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

“I know,” smiled Terri. “For Kurtis and his friends, adults are bowling pins you knock over. Like inflatable clown dolls with weights on the bottom so you can hit them again and again and they keep bouncing back up.”

“Poor Dad,” said Ike. “What a way to talk.”

“Yeah, poor Dad and his Sons of Adam Heritagist hate group,” said Terri. “You know what I ought to do? I ought to start hanging around with moldies. Maybe that would make him notice that I’m alive.”

“What is your problem today, sis? Did something bad happen to you?”

“Yes,” said Terri, “something did. About a half hour ago, while I was cleaning the house and emptying the trash cans as usual, I saw some papers on Dad’s desk. You know what I saw there? His will.”

“Oh God, is he sick?”

“Just because you have a will, it doesn’t mean you’re about to die, idiot,” said Terri. “It’s just something that grown-ups do. Like taxes. So anyhow, the will says that you inherit the restaurant, I get ten thousand dollars, and Alice gets the motel, the house, and everything else.”

“Ten thousand dollars,” said Ike enviously. “That’s righteous bucks. Why don’t I get any money?”

“The restaurant is worth a lot more than ten thousand dollars, you fool.”

“Oh yeah, I guess it is.”

“And you get it all to yourself,” spat Terri. “Just because you’re a boy with a stupid gross ball sack.”

“Whoah!”

That summer Terri had a summer job running the cash register in Dom’s Grotto out on the Santa Cruz Wharf. Dom was virulently antimoldie, and he made a point of advertising that no moldies were employed in any capacity by his restaurant. ALL HUMAN-PREPARED FOOD read the signs outside. HERITAGISTS WELCOME. NO MOLDIES WORK HERE. Due to the stench of moldies, not many restaurants employed them anyway, except perhaps to wash dishes or keep the books, but Dom liked to promote the Heritagist cause, even at the risk of getting in trouble for violating the equal rights clause of the Moldie Citizenship Act.

Terri was a calm and efficient cashier, sitting there afternoons and evenings on a high stool. She wore pink lipstick, and she wore her hair long and straight. She chewed gum. Her face was thin, her skin was dark, she was sexy. Terri slept late in the mornings, and at night she went to as many beach parties as her parents would let her get away with.

Ike was working as a deckhand on a Percesepe day-cruise fishing boat run by Dom’s brother Carmen. Ike’s boat would leave early and come back to the wharf around 4 P.M. He’d help clean the fish the tourists had caught, collect his tips, hose himself off with fresh water, and go over to Dom’s Grotto to get his main meal of the day. Terri would order it up as takeout and let Ike have it for free; this was approved by Dom, with the stipulation that Ike’s meals not be extravagant.

One foggy day in August, Ike came in wet and wiry, his brown eyes big and his short hair bristling. He wore boots, baggy shorts, and a damp, stained T-shirt.

“Yaar, Terri!”

“Yaar, kiddo. How were the tips?”

“So-so.” He shoved his hand in his pocket and held out a small wad of ones and fives. “The customers caught their limit of rockfish, but they were cheap bastards. They were Baptist Heritagists from Texas; Dad’s group invited them here and gave them a reduced rate. They kept hoping someone would hook a rogue moldie so we’d have to flame it. Instead of tipping me, one couple gave me, look at this—” Ike dug in his other pocket and produced a gospel DIM that displayed a little hollow film loop about moldies being the Beast predicted by the Book of Revelations.

“Moldies are Satan,” chirped the little DIM as it played its images.

“How bogus,” said Terri. “How valley. And I notice they don’t hate moldies too much to use a DIM for their gospel tract. Like they don’t realize that DIMs are small pieces of moldie?”

“They don’t know shit,” said Ike. “When I mentioned that we’re Catholic, they said that the Virgin Mary is a false idol. Whatevray. I’m starving, Terri. Can I get a Dungeness crab? Just this once?”

“You know Dad says to give you cheap food,” said Terri. “Unsold fish for upstart barbarians.”

“Yeah,” said Ike, “with lemonade for dessert. Come on, Terri. Let me have a crab today. If Dad complains, I’ll take the blame.”

“He won’t let you take the blame,” said Terri. “You’re the son. Dad saves all the blame for me. But what the hey, big sis can handle it. What do you want with your crab?”

“I want steamed clams, garlic bread, onion rings, french fries, coleslaw, corn on the cob, and a double vanilla milk shake.”

“Hungry much?” Terri filled out a takeout check and handed it in through a little window to the kitchen. Ike flopped down on one of the captain’s chairs by the register.

“Don’t sprawl, Ike. You’ll scare off the paying customers. We don’t want them to think this is a place for grunge buckets.”

“Shut up,” said Ike, rubbing his face and lolling even farther back.

“I saw little Cammy Maarten at the party last night,” said Terri to needle her brother. “Isn’t she in your grade? She asked about you. She said I should bring you to the next party. She thinks you’re cute.”

“Cammy Maarten is a feeb,” said Ike. He had not yet realized that girls were something he needed. “And I’d feel stupid coming to a surfer beach party when I don’t even have a board.”

“We should get a board, Ike,” said Terri. “I’ve been thinking about that. We could get a DIM board and share it. We’ll each get our own wet suit, of course. I have a lot of money saved up from this job, and you have a big hoard of birthday and Christmas money, don’t you? It’s totally lame for us to be living in Cruz and not know how to surf.”

“Dad won’t like it,” said Ike. “He hates surfers.”

“Not every single thing has to go Dad’s way, does it?” asked Terri.

“I would love to surf,” allowed Ike. “But don’t you think maybe we’re too old to learn?”

“Seventeen and fifteen isn’t old, Ike, believe me. Old is the people who eat in this restaurant all day. Hey, here’s your order. Stick around outside and wait for me. I’ll tell Teresa I have cramps from my period and she’ll let me off early and we can go to the surf shop.”

“You’re gross,” said Ike and went out on the wharf to feast. Terri came out when he was almost through eating and ate the rest of his french fries and onion rings, plus the hard-to-get meat in the body of his crab. Hungry seagulls skirled overhead and sea lions barked down among the pilings.

They fed the crab shells to the sea lions and walked down to the land end of the wharf to wait for a moldie bus. Before long the big loping thing came pattering by, coming down the grass-and-sand street. Terri waved, and the bus stopped. The bus was a fused grex made of twelve moldies. Her name was Muxxi.

“Howdy thar, Terri and Ike,” said Muxxi in the corny Wild West accent she affected, perhaps to please tourists or perhaps to mock. “Whar ye goin’ today?”

“We want to go to Dada Kine Surf Shop, Muxxi,” said Terri.

“Waal, now, I reckon that means we’ll be a-settin’ you young-uns off at the corner of Forty-First Street and Opal Cliff Drive,” said Muxxi, displaying the fare as numbers in her skin. “Pay up!”

Ike and Terri handed their fares to Muxxi, who rippled her imipolex to move the other riders toward the rear of the bus. Muxxi bulged out two fresh front-row seats for Ike and Terri. The kids lowered their butts down into the seats and the seats grabbed them tight. In bad weather the seats formed protective cowls, but today Terri and Ike were fully exposed to the pleasant sun and off shore breeze.

The bus’s giant sluglike body rippled along through the main beach area. There on the right was the Boardwalk with its classic mechanical roller coaster and on the left was the hill with the family motel, the Terrace Court. Terri’s motel—someday. Terri had gone to her mother to complain about the will, and Alice had promised Terri that she would pass the motel directly on to her, which made Terri feel a lot better. Alice had even asked Terri what she thought about maybe adding Clearlight to their motel’s name.

The bus waded across the shallow San Lorenzo River and humped up a slope to a grassy road that capped the cliffs. Muxxi let off two passengers at the yacht harbor, where the cliffs dropped away. She got another few passengers as she raced along the edges of Twin Lakes and Live Oaks beaches. As each group of passengers got on, Ike and Terri’s seats moved further towards the rear.

The cliffs rose up again and the bus surged onto them, the thick corrugations on her underside swaying at a rapid steady pace. Now they were at Pleasure Point with its schools of surfers.

“Here’s whar ye git off, Terri and Ike,” twanged Muxxi. Their seats turned to the side and became chutes that slid them slowly down to the ground. Muxxi pattered off, and the kids stood watching the surfers for a while.

“Do you really think we can learn to do it, Terri?” asked Ike.

“Sure. It’s easier with a DIM board. They have ripples on their bottom like Muxxi; they can swim. It makes it a lot less work to catch waves.”

“What if they swim off without you and go rogue?”

“They don’t,” said Terri. “They’re not smart and independent like moldies. They’re DIMs. A DIM board is smart enough to swim and to let you steer it, and that’s all it wants to do. Dom thinks women should be like DIMs.”

“Stop going off about Dom,” said Ike. “I’m ready to buy a board.”

They walked a block up Forty-First Street to the Dada Kine Surf Shop. Inside the store it was dark and cool. New and used DIM boards lined two walls and hung from the ceiling. Racks of wet suits filled out the rest of the store. A Hawaiian kahuna was sitting behind the counter. Slouched next to him was a red-and-yellow moldie, a liveboard. A liveboard was vastly more skilled and functional than a DIM board, but, of course, full moldies were very expensive. Instead of just buying them, you had to put them on a salary.

“Yaar, Terri,” said the big Hawaiian. “Your bud Kurtis Goole was in here earlier today. I think he went up to Four Mile Beach.”

“I’m not looking for him, Kimo,” said Terri. “I’m here to shop. This is my brother Ike. We want to get wet suits and a DIM board.”

“Two boards,” said Ike all of a sudden. “I don’t want to have to share with you, Terri.”

“Tell me how much money you want to spend,” said Kimo. “And we’ll see what we can do.”

“And I’ll give you little bangtails a cost-free and unforgettably wise lesson,” volunteered the moldie liveboard beside him. “A gorgeous incentive for them, right, Kimo? Business being so slow that I haven’t been paid in it seems like seven weeks, you understand.”

“Mahalo very much, Everooze,” said Kimo. “It’ll