Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“It’s safer than you realize,” Gurdle-7 was uvvying to the Nest moldies as Terri tuned in.

“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 cactus-like 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?”