by Rudy Rucker
“Emuw,” slobbered Mooney. “A boppuh cawwed Emuw. He want to know if youw pwegnan. He wan you ta gwow an extwuh buhbuh . . . ” His face went totally slack and he puddled.
“I’m getting an abortion,” Della told the two-eyed Mooney puddle. “I’m gonna go do it like right now.”
Mooney had flowed right out of his dooky jumpsuit. Darla went through its pockets, found her needler and a . . . wad of bills . . . $20K, oxo wow! And, oh-oh, a remote mike. He was bopperbugged, which meant they’d just heard what she said about getting an abortion. Darla started shaking again. Hurry, Darla, hurry! She stuffed the merge flask and the money in her shirt’s pouch. She fired six quick needler blasts through the zapper curtain. Then she cut off the curtain and jumped out into the hall.
Empty. The curtain powered back up, and Darla was alone in a fifty-yard corridor. No sound but the slight humming of all the zappers. She took off running down the hall. She kept expecting a meatie to dart out from behind one of the zapper doors. She was in such a hurry that she forgot to look up when she jumped into the shaft that led down to the Markt.
Just as she got hold of the fireman’s pole that ran down the center of the shaft, someone bumped into her from above.
“I’m sorry . . . ” Darla began, but then something jabbed her spine. She twitched wildly, as if from a seizure, and let go of the pole. A strong hand caught hold of her wrist. The seizure passed. Darla felt her body get back hold of the fireman’s pole. She wanted to turn her head and see who’d stabbed her, but she couldn’t. She landed heavily on the Markt level. She could hear her invisible assailant hurrying back up the ladder, and then her legs led her out into the Markt and off to the right. Away from the Tun.
It’s a zombie box, Darla thought to herself, feeling oddly calm. The boppers knew my wiring from the last time, so they had a special box all fixed to spike right in. I wonder if it shows under my hair?
She walked stiff-hipped past the rows of shops. The robot control of her body made her move differently from normal. Her arms hung straight at her sides, and her knees flexed deeply, powering her along in a rapidly trucking glide. She looked like a real jerk. She could tell because, for once, men didn’t stare at her.
Her bobbing bod angled into the door of a shop called Little Kidder Toys. A crummy, dimlit place she’d never bothered noticing before. Outdated mecco novelties, some cheap balls, and two kids nosing around. A hard-looking middle-aged grit woman behind the counter. Before Darla could see anything else, her robot-run body whirled and peered out the shop door, staring back down the Markt mall to see if anyone was following her. No one, no one, but yes, there, just coming out of the shaft, far and tiny, was Whitey! She jerked back out of sight.
“Kin ah hep yew?” The shopkeeper had saggy boobs and a cracker accent. “Ah’m Rainbow.” Her short, chemically distressed hair was indeed dyed in stripes of color: a central green strip flanked by two purples and two yellows. The roots were red. A true skank. “Yew lookin fo a toooy, hunnih?”
The zombie box had Darla’s speech centers blocked. Instead, she leaned forward, making sure the children couldn’t see, and made four quick gestures with her left hand. Three fingers horizontal—three fingers pointing down—fingers and thumb cupped up—fingers straight up with thumb sticking out to the side. Simple sign language: E-M-U-L.
“Well, les check on that, huunnih,” drawled Rainbow casually. “Les check in bayack. Have you two chirrun decahded whut you wawunt yet?”
The two children looked up from their toygrubbing. A young boy and a younger girl. They looked like brother and sister. “I want to get this toy fish,” said the girl in a quacky little voice. She held the fish cradled against her thin chest. “My brother has all the money.”
“But I’m not ready yet,” said the boy stubbornly. “I want a glider, and I haven’t decided which one.”
“Ah don’t lahk you all takin so looong,” said Rainbow coaxingly. “Ah gotta hep this naahce grownup lady naow. Tell you whut, young mayun. You kin have the bes glaahder fo two dollahs off.”
“Yes, but . . . ”
Rainbow strode forward, plucked a glider off the rack, and pressed it into the boy’s hand. “Gimme fi dollah an git!”
He drew a large handful of change out of his pocket and studied it carefully. “I only have four seventy-five, so . . . ”
“Thass fahn!” Rainbow took the money off the boy and pushed the two children out the door. “Bah-bah, kiddies, be gooood.” As soon as they were outside she turned on the zapper. The doorway filled with green light.
“Naow,” said Rainbow. “Les go on in bayack.”
Darla followed Rainbow to the rear of the shop. There was no door there, only a rock wall with pegs holding cheap moongolf equipment. Rainbow did a coded tap-tap-ta-tap-TAP-ta-ta against one edge of the wall, and it swung open, revealing a bright-lit room whose far end tapered off into a dim rock-walled corridor. A thin, greasy-haired little man sat on a couch in there, wearing earphones and watching Bill Ding’s Pink Party on a portable vizzy. He had pockmarked skin and a pencil-thin mustache. There could be no doubt that he was Rainbow’s mate.
“This is Berdoo,” Rainbow told Darla. “He’ll take care of yew.”
Berdoo pulled off his earphones and gave Darla the once-over. Though his features formed the mask of a frozen-faced tough guy, he looked pleased at what he saw.
“Now yew behave yoself, Berdoo!” giggled Rainbow. She stepped back from the open wall and . . . oh please no . . . Darla’s legs trucked her on in. “Baaah,” said Rainbow and swung the wall door closed.
Berenice stood there alone with Berdoo, guardian of the hidden hallway to hell. He looked like a pimp, a grit, a Hell’s Angel gone a bit mild with age. Once again her hand spelled out E-M-U-L. Berdoo just sat there looking at her for a minute, and then he got up and took off all her clothes. Darla’s limbs helped him, but then, before Berdoo could push her down onto the couch, Darla’s left hand gave him a hard poke and spelled out N-O.
“No?” said Berdoo. His voice was a hoarse whisper, with a cracker accent like Rainbow’s. “What kinda bull is this, Emul?”
Darla’s body leaned over and took the merge flask and the $20K out of her shirt’s pouch. She gave them to Berdoo. He counted the money and sniffed at the merge.
“Wal, ah guess thass killah enough, Emul, but this old dawg sho does lahk to roll in fresh meat.”
Two fingers pointing down—thumb and forefinger looped. N-O.
Berdoo sighed, then tossed the merge and money into an open wall safe over the couch. He went around behind Darla and lifted her hair to check out the zombie box. “Naahce work,” he muttered, jiggling it a bit. He got some dermaplast and pasted a bit of it onto Darla’s neck, just to make sure the junction was secure. Finally he gave Darla’s buttocks a lingering, intimate caress and seated himself back on the couch. “Thass it, hunnih. Baaah.”
Darla loped on down the corridor, which grew narrower and rougher as soon as she left Berdoo’s office area. A pale light strip ran along the ceiling, eight feet overhead. Each of her rapid lowgee bounds took her right up against the light strip, and Darla grew disoriented from the steady motion and the rhythmic pulsing of the light. Would it help if she fainted? For a moment she did seem to lose consciousness, but it made no difference. The zombie box kept her body moving with the tireless repetitiveness of a machine. The corridor stretched on and on, mile after mile. With her legs numb and out of her control, Darla soon began to feel that she was falling down and down the light-striped hallway, endlessly down some evil rat’s hole.
Rat, thought Darla bleakly, I wonder if that’s what they’re taking me for, to get a rat in my skull. How ever will that feel? Like this, maybe, with a robot running my body and my head thinking its same old thoughts. But it’ll be worse, won’t it, with half my brain gone. Was Whitey coming? He would have tried the Tun first, wouldn’t he, and then he would have looked up and down the Markt and not seen anything. Maybe those children would tell him they
saw her in Little Kidder Toys. Cute children they’d been, oh, if only she could really have had a child with Whitey, instead of ending up like this, people had always treated her bad just because she had big boobs, that was it really, a not-too-bright girl with big boobs didn’t have a chance, though Whitey always treated her nice, he did, and, oh man, was that rotten creep Stahn Mooney going to get it. If only they didn’t make her a meatie and send her out after Whitey, if only . . .
Darla drifted off into a kind of doze then.
When she woke up, she was in a stone room with one glass wall. It was like a pink-lit aquarium of air. It had furniture more or less like her and Whitey’s cubby. She was lying on the bed. Her neck hurt in back. She reached to feel herself . . . she could move her arms again! Her neck was bare, with a fresh scab. Was . . . was there a rat in her head?
“Hello, Darla,” said a box across the room. She hadn’t noticed it before. Its surface was a mosaic of red-yellow-blue squares, with one section coned into a speech membrane. “Darla with her eyes all dark, all wild and midnight, all apple tree and gold, no false pose and camp, oh Darla. I’m Emul.” Square-edged little bumps moved back and forth along the box’s surface. “You beautiful doll, your hair, your scent and slide, you dear meat thing, please trust me.”
The box grew arms and legs then, and a square-jawed head. Darla sat up on the edge of the bed and watched it. “I want clothes,” said Darla.
“Wear me, Dar. I’ll lick your snowy belly and nose your every tiny woman part.” Emul flicked one of his arms and it flew off to land on the floor. As Darla watched, the arm’s component blocks split and resplit, folding here and flexing there. In a few moments, the arm had turned into a kind of playsuit: baggy blue-red shorts topped with a stretchy yellow tunic.
“I . . . ” Darla stepped forward and poked the garment with her toe. It didn’t do anything, so she went ahead and put it on. It was imipolex, warm and well-fitting. She paced off the room’s dimensions—five paces by four. There was an airlock set into one of the stone sidewalls. She rapped a knuckle on the hard glass wall in front. There was a kind of laboratory outside, with a few other boppers moving around. She turned and stared at Emul. He’d grown another arm to replace the one she was wearing. With clothes on, Darla felt more like her old self. “What do you really want, Emul? No more pervo spit-talk. I could get real mental, scuzzchips.” She picked up a stool and hefted it.
Emul tightened up the features on the head he’d grown. Except for the RYB skin coloring, he looked almost human. “In clear: you are pregnant with Whitey Mydol’s child. Mamma mammal’s mammaries swell. I have an extra embryo I’d like you to carry to term. Pink little Easter baby jellybean. I would like your permission to plant it in your womb.”
Instinctively Darla put her hands over her crotch. “You want me to grow an extra baby?”
“Twins, Darla, yours and Whitey’s, Berenice’s and mine; I’ll make love to you or do it like a doped-up doc, I don’t care either way, your way is my way, you can watch me all you want.”
“And then you’ll let me go? You won’t put a rat in my skull? I’m not supposed to stay here for nine months, am I?”
“Ah . . . possibly, or until it’s safe as houses in Einstein. I’ll let you leave with absentminded pumping legs, Dar. A double stroller for the chinchuck twins, and you all your own homey self. Proud Whitey handing out cigars.”
“Right. You better hope Whitey doesn’t decide to come here and get me, bitbrain. Whitey does what’s necessary, and he never says he’s sorry. Never.”
Emul made a noise like a laugh. “That’s my lookout, spitfire. Will you spread?”
“It won’t hurt?”
“Your way is my way.”
Darla sighed, slipped her playsuit back off and flopped down on the bed. “Just get it over with. Just slip it in.” She parted her legs and cocked her head up to watch Emul. “Come on. And don’t talk while you do it.”
Emul grew a stiff penis and stepped forward. The blocks that made up his body smoothed their edges off, and he slipped into her like a plastic man. His penis seemed to elongate as it entered her; it reached up and up, bumped her cervix, and slid on through. A fluttering feeling deep in Darla’s belly. It felt almost good. Emul’s imipolex lips brushed her cheeks and he detumesced. He drew back out of her and stood up. “Hail, Darla, full of life. Blessed be the fruit of thy magic star-crossed bod.”
Darla lay still for a minute, thinking. Finally she sat up and put her playsuit back on. Emul had turned back into an RYB box with a speaker cone. She looked him over, considering. “I’d like a vizzy, Emul. And food. You can bring me food from Einstein, right? I’d like about fifty dollars of Chinese food and a twelve-pack of beer. Some weed, too, and you gotta rig me up a showerbath. Maybe a little quaak . . . no, that could hurt the babies. Beer, weed, Chinese food, a vizzy and a shower. I’ll think of more stuff later. Get on it, bop, make me comfortable.”
“Whatever you say, Queen Bee. You want, you get.” Emul bowed deeply and disappeared into the airlock.
CHAPTER TEN
ISDN
January 27, 2031
Stahn was so merged that even his bones were melted. Darla had hit him with a hundred times the normal dose. He dissolved into the clear white light and talked to God for the second time in a month. The light was filled with filigreed moire patterns, infrared and ultraviolet, silver and gray. God’s voice was soft and strong.
“I love you, Stahn. I’ll always love you.”
“I’m a screwup, God. Everything I touch turns to garbage. Will it be like this when I die?”
“I’m always here, Stahn. It’s all right. I love you, no matter what.”
“Thank you, God. I love you.”
A long timeless peace then, a bath in God’s uncritical love. Clear white light. But bit by bit, God broke the light into pieces, into people and boppers and voices from the past and from the future, all woven together, warped into weird, sinister loomings:
“Here, Stahn, let me check you over for existence. Me existing with mikespike skull. They have tract homes for a person killing GAX. I am two knobs in half half your head. We value information over all this chauvinism, soft, wet, limp, I mean the Happy Cloak. Old Cobb wiggly in here tonight. I’m Wendy, naw, I’m Eurydice, dear Orpheus. Even Ken Doll seems to sing when you get rich. You take that first into slavery, to quit fact. You can go they know it. Chipmold oxo, Whitey a natural next. Gawk a clown to me. But score, while you can still talk. It’s so wiggly on Mars. Wave on it together in slices. We can learn which soul ain’t never ate no live brain before. If the head’s shot, sell the bod. I am hungry, I am pleased, I hope you trust nothing. Dream on, exile, sweet body and brain are mikes. ISDN she you, voluntary meatie? Why did you say I was your wife? Noise is like spaceships existing on chips. Hi ‘surfer. God can be very ruthless. Think I was human again, Stahn Junior? Are you in dutch with logically deep information?”
Oh God, oh Jesus, oh what does it mean? Now there was something . . . poking at Stahn. Seasick waves jittered back and forth through his melted flesh. His eyes were merged down to photosensitive patches; he could make out a shadow moving back and forth over him. Light dark light dark, and then a heavy sloshing of his tissues. Dark. Pressure all around him, and more waves, painfully irregular, someone was carrying him in a bag. A splat then, feel of a cold smooth floor, and it was light. Shadows moving.
Something splashed on Stahn. There was a tingling and a puckering, and then he was lying naked on a bimstone floor with a ring of five people looking down at him.
One of them was, oh no, Whitey Mydol. Stahn jerked convulsively at the sight of Whitey, recalling the threats that Darla had made on Whitey’s behalf. But for now, Whitey just stood there looking mean, tapping a needler against his palm.
Next to Whitey was an Asian man with vertical wrinkles running up and down his face. Next to him was Max Yukawa, and next to Yukawa were a familiar-looking man and woman: the woman dark, wide-mouthed, and beautiful,
the man oily and mean. It was, yeah, Mrs. Beller and Ricardo from Yukawa’s love-puddle. Stahn scooted a little on his back; he had a silly head and a throbbing erection from the sudden merge comedown; that message, all about meaties and Wendy and Orpheus and God . . .
Mrs. Beller stared down at Stahn dispassionately. He could see up her skirt. Oh, Mrs. Beller, I need love, too. I’m not really so . . .
“He’s all jelled,” said Mrs. Beller’s soft, lazy voice. “Give him his clothes, Whitey.”
Whitey stepped forward, holding Stahn’s red jumpsuit bunched in one hand. With a grunt of effort, Whitey whipped the zippered cloth across Stahn’s face with all his might; whipped and whipped again.
“Don’t mark him, Mydol,” came a singsong voice. The wrinkled man. Stahn grinned uncertainly and slipped his suit on. He stood up and swayed, unsteady on his feet.
“Let me do the introductions,” said Yukawa, graciously inclining his long thin head. “Mr. Mooney already knows me and Whitey, and I believe he glimpsed Mrs. Beller and Ricardo at my lab. Fern Beller, Stahn Mooney, Ricardo Gutierez. And the wise celestial here is Bei Ng, my merge-brother. He says he’s wise, anyway.”
Whitey Mydol was shirtless as usual, his greasy blond mohawk running all the way down his back to his jeans. Mrs. Beller was beautifully pale and supple. Her face was brightly made up, and she wore an electric blue imipolex tank top over a short, wide-flared yellow skirt. Ricardo wore a purple-stitched black silk cowboy shirt, black gym shorts, and heavy motorcycle boots. He had snakes tattooed on his arms and legs, a black toothbrush mustache, and deep purple mirrorshades. His black hair was worn in a short, greasy brushcut. He smiled at Stahn, showing two even rows of gold-capped teeth.
Moving as smoothly as a figure in a gangster ballet, Whitey Mydol stepped forward and grabbed Stahn by the throat. “Where’s Darla, Mooney? WHERE IS SHE?”
Whitey was squeezing so hard that Stahn couldn’t get any words out. His eyes were watering, and the only noise he could make was a high creaking sound.
