Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

“I’m not leaving any tern unstoned, as the nasty little kid said when he was pitching pebbles at the shore birds.”

PJ relented and smiled at my bad joke. “Did you actually imagine I had never heard that one before?”

“No. But I did imagine that you would imagine that I would never be dumb enough to say it. And so it made you smile anyhow.”

“Touché…”

“Now let’s finish up. I’m going to take you to a show.”

“Which one?”

“The touring version of Metropolis .”

“With Bernadette Peters as Maria?”

“The one and only.”

“Let’s go!”

Was it cheating to have looked up PJ’s passions on the a-net? If so, I joined millions of other romance-seeking geeks.

After the show we ended up on the observation deck of the Agberg Tower of Glass. All of Centropolis lay spread out below us, a lattice of lights, and I felt the same epiphany experienced by Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Cryonics of Blot 49 , when she envisioned the alien spaceport as pure information.

This high, the air was chilly, and PJ huddled naturally into my embrace. We kissed for a long time before our lips parted, and she said wistfully, “This tower is the fourth-highest in the world.”

“But only,” I whispered, “until the completion of the Atreides Pylon in Dubai.”

The next day I took the trolley to the intersection of Kirby Avenue and Lee Street, to the HQ of MetamorPharma. Built in the classic Rhizomatic style pioneered twenty years ago by the firm of Fuller, Soleri and Wright, the building resembled an enormous fennel bulb topped with ten-storey stylized fronds. The fronds were solar collectors, of course.

Inside at reception, where giant murals featuring the corporate cartoon—the famed multicoloured element man—dominated the walls, I used the annunciator to rouse Taft Greenstock, sales rep, from whatever office drudgery he had been performing. In a few moments, he emerged to greet me.

Greenstock was a black man of enormous girth and height, sporting scraggly facial hair and an Afro modelled on Luke Cage’s, and wearing a polychromatic caftan and sandals. As he got closer, I smelled significant B.O. and booze. Aside from his sheer size, he was hardly intimidating. I had expected some kind of hard-nosed Octopus or Joker or Moriarty, the instrument of Hornbine’s murder, and instead had gotten a fourth-rate Giles Habibula.

I had been planning to show Greenstock a fake ID and profile I had set up on the a-net, and feed him a line of foma. But taking his measure as an unwitting proxy who might be frightened into spilling some beans, I shifted plans. After we shook hands and I showed him my NC license, I just braced him with the truth.

“Chum Greenstock, I’m here about the death of Dr. Harold Hornbine. We have cause to believe he was murdered.”

Greenstock looked confused, and began to sweat. I could smell metabolized gin. People passing in the lobby glanced at us curiously.

“I don’t know anything about that. He was just a customer. I deal with hundreds of medicos every week. He was fine the last time I saw him—”

“And what did you discuss with him during that visit?”

“A new product. A vaccine. KannerMax.”

“What’s KannerMax inoculate against?”

“It’s not for every child. It’s only recommended for those with certain chromosomal defects. I don’t know the hard scientific data, I’m just a salesman. I left him all the literature and a sample—”

Greenstock looked like he was about to collapse. I quit pushing.

“All right, that’s fine. You’ve helped me a lot, Chum Greenstock. I’ll be back if I have any further questions.”

I had the name of the compound that had seemingly been the catalyst in Hornbine’s murder. And murder I now indeed believed it to be. Greenstock’s visit introducing this new vaccine synchronized too well with Hornbine’s “heart attack.” The Doc must’ve learned something upon examination of the vaccine that earned him a death sentence.

Leaving the building, I knew just where to turn next.

Dinky Allepo.

Wonder Woman was sitting in Doc Savage’s lap, while Atom Boy rested on her shoulders. Godzilla was destroying Jonestown, home to the wacky Stimsons clan, while Maggie and Jiggs and Lil Abner and Daisy Mae applauded. Mutt and Jeff were herding approximately a dozen Felix the Cats toward the maw of Cthulhu. And my namesakes, Max and Moritz, were duking it out with Skeezix and Little Lulu.

These scenes of extreme cognitive dissonance comprised the smallest part of Dinky Allepo’s many thousands of disparately sized action figures. They covered every available table-top and shelf, much of the furniture, and a good portion of the floor. I had to walk as if through a minefield of sharp plastic shrapnel.

Having let myself in, I found Dinky in front of his a-net terminal, his usual habitat. He was surrounded by a midden of fast-food debris. On the walls of his study hung various film posters, mostly featuring busty, scantily clad scream queens: Tura Satana in The Female Man ; Elke Sommer in The Left Hand of Darkness ; June Wilkinson in Motherlines .

Dinky’s long greasy hair hung at an acute angle as he tipped his head back to drain a can of Brazilian guarana drink. His soiled t-shirt was printed with the molecular structure of caffeine.

“Em und Em, how can I help you today? Need some more dope on who’s ripping off whom in the exciting world of playware?”

“No, Dink, it’s something more serious this time….”

I explained to him everything I had on the Hornbine case. His dilated pupils widened even further with interest.

“KannerMax, huh? Let me see what I can learn—”

Dinky swung back to his a-net node and got to work.

Dinky Aleppo was one of the top fifty Nexialists in the GDM. If his synthesizing skills couldn’t connect the pieces of this puzzle, I wouldn’t know where else to turn.

Not wanting to disturb his work, I left the room.

Dinky’s den held a big ether-vision set, whose remote I grabbed. I dropped down into a chair and immediately sprang up with a shout. My left buttock had not taken kindly to being pierced by the spear held by Alley Oop. For a moment I was frozen in geekish reverie. I thought about how “Alley Oop” was a near anagram of “Aleppo,” and how if you added in the name of the caveman’s dinosaur, “Dinny,” you could almost get “Dinky” as well. Then I threw the action figure across the room.

The set came alive to a broadcast of Ziegfeld Follies of 1975 . God bless our quondam President Hearst! He had loved chorus girls even after his marriage and spiritual reformation, and endowed the Follies as a subsidized National Treasure. But I wasn’t in the mood for all the leggy dancework, and I switched to one of the fifteen major history channels.

I arrived in the middle of a documentary on the 1930s.

After the gradual pacification of the world in the first two decades of the century, the thirties had been a march of progress unparalleled in history. Scientific, economic, artistic—that decade had seen the true flowering of geek culture as it spread across the globe. The first generation of True Geeks, their sensibilities fostered by twenty years of the Funnypaper Boys and other creators, had finally supplanted any remnant of old-school barbarism. The creation of Centropolis as the new capital of the nation had been the crowning achievement of that era, surpassed only by the establishment in the forties of Global Data Management as the civic superego of national governments.

I was just enjoying some old newsreels of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich judging an Atlantic City beauty pageant awarding the title of “Sexiest Wilma Deering of 1939” (Alex was a healthy young man then thanks to the hemophilia cure invented by Linus Pauling), when Dinky called my name. I shut off the set and rejoined him.