Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“I want steamed clams, garlic bread, onion rings, french fries, coleslaw, corn on the cob, and a double vanilla milk shake.”

“Hungry much?” Terri filled out a takeout check and handed it in through a little window to the kitchen. Ike flopped down on one of the captain’s chairs by the register.

“Don’t sprawl, Ike. You’ll scare off the paying customers. We don’t want them to think this is a place for grunge buckets.”

“Shut up,” said Ike, rubbing his face and lolling even farther back.

“I saw little Cammy Maarten at the party last night,” said Terri to needle her brother. “Isn’t she in your grade? She asked about you. She said I should bring you to the next party. She thinks you’re cute .”

“Cammy Maarten is a feeb,” said Ike. He had not yet realized that girls were something he needed. “And I’d feel stupid coming to a surfer beach party when I don’t even have a board.”

“We should get a board, Ike,” said Terri. “I’ve been thinking about that. We could get a DIM board and share it. We’ll each get our own wet suit, of course. I have a lot of money saved up from this job, and you have a big hoard of birthday and Christmas money, don’t you? It’s totally lame for us to be living in Cruz and not know how to surf.”

“Dad won’t like it,” said Ike. “He hates surfers.”

“Not every single thing has to go Dad’s way, does it?” asked Terri.

“I would love to surf,” allowed Ike. “But don’t you think maybe we’re too old to learn?”

“Seventeen and fifteen isn’t old, Ike, believe me. Old is the people who eat in this restaurant all day. Hey, here’s your order. Stick around outside and wait for me. I’ll tell Teresa I have cramps from my period and she’ll let me off early and we can go to the surf shop.”

“You’re gross,” said Ike and went out on the wharf to feast. Terri came out when he was almost through eating and ate the rest of his french fries and onion rings, plus the hard-to-get meat in the body of his crab. Hungry seagulls skirled overhead and sea lions barked down among the pilings.

They fed the crab shells to the sea lions and walked down to the land end of the wharf to wait for a moldie bus. Before long the big loping thing came pattering by, coming down the grass-and-sand street. Terri waved, and the bus stopped. The bus was a fused grex made of twelve moldies. Her name was Muxxi.

“Howdy thar, Terri and Ike,” said Muxxi in the corny Wild West accent she affected, perhaps to please tourists or perhaps to mock. “Whar ye goin’ today?”

“We want to go to Dada Kine Surf Shop, Muxxi,” said Terri.

“Waal, now, I reckon that means we’ll be a-settin’ you young-uns off at the corner of Forty-First Street and Opal Cliff Drive,” said Muxxi, displaying the fare as numbers in her skin. “Pay up!”

Ike and Terri handed their fares to Muxxi, who rippled her imipolex to move the other riders toward the rear of the bus. Muxxi bulged out two fresh front-row seats for Ike and Terri. The kids lowered their butts down into the seats and the seats grabbed them tight. In bad weather the seats formed protective cowls, but today Terri and Ike were fully exposed to the pleasant sun and off shore breeze.

The bus’s giant sluglike body rippled along through the main beach area. There on the right was the Boardwalk with its classic mechanical roller coaster and on the left was the hill with the family motel, the Terrace Court. Terri’s motel—someday. Terri had gone to her mother to complain about the will, and Alice had promised Terri that she would pass the motel directly on to her, which made Terri feel a lot better. Alice had even asked Terri what she thought about maybe adding Clearlight to their motel’s name.

The bus waded across the shallow San Lorenzo River and humped up a slope to a grassy road that capped the cliffs. Muxxi let off two passengers at the yacht harbor, where the cliffs dropped away. She got another few passengers as she raced along the edges of Twin Lakes and Live Oaks beaches. As each group of passengers got on, Ike and Terri’s seats moved further towards the rear.

The cliffs rose up again and the bus surged onto them, the thick corrugations on her underside swaying at a rapid steady pace. Now they were at Pleasure Point with its schools of surfers.

“Here’s whar ye git off, Terri and Ike,” twanged Muxxi. Their seats turned to the side and became chutes that slid them slowly down to the ground. Muxxi pattered off, and the kids stood watching the surfers for a while.

“Do you really think we can learn to do it, Terri?” asked Ike.

“Sure. It’s easier with a DIM board. They have ripples on their bottom like Muxxi; they can swim. It makes it a lot less work to catch waves.”

“What if they swim off without you and go rogue?”

“They don’t,” said Terri. “They’re not smart and independent like moldies. They’re DIMs. A DIM board is smart enough to swim and to let you steer it, and that’s all it wants to do. Dom thinks women should be like DIMs.”

“Stop going off about Dom,” said Ike. “I’m ready to buy a board.”

They walked a block up Forty-First Street to the Dada Kine Surf Shop. Inside the store it was dark and cool. New and used DIM boards lined two walls and hung from the ceiling. Racks of wet suits filled out the rest of the store. A Hawaiian kahuna was sitting behind the counter. Slouched next to him was a red-and-yellow moldie, a liveboard. A liveboard was vastly more skilled and functional than a DIM board, but, of course, full moldies were very expensive. Instead of just buying them, you had to put them on a salary.

“Yaar, Terri,” said the big Hawaiian. “Your bud Kurtis Goole was in here earlier today. I think he went up to Four Mile Beach.”

“I’m not looking for him, Kimo,” said Terri. “I’m here to shop. This is my brother Ike. We want to get wet suits and a DIM board.”

“Two boards,” said Ike all of a sudden. “I don’t want to have to share with you, Terri.”

“Tell me how much money you want to spend,” said Kimo. “And we’ll see what we can do.”

“And I’ll give you little bangtails a cost-free and unforgettably wise lesson,” volunteered the moldie liveboard beside him. “A gorgeous incentive for them, right, Kimo? Business being so slow that I haven’t been paid in it seems like seven weeks, you understand.”

“ Mahalo very much, Everooze,” said Kimo. “It’ll be bitchin’ if you give them a lesson. How much bucks you got, kids?”

An hour later Ike and Terri had each gotten a used wet suit and a rebuilt DIM board—at a very reasonable price. Ike’s board was red with black checkers, Terri’s was patterned with blue-and-green flames. The liveboard Everooze bounced down to the beach with them, jabbering away, and they swam out to a small uncrowded break.

“I’ll hang this fabulation on three ripe words like an uvvy preacher,” said Everooze. “ Visualize, realize , and actualize . How do you talk to your DIM board? It’s a telepathic union, thanks to a little piece of uvvy in the nape of the wet suit neck, cuddled right up near your bright young Percesepe brain. To make your board swim, you visualize the motion you want, and then you realize that thought—push it out of your head so’s the DIM can channel it. And then, step three, the DIM makes it actual , all by itself. Splutter mutter, peanut butter! Visualize, realize , and actualize —these are the keys to correct surf motion in the water and— hmmm —indeed in all other walks or flights of life. The magic of the -alize ending. Yes. The DIM in the DIM board is a clueless little tad of flickercladding, a lonely finger’s worth of a moldie, but if you can visualize and realize , it can actualize . It works fairly well, at least on these puny waves. Puny waves but nicely tubular, I should add. Let’s surf ‘em.”