"Hi, Phil," said Yoke. "Cobb, this is Phil Gottner. Phil, this is Cobb Anderson. Cobb flew me down here from the Moon. He's here to pick up one of his relatives from Santa Cruz. His great-grandson."
Phil was surprised. 'You're from the Moon, Yoke?"
"Duh! Why do you think it took me so long to walk up those stairs? I could see you feeling sorry for me. Well, I'm getting stronger every day."
"Hello, Phil," said Cobb, insisting on shaking Phil's hand. His imipolex moldie flesh was cool and slightly slippery. "Tre says your father was a great man. I hope you don't mind my coming to the ceremony. I'm just so happy to be out with people doing regular things. I haven't done anything normal in I don't know how many years." He had a hearty, booming voice with a crackle in the lower registers. His speech membranes couldn't quite reproduce a true human bass.
"I don't mind if you're here, Mr. Anderson, it's an honor. My father would be happy. But--there are a lot of the people at the Bass School who really hate moldies. Not that you're a moldie exactly. I mean, at least you started out as human."
"I'm like a Wal-Mart greeter now," rumbled Cobb. "If that means anything to you. Pure plastic." He turned his massive head, slowly looking around. "Now that you mention it, Phil, I do notice a few frosty stares. I'll just take a little stroll around the neighborhood. This is Palo Alto, eh? Pretty snooty. I can see why my great-grandson didn't want to come." Cobb smiled, bowed, and undulated off down the school's gravel driveway.
"I don't get how he could fly you down here from the Moon," Phil said to Yoke.
"I was inside him. Like the wendy meat in a California corn-dog!"
"Yoke's been walking around the Santa Cruz Boardwalk absorbing Earth culture," said Terri. "She and I made friends when I was up on the Moon, so I invited her to stay with us when she came down." Terri was a trim, deeply tanned woman with straight dark hair and pink lipstick. Bright golden DIM beads crawled slowly about in her hair.
"Terri's teaching me about diving," said Yoke. "I love being underwater. Everything alive all around you. I want to go to the South Pacific pretty soon. Earth is wonderful. And not just the water. The sky!" She gestured upward. A low gauzy cloud was drifting against a background of distant high clouds that rose up like mountain ranges to a tender patch of blue. "How can you mudders ever get anything done? Whenever I look at the sky I forget all about whatever I've been doing. Such stuzzy soft fractals." But now her attention returned to Phil. "What kind of job do you have?"
"Non tech. I'm a cook at a three-star San Francisco restaurant named LoLo. My father was disappointed in me. But I'm good at what I do."
"We hardly have any restaurants on the Moon. Most people just eat food-paste from the tap. And raw fruits and veggies from week trees."
"Well then, Yoke, our food's another mudder thing you can enjoy learning about. I'd love to cook some special dishes for--"
"Hi, I'm Kevvie Inch," interrupted Kevvie, suddenly appearing between Phil and Yoke. "Phil and I live together. Who are you?"
"I'm Yoke Starr-Mydol. I'm from the Moon."
"What are you doing down here?"
"Oh, tourism, self-improvement. I'm interested in the ocean."
"You don't work?"
"Well, nobody's paying me," said Yoke. "I'm kind of a software artist. I like to think of algorithms for simulating natural processes. I plan to try and model some Earth things while I'm here."
"I'm a geezer-visitor," said Kevvie. "I go see old people all over San Francisco. They have little DIM machines to take care of them, but they don't have anyone to talk to them. It's sort of like being a sex-worker, except there's no sex. I have a girlfriend who's a sex-worker. Klara Bio. She and I had bacteria-style sex a few weeks back. Have you ever tried bacteria-style sex, Yoke?"
Phil groaned inwardly. This was a new obsession of Kevvie's and she was always talking about it. "Bacteria-style sex" was the current expression for getting in a tub with someone and taking the drug merge to make your bodies temporarily melt together. Phil refused to do it, because he figured that just one pleasure rush could blow him off the Straight Edge and down into the addict's 24-7-365 regimen, wasted twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Kevvie had started out Straight Edge like Phil, but she'd started dipping and dabbing six months ago, and now she was getting worse all the time.
"I wouldn't want to," Yoke was saying matter-of-factly. "I think it's skanky. My parents have been merge addicts since before I was born. Or were. My mother Darla died two months ago. That's something I wanted to talk to you about some more, Phil. The thing that killed Darla could have been the same thing that killed your dad. And maybe Tempest Plenty too."
"I've got it!" interrupted Kevvie. "Flying saucers took them! Have you ever seen a flying saucer, Yoke?"
"I saw the real aliens who were on the Moon in November," said Yoke. "But they didn't come in any flying machine. They travel in a form like radio waves."
"I don't buy that," said Kevvie, with irrational vehemence. Phil realized that she was lifted. "If those things you saw were really aliens, there has to have been a saucer that they came in. They use a special metal. I bet ISDN or the gimmie is covering it up."
"There goes a saucer now, Kevvie," said Tre, pointing up at the sky. "Yaaar." He had long, tangled, sun-bleached hair and he wore weird little brown sunglasses over his no doubt bloodshot eyes. Once he'd gotten Kevvie to start staring upward, Tre looked back down. "What Yoke was talking about, Phil, is that Darla and Whitey had a wowo in their cubby. Only nobody saw Darla dying, so it didn't occur to anyone that the wowo might have been involved. I should have thought of it when Tempest Plenty disappeared last month. She was the aunt of our neighbor Starshine Plenty; we were putting Tempest up in one of our spare rooms." Phil could tell Kevvie wanted to butt in and say something else dumb, but Terri spoke first. "Tempest was this colorful redneck pheezer," said Terri. "A dynamo. Mean as a snake. A lifter. She liked to work on Starshine's garden, always talking a mile a minute, whether or not anyone was listening. And then one morning she was gone, along with Starshine's wowo and Starshine's dog Planet. Starshine figured Tempest had taken the dog and the wowo back to Florida. She says most of the people in her family are like that. Rip something off and head for home."
"The wowo Tempest took was in Starshine's garden," continued Tre. "It was the best and biggest wowo I ever made, but the base only weighed a couple of pounds. Tempest loved to look at it, especially when she was lifted. And she was crazy about that dog. So what Starshine thought seemed reasonable. We were like, 'So what, at least Tempest's gone.' But then -- mur!--Willow saw the wowo swallow Kurt and I put it all together. I switched off all the wowos that I've distributed."
"How did you manage that?" demanded Kevvie.
"All of my Philosophical Toys maintain an uvvy link to me. That way I can send out upgrades and -- in the case of a catastrophe like this --I can shut them down." Although Tre looked like a Santa Cruz lifter, his Philosophical Toys had made him reasonably wealthy, and he ran his business in an orderly and efficient way. "I've been wanting to ask Willow for a really detailed description of how it went down. But I don't want to tweak her out."
"You should see what Jane has," said Phil. "Hey, Jane!"
Jane was still in conversation with old Isolde and Hildegarde, and she gave Phil a sisterly "How rude!" kind of look, a big jokey frown. Isolde and Hildegarde used the interruption to begin creeping toward the buffet.
"What?" said Jane, giving Phil a gratuitous poke in the ribs as she joined them.