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  "That's my nestmate," said Ouish. "That's her right now. And I don't know how she got that way or where she is. Tell me about the guest who took her."

  "At first Tre thought he was just a weird redneck limpware salesman," said Terri.

  "His name is Randy Karl Tucker," added Tre. "He's from Kentucky. He was real interested in Monique last night, and this morning he got her to rickshaw him out of here. I almost caught up with them near the wharf, but Tucker put some kind of DIM patches on my tires that made them jump off my wheels and try to choke me and turn into seagulls and fly away. Does… does that any make sense to you guys?"

  "It could be done," said Xanana. "Have you heard of superleeches? No? You poor fleshers can be so out of it. There's a new kind of leech-DIM called superleeches; they just started showing up in August. Nobody's told you? A

  superleech lets a human take control of a moldie or, for that matter, take control of a simple DIM device like an imipolex tire. It's made of some new kind of imipolex. None of us knows where the superleeches are coming from. They're very bad. Very very bad. Very very very bad. Very very very very bad—" Xanana repeated this loop phrase maybe twenty or a hundred times, saying it faster and with more verys each time, so that the last repetitions merged into a single chirp. Xanana liked infinite regresses.

  "And you say Tucker's a cheeseball?" interrupted Ouish.

  "I don't really know for sure," said Terri. "It's a guess."

  "Yeah Monique was gonna fuck him," said Xlotl. "We was talkin' about it during our break. Just ball him to make money, ya know."

  "Oh wow, that's classy," exclaimed Terri. "Monique turning tricks in our motel.

  If that's the case, we don't want her working here, do we, Tre? With the children? We don't want to run that kind of motel, do we? We don't want the Clearlight to end up like that horrible place where my father died!" The moldies shifted about uneasily at this remark, but Terri seemed not to notice.

  "Answer me, Tre!"

  "No, we don't want that," said Tre slowly. He'd been deep in thought ever since hearing what Xanana said. "I need to find out more about these superleeches.

  I've got this feeling they're based on my four-dimensional Perplexing Poultry.

  How come Apex Images never tells me anything?"

  "Let's stick to the point," said Xlotl. "How do we save Monique? Is it for real that she's underwater?"

  "She might be," said Ouish. "Or she might just be dreaming."

  "Maybe she and Tucker turned right at the wharf and headed up toward Steamer Lane," suggested Tre. "Can you guys uvvy any moldies there?"

  "Let me try," said Xanana. "Everooze and Ike might be surfing Steamers today."

  In a minute, he'd made contact. Everooze, father of Monique and Xanana, was indeed surfing Steamer Lane, a point break at the Santa Cruz lighthouse.

  Xanana spoke aloud so that Tre and Terri could follow the conversation.

  "Yaar, Pop, have you seen Monique? Or has anyone else there seen her? Yeah, I'll hold on while you check. What's that? Zilly the liveboard did? Monique turned herself into a diving suit for a tourist and jumped into the ocean? But you didn't notice it yourself. You were shredding the curl. Wavy. Yeah. We think Monique's been abducted. Her signal's really weird; you can check it out.

  You're going after her? Hold on, Ouish and me want to come too."

  "I'm in," said Xlotl.

  "And me too," said Terri. "If I can wear you underwater, Xanana?"

  "Sure thing. Is Tre coming? He could ride inside Ouish."

  "I should rest," said Tre. "I'm still a little shaky from the accident. And I've got to find out about this superleech stuff. I'll make some uvvy calls."

  "Okay," said Terri. "But be sure and take it easy. Ouish, can you rickshaw me out to Steamers?"

  "I don't do that," said Ouish coldly. "I'm a diver, not a rickshaw."

  "You can say that again," said Xanana. "You can say, 'You can say that again'

  again. You can say, 'You can say, 'You can say, "You can say that again" again'

  again. You can say, "You can say, 'You can say that again' again" again'

  again."

  And he was off to the races with another regress.

  "La-di-da," said Xlotl. "This ain't no tea dance. Get the hell on me, Terri."

  Xlotl formed a saddle shape on his back, and Terri got aboard. The three moldies and Terri went bouncing down the hill.

  Tre watched them go, checked on Molly and the kids, sat down in a comfortable chair, donned the uvvy, planning to put in a call to Stahn Mooney. But just then the uvvy signaled for him.

  "Hello?"

  "Hi there!" Tre saw the image of a teenage girl hick with a colorless lank ponytail. "My name is, um, Jenny? I bet you're wondering about Randy Karl Tucker's superleeches, aren't you?" Jenny gave a shrill giggle. "I could tell you all about them if I wanted to."

  "Are you working with Randy for the Heritagists or something?" asked Tre. "I want Monique back right now. Are you a blackmailer?"

  "Those are silly questions," said Jenny. "Me, a Heritagist? A blackmailer?

  Think bigger, Tre. I want to talk to you about smart stuff! I can tell you exactly how Sri Ramanujan at Emperor Staghorn used your 4D Poultry to design imipolex-4 and the superleech. I have a viddy of him explaining it. If I show it to you, will you promise to tell me all the things it makes you think of next?" "But I have an exclusive contract with Apex Images."

  "Oh right! I'm so sure. And meanwhile Apex never tells you anything.

  Ramanujan gets your ideas and hogs them and doesn't give you anything back. You can trust Jenny, Randy. I'll never tell anyone a thing about our little deal. Here's a peek."

  Jenny started a tape of a round-faced Indian man, presumably Ramanujan, explaining about his marvelous new Tessellation Equation. He seemed to be in a lab, and there was a math screen behind him. Tre could instantly see that this was a major mathematical breakthrough and that it had been inspired by his 4D

  Poultry. It was like he was suddenly getting a glass of water after crawling through a desert. Just then Jenny stopped the tape.

  "Are we interested? Hmmm?" Something synthetic about the hum made Tre suddenly realize that Jenny was a software construct and not a person at all. God only knew who she really worked for.

  "Please let me see the rest of it, Jenny."

  "And you promise to tell me what it makes you think of?"

  "I promise."

  CHAPTER FOUR. RANDY. MARCH 2052 - AUGUST 2053

  All through the fall and winter of 2051, Parvati kept up her visits to Randy.

  They had sex and took camote/leech-DIM trips together, and now and then Parvati would take Randy on tours into the surrounding countryside. Once they went to the jungle and rode wild elephants; another time they flew over the Western Ghats to go diving in the Arabian Sea. Shiva came along for that trip; he'd learned to tolerate Randy, as Randy was now giving Parvati a full kilogram of imipolex a month toward the creation of Shiva and Parvati's third child.

  To make enough money for the imipolex payments, Randy was working lots of overtime hours at Emperor Staghorn. He absorbed an intensive uvvy course on Electrical Contracting and began doing some of the electrical work in the sub fab as well as the plumbing. Thanks to his shared weekly camote/ leech-DIM

  trips with Parvati, he felt like his mind was getting bigger all the time.

  Parvati carried most of the imipolex on her belly, and after ten months she stuck out as if she were massively pregnant. Shiva was equally fattened up with the imipolex that he'd obtained on his own. On the eleventh month after her first date with Randy, Parvati showed up at the Tipu Bharat room looking like a feeble ghost of her old self. She and Shiva had pooled their hard-won surplus imipolex to make the body of a new moldie son named Ganesh—their final child.

  Once a moldie had produced three children, he or she normally died.

  "Please help me to get strong again, Randy," said Parvati. "If you give me enough imipolex, I can use
it to upgrade my own body. If I don't get it, I'll rot and fall apart like Angelika and Sammie-Jo. Shiva's already stinking—he accepts death, but I don't. Randy, if you get me forty kilograms of imipolex, can renew myself. I know I'm not so attractive as before, but—"

  "Don't worry, Parvati," said Randy, feverishly pressing her against him and taking deep breaths of her slightly putrefied scent. "You're the one I love, li'l stinker. I'll find a way. I'll take out a loan. I'll push for a promotion!"

  "Oh, Randy. I know it's wrong, but sometimes—sometimes I actually enjoy having you touch me. Yes, do touch me, darling. Tell me you love me."

  With this inspiration, Randy checked the Emperor Staghorn in-house list of job openings and applied for a position as a process engineer for Emperor Staghorn's great researcher, Sri Ramanujan.

  When Randy approached Neeraj Pondicherry for a recommendation, the older man was incredulous. "You have no higher degrees, Randy, no college education. You're a plumber, a handyman. Do you have any notion of what a process engineer does?"

  "Hell, it can't be so different from hooking up pipes and wires. I need the raise, Neeraj. I want to buy Parvati a complete body upgrade."

  "It would be more realistic to take up with a fresh young moldie, Randy. A

  one-year-old. Instead of quixotically squandering so many rupees to keep a four-year-old moldie alive."

  "Are you gonna help me or not?"

  "Of course I will help," sighed Neeraj. "I can tell Ramanujan that you are a reliable and uniquely adaptable employee. The work you've done on the electric power network in the sub fab is very ingenious; this work evidences your ability to extrapolate beyond plumbing. Indeed, now that I think upon it, it seems possible that Ramanujan may choose you. He is a very strange person."

  A week later Randy started work in Ramanujan's lab, a large room off to one side of the fab. Half of Ramanujan's lab was a walled-off clean room, and half of it was the man's messy office, which included a small kitchen area. Ramanujan was a short uncouth man, stout, unshaven, and not overly clean. His brown eyes shone with preternatural intelligence.

  "So, Mr. Tucker, you are the new chap to be helping me," said Ramanujan in welcome. "Don't be shy, I too have bucolic origins—although of course I am Brahman. Neeraj Pondicherry tells me that you are very dexterous with complex systems. As it happens, your complete lack of academic credentials is a plus rather than a minus. For reasons of industrial security, I prefer that my assistants are not able to fully understand what I am doing."

  "I'm rarin' to go, Sri. Can you walk me around and tell me what's a-goin' on?

  And what all a process engineer does?"

  "A research scientist makes things begin to happen; a process engineer arranges that the same things may continue to happen for a very long time. In this laboratory I am creating some experimental designer imipolex that I use to make leech-DIMs. At present I am crafting these DIMs one at a time; my immediate problem is how to avoid doing all this work by myself so that I can focus on the question of how to enhance the functionality of the leech-DIMs. You do know what leech-DIMs are?"

  "You bet," said Randy. "I have a moldie girlfriend, and I put one of your leech-DIMs on her all the time. After we fuck, I'll chew up a couple of her camote nuggets and slap the leech-DIM on her and then—" Randy broke off when he noticed Ramanujan's shocked expression. This was the first time he'd tried to tell a human the details of what he habitually did with Parvati.

  "Please go on," said Ramanujan dryly. "I am on tenterhooks."

  "Well, Sri, it's like Parvati and me see God. Everything gets white and then it breaks into beautiful colors. And Parvati is in there with me. It's not really magic, even though it feels that way—she wraps herself around my head while we're tripping, so I guess she's like a big uvvy echoing the camote hallucinations. She says the leech-DIM sets all of her thoughts loose at once.

  Did you ever realize that Everything is the same as Nothing?"

  Ramanujan frowned and shook his head. "The whole point of my inventing the leech-DIM, Mr. Tucker, was to provide a means of protection from moldies. Yet you are drugging yourself like a sadhu and wrapping a moldie around your head?

  I think before we go any further I must give you a brainscan to make sure that you don't have a thinking cap in your skull. It would be a security disaster to have the moldies looking out through my assistant's eyes."

  "Parvati and I love each other, and she promised not to put no thinking cap on me. But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and scan me, Sri. Where's the brainscanner at?"

  "Right here," said Ramanujan, pointing to a small circular hatch set into his office wall at waist height. "Just lean over and stick your head inside."

  "You've got a scanner built into your wall?"

  Suddenly there was a needler in Ramanujan's hand. "No temporizing, please, Mr.

  Tucker. Get over there and stick your head into the scanner. For all I know, you're a moldie-run meat puppet playing the part of the innocent oaf."

  "Shitfire," said Randy weakly and stuck his head into the round hole in the wall. There was a buzzing, a flash of purple light, and then it was over.

  "All's well and good," said Ramanujan, his needler already back out of sight.

  "I'm sorry if I frightened you. Would you object to being scanned every day?"

  "Is it bad for me?"

  "Not particularly. Especially as compared with your other habits."

  "Don't you like moldies, Sri?"

  "I'm fascinated by them, Mr. Tucker. But I fear them. My ongoing work is to find ways for human logic to control them. My first leech-DIM is a crude design—it zeroes out all of a moldie's neuronal thresholds to produce an effect that I suppose could be thought of as similar to that of a mystical union with the One as you suggest. In the future, I hope to have leech-DIMs which allow human users to more directly control the behavior of a moldie. Enlightenment is easy, but logic is hard."

  "How do you make leech-DIMs?"

  "The abstract answer involves a great deal of higher mathematics which would be quite impossible for you to understand. The concrete answer lies in there."

  Ramanujan gestured toward the clean room half of his lab, which was separated from them by a narrow transparent chamber holding bunny suits and an air shower.

  "Shall we go in?"

  The lab had a long, cluttered workbench on either side of the room—a chemical bench on the right and a biological bench on the left.

  The near end of the chemical bench held a miniaturized glass refinery, which was fed by lines coming up through the floor from the sub fab. As Randy now knew, the tubes carried such things as water, glycerol, ethanol, polystyrene, ethylbenzene, tetrafluoroethylene, poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), poly(methyl vinyl ether), and solutions of natural resins and alkaloids extracted from the plants and animals of Gaia's jungles and seas.

  The refinery cracked and cooked the chemical compounds into imipolex variants for Ramanujan to decant into a multitude of small beakers, tanks, trays, watch glasses, and crucibles that were ranged all down the length of the chemical bench.

  The center of the room held a large brightly lit aquarium. Inside the aquarium, small imipolex slugs crawled and floated about like the shimmering nudibranchs, ctenophores, and jellyfish of the Indian Ocean—or, no, they were like Kentucky leeches—like freshwater horse leeches lazily stretching and shortening their bodies as they waited for prey.

  "I keep them in there while I'm working on them," said Ramanujan. "When I'm ready to ship one of them, I dry it into a hibernation state."

  "You make them by just pouring out some special imipolex, and that's that?"

  "Of course not. In order to get any computational power, the little slugs of imipolex need to be doped with metals and seeded with chipmold. The main fab breaks that into numerous steps, but in here I have a nanomanipulator that can do everything at once."

  Set into the back wall of the lab there was a three-dimensional nanomanipulator with a heads-up holograph
ic display showing a magnified electron microscope image of the DIM inside it. The device also had a VR uvvy that allowed the user to fly about inside the image, using and programming the nanomanipulator's individual nanopincers and nanofeelers.

  "It's fairly easy to train the nanomanipulator to do repeated steps," said Ramanujan. "If it was very much smarter, it would be a full-fledged moldie, and my security would be smashed to blazes. It's an awkward position I'm in.

  Hopefully you can learn to emulate in some measure the efficiency of a moldie.

  Go ahead and try on the uvvy."

  Randy put it on. He was in an ocean of imipolex, with hollowed-out tube tunnels leading here and there. Some of the tubes held bright geometric icons—these stood for rare-earth metal crystals. Elsewhere in the mazes of the tubes were fuzzy globs—these represented the spores and algae of the chipmold. Myriads of little claws were scattered about—his nanopincers.

  "The metals and the spores have to be distributed in certain ways," said Ramanujan. "Fortunately, the controls are fractalized. That is, you can group them and cascade them. It's as if you could shrink your hands and put copies of your hands at the tips of each of your fingers—and then do it again."

  Randy played around in the nanomanipulator's space for a while. The tubes were like pipes, and the cascaded controls were not unlike a multihead pipe-gun.

  "I can drive this," he said presently. "But what patterns do you want me to put in?

  Where are the specs?" "In here," said Ramanujan, tapping his head.

  "How'm I gonna know what to do?"

  "Just study the patterns I've been using and do something similar. As it happens, the actual pattern used for the etching process doesn't seem to be terrifically important. It's more like you're a farmer cultivating a field—you plow it up to a certain statistical density and then you broadcast your seeds.

  The field and the seeds are smarter than the farmer."

  "Thanks a lot, Sri. Now tell me about that other bench."

  The biological bench along the left wall was covered with flasks and beakers where the chipmold cultures were prepared. One large beaker was half-filled with a gel of imipolex made cloudy by a million threads of mycelium. Up above the gel, great ruffs of chipmold climbed the sides of the beaker like shelf mushrooms on a rotten tree.