Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker Page A

closed the door behind us. God, I was hungry. I felt like I hadn’t eaten good food in a hundred years.
    But Charlie wouldn’t let up. “Did he tell you how we got here?”He had a protective arm around her, the goddamn vegetarian.
    “Just can it, Mr. Clean,” I shouted. “The decision is hers. I’m ready to buy her the best prosthetic leg that money can …” I stopped suddenly. Things were developing a little faster than I’d planned.
    Zoozie was looking back and forth between us. “You tollahs jab so old. Fancy dress?”
    “We’re from 2050,” Charlie said, speaking slowly. “We stole lots of gold and had to hide for a hundred years. Now we’re rich and we’re safe, but Eddie can’t get what he wants to eat.”
    There was no use putting it off. I answered the question in her eyes. “I’d like to buy one…one of your drumsticks.”
    Charlie held the door open for her. We listened as her footsteps pattered into the distance. “Don’t worry, Eddie,” he said. I’ve got some slime mold evolving under the Regulator. We’ll be feasting on horseshoe crab before you know it.”
    ============
Note on “Sufferin’ Succotash”
    Written in Summer, 1979.
    The 57th Franz Kafka , Ace Books, 1983.
    I made my first stab at writing science-fiction when I was a senior at Swarthmore College, and I actually wrote the first few pages of this story in 1967. In 1979, I was pushing hard to become a pro SF writer, and I wanted always to have a story in the mail. So I dug out “Sufferin’ Succotash” and finished it. In a way, this is my first SF story that I started, although it’s not the first that I finished.
    Oh, but wait, I did write an even earlier science-fiction story; it was called “The Miracle,” and appeared in The Pegasus , an annual magazine published by The Chevalier Literary Society in Louisville, Kentucky, March, 1962. If you want to read that one, you’ll have to find a copy of The Pegasus ! I can’t bring myself to reprint it.
    The Chevalier Literary Society was in fact a social club for high-school boys in Louisville. There were about six of these high-school fraternities in Louisville, and we all had to publish annual literary magazines to lend an air of legitimacy. The Pegasus of June, 1963, contains an actually usable piece of writing by me, a stream-of-consciousness piece called “Bus Ride—December 20, 1962.” Later I lifted this piece nearly intact for use at the end of the third chapter of my transreal novel The Secret of Life.

A New Golden Age
    “It’s like music,” I repeated. Lady Vickers looked at me uncomprehendingly. Pale British features beneath wavy red hair, a long nose with a ripple in it.
    “You can’t hear mathematics,” she stated. “It’s just squiggles in some great dusty book.” Everyone else around the small table was eating. White soup again.
    I laid down my spoon. “Look at it this way. When I read a math paper it’s no different than a musician reading a score. In each case the pleasure comes from the play of patterns, the harmonies and contrasts.” The meat platter was going around the table now, and I speared a cutlet.
    I salted it heavily and bit into the hot, greasy meat with pleasure. The food was second-rate, but it was free. The prospect of unemployment had done wonders for my appetite.
    Mies van Koop joined the conversation. He had sparse curly hair and no chin. His head was like a large, thoughtful carrot with the point tucked into his tight collar. “It’s a sound analogy, Fletch. But the musician can play his score, play it so that even a legislator …” he smiled and nodded donnishly to Lady Vickers. “Even a legislator can hear how beautiful Beethoven is.”
    “That’s just what I was going to say,” she added, wagging her finger at me. “I’m sure my husband has done lovely work, but the only way he knows how to show a person one of his beastly theorems is to make her swot through pages and pages of teeming little