Spaceland (22 page)

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Authors: Rudy Rucker

BOOK: Spaceland
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He hung up. coughed, laughed, walked over and kissed Tulip on her big. soft, chocolate mouth. I decided to kill him.
I drew back a foot from Spaceland and wriggled along until I was right even with Spazz. I peered into his body. There was his heart.
I shot my hand forward and grabbed his aorta, squeezing it shut. Spazz grunted and clutched his chest. Tulip dragged a chair over and helped Spazz to sit down. They didn't know it was me, because the only part of me inside Spaceland was my hand, and that was hidden inside Spazz's chest. The aorta was tough and slippery and twitchy. I kept up the pressure. Spazz's heart was flopping around, bumping at me. His eyes rolled up and closed. He slumped back in his chair. Tulip. was screaming, though with my head out in hyperspace I couldn't hear her. She grabbed the phone and dialed 911. I hung onto Spazz's aorta. His face was starting to turn blue.
Something struck me in the middle of the guts and sent me spinning. Spazz's aorta slipped out of my grasp. I was tumbling through hyperspace and now something grabbed me hard and shook me.
Yes, it was Wackle. Another Wackle, that is, another red devil figure at the end of a long, winding tentacle thread that led all the way hack to the distant Dronian cliffs.
“Peace and love, bro Joe,” said Wackle, his crimson face pushing close to mine. He smelled like the ocean. His mouth was like a clam shell and his eyes were on little stalks. “Killing kills the killer. Re gentle in the lonely night.”
Though Wackle was terrifying to look at, his tone was sweet and his words were reasonable. Maybe the Dronners weren't really the bad guys? I paused and caught my breath.
Down in Spaceland, Spazz was hack on his feet, coughing. Tulip gave him a glass of water. Spazz picked up the phone, punched in 911. and talked to someone to cancel Tulip's call for help. I could
see Tulip arguing about it, but Spazz's gestures clearly indicated that he didn't want cops and medics poking around his house. He was already completely recovered.
I was glad. It was good I hadn't killed Spazz. I would have felt bad about it for the rest of my life. I'd been crazy to go after him like that.
“You were right,” I told Wackle.
“What it is,” said Wackle. “You're thick as pie, a Klupper-fed guy. The fattened-up Spacelander, yas. For shame to be a shark. There's a reason, there's a rhyme, there's a season, there's a time. What it is Momo do with you?”
“I don't know what Momo's really up to,” I told Wackle. “It's complicated. She says her family wants me to make the Mophones so the antenna crystal signals will keep you Dronners from stealing their grolly.”
“Bullpoo,” said Wackle. “Grolly's junk. What Kluppers got, Dronners don't want. Nohow. Just want they leave us alone. Worrisome they're working you, is what we thinky-thunk.”He gave a cackle and formed some stubby arms which pretended to shoot a hyperbazooka. “Blooey! Wackle kerflooey! Scatter my smeel, a favor indeed. Those splatters put new me trees on the grow there and there and there and there and there and there and there and there and there …” He pointed twenty arms towards the Dronian cliffs. “Bud me, baby! Simpler than your two go.” Down in Spaceland, Tulip and Spazz were embracing.
“I—I guess I'll go back down,” I said, when Wackle didn't say more. “And—thanks.”
“Ding the dong,” said Wackle. “Old trick, new dog. Glad to save your soul, little fatty. I'll keep out an eye, ever so many an eye. You can count on me when the Klupper runneth over.”
“All right,” I said, and flopped back into my car, making sure not to come down backwards. I sat there and honked the horn.
Spazz peered out, did a double take, gestured that I should come talk. I got out of my car and spoke to him from the yard. I'd decided to play my hand strong.
“How's the heart?” I said straight up. I reached out towards him and made a squeezing gesture with my hand.
Spazz winced and his jaw dropped a little. He put his hand on his chest.
“What it is,” I said, half-imagining I could hear a Wackle cackle. “Hurry up, dude, we've got our meeting with Ken at eleven.” I started to get back in my car, then paused and glared back at him. “Call Ken and tell him the meeting today is the real thing, okay? And, dude, don't forget to bring the Mophones.” I made another violent grab with my hand, and this time I really did hear a Wackle cackle. But it was me making it.
I drove off, giving Jena a cell phone call on my way home. I kept it simple, just told her that Spazz and Tulip would definitely be there.
“I'm at the Los Perros Coffee Roasting,” Jena told me. “Tell you what. I'll run over and get a computer projector and a little movie screen at OfficeMax.” She was back into the program. She was good at this stuff. “Showing PowerPoint slides on your desktop is bush.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Mophone will reimburse you.”
When I was nearly home, a lump of Momo appeared on the car seat next to me. Back in town.
“You were in Dronia again,” she said accusingly. “Where you were expressly forbidden to go.”
“Just for a minute,” I said defensively. “To eavesdrop on Spazz.”
“I witnessed your actions,” said Momo. “I saw your hand grasping his heart, and I peeked into Dronia. Do you presume to play the higher being, Joe?”
“I just wanted to scare him,” I said. I glanced over at the lump of flesh next to me. It was the size of a small dog, with a mouth,
an ear, and a hank of blonde hair. The mouth looked angry. “Spazz was trying to ruin the company,” I added, “It's me who's working things out for you, Momo. I'm your man.”
“You spoke with a Wackle as well,” she said coldly. “That's what caused you to release your rival's heart. It was a Wackle who knocked you loose. You and he engaged in a colloquy, his goal being, I well know, to undermine and subvert.”
“Maybe,” said, barely moving my lips. “I don't know. I have to watch the road. I have to think about the meetings today. I'm doing them for you.”
“You blotch, you stain, you cartoon,” said Momo. A tendril of her flesh reached towards me and seemed to sink through my skin and into the fibers of my spine. I felt a shiver of pain, like the lightest of notes struck upon a harp. Another twinge, stronger this time. And then a true spasm that forced me to pull the car off the road and bend forward moaning in agony. “Don't presume!” said the blob on the seat next to me. “Don't pick and choose which of my orders you should obey.”
“I won't, Momo,” I whispered. “I won't do it again.” I felt a thousand needles in my back.
“What won't you do?” insisted the blob.
“I won't go into Dronia again.”
The pain stopped, and the mouth formed a smile. “Very well then. Remember this: I'll be close by.”
The day's meetings started very badly. Ken Wong and some old Taiwanese guy showed up before any of us had had a chance to talk and clear up our unresolved issues. The room was so tense it felt like the air was tied into knots.
Spazz had made another call to Ken Wong on his way into our Mophone headquarters, and with all the crossed signals, Ken didn't know what to believe or who to listen to, which is not a state of mind conducive to dropping a bundle of cash on anyone. He
stopped Jena halfway through her presentation and remarked that Spazz and I would be welcome to come back to our old johs if this didn't work out. And then he and his partner were gone.
We had twenty minutes till the next prospective business angel, and now I had a chance to coach Jena about the slides. She'd done Ken's presentation cold. While we were going over the slides, Spazz started heckling me, saying I'd scanned the wrong UML diagrams.
“We don't have time to change them,” I snapped. “Maybe if you'd stuck around and helped last night instead of taking off.”
“I just can't believe you think you're running this show,” said Spazz. “Pinhead. Nazi. Murderer.” He broke into a long bout of coughing.
“Don't get so angry, Spazz,” said Tulip. “You'll make yourself sick again.”
Evidently Spazz hadn't yet told Tulip. what had really happened in the cabin. But now he spilled the beans. “It was Joe who made me sick,” Spazz told Tulip. “He went up into the fourth dimension, and he reached down inside my chest to squeeze my heart. Or he got Momo to do it for him.” His face still looked a little blotchy, and he hadn't shaved. He glared at me. “If you pull that again. Cube, I'll tell the cops.”
“There's not a jail that can hold me,” I said, feeling cocky. I really had him on the ropes.
“You put a curse on Spazz?” said Tulip, shrinking back a little. “You and your familiar hexed him in the cabin?”
“
What
are you talking about?” asked Jena, looking up from the computer.
“Spazz was all set to double cross Joe with Ken Wong,” Tulip told Jena. “And Joe gave Spazz a heart attack. It was dreadful. I think maybe all of this is black magic.”
Jena's eyes got narrow. “We're getting ready to pitch to six prospects in a row. Our big break. So
stop freaking out.
All of you. We
can fight later. I'm the one who should be mad anyway. With Spazz running out on me like that.” She pouted her lips and trembled her chin a little. “I thought you were tired of Tulip, Spazz.”
“I am,” said Spazz weakly. “I'm sorry about last night.”
Tulip threw down the Mophone she was holding and disappeared into the kitchen. There was a knock on the door.
The business angels were all over the map in appearance, approach, and behavior: a gray-haired fatherly blood-sucker from the chip industry; a shrink-wrap billionaire bent on collapsing the self confidence of anybody with the ambition of following in his footsteps ; a seen-it-all portfolio manager ready to rewrite our business strategy as soon as he met us; a shy, liquid-eyed Colombian who said he was a rancher looking to diversify; and two twenty-year-old day-traders who said they'd spent the morning playing volleyball on the beach. I talked a little volleyball with the day-traders—volleyball was one of my things, too, though I didn't get in as many games as I would have liked.
Jena's presentation got better and better—it was like a dance, like the miniature theatrical performances that airline stewardesses do to accompany the safety messages, like cheerleading. Spazz was mesmerized, but none of the investors were buying it. The chip guy didn't like our staffing, the shrink-wrap guy thought our Mophones were fakes, the portfolio guy didn't like our numbers for scaling to the mass market, the rancher—if that's what he really was—couldn't understand the point of our product, the day-traders thought our timeline to a hundred percent profit was way too long.
And then Clement Treed showed up. There were footsteps on the porch, the door swung open, and it was him, tall and lanky, his froggy mouth bent in the shape of a smile, his eyes alert behind his glasses. He had a surprisingly small head, made smaller by his monkish haircut. He was wearing preppy J. Crew clothes so new they looked like they were right out of the UPS box. Compared to
Clement, I was almost grungy. He gave a high sign to his limo driver and came on in. He spotted Tulip right away.
“We paid to use Gandhi's image, you know,” he told her in a quiet tone, as if continuing a conversation from two or three minutes ago. “A charity in Calcutta. His family picked it.”
“Oh, I'm sorry I ever brought that up,” said Tulip, twisting a long strand of her hair. “I was just having a little fun at your expense to impress my cousin.”
“Fun at my expense,” echoed Treed, snagging my desk chair and lightly sitting down. He was a thin man with a slight paunch, in his late thirties. “That's something the government likes too. You'd think the public would be more appreciative of what MeYou has done for everyone. And I'm not done yet. I'm out to diversify. Who's the CEO?”
“Me,” I said, stepping forward. “Joe Cube.”
Treed shook my hand, his grip firmer than I'd expected. “You've got ten minutes,” he said. “Amaze me.”
Jena did her cheer routine. Treed interrupted only once, to volunteer a detailed correction to one of the UMI, diagrams. When Jena was done, he sat staring at the last slide, the one with the picture of the antenna crystal. And then he started polishing his glasses.
“Can somebody tell me more about this so-called superchannel?” he said, still looking down at his glasses. “How does it work
“That's our core trade secret,” I said.
“I signed your non-disclosure form,” said Treed in a mild but impatient voice. “And now I need to know if you have something, or not.”
“Tell him, Joe,” said Spazz.
“It's—it's the fourth dimension,” I said. “The antenna crystal has a wire that sticks into hyperspace.”
“Cute,” said Treed, his long mouth spreading in a rueful smile.
“Science fiction.” He put on his glasses and got to his feet. “I have to ask—that thing in the paper yesterday, the mirror-money hoax. Was that a set-up for this?” It was like Clement Treed's riny head held an all-seeing web-crawler that ran a thousand times as fasr as my brain. “Which of you four is the one who convinced the others?” he demanded.

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