by Rudy Rucker
There was the sweet energizing smell of clean air. Stahn’s eyes flickered open. The part of the Happy Cloak in front of his face was transparent; he could see out. There was a series of sharp pains in the back of his neck. The Happy Cloak was plugging its microprobes into his nervous system.
Hello, meatie, came the Happy Cloak’s sweet voice in Stahn’s head. I am pleased to ride your body once more. Much has changed.
“Call me Stahn. I must bring a wendy intact to Einstein. Helen’s orders.”
That is untrue. The boppers are all dead. Take me to the light-pool so I can feed. Then I can help you.
“Fine.” Stahn decided to think and say as little as possible. He got to his feet and wondered which way to go. Wendy was around here someplace, but he kept forgetting which direction was which. “We’ll come back for Wendy later, right?”
Come. The Happy Cloak spacesuit nudged Stahn towards Helen and Ulalume, lying there on the floor. By selectively stiffening itself, the Happy Cloak could control which directions Stahn could move in. He had no desire to approach Helen’s dangerous pod, but then he was leaning over her and touching her. Her mottled flickercladding blinked rapidly—as if talking to the Happy Cloak. He laid his other hand on the inert Ulalume, and her cladding responded in the same way.
Carry my fellows to the light-pool, said the voice in Stahn’s head. They are hungry, too. The Happy Cloak flickered strobily at the bodies of Helen and Ulalume, and then the two weird sisters’ skins slid off, exposing the hard blank bodyshells underneath. The shells weren’t quite blank: threads of gray-yellow fuzz projected out of the microcracks at the joints. Chipmold. It had strangled the boppers’ processors long before they could begin to synthesize the proper antigen. Humans had the edge on them there, with their bodies’ built-in wetware labs. The boppers’ hardware was slushed, though their limpware—their symbiotic imipolex skins—seemed to be actually enjoying the mold. Stahn stooped and picked up the two wriggling imipolex sheaths. They weighed very little in the weak lunar gravity.
Thank you. The Happy Cloak wasn’t running him as Helen had; it was simply nudging him and making suggestions. It was happy to see through Stahn’s eyes and have Stahn carry it.
“Which way?”
Follow the star. Your Wendy will wait. We’ll save her and Darla too.
A blue line drawing of a stellated dodecahedron appeared in Stan’s visual field. Sometimes he’d lose sight of it, but if he turned his head back and forth he could always find it. He followed the star out of the lab, down a short corridor, and out into the huge open space of the Nest. Stahn paused, looking this way and that, still having trouble seeing anything on his weak left side. The Nest was roughly conical in shape, with a vast shaft of light coming down its central axis. For a terrified moment, Stahn felt as if he would fall upward along the Nest’s pocked, towering walls.
The light-pool is ahead.
Stahn followed the blue star down a street with shops and boppers. The Nest had become a ghost town; all the boppers were motionless. Some of them must have depleted their batteries, for their skins were blank and empty. But most of them still had some juice, and their blotched claddings pulsed in asymmetric harmonies. They seemed to have enough photosensitivity to be able to converse among each other, at least after a fashion. Over and over, Stahn’s Happy Cloak would flash a special stroby way, and an immobilized bopper’s skin would slither off for Stahn to carry.
Finally they were at the light-pool, a great round patch of sunlight some fifty feet across. Dozens of paralyzed boppers crouched there, as well as scores of flickercladdings who’d laboriously crawled there on their own. The claddings looked like bright slugs. When Stahn tossed down his bale of claddings, many of the others came inching over to “talk.” Stahn lay down to rest while the Happy Cloak around him ate its fill of light. The Happy Cloak cradled Stahn and fed him air. Its guileless microprobe outputs were bright and happy.
Stahn fell asleep and dreamed.
He was on a red rocky field, maybe Mars, though there was air, thin clean mountain air. The sun was small and hot. He had wings, huge imipolex wings. He was not alone; there were other humans like him, all partly clad in Happy Cloaks with great glider wings. Wendy was there, and Whitey and Darla. “Yay, Stahn,” they yelled with laughing voices. “Come on!” They ran down a slope and leaped off the edge of the cliff the slope ended in, leaped out and circled like swallows over the great bright city in the rift.
The scene shifted, and he was back on Earth, deep undersea, dressed in a knowing imipolex diving suit beefed up to the size of a dolphin. Wendy was a plastic dolphin beside him, skirling chirrups. They arced into a juicy drift of squid.
He was in space, mellow with amines, drifting like a spore.
He was skittering across the heavy methane atmosphere of Jupiter, straining his senses downward to catch the mighty songs of the Great Old Ones below.
Come, Stahn. Let us be on our way. We’ll get Darla and Wendy and walk to Einstein.
Stahn opened his eyes and sat up. Such sweet dreams. Helen had never let him dream, not for a month.
His Happy Cloak felt livelier; its renewed energies put a real spring in his motions. His left side was working much better. He leaped to his feet and stretched. The loose limpwares flickered at him, wishing him well. Two of them crawled closer, begging to be picked up.
I have showed them how to be spacesuits, said the voice in Stahn’s head. Bring them and follow the star.
The spiky blue line shape appeared in Stahn’s visual field, and he bounded along after it, carrying the two extra Happy Cloaks under his arm. First they’d save Darla. That was a good idea, and only fitting, as it was Stahn’s fault that she’d been taken captive.
With part of his right brain missing, Stahn still didn’t have a clue about which way was which. But he didn’t worry about it too much. He knew that, just as limited damage to the left brain can knock out your ability to speak, limited damage to the right brain can destroy your ability to form mental 3D simulations of your surroundings. He’d get some new brain tissue from ISDN or, hell, he’d just keep this wavy Happy Cloak.
The blue star twinkled, and the voice in his head said, I am pleased.
They were in a kind of factory district now; huge idle buildings that must have been chip-smelters. They came to the Nest’s wall, balconied like a highrise. A series of powerful leaps took Stahn up five levels, and then he followed the star down a short series of branching tunnels that ended with a single open door.
This was the laboratory of Emul and Oozer.
Stahn stepped in and looked around. It was a long low room, vaguely reminiscent of Yukawa’s lab. There were vats at the far end, and there were twitching mounds of flickercladding here and there. This end of the room held a desk with four colored S-cubes on it. On the floor were the split-open bodies of the two mold-killed boppers, Oozer and Emul. Their claddings were gone: it was just the body casings there; the pressure of the mold’s biomass had split the casings open like seed pods. In terms of hardware, Emul and Oozer were now like rusted-out cars with weeds growing in them, like mirrored freeform flowerboxes full of sprouts, like hollow logs covered by the rubbery fungus known as witch ears. Emul and Oozer’s chipmold was at the end of its life cycle. The gray-yellow threads had formed golfball-sized nodes: fruiting bodies. Stahn reached down and picked one of them; it could be worth something on the outside. Just then he caught some motion out of the corner of his eye. Over there, set into the wall, was a window showing . . . Now who was that in there? He should have known the face but . . . dammit . . .
I think that’s Darla.
Of course! “Darla!” shouted Stahn, even though she couldn’t hear him. Darla waved both arms and drummed soundlessly on her window. Stahn put his moldfruit in the cloak’s pouch and hurried into the airlock. He fumbled around for what seemed a very long time, and finally emerged into Darla’s pink room. Obligingly, his Happy Cloak slid off.
Suddenly nude, Stahn lost contro
l of his left leg and fell down. The woman leaned over him, her face large and upside down.
“Are you all right, Mooney? Can you get me out?”
Stahn had forgotten her name. He stared at her, breathing in the room’s thick, female air. “Wendy? What did you just ask?”
“I’m Darla, fool. Can you get me out?”
“Yes,” said Stahn quickly, and stood up. Looking straight at her, it was easier to remember her name. She was wearing an RYB playsuit. He’d called on her in her home last month. “Yes, Darla, I can get you out. We’ll wear these.” He pointed to the Happy Cloaks. “Come.” He picked up his cloak and slung it over him. It flowed into position. Darla hesitated, and then did the same with one of the others. Stahn watched Darla jerk spastically as her cloak’s microprobes slid into her spine.
“It’s OK,” said Stahn. “Don’t worry.”
She can’t hear you. Touch heads.
Stahn pressed the clear plastic of his face visor against Darla’s. “It’s all right, Darla, it really is. These Happy Cloaks are wavy limpware dudes.”
“It’s stabbing my neck.” Her voice through the plastic was faint and rubbery.
“That’s just so it can see through your eyes and talk to you. Believe me, being a meatie is a lot worse.”
“You were a meatie all along?”
“Just this month. Whitey had ISDN make me a meatie to get even for what I did to you.”
“I told you he’d get even. Can we just walk out of here now?”
“Yeah. We’ll pick up my Wendy and walk to Einstein.”
“Wendy?”
“You’ll see.” Stahn noticed that there was an air-filled tunnel leading out from one end of Darla’s room, a tunnel blocked by a locked cell door. It would certainly make things easier if they could find a tunnel to Einstein.
“Does the tunnel from your room go all the way through?”
“It used to. It used to start at a scurvy place called Little Kidder Toys,” answered Darla. “But Emul exploded that end of the tunnel day before yesterday. Whitey and his guys were trying to come through.”
“If we can’t find a tunnel, we’ll have to climb out the Nest’s main hole and walk. I just hope my Wendy can make it.”
“What’s wrong with your precious Wendy?” Darla was getting impatient. She didn’t like having Mooney’s face shoved up against hers for so long, though he, of course, seemed to be enjoying it.
“She’s a clone, Darla. Her mind is a complete blank. It’s like she’s a hundred-and-twenty-pound newborn baby.”
“Sounds like just your pervo trip, geek. Here, you carry her Happy Cloak.”
“Now look—”
Darla snapped her head back and marched into the airlock. Stahn followed along and moments later they were out in the lab. Stahn’s Happy Cloak made another request.
Take my brothers out of here. They hunger. Carry them to the light-pool.
“No way. That’s too far. Darla won’t go for it. But maybe . . . ” Stahn remembered his good smart bomb: his flickercladding Superball that had bounced so well. “How about this, cloak. If your brothers can roll themselves up like big balls, we can throw them off the balcony towards the light-pool. They can bounce and roll all the way there.”
Yes. I understand.
Stahn limped around the room patting the loose claddings, one by one, so that his cloak could tell them what to do. There were fifteen of them—thirteen from the vats and two from Oozer and Emul, not that you could tell who was which. The claddings pulled themselves together, and then they lay there like fifteen variegated marbles, each about the size of a bowling ball. Darla watched Stahn from the lab door. She had her hands on her hips and she was tapping her foot. Stahn walked over and pushed his face against hers. She was wearing a tough frown.
“What are you doing, Mooney, you slushed pig?”
“Darla-pie, let’s get it straight: I’m saving your life. My cloak wants us to throw these balls off the balcony out there. We’ll do that, and then we’ll get Wendy, and then we’ll go home. There’s no big rush, because all the boppers are dead. I killed them with chipmold; that’s what ISDN used me for, baby, so shut your crack.”
It was Stahn’s turn to snap his head back. And then, just to bug Darla the more, he rolled the fifteen balls together into a triangular pattern like a rack of fresh balls on a pool table. He couldn’t visualize the triangle in advance, but he could tell when he was done. He picked up two of the balls—three would have been too awkward—and followed his cloak’s blue mindstar through the tunnels to the balcony. Darla followed suit. She jerked in surprise when they got out to the edge; she’d never seen the Nest.
Stahn pointed across the dead underground city at the light-pool. A straight street ran from the pool to the base of the wall below them. He set down one of his cladding balls and lifted the other one overhead with both arms. He threw it out and up, putting all he had into it. The ball shot along a soaring lowgee trajectory, bounced perfectly, sailed, bounced, sailed and dribble-rolled towards the light-pool’s distant, bright spot. Stahn threw his second ball, and then Darla threw both of hers.
On their fourth trip, Darla only had one ball to carry. She pressed her face against Stahn’s face. The exercise had put her in a better mood.
“Can we go now, Mooney?”
“Sure. And call me Stahn. What were those S-cubes on the desk in there?”
“Personality cubes for Emul and some of his friends. He was always fiddling with them. Do you think we ought to bring them? Valuable info, right?”
“Hell, let’s not bother. I don’t want to see any of those boppers for a long time. I’m glad the mold killed them.”
Follow the star to Wendy, Stahn.
They scrambled down the balconies to the Nest floor and turned right on a circumferential road along the cliffs base. They walked and walked, until the star darted into one of the cliff-base doors. They went in, and there they were, back at the pink-tank labs.
Darla cycled them through the lock into the room with the tanks. Wendy was right where Stahn had left her, lying on her back with her blank eyes wide open. She was staring at her fingers and wiggling them. Stahn pushed his cloak off his face and Darla did the same.
“Stinks in here,” said Darla. “So that’s Wendy? Poor clone. She’s like a baby. Did you see how high up it is to the hole at the top of the Nest?”
“Really far,” said Stahn. “But I ain’t going without my Wendy. She’s what I came here for, all right?”
I have a suggestion, said the voice in Stahn’s head. The cloak you brought for her can drive her.
“Can you hear your spacesuit talking to you?” Stahn asked Darla.
“Is that what it is? I thought I was hallucinating from all the sense-depriv. These things are like really alive?”
“Especially now that they’ve got chipmold nodules in them. We used to call them Happy Cloaks, but now maybe we should call them moldies. My cloak—my moldie—it says that the one I brought for Wendy’s spacesuit can drive her body around.”
And talk through her.
“And talk through her,” said Darla. “Stop that.” She slapped at the splotchy, flickering moldie that covered her bod. “So do it, Stahn.”
Stahn flopped the extra moldie over Wendy. It flowed all over her. For a long time it seemed like nothing was happening. But then Wendy began to tremble, first a little, and then a lot. All at once the trembling stopped. More time passed and then Wendy stood up. Now it was Stahn who was trembling. He reached his shaky hands forward and pulled the cladding down from off her face.
“Hello,” said the bright happy face. “This is very nice!” The voice sounded just like Stahn had remembered it, for all these years.
“Oh Wendy.” Stahn put his arms around her and held her tight.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DELLA
March 7, 2031
Della didn’t recognize the man at her door. He was fat and pale and fortyish, with black shoes and a
cheap, ill-fitting suit. Though his features were snubbed and boyish, his face was puffed, giving him a callow, watery air. Perhaps he’d been handsome in his youth, but something must have gone badly wrong for him since; some kind of hormone imbalance. Della was glad she had the doorchain fastened.
“Who are you?” she asked through the crack. Her new apartment’s location was supposed to be private—so many nuts had come traipsing by the Tazes’ that Della’d had to move out. “What do you want?”
“I got this address from Ilse Taze. If you don’t want to let me in, why don’t you come out and we can take a walk.” He tapped his mouth and his ear, suggesting that what he had to tell Della was private.
Della shook her head. The guy could be a Gimmie agent, an ISDN newshound, a crazed Thangie, a Racial Puritan, or an ordinary sex criminal. A lot of weirdos had it in for her, ever since it had become widely known that Della’s womb had borne Manchile. The story had come out after Manchile’s assassination and Willy’s arrest. Della had refused all interviews, though she’d had to tell most of her story in court during the ongoing meatbop conspiracy trial. Lots of people wanted to meet Della, which was the main reason she had gotten this absolutely secret apartment to live in. This visitor was the first to have tracked her here. Why had Ilse told him where to come?
