Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Phil—you mean Phil Gottner?” said Wendy, sticking to the personal level. “How are he and that cute little Yoke doing?”

“They’re engaged! And—” Babs broke off, still not quite ready to tell her news. She jumped to another topic. “Speaking of building, Yoke and Phil made themselves a nest in my alley. They keep adding to it; it’s grown up the side of my warehouse and onto the roof. Like a shelf-fungus. Yoke’s busy designing artificial coral and Phil’s trying to invent the perfect personal flying machine.”

“And what about you and Randy?” pressed Wendy. “Is it true love?” Even though she looked like a twenty-year-old, Wendy still had the personality of a nosy old mom.

Now would have been the moment for Babs to make her announcement, but Da spoke up before she could.

“The other day I talked to the man who was Randy’s boss in India,” said Stahn. “Sri Ramanujan. He called Randy a ‘degenerate bumpkin.’ “

“Why do you always have to dump on my boyfriends, Da?” snapped Babs. “Is it a Freudian thing?”

“You of all people can’t be prejudiced against someone who likes moldies, Stahn,” put in Wendy.

“Sorry, I’m just telling you what Ramanujan said. He’s a snothead, a scientist mandarin, I’m not saying I agree with him. If Randy makes you happy, Babs, that’s the main thing. I wish you’d let me meet him for myself.”

“Why don’t you introduce him to us, dear?” asked Wendy. “There’s not something you’re hiding from us or from him is there? Uvvy Randy to come over right now! He could help us put up Da’s redwood. With four of us using our allas at the same time we could get sixteen pi meters, which is, um, 164 feet and 10.95 inches.” Wendy’s moldie brain could effortlessly crunch any calculation. “We need that much because at least thirty feet are going to get used up by the roots. Three of us wouldn’t be enough to make a proper-sized tree. Randy will be happy that we need him.”

“Well—I’d like to,” said Babs. “It’s high time. As a matter of fact Randy and I rode over here together, but he was scared to come in. He’s wandering around looking at the Haight. I told him I would uvvy him if it looked like Da could act normal. Can you, Da?”

“Of course I can. I’m sure he’s a fine boy. I won’t scare him off .”

So Babs uvvied Randy and a few minutes later he walked up the front steps. He was pink with self-consciousness and his Adam’s apple was bobbing. He was wearing a new T-shirt with an incredibly intricate stippling of colors. Babs thought he looked so cute that she planted a kiss on him when she opened the door.

“Come on in, Randy. Ma, Da, this is Randy. Randy, this is Stahn and Wendy.”

“Hey,” said Randy, shaking their hands. “It’s an honor. I’ve heard about you two all my life. The Heritagists back in Kentucky are still squawkin’ about that Moldie Citizenship Act.”

Babs noticed Randy’s nostrils flaring as he sampled Wendy’s odor. Wendy had successfully infected her Happy Cloak with Cobb’s new stinkeater bacteria last week, so the smell was quite mild. But Babs didn’t want to tackle the topic of Randy and the smells of moldies. “How were things down on Haight Street today, Randy?” she asked.

“Waaald. Is it always that crowded? Or maybe it’s on account of it bein’ April Fool’s Day. It’s like a street festival, people alla-making shit you can’t believe.”

“I haven’t been on Haight Street in weeks,” said Stahn. “I always go around the back way. And, yeah, All Fool’s Day is very big in the Haight. What did you see?”

“Some of the stores have their windows painted over and you have to pay the owner to get in. Thanks to the individual Web address on each dollar bill, people can’t alla up counterfeit, so money’s still real anyway. Not that you need it for most things.”

“I noticed those stores,” said Wendy. “What do you get if you go inside?”

“Well, I paid one fella to find out,” said Randy, looking a little embarrassed. “Guess I thought he’d have something pretty racy behind them painted windows. But it was just a goddamn T-shirt store. He lets you pick out a T-shirt you like and then you alla yourself a copy. Can’t hardly sell objects no more. All you can do is sell ideas.”

“Exactly!” said Babs. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Da. Intellectual property is all that matters now. It’s wonderful.”

“Yeah,” said Randy, looking down at his T-shirt, which had subtle patterns like faces embedded in its fractal swirls. “Notice how much detail this shirt’s got? I never could have seen it all in time to make a copy just from lookin’ at it. The store-guy uvvied me the design. Reason he keeps the store windows covered is some folks will just eyeball one of his shirts and alla-make a half-ass knockoff of it. There was a gaaah right outside the store, matter of fact, who looked me over and made a copy of my new shirt, then turned around and sold it to a tourist. All smudged and blurry, though. Look over here on the sleeve, I just noticed this line o’ little elephants. No way the pirated street copy picked that up.”

“I think I’m too old for new ideas,” sighed Stahn. “Don’t want to buy, don’t have to sell. What else did you see on Haight Street, Randy?”

“There was some folks in old-time metal armor with imipolex power hinges. Jumpin’ around like silver jelly beans. I saw a guy givin’ away jeweled Easter eggs, all diamonds and rubies, and when you took one, he’d make it disappear. April fool! Another fella was walking down the sidewalk poppin’ out a concrete lawn dwarf every step he took. Skinned my knee on one of those suckers, and allaed a bunch of ‘em back into air. Some hairfarmers made themselves a pizza ten feet across and didn’t eat but a corner of it, then just left it on the sidewalk so you had to step around it. Wasn’t nobody bothering to clean it up, and when I went to turn that one into air, one o’ the hairfarmers yelled at me not to waste food. One gaaah was standin’ around naked doin’ his laundry in the middle of the street; he had a washin’ machine hooked to a quantum dot battery and he was usin’ his alla to feed the water into it. He was just lettin’ the wastewater spill out on the ground. He shoulda alla-made it back into air, but I didn’t feel up to hasslin’ him. There was a peck of musicians playin’ electric guitars hooked to batteries, and a bunch of women doing brain concerts on sheets of imipolex hangin’ off the lamp-posts—right confusing, all the noise. One gaaah had a swarm of maybe a hundred dragonfly cameras buzzin’ all over gettin’ in everyone’s face and he was mixing their video so you’d just about go crazy lookin’ at the output—it was runnin’ on an imipolex billboard he’d pasted to the wall. Lots o’ cars and custom motorcycles. One of the choppers had a bathtub for the driver to sit in, and it wasn’t just a tub, it was a merge love puddle. Can you imagine drivin’ a hog while you’re merged? Your eyeballs stickin’ up on little stalks?” Randy laughed and shook his head. “I love this city. First place I ever felt normal. The craziest thing I saw in the Haight was two stoners taking turns zapping each other into air. And then recorporatin’ the aired-out gaaah from his alla.”

“Ow,” said Babs. “I wouldn’t do that for anything. Yoke said there’s a real chance of not being able to come back.”

“I hear there’s been a lot of people getting ‘aired out,’ ” said Wendy. “And not for fun. People trying to kill each other.”

“Yeah, but remember that it hasn’t been working,” said Babs. “Seems like Om’s got it set so that a dead person’s alla starts beeping after a day. An alla is indestructible, and someone always finds it. And if it was an alla that killed you, your alla offers to bring you back.”