The Big Aha Page 6

  “Sure they do. But anyway, can you, uh, tell me about Loulou Sass?” For some reason Reba Ranchtree had fallen into an intense conversation with Loulou. It looked like they were making a deal.

  “Loulou’s a few years younger than us.” said Carlo. “But she’s gotten around. Used to be a well-known nurb modder. Started out as a gamer, then got hired for commercial apps. Worked at United Mutations for awhile. I don’t know why she’s dropped down to working on Gaven’s farm, but I’ve seen her talking a lot with Junko. I’m sure there’s some kind of weird twist to come.”

  “Loulou’s deep, huh?”

  “Ruthless. At this point, I think she’s gone qwet like Joey. If I even look at her, I feel like I’m going to explode. It’s like going into a carnival funhouse.” Carlo stared down at his hand, trying to control his careening thoughts. “This rat-bit finger, man, I can’t understand why nobody wants to help me. Junko’s over there talking to Joey Moon. Why bother? Meanwhile there’s something physically twitching inside my finger, Zad. A horrible parasite alive in my flesh.”

  “You’re wasted, man. You’re on a head trip.”

  “Hey you two!” called Reba, very jolly in the wake of her conversation with Loulou. “My two old beaus. I don’t usually have this much fun on a Friday night. Eeny meeny miney moe, catch a qrudie by the toe!” She was moving her finger back and forth with the words, and she ended up pointing at me. The gold paint on her eyelids was sparkling. “Aren’t you lonely sleeping in the back of your store like a janitor, Zad?”

  And now here came the newly trim Gaven, walking with his arm around Jane’s waist. His gold-tinted wristphone gleamed in the low sun.

  “How can Jane stand letting him physically touch her?” said Carlo, blurting out exactly what was in my mind. He said it loud enough for them to hear. Jane responded with a cretin grunt.

  “Shall we dine en plein air?” said Gaven, coming on all smooth and baronial.

  “You sound like Todd Trask,” I told him. “Guy who used to live here. Piss-elegant.”

  “A good role model for me, no?” said Gaven. “Landed gentry. I’m upgrading my image. Do let’s eat.” Gaven turned Jane loose and gestured towards the horn of plenty. “Sausages, shrimp, burgers, quail—whatever you feel like grilling. Do it yourself. Or ask Loulou.”

  “But don’t ask Joey,” hollered Joey Moon, fifty feet away by the base of the tree with Junko Shimano standing there talking softly to him, as if trying to steer him out of his fugue. Joey was way too tuned in.

  “If all of our qwet rat template providers experience psychiatric dislocations of this nature, it could pose a workflow problem,” said Gaven in a bloodless monotone. “Not to mention the public relations fallout regarding qwet teep.”

  “What if, for the rats, we just use Joey’s personality over and over?” suggested Carlo, wrenching himself back into business mode. “We could copy it across from Skungy. No need to deal with Joey or with any other human template again.”

  “No need for Joey,” echoed Gaven, liking the sound of that. “We can put him into treatment, in a place where he’s safe.”

  “And that way Zad gets a clear shot at Loulou,” said Carlo, beginning to enjoy himself again.

  “Is that really what you’re thinking?” Jane asked me. “You’d go for a slutty climber like that?”

  “That’s not your business anymore, is it?” I said. “Especially if you’re dating Gaven. Or going back to that psycho Whit Heyburn. And Loulou’s not slutty.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Jane. “You’re so unaware, Zad. It’s pitiful.” She put on a blank, simpering expression. “La, la, la, I’m the unworldly artist.”

  “Let’s scroll back,” interrupted Carlo. “Back to Skungy being, like, the standard meter for the qwet rat personalities. My bright idea.”

  “I’ve got your platinum diamond meter stick right here!” screamed Joey. He was pulling down his pants.

  Junko backed away from him—laughing and not particularly shocked.

  Gaven was murmuring into his gold wristphone. “Code red, Artie. Calm Joey.”

  Artie was smooth as silk. He loped down from the driveway and sprayed a nod pod into Joey’s contorted face. Joey took a halting step, then collapsed to the ground, his body limp, his pants around his knees. Loulou said something sharp to Artie, pointing her finger. The guard shrugged, then fastened up the inert Joey’s trousers. Loulou looked deeply unhappy, indeed she stuck out a finger and mimed shooting herself in the head.

  “Time for grub,” said Gaven. “I think we’re all a little on edge. You can go back up to the driveway, Artie.”

  “Is Joey going to be all right?” I asked.

  “Artie only gave him a light dose,” said Junko, rejoining us. “He’ll bounce back in fifteen minutes or half an hour. We’ve had to do this before. Sadly. Joey’s really such an interesting character. Did you know he’s an artist? I don’t know why he’s stuck in such a recursive thought loop. Teeping himself teeping himself. He makes qwet look bad. Do you know Joey very well, Zad?”

  “A little,” I said. “He’s younger than me. Sharp, off-kilter. Maybe he could be a hit. For sure Joey’s colorful, especially with his psychiatric issues. The public likes an eccentric artist. But he hasn’t learned to crank a steady flow of product.”

  “So, okay, you should know I’m pushing qwet treatments for everyone,” said Junko. “A ninety percent adoption rate, right, Gaven? It’s disruptive tech. Like the PC or the smartphone or the nurb.”

  “And the worry is that lots of people end up like Joey?” I asked.

  “Just forget about him,” said Junko, her voice rising. “We’ve tested other people. Joey is an anomaly. An exception. He’s only caught in a loop in his head because that happens to be the type of thing he’s obsessed with. Basically he’s doing it to himself.”

  “What you’re telling Zad is supposed to be a secret,” Gaven warned Junko. “You signed a non-disclosure agreement, you know.”

  “Disclose what?” said Junko tartly. “I invented the qwet process on my own, and I chose to make it open source. It’s a matter of public record. Not that anyone else knows how to use it yet.”

  “Open source?” I said. “That means free?”

  “Slygro will be marketing installation and maintenance,” said Gaven. “At least that’s been our plan. But, as I said before, the plot is thickening. A rather different business model that may come into play.”

  “Whatever that means,” I said. “I’m not good at decrypting your sly, meaningful biz hints. I’m an artist.”

  “I think Gaven and Slygro are moving too slow,” said Junko. “And United Mutations is going to eat our lunch. My big-deal founder’s stock won’t be worth crap.” Junko stared at me, and I seemed to feel a tingle from the touch of her alert eyes. “I’m qwet already,” she said, nodding her head. “And so is Gaven. We made the change a week ago. It feels good. It’s fine for everyone in the world except crazy Joey Moon.”

  “I think I’m turning qwet too,” interrupted Carlo, deep into his own head. “Thanks to that filthy rat biting me. I have this, like, creepy free-floating feeling of empathy? Like I’m a social worker? I hate empathy.”

  “Not to harp, but am I the only one who’s at all hungry?” said Gaven, sounding testy. Whatever biotweak he’d done on his metabolism, he still had the same big appetite. “Why won’t you people look at my wonderful food! Open up some of the German white wine, would you, Loulou?”

  Loulou took a deep breath and nodded—even though her husband Joey lay unconscious on the ground. My heart went out to her. She was so incredibly lovely.

  “I remember my family coming to a cook-out exactly here,” I told Loulou, wanting to lighten her mood. “Twenty-five years ago. One of my first memories. I really appreciate your helping out today.”

  Loulou mimed an expression of extravagant gratitude and interest. Probably sarcastic. She hadn’t always been a maid. I wasn’t getting over to her at all.


  I skewered a hot dog with one of the supple green branches that Loulou had prepared. I held the thing over the fire, enjoying the gentle bobbing of the weighted branch. The big air-cooling frogs made the heat of the flames bearable.

  “I see this man knows the drill,” said Gaven.

  “Be a dear, Zad, and roast some of those divine little sausages for Jane and I.” This from Reba, in a faux high-society voice. She and Jane burst into laughter.

  “And I’ll sizzle up a couple for Junko and me,” said Carlo, pulling himself together. “Gaven here can handle his own weenie. As per usual.” The drinks were making us silly.

  The horizon was a dappled sundown maze of gray and gold. Reba’s flydino and my slugfoot were peaceful in the pond. Joey was flat on his back.

  “Something I just remembered,” I said. “Those cattails—they look like hot dogs on sticks, right? And when we came here when I was five, I was sure that if I could manage to yank a cattail out of the pond, it would roast up just as good.”

  “I wonder if I can make that happen for you,” said Gaven, feeling at the gizmo he wore dangling from his belt. “With my qwetter and a little teep. Junko and I designed the qwetter last month.”

  “Gaven shouldn’t have worked on our design project at all,” said Junko. “All of his ideas were wrong. Like he rushed me so much that we used all this kludgy, ridiculous old-time tech. Like you’d see in a United Mutations genemodder wand.”

  “He’s saying he can use the qwetter to turn a cattail into a hot dog?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why not,” said Gaven in a stiff tone. He was stung by Junko’s criticism. “After I make the cattails qwet, I’ll do telepathy with them. And then I’ll ask them to taste like meat. Like tweaking a nurb with a genemodder wand. Seems easy enough.”

  Junko rolled her eyes, but refrained from saying anything.

  The qwetter device had the rough outline of a pistol—a pistol that was cobbled together from a hundred little parts. Fins, tubes, chips, condensers, magnets, mirrors, a superheterodyne unit, and a tiny helium tank—stuff like that. Kind of weird.

  Gaven tinkered with the components for a minute, then aimed the pistol at the pond. Unnerved, the flydino and my giant slug splashed to the pond’s far end.

  The qwetter hummed with no obvious effects. Gaven stared at the cattails for a very long time. His lips were moving. He made mystic passes with his hands. It was like he imagined himself to be hypnotizing the cattails, asking them to turn into meat.

  “Mind over matter!” he crowed. “Harvest time, Zad.”

  “Here, Reba,” I said. “Hold my hot dog sticks for a sec.”

  “I think not. Let Loulou do it. Could you, dear?”

  Pouting and wordless, Loulou took over my sticks. Her hand brushed against mine, and I felt a sexual thrill—followed by guilt at thinking about her that way, with her poor husband all screwed up and lying on the ground conked out by the bodyguard’s nod mist. And meanwhile I had the creepy feeling that Loulou knew everything I was thinking.

  Oh well. By now I was drunk enough to wade into the pond with my shoes on, and to yank up three of the cattails by their roots. But despite all of Gaven’s build-up, the cattail bulges weren’t even close to being meat.

  “Fluff,” I announced, scratching at one of the cattails with my fingernail. “Same as before.”

  “So okay, maybe the cattails are qwet by now,” Junko told Gaven in a flat tone. “And maybe you can do telepathy with them. But, Gaven, the only things we can genemod are programmable nurbs. Nurbs that have little antennae on their DNA strands. Not the locked commercial nurbs. Not people. Not animals. And not wild plants. You’re like a clanking robot trying to hump a junked car. Stick to money. Stocks, deals, licenses, non-disclosure agreements, like that.”

  “Won’t any of you know-it-alls at least taste one of my cattails?” said Gaven. Peevishly he tossed the qwetter back to Reba. “Maybe the cattails are meat, but in a downy form? Take a bite, Carlo.”

  “No way,” said Carlo. “Bad enough that my finger’s infected.”

  “Feed Joey Moon a cattail!” whooped Reba. She’d always had a bit of a mean streak.

  As if roused by the sound of his name, Joey jumped to his feet and, moving unbelievably fast, pinwheeled over and snatched the qwetter from Junko’s hand.

  “No!” roared Gaven. “Don’t start with that! Guard! Artie! Stop him!”

  “Who wants to be first?” cried Joey. “Zad? Jane? Reba?” He was making really horrible faces while he danced around. His mouth was a crooked slash, and his freaked-out eyes were like wobbly, scribbled dots. He waved his arms frenetically, holding them at unlikely angles. One of his legs went back and back in an extreme yoga move until it touched his shoulder from behind, leaving him balanced on the remaining leg like a flamingo.

  Artie the guard was almost upon Joey again.

  “Wheenk,” whooped Joey, hopping into the air and whirling around. He sprayed the qwetter at the hapless guard, then focused the full force of his will upon him.

  As if hypnotized, Artie dropped to all fours—and began imitating a pig. Joey was teeping into Artie’s mind, overwhelming him with bad vibes. The long-bodied Artie rubbed his nose and chin across the ground, as if sniffing for acorns.

  Back on two feet, moving slowly and regally as if fascinated by his own weirdness, Joey grabbed a handful of food from the horn-of-plenty nurb and stuffed it into his mouth. Cheeks full, hair spiky, scowling, he leveled the qwetter at us, preparing to—

  Cuing on some unseen signal of Gaven’s, one of the big cooling frogs flipped out a thirty-foot tongue and glommed the qwetter tool from Joey Moon’s hand. Rushing forward, Gaven fixed his eyes on Joey and on the rooting Artie, thinking at them, teeping his notion of normality into their heads. And this time Gaven’s efforts seemed to be having an effect.

  “Undo, undo, undo,” cried Gaven, his voice shrill with the joy of winning. I remembered that tone of his from our schooldays—when he’d gloat about his perfect grades.

  Moments later, Artie was back on his feet, acting like his old self, more or less—and Joey had collapsed once more to the ground. His limp limbs slid back into their normal alignment. Despair radiated from him like a physical force.

  “Put Joey under physical restraints,” Gaven instructed Artie. “And call in that psych clinic we’ve been talking about. Have them send an ambulance. Why do you look so scared, Artie? Don’t worry. It’s just that you’re qwet. It’s good. You’ll learn to like it.”

  Artie ran a trembling, big-knuckled hand across his features, checking that everything was in place. He had mud on his nose, and a bit of acorn in the corner of his mouth. “I—I can feel Joey’s mind. And yours, Gaven, and Junko’s and—”

  But now Artie was interrupted by Carlo screaming bloody murder. Right in my ear.

  “What is your problem?” I snapped.

  “My finger! It’s splitting open. Oh my god, a tiny rat is crawling out. Shit, shit, shit!” The newborn rat dropped wriggling to the ground.

  Skungy snickered. He was perched on my shoulder again. “Carlo said I couldn’t make babies. He was wrong. That’s my daughter. Call her Sissa. I grew her from a clone cell I put inside Carlo. And now I’m sending my personality into her. I’m making her just like me.”

  “It keeps getting worse,” moaned Carlo, holding his head, with blood dribbling from his split finger. “The sky is singing. And Joey and Gaven and Junko and Loulou—they’re like cyclones of colored fog. I’m screwed, I’m qwet. I was hoping I could—oh, shit. Help me, Junko.”

  Junko wrapped a healer leech around Carlo’s finger while he goggled at her, increasingly disturbed by his teep impressions of her mind.

  “You’re not attracted to me at all?” he asked.

  “Just as a friend. Duh? Can’t you see I’m gay? Am I in Kentucky yet?”

  Carlo cursed and stumped across the grass to get himself another a glass of bourbon.

  “Carlo has a marginal personality,�
�� said Junko. “And so does Joey Moon. At least Joey’s artistic. Loulou says he’s made some amazing pieces over the years. The art grenades? The painter slugs? And his new mirror paintings are incredible. Loulou herself is very creative, too, in case you didn’t know. She used to be a champion at Levolver. That game about making battle nurbs?”

  “Impressive,” I said. “Carlo mentioned something like that. And he said Loulou worked for United Mutations, too. But now she’s here on Gaven’s farm being—what? A maid?”

  “To tell the truth, she’s been consulting with me quite a bit,” said Junko. “But I’ll end up with most of the credit. Stanford grad that I am.”

  “Thank god this is a private party,” interrupted Jane, wandering over. “I’ve never seen such a fiasco.”

  “You like the excitement I’m bringing to town,” said Gaven. “Right?”

  Jane studied the twitchy, unprepossessing little man. I was picking up her on emotions—not via qwet teep, but via married-couple vibe-resonance. With regard to Gaven, Jane was midway between pity and repulsion. In any case, she meant to play him and get what she could. A strategic plan. It made me jealous, but for now I had to let it go.

  Down at my feet, the new little rat Sissa was shaking her body—letting the Skunginess stink in. And now the wised-up baby rat made as if to climb my leg like her father had done. Skungy scampered down my leg and bared his teeth at her.

  “Zad’s mine,” squealed the older rat. “You be Loulou’s helper. That woman right here.”

  Loulou was at my side, as if magnetically drawn by my longing for her. “Get me out of here,” she said in a low, vibrant tone, twiddling her fingers in a gesture of legs running away. “It’s too crazy.”

  All right, then. I led the mysterious woman to my car, followed by our two qwet rats. The Lincoln’s slugfoot was already back in place beneath the chassis.

  “We’re outta here!” I whooped, an unsteady mania in my voice. “Screw you all!”

  And now I was speeding away from the Trask farm with a woman again—just like with Jane, ten years ago. Ah, Jane. The voices behind us rose in remonstrance and complaint. And then Loulou and I were out the driveway and heading for River Road.