Пол Филиппо - Ribofunk

Jinx had been born this way. His poohs were third-generation spacelings whose ancestors hadn't seen much need for deadmeat legs in zero-gee, and so they had bid the chromosartors snip and transcribe until the result was my proxy, Jinx.

His folks-nomenklatura of Asgard-had sent Jinx to Gaia-to our school-for what they insisted was a superior educational experience. (Although, what with tropes and the digiverse being equally accessible and high-quality practically anywhere, I failed to see exactly what benefits they were conferring on him, unless it was the dubious Gaian social life or high-status eft expenditure.)

When I first got friendly with Jinx, I asked him two questions.

"How come you don't ride, um, a prosthocart, maybe like the dolphinboys use?"

"Because I'm not a cripple. I'm completely normal, for a spaceling."

I didn't argue the point, even though only baseline scantlings like me rate the semiderogatory word "normal." Maybe the word meant something different on Asgard. Instead, I asked the second question.

"I imagine your colony cooks new members in some fancy ductwork."

"Yeah. Repligen wombs with i-Stat endometriums and Ares-Serono placentas."

"But how do you-I mean, what do you do when-"

"How do we get wiggly?"

"Well, yeah!"

"It's all virtual. That's the one thing I don't like about home. I keep wishing I had-had legs and a cock! I even dream I'm walking sometimes… "

"It's probably feedback from Gaia's morphic fields, the human subset. You felt it out in space, but it's even stronger here. Like they say, 'Ain't no shield against the field, cuz it dwells in the cells.'"

"I guess."

Now, as I helped Jinx to a "sitting" position, my reverie was brought to a harsh end by Honeysuckle's sashaying, tit-quaking approach. She stopped a meter or so away and addressed me while ignoring Jinx-except to insult him.

"If you're done helping that knucklebuster, I'd like to finish up our little business matter."

Honeysuckle ran a flicker-screen thumbnail across a seam bisecting her bare midriff, opening up a possum-pouch. From within, she deftly filched a flashcard and handed it to me.

I noticed that Honeysuckle's nailscreen was running the Mandelbrot set, and everything suddenly felt as strange as one of the set's remoter precincts.

With nervous fingers I flexed the still-warm card, and its silicrobe message blinked at me.

THE G– GNOME'S CAVE 1040 BUGHOUSE SQUARE (RIDE THE RED ARTERY TO NODE TEN, OR TAKE SLIDEWALK SEVEN)Somatic and gnomic alterations of all types. Deletions, insertions, and inversions. Coleopterics a specialty. Fully bonded and licensed by the BDC.

I flexed the card again, and Honeysuckle's totipotent family chop showed up, the semi-infamous Rancifer icon.

Honeysuckle leered. "That'll get you and your friend anything you ask for from the G-Gnome-including tits, if that's what you really want."

I stiffened right up, but managed not to change my expression-I hoped. I knew the whole class was watching and listening.

"No, I want a spike."

"Me too," said Jinx in a comradely way, although I could sense that he was having second thoughts just like me.

"Pardon me, but I'm sure neither one of you knows your efferents from your afferents. But if you both show up tomorrow with spikes, I'll have to admit you've got plenty of testo-estro."

And with that, Honeysuckle turned her back on us as if we had ceased to exist.

The teacher called us to return to our studies then, and so I couldn't talk anymore with Jinx.

Needless to say, the rest of the four-hour school day moved slow as a crawlypatch. With Honeysuckle's card in my pocket, I couldn't concentrate on plectics or cladistics or kundalini or behavioral pragmatics or even lunch! (And they were serving my favorite that day too: deep-fried free-range croc with null-cal Ben and Jerry's for dessert.) All I wanted was to be finished with classes, so that Jinx and I could decide what, if anything, we were going to do with the magic flashcard.

At last– of course and however-we were free.

Or as free as any eleven-year-old ever is in this ageist society!

Jinx and I met at our usual place, beneath the towering forty-foot paulownia tree on the edge of the schoolyard. We had helped to plant the giant when it was just a tiny seedling two years ago, on Global Arbor Day, and it had been our special spot ever since.

If Jinx had had feet, he probably would have been kicking the dirt. As it was, he exhibited his nervousness by picking bark off our tree.

"I don't know about you," my spaceling proxy said when I came up to him, "but I can't think straight. What do you say we bind some satori and just sit a minute?"

"Now you're firing! I hear the Chromatin Cafe has that new line of Archer Daniels-Midland tropes on tap… "

"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go!"

So with Jinx swinging himself along as I ambled, we made our way to the Chromatin Cafe.

We were supposed to be reporting to our separate afterschool apprenticeships. Jinx to his nafta boss at the Mercosur Mart (he was training to run an entrepot for Asgard) and me to the local branch of the Sheldrake Institute, where I was trying to grok morphic field modulation.

But if we were indeed going to be spiked, then missing our work stints would be the least of our transgressions.

The CC was only half a klick from the school, so we didn't bother with the slidewalks. It felt good to use my muscles after so much virtual nonexercise, and I knew Jinx felt the same.

Soon we were inside the sodaparlor with its old-fashioned decorations, primitive PET-scan printouts, and NMR images of brain-glucose uptake, flickering on ancient crackly low-res monitors.

"Two Joshu Juices," I said to the poptate kibernetica behind the counter, presenting Honeysuckle's flashcard. If she didn't pay for anything else, at least she'd pay for our drinks.

"Make mine a Potala Punch," countermanded Jinx.

''The order is two Joshu Juices and one Potala Punch," said the kibe.

"No. One of each."

"The order is one Joshu Juice and one Potala Punch."

"Flame on!"

"This is an assent?"

"Does the Goddess use tampons?"

The poptate churned its heuristics for ten seconds, then began to brew us our sidechains.

"Want to sit by the pond?" asked Jinx, after the drinks were mixed.

"Sure."

I carried the juices, and we found an empty bench on the grassy marge of the small ornamental pond. Two or three baseline ducks were paddling in the reeds, and I was reminded of my dumb id2 and Honeysuckle's sexy one.

I plopped down on the syalon seat, and Jinx used his strong arms to lever himself up beside me. Sitting together like this, his head nearly on a level with mine, it was easy to forget his lack of legs.

We clinked our glasses, and I quoted the ADM jingle.

"'Peace of mind-'"

"'– for a nudollar ninety-nine!'" finished Jinx.

We downed our brews and waited for the effects.

The tropes had been expertly reverse-engineered from a sampling of meditating monks: in the case of Jinx's drink, from the mind of the Dalai Lama himself. In'a minute or so, the world took on a shimmering translucence, and I felt connected to the whole universe. Nothing mat-

tered, but everything counted. All my problems were non-existent.

Staring out over the perfect pond, I saw the surface ripple in the middle, then break to reveal the finned back of an airfish making the phase-change into the second half of its life.

We had just studied the specs on these splices, and they rushed into my brain in perfect arrays.

Having filled its flotation bladders with hydrogen broken out of the water and revamped its physiology, the airfish was now ready to live in the atmosphere. It would subsist for a few months on airborne microzooa, spore, and pollen, all the while sucking low-level ozone from the air and concentrating it in a different bladder. Rising higher and higher, it would eventually burst at around 15,000 meters, the lower edge of the ozone layer, releasing its cargo of reactive molecules where they would do good, not harm.