Freeware

by Rudy Rucker

  "I've been wanting to meet Wendy," said Sally. "We moldies all wonder about her.

  How do you do it? Emulate a human wife and mother, I mean. It's a pretty bizarre thing to do."

  "I've been doing it so long it feels normal," said Wendy. "Though I am getting a bit tired of this particular human body."

  Sally produced a screw-top jar from the folds of her flesh and took off the top.

  "I like to have a little rub of this when I'm around people getting high," she said, using a green-striped finger to crook out a glob of ointment. She rubbed the goo into her chest and handed the jar to Wendy. "Try some, Wendy. It's betty. Fine, fine betty."

  "We still have a long trek home," objected Stahn. He counted on Wendy being the sober one.

  "Just chill sometime," said Wendy, scooping up two fingers of betty and smoothing it onto her 'Cloak self.

  By the time Sally could put the jar away, she and Wendy were completely lifted.

  "Wave this new take on the soft watch," said Sally, turning beige. In seconds she was shaped like an old-time computer box with a monitor on it—the box melting and drooling off the edge of her chair to make a puddle on the floor, and the monitor was displaying—the face of that Jenny-thing who'd been on-line with Tre Dietz last night?

  At the same time, Wendy was tweaking quite savagely. Her Happy Cloak stopped being a demure red Wendy the Witch cape and bunched up around her neck in a big convoluted green dinosaur ruffle. "I've been a good wife and mother all these years, but I don't want to get any older. I want a full upgrade! You need to understand this meat body isn't me," she raved. "Watch!" The ruff on her neck bucked up, pulling a frightening tangle of rootlike connectors out of her flesh and into the air. Wendy's face went slack and her head pitched forward to lie on her crossed arms on the table. Wendy's 'Cloak gestured nastily with its tendrils, then wormed them back into Wendy's neck. Wendy straightened up, a triumphant gleam in her eyes. "See?"

  "We're outta here," said Stahn, getting to his feet and throwing down money for the check. "You shouldn't have given her that damn shit, Sally."

  "Bye, Sally," said Wendy. She winked and pointed a finger upward. "Thanks for the lift and the lift."

  "Have a good trip," said Sally.

  Stahn tried to take Wendy's arm to steady her, but she twisted away from him with frightening vigor. She pushed out to the street, followed by her family.

  "I wish I hadn't seen that," said Babs quietly. "Is Ma all right?"

  "We just need to get home and kick," said Stahn. "I wonder if there's any chance of a rickshaw or a streetcar. Oh good, it looks like Wendy's calling one."

  Wendy was gesturing broadly, and the dragonfly hopped off its perch and circled as if searching for a ride.

  "It'll be here soon," said Wendy, smiling crookedly. "And, kids, I'm sorry about freaking in the restaurant, but it's for true. I'm about to shed."

  She didn't elaborate, and nobody knew what to say, so for a half minute the four of them just stood there among the people and the moldies passing by. A

  streetcar ground past, going the wrong way. A sudden breeze swept up from the Bay, startlingly strong and chilly. Stahn turned his back against it, wishing he'd worn a thicker coat. Wendy and the kids were facing him, and for a moment he thought the kids were teasing when they began to scream.

  "Here's our ride, Stahn!" whooped Wendy.

  The wet frigid air whirled like a tornado, and a huge blue pterodactyl shape swooped down toward them. Its wingspan was so large that it could barely fit in between the buildings. It would have to break through the streetcar wires if it wanted to reach them; they might have time to escape!

  "Run!" yelled Stahn. "Back in the restaurant!"

  But before he could move, Wendy's Happy Cloak lifted off and flapped toward Stahn like a pair of ragged bat wings. Stahn was too slowed by drink and too distracted by the sight of Wendy's body falling to the ground to stop the

  'Cloak from wrapping itself around him. Quickly the 'Cloak sank its tendrils into Stahn's neck and froze him in place. Stahn stood there staring at his children trying to tend their mother's imbecilic limp body—and then the great pterodactyl pecked down in between the wires, pecked up Stahn and swallowed him and Wendy's Happy Cloak whole.

  Stahn heard the muffled sound of the pterodactyl's screeching caw of triumph, and he felt himself borne up and away. All was dark and airless, but then the Wendy 'Cloak began feeding Stahn air and information.

  "Don't be scared, dear Stahn," said Wendy's voice. "I'll take care of you.

  Flapper is going to help us fly to the Moon. It'll be a good change of pace for you. And the loonie moldies are eager for you to visit. And I'm going to the Nest to get a new wendy from the pink-tanks. You'll be wearing me until then."

  "The Moon," said Stahn numbly. "You're kidding. Who's Flapper?"

  "She's like a customs official for the loonie moldies; she keeps an eye on what goes from Earth and Moon. Since the loonie moldies want you to visit, Sally had the idea of asking Flapper to come down and peck like a pterodactyl."

  "Wait a minute. Can you still see through the dragonfly? How are the children?

  Show them to me."

  The Wendy 'Cloak fed Stahn the uvvy image of Saint squatting by his mother's body, with desperate Babs out in the street trying to flag down a rickshaw.

  The vacated wendy just lay there twitching.

  "Those poor children," said Stahn, his eyes filling with tears. "Those poor, poor children."

  "Tsk," said the 'Cloak. "It is sad. But I hope they don't waste a lot of money and emotion on that brainless worn-out old body. I should have killed it before I left." She cut off the dragonfly video feed and all was black again. "Wendy, what's happened to your feelings? Does it even make sense to call you Wendy anymore?"

  "Sure, I'm Wendy. Yeah, I guess I am being a little cold, huh? Not too characteristic of my usual persona." The 'Cloak giggled. "I guess it's the betty makes me act this way. Now you can see how it feels, Stahn. You're always so heartless to me when you're lifted."

  "If you're going to nag me like a wife while I'm wrapped up inside you, I'm going to go crazy. I'd rather die! We're high above Earth by now, right? Why don't you and this damned Flapper push me out and let me drop! Do it! I'd be glad to die, Wendy, glad to get the endless misery over with!"

  "You just feel that way because you're strung out on drugs, you fool."

  "I'm coming down again, baby! All I do is get high and come down; nobody likes me anymore; I'm no good to anyone; I might as well be dead; let me fuckin'

  drop and die."

  Rapper's soprano voice interrupted in operatic song, "I wonder if he really means it? Look at this, Stahn Mooney!" There was a doughy rubbing against Stahn's body from head to toe, a lumpy peristalsis as if he were feces being squeezed down a long rectum. The pressure on the top of his head was great.

  Clever small folds in the plastic took off Stahn's clothes and spirited them away.

  "Yeah, pop us halfway out, Flapper," laughed Wendy. "Let Stahn see!"

  Flapper sphinctered open a hole and pushed out Stahn's upper body. She clamped lightly down on the top of Stahn's pelvis to keep the wind from ripping him away.

  So here was Stahn hanging out of a giant moldie pterodactyl's ass, staring down at the great dark world below. The air beat at him, but he felt it only thinly, for now the Wendy 'Cloak was stretched over him like a bubbletopper spacesuit, and the 'Cloak's smart imipolex was twitching and shuddering to cancel out the resonant vibrations.

  Far off to the west, a crescent of the Earth was still in sunshine; it was a blazing arc of hot blue ocean. But most of the planet was a silvery monochrome, bathed by the light of the Moon. The high clouds beneath Stahn were stippled in a regular pattern like fish scales, a mackerel sky. Off to the east, the clouds transmuted into flowing mares' tails, with each tail shaped the same. The world was beautiful.

  "I don't want to die after all," volunteered Stahn. The city of San Francisco was a speck of
brightness far far below. "How high are we?"

  "Fifty miles and rising fast. Flapper's going to squirt you and me toward the Moon like a torpedo when she gets to sixty miles! I don't have enough oomph to fly us all the way from the Earth to the Moon, see, but with Flapper launching us we can make it. We'll do the next two hundred thousand miles on our own!"

  As his eyes adjusted, Stahn could make out more and more detail in the moonlit clouds below. Once again he marveled at the world's fractal beauty, at its fondly loved structures recurring across every size scale—in the clouds, the land, the sea—ah, the great living skin of sacred Gaia. "This is wavy," said Stahn presently. "Even though I'm not lifted anymore.

  Usually when I'm not lifted, everything is slow and boring and kludgy."

  "That's another reason this trip is important," said Wendy. "It'll take us a week to get to the Moon, enough time for you to dry out for the first time in years. It'll be like a honeymoon."

  "Except you don't have a human body," said Stahn. "A body's considered kind of important on a honeymoon."

  "I can give you hand jobs, Stahn. I can stick fingers up your butt. You'll like it. You'll see."

  As they flew higher and higher, the pterodactyl's wings grew larger and thinner, till finally she looked like a giant stingray.

  "I'm nearly ready to launch you!" trilled the great ray's voice. "Let me draw you back in so I can push you harder. Brace Stahn tight, Wendy."

  "Okay, Flapper," said Wendy.

  Flapper puckered her flesh and drew Stahn and Wendy up into herself. Stahn was starting to feel panicky. "Even if she launches us, how are you going to get the energy to decelerate us into lunar orbit, Wendy? You're not very big. I doubt if you weigh more than fifteen pounds. When you and me flew down to Earth on Spore Day in 2031, our Happy Cloaks were beefed up to ten times that much. Are you sure you have enough stored-up energy to keep me warm while we're floating though space?"

  "Flapper gets lots of energy from the Sun up here, and she stores it as quantum dots. Don't forget, a mole of quantum dots is no bigger than a hundred nanograms. And Flapper's going to give me a whole gram! We'll have a full tank of gas, big guy."

  "Yes, Wendy, here come your quantum dots," sang Flapper. "I'm spraying them into your flesh. And now I'm nearly ready to birth you!"

  By craning his head back, Stahn could see down the tunnel of flesh that led from inside Flapper to the outside. The tube was more vagina than rectum now, and Stahn was a baby instead of a turd.

  "Straighten out your neck, Stahn," said Wendy, her voice vibrant with energy.

  "It's time for me to go rigid." She squeezed very tightly around Stahn and made the imipolex of her flesh as stiff as steel.

  Flapper started a great loop-the-loop to bring her underside uppermost. As she rose to the top of the loop, she bunched her body into a huge mass of muscle and pushed.

  Stahn and Wendy shot out from Flapper with incredible speed; the strength of the g-forces was such that Stahn fainted dead away.

  When he came to, he was staring out into black starry space. Wendy had lost her rigidity, and Stahn could look down past his feet at the great planet Earth falling away or crane his head back and look up toward the disk of the Moon.

  The Sun was hidden behind the Earth for now.

  To maintain Stahn's temperature, Wendy had silvered her surface inside and out; except for the half-silvered patch over Stahn's eyes. Stahn spent some time moving his arms and legs and marveling at the multiple reflections of himself, the Earth and the Moon. How beautiful it was. But how lonely. He was all by himself, hurtling farther and farther away from home, with nothing but a moldie

  'Cloak for company. Tumbling through the dark, forever alone.

  "This is like a bad dream," said Stahn.

  "I like it," said Wendy. "Are you warm enough?"

  "I'm fine." The silvered imipolex kept Stahn comfortable, and the air in his nose was fresh and cool.

  "Should I worry about radiation?" asked Stahn. "About cosmic rays?"

  "Let's put it this way: your odds of cancer are going to be a little higher after this trip. And cosmic rays can have an effect on moldies too. But we'll just have to grin and bear it and hope for the best, I suppose."

  "Can you feel how hard I'm grinning?" said Stahn. "Not. This is really selfish of you, Wendy."

  "It'll do you good, Stahn. You need the detox."

  Stahn thought longingly of his pot at home and his liquor cabinet and his squeezies of snap and gabba. He loved all drugs except merge. He'd been through a bad experience with merge—the time that Darla had overdosed him on merge back on the Moon. By the time that bummer was fully over, Stahn had lost the entire right half of his brain. What a burn.

  "Uvvy the kids, can you do that? And then we should uvvy Whitey Mydol on the Moon. He should know that we're coming. I guess we'll be landing on the Moon the day after Blaster and Terri, right? A week from now?"

  "Right. We're traveling along a seven-day Earth-to-Moon spacetime geodesic just like Blaster is. He's a day ahead of us, yes, and we can keep checking with him.

  He'll be our closest neighbor most of the way."

  "We can uvvy him and everyone else as much as we want to?" This thought was somewhat comforting. Not to be wholly alone in the void.

  "Well, uvvying costs us a trillion quantum dots per second per call."

  "You're running low on dots already?" whinnied Stahn in sudden terror.

  "You're not going to have enough for keeping me warm and for braking our descent?"

  "Not to worry," giggled Wendy. "Flapper gave me like ten-to-the-thirtieth quantum dots. That's enough energy for over a quadrillion hour-long uvvy calls.

  So now let's call the kids."

  "Yes yes, do it. You talk to them first so that they know right away that you're okay. You threw quite a scare into them."

  So they talked to the kids. Babs was crying and Saint was near tears himself; Wendy's abandoned body had just died. The conversation went on for a while and finally they all felt pretty solid again.

  Next they uvvied Whitey. They were still close enough to the Earth that there was a noticeable two- or three-second lag in round-trip transmissions to the Moon, so that call didn't amount to much. And then they tried Blaster.

  "Hi, guys," uvvied Blaster's deep voice. "Welcome to the worm farm." Blaster himself was a presence made up of four or five permanently fused moldies, but his psychic uvvyspace arched out to include the minds of the shanghaied moldies he had aboard. And down under Blaster's basso profundo and the excited chatter of the moldies was Terri Percesepe.

  "Hi, Terri," said Stahn. "It's Stahn Mooney."

  "Oh good," said Terri. "Tre said you'd arranged to ransom me. But I don't understand the uvvy image I see. Are you—are you out in space?"

  "Yeah, I got abducted too. By my own wife, Wendy."

  "Wendy meat Wendy?" asked Terri. "Who Tre's always doing the ads about? I don't get what's going on."

  "We're going up to the Moon so I can get a new flesh body," said Wendy. "How is it for you guys inside Blaster, Terri?"

  "It's kickin'," put in one of the moldies. The uvvy image of Blaster showed a writhing knot of moldies, all slowly crawling about while keeping Blaster in the same overall shape. The moldie talking to them was bright yellow with green-and-pink fractal spirals. "This is Sunshine fabulating atcha. My man Mr.

  Sparks and me are drifters, but will work for imipolex."

  "Mostly we been wandering up and down the streets of Santa Cruz stealin' shit and doin' odd jobs to score betty," amplified Mr. Sparks, a red snake decorated with yellow lightning bolts. "Blaster says we'll like it on the Moon. Lotta lifty action there. Not to mention a good chance of finally hooking into enough imipolex to have a kid."

  "My family is not happy about it," said another voice. "I am Verdad, this is my wife Lolo, and -these are my in-laws Hayzooz and Mezcal." Verdad and his family were blobby in shape and colored in brown-and-green earth tones. "We have been farmin' the f
ields for five generations. We are not enjoy in' this change very much. I think there is nothin' at all we can grow on the Moon."

  "Muy malo," grumbled Hayzooz. "This is some ugly kilp. Why don't you let us fly back to the Earth, Blaster?"

  "We're already in orbit," said Blaster. "We're coasting. The only way you chukes'll get enough quantum dots for a return flight is to do some work on the Moon. But, believe me, you won't want to go back. You'll love it in the Nest.

  You can work in the fab growing chipmold. Or in the pink-tanks growing organs.

  Or learn some hi-tech trades. You're moldies, for God's sake, not flesher dirt farmers."

  "We are goin' to miss the rain and the soil and the little growin' things."

  "The purity of the Moon is good," said Blaster. "It is an ascetic spiritual path, but a highly efficacious one."

  "I don't care how spiritual it is, as long as I can get that fresh imipolex you promised," said the voice of a pale white moldie covered with pimply red spots and with a sharp beak at one end. "Buttmunch here. Gypsy and me are five years old and our upgrades are just about worn out. We've been rogues our whole lives, spent a lot of it underwater. We help smugglers bring things in and out of Davenport Beach, and this last time we got careless and a flesher zombified us.

  But Blaster says on the Moon we'll get new imipolex and heavy-duty tunneling ware and we can like grind around underground, and that'll be stuzzy.

  Swimming through rock and getting good bucks. It's a new lease on life."

  "Yaar, I'm for it," said Gypsy, who was flesh-colored and covered with fingerlike bumps like the underside of a starfish. And like on a starfish, each flexible little finger had a sucker at its tip. "But even so I wish we could snuff that dook Aarbie Kidd for putting the superleeches on us. Remember that very first job you and me did, Buttmunch? The real tasty one in Aarbie's cottage? When we offed that Heritagist asshole Dom Per—"

  "Shut th' fuck up, Gyp," interrupted Buttmunch, but it was too late.

  "You killed my father?" Terri screamed. "You scummy mucus slugs killed my dad?"