The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  The Bandersnatch flanked around to one side to try and catch the rath, but Corey was too fast. With a brutal, swift gesture, Corey swung the knife and cut off the Bandersnatch’s hand. The hand rose up onto its fingers and ran out of the kitchen like a tarantula, with the screeching Bandersnatch close behind.

  “Anybody else?” roared Corey. “I built the bodies you starry motherfuckers are running around in! Let’s show the Silly Putter King some fucking respect!”

  After a tense moment, the posse of Putters turned and bounced back out of the kitchen. Corey slammed the door behind them, lifted the rath and the Jubjub bird back onto his table, and took another drag 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 sends it down into our great sublunar home. The Nest is a wonderful place, modern yet suffused with history, cradle of the solar system’s two greatest civilizations the boppers and their mighty heirs, the moldies.”

  The signal of an incoming uvvy call sounded. It was the time of day when Tre usually called for Terri.

  “Pick it up, Blaster,” yelled Terri. “I bet it’s Tre and the kids. Please?”

  “No,” said Blaster, “I’m not going to take the chance.” But then all at once the uvvy connection formed anyway. The call was in preemptive mode. And it wasn’t from Tre.

  Blaster cried out and tried to break the connection, but he couldn’t. And then he was dead. The complexly modulated hissing noise of raw information went on and on until Terri could start to hear sounds within it like cruel guitar feedback and angry bagpipes. It was impossible to think about anything except the noise until finally—finally—it stopped.

  In the sudden deafening silence, the hundreds of kilograms of imipolex around Terri began to ripple and convulse. And then another noise began, like a chorus sung by the dead moldies, a deep low note that rose higher and higher into a sliding one-second whoop—just the one whoop, screeching to an insane fever pitch with the moldie flesh around Terri vibrating along.

  Toward the end of the whoop, a thixatropic phase transition took place—like when you shake up ketchup in a bottle. The buzzing gelatin of Monique’s body went lax around Terri and fused with the flesh of all the other moldies into some new state of imipolex that was almost like a liquid—like the cytoplasm of a single biological cell. And then the whoop was over and the silence returned.

  Air was still trickling out of the plastic around Terri’s face. She stretched her arms and legs. It felt like she was in heavy water. With the tightness gone, she could touch her bare face with her bare hands. It felt good. Terri noticed that when she moved her head, the airy region magically moved with her. She did a couple of frog-kicks to get closer to Blaster’s outer wall so that she could see better. They’d dropped to such a low altitude that Einstein was far off toward the horizon. The spaceport loomed hugely below them, it was growing at a sickening rate of speed. The fused moldie mass around Terri was plummeting downward in an uncontrolled free fall.

  Mentally reaching out, Terri found that she had an uvvy connection to the new creature around her. The being seemed oddly slow-witted; with thoughts somehow formed from bright light. But there was no time to examine its intellect.

  “Slow down!” hollered Terri. “We’re about to crash!”

  “I am Quuz from Sun,” replied the great slug.

  “Do you know how to land without crashing? Do you want me to help you?”

  “Don’t worry. Quuz knows everything that these moldie plastic creatures knew before his decryption. Yes, I will decelerate, Terri Percesepe.”

  The ship shuddered with a massive downward rocket blast that quickly slowed its rate of fall to something reasonable. The intense gees pressed Terri down against the very bottom of the great bag of imipolex and briefly knocked her senseless. Blessedly the outer wall held and she didn’t pop through.

  “Now I will prepare to sing,” Quuz was saying when Terri came to.

  Quick rip currents of imipolex flowed past Terri, tumbling her this way and that. It was like wiping out over the falls and having a mongo big wave break on you; it was like being inside a mucus-filled washing machine. But, oh so wonderfully, there was always air around Terri’s mouth. The lower part of Quuz bucked up into a giant curved disk shaped like a parabolic antenna pointing down at the ever-approaching spaceport. Terri lay flat against the inner wall of the disk membrane, staring down through it in terror and fascination.

  Her uvvy began to crackle with the same warbling hiss she’d heard before. Quuz was singing this song to the spaceport below. In order to drown out the maddening noise, Terri began singing herself, singing, “La-la-la-la” at the top of her lungs.

  The moonscape below them kept exfoliating new levels of detail: paths and roads in the dust, small branching rilles, moon buggies, moldies melting into blobs, people in bubble-toppers running . . .

  The ship seemed not to be heading down toward the center of the landing field; instead it was lowering down at the very edge of the field by the spaceport dome—no!—it was going to land on the dome itself!

  “We’re crashing into the building!” screamed Terri. �
��Quuz, look out!” But Quuz was deaf to all but his own song.

  Below them, in the spaceport, Quuz’s song was being heard and understood. Just before they impacted the spaceport dome, the dome’s great curve split hugely open, shattering from within like a hatching egg, revealing a vast grex of imipolex that reached up to receive them, reached up through the tumbling wreckage and the sparkling clouds of vacuum-frozen vapor.

  Quuz merged with the new slug, lost his balance, and crashed to the floor of the shattered dome with a concussive thud that rattled Terri’s teeth and bones. She looked out through Quuz’s skin and saw dead people all around, vacuum-killed people with popped-out eyes and bloated tongues and mangled limbs that pushed out freezing foams of pale pink blood like high-speed shelf fungi growing upon rotten wood.

  Quuz wallowed about in the dome’s wreckage, scavenging up every bit of imipolex there was to be found. And then bigger-than-ever Quuz crashed free of the debris and began humping across the dust of the Sea of Tranquility. Heading not west toward Einstein, but east toward the Nest.

  “Where are you going, Quuz?” shouted Terri. “Aren’t you going to let me go?”

  “Quuz wants to go to the Nest and sing. Many moldies live there. I will eat them. You are not like the moldies, Terri Percesepe. I will keep you safe.”

  “King Kong,” thought Terri, and a shriek of edgy laughter escaped her. She composed herself and asked the next question. “Why do you want to eat all the moldies?”

  “Sun wants to eat everything. For eons Sun has stared out at the beautiful planets and their moons. Sun wants to eat the pretty food. If Quuz is strong enough, Quuz can push Moon into Earth and make them both crash into Sun. Sun will be very happy. Sun wants eat Earth. Sun want eat Moon.”

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” groaned Terri.

  The gray dusty moonscape kept jouncing past. There was no trace of any individual moldies within the Quuz mind around her. Quuz’s thoughts were mostly images of what must have been the Sun: its surface like great seas of fire marked with shapes like reptile scales, and its interior filled with intense winding red/yellow/white patterns of energy tornadoes wrapped thick as sauced spaghetti in an endless vat.