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

show...he not care about making me felony burglary accessory after the fact.
    The batteries connect to colored juice between two sheets of glass he cut out of my window. Seems like he’s hand-crafted some kind of optical display, it’s hooked into his radio tubes to make a show for his skug thing that sits on a cushion like a hairless cat—watching. Horribly the skug have grown a fuzz of snail-antennae, with a tiny black eyeball atop each wobbly stalk.
    I fix M and settle in with the skug to watch Turing’s show this morning for a few hours...jaguar yage visions, subdimensional towers, sea cucumbers of the hollow earth, branching tentacles of the Crooked Beetle, and then Joan’s annulled face transitioning through the days and months of decomposition. Turing has the skug mirroring these mind movies on its own skin. He has probes all over it, he at his controls, watching me from the corner of his eye, his own raw face unreadable.
    Despite all recent reverses, Turing remain manfully eager to emigrate to Amerika and set to work building morphogenetic slime processors for the Fatherland.
    One thing Turing say this afternoon is very disturb me: “Tomorrow for Christmas, I want to be you.” He say this with his voice flat and wistful like a prairie orphan, his teeth very prominent in his ruined face.
    At this point, I’d gladly throw my boy Kiki off the sled and into Turing’s slavering jaws, but Kiki don’t come around no more. My lodger the Mathematical Brain is give everyone the creeps.
    “Sorry to be a bother, Burroughs, but could you pop out for some turmeric and cayenne pepper? My display needs more hues .”
    Like I owe him endless favors. Just because I carved off his nasty rotting face. Classic mooch psychology.
    I’m scared of him, Brother Jack.
     
    As ever,
    Bill
     
    ***
     
    To Allen Ginsberg, Letter A
    Tanger, December 25, 1954
    Letter A
     
    My original plan today: take a break from junk so’s I can get my sex up...hit the Socco Chico and gift myself a Christmas boy...or eat majoun and be a centipede that wriggle along the endless maze of Tanger sewer pipes inspecting cheeks.
    But I got this like house guest Alan Turing who spring a surprise routine of his own. He was working all night, and when I wake up this morn, there’s no gay, bright presents...instead I see Turing’s become a human-sized slug of undifferentiated tissue. What I’d call a skugger . The prof’s gone viral on my ass.
    He slime up onto the wall and across the ceiling, he move very fast for a mollusk, like a speeded up movie, schluppp , he drop down and assimilate me right in my bed. Now I’m a skugger too. Our skins quilt themselves together...all is one... everything is merged inside. We’re filled with white light ecstasy, our four tranced eyes stare up like shiny puddles. Thinking fast.
    Sexy the way our livers slide across each other, tasty how our bones bump the grind. With the orgone pleasure rush comes a nausea like I never feel it before, my trillions of cells in revolt against Turing’s violation of the immune system code...
    Feeling overly full, your humble correspondent lumbered down the stairs to his filth-strewn back yard and took a seventy kilogram dump...eliminating redundant units like a corporation resizing herself after a handsome acquisition. Mercy me, but I was shivers all over when I passed that gentleman’s skull. Can’t say as I actually looked back at what I crapped out, just scuffed some dust over the remains like a dog does, then hurried back inside for a festive refreshment—candied dates and hot black tea. For the first time in years, I’m feeling no craving for junk, booze or Miss Green.
    I sat down at my well-oiled typewriter and began transmitting you this latest news...and then came the confrontation that every man fears and longs for the most.
    The shambling thump of...something Burroughsian... huffing up the sun-sharpened stairs to my door, my fellow skugger dragging himself towards me like