Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“ I remember,” said Aunt Ilse, waving her fork. “And then we made the children go ahead and pull the wishbone with each other—”

“And they each wished that the other one would lose!” squealed Mom.

“Who won?” asked Della. “I don’t remember.”

“I did,” said Willy complacently. “So I got my wish. You want to try again?”

“It’s boneless, dear,” said Mom. “Didn’t you notice? Look at the week tree, it’s getting leaves and tiny little apples!”

After dinner, Willy and Della decided to go for a walk. It was too boring watching their parents get stoned and start thinking everything they said was funny, when it really was just stupid.

It was bright and gray, but cold. Bowser ran ahead of them, pissing and sniffing. Little kids were out on the sidewalks with new scootcycles and gravballs; all of them warmly wrapped in bright thermchos and buffs. Just like every other Christmas.

“My father said you’d gotten into some kind of trouble on the Moon?” asked Willy after a while.

“Have they already been gossiping about me?”

“Not at all. Hell, you are my favorite cousin, Della. I’m glad you’re back, and I hope you stay in Louisville, and if you don’t want to tell me why you came back, you sure don’t have to.” Willy cast about for some way to change the subject. “That new heartbeat blouse of yours is really nice.”

“Thank you. And I don’t want to talk about what happened, not yet. Why don’t we just walk over to your house and you show me your stuff . You always had such neat stuff in your room, Willy.”

“Can you walk that far? I notice you’re still wearing a flexiskeleton.”

“I need to keep exercising if I’m ever going to get rid of it. You don’t have any merge at your house, do you?”

“You know I don’t use drugs, Della. Anyway, I doubt if there’s any merge in all of Louisville. Is it really so wonderful?”

“Better. Actually, I’m glad I can’t get hold of any. I feel kind of sick. At first I thought it was from the gravity, but this feels different. It must be from the merge. I took blocker, but my stomach keeps fluttering. I have a weird feeling like something’s alive inside me.” Della gave a slow, dry laugh; and then shot a glance over to see if Willy was impressed. But, as always, it was hard to tell what was going on behind that big round forehead of his.

“I’ve got a cephscope I built,” volunteered Willy after a while. “You put that on, it’s as good as any stupid drug. But it’s not somatic. It’s a pure software high.”

“Wiggly, Cousin Will.”

Colin Taze’s house was about five blocks from Dad’s. All through his twenties and thirties, Colin had lived in different cities—an “academic gypsy,” he liked to say—but now, as he neared forty, he’d moved back to Louisville and settled near his big brother Jason. His house was even older than Jason’s, and a bit run down, but it was big and comfortable. Willy undid the locks—it seemed like there were more robbers all the time—and the two cousins went on down to Willy’s basement apartment. Willy was too out of it—or lazy—to leave home.

“This is my electron microscope, this here is my laser for making holograms, here’s my imipolex-sculpture stuff , and this is the cephscope. Try it on—you wear it like earphones.”

“This isn’t some kind of trick, is it, Willy?” When they’d been younger, Willy had been big on practical jokes. Della remembered one Christmas, years ago, when Willy had given her a perfume bottle filled with live ants. Della had screamed, and Ruby and Sude had teased her for weeks.

But today, Willy’s face was all innocence. “You’ve never used a cephscope?”

“I’ve just read about them. Aren’t they like twist-boxes?”

“Oh God, that’s like saying a vizzy is like a pair of glasses. Cephscopes are the big new art form, Della. Ceph art. That’s what I’d really like to get into. This robot stuff I do is loser—deliberately designing programs that don’t work too well. It’s kilp. Here, put this on your head so the contacts touch your temples, and check it out. It’s a . . . symphony I composed.”

“What if I start flicking out?”

“It’s not like that, Della, really.” Willy’s face was kind and serious. He was really proud of his cephscope, and he wanted to show it off .

So Della sat in an easy chair and put the earphone things on her head with the contacts touching her temples, and Willy turned the cephscope on. It was nice for a while—washes of color, 3D/4D inversions, layers of sound, and strange tinglings in the skin. Kind of like the beginning of a merge-trip, really—and this led to the bad part—for now she flashed back into that nightmare last merge in her Einstein cubby . . .

Starting the merge, so loving, so godlike, they’d be like Mother Earth and Father Sky, Many into One, yes, and Buddy was sliding in the puddle now . . . but . . . suddenly . . . a wrenching feeling, Buddy being pulled away, oh where, Della’s puddled eyes just floating, unable to move, seeing the violent shadows on the ceiling, noise vibrations, shadows beating and smashing and then the rough hand reaching up into her softness and . . .

Aaaaaaaaeeeeehh!!!

“Della! Della, are you all right? Della! It’s me, Willy! God, I’m sorry, Della, I had no idea you’d flip like that . . . are you all right? Look how fast your heart is going!” Willy stopped and looked closer. “And, Della . . . “

Della looked down at her heartshirt. The red circles were racing out from her heart. But something had been added to the pattern. Circles were also pumping out from a spot right over her swollen belly. Baby heart circles.

In 2030, the Moon had two cities: Einstein (formerly known as Disky), and the Nest. They lay within eight miles of each other at the southeastern lobe of the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the site of the original lunar landing of 1969. Originally built by the autonomous robots known as boppers, Einstein was now a human-filled dome habitat about the size of Manhattan. There was a spaceport and a domed trade center three miles east of Einstein, and five miles east of that was the Maskelyne G crater, entrance to the underground bopper city known as the Nest.

Cup-shaped and buffed to a mirror sheen, Maskelyne G glittered in the sun’s hard radiation. At the focus of the polished crater was a conical prism that, fourteen days a month, fed a vast stick of light down into a kind of mineshaft .

In the shaft’s great, vertical tunnel, bright beings darted through the hot light; odd-shaped living machines that glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. These were the boppers: self-reproducing robots who obeyed no man. Some looked humanoid, some looked like spiders, some looked like snakes, some looked like bats. All were covered with flickercladding, a microwired imipolex compound that could absorb and emit light.

The shaft went one mile straight down, widening all the while like a huge upside-down funnel. Tunnels punched into the shaft’s sides, and here and there small mirrors dipped into the great light beam, channeling bits of it off through the gloom. At the bottom of the shaft was a huge, conical sublunar space—the boppers’ Nest. It was like a cathedral, but bigger, much bigger, an underground pueblo city that would be inconceivable in Earth’s strong gravity. The temperature was only a few degrees Kelvin—this suited the boppers, as many of them still had brains based on supercooled Josephson-junction processors. Even though room-temperature superconductors were available, the quantum-mechanical Josephson effect worked only at five degrees Kelvin and below. Too much heat could kill a J-junction bopper quickly, though the newest boppers—the so-called petaflop boppers—were based on fiber-optics processors that were immune to heat.