Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Your left hand is holding a heavy smooth thing, it’s a . . . uh . . . your right hand takes it over, it’s a chromesteel copy of the Brancusi sculpture, Flight . Your left hand hiphops into your pocket and gets a little vial: the life.

You are ready now, new life on the left and death on the right. Blunt instrument Brancusi bludgeon just right to lift and smash flubby goosh. Whiteblackwhiteblackwhiteblack. Your breath comes too fast. You tap your forehead hard with the bluhbluhbluh. A star blooms. Stand there for a hundred heartbeats, the voices bouncing back and forth, and out of your mouth leaks a whisper that grows into a scream:

“Twas the week before Cwistmas and Aaall Thwough da CUBBY, Da Fwesh-Eating WABBIT CWUSHED DA FUNBOY FLUBFLUBBY! ”

“Who is it?!?!” yells a voice from the far room with the splishsplash light, and you’re already running in there fast, with your smasher raised high, and your tongue stretched out to touch your chin. The girl is melted in the tub, pink flesh with eyes on top, and the black man is sitting on the edge, just starting to melt, and he’s trying to stand up and he can’t, and his screaming mouth is a ragged drooping hole, oh what perfect timing your headvoice has, swfwack , oh how neat, his head fell off , thwunk , the arms, the legs, smuck smuck .

The pink puddlegirl shudders, her eyes see only the shadows on the ceiling, she can’t see you or her dear funboy, but she knows maybe, through her ecstasy, that the Flesh-Eating Rabbit has come.

What have you done? What have you done? More orders flow in, the calm voice says it’s right, you can’t stop now, you have to crouch down, yes, and open the vial . . . can’t open it. Hands peck at each other like little chickens. You turn your head back and forth, eye to eye, moving the field, mother hen, cross-cuing till your hands get it right.

Right. Left. Top off, yah, the pink jellybean embryo, reach into that pink puddlegirl and put it where it belongs. A sudden flash of orgasm spasms you, sets your teeth on edge, brain chatter, you twitch all over, lying there by the love-puddle, blackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite.

When Mooney’s flare-ray grazed Whitey Mydol’s shoulder, the heat blistered his skin. It hurt a lot. Whitey bought some gibberlin lotion at a drugstore and walked the few blocks to the chute that led down to his neighborhood, a cheap subterranean warren called the Mews. Whitey lived four levels down. The chute was a large square vent shaft, with fans mounted along one side, and with a ladder and a fireman’s pole running down each of the other three sides. To go down, you jumped in and grabbed a pole; and to get back up you climbed a ladder. In the low gravity, both directions were easy. Whitey slid down to his level and hopped off into the cool, dusty gloom of his hallway.

The boppers had built these catacombs, and there were no doors or ventilation pipes; you just had to count on air from the chute drifting down your hall and into your room. To keep thieves out, most people had a zapper in the frame of their cubby door. When the zapper was on, the doorframe filled with a sheet of light. You could turn it off with a switch on the inside, or by punching the right code on the outside. Air went right through a zapper curtain, but if you tried to walk through one, it would electrocute you. All the zappers in the hall except Whitey’s were turned on. His door gaped wide open. Odd. The inside of his cubby was lit by the pink-flickering vizzy. Bill Ding . A fuff show. Besides the vizzy, the cubby held a few holos, a foodtap, and a bed. There was a naked woman lying on the bed, with her legs parted invitingly. Whitey’s mate.

“Oh, Whitey! Hi!” Her legs snapped shut and she sat up and began fumbling on her X-shirt, which was a T-shirt silkscreened with a color picture of her crotch. Everyone in the Mews was wearing X-shirts this month, so that was nothing special. But.

“Who were you waiting for with the zapper off and your legs spread like that, Darla?” He checked the vizzy camera; it was on. “Were you running a personal?”

“What do you mean, waiting?” She pulled on a panty-skirt and went to the mirror to rummage at her long, strawy black hair. “I’m just getting up from a nap. I finished off the quaak and played with myself and I must have blanked out . . . what time is it? Did you get some merge?” Her voice was shrill and nervous. She dabbed more paint on her already shiny lips.

“If a dook shows up now, Darla, I’m going to know what he came for. You don’t have to jive me like an oldwed realman. I just want to know if you had a personal on Bill Ding , or if you have a specific boyfriend coming.”

Darla fiddled with the vizzy till it showed a picture of a window, with a view of blooming apple trees. A gentle wind tossed the trees and petals drifted. “That’s better,” said Darla. “What happened to your shoulder? It’s all red.”

Whitey handed her the gibberlin and sat down on the large bed, which was their only piece of furniture. “Kilpy rental-pig burned me, Darla, trying to score. Rub the lotion in real soft, pleasey.” He liked coming on sweet to Darla; it made up for the way he treated everyone else.

She peeled off the loose, blistered skin and began rubbing the cream in. “Near miss, Whitey. Whadja do back?”

He breathed shallowly, staying below the pain. “I can find him and kill him anytime, Darla. Maybe merge him and pull out all his bones. The merge’ll wear off, and he’ll be layin there like a rubber dolly. You can sit on his chest to smother him. That might be tasty. I can always find him because I planted a tap on him this morning. He’s an old rental-pig called Stahn Mooney. He was in the bopper civil war ten years ago? Was called Sta-Hi? Bei Ng put me on him.”

“He deals?”

“Nego. You know Yukawa the merge-wiz, right?”

“Affirmo.”

“Bei Ng’s got him tapped six ways. Bei’s really hung up on Yukawa. This morning Yukawa called Mooney up to search for that girl Della Taze. You remember her—blonde, snub nose, kind of snobby?”

“Clear. We merged with her and her black funboy one time.”

“Right. Well, she was Yukawa’s assistant, which is why she always had such a good stash, wave, but now she’s disappeared. Bei has her apartment tapped, too, so he knows what happened, more or less, but that’s another story. Since I was the closest to Mooney’s building, Bei put me on Mooney. I walked up to him and stuck a crystal mikespike in his skullbone, and the dook thought I was giving him a blessing. Felt sorry for me.” Whitey tapped the transceiver set into the side of his skull. “I can hear Mooney all the time.”

“What’s he doing right now?”

“Coming off a merge-trip.” Whitey gave an abrupt snicker. “Moaning.

Muttering about some slit called Wendy.” He peered over at his shoulder. “It’s starting to grow back. You can rub harder now.”

“But why did Mooney shoot you?” Darla massaged the new skin on Whitey’s shoulder with one hand, and ran her other hand down the long strip of hair that covered his spine. She liked hearing about Whitey’s adventures.

“Aw, I heard Yukawa giving him a whole flask of merge, so I went up to his office and tried to buy a hit. But Mooney was loaded mean—he’s into this cryboy macho private eye trip—and he flared me.” Whitey cocked his head. “Now he’s . . . getting in a maggie. Sssh. I bet he’s going over to Della Taze’s.” Another pause. Whitey nodded, and then he focused back on Darla. “So who were you waiting for, Darla? There wasn’t any quaak here, and you weren’t asleep. Were you just keeping your legs spread for the first guy to see you on the vizzy? Or was it someone special? I gotta know.” This time he didn’t bother sweetening his voice.