The Big Aha Read online

  “Joey Moon sold his soul to feed his ratty little wife,” put in Skungy, loading the pathos into his grainy voice.

  “And the other Skungies?” I asked. “The qwet rats to come? Will they be copies of Joey too?”

  At this, the gnats began buzzing in Carlo’s face, and his wristphone went wild with messages.

  “That’s enough whittlin’ and spittin’ on the courthouse steps, old son,” said Carlo. “More details later. Gaven’s throwing a pre-launch picnic on his farm starting about now. You and Jane are both invited—Gaven already messaged her. He messaged Reba too. That’s where she was headed on her flydino, no doubt. Come on over soon as you can. Maybe you’ll get laid! You’re gonna like it on the Slygro team, Zad. We keep our big ole balls in the air.”

  And then Carlo was in the street, jouncing off on his roadspider.

  * * *

  2: The Coming of the Nurbs

  I’d known Jane Roller my whole life—starting in fog and shadows of early childhood. My parents were in the Rollers’ circle of friends, even though we weren’t nearly as well-off.

  I was an only child. Dad was a society painter, turning out landscapes of country mansions and portraits of the elite who lived within. He wasn’t above painting bird dogs and thoroughbred horses as well. Mom was a wedding planner, with a sideline in floral arrangements. We had a reasonably solid old house on fifteen acres in Skylight, east of Louisville. It wasn’t a working farm, just a big rolling field that flowed into the woods. We had a barn that Dad used for a studio. I attended the private St. Francis school amid the nearby horse farms—as did Jane Roller. We were in the same grade.

  So, as I say, Jane was around from the start—at church, at school fairs, at Fourth of July parties, at the Louisville Country Club, and, later, at our high-school blow-outs.

  Jane had remarkable hair—more than blonde, it was yellow with a tinge of red. She’d get flushed and shiny when she was feeling lively, which was often. She had a flexible voice—jolly, outraged, defiant, conspiratorial, amused—and she liked to talk in accents. Not that, in the earliest days, I paid much attention to her. The boys played with the boys, the girls with the girls.

  Jane’s parents owned a downtown company that made feed for livestock. When I was about four years old, they switched to making food for the new United Mutations nurbs. I first heard about this when my mother showed me what she called a bouquet reef. It was something she’d purchased for a spare-no-expense wedding reception. The bottom of the bouquet reef looked like a log, and pale, flexible blossoms were growing out of it—an amazing array, resembling white roses, creamy tulips, and calla lilies.

  “They’re not regular flowers,” Mom told me. “They’re nurbs, with special genes. More like animals than like plants, I think. Here, you can have one.” She uprooted a fake lily, bringing a bit of the crumbly log-thing with it. The lily wailed in protest, lashing back and forth.

  I’d been hearing talk about nurbs, but in the outskirts of Louisville this was the first nurb I’d actually seen. I was greatly intrigued. I took the lively lily to my room, and for a few days she was my pet. I fed her sips of water and crumbs of what Mom called nurb chow.

  “Made by our good friends the Rollers!” Mom told me. “You know Jane. The big secret is putting tobacco in the chow. That way the nurbs get hooked.”

  A couple of years later, when I was six, I went over to Jane Roller’s house for her big brother Kenny’s birthday party. I didn’t like Kenny—he was the kind of guy who’d carelessly do something violent to hurt you—and then deny that it had happened. But never mind about him for now.

  The point is that Jane had been allowed to invite all her classmates from school. The Rollers inhabited a mansion in the elegant Glenview neighborhood, closer to town than Skylight. The house had intricate wooden paneling and moldings, etched glass doors between the rooms, wrought-iron light fixtures on the walls, and ceilings twice as high as the ones in my family’s plain country home. Waiters were serving cake and ice cream from tables around the edges of the dining room. It was a blast, a kiddie paradise.

  Mrs. Roller was floating around, keeping it all together. She liked my dad, but she didn’t like me. Her hair was the same color as Jane’s. She had a sharp voice that she used to keep some control over her family.

  After awhile, Mr. Roller announced that he had a special show for us. He was a stocky man with short spiky hair, often very reckless. In addition to manufacturing the Roller nurb chow, he’d become a nurb wholesaler. He had access to the all the latest nurbs that United Mutations was putting out.

  He opened the door to a room that he’d kept closed off thus far. Something like a giant flat squid was fastened to one of the paneled walls. A nurb, twenty feet across, holding himself in place with tentacles that grew from the edges of his big flickering body. His skin was forming pictures—he was what we would come to call a squidskin display.

  What made the nurb squid a little creepy was that he had a pair of large, expressive yellow eyes, and he was watching us kids troop in. He looked as if he were uneasy, and possibly on the verge of lashing out. The tips of his tentacles were in constant motion, fretfully coiling and uncoiling.

  Chubby little Gaven Graber was there too—he was in the same grade as me and Jane. He was overly hyper, perhaps overwhelmed at being included in a birthday party. Wanting to show off, he ran up to the squidskin and yanked one of its tentacles so hard that it broke off. The severed tentacle wrapped around Gaven’s neck and choked him a little, then dropped to the floor and humped back to rejoin the squidskin. Gaven started yelling curse words—I was kind of surprised that he even knew them. Normally he talked like a little businessman.

  To calm things down, Jane’s father walked over to the squidskin with a bowl of Roller nurb chow. The nurb had a large, unsettling beak. While the nurb was eating, Mr. Roller pointed at the beak, and then at Gaven Graber, as if issuing a warning. I didn’t want to see the squid take a bite out of Gaven. You had to feel a little sorry for the kid.

  At this point Jane began clowning. “Oh, squiddy, my dear!” she yelled in a mock British accent. “Do you care for some tea?”

  “No tea, thank you, Lady Jane,” responded the squidskin. His voice was gassy and unclean. We kids whooped at the sound. The creature talked by vibrating his surface. I could see his skin bucking up and down.

  Mr. Roller gave the squidskin an instruction now, and images began to play across his slick hide. We were seeing a photorealistic cartoon adventure of a little penguin swimming deep beneath the Antarctic ice. The water was cool blue with sun-shafts of luminous green. The penguin swooped along lovely, twisting curves. Little chains of bubbles percolated upward, each bubble a different shade of pastel, the bubbles bumpy on the surface of the squidskin. And now the penguin reached the ocean floor, brilliant with starfish and eels and soft corals, an enchanted kingdom.

  Softly squawking in a gargly underwater voice, the penguin located a dully gleaming metal chest. He pecked sharply at the lock with his orange beak—once, twice, three times—and the top flipped open. Yeeeek!—a cartoon squid darted out, dark purple and dark green. The creature was surely too large to have been inside that little chest, but here he came anyhow, swelling up like a cloud of smoke.

  To complete the surprise effect, the cartoon squid grew to the point where he precisely overlaid himself upon the nurb squid on the wall. And now the big nurb detached himself and began chasing us screaming children around the room, with his beak clacking and his tentacles going flub-flub-flub on the floor.

  Mr. Roller was laughing so hard that he bent over to brace his hands on his knees. He was kind of crazy, kind of a jerk, kind of like Jane’s big brother Kenny.

  Jane, who was sitting at my side, threw her arms around me. Whit Heyburn, a mean, handsome rich kid, also from Glenview, was sitting on her other side, but Jane had turned to me. The amok squid wrapped a tentacle around her ankle. Jane screamed for help, screaming right into my ear. Straining our puny rubber
-band muscles to their utmost, Whit and I managed to drag Jane into the sanctuary of the dining room, still a peaceable kingdom of birthday sweets.

  “Do it again, Dad!” cried Jane, and ran back into the screening room with Whit. The giant squid was crawling up onto the wall again. I stayed in the dining room with Mrs. Roller, just the two of us. I took more cake.

  “Jane’s too good for you,” the bright-haired Mrs. Roller said to me out of the blue. “Don’t get any ideas.” Maybe she was drunk.

  My own little family’s parade of days marched on, Mom and Dad and me, with the nurbs keeping pace. The nurbware engineers were learning to mod nurb genes in a more systematic way. It was all a little hit and miss but, often enough to matter, they’d get a new organism to doing something people liked.

  Mom began using a china bush and a silver stalk to grow plates and cutlery for her wedding receptions. You had to fertilize the hell out of these two nurbs, but they yielded wonderful thin porcelain and delicately scrolled forks and knives. And, around when I was ten, Mom got the idea of letting nurbs provide the wedding buffet food as well.

  The first test-run was a shambles. Mom had gotten hold of a new nurb called a magic table. It was a heavily biotweaked fungus. I helped Mom spread the thing’s spores in a circle on the ground in a clearing at the edge of the woods.

  “It starts out like a fairy ring of mushrooms,” Mom told me. “Have you ever seen a fairy ring?”

  “Yeah.” I tended to pass a lot of my time outdoors. We lived amid farms, woodlands, and abandoned quarries.

  “These nurb shrooms will come up fast,” continued Mom. “We’ll have our magic table ready in time for our guests.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “The Rollers and the Grabers. It’s Dick Roller who got me these spores. They’re experimental. I’m sure you’ll be happy to see your little friend Jane from school. And her brother Kenny?”

  “I hate Kenny.”

  “The Graber’s son Gaven is coming as well,” said Mom. “They say he’s very smart.”

  “He’s faking. It’s not like you can actually talk to him about anything interesting.”

  “Don’t be so picky, Zad. Be polite to our guests.”

  An hour later, the Rollers, the Grabers and another couple arrived. The grown-ups stood around having drinks. Jane’s father was already tiddly and Mrs. Roller was flirting with Dad. Kenny wanted to wrestle with me, but I refused. To get him off my back, I untruthfully told him that Dad had boy and girl sex-nurbs in the woods, and Kenny dashed off to look for them.

  Meanwhile, I showed Gaven my father’s painting studio in our wonderfully creaky old barn. Gaven was fairly bearable. He was curious about Dad’s craft. He liked the idea of people making things they could sell.

  When we returned to the clearing between our house and the woods, little mushrooms were sprouting in a circle, growing so fast that we could see them moving. Bunches of the stalks fused together, making nine columns around the edge. The columns opened into red parasols at the top. Wobbling and feeling around in the air, the mushroom caps fused to make a smooth, undulating red tabletop. Kenny Roller returned from the barn and raced around the table, pounding on it like he wanted to break it, idiot that he was.

  “That’s not the right way,” reproved Gaven Graber, who was very interested in nurbs. Gaven went over to the unsteady red table and—talked to it, like someone calming an overexcited horse.

  I’m not sure if Kenny’s or Gaven’s actions had any real effect on the magic table—or if its actions were predetermined from the start. In any case, the nurb entered a fruiting mode. A frenzied cornucopia of vittles began sprouting forth. Rows of puffball popovers, a twitching country hammie, a roast turkon, loaves of grobread, thickets of asparagrass, pudding pupas—a dizzying array of toothsome delights, many of them unheard of.

  My dad stayed away from the food.

  “Spaulding Heyburn told me about the magic table this week,” said Mr. Roller, talking with his mouth full. “Had lunch with him at the Pendennis Club. The Heyburns pretty much own the local United Mutations operation, you understand. Spaulding says the nurb food is testing out as top-notch. Organic, nourishing, all that good shit. You know what, Lennox? Before long, you’ll be using nurbs to help you paint.”

  “An artist wants to be alone the studio,” said Dad, shaking his head. “And any real chef wants ingredients that don’t talk back.” Dad was a fuddydud.

  New dishes continued to form on the magic table, as if at some out-of-control potluck buffet. Mom called in our neighbors the Trasks to help polish off the feast. Fifteen of us ate like hungry animals for two hours until finally the drained magic table shriveled and collapsed.

  And then everyone started feeling dizzy and throwing up—everyone except for Dad and, for some reason, Gaven, even though Gaven had eaten more than his share.

  “That damned magic table is using us to spread its spores,” muttered Mr. Roller, weakly leaning against a tree. “Have to redesign the wetware. Sterilize the motherfucking nurbs. Don’t let them reproduce at all. We can always clone off copies if we want to.”

  To my poisoned eyes, the sky seemed full of flowing colors. As if the Northern Lights had settled over Louisville.

  “Or like van Gogh’s Starry Night,” I told Jane Roller, not sure if I were speaking aloud. Thanks to Dad, I knew a lot about painting. But Jane didn’t understand. She was busy retching.

  I fetched a wet towel to wipe her face.

  “Thank you, kind sir,” murmured Jane. “You’re nice. Funny thing is—that food tasted so good.” She waved her hands in front of her face, watching the trails they seemed to leave in the air. Her familiar laugh bubbled forth and she put on a thick Kentucky accent. “Looks like an all-nurb world, don’t it, Zad? Everthaang’s alive.”

  My next big memory of Jane dates from a bit later, when I was twelve. The loofy crowd from our class at St. Francis was at the house of Jane’s friend Reba Ranchtree. They were taking a run at having a teenage party.

  Jane and her girlfriends huddled together, whispering, and then Reba and another girl ran over and grabbed me by the hands.

  “Seven minutes in heaven,” they cried, all but choking on their glee. “Jane Roller and Zad Plant!”

  They shoved Jane and me into a dark coat closet and slammed the door.

  “Well?” said Jane, standing very close to me. Some of the coats were nurbs, and they were twitching. In the dark, I imagined that I could see Jane’s voice. It looked like a short length of wide gold ribbon with a filigree at one end.

  “What?” I said. I didn’t actually talk with Jane very often. It was more like we just happened to bounce off each other now and then.

  “Kiss!” yelled the two giggling girls outside the closet door. “Zad and Janie in the closet, see? K-I-S-S-I-N-G! One minute gone, six to beeee!”

  “We can kiss, yes,” said Jane, pecking me on the mouth. At first I held my lips stiff, but quickly I learned to make them soft, and even to poke my tongue into Jane’s mouth. A flat, neutral taste, not unpleasant.

  I didn’t know where to put my hands, so I wrapped my arms around her. A hug. Close up, she smelled like honeysuckle vines and like salt. Time seemed to stop. My penis was stiff. I hoped Jane didn’t notice it bumping against her through our clothes. And at the same time I hoped she did.

  Loud thumping on the closet door.

  “Lovebirds forevva,” said Jane lightly. The door opened, and the excited Reba Ranchtree gave me a kiss too. The girlfriends shrieked, the world rolled on.

  Heedless as boys tend to be, I pretty much forgot about the seven minutes in heaven and went back to my ordinary life. It never occurred to me to try and orchestrate a second tryst with Jane. Her parents were so much richer than mine. And it seemed like she was mostly going around with boys from the upper grades at school—the sleek, sinister Whit Heyburn in particular.

  Senior year in high school, some of the kids were talking about going to college, but not many peopl
e did college anymore.

  Sure, there was still a winged-ants-mating-flight aspect to higher education. It was a way to find lovers, friends, and future business contacts. But by now we all had squidskin wristphones—and we made a lot of our social connections via the web. As for learning things, colleges still had some intense courses. But the courses were online as well—if you had the patience to channel them, not that many of us did. In reality you could get by with grabbing piecemeal info off the web—or getting little apps to do the work for you. And whatever you forgot, you could find again.

  So I nixed any worries about the expense of upper-crust schools and told Mom and Dad I wasn’t going there. They were relieved—for about ten minutes. And then they switched to worrying about me finding a career.

  Mom suggested that I might help her with the wedding catering. I was, after all, good with the sometimes capricious nurbs. By now all the nurbs had built-in web interfaces. You could give them instructions on the fly. I’d gotten the hang of talking to them. And, unlike most pro engineers, I had a flair for empathy. People and nurbs liked me. But no, working my friends’ weddings wasn’t a row I wanted to hoe.

  “Be an artist with me,” said Dad. “We can do the traditional thing. Plant the Elder and Plant the Younger. Lennox and Zad. Louisville’s high-society art dynasty. You draw so beautifully, Zad. You have a vibrant, living line.”

  “Thanks, Dad. But what did you see me draw lately?”

  He was a little embarrassed. “Well, you know. Every once in awhile I cruise the social webs. I did a search for you, and I saw some sketches. That one of your friend Carlo wearing a squidskin coat? And the drawing of that dark-haired girl you’ve been seeing—Reba Ranchtree? Vivid, powerful work.”

  “Reba liked her picture too,” I allowed. “It upped her sexability rank.”

  “What if, just to start with, you take on some of my horse and dog commissions?” suggested Dad. Catching the look on my face, he added, “And paint some of the estates as well. They’re fun. But it’ll be awhile until you can handle the clients’ portraits.” He smiled softly. “These wealthy women—they’re very sensitive, very particular in their needs.”