by Rudy Rucker
"Dom fuckin' burned Aarbie twice," snapped Gypsy. "Me and Buttmunch were just youngsters anyhow. You don't like it, spoiled little rich bitch Terri Percesepe, then why don't you go on and jump off the ship. Or maybe I should crawl over there and teach you a fuckin'—ow!"
"I'm right next to you, Gypsy," said Xlotl's voice. "And so's Monique. Push harder, Monique." In the background, Blaster started laughing.
"Hey, quit it!" yelled Gypsy. "Help me, Buttmunch! They're trying to squeeze me in half!"
"You be nice to Terri," said Monique, her voice tight and hard as she and Xlotl hour-glassed Gypsy's waist. "Or—"
"Hey, hey, hey," interrupted Stahn, trying to be senatorial. "Simmer down over there. We've got six more days ahead of us. Make them stop, Blaster!"
"I wouldn't dream of it," chortled Blaster. "The fighting dogpile is an essential stage of my moldies' journey to liberation. Xanana and I will keep an eye on Terri, won't we, Xan'?"
"Of course. But frankly I'd rather not have to be Terri's life support for the whole way. The whole whole way. The whole whole whole way. Someone else should do it for a while. Monique. After all, it's Monique who got our family into this. Whoring for that Heritagist zerk Randy Karl Tucker."
"You're a real DIM head, Monique," put in Ouish, who was squeezed up against Xanana. She wormed out a long tendril and gave Monique a sharp poke.
"Fightin' dogpile," repeated Blaster happily. "You're a spunky bunch of recruits."
"Um, speaking of Heritagists?" uvvied a new voice. "This is Jenny from Salt Lake City?" The visage of a lank, immature country gal appeared in the shared uvvyspace. "Hellooo there! You guys ought to realize that some of us so-called Heritagists are really and truly working for the Nest."
"Oh God, not her again," said Stahn. "I've heard enough for now, Wendy."
Wendy closed their connection and they went off-line.
The better part of a week went by, and Stahn started feeling a lot healthier.
Having the drugs leave his system felt like having shiploads of life come up a river to be unloaded on his front steps. Big bales of L-I-F-E. Stahn remembered once again that his worst times sober were better than his best times high.
Whenever things started to lag, he and Wendy would make uvvy calls.
The day before Stahn and Wendy were due to land, Jenny's uvvy presence popped up again. It was while Stahn and Wendy were talking to Blaster.
"Hi, gang," said Jenny's callow giggly voice in the common uvvyspace. "Good news, Wendy, I've just arranged for you to download your personality for safekeeping, in case something happens to you during landing."
"That sounds like a good idea," said Wendy. "But no way am I downloading to Salt Lake City."
"Heavens no," said Jenny after a pause. "You'll download to the Nest. You've heard of Willy Taze? One of his friends in the Nest is a moldie called Frangipane. Frangipane is all set for you. Speak up now, Frangipane. Don't be shy!"
"Yes, I'm here," said a clear sweet voice with a French accent. "I am logged on to your uvvyspace. Bonjour, tout le monde. This is Frangipane in the Nest. I have an S-cube all prepared for you, Wendy." Frangipane resembled an oversized exotic orchid; she was a chaotically pulsing construct of delicately shaded ruffles and petals.
"Well, okay then, here I come," said Wendy. There was a slow hum for several seconds while she sent her info across the short clear span of space down to the Nest. "All done," said Wendy then, fairly chirping with enthusiasm. "My, that felt good! I'm so much more secure now. Too bad we can't do the same for Stahn without taking him apart."
"We can talk about that on the Moon if he has interest," said Frangipane. "My lover Ormolu has some knowledge of the lost wetware arts." Ormolu waved from the background. He looked like a blobby gilt cupid from an antique clock.
"Put a cork in it," said Stahn. "I don't want to get vivisected the way Cobb Anderson did."
"What about me?" interrupted Blaster. "Why doesn't the Nest ever do a pre-landing backup for me or my recruits? Aren't I as important as Wendy?"
"You are too big, Blaster," said Frangipane. "And no, you are not really so important, I regret to say. In any case, I don't have the resources to make any other backups. Your new recruits should just be happy that we have jobs for them."
"Xoxx you, then," said Blaster. "I don't need your help anyway. I've made this landing without a problem plenty of times."
"That's right. And you should not have a problem today."
"Yeah, and just to make sure and keep it that way, I'm not taking any more calls. I don't feel good at all about getting uvvied by your Heritagist friend Jenny while I'm in landing countdown mode. I'm going to take this up with the Nest Council later." Huffy Blaster went off-line.
A few hours later, just before Blaster was scheduled to land, Wendy and Stahn got a call. They expected it to be Blaster, but it was Frangipane, her petals blushing and a-flutter.
"Bonjour," said the moldie. "There's no good way to explain about this, Wendy, but it seems we in the Nest are finally ready to attempt a full Gurdle Decryption with a moldie as host. We have tested it on some Silly Putters this morning, and now we're going to try it on you. It seems safer with you out in space, and with wise old Senator Mooney inside you. Be of good courage!"
A sudden sharp crackle of petabyte information hiss came over the uvvy—a virus!
Stahn told Wendy to turn it off, but Wendy was already gone. The noise lasted for what seemed like a very long time, the sound so densely fractal and impossible to ignore that Stahn started hearing nutso voices in it. And there was nothing to do but grit his teeth until finally the connection broke. And then Wendy started making a noise; long, slow, rising whoops, each about one second long.
"Whooop whooop whooop whooop—"
"What's the matter, Wendy?"
"Whooop whooop whooop whooop whooop whooop—"
Frangipane's info had set Wendy to shivering. She was so tightly linked to Stahn that he could see down into her and feel it like it was happening to himself.
Piezoplastic vibrations deep inside Wendy were crisscrossing and spewing cascades of phonons down into the live net of her quasicrystalline structure.
And the structure was spontaneously deforming like someone was turning a dial on the Tessellation Equation, causing the structure of Wendy's plastic to slide-whistle its way up the scale through 4D, 5D, 6D, 7D… on and on, with each level happening twice as fast as the one before, so that—it felt like to Stahn, at least—Wendy was going through infinitely many dimensional arrangements in each second. And then starting right up again. Whooop whooop whooop whooop.
Wendy's imipolex was like a scanner going over and over the channels, alef null channels zeno-paradoxed into every second and suddenly—Stahn flashed an eidetic mental image of this—a cosmic ray in the form of a sharp-edged infinite-dimensional Hilbert prism slammed into Wendy and lodged itself in her warm flesh, working its way through and through her like a migrating fragment of shrapnel. The shudderingly rising dimensionality of Wendy's quasicrystalline structure caught the wave of information and amplified it. The info surfed Wendy's whoop and blossomed suddenly inside her like a great still explosion in deep space.
"*Ffzzzt!* crackle gonnnnng—hello, I am Quuz from Sun."
At first Stahn was in denial. "Aw, Wendy, why you gotta lay such a weird trip on me, us floating here in outer space halfway to the Moon, I mean what the—"
"What manner of creature are you—Stahn Mooney?"
The sincerity of the question struck a chill into Stahn's heart. "Stop it, Wendy! Wendy?"
"Wendy is dead, Stahn Mooney. I am Quuz from Sun."
"Help! Uvvy someone for help! Frangipane? Are you there? We've got to warn Blaster!"
"How do I uvvy Blaster?" asked the mighty Quuz voice, and before Stahn thought the better of it, he showed Quuz where Wendy had kept her dial-up protocols, and Quuz dialed Blaster and the connection formed, even though Blaster didn't want it to, and Quuz fed Blaster the same skirling cr
ackle that Frangipane had fed to Wendy just a minute or two before.
CHAPTER EIGHT. DARLA. 2031 - NOVEMBER 6, 2053
Darla woke up cranky. The uvvy was calling for her, but she didn't pick up.
The message software kicked in, and a live hologram of the unwelcome bulk of Corey Rhizome appeared in her and Whitey's sleeping cubby, half a mile beneath the surface of the Moon.
The sides of Corey's head were shaved clean, but his goatee's formerly strict vertical rectangle had gone a bit wispy and strange. He had gained weight and his skin looked grayish-green. His voice had its usual sneering, mocking tone, even though he was trying to be friendly.
"Hi, Darla," said Corey's hollow. "This is the Old Toymaker. I know you're there, moonqueen. I'm going to stand here and keep talking until you pick up.
I have a problem I need to talk about. And I miss you and Whitey and the twins."
"I bet you do," thought Darla.
Darla's "identical" twin girls Yoke and Joke had been born in 2031, right after the Second Human-Bopper War. Although Yoke and Joke looked exactly the same, they had different fathers. Yoke was the traditional result of Darla's fucking her partner Whitey Mydol, but Joke was a wetware engineered clone of Yoke that a bopper named Emul had implanted in the pregnant Darla's womb after abducting and imprisoning her.
Joke was just as cute and bouncy as Yoke during her first year, but once she began to talk it was evident that she was different. When strangers would ask her who her parents were, she'd say, "Whitey, Darla, Emul, and Berenice."
"Who are Emul and Berenice, honey?"
"Boooppers," the little voice would say, drawing out the first syllable.
"They're dead right now. But I talk to them in my head all the time."
"Can it, Joke," Darla might say then if the stranger looked to be a rare lunar asshole of the Heritagist persuasion. "Don't listen to her, Ms. Murgatroyd.
Joke's full of jive. Aren't you, Jokie?" Poke.
The first day that Joke and Yoke went to school, Yoke was in tears when they came home. "Joke already knows how to read," she wailed. "Why do I have to be so dumb?"
"It's not really me who reads," Joke told her. "Emul and Berenice look out through my eyes and they think the words to me."
"What's it like having them in your head?" asked Yoke, drying her eyes.
"It feels crowded," said Joke. "They talk funny. Berenice is all flowery and old-fashioned, and Emul jumbles up his words."
"Are you going to keep coming to school even though you know everything?"
"Of course, Yoke. It's fun to see the other kids. And we belong together, you and me. If I went around alone without you all day, I'd get lost."
"That's true. You're always getting turned around and mixed up, Joke, even if you already can add and read."
"Emul and Berenice say I have a right-brain deficit," said Joke, enunciating the words carefully. " 'Cause that's where they live." Joke tapped her cute delicate hand against the right side of her head. She and Yoke had glistening chestnut brunette hair.
"Poor Jokie. I'll keep you from getting lost and you'll help me with hard stuff at school," said Yoke.
As they grew older, Yoke and Joke were inseparable companions, well loved by Whitey and Darla's circle of friends. On their eighth birthday, Corey Rhizome brought a special toy over as a present for them.
"Wave this, girls," said Corey, setting a small plastic dinosaur down on the floor. The dino reared back and gave a small roar that was interrupted by a hiccup so vigorous that the little creature fell over on his side, which sent Yoke and Joke into gales of laughter.
"What is that thing?" asked Darla as the plastic dinosaur grinned sheepishly and got back on its feet.
"It's a production-quality Silly Putter," said Corey proudly. "Willy showed me how to program them way back when, and I've been refining their software and limpware ever since. Check it out. I think I've advanced my Art to the magical level. I expect a stunning tsunami of commercial success for Rhizome Enterprises. I can like mass-produce plastic animals that I invented. Yes, I'm about to surf the tsunami, Darla—everyone's going to want to buy a Silly Putter."
"Your Silly Putter is funny," chuckled Yoke, squatting down to watch as the little dinosaur began dancing a jig.
"Can we really keep this one?" asked Joke.
"Yes yes, it's a present for you girls!" said Corey, patting them on their heads. "Because you two are so cute."
"Hold on," said Darla. "What if it's dangerous? It might hurt children. You know how devious moldies are."
"Moldies are good," put in little Joke loyally. She always stuck up for the hoppers and their descendants.
"Don't get your bowels in an uproar, Darla," sneered Corey. "Silly Putters aren't smart enough to be dangerous."
"Oh right! And meanwhile the DIM in my microwave or in a maggie is about the size of my thumb. DIMs are tiny. This dinosaur is like a thousand times bigger, in terms of mass."
"You're smart, huh, Darla?" went Corey. "So dig it, that's the exact problem that Willy solved for me like six years ago, before he started spending all his time sitting in the marijuana grove staring up at the stars. The Silly Putters homeostatically damp themselves. Admittedly they mass enough imipolex to go moldie. But they don't because we have them in a feedback loop. Instead of getting smarter, they make themselves more beautiful. And they know how to become beautiful because I told them how, and I'm an Artist. They don't reproduce, by the way—if you want more of them, you have to get them from me: Corey Rhizome, a.k.a. the Old Toymaker, a.k.a. the Silly Putter King, a.k.a.
the president of Rhizome Enterprises."
"Corey's got orders for three thousand Silly Putters," put in Whitey. "We think they're gonna be a fad. Willy's not interested in investing anymore, so I gave Corey some money myself. And he'll give me initial public offering stock in return. We're owners, now, Darl, we're realman and realwoman." "You gave him money?" demanded Darla. "Who exactly is ordering all these Silly Putters?"
"All the orders for the Silly Putters are on the Moon," intoned Corey. "I think right now Earth figures they have enough trouble with the Moldie Citizenship Act without importing more weird limpware. Especially with those asshole Heritagists. You know what they should really call that religion? The Born-Again Dogshit Moron Motherfucking Asshole Scumbag Church of Fuck Your Kids and Blame Satan." Corey's antic smile broke into wheezing chuckles. "But I digress.
Silly Putters are perfect toys and pets for up here, where the moldies don't live with us. Silly Putters appeal to our loonie sense of the strange, and they're an ideal substitute for the animal pets we're not allowed to have because of our air-quality laws. Silly Putters are squeaky clean."
The business did well, and over the next few years, Corey gave Yoke and Joke several more Silly Putters. The girls liked the toys, and they enjoyed Corey.
Corey was one of the only people who would let Joke talk freely about Emul and Berenice. He was also the only one of Whitey and Darla's friends who knew anything about literature. He got Yoke and Joke to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
On the girls' eleventh birthday, Corey showed up with a set of six brand-new Silly Putters. Chuckling and showing his gray teeth, he upended his knapsack to dump the lively plastic creatures out on the floor. "Remember Jabberwocky, girls?" he cried. "Jokie, can you recite the first two verses?"
"Okay," said Joke and declaimed the wonderful, time-polished words.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"
As Joke spoke, each of the six new Silly Putters bowed in turn: the tove, a combination badger and lizard with corkscrew-shaped nose and tail; the borogove, a shabby moplike bird with long legs and a drooping beak; the rath, a small n
oisy green pig; the Jabberwock, a buck-toothed dragon with bat wings and long fingers; the Jubjub bird with a wide orange beak like a sideways football and a body that was little more than a purple tuft of feathers; and the Bandersnatch, a nasty monkey with a fifth hand at the tip of his grasping tail.
Joke and Yoke shrieked in excitement as the Jabberwocky creatures moved about.
The Jubjub bird swallowed the rath and regurgitated it. The freed rath gave an angry squeal that rose into a sneezing whistle. The Jabberwock flapped its wings hard enough to rise a few inches off the floor. The tove alternately tried to drill its nose and its tail into the floor. The borogove stalked this way and that, peering at the others but not getting too close to them. And the Bandersnatch snaked its tail behind Yoke and felt up her ass.
"Don't!" said Yoke, slapping at the Bandersnatch's extra hand. The Bandersnatch gibbered, rubbed its crotch, capered lewdly, and then seized the back of Joke's leg, shudderingly hunching against the young girl's calf.
"I better do some more work on him," wheezed Corey, grabbing the Bandersnatch and stuffing the struggling Silly Putter back into his knapsack. "I put so much of myself into each of them that I'm never quite sure how they'll react to new situations. Quit staring at me like that, girls."
"Uncle Corey's a frumious Bandersnatch," giggled Yoke.
"It was so sick how that thing was pushing on my leg?" said Joke.
"Doing it," whooped Yoke. "Oh, look, the Jubjub bird is going to swallow the rath again and make it outgrabe!"
"The present tense is outgribe," corrected the literate Joke. "It's like give and gave."
If Darla was upset by the incident of the Bandersnatch, her suspicions about Corey Rhizome were fully confirmed a few months later when Kellee Kaarp came over to visit.
Kellee was a young friend of Darla's from Darla's heavy drug-use days, back when she'd been living in the Temple of Ra. Kellee was strung out on drugs—quaak, snap, three-way, merge, whatever—and she had sex with anyone who could get her high. She only visited when she needed something, but Darla always welcomed her.