Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel by Rudy Rucker Page B

channeling the Burroughs database that lay within his cells. Doing this, he could feel there was something bad about his past with Billy—something that he hadn’t yet excavated. “Anyway I’d like to stay with you folks for a couple of days.” He studied Billy. “How old are you?”
    “A father should know that,” said Laura.
    “Where’s his mother, anyway?” asked Alan carelessly. The air froze, shattered, and clattered to the floor. The sad faces of the family members were like smudged flowers. And now the troubling memory emerged like a maggot from a wound. Three years ago, William Burroughs had shot his wife in a moment of sodden horseplay.
    “You’re asking us where’s Joan?” said Mote, his expression a mixture of pity and contempt.
    Desperate to recoup, Alan feigned a poetic transport, and tried to frame his awkward question as rhetoric. Placing the back of his hand on his forehead, he quoted the first snatch of weepy doggerel that came to mind: “ Vainly I have sought to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore / For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore ... ” He grabbed his glass of cola, drank deeply, and bathetically concluded: “Q uaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget the lost Lenore! ”
    “So let’s be off to beddy-bye,” said Laura after a long pause. She corked the bourbon and put it away. “Do you think you need to see the dentist or the doctor, Bill? I could make some appointments.”
    “Feeling fit,” said Alan, getting to his feet. After Bill’s many years of riotous living, Mort and Laura’s expectations from their son weren’t high. But tonight he was hitting new lows. “Sorry for the outburst. I’ll be charming tomorrow.”
    “I’ll show you your alligator wallow,” said Billy, brightening up again.
    The extra bedroom had a window looking onto the lush garden behind the house. The rain was abating; the temperature was pleasant. Alan opened the window and its screen by a small amount to let the fresh air waft in unimpeded—he’d missed this in his shipboard cell.
    Alone again, tucked into his soft bed, Alan completely relaxed all control over his body. In seconds he’d slid into the form of a giant slug, homogeneous and boneless, a slimy yellow mollusk on the sheets, with his eyestalks drooping across the pillow. Cozy. He slept.
    He awoke at the first light of morning. It was a fine day. Out the window, the southern sky was aglow with the ocean’s reflected light. Something bumped and nudged against his window sash—pushing it wider open. The police? A thief?
    With a quick pulse of will, Alan pulled his amorphous body into the shape of William Burroughs. Hopping out of bed, he saw a fleshy tendril come sliding through the window’s open slit. Flowing inward like a time-reversed cascade, the glistening, doughy flesh accumulated on the parquet floor beside the window. A skug.
    Holding its default mollusk-shape but briefly, the skug rose up from the floor and took on the look of the nude—Vassar Lafia?
    “How— how did you—” began Alan, but the Vassar-like skugger strode forward and kissed him, cutting off all talk. Quite unable to control himself, Alan morphed into his womanly Abby form and let his partner’s penis slide into him.
    The bed was across the room, and having sex on the floor seemed somehow indelicate. As if sensing Alan’s hesitation, his partner flung up one of his arms, letting it stretch into a thick tendril that thwapped against the high ceiling. Fully in synch, Alan glued his hand to the ceiling as well. Once he’d extended his arm that high, it should only be a matter of sending microtendrils from his palm to take hold of the lath and plaster—like the footpad of a housefly.
    Softening their bodies, Alan and the intruder twined themselves around each other and rose off the floor.
    Error. Plaster and splintered wood tore loose from the ceiling. They thumped to the floor.
    Reset. Alan