Ribofunk Page 18

  In the face of all the laughter Honeysuckle's comment caused, I found myself having to stick up for my dads, and it was awfully difficult, since I didn't really want to and felt like a total hypocrite.

  "My poohs may be retro-jethro KISS-asses," I said, "but at least they're not black science boryokudans like yours!"

  Everyone got silent as cell-death. My reference to the illegal underworld origin of the wealth of Honeysuckle's surface-respectable poohs was ultra loosh and faroosh. But I couldn't just sit there batting off phagocytes and let her run my dads down. I mean, it was all right for me to do it, but not her!

  Honeysuckle's cartoon gaze grew as slitted and mean as that of a Secret Service pantherine confronted with a suspicious character feinting at the World Bank Managing Director. I knew I was truly on her shit list now and wondered how wise it had been to sass such a nasty girl.

  "Well," she said, her voice dripping lysozymes, "the duck can quack! I suppose you think it's all spidersilk and hormone sodas, having poohs like mine. You don't know what it's like, every night half-expecting the crick-cops or Protein Police or the IMF to bust down the door and boot us all!"

  It was hard to feel sorry for Honeysuckle as she sat there on a spongy mass of lymph, flicking her flippers and flaunting her chest, so I didn't even try. "You can have anything you want-"

  "What does that have to do with being happy! Suppose you could have anything you wanted? Would you always be happy?"

  "Why, sure… "

  Honeysuckle assumed a venomous smile. "All right, then. What do you want most? C'mon, tell us, and I'll give it to you. I'll see to it that your wildest dreams come true."

  Somehow the grounds of this battle had shifted under me. How we had gotten from the respective merits of our parents to who had the happier life eluded me, and I didn't like the change. Somehow, I found myself on the defensive and was really uneasy.

  What could I say, in front of Honeysuckle and all my friends? All I really wanted was a pair of nice unassuming moderate-sized boobs and maybe some basal whychrome genitals for Jinx. But I was too embarrassed to say so. So instead, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

  "I'd like, um-a spike!"

  Honeysuckle laughed. "That's all? Out of anything you could have, you choose a crummy, soilin' spike?"

  Jinx intervened then, and I sent a silent thanks his way.

  "What's the matter with a spike? They're really peppy! Plus they're so new, hardly anybody's got one!"

  Honeysuckle huffed. "Oh, I suppose you'd like one too?… "

  "I wouldn't mind one. But they cost more than a bucket of brains. And besides, you need your pooh's chop to get one planted… "

  Now Honeysuckle adopted that I've-swallowed-every-trope-ever-made tone she frequently used, which always got under my skin like a stitchbug.

  "Well, I think they're simply as tawdry as sparkleskin, and frankly I'd rather wear chitin! But if you two larvae want spikes, I suppose I'll just have to get them for you."

  Before Honeysuckle or Jinx or I could say any more, the tutor-turtle informed us that recess was over, and we had to get back to work.

  I couldn't really concentrate on the rest of the lesson. All my bulbs were firing doubletime, trying to imagine what Honeysuckle intended to do for-or to-Jinx and me.

  Finally, the tutor-turtle told us to get ready for the phase-change out of virtuality, and the next thing I knew, I was back in my Sack, which was already withdrawing its squelchy threads and tendrils.

  I tickled it open and emerged into the classroom.

  All the other kids were climbing out of their Sacks too, their familiar faces and forms a welcome sight after so much microdiz nutrasweet. Most of them-all of them except poor old me, in fact-sported various kiddie-moddies: tails, scales, and pointy nails, manes, veins, and extra brains. I was the only one whose poohs wouldn't let her have even the simplest little gill-slit or sixth finger-never mind tits-all because they believed in some weird principle of "somatic integrity."

  Honeysuckle was brushing her perfect calico hair and eyeing me from her perch on the corner of a smartdesk with the raptorial look of an execucondo's security bird. I wanted Jinx beside me before she could say anything, but he was still struggling to get out of his sack, last one as usual. I went over to help him.

  Jinx's sack was undergoing some bizarro kind of peristaltic reaction, and I had to pet its control ganglia till it calmed down. Jinx always had some kind of trouble with his interface bag, because its parms weren't set up for his peculiarities.

  At last, though, the two of us got it open, and Jinx emerged.

  There was nothing to Jinx below his abdomen. His body simply ended a few centimeters below his navel. He looked just like he had been sliced in half by some mad magician.

  His bottom-or ventral side or whatever you want to call it-was capped with a tough protective Immunologic membrane like sharkskin that was integral with his regular epidermis. This membrane handled all his metabolic wastes, so that Jinx never had to pee or shit.

  The way Jinx got around was on his knuckles. His hands and supermyofibril biceps were massive, and his knuckles well calloused. Suspended from these pylons, he could either swing his torso forward, rest on it, then shift both supports, or he could sort of fall forward from left to right hand.

  Jinx had been born this way. His poohs were third-generation spacelings whose ancestors hadn't seen much need for deadmeat legs in zero-gee, and so they had bid the chromosartors snip and transcribe until the result was my proxy, Jinx.

  His folks-nomenklatura of Asgard-had sent Jinx to Gaia-to our school-for what they insisted was a superior educational experience. (Although, what with tropes and the digiverse being equally accessible and high-quality practically anywhere, I failed to see exactly what benefits they were conferring on him, unless it was the dubious Gaian social life or high-status eft expenditure.)

  When I first got friendly with Jinx, I asked him two questions.

  "How come you don't ride, um, a prosthocart, maybe like the dolphinboys use?"

  "Because I'm not a cripple. I'm completely normal, for a spaceling."

  I didn't argue the point, even though only baseline scantlings like me rate the semiderogatory word "normal." Maybe the word meant something different on Asgard. Instead, I asked the second question.

  "I imagine your colony cooks new members in some fancy ductwork."

  "Yeah. Repligen wombs with i-Stat endometriums and Ares-Serono placentas."

  "But how do you-I mean, what do you do when-"

  "How do we get wiggly?"

  "Well, yeah!"

  "It's all virtual. That's the one thing I don't like about home. I keep wishing I had-had legs and a cock! I even dream I'm walking sometimes… "

  "It's probably feedback from Gaia's morphic fields, the human subset. You felt it out in space, but it's even stronger here. Like they say, 'Ain't no shield against the field, cuz it dwells in the cells.'"

  "I guess."

  Now, as I helped Jinx to a "sitting" position, my reverie was brought to a harsh end by Honeysuckle's sashaying, tit-quaking approach. She stopped a meter or so away and addressed me while ignoring Jinx-except to insult him.

  "If you're done helping that knucklebuster, I'd like to finish up our little business matter."

  Honeysuckle ran a flicker-screen thumbnail across a seam bisecting her bare midriff, opening up a possum-pouch. From within, she deftly filched a flashcard and handed it to me.

  I noticed that Honeysuckle's nailscreen was running the Mandelbrot set, and everything suddenly felt as strange as one of the set's remoter precincts.

  With nervous fingers I flexed the still-warm card, and its silicrobe message blinked at me.

  THE G– GNOME'S CAVE 1040 BUGHOUSE SQUARE (RIDE THE RED ARTERY TO NODE TEN, OR TAKE SLIDEWALK SEVEN)Somatic and gnomic alterations of all types. Deletions, insertions, and inversions. Coleopterics a specialty. Fully bonded and licensed by the BDC.

  I flexed the card aga
in, and Honeysuckle's totipotent family chop showed up, the semi-infamous Rancifer icon.

  Honeysuckle leered. "That'll get you and your friend anything you ask for from the G-Gnome-including tits, if that's what you really want."

  I stiffened right up, but managed not to change my expression-I hoped. I knew the whole class was watching and listening.

  "No, I want a spike."

  "Me too," said Jinx in a comradely way, although I could sense that he was having second thoughts just like me.

  "Pardon me, but I'm sure neither one of you knows your efferents from your afferents. But if you both show up tomorrow with spikes, I'll have to admit you've got plenty of testo-estro."

  And with that, Honeysuckle turned her back on us as if we had ceased to exist.

  The teacher called us to return to our studies then, and so I couldn't talk anymore with Jinx.

  Needless to say, the rest of the four-hour school day moved slow as a crawlypatch. With Honeysuckle's card in my pocket, I couldn't concentrate on plectics or cladistics or kundalini or behavioral pragmatics or even lunch! (And they were serving my favorite that day too: deep-fried free-range croc with null-cal Ben and Jerry's for dessert.) All I wanted was to be finished with classes, so that Jinx and I could decide what, if anything, we were going to do with the magic flashcard.

  At last– of course and however-we were free.

  Or as free as any eleven-year-old ever is in this ageist society!

  Jinx and I met at our usual place, beneath the towering forty-foot paulownia tree on the edge of the schoolyard. We had helped to plant the giant when it was just a tiny seedling two years ago, on Global Arbor Day, and it had been our special spot ever since.

  If Jinx had had feet, he probably would have been kicking the dirt. As it was, he exhibited his nervousness by picking bark off our tree.

  "I don't know about you," my spaceling proxy said when I came up to him, "but I can't think straight. What do you say we bind some satori and just sit a minute?"

  "Now you're firing! I hear the Chromatin Cafe has that new line of Archer Daniels-Midland tropes on tap… "

  "Then what are we waiting for? Let's go!"

  So with Jinx swinging himself along as I ambled, we made our way to the Chromatin Cafe.

  We were supposed to be reporting to our separate afterschool apprenticeships. Jinx to his nafta boss at the Mercosur Mart (he was training to run an entrepot for Asgard) and me to the local branch of the Sheldrake Institute, where I was trying to grok morphic field modulation.

  But if we were indeed going to be spiked, then missing our work stints would be the least of our transgressions.

  The CC was only half a klick from the school, so we didn't bother with the slidewalks. It felt good to use my muscles after so much virtual nonexercise, and I knew Jinx felt the same.

  Soon we were inside the sodaparlor with its old-fashioned decorations, primitive PET-scan printouts, and NMR images of brain-glucose uptake, flickering on ancient crackly low-res monitors.

  "Two Joshu Juices," I said to the poptate kibernetica behind the counter, presenting Honeysuckle's flashcard. If she didn't pay for anything else, at least she'd pay for our drinks.

  "Make mine a Potala Punch," countermanded Jinx.

  ''The order is two Joshu Juices and one Potala Punch," said the kibe.

  "No. One of each."

  "The order is one Joshu Juice and one Potala Punch."

  "Flame on!"

  "This is an assent?"

  "Does the Goddess use tampons?"

  The poptate churned its heuristics for ten seconds, then began to brew us our sidechains.

  "Want to sit by the pond?" asked Jinx, after the drinks were mixed.

  "Sure."

  I carried the juices, and we found an empty bench on the grassy marge of the small ornamental pond. Two or three baseline ducks were paddling in the reeds, and I was reminded of my dumb id2 and Honeysuckle's sexy one.

  I plopped down on the syalon seat, and Jinx used his strong arms to lever himself up beside me. Sitting together like this, his head nearly on a level with mine, it was easy to forget his lack of legs.

  We clinked our glasses, and I quoted the ADM jingle.

  "'Peace of mind-'"

  "'– for a nudollar ninety-nine!'" finished Jinx.

  We downed our brews and waited for the effects.

  The tropes had been expertly reverse-engineered from a sampling of meditating monks: in the case of Jinx's drink, from the mind of the Dalai Lama himself. In'a minute or so, the world took on a shimmering translucence, and I felt connected to the whole universe. Nothing mat-

  tered, but everything counted. All my problems were non-existent.

  Staring out over the perfect pond, I saw the surface ripple in the middle, then break to reveal the finned back of an airfish making the phase-change into the second half of its life.

  We had just studied the specs on these splices, and they rushed into my brain in perfect arrays.

  Having filled its flotation bladders with hydrogen broken out of the water and revamped its physiology, the airfish was now ready to live in the atmosphere. It would subsist for a few months on airborne microzooa, spore, and pollen, all the while sucking low-level ozone from the air and concentrating it in a different bladder. Rising higher and higher, it would eventually burst at around 15,000 meters, the lower edge of the ozone layer, releasing its cargo of reactive molecules where they would do good, not harm.

  Highly unslouch. Truly nonfactorable goldstar-plus cytofabrication. I definitely wasn't down with the kids who'd try to shoot the O3-suckers with flashlights just to watch the hydrogen mini-explosion.

  Jinx spoke up with deep significance. "The airfish is born, becomes adult, does its work, then dies."

  Without satori tropes, Jinx's words probably don't mean much, or else sound ultra-simplex. But I can't tell you what they meant to me then. They seemed to encapsulate our whole situation in a nutshell.

  "We're 'fish too," I answered. "But we're also more than 'fish."

  "You're bright as a three-alarm solar flare, girl!"

  I knew then that I loved Jinx and would always be with him.

  At that very moment, as if in confirmation of our love, another couple wandered in to sit on the bench next to us.

  The woman wore Systemix meat, a Great Mother soma-type. Dressed only in a grass skirt, she had a double line of small breasts running down her torso, and her hips were broad as the lake behind the Yellow River dam.

  Her companion's silicrobe trademark told me he was racked out by Cellpro. And what a superstring raster he was! Hawkheaded Horus, noble falcon plumage mantling his shoulders.

  Jinx and I looked on in mute admiration for several minutes. In the midst of our trope-induced satori, the couple seemed like heavenly visitors. Even after the glamour had worn off our vision, they still looked megatrump, if merely human.

  Ignoring us, the adults quaffed their drinks. (Horus's pointy birdtongue was ultra-uptake!) The brews must have been some kind of aphrodelix, since the couple soon started into some heavy petting. Horus's loincloth quickly became a tent, and I got awfully jealous and sad at the same time.

  "Jinx," I pleaded irrationally, "let's use Honeysuekle's card to get the moddies we've always talked about, then run away together!"

  Jinx held my hand. "Arnie, think twice. Putting legs on me is no simplex patch job. I'd be laid up for days. We couldn't travel very far even in a hired scar car without leaving a trail even a senile augie-doggie could follow.

  Honeysuckle would be pissing prostaglandins at the theft of her card. And then our poohs-or yours anyway-would snatch us back, and the next thing you know, we'd be wearing obedience collars like some splice! No, the only thing to do is to hold out for a year. It's not such a long time… "

  Jinx spoke with the voice of reason, and I knew what he advocated was the only sensible course. Still, my whole soul rebelled at the notion of going on with our boring lives without doing something, especial
ly when we'd have to face all our cohort tomorrow.

  I stood up. "I guess the only thing left to do then is to get spiked. At least it'll show our poohs we've got wills of our own. And it should shut Honeysuckle right up. Are you in a dedicated mode?"

  Jinx boosted himself off the bench, thumping onto the grass. "Does a carebear sit in the pedwards?"

  I laughed. "G-Gnome, here we come!"

  Slidewalk Seven was only a one-block stroll north of us, so we chose that transport over the Arteries.

  If you pulled out a length of your intestines and slit it longwise, you'd expose the velvety microvilli lining, the zillions of little fingers that propel food through your gut. You'd also have a pretty good model of a slidewalk.

  The sturdy silicrobe microvilli of the slidewalk propelled anything placed atop them along at a steady 5kph. (You could ride the network cross-continent in just a month, if you wanted to spend your vacation that boring way, like many slouch oldsters did.) Each invisible finger was rooted in place, yet flexible enough to pass on its burden to its neigh-

  bor. (In constant motion, the slidewalks conveyed a visual impression similar to the waveriness of heated syalon pavement. And if you rode them barefoot, they tickled almost subliminally.) Different lanes had different built-in directional orientations, for two-way travel.

  The Amgen motto-"Taxis, not taxis"-was spelled out right in the substance of the slidewalks. I remembered having to have my dads explain it to me when I was little, since I never knew that "tax-us" could also be pronounced ''tax-ease," or even what they were.

  Jinx swung himself deftly onboard with the other passengers, vars, kibes, and citizens, and I had to stutter-skip to stay with him. I wasn't usually so awkward, but guess I was kind of nervous about our plans, even though I thought I had convinced myself it was the only way.

  As if sensing my unease, Jinx tried to make me laugh. "Did you ever download any reductionist paradigm fiction where the author tried to imagine a system like this and came up with miles of rubber belts on rollers?"

  Jinx's trick worked, and I laughed like a hyena splice. "That's not true. You're yanking my rods."