Utterly exhausted, Sta-Hi flopped onto his back and closed his eyes. He saw a series of rings, sights he had to line up on that distant yet intimate white center, the brain’s own blind spot. He felt like an oyster trying to see up through the water to the sun. Cautiously he opened his shell a bit wider.
There was a sudden thunder in his ear, a smell of rotten flesh. Ha schnurf gabble O. Kissy lick. A black poodle at his face, a shiteater for sure. Sta-Hi sat up sharply and pushed the puppy away. It nipped his hand with needlelike milk-teeth.
A blonde chick stood twenty meters away, smiling back at her pup. “Come on, Sparky!” She yelled like a bell.
The dog barked and tossed its head, ran off . The girl was still smiling. Aren’t I cute with my doggy? “Jesus,” Sta-Hi moaned. He wished he could melt, just fucking die and get it over with. Everything was too wiggly, too general, too specific.
He stood up, burning out thousands of braincells with the effort. He had to get in the water, get cooled off . The chick watched him wade in. He didn’t look, but he could feel her eyes on his little flap. A spongy morsel.
A quiver of fish phased past. Hyper little mothers, uptightness hardwired right into their nervous systems. He squatted down in the waist-deep water, imagining his brain a jelly-fish floating beneath the Florida sun. Limp, a jelly-fish with wave-waved tendrils.
Uh, uh, uh.
He let the saltwater wash the light-tan foam-spit off his lips. The little bubbles moved among the white water-bubbles, forming and bursting, each a tiny universe.
His waistband felt too tight. Slip off the undies?
Sta-Hi slid his eyes back and forth. The chick was hanging around down the beach a ways. Throwing a stick in the surf, “Come on, Sparky!” Each time the dog got the stick it would prance stiff-legged around her. Was she trying to bug him or what? Of course it could be that she hadn’t really noticed him in the first place. But that still left all the perverts with spyglasses.
He waded out deeper, till the water reached his neck. Looking around once more, he slipped off his tight underwear and relaxed. Jellyfish jellytime jellypassed. The ocean stank.
He swam back towards shore. The saltwater lined his nostrils with tinfoil.
When he got to shallower water he stood, and then cried out in horror. He’d stepped on a skate. Harmless, but the blitzy twitch of the livery fleshmound snapping out from underfoot was just too . . . too much like a thought, a word made flesh. The word was, “AAAAAUUGH!” He ran out of the water, nancing knees high, trying somehow to run on top.
“You’re naked,” someone said and laughed hmmm-hmmm-hmmm. His undies! It was the chick with the dog. High above, spyglasses stiffened behind dirty panes.
“Yeah, I . . . ” Sta-Hi hesitated. He didn’t want to go back into the big toilet for more electric muscle-spasm foot-shocks. Suddenly he remembered a foot-massager he’d given his Dad one Christmas. Vibrating yellow plastic arches.
The little poodle jumped and snapped at his penis. The girl tittered. Laughing breasts.
Bent half double, Sta-Hi trucked back and forth across the sand in high speed until he saw a trouser-cuff. He scrabbled out the jeans and T-shirt, and slipped them on. The poodle was busy at the edge of the water.
“Squa tront,” Sta-Hi muttered, “Spa fon.” The sounds of thousands of little bubble-pops floated off the sea. The sun was going down, and the grains of sand crackled as they cooled. Each tiny sound demanded attention, undivided attention.
“You must really be phased,” the girl said cheerfully. “What did you do with your bathing suit?”
“I . . . an eel got it.” The angles on the chick’s face kept shifting. He couldn’t figure out what she looked like. Why risk waking up with a peroxide pig? He dropped onto the sand, stretched out again, let his eyes close. Turdbreath thundered in his ear, and then he heard their footsteps leave. His headbones could pick up the skrinching.
Sta-Hi breathed out a shuddering sigh of exhaustion. If he could ever just get the time to cut power . . . He sighed again and let his muscles go limp. The light behind his eyes was growing. His head rolled slowly to one side.
A film came to mind, a film of someone dying on a beach. His head rolled slowly to one side. And then he was still. Real death. Slowly to one side. Last motion.
Dying, Sta-Hi groaned and sat up again. He couldn’t handle . . . The chick and her dog were fifty meters off. He started running after them, clumsily at first, but then fleetly, floatingly!
4
“ . . . 0110001,” Wagstaff concluded.
“100101,” Ralph Numbers replied curtly. “0110000010101000110101010001001110010000000000110000000001010011111001110000000000000000000101000111100001111111110100111011000101010110000111111111111111110011010101011110111100000101000000000000000001111010011101101110111101001000100000100011111101010000001111010101001111010101111000011000011110000111100111110111001111111111110000000000010100001100000000001.”
The two machines rested side by side in front of the One’s big console. Ralph was built like a file cabinet sitting on two caterpillar treads. Five deceptively thin manipulator arms projected out of his body-box, and on top was a sensor head mounted on a retractable neck. One of the arms held a folded umbrella. Ralph had few visible lights or dials, and it was hard to tell what he was thinking.
Wagstaff was much more expressive. His thick snake of a body was covered with silver-blue flickercladding. As thoughts passed through his super-cooled brain, twinkling patterns of light surged up and down his three-meter length. With his digging tools jutting out, he looked something like St. George’s dragon.
Abruptly Ralph Numbers switched to English. If they were going to argue, there was no need to do it in the sacred binary bits of machine language.
“I don’t know why you’re so concerned about Cobb Anderson’s feelings,” Ralph tight-beamed to Wagstaff. “When we’re through with him he’ll be immortal. What’s so important about having a carbon-based body and brain?”
The signals he emitted coded a voice gone a bit rigid with age. “The pattern is all that counts. You’ve been scioned haven’t you? I’ve been through it thirty-six times, and if it’s good enough for us it’s good enough for them!”
“The wholle thinng sstinnks, Rallph,” Wagstaff retorted. His voice signals were modulated onto a continuous oily hum. “Yyou’ve llosst touchh with what’ss reallly goinng on. We arre on the verrge of all-outt civill warr.
You’rre sso fammouss you donn’t havve to sscrammble for yourr chipss like the resst of uss. Do yyou knnoww how mmuch orre I havve to digg to gett a hunndrredd chipss frrom GAX?”
“There’s more to life than ore and chips,” Ralph snapped, feeling a little guilty. He spent so much time with the big boppers these days that he really had forgotten how hard it could be for the little guys. But he wasn’t going to admit it to Wagstaff. He renewed his attack. “Aren’t you at all interested in Earth’s cultural riches? You spend too much time underground!”
Wagstaff’s flickercladding flared silvery-white with emotion. “You sshould sshow thhe olld mann mmorre respecct! TEX and MEX just want to eat his brainn! And if we donn’t stopp themm, the bigg bopperrs will eatt up all the rresst of uss too!”
“Is that all you called me out here for?” Ralph asked. “To air your fears of the big boppers?” It was time to be going. He had come all the way to Maskelyne Crater for nothing. It had been a stupid idea, plugging into the One at the same time as Wagstaff. Just like a digger to think that would change anything.