Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online

tormented heart. He’s quite impressed with my pedigree, says he’s had dealings with a giant artificial brain that use a magnetic memory unit from my grandpaw’s Burroughs Corporation.
    Turing says he’s on the lam from England for some decryptional security breach. And now he’s evacuated his Tangier squat to sponge off me. It’s Strickly Platonic between Turing and me, at least for now, we’re two logico-analytic brains in jars. But now and then I catch his brain stem schlupping across the counter and vining up my leg. There is, one allows, a certain mutual attraction.
    But all this is nothing compared to the real-life routine my prof-in-residence is laying down... and this is the tasty part. Turing is wearing an artificial face, a meat-skin flesh mask that he pancaked on while escaping the MI5 Heat.
    Says he grew the face from a sample taken from the tip of his deceased Greek lover’s nose... that being the original Zeno Metakides. Seems the stumblebum Mystery Hit Squad poisoned Metakides instead of Turing. They used a pot of cyanide tea, how cozy. Whiz that Turing is, he quick grew copies of his phiz and of Zeno’s dead pan, reassigned identities, and left the tarted corpse back home, escaping with the Metakides passport to...where else but old William Lee’s trap in Tangier. It’s like Allah sends him here special to be my gunjy muse.
    Fed by Interzone’s miasmas, his face-rot have turn galloping necrotic over the last six months, and now he’s working on a cure. Yesterday all day he’s tinkering with colored goo and radio tubes while I write out a new routine in longhand, reading some of the choicer bits to the wacky prof.
    Passable fun, but around sunset, Turing drop all dignity and begin mewling and holding his face. “Oh how it aches, Bill, can you give me something for the pain?” My reputation have precede me.
    I fix him with an ampule of Eukodal and I sit in my rocking chair watching the show. While Turing dreamy on the floor, this one particular centipede name of Akhmed crawl outta the crack by the toilet bowl to munch on his cheek. I break off a twitching bug-leg and smoke it in my tessellated pipe. And so we passed the night.
    This morning Turing clarify that, the day before he moved in on me, the Interzone Heat have made him. He’s rather shy on this point, but I gather he has offed a secret agent by feeding him to a shapeshifting slug that was originally to have been a special unguent for his horrible condition. And this thing is now on the loose.
    Turing brought a pound of his alien mollusk’s flesh in a cloth sack, and he set it out in a bowl on my counter. He call the thing a skug, he say it made of UDT or undifferentiated tissue, he talk to it like a pet. The UDT is subject to take root and grow anywhere. He very uneasy about using his skug before he’s done doctoring the pet with, like, goat bile and radio waves, he brought a whole mad-scientist lab along.
    Meanwhile, every time I turn around, Turing want more medicine. His horrible condition is make him a junk hog in record time. And this afternoon while I step out to fetch my mail, the situation reach the inevitable crisis.
    As fate wills it, I was detain from my rapid return on account of three fellahs are immolating some kind of mutant monster in the lane that leads into my naberhood.
    “This clumsy thing brings us shame,” a boy explain, with weirdly fluid gestures of his arms—like maybe he a mollusk too.
    Makes me feel so hot and nasty to see the flames lick across the rival mutant they’ve laid low, half-man/half-slug. The boys are goosing each other, laughing like hyenas, bending their faces into impossible grins.
    When I finally sashay home, I find all my ampules gone, and my guest nodded out on the shitter floor. In a spasm of disgust I am compelled to remove his moribund facial tissues, using my scalpel-sharp shiv to sever the capillary-rich roots.
    Liquidated Zeno’s face in the bidet, I did, doused it in nitric acid.