by Rudy Rucker
"This place is compartmentalized against blowouts," said Whitey. "I don't know how many times I've heard you or Willy bragging about it, Corey. We just leave the conservatory and seal it off. The floor and walls are stone, and if the flames melt a hole in the titamplast ceiling, so much the better. The vacuum will put the fire out. According to what you've always said about the isopod's design, the blowout won't spread past the conservatory."
"Well, yeah, that's how it's supposed to be," allowed Corey. "But remember, it's just Willy who designed it. And we've never tested it. Getting out of the conservatory in time is gonna be hella chaotic."
"Give me that needler and let's get going," interrupted Darla, taking the big weapon back from Whitey. "My plan is simple. I'm going to stand near Joke and Yoke and blast every alien in sight."
"Yaar," said Whitey "And I'll use the ugly stick, and the moldies here can be spitting poofballs. What are you going to do, Corey?"
"I'm going to stand by the door and make sure everyone gets out in time.
Especially me." Corey hunkered down and called the rath and the Jubjub bird.
"You moldies better hurry up and do that vaccination thing before we go back.
We've been in here so long that I bet the aliens are starting to get suspicious."
"I've been like listening to them talk?" said Jenny, cocking her body to one side. "They're not suspicious at all. Somebody who used to be a quasar vortex or a giant crystal has no idea about how long things are supposed to take people and moldies to do. Terri's fast asleep and Willy, Joke, and Yoke are asking the aliens questions." Jenny gave one of her inane giggles. "They're asking about God and the meaning of life."
"Here you go, wigglers," said Corey, offering the rath and the Jubjub bird to the moldies. "You can do the vaccinations yourselves. We didn't really need to come back to my limpware studio for this at all. You just uvvy into one of these Putters and grep through the Limplan code to find the routine labeled 'Cubic Homeostasis'. Shell it around your uvvy reception ware and you're vaccinated.
But be careful not to put it anywhere in your main action group or you'll turn into a Silly Putter and get real simple."
Frangipane wrapped her petals around the kicking, squealing rath. She looked like a Venus fly-trap eating a fat green beetle Meanwhile Jenny ensnared the cawing Jubjub bird with the tentacles at the blunt end of her carrot. Then Frangipane passed the rath to Ormolu and he held it tight under his arm, absorbing the Cubic Homeostasis algorithm for himself. Meanwhile they discussed the plan of attack a little more.
A few minutes later, they were walking back down the hall toward the conservatory Corey was holding the rath and the Jubjub bird. He'd temporarily paralyzed them so that he could cradle them in one arm Darla earned the needler and Whitey earned the ugly stick, both of them holding their weapons casually dangling Jenny and Ormolu were pretending to argue, getting ready to distract the aliens.
They found things in the conservatory much as they had left them. Terri was stretched out full-length, asleep on one couch, Joke and Yoke were perched next to each other on one of the other couches, and Willy was excitedly pacing about on the far side of the room. Four of the aliens were grouped near the fountain, dabbling their fingers in the water and talking with Yoke and Joke. The other eight freeware-possessed moldies were off on the far side of the room, examining S-cubes and conversing with Willy.
"You are such a bully!" screeched Jenny as they entered. She tossed the fat end of her carrot from side to side and then thudded it into Ormolu. Ormolu seemed to lose his footing and tumbled like an acrobat, knocking over a plant and pin-wheeling his arms. He wound up on the other side of the couches, right near the far wall where the eight aliens were gathered.
"It's not my fault I love you, Jenny!" shouted Ormolu, kneeling with his back to the eight aliens and holding out his hands supplicatingly toward Jenny.
"What's going on?" demanded Joke
"Oh, these dooky slugs are in some kind of tussle," said Darla dismissively.
"Gurdle-7 and Ormolu are both hot for Jenny—if you can believe that. They had an argument, and Gurdle-7 is sulking in Corey's studio." She flopped down on the couch next to Yoke and Joke, setting down the needler beside her so that it pointed at the four aliens by the fountain, one of whom was Shimmer.
"Hello, Darla," said Shimmer, but Darla acted like she was too busy staring at Jenny to answer.
"You're saying you love me?" Jenny paraded across the room, tossing and undulating for all she was worth. Running her shrill voice up and down the octaves. "What will you do to prove it?" Now she was standing over the kneeling Ormolu.
"This oughtta be very weightless," Whitey announced loudly. "You aliens oughtta check this out." He went and perched on the other end of the couch with Yoke and Joke, holding the O.J. ugly stick with exaggerated casualness. Frangipane circled around and stood near the other end of the grouping of eight aliens.
"Do you know any floatin' chaotic attractors, Ormolu?" shrilled Jenny. "Make one for me. Make the Nguyen Attractor!"
"What the hell is wrong with you moldies?" said Willy, turning away from the aliens to yell angrily at Jenny and Ormolu. "We've just been having this incredibly fascinating philosophical discussion with the aliens, and you stinkers barge in here and start acting like—good Lord, I didn't know moldies could do that!"
On her couch, Terri sat up and rubbed her eyes. Darla shifted the needler to her lap and prayed that Terri wouldn't take it into her mind to walk between her and the four aliens by the fountain.
Ormolu's upper body shuddered and broke into threads that began looping around in hypnotic weaving patterns of standing waves, like a hydra head of a thousand thin filaments, with the envelopes of the filaments' motions forming a hallucinatory shape of warping, mutating curves "Big xoxxin' deal," griped Yoke. "That's nothing compared to what Syzzy here has been telling us about—"
"But wait!" called Corey, still standing off by the door that led from the conservatory to the hallway ."Everyone watch very closely to see what Ormolu does next!"
"Oh, I am so ready!" screeched Jenny, dancing around to stand to the side of Ormolu. "I'm ready now!"
At this signal, Frangipane, Jenny, and Ormolu began spewing out withering streams of flaming poofballs, Ormolu shooting from out of a freshly formed pucker in the center of his back. Meanwhile Whitey began firing the ugly stick into the bodies of the aliens by the fountain. And at the same moment, Darla pressed the needler button and sent a slow straight line across the aliens by the fountain and—yes!—three of them burst into flame. With its strong fresh charge, the needler was much more powerful than any she'd ever used. It instantly grew hot in her hand, but she hung onto it, flicking the dazzling violet laser beam back and forth across the three aliens, setting them alight here, there, and everywhere, even as Whitey's ugly stick chewed them to pieces.
The only problem was that the fourth alien kept moving out of the way each time that Darla or Whitey shot. It was Shimmer. No matter how hard you tried to shoot her, Shimmer was always just out of the line of fire. Whitey stood up and moved around her, blazing away with the ugly stick, but hitting Shimmer was impossible. She wasn't moving particularly fast, but magically, effortlessly, as if by repeated strokes of luck, Shimmer was never in the spot where a flechette or needler beam ended up.
Darla glanced over to the far wall—Jenny, Frangipane, and Ormolu had killed all eight of their aliens, the eight bodies were a great heap of smoking, crackling flame. Someone shoved Darla. It was Joke. She was screaming, "Stop!" Darla realized then that Joke had been screaming the whole time. "Stop hurting them!"
She struck Darla's hand, and the blistenngly hot needler clattered to the floor.
Darla clawed for it, but Joke kicked it aside. Shimmer was standing right in front of them by the fountain.
"We missed one!" shouted Darla to the three moldies. "We missed Shimmer!"
A dozen pellets of imipolex whistled past Darla's head. Shimmer bent slightly to o
ne side and lifted her leg, all the poofballs missed her and burst harmlessly into flames against the fountain's basin. Whitey got around behind Joke, Yoke, and Darla to shoot the ugly stick toward Shimmer some more and completely missed her again and again. Shimmer turned and ducked and hopped and pirouetted, moving in dreamy slow motion, always in the right place at the right time. The room was filling with thick black smoke, oily with plastic and—Darla realized in a sudden wave of disorientation—loaded with the psychedelic vapors of camote.
A rapid breeze swept by Darla, fanning the blazing imipolex of the three dead aliens by the fountain. It was Shimmer running by her, disappearing into a far corner of the room.
"Everybody out now!" Corey was yelling. "We have to seal off the smoke!
Everyone out in the hall so I can seal the door!" The bewildered Terri was already over there with him.
Darla seized Joke by the wrist and dragged her toward the door. Whitey had hold of Willy and Yoke Ormolu, Jenny, and Frangipane came on their own. The flames were roaring higher and higher. In the stony slowed-down time of the camote smoke, it felt like a long, long trip to the hallway door.
All the while, Corey kept yelling for them. "Hurry up! The ceiling could blow out any time!"
As they made their way, the smoke grew thicker. Whitey went last, still firing his ugly stick back into the room, hoping to hit Shimmer. When Darla made it to the hallway, she gasped down some of the less smoky air and turned to stare into the inferno of the conservatory.
In the center of the room, on top of the fountain, stood Shimmer, staring calmly at them. Two heartbeats passed, Darla shouted, and a volley of poofballs and flechettes shot toward the alien. But by then Shimmer had sprung high upward and turned on the ion jets in her moldie body's heels. The conservatory roof shattered and a huge rush of wind slammed the conservatory door shut with a deafening thud.
The door to the conservatory held firm, but on the other side of it there were alarming crashes and screechings as the room's air rushed out into the vacuum, whirling the objects in the conservatory about like a cyclone.
"This isopod is really blowout-proof, isn't it, Willy?" said Corey, shouting to make himself heard over the chaos in the next room.
"That's how I designed it," said Willy. "But I've been wrong before. The farther we get from the conservatory, the better. Let's head down the hall, close the hall door, go through the kitchen, close the kitchen door, and then go up the stairs to the garage. There's a bunch of bubbletoppers in there and two moon buggies. So come on, let's move fast down the hall. Whose idea was it to kill the aliens?"
"I'll take the credit," said Darla, trotting along beside Willy. "I'm part Native American. We know a lot about cultural imperialism."
"You have a point," said Willy. "But Gurdle-7's going to be furious."
"Gurdle-7's dead," said Whitey.
"I think you're a bitch, Ma," said Joke. "The aliens were beautiful. They had so much to teach us."
"Well, there's still two of them left to learn from," said Corey, ushering the group out of the hall and into the kitchen. "There's still Shimmer and the Wendy version of Quuz."
"We still gotta fly up and kill Quuz and save Stahn Mooney!" exclaimed Whitey.
"Are you moldies ready for that?" "We've helped enough," said Ormolu. "I'm scared that Shimmer's going to do something bad to us now."
As if in confirmation, there was a roaring behind the hall door. The hall roof had given way as well. It sounded like the end of the world.
"How do we get out of here?" shrieked Jenny. "I want to go back to the Nest!"
"And I want to go home to Santa Cruz," wailed Terri.
"Through this door for the garage," said Corey, crossing the kitchen and opening a door that led to an upward flight of stairs. "Everyone hurry on up there and put on a bubbletopper. The whole garage is an air lock."
Corey went last, closing the kitchen door and the staircase door behind them.
The seven humans wriggled into the waiting bubbletoppers, Corey still carrying his rath and Jubjub bird. There were more ominous crashes and roars from the isopod. Once they had the bubbletoppers on, they switched to uvvy communication and Corey cycled the garage's big air lock door open.
"Adieu," said Frangipane, humping out to the open surface of the Moon and preparing to fly away.
"Good luck," added Jenny, joining Frangipane and anxiously glancing up at the black sky.
"We did our best," said gleaming Ormolu.
And then, in a puff of dust, the three moldies had jetted away, arcing off toward the Nest.
"Let's get clear of the isopod right away," uvvied Corey. Darla and her family got on one of the moon buggies, while Corey, Willy, and Terri got on the other.
They floored the accelerators and the buggies darted out across the dusty surface of the Moon.
Yoke was driving again, with Joke next to her and Whitey and Darla in back.
Darla turned to stare back at the isopod, and as she watched, the ragged hole over the conservatory and hallway ripped farther open. The entire remaining part of the dome gave way in a great burst of frozen air, with clothes, furniture, and huge branches of the marijuana trees tumbling up through the lunar vacuum.
"So much for your blowout-proof design, Willy," said Corey's slow ironic voice.
"Oh well. I was thinking about moving back into Einstein anyway."
A voice suddenly crackled over Darla's uvvy and over the uvvies of the others.
The voice of Shimmer.
"Well done," said Shimmer. "You chose an optimal thread."
"Shimmer," uvvied Joke, craning her head back and looking upward. "Where are you?"
"I'm a hundred and fifty miles straight up from the Moon. It's an interesting view."
"Are you angry that we killed your friends?" asked Darla. "Are you going to get even with us?"
" 'Kill,' " said Shimmer musingly. "The word means a lot to you, doesn't it?
Your spacetime is so—so poignant. To live with the immediacy of total annihilation always around you. Your condition has a fine dark beauty."
"Please don't hurt us," uvvied Willy. "Darla and the others were only scared that you aliens would overwhelm our little civilization."
"Darla was right," said Shimmer. "From what I hear, it's not a pretty thing for a civilization as undeveloped as yours to become a Decryption node." "But how did you escape, Shimmer?" Whitey wanted to know. "I kept aiming right at you, but then you were never there when I shot."
"Even though your alternate worlds are unreal, I can still see them," said Shimmer's voice. "All I had to do was to keep picking the correct bending of my world line."
"So what are you going to do now?" asked Joke.
"I might visit Earth for a while," said Shimmer. "But don't worry. Sooner or later, I'll chirp out of here. You do not welcome me, and I do not wish to overstay. Although one-dimensional time has a certain fatalistic glamour, it's not a spacetime configuration I'm prepared to inhabit forever."
"Could you do us one favor?" put in Terri.
"Maybe."
"Kill that other Quuz-thing."
"I was already planning to. Should I kill the human in Quuz as well?"
"Let me try to save him!" cried Whitey.
"Shut up!" said Darla, who'd never much liked Stahn. "It's too late, Whitey, and you'd probably get killed. Shimmer—could you kill Quuz and code up Stahn and chirp him out of here? Then it wouldn't be like he really died."
"I could do that," said Shimmer. "I can do almost anything. Stahn would become a personality wave. In the fullness of transfinite cosmic time, he'd Decrypt somewhere and somewhen else."
"Oh, don't do that," said Willy. "Please listen to me. It's my fault that Stahn got into this in the first place. Gurdle-7 and I had this stupid idea that it would help to have Stahn inside the first moldie that we did a Decryption on.
But apparently it didn't help at all."
"So what are you asking me to do?" said Shimmer.
; "Ferry Stahn down to us," said Willy. "He doesn't want to live somewhere and somewhen. He wants to be here and now. Like any other person. Kill Quuz and bring Stahn the rest of the way to Einstein, Shimmer. Fly him down inside you."
"Shimmer doesn't want to do that," snapped Darla, feeling guilty for being so nasty, but letting it out anyway. "It'll take her too long."
"Oh, I have all the time in the world," laughed Shimmer. "It'll be an interesting challenge to kill the Quuz without killing Stahn. I'll fly back here and drop him off at the Einstein air lock. If I flew very fast, I could have Stahn for you by the time you get there yourself. In half an hour. But the acceleration would kill him. Kill. There's that word again." Shimmer gave a buzzing, chiming laugh and broke the uvvy connection.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. STAHN. NOVEMBER 7, 2053 - DECEMBER 2053
So there was Stahn hurtling through cislunar vacuum, Stahn wrapped inside the fifteen kilograms of imipolex that had once been Wendy and which now was Quuz.
They weren't talking anymore, but Quuz had kept their uvvy link jammed open for maximum access Stahn could sense Quuz's consciousness all around him as intimately as if Quuz were breathing in his face.
Stahn hated Quuz. Quuz had killed Wendy, and thanks to Stahn's having foolishly shown Quuz the communication protocols, Quuz had taken over all the moldies in Blaster as well.
Being forcibly linked to Quuz reminded Stahn of how it had felt when he'd been a slave worker in the pink-tanks—a meatie with a robot rat remote of Helen the bopper in place of the right hemisphere of his brain. While flashing back on that ugly memory, Stahn had unwisely vented rage at Quuz, right after Quuz took over Wendy's and Blaster's imipolex. From that point on, Quuz had dropped all verbal communication.