The Ware Tetralogy, Rudy Rucker [inspirational books TXT] 📗

“Call me Tre. Yeah it is. You like it?”

“What I do,” said Tucker, “what I do is limpware upgrades. When’s the last time you got those tires upgraded?”

“What for? It’s never occurred to me. The tires work fine.”

“Shit-normal rubber tires would work, but you don’t use ‘em,” said Tucker. “I happen to be the sole local distributor for a new limpware patch that enhances the performance of DIM tires a hundred and fifty percent. Smooths the hell out of the bumps.”

“You’re a limpware salesman?” said Tre disbelievingly.

“You don’t think I look like no kind of a hi-tech propellorhead, do you, Tre Dietz?” Tucker chuckled slyly. “I might’s well confess, I already know who you are. That’s one of the reasons I’m bunkin’ at this hole; I admire the hell outta your philtres. But I’m not here to hassle you, man. The thing about the tires is, I’d be right proud to give you an upgrade for twenty percent off the room rate.”

Just then Dolf came tearing out of the back apartment, wet and naked. “Catch him, Tre!” called Terri.

Tre grabbed at Dolf, who roared with joy and ran back into the apartment. “I better go help with the kids,” Tre told Randy Karl Tucker. “We can talk about your off er tomorrow when I have more time, but I’m probably not interested. Thanks anyway. Do you mind if I have Monique show you to your room now?”

“It’d be my pleasure,” said Tucker.

The next morning Molly showed up to watch the kids, and Terri went surfing. Tre smoked a joint and went to sit in a sunny spot out in front of the motel office with his uvvy. Now that he’d mastered the four-dimensional Perplexing Poultry, he was getting close on a general N-dimensional method for creating attractive analogs of the Conway cross-product prisms. These days he had a lot of interesting work to do.

Monique come bouncing up from the lower terrace. Her facial expression was even more opaque than usual, and she was followed closely by Randy Karl Tucker, dressed the same as yesterday and carrying his bag. Tucker looked mussed and wild-eyed, as if he’d been wrestling with someone. His neck bore several red welts, some of them disk-shaped as if from a mollusk’s suckers. He was wearing his uvvy.

“Haaaaah, gaaaaah,” wheezed Tucker. “Here’s that upgrade I promised you!” Before Tre could object, Tucker had pulled two purplish postage-stamp-sized patches of plastic out of his pants pocket and had slapped them onto the fat white imipolex tires of Tre’s hydrogen cycle. “You’re gonna love these to death, freakbrain,” said Tucker. “I’m outta here. Monique, you whore! I want you to carry me on your fat ass!”

“Just a minute there,” said Tre, losing his temper. “You can’t talk like that. Monique has work to do. She doesn’t rickshaw for the guests. And I don’t want your xoxxin’ goober patches on my DIM tires! Who the hell do you think you are?”

Tucker didn’t bother to answer. Monique leaned forward and broadened her butt. Tucker sprang onto her, sinking one hand into her flesh and grasping his travel bag with his other hand. Monique found her balance, Tucker whooped, and they hopped rapidly away.

The enraged, flabbergasted Tre stared after them for a moment, then ran back through the office and yelled to Molly, who was playing checkers with Dolf while Wren watched from her walker. “Keep an eye on things, Molly! I have to go out!”

“All righty,” sang Molly. “The boy and me are about to eat cookies! I’ll give Wren one too. I love cookies, but I hate graham crackers!”

“Fine, Molly, fine.”

Tre dashed back out and jumped onto his hydrogen cycle. The burner hiccupped on, and Tre pedaled to the corner with the little engine helping him. There, down at the bottom of the hill, were Tucker and Monique, moving toward the wharf in long, graceful leaps. Tre hurtled after them.

He thought—too late—of Tucker’s patches on his DIM tires as he shot across the train tracks at the bottom of the hill. Instead of smoothing the bump energy into the usual chaotic series of shudders, Tre’s tires seemed to blow out. The raw metal of the wheel rims scraped across the pavement, showering sparks. The bike slewed, the front rim crimped and caught, Tre went over the falls. His shoulder made a horrible crunch as he hit the pavement.

Tre lay there gasping for breath, monitoring the nerve impulses from his battered bod. Big problem in his right shoulder, a scrape on his forearm, but he hadn’t hit his head. All right, he was going to be okay, but then—

Two strong slippery shapes wound around Tre’s waist. The DIM tires Tre jerked up into a sitting position. Bone ground against bone in his right shoulder. The tires were like fat white hoop snakes who’d stopped biting their tails; they were the two sea serpents who slew Laocoon. Tucker’s DIM patches glowed on the tires like evil eyes. There was a hideous pressure around Tre’s waist, squeezing the air out of him. He got hold of the tires with his left hand and pulled them loose; they writhed up his left arm and twined around his neck.

“What’s he doing? Is it a trick?”

A group of tourists had gathered around Tre and the DIM snakes. The young man who spoke was a valley wearing a bright new Santa Cruz DIM shirt with a gnarly graphic of a surfer on a liveboard.

“He’s bleeding,” said the woman at his side. She wore her long pink hair in three high ponytails. “And it looks like those moldie things are choking him.”

“Help,” gasped Tre. “Get them off me. They—” The pressure on his windpipe made further speech impossible, but now, blessedly, the tourist stepped forward and tugged at the snakes. While continuing to grip Tre’s neck with their tails, the snakes elongated their heads and stuck at the man. Another onlooker—a lithe black woman in cotton tights—stepped forward and yanked the distracted snakes off  Tre. She swung the snakes through the air and slammed them down hard on the pavement.

“Rogue moldies,” yelled an old man. “Hold ‘em down! I’ll run into that liquor store and get some 191-proof rum to burn ‘em!”

The valley guy planted his feet on one of the stunned DIM tires and the black woman stood on the other. The old man hurried hitchingly toward Beach Liquors. The woman with the three ponytails leaned over Tre, who was flat on his back.

“Are you okay, mister?” The woman’s upside-down face looked big and soft and strange. Watching her white-lipsticked lips move was like seeing someone with a mouth in her forehead.

“I think so,” whispered Tre.

There was a sudden cry, and now the DIM snakes had wormed out from under the people’s feet. They humped off rapidly, leaped into the air, and all at once flipped into the shapes of seagulls.

Still on his back, Tre stared at the white shapes flapping away. The blue sky. It was precious to be alive.

“What the hell?” asked the guy in the DIM shirt.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” said the black woman.

“Here’s the rum!” called a voice, and the old man’s footsteps came scuffing closer. “They got away? Gol-dang it. I’ve always wanted to burn a moldie. Well, what the hey.” There was a sound of a bottle being uncapped, followed by a gurgle of drinking. “Anybody else want some? How ‘bout the victim here?”

Tre sat up and weakly waved the old man away. “Thank you,” he said to the tourists. “You saved my life. God bless you.”

“Shouldn’t he stay on his back?” interjected an old woman. “His neck could be broken. He might have internal bleeding. We should get him to a doctor. Where’s the nearest hospital? Stop guzzling that rum, Herbert!”

“Most of us don’t use doctors and hospitals here,” said Tre painfully. Moving very slowly, he got to his feet. “I’ll go to a healer.”

“But shouldn’t we call the Gimmie?” asked the valley.

“We don’t like to use them either,” said Tre, attempting a grin. “We use privatized cops. Popos. Welcome to Santa Cruz.”

After a little more chatter, the people drifted away. Tre stared briefly up and down Beach Street, then out toward the wharf, but nothing much was to be seen. People coming and going. A Percesepe cruise boat pulling away. No sign of Tucker, Monique, or the DIM tires/seagulls.

It was only two blocks back to the motel, so Tre decided to wheel his cycle back there before doing anything else. The bare wheel rims clanged, the bones in his shoulder grated, but Tre made it. He was thankful to find Terri there.

“Terri, I’m hurt. I was in an accident. I think I broke a bone.”

“Oh, Tre, that’s wiped! You’re so pale! How did it happen?”

“I was chasing Monique and Randy Karl Tucker. That weird hillbilly limpware salesman who checked in last night? Somehow he got Monique to rickshaw him away, and I was trying to chase them down with my cycle.”

“You fell off your bike?”

“My tires squirmed off the rims. Then they tried to squeeze me to death and then they tried to strangle me and then they turned into seagulls and they flew away.”

“Who did?”

“My DIM tires. Tucker put some kind of patch on them. He jammed their limpware.”

“You fell off your bike and your tires tried to choke you and then they flew away. Tre, you’re stoned, aren’t you? Why do you do this to yourself? To me and the kids?”

“I did smoke pot this morning, but that has nothing to do with it! Why are you so suspicious, Terri? I need your help, for God’s sake. My shoulder’s broken, I’ve nearly been killed, and I have to see a healer!”

“Fine,” said Terri curtly. “We’ll go to Starshine.”

“Can I come too?” asked Dolf. “I want to see Starshine make Daddy well.” The little boy stared worriedly up at Tre, who was grimacing.

“Yes, you can come,” said Tre, patting his son on the head. It would be good to have a buffer between him and Terri. Terri often got angry when she was afraid. “Molly, we three are going down to Starshine’s.”

“Bye-bye. Say bye-bye, Wren!” Little Wren stood unsteadily on Molly’s lap and waved bye-bye, dimpling her cheeks and showing her gums.

The sun was high and glaring. Dolf skipped down the sidewalk ahead of the silent Terri and Tre. They walked a block down the back side of the beach hill to the little house where Starshine and her husband Duck Tapin lived. The house was set back from the street with a garage up front by the curb in the shade of a huge palm tree.

Duck was visible in the shadows of the garage, wearing his inevitable outfit of tan shorts and flowered shirt. He had a long, weathered face with reddish-blond walrus whiskers; his hair was a floppy mat of blond curls.

“Yaar, Duck,” said Terri.

“Yaar,” said Duck. “What’s happening?” He looked up from the big table where he was carefully assembling some scroll-shaped pieces of colored glass into one of the windows that he sold for a living. Starshine’s orange-and-white dog Planet lay at Duck’s feet, quietly thumping his tail. Little Dolf hunkered down near Planet to pet him.

“My hydrogen cycle’s DIM tires got screwed up,” said Tre. “I fell off the cycle and broke something.”

“Oh, that’s dense,” said Duck hoarsely. California born and raised, Duck was an unreflective pleasure hound who happened somehow to be a very gifted