by Rudy Rucker
“And then what?” asked Loulou, puzzled by the pointlessness of the feat.
Craig glanced around his space, feigning slyness. “And then? We do it again. I’ve been running my tests at night. But tell me this. Have you two had sex yet? Do you need to borrow some chains?”
As I said, Craig’s notions about women were very cartoony. Indeed, my sense was that, given his druthers, he’d prefer to be gay. But he seemed to have no hands-on experience in that area either. Apparently he labored under some unrealistic hangup about shocking his mother—who surely wouldn’t have cared.
“Craig’s always been special,” I told Loulou. “A genius who acts like he’s from Mars.”
“Faint praise,” said Craig. “Are you here for business?”
“Two of your mover golems,” I said. “We’ll need them for a little over an hour.”
Craig drew a folded, dirty piece of paper from his gray pants and mimed a lengthy written calculation with a pencil, muttering while he worked. “Base rate, temporal overage, cartage surcharge, cleaning costs, negative discount, rudeness multiplier, fat tax, chintz lien…”
But this was one of his routines. The rental amount was in fact very reasonable. I paid Craig and he called over two of his golems—stocky, gray-skinned figures like clay men. They were four feet tall, with three-fingered hands, and with stubby tails on their rears. Instead of having skeletons, they were all muscle, and they had an ability to adjust their shapes by flexing themselves in various ways.
“I’m Gustav,” rasped the first one, staring at us with flat black eyes. “I da one who bounce like a ball.”
“I’m Bonk,” said the other, his voice an octave deeper. “I’m strong.”
Loulou and I set off towards Jane’s housetree with the golems.
“You want me carry you?” offered Gustav.
“No thanks,” said Loulou. “You might crush me.”
“We got delicate touch,” said Bonk.
“Just follow us,” I said.
The housetrees were imposing things—verdant, smooth, stretching up towards the heavens, gently curved. Recognizing me, Jane’s lifter tube opened for us, and the fine hairs on the tube’s inner walls swept us to the eighteenth floor. The apartment door opened and there we were. My former home. A big round room, with a segment divided off for the bedroom. The living green walls were slightly translucent, with transparent spots. The city, the bridge, the river—all at our feet.
“Nice,” said Loulou, twirling. “How long ago did you move out?”
“Move everything now?” interrupted Bonk, misunderstanding her.
“You two stand still,” I told the golems, and turned to Loulou. “It’s been six months.”
“I like the shiny old wood furniture,” said Loulou, drifting around, touching things. “The fancy vases and the oriental rugs. Silk cushions. In my house we had cheap junk, and then we got cheap nurbs. How was it in the house where you grew up?”
“Country casual. Kind of a farm. My mother’s a caterer and my father’s an old-school painter. Lennox and Sally Plant.”
“I sort of remember that from our dreams. With the memories all warped and inside out. Your mother killing pigs and your father rolling in the blood.”
“But exactly!” I said with a laugh. “Maybe I’ll take you to meet Mom and Dad sometime.”
“You’re laying it on thick, Zad.” She kissed me. “Should we make love in Jane’s bed? Taint her sheets with my scent?” Loulou flashed me a hot rush of teep.
I was tempted, but fuddydud common sense prevailed. “Everything in here is watching us,” I reminded Loulou. “You know how nurbs are. They tell their owners whatever they see.”
“Fine with me!” said Loulou. “I don’t like Jane. Anyway—” and now her eyes went slanty and sly. “I know some nurb maintenance codes from working as a modder. I know how to put nurbs to sleep. It’s like a temporary hypnosis. Genemodders and cops use the codes all the time.”
For the sake of drama, Loulou moved her hands in a circle, as if casting a spell over the room. But really she was beaming out a rather long string of low-level nurb program code. I paid close attention, memorizing the details.
“You really are putting them in a trance,” I said, kind of amazed. “I didn’t know anyone could do this. It’s like knowing a magic spell.”
“Yeah. It lasts for about half an hour. The nurbs won’t see or remember anything we do. So come on, Zad. Fuck me on Jane’s floor.”
What was the word Carlo had used about Loulou? Ruthless.
“I’ve still got a lot of sympathy for Jane,” I told Loulou. “So the answer has to be no.”
“I’m disappointed,” said Loulou, not letting up.
“Come on now, I’ll show you the balcony,” I wanted to get this errand done. “You too, Gustav and Bonk. Don’t bump anything.”
“We not clumsy,” said Gustav.
The vat of nurb-paint wasn’t quite as big as I’d remembered, maybe three feet across and two feet deep. It was two-thirds full with nurb slime mold, gently undulating, cloudy-clear, with inner webs of colored veins. It made me happy to see the stuff.
If Loulou really did come live with me, maybe I’d start painting again. Even if she thought my work was corny. I could kick it up a notch, show her something new, take a further step. Maybe go abstract at last. Even if Dad still claimed that abstraction was a cop-out. Fuddydud that he was.
Bonk walked over to the vat and nudged it, not having much trouble making it move.
“Nurb-gel can be so pretty,” said Loulou, admiring the stuff. “I used to love working with it when I played Levolver all the time. How much does the vat weigh?”
“Half ton,” said Bonk. “Thousand pound. I can carry.”
“And I can balance,” said Gustav.
“That’s fine, boys,” I said. “Bring it to the alley in back of my store on Main Street.”
“I could qwet your nurb-paint, do a genemod on it and make it into—I don’t know—maybe a nurb ape,” said Loulou. “Strong little guy. He could carry us down the housetree’s outside wall like King Kong.”
“I want to do this my way,” I said, feeling stubborn. Nurb-paint was my thing. I didn’t want Loulou taking it over.
“Suit yourself,” said Loulou, still miffed about my not wanting to have sex. “Be an ass-kissing society artist. Too stuffy to learn from the street.”
I took a hit of cosmic mode and held my tongue.
Bonk widened himself and hunkered down. His muscles were extremely elastic. His hands began pulling on the vat’s closer edge. Gustav lifted the vat from the other side, helping to position it atop Bonk. Bonk rose a bit, resting on his tail as well as his feet, like a three-legged table. His calm, lucid eyes peeped out from beneath the vat.
Loulou was leaning on the balcony railing, taking in the scene. “I love the air up here,” she said. “So fresh and high. I’ve spent my whole life in cruddy shacks. Will you get me an apartment like this, Zad?”
“This teep thing is accelerating the hell out of our affair,” I said, drawn to letting my mind merge with Loulou’s yet again. We were soaring birds, cathedral gargoyles, stars in the sky. Of course I wanted to get this difficult, exotic woman an apartment. But I didn’t have the dough.
As we dropped back into the robotic mode of thought, Loulou fully assimilated the knowledge that I was poor. Something she hadn’t realized before. Something she didn’t like to know. Something that would permanently reduce my standing in her eyes.
“We go now?” said Gustav, standing beside Bonk with his steadying hands on my vat of living goo.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Before Jane comes home.”
“Let’s steal something,” said Loulou as we passed again through the sumptuous living room. “That!” The little nurb cuttlefish in her earrings waved their tentacles in glee.
She was pointing at a smooth, organic-looking object that sat upon a carved wooden shelf. It was the shape of a baseball, its surface mottl
ed in shades of lavender and mauve. One side of the ball bore a puckered conical indentation. I’d often studied the thing, trying to decipher its origins and its possible significance.
One of the odd things about the curio was that its appearance wasn’t fixed. The subtle spots and streaks on its surface changed from day to day. And sometimes the ball would wobble and pulse, with its puckered dimple flexing like the lips of a mouth with no teeth.
Jane had given me this numinous token for Christmas last year. So it was arguably within my rights to bag it. But Jane was very fond of the thing. She called it her amazing oddball. She’d found it walking alone in the woods near her parents’ house. I hadn’t been with her that afternoon.
Jane claimed the oddball had called her by whispering her name, and I half believed that. We still hadn’t fully decided what the oddball actually was. We’d done numerous web image searches for objects resembling the oddball, but we’d never found anything similar. Our best guess was that it was a fungus of some kind, like a puffball. Or an invertebrate animal of some kind. Or possibly it had some connection with Kentucky’s ubiquitous limestone caves?
When I’d obsessed on the oddball in the past, I’d sometimes get a feeling it was talking to me, not that I ever understood what it said. And sometimes I’d dream about its mouth. If I could shrink down and crawl inside the mouth—where would I land?
Here in the moment with Loulou, I took the oddball in my hand. It nestled against my palm, and I seemed to feel a faint glow of thought. Now that I had teep, I was more sensitive than ever before. Was the curio synching with my qwet mind? No time to ponder this now.
“Okay, I’ll bring it,” I told Loulou as I squeezed the slightly yielding ball into my pocket. “Really it’s mine anyway. So we’re not actually stealing. And tell Jane’s apartment to snap out of your trance and let us go.”
Loulou broadcast another code and a moment later the door to the downward lifter tube opened.
“We go first,” said Gustav, still guiding the heavy-laden Bonk.
“Oh yeah.” The lifter tube’s cilia were powerful, but I didn’t want to be in there with those guys tumbling after me.
Within a half hour, the vat of nurb-paint was in the alley behind my shop, right next to my slugfoot Lincoln. Gustav and Bonk had walked back to Gurky Movers. My Lincoln’s slug was draped on the car’s roof, soaking up the sun. I had a roadspider hanging around back there too. As kind of a joke, I’d named her Xiz in memory of old Zix—I’d had to incinerate Zix after she killed that colt.
“Let’s do make my nurb-paint qwet now,” I said to Loulou. “The paint will know how I feel. Have a sense of my dreams. It’ll deepen my work. Make it less corny, right?”
“Oh, Zad, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings when I said that word. Let’s not end on a sour note.”
“End? We’re just getting started, aren’t we? Tell me again what you did to make your earrings qwet. Did you really just spit on them? It’s that simple?”
“For the spit to be contagious you have to add some psychic oomph,” said Loulou. “Lean over your vat, massage the slime, drool on it, and imagine that the slime is getting qwet. If you want something badly enough, you can actualize it. And, Zad, you should really start biomodding. Painting pictures isn’t enough. We’re deep into the twenty-first C. You ought to be making live nurbs. Like—surreal animals with bizarre personalities.”
“I’m not really good using the biomodder wand,” I muttered.
“Don’t play dumb,” said Loulou. “You’re qwet now. You can biomod without any United Mutations wand. Teep into the target nurbs with your mind.”
“How would I figure out the right mods?”
“If you’re in cosmic mode, the gene designs pop right out at you, qrude. That’s what we call cosmic logic. You find the mods and you teep them right into a nurb without any kludgy wand involved. I’m pretty sure we talked about this last night. Why do you look so blank?”
At some level this stuff did sound familiar, if foggy. “Maybe later I’ll try,” I said. “But right now I’d rather do things my way.”
“Oh fine!” said Loulou impatiently. “Model your gel with your hands. The fuddydud stays in nursery school. What-fucking-ever. Can I play with Jane’s oddball now?”
“Sure,” I said, more than ready for her to go away. I handed her the oddball. She carried it into my bedroom.
* * *
5: Scene of the Crime
Not really expecting the process to work, I put some spit on my fingers and dipped it into my vat of nurb-paint. As usual, it reacted to my touch with a ripple of pastel colors. But I didn’t feel anything like an answering pulse of teep. I’d need to try harder.
I knelt by the vat, rolled up my sleeves and buried both my hands in the gel, waggling my fingers. I liked the smell of the stuff, faintly sour and carrying a slightly intoxicating headiness. Why had I stopped painting? Just because of a dip in sales? Painting was, after all, the one thing that made me truly happy. I’d been a fool to stop. And perhaps Loulou was right—perhaps I could progress into animated sculptures, or hell, why not start biomodding full-fledged nurbs. But for the moment, I just wanted to play.
“I love you,” I told my nurb-paint. “I’m qwetting you.”
I lowered my face to the vat and licked the slime. It shuddered and bulged, then extended a tongue of its own upwards. I let the tongue into my mouth—cool, smooth, and tingly. But when it made a move to slide down my throat I spit it out.
I heard a giggle. The gel was qwet. We were teeping. I had a new friend. I sent some of my thoughts into it—my worries about Jane, my excitement over Loulou, my longing to resume my career. Bubbles and blocks of color danced in the vat, connected by a network of spiral curves.
“This is good,” I happily told the paint. “We’ll make some great new pieces pretty soon.”
Walking through my bedroom to the storefront, I told Loulou I’d successfully qwetted my paint. “Uh huh,” she said, not really listening. She was busy staring at the oddball, turning it this way and that. “From somewhere else,” she muttered. “Another world.” I’d sometimes had that feeling about the oddball myself. But right now I needed to see what Skungy was up to.
“Did anyone come in?” I asked the rat, entering the front room.
“Losers looking to buy shit,” said Skungy, running his tough-guy routine. “I chased them off.”
“Thanks a lot. No food for you tonight.”
“I’ll rip your damn throat out.”
“I’ll incinerate you.” The rat and I were enjoying ourselves. It was like the way I talked to Carlo.
Speaking of whom—a couple of noisy idiots burst into the store just then, yelling my name. It was Carlo and Reba, laughing their heads off, with Carlo beating bebop-a-rebop tattoos on the wall and Reba teeping into my head. Her personality felt like a tropical jungle.
“I’m qwet too!” she exulted. “Isn’t it dreamy, Zad? The next big thing. And we’re launching it in little old Louisville.”
“I boned Reba,” said Carlo. “If that’s not too frank?”
“Speaking truth to power,” said Reba. “After we merged, Carlo and I got so jazzed that we staged a Slygro palace revolution. Gaven’s great at streamlining production, but he’s too fuddydud for a major market splash. I’m the big boss now, and I started marketing the Slygro qwet teep personality upgrade as of noon today.” Just what Loulou had predicted.
“Tell me more,” I said.
“Carlo and I went out to the Slygro lab in the barn around eleven, and nobody was there,” answered Reba. “We found the qwetter lying there on a work bench, and I took it. So that means we’ve got a service to supply. And while we were at it, Carlo tweaked the Slygro phone tree so that incoming calls go directly to me. Reba the CEO. Buy your qwet from Reba. In fact I already sold a qwet treatment to a jeweler down the street from your store. Ned White? He called me up—that’s why we came down here.”
“Gaven is okay with all this?�
�� I demanded.
“We didn’t actually see Gaven at all,” said Reba. “But he knows what’s up. He sent this nasty furry thing with a beak to spy—”
“A platypus,” interrupted Carlo. “Gaven has two qwet platypuses living in a burrow off the pond. I didn’t tell you? It’s his latest thing. He’s been backing up his personality onto them. An idea Gaven and Junko have been working on. Junko wants to take it a step further and write the backups into her own body’s muscles.”
“Anyway, yeah, Gaven’s platypus was watching us,” continued Reba. “The man himself was sulking in his house. He doesn’t like that I’m in charge. He’s like a spoiled kid. As of today, I own fifty-five percent of the stock, qrude. I paid a pretty penny. But a girl needs her fun.”
“Reba bought stock from Loulou at the picnic,” reported Carlo. “And I sold her mine during the night. And this morning Reba called Junko Shimano and got her to sell, too.”
“Loulou had stock?” I said.
“It used to be Joey’s,” said Reba. “But Joey’s mentally incompetent, and Loulou’s his wife. So!” Reba paused, studying my reaction. “Loulou didn’t tell you about her little side deal, did she? Now do you believe that she’s a two-faced whore?” Surely Loulou was hearing this from the bedroom.
“Watch your mouth,” I snapped at Reba. “And I don’t know what the hell you think you’re buying with Slygro. Junko Shimano is the one who invented qwet tech, and she made it open source. That’s why she was glad to sell you her stock. It’s not worth shit.”
My back door slammed right about then. Loulou on the way out.
“Exit the guttersnipe,” whooped Reba, gladly throwing an extra log onto my firestorm of emotions. “And, oh-oh, look out the window, there she goes on your roadspider!”