Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Stahn retched hard and harder and then . . . the little dead plastic rat slid out of his mouth and clattered to the floor. All right! No more rat, no more of Helen’s goddamn nagging voice in his head day and night, like a mother you can’t get away from, do this Stahn, do that, oh I like when you move your bowels. No more of Helen in Stahn all the time, using him in the stink. He ground the rat under his foot.

Something had happened to Helen; something had shut her down. So wonderful, at last, to sit here thinking his own thoughts and looking around . . . though there was still some problem . . . hmmmm, oh yes . . . his right brain damage . . . and the way he kept forgetting about the left half of his body. Could he move his left leg, if he really tried? His left thumb?

Stahn stared hard at his thumb. He used to know how to move it, but just now, without Helen’s voice running his left side, he . . . couldn’t . . . get the notion of purposeful action . . . so he grabbed the thumb with his good right hand and wiggled it, yah, he even leaned over and sniff ed it, licked it, bit it and . . . there . . . it was moving . . . spastically moving as new nerve routings opened up . . . tingling . . . he did the rest of his hand then . . . step by step . . . the arm . . . the arm flapping at his side like the chicken imitation he used to do on Z-gas in Daytona . . . lean over so it beats on your leg, Stahn . . . shuffle splutter, splutter mutter . . .

Eventually he struggled to his feet and stood there, pigeon-toed and awkward, but, yes, stood. And found his way over to Wendy and felt the roof of her mouth, looking for a rat, but she was untouched, still too dumb for the boppers to use, good deal.

“We’re gonna make it, Wendy; we’re gonna make it back, babe.”

He worked on Wendy’s body for a while, rubbing and flexing her arms and legs like a physical therapist, or like a mother with her baby, rubbed and flexed her, talking all the while, thrilled to talk for the first time in . . . yes . . . it had been a month.

Stahn’s memory of the month’s slavery was oddly faint. Possibly the horror of it had been such that his brain refused to remember. Or perhaps it was that, with Helen calling all all all the shots always always always, his brain had known that it needn’t bother to make notes. Or maybe the surgical brain trauma had screwed up his memory for good.

ISDN had done this to him . . . why? To bring the chipmold to the Nest, yes. The chipmold must have worked, that was it, the chipmold had fried the brains of all the boppers. They were crispy critters now, that’s what Chief Jackson had always called the gone loveboat dopers who couldn’t remember their names, crispy critters. Stahn had been pretty sick with that chipmold himself for a week there . . . he remembered the ache in his throat and in his kidneys . . . but he’d gotten well, the ancient streetwise human wetware had come up with an antidote.

Stahn tugged Wendy up onto the bench. She sat unsteadily at his right side, blowing spit bubbles. After a while she slid back off the bench.

Stahn worked on his left side some more, trying to keep remembering it, and then he picked his way across the cell to examine the door. He couldn’t really see through his left eye, or do anything about what he felt with his left hand, but after a while he had the door pretty well doped out. It was held locked by a hook-and-eye latch. The lock was hard to work . . . Stahn kept moving his hands in the wrong direction like in a mirror . . . but finally he got their cell open.

“Come on, Wendy. We’re going home.” He pulled Wendy to her feet and put a tight arm around her waist. They shuffled out of their cell into the pink-lit room where the organ-filled pink-tanks were. It looked very familiar in a way, albeit as confusing as a maze. Wandering this way and that, his heart pounding anxiously, Stahn finally bumped into the glass wall next to the airlock.

Helen and Ulalume were out there, sitting in the middle of the floor and not doing anything, not dead or alive but just kind of . . . sitting there with their flickercladding gone strange. Tranced out, like. Yukawa had said that the chipmold would start some kind of electric vibrations in the boppers’ brains and give them fits. Cataleptic as opposed to epileptic, or so it would seem. Helen and Ulalume were buddha-ed out, man, just sitting out there—Stahn chuckled softly—just sitting out there in perfect full-lotus aum mane padme hum meditation, wave, robot sees God in a mold, all right. And their flickercladding was doing weird stuff , blotched and splotchy all along Helen’s xoxy big nurse pod-bod and on that “fine­

featured Nefertiti head” she was so proud of, always reciting Poe’s “To Helen” in Stahn’s brain, ghastly old vampire bat that she was, always bugging Stahn always, and now she had big moldy bright spots in her flickercladding. Squidhead Ulalume and toothed-vagina Helen just sitting out there in the middle of the floor, side by side, waiting for ye Judgment Day trumps, or so so so it would seem. No prob. Do what?

Stahn struggled for an idea. He wanted to leave, but there was no air out there. How had Emul transported him here, through the Nest’s cold hard vacuum? At first he couldn’t remember at all, but then it came to him. After Emul had met Stahn at the trade center, he’d wrapped Stahn in a special Happy Cloak, a big piece of flickercladding that was programmed to behave like a bubbletopper spacesuit. Emul had used the Happy Cloak to bring Stahn from the trade center to the ratmaker, where Stahn had gotten a rat compatible with his new neuroplug. That was all very vague. And then Emul had sold Stahn to Helen, bringing him here to the pink-tanks, still in the Happy Cloak. Stahn could see the Happy Cloak hanging from a hook right across the room from the airlock, as a matter of fact, hanging there twisting and glowing in blotchy thought. He just had to run out through the vacuum and get the cloak, that was it.

It? Get the cloak, Stahn, yes. He set Wendy down on the floor, leaning her against the wall, and went into the airlock. It took him the longest time to get the door closed behind him, and then he got mixed up and went back out of the airlock into the pink-tank room with Wendy. He was so flustered that he forgot the left half of his body for an instant there, and fell to the floor, landing facedown in the warm puddle between Wendy’s widespread legs, Happy Acres. He stood back up and peered out through the glass wall again, trying to gather his wits.

He spotted the Happy Cloak on the wall again, and remembered, and went back into the airlock. When it opened he would run out, grab the Happy Cloak, and run back in here to put it on. He poised himself to run, put his right hand on one of the door handles—he hoped it was the correct handle this time—and slapped his clumsy left hand against the vent button. The air whooshed out . . . Stahn kept his mouth and throat open, letting his lungs collapse instead of popping . . . and he was running across the room . . . or trying to run . . . like a palsy victim in the Special Olympics four-yard dash, man, don’t forget your left leg . . . got his hand on the Happy Cloak . . . it simpered and came loose from its hook . . . oh the cold the pain in his ears his achy lungs and sweat crystallizing on his stiffening skin . . . but where was the airlock? Stahn swung his head this way and that, not seeing what he was looking for . . . a door shape over there, but that didn’t look right . . . he tried to turn . . . stumble . . . oh no!

Too confused to do anything but lie there and thrash, ow, Stahn began to die, but then, at the last moment, the Happy Cloak flowed out over his whole body, making itself into a warm air-filled spacesuit.