“You look guh-great, Wendy. You’re a red witch.”
“You sound funny, Stahn,” said Wendy suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you took even more drugs!”
“Nuh-nuh-nothing really. Some deeves gave me a pulse of guh-gabba. I’m trying to feel normal, you understand. We’re wuh-walking to the Castro, right?”
“Yes. Did you wake up a dragonfly?”
“I fuh-forgot. I don’t feel like wearing my uvvy, Wendy, not after last night. Luh-like I was telling you, Tre Dietz uvvied me all this wuh-weird shit and and—”
“Oh, spare me the wasted slobbering. I’ll get the dragonfly.” Wendy used her Happy Cloak to uvvy a message, and right away a little dragonfly telerobot flew down from its perch in the eaves of their house. The streetlights made gleaming Lissajous patterns on the dragonfly’s shiny, rapidly beating wings. “You stay about a block ahead of us and watch the foot traffic,” Wendy told it, speaking out loud. “We’re walking over the hill to Market and Castro. And keep scanning faces for Saint and Babs. We’re expecting you to find them.” The dragonfly whirred away.
“Really, Stahn,” continued Wendy as they walked up Masonic together. “You’re starting to worry me. A man your age. Two more years and you’ll be sixty!” Wendy was effectively eleven years younger than Stahn, and she worked hard to keep Stahn from turning senile. “What is it that Tre showed you anyway?”
“Perplexing Puh-Poultry N-dee,” said Stahn, clamping his hands tightly together in an effort to hold back the gabba stutter. “Some kind of freelance software agent called Jenny told him this thing called Ramanujan’s Tuh-Tessellation Equation, and right away he found a new kind of higher-dimensional quasicrystal design. The new Poultry puh-peck and peck and peck. He wants me to suh-sell the new idea before Jenny can. And we were also talking about how to ruh-ransom his wife.”
They paused on the saddle of the Buena Vista hill between the Haight and the Castro, catching their breath and looking at the view. “Oh, it’s beautiful out tonight, isn’t it, Stahn?”
“Yeah. I’m glad you got me to go outside.” He took a deep shaky breath, and the gabba shuddering left the hinges of his jaws. The first part of a gabba lift was always the hardest. “Reality is such a gas.” His words in his ears sounded smooth, pneumatic, resonant.
“What was that about ransoming Tre Dietz’s wife?”
“The loonie moldies kidnapped her by accident yesterday. She’s on her way to the Moon. I’m supposed to pay a big ransom and get Whitey Mydol and Darla Starr to pick her up. I already transferred the credit to Whitey’s account.”
“Whitey and Darla! But why should you have to pay for stupid Tre Dietz’s wife?”
“He’s made me lot of money, and this new thing’ll make a lot more. His poor wife is up there in the sky inside a moldie on the way to the Moon.”
“It’s not such a bad flight,” said Wendy. “It was fun when you and me flew from the Moon to the Earth together in 2031. It might be good for you to do it again.”
“Forget it, Wendy.” Stahn started walking again. “Which way are we supposed to go?”
“Judging from what the dragonfly’s showing me, we should walk down Ord Court to States Street to Castro,” said Wendy, cocking her head. “That’s the least crowded way.” As they linked arms and headed downhill, she turned her attention back to Stahn. “So you saw N-dimensional Perplexing Poultry, huh? Have you ever heard the theory that mathematics keeps people young? I think it’s good for you to be thinking about these things. Instead of about power and money. And all your hangovers.”
“I wish you wouldn’t obsess about age all the time, Wendy. You know damn well that with DIM parts and tank-grown organs, anyone with our kind of money can live to a hundred and twenty.”
“Yes,” said Wendy. “All thanks to the wonderful compatibility of me. But because Wendy Meat and W. M. Biologicals do, in fact, grow clones of me, I can do something better than get patched up. I can start over in a blank twenty-five-year-old wendy. My ‘Cloak could transfer all the information. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“Oh, don’t, Wendy. What would happen to this body?” Stahn snaked his arm under Wendy’s Happy Cloak and around her waist to hug her. “This body I’ve loved so long? Would you cut it up and sell off the meat and the organs?”
“I’m serious about this, Stahn, so don’t try and make it hard for me. But let’s not talk about it now. You’re in no condition.” She twisted away from Stahn’s grip and brightened her voice. “Look, we’re almost there. And—yes!—the dragonfly just spotted the kids.”
Wendy stopped walking for a second, the better to absorb the images the dragonfly was uvvying to her, and as she viewed them she began to laugh. “Saint is—he’s wearing a silvered coat and he has tinfoil on his head. And Babs is—oh, Babs—” She laughed harder. “I can hardly describe this, Stahn. She’s got a little tray around her waist with things on it and a terrible yellow shirt; I have no idea what she’s supposed to be. Let’s hurry and meet them.”
“Do you really want those poor children to see their mother’s body butchered?” demanded Stahn. “It would be traumatic. And then, once you were twenty-five, you’d get young guys and you wouldn’t want me! That’s what I get for being faithful to you all these years?”
“I said let’s drop it. You get so dramatic when you’re lifted! You know damn well that I’m a Happy Cloak, not a human body. This body—this wendy—it’s a mindless piece of meat that I use to walk around in and to make love to you, Stahn. You never got excited when I replaced my imipolex every three years. If I change my flesher body, everything will be just the same. I’m a moldie, I’m your wife, and I’ll always love you. So there.”
Wendy pushed into the crowd, and Stahn followed. There were a lot of brides here tonight; that was just about the number-one favorite costume. Other faves were strippers, debutantes, princesses, and slaves. A few people recognized Stahn or Wendy, but most mistook them for het looky-look tourists. “Hello, Cleveland,” sneered a skinny large-breasted morph with a beard. A disco dandy snipped, “When you drive back to the ‘burbs, remember that my car is the Mercedes and yours is the BMW.”
“I didn’t use a car,” said Wendy pityingly, “I used my broom!” Though Stahn hadn’t noticed it before, Wendy was indeed holding a broom—oh yeah, it was a piece of her ‘Cloak that she’d temporarily pinched off and reshaped.
Wendy pointed Stahn in the direction where the dragonfly had shown her the kids. “Press on, dear old fool.” Stahn fought past a man with a cardboard toilet around his head and his face sticking out of the bowl and a plastic dick over his nose, past a woman with a leash leading a blindfolded nude ungenitaled Barbie, past a morph with a head built up with phonybone to the shape of a cube, past people with wings and huge flexing cocks—the crowd pressed and swirled like the ripping currents of a particularly nasty ocean break—
“Hey, Da, Ma!” called Babs.
“Yaar!” whooped Saint.
Babs and Saint were in a doorway near the Castro Theater. Saint was a tall cheerful youth who habitually darkened his appearance by means of odd hair, a ratty beard, silvery stun glasses, and heavy blue suede boots. For tonight, he’d covered his head with vintage aluminum foil crudely wadded into the shape of a helmet, and he wore a reflective metallic fireman’s coat that went down to his knees.
Babs had big firm cheeks that grew pink when she was excited, like now. As part of her costume, she wore a yellow polyester shirt with a tag saying:
HI I’M LYNNE - HAPPY DOLLAR