Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Dear Vaana,” said the King. “I was devastated when that fool of a captain shot you. Thank heavens you recovered.”

“Don’t let it happen again,” said Vaana. “One more thing, Bou-Bou. You got any more superleeches?”

“I don’t!” cried the King. “It was all Onar’s idea. He got what he deserved. Disgusting person. I never should have befriended him.” He was dog-pad­dling hard, weighed down by his heavy clothes. “I’m sinking, Vaana.”

Vaana sucked in volumes of air and positioned herself between the King’s legs like an inflatable sea horse.

“I hope Kennit and the boys don’t start shooting again,” fretted the King. “With Cappy Jane here they must be going mad. I never should have given them guns.”

Vaana grew her neck up twenty feet to have a look. Her head snaked around for a minute up there like that of a slender green sea serpent. “They’re way over by the ship. The launch circlin’ around to pick everyone up. We cool for a while. Man, when I chirped for help, I didn’t expect Cappy Jane to come. Twenty thousand miles in twenty minutes? She must have curled up like javelin for the trip down.”

“Remember that it’s important that the moldies don’t find out who Yoke and I are,” Cobb whispered urgently to Vaana and the King, using his voice rather than the uvvy. “Or they’re going to be hounding us for Yoke’s alla. That’s why you set up the Squanto and Sue Miller ID viruses for us, right?”

“That’s right,” said the King.

“Here, Cobb,” murmured Yoke. “I’ll uvvy you their identity codes.”

“Beautiful,” whispered Cobb. “I’ll put those out for the Cappy Janes to see. We don’t want them and their pals to follow us home for more free goodies.”

“Where’s our imipolex?” squawked one of the bird heads sticking out of the big disk of Cappy Jane. “Yeah, Vaana,” said another of the heads, clacking its beak. “You called for help and promised us more imipolex than we’ve ever seen, so where the fuck is it?” A third head craned toward the aluminum ship. “Is it in the hold of that tub?”

“The local moldies done cleaned us out,” said Vaana. “Nothin’ left in there but gold.”

“Ah, the superstitious human worship of rare minerals,” said one of the Cappy Jane heads bitterly. “Too bad they don’t know what it’s like to have to buy the flesh to make their children.” A different head eyed Yoke and piped, “Is this the girl who’s supposed to have the magic wand? Who is she?”

“I’m Sue Miller,” said Yoke. “And this is my moldie Squanto. How much imipolex would you like? How about a thousand tons!” She felt gay and reckless from so many crazy events. If things kept up as weird as this, maybe Phil could come back too.

Yoke gripped her alla and grew a large bright-line box in the water, keeping it a safe distance from her and the others. She could sense the location of the alla box through her uvvy, as if from a phantom limb. How big could it get, anyway? Though she tried to push it farther, the cube seemed to max out somewhere between twelve and thirteen meters on each side. About forty feet. Well short of touching the sea floor.

“Get ready for a jolt!” she cautioned the others. “I’m going to turn that big cube of water into imipolex. Actualize!”

Sproing!

Something like an enormous cube of gelatin was now bobbing in the sea, just barely afloat. A giggly, shuddery gelatin, alive with pulsing colors. Truly something for nothing. What was that Josef had said about the working of the alla? “Quark flipping is like jujitsu. As if to look at some­thing and then to look at it in a different way.”

“Wow!” exclaimed one of the Cappy Jane bird heads, eyeing the imipolex.

Ordinarily, moldies reproduced in pairs, each acquiring half the necessary imipolex for new scion and each contributing about half of the newborn’s nervous system and software. But given an opportunity like this, a moldie could reproduce all alone. If you gave a moldie a seventy kilogram chunk of imipolex, it could replicate itself in seconds—provided it hadn’t done so within the last six months.

The six-month condition had to do with the fact that, when repro­ducing, a moldie’s system generated a growth hormone that spurred its mold-and-algae nervous system to speed-grow a fresh nervous system into virgin imipolex. Six months was how long it took a moldie’s body to generate a sufficient amount of its reproductive growth hormone.

The big Cappy Jane pie undulated over to the cube and began madly pecking away. Minutes later there were two pies. Due to the growth hormone limitation, the Cappy Jane moldies couldn’t reproduce any further than that, but for a while they kept pecking, bulking up their bodies with additional imipolex. Each of them grew to as large a size as his or nervous system could handle, and then they pooped out, leaving most of the gnawed imipolex cube still floating in the water.

“ Urp,” belched the nearest Cappy Jane beak. “What a blowout. A clone­-fest. I wish I had enough mold in me to breed over and over and over. Where did you get that terrific tool, Sue?”

“From some aliens,” said Yoke, not thinking to lie.

“ Yeek!” screeched the pie-bird. “Aliens! Find them! Kill them! Emergency!” The pie lifted awkwardly out of the water, little take-off jets firing out of its underside. It was slow and heavy from having incorpo­rated as much imipolex as it could possibly hold.

“Being a grex down here sucks,” cawed one of the birds in the flying pie, and twitched itself free. The disk broke up into pieces then, into twenty-four awkward-looking moldies. For now the other pie kept its integrity, floating there in the water. The freed Cappy Jane birds looked like feather­less pelicans. Or maybe pterodactyls.

Back beyond the pie and the squawky birds, Yoke could glimpse the navy launch trying to circle around toward them. A figure was standing in the bow, tiny at this distance.

“The Metamartians are our—” Yoke had been about to say “friends,” but then she remembered Phil’s last warning. About how Shimmer had deliber­ately told the powerball to swallow her mother. But if the Cappy Janes wiped out the aliens, that might scotch any hope of getting Phil and Darla back.

“What?” croaked the closest Cappy Jane bird. “What did you say about the aliens, Sue? Metamartians you call them?”

“I’m not sure they’re enemies,” said Yoke lamely.

“Who knows where the Metamartians are?” screeched one of the birds still in the pie. “I want our grex to be the one to get them! Let’s test some poofballs, guys!” Like a flock of pistons, the birds in the pie rose and fell, successively belching out little balls of imipolex that burst into flame once they were well up into the air.

“Yee haw!” crowed one of the birds raucously. “Follow me to kill the Metamartians! I just found out their location from Squanto!”

“Ooops,” said Cobb.

“Oh, Squanto,” said Yoke.

“It’s hard, dammit,” said Cobb. “That Cappy Jane kept nosing at me and asking stuff about Vava’u and somehow an image popped out. I showed her the aliens looking out of that cave on the beach. But that’s all. I’m sorry. Anyway, you’re the one who really blew it. ‘Where did you get that wonderful tool, Sue?’ “

Rather than probing any further, the Cappy Jane creatures lifted off in hot pursuit of the aliens. The leathery birds spread out their rumpled new wings. The great wobbly pie launched itself on steamy jets and, once airborne, began flapping like a stingray.

“I hope they find ’em,” said Vaana. “Aliens mean trouble, Bou-Bou. Especially for moldies. They can move their minds right into a moldie’s body. They talk about freeware, ‘cept we the ones that get taken for free. It’s just as well if things get back to normal here.”