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

from his pipe. “I’d phone ISDN myself, but the aliens took my uvvy away, and this crappy old vizzy phone can’t call out. Are you coming over here or not?”

“We’re supposed to go to the spaceport right now, Corey,” said Joke. “There’s an abductor ship landing that has a woman aboard, remember? Yoke and I are going to put her up.”

“The spaceport?” said Corey. “I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“That’s the main reason I wanted to call you,” explained Darla. “To find out if we should turn back.”

“You’re already out on the surface?” said Corey. “God yes, you should turn back. Even better, you should come see me. You’re only half a mile from my isopod.” Corey’s kitchen door flew open again. The frightened rath rooted its way under a stack of palimpsest on Corey’s table, while the Jubjub bird frantically beat its useless wings. “Hold on for a minute,” said Corey, grabbing his big knife.

The Bandersnatch came capering back in again, screeching and making faces at Corey. His severed hand was back in place, and he used the hand to give Corey the finger. Corey went after the Bandersnatch full-tilt, just like he was supposed to. In the twinkling of an eye, Clever Hansi had circled around behind Corey and stuffed the rath and the Jubjub bird into a pillowcase. Realizing he’d been had, Corey turned and lunged for Clever Hansi, but the Jabberwock flew into his face and the borogove wrapped itself around his ankles. Corey fell heavily onto the kitchen table, tipping it completely over. The uvvy link went dead on a last image of Corey’s hookah and vizzy phone flying through the air.

“Oh, I hope he’s all right,” said Joke, holding her head. “Don’t talk now. I have to listen to what Berenice and Emul think about this.” They rode in silence for another minute, and then Joke cried out, “Oh no! Stop right now!”

Yoke braked the moon buggy so abruptly that it skidded in the dust. She’d learned to take seriously Joke’s reports about the Emul and Berenice in her head.

“What is it, Joke?” demanded Darla. The spaceport dome was about half a mile off. Darla could make out some moon buggies and spacesuited humans waiting on the field, also a few colorful moldies.

“Berenice and Emul say that Blaster’s been infected too. By some freeware like with Rags and with Corey’s Silly Putters. Except this one is called Quuz from the Sun. Look!”

Darla stared upward, following Joke’s pointing finger. High above them was a bright sunlit object—the spaceship moldie grex Blaster lowering himself down on a wavering column of energy.

The last part happened very rapidly. With an extreme burst of energy, Blaster slowed his fall at an altitude of perhaps two thousand feet. The rocket’s body undulated in fat bell-like curves, and the lower part formed itself into the shape of a bowl or a dish, a great dish aimed down at the spaceport.

A sudden blast of noise/information filled Darla’s uvvy, the maddening skritchy dense sound of a DIM’s direct info feed, a sound not meant for human ears. Darla had heard the sound a few times before, like when getting a DIM-equipped appliance to dial in for software maintenance—and again this morning when Corey had infected Rags.

“Turn off,” she screamed, but her crackling uvvy ignored her. She fought back an insane desire to rip the uvvy right out of her bubbletopper, for this would mean tearing a hole in her suit. Instead she squirmed and shrugged in a fruitless attempt to move the nape of her neck away from her uvvy’s contacts. But then the uvvy chirp ended. There was a single brief whooping noise and then Darla was immersed in a dreamlike landscape of reticulated light—an undulating sea of fire that was patterned with networks of dark lines. Raging across this surface were whirlpools and whirlwinds and vast silent explosions. In this oddly silent vision, a huge fountain of flame was arching up overhead.

As she began slumping forward, Darla realized that she was suffocating. Her suit’s DIM had stopped feeding her air. Through blurring eyes, she saw the buggy jerk sharply as its DIM tires lost their programming and went flat. The buggy tipped to one side, and Darla fell out of her seat. The shock of hitting the ground helped her to focus her scattered attention. There was an emergency manual override switch for the air regulator on her chest. Darla hit the air switch and lost track again—lost track of anything but the crashing oceans of fire that her uvvy was showing her.

Now Yoke and Joke were leaning over Darla, each of them lifting her by an arm. With their uvvies busy showing visions, they couldn’t talk to Darla, but they could gesture. Woozy Darla stared where they were pointing.

Blaster was only a hundred feet above the spaceport. Peering past the unreal fire images, Darla could tell that he was not aligned correctly— Blaster was going to land right on the spaceport dome! Meanwhile the possessed moldies on the spaceport field were crawling into the dome as fast as they could.

Silently, massively, Blaster lowered down toward the fragile spaceport dome. And, oh God, Whitey was in there! At the last instant, the edge of the dome split open as a huge sluglike shape punched its way out, a mega-grex twenty times the volume of Blaster and standing nearly a hundred feet tall. A great fog of air laden with flash-frozen water vapor mushroomed out of the breach in the dome as Blaster dropped into the waiting mass of the dome’s grex. For a moment the huge new group moldie stood wavering like the fruiting stalk of a slime mold, and then it went off -balance and fell ponderously to one side. The giant slug began humping about as if scavenging for food, churning up the wreckage of the dome. At this point, Darla’s tortured uvvy went completely dead.

“Whitey!” screamed Darla. She wanted to run toward the ruined spaceport, but Yoke and Joke held her back. Joke pressed her bubbletopper against Darla so they could faintly talk.

“Hold on,” said Joke. “I think I can still get the buggy to work.” Blaster’s signal had wiped out all the DIMs, but like the bubbletopper, the buggy had manual overrides for its DIM-controlled functions, and thanks to Berenice and Emul, Joke knew the proper switch settings. After a minute or two of fiddling, she had the little vehicle back in action. It moved awkwardly on its flat tires, but it moved.

The three women drove cautiously toward the ruined spaceport. The giant group moldie there had formed itself back into a whole and was nosing about in the wreckage of the space-dome, perhaps looking for missing moldies. There were many human corpses visible—people who’d been caught without a spacesuit, and people who’d been crushed. Desperately, Darla focused her attention on the few people who were still moving about. Suddenly one of them spotted the buggy and started running their way.

As the bounding human figure drew closer, the grammar of its gestures snapped into familiarity—yes! It was Whitey.

The buggy rocked heavily as Whitey hopped up to join them; he and Darla embraced and the girls hugged Whitey as well. They pressed their four heads together so that they could talk.

“Where should we go?” asked Whitey after they’d all reassured each other a bit. “Do you know anything? Where is it safe?”

“Corey’s isopod isn’t far,” said Joke. “We were just talking to him before Blaster beamed out that signal. Let’s try going there.”

“You don’t think that he got baked like the spaceport?” wondered Darla.

“We’ll have to see,” said Joke. “I’m hoping the transmission didn’t reach that far. Or that the starry aliens were able to protect Corey.”

“Look out, there goes the slug!” cried Yoke, pointing. “Let’s drive the opposite way!”

“I bet it’s heading for the Nest,” said Whitey. “Yeah, drive us to Corey’s, Joke. That is pretty much the opposite way. I don’t feel like talking anymore right now. I saw Lo Tek get killed right next to me when the dome blew. A chair just about tore her head off.”

Darla held her tongue, but gave a silent cheer.

CHAPTER NINE

TERRI

November, 6 – 2053

Terri was wearing Monique when Blaster came in for the landing.

Monique’s smell was as bad as Xanana’s, but she was better company. Monique was, for instance, willing to talk at length about Tre and little Dolf and Wren, which helped Terri keep her spirits up during the week’s long, lonely trip. Tre and the kids uvvied Terri daily, but the calls were inevitably too short.

Over the days, the mood among the moldies aboard Blaster improved, though of course Terri still had a big problem being so close to her father’s killers, the foul Gypsy and the vile Buttmunch. But the other moldies got those two to leave her alone, and the mood was more or less okay. Final arrangements had been made for Whitey Mydol to pick up Terri at the spaceport; Terri would rest a few days with Whitey’s daughters Yoke and Joke, have a look around Einstein, get in a little dustboarding maybe, and then fly back to Earth on a commercial passenger ship.

If all went well, this would turn out to be that much-needed exotic vacation that Terri had been dreaming of. She’d always been jealous of the Hawaiian surfari her brother Ike had treated himself to after he sold Dom’s Grotto. Ike had been the first of them to surf Hawaii, but Terri could be the first to surf the Moon.

According to current surfer fabulation, the dustboarding in the Haemus Mountains north of Einstein was a truly stokin’ float. You could hire a local moldie to rocket you there and help you spend a monumental day trippin’ down harsh steep canyons filled with moondust, everything big and funny in the Moon’s low gee. Terri liked the thought of coming back to Cruz and telling the other surfers about how she’d raged Haemus. Or, better yet, wear stunglasses and broadcast her session live to the Show.

During his daily uvvy calls, Tre encouraged Terri in these pleasant thoughts, sweet-talking her and encouraging her, telling her that he and Molly were handling the kids fine, telling her everything would be okay, and that Terri should just please be careful and on the lookout and don’t let the moldies pull anything weird.

The Moon grew bigger and bigger, and finally it was landing day. Blaster was full of chatter and stories, talking about life on the Moon and how to get along in the Nest. Wendy and Frangipane butted in over the uvvy and briefly annoyed Blaster, but he blew them off and went back to exhorting and heartening his recruits. The moldies were in a cheerful tizzy, even the farming family. Terri kept feeling herself grinning. After a week in space, any kind of landfall was looking real good.

A half hour before they landed, Blaster started pointing out landmarks. “That’s the Sea of Tranquility. Apollo 11 landed there, and that lobe down in the southwest is where Ralph Numbers and the first boppers were set free. See the two shiny things? The big one to the west is the Einstein dome, and the little one, more out in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility, is the spaceport. It’s three miles due east from Einstein to the spaceport. Now move your attention along the same vector, but five miles farther east into the Sea of Tranquility. See that crisp dark circular spot? That’s the entrance to the Nest, used to be a crater called Maskelyne G. When the boppers built the Nest, they buffed Maskelyne G to a sheen so it collects light and