Spaceland by Rudy Rucker Page A

signaling system to prevent the all-doors-open-at-once disaster, a system of strings rigged up along the ceilings between the pairs of doors.

    The buildings had markings in the form of colored dashes and dots along their outer walls. Thanks to the magic of dreams, I could read the signs. I saw a hot dog stand that I remembered from my boyhood: Cowboy Zeke’s Dawg ’N Suds. I watched a man eating a Wrangler Dog; he chewed it up and swallowed the pieces down into the sack of his stomach, washing down the food with a two-dimensional bottle of root beer. The woman behind the T-shaped counter had popped off the two-dimensional bottle-cap for him; the cap was a neat little thing shaped like a staple.

    In my dream I knew that the flat man was my Dad. This hadn’t mattered at first, but now it did matter. Dad reached up high to wipe off the mouth on the top of his head, then leaned on the counter of the hot dog stand, pointing his mouth towards the
shapely young counter woman, bulging out his eyes so that he could look at her. They got into a lively conversation. I reached out and gently touched the surface of the flat world so that the sounds of their voices could travel up my arm and into my inner ear. The Flatlanders sounded country, just like the folks back in the real Matthewsboro.
    The woman’s name was Dawna. Dad wanted Dawna to come for a walk and let him “pitch some woo.” Dad often talked that way, using that forties kind of big-band slang. Some women liked it. Dawna sealed up the hot dog stand and they set off, scrambling over building after building until they’d found their way into the woods to the east of Matthewsboro.
    The woods were like the cross section of a broccoli plant: green and filled with nooks and crannies. Beyond the woods lay the shallow bowl of a lake—a water-filled dent in the planet’s surface. People were swimming in the lake, diving to pass under each other when necessary. There was steady foot traffic back and forth over the woods between Matthewsboro and the lake, but the daytrippers stuck to the outmost edges of the vegetation rather than pushing down into its depths. Dad and Dawna were as private as a pair of aphids in a tea rose.
    I watched them bend their heads to rub their mouths together, and then they peeled off their clothes, the thin strings they wrapped around themselves to hide their skin. How small their clothes were compared to their bodies.
    Dad’s penis stiffened between his legs. He and Dawna folded and bent their double-jointed legs so they could have sex. Dawna helped Dad insert tab A into slot B. It looked so strange from the third dimension.
    A teenage girl was passing westward over the outer edges of the woods, on her way home from swimming in the lake. She looked familiar, but for the moment I couldn’t place her. She wore her hair glued into two ponytails below her eyes, one ponytail on either side of her head. She had a little pet with her, a small darting animal like a dog. The pet unexpectedly burrowed down into a narrow inlet of the woods, and the girl followed after it. Perhaps the dog was drawn by Dad and Dawna’s rustlings. The ponytailed girl saw the two lovers, but they didn’t see her. Very agitated, the girl grabbed her dog and took off towards Matthewsboro.

    A bit later, Dad dropped Dawna off at the hot dog stand and ambled home, pausing on the way to vomit the digested remnants of his meal into a special public trough at the side of a building. In this flat world, people didn’t have full digestive tracts. Dad bumped into a friend at the trough. I touched my finger to their plane in the shadow of the trough so I could pick up their sound vibrations.
    â€œHowdy, big gaaah,” said Dad’s friend, another cowboy-type character. He, too, was squeezing out the waste from his belly. “Nothin’ like emptyin’ yore gut before dinner, hey Ed?”
    â€œUrp, yep,” said Dad. “After