by Rudy Rucker
Meanwhile the dogs were still chewing. Frek went over to say good-bye. His foot bumped against the big bone, and Woo unthinkingly growled. Frek hunkered down next to his dog. “I’m going, Wow. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
Wow paused in his chewing and looked up at him. “Wow have bone. Woo have heat.” He was in heaven just now, and clearly in no mood to go anywhere. Frek sighed. Well, it wasn’t like he should expect Wow to follow him into the jaws of death or down the river or wherever the heck he was headed—though, really, that might have been kind of nice.
“You go home soon,” Frek told Wow. “Tell Lora Frek fine.” He gave Wow a few more lingering pats, and then he left the culvert. He was going to miss that dog. The sky was yellow in the east, and clear lavender-gray above, with a few high, pink cirrus clouds. It wasn’t hard to locate the puffball. It was a few blocks up the hill that led away from the river. Its great bulge blotted out a good bite of the sky.
Despite the early hour, others were out and about on the tough bindmoss walkways of Stun City. Workers were coming and going from the Kritterworks. A turbaned man on a coffee-camel was selling mugs of java warmed by the flames of the beast’s combustible breath. Whooosh! It was a gripper thing to see. The coffee came from a leaf-covered pouch slung across the camel’s back; a kind of plant that produced coffee as its sap. The pouch was symbiotic with the camel; its roots grew right into the hot-breathed beast’s hump. “Coffee here!” called the man in the turban, setting out a row of fresh-filled mugs. “Piping hot.”
A heavily modified couple came bouncing up for some coffee; maybe they’d been out all night. A young man and woman, they had long floppy ears and elastic balloons of skin growing from the soles of their bare feet. Boing, they went up into the air, bouncing on their foot-puffs, and came down, boing, boing, boing, in smaller and smaller increments, finally coming to a rest. The really weird thing was that their knees bent backward. Whooosh went the coffee camel, lighting its breath with a spark from its flinty back teeth. Sipping their drinks, the ball-foot couple stared absentmindedly at Frek—as if he were the odd one—all the while talking a funny city slang that he couldn’t understand.
“Goggy Glen, it’s goo to googoo you,” said the woman, laughing and leaning against her boyfriend. The letter ‘G’ was very much the gripper thing to use these days. “Glim me a guzzle, gurgle my genes.” She licked the side of his cheek. Her tongue was green.
“It’s godzoon gauss to glawk with you, Gillian,” said the man, spicing her coffee with a bit of mod gel he drew out of a pouchlike pocket in his skin. “Glug the grog, my guddly gollywog!”
“Gump dump grew you?” the woman asked Frek, swishing the modified coffee around her mouth. “Going Gov grotto for stim?”
“I’m going to the puffball,” said Frek.
“What I said,” answered the woman in clear. Her dangling ears were covered with animated tattoos. But despite her wild, uncanny looks, she meant to be helpful. “Up two blocks that way, one right, one left to the NuBioCom sample door.” Frek’s twisted lips and shrunken arm must have given her the impression he was testing mods for NuBioCom. Like a Grulloo.
“Geevey khora-khora goo on you,” observed the man. His green-gummed smile and his backward-bending legs made Frek very ill at ease.
With the briefest of nods, Frek hurried up the hill toward the puffball in the direction the woman had pointed. He passed some men unloading an elephruk full of metallic dust and uncorking casks of aircoral polyps. They were adding a story to a shiny restaurant. A fish market stood next to the eatery; here in the big city people wanted something more than simple anymeat loaf every day. The fish were amplified trout from the River Jaya, identically plump and healthy. A little man with webbed fingers was busy laying them out.
At the end of two blocks, Frek was right up against the NuBioCom puffball, its shadow spreading across the green moss of the street. The building wasn’t an aircoral, it was a single living thing, a giant fungus with brain nodules amid the computational richness of its mycelia and hyphae. Gov’s home. The air in the shade of the puffball was cool and moldy-smelling, though now and then the breeze seemed to bring out a scent of corruption, as of rotten vegetables and decaying meat.
Remembering what the bouncy woman had told him, Frek turned right, then left, skirting around the edge of the puffball. The puffball presented a blank, greenish-gray surface to the outer world. Its walls had glassy black eyes set into in them; Frek wasn’t sure if they noticed him or not. Thanks to Phamelu, Gov would know his disguise by now. Frek took out Jeroon’s purse-fungus and stuck it to the palm of his hand. It clung tight there. Soon it would be time to put on the chameleon mod.
At the far side of the puffball, Frek found a square with a queue of gumpy mod-testers, waiting for admittance to the puffball’s low, arched rear door. There was so much traffic here that, rather than being covered with bindmoss, the square was paved with live cobblestones, which were gray, rocky tubers grown right into place. The nearest gumps in line included a man with long antennae protruding from his head, a woman with an extra pair of arms, an old Grulloo woman with a squirrel tail, and a couple whose heads were partly melted into each other. A pair of beefy counselors were admitting the testers a few at a time. The puffball door opened onto a little chamber that flickered with colors; the walls inside the puffball were alive with images. Inside the door Frek could glimpse NuBioCom counselors taking blood samples from the mod-testers, and shadowy tunnels leading deeper into the puffball. That’s where Frek wanted to go.
He squeezed up against the wall of the puffball and took the chameleon mod-pod out of his purse-fungus—and not a moment too soon, for now he heard the buzz of a lifter beetle drawing near. It pulled into view and angled down for a landing. PhiPhi. She hadn’t noticed him yet. Frek squashed himself into the pinched crack where the puffball met the ground, taking off his shoes and slipping out of his blue turmite silk pants and his yellow T-shirt.
Just then Dibble came marching into the square. The Grulloo egg-baskets were back in her bed, plus an unhappy Gibby, propped up against a basket with his hands bound together by a wad of gunk from the webgun. Dibble’s driver was none other than blond, kind-faced Phamelu. Frek guessed she’d come to sell Gibby’s eggs for herself—and probably to sell Gibby, too. Gov wasn’t likely to show the cantankerous Grulloo much mercy. Frek realized that it was up to him to save his friend.
Phamelu’s bright gaze fell upon Frek; instantly, she pointed at him and raised her voice.
“There he is! The boy who ran away!”
5
Professor Bumby
Already naked, Frek dabbed a third of the chameleon goo onto his bare stomach, and willed his body to start looking like the gray-green puffball and the reddish dirt beneath his feet.
It happened fast as thought. The effect began with a stippled pattern of dull red and green dots that spread from his stomach to his chest and arms and legs, the dots racing across his skin. They covered every bit of him, even sliding out along his hairs. The color spots split into smaller and smaller dots with ever finer shadings. Frek’s body looked like a house tree’s wall skin bringing a scene into focus. And then his feet were indistinguishable from the dirt, and his upper body was a perfect match for the slanting puffball’s skin.
But of course the counselors were still running straight toward the spot where Frek stood. There was PhiPhi, and one of the guards from the puffball entrance, and two more counselors who’d appeared from inside. Phamelu remained perched upon Dibble, guarding her plunder.
Frek darted in a direction his pursuers might not expect: toward Phamelu. As he moved, his body matched itself to the appearance of the square’s cobblestone tubers and the appearance of the buildings and streets beyond. It was like having a perspective-warped toon show playing on his skin. Magical. The chameleon mod worked without his having to control the details consciously.
But when he was out in the open like this, the illusion couldn’t
fit together for every direction at once. Though Phamelu was still pointing at the spot by the wall where he’d started, the guard from the door was easily following Frek across the square. Reaching Dibble, Frek pressed himself against the elephruk’s gray flank, figuring the chameleon effect would work better against something flat.
Meanwhile—accidentally on purpose—the gump with antennae had gotten in the guard’s way, and the Grulloo woman with the squirrel tail had tripped up PhiPhi.
Frek’s skin was an elephruk shade of gray now, complete with darker lines to mimic the beast’s wrinkles. By the time the guard had reached the front of the elephruk, Frek had scooted along its body to the rear. For the moment, nobody knew exactly where Frek was.
Except for Gibby. The Grulloo was less than a meter away and he could hear Frek breathing.
“Didn’t I say git?” hissed Gibby.
“I’m going to save you,” murmured Frek, though he didn’t know how. With the four counselors after him, and only his naked body, there was no hope of cutting Gibby’s bonds. And he wouldn’t get very far if he tried to carry him.
Phamelu must have heard them talking, for now she was turning around. “Thar he is!” shouted Gibby to distract her. “Headin’ off downhill! Look! Look! Look!” It was the oldest trick in the book, but Gibby was yelling so loud that Frek’s pursuers couldn’t help but look down the street toward the river. The gump mod-testers took up Gibby’s cries and kept getting in the way of the counselors. The counselors now wasted a few precious moments in clearing the riffraff from the square.
Meanwhile Frek dropped to the ground, crawled under Dibble, finding his way among her legs, and came out on the elephruk’s other side. He realized that his ring was still visible. He used his thumb and fingers to work it loose, and tucked it into the purse-fungus pasted to the palm of his hand. And then he flattened himself on his stomach against the cobblestones and began worming his way across the square, moving quite fast. His stub-arm was fine for this kind of crawling.
With Frek flat on the ground, the chameleon effect was perfect. Looking down as he slid his hand across the ground, he could see every detail of the street’s surface echoed upon his skin. If he moved his arm across a pebble, the image of a pebble moved across his skin; if a leaf was beneath his fingers, the image of a leaf was displayed upon his knuckles. Frek recalled hearing that the chameleon mod made your skin photosensitive, effectively giving it the ability to see. One side of his arm could tell the other side what color to use. The effect was as if Frek were made of glass, except that the purse-fungus glued to his palm didn’t show through.
Frek worked his way over to the far side of the square, and then crawled around the square’s edge to get back to the puffball’s wall. Meanwhile, the counselors were ineffectually milling around. Gov was trying to think for all of them at once, and not doing too well at it. Only if one of them happened to blindly step on Frek would they find him. And that wasn’t likely, now that Frek was back under the bulge of the puffball. A bad smell, as of a dead animal, drifted past again. Frek crept along the wall toward the waiting door.
Getting through the door was going to be tricky, as counselors kept rushing in and out, for all the world like turmites in a hill. The only thing to do would be to wait for a lull and make a dash for it. Somebody might glimpse him going in, but once he was inside the puffball there’d be hundreds of meters of smoothly curved walls against which he could hide himself. Even if the walls were covered with toons, Frek felt sure his chameleon skin could keep pace with them. His mod still had maybe twenty minutes to go. He crouched beside the door, waiting for the counselors to clear out of his way. He felt just a bit hypnotized by the slowly changing colors he could see inside the entrance.
Sitting still like this, Frek entered a strange, yet familiar, state of mind. The world took on a kind of golden glow, as if Earth were an exotic place and he were seeing it for the very first time, being sure to clearly characterize everything that he saw. It wasn’t just the puffball that looked goggy—it was everything around him that looked new: the forms and faces of the people, the colors of the plants, the clouds in the sky, the live cobblestones. The gentle whisper of his breath was deeply significant; the counselors’ footsteps were like an orchestra. Most of all, the play of Frek’s consciousness felt like a performance, unique and miraculous, like some exquisite piece of craftsmanship with all of its components on display. This was the same golden glow sensation he’d been having off and on for the last couple of weeks. Ever since, come to think of it, the mysterious trouble on Sick Hindu. What did it mean?
“If you can’t find him, better take my goods and close the door,” called Phamelu right about then, breaking the spell. “Frek and this little Grulloo were planning to get inside the puffball and find the Anvil. The Grulloo was bragging about it last night when he was drunk. Might as well give him what he asked for!”
“You poisoned me!” shouted Gibby. “I’m bein’ kidnapped and robbed! The boy ain’t here, he’s run off, I tell you, he’s goin’ down the river!”
Ignoring his cries, five puffball counselors converged on the elephruk, one for each basket of eggs, and one for Gibby. Meanwhile the color-lit puffball door was drawing itself together like an anxious mouth. It was time to act. While the door was still waiting for the counselors to carry in Gibby and the baskets of eggs, Frek ran for it as fast as he could.
“There he goes,” cried the alert Phamelu, who’d been watching for him. The guard by the door glimpsed him too, and almost caught him, but Frek managed to dodge past his grasp. And then he was inside the puffball.
The room had four, no five, tunnels leading off it. The walls were flowing with pastel hues like watercolors melding on wet paper. Frek’s skin took on the same shades. The center of the room was full of equipment growing out of the floor: chairs, desks, lamps, hoses. Gov’s disembodied voice called out a warning. Three counselors jumped up.
The wall skins went creamy white, as if to make Frek easier to see. But of course he turned the same shade of white all over. Nevertheless, at least one of the counselors had gotten a good visual fix on him when he came in, and they were closing in.
Small and quick as he was, Frek was able to dodge past them. He took off into the handiest of the tunnel mouths. It proved to be a spiral ramp winding up to the next level, and then to levels above that. Frek kept going up, hoping the counselors would tire before he did. But they remained close behind. As if to make it harder for Frek to stay in synch with his background, the walls now began to flicker rapidly through an irregular sequence of solid colors. It was dizzying.
By the fourth level, Frek didn’t have the breath to climb anymore. He branched off into a level hallway, and ran fifty yards along that. The hall seemed to circle along the outer edge of the puffball. Every few yards an oval door gave upon a chamber with a window. People were in many of these little rooms, NuBioCom techs and genomicists. All the while, Gov was broadcasting warnings from the puffball wall skins, and some of the workers joined in trying to capture Frek.
By dint of some tricky turns and reversals, Frek managed to lose his pursuers for a bit; they thundered off down the hall ahead of him, leaving him camouflaged against a wall. He dropped to the floor and crept into a room off the hall. It was a kind of meeting room, with two men and two women standing by a table. NuBioCom execs. Frek didn’t take time to really look at them. A window faced out on Stun City; it occurred to Frek that if all else failed, he might use a chair to smash open the window and then slide down the curving puffball wall.
The execs had jumped up in response to Gov’s alarm, but now that the chase had moved off to another part of the puffball, they were settling back down.
“Terrible business, that runaway boy getting inside our headquarters,” said one of the women. Her face was so flat that the bridge of her nose was level with her eyes. It almost looked as if her eyes could see each other.
“I know him,” grunted one of the men. “He’s a misfit, pract
ically a mutant. Four sigmas off the genomic norm. Frek Huggins. His father went over to the Crufters last year. Young Frek was always wanting to come over to play with our son, Stoo. I did what I could to make him feel unwelcome.”
Wedged down against the curved corner where the wall met the floor, Frek recognized the voice. It was Kolder Steiner talking. Frek had never realized the Steiners thought quite so poorly of him. It made him ashamed to think back on all the times he’d tried to be nice to them, and them just thinking he was a gleep.
“Well, let’s get back to the business at hand,” the second woman exec said. She was dark-skinned, with slowly writhing copper hair. “The internal uvvy, to be known as the ooey. We need to get the ooey genome finalized so we can give the product a full-court press. We’re targeting a ten percent early-adopter rate in the first quarter and a front-porch bulge of sixty percent by the end of the second year. After that, Gov makes them mandatory.”
“Mandatory?” said the second man at the table, who sounded a little surprised. He was younger and more thoughtful looking than the other three. A genomicist.
“Makes things easier to just have one kind of uvvy,” said Kolder dismissively.
“But—what if somebody doesn’t want a voice in their head?” asked the young genomicist. “That’s what’s bothering some of us. We want the internal uvvy to have an ‘off’ mode. A user-activated pause control.”
“Excellent that you mention this,” said the copper-haired woman. “It’s exactly the main topic we planned for this meeting. The point is that an off mode would defeat our goal. Gov wants everyone online, all the time, everywhere. A hundred percent connectivity. This is absolute and nonnegotiable. The internal uvvies are to be universally adopted and always active. Why? Think of the marketing possibilities. The educational benefits. Gov feels this will be the most important thing he’s ever done.”