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

would be smashed to blazes. It’s an awkward position I’m in. Hopefully you can learn to emulate in some measure the efficiency of a moldie. Go ahead and try on the manipulator’s uvvy.”

Randy put it on. He was in an ocean of imipolex, with hollowed-out tube tunnels leading here and there. Some of the tubes held bright geometric icons—these stood for rare-earth metal crystals. Elsewhere in the mazes of the tubes were fuzzy globs—these represented the spores and algae of the chipmold. Myriads of little claws were scattered about—his nanopincers.

“The metals and the spores have to be distributed in certain ways,” said Ramanujan. “Fortunately, the controls are fractalized. That is, you can group them and cascade them. It’s as if you could shrink your hands and put copies of your hands at the tips of each of your fingers—and then do it again.”

Randy played around in the nanomanipulator’s space for a while. The tubes were like pipes, and the cascaded controls were not unlike a multihead pipe-gun. “I can drive this,” he said presently. “But what patterns do you want me to put in? Where are the specs?”

“In here,” said Ramanujan, tapping his head.

“How’m I gonna know what to do?”

“Just study the patterns I’ve been using and do something similar. As it happens, the actual pattern used for the etching process doesn’t seem to be terrifically important. It’s more like you’re a farmer cultivating a field—you plow it up to a certain statistical density and then you broadcast your seeds. The field and the seeds are smarter than the farmer.”

“Thanks a lot, Sri. Now tell me about that other bench.”

The biological bench along the left wall was covered with flasks and beakers where the chipmold cultures were prepared. One large beaker was half-filled with a gel of imipolex made cloudy by a million threads of mycelium. Up above the gel, ruffs of chipmold climbed the sides of the beaker like shelf mushrooms on a rotten tree.

“That’s one of the classic strains,” said Ramanujan. “Each layer of my leech-DIMs gets a dusting of that fellow’s spores. But the real computational power comes from the cultures in the flasks.”

The flasks held agars of imipolex with chipmolds growing in them. Most of them held several kinds of mold, with the populations intermingling like plants in a meadow or like corals on a reef. In a few of the flasks, the regions of differently colored mold moved about at a visible pace.

Randy leaned over to stare deep into one of the little bottles and saw a background pattern of green-and-yellow citylike structures that were forever assembling themselves and breaking apart. Filling the spaces between the hives were lively vortex rings, each like a mushroom cap or like a jellyfish. These little jellyfish patterns were in shades of royal blue, tipped with vermilion accents. They pulsed their way through the interstices of the background pattern, splitting in two at some intersections, merging at others. “It’s pretty,” said Randy.

“Yes yes,” said Ramanujan. “Pretty complicated. Are you ready for me to go through the whole process for you step-by-step? I suppose we’ll have to do this several times. Are you prepared to concentrate? Each full run-through takes about four hours.”

“I’m ready,” said Randy.

Over the following days, Ramanujan led Randy through the leech-DIM fabrication process over and over until Randy could reliably do it himself. Randy was like a cook working for a master chef. As he grew more familiar with the recipe, he began finding ways to streamline it, although Ramanujan resisted any attempts to fully automate it. His great fear was that an automated process would amount to a program which could be stolen by Emperor Staghorn’s industrial rivals, by the moldies, or by some other interested parties.

Such as the Heritagists. The evening after his first day of work with Ramanujan, Randy went to bed early. Parvati was feeling too weak to visit, and Randy was tired out from running through the leech-DIM recipe—not once but twice. Ramanujan was a slave driver. Just as Randy got into bed, his uvvy began beeping for him. Hoping it might be Parvati—he was eager to tell her that he’d nailed down the job—he slapped the uvvy on his neck.

“Hi there, Randy. You sure aren’t very thoughtful about your old friends.” It was a pale silly goose of a girl with a very bad complexion. For a moment Randy didn’t recognize her.

“Helloooo! Salt Lake City calling Bangalore!” She waved both hands and grinned ingratiatingly. “Jenny from the Human Heritage Council? Jenny who found your neato keeno new job?”

The whole dreary, smarmy, small-time-loser vibe of Heritagism came crashing back in on Randy. He’d completely blocked out Heritagism and the wretched Shively days since coming here—what with the interesting work at Emperor Staghorn, the fabulous love affair with Parvati, and the profoundly psychedelic camote visions to think about. Now and then he’d written his mother, sure, but he’d totally spaced out on his promise to make regular reports to the Jenny thing. Ugh!

“A little birdie told me you’re moving up the ladder at Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae, Ltd.,” said Jenny. “Working with Sri Ramanujan, no less. We’re very proud of you!”

“Uh, yeah, Jenny, I’m sorry I never called. I reckon I oughtta tell you I’m not much of a Heritagist no more.”

“So?” Jenny had stopped smiling.

“So that’s why I’m not too interested in talking to you.”

Jenny’s white little goody-goody face grew pinched and mean. “We got you this job, Randy, and we can take it away. Now that you are finally in a position to give us some useful information, you are going to deliver. Or else. I want a step-by-step rundown on Ramanujan’s leech-DIM process, and I want it now.”

“I only started learnin’ it! Anyway, Ramanujan would kill me if he knowed I was leakin’ on him. What the hell do you dooks have against moldies anyway? They’re beautiful!”

“Start uvvying me the information, Randy, or you’ll find your Emperor Staghorn employee pass is void when you show up to work tomorrow. You’ll be out of work and your little moldie girlfriend will rot to death. Believe it. Once a month I’m going to call you, and once a month you’re going to run through the leech-DIM process for me. Each time you finish, I’ll tell you which parts need more detail, and you’ll get me the details by the next month. I’m not here to argue with you. I’m here to get the information.”

So Randy told Jenny the leech-DIM recipe as best he could and tried not to worry too much about what Jenny was going to use it for.

That week the Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae company store let Randy get forty kilos of imipolex on credit, and Parvati was suddenly like new again. Shiva died right around then, and Parvati started living with Randy full-time, cooking and cleaning for him and flying him to and from work every day.

The other roomers in the Tipu Bharat made no objection; they all liked Randy because in his spare time he’d fixed the building’s leaky pipes and drains. It had turned out that most of the building’s sewer lines were actually made of waxed cardboard tubes; once Randy got them all replaced, the Tipu Bharat was a much more pleasant place to live. The grateful owner let Randy and Parvati move into a three-room apartment at only a slightly higher price.

On weekends, Randy and Parvati would go diving or to the jungle, as before, but now that they were practically a married couple, Parvati began letting Randy in on some secrets.

One Saturday morning three months after Parvati moved in with him, Randy woke to the smell of spiced, sugared tea with warm milk.

“Good morning, darling,” smiled Parvati. She was plump and beautiful, with fine Indian features and her fingers fluttering through poised gestures of formal dance. She handed him a mug of the chai and a plate of hoppers: Tamil griddle cakes with fresh mango. “I have a nice idea for a trip today. I’ll show you where some of the really successful moldies live. We call them the nabobs.” While Randy ate his food, Parvati stoked herself up with a few nanograms of quantum dots; Randy kept a supply of this compact moldie energy source on hand to supplement Parvati’s solar energy.

With breakfast over, they walked up the stairs to the roof of the Tipu Bharat. Parvati’s extruded ghungroo ankle bells tinkled with each step. On the roof, Parvati pressed herself against Randy from behind, growing clamps around his chest and waist. She let her remaining mass flow into a large pair of wings that stretched out as if from Randy’s back. Now Randy stepped up onto the building’s low parapet. A light morning breeze blew against his face. There was a thronged market square directly below them, part of the Gandhi Bazaar. The cracked, wavering sound of a snake charmer’s fat-bulbed little been horn rose up toward them—the Indians seemed not to mind how weird and gnarly a tone might be, just so long as it was persistent and loud.

Parvati’s uvvy pad rested on the back of Randy’s neck, talking to him. Now she signaled that she was ready, and he flexed his legs and leapt off the building with his arms outstretched. A woman in the market square pointed up at them and screamed; hundreds of people stared as Parvati’s great gossamer wings caught hold. They glided high across the market, slowly gaining altitude.

Rather than crudely flapping her wings, Parvati sent dynamically calculated ripples through them, getting the greatest possible lift from her energy. At the far side of the square, she heeled over into a turn, and then she held the turn so that they rose up and up in an ascending helix. Below them Bangalore dwindled to the semblance of a city map, set into a patchwork landscape of fields and factories. Now Parvati leveled out and began flying southwest.

“It’ll take us perhaps an hour to get there,” she told Randy. “We moldies call this place Coorg Castle. It’s in the jungles near Nagarhole.” Randy relaxed and enjoyed the sensation of the air rushing past him and the vision of the landscape scrolling by below. When the beating of the air got to be too much, Parvati grew a little windshield to protect his face. Buying Parvati a new body was the best thing he’d ever done. And with the good pay he was getting now, he would have fully paid for it in just one more month.

Coorg Castle was a jagged cliff deep in an inaccessible part of an official jungle preserve, a cliff pocked with ancient caves. Parvati told Randy that the richer, more successful moldies lived here despite the law that the preserve was solely for wildlife. They helped keep human poachers out of the preserve. “And, of course, they are also giving a lot of baksheesh to the authorities.”

Randy and Parvati landed in a grassy clearing at the base of the cliff , with flowers blooming all around. Parvati let go of Randy and took on humanoid form. Rather than taking on her customary appearance of a bejeweled sex goddess, Parvati made herself look like a wealthy high-caste widow, modestly wrapped in a white silk sari and adorned with only a few choice bangles and a fashionably large bindi dot on her forehead.

Parvati had uvvied the Coorg Castle moldies about their arrival, and a number of the moldies flew out of their caves and circled above, staring down at them. Randy was thrilled by the sight of the great iridescent creatures moving against the blue cloud-puffed sky with the sunlight streaming through their