Finally one day in the summer of 2052—so many years gone!— something new got Willy’s attention.
It started with a grinding sound beneath the soil, over in the corner of the grove where the dome met the ground. A moon-quake? A rupture in the plastic beneath the soil floor? But then the ground heaved upward as if from a giant mole, and a shiny blob of purple imipolex pushed up into the isopod air. The blob formed a face and spoke.
“Willy Taze! You still haven’t visited the Nest! We need you now. With your help, the first Gurdle decryption may happen soon.”
“You’re . . . you’re Gurdle?”
The moldie wormed himself farther out of the hole, though carefully leaving his tail in the hole to prevent the isopod’s air from rushing out. His purple skin glinted with silvery highlights. “I’m Gurdle-7! Gurdle’s great-great-great-great-grandson. It’s been twenty-one years, Willy! And now it’s time to leave your enchanted garden. Come on and slip inside of me. I’ll be a bubbletopper to carry you to the Nest. And inside the Nest, we have prepared a pink-house for you every bit as pleasant as this isopod.”
“Do we have to crawl back through that hole?” said Willy dubiously. “I’ll bump myself on the rocks.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make my skin hard around you. And I’ll patch the hole behind me. Come, Willy. Arise! The Gurdle decryption is of cosmic importance. And only you can help us accomplish the final steps.”
7
Stahn
Stahn stepped out of his fine Victorian mansion on Masonic Avenue above Haight Street in San Francisco. It was early evening on Halloween, 2053. Walking by were lively groups of people on their way to the Castro Street Halloween party, a traditional event now back in operation after a brief hiatus during the anxious years surrounding the coming of the Second Millennium. AIDS was gone, drugs were legal, and San Francisco was more fun than ever.
Stahn felt very strung out. He’d gotten lifted on camote after his final conversation with Tre Dietz late last night. In the afternoon, Tre had uvvied up to announce that some kind of software agent named Jenny had shown him a secret tape of Sri Ramanujan explaining a new piece of mathematics called the Tessellation Equation. Jenny had talked to Stahn too. She looked like a lanky teenage farm girl. It seemed she lived inside a Heritagist computer, but that she had very close connections to the loonie moldies. Then, in the evening, Tre had called again—very distraught—to talk about ransoming his wife Terri from the moldies. Stahn made some calls to the Moon to try and help out with that, and told Tre, and had then started getting loaded as he normally did in the evening.
But then a few hours later Tre uvvied again, fantastically excited about some new vision about how to use the Tessellation Equation to make Perplexing Poultry imipolex based on tilings of every finite dimension. Disquietingly, this software agent Jenny thing was there on the link with Tre, listening in. She wouldn’t say why she was so interested in this information. But Tre didn’t care, his obsession was to get Stahn to understand about Perplexing Poultry in Hilbert space, and about how Ramanujan’s Tessellation Equation could now be used to make imipolex-5, imipolex-6, imipolex-N!
To help himself understand the strange ideas he was hearing, Stahn drunkenly chewed up a couple of nuggets of camote while Tre was talking. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried the drug, but this time it turned out to be a big mistake, an unbearably strange lift, a psychotically strange panic trip to deep and personal revelations about his multitudinous personality flaws. Stahn went to bed and tried to sleep, but instead spent ten hellish hours in Hilbert space with Tre’s multi-dimensional Poultry pecking and clucking in the mysterious thickets of his chaotically disturbed consciousness. It was a relief to see dawn come, and to get up and try and start a new day.
In the afternoon, Stahn finally managed to get some sleep, but then, around dusk, his wife Wendy woke him.
“Get up, sleepyhead. We’re going to the Halloween parade, remember? What the heck did you do to yourself last night, anyway? I came downstairs and tried to talk to you, but you were completely gaga.” She had wide hips, pert lips, a soft chin, and blonde hair. Her voice was soothingly normal.
“I have to get up?”
“You have to get up. Here.” She handed him a big mug of tea with milk and sugar. “We’re walking to the Castro and meeting Saint and Babs. Our children? A family outing? Helloooo!”
“Okay, Wendy, don’t overdo it. I’m here. Thanks for the tea. I got lifted on camote after talking to Tre Dietz last night. I thought it might make me smart like him. What a burn. I’ll tell you about it later.”
So Stahn took a shower and put on black clothes and painted his hands and face black. He dusted himself with silver sparkles and went to stand on his front steps while waiting for Wendy to finish getting dressed. His head hurt very deeply; he could feel the pain deep inside his brain from the healed wounds where he’d gotten a tank-grown pre-programmed flesh-and-blood right hemisphere to replace the Happy Cloak that had replaced the robot rat that had replaced his original right brain—his skull was a xoxxin’ roach-motel and thanks to Tre he’d been to Hilbert space and was no doubt subject to snap back there anytime—
“Wassup, Sen-senator Stahn!” shrieked a lifted young Cicciolina from a passing gaggle of morphs. A bride and a Betty Page were in the group as well.
“Out for a night on the town?” asked the tall bride in a deep, honking voice. “Does Wendy know?”
The Betty Page snorted, chortled and bent over, rucking up a tight skirt to expose a reasonable facsimile of a woman’s naked ass. “Take a taste of Betty, Senator Moo! Relish the fine fine superfine succulence of a bad-girl butt too good for tacos!”
The kid was trying to needle Stahn about wendy meat, but Stahn gave a politician’s genial, dismissive wave, expecting the morphs to move on. Most people didn’t understand about the wendy-meat ads; the fact that they showed Wendy with her Happy Cloak was intended to be a positive force for human-moldie friendship.
“Shut your rude tuh-twat, Betty,” stuttered Cicciolina. “Yo-yo-yo, brah Stahn, wanna puh-peg of gabba? It’s straight out of the resolver; I harvested the kuh-kuh-crystals today.”
“Affirmo everplace,” said Stahn on a sudden impulse. “I can relate. Gabba gives me the yipes, you wave, but I already got the yipes on account of what I did last night, and if I can get some gabba-yipes happening, why then I’ll feel normal; it’ll be a lift instead of a drag. So come on over here, you big deeve.”
The Cicciolina drew a squeezie out of his decolletage and strutted over to Stahn, holding the little bulb up high like a magical lantern. “Tuh-toot the snoot, Senataroot!”
Stahn took the squeezie and pulsed a dose for each nostril. Ftooom! Fireworks of pleasure exploded behind his eyes, a chrysanthemum bloom of evil joy, a flower with a ring of screamers around the outer edge, screamers that floated to earth and took the form of darting, two-legged yipes.
“Ftoom yipes,” jabbered Stahn. “Ftoom ftoom fuh-fuh-ft oom yipes.”
“Gabba hey,” said the Cicciolina. “The fringe still luh-loves you, Senator.”
“Long may it wuh-wave,” said Stahn.
The three morphs moved on, camping and laughing. Stahn looked up at his house, its windows mellow yellow with electric light. The yipes felt good. He was lucky to have a good house in the city. He was lucky to be alive. He was lucky to have a family. How sad it would be if all of this should end.
With a sudden flurry of footsteps, Wendy swept out of the house and down the steps. “Hi, Stahn! I’m ready!” She was dressed like a witch, with high-heeled boots, long dress, large Happy Cloak, and rakish pointed hat—all a bright, matching red. The ‘Cloak was a beloved moldie that Wendy continually wore to make up for the unparalleled developmental deficiencies caused by the fact that her body was a tank-grown clone.