Freeware

"You're gross," said Ike and went out on the wharf to feast. Terri came out when he was almost through eating and ate the rest of his french fries and onion rings, plus the hard-to-get meat in the body of his lobster. Hungry seagulls skirled overhead and sea lions barked down among the pilings.

They fed the lobster shells to the sea lions and walked down to the land end of the wharf to wait for a moldie bus. Before long the big loping thing came pattering by, coming down the grass-and-sand street. Terri waved, and the bus stopped. The bus was a fused grex made of twelve moldies. Her name was Muxxi.

"Howdy thar, Terri and Ike," said Muxxi in the corny Wild West accent she affected, perhaps to please tourists or perhaps to mock. "Whar ye goin'

today?"

"We want to go to Dada Kine Surf Shop, Muxxi," said Terri.

"Waal, now, I reckon that means we'll be a-settin' you young-uns off at the corner of Forty-First Street and Opal Cliff Drive," said Muxxi, displaying the fare as numbers in her skin. "Pay up!"

Ike and Terri handed their fares to Muxxi, who rippled her imipolex to move the other riders toward the rear of the bus. Muxxi bulged out two fresh front-row seats for Ike and Terri. The kids lowered their butts down into the seats and the seats grabbed them tight. In bad weather the seats formed protective cowls, but today Terri and Ike were fully exposed to the pleasant sun and offshore breeze.

The bus's giant sluglike body rippled along through the main beach area.

There on the right was the Boardwalk with its classic mechanical roller coaster and on the left was the hill with the family motel, the Terrace Court. Terri's motel—someday. Terri had gone to her mother to complain about the will, and Alice had promised Terri that she would pass the motel directly on to her, which made Terri feel a lot better. Alice had even asked Terri what she thought about maybe adding Clearlight to their motel's name.

The bus waded across the shallow San Lorenzo River and humped up a slope to a grassy road that capped the cliffs. Muxxi let off two passengers at the yacht harbor, where the cliffs dropped away. She got another few passengers as she raced along the edges of Twin Lakes and Live Oaks beaches. As each group of passengers got on, Ike and Terri's seats moved further towards the rear.

The cliffs rose up again and the bus surged onto them, the thick corrugations on her underside swaying at a rapid steady pace. Now they were at Pleasure Point with its schools of surfers.

"Here's whar ye git off, Terri and Ike," twanged Muxxi. Their seats turned to the side and became chutes that slid them slowly down to the ground. Muxxi pattered off, and the kids stood watching the surfers for a while.

"Do you really think we can learn to do it, Terri?" asked Ike.

"Sure. It's easier with a DIM board. They have ripples on their bottom like Muxxi; they can swim. It makes it a lot less work to catch waves."

"What if they swim off without you and go rogue?"

"They don't," said Terri. "They're not smart and independent like moldies.

They're DIMs. A DIM board is smart enough to swim and to let you steer it, and that's all it wants to do. Dom thinks women should be like DIMs."

"Stop going off about Dom," said Ike. "I'm ready to buy a board."

They walked a block up Forty-First Street to the Dada Kine Surf Shop. Inside the store it was dark and cool. New and used DIM boards lined two walls and hung from the ceiling. Racks of wet suits filled out the rest of the store. A

Hawaiian kahuna was sitting behind the counter. Slouched next to him was a red-and-yellow moldie, a liveboard. A liveboard was vastly more skilled and functional than a DIM board, but, of course, full moldies were very expensive.

Instead of just buying them, you had to put them on a salary.

"Yaar, Terri," said the big Hawaiian. "Your bud Kurtis Goole was in here earlier today. I think he went up to Four Mile Beach."

"I'm not looking for him, Kimo," said Terri. "I'm here to shop. This is my brother Ike. We want to get wet suits and a DIM board."

"Two boards," said Ike all of a sudden. "I don't want to have to share with you, Terri."

"Tell me how much money you want to spend," said Kimo. "And we'll see what we can do."

"And I'll give you little bangtails a cost-free and unforgettably wise lesson," volunteered the moldie. "A gorgeous incentive for them, right, Kimo? Business being so slow that I haven't been paid in it seems like seven weeks, you understand."

"Mahalo very much, Everooze," said Kimo. "It'll be bitchin' if you give them a lesson. How much bucks you got, kids?"

An hour later Ike and Terri had each gotten a used wet suit and a rebuilt DIM

board—at a very reasonable price. Ike's board was red with black checkers, Terri's was patterned with blue-and-green flames. Everooze bounced down to the beach with them, jabbering away, and they swam out to a small uncrowded break.

"I'll hang this fabulation on three ripe words like an uvvy preacher," said Everooze. "Visualize, realize, and actualize. How do you talk to your DIM

board?

It's a telepathic union, thanks to a little piece of uvvy in the nape of the wet suit neck, cuddled right up near your bright young Percesepe brain. To make your board swim, you visualize the motion you want, and then you realize that thought—push it out of your head so's the DIM can cha

Visualize, realize, and actualize—these are the keys to correct surf motion in the water and—hmmm—indeed in all other walks or flights of life. The magic of the -alize ending. Yes. The DIM in the DIM board is a clueless little tad of flicker-cladding, a lonely finger's worth of a moldie, but if you can visualize and realize, it can actualize. It works fairly well, at least on these puny waves. Puny waves but nicely tubular, I should add. Let's surf 'em."

The realizing step was a little hard to get, but after a while Terri and Ike had it down. The trick was to think that you were already moving the way you wanted—to make it real at least for yourself—and the DIM would pick up on that.

Ike said it felt like his whole body was talking to the DIM, and Terri said it was more like focusing your attention ahead of where you already were.

Everooze said that either way was perfectly floatin', although it was best of all to degravitate to the fact that they were, in fact, helping the DIM boards to surf.

Once they swam out through the breakers, Everooze started showing them how to catch a wave. "It's a cosmic rhythm, you viz?" said Everooze, repeatedly catching waves, then ducking underwater to swim back to Terri and Ike like a big oblong sea skate turned skateboard. "It's not enough to see a wave coming; you want to smell it and hear it and feel it in the air and in the water.

Undoubtedly there's a little current between your toes right now, for instance, which is the suck of the draw of the next wave crest to come. Get fully lifted on synesthesia because the ocean is indeed realizing its ability to actualize the way you are going to move. Not only are you helping the DIM board; you're helping the ocean as well. Think of yourself as the ocean's DIM."

Terri and Ike started catching waves then and riding them, at first on all fours and then, miraculously, standing on two feet. "Ah yes," exulted Everooze.

"The human race rises from the primordial sea, a boy and a girl step forth from the zillion whats of past time to be here—whoops!—keep your center between your knees, Terri, think of your whole mass as a magic invisible weight dangling down there—that's it, my lassie—yee-haw!—and another one, Ike—boom—over the falls for sure, a Niagara wet whirl under there in Neptune's washing machine, no harm in that, no loss in failure, the surf god is actualizing tubes, kids, so get back out there—whoo-ee!"