by Rudy Rucker
Rather than probing any further, the Cappy Jane creatures lifted off in hot pursuit of the aliens. The leathery birds spread out their rumpled new wings. The great wobbly pie launched itself on steamy jets and, once airborne, began flapping like a stingray.
“I hope they find ’em,” said Vaana. “Aliens mean trouble, Bou-Bou. Especially for moldies. They can move their minds right into a moldie’s body. They talk about freeware, ’cept we the ones that get taken for free. It’s just as well if things get back to normal here.”
“I suppose so,” said the King. “And we’re still lovers?”
“Sho’,” said Vaana. “And the rest of the imipolex here, that’s for my people, right?”
“We already had a lot of your ‘people’ clean the imipolex out of our ship, Vaana. It was—daunting. I think it best to get rid of this. We’ve already had too much attention.”
“Let me fill up,” said Vaana, and assimilated as much of the imipolex as she could hold—swelling to perhaps twice her usual size. “I’m not quite ready to reproduce yet,” she said. “But Lord knows when the time comes I’ll be ready. You say all the other locals got some plastic too?”
“I don’t know about all, but it sure seemed like a lot of them,” said Yoke. “I think the King’s right about getting rid of this evidence.”
“Okay,” said Vaana.
Yoke sent her control mesh out over the sullenly floating imipolex cube and turned it back into seawater, complete with an assortment of local diatoms and plankton.
“Cobb and I are ready to leave, aren’t we, Cobb?” said Yoke.
“Okay,” said the old man. “Did we finish doing whatever we came here for?”
“Diving,” said Yoke. “I came here to dive. And Phil came to find me. We did have one good morning of snorkeling. I saw a wonderful little fish in a staghorn coral. And a giant clam.”
“Don’t forget the whale and squid,” said Cobb.
“Do you think the Cappy Janes will kill the aliens?” asked Yoke.
Cobb’s answer was drowned out in the roar of the navy launch that pulled up next to them. Aboard were Kennit, the two bodyguards, four sailors, and Tashtego and Daggoo.
Kennit and the bodyguards were grinning ear-to-ear, obviously thrilled at finding their king in good shape. It didn’t look like they cared one bit anymore about seeing HRH so cozy with Vaana. There were no guns in sight. “We got a ladder in the rear,” said Kennit. “Watch your step, Your Majesty. I think we ought to haul ass out of here. There’s some sharks in a feeding frenzy on the other side of the ship. Finishing off Onar.”
“Let’s bail,” Yoke said to Cobb. “Before everyone starts in on me again.”
“Okay,” said Cobb.
“Thanks awfully,” said the King, still bobbing on Vaana’s back. He extended his hand and Yoke shook it. “Do come visit Tonga again. Could I ask you one last favor?”
“You want more gold,” groaned Yoke.
“Just, you know, as you’re flying away, buzz the ship and put a few more tons in the hold? I’ll tell the captain not to fire on you. It would be so lovely to have our budget balanced. I did get you the alla, you know. You’re fixed for life now, Yoke. You’re a golden goose.”
“Honk honk,” sighed Yoke, looking down at her alla. “Though I may end up throwing this thing into the ocean. So all right, one last favor. And in return, Bou-Bou, I want you to do whatever you can to block any publicity about me and the alla. Don’t tell anything to the Cappy Janes. Stick to the Sue Miller and Squanto cover-up. And I hope the Tongan moldies don’t know too much?”
“Tashtego and Daggoo know more than the others,” said the King. “But nobody listens to Tongans. Let’s do our best to consider this entire interlude expunged from the historical record. Deny, deny, deny. It’s best this way for all of us. I wouldn’t want the Fijians to know I’m selling fairy gold.”
So Cobb and Yoke cautiously buzzed the navy ship, Yoke averting her eyes from the avid gray sharks who’d eaten Onar.
Captain Pulu waved a friendly go-ahead. They landed long enough for Yoke to outdo herself by making a perfect one-meter gold cube, weighing in at just under twenty tons. The cube was quite the elegant objet d’art.
But, in the event, making so massive an object out of thin air was fairly drastic.
As Yoke later calculated, if one kilogram of air takes up a cubic meter, twenty tons of air takes up a cube some twenty-seven meters on a side. A volume the size of a ten-story office building. Fortunately, she thought of making herself a pair of earplugs before she did it.
The whirlwind of so much air being sucked into the alla-cube made a thunderclap that knocked Cobb and Yoke off their feet. The ocean sloshed sullenly and some loose debris blew off the deck. But nobody was hurt, and the ship’s hull didn’t burst, and the captain didn’t shoot at them, and Yoke and Cobb flew on up into the sky, leaving the Tongans with nearly one hundred million dollars worth of gold.
“But wait, Cobb,” said Yoke as the ship began to dwindle below them. “We have to stop by the place where we slept last night. I want to bring my souvenirs.”
“What souvenirs?”
“Oh, just some little things. Come on, Cobb. We’ll do it fast.”
Ms. Teta, the housekeeper with the glossy bun, greeted them. She was dozing in the shade with the cook and the maid. “You want lunch today?”
“We’re going home,” said Yoke. “We’re all finished.”
“You been back for a while?” asked Ms. Teta. “I thought I heard you in your room.”
“No, I’ve been out on the ship with the King all morning.”
“Well, maybe it was your boyfriend.”
“Um, maybe?” said Yoke, her heart beating faster. She opened her room’s door with a mixture of hope and fear. But it looked the same as before, except that the beds had been made.
“So what are we taking?” asked Cobb.
Yoke picked up her glass sculpture and the looped metal band with the ants embossed on it. Phil had been with her when she’d made them. She spotted Phil’s dirty shirt from the day before, picked it up and sniffed it. His smell. She wrapped it around the sculptures. And there was the big green bean Phil had been so proud of. Of course, that had to come too. Yoke’s eyes filled with tears. Last night had felt like the first of an endless series of similar nights—hard to believe it could have been the only one.
“Let’s go, Cobb.”
As they arced up into the sky, Cobb used telephoto vision to peer down at the beach where the aliens had been. Yoke shared in his vision via the uvvy. It looked like a pelican rookery and UFO landing field down there, with all the Cappy Jane birds and the giant disk. And—
“Oh Lord, they caught them,” said Yoke. “Why didn’t they run away?”
Cobb’s telephoto vision had a nearly unlimited zoom ability; Yoke was able to dial it up to see that the Cappy Janes had captured all seven Metamartians down there. They had Shimmer, Ptah, Peg, Siss, Wubwub, a new one that looked like a man-sized bird and—dialing up the magnification a bit more—Yoke could even see that one of the Cappy Jane birds was holding the little beetle Josef. The Cappy Janes kindled a fire in which the seven unresisting aliens were consumed.
“It’s hard to believe,” said Cobb.
“Maybe it has something to do with coming from two-dimensional time,” said Yoke. “They might not have much of a survival instinct? But that’s not how I saw Shimmer acting that time on the Moon. It’s weird. But, oh Cobb, with the aliens gone, how can I ever get Phil?”
“I don’t know,” said Cobb. “Could be you’ll have to give up on him. There’s more fish in the sea, Yoke.” He powered up for a bit longer, finally reaching a point where he could cut off his jets and let them coast along their trajectory.
“I just noticed that the Cappy Janes are locked onto our location,” Cobb said. “They’re tracking us. Unless we do something, they’ll track us all the way to San Francisco. And eventually hunt us down.”
“Can y
ou make yourself invisible?”
“I can block the Squanto ID locator signal I’m putting out, but then they might want to follow us in person. One of them might tail us.”
“Why don’t we send off a decoy? I can alla you some imipolex and you can copy yourself just like the Cappy Janes did.”
“Two of me?” said Cobb hesitantly. “I’m not sure I’m in a mood to reproduce.”
“Can you just make a dumb minimal clone that sends out your Squanto signal and flies—I don’t know—out into space or something?”
“I could do that. In fact we can send Squanto on a trip to the Moon. That’ll make sense to them, even if the ‘Sue and Squanto’ cover breaks down. The Moon is exactly where you might expect Cobb and Yoke to go. Tell you what, Yoke, use your alla to customize a piece of imipolex shaped exactly like me. And I can put a partial nervous system into it. The air’s very thin up here. Anything you make will just coast along next to us. Can you stick your alla out through my skin?”
“I don’t need to stick it out. I can move the control mesh to wherever I like. There it is.” A bright-line copy of Cobb’s form appeared next to them, and then—whoosh—it was virgin imipolex.
Cobb stretched out a mold-filled tendril and began programming his dummy. “Something else, Yoke,” he said after a minute. “I think you should make a big piece of human flesh that we can seal inside him so he looks like he’s still carrying you. In case the Cappy Janes really focus in on him.”
“There’s no human flesh in the alla catalog. The Metamartians didn’t want it to be easy for us or the moldies to try and use the alla for reproduction. But, hmm, they do have a human skeleton. Remember, it’s like every possible catalog in the world got folded into the master alla catalog. And this skeleton I’m looking at is like what you buy to use for anatomy classes. I guess it’s kosher for the alla, since dead bone doesn’t have living cells. And, oh wow, of course it’s tweakable. I can make it just the same proportions as me!”
“Do it.”
“I’m getting it ready in my head. The way you do realware, Cobb, is you completely get your image all together before you make the mesh and actualize it with the alla. Instead of just making a naked skeleton, I’m going to wrap the skeleton up in something of about the right density. I could use bologna but—” Yoke suddenly giggled. “How about tofu! Sue Miller as the ultimate vegan!” Another whoosh, and there was a tofu-and-bone fake Yoke flying along next to them.
The fake Cobb opened up and sealed itself over the fake Yoke. Cobb turned off his own locator ID signals and brought up the dummy’s signals at the same time. And then the fake Yoke and Cobb—or the fake Squanto and Sue Miller—blasted on up away from them, presumably tracked by the Cappy Jane’s surveillance signals.
The flight back to San Francisco was uneventful; Yoke slept most of the way. She woke as they plummeted down toward the thumb of the San Francisco peninsula. The sun was setting and the buildings of San Francisco looked lovely and gold.
“Back to Babs’s?” asked Cobb.
“Yeah,” said Yoke. “I like her. And she seems to have a lot of room. I hope she doesn’t mind putting us up.”
“She talks tough, but she’s a soft touch,” said Cobb. “Hell, she’s even letting my great-grandson Randy stay there. I like Babs too. Wait till she sees your alla!”
“We should keep that quiet for now, Cobb. I don’t want to end up in the middle of another feeding frenzy.”
Nobody paid much notice when they landed on the dead-end street with Babs’s warehouse. There was a homeless woman fishing in the bay, some kids working on an ancient old truck, a woman bent over her garden, a long-haired boy sitting on some steps strumming his guitar, a man walking down the street with a bag of groceries. And now here were Cobb and Yoke again, back in the thick of it.
They walked in through the open garage door to Babs’s warehouse. The little plastic chicken Willa Jean cackled a warning. Randy Karl Tucker looked up from a nanomanipulator, surprised to see them. “Shit howdy! I thought you’d be gone till next weekend, Cobb.”
“Well, we—um—”
“We pretty much did everything in Tonga already,” said Yoke.
“Did Phil come back too?” asked Randy.
“Not yet,” said Cobb after a quick glance at Yoke.
“I hope you ain’t gonna try and rush me off to that dang Moon,” said Randy. “I’m lovin’ it here. Hey, Babs! They’re baaack! Quiet down, Willa Jean.”
The little chicken walked over and pecked at Cobb’s foot. And Yoke and Cobb’s gaze fell upon the twisted purple superleech embedded in Willa Jean’s back. With a grunt of anger, Cobb lashed down with an arm suddenly grown long. He caught hold of the wildly squawking Willa Jean, formed his other fingers into scissors, and excised the offending strip of limpware. And then he dropped the chicken and cut the superleech into teensy tiny bits.
“God damn you to hell, Cobb!” Randy picked up the wounded plastic chicken and cradled her to his chest. “Willa Jean’s been my special pet since India!”
“She’ll live,” said Cobb. “You got any more of those xoxxin’ leech-DIMs around here?”
Randy sullenly refused to answer, and Yoke got right into his face. “Phil told me you were bragging about superleeches, Randy. If you have any, cough them up. I wasn’t going to talk about it, but down in Tonga we saw some shit that—”
“What’s all the psychodrama?” asked Babs Mooney, ambling out from the warehouse’s colorful, fabric-hung depths. “You sound like a bunch of snap-heads!”
“Did Randy give you any superleeches yet?” asked Yoke.
“Tomorrow Aarbie Kidd is supposed to—”
“Call it off, Randy,” said Cobb. “Or I’ll tell Willy to disinherit you without a cent. Frankly, he’d love the excuse.”
“Oh, fuck my ass and call me Barbie,” said Randy. He sighed and made a voice connection with his uvvy. “ ’Sup, brah? No, that’s why I’m calling. No can do. Problem at this end. Yeah yeah, a shitty diaper. Reet. Later.” He glared over at Yoke and Cobb. “Satisfied?”
“What excitement,” said Babs, sitting down on a sofa. “Tell me what came down in Tonga. The way you two look, it must have been savage.”
Yoke so much wanted to pour out her heart. She’d been meaning to uvvy her twin sister Joke on the Moon, but Babs was right here, and she was cozy and easy to talk to. And even Randy, in his oddball way, was comforting too. “Can you really really promise to keep a secret, Babs? Randy? Not tell a single soul outside this room?”
“I’ll close the front door if you like,” said Babs.
“You should,” said Cobb. “If we’re going to spill everything. And then you’ll understand why I got so upset, Randy. I’m sorry about Willa Jean. I bet we can rig up a safe workaround. You don’t need a full superleech to remote-run a chicken, for God’s sake. I’ll help you design something simpler.”
“Okey-doke,” said Randy. “Hell, it’s just as well not to be startin’ up again with Aarbie Kidd.”
So for the next two hours Yoke and Cobb told Babs and Randy the whole story of what had happened in Tonga. As they talked they made a supper of what Babs had around her kitchen: half a loaf of bread, a green pepper, jack cheese, old salsa, hibiscus tea, a liter of beer, and a gnawed Hershey bar. Cobb, of course, didn’t eat anything, and he decorously held his pores closed so as not to exude an unappetizing smell.
“Show me how you make something with the alla,” asked Babs when Yoke finished talking. It was dark outside and the kitchen was lit with candles.
“I don’t want to,” said Yoke. “Not today. I did it way too much this morning. The cubic meter of gold. Did I mention that I put Andy Warhol’s signature on it?” She smiled and yawned, then got out the two sculptures wrapped in Phil’s shirt. “These are more the kind of realware I’d like to get into.” They looked good to her: the chunk of glass glinting in the candlelight, the ants shiny on the band of metal.
“Those are great, Yoke,” said Babs, hand
ling them. But Yoke could tell Babs wasn’t all that impressed. Babs only liked art that did things.
“There’s so many possibilities,” said Yoke, running her hand over the embossed ants.
“Realware,” said Babs. “I’d love to make some.”
“I’d like to meet Shimmer,” said Randy thoughtfully. “I bet she escaped the Cappy Janes. Shimmer can give an alla to most anyone she wants to, right? I wonder what I’d make with an alla?” Randy looked at the healed up Willa Jean in his lap and gave a country chuckle. “Maybe a sexier chicken.”
“Randy!” said Babs.
“After Tonga, I think the best thing to make would be allas for everyone,” said Cobb. “So people don’t beg you and hassle you for things.”
“Can you make an alla with an alla?” asked Babs.
“Josef said it was possible, but that the Metamartians don’t want to tell us how,” said Yoke. “And speaking of chickens, they put living things into their preprogrammed alla catalog too. Everything but moldies and people. I want to make a real reef and then try to limpware engineer an imipolex reef to copy it.”
“I’m starting to think being a moldie is better than being flesh and blood,” said Cobb. “By the way, Randy, you would have gone bananas over Vaana. Did I mention that we fucked?”
“It must be naahce when two moldies do it, huh, Cobb?” said Randy, his voice turning low and husky. “When it’s just the two of you, one on one.”
“I’m outta here,” said Yoke, getting to her feet. “Can I sleep in the same place as before, Babs?”
“Sure. And I’m so sorry about Phil.”
“Me too. Thanks.” Yoke found her way to a foam mattress on the floor in a corner of the. warehouse, next to a giant red and purple wall-hanging. She took off her clothes and put on Phil’s shirt to sleep in. She set Phil’s funny big bean pod next to her bed. The bean had seven odd shiny spots on it, a little patch near the summit of each bulging seed.
February 24
“Yoke?” “You’re going to wake her?” “Shh!” “What’s she going to say?” “This feels fine, doesn’t it?” “I don’t like being small.” “Will she help us?”
