The Ware Tetralogy, Rudy Rucker [inspirational books TXT] 📗

abandoned way that Terri found intensely annoying.

“Elvira cheers me up,” said Willy evasively. “She’s what they call a femlin. Are you hungry? Elvira or Doc can get you something.”

“What kind of food do you have? Do you have vegetables or fruit? I’ve had nothing but moldie juice for over a week. But I’d rather help myself. I certainly wouldn’t want to eat anything that’s been touched by Elvira.”

“If that’s the way you feel,” said Willy stiffly.

“It’s the way any woman would feel. You’ve been living alone too long, Willy. For God’s sake, tell that thing to stop dancing. I don’t have to put up with this.”

“Oh, whatever. Elvira, hide!” The femlin went back behind the couch. Willy sat down in the easy chair and gestured toward the food pantry. “So eat something. You’re hungry and cranky. I got fresh fruits and veggies delivered from the greenhouse today.”

Terri found herself a banana and a bunch of strawberries. She ate them with wheat germ and runny tofu. Delicious. While she ate, Willy stared off into space, listening down into his uvvy.

“Can I uvvy my husband now?” asked Terri after she’d finished. “He must be worried sick.”

“Um, yeah,” said Willy, coming back from wherever he’d been. “I’ve got an extra uvvy that you can use. I invented the uvvy, you know. I’m not just some crazy weirdo, Terri.”

“I know that, Willy. I guess maybe I was a little short-tempered just now.”

“Well, I’m glad to have you here,” said Willy and handed Terri a green uvvy.

Donning the uvvy felt like opening her eyes and discovering a roomful of surprise-party guests. The presences of Willy, Gurdle-7, Frangipane, Jenny, and Ormolu were close by, and beyond them lay a vast churning crowd of other moldie minds. It seemed like everyone in the nest was uvvy-connected to everyone else. Hundreds of voices were talking at once, but via some multiplex uvvy magic, Terri could follow the threads of the conversations.

The two main questions being discussed were (a) how to prevent Wendy-Quuz from triggering another catastrophe and (b) what to do with the new Gurdle decryption technology. Most of the moldies were for sending a smart bomb to annihilate Wendy-Quuz and for never using Gurdle decryption again, but Willy and Gurdle-7 were arguing that the technology was too important to ignore.

“It’s safer than you realize,” Gurdle-7 was uvvying to the Nest moldies as Terri tuned in.

“Quuz killed my husband at the dome this morning,” responded an angry red moldie who resembled a crab.

“Not all of the personalities we decrypt will be like Quuz,” insisted Gurdle-7. “Most of them will be intelligent and full of useful information.”

“Useful like ‘Sun wants eat Moon’?” hooted another voice.

“Just listen for a minute,” said Gurdle-7. “This morning before the Wendy experiment, we did a test on some Silly Putters. Frangipane sent the Stairway To Heaven program to infect twelve of the Silly Putters in Corey Rhizome’s isopod.”

“You’re crazy, Gurdle-7!” raged the red moldie. “The infection’s going to spread! We ought to kill you!”

“The infection, it is not spreading,” volunteered Frangipane. “And I will recount why. It is that Rhizome’s Silly Putters have decrypted into some aliens who are mature, evolved beings. They are very glad to be able to decrypt here. They speak of our Earth-Sun system as a ‘new node’ and they are concerned with finding a way to ‘ensure the integrity of this new node.’ They are not clumsy babies from the Sun like Quuz. They are elegant old minds from deep in the space.”

“What’s to stop them from uvvying Einstein and running the Stairway To Heaven on every Silly Putter and DIM in town?” demanded a moldie who looked like a cholla cactus with braidlike green arms.

“That’s not what they want,” said Gurdle-7. “As a matter of fact, they destroyed Corey Rhizome’s uvvy. In the spirit of frankness, I suppose I should announce that Corey did infect one single Silly Putter in Einstein. But that Putter was instantly killed by its owner, Darla Starr.” Great moldie cries of fear and anger followed.

“I didn’t know that,” said Willy across the hubbub. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now,” said Gurdle-7. “Corey’s had two calls since the infection, and I monitored both of them. First he called Darla Starr, and then after the aliens took his uvvy away, Corey used a regular old vizzy phone to accept a call from Darla. During the second call, I had the opportunity to notice that the aliens were very interested in the fact that two of Corey’s Silly Putters had turned out to be immune to the Stairway To Heaven infection. The aliens wanted Corey to hand those last two Silly Putters over for examination, but Corey wouldn’t. It became an issue. In the end, the aliens got their way, and Corey’s vizzy phone got broken. That’s why there haven’t been any more calls.”

“The rath and the Jubjub bird!” exclaimed Willy. “Yes! They’re immune because they have cubic damping! We have to go to Corey’s isopod and get that algorithm. I can’t remember the exact details, but I can find them out by looking at the rath and the Jubjub bird. And then maybe we can use cubic damping to make all the moldies safe from the Stairway To Heaven.”

“Frankly I’d be a little leery of going in there with those aliens,” said Gurdle-7. “Until we have more information. But I could take you as far as Corey’s air lock.”

“Gurdle-7 is a filthy coward!” hollered one of the angry Nest moldies.

“We should bomb the Rhizome isopod!” yelled another.

“Calm down and wait till I go up there and see what the situation is,” said Willy.

“I think the Stairway To Heaven is a flesher trick to kill all the moldies!” said the green cactus-like moldie, waving its spiny arms. “Gurdle-7 is a traitor!”

“I’ll kill him if no one else will!” yelled another moldie, the one like a red crab. “I’m going to get Gurdle-7 right now!”

“Kill Terri Percesepe too! She came here inside Quuz! It’s all her fault!” shouted the cactus moldie.

“Destroy the Stairway To Heaven!” said one and then five and then a host of others, falling into a chant. “Bomb the lab! Bomb the lab! Bomb the lab!”

“Local network mode,” said Willy, and all the Nest moldie presences disappeared from Terri’s uvvy—all except Gurdle-7, Jenny, Frangipane, and Ormolu. “We have to leave right away,” Willy told them. “Exit Plan K. Hurry!”

Looking through the wall into the cave, Terri saw the four moldies race out of the lab. And then she saw them circle around to the front of the pink-house. Gurdle-7 and the original Jenny pushed their way into the pink-house’s air lock and Willy slammed on the lock’s air feed. Outside, Ormolu and Frangipane stood guard, Frangipane holding a heavy-duty needler and Ormolu wielding an O.J. ugly stick.

Now Willy opened the inner door of the air lock and Jenny and Gurdle-7 came writhing in. Looking outside, Terri could see the approaching lights of perhaps a dozen moldies. Not as many as she’d feared. Frangipane turned on her needler and swept its laser ray through an arc of warning.

“Hello there, Terri Percesepe,” said Gurdle-7 as he bowed down by Willy’s side and split his back open. The opening of his tissues changed his reek from intense to unbelievable. “Perhaps you don’t know this, but without your husband Tre’s contribution, the success of my Gurdle decryption process would have taken much longer. We are grateful.”

“Maybe we’re grateful,” said carrot-shaped Jenny, who’d flopped down in the middle of the oriental carpet next to Terri and was splitting herself open as well. “But so far your decryption hasn’t done us one bit of good, Gurdle. Get on in me, Terri. Snug as a bug.”

“Don’t be superficial, Jenny,” said Gurdle-7, sealing himself up over Willy. “This is the most important day in the whole history of the world.”

“I just hope we live through it!”

So Terri got inside Jenny, and then they went out through the air lock and back onto the floor of the Nest. The red moldie with claws like a crab came running toward them. Shiny Ormolu braced himself and fired off a burst of metal darts that cut the crab moldie into three or four twitching chunks. Two boxy blue moldies scavenged up the broken pieces of the crab. Meanwhile flowery Frangipane leaned back and sent a needler blast up into the core of the cactus-shaped green moldie as it powered down toward them. The attacker melted and splattered to the Nest floor in lumps that were gathered up by other opportunistic moldies.

“Hold tight, Terri, we’re going airborne,” said Jenny, rearing up onto the fat end of her carrot body. There was a poofing sound and the four moldies rose up into the great vacuum of the Nest, each propelled by a slim ion beam. Ormolu and Frangipane fired some shots back at the moldies still coming after them, and soon those moldies abandoned their pursuit.

Terri sighed in relief and looked downward. The sight of the Nest floor was mesmerizing. It felt almost as if they were gnats inside a giant old-fashioned computer box, with the floor a great motherboard covered with winding lines and square-chunked chips.

Looking toward where they’d come from, Terri realized that the pursuing moldies had turned back in order to trash Willy’s dome and Gurdle-7’s lab. There was a small bright grouping of moldie dots down there—and now there was a sudden flash as a bomb destroyed all of the lab’s equipment.

“That’s seven lives’ work!” screeched Gurdle-7 over the uvvy. “Let’s go back and punish them! They’ve destroyed all my S-cubes! All of my records were in there. And our backup of Wendy Mooney! Those ignorant chauvinistic fools! They’re no better than fleshers!”

“You do have all the Stairway To Heaven knowledge stored in your own body, don’t you?” asked Willy.

“Yes, but that’s the only complete copy. If something were to happen to me… ”

“Silence,” urged Frangipane. “Who knows who is listening?”

They rose farther, with Ormolu and Frangipane having to shoot at several other moldies who came darting out at them from the narrowing Nest walls. Up above them Terri could see the blazing light prism through the crater hole. And then they sailed up through the crater hole and around the prism. The boundless open space of the Moon’s surface sprang out around them, silvery and gray.

“Willy,” said Terri, her voice shaking despite herself. “I still want to uvvy my husband. How do I place the call?”

“Push the button,” said Willy, his icon distractedly fashioning a virtual button and displaying it in front of Terri. Terri pushed the button right away, and after a little bit Tre’s face appeared.

“Tre!” cried Terri. Like radio waves, uvvy signals were electromagnetic waves that travel at the speed of light, and even light takes over a second to make a one-way trip between Earth and Moon. An agonizing two and a half seconds elapsed while Terri’s info traveled down to Earth and Tre’s info traveled back.

“Terri! Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I’m inside a moldie who just flew out of the moldies’ Nest, Tre. We’re going to the dome of a man named Corey Rhizome.” Another long pause. Terri noticed that Willy and the four moldies were eavesdropping.

“Oh, darling.” Tre’s voice was breaking. “I heard about Blaster crashing into the spaceport and I thought—”

“I surfed my way through it,” said Terri, her own tears starting to flow. “It was terrible. And things still aren’t too glassy.” They’d risen