The Ware Tetralogy - Rudy Rucker (popular ebook readers .TXT) 📗

I should have paid more attention when Da tried to teach me about the fourth dimension.”

“I was so sorry to hear about your father, Phil,” put in Babs Mooney.

“Yaaar,” chimed in her brother Saint. “Poor Kurt. It would xoxx to get chopped up by a hyperspace blender.” Babs and Saint had DIM lice in their hair, colorful little bugs that moved around on their scalps like tiny cars in traffic, arranging their hair in filigrees that could variously resemble paisley, crop circles, or herringbone tweed. Programming the lice was one of Saint’s art projects.

“I have a theory about the wowo,” proposed Onar, holding up a bony finger. “The wowos were a representation of the Klein bottle, were they not? Two Mobius strips sewn together?”

“I guess,” said Phil. “But it was just a goof. An illusion.”

“Perhaps the models set up a morphic resonance. Reality is, after all, a consensual hallucination. If enough people see something as a Klein bottle, then—voila—it’s a Klein bottle. It’s not impossible to be killed by a dream.”

“Don’t make it a New Age fantasy, Onar,” reproved Saint. “This thing was real.”

“Reality is a hobgoblin for small minds,” said Onar mildly. Yoke giggled. She seemed to find Onar entertaining.

Phil got the head chef to let him prepare most of the food for Yoke’s table. He cooked with fervor, and the meal was a big success. Around midnight he and the four guests stepped out of LoLo together. It was still pouring rain. Yoke did something with her uvvy as they stepped outside, and a moldie suddenly came bouncing up the street, sending out great splashes of water with each jump. It was Cobb Anderson.

“Thanks for waiting, Cobb,” said Yoke. “What did you do?”

“Oh, I was going around town with Randy Karl,” said Cobb. “And then we split up and I was hanging out with some homeless people in an alley off Columbus Street. Talking with them. One of them was a very intelligent fellow. It’s not so much that the homeless are crazy and addicted, it’s that they don’t have money for rent. Just that one simple lack. We need to find a way to make cheap housing for the poor. But hey, just for right now, let me be your umbrella.” Cobb stuck up his arms, and his tissues flowed upward, spreading out and thinning to make a giant umbrella that they could all stand under, the five young people in a circle around the moldie. “Better hold up the edges,” said Cobb. He’d used so much of his body flesh in the umbrella that his head had sunk down to chest-level.

“Where’s Randy now?” asked Yoke.

“By now I imagine he’s found a moldie hooker like he was looking for. I really should get that boy up to the Moon to be with his father. Eventually. Randy’s in no rush to go.”

“Cobb’s talking about his great-grandson,” Yoke explained to the others. “Randy Karl Tucker. He’s a cheeseball from Kentucky. He lives in Santa Cruz. Tre and Terri Dietz hate him. Randy kidnapped one of their moldies by putting a superleech on her. The new kind of leech-DIM. But now Randy says he realizes it was wrong. Cobb’s supposed to take him to the Moon to meet his father.”

“What is this ‘DIM’ that everyone’s always talking about?” asked Cobb.

“It stands for ‘Designer Imipolex’, Cobb,” said Yoke. “It’s what everyone uses instead of the old-time silicon computer chips anymore. A DIM is made of imipolex with some mold and algae in it. Just like your new body. You were out of it for a looong time, weren’t you?”

“I’m still out of it,” said Cobb. “That’s another reason I want to have a good look around dear old Earth before I go back to the Moon. And , like I say, Randy’s in no hurry either. He’s been busy spending the money his father keeps sending him. Sad to say, Willy’s a little reluctant to meet his only son. At this rate, poor Randy could wind up being a remittance man—someone whose father pays him to stay away. I’ve told Willy he should be more excited about Randy, but so far Willy doesn’t want to listen to his Grandpa. I think he’s been on the Moon too long.”

“Why didn’t Randy come along for dinner?” asked Phil.

“Hell, he was in too big a rush to get to that scurvy place in North Beach,” said Babs, laughing. “Real Compared To What. Can you even imagine? Randy’s certainly a man who knows what he wants. Admirable, in a way.”

They walked down the sidewalk as a single group dome. The plan was to go back to Babs’s space in a warehouse not far from Phil’s. Yoke, Cobb, and Randy were spending a few days with Babs. The rain made a nice reverberating sound against Cobb’s taut moldie flesh, which smelled like a dank basement. Phil managed to be next to Yoke, though Onar was on her other side.

“So you’re into helping people now, Cobb?” asked Onar. “Is this a result of some experiences you had while you were dead? And what was that like?”

“My original human personality was stored on an S-cube for over twenty years,” said Cobb. “And, yes, that was more or less the same as being dead. That me is dead forever, and it’s the same as the me right now. Memories of it? A big white light. The SUN. Endlessly falling into it, but never reaching the core. A cloud of other souls around me. The end of time, forever and ever.”

“You mean ‘Sun’ like our home star?” asked Phil.

“No,” said Cobb, “I mean capital S-U-N. At least that’s the name I use. The Divine Light, the universal rain that moistens all creatures. The SUN is a little like the eye on the top of the pyramid on the old dollar bills. Except SUN isn’t about money, the SUN is about love and peace.”

“Oh look,” said Babs, changing the subject by noticing a shop window, and the group stopped to gaze in. Colorful felt hats, each a single pastel shade, were suspended in the window, funny and bright, with an intricate patterning in their fabric. “I’m getting so into fashion,” added Babs. “I’ve been designing lace. It’s too bad nobody ever wears lace. They should.” Babs herself wore a silky shawl of thick, intricate nonrepeating lace. A mantilla.

“How did that work, your getting an imipolex body?” Phil asked Cobb.

“It was interesting,” said Cobb. “These two loonie moldies each started running a simulation of me. They pulled me back from the SUN. They were running two simulations of me so they could compare and contrast and get the parameters tweaked. And meanwhile they had a new imipolex body ready for me. So there were two simulations of me waiting for the one body. I and I got into a telepathic uvvy link so that we could merge and share—instead of doing sudden-death musical chairs. From that merging experience, and from being with the SUN, I got the conviction that each of us is the same person. And that’s why we should be really kind. Which answers Onar’s question of why I want to do good.”

“How do you make the lace?” Yoke was asking Babs.

“I use fabricants,” said Babs. “I don’t think you have those on the Moon yet? They’re crawly little DIMs like the lice in my hair, plastic ants that can spin fabric like spiders. People are using them for everything in the fashion business. I bet those hats were made by fabricants. Fabricants eat just any old thing—weeds, scrap wood, cardboard—and they spin it into fiber. I’ll show them to you when we go back to my place.”

“If we’re going to Babs’s,” said Onar, “let’s get some kind of transport. I don’t want to walk the whole way under a vile-smelling live toadstool.”

“Randy would love it,” said Babs. “But we can get the streetcar at the corner up there. You can ride too, Cobb, it’s run by a moldie.”

The streetcar with its moldie conductor came clanking up then. Cobb and the five young people got aboard. Phil ended up between Yoke and Cobb.

“Do you think I smell bad?” Cobb asked Phil.

“Of course,” said Phil. “That’s the way moldies are.”

“Well then, that’s another problem I want to work on,” said Cobb. “Besides more housing. I want to make moldies smell good. I bet a little biotech research could do it. The moldies just haven’t bothered to fix their smell before because they don’t care. What if the moldies made themselves smell good and built a whole lot of free housing!”

“Maybe Cobb should run for mayor of San Francisco,” said Yoke. “He’s friends with ex-Senator Mooney, you know. Babs’s and Saint’s dad.”

“I’ve got a new life and I want to help people,” said Cobb.

“A moldie run for an election?” exclaimed Phil. “You’d get all the moldie votes, but that’s ten percent of the city at best. What human would vote for a moldie? Even if you did used to be a person. And you’ve only been in San Francisco for, what, two days? Talk about a carpetbagger!”

“Well, it would be very popular to help people find housing,” said Babs. “That’s like the biggest problem. Cobb could win a lot of votes by fixing up abandoned warehouses.”

“Are you rich, Cobb?” asked Onar.

“I don’t actually own much of anything,” said Cobb. “My estate was divvied up a long time ago. My grandson Willy is wealthy, though I doubt he’d be much interested in this issue. But even without money, I have a very high recognition factor. As a politician I could act as a ‘facilitator.’ ” Cobb smirked a little at the bogus word. “How about this?” he added, and started up a series of impressions, changing his voice and features to resemble half-remembered images of dead Presidents. “The last four letters of ‘American’ are ‘I can.’ Mo’ folks, mo’ better. Ask not—”

“Stow it, Cobb,” said Yoke, cutting him off. “Presidents suck.”

They got off the streetcar a block from Babs’s warehouse, and the five humans ran there, with Cobb bouncing along next to them, hitting every puddle on the way. The inner walls of Babs’s warehouse space were decorated with great webs of shiny woven fiber, bright-colored and iridescent. There was a polyglass keg of beer that Saint had brewed, and he and Onar got into drinking it.

Babs’s fabricants lived in a little glass box like a terrarium, with strong lights and with a dish of wet paper for food. There were dozens of them, shiny little hourglass shapes with six legs. Babs showed Yoke how to use an uvvy to program them, and Yoke picked up on it right away. Within half an hour she’d gotten the fabricants to spin her a mantilla filled with spidery copies of her name.

Cobb sat quietly on the couch, taking everything in. He’d tightened up his body so that he was dense and practically odorless.

Onar found a great sheet of piezoplastic in Babs’s supplies and flopped it out onto an open space on the floor. With a deft move of his long fingers, Onar pinched off a bit of his own uvvy to make a receiver-DIM which he affixed to the big sheet of plastic. Now the imipolex came alive with colors and shapes: some abstract, some like cartoon images and blurred photographs, all coming directly from Onar’s brain. Saint put on his uvvy and got in on the act too, moving around playing air guitar and sending thought-sounds to the blanket of piezoplastic. The great sheet began to buzz and vibrate like a giant speaker, its