by Rudy Rucker
Frek stared at the orchid-bedecked trees, at the dragonflies, the scuttling rodents, the languid snakes, the crazy monkeys, and the lurking big cats. The Gaiatopia was populated by toons of all the lost species of Earth—at least all the species that the designers could remember. NuBioCom had collapsed the Earth’s biome in 2666, and the species they’d winnowed out weren’t ever coming back. NuBioCom didn’t exactly advertise the fact, but if you poked around on the Net, you’d find that the old DNA codes were gone as well. Erased from all the memory archives. These days evolution was limited to NuBioCom’s designs for commercial kritters, and to the toons.
Not for the first time, Frek let himself dream of finding a way to bring back Earth’s real plants and animals—of going on a quest for a magic elixir to heal his home world. But he had no idea of where to begin. Visiting the Gaiatopia always made him a little sad.
When Frek peeled the two urlbuds off the wall, it reverted to looking like silvery paisley. Goob Doll Judy was gone, too. Once all the urlbuds were stored away, Frek set to work on the mess of wooden blocks left in his room by Ida, who’d been building a maze for Wow the other day. Despite Ida’s injunctions, Wow had of course just stepped over the blocks to get to the scrap of anymeat that Ida had placed at the maze’s end. The kids could never quite decide how smart or dumb their dog was.
Frek decided to stash Ida’s blocks under his bed, which was a bouncy platform grown right out of the house tree wall, with a pair of legs at the outer corners to hold it up. A bunch of stuff was already under there, but the blocks fit easily enough, as did the curved ebony shapes of Frek’s Space Monkeys puzzle, his real metal spring, and the wooden top that he could never get to work. And then Frek crammed his throwing disk under the bed, also his ball-paddles, his model rocket made of a tweaked snail’s shell, and the box holding a tank-grown microscope eye you could uvvy-link to.
With all of this gear out of the way, the only thing left to get rid of was Frek’s battered old Solar Trader game. He’d been playing a big tournament with Stoo over several days this week. The colorful money leaves and deed petals and hotel seeds were all over the place. The edges of the game’s turmite-paper box were broken, which meant that after Frek got all of the Solar Trader stuff sandwiched in between the flattened top and the bottom he couldn’t carry it very far, or everything would slide out.
He tried to push the box under his bed, but it wouldn’t fit. A giant shove might have done it, but Frek was worried all the game pieces might spew out. He leaned over and peered under his bed at the clothes, blocks, and toys. In toward the middle was a pillow, a fancy pillow of Geneva’s that Frek had forgotten about. He’d hidden it there last month when he and his sisters were in the middle of a great pillow fight.
The pillow had a picture of a rabbit embroidered on it. Grandma Huggins had made it by hand when Geneva was born. Frek had hidden the rabbit pillow so that Geneva couldn’t hit him with it, and so that he himself would have extra artillery for the next pillow war. Geneva had asked him about her rabbit pillow a few times since then, but so far she hadn’t gotten around to pitching a big enough fit to make Frek find it and give it back. Geneva had other things on her mind these days.
Frek lay down flat on his stomach and worked the pillow out from under the middle of the bed, trying not pull along the junk squeezed in around it. Just as the pillow came loose he glimpsed something odd in the farthest, darkest corner of the space under his bed. Something rounded and shiny. A dark, glossy purple, almost black. The size of a squashed bowling ball, with a dimple on the side facing him. He couldn’t think what it might be. A toy he’d forgotten about?
Downstairs Mom had just told the house tree to take the toons off the walls. Ida was yelling about it, but there was no stopping Lora Huggins. “Good-bye, Ida, good-bye Geneva,” sang the sweet, chuckling voices of the Goob Dolls. “I wish Frek would listen to me,” called Goob Doll Judy just before Mom closed her down. “I have more to tell him.” Right.
Ida’s footsteps came pounding up the steps. Instead of starting to clean her room, Ida dashed into Frek’s room. She was a cheerful little girl with golden skin and sparkling black eyes. She was wearing yellow turmite-silk pajamas that had black fuzzy stripes to make her look like a bumblebee.
“You found Geneva’s rabbit pillow,” said Ida in her deep little voice.
“I had it under my bed,” said Frek. “My stockpile for the next pillow fight.”
“Pillow fight!” exclaimed Ida. She snatched Frek’s pillow from his unmade bed and smacked him with it.
“Ida!” called Mom from the foot of the stairs. “If you don’t clean your room, you’re not getting any allowance!”
“All right,” shouted Ida. She always got rebellious when she had to clean her room. Ida was rebellious a lot. Being the youngest of three kids, she had to be. She gave Frek another good whack with his pillow and took off down the hall.
Frek decided to leave the mysterious shiny purplish thing under his bed for later. It was time to get going. Stoo would already be deep into the land of Skull Farmers. Frek pushed everything a little farther under the bed, finally making enough room for the Solar Trader set. To finish things off, he made his bed.
On his way down the hall, he tossed the rabbit pillow onto the floor of Geneva’s room, making an exploding sound with his mouth as he did it. Geneva was in there, sitting on her bed, her eyes blank as she focused on the signal from the pulsing uvvy kritter on the back of her neck.
“Brat,” said Geneva to Frek, snatching up the pillow and setting it beside her on the bed. She made her mouth a thin straight line and shook her fist. And then she went back to talking to her friend. Even though you didn’t really have to, most people talked out loud when they were on the uvvy, and usually they even gestured with their hands. As if the other person were right there in front of them. “Oh that was just my brother,” said Geneva. “Yon upstart barbarian. So what should we wear to the store, Amparo?”
Outside, Wow greeted Frek with enthusiasm, bowing and wagging his tail and squeaking, “Frek,” from the back of his throat. In principle Wow wasn’t allowed in the house as he still chewed things and he went to the bathroom on the floor sometimes. But Ida loved to smuggle Wow in. He was only outside today because he truly couldn’t stand to be around when Snaffle was active. Snaffle and Wow were archenemies: Ms. Tidy and Mr. Mess.
Wow was the one and only kind of dog left after the Great Collapse. NuBioCom changed the design very little from year to year. Wow was a little like a collie and a little like a beagle, medium-sized with white hair, a dark tail, and an orange saddle-shaped patch on his back. Every dog in town looked pretty much like Wow—every dog on Earth for that matter—but even so, the Huggins kids felt like their dog was the best. Wow’s eyes were perhaps a lighter shade of brown than those of some other dogs, flecked with gold in certain lights, and surely Wow was unusually intelligent-looking.
The garage’s thin turmite-paper door opened at a touch of Frek’s finger. Wow tried to push into the garage with Frek, but Frek didn’t let him. The angelwings were scared of dogs.
The angelwings were godzoon goggy kritters, one of the newbio miracles that made the collapse of the biome seem almost okay. Each was about one and a half meters long and resembled a scaled-up mosquito wing, a transparent wing veined with branching struts. They had a rainbow sheen to them. Despite their name, they didn’t look much like the wings on angels in old-time pictures; if anything, they looked devilish. An angelwing’s body was a flexible stick along the base end of the single wing. There were left and right angelwings; they came in pairs like shoes. The sticklike body had an insect head at one end, a few padded legs in the middle, and a bunch of soft, sticky tendrils mixed in with the legs.
The six angelwing kritters dragged themselves slowly across the floor toward Frek. Kvaar, buzzed six sets of mandibles. Kvirr, kvurr, kvak. The long gossamer-thin wings were layered on top of each other like a pile of stained glass.
Frek got a bag
of water-soaked beans and rice down from the shelf, sprinkled it with mapine sugar, and spilled the mush into the angelwings’ trough. While they were eating—never a pleasant sight to watch—Frek used a broom-branch to sweep away the sticky pellets of waste they left on the hard dirt floor, lifting up the wings to reach under them.
You wouldn’t have thought the frail angelwings could possibly have enough power to raise a person off the ground. But NuBioCom had found a way around that; their organisms incorporated a secret process that metabolized energy from the invisible dark matter known to pervade all of space. Normally you didn’t notice dark matter because it was somehow perpendicular to ordinary matter. The patented NuBioCom process depended upon a certain oddly knotted molecule’s ability to rotate particles of dark matter into normal space. Or something like that.
When the angelwings had finished eating, Frek brought them a bucket of water from the side of the house tree. They uncurled their long hollow tongues to slurp up the water. Meanwhile Frek took the waste pellets out to the turmite mound.
A few turmites came poking up out of their lacy mud galleries. They resembled pale, oversize ants, each with six legs and a complicated mouth. They gave Frek the creeps. Last year he’d gooshed a couple of them sort of by accident, but not really, and a swarm of turmites had instantly crawled out of the mound to begin biting him. You had to mind your manners with these little kac-eaters.
Wow kept poking his nose through the open garage door. He was always curious about the angelwings. Frek shooed him away and herded his two angelwings out onto the flat lawn. It didn’t take much urging. The angelwings loved the chance to fly.
Frek lay down on his back and the angelwings scooted over next to him, clamping their padded legs around his upper arms and fastening their tendrils all along his ribs. The tips of the tendrils were fine enough to reach right through the cloth of Frek’s shirt. He rocked up one shoulder, then the other, letting the wings reach behind him.
By the time he got to his feet, the angelwings had comfortably bonded to his back, chest, and arms. Frek held out his arms and flapped. The wiry muscles of the angelwings amplified Frek’s shoulder motions strongly enough to lift him a few centimeters off the ground. Wow began barking.
The wingtips quickly sped up into their own rhythm, beating in figure-eights at many times the frequency of Frek’s motions. From now on, the main thing he had to do was steer. With a twitch of his shoulders, Frek buzzed high into the air. He began looping around the trees, hoping someone would look out of his house and see him.
The Hugginses’ yard had one each of the three standard NuBioCom trees: a house tree, an anyfruit tree, and an all-season mapine—which was about it for trees anymore. The house tree resembled a thick, sturdy oak with oval window holes and an arched door. House trees were perhaps the finest miracle of genomics. They grew their own plumbing, saved up solar energy, showed video on their inner walls, and networked via the antenna veins in their branches. Frek glimpsed Mom through her bedroom window, folding clothes on her bed. She looked up and spotted him, then smiled and waved. He waved back.
On the other side of the house tree was their anyfruit tree. Depending on the season, it might have cherries, plums, pears, or apples. Right now it was making blackberries. Rolling his shoulders in a hover-pattern he’d just learned, Frek got the angelwings to suspend him over the highest branch of the anyfruit. He ate a handful of ripe berries.
Right about then a special feeling came over Frek, a feeling that he’d been having off and on all week. The feeling had to do with the world taking on a larger-than-life quality, and with Frek’s own sensations seeming exceptionally fresh and interesting. A golden glow would spread across things, and Frek would imagine that someone was watching him and asking him to explain everything that he thought. It felt like he was a star being interviewed. He didn’t know why he felt this way, but it was kind of fun.
Grinning like a newscaster, Frek threw his shoulders far back. The angelwings scooped mightily at the air, giving him the altitude to sail over their all-season mapine. The mapine bore red-yellow autumn foliage, tender new green shoots and dusty summer leaves. Some of its branches were wintry and bare, while others were dripping the sticky sap of spring. From above the mapine, Frek could see across his whole neighborhood. The three kinds of trees were scattered in an organic, natural way across the hills and dales. You could hardly tell you were looking at a Nubbie village. No roads or wires or pipes—just the house trees and anyfruits and mapines and some winding grassy footpaths, with bindmoss covering the spots where the grass had worn away. Every part of the Nubbies’ lives depended on the NuBioCom kritters.
Frek and his angelwings flew toward the Steiners’ house tree, which was near the highest point in Middleville, at the base of Lookout Mountain. Frek made a long and winding trip of it, with Wow running along below the trees like a bouncy brown and white toon animated onto the uniformly green lawns. The angelwings were young and playful; they enjoyed a barrel-roll or a loop-the-loop as much as Frek. Occasionally Frek would get so dizzy from his gyrations that he’d have to orient himself by peering down at Wow, always doggedly on course for the Steiners’. Wow knew where they were going and he wanted to get there. Stoo’s mother usually fed him something.
When Frek touched down in the Steiners’ yard, he found Stoo’s father, Kolder Steiner, trying to get his shiny green lifter beetle to fly him to work. The beetle’s passenger pod was of transparent chitin, with a seat made up of swirly spiral curls the same golden-green as the beetle’s wing covers. At one point in the beetle’s life-cycle, the pod had been his pupa-casing. The beetle himself was perched on the top of the pod with his legs hooked into it. The great insect seemed to be in a contrary mood; he was snapping his mandibles and making liquid high-pitched noises.
Even though Kolder was a high-ranking exec at NuBioCom, he wasn’t good at handling his living helpers. Kolder pressed a spot between the beetle’s antennae, and the kritter went sgli-gli-hi-hi.
“Hi,” said Frek.
“Hello, Frek,” said Kolder Steiner, not really looking up. He was a hairy man with strong arms. He poked impatiently at the beetle and again the kritter made the noise. Sgli-gli-gli-hi-hi. So far he hadn’t lifted his wing covers.
“It sounds like a giggle, doesn’t it?” said Frek, trying to be friendly. Frek’s father had been gone for so long that Frek wasn’t sure anymore how to act with grown-up men. Kolder Steiner didn’t answer him. Jerk.
Frek walked past Kolder’s uncommunicative back and stashed his angelwings in the Steiners’ garage. When Frek came out, Kolder was glaring at the lifter beetle and muttering under his breath. Now he gave the beetle’s domed back a savage slap. Gli-squeeeek-gli-hi-hi, said the beetle.
Inside the house tree, Sao Steiner was sitting at a table dictating a shopping list to a glypher slug. Like everyone else, she had golden skin and dark, almond-shaped eyes. But Sao was thinner than most people, and she had extra teeth in her smile. Toothbuds. She was wearing a white turmite-lace tube-top and tight, shiny, shin-length gray pants. A pile of new clothes sat on the table next to her; apparently she was planning to exchange some of them.
Sao made shopping complicated. She liked to go to the local turmite tailors who’d trained certain turmite mounds to create uniquely styled fabrics. She made forays into Stun City as well, seeking out the cured wall skin garments popular there. Sao would bring her selections home and try them on for days and then take most of them back. She was always talking about it. Shopping was like her main job.
“Yubba, Frek,” said Sao, flashing her amplified teeth. “Are you ready to rock and roll?”
“How do you mean?” said Frek. Sao Steiner had a way of saying offbeat things. It was like she was always acting flirty—or maybe like she thought it didn’t much matter what she said to him. Frek found it interesting to talk with her, even though he could tell she didn’t really approve of him. He was different from the other kids; his father was a Crufter and his mother had
a low-status job.
“That’s what Stoo’s new game says when it starts up,” said Sao Steiner. “Are you ready to rock and roll? I think it’s hysterical. You’ll find the crown prince in his room. Here.” She stood up and got some cookies out of a drawer to put on a plate. “You can take these up with you. Nothing like some fat and sugar. Oh, look who else is here. Wowie! Want a cookie, Wow-Wow?”
“Cookie,” said Wow, opening his jaws wide to squeeze out the sound. “Wow want cookie.” His lips were drawn back from his teeth with the strain of using his voice, which sounded like the squeak at the end of a yawn. It was rare for Wow to talk, but Sao could always get him to do it. Lora Huggins didn’t encourage Wow’s talking—she said she heard enough from her three kids.
Sao Steiner held a cookie up in the air and Wow jumped for it, making a wet inhaling noise. He’d gobbled down the cookie by the time he was back on all four feet. He quickly nosed a stray crumb off the floor, then looked up at Sao Steiner, licking his chops, his gold-flecked eyes watching her every move.
“I’m thinking we should get a dog, too,” said Sao. “But Kolder wants to wait for next year’s model. Wow’s cute, but there’s already so many of him in town. Kolder says the 3004 model dogs won’t mind fleas. That’s why it’s good that dogs don’t have puppies. The new models replace the old ones.”
At the sound of the word “flea,” Wow abruptly lay down and started chewing at the hair on the base of his tail. Any talk about fertility was over his head. He remained prone to wandering off in search of female dogs in heat, even though nothing could ever come of it.
“When NuBioCom collapsed the biome, why didn’t they get rid of fleas?” Frek asked Sao Steiner. Since Kolder was such a big deal at NuBioCom, Frek figured Sao might have some inside information. “All the ants and beetles are gone, and the grasshoppers and butterflies and lightning bugs—why keep fleas?”
“They kept mosquitoes, too,” said Sao, shaking her head. “Counting everything, we’re down to only two hundred and fifty-six kinds of legacy species—including mosquitoes and fleas. I’ve asked Kolder about it, and he says NuBioCom has a use for blood-suckers. They’re vectors for spreading the knockout virus to spots where the puffball spores might not reach. We need the knockouts to keep dogs from conceiving puppies, for instance. And to keep people from having un-licensed children. Don’t frown like that, Frek! You don’t want to end up like your father, off in some crazy Crufter asteroid and maybe even disappeared from there. Life’s gog gripper just the way she is.” It grated to hear someone’s mother try to use kids’ slang.