by Rudy Rucker
“Quuz killed my husband at the dome this morning,” responded an angry red moldie who resembled a crab.
“Not all of the personalities we decrypt will be like Quuz,” insisted Gurdle-7. “Most of them will be intelligent and full of useful information.”
“Useful like ‘Sun wants eat Moon’?” hooted another voice.
“Just listen for a minute,” said Gurdle-7. “This morning before the Wendy experiment, we did a test on some Silly Putters. Frangipane sent the Stairway To Heaven program to infect twelve of the Silly Putters in Corey Rhizome’s isopod.”
“You’re crazy, Gurdle-7!” raged the red moldie. “The infection’s going to spread! We ought to kill you!”
“The infection, it is not spreading,” volunteered Frangipane. “And I will recount why. It is that Rhizome’s Silly Putters have decrypted into some aliens who are mature, evolved beings. They are very glad to be able to decrypt here. They speak of our Earth-Sun system as a ‘new node’ and they are concerned with finding a way to ‘ensure the integrity of this new node.’ They are not clumsy babies from the Sun like Quuz. They are elegant old minds from deep in the space.”
“What’s to stop them from uvvying Einstein and running the Stairway To Heaven on every Silly Putter and DIM in town?” demanded a moldie who looked like a cholla cactus with braidlike green arms.
“That’s not what they want,” said Gurdle-7. “As a matter of fact, they destroyed Corey Rhizome’s uvvy. In the spirit of frankness, I suppose I should announce that Corey did infect one single Silly Putter in Einstein. But that Putter was instantly killed by its owner, Darla Starr.” Great moldie cries of fear and anger followed.
“I didn’t know that,” said Willy across the hubbub. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now,” said Gurdle-7. “Corey’s had two calls since the infection, and I monitored both of them. First he called Darla Starr, and then after the aliens took his uvvy away, Corey used a regular old vizzy phone to accept a call from Darla. During the second call, I had the opportunity to notice that the aliens were very interested in the fact that two of Corey’s Silly Putters had turned out to be immune to the Stairway To Heaven infection. The aliens wanted Corey to hand those last two Silly Putters over for examination, but Corey wouldn’t. It became an issue. In the end, the aliens got their way, and Corey’s vizzy phone got broken. That’s why there haven’t been any more calls.”
“The rath and the Jubjub bird!” exclaimed Willy. “Yes! They’re immune because they have cubic damping! We have to go to Corey’s isopod and get that algorithm. I can’t remember the exact details, but I can find them out by looking at the rath and the Jubjub bird. And then maybe we can use cubic damping to make all the moldies safe from the Stairway To Heaven.”
“Frankly I’d be a little leery of going in there with those aliens,” said Gurdle-7. “Until we have more information. But I could take you as far as Corey’s air lock.”
“Gurdle-7 is a filthy coward!” hollered one of the angry Nest moldies.
“We should bomb the Rhizome isopod!” yelled another.
“Calm down and wait till I go up there and see what the situation is,” said Willy.
“I think the Stairway To Heaven is a flesher trick to kill all the moldies!” said the green cactuslike moldie, waving its spiny arms. “Gurdle-7 is a traitor!”
“I’ll kill him if no one else will!” yelled another moldie, the one like a red crab. “I’m going to get Gurdle-7 right now!”
“Kill Terri Percesepe too! She came here inside Quuz! It’s all her fault!” shouted the cactus moldie.
“Destroy the Stairway To Heaven!” said one and then five and then a host of others, falling into a chant. “Bomb the lab! Bomb the lab! Bomb the lab!”
“Local network mode,” said Willy, and all the Nest moldie presences disappeared from Terri’s uvvy—all except Gurdle-7, Jenny, Frangipane, and Ormolu. “We have to leave right away,” Willy told them. “Exit Plan K. Hurry!”
Looking through the wall into the cave, Terri saw the four moldies race out of the lab. And then she saw them circle around to the front of the pink-house. Gurdle-7 and the original Jenny pushed their way into the pink-house’s air lock and Willy slammed on the lock’s air feed. Outside, Ormolu and Frangipane stood guard, Frangipane holding a heavy-duty needler and Ormolu wielding an O.J. ugly stick.
Now Willy opened the inner door of the air lock and Jenny and Gurdle-7 came writhing in. Looking outside, Terri could see the approaching lights of perhaps a dozen moldies. Not as many as she’d feared. Frangipane turned on her needler and swept its laser ray through an arc of warning.
“Hello there, Terri Percesepe,” said Gurdle-7 as he bowed down by Willy’s side and split his back open. The opening of his tissues changed his reek from intense to unbelievable. “Perhaps you don’t know this, but without your husband Tre’s contribution, the success of my Gurdle decryption process would have taken much longer. We are grateful.”
“Maybe we’re grateful,” said carrot-shaped Jenny, who’d flopped down in the middle of the oriental carpet next to Terri and was splitting herself open as well. “But so far your decryption hasn’t done us one bit of good, Gurdle. Get on in me, Terri. Snug as a bug.”
“Don’t be superficial, Jenny,” said Gurdle-7, sealing himself up over Willy. “This is the most important day in the whole history of the world.”
“I just hope we live through it!”
So Terri got inside Jenny, and then they went out through the air lock and back onto the floor of the Nest. The red moldie with claws like a crab came running toward them. Shiny Ormolu braced himself and fired off a burst of metal darts that cut the crab moldie into three or four twitching chunks. Two boxy blue moldies scavenged up the broken pieces of the crab. Meanwhile flowery Frangipane leaned back and sent a needler blast up into the core of the cactus-shaped green moldie as it powered down toward them. The attacker melted and splattered to the Nest floor in lumps that were gathered up by other opportunistic moldies.
“Hold tight, Terri, we’re going airborne,” said Jenny, rearing up onto the fat end of her carrot body. There was a poofing sound and the four moldies rose up into the great vacuum of the Nest, each propelled by a slim ion beam. Ormolu and Frangipane fired some shots back at the moldies still coming after them, and soon those moldies abandoned their pursuit.
Terri sighed in relief and looked downward. The sight of the Nest floor was mesmerizing. It felt almost as if they were gnats inside a giant old-fashioned computer box, with the floor a great motherboard covered with winding lines and square-chunked chips.
Looking toward where they’d come from, Terri realized that the pursuing moldies had turned back in order to trash Willy’s dome and Gurdle-7’s lab. There was a small bright grouping of moldie dots down there—and now there was a sudden flash as a bomb destroyed all of the lab’s equipment.
“That’s seven lives’ work!” screeched Gurdle-7 over the uvvy. “Let’s go back and punish them! They’ve destroyed all my S-cubes! All of my records were in there. And our backup of Wendy Mooney! Those ignorant chauvinistic fools! They’re no better than fleshers!”
“You do have all the Stairway To Heaven knowledge stored in your own body, don’t you?” asked Willy.
“Yes, but that’s the only complete copy. If something were to happen to me . . . ”
“Silence,” urged Frangipane. “Who knows who is listening?”
They rose farther, with Ormolu and Frangipane having to shoot at several other moldies who came darting out at them from the narrowing Nest walls. Up above them Terri could see the blazing light prism through the crater hole. And then they sailed up through the crater hole and around the prism. The boundless open space of the Moon’s surface sprang out around them, silvery and gray.
“Willy,” said Terri, her voice shaking despite herself. “I still want to uvvy my husband. How do I place the call?”
“Push the button,” said Willy, his icon distra
ctedly fashioning a virtual button and displaying it in front of Terri. Terri pushed the button right away, and after a little bit Tre’s face appeared.
“Tre!” cried Terri. Like radio waves, uvvy signals were electromagnetic waves that travel at the speed of light, and even light takes over a second to make a one-way trip between Earth and Moon. An agonizing two and a half seconds elapsed while Terri’s info traveled down to Earth and Tre’s info traveled back.
“Terri! Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m inside a moldie who just flew out of the moldies’ Nest, Tre. We’re going to the dome of a man named Corey Rhizome.” Another long pause. Terri noticed that Willy and the four moldies were eavesdropping.
“Oh, darling.” Tre’s voice was breaking. “I heard about Blaster crashing into the spaceport and I thought—”
“I surfed my way through it,” said Terri, her own tears starting to flow. “It was terrible. And things still aren’t too glassy.” They’d risen up to nearly a mile above the Moon now, the four moldies flying in formation.
“1 love you, Terri,” said Tre’s dear voice.
“I love you too. Give the children a big kiss from me.” Another two-and-a-half-second wait.
“I will. But tell me more about what happened, Terri. The only news we’re able to get about it is dooky kilp from freelance newsies in Einstein. Why did Blaster crash? And what happened to all the moldies at the spaceport?”
“Willy Taze and a moldie called Gurdle-7 invented a kind of program that changes the dimensions of imipolex or something. And that makes the moldies get possessed by like alien personality waves. Gurdle-7 said you helped them, but how?” Now Gurdle-7, Jenny, Ormolu, and Frangipane cut back their power and let themselves coast up to the top of a huge flight parabola.
“My God!” came Tre’s reply. “They must have used my N-dimensional Perplexing Poultry design! Someone or something called Jenny showed me Ramanujan’s Tessellation Equation, and I designed the new Poultry for her. Is there maybe a Jenny up there?”
“Um-hmmm!” uvvied Jenny, displaying her teenage girl icon as she butted into the conversation. “I’ve got your little wife right inside me, Tre! Too true!”
“I’ll call you again when I get some privacy,” said Terri. “It looks like we’ll be landing down at Corey’s house soon. Apparently some of those alien things are inside it. Wish me luck. And—and good-bye, darling, just in case. I’ve always loved you. You’ve been good to me.” She waited the two and a half seconds for Tre’s wet-eyed good-bye, and then she pushed the virtual button to end the heart-wrenching call.
They were arcing down toward a small crater filled with a shiny dome. Corey Rhizome’s isopod. The moldies turned their ion jets back on to brake the fall. When Terri had composed herself again, she asked Willy a question.
“Did you really use Tre’s Perplexing Poultry to design the Stairway To Heaven?”
“Yes,” said Willy. “We had all the pieces, and we couldn’t quite fit them together. But once Jenny showed the information to Tre, he knew what to do. Not that he realized what we needed it for. He’s such an N-dimensional artist that he did it for free. He wanted to do it.”
“You ripped him off?” demanded Terri.
“If there turns out to be a profit in it, I’ll try and see that he gets a share.”
Now Jenny spoke up again, still using her prairie girl icon. “It’s a real pain talking to Earth from up here, isn’t it, Terri,” she uvvied chattily. “What with all those two- or three-second waits. I talk to Earth a lot and—you know me, once I get going, I like to just fabulate on and on. Yadda-da-dadda-da-dadda.” Her ion jets were blasting harder and they were falling slower and slower. The Moon’s horizon was rising up around them again.
“Are you nervous about going to Corey’s?” asked Terri.
Jenny chose to ignore the question. “Um, so like I was saying,” she continued. “Those light-speed waits are such a bother that I found a way around them. Though a flesher probably wouldn’t be able to do what I do.”
“Do what?” asked Terri, staring at the way that the isopod dome bulged out of its little crater. They were lowering down toward a spot a few hundred feet to the crater’s side.
“Do what Jenny does so she can gossip with Earth as fast as she likes. I have a remote slave simmie of myself running inside one of the Heritagists’ computers in Salt Lake City! And my simmie’s smart enough to think a few seconds ahead or even to say stuff on her own. That way when I talk to people like your husband, they don’t realize that I’m a moldie on the Moon. Your husband’s a real cutie, by the way, Terri. I bet he’s such a good fuck.”
“What would you know about fucking?” demanded Terri, surprised enough to momentarily forget about the aliens in Corey’s dome.
“You’d be surprised. Um-hmmmm! Those Heritagists think my simmie is something that works for them, and they’re always getting it to, um, investigate the sexual shenanigans that their ministers get up to? It’s nasty work, but I like it a lot. Humans are just too funny. You should have seen this one man Randy Karl Tucker, who I used to work with. Come to think of it, I guess maybe you’ve met him? Randy Karl is Willy’s son, though Willy doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Shut up, Jenny,” said Willy.
“Yes, Jenny,” said Gurdle-7. “Please shut up. The most important meeting of all time is about to happen.”
The four moldies landed in the dust near Corey’s isopod, kicking up a spray of moondust that quickly fell back down.
Hearing about Randy Karl Tucker had inflated a balloon of anger in Terri’s chest. “It’s Randy Karl who kidnapped poor Monique and got me into this mess in the first place. I can’t say that I like the sleazy things you’ve been responsible for, Jenny. Some of your Santa Cruz moldie pals murdered my father five years ago. You loonie moldies should leave Earth the hell alone.”
“Oh now, don’t be getting on your high horse, Terri. We’re all in this together. More than ever, now that Gurdle-7’s great invention has brought the aliens to meet us. Gurdle-7’s my husband, you know.”
“I bet he’s such a good fuck,” said Terri.
“Will you two stop it!” hissed Willy.
In silence they made their way toward the bulging dome. Willy led them to a notch in the crater’s edge where a narrow strip of the whole height of the dome wall was exposed. A stone ramp led down to an air lock at the level of the isopod’s ground floor.
“I’ll bring you into the air lock, Willy,” said Gurdle-7. “But then I think I’ll come back outside.”
“We’re waiting outside too,” chimed in Frangipane and Ormolu.
“Fraidy cats,” said Jenny. “Party poopers. I’m going aaall the way.” On the last word, her voice broke into a dry frightened squeak. She made a throat-clearing noise and continued. “Jenny likes to be the first to know!”
“It’s odd how they’re not responding to my uvvy signals at all,” said Gurdle-7 quietly as he and Jenny humped into the air lock. The lock hissed full of air, and the moldies disgorged Willy and Terri. “Well, I’ll be right outside, Jenny,” continued Gurdle-7, worming out through the lock’s airtight outer sphincter. “I’ll count on you to stay in constant uvvy touch with me.”
The air lock’s inner door swung open, and there stood a figure of unearthly beauty—a woman like a classic marble statue, though made of supple imipolex. Her flesh glowed with a mild internal light; her pale skin was as a seashell’s iridescent lining.
“Welcome,” she said. “Willy, Terri, and Jenny. In your system of air-pressure modulations, my name might go like this.” Her whole body seemed to vibrate, and the air filled with the piping of flutes, the whining of sitars, and the gentle resonations of a gong. A sound that rose and fell and left Terri hungering to hear more.
“A shimmer of sound,” murmured Willy.
“Then let Shimmer be my human name,” said the goddess. “I much prefer that to Clever Hansi. Please enter and join us. Corey is here, also his fr
iends Darla, Whitey, Yoke, and Joke. And a large number of aliens. I’m listening to everyone’s conversation at once, and it’s very exciting.”
Hardly knowing what to say, they accompanied Shimmer down the isopod hall toward a hubbub of voices. “It sounds like they’re in the conservatory,” Willy said to Terri. “I used to live here, you know. Shimmer, I can’t believe that you’re what’s become of Clever Hansi. Clever Hansi was half your size. Just a little Silly Putter doorgirl.”
“I helped myself to thirty kilograms of Corey’s extra imipolex,” said Shimmer. “We aliens divided up all the extra imipolex stored here and made ourselves decent-sized bodies. There’s twelve of us. We decided it would be diplomatic to take on human forms.”
“Corey let you help yourself to the imipolex?”
“We did what we liked. Corey spent most of the day hiding from us in his bathroom and in his kitchen. He just came out a little while ago.”
“Hi, Willy!” called everyone as they entered the high-ceilinged conservatory, a cool airy room with three soft couches and potted plants everywhere. The conservatory’s transparent ceiling had a system of lights and louvers designed to simulate the ordinary cycle of a twenty-four-hour Earth day. There were straw rugs on the stone floors, and in the center of the room there was a large carved stone fountain—the only fountain in existence on the Moon. Terri had seen a picture of it once in an article about reclusive limpware tycoon Willy Taze. The couches were arranged around the fountain like three sides of a big triangle.
Scattered about the room were eleven more human-shaped imipolex aliens like Shimmer. They were sitting on the floor—some near the fountain and some near the edges of the room—animatedly passing back and forth hundreds of S-cubes that they’d gathered from around the isopod. And seated on two of the couches were five humans.
“This is Terri and Jenny,” said Willy. “Terri, this is Corey, Darla, Whitey, Joke and Yoke.” Terri sized them up. If muscular old Whitey were to get a tan and to shave off the groovy mohawk that ran all the way down his back, he could maybe pass for an aging surfer, but Corey looked like an unsavory old stoner, even grottier than Willy—no wonder they’d been roommates. Corey had two imipolex pets on the couch next to him: a giant-beaked little bird and a small green pig. As for Darla, well, the woman looked outrageously sensual—obviously she was very comfortable in her own skin, though just now her eyes were blazing with some kind of fear and rage. Darla’s twin daughters Joke and Yoke were cute and lively, Joke in bright punk rags with a blonde-and-purple hairdo, and Yoke dressed moonmaid-style in a flowing dress and silver boots. Joke was sitting next to Corey and toying with Corey’s plastic pets.