Freeware

by Rudy Rucker

  "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 expensive 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 them 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 Tranquillity. 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 Tranquillity, 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 Tranquillity.

  See that crisp dark circular spot? That's the entrance to the Nest, used to be a crater called Maskeleyne G. When the boppers built the Nest, they buffed Maskeleyne 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 hoppers 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 Momque'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 did not 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 Tranquillity. 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 want 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.

  What to do? Terri thought back to the fact that Frangipane of the Nest had made a point of saving Wendy's personality. It must have been that Frangipane had known that Quuz, or something like him, was about to take Wendy over.

  Probably Quuz had first gotten Wendy, and then Wendy had uvvied Blaster to sing his song.

  "Can you uvvy Wendy?" Terri asked Quuz.

  "Wendy is Quuz. I am Quuz. There is nothing to say."

  "But I'd like to talk to Stahn Mooney," protested Terri.

  "Be still, Terri Percesepe. Soon I must sing."

  And then they wallowed up a long, dusty slope to reach the lip of the crater that was the Nest's entrance. The big polished crater shone like a huge dark mirror. In its very center a great conical prism hung magnetically levitated above the central hole. The mirror's shape formed odd virtual images; Quuz himself was reflected as an unsteady blob across the crater's diameter. But there were no signs of any moldies. With a warbling cry of excitement, Quuz launched himself over the crater's edge and down onto the slope of the vast parabolic bowl. To Terri, up at the front of Quuz's body, it felt like carving a surf path down the face of a hundred-year tsunami.

  They whooshed down the glistening polished stone, slowing a bit as the curve grew gentler, and then they passed beneath the massive, suspended cone mirror and dropped through the hole at the crater's center. The gentle gravity drew them downward into the huge empty space of the Nest's interior, and Quuz uttered the first hissing squeals of his song—

  A terawatt laser beam seared through the imipolex near Terri, barely missing her. If oxygen had been present, Quuz would have gone up in a giant mothball of flame. But without the oxygen, the beam just cut the imipolex like a hot knife in sputtering butter. More and more beams flashed on every side, chopping Quuz up into hundreds of thrashing lumps. His song, barely begun, faded into silence.

  Perhaps, given some time, Quuz would have been able to program himself down into each of his chunks, but the change came so rapidly that his simulation completely collapsed, leaving the freshly chopped-up globs of plastic with no minds.

  The flow of air at Terri's mouth came to a stop. Swathed in a lump of dumb airless imipolex, she was hurtling down through the cold vacuum of the Nest toward a stone floor somewhere below. Surfer Terri maintained her shit. She looked around, trying to figure out the next correct move.

  Flying about and filling every angle of Terri's vision there was a host, a legion, a hornet swarm of moldies. They seemed to be attacking and capturing the falling lumps, one lump to a moldie. A golden carrot with a fringe of little green tentacles darted forward and attached itself to Terri's imipolex.

  Immediately the imipolex came alive with the personality of the golden carrot.

  "Give me air," uvvied Terri as hard as she could. "I need air!"

  The divine flow of gas started up again and Terri sucked in a hungry lungful.

  "I'm Jenny," said the shape around her. "Well, really, I'm Jenny-2, and Jenny is the first me, the one holding us, you could call her Jenny-1 if you wanted to be super-accurate and everything. Isn't this exciting!" Jenny's uvvy voice was shrill and gossipy.

  Jenny habitually projected an uvvy image of herself that showed a smirking oily-skinned girl with lank blonde hair. All the other moldies Terri had ever uvvied with had been content to use a photorealistic uvvy image of their actual bodies. What a groover Jenny's image looked like! Like a Heritagist hick. But these thoughts rushed through Terri's mind in only the briefest of flashes; for the main thing to think about was that they were dropping through space like falling scrap metal.

  "Yes yes," said Terri urgently. "Don't let us crash!"

  The two embracing Jennys jetted out a downward ion beam to slow their fall.

  Terri could see that the Nest was a huge funnel-shaped space with lots of caves and holes in its walls, and running straight down the central axis of the Nest was a great shaft of sunlight, gathered from the crater mirror high above.

  Moldies flew around them, sparkling like Mylar confetti. Most of them were accompanied by clones newly fashioned from captured lumps of Quuz's flesh.

  One moldie was striped blue-and-silver with stubby little fins or wings, another glowed red-and-yellow, still another looked like a tangle of wire. Jenny pointed out two moldies whom she said were her close friends: Frangipane, who looked like an orchid blossom, and Ormolu, who looked like a kitschy ornamental cupid.

  Looking down at the enormous disk-shaped floor of the Nest, Terri saw things like factories along one part of the edge and a pink-glowing assemblage of domes diametrically opposite. The region of the Nest floor directly below them held a light-bathed circle with moldies in it, and between this lightpool's central plaza and the Nest's walls were winding little streets lined with buildings and shops.

  "I don't feel very good," Terri told the Jennies. "Is there someplace I can rest and walk around in normal air? Take a shower and lie down?"

  "Yes indeedy," said Jenny-1. "And I'm taking you right there. Um-hmmm! Don't you worry one tiny bit."

  "But where?" asked Terri anxiously.

  "See those pink domes over there? Most of those are the pink-tanks where we grow nice healthy human organs to sell. But that little round one right at the end is a pink-house where humans can live. That's where I'm taking you, Terri. Willy Taze lives there."

  Terri recognized the name. Willy Taze was the eccentric computer genius who'd invented the uvvy some twenty years ago. She recalled hearing a news story last year about Willy moving into the boppers' Nest.

  The Jennies angled out of the great column of light and headed toward the pink domes by the Nest wall. The flowery Frangipane and the gilded Ormolu accompanied them, each of them bearing a new copy of themselves. Two orchids, two cupids, and two carrots, with Terri inside one of the carrots. They touch
ed down lightly outside the air lock of a dome that resembled half of a giant peach.

  "We put the woman into the air lock and then we go to the lab, yes?" uvvied Frangipane.

  "Push in through that pucker in the air lock, Jenny-2," added Ormolu. "Ditch the flesher and then let's tweak our new clones. Wasn't that great how we chopped up Quuz, Frangipane? And free new bodies for all of us. Was that an easy score or what?"

  "Out out, to chop up Quuz was very easy," said Frangipane. "But it is no cause to be joyful. Quuz was formed from the bodies of honest moldies like you and me.

  All of them were murdered by the Gurdle Decryption process that we have helped to bring about. I hardly know what will come next."

  "Stahn Mooney is coming next—inside the little Quuz that used to be Wendy," said Jenny-1. "Twenty-four hours from now."

  "We have to find a way to halt him!" cried Frangipane. "We must discuss with Gurdle-7. You three new clones—go away instead of following us and being always under the foot. Later we can enjoy to talk with you. And as for you, Terri—Jenny's clone will help you into Willy's dome, and we will see more of you very soon. Gurdle-7's lab is sharing a wall with Willy."

  Frangipane, Jenny, and Ormolu hurried off around the side of the pink dome and into a hole in the cliff, leaving the three new clones to fend for themselves.

  "So what is it we are doing?" asked Frangipane-2, fluttering one of her petals.

  "I say we go over to the lightpool at the center of the Nest and make some friends," said Ormolu-2, pointing with a shiny chubby arm. "We've got all this Know from our parents, but now we can find things out on our own."

  "That is such a good idea," said Jenny-2. "Wait just a sec for me while I get Terri to where she's going."

  Jenny-2 wormed pointy-end-first through the sphincter in the outer door of the dome's air lock. "You look out for that Willy Taze, Terri. I know he's a real horn-dog!" There was a hiss as air filled the lock. Jenny-2 gave a wild giggle and hatched Terri out onto the air lock's stone floor like a pea shelled from the pod. The carrot-shaped moldie gave an abrupt bow and squeezed back out through the pucker in the outer door. Then the three clone moldies bounded off toward the Nest's center.