Complete Stories (65 page)

Revel peered at Tug over the tops of his designer sunglasses, assuming what he seemed to think was a trustworthy expression. “But that ain’t the half of it, Tug. Wait till I tell you what we did with the stuff once we had it.”

Tug was impatient. Gusher or not, Revel’s bizarre maunderings were not going to sell any jellyfish. “What did you think of that artificial jellyfish I sent you?”

Revel frowned. “Well, it looked okay when it showed up. About the size of a deflated football. I dropped in my swimmin’ pool. It was floatin’ there, kinda rippling and pulsing, for about two days. Didn’t you say that sucker would run for weeks? Forty-eight hours and it was gone! Disintegrated I guess. Chlorine melted the plastic or something.”

“No way,” protested Tug, intensely. “It must have slipped out a crack in the side of your pool. I built that model to last three weeks for sure! It was my best prototype. It was a chemotactic artificial jellyfish designed to slither into undersea vents and find its way to underground oil beds.”

“My swimming pool’s not in the best condition,” allowed Revel. “So I guess it’s possible that your jellyfish did squeeze out through a crack. But if this oil-prospecting application of yours is any good, the thing should have come back with some usable geology data. And it never did come back that I noticed. Face it Tug, the thing melted.”

Tug wouldn’t give in. “My jellyfish didn’t send back information because I didn’t put a tracer chip in it. If you’re going to be so rude about it, I might as well tell you that I don’t think oil prospecting is a very honorable application. I’d really rather see the California Water Authority using my jellies to trace leaks in irrigation and sewage lines.”

Revel yawned, sinking deeper into the passenger seat. “That’s real public-spirited of you, Dr. Mesoglea. But California water ain’t worth a dime to me.”

Tug pressed onward. “Also, I’d like to see my jellyfish used to examine contaminated wells here in Silicon Valley. If you put an artificial jellyfish down a well, and leave it to pulsate down there for a week or two, it could filter up all kinds of trace pollutants! It’d be a great public-relations gambit to push the jelly’s anti-pollution aspects. Considering your family history, it couldn’t hurt to get the Pullen family in the good graces of the Environmental Protection people. If we angle it right, we could probably even swing a federal development grant!”

“I dunno, hombre,” Revel grumbled. “Somehow it just don’t seem sportin’ to take money from the Feds …” He gazed mournfully at the lushly exotic landscape of monkey-puzzle trees, fat pampered yuccas, and orange trees. “Man, everything sure looks green out here.”

“Yes,” Tug said absently, “thank God there’s been a break in the drought. California has plenty of use for a jellyfish that can monitor water-leaks.”

“It’s not the water that counts,” said Revel, “it’s the carbon dioxide. Two hundred million years’ worth of crude oil, all burned to carbon dioxide and spewed right into the air in just few short decades. Plant life’s goin’ crazy. Why, all the plant life along this highway has built itself out of car exhausts! You ever think o’ that?”

It was clear from the look of glee on Revel’s shallow features that this thought pleased him mightily. “I mean, if you traced the history of the carbon in that weirdass-lookin’ tree over there…hunnert years ago it was miles down in the primeval bowels of the earth! And since we eat plants to live, it’s the same for people! Our flesh, brain and blood is built outa burnt crude-oil! We’re creatures of the Urschleim, Tug. All life comes from the primeval goo.”

“No way,” said Tug heatedly. He took a highway exit to Los Perros, his own local enclave in the massive sprawl that was Silicon Valley. “One carbon atom’s just like the next one. And once you’re talking artificial life, it doesn’t even have to be an ‘atom’ at all. It can be a byte of information, or a microbead of piezoplastic. It doesn’t matter where the material came from—life is just a pattern of behavior.”

“That’s where you and me part company, boy.” They were tooling down the main drag of Los Perros now, and Revel was gaping at some chicly dressed women. “Dig it, Tug, thanks to oil, a lot of the carbon in your yuppie neighbors comes from Texas. Like or not, most modern life is fundamentally Texan.”

“That’s pretty appalling news, Revel,” smiled Tug. He took the last remaining hilly corners with a squeal of his Michelins, then pulled into his driveway. He parked the Animata under the rotting, fungus-specked redwood deck of the absurdly overpriced suburban home that he rented. The rent was killing him. Ever since his lover had moved out last Christmas, Tug had been meaning to move into a smaller place, but somewhere deep down he nursed a hope that if he kept the house, some nice strong man would come and move in with him.

Next door, Tug’s neighbors were flinging water-balloons and roaring with laughter as they sizzled up a huge aromatic rack of barbecued tofu. They were rich Samoans. They had a big green parrot called Toatoa. On fine days, such as today, Toatoa sat squawking on the gable of the house. Toatoa had a large yellow beak and a taste for cuttlebone and pumpkin-seeds.

“This is great,” Revel opined, examining the earthquake-split walls and peeling ceiling sheetrock. “I was afraid we’d have some trouble findin’ the necessary space for experiments. No problem though, with you rentin’ this sorry dump for a workshop.”

“I live here,” said Tug with dignity. “By California standards this is a very good house.”

“No wonder you want to start a company!” Revel climbed the redwood stairs to Tug’s outdoor deck, and dragged a yard-long plastic pressure-cylinder from within his duffel bag, flinging aside some balled-up boot socks and a set of watered-silk boxer shorts. “You got a garden hose? And a funnel?” He pulled a roll of silvered duct tape from the bottom of his bag.

Tug supplied a length of hose, prudently choosing one that had been severely scorched during the last hillside brushfire. Revel whipped a French designer pocketknife from within his Can’t-Bust-‘Ems and slashed off a three-foot length. He then deftly duct-taped the tin funnel to the end of the hose, and blew a few kazoo-like blasts.

Revel then flung the crude horn aside and took up the pressure cylinder. “You don’t happen to have a washtub, do you?”

“No problem,” Tug said. He went into the house and fetched a large plastic picnic cooler.

Revel opened the petcock of the pressure cylinder and began decanting its contents into the cooler. The black nozzle slowly ejaculated a thick clear gel, rather like silicone putty. Pint after pint of it settled languorously into the white pebbly interior of the hinge-topped cooler. The stuff had a sulfurous, burning-rubber reek that Tug associated with Hawaii—a necessarily brief stay he’d had on the oozing, flaming slopes of Kilauea.

Tug prudently sidled across the deck and stood upwind of the cooler. “How far down did you obtain this sample?”

Revel laughed. “Down? Doc, this stuff broke the safety-valves on old Ditheree and blew drillin’ mud over five counties. We had an old-time blue-ball gusher of it. It just kept comin’, pourin’ out over the ground. Kinda, you know, spasmodic…Finally ended up with a lake of clear hot pudding higher than the tops of pickups.”

“Jesus, what happened then?” Tug asked.

“Some evaporated. Some soaked right into the subsoil. Disappeared. The first sample I scored was out of the back of some good ol’ boy’s Toyota. Lucky thing he had the tailgate up, or it woulda all run out.”

Revel pulled out a handkerchief, wiped sweat from his forehead, and continued talking. “Of course, once we got the rig repaired, we did some serious pump-work. We Pullens happen to own a tank-farm near Nacogdoches, a couple a football field’s worth of big steel reservoirs. Haven’t seen use since the OPEC embargo of the 70s. They were pretty much abandoned on site. But every one of them babies is brim-full with Revel Pullen’s trademark Urschleim right now.” He glanced up at the sun, looking a bit wild-eyed, and wiped his forehead again. “You got any beer in this dump?”

“Sure, Revel.” Tug went into the kitchen for two bottles of Etna Ale, and brought them out to the deck.

Revel drank thirstily, then gestured with his makeshift horn. “If this don’t work, well, you’re gonna think I’m crazy.” He pushed his Italian shades up onto the top of his narrow crewcut skull, and grinned. He was enjoying himself. “But if it does work, ol’ son—you’re gonna think you’re crazy.”

Revel dipped the end of the funnel into the quiescent but aromatic mass. He swirled it around, then held it up carefully and puffed.

A fat lozenge-shaped gelatinous bubble appeared at the end of the horn.

“Holy cow, it blows up just like a balloon,” Tug said, impressed. “That’s some kind of viscosity!”

Revel grinned wider, holding the thing at arm’s length. “It gets better.”

Tug Mesoglea watched in astonishment as the clear bubble of Urschleim slowly rippled and dimpled. A long double crease sank into the taut outer membrane of the gelatinous sphere, encircling it like the seam on an oversized baseball.

Now, with a swampy-sounding pop, the bubble came loose from the horn’s tin muzzle and began to float in midair. A set of cilia emerged along the seam and the airborne jelly began to bob and beat its way upward.

“Urschleim!” whooped Revel.

“Jesus Christ,” Tug said, staring in shocked fascination. The air jelly was still changing before its eyes, evolving a set of interior membranes, warping, pulsing, and rippling itself into an ever more precise shape, for all the world like a computer graphics program ray-tracing its image into an elegant counterfeit of reality…

Then a draft of air caught it. It hit the eaves of the house, adhered messily, and broke. Revel prudently stepped aside as a long rope of slime fell to the deck.

“I can hardly believe it,” said Tug. “Spontaneous symmetry breaking! A self-actuating reaction/diffusion system. This slime of yours is an excitable medium with emergent behavior, Revel! And that spontaneous fractalization of the structures…Can you do it again?”

“As many times as you want,” said Revel. “With as much Urschleim as you got. Of course, the smell kinda gets to you if you do it indoors.”

“But it’s so odd,” breathed Tug. “That the slime out of your oil-well is forming itself into jellyfish shapes just as I’m starting to build jellyfish out of plastic.”

“I figure it for some kind of a morphic resonance thing,” nodded Revel. “This primeval slime’s been trapped inside the Earth so long it’s truly achin’ to turn into something live and organic. Kind of like that super-weird worm and bacteria and clam shit that grows out of deep undersea vents.”

“You mean around the undersea vents, Revel.”

“No Tug, right out of ‘em. That’s the part most people don’t get.”

“Whatever. Let me try blowing an Urschleim air jelly.”

Tug dabbled the horn’s tin rim in the picnic cooler, then huffed away at his own balloon of Urschleim. The sphere began to ripple internally, just as before, with just the same dimples and just the same luscious double crease. Tug had a sudden deja vu. He’d seen this shape on his computer screen.

All of a sudden the treacherous thixotropic stuff broke into a flying burst of clear snot that splashed all over his feet and legs. The magic goo felt tingly on Tug’s skin. He wondered nervously if any of the slime might be passing into his bloodstream. He hurriedly toweled it off his body, then used the side of his Birkenstock sandal to push the rest of the slime off the edge of the deck.

“What do you think?” asked Revel.

“I’m overwhelmed,” said Tug, shaking his head. “Your Urschleim jellyfish look so much like the ones I’ve been building in my lab. Let’s go in. I’ll show you my jellyfish while we think this through.” Tug led Revel into the house.

Revel insisted on bringing the Urschleim-containing cooler and the empty pressure canister into the house. He even got Tug to throw an Indian blanket over them, “in case we get company.”

Tug’s jellyfish tanks filled up an entire room with great green bubbling glory. The aquarium room had been a domestic video game parlor during the early 1980s, when the home’s original builder, a designer of shoot-em-up computer twitch-games, had shored up the floor to accommodate two dozen massive arcade-consoles. This was a good thing too, for Tug’s seawater tanks were a serious structural burden, and far outweighed all of Tug’s other possessions put together, except maybe the teak waterbed which his ex-lover had left. Tug had bought the tanks themselves at a knockdown auction from the federal-seizure sale of an eccentric Oakland cocaine dealer, who had once used them to store schools of piranha.

Revel mulled silently over the ranks of jellyfish. Backlit by greenish glow from the spotlights of a defunct speed-metal crew, Tug’s jellies were at their best. The backlighting brought out their most secret, most hidden interior curvatures, with an unblinking brilliance that was well-nigh pornographic.

Their seawater trace elements and Purina Jellyfish Lab Chow cost more than Tug’s own weekly grocery bills, but his jelly menagerie had come to mean more to Tug than his own nourishment, health, money, or even his love-life. He spent long secret hours entranced before the gently spinning, ciliated marvels, watching them reel up their brine shrimp prey in mindless, reflexive elegance, absorbing the food in a silent ecstasy of poisonous goo. Live, digestive goo, that transmuted through secret alchemical biology into pulsating, glassy flesh.

Tug’s ex-lover had been pretty sporting about Tug’s goo-mania, especially compared to his other complaints about Tug’s numerous perceived character flaws, but Tug figured his lover had finally been driven away by some deep rivalry with the barely-organic. Tug had gone to some pains to Windex his noseprints from the aquarium glass before Revel arrived.

“Can you tell which ones are real and which ones I made from scratch?” Tug demanded triumphantly.

“You got me whipped,” Revel admitted. “It’s a real nice show, Tug. If you can really teach these suckers some tricks, we’ll have ourselves a business.”

Revel’s denim chest emitted a ringing sound. He reached within his overalls, whipped out a cellular phone the size of a cigarette-pack, and answered it. “Pullen here! What? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Okay, see you.” He flipped the phone shut and stowed it.