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

darkened his appearance by means of odd hair, a ratty beard, silvery stun glasses, and heavy blue suede boots. For tonight, he’d covered his head with vintage aluminum foil crudely wadded into the shape of a helmet, and he wore a reflective metallic fireman’s coat that went down to his knees.

Babs had big firm cheeks that grew pink when she was excited, like now. As part of her costume, she wore a yellow polyester shirt with a tag saying:

HI I’M LYNNE – HAPPY DOLLAR

She held a stick bearing something like a square lantern with the numeral “3″ on each of its four sides, and around her waist was a cardboard tray with packages glued to it—cereal boxes and udon and pho noodles and tampons and panty shields and disposable ceramic forks. Her hair was pulled tight into a lank little ponytail that was barrette-clamped to point upward; and to complete the groovy hairdo, she wore a wiiiiiide bandeau.

“Can you tell what I am?” chirped Babs cozily. Wendy couldn’t guess, but Stahn recognized it from his childhood.

“You’re a clerk in an old-time supermarket!”

“Ye oldie checker gal,” said Babs, laughing gaily.

“What about me?” asked Saint.

“A robot?” guessed Wendy.

“Sort of,” said Saint. ” ‘I am Iron Man.’ I’ve got my stunglasses broadcasting realtime live on the Show, you wave, and I’m using this classic twentieth-century metal song for the background. Listen.” He switched his uvvy to speaker mode and karaoked some crude guitar licks. “Danh-danh deh-denh-deh. Dadadada-danh-danh-dah-dah.”

Wendy had set their dragonfly to filming the little family outing; it hovered a few feet over their heads like a hummingbird, its wings whispering and its single bright bead-eye lens staring at the Mooneys. Wendy and Saint could see the pictures through their uvvies.

Saint sang Iron Man some more, raising his hand toward the dragonfly in a spread-fingered salute; Wendy could see that he was goofing on the self-images he was realtime mixing into the ceaseless global interactive multiuser stunglasses Show. Saint saw Wendy seeing him, and he shifted fabulations.

“Ma is Wendy the red witch,” smiled Saint. “Who are you, Da?”

“I’m the night sky,” said Stahn, all painted black and spangled with sparkles. “As seen by a cosmic ray from the galactic equator. How you kids floatin’?”

“We’re having a good time,” said Saint. “I like how much there is to see. I’m pulling in some viewers. I’m not gonna have to pay any Web charges for weeks.”

“People keep trying to take stuff off my counter,” said Babs. “And then they’re surprised when it’s glued on. You look beautiful, Ma.”

“Thanks, Babs,” said Wendy. “But don’t you think I’d look better with an age-twenty-five body?”

“Oh, come on, Wendy,” said Stahn.

“Let her talk, Da,” said Babs. “She’s already told me all about it and it’s no prob.”

“I see a group that looks funny,” said Saint, pointing. “Let’s head that way.”

They pushed down the street toward a group of nude morphs, each painted a different primary color and each equipped with big morph muscles. A few of them had tails. They were tossing each other about like acrobats—with much lewd miming.

The Mooneys walked along with the happy, laughing crowd watching the acrobats for a while, then drifted into the less crowded blocks deeper into the Mission. “I still haven’t had supper,” said Wendy presently. “Is anyone else hungry?”

“I am,” said Saint. “Where should we go?”

“I know a wavy Spanish place near here,” said Babs. “The Catalanic.”

“Let’s do it,” said Stahn.

As they walked toward the restaurant, Babs began tearing items off her counter and setting them down on doorsteps. “For the homeless,” she explained. “Anyhoo, I’m tired of wearing all this.” She took the cardboard counter from around her waist and skimmed it toward Saint as hard as she could. He caught it, ran with it, flipped it onto the sidewalk, and managed to slide about twelve feet before stumbling off, pin-wheeling his arms and yelling, “Aaawk! Happy Dollar! Aaawk! Happy Dollar.”

The outside of the Catalanic was a warmly lit storefront painted red-and-yellow. Inside, it was bustling and cream-colored, with a few nice things on the walls: an old Spanish clock, two nanoprecise copies of Salvador Dali oils (Persistence of Memory and Dali at the Age of Six Lifting the Skin of the Water to Observe a Dog Sleeping in the Shadow of the Sea), and two nanocopied Joan Miro paintings of hairy bright lop-lop creatures (Dutch Interior I and Dutch Interior II). There were lots of people sitting at tables covered with tapas dishes and—“Yes, of course, Senator Mooney”—there was a table for four. Wendy’s dragonfly telerobot perched on a cornice across the street to wait.

The Mooneys sat down happily and fired off an order for Spanish champagne and plates of potatoes, shrimp, spinach, pork balls, squash, chicken, mussels, endives, and more potatoes. The bubbly and the first dishes began arriving.

“See that moldie over there with the bohos?” said Babs, waving across the room. “She’s a friend of mine. She’s called Sally. She’s so funny. One day when I was here, Sally and I fabbed about Dali for a long time.”

Sally was sitting on a chair with a group of five lively young black-dressed artists. Sally had been shaped like a colorful Picasso woman, but now, seeing Babs, she suddenly let her body slump into the shape of a melting jellyfish with wrinkles that sketched a flaccid human face.

“Look,” laughed Babs. “She’s imitating the jellyfish in Persistence of Memory. Hey, Sally! Do a soft watch!”

While her arty friends watched admiringly, Sally formed herself into a large smoothly bulging disk that bent in the middle to rest comfortably in her chair. She made her skin shiny—gold in back and glassy in front with a huge watch dial with warping hands. Her soft richly computing body drooped off the edges of her chair like a fried egg. Salvador Dali had predicted the moldies. It was perfect.

But Stahn was too benumbed to appreciate Sally’s visual pun. “I’m kind of surprised they let her in here,” he said thoughtlessly. “What with the stink.”

“Do I stink in restaurants?” demanded Wendy. “Some of us are civilized enough to know when to close our pores. You should talk, Stahn, the way you’ve been farting recently.”

Saint cackled to hear this. “Da stinks. Da’s a moldie.”

Stahn quietly poured himself another glass of champagne.

“How did you like the parade, old man?” asked Babs.

“I must say, it made me feel straight. That’s not a way I like to feel, mostly.”

“Men are so worried about being macho,” said Wendy.

“Will everyone stop picking on me?” snapped Stahn.

“We’re not picking on you,” said Saint, reaching over to give Stahn a caress followed by a sly poke.

“Da is a wreck,” said Wendy. “He stayed up most of last night.”

“What did you do, Da?” asked Saint.

“Never mind.” Stahn didn’t want to tell his kids about the camote. He was ashamed to be such an eternal example of out-of-control drug-taking; in recent years he’d backslid terribly. “It has to do with this new way to control moldies.”

“Are you scheming to control me?” Wendy wondered suddenly. “Me, in the sense of Wendy’s Happy Cloak?”

“No,” said Stahn. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Though it might not hurt for you to try seeing how a leech-DIM feels sometime. They say for a moldie it’s like being lifted. Then you’d understand. Instead of always being such a straight goody-goody.”

“I’ve been busy making a farm,” said Babs, changing the subject. “Did I tell you? It’s so floatin’. Place moistened humus between two glass sheets and add one pint red worms. Voila!”

“You’re doing this for fun?” asked Stahn. “Or is it art?”

“If you mean, ‘Can I sell worm farms?’—waaal, old-timer, I just dunno. So maybe it’s fun. But, wave, if I were to put DIM worms in with the real ones, why then it’d be ye new Smart Art and maybe I could sell some. But making the boxes is so damn hard. You wanna make me some worm farm boxes, Saintey? Eeeeeew! What are those gross things crawling on your head?”

“Lice,” said Saint. He’d taken off his foil helmet and shrugged his coat onto the back of his chair. His hair looked like upholstery on cheap furniture—it was buzz-cut, half-bleached to a punky orange, and there was a paisley filigree cut into it, revealing curving lines of scalp that seemed to have small translucent insects crawling along them.

“You have lice, Saint?” exclaimed Wendy. “How filthy! We have to get you disinfected! Oh! And we’ve all been hugging you!”

“I think he’s teasing you, Wendy,” said Stahn, peering closer at the tiny creatures on his son’s scalp. “Those are micro-DIMs. I know they’ve been used for barbering, but I’ve never heard of them doing paisley before. Did you program that yourself, Saint?”

“My friend Juanne taught the lice,” said Saint. “But I found the DIM beads. I’ve been finding some really floatin’ ware in this building I’m maintenance-managing, Da.”

“This is your new janitor job?” said Stahn.

Saint was suddenly very angry. “Don’t you always say that, you stupid old man. A maintenance manager is not a janitor. I like to fix things. I’m good at it. And for you to always act like it’s—”

Stahn winced at the intensity of his son’s reaction. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it,” he said quickly. “I’m senile. When I was your age, I was Sta-Hi the taxi driver, so who am I to talk? Maintenance is wavy. Retrofitting. Tinkering. It’s almost like engineering.”

“Saint doesn’t want to go to engineering school, Da,” put in Babs. “Get over it. His friends already look up to him like a teacher.”

“They do?” asked Stahn.

“Yes,” said Saint. “I like to think about the meaning of things. And what to do with life. Every day should be happy. My friends listen to me.”

“Well, hell,” said Stahn. “Then maybe you can be a senator.” He put up his hands cringingly. “Just kidding!”

The waitress arrived with a pitcher of sangria, more potatoes, and the grilled prawns. Stahn passed Saint the prawns and poured out glasses of the sangria.

“What’s the building you’re doing maintenance for?” Wendy asked Saint.

“Meta West Link,” said Saint. “They own the satellites and dishes for sending uvvy signals to the Moon.”

“Wholly owned by ISDN since 2020,” put in Stahn. “I can certainly believe that Meta West would have some interesting things in their basement.”

“Give me some DIM lice, Saintey?” pleaded Babs. “I’ll make a Smart Art flea circus! I want lice right now!” She crooked one arm around her brother’s neck and began picking at his head. “I’m the lice doctor!” When Babs had been younger, she’d enjoyed taking ticks off the family dog.”

“Don’t be so disgusting, you two,” said Wendy severely. “You’re in a restaurant. Stop it right now.”

The kids broke apart with a flurry of screeches and pokes, and then both of them sat there calmly with their hands folded.

“It’s Da’s fault,” said Saint.

“Da did it,” added Babs.

“Da’s bad,” said Saint.

“Da’s lifted and drunk,” said Babs.

“Da has a drug problem,” said Saint.

Stahn got the waitress and ordered himself a brandy and an espresso. “Anyone else for coffee or a drink? Anything? Dessert, kids?”

Saint and Babs ordered cake, but Wendy didn’t want anything. She said she thought it was about time they got going.

“Mind if I join you?” said Sally the moldie, suddenly appearing at the end