth century. And this evening I walked past the vanishing point and saved our

universe from Harna's collecting bag. I'm the queen of space and time. I'm trying to write up my story to

pitch as a reality TV show.

Let's start with paramecia. Unicellular organisms became a hobby of mine a few months ago when I stole

a microscope from my job. I was sorting egg and sperm cells for an infertility clinic called Smart Stork.

Even though I don't have any kind of biology background they trained me.

I'm not dumb. I have a Bachelor's in Art History from San Jose State, which is just a few blocks from my

apartment on Sixth Street. Well, almost a degree. I never finished the general education courses or my

senior seminar, which would probably, certainly, have been on Hieronymus Bosch. I used to have a

book of his pictures I looked at all the time— although today the book disappeared. At first I thought it

was hidden under something. My apartment is a sty.

My lab job didn't last long—I'm definitely not the science type. I wasn't fast enough, I acted bored, I

kissed the manager Dick Went after one too many lunchtime Coronas—and he fired me. That's when I

bagged my scope—a binocular phase-contrast Leica. I carried it home in my ever ready XXL purse.

Later that day Dick came to my apartment to ask about it, but I screamed through the door at him like a

crazy person until he went away. Works on the landlord, too.

Now that I have a microscope, I keep infusions of protozoan cultures in little jars all over my apartment.

It's unbelievably easy to grow the infusions. You just put a wad of lawn grass in with some bottled water.

Bacteria breed themselves into the trillions—rods and dots and corkscrews that I can see at 200X. And

before you know it, the paramecia are right there digging on the bacilli. They come out of nowhere. What

works really well is to add a scrap of meat to an infusion, it gets dark and pukeful, and the critters go

wild for a few days till they die of their own shit. In the more decadent infusions you'll find a particular

kind of very coarsely ciliated paramecium rolling and rushing around. My favorites. I call them the

microhomies.

So today is a Sunday morning in March and I'm eating my usual breakfast of day-old bread with slices of

welfare cheddar, flipping through my Bosch book thinking about my next tattoo. A friend named Sleepey

is taking an on-line course in tattooing, and he said he'd give me one for free. He has a good flea-market

tattoo-gun he traded a set of tires for. Who needs snow tires in San Jose? So I'm thinking it would be

bitchin' to bedizen my belly with a Bosch.

I'm pretty well settled on this blue bagpipe bird with a horn for his nose. It'll be something to talk about,

and the bagpipe will be like naturalistic on my gordo gut, maybe it'll minimize my girth. But the bird needs

a background pattern. Over my fourth cup of microwave coffee, I start thinking about red blood cells,

remembering from the lab how they're shaped. I begin digging on the concept of rounding out my Bosch

bird tattoo with a blood-cell tiling.

To help visualize it, I pinprick my pinkie and put a droplet on a glass slide under my personal Glenda

Gomez research scope. I see beautiful shades of orange and red from all my little blood cells massed

together. Sleepey will need to see this in order to fully grasp what to do. I want to keep on looking, but

the blood is drying fast. The cells are bursting and cracks are forming among them as they dry. I

remember that at Smart Stork we'd put some juice on the slides with the cells to keep them perky. I

don't know what kind of juice, but I decide to try a drop of water out of one of my infusions, a dark

funky batch that I'd fed with a KFC chicken nugget.

The infusion water is teeming with those tough-looking paramecia with the coarse bristles—the

microhomies. What with Bosch on my brain, the microhomies resemble tiny bagpipes on crutches. I'm

like: tattoo them onto my belly too? While I'm watching the microhomies, they start digging on my

ruptured blood cells. "Yo," I say, eyeing an especially bright and lively one. "You're eating me."

And that's when it happens. The image loses its focus, I feel a puff of air, my skin tingles all over. Leaning

back, I see a bag of glowing light grow out from the microscope slide. It's a foot across.

I jump to my feet and back off. I may be heavy, but I'm still quick. At first I have the idea my apartment

is on fire, and then for some reason I think of earthquakes. I'm heading for the door. But the glowing

sack gets there before me, blocking the exit. I try to reach through it for the doorknob.

As soon as my hand is inside the lumpy glow I hear a woman's voice. "Glenda! Hello dear."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Harna from Hilbert space." She has a prim voice; I visualize flowery dresses and pillbox hats. "I

happened upon your brane several—days—ago. I've been teeming with the microlife, a bit humdrum,

and I thought that's all there is to see in this location. Worth documenting, but no more than that. I had no

idea that only a few clicks up the size scale I'd find a gorgeous entity like you. Scale is tricky for me, what

with everything in Hilbert space being infinite. Thank goodness I happened upon your blood cell. Oh,

warmest greetings, Glenda Gomez. You're—why, you're collectible, my dear." I'm fully buggin'. I run to

the corner of my living room, staring at the luminous paramecium the size of a dog in mid-air. "Go away,"

I say.

Harna wobbles into the shape of a jellyfish with dangling frilly ribbons. She drifts across the room, not

quite touching the floor, dragging her oral arms across the stuff lying on my tables, checking things out.

And then she gets to my Bosch book, which is open to The Garden of Earthly Delights.

"A nonlinear projection of three-space to two-space," burbles Harna, feeling the paper all over. "Such a

clever map. Who's the author?"

"Hieronymus Bosch," I murmur. "It's called perspective." I'm half-wondering if my brain has popped and

I'm alone here talking to myself. Maybe I'm about to start fingerpaint-ing the floor with Clorox. Snorting

Ajax up my nose.

"Bosch?" muses Harna. Her voice is fruity and penetrating like my old guidance counselor's. "And I just

know you have a crush on him, Glenda! I can tell. When can I meet him?"

"He lived a long time ago," I whisper. I'm stepping from side to side, trying to find a clear path to the

door.

"Most excellent," Harna is saying. "You'll time-snatch him, and then I can use the time-flaw to

perspective-map your whole spacetime brane down into a sack! Yummy! You are so cute, Glenda. Yes,

I'm going to wrap you up and take you home!"

I get past her and run out into the street. I'm breathing hard, still in my nightgown, now and then looking

over my shoulder. So of course a San Jose police car pulls over and sounds me on their speaker. They

think I'm a tweaker or a nut-job. Did I mention that it's Sunday morning?

"Ma'am. Can we help you? Ma'am. Please come over to the police car and place your hands on the

hood. Ma'am." More cop-voice crackle in the background and here comes Harna down the sidewalk,

still shaped like a flying jellyfish, though bigger than before. The cops can't see her, though.

"Ma'am." One of them gets out of the car, a kid with a cop mustache. He looks kind, concerned, but his

hand is on the butt of his Taser.

I whirl, every cop's image of a madwoman, pointing back down the sidewalk at the swollen Haraa, who's

shaping herself into a damn good replica of the cops' car. She's made of glowing haze and hanging at an

angle to the ground.

Right before the cop grabs my wrist or Tasers me, Harna sweeps over and—pixie-dust! I'm riding in a

Gummi-Bear cop car, with Harna talking to me from the radio grill. The cops don't see me anymore.

Harna heads down the street, then swerves off parallel to spacetime. She guns her mill and we're

rumbling through a wah-wah collage of years and centuries, calendar leaves flying, the sun flickering off

and on, Earth rushing around the Sun in a blur. And it's not just time we're traveling through, we're rolling

through some miles as well. We arrive in the Lowlands of 1475.

It's a foggy dawn, Jerome Bosch is at his bedroom window, arcing a stream of pee toward the glow of

the rising sun. I know from books that Hieronymus was just his fancy show name, and that his homies

called him Jerome. Like my given name is Guadalupe—but everyone calls me Glenda. Seeing the man in

the window, my heart does a little handstand. My love has guided us all this way.

"He is scrumptious," says Harna.

As he lowers his nightshirt, Jerome's gaze drifts away from the horizon—and he sees us. His expression

is calm, resigned—it's like he's always been expecting a flying jellyfish/cop-car carrying a good-looking

woman from the next millennium. Calm, yes, but he's moving back from the window hella fast.

Harna flips out a long vortex of force, a tornado that fastens onto Jerome and pulls him to us. He's

hanging in the air a few feet away from me, slowly spinning—and yelling in what must be Dutch.

"Grab your fella," says Harna. "It has to be you who lands him. It's not for me to meddle in a brane's

spacetime."

The wind has flopped Bosch's hair back. His cheekbones are high, his lips are thin, his eyes are bright.

The man for me. I reach out and catch hold of his hand. It's warm.

Harna's light flows down my arm and up Jerome's. Augmerited by Harna, I'm strong as a steam-shovel. I

set Bosch down on the jelly car seat next to me.

"It's too soon," he says, clear as day. "I'm not ready."

"I'm Glenda," I say, not all that surprised he's speaking English. Another Harna miracle. "Ready or not,

I'm taking you home."

"To Hell?" exclaims Jerome. "That's quite unjust. Only yesterday I was absolved by the priest. My sins in

these last hours have been but petty ones. A touch of anger at the neighbor's dog, my usual avarice for a

truly great commission, and the accustomed fires of lust, of course—" As he mentions this last sin, he

looks down my nightgown, which I'm just loving. I press his hand against my warm thigh.

"Don't worry, sweetie. I don't live in Hell. I live in San Jose."

For the rest of the ride, Jerome is busy looking around, taking everything in. What eyes he has! So sharp

and smart and alert. What with the time-winds flapping my flimsy, he can see I'm all woman. I'm doing

my best to keep the fabric cinched in around the problem areas at my waist, and I'm trying to get his

arms around me, but he's kind of reluctant. He's uneasy about whither we're bound. I can dig it.

Finally Harna sets us down in the sunny street outside my apartment. Lucky me, the cops are gone.

Everything looks the same—the dead palm leaves, the beater cars and pickups, the dusty jasmine vines,

the broken glass on the dry clay, the 7-11 store, the university parking garage—sunny and dry.

Harna rises into the air and spreads out, layering herself across the scene like extra sunshine. No doubt

she'll be back in some more personal form pretty soon. But meanwhile I've got me a man. I smile at

Jerome and give his arm a happy squeeze.

"This is Spain?" he wonders.

"America," I tell him, which doesn't seem to ring a bell. "The new world across the Atlantic Ocean, plus

some five centuries past your time."

He shakes his head, and stares around like a bird fallen from its nest. "It's after the Second Coming?" he

asks. "Christ has dominion over the Earth?"

"The Church is doing fine," I say, not sure where this is going. We shouldn't stand around the street in our

nightgowns. "Come on inside."

I hustle him up the stairs into my apartment and first of all get us in some clothes. I dress him in my

favorite vintage red Ramones T-shirt and my yellow SJSU sweat pants. Me, I put on some nice tight

Capri pants with a Lycra tummy panel and a pink baby-doll blouse that's loose at the bottom. Truth be

told, I do a certain amount of my shopping in the maternity section at Target.

In the kitchen I offer Jerome some Oreos and microwave two cups of instant coffee. Buzz! The

microwave is built into the wall so we delinquent renters can't hock it. Jerome overlooks the futuristic

aspects of my kitchen because he's busy holding one of the cookies up to the light, studying the

embossed writing and curlicues.

"They're food," I tell him. I rotate one in two and give him the better half. He scarfs it down—and I'm

secretly glad, thinking that we've broken bread together now. Jerome takes another Oreo and eats the

whole thing. They're gettin' good to him.

Meanwhile I touch up my black lipstick and lip liner. All the time I'm watching him. Even though he's from

a long time ago, he's not old. Maybe twenty-five. He would have still been at the start of his career. No

reason he can't have as good a career here in San Jose with me.

Jerome watches me right back. His gaze is warm and alive, as if there's an extra brain inside each eyeball.

After a bit he fixates on my mug of colored pencils, looking at them the way I wish he was looking at my

boobs.

"Want to draw?" I ask him. "You can decorate my walls." There's two smooth blank walls in my living

room, a short wall across from the hall door and a big one across from the window.

"A mural?" says Jerome, examining a couple of the pencils.

"Bingo."

He starts in on the smaller wall. And me, I sit down with pen and paper at my round table on the one

chair I've got. I want to try and start documenting some of this unfurling madness. For sure there's a

reality TV show in this. All my friends say I should be on TV, and who am I to disagree. I recite a prayer

to give me courage to write.

"Hail Glenda, full of grace, an alien paramecium was with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and

blessed is the fruit of your brain, Glenda And Jerome."

I lean over my spiral notebook, pen in hand.

To whom it may concern:

It may interest you to know that…

Is it Hie or Hei? Love has made me dyslexic.

I look around, trying to find the book that turned Harna on to Jerome, but I can't see it just now.

Thinking about the book, I have to grin, thinking how incredible it is to have the artist himself here with

me.

"Hey, Jerome. I'm writing about you."

"Not yet," he says and taps his thumb with his finger. Like that's the Lowlands chill-it gesture. He's

holding a purple pencil in his other hand. Getting started on marking up my little wall. Holding the pencil

gives him power, aplomb. He's a suspicious genius with sharp eyes and a trapdoor mouth. I keep talking

to him.

"It's fabulous that you're drawing, Jerome. This hole will be an art grotto. I hope they don't paint it over

when we move." And surely we will be moving quite soon, with Jerome pulling in the Old Master bucks.

We'll be on TV. We'll get a condo in one of those beautiful new buildings across from the SJSU library

on Fourth Street.

I smile at Jerome and fluff my hair a little. I wear it long and black with henna highlights and Bettie Page

bangs. Too bad I didn't happen to shampoo and condition it yet this week. I look sexier when my mane

is lustrous.

Rudy Rucker - Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch.pdf

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