Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Cobb’s talking about his great-grandson,” Yoke explained to the others. “Randy Karl Tucker. He’s a cheeseball from Kentucky. He lives in Santa Cruz. Tre and Terri Dietz hate him. Randy kidnapped one of their moldies by putting a superleech on her. The new kind of leech-DIM. But now Randy says he realizes it was wrong. Cobb’s supposed to take him to the Moon to meet his father.”

“What is this ‘DIM’ that everyone’s always talking about?” asked Cobb.

“It stands for ‘Designer Imipolex’, Cobb,” said Yoke. “It’s what everyone uses instead of the old-time silicon computer chips anymore. A DIM is made of imipolex with some mold and algae in it. Just like your new body. You were out of it for a looong time, weren’t you?”

“I’m still out of it,” said Cobb. “That’s another reason I want to have a good look around dear old Earth before I go back to the Moon. And , like I say, Randy’s in no hurry either. He’s been busy spending the money his father keeps sending him. Sad to say, Willy’s a little reluctant to meet his only son. At this rate, poor Randy could wind up being a remittance man—someone whose father pays him to stay away. I’ve told Willy he should be more excited about Randy, but so far Willy doesn’t want to listen to his Grandpa. I think he’s been on the Moon too long.”

“Why didn’t Randy come along for dinner?” asked Phil.

“Hell, he was in too big a rush to get to that scurvy place in North Beach,” said Babs, laughing. “Real Compared To What. Can you even imagine? Randy’s certainly a man who knows what he wants. Admirable, in a way.”

They walked down the sidewalk as a single group dome. The plan was to go back to Babs’s space in a warehouse not far from Phil’s. Yoke, Cobb, and Randy were spending a few days with Babs. The rain made a nice reverberating sound against Cobb’s taut moldie flesh, which smelled like a dank basement. Phil managed to be next to Yoke, though Onar was on her other side.

“So you’re into helping people now, Cobb?” asked Onar. “Is this a result of some experiences you had while you were dead? And what was that like?”

“My original human personality was stored on an S-cube for over twenty years,” said Cobb. “And, yes, that was more or less the same as being dead. That me is dead forever, and it’s the same as the me right now. Memories of it? A big white light. The SUN. Endlessly falling into it, but never reaching the core. A cloud of other souls around me. The end of time, forever and ever.”

“You mean ‘Sun’ like our home star?” asked Phil.

“No,” said Cobb, “I mean capital S-U-N. At least that’s the name I use. The Divine Light, the universal rain that moistens all creatures. The SUN is a little like the eye on the top of the pyramid on the old dollar bills. Except SUN isn’t about money, the SUN is about love and peace.”

“Oh look,” said Babs, changing the subject by noticing a shop window, and the group stopped to gaze in. Colorful felt hats, each a single pastel shade, were suspended in the window, funny and bright, with an intricate patterning in their fabric. “I’m getting so into fashion,” added Babs. “I’ve been designing lace. It’s too bad nobody ever wears lace. They should.” Babs herself wore a silky shawl of thick, intricate nonrepeating lace. A mantilla.

“How did that work, your getting an imipolex body?” Phil asked Cobb.

“It was interesting,” said Cobb. “These two loonie moldies each started running a simulation of me. They pulled me back from the SUN. They were running two simulations of me so they could compare and contrast and get the parameters tweaked. And meanwhile they had a new imipolex body ready for me. So there were two simulations of me waiting for the one body. I and I got into a telepathic uvvy link so that we could merge and share—instead of doing sudden-death musical chairs. From that merging experience, and from being with the SUN, I got the conviction that each of us is the same person. And that’s why we should be really kind. Which answers Onar’s question of why I want to do good.”

“How do you make the lace?” Yoke was asking Babs.

“I use fabricants,” said Babs. “I don’t think you have those on the Moon yet? They’re crawly little DIMs like the lice in my hair, plastic ants that can spin fabric like spiders. People are using them for everything in the fashion business. I bet those hats were made by fabricants. Fabricants eat just any old thing—weeds, scrap wood, cardboard—and they spin it into fiber. I’ll show them to you when we go back to my place.”

“If we’re going to Babs’s,” said Onar, “let’s get some kind of transport. I don’t want to walk the whole way under a vile-smelling live toadstool.”

“Randy would love it,” said Babs. “But we can get the streetcar at the corner up there. You can ride too, Cobb, it’s run by a moldie.”

The streetcar with its moldie conductor came clanking up then. Cobb and the five young people got aboard. Phil ended up between Yoke and Cobb.

“Do you think I smell bad?” Cobb asked Phil.

“Of course,” said Phil. “That’s the way moldies are.”

“Well then, that’s another problem I want to work on,” said Cobb. “Besides more housing. I want to make moldies smell good. I bet a little biotech research could do it. The moldies just haven’t bothered to fix their smell before because they don’t care. What if the moldies made themselves smell good and built a whole lot of free housing!”

“Maybe Cobb should run for mayor of San Francisco,” said Yoke. “He’s friends with ex-Senator Mooney, you know. Babs’s and Saint’s dad.”

“I’ve got a new life and I want to help people,” said Cobb.

“A moldie run for an election?” exclaimed Phil. “You’d get all the moldie votes, but that’s ten percent of the city at best. What human would vote for a moldie? Even if you did used to be a person. And you’ve only been in San Francisco for, what, two days? Talk about a carpetbagger!”

“Well, it would be very popular to help people find housing,” said Babs. “That’s like the biggest problem. Cobb could win a lot of votes by fixing up abandoned warehouses.”

“Are you rich, Cobb?” asked Onar.

“I don’t actually own much of anything,” said Cobb. “My estate was divvied up a long time ago. My grandson Willy is wealthy, though I doubt he’d be much interested in this issue. But even without money, I have a very high recognition factor. As a politician I could act as a ‘facilitator.’ ” Cobb smirked a little at the bogus word. “How about this?” he added, and started up a series of impressions, changing his voice and features to resemble half-remembered images of dead Presidents. “The last four letters of ‘American’ are ‘I can.’ Mo’ folks, mo’ better. Ask not—”

“Stow it, Cobb,” said Yoke, cutting him off. “Presidents suck.”

They got off the streetcar a block from Babs’s warehouse, and the five humans ran there, with Cobb bouncing along next to them, hitting every puddle on the way. The inner walls of Babs’s warehouse space were decorated with great webs of shiny woven fiber, bright-colored and iridescent. There was a polyglass keg of beer that Saint had brewed, and he and Onar got into drinking it.

Babs’s fabricants lived in a little glass box like a terrarium, with strong lights and with a dish of wet paper for food. There were dozens of them, shiny little hourglass shapes with six legs. Babs showed Yoke how to use an uvvy to program them, and Yoke picked up on it right away. Within half an hour she’d gotten the fabricants to spin her a mantilla filled with spidery copies of her name.

Cobb sat quietly on the couch, taking everything in. He’d tightened up his body so that he was dense and practically odorless.