Ribofunk (2 page)

At the door we paid the cover to a surly anabolic hulkster and went inside.

Club GaAs had imipolex walls that writhed just like Casio’s vest, dancing in random biomorphic ripples and tendrils. On the stage the Nerveless were just setting up, it being still early, only around eight. I had only met Ginko once, but I recognized him from his green skin and leafy hair. Casio went onstage to talk to him, and I sat down at a table near one wall and ordered a cheer-beer.

Casio rejoined me. “Ginko says I can handle the megabops.”

The cheer-beer had me relaxing so I had almost forgotten my problems. “That’s trump, proxy. Listen, have a cheer-beer—it’s your eft.”

Casio sat and we talked a while about the good old days, when we were still kids in highschool, taking our daily rations of mnemotropins like good little drudges.

“You remember at graduation, when somebody spiked the refreshments with funky-monkey?”

“Yeah. I never seen so many adults acting like apes before or since. Miz Spencer up on the girders—!”

“Boy, we were so young then.”

“I was even younger than you, Dez. I was eleven and you were already twelve, remember?”

“Yeah, but them days are wiped now, Casio. We’re adults ourselves now, with big adult probs.” All my troubles flooded back to me like ocean waves on the Big-One-revised California shoreline as I said this konky bit of wisdom.

Casio was sympathetic, I could fax that much, but he didn’t have the answers to my probs any more than I did. So he just stood and said, “Well, Dez, I got to go play now.” He took a few steps away from the table and then was snapped back to his seat like he had a rubber band strung to his ass.

“Hold on a millie,” I said. “The wall has fused with your vest.” I took out my little utility flashlight and lasered the wall pseudopod that had mated with Casio’s clothing.

“Thanks, proxy,” he said, and then was off.

I sat there nursing the dregs of my cheer-beer while the Nerveless tuned up. When the rickracks were spinning fast and the megabops were humming and everyone had their percussion suits on, they jumped into an original comp, “Efferent Ellie.”

Forty-five minutes later, after two more cheer-beers thoughtfully provided by the management to the grateful friend of the band, I was really on the downlink with Casio and the Nerveless. I felt their music surging through me like some sonic trope. Tapping my foot, wangle-dangling my head like some myelin-stripped spaz, I was so totally downloading that I didn’t even see Turbo and his set slope on into Club GaAs and surround me.

When the current song ended and I looked up, there they all were: Turbo and his main sleeve, Chuckie, who had her arm around his waist; Jeeter, Hake, Pablo, Mona, Val, Ziggy, Pepper, Gates, Zane, and a bunch of others I didn’t know.

“Hah-hah-hah-how’s it climbing, molars?” I said.

They were all as quiet and stone-faced as the holo of a cheap Turing Level One AI with its mimesis-circuits out of whack. As for me, I could do nothing but stare.

The Body Artists were all naked save for spandex thongs, he’s and she’s alike, the better to insure proper extero- and interoceptor input. Their skins were maculated with a blotchy tan giraffe pattern. The definition of every muscle on their trim bods was like
Gray’s Anatomy
come to life.

Now, to me, there were no two ways about it: the Body Artists were simply the most trump set in TeeVeeCee. The swiftest, nastiest, downloadingest pack of lobe-strobers ever to walk a wire or scale a pole. Who else were you gonna compare ’em to? The Vectors? A bunch of wussies dreaming their days away in mathspace. (I didn’t buy their propaganda about being able to disappear along the fourth dimension either.) The Hardz ’n’ Wetz? Nothing but crazy meat- grinders, the negative image of their rivals, the Eunuchs. The Less Than Zeroes? I don’t call pissing your pants satori, like they do. The Thumb suckers? Who wants to be a baby forever? The Boardmen? I can’t see cutting yourself up and headbanging just to prove you feel no pain. The Annies? A horde of walking skeletons. The Naked Apes? After seeing our whole faculty under the influence of funky-monkey that day, I had never latched onto that trip. The Young Jungs? Who wants to spend his whole life diving into the racemind?

No, the only ones who might just give the Body Artists a run for their eft were the Adonises or the Sapphos, but they had some obvious kinks that blocked my receptors.

So you’ll understand how I could feel—even as the center of their threatening stares—a kind of thrill at being in the presence of the assembled Body Artists. If only they had come to ask me to join them, instead of, as was so apparent, being here with the clear intention of wanting to cut my nuts off—

The Nerveless started another song. Casio was too busy to see what was happening with me. Not that he coulda done much anyhow. Turbo sat liquidly down across from me, pulling Chuckie down onto his lap.

“So, Dez,” he said, cool as superwire, “I hear you are Chuckie’s secret mojoman now.”

“No, no way, Turbo, the parity bits got switched on that message all right. There ain’t not truth to it, no sir, no way.”

“Oh, I see, molar,” said Turbo, deliberately twisting things around tighter’n a double-helix. “My sleeve Chuckie ain’t trump enough for a molar who’s as needlestrength as you.”

I raised my eyes and caught Chuckie sizing me up with high indifference. Her looks made me feel like I was trying to swallow an avocado pit.

Charlotte Thach was a supertrump Cambodian-Hawaiian chica whose folks had emigrated to TeeVeeCee when the Japs kicked everyone outa the ex-state in the process of forming the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperative. Her eyes were green as diskdrive lights, her sweet little tits had nipples the color of strong tea.

After she was done sizing me up, she held out one beautiful hand as if to admire her nails or something. Then, without moving a single muscle that I could see, she audibly popped each joint in her fingers in sequence. I could hear it clear above the music.

I gulped down that slimy pit and spoke. “No, Turbo, she’s trump enough for anyone.”

Turbo leaned closer across Chuckie. “Ah, but that’s the prob, molar, Chuckie don’t do it with just anyone. In fact, none of the Artists do. Why, if you were to try to ride her, she’d likely snap your cock off. It’s Body to Body only, you latch?”

“Yeah, sure, I latch.”

Turbo straightened up. “Now, the question is, what we gonna do with someone whose head got so big he thought he could tell everyone he was bumpin’ pubes with a Body Artist?”

“No disinfo, Turbo, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“Shut up, I got to think.”

While he was thinking, Turbo made all the muscles in his torso move around like snakes under his skin.

After letting me sweat toxins for a while, Turbo said, “I suppose it would satisfy the set’s honor if we were to bring you up to the top of the George Washington Bridge and toss you off—”

“Oh, holy radwaste, Turbo, my molar, my proxy, I really don’t think that’s necessary—”

Turbo held up his hand. “But the ecoharrys might arrest us for dumping shit in the river!”

All the Body Artists had a good laugh at that. I tried to join in, but all that came out was a sound like “ekk-ekk-ekk.”

“On the other hand,” said Turbo, rotating his upraised hand and forearm around a full two-seventy degrees, “if you were to become a Body Artist, then we could let it be known that you were under consideration all along, even when you were making your konky boasts.”

“Oh, Turbo, yeah, yeah, you don’t know how much—”

Turbo shot to his feet then, launching Chuckie into a series of spontaneous cartwheels all the way across the club.

“Jeeter, Hake! You’re in charge of escorting the pledge. Everyone! Back to nets!”

We blew out of Club GaAs like atmosphere out of a split-open o’neill. My head was spinning around like a Polish space station. I was running with the Body Artists! It was something I could hardly believe. Even though I had no hint of where they were taking me; even though they might be setting me up for something that would wipe me out flatter than my eft-balance—I felt totally frictionless. The whole city looked like a place out of a fantasy or stiffener holo to me, Middle Earth or
Debbie Does Mars
. The air was cool as an AI’s paraneurons on my bare arms.

We headed west, toward the riverside park. After a while I started to lag behind the rest. Without a word, Jeeter and Hake picked me up under my arms and continued running with me.

We entered among the trees and continued down empty paths, under dirty sodium lights. I could smell the Hudson off to my right. A dirty-harry buzzed by overhead but didn’t stop to bother us.

Under a busted light we halted in darkness. Nobody was breathing heavy but me, and I had been carried the last half mile. Hake and Jeeter placed me down on my own feet.

Someone bent down and tugged open a metal hatch with a snapped hasp set into the walk. The Body Artists descended one by one. Nervous as a kid taking his first trope, I went down too, sandwiched between Hake and Jeeter.

Televison City occupied a hundred acres of land which had originally sloped down to the Hudson. The eastern half of TeeVeeCee was built on solid ground; the western half stood on a huge platform elevated above the Conrail maglev trains.

Fifteen rungs down, I was staring up at the underside of TeeVeeCee by the light of a few caged safety bulbs, a rusty constellation of rivets in a flaky steel sky.

The ladder terminated at an I-beam wide as my palm. I stepped gingerly off, but still held onto the ladder. I looked down.

A hundred feet below, a lit-up train shot silently by at a hundred-and-eighty mph.

I started back up the ladder.

“Where to, molar?” asked Hake above me.

“Uh, straight ahead, I guess.”

I stepped back onto the girder, took two wobbly Thumbsucker steps, then carefully lowered myself until I could wrap my arms and legs around the beam.

Hake and Jeeter unpeeled me. Since they had to go single file, they trotted along carrying me like a trussed pig. I kept my eyes closed and prayed.

I felt them stop. Then they were swinging me like a sack. At the extreme of one swing, they let me go.

Hurtling through the musty air, I wondered how long it would take me to hit the ground or a passing train and what it would feel like. I wouldn’ta minded so much being a Boardman just then.

It was only a few feet to the net. When I hit, it shot me up a bit. I oscillated a few times until my recoil was absorbed. Only then did I open my eyes.

The Body Artists were standing or lounging around on the woven mesh of graphite cables with perfect balance. Turbo had this radwaste-eating grin on his handsome face.

“Welcome to the nets, Mister Pledge. You didn’t do so bad. I seen molars who fainted and fell off the ladder when they first come out below. Maybe you’ll make it through tonight after all. C’mon now, follow us.”

The Body Artists set off along the nets. Somehow they managed to coordinate and compensate for all the dozens of different impulses traveling along the mesh so that they knew just how to step and not lose their balance. They rode the wavefronts of each other’s motions like some kinda aerial surfers.

Me? I managed to crawl along, mostly on all fours.

We reached a platform scabbed onto one of the immense pillars that upheld the city. There the Body Artists had their lab, for batching their black meds.

I hadn’t known that Ziggy was the Artists’ watson. But once I saw him moving among the chromo-cookers and amino-linkers like a fish in soup, if you know what I mean, it was clear as hubble that he was the biobrujo responsible for stoking the Artists’ neural fires.

While Ziggy worked I had to watch Turbo and Chuckie making out. I knew they were doing it just to blow grit through my scramjets, so I tried not to let it bother me. Even when Chuckie—Well, never mind exactly what she did, except to say I never realized it was humanly possible to get into that position.

Ziggy finally came over with a cup full of uncut bugjuice.

“Latch onto this, my molar,” he said with crickly craftsmanly pride, “and you’ll know a little more about what it means to call yourself a B-Artist.”

I knew I didn’t want to taste the undiluted juice, so I chugged it as fast as I could. Even the aftertaste nearly made me retch.

Half an hour later, I could feel the change.

I stood up and walked out onto the net. Turbo and the others started yanking it up and down.

I didn’t lose my balance. Even when I went to one foot. Then I did a handstand.

“Okay, molar,” said Turbo sarcastically, “don’t think you’re so trump. All we gave you is heightened ’ception, extero, intero, and proprio. Plus a little myofibril booster and something to damp your fatigue poisons. And it’s all as temporary as a whore’s kisses. So, let’s get down to it.”

Turbo set off back along the nets, and I followed.

“No one else?” I asked.

“No, Dez, just us two good proxies.”

We retraced out way to the surface. Walking along the I-beam under my own power, I felt like king of the world.

Once again we raced through the streets of Televison City. This time I easily kept pace with Turbo. But maybe, I thought, he was letting me, trying to lull me into a false sense of security. I made up my mind to go a little slower in all this—if I could.