Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“We missed one!” shouted Darla to the three moldies. “We missed Shimmer!”

A dozen pellets of imipolex whistled past Darla’s head. Shimmer bent slightly to one side and lifted her leg. All the poofballs missed her and burst harmlessly into flames against the fountain’s basin. Whitey got around behind Joke, Yoke, and Darla to shoot the ugly stick toward Shimmer some more and completely missed her again and again. Shimmer turned and ducked and hopped and pirouetted, moving in dreamy slow motion, always in the right place at the right time. The room was filling with thick black smoke, oily with plastic and—Darla realized in a sudden wave of disorientation—loaded with the psychedelic vapors of camote.

A rapid breeze swept by Darla, fanning the blazing imipolex of the three dead aliens by the fountain. It was Shimmer running by her, disappearing into a far corner of the room.

“Everybody out now!” Corey was yelling. “We have to seal off the smoke! Everyone out in the hall so I can seal the door!” The bewildered Terri was already over there with him.

Darla seized Joke by the wrist and dragged her toward the door. Whitey had hold of Willy and Yoke. Ormolu, Jenny, and Frangipane came on their own. The flames were roaring higher and higher. In the stony slowed-down time of the camote smoke, it felt like a long, long trip to the hallway door.

All the while, Corey kept yelling for them. “Hurry up! The ceiling could blow out any time!”

As they made their way, the smoke grew thicker. Whitey went last, still firing his ugly stick back into the room, hoping to hit Shimmer. When Darla made it to the hallway, she gasped down some of the less smoky air and turned to stare into the inferno of the conservatory.

In the center of the room, on top of the fountain, stood Shimmer, staring calmly at them. Two heartbeats passed, Darla shouted, and a volley of poofballs and flechettes shot toward the alien. But by then Shimmer had sprung high upward and turned on the ion jets in her moldie body’s heels. The conservatory roof shattered and a huge rush of wind slammed the conservatory door shut with a deafening thud.

The door to the conservatory held firm, but on the other side of it there were alarming crashes and screechings as the room’s air rushed out into the vacuum, whirling the objects in the conservatory like a cyclone.

“This isopod is really blowout-proof, isn’t it, Willy?” said Corey, shouting to make himself heard over the chaos in the next room.

“That’s how I designed it,” said Willy. “But I’ve been wrong before. The farther we get from the conservatory, the better. Let’s head down the hall, close the hall door, go through the kitchen, close the kitchen door, and then go up the stairs to the garage. There’s a bunch of bubbletoppers in there and two moon buggies. Whose idea was it to kill the aliens?”

“I’ll take the credit,” said Darla, trotting along beside Willy. “I’m part Native American. We know a lot about cultural imperialism.”

“You have a point,” said Willy. “But Gurdle-7’s going to be furious.”

“Gurdle-7’s dead,” said Whitey.

“I think you’re a bitch, Ma,” said Joke. “The aliens were beautiful. They had so much to teach us.”

“Well, there’s still two of them left to learn from,” said Corey, ushering the group out of the hall and into the kitchen. “There’s still Shimmer and the Wendy version of Quuz.”

“We still gotta fly up and kill Quuz and save Stahn Mooney!” exclaimed Whitey. “Are you moldies ready for that?”

“We’ve helped enough,” said Ormolu. “I’m scared that Shimmer’s going to do something bad to us now.”

As if in confirmation, there was a roaring behind the hall door. The hall roof had given way as well. It sounded like the end of the world.

“How do we get out of here?” shrieked Jenny. “I want to go back to the Nest!”

“And I want to go home to Santa Cruz,” wailed Terri.

“Through this door for the garage,” said Corey, crossing the kitchen and opening a door that led to an upward flight of stairs. “Everyone hurry on up there and put on a bubbletopper. The whole garage is an air lock.”

Corey went last, closing the kitchen door and the staircase door behind them. The seven humans wriggled into the waiting bubbletoppers, Corey still carrying his rath and Jubjub bird. There were more ominous crashes and roars from the isopod. Once they had the bubbletoppers on, they switched to uvvy communication and Corey cycled the garage’s big air lock door open.

“ Adieu ,” said Frangipane, humping out to the open surface of the Moon and preparing to fly away.

“Good luck,” added Jenny, joining Frangipane and anxiously glancing up at the black sky.

“We did our best,” said gleaming Ormolu.

And then, in a puff of dust, the three moldies had jetted away, arcing off toward the Nest.

“Let’s get clear of the isopod right away,” uvvied Corey. Darla and her family got on one of the moon buggies, while Corey, Willy, and Terri got on the other. They floored the accelerators and the buggies darted out across the dusty surface of the Moon.

Yoke was driving again, with Joke next to her and Whitey and Darla in back. Darla turned to stare back at the isopod, and as she watched, the ragged hole over the conservatory and hallway ripped farther open. The entire remaining part of the dome gave way in a great burst of frozen air, with clothes, furniture, and huge branches of the marijuana trees tumbling up through the lunar vacuum.

“So much for your blowout-proof design, Willy,” said Corey’s slow ironic voice. “Oh well. I was thinking about moving back into Einstein anyway.”

A voice suddenly crackled over Darla’s uvvy and over the uvvies of the others. The voice of Shimmer.

“Well done,” said Shimmer. “You chose an optimal thread.”

“Shimmer,” uvvied Joke, craning her head back and looking upward. “Where are you?”

“I’m a hundred and fifty miles straight up from the Moon. It’s an interesting view.”

“Are you angry that we killed your friends?” asked Darla. “Are you going to get even with us?”

“ ‘ Kill ,’ ” said Shimmer musingly. “The word means a lot to you, doesn’t it? Your spacetime is so—so poignant. To live with the immediacy of total annihilation always around you. Your condition has a fine dark beauty.”

“Please don’t hurt us,” uvvied Willy. “Darla and the others were only scared that you aliens would overwhelm our little civilization.”

“Darla was right,” said Shimmer. “From what I hear, it’s not a pretty thing for a civilization as undeveloped as yours to become a decryption node.”

“But how did you escape, Shimmer?” Whitey wanted to know. “I kept aiming right at you, but then you were never there when I shot.”

“Even though your alternate worlds are unreal, I can still see them,” said Shimmer’s voice. “All I had to do was to keep picking the correct bending of my world line.”

“So what are you going to do now?” asked Joke.

“I might visit Earth for a while,” said Shimmer. “But don’t worry. Sooner or later, I’ll chirp out of here. You do not welcome me, and I do not wish to overstay. Although one-dimensional time has a certain fatalistic glamour, it’s not a spacetime configuration I’m prepared to inhabit forever.”

“Could you do us one favor?” put in Terri.

“Maybe.”

“Kill that other Quuz-thing.”

“I was already planning to. Should I kill the human in Quuz as well?”

“Let me try to save him!” cried Whitey.

“Shut up!” said Darla, who’d never much liked Stahn. “It’s too late, Whitey, and you’d probably get killed. Shimmer—could you kill Quuz and code up Stahn and chirp him out of here? Then it wouldn’t be like he really died.”