The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (ebook reader 8 inch .txt) 📕

An hour later Ike and Terri had each gotten a used wet suit and a rebuilt DIM board—at a very reasonable price. Ike’s board was red with black checkers, Terri’s was patterned with blue-and-green flames. The liveboard Everooze bounced down to the beach with them, jabbering away, and they swam out to a small uncrowded break.

“I’ll hang this fabulation on three ripe words like an uvvy preacher,” said Everooze. “Visualize, realize, and actualize. How do you talk to your DIM board? It’s a telepathic union, thanks to a little piece of uvvy in the nape of the wet suit neck, cuddled right up near your bright young Percesepe brain. To make your board swim, you visualize the motion you want, and then you realize that thought—push it out of your head so’s the DIM can channel it. And then, step three, the DIM makes it actual, all by itself. Splutter mutter, peanut butter! Visualize, realize, and actualize—these are the keys to correct surf motion in the water and—_hmmm_—indeed in all other walks or flights of life. The magic of the -alize ending. Yes. The DIM in the DIM board is a clueless little tad of flickercladding, a lonely finger’s worth of a moldie, but if you can visualize and realize, it can actualize. It works fairly well, at least on these puny waves. Puny waves but nicely tubular, I should add. Let’s surf ‘em.”

The realizing step was a little hard to get, but after a while Terri and Ike had it down. The trick was to think that you were already moving the way you wanted—to make it real at least for yourself—and the DIM would pick up on that. Ike said it felt like his whole body was talking to the DIM, and Terri said it was more like focusing your attention ahead of where you already were. Everooze said that either way was perfectly floatin’, although it was best of all to wave to the fact that they were, in fact, helping the DIM boards to surf.

They guided their boards out through the breakers, and Everooze started showing them how to catch a wave. “It’s a cosmic rhythm, you viz?” said Everooze, repeatedly catching waves, then ducking underwater to swim back to Terri and Ike like a big oblong sea skate turned skateboard. “It’s not enough to see a wave coming; you want to smell it and hear it and feel it in the air and in the water. Undoubtedly there’s a little current between your toes right now, for instance, which is the suck of the draw of the next wave crest to come. Get fully lifted on synesthesia because the ocean is indeed realizing its ability to actualize the way you are going to move. Not only are you helping the DIM board; you’re helping the ocean as well. Think of yourself as the ocean’s DIM.”

Terri and Ike started catching waves then and riding them, at first on all fours and then, miraculously, standing on two feet. “Ah yes,” exulted Everooze. “The human race rises from the primordial sea, a boy and a girl step forth from the zillion whats of past time to be here—whoops!— keep your center between your knees, Terri, think of your whole mass as a magic invisible weight dangling down there—that’s it, my lassie—_yee_

haw!—and another one, Ike—_boom_—over the falls for sure, a Niagara wet whirl under there in Neptune’s washing machine, no harm in that, no loss in failure, the surf god is actualizing tubes, kids, so get back out there—_whoo-ee_!”

When they got back home from that long, magical afternoon, Terri and Ike were committed surfers.

Dom never approved, but in the end it didn’t matter. Terri and Ike finished out high school and kept on surfing and working various small-time jobs, and then Dom died.

It happened over Thanksgiving weekend, 2048. There was a big family dinner at their Uncle Carmine’s. Alice had a couple of drinks and started a big argument with Dom. Apparently she wasn’t happy with their sex life. Dom stormed out into the night and disappeared.

Back home around midnight, after Terri and Ike had finally gotten their mother to bed, there was an uvvy call from a Wackerhut popo—a private cop. Terri answered.

“Is this the Percesepe residence?”

“Yes, who’s calling?”

“I’m an investigator for Wackerhut Security. There’s a problem here with a Dom Percesepe. Are you his next of kin?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“You better get over here: 2020 Bay Street, right near the Saturn Cafe.”

“Is he okay?”

“You’d better come over.”

As Ike and Terri stepped out of the house, several small dragonfly telerobots buzzed around them. They were newsies, remotely controlled mobile camera eyes. Something serious had happened to Dom. Before they could get on their hydrogen cycles, a car pulled up and a man got out. He wore a customized uniform and a gun; he was another popo. A newsie dragonfly hung whirring in place above his head.

“I’m from Boozin Security,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

“Wasn’t it a Wackerhut popo who called me before?” said Terri.

“The uvvy newsies are calling all the local popos. There’s enough blood for everyone.”

“What’s happened to my father?” shouted Ike.

“You better come see.”

The limo took them to a small yellow Santa Cruz cottage surrounded by knots of popos and newsies. Scores of dragonflies buzzed in the air. There were spotlights and the popo cars were flashing red and blue. A woman stepped forward to interview Terri and Ike, but a burly Wackerhut popo hustled them inside the cottage.

The place smelled more strongly of moldies than anyplace Terri had ever been. There was a slit-open moldie body with a full harvest of camote nodules on the floor. On the bed was a naked dead person. Dom.

There was blood all over his face; his nose was torn wide open. His genitals were bloody as well. He had a blowtorch clenched in his dead hand. His body was welted with circular marks, as if from squid tentacle suckers. The fast little dragonfly cameras darted this way and that, agitated as blowflies around fresh carrion.

It soon came out that Heritagist Dom was a longtime cheeseball. What exactly had gone wrong in the cottage on that last night remained unclear. Had Dom been threatening the flammable moldie with the blowtorch? Or trying to defend himself? It was hard to be sure. The cottage belonged to a woman named Myrdle Deedersen, who said she hadn’t realized what was going on. She’d been renting the cottage to a biker from Florida who wasn’t around very often. He always paid her in cash and she didn’t know his name. She thought he’d left town.

Nobody really believed her, but it was such a distasteful case that nobody in the Percesepe family was willing to pay for an official Gimmie investigation. Suffice it to say that Dom had gotten himself killed either by a moldie or by some local sporehead ring involved in kidnapping moldies and butchering them to sell off their imipolex and their camote on the black market. Dom should have known better than to be a cheeseball. Case closed.

Sure enough, Dom’s will left the restaurant to Ike. The twenty-year-old Ike struggled half a year with Dom’s Grotto, suffering much advice from his mother and his uncles, but the restaurant business wasn’t for him. When Kimo put Dada Kine up for sale in 2049, Ike sold Dom’s Grotto to his Uncle Carmine and bought the surf shop and all its assets, including the aging Everooze.

The first thing Ike did was to use some of his excess profit from the deal to get Everooze a complete retrofit and take him surfing in Hawaii, along with Kimo and Kimo’s new moldie liveboard ZyxyZ. They surfed the epic waves of the Pipeline, waves so big that before liveboards the only way a person could catch one of them was to be towed in by Jet Ski. It was a deeply memorable trip.

Now, four years later, Ike was a pro surfer and a seasoned businessman. Alice was still alive, and Terri and Tre were scraping by on Tre’s gigs and on the money from managing Alice’s motel. Rather than feeling guilt about his fat inheritance, Ike blamed Terri’s poverty on Tre. Ike didn’t like Tre.

Ike was waiting on the cliff beside Everooze when sharky Ouish and Xanana came bouncing up to the Steamers Lane overlook, with Terri and Xlotl rickshawing along behind. Everooze was distorted into the shape of an airy igloo, his new method of actualizing the maximum amount of solar radiation.

“Yaar, Terri,” said Ike. “What’s happening?”

“Monique took off with one of our guests,” said Terri as Xlotl set her down on the ground. “We think he’s gotten control over her somehow.”

“You saw her leave?” asked Ike.

“Tre did. He tried to stop her, but then he had a bike accident and broke his collarbone.”

“That stupid stoner hairfarmer.”

“He’s not a hairfarmer, Ike; he’s a scientist and an artist. He’s a chaotician.”

“Yeah, but you’re not denying he’s a stoner, are you? These poor valleys come out to live at the beach and they think it’s nothing but party time.”

“Now he’s valley too?”

“He comes from Iowa! Can’t get more valley than that. You never should’ve married him, Terri.”

‘Thank you for your wonderful support, you selfish prick. Now go away.”

“Let’s cut the jawing and make tracks,” snapped Xlotl.

“Tell us, Pop,” said Xanana to the red-and-yellow-striped dome that was Everooze. “Which way did she go? Which way did she go? Which way did she go?” He put the phrase through maybe two hundred repetitions in two seconds.

“I’ll ask Zilly if he can lead us,” said Everooze, making a popping noise and flipping his shape into that of a giant potato chip. “He’s been surfing here all day, and he says he saw Monique go in. But, Ike, what with the negative vibrations and so on and howsomever, it will indeed be wavier if you don’t come. Get the bus back to the shop, chill, and I’ll see you there later, your humble worker till wigdom come or I retire, whichever comes first.”

“Fine,” said Ike, stomping off. “To hell with all of you.”

Xanana lay down flat and split his backside, opening up like a seed pod.

“Undress and snuggle on in, Terri. You’ll be able to see out through my face. It’s transparent there. Let’s practice while Everooze talks to Zilly.”

“I haven’t done this before,” said Terri, recalling her dead father’s hypocritical tirades against intimacy with moldies. “Are you sure I’ll be able to breathe?”

“Of course,” said Xanana. “I have enough algae and other stuff in my tissues to make air twice as fast as a person can breathe. Or just as fast as any two people can breathe. Or half as fast as four people can breathe. Or—”

“Yeah, but your… your air is going to stink.”

“Just wear nose filters. I usually keep some—” Xanana’s flesh rolled about for a minute, and then a small slit opened up in his skin to disgorge two small metal sponges. “Palladium filters. Never heard of them? I’m beginning to think you’re moldiephobic, Terri. You sure you’re not a Heritagist? I know a lot of the Percesepes are.”

“Well, I’m not,” said Terri bravely. “I admit my uncles are xoxxy. They’re all Heritagists, yes. Sons of Adam. My father was too—at least we thought he was. But it turned out