Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Phil glared at Kevvie, but felt he had to pass the idea on. “Do you have a lawyer?”

“Right! As if I need a lawyer to deal with some stupid popo pigs who I’m paying in the first place. As if a lawyer’s going to protect me from a fucking hole to the fourth dimension that ground up my brilliant handsome husband like garbage!” She glared angrily at someone out of view. “Stay away from me, you sow!” The uvvy-view jerked wildly. “Stop it!” Then the uvvy went dead. Phil immediately called again; a popo answered.

“Officer Grady, Wackerhut Police Services, Palo Alto Station.”

“I was just talking to Willow Gottner?” Phil said. “We were cut off?” He could hear Willow screaming curses in the background.

“She’s out of control, sir,” said the popo officer. “We’re concerned she could injure herself. I’m afraid we’re going to have to restrain her and administer a sedative.”

“Take it easy! I’ll be right there. I’m Kurt Gottner’s son Phil. Where’s your station located? I’m driving down from the city.”

The popo gave Kurt directions and added, “I’m very sorry about this, Mr. Gottner.”

“My father’s really dead?” Kurt asked.

“We’ve got a response team up there. We’re still not entirely sure what the situation is. The material evidence indicates a fatality, but there’s no body. And, yes, your father’s missing.” There was a shriek from Willow. “She wants to tell you one more thing. I’ll hold the uvvy out to her.”

The little image showed Willow, sitting on a plastic couch squeezed between two Wackerhut policewomen. They had their arms twined with hers in some special cop way and one of them was in the process of pulsing a drug-mist squeezie in front of Willow’s tiny triangular nose.

“Phil, be sure to call Tre Dietz,” said Willow, her features already slackening. “I forgot to tell Jane.”

“Don’t worry, Willow. I’ll be right there.”

“Call him!” insisted Willow. “Tell Tre the wowos are real! The bastard.” The uvvy clicked off .

“Who’s Tre?” Kevvie wanted to know.

“Oh, you’ve heard of him. He’s the uvvy graphics hacker in Santa Cruz who runs that new company Philosophical Toys? He got interested in Da’s work on this weird shape called a Klein bottle—and they did the wowo together. Just for a goof. Tre’s only about thirty. He and Da used to hang together and tweak the wowos.” The unreality of it all came crashing over Phil then and he was crying. “I don’t understand, Kevvie. Da can’t be dead.”

“But who actually owns the rights to the wowo?” asked Kevvie.

“Kevvie, that’s too—” Phil broke off and slumped in his chair. This had really taken the wind out of his sails. “Can you drive, Kevvie? I don’t think I can drive. I’m all torn up.”

“I’ll go dress.”

When Kevvie left, Umberto came skulking back out of the doughnut. Phil petted him absently as he uvvied Tre. Tre was still in bed with his wife Terri, and none too talkative.

“Yaaar?”

“Tre, this is Phil Gottner. One of the wowos just killed my dad. You better turn the rest of them off .”

“ Myoor ! That’s so xoxxed! I should have thought of this. Your poor dad. I’ll kill the wowos right now. Later.”

Phil left a message at the restaurant where he cooked, and then he put on his silver boots and black leather jacket and went outside with Kevvie. There was a stink like sewage and cheese from the big moldie nest in the abandoned red ship that sat in a silted-in slip across the street from Phil’s warehouse—the Snooks family. A group of skungy sporeheads and slug-skaters were standing on the pavement by the ship talking to a couple of the Snooks moldies and buying camote, the sporeheads’ drug of choice. Obviously they’d been up all night. Phil gave them the finger, pro forma. They jeered back; one of them halfheartedly threw a rock. Phil and Kevvie headed out.

It started raining as they got on the road. The traffic was light; the former Silicon Valley of the Peninsula had become something of a Rust Belt, and there wasn’t much reason for anyone to go down there from San Francisco. There were only a handful of cars on the road, all tiny electric jobbies with hydrogen fuel cells. Overhead you could see a few of the richer travelers riding on great flapping moldies.

Kevvie wanted to listen to an old-fashioned morning audio show she liked, a smugly cynical guy and a woman with a dead flat that’s-the-way-it-is-and-nothing-more voice just like Kevvie’s. The theme of the show was that flying saucer aliens had been invading Earth for over a century and that the government was keeping it a secret. As if there were a government that mattered. As if the actual aliens who’d briefly appeared on the Moon this winter weren’t more exciting than hundred-year-old lies. But Kevvie loved this shit. Phil threw a fit and made her turn it off .

“You’re in a nasty mood today.”

“My father’s been murdered!”

“It’s not like you two got along all that well. You had a big fight the last time you saw him.”

Phil sighed as if his heart would break. “Poor Da. I wish I could see him just one more time.” Up above the rainy freeway was a big sign temporarily wrapped in black plastic, the wind picking at the plastic and making it flap and billow in a way that spooked Phil. It was like a shroud. The brutal synchronicity of the universe displaying this just for him. Phil shuddered; the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

On Saturday they held the memorial service on the grounds of the Bass School, the private school where Kurt had worked. A quartet of students played sweet music on violin, viola, flute, and harp. A big redwood towered overhead, fog in its branches. It had rained all night, but now the sky was clearing. The mourners sat in folding chairs on the flat ground in front of the school’s main building, an enormous old two-story house, all glass and redwood, the home of a deceased software tycoon, the Bass of Bass school.

People took turns getting up and saying things about Kurt Gottner. Phil didn’t feel able to speak. If he opened his mouth he’d be likely to start howling. Why expose himself like that, especially with all the Bass mucky-mucks here? Though he’d gone to Bass School for four years, Phil had no great love for the place. Da had met Willow Chen through Bass—she was a professional fund-raiser who did contract work—and Phil tended irrationally to blame Bass for his parents’ breakup.

Phil’s mother Eve had pulled Phil and Jane out of Bass after the breakup, and from then on they’d gone to public school—which had been, on the whole, more fun. The larger classes of the public school made it likelier that you could find a kindred spirit. And public school had moldies working as teachers’ aides. You could learn a lot really fast from an uvvy link with a moldie. Bass, on the other hand, prided itself on being moldie­-free. Eve hated Bass. According to her, the students and faculty at Bass were a pack of freaks and losers, and the parents of the Bass kids were snobby self-indulgent artsy-fartsy crypto-Heritagist poseurs trying to buy themselves the illusion that their neurotic drug-addicted promiscuous bulimic dyslexic brats had one single grain of brains or talent. This, Eve’s opinion. Phil, however, had found many of the Bass teachers quaint and nice. Especially his father.

At the funeral, Eve sat at left end of the front row, next to Phil, Jane, Kevvie, Willow, Willow’s mother Jia, Da’s brother Rex, Rex’s wife Zsuzsi, Rex and Zsuzsi’s daughters Gina and Mary, Kurt and Rex’s mother Isolde, and Isolde’s kind old sister Hildegarde, whose face could stop a clock.

Rex got up and spoke a little, about how Kurt had always been accident-prone as a child. “One time when Kurt was little he fell off his bicycle and I carried him home. A few years later he broke his ankle in a soccer game and a friend and I carried him home. Today’s the last time we’ll do it. We’re carrying Kurt home.”