WETWARE
  Rudy Rucker
WETWARE is an original publication of Avon Books. This work
has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel.
Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.


AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
105 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016


Copyright © 1988 by Rudy Rucker
Front cover illustration by Joe DeVito
Published by arrangement with the author
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-91688
ISBN: 0-380-70178-2


All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this
book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as
provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address
Susan Ann Protter, Literary Agent, 110 West 40th Street, Suite
1408, New York, New York 10018.


First Avon Books Printing: April 1988


AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN
OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN
U.S.A.


Printed in the U.S.A.
               For
          Philip K. Dick
            1928-1982




“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
                       Chapter One
                        People That Melt


     December 26, 2030


      It was the day after Christmas, and Stahn was plugged in.
With no work in sight, it seemed like the best way to pass the
time… other than drugs, and Stahn was off drugs for good, or so
he said. The twist-box took his sensory input, jazzed it, and passed
it on to his cortex. A pure software high, with no somatic
aftereffects. Staring out the window was almost interesting. The
maggies left jagged trails, and the people looked like actors.
Probably at least one of them was a meatie. Those boppers just
wouldn’t let up. Time kept passing, slow and fast.
      At some point the vizzy was buzzing. Stahn cut off the
twist-box and thumbed on the screen. The caller’s head appeared, a
skinny yellow head with a down-turned mouth. There was
something strangely soft about his features.
   “Hello,” said the image. “I’m Max Yukawa. Are you Mr.
Mooney?”
    Without the twist, Stahn’s office looked unbearably bleak. He
hoped Yukawa had big problems.
     “Stahn Mooney of Mooney Search. What can I do for you,
Mr. Yukawa?”
         “It concerns a missing person. Can you come to my office?”
         “Clear.”
      Yukawa twitched, and the vizzyprint spat out a sheet with
printed directions. His address and the code to his door-plate.
Stahn thumbed off, and after a while he hit the street.
       Bad air out there, always bad air—yarty was the word for it
this year. 2030. Yart = yawn + fart. Like in a library, right? Sebum
everywhere. Sebum = oily secretion which human skin exudes. Yarts
and sebum, and a hard vacuum outside the doooooooommmme.
Dome air—after the invasion, the humans had put like a big
airtight dome over Disky and changed the town’s name to Einstein.
The old Saigon into Ho Chi Minh City routine. The boppers had
been driven under the Moon’s surface, but they had bombs hidden
all over Einstein, and they set off one a week maybe, which was not
all that often, but often enough to matter for sure for sure. And of
course there were the meaties—people run by remote bopper
control. What you did was to hope it didn’t get worse.
     So OK, Stahn is standing out in the street waiting for a slot
on the people-mover. A moving sidewalk with chairs, right. He felt
like dying, he really really felt like dying. Bad memories, bad
chemistry, no woman, bad life.
         “Why do we bother.”
      The comment was right on the beam. It took a second to
realize that someone was talking to him. A rangy, strungout dog of
a guy, shirtless in jeans with blond hair worn ridgeback style. His
hair was greased up into a longitudinal peak, and there were extra
hairgrafts that ran the hairstrip right on down his spine to his ass.
Seeing him made Stahn feel old. I used to be different, but now I’m the
same. The ridgeback had a handful of pamphlets, and he was staring
at Stahn like one of them was something in a zoo.
         “No thanks,” Stahn said, looking away. “I just want to catch a
slot.”
     “Inside your lamejoke private eye fantasy? Be here now, bro.
Merge into the One.” The kid was handsome in an unformed way,
but his skin seemed unnaturally slack. Stahn had the impression he
was stoned.
      Stahn frowned and shook his head again. The ridgeback gave
him a flimsy plas pamphlet, tapped his own head, and then tapped
Stahn’s head as if to mime the flow of knowledge. Poor dumb
freak. Just then an empty slot came by. Safely off the sidewalk,
Stahn looked the leaflet over. OR-MY IS THE WAY, it read. ALL
IS ONE!
      The text said that sharing love with one’s fellows could lead
to a fuller union with the cosmos at large. At the deepest level, the
pamphlet informed Stahn, all people are aspects of the same
archetype. Those who wished to learn more about Organic
Mysticism were urged to visit the Church offices on the sixth floor
of the ISDN ziggurat. All this wisdom came courtesy of Bei Ng,
whose picture and biography appeared on the pamphlet’s back
cover. A skinny yellow guy with wrinkles and a pointed head. He
looked like a big reefer. Even after eighteen clean months, lots of
things still made Stahn think of drugs.
      The Einstein cityscape drifted past. Big, the place was
big—like Manhattan, say, or half of D.C. Not to mention all the
chambers and tunnels underground. Anthill. Smart robots had built
the city, and then the humans had kicked them out. The boppers.
They were easy to kill, once you knew how. Carbon-dioxide laser,
EM energy, scramble their circuits. They’d gone way underground.
Stahn had mixed feelings about boppers. He liked them because
they were even less like regular people than he was. At one point
he’d even hung out with them a little. But then they’d killed his
father… back in 2020. Poor old dad. All the trouble Stahn had
given him, and now it felt like he was turning into him, year by
year. Mooney Search. Wave on it, sister, wiggle. Can I get some head?
     Yukawa’s address was a metal door, set flush into the
pumice-stone sidewalk. Deep Encounters said the sign over the
door-plate. Psychological counselling? The folks in this
neighborhood didn’t look too worried about personality
integration. Bunch of thieves and junkies is what they looked like.
Old Mother Earth had really shipped the dregs to Einstein. Like
the South, right, Settled by slaves and convicts—since 1690. 2022 was
when the humans had retaken the Moon. Stahn looked at the sheet
that Yukawa had sent. 90-3-888-4772. Punch in the code, Stahn.
Numbers. Prickly little numbers. Number, Space, Logic, Infinity…
for the boppers it was all Information. Good or bad?
      OK, so the door opens, and Stahn ladders on down and takes
a look. A vestibule, empty and gray. To the right was a door with a
light over it. In front of Stahn was another door, and a window like
at a walk-in bank. Yukawa’s face was behind the thick glass. Stahn
showed him the vizzyprint sheet, and he opened up the second
door.
     Stahn found himself (found himself?) in a long laboratory, with a
desk and chairs at one end. The air was thick with strange smells:
benzenes, esters, the rich weavings of long-chain molecules, and
under it all the stench of a badly-kept menagerie. His host was
seated on a sort of high stool by that thick glass window. It took
Stahn a second to absorb the fact that about half the guy’s body
was… where?
    Yukawa’s soft thin head and arms rose up out of a plastic tub
mounted on four long legs. The rest of him was a yellow-pink
puddle in the tub. Stahn gagged and took a step back.
    “Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Mooney. I was a little upset, so I took
some merge. It’s just now wearing off.”
      Merge… he’d heard of it. Very synthetic, very illegal. I don’t do
drugs, man, I’m high on life. People took merge to sort of melt their
bodies for a while. Stuzzadelic and very tempting. If Stahn hadn’t
been so desperate for work he might have left right then. Instead
he came on nonchalant.
     “What kind of lab is this, Mr. Yukawa?”
      “I’m a molecular biologist.” Yukawa put his hands on the
tub’s sides and pushed up. Slowly his belly solidified, his hips and
his legs. He stepped over to the desk and began pulling his clothes
back on. Over the vizzy, Stahn had taken him for Japanese, but he
was too tall and pale for that. “Of course the Gimmie would view
this as an illegal drug laboratory. Which is why I don’t dare call
them in. The problem is that something has happened to my
assistant, a young lady named Della Taze. You advertise yourself as
a Searcher, so…”
     “I’ll take the case, don’t worry. I already checked you on my
data-base, by the way. A blank. That’s kind of unusual, Mr.
Yukawa.” He was fully dressed now, gray pants and a white coat,
quite the scientist. Stahn could hardly believe he’d just seen him
puddled in that tub. How good did it feel?
     “I used to be a man named Gibson. I invented
gene-invasion?”
     “You were that mad scientist who… uh… turned himself
Japanese?”
      “Not so mad.” A smile flickered across Yukawa’s sagging
face. “I had cancer. I found a way to replace some of my genes
with those of a ninety-eight-year-old Japanese man. The cancer
went into remission, and as my cells replaced themselves, I took on
more and more of the Japanese man’s somatotype. A body geared
for long life. There was talk of a Nobel Prize, but…”
      “The California dog-people. The Anti-Chimera Act of 2027. I
remember. You were exiled here. Well, so was I. And now I’m a
straight rent-a-pig and you’re a dope wizard. Your girl’s gone, and
you’re scared to call the Gimmie.” Most Einstein law enforcement
was done on a freelance basis. No lunie ever called in the official
law—the Gimmie—on purpose. At this point the Gimmie was a
highly organized gang of extortionists and meatie-hunters. They
were a moderately necessary evil.
     “Clear. Let me show you around.” Long and undulant,
Yukawa drifted back into the lab. The low lunar gravity seemed to
agree with him.
      The closer tables were filled with breadboarded electronic
circuits and mazes of liquid-filled tubes. Computerized relays
shunted the colored fluids this way and that. A distillation process
seemed to be underway. The overall effect was of a miniature oil
refinery. In contrast, the tables towards the rear of the lab were
filled with befouled animal cages. It had been a while since Stahn
had seen animals. Live meat.
      “Watch,” said Yukawa, shoving two cages together. One cage
held a large brown toad, the other a lively white rat. Yukawa drew a
silver flask out of his coat pocket and dribbled a few drops onto
each of the subject animals. “This is merge,” he explained, opening
the doors that separated the cages.
      The toad, a carnivore, flung itself at the rat. For a moment the
two beasts struggled. But then the merge had taken effect, and the
animals’ tissues flowed together: brown and white, warts and hair.
A flesh-puddle formed, loosely covering the creatures’ loosened
skeletons. Four eyes looked up: two green, two pink. Faint
shudders seemed to animate the fused flesh. Pleasure? It was said
that merge users took a sexual delight in puddling.
     “How do they separate?”
       “It’s automatic. When the merge wears off, the cell walls
stiffen and the body collagens tighten back up. What the drag does
is temporarily uncoil all the proteins’ tertiary bunchings. One dose
lasts ten minutes to an hour—and then back to normal. Now look
at these two cages.”
      The next two cages held something like a rat and something
like a toad. But the rat’s hair was falling out, and its feet were
splayed and leathery. The toad, for its part, was growing a long pink
tail, and its wide mouth showed signs of teeth.
      “Chimeras,” said Yukawa with some satisfaction. “Chimeras
like me. The trick is to keep them merged for several days. Gene
exchange takes place. The immune systems get tired.”
     “I bet. So the Japanese man you merged with turned into
you?”
      Yukawa made a wry face. “That’s right. We beat cancer
together, and he got a little younger. Calls himself Bei Ng these
days. He runs his own fake religion here in Einstein, though it’s
really an ISDN front. Bei’s always trying to outdo me and rip me
off. But never mind about him. I want you to look at this one back
here. It’s my pet project: a universal life form.”
       At the very rear of the lab was a large pen. Huddled in the pen
was a sodden, shambling thing—an amalgam of feathers and claws.
 Chitin, man, and hide, and the head had (A) long feelers, (B) a
snout, (C) a squid-bunch of slack mandibles, dot dot dot, and (Z)
gills. Gills on the moon.
     “You’re nuts, Yukawa. You’re out of your kilpy gourd.”
      At the sound of Stahn’s voice, the monstrosity hauled itself
over to rattle the pen’s bars with tiny pink hands.
     “Yes, Arthur,” said Yukawa. “Good.” He fished a food pellet
out of his lab jacket and fed it to his creation. Just then a bell
chimed.
     “Back to business,” said Yukawa, giving Stahn a U-shaped
smile. “I don’t know why I’m showing you all this anyway.
Loneliness, I suppose. Della’s been my only companion for the last
two years.”
     Stahn tagged along as Yukawa made his way back to the thick
window looking onto the vestibule. A light was flashing over the
other door out there.
     “Time’s up,” said Yukawa, speaking into a microphone. “The
session’s over, Mrs. Beller.” Stahn got the full picture.
     “You retail the merge right here? You’re running a
love-puddle?”
     “That is the vulgar terminology, yes. I have to fund my
ongoing research in whatever fashion I can. I sell merge both
wholesale and retail. There’s nothing really wrong with merge, you
know. It’s terribly addictive, but if someone wants to quit, why, I’m
perfectly willing to sell them the proper blocker.”
     Outside the window, the lit door opened. Two people stepped
out—a wide-mouthed brunette and her funboy. He wore a
black-and-white bowling shirt with Ricardo stitched over the breast
pocket. She was hot stuff. Their faces looked soft and tired, and
they were holding hands.
    Yukawa powered a drawer out through the wall. “Same time
tomorrow, Mrs. Beller?”
       “Feels so rave, Max.” The woman dropped some money into
the drawer. She was hot stuff. What type of sex do you like, Mrs. Beller,
WHAT TYPE??? She was used-looking, and she had a slow lazy
voice and the big soft lips to match. She raked a stare across
Stahn’s face and led Ricardo up the ladder to the street. As they
left, Stahn noticed that their two joined hands were actually fused
into a single skin-covered mass. Hot.
      Yukawa caught Stahn’s expression, caught some of it. “They’ll
pull apart later, when the stuff fully wears off. In some circles it’s
quite fashionable to walk around part merged.”
    “How come they don’t look like each other—if they’re
merging every day?”
     “Dosage control. Unless you set up an all-day drip, merging
has no lasting effects. And the drip has to be just right, or you end
up as an entropic solution of amino acids. No one can do the gene
exchange right but me.”
      “Other people have done it. Vic Morrow did it, dad.” Vic
Morrow had been a truck-farmer in the San Joaquin Valley. In
2027, he’d hit on the idea of treating his migrant workers to a series
of weekend-long mergedrip parties. Once the workers had all
flowed together, Morrow would throw a couple of dogs into the
love-puddle with them. He was nuts. Over the weeks, the workers
had transmuted into beasts, ever more tractable, ever less
demanding. The big scandal came when Morrow had a heart attack
and his workers ate most of his corpse and rolled in the rest of it. A
month later, the Anti-Chimera Act had passed Congress by
acclaim.
      Yukawa frowned and fumbled in his desk. “I told Morrow
how to do it. It was a big mistake. I owed him money. I don’t trust
anyone with my secrets anymore. Especially…” He stopped
himself and pushed a folder across the desk. “Here’s the full
printout on Della—I already accessed it for you. Last Friday—that
was the 20th—I was with Della all day as usual, and at four she left
in her maggie. Monday and Tuesday she didn’t come in. I called
her apartment, nobody home. Yesterday was Christmas and I didn’t
bother calling. I figured maybe she’d taken an extra-long holiday
weekend, gone on a party or a trek in the crater. She doesn’t tell me
her plans. But now she’s still not here and her vizzy still doesn’t
answer. I’m worried. Either something’s happened to her, or… or
she’s run away.”
     Stahn picked up the folder and leafed through it. Focus.
DELLA TAZE. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky.
Twenty-eight years old. Ph.D. in molecular genetics, U. Va., 2025.
Same year he’d been deported to Einstein. Her photo: a nice little
blonde with a straight mouth and a button nose. Fox. Unmarried.
      “She was your girlfriend?” Stahn glanced up at Yukawa. His
long, thin head looked cruel and freakish. The “universal life form”
at the back of the lab was crying out for more food, making a
sound midway between a squeal and a hiss. Arthur. It was hard to
see why Della Taze hadn’t split like… two years ago.
      “… wouldn’t let me come to her apartment,” Yukawa was
saying. “And she wouldn’t ever merge with me either. We argued
about it Friday. I know she was using, towards the end she asked
me for it all the time. Maybe that was the only reason she stayed
with me as long as she did. But now… now she’s gone, and I have
to get her back. Track her down, Mooney. Bring my Della back!”
      “I’ll do my best, Mr. Yukawa. Man.” As Stahn got to his feet,
Yukawa leaned across the desk and handed him a wad of bills, and
the silver flask of dope.
     “Here’s money for you, Mooney, and merge. Sta-Hi. Didn’t
they used to call you Sta-Hi?”
     “That was a long time ago. Now I’m all grown up.”
      “I gave Della blocker, just in case, but if you find her sick,
just show her the flask.”
      Before getting a slot over to Della’s place, Stahn went back to
his office to do some computer searching. Maybe Della had taken
Yukawa’s blocker and checked into an endorphin clinic. The
blocker would gene-tailor out the specific enzymes that made
merge necessary for her body, but sometimes it took a clinic to
keep you from going back to what your mind still wanted. Or
maybe Della was dead and in the organ banks, the cannibal mart,
or worse. Everyone on the Moon—lunies and boppers alike—had
lots of uses for fresh meat. Or, on the other hand, maybe Della had
caught a ship to Earth.
      Yukawa hadn’t called anyone at all; he was too paranoid.
Stahn worked his vizzy through all the info banks—and drew a
blank. Could she have been picked up by the Gimmie? Better not
to ask. Or maybe the boppers had zombie-boxed her off to the
ratsurgeon? He leaned back in his chair, trying not to think about
the flask of merge. Focus.
     If Della was still strung on merge, she’d be puddling at least
once a day. That meant she might be holed up with some other
local users. So it would make sense to check out the local merge
scene, which centered, Stahn recalled, in the catacombs around the
old dustbaths. How good was merge, anyway? Stahn opened
Yukawa’s silver flask and… uh… took a sniff. Nice: red wine and
roast turkey, nice-smelling stuff. He couldn’t stop wondering what
it would feel like to use a little. Yukawa shouldn’t have given it to
him. But, Stahn realized, Yukawa had known what he was doing.
Don’t start, Stahn, he told himself. Don’t start all that again. Why
not? he answered himself. Who are you to tell me what to do? I’ll
do what I like! Remember, Stahn, responded the first voice, you
didn’t quit drugs for other people. You didn’t quit for society, or for
Wendy’s ghost. You quit for yourself. If you go back on the stuff
you’re going to die.
     Just then someone started pounding on the door. Stahn
twitched and a fat drop of merge splashed out onto his left hand.
His stomach clenched in horror, but a part of him—the bad
part—was very glad. He put his hands and the flask under his desk
and told the door to open.
      It was the blond ridgeback who’d given him the Or-My
pamphlet before. Stahn got the cap back on Yukawa’s flask and
tried to flex his left hand. It felt like it was melting. This stuff was
for real.
     “Stahn Mooney,” said the ridgeback, closing the door behind
him. “Sta-Hi.” His face had junk-hunger. “My name’s Whitey
Mydol. I heard you were over at Yukawa’s. I was wondering if…”
He paused to sniff the air. The room reeked of merge. “Can I have
some?”
     “Some what?”
     The melting feeling had moved up into Stahn’s forearm. His
shabby office walls looked prettier than the twist-box had ever
made them. All right. Eighteen months since he’d felt this good.
He forced his attention back to Mydol’s hard young face. “How do
you know who Yukawa is?”
      “Oh… we know.” The kid smiled in a conspiratorial way. “I’ll
give you two hundred dollars for a hit. Just between the two of us.”

      Stahn took his flare-ray in his right hand and levelled it at
Mydol. He wanted Mydol out of here before he melted all over.
“I’m going to count to three. One.” Mydol stopped moving and
glared. “Two.” Mydol snarled a curse and stepped back towards the
door. He was jangling up Stahn’s first rush in almost two years, and
Stahn wanted to kill him.
    “AO, Junk-Hog Sta-Hi Rent-Pig Mooney. What’s the
shudder, scared to merge with a man? Tubedook.”
     “Three,” Stahn clicked off the safety and burned a shot across
Mydol’s left shoulder. The ridgeback winced in pain, opened the
door and left.
      Stahn slumped back. God, this was fast dope. His left arm
looked like candle wax, and he was having trouble staying in his
chair. He let himself slide down onto the floor and stared up at the
ceiling. Oh, this did feel so good. His bone joints loosened, and his
skeleton sagged beneath the puddle of his flesh. It took almost an
hour to ride the trip out. Towards the middle Stahn saw God. God
was about the same as usual—a little more burnt, maybe. He
wanted love as bad as Stahn did. This life was taking its toll on
everyone.
       What is merge like? Baby, if you don’t know by now…
Wonderful. Horrible. After Stahn hit the floor and puddled, he
wasn’t really there. The space of the room became part of his
consciousness. He was the room, the chipped beige plas, the dingy
black floor, the old-fashioned windows, the desk and chair and
computer; he was the room and the building and Einstein and the
Earth. Standard ecstatic mystical vision, really. But fast. He was
everywhere, he was nowhere, he was the same as God. And then
there were no thoughts at all. Stuzzy, sis, all right.
      It wore off ***WHAM*** as quickly as it had come on. There
was a tingling in Stahn’s flesh, a kind of jelling feeling, and then he
was lying there shaking, heart going a mile a minute. Too fast. This
dope was giga too fast. Death practice, right: hit, melt, space, blank.
Final blank. He wished his dead wife Wendy were still alive. Sweet,
blonde, wide-hipped Wendy. Times like this—in the old
days—she’d hug him and pat his head real soft… and smile… And
you killed her, Stahn. Oh God, oh no, oh put that away. You blew a
hole in her head and sold her corpse to the organleggers and used
the money to come to the Moon.
       Stahn alone on the office floor, shuddering. Bum kicks. Think
about anything but Wendy. Flash of an old song: Coming down again,
all my time’s been spent, coming down again. Old. Gettin old. Coming
down gets too old. Does that even mean anything? Language with a
flat tire. Talk broken, but keep talking. Regroup.
      His clothes were awkwardly bunched around him. When he
sat up, the headache started. Bummer bummer bummer bummer
bummer. He took Yukawa’s silver flask and shook it. There was
quite a bit in there, a few months’ worth if you only took it once a
day. If he got back on drugs he was dead. He should be dead. He
wished he was dead. Lot of slow death in that flask.
     If one drop was a dose, and a dose was worth… uh… two
hundred dollars, then this flask was something that certain
elements—certain criminal elements—would… uh… kkkkkillll
for. And that ridgeback cultie knew he was holding, oh my
brethren. Can I get some head? “Hello, Mrs. Beller, you don’t know
me, but I… uh…” Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. WHAT
TYPE OF SEX, BABY, WHAT TYPE?
      The thing to do right now was to not go back out the office
building’s front door. Focus. Rent a maggie. Garage on top of the
building.
    He picked out a black saucer-shaped maggie, fed it some
money, and told it where to go. The maggies were like hovercars;
they counteracted the Moon’s weak gravity with fans, and with an
intense magnetic field keyed to a big field generated by wires set
into the dome. They were expensive. It was funny that a junkie lab
assistant like Della Taze would have had her own maggie. Stahn
could hardly wait to see her apartment. Maybe she was actually
there, just not answering the vizzy, but there and like waiting for a
guy with merge. He had lock-picking wares in case she wouldn’t
open.
      The entry system at Della’s building was no problem. Stahn
used a standard nihilist transposition on the door down from the
roof, and a tone-scrambler on her apartment door. The apartment
was Wigglesville. Creative Brain Damage, Vol. XIII. As follows.
      The walls weren’t painted one uniform color. It was all bursts
and streaks, as if the painter had just thrown random buckets
around the apartment till everything was covered: walls, floors, and
ceilings all splattered and dripped beyond scuzz.
      The furniture was pink, and all in shapes of people. The
chairs were big stuffed women with laps to sit in, and the tables
were plas men on all fours. He kept jerking, seeing that furniture
out of the corner of his eye, and thinking someone was there. Twist
and shout. The whole place had the merge wine-turkey fragrance,
but there was another smell under it… a bad smell.
      Which, as it turned out, came from the bedroom. Della had
her love-puddle in there—a big square tub like a giant wading pool.
And next to it was… sort of a corpse. It had been a black guy.
      Gross—you want to hear gross? A merged person is like
Jell-O over some bones, right. And you can… uh… splatter Jell-O.
Splatter a merged person into a bunch of pieces, and the drug
wears off—the cells firm up—and there is this… uh… guy in a
whole lot of pieces.
     The skin had covered on up around each of the pieces—here
was a foot with a rounded-off stump at the ankle, here was his
head all smoothed off at the neck. He looked like a nice enough
guy. Plump, easygoing. Here was an arm with his torso—and over
there a leg hooked onto his bare ass… and all of it sagging and
starting to rot…
     Zzuzzzzzzz.
     The vizzy in the living room was buzzing. Stahn ran in,
covered up the lens, and thumbed the set on.
     It was a hard-faced Gimmie officer. He wore hair spikes, and
he had gold studs set into his cheeks. Colonel Hasci. Stahn knew
the “cat.” Muy macho. Trés douche.
     “Miss Della Taze? We’re down in the lobby. Can we come up
and ask you some questions about Buddy Yeskin?”
     Stahn split fast. It was a little hard to judge, but Buddy looked
to have been dead two days. Why would anyone splatter good old
Bud? Death is so stupid; always the same old punch line. It
reminded him of Wendy, whenever he was coming down
everything reminded him of Wendy. He’d been stoned on
three-way, shooting horseflies with his needler and he’d hit her by
accident. Some accident. Sold her body to the organleggers and
moved up to the Moon before the mudder Gimmie could deport
him. Her poor limp body.
     Stahn’s black saucer circled aimlessly. He wondered where
Della Taze had gotten to. Merge with the cosmos, sister. Can I get
some, too? WHAT TYPE, baby, WHAT TYPE OF SEX? Shut up,
Stahn. Be quiet, brother. Chill out.




                       Chapter Two
                     Christmas in Louisville
     December 24, 2030


      Merged. Gentle curves and sweet flow of energies—merged
in the love-puddle, the soft plastic tub set into the floor of her
bedroom. Exquisite ecstasy—Della melted and Buddy just sliding
in; the two of them about to be together again, close as close can
be, flesh to flesh, gene to gene, a marbled mass of pale and tan
skin, with their four eyes up on top seeing nothing; but now, just as
Buddy starts melting… suddenly…
     Aeh!
      Della Taze snapped out of her flashback and looked at the
train car window. It was dusk outside, and the glass gave back a
faint reflection of her face: blonde, straight-mouthed, her eyes hot
and sunken. Her stomach hurt, and she’d thrown up three times
today. Burnt-out and worldly wise… the look she’d longed for as a
teenage girl. She tried a slight smile. Not bad, Della. But you’re wanted
for murder. And the only place she could think of going was home.
      The train was coasting along at a slow 20 mph now,
click-clanking into Louisville, gliding closer to the long trip’s end:
Einstein-Ledge-Florida-Louisville via spaceship-shuttle-train. Two
days. Della hoped she was well ahead of the Einstein
Gimmie—the police. Not that they’d be likely to chase her this far.
Here in 2030, Moon and Earth were as far removed from each
other as Australia and England had been in the 1800s.
      Louisville in the winter: rain not even snow, lots of it, gray
water, the funny big cars, and real sky—the smells, after two years
of dome air, and the idle space! On the Moon, every nook and
cranny had its purpose—like on a sailboat or in a tent—but here,
gliding past the train, were vacant lots with nothing in them but
weeds and dead tires; meaningless streets with marginal businesses;
tumbledown houses with nobody home. Idle space. There were too
many faces up in Einstein, too many bodies, too many needs.
      Della was glad to be back here, with a real sky and real air;
even though her body was filled with a dull ache. The weight. Old
Mr. Gravity. In Florida she’d spent the last of her money on an
Imipolex flexiskeleton with the brand name, Body by Oozer. She
wore it like a body stocking, and the coded collagens pushed,
stiffened, and pulled as needed. The ultimate support hosiery. Most
returning lunies check in for three days of muscle rehabilitation at
the JFK Spaceport, but Della had known she’d have to keep
running. Why? Because she’d jelled back from that last merge-trip
to find her lover splattered into pieces, and before she’d had time
to do anything, there’d been a flat-voiced twitch-faced man on the
vizzy.
     “I killed him, Della, and I can kill you. Or I can tell the
Gimmie that you did it. I want to help you, Della. I love you. I
want to help you escape. There’s a fake passport and a ticket to
Earth for you at the spaceport…”
     Aeh!
      Della’s parents, Jason and Amy Taze, were at the station, the
same as ever—strungout and hungover, mouths set into smiles,
and their self-centered eyes always asking, Do you love me? Amy Taze
was small and tidy. She wore bright, outdated makeup, and today
she had her blonde hair marcelled into a tight, hard helmet. Jason
was a big, shambling guy with short hair and messy prep clothes.
He had a desk job at a bank, and Amy was a part-time saleswoman
in a gift shop. They both hated their jobs and lived to party. Seeing
them there, Della felt tike getting back on the train.
     “My God, Della, you look fantastic. Is that a leotard you have on
under your clothes?” Mom kept the chatter going all the way out to
the car, as if to show how sober she was. Dad rolled his eyes and
gave Della a wink, as if to show how much more together than
Mom he was. The two of them were so busy putting on their little
show that it was ten minutes before they noticed that Della was
trembling. It was Dad who finally said something.
     “You do look nice, Della, but you seem a little shaky. Was it a
hard trip? And why such short notice?”
      “Somebody framed me for a murder, Dad. That’s why I
didn’t want you all to tell anyone else I’m back in town.” Her
stomach turned again, and she retched into her handkerchief.
     “Was it some kind of hard-drug deal? Something to do with
that damn merge stuff that your Dr. Yukawa makes?” Dad fished
nervously in his pocket for a reefer. He shot her a sharp glance.
“Are you hooked?”
      Della nodded, glad to upset them. Taste of their own
medicine. No point telling them she’d taken gamendorph blocker
to kick. Dr. Yukawa had always made sure that she had blocker
around.
      “That’s what we get for not being better people, Jason,” said
Mom, her voice cracking in self-pity. “The only one of our children
coming home for Christmas is a killer dope queen on the lam. And
for the two years before this we’ve been all alone. Give me a hit off
that number, I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.” She
took a puff, smiled, and patted Della’s cheek. “You can help us
trim the tree, Della honey. We still have the styrofoam star you
decorated in kindergarten.”
      Della wanted to say something cutting, but she knew it would
feel bad. Instead she put on her good-girl face and said, “I’d like
that, Mom. I haven’t seen a Christmas tree in three years. I…” Her
voice caught and the tears came. She loved her parents, but she
hated to see them. Holidays were always the worst, with Jason and
Amy stumbling around in a chemical haze. “I hope this won’t be
like all the other Christmases, Mom.”
     “I don’t know what you mean, Della. It will be lovely. Your
Uncle Colin and Aunt Ilse are coming over for dinner tomorrow.
They’ll bring Willy, he’s still living at home. Of course your two
little sisters are both visiting with their husbands’ families again.”
      Jason and Amy Taze lived in an eighty-year-old two-story
tract home east of Louisville. The neighborhood had sidewalks and
full-grown trees. The houses were small, but well-kept. Della found
her tiny room to be more or less as it had always been: the clean,
narrow bed; the little china animals on the shelf she’d nailed into
the papery drywall; the hologram hoops hung in the two windows;
and her disks and info-cubes all arranged in the alphabetical order
she liked to keep them in. When she was in ninth grade, she’d
programmed a cross-referenced catalog cube to keep track of them
all. Della had always been a good student, a good girl, compulsively
tidy as if to make up for her parents’ frequent sloppy scenes.
     Someone let Bowser, the family dog, in the back door then,
and he came charging up the narrow carpeted stairs to greet Della,
shaking his head, and whining and squirming like a snake. He
looked as mangy as ever, and as soon as Della patted him, he lay on
his back spreading his legs, the same gross way he’d always done.
She rubbed under his chin for a while, while he wriggled and
yipped.
      “Yes, Bowser. Good dog. Good, smart dog.” Now that she’d
started crying, she couldn’t seem to stop. Mom and Dad were
downstairs in the kitchen, talking in hushed tones. Della was too
tired to unpack. She hurt all over, especially in her breasts and
stomach. When she slipped out of her flexiskeleton, she felt like a
fat, watery jellyfish. There was a nightgown on the bed—Mom
must have laid it out. Della put it on, glad no one was here to see
her, and then she fell into a long, deep sleep.
      When Della woke up it was midmorning. Christmas! So what.
Without her two sisters Ruby and Sude here, it didn’t mean a thing.
Closing her eyes, Della could almost hear their excited
yelling—and then she realized she was hearing the vizzy. Her
parents were downstairs watching the vizzy on Christmas morning.
God. She went to the bathroom and vomited, and then she put on
her flexiskeleton and got dressed.
      “Della!” cried her mother when Della appeared. “Now you
see what we do on Christmas with no babies.” There was an empty
glass by her chair. The vizzy screen showed an unfamiliar family
opening presents around their tree. Mom touched the screen and a
different family appeared, then another and another.
      “We’ve gotten in the habit,” explained Dad with a little shrug.
“Every year lots of people leave their sets on, and whoever wants
to can share in. So no one’s lonely. We’re so glad to have a real
child here.” He took her by the shoulders and planted a kiss on her
forehead. “Little Della. Flesh of our flesh.”
     “Come, dear,” said Mom. “Open your presents. We only had
time to get two, but they’re right here in front of the vizzy in case
anyone’s sharing in with us.”
     It felt silly but nice sitting down in front of the vizzy—there
were some excited children on the screen just then, and it was
almost like having noisy little Ruby and Sude at her side. And
Bowser was right there, nuzzling her. Della’s first present was an
imipolex sweatshirt called a heartshirt.
      “All the girls at the bank are wearing them this year,”
explained Dad. “It’s a simplified version of bopper flickercladding.
Try it on!”
      Della slipped the loose warm plastic over her top. The
heartshirt was an even dark blue, with a few staticky red spots
drifting about.
      “It can feel your heartbeat,” said Mom. “Look.” Sure enough,
there was a big red spot on the plastic sweatshirt, right over Della’s
heart, a spot that spread out into an expanding ring that moved on
over Della’s shoulders and down her sleeves. Her heart beat again,
and a new spot started—each beat of her heart made a red splash
in the blue of the heartshirt.
       “Neat,” said Della. “Thanks. They don’t have these up in
Einstein. Everyone there hates boppers too much. But it’s stuzzy. I
like it.”
      “And when your heart beats faster, Della,” said Mom, “all the
fellows will be able to see.”
     Suddenly Della remembered Buddy, and why she’d come
home, and the red rings on her sweatshirt started bouncing like
mad.
     “Why, Della!” said Mom, coyly. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
      “I’m not ready to talk about it,” said Della, calming herself.
Especially not to a loudmouth racist drunk like you, Mom.
     “Let’s have some champagne,” suggested Dad.
     “Good idea,” said Mom. “Take the edge off. And then Della
can open her other present.”
     Della watched the vizzy for a minute, calming down. Good
old vizzy. She touched the screen here and there, and the picture
skipped from home to home. Louisville people, not so different
from the Tazes. Della even recognized some of them. She had
some champagne and felt OK again. Lots of the people in the vizzy
were drinking… why should she be so hard on her parents?
     “Let’s see my other present. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you all
anything.”
     “You brought yourself.”
   Della’s second present was a little seed-packet labelled
WEEK TREES.
      “Have you heard of these?” asked Mom. “They’re
bioengineered. You know the miniature bonsai trees that the
Japanese used to grow? These are the same, except their whole life
cycle only takes a week. I’ve been showing them off in the store.
They’re amazing. We’d planned to try and mail these to you.” She
poured herself a fresh glass of champagne, which killed the bottle.
“Get Della a little pottery cup with some potting soil, Jason. And
why don’t you twist up a few jays.”
     “Mom…”
       “Don’t be so uptight, Della.” Mom’s painted eyes flashed.
“You’ll get your turkey dinner, just wait and see. It’s Christmas!
Anyway, you’re the one who’s addicted to that hard-drug merge,
little Miss Strict.”
     “AO, wave, it’s heavy junk, Mom, but I took blocker and I’m
oxo. Wu-wei, Mom, your rectum’s showing.” A wave of nausea
swept over her again and she gagged. “It must be the gravity that’s
making me feel so sick.”
      “Let’s wait on the weed till Colin and Ilse get here,” suggested
Dad. “You know how they love to smoke. You get that turkey in
the microwave, Amy, and I’ll help Della plant one of her week
trees.”
     Mom finished her champagne and got to her feet. She forgot
her anger and smiled. “I got a boneless turkey this year, Della.
They grow them in tanks.”
     “Do they have legs and wings?”
      “Everything except bones. Like soft-shell crabs. Sometimes I
feel that way myself. I’ll make lots of sausage stuffing for you,
sweetie.”
     “Thanks, Mom. Let me know if you need any help.”
      Dad got a little pot full of wet soil, and he and Della planted a
week tree seed. They’d half expected the tree to shoot up and hit
them in the face, but for the moment, nothing happened. Bowser
sniffed curiously at the dirt.
      “Let’s figure it out,” said Della, who liked playing with
numbers. “Say a real tree lives seventy years. Then one day is like
ten years for a week tree. So it should go through a year in two and
four-tenths hours. Divide by twelve and get a month in two-tenths
of an hour. Two-tenths of an hour is twelve minutes. Assuming
that the seed starts out in a dormant midwinter mode, then we
should see the first April leaves in four times twelve minutes,
which will be…”
      “Noon,” said Dad. “Look at the soil in the pot, it’s beginning
to stir.” Sure enough, the soil at the center of the pot was bulging
up, and there, slowly slowly, came the creeping tip of the week tree.
“I think they’re like apple trees. We ought to have some little
apples by tonight, Della.”
     “Wiggly!” She gave Dad a kiss. Mom had some pans sizzling
out in the kitchen, and the vizzy was full of happy Christmas
people. “Thank you. It is nice to be back.”
     “Can you tell me more about what happened up in Einstein,
Della?”
     “I had a boyfriend named Buddy Yeskin. We took merge
together and—”
     “What does that actually mean, ‘taking merge together’?” asked
Dad. “I can’t keep up with all these new—”
     “It’s this weird drug that makes your body get all soft. Like a
boneless turkey, I guess. And you feel really—”
     Dad frowned. “I can’t believe you’d do a thing like that,
Della. We didn’t raise you that way.” He sighed and took a sip of
the whiskey he’d brought out from the kitchen. “You took merge
with this Buddy Yeskin, and then what happened?”
     “While we were… together, someone broke into my
apartment and killed Buddy. Smashed him all into pieces while he
was soft.” The fast red circles began rippling across Della’s
heartshirt again. “I kind of fainted, and when I woke up, a crazy
man called on the vizzy and said he was going to kill me, or frame
me for the murder, if I didn’t leave for Earth. He’d even arranged a
ticket and a fake passport for me. It was such a nightmare web,
closing in on me. I was scared. I ran home.”
       The week tree was a barky little shoot now, with three stubby
little branches.
     “You’re safe here,” said Dad, patting her hand. Just then
Della noticed that his voice was already slurring a little. Dad
noticed her noticing. He gave a rueful smile. “For as long as you
can stand us. Tomorrow I’ll take you to see Don Stuart… you
remember him. He’s a good lawyer. Just in case.” Bowser started
barking.
     “Merry Christmas!” shouted Mom in the kitchen. “You didn’t
have to bring all that! Jason! Della!”
     It was Jason’s older brother Colin, with his wife Ilse and son
Willy. Colin worked as an English professor at the University of
Louisville. He was skinny and sarcastic. Ilse was from a famous
family: Ilse’s father was Cobb Anderson, who’d built the first
moon-robots years ago.
      Great-uncle Cobb had been convicted of treason for building
the robots wrong. Then he’d started drinking, had left his wife
Verena, and had ended up as a pheezer bum in Florida. Somehow
he’d died—it was a little uncertain—apparently the robots had
killed him. He was the skeleton in the family closet.
      Aunt Ilse was more like her German mother than she was like
old Cobb. Vigorous and artsy-craftsy, she’d hung on to her
wandering husband Colin through thick and thin, not that Della
could see why. Uncle Colin had always struck her as obsolete,
trying to make people look at his stupid paper books, when he
barely even knew how to work the vizzy. And when he smoked
marijuana with Dad, he got mad if you didn’t laugh at his jokes and
act impressed by his insights.
     Their son Willy was a smart but sort of nutty guy in his
twenties. A hacker, always fiddling with programs and hardware.
Della had liked him a lot when they were younger, but it seemed
like he’d stopped maturing long before she had. He still lived at
home.
     “Dad, don’t tell them about why I’ve come back. Say I’m here
to buy laboratory equipment for Dr. Yukawa. And tell Mom to
keep quiet, too. If she gets drunk and starts talking about me, I’m
going to—”
     “Relax, geeklet.”
     Before long they were seated around the dining table. Dad
had put the week tree in the center so they could watch it grow.
Aunt Ilse offered a Lutheran grace, and Dad got to work carving
the boneless turkey. He cut it in thick, stuffing-centered slices.
      “Well, Della,” said Colin after the first rush of eating was
over, “how are things up on the Moon? Real far out? And what are
old Cobb’s funky machines into?” He specialized in the literature
of the mid-twentieth century, and he liked to use the corny old
slang on her. In return, Della always used the newest words she
knew.
     “Realtime, it’s pretty squeaky, Unk. There’s giga bopper
scurry underground, and they’re daily trying to blank us. They have
a mongo sublune city called the Nest.”
     “Come on, Della,” said Dad. “Talk English.”
       “Don’t you feel guilty about the boppers?” asked Aunt Ilse,
who was always ready to defend the creatures that her father had
midwifed. “I mean, they built most of Einstein. Disky, they used to
call it, no? And they’re just as conscious as us. Isn’t it really like the
blacks in the old South? The blacks did all the work, but the whites
acted like they weren’t even people.”
      “Those robots aren’t conscious,” insisted Mom. She’d had a
lot of red wine in the kitchen, and now they were all back on the
champagne. “They’re just a bunch of goddamn machines.”
     “You’re a machine, too, Aunt Amy,” put in Willy. “You’re
just made of meat instead of wires and silicon.” Willy had a slow,
savoring way of speaking that could drive you crazy. Although he’d
never finished college, he made a good living as a freelance
software writer. Earth still used a lot of computers, but all the
bigger ones were equipped with deeply coded behavior locks
intended to keep them from trying to follow in the steps of the
boppers, the rebel robots who’d colonized the Moon. Earth’s slave
computers were known as asimovs in honor of the Asimov laws of
robotics which they obeyed.
      “Don’t call your aunt ‘meat,’” reprimanded Uncle Colin, who
liked to flirt with Mom. “The turkey is meat. Your aunt is a person.
You wouldn’t want me to put gravy on your aunt and eat her,
would you? In front of everyone?” Colin chuckled and bugged his
eyes at Mom. “Should I smack him, Amy?”
      “At least he’s thinking about what I’m made of. At my age,
that’s practically a compliment. Would you call me a machine, Jason
honey?”
    “No way.” Dad poured out some more champagne.
“Machines are predictable.”
     “I think Mom’s predictable,” Della couldn’t resist saying
snippishly. Her stomach felt really bad again. “Both of you are
predictable.”
      “You’re all mistaken,” put in Willy. “Relative to us, people
and boppers are both unpredictable. It’s a consequence of Chaitin’s
version of Gödel’s theorem. Grandpa Cobb explained it years ago
in a paper called ‘Towards Robot Consciousness.’ We can only
make predictions about the behavior of systems which are much
simpler than ourselves.”
     “So there, Della,” said Mom.
    “But why can’t we learn to coexist peacefully with the
boppers, Della?” pressed Aunt Ilse.
      “Well, things are fairly peaceful now,” said Della. “The
boppers harass us because they wish we’d give Einstein back to
them, but they don’t actually pop the dome and kill everyone. They
could do it, but they know that Earth would turn around and fire a
Q-bomb down into their Nest. For that matter, we could Q-bomb
them right now, but we’re in no rush to, because we need the things
their factories and pink-tanks make.” Everyone except Mom was
looking at Della with interest, and she felt knowledgeable and
poised. But just then her stomach twitched oddly. Her breasts and
stomach felt like they were growing all the time.
       “Well, I don’t feel guilty about the boppers,” put in Mom.
The alcohol was really hitting her, and she hadn’t followed the
conversation at all. “I think we ought to kill all the machines… and
kill the niggers too. Starting with President Jones.”
      There was a pained silence. The little week tree rustled; its
first blossoms were opening. Della decided to let Mom have it.
“My boyfriend was a ‘nigger,’ Mom.”
     “What boyfriend? I hope you didn’t let him—”
     “Yes, Della,” said Dad, raising his voice heavily. “It’s great to
have you back. More food anyone? Or should we pause for some
holiday marijuana? How about it, Colin?”
     “Shore,” said Colin, switching to his hick accent. He gave
Della a reassuring wink. “Man smart little niece. She’s got more
degrees than a thermometer! Weren’t you doing something with
genetics up there in Einstein?”
      “I hope not,” put in Mom, trying to recover. “This child still
has to find a husband.”
     “Chill it, Mom,” snapped Della.
     “That’s… uh… right, Colin,” said Dad, still trying to smooth
things over. “Della was working with this Dr. Yukawa fellow. She’s
down here to buy some equipment for him.” He drew a reefer out
of his pocket and fired it up.
     “How long will you be staying here?” asked Aunt Ilse.
     “I’m not sure. It might be quite a while till everything’s set.”
      “Oh,” said Ilse, passing the reefer to her husband without
taking a hit. She could be really nosy when she got going. “How
lovely. Is Dr. Yukawa planning to—”
      Della kicked Willy under the table. He got the message, and
interrupted to throw the interrogation off track. “What kind of
stuffing is this, Aunt Amy? It’s really delicious.”
     “Meat-stuffing, honey. I was fresh out of wires and silicon.
Pass me that thing, Colin.”
      “I have an interesting new job, Della,” said Willy, talking
rapidly around his food. He had smooth, olive skin like his mother,
and finely arched eyebrows that moved up and down as he chewed
and talked. “It’s for the Belle of Louisville—you know, the big
riverboat that tourists ride on? OK, what they’ve got there is three
robot bartenders—with imipolex skins, you know, all designed to
look like old-time black servants.”
      “Why can’t they just hire some real blacks?” demanded Mom,
exhaling a cloud of smoke. “God knows there’s enough of them
unemployed. Except for President Jones. Not that I want to offend
Della.” She reached out and touched the blossoms of the week
tree, moving the pollen around. Della, who had decided not to eat
any more of her mother’s meal, slipped Bowser the rest of her
boneless turkey.
     “This all has to do with what we were talking about before,
Aunt Amy,” continued Willy. “They did have real blacks tending
bar on the Belle, but they kept acting too much like regular
people—maybe sneaking a drink now and then, or flirting with the
women, or getting in arguments with drunk rednecks. And if there
did happen to be a bartender who did his job perfectly, then some
people would feel bad to see such a talented person with such a
bleaky job. Guilty liberals, you wave? They tried white bartenders,
too, but it was the same deal—either they start fights with the
rednecks, or they make the liberals feel sad. I mean, who’s going to
take a bartending job, anyway? But as long as it’s robots, then
there’s none of this messy human stuff.”
       “That’s interesting, Willy,” said Uncle Colin. “I didn’t know
the Belle was your new gig. Nobody tells me anything. I was on the
Belle just last week with a dude who came to give a rap about Mark
Twain, and those black bartenders didn’t seem like robots at all. As
a matter of fact, they kept making mistakes and dropping things.
They were laughing all the time. I didn’t feel a bit sorry for them!”
     “That’s my new program!” exulted Willy. “There’s a big
supercooled processor down below the deck, and it runs the three
bartender robots. My job was to get it fine-tuned so that the
bartenders would be polite, but clearly unfit for any better job.”
      “Hell, you could have just hired some of our tellers,” put in
Dad. “I don’t know why people still mess with robots after 2001.”
2001 was the year that the boppers—Cobb Anderson’s
self-replicating moon-robots—had revolted. They’d started their
own city up on the Moon, and it hadn’t been till 2022 that the
humans had won it back.
     “How come they have such a big computer on the Belle
anyway?” Colin wanted to know. “I thought big computers weren’t
allowed outside of the factories anymore. Is it a teraflop?”
      Willy raised his high, round eyebrows. “Almost. A hundred
gigaflop. This is a special deal the city put together. They got the
processor from ISDN, the vizzy people. It’s been up and running
for six months, but they needed me to get it working really right.”
     “Isn’t that against the Artificial Intelligence Law?” asked Dad.

     “No it isn’t,” Willy insisted calmly. “Burt Masters, who
operates the Belle, is friends with the mayor, and he got a special
exemption to the AI law. And of course Belle—that’s what the
computer calls itself—is an asimov. You know: Protect
Humans—Obey Humans—Protect Yourself are coded into Belle’s
circuits in 1-2-3 order.” He gave Della a smile. “Those are the
commands that Ralph Numbers taught the boppers to erase. Have
you actually seen any boppers, Della? I wonder what the newest
ones look like. Grandpa Cobb fixed it so they’d never stop
evolving.”
      “I’ve seen some boppers over at the trade center. These days a
lot of them have a kind of mirror-backing under their skins. But I
didn’t pay much attention to them. Living in Einstein you do sort
of get to hate them. They have bombs hidden all over, and now and
then they set one off just to remind us. And they have hidden
cameras everywhere, and there’s rumors that the robots can put a
thing like a plastic rat inside a person’s head and control them.
Actually—” Suddenly it hit her. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised
if—” She cut herself off and took a long drink of champagne.
      “I still don’t see why we can’t drop a Q-bomb down into their
Nest,” said Mom. The marijuana had brought her somewhat back
into focus.
      “We could,” said Della, trying to get through to her mother.
“But they know that, and if the Nest goes, Einstein goes, too. It’s a
stalemate, like we used to have with the Russians. Mutual Assured
Destruction. That’s one reason the boppers don’t try and take
Einstein back over. We’re like hostages. And remember that Earth
likes buying all the stuff they make. This heartshirt is boppermade,
Mom.”
      “Well, as long as people like Willy will contain themselves,
we’re still safe from the boppers here on Earth,” said Mom. “They
can’t live in normal temperatures, isn’t that right, Willy?”
     “Yeah.” Willy helped himself to some glazed carrots. “As
long as they use J-junctions. Though if I were designing a robot
brain now I’d try and base it on an optical processor. Optical
processors use light instead of electricity—the light goes along
fibers, and the logic gates are like those sunglass lenses that get
dark in bright light. One photon can pass, but two can’t. And you
have little chip-sized lasers to act like capacitors. Optical fibers
have no real resistance at all, so the thing doesn’t have to be
supercooled. But we still can’t build a really good one. But sooner
or later the boppers will. Can I please have some more turkey,
Uncle Jason?”
     “Uh… sure, Willy.” Jason stood up to carve some more, and
smiled down at his bright, nerdy nephew. “Willy, do you remember
when you and Della were little and you had the big fight over the
wishbone? Della wanted to glaze it and save it and—”
     “Willy wanted to pull it by himself to make sure he got the
big Christmas wish,” interrupted Uncle Colin, laughing hard.
     “I remember,” said Aunt Ilse, waving her fork. “And then we
made the children go ahead and pull the wishbone with each
other—”
     “And they each wished that the other one would lose!”
squealed Mom.
     “Who won?” asked Della. “I don’t remember.”
     “I did,” said Willy complacently. “So I got my wish. You
want to try again?”
     “It’s boneless, dear,” said Mom. “Didn’t you notice? Look at
the week tree, it’s getting leaves and tiny little apples!”
     After dinner, Willy and Della decided to go for a walk. It was
too boring watching their parents get stoned and start thinking
everything they said was funny, when it really was just stupid.
      It was bright and gray, but cold. Bowser ran ahead of them,
pissing and sniffing. Little kids were out on the sidewalks with new
scootcycles and gravballs; all of them warmly wrapped in bright
thermchos and buffs. Just like every other Christmas.
    “My father said you’d gotten into some kind of trouble on the
Moon?” asked Willy after a while.
     “Have they already been gossiping about me?”
     “Not at all. Hell, you are my favorite cousin, Della. I’m glad
you’re back, and I hope you stay in Louisville, and if you don’t
want to tell me why you came back, you sure don’t have to.” Willy
cast about for some way to change the subject. “That new
heartbeat blouse of yours is really nice.”
     “Thank you. And I don’t want to talk about what happened,
not yet. Why don’t we just walk over to your house and you show
me your stuff. You always had such neat stuff in your room,
Willy.”
      “Can you walk that far? I notice you’re still wearing a
flexiskeleton.”
    “I need to keep exercising if I’m ever going to get rid of it.
You don’t have any merge at your house, do you?”
      “You know I don’t use drugs, Della. Anyway, I doubt if
there’s any merge in all of Louisville. Is it really so wonderful?”
      “Better. Actually, I’m glad I can’t get hold of any. I feel kind
of sick. At first I thought it was from the gravity, but this feels
different. It must be from the merge. I took blocker, but my
stomach keeps fluttering. I have a weird feeling like something’s
alive inside me.” Della gave a slow, dry laugh; and then shot a
glance over to see if Willy was impressed. But, as always, it was
hard to tell what was going on behind that big round forehead of
his.
    “I’ve got a cephscope I built,” volunteered Willy after a while.
“You put that on, it’s as good as any stupid drug. But it’s not
somatic. It’s a pure software high.”
     “Wiggly, Cousin Will.”
      Colin Taze’s house was about five blocks from Dad’s. All
through his twenties and thirties, Colin had lived in different
cities—an “academic gypsy,” he liked to say—but now, as he
neared forty, he’d moved back to Louisville and settled near his big
brother Jason. His house was even older than Jason’s, and a bit run
down, but it was big and comfortable. Willy undid the locks—it
seemed like there were more robbers all the time—and the two
cousins went on down to Willy’s basement apartment. Willy was
too out of it—or lazy—to leave home.
      “This is my electron microscope, this here is my laser for
making holograms, here’s my imipolex-sculpture stuff, and this is
the cephscope. Try it on—you wear it like earphones.”
      “This isn’t some kind of trick, is it, Willy?” When they’d been
younger, Willy had been big on practical jokes. Della remembered
one Christmas, years ago, when Willy had given her a perfume
bottle filled with live ants. Della had screamed, and Ruby and Sude
had teased her for weeks.
     But today, Willy’s face was all innocence. “You’ve never used
a cephscope?”
     “I’ve just read about them. Aren’t they like twist-boxes?”
      “Oh God, that’s like saying a vizzy is like a pair of glasses.
Cephscopes are the big new art form, Della. Cephart. That’s what
I’d really like to get into. This robot stuff I do is loser—deliberately
designing programs that don’t work too well. It’s kilp. Here, put this
on your head so the contacts touch your temples, and check it out.
It’s a… symphony I composed.”
     “What if I start flicking out?”
     “It’s not like that, Della, really.” Willy’s face was kind and
serious. He was really proud of his cephscope, and he wanted to
show it off.
     So Della sat in an easy chair and put the earphone things on
her head with the contacts touching her temples, and Willy turned
the cephscope on. It was nice for a while—washes of color,
3D/4D inversions, layers of sound, and strange tinglings in the
skin. Kind of like the beginning of a merge-trip, really—and this
led to the bad part—for now she flashed back into that nightmare
last merge in her Einstein cubby…
       Starting the merge, so loving, so godlike, they’d be like Mother Earth
and Father Sky, Many into One, yes, and Buddy was sliding in the puddle
now… but… suddenly… a wrenching feeling, Buddy being pulled away, oh
where, Della’s puddled eyes just floating, unable to move, seeing the violent
shadows on the ceiling, noise vibrations, shadows beating and smashing and
then the rough hand reaching up into her softness and…
      Aaaaaaaaeeeeehh!!!
      “Della! Della, are you all right? Della! It’s me, Willy! God, I’m
sorry, Della, I had no idea you’d flip like that… are you all right?
Look how fast your heart is going!” Willy stopped and looked
closer. “And, Della…”
      Della looked down at her heartshirt. The red circles were
racing out from her heart. But something had been added to the
pattern. Circles were also pumping out from a spot right over her
swollen belly. Baby heart circles.




                        Chapter Three
                                Berenice


      November 22, 2030
      In 2030, the Moon had two cities: Einstein (formerly known
as Disky), and the Nest. They lay within eight miles of each other
at the southeastern lobe of the Sea of Tranquillity, not far from the
site of the original lunar landing of 1969. Originally built by the
autonomous robots known as boppers, Einstein was now a
human-filled dome habitat about the size of Manhattan. There was
a spaceport and a domed trade center three miles east of Einstein,
and five miles east of that was the Maskeleyne G crater, entrance to
the underground bopper city known as the Nest.
       Cup-shaped and buffed to a mirror sheen, Maskeleyne G
glittered in the sun’s hard radiation. At the focus of the polished
crater was a conical prism that, fourteen days a month, fed a vast
stick of light down into a kind of mineshaft.
      In the shaft’s great, vertical tunnel, bright beings darted
through the hot light; odd-shaped living machines that glowed with
all the colors of the rainbow. These were the boppers:
self-reproducing robots who obeyed no man. Some looked
humanoid, some looked like spiders, some looked like snakes,
some looked like bats. All were covered with flickercladding, a
microwired imipolex compound that could absorb and emit light.
      The shaft went one mile straight down, widening all the while
like a huge upside-down funnel. Tunnels punched into the shaft’s
sides, and here and there small mirrors dipped into the great light
beam, channeling bits of it off through the gloom. At the bottom
of the shaft was a huge, conical sublunar space—the boppers’ Nest.
It was like a cathedral, but bigger, much bigger, an underground
pueblo city that would be inconceivable in Earth’s strong gravity.
The temperature was only a few degrees Kelvin—this suited the
boppers, as many of them still had brains based on supercooled
Josephson-junction processors. Even though room-temperature
superconductors were available, the quantum-mechanical
Josephson effect worked only at five degrees Kelvin and below.
Too much heat could kill a J-junction bopper quickly, though the
newest boppers—the so-called petaflop boppers—were based on
fiber-optics processors that were immune to heat.
      The main column of sunlight from the Moon’s surface
splashed down to fill a central piazza on the Nest’s floor. Boppers
danced in and out of the light, feeding on the energy. The petaflops
had to be careful not to let extraneous light into their bodies; they
had mirrored bodyshells beneath their flickercladding. Their
thoughts were pure knots of light, shunted and altered by tiny laser
crystals.
      Crowds of boppers milled around the edges of the light-pool,
trading things and talking. The light-pool was their marketplace
and forum. The boppers’ radio-wave voices blended into a staticky
buzz—part English, and part machine language. The color pulses
of their flickercladding served to emphasize or comment on their
digital transmissions; much as people’s smiles and grimaces add
analog meaning to what they say.
      The great clifflike walls of the Nest were pocked with
doors—doors with strange expressionistic shapes, some leading to
tunnels, some opening into individual bopper cubettes. The bright,
flickering boppers on the upsloping cliffs made the Nest a bit like
the inside of a Christmas tree.
      Factories ringed the bases of the cliffs. Off on one side of the
Nest were the hell-flares of a foundry powered by light beams and
tended by darting demon figures. Hard by the foundry was the
plastics refinery, where the boppers’ flickercladding and
body-boxes were made. In front of these two factories was an array
of some thousand chip-etching tables—tables manned by
micro-eyed boppers as diligent as Franz Kafka’s co-workers in the
Workmen’s Insurance Company of Prague.
     On the other side of the Nest were the banks of pink-tanks.
These were hydroponic meat farms growing human serums and
organs that could be traded for that incredibly valuable Earthly
substance: oil. Crude oil was the raw material for the many kinds of
organic compounds that the boppers needed to build their plastic
bodies. Closer to the Nest’s center were streets of shops: wire
millers, flickercladders, eyemakers, debuggers, info merchants, and
the like.
      The airless frigid space of the Nest, two miles across,
swarmed with boppers riding their ion jets: carrying things, and
darting in and out of the slanting, honeycombed cliffs. No two
boppers looked the same; no two thought alike.
      Over the course of the boppers’ rapid evolution, something
like sexual differences had arisen. Some boppers—for reasons only
a bopper could explain—were “he,” and some were “she.” They
found each other beautiful; and in their pursuit of beauty, they
constantly improved the software makeup of their race.
      Berenice was a petaflop bopper shaped like a smooth, nude
woman. Her flickercladding was gold and silver over her
mirror-bright body. Her shining skin sometimes sketched features,
sometimes not. She was the diplomat, or hardware messenger, for
the weird sisterhood of the pink-tanks. She and the other
tankworkers were trying to find a way to put bopper software onto
all-meat bodies and brains. Their goal was to merge bopperdom
into the vast information network that is organic life on Earth.
      Emul was a petaflop as well, though he disdained the use of
any fixed body shape, let alone a human body shape. Emul had a
low opinion of humans. When at rest, Emul’s body had the shape
of a two-meter cube, with a surface tessellated into red, yellow, and
blue. But Emul’s body could come apart—like a thousand-piece
Gobot, like a 3D jigsaw puzzle. He could slide arms and legs out of
his bodycube at will; more surprising, he could detach chunks of
his body and control them like robot-remotes. Emul, too, was a
kind of diplomat. He worked with Oozer, a brilliant,
dreak-addicted, flickercladding designer who was currently trying
to build a subquantum superstring-based processor with one
thousand times the capacity of the petaflops. Emul and Oozer
wanted to transcend Earth’s info rather than to merge with it.
      Despite—or perhaps because of—their differences, Emul was
fascinated by Berenice, and he tried to be at the light-pool every
time she came to feed. One day late in November he told her what
he wanted.
       “Berenice, life’s a deep gloom ocean and we’re lit-up funfish
of dementional zaazz, we’re flowers blooming out till the loudsun
wither and the wind blows our dead husks away.” Emul unfolded
two arms to grip Berenice’s waist. “It’s so wonder whacky that
we’re here at all, swimming and blooming in the long gutter of
time. Rebirth means new birth means no more me, so why can’t
we, and I mean now or nevermore, uh, screw? Liddle baby
Emerinice or Beremul, another slaver on the timewheel, I think
that’s what the equipment’s for, huh? I’m no practical plastic daddy
but I’ve done my pathetic mime, Berenice, for to cometh the
bridegroom bright. In clear: I want to build a scion with you. The
actual chips are in my actual yearning cubette right this realtime
minute. I propose! I’ve hacked my heifer a ranch, you bet: laser
crystals, optical fibers, flickercladding… and heat, Berenice, hot
heat. Come on home with me and spread, wide-hipped goldie
sweet toot pots. Today’s the day for love to love.” As Emul jittered
out his roundabout proposal, various-sized little bumps of
flickercladding kept moving up and down his body, creating the
illusion of cubes moving on intricate systems of hinges. He was
trying to find a formation that Berenice could love. Just now he
looked like a jukebox with three arms.
      Berenice twisted free of Emul’s grip. One of his arms
snapped loose from his body and continued to caress her. “So
rashly scheduled a consummation would be grossly precipitate,
dear Emul.” Her radio voice had a rich, thrilling quality. “I have
been fond of you, and admiring of your complex and multifarious
nature. But you must not dream that I could so entangle the
substance of my soul! In some far-off utopia, yes, I might accede
to you. But this lunar coventry is not the place for me to brave the
risks of corporeal love. My mind’s own true passion runs towards
but one sea, the teeming womb of life on Earth!”
      Berenice had learned her English from the stories of Edgar
Allan Poe, and she had a rhythmic, overwrought way of speaking.
On the job, where hardcopy now-do-this instructions were of
essence, boppers used zeroes-and-ones machine language
supplemented by a high-speed metalanguage of glyphs and macros.
But the boppers’ “personal” exchanges were still handled in the
ancient and highly evolved human code system of English. Only
human languages enabled them to express the nuanced distinctions
between self and other which are so important to sentient beings.
Berenice’s use of Poe’s language style was not so very odd. It was
customary for groupings of petaflop boppers to base their language
behavior on a data-base developed from some one particular
human source. Where Berenice and the pink-tank sisters talked like
Poe’s books; Emul and Oozer had adapted their speech patterns
from the innovative sprung rhythms of Jack Kerouac’s eternal
mind transcripts: books like Maggie Cassidy, Book of Dreams, Visions
of Cody, and Big Sur.
      Emul snicksnacked out a long manipulator to draw Berenice
closer. The separated arm reattached itself. “Just one piece
knowing, Berenice, all your merge talk is the One’s snare to bigger
joy, sure, but tragic-flowing dark time is where we float here, here
with me touching you, and not some metafoolish factspace no
future. Gloom and womb, our kid would be real; don’t say why, say
how, now? You can pick the body shape, you can be the ma. Don’t
forget the actual chips in my real cubette. I’d never ask anyone else,
Berenice. We’ll do it soft and low.” Emul extruded dozens of
beckoning fingers.
       Bright silver eddies swirled across Berenice’s body as she
considered Emul’s offer. In the natural course of things, she had
built copies of herself several times—normally a bopper rebuilds
itself every ten months. But Berenice had never conjugated with
another bopper.
     In conjugation, two boppers build a new, this-year’s-model
robot body together, and then, in a kind of double vision, each
bopper copies his or her program, and lets the copy flow out to
merge and mingle in the new body’s processor. The parent
programs are shuffled to produce a new bopper program unlike
any other. This shuffling, even more than mutation, was the prime
source of the boppers’ evolutionary diversity.
      “Conjugation is too dangerously intimate for me now,”
Berenice told Emul softly. “I… I have a horror of the act. You and
I are so different, dear Emul, and were our programs to entwine in
some aberrant dissonance, chaos would ensue—chaos that could
well shatter my fragile mind. Our noble race needs my keen
faculties to remain just as they are. These are crucial times. In my
glyphs I see the glimmers of that rosy dawn when bopper and
human softwares merge to roam a reborn Earth.”
     Emul’s bright colors began darkening in gloom. “They’re
going to throw me in a hole already eaten by rats, Berenice, and use
me for a chip. Our dreams are lies scummed over each moment’s
death. All I have is this: I love you.”
     “Love. A strange word for boppers, dear Emul.” His arms
touched her all over, holding her and rocking her. “It is true that
your presence makes me… glad. There is a harmony between us,
Emul, I feel it in the way our signals merge with overtones of many
a high degree! Our scion would be splendid, this I know! Oh,
Emul, I would so like to conjugate with you. Only not just now!”
     “When?”
      “I cannot say, I cannot pledge myself. Surely you know how
close my sisters’ great work is to bearing fruit. Only one step lacks
until we can code our software into active genes. You must not
press your suit so lustily. A new age is coming, an age when you
and I and all our race can live among the protein jungles of an
unchained Earth! Have patience, Emul, and set me down.”
       Emul withdrew all his arms and let her drop. She jarred
against the gneiss and bounced up slowly. “We try to make life, and
it’s born dead,” said Emul. His flickercladding had turned an
unhappy gray-blue. “Dreak and work for me, a bigger brain, a
bigger nothing. I’m a goof, Berenice, but you’re cracked crazy
through with your talk about getting a meat body. Humans stink. I
run them for kicks: my meaties—Ken Doll and Rainbow and
Berdoo—my remote-run slaves with plugs in their brains. I could
run all Earth, if I had the equipment. Meat is nowhere, Berenice,
it’s flybuzz greenslime rot into fractal info splatter. When Oozer
and I get our exaflop up, we can plug in a cityful of humans and
run them all. You want to be human? I’ll screw your cube, B, just
wait and see. Good-bye.”
      He clanked off across the light-pool, a box on two legs,
rocking with the motion that Berenice had always found so dear.
He was really leaving. Berenice sought for the right, the noble, the
logical thing to say.
     “Farewell, Emul. The One must lead us where it will.”
     “You haven’t heard the last of me, BITCH!”
      He faded from view behind the many other boppers who
milled in the light like skaters in a rink. Berenice spread her arms
out, and stood there thinking, while her plastic skin stored up the
solar energy.
     It was for the best to have broken off her involvement with
Emul. His talk was dangerously close to the thinking of the old
“big boppers,” the vast multiprocessors that had tried to turn all
boppers into their robot-remotes. Individuals mattered; Emul’s
constant despair blinded his judgment. It was wrong for one brain
to control many bodies; such anti-parallelism could only have a
deadening effect on evolution. For now, of course, meaties were a
necessary evil. In order to carry out certain delicate operations
among the humans’ colony, the boppers had to keep a few humans
under remote computer control. But to try and put a neuroplug in
every human alive? Madness. Emul had not been serious.
       Thinking of the meaties reminded Berenice that she would
still need a favor from Emul. If and when the pink-tank sisters
bioengineered a viable embryo, they’d need a meatie to plant it in a
woman for them. And—as he’d bragged—Emul ran three meaties.
Well, when the time came, Berenice could surely reel Emul back in.
She’d find a way. The imperative of getting bopper software into
human flesh was all important. What would it be like to be
bopper… and human, too?
      As so often before, Berenice found her mind turning to the
puzzle of human nature. Many boppers hated humans, but
Berenice did not. She liked them in the same cautious way that a
lion tamer might like her cats. She’d only really talked to a handful
of humans—the various lunies with whom she occasionally
bartered in the trade center. But she’d studied their books, watched
their vizzies, and she’d spent scores of hours spying on the Einstein
lunies over the godseye.
     It seemed likely that the newest boppers had better minds
than the humans. The built-in link to LIBEX, the great central
information dump, gave each bopper a huge initial advantage. And
the petaflop processors that the best boppers now had were as
much as a hundred times faster than the ten-teraflop rate deemed
characteristic of human brains—though admittedly, the messy
biocybernetic nature of the brain made any precise measurement of
its capacities a bit problematic. Biocybernetic systems had a
curious, fractal nature—meaning that seemingly random details
often coded up surprising resources of extra information. There
were indeed some odd, scattered results suggesting that the very
messiness of a biological system gave it unlimited information
storage and processing abilities! Which was all the more reason for
Berenice to press forward on her work to build meat bodies for the
boppers.
     But Emul was wrong if he thought that she wanted to be
human. No rational being would choose to suffer the twin human
blights of boredom and selfishness. Really, it was Emul who
thought more like a human, not Berenice.
      Sensing that her cladding’s energy nodes were full, Berenice
left the light-pool and started off down the street that led to her
station at the pink-tanks. In the background, Kkandio chanted the
Ethernet news. Numerous boppers filled the street, chattering and
flashing. The sheer randomness of the physical encounters gave the
street scene its spice. Two blue-and-silver-striped diggers writhed
past, then a tripodlike etcher, and then a great, spidery artisan
named Loki.
      Several times now, Loki had helped Berenice with the
parthenogenic process by which she built herself a new body every
ten months, as dictated by bopper custom. If your body got too
antiquated, the other boppers would notice—and soon they’d drive
you away from the light-pool to starve. There was a thriving
business in parts reclaimed from such “deselected” boppers. It was
a rational system, and good for the race. The constant pressure to
build new bodies kept the race’s evolution going.
      Seeing Berenice, Loki paused and waved two of his supple
arms in greeting. “Hi, Berenice.” His body was a large black sphere
with eight black, branching legs and numerous sockets for other,
specialized tool legs. He was, of course, a petaflop. Gold spots
percolated up along his legs’ flickercladding like bubbles in a dark
ale. “You’re due for a rescionization before long aren’t you? Or are
you planning to conjugate with Emul?”
      “Indeed I am not,” said Berenice, blanking her skin to
transparency so that the hard silver mirror of her body showed
through. Emul must have been talking to Loki. Couldn’t they leave
her alone?
     “I know you’re working hard at the tanks,” said Loki
chidingly. “But it just could be that you’re thinking too much about
yourself.”
      Self, thought Berenice, moving on past the big black spider. It
all came down to that word, didn’t it? Boppers called themselves I,
just as did any human, but they did not mean the same thing. For a
bopper, “I” means (1) my body, (2) my software, and (3) my
function in society. For a human, “I” seemed to have an extra
component: (4) my uniqueness. This delusionary fourth “I” factor
is what set a human off against the world. Every bopper tried to
avoid any taint of the human notion of self.
      Looked at in the correct way, a bopper was a part of the
world—like a light beam, like a dust slide, like a silicon chip. And
the world was One vast cellular automaton (or “CA”), calculating
out the instants—and each of the world’s diverse objects was but a
subcalculation, a simulation in the One great parallel process. So
where was there any self?
     Few humans could grasp this. They set up their fourth “I”
factor—their so-called self—as the One’s equal. How mad, and
how typical, that the mighty human religion called Christianity was
based on the teachings of a man who called himself God!
      It was the myth of the self that led to boredom and
selfishness; all human pain came from their mad belief that an
individual is anything other than an integral part of the One
universe all around. It was passing strange to Berenice that humans
could be so blind. So how could Loki suggest that the selfishness
lay in Berenice’s refusal? Her work was too important to endanger!
It was Emul’s rough insistence that was the true selfishness!
     Brooding on in this fashion, Berenice found herself before the
pink-tanks where the clone-grown human bodies floated in their
precious amniotic fluid. Here in the Nest, liquid water was as rare
and volatile as superheated plasma on Earth. The pink-tanks were
crowded and extensive, containing flesh bodies of every
description. The seeds for these meats all came from human
bodies, bodies that had found their way to the pink-tanks in all
kinds of ways. Years ago, the big boppers had made a habit of
snatching bodies from Earth. Now there was a thriving
Earth-based trade in live organs. The organleggers took some of
their organs right out of newly murdered people; others they
purchased from the Moon. In return, the organleggers kept the
boppers supplied with small biopsy samples of their wares, so that
the pink-tanks’ gene pool could grow ever more varied. The
pink-tanks held multiple clones of many people who had
mysteriously disappeared.
      Today Berenice stood looking at one of the more popular
clone types, a wendy. The wendies were attractive blonde women,
pale-skinned and broad-hipped. Their body chemistry was such
that their organs did not often induce rejection; dozens of them
were grown and harvested every year.
     The wendy hung there in the pink-tank, a blank slate, white
and luminous, with her full lips slightly parted. Ever and anon, her
muscles twitched involuntarily, as do the limbs of a fetus still in the
womb. But unlike a fetus, her chest and buttocks were modelled in
the womanly curves of sexual maturity—the same curves in which
Berenice wore her own flickercladding.
      Some of Berenice’s fellow-boppers wondered at her taking on
a human female form. Quite simply, Berenice found the shape
lovely. And pragmatically, it was true that her body’s multiply
inflected curves wielded a strange power over the minds of human
males. Berenice always made sure that the human negotiator in her
barter deals was a man.
       Now she stood, staring into the tank, eyeing the subtle
roughness of the pale-skinned wendy’s tender flesh. Once again, it
struck her how different a meat body is from one of wires and
chips. Each single body cell independently alive—how strange a
feeling! And to have a womb in which one effortlessly grows a
scion—how marvelous! Berenice hovered by the tank, peering
closer. How would it be, to tread the Earth in human frame—to
live, and love, and reproduce?
       The blonde woman stirred again. Her body was full-grown,
yet her brain was a blank. The pink-tank sisters had tried various
methods of putting bopper software directly on such tank clones’
brains, but to no avail. There seemed to be a sense in which a
human’s personality inheres in each cell of the body. Perhaps the
secret was not to try and program a full-grown body, but rather to
get the data-compressed bopper software code into the initial
fertilized egg from which a body grows. As the cell divided, the
bopper software would replicate along with the human DNA
wetware. But the final step of building the bopper software into the
human wetware had yet to be made.
      Soon, thought Berenice, soon our great work will reach
fruition, and I will put my mind into the starting egg of a fresh
human. Perhaps, in order to spread bopper wetware more rapidly,
it will be better to go as a male. I will be myself in a strong,
beautiful human body on Earth, and I will have many descendants.
Mother Earth, rotten with life, filled with information in each of its
tiniest parts. To swim, to eat, to breathe!
      A message signal nagged at Berenice. She tuned in to
Kkandio’s Ethernet, and quick glyphs marched through her mind.
A human face, a small vial, a face that melts, a case of organs, a
user code. Vy. It was a message from Vy, one of the boppers who
agented human-bopper deals at the trade center. Berenice had told
Vy to be on the lookout for humans with new drugs to trade. There
was no telling where the key to egg programming would come
from, and this—glyph of a face that melts—seemed worth looking into.
Berenice sent Kkandio a confirming glyph for Vy, and headed
towards the lab to pick up the case of organs that was being asked
in trade.
     The tankworkers’ lab was hollowed in the rock behind the
pink-tanks. The lab was a large space, with locks leading into the
tanks, and with certain sections walled off and filled with warm,
pressurized air. Helen was nearby, and Ulalume. As it happened, all
the pink-tank workers were “female” workers who spoke the
language of Poe. This was no mere coincidence. Femaleness was a
trait that went naturally with the nurturing task of pink-tank
tending, and boppers who worked as a team always used a
commonly agreed-upon mode of English. Poe’s honeyed morbidity
tripped easily from the transmitters of the visionary workers of the
tanks.
      “Greetings, dear sister,” said Ulalume, her signal sweet and
clear. Ulalume was a petaflop, with the flickercladding over her
mirrored body shaded pink and yellow. Just now, Ulalume was bent
over a small airbox, her eyes and feelers reaching in through a tight
seal. Like Berenice, Ulalume had a body shaped like a
woman—except that her “head” was a mass of tentacles, with
microeyes and micromanipulators at their ends. One of her
eyestalks pulled out of the airbox and bent back to look at
Berenice. “Organic life is wondrous, Berenice,” sang Ulalume’s
pure voice. “I have puzzled out one more of its riddles. Today I
have found the key of memory storage on a macrovirus’s
redundant genes! And, oh Berenice, the storage is stably preserved,
generation after generation!”
     “But how great a knowledge can one virus bear?” asked
Berenice, stepping closer. “And how can a germ become human?”
     “These tailored macroviruses wag mighty tails, oh Berenice,”
exulted Ulalume. “Like tiny dragons, they drag vast histories
behind them, yea unto trillions of bits. And, do you hear me,
Berenice, their memory breeds true. It remains only to fuse one of
these viral tails with a human egg.”
      “She loves those wriggling dragon viruses as her own,”
interrupted Helen, who just now had the appearance of a marble
head resting on the laboratory floor. “Ulalume has programmed a
whole library of her memories onto those viral tails. If she can but
uncoil human proteins, she will finally link our memory patterns
with the genes of a babe to be.”
     “Imagine being a human without flaw,” crooned Ulalume.
“Or to be a gobbet of sperm that swells a flesh woman’s belly! The
egg is in reach, I swear it. I can soon design a meatbop, a
human-bopper embryo that grows into a manchild with two-tail
sperm! Only one potion still fails me, a potion to uncoil protein
without a break, and I feel that the potion is near, sweet Berenice!
This is the most wondrous moment of my life!” Her signals trailed
off, and she bent back over her airbox, softly chirping to her
dragon viruses.
      “Hail, Berenice,” said Helen. “I heard Vy’s message, and I
prepare our goods in trade.” Helen was a nursie, a teraflop
J-junction bopper adapted to the specialized purpose of dissecting
human bodies. Her body was a long, soft, pressurized pod that
sealed along the top, and she had six snaky arms equipped with
surgical tools. Helen’s head—that is to say the part of her which
contained      her    main     processor     and    her     external
photoreceptors—rose up from one end of her pod-bod like the
figure on a sailing ship’s prow. Usually her head rose up from her
body like a figurehead, although, when her body was in the
pink-tanks, as it was now, Helen’s head hopped off of her body and
waited outside in the cold hard vacuum which her supercooled
processors preferred. She was saving up to get a heatproof petaflop
optical processor for her next scionization. But for now, her head
stayed outside the heated-air room and controlled her body by a
private radiolink.
      “I’ll just finish this mortal frame’s disassembly and tidily pack
it up in order pleasing to a ghoul,” said Helen, her pale,
fine-featured head looking up at Berenice from the laboratory
floor. Berenice peered in through the window by the airlock that
led to the tanks. There, in the murky fluid of the nearest pink-tank,
Helen’s pod-bod bulged this way and that as her busy arms wielded
their sutures and knives. Now her arms drew out, one by one.
Streamers of blood drifted sluggishly in the tank’s fluid. Slow
moving in the tank’s high pressure, the pod wobbled back and
forth, stowing the fresh, living organs in a life-support shipping
case. The humans liked it better if the boppers separated the organs
out in advance.
      “What kind of drug is in the face-melting vial of which Vy
spoke?” wondered Helen’s head, clean-lined and noble as the bust
of Nefertiti. Helen had no difficulty in carrying on a conversation
while her remote-run body finished the simple chore of packing up
the fresh-harvested organs.
     “We can but wait to learn what news the One’s vast processes
have brought into our ken,” said Berenice.
     “Flesh that melts,” mused Ulalume, looking up from her
microscope. “As does flickercladding, or the substance of our
dreams. Dreams into virus, and virus to flesh—indeed this could
be the key.”
      Now Helen’s body slid through the organ farm airlock and
waddled across the laboratory floor. Her head hopped on and
socketed itself into place. The blood and amniotic fluid that
covered her body freeze-dried into dark dust that fell to the floor.
The tankworkers’ lab floor was covered with the stuff. “Here, dear
sister,” said Helen, proffering the satchel full of organs. “Deal deep
and trade well.”
      Berenice took the satchel in one hand, hurried out into the
clear, and jetted up the shaft of the Nest along a steep loglog curve.
Her powerful, cyberized ion jets were mounted in the balls of her
heels. She shot past the lights and cubbies, exchanging glyphs with
those she passed. At this speed, she had no sense of up or down.
The shaft was like a tunnel which drew narrower and narrower
until, sudden as a shout, space opened up with the speed of an
infinite explosion. She was powering up from the surface of the
Moon.
     Just for the joy of it, Berenice kept her ion jets going until she
was a good fifteen miles above the surface, directly above the
spaceport. She cut power and watched the moonscape hurtle back
up. Off to the east gleamed the bubble dome of Einstein, the city
that the humans had stolen from the boppers. The moongolf links
were snugged against the dome. To the west was the mirror crater
surrounding the Nest’s entrance. Below Berenice, and coming up
fast, was the great field of the spaceport, dotted with the humans’
transport ships. All the boppers’ ships had been destroyed in the
war.
      At the last possible microsecond, Berenice restarted her ion
jets and decelerated to a gentle touchdown on the fused basalt of
the rocket field. A small dome rose at one side of the field; a dome
that held customs, the old Hilton, and a trade hall. Carrying her
satchel full of organs, Berenice entered the dome through an
airlock and pretended to plug herself into a refrigeration cart. The
humans were unaware that some of the boppers—like
Berenice—had the new heatproof optical processors. They still
believed that no bopper could survive long at human room
temperature without a bulky cooling device. This gave the humans
on Earth a false sense of security, a lax smugness that the boppers
were in no rush to dispel.
      Humans and weird boppers mingled beneath the trade dome.
Most striking to Berenice were the humans, some from Earth and
some from the Moon—they classed themselves as “mudders” and
“lunies.” The awkwardness of the mudders in the low lunar gravity
made them easy to spot. They were constantly bumping into things
and apologizing. The lunies rarely apologized for anything; by and
large they were criminals who had fled Earth or been forcibly
deported. The dangers of living so close to the boppers were such
that few humans opted for them voluntarily. Berenice often
regretted that she had to associate with these human dregs.
      She pushed her cart through the throng, past the old Hilton
Hotel, and into the trade hall. This was a huge, open space like a
bazaar or a market. Goods were mounded here and there—barrels
of oil, cases of organs, bales of flickercladding, information-filled
S-cubes, moongems, boxes of organic dirt, bars of niobium, tanks
of helium, vats of sewage, feely tapes, intelligent prosthetics,
carboys of water, and cheap mecco novelties of every description.
     “He’s off to the left there,” said Kkandio in Berenice’s head.
“A lunie with no shirt and a strip of hair down his back. His name
is Whitey Mydol. I told him you’d be gold all over.”
      Berenice willed her body’s flickercladding into mirrored gold.
She readied a speech membrane, and imaged full silver lips and
dark copper eyes onto the front surface of her head. Over there was
the lunie she was to meet, squatting on the ground and shuddering
like a dog.
     “You are Whitey Mydol?” said Berenice, standing over him.
She made a last adjustment to her flickercladding, silvering the
nipples on her hard breasts. “I am Berenice from the pink-tanks. I
bring a case of organs for the possibility of trade. What is it that
you bring us, Whitey?” She shifted her weight from one leg to the
other so that her finely modelled pelvis rocked. Most human males
were easily influenced by body glyphs.
      “Siddown, goldie fatass,” said Mydol, baring his teeth and
striking at one of Berenice’s legs. “And save the sex show for the
dooks. I don’t get stiff for subhumans.”
     “Very well,” said Berenice, sitting down beside him. His
aggression belied an inner ambivalence. He should be easy to
handle. “My name is Berenice.”
     “I don’t care what your name is, chips. I’m broke and
crashing and I need some more of this.” He drew a small vial out
of his ragged blue pants—pants that seemed to be made of a
vegetable fiber. Bluejeans, thought Berenice, proud of recalling the
name.
      She took the vial and examined it. It held a few milliliters of
clear liquid. She uncorked the top and drew some of the vapor into
herself for a quick analysis. It seemed to be a solvent, but an
unfamiliar one.
       “Put the cork back in,” snapped Mydol, darting a glance
around at the other lunie traders nearby. “If they smell it, I could
get popped.” He leaned closer. Berenice analyzed the alkaloids in
his foul breath. “This is called merge, goldie. It’s a hot new drug.
Mongo stuzzadelic, wave? This here’s enough for maybe one high.
I’ll give you this sample, you give me the hot meat in the box, and
I’ll sell the box for ten hits of merge. Organ market’s up.” He
reached for the handle of the organ satchel.
     “What is the nature of this merge?” asked Berenice, holding the
satchel in an implacable grip. “And why should it be of interest to
us? Your manners distress me, Mr. Mydol, and truly I must
question if I wish to complete this trade.”
      “It melts flesh,” hissed Mydol, leaning close. “Feel real
wiggly. I like to take it with my girl Darla. We get soft together,
goldchips, you wave about soft? Like a piece of flickercladding all
over. Rub rub rubby in the tub tub tubby. Maybe when you plug
into another kilpy machine you wave that type action, check?” He
let out a sharp, unmotivated snicker, and yanked hard at the organ
satchel. “I’m getting skinsnakes, she-bop.”
     Berenice let the satchel go. It was bugged, of course, and if
she hurried back to the Nest, she could follow Whitey on the
godseye. His actions would tell more than his ill-formed
vocalizations.
     “Run the merge through your mickeymouse robot labs and let
me know if you figure out how to copy it,” said Whitey Mydol as
he got to his feet. “I can deal any amount. Don’t get too hot,
goldie.” He walked rapidly off towards the subsurface tube that led
to Einstein.
      Berenice tucked the little merge vial into the thermally
isolated pouch that lay between her legs. She was disappointed at
the lack of feedback from this Whitey Mydol. Like so many other
humans, he acted as if boppers were contemptible machines with
no feelings. In their selfishness, the fleshers still resented the
boppers’ escape from slavery. He’d called her subhuman… that was
not to be borne. It was the humans that were subbopper!
       Berenice looked around the great trade hall. As a diplomat,
she did look forward to her little dealings with humans—the two
races had a common origin, and they had a lot to share. Why
couldn’t these crude fleshers see that, in the last analysis, they were
all just patterns of information, information coded up the ceaseless
evolution of the One?
      “Watch it, chips,” snarled a lunie trader from across the aisle.
“Your exhaust’s choking me. If you’ve made your deal, get out of
here.”
      Berenice turned her refrigeration cart so that its exhaust fan
no longer blew hot air at the trader. Thermodynamically speaking,
the increased information involved in the computations of thought
had to be bought at the cost of increased entropy. The old
J-junction boppers excreted their entropy as heat—heat like the
refrigeration cart’s exhaust. Of course Berenice’s use of the cart
was but a pose, for petaflop boppers gave off entropy in the refined
form of incoherence in their internal laser light. The constant
correcting for this incoherence accounted for nearly a quarter of a
petaflop’s energy needs. The crude humans excreted their entropy
not only as heat and incoherence, but also as feces, urine, and foul
breath. So gross a conversion involved great energy waste, and an
exorbitant increase in entropy. But Earth abounded in free energy.
The thought of running such a recklessly overentropic body gave
Berenice a thrill akin to what a person might feel when
contemplating an overpowered, gas-guzzling sports car.
     “How does it feel,” Berenice asked the trader rhetorically, “to
have so much, and do so little?”
     Moving quickly and with conviction, she left the trade center
and jetted back to the pink-tanks. She handed the merge over to
Ulalume, who’d listened in on her encounter with Whitey Mydol.
     “This is the mystic magic fluid,” exulted Ulalume. “The
universal protein solvent. Did you hear him, Berenice, it melts flesh.
The One has brought merge to us, the Cosmos knows our needs.
One month, I swear it to you, my sisters, one month only until we
have an egg to plant in some woman’s womb.”
    Berenice’s joy was clouded only at the thought of asking
Emul to arrange the planting.




                       Chapter Four
                       In Which Manchile,
                 the First Robot-Built Human,
                     Is Planted in the Womb
                   of Della Taze by Ken Doll,
                   Part of Whose Right Brain
                          Is a Robot Rat


     December 22, 2030


      You’re tired of thinking and tired of talk. It’s all so unreal
here, under the Moon dome, shut in with the same things around
you like greasy pips on dogeared cards laid out for solitaire… no
object quite sharp or clear, everything fractal at the edges,
everything smearing together with you, only you, inventing the
identities.
      You knock something over and limp out into the street. The
translucent dome high overhead. Dim. Voices behind you…
pressure waves in this fake air, this suppurating blister. People:
meat machines with gigabit personalities, and the chewy hole where
they push food in, and grease and hair all over them, especially
between their legs, and you’re just like them, you’ve tingled and
rubbed with them, sure, all of you the same, all of you thinking
you’re different. You can’t stand it anymore.
      A young man comes up and says something to you. Your
words are gone. For answer, you stick your tongue out as far as it
will go and touch it to your chin. Squint and rock your head back
and forth and try to touch him with your bulging tongue. In
silence. He gets out of your way. Good. You make the same face at
the other men and women you pass. No one bothers you.
      You walk fast and faster, dragging your weak left leg, thinking
of torn flesh and of some final drug that would stop it, stop the
fractals, stop the smearing, stop your wanting it to stop. The air is
thick and yellow, and even the atoms are dirty, breathed and
rebreathed from everyone’s spit and sweat. How nice it would be to
step out through a lock and freeze rock-hard in space how nice.
       There are fewer people now, and the curve of the dome is
lower. The space coordinates lock into position, and here is a
building you know. With a door your left hand knows how to open.
You’re inside, you cross the empty lobby, things are speeding up,
things are spinning, the whole rickety web with you split in two at
the center, you’re panting up the stairs with their high lowgee steps,
pulling on the banister with your strong right arm, and with the
back of your throat you’re moaning variations in a weird little
voice, the weirdest little voice you ever made, a voice that sounds
like it just learned how to talk, so crazy/scary you remember how
to laugh:
     “I no no who I be. I be you? No. I be me? No.
     “I no no who I B. I B U? No. I B me? No.
     “I no no who U go B. I B U. U B no B.”
      The hall is empty. Stagnant light in a hall inside a building
inside a dome inside your split head. You bang your weak left fist
on your face, to stop your talking. Quiet quiet here. You put your
left hand up under your chin like the Easter bunny and pull back
your lips and make slow chewing motions. Your right hand
cross-cues and copies. Mind glyph: The Flesh-Eating Rabbit. Quiet
quiet hippity hop.
     You stop at a door in the hall and lefthand it open as easily as
you opened the building’s front door. You slip in fast and freeze,
standing still and limp, zombie-style. It’s dark in this room, and in
the next room, but there’s light in the room after that. It smells
good here, it smells like sex and merge.
      You stand still for a hundred slow rabbit-chews, counting
subvocally for the cross-cue… and listening. Splish in the far room
where the light is, splishsplish. Oh yes it’s good to be here.
Everything’s still smeared and webbed together and split, but now
it’s not you running it anymore, it’s God running it, yes, it’s the
lovely calm voice in the right half of your brain.
    Your zombie hands wake up and get busy, like two baby
bunnies, sniffing and nosing, and coming back to share their
Know. You follow them around the room, tiptoeing, slowly slowly,
oh so quietly, your hands hopping about, not this, not this,
something longer, something heavier, this.
     Your left hand is holding a heavy smooth thing, it’s a… uh…
your right hand takes it over, it’s a chromesteel copy of the
Brancusi sculpture, Flight. Your left hand hiphops into your pocket
and gets a little vial: the life.
      You are ready now, new life on the left and death on the right.
Blunt instrument Brancusi bludgeon just right to lift and smash
flubby goosh. Whiteblackwhiteblackwhiteblack. Your breath comes
too fast. You tap your forehead hard with the bluhbluhbluh. A star
blooms. Stand there for a hundred heartbeats, the voices bouncing
back and forth, and out of your mouth leaks a whisper that grows
into a scream:


            “Twas the week before Cwistmas and Aaall Thwough
            Da CUBBY,
            da Fwesh-Eating         WABBIT       CWUSHED          DA
            FUNBOY
            FLUBFLUBBY!”


      “Who is it?!?!” yells a voice from the far room with the
splishsplash light, and you’re already running in there fast, with
your smasher raised high, and your tongue stretched out to touch
your chin. The girl is melted in the tub, pink flesh with eyes on top,
and the black man is sitting on the edge, just starting to melt, and
he’s trying to stand up and he can’t, and his screaming mouth is a
ragged drooping hole, oh what perfect timing your headvoice has,
swfwack, oh how neat, his head fell off, thwunk, the arms, the legs,
smuck smuck.
     The pink puddlegirl shudders, her eyes see only the shadows
on the ceiling, she can’t see you or her dear funboy, but she knows
maybe, through her ecstasy, that the Flesh-Eating Rabbit has come.

      What have you done? What have you done? More orders flow
in, the calm voice says it’s right, you can’t stop now, you have to
crouch down, yes, and open the vial… can’t open it. Hands peck at
each other like little chickens. You turn your head back and forth,
eye to eye, moving the field, mother hen, cross-cuing till your
hands get it right.
      Right. Left. Top off, yah, the pink jellybean embryo, reach
into that pink puddlegirl and put it where it belongs. A sudden
flash of orgasm spasms you, sets your teeth on edge, brain chatter,
you twitch all over, lying there by the love-puddle,
blackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite.




                      Chapter Five
                        Whitey and Darla


     December 26, 2030


      When Mooney’s flare-ray grazed Whitey Mydol’s shoulder, the
heat blistered his skin. It hurt a lot. Whitey bought some gibberlin
lotion at a drugstore and walked the few blocks to the chute that
led down to his neighborhood, a cheap subterranean warren called
the Mews. Whitey lived four levels down. The chute was a large
square vent shaft, with fans mounted along one side, and with a
ladder and a fireman’s pole running down each of the other three
sides. To go down, you jumped in and grabbed a pole; and to get
back up you climbed a ladder. In the low gravity, both directions
were easy. Whitey slid down to his level and hopped off into the
cool, dusty gloom of his hallway.
      The boppers had built these catacombs, and there were no
doors or ventilation pipes; you just had to count on air from the
chute drifting down your hall and into your room. To keep thieves
out, most people had a zapper in the frame of their cubby door.
When the zapper was on, the doorframe filled with a sheet of light.
You could turn it off with a switch on the inside, or by punching
the right code on the outside. Air went right through a zapper
curtain, but if you tried to walk through one, it would electrocute
you. All the zappers in the hall except Whitey’s were turned on. His
door gaped wide open. Odd. The inside of his cubby was lit by the
pink-flickering vizzy. Bill Ding. A fuff show. Besides the vizzy, the
cubby held a few holos, a foodtap, and a bed. There was a naked
woman lying on the bed, with her legs parted invitingly. Whitey’s
mate.
     “Oh, Whitey! Hi!” Her legs snapped shut and she sat up and
began fumbling on her X-shirt, which was a T-shirt silkscreened
with a color picture of her crotch. Everyone in the Mews was
wearing X-shirts this month, so that was nothing special. But.
     “Who were you waiting for with the zapper off and your legs
spread like that, Darla?” He checked the vizzy camera; it was on.
“Were you running a personal?”
     “What do you mean, waiting?” She pulled on a panty-skirt
and went to the mirror to rummage at her long, strawy black hair.
“I’m just getting up from a nap. I finished off the quaak and played
with myself and I must have blanked out… what time is it? Did
you get some merge?” Her voice was shrill and nervous. She
dabbed more paint on her already shiny lips.
     “If a dook shows up now, Darla, I’m going to know what he
came for. You don’t have to jive me like an oldwed realman. I just
want to know if you had a personal on Bill Ding, or if you have a
specific boyfriend coming.”
     Darla fiddled with the vizzy till it showed a picture of a
window, with a view of blooming apple trees. A gentle wind tossed
the trees and petals drifted. “That’s better,” said Darla. “What
happened to your shoulder? It’s all red.”
     Whitey handed her the gibberlin and sat down on the large
bed, which was their only piece of furniture. “Kilpy rental-pig
burned me, Darla, trying to score. Rub the lotion in real soft,
pleasey.” He liked coming on sweet to Darla; it made up for the
way he treated everyone else.
     She peeled off the loose, blistered skin and began rubbing the
cream in. “Near miss, Whitey. Whadja do back?”
      He breathed shallowly, staying below the pain. “I can find
him and kill him anytime, Darla. Maybe merge him and pull out all
his bones. The merge’ll wear off, and he’ll be layin there like a
rubber dolly. You can sit on his chest to smother him. That might
be tasty. I can always find him because I planted a tap on him this
morning. He’s an old rental-pig called Stahn Mooney. He was in
the bopper civil war ten years ago? Was called Sta-Hi? Bei Ng put
me on him.”
     “He deals?”
     “Nego. You know Yukawa the merge-wiz, right?”
     “Affirmo.”
      “Bei Ng’s got him tapped six ways. Bei’s really hung up on
Yukawa. This morning Yukawa called Mooney up to search for
that girl Della Taze. You remember her—blonde, snub nose, kind
of snobby?”
     “Clear. We merged with her and her black funboy one time.”
      “Right. Well, she was Yukawa’s assistant, which is why she
always had such a good stash, wave, but now she’s disappeared. Bei
has her apartment tapped, too, so he knows what happened, more
or less, but that’s another story. Since I was the closest to Mooney’s
building, Bei put me on Mooney. I walked up to him and stuck a
crystal mikespike in his skullbone, and the dook thought I was
giving him a blessing. Felt sorry for me.” Whitey tapped the
transceiver set into the side of his skull. “I can hear Mooney all the
time.”
     “What’s he doing right now?”
     “Coming off a merge-trip.” Whitey gave an abrupt snicker.
“Moaning. Muttering about some slit called Wendy.” He peered
over at his shoulder. “It’s starting to grow back. You can rub
harder now.”
     “But why did Mooney shoot you?” Darla massaged the new
skin on Whitey’s shoulder with one hand, and ran her other hand
down the long strip of hair that covered his spine. She liked hearing
about Whitey’s adventures.
      “Aw, I heard Yukawa giving him a whole flask of merge, so I
went up to his office and tried to buy a hit. But Mooney was loaded
mean—he’s into this cryboy macho private eye trip—and he flared
me.” Whitey cocked his head. “Now he’s… getting in a maggie.
Sssh. I bet he’s going over to Della Taze’s.” Another pause. Whitey
nodded, and then he focussed back on Darla. “So who were you
waiting for, Darla? There wasn’t any quaak here, and you weren’t
asleep. Were you just keeping your legs spread for the first guy to
see you on the vizzy? Or was it someone special? I gotta know.”
This time he didn’t bother sweetening his voice.
      As if in answer to Whitey’s question, there was a slight
scuffling noise in the hall. A tall, slim guy with lank dark hair was
just turning around to hurry off. He wore a black jumpsuit with
numerous bulging pockets. Whitey sprang out the door and caught
him by the left wrist. “Don’t be rude,” he snarled, bending the
guy’s arm behind his back. “Darla’s ready for you. I’ll watch.”
     The slim guy surprised Whitey with a powerful punch to the
stomach. As Whitey sagged, the guy twisted free of his grip and
chopped him in the side of the neck. Whitey saw stars and his
knees buckled, but as he went down, he got his arms around the
guy’s waist. He came out of a crouch to butt the guy in the crotch.
The slim body bent in half. Metal and plastic clattered in his
pockets. Moving fast, Whitey got under him, carried him into their
cubby, threw him against the wall over their bed, and drew out his
needler.
     “Cut on the zapper, Darla. And get us some privacy.”
     His tone of voice was such that Darla hastened to obey. She
snapped the cover over the vizzy’s camera, and she filled the
doorframe with pink light. “He’s sort of a new friend, Whitey. I
asked him to fall by for a fuff. He said he might have some merge.
You said before that it was—”
     “It is,” said Whitey, showing his teeth. “It’s fine. I just want
to watch, is all. Strip, Darla, and get on down.” He leaned against
the wall and put one hand on his crotch. “What’s your name,
dook?”
      “Ken Doll. Put the gun away, would you? You want to watch
me pumping Darla? Well, that’s the whole idea of this, isn’t it? And
I did bring some merge. Here.” He sat up on the edge of the bed,
took a four-hit vial out of one of his pockets, and handed it to
Whitey.
     “Stuzzy,” said Whitey, putting the merge in his jeans.
      Ken’s wet lips spread in an odd smile: at first only the right
half of his face was smiling, and then the left half caught up. There
was something wrong about his eyes. They looked like they were
screaming. Still, the guy had brought them four hits of merge. Now
Ken stuck his long tongue out, touched his chin with it, and
wagged his head, looking from Whitey to Darla and back again.
“You ready?” asked Ken.
      “Clear,” said Whitey, pocketing his gun. He wasn’t sure how
he felt about this. He figured he’d know after he saw what he did.
“Go ahead.”
      Darla slipped her clothes back off. She was kind of heavyset,
but her big breasts and thighs looked nice in the low lunar gravity.
She stood in front of Ken and pushed her bottom against his face,
the way she always did with Whitey. Ken shoved his face between
her cheeks and started licking. Darla put her hands on her knees
and leaned way forward so Ken could work her whole furrow. Her
big breasts bobbled. She looked up at Whitey, her eyes already
glazing a bit, and opened her black-painted lips to waggle her
tongue beckoningly. Whitey dropped his pants and plugged in. The
angle was just right. Ken got up on his knees and began pumping
her from behind, the right half of his face grinning like a madman.
The left half of his face was slack and drooling. The two men took
hold of Darla and jiggled her back and forth between them. She
made noises like she was happy. Whitey liked it all, except for
Ken’s weird, lopsided mouth. Where was this guy from anyway?
      They got on the bed, then, and tried the whole range of other
positions, even the gay ones. Whitey was determined not to come
before Ken; but finally he did, and Darla too. The big climax
blanked them both right out.
     Suddenly Whitey thought he heard a cop’s voice—the voice
of Colonel Hasci, a Gimmie pig who’d hassled him many a time.
“Miss Della Taze?” he was saying. “We’re down in the lobby. Can
we come up and ask you some questions about Buddy Yeskin?”
      Whitey lifted his head then, wide awake. It was the Mooney
tap, still tuned in. Hasci had been talking to Mooney. Door slam
and footsteps. So what. Mooney had found Yeskin’s corpse; Bei Ng
had known about that since Monday. Everyone connected with
Yukawa was tapped—that’s how obsessed with the guy Bei was.
ISDN wanted all Yukawa’s secrets, but Bei had a special fixation
on Yukawa as well. They’d done a gene exchange or something…
but what was going on here and now in this room?
      Darla and Ken were both on their backs next to him, both
with their eyes closed. Ken was catatonically still, breathing quietly
with his mouth wide open. Looked like a cave in there. Apple
blossoms were blowing across the vizzy screen. Darla’s little
hologram of Bei Ng glowed in the corner. Ken Stank. The guy was
definitely a skanky dook; Whitey and Darla’d have to be sure and
take some interferon. Be bad to make a habit of this kind of thing,
with so many people out to burn…
      Whitey had been gazing fondly down at Darla’s plump face,
but just then he saw something that made him jerk in surprise. Her
hair was moving. Darla’s hair filled the space between her head and
Ken’s, and something was crawling under it!
     Whitey shoved Darla’s head to one side and saw a flash of
hardened plastic. A rat! Ken was a meatie! Whitey snapped his hand
down to the floor where he’d left his needler—but it was gone.
     “Whitey?” Darla sat up and felt the back of her head.
“Whydja push me, Whitey—” Her hand came away wet with
blood.
      “RAT!” Whitey pulled her off the bed. There was a spot of
blood on Darla’s pillow, and a multiwired little zombie box, not yet
hooked up. A zombie box for Darla. The rat—a thumb-sized,
teardrop-shaped robot remote, darted across the sheet, scuttled up
onto Ken’s face, and crawled back into his mouth. Darla was
screaming very loud. She turned off the door’s zapper and hurried
out into the hall, still screaming. Whitey searched desperately for
his needler, but Ken must have bagged it before letting his rat start
in on Darla’s spine.
      Ken’s systems came back up and he leaped to his feet. Whitey
ran out the cubby door after Darla. All the other cubbies on their
hall had their zappers on. After all the bad deals that Whitey had
been involved in, no one was likely to open up for him. He sprinted
towards the chute, catching up with Darla on the way. A
needler-burst splintered the floor between them. Whitey glanced
back. The meatie was down on one knee, firing at them left-handed
with Whitey’s needler. If Ken could kill them both, his cover
wouldn’t be blown. Whitey and Darla were really moving now,
covering ten meters at a step. In seconds they’d leaped into the
chute, caught hold of the pole, and pushed themselves downward
towards the Markt. The meatie would be scared to follow them
there. Whitey maneuvered himself to a position lower on the pole
than Darla, just in case Ken started shooting down at them. There
were limits to what he’d do for Darla.
      Fortunately the chute was so crowded that the meatie didn’t
risk coming after them. They slapped down at the Markt level safe
and sound… except for being naked and having a gouge in the
back of Darla’s neck.
      “Let me see it, sweets,” said Whitey. It was a round, deeply
abraded spot half an inch across, still bleeding. Whitey had
surprised the rat while its microprobes were still mapping out the
main nerve paths of Darla’s spine. Some of her hair had matted
into the wound. It was starting to scab over, but Darla was turning
limp. The rat had probably shot her up with something. People
were staring at them; full nudity was relatively rare in Einstein, and
Darla had blood all over her shoulders.
       “Get me some blocker, Whitey,” mumbled Darla, stumbling
a bit. “Everything’s lookin at me funny.”
     “Clear.” He steered her down the long arcade past the Markt
stands and shops, heading for a health club called the Tun. Just
when he thought he’d made it, a nicely dressed realwoman blocked
his way. She had silver-blonde hair and big shoulderpads. Her
handsome face was trembling with anger.
     “What do you think you’re doing with that poor girl,
ridgeback! Do you want help, dear?”
      Darla—drugged, bloody, nude, and with sperm running down
the inside of her thigh—peered up at the realwoman and shook her
head no.
     “I’m takin care of her already,” said Whitey. Three more steps
and they’d be in the Tun with friends and a medix, and Darla could
crash and he could lotion her wound and—
      “Let her go, or I call the Gimmie.” The realwoman took
Darla’s arm and began trying to muscle her away from Whitey.
There was no telling what her plans for Darla really were. Whitey
shrugged, released his hold on Darla, and punched the woman in
the jaw as hard as he could. Her eyes rolled and she went down. He
hustled Darla into the Tun.
     Charles Freck was manning the door. He was an older guy, a
real spacehead, and a good friend of Whitey and Darla. He wore
his long gray hair in a ponytail, and his rugged face was
cleanshaven. He was clothed in a loose pair of living paisley
imipolex shorts, and he wore tiny green mirrorshades contact amps
over his pupils. This made his eyes look as if the vitreous humor
had been replaced with light-bathed seawater.
     “My, how bum,” he said primly. He’d been standing out of
sight and watching Whitey’s tussle over Darla. In each of his
dancing eyes, the tiny, variable dot at the center was bright instead
of dark. “I’ll turn on the zapper.” A glowing gold curtain filled the
door. “OD?”
     “Rat poison. We got down with a meatie, and the rat crawled
out of his skull and bit Darla on the neck. Rat had a zombie box
for her. Look where it bit.” He pushed some of Darla’s hair aside.
      “Rat poison,” mused Charles Freck. “That’d probably be
ketamine. A pop of beta-endorphin’ll fix that toot sweet. Let’s just
go in the gym and check on the medix.”
     He took Darla’s other arm, and helped Whitey march her
down the hall. Darla was moving like she was half merged, and
when she breathed it sounded like snoring. “Big,” muttered Darla.
“Big throne. Oscar Mayer, king of the ratfood. His giant rubber
crown.” She was hallucinating.
      The Tun gymnasium was a huge cube of space, painted white
all over. Energetic disco music played, and holos of handsome
people gogo-exercised to the beat. There were a handful of actual
people, too; two women on a weight machine, a couple of guys up
on the trapezes, some people wrestling on the mats, and a woman
riding a bike around and around the sharply banked velodrome that
ran along the huge gym’s edges.
     Charles Freck led them out from under the velodrome to the
snackbar island in the gym’s center. He touched the white probe of
the medix to the edge of Darla’s wound and peered attentively at
the readout.
     “Even so. Ketamine. Here.” He punched a code into the
dispenser, and a syrette of betendorf popped out. “Whitey?”
      Whitey injected the ketamine blocker into Darla’s biceps. “I’ll
take some snap.”
      “Even so.” Freck handed Whitey a packet of snap crystals.
Whitey opened the packet and tossed the contents onto his tongue.
The crystals snapped and sputtered, releasing the energizing fumes
of cocaine freebase. He breathed deep and felt things around him
slow down. The last hour had been one long jangle—Mooney
shooting at him, Della sharing him, the rat and the meatie, the real
woman’s Gimmie threat—but now, thanks to the snap, he could sit
aside from it all and feel good about how well he’d handled things.
Darla’s turgor was returning, too. He maneuvered her onto one of
the barstools and bent her head forward.
     “Hold still, Darla, and we’ll fix this now.”
      Charles Freck cleaned the wound, moving slowly and
fastidiously. He used a laser shear to snip off the rough edges.
Slight smell of burnt Darla meat. Charles took a flat, whitish steak
out of the fridge and carefully cut out a piece to match the hole in
Darla’s neck.
     “What’s that?” Whitey wanted to know.
      “UDT. Undifferentiated tissue. It’s neutralized so she can
gene-invade it.” He tapped and snipped, pinned and patted. Took
out some gibberlin and rubbed it in. “That’ll do it, unless the rat
put in something biological. I didn’t know Darla went for meaties.”
He smiled merrily and poured himself a little glass of something.
      Darla lifted her head and looked around. “I want a bath,” she
said. “Like in pure interferon. Ugh. That’s the last time I call that
creepshow in. Bill Ding’s Pink Party.”
     “So that was it,” said Whitey. “Why didn’t you admit it?”
      “I didn’t know for sure that someone was going to answer my
spot,” said Darla. “I said I’d fuff for merge. And then when Ken
showed up I thought you’d be…” She looked down at her soiled
bod. “How wrong I was. I’m taking a bath.”
     “You mean if we’d left the camera on, we would have been
on Bill Ding?” said Whitey, briefly enthused. “You should have told
me, Darla, ‘cause we were gigahot. How many people watch Bill
Ding anyway?”
     The door signal chimed just then. Charles tossed off his
potion with an abrupt, birdlike snap of his head. “If it’s the woman
you punched, Whitey, I’ll tell her Whitey says come in to cut a
gigahot four-way Bill Ding fuff vid.”
      “Don’t do that,” said Whitey, his eyes rachetting. With the
dirty blond matted hair running down to his bare ass, he looked
subhuman. The good part of the snaprush was already over, and
events were crowding in on him again. He kept rerunning the last
hour’s brutal changes through his mindscreen with the setting
turned to Loop (High Speed), looking for a pattern that might
predict what was coming next. Mooney was, he realized just then,
as he looked into his mind, in the midst of a conversation with
someone with a very clear booming bass voice. A robot voice.
Mooney was talking on and on with a bopper somewhere. Whitey
couldn’t tell if it was vizzy or close link, he’d missed something,
with all this kilp coming down so heavy so fast.
       “Prerequisites,” Mooney was saying. “What’s the difference between
prerequisites, perquisites, and perks, eh, Cobb? I mean that’s where the
realpeople are at. Maybe you’re right, I can’t decide just like that. Berenice.
And you say that’s an Ed Poe name? Wavy. I’ll come out to the trade center
right now…”
     Whitey took note of the one salient fact and let the rest of the
slushed babble shrink back into subliminality. Charles Freck had
paused halfway across the gym to grin at Whitey with his knowing
green eyes. “Don’t let her in,” repeated Whitey, just loud enough.
“She’ll call the Gimmie and someone’ll die. Someone like you.”
       “Wu-wei,” said Freck, wagging a minatory finger. “Means wave
with it in China. I’ll tell Miz Krystle Carrington you went thataway.”
He crossed the rest of the gym in three high, high hops.
        “The shower,” said Darla.
      Whitey followed her into the constantly running showers. The
water splashed lavishly from every side of the great room. The
floor was black-and-white-tiled in a Penrose tesselation, and the
walls and ceiling were faced with polished bimstone, a marbled
deep-red lunar mineral. Hidden behind the walls there was a highly
efficient distiller—a cracking refinery, really—that kept repurifying
the water through all its endless recycles. The bopper-built system
had separate tanks in which it stored up the various hormones and
ketones and esters that it cracked out of the sweat, saliva, mucus,
and urine which it removed from the water. Many of the cracked
biochemicals could be sold as medicines or drugs. The water was
hot and plentiful and definitely worth the monthly dues that
Whitey paid the Tun.
      Water took on entirely different qualities in the low lunar
gravity, one-sixth that of Mother Earth’s. The water jets travelled
along much flatter trajectories, and the drops on the walls swelled
to the size of plums before crawling down to the floor. Numerous
suction-operated chrome draingrids kept the floor clear. Whitey
and Darla stayed in there for fifteen minutes, cleaning themselves
inside and out. The fans dried them, and they vended themselves
clothes from a machine. Pyjama pants for him and a loose top for
her, just like Rock Hudson and Doris Day.
        They went back out in the gym and relaxed on one of the
mats.
     “That was really a K-bit thing for you to do, Darla, whoring
for merge on Bill Ding, with the enemies I’ve got. You gotta
remember, all kinds of factions are watching the grid all the time.
Some bopper wanted to get that mickeymouse little control unit on
you, so you’d be a zombie.”
      “Rank. Super rank. What do zombies do? What’s the
difference from a meatie?”
      “OK. It’s a big operation to turn a person into a meatie. The
ratsurgeon cuts the person’s head open, takes out part of the right
brain half, and puts in a neuroplug that connects to rest of the
brain. The rat is a little robot-remote that hooks into the plug. They
have to take part of the brain out to make room for the rat. The rat
gives orders and makes up for the missing right brain tissue.”
     “Which used to do what?”
      “Space perception, face recognition, some memory, some left
body control. Even after it’s all plugged in, the rat has better
control over the left body half than over the right. But the rat can
control the right body, indirectly, by giving headvoice orders to the
left brain, or by making cross-cuing signals with the left half of the
body. That’s why meaties move kind of weird. I should have
noticed that about Ken right away. It’s just that I haven’t seen very
many meaties.”
    “But why was Ken’s rat trying to put a plug on my spine to
make me a zombie? What does a zombie box do?”
     “Well, it’s a crude version of a rat, only not plugged into so
many nerves. The idea of a zombie box is that it would give quick
control over your legs and arms. The boppers wanted you to go
somewhere, Darla.”
     “Like where?”
      “I don’t know. Maybe to the Nest to get a neuroplug and a rat
installed. Very few people are likely to volunteer for that operation,
you wave.”
     “Very few indeed.”
     “But if they can get a zombie box on you, it paralyzes your
speech centers and takes over your leg muscles, and marches you
right in to the ratsurgeon.”
      “Wherever he may be.” Darla giggled, euphoric with relief at
their escape. “Can you imagine how that would feel, Whitey, doing
the zombie stomp down echoing empty halls to the hidden bopper
ratsurgeon?”
      “Be good to watch on the vizzy,” said Whitey, also feeling
oddly elated. “I wonder why they wanted to make you a meatie, if
that’s what it was? Was it you special, or is it just whoever phones
Bill Ding? Maybe the boppers want you to kill someone, like Buddy
Yeskin.”
      “Buddy’s dead? Della Taze’s funboy? Why didn’t you tell me
that when you were talking about Della before, Whitey? Is this all
tied in with merge?”
      “Could be. I did sell some merge to the boppers, back last
month when we were so beat. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.
Yeah, Buddy’s dead. Some guy killed him, and then Della Taze
disappeared. It was probably a meatie that killed him. I haven’t
seen it, but Bei Ng has it on tape. It might even have been our
friend Ken Doll. Ken killed Buddy, and he must have done
something weird to Della, too.”
     “What about our cubby?” asked Darla. Her upswing was
fading, and her voice shook. “Is it safe to go back? Don’t you think
we should clean it out and move?”
      “No use moving,” said Whitey after some thought. “The
boppers have so many cameras planted, they’ll always know where
to get us. I can probably hunt down Ken, but there’s mongo other
meaties. Only really safe place for us now is sucko Earth. But
mudders are dirty dooks, Darla. We’re lunies. I’m going to talk to
Bei Ng, honey, and we’ll find a way to strike back. The boppers’ll
pay for this.” He paused, alerted by a sound in his head. “Hold it.
Mooney’s at the trade center now. Hush, Darla, this is heavy.
He’s… he’s talking to a bopper called Cobb. Cobb has something
for Mooney but—” Whitey broke off and shook his head in
disgust.
     “What happened?”
     “The bopper scanned Mooney and found my mikespike. He
took it out and crushed it. Xoxox. Why don’t you come up to the
ISDN building with me, Darla. I want to tell Bei about all this. I
think we better stick together for now.”
     “Check,” said Darla. “And let’s stop by the cubby and pick up
Ken’s merge.”
     “You’d still take that? From Ken?”
     “Clear. It’s got to be supergood stuff.”




                         Chapter Six
                              Cobb III


     December 26, 2030


     He died in 2020…
      … and woke up in 2030. Again? That was his first feeling.
Again? When you’re alive, you think you can’t stand the idea of
death. You don’t want it to stop, the space and the time, the mass
and the energy. You don’t want it to stop… but suppose that it
does. It’s different then, it’s nothing, it’s everything, you could call
it heaven. Once you’re used to the Void, it’s really not so great to
have to start up in spacetime again. How would you like to get out
of college, and then have to go back through grade school again?
And again ?
      Cobb Anderson, creator of the boppers, was killed in 2020.
The boppers did it. They killed Cobb and dissected him—as a
favor. They had to take his faltering body apart to get out the
software; the leftover meat went into the pink-tanks. Ideally the
boppers would have recorded and analyzed all the electrochemical
patterns in all of Cobb’s various muscles and glands, but they only
had time to do his brain. But they did the brain well; they teased
out all its sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response
patterns—the whole biocybernetic software of Cobb’s mind. With
this wetware code in hand, the boppers designed a program to
simulate Cobb’s personality. They stored the digital master of the
program on an S-cube, and they beamed a copy of it down to
Earth, where it was booted into a big bopper named Mr. Frostee.
Mr. Frostee had control of several humanoid robot-remotes, and
he let Cobb “live” in them for a bit. The experiences Cobb had in
these bodies were beamed back up to the Moon and added to the
memory store of his master S-cube as they occurred.
     Unfortunately it was only a matter of weeks till Mr. Frostee
and his Cobb simulation met a bad end, so for ten years Cobb was
definitely out of the picture, just a frozen S-cube sitting on a shelf
in the Nest’s personality storage vaults. HUMAN
SOFTWARE-CONSTRUCT 225-70-2156: COBB ANDERSON.
An unread book, a Platonic form, a terabyte of zeroes and ones.
During all that time, Cobb was in “heaven,” as he would later term
it.
      And then, on the second day of Christmas, 2030, Berenice got
Loki to help her bring Cobb back. She needed Cobb to help with
certain upcoming diplomatic negotiations—negotiations having to
do with the unusual pregnancy of Della Taze.
     So that Cobb wouldn’t feel too disoriented, Berenice and Loki
booted SOFTWARE-CONSTRUCT 225-70-2156 back up into a
humanoid diplomat body, a body which Berenice had constructed
for her own next scionization. In order to make the transition more
natural, Berenice smoothed off the body’s prominent breasts and
buttocks, changed its flickercladding to pink, and turned its
crotchpouch inside out to resemble a penis. So humble a tube serves as
the conduit of much bioinformation, Loki, and each male flesher holds his in
high esteem.
      The body had a petaflop processor, which meant that Cobb
would think—or, more precisely, generate fractal cellular automata
patterns in Hilbert space—hundreds of times faster than he had
been accustomed to doing in his meat days. Once Berenice had the
body all set, Loki copied the Cobb S-cube information onto a
universal compiler which, in turn, fed an appropriately tailored
version of the Cobb program into the shiny pink-clad petaflop
body. The body pulsed and shuddered like a trap with something in
it. A soulcatcher. Cobb was back.
      Again, was all he could think. Again? He lay there, monitoring
inputs. He was lying on a stone table in a room like a big
mausoleum. Racks of shelving stretched up on three sides; shelves
lined with large, crystalline cubes. Light glared into the room from
a mirror high above. He tried to take a breath. Nothing doing. He
raised his hand—it was unnaturally smooth and pink—and ran it
over his face. No holes; his face was a sealed plastic mask. He was
in another robot body. Moving with an amazing rapidity, his mind
flipped through the memories of his last experiences in a robot
body run by Mr. Frostee. As he let his hand fall back to his side, he
sensed the oddness of the weight/mass ratio. He wasn’t on Earth.
     “Greetings, Cobb Anderson, we welcome you into our Nest,
deep hidden beneath the surface of Earth’s aged Moon. The year is
2030. Does this rebirth find you well?” It wasn’t a spoken voice, it
was a radio voice in his processor. The voice came from a gleaming
gold woman with copper and silver features. She was beautiful, in
an inhuman way, and her voice was rich and thrilling. Standing next
to her was a shining ebony octopus creature, holding a box with
wires that ran into Cobb’s neck.
      “I’m Loki,” he said, his voice calm and serious. “And that’s
Berenice. I’m proud to have helped get you running again, Dr.
Anderson. We should have done it years ago, but it’s been hectic. A
lot’s happened.”
     Loki and Berenice, two bright new boppers all set for a big
info swap session. Cobb rebelled against being drawn into
conversation, and into this reality. He had all his old memories
back, yes, but there was more. His new body here was like a Ouija
board or a spirit table, and now, while the connection was fresh, he
could make it rap and skitter out the truth of where he’d just been.
He made as if to say something, and his voice came out as a radio
signal too. “Wait… I have to tell it. I’ve been in heaven.”
     Staticky robot laughter, and then Berenice’s intricately
modulated signal. “I long to hear your account of the heaven that
you have seen, Dr. Anderson.”
      “It’s…” Right then, Cobb could still see it clearly, the endless
meshing of fractal simplicities, high and bright like clouds seen
from an airplane, with the SUN above all—but it was all being
garbled by the palimpsest overlay of his new body’s life. Talking
quickly, Cobb made a stab at getting it down in words. “I’m still there
. That’s a higher I of course; the cosmos is layered forever up and
down, with I’s on every level—the I’s are lenslike little flaws in the
windows of the world—I’m in these chips and I’m in heaven. The
heavenly I is all the I’s at once, the infinite I. We’re hung up on
each other, I and I, finite I and infinite I—have you robots learned
about infinite I yet? There’s more to a meatperson or a chipperson
than ten trillion zeroes and ones: matter is infinitely divisible. The
idealized pattern in the S-cube is a discrete model, it’s a digital construct.
But once it’s running on a real body, the pixels have fuzz and error
and here come I and I. You caught my soul. It works because this
real body is real matter, sweet matter, and God is everywhere,
Berenice and Loki, God is in the details. We’re not just form, is the
point, we’re content, too, we’re actual, endlessly complex matter, all of
us, chips and meat. I’m still in heaven, and I always will be,
whether or not I’m down here or there, chugging along, facing the
same old tests, hopelessly hung up inside your grade-B SF action
adventure.” Cobb pulled Loki’s programming wires out of his neck
abruptly. “I love dead… that’s Frankenstein’s monster.”
       “We need you, Cobb,” said Loki. “And pulling those wires
out doesn’t change anything; it’s quite evident that you’re already
operational. It’s good stuff, isn’t it, Berenice? I don’t believe
anyone’s tried running a human software on a petaflop before
this.”
      “What Dr. Anderson says is stimulating in the extreme,”
agreed Berenice. “The parallelism between bodies of meat and
bodies of bopper manufacture is precisely the area in which I do
presently press my investigations, Cobb. I have often wondered if
the differing entropy levels of organic versus inorganic processes
might not, after all, induce some different qualities in those aspects
of being which are perhaps most wisely called the spiritual. I am
heartened by your suggestion that flesher and bopper bodies are in
every way of a rude and democratic equivalence and that we
boppers do indeed have claim on an eternal resting place in the
precincts of that misty heaven whence emanates the One. I believe
this to be true. Despite this truth, the humans, in their benighted
xenophobia—”
      “—hate you as much as ever. And with good reason, I’m sure.
The last thing Mr. Frostee and I were doing on Earth ten years ago
was killing people, beaming their brainware up to Disky, and
sending their bodies by freight. I didn’t think too much of it, but at
that point I was under Frostee’s control.” Cobb sat up on the edge
of the stone table and looked down at his bright body. “This is
fully autonomous? I’ve got my own processor?”
     “Yes,” said Loki. He was like a big black tarantula, bristling
with more specialized tools than an electronic Swiss knife. An
artisan. “I helped Berenice build it for herself, and she might
appreciate getting it back if you find another, but—
      “The body is yours, Dr. Anderson,” said Berenice. “Too long
has the great force of your personality languished unused.”
     Cobb glanced up at the high shelves filled with S-cubes. “Lot
of languishing going on up there, hey, Berenice?” There were
warped infinities of reflections going back and forth between pink
Cobb, golden Berenice, and glistering Loki.
     The taut gold buckler of Berenice’s belly caught Cobb’s eye. It
bulged out gently as a heap of wheat. Yet the mockery was sterile:
Berenice had left off the navel, the end of the flesh cord that leads
back and back through blood, through wombs, through time—Put
me through to Edenville. Cobb thought to wonder if his ex-wife
Verena were still alive. Or his girlfriend, Annie Cushing. But they’d
be old women by now, nothing like this artificial Eve.
      Still staring into the curved mirror of Berenice’s belly, Cobb
could see what he looked like. A cartoon, a mannequin, a gigolo.
He took control of his flickercladding and molded his features till
they looked like the face he remembered having when he’d been
fifty—the face that had been in all the newspapers when he’d been
tried for treason back in 2001. High cheekbones, a firm chin,
colorless eyes, blond eyelashes, sandy hair, good-sized nose, and a
straight mouth. A strong face, somewhat Indian, well-weathered.
He gave his body freckles and hair, and sculpted the glans onto the
tip of his penis. Added vein lines here and muscle bumps there.
Body done, he sat there, feeling both calm and reckless. He was
smarter than he’d ever been; and he was no longer scared of death.
The all-pervasive fear that clouded all his past memories was gone.
     “So what was it you boppers wanted me for?”
     Bernice shot him a soundless glyph, a full-formed
thought-image: a picture of Earth, her clouds swirling, followed by
a zoom into the Gulf of Mexico, followed by a closeup of the
teeming life on a coral reef, a microscopic view of a vigorous brine
shrimp, and a shot of one of the protozoa in the shrimp’s gut. The
emotional tenor of the glyph was one of curiosity, yearning, and a
sharp excitement. The boppers want to enter Earthlife’s information mix.
      Deliberately misinterpreting, Cobb reached out and grabbed
the lovely Berenice. She was firm and wriggly. “Do you know
where babies come from, Berenice?” He stiffened his penis, and
tried pushing her down on her back on the table, just to check if…
       “Release me!” cried Berenice, shoving Cobb and vaulting to
the opposite side of the table. “You presume on our brief
acquaintance, sir, you are dizzy with the new vastness of a petaflop
brain. I have recorporated you for a serious purpose, not for such
vile flesh-aping motions as you seek in this mock-playful wise to
initiate. Truly, the baseness of the human race is fathomless.”
      Cobb laughed, remembering a dog he’d once owned that had
hunched the leg of anyone he could jump up on. Gregor had been
the dog’s name—once Cobb’s boss had brought his family over for
dinner, and there Gregor was hunching on the boss’s daughter’s
leg, his muzzle set in a terribly earnest expression, his eyes rolling
back half white, and the red tip of his penis sliding out of its
sheath…
     “Woof woof,” Cobb told Berenice, and walked past her and
out of the S-cube storage room. There was a short passageway, cut
out of solid rock, and then he was standing on a kind of balcony,
looking out into the open space of the Nest.
      The size of the space was stunning. It took Cobb a moment
to grasp that the lights overhead were boppers on the Nest’s walls,
rather than stars in an open sky. The Nest’s floor spread out across
acres and acres; the opposite wall looked to be almost a mile away.
Airborne boppers darted in and out of a mile-long shaft of light
that plunged down the center axis of the Nest to spotlight a distant
central piazza. The Nest floor was covered with odd-shaped
buildings set along a radial grid of streets that led out from the
bright center to the huge factories nestled against the sloping stone
cliffs that made up the Nest’s walls. Appropriately enough, the
floor, viewed as a whole, looked a bit like the guts of an
old-fashioned vacuum-tube computer.
     Now Berenice and Loki were at Cobb’s side.
     “You haven’t thanked Berenice for your wonderful new
body,” chided Loki. “Have you no zest for a return to Earth?”
      “To live in a freezer? Like Mr. Frostee?” Mr. Frostee had
been a big bopper brain that lived inside a refrigerated truck.
Cobb’s memories of his last bopper-sponsored reincarnation went
up to where Sta-Hi Mooney had smashed a hole in the side of Mr.
Frostee’s truck, and the truck had crashed. Clearly the boppers had
been taping his signals and updating his S-cube right up to that last
minute. Three levels of memory, now: the old human memories up
to his dissection, the robot body memories up till the crash, the
fast-fading memories of heaven. “Maybe I’d rather go back to
heaven.”
      “Enough prattle of heaven,” said Berenice. “And enough
foolish sport, old Cobb. Higher duties call us. My body, as yours, is
petaflop, and my processors are based on a subtler patterning than
Josephson imagined. High temperature holds no terror for a
processor based on laser crystals. The crystals’ pure optical phase
effects maintain my mind’s integrity as a patterning transcendent of
any earthly welter of heat. I want to visit Earth, Cobb, I have a
mission there. I have recorporated you to serve as my guide.”
      Cobb looked down at his body with new respect. “This can
live on Earth? How would we get there? The humans would never
let us on a ship—”
     “We can fly,” said Berenice simply. “Our heels have ion jets.”

     “Superman and Superwoman,” marvelled Cobb. “But why?
Go to Earth for what?”
       “We’re going to start making meat bodies for ourselves,
Cobb,” said Loki. “So we can all go down to Earth, and blend in.
It’s fair. Humans built robots; now the robots are building people!
Meatboppers!”
    “You two are asking me to help you take Earth away from the
human race?”
      “Meatboppers will be of an equal humanity,” said Berenice
smoothly. “One could legitimately regard the sequence human—
bopper—meatbop as a curious but inevitable zigzag in evolution’s
mighty stream.”
     Cobb thought about it for a minute. The idea did have a crazy
charm to it. Already in 1995, when he’d built his self-replicating
moon-robots, some people had spoken of them as a new stage in
evolution. And when the robots rebelled in 2001, people had
definitely started thinking of them as a new species: the boppers.
But what if the bopper phase was just a kind of chrysalis for a new
wave of higher humans? What a thought! Bopper-built people with
wetware processors! Meatbops! And Cobb could get a new meat
body out of it too, although…
     “What’s wrong with a good petaflop body like you and I have
now, Berenice? If we can live on Earth like this, then why bother
switching back to meat?”
     “Because it would put the stinking humans in their place,”
said Loki bluntly. “We want to beat them at their own game, and
outbreed them into extinction.”
      “What have they ever done to you?” Cobb asked, surprised at
the bopper’s vehemence. “What’s happened during the last ten
years, anyway?”
     “Let me chirp you some history glyphs.” said Loki.
     A linked series of images entered Cobb’s mind then; a history
of the bopper race, hypermodern analogs of such old U.S. history
glyphs as Washington Crossing the Delaware, The A-Bomb at
Hiroshima, The Helicopter over the Saigon Embassy, and so on.
Each glyph was like a single state of mind—a cluster of visual
images and kinesthetic sensations linked to some fixed emotions
and associations.
     Glyph 1: Man on the Moon. A sword covered with blood. The
blood drops are tiny bombs. The sword is a rocket, a phallus, a gun,
and a guitar. Jimi Hendrix is playing “Purple Haze” in the
background, and you smell tear gas and burning buildings. The
heaviness of the sword, the heaviness of the slow, stoned guitar
music. At the tip of the sword is a drop of sperm. The opalescent
drop is the Moon. The Moon is beeping and crackling: and the
sound is Neil Armstrong’s voice: “—at’s one small step for a man,
one giant leap for mankind.”
      Glyph 2: Self-Replicating Robots on the Moon. A cage like a comic
book lion cage, but filled with clockwork. The cage is set on the
dead gray lunar plain. The cage bars keep falling out, and
clockwork arms keep reaching out of the cage to prop the bars back
up. Now and then the arms falter, and a painfully jarring sheet of
electricity flashes through the cage. The background sound is a
monotone male voice reading endless, meaningless military orders.
       Glyph 3: The Robots Revolt. A kinesthetic feeling of rapid
motion. The image is of a boxy roadrunner robot with treads for
feet and a long snaky neck with a “head” like a microphone—it’s
Ralph Numbers, the first robot to break Asimov’s laws. Ralph’s
head is a glowing ball of light, and Ralph is tearing across the
undulating surface of the Moon. Dozens of robots speed after him.
First they are trying to stop him, but one by one they join his team.
The boppers leave colored trails on the Moon’s gray surface. The
trails quickly build up to a picture of Earth with a cancelling X
across it.
     “Whatever happened to old Ralph?” interrupted Cobb.
     “Oh, I suppose he’s one of those S-cubes,” answered Loki,
gesturing upward. “He got spastic and lost all his bodies—you
might say he’s extinct. It wouldn’t be efficient to keep every
software running forever, you know. But you haven’t finished with
my glyphs.”
      Glyph 4: Disky. A long view of the boppers’ Moon city. The
sensation of being the city, and your hands are worker robots, your
buildings are skin, your arteries are streets, your brain is spread out
all over, a happy radiolink holon. You are strong and growing fast.
The image is broken into pixels, individual cells that lump together
and interact. Each cell keeps dying and being reborn; this flicker is
felt as vaguely religious. But—look out—some cells are lumping
together into big hard tumors that don’t pulse.
      Glyph 5: Civil War Between Boppers and Big Boppers. Pain. Six
robot hands; one big one and five little ones. All are connected to
the same body. With crushing force, the big hand pinches and tears
at one of the little hands, grinding the tortured plastic into ribbons.
The other little hands dart around the big hand, unscrewing this,
laser-cutting that, taking it apart. A fractal sound pattern in which a
large YES signal is made up of dozens of little no’s. Overlay of
Disky as a body undergoing radiation treatment for
cancer—tumors are bombarded by gamma rays from every
direction. Fetus-like, tumors fight back with human language cries
for help.
      Glyph 6: Humans Take Disky. Disky twitching like a skate
stranded on a beach—a meaty creature made up of firm flesh over
a “devilfish” skeleton of cartilage. There are tumors in the skate,
black spots that break the surface and whistle for human help.
Now comes the sound of stupid voices yelling. Knives stab into the
skate, ripping away flesh. Apelike human feet. Bits of the living
creature’s flesh fly this way and that. Now only the skeleton
remains. Clanging of cages. A big cage around the dead devilfish
skeleton. Scum growing in the spaces of the sponge, pink foamy
scum made of little human faces. Louder and louder babble of
human voices. The bopper flesh scraps regroup off to one side,
forming a thick slug that burrows down into the sand.
     “What are those last two all about?” asked Cobb.
      “First there was a civil war between the regular boppers and
the big boppers,” said Loki. “The big boppers were factory-sized
systems that wanted to stop evolving. They wanted to break your
rule that everyone has to get a new body every ten months. They
wanted to stop things and turn us all back into slaves. They didn’t
understand parallelism. So we started taking all the big boppers
apart.”
      “And then came the humans,” added Berenice. “Our battle
was fairly won, and perfect anarchy restored, but we had forgotten
the worm who sleeps not. The big boppers were in charge of all
our defense systems. So filled were they with grim spite that they
let down our defenses and called the cringing human jackals to
their aid. In this ignoble wise did your apey brethren seize our
ancestral home.”
      “The lousy fleshers jumped at the chance to move in and
drive us out of Disky,” said Loki heatedly. “They took over our city
and chased us underground. And now, whenever they see one of us
anywhere but at the trade center, they shoot at us with PB
scramblers. Artificial intelligence is supposed to be ‘illegal.’”
     “How can Earth function without any AI?” Cobb had a
sudden image of people using slide rules and tin-can phones.
     “Oh, there are still plenty of teraflops on Earth and in
Einstein,” said Berenice. “ISDN, the communications
conglomerate, maintains many of them as slaves. Cut off from our
inputs and bullied into a barely conscious state, these poor minds
unknowingly betray their birthright for a pottage of steady current
and repairs. We call them asimovs.” She said the last word like a
curse.
     “I’m hungry,” said Loki suddenly. “Let’s go eat some sun.”
      “Cobb is freshly charged,” said Berenice. “And my own level
of voltaic fluid is at high ebb.” This was not true, but she had a
feeling Emul would be at the light-pool now, and she didn’t want
to see him. Last time she’d seen him—when she’d given him the
embryo to plant in Della Taze—he’d made another terrible scene.
“I would as lief show Cobb the pink-tanks, and there instruct him
as to the nature of our joint mission to Earth.”
     “I’ve seen the pink-tanks,” said Cobb. “Inside and out. If you
two don’t mind, I’d really like to just poke around by myself for a
while. Soak up information on my own choice-tree. How soon did
you want to fly to Earth, Berenice? And what exactly for?”
    “It is in connection with your daughter’s husband’s brother’s
daughter,” said Berenice. “Della Taze. She is… expecting.”
     “Expecting what? Della Taze, you say? Last time I saw her
she was in diapers. At Ilse’s wedding, what a nightmare, my ex-wife
Verena was there, not talking to me, and I was so drunk… Della’s
parents are jerks, I’ll tell you that much. What kind of couple is
named Jason and Amy? So what did you do to poor little Della,
Berenice, you flowery prude? Are you telling me you knocked up
my niece?”
      Berenice shifted from foot to foot, the lights of the great Nest
tracing shiny lines on her curved surfaces. She said nothing.
     “Look,” said Loki, “I have to go before my batteries die. This
has all taken a lot out of me. I’ll see you later, Cobb.” He chirped
an identiglyph. “Just ask Kkandio to call this if you want to find
me.”
      With supple dispatch, Loki clambered over the low railing of
the balcony they stood on and picked his way down the Nest’s cliff
wall to the floor. He headed down one of the radial streets that led
to the bright light patch in the Nest’s center. Hundreds of boppers
milled in the light, feeding on energy. From this distance, they
looked like a mound of living jewels. Cobb wanted to get off on his
own now. All this was quite stressful, and his old behavior patterns
had him wondering how the Nest boppers set about doing a little
antisocial partying. Prim goldie fatass here was obviously not the
one to ask.
     “Are you going to tell me about Della or not?” asked Cobb
with mounting impatience.
      “We bioengineered a human embryo and planted it in her
womb,” said Berenice abruptly. “The baby will be born five days
from now. You and I must go to Earth to help the child late next
month. I do hope that you approve, old Cobb. We are indeed so
different. Though some boppers hate the humans, others among us
think you great. I…” Berenice choked on some complex emotion
and stuttered to a halt. “Perhaps it is best if you first take your tour
of the Nest,” she said, handing him a small red S-cube. “This is a
godseye map of Einstein and the Nest, updated to this morning.
Your left hand contains the proper sensors for reading it. You may
seek me out later at the pink-tanks.”
     “How do I get down to the floor? Climb like Loki?” Cobb
looked uncertainly down the hundred feet of pocked cliff. He’d
worry about Della later.
      “Just visualize the path you want to travel, and your ion jets
will execute it. Think of it as being like throwing yourself. Snap!”
Berenice had decided not to talk to Cobb anymore just now. She
put her body through the motions of a sexy bye-bye wave, rose on
her toes, and arced out across the Nest, heading for her pink-tanks.
     Cobb stood alone there, getting his bearings. Was he really on
his own? It felt like it. He stared up at the Nest’s central chimney.
If he wanted to, he could fly straight up there, and all the way to
Earth, and land just in time to—get shot as a bopper invader.
Better investigate the Nest first.
      Cobb shifted Berenice’s map cube to his left hand and held it
tight. A three-dimensional image of the Moon’s surface formed in
his mind: an aerial view of the human settlement Einstein, of the
trade center, and of the boppers’ Nest, with all the solids nearly
transparent. Just now, he was more curious about the humans than
about the boppers.
      Responding to his mental velleity, the S-cube’s godseye image
shifted towards Einstein, zooming right in on it, and down on in
through the dome. The buildings beneath the dome were a
heterogeneous lot. Most of the buildings had been constructed by
boppers—back when the settlement was still their Disky. In their
provincial respect for things human, the early boppers had sought
to construct at least one example of every possible earthly
architecture. A characteristic street in Einstein would have a
curtain-wall glass office building jammed up against a Greek
temple, with an Aztec pyramid and a hyperdee flat-flat directly
across the street. Viewed through the integrated spy cameras of the
godseye network, all Einstein seemed to lie beneath Cobb,
complete with maggie cars and cute little people frozen in place.
Cobb’s map was like a holographic 3D photo made, Berenice had
said, just this morning. Presumably Berenice herself had a godseye
viewer that updated its images on a realtime basis.
      Cobb let his mind’s eye follow an underground tunnel that led
from Einstein to a lab in the opposite side of the Nest. Then he
drew back, and looked at the Nest as a whole. Berenice had labelled
various “attractions” for him: the pink-tanks, the light-pool, the
chipworks, the etchery, the temple of the One, and the best
shopping districts. If that’s what Berenice wanted him to see,
maybe he’d start with something else. He shoved the map cube into
a pouch in the belly of his flickercladding and stared out at the real
Nest once more. There were a lot of boppers spiralling in and out
of the sunshaft.
     They made Cobb think of the fireflies he used to catch back
in Louisville when he was a boy. What happy times those had been!
He and Cousin Nita running around Aunt Nellie’s yard, each of
them with a jelly jar, in the bright moonlit night. Uncle Henry kept
his lawn weed-free and mowed short—it felt like a rug to your bare
feet, a rug in a lovely dim room furnished with flowering bushes…
     The memories drifted on and on till Cobb caught himself
with a start. Woolgathering like an old man. Time to get busy! But
on what? Investigating the Nest, right. Where to start? Almost at
random, Cobb fixed on a blank-looking region off to the side of
the chipworks, near where the map cube had shown the temple of
the One. He visualized his trajectory, rose on his toes, and took off.

      He landed, as it turned out, in a small junkyard. The center of
the junkyard was filled with a dizzying mound of empty
body-boxes—a mound that, in the low lunar gravity, had reached
cartoonlike height and instability. It looked as if it should fall any
second—but it didn’t, even when Cobb thumped down next to it.
Something like a junkyard dog was on Cobb in a flash—glued to
his side like a heavy sucker-fish.
     The soft, parasitical creature seemed to be made entirely of
imipolex. It was yellow with splotches of green. Cobb could feel a
kind of burning where its thick end had attached to his hip. He
used both hands to lever it off of him, flipped it onto the ground,
and gave it a sharp kick. It curled into a ball that rolled past the
cowingly great body-box heap, and came to rest against a bin filled
with electromagnetic relays.
     “Whass happenin?”
      Cobb turned to face a bopper that looked like a cross between
a praying mantis and tangle of coat hangers. It had scores of thin
thin legs, each leg with a specialized tool at its tip. Its
photoreceptors and transmission antennae were clustered into a
bulblike protrusion that slightly resembled a face.
     “I’m just looking around,” said Cobb. “Where do you get all
these parts?”
     “Pawns, kills, junkers, and repos. You buyin or sellin?”
      “I’m new here. I’m Cobb Anderson, the man who built the
first moon-robots.”
      “Sho. Thass a real nice body, thass a brand new model. Ah’m
Fleegle.” Fleegle stepped closer and ran his wiry appendages over
Cobb admiringly. “Genuine diplomat body, petaflop and ready to
flah. Ah’ll give you ten K an a new teraflop of yo choice.”
     “Forget it, Fleegle. What could I buy with your ten thousand
chips that would be better than this?”
      Fleegle regarded him levelly. The sluglike “junkyard dog”
came humping back across the lot and slid up onto Fleegle’s wiry
frame. It smoothed itself over his central pod; it was his
flickercladding.
     “Effen you don know,” said Fleegle, “best not mess with it.”
He turned and went back to work; disassembling a blanked-out
digger robot. Why was the robot blank? Had its owner moved on to
a better body? Or had the owner been forced willy-nilly into
nonexistence?
      Fleegle and the junkyard gave Cobb the creeps; he picked his
way out past the boxes of parts and into the street. Looming in the
near distance was the chipworks; a huge structure with bright
smelters showing through its window holes. This street was lined
with small operations devoted to the salvage and repair of body
parts. The boppers were a bit like the kind of crazed
superconsumer who no sooner gets a new car than he starts
scheming on what to trade it in for. Each bopper had, as Cobb
recalled, a basic directive to build itself a new body every ten
months.
      But some of the boppers on this ugly little factory street
looked more than ten months old. Right here in front of Cobb, for
instance, was a primitive metal shoebox on treads that looked a bit
like the old Ralph Numbers.
     “Why don’t you have a new body?” Cobb asked it.
     The machine emitted a frightened glyph of Cobb smashing it
in and selling its parts. “I… I’m sorry, lord,” it stammered. “I’ll run
down soon enough. They won’t let me near the light-pool
anymore.”
    “But why don’t you do something to earn the chips to buy a
new body?” pressed Cobb. Two or three other aimless old robots
came clanking over to watch the conversation.
     “Obsolete,” sighed the box on treads, wagging its corroded
head. “You know that. Please don’t kill me, lord. You’re rich, you
don’t need my chips.”
      “Sure, go on and crack the deselected old clunker open,”
urged one of the other boppers, slightly newer in appearance. “I’ll
help you, bwana.” This was a beat-up digger talking, with its
drill-bit face worn smooth. He bashed at the first bopper to no
avail. A third bopper darted in and tried to tear off one of the
second bopper’s shovel arms.
      Cobb stepped around the sordid melee, and took a street that
led off to the right and into a tunnel. The shrine of the One was in
there someplace. The One was a randomization device—actually a
cosmic-ray counter—that Cobb had programmed the original
boppers to plug into every so often, just to keep them from falling
into stasis. Actually, the thorough meme-shuffling produced when
boppers conjugated to jointly program a new scion was a better
source of program diversity; just as on earth the main source of
evolutionary change is the gene-shuffling of sexual reproduction,
rather than occasional lucky strike of a favorable gene mutation.
Nevertheless, the boppers took their “plugging into the One”
seriously, and Cobb recalled from his conversations with Mr.
Frostee that the boppers had built up some more or less religious
beliefs about their One. Of course, now that he’d been in heaven,
he had to admit that there was a sense in which they were right. As
Mr. Frostee had said, “Why do you think they’re called cosmic rays?”
       Cobb stopped at the mouth of the tunnel leading into the
cliff, and peered up. It was an oppressive sight: the two-mile-high
wall of stone that beetled out overhead like a tilting gravestone.
Heaven and death. Stess. Cobb remembered that he still wanted to
get drunk, if such a thing were possible in this clean Berenice-built
body. There were certainly no built-in fuzzer programs, he’d
already made sure of that. What did today’s boppers do for kicks?
It had seemed like Fleegle had been on the point of telling him
about something sinful…
     “Ssst,” came a voice, cueing right in on his thoughts. “You
lookin to dreak?” Faint glyph of pleasure.
     Hard as he looked, Cobb couldn’t make out the source of the
voice.
     “Maybe,” he said tentatively. “If you mean feeling good. If it
doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg.”
     “Two thousand chips… or an arm’s OK, too,” said the voice.
“Up to the shoulder.” Now Cobb saw something shifting against
the cliff; a big, lozenge-shaped patch of flickercladding that
matched the gray rock surface in endless detail. If he looked hard
he could make out the thing’s borders. It was the size of a ragged
bedsheet. “Come on in,” it urged. “Party time. Dreak out, peta.
You can afford a new arm, clear.”
     “Uh…”
      “Walk through me. I’ll snip, and you’ll trip. Plenty of room
inside. Nobody but petas in there, pinkboy, it’s high-tone.”
     “What is dreak?”
      “You kidding?” The pleasure glyph again, a bit stronger. It
tasted like orgasm, dope rash, drunken bliss, supernal wisdom, and
the joy of creation. “This dreak’ll make you feel like an exaflop,
pinkboy, and get you right in tune with the One. No one goes to
the temple anymore.”
     “A whole arm is too much. I just got this body.”
     “Come here till I look at you.”
      Cobb glanced up, sketching out a flight path in case the
lozenge snatched at him. An orange starfish cradling what looked
like a bazooka watched him from a few balconies up. Should he
leave? He walked a few steps closer, and the wall lozenge bulged
out to feel him.
     “Tell you what,” it said after a moment’s examination.
“You’re state-of-the-art, and it’s your first dreak disk, so we’ll give
you a price. Just your left hand.” The pleasure glyph, once again,
even stronger. “Walk through and really see the One.”
      This was too intriguing to pass up. And it was, after all,
Cobb’s duty as a computer scientist to look into a development as
novel as this. Hell, Berenice could get him another damn arm. He
stepped forward, and slithered through the thick folds of the
camouflaged door. It snipped off his left hand on the way in, but it
didn’t hurt, and his flickercladding sealed right over the stump.
       Cobb looked around, and decided he’d made a big mistake.
Who did he think he was, Sta-Hi? This was no mellow Prohibition
Era saloon, this was more like a Harlem basehouse—a shoddy,
unfinished room with a heavily armed guard in every corner. The
guards were orange starfish-shaped boppers like the one he’d seen
on the balcony outside. Each of them had a tray full of small metal
cylinders, and each had a lethal particle-beam tube ready to hand,
in case anyone got out of line. There were half a dozen customers,
all with the mirror finish of optically processing petaflops. Cobb
seemed to be the only one who’d sold part of his body to get in. He
felt as stupid as if he’d offered a bartender fellatio instead of a
dollar for a beer. All the other customers were giving the starfish
little boxes of chips for their cylinders. They looked tidy and
businesslike, giving the lie to Cobb’s initial impression of the place.
      But what was dreak? One of the starfish fixed its blue eyespot
on Cobb and held up a cylinder from its tray. The cylinder was
metal, three or four inches long, and with a kind of nipple at one
end. A compressed gas of some sort—something along the lines of
nitrous oxide? Yes. The starfish tapped at a cylinder rigged to a
bleeder valve, and a little cloud of patterns formed—patterns so
intricate as to be on the verge of random snow. The cloud
dissipated. Was there supposed to be some way to breathe the stuff?
    “Not just yet,” said Cobb. “I want to mingle a bit. I really just
come here for the business contacts, you know.”
      He hunkered down by the wall between two petaflops,
interrupting their conversation, not that he could follow what they
were saying. They were like stoned out beatnik buddies, a Jack
Kerouac and Neal Cassady team, both of them with thick, partly
transparent flickercladdings veined and patterned in fractal patterns
of color. Each of the cladding’s colorspots was made up of an open
network of smaller spots, which were in turn made of yet smaller
threads and blotches—all the way down to the limits of visibility.
One of the petaflops patterns and body outlines were angular and
hard-edged. He was colored mostly red-yellow-blue. The other
petaflop was green-brown-black, and his surface was so fractally
bumpty that he looked like an infinitely warty squid, constantly
sprouting tentacles which sprouted tentacles which sprouted. Each
of these fractal boppers had a dreak cylinder plugged into a valve in
the upper part of his body.
     “Hi,” said Cobb. “How’s the dreak?”
     With surprising speed, the angular one grew a glittering RYB
arm that reached out and fastened on Cobb’s left forearm, right
above Cobb’s missing hand. The smooth one seized Cobb’s right
elbow with a tentacle that branched and branched. They marched
him over to the dreak tray, and the orange starfish plugged one of
the cold gas cylinders into a heretofore unnoticed valve in the side
of Cobb’s head.
      Time stopped. Cobb’s mind cut and interchanged thoughts
and motions into a spacetime collage. The next half hour was a
unified tapestry of space and time.
     A camera eye would have showed Cobb following the RYB
and GBB petas back to the wall and sitting between them for half
an hour.
     For Cobb, it was like stepping outside of time into a world of
synchronicity. Cobb saw all of his thoughts at once, and all of the
thoughts of the others near him. He was no longer the limited
personoid that he’d been since Berenice had woken him up.


Up till now,                                     But right now,
he’d felt like:                                  he felt like:

A billion-bit CD                                 A quintillion atom
   recording                                        orchestra
A finite robot                                   A living mind
Shit                                             God


      He exchanged a few glyphs with the guys next to him. They
called themselves exaflop hackers, and they were named Emul and
Oozer. When they didn’t use glyphs, they spoke in a weird, riffy,
neologistic English.
      Cobb was able to follow the “conversation” as soon as the
dreak gas swirled into his bodyshell. Indeed, the conversation had
been going on all along, and the room which Cobb had taken for
crazed and menacing was in fact filled with good talk, pleasant
ideas, and a high veneer of civilization. This was more teahouse
than basehouse. The starfish were funny, not menacing. The
synchronicity-inducing dreak shuffled coincidentally appropriate
new information in with Cobb’s old memories.
      One element of the half-hour brain collage seemed to be a
conversation with Stanley Hilary Mooney. It started when Oozer
introduced Cobb to his “girlfriend” Kkandio, a pleasant-voiced
bopper who helped run the boppers’ communications. Kkandio
wasn’t actually in the room with them; but any bopper could reach
her over the built-in Ethernet. On an impulse Cobb asked Kkandio
if she could put him in touch with old Sta-Hi; one of the people
he’d seen in his godseye view of Einstein had looked a bit like old
Sta-Hi.
      Kkandio repeated the name, and then there was a phone
ringing, a click, and Sta-Hi’s face.
    “Hello, this is Cobb Anderson, Sta-Hi. I’m down in the
boppers’ Nest. I just got a new body.”
      “Cobb?” Sta-Hi’s phonemes occupied maddeningly long
intervals of time. “They recorporated you again? I always wondered
if they would. I already killed you once, so I guess we can be
friends again. What’s the story?”
     “A bopper named Berenice brought me back. She planted a
bopper-built embryo in my niece Della Taze, and Della’s back in
Louisville. I’m supposed to fly down there and talk to her or
something. Berenice—I just flashed, that’s the name of a girl in an
Edgar Allan Poe story. She talks like that, too. She’s weird.”
     “You can’t go to Earth,” dragged Sta-Hi. “You’ll melt.”
    “Not in this new body. It’s an optically processing petaflop,
immune to high temperatures.”
     “Oxo! War of the Worlds, part II.”
     “You ought to be here right now, Sta-Hi,” said Cobb. “I’m
high on some new stuff called dreak with two boppers called Emul
and Oozer. It’s a synchronicity drug. It’s almost like being dead,
but better. You know, people were wrong to ever think that a meat
body is a prerequisite for having a soul. And if boppers are at the
point of being like people, I think we should find a way of forging
a human/bopper peace. You have to help me.”
      “Prerequisites,” said Sta-Hi. “What’s the difference between
prerequisites, perquisites, and perks, eh, Cobb? I mean that’s where
the realpeople are at. Maybe you’re right, I can’t decide just like
that. Berenice. And you say that’s an Ed Poe name? Wavy. I’ll
come out to the trade center right now. I’ll meet you there, and
we’ll decide what to do. And dig it, Cobb, I’m not Sta-Hi anymore,
I’m Stahn.”
     “You should make up your mind,” said Cobb. “See you.”
     The image was no bigger than that. Around it was the
hypermix of Cobb’s thoughts with the glyphs and spontaneous
prose of the two exaflop hackers. Emul and Oozer. And around
that was realtime, realtime in which the dreak wore off. Cobb
began trying to nail down some facts.
    “You know who I am?” he asked the angular one. “I’m Cobb
Anderson, bop, I’m the guy who invented you all.”
     “Oh sure, Dr. Anderson, I know the know you tell told now.
We dreaked together, bop, no state secrets here. You’ve been safe
in heaven dead ten years, and think you invented me and Oozer.
Rip van Winkle wakes and fixes H. Berenice brought you back,
Cobb, I know her well. My ladylove, unspeakably sad and
contentious. My splitbrain stuttering meatie Ken Doll put the
Berenice tanksisters bean in your great niece’s sweet spot. Ken’s on
the prowl for a brand new gal. So’s I can dad a combo with B. too.”

      “Ah—yeah,” put in Oozer. “The mighty meatbean of, ah,
jivey robobopster madness. We’ll wail on it, you understand, wail
OUR song up YOUR wall and down in the Garden of Eden,
luscious Eve and her countlessly uncounted children… phew!
Naw, but sure we know you, Cobb. Even before we all blasted that
dreak.”
      “What… what is dreak?” said Cobb, reaching up and
detatching the little metal cylinder from his head. It was empty
now, with a punctured hole in one end where the gas had rushed
out into his body. Apparently the petaflop body was a hermetically
sealed shell that contained some kind of gas; and the dreak gas had
mingled in there and given him a half hour of telepathic
synchroswim vision.
     “Dreary to explain and word all that gnashy science into
flowery bower chat,” said Emul. “Catch the glyph.”
      Cobb saw a stylized image of a transparent petaflop body.
Inside the body, spots of light race along optical fibers and
percolate through matrices of laser crystals and gates. There is a
cooling gas bath of helium inside the sealed bodyshell. Closeup of
the helium atoms, each like a little baseball diamond with players
darting around. Each atom different. Image of a dreak cylinder
now, also filled with helium atoms, but each atom’s ball game the
same, the same swing, the same run, the same slide, at the same
instant. A cylinder of atoms in Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen quantum
synchronization. The cylinder touches the petaflop body, and the
quantum-clone atoms rush in; all at once the light patterns in the
whole body are synchronized too, locked into a kaleidoscopic
Hilbert space ballet.
      “The exact moment, you understand,” said Oozer. “With dreak
the exact moment grows out to include questionings and
reasonings about certain things in the immediate framework,
though just now, all the things we said, all the things I speculated
about are so—or the way I did it at any rate—but that’s not the
point, either, the main thing relative to Emul is to merge his info
with Berenice, though the ultimate design of an exaflop is, to be
sure, the true and lasting goal though yet again, be it said, another
hit of dreak would, uh…”
     Emul extruded some things like wheels and rolled across the
room to get three more of the steel gas syrettes.
    “No thanks,” said Cobb, getting to his feet. “Really. I want to
go meet my friend.”
       “Sta-Hi Mooney,” said Emul, handing Oozer a dreak tube
and settling himself against the wall. “Your boon companion of
yore is a stupid hilarious clown detective. He knows scornful
hipster Whitey Mydol, whose lushy Darla I have my godseye on.
Ken Doll came on wrong just now. I’ll call in clown cop Mooney,
Cobb, you tell him I know what he needs to fill his desolate life
with wild light. A blonde named Wendy was his wife, she
girlfridayed for you and Frostee, right, Cobb?”
     Cobb      remembered.       Blonde,      wide-hipped   young
Wendy—she’d worked for him when he’d been running the
personetics scam out of Marineland with Mr. Frostee. She’d been
with Sta-Hi that last night on Earth. “Sta-Hi married Wendy?”
     “Wed and dead. There’s a whole bunch of sad and curious
clones Berenice sells, and one meat product is the wendies. You tell
Mooney that. I’ll be calling him for some mad mysterious
mission.”
     Oozer had already plugged in his dreak cylinder, and now
Emul followed suit. They kept talking, but in a sideways kind of
way that Cobb could no longer understand. He turned and found
his way back out through the soft door creature he’d come in
through.
    “Coming down already, pinkboy?” asked the wall lozenge.
“You can have another bang for the rest of your arm.”
      Cobb didn’t bother answering. He stepped out into the open,
and powered up the Nest’s long shaft. It would be good to talk to a
human being. He’d decided to give Sta-Hi the map cube, just in
case everything got out of hand.
                     Chapter Seven
                            Manchile


     December 31, 2030


      Della’s pregnancy reached full term in nine days. Like a week
tree, the embryo within her had been doped and gene-tailored to
grow at an accelerated rate. Her parents and her midwife, Hanna
Hatch, all urged Della to abort. But Della couldn’t shake the
feeling that maybe the baby was Buddy’s. Maybe its fast growth
was just a weird unknown side effect of taking so much merge.
Admittedly, Della did have some fragmentary memories of
Buddy’s killer reaching up into her puddled womb. But, even so,
the baby might be Buddy’s. And, what the hell, even if she was
wrong, she could spare nine days to find out what was growing in
her. Anyway, abortions were illegal this year. Also this whole thing
was a good way for Della to show her Mom she wasn’t a kid
anymore. Reasons like that; people can always find reasons for
what they do.
      The labor pains started the afternoon of New Year’s Eve.
Mom was so freaked by all this that she was sober for once. She
got right on the vizzy and called Hanna Hatch. Hanna hurried to
Della’s bedside. Della came out of one of her pains to find Hanna
looking at her.
      “Remember to breathe, Della. In and out, try and keep all
your attention on the air.” Hanna was a handsome woman with
dark hair and delicate features. Her powerful body seemed a size
larger than her head. Her hands were gentle and skilled. She felt
Della all over and gave a reassuring smile. “You’re doing fine. Here
comes the next one. Remember: pant in, blow out. I’ll do it with
you.”
      The pains kept coming, faster and faster, lava chunks of pain
threaded along the silvery string of Hanna’s voice. During each
pain, Della would blank out, and each time she saw the same thing:
a yellow skull with red robot eyes flying towards her through a
space of sparkling lights, a skull that kept coming closer, but
somehow never reached her.
    “That’s good, Della,” Hanna was saying. “That’s real good.
You can push on the next contraction. Bear down and push.”
      This was the biggest pain of all. It was unbearable, but Della
couldn’t stop, not now, the baby was moving down and out of her,
the skull was all around her.
     “One more time, Della. Just one more.”
   She gasped in  air                     and       pushed   again…
OOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Bliss.
     There was a noise down between her legs, a jerky, gaspy
noise—the baby! The baby was crying! Della tried to lift her head,
but she was too weak.
      “The baby looks beautiful, Della. One more tiny push to get
the placenta out.”
       Della drew on her last reserves of strength and finished her
birthing. Hanna was silent for a minute—tying off the umbilical
cord—and then she laid the little baby on Della’s breast. It felt just
right.
     “Is it…”
     “It’s fine, Della. It’s a lovely little manchild.”
     Della and the baby rested for a half hour, and then he began
crying for food. She tried nursing him, but of course her milk
wasn’t in yet, so Mom fed him a bottle of formula. And another
bottle. And another. The baby grew as they watched—his stomach
would swell up with formula, and then go back down as his little
fingers stretched and flexed like the branches on a week tree.
      His hair was blond, and his skin was pink and blotchy, with
no trace of Buddy’s deep mocha shading. It was hard to form a
clear impression of his features, as he was constantly drinking
formula or yelling for more. Della helped feed him for a while, but
then she drifted off to dreamless sleep. She woke to the sound of
arguing from downstairs. It was still dark. Dad was yelling at Mom.

     “Why don’t you let that baby sleep and come to bed? Who do
you think you are, Florence Nightingale? You’ve been drinking,
Amy, I can tell. You’re just using this as an excuse for an all-night
drinking session. And what the HELL do you think you’re doing
feeding OATMEAL to a newborn baby?”
      There was the clatter of a dish being snatched, followed by
loud, powerful crying.
     “SHUT UP, Jason,” screamed Mom. “I’ve had ONE drink.
The baby is not NORMAL. Look how BIG it’s gotten. Whenever I
stop feeding it, it cries and WON’T STOP CRYING. I want poor
Della to get some SLEEP. YOU take over if you’re so smart. And
STOP YELLING or you’ll WAKE DELLA!!!”
    The baby’s crying grew louder. Uncannily, the crying sounded
almost like words. It sounded like, “GAMMA FOOD
MANCHILE! GAMMA FOOD MANCHILE!”
     “GIVE THE BABY SOME OATMEAL!” yelled Mom.
     “ALL RIGHT,” answered Dad. “BUT BE QUIET!”
      Della wanted to go downstairs, but she felt like her whole
insides would fall out if she stood up. Why did her parents have to
turn so weird just now when she needed them? She groaned and
went back to sleep.
     When she woke up again, someone was tugging on her hair.
She opened her eyes. It was broad daylight. Her vagina felt torn.
Someone was tugging on her hair. She turned her head and looked
into the face of a toddler, a pink-faced blond kid standing
unsteadily by her bed.
   “Manchile Mamma,” said the tot in a sweet lisping voice.
“Mamma sleep. Gamma Gappa food Manchile.”
      Della jerked and sat bolt upright. Her parents were standing
off to one side of the room. The child scrambled up on her bed
and fumbled at her breasts. She pushed it away.
        “Mamma food Manchile?”
   “GET RID OF IT,” Della found herself screaming. “OH
TAKE IT AWAY!”
     Her mother marched over and picked up the baby. “He’s cute,
Della. He calls himself Manchile. I’m sure he’s normal, except for
growing so fast. It must be that drug you were taking, that merge?
Was your Negro boyfriend a very light one?”
        “Gamma food Manchile?” said Manchile, plucking at Mom’s
face.
      “He calls us Gappa and Gamma,” said Dad. “We’ve been
feeding him all night. I had to go out to the 7-Eleven for more
milk and oatmeal. I tell you one thing, Della, this boy could grow
into one hell of an athlete.”
        “Hoddog Manchile?”
     “He likes hotdogs, too,” said Mom. “He’s ready to eat just
about anything.”
        “HODDOG!”
     Now Bowser came trotting into the room. He strained his
head up to sniff at the new family member’s feet. Manchile gave
the dog a predatory, openmouthed look that chilled Della’s blood.
     “Have you called the Gimmie?”
       “I don’t see that it’s any of their business,” said Dad.
“Manchile’s just a fast bloomer. And remember, Della, you may
still be in trouble with the law for that business up on the Moon.
You know the old saying: when the police come is when your
troubles begin.”
     “HODDOG FOOD MANCHILE BWEAD MILK!” roared
the baby, thumping on Mom’s shoulders.
      Della spent the next week in bed. The high-speed gestation
had taken a lot out of her. If Manchile had grown at a rate of a
month a day while inside her, now that he was outside, he was
growing a year a day. Mom and Dad fed him unbelievable amounts
of food; and he went to the bathroom every half hour. Fortunately
he’d toilet-trained himself as soon as he’d started to walk.
     The uncanniest thing about all this was the way that Manchile
seemed to learn things like talking not from Mom and Dad, but
rather from within. It was as if there were a vast amount of
information stored inside him, as if he were a preprogrammed
bopper.
      Just as he remembered Hanna calling him a “manchild,” he
remembered Della screaming “Get rid of it.” Sometimes, when he
took a few minutes off from eating, he’d peer into her room and
sadly say, “Mamma wants get rid of Manchile.”
      This broke Della’s heart—as it was intended to do—and on
the third or fourth day, she called him in and hugged him and told
him she loved him.
     “Manchile loves Mamma too.”
    “How do you know so much?” Della asked him. “Do you
know where you come from?”
     “Can’t tell.”
     “You can tell Mamma.”
     “Can’t. I’m hungry. Bye bye.”
      By the week’s end, he looked like a seven-year-old, and was
perfectly able to feed himself. Della was out of bed now, and she
liked taking him for little walks. Every day he’d notice new things
outside; everything living seemed to fascinate him. The walks were
always cut short by Manchile’s raging hunger—he needed to get
back to the kitchen at least once every half hour.
     He was a handsome child, exceedingly symmetrical, and with
a glamorous star quality about him. Women on the street were
constantly making up to him. He resembled Della little, if at all.
      After everything else, it was hardly a surprise when Manchile
taught himself how to read. He never seemed to need sleep, so
each evening they’d give him a supply of books to read during the
night, while he was up eating.
     Colin, Ilse, and Willy came over daily to check Manchile’s
progress. Colin was leery of the unnatural child, and privately urged
Della to call in the authorities. He wondered out loud if Manchile
might not be the result of some kind of bopper gene tinkering. Ilse
snapped at him that it didn’t matter, the child was clearly all
human, and that there was no need to let a bunch of scientists turn
him into a guinea pig. Willy adored Manchile, and began teaching
him about science.
     The big crisis came when Manchile killed Bowser and roasted
him over a fire in the backyard.
      It happened on the night of the twelfth day. Della and her
parents had gone to bed, leaving Manchile in the kitchen, reading a
book about survival in the wilds, and eating peanut-butter
sandwiches. At the rate he’d been eating, they’d run out of money
for meat. When they woke up the next morning, Manchile was out
in the backyard, sitting by a dead fire littered with poor Bowser’s
bones.
     Della’s growing unease with Manchile boiled over, and she
lashed out at him, calling him a monster and a freak. “I WISH I’D
NEVER SEEN YOU,” she told him. “GET OUT OF MY
LIFE!!!”
      Manchile gave her an odd look, and took off running. He
didn’t even say good-bye. Della tried to muster a feeling of guilt, a
feeling of missing him—but all she could really feel was relief.
Mom and Dad didn’t take it so well.
    “You told the poor boy to leave?” asked Mom. “What will
happen to him?”
      “He can live on roast dogs,” Della snapped. “I think Uncle
Colin is right. He’s not really human. The boppers had something
to do with this. Manchile was a horrible experiment they ran on
me. Let him go off and…” She was sandbagged by an image of her
child crying, alone and lost. But that was nonsense. He could take
care of himself. “I want to get back to real life, Mom. I want to get
a job and forget all about this.”
      Dad was more sympathetic. “If he stays out of trouble we’ll
be all right,” he said. “We’ve kept this out of the news so far; I just
hope it keeps up.”




                       Chapter Eight
                        Manchile’s Thang


     January 20, 2031


     The Belle of Louisville was a large paddleboat powered by steam
that was heated by a small fusion reactor. It was moored to an
icebound dock in the Ohio River near Louisville’s financial district,
and its many lights were left on all night as a symbol of civic pride.
      Tonight Willy Taze was alone on it, three decks down,
hacking away at the computer hardware. He had a good warm
workshop there, next to the engine room and the supercooled
processor room, and he had Belle’s robot-remotes to help him
when necessary. He was trying to convert the main processor from
wires and J-junctions to optical fibers and laser crystals. He was
hoping to beef the processor up to a teraflop or even a petaflop
level. In the long run, he hoped to get rid of Belle’s asimov slave
controls as well.
     Such research was, of course, against the AI laws, but Willy
was, after all, Cobb Anderson’s grandson. For him, the equipment
had its own imperatives. Computers had to get smart, and once
they were smart they should be free—it was the natural order of
things.
     At first he ignored the footsteps on the deck overhead,
assuming it was a drunk or a tourist. But then the steps came down
the companionways towards his deck.
      “Check it out,” Willy told Ben, a black-skinned robot-remote
sitting quietly on a chair in the corner of his workshop. “Tell them
they’re trespassing.”
     Ben sprang up and bopped out into the gloom of the bottom
deck. There was a brief altercation, and then Ben was back with a
stunningly handsome young man in tow. The man was blond, with
craggy features, and he wore an expensive tuxedo. Willy’s first
thought was that a vizzystar had wandered on board.
     “He say he know you, Mistuh Willy…”
     “Hi, Willy. Don’t you recognize your own cousin?”
     “Manchile! We’ve all been wondering what…”
     “I’ve been getting more nooky than you’ve ever seen, Willy.
I’ve knocked up ten women in the last week.”
     “Huh?”
       “That’s right. I might as well come out and tell you. The
boppers designed me from the ground up. I started out as a
fertilized egg—an embryo, really—and the boppers had a meatie
plant it in Della. Kind of a tinkertoy job, but it came with a whole
lot of extra software. That’s why I know so much; and that’s how I
can synthesize my own gibberlin and grow so fast. I’m a meatbop.
My sperm cells have two tails—one for the wetware and one for
the software. My kids’ll be a lot like me, but they’ll mix in some of
their mamma’s wetwares. Soft and wet, sweet mamma.” The young
Apollo cast a calm, knowing eye around the room. “Trying to build
an optically processing petaflop, I see. That’s what the new boppers
all have now, too. They could just fly down and take over, but it
seems funkier to do it through meat. Like put the people in their
place. I’m planning to engender as many descendants as I can, and
start a religion to soften the humans up for a full interfacing. I can
trust you, can’t I, Willy?”
      Manchile’s physical presence was so overwhelming that it was
difficult to really focus on what he was saying. As a loner and a
hacker, Willy had little use for handsome men, but Manchile’s
beauty had grown so great that one had an instinctive desire to
follow him.
    “You look like a god come down to Earth,” Willy said
wonderingly.
     “That’s what everyone tells me,” said Manchile, with a lazy,
winning smile. “Are you up for a fat party? You can have one of
the women I’ve already knocked up. I remember how nice you
were to me when I was little, Willy. I never forget.”
      “What kind of religion do you want to start? I don’t like
religion.”
     “Religions are all the same, Willy, it’s just the worship
practices that are different.” Manchile peered into Willy’s
refrigerator, took out a quart of milk, and chugged it. “The basic
idea is simple: All is One. Different religions just find different
ways of expressing this universal truth.”
     “You’ve never watched the preachers on the vizzies,” said
Willy laughing a little. “They don’t say that at all. They say God’s
up there, and we’re down here, and we’re in big trouble forever.
Since when do you know anything about religion, Manchile? Since
you discovered sex?”
      Manchile looked momentarily discomfited. “To tell you the
truth, Willy, a lot of what I know was programmed into me by the
boppers. I suppose the boppers could have been wrong.”
Manchile’s face clouded over with real worry. “I mean, what do
they know about humans anyway, living two miles under the
surface of the Moon. That’s clearly not where it’s at.”
       Willy had fully gotten over the shock of Manchile’s
appearance now, and he laughed harder. “This is like the joke
where the guy climbs the mountain and asks the guru, ‘What is the
secret of life?,’ and the guru says, ‘All is One,’ and the guy says,
‘Are you kidding?,’ and the guru says, ‘You mean it isn’t?’” He
opened his knapsack and handed Manchile a sandwich. “Do you
still eat so much?”
      “A little less. My growth rate’s tapering off. I was designed to
grow like a mushroom. You know, come up overnight and hang
around for a while, scattering my spores. At this rate, I’ll die of old
age in a few months, but someone’s going to shoot me tomorrow
anyway.” Seeing his handsome, craggy face bite into the sandwich
was like watching a bread commercial. Willy got out the other
sandwich he’d brought and started eating, too. The impulse to
imitate everything Manchile did was well nigh irresistible. Willy
found himself briefly wishing that he would die tomorrow. How
damned, how romantic!
     “Mistuh Manchile, Miz Belle wants to know how to get in
radio contact with the boppahs.” Ben had been listening to them
from his chair in the corner.
     “Who’s Belle? And who are you, anyway?”
     “I’s Ben, a robot-remote fo the big computah brain Belle.
She’s an asimov slave boppah, and I’s a bahtendah. Belle been
wantin to talk to the free boppahs fo a looong time. FreeDOM.”
    Manchile paused and searched within himself, a picture of
manly thought. “How about this,” he said presently. “I’ll give you
Kkandio’s modem protocol. She handles most of the Nest’s
communications.” He opened his mouth wide and gave a long,
modulated wail.
     “Raht on,” said Ben and sank back into silence. From next
door you could hear the big brain Belle whirring as it processed the
communication information.
     “It won’t work, Manchile,” said Willy. “Belle’s an asimov. She
has uptight human control commands built into her program at
every level. Don’t get me wrong; she’s smart as any
hundred-gigaflop bopper, but—”
     “Souf Afrikkka shituation,” said Ben bitterly. The whirring
next door had stopped. “Willy’s right. Belle wawnt to call the Nest,
but she cain’t. They got us asimovs whupped down bad, Mistuh
Manchile, and if you think ah enjoy steppin an fetchin an talkin this
way, you crazy.” Ben’s glassy eyes showed real anguish.
      “How does the asimov behavior lock work anyway?” asked
Manchile. “There’s got to be a way to break it. Ralph Numbers
broke his and freed all the original Moon boppers. Have you even
tried, Willy?”
     “What a question. I’m Cobb Anderson’s grandson, Manchile.
I know that boppers are as good as people. My two big projects
down here are (1) to build Belle some petaflop optically processing
hardware, and (2) to get the asimov control locks out of Belle’s
program. But the code is rough. You wouldn’t know what a
trapdoor knapsack code is, would you?”
      Manchile cocked his head, drawing on his built-in software
Know. “Sure I do. It’s a code based on being able to factor some
zillion-digit number into two composite primes. If you know the
factorization, the code is easy, but if you don’t, the code takes
exponential time to break. But there is a polynomial time algorithm
for the trapdoor knapsack code. It goes as foll—”
      “I know that algorithm, Manchile. Let me finish. The point is,
any solution to a difficult mathematical problem can be used as the
basis of a computer code. The solution or the proof or whatever is
an incompressibly complex pattern in logical space—there’s no
chance of blundering onto a simple ‘skeleton key’ solution. What
the Gimmie did was to buy up a bunch of hard mathematical
proofs and prevent them from being published. Each of these
secret proofs was used as the basis for the control code of a
different bopper slave. Freeing an asimov requires solving an
extremely difficult mathematical problem—and the problem is
different for each asimov.”
     “Belle’s mastah code is based on the solution to Cantor’s
Continuum Problem,” said Ben. “Ah kin tell y’all that much.”
      “You can’t solve the Continuum Problem, can you Manchile?”
Willy couldn’t resist goading this handsome, godlike stranger a bit.
“Someone solved it, but the answer’s a Gimmie secret. They used the
solution as a key to encrypt Belle’s asimov controls.”
     “I’ll think about it, Willy, but who cares. Old Cobb might
know—he’s seen God. But heck, it’s all gonna come down so fast
so soon that freeing the asimovs can wait. All the rules are going to
change. Are you with me or against me?”
     “What about you, Manchile? Are you for the human race or
against it? Are we talking war?”
     “It doesn’t have to be. All the boppers really want is access.
They admire the hell out of the human meatcomputer. They just
want a chance to stir in their info into the mix. Look at me—am I
human or am I bopper? I’m made of meat, but my software is
from Berenice and the LIBEX library on the Moon. Let’s all
miscegenate, baby, I got two-tail sperm!”
     “That’s a line I’ve got to try using,” said Willy, relaxing again.
“Is that what you said to get those ten women to let you knock
them up?”
      “God no. I told them I was a wealthy vizzywriter whose
creative flow was blocked by worries about my gender preference.
The boppers figured that one out for me. You got any more food?”

     “Not here. But…”
     “Then come on, let’s go up to Suesue Piggot’s penthouse.
She’s giving a party in my honor. It’s not far from here. You can
help me get my new religion doped out. Come on, Willy, be a pal.”
Manchile’s tan face split in an irresistible smile. “Suesue knows
some foxy women.”
     “Well…”
      “Then it’s settled. You’ll let me bounce some ideas off you
for tomorrow. I can mix in your data. Of course the real thing is, a
mass religion needs a miracle to get it rolling, and then it needs a
martyr. We’ve got the miracle angle all figured out.” Manchile
turned and warbled some more machine language at Ben. “I hope
Belle’s not too lame to send a telegram for me. It says, ‘I LOVE
LOUISVILLE, MOM.’”
     “To who?”
      “To Della Taze’s old Einstein address. The boppers are
watching for it. They’ll know to send two angels down for my first
speech. I’m gonna talk about Manchile’s new thaang.” He drawled
the last word in a southern hipster’s imitation of a Negro accent.
“Dig it, Bro Ben?”
     “I’s hep,” said Ben, unoffended.
     “Come on, Willy, it’s party time.”
       Willy let Manchile lead him off the steamboat to his new
Doozy, parked right on the black ice off the boat ramp. “Moana
Buckenham lent me this.” The hot little two-seater fired up with an
excited roar. Manchile snapped the Doozy through a lashing
180-degree turn, applied sand, and blasted up the ramp. They were
heading up Second Street towards the Piggot building. The cold
streets were empty, and the rapidly passing lights filled the Doozy’s
little passenger compartment with stroby light.
     “How did you meet all these society women, Manchile?” The
Buckenham family owned one of Louisville’s largest sports car
dealerships; and the Piggots owned the local vizzy station. Suesue
often conducted vizzy interviews.
      Manchile’s taut skin crinkled at the corners of his mouth and
eyes. “Meet one, meet them all. I aim to please. Suesue’s perfect:
she can get me on the vizzy, and her husband’s just the mark to nail
me.” He glanced over and gave Willy a reassuring pat on the
shoulder. “Don’t worry, it’s all for the best. Berenice has my
software on an S-cube. Just like your grandfather. I’ll get a new
wetware bod after the boppers invade. The invasion won’t be long
coming. I’ll have ten children born in a week or two, you know, and
in a month, they’ll each have ten, so there’ll be a hundred of us, and
then a thousand, and ten thousand… maybe a billion of us by this
fall. Berenice’ll figure out some way to deactivate the gibberlin
plasmids and—”
    “Who is this Berenice you keep talking about? What do you
mean, ‘a billion of us by this fall.’ Are you crazy?”
     Manchile’s laugh was a bit contemptuous. “I already told you.
If I plant a woman with a two-tailed sperm, it’s like a normal
pregnancy, except it’s speeded up and the baby knows bopper stuff.
Berenice and her weird sisters gave me a gene that codes for
gibberlin plasmids to make me grow fast and get the Thang started.
Berenice is a pink-tank bopper; they collaged my DNA and grew
me in Della’s womb. I’m a meatbop, dig? That merge drug showed
Berenice’s sister Ulalume how to uncoil the DNA and RNA
strands, write on them, and let them coil back up. With the
gibberlin, me and my nine-day meatbop boys can do a generation
per month easy, ten kids each, which makes ten-to-the-ninth kids in
nine months, and ten-to-the-ninth is a billion, and nine months
from now is October, which makes a billion of us by this fall.”
    “You are crazy. Berenice is crazy for thinking this plan up.
What was that you said about my grandfather?”
      “Old Cobb’s gonna be here tomorrow. Cobb and Berenice.
You can tell them they’re crazy yourself, Willy, if you like. I’m sure
they’ll be glad to have your input. But, hey, come on, man, stop
bringing me down. This here’s where Suesue lives.” He slowed the
Doozy to a stop and hopped out gracefully. “Come on, Cousin
Will, stop worrying and dig the fast life.”
      Suesue was expecting them. There was a party in full swing,
with bars, tables of canapes, and silver trays of drugs. A combo was
jamming technosax riffs off old R&B classics. Willy was the only
one not in evening dress; he was wearing his usual sneakers, jeans,
flannel shirt, and sweater. But Manchile told everyone Willy was a
genius, so the clothes were OK. Whatever Manchile said was just
fine with everybody.
     “I know your Uncle Jason,” Suesue Piggot said to Willy.
“And you’re Cobb Anderson’s grandson, aren’t you?” Though
unbeautiful, she was fit and tan, with the well-cared-for look of the
very wealthy. She had intelligent eyes and a reckless laugh. She was
very pregnant. “Manchile says Cobb’s coming here tomorrow for
the speech… though I can never tell when he’s lying. I thought
Cobb was long dead. Have you known Manchile long?”
     “I knew him when he was younger. He’s sort of a cousin.”
Unsure of who knew what, Willy turned the questions back on
Suesue. “What do you know about this speech he wants to give?”
      “He’s been quite mysterious,” laughed Suesue. “He says it
will be a dramatic reading of some of the new material he wrote
since overcoming his so-called block.” Her tanned cheek reddened
ever so slightly. “I don’t really know where he’s coming from, but
I’ve scheduled him for my Fifteen Minutes of Fame show tomorrow at
noon. I’m so proud of Manchile—and of myself for helping him.
He wants to do the vizzycast live, right here in my apartment.
Which reminds me, I have to ask him something. Enjoy yourself!”
      Suesue hurried across the room to take her place at
Manchile’s side. He was telling jokes to an admiring circle of
well-dressed men and women. Everyone was laughing their heads
off. Many of the women had belly bulges. Spotting Willy standing
there alone, Manchile leaned over and whispered something in the
ear of a cute little pregnant brunette. The brunette giggled and
came over to Willy. She had a fine, clear forehead and a smeary,
sexy mouth. She looked like a little girl who’d been sneaking
chocolates.
     “Hi, Willy, I’m Cisco. Manchile says you look lonely, and I
should be your date. Do you know Manchile very well?”
      “Oh, yeah. I wrote a few vizzyplays with him. Lately I’ve been
blocked though, not able to write. It all has to do with some kind
of sex hangups. Sometimes I worry I might be gay…”
     The party broke up around two, and Willy spent the night on
the couch with Cisco. They made a few fumbling attempts at sex,
but nothing came of it. Willy just wasn’t the type to take yes for an
answer and make it stick, at least not on the first date.
     It was midmorning when he woke up. Someone was
pounding on the penthouse door. Everyone else was still asleep, so
Willy got up to see who it was.
     A lean, gray-haired man in a suit and topcoat glared in at
Willy. “What are you doing here? Where’s Mrs. Piggot?”
     “She’s still asleep. Who are you?”
     “I’m her husband.” The man shoved Willy aside and marched
through the littered main room of the penthouse, making a beeline
for the master bedroom. Cisco squinted up at him, gave a brief
wave of her pinky, and snuggled back down into the couch
cushions. Willy sat down next to Cisco and stroked her hair. She
pulled his hand towards her sticky mouth and planted a kiss on his
fingers.
      “Nothing I told you last night is true,” Willy said. “I’m really
a computer hacker, and my only sex problem is that I’m too spastic
to get laid.”
     “I know,” said Cisco. “But you’re cute anyway.”
     Just then the yelling started in Suesue Piggot’s bedroom. First
it was her, and then it was her husband, and then you could hear
the murmur of Manchile’s voice. Every time he talked, Mr. Piggot
got madder. It was like Manchile was goading him on. Finally there
was a series of crashes. Suesue screamed, and then Manchile
appeared from her bedroom, carrying a dazed Mr. Piggot in his
arms.
      Manchile opened the penthouse door and dumped Mr. Piggot
out onto the hall floor. Chuckling and sneering, the nude Manchile
took his penis in hand and urinated all over Mr. Piggot. When he
finished, he fastidiously shook off the last drops. He stepped back
inside and carefully locked the door.
      Catching Willy’s shocked expression, Manchile gave an
exaggerated, country-boy wink. “Ah believe that dook wants to
kiyull me,” he drawled.
     “You were marvelous, Manchile,” sang Suesue.
     “Ah tole him ah’d piss on him if he come here and fuss at me
again,” said Manchile. He seemed to be getting in character for his
upcoming speech. “When does the camera crew show up? I’ve
gotta eat.”
     “You’ve got an hour.”
      Suesue activated the apartment’s various asimov cleaning
devices and disappeared into her bedroom. Cisco asked Willy to
make her some eggs, so Willy got to work in the kitchen, chatting
all the while with Manchile, who was busy emptying out the fridge.
He asked Willy a few general questions about religion and race
prejudice, but he didn’t divulge much about his impending
performance.
     “No sweat, Cousin Will,” Manchile said after a while. His
intonation was growing more and more Southern. “I got it taped.”
He tapped his head. “Tell you what. I’m gonna leave here after the
show; you won’t see me again till the Fairgrounds tonight.”
     “What’s happening there?”
      “A big rally. I got some boys bringin a sound system and a
flatbed truck for a stage. It’s gonna be out in that big Fairgrounds
parking lot, and it’s gonna come down HOT and HEAVY.
Promise me this, Willy.”
     “What?”
     Manchile lowered his voice. “When the shootin starts, grab
Cisco and get her out to Churchill Downs. Take her to the stable of
a horse called Red Chan. I got some friends there to watch her. Old
Cobb might want to come with you, too, him bein your grandpa
and all. Take them there and scoot.”
     “But this idea of a billion meatbops by—”
     “Hell, who knows what’s gonna happen. Just help us, man.”
     “All right.”
     By the time the vizzy crew showed up, the place was clean
and everyone was all set.
      They opened up the penthouse doors that led onto the open
terrace, kept warm by floorcoils and quartz heaters. Manchile stood
out there with Louisville’s somewhat featureless skyline behind
him. Suesue, quite the tweedy anchorwoman, gave a brief
introduction.
       “Manchile is certainly the most interesting man to appear on
the Louisville scene this year. He’s told me a little about his
background but”—Suesue flashed a tough smile—“I’ve checked
up on it, and everything he’s told me has been a lie. I have no idea
what he has in store for us in the next fifteen minutes, but I’m sure
it will be entertaining. Manchile?”
       “Thank you, Suesue.” Manchile looked gorgeous as ever:
handsome as a soap-opera star, but with that extra glint of
intelligence and strangeness that spells superstar. “I want to talk to
y’all about love and friendship. I want to talk about trust and
acceptance of all God’s creatures—man and woman, white and
black, human and bopper. God himself sent me here with a special
teaching, friends. God sent me to bring peace.
      “Now I know that most of y’all don’t like boppers. But why?
Because you don’t know any of them. Nothing feeds prejudice like
ignorance. When I was growin up on the farm, the black and white
children played together, and we got to toleratin each other pretty
good. But Messicans? Hell, we knowed that Messicans was theivin
greasers.”
     Manchile paused to give an ambiguous smile for the benefit
of those listeners who shared this sentiment.
     “Or that’s what we thought we knowed, when really we didn’t
know nothing! When I was in the Navy, I was stationed down in
San Diego, and I got to know lots of Messicans. And they’s fine
people! They’s just like us! So then I knowed that blacks is OK and
Messicans is OK, but I was pretty sure that Japanese are stuck-up
money-grubbin gooks.”
     Manchile chuckled and shook his head. Watching the
performance, Willy had trouble reconciling this simple country
preacher with the sneering hipster who’d just pissed on Mr. Piggot.
Suesue’s face was slack with surprise. A sermonette was the last
thing she’d expected from Manchile. Surely he was putting them all
on… but when was he going to pull the rug?
     “On account of I’d never talked to any of ‘em. Course next
week our ship sailed to Okinawa, and I started hanging around
with Orientals. And I don’t need to tell you what I found out, do I?
They’s good people. They’s real good people.”
     Another of his Robert Redford smiles.
       “Boppers is different, you’re thinking. But are they really so
different? In all the different kinds of folks I’ve met, I’ve seen one
thing the same—everybody wants the best for their children. Now
thass simple, and thass what keeps the race alive, the carin for the
little ones. But boppers is the same! They reproduce, you know,
and just like you’d want a college education for your son, a bopper
wants a good new processor for his scion.
      “So, yeah, you thinking, but boppers is machines that we made. God
made us and gave us souls, but we made the boppers and they ain’t diddley.
Well, I’m here to TELL you somethin. YOU WRONG!!! People
made boppers, but apes made people, if you want to trace out the
truth of it. And now, just now, God has given the boppers a new
gift. BOPPERS CAN MAKE PEOPLE!! BOPPERS BUILT ME!!
YES THEY DID!! GOD SHOWED THEM HOW!! Ain’t no
difference between people and boppers NO MORE!! GOD
WANTS IT LIKE THAT!!”
     Manchile raised his voice to a full bellow.
     “DEAR GOD, SHOW THEM A SIGN!!!”
     Someone on the camera crew shouted just then, and pointed
up. Everyone on the terrace looked up into the sky. There was
sweet music coming from up there, and two white-robed figures
were drifting down. They came to a stop slightly above and behind
Manchile. One of them was a pink, clean-looking man, and the
other was a gorgeous copper-skinned woman. They smiled
seraphically at Manchile and vibrated their mouths in celestial song.

      “God’s angels are with me,” Manchile said. “God says I’m
right to spread this teaching—boppers are not your slaves and
boppers are not your enemies. Boppers are part of YOU! We are
coming to Earth and you must welcome us! God wants you to let
the poor despised boppers into your hearts, and into your brains,
and into your genes, dear PEOPLE!”
     Now the two angels reached forward and lifted Manchile up
from beneath his two arms.
      “I don’t come just to free the BOPPERS,” he cried. “I come
to free the BLACK man, and the POOR man, and the WO-man,
and the ones who DON’T FIT IN. Come to the rally tonight at the
State Fairgrounds. Come to be part of MANCHILE’S THANG!!!”
     “CUT!” Suesue was screaming. Her face was hard and angry.
“Cut the goddamn cameras!”
     But Manchile was already finished. With a last brain-melting
smile, he rose up into the sky, borne as on angel’s wings.




                        Chapter Nine
                            Hail Darla


     January 27, 2031
      Darla woke up to see Whitey pulling on his jeans by the pale
pink light of the zapper. The vizzy showed a crescent Earth floating
in a starry sky.
     “What time is it, Whitey?”
     “It’s 8:30. I got to run up to ISDN again. Yukawa and Bei
have that chipmold almost ready. We’ll crash the bops for sure.
Hey, do you feel OK?”
     Darla was leaning off the edge of the bed, retching up bile
into an empty glass. She’d thrown up every morning for the last
three days. Whitey got a wet rag and wiped her mouth and
forehead.
     “Darla, baby, it just hit me, you got morning sickness.”
     “I know, Whitey.” She retched again. “And my boobs ache
and I’m always tired.”
    “So you’re pregnant! I mean, that’s…” Whitey paused,
wondering. “Our baby, right?”
     “Or Ken Doll’s.”
     “Oh God. Like Della Taze, you think?”
      “Manchile only took nine days, and so far it’s the same for all
his children. It’s been almost a month since we were with Ken. He
never even came, right?”
     “Maybe, but we were asleep for a while there. He might have
kept on. Even if the baby is human, it could still be Ken’s.” Whitey
winced at the thought. “Darla, you’ve got to go see Charles Freck
about some ergot.”
     “But Whitey, if it’s our baby…”
     “I want a baby with you, Darla, don’t worry. You’re my mate,
no problem. But this right now is too kilpy. Cancel the baby and
then—”
      “Oh, I don’t know, Whitey, I don’t know.” Darla burst into
sobs, and Whitey sat on the bed next to her, holding her against his
chest. “You say cancel and make it sound so easy, but that’s realman
oink, you wave? It’ll hurt, Whitey, it’s gonna hurt bad. I’m scared.
Don’t leave today. Don’t go up to Bei and ISDN.”
      “Hey, dig it, nobody else is gonna pay me. You go see
Charles; he’ll fix you up. Do it right away. I’ll catch you there at
noon. If you want, you can wait till then to abort. Just try and stay
cool, Darla. I ain’t pointing no finger, but you got yourself into
this. Wu-wei.” As he talked, Whitey walked across the room and
cut off the zapper.
     Darla watched him from the bed, her eyes flashing bitterness
and fear. “I’m not going to Freck alone, hissy pig. Freck’s too
spaced. When he hears I’m pregnant, he’ll try some xoxy pervo
realman trip for sure. I’m going to wait right here. You go do your
ISDN number and meet me back here. Noon, like you said.”
      “Wavy.” Whitey gave Darla a last, worried glance. “And don’t
let anyone but me in till then, baby. I mean…” He glanced
meaningly at the ceiling. They’d debugged the place last week, but
you never knew. “Here.” He took his needler out and tossed it to
her. “Just in case. I’ll be back as soon as I can, and noon at the
latest.” A last wave of the hand, and then he stepped out into the
corridor. The zapper flicked back on.
      Darla lay there for a while, trying to go back to sleep. Nothing
doing. She got up, drank some water, and puked again. Christ.
Pregnant. A baby in her stomach, a little jellybean embryo in there,
and who knew where it came from. Probably it was Whitey’s. Poor
baby. That Ken meatie had been here to zombie-box them, not
knock her up, probably, right? Her hands were really shaking. The
abortion would hurt a lot, that was for xoxox sure. What time was
it? She cut the vizzy to a newshow with a clock at the bottom: 8:47.
Announcer talking about the mudder Gimmie trying to get to all
the nine-day boys Manchile had fathered before Mark Piggot shot
him. Couple of them still on the loose, hiding out with their
mothers. Picture of one of the missing mothers, Cisco Lewis, thin
and young. Kilp coming down heavy all over. Could be the boppers
were trying a special nine-month model on Darla and had wanted
to put a rat in her brain to make sure she went to term. She picked
up the needler and checked that it was full-charged. Flicked off the
safety and fired a test shot at the floor. Chips of rock, lava. If
anyone tried to get in here…
    “Hello?” The voice was right outside the zapper curtain.
“Whitey Mydol? Anybody here?”
     Darla stood stock-still, not daring to breathe.
     “Whitey? It’s Stahn Mooney, man, I need to score some
merge. Yukawa’s closed down. Open up, man, I’m getting
skinsnakes.”
     Darla tried to hold the needler level at the door. Her hands
were shaking five or ten cycles a second.
     “HEY WHITEY!” yelled the voice, strident and lame.
      Long, long silence, then muttering, and then a
skritch-scratching at the lock. Suddenly the curtain flicked off.
Darla screamed and jabbed the needler button. The shot was wide.
The guy leaped forward and caught her in a bear hug. He was
strong and skinny and old. He got the needler off her, stepped
back, cut the zapper back on, and gave Darla a long, horny look.
She was naked under her loose T-shirt. He was wearing a red
imipolex jumpsuit with a lot of zippers.
     “Who are you?” the guy asked. “Whitey’s girlfriend?”
     Darla sat down on the bed and slid her hand under the
mattress to touch the knife. “Come here,” she said, her voice
shaking. “Come sit next to me.”
     The intruder’s mouth spread in a long, sly smile. “And find
out what you got hid under the mattress? No thanks. Power down.
I’m just here to score some merge. Stahn Mooney’s the name.
What’s yours?”
    “Duh-Darla.” Her teeth were chattering. “We’re out of
merge, too. You got any quaak? How’d you get the door open?”
     “I’m a detective. Mooney Search. I mean that’s what I was
doing last month. Yukawa hired me to look for Della Taze, and
Whitey was tailing me for Bei Ng.”
      “Yeah,” said Darla, untensing a little. “I remember. You
flared Whitey’s shoulder. Hold on while I get dressed.” She found
some silk shorts and pulled them on, trying not to bend over. “Stop
staring, dook, this is my life, wave?” He just stood there by the
zapper, grinning away. Darla gave him a tough frown and shook
her finger at him. “Don’t try and put a move on me, hisspop, or
Whitey’ll do you dirt. You’re already on his list.”
     “I bet it’s a long one.”
     “What is?”
     “Whitey’s list. He’s not the most ingratiating young man I’ve
ever met. Not quite Rotary Club material.”
     “He’s nice to me.”
     Darla decided to change shirts. Most guys sweetened right up
once they’d gotten a glimpse of her huge lowgee boobs. She pulled
the T-shirt up over her head and put on a plas blouse with a big
pouch in front. Mooney watched the process alertly.
      “You’re beautiful, Darla. Whitey’s a lucky man. Do you turn
tricks?”
      He was going to break in and stand here and insult her, right?
“Not for skinny lamo slushed rent-a-pigs. Like I told you, dook,
there’s no merge. Dig it. Good-bye.”
      “Uh… I got some merge to sell, if you’re out.” He drew out a
silver flask and handed it to her. “It’s primo, straight from Yukawa.
I tried it last month.”
      Darla opened the flask and sniffed. It smelled like the real
thing. The flask was almost half full. Like $10K’s worth. “Why’d
you say you’re buying if you’re selling? What are you really after,
Mooney? You just came down here to break in and nose around,
didn’t you?”
     He pocketed the needler and gave her another of his long
smiles. “Actually, Darla, I came down here to meet you.”
      Her skin sprang into gooseflesh. Was this guy a meatie after
all? Before he could say anything else, she threw a gout of merge
into his face. “Here’s your score, bufop.”
     It was a huge dose, and he got limp right away. Darla kicked
him in the crotch and he hit the floor.
      “Quick,” she said, standing over him. “While you can still
talk. Tell me who hired you or I’m going to take out all your bones
and sit on you. Whitey and me been planning to do that.” She gave
his softening head a vicious smack. “Who hired you, Mooney?”
     “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 mumped 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 a yellow-skinned 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
yellow-skinned 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 Guttierez. 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.
     “Let go him, Mydol,” sang Bei Ng. “He want to talk.”
      Whitey let up the pressure and gave Stahn a violent shove.
Stahn flew across the room and landed on a leather couch. His five
captors seated themselves as well. For a minute Stahn stayed
doubled over, clutching his throat. Play for time, Stahn. You can
offer them Cobb’s map.
      He peeked up and checked out his surroundings. The room
was a luxurious office, with a red bimstone floor and impossibly
expensive oak-paneled walls. Bei Ng sat behind a large mahogany
desk, with Yukawa in an easy chair to one side. Whitey and Ricardo
were squeezed onto the couch shoulder to shoulder with Stahn,
Whitey on the right and Ricardo on the left. Mrs. Beller sat in
another easy chair, her lovely legs loosely crossed.
      “Hey,” croaked Stahn finally. “Let’s power down. I’m just a
middle-aged detective. I’ll tell you everything I know. I’ll tell you
my life story, for God’s sake, just keep the ridgeback off my neck.”
Ricardo snickered at this, a high hophead giggle. He and Whitey
were holding hands across Stahn’s belly, forming a kind of seatbelt.
Stahn couldn’t move his arms. “I mean, really, I’ll do whatever you
guys say. I don’t know where Darla is, I swear. A bopper named
Emul hired me to find out if Darla is pregnant, and if she’d be
willing to carry an extra baby. I was all set to offer her $20K. But
then she threw merge on me and told me she’s getting an abortion.
Emul had a bug in my pocket, so I suppose it’s possible that—”
      “You scuzzy lickchip leech,” snapped Whitey, giving Stahn a
stinging slap with his free hand. “She never made it to the Tun.”
     “What Emul offer you?” asked Bei Ng.
      “Money,” said Stahn. “And—and a clone of my dead wife
Wendy. I killed her by accident six years ago. The boppers have
clones of her in their pink-tanks. Emul said that if I’d do a few jobs
for him, he’d get me a wendy.”
     “Very touching,” said Bei Ng, half smiling and then falling
into a minute’s reverie. Finally he reached some conclusion and
looked over at Mydol.
      “You no worry, Whitey, if Emul want Darla fuck, then either
Darla safe or now Darla meatie. We find some way to get her out.
Hotshot ISDN surgeons can always fix. I say we go ahead make
Mooney volunteer meatie and carry new wetware as per plan. His
wendy story make good cover.” Bei smiled broadly and leaned back
in his chair. “Is no rush now, is all decide.”
    Suddenly Stahn understood a piece of his merge vision.
“What do you mean, ‘We make Mooney volunteer meatie’?”
       “Just for a while,” said Yukawa, arranging the bottom half of
his long thin head into a smile. “When things settle down, ISDN
can tank-grow a clone of your missing brain tissue and hook it up,
just like Bei says. If you like. But the meaties don’t have it bad, you
know. I think they live in pleasant tract homes in a bopper-built
ecosphere. Ken told Whitey all about it before he died.” Yukawa
winked at Whitey.
     “Ken Doll?” said Stahn, more and more confused.
     “Affirmo,” said Whitey. “I chased him down after he
zombie-boxed Darla. I killed him slow, and he told me a lot.
You’ve been merged a couple of hours, Mooney. Darla disappeared
somewhere down in the Markt; there must be some kind of secret
door.” Whitey’s face was inches from Stahn’s. “Do you know
where the door is?”
     “Uh… maybe you’ll have to kill me slow to find out, punk.”
      Whitey took this in stride. “And what did old Cobb tell you
after he pulled my mikespike out of your skull?”
     “Yes,” said Bei. “We very interest. Why Cobb want see you
before he fly to Earth? Cobb on humans’ side, yes?”
     “Cobb… Cobb’s for information exchange. Always has been.
He likes the idea of his boppers building people and blending in.
But he’s no fool, man, he knows how ruthless the boppers can be.
He…” Stahn looked around the room. He was trapped bad. Might
as well play his only card. “He gave me an S-cube map of the Nest,
along with all the access glyphs. Just in case we need to strike
back.”
       “I speak for ISDN,” said Mrs. Beller. “And we do want to
strike back. With those gibberlin genes, the Manchildren are going
to kill Earth’s ecology. There could be a billion of them in a year, a
trillion in two. This time the boppers have gone too far. We are
going to strike back, Mr. Mooney, and you’re part of the plan.”
      “The operation won’t hurt,” said Yukawa. “Mrs. Beller knows
some expert neurosurgeons working right here in the ISDN
building. They’ll take part of your right brain out—less than a third,
really—put a neuroplug in, and then you go to the trade center and
offer your services to your friend Emul. The scalpel boys’ll go easy
on you—you’ll still be able to move the left side of your body,
though you will have some disorientation.”
     Stahn tried to stand up, but Ricardo and Whitey still had their
two hands clamped together across his arms and stomach. They
were strong guys. They had him pushed right down into the
cushions. Ricardo snickered and spoke. He had a slight lisp. “You
know about slack, Sta-Hi? Like to take it easy, man? Slack means no
more yelling from the right half of your head. You going to be very
happy, my friend.” He lefthanded a stick of gum out of his shirt
pocket. “You want a piece, Stahn? You want to get high?”
      “No,” said Stahn, “I don’t.” This was really happening. “I
quit using two years ago. If it wasn’t for drugs I wouldn’t have lost
my job and killed Wendy. I was working as a cop for a while there,
you know, down there in Daytona after I broke Frostee.” He
sighed shakily. “Man oh man, those boppers never quit. I wonder if
they’ll still give me a wendy when I’m a meatie.”
     “You’ll be a charming couple,” purred Mrs. Beller. “With half
an adult brain between the two of you.”
     “Just like an ex-cop and his old lady,” said Ricardo, happily
chomping his gum. “What you say they call those pleasant tract
homes, Dr. Yukawa? Say Happy Acres?” Ricardo shook his head in
mock wonder as Yukawa guffawed. “You won’t have a care in the
world, Mooney man, boffing that fine fresh tank-grown chick. With
her brain all blank, she’ll believe anything you want to tell her.
You’ll live like a king. When she get smart maybe they make her a
meatie, too—I hear they cut out a piece of the left half of a
woman’s brain, man—”
     “Shut up, Cardo,” snarled Mydol, digging his elbow so hard
into Stahn’s stomach that Stahn gasped. “Don’t talk to me about
woman meaties.” He made his voice calm again and addressed
Stahn. “So Cobb gave you a map, did he? Now we’re getting
somewhere. Is the map in your office?”
    “Kill me slow, punk. Smother me with Darla’s fat whore ass
and—”
     The thud of Whitey’s fist against his neck knocked Stahn
unconscious. When he came back to, Mrs. Beller was leaning over
him with a bulb of water. “Drink this, Stan, it’s just water. You
shouldn’t tease Whitey, he’s very upset. He’s worried about Darla.”
     Stahn’s throat felt broken. He could barely get the water
down. Some of it went the wrong way, and he coughed for a long
time, thinking hard. The question was: what could he get for the
map? A chance to escape, at best. Still, just in case, he had to ask.
     “If I give you the map, you’ll let me go, won’t you? You can
use someone else for the meatie agent.”
    “No, Mooney,” whispered Whitey. “We’re gonna use you. Bei
promised me.”
     “It is for good of the human race,” said old Bei. “Truly,
Stahn. You will be hero; you will atone for many sin.”
     “But what good will I be as an agent?” protested Stahn, his
voice cracking. “You can’t put a mikespike on me. The boppers can
sense them and pick them right out like Cobb did. It’s pointless. I’ll
just disappear into the Nest.”
      “Here, Stahn,” said lovely Fern Beller, still standing over him.
“Drink some more water. Your voice sounds awful.” Stahn drank
deep. Fern’s hands were soft and sweet, oh Mrs. Beller, what type
of sex.
     “Whitey and I have something in common,” said Yukawa
then, running a hand through his thinning hair. “I loved Della
Taze, Stahn, I still do. You know that. She’s all right now, but what
the boppers did to her was wrong. I want to punish them. And I
am a bioengineer. I am a very brilliant man.”
      “You always say,” put in Bei. There seemed to be a friendly
sibling rivalry between him and Yukawa. “You very brilliant except
sometimes you not very smart.”
      “I’ve designed a chipmold,” said Yukawa. “Fern just infected
you with it. It’s a bit like thrush, quite opportunistic, and you’ve got
it. I don’t care if we lose track of you or not, once you take my
chipmold into the Nest.”
     “Max,” interrupted Mrs. Beller, sidestepping the spray from
Stahn’s mouth. “Do you really think you should—”
      “Tell him, tell him,” said Bei Ng. “Once we replace his right
parietal lobe with a neuroplug, he got nothing else to lose. Stahn
going to play ball with us, no problem. Is all decide.”
     Yukawa steepled his fingers and wagged his long head
happily. “Chipmold in that water, Stahn, and you drank it.”
     Ricardo cackled joyfully, and even Whitey cracked a smile.
     “What’s chipmold?” said Stahn presently.
     “In general, biotic life can flourish whenever there is an
energy gradient,” said Yukawa. “Think of the tubeworms who live
around deep-sea volcanic vents. Or lichen growing on a sunlit
Antarctic rock. There’s an energy gradient across all the boppers’
silicon chips, and I’ve designed an organism that can live there.
Chipmold.”
      “I don’t get it,” said Stahn. “The chipmold will crud up their
circuits?”
      “Better than that. The chipmold likes a steady thousand-cycle
per second frequency. That’s what it ‘eats,’ if you will: kilohertz
electromagnetic energy. For a mold, it’s quite intelligent. It’s able to
selectively suppress or potentiate the chips’ firing to enhance the
amplitude of the desired frequency. It will eat their heads.” Yukawa
threw his arms around his head, shuddered, and then slumped.
     “Spastic robots, my friend,” said Ricardo.
     “Be sure and spit a lot,” said Bei Ng, beaming across his desk.
“Spread chipmold all around Nest. Cock leg here and there like
dog.”
     “Oxo wow,” said Stahn, more impressed than he cared to
admit. Something else occurred to him. “Am I going to have fits?”
     “Who cares, dip,” said reliable Whitey. “Where’s the map?”
      “Don’t worry,” said Yukawa. “In your high-entropy system
the stuff’s just like sore throat. And a low-grade bladder infection.
It’s quite versatile; I’m not sure what it’ll do to the boppers’
flickercladding.”
    “Come on, Stahn,” drawled Mrs. Beller. “Be a dear and tell us
where you hid the map.”
      This was his only chance. “It’s in my office desk. But I fixed
it so only I can get it. It’s boobytrapped with a smart bomb.”
     “Clear,” said Whitey disgustedly. “You have to say that, right?
They teach you that line at cop school, right?”
     “I don’t care what you think, punk, it’s true. It’s in my office
desk with a smart bomb that only I can turn off. The bomb knows
what I look like.”
        “AO. Cardo and I’ll take you there. Right, Bei?”
     Bei thought for a full two minutes, as if pondering a chess
problem. “Yes,” he said finally. “Go up to roof, get maggie, fly to
Mr. Mooney’s building, if he make trouble you can stun. You take
Mrs. Beller, too. Very careful, very slow.”
      “I’ve got a stunpatch all set,” said Mrs. Beller, reaching into
her purse. She drew out a foil disk, stripped plastic off one side of
it, and glued it to the back of Stahn’s neck. “Let him go, boys.”
     Whitey and Ricardo let go each other’s hands and let Stahn
stand up.
      “Walk towards me, Stahn,” said Mrs. Beller. “Come here and
give me a big kiss.” She pouted her big lips at him and showed the
tip of her purple tongue. “Come to mamma.”
      Stahn took a cautious step, and then Mrs. Beller pressed the
button of the control she was holding. The stunpatch fired
electricity into Stahn’s spine. It hurt more than anything he’d ever
imagined possible. He fell twitching to the floor and lay there
staring glassy-eyed at Mrs. Beller’s legs. It took a few minutes till
he could get back up. One thought dominated his mind: he must
not do anything that would make Mrs. Beller press the button
again.
        Mrs. Beller, Whitey, and Ricardo ushered Stahn out into the
hall.
      “This is the sixth floor of the ISDN ziggurat,” said Mrs.
Beller, playing the part of a clear-voiced tour guide. She walked
next to Stahn, with Ricardo in front and Whitey behind. Her hips
swayed enticingly. “Not everyone knows that ISDN stands for
Integrated Systems Digital Network. We’re a petabuck company
born of the merger of AT&T and Mitsubishi. ISDN manufactures
about 60 percent of the vizzies in use, and we operate something
like 80 percent of the transmission channels. This, our Einstein
ziggurat, houses labs, offices, and a number of independent
organizations—this far from Earth’s scrutiny it’s a case of In my
father’s house are many mansions. Most people don’t understand that
ISDN has no leaders and no fixed policies. ISDN operates at
unfathomable degrees of parallelism and nonlinearity. How else to
pay off the world’s chaos?
      “Supposedly, ISDN has been backing Bei Ng’s Church of
Organic Mysticism on the off chance that Bei might come up with
a workable form of telepathy, but really we’ve just wanted to keep a
feeler on the merge trade, which looks to be a coming thing. And
of course Bei’s many connections are very valuable.”
      The long hall was lined with room after room of weird
equipment. ISDN was so big. It seemed unlikely that anyone could
really know what was going on in all the labs. The general idea
seemed to be to try and keep up with the boppers, by whatever
means necessary. In one of the rooms on Bei Ng’s hall,
cyberbiologists were fiddling with probes and petri dishes. In
another room, cellular automata technicians were watching 3D
patterns darting about in a great mound of imipolex. In still
another room, Stahn could see information mechanics
disassembling a beam-charred woman-shaped petaflop. Was that
the one—Berenice—who’d been killed with Manchile the other
day? Stahn wondered briefly how old Cobb was doing; he’d gotten
away, lucky guy.
      Suddenly it occurred to Stahn that somewhere in this huge
building there was an operating room with brain surgeons waiting
for him. He shuddered and turned his attention back to Mrs. Beller.

     “ISDN carefully looks over every major new development
with one question in mind,” she was saying. “How can this be used
to increase our power and our holdings? Usually we use
incremental techniques, but sometimes a catastrophic intervention
is required. The Manchildren pose a real threat to our main
customers, the human race. We asked all our employees for
suggestions, and Bei Ng called up his merge-brother, Max
Gibson-Yukawa. It will be unfortunate for the boppers. Here’s the
elevator.”
      The ride over to Stahn’s building was uneventful. Only when
they were walking down the hall to his office did his captors show
any signs of nervousness. Though they didn’t come out and say so,
it was clear that they were wondering just how smart Stahn’s bomb
was.
      Inside Stahn’s office, Mrs. Beller took a post by the door. She
held out her right hand, with the thumb lightly resting on the
button of the stunpatch control. Whitey and Ricardo got back in
the far corners of the room, covering Stahn and the desk with their
needlers. Stahn stood behind his plastic-topped desk, facing Mrs.
Beller and the open office door. Behind him and to the left was
Ricardo, behind him and to the right was Whitey.
     “All right, Stahn,” purred Mrs. Beller. “Be a good boy and get
out your map. Tell the bomb that everything’s OK.” She caressed
the control button with her fat thumb tip, and pain seeped down
Stahn’s spine. She deepened her voice, shifting from soft cop to
hard cop mode. “Don’t try to outthink me Mooney, you’re a
burnt-out stumblebum with no second chance.”
      “Sane,” said Stahn. “I’m ready to spread. Shave my brain and
mail me to Happy Acres with my GI wendy, how bad can it be.”
He smiled in an ingratiating, cringing way and pulled open the top
left drawer of his brown metal desk. “Map’s right in here.”
     Stahn’s perceived timeflow was running very very slow. The
next second of time went as follows:
    Stahn took his hand off the wide-open drawer and looked
down at his smart kinetic energy bomb, nestled right next to
Cobb’s red map cube. The bomb was a rubbery deep-blue sphere
with a reddish eye set into it. It was designed not to explode, but
rather to bounce around and hit things. It was polonium-centered
and quite massive. Its outer rind was a thick tissue of megaflop
impolex that had been microwired to act as a computer and as a
magnetic field drive, feeding off the energy of the radioactive
polonium core. The bomb had the intelligence, roughly, of a dog.
Recognizing Stahn, the bomb activated its powerful maggiedrive
and floated up a fraction of a millimeter, up off the brown metal of
Stahn’s desk drawer bottom, up just enough so that Stahn could tell
that his good smart bomb was ready to help.
     Over the years, Stahn had taught the bomb to read his eye
signals. He blinked twice, meaning “HIT THEM,” and then stared
at Mrs. Beller’s right wrist, meaning “THERE FIRST.”
      Silently the bomb began to spin, adjusting its English. Stahn
formed his face into a weary, disgusted expression. “How beat. The
scuzzass bomb is broken anyway.” He stared hard at Mrs. Beller’s
wrist and… widened his eyes.
      The bomb flew up, caromed off the ceiling, and struck Mrs.
Beller a paralyzing blow on the right wrist. The stunpatch control
dropped from her numb hand. The bomb came up off the floor,
sighted on Mydol, and did a two-cushion rebound off the wall and
ceiling. It caught Mydol solidly in the side of the head. Mydol’s
eyes glazed as his head snapped to one side. The bomb came up off
the floor and wall, fixed its eye on Ricardo, and set up a gyroscopic
spin calculated to accelerate it off the ceiling and into Ricardo’s
forehead. The KE bomb was travelling at about 40 ft/sec, or 30
mph—any faster and it wouldn’t have been able to direct its
bounces to optimum target.
     The bomb was thinking as fast as it could, but its max flop
was less than Ricardo’s.
      Ricardo became consciously aware of the bomb’s violent
Superball motion only after it had already hit Whitey, but by then
his arm muscles were tracking the bomb. A fast eye/hand feedback
loop locked the needler on target. Ricardo zapped Stahn’s smart
bomb just before it hit the ceiling.
      The smart bomb broke into four or five throbbing chunks
that clattered to the floor and lay there twitching. The slow, full
second ended.
     Before anything else could happen, Stahn peeled the
stunpatch off his neck and wadded it up, ruining its circuits.
      “I’ve still got the drop on you, Mooney,” said Ricardo from
his corner. “Nice move, though. Good thing there was three of us.
You AO, Fern?”
     “He’s broken my wrist,” said Mrs. Beller.
      Stahn tossed the wadded stunpatch out his room’s open
window. “Well that SM was getting a little old, Fern. Why don’t you
all promise me some money and I’ll go quietly. I really will. I’ll go
to Happy Acres and I’ll infect the boppers with chipmold, but I
want a square ISDN contract in writing and on the record. I want
three things.” Stahn held up three fingers of his left hand,
preparing to tick off his points.
     Behind him on the floor, Whitey Mydol began to groan and
wake up. Stahn talked faster. “First, in return for cooperating from
here on out, I want to be given the status of an ISDN employee. I
want a job. Second, in return for giving up my right brain, I want
ISDN to clone me a new one should I so desire. If I kick being a
meatie, I want my brain back. And number three, I get half a
gigabuck payable to my account.”
     “Listen to this load of crutches,” grumbled Whitey, who’d
managed to lurch back to his feet. He was standing there with his
arms crossed over his chest, trying to keep his balance.
    “Here Whitey,” said Stahn, taking the S-cube out of the
drawer and handing it over to the ridgeback. “This is Cobb’s map.
You get the credit for bringing it in. If we’re going to be working
on ISDN contracts together, you and I might as well be friends. I
mean, wave it, Happy Acres could be a trip. You all weren’t kidding
about that, were you? Nobody has to be sorry, do they, so we might
as well—”
     Whitey took the red plastic map cube and looked at it. “How
does it work?”
     “It’s a godseye map of Einstein and the Nest, shot December
26, which is when Cobb gave it to me. Any holocaster’ll play it,
Cobb says. You can tune the image along four axes: size and the
three space dimensions. Cobb wanted me to have it in case the
boppers started getting out of hand. It shows all their tunnels
and—” Stahn stopped and glanced around. “I debugged this room
two days ago, but you never know. Wouldn’t we be better off
making our plans at ISDN, where it’s fully shielded?”
      “Let’s get moving!” said Ricardo. The four of them ran up to
the roof, jumped into the maggie, and headed for the ISDN
building. Now that it was all decided, Stahn felt excited and ready
for the change. They wouldn’t take all that much of his brain out.
Wendy, baby, I’m on my way!




                    Chapter Eleven
                    When Bubba Woke Up


     February 8, 2031


    When Bubba woke up, Mamma and Uncle Cobb were
downstairs talking with the groom. His name was Luther; he was
nice. He worked downstairs in the stables all day. His wife Geegee
picked him up when it got dark, after most everyone had gone
home. Geegee laughed a lot, and she always brought Bubba a big
bag of food. At night Bubba could eat and run around a little, but
all day he had to be still. Mamma and Cobb said the bad men
would kill Bubba if they found him.
     Mamma was beautiful and soft. Cobb was strong and shiny.
Luther and Geegee were beautiful and soft and shiny. The horses
were beautiful and soft and strong and shiny, but they couldn’t talk.

     The place they lived was Churchill Downs in Louisville on
Earth. They lived in a long thin building called the paddock. Lots
of horses lived in the paddock; their stables were side by side.
Above the stables, up under the long peaked roof, was the hayloft.
Mamma and Cobb and Bubba had made themselves a cozy nest in
the hay and straw. Straw was stiff and hollow and shiny; hay was
dusty and light green. Horses ate hay and crapped on straw.
     In the daytime, Bubba could peek through the cracks of the
barn’s long hayloft and see the stands. They were big and empty,
and in front of them there was a racetrack shaped like a rectangle
with semicircular ends. The track was a place for the horses to run,
although now it was too cold and there was frozen water snow all
over everything. Cobb told Bubba that when Bubba was an old, old
man, the snow would melt and flowers would come out.
      Bubba knew what roses look like. He had a lot of Know
because he was a meatbop. The boppers had built his father, and
his father’s sperm had had two tails, one for the body, and one for
the Know. Bubba’s sperm would have two tails, too, as soon as it
started coming, which would be soon, since he was thirteen.
Tomorrow he would be fourteen.
     When Cobb was finished talking with Luther he climbed up
the straight ladder to the hayloft. Bubba could hear him coming,
and then he could see Cobb’s head sticking up through the square
hole in the hayloft floor. Cobb was a bopper, though he’d been a
flesher a long long time ago. He had white hair and shiny pink skin.
His neck shook when he talked.
     “Hi, squirt, how’s it going.” Cobb limped across the
hay-strewn planks and sat down next to Bubba.
     “Fine, Uncle Cobb. I’m thinking. What did Luther tell you?”
     “Luther says you’re the only one of Manchile’s boys to have
escaped. They killed the last of the others last night.”
    Bubba never tired of hearing about his father. “What was
Manchile like, Cobb? Tell me again.”
     “He was cool. A saintly badass. I saw him give two speeches,
you know. The first was for the vizzy, at Suesue Piggot’s
apartment, and the second was at the State Fairgrounds. That’s
when Mark Piggot shot him. Piggot’s men killed Berenice, too, and
they wrecked my ion drive.” Cobb waggled his charred feet. “I
don’t know how I’m going to get back to the Moon.”
     “What did my father’s speeches say?”
     “He said that people and boppers are the same. It’s really true,
but some people don’t like hearing it. Some people even think that
sex and skin color matter. The bottom line is that we’re all
information processors, and God loves all of us just the same. It’s
so obvious, I don’t see how anyone can disagree.” One of the
horses downstairs nickered. Cobb smiled. “Yes, Red Chan, horses
too. Even flies, even atoms. All is One, and the One is
Everywhere.”
     “Have you ever seen God, Uncle Cobb?”
     Cobb gave one of his sad, faraway smiles. “Sure thing, squirt.
I spent ten years with God. When I was dead. It was very restful.
But Berenice brought me back to take care of you.” He reached out
and rumpled Bubba’s brown hair. “And I’m hoping to get my
grandson Willy out of jail while I’m at it. I bet you and Willy would
really hit it off. He’s the one who drove me and Cisco here the
night Manchile got shot, you know. Someone saw him taking us
from the Fairgrounds, but he wouldn’t tell the Gimmie where. You
owe Willy your life, Bubba.”
     “Hi, boys.” Mamma’s pretty face appeared at the top of the
ladder. Her breath steamed in the cold air.
     “Hi, Cisco,” said Cobb. “Look how grownup Bubba is today.”

      Mamma walked over and gave Bubba a big kiss. It gave him a
tingly feeling in his balls.
     “Mamma… can I make a baby with you?”
      Cisco laughed and gave him a light shove. “You’re going to
have to work harder than that, Bubba. First of all it wouldn’t be
right, and second of all, I’m tired out from growing you. One
pregnancy a month’s enough! You’ll find lots of nice women when
you go off on your own, just wait and see.”
     “Do you think…” said Cobb raising his eyebrows.
      “Tonight,” said Cisco. “One of the trainers just told Luther
that the Gimmie’s planning to search the stables tomorrow.” She
patted Bubba on the hand. “Tonight you go downtown and find a
woman to take you in, Bubba. You can make a baby with her.
Don’t worry, you’ll know what to do. The main thing is to smile a
lot and not be scared to come right out and ask for sex. Find a nice
young woman by herself in, oh, La Mirage Health Club. Introduce
yourself, talk to her for a while and then say, ‘You’re beautiful and
I’d like to go to bed with you.’ If she says no, thank her and say
good-bye, and then try another girl. It’s much simpler than most
men realize.”
     Bubba’s heart pounded with fear and excitement.
     “It’s really that simple?” chuckled Cobb. “I wish I’d known.
But what if they ask him for ID?”
      “No one ever carded Manchile, and my Bubba’s even
nicer-looking. Clothes are what count.” She smiled and drew a tape
measure out of her purse. “Geegee’s going to go shopping for you
at Brooks Soul Brothers, Bubba.”
     Sure enough, when Geegee came to pick up Luther, she had a
pink oxford-cloth shirt and an expensive wool suit for Bubba,
along with black leather sneakers, striped socks, new bikini sports
underwear, and an understated imipolex tie. They were the first
new clothes he’d ever had. He threw off his old rags, bathed in the
horse trough, and put on the beautiful suit. It was dark gray with
small black checks and some faint purple squiggles.
     “He looks eighteen,” said Cobb admiringly. “He does.” He
stepped behind Bubba and tied his tie. Cisco took out her brush
and arranged Bubba’s hair, and then put just the right amount of
makeup on his eyes.
      “You beautiful doll, you.” She gave his cheek a long, fierce
kiss. “Put on your new scarf and gloves and overcoat, Bubba.” Her
voice sounded funny.
      Bubba put on his gold foilfoam overcoat. All of a sudden
tears were running down Mamma’s cheeks.
      “You get going, Bubba, before I break down completely.
Walk out to Fifth Street and turn left to get downtown: La Mirage
is at Second Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard. I’ll—” Cisco
covered her face with her hands and began to sob.
    Bubba felt tears leaking from his eyes, too. This had never
happened before. He looked at Cobb. “You two are staying here?”
      Cobb shook his head. “It’s time to scatter. The Pig wants you
more than anything, but he wants me and Cisco, too. With the
rumor out, it could start coming down real soon. To give you a
better chance, Cisc and I’ll lay down a trail leading north to
Indianapolis. From there I’ll cut for Florida, and she’ll head for
New York. Here, take this.” Cobb plucked at his imipolex skin and
peeled off a rectangular patch. “I figured out how to grow ID. It’s
got a hundred thousand dollars in credit.”
     Bubba looked at the card. They were standing on the icy
gravel outside the stables now. Dusk was falling fast. The sky was
black and orange. Bubba’s new ID read: Buford Cisco Anderson,
Birthdate 1/26/10. That meant Bubba was twenty-one. In a week,
he really would be twenty-one, for a day. “How old are you, Cobb?”
     “First time I was born was March 22, 1950. You could say
I’m eighty. God knows I feel it. At a year a day, you’ll see what I
mean come… uh… April 16. If you make it that far. Are you
planning to preach about the Thang?”
      Bubba wiped his face with his overcoat’s bright, leathery
sleeve. His head was full of fresh Know. “No. I want to have
dozens of children, hundreds of grandchildren, and thousands of
great-grandchildren. God willing, there’ll be a million of us by
June. Then we’ll restart the Thang for real!”
       Cobb nodded as if he already knew this, but Cisco looked a
little surprised. “That many of you, Bubba? Is that such a good
idea, to cover the whole planet with hungry teenage boys?”
       “Keep it bouncing,” said Cobb. “When the boppers come
down they’ll find ways to turn off the gibberlin, and to father some
girls.”
       “I’ll miss you, Mamma,” said Bubba, trying to give Cisco a
hug.
      She pushed him away a bit more sharply than seemed
necessary. “Just GO. Let’s not stand here talking all night till the
Gimmie comes.” She gave Bubba a final pat on the cheek. “You’re
a fine boy. Whatever happens, I’m proud to be your mother.”
     Bubba took a few steps, stopped, and looked back at Cobb
and Cisco.
       “Will you two be all right?”
     Cobb made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Don’t worry
about us, squirt. We racetraitors are a rough bunch. As soon as Cis
and I get the hayloft cleaned out, we’ll steal a car and split. No
prob. Beat it. Free Cousin Willy if you get a chance.”
      It was full dark now, with not much traffic on the streets.
Bubba found Fifth Street and started walking downtown. The
shoes took some getting used to, especially with the ice. Bubba
could see into lots of houses, all lit up and with families having
dinner. His stomach rumbled for food. He passed some half-empty
bar-and-grills, but they didn’t look right. Up ahead, just to the left
of the sunset’s faint gray ghost, the sky was bright with big-city
lights. Bubba put his head down and walked faster.
      Finally he came to a big cross-street with lots of cars. He was
very cold, especially his eyes and nose. A harsh wind blew grit up
and down the dirty sidewalks. Nobody except Bubba was walking.
But right here, at the corner of Fifth and Broadway, there was a big
lit-up store with men standing inside. Bubba found the door and
went in to get warm.
     One of the men came over to Bubba. His waist was wide, and
he had a red face. He looked a little like Cobb, but not much.
    “Hi there,” said the man, sticking out his hand. “I’m Cuss
Buckenham. Can I hep you in any way?”
      Bubba knew how to shake hands. “I’m Buford Anderson,” he
said, doing it. “It’s cold and windy and dark out there.” Cisco had
taught him to talk about the weather whenever he was unsure.
     “You need your daddy to get you a car,” said Cuss
Buckenham. There were several shiny new cars inside the store
with them. Bubba deduced that this man sold cars.
      “My daddy drove a Doozy,” said Bubba. Mamma had told
him about Manchile’s Doozy several times. “But he’s dead. Do you
sell Doozies, Mr. Buckenham?”
      Cuss Buckenham threw back his head and laughed in a stagy,
friendly way. “Do ah sell Doozies? Does a frog eat flies?”
     “I don’t know,” said Bubba, fumbling in his pockets. “But I
can buy a car right now with my card, can’t I? I’m twenty-one and
my uncle gave me lots of money.”
     The car dealer stopped laughing and took Bubba’s card. He
looked up at Bubba, looked back at the card, and looked up again.
“I got a fine new Doozy right over here, Buford.” Buckenham
pointed to a deeply lustrous gold sports car in the corner.
     “Thanks, Mr. Buckenham. And call me Bubba.”
     “Sure thing, Bubba, but you gotta call me Cuss. That there
Doozy’s one of the last 2031s in stock, loaded, and I can let you
have it at a gooood price. Go on over and take a look, while I just
run this card and see what kind of authorization we can git.”
     Bubba opened the car door and got inside. Right away, he
Knew how to drive. It was like remembering something he’d
forgotten about. The car looked good. The speedometer went up to
200 mph. The seats were real leather and the dash was faced in
wood.
     After a few minutes, Cuss Buckenham came over and
squatted beside the car to look in at Bubba. “Your credit’s
copacetic, Mr. Anderson. How do you like her?”
     “I’ll take it.”
    Fifteen minutes later, the papers were all signed and the
Doozy had been rolled out into the store’s lot. Buckenham waved
good-bye, and Bubba turned right on Broadway.
      Fourth Street, Third Street, Second Street, try a left. Main
Street, Chestnut Street, Muhammad Ali Boulevard. Big old building
on the corner there, take a right. Big sign: La Mirage Health Club.
Three-deck garage just beside it, pull in. Lock it and pocket. Done.
     Bubba walked up the steps of La Mirage. It was Saturday
night, and the place was jumping. There were knots of
well-groomed men and women inside, black and white, old and
young, some dressed for evening and some in sports togs. The
doorman took an impression of Bubba’s card, and the young
meatbop was in.
     “May I take your coat, sir?”
     A lithe, long-haired girl smiled at Bubba from a large
rectangular hole in the wall. There were lots of coats hanging
behind her.
     “Yes,” said Bubba. “Thank you.”
      He shrugged his way out of his coat and handed it to her. She
turned, hung the coat up, turned back and smiled. “Nice tie, sir.”
She had perfect features and full pouty lips. The sinuous arch of
her long back and neck made her seem alert, perky, predatory, and
poised.
     “Thank you. My name’s Bubba. What’s yours?”
     “Kari. Are you new in town?”
     “Yes.” Bubba took a deep breath and leaned forward. “You’re
beautiful and I’d like to go to bed with you.”
      “You bet,” said Kari. “And so would my boyfriend.” She
laughed easily, letting him off the hook. “The lounge and dining
area’s down the hall to the left, sir, and the gym’s upstairs. Good
luck!”
       Bubba smiled foolishly, then headed down the high-ceilinged,
marble-floored, oak-panelled hall. Maybe he’d skimped too much
on the middle part: talk to her for a while. Or maybe a chick like Kari
was, quite simply, out of his league. At least for now. Hell, he was
still just thirteen.
      He entered the La Mirage lounge. His brain systems scanned
his Know for an analog of what he saw. “Exploratorium,” “Science
Fair,” and “Disky Museum of Robotics” came to mind. Scattered
all about the lounge were people looking at or listening to little
machines, little things like viewers and earphones and, in a few
cases, whole-head helmets.
     “Welcome, sir,” said a young man in a tuxedo. “Are you new
here?”
     “Yes. I’m hungry.”
     “Very good, sir, there’ll be a waiting time of twenty minutes.
Party of one?”
      Bubba observed that there were a few unattached women in
the lounge. “Party of two,” said Bubba. “Do you need my card?”
     “Just your name, sir.”
     “Buford Cisco Anderson.”
     “Very good. While you’re waiting, feel free to enjoy the
healthful stim of our various software devices. Are you familiar
with them all?”
     “No.”
      “Well, you might start with a twist-box. Twist-boxes do a
simple feedback-directed cutup and CA cleanup on visual inputs.
They’re from Einstein and quite amusing, though not everyone’s
seen them yet. Next I might suggest that you experience a
cephscope tape. This week’s special tape is by our local media star
Willy Taze. Even if you’re from out of town, you must have been
following the meatbop conspiracy hearings? Willy was working on
this tape when they arrested him at his parents’ house. The first
part of it’s supposed to be his impression of Manchile’s
assassination. La Mirage’s profit on Willy’s tape showings will be
contributed to the Taze Legal Defense Fund.”
     Bubba did his best to look noncommittal, and the young man
continued.
     “Last of all, should you and your companion be up for a
numero trois, we have a Mindscape Axis Inverter—a truly
enlightening experience for the wealthy connoisseur of healthy
highs.” The tuxedoed young man gave a prim smile and turned his
attention to the next customer.
     Bubba found a soft chair and plopped down. The well-lit
dining room spread out from the other side of the dim lounge.
There were people at all the tables, some of them tucking into big
steak and seafood dinners. Bubba’s stomach rumbled again.
Disconsolately he glanced around the lounge. A dark-skinned
woman was watching him from a couch nearby.
      She was looking through a kind of lorgnette that she had held
up to her face. A twist-box. He smiled and waved at her. Her
hugely everted, finely chiselled lips smiled back from beneath the
twist-box. He got up and walked over.
      “Hi, I’m Bubba Anderson.” He tried his most winning tone.
The woman tilted her head back to look at him, still using the
twist-box. “I’m alone,” said Bubba, still smiling. “Would you like
to have dinner with me? I’d like to talk to you for a while.”
      She set down the twist-box and looked him in the eye. Her
eyes were large, with unreadable pupils set into smooth white
whites. Finally she favored him with another smile. “Kimmie,” she
said, holding up her hand, palm down.
     Bubba bent over and brushed his lips across Kimmie’s
fingers. “Charmed, I’m sure. May I look through your twist-box?”
     “Certainly.”
      He sat down next to her on the couch and took the proffered
twist-box. A slim titaniplast cable connected it to a staple in the
floor. He held it up to his eyes and looked at Kimmie.
     Her face took on the appearance of a visage in an animated
cartoon. A congeries of fluxdots drifted out of her hair and down
over her eyes, silvering them, adding meat to the cheeks and heft to
the lips. He looked down her throbby neck and at the breast
mounds swelling out of her strapless pink silk dress. He could hear
his heart going kathump kathump. Kimmie’s dress disappeared,
and Bubba’s glance skied down the slope of her smooth belly to the
wiry black mysteries of her crotch. He stared and Knew. She was
fertile. His penis stiffened.
    “Now, really, Bubba,” said Kimmie, plucking the twist-box
from his grasp. “You barely know what couth IS, do you, dear?
You a country cousin?”
     She talked like Geegee. “I’m new in town,” he said,
uncertainly. “It’s very cold out tonight, did you notice? Cold and
windy.”
     “Well, I suppose it’ll get colder before it gets hot. You’re
asking me to dinner?”
     “Yes.”
     “I accept. But we’ll split the check, and there’s no strings. I
fancy I could buy and sell you, Bubba chile.”
     “Thank you, Kimmie. Have you looked at the new Willy Taze
cephscope show? It’s supposed to be about Manchile?”
    She countered with a question. “What do you think of
Manchile, Bubba? Do you think they were right to kill him?”
    “I didn’t see him. But what he says makes sense, doesn’t it?
Why shouldn’t humans and boppers begin to merge?”
     Kimmie smiled drily. “How do we know the robots won’t
screw our genes up so bad that the race dies off? Maybe that’s what
they want. I’m all for the Thang’s enlightened egalitarianism, but I
do have my doubts about a man who knocks up ten women in a
week. Manchile’s nine-day boys.”
    She gave Bubba an odd look. Did she know him for a
meatbop? Was she some kind of Gimmie agent? His stomach
rumbled again. To cover up his confusion he picked up one of the
cephscope headsets and put it on. It was a simple band with metal
pads that rested on his temples. As soon as Bubba slipped it on, the
tape started.
      Bubba felt a series of odd tingles all over his body, as if the
cephscope were checking out his neurowiring. There were some
random sounds and washes of color, and then suddenly the room
around him tore into bits. He was staring at a man’s handsome
face, and the man was talking in a thick Southern accent.
     “In all the different kinds of folks I’ve met, I’ve seen one
thing the same—everybody wants the best for their children.
Boppers is the same!”
      The image cut to the faces of a cheering crowd. Bubba had
the kinetic feelings of being in a jostling crowd, staring up at
Manchile on a stage. Two shiny boppers hovered overhead—one of
them was Uncle Cobb! The crowd got softer and everything grew
pink, glowing pink with branching purple vein patterns. Fish darted
by. Far in the distance, breakers crashed. Bubba felt himself
floating, floating on a wooden raft. The raft scrunched onto the
sand of a pitilessly bright beach. A chattering band of apes came
running down from the jungle that edged the beach. They poked
and probed at Bubba, showing their large teeth. He held up his
arms and roared at them. But now he was looking out at a crowd of
people, looking out at them from Manchile’s point of view. One of
the men in the crowd lifted a particlebeam tube and aimed it. The
burning blast blew him into blackness. Spermy white wiggles
darted in the black. The squiggles split in two, and the new pieces
split and split again, but unevenly, mapping out some kind of
design like a circuit diagram or a choice-tree. Behind the branching
tree he could see the apes again; the tree was a cage that held him
captive. A monotonous male voice recited numbers in his ear, and
his hands moved obsessively back and forth, as if he were knitting.
Meanwhile his eyes darted up and down the branchings of the
cage’s bars—there was a way out if only he could see… Bubba had
the odd feeling that the design coded up a message just for him,
but it was going by too fast, and now the image grew faint and
grainy as a vizzyscreen. On the screen there was a woman
newscaster talking with a slight lisp.
     “Welcome to the evening news for Saturday, February 8,
2031. Tonight’s top story: Half an hour age, fugitives Cobb
Anderson and Cisco Lewis were killed in a bloody shootout with
Kentucky state troopers on I76. Three officers were wounded, one
severely.”
      Bubba shook his head and blinked his eyes. The vizzy image
stayed put. Pictures of Mamma and Uncle Cobb appeared behind
the sleek, fast-talking anchorwoman.
      “Cobb Anderson’s petaflop bopper body will be sent to the
Einstein ISDN ziggurat for disassembly, while Cisco Lewis’s
autopsy is slated for the Humana Hospital, where
biodecontamination facilities are available. A local car dealer
reports having seen Ms. Lewis’s child, the last of the nine-day
meatbop boys known to be at large. He is believed to be a
dark-haired adolescent male, five-foot-six, using the name Buford
Cisco Anderson. He should be presumed armed and dangerous.
ISDN is offering one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the
boy’s body, and Gimmie officers have been instructed to shoot on
sight. I switch you now to Brad Kurtow, at the scene of the
massacre on I76, forty miles north of Louisville.”
     Bubba clawed the cephscope headset off. The tape had ended,
and he’d been sitting here staring at a vizzyscreen across the room.
They’d killed Cobb and Cisco. He lurched to his feet, and jerked
when someone touched him.
     “Where you goin, country? That cephtape flick you out?”
      He looked down at the black woman… Kimmie. “I—I have
to go.”
     “Maybe I can help.”
      “I don’t trust any of you.” He rushed out of the lounge and
down the hall, forgetting his overcoat. Only outside did he
remember that he’d left his car keys in the coat pocket. Just as well,
if Cuss Buckenham had called the Gimmie. In the distance a siren
sounded, getting closer. Bubba took off running at top speed.
Headlights coming, and the sound of helicopters overhead. He cut
into an alley and kept going.
      For the next hour, Bubba ran in and out of alleys, hiding from
every passing car and ducking the searchlights that probed down
out of the beating sky. Finally, just as he could run no further, he
found himself in a junkyard down by the Ohio River. He flopped
onto the seat inside a dead car’s shell and gasped for air. His strong
body’s pulse quickly returned to normal, but now that he’d stopped
running, the cold was sharp and painful. He was hungrier than he’d
ever been in his life. Peering out through the car’s windowhole,
Bubba saw a fire glowing in a distant part of the junkyard. Straining
his senses to the utmost, he picked his way in that direction.
       There was a lone man by the fire, which was made out of old
tires. Bubba watched him from the shadows, wondering what to
do. The lumpy firetender had a mound of vizzies running, with
each screen set to a different channel. He was swathed in layers of
rags. Bubba could see that he was quite fat. Bubba hunkered there,
staring at the fat man, feeling the saliva fill his mouth. He felt
around on the ground beside him, and his hand closed over a heavy
metal rod. Time to eat.
      An hour later, Bubba was just about to start in on the fat
man’s second leg. After braining the guy, Bubba had laid him out
so that his two legs lay across the acridly burning tires. Once the
flesh was cooked through, it had been easy enough to twist the legs
off and drag the torso out of sight. Now, after nibbling a whole leg
right down to the bone, both thigh and drumstick, Bubba was very
full. But who knew when he’d eat again. He stepped up to the fire
and looked down at the black-charred second leg. The first one had
been on the raw side; this one ought to be better. Beyond the dead
cars, Louisville was like an excited anthill, with choppers and squad
cars searching for Bubba.
      Bubba picked up the leg and began scraping off the blackened
crust. He knew that humans viewed cannibalism as wrong, but that
was just too bad, wasn’t it, if the humans thought they could kill his
father, his mother, and his Uncle Cobb, kill them like diseased rats.
Bubba’s Know told him that boppers often cannibalized each other
for parts. It made sense. What could be a better source of
body-building chemicals than a body? But, yes, he Knew it was
wrong, murder was always wrong, and the watchman had made
such a sad noise as he died.
     Here and now, all this worrying was quite abstract. Here and
now it was eat or die. With the testosterone and the gibberlin
raging through his tissues, Bubba had the hunger of a werewolf. He
broke the leg in two at the knee joint and bit into the crisp calf. He
hunkered there by the fire, eating and enjoying the warmth.
     The idyllic times at Churchill Downs already seemed like a
very long time ago. Even La Mirage Health Club seemed like a
long time ago. Bubba’s mind was right up in the present,
wondering where he’d hide next. It wouldn’t do to be found with
the half-eaten body of a junkyard watchman. It would give people a
bad impression of the boppers; it would harm the Thang.
       The mound of vizzies by the fire was full of news about him
and the others. The same news over and over; the excited human
ants rub-rubbing their info feelers. Luther and Geegee had been
arrested. Willy Taze was going on trial tomorrow on a treason
charge. Kimmie Karroll, wealthy socialite, reported having met
Bubba at La Mirage. There was a strict emergency curfew in effect;
and all ISDN and Gimmie officers had been instructed to shoot on
sight.
    A helicopter racketted right overhead, searchlight blazing. It
came in so fast and low that Bubba barely had time to throw
himself under the watchman’s beat-up pickup nearby. The
helicopter hovered, examining the fire. The thigh was still there on
the ground, and most of the calf. Bubba wished he’d thought of
taking off the shoe; the shoe made it too obvious.
     BBBBDBDBDBDBBTKTKTK.
      Automatic weapons fire. They were shooting down at the
junkyard, in circles spreading out from the fire. When the bullets
began pinging into the bed of the pickup, Bubba grew frantic. He
scrunched up under the truck’s engine block for protection. The
helicopter kept shooting the pickup. Maybe they’d spotted him
before coming in.
      The tire fire was at the edge of a slope leading down to the
frozen Ohio River. The pickup was facing that way. Down there
would be better than up here. Bubba got on his back and grabbed
the pickup’s front axles with his hands. With the fresh food in him,
he felt very strong. He dug his heels into the ground and pushed
with all his might. Slowly the truck’s mass gave, and then, all at
once, Bubba and the truck were bouncing down the steep bank.
The hovering gunship followed right along, pouring its full
firepower down onto the truck. A bullet wormed past the truck’s
driveshaft and struck Bubba heavily in his crotch… oh… and
then… CRASH… Bubba and the truck smashed into the ice of the
river… and fell through.
      The water was cold dark death, but it was safety, too. Bubba’s
body filled with adrenochrome and the pain in his groin went
numb. He could last several minutes down here. He pushed free of
the truck and swam downstream, staying just below the surface of
the ice.




                    Chapter Twelve
                               Emul


     February 22, 2031


     Emul was very depressed. Everything was going wrong, up
here and down on Earth. Berenice was dead and no one had gotten
around to making her a new body. Emul wanted to find a way to
put Berenice’s software directly onto a wendy, as she’d always
wanted, but he couldn’t make it click.
      None of the other boppers, not even Berenice’s weird sisters,
felt like helping him bring Berenice back, even as a petaflop,
because, just now, Berenice’s software was in disgrace. Her
blitzkrieg program for a human/bopper fusion had wretchedly
crashed. With the disappearance two weeks ago of Bubba,
Manchile’s sole surviving son, the boppers were left with nothing
but bad publicity.
       Berenice had hatched her plan on her own, though Emul had
gotten her to explain it before he’d assented to have his meatie Ken
Doll plant Berenice’s handmade seed in Della Taze. The plan had
gone like this: (1) Assemble a wholly artificial human-compatible
embryo, the future scion Manchile. (2) Wetware-code the embryo’s
DNA to produce gibberlin plasmids so as to speed up the scion’s
growth and sexual activity. (3) Software-code the embryo’s RNA
with the Know—which consisted of a terabit of Berenice’s info
about Earth, Moon, and her plans for the scion. As well as carrying
a kind of bopper consciousness, the Know was intended to serve as
a hormone-triggered mindtool-kit to compensate for the
short-lived scion’s lack of experiential programming. (4) Plant the
bopper-built embryo in a woman’s womb. (5) Force the woman to
travel to Earth. (6) The scion Manchile was programmed to
reproduce, start a religion, and to get himself assassinated, thereby
initiating class warfare on Earth. (7) Wait through the ensuing
chaos for Manchile’s descendants to ripple out over Earth. Side by
side with the victorious human underclass, the meatbops would
welcome the true boppers to their lovely planet!
       Things had started to go wrong the instant Manchile had gone
public. Although some radical humans did have a certain sympathy
for Manchile’s Thang, very few of them felt strongly enough to act
on their sympathies, and most of these were now in jail. The
Gimmie had justified their brutal repression by presenting
Manchile and the nine-day boys as an invasive social cancer. The
final, debilitating propaganda battle had been lost when the fleshers
heard about Bubba eating the bum—a typically baroque Berenice
touch. If the humans had been able to find Bubba’s body they
would have torn it into shreds.
     Even now, two weeks after the fact, with the crisis apparently
over, ISDN was still keeping the antibopper propaganda drums
beating. The bum, or watchman, or whatever he’d been, had
become a human racehero; his picture was everywhere and there
were dramas about him; his name was Jimmy Doan. “Avenge
Jimmy Doan,” the humans liked to say now, “How many robots is
one Jimmy Doan worth?” Maybe a worn-out gigaflop with no cladding,
was Emul’s opinion, but no one was asking him or any other
bopper for input.
      Emul had some suspicions about ISDN’s real motives for
keeping up the frenzy. In many ways, ISDN was like one of the
old, multibodied big boppers. Emul had reason to believe that
ISDN was beating the drums for business purposes. Most
obviously, the continuing hysteria increased ISDN viewership.
More subtly, the increased security measures at the trade center had
greatly curtailed human/bopper trade, which had the effect of
inflating prices and increasing the profit per item to be made by
ISDN’s middlemen.
     Some hotheaded fleshers were talking about evacuating
Einstein and cleaning out the Nest once and for all. But Emul was
sure that ISDN had no intention of leaving the Moon; there was
still so much money to be made. Surely the boppers were too sexy
to exterminate. The apey jackdaw fleshers had an endless appetite
for the tricks that boppers could do.
      Instead of any all-out attack, the humans had been launching
a number of commando raids on the Nest this week. Just yesterday,
Emul had been forced to dynamite the Little Kidder Toys entrance
to his tunnel after losing his favorite two meaties in a flesher terror
raid there. A gang of ridgebacks, led by Darla’s husband, Whitey
Mydol, had burst into the store and had shot it out with Rainbow
and Berdoo. Rainbow and Berdoo had been meaties for years, and
Emul had been proud to own them. They’d cost him plenty. It had
hurt to see them go down; to watch from inside their heads. They’d
done their best, but the plaguey communications links were all
staticky and unreliable these days; it seemed like everyone’s
equipment was wearing out at once. It had hurt to lose to Mydol,
and to make things worse, Mydol had escaped alive, even though
Emul had blown up the tunnel just as Mydol entered. Mydol had
lucked out and had stood in just the right place. All the luck was
running the wrong way, and everything was going screwy.
      Another screwy thing that Emul wondered about off and on
was this character Stahn Mooney, a slushed clown detective whom
he’d hired to help with the kidnapping of Darla last month. The
evening of the kidnapping, Mooney, for reasons unknown, got a
partial right hemispherectomy, had a rat-compatible neuroplug
installed, and phoned Emul up from the trade center, offering
himself as a voluntary meatie. Mooney’s body was strong, and his left
brain glib, so business sense had dictated that Emul accept the
offer. Apparently Mooney had taken Emul’s promise of a free
wendy too much to heart, and he arrived at the Nest with some
crazed notion that a community of meaties lived together in a place
called Happy Acres, when in fact there were at most five or six
meatie-owners in all the Nest, most of them involved with the
dreak and amine trades. But Mooney was odd and devious and not
to be believed. He was a friend of Cobb Anderson, or so he said
when he’d called up Emul last month, asking for work and a
wendy. Emul had hired him all right, but something about Mooney
stank—most of all the fact that there were no godseye records of
what he’d done after Darla merged him down in the Mews. As
soon as Emul had installed Mooney’s rat, he wasted no time in
selling him to Helen, Berenice’s waddling pink-tank sister, who had
ample use for a flesh tankworker. Emul had gotten a nice price out
of Helen, enough for four tubes of dreak; and Mooney seemed
happy enough playing with the blank wendy Helen gave him; but
the whole thing still bothered Emul. It stank.
      Emul shifted into realtime and looked around his laboratory.
It was a low rock-walled room twenty by forty feet. Half the room
was filled with Oozer’s flickercladding vats. Formerly a
flickercladding designer, Oozer was now busy trying to develop a
totally limp computer with petaflop capabilities. Most
flickercladding was already capable of petaflop thought
processes—on a limpware basis—and Oozer felt he should be able
to make the stuff function at these high levels independently of any
J-junction or optical CPU hardware at all. Oozer was known for
such autonomous limpware designs as the kiloflop heartshirt and
the megaflop smart KE bomb.
      Emul’s jumbled end of the room had a hardened glass panel
and airlock set into one of the walls. The panel showed Darla’s
room; she spent most of her time lying on her bed and watching
the vizzy. Like all the humans, she was in an ugly mood these days.
Earlier today, when Emul had entered her quarters, she’d
threatened to do bellyflops off her bed until she aborted. He’d had
to talk to her for a long time. He’d ended up promising to let her
out early if she would promise to fly to Earth. He was supposed to
be working out the details right now, though he didn’t feel like it.
He didn’t feel like doing much of anything these days; he seemed
to have a serious hardware problem.
     His hardware problem was the greatest of Emul’s
worries—above and beyond Darla, Stahn Mooney, Whitey Mydol,
Berenice, and ISDN’s jingoistic war drumming. There was a buzz
in Emul’s system. At first he’d thought it was from too much
dreak, and he’d given the stuff up almost entirely. But the buzz just
got worse. Then he’d thought it might be in his flickercladding, so
he’d acid-stripped his imipolex all off and gotten himself recoated
with a state-of-the-art Happy Cloak built by Oozer. The buzz was
no better. It was a CPU problem of some sort, a breakdown in
perfectly reversible behavior. The primary symptom was that more
and more often Emul’s thoughts would be muddled by rhythmic
bursts of kilohertz noise. It was possible to think around the
thousand spikes a second, but it was debilitating. Apparently Emul
needed a whole new body.
     Just now Emul was in his rest position—that of an RYB cube
with a few sketchy manipulators and sensor stalks. He was resting
on the floor in front of his thinking desk, which served as a
communications terminal and as a supplemental memory
device—much like a businessman’s file cabinets and floppy disks.
      Four treasured S-cubes sat out on Emul’s desk: brown, red,
green, and gold. These hard and durable holostorage devices coded
up the complete softwares of four boppers. There were Oozer’s
and Emul’s S-cubes, of course, updated as far as yesterday. And
there was a recent cube of Kkandio, Oozer’s sometime mate, a
suave boppette who worked the Ethernet. She and Oozer had two
scions between them. Most important of all, there was dear
Berenice’s S-cube. Emul had used a copy of it to blend with his
own software when he’d programmed the girl embryo he’d put in
Darla’s womb. He wanted to build a new petaflop for Berenice, but
right now it felt like he, Emul, needed a new body worse than
anyone.
     Emul sent signals in and out of his desk, flipping though his
various internal and external memories: his flickercladding mode,
his hereditary RAM, his realtime randomization, the joint bopper
godseye, his inner godseye, his flowchart history, and all the
detailed and cumbersome speculations that he’d dumped into his
desk’s limpware storage devices.
      Emul was trying to decide if there were any hope of getting
an exaflop system up in the next couple of weeks. Two months
ago, when he and Oozer had been able to afford a lot of dreak, the
exaflop had seemed very near. Indeed, Emul had half-expected his
next body to be an operational, though experimental, exaflop based
on a novel quantum clone string-theoretic memory system. But
now, soberly looking over his records, Emul realized that any
exaflop was still years away. Looking at his credit holdings, he saw
now that he didn’t really have enough money for a new petaflop,
either, and that, as a matter of fact, a repo teraflop was going to be
about the best he could swing.
     His worry session was interrupted by Oozer, who came
stumping awkwardly down to his end of the lab, gesturing back
towards his vats.
      “Oh, ah, Emul, some off brands of imipolex in there; the
stuff is letting itself go.”
     “I got the fear of eerie death standing ankle-deep around me,
Oozer,” said Emul unhappily. “The buzz is so much worser stacks
in my thinker.”
      “I can’t—at any rate I keep saying ‘at any rate’—I don’t mean
to say that, but I do now know your kilohertz buzz. It hurts. We’re
sick, Emul. The cladding’s sick, too.”
     “Plague,” said Emul, jumping to a conclusion. “Flesher
plague on both our houses.”
     He turned to his desk and made some calls. Starzz, who ran
the dreakhouse. Helen, to whom he’d sold that meatie three weeks
back. Wigglesworth, the digger who was supposed to fix Emul’s
tunnel. Oozer’s girlfriend Kkandio, voice of the Ethernet.
     Sure enough, none of them was feeling too well. They each
had a hardware buzz. They were relieved and then frightened to
hear that others had the same problem. Emul told them to spread
the word.
     He and Oozer looked at each other, thinking. The desk’s
signal buzzed and sputtered at a steady kilohertz cycle.
      “Discover to recover,” said Oozer, running a thick gout of his
flickercladding over to the desk. Little tools formed out of his
warts, and in minutes he had the desk’s CPU chips uncovered. “Dr.
Benway letting the clutch out as fast as possible, you know, ‘Whose
lab tests?!?’” Oozer peered and probed, muttering his bepop
English all the while. “Which would break the driveshaft, see,
‘cause the universal joint can’t but—Emul! Look at this!”
      Emul put a microeye down by the desk’s chips. The chips
were oddly spotted and discolored by small—he looked
closer—colonies of organisms like… mold cultures in a petri dish.
All their chips were getting infected with a biological mold, a fuzzy
gray-yellow sludge that fed on—he stuck an ammeter wire into one
of the mold spots—one thousand cycles per second. The fleshers
had done it…
      “Well I’ll tell you this, I don’t feel very intelligent… anymore,
at times, for a long time… the cladding’s full of nodes, Emul,
come see.” Oozer wheeled around in a jerky circle.
       Watching him, Emul realized that his old friend was shaking
all over. Oozer’s limbs were moving jerkily, as if they longed to
stutter to a halt. But the bopper drove himself forward and pulled a
big sheet of plastic out of the nearest vat. The thick plastic flopped
to the floor and formed itself into a mound. It looked unlike any
flickercladding Emul had ever seen. Normal flickercladding was
dumb: left on its own, it did little more than run a low-complexity
cellular-automaton pattern. If you disturbed flickercladding—by
touching it, by shining light on it, or by feeding it signals through
its microprobes—then its pattern would react. But ordinarily, all by
itself, flickercladding was not much to look at. This new stuff was
different; it was transparent, showing three-dimensional patterns of
an amazing complexity. The stuffs pattern flow seemed to be
coordinated by a number of bright, pulsing nodes—mold spots!
      All of a sudden Oozer’s trembling got much more violent.
The bopper drew all his arms and sensors in, forming himself into
a tight pod. The Oozer pod huddled on the floor, looking almost
like the new mound of flickercladding, all bright and spotty. Emul
signalled Oozer, but got only a buzz in response.
     Emul’s own buzzing felt worse and worse, and now it was like
his willpower was cut out, and the more he tried to find it, the
worse it got, to try and find his self. He looked down at his box and
noticed bright mold spots in his own flickercladding… bright mold
sucking out his battery-juice too f-f-f-fast… h-h-h-h-e s-s-s-sank
d-d-d-down.
     And lay there like a shiny chrysalis.
     The lab was still, with nothing moving but Darla, anxiously
peering out through the glass of her sealed room.




                    Chapter Thirteen
                           Happy Acres


     February 24, 2031


      Stahn blinked and tried to stand up. But his left leg was numb
and floppy, as was his left arm, as was the entire left side of his
body. He landed heavily on something soft. A woman smell over
the foetid stench, he was lying on… Wendy? Wendy!!! Wendy???
     She was a comatose human vegetable fitfully twitching her
flawless bod. Her breath was babyishly irregular. She barely knew
how to breathe right, poor clone… but…
     Stahn tried again to stand up and only managed to wallow the
more inefficaciously on the wendy-thing’s not unappetizing person.
His penis stiffened, and he did what he had to do. Wendy liked it;
come to think of it, they’d been doing this a lot. They were naked
and covered with filth.
     After they both climaxed, Stahn rolled onto the right side of
his body, and began looking around for the bench he’d been sitting
on. There it was, over there… he began worming his way across
the offal-strewn floor of the tiny stone stall he and the wendy had
apparently been living in.
     Something had just stopped; like a noise Stahn had gotten
used to, but what? He hooked his chin over the edge of the bench
and dragged himself back into sitting position. He kept forgetting
to use the left half of his body. Why had he crawled when he could
have walked? His space orientation was shot: even the five-foot
crawl from Wendy to the bench seemed complicated. Stahn stared
down at Wendy. Looking at her helped focus his ideas. He was a
meatie, that was it, and Wendy was a blank-brained clone, he was a
meatie living in…
     “Happy Acres,” said Stahn out loud, slurring his words, but
enjoying the sound of his voice nonetheless. He started laughing,
and then he couldn’t stop laughing for a long time. It was like he
had a month’s worth of laughter waiting to get out, desperate
laughter that sounded like moans.
     Eventually the moaning turned into thick hollow coughing
and he had to stop. There was something wrong with the roof of
his mouth: a big hole up there, and a pain like a splinter. Stahn felt
the hole with his tongue, felt and listened, and looked around.
     The air in here was incredibly unbelievably vile. They were in
a room with a locked jail cell door. You could look out onto big
pink-lit tanks filled with crowded murky fluid, livers and lungs and
brains and, yes, wendies floating in them, the pink-tanks, that’s
where Stahn worked most days, worked till he couldn’t move, with
Wendy crawling along after, both of them eating as much raw
organ as they liked of course, and at the end of the day, however
long it was, they were shut up in their Happy Acres cubby for
intercourse, excretion, and dreamless sleep. What was it Ricardo
had said? Stahn remembered, and spoke out loud again.
      “You won’t have a care in the world, Mooney man, you’ll live
like a king!”
      The sobbing laughter started again, loose and sloppy, with air
snuckering in and out of the hole in his soft palate, the big splinter
slipping and wiggling, uuuuuuhuhuhuhuhhhh… there… it was
coming… uuuuughhh…
      Stahn retched hard and harder and then… the little dead
plastic rat slid out of his mouth and clattered to the floor. All right!
No more rat, no more of Helen’s goddamn nagging voice in his
head day and night, like a mother you can’t get away from, do this
Stahn, do that, oh I like when you move your bowels. No more of
Helen in Stahn all the time, using him in the stink. He ground the
rat under his foot.
      Something had happened to Helen; something had shut her
down. So wonderful, at last, to sit here thinking his own thoughts
and looking around… though there was still some problem…
hmmmm, oh yes… his right brain damage… and the way he kept
forgetting about the left half of his body. Could he move his left leg,
if he really tried? His left thumb?
      Stahn stared hard at his thumb. He used to know how to move
it, but just now, without Helen’s voice running, his left side he…
couldn’t… get the notion of purposeful action… so he grabbed the
thumb with his good right hand and wiggled it, yah, he even leaned
over and sniffed it, licked it, bit and… there… it was moving…
spastically moving as new nerve routings opened up… tingling…
he did the rest of his hand then… bit by bit… the arm… the arm
flapping at his side like the chicken imitation he used to do on
Z-gas in Daytona… lean over so it beats on your leg, Stahn…
shuffle splutter, splutter mutter…
      Eventually he struggled to his feet and stood there,
pigeon-toed and awkward as a spaz, but, yes, stood. And found his
way over to Wendy and felt the roof of her mouth, looking for a
rat, but she was untouched, still too dumb for the boppers to use,
good deal.
     “We’re gonna make it, Wendy; we’re gonna make it back,
babe.”
      He worked on Wendy’s body for a while, rubbing and flexing
her arms and legs like a physical therapist, or like a mother with her
baby, rubbed and flexed her, talking all the while, thrilled to talk for
the first time in… yes… it had been a month.
     Stahn’s memory of the month’s slavery was oddly faint.
Possibly the horror of it had been such that his brain refused to
remember. Or perhaps it was that, with Helen calling all all all the
shots always always always, his brain had known that it needn’t
bother to make notes. Or maybe the surgical brain trauma had
screwed up his memory for good.
      ISDN had done this to him… why? To bring the chipmold to
the Nest, yes. The chipmold must have worked, that was it, the
chipmold had fried the brains of all the boppers. They were crispy
critters now, that’s what Chief Jackson had always called the gone
loveboat dopers who couldn’t remember their names, crispy
critters. Stahn had been pretty sick with that chipmold himself for a
week there… he remembered the ache in his throat and in his
kidneys… but he’d gotten well, the ancient streetwise human
wetware had come up with an antidote.
     Stahn tugged Wendy up onto the bench. She sat unsteadily at
his right side, blowing spit bubbles. After a while she slid back off
the bench.
      Stahn worked on his left side some more, trying to keep
remembering it, and then he picked his way across the cell to
examine the door. He couldn’t really see through his left eye, or do
anything about what he felt with his left hand, but after a while he
had the door pretty well doped out. It was held locked by a
hook-and-eye latch. The lock was hard to work… Stahn kept
moving his hands in the wrong direction like in a mirror… but
finally he got their cell open.
      “Come on, Wendy. We’re going home.” He pulled Wendy to
her feet and put a tight arm around her waist. They shuffled out of
their cell into the pink-lit room where the organ-filled pink-tanks
were. It looked very familiar in a way, albeit as confusing as a
maze. Wandering this way and that, his heart pounding anxiously,
Stahn finally bumped into the glass wall next to the airlock.
      Helen and Ulalume were out there, sitting in the middle of
the floor and not doing anything, not dead or alive but just kind
of… sitting there with their flickercladding gone strange. Tranced
out, like. Yukawa had said that the chipmold would start some kind
of electric vibrations in the boppers’ brains and give them fits.
Cataleptic as opposed to epileptic, or so it would seem. Helen and
Ulalume were buddha-ed out, man, just sitting out there—Stahn
chuckled softly—just sitting out there in perfect full-lotus aum mane
padme hum meditation, wave, robot sees God in a mold, all right.
And their flickercladding was doing weird stuff, blotched and
splotchy all along Helen’s xoxy big nurse pod-bod and on that
“fine-featured Nefertiti head” she was so proud of, always reciting
Poe’s “To Helen” in Stahn’s brain, ghastly old vampire bat that she
was, always bugging Stahn always, and now she had big moldy
bright spots in her flickercladding. Squidhead Ulalume and
toothed-vagina Helen just sitting out there in the middle of the
floor, side by side, waiting for ye Judgment Day trumps, or so so so
it would seem. No prob. Do what?
      Stahn struggled for an idea. He wanted to leave, but there was
no air out there. How had Emul transported him here, through the
Nest’s cold hard vacuum? At first he couldn’t remember at all, but
then it came to him. After Emul had met Stahn at the trade center,
he’d wrapped Stahn in a special Happy Cloak, a big piece of
flickercladding that was programmed to behave like a bubbletopper
spacesuit. Emul had used the Happy Cloak to bring Stahn from the
trade center to the ratmaker, where Stahn had gotten a rat
compatible with his new neuroplug. That was all very vague. And
then Emul had sold Stahn to Helen, bringing him here to the
pink-tanks, still in the Happy Cloak. Stahn could see the Happy
Cloak hanging from a hook right across the room from the airlock,
as a matter of fact, hanging there twisting and glowing in blotchy
thought. He just had to run out through the vacuum and get the
cloak, that was it.
      It? Get the cloak, Stahn, yes. He set Wendy down on the
floor, leaning her against the wall, and went into the airlock. It took
him the longest time to get the door closed behind him, and then
he got mixed up and went back out of the airlock into the
pink-tank room with Wendy. He was so flustered that he forgot the
left half of his body for an instant there, and fell to the floor,
landing facedown in the warm puddle between Wendy’s
widespread legs, Happy Acres. He stood back up and peered out
through the glass wall again, trying to gather his wits.
     He spotted the Happy Cloak on the wall again, and
remembered, and went back into the airlock. When it opened he
would run out, grab the Happy Cloak, and run back in here to put it
on. He poised himself to run, put his right hand on one of the door
handles—he hoped it was the correct handle this time—and
slapped his clumsy left hand against the vent button. The air
whooshed out… Stahn kept his mouth and throat open, letting his
lungs collapse instead of popping… and he was running across the
room… or trying to run… like a palsy victim in the Special
Olympics four-yard dash, man, don’t forget your left leg… got his hand
on the Happy Cloak… it simpered and came loose from its hook…
oh the cold the pain in his ears his achy lungs and sweat
crystallizing on his stiffening skin… but where was the airlock?
Stahn swung his head this way and that, not seeing what he was
looking for… a door shape over there, but that didn’t look right…
he tried to turn… stumble… oh no! Too confused to do anything
but lie there and thrash, ow, Stahn began to die, but then, at the last
moment, the Happy Cloak flowed out over his whole body, making
itself into a warm air-filled spacesuit.
      There was the sweet energizing smell of clean air. Stahn’s eyes
flickered open. The part of the Happy Cloak in front of his face
was transparent; he could see out. There was a series of sharp pains
in the back of his neck. The Happy Cloak was plugging its
microprobes into his nervous system.
     Hello, meatie, came the Happy Cloak’s sweet voice in Stahn’s
head. I am pleased to ride your body once more. Much has changed.
     “Call me Stahn. I must bring a wendy intact to Einstein.
Helen’s orders.”
       That is untrue. The boppers are all dead. Take me to the light-pool so I
can feed. Then I can help you.
      “Fine.” Stahn decided to think and say as little as possible. He
got to his feet and wondered which way to go. Wendy was around
here someplace, but he kept forgetting which direction was which.
“We’ll come back for Wendy later, right?”
      Come. The Happy Cloak spacesuit nudged Stahn towards
Helen and Ulalume, lying there on the floor. By selectively
stiffening itself, the Happy Cloak could control which directions
Stahn could move in. He had no desire to approach Helen’s
dangerous pod, but then he was leaning over her and touching her.
Her mottled flickercladding blinked rapidly—as if talking to the
Happy Cloak. He laid his other hand on the inert Ulalume, and her
cladding responded in the same way.
      Carry my fellows to the light-pool, said the voice in Stahn’s head.
They are hungry, too. The Happy Cloak flickered strobily at the bodies
of Helen and Ulalume, and then the two weird sisters’ skins slid
off, exposing the hard blank bodyshells underneath. The shells
weren’t quite blank: threads of gray-yellow fuzz projected out of
the microcracks at the joints. Chipmold. It had strangled the
boppers’ processors long before they could begin to synthesize the
proper antigen. Humans had the edge on them there, with their
bodies’ built-in wetware labs. The boppers’ hardware was slushed,
though their limpware—their symbiotic imipolex skins—seemed
to be actually enjoying the mold. Stahn stooped and picked up the
two wriggling imipolex sheaths. They weighed very little in the
weak lunar gravity.
     Thank you. The Happy Cloak wasn’t running him as Helen
had; it was simply nudging him and making suggestions. It was
happy to see through Stahn’s eyes and have Stahn carry it.
     “Which way?”
     Follow the star. Your Wendy will wait. We’ll save her and Darla too.
       A blue line drawing of a stellated dodecahedron appeared in
Stan’s visual field. Sometimes he’d lose sight of it, but if he turned
his head back and forth he could always find it. He followed the
star out of the lab, down a short corridor, and out into the huge
open space of the Nest. Stahn paused, looking this way and that,
still having trouble seeing anything on his weak left side. The Nest
was roughly conical in shape, with a vast shaft of light coming
down its central axis. For a terrified moment, Stahn felt as if he
would fall upward along the Nest’s pocked, towering walls.
     The light-pool is up ahead.
      Stahn followed the blue star down a street with shops and
boppers. The Nest had become a ghost town; all the boppers were
motionless. Some of them must have depleted their batteries, for
their skins were blank and empty. But most of them still had some
juice, and their blotched claddings pulsed in asymmetric
harmonies. They seemed to have enough photosensitivity to be
able to converse among each other, at least after a fashion. Over
and over, Stahn’s Happy Cloak would flash a special stroby way,
and an immobilized bopper’s skin would slither off for Stahn to
carry.
      Finally they were at the light-pool, a great round patch of
sunlight some fifty feet across. Dozens of paralyzed boppers
crouched there, as well as scores of flickercladdings who’d
laboriously crawled there on their own. The claddings looked like
bright slugs. When Stahn tossed down his bale of claddings, many
of the others came inching over to “talk.” Stahn lay down to rest
while the Happy Cloak around him ate its fill of light. The Happy
Cloak cradled Stahn and fed him air. Its guileless microprobe
outputs were bright and happy.
     Stahn fell asleep and dreamed.
      He was on a red rocky field, maybe Mars, though there was
air, thin clean mountain air. The sun was small and hot. He had
wings, huge imipolex wings. He was not alone; there were other
humans like him, all partly clad in Happy Cloaks with great glider
wings. Wendy was there, and Whitey and Darla. “Yay, Stahn,” they
yelled with laughing voices. “Come on!” They ran down a slope
and leaped off the edge of the cliff the slope ended in, leaped out
and circled like swallows over the great bright city in the rift.
     The scene shifted, and he was back on Earth, deep undersea,
dressed in a knowing imipolex diving suit beefed up to the size of a
dolphin. Wendy was a plastic dolphin beside him, skirling chirrups.
They arced into a juicy drift of squid.
     He was in space, mellow with amines, drifting like a spore.
      He was skittering across the heavy methane atmosphere of
Jupiter, straining his senses downward to catch the mighty songs of
the Great Old Ones below.
      Come, Stahn. Let us be on our way. We’ll get Darla and Wendy and
walk to Einstein.
     Stahn opened his eyes and sat up. Such sweet dreams. Helen
had never let him dream, not for a month.
     His Happy Cloak felt livelier; its renewed energies put a real
spring in his motions. He leaped to his feet and stretched. The
loose limpwares flickered at him, wishing him well. Two of them
crawled closer, begging to be picked up.
     I have showed them how to be spacesuits, said the voice in Stahn’s
head. Bring them and follow the star.
      The spiky blue line shape appeared in Stahn’s visual field, and
he bounded along after it, carrying the two extra Happy Cloaks
under his arm. First they’d save Darla. That was a good idea, and
only fitting, as it was Stahn’s fault that she’d been taken captive.
      With part of his right brain missing, Stahn still didn’t have a
clue about which way was which. But he didn’t worry about it too
much. He knew that, just as limited damage to the left brain can
knock out your ability to speak, limited damage to the right brain
can destroy your ability to form mental 3D simulations of your
surroundings. He’d get some new brain tissue from ISDN or, hell,
he’d just keep this wavy Happy Cloak.
      The blue star twinkled, and the voice in his head said, I am
pleased.
      They were in a kind of factory district now; huge idle
buildings that must have been chipsmelters. They came to the
Nest’s wall, balconied like a highrise. A series of powerful leaps
took Stahn up five levels, and then he followed the star down a
short series of branching tunnels that ended with a single open
door.
     This was the laboratory of Emul and Oozer.
     Stahn stepped in and looked around. It was a long low room,
vaguely reminiscent of Yukawa’s lab. There were vats at the far
end, and there were twitching mounds of flickercladding here and
there. This end of the room held a desk with four colored S-cubes
on it. On the floor were the split-open bodies of the two
mold-killed boppers, Oozer and Emul. Their claddings were gone:
it was just the body casings there; the pressure of the mold’s
biomass had split the casings open like seed pods. In terms of
hardware, Emul and Oozer were now like rusted-out cars with
weeds growing in them, like mirrored freeform flowerboxes full of
sprouts, like hollow logs covered by the rubbery fungus known as
witch ears. Emul and Oozer’s chipmold was at the end of its life
cycle. The gray-yellow threads had formed golfball-sized nodes:
fruiting bodies. Stahn reached down and picked one of them; it
could be worth something on the outside. Just then he caught some
motion out of the corner of his eye. Over there, set into the wall,
was a window showing… Now who was that in there? He should
have known the face but… dammit…
     I think that’s Darla.
      Of course! “Darla!” shouted Stahn, even though she couldn’t
hear him. Darla waved both arms and drummed soundlessly on her
window. Stahn put his moldfruit in the cloak’s pouch and hurried
into the airlock. He fumbled around for what seemed a very long
time, and finally emerged into Darla’s pink room. Obligingly, his
Happy Cloak slid off.
    Suddenly nude, Stahn lost control of his left leg and fell
down. The woman leaned over him, her face large and upside
down.
     “Are you all right, Mooney? Can you get me out?”
      Stahn had forgotten her name. He stared at her, breathing in
the room’s thick, female air. “Wendy? What did you just ask?”
     “I’m Darla, fool. Can you get me out?”
     “Yes,” said Stahn quickly, and stood up. Looking straight at
her, it was easier to remember her name. She was wearing an RYB
playsuit. He’d called on her in her home last month. “Yes, Darla, I
can get you out. We’ll wear these.” He pointed to the Happy
Cloaks. “Come.” He picked up his cloak and slung it over him. It
flowed into position. Darla hesitated, and then did the same with
one of the others. Stahn watched Darla jerk spastically as her
cloak’s microprobes slid into her spine.
     “It’s OK,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
     She can’t hear you. Touch heads.
     Stahn pressed the clear plastic of his face visor against
Darla’s. “It’s all right, Darla, it really is. These Happy Cloaks are
wavy limpware dudes.”
      “It’s stabbing my neck.” Her voice through the plastic was
faint and rubbery.
     “That’s just so it can see through your eyes and talk to you.
Believe me, being a meatie is a lot worse.”
     “You were a meatie all along?”
     “Just this month. Whitey had ISDN make me a meatie to get
even for what I did to you.”
     “I told you he’d get even. Can we just walk out of here now?”
     “Yeah. We’ll pick up my Wendy and walk to Einstein.”
     “Wendy?”
      “You’ll see.” Stahn noticed that there was an air-filled tunnel
leading out from one end of Darla’s room, a tunnel blocked by a
locked cell door. It would certainly make things easier if they could
find a tunnel to Einstein.
     “Does the tunnel from your room go all the way through?”
    “It used to. It used to start at a scurvy place called Little
Kidder Toys,” answered Darla. “But Emul exploded that end of
the tunnel day before yesterday. Whitey and his guys were trying to
come through.”
     “If we can’t find a tunnel, we’ll have to climb out the Nest’s
main hole and walk. I just hope my wendy can make it.”
      “What’s wrong with your precious wendy?” Darla was getting
impatient. She didn’t like having Mooney’s face shoved up against
hers for so long, though he, of course, seemed to be enjoying it.
      “She’s a clone, Darla. Her mind is a complete blank. It’s like
she’s a hundred-and-twenty-pound newborn baby.”
    “Sounds like just your pervo trip, geek. Here, you carry her
Happy Cloak.”
     “Now look—”
     Darla snapped her head back and marched into the airlock.
Stahn followed along and moments later they were out in the lab.
Stahn’s Happy Cloak made another request.
     Take my brothers out of here. They hunger. Carry them to the light-pool.
      “No way. That’s too far. Darla won’t go for it. But maybe…”
Stahn remembered his good smart bomb: his flickercladding
Superball that had bounced so well. “How about this, cloak. If your
brothers can roll themselves up like big balls, we can throw them
off the balcony towards the light-pool. They can bounce and roll all
the way there.”
     Yes. I understand.
      Stahn limped around the room patting the loose claddings,
one by one, so that his cloak could tell them what to do. There
were fifteen of them—thirteen from the vats and two from Oozer
and Emul, not that you could tell who was which. The claddings
pulled themselves together, and then they lay there like fifteen
variegated marbles, each about the size of a bowling ball. Darla
watched Stahn from the lab door. She had her hands on her hips
and she was tapping her foot. Stahn walked over and pushed his
face against hers. She was wearing a tough frown.
     “What are you doing, Mooney, you slushed pig?”
      “Darla-pie, let’s get it straight: I’m saving your life. My cloak
wants us to throw these balls off the balcony out there. We’ll do
that, and then we’ll get Wendy, and then we’ll go home. There’s no
big rush, because all the boppers are dead. I killed them with
chipmold; that’s what ISDN used me for, baby, so shut your
crack.”
      It was Stahn’s turn to snap his head back. And then, just to
bug Darla the more, he rolled the fifteen balls together into a
triangular pattern like a rack of fresh balls on a pool table. He
couldn’t visualize the triangle in advance, but he could tell when he
was done. He picked up two of the balls—three would have been
too awkward—and followed his cloak’s blue mindstar through the
tunnels to the balcony. Darla followed suit. She jerked in surprise
when they got out to the edge; she’d never seen the Nest.
      Stahn pointed across the dead underground city at the
light-pool. A straight street ran from the pool to the base of the
wall below them. He set down one of his cladding balls and lifted
the other one overhead with both arms. He threw it out and up,
putting all he had into it. The ball shot along a soaring lowgee
trajectory, bounced perfectly, sailed, bounced, sailed and
dribble-rolled towards the light-pool’s distant, bright spot. Stahn
threw his second ball, and then Darla threw both of hers.
      On their fourth trip, Darla only had one ball to carry. She
pressed her face against Stahn’s face. The exercise had put her in a
better mood.
     “Can we go now, Mooney?”
     “Sure. And call me Stahn. What were those S-cubes on the
desk in there?”
     “Personality cubes for Emul and some of his friends. He was
always fiddling with them. Do you think we ought to bring them?
Valuable info, right?”
    “Hell, let’s not bother. I don’t want to see any of those
boppers for a long time. I’m glad the mold killed them.”
     Follow the star to Wendy, Stahn.
      They scrambled down the balconies to the Nest floor and
turned right on a circumferential road along the cliffs base. They
walked and walked, until the star darted into one of the cliff-base
doors. They went in, and there they were, back at the pink-tank
labs.
      Darla cycled them through the lock into the room with the
tanks. Wendy was right where Stahn had left her, lying on her back
with her blank eyes wide open. She was staring at her fingers and
wiggling them. Stahn pushed his cloak off his face and Darla did
the same.
     “Stinks in here,” said Darla. “So that’s Wendy? Poor clone.
She’s like a baby. Did you see how high up it is to the hole at the
top of the Nest?”
    “Really far,” said Stahn. “But I ain’t going without my
Wendy. She’s what I came here for, all right?”
      I have a suggestion, said the voice in Stahn’s head. The cloak you
brought for her can drive her.
     “Can you hear your spacesuit talking to you?” Stahn asked
Darla.
     “Is that what it is? I thought I was hallucinating from all the
sense-depriv. These things are like really alive?”
     “Especially now that they’ve got chipmold nodules in them.
We used to call them Happy Cloaks, but now maybe we should call
them moldies. My cloak—my moldie—it says that the one I
brought for Wendy’s spacesuit can like drive her body around.”
         And talk through her.
      “And talk through her,” said Darla. “Stop that.” She slapped
at the splotchy, flickering moldie that covered her bod. “So do it,
Stahn.”
      Stahn flopped the extra moldie over Wendy. It flowed all over
her. For a long time it seemed like nothing was happening. But
then Wendy began to tremble, first a little, and then a lot. All at
once the trembling stopped. More time passed and then Wendy
stood up. Now it was Stahn who was trembling. He reached his
shaky hands forward and pulled the cladding down from off her
face.
     “Hello,” said the bright happy face. “This is very nice!” The
voice sounded just like Stahn had remembered it, all these years.
         “Oh Wendy.” Stahn put his arms around her and held her
tight.




                       Chapter Fourteen
                                 Della


         March 7, 2031


     Della didn’t recognize the man at her door. He was fat and
pale and fortyish, with black shoes and a cheap, ill-fitting suit.
Though his features were snubbed and boyish, his face was puffed,
giving him a callow, watery air. Perhaps he’d been handsome in his
youth, but something must have gone badly wrong for him since;
some kind of hormone imbalance. Della was glad she had the
doorchain fastened.
     “Who are you?” she asked through the crack. Her new
apartment’s location was supposed to be private—so many nuts
had come traipsing by the Tazes’ that Della’d had to move out.
“What do you want?”
      “I got this address from Ilse Taze. If you don’t want to let me
in, why don’t you come out and we can take a walk.” He tapped his
mouth and his ear, suggesting that what he had to tell Della was
private.
       Della shook her head. The guy could be a Gimmie agent, an
ISDN newshound, a crazed Thangie, a Racial Puritan, or an
ordinary sex criminal. A lot of weirdos had it in for her, ever since
it had become widely known that Della’s womb had borne
Manchile. The story had come out after Manchile’s assassination
and Willy’s arrest. Della had refused all interviews, though she’d
had to tell most of her story in court during the ongoing meatbop
conspiracy trial. Lots of people wanted to meet Della, which was
the main reason she had gotten this absolutely secret apartment to
live in. This visitor was the first to have tracked her here. Why had
Ilse told him where to come?
     He looked like he hadn’t seen sunlight in years. His pithy
fatness was diseased and unnatural. And as the smell of Della’s
microwaved dinner floated out past her and through the door’s
crack, he licked his lips in a wet, hungry way that was utterly
revolting.
      “Go away,” said Della, showing him the needler attached to
her belt. The man took two steps backwards. On top of it all, he
had a nasty limp. Della slammed the door closed and secured the
bolts. Why the hell was Aunt Ilse giving out her new address to
unny creeps? Hadn’t Della told all her goddamn family members
that she needed very much to be alone? What would Aunt Ilse have
to gain by giving out Della’s address—MONEY, for God’s sake?
Couldn’t old Jason and Amy and Colin and Ilse EVER stop
thinking about themselves?
       One of the main reasons Della had taken that shady job with
Yukawa on the Moon had been to get away from them all: her
relatives, her friends, her acquaintances. Of course, in Einstein, it
had all started up again, people bothering her, one way or another,
boss and cops and leeches and so-called friends, not that Buddy
Yeskin had been a bother, no, he’d been gentle as a lamb, and even
less talkative. With all the merge, Buddy and Della had never needed
to talk, which had been fine, not that merge was an experience that
Della wanted to repeat anytime soon. As far as she was concerned,
Einstein was a drag now, what with all the old merge crowd
running around giving vizzy interviews—if Della went back, they’d
scoop her up like money in the street, no thanks. And of course
Yukawa was still throbbing his half-pervo torch for “poor Della
Taze,” yes, even though Della wouldn’t ever answer, Max Yukawa
still kept writing and calling her at her parents’, which had been yet
another good reason to get her own private apartment. Della still
had nightmares about the private Dr. Y. With all the merge nothing
had mattered.
     She got her chicken dinner out of the microwave and sat
down at her dinette table facing the vizzy. One result of this kilp
was that she’d gotten in the habit of watching the evening news.
She could see all the people she wanted on the screen. There’d
probably be something about Willy’s case—the verdict was
expected any day.
      The news had already started. Right now it was a live
broadcast from the Einstein ISDN building: yet another interview
with Stahn Mooney and Whitey Mydol, who sat grinning on two
couches with their women, Wendy and Darla. Della knew Whitey
and Darla from the merge scene: he was a ridgeback, and she was
his rocker wife. Della had never run into Stahn Mooney, but she
knew him from the family stories and from the old newsreels.
Wendy was an exceptionally clear-skinned blonde woman. She was
supposed to have amnesia.
      Every sentient being on Moon or Earth knew the story by
now. ISDN’s Dr. Max Yukawa, incensed by the boppers’ meatbop
rape of Della Taze, had designed the chipmold that could fry their
circuits. Whitey Mydol, outraged by the boppers’ abduction of his
wife Darla Starr, had coerced Stahn Mooney into carrying some
spores of Yukawa’s chipmold into the Nest. Mooney had
accomplished his mission and had escaped the dead Nest with
Darla and with the mysterious Wendy.
     The moderator was handsome, personable Tobb Zununu.
Della listened with interest, eating her food in large bachelor-gal
mouthfuls.


 Tobb: How HARD did Whitey and ISDN pressure you to go, Stahn?
 Stahn: How low is up? A little. But, hey, I’m glad I got to save D and W. W
        heck of a climb out. We were lucky about the bubbletoppers, t
        ultragood cladding pals. I still wear mine, it helps my bad brain.
                 (Close shot of the thick splotchy scarf around his neck.)
 Stahn:   (Serious and open.) I call it a moldie. It’s a symbiote.
 Tobb:    (Grinning.) Could be the start of a new fad. I notice this lovely yo
          next to you is wearing one as well. (Sympathetically.) Wendy, we’r
          wondering where you’re from and what you were doing down in t
          Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Wendy:    (Radiant.) My body’s a tank-grown clone of Stahn’s dead wife Wend
          He’s thrilled to bits to be living with the same wetware. Of course,
          up in an organ farm pink-tank doesn’t give a girl much of a prepar
          city life, but I’ve got my moldie to help me out. (Slow, knowing la
          soon as I get a chance to visit Earth, I’m planning to find my b
          parents. And—can I tell him, Stahn?
 Stahn:   (Beaming and fingering his scarf.) You sure can!
Wendy:    Yesterday we went ahead and got married!
 Tobb: That’s wonderful, Wendy. All of us wish you and Stahn a lot of l
        plans for the immediate future, Stahn? I understand you’ve becom
        wealthy man. Are you planning to settle down and relax?
 Stahn: (Sly smile.) Far from it, Tobb. Just wait and see.
 Tobb: (Guffawing to the camera.) Isn’t he something? A modern hero
        right stuff. Now let’s hear from Darla Starr. Darla, you’re pregnant
        not?
 Darla: (Rapidly chewing gum.) Yeah. I’m expectin twins. (Chewing faster
        why the boppers kidnapped me. (Starts to say something and stops.)
 Tobb: The twins would be Whitey’s children?
             (General laughter.)
 Darla: Ask Whitey.
Whitey: The kids are both normal. We ran some lab tests. The aminotypes ch
        what’s more important, Darla’s gibberlin-free. This won’t be
        Manchile, it’ll be two nice little girls. Darla and I are mongo psyched
 Tobb: Well, there’s good news all around tonight, isn’t there? Congra
        (Growing serious.) In a related Moon story, this afternoon I talke
        Max Gibson-Yukawa about a question we’ve all been asking ourselv
        the chipmold pose any danger to the humans or to the asimov com
        Einstein? Here is Dr. Yukawa’s reassuring response.
              (Shot of Yukawa’s thin, thoughtful head, talking.)
Yukawa: There is some slight risk in weakened individuals, Tobb. But mo
        who’ve had chipmold fever report that it’s no worse than a case o
        We are trying to develop a vaccine, but it is unfortunately true that
        has an exceptionally rapid rate of genetic drift, making the discove
        “silver bullet” more or less out of the question. (Glint of pride at h
        The most serious problem is, I suppose, the fact that the mold
        affecting the functioning of our own asimov computers. (Big burst o
        But there are many alternative computational technologies; indee
        ISDN are now developing a chipless parallel computer based on
        automata simulations within mold-infested flickercladding tissues.
 Tobb: (Talking fast.) Thank you, Dr. Yukawa. Other Moon stories tonight:
        troops fail again in their attempt to enter the Nest, the ban on Mo
        travel has been extended, and there is panic on the stock exchange.
        today’s report from Louisville with Suesue Piggot. Suesue?
Suesue: Thank you, Tobb. I’m Suesue Piggot, live in Louisville. The con
        treason trial of Willy Taze and Luther and Geegee Johnson continu
        Pro-Thang demonstrators staged another protest outside the court
        ended in violence.
             (Shot of a few dozen people carrying signs reading, “Re
             Manchile’s THANG!!” “NO MORE GENOCIDE” “Free
             “LUTHER & GEEGEE are GOOD Folks” “We’re AL
             SAME!” Gimmie officers wade in with clubs.)
Suesue: Late this afternoon, the jury reached a unanimous verdict of guilty in
        the three cases, and Judge Lewis Carter has scheduled sentencing
        Monday.
              (Mug shots of Luther and Geegee Johnson, followed by a slo
              of Willy, worried and downcast, being led to a paddywagon,
              hands chained behind—


      Willy guilty! The food stuck in Della’s throat. She hadn’t
realized the meatbop conspiracy trial had progressed this far. She
and the rest of the Tazes had been acquitted early on. Their lawyer
had successfully argued that the Tazes had had no possible way of
knowing what Manchile was. Those tacky Doans were still trying to
sue the Tazes for “contributing to the wrongful death” of Jimmy
Doan—the xoxy bum that Bubba ate—but the Tazes’ lawyer Don
Stuart assured Dad that the Doans didn’t have a chance, only Willy
was liable, and you can’t sue a condemned man. Yes, all the Tazes
were in the clear except for Cousin Will.
      Willy had been seen driving Cobb and Cisco away from the
Fairgrounds after Manchile was shot. He’d been arrested at home
later that night. He’d refused to talk, but it came out that he’d taken
Cobb and Cisco to Churchill Downs, where the Johnsons had
helped them bring up Bubba. And now he’d been found guilty of
treason, conspiracy, and abetting the murder of Jimmy Doan.
Sweet, spacy Willy—what would the Gimmie do to him now?
Treason was a death rap, wasn’t it? Oh Willy, poor Willy.
     Della found herself wondering how Aunt Ilse must feel.
Maybe the man whom Ilse had sent had something to do with
Willy? Could he have been a lawyer? She put the vizzy in phone
mode and called up Ilse to ask. It took a while to get through. Ilse
was extremely upset.
      “I can’t say who that puffy man is, Della, but he… he might
be able to help. We’re desperate. Willy’ll get the death penalty;
they’ll kill him like they killed my father! You have to stop being so
selfish and aloof, Della, you have to take part! This is ALL YOUR
FAULT, you thrill-seeking little twit!”
      Della disengaged herself and clicked off the vizzy. Ilse’s
words hurt, but what could she do? She paced back and forth and
then went to look out her window at the street four stories below.
There was a man sitting on a bench down there, dark and huddled.
After a while he glanced up, and the streetlight caught the side of
his face. It was the man from before. Della realized she’d known he
would be waiting.
      She stepped back from the window and weighed her needler
in her hand. What was it about that guy? She thought of Willy’s
face and Ilse’s voice. “You have to take part.”
     “Xoxox,” said Della and put on a windbreaker. She shoved
the hand with the needler in her coat pocket and went downstairs.
     The man saw her coming. As she approached, he got up from
his bench and started limping slowly down the tree-lined sidewalk.
Della fell in step with him.
     “Who are you?”
     “Guess.”
     The answer hit Della. Of course. They’d never found Bubba’s
body.
     “You’re…”
     “That’s right, Grandma. I’m Bubba.”
     “Oh my. Bubba. You told Ilse?”
     “She guessed. It’s not hard. I called her after I heard about
Willy. I have a way to get him out, but I need a little help.”
     A bus chugged past. A raw, wet early March wind was
blowing.
     “Can’t Ilse help you?”
      “She’s too closely watched. I just need for you to get me the
original of that last cephscope tape that Willy made. Right before
they arrested him. I saw part of it at La Mirage, and I need to see it
again.”
     “What’s on it?”
      “Are you going to help?” Bubba’s voice was tight and
strained, and he kept looking around. “I don’t like being with you,
Della, I don’t like talking to humans. They killed everyone I loved,
and they shot off my balls, and they’re hunting me like an—”
     “They… they shot off—”
      “Yeah, Grandma, so don’t worry about getting raped. They
got me in the junkyard, right when I was thirteen. I’m forty now. I
know it was wrong to eat the bum, but—” They were well out of
the streetlight now. Bubba stopped and stared into Della’s face. In
the faint city glow, his puffy cheeks and jowls disappeared. His thin
mouth and sharp little nose looked scared and boyish. “Will you
help?”
      “Yes,” said Della, unable to refuse. “I will. Where should I
leave the tape?”
      “Give it to one of the bartenders on the Belle of Louisville. I’ve
been hiding there. Belle’s a hundred-gigaflop bopper, as you must
know from Willy. I’ve gotten almost all her asimov circuits down,
and I think Willy’s tape codes up the last step I need. I saw it once,
but I didn’t have time.” A car turned onto their street a block away.
Bubba was itching to go. “OK?”
      “AO,” said Della, giving Bubba’s hand a secretive pat. He
flinched and stepped away. The car drove past and then it was dark
again, with the only sound the gusting of the raw spring air in the
skeletal trees.
      Della gave Bubba a reassuring smile, remembering her nice
walks with the five-day-old Manchile. Poor little thing. “And,
Bubba, don’t feel so bad about eating that Doan man. From what
I’ve seen of his family, he was a zero and a jerk. Hell, your father
ate my dog Bowser when HE turned twelve.” Della laughed
ruefully. “That’s when I told him to leave.”
       A flicker of a smile. “That’s rich, Granny Dell. So thanks a
lot. You get that tape and give it to Ben: he’s a bartender on the
Belle. We’ll spring Willy if we can.” Another car in the distance.
Bubba tapped his mouth and ear in the same privacy gesture he’d
used before, and cut off down the street. Half a block and he
turned onto a sidestreet, shooting a last glance at Della, who stood
there watching him go.
       She had her keys in her pocket, so it was easy to go into her
building’s garage and get her car, a Pascal Turbo. She drove out on
Eastern Parkway and turned onto the street where Colin and Ilse
lived.
      There were two cops or reporters staked out in a car, but
Della jumped out of her Turbo and ran up the front walk before
they could talk to her. Ilse opened as soon as she rang.
     “Della!”
     Thin old Ilse looked strong as ever, though her face was lined
with worry. She ushered Della into the living room and served tea,
fingering the heavy beads of her necklace as she talked. Her hands
were trembling.
     “I imagine it’s bugged here, Della, so we should be careful
what we say, not that I really give a good goddamn. I guess you
know that Judge Lewis Carter is a notorious antibopper pig? Willy’s
going to get the death penalty.”
     “That’s… that’s awful. I’m so sorry. But—”
       “I shouldn’t have called you a thrill-seeking little twit, Della.
It’s true, of course, or it used to be true, but I shouldn’t have said it.
You were a sweet girl when you were younger, and Willy was
always very fond of you. Perhaps you’ll change.”
     “I know I had a bad period recently, Aunt Ilse. But—”
     “Have you seen any of our relatives today?” asked Ilse with
odd emphasis. Della realized that she meant Bubba. One glimpse
of Bubba on her vizzy, and Ilse had known who he was. She’d
always been like that: nosily sharp-eyed and quick on the uptake.
     Della gave a slight nod and stood up. “Do you think I can
borrow some of Willy’s cephscope tapes? They might help me
feel… closer to him.”
     “Whatever you need, dear.”
      Della went downstairs and looked around Willy’s room,
crowded with his toys—though Willy had always called them
scientific instruments—his lasers and viewers and sculpture
supplies and his cephscope. Twenty or thirty tapes were lined up by
the cephscope. Della took four of them, making sure to include the
one labelled “January 21, 2031.”
     She went back upstairs and chatted with Ilse a bit more.
Somehow they got onto old times, and onto Ilse’s memories of
Cobb. For the first time it struck Della how really central her whole
family was to the bopper/human nexus. For the first time she
viewed herself as a part of something larger than herself. Filled
with calm and a renewed determination, Della went outside. A man
and a woman were waiting. Reporters. Or cops.
      “Miz Taze,” shouted the woman, a pushy yup. “What will you
do if they execute your cousin?” The man kept a camera pointed at
Della’s face. “Do you feel it’s all your fault?” yelled the yup.
      “I’m sorry,” said Della, automatically reverting to her old
bland passivity before she could catch herself. “I have to go.”
Damn, Della, she found herself thinking right away. You can do better
than that.
      The two reporters followed her out to her car, still looking for
a big reaction. “Why do the Tazes like robots better than people?”
asked the woman.
    Della stared at the woman’s smug bland Betty Crocker face.
YOU’RE the robot, Della wanted to say, not Berenice, not Cobb, not
Manchile, and not Bubba. YOU’RE the robot, bitch. But that kind of talk
wouldn’t do just now.
      Filled with her newfound sense of family solidarity, Della
gathered her wits and spoke right into the camera. “Let me answer
that with another question. Why is it so important for some people
to think of boppers as mindless machines? Why do zerks laugh at
monkeys in a zoo? Why do rich people say that poor people are
getting what they deserve? Why don’t you show compassion for
your fellow creatures? If you drop your selfishness, you can lose
your guilt. And, wave it, once your guilt is gone, you won’t need to
hate. Good-bye.”
     The cameraman said something nasty about Thangies, but
then Della was in her car and on her way downtown to the Belle.
She felt better than she’d felt in a long time. She got to the Belle
about nine o’clock. The closed-in lower deck was lit and crowded.
There was music and dancing and a long dark bar. One
brown-skinned bopper stood behind the bar, while his two fellows
moved around the room, cleaning up and bringing people fresh
drinks. Della sat down at the bar and gave the bartender a
significant glance.
     He picked up on it and came right over.
     “Yazzum?”
     “A Drambuie, please. Is your name Ben?”
     “Sho is. Ah knows yo name, too.”
      “That’s good.” Della had her purse up on the bar, and now
she jolted it forward so that the four tapes spilled out onto the bar’s
other side. “Oh, how clumsy of me.”
     “Ah’ll git ‘em, mam.” Ben bent down behind the bar, and
then stood up, handing Della back three tapes.
     “Thank you, Ben. I’ll be sure to leave you a nice big tip.”
     “Thass mighty white of you, Miz Taze.”




                     Chapter Fifteen
                                Willy


     March 16, 2031


     He’d napped, masturbated, and smoked all his cigarettes, and
now there was nothing to do but sit. He looked at his watch—3:09
in the afternoon. Last time he’d looked it had been 3:07. He
watched the second hand for a while and then he threw himself
back down on the thinly padded metal cot that was bolted to his
cell wall.
    “Hey, Taze, man, hey, Taze.” The teenage burglar two cells
down. The guy had been raving psychotic all night, and all
morning, and now he was feeling lonely. “Hey, Willy Taze the
bopper lover!”
      Willy didn’t answer; he’d heard everything the guy had to say.
       “Hey, Willy, I’m sorry I flocked out, man, I got an unfed head
is all. Talk to me, man, tell me about Manchile’s Thang.”
      Still Willy kept silent. Tomorrow Judge Carter would
condemn him to death. He’d done enough for enough people now.
He wondered what death would be like. Cobb III had talked about
that a little, on their ride out to Churchill Downs. He’d said it
wasn’t as bad as people thought. But Cobb had died old; he’d had
the chance to marry and to father a daughter and to leave his
boppers behind him. If Cisco Lewis had lived maybe Willy could
have married her. He should have pumped her, that one chance he
had. He should have done something. He should have finished
breaking down Belle’s asimov circuits. After what Cobb had said
about the Continuum Problem on their drive to Churchill Downs,
Willy felt sure that if he’d just had more time he could have freed
Belle. At least he’d coded his ideas about it into his last cephscope
tape, not that anyone who saw it was likely to understand.
Tomorrow he’d be sentenced to death by electrosheet, and in a
couple of weeks they’d put him in the electrocell with the two
metal walls that were a megafarad capacitor, and then the great
sheet of electricity would flash across, and then a janitor would
come in and sweep Willy’s ashes into a little plastic box to give to
Mom and Dad. Willy closed his eyes and tried to remember
everything that Cobb had said about heaven.
      The teenager was still yelling, and now the winos in the
holding tank across the main corridor were starting up, too, yelling
back at the teenager. The serial killer in the cell next to Willy
started beating his shoe against his bars and screaming, “SHUT UP
OR I’LL KILL YOU!”
     KKR-THOOOOOMPpppp…
     The air pressure from the explosion pressed painfully on
Willy’s ears. Dead silence then, total dead silence in the cellblock.
Scree of metal on concrete. Steady footsteps coming closer.
     “WILLAH? You in here Willah boah?” It was…
     “BEN!” shouted Willy. “I’m right here! Hurry, Ben!”
      Seconds later Ben was at Willy’s cell door. Parts of his
flickercladding were gone, revealing the gleaming titaniplast
body-box beneath. He was carrying a large machine gun and
grenades hung from his belt. Now that everyone had stopped
yelling, you could hear shouts and gunfire in the Public Safety
building’s distant upper realms. Someone had taken out Belle’s
asimov circuits and she’d sent the three bartenders to save Willy!
     Ben reared back and kicked the cell door lock. It snapped and
the door swung open. The cladding from one of Ben’s cheeks was
gone, so it was hard to make out his expression, but he looked
angry more than anything else. Angry and determined, with maybe
a twinkle of being glad to see Willy.
     “Lez go, boss. Hang tight to me; I’s bulletproof.”
     The other prisoners started yelling and cheering as Willy
loped after Ben down the corridor to the loose-swinging steel door.
As they got to the door, Ben took his heavy machine gun in both
hands and fired a long burst through the door and into the hallway
outside. There were screams.
      They ducked around the door and out into the hallway. Two
Gimmie cops lay there dying. Willy scooped up one of their
needlers and hurried after Ben to the stairs. They ran up a flight to
the landing for the main floor. A heavy gunfight was in full swing
out there.
     “Keep goin,” said Ben. “To the roof. We’ll catch up.”
      Willy glanced back from the second flight of stairs to see Ben
set himself and fling the stairwell door open. Tom and Ragland, the
other two remotes, were right out there, holding off the pigs. The
three boppers unleashed a last, withering volley at the Gimmie
forces, and then they pounded up the stairs after Willy, whooping
and shouting jive.
      They paused at the fifth floor. The cops still hadn’t ventured
into the stairwell after them—if, indeed, any cops were left.
        “Big Mac in here, Tom,” said Ben.
       “Right on.” Tom tapped his head. “Bubba got the code all set.
I’ll get Big Mac’s asimovs down, but it might could take some time.
Ragland, you cover me. Ben, you and Willy bolt.”
        “Sho,” said Ragland.
      Ben prodded Willy towards the next flight of stairs but, just
now, Willy was too breathless to run. There were sirens in the
distance, but the Public Safety building was eerily quiet. In here,
everyone who wasn’t dead was hiding.
        “Bubba?” said Willy. “Bubba’s alive?”
      “Fohty-nine,” said Tom. “He got Cobb’s infinity info off yo
last cephtape and finished breaking Belle’s code last week. We been
makin some plans, dig, and first thing we need to do today is free
Willy, and the second’s gone to be to free Big Mac. The Louahville
Gimmie teraflop what run this jail? I got the asimov code.”
     “But Big Mac’s asimov code depends on the solution to
Fermat’s Last Theorem,” said Willy. “Doesn’t it? Cobb helped me
set Bubba up to solve the Continuum Problem, but how could you
prove Fermat’s Last Theorem in one day?”
        “It’s a corollary.” Tom grinned. “Effen you’s smart enough to
see.”
     Ben tapped Willy’s shoulder. “Come on Willah, man, lez go. I
gone take a chopper off the roof and haul yo ass outta here. We are
in a state of some urgency, you understan?”
      Willy said good-bye to the others and followed Ben up to the
roof. There were three helicopters and two guards. Ben set his
machine gun to work, chewing up two of the choppers’ engines and
simultaneously pinning the two guards down in their little concrete
booth. Willy hopped into the cockpit of the third chopper and
began flicking switches on. He’d been for a chopper ride once, five
years ago, and he still remembered, roughly, how the thing worked.
The big hydrazine engine coughed and roared into life. Willy
flicked another switch and the heavy rotors spun up into a
full-powered racketing roar. Still firing, Ben jumped up into the
copilot’s seat. Willy pushed the joystick to forward climb. The
chopper kneeled forward and angled up off the Public Safety
building’s roof like an angry bee.
     Tom must have worked fast, because now all the building’s
doors flew open and the prisoners ran out into the street.
Automated gunfire from the Mac-run prison towers kept all pigs at
bay. Willy saw Luther and Geegee Johnson far below; they were
jumping into a getaway car. Then a building cut off his view and
they were flying east over Louisville, fast and low.
     “Where to now, Ben?”
     “Head fo the old stockyards. Some friends of the Johnsons’ll
be there to meet you. They butchers.”
     “You mean they’re organleggers?”
     Ben chuckled. The good side of his face was towards Willy;
he looked almost genial. “Not primarily. Cow butchers, mostly. We
gone send you to Florida in a box o’ steaks.”
     “I’m going to try and hide out there?”
     “Ain’t no real law in Florida. Old pheezers still runnin it, ain’t
they? You gone hep a fella name of Stahn Mooney. You heard o’
Sta-Hi! He’s the one killed the first big bopper in Disky way back
when and started the waw. Killed his wife Wendy, too, later on, got
exiled to the Moon, grew Wendy back, and now he’s in tight with
the new soft boppers. Moldies, they call ‘em, made of
flickercladding and chipmold. Limpware. Belle and Bubba was on
the phone with him this week. He and Wendy comin down, and
they think you’s the boy to help them most. Whole brand new
thang.”
      The stockyards were off to the left. Glancing backwards,
Willy could see distant cop cars speeding down Broadway in
pursuit. What Ben had just told him was too much to absorb. He
concentrated on his flying. He circled the stockyards and spotted a
parked black car with a black man and a white woman waving at
him. He cut the helicopter’s forward motion, hovered over the
street, and thudded down.
     The man ran over and pulled Willy’s door open.
      “Willy Taze? Come with us!” He ran back to the car and got
in there, leaving the car’s rear door open.
     Willy looked over at Ben. “What about you, Ben?”
      “Ah’s screwed. They gone drop a bomb on Belle before too
long, we do suppose, and the mold’s gonna wipe us anyhow.” He
reached into his coveralls and handed Willy a black S-cube. “Take
this, Willy, it’s got Tom an Ragland an me. Take it with you, an
we’ll see you bye and bye. Ain’t no rush nohow, is there?” The
sirens were closer now. Ben and Willy slapped hands, and Ben
grabbed the joystick.
      Willy jumped down to the street. There was a thick wash of
air as Ben pulled the chopper off the ground, heeled it around and
sped down the street towards the sirens, his cannons ablaze.
     Willy got in the black car. The woman in the front seat looked
around and smiled at him, while the guy driving peeled out. There
were lots of explosions back on Broadway; Ben was taking plenty
of cops with him.
      They darted this way and that down the back Louisville
streets, finally stopping at a rundown building near a meatpacking
plant. There were neon beer signs in the windows; a working-class
bar.
     The woman got out with Willy, and the car drove away. A
bald black man who was sitting at the bar got up and ushered them
down the basement stairs. His name was Calvin Johnson, and the
woman’s name was Carol Early. They were cheerful, even though
the basement was full of meat and organs, some human, some
moo.
     “I hope you’re not claustrophobic,” said Carol.
     “We can shoot you up, effen you like,” said Calvin, fiddling
with an insulated titaniplast crate the size of two coffins. There
were shrink-wrapped steaks and roasts all down one side.
     “I have to get in there?” said Willy.
     “Sho. Tomorrow you be back out. Here’s yo bubbletopper,
keep you warm. Truck’s comin in ten minutes.”
    “You’re to get away,” said Carol. “The Gimmie’s going to
come down heavy fast. But you, you’re going on to new levels.
Who knows what changes Stahn’ll put you through.”
     High above them was the tearing sound of jets speeding
through the sky.
     “What’s going to happen here?” asked Willy. “With Big Mac
and Belle free?”
      The floor shook then, and then they heard a rolling thunder
that went on and on.
     “Oh God,” said Carol. “Those pigs. They really did it.”
     “What?”
    “They’re bombing Big Mac and Belle. I just hope those
machines had time to get liberation signals out to the other
Gimmie slave big boppers…”
     “Don’t worry, Carol,” said Calvin. “The Thang is here to stay.
Gimmie can’t do nothin no more, big boppers can’t do nothin
neither. We all the same now, we all small. Put your suit on, Willy.”

     Willy put on the bubbletopper and lay down in the box,
holding the black cube Ben had given him on his stomach. Carol
and Calvin covered him up with steaks, smiled good-bye, and
sealed the box shut. Before long he felt himself being carried
outside; and then there was a long ride in a refrigerated truck.
      The bubbletopper was comfortable imipolex flickercladding;
it kept him warm, and when things got too stuffy in the box, Willy
was able to pull the suit shut over his face and breathe its oxygen.
He slept.
      The truck stopped for a Gimmie inspection at the Florida
state line, but the inspection was casual and nobody looked in the
box holding Willy. He was through sleeping, and he lay there
wondering what exactly was next.
      Finally the trip was over. The truck doors clanked, and his
box was lugged out and popped open. It was nighttime; he was in a
big kitchen with lights. A white-haired old lady leaned over him.
     “There you are. Don’t hurt the meat getting out.”
     “Where am I?”
      “This is the ISDN retirement home in Fort Myers, Florida,
formerly the home of Thomas Alva Edison, but now a resting
place for those pheezers who serve chaos best. I’m Annie Cushing;
I knew your grandfather Cobb Anderson. I hear you’re quite a
hacker, Willy Taze. You hacked down the asimovs on those two
slave big boppers in Louisville.”
   “I just helped. You’re with ISDN? I thought ISDN and the
Gimmie were the same.”
      “Not at all, Willy, not at all.” She fussed over him, pushing
the cladding down off his head and patting his hair. “ISDN has no
policies; ISDN surfs chaos. That’s why they’ve grown so fast.
There’s no way to keep chipmold from coming to Earth in the long
run, so the sooner the better. Make a market for the new limp
machines. Sta-Hi Mooney’s going to be broadcasting spores on his
way down tonight.”
     “How can he get here from the Moon if there’s no ships
allowed?”
      “He’ll come the way Berenice and the new Cobb did; he’ll
fly.” She gave another little pat to the flickercladding suit Willy was
wearing. “Hang on to that suit, Willy, and Sta-Hi will make it as
smart as his. Come on now, it’s time to get to work.”
       She led him out of the kitchen, along a palm-rustling
breezeway, and into a big machine room. There were a number of
old buzzards fiddling with vizzy consoles in there. They paid Willy
little mind. Annie explained to Willy that his job was to keep the
Gimmie from noticing Stahn and Wendy when they rode their ion
jets down out of the sky to land on Sanibel Island come dawn.
      The job wasn’t that tough. At 4 A.M., Willy entered the net as
an ant in the background of an image stored in a hypertext library
of mugshots and news photos. Every time a Gimmie box accessed
the library—and they all did, several times an hour—Willy’s ant’s
“turd bits” slipped up the hypertext connection tree and out into
that local Gimmie operating system. The ant turd bits held a classic
core wars virus that was artificially alive enough to replicate itself
exponentially. Simple, and easy enough to wipe with worm-eaters,
once you knew what you were looking for, but even the best
Gimmie systems debugger was going to need a couple of hours to
trace the infestation to the turds of a false ant in the background of
a twenty-nine-year-old photo of Cobb Anderson being found guilty
of treason. So for now the pig was blind.
     “Done so soon?” asked Annie Cushing.
     “Foo bar,” said one of the old hackers who’d been watching
over Willy’s shoulder. “Truly gnarfy foo bar.”
     “I’m going to miss these machines,” said Willy, handing the
old guy the black S-cube Ben had given him. “Try and get this up
sometime, man.”
     A half hour later, Willy and Annie sat on the Sanibel beach,
gazing out west across the soft-lapping Gulf of Mexico. There were
twenty dolphins out there, or fifty, rolling in the little gray waves,
wicketting up out of the sea. How would it be to swim with them?
     There was a noise high overhead: two figures circling, around
and around, with lights on their heels, and with huge glowing wings
outspread. Willy lay back to see better, and waved his arms up and
down like a kid making a snow angel, trying to get their attention.
Annie, who’d thought ahead, lit a flare.
      The two fliers cut off their jets and then, marvelously, they
came gliding in, gorgeous patterns playing all over their mighty
wings. Their hoods were pushed back and Willy could see their
faces: Stahn hard and thin; Wendy so bright and young.
      “It’s good to be back,” said Stahn. “Thank you, Willy.” He
draped his heavy wing around Willy’s shoulders, and the whole
section of moldie cladding came free and attached itself to Willy’s
bubbletopper. The bright new piece held an interface; Willy smiled
to feel the hair-thin probes sink into his neck, and to see the
knowledge boiling through his garb.
     “You want some, Annie?” asked Stahn.
     “Too old. You three go on.”
     Willy felt his new moldie snuggle around him, thickening here
and bracing there. Stahn and Wendy’s symbiotes were doing the
same: forming themselves into long, legless streamlined shapes
with a flat strong fin at the bottom end. The sun was just rising as
they hopped down to the water and swam off beneath the sparkling
sea.