The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (ebook reader 8 inch .txt) 📕

sends it down into our great sublunar home. The Nest is a wonderful place, modern yet suffused with history, cradle of the solar system’s two greatest civilizations the boppers and their mighty heirs, the moldies.”

The signal of an incoming uvvy call sounded. It was the time of day when Tre usually called for Terri.

“Pick it up, Blaster,” yelled Terri. “I bet it’s Tre and the kids. Please?”

“No,” said Blaster, “I’m not going to take the chance.” But then all at once the uvvy connection formed anyway. The call was in preemptive mode. And it wasn’t from Tre.

Blaster cried out and tried to break the connection, but he couldn’t. And then he was dead. The complexly modulated hissing noise of raw information went on and on until Terri could start to hear sounds within it like cruel guitar feedback and angry bagpipes. It was impossible to think about anything except the noise until finally—finally—it stopped.

In the sudden deafening silence, the hundreds of kilograms of imipolex around Terri began to ripple and convulse. And then another noise began, like a chorus sung by the dead moldies, a deep low note that rose higher and higher into a sliding one-second whoop—just the one whoop, screeching to an insane fever pitch with the moldie flesh around Terri vibrating along.

Toward the end of the whoop, a thixatropic phase transition took place—like when you shake up ketchup in a bottle. The buzzing gelatin of Monique’s body went lax around Terri and fused with the flesh of all the other moldies into some new state of imipolex that was almost like a liquid—like the cytoplasm of a single biological cell. And then the whoop was over and the silence returned.

Air was still trickling out of the plastic around Terri’s face. She stretched her arms and legs. It felt like she was in heavy water. With the tightness gone, she could touch her bare face with her bare hands. It felt good. Terri noticed that when she moved her head, the airy region magically moved with her. She did a couple of frog-kicks to get closer to Blaster’s outer wall so that she could see better. They’d dropped to such a low altitude that Einstein was far off toward the horizon. The spaceport loomed hugely below them, it was growing at a sickening rate of speed. The fused moldie mass around Terri was plummeting downward in an uncontrolled free fall.

Mentally reaching out, Terri found that she had an uvvy connection to the new creature around her. The being seemed oddly slow-witted; with thoughts somehow formed from bright light. But there was no time to examine its intellect.

“Slow down!” hollered Terri. “We’re about to crash!”

“I am Quuz from Sun,” replied the great slug.

“Do you know how to land without crashing? Do you want me to help you?”

“Don’t worry. Quuz knows everything that these moldie plastic creatures knew before his decryption. Yes, I will decelerate, Terri Percesepe.”

The ship shuddered with a massive downward rocket blast that quickly slowed its rate of fall to something reasonable. The intense gees pressed Terri down against the very bottom of the great bag of imipolex and briefly knocked her senseless. Blessedly the outer wall held and she didn’t pop through.

“Now I will prepare to sing,” Quuz was saying when Terri came to.

Quick rip currents of imipolex flowed past Terri, tumbling her this way and that. It was like wiping out over the falls and having a mongo big wave break on you; it was like being inside a mucus-filled washing machine. But, oh so wonderfully, there was always air around Terri’s mouth. The lower part of Quuz bucked up into a giant curved disk shaped like a parabolic antenna pointing down at the ever-approaching spaceport. Terri lay flat against the inner wall of the disk membrane, staring down through it in terror and fascination.

Her uvvy began to crackle with the same warbling hiss she’d heard before. Quuz was singing this song to the spaceport below. In order to drown out the maddening noise, Terri began singing herself, singing, “La-la-la-la” at the top of her lungs.

The moonscape below them kept exfoliating new levels of detail: paths and roads in the dust, small branching rilles, moon buggies, moldies melting into blobs, people in bubble-toppers running…

The ship seemed not to be heading down toward the center of the landing field; instead it was lowering down at the very edge of the field by the spaceport dome—no!—it was going to land on the dome itself!

“We’re crashing into the building!” screamed Terri. “Quuz, look out!” But Quuz was deaf to all but his own song.

Below them, in the spaceport, Quuz’s song was being heard and understood. Just before they impacted the spaceport dome, the dome’s great curve split hugely open, shattering from within like a hatching egg, revealing a vast grex of imipolex that reached up to receive them, reached up through the tumbling wreckage and the sparkling clouds of vacuum-frozen vapor.

Quuz merged with the new slug, lost his balance, and crashed to the floor of the shattered dome with a concussive thud that rattled Terri’s teeth and bones. She looked out through Quuz’s skin and saw dead people all around, vacuum-killed people with popped-out eyes and bloated tongues and mangled limbs that pushed out freezing foams of pale pink blood like high-speed shelf fungi growing upon rotten wood.

Quuz wallowed about in the dome’s wreckage, scavenging up every bit of imipolex there was to be found. And then bigger-than-ever Quuz crashed free of the debris and began humping across the dust of the Sea of Tranquility. Heading not west toward Einstein, but east toward the Nest.

“Where are you going, Quuz?” shouted Terri. “Aren’t you going to let me go?”

“Quuz wants to go to the Nest and sing. Many moldies live there. I will eat them. You are not like the moldies, Terri Percesepe. I will keep you safe.”

“King Kong,” thought Terri, and a shriek of edgy laughter escaped her. She composed herself and asked the next question. “Why do you want to eat all the moldies?”

“Sun wants to eat everything. For eons Sun has stared out at the beautiful planets and their moons. Sun wants to eat the pretty food. If Quuz is strong enough, Quuz can push Moon into Earth and make them both crash into Sun. Sun will be very happy. Sun wants eat Earth. Sun want eat Moon.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” groaned Terri.

The gray dusty moonscape kept jouncing past. There was no trace of any individual moldies within the Quuz mind around her. Quuz’s thoughts were mostly images of what must have been the Sun: its surface like great seas of fire marked with shapes like reptile scales, and its interior filled with intense winding red/yellow/white patterns of energy tornadoes wrapped thick as sauced spaghetti in an endless vat.

What to do? Terri thought back to the fact that Frangipane of the Nest had made a point of saving Wendy’s personality. It must have been that Frangipane had known that Quuz, or something like him, was about to take Wendy over. Probably Quuz had first gotten Wendy, and then Wendy had uvvied Blaster to sing his song.

“Can you uvvy Wendy?” Terri asked Quuz.

“Wendy is Quuz. I am Quuz. There is nothing to say.”

“But I’d like to talk to Stahn Mooney,” protested Terri.

“Be still, Terri Percesepe. Soon I must sing.”

And then they wallowed up a long, dusty slope to reach the lip of the crater that was the Nest’s entrance. The big polished crater shone like a huge dark mirror. In its very center a great conical prism hung magnetically levitated above the central hole. The mirror’s shape formed odd virtual images; Quuz himself was reflected as an unsteady blob across the crater’s diameter. But there were no signs of any moldies. With a warbling cry of excitement, Quuz launched himself over the crater’s edge and down onto the slope of the vast parabolic bowl. To Terri, up at the front of Quuz’s body, it felt like carving a surf path down the face of a hundred-year tsunami.

They whooshed down the glistening polished stone, slowing a bit as the curve grew gentler, and then they passed beneath the massive, suspended cone mirror and dropped through the hole at the crater’s center. The gentle gravity drew them downward into the huge empty space of the Nest’s interior, and Quuz uttered the first hissing squeals of his song—

A terawatt laser beam seared through the imipolex near Terri, barely missing her. If oxygen had been present, Quuz would have gone up in a giant mothball of flame. But without the oxygen, the beam just cut the imipolex like a hot knife in sputtering butter. More and more beams flashed on every side, chopping Quuz up into hundreds of thrashing lumps. His song, barely begun, faded into silence. Perhaps, given some time, Quuz would have been able to program himself down into each of his chunks, but the change came so rapidly that his simulation completely collapsed, leaving the freshly chopped-up globs of plastic with no minds.

The flow of air at Terri’s mouth came to a stop. Swathed in a lump of dumb airless imipolex, she was hurtling down through the cold vacuum of the Nest toward a stone floor somewhere below. Surfer Terri maintained her shit. She looked around, trying to figure out the next correct move.

Flying about and filling every angle of Terri’s vision there was a host, a legion, a hornet swarm of moldies. They seemed to be attacking and capturing the falling lumps, one lump to a moldie. A golden carrot with a fringe of little green tentacles darted forward and attached itself to Terri’s imipolex.

Immediately the imipolex came alive with the personality of the golden carrot. It had cloned its mind into the lump.

“Give me air,” uvvied Terri as hard as she could. “I need air!”

The divine flow of gas started up again and Terri sucked in a hungry lungful.

“I’m Jenny,” said the shape around her. “Well, really, I’m Jenny-2, and Jenny is the first me, the one holding us, you could call her Jenny-1 if you wanted to be super-accurate and everything. Isn’t this exciting!” Jenny’s uvvy voice was shrill and gossipy.

Jenny was projecting an uvvy image of herself that showed a smirking oily-skinned girl with lank blonde hair. All the other moldies Terri had ever uvvied with had been content to use a photorealistic uvvy image of their actual bodies. What a groover Jenny’s image looked like! Like a Heritagist hick. But these thoughts rushed through Terri’s mind in only the briefest of flashes; for the main thing to think about was that they were dropping through space like falling scrap metal.

“Yes yes,” said Terri urgently. “Don’t let us crash!”

The two embracing Jennies jetted out some ion beams to slow their fall. Terri could see that the Nest was a huge funnel-shaped space with lots of caves and holes in its walls, and running straight down the central axis of the Nest was a great shaft of sunlight, gathered from the crater mirror high above. Moldies flew around them, sparkling like Mylar confetti. Most of them were accompanied by clones newly fashioned from captured lumps of Quuz’s flesh. One moldie was striped blue-and-silver with stubby little fins or wings, another glowed red-and-yellow, still another looked like a tangle of wire. The Jennies pointed out two moldies whom she said were close friends: Frangipane, who looked like an orchid blossom, and Ormolu, who looked like a kitschy ornamental cupid.

Looking down at the enormous disk-shaped floor of the Nest, Terri saw things like factories along one part of the edge and a pink-glowing assemblage of