Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

I think that’s Darla .

Of course! “Darla!” shouted Stahn, even though she couldn’t hear him. Darla waved both arms and drummed soundlessly on her window. Stahn put his moldfruit in the cloak’s pouch and hurried into the airlock. He fumbled around for what seemed a very long time, and finally emerged into Darla’s pink room. Obligingly, his Happy Cloak slid off .

Suddenly nude, Stahn lost control of his left leg and fell down. The woman leaned over him, her face large and upside down.

“Are you all right, Mooney? Can you get me out?”

Stahn had forgotten her name. He stared at her, breathing in the room’s thick, female air. “Wendy? What did you just ask?”

“I’m Darla, fool. Can you get me out?”

“Yes,” said Stahn quickly, and stood up. Looking straight at her, it was easier to remember her name. She was wearing an RYB playsuit. He’d called on her in her home last month. “Yes, Darla, I can get you out. We’ll wear these.” He pointed to the Happy Cloaks. “Come.” He picked up his cloak and slung it over him. It flowed into position. Darla hesitated, and then did the same with one of the others. Stahn watched Darla jerk spastically as her cloak’s microprobes slid into her spine.

“It’s OK,” said Stahn. “Don’t worry.”

She can’t hear you. Touch heads .

Stahn pressed the clear plastic of his face visor against Darla’s. “It’s all right, Darla, it really is. These Happy Cloaks are wavy limpware dudes.”

“It’s stabbing my neck.” Her voice through the plastic was faint and rubbery.

“That’s just so it can see through your eyes and talk to you. Believe me, being a meatie is a lot worse.”

“You were a meatie all along?”

“Just this month. Whitey had ISDN make me a meatie to get even for what I did to you.”

“I told you he’d get even. Can we just walk out of here now?”

“Yeah. We’ll pick up my Wendy and walk to Einstein.”

“Wendy?”

“You’ll see.” Stahn noticed that there was an air-filled tunnel leading out from one end of Darla’s room, a tunnel blocked by a locked cell door. It would certainly make things easier if they could find a tunnel to Einstein.

“Does the tunnel from your room go all the way through?”

“It used to. It used to start at a scurvy place called Little Kidder Toys,” answered Darla. “But Emul exploded that end of the tunnel day before yesterday. Whitey and his guys were trying to come through.”

“If we can’t find a tunnel, we’ll have to climb out the Nest’s main hole and walk. I just hope my Wendy can make it.”

“What’s wrong with your precious Wendy?” Darla was getting impatient. She didn’t like having Mooney’s face shoved up against hers for so long, though he, of course, seemed to be enjoying it.

“She’s a clone, Darla. Her mind is a complete blank. It’s like she’s a hundred-and-twenty-pound newborn baby.”

“Sounds like just your pervo trip, geek. Here, you carry her Happy Cloak.”

“Now look—”

Darla snapped her head back and marched into the airlock. Stahn followed along and moments later they were out in the lab. Stahn’s Happy Cloak made another request.

Take my brothers out of here. They hunger. Carry them to the light-pool .

“No way. That’s too far. Darla won’t go for it. But maybe . . . ” Stahn remembered his good smart bomb: his flickercladding Superball that had bounced so well. “How about this, cloak. If your brothers can roll themselves up like big balls, we can throw them off the balcony towards the light-pool. They can bounce and roll all the way there.”

Yes. I understand .

Stahn limped around the room patting the loose claddings, one by one, so that his cloak could tell them what to do. There were fifteen of them—thirteen from the vats and two from Oozer and Emul, not that you could tell who was which. The claddings pulled themselves together, and then they lay there like fifteen variegated marbles, each about the size of a bowling ball. Darla watched Stahn from the lab door. She had her hands on her hips and she was tapping her foot. Stahn walked over and pushed his face against hers. She was wearing a tough frown.

“What are you doing, Mooney, you slushed pig?”

“Darla-pie, let’s get it straight: I’m saving your life. My cloak wants us to throw these balls off the balcony out there. We’ll do that, and then we’ll get Wendy, and then we’ll go home. There’s no big rush, because all the boppers are dead. I killed them with chipmold; that’s what ISDN used me for, baby, so shut your crack.”

It was Stahn’s turn to snap his head back. And then, just to bug Darla the more, he rolled the fifteen balls together into a triangular pattern like a rack of fresh balls on a pool table. He couldn’t visualize the triangle in advance, but he could tell when he was done. He picked up two of the balls—three would have been too awkward—and followed his cloak’s blue mindstar through the tunnels to the balcony. Darla followed suit. She jerked in surprise when they got out to the edge; she’d never seen the Nest.

Stahn pointed across the dead underground city at the light-pool. A straight street ran from the pool to the base of the wall below them. He set down one of his cladding balls and lifted the other one overhead with both arms. He threw it out and up, putting all he had into it. The ball shot along a soaring lowgee trajectory, bounced perfectly, sailed, bounced, sailed and dribble-rolled towards the light-pool’s distant, bright spot. Stahn threw his second ball, and then Darla threw both of hers.

On their fourth trip, Darla only had one ball to carry. She pressed her face against Stahn’s face. The exercise had put her in a better mood.

“Can we go now, Mooney?”

“Sure. And call me Stahn. What were those S-cubes on the desk in there?”

“Personality cubes for Emul and some of his friends. He was always fiddling with them. Do you think we ought to bring them? Valuable info, right?”

“Hell, let’s not bother. I don’t want to see any of those boppers for a long time. I’m glad the mold killed them.”

Follow the star to Wendy, Stahn .

They scrambled down the balconies to the Nest floor and turned right on a circumferential road along the cliffs base. They walked and walked, until the star darted into one of the cliff-base doors. They went in, and there they were, back at the pink-tank labs.

Darla cycled them through the lock into the room with the tanks. Wendy was right where Stahn had left her, lying on her back with her blank eyes wide open. She was staring at her fingers and wiggling them. Stahn pushed his cloak off his face and Darla did the same.

“Stinks in here,” said Darla. “So that’s Wendy? Poor clone. She’s like a baby. Did you see how high up it is to the hole at the top of the Nest?”

“Really far,” said Stahn. “But I ain’t going without my Wendy. She’s what I came here for, all right?”

I have a suggestion , said the voice in Stahn’s head. The cloak you brought for her can drive her .

“Can you hear your spacesuit talking to you?” Stahn asked Darla.

“Is that what it is? I thought I was hallucinating from all the sense­-depriv. These things are like really alive?”

“Especially now that they’ve got chipmold nodules in them. We used to call them Happy Cloaks, but now maybe we should call them moldies. My cloak—my moldie—it says that the one I brought for Wendy’s spacesuit can drive her body around.”

And talk through her .

“And talk through her,” said Darla. “Stop that.” She slapped at the splotchy, flickering moldie that covered her bod. “So do it, Stahn.”