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

insects that the cows stirred up. The egrets looked like little old men with no arms.

A few miles of pastures and barns brought them to a bend in the road called Purcell. There were some big houses and some cracker-boxes, a tiny Winn-Dixie, and a couple of fuel-stations. Cobb pulled into a tree-shaded Hy-Gas that had a hand painted sign saying Body Work.

There was a three-legged dog lying on the asphalt by the pumps. When Cobb pulled up, the animal rose and limped off, barking. The fourth leg ended half-way down, in a badly bandaged stub.

Cobb hopped out of the truck cab. A young sandy-haired man in stained white coveralls came ambling out of the garage. He had prominent ears and thick lips.

“Mr. Frostee time!” the attendant observed. He screwed the hydrogen nozzle into the truck’s hydride tanks. There was a sort of foliated metal in the tanks which could absorb several hundred liters of the gas. “Gimme one?”

“It’s empty,” Cobb said. “This isn’t really a Mr. Frostee truck anymore. It’s mine.”

The attendant absorbed this fact in silence, looking Cobb’s skinny rat faced body up and down. “You baah it?”

“I sure did,” Cobb said, putting on a local accent. “Over in Cocoa. Fella closed his franchise down. I aim to fix this truck up and use it for my meat business.”

The attendant topped up the tank. He was tanned, with white squint-wrinkles around his eyes. He shot Cobb a sharp glance.

“You don’t look like no butcher to me. You look like a grease monkey in a stolen truck.” He punctuated this with a sudden, toothy smile. “But I could be wrong. You need anything besides the hydrogen?”

The guy was suspicious, but seemed willing to be bought off. Cobb decided to stay. “Actually… I’d like to get this truck painted. It’s a burden having to explain to everyone that it’s really mine.”

“I reckon so,” the sandy-haired man said, smiling broadly. “If you pull her round back, I might could he’p you solve your problems. I’ll paint it and forgit it. Cost you a thousand bucks.”

That was much too high for two hours’ work. The guy was sure the truck was stolen.

“OK,” Cobb said, meeting the other man’s prying eyes. “But don’t try to double-cross me.”

The attendant displayed his many crooked teeth in another smile. “What color y’all want?”

“Paint it black,” Cobb said, relishing the old phrase. “But first let’s get that goddamn cone off the top.”

He got back in the truck, pulled off the asphalt, and drove through rutted weeds to the junky lot behind the Hy-Gas station. The attendant, on foot, led the way.

“Perhaps he is not honest,” Mr. Frostee said inside Cobb’s head, sounding a bit worried.

“Of course he isn’t,” Cobb answered. “What we have to look out for is him calling the cops anyway, or trying to blackmail us for more money.”

“I think you should kill him and eat his brain,” Mr. Frostee said quickly.

“That’s not the answer to every problem in interpersonal relations,” Cobb said, hopping out. He was learning to talk to Mr. Frostee subvocally, without actually opening his mouth.

The attendant had brought a screwdriver and a couple of Lock-Tite wrenches. He and Cobb got the cone off , after ten or fifteen minutes’ work. The emptily smiling swirl-topped face landed in the weeds next to half of a rusted-out motorcycle. The two men’s bodies worked well together, and a certain sympathy developed between them.

The attendant introduced himself as Jody Doakes. Cobb, hoping to confuse his trail, said his name was Berdoo. They went around front to get the paint and the spray-gun compressor. Cobb solved the problem of when to pay, by tearing a thousand-dollar-bill in half and giving Jody one piece.

“You’ll get the other half when I pull out of here,” Cobb said. “And no earlier.”

“I see your point,” Jody said, with a knowing chuckle.

First they had to wash the truck off. Then they taped newspaper over the tires, lights and windows. They sprayed everything else black. The paint dried fast in the hot air. They were able to start the second coat as soon as they finished the first.

The job took all morning. Now and then that three-legged dog would start barking, and Jody would go out to serve a customer. Mr. Frostee’s refrigeration unit kept running, drawing its energy from the hydride tank. Jody asked once why the refrigerator had to be on if there wasn’t any more ice-cream. Cobb told him that if he wanted the other half of the thousand dollar-bill he could keep his questions to himself.

They finished the second coat a few minutes after the noon siren blew on the Purcell fire-house.

“Y’all want a bite to eat?” Jody asked. “I got the makins for sandwiches inside.” He hooked his thumb at the garage.

“Sure,” Cobb said, ignoring the fact that he’d just have to clean the chewed-up bread and lunchmeat out of his food unit later on. Eating was fun. “I could use a couple of beers, too.”

“Come shot!” Jody said, meaning something like you bet. “Come shot on the beer, Berdoo.”

They had a friendly lunch. More strongly than ever, Cobb felt able to enter into other people’s thoughts. Again the thought of starting a cult crossed his mind.

The food and beer felt good in his mouth. Over Mr. Frostee’s protests, Cobb cut in the DRUNKENNESS subroutine and gave himself a hit for each beer. They split a six-pack. Jody allowed as how, for an extra two hundred bucks, he’d be willing to let Cobb have some fresh license plates and registration papers he happened to have.

Cobb enjoyed their dealings very much. In his old body he had never been able to talk comfortably to garage mechanics. But now, with a random grease monkey’s face on a Sta-Hi-shaped body, Cobb fit in at a filling station as easily as he used to fit in at research labs. Idly he wondered if Mr. Frostee could change the flickercladding enough to turn him into a woman. That would be interesting. There was so much to look forward to!

After lunch they changed the license plates. Cobb handed over the missing half of the thousand-dollar-bill, and the extra two hundred dollars. Hoping to keep Jody bought, he suggested that he might be back with more of the same kind of business next month, if things worked out.

“Come shot!” Jody said. “And good luck.”

Cobb drove out of Purcell, heading east, past cows and egrets.

“I wish you’d taped his brain,” Mr. Frostee nagged. “We can always use a good mechanic.”

Cobb had been expecting a remark like this. And the next remark, too.

“How come you’re driving East? That’s not the right way to Disney World. We’ve still got to get Berdoo!”

“Mr. Frostee,” Cobb said, “I love my new body. And I support your basic plan. It’s the logical next step for human evolution. But mass-murder is not the way. There’s a better way, a way to get people to volunteer for brain-taping. We’ll start a new religious cult!”

There was a pained silence. Finally Mister Frostee spoke. “I feel I should warn you, Cobb. You have free will in the sense that I can’t control your thoughts. But the body belongs to both of us. In certain special circumstances I may take… ”

“Please,” Cobb said, “hear me out. Am I right in believing that you’re the only big bopper now on Earth?”

“That’s right.”

“And I’m using the only robot-remote you have left ?”

“Yes. Hopefully, with Mooney out of the way, security at the spaceport will be relaxed again. We had planned a shipment of some thousand new remotes during the next two years, as well as several more big bopper units. These plans are unfortunately… in flux. There are some… difficulties on the Moon. But until the situation re-stabilizes, I intend to continue gathering tapes and… ”

“You’re trying to tell me there’s an all-out civil war starting on the Moon, aren’t you?” Cobb exclaimed. “We’re on our own, M.F.! If we go back to the spaceport and try…”

“There is no need to go to spaceport for tape transmission. I can radio-beam the tapes directly up to BEX at Ledge.”

“A soul transmitter,” Cobb said thoughtfully. “That’s a good angle. Personetics: The Science of Immortality.”

“What do you mean?”

“The religion! We’ll get the down-and-out, the runaways, the culties… we’ll get them to believe that you’re a machine for sending their souls to heaven. It’s not really so…”

“But why bother? Why not just proceed as Phil always did? To seize, and cut, and… ”

“Look, M.F., we’re in this together. It works both ways. If something happens to this truck I’m dead. I don’t think you realize just how strongly humans react to murder and cannibalism. This is no bopper anarchy here, it’s more like a police-state. If you and I are going to last out until BEX gets the troops here, we’re going to need to lay low and play it careful.”

Just thinking about it gave Cobb the creeps. If he couldn’t get fuel for the truck, if the cops stopped them, if the refrigeration unit broke… It was like being a snail with a ten-ton shell! A snowball in hell!

“We need security,” Cobb said urgently. “We need a lot of people to take care of us, and we need money to keep the hydride tanks full. If we get enough money I think we should build a scion, too. A copy of your processor. We could get our followers to buy the components in computer shops. You’ve got to understand the realities of life on Earth!”

“All right,” Mr. Frostee said finally. “I agree. But where are you driving to?”

“Back to the coast,” Cobb said. “I know a place north of Daytona Beach where we can hole up. And, say… give me a new face. Something fatherly.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

After his father’s funeral, Sta-Hi went back to driving a cab in Daytona Beach. Bea, his mother, wanted to put the house up for sale and move north, away from the pheezers. She hated them since Mooney’s death… and who could blame her! Her husband had gone to old Cobb Anderson’s house on a routine check, and had been blown to smithereens! Just for doing his job! And so on.

There was an investigation into Mooney’s death, but the blast hadn’t left a hell of a lot to investigate. There was not a scrap of the suspected robot double to be found. And Sta-Hi didn’t tell the authorities any more than he had to. He still couldn’t decide whose side he was on.

He took a couple of his father’s space-ship paintings and rented a room in Daytona. He went back to Yellow Cab and they gave him a job driving the night-shift. Mostly it was a matter of bringing drunks and whores to motels. Seamy. And duller’n shit.

His dope habit crept up on him again. Pretty soon he was smoking, snorting, dropping, spraying and shooting his money as fast as he made it. Late at night, driving up and down the one-dimensional city, Sta-Hi would dream and scheme, forming huge, interlocking plans for the future.

He would make a movie about cab-driving. He would write a book about the boppers. No, man, do it with music!

He would learn how to play the guitar and start a band. Fuck learning! He would get another Happy Cloak and let it play his fingers for him. He needed a Happy Cloak!

He’d threaten the