Freeware

by Rudy Rucker

  Luh-like I was telling you, Tre Dietz uvvied me all this wuh-weird shit and and—"

  "Oh, spare me the wasted slobbering. I'll get the dragonfly." Wendy used her Happy Cloak to uvvy a message, and right away a little dragonfly telerobot flew down from its perch in the eaves of their house. The streetlights made gleaming Lissajous patterns on the dragonfly's shiny, rapidly beating wings. "You stay about a block ahead of us and watch the foot traffic," Wendy told it, speaking out loud. "We're walking over the hill to Market and Castro. And keep scanning faces for Saint and Babs. We're expecting you to find them." The dragonfly whirred away.

  "Really, Stahn," continued Wendy as they walked up Masonic together. "You're starting to worry me. A man your age. Two more years and you'll be sixty!"

  Wendy was effectively eleven years younger than Stahn, and she worked hard to keep Stahn from turning senile. "What is it that Tre showed you anyway?"

  "Perplexing Puh-Poultry N-dee," said Stahn, clamping his hands tightly together in an effort to hold back the gabba stutter. "Some kind of freelance software agent called Jenny told him this thing called Ramanujan's Tuh-Tessellation Equation, and right away he found a new kind of higher-dimensional quasicrystal design. The new Poultry puh-peck and peck and peck. He wants me to suh-sell the new idea before Jenny can. And we were also talking about how to ruh-ransom his wife."

  They paused on the saddle of the Buena Vista hill between the Haight and the Castro, catching their breath and looking at the view. "Oh, it's beautiful out tonight, isn't it, Stahn?"

  "Yeah. I'm glad you got me to go outside." He took a deep shaky breath, and the gabba shuddering left the hinges of his jaws. The first part of a gabba lift was always the hardest. "Reality is such a gas." His words in his ears sounded smooth, pneumatic, resonant.

  "What was that about ransoming Tre Dietz's wife?"

  "The loonie moldies kidnapped her by accident yesterday. She's on her way to the Moon. I'm supposed to pay a big ransom and get Whitey Mydol and Darla Starr to pick her up. I already transferred the credit to Whitey's account."

  "Whitey and Darla! But why should you have to pay for stupid Tre Dietz's wife?"

  "He's made me lot of money, and this new thing'll make a lot more. His poor wife is up there in the sky inside a moldie on the way to the Moon."

  "It's not such a bad flight," said Wendy. "It was fun when you and me flew from the Moon to the Earth together in 2031. It might be good for you to do it again."

  "Forget it, Wendy." Stahn started walking again. "Which way are we supposed to go?"

  "Judging from what the dragonfly's showing me, we should walk down Ord Court to States Street to Castro," said Wendy, cocking her head. "That's the least crowded way." As they linked arms and headed downhill, she turned her attention back to Stahn. "So you saw N-dimensional Perplexing Poultry, huh? Have you ever heard the theory that mathematics keeps people young? I think it's good for you to be thinking about these things. Instead of about power and money. And all your hangovers."

  "I wish you wouldn't obsess about age all the time, Wendy. You know damn well that with DIM parts and tank-grown organs, anyone with our kind of money can live to a hundred and twenty."

  "Yes," said Wendy. "All thanks to the wonderful compatibility of me. But because Wendy Meat and W. M. Biologicals do, in fact, grow clones of me, I can do something better than get patched up. I can start over in a blank twenty-five-year-old wendy. My 'Cloak could transfer all the information.

  I've been thinking about it a lot."

  "Oh, don't, Wendy. What would happen to this body?" Stahn snaked his arm under Wendy's Happy Cloak and around her waist to hug her. "This body I've loved so long? Would you cut it up and sell off the meat and the organs?"

  "I'm serious about this, Stahn, so don't try and make it hard for me. But let's not talk about it now. You're in no condition." She twisted away from Stahn's grip and brightened her voice. "Look, we're almost there. And—yes!—the dragonfly just spotted the kids."

  Wendy stopped walking for a second, the better to absorb the images the dragonfly was uvvying to her, and as she viewed them she began to laugh.

  "Saint is—he's wearing a silvered coat and he has tinfoil on his head. And Babs is—oh, Babs—" She laughed harder. "I can hardly describe this, Stahn. She's got a little tray around her waist with things on it and a terrible yellow shirt; I have no idea what she's supposed to be. Let's hurry and meet them."

  "Do you really want those poor children to see their mother's body butchered?" demanded Stahn. "It would be traumatic. And then, once you were twenty-five, you'd get young guys and you wouldn't want me! That's what I get for being faithful to you all these years?"

  "I said let's drop it. You get so dramatic when you're lifted! You know damn well that I'm a Happy Cloak, not a human body. This body—this wendy—it's a mindless piece of meat that I use to walk around in and to make love to you, Stahn. You never got excited when I replaced my imipolex every three years. If I change my flesher body, everything will be just the same. I'm a moldie, I'm your wife, and I'll always love you. So there."

  Wendy pushed into the crowd, and Stahn followed. There were a lot of brides here tonight; that was just about the number-one favorite costume. Other faves were strippers, debutantes, princesses, and slaves. A few people recognized Stahn or Wendy, but most mistook them for het looky-look tourists. "Hello, Cleveland," sneered a skinny large-breasted morph with a beard. A disco dandy snipped,

  "When you drive back to the 'burbs, remember that my car is the Mercedes and yours is the BMW." "I didn't use a car," said Wendy pityingly, "I used my broom!"

  Though Stahn hadn't noticed it before, Wendy was indeed holding a broom—oh yeah, it was a piece of her 'Cloak that she'd temporarily pinched off and reshaped.

  Wendy pointed Stahn in the direction where the dragonfly had shown her the kids.

  "Press on, dear old fool." Stahn fought past a man with a cardboard toilet around his head and his face sticking out of the bowl and a plastic dick over his nose, past a woman with a leash leading a blindfolded nude ungenitaled Barbie, past a morph with a head built up with phonybone to the shape of a cube, past people with wings and huge flexing cocks—the crowd pressed and swirled like the ripping currents of a particularly nasty ocean break—

  "Hey, Da, Ma!" called Babs.

  "Yaar!" whooped Saint.

  Babs and Saint were in a doorway near the Castro Theater. Saint was a tall cheerful youth who habitually darkened his appearance by means of odd hair, a ratty beard, silvery stung-lasses, and heavy blue suede boots. For tonight, he'd covered his head with vintage aluminum foil crudely wadded into the shape of a helmet and he wore a reflective metallic fireman's coat that went down to his knees.

  Babs had big firm cheeks that grew pink when she was excited, like now. As part of her costume, she wore a yellow polyester shirt with a tag saying: HI I'M LYNNE - HAPPY DOLLAR

  She held a stick bearing something like a square lantern with the numeral "3" on each of its four sides, and around her waist was a cardboard tray with packages glued to it—cereal boxes and udon and pho noodles and tampons and panty shields and disposable ceramic forks. Her hair was pulled tight into a lank little ponytail that was barrette-clamped to point upward; and to complete the groovy hairdo, she wore a wiiiiiide bandeau.

  "Can you tell what I am?" chirped Babs cozily. Wendy couldn't guess, but Stahn recognized it from his childhood.

  "You're a clerk in an old-time supermarket!"

  "Ye oldie checker gal," said Babs, laughing gaily.

  "What about me?" asked Saint.

  "A robot?" guessed Wendy.

  "Sort of," said Saint. " 'I am Iron Man.' I've got my stunglasses broadcasting realtime live on the Show, you wave, and I'm using this classic twentieth-century metal song for the background. Listen." He switched his uvvy to speaker mode and karaoked some crude guitar licks. "Danh-danh deh-denh-deh.

  Dadadada-danh-danh dah-dah-dah."

  Wendy had set their dragonfly to
filming the little family outing; it hovered a few feet over their heads like a hummingbird, its wings whispering and its single bright bead-eye lens staring at the Mooneys. Wendy and Saint could see the pictures through their uvvies.

  Saint sang Iron Man some more, raising his hand toward the dragonfly in a spread-fingered salute; Wendy could see that he was goofing on the self-images he was realtime mixing into the ceaseless global interactive multiuser stunglasses Show. Saint saw Wendy seeing him, and he shifted fabulations.

  "Ma is Wendy the red witch," smiled Saint. "Who are you, Da?"

  "I'm the night sky," said Stahn, all painted black and spangled with sparkles.

  "As seen by a cosmic ray from the galactic equator. How you kids floatin'?"

  "We're having a good time," said Saint. "I like how much there is to see. I'm pulling in some viewers. I'm not gonna have to pay any Web charges for weeks."

  "People keep trying to take stuff off my counter," said Babs. "And then they're surprised when it's glued on. You look beautiful, Ma."

  "Thanks, Babs," said Wendy. "But don't you think I'd look better with a new age-twenty-five body?"

  "Oh, come on, Wendy," said Stahn.

  "Let her talk, Da," said Babs. "She's already told me all about it and it's no prob."

  "I see a group that looks funny," said Saint, pointing. "Let's head that way."

  They pushed down the street toward a group of nude morphs, each painted a different primary color and each equipped with big morph muscles. A few of them had tails. They were tossing each other about like acrobats—with much lewd miming.

  The Mooneys walked along with the happy, laughing crowd watching the acrobats for a while, then drifted into the less crowded blocks deeper into the Mission.

  "I still haven't had supper," said Wendy presently. "Is anyone else hungry?"

  "I am," said Saint. "Where should we go?"

  "I know a wavy Spanish place near here," said Babs. "The Catalanic."

  "Let's do it," said Stahn.

  As they walked toward the restaurant, Babs began tearing items off her counter and setting them down on doorsteps. "For the homeless," she explained.

  "Anyhoo, I'm tired of wearing all this." She took the cardboard counter from around her waist and skimmed it toward Saint as hard as she could. He caught it, ran with it, flipped it onto the sidewalk, and managed to slide about twelve feet before stumbling off, pin-wheeling his arms and yelling, "Aaawk! Happy Dollar!

  Aaawk!

  Happy Dollar."

  The outside of the Catalanic was a warmly lit storefront painted red-and-yellow.

  Inside, it was bustling and cream-colored, with a few nice things on the walls: an old Spanish clock, two nanoprecise copies of Salvador Dali oils

  (Persistence of Memory and Dali at the Age of Six Lifting the Skin of the Water to Observe a Dog Sleeping in the Shadow of the Sea), and two nanocopied Joan Miro paintings of hairy bright lop-lop creatures (Dutch Interior I and Dutch Interior II).

  There were lots of people sitting at tables covered with tapas dishes and—"Yes, of course, Senator Mooney"—there was a table for four. Wendy's dragonfly telerobot perched on a cornice across the street to wait.

  The Mooneys sat down happily and fired off an order for Spanish champagne and plates of potatoes, shrimp, spinach, pork balls, squash, chicken, mussels, endives, and more potatoes. The bubbly and the first dishes began arriving.

  "See that moldie over there with the bohos?" said Babs, waving across the room.

  "She's a friend of mine. She's called Sally. She's so funny. One day when I was here, Sally and I fabbed about Dali for a long time."

  Sally was sitting on a chair with a group of five lively young black-dressed artists. Sally had been shaped like a colorful Picasso woman, but now, seeing Babs, she suddenly let her body slump into the shape of a melting jellyfish with wrinkles that sketched a flaccid human face.

  "Look," laughed Babs. "She's imitating the jellyfish in Persistence of Memory.

  Hey, Sally! Do a soft watch!"

  While her arty friends watched admiringly, Sally formed herself into a large smoothly bulging disk that bent in the middle to rest comfortably in her chair.

  She made her skin shiny—gold in back and glassy in front with a huge watch dial with warping hands. Her soft richly computing body drooped off the edges of her chair like a fried egg. Salvador Dali had predicted the moldies. It was perfect.

  But Stahn was too benumbed to appreciate Sally's visual pun. "I'm kind of surprised they let her in here," he said thoughtlessly. "What with the stink."

  "Do I stink in restaurants?" demanded Wendy. "Some of us are civilized enough to know when to close our pores. You should talk, Stahn, the way you've been farting recently."

  Saint cackled to hear this. "Da stinks. Da's a moldie."

  Stahn quietly poured himself another glass of champagne.

  "How did you like the parade, old man?" asked Babs.

  "I must say, it made me feel straight. That's not a way I like to feel, mostly."

  "Men are so worried about being macho," said Wendy.

  "Will everyone stop picking on me?" snapped Stahn.

  "We're not picking on you," said Saint, reaching over to give Stahn a caress followed by a sly poke.

  "Da is a wreck," said Wendy. "He stayed up most of last night."

  "What did you do, Da?" asked Saint.

  "Never mind." Stahn didn't want to tell his kids about the camote. He was ashamed to be such an eternal example of out-of-control drug-taking; in recent years he'd backslid terribly. "It has to do with this new way to control moldies."

  "Are you scheming to control me?" Wendy wondered suddenly. "Me, in the sense of Wendy's Happy Cloak?"

  "No," said Stahn. "I wouldn't dream of it. Though it might not hurt for you to try seeing how a leech-DIM feels sometime. They say for a moldie it's like being lifted. Then you'd understand. Instead of always being such a straight goody-goody."

  "I've been busy making a worm farm," said Babs, changing the subject. "Did I tell you? It's so floatin'. 'Place moistened humus between two glass sheets and add one pint red worms.' Voila!"

  "You're doing this for fun?" asked Stahn. "Or is it art?"

  "If you mean, 'Can I sell worm farms?'—waaal, old-timer, I just dunno. So maybe it's fun. But, wave, if I were to put DIM worms in with the real ones, why then it'd be ye newie Smart Art and maybe I could sell some. But making the boxes is so damn hard. You wanna make me some worm farm boxes, Saintey? Eeeeeew! What are those gross things crawling on your head?"

  "Lice," said Saint. He'd taken off his foil helmet and shrugged his coat onto the back of his chair. His hair looked like upholstery on cheap furniture—it was buzz-cut, half-bleached to a punky orange, and there was a paisley filigree cut into it, revealing curving lines of scalp that seemed to have small translucent insects crawling along them.

  "You have lice, Saint?" exclaimed Wendy. "How filthy! We have to get you disinfected! Oh! And we've all been hugging you!"

  "I think he's teasing you, Wendy," said Stahn, peering closer at the tiny creatures on his son's scalp. "Those are micro-DIMs. I know they've been used for bartering, but I've never heard of them doing paisley before. Did you program that yourself, Saint?"

  "My friend Juanne taught the lice," said Saint. "But I found the DIM beads.

  I've been finding some really floatin' ware in this building I'm maintenance-managing, Da."

  "This is your new janitor job?" said Stahn.

  Saint was suddenly very angry. "Don't you always say that, you stupid old man.

  A

  maintenance manager is not a janitor. I like to fix things. I'm good at it.

  And for you to always act like it's—"

  Stahn winced at the intensity of his son's reaction. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it," he said quickly. "I'm senile. When I was your age, I was Sta-Hi the taxi driver, so who am I to talk? Maintenance is wavy. Retrofitting. Tinkering.

  It's almost like engineering
."

  "Saint doesn't want to go to engineering school, Da," put in Babs. "Get over it.

  His friends already look up to him like a teacher."

  "They do?" asked Stahn.

  "Yes," said Saint. "I like to think about the meaning of things. And what to do with life. Every day should be happy. My friends listen to me."

  "Well, hell," said Stahn. "Then maybe you can be a senator." He put up his hands cringingly. "Just kidding!"

  The waitress arrived with a pitcher of sangria, more potatoes, and the grilled prawns. Stahn passed Saint the prawns and poured out glasses of the sangria.

  "What's the building you're doing maintenance for?" Wendy asked Saint.

  "Meta West Link," said Saint. "They own the satellites and dishes for sending uvvy signals to the Moon."

  "Wholly owned by ISDN since 2020," put in Stahn. "I can certainly believe that Meta West would have some interesting things in their basement."

  "Give me some DIM lice, Saintey?" pleaded Babs. "I'll make a Smart Art flea circus! I want lice right now!" She crooked one arm around her brother's neck and began picking at his head. "I'm the lice doctor!" When Babs had been younger, she'd enjoyed taking ticks off the family dog and announcing that she was the "tick doctor."

  "Don't be so disgusting, you two," said Wendy severely. "You're in a restaurant.

  Stop it right now."

  The kids broke apart with a flurry of screeches and pokes, and then both of them sat there calmly with their hands folded.

  "It's Da's fault," said Saint.

  "Da did it," added Babs.

  "Da's bad," said Saint.

  "Da's lifted and drunk," said Babs.

  "Da has a drug problem," said Saint.

  Stahn got the waitress and ordered himself a brandy and an espresso. "Anyone else for coffee or a drink? Anything? Dessert, kids?"

  Saint and Babs ordered cake, but Wendy didn't want anything. She said she thought it was about time they got going.

  "Mind if I join you?" said Sally the moldie, suddenly appearing at the end of the table. Her body was a cubist dream of triangles and bright colors.

  "Sally, ole pal!" said Babs, hilarious on her four drinks. "Sit down." Sally pulled up a chair and Babs introduced her. "This is my bran and my rents—Saint, Stahn, and Wendy. This is Sally, guys."