by Rudy Rucker
“I don’t like to admit this,” he quietly said. “But I heard something about half an hour ago. Gaven and Loulou yelling. And then they stopped all at once. I should have done something—but I was zoned into the teep with my wife. Deep into our humble joy.”
“So you heard the noise, you stayed in cosmic mode, and—”
“I felt your vibe coming into Gaven’s house, and that finally got me out of the sack. Poor Gaven. He was a jerk, but even so—” Artie trailed off.
Two police spiders were loping up the drive— dark blue, long-legged, with a fluid and sinister quality to their gait.
The lead cop was yet another guy I knew from high-school days. Lief Larson. I even knew his assistant, a hard guy we called Grommet. God, I was getting old. I knew people who were cops.
“Hi, Lief. Grommet.”
“Zad dad,” said Lief. “The gnat cameras told me you’d be here. They claim they saw you kill Gaven with an overdose of nod spray. They say they have video.” He stared at me.
“You’re putting me on,” I said flatly. “Trying to frame me.”
“That’s my job,” said Lief, backing off a bit. He was an odd guy, with a sardonic, tragic view of life. He didn’t take anything seriously. He leaned over and released a particular kind of forensic nurb, a thing called a crawly hand. It began creeping around on Gaven’s body. As the name suggested, it resembled a small, pale human hand, only it had nostrils in its thumb, an eye in its palm, a tiny mouth on the back of the hand, and a cluster of slender tentacles where the index finger should have been. Unpleasant to look at.
“The gnats were offline when I got here,” I told Lief. “And I doubt they’d make up stories about me. I found Gaven dead, yes. With that weird picture lying next to him? My theory is that he had some kind of brain attack.”
“Zad the artist,” said Lief. The forensic hand was pushing its flexible tentacle-probes deep into Gaven’s nose. Lief gazed at me, a muscle twitching in his cheek. “Next you’ll tell me that you gave Graber the bill for this wonderful portrait and he keeled over stone cold dead? Come on, Zad, don’t screw with me. What’s actually happening here? What’s this qwet teep I’m hearing about? What’s up with Joey Moon and Loulou Sass? And why did you come out to the farm?”
“I was supposed to start selling Gaven’s Slygro products in my store. Pet rats like this one I have here. I came to talk to Gaven about the plan. As for the rest of it, I’m as confused as you. I don’t know anything about qwet teep.”
“I doubt it. We questioned Ned White after he left your store an hour ago. He was all excited about a qwet teep treatment that he’d gotten from your friend Reba Ranchtree. Talkative guy. He said you’d spent the night with Loulou Sass. Who lives on this estate. And who arrived in Louisville riding a stolen road-scorpion.” Lief gave me a long look, then turned to Artie. “How about you? What’s your excuse?”
“I’m the security guard. I was asleep.”
“You and the nurbs both. The mystery of the enchanted farm. I’ll let you go for now, Artie. But Zad, I’d like you to come downtown with me. I’ll drive you in your car, if you don’t mind. The slugfoot Lincoln. I want to check out the ride. My spider can follow along.”
“You’re arresting me?” My voice rose in surprise. Teep or not, I hadn’t seen this coming.
“Yeah, you’re arrested,” rasped Grommet, getting right in my face about it. He had a broad face, high cheekbones and a trim beard. “That a problem? Want to escalate?” He’d always been a bully. I remembered him rubbing snow on my face. And bragging about forcing sex on girls. A nasty person. I resisted my impulse to whack an elbow into Grommet’s eye.
“I’m calling you a murder suspect,” said Lief. “I don’t like it when people bullshit me. We’ll get our judge owl to arraign you. I’ll drive you downtown to meet the owl, and then you can see about getting some bail.”
Skungy was up on his rear haunches, curiously sniffing at the forensic hand, which had forced some of its probes right through the wall of Gaven’s chest. Measuring levels, feeling for clots. And now the forensic hand chirped to signal that it was done. Lief picked it up and held it to his ear.
“The hand reports that Gaven Graber died of asphyxiation,” he intoned, staring me. “You can see there’s no bruises around his throat. Either he was smothered or he somehow stopped breathing. Time of death approximately one thirty this afternoon. And now it’s two thirty. When exactly did you arrive here, Zad?”
“Not till two. The gnats called you almost right away. And Artie showed up a little later.”
“The house isn’t telling me jack,” said Lief. “And the gnats are blank for the fifteen minutes before they called us in. Like a professional hit. Are you pro, Zad? Did you smother him?”
“I think it was this ugly picture. It scared him to death. Took his breath away.”
“Scare a cold fish like Gaven Graber?” said Lief with a snort. “Yes, I can see that his death expression matches the picture’s. Too tidy. It stinks. I’m thinking murder one.”
“The picture herded Gaven into a psychotic break!”
“Spare me the fancy bullshit,” snapped Lief. “Once we get downtown, maybe we’ll pound the truth out of you.”
“You guys don’t do that anymore,” I said, hoping this was true.
“We’ve still got a back room,” said Lief shortly. “Crunch numbers, crunch heads.” He stared at me again, still hoping I’d crack. “The crawly hand is done, but I’m gonna cart Garber’s stiff to our morgue. Maybe we’ll cut him up. Or put him in a cell with you. Get old-school on the case. You mind if I bring Gaven in the back seat of your car?”
“I’m supposed to ride in my car with a corpse and a cop?”
“You’ll be handcuffed as well,” said Lief, always pushing for a reaction. “And we’ll be keeping your car for awhile.”
Right about then, Grommet caught Skungy with a net. The nurb mesh tightened, and Grommet dropped the squalling Skungy into his coat pocket. “We can run him through a terminal interrogation,” said Grommet. “Or maybe you’d talk to save your qwet rat?”
“Oh, you’re really up on the qrude lingo,” I blindly challenged. “Qwet rat.”
“I might as well tell you that today’s investigation is about more than you killing Graber,” said Lief. “We’ve got an inquiry from the big DoG. The Department of Genomics. They want to know more about qwet. We’re gonna search this whole farm on the DoG’s behalf. They’ll cut our department a fat check.”
Three more cops arrived, one on a roadspider, the other two in an oversized roadhog van. Lief handed one of them the weird picture of Gaven that had been lying on the floor. “Put this in the trunk of that Lincoln over there.”
“The boys and me are gonna comb through this place now,” Grommet told me, hefting a billy club that he’d produced from inside his coat. He was such a caricature, such a complete dick. “I’m still waiting to hear if you have any problems.”
I stared at Grommet in silence, not wanting to give him any satisfaction.
“And—Zad?” added Grommet, sweetening his voice. “DoG says your nurb reseller’s license is revoked. You’ll have to close your Live Art store.”
Combined with my teep sense of Grommet’s gloating hostility, the news hit hard. As I’d done when facing Whit, I took a series of deep breaths and melted far into the cosmic mode. Beyond the pale. One with everything. The world was like a springtime dogwood tree—with Grommet and me like little white flowers, wearing ballet tutus and dancing in the breeze. All a performance, all a show. Nothing mattered.
And now here came Junko Shimano, galloping up the driveway on her pale green roadspider.
“Hi, Zad,” called Junko, pulling up next to us. “Gaven’s really dead? Bummer, bummer, bummer. I heard about it from his gnat cams. The control of the cams has passed to me.”
“State your name,” said Lief Larsen.
“Junko Shimano,” she said, dismounting from the roadspider. “I’m Gaven’s chief
engineer. And I brought a lawyer along.”
She held out a lawyer head, that is, a blobby nurb that was covered with the squidskin image of one Herb Stork, Esq. About the size of a roast chicken. The counselor wasn’t able to make it out here in person on such short notice; he was in his home office, realtime-linked to our scene.
“Cease and desist,” said the lawyer head. “Habeas corpus. Lacking firm evidence of a crime, you can’t do a destructive autopsy.”
“I’ve been tracking the feeds from Gaven’s gnat cams on the way over here,” added Junko. “I’m up on what’s down. Gaven has a notarized Advance Directive form. You can’t just go and trash his body, Detective Lief Larsen.”
The lawyer head sounded forth. “The Advance Directive specifies that, lacking a countervailing legal order, Gaven Graber’s remains are to be placed into his stasis machine for possible resuscitation. As you know, this is a standard practice.”
“Gaven has his stasis machine on standby in the farm’s old smokehouse,” continued Junko—doing a ping-pong routine with her lawyer. “That little gray stone building over there? If you policemen want to do something useful, help us carry Gaven’s body. Right away? He’s already starting to deliquesce, as I’m sure you know.”
Grommet was on the point of barking out some ignorant insult, but Lief waved him off. “We’ll be glad to assist,” said Lief smoothly. “We know about stasis machines, of course. It’s fine, just so the body remains accessible to our forensic nurb hands. And you’ll have to inform us if and when Graber is repaired and resuscitated.”
“It’s quite likely to happen,” said Junko. “Gaven set aside a fund for the best in medical nurb ants—just in case something like this happened. We’re not done with him yet.”
“Let me ask you something, Ms. Shimano. Were you in conflict with the deceased?”
“At times,” she said with a shrug. “We argued about business strategy. But it was nothing I’d kill him for. What am I, a suspect now? I can’t believe you’re arresting poor Zad.”
“Do you know of some better suspects?” asked Lief smoothly.
“Oh—everyone,” said Junko, leaning over the corpse. “What a horrible face! Gaven had very low empathy, even after he—well, he had low empathy no matter what. None of us at Slygro really liked him. What a horrible look he has on his face.”
“What about qwet teep?” slipped in Lief. “What do you know?”
“That’s under non-disclosure,” interrupted Junko’s lawyer head. “She can’t talk about that.”
“What do you know about the picture Garber was looking at when he died?” continued Lief. “I assume the gnat cams fed you my conversation about it with Zad?”
“Yeah,” said Junko. “I can tell you that picture is definitely based on one of Joey Moon’s constructions. He calls them magic mirrors. They start blank and they stop when they reach a peak. I don’t know if Joey’s ever shown them to anyone besides Loulou Sass and me. But Joey can’t be a suspect. He’s locked up in a clinic.”
“You need to be checking your facts,” said Lief. “Joey escaped from the clinic around eleven thirty this morning. He’d be a good suspect, from what you’re telling me.”
“I doubt it,” said Junko, not liking the idea. “But we can’t stand here talking. We have to get Gaven into his stasis. If you two officers can get him by shoulders, Zad and I can take his legs.”
“Just stand aside, Ms. Shimano,” said Lief. “My men can carry him on their own. Lead the way, and power up your stasis machine. We’ll let Mr. Graber rest in peace.” Lief ran his hands over Gaven’s face, smoothing the man’s grimace, closing his eyes.
Back when Todd Trask had lived here, he cured a few hams every year. He’d pack hog legs in salt for a month, then hang them up to dry for another whole month in the smokehouse—with a slow, smoky fire burning for all thirty days. The smoke kept flies from laying eggs in the meat before it had developed a moldy, impervious rind.
I tried telling Junko about this while she and I walked ahead of the cops carrying Gaven, but she was too excited to listen. She was amped up about using the stasis machine.
“It’s a system of concentric deformed ellipsoids, each of them bearing an increasingly strong bosonic shield,” she told me. “Like an invisible cocoon of nested sleeping bags. At the very core, the flow of time effectively stops.”
Junko opened the smokehouse’s heavy, studded wooden door, releasing the lingering smell of bacon and smoked meat. She reached in and flicked a switch. Pale purple light glowed from one side of the room to the other, intricate webs of bright lines outlining a six-foot-long banana-shaped pod. A virtual hammock, dramatic against the smokehouse’s soot-covered inner walls.
The stasis field’s generators were a waist-high pair of high-tech lumps fastened to the stone walls. They were utterly silent, powered by a subquantum Maxwell’s Demon effect that was said to draw energy from the fluctuations of spacetime foam.
“Flop Gaven into the stasis spindle,” Junko told the cops, stepping to one side. “It’s like you’re putting him in a hammock. The field will hold him up. Be careful with your hands. If you leave your hand in the stasis field for too long, it’ll get out of synch and snap off at the wrist. Like on a Greek statue.” Possibly she was teasing them. I was having trouble reading Junko today.
With gingerly motions, the bearers did their work. Gaven lay there, gently rocking, a high-tech pod-person. The police went back to the porch, and Junko sent the gnats with them. She and I stood alone by Gaven for a minute, looking at him and vibing each other’s teep. Junko was sad, exultant, scared, eager, lonely, sly.
“What next?” I murmured. “Where does this go?”
“Slygro is over,” she breathed. “Qwet teep isn’t a product, it’s a cause. I want to start a commune where the local qwetties can synergize.”
“A commune on Gaven’s farm?”
Junko made a tiny gesture of shaking her head. “Something better. Something luxor. I have a few ideas, and you should work your connections too. Call me in the morning.”
There was a rectangular spot of daylight at the bottom of one of the smokehouse walls. A vent. I noticed something moving there. A furry little animal in the vent hole, gazing up at Gaven’s spindle. Pale purple light glinted on the thing’s eyes and on its—beak? Oh God, a platypus.
Carlo had told me a little more about the two qwet platypuses in Gaven’s pond. Gaven’s software was waiting in these platypuses—waiting for the time when the man’s slightly damaged body would be repaired by a colony of medical nurb ants. These high-priced ant colonies included workers in a full range of sizes—running all the way down to the molecular level. Big suture ants, small inspectors, minute tube-cleaners, and an army of nanoants for the deeper-down nasties. Could they really raise Gaven from the dead? I’d always suspected the concept to be a scam.
In any case, the idea of Gaven’s personality being inside this platypus creeped me out. According to Carlo, the platypus could force Gaven’s personality onto you even if you weren’t Gaven. It could overwrite your mind. This wasn’t at all an easy thing to do. Your mental essence has its own built-in firewalls. Ordinarily nobody can teep into you and replace your personality with theirs.
But Gaven’s tweaked platypuses had a work-around. The spurs on their rear legs excreted a paralyzing drug called a conotoxin. It was like curare, only stronger. The effects only lasted for a minute, but that was enough. The platypus would sting you, you’d keel over like a plank, the platypus would teep Gaven’s personality into your head, and when you sat up—you’d be Gaven.
The thought horrified me. I wasn’t always that good at winning arguments. A lot of time I’d get shouted down. That’s one reason I liked to go off by myself and make art. It made me sick to imagine someone else’s personality crawling inside my head and bullying me into submission.
I stayed a good distance from the platypus. I couldn’t tell if Junko had noticed it too. I did my best to hide my thoughts about it.
This whole scene was starting to feel like an intricate game, and I needed to keep any slight edge I might have.
In terms of edges, it might be good for me if I turned up a mansion where we could crash. Jane’s family estate would be a great pick. But, now that I looked, I could see that option was already in Junko’s mind. In any case, before doing any further mind-gaming, I had to go downtown with Lief Larsen.
Once we were in copland, a squat little nurb owl judge arraigned me on a manslaughter charge. He was a gray lump of feathers with a brown beak, big eyes, and with his legs growing out of a waxy pedestal of memory tissue. The corpus of the Law. Zero empathy from that owl. He gnawed on a dead rat while he pondered my case.
For a second there, I thought the dead rat was Skungy. But, no, Skungy was in another room, locked in a cage. I could teep his unruly vibes. Skungy and I couldn’t make any really specific plans. What with teep being oblivious, I wouldn’t remember anything he said. But I came out of our teep with a gut feeling that my rat would make an escape before long.
“The manslaughter charge is to get your attention,” Lief told me. “To encourage cooperation. The owl and I know you’re holding out on us about qwet teep. And about Graber’s death. We’re releasing you on bail so can think things over, and nose out info. Once you actually help us—and you will—we’ll dismiss the charge. Meanwhile sign here to give us your store in lieu of cash bail.”
“Can I still live in the store if I do that?”
“You can’t live there anyway,” said Lief. “The DoG has quarantined it. Like Grommet told you. You aren’t allowed in your store at all. That’s part of the fallout from your nurb reseller’s license being revoked. And that’s happening because you’re involved with qwet teep. Whatever the hell it is, DoG doesn’t like it.”
I used the cosmic mode to blow off my anger. And then I robotically signed what I had to. When I got out of the cop station, I walked the five blocks to my store—to see in person what had come down. It was nearly dusk by now, with the sky turning gray, with a cool breeze picking up.