A Good Old-Fashioned Future Read online

  “Hey, Tug!” Revel called, slapping a sea nettle away from his face. “What’s goin’ on, buddy? Is it safe in here?”

  Tug appeared from around a corner. He was wearing a long blonde wig. His cheeks were high pink with excitement, and his blue eyes were sparkling. He wore bright lipstick, and a tight red silk dress. “It’s a jelly party, Revel!”

  A huge siphonophore shaped like a mustachioed rope of mucus came bumping along the ceiling toward Revel, its mane of oral arms soundlessly a-jangle.

  “Help!”

  “Oh, don’t worry so,” said Tug. “And don’t beat up a lot of wind. Air currents are what excites them. Here, if you’re scared, come down to my room while I slip into something less confrontational.”

  Revel sat on a chair in the corner of Tug’s bedroom while Tug got back into his shorts and sandals.

  “I was so excited when all that slime came this morning that I put on my dress-up clothes,” Tug confessed. “I’ve been dancing with my equations for the last couple of hours. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to the size of the jellyfish I can blow. We can make Urschleim jellyfish as big as anything!”

  Revel rubbed his cheek uncertainly. “Did you figure anything more out about them, Tug? I didn’t tell you before, but back at Ditheree we’re getting spontaneous air jelly releases. I mean—I sure don’t understand how the hell they can fly. Did you get that part yet?”

  “Well, as I’m sure you know, the scientific word for jellyfish is ‘coelenterate,’ ” said Tug, leaning toward the mirror to take off his lipstick. “ ‘Coelenterate’ is from ‘hollow gut’ in Latin. Your average jellyfish has an organ called a coelenteron, which is a saclike cavity within its body. The reason these Urschleim fellows can fly is that somehow the Urschleim fill their coelenterons with, of all things, helium! Nature’s noblest gas! Traditionally found seeping out of the shafts of oil wells!” Tug whooped, waggled his ass, and slipped off his wig.

  Revel clambered angrily to his feet. “I’m glad you’re having fun, Doc, but fun ain’t business. We’re in retail now, and like they say in retail, you can’t do business from an empty truck. We need jellies. All stocks, all sizes. You ready to set up shop seriously?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean build product, son! I done called my man Hoss Jenkins at Ditheree, and we’re gonna be ready to start pumping Urschleim cross-country by pipeline around noon our time tomorrow. That is, if you’re man enough to handle the other end of the assembly line here in California.”

  “Isn’t that awfully sudden?” Tug hedged, wiping off his mascara. “I mean, I do have some spreadsheets and business plans for a factory, but …”

  Revel scoffed, and swatted at the jelly-stained leg of his Can’t-Bust-’Ems. “Where have you been, Tug? This is the twenty-first century. Ain’t you ever heard of just-in-time manufacturing? Hell, in Singapore or Taiwan they’d have already set up six virtual corporations and had this stuff shipped to global markets yesterday!”

  “But I can’t run a major manufacturing enterprise out of my house,” Tug said, gazing around him. “Even my laser-sintering equipment is on a kind of, uhm, loan, from the University. We’ll need lasers for making the plastic jellies to seed the big ones.”

  “I’ll buy you lasers, Tug. Just give me the part numbers.”

  “But, but, we’ll need workers. People to answer the phone, men to carry things …” Tug paused. “Though, come to think of it, we could use a simple Turing imitation program to answer the phones. And I know where we can pick up a few industrial robots to do the heavy lifting.”

  “Now you’re talking sense!” Revel nodded. “Let’s go on upstairs!”

  “But what about the factory building?” Tug called after Revel. “We can’t fit the business into my poor house. We’ll need a lot of floor space, and a tank to store the Urschleim, with a pipeline depot nearby. We’ll need a power hookup, an Internet node, and—”

  “And it has to be some outta-the-way locale,” said Revel, turning to grin down from the head of the stairs. “Which I already leased for us this morning!”

  “My stars!” said Tug. “Where is it?”

  “Monterey. You’re drivin’.” Revel glanced around the living-room, taking in the odd menagerie of disparate jellyfish floating about. “Before we go,” he cautioned, “you better close the door to your wood-stove. There’s a passel of little air jellies who’ve already slipped out through your chimney. They were hassling your neighbor’s parrot.”

  “Oh!” said Tug, and closed the wood-stove’s door. The big siphonophore slimed its arms across Tug. Instead of trying to fight away, Tug dangled his arms limply and began hunching his back rhythmically—like a jellyfish. The siphonophore soon lost interest in him and drifted away. “That’s how you do it,” said Tug. “Just act like a jellyfish!”

  “That’s easier for you than it is for me,” said Revel, picking up a twitching plastic moon jelly from the floor. “Let’s take some of these suckers down to Monterey with us. We can use them for seeds. We can have like a tank of these moon jellies, some comb-jellies, a tank of sea nettles, a tank of those big street-loogie things over there—” He pointed at a siphonphore.

  “Sure,” said Tug. “We’ll bring all my little plastic ones, and figure out which ones make the best Urschleim toys.”

  They set a sheet of plastic into the Animata’s trunk, loaded it up with plastic jellyfish doused in seawater, and set off for Monterey.

  All during the trip down the highway, Revel jabbered into his cellular phone, jolting various movers and shakers into action: Pullen family clients, suppliers, and gophers, in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio—even a few discreet calls to Djakarta and Macao.

  Quinonez’s tank farm was just north of Monterey, squeezed up against the boundaries of what had once been Fort Ord. During their occupancy of these rolling dunes, the army had so thoroughly polluted the soil that the land was now legally unusable. The base, which had been closed since the 1990s, was a nature preserve cum hazardous waste site. Those wishing to stroll the self-guiding nature trails were required to wear respirators and disposable plastic shoe-covers.

  Tug guided the Animata along a loop road that led to the back of the Ord Natural Waste Site. Inland from the dunes were vast fields of brussels sprouts and artichokes. In one of the fields six huge silvery tanks rested like visiting UFOs.

  “There it is, Tug,” said Revel, putting away his phone. “The home of Ctenophore, Inc.”

  As they drew closer, they could see that the great storage tanks were marred with graffiti and pocked with rust. Some of the graffiti was richly psychedelic, but most was Aztec gang-code glyphs about red and blue, South and North, the numbers 13 and 14, and so on. The gangs’ points of dispute grew ever more abstract.

  Between the tanks and the road there was a vast gravel parking lot with yellowed thistles pushing up through it. At one side of the lot was a truly enormous steel and concrete garage, practically the size of an airplane hangar. Painted on the wall in fading electric pink, yellow, and blue was Quinonez Motorotive—Max Nix We Fix!

  “Park here, Tug,” said Revel. “Mr. Quinonez is supposed to show up and give us the keys.”

  “How did you get the lease lined up already?”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing on the phone, Doc? Ordering pizza?”

  They got out of the Animata, and stood there in the sudden, startling silence beneath the immense, clear California sky. In the distance a sputtering motor made itself heard, then pushed closer. Revel wandered back toward the nearest oil-tank and peered at it. Now the motor arrived in the form of a battered multicolored pickup truck driven by a rugged older man with iron gray hair and a heavy mustache.

  “Hello!” sang Tug, instantly in love.

  “Good afternoon,” said the man, getting out of his pickup. “I’m Felix Quinonez.” He stuck out his hand and Tug eagerly grasped it.

  “I’m Tug Mesoglea,” said Tug. “I handle the science, and my partner Revel
Pullen over there handles the business. I think we’re leasing this property from you?”

  “I think so, too,” said Quinonez, baring his strong teeth in a flashing smile. He let go of Tug’s hand, giving Tug a thoughtful look. An ambiguous look. Did Tug dare hope?

  Now Revel came striding over. “Quinonez? I’m Revel Pullen. Did you bring the contract Lucy faxed you? Muy bueno, my man. Let’s sign the papers on the hood of your pickup, Texas style!”

  The ceremony completed, Quinonez handed over the keys. “This is the key to the garage, this is for the padlock on the pipeline valve, and these here are for the locks on the stairways up onto the tanks. We’ve been having some trouble keeping kids out of here.”

  “I can see that from the free paint-jobs you been getting,” said Revel, staring over at the graffiti-bedecked tanks. “But the rust I’m seeing is what worries me. The corrosion.”

  “These tanks have been empty and out of use for quite a few years,” granted Quinonez. “But you weren’t planning on filling them, were you? As I explained to your assistant, the hazardous materials license for this site was revoked the day Fort Ord was closed.”

  “I certainly am planning on filling these tanks,” said Revel, “or why the hell else would I be renting them? But the materials ain’t gonna be hazardous.”

  “You’re dealing in beet-sugar?” inquired Quinonez.

  “Never you mind what’s going in the tanks, Felix. Just show me around and get me up to speed on your valves and pipelines.” He handed the garage key to Tug. “Here, Doc, scope out the building while Felix here shows me his system.”

  “Thanks, Revel. But Felix, before you go off with him, just show me how the garage lock works,” said Tug. “I don’t want to set off an alarm or something.”

  Revel watched disapprovingly while Tug walked over to the garage with Felix, chattering all the way.

  “You must be very successful, Felix,” gushed Tug as the leathery-faced Quinonez coaxed the garage’s rusty lock open. Grasping for more topics to keep the conversation going, Tug glanced up at the garage’s weathered sign. “Motorotive, that’s a good word.”

  “A cholo who worked for me made it up,” allowed Quinonez. “Do you know what Max Nix We Fix means?”

  “Not really.”

  “My Dad was in the army in the sixties. He was stationed in Germany, he had an easy deal. He was in the motor vehicle division, of course, and that was their slogan. Max Nix is German for ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ”

  “How would you say Max Nix in Spanish?” inquired Tug. “I love Spanish.”

  “No problema,” grinned Felix. Tug felt that there was definitely a good vibration between them. Now the lock on the garage door squeaked open, and Felix held it open so that Tug could pass inside.

  “The lights are over here,” said Felix, hitting a bank of switches. The cavernous garage was like a vast barn for elephants—there were thirty vehicle-repair bays on either side like stalls; each bay was big enough to have once held a huge green army truck.

  “Hey, Quinonez,” came Revel’s holler. “I ain’t got all day!”

  “Thanks so much, Felix,” said Tug, reaching out to the handsome older man for another handshake. “I’d love to see more of you.”

  “Well, maybe you will,” said Felix softly. “I am not a married man.”

  “That’s lovely,” breathed Tug. The two made full eye contact. No problema.

  Later that afternoon, Tug and Revel settled into a top-floor suite of a Monterey seaside hotel. Tug poured a few buckets of hotel ice onto the artificial jellyfish in his trunk. Revel got back into the compulsive wheeler-dealer mode with his portable phone again, his demands becoming more unseemly and grandiose as he and Tug worked their way, inch by amber inch, through a fifth of Gentleman Jack.

  At three in the morning, Tug crashed headlong into bed, his last conscious memory the clink and scrape of Revel razoring white powder on the suite’s glass-topped coffee-table. He’d hoped to dream that he was in the arms of Felix Quinonez, but instead he dreamed once again about debugging a jellyfish program. He woke with a terrible hangover.

  Whatever substance Revel had snorted—it seemed unlikely to be anything so mundane and antiquated as mere cocaine—it didn’t seem to be bothering him next morning. Revel lustily ordered a big breakfast from room-service.

  As Revel tipped the busboy lavishly and splashed California champagne into their beaker of orange juice, Tug staggered outside the suite to the balcony. The Monterey air was rank with kelp. Large immaculate seagulls slid and twisted along the sea-breeze updrafts at the hotel’s walls. In the distance to the north, a line of California seals sprawled on a rocky wharf like brown slugs on broken concrete. Dead tin-roofed canneries lined the shore to the south, some of them retrofitted into tourist gyp-joints and discos, others empty and at near-collapse.

  Tug huffed at the sea air until the vise-grip loosened at his temples. The world was bright and chaotic and beautiful. He stumbled into the room, bolted down a champagne mimosa and three forkfuls of scrambled eggs.

  “Well, Revel,” he said finally, “I’ve got to hand it to you. Quinonez Motorotive is ideal in every respect.”

  “Oh, I’ve had Monterey in mind since the first time we met here at SIGUSC,” Revel admitted, propping one boot-socked foot on the tabletop. “I took to this place right away. This is my kind of town.” With his lean strangler’s mitts folded over his shallow chest, the young oilman looked surprisingly at peace, almost philosophical. “You ever read any John Steinbeck, Tug?”

  “Steinbeck?”

  “Yeah, the Nobel Prize-winning twentieth-century novelist.”

  “I never figured you for a reading man, Revel.”

  “I got into Steinbeck’s stuff when I first came to Monterey,” Revel said. “Now I’m a big fan of his. Great writer. He wrote a book set right here in Cannery Row … you ever read it? Well, it’s about all these drunks and whores living on the hillsides around here, some pretty interesting folks, and the hero’s this guy who’s kind of their mentor. He’s an ichthyologist who does abortions on the side. Not for the money though, just because it’s the 1940s and he likes to have lots of sex, and abortion happens to be this thing he can hack ’cause of his science background.… Y’see, Tug, in Steinbeck’s day, Cannery Row actually canned a hell of a lot of fish! Sardines. But all the sardines vanished by 1950. Some kind of eco-disaster thing; the sardines never came back at all, not to this day.” He laughed. “So you know what they sell in this town today? Steinbeck.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Tug. “It’s kind of a postmodern culture-industry museum-economy tourist thing.”

  “Yeah. Cannery Row cans Steinbeck now. There’s Steinbeck novels, and tapes of the crappy movie adaptations, and Steinbeck beer-mugs, and Steinbeck key chains, Steinbeck bumper-stickers, Steinbeck iron-on patches, Steinbeck fridge-magnets … and below the counter, there’s Steinbeck blow-up plastic love-dolls so that the air-filled author of Grapes of Wrath can be subjected to any number of unspeakable posthumous indignities.”

  “You’re kidding about the love-dolls, right?”

  “Heck no, dude! I think what we ought to do is buy one of ’em, blow it up, and throw it into a cooler full of Urschleim. What we’d get is this big Jell-O Steinbeck, see? Maybe it’d even talk! Like deliver a Nobel Prize oration or something. Except when you go to shake his hand, the hand just snaps off at the wrist like a jelly polyp, a kind of dough-lump of dead author flesh, and floats through the air till it hits some paper and starts writing sequels.…”

  “What the hell was that stuff you snorted last night, Revel?”

  “Bunch of letters and numbers, old son. Seems like they change ’em every time I score.”

  Tug groaned as if in physical pain. “In other words you’re so fried, you can’t remember.”

  Revel, jolted from his reverie, frowned. “Now, don’t go Neanderthal on me, Tug. That stuff is pure competitive edge. You wouldn’t act so shocked about it, if you’d sp
ent some time in the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 lately. Smart drugs!” Revel coughed rackingly and laughed again. “The coolest thing about smart drugs is, that if they even barely work, you just gotta take ’em, no matter how square you are! Otherwise, the Japanese CEOs kick your ass!”

  “I think it’s time to get some fresh air, Revel.”

  “How right you are, hombre. We gotta settle in at Quinonez’s tank farm this morning. We’ve got a Niagara of Urschleim headed our way.” Revel glanced at his watch. “Fact is, the stuff oughta be rollin’ in a couple of hours from now. Let’s go on down and get ready to watch the tanks fill up.”

  “What if one of the tanks splits open?”

  “Then I expect we won’t use that particular tank no more.”

  When Tug and Revel got to Quinonez Motorotive, they found several crates of newly delivered equipment waiting for them. Tug was as excited as Christmas morning.

  “Look, Revel, these two boxes are the industrial robots, that box is the supercomputer, and this one here is the laser-sintering device.”

  “Yep,” said Revel. “And over here’s a drum of those piezoplastic beads and here’s a pallet of titaniplast sheets for your jellyfish tanks. You start gettin’ it all set up, Doc, while I check out the pipeline valves one more time.”

  Tug unlimbered the robots first. They were built like short squat humanoids, and each came with a telerobotic interface that had the form of a virtual reality helmet. The idea was that you put on the helmet and watched through the robot’s eyes, meanwhile talking the robot through some repetitive task that you were going to want it to do. The task in this case was to build jellyfish tanks by lining some of the garage’s big truck bays with titaniplast—and to fill up the tanks with water.

  The robot controls were of course trickier than Tug had anticipated, but after an hour or so he had one of them slaving away like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. He powered up the second robot and used it to bring in and set up the new computer and the laser-sintering assemblage. Then he crossloaded the first robot’s program onto the second robot, and it, too, got to work turning truck bays into aquaria.