Rudy Rucker - Ware 3 - Freeware

Rudy Rucker - FreewareFreeware

Rudy Rucker

For Embry Cobb Rucker

October 1, 1914 - August 1, 1994

"We live in hope."

CONTENTS

MONIQUE : October 30, 2035

RANDY : September 2048 - April 2051

TRE : March 2049 - October 30, 2053

RANDY : March 2052 - August 2053

TERRI : June 2043 - October 30, 2053

WILLY : March 17, 2031 - July 2052

STAHN : October 31, 2053

DARLA : 2031 - November 6, 2053

TERRI : November 6, 2053

DARLA : November 6, 2053

STAHN : November 7, 2053 - December 2053

CHAPTER ONE

MONIQUE

OCTOBER 30, 2035

Monique was a moldie: an artificial life form made of a soft plastic that was

mottled and veined with gene-tweaked molds and algae. Although Monique was a

being with superhuman powers, she was working as maid, handyman, and

bookkeeper

for the Clearlight Terrace Court Motel in Santa Cruz, California. The motel

manager, young Terri Percesepe, occasionally worried about Monique's motives.

But the moldie's work was affordable and excellent.

The Clearlight was situated near the top of a small hill, fifty yards back

from

the Santa Cruz beach with its Boardwalk amusement park. It was a fine fall

day,

October 30, 2053, and the morning sun filled the town with a dancing

preternatural light that made the air itself seem jellied and alive. On the

ocean, long smooth waves were rolling in, each wave breaking with a luscious

drawn-out crunch.

The motel consisted of a wooden office and three terraced rows of connected

stucco rooms, each room with a double sliding glass door looking out over the

sea. Pasted onto part of each room's door was a translucent psychedelic

sticker

mimicking an arabesque tiling. The weathered motel office sat on a flat spot

behind the highest terrace. The back part of the office held a four-room

apartment in which Terri lived with her husband Tre Dietz and their two

children: four-year-old Dolf and one-year-old Baby Wren.

Monique was making her way from room to room, changing the sheets and towels,

enjoying the feel of the bright sun slanting down on her and on the faded

blue

walls of the motel buildings. She'd already finished the rooms in the two

upper

rows and was now busy with the rooms of the lowest terrace, which sat

directly

above the well-worn shops of Beach Street. It was almost time for Monique's

midday break; as soon as her husband Xlotl called up, she'd go down for an

hour

on the beach with him.

Monique looked like a woman, sort of, most of the time, which is why it was

customary to refer to her as a she. Moldies picked a gender at birth and

stuck

to it throughout the few years that they lived. Though arbitrarily determined,

a

moldie's sex was a very real concept to other moldies.

Each moldie was passionately interested in mating and reproducing at least

once

before his or her short life should expire. The moldies reproduced in pairs

and

lived in nests that were like extended families. Monique was in a nest of

six:

herself, her parents Andrea and Everooze, her husband Xlotl, her brother

Xanana,

and Xanana's wife Ouish.

Monique's mother Andrea was very strange. Sometimes, under the influence of

certain chelated rare-earth polymers, she would form her body into a giant

replica of the Koran or of the Book of Mormon and lie out in front of the

beachfront Boardwalk amusement park, babbling about transfinite levels of

heaven, chaotic feedback, and the angels Izra'il and Moroni. Her body was

more

mold than plastic, and it looked like she might fall apart anytime now, but

Andrea had gotten rejuvenation treatments for herself before, and she planned

to

do it again—if she could get the money.

Monique's father Everooze worked as a liveboard for Terri Percesepe's kid

brother Ike, who ran a surf shop called Dada Kine out at Pleasure Point in

south

Santa Cruz. Like Andrea, Everooze was quite old for a moldie and had been

rejuvenated several times. Ike had been going out surfing with Everooze every

day for the last few years, and occasionally Ike might lend or rent Everooze

to

friends or to stuzzy big-time surfers. For his own part, Everooze got a kick

out

of giving free lessons to beginners and spreading the gospel of surf. Like

Andrea, Everooze was starting to flake pretty badly. Without a retrofit he'd

die

this winter. But Ike worshipped Everooze and was prepared to pay for his

rejuvenation.

When Terri had heard about Monique's birth to Everooze and Andrea—last

August—she'd thought of hiring the newborn moldie right away, and she'd been

able to convince Andrea and Everooze that it was a floatin' idea.

Monique quickly learned the ins and outs of running the Clearlight, and her

diligent efforts left Terri and Tre plenty of free time. Not only did Monique

make up the rooms quickly and beautifully, she managed all of the motel's

books.

Terri went out surfing most every day, and Tre liked to sit in an easy chair

behind the motel office desk, whiling away the hours smoking pot while

wearing

an uvvy on his neck and doing complicated things with his brain. Although

most

people thought of an uvvy as a communication device, you could also use it as

a

computer terminal, which was something Tre did a lot. "Uvvy" was pronounced

soft

and cozy, like "lovey-dovey."

Tre earned a middling amount of money designing intricate uvvy graphics

effects

for Apex Images, a commercial graphics shop that did contract work for ad

agencies and music producers. The number-crunching and brute programming of

Tre's visions could be carried out by well-paid moldies, but it took Tre's

unique sensibility to come up with juicy, tasty, gnarly images that people

felt

a visceral need to see over and over. Tre got royalties on the effects that

Apex

was able to use.

With Monique in their employ, Tre and Terri's motel responsibilities amounted

to

little more than providing a human interface for the guests to interact with.

They needed to be there to buffer new arrivals from the unsettling sight and

smell of Monique.

The guests, always tourists, usually middle-class and Midwestern, came to

Santa

Cruz because of its low prices and were often shocked at the number of

moldies.

There weren't very many moldies in the heartlands, for the people there hated

them—many Midwesterners were Heritagists. The common Heritagist term for

burning

a moldie in a puddle of grain alcohol was "fryin' up an Iowa chop." "With

truffle sauce." people would add sometimes, referring to the deep-buried

nuggets

of camote fungus that would crisp up as a moldie's twitching plastic

disintegrated into the flames, sending off psychedelic clouds of blackened

spores.

It was up to Terri and Tre to put the guests at ease in the free zone of

Santa

Cruz and to make them feel that Santa Cruz wasn't threatening, even though

the

town was filled with students, moldies, farmworkers, surfers, and homeless

stoners. But, yes, prices were low, and there were a lot of entertaining

things

to do.

Monique's husband Xlotl worked at Los Trancos Taco Bar, just down the hill

from

the Clearlight. As well as chopping the vegetables and cleaning the kitchen,

Xlotl maintained the tank in which the meats used for the tacos were grown.

The

tank contained four perpetually self-renewing loaves of meat: chicken, beef,

pork, and wendy—wendy being the human-cloned flesh which had taken such a

hold

on people's palates in recent months.

Pulling clean sheets off her cart for Room 3B on this sunny October morn,

Monique resembled a short Indian-blooded Mexican woman. Her skin was a

coppery

orange, with irregular veins of green and blue lichen just below the surface.

Rather than forking into legs, her lower body was a solid tapering mass that

fluted out into a broad bottom disk—Monique was shaped more or less like a

chessman with arms, like a pawn or a queen or a knight. The exact appearance

of

her humanoid head and arms was something she could tweak according to the

realtime situation. But when Monique relaxed, like now, she looked Aztec.

Monique's disk-shaped plastic foot had ridges on the bottom, piezoplastic

imipolex ridges that could ripplingly glide Monique across level surfaces.

For

more rapid progress or on an irregular terrain, Monique could hop. If the

utmost

speed was called for, she could flip her body out of the "chess man" mode and

go

over into another of her body's stable attractor modes, a mode in which she

could fly. In this alternate "pelican" mode, Monique became a set of great

flapping wings attached to a tapered big-eyed body resembling the brown

pelicans

who dive for fish along the Santa Cruz coast.

Monique's tissues had at least three other basic attractor modes as well: the

spread-out "puddle" shape she used for soaking up sun, the seagoing "shark"

shape, and the rarely used "rocket" shape that moldies could use to fly back

and

forth between the Earth and the Moon, not that a moldie like Monique had any

desire to go to the Moon with its fanatic loonie moldies.

The changes between body modes could happen quite abruptly, like a structure

of

springs and dowels that snaps into a new position if you pull one of its

armatures just so—like the Zeeman Catastrophe Machine of the 1970s, which was

an

educational toy made out of cardboard, paper clips, and rubber bands that

would

unexpectedly and catastrophically (in the technical chaos-theoretical sense

of

the word) snap into one of two different positions, depending on how you

manipulated it. Imagine being able to change your body into a rug or a bird or

a

fish or a spaceship simply by pretzeling yourself into a peculiar yoga

position.

Moldies could!

The pelican shape was Monique's favorite. There was nothing Monique enjoyed

more

than gliding high in the sky above the cliffs and the crashing sea of

Monterey

Bay, with the algae in her wings feasting on the impartially free energy of

the

sun. She'd been out flying with Andrea and Xlotl yesterday, in fact. But now

today here Monique was, cleaning rooms and keeping the books for a flesher

motel. It was fully a xoxxox bummer, and all just to have a baby?

There was a rapping noise from Room 3D, two doors down. A gangly young man

was

standing behind the sliding door and knocking on the glass with his ring, one

of

those heavy high school rings with a hollow, or hologram, of a rose or a

skull

or a school mascot inside the cheaply doped stone. The man gestured for

Monique

to come into his room. He wore a white plastic shirt and gray slacks. Monique

made a quick mental check of the registration records and found that the man

was

named Randy Karl Tucker and that he was occupying the room alone.

Monique jumped to the conclusion that Tucker was a cheeseball, a person given

to

having sex with moldies. A cheeseball was not a high-class kind of person by

any

means. The name had to do with the fact that moldies didn't smell very good.

Depending on the exact strains of fungi and algae that a given moldie

incorporated, the smell might resemble mildewed socks or brussels sprouts or

an

aggressively ripe cheese. The most noticeable component of Monique's sachet

was

a tangy iodine smell suggestive of fecal black muck from the Santa Cruz

harbor

floor.

It went without saying that a moldie's intelligent, malleable flesh could

provide a very unique multipronged personal massage for those humans who

sought

sex in strange forms. The unnaturalness of the act was of appeal to certain

individuals; indeed the very reek of a moldie was something that most

cheeseballs found powerfully arousing. Sad to say for the men of this world,

cheeseballs were almost always male.

Behind the glass door of Room 3D, Tucker formed a cozening, humorless smile

and

winked at Monique. He had prominent cheekbones and thin lips; he looked like

a

country hick. The sly, insistent way that he kept crooking his finger made it

seem almost certain that he was a cheeseball.

As it happened, when Monique, Xlotl, and Andrea had been out flying

yesterday,

Andrea had talked to the younger moldies about cheeseballs. Andrea had some

very

definite ideas about how to handle them.

"Persuade the cheeseball to accompany you to an isolated setting," intoned

Andrea, who'd recently started talking like an engineer or, of all things, a

robot. In the past she'd used the gaseous verbiage of the King James Bible,

the

Book of Mormon, and the Koran, but these days she modeled her speech patterns

on

the style of science journals. "Encourage the cheeseball to initiate mating

behavior and then supply genital stimulation until the cheeseball is

thoroughly

distracted. At this point extrude a long tendril from your body mass and use

rapid, decisive motions to encircle the cheeseball's neck with the tendril.

Immediately tighten the tendril in the fashion of a noose, so as to produce a

cessation in the cheeseball's respiration."

"You choke him to death? You just snuff him pronto?" asked Xlotl. Each moldie

based its speech patterns on some different database. While Andrea had filled

herself with science writing, Xlotl had steeped himself in hard-boiled

detective

novels and gangster film noirs.

"By no means," said Andrea. "The goal is to render him unconscious so that

you

can operate on his brain. During the interval that you are constricting his

throat, you must monitor his pulse, taking care that it does not become too

slow

or too irregular. Allow him to respire small amounts of air as needed.

Meanwhile

you elongate your tendril and insert its tip into his left nostril."

"Eeew," said Monique. "Guh-ross. I mean like what's in his nose?" She had

modeled her speech on the bubbly, questioning Valley Girl slang of the

late-twentieth century. They were hovering on the thermals off the cliffs

north

of Santa Cruz, all three of them snapped into pelican mode, talking in the

shrill, compressed chirps of encrypted sound that moldies could use to speak

with each other. The moldies were like great birds, squawking high above the

crawling, wrinkled sea—yet to each other, they sounded like people talking.

"One of the weakest spots in a flesher's skull is the upper nasal sinus," old

Andrea explained. "Adjacent to the ocular orbit. This is where you must punch

through with your tendril. At this point you will have free access to his

brain.

And you give him a thinking cap."

"Gripes! A brain control!" exclaimed Xlotl.

"Your thinking cap will live in his skull like the pith on a nut in its

hull,"

said Andrea, cackling and flapping her wings. "The cap functions as an I/O

port

or like an internal uvvy. Once he has your thinking cap, the cheeseball is

your

peripheral device."

"This sounds totally hard, Andrea," said anxious Monique. "I'd be freakin'.

What

if I don't choke him enough? And then I'm all 'Where's the weak spot?' I am

so

sure. And how am I supposed to know how to like hook a thinking cap into some

pervo flesher's brain?"

"Come close, children," said Andrea. "I can give you copies of the full specs

for a human brain interface. Make a physical contact with me for direct

transmission."

The three soaring pelicans brushed wings, and Andrea downloaded a petabyte of

information to each of the younger moldies. Thanks to the conductive polymers

which filled their plastic tissues, moldies could communicate

electromagnetically as well as by sound.

"Andrea, have you ever really done it? Tell me true," sang Monique after

storing

the info.

"Yes, I have given thinking caps to two cheeseballs in the past," said

Andrea.

"I refer of course to Spike Kimball and Abdul Quayoom—of whom I have often

spoken. As my servants, these men left their families and their old lives.

All

of their assets and possessions were liquidated, with the full proceeds being

given to me. By use of these resources, I have been able to purchase

rejuvenation treatments as well as to buy the imipolex necessary to bring you

and Xanana into the world, Monique."

Spike Kimball had been a muscular Mormon missionary who'd asked Andrea for

sex

three years ago, and Abdul Quayoom had been an Islamic rug programmer who'd

approached Andrea three years before that. If they'd been smarter, instead of

trying to have sex with Andrea, they would have burned her in a puddle of

alcohol.

"So what do you do with a mark after you bleed him dry?" asked Xlotl. "Make

him

shoot himself? Have him swan-dive off a building to cave in his skull?"

"The direct control of a cheeseball must be of limited temporal duration,"

said

Andrea. "Otherwise the danger of discovery becomes too great. And it is

indeed

essential that the cheeseball be terminated in such a way that no trace of

the

user's thinking cap can be found in his remains. Do you want to hear what I

did

to Quayoom and Kimball? About how I helped them follow their death angels

Moroni

and Izra'il into the beyond?"

"Oh yes," cried Monique and Xlotl.

"I directed them each to swim a mile out into the ocean at night and tread

water

there until hypothermia enabled them to drown. Once the subject had

experienced

brain death, I had my thinking cap crawl out of his nose and swim like a fish

to

meet me, waiting upon the shore."

"Whoah, that's cold," said Monique.

"Many fleshers would treat us with equal severity," said Andrea primly. "And

remember, dear Monique, it is only by these means that I was able to acquire

sufficient resources to continue my life after having given birth to you and

Xanana. Would you deny your own mother the chance to rejuvenate herself?

Moldie

flesh is exorbitantly precious. Certainly you wouldn't want to stoop to

victimizing other moldies instead of fleshers. I've heard that's what the

loonie

moldies do. You wouldn't want to be like them."

So when the hillbilly cheeseball solicited Monique from the door of Room 3D,

she

started thinking about giving him a thinking cap—thinking a mile a minute.

Should she? Could she? Dare she try?

Just then Xlotl's voice spoke up in Monique's head. "Time for lunch break,

baby.

Meet me down at the beach?" The Los Trancos Taco Bar liked Xlotl to take an

hour

or more off around noon, so that his presence wouldn't repel people wanting

to

have lunch. In principle, Xlotl could have sealed his pores and become nearly

odorless, but human prejudice ran deep. It was better not to have him in the

place when a lot of folks were eating.

"Totally," thought back Monique. "There's something I want to discuss with

you

in person." Due to the irredeemable promiscuity of electromagnetic radiation,

no

uvvy link could be secure enough for planning murder.

Monique waved enticingly to the cheeseball behind his green-and-red-stickered

window glass, then flounced down the stairs to Beach Street.

A moldie bus full of tourists went quietly pattering past, followed by five

moldies acting as rickshaws and carrying individual people. Monique boinged

around them, chirping hellos to the ones that she recognized, and then she

was

on the beach. Looking up the hill toward the Los Trancos Taco Bar, Monique

could

see her darling husband hopping toward her. Xlotl resembled his wife

Monique—he

was shaped like a coppery Aztec chessman with a mouth like a purple slash in

his

face.

He bounced right into Monique, whooping wildly, and they wrapped their arms

around each other and went rolling down toward the water. They came to rest

at

surf's edge and lay there writhing in a sexual embrace, each of them pushing

branching tendrils deep and deeper into the other's body.

Monique loved the intimate sensation of having herself in Xlotl and Xlotl in

her. They were linked up like fractal puzzle pieces, with as much of their

surfaces in contact as possible. In the deepest cracks of their linkage,

their

skins opened up so that their bodies could exchange small wet seeps of

imipolex,

carrying along cells of their symbiotic fungi and algae. The more often two

moldies embraced in this sexual manner, the more their bodies came to

resemble

each other.

The pleasure of contact reached an intense crescendo—an orgasm, really—and

then

the moldies slipped into puddle shapes so that their algae could soak up as

much

sun as possible.

"Oh, that was yummy," sighed Monique. "We're getting so tight with each

other,

Xlotl. If we can buy the imipolex, we'll be ready to have a baby soon."

After having sex enough times, two moldies would buy the necessary imipolex

plastic for a new body and fuck it into new life, creating a child infused

with

some combination of the parents' lichens and software. The plastic was

expensive

and could only be purchased from one of two or three large human-run

companies

with money earned (or stolen) from the fleshers. Like it or not, the moldies

and

the fleshers were uneasily allied, even though some moldies were capable of

invading human brains and some humans were willing to burn moldies in pools

of

alcohol.

"It's gonna take a while to earn the dough, what with the crummy wages we're

getting," chirped Xlotl cozily. "But we're having fun anyway, ain't we?" The

foam lapped about them and Xlotl snuggled himself against Monique, making

sure

that they touched all along the edge that separated their two puddles. For a

moment Monique slipped into sleep and started to dream. About whales. But then

a

bold wave splashed her and she was back awake. Something was wrong… oh yes.

"Xlotl, omigod, I forgot to tell you! This cheeseball in Room 3D is like

coming

on to me?"

"No kidding? A cheeseball?"

"For sure. I'm about to like clean the room and he's standing there behind

the

glass waving to me. Beckoning me? Just then you called and I jammed down here.

I

don't want to go back."

"Aw, go on in there and take him for every cent he's worth, Momo. Andrea

taught

us how to do it yesterday."

"I'm scared. And, Xlotl, don't you think it's a negative thing to trash a

dook's

brain and then make him like die? I mean of course it's only a flesher… but

don't you ever flash that information is sacred? Even a flesher cheeseball's

brain?"

"Honey, it balances out. A dog is sacred, a DIM is sacred. Everything's

sacred.

But with this mark's money we can have a child right away and use our own

money

to get ourselves retrofits. Like Andrea does. Hell, we can have two, three

children and rejuvenate ourselves if your dook is well fixed. All this fine

moldie consciousness for the cost of one less flesher? I'd call that a net

gain

of information. Move in on him, baby!"

"I'm like undecided? Let's fab about something else. How's Los Trancos today?"

"Same sleazy dive. This morning I had to goose the loaf of wendy meat with

hormones to make it grow faster. All the tourists are gobbling it. I think

they

ain't got that brand outside of California yet."

"And wendy meat is human flesh!" exclaimed Monique. "It's all cloned from the

same cells as that Wendy Mooney who's in the ads. I thought there was some

heavy

human taboo about cannibalism!"

"Fleshers will eat anything, Monique. They're like lobsters. How do you know

the

woman in the ad is the actual Wendy Mooney anyhow?"

"Tre told me. He just helped Apex Images design a wendy meat ad—the big one

down

at the Boardwalk?"

Monique and Xlotl laid back down in the shallow, lapping surf, enjoying the

warmth of the sun and the coolness of the water. Xlotl formed a cavity in his

flesh, filled it with water, and sprayed it up overhead like a fountain.

Monique

engulfed an even bigger amount of water and sprayed higher than him. Then

break

time was over and the two moldies shared a last intimate embrace.

Just then a little boy stopped to stare at Monique and Xlotl.

"Lookie, Paw, it's two moldies fucking!" he bawled. "I'll try and kill 'em!"

The

child picked up a stick and poked it into Xlotl. Hard. Xlotl pinched off his

skin around the puncture before he lost much cell tissue, and then he twisted

around so that he flipped into the shape of an angry chessman, with the stick

still protruding from his chest.

"You want me to bust your sack for good, you twerp?" snarled Xlotl, rearing

up

like a six-foot nightmare centaur. He pushed the stick out of his flesh so

hard

that it flew past the boy's head like a viciously hurled boomerang.

The kid took off crying, only to return a moment later with his father in tow.

"What are you scummy moldies doing out here?" asked the man. Monique jumped

up

into her chessman mode as well.

"This is a public beach, dook," said Xlotl. "And we're citizens."

"Hell you are," said the man, not drawing any closer. He was balding and

paunchy, with sunburned pale skin. "You leave my kid alone or else." He

turned

and moved back off down the beach. The little boy followed his dad, turning

once

to give Xlotl the finger.

"Fleshers," said Xlotl. "Why can't we ever get away from them? Why can't we

kill

them all?"

"It wouldn't work," said Monique. "You know that. You can't ever kill all of

anything."

"The fleshers killed all of the boppers in 2031, didn't they?" said Xlotl.

"With

chipmold. All we need is a really good plague germ to kill off all the

humans."

"They didn't really kill the boppers. Lots of the bopper software still lives

on

in us. The chipmold just helped the boppers move to a new platform. All at

once.

And really, Xlotl, you know that if the moldies start a biological war

against

the fleshers, the fleshers will come back at us with some really sick

disease.

Everyone knows that. It's live and let live."

"Also known as a mutual-assured destruction," said Xlotl. "Thank God for the

Moldie Citizenship Act. Now what about this cheeseball situation. You ain't

gonna punk out, are you? Get mad! Think about the kid who poked me."

"Maybe—why don't I go get a pep talk from Mom. I think she said she was gonna

get high and lie out in front of the Boardwalk today."

"Shaped like the Koran or the Book of Mormon? Or maybe like the fuckin' works

of

Shakespeare!"

"Like the Bible. Remember? Andrea's into Christianity these days. She's all—"

Monique broke into laughter, threw back her head, and delivered a

pitch-perfect

imitation of her mother's tones: " 'I am interested in a relationship with a

God-fearing Christian man.' "

Xlotl nodded thoughtfully. "Andrea will get you to go through with it. If she

don't take the job herself. I'll cool my heels at Los Trancos—with my uvvy

tuned

for you. Squawk if you need muscle."

"Wavy, darling. Wish me luck." Monique bounded down the beach toward the

Boardwalk.

She stayed at the edge of the surf, where the glistening wet sand was the

firmest. Some of the people she passed smiled and nodded, while others

frowned

and looked away. One guy—the father of the boy Xlotl had frightened—stood up

and

shouted, "Go back to the Moon!" He was holding a beer.

Instead of bouncing on farther, Monique stopped short and faced him. He was

sitting on a blanket with his wife and another couple under an oversized

beach

umbrella. Their pale, weedy kids grubbed in the sand around them.

"I've never been to the Moon," shouted back Monique. "Why don't you get out

of

my town?"

"Fuck you!" hollered the man.

"Where do you want it?" screeched Monique, phallically thrusting her arm. "In

your nose or up your ass?" She bounced menacingly toward the man. He sat down

and gestured weakly for Monique to go away.

In a few minutes Monique drew even with the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, a classic

seaside amusement park. All day long, the students, moldies, farmworkers,

surfers, and homeless stoners of Santa Cruz streamed through the Boardwalk,

diluting the valleys and Heritagists enough so that the place was never

whitebread dull. The Boardwalk was six blocks long and half a block thin.

Despite the name, the grounds were paved with concrete.

Monique went up from the beach onto the Boardwalk near the main snack bar,

which

had Tre's huge new ad for wendy meat on display overhead. The ad was a vast

translucent hollow made up of seven kinds of funny-shaped creatures pecking

each

other's butts and heads and adding up to an image of an impossibly beautified

man and woman whose expressions kept cycling through an ever-escalating but

never repeating spiral of joy. The man was modeled on ex-Senator Stahn Mooney

and the woman on his wife Wendy Mooney, sexily wearing nothing but her Happy

Cloak. It was a fascinating thing to look at, like an immense

three-dimensional

mosaic of pastel chunks. The shapes of the chunks were based on a

four-dimensional Perplexing Poultry philtre which Tre had discovered in July.

Monique had helped Tre a bit with the final computations for the ad, and it

made

her proud to see it.

As Monique crossed the Boardwalk, somebody mistook her for a worker and asked

her where to get ride tickets. Monique pointed to the ticket kiosk and

motorvated on past it, smoothly rolling the ripples of her base.

On the sidewalk outside the Boardwalk was Monique's mother Andrea, spread

softly

out on the pavement like a Colorado River toad, but a toad in the shape of a

giant book lying open on the ground. The Good Book. Big gothic letters

scrolled

across the two exposed pages. Just now the letters read THOU SHALT NOT HATE

Rudy Rucker - Ware 3 - Freeware

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