Down on the factory floor, two of Derek's "attractors" were active. One looked like a big wobbly green doughnut, the other like a purple cow-udder with twisting teats. They were patterns of air currents, flowing volumes of air made visible by color-lit fogs of vapor, fractally rich with eddies and schlieren. A dozen other attractor-devices sat idle: cryptic, mute technoclutter. Only when the attractors were powered up did they clothe themselves in beautiful, orderly chaos. Da's wowo had been a similar kind of thing.
Phil took a shortcut through the doughnut volume, careful not to bang into the machinery at its core. But he stepped on something anyway, something that yipped. Derek's mutt Umberto. The dog sometimes liked to sleep hidden inside the doughnut, warmed by the central generator.
"Hush, Umberto," said Phil. "It's okay." If only that were true. In the bathroom, Phil drank some water. The water on his teeth like a mountain stream. Da dead? It was way too soon. There was still too much to say to the old man, too much to learn. Now the tears were beginning to come. A rough sob. He buried his face in a towel.
After a bit, Phil washed off his face with cold water, then cried some more and washed some more. The beautiful complexity of water, of its sounds and motions. Da wouldn't see water anymore. Phil's dream just before waking--he'd been climbing the teeth-mountains and --hadn't there been a ball of light in the dream? Phil leaned on the sink, resting his forehead against the mirror with his eyes closed, trying to look back into his dream. Wouldn't it make sense to have had a special dream just as his father died? Especially when Da had died so strangely.
"Here's some coffee," said Kevvie, who'd followed him as far as the kitchen --the little area of the factory floor that passed for a kitchen, a sink and a stove and a table with chairs on the concrete floor beneath the seventy-foot-high truss-supported corrugated steel ceiling. She'd brought the uvvy as well. "Get away, Umberto," she said, and aimed a sharp kick at the dog, who'd come over to see if he might get some breakfast. Kevvie couldn't stand Umberto.
"Don't hurt him, Kevvie." Phil took the coffee. "Thanks. I can't believe this. I feel so --it's like my head's exploding. Life's not a rehearsal. It's real." He took the coffee Kevvie handed him, but set it down without drinking.
"You better call Willow," said Kevvie. She glared at Umberto so hard that the dog went slinking away.
"I know." Phil told the uvvy to dial his stepmother Willow. Phil's father Kurt had left Phil and Jane's mother Eve for Willow when Phil was thirteen and Jane was eleven. Eve had successfully remarried, and the families had stayed reasonably close over the years, with Phil and Jane freely moving between the households of their two biological parents.
Willow answered on the second ring. "Willow Chen Gottner," her voice was loud and harsh, just short of a scream. Willow's image floated above the uvvy--she was a thoroughly Californian Chinese woman with a symmetric face, full lips, and blonde hair so shiny and processed that it looked like metal. She moved with abrupt, birdlike gestures. There were smears of blood on her hands and on her cheeks. Her normally tidy features were blurred and twisted with anguish.
"Hi, Willow, it's Phil. I just talked to Jane."
"Kurt's really dead, yes, this is his blood all over me. I'm so scared, Phil. The wowo ate him like garbage."
"I'm coming right down. Where are you?"
"I'm at the gimmie station. They don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. They think I murdered Kurt or some shit." Willow was notoriously foul-mouthed. This was something that Phil and Jane's mother always tut-tutted over, but it made Phil and Jane like Willow more than they might have otherwise.
"You see!" interjected Kevvie. "Tell her to get a top criminal attorney!" Phil glared at Kevvie, but felt he had to pass the idea on. "Do you have a lawyer?"
"Right! As if I need a lawyer to deal with some stupid gimmie pigs who I'm paying in the first place. As if a lawyer's going to protect me from a fucking hole to the fourth dimension that ground up my brilliant handsome husband like garbage!" She glared angrily at someone out of view. "Stay away from me, you sow!" The uvvyview jerked wildly. "Stop it!" Then the uvvy went dead. Phil immediately called again; a gimmie answered.
"Officer Grady, Wackerhut Police Services, Palo Alto Station."
"I was just talking to Willow Gottner?" Phil said. "We were cut off?" He could hear Willow screaming curses in the background.
"She's out of control, sir," said the gimmie officer. "We're concerned she could injure herself. I'm afraid we're going to have to restrain her and administer a sedative."
"Take it easy! I'll be right there. I'm Kurt Gottner's son Phil. Where's your station located? I'm driving down from the city."
The gimmie gave Kurt directions and added, "I'm very sorry about this, Mr. Gottner."
"My father's really dead?" Kurt asked.
"We've got a response team up there. We're still not entirely sure what the situation is. The material evidence indicates a fatality, but there's no body. And, yes, your father's missing." There was a shriek from Willow. "She wants to tell you one more thing. I'll hold the uvvy out to her."
The little image showed Willow, sitting on a plastic couch squeezed between two Wackerhut policewomen. They had their arms twined with hers in some special cop way and one of them was in the process of pulsing a drug-mist squeezie in front of Willow's tiny triangular nose.
"Phil, be sure to call Tre Dietz," said Willow, her features already slackening.
"I forgot to tell Jane."
"Don't worry, Willow. I'll be right there."
"Call him!" insisted Willow. "Tell Tre the wowos are real! The bastard." The uvvy clicked off.
"Who's Tre?" Kevvie wanted to know.
"Oh, you've heard of him. He's the uvvy graphics hacker in Santa Cruz who runs that new company Philosophical Toys? He got interested in Da's work on this weird shape called a Klein bottle -- and they did the wowo together. Just for a goof. Tre's only about thirty. He and Da used to hang together and tweak the wowos." The unreality of it all came crashing over Phil then and he was crying.
"I don't understand, Kevvie. Da can't be dead."
"But who actually owns the rights to the wowo?" asked Kevvie.
"Kevvie, that's too -- " Phil broke off and slumped in his chair. This had really taken the wind out of his sails. "Can you drive, Kevvie? I don't think I can drive. I'm all torn up."
"I'll go dress."
When Kevvie left, Umberto came skulking back out of the doughnut. Phil petted him absently as he uvvied Tre. Tre was still in bed with his wife Terri, and none too talkative.
"Yaaar?"
"Tre, this is Phil Gottner. One of the wowos just killed my dad. You better turn the rest of them off."
"Myoor! That's so xoxxed! I should have thought of this. Your poor dad. I'll kill the wowos right now. Later."
Phil left a message at the restaurant where he cooked, and then he put on his silver boots and black leather jacket and went outside with Kevvie. There was a stink like sewage and cheese from the big moldie nest in the abandoned red ship that sat in a silted-in slip across the street from Phil's warehouse -- the Snooks family. A group of skungy sporeheads and slug-skaters were standing on the pavement by the ship talking to a couple of the Snooks moldies and buying camote, the sporeheads' drug of choice. Obviously they'd been up all night. Phil gave them the finger, pro forma. They jeered back; one of them halfheartedly threw a rock. Phil and Kevvie headed out.