Free A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling Page B

computer’s new screen. Tug went out and looked at the robots; they’d finished five aquaria now, and water was gushing into them from connections the busy robots had made to the Quinonez Motorotive watermain.
    Tug opened the trunk of his car and began bringing in artificial jellyfish and throwing them into the new tanks. Meanwhile Revel was moving about on the big storage tanks, crawling all over them like an excited fly on freshmeat. Spotting Tug, Revel whooped and waved from the top of a tank. “The slime’s comin’ soon,” hollered Revel. Tug waved back and returned to his computer.
    Checking his e-mail, Tug saw that he’d finally gotten a coelenteratological monograph concerning one of the ctenophores he’d been most eager to model: the Venus’s-girdle, or
Cestus veneris
, a comb-jelly native to the Mediterranean, shaped like a wide, tapering belt covered with cilia. The Venus’s-girdle was a true ctenophore, and its water-combing cilia were said to diffract sunlight into gorgeous rainbows. It might be fun to wrap one of them around your waist for dress-up. Ctenophore, Inc. could make fashion accessories as well as toys! Smiling as he worked, Tug began transferring the report’s data to his design program.
    The roar of the Urschleim coming through the pipeline was like a subway underground. Initially taking it for an earthquake, Tug ran outside and collided with the jubilant Revel.
    “Here she comes, pardner!”
    The nearest of the giant tanks boomed and shuddered as the slime began coursing into it. “So far, so good!” said Revel.
    Tanks two and three filled up uneventfully, but a long vertical seam midway up on tank four began to gape open as the tank was filling. Scampering about like a meth-biker roughneck, Revel yanked at the pipeline valves and diverted the Urschleim flow from tank four into tanks five and six, which tidily absorbed the rest of the shipment.
    As the roaring and booming of the pipeline delivery died down, the metal of tank four gave a dying shriek and ripped open from top to bottom. Floundering in vast chaotic motion, the sides of the great tank unrolled to fall outward like a snipped ribbon, tearing loose from the huge disk top, which glided forward some twenty yards like a giant Frisbee.
    An acre or more of slime gushed out of the burst tank to flood the tank farm’s dry weedy soil. The thousands ofgallons of glistening Urschleim mounded up on the ground like a clear tapioca pudding.
    Tug started running toward the spill, fearful for Revel’s safety. But, no, there was Revel, standing safe off to one side like a triumphant cockroach. “Come on, Tug!” he called. “Come look at this!” Tug kept running and Revel met him at the edge of the Urschleim spill.
    “This is just like the spill at Ditheree!” exclaimed Revel. “But you’ll see, spillin’ Urschleim on the ground don’t mean a thing. You ready to start fillin’ orders, Tug?” His voice sounded tinny and high, like the voice of an indestructible cartoon character.
    “The stuff is warm,” said Tug, leaning forward to feel the great knee-high pancake of Urschleim. His voice, too, had a high, quacking quality. Here and there fat bubbles of gas formed beneath the Urschleim and burst plopping holes in it. The huge Urschleim flapjack was giving off gas like a dough full of yeast. But the gas was helium, which is why their voices were high and—
    “I just realized how the Urschleim makes helium,” squawked Tug. “Cold fusion! Let’s run back in the garage, Revel, and find out whether or not we’ve got radiation sickness. Come on. I mean it. Run!”
    Back in the garage they caught their breath for a while. “Why would we have radiation sickness?” puffed Revel finally.
    “I think your Urschleim is fusing hydrogen atoms together to make helium,” said Tug. “Depending on the details of the process, that could mean anything from warming the stuff up, to killing everyone in the county.”
    “Well, it ain’t