by Rudy Rucker
“Something like that,” grumbled Darla. “I didn’t finish talking to him. Xoxxy pervo that he is. Don’t call him, come to think of it. Not that we could anyway, what with the kilpy uvvy broken. I’ll have to get a new one today. What did you two brats come here for, besides making fun of your poor old mother?” Seeing her daughters always cheered Darla up.
“There’s an abductor ship about to land out at the spaceport,” said Joke. “Blaster? He caught about twenty moldies. And—get this—Blaster has a human woman aboard as well. Her name’s Terri Percesepe. Blaster wants to sell her like for a ransom.”
“Sell her to who?”
“Stahn Mooney’s paying. He called Pop to arrange it last week. Didn’t Pop tell you? Yoke and I are supposed to pick Terri up and help her get back to Earth.”
“For free?” snapped Darla.
“Of course not,” said Joke, tapping her head. “We’re getting good money. Berenice made up the contract with Blaster.” For Joke, Emul and Berenice were living beings.
“Anyway,” chimed in Yoke, “we thought you might enjoy going out to the spaceport with us to greet her. Pop will be there too.”
“He could have called me about this,” complained Darla. “Sometimes I think Whitey doesn’t love me anymore.”
“Sure he does, Ma,” said Joke. “Are you gonna come?”
“All right,” said Darla. “I wouldn’t mind getting out a little. I have the creeps from this place, after Rags acting that way.”
“It was probably just a malfunction,” said Yoke soothingly. “Corey’s been known to err.”
“But he said all his Silly Putters had turned into . . . I think he said aliens?” said Darla. “Are your Silly Putters acting weird today? You still have a lot of them, don’t you?”
“Joke took them all back to Corey,” said Yoke sadly. “Even the rath and the Jubjub bird.”
“For a while there, Emul and Berenice had me convinced that Silly Putters are wrong,” said Joke. “Berenice kept asking how I would feel about owning six-inch-tall pet humans programmed to be animals.”
“I doubt if pet humans would ever suddenly decide that they’re from another galaxy,” said Darla. “Cthon—that’s what Rags said his name was. He was walking on his hind legs and he was talking. His eyes were different.”
“Well, maybe we should go out to the isopod and visit Corey,” suggested Joke. “If it’s really true.”
“That child molester?” flared Darla. “Locked in the bathroom is where he belongs! We’re not speaking to him anymore!”
“We’re not children anymore, Ma,” said Joke. “Anyway, I already have seen him again. He’s lonely since Willy moved out of the isopod and into the Nest. We’ve had dinner a couple of times. His studios are totally gogo. And I’ve decided Emul and Berenice were wrong about Silly Putters. Corey’s Silly Putters aren’t sad at all; they’re a great art-form. There’s no reason not to be like animals instead of being like people. Look at tropical fish, for instance. Instead of putting their computational energy into being smart, they put it into being beautiful.”’
“Wait, wait, wait, Joke,” cried Darla. “Stop it right there. You’re telling me you’ve been to Corey’s isopod?”
“Interrupt,” said Yoke. “We gotta jam over to the spaceport right now, sistahs. Berenice says Blaster’s almost here. You two can finish arguing while we’re on the way.”
Outside the apartment, they walked down the corridor past other cubby doors closed off by the faintly buzzing curtains of zappers. At the end of the corridor was the vertical shaft that led down to the Markt and up to the domed city of Einstein.
“Are we gonna take the underground tunnel?” asked Darla.
“No,” said Joke. “We’ll rent a buggy and drive. It’s prettier that way. And Stahn’s paying. It’s in the contract.”
“Boway!” exulted Darla. “Wonderbuff. I haven’t been out under the stars in a long time. But maybe . . . maybe I should have worn more clothes.”
“Aw, you look bitchin’, Ma,” said Yoke. “The bubbletopper’ll keep you warm. Let’s go!”
They swung easily up the ladder that led to the top of the shaft and stepped out onto the streets of Einstein. High above them the huge dome arched over the city, with maggies flying this way and that. In the center of the street was a moving sidewalk with chairs.
“Look, girls, there goes a woman with a Silly Putter,” said Darla, pointing to a woman gliding past with what looked like a Siamese cat in her lap. “I wonder if—” But the imipolex cat was just sitting there, looking comfortable and normal. Yoke looked at Darla a little questioningly. “Well, maybe Corey hasn’t sent the virus to anyone else,” said Darla.
“Here comes a slot,” said practical Joke, and the three of them hopped onto the slidewalk and took a seat. The incredibly various architecture of Einstein streamed past, setting Darla to reminiscing.
Here came, for instance, the lotus-stem-columned Temple of Ra, a former bopper factory that had been a flophouse since the First Human-Bopper War in 2022. Darla had lived there when she’d first come up to the Moon in 2024; she’d come as the fungirl traveling companion of a construction company executive named Ben Baxter. Darla started out as the Baxter family’s baby-sitter back in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but soon Baxter had fallen for Darla in a big way. Darla played along with the dook, but once he’d gotten her to the Moon, she’d ditched him and struck out on her own. Those had been some wild and scroungy times in the Temple of Ra. That was where Darla had discovered merge, and merge had led her to Whitey.
Darla’s reverie was interrupted by the sight of something odd in the alley that separated the Temple of Ra from the 1930s-style office building next door. The alley was largely filled with the rubble of discarded loonie utensils and furniture, most of it made of ceramics and polished stone, with the broken-up surfaces giving off random glints of light. A drift of polished pumice seemed to be moving around as if windblown, but there was never any wind in the Einstein dome. Could it be virus-infected rogue Silly Putters under the garbage? But just as the alley swung out of sight, Darla got a glimpse of a rat popping out from under the broken stones, a regular gray rat with a naked pink tail. Maybe Corey had just been stoned and Darla was just being paranoid. But then—what was it that had happened to Rags?
Now they slid past the old office building—it was called the Bradbury and Stahn Mooney’s detective office had been in there. What a strange skinny dook Stahn had been. Hard to believe he’d moved back to Earth and been a U.S. Senator for twelve years. Him and his Moldie Citizenship Act, what kilp. At least on the Moon, the moldies weren’t interested in acting like citizens. They stayed out of Einstein, and the humans stayed out of their Nest. It was better that way. Darla nodded to herself.
“’Sup, Ma?” said Yoke, throwing her arms around Darla and giving her a hug.
“I was watching an uvvy show about Earth the other day,” said Darla. “I can’t believe those filthy mudders live with moldies right among them.”
“Don’t whip yourself into a racist frenzy, Ma,” said Joke. “Remember that (a) it hurts my feelings and (b) we’re going to be surrounded by moldies at the spaceport trade center.”
“Well, how would you like it if some xoxxox bopper had caged you up and raped you like Emul did to me? Not that I don’t love you, Jokie, but—”
“Oh, give it a rest, you two,” interrupted Yoke. “We get off here.”
They hopped down from the moving sidewalk’s bench. They were near the edge of Einstein, with the dome wall just a few hundred feet ahead. Butted up against the wall was a pumice-block building with a high false front shaped like a crenellated castle wall. The wall was decorated with huge set-in polished obsidian letters saying MOON BUGGIES.
The three women went in and got bubbletopper spacesuits and a solar-powered buggy with large flexible wheels. The buggy’s metal surfaces were candy-flecked purple, and the wheels had orange imipolex DIM tires. The buggy had four independent
ly stanchioned seats, each seat a minimal affair with a back pad and two butt pads. In a few minutes they were bouncing along the dusty gray tracks that led from Einstein to the spaceport. Yoke drove, Darla rode shotgun, and Joke sat in back. Back in the 2030s, when the loonie moldies were less proud, the bubbletoppers might have been full-fledged moldies, but now the bubbletoppers were back to being dumb piezoplastic with a DIM set in. At least the suits had uvvies, so it was easy for the women to talk.
“That man in there had the hots for you, Ma,” uvvied Yoke, jouncing happily and handling the wheel. “When he helped you into the bubbletopper, he got turned on. I could see the nasty bulge in his pants.”
“Ha, a fat old woman like me? I doubt it. Speaking of romance, let’s get back to the subject of Joke and Corey Rhizome. Spill it, kid!”
“There’s nothing to tell, really,” replied Joke from the rear. “I’ve seen him a couple of times recently. He’s nice. And you know, Ma, he never actually did anything to Yoke and me when we were little. Everyone knows that snapped-out Kellee Kaarp was lying about Corey fuffing Kellee with a slarvy philtre of me. Corey would never sleep with a skeeze like Kellee.” Now Joke’s voice grew tender. “My dear old Bandersnatch is much too fine a lover for that.”
“You fucked him?” screeched Darla, turning around to stare at Joke’s blankly reflecting bubbletopper in the backseat.
“I think she’s teasing you, Ma,” giggled Yoke, piloting the buggy over the lip of one of the larger craters crossed by the broad beaten-down trail to the spaceport. “But I don’t know for sure. Joke won’t tell me.”
Darla stopped staring at Joke’s mirrorball head, relaxed into her seat, and sighed. The buggy flew a hundred and fifty feet through space before landing on the crater’s bottom. The oversized DIM-equipped tires adaptively cushioned the landing and the buggy began tearing across the vast dusty flat of the crater floor.
Darla started goofing on the black lunar sky with its scarf of stars and the distant blue Earth. Today was one of those times she could see New Mexico. She mused on her past and present. Whitey was the love of her life, but of late he’d seemed inattentive. He was always off working for ISDN or something; he didn’t tell Darla many details. There was an annoying sexual presence among the ISDN people Whitey hung with, the sexy young morphodite Lo Tek, and Darla had a bad feeling about Whitey and Lo Tek’s relationship. Not that Darla herself didn’t now and then catch the odd random fuff with old Spanish pals like Raphael, Rodolfo, or Ricardo. Whitey had recently stopped speaking to Ricardo, conceivably on account of Darla, but xoxx that, Darla and Whitey weren’t married after all, they weren’t realman and realwoman, not yet and not never—they were still wavy x’s on the ever-surfest urge of mighty merge’s teachings.
Darla turned her gaze back down from the sky and watched the pocked moondust crater floor rushing toward them and somehow through them and out. The stark Sun cast an ink-black razor-edged shadow of them that raced along on Darla’s side of the buggy. The shadow was angled forward slightly ahead of them, with Darla’s round head shadow on top, the round black shape undulating across the plain like a creature in a two-dimensional world—whup—here’s a depression—whoah—here’s a rise. The crater floor ramped upward; Yoke slewed the buggy into a well-worn track that curved up to a low spot in the lip; they shot over the lip, making another hundred-foot leap and bouncing down with a stuttering washboard effect as the DIM tires shed the shock.
Now Darla could see the small glint of the spaceport dome, maybe two miles away. As well as a terminal, the dome served as a market; it would be full of moldies, visiting from their great underground Nest to make business deals with humans. The DIMs around Darla right now—in her uvvy, in the buggy’s tires, in her bubbletopper’s air regulator—these were still working fine, but something had happened to her Silly Putter. What if something bad had happened to the moldies as well? How would it be to step into the spaceport dome with the moldies gone completely batshit?
“You know, Joke,” remarked Darla, trying to sound casual. “As long as we’re wearing uvvies, I think maybe you should call Corey to see if he’s all right. Yoke and I can listen in. I’ve got to find out more about what’s happening to the Silly Putters.”
“Floatin’,” replied Joke. “But why don’t you admit that you want me to uvvy Corey so that you can nose and long-tooth about whether or not we’ve fucked.”
“You’re such a nasty little chippie sometimes,” snapped Darla. “I don’t know where you get it.”
“Another thing, Ma,” said Joke. “Didn’t you just finish telling us that Corey’s uvvy sent you a virus? What if he sends us a virus out here? Our bubbletoppers might stop working.”
“Well—hang up real fast if you hear something like a crackle,” said Darla.
“If worst comes to worst, we can run our bubbletoppers on manual,” said Yoke. “Like they teach you in space-certification class.”
So Joke told her uvvy to call Corey, and moments later Corey picked up. With their uvvies linked, Darla and her daughters could channel Corey together.
“What?” screamed Corey. “Who the fuck is it?” Instead of using his uvvy, Corey was yelling at an ancient tabletop vizzy phone with a wall-mounted camera and a broken screen. The brah’s only incoming info was audio. The vizzy’s camera showed Corey slumped at a filthy round kitchen table with the rath and Jubjub bird on top of the table, scrabbling over mounds of tattered palimpsest. The table was further cluttered with ceramic dishes of half-eaten food, a clunky Makita piezomorpher, some scraps of imipolex, and, of course, Corey’s vile jury-rigged smoking equipment.
The Jubjub bird opened its mouth hugely and clapped it down on the rath’s curly tail. The rath outgrabe mightily, combining the sound of a bellow, a sneeze, and a whistle. Corey winced and leaned forward into his smoke filter to take a long pull from his filthy hookah.
“Corey,” spoke up Darla before Joke could say anything. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“Darla?” Corey drew his head out of the fume hood and, shocking to see, there was thick gray smoke trickling out of his nose and mouth. “What happened to Rags, Darla? I can’t see you anymore because Clever Hansi took my uvvy away right after I talked to you this morning. She said she couldn’t allow the risk that I’d infect any other people’s Silly Putters. Things are fucked-up beyond all recognition. How did you deal with Rags?”
“I killed him with the needler, no thanks to you. Is Clever Hansi one of your Silly Putters? The two that I can see look normal.” The rath extricated its tail from the Jubjub bird’s beak and reared back to drum its green trotters on the Jubjub’s minute, feathered cranium. The Jubjub bird lost its footing and slid off Corey’s table, taking a stress-tuned lava cup with it to clatter about endlessly in the low gravity. The rath outgrabe triumphantly, and the Jubjub bird let out a deep angry caw.
“It’s funny about those two,” said Corey. “Whenever the others try to infect them, they shake it off. They’re stupid, of course, but certainly no stupider than the Jabberwock or the borogove. I think maybe they’re immune because Willy used a cubic homeostasis algorithm on them instead of the usual quadratic one. It’s been a while. I made them for Joke and Yoke’s eleventh birthday, remember?”
“You and your gunjy pedophile Bandersnatch,” uvvied Darla nastily.
“The Bandersnatch is bad news,” said Corey. “I admit it. Now more than ever. He says he’s Takala from the Crab Nebula. My Silly Putters say they’re from all different places in the universe. Clever Hansi and the Bandersnatch are the leaders. They keep trying to get hold of the rath and the Jubjub bird to examine them.” On the floor, the Jubjub bird and the rath were vigorously playing a game of full-tilt leapfrog; repeatedly smacking into the walls and then bouncing around all over the kitchen floor, cawing and outgribing and biting at each other. “The aliens have taken over my studios and all my equipment. What if they’re building some kind of magical supermachine? And they won’t even let me watch.” Corey crumble
d a small bud of something tasty into the bowl of his water pipe.
“How did you get out of your bathroom?” asked Darla.
“I decided I needed a smoke badly enough to risk my life. And then, after I got high, I decided that even though my Silly Putters have turned into starry aliens, they’re probably not dangerous.”
“They’re not dangerous?”
“Not right this minute—or so it would seem. I wish Whitey or some other people from ISDN would come over here. Don’t you know where the fuck Whitey is?”
Suddenly the door to Corey Rhizome’s kitchen flew open and in marched a sturdy little figure who looked like a woman butler. Although her breasts moved about like a naked woman’s, her skin was patterned as if she were wearing a tuxedo. She had a broad friendly mouth.
“Be reasonable, Corey Rhizome,” said the Silly Putter. “Give us the rath and the Jubjub bird. We seek only to ensure the integrity of this new node.”
Following along behind her were the Bandersnatch, the Jabberwock, and nine more alien-infected Silly Putters. The rath and the Jubjub bird went and huddled under Corey’s chair.
“What’s that little butler woman?” asked Darla.
“That’s Clever Hansi,” said Joke quietly. “Willy built her a couple of years ago to guard the isopod. He used to have sex with her too. Corey thought it was funny. Right before Willy moved out, Corey snuck in and made a viddy of them doing it and Willy got really mad.”
“Ick,” said Darla. “Truly perv.”
“Joke is there too?” cried Corey, hearing her voice. “I wish you women would come over to my isopod. Somebody should help me!” He picked up a long knife from the kitchen table and rose to his feet to confront Clever Hansi. “Back off, goddamn you! The rath and the Jubjub bird are mine! Get the fuck out of here or I’ll cut off your head!” Corey lunged forward, savagely swinging the knife. Clever Hansi leaped back and gibbered at the other Silly Putters in an unknown tongue that sounded like rich multilayered music, like an orchestra of sitars and flutes and gongs. “Tweet, thump, whang, a-byoooyooyoooom.”
