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

“Now you see what we do on Christmas with no babies.” There was an empty glass by her chair. The vizzy screen showed an unfamiliar family opening presents around their tree. Mom touched the screen and a different family appeared, then another and another.

“We’ve gotten in the habit,” explained Dad with a little shrug. “Every year lots of people leave their sets on, and whoever wants to can share in. So no one’s lonely. We’re so glad to have a real child here.” He took her by the shoulders and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Little Della. Flesh of our flesh.”

“Come, dear,” said Mom. “Open your presents. We only had time to get two, but they’re right here in front of the vizzy in case anyone’s sharing in with us.”

It felt silly but nice sitting down in front of the vizzy—there were some excited children on the screen just then, and it was almost like having noisy little Ruby and Sude at her side. And Bowser was right there, nuzzling her. Della’s first present was an imipolex sweatshirt called a heartshirt.

“All the girls at the bank are wearing them this year,” explained Dad. “It’s a simplified version of bopper flickercladding. Try it on!”

Della slipped the loose warm plastic over her top. The heartshirt was an even dark blue, with a few staticky red spots drifting about.

“It can feel your heartbeat,” said Mom. “Look.” Sure enough, there was a big red spot on the plastic sweatshirt, right over Della’s heart, a spot that spread out into an expanding ring that moved on over Della’s shoulders and down her sleeves. Her heart beat again, and a new spot started—each beat of her heart made a red splash in the blue of the heartshirt.

“Neat,” said Della. “Thanks. They don’t have these up in Einstein. Everyone there hates boppers too much. But it’s stuzzy. I like it.”

“And when your heart beats faster, Della,” said Mom, “all the fellows will be able to see.”

Suddenly Della remembered Buddy, and why she’d come home, and the red rings on her sweatshirt started bouncing like mad.

“Why, Della!” said Mom, coyly. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“I’m not ready to talk about it,” said Della, calming herself. Especially not to a loudmouth racist drunk like you, Mom.

“Let’s have some champagne,” suggested Dad.

“Good idea,” said Mom. “Take the edge off. And then Della can open her other present.”

Della watched the vizzy for a minute, calming down. Good old vizzy.

She touched the screen here and there, and the picture skipped from home to home. Louisville people, not so different from the Tazes. Della even recognized some of them. She had some champagne and felt OK again. Lots of the people in the vizzy were drinking… why should she be so hard on her parents?

“Let’s see my other present. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you all anything.”

“You brought yourself.”

Della’s second present was a little seed-packet labeled WEEK TREES.

“Have you heard of these?” asked Mom. “They’re bioengineered. You know the miniature bonsai trees that the Japanese used to grow? These are the same, except their whole life cycle only takes a week. I’ve been showing them off in the store. They’re amazing. We’d planned to try and mail these to you.” She poured herself a fresh glass of champagne, which killed the bottle. “Get Della a little pottery cup with some potting soil, Jason. And why don’t you twist up a few jays.”

“Mom… ”

“Don’t be so uptight, Della.” Mom’s painted eyes flashed. “You’ll get your turkey dinner, just wait and see. It’s Christmas! Anyway, you’re the one who’s addicted to that hard-drug merge, little Miss Strict.”

“AO, wave, it’s heavy junk, Mom, but I took blocker and I’m oxo. Wu-wei, Mom, your rectum’s showing.” A wave of nausea swept over her again and she gagged. “It must be the gravity that’s making me feel so sick.”

“Let’s wait on the weed till Colin and Ilse get here,” suggested Dad. “You know how they love to smoke. You get that turkey in the microwave, Amy, and I’ll help Della plant one of her week trees.”

Mom finished her champagne and got to her feet. She forgot her anger and smiled. “I got a boneless turkey this year, Della. They grow them in tanks.”

“Do they have legs and wings?”

“Everything except bones. Like soft-shell crabs. Sometimes I feel that way myself. I’ll make lots of sausage stuffing for you, sweetie.”

“Thanks, Mom. Let me know if you need any help.”

Dad got a little pot full of wet soil, and he and Della planted a week tree seed. They’d half expected the tree to shoot up and hit them in the face, but for the moment, nothing happened. Bowser sniff ed curiously at the dirt.

“Let’s figure it out,” said Della, who liked playing with numbers. “Say a real tree lives seventy years. Then one day is like ten years for a week tree. So it should go through a year in two and four-tenths hours. Divide by twelve and get a month in two-tenths of an hour. Two-tenths of an hour is twelve minutes. Assuming that the seed starts out in a dormant midwinter mode, then we should see the first April leaves in four times twelve minutes, which will be… ”

“Noon,” said Dad. “Look at the soil in the pot, it’s beginning to stir.” Sure enough, the soil at the center of the pot was bulging up, and there, slowly slowly, came the creeping tip of the week tree. “I think they’re like apple trees. We ought to have some little apples by tonight, Della.”

“Wiggly!” She gave Dad a kiss. Mom had some pans sizzling out in the kitchen, and the vizzy was full of happy Christmas people. “Thank you. It is nice to be back.”

“Can you tell me more about what happened up in Einstein, Della?”

“I had a boyfriend named Buddy Yeskin. We took merge together and—”

“What does that actually mean, ‘taking merge together’?” asked Dad. “I can’t keep up with all these new—”

“It’s this weird drug that makes your body get all soft. Like a boneless turkey, I guess. And you feel really—”

Dad frowned. “I can’t believe you’d do a thing like that, Della. We didn’t raise you that way.” He sighed and took a sip of the whiskey he’d brought out from the kitchen. “You took merge with this Buddy Yeskin, and then what happened?”

“While we were… together, someone broke into my apartment and killed Buddy. Smashed him all into pieces while he was soft.” The fast red circles began rippling across Della’s heartshirt again. “I kind of fainted, and when I woke up, a crazy man called on the vizzy and said he was going to kill me, or frame me for the murder, if I didn’t leave for Earth. He’d even arranged a ticket and a fake passport for me. It was such a nightmare web, closing in on me. I was scared. I ran home.”

The week tree was a barky little shoot now, with three stubby little branches.

“You’re safe here,” said Dad, patting her hand. Just then Della noticed that his voice was already slurring a little. Dad noticed her noticing. He gave a rueful smile. “For as long as you can stand us. Tomorrow I’ll take you to see Don Stuart… you remember him. He’s a good lawyer. Just in case.” Bowser started barking.

“Merry Christmas!” shouted Mom in the kitchen. “You didn’t have to bring all that! Jason! Della!”

It was Jason’s older brother Colin, with his wife Ilse and son Willy. Colin worked as an English professor at the University of Louisville. He was skinny and sarcastic. Ilse was from a famous family: Ilse’s father was Cobb Anderson, who’d built the first moon-robots years ago.

Great-uncle Cobb had been convicted of treason for building the robots wrong. Then he’d started drinking, had left his wife Verena, and had ended up as a pheezer bum in Florida. Somehow he’d died—it was a little uncertain—apparently the robots had killed him. He was the skeleton in the family closet.

Aunt Ilse was more like her German mother than she was like old Cobb. Vigorous and artsy-craftsy, she’d hung on to her wandering husband Colin through thick and thin, not that Della could see why. Uncle Colin had always struck her as obsolete, trying to make people look at his stupid paper books, when he barely even knew how to work the vizzy. And when he smoked marijuana with Dad, he got mad if you didn’t laugh at his jokes and act impressed by his insights.

Their son Willy was a smart but sort of nutty guy in his twenties. A hacker, always fiddling with programs and hardware. Della had liked him a lot when they were younger, but it seemed like he’d stopped maturing long before she had. He still lived at home.

“Dad, don’t tell them about why I’ve come back. Say I’m here to buy laboratory equipment for Dr. Yukawa. And tell Mom to keep quiet, too. If she gets drunk and starts talking about me, I’m going to—”

“Relax, geeklet.”

Before long they were seated around the dining table. Dad had put the week tree in the center so they could watch it grow. Aunt Ilse offered a Lutheran grace, and Dad got to work carving the boneless turkey. He cut it in thick, stuffing-centered slices.

“Well, Della,” said Colin after the first rush of eating was over, “how are things up on the Moon? Real far out? And what are old Cobb’s funky machines into?” He specialized in the literature of the mid-twentieth century, and he liked to use the corny old slang on her. In return, Della always used the newest words she knew.

“Realtime, it’s pretty squeaky, Unk. There’s giga bopper scurry underground, and they’re daily trying to blank us. They have a mongo sublune city called the Nest.”

“Come on, Della,” said Dad. “Talk English.”

“Don’t you feel guilty about the boppers?” asked Aunt Ilse, who was always ready to defend the creatures that her father had midwifed. “I mean, they built most of Einstein. Disky, they used to call it, no? And they’re just as conscious as us. Isn’t it really like the blacks in the old South? The blacks did all the work, but the whites acted like they weren’t even people.”

“Those robots aren’t conscious,” insisted Mom. She’d had a lot of red wine in the kitchen, and now they were all back on the champagne. “They’re just a bunch of goddamn machines.”

“You’re a machine, too, Aunt Amy,” put in Willy. “You’re just made of meat instead of wires and silicon.” Willy had a slow, savoring way of speaking that could drive you crazy. Although he’d never finished college, he made a good living as a freelance software writer. Earth still used a lot of computers, but all the bigger ones were equipped with deeply coded behavior locks intended to keep them from trying to follow in the steps of the boppers, the rebel robots who’d colonized the Moon. Earth’s slave computers were known as asimovs in honor of the Asimov laws of robotics which they obeyed.

“Don’t call your aunt ‘meat,’” reprimanded Uncle Colin, who liked to flirt with Mom. “The turkey is meat. Your aunt is a person. You wouldn’t want me to put gravy on your aunt and eat her, would you? In front of everyone?” Colin chuckled and bugged his eyes at Mom. “Should I smack him, Amy?”

“At least he’s thinking about what I’m made of.