Joke: “Too true. I do wish you’d come back home, Yoke. Those allas— they could be dangerous. What if someone were to turn one against you? It sounds like things could so easily get out of control. Does Randy Karl Tucker realize that the aliens are in bodacious moldie bodies just down the block?”
Yoke made a little marble head with her alla, an image of how she felt. An open-mouthed face: excited, anxious, aware. “We didn’t tell him yet, no. But I think we might go see them tonight.”
5
Randy, Phil, Babs, Phil
Randy steered his motorcycle south out of San Francisco, taking Route 1 down along the coast past Pacifica. Though it had been sunny over at Babs’s warehouse, it was foggy and cold on the coast. He pulled over and alla-made himself gloves and a set of biking leathers. Awesome what the little coppery tube could do. It had been great making things with Babs and Yoke yesterday. That Babs was really something. And now, just when he was starting to go for her, she was slipping away from him, which was majorly depressing. Maybe it was time for him to change.
Randy tucked the alla tube inside his right glove just in case he needed it all of sudden. He’d never ridden a motorcycle before, and he had a notion that if he were about to collide with something, he might be able to use the alla to turn the obstacle into thin air. Just project a bright-line cube on out there and zap whatever it was: a rock, a tree, or even another vehicle. Though if he couldn’t have Babs, then why bother? Randy caught himself and pushed that feeling away.
Riding the bike proved quite easy. Randy had picked a top-of-the-line model out of the alla catalog, and it was very stable.
It had a big quantum-dot electric motor and imipolex DIM wheels. South of Half Moon Bay, Randy decided to stop and make himself a snack. Not seeing any official beach, he simply drove his bike across a field of dead brussels sprouts to the edge of a hundred-foot bluff at the edge of the sea. The smart wheels had no problem picking their way across the furrows.
Randy parked his bike upright on its stand, then used his alla to make himself an energy bar and a can of Bharat Jolly-Zest soda, an anise-flavored Indian soft drink he’d become fond of in Bangalore. He was pleased to find it in the truly exhaustive alla catalog. After eating, he kept sitting on the bluff, amusing himself by designing a series of little realware glider airplanes and flinging them out into the eddying winds. He couldn’t stop thinking about Babs Mooney.
Babs’s sudden relationship with Theodore was bothering Randy a lot more than he would have expected. Up until a few days ago he’d been thinking of Babs as basically an easy mark whom he could sponge off of, as well as being a pretty good person to kill time with. It’s not like she was knock-down gorgeous or anything. But now all of a sudden things were getting complicated, the way women were said to like them to be.
Randy’s experience thus far with women was very limited, one might even say stunted. The sum total was this: in high school he’d had a hot and heavy affair with a bisexual older woman named Honey Weaver who—it later developed—had really just been using him as a way to get at his mother, with whom Honey also had an affair. It was Honey who’d gotten Randy interested in cheeseball sex. She’d had two memorable moldie sex toys: the dildo Angelika and the versatile rubber sheet Sammie-Jo.
The day after Randy graduated from high school—lordy lord, that was nearly four years ago—Honey had converted to Heritagism and cut him off without so much as a kiss good-bye. “All them things you and me did was wrong, Randy Karl,” she’d said. “I’m through bein’ the goddamn Whore of Babylon. It was only because of your mother that you was important to me.”
Honey had used him and ditched him, and then the same thing had happened again—only this time with a moldie named Parvati. Randy lived with Parvati while he was working for an imipolex fab in Bangalore, India. In the end it came out that Parvati really and truly only wanted him for the imipolex he could give her. There’d been a bad last scene involving poisoning and knife-play; Randy ended up in possession of one of Parvati’s buttocks, which had become none other than Willa Jean.
Randy didn’t tell anyone that particular story because it was too ludicrous, like so much of his sorry-ass life. From the inside, of course, his life didn’t feel funny one bit. Just because most people’s lives worked out so goody-goody bone-normal, did that make him a Bozo clown that anyone could take a shot at?
He sighed, staring down at his bright-line alla mesh and tweaking the wing shape of another glider. No way to deny that it was his fault Babs thought he was a fool. First of all, he’d come in loaded on camote on Tuesday morning. He had a painful memory of trying to hump one of those aliens, just like a dog getting on someone’s leg. His eyes all rolling back to show their whites. Ow. Since then he’d been too ashamed to talk about the aliens, or even to ask Babs where they’d gone.
And then there’d been the second thing. Tuesday night, before he had any kind of chance to reestablish his credibility, Babs had left for a date—a date!—and in the night he had his godawful recurring nightmare about the snail that followed him everywhere, the snail that would always catch up no matter how fast or how far he ran.
Sitting alone on the bluff, Randy writhed in agony, remembering the raw terror of waking up in the night with everything not okay, with the nightmare snail big and real and truly after him, dragging its realware shell through the sad real world, the snail talking like his poor dead mother, its voice loud and clear so that Yoke and Cobb could hear it, could hear all about how the snail wanted to sit on his face so nasty. “Ah’m real hot to crawl on you, Randy Karl.”
He was no motherfucker, he didn’t deserve this kilp, but try and explain it to Babs after she heard all about it from that little loonie twist Yoke; Yoke laughing her ass off about it every time she brought it up, twenty times so far if it was one.
And this morning Yoke had told that slick Theodore about the snail. Since they were keeping the allas secret, Yoke had to talk all around everything to avoid spilling the beans. She’d made it sound like he had hand-built the monster while he was lifted or sleepwalking or something.
So who was Babs gonna go for, Bozo the hillbilly or Theodore the smooth-talking California scene-maker, always with the right opinions about the right things—shit, the dook even worked at an art gallery, which had to be Babs’s perfect wet dream. Theodore had slept over with Babs last night. The guy was already gettin’ on her. Randy felt a sick rush of self-loathing. All the twisted, rotten things he’d done over the years—how could any regular woman love him?
Randy set the next glider on fire and watched as it warped and burned, spiraling down into the pounding surf. “That’s me,” he muttered, and damned if he didn’t half feel like jumping off the cliff himself. Get it the hell over with. The way he was, nobody could ever love him. He was better off dead. Randy inched closer to the cliffs edge, watching as some dirt crumbled under his weight. Better off dead? All because of that noisy, plump-cheeked little Babs Mooney? “Come on, Randy boy. Tat tvam asi.”