Software Page 6

  "Did you ever flash," he asked through a cloud of exquisitely detailed smoke, "that maybe those copies of us could be permanent? That this is all just to get us out of the way so Anderson2 and Sta-Hi2 can pose as humans?" This was, at least in Sta-Hi's case, a fairly correct assessment of the situation. But Cobb chose not to tell Sta-Hi this. Instead he blustered.

  "That's just ridiculous. Why would..." "You know more about the boppers than I do, old man. Unless that was shit you were spouting about having helped design them."

  "Didn't you learn about me in high-school, Sta-Hi?" Cobb asked sorrowfully. "Cobb Anderson who taught the robots how to bop? Don't they teach that?"

  "I was out a lot," Sta-Hi said with a shrug. "But what if the boppers wanted two agents on Earth. They send down copies of us, and talk us into coming up here.

  As soon as we're gone the copies start standing in for us and gathering information. Right?"

  "Information about what?" Cobb snapped. "We weren't leading real high security-clearance lives down there, Sta-Hi."

  "What I'm worried about," Sta-Hi went on, flicking invisible drops of tension off the tips of his fingers, "is whether they'll let us go back. Maybe they want to do something with our bodies up here. Use them for hideous and inhuman experiments." On the last phrase his voice tripped and broke into nervous laughter.

  Cobb shook his head. "Dennis DeMentis. That's what it says on your visa. And I'm... ?"

  Sta-Hi fished out the papers from his pocket and handed them over. Cobb looked through them, sipping at his coffee. He'd been drunk at Ledge, but the stewardess had fixed him up with a shot of stimulants and B-vitamins. He hadn't felt so clear-headed in months.

  There was his visa. Smiling bearded face, born March 22, 1950, Graham De Mentis signed in his looping hand down at the bottom of the document.

  "That's the green stuff," Sta-Hi remarked, looking over his shoulder. "What is?"

  Sta-Hi's only answer was to press his lips together like a monkey and smack a few times. The stewardess moved down the aisle, her Velcro foot-coverings schnicking loose from the Velcro carpet at each step. Longish blonde hair free-falling around her face. "Please fasten your safety belts. We will be landing at spaceport Disky in six-oh-niner seconds."

  The rockets cut in and the ship trembled at the huge forces beneath it. The stewardess took Cobb's empty cup and snapped up his table. "Please extinguish your smoking materials, sir." This to Sta-Hi.

  He handed her the roach, smiling and letting smoke trickle through his teeth and up at her. "Get wiggly, baby."

  Her eyes flickered... Yes? No?... and then she flicked the roach into Cobb's coffee cup and moved on.

  "Now remember," Cobb cautioned. "We play it like tourists at the spaceport. I gather that some of the boppers, the diggers, are out to stop us."

  The ship's engines roared to a fever pitch. Little chunks of rock flew up from the landing field and there was silence. Cobb stared out the lens-like little port-hole. The Sea of Tranquility.

  Blinding gray, it undulated off to the too-close horizon. A big crater back there... five kilometers, fifty? ... the Maskeleyne Crater. Unnaturally sharp mountains in the distance. They reminded Cobb of something he wanted to forget: teeth, ragged clouds... the Mountains of Madness. Surely some civilization, somewhere, had believed that the dead go to the Moon.

  There was a soft but final-sounding thop from the other side of the ship. The air tunnel. The stewardess cranked open the lock, her sweet ass bobbing with the wheel's rhythm. On the way out, Sta-Hi asked her for a date.

  "Me and Gramps'll be at the Hilton, baby. Dennis DeMentis. I'll go insane if I don't get some drain. Fall on by?"

  Her smile was as unreadable as a Halloween mask. "Perhaps you'll run into me at the lounge." "Which..." he began.

  She cut him off. "There's only one." Shaking Cobb's hand now. "Thank you for traveling with us, sir. Enjoy your stay."

  The space terminal was crowded with boppers. Sta-Hi had seen models of a few of the basic types before, but no two of them waiting out there looked quite alike. It was like stepping into Bosch's Hell. Faces and... "faces"... crowding the picture plane top to bottom, front to back.

  Hovering right by the door was a smiling sphere holding itself up with a whirling propeller. The smile all but split it in half. "See subterranean cities!" it urged, rolling fake eyeballs.

  Down at the end of the ramp waited the visa-checker, looking something like a tremendous stapler. You stuck your visa in there while it scanned your face and fingerprints. KAH-CHUNNNG! Passed.

  Standing right next to the visa-checker was a boxy red robot. Things like blue snakes or dragons writhed around his treads. Diggers. The red robot stuck a nervous microphone of a face near Sta-Hi and Cobb, then reeled his head back in.

  He reminded Cobb a little of good old Ralph Numbers. But with those diggers there it was better not to ask. It could wait until they met in the museum.

  In the lobby, dozens of garish, self-made machines wheeled, slithered, stalked and hovered. Every time Cobb and Sta-Hi would look one way, snaky metal tentacles would pluck at them from the other direction.

  "You buy uranium?"

  "Got mercury?"

  "Old fashion T.V. set?"

  "Fuck android girls?"

  "Sell your fingers?"

  "Moon King relics?"

  "Prosthetic talking penis?"

  "Chip-market tip-sheet?"

  "Home-cooked food?"

  "Set up factory?"

  "Same time fuck-suck?"

  "DNA death code?"

  "Dust bath enema?"

  "See vacuum bells?"

  "Brand-new voice-prints?"

  "No-risk brain-tape?"

  "You sell camera?"

  "Play my songs?"

  "Me be you?"

  "Hotel?"

  Cobb and Sta-Hi jumped into the lap of this last bop-per, a husky black fellow contoured to seat two humans.

  "No baggage?" he asked.

  Cobb shook his head. The black bopper forced his way through the crowd, warding off the others with things like huge pinball flippers. Sta-Hi was silent, still thinking some of those offers over.

  The bopper carrying them kept a microphone and camera eye attentively focused on them. "Isn't there any control?" Cobb asked querulously. "Over who can come in here and bother the arriving passengers?"

  "You are our honored guests," the bopper said obliquely. "Aloha means hello and... good-bye. Here is your hotel. I will accept payment." A little door opened between the two seats.

  Sta-Hi drew out his wallet. It was nice and full. "How much do..."he began.

  "Money is so dull," the bopper answered. "I would prefer a surprise gift. A complex information."

  Cobb felt in the pockets of his white suit. There was still some scotch, a brochure from the space-liner, a few coins...

  Boppers were pressing up to them again, plucking at their clothes, possibly snipping out samples.

  "Dirt-side newspapers?"

  "'Slow boat to China'?"

  "Execution sense tapes?"

  The black bopper had only carried them a hundred meters. Impatiently, Sta-Hi tossed his handkerchief into their carrier's waiting hopper.

  "Aloha," the bopper said, and rolled back towards the gate, grooving on the slubby weave.

  The hotel was a pyramid-like structure filling the center of the dome. Cobb and Sta-Hi were relieved to find only humans in the lobby. Tourists, businessmen, drifters.

  Sta-Hi looked around for a reception desk, but could spot none. Just as he was wondering who he might approach, a voice spoke in his ear.

  "Welcome to the Disky Hilton, Mr. DeMentis. I have a wonderful room for you and your grandfather on the fifth floor."

  "Who was that?" Cobb demanded, turning his big shaggy head sharply.

  "I am DEX, the Disky Hilton." The hotel itself was a single huge bopper. Somehow it could point-send its voice to any spot at all ... indeed it could carry on a different conversation with every
guest at once.

  The ethereal little voice led Cobb and Sta-Hi to an elevator and up to their room. There was no question of privacy. After heartily drinking a few glasses of water from the carafe, Cobb finally called to Sta-Hi, "Long trip, eh Dennis?"

  "Sure was, Gramps. What all do you think we should do tomorrow?"

  "Waaal, I think I'll still be too tuckered out for them big dust-slides. Maybe we should just mosey on over to that museum those robots built. Just to ease ourselves in slow like, you know."

  The hotel cleared its throat before talking, so as not to startle them. "We have a bus leaving for the museum at oh-nine-hundred hours."

  Cobb was scared to even look at Sta-Hi. Did DEX know who they really were? And was he on their side or the diggers' side? And why would any of the boppers be against making Cobb immortal in the first place? He poured out the last of his Scotch, tossed it off, and lay down. He really was tired. The low lunar gravity felt good. You could gain a lot of weight up here. Wondering what would be for breakfast, Cobb drifted into sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  Sta-Hi threw a blanket over the old man and walked over to look out the window. Most of the boppers were gone now. They had left a jumble of wheeled refrigeration carts next to the air-lock. Slowly, meticulously, a hunch-backed bopper was lining the carts up.

  A human couple strolled around the plaza between the hotel and the visa-checker. There was something odd to Sta-Hi in the studied aimlessness of the couple's wanderings. He watched them for five minutes and they still didn't get anywhere. Around and around like mechanical hillbillies in a shooting gallery.

  The translucent plastic dome was not far overhead, tinted against the raw sunlight. For the humans it was night in here, but outside the sun still shone, and the boppers were as active as ever. Even though the Lunar day lasts two weeks, and even though the boppers rarely "slept," they still, perhaps out of nostalgia, but probably out of inertia, kept time by the humans twenty-four-hour day system. And to make the humans comfortable, they varied the brightness of their dome accordingly.

  Sta-Hi felt a shudder of claustrophobia. His every action was being recorded, analyzed. Every breath, every bite was just another link to the boppers. He was, right now, actually inside a bopper, the big bopper DEX. Why had he let Cobb talk him into coming here? Why had Cobb wanted him?

  Cobb was snoring now. For a terrible instant, Sta-Hi thought he saw wires running out of the pillow and into the old man's scalp. He leaned closer and realized they were just black hairs among the gray. He decided to go down to the lounge. Maybe that stewardess would be there.

  The hotel bar and lounge was full, but quiet. Some businessmen were bellied up to the automatic bar. They were drinking moon-brewed beer... the dome's dry air made you mighty thirsty.

  In the middle of the lounge a bunch of tables had been pushed together for a party. Earth-bottled champagne. Sta-Hi recognized the revelers from the flight up. A fortyish dominatrix-type tour-guide, and six sleek young married couples. Inherited wealth, for them to be up here so young. They ignored Sta-Hi, having long since sized him up as dull and lower-class.

  Alone in a booth at the end of the room was the face he wanted. The stewardess. There was no drink in front of her, no book... she was just sitting there. Sta-Hi slid in across from her. "Remember me?"

  She nodded. "Sure." There was something funny about how she had been sitting there . . . blank as a parked car. "I've sort of been waiting for you." "Well all right! Do they sell dope here?" The hotel's disembodied voice cut in. "What would be your pleasure, Mr. DeMentis?"

  Sta-Hi considered. He wanted to be able to sleep... eventually.

  "Give me a beer and a two-boost." He glanced at the symmetrical, smiling face across the table. "And you?" "The usual."

  "Very good, sir and madam," the hotel murmured. Seconds later a little door in the wall by their table popped open. A conveyor belt had brought the order. Sta-Hi's two-boost was a shot-glass of clear liquid, sharp with solvents, bitter with alkaloids. The woman's...

  "What's your name anyway?" Sta-Hi tossed off his foul-tasting potion. He'd be seeing colors for two hours. "Misty." She reached out to pick up the object she had ordered. The usual.

  "What is that?" A too-high rush of panic was percolating up his spine. Fast stuff, the two-boost. The girl across from him was holding a little metal box, holding it to her temple...

  She giggled suddenly, her eyes rolling. "It feels good." She turned a dial on the little box and rubbed it back and forth on her forehead. "This year people say….wiggly?"

  "You don't live on Earth anymore?"

  "Of course not." Long silence. She ran the little box over her head like a barber's clippers. "Wiggly."

  There was a burst of laughter from the young-marrieds. Someone had made an indecent suggestion. Probably the beefy guy pouring out more champagne.

  Sta-Hi's attention went back to the emptily pretty face across the table from him. He'd never seen anything like the thing she was rubbing on her head. "What is that?" he asked again.

  "An electromagnet,"

  "You're... you're a bopper?"

  "Well, sort of. I'm completely inorganic, if that's what you mean. But I'm not self-contained. My brain is actually in BEX. I'm sort of a remote-controlled part of the spaceship."

  She flicked the little box back and forth in front of her eyes, enjoying the way the magnetic field lines moved the images around. "Wiggly. Can you teach me some more new slang?"

  Before seeing his own robot double at the spaceport, Sta-Hi had never believed that he could mistake a machine for a person. And now it was happening again. Sitting here in the roar of the two-boost, he wished he was someplace else.

  Misty leaned across the table, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. "Did you really think I was human?"

  "I don't normally make dates with machines," Sta-Hi blurted, and tried to recover with a joke. "I don't even own a vibrator."

  He'd hurt her feelings. She turned up the dial on her magnet, blanking her face in an ecstasy that showed him her contempt.

  Suddenly lonely, he reached out and pulled the hand with the electromagnet away from her temple.

  "Talk to me, Misty." He could feel the movements of his lips and talking tongue. Too high. He had a sudden horrible suspicion that everyone here was a robot. But, even so, the girl's hand was warm under his, fleshy. Sta-Hi's beer sat untouched on the table-top between them. Misty blew part of the head away, took a sip, handed the glass to Sta-Hi. He sipped too. Thick, bitter. "DEX brews this himself," she remarked. "Do you like it?"

  "It's O.K. But can you digest? Or is there a plastic bag you empty every ..."

  Misty set down her magnet-box and twined her fingers with Sta-Hi's. "You should think of me as a person. My personality is human. I still like eating and... and other things." She dimpled prettily and traced a circle on Sta-Hi's palm. "I don't get to meet many stuzzy young guys just stewardessing the Ledge-Disky run ..."

  He pulled his hand away. "But how can you be human if you're a machine?"

  "Look," Misty said patiently. "There used to be a young lady called Misty Nivlac who lived in Richmond, Virginia. Last spring Misty-girl hitchhiked to Daytona Beach for some brainsurfing. She fell in with a bad crowd. Really bad. A gang called the Little Kidders."

  The Little Kidders. Sta-Hi could still see their faces. That blonde girl who'd picked him up ... Kristleen? And Berdoo, the skinny little guy wearing chains. Haf'N'Haf with all those missing teeth. And Phil, the leader, the big guy with the tattoo on his back.

  "... got her brain-tape," Misty was saying. "While BEX built a copy of her body. So now inside BEX there's a perfect model of Misty-girl's personality. BEX tells the model what to do, and the model runs... this." She spread out her hands palm up. "Brand-new Misty-girl."

  "From what I hear," Sta-Hi said as neutrally as possible, "the Little Kidders go around eating brains, not taping them."

  "You've heard of them?" She seemed surprised. "Well, it loo
ks like they're eating the brain. But one of them is a robot with a sort of laboratory inside his chest. He has all the equipment to get the memories out. The patterns. They get a lot of people's brains that way. The big boppers are making a sort of library out of them. But most people don't get their own robot-remote body like me. I'm just really... lucky." She smiled again.

  "I'm surprised you're telling me all this," Sta-Hi said finally. BEX... Misty... must really not know who he was. Whoever had fixed up their fake ID's must not have had time to tell the others.

  But maybe... and this would be much worse... maybe they did know perfectly well who he was. But he was already doomed, a walking dead man, just waiting for them to extract his brain-tape and send it down to Earth to run that Sta-Hi2 they had all set. You can tell anything to a man about to die.

  "But BEX didn't want me to," Misty was saying. "You can't hear him of course, but he's been telling me to shut up the whole time. But he can't make me. I still have my free will... it's part of the brain-tape. I can do what I like." She smiled into Sta-Hi's eyes. There was a moment's silence and then she started talking again.

  "You wanted to know who I am. I gave you one answer. A robot-remote. A servo-unit operated by a program stored in a bopper spaceship. But... I'm still Misty-girl, too. The soul is the software, you know. The software is what counts, the habits and the memories. The brain and the body are just meat, seeds for the organ-tanks." She smiled uncertainly, took a pull at his beer, set it down. "Do you want to fuck?"

  The sex was nice, but confusing. The whole situation kept going di-polar on Sta-Hi. One instant Misty would seem like a lovely warm girl who'd survived a terrible injury, like a lost puppy to be stroked, a lonely woman to be husbanded. But then he'd start thinking of the wires behind her eyes, and he'd be screwing a machine, an inanimate object, a public toilet. Just like with any other woman for him, really.

  Chapter Eleven