The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  But then a few hours later Tre uvvied again, fantastically excited about some new vision about how to use the Tessellation Equation to make Perplexing Poultry imipolex based on tilings of every finite dimension. Disquietingly, this software agent Jenny thing was there on the link with Tre, listening in. She wouldn’t say why she was so interested in this information. But Tre didn’t care, his obsession was to get Stahn to understand about Perplexing Poultry in Hilbert space, and about how Ramanujan’s Tessellation Equation could now be used to make imipolex-5, imipolex-6, imipolex-N!

  To help himself understand the strange ideas he was hearing, Stahn drunkenly chewed up a couple of nuggets of camote while Tre was talking. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried the drug, but this time it turned out to be a big mistake, an unbearably strange lift, a psychotically strange panic trip to deep and personal revelations about his multitudinous personality flaws. Stahn went to bed and tried to sleep, but instead spent ten hellish hours in Hilbert space with Tre’s multi-dimensional Poultry pecking and clucking in the mysterious thickets of his chaotically disturbed consciousness. It was a relief to see dawn come, and to get up and try and start a new day.

  In the afternoon, Stahn finally managed to get some sleep, but then, around dusk, his wife Wendy woke him.

  “Get up, sleepyhead. We’re going to the Halloween parade, remember? What the heck did you do to yourself last night, anyway? I came downstairs and tried to talk to you, but you were completely gaga.” She had wide hips, pert lips, a soft chin, and blonde hair. Her voice was soothingly normal.

  “I have to get up?”

  “You have to get up. Here.” She handed him a big mug of tea with milk and sugar. “We’re walking to the Castro and meeting Saint and Babs. Our children? A family outing? Helloooo!”

  “Okay, Wendy, don’t overdo it. I’m here. Thanks for the tea. I got lifted on camote after talking to Tre Dietz last night. I thought it might make me smart like him. What a burn. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  So Stahn took a shower and put on black clothes and painted his hands and face black. He dusted himself with silver sparkles and went to stand on his front steps while waiting for Wendy to finish getting dressed. His head hurt very deeply; he could feel the pain deep inside his brain from the healed wounds where he’d gotten a tank-grown pre-programmed flesh-and-blood right hemisphere to replace the Happy Cloak that had replaced the robot rat that had replaced his original right brain—his skull was a xoxxin’ roach-motel and thanks to Tre he’d been to Hilbert space and was no doubt subject to snap back there anytime—

  “Wassup, Sen-senator Stahn!” shrieked a lifted young Cicciolina from a passing gaggle of morphs. A bride and a Betty Page were in the group as well.

  “Out for a night on the town?” asked the tall bride in a deep, honking voice. “Does Wendy know?”

  The Betty Page snorted, chortled and bent over, rucking up a tight skirt to expose a reasonable facsimile of a woman’s naked ass. “Take a taste of Betty, Senator Moo! Relish the fine fine superfine succulence of a bad-girl butt too good for tacos!”

  The kid was trying to needle Stahn about wendy meat, but Stahn gave a politician’s genial, dismissive wave, expecting the morphs to move on. Most people didn’t understand about the wendy-meat ads; the fact that they showed Wendy with her Happy Cloak was intended to be a positive force for human-moldie friendship.

  “Shut your rude tuh-twat, Betty,” stuttered Cicciolina. “Yo-yo-yo, brah Stahn, wanna puh-peg of gabba? It’s straight out of the resolver; I harvested the kuh-kuh-crystals today.”

  “Affirmo everplace,” said Stahn on a sudden impulse. “I can relate. Gabba gives me the yipes, you wave, but I already got the yipes on account of what I did last night, and if I can get some gabba-yipes happening, why then I’ll feel normal; it’ll be a lift instead of a drag. So come on over here, you big deeve.”

  The Cicciolina drew a squeezie out of his decolletage and strutted over to Stahn, holding the little bulb up high like a magical lantern. “Tuh-toot the snoot, Senataroot!”

  Stahn took the squeezie and pulsed a dose for each nostril. Ftooom! Fireworks of pleasure exploded behind his eyes, a chrysanthemum bloom of evil joy, a flower with a ring of screamers around the outer edge, screamers that floated to earth and took the form of darting, two-legged yipes.

  “Ftoom yipes,” jabbered Stahn. “Ftoom ftoom fuh-fuh-ftoom yipes.”

  “Gabba hey,” said the Cicciolina. “The fringe still luh-loves you, Senator.”

  “Long may it wuh-wave,” said Stahn.

  The three morphs moved on, camping and laughing. Stahn looked up at his house, its windows mellow yellow with electric light. The yipes felt good. He was lucky to have a good house in the city. He was lucky to be alive. He was lucky to have a family. How sad it would be if all of this should end.

  With a sudden flurry of footsteps, Wendy swept out of the house and down the steps. “Hi, Stahn! I’m ready!” She was dressed like a witch, with high-heeled boots, long dress, large Happy Cloak, and rakish pointed hat—all a bright, matching red. The ’Cloak was a beloved moldie that Wendy continually wore to make up for the unparalleled developmental deficiencies caused by the fact that her body was a tank-grown clone.

  “You look guh-great, Wendy. You’re a red witch.”

  “You sound funny, Stahn,” said Wendy suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you took even more drugs!”

  “Nuh-nuh-nothing really. Some deeves gave me a pulse of guh-gabba. I’m trying to feel normal, you understand. We’re wuh-walking to the Castro, right?”

  “Yes. Did you wake up a dragonfly?”

  “I fuh-forgot. I don’t feel like wearing my uvvy, Wendy, not after last night. Luh-like I was telling you, Tre Dietz uvvied me all this wuh-weird shit and and—”

  “Oh, spare me the wasted slobbering. I’ll get the dragonfly.” Wendy used her Happy Cloak to uvvy a message, and right away a little dragonfly telerobot flew down from its perch in the eaves of their house. The streetlights made gleaming Lissajous patterns on the dragonfly’s shiny, rapidly beating wings. “You stay about a block ahead of us and watch the foot traffic,” Wendy told it, speaking out loud. “We’re walking over the hill to Market and Castro. And keep scanning faces for Saint and Babs. We’re expecting you to find them.” The dragonfly whirred away.

  “Really, Stahn,” continued Wendy as they walked up Masonic together. “You’re starting to worry me. A man your age. Two more years and you’ll be sixty!” Wendy was effectively eleven years younger than Stahn, and she worked hard to keep Stahn from turning senile. “What is it that Tre showed you anyway?”

  “Perplexing Puh-Poultry N-dee,” said Stahn, clamping his hands tightly together in an effort to hold back the gabba stutter. “Some kind of freelance software agent called Jenny told him this thing called Ramanujan’s Tuh-Tessellation Equation, and right away he found a new kind of higher-dimensional quasicrystal design. The new Poultry puh-peck and peck and peck. He wants me to suh-sell the new idea before Jenny can. And we were also talking about how to ruh-ransom his wife.”

  They paused on the saddle of the Buena Vista hill between the Haight and the Castro, catching their breath and looking at the view. “Oh, it’s beautiful out tonight, isn’t it, Stahn?”

  “Yeah. I’m glad you got me to go outside.” He took a deep shaky breath, and the gabba shuddering left the hinges of his jaws. The first part of a gabba lift was always the hardest. “Reality is such a gas.” His words in his ears sounded smooth, pneumatic, resonant.

  “What was that about ransoming Tre Dietz’s wife?”

  “The loonie moldies kidnapped her by accident yesterday. She’s on her way to the Moon. I’m supposed to pay a big ransom and get Whitey Mydol and Darla Starr to pick her up. I already transferred the credit to Whitey’s account.”

  “Whitey and Darla! But why should you have to pay for stupid Tre Dietz’s wife?”

  “He’s made me lot of money, and this new thing’ll make a lot more. His poor wife is
up there in the sky inside a moldie on the way to the Moon.”

  “It’s not such a bad flight,” said Wendy. “It was fun when you and me flew from the Moon to the Earth together in 2031. It might be good for you to do it again.”

  “Forget it, Wendy.” Stahn started walking again. “Which way are we supposed to go?”

  “Judging from what the dragonfly’s showing me, we should walk down Ord Court to States Street to Castro,” said Wendy, cocking her head. “That’s the least crowded way.” As they linked arms and headed downhill, she turned her attention back to Stahn. “So you saw N-dimensional Perplexing Poultry, huh? Have you ever heard the theory that mathematics keeps people young? I think it’s good for you to be thinking about these things. Instead of about power and money. And all your hangovers.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t obsess about age all the time, Wendy. You know damn well that with DIM parts and tank-grown organs, anyone with our kind of money can live to a hundred and twenty.”

  “Yes,” said Wendy. “All thanks to the wonderful compatibility of me. But because Wendy Meat and W. M. Biologicals do, in fact, grow clones of me, I can do something better than get patched up. I can start over in a blank twenty-five-year-old wendy. My ’Cloak could transfer all the information. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

  “Oh, don’t, Wendy. What would happen to this body?” Stahn snaked his arm under Wendy’s Happy Cloak and around her waist to hug her. “This body I’ve loved so long? Would you cut it up and sell off the meat and the organs?”

  “I’m serious about this, Stahn, so don’t try and make it hard for me. But let’s not talk about it now. You’re in no condition.” She twisted away from Stahn’s grip and brightened her voice. “Look, we’re almost there. And—yes!—the dragonfly just spotted the kids.”

  Wendy stopped walking for a second, the better to absorb the images the dragonfly was uvvying to her, and as she viewed them she began to laugh. “Saint is—he’s wearing a silvered coat and he has tinfoil on his head. And Babs is—oh, Babs—” She laughed harder. “I can hardly describe this, Stahn. She’s got a little tray around her waist with things on it and a terrible yellow shirt; I have no idea what she’s supposed to be. Let’s hurry and meet them.”

  “Do you really want those poor children to see their mother’s body butchered?” demanded Stahn. “It would be traumatic. And then, once you were twenty-five, you’d get young guys and you wouldn’t want me! That’s what I get for being faithful to you all these years?”

  “I said let’s drop it. You get so dramatic when you’re lifted! You know damn well that I’m a Happy Cloak, not a human body. This body—this wendy—it’s a mindless piece of meat that I use to walk around in and to make love to you, Stahn. You never got excited when I replaced my imipolex every three years. If I change my flesher body, everything will be just the same. I’m a moldie, I’m your wife, and I’ll always love you. So there.”

  Wendy pushed into the crowd, and Stahn followed. There were a lot of brides here tonight; that was just about the number-one favorite costume. Other faves were strippers, debutantes, princesses, and slaves. A few people recognized Stahn or Wendy, but most mistook them for het looky-look tourists. “Hello, Cleveland,” sneered a skinny large-breasted morph with a beard. A disco dandy snipped, “When you drive back to the ’burbs, remember that my car is the Mercedes and yours is the BMW.”

  “I didn’t use a car,” said Wendy pityingly, “I used my broom!” Though Stahn hadn’t noticed it before, Wendy was indeed holding a broom—oh yeah, it was a piece of her ’Cloak that she’d temporarily pinched off and reshaped.

  Wendy pointed Stahn in the direction where the dragonfly had shown her the kids. “Press on, dear old fool.” Stahn fought past a man with a cardboard toilet around his head and his face sticking out of the bowl and a plastic dick over his nose, past a woman with a leash leading a blindfolded nude ungenitaled Barbie, past a morph with a head built up with phonybone to the shape of a cube, past people with wings and huge flexing cocks—the crowd pressed and swirled like the ripping currents of a particularly nasty ocean break—

  “Hey, Da, Ma!” called Babs.

  “Yaar!” whooped Saint.

  Babs and Saint were in a doorway near the Castro Theater. Saint was a tall cheerful youth who habitually darkened his appearance by means of odd hair, a ratty beard, silvery stun glasses, and heavy blue suede boots. For tonight, he’d covered his head with vintage aluminum foil crudely wadded into the shape of a helmet, and he wore a reflective metallic fireman’s coat that went down to his knees.

  Babs had big firm cheeks that grew pink when she was excited, like now. As part of her costume, she wore a yellow polyester shirt with a tag saying:

  HI I’M LYNNE - HAPPY DOLLAR

  She held a stick bearing something like a square lantern with the numeral “3” on each of its four sides, and around her waist was a cardboard tray with packages glued to it—cereal boxes and udon and pho noodles and tampons and panty shields and disposable ceramic forks. Her hair was pulled tight into a lank little ponytail that was barrette-clamped to point upward; and to complete the groovy hairdo, she wore a wiiiiiide bandeau.

  “Can you tell what I am?” chirped Babs cozily. Wendy couldn’t guess, but Stahn recognized it from his childhood.

  “You’re a clerk in an old-time supermarket!”

  “Ye oldie checker gal,” said Babs, laughing gaily.

  “What about me?” asked Saint.

  “A robot?” guessed Wendy.

  “Sort of,” said Saint. “‘I am Iron Man.’ I’ve got my stunglasses broadcasting realtime live on the Show, you wave, and I’m using this classic twentieth-century metal song for the background. Listen.” He switched his uvvy to speaker mode and karaoked some crude guitar licks. “Danh-danh deh-denh-deh. Dadadada-danh-danh dah-dah-dah.”

  Wendy had set their dragonfly to filming the little family outing; it hovered a few feet over their heads like a hummingbird, its wings whispering and its single bright bead-eye lens staring at the Mooneys. Wendy and Saint could see the pictures through their uvvies.

  Saint sang Iron Man some more, raising his hand toward the dragonfly in a spread-fingered salute; Wendy could see that he was goofing on the self-images he was realtime mixing into the ceaseless global interactive multiuser stunglasses Show. Saint saw Wendy seeing him, and he shifted fabulations.

  “Ma is Wendy the red witch,” smiled Saint. “Who are you, Da?”

  “I’m the night sky,” said Stahn, all painted black and spangled with sparkles. “As seen by a cosmic ray from the galactic equator. How you kids floatin’?”

  “We’re having a good time,” said Saint. “I like how much there is to see. I’m pulling in some viewers. I’m not gonna have to pay any Web charges for weeks.”

  “People keep trying to take stuff off my counter,” said Babs. “And then they’re surprised when it’s glued on. You look beautiful, Ma.”

  “Thanks, Babs,” said Wendy. “But don’t you think I’d look better with an age-twenty-five body?”

  “Oh, come on, Wendy,” said Stahn.

  “Let her talk, Da,” said Babs. “She’s already told me all about it and it’s no prob.”

  “I see a group that looks funny,” said Saint, pointing. “Let’s head that way.”

  They pushed down the street toward a group of nude morphs, each painted a different primary color and each equipped with big morph muscles. A few of them had tails. They were tossing each other about like acrobats—with much lewd miming.

  The Mooneys walked along with the happy, laughing crowd watching the acrobats for a while, then drifted into the less crowded blocks deeper into the Mission. “I still haven’t had supper,” said Wendy presently. “Is anyone else hungry?”

  “I am,” said Saint. “Where should we go?”

  “I know a wavy Spanish place near here,” said Babs. “The Catalanic.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Stahn.

  As they walked toward
the restaurant, Babs began tearing items off her counter and setting them down on doorsteps. “For the homeless,” she explained. “Anyhoo, I’m tired of wearing all this.” She took the cardboard counter from around her waist and skimmed it toward Saint as hard as she could. He caught it, ran with it, flipped it onto the sidewalk, and managed to slide about twelve feet before stumbling off, pin-wheeling his arms and yelling, “Aaawk! Happy Dollar! Aaawk! Happy Dollar.”

  The outside of the Catalanic was a warmly lit storefront painted red-and-yellow. Inside, it was bustling and cream-colored, with a few nice things on the walls: an old Spanish clock, two nanoprecise copies of Salvador Dali oils (Persistence of Memory and Dali at the Age of Six Lifting the Skin of the Water to Observe a Dog Sleeping in the Shadow of the Sea), and two nanocopied Joan Miro paintings of hairy bright lop-lop creatures (Dutch Interior I and Dutch Interior II). There were lots of people sitting at tables covered with tapas dishes and—”Yes, of course, Senator Mooney”—there was a table for four. Wendy’s dragonfly telerobot perched on a cornice across the street to wait.

  The Mooneys sat down happily and fired off an order for Spanish champagne and plates of potatoes, shrimp, spinach, pork balls, squash, chicken, mussels, endives, and more potatoes. The bubbly and the first dishes began arriving.

  “See that moldie over there with the bohos?” said Babs, waving across the room. “She’s a friend of mine. She’s called Sally. She’s so funny. One day when I was here, Sally and I fabbed about Dali for a long time.”

  Sally was sitting on a chair with a group of five lively young black-dressed artists. Sally had been shaped like a colorful Picasso woman, but now, seeing Babs, she suddenly let her body slump into the shape of a melting jellyfish with wrinkles that sketched a flaccid human face.