The Big Aha Page 2

  Carlo glared at Skungy. “Keep it up with that loose-cannon bullshit, and you’ll be the very last qwet rat that Slygro ever makes. Gaven and I need to see some willingness to please. Right now, Skungy. Start kissing my butt.”

  “You go first,” said Skungy, laying a fresh turd on my counter. “Clean my tail. Aw, I’m just joshing. Here’s something sweet.” The rat began rocking his pelvis and singing, his little voice raspy and sweet. “I want to liiiive,” he twanged, for all the world like a Grand Ole Opry performer. “I want to raise me up a famileeee!”

  A faint odor of qwet rat had permeated the store by now. And Skungy’s plangent melody caught the attention of the other nurbs—the bin of floor lickers, the web-cruising chairs, the wristphone squidskins, the buoyant magic pumpkins, and even the stack of flat, leathery house seeds—all of them were nodding and twitching in sympathy. Gaven’s gnat swarm was folding upon itself like ghostly dough.

  The scene reminded me of those primordial black and white cartoons where all the objects on a farm start jiving to a tune. I was falling under the music’s spell too. Skungy had an ability to get all of us into his channel. Was this part of the quantum wetware thing? The rat seemed taller than before, his fur lustrous and beautifully groomed, his motions eloquent and filled with worldly-wise tenderness and wit.

  Relishing his power over us, Skungy rasped a final chorus, then took a deep bow with his paws outstretched. An appreciative murmur passed around the room. We loved him.

  Well, maybe not Carlo. “That part about raising a family?” Carlo said, his voice cold. “That’s out of the question, Skungy. You’re sterile. Like all the other nurbs.”

  “Man that’s harsh!” said Skungy, feigning exaggerated surprise.

  “Think about it,” I put in, thinking I needed to comfort the rat. “If you nurbs were to start hatching out litters, what would retailers like me even sell? How would producers like Slygro pay their development expenses?”

  “Oh, Skungy knows damn well he’s sterile,” said Carlo. “He’s just jerking your chain.”

  “I’m gonna clone me some copies,” said Skungy. “I ain’t no simple tool like those other nurbs. They’re soft machines. Me, I’ve got fighting spirit, and I’m qwet, see? A whole new deck of cards.”

  Carlo sighed and peeled the healer leech off his finger. The wound was gone, with the skin grown back into place. “I keep telling Gaven he should reprogram Skungy’s personality,” said Carlo, studying his finger. “But he won’t. It’s like he’s too impatient about impressing us local yokels. In a frantic rush to buy our respect.”

  “Buying is fine. I’m close to tapped out.”

  “Oh, did I mention your bonus?” Carlo dug into his fancy jacket and hauled out a serious wad of hundred dollar bills. “To help you with transitional issues. While you’re distributing and patching the rats.”

  A thought struck me. “What if I myself had quantum wetware? Could it give me a better personality?”

  “We’ll see,” said Carlo. “Most likely it would make you smarter—at least some of the time. And, yeah, the qwet rats are a warm-up for the personal product. I’m hanging with this new woman who’s far into the concept. The one I mentioned—Junko Shimano?”

  “Have I met her?”

  “Not from Louisville. A Japanese California girl. Talks all creaky and flat. Went to Stanford? She’s the head nurbware engineer at Slygro, yeah. Invented the qwet tech. Didn’t even patent it, for some weird idealistic California-type reason.”

  “No patent?”

  “Doesn’t matter yet, since nobody but Junko really understands about qwet. Gaven’s mostly faking his part. Slygro’s got a big head start having Junko on board. We’re tiny, you know, working out of a barn on Gaven’s farm. I met Junko the first day that I signed on as the marketeer, and I think we clicked. I’m betting I’ll get her in bed. Only—she’s on a different level than me. Like she’s a human and I’m a dog? But I’m playing it all jaded and courtly, and that usually works. I’m hoping for some volcanic geek-girl sex, qrude. I might even capture some video that you could—”

  The gnats appeared upset—to the extent that tweaked insects can show emotion.

  “What now?” said Carlo, noticing the swarm’s chaotic tremors. “You’re jealous, Gaven? Them that asks, gits. Learn from the rockabilly qrudes. Stop being a number skull.”

  “I’m in a dry spell myself,” I sighed. “I need to find the big aha. Before I wither and drop like an autumn leaf.”

  “Everyone’s getting so sad and serious!” said Carlo, shaking his head. “Just because we turned thirty? We’ll be giving you ten qwet rats on Monday, Zad. Keep Skungy for your helper. I’m sensing a mutual resonance between you two.”

  I looked down at the qwet rat. As if overwhelmed by the Derby pizza and his performance routine, he was lying limp on my sales counter. Asleep? He didn’t look so nasty to me anymore. He looked like he belonged. He wouldn’t bite me. I wasn’t a jerk like Carlo.

  “Deal,” I said. “I’ll keep Skungy. But I’m warning you that business isn’t good. I know you’re giving me that incentive fee, but it’ll only cover the hassle of housing your qwet rats for—let’s say a month. If they’re not selling by the end of October, I get more money or Gaven takes them back.”

  “Incentive fee,” echoed Carlo, savoring the tasty phrase. “Let me tell you this. If you don’t bungle the qwet rat test run, Gaven might let you do trial marketing for more new nurbs. Even better, he might let you market the human qwet treatment he wants to sell. He has a whole bunch of loofy things to spring. Lucky little Louisville. Gaven says we’ll be, like, the epicenter of the qwet wave.”

  “Let me ask you this,” I said, uneasy with all these grandiose plans. “Do you remember my first roadspider? Zix? Untested nurbs can get into dark and surreal fail-modes. Tragically inept. Deadly. People know this. A barn-brewed uncertified trial-market nurb is a tough sell.”

  “Your art shop sells to the fringe,” said Carlo. “The eccentrics, the loofy debs, the qrudes among the horsey set. You sell forbidden fruit. And they feel safe getting it from you. You’re a society artist. Your shop is in the eleganto old-town district on Main Street, surrounded by red-brick buildings and the up-to-the-minute Gaven Graber highrise housetrees by the river. I can hear the tintinnabulation of ice cubes in the merrymilk highballs from those balconies. You’re at the core, qrude. Totally luxor. Like a high-end drug pusher.” Carlo’s eyes were liquid, sincere. He had a way of getting deeply into whatever line he was feeding you.

  “I’m living in the back of a store,” I said flatly. “And the best thing that’s happened to me today is that I’m feeling this weirdly organic bond of sympathy with a rat.”

  Despite my spoken doubts, I had a gut feeling that Skungy would be of great value. A rapport was indeed forming. And at this point I realized that Skungy wasn’t actually asleep.

  “He’s using a cosmic mind state to merge his quantum waves with yours,” explained Carlo, giving me a perspicacious look. “A qwet rat does that with his new owner. They’re kind of telepathic. You’re feeling his glow.”

  I myself was no mind reader—not yet, anyway— but with the qwet rat focusing on me, I imagined I could feel his little breaths, the rapid patter of his tiny heart. I even glimpsed the dancing triangles of his ratty thoughts. Cat noses, rat vulvas, corners of cheese.

  “I wave on him,” I murmured.

  “Here’s his special food,” said Carlo, handing me a sack of golden brown cubes—addictive Roller nurb chow for Skungy. The chow smelled like tobacco—which was indeed one of its ingredients. As long as I controlled Skungy’s chow, I’d be at the center of his life.

  Carlo was ready to move on to other topics. “So—with Jane out of the picture, what are you doing for action? Boning a sex nurb?” Carlo swiveled his head, keenly scanning my store. “You still stock them, don’t you? Slit spheres, magic staffs, like that?”

  “No, you moron. Sex nurbs are over. The Live Art shop is
about quality and grace. And when I get antsy, I go out behind the shop and work on my new car. Sublimating randiness into craft. Thereby enhancing my he-man charm.”

  “Car?” said Carlo blankly.

  “I’ve got an antique show car,” I said. “It’s the same model as the black convertible where JFK got shot a hundred years ago. That President? Wife wore a pillbox hat? My car’s a Lincoln Continental stretch limo from a bankrupt car museum out on Shelbyville Road. Sizzler Jones bought out the museum—you remember Sizzler from school? He’s a land developer now. I traded him one of my nurb-paint pictures for this particular vehicle. I let him have Cold Day in Hell: Why You Believe in God.”

  “Always with that same half of the title, Zad?”

  “My brand. It still works a little bit. Sometimes. Rack up a fat sale by Louisville’s beloved rebel qrude artist, Zad Plant!”

  “You said it was a trade to Sizzler Jones,” corrected Carlo. “Not a sale.”

  “It’s the same,” I said impatiently. “Anyway, Sizzler is razing the museum and planting a grove of Gaven Graber housetrees. There’s rolling fields and a lake, see, and Sizzler put a few thoroughbreds in the pasture. Nurb merry mares, actually, but whatev.”

  “Look, I gotta get going,” said Carlo, losing interest.

  “Let me finish! You’re gonna do business with me, we gotta chat, right? Whittle and spit and talk about cars! Like our grandfathers used to do.” I was oddly excited, and I was running my hand across the damp fur of the sleeping rat all the while. Picking up traces of his dreams. “My Lincoln Continental has a V8 internal combustion engine and a Turbo-Drive transmission,” I continued. “Not that you can get gas these days, but I’ve got Detroit pig-iron all the same.”

  Carlo was at the front door, ready to make his exit. “Roadspiders and flydinos are what matter,” he said, pointing at the sky. “There’s Reba Ranchtree on her flydino right now. Slygro’s biggest investor. Yeah.”

  For a while after high school, Reba had been my girlfriend. She’d been very bitter when I dropped her for Jane. And then she’d started dating Carlo and we’d become friends again. Always the same little circle of people in my life, nothing ever forgotten, all of us endlessly mind-gaming each other. Louisville’s like that.

  Following Carlo out to the grassy street, I peered up into the swaying housetrees by the river. It was getting on towards the evening of a late September day, a Friday, the sun low and brassy, the temperature bearable, an evening breeze beginning to stir.

  Reba’s condo was in the same tree as where I’d been living with Jane. I could see Reba lying on her stomach on the back of the oversized leather-winged nurb flydino that she rode. Tiny and far as Reba was, she somehow managed to see Carlo and me, and she gave us a wave. Maybe the wave was cheerful, but I took it to be lofty. Like a queen acknowledging ants.

  “Reba and her rhamphorhyncus,” I said with unexpected bitterness. “The savage, toothy beak. The walnut-sized brain.” Loser that I’d become, I hated anyone who was doing well. I was forgetting that Reba was my pal.

  “And Reba’s snobby about—what?” said Carlo, stoking my resentment trip. “That’s what I always wonder when I see her these days. Why does she think she’s better than me? Because her parents died and left her a fortune? I mean, both of us were her lovers ten years ago. That should make for happy memories, right?”

  “Actually she treats me okay,” I had to admit. “But it’s like she’s sorry for me. Little does Reba realize how nice my shop’s spare room is. Little does she grasp that I’ve attached a giant nurb slug to the underside of my obsolete metal car. The slug is an industrial nurb I got wholesale from United Mutations. I drove my slugfoot Lincoln around the block last week. Did you hear about that?”

  “Maybe, yeah, now that you mention it.” Carlo was mildly interested again, and he let me draw him back inside.

  “My big ride, she slime around so nasty,” I said, my spirits rising. “Low and slow, qrude. A luxor assassination limo with a slugfoot. I might relaunch myself selling retrofitted cars.”

  “Screw retro. But a giant slugfoot—that’s good. I want to ride in your car. When I have more time.”

  Skungy was snuggling against my hand. Brother Rat. He rolled onto his back to expose his white underbelly. I caressed him with my fingertips.

  “Before you go, Carlo, give me some background. For pitching our qwet rats to the slobbering marks. I mean—what the fuck is quantum wetware?”

  “Well—wetware is, like, your body’s chemistry. The genes and the hormones and the brain cell goo. You’re a wet computer. And your brain has this switch that Gaven calls a gee-haw-whimmy-diddle. He thinks it’s a funny name.”

  “Huh?”

  “The name is a hillbilly thing. It’s a wooden toy that, like, your country cousin Dick Cheeks might whittle to sell to the slickers at the Shelby County Fair? You’ve probably seen one. It’s a thin bumpy stick with a tiny wood twirler like a propeller on one end? You rub another stick along the bumps, and you holler ‘gee’ or ‘haw’ like you’re a farmer talking to his mule, and the propeller spins the one way or the t’other. Fun for the young, fun for the old. Gee-haw-whimmy-diddle.”

  “Oh, please. And your brain’s wetware gee-haw-whimmy-diddle switch does—what?”

  “The ultra-nerds say that a quantum system can be smooth and cosmic—or jerky and robotic. Gaven’s quantum wetware lets you jam your brain’s gee-haw-whimmy-diddle switch wide open. You can stay in the cosmic mode. And if your buddy does that, too—why then y’all get into a kind of telepathy. What we call qwet teep.”

  “And Skungy the rat can read minds.”

  “Yeah, like I said. He’s better at it if he’s around someone else who’s got the quantum wetware. A fellow qwet teeper.”

  “I’m liking this, Carlo. I’d love to have telepathy. And then at last someone might understand what I’m saying. Or what I’m trying to paint.”

  “The lonely bull. The qwet teep won’t be exactly like you expect. According the Gaven and Junko, teepers don’t actually remember each other’s thoughts. Because of some even more complicated quantum mechanics bullshit.”

  “Oh man. It’s bait and switch.”

  “After Gaven hired Junko, he was looking for secret military funding, but when he told the war-pigs that qwet teep won’t be any good for sending secret messages, they cut him off. And now our man’s on the brink of a financial cliff. Junko and I are saying he needs to be selling people the qwet teep right away. People will enjoy it even if it’s not some obvious bullshit secret-messaging thing.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Can Skungy read my mind or not?”

  “Let’s just say he’s good at picking up people’s vibes. Thing is, as long as you’re physically near a qwet teeper, you’ll get these little brief touches of mind merge with them, no matter what. And if you’re qwet yourself, you get the full connection.”

  “And then?

  “As soon as Skungy was qwet, Gaven used teep to copy a qwet guy’s whole personality over to the rat’s brain.”

  “So now Skungy’s a person?” I echoed, more bewildered all the time.

  “Yeah, baby,” said Carlo. “And we’re rats.” He put his hands up under his chin with his wrists limp. He cheesed his teeth at me, nibbling the air.

  I held my hands like rat-paws too. Skungy, Carlo and I looked at each other, our six eyes glittering with glee. A multi-level goof was filling the room, fueled by Skungy’s musky odor. It was like we were high. I could feel the rat’s scent molecules impacting me—pow, pow, pow.

  I wrestled myself out of my trance and asked another question. “And where exactly did Gaven get Skungy’s particular human personality?”

  “Joey Moon,” squeaked Skungy. His rough little voice was warm. “I am Joey Moon.”

  “Moon works on Gaven’s farm these days,” said Carlo. “Kind of a caretaker. He’s twenty-five, has a pretty wife, always broke. A pale guy with big dark eyes. Kind of rowdy. Dri
nks, gets into axelerate buds. He calls himself an artist too.”

  “ I know him,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s not exactly the ideal personality you’d want to implant inside a consumer product.”

  I’d seen Joey Moon around town over the years, riding a scorpion or drunk in a bar. He was about eight years younger than me, and several notches wilder than my crowd had ever been. He was indeed an artist, in his own way, not that he painted. He made weird, confrontational works from nurbs. Bursting sacks of paint, hypnotically droning mushrooms, slug nurbs that left iridescent trails on your walls and, more recently, some paintings that he wouldn’t show me.

  In a way, I admired Joey. He went far out. But when he’d wanted to hang his latest paintings in my gallery I’d turned him down. Apparently they were portraits of some type, but, like I’m saying, he steadfastly refused to let me see them until they went on sale. He worried that, as an “art star,” I might “steal his big idea.” From the few hints that Joey dropped, I had the impression that the so-called pictures might be empty frames or glass mirrors. But his stories were always changing. It was like he wanted your approval, but he wanted to completely mock you and prank you—all at the same time.

  “I didn’t like for Gaven to be using Joey Moon for the rat either,” said Carlo. “Like I said, I wanted someone from New York. But Joey was handy. And, hell, we’re only in prototype mode. Gaven paid Joey to sign a legal waiver and to give us full mental access, whatever that means. He gave Joey him a nice chunk of founder’s stock as well. And then he made Joey qwet.”

  “I still don’t get the point.”

  “The point is that we didn’t have to design Skungy’s personality. Joey just teeped it over. Like—here! This is me! He didn’t send it as a program or anything. You can’t use teep for detailed facts, see. Joey sent himself as a personal vibe. Like an emotion, almost.”

  “So that’s good?”

  “Yeah, but the qwetting process has had some effects on Joey. He’s not coping. We’re still waiting to see how things pan out. Before we start selling qwet teep treatments all over the place.”