Complete Stories (144 page)

“You two have thought about this a lot,” said Laura. She glanced over at Elver and giggled. The silent Elver responded with a nod.

“Our products will go everywhere, and their glyphic subtexts will remake the world!” declaimed Ola. By now, Elver had wriggled fully out of the water, settling himself near Laura’s feet.

“So let’s get it done,” said Mark, a little distracted by the thoughts evoked by the eel man’s proximity.

“Oh, and one other thing,” said Laura brightly. “We’ll work images of Mark and me into a lot of the ads. We’ll be wrapped around glyphs of love and trust and acceptance, you see. That way those government pigs will be primed to pardon our so-called crimes. In case we, uh, ever want to go home.”

“We will be mailing our press-kits to whomever you suggest,” said Ola smoothly.

The quartet worked congenially all that day in the mold-lit cavern. Elver wasn’t a bad guy, for being an immortal subaqueous demigod who communicated via pictures on his flesh.

Around tea time they took a break, and Ola fetched them a picnic basket of wine, berries, bread, and smoked eel-meat, along with a blanket to make it more comfortable on the stony edge of the underground lake.

As he lay resting from the repast, idly dreaming up still grander plans, Mark noticed one of Elver’s tendrils snaking across the cloth to alight on Laura’s leg. Laura sighed and smiled, shifting onto her back. Ola was watching too, and batting her eyes. Mark felt himself slipping into the same erotic intoxication that had possessed him the night before. He turned to look at the ålefisk man.

Although Elver possessed no precise human countenance, Mark could detect what passed for a smile in an eel.

============

Written September, 2010.

Flurb #13
, Fall, 2011.

In 2009, Sylvia and I took memorable trip to Norway, riding a ferry up a fjord to the lovely little town of Fjaerland. We we disembarked from the boat on a quiet Sunday morning, and I immediately had the sense of having walked into an episode of the old
Twilight Zone
. I decided to go with a Lovecraftian theme for the story, but I couldn’t quite get it going. And so I turned to my ace collaborator, Paul DiFilippo, who quickly got some subplots going. One thing I enjoy about collaborating is that, when all goes well, you develop a fusion style that’s not quite the same as that of either of the individual authors. Needless to say, the characters in our story bear no resemblance to the actual inhabitants of Fjaerland, Norway, nor to the management of the wonderful Hotel Mundal to be found there.

Vicky was a cheerful, lively woman, given to moments of deep inattention. She had a strong sense of fashion, and she made the most of her slim wardrobe. Her cute husband Bix worked as a freelance programmer, picking up a couple of contracts a year, and Vicky earned a little money teaching yoga classes at a studio off Valencia Street in San Francisco. The biggest factor in their lives these days was their two-year-old son, whom they’d named Stoke. The name had been a last-minute inspiration.

One rainy Tuesday afternoon in April, Vicky met up with Bix and Stoke at a funky coffee shop called the Scavenger. The Scavenger was a good place to hang, and it was near the spot where Vicky taught. A hyperactive guy named Cardo ran the place, and you could buy his third-hand furniture right off the floor if you wanted.

Cardo was a study in contrasts. His family back in Manila ran a business called Gloze, who made quick-turn-around knock-offs of the latest biogadgets. Gloze was supporting Cardo as their San Francisco rep, but instead of renting an office, Cardo had chosen to open a grungy coffee shop for his workspace. He looked a like a thirty-something businessman, in that he wore shirts with collars and had his hair slicked back. But he lived like an impoverished slacker, and spent most of his time talking about the new pepster music.

As it happened, Cardo and his wife Maricel lived just a few doors away from Vicky and her husband. Quite recently, Bix had been doing some consulting for Cardo and Gloze, but last week there’d been a falling out—Bix wanted extra money for something unexpected he’d discovered. Cardo would have been willing to give Bix the bonus, but his family back in Manila wouldn’t approve the overage. So Bix had resigned, sort of—even though he was still hanging out in the Scavenger, and even though he’d kept his not-actually-in-production-yet Gloze squidskin computer. Cardo still had a biogadget link for copying Bix’s work off his rectangle of autonomous cephalopod tissue. But for now, Bix had stopped telling Cardo how to use his cryptic new program.

“Mama!” piped Stoke, noticing Vicky the instant that she stepped into the coffee shop. Bix was fiddling with his polka-dotted Gloze squidskin. Father and son were sprawled on a fat vinyl couch.

Bix smiled up at Vicky, cheerful as usual. He never seemed to mind taking care of the tot—if anything, two-year-olds were closer to Bix’s wavelength than were most grown-ups. Employed or not, Bix was pushing forward with the discoveries he’d made on the Gloze prototype. Something about using pictures to model real-world systems. Bix called his new program a morphon muncher.

“Hiiiii,” said Vicky, making her way across the room.

“Tweety!” called little Stoke with a wild laugh.

“You didn’t show him those ancient Tweety and Sylvester videos, did you Bix?” asked Vicky, flopping down with her family. “Those old-time cartoons so violent. So unaware. And kind of seedy, don’t you think?

“
Birdseed
,” said Bix in his idea of Tweety’s voice. “Actually we’re munching morphons. Stoke just
thinks
this one looks like Tweety. It’s a model of the Shanghai stock exchange. Cardo’s family are especially hot for me to explain this one.” Stoke was poking Bix’s squidskin, slowly warping the bulbous canary-yellow shape.

“You’re always talking about morphons these days,” said Vicky, feeling cozy with the vague old word, which had something to do with chaos or math. “And I thought people just used morphons on t-shirts anymore. Hi Stokie.” She loved the sight and sound and scent of her husband and her little boy.

“Morphons are due for a huge comeback,” said Bix. “Even though the
old
morphons are too obvious. Homeless stoners draw them in chalk on the sidewalk. But my new morphons—”

“A fashion tsunami!” said Vicky. “Right, Stoke? A big, big
wave
!” She raised her voice an octave and bounced the couch cushions to make Stoke giggle.

“I’m paddling into position,” said Bix. “I’m building my morphon muncher into a universal emulator! As of today, I can flip my morphons into superexponential mode and the screen shudders and pukes Jello-cube pixels the size of your thumb. And each of them stands for something real. In a few minutes I’m gonna use this demo for another try at convincing Cardo’s stingy-ass relatives to pay me the bonus.” Bix glanced over to where Cardo sat behind the counter with earbuds on, poking at his phone slug and dancing in his seat.

“The practical core,” said Vicky, smiling at Bix. “The method behind his seeming madness.”

“Tweety bonk!” said Stoke, leaning in close to Bix and smacking the squidskin’s screen as hard as he could.

The yellow blob splattered and rearranged itself, taking on the appearance of a spiky sea-urchin. Endless parades of pastel elephants were marching into the slits between the sea-urchin’s spikes. Ragged St. Elmo’s fire swept up into the masts and the rigging that reticulated the space outside the urchin.

“Nobody could compute like this before the squidskins,” said Bix. “Our society ignored universal dynamics for thirty or forty years, see, and while we were gone, the morphons grew wild in our vacant lots. They got all crooked and stinky.”

“Papa stinky,” chortled Stoke, and Bix made a shocked face that sent the boy into happy laughter.

“What’s all that pink junk under the sea-urchin-shape?” asked Vicky, getting interested in the image on Bix’s screen. “It looks odd there. Like fish eggs? With little starfish in the eggs.”

“I call that kind of stuff
fnoor
,” said Bix. “Batshit weirdness, seething dog barf, morphons to the max. It shows up where your virtual world is being clipped by computational constraints. The fnoor is indirectly telling me to ramp up my paravirtualization so that my apps are running full-tilt on the Gloze bare meat.”

“Too much coffee for you,” said Vicki, finishing Bix’s cup. “Paravirtualization? Maybe I can use that word when I talk to my yoga students about getting in touch with their—bare meat?”

“The physical reality underlying the illusion,” said Bix. “The embodied wetware.”

Vicky looked around the friendly coffee shop, with all the lively people doing stuff together, techies and bums, the words and smells in the air, the dusty furniture, the nurturing rain running down the windowpanes, and the big city spring stirring outside, green sprouts in all the cracks of the alleys. It was nice to be here with her son and her man, her muscles loose and relaxed from her class.

“Real life is my favorite illusion,” said Vicky, giving Stoke a hug.

“And underneath it—” began Bix.

“A beautiful dance,” said Vicky. “You should turn off your squidskin and your phone slug and come to yoga class sometimes. Ready to go home and help Mama, Stoke?”

Bix went over to buttonhole Cardo, and Vicky took Stoke back to their tiny house on a steep, dead-end street in the Mission. Bix had managed to buy it five years ago, after a contract-programming gig for a successful start-up that had paid him in stock.

The house was kind of a dump, but Bix had made it nice. He’d replaced the rotten floorboards in the kitchen and knocked out some crazy-making interior walls—he’d painted, roofed, plumbed, and wired. He’d built a wooden deck in front, and when the weather was good, he and Vicky put furniture on the deck and driveway and lived outside like Pacific islanders.

But with a two-year-old, on a cold or rainy day, the house was tight. And if they were to have more children like they wanted to—well, really they needed to find a bigger place. But the prices were so insane. The housing situation was like some unsolvable sliding-blocks problem or word rebus revolving in your head as you tossed and turned through a long night of fever-dreams. Vicky tried not to go there.

In any case, they were happy in their house for now and Bix—dreamy, optimistic Bix—had been refinishing the attic, even though the roof up there only rose to about four feet above the floor, and every couple of yards there was a cross-bar that you had to crawl under or step over. Bix had added flooring and a couple of vents and a skylight. To get to the attic, you had to climb an aluminum step-ladder that Bix had set up beneath the crawl hole in the ceiling of their little hall.

Sometimes, after a long day of work and child-care, Bix would ascend to the attic with his music player and hang out. “It’s rather comfortable, if you lie flat on the floor,” he’d calmly say. “I can imagine people paying to go into a nightclub like that. A room that’s only four feet high, with a head-or-shin-bonking rafter every few steps. Party!” For her part, Vicky had only gone in the attic once. She didn’t like being cramped.

When Vicky and Stoke got back from the Scavenger, it was late afternoon and Stoke was a little fussy. Vicky helped him build some block towers, and then she got supper started.

When Bix showed up, they shared one of their home-brewed beers. Their circle of friends were into do-it-yourself, like urban pioneers. It was a counterbalance for the ubiquitous biogadgets.

“So how was your talk with Cardo?” asked Vicky.

“He’s got no clue about business negotiation,” said Bix shaking his head. “All he really wants is to be a deejay in Manila night-club. When we talk about business, he’s just parroting whatever his aunts and uncles say.”

“Which is?”

“Oh—that Gloze owns my new morphon muncher because I developed it on their machine. And that it’s my legal duty to give Gloze a user’s guide to the program. I’m really eager to talk about the morphon muncher, actually—if I don’t explain it to someone pretty soon I might forget how. It’s that slippery. But I want money so we can think about a bigger house. Negotiating with Cardo is impossible. He should go back to the Philippines and run a pepster music club like he wants to.”

“I think his wife’s Maricel’s little cold and unfriendly, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Bix. “I just hope Cardo and his family don’t try something weird on me. It was almost like Cardo was hinting at that today.”

“Things will look better after we eat.” They sat down and shared the vegetable stew Vicky had made, with Stoke doing pretty well with his rice and beans.

“Oh oh, I left the chickens loose,” observed Bix as they finished the meal. He’d built a henhouse against the back wall of their house, and they’d installed four hens, each a slightly different color.

Most days Bix or Vicky would let the chickens out of their coop to range around the wonderfully overgrown backyard pecking up seeds and bugs. It was fun to watch how a hen would scratch with her claws down under her fat body. After scratching, she’d mincingly walk backwards and cock her head to see what she might have unearthed. Like a businesswoman checking the messages on her phone slug.

It wasn’t a good idea to leave the chickens out overnight—all sorts of creatures thought of chickens as being lower than them on the food chain. Dogs, cats, rats…and the occasional rogue phone slug.

“Help Papa catch the chickies!” Bix told Stoke.

The boys were outside for a few minutes, then came back in laughing.

“In the tree!” Stoke told his mother, throwing his little arms into the air. “Chicken in the tree!”

“We couldn’t find them
anywhere
,” said Bix, dramatizing for the sake of the boy. “And then Stoke heard cheeping, and he looked up and saw them…”

“In the tree,” said Stoke in his sturdy little voice. “High.”

“Roosting in a row,” said Bix. “One two three four. They look smarter than before. We left them there.”

“Papa found an egg!” added Stoke, and indeed Bix had a nice big egg in his hand. He set it down on the kitchen counter.