The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  Humans and weird boppers mingled beneath the trade dome. Most striking to Berenice were the humans, some from Earth and some from the Moon—they classed themselves as “mudders” and “loonies.” The awkwardness of the mudders in the low lunar gravity made them easy to spot. They were constantly bumping into things and apologizing. The loonies rarely apologized for anything; by and large they were criminals who had fled Earth or been forcibly deported. The dangers of living so close to the boppers were such that few humans opted for them voluntarily. Berenice often regretted that she had to associate with these human dregs.

  She pushed her cart through the throng, past the old Hilton Hotel, and into the trade hall. This was a huge, open space like a bazaar or a market. Goods were mounded here and there—barrels of oil, cases of organs, bales of flickercladding, information-filled S-cubes, moongems, boxes of organic dirt, bars of niobium, tanks of helium, vats of sewage, feely tapes, intelligent prosthetics, carboys of water, and cheap mecco novelties of every description.

  “He’s off to the left there,” said Kkandio in Berenice’s head. “A loonie with no shirt and a strip of hair down his back. His name is Whitey Mydol. I told him you’d be gold all over.”

  Berenice willed her body’s flickercladding into mirrored gold. She readied a speech membrane, and imaged full silver lips and dark copper eyes onto the front surface of her head. Over there was the loonie she was to meet, squatting on the ground and shuddering like a dog.

  “You are Whitey Mydol?” said Berenice, standing over him. She made a last adjustment to her flickercladding, silvering the nipples on her hard breasts. “I am Berenice from the pink-tanks. I bring a case of organs for the possibility of trade. What is it that you bring us, Whitey?” She shifted her weight from one leg to the other so that her finely modeled pelvis rocked. Most human males were easily influenced by body glyphs.

  “Siddown, goldie fatass,” said Mydol, baring his teeth and striking at one of Berenice’s legs. “And save the sex show for the dooks. I don’t get stiff for subhumans.”

  “Very well,” said Berenice, sitting down beside him. His aggression belied an inner ambivalence. He should be easy to handle. “My name is Berenice.”

  “I don’t care what your name is, chips. I’m broke and crashing and I need some more of this.” He drew a small vial out of his ragged blue pants—pants that seemed to be made of a vegetable fiber. Bluejeans, thought Berenice, proud of recalling the name.

  She took the vial and examined it. It held a few milliliters of clear liquid. She uncorked the top and drew some of the vapor into herself for a quick analysis. It seemed to be a solvent, but an unfamiliar one.

  “Put the cork back in,” snapped Mydol, darting a glance around at the other loonie traders nearby. “If they smell it, I could get popped.” He leaned closer. Berenice analyzed the alkaloids in his foul breath. “This is called merge, goldie. It’s a hot new drug. Mongo stuzzadelic, wave? This here’s enough for maybe one high. I’ll give you this sample, you give me the hot meat in the box, and I’ll sell the box for ten hits of merge. Organ market’s up.” He reached for the handle of the organ satchel.

  “What is the nature of this merge?” asked Berenice, holding the satchel in an implacable grip. “And why should it be of interest to us? Your manners distress me, Mr. Mydol, and truly I must question if I wish to complete this trade.”

  “It melts flesh,” hissed Mydol, leaning close. “Feel real wiggly. I like to take it with my girl Darla. We get soft together, goldchips, you wave about soft? Like a piece of flickercladding all over. Rub rub rubby in the tub tub tubby. Maybe when you plug into another kilpy machine you wave that type action, check?” He let out a sharp, unmotivated snicker, and yanked hard at the organ satchel. “I’m getting skinsnakes, she-bop.”

  Berenice let the satchel go. It was bugged, of course, and if she hurried back to the Nest, she could follow Whitey on the godseye. His actions would tell more than his ill-formed vocalizations.

  “Run the merge through your mickeymouse robot labs and let me know if you figure out how to copy it,” said Whitey Mydol as he got to his feet. “I can deal any amount. Don’t get too hot, goldie.” He walked rapidly off towards the subsurface tube that led to Einstein.

  Berenice tucked the little merge vial into the thermally isolated pouch that lay between her legs. She was disappointed at the lack of feedback from this Whitey Mydol. Like so many other humans, he acted as if boppers were contemptible machines with no feelings. In their selfishness, the fleshers still resented the boppers’ escape from slavery. He’d called her subhuman . . . that was not to be borne. It was the humans that were subbopper!

  Berenice looked around the great trade hall. As a diplomat, she did look forward to her little dealings with humans—the two races had a common origin, and they had a lot to share. Why couldn’t these crude fleshers see that, in the last analysis, they were all just patterns of information, information coded up the ceaseless evolution of the One?

  “Watch it, chips,” snarled a loonie trader from across the aisle. “Your exhaust’s choking me. If you’ve made your deal, get out of here.”

  Berenice turned her refrigeration cart so that its exhaust fan no longer blew hot air at the trader. Thermodynamically speaking, the increased information involved in the computations of thought had to be bought at the cost of increased entropy. The old J-junction boppers excreted their entropy as heat—heat like the refrigeration cart’s exhaust. Of course Berenice’s use of the cart was but a pose, for petaflop boppers gave off entropy in the refined form of incoherence in their internal laser light. The constant correcting for this incoherence accounted for nearly a quarter of a petaflop’s energy needs. The crude humans excreted their entropy not only as heat and incoherence, but also as feces, urine, and foul breath. So gross a conversion involved great energy waste, and an exorbitant increase in entropy. But Earth abounded in free energy. The thought of running such a recklessly overentropic body gave Berenice a thrill akin to what a person might feel when contemplating an overpowered, gas-guzzling sports car.

  “How does it feel,” Berenice asked the trader rhetorically, “to have so much, and do so little?”

  Moving quickly and with conviction, she left the trade center and jetted back to the pink-tanks. She handed the merge over to Ulalume, who’d listened in on her encounter with Whitey Mydol.

  “This is the mystic magic fluid,” exulted Ulalume. “The universal protein solvent. Did you hear him, Berenice, it melts flesh? The One has brought merge to us, the Cosmos knows our needs. One month, I swear it to you, my sisters, one month only until we have an egg to plant in some woman’s womb.”

  Berenice’s joy was clouded only at the thought of asking Emul to arrange the planting.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN WHICH MANCHILE,

  THE FIRST ROBOT-BUILT HUMAN,

  IS PLANTED IN THE WOMB

  OF DELLA TAZE BY KEN DOLL,

  PART OF WHOSE RIGHT BRAIN

  IS A ROBOT RAT

  December 22, 2030

  You’re tired of thinking and tired of talk. It’s all so unreal here, under the Moon dome, shut in with the same things around you like greasy pips on dogeared cards laid out for solitaire . . . no object quite sharp or clear, everything fractal at the edges, everything smearing together with you, only you, inventing the identities.

  You knock something over and limp out into the street. The translucent dome high overhead. Dim. Voices behind you . . . pressure waves in this fake air, this suppurating blister. People: meat machines with terabyte personalities, and the chewy hole where they push food in, and grease and hair all over them, especially between their legs, and you’re just like them, you’ve tingled and rubbed with them, sure, all of you the same, all of you thinking you’re different. You can’t stand it anymore.

  A young man comes up and says something to you. Your words are gone. For answer, you stick your tongue out as far as it will go and touch it to your chin. Squint and rock your head bac
k and forth and try to touch him with your bulging tongue. In silence. He gets out of your way. Good. You make the same face at the other men and women you pass. No one bothers you.

  You walk fast and faster, dragging your weak left leg, thinking of torn flesh and of some final drug that would stop it, stop the fractals, stop the smearing, stop your wanting it to stop. The air is thick and yellow, and even the atoms are dirty, breathed and rebreathed from everyone’s spit and sweat. How nice it would be to step out through a lock and freeze rock-hard in space how nice.

  There are fewer people now, and the curve of the dome is lower. The space coordinates lock into position, and here is a building you know. With a door your left hand knows how to open. You’re inside, you cross the empty lobby, things are speeding up, things are spinning, the whole rickety web with you split in two at the center, you’re panting up the stairs with their high lowgee steps, pulling on the banister with your strong right arm, and with the back of your throat you’re moaning variations in a weird little voice, the weirdest little voice you ever made, a voice that sounds like it just learned how to talk, so crazy/scary you remember how to laugh:

  “I no no who I be. I be you? No. I be me? No.

  “I no no who I B. I B U? No. I B me? No.

  “I no no who U go B. I B U. U B no B.”

  The hall is empty. Stagnant light in a hall inside a building inside a dome inside your split head. You bang your weak left fist on your face, to stop your talking. Quiet quiet here. You put your left hand up under your chin like the Easter bunny and pull back your lips and make slow chewing motions. Your right hand cross-cues and copies. Mind glyph: The Flesh-Eating Rabbit. Quiet quiet hippity hop.

  You stop at a door in the hall and lefthand it open as easily as you opened the building’s front door. You slip in fast and freeze, standing still and limp, zombie-style. It’s dark in this room, and in the next room, but there’s light in the room after that. It smells good here, it smells like sex and merge.

  You stand still for a hundred slow rabbit-chews, counting subvocally for the cross-cue . . . and listening. Splish in the far room where the light is, splishsplish. Oh yes it’s good to be here. Everything’s still smeared and webbed together and split, but now it’s not you running it anymore, it’s God running it, yes, it’s the lovely calm voice in the right half of your brain.

  Your zombie hands wake up and get busy, like two baby bunnies, sniffing and nosing, and coming back to share their Know. You follow them around the room, tiptoeing, slowly slowly, oh so quietly, your hands hopping about, not this, not this, something longer, something heavier, this.

  Your left hand is holding a heavy smooth thing, it’s a . . . uh . . . your right hand takes it over, it’s a chromesteel copy of the Brancusi sculpture, Flight. Your left hand hiphops into your pocket and gets a little vial: the life.

  You are ready now, new life on the left and death on the right. Blunt instrument Brancusi bludgeon just right to lift and smash flubby goosh. Whiteblackwhiteblackwhiteblack. Your breath comes too fast. You tap your forehead hard with the bluhbluhbluh. A star blooms. Stand there for a hundred heartbeats, the voices bouncing back and forth, and out of your mouth leaks a whisper that grows into a scream:

  “Twas the week before Cwistmas and Aaall Thwough

  da CUBBY,

  Da Fwesh-Eating WABBIT CWUSHED DA FUNBOY

  FLUBFLUBBY!”

  “Who is it?!?!” yells a voice from the far room with the splishsplash light, and you’re already running in there fast, with your smasher raised high, and your tongue stretched out to touch your chin. The girl is melted in the tub, pink flesh with eyes on top, and the black man is sitting on the edge, just starting to melt, and he’s trying to stand up and he can’t, and his screaming mouth is a ragged drooping hole, oh what perfect timing your headvoice has, swfwack, oh how neat, his head fell off, thwunk, the arms, the legs, smuck smuck.

  The pink puddlegirl shudders, her eyes see only the shadows on the ceiling, she can’t see you or her dear funboy, but she knows maybe, through her ecstasy, that the Flesh-Eating Rabbit has come.

  What have you done? What have you done? More orders flow in, the calm voice says it’s right, you can’t stop now, you have to crouch down, yes, and open the vial . . . can’t open it. Hands peck at each other like little chickens. You turn your head back and forth, eye to eye, moving the field, mother hen, cross-cuing till your hands get it right.

  Right. Left. Top off, yah, the pink jellybean embryo, reach into that pink puddlegirl and put it where it belongs. A sudden flash of orgasm spasms you, sets your teeth on edge, brain chatter, you twitch all over, lying there by the love-puddle, blackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHITEY AND DARLA

  December 26, 2030

  When Mooney’s flare-ray grazed Whitey Mydol’s shoulder, the heat blistered his skin. It hurt a lot. Whitey bought some gibberlin lotion at a drugstore and walked the few blocks to the chute that led down to his neighborhood, a cheap subterranean warren called the Mews. Whitey lived four levels down. The chute was a large square vent shaft, with fans mounted along one side, and with a ladder and a fireman’s pole running down each of the other three sides. To go down, you jumped in and grabbed a pole; and to get back up you climbed a ladder. In the low gravity, both directions were easy. Whitey slid down to his level and hopped off into the cool, dusty gloom of his hallway.

  The boppers had built these catacombs, and there were no doors or ventilation pipes; you just had to count on air from the chute drifting down your hall and into your room. To keep thieves out, most people had a zapper in the frame of their cubby door. When the zapper was on, the doorframe filled with a sheet of light. You could turn it off with a switch on the inside, or by punching the right code on the outside. Air went right through a zapper curtain, but if you tried to walk through one, it would electrocute you. All the zappers in the hall except Whitey’s were turned on. His door gaped wide open. Odd. The inside of his cubby was lit by the pink-flickering vizzy. Bill Ding. A fuff show. Besides the vizzy, the cubby held a few holos, a foodtap, and a bed. There was a naked woman lying on the bed, with her legs parted invitingly. Whitey’s mate.

  “Oh, Whitey! Hi!” Her legs snapped shut and she sat up and began fumbling on her X-shirt, which was a T-shirt silkscreened with a color picture of her crotch. Everyone in the Mews was wearing X-shirts this month, so that was nothing special. But.

  “Who were you waiting for with the zapper off and your legs spread like that, Darla?” He checked the vizzy camera; it was on. “Were you running a personal?”

  “What do you mean, waiting?” She pulled on a panty-skirt and went to the mirror to rummage at her long, strawy black hair. “I’m just getting up from a nap. I finished off the quaak and played with myself and I must have blanked out . . . what time is it? Did you get some merge?” Her voice was shrill and nervous. She dabbed more paint on her already shiny lips.

  “If a dook shows up now, Darla, I’m going to know what he came for. You don’t have to jive me like an oldwed realman. I just want to know if you had a personal on Bill Ding, or if you have a specific boyfriend coming.”

  Darla fiddled with the vizzy till it showed a picture of a window, with a view of blooming apple trees. A gentle wind tossed the trees and petals drifted. “That’s better,” said Darla. “What happened to your shoulder? It’s all red.”

  Whitey handed her the gibberlin and sat down on the large bed, which was their only piece of furniture. “Kilpy rental-pig burned me, Darla, trying to score. Rub the lotion in real soft, pleasey.” He liked coming on sweet to Darla; it made up for the way he treated everyone else.

  She peeled off the loose, blistered skin and began rubbing the cream in. “Near miss, Whitey. Whadja do back?”

  He breathed shallowly, staying below the pain. “I can find him and kill him anytime, Darla. Maybe merge him and pull out all his bones. The merge’ll wear off, and he’ll be layin there like a rubber dolly. You can sit o
n his chest to smother him. That might be tasty. I can always find him because I planted a tap on him this morning. He’s an old rental-pig called Stahn Mooney. He was in the bopper civil war ten years ago? Was called Sta-Hi? Bei Ng put me on him.”

  “He deals?”

  “Nego. You know Yukawa the merge-wiz, right?”

  “Affirmo.”

  “Bei Ng’s got him tapped six ways. Bei’s really hung up on Yukawa. This morning Yukawa called Mooney up to search for that girl Della Taze. You remember her—blonde, snub nose, kind of snobby?”

  “Clear. We merged with her and her black funboy one time.”

  “Right. Well, she was Yukawa’s assistant, which is why she always had such a good stash, wave, but now she’s disappeared. Bei has her apartment tapped, too, so he knows what happened, more or less, but that’s another story. Since I was the closest to Mooney’s building, Bei put me on Mooney. I walked up to him and stuck a crystal mikespike in his skullbone, and the dook thought I was giving him a blessing. Felt sorry for me.” Whitey tapped the transceiver set into the side of his skull. “I can hear Mooney all the time.”

  “What’s he doing right now?”

  “Coming off a merge-trip.” Whitey gave an abrupt snicker. “Moaning. Muttering about some slit called Wendy.” He peered over at his shoulder. “It’s starting to grow back. You can rub harder now.”

  “But why did Mooney shoot you?” Darla massaged the new skin on Whitey’s shoulder with one hand, and ran her other hand down the long strip of hair that covered his spine. She liked hearing about Whitey’s adventures.

  “Aw, I heard Yukawa giving him a whole flask of merge, so I went up to his office and tried to buy a hit. But Mooney was loaded mean—he’s into this cryboy macho private eye trip—and he flared me.” Whitey cocked his head. “Now he’s . . . getting in a maggie. Sssh. I bet he’s going over to Della Taze’s.” Another pause. Whitey nodded, and then he focussed back on Darla. “So who were you waiting for, Darla? There wasn’t any quaak here, and you weren’t asleep. Were you just keeping your legs spread for the first guy to see you on the vizzy? Or was it someone special? I gotta know.” This time he didn’t bother sweetening his voice.