"Rudy Rucker - Freeware" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

cardboard, paper clips, and rubber bands that would unexpectedly and catastrophically
(in the technical chaos-theoretical sense of the word) snap into one of two different
positions, depending on how you manipulated it. Imagine being able to change your body
into a rug or a bird or a fish or a spaceship simply by pretzeling yourself into a peculiar
yoga position. Moldies could!

The pelican shape was Monique's favorite. There was nothing Monique enjoyed more
than gliding high in the sky above the cliffs and the crashing sea of Monterey Bay, with
the algae in her wings feasting on the impartially free energy of the sun. She'd been out
flying with Andrea and Xlotl yesterday, in fact. But now today here Monique was, cleaning
rooms and keeping the books for a flesher motel. It was fully a xoxxox bummer, and all
just to have a baby?
There was a rapping noise from Room 3D, two doors down. A gangly young man was
standing behind the sliding door and knocking on the glass with his ring, one of those
heavy high school rings with a hollow, or hologram, of a rose or a skull or a school mascot
inside the cheaply doped stone. The man gestured for Monique to come into his room. He
wore a white plastic shirt and gray slacks. Monique made a quick mental check of the
registration records and found that the man was named Randy Karl Tucker and that he
was occupying the room alone.

Monique jumped to the conclusion that Tucker was a cheeseball, a person given to having
sex with moldies. A cheeseball was not a high-class kind of person by any means. The
name had to do with the fact that moldies didn't smell very good. Depending on the exact
strains of fungi and algae that a given moldie incorporated, the smell might resemble
mildewed socks or brussels sprouts or an aggressively ripe cheese. The most noticeable
component of Monique's sachet was a tangy iodine smell suggestive of fecal black muck
from the Santa Cruz harbor floor.
It went without saying that a moldie's intelligent, malleable flesh could provide a very
unique multipronged personal massage for those humans who sought sex in strange
forms. The unnaturalness of the act was of appeal to certain individuals; indeed the very
reek of a moldie was something that most cheeseballs found powerfully arousing. Sad to
say for the men of this world, cheeseballs were almost always male.

Behind the glass door of Room 3D, Tucker formed a cozening, humorless smile and
winked at Monique. He had prominent cheekbones and thin lips; he looked like a country
hick. The sly, insistent way that he kept crooking his finger made it seem almost certain
that he was a cheeseball.

As it happened, when Monique, Xlotl, and Andrea had been out flying yesterday, Andrea
had talked to the younger moldies about cheeseballs. Andrea had some very definite ideas
about how to handle them.
"Persuade the cheeseball to accompany you to an isolated setting," intoned Andrea, who'd
recently started talking like an engineer or, of all things, a robot. In the past she'd used
the gaseous verbiage of the King James Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Koran, but
these days she modeled her speech patterns on the style of science journals. "Encourage
the cheeseball to initiate mating behavior and then supply genital stimulation until the
cheeseball is thoroughly distracted. At this point extrude a long tendril from your body
mass and use rapid, decisive motions to encircle the cheeseball's neck with the tendril.
Immediately tighten the tendril in the fashion of a noose, so as to produce a cessation in
the cheeseball's respiration."