by Rudy Rucker
People took turns getting up and saying things about Kurt Gottner. Phil didn’t feel able to speak. If he opened his mouth he’d be likely to start howling. Why expose himself like that, especially with all the Bass mucky-mucks here? Though he’d gone to Bass School for four years, Phil had no great love for the place. Da had met Willow Chen through Bass—she was a professional fund-raiser who did contract work—and Phil tended irrationally to blame Bass for his parents’ breakup.
Phil’s mother Eve had pulled Phil and Jane out of Bass after the breakup, and from then on they’d gone to public school—which had been, on the whole, more fun. The larger classes of the public school made it likelier that you could find a kindred spirit. And public school had moldies working as teachers’ aides. You could learn a lot really fast from an uvvy link with a moldie. Bass, on the other hand, prided itself on being moldie-free. Eve hated Bass. According to her, the students and faculty at Bass were a pack of freaks and losers, and the parents of the Bass kids were snobby self-indulgent artsy-fartsy crypto-Heritagist poseurs trying to buy themselves the illusion that their neurotic drug-addicted promiscuous bulimic dyslexic brats had one single grain of brains or talent. This, Eve’s opinion. Phil, however, had found many of the Bass teachers quaint and nice. Especially his father.
At the funeral, Eve sat at left end of the front row, next to Phil, Jane, Kevvie, Willow, Willow’s mother Jia, Da’s brother Rex, Rex’s wife Zsuzsi, Rex and Zsuzsi’s daughters Gina and Mary, Kurt and Rex’s mother Isolde, and Isolde’s kind old sister Hildegarde, whose face could stop a clock.
Rex got up and spoke a little, about how Kurt had always been accident-prone as a child. “One time when Kurt was little he fell off his bicycle and I carried him home. A few years later he broke his ankle in a soccer game and a friend and I carried him home. Today’s the last time we’ll do it. We’re carrying Kurt home.”
Not that there was going to be much of Kurt to carry. The Gimmie had scraped together maybe an ounce of blood and tissue-fragments. After freezing a sample of the DNA, the Gimmie had incinerated the remains for Willow, who’d placed the ashes in a tiny octagonal madrone-wood box. The box sat before the mourners on a small Oriental rug on the ground.
Isolde got up and talked about Kurt as a child. She was a little woman with white hair and a strong voice. “Kurt was a wise soul,” said Isolde. “He knew more than other people. He was shy and he didn’t like to talk about it, but I could always see it in his bright brown eyes—he knew. He knew more than anyone could teach him, and he spent his life exploring the world of ideas. Nothing else mattered to him. I used to say, ‘Kurt, why don’t you get a Ph.D. and work at a university?’ ‘I don’t have time, Mom,’ he’d say. ‘I’m too busy.’ And all he’d be doing would be sitting in his armchair looking at a sunbeam. Too busy. Maybe Kurt knew he wouldn’t have as much time as the rest of us.” She gave a mild, rueful laugh and wiped her eyes. “Kurt was so excited about his last discoveries, about his dimensions and his wowos. I only hope that some good can still come of them. We’re all trying to understand this death. What happened? I’d like to think that Kurt knew—and that somewhere he’s still knowing. My son was an explorer.”
Willow spoke next. The Gimmie had cleared Willow of any wrongdoing; the cause of death had been written off as a freak electrical phenomenon, perhaps ball lightning, perhaps a corona discharge from Kurt and Tre’s holographic wowo projection equipment. Willow looked stunning, slim and chic in a black wool suit, her face composed and perfect below her shiny bright hair.
“He was the best man I’ve ever known,” Willow was saying. “He shouldn’t be forgotten. And I’ve been working to set up a fitting memorial. The trustees of the Bass School have agreed to start a Kurt Gottner Scholarship Fund. An anonymous donor has agreed to match dollar-for-dollar any pledges made to this fund today. So please give generously.”
“Sell it, Willow,” Phil murmured to Jane.
Pretty soon one of the Bass administrators was speaking, a Doctor Peck, stringing together a line of fund-raising platitudes. “Bass School one big family . . . Kurt Gottner the quintessential . . . quick mind and open inquiry . . . such a special place . . . your unique opportunity . . . Kurt Gottner Scholarship Fund . . . ”
Phil couldn’t listen anymore. There were as many people standing as sitting, so he felt free to sidle out of his seat and wander over toward the deck of the school building where some little kids were already nosing around a big table full of canapés catered by the Bass School parents. Funeral meats. Phil cast a professional eye over the spread. He could have done a much better job, but oh well. He ate a salty deviled egg and a crustless triangle of bread with tank-grown salmon. Now a town councilman was butt-kissing the mourners, marveling at how “eukaryotic” was the nucleus of the Bass School community relative to Palo Alto at large.
Phil pushed open the big glass-paned front door and went inside the school, flashing back to his years here as a student. Fourth through eighth grades, with Da a genial distant figure teaching math and uvvy graphics to the seniors. Eve happy at home, taking care of them all, doing uvvy work for her family’s olive-import business by running a dragonfly camera that talked to farmers in Greek. Those had been cozy years. The little family, the parade of days.
Phil walked down the creaky wood-floored hall, looking at the rows of pictures by primary-school students on display. Lots of hearts; odd as it seemed, today was Valentine’s Day. Monday the hearts would come down, and spring flowers would be next. Or perhaps dead presidents. George Birthington’s Washday, his English teacher had liked to call it—a bit of wordplay that Phil had found the very apex of worldly wit. The old school smelled the same as ever. Yes, it had been peaceful here until Willow appeared. She’d flown in like some bright magpie, snatching up Phil’s woolly father for her nest.
“Are you a teacher?”
Phil’s reverie popped. A slender dark-haired girl his age was looking at him. Her jawline was strikingly angled, her eyes clear, her mouth intelligent and kind. Her one nonidealized feature was her nose, which was a bit larger than normal, though it sat quite harmoniously in the calm oval of her face.
“Me? My father was the teacher.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry, you’re Kurt Gottner’s son, aren’t you? You must be so weighted that you don’t know what to do.”
“Yes, exactly. Thank you. My name is Phil.” He held out his hand.
“I’m Yoke.”
“That’s a nice easy name. What was your connection with my dad?”
“Oh, I’m visiting Terri and Tre Dietz, so I came along with them to pay my respects. Tre’s been so excited about your father’s work, he talks about him all the time. Your father must have been a great man. How horrible that the wowo killed him.”
“It’s a nightmare. Everyone’s scared to sleep in his house anymore. I’ve been down here in a motel since Thursday—today’s Saturday, right?”
“Yes. Time’s strange for you now, isn’t it? My mother died at Christmas—which is another reason I’m here—and for the few days afterward it was like there was this glowing light everywhere and time wasn’t moving at all. I even started smoking for a week, something about the cigarettes made it easier to chop up the time. And where I come from, smoking is practically impossible.”
“Cigarettes, what a concept,” said Phil. “I’m sorry to hear about your mother. She died on Christmas Day?”
“Christmas Eve. She was alone. I feel terrible.” Yoke’s eyes moistened.
“Poor Yoke,” said Phil, and went on talking lest the two of them break down. “You’re right about the kind of glow everywhere. Luminous. Realer than real. My father’s ashes are in that little box on the rug on the lawn and the rest of him is who knows where, he’s really dead and someday I’m going to die too. This—” Phil gestured at the old building around them, at the misty trees and the people outside. “This is what there is. We’re like ants under lichen. Actual organisms crawling around in this shallow layer of fuzz on
the Earth.”
“Lichen?” smiled Yoke, wiping off her eyes. “I just saw natural lichen for the first time this week—forest lichen instead of the stuff inside moldies. Terri took me on a tour of the Big Basin redwoods. The ranger said, ‘Alice Alga took a lichen to Freddie Fungi, and ever since, their marriage has been on the rocks.’ ” When Yoke hit the “lichen” pun, she giggled and raised her eyebrows.
“Or maybe we’re like beetles under bark,” said Phil, trying to stay poetic and serious. “Or rabbits in a briar patch. I keep having this funny vision of how glued to the Earth’s surface we are. And how shallow the atmosphere is. Gaia’s skin.”
“I totally know,” said Yoke in a heavy Val accent. Phil couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or if that was a way she really talked.
Outside, the last speaker had finished and people were standing up and starting to mill around.
“Everyone’s going to hit the canapés now,” said Yoke. “Big-time. Before the crowd gets here I need to go to the bathroom.”
“So that’s why you asked if I’m a teacher,” said Phil. “It’s up those stairs, Yoke.”
“Thanks, Phil. It’s nice to meet you. Let’s talk some more in a minute.”
Phil watched Yoke go up the stairs. She had a high, perfectly rounded butt. But she moved up the stairs very slowly, taking one step at a time. It was so painful to watch that Phil looked away for a minute. When he looked back, Yoke was at the top. She smiled and waved as if she’d just mounted some great peak.
“Oh there you are.” It was Kevvie, chewing a stick of celery. “Why’d you run off in the middle of the service?”
“It was getting to be too much for me.” Phil glanced up the stairs. No more Yoke. He sort of didn’t want her to see him with Kevvie. “Let’s go out on the porch.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something about your father’s ashes?”
“Oh God, I forgot.”
Phil hurried back down the steps to where his family stood around the rug on the ground. The reddish madrone wood of the miniature eight-sided box made Phil think of a stop sign.
Angular little sister Jane hugged Phil. Willow gave him a brittle smile. Eve, Isolde, and great-aunt Hildegarde each gave him a kiss. Rex shook his hand and clapped his shoulder, Aunt Zsuzsi patted his cheek, cousins Gina and Mary smiled sadly.
Kurt had often said he wanted them to dig his ashes into the soil under a certain big oak tree in a park near Palo Alto, he and the kids had strolled there together many times. The tree was split near its base into a pair of great twin trunks. Phil had been placed in charge of informally sneaking the ashes into the public land, so now he put the flat little box in his coat pocket. Eve had forced him to buy a suit for the funeral; it was the first time in his life Phil had ever worn one.
They stood around for a bit, sadly reminiscing. Jane recalled how Kurt had always rhapsodized about the oak tree, how he’d gone on about fractals and gnarliness and self-organized criticality.
“I remember another thing Da used to say about that tree,” said Phil. “He talked about how the week before the psychologist C. G. Jung died, Jung had a dream about an oak tree blown over in a storm with great nuggets of gold found twined in its roots. ‘I want to be remembered like that,’ Da always said. ‘That my life sent down deep roots that pulled up gold.’ ” Phil sighed heavily. “I don’t know if he really made it.”
“Of course he did,” said Isolde. “Think of his students.”
“And who knows what the wowo will lead to,” said Rex. “Don’t underestimate your old dad, Phil. He was a pisser, but he was deep.”
“Your father loved you very much, Phil,” said Willow reproachfully.
“When he wasn’t too drunk,” muttered Phil.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Speaking of wowos, look at this,” said Jane, hurriedly getting something out of her purse. “Willow gave this to me.”
There was knotted little bit of metal in the palm of Jane’s thin little hand—a gold ring tied in an overhand knot with no sign of a break or a weld. Like a tiny sculpture.
“It’s his wedding-ring,” said Willow. “The rent-a-cops found it on our bedroom floor. If you look closely, you can still make out the inscription, ‘To Kurt from Willow.’ It’s creepy the way it’s knotted. I don’t want it.”
“I think it’s been knotted in the fourth dimension,” said Jane. She’d always been a better student of their father’s ideas than Phil. “In the fourth dimension you can knot a closed loop by lifting part of it ana out of our space, moving it across, and then pushing it back kata into our space.” Ana and kata had been Kurt Gottner’s special words for the four-dimensional analogs of up and down. Jane looked at Phil with intent eyes. “This means the thing that ate Da comes from a higher dimension.”
“Oh sick, there’s a moldie here,” interrupted Kevvie, sniffing the air. She looked around. “Over there with Tre and Terri Dietz. Who invited a moldie?”
There was indeed a soft-looking figure standing with Tre and Terri Dietz, a plastic moldie shaped like a barrel-chested sixty-year-old man, white-bearded and white-haired, a man with a big head and high cheekbones, his skin somewhat papery in appearance. Even without the smell, you could tell he was a moldie from how flexibly he moved. Yoke was standing next to him, chatting and laughing with a bottle of soda in her hand. She looked like a fashion model.
“I think that’s—you know—Cobb Anderson!” exclaimed Phil, glad for the distraction. Growing up as Kurt Gottner’s son, he’d heard enough about higher dimensions to last him a lifetime. “We’ll talk about it later, Jane.” He hurried over to the other group, glad for another chance to be with Yoke.
“Hi, Phil,” said Yoke. “Cobb, this is Phil Gottner. Phil, this is Cobb Anderson. Cobb flew me down here from the Moon. He’s here to pick up one of his relatives from Santa Cruz. His great-grandson.”
Phil was surprised. ‘You’re from the Moon, Yoke?”
“Duh! Why do you think it took me so long to walk up those stairs? I could see you feeling sorry for me. Well, I’m getting stronger every day.”
“Hello, Phil,” said Cobb, insisting on shaking Phil’s hand. His imipolex moldie flesh was cool and slightly slippery. “Tre says your father was a great man. I hope you don’t mind my coming to the ceremony. I’m just so happy to be out with people doing regular things. I haven’t done anything normal in I don’t know how many years.” He had a hearty, booming voice with a crackle in the lower registers. His speech membranes couldn’t quite reproduce a true human bass.
“I don’t mind if you’re here, Mr. Anderson, it’s an honor. My father would be happy. But there are a lot of the people at the Bass School who really hate moldies. Not that you’re a moldie exactly. I mean, at least you started out as human.”
“I’m like a Wal-Mart greeter now,” rumbled Cobb. “If that means anything to you. Pure plastic.” He turned his massive head, slowly looking around. “Now that you mention it, Phil, I do notice a few frosty stares. I’ll just take a little stroll around the neighborhood. This is Palo Alto, eh? Pretty snooty. I can see why my great-grandson didn’t want to come.” Cobb smiled, bowed, and undulated off down the school’s gravel driveway.
“I don’t get how he could fly you down here from the Moon,” Phil said to Yoke.
“I was inside him. Like the wendy meat in a California corn-dog!”
“Yoke’s been walking around the Santa Cruz Boardwalk absorbing Earth culture,” said Terri. “She and I made friends when I was up on the Moon, so I invited her to stay with us when she came down.” Terri was a trim, deeply tanned woman with straight dark hair and pink lipstick. Bright golden DIM beads crawled slowly about in her hair.
“Terri’s teaching me about diving,” said Yoke. “I love being underwater. Everything alive all around you. I want to go to the South Pacific pretty soon. Earth is wonderful. And not just the water. The sky!” She gestured upward. A low gauzy cloud was drifting against a b
ackground of distant high clouds that rose like mountain ranges to a tender patch of blue. “How can you mudders ever get anything done? Whenever I look at the sky I forget all about whatever I’ve been doing. Such stuzzy soft fractals.” But now her attention returned to Phil. “What kind of job do you have?”
“Non tech. I’m a cook at a three-star San Francisco restaurant named LoLo. My father was disappointed in me. But I’m good at what I do.”
“We hardly have any restaurants on the Moon. Most people just eat food-paste from the tap. And raw fruits and veggies from week trees.”
“Well then, Yoke, our food’s another mudder thing you can enjoy learning about. I’d love to cook some special dishes for—”
“Hi, I’m Kevvie Inch,” interrupted Kevvie, suddenly appearing between Phil and Yoke. “Phil and I live together. Who are you?”
“I’m Yoke Starr-Mydol. I’m from the Moon.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“Oh, tourism, self-improvement. I’m interested in the ocean.”
“You don’t work?”
“Well, nobody’s paying me,” said Yoke. “I’m kind of a software artist. I like to think of algorithms for simulating natural processes. I plan to try and model some Earth things while I’m here.”
“I’m a geezer-visitor,” said Kevvie. “I go see old people all over San Francisco. They have little DIM machines to take care of them, but they don’t have anyone to talk to them. It’s sort of like being a sex-worker, except there’s no sex. I have a girlfriend who’s a sex-worker. Klara Blo. She and I had bacteria-style sex a few weeks back. Have you ever tried bacteria-style sex, Yoke?”
Phil groaned inwardly. This was a new obsession of Kevvie’s and she was always talking about it. “Bacteria-style sex” was the current expression for getting in a tub with someone and taking the drug merge to make your bodies temporarily melt together. Phil refused to do it, because he figured that just one pleasure rush could blow him off the Straight Edge and down into the addict’s regimen, wasted twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Kevvie had started out Straight Edge like Phil, but she’d started dipping and dabbing six months ago, and now she was getting worse all the time.
