by Rudy Rucker
"Maybe Corey's not the only thing I'm upset about!" sobbed Darla. "Maybe there's lots of other things I think we should do something about. Hold me, Whitey!"
Whitey put his arms around Darla and she pressed herself against him, putting her mouth right next to his ear.
"Please don't start acting like talk-viddy dregs!" exclaimed Joke. "Can't we be rational? I have so many more questions for the aliens. Like you, Shimmer, you said you were made of a zillion parallel lives—I want to know what kind of individual creatures were living these lives. Squids or insects or artichokes or sunspots or what?"
"My individual beings were animals a lot like humans," said Shimmer. "But they could equally well have been rivers or trees."
"Trees!" exclaimed Willy. "I love trees."
"The moral is that everything is conscious," volunteered a pink woman alien.
"And everything is alive. My name is Parella. I come from a planet of crystals.
Syzzy may think your time is slow, but I think it's fast."
"I just thought of something," interrupted Whitey, with Darla still leaning against his chest "Stahn Mooney's still out there inside some Quuz-infected imipolex When he lands—like fourteen hours from now—when he gets close enough, his Quuz is likely to do a repeat of what Blaster did today. Or worse. What if Stahn were to come down on the Einstein dome and do a Pied Piper number on all the Silly Putters and DIMs in there? Mongo xoxx."
"It's so weird about Quuz," said Terri sleepily. "I've always had such good feelings about the Sun. But now—now whenever I look at the Sun, I'll know that it wants to eat us."
"He has to be stopped," said Darla.
"I'd be glad to fly up and destroy the Quuz," said Syzzy. "I hate primitive sunspot creatures like Quuz."
"Floaty, but I think it would be better for the humans and moldies to handle it," said Whitey. "We're more familiar with the way things work here. Also I'd like to try and do this without killing Stahn. He's an old friend of mine."
"Don't look at me. I'm too tired to help," Terri heard herself saying. And it was true. She was slumped back onto her couch and her fluttering eyelids kept trying to close.
Now Jenny and Corey returned with the three other moldies. Corey had gotten Ormolu and Frangipane to give him their weapons for safekeeping. He was casually carrying the heavy needler and O.J. ugly stick in one hand.
"Hey, Corey," said Whitey. "Why don't you and me and these tour moldies fly up and save Senator Stahn? We could leave in like two hours."
"I don't want to go," said Gurdle-7.
"Look, you stinky slug," snarled Whitey. "You're the smart one who got us into this mess. You have to go."
"No," said Gurdle-7. "I want to stay right here and exchange information with the aliens. I've been working all my life for this."
"I don't want to leave either," said Willy.
"So let them stay," said Corey. Terri happened to be drowsily staring at Darla just then and she noticed Darla giving Corey a charged intent look. "You and me, Whitey, we can do it if Jenny, Frangipane, and Ormolu are willing. I can fly in Frangipane, you go in Ormolu, and Jenny can bring Stahn back. It'd be perfect that way."
"Copacetic," said Whitey.
"But what occurs when the Wendy-Quuz sings the Stairway To Heaven to us?" protested Frangipane. "Directly to us from very close up." "Haven't you been monitoring Jenny's uvvy? Our alien friends figured out how to use the rath and the Jubjub bird to vaccinate themselves against the Stairway To Heaven virus," said Corey.
"How would we install it on ourselves?" asked Ormolu uncertainly.
"Well, the aliens did it alone, but I think you moldies will need for me to help you," said Corey glibly. "Let's just take the magic pig and bird back into my limpware studio and I'll fix you right up. Come on. You come too, Gurdle-7."
"Yes yes, I want the vaccination so that I can teach it to all the moldies in the Nest," said Gurdle-7. "Then they won't be angry at me anymore. By the way, Corey, do you have some extra S-cubes so that I can download a copy of my Stairway To Heaven program? There aren't any copies of the documentation left anymore. Those paranoid Nest moldies blew up my lab."
"Sure, I've got the equipment for that too," said Corey. "Come on, you four moldies."
"I'll help," said Whitey. "I'll carry those weapons for you, Corey. You grab the bird and the pig."
"I want to watch too," said Darla. "I haven't walked around in this house for such a long time." Corey, Whitey, Darla, and the four moldies clumped off down the hall, Corey carrying the rath and the Jubjub bird and Whitey carrying the needler and the ugly stick.
"We've heard from Shimmer the 2D-time humanoid, Zad the squid, Syzzy the quasar vortex, Takala the mantis, Bloog the jellyfish, and Parella the crystal,"
Willy said. "How about you other six aliens?"
Though it was some of the most interesting information she'd ever heard, Terri couldn't keep her eyes open, and she drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER TEN. DARLA. NOVEMBER 6, 2053
Darla's grandmother's family were American Indians from the Acoma pueblo near Albuquerque. From listening to her Indian relatives, Darla knew all too well what it meant to have a powerful alien culture arrive. She knew all about the greed, the disease, the cruelty, and the heartless disdain for the native culture. "Give us your gold; we'll give you disease; your religion is evil; support our parasitic priests." Finding the aliens in Corey's isopod filled Darla with a deep visceral loathing. But she knew better than to prematurely show her feelings.
Under the pretext of having a fit over Joke and Corey, Darla got herself into Whitey's arms and whispered into his ear: "We have to kill the aliens."
She could tell from Whitey's body language that he understood and agreed. And when Corey came back with the four moldies and the needler and the O.J. ugly stick, Darla sensed that Corey too knew what had to be done.
Corey and Whitey led the way off down the hall toward Corey's studio, followed by the four moldies, with Darla in the rear. Trying hard to keep her voice even, Darla made housewifely commentary on the features of the isopod.
"That's nice to see your giant marijuana plants are doing so well in the grove out there, Corey. How tall are they? And I see you've still got your velvet paintings up. I always liked that one of the nuking of Akron."
"Yeah," said Corey. "I put a lot of myself into that picture. I went to high school in Akron. I hated it, of course, but sometimes I'm sort of sorry those Yaqui rubber tappers blew it up. Odd as it sounds, when I lived in Akron, I used to dream about blowing it up myself. Like precognition. In one dream I was in the middle of this big Akron stadium with a white-painted fat-boy H-bomb and there were thousands of people in the seats watching me and they were chanting,
'Light the Bomb!' Look, see how I worked a shattering stadium into the corner of the picture?" They'd stopped walking, and Corey was standing there, happily studying his art. "And your picture's over there, Darla." He pointed to an oversized velvet painting that showed the mirror-clad figures of Stahn and Darla at the mouth of the Nest. "See the stars in the reflections? And the little Earths?"
"That seems like so long ago," said Darla. "It's been a while since I did anything heroic. Wouldn't it be nice to be heroic again, Whitey?"
"I hear you," said Whitey, and they started walking again.
"I'm the one who's going to be the hero for this year," said Gurdle-7 smugly.
"Isn't it amazing to have the aliens here? Just think of all the advances that they'll bring us. And think of how many more aliens there are for us to Decrypt—cosmic personality waves are flying past us all the time."
"I think getting vaccinated against the Stairway To Heaven is a very good idea," said Frangipane quietly.
"Yeah," said Ormolu. "I'm freakin'. What if the aliens start getting greedy to do lots and lots of Gurdle Decryptions? What if some Decrypted lobster-thing gets real eager to fab with another lobster-thing from the same planet and starts doing thousands of Decryptions, waiting for the right one? Who decides how
much of our imipolex the aliens are allowed to use? What if they want to use up all of the resources in the whole solar system?"
"They cleaned out my stash of flickercladding without even asking," said Corey.
"They beefed themselves up to seventy kilograms each. That's a lot of bucks."
"And what if another Quuz-type alien gets Decrypted and kills even more of us?" said Jenny. "I hate to tell you, Gurdle-7, but Decryption is turning out to be a xoxxin' bad idea. I know we worked really hard on it, but…"
"You're too cautious," snapped GurdIe-7. "You sound like a filthy Heritagist.
Are you so frightened of transcendence?"
"Here's my limpware studio," said Corey, opening a door. He tossed the rath and the Jubjub bird in and let them start running around on the floor, chasing each other as usual. Whitey and the moldies followed him, and Darla came in last.
The room held some fairly sophisticated design tools. There was a large industrial-looking machine in one corner, a couple of workbenches with things that looked more or less like power tools, and shelves along the walls laden with cans, bottles, tubes, and boxes.
Darla closed the door behind her and leaned against it. She noticed that Whitey was having trouble holding both the needler and the O.J. ugly stick. "Let me look at that needler, Whitey," she said. "I've never seen one that big."
Whitey handed it to her and wrapped his hands firmly around the ugly stick.
"I want to download my info onto an S-cube before we do anything else," said Gurdle-7. "We don't want to take any chances with my information about the Stairway To Heaven."
"No," said Whitey. "We don't." And then he turned on the ugly stick and cut Gurdle-7 into pieces, moving the whispering stream of magnetically launched metal darts with practiced accuracy and speed. A few of the flechettes pinged off the stone walls of the room.
"Don't you dare call for help," said Darla, pointing the needler at the three remaining moldies. "If I push the button, you stinkers go up in flames.
Jenny!
Start faking Gurdle-7's uvvy signal, in case that nosy Shimmer checks on us.
Frangipane and Ormolu! Mask your real thoughts and make your uvvy signals look like you're watching Corey make an S-cube copy of Gurdle-7."
"Yaar," said Whitey, training the muzzle of the O.J. ugly stick on the moldies.
The air was thick with the astonishing stench of the shredded Gurdle-7. The frightened rath and Jubjub bird had disappeared behind the big machine in the corner.
"We're all riding the same wave, aren't we, guys?" said Corey. "The aliens have to die."
"For sure," said Darla. "Unless we want the human and the moldie races to end up selling souvenirs and running gambling casinos for the galactic gods."
"Um… too true!" said Jenny after a moment's hesitation. Her voice wavered.
"But poor Gurdle-7. We never thought it would turn out this way. He was so smart and so dumb."
"I am agree," said Frangipane. "The aliens are a big mistake."
"I'm with you too," said Ormolu. "I've been liking my life just the way it is.
I don't want this kind of cataclysmic change. But how do we kill the aliens?
There's twelve of them."
"I'll set them on fire with this heavy-duty needler," said Darla. "When I needled Rags this morning, he caught fire almost right away."
"Almost right away," said Whitey. "But by the time you got two or three of the aliens lit, the others would be all over you. Don't you have any more weapons, Corey? It would be stuzzadelic if all six of us were armed."
"All I've got is water guns," said Corey apologetically. "I'm a Dadaist artist.
The whoopee cushion is mightier than the sword."
"I can spit things out really hard from any part of my body," said Ormolu, stretching out his hand and ejecting something that struck against the room's far wall with a resounding splat,
"What was that?" asked Darla.
"Camote truffle."
"That's not going to kill anyone."
"We could point our ion jets at them," said Jenny. "Except the jets aren't hot."
"What about the equipment in this studio, Corey?" said Whitey. "Tell us what it all is and maybe we'll think of something."
"Okay," said Corey. "That old-timey machine in the corner is an injection molder. I use it to cast my Silly Putters into certain shapes. The workbench on the right is where I carve the models I use to make the molds. That tool that looks like an electric drill is a piezomorpher, it's very good for carving imipolex. It uses ultrasound. Not much of a weapon, though, because you have to be right on top of the material to piezomorph it. It's more like a dentist's drill than like a bazooka. Now this bench over here is where I paint my Silly Putters. To some extent they can control their colors, but they need a basis to start from. You have to get the right pigments and metal oxides into their flesh for them to work with. This particular tool is something like an old-fashioned airbrush. Slightly higher-tech than an airbrush, because it shoots the color particles right into the plastic up to a depth of four centimeters. A
volume-filling brush, in other words. It's a good tool but, again, not particularly lethal."
While Corey talked, the three moldies grazed their way across the floor, quietly absorbing the pieces of imipolex that had been Gurdle-7. The rath and the Jubjub bird came creeping out of hiding to snuffle up the smaller crumbs.
"I hope none of you moldies is ending up with the intact Stairway To Heaven information?" said Darla, fingering her needler.
"Not to worry," said Frangipane, now about 30 percent larger than before. "I have already reprogram all the imipolex I just ate." She sprouted two new petals, hiccuped, and spit out some triangular flat ugly-stick darts as if they were watermelon seeds. "Excusez moi."
"No problem here either, Darla," said Ormolu, who was staring down at his body with evident satisfaction. "I turned all of my Gurdle-7 share into muscle."
He flexed his legs and made taut ridges spring out along them.
"I didn't save any of Gurdle-7's science information," said Jenny. "But I'm keeping some of his feelings, no matter what you say. He was a bold explorer.
And we loved each other." For a giant carrot, she looked quite humanly miserable.
"How about those cans and bottles on the shelves?" Whitey asked Corey.
"What's in them?"
"Chemicals. Like resins and polymers for doctoring the imipolex. And paints and solvents for coloring the Putters."
"Solvents!" exclaimed Whitey. "We could make firebombs!"
"Oh right!" said Darla. "Like we'll walk back into the conservatory lugging buckets of gasoline. If the aliens see what's coming, they'll attack us first.
Or take hostages. I don't want anything to happen to Yoke or Joke. No, we have to think of a way to hit those freeware slugs giga fast and yotta vicious"
"I have an idea!" said Frangipane after a minute's thought. "We can spit out little balls of imipolex and have them move like the smart kinetic-energy bombs." She flicked one of her petals and sent a little lump of shiny gold imipolex bouncing across the room. "It is a waste of imipolex, but now after eating poor Gurdle-7, we can spare a little."
"So how's a bouncing glob going to hurt an alien?" asked Corey. The little gold ball bounced past the rath, and the rath sprang forward in an effort to gulp it down. As if in reaction, the ball took a sudden backward bounce, hit the rath in the nose, then bounced several more times with increasing amplitude, finally caroming off the wall and ceiling to return to Frangipane.
"Voila," said Frangipane. "The bouncing glob is clever."
"We can control pieces of ourselves, even after we split them off," explained Jenny. "Though, of course, if you get totally minced like poor Gurdle-7, there's nothing left to do any controlling." She whipped the thin tip of her carrot body to one side and sent another ball a-bouncing, and this time the Jubjub bird tried to catch it. Just as Frangipane had done, Jenny used her uvvy signals to guide the ball safely
back to herself.
"Big xoxxin' deal," said Darla. "A smart plastic ball."
"Attendez!" said Frangipane. "It is the next part that is the really new idea.
If I put a sufficient amount of my quantum dots into a smart little ball, then I can make it commit the suicide." She spat another nugget of imipolex off into the air, but this time, just as the little ball neared the ceiling, it made a popping sound and fiercely caught ablaze. Flapping its flames like a burning mothball, it fell to the stone floor and consumed itself. "La poof!," exclaimed Frangipane.
"Yaar," said Whitey admiringly. "Flamin' poofballs!"
"Uvvy us how to do that, Frangipane!" said Ormolu. A few seconds later, Ormolu and Jenny had learned the trick. Ormolu splatted a fat poofball against the stone wall, where it burst into flame like a sticky glob of napalm. Jenny shot a barrage of four tiny flaming poofballs toward the rath, sending it out again for cover.
"You moldies can act like machine-gun flamethrowers!" exclaimed Darla. "The aliens won't have a chance!"
"But—whoah—that one poofball used up a lot of quantum dots," said Ormolu, feeling down into himself.
"Yes, I am afraid if I shoot very many poofballs, I won't have enough energy left to use my jets," said Frangipane. "I would not like that."
"But I have a huge stash of quantum dots!" exclaimed Corey. "I use them to charge up my Silly Putters before I sell them. Look here." He opened a cabinet and took out a shiny flask with little tubes and wires all over it. "It's a magnetic bottle. Ten grams in there! Stoke yourselves up to the max, guys."
"Save some for me to put into the needler and the ugly stick as well," said Whitey. "We want them at full charge."
Frangipane decanted a hefty splash of the quantum dot superfluid onto herself.
It was odd silvery-gray stuff that didn't move like an ordinary liquid. Then she passed the bottle on to the other two moldies They practiced firing off a few more flaming poofballs while Whitey charged up the needler and the ugly stick.
"The poofballs are perfect," exclaimed Corey. "I love them. I want to make a fire-breathing Silly Putter dragon when we get through with this. And maybe a mad fire-farter. Hey! Not so near the supply shelves, Jenny! We don't want to explode those cans of solvents, do we? Speaking of safe fire practices, has anyone thought about what happens after we light the aliens? We're talking about nearly a ton of flaming imipolex. What's that going to do to my isopod? And how are we going to breathe with all the smoke?"