“Hold on a minute,” said Babs, and privately readjusted the design of her section. “Okay, now I’m set. On three. Let’s count together.”
“One, two—actualize!” said the four.
Ka-whooomp! The ground beneath their feet shuddered, filling up with the roots. Jones across the street shouted in surprise at the noise. Above them towered 120 feet of fluted trunk, garlanded with swaying branches whose needles shivered in the breeze. But then—
“It’s falling!” screamed Stahn, streaking across the yard. “Run!”
From across the street Jones echoed Stahn’s shriek. Frantically Babs stared upward, projecting her largest cubical alla control mesh, ready to convert the tumbling behemoth into air before it crushed her. The tree was so big that it was too late to run. But—
The tree wasn’t falling.
“April fool,” said Stahn, his long smile an icon of utter delight. “Gotcha.”
“Phew,” said Randy, with a loose grin. “What a lift .”
“Zerk,” said Wendy, poking Stahn. “We’re not always this hard to be around, Randy.”
“Hey, I’m havin’ a good taaahm. But what are those holes up in the top?”
Stahn glanced up, worried. “Don’t tell me there’s something—”
“I put a room inside it,” said Babs. “Just like in that book we read when I was little. I put a nice room with a door and three windows. And a deck.”
“The Little Fur Family,” remembered Wendy. “How sweet.”
“Is it strong enough, hollowed out like that?” wondered Stahn.
“Sure,” said Babs. “Redwoods have hollow spots in them all the time.”
“How do we get up there?” was Stahn’s next question.
“Anemone boots and Spider-Man gloves,” said Randy, quick as a flash. “Me and Babs found ‘em when we wanted to climb our palm trees. I’ll show you in the alla catalog. They used to be made by a company named Modern Rocks out to Colorado. Guess they outta business now—like all the other folks with goodies in the alla catalogs.”
Stahn alla-made himself a set of the bulbous yellow plastic boots and gloves. “Stuzzadelic! I never would have bought them.”
“See, he’s finally getting the picture,” said Babs. “With an alla you get all the wavy stuff you’d never buy. And then you turn it back into air. Consumerism isn’t wasteful anymore.” She and Randy made themselves Spider-Man gloves and anemone boots as well. “I’ll go first. Watch how I do it, Da.” Babs stared at the first branch she wanted to get to, then spread the fingers of her right hand. Her Spider-Man glove shot out a thick, sticky rope of imipolex—a bit like a frog’s tongue. The glove had a DIM linking it to Babs’s uvvy, and it knew to shoot its tongue at whatever Babs was staring at. Now Babs relaxed her fingers. This gesture told the strand of imipolex to slowly contract, pulling her up. Meanwhile the toes of her anemone boots had split into a zillion pseudopods that walked their way along the bark like the legs of a millipede, preventing too much strain on Babs’s arm, as well as ruling out any chance of her being yanked around uncontrollably. Babs smiled down from the first branch, securely anchored by her anemone boots. “Come on, Da, it’s easy.”
“I’m supposed to do this every time I want to visit my lookout?”
“You can figure out an easier way if you like. That’s the fun of having an alla. It lets you try all sorts of new things, and if something doesn’t work, you get rid of it.”
“Or you pile it in your yard like the Joneses.”
“Sooner or later they’ll realize they don’t have to hoard. Matter doesn’t matter anymore.”
Stahn shot up a tongue of imipolex with each hand, and gingerly hauled his way up to stand beside her. “This is easier than it looks. Thanks, Babs.”
Now Randy climbed up to join them. Babs took off fast, closely followed by Randy, the two of them scampering up the tree like a pair of squirrels. Splat kick kick, splat kick kick. What fun! Babs could see Stahn far below them, creeping along. And Wendy? There she was, swooping around the tree like a sea gull. She’d unfurled her Happy Cloak into a huge set of wings. She reached the top before Babs and Randy.
“Oh, this is beautiful,” she called down. “There’s a cute, round room.”
The trunk was about ten feet across up here. The room was carved right into the living heartwood of the tree, with two polished bucket seats, three little porthole windows, and an arched door. The widest part of the floor was maybe five feet across. A plump burl of the redwood bulged out to make a deck in front of the door, with four more seats carved into it. Once they were all up top, they tried out everything, and then Ma and Da sat on the deck, while Babs and Randy sat cozily in the little room.
“This view kicks ass!” exulted Stahn. “I can see the whole city and both bridges! I can even see the Farallon Islands!” He leaned over, chuckling with satisfaction. “Jones looks like a bewildered gopher. Should I give him the finger? Alla down a bucket of piss?”
“Don’t goad him,” said Wendy. “He might turn us all into air. That’s been happening quite a bit, you know. I hear there’s been too many killings for the Gimmie to even keep track of. And not everyone’s been able to get recorporated.”
Stahn winced at the thought. “You’re right. I have to be nice to Jones. Maybe I could convince him to replace his tower with a tree. This is where it’s at, no lie. Is it stuzzy in that room, Babs?”
“You want to trade places?”
“No no, the cozy nook should be for the lovers. Ma and I can try it when you’re gone. Hey, Wendy, can you viz letting me bone you up here? Tarzan and Jane. But our feet would stick out of the door.”
“You could alla-carve bigger rooms lower down in the tree,” said Babs equably. She was accustomed to her father’s gaucherie. Maybe that was why she was so comfortable with Randy. Babs patted Randy’s hand, and he smiled at her. The redwood room had a nice, fresh fragrance. Tendrils of late afternoon fog were drifting by.
“We could live in a tree like this, Babs,” murmured Randy. “Maybe we oughta put one up by your warehouse. Or once I get my consulting business goin’ I can buy us some land down in the Santa Cruz Mountains and we can live in a tree out there.”
“What kind of consulting do you want to do, Randy?” asked Wendy. Her hearing was preternaturally sharp.
“Nose much, Ma?” said Babs, implicitly daring her mother to ask the question that was really on her mind.
“And you’re planning to live together? That’s nice . . . ” Wendy’s voice trailed off, begging for more information.
“We’re engaged,” said Babs, finally springing her news. “We’re going to have a double wedding with Yoke and Phil on the first of June.”
To Randy’s relief—and slight surprise—Babs’s parents gave his marriage proposal their blessing. He settled in at Babs’s, waiting for the big day and working on some projects with the others. It seemed important to try and do good things with the allas, all the more so because the world news was bad. Savage conventional wars had broken out in Africa, Central America, Quebec, and the Balkans. There was sporadic gang fighting in parts of the U.S. too, mostly near Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Needless to say, there were almost no women doing it, and the moldies were staying pretty well out of the fray as well. It was just men fighting men. Everyone had all the food and shelter they wanted, so there was no logical reason to fight—but men were doing it anyway, using all the great new weapons they could alla up for themselves.
It turned out that Phil was right—the allas wouldn’t undo the ordinary kinds of deaths. If someone shot you or blew you up, your alla wouldn’t save you. The alla recorporation feature was indeed designed only to undo any killings that had been done by an alla itself. Even so, there were men who used the allas to make themselves weapons so they could beat and rape and torture and kill at will, growing more cruel and brutal every day. The killers were killing each other off, but still there seemed to be no shortage of them. And the innocent were dying as well. The only thing keeping the wars down was that the Metamartians’ flying saucer kept appearing at the goriest battle scenes. First the saucer would call for peace, and then it would beam down rays to destroy everyone’s weapons, and if the men still kept on fighting, the saucer would incinerate them. But the Metamartians couldn’t be everywhere.