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

“No.”

“Let Xanana worry about it. He’s the one who brought you.”

Terri focused on Xanana’s uvvy feed. He was happier and happier about going to the Moon.

“Xanana, can you make food and water for me?”

“Well, I can drip out some moldie juice for you. It’s sort of like sap, except you won’t like the way it smells. It’s nourishing. How are your nose filters holding up?”

Terri hadn’t thought about them for a while. She felt her nose, stiff with the palladium sponges inside its nostrils. “The filters are fine. I guess I’d like to try some moldie juice. My mouth is awfully dry.”

“I’ll push out a nipple by your mouth. Just suck on it.”

Terri put her lips around the slick imipolex nipple and cautiously sucked. Her mouth filled with a lukewarm salty flow of slippery fluid. Thanks to the nose filters, she couldn’t really smell it, and she was able to swallow it down without gagging.

“Thank you, Xanana. I’ll repay you somehow.”

“No need. I’m happy you got me into this.”

Terri drifted off into a dreamless nap. At some point she began having a vision of Tre. It took her a minute or two to realize that this was an uvvy call and that she was again awake.

Tre was standing on the patch of lawn in front of the motel office. It was night and he was staring up at the sky. “Terri! Finally! Are you okay?”

“I’m alive, but it’s a pretty iffy situation. I’m inside a moldie grex that’s flying to the Moon. What a freak show. Are the children all right?”

“They’re scared. It was hard to get them to sleep. We saw that moldie rocket blasting off; we were looking at the ocean just then. Then Everooze came over and told us the bad news. Can you breathe? Is there water?”

“So far Xanana’s taking care of me. But it’s going to take seven days.”

“Oh, Terri. I can’t stand to think of you alone up there in outer space. Will the moldies let you go when they get to the Moon?”

“They want to sell me for ransom. You’re supposed to get Stahn Mooney to call Whitey Mydol and Darla on the Moon. If Mooney will pay.”

“He’ll pay all right—if I have to kill him. He owes me big-time. Remember how he gave my 4D Poultry source code to Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae, Ltd.? This afternoon I found out that Emperor Staghorn used my poultry to invent the superleeches. And thanks to the superleeches, my wife is on her way to the Moon. Oh, Terri. I’m sorry I haven’t been nicer to you. I love you so much.”

“Just get me out of this, Tre, and don’t waste energy guilt-tripping yourself. I don’t want to end up down in the loonie moldies’ Nest.”

“I’ll talk to Stahn again right away. And then I’m gonna jam some math. This stuff Emperor Staghorn came up with is pretty exciting.”

“Take good care of the kids. Maybe they can uvvy me in the morning. The view from here is stunning. I’d like to show it to them.”

“We’ll call early tomorrow. In about ten hours. Hang in there, darling. I’ll call Mooney now and make sure Whitey and Darla ransom you as soon as Blaster hits the Moon. I love you so much, Terri. You’re so small and precious, up there in the sky.”

“And I love you, Tre.”

Tre’s image jittered away, and Terri could stared back at shiny soft small Gaia with her own eyes.

CHAPTER SIX

WILLY

March 17, 2031 – July 2052

The day after Willy Taze got off death row, he met Stahn Mooney.

Willy and his rebel friends were bopper lovers; they thought artificial life forms were just as good as people. The rebels busted Willy out of the Louisville jail and smuggled him down to Florida, where he could do some good. Willy made the trip hidden in a truckload of meat, garbed in an imipolex bubble-topper spacesuit for warmth and air. The minute he hit Florida, Willy got on a computer and gosperized the Gimmie’s air defenses with turd bits and foo series so that the a-life invasion could come down. Around dawn an old woman named Annie Cushing drove Willy to a particular beach on Sanibel Island, Florida, Willy still wearing his bubbletopper, the date March 17, 2031, a day that would be forever known as Spore Day.

There was a sound of ion jets, abruptly terminated, and then Stahn and Wendy came coasting down from the sky on big Happy Cloak wings; they were each wearing about a hundred kilograms of chipmold-infected imipolex. In the firmament high above them, quadrillions of chipmold spores formed a barely visible cirrostratus cloud made wavy by the steady nibbling of the subtropical jet stream. The rising sun glinted off the spore cloud, tracing a great halo that would soon circle the heavens worldwide. Spore Day marked the death of Gaia’s boppers and chips, the birth of her moldies and DIMs.

“It’s good to be back,” said Stahn. “Thank you, Willy. Thanks, Annie.” He slung his right wing across Willy’s back. The heavy wing pulled loose from Stahn and stayed on Willy, merging its plastic with Willy’s bubbletopper and sinking thin probes into his neck.

Willy smiled to feel the boiling rush of information. The Happy Cloak spoke to him and transmitted direct messages from Stahn and Wendy. It was like having them whisper in his ears.

“Let’s stride,” murmured Stahn. “I don’t want a lot of goobs to see me here.”

“I’m for it,” answered Willy. “The farther underground I go, the better.” He turned to Annie. “Thanks for helping.”

“God bless you, Willy,” said old Annie. “Your grandfather Cobb would be proud of you. Keep it bouncing.”

And then the smart moldie ‘Cloaks formed themselves into dolphin shapes, and Willy, Stahn, and Wendy took off undersea. The clear Gulf waters were shallow out to about a mile, where the bottom dropped off steeply. Huge surgeonfish and groupers sped away from the moldie-encased humans.

“Where we going?” asked Willy.

“I want to swim around to the other side of Florida and get near Cocoa Beach,” said Stahn. “At the right moment, we’ll blast up out of the water like old-time submarine-launched missiles.”

“I’ll blast off?”

“No, man, just me and Wendy. We’re going to fly up to the spaceship Selena that’s landing at the spaceport tomorrow. Of course the _Selena’s _bopper slave computers are already dead, but this woman Fern Beller is piloting the ship down. Fern is very together. She’s wearing a Happy Cloak and doing the astrogation in her head. She’ll let me and Wendy aboard so quietly that nobody will know how we really came down.”

“Why can’t I come too?” asked Willy. “If the Gimmie catches up with me—”

“Exactly,” said Stahn. “Which is why you don’t want to be on the _Selena _when she lands. There’ll be customs inspectors, reporters, xoxxin’ Gimmie pigs, and quarantine for all aboard. It’s no prob for me because I’m a hero; for you it would be back to the death house. Once the pig truly grasps that the chipmold’s already infected everything, they’ll let me and Wendy out of quarantine. Probably take six weeks, tops. ISDN’ll pay off whoever they have to pay. And dig it, man, then me and Wendy move to San Francisco and I run for the U.S. Senate.”

“I think Willy should move to the Moon,” said Wendy’s light voice. “It’s nice there. Not so heavy. The gravity’s too strong on Earth. I could hardly stand up on the beach just now. Go to the Moon, Willy.”

“Affirmo!” said Stahn. “The Moon is where it’s kickin’. Fern can take you when she goes back, Willy. Lay low for a month or two, however long it takes, and then sneak aboard when the Selena gets cleared for takeoff. You can hook up with Fern when she gets out of quarantine. You lucky dog. Fern, Fern, Fern—the woman is hot.”

“You’re married now, Stahn,” warned Wendy. “And I’m pregnant.”

“I’m only saying that she’s hot. I won’t act out. I promise. Anyway, she doesn’t like me.”

“While I’m waiting for Fern—” put in Willy. “I should hang around Cocoa?”

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” said Stahn. “The Gimmie is going to be xoxxed as of today. Spore Day! In a week there won’t be a computer working on the whole planet. Not one.”

Stahn was right about that; in fact, most computers were dead by the end of the day. He and Wendy took off for the Selena the next morning, and that evening Willy and his Happy Cloak swam ashore and landed in a small estuarial swamp.

“I’ll stash you here in these mangrove thickets,” Willy told his ‘Cloak.

“If you do that, I won’t wait for you,” said the ‘Cloak. “I have not traveled all this way to cower in filth. Keep me with you; wear me as a garment. I’ll slide down low and emulate a workman’s heavy boots and trousers. I can shift my plug-in to the base of your spine.”

“If you’re going to be a long-term symbiote with me, I ought to have a name for you,” said Willy.

“Call me Ulam,” said the ‘Cloak. “It’s an abbreviated form of a dead bopper’s name: Ulalume. Most of my imipolex used to be Ulalume’s flickercladding—Stahn had a couple of hoppers’ worth on his back. Ulalume was female, but I think of myself as a male. Be still while I move the plug-in, and then we can go.”

So here’s shirtless Willy under the star-spangled Florida sky with eighty pounds of moldie for his shoes and pants, scuffing across the cracked concrete of the JFK spaceport pad. The great concrete apron was broken up by a widely spaced grid of drainage ditches, and the spaceport buildings were dark. It occurred to Willy that he was very hungry.

There was a roar and blaze in the sky above. The Selena was coming down. Close, too close. The nearest ditch was so far he wouldn’t make it in time, Willy thought, but once he started running, Ulam kicked in and superamplified his strides, cushioning on the landing and flexing on the takeoff s. They sprinted a quarter of a mile in under twenty seconds and threw themselves into the coolness of the ditch, lowering down into the funky brackish water. The juddering yellow flame of the great ship’s ion beams reflected off the ripples around them. A hot wind of noise blasted loud and louder; then all was still.

Ordinarily a fleet of trucks might have surrounded the Selena to unload her, but on this evening, the day after Spore Day, there were no vehicles that functioned. A small group of Gimmie officials walked out to the Selena and waited until its hatch was hand-winched open. Watching from his drainage ditch, Willy saw Stahn, Wendy, and the others being led away. He spotted the one who was probably Fern Beller, the tall willowy brunette who was doing all the talking.

“Looks like they left the Selena all alone,” Willy observed to his Happy Cloak.

“The Selena can act by herself if need be,” said Ulam. “Fear not.”

“I’m really hungry,” said Willy. “Let’s go into town and find some food.” As they walked the rest of the way across the spaceport field, they encountered a crowd of aggrieved Florida locals, many of them senior citizens.

“Y’all come from that ship?” demanded one of them, a lean Cuban. His