Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Don’t do that,” said Xanana. “She deserves better. Why don’t you try and get a ransom for her?”

“Maybe from the Percesepe family,” said Blaster. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. But they’re like allies of mine through the Heritagist connection, and it would look bad to be holding them up for ransom. Is there anyone else who might pay, Terri? Do you have any important friends?”

“Stahn Mooney!” exclaimed Terri. “Ask him. My husband Tre works for one of Stahn’s companies. You moldies have a lot of respect for Stahn, right?”

“We don’t respect any fleshers,” said Blaster. “Can’t you understand that? In any case, I’d want to hand you over to someone on the Moon. Do you know anyone on the Moon, Terri?”

Terri racked her brain. Starshine had mentioned some friends of Mooney’s—a man named Whitey Mydol who lived with a woman named Darla.

“Uh . . . have you ever heard of Whitey Mydol? And Darla?”

“ Yeah I have,” said Blaster. “Maybe I’ll get in touch with them. So long for now.”

“Wait,” cried Terri. “How long is this flight going to take? What am I going to eat and drink?”

“You fleshers,” growled Blaster. “Always asking for more. The trip takes a week. Can’t you wait for food and water till we get there?”

“No.”

“Let Xanana worry about it. He’s the one who brought you.”

Terri focused on Xanana’s uvvy feed. He was happier and happier about going to the Moon.

“Xanana, can you make food and water for me?”

“Well, I can drip out some moldie juice for you. It’s sort of like sap, except you won’t like the way it smells. It’s nourishing. How are your nose filters holding up?”

Terri hadn’t thought about them for a while. She felt her nose, stiff with the palladium sponges inside its nostrils. “The filters are fine. I guess I’d like to try some moldie juice. My mouth is awfully dry.”

“I’ll push out a nipple by your mouth. Just suck on it.”

Terri put her lips around the slick imipolex nipple and cautiously sucked. Her mouth filled with a lukewarm salty flow of slippery fluid. Thanks to the nose filters, she couldn’t really smell it, and she was able to swallow it down without gagging.

“Thank you, Xanana. I’ll repay you somehow.”

“No need. I’m happy you got me into this.”

Terri drifted off into a dreamless nap. At some point she began having a vision of Tre. It took her a minute or two to realize that this was an uvvy call and that she was again awake.

Tre was standing on the patch of lawn in front of the motel office. It was night and he was staring up at the sky. “Terri! Finally! Are you okay?”

“I’m alive, but it’s a pretty iffy situation. I’m inside a moldie grex that’s flying to the Moon. What a freak show. Are the children all right?”

“They’re scared. It was hard to get them to sleep. We saw that moldie rocket blasting off; we were looking at the ocean just then. Then Everooze came over and told us the bad news. Can you breathe? Is there water?”

“So far Xanana’s taking care of me. But it’s going to take seven days.”

“Oh, Terri. I can’t stand to think of you alone up there in outer space. Will the moldies let you go when they get to the Moon?”

“They want to sell me for ransom. You’re supposed to get Stahn Mooney to call Whitey Mydol and Darla on the Moon. If Mooney will pay.”

“He’ll pay all right—if I have to kill him. He owes me big-time. Remember how he gave my 4D Poultry source code to Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae, Ltd.? This afternoon I found out that Emperor Staghorn used my poultry to invent the superleeches. And thanks to the superleeches, my wife is on her way to the Moon. Oh, Terri. I’m sorry I haven’t been nicer to you. I love you so much.”

“Just get me out of this, Tre, and don’t waste energy guilt-tripping yourself. I don’t want to end up down in the loonie moldies’ Nest.”

“I’ll talk to Stahn again right away. And then I’m gonna jam some math. This stuff Emperor Staghorn came up with is pretty exciting.”

“Take good care of the kids. Maybe they can uvvy me in the morning. The view from here is stunning. I’d like to show it to them.”

“We’ll call early tomorrow. In about ten hours. Hang in there, darling. I’ll call Mooney now and make sure Whitey and Darla ransom you as soon as Blaster hits the Moon. I love you so much, Terri. You’re so small and precious, up there in the sky.”

“And I love you, Tre.”

Tre’s image jittered away, and Terri could stared back at shiny soft small Gaia with her own eyes.

The day after Willy Taze got off death row, he met Stahn Mooney.

Willy and his rebel friends were bopper lovers; they thought artificial life forms were just as good as people. The rebels busted Willy out of the Louisville jail and smuggled him down to Florida, where he could do some good. Willy made the trip hidden in a truckload of meat, garbed in an imipolex bubble-topper spacesuit for warmth and air. The minute he hit Florida, Willy got on a computer and gosperized the Gimmie’s air defenses with turd bits and foo series so that the a-life invasion could come down. Around dawn an old woman named Annie Cushing drove Willy to a particular beach on Sanibel Island, Florida, Willy still wearing his bubbletopper, the date March 17, 2031, a day that would be forever known as Spore Day.

There was a sound of ion jets, abruptly terminated, and then Stahn and Wendy came coasting down from the sky on big Happy Cloak wings; they were each wearing about a hundred kilograms of chipmold-infected imipolex. In the firmament high above them, quadrillions of chipmold spores formed a barely visible cirrostratus cloud made wavy by the steady nibbling of the subtropical jet stream. The rising sun glinted off the spore cloud, tracing a great halo that would soon circle the heavens worldwide. Spore Day marked the death of Gaia’s boppers and chips, the birth of her moldies and DIMs.

“It’s good to be back,” said Stahn. “Thank you, Willy. Thanks, Annie.” He slung his right wing across Willy’s back. The heavy wing pulled loose from Stahn and stayed on Willy, merging its plastic with Willy’s bubbletopper and sinking thin probes into his neck.

Willy smiled to feel the boiling rush of information. The Happy Cloak spoke to him and transmitted direct messages from Stahn and Wendy. It was like having them whisper in his ears.

“Let’s stride,” murmured Stahn. “I don’t want a lot of goobs to see me here.”

“I’m for it,” answered Willy. “The farther underground I go, the better.” He turned to Annie. “Thanks for helping.”

“God bless you, Willy,” said old Annie. “Your grandfather Cobb would be proud of you. Keep it bouncing.”

And then the smart moldie ‘Cloaks formed themselves into dolphin shapes, and Willy, Stahn, and Wendy took off undersea. The clear Gulf waters were shallow out to about a mile, where the bottom dropped off steeply. Huge surgeonfish and groupers sped away from the moldie-­encased humans.

“Where we going?” asked Willy.

“I want to swim around to the other side of Florida and get near Cocoa Beach,” said Stahn. “At the right moment, we’ll blast up out of the water like old-time submarine-launched missiles.”

“ I’ll blast off?”

“No, man, just me and Wendy. We’re going to fly up to the spaceship Selena that’s landing at the spaceport tomorrow. Of course the Selena’s bopper slave computers are already dead, but this woman Fern Beller is piloting the ship down. Fern is very together. She’s wearing a Happy Cloak and doing the astrogation in her head. She’ll let me and Wendy aboard so quietly that nobody will know how we really came down.”