The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

“Love to,” said Monique drily. She finished unbuttoning Randy’s shirt, and now she undid his pants. She paused, looking at him. He was weedy and thin, but with a certain amount of muscle. She was going to have to be sure to get a tight choke hold on him when she went up his nose and punched into his cranium.

  Now he lay back on his bed and Monique pressed against him, letting her tissues flow and reshape to mold themselves so as to fully envelop Randy’s private parts. Sexually, it meant no more to her than pushing a wheelbarrow would mean to a human. Monique set up some caressing rhythms, trying to rock the weight up to speed.

  While Tucker wheezed and twitched in mounting excitement, Monique set her right forefinger to growing like a vine. She twined it up along Tucker’s torso and wrapped it once around his neck.

  Feeling leery of starting to choke Tucker right away, Monique went ahead and slid the tip of her four-foot-long finger into Tucker’s nose, at the same time setting some chaotic ripples onto his genitals. But now, instead of lying back in blind ecstasy, Tucker suddenly sat up and started clawing at his face and neck.

  “What the hell you think you’re doin’ in my nose, bitch? Thought you’d give me a thinking cap, didn’t you!” Weirdly enough, he sounded not so much angry as excited, and he made a rattling noise that sounded almost like a cackle.

  Monique tightened herself around his neck as much as possible and punched her tendril with all her might against the spot high up at the back of Tucker’s nose. But it wouldn’t give! She punched and punched again, but it was like Tucker’s skull was patched with titaniplast or something—Monique couldn’t get in!

  And now Tucker had wormed his right hand between Monique’s noose and his throat, and she couldn’t choke him anymore. With his left hand, he yanked Monique’s tendril out of his nose. He got to his feet and started kicking at Monique’s body. Monique squeezed his testicles so hard that he screamed and fell sideways, crashing into the desk and plopping the uvvy and its holograms to the floor. This was turning into a full-scale disaster. If Monique ran off now, Tucker would tell people about Monique’s attack on him and she’d be hunted down and exterminated. She had to finish him off!

  Tucker was on his back now, and Monique was on his nude body like a savage vampire slug. There was a fight scene playing on the hollow too, which seemed to be drowning out Tucker’s cries so far. Or maybe all the people in the nearby rooms were out on the beach where they belonged, instead of lurking inside waiting to have sex with a moldie like this skungy Heritagist bastard—

  Tucker had hold of his travel bag now and was fumbling to unlatch it. A gun? A gun couldn’t hurt a moldie. With his left arm out of the way, Monique was free to shove a fat tendril down his throat. She’d been on the point of calling Xlotl for help, but now she was sure she was going to win. There was a good weak spot in the skull right behind the roof of the flesher’s mouth, and it wasn’t armored like the spot in his nose. Bye, flesher. But just as Monique began to push, something leapt out of Tucker’s suitcase and slapped up against her—and everything changed.

  Instead of being on top of the struggling Randy Karl Tucker, Monique was curled up on the floor beside him. His voice was inside her, whispering to her. She could make no move without his permission. Even her thoughts were not fully her own.

  “Yeah, you just lay still for now, Monique,” Randy said, getting to his feet. “Nice li’l tussle you put up there.”

  A lively little two-legged imipolex creature was strutting back and forth on the floor like a chicken. It was the thing that had jumped at Monique. “Back in the bag, Willa Jean,” Randy told it. “You done good. You pasted that superleech on her just in time.” He coughed and went into the bathroom to drink some water. The chicken stood there staring at Monique. It had a fuzzy purple patch on its back. It moved tentatively closer and gave Monique’s face a gentle peck, then a harder one, gouging out and absorbing a little strip of Monique’s imipolex.

  “Back in the bag, Willa Jean,” repeated Randy, coming out of the bathroom. “Now.” The creature hopped into Randy’s bag and he closed it back up.

  Randy dug in his pocket and examined a couple of small purple patches of imipolex he found there. Then he picked up the room’s uvvy and called someone, using a voice connection alone.

  “Aarbie? Randy here, ole son. Got me one. How soon can y’all get the boat out there? Copacetic. I’m startin’ now.” He turned off the uvvy.

  “We goin’ for a swim,” Randy told Monique, this time without speaking out loud. “We’ll walk outside and you’ll rickshaw me down to the cliff at Steamer Lane. We gonna step lively so your boss don’t stop us.”

  Monique had a sudden hallucination of the seabed lying all uncovered, with gasping fish lying on their sides and octopuses slithering about and great windrows of kelp filled with starfish of every color. She felt floppy and without force; she felt like a jellyfish.

  “Up and at ’em, Monique.” The voice goaded her upright, and she made her way out of Room 3D with Randy Karl Tucker close behind.

  Tre was sitting in front of the motel office, but Monique walked right past him. Randy had some brief discussion with Tre behind Monique’s back, and then Randy jumped onto her, riding her like a beast of burden. They raced down the hill to the water’s edge, then hurried the half mile north to Steamer Lane.

  “Now you be a wetsuit for me,” Randy told her and forced Monique to flow out around him, forced his nasty body all the way inside her. They dove off the cliff.

  The water broke around Monique in a dizzying explosion of color and light. She was hallucinating again. A whirlwind of pure energy boiled around her and through her. In the boiling she forgot herself entirely for a time and then, as the roar damped down, Monique realized she’d been swimming for ages; she could feel it from the fatigue in her body. The seabed looked odd; it was patterned with a grid like a map, and the fish around her seemed to have human faces. In the same dreamy way, the kelp plants seemed to be made of gears and metal.

  And then she stopped, and near her was a white boat. Sun-dappled wave crests marched out to the horizon and suddenly she noticed something amazing, a great poisonous green bulk hanging over the water near the boat, a spot she’d seen but not registered before. It was a great translucent green whale hanging there in midair, and now that Monique saw it, the whale began to fall, its flukes threshing the air. “You gonna follow that,” said the enemy who was nestled inside her, and the whale jumped backward in time, its great tapered tail rising up out of the water in an arc with the huge striped belly and giant mouth coming after, the whale hanging there in the air, smiling so strange and friendly that Monique began to laugh and laugh. She laughed so hard that her back split open, and the evil white worm man popped out of her and swam to the boat.

  “Follow the whale,” the man called, and now the dreamy ghost of a whale moved forward again in time, diving into the water, sounding for the ocean’s very floor, with Monique swimming after, swimming down and down toward the whale’s glowing green light.

  CHAPTER TWO

  RANDY

  September 2048 - April 2051

  Randy Karl Tucker grew up near the Dixie Highway in tacky Shively, down in the southwest corner of Louisville. About a century earlier, the Dixie Highway had been the main road into town from the army base at Fort Knox, thirty miles south of Louisville, and Shively had been a place where soldiers would come to taste the calm pleasures of civilian life—or to gamble at Churchill Downs and get drunk and sleep with floozies. Many of the soldiers ended up marrying Shively women; over the years it became a solid little community, with its full share of godless lowlifes, professional Christians, and dazed white trash.

  Randy’s mother Sue Tucker was bi, on the butch side, though cutely tomboyish to some male eyes. She was a master plumber with her own business that she ran out of her truck and her little house’s garage. Mostly she did repairs, though now and then she’d do contract work for remodeling.

  Sue didn’t like to talk about Randy’s
father, but children hear everything, and over the years Randy had learned that his father had been a random guy who’d happened to make it with Sue in the course of a big sex party at the La Mirage Health Club in downtown Louisville on Halloween, 2031. According to Sue, the guy had been masked behind a flickercladding Happy Cloak, disguised as a woman, in fact, and she’d never found out who he was.

  There were men around when Randy was quite young, but at the time he entered adolescence, Sue Tucker was in lesbian mode. One of Sue’s favorite girlfriends was a femme named Honey Weaver—a stocky bleached-blonde waitress with large breasts and a weak chin. Soon after Randy’s sixteenth birthday, Sue Tucker selected Honey to be the one to instruct Randy Karl about sex, the idea being that, as a lesbian, Honey would teach Randy a proper respect for women.

  “Randy Karl,” Sue said one September afternoon in 2048 after coming home to find Randy squirmingly watching porno on the uvvy once again. “Turn off that kilp. It’s antiwoman.”

  “Oh, come on, Sue.” He always called his mother by her first name. “It don’t hurt none. At least let me do it till I need glasses.” He was a mournful-looking lad with a long, thin face. He hadn’t gotten his growth yet and was only a little over five feet tall. He wore his hair in a flattop. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and khakis; the khakis had a nasty bulge in them from Randy’s watching the filth on the uvvy.

  “Randy Karl, it’s high time you learned what’s what. I want you to go on over to Honey Weaver’s right now.”

  “Huh? What for?”

  “She’s having a problem with her drain. You can fix that for her, can’t you?”

  Randy had often helped his mother on jobs, but this was the first time she’d offered to let him go out on his own.

  “Will I git paid union wage?”

  “And then some.”

  Randy put together a toolbox and walked down the street to Honey’s—she lived two and a half blocks away in a house exactly like the Tuckers’: a three-room bungalow with cheap ceramic siding and a concrete front stoop.

  Honey came to the door in a loosely fastened pink wrapper.

  “Oh, hi there, Randy. Sue told me you were on your way. I just changed out of my waitress clothes. Come on in.” As she opened the door, her wrapper slid a bit farther open, and Randy could see her bare breasts and a flash of her pubic hair. “What you starin’ at, boy?” said Honey with a gentle laugh. “Ain’t you never seen a live woman before?”

  “I—” choked Randy, setting down his box of tools with a clatter. “Honey, I—”

  “You’re all excited,” purred Honey. “You cute little thing.” She stretched out her arms so that her wrapper fell wide open. “Come here, Randy. Hug me and kiss my tits.”

  Randy exulted in the smell and feel of Honey’s pillowy breasts, breasts that smelled of sweat and perfume, breasts that rubbed Randy’s face with stiff nipples. Honey snaked her hand down and undid Randy’s pants. Before he knew what was happening, she’d gotten out his stiff little dick and he’d come off into her insistent, intimate fingers. He was so surprised and embarrassed that he burst into tears.

  “There, there,” said Honey, smiling down at him and rubbing his sperm onto her breasts. “That makes nice smooth skin. I like milking a little boy like you, Randy Karl. Would you like to see my vagina?”

  “Yes, Honey, I surely would.”

  “Kneel down on the floor in front of me.”

  Randy knelt on the smooth plastic floor, and Honey stepped up close to Randy with her fragrant, bushy crotch right at the level of his face. She adjusted her legs a bit, straddling them wider.

  “Kiss my pussy, Randy Karl. Lick on it all over.”

  Randy started in gingerly, but then Honey seized his head with both hands and pressed his face tight between her legs. Honey’s slippery, soft tissues felt luxurious, extravagant, intoxicating. Honey began a rapid rhythmic bucking of her pelvis against Randy’s mouth, a bucking that cascaded into chaotic shudders. And then she sank down to the floor beside Randy.

  Randy crawled up onto Honey, hoping to sink his painfully stiff erection into her—but she balked.

  “I don’t want no man’s dick in me never again, Randy Karl, not even yours.” She sat up, looking a little dazed. Outside it was dusk; the door was slightly open, and through the screen door Randy could see people down on the sidewalk passing by. But the kitchen lights were off and the people couldn’t see in. “If you do one more favor for me, Randy, I’ll milk you off again.”

  “Sure, Honey. I’ll do anything you say. This is the most fun I ever had.” At this moment Honey looked sublimely beautiful to Randy, even with the roll of fat at her waist and with her stark lack of a chin.

  “Wait right here.”

  Honey went into her bedroom and got something. A long, soft, plastic thing in the shape of a dick. It was dark blue with shifting highlights of gold.

  “This here’s my limpware dildo,” said Honey. “Since I’m a dyke, I call it a she. Her name is Angelika. Angelika, this is Randy Karl Tucker. Randy, meet Angelika.”

  The dildo twitched and simpered in Honey’s hand. It—she—actually had a little voice. Randy recognized that Angelika was made of imipolex with a DIM; she was like a moldie, only not so smart. Randy had hardly ever seen any moldies or even limpware in Shively before. There were enough militant Christian Heritagists around to keep that kind of thing out of sight.

  “Stick Angelika in me, Randy Karl,” said Honey, laying back on the floor. “It’s what your mommy always does for me. And get over on one side of me so’s I can reach your dick.”

  Angelika was lively and vibrant in Randy’s hand. She hummed as if in pleasurable anticipation. Noticing an odd smell, Randy held the dildo up to his nose and sniffed it. The limpware gave off a gamy fetid odor quite unlike Honey’s funky musk.

  “That’s the way moldies smell,” Honey explained. “It seems right nasty at first, but later you get used to it. It’s sexy! Spray out more smell, Angelika!”

  The dildo chirped and hissed, and the sharp moldie stink got ten times stronger. Randy could feel his blood pounding in his temples. He’d never been so aroused in his entire life.

  “Come on, Randy!” urged Honey. “We’re still just gittin’ started!”

  Over and over for the next two years—the rest of his time in high school—Randy kept coming back for sex with Honey, and Honey kept thinking of new things for them to do. When she noticed how interested Randy was in seeing her go to the bathroom, she bought a big moldie imipolex sheet that Randy would lie down on naked while Honey urinated all over him. The sheet’s name was Sammie-Jo.

  Randy’s grades dropped as he wandered around in a haze, continually thinking of things like the scent of Honey’s hot urine mingled with the rank odor of Sammie-Jo. He made some halfhearted attempts to date the girls he went to high school with, but nothing could come close to Honey Weaver, Angelika, and Sammie-Jo. Randy was becoming sexually addicted to imipolex.

  One of Honey’s motives for the whole affair was to focus Sue Tucker’s attention on Honey’s sexuality. Honey loved to tell Sue all the intimate details of what she did with Randy. At first Sue was compulsively, unwholesomely fascinated; during those unpleasant months Randy would sometimes catch his mother watching him with a bright, quizzical expression. But finally Sue’s motherly instincts won out and she banished all interest in her son’s sex life.

  This turned out to be a net loss for Honey, because Sue’s interest in Honey’s sexuality got repressed right alongside the visions of Randy servicing Honey. Sue had several screaming arguments with Honey on the uvvy before she could get Honey to stop calling her up with the latest details. After a year or so, the irregular love triangle became so galling to Sue that she stopped talking to Honey entirely.

  In the spring of Randy Karl’s senior year in high school, Sue flipped back to being het. She started a steady relationship with an unpleasant, foppish man named Lewis. Lewis had a mustache grown out so long that it was possible to t
wirl the ends, which was something Lewis frequently did. Lewis was a site manager for the company building London Earl Estates, a cut-rate housing development in Okalona, Kentucky, twenty miles south of Shively. Sue was doing a lot of the plumbing contracting at London Earl, which is how she met Lewis, who spent his days there in a trailer office. Lewis was a martinet and a weakling, but Sue seemed to enjoy him. She was quite a bit smarter than him, and she was generally able to get him to do whatever she wanted him to.

  As soon as Lewis moved in with Sue, he started pressuring Randy to leave, but Sue stuck up for her son. She moved Randy’s room out into the garage so Randy and Lewis wouldn’t get in each other’s way so much, and she began passing Randy all of her plumbing work other than the contracts out at London Earl Estates. Randy already had his journeyman plumber certification, and she wanted him to make master plumber before leaving home.

  “Technology can come and go, Randy Karl,” Sue liked to tell Randy. “But people are always going to use pipes. These days we got soft pipes and smart pipes, but they’re still pipes. There’s no other way to move water around, and nobody knows how to handle pipes except plumbers. Once you’re a master plumber, you’re fixed for life.”

  Randy was happier than he’d ever been that spring. His sex thing with Honey was going hot and heavy. And he made great money after school and on the weekends. He was getting really good at the new plumbing technologies. His favorite was the pipe-gun that would grow a plastic pipe right under a house’s crawl space, a snaky crawling pipe that would zig and zag where you told it to. He liked living in the garage, and Sue was proud of how fast he was learning.

  The end to this golden age came on June 20, 2050, the day after Randy graduated from high school.

  Randy woke up late; it was nearly noon. Some of his classmates had thrown a big party after the graduation and for once they’d let Randy come. He still felt giddy from the beer, pot, bourbon, and snap he’d had the night before. Randy wasn’t used to drinking and doping. How had he gotten home? Oh yeah, he’d walked, stopping every few blocks to puke into people’s yards. What a toot!