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

Hideous pungent stench. An Arab gendarme come pounding on my door, I yell that I’m making a pork couscous, and can I borrow a pint of piss. And then Turing arises from the Land of Nod and runs out to the balcony screaming like lobster lost his shell, blending his voice with the muezzin in the minaret across the way.
    The stub of Turing’s original face is red and raw like dysenteric buttocks. Taking pity, I squirt on some Vaseline and give him the last of my M tabs. He’s asleep on the couch now.
    I’m having a pipe, watching the skug-thing twitch on the counter. Maybe if I dip a dab onto my spine I sprout a lemur tail.
     
    As ever,
    Bill
     
    ***
     
    To Jack Kerouac
    Tangers, December 24, 1954
     
    Dear Jack,
     
    Turing fixed my typewriter, so now it’s back to my novel, if it is a novel. Interzone . Maybe I just interleave the carbons of my letters with you-are-there descriptions of my innaresting daily routines. “I live my art,” says the Author, smoothing his eyebrow with buffed-nail pinkie. “Don’t you?” What I need is a television camera broadcasting me all day long. “You got an audience of like two, Boss. A hebephrenic and a blind leper.”
    We find our protagonist in his louche Casbah suite...the plot as thick as the goat offal simmering on his alcohol stove. Cook it up and shoot it, amigo.
    Continuity note: House-guest Alan Turing was hogging my junk to the point where I find my day’s box of Eukodal ampules empty before the Hour of Prayer. So I shave off the dying Zeno face that was paining him. Made a man of him, I did, only he look like lunch counter hamburger meat. He planning to patch himself with questionable slime that he call his pet skug. A larger version of his skug have eat a secret agent and was burned by Arabs in the street.
    This afternoon, while Turing fiddle-fucks with his radio tubes and my broken typewriter, I watch a buzzard circling the fellahin sky. I am one with the bird, taking in the fragrant cedar of the souq braziers, the kief pipes’ glad exhalations, the drying jissom on pearly bellies, the slow rotting of the black meat, and the persistent pong of the parasitic Zeno Nu-Face that I charred with acid in my bidet. Flashback of me stirring clotted filaments with my double-jointed three-foot switch-blade.
    Clickity-clack. Happy keys on my typewriter. I dance the alphabet while my flayed-face professor putters at my kitchen counter, less jolly than before. He plan to change his looks yet again, and then to obtain a fresh passport—not easy just now as the heat have close down the Interzone paperhangers on account of a rogue con-man have pass himself off as the Norwegian consul and infect half of Embassy Row with coal-gas addiction which result in they metamorphose into scaly manila folders that smell of lutefisk .
    “I am my papers.”
    Turing’s company wears thin. In reaction, I’m compulsively pitching comedy routines at him, just to hear him laugh—a sound like a starter-motor on a cold morn.
    I can’t ascertain if he has hard feelings over my emergency surgery on him, his raw-meat phiz being somewhat hard to read. He still poking at his skug of undifferentiated tissue. He say he eventually need to let it grow all over his head for making a new face. But first he want to make it smarter.
    Meanwhile he giving me the horrors with his boffin etiquette. “I say, Burroughs, could you possibly procure a pint of ammonia?”
    He’s sent me out to the farmacia twice today for like streptococcal infusion and bovine growth hormone, the latter come in glass icicle tubes that Turing crack open to drip yellow glow-juice into his little reagent vat...formerly my cooking-pan and now destined, I shouldn’t wonder, for the Royal British Museum of the History of Bio-Computational Science.
    Drip, stir, measure, mix, low mutter, squeak of pencil on paper...last night Turing sneak out and steal two car batteries he use to power a mad-scientist all-fluid self-generating magic-lantern