Rudy Rucker: The Ware Tetralogy

Immortal! The word was like a window flung open. With death so close nothing had mattered. But if there was a way out . . .

“How?” Cobb demanded. In his excitement he rose to his feet. “How will you do it? Will you make me young again, too?”

“Take it easy,” the robot said, also rising. “Don’t get over-excited. Just trust us. With our supplies of tank-grown organs we can rebuild you from the ground up. And you’ll get as much interferon as you need.”

The machine stared into Cobb’s eyes, looking honest. Staring back, Cobb noticed that they hadn’t gotten the irises quite right. The little ring of blue was too flat and even. The eyes were, after all, just plastic, unreadable plastic.

The double pressed the money into Cobb’s hand. “Take the money and get the shuttle tomorrow. We’ll arrange for a young man called Sta-Hi to help you at the spaceport.”

Music was playing, wheedling closer. A Mr. Frostee truck, the same one Cobb had seen before. It was white, with a big freezer-box in back. There was a smiling giant plastic ice-cream cone mounted on top of the cab. Cobb’s double gave him a pat on the shoulder and trotted up the beach.

When he reached the truck, the robot looked back and flashed a smile. Yellow teeth in the white beard. For the first time in years, Cobb loved himself, the erect strut, the frightened eyes. “Good-bye,” he shouted, waving the money. “And thanks!”

Cobb Anderson 2jumped into the soft-ice-cream truck next to the driver, a fat short-haired man with no shirt. And then the Mr. Frostee truck drove off, its music silenced again. It was dusk now. The sound of the truck’s motor faded into the ocean’s roar. If only it was true.

But it had to be! Cobb was holding twenty-five thousand-dollar bills. He counted them twice to make sure. And then he scrawled the figure $25000 in the sand and looked at it. That was a lot.

As the darkness fell he finished the sherry and, on a sudden impulse, put the money in the bottle and buried it next to his tree in a meter of sand. The excitement was wearing off now, and fear was setting in. Could the boppers really give him immortality with surgery and interferon?

It seemed unlikely. A trick. But why would the boppers lie to him? Surely they remembered all the good things he’d done for them. Maybe they just wanted to show him a good time. God knows he could use it. And it would be great to see Ralph Numbers again.

Walking home along the beach, Cobb stopped several times, tempted to go back and dig up that bottle to see if the money was really there. The moon was up, and he could see the little sand-colored crabs moving out of their holes. They could shred those bills right up , he thought, stopping again.

Hunger growled in his stomach. And he wanted more sherry. He walked a little further down the silvery beach, the sand squeaking under his heavy heels. It was bright as day, only all black-and-white. The full moon had risen over the land to his right. Full moon means high tide , he fretted.

He decided that as soon as he’d had a bite to eat he’d get more sherry and move the money to higher ground.

Coming up on his moon-silvered cottage from the beach he spotted Annie Cushing’s leg sticking past the corner of her cottage. She was sitting on her front steps, waiting to snag him in the driveway. He angled to the right and came up on his house from behind, staying out of her line of vision.

Inside Cobb’s pink concrete-block cottage, Stan Mooney Senior shifted uncomfortably in a sagging easy chair. He wondered if that fat white-haired woman next door had warned the old man off. Night had fallen while he sat here.

Without turning the light on, Mooney went into the kitchen nook and rummaged for something to eat. There was a nice piece of tuna steak shrink-wrapped in thick plastic, but he didn’t want that. All the pheezers’ meat was sterilized with cobalt-60 for long shelf-life. The Gimmie scientists said it was harmless, but somehow no one but the pheezers ate the stuff . They had to. It was all they got.

Mooney leaned down to see if there might be a soda under the counter. His head hit a sharp edge and yellow light bloomed. “Shit fuck piss,” Mooney muttered, stumbling back into the cottage’s single room. His bald-wig had slipped back from the blow.

He returned to the lumpy armchair, moaning and readjusting his rubber dome. He hated coming off base and looking around pheezer territory. But he’d seen Anderson breaking into a freight hangar at the spaceport last night. There were two crates emptied out, two crates of bopper-grown kidneys. That was big money. On the black market down here in pheezer­land you could sell kidneys faster than hot-dogs.

Too many old people. It was the same population bulge that had brought the baby boom of the forties and fifties, the youth revolution of the sixties and seventies, the massive unemployment of the eighties and nineties. Now the inexorable peristalsis of time had delivered this bolus of humanity into the twenty-first century as the greatest load of old people any society had ever faced.

None of them had any money . . . the Gimmie had run out of Social Security back in 2010. There’d been hell to pay. A new kind of senior citizen was out there. Pheezers: freaky geezers.

To stop the rioting, the Gimmie had turned the whole state of Florida over to the pheezers. There was no rent there, and free weekly food drops. The pheezers flocked there in droves, and “did their own thing.” Living in abandoned motels, listening to their crummy old music, and holding dances like it was 1963, for God’s sake.

Suddenly the dark screen-door to the beach swung open. Reflexively, Mooney snapped his flash into the intruder’s eyes. Old Cobb Anderson stood there dazzled, empty-handed, a little drunk, big enough to be dangerous.

Mooney stepped over and frisked him, then flicked on the ceiling light.

“Sit down, Anderson.”

The old man obeyed, looking confused. “Are you me, too?” he croaked.

Mooney couldn’t believe how Anderson had aged. He’d always reminded Mooney of his own father, and it looked like he’d turned out the same.

The front screen-door rattled. “Look out, Cobb, there’s a pig in there!” It was the old girl from next door.

“Get your ass in here,” Mooney snarled, darting his eyes back and forth. He remembered his police training. Intimidation is your key to self-protection . “You’re both under arrest.”

“Fuckin Gimmie pig,” Annie said, coming in. She was glad for the excitement. She sat down next to Cobb on his hammock. She’d macraméed it for him herself, but this was the first time she’d been on it with him. She patted his thigh comfortingly. It felt like a piece of drift wood.

Mooney pressed a key on the recard in his breast pocket. “Just keep quiet, lady, and I won’t have to hurt you. Now, you, state your name.” He glared at Cobb.

But the old man was back on top of the situation. “Come on, Mooney,” he boomed. “You know who I am. You used to call me Doctor Anderson. Doctor Anderson, sir ! It was when the army was putting up their moon-robot control center at the spaceport. Twenty years ago. I was a big man then, and you . . . you were a little squirt, a watchman, a gofer. But thanks to me those war-machine moon-robots turned into boppers, and the army’s control center was just so much stupid, worthless, human-chauvinist jingo jive.”

“And you paid for it, didn’t you,” Mooney slipped in silkily. “You paid everything you had . . . and now you don’t have the money for the new organs you need. So last night you broke into a hangar and stole two cases of kidneys, Cobb, didn’t you?” Mooney dialed up the recard’s gain. “ADMIT IT!” he shouted, seizing Cobb by the shoulders. This was what he’d come for, to shock a confession out of the old man. “ADMIT IT NOW AND WE’LL LET YOU OFF EASY!”