BIG JELLY By RUDY RUCKER AND BRUCE STERLING The screaming metal jellyfish dragged long, invisible tentacles across the dry concrete acres of the San Jose airport. Or so it seemed to Tug-Tug Mesoglea, math-drunk programmer and fanatic aquarist. Tug was working on artificial jellyfish, and nearly everything looked like a jellyfish to him, even airplanes. Tug was here in front of the baggage claim to pick up Texas billionaire Revel Pullen. It had taken a deluge of phone-calls, faxes, and e-mail to lure the reclusive Texan venture-capitalist from his decrepit, polluted East Texas oil-fields, but Tug had now coaxed Revel Pullen to a second face-to-face meeting in California. At last, it seemed that Tug's unconventional high-tech startup scheme would charge into full-scale production. The prospect of success was sweet. Tug had first met Revel in Monterey two months earlier, at the spring symposium of the ACM SIGUSC, that is, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group for Underground and Submarine Computation. At the symposium, Tug had given a badly botched presentation on artificial jellyfish. He'd arrived with five hundred copies of a glossy desktop-published brochure: "Artificial Jellyfish: Your Route to Postindustrial Global Competitiveness!" But when it came time for Tug's talk, his IS-terabyte virtual jellyfish-demo had crashed so hideously that he couldn't even reboot his machine-a cheap Indonesian Sun-clone laptop that Tug now used as a bookend. Tug had brought some slides as a backup, but of course the slide-tray had jammed. And, worst of all, the single working prototype of Tug's plastic artificial jellyfish had burst in transit to Monterey. After the talk, Tug, in a red haze of shame, had flushed the sodden rags of decomposing gel down the conference center's john. Tug had next headed for the cocktail lounge, and there the garrulous young Pullen had sought him out, had a few drinks with him, and had even picked up the tab-Tug's wallet had been stolen the night before by a cute older busboy. Since Tug's topic was jellyfish, the raucous Pullen had thought it funny to buy rounds of tequila jelly-shots. The slimy jolts of potent boozy Jell-O had combined with Revel's bellowed jokes, brags, and wild promises to ease the pain of-Tug's failed speech. The next day, Tug and Revel had brunched together, and Re.vet1ladwritten Tug a handsome check as earnest money for pre-development expenses. Tug was to develop an artificial jellyfish capable of undersea oil prospecting. As software applications went, oil-drilling was a little roughnecked and analog for Tug's taste, but the money certainly looked real enough. The only troubling aspect about dealing with Revel was the man's obsession with some new and troublesome organic slime which his family's oldest oil-well had recently tapped. Again and again, the garish Texan had steered the conversation away from jellyfish and onto the subject of ancient subterranean slime. Perched now on the fire-engine red hood of his expensive Animata sports car, Tug waited for Revel to arrive. Tug had curly dark hair and a pink-cheeked complexion. He wore shorts, a sport shirt, and Birkenstock sandals with argyle socks. He looked like a depraved British schoolboy. He'd bought the Animata with his house money nest-egg when he'd learned that he would never, ever be rich enough to buy a house in California. Leaning back against the windshield of his car, Tug stared at the descending airplanes and thought about jellyfish trawling through sky-blue seawater. Tug had whole tankfuls of jellies at home: one tank with flattish moon jellies each with its four whitish circles of sex organs, another tank with small clear bell jellies from the eel grass of Monterey bay, a large tank with sea nettles that had long frilly oral arms and whiplike purple tentacles covered with stinging cells, a smaller tank of toadstool-like spotted jellies from Jellyfish Lake in Palau, a special tank of spinning comb-jellies with trailing ciliated arms, a Japanese tank with umbrella jellies-and more. Next to the arsenal of tanks was the huge color screen of Tug's workstation. Tug was no biologist; he' blundered under the spell of jellies while using mat matical algorithms to generate cellular models of vorte sheets. To Tug's mathematician's eye, a jellyfish was a highly perfected relationship between curvature and torsion, just like a vortex sheet, only a jellyfish was working off dynamic tension and osmotic stress. Real jellyfish were gnarlier than Tug's simulations. Tug had become a dedicated amateur of coelenteratology. Imitating nature to the core, Tug found a way to evolve and improve his vortex sheet models via genetic programming. Tug's artificial jellyfish algorithms competed, mutated, reproduced, and died inside the virtual reality of his workstation's sea-green screen. As Tug's algorithms improved, his big computer monitor became a tank of virtual jellyfish, of graphic representations of Tug's equations, pushing at the chip's computational limits, slowly 'pulsing about in dimly glowing simulation-space. The living jellies in the tanks of true seawater provided an objective standard toward which Tug's programs could try to evolve. At every hour of the day and night, video cameras peered into the spot-lit water tanks, ceaselessly analyzing the jellyfish motions and feeding data into the workstation. The recent, crowning step of Tug's investigations was his manufacturing breakthrough. His theoretical equations had become actual piezoplastic constructions-soft, watery' gelatinous robot jellies of real plastic in the real world. These models were produced by using an intersecting pair of laser beams to sinter-that is, to join together by heating without melting-the desired shape within a matrix of piezoplastic microbeads. The sintered microbeads behaved like a mass of cells: each of them could compress or elongate in response to delicate vibratory signals, and each microbead could in turn pass information to its neighbors. A completed artificial jellyfish model was a floppy little umbrella that beat in steady cellular waves of excitation and~ela tion. Tug's best plastic jellyfish could stay active for u to three weeks. ug's next requirement for his creations was "a killer application," as the software tycoons called it. And it seemed he might have that killer app in hand, given his recent experiments in making the jellyfish sensitive to chemical scents and signals. Tug had convinced Reveland half-believed himself-that the artificial jellies could be equipped with radiosignaling chips and set loose on the sea floor. They could sniff out oil-seeps in the ocean bottom and work their way deep into the vents. If this were so, then artificial jellyfish would revolutionize undersea oil prospecting. The only drawback, in Tug's view, was that offshore drilling was a contemptible crime against the wonderful environment that had bred the real jellies in the first place. Yet the plan seemed likely to free up Texas venture capital, enough capital to continue his research for at least another year. And maybe in another year, thought Tug, he would have a more ecologically sound killer app, and he would be able to disentangle himself from the crazy Texan. Right on cue, Revel Pullen came strolling down the exit ramp, clad in the garb of a white-trash oil-field worker: a flannel shirt and a pair of Can't-Bust-'Em overalls. Revel had a blond crewcut and smooth dark skin. The shirt was from Neiman-Marcus and the overalls were ironed, but they seemed to be genuinely stained with dirtfresh Texas crude. Tug hopped off the hood of his car and stood on tiptoe to wave, deliberately camping it up to jangle the Texan's nerves. He drew up a heel behind him like Marilyn Monroe waving in The Misfits. Nothing daunted, Revel Pullen headed Tug's way with an exaggerated bowlegged sprawl and a scuff of his pythonskin boots. Revel was the scapegrace nephew of Amarillo's billionaire Pullen Brothers. The Pullen clan were malignant market speculators and greenmail raiders who had once tried to corner the world market in molybdenum. Revel himself, the least predictable of his clan, was in charge of the Pullen Brothers' weakest investments: the failing oil wells that had initially brought the Pullen famil to prominence-beginning with the famous Dit ree Gusher, drilled near Spindletop, Texas, in 1892. Revel's quirk was his ambition to become a high-tech tycoon. This was why Revel attended computer-science meetings like SIGUSC, despite his stellar ignorance of everything having to do with the movement of bytes and pixels. Revel stood ready to sink big money into a technically sexy Silicon Valley start-up. Especially if the start-up could somehow do something for his family's collapsing oil industry and-though this part still puzzled Tug-find a use for some odd clear fluid that Revel's engineers had recently been pumping from the Ditheree hole. "Shit howdy, Tug," drawled Revel, hoisting his polyester/denim duffel bag from one slim shoulder to another. "Mighty nice of y'all to come meet me." Beaming, Tug freed his fingers from Revel's insistent grip and gestured toward the Animata. "So, Revel! Ready to start a business? I've decided we should call it Ctenophore, Inc. A ctenophore is a kind of hermaphroditic jellyfish which uses a comblike feeding organ to filter nutrients from the ocean; they're also called comb-jellies. Don't you think Ctenophore is a perfect name for our company? Raking in the dollars from the economy's mighty sea!" "Not so loud!" Revel protested, glancing up and down the airport pavement in a parody of wary streetsmarts. "As far as any industrial spy knows, I'm here in California on a personal vacation." He heaved his duffel into the back of Tug's car. Then he straightened, and reached deep into the baggy trouser-pocket of his Can'tBust-'Ems. The Texan dragged out a slender pill-bottle filled with clear viscous jelly and pressed the crotch-warmed vial into Tug's unwilling palm, with a dope-dealer'S covert insistence. "I want you to keep this, Tug. Just in case anything should ... you know ... happen to me." Revel 'swiveled his narrow head to scan the passers-by with paranoid alertness, briefly reminding Tug of the last time he'd been here at the San Jose airport: to meet his ailing father, who'd been fingerpaint-the-wall-with-shit senile and had been summarily dumped on the plane by Tug's uncle. Tug had gotten his father into a local nursing home, and last summer Tug's father had died. Life was sad, and Tug was letting it slip through his fingers-he was an unloved gay man who'd never see thirty again, and now here he was humoring a nutso het from Texas. Humoring people was not something Tug excelled at. "Do you really have enemies?" said Tug. "Or do you just think so? Am I supposed to think you have enemies? Am I supposed to care?" "There's money in these plans of ours-real foldin' money," Revel bragged darkly, climbing into the Animata's passenger seat. He waited silently until Tug took the wheel and shut the driver's-side door. "All we really gotta worry about," Revel continued at last, "is controlling the publicity. The environmental impact crap. You didn't tell anybody about what I e-rnailed you, did you?" "No," snapped Tug. "That cheap public-key encryption you're using has garbled half your messages. What are you so worried about, anyway? Nobody's gonna care about some slime from a played-out oil well-even if you do call it Urschleim. That's German, right?" "Shhhhh!" hissed Revel. Tug started the engine and gunned it with a bluish gust of muscular combustion. They swung out into the endless California traffic. Revel checked several times to make sure that they weren't being trailed. "Yes, I call it Urschleim," he said at last, portentously. "In fact, I've put in a trademark for that name. Them old-time German professors were on to something. Ur means primeval. All life came from the Urschleim, the original slime! Primeval slime from the inner depths of the planet! You ever bitten into a green almond, Tug? From the tree? There's some green fuzz, a thin little shell, and a center of clear, thick slime. That's exactly how our planet is, too. Most of the original Urschleim is still flowing, and oozing, and lyin' there 'way down deep. It's just waitin' for some bright boy to pump it out exploit its commercial potential. Urschleim is life . "That's pretty grandiose," said Tug evenly. "Grandiose, hell!" Revel snapped. "It's the only salvation for the Texas oil business, compadre! God damn it, if we Texans don't drill for a living, we'll be reduced to peddling chips and software like a bunch of goddamn Pacific Rim computer weenies! You got me wrong if you think I'll give up the oil business without a fight!" "Sure, sure, I'm hip," Tug said soothingly. "My jellyfish are going to help you find more oil, remember?" It was easy to tell when Revel had gone nonlinear-his Texan drawl thickened drastically and he began to refer to his beloved oil business as the "aisle bidness." But what was the story with this Urschleim? Tug held up the pill-bottle of clear slime and glanced at it while steering with one hand. The stuff was thixotropic-meaning a gel that becomes liquid when shaken. You'd tilt the vial and all the Urschleim would be stuck in one end, but then, if you shook the bottle a bit, the slime's state would change and it would run down to the other end like ketchup suddenly gushing from a bottle. Smooth, clear ketchup. Snot. "The Ditheree hole's oozin' with Urschleim right now!" said Revel, settling a pair of Italian sunglasses onto his freckled nose. He looked no older than twenty-five. "I brought three gallons of it in a tank in my duffel. One of my engineers says it's a new type of deep-lying oil, and another one says it's just water infected with bacteria. But I'm with old Herr Doktor Professor von Stoffman. We've struck the cell fluid of Mother Earth herself: undifferentiated tissue, Tug, primordial ooze. Gaia goo. Urschleim!" "What did you do to make it start oozing?" asked Tug, suppressing a giggle. Revel threw back his head and crowed. "Man, if OPEC got wind about our new high-tech extraction techniques .... You don't think 1 got enemies, son? Them sheikhs play for keeps." Revel tapped his knuckles cagily against the car's closed window. "Hell, even Uncle Sam'd . be down on us if he knew that we've been twisting genes and seeding those old worn-out oil beds with designer bacteria! They eat through tar and paraffin, change the oil's viscosity, unblock the pores in the stone, and get it all fizzy with methane .... You wouldn't think the 01' Ditheree had it in 'er to blow valves and gush again, but we plumbed her out with a new extra-virulent strain. And what did she gush? Urschleim!" Revel peered at Tug over the tops of his designer sunglasses, assuming what he seemed to think was a trustworthy expression. "But that ain't the half of it, Tug. Wait till 1 tell you what we did with the stuff once we had it." Tug was impatient. Gusher or not, Revel's bizarre maunderings were not going to sell any jellyfish. "What did you think of that artificial jellyfish I sent you?" Revel frowned. "Well, it looked okay when it up. About the size of a deflated football. I dropped it in swimmin' pool. It was floatin' there, kinda rippling pulsing, for about two days. Didn't you say that would run for weeks? Forty-eight hours and it was Disintegrated I guess. Chlorine melted the plastic or thing." "No way," protested Tug, intensely. "It must slipped out a crack in the side of your pool. I built model to last three weeks for sure! It was my best type. It was a chemotactic artificial jellyfish designed slither into undersea vents and find its way to ground oil beds." "My swimming pool's not in the best condition," lowed Revel. "So I guess it's possible that your jellyfish squeeze out through a crack. But if this oil-prosoectini application of yours is any good, the thing should come back with some usable geology data. And it did come back that I noticed. Face it, Tug, the melted." Tug wouldn't give in. "My jellyfish didn't send information because I didn't put a tracer chip in it. you're going to be so rude about it, I might as well tell that I don't think oil prospecting is a very honorable cation. I'd really rather see the California Water using my jellies to trace leaks in irrigation and lines." Revel yawned, sinking deeper into the passenger "That's real public-spirited of you, Dr. Mesoglea. But ifornia water ain't worth a dime to me." Tug pressed onward. "Also, I'd like to see my used to examine contaminated wells here in Silicon If you put an artificial jellyfish down a well, and leave it pulsate down there for a week or two, it could filter up kinds of trace pollutants! It'd be a great public-relations gambit to push the jelly's antipollution aspects. Considering your family history, it couldn't hurt to get the Pullen family in the good graces of the Environmental Protection people. If we angle it right, we could probably even swing a federal development grant!" "I dunno, hombre," Revel grumbled. "Somehow it just don't seem sportin' to take money from the Feds .... " He gazed mournfully at the lushly exotic landscape of monkey-puzzle trees, fat pampered yuccas, and orange trees. "Man, everything sure looks green out here." "Yes," Tug said absently, "thank God there's been a break in the drought. California has plenty of use for a jellyfish that can monitor water-leaks." "It's not the water that counts," said Revel, "it's the carbon dioxide. Two hundred million years' worth of crude oil, all burned to carbon dioxide and spewed right into the air in just a few decades. Plant life's goin' crazy. Why, all the plant life along this highway has built itself out of car exhausts! You ever think 0' that?" It was clear from the look of glee on Revel's shallow features that this thought pleased him mightily. "I mean, if you traced the history of the carbon in that weirdasslookin' tree over there . . . hunnert years ago it was miles down in the primeval bowels of the earth! And since we eat plants to live, it's the same for people! Our flesh, brain, and blood is built outa burnt crude-oil! We're creatures of the Urschleim, Tug. All life comes from the primeval goo." "No way," said Tug heatedly. He took a highway exit to Los Perros, his own local enclave in the massive sprawl that was Silicon Valley. "One carbon atom's just like the next one. And once you're talking artificial life, it doesn't even have to be an 'atom' at all. It can be a byte of information, or a microbead of piezoplastic. It doesn't matter where the material came from-life is just a pattern of behavior." "That's where you and me part company, boy." They tooling down the main drag of Los Perros now, and was gaping at some chicly dressed women. "Dig it, thanks to oil, a lot of carbon in your yuppie neighbors comes from Texas. Like or not, most modern life is fundamentally Texan." "That's pretty appalling news, Revel," smiled Tug. He took the last remaining hilly corners with a squeal of his Michelins, then pulled into his driveway. He parked the Animata under the rotting, fungus-specked redwood deck of the absurdly overpriced suburban home that he rented. The rent was killing him. Ever since his lover had moved out last Christmas, Tug had been meaning to move into a smaller place, but somewhere deep down he nursed a hope that if he kept the house, some nice strong man would come and move in with him. Next door, Tug's neighbors were flinging waterballoons and roaring with laughter as they sizzled up a huge aromatic rack of barbecued tofu. They were rich Samoans. They had a big green parrot named Toatoa. On fine days, such as today, Toatoa sat squawking on the gable of the house. Toatoa had a large yellow beak and a taste for cuttlebone and pumpkin-seeds. "This is great," Revel opined, examining earthquake-split walls and peeling ceiling Sheetrock. was afraid we'd have some trouble findin' the necessary] space for experiments. No problem, though, with you tin' this sorry dump for a workshop." "I live here," said Tug with dignity. "By California standards this is a very good house." "No wonder you want to start a company!" Revel climbed the redwood stairs to Tug's outdoor deck, and dragged a yard-long plastic pressure cylinder from . his duffel bag, flinging aside some balled-up boot socks and a set of watered-silk boxer shorts. "You got a garden hose? And a funnel?" He pulled a roll of silvered duct tape from the bottom of his bag. Tug supplied a length of hose, prudently choosing that had been severely scorched during the last hillside brushfire. Revel whipped a French designer pocketknife from within his Can't-Bust-'Ems and slashed off a threefoot length. He then deftly duct-taped the tin funnel to the end of the hose, and blew a few kazoo-like blasts. Next Revel flung the crude horn aside and took up the pressure cylinder. "You don't happen to have a washtub, do you?" "No problem," Tug said. He went into the house and fetched a large plastic picnic cooler. Revel opened the petcock of the pressure cylinder and began decanting its contents into the cooler. The black nozzle slowly ejaculated a thick clear gel, rather like silicone putty. Pint after pint of it settled languorously into the white pebbly interior of the hinge-topped cooler. The stuff had a sulfurous, burning-rubber reek that Tug associated with Hawaii-a necessarily brief stay he'd had on the oozing, flaming slopes of Kilauea. Tug prudently sidled across the deck and stood upwind of the cooler. "How far down did you obtain this sample?" Revel laughed. "Down? Doc, this stuff broke the safety-valves on old Ditheree and blew drillin' mud over five counties. We had an old-time blue-ball gusher of it. It just kept comin', pourin' out over the ground. Kinda, you know, spasmodic. . . . Finally ended up with a lake of clear hot pudding higher than the tops of pickups." "Jesus, what happened then?" Tug asked. "Some evaporated. Some soaked right into the subsoil. Disappeared. The first sample I scored was out of the back of some good 01' boy's Toyota. Lucky thing he had the tailgate up, or it woulda all run out." Revel pulled out a handkerchief, wiped sweat from his forehead, and continued talking. "Of course, once we got the rig repaired, we did some serious pump-work. We Pullens happen to own a tank farm near Nacogdoches, a couple of football fields' worth of big steel reservoirs. Hasn't seen use since the OPEC embargo of the '70s. The tanks were pretty much abandoned on site. But everyone of them babies is brim-full with Revel Pullen's trademark Urschleim right now." He glanced up at the sun, looking a bit wild-eyed, and wiped his forehead again. "You got beer in this dump?" "Sure, Revel." Tug went into the kitchen for two tles of Etna Ale, and brought them out to the deck. Revel drank thirstily, then gestured with his horn. "If this don't work, well, you're gonna think crazy." He pushed his Italian shades up onto the top of narrow crewcut skull, and grinned. He was enjoying self. "But if it does work, 01' son-you're gonna you're crazy." Revel dipped the end of the funnel into the '-Iu,,,~,~,,., but aromatic mass. He swirled it around, then held it carefully and puffed. A fat lozenge-shaped gelatinous bubble appeared the end of the horn. "Holy cow, it blows up just like a balloon," Tug impressed. "That's some kind of viscosity!" Revel grinned wider, holding the thing at arm's "It gets better." Tug Mesoglea watched in astonishment as the bubble of Urschleim slowly rippled and dimpled. A double crease sank into the taut outer membrane of gelatinous sphere, encircling it like the seam on an sized baseball. Now, with a swampy-sounding plop, the bubble loose from the horn's tin muzzle and began to float midair. A set of cilia emerged along the seam and the borne jelly began to bob and beat its way upward. "Urschleim!" whooped Revel. "Jesus Christ," Tug said, staring in shocked >a~'''H''n tion. The air jelly was still changing before his eyes, ing a set of interior membranes, warping, pulsing, rippling itself into an ever more precise shape, for all world like a computer graphics program ray-tracing image into an elegant counterfeit of reality. . . . Then a draft of air caught it. It hit the eaves of the house sturdily, bounced, and drifted up over the roof and into the sky. "I can hardly believe it," said Tug, staring upward. "Spontaneous symmetry breaking! A self-actuating reaction/diffusion system. This slime of yours is an excitable medium with emergent behavior, Revel! And that spontaneous fractalization of the structures . . . can you do it again?" "As many times as you want," said Revel. "With as much Urschleim as you got. Of course, the smell kinda gets to you if you do it indoors." "But it's so odd," breathed Tug. "That the slime out of your oil well is forming itself into jellyfish shapes just as I'm starting to build jellyfish out of plastic." "I figure it for some kind of a morphic resonance thing," nodded Revel. "This primeval slime's been trapped inside the Earth so long it's truly achin' to turn into something live and organic. Kind of like that super-weird worm and bacteria and clam shit that grows out of deep undersea vents." "You mean around the undersea vents, Revel." "No, Tug, right out of 'em. That's the part most people don't get." "Whatever. Let me try blowing an Urschleim air jelly." Tug dabbled the horn's tin rim in the picnic cooler, then huffed away at his own balloon of Urschleim. The sphere began to ripple internally, just as before, with just the same dimples and just the same luscious double crease. Tug had a sudden deja vu. He'd seen this shape on his computer screen. It started to float away, but frugal Revel darted forward and repeatedly slashed at it with his Swiss knife, finally causing the air jelly to break into a flying burst of clear snot that splashed all over Tug's feet and legs. The magic goo felt tingly on Tug's skin. He wondered nervously if any of the slime might be passing into his bloodstream. Revel scooped most of the slime off the deck and put it back in the cooler. "What do you think?" asked Revel. "I'm overwhelmed," said Tug, shaking his head. "Your Urschleim jellyfish look so much like the ones I've been building. in my lab. Let's go in. I'll show you my jellyfish while we think this through." Tug led Revel into the house. Revel insisted on bringing the Urschleim-containing cooler and the empty pressure canister into the house. He even got Tug to throw an Indian blanket over them, "in case we get company." Tug's jellyfish tanks filled up an entire room with great green bubbling glory. The aquarium room had been a domestic video game parlor during the early 1980s, when the home's original builder, a designer of shoot-'em-up computer twitch-games, had shored up the floor to accommodate two dozen massive arcade-consoles. This was a good thing, too, for Tug's seawater tanks were a serious structural burden, and far outweighed all of Tug's other possessions put together, except maybe the teak waterbed that his ex-lover had left. Tug had bought the tanks themselves at a knockdown auction from the federal-seizure sale of an eccentric Oakland cocaine dealer, who had once used them to store schools of piranha. Revel mulled silently over the tanks of jellyfish. Backlit by greenish glow from the spotlights of a defunct speedmetal crew, Tug's jellies were at their best. The backlighting brought out their most secret, most hidden interior curvatures, with an unblinking brilliance that was wellnigh pornographic. Their seawater trace elements and Purina Jellyfish Lab Chow cost more than Tug's own weekly grocery bill, but his jelly menagerie had come to mean more to Tug than his own nourishment, health, money, or even his love-life. He spent long secret hours entranced before the gently spinning, ciliated marvels, watching them reel up their brine shrimp prey in mindless, reflexive elegance, absorbing the food in a silent ecstasy of poisonous goo. Live, digestive goo, that transmuted through secret alchemical biology into pulsating, glassy flesh. Tug's ex-lover had been pretty sporting about Tug's goo-mania, especially compared to his other complaints about Tug's numerous perceived character flaws, but Tug figured his lover had finally been driven away by some deep rivalry with the barely organic. Tug had gone to some pains to Windex his noseprints from the aquarium glass before Revel arrived. "Can you tell which ones are real and which ones I made from scratch?" Tug demanded triumphantly. "You got me whipped," Revel admitted. "It's a real nice show, Tug. If you can really teach these suckers some tricks, we'll have ourselves a business." Revel's denim chest emitted a ringing sound. He reached within his overalls, whipped out a cellular phone the size of a cigarette-pack, and answered it. "Pullen here! What? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Okay, see you." He flipped the phone shut and stowed it. "Got you a visitor coming," he announced. "Business consultant I hired." Tug frowned. "My uncle's idea, actually," Revel shrugged. "Just kind of standard Pullen procedure before we sink any real money in a venture. We got ourselves one of the best computer-industry consultants in the business." "Yeah? Who?" "Edna Sydney. She's a futurist, she writes a highfinance technology newsletter that's real hot with the boys in suits." "Some strange woman is going to show up here and decide if my Ctenophore, Inc. is worth funding?" Tug's voice was high and shaky with stress. "I don't like it, Revel." "Just try 'n' act like you know what you're doing, Tug, and then she'll take my uncle Donny Ray a clean bill of health for us. Just a detail really." Revel laughed falsely. "My uncle's a little over-cautious. Belt-and-suspenders kinda guy. Lot of private investigators on his payroll and stuff. The old boy's just tryin' to keep me outa trouble, basically. Don't worry about it none, Tug." Revel's phone rang again, this time from the pocket on his left buttock. "Pullen here! What? Yeah, I know his house don't look like much, but this is the place, all right. Yeah, okay, we'll let you in." Revel stowed the phone again, and turned to Tug. "Go get the door, man, and I'll double check that our cooler of Urschleim is out of sight." Seconds later, Tug's front doorbell rang loudly. Tug opened it to find a woman in blue jeans, jogging shoes, and a shapeless gray wool jersey, slipping her own cellular phone into her black nylon satchel. "Hello," she said. "Are you Dr. Mesoglea?" "Yes, I am. Tug Mesoglea." "Edna Sydney, Edna Sydney Associates." Tug shook Edna Sydney's dainty blue-knuckled hand. She had a pointed chin, an impressively large forehead, and a look of extraordinary, almost supernatural intelligence in her dark brown shoebutton eyes. She had a neat cap of gray-streaked brown hair. She looked like a digital pixie leapt full-blown from the brain of Thomas Edison. While she greeted Revel, Tug dug a business card from his wallet and forced it on her. Edna Sydney riposted with a card from the satchel that gave office addresses in Wash~ ington, Prague, and Chicago. "Would you care for a latte?" Tug babbled. "Tab? Pineapple-mango soda?" Edna Sydney settled for a Jolt Cola, then gently mao neuvered the two men into the jellyfish lab. She listened attentively as Tug launched into an extensive, arm-waving spiel. Tug was inspired. Words gushed from him like Revel's Urschleim. He'd never before met anyone who could fully understand him when he talked tee hie jargon absolutely as fast as he could. Edna Sydney, however, not only comprehended Tug's jabber but actually tapped her foot occasionally and once politely stifled a ,yawn. "I've seen artificial life devices before," Edna allowed, as Tug began to run out of verbal ectoplasm. "I knew all those Santa Fe guys before they destroyed the futures exchanges and got sent off to Leavenworth. I wouldn't advise trying to break into the software market with some new genetic algorithm. You don't want to end up like Bill Gates." Revel snorted. "Gates? Geez, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy." He chortled aloud. "To think they used to compare that nerd to Rockefeller! Hell, Rockefeller was an oil business man, a family man! If Gates had been in Rockefeller's class, there'd be kids named Gates running half the states in the Union by now." "I'm not planning to market the algorithms," Tug told the consultant. "They'll be a trade secret, and I'll market the jelly simulacra themselves. Ctenophore, Inc. is basically a manufacturing enterprise." "What about the threat of reverse engineering?" "We've got an eighteen-month lead," Revel bragged. "Round these parts, that's like eighteen years anywhere else! Besides, we got a set of ingredients that's gonna be mighty hard to duplicate." "There hasn't been a lot of, uh, sustained industry development in the artificial jellyfish field before," Tug told her. "We've got a big R&D advantage." Edna pursed her lips. "Well, that brings us to marketing, then. How are you going to get your products advertised and distributed?" "Oh, for publicity, we'll do COMDEX, A-Life Developers, BioScience Fair, MONDO 3000, the works," Revel assured her. "And get this-we can ship jellies by the Pullen oil pipelines anywhere in North America for free! Try and match that for ease of distribution and clever use of an installed base! Hell, it'll be almost as easy as downloadin' software from the Internet!" "That certainly sounds innovative," Edna nodded. "So-let's get to the crux of matters, then. What's the killer app for a robot jellyfish?" Tug and Revel traded glances. "Our exact application is highly confidential," Tug said tentatively. "Maybe you could suggest a few apps, Edna," Revel told her, folding his arms cagily over the denim chest of his Can't-Bust-'Ems. "Come on and earn your twenty thousand bucks an hour." "Hmmm," the consultant said. Her brow clouded, and she sat in the armchair at Tug's workstation, her eyes gone distant. "Jellyfish. Industrial jellyfish . _ ." Greenish rippling aquarium light played across Edna Sydney's face as she sat in deep thought. The jellyfish kept up their silent, eternal pulsations; kept on bouncing their waves of contraction out and back between the centers and the rims of their bells. "Housewares application," said Edna presently. "Fill them with lye and flush them through sinks and commodes. They agitate their way through sink traps and hairballs and grease." "Check," said Tug alertly. He snatched a mechanical pencil from the desktop and began scribbling notes on the back of an unpaid bill. "Assist fermentation in septic tanks by loading jellies with decomposition bacteria, then setting them to churn the tank sludge. Sell them in packs of thousands for citysized sewage-installations." "Outrageous," said Tug. "Microsurgical applications inside plugged arteries. Pulsates plaque away gently, but disintegrates in the ventricular valves to avoid heart attacks." "That would need FDA approval," Revel hedged. "Maybe a few years down the road." "You can get a livestock application done in eighteen months," said Edna. "It's happened in recombinant DNA." "Copacetic," said Revel. "Lord knows the Pullens got a piece 0' the cattle business!" "If you could manufacture Portuguese men-of-war or other threatening toxic jellies," Edna said, "then you could set a few thousand right offshore in perhaps Hilton Head or Puerto Vallarta. After the tourist trade crashed, you could buy up shoreline property cheap and make a real killing." She paused. "Of course, that would be illegal." "Right," Tug nodded, pencil scratching away. "Although my plastic jellyfish don't sting. I suppose we could implant pouches of toxins in them. . . ." "It would also be unethical. And wrong." "Yeah, yeah, we get it," Revel assured her. "Anything else?" "Do the jellyfish reproduce?" asked Edna. "No, they don't," Tug said. "I mean, not by themselves. They don't reproduce and they don't eat. I can manufacture as many as you want to any spec, though." "So they're not truly alive, then? They don't evolve? They're not Type III a-life?" "I evolved the algorithm for their behavior in my simulations, but the devices themselves are basically sterile robots with my best algorithms hard-coded in," Tug geeked fluently. "They're jellyfish androids that run my code. Not androids, coelenteroids." "It's probably just as well if they don't reproduce," said Edna primly. "How big can you make them?" "Well, not much bigger than a basketball at present. The lasers I'm currently using to sinter them are of limited capacity." Tug neglected to mention that he had the lasers out on unauthorized loan from San Jose State University, thanks to a good friend in lab support at the School of Engineering. "In principle, a jellyfish could be quite large." "So they're currently too small to live inside," said Edna thoughtfully. Revel smiled. " 'Live inside,' huh? You're really something special, Edna." "That's what they pay me for," she said crisply. She glanced at the screen of Tug's workstation, with its rich background color drifting from sky-blue to sea-green, and with a vigorous pack of sea nettles pumping their way forward. "What genetic operators are you using to your algorithms?" "Standard Holland stuff. Proportional crossover, mutation, and inversion." "The Chicago a-life group came up schemata-sensitive operator last week," said Edna. liminary tests are showing a 40 percent speed-up searching intractable sample spaces." "Terrific! That would really be useful for me," Tug. "I need that genetic operator." Edna scribbled a file location and the electronic dress of a downloading site on Tug's business card gave it back to him. Then she glanced at a dainty watch inside her left wrist. "Revel's uncle paid for a hour plus travel. You two want to spring for a retainer, do 1 go?" "Uh, thanks a lot, but 1 don't think we can swing retainer," Revel said modestly. Edna nodded slowly, then touched one finger to pointed chin. "I just thought of an angle for using jellyfish in hotel swimming-pools. If your jellyfish sting, you could play with them like beach balls, filtrate the water, and they could shed off little polyps look for cracks. 1 just hate the hotel pools in California. They're surrounded by anorexic bleached blondes drinking margaritas made of chemicals with forty letters in their names. Should we talk some more?" "If you don't like your pool, maybe you could take a nice dip in one of Tug's tanks," Revel said, with a glance at his own watch. "Bad idea, Revel," Tug. said hastily. "You get a good jolt from those natural sea nettles and it'll stop your heart." "Do you have a license for those venomous creatures?" Edna asked coolly. Tug tugged his forelock in mock contrition. "Well, Ms. Sydney, amateur coelenteratology's kind of a poorly policed field." Edna stood up briskly, and hefted her nylon bag. "We're out of time, so here's the bottom line," she said. "This is one of the looniest schemes I've ever seen. But I'm going to phone Revel's uncle with the go-ahead as soon as I get back into Illinois airspace. Risk-taking weirdos like you two are what makes this industry great, and the Pullen family can well afford to back you. I'm rooting for you boys. And if you ever need any cut-rate Kazakh programmers, send me e-mail." "Thanks, Edna," Revel said. "Yes," said Tug. "Thank you for all the good ideas." He saw her to the door. "She didn't really sound very encouraging," Tug said after she left. "And her ideas were ugly, compared to ours. Fill my jellyfish with lye? Put them in septic tanks and in cow arteries? Fill them with poison to sting families on vacation?" He flung back his head and began camping back and forth across the room imitating Edna in a shrieking falsetto. "They're not Type III a-life? Oh dear! How I hate those anorexic blondes! Oh my!" "Look, Tug, if Edna was a little underwhelmed it's just 'cause I didn't tell her everything!" said Revel. "A trade secret is a trade secret, boy, and three's a crowd. That gal's got a brain with the strength 0' ten, but even Edna Sydney can't help droppin' certain hints in those pricey little newsletters of hers. . . ." Revel whistled briefly, pleased with his own brilliance. Tug's eyes widened in sudden, cataclysmic comprehension. "I've got it, Revel! I think I've got it! When you first saw an Urschleim air jelly-was it before or after you put my plastic jellyfish in your swimming pool?" "After, compadre. I only first thought of blowing Urschleim bubbles last week-I was drunk, and I did it to make a woman laugh. But you sent me that sorry-ass melting jellyfish a full six weeks ago." "That 'sorry-ass melting jellyfish' found its way out a crack in your swimming pool and down through the shale beds into the Ditheree hole!" cried Tug exultantly. "Yes! That's it, Revel! My equations migrated right out into your goo!" "Your software got into my primeval slime?" said Revel slowly. "How exactly is that s'posed to happen?" "Mathematics represents optimal form, Revel," said Tug. "That's why it slips in everywhere. But sometimes you need a seed equation. Like if water gets cold, it likes to freeze; it freezes into a mathematical lattice. But if you have really cold water in a smooth tank, the water might not know how to freeze-until maybe a snowflake drifts into it. To make a long story short, the mathematical formations of my sintered jellyfish represent a low-energy phase space configuration that is stably attractive to the dynamics of the Urschleim." "That story's too long for me," said Revel. "Let's just test if you're right. Why don't we throw one of your artificial jellies into my cooler full of slime?" "Good idea," Tug said, pleased to see Revel plunging headlong into the scientific method. They returned to the aquana. Tug mounted a stepladder festooned with bright-red anti-litigation safety warnings, and used a long-handled aquarium net to fetch up his best artificial jelly, a purplestriped piezoplastic sea nettle that he'd sintered up just that morning, a homemade, stingless Chrysaora quinquecirrha. Revel and Tug strode out to the living room with the plastic sea nettle pulsating gamely against the fine-woven mesh of the net. "Stand back," Tug warned and flipped the jelly into the four inches of Urschleim still in the plastic picnic cooler. The slime heaved upward violently at the touch of the little artificial jellyfish. Once again Revel blew some Texan hot air into the goo, only this time it all lifted up at once, all five liters of it, forming a floating sea nettle the size of a large dog. Revel shouted. The Urschleim jelly drifted around the room, its white oral arms swaying like the train of a wedding dress. "Yee haw! Shit howdy!" shouted Revel. "This one's different from all the Urschleim ones I've seen before. People'd buy this one just for fun! Edna's right. It'd be a hell of a pool toy, or, heck, a plain old land toy, as long as it don't flyaway." "A toy?" said Tug. "You think we should go with the recreational application? I like it, Revel! Recreation has positive energy. And there's a lot of money in gaming." "Just like tag!" Revel hooted, capering. "Blind man's bluff!" "Watch out, Revel!" One swaying fringe of the dogsized ur-jelly made a sudden whipping snatch at Revel's leg. Revel yelped in alarm and tumbled backward over the living-room hassock. "Christ! Get it off me!" Revel cried as the enormous jelly reeled at his ankle, its vast gelatinous bulk hovered menacingly over his upturned face. Tug, with a burst of inspiration, slid open the glass doors to the deck. Caught in a draft of air, the jelly released Revel, Roated out through the doors, and sailed off over Tug's redwood deck. Tug watched the dog-sized jelly ascending serenely over the neighbors' yard. Engrossed in .beer and tofu, the neighbors failed to notice it. Toatoa the parrot swooped off the roof of the Samoans' house and rose to circle the great flying sea nettle. The iridescent green parrot hung in a moment of timeless beauty near the translucent jelly, and then was caught by one of the lashing oral arms. There was a frenzy of green motion inside the Urschleim sea nettle's bell, and then the parrot had clawed and beaked its way free. The nettle lost a little altitude, but then sealed up its punctures and began again to rise. Soon it was a distant, glinting dot in the blue California sky. The moist Toatoa cawed angrily from her roof-top perch, flapping her wings to dry. "Wow!" said Tug. "I'd like to see that again-on digital video!" He smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand. "But now we've got none left for testing! Exceptwait!-that little bit in the vial." He yanked the vial from his pocket and looked at it speculatively. "I could put a tiny Monterey bell jelly in here, and then put in some nanophones to pick up the phonon jitter. Yeah. If I could get even a rough map of the Urschleim's basins of chaotic attraction-" Revel yawned loudly and stretched his arms. "Sounds fascinatin', Doc. Take me on down to my motel, would you? I'll call Ditheree and get some more Urschleim delivered to your house by, oh, 6 A.M. tomorrow. And by day after tomorrow I can get you a lot more. A whole lot more." Tug had rented Revel a room in the Los Perros Inn, a run-down stucco motel where, Tug told Revel as he dropped him off, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe had once spent a honeymoon night. Fearing that Tug harbored a budding romantic notion of a honeymoon night for himself, Revel frowned and muttered, "Now I know why they call this the Granola State: nuts, flakes, and fruits." "Relax," said Tug. "I know you're not gay. And you're not my type anyway. You're way too young. What I want is a manly older guy who'll cherish me and take care of me. I want to snuggle against his shoulder and feel his strong arms around me in the still of the night." Perhaps the Etna Ale had gone to Tug's head. Or maybe the Urschleim had affected him. In any case, he didn't seem at all embarrassed to be making these revelations. "See you tomorrow, old son," said Revel, closing his door. Revel got on the phone and called the home of Hoss Jenkins, the old forehand of the Ditheree field. "Hoss, this is Revel Pullen. Can you messenger me out another pressure tank of that goo?" "That goo, Revel, that goo! There's been big-ass balloons of it floatin' out of the well. You never should of thrown those gene-splice bacteria down there." "I told you before, Hoss, it ain't bacteria we're dealing with, it's primeval slime!" , "Ain't many of us here that agree, Revel. What if it's some kind of plague on the oil wells? What if it spreads?" "Let's stick to the point, Hoss. Has anybody noticed the balloons?" "Not yet." "Well, just keep folks off our property. And tell the boys not to be shy of firing warning shots-we're on unincorporated land." "I don't know how long this can stay secret." "Hoss, we need time to try and find a way to make a buck off this. If I can get the right spin on the Urschleim, folks'll be glad to see it coming out of Ditheree. Just between you and me, I'm out here with the likeliest old boy to figure out what to do. Not that he's much of a regular (ella, but that's neither here nor there. Name of Tug Mesoglea. I think we're on to something big. Send that tank of goo out to Mesoglea's address, pronto. Here it is. Yeah, and here's his number, and while we're at it, here's my number at the motel. And, Hoss, let's make that three tanks, the same size as the one you filled up for me yesterday. Yeah. Try and get 'em out here by six A.M. tomorrow. And start rounding out a Pullen pipeline connection between our Nacogdoches tank farm and Monterey." "Monterey, California, or Monterrey, Mexico?" "California. Monterey's handy and it's out of the way. We'll need someplace real quiet for the next stage I'm planning. There's way too many professional snoops watching everybody's business here in Silicon Valley, drivin' around scanning cellular phones and stuff-you're receiving this call as encrypted, aren't you, Hoss?" "Sure thing, boss. Got my Clipper Chip set to maximum scramble." "Good, good, just making sure. I'm trying to be cautious, Hoss, just like Uncle Donny Ray." Hoss gave a snort of laughter on the other end of the line, and Revel continued. "Anyhoo, we need someplace kind of out of the way, but still convenient. Someplace with some spare capacity, but a little run-down, so's we can rent lots of square footage on the cheap and the city fathers don't ask too many prying questions. . . . Ask Lucy to sniff around and find me a place like that in Monterey." "There's already hundreds of towns like that in Texas!" "Yeah, but I want to do this out here. This deal is a software kind 0' thing, so it's gotta be California." Revel woke around seven A.M., stirred by the roar of the morning rush-hour traffic. He got his breakfast at a California coffee shop that called itself "Southern Kitchen," yet served orange-rind muffins and sliced kiwi-fruits with the eggs. Over breakfast he called Texas, and learned that his assistant, Lucy, had found an abandoned tank farm near a defunct polluted military base just north of Monterey. The tank-farm belonged to Felix Quinonez, who had been the base's fuel supplier. The property, on Quinonez's private land, included a large garage. The set-up sounded about perfect. "Lease it, Lucy," said Revel, slurping his coffee. "And fax Quinonez two copies of the contract so's me and him can sign off down at his property today. I'll get this Tug Mesoglea fella to drive me down there. Let's say two o'clock this afternoon? Lock it in. Now has Hoss found a pipeline connection? He has? Straight to Quinonez's tanks? Bless you, honey. Oh, and one more thing? Draw up incorporation papers for a company called Ctenophore, Inc., register the company, and get the name trademarked. C-T-E-N-O-P-H-O-R-E. What it means? It's a kind of morphodite jellyfish. Swear to God. I learned it from Tug Mesoglea. If you should put Mesoglea's name on my, incorporation papers? Are you teasin' me, Lucy? Are you tryin' to make 01' Revel mad? Now book me and Mesoglea a suite in a Monterey hotel, and fax the incorporation papers to me there. Thanks, darlin'. Talk to ya later." The rapid-fire wheeling and dealing filled Revel with joy. Expansively swinging his arms, he strolled up the hill to Tug's house, which was only a few blocks off. The air was clear and cool, and the sun was a low bright disk in the immaculate blue sky. Birds fluttered this way and that-sparrows, grackles, robins, humming-birds, and the startlingly large California bluejays. A dog barked in the distance as the exotic leaves and flowers swayed in the gentle morning breeze. As he drew closer to Tug's house, Revel could hear the steady screeching of the Samoans' parrot. And when he turned the corner of Tug's block, Revel saw something very odd. It was like there was a ripple in the space over Tug's house, an undulating bluish glinting of curved air. Wheeling about in the midst of the glinting was the furious Toatoa. A school of small airborne bell jellies were circling around and around over Tug's house, now fleeing from and now pursuing the parrot, who was endeavoring, with no success, to puncture them. Revel yelled at the cloud of jellyfish, but what good would that do? You could as soon yell at a volcano or at a spreadsheet. To Revel's relief, the parrot retreated to her house with a broken tailfeather, and the jellies did not follow her. But now-were the air bells catching the scent plume of the air off Revel's body? They flocked and spiraled eldritchly. Revel hurried up Tug's steps and into his house, right past the three empty cylinders of Urschleim lying outside Tug's front door. Inside Tug's house reeked of subterranean sulfur. Air jellies of all kinds pressed this way and that. Sea nettles, comb-jellies, bell jellies, spotted jellies, and even a few giant siphonophores-all the jellies of different sizes, with the smaller ones beating frantically faster than the bigger ones. It was like a children's birthday party with lighterthan-air balloons. Tug had gone utterly bat-shit with the Urschleim. "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 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 of hours. There doesn't seem to be any limit to the size 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-intime 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-Ioogie things over there-" He pointed at a siphon ph ore. "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 nearest oil-tank and peered at it. Now the motor arrived in the form of a battered multicolored pickup driven by a rugged older man with iron gray hair and heavy mustache. "Hello!" sang Tug, instantly in love. "Good afternoon," said the man, getting out of pickup. "I'm Felix Quinonez." He stuck out his hand Tug eagerly grasped it. "I'm Tug Mesoglea," said Tug. "I handle the scrence; and my partner Revel Pullen over there handles the ness. I think we're leasing this property from you?" "I think so, too," said Quinonez, baring his teeth in a flashing smile. He let go of Tug's hand, Tug a thoughtful look. An ambiguous look. Did Tug hope? Now Revel came striding over. "Quinonez? I'm Pullen. Did you bring the contract Lucy faxed you? bueno, my man. Let's sign the papers on the hood of pickup, Texas style!" The ceremony completed, Quinonez handed over keys. "This is the key to the garage, this is for the pa on the pipeline valve, and these here are for the locks the stairways up onto the tanks. We've been having trouble keeping kids out of here." "I can see that from the free paint-jobs you been ting," said Revel, staring over at the tanks. "But the rust I'm seeing is what worries me. corrosion. " "These tanks have been empty and out of use for a few years," granted Quinonez. "But you weren't ning on filling them, were you? As I explained to assistant, the hazardous materials license for this site revoked the day Fort Ord was closed." "I certainly am planning on filling these tanks," Revel, "or why the hell else would I be renting them? 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. J show me around and get me up to speed on your val 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 topfloor 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 M