Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Wait,” said Yoke. “Don’t forget that we want Josef to tell Om to prevent allas from making plutonium.”

But Josef had already flown off .

Babs, Randy, and Yoke headed across the deck to the companionway. There were a few others grouped here and there on the deck, many of them well into trips on various kinds of drugs. Their faces made Babs think of people sitting on the John. Listening to their bodies.

Down below there was an Egyptian-looking bar decorated with lotus-stem columns, a hieroglyph mural, and an overhanging textured plastic Sphinx head. Hieroglyphs covered the other walls as well, and there was a music mix going, a combination of notes and sound samples. Not all that great, thought Babs. But of course people didn’t come here because of any wonderful artistic ambiance—they came for the illicit things they could do. The room reeked of moldies, of corruption and decay.

A Snooks moldie who resembled a partially unwrapped mummy was busy behind the bar, serving up whatever concoctions were requested. Now and then he plucked a camote nugget out of his windings. Randy got beers for himself and Babs, but Yoke didn’t want anything. She just wanted to run around looking for the Metamartians. Babs suggested they meet up again inside the big show room.

As she drank her beer Babs noticed that there was a sound-DIM stuck to the side of the bottle, and that when she moved the bottle, a little bit of the music changed. When she wiggled the bottle back and forth, for instance, there was a skritchy-skritch sound, and when she moved it up and down there was a loop of black rapper saying, “Yubiwaza!” She played with that for a minute. “Yu-Yu-Yu-Yu-Yubiwaza!” When Babs got her second beer, she kept the first bottle. The second bottle’s DIM could trigger a guitar riff — whang— and a woman’s deep voice saying, “Space cowgirl?” With a bottle in either hand, Babs began tweaking the web of sound. “Skritch sk-sk-skritch-itch yu-yu-yubi space cow-ow-ow- itchy-itch -owgirl? girl? Wha-whang girl? girl? girl? Whang-a-whang yubiwaza cowgirl?” Once you were part of it, the music sounded good.

Randy noticed what Babs was doing, and was smilingly-dancing along. And there were three lifters dancing too, doing the flat-footed sporehead newt-dance. One of them was a musician, he had about a hundred sound DIMs stuck all over himself. Each of his gestures made audible trails of tasty media-sampled noise. There were a couple of Egyptian-looking Snooks moldies dancing too, with gracefully undulating arms grown impossibly long.

The people in the booths nearby weren’t really into the music, at least not in any obvious way—they were mostly just sitting there sucking on soft bags of juice and wearing that inward look of “When does my lift come on?” or “When do I come down?” A few of them were peaking, and their expressions were more like a cartoon image of something missing: a white void with alternating long and short surprise-lines radiating out from a central mystery. Like, “Huh?”

Babs saw one of the dancing Snooks moldies snake her arm down behind a really zoned man. A lump moved up the moldie’s arm like a rabbit inside a python. Probably the guy’s wallet.

One of the other Snooks moldies had split himself or herself into an archipelago of body segments, shaped like egg-sized two-legged eyeballs carrying swords and shields. There were maybe two dozen of them, a few with wings as well, the eyeballs running all over the room chasing each other, having little sword fights, jumping off of things, and all the while piping their high voices into the sound mix.

In the far corner of the room was a big transparent-walled love-puddle with a bunch of people in it merged together. Hard to be sure how many. Four, five, six? You could see the faint outlines of their limbs through the sides of the merge tank; the limbs were temporarily fused, but there was still a kind of wrinkle where one person started and the other left off .

Right next to the merge tank, some moldies were sitting around a big round table getting high on betty, rubbing each other with ointment from a little jar shaped like a pyramid. The lifted moldies were growing their bodies into really odd forms. It was like they were trying to outdo each other—though none of them was really as good as the fighting eyeballs, who kept running across the betty table as if to playfully hassle them. One of the lifted moldies was made of nothing but long, wagging, spitty-looking tongues; a second was shaped like the Book of Mormon, with Urim and Thummim stones dangling to one side; and a third was a lacy hollow form a bit like wrought-iron lawn furniture. Babs danced closer, studying the lace moldie’s pattern, trying to remember it so she could copy it later, but just then a teenage girl vomited on the floor right next to her, spattering chunks of camote all over her shoes.

“Gettin’ a little rough,” said Randy. “Let’s go into the big room, Babs.”

They pushed through the sound-canceling imipolex curtains that separated the bar from the big room. It was a vast echoing space, formerly one of the ship’s holds, with steel deck and slanting steel walls. Dwarfed in the center of the cavernous volume was a little round stage, lit by an overhead spotlight. Slowly-gyrating at stage left was a pale purple Snooks moldie with a fat stomach and a nose that grew out like a long trumpet. Babs knew him from sight; his name was Ramses. Ramses was fingering his nose horn, playing soft Egyptian music. The note progressions were hypnotic, a whole different world from the bar’s chaotic munge. Babs took a few deep breaths and peered around, getting a look at the crowd.

There were no chairs; people and moldies were either standing or sitting on the steel deck. There were maybe a hundred spectators in all—far too small a crowd to make this enormous cold room feel properly inhabited. It was easy to pick out the few moldies in the crowd because they glowed. Of the humans, it looked like there were a lot more men than women. Babs had never known anyone who had even met any woman who was a cheeseball. But men liked to imagine that such women did exist—to imagine, in other words, that some women could be such indiscriminate hump-anything horndogs as men.

Now Babs noticed some objects moving about overhead, repeatedly passing through the spotlight’s bright cone like great, bumbling moths. Phil’s blimps! He must have given them to the moldies when he left town. Babs knew them well, as Phil had always brought them to their block parties. She pointed out the blimps to Randy, telling him some of their names. “That little one is the Graf Z,” she whispered. “And there’s Led Zep, and the big fat polka-dotted one is the Uffin’ Wowo. And, oh look, its dots are Egyptian cartouche patterns now.”

“Pssst!” said Yoke, sidling up out of the darkness. “Most of the Metamartians are in here. See over there? Peg the devil-girl with the proverbial drunk businessman. I asked her if she could help us, but she said the same thing as Josef. ‘It’s up to Om.’ What a bitch. I didn’t talk to any of the others yet. See Wubwub over by the wall? With the beautiful woman on his arm? Can you even believe?”

“That’s a trannie,” whispered Babs. “Look at her hips.”

“Oh, too true. And Shimmer and Ptah are sitting together right beside the stage, someone said they were about to perform.”

“I don’t see Siss or Haresh,” said Babs.

“Siss went off with Cobb,” said Yoke. “Maybe he can get her to talk? Like if he fucks her?”

“What’s Siss look laahk?” interjected Randy.

“Like a snake-woman,” said Babs, giving Randy’s leg a big pinch. “Bite! Uh-oh, Shimmer and Ptah are going onstage.”