Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Why can’t I come too?” asked Willy. “If the Gimmie catches up with me—”

“Exactly,” said Stahn. “Which is why you don’t want to be on the Selena when she lands. There’ll be customs inspectors, reporters, xoxxin’ Gimmie pigs, and quarantine for all aboard. It’s no prob for me because I’m a hero; for you it would be back to the death house. Once the pig truly grasps that the chipmold’s already infected everything, they’ll let me and Wendy out of quarantine. Probably take six weeks, tops. ISDN’ll pay off whoever they have to pay. And dig it, man, then me and Wendy move to San Francisco and I run for the U.S. Senate.”

“I think Willy should move to the Moon,” said Wendy’s light voice. “It’s nice there. Not so heavy. The gravity’s too strong on Earth. I could hardly stand up on the beach just now. Go to the Moon, Willy.”

“Affirmo!” said Stahn. “The Moon is where it’s kickin’. Fern can take you when she goes back, Willy. Lay low for a month or two, however long it takes, and then sneak aboard when the Selena gets cleared for takeoff . You can hook up with Fern when she gets out of quarantine. You lucky dog. Fern, Fern, Fern—the woman is hot.”

“You’re married now, Stahn,” warned Wendy. “And I’m pregnant.”

“I’m only saying that she’s hot. I won’t act out. I promise. Anyway, she doesn’t like me.”

“While I’m waiting for Fern—” put in Willy. “I should hang around Cocoa?”

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” said Stahn. “The Gimmie is going to be xoxxed as of today. Spore Day! In a week there won’t be a computer working on the whole planet. Not one.”

Stahn was right about that; in fact, most computers were dead by the end of the day. He and Wendy took off for the Selena the next morning, and that evening Willy and his Happy Cloak swam ashore and landed in a small estuarial swamp.

“I’ll stash you here in these mangrove thickets,” Willy told his ‘Cloak.

“If you do that, I won’t wait for you,” said the ‘Cloak. “I have not traveled all this way to cower in filth. Keep me with you; wear me as a garment. I’ll slide down low and emulate a workman’s heavy boots and trousers. I can shift my plug-in to the base of your spine.”

“If you’re going to be a long-term symbiote with me, I ought to have a name for you,” said Willy.

“Call me Ulam,” said the ‘Cloak. “It’s an abbreviated form of a dead bopper’s name: Ulalume. Most of my imipolex used to be Ulalume’s flickercladding—Stahn had a couple of hoppers’ worth on his back. Ulalume was female, but I think of myself as a male. Be still while I move the plug-in, and then we can go.”

So here’s shirtless Willy under the star-spangled Florida sky with eighty pounds of moldie for his shoes and pants, scuffing across the cracked concrete of the JFK spaceport pad. The great concrete apron was broken up by a widely spaced grid of drainage ditches, and the spaceport buildings were dark. It occurred to Willy that he was very hungry.

There was a roar and blaze in the sky above. The Selena was coming down. Close, too close. The nearest ditch was so far he wouldn’t make it in time, Willy thought, but once he started running, Ulam kicked in and superamplified his strides, cushioning on the landing and flexing on the takeoff s. They sprinted a quarter of a mile in under twenty seconds and threw themselves into the coolness of the ditch, lowering down into the funky brackish water. The juddering yellow flame of the great ship’s ion beams reflected off the ripples around them. A hot wind of noise blasted loud and louder; then all was still.

Ordinarily a fleet of trucks might have surrounded the Selena to unload her, but on this evening, the day after Spore Day, there were no vehicles that functioned. A small group of Gimmie officials walked out to the Selena and waited until its hatch was hand-winched open. Watching from his drainage ditch, Willy saw Stahn, Wendy, and the others being led away. He spotted the one who was probably Fern Beller, the tall willowy brunette who was doing all the talking.

“Looks like they left the Selena all alone,” Willy observed to his Happy Cloak.

“The Selena can act by herself if need be,” said Ulam. “Fear not.”

“I’m really hungry,” said Willy. “Let’s go into town and find some food.” As they walked the rest of the way across the spaceport field, they encountered a crowd of aggrieved Florida locals, many of them senior citizens.

“Y’all come from that ship?” demanded one of them, a lean Cuban. His voice was tight and high.

“No no,” said Willy. “I work for the spaceport.”

“What the Sam Hill kinda pants do he got on?” demanded a fat black woman.

“These are fireproof overalls,” said Willy. “I wear them in case there’s an explosion.”

“You stick around, vato , you’ll see somethin’ explode, all right,” said the Cuban. “We gone wail on that ship, es verdad . Their loonie chipmold broke our machines forever.”

“You ain’t a-hankerin’ to try and stop us, is you?” rumbled a new voice from the crowd. “ ‘Cause effen you is, I’m gone have to take you out.”

“Oh no, no indeed,” said Willy. “I’m going on break for supper. In fact, I didn’t even see you.”

“Food’s free tonight,” whooped a white cracker woman. “Especially if you packin’ heat! Let’s see who can hit the ship from here!” There was a fusillade of gunshots and needler blasts, and then the mob surged toward the Selena , blazing away at the ship as they advanced.

Their bullets pinged off the titaniplast hull like pebbles off galvanized steel; the needlers’ laser rays kicked up harmless glow spots of zzzt . The Selena shifted uneasily on her hydraulic tripod legs.

“Her hold bears a rich cargo of moldie flesh,” said Ulam’s calm eldritch voice in Willy’s head. “Ten metric tons of chip-mold-infected imipolex, surely to be worth a king’s ransom once this substance’s virtues become known. This cargo is why Fern flew the Selena here for ISDN. I tell you, the flesher rabble attacks the Selena at their own peril. Although the imipolex is highly flammable, it has a low-grade default intelligence and will not hesitate to punish those who would harm it.”

When the first people tried to climb aboard the Selena , the ship unexpectedly rose up on her telescoping tripod legs and lumbered away. As the ship slowly lurched along, great gouts of imipolex streamed out of hatches in her bottom. The Selena looked like a defecating animal, like a threatened ungainly beast voiding its bowels in flight—like a frightened penguin leaving a splatter trail of krilly shit. Except that the Selena’s shit was dividing itself up into big slugs that were crawling away toward the mangroves and ditches as fast as they could hump, which was plenty fast.

Of course, someone in the mob quickly figured out that you could burn the imipolex shit slugs, and a lot of the slugs started going up in crazy flames and oily, unbelievably foul-smelling smoke. The smoke had a strange disorienting effect; as soon as Willy caught a whiff of it, his ears started buzzing and the objects around him took on a jellied peyote solidity.

The burning slugs turned on their tormentors, engulfing them like psychedelic kamikaze napalm. There was great screaming from the victims, screams that were weirdly, hideously ecstatic. And then the mob’s few survivors had fled, and the rest of the slugs had wormed off into the flickering night. Willy and Ulam split the scene as well.

Beyond the light of the flames and past the pitch-black spaceport, all the roads and buildings were dark. There was, in fact, no glow anywhere on the horizon. The power grid was dead.