by Rudy Rucker
As if in answer to Whitey’s question, there was a slight scuffling noise in the hall. A tall, slim guy with lank dark hair was just turning around to hurry off. He wore a black jumpsuit with numerous bulging pockets. Whitey sprang out the door and caught him by the left wrist. “Don’t be rude,” he snarled, bending the guy’s arm behind his back. “Darla’s ready for you. I’ll blend in.”
The slim guy surprised Whitey with a powerful punch to the stomach. As Whitey sagged, the guy twisted free of his grip and chopped him in the side of the neck. Whitey saw stars and his knees buckled, but as he went down, he got his arms around the guy’s waist. He came out of a crouch to butt the guy in the crotch. The slim body bent in half. Metal and plastic clattered in his pockets. Moving fast, Whitey got under him, carried him into their cubby, threw him against the wall over their bed, and drew out his needler.
“Cut on the zapper, Darla. And get us some privacy.”
His tone of voice was such that Darla hastened to obey. She snapped the cover over the vizzy’s camera, and she filled the doorframe with pink light. “He’s sort of a new friend, Whitey. I asked him to fall by for a fuff. He said he might have some merge. You said before that it was—”
“It is,” said Whitey, showing his teeth. “It’s fine.” He leaned against the wall and put one hand on his crotch. “What’s your name, dook?”
“Ken Doll. Put the gun away, would you? You want to watch me pumping Darla? Well, that’s the whole idea of this, isn’t it? And I did bring some merge. Here.” He sat up on the edge of the bed, took a four-hit vial out of one of his pockets, and handed it to Whitey.
“Stuzzy,” said Whitey, putting the merge in his jeans.
Ken’s wet lips spread in an odd smile: at first only the right half of his face was smiling, and then the left half caught up. There was something wrong about his eyes. They looked like they were screaming. Still, the guy had brought them four hits of merge. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Ken stuck his long tongue out, touched his chin with it, and wagged his head, looking from Whitey to Darla and back again. “You ready?” asked Ken.
“Clear,” said Whitey, pocketing his gun. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this. He figured he’d know after he saw what he did. “Go ahead.”
Darla slipped her clothes back off. She was kind of heavyset, but her big breasts and thighs looked nice in the low lunar gravity. She stood in front of Ken and pushed her bottom against his face, the way she always did with Whitey. Ken was fully into it. Darla put her hands on her knees. Her big breasts bobbled. She looked up at Whitey, her eyes already glazing a bit, and opened her black-painted lips to waggle her tongue beckoningly. Whitey dropped his pants and plugged in. The angle was just right. Ken got up on his knees and began pumping her from behind, the right half of his face grinning like a madman. The left half of his face was slack and drooling. The two men took hold of Darla and jiggled her back and forth between them. She made noises like she was happy. Whitey liked it all, except for Ken’s weird, lopsided mouth. Where was this guy from anyway?
They got on the bed, then, and tried the whole range of other positions, even the gay ones. Whitey was determined not to come before Ken; but finally he did, and Darla too. The big climax blanked them both right out.
Suddenly Whitey thought he heard a cop’s voice—the voice of Colonel Hasci, a Gimmie pig who’d hassled him many a time. “Miss Della Taze?” he was saying. “We’re down in the lobby. Can we come up and ask you some questions about Buddy Yeskin?”
Whitey lifted his head then, wide awake. It was the Mooney tap, still tuned in. Hasci had been talking to Mooney. Door slam and footsteps. So what. Mooney had found Yeskin’s corpse; Bei Ng had known about that since Monday. Everyone connected with Yukawa was tapped—that’s how obsessed with the guy Bei was. ISDN wanted all Yukawa’s secrets, but Bei had a special fixation on Yukawa as well. They’d done a gene exchange or something . . . but what was going on here and now in this room?
Darla and Ken were both on their backs next to him, both with their eyes closed. Ken was catatonically still, breathing quietly with his mouth wide open. Looked like a cave in there. Apple blossoms were blowing across the vizzy screen. Darla’s little hologram of Bei Ng glowed in the corner. Ken stank. The guy was definitely a skanky dook; Whitey and Darla’d have to be sure and take some interferon. Be bad to make a habit of this kind of thing, with so many people out to burn . . .
Whitey had been gazing fondly down at Darla’s plump face, but just then he saw something that made him jerk in surprise. Her hair was moving. Darla’s hair filled the space between her head and Ken’s, and something was crawling under it!
Whitey shoved Darla’s head to one side and saw a flash of hardened plastic. A rat! Ken was a meatie! Whitey snapped his hand down to the floor where he’d left his needler—but it was gone.
“Whitey?” Darla sat up and felt the back of her head. “Whydja push me, Whitey—” Her hand came away wet with blood.
“RAT!” Whitey pulled her off the bed. There was a spot of blood on Darla’s pillow, and a multiwired little zombie box, not yet hooked up. A zombie box for Darla. The rat—a thumb-sized, teardrop-shaped robot remote—darted across the sheet, scuttled up onto Ken’s face, and crawled back into his mouth. Darla was screaming very loud. She turned off the door’s zapper and hurried out into the hall, still screaming. Whitey searched desperately for his needler, but Ken must have bagged it before letting his rat start in on Darla’s spine.
Ken’s systems came back up and he leaped to his feet. Whitey ran out the cubby door after Darla. All the other cubbies on their hall had their zappers on. After all the bad deals that Whitey had been involved in, no one was likely to open up for him. He sprinted towards the chute, catching up with Darla on the way. A needler-burst splintered the floor between them. Whitey glanced back. The meatie was down on one knee, firing at them left-handed with Whitey’s needler. If Ken could kill them both, his cover wouldn’t be blown. Whitey and Darla were really moving now, covering ten meters at a step. In seconds they’d leaped into the chute, caught hold of the pole, and pushed themselves downward towards the Markt. The meatie would be scared to follow them there. Whitey maneuvered himself to a position lower on the pole than Darla, just in case Ken started shooting down at them. There were limits to what he’d do for Darla.
Fortunately the chute was so crowded that the meatie didn’t risk coming after them. They slapped down at the Markt level safe and sound . . . except for being naked and having a gouge in the back of Darla’s neck.
“Let me see it, sweets,” said Whitey. It was a round, deeply abraded spot half an inch across, still bleeding. Whitey had surprised the rat while its microprobes were still mapping out the main nerve paths of Darla’s spine. Some of her hair had matted into the wound. It was starting to scab over, but Darla was turning limp. The rat had probably shot her up with something. People were staring at them; full nudity was relatively rare in Einstein, and Darla had blood all over her shoulders.
“Get me some blocker, Whitey,” mumbled Darla, stumbling a bit. “Everything’s lookin at me funny.”
“Clear.” He steered her down the long arcade past the Markt stands and shops, heading for a health club called the Tun. Just when he thought he’d made it, a nicely dressed realwoman blocked his way. She had silver-blonde hair and big shoulderpads. Her handsome face was trembling with anger.
“What do you think you’re doing with that poor girl, ridgeback! Do you want help, dear?”
Darla—drugged, bloody, nude—peered up at the realwoman and shook her head no.
“I’m takin care of her already,” said Whitey. Three more steps and they’d be in the Tun with friends and a medix, and Darla could crash and he could lotion her wound and—
“Let her go, or I call the Gimmie.” The realwoman took Darla’s arm and began trying to muscle her away from Whitey. There was no telling what her plans for Darla really were. Whitey shrugged, released his hold on Darla, and shoved the woman as hard
as he could. She tumbled to the ground and skidded down the hall. Whitey hustled Darla into the Tun.
Charles Freck was manning the door. He was an older guy, a real spacehead, and a good friend of Whitey and Darla. He wore his long gray hair in a ponytail, and his rugged face was cleanshaven. He was clothed in a loose pair of living paisley imipolex shorts, and he wore tiny green mirrorshades contact amps over his pupils. This made his eyes look as if the vitreous humor had been replaced with light-bathed seawater.
“My, how bum,” he said primly. He’d been standing out of sight and watching Whitey’s tussle over Darla. In each of his dancing eyes, the tiny, variable dot at the center was bright instead of dark. “I’ll turn on the zapper.” A glowing gold curtain filled the door. “OD?”
“Rat poison. We got down with a meatie, and the rat crawled out of his skull and bit Darla on the neck. Rat had a zombie box for her. Look where it bit.” He pushed some of Darla’s hair aside.
“Rat poison,” mused Charles Freck. “That’d probably be ketamine. A pop of beta-endorphin’ll fix that toot sweet. Let’s just go in the gym and check on the medix.”
He took Darla’s other arm, and helped Whitey march her down the hall. Darla was moving like she was half merged, and when she breathed it sounded like snoring. “Big,” muttered Darla. “Big throne. Oscar Mayer, king of the ratfood. His giant rubber crown.” She was hallucinating.
The Tun gymnasium was a huge cube of space, painted white all over. Energetic thuddy music played, and holos of handsome people gogo-exercised to the beat. There were a handful of actual people, too; two women on a weight machine, a couple of guys up on the trapezes, some people wrestling on the mats, and a woman riding a bike around and around the sharply banked velodrome that ran along the huge gym’s edges.
Charles Freck led them out from under the velodrome to the snackbar island in the gym’s center. He touched the white probe of the medix to the edge of Darla’s wound and peered attentively at the readout.
“Even so. Ketamine. Here.” He punched a code into the dispenser, and a syrette of betendorf popped out. “Whitey?”
Whitey injected the ketamine blocker into Darla’s biceps. “I’ll take some snap.”
“Even so.” Freck handed Whitey a packet of snap crystals. Whitey opened the packet and tossed the contents onto his tongue. The crystals snapped and sputtered, releasing the energizing fumes of cocaine freebase. He breathed deep and felt things around him slow down. The last hour had been one long jangle—Mooney shooting at him, Darla sharing him, the rat and the meatie, the realwoman’s Gimmie threat—but now, thanks to the snap, he could sit aside from it all and feel good about how well he’d handled things. Darla’s turgor was returning, too. He maneuvered her onto one of the barstools and bent her head forward.
“Hold still, Darla, and we’ll fix this now.”
Charles Freck cleaned the wound, moving slowly and fastidiously. He used a laser shear to snip off the rough edges. Slight smell of burnt Darla meat. Charles took a flat, whitish steak out of the fridge and carefully cut out a piece to match the hole in Darla’s neck.
“What’s that?” Whitey wanted to know.
“UDT. Undifferentiated tissue. It’s neutralized so she can gene-invade it.” He tapped and snipped, pinned and patted. Took out some gibberlin and rubbed it in. “That’ll do it, unless the rat put in something biological. I didn’t know Darla went for meaties.” He smiled merrily and poured himself a little glass of something.
Darla lifted her head and looked around. “I want a bath,” she said. “Like in pure interferon. Ugh. That’s the last time I call that creepshow Bill Ding’s Pink Party.”
“So that was it,” said Whitey. “Why didn’t you admit it?”
“I didn’t know for sure that someone was going to answer my spot,” said Darla. “I said I’d fuff for merge. And then when Ken showed up I thought you’d be . . . ” She looked down at her soiled bod. “How wrong I was. I’m taking a bath.”
“You mean if we’d left the camera on, we would have been on Bill Ding?” said Whitey, briefly enthused. “You should have told me, Darla, ’cause we were gigahot. How many people watch Bill Ding anyway?”
The door signal chimed just then. Charles tossed off his potion with an abrupt, birdlike snap of his head. “If it’s the woman you decked, Whitey, I’ll tell her Whitey says come in to cut a gigahot four-way Bill Ding fuff vid.”
“Don’t do that,” said Whitey, his eyes rachetting. With the dirty blond matted hair running down to his bare ass, he looked subhuman. The good part of the snaprush was already over, and events were crowding in on him again. He kept rerunning the last hour’s brutal changes through his mindscreen with the setting turned to Loop (High Speed), looking for a pattern that might predict what was coming next. Mooney was, he realized just then, as he looked into his mind, in the midst of a conversation with someone with a very clear booming bass voice. A robot voice. Mooney was talking on and on with a bopper somewhere. Whitey couldn’t tell if it was vizzy or close link, he’d missed something, with all this kilp coming down so heavy so fast.
“Prerequisites,” Mooney was saying. “What’s the difference between prerequisites, perquisites, and perks, eh, Cobb? I mean that’s where the realpeople are at. Maybe you’re right, I can’t decide just like that. Berenice. And you say that’s an Ed Poe name? Wavy. I’ll come out to the trade center right now . . . ”
Whitey took note of the one salient fact and let the rest of the slushed babble shrink back into subliminality. Charles Freck had paused halfway across the gym to grin at Whitey with his knowing green eyes. “Don’t let her in,” repeated Whitey, just loud enough. “She’ll call the Gimmie and someone’ll die. Someone like you.”
“Wu-wei,” said Freck, wagging a minatory finger. “Means wave with it in China. I’ll tell Miz Krystle Carrington you went thataway.” He crossed the rest of the gym in three high, high hops.
“The shower,” said Darla.
Whitey followed her into the constantly running showers. The water splashed lavishly from every side of the great room. The floor was black-and-white-tiled in a Penrose tessellation, and the walls and ceiling were faced with polished bimstone, a marbled deep-red lunar mineral. Hidden behind the walls there was a highly efficient distiller—a cracking refinery, really—that kept repurifying the water through all its endless recycles. The bopper-built system had separate tanks in which it stored up the various hormones and ketones and esters that it cracked out of the sweat, saliva, mucus, and urine which it removed from the water. Many of the cracked biochemicals could be sold as medicines or drugs. The water was hot and plentiful and definitely worth the monthly dues that Whitey paid the Tun.
Water took on entirely different qualities in the low lunar gravity, one-sixth that of Mother Earth’s. The water jets traveled along much flatter trajectories, and the drops on the walls swelled to the size of plums before crawling down to the floor. Numerous suction-operated chrome drain grids kept the floor clear. Whitey and Darla stayed in there for fifteen minutes, cleaning themselves inside and out. The fans dried them, and they vended themselves clothes from a machine. Pajama pants for him and a loose top for her, just like Rock Hudson and Doris Day.
They went back out in the gym and relaxed on one of the mats.
“That was really a K-bit thing for you to do, Darla, whoring for merge on Bill Ding, with the enemies I’ve got. You gotta remember, all kinds of factions are watching the grid all the time. Some bopper wanted to get that mickeymouse little control unit on you, so you’d be a zombie.”
“Rank. Super rank. What do zombies do? What’s the difference from a meatie?”
“OK. It’s a big operation to turn a person into a meatie. The ratsurgeon cuts the person’s head open, takes out part of the right brain half, and puts in a neuroplug that connects to rest of the brain. The rat is a little robot-remote that hooks into the plug. They have to take part of the brain out to make room for the rat. The rat gives orders and makes up for
the missing right brain tissue.”
“Which used to do what?”
“Space perception, face recognition, some memory, some left body control. Even after it’s all plugged in, the rat has better control over the left body half than over the right. But the rat can control the right body, indirectly, by giving headvoice orders to the left brain, or by making cross-cuing signals with the left half of the body. That’s why meaties move kind of weird. I should have noticed that about Ken right away. It’s just that I haven’t seen very many meaties.”
“But why was Ken’s rat trying to put a plug on my spine to make me a zombie? What does a zombie box do?”
“Well, it’s a crude version of a rat, only not plugged into so many nerves. The idea of a zombie box is that it would give quick control over your legs and arms. The boppers wanted you to go somewhere, Darla.”
“Like where?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to the Nest to get a neuroplug and a rat installed. Very few people are likely to volunteer for that operation, you wave.”
“Very few indeed.”
“But if they can get a zombie box on you, it paralyzes your speech centers and takes over your leg muscles, and marches you right in to the ratsurgeon.”
“Wherever he may be.” Darla giggled, euphoric with relief at their escape. “Can you imagine how that would feel, Whitey, doing the zombie stomp down echoing empty halls to the hidden bopper ratsurgeon?”
“Be good to watch on the vizzy,” said Whitey, also feeling oddly elated. “I wonder why they wanted to make you a meatie, if that’s what it was? Was it you special, or is it just whoever phones Bill Ding? Maybe the boppers want you to kill someone, like Buddy Yeskin.”
“Buddy’s dead? Della Taze’s funboy? Why didn’t you tell me that when you were talking about Della before, Whitey? Is this all tied in with merge?”
