Cyberpunk

behind him.
    Passing the nadir of descent, Kane felt the insistent tug of the Return, a conceptual rebirth. His pattern nearly finished, he thought of the others who had walked it. Most of all Jason, the obsessed & broken sailor, whose creaking ship & brine-scented voyage had haunted his dreams. Of Percival, the soldier maddened by his realization of the Pattern, ending his days in futile subservience to a nameless God.
    Kane knew that each of them, the single being they made up & the single act they performed outside time, would continue. To each of them was a unique moment, a contribution, a change. Kane knew what his had to be.
    Molly was asleep & he was relieved that she did not wake up when he entered. His voices silent now, Kane set the panel beside her bed. Her Pattern was yet to come; Kane wondered if Odysseus would sing to her on her voyages.
    Kane’s point of view had begun to shimmer & bleed, like the gate that Reese had used. Only a force of will held his perceptions together as he suited up & began the walk back to his ship, back to the Earth, back to his kingdom.

THE JACK KEROUAC DISEMBODIED SCHOOL OF POETICS

----
    By Rudy Rucker

    I got the tape in Heidelberg. A witch named Karla gave it to me.
    I met Karla at Diaconescu’s apartment. Diaconescu, a Romanian, was interesting in his own right although, balding, he had a “rope-throw” hairdo. We played chess sometimes in his office, on a marble board with pre-Columbian pieces. I was supposed to be a mathematician and he was supposed to be a physicist. His fantasy was that I would help him develop a computer theory of perception. For my part, I was hoping he had dope. One Sunday I came for tea.
    Lots of rolling papers around his place, and lots of what an American would take to be dope-art. But it was only cheap tobacco, only European avant-garde. Wine and tea, tea and Mozart. Oh man. Stuck inside of culture with the freak-out blues again.
    Karla had a shiny face, like four foreheads clustered around her basic face-holes. All in all, it occurred to me, men have nine body-holes, women ten. I can’t remember if we spoke German or English—English most likely. She was writing a doctoral dissertation on Jack Kerouac.
    Jack K. My main man. Those dreary high school years I read On the Road , then Desolation Angels and Big Sur in college, Mexico City Blues in grad school and, finally, on the actual airplane to actual Heidelberg, I’d read Tristessa : “All of us trembling in our mortality boots, born to die, BORN TO DIE I could write it on the wall and on Walls all over America.”
    I asked Karla if she had weed. “Well, sure, I mean I will soon,” and she gave me her address. Some kind of sex-angle in there too. “We’ll talk about the beatniks.”
    I phoned a few times, and she’d never scored yet. At some point I rode my bike over to her apartment anyway. Going to visit a strange witchy girl alone was something I’d never done since marriage. Ringing Karla’s bell felt like reaching in through a waterfall, like passing through an interface.
    She had a scuzzy pad, two rooms on either side of a public hall. Coffee in her kitchen and cross the hall to look at books in her bedroom. Dope coming next week maybe.
    Well, there we were, her on the bed with four foreheads and ten holes, me cross-legged on the floor looking at this and that. Heartbeat , a book by Carolyn Cassady, who married Neal and had Jack for a lover. Xeroxes of letters between Jack and Neal, traces of the long disintegration, both losing their raps, word by word, drink by pill, blank years winding down to boredom, blindness, O. D. death. A long sliding board I’m on too, oh man, oh man, sun in a meat-bag with nine holes.
    Karla could see I was real depressed and in no way about to get on that bed with her, hole to hole, hole to hole. To cheer me up she brought out something else: a tape-cassette and a cassette-player. “This is Jack.”
    “Him doing a reading?”
    “No, no. It’s really him. This is a very special machine. You know how Neal was involved with the Edgar Cayce people?”
    “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know.” The tape-player did look funny. Instead of the speaker there was a sort of cone-shaped hole. And there were no controls, no fast-forward or reverse, just an on-off switch. I leaned to look at the little tape-cassette. There was a tape in there, but a very fine and silvery sort of tape. For some reason the case was etched all over in patterns like circuit