As well as working on floaty new philtres and now and then doing a contracted tweak for Apex, Tre kept busy helping Terri keep up the motel. And Tre and Terri fell more and more in love. Before they knew it, out popped two babies: first a son, Dolf, born September 23, 2049, and then a daughter, Baby Wren, born June 26, 2052.
The one thing that always seemed the same, whether Tre was high or not, were the children. Tre delighted in them. It was fun to follow them around and watch them doing things.
“Clearly a biped,” he would say, watching Wren stomp around their apartment with her stubby little arms pumping. Baby Wren was so short that if Tre put his arm down at his side, the silky top of standing Wren’s head was still an inch or two below his hand. Wren was about as short as a standing-up person could possibly be. Dolf was a clever lad who liked asking his father questions like “Will our house float if there’s a flood?” or “If we couldn’t get any more food, how long would it take to eat everything in the kitchen?” Little Dolf was determined to survive, come what may.
In the spring of 2053, Tre got an uvvy call from Stahn Mooney. Senator Stahn was way lifted and messed up.
“I’m a wee bummed you never got the fuh-four-dimensional Perplexing Poultry together, Tuh-Tre,” jabbered the middle-aged man. “You luh-loser.” He looked twitchy and hostile. “I’ve been asking Kuh-Kuh-Kasabian why I shouldn’t fire you.”
“Kiss my ass,” said Tre and shakily turned off the uvvy. Early the next morning, Mooney called him back sober.
“Sorry about that last call,” said Mooney. “My legendary problems with substance abuse are back; I’m turning into the bad old Sta-Hi Mooney. Of course your work is excellent, Apex wouldn’t dream of letting you go.”
“Glad to hear it. And I am sorry I never delivered on the four-dimensional Poultry design. It turns out John Horton Conway found four-dimensional and five-dimensional aperiodic monotiles sixty years ago, but it’s not too well documented. UCSC Wad finally unearthed a construction in Conway’s e-mail archives. But turning Conway’s tessellations into beautiful three-dimensional projections—so far I can’t do it, even with UCSC’s Wad. I do still think about it from time to time.”
“Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae, Ltd., is offering some really serious bread, Tre, which is what got me back onto this. It’s a mongo business opportunity. Ramanujan needs four-dimensional Perplexing Poultry right now, and Emperor Staghorn will pay whatever it takes to get them. Ramanujan can’t figure it out himself, and he has this conviction that you’re the man. It’s not just the actual tessellation that counts, you wave, it’s the gnarly Tre Dietz way you tweak it.”
“Well, that’s nice, but—”
“The loonie moldies are interested in this too. My old friend Willy Taze; he moved into the loonie moldies’ Nest a couple of years ago. He’s talking about creating a virtual dial to like set the Perplexing Poultry’s dimensionality to any number N.” Stahn cleared his throat uncertainly. “Like three, four, five, six, seven . . . N—you wave? Didn’t you say something about a general solution when we hired you?”
“Yes, the Schmitt-Conway biprism works for any N of the form 3 times M. Like for three, six, nine, and so on. And now that we have four and five, we can get all the others as Cartesian cross products. The dimensions sum when you cross the spaces. But you’ve got to understand that Conway’s prisms are ugly. They look like waffles or like factory roofs. Turning them into pleasing visual Poultry is just too—”
“Try harder, Tre. I’ve got something for you to download that might help. It’s a philtre Willy Taze sent me. Bye for now. It’s time for my morning pick-me-up.”
“Wait,” said Tre. “One question. What do Emperor Staghorn Beetle and the loonie moldies want N-dimensional Perplexing Poultry for?”
“They won’t exactly tell me. But supposedly it has something to do with better communications between humans and moldies. And merging is something I’m always for.” Grinning Stahn pulsed himself a big toot from a handheld squeezie and toggled the connection off .
The loonie philtre, which was called TonKnoT, generated silent movies of smooth, brightly colored tubes tying themselves into N-dimensional knots. TonKnoT kept pausing and starting over with a fresh knot. The knot would start as a straight stick with arrows on it, and then all the arrows would move about and the stick would turn, in some indefinable way, into a knot. The pictures seemed so urgent, yet the meaning continued to escape Tre. “Look at this,” TonKnoT seemed to be saying. “This is important. This is one of the hidden secrets of the world.” The knot deformations were almost insultingly slow and precise, yet the gimmick of the shift kept somehow eluding Tre. “Look harder and you will understand.”
And then in July, the jam broke and Tre finally designed his four-dimensional Perplexing Poultry.
Taking care of the kids and the motel had been getting to be too much grunt work, so as soon as Tre got his big advance from Apex for the four-dimensional Perplexing Poultry, he and Terri hired a moldie worker. Up until then, they’d been getting by with the bumbling uncertain labor of the sweet, bright woman named Molly, whom Terri’s mother had passed on to them with the motel. By the ongoing linguistic warpage of euphemism, bright in 2053 had come to mean what special or retarded or half-witted might have meant sixty or a hundred years earlier. Tre and Terri took some pains to prevent Molly from buttonholing guests to talk on and on about what kinds of foods she laaaahked—always a favorite topic of Molly’s. She liked oysters but not clams, crabs but not shrimp, squid but not mussels, beef but not ham, spaghetti but not macaroni, and on and on. The weird cryptic idiot savant joke in this was that Molly liked only the foods whose name did not contain the letter m—it was Terri who’d figured that out. They could never decide if Molly herself consciously understood this; if you asked her about it, she just laughed and said she didn’t know how to spell.
Once they had a moldie to do the rooms, Terri and Tre began using Molly as a baby-sitter. She’d worked for the Percesepe family so long that there could be no thought of letting her go. The baby-sitting job worked out fine, as Dolf and Baby Wren loved Molly and hated Monique. Like most children, they instinctively feared moldies, with their odd motions and their alien stench.
When Randy Karl Tucker checked into the Clearlight Terrace Court Motel—the day before he abducted Monique—it was eight-thirty on a clear October evening. Terri and Tre were in the process of giving the kids a bath—always a fun family time, with fat Wren slapping the water and shouting, while Dolf manned the faucets and guided a flotilla of floating things around the dangerous Wren. Terri was kneeling by the tub with a washrag and Tre was sitting on the closed toilet seat with a towel in readiness. Just then there was a chime.
“Uh-oh,” said Tre. “A guest. I better go help Monique.”
“Wren’s done,” said Terri. “Grab her and put her in her sleeper first. I can’t do both the kids alone.”
Tre pulled his uvvy out of his pocket, put it on his neck, and told Monique to stall. It was always good practice to get a face-to-face look at your guests. Not only did it make the customers happier, but it was unwise to trust a moldie’s judgment about who to let into the motel.
Terri handed Wren into Tre’s waiting towel. Moving quickly, Tre diapered Wren, zipped her into her sleeper, and set her down in her crib.
“I’ll be right back, Wren.” Wren wailed to see her father go so quickly, but then shifted her focus to her crib toys.