"Oh, this is beautiful," she called down. "There's a cute, round room." The trunk was about ten feet across up here. The room was carved right into the living heartwood of the tree, with two polished bucket seats, three little porthole windows, and an arched door. The widest part of the floor was maybe five feet across. A plump burl of the redwood bulged out to make a deck in front of the door, with four more seats carved into it. Once they were all up top, they tried out everything, and then Ma and Da sat on the deck, while Babs and Randy sat cozily in the little room.
"This view kicks ass!" exulted Stahn. "I can see the whole city and both bridges! I can even see the Farallon Islands!" He leaned over, chuckling with satisfaction. "Jones looks like a bewildered gopher. Should I give him the finger? Alla down a bucket of piss?"
"Don't goad him," said Wendy. "He might turn us all into air. That's been happening quite a bit, you know. I hear there's been too many killings for the gimmie to even keep track of. And not everyone's been able to get recorporated." Stahn winced at the thought. "You're right. I have to be nice to Jones. Maybe I could convince him to replace his tower with a tree. This is where it's at, no lie. Is it stuzzy in that room, Babs?"
"You want to trade places?"
"No no, the cozy nook should be for the lovers. Ma and I can try it when you're gone. Hey, Wendy, can you viz letting me bone you up here? Tarzan and Jane. But our feet would stick out of the door."
"You could alla-carve bigger rooms lower down in the tree," said Babs equably. She was accustomed to her father's gaucherie. Maybe that was why she was so comfortable with Randy. Babs patted Randy's hand, and he smiled at her. The redwood room had a nice, fresh fragrance. Tendrils of late afternoon fog were drifting by.
"We could live in a tree like this, Babs," murmured Randy. "Maybe we oughta put one up by your warehouse. Or once I get my consulting business goin' I can buy us a lot down in the Santa Cruz Mountains and we can live in a tree out there."
"What kind of consulting do you want to do, Randy?" asked Wendy. Her hearing was preternaturally sharp.
"Nose much, Ma?" said Babs, implicitly daring her mother to ask the question that was really on her mind.
"And you're planning to live together? That's nice . .." Wendy's voice trailed off, begging for more information.
"We're engaged," said Babs, finally springing her news. "We're going to have a double wedding with Yoke and Phil on the first of June."
Randy, May 1
To Randy's relief--and slight surprise --Babs's parents gave his marriage proposal their blessing. He settled in at Babs's, waiting for the big day and working on some projects with the others. It seemed important to try and do good things with the allas, all the more so because the world news was bad. Savage conventional wars had broken out in Africa, Central America, Quebec, and the Balkans. There was sporadic gang fighting in parts of the U.S. too, mostly near Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Needless to say, there were almost no women doing it, and the moldies were staying pretty well out of the fray as well. It was just men fighting men. Everyone had all the food and shelter they wanted, so there was no logical reason to fight-- but men were doing it anyway, using all the great new weapons they could alla up for themselves. It turned out that Phil was right--the allas wouldn't undo the ordinary kinds of deaths. If someone shot you or blew you up, your alla wouldn't save you. The alla recorporation feature was indeed designed only to undo any killings that had been done by an alla itself. Even so, there were men who used the allas to make themselves weapons so they could beat and rape and torture and kill at will, growing more cruel and brutal every day. The killers were killing each other off, but still there seemed to be no shortage of them. And the innocent were dying as well. The only thing keeping the wars down was that the Metamartians' flying saucer kept appearing at the goriest battle scenes. First the saucer would call for peace, and then it would beam down rays to destroy everyone's weapons, and if the men still kept on fighting, the saucer would incinerate them. But the Metamartians couldn't be everywhere. Babs was in a frantically creative mode, as if trying to prove it hadn't been a mistake to distribute the allas. In mid-April, Theodore helped her put on a show at the Asiz Gallery. Theodore was being a good sport about losing Babs, which surprised Randy, who kept expecting some Kentucky-style sneak attack from the guy: a stolen vehicle, a midnight beating, an arson fire, a tip-off to the gimmie. But it never came. Instead Theodore got Babs gallery space and wrote a great little catalog for her. Randy was unable to comprehend such behavior. Babs's show was called "Realware Worms," and it featured twenty of her worm-farms. Some were the ones she'd been making before she got the alla: mazes of plastic tubing filled with soil and a mixture of real and imipolex DIM worms. Just to play with the categories a little, Babs had also made some new versions of these, using alla-made realware biological worms in place of "wild" biological worms. In addition, she'd alla-made a half-dozen large transparent shapes filled solid with writhing DIM worms. There were cubes of plastic worms, some big doughnut shapes, and even a mounting, squiggly spiral like a moonshiner's "worm coil" condenser. That last one had been Randy's suggestion, he was proud to say. To fill out the show, Babs hung a lot of her lace on the walls and alla-made seven variations on her cartoonlike dune buggy, giving them hard "kandy kolors" that marched up the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Babs put smiling worm logos on the car doors so they'd fit the show's theme, and parked the "worm buggies" in a cutely angled row on the sidewalk outside the Asiz.
The title of the show was a good idea, as everyone was still in the process of trying to assimilate what "Realware" might mean. There was a big crowd on opening night -- decked out in freaky S.F. outfits like never before seen --but the sales were disastrously weak. The potential customers seemed to want to go home and make their own copies of Babs's works with their allas. In fact, one woman with a beehive hairdo and a skirt made of dangling transparent dildos stood out on the sidewalk staring really hard at one of the worm-buggies for half an hour and then -- whoosh -- used her alla to make her own version, using the same base-model Metamartian alla catalog dune buggy that Babs had used. The art on the knockoff worm buggy wasn't quite the same, for it came out of the dildo-skirted woman's head and not Babs's, but it seemed to suit her well enough, and maybe better. She hopped in her new car and drove off, with Randy running after her down the street shouting empty threats.
The situation with the lace was a bit different. The decorations of the worm-buggies were big and easy to mentally represent, but the lace simply had too much pattern, produced as it was by colonies of interacting DIM-based fabricants. No casual gallery-goer would be able to mentally specify the twists and turns of all the lace knots for his or her alla. Even so, Randy did catch a tipsy man in orange leather leaving the gallery wearing a mantilla of crude knockoff lace on his shoulders. Rather than being knotted, the copied lace's threads were simply fused at the crossings. And the overall pattern repeated itself every four inches, instead of subtly varying all along the mantilla's length.
The plastic worms were the least susceptible to copying, as it was their living behavior that made them art. Their flocking, their wriggling, their subtly oscillating hues --all of these were based on limpware DIM designs that Babs had invented for them with Randy's help. And there was no way to "see" these microscopic code designs just by looking at the worms. Yet everyone was in such a do-it-yourself frenzy with their allas that they seemed to overlook this fact. The sole person to offer to purchase one of Babs's works was a sleek banker named Chock Fresser. Fresser wanted to acquire the show's centerpiece: a twelve-foot transparent pretzel filled with imipolex worms in a thousand different shades of blue and green; it was called "Wowo Worms." But Fresser didn't want to take delivery on the physical item; he wanted Babs to uvvy him a copy of the software design so he could alla-make the work in situ at his house. "Too much trouble to ship it home," said Fresser. "Packing, unpacking-- who needs it anymore? Give me the code and that way I can bring 'Wowo Worms' in and out of storage as needed."