Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

The angles of the room twisted and loomed. Randy staggered to the sink and began vomiting onto the dishes, seeing thousands of slow-motion faces in the beige textures of his puke. Parvati stood quietly to one side, watching him. Through the uvvy, Randy could sense her sly glee. What else might she do to him?

Randy drank as much water as he could hold and forced himself to vomit again. His brain’s vision processor was crashed; he was getting his eyes’ unfiltered input; it was like seeing through twitching, splotchy fish-eye lenses. His hearing was equally xoxxed, all fades and echoes—he became convinced Parvati was whispering something that the superleech wouldn’t let him hear.

“Talk to me, Parvati,” cried Randy. “Talk to me out loud. Let her talk, superleech, let her say whatever she wants to, but don’t let her come at me.”

“I dare you to kill me,” said Parvati. “Kill me and get some fun out of it. Look at this.” Her flesh flowed and twisted and she took on the likeness of Honey Weaver. “You’re a freak, Randy Karl,” she drawled, hefting her tits. “You’re nothing more than a kid I liked to piss on. If you was a man, you’d take that knife outten the sink and kill me. But you’re a candy-ass chickenshit.”

The big long kitchen knife in the sink winked at Randy. He rinsed the vomit off it and hefted it in his hand. It was sharp, so sharp. He was careful to hold the point away from himself. He could see networks of veins and arteries beneath his flawed, ugly skin.

When Randy looked back at Parvati, she’d changed shape again. She looked exactly like Randy’s mother. “Who’s my father, Sue?” croaked Randy. “Why won’t you ever tell me? Tell me who’s my father!”

“Never mind about your father,” screamed Parvati/Sue. “I wish I’d aborted you! Don’t you have the guts to kill me? You stupid little jerk. If you let me walk out of here, I’ll get you fired from Emperor Staghorn Beetle!”

“I want my daddy,” said Randy, suddenly breaking into sobs.

Parvati’s skin grew dark and her teeth got sharp and long. She was turning into Kali. “Kill me!” she screamed. “Chop me up before I give you a thinking cap! It’s coming soon, you flesher freak! Kiiiiiiill !”

“Help me, Daddy!” screamed Randy Karl and lunged forward with the long knife. He stabbed and chopped and hacked for the longest time, and the immobile Parvati did nothing to stop him. Finally he was too tired to slice anymore. He dropped the knife to the floor and washed himself off in the sink. There were lots of crumbs of imipolex and chipmold on him; he kept thinking they were gobbets of coagulated blood. When he turned off the water, the room was very quiet. What had he done?

The weirdly bulging kitchen floor was covered with chunks of imipolex, none of them larger than a loaf of bread. They were Parvati. He’d killed Parvati. The pieces of imipolex were slowly dragging themselves around like big slugs. Randy sat cross-legged on the kitchen counter to be up high away from the slugs, and he closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see them.

Time passed and colors played behind Randy’s eyelids. He seemed to hear a man’s voice talking to him. His father? “You’re doing fine, son. I’m proud of you. You’re doing just fine.” Randy felt happy and calm. A gentle breeze wafted through the apartment and caressed him. Someone tapped him on the knee. He let his eyes flutter open.

“Bye, Randy.” It was Parvati, fully formed, though with a network of pale orange scars.

“What!?”

“I crawled back together. Except for that piece.” She pointed to a glob of imipolex lying off to one side of the floor with the purple welt of the superleech knotted into it. “That piece is yours. I tricked you into cutting it out of me.”

Randy fumbled for the knife.

“Don’t start again or I really will kill you. I feel stronger than ever. The only reason I don’t give you a thinking cap is that I’m so sick of you.” She turned and walked to the door, slightly limping. “Just for old times’ sake, I won’t call Emperor Staghorn till tomorrow afternoon. If I were you, I’d leave town before then. The dacoits, don’t you know.” The door slammed behind her.

Randy walked gingerly across the room and nudged the piece of imipolex that Parvati had left .

“I am superleech type 4, series 1, ID #6,” uvvied the hoarse little voice. “I am currently coupled to 723 grams of imipolex with traces of a moldie program. This imipolex was part of the left buttock of a moldie named Parvati.”

“Can you wipe out the moldie traces and run the imipolex yourself?”

“Yes. Shall I proceed?”

“Do it. And then keep watch. Grow some feet and walk around. If anyone or anything comes in here, squawk and wake me up. I gotta crash.”

Randy tottered to his bed, took off his uvvy, and fell into a whirling kind of nightmare sleep. At some point in the middle of the night, something hopped into bed with him and snuggled up by his chest. He cradled it against himself and slept a little better.

At dawn, the uvvy rang for him: “Randy Randy Randy Randy . . . “

A creature shaped like a young hen hopped off Randy’s bed onto the floor and began making a ruckus. What? Randy reached out and slapped the uvvy that sat on his bedside table, setting it to projection mode. Jenny’s face appeared. She had a big zit on the side of her forehead.

“Rise and shine, Randy! We have a lot to do today.”

“I’m not ready.” He rubbed his face, trying to put together his memory of what had happened the night before. The little chicken strutted this way and that, staring at Randy for approval. The nappy purple shape of the superleech ran down the center of its back.

“I saw it all,” said Jenny, looking eager and gossipy. “I never told you, but I keep a tap on your uvvy? So when I heard you going off about your father, I did some quick research and found out who he is.”

“Now, hold on,” said Randy. “Just slow down here. Parvati is gettin’ me fired anyway. I’m through working for you skungy Heritagists.”

“I’m not a Heritagist, Randy Karl,” said Jenny. “I’m a software simmie created by a certain loonie moldie who’s also called Jenny. For fast Earth contact, I need to live down here on a serious machine. So I’m working for the Heritagists just to like pay the rent for my space on their machine. I’m living on the Heritagists’ big underground asimov computer in Salt Lake City—but, um, Randy, I could move? With a client like you, I could be a freelance agent for both you and moldie Jenny from the Moon. I could buy myself a proprietary hardware node in Studio City.”

“Forget it!” said Randy. “Good-bye!”

“Wait! Don’t you want to know who your father is?”

“Okay, who is he?”

“ I’ll never tell,” giggled Jenny, every bit the snippy teenage Heritagist girl with a secret. “Just kidding! But you have to listen to my new plan too.”

“Yeah yeah.” Randy kept being distracted by the antics of the superleech-animated chicken; it was prancing around like a miniature moldie, pretending to scratch for worms in the wooden floor. Wormwood. Randy was still seeing colorful trails every time he moved his eyes. “Let me get it together for a minute, Jenny. I feel mighty rough.”

He went and looked in the kitchen. The floor was bare. There were flies on the vomit in the sink. He ran the water for a minute, taking a drink and rinsing off his face. What was that last thing Parvati had said about dacoits? He checked that the apartment door was locked, then took a pee. The hen trailed after Randy like a chick following its mother.

“I’m gone call you Willa Jean,” Randy told it. “That fine by you?” The chicken clucked and bobbed its head. Randy leaned over and petted it. “You my little friend, ain’t you, Willa Jean? I’ve always wanted a pet chicken. Good girl. Good Willa Jean.”