Complete Stories (146 page)

The fnoor hen was yet larger than before, perhaps eight feet across and four feet high, squeezed right up against the sloping underside of the little house’s roof. Her dark body was like twisting ropes of smoke, a chiaroscuro of grays and blacks with the spots of light like nests in a tree. That lively little silhouette within the closest light—yes, that was Bix. Why didn’t he come back out?

The fnoor hen puffed herself up and made a staccato chirrup. Vicky extended her left arm with its goofy tangle of protein-string and tossed the free end out past her fingers and into contact with the fuzzy border of the hen.

The mesh came alive when it touched the shifting mass of fnoor. The orange strings twitched and glowed. Eldritch energies flowed through Vicky’s body and branched into her brain. And, just as Maricel had predicted, Vicky could hear the fnoor hen’s voice in her head.

“Lonely, lonely,” the fnoor hen was saying. She sounded like a fussy old woman fretting to herself. “No chicky-chicks to play with me.”

“Hello?” said Vicky in a quiet tone.

“Talking monkey! I have your mate.”

“Let him go,” said Vicky.

“Come and lie with him,” said the fnoor hen with a creepy giggle. “Come stay with me.” She drew in the protein-string mesh, slurping it up like spaghetti, leaving Vicky’s arm bare. And now she sent her vortices to draw Vicky in as well. Feeling dreamy and passive, Vicky let it happen.

The hen’s interior was like a moist rainy jungle—filled with rustles, whoops and tweets. The sounds fit together in a wonderfully precise way, like the notes of a symphony. Glowing white flowers hovered amid the tangled vines, their scent indescribably lush. A stick-thin creature was perched in a flower-cup nearby. Oh wait, that was—

“Vicky,” said the sketchy form. “Come to me.”

“Bix!” cried Vicky, trying to keep her head together. She was dizzy from the blossom’s perfume and from the architectonic cloud of sound. There was much more room inside the fnoor hen than she’d expected. She felt as if she were only a few inches long, like a mantis or a dragonfly—

“Buzz up,” said Bix, as if reading her mind.

With a few rapid flaps of her arms, Vicky rose to Bix’s creamy flower-bowl. She perched beside him and they embraced, twining their arms and legs together. They made love, reached their climax, and lolled against the smooth petals. For some incalculable length of time, Vicky lounged there, speechless, drunk with pleasure, no longer thinking in words at all, knowing only that she was with her one true love.

The crying brought Vicky back. She sat up and dragged herself to the edge of the flower cup, which by now loomed as large as a gymnasium.

“Mama! Papa!”

“Stoke!” called Vicky, but her voice was so thin and high that the boy didn’t hear her. He was outside the fnoor hen, standing alone on the dusty plain of the attic floor.

“I’m glad you two came for me,” said Bix, hauling himself up to Vicky’s side. “My little family.”

“What have you been doing in here all this time?” asked Vicky. “I’m confused.”

“I was thinking about my morphon muncher,” said Bix. “Feeding a user’s guide to the fnoor hen.”

“Why?”

“Because—because it felt good? And talking to her helped me understand my work in a new way? The fnoor hen has a funny way of playing on your feelings. It’s kind of wonderful in here.”

“But it’s terrible, too,” said Vicky, as the two of them absent-mindedly slid back into the flower cup. Vicky had a definite feeling that she’d just now forgotten something important—but for the moment she couldn’t say what.

“Terrible,” echoed Bix. “At least I’ve been figuring out about the hen while I’ve been talking to her. I know how to give her some new tasks. She’ll help me, now that I gave her what she was after.”

“Mama!” called Stoke again—and Vicky remembered what she’d forgotten.

Stoke’s presence was like a beacon. Guiding themselves towards his bright vibrations, Vicky and Bix found their way out of the fnoor jungle within the hen.

Vicky hurried across the attic floor to hug her son. And when the hen tried to come after them, Bix made some fancy gestures with his hands, smoothing out the fnoor hen, molding her down to the size and shape of a—

“Tweety bird!” said Stoke over Vicky’s shoulder, admiring his father’s craft. The fnoor hen had even taken on an iridescent yellow sheen.

“Our friend now,” said Bix, cradling the reshaped fnoor hen.

Smoke was drifting up from downstairs. “Hey, Maricel!” yelled Vicky, peering down through the trap-door.

“Oh, uh, just a minute,” said Maricel, wandering into view. She was having another cigarette. She glanced up at Vicky. “All set now? I’ve got Cardo on the phone slug. He’s coming right over. Oh—I’m sorry, did little Stoke climb up there?”

“Maricel, you get your scheming ass out of here,” yelled Vicky, coming down the ladder with Stoke right behind her.

“We’re not done,” said Maricel. “Not till Cardo gets his morphon muncher user’s guide.”

“You’ll get it all right,” said Bix, descending the ladder with the yellow little fnoor hen perched on his shoulder. He walked outside and set the odd little form on a perch inside the henhouse that was attached to their house’s outside wall. The four regular chickens crowded in there too, wanting to check out the fnoor hen. Bix shut the little door, closing them in together.

Cardo arrived then, bopping down the sidewalk in a cloud of pepster music.

“Where’s my bird?” he asked Bix.

“She’s roosting in my henhouse for a minute,” said Bix. “She told me she’d tidy it up.”

“We’re all cool?” said Cardo. “You gave her the user’s guide?”

“Yeah,” said Bix. “And then she asked me what she should do next. I gave her two more tasks. You want to hear about the task that applies to you?”

“Don’t go threatening me,” said Cardo, slicking back his hair. “I carry a gun. And, look, you gotta hand over your squidskin computer, too. Aunt Perla doesn’t want you working with Gloze at all anymore.”

“I have it here,” called Maricel, coming out of the house with the iridescent tablet in her grip.

“Fine,” said Bix. “I don’t need it anymore. I know the code by heart. And now it’s time for you guys to leave.”

“Look!” yelled Stoke.

The henhouse door had opened halfway and the fnoor hen was fluttering out with her wings a tiny Tweety-bird blur. She changed shape as she moved, growing bigger again—a lot bigger. She caught Maricel and Cardo in fleshy claws made of a zillion tiny biogadgets bunched together.

“Put us down,” yelled Cardo.

Stoke ran to Vicky and climbed into her arms.

“Relax,” Bix told Cardo over the beating of the great fnoor hen’s wings. “The bird’s taking you two home to the Philippines. Just like you’ve been wanting all along.”

“Let’s go for it, Cardo,” cried Maricel.

“Oh, why not,” said Cardo, breaking into a grin. “What the hell.”

“We’ll need a place to live there,” Maricel yelled to Bix. “Can the fnoor hen bring our house?”

“Sure,” said Bix. “I guess. Do it, fnoor hen.”

Growing to the size of a dragon, the fnoor hen buzzed up the block, dropping a couple of feathers the size of palm fronds. Quickly the feathers dissolved into swarms of gnat-like biogadgets that flew up the street the rejoin the mother hen.

With delicate motions of her huge claws, the fnoor hen set Cardo and Maricel on the porch of their cracker-box house. And then she yanked the house loose from its moorings. They rose into the sky—a winged cabin with Cardo and Maricel waving from the porch.

“Wow,” said Vicky. “And what was the other task?

“More room for our family,” said Bix.

He marched over to the henhouse and swung its door wide open. The henhouse ceiling bulged up like the custard in a Dairy Queen cone, swirling upward towards a central point. The four chickens were fluttering around in the vasty interior, flustered and lost.

“Oh my god,” said Vicky, peering over Bix’s shoulder. “It’s gone bulbous. Like the inside of a Moscow onion dome! The henhouse is as big as our real house!”

“The fnoor hen warped the space for us,” said Bix. “This way we won’t have to move! I’ll take off a couple of weeks and work on the place. Put in some flooring, maybe. Wires and pipes. Build a door to connect the dome room to our living-room. And I’ll make a new henhouse for you chickens, okay?”

The chickens flapped out to perch again on the tree. They really did look smarter than before.

“You need a rest from the programming,” said Vicky. “You were going too far.”

“I need a month or two with you,” agreed Bix. “And then—the
meta
morphon muncher.”

“And the fashion tsunami,” said Vicky, kissing her husband’s stubbled cheek.

============

Written July, 2010.

Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine
, 2011.

My son, Rudy Jr., and his wife Penny have a pair of twin girls that I dote upon. Rudy and his family live in Berkeley, and my wife, Sylvia, and I often go up there to babysit the twins for a day. One rainy day we met Rudy at a coffee shot on College Avenue. He was sitting on a couch with his laptop and the twins. And that was the scene that got me started on this story.

Another contributing factor was that Rudy and Penny had recently installed four chickens in their back yard, and I was excited about the chickens. I wanted to use the traditional fairy-tale notion of a bird that lays some magical kind of egg. Yet another factor here was that I’d been working with some modern, 21st century fractals whose forms I liked to refer to as “fnoor,” a word that I’d first coined in my novel,
The Hacker and the Ants
.

Diane met Jeff at a karate dojo behind a Wienerschnitzel hot-dog stand in San Bernardino. Jeff was lithe and lightly muscled, with an ingratiating smile. Diane thought he was an instructor.

Jeff spent thirty minutes teaching Diane how to tilt, pivot, and kick a hypothetical assailant in the side—which was exactly what she’d wanted to learn how to do. She worked in a strip mall in Cucamonga, and she’d been noticing some mellow but edging-to-scary guys in the parking lot where she worked. The dividing line between mellow and scary in Cucamonga had a lot to do with the line between flush and broke, and Diane wanted to be ready when they crossed that line.

Diane was now feeling that she had a few skills that would at least surprise someone who thought she was a little dipshit officeworker who couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag.

“I bet I could just add these to my yoga routine,” she said, smiling gratefully at Jeff.

“Bam,” said Jeff. “You’ve got it, Diane. You’re safe now. Why don’t you and I go out to eat?” He drew out his silvery smartphone and called up a map, then peered at Diane. “I’m visualizing you digging into some…falafel. With gelato for dessert. Yes? You know you want it. You gotta refuel after those killer kicks.”

“Sounds nice,” said Diane. “But don’t you have to stay here at the dojo?” This Jeff was cute, but maybe too needy and eager to please. And there was something else about him….

“I don’t actually work here,” said Jeff. “The boss lets me hang out if I work out with the clients. It’s like I work here, but I have my freedom, y’know? You go shower off, and I’ll meet you outside.”

Well, that was the something else. Did she want to get involved with another loser guy—a cute guy, okay?—but someone who had a smartphone, a lot of smooth talk, and still couldn’t even get hired by a dojo to chat up new customers?

“Oh, all right,” said Diane. It wasn’t like she had much of anything to do tonight. She’d broken up with her jerk of a boyfriend a couple days before.

Jeff was waiting in a slant of shade, tapping on his smartphone. It was the end of June, and the days were hot and long. Jeff looked at Diane and made a mystic pass with his hand. “You broke up with your boyfriend last week.”

She gave him a blank stare.

“And you’re pretty sure it was the right thing to do. The bastard.”

“You’re googling me?” said Diane. “And that stuff about Roger is
public
?”

“There are steps you could take to make your posts more private,” said Jeff. “I can help you finesse your web presence if you like. I
live
in the web.”

“What’s your actual job?” asked Diane.

“I surf the trends,” said Jeff, cracking a wily smile. “Public relations, advertising, social networking, investing, like that.”

“Do you have a web site?”

“I keep a low profile,” said Jeff.

“And you get paid?”

“Sometimes. Like—today I bought three hundred vintage Goob Dolls. They’re dropping in price, but slower than before. It’s what we call a second-order trend? I figure the dolls are bottoming out, and in a couple of days I’ll flip them for a tidy profit.”

“I always hated Goob Dolls when I was a kid,” said Diane. “Their noses are too snub, and I don’t like the way they look at me. Or their cozy little voices.”

“Yeah, yeah. But they’re big-time retro for kids under ten. Seven-year-old girls are going to be mad for them next week. Their parents will be desperate.”

“You’re gonna store three hundred of them and ship them back out? Won’t that eat up most of your profit?”

“I’m not a flea-market vendor, Diane,” said Jeff, taking a lofty tone. “I’m buying and selling Goob Doll
options
.”

Diane giggled. “The perfect gift for a loved one. A Goob Doll option. So where’s your car anyway?”

“Virtual as well,” said Jeff smoothly. “I’m riding with you. Lead the way.” He flung his arm forward dramatically. “You’re gonna love this falafel place, it’s Egyptian style. My phone says they use fava beans instead of garbanzos. And they have hieroglyphics on their walls. Don’t even ask about the gelato place next door to it. Om Mane Padme Yum #7. Camphor-flavored buffalo-milk junket. But, hey, tell me more about yourself. Where do you work?”

“You didn’t look that up yet? And my salary?”

“Let’s say I didn’t. Let’s say I’m a gentleman. Hey, nice wheels!”

“I’m a claim manager for an insurance company,” said Diane, unlocking her sporty coupe. “I ask people how they whiplashed their necks.” She made a face. “
Bo
-ring. I’m counting on you to be interesting, Jeff.”