by Rudy Rucker
"Like in The Telltale Heart," said Stahn. "That Poe viddy where the murdered man's heart under the floorboards is beating so loud that it shakes the room. So what else did you see on Haight Street, Randy?"
"Did I mention that it's crawlin' with moldies down there? It's a good thing they can't reproduce themselves but every six months. Even if the average moldie don't live but two years, that makes three times as many moldies every two years, less some-thin' makes 'em cut back. Lord knows I'm the last one to say anything against moldies, but they could run us outta room! They don't hardly smell like nothin' anymore. I can tell you got that new stinkeater bug too, Ms. Mooney."
"Oh, call me Wendy," said Ma. "Yes, Cobb brought some over here before he left with Darla. He said since I'm a public figure, I should be an example. So I went ahead and infected myself with stinkeater. It's not an infection, really, it's more like a symbiosis. I benchmarked my computation rate before and after the stinkeater, and there's an eleven percent enhancement. So I'm telling all the moldies to do it. Stahn likes it and I do too."
"She's moanin', huh?" said Stahn, admiring his wife. "But I'm with you on what you said about too many moldies, Randy. We three were just fabbing about it. Too many people, too many moldies, too much stuff. I think the allas suck. Look out there right now. My moron neighbor Jones is up on his roof again. I bet he's planning a second tower for his house. I can't fucking believe it. And see the house right down the hill from him? Used to be a beautiful madrone tree there, and now Ms. Lin has a garage. For what? For her brand-new fucking electric-motor-retrofitted vintage 1956 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with twenty-four-karat-gold trim. A garage to protect her car that she made out of air and could replace in one second."
"Don't make yourself sick, Stahn," said Wendy. "Let's go out in our backyard and build the tree. Randy, we were thinking we'd make a redwood with some kind of tree house in it. And we figured out that if each of us alla-makes a section at the same time, the tree can be a hundred and sixty feet long from top branch to bottom root. Come on, we go out this way."
"Maybe it should be two hundred feet," said Stahn when they got outside. He was starting to get excited. "A monster tree. That'll show 'em." Their yard was maybe fifty feet on a side.
"Let's call Saint," suggested Wendy. "He should be here for our little get-together. With five allas, the tree could be two hundred six feet and 1.69 inches. Call your brother, Babs, I don't want to always be the one to bother him."
Saint answered Babs's uvvy call right away. " 'Sup, sis?" He sounded cheerful and lively.
"I'm over at Ma and Da's with Randy," said Babs.
"Yaaar. Did you tell them yet?"
"There hasn't been a good moment. Da's all uptight about the neighbors. We're going to help him put up a giant redwood."
"Make a sequoia instead." Saint had a contrary streak.
"A big tree," said Babs. "I don't really care what kind, but now Da's fixated on redwood. Anyway, that's what right for this climate. If you were here, there'd be five of us and the tree could be two hundred feet tall instead of a hundred and sixty. What are yon doing anyway?"
When Saint had gotten his alla, he'd quit working at Meta West. Recently he and Phil and Randy had been talking about starting a business. But for now he'd been spending most of his time riding his bicycle and playing uvvy games with friends. And he had a new girlfriend.
"I made a bicycle that I can ride on the water," said Saint. He patched in a view of where he was: out on the bay, near the Golden Gate Bridge. He glanced up at the people-nests encrusting the underside of the bridge, then turned his attention back to the water. There were exceedingly many recreational watercraft around him. Everyone who'd ever wanted a sailboat or DIM board had one now. And you didn't need an expensive dock for your boat--when you finished using it, you just turned it back into air. Saint abruptly veered to avoid a collision. "This is too much fun to stop right now. And I'm supposed to meet Milla later. Whoah, here comes another boat. Just say hi for me.
It's enough if Da's tree is a hundred and sixty feet. Tell him not to be so greedy. And to make it a banyan."
" 'Bye, Saint."
"Good luck with Randy and the rents."
"He doesn't want to come," Babs told the others. "He's out bicycling on the bay. And then he's going to see Milla." She stressed the last word as bait for her mother.
"We haven't met Milla yet," complained Ma. "You children are so secretive."
"You two are so hard to talk to," said Babs.
"Let's make the redwood," said Stahn. "I'm stoked."
Babs found a redwood in her alla catalog, and scaled it up to 160 feet, including the big fan of roots at the bottom. She jiggled around four bright-line maximum alla cubes and readjusted the image until everything just fit lengthwise. There was still room to spare on the sides, so Babs enlarged the redwood some more, then lopped off the parts that stuck out. This gave the effect of a really big redwood that had been topped. The trunk was thick all the way up.
"Floatin'!" said Stahn when Babs uvvied everyone the pattern of the tree overlaid with the four alla cubes. But then he paused. "What if it falls over? Then we lose our house as well. We end up with nothing."
"We could alla-make a new house if it came to that," said Wendy. "I've been thinking of all sorts of improvements."
"I want a real house, not a realware house," insisted Stahn.
"But just think," said Wendy teasingly. "If it falls, maybe it'll reach clear across the street and crush the Joneses!"
"Yaaar," said Stahn. "Tree good, house bad."
"It's not going to fall," insisted Babs. "Like I said, Randy and I made a bunch of big palm trees from two pieces each. If two pieces work, so will four. Now, Da, you make the roots and the bottom of the trunk, Ma can make the next piece, Randy will do the piece above that, and I'm going to make the top. Oh, and we better wear earplugs."
They placed themselves in four different corners of the backyard, made themselves earplugs, and carefully aligned their alla control meshes.
"Hold on a minute," said Babs, and privately readjusted the design of her section. "Okay, now I'm set. On three. Let's count together."
"One, two --actualize!" said the four.
Ka-whooomp! The ground beneath their feet shuddered, filling up with the roots. Jones across the street shouted in surprise at the noise. Above them towered 120 feet of fluted trunk, garlanded with swaying branches whose needles shivered in the breeze. But then --
"It's falling!" screamed Stahn, streaking across the yard. "Run!" From across the street Jones echoed Stahn's shriek. Frantically Babs stared upward, projecting her largest cubical alla control mesh, ready to convert the tumbling behemoth into air before it crushed her. The tree was so big that it was too late to run. But--
The tree wasn't falling.
"April fool," said Stahn, his long smile an icon of utter delight. "Gotcha."
"Phew," said Randy, with a loose grin. "What a lift."
"Zerk," said Wendy, poking Stahn. "We're not always this hard to be around, Randy."
"Hey, I'm havin' a good taaahm. But what are those holes up in the top?" Stahn glanced up, worried. "Don't tell me there's something-- "
"I put a room inside it," said Babs. "Just like in that book we read when I was little. I put a nice room with a door and three windows. And a deck."
"The Little Fur Family," remembered Wendy. "How sweet."
"Is it strong enough, hollowed out like that?" wondered Stahn.
"Sure," said Babs. "Redwoods have hollow spots in them all the time."
"How do we get up there?" was Stahn's next question.
"Anemone boots and Spider-Man gloves," said Randy, quick as a flash. "Me and Babs found 'em when we wanted to climb our palm trees. I'll show you in the alla catalog. They used to be made by a company named Modern Rocks out to Colorado. Guess they outta business now--like all the other folks with goodies in the alla catalogs."
Stahn alla-made himself a set of the bulbous yel
low plastic boots and gloves.
"Stuzzadelic! I never would have bought them."
"See, he's finally getting the picture," said Babs. "With an alla you get all the wavy stuff you'd never buy. And then you turn it back into air. Consumerism isn't wasteful anymore." She and Randy made themselves Spider-Man gloves and anemone boots as well. "I'll go first. Watch how I do it, Da." Babs stared at the first branch she wanted to get to, then spread the fingers of her right hand. Her Spider-Man glove shot out a thick, sticky rope of imipolex--a bit like a frog's tongue. The glove had a DIM linking it to Babs's uvvy, and it knew to shoot its tongue at whatever Babs was staring at. Now Babs relaxed her fingers. This gesture told the strand of imipolex to slowly contract, pulling her up. Meanwhile the toes of her anemone boots had split into a zillion pseudopods that walked their way along the bark like the legs of a millipede, preventing too much strain on Babs's arm, as well as ruling out any chance of her being yanked around uncontrollably. Babs smiled down from the first branch, securely anchored by her anemone boots. "Come on, Da, it's easy."
"I'm supposed to do this every time I want to visit my lookout?"
"You can figure out an easier way if you like. That's the fun of having an alla. It lets you try all sorts of new things, and if something doesn't work, you get rid of it."
"Or you pile it in your yard like the Joneses."
"Sooner or later they'll realize they don't have to hoard. Matter doesn't matter anymore."
Stahn shot up a tongue of imipolex with each hand, and gingerly hauled his way up to stand beside her. "This is easier than it looks. Thanks, Babs." Now Randy climbed up to join them. Babs took off fast, closely followed by Randy, the two of them scampering up the tree like a pair of squirrels. Splat kick kick, splat kick kick. What fun! Babs could see Stahn far below them, creeping along. And Wendy? There she was, swooping around the tree like a sea gull. She'd unfurled her Happy Cloak into a huge set of wings. She reached the top before Babs and Randy.
"Oh, this is beautiful," she called down. "There's a cute, round room." The trunk was about ten feet across up here. The room was carved right into the living heartwood of the tree, with two polished bucket seats, three little porthole windows, and an arched door. The widest part of the floor was maybe five feet across. A plump burl of the redwood bulged out to make a deck in front of the door, with four more seats carved into it. Once they were all up top, they tried out everything, and then Ma and Da sat on the deck, while Babs and Randy sat cozily in the little room.
"This view kicks ass!" exulted Stahn. "I can see the whole city and both bridges! I can even see the Farallon Islands!" He leaned over, chuckling with satisfaction. "Jones looks like a bewildered gopher. Should I give him the finger? Alla down a bucket of piss?"
"Don't goad him," said Wendy. "He might turn us all into air. That's been happening quite a bit, you know. I hear there's been too many killings for the gimmie to even keep track of. And not everyone's been able to get recorporated." Stahn winced at the thought. "You're right. I have to be nice to Jones. Maybe I could convince him to replace his tower with a tree. This is where it's at, no lie. Is it stuzzy in that room, Babs?"
"You want to trade places?"
"No no, the cozy nook should be for the lovers. Ma and I can try it when you're gone. Hey, Wendy, can you viz letting me bone you up here? Tarzan and Jane. But our feet would stick out of the door."
"You could alla-carve bigger rooms lower down in the tree," said Babs equably. She was accustomed to her father's gaucherie. Maybe that was why she was so comfortable with Randy. Babs patted Randy's hand, and he smiled at her. The redwood room had a nice, fresh fragrance. Tendrils of late afternoon fog were drifting by.
"We could live in a tree like this, Babs," murmured Randy. "Maybe we oughta put one up by your warehouse. Or once I get my consulting business goin' I can buy us a lot down in the Santa Cruz Mountains and we can live in a tree out there."
"What kind of consulting do you want to do, Randy?" asked Wendy. Her hearing was preternaturally sharp.
"Nose much, Ma?" said Babs, implicitly daring her mother to ask the question that was really on her mind.
"And you're planning to live together? That's nice . .." Wendy's voice trailed off, begging for more information.
"We're engaged," said Babs, finally springing her news. "We're going to have a double wedding with Yoke and Phil on the first of June."
Randy, May 1
To Randy's relief--and slight surprise --Babs's parents gave his marriage proposal their blessing. He settled in at Babs's, waiting for the big day and working on some projects with the others. It seemed important to try and do good things with the allas, all the more so because the world news was bad. Savage conventional wars had broken out in Africa, Central America, Quebec, and the Balkans. There was sporadic gang fighting in parts of the U.S. too, mostly near Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Needless to say, there were almost no women doing it, and the moldies were staying pretty well out of the fray as well. It was just men fighting men. Everyone had all the food and shelter they wanted, so there was no logical reason to fight-- but men were doing it anyway, using all the great new weapons they could alla up for themselves. It turned out that Phil was right--the allas wouldn't undo the ordinary kinds of deaths. If someone shot you or blew you up, your alla wouldn't save you. The alla recorporation feature was indeed designed only to undo any killings that had been done by an alla itself. Even so, there were men who used the allas to make themselves weapons so they could beat and rape and torture and kill at will, growing more cruel and brutal every day. The killers were killing each other off, but still there seemed to be no shortage of them. And the innocent were dying as well. The only thing keeping the wars down was that the Metamartians' flying saucer kept appearing at the goriest battle scenes. First the saucer would call for peace, and then it would beam down rays to destroy everyone's weapons, and if the men still kept on fighting, the saucer would incinerate them. But the Metamartians couldn't be everywhere. Babs was in a frantically creative mode, as if trying to prove it hadn't been a mistake to distribute the allas. In mid-April, Theodore helped her put on a show at the Asiz Gallery. Theodore was being a good sport about losing Babs, which surprised Randy, who kept expecting some Kentucky-style sneak attack from the guy: a stolen vehicle, a midnight beating, an arson fire, a tip-off to the gimmie. But it never came. Instead Theodore got Babs gallery space and wrote a great little catalog for her. Randy was unable to comprehend such behavior. Babs's show was called "Realware Worms," and it featured twenty of her worm-farms. Some were the ones she'd been making before she got the alla: mazes of plastic tubing filled with soil and a mixture of real and imipolex DIM worms. Just to play with the categories a little, Babs had also made some new versions of these, using alla-made realware biological worms in place of "wild" biological worms. In addition, she'd alla-made a half-dozen large transparent shapes filled solid with writhing DIM worms. There were cubes of plastic worms, some big doughnut shapes, and even a mounting, squiggly spiral like a moonshiner's "worm coil" condenser. That last one had been Randy's suggestion, he was proud to say. To fill out the show, Babs hung a lot of her lace on the walls and alla-made seven variations on her cartoonlike dune buggy, giving them hard "kandy kolors" that marched up the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Babs put smiling worm logos on the car doors so they'd fit the show's theme, and parked the "worm buggies" in a cutely angled row on the sidewalk outside the Asiz.
The title of the show was a good idea, as everyone was still in the process of trying to assimilate what "Realware" might mean. There was a big crowd on opening night -- decked out in freaky S.F. outfits like never before seen --but the sales were disastrously weak. The potential customers seemed to want to go home and make their own copies of Babs's works with their allas. In fact, one woman with a beehive hairdo and a skirt made of dangling transparent dildos stood out on the sidewalk staring really hard at one of the worm-buggies for half an hour and t
hen -- whoosh -- used her alla to make her own version, using the same base-model Metamartian alla catalog dune buggy that Babs had used. The art on the knockoff worm buggy wasn't quite the same, for it came out of the dildo-skirted woman's head and not Babs's, but it seemed to suit her well enough, and maybe better. She hopped in her new car and drove off, with Randy running after her down the street shouting empty threats.
The situation with the lace was a bit different. The decorations of the worm-buggies were big and easy to mentally represent, but the lace simply had too much pattern, produced as it was by colonies of interacting DIM-based fabricants. No casual gallery-goer would be able to mentally specify the twists and turns of all the lace knots for his or her alla. Even so, Randy did catch a tipsy man in orange leather leaving the gallery wearing a mantilla of crude knockoff lace on his shoulders. Rather than being knotted, the copied lace's threads were simply fused at the crossings. And the overall pattern repeated itself every four inches, instead of subtly varying all along the mantilla's length.
The plastic worms were the least susceptible to copying, as it was their living behavior that made them art. Their flocking, their wriggling, their subtly oscillating hues --all of these were based on limpware DIM designs that Babs had invented for them with Randy's help. And there was no way to "see" these microscopic code designs just by looking at the worms. Yet everyone was in such a do-it-yourself frenzy with their allas that they seemed to overlook this fact. The sole person to offer to purchase one of Babs's works was a sleek banker named Chock Fresser. Fresser wanted to acquire the show's centerpiece: a twelve-foot transparent pretzel filled with imipolex worms in a thousand different shades of blue and green; it was called "Wowo Worms." But Fresser didn't want to take delivery on the physical item; he wanted Babs to uvvy him a copy of the software design so he could alla-make the work in situ at his house. "Too much trouble to ship it home," said Fresser. "Packing, unpacking-- who needs it anymore? Give me the code and that way I can bring 'Wowo Worms' in and out of storage as needed."
