Spaceland (19 page)

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Authors: Rudy Rucker

BOOK: Spaceland
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“You're saying the Mophone could work without a phone company to back it up?” I said, getting excited. “The users wouldn't have to pay a monthly service charge?”
“Would be nice, huh?” Tulip crimped in the corners of her mouth and gave me a serious look. “What's the story with the superchannel, Joe? And where did you get the crystals?”
“I guess I can tell you new,” I said. “A creature from the fourth dimension gave them to me. Her name is Momo. The wires in the middle don't actually disappear; they stick into the fourth dimension. They make a loop on the vinn side of our space.”
“So you're going to be like that, huh?” said Tulip, leaning over the phones. She totally thought I was kidding. A little blue plume of smoke spiraled up from her soldering gun. “Never mind. Did you hear anything from Jena today?”
“No. I guess she went in to work.”
“I don't think so,” said Tulip, brushing aside a hanging twist of hair. “I cruised by 1234 Silva View Crescent on my way back from Fry's.” She rolled her big eyes my way, regarding me over the lenses of her glasses. “Jena's Beetle and Spazz's motorcycle were both there. I guess they're having a honeymoon.”
“They missed work?” I exclaimed. “I wonder if something's wrong with them.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Tulip. “You didn't sneak over there and kill them, did you, Joe? The house looked awfully quiet.” There was a slight smile on her full, chocolate lips, but she wasn't completely joking. She was a little afraid. She wasn't quite sure what I was like. She had this skittish, almost paranoid side to her.
“I'm not a violent guy, Tulip.”
“Last night you said you wanted to kill Spazz.”
“And you said you wanted to wring Jena's neck. We were venting. Commiserating. Look, I am so over Jena, you wouldn't believe
it. I've wasted too many years looking to her for my self-esteem. I'm okay. I know that now. I'm okay just as I am. Do you have good self-esteem, Tulip?”
“Of course,” said Tulip. “But that's not the right way to think. I'm more concerned about my relationship to God.”
This was kind of jarring. I hadn't heard a single person talk seriously about religion in the whole time I'd been in California. Not like back in Matthewsboro—I remember one time there I'd picked up a hitchhiker from the local Bible school, and as soon as he'd gotten in my car, he'd said, “Have you heard about Jesus?” Just to be a wise guy, I gave Tulip the same mock-innocent answer I'd given the hitchhiker.
“Who?”
“I told you I'm religious, Joe. It's the center of my life. God is the living core of everything around us. We're the clients and God's the Server. He has an inordinate fondness for people as well as beetles.” She laughed easily. “Yes, I'm different from most people. I care about God and about my fellow humans. I hope you don't have a problem with that, Mr. Self-Esteem.”
“I totally respect your opinions,” I told Tulip. “But I do have a little trouble seeing how you fit in with Spazz.”
Tulip was quiet for a minute, thinking. “Spazz's attraction for me? You know how we met? We were both buying earrings at an Indian store. Spazz makes me laugh. And—well, I've always been a very good girl, you know. Spazz represents, oh, chaos, disorder, creativity, bohemianism. He excites me. I guess I had some hope of reforming him a little bit. But it didn't work.”
“Spazz—he's not religious at all,” I said. “He's a stoner.”
“Well, Spazz claims getting high is a way to see God,” said Tulip. “But enlightenment isn't about getting high. It's about compassion.” She'd been working all this time. Now she set down her tools, took off her glasses, and got up from her stool. She gave me a full, frank
look. Her dark mouth was level and serious. There were shiny highlights from the window on her large, thoughtful eyes. I'd stopped noticing the scars on her cheeks. I wished I were more bohemian. “Here,” said Tulip, handing me one of the cell phones. It looked the same as ever, but she'd put the antenna crystal inside it. “Take this outside and try to call me.”
“You're done?”
“For now. The way it works is that when you press the Send button on either of these phones it makes the other one ring.”
I went out into the backyard and pressed the Send button on the Mophone. I heard a ringing from inside the house, and then, over the phone, a click and silence. Tulip had answered my call.
“Mr. Watson, come here,” I said. “I want you.”
“Mr. Bell,” came back Tulip's voice, crystal clear. “I heard every word you said—distinctly!” We'd both seen that old movie about the invention of the telephone.
“Terrific!” I cried. “I wonder what kind of distance we can get? Should be pretty much unlimited. There's nothing to get in the way in hyperspace. No buildings, no curvature of the Earth.”
“Hyperspace,” said Tulip's voice in the Mophone. She was ready to take me seriously. “You really say a creature from hyperspace gave the antenna crystals to you?”
“Momo,” I said.
“Did she ask you to worship her?” Tulip stepped out onto the porch to look at me. The bags under her eyes were dark and tired. “Did she ask for your soul?” I remembered Tulip's mentioning that she watched a lot of supernatural horror movies. She seemed like one of those people for whom a fear of the devil was the downside of their love for God. My mother had been like that; in fact she'd thought about the devil a whole lot more than she'd thought about God. I'd never seen the point. Believe in a loving God, fine, but why scare yourself with stories about Satan? It's not like you need
Satan to account for evil. Ordinary people pump out plenty of it on their own.
“It wasn't like that at all,” I told Tulip, turning off the Mophone and looking at her. “There's nothing supernatural here. This is science and business. Momo's basically a plantation owner from the fourth dimension. Like a saucer alien or something. Her family grows this stuff called grolly.”
Tulip shook her head. The idea of Momo seemed to upset her. “I think I've done enough for one day,” she said. “Four thousand dollars worth. I'm going home.”
“Will you come back tomorrow?”
“Maybe.” She fingered one of the dark humps on her cheek. “Will you cut me in for stock?”
“Sure I will! You can really take another day off from work?”
“Yeah,” said Tulip. We walked back into the house and sat on the stools in the kitchen. “I phoned ExaChip while I was at Fry's,” she explained. “They're not doing jack this week. I told my boss I'm going skiing, and he said it was fine.” She hefted her Mophone. Her mood was brightening again. “I'm starting to believe in the antenna crystals. The fourth dimension. I guess anything's possible. The Mophone could be a killer product. How much stock would you offer me?”
“You can be the Chief Technology Officer,” I said. “I'll give you, I don't know, a tenth of our founder's stock? But then I'd only want to pay you like five hundred dollars a day.”
“I'm getting two hundred thousand a year at ExaChip,” said Tulip. “So you'd have to go at least a thousand a day.”
“I could do that,” I said, maybe too quickly. I really wanted Tulip in on this. She was smart, I was attracted to her, and—if I could win her over, it would be a way to get back at Spazz. Show him I was as much of a man as he was. “I could give you my extra room, too. If you need a place to live.”
“Let's take a look at it.”
We walked through the tiny hall to the unused bedroom. Tulip gave the room the once over and peered out the windows. She turned her big eyes on me and brushed back her loose-hanging hair. “It would be handy, for a while. But I wouldn't want you to have any unrealistic notions.”
“I don't, Tulip,” I lied. “Not at all. Strictly business. Though if you change your mind—”
“It's no good to rush into a new relationship just to get back at someone,” said Tulip, as if she were reading my mind. She fingered the three hoops in her right ear, thinking. My subtle vision had gone fuzzy, but I managed to glance inside Tulip's body: she was still and calm. “This would be a lot nicer than my sister's,” said Tulip presently. “I have to sleep on the couch there. And Sis always expects me to baby-sit. Did I mention that Fremont bites? I have to drive on the Nimitz to commute from there.” The Nimitz was the worst freeway in the whole Bay Area. At just about any time of day, it could take you an hour to go five miles on the Nimitz. Hooray for the Nimitz! Thanks to the Nimitz, Tulip was going to move in with me! “I'll do it,” she said. “And no Satanism.”
“Don't worry!” I said. “It'll be great. We'll get rich together.”
“I'll tell you what,” said Tulip. “I'll drive up to Fremont right now and get my stuff. And I'll take the Mophone with me and we can check if it keeps working when I'm far away.”
So that's what we did. Tulip launched her Nissan into the traffic, and for the next hour and a half she called me every five or ten minutes. The connection held up fine. No fading, no tearing, no cut-outs, no drift. We had a peer-to-peer phone that scaled over intercity distances! Every time we talked, Tulip got more excited. She asked me again about how the chips worked, and I told her a little more about Momo and the fourth dimension. She was believing
it, but she still didn't like the idea of Momo. And then she was at her sister's house and she hung up for a while.
I got to work on my computer, making up a business plan. If we were going public with Mophone, we couldn't fund it with stolen money. Sooner or later some auditors would be looking at our books. We were going to need some honestly scammed venture capital. I felt a little dizzy at the thought of this. The uneasy, wobbly feeling I'd had after lunch came back to me. I went and lay down on my bed.
The phone started ringing not the Mophone, my regular cell phone. It was Tulip.
“I'm just starting back, Joe,” she said. “But something funny happened. The Mophone disappeared.”
“How do you mean?”
“It was in my purse in the car, and when I went back out it was gone.”
“Maybe your nieces and nephews took it?”
“No, the car was locked and I have the only key. I don't see what could have happened to it. Could this have something to do with that—that supernatural creature you were talking about? Do you think she might be from the Evil One?”
“Relax,” I said. “Those nuns made you too superstitious. If Momo took your Mophone she'll give it back. She might just be checking out your engineering. Maybe even improving it.” I sounded more confident than I felt. If it was a Dronner like Wackle who'd taken it, I was screwed. Doubly screwed if Tulip ever got a glimpse of a hypercreature who looked like Beelzebub himself. I might need to go looking for the missing Mophone. “If I'm not here when you get back, you can let yourself in with the key under the doormat,” I told Tulip.
“Okay.” Now that she'd dropped her bomb, she sounded calm.
“I'll take my time. The traffic's gridlocked. I'm going to stop off at the Great Mall and pick up a bed and stuff. See you later.”
I found my hypersack and tied it to my belt in case I was going to have to go out into the All to find Tulip's Mophone. And right then my Mophone rang. It was Jena. I wasn't really surprised. Jena and phones went together.
“How did you get it?” I asked as soon as she'd said hello.
“Momo's here. She gave us a bunch of antenna crystals this morning. Spazz has been trying to wire them up all day, but it's not happening for him. Momo brought us one of your Mophones so Spazz can see how you did it.”
“Goddamn it!” I yelled. “Let me talk to Momo!”
“I think we better talk in person, Joe,” said Jena. “Come on over. And bring my half million.”
“It's gone,” I snapped. “Didn't Momo tell you?”
“You've got more,” said Jena. “I saw the paper.”
“Shut up!”
“Come on over. Don't take too long, or I might make some more calls.” Jena hung up.
It took me a minute to get my head back together. What was all that crap I'd been telling myself about being okay? I wasn't okay at all. Jena was pushing me around as much as ever. I drove over to my old house, cursing and fuming.
Spazz met me at the door. He wasn't wearing his nose-ring anymore; maybe Jena had already talked him out of it. But he still had the big silver stud in the top of his ear. I felt like ripping it out.
“Dude,” said Spazz, but nothing else for the moment.
Jena was sitting on the couch biting her nails, and next to her was Momo, looking like a fat, naked Picasso woman. Momo nodded in my direction, and one of her eyes crawled across her face and winked at me. Meanwhile Spazz sat down at my old kitchen table. He had some tools there, though not nearly so clean a kit as Tulip's.
Tulip's pried-open Mophone was lying next to two more cell phones that Spazz had been tinkering with. Spazz was avidly studying the details of what Tulip had done.

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