Read Online A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling - Free Book Online

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 lighter-than-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 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