Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“I surf all, Tre,” said Monique pleasantly. “Delish!”

After signing off with Tre, Monique used part of her computational space to follow the data threads that led out of the registration information she had on Randy Karl Tucker in Room 3D. He was a native of Shively, Kentucky, twenty-one years old, unmarried, and with a good bank balance. Apparently he’d been overseas recently, but Monique wasn’t able to access any information about the trip; this part of Tucker’s data trail had been covered with a security lock. The most salient point was that Tucker had more than enough money to pay for the plastic for a child. Randy the redneck seemed like just the kind of victim Andrea had told her to look for.

Monique glided over to Randy Karl Tucker’s door and knocked. He opened it, and Monique mamboed on in. The room smelled like Tucker’s breath. Tucker’s uvvy was sitting on his desk, projecting a hollow of a pornographic soap opera.

“Yaar there,” said Monique, synthesizing the sounds on a fluttering membrane near the back of her mouth cavity. “I saw you, um, gesturing to me before? Is there something I can like do for you?”

Tucker’s thin mouth lengthened in a sly, lustful smile. “I knowed you’d come back. That’s why I been settin’ here a-waitin’. Just close the door to begin with, you little stinker. And pull the drapes. Before we start a-carryin’ on.” He was clean-shaven, and his eyes were flat and pale. Two women on the porno soap were arguing over a boyfriend.

“I’m not sure I can help you, sir,” said knowing Monique, sliding the door closed and pulling the curtain across it. “Terri Percesepe, she’s the manager here, she was just telling me this morning that it’s not proper for me to have any kind of intimacy with the guests. ‘The Clearlight Terrace Court Motel is a place for wholesome family fun.’ Those were Terri’s exact words.” Monique set her arms akimbo, flexed the erectile tissues of her breast mounds, and waggled the hiplike swelling below her waist. “So, um, like what is it that you want from me, country boy?” She pouted out her lips and giggled.

“I . . . ” Moving as stagily as one of the actors on the soap, Tucker paused to take a slurp from a cardboard cup of coffee printed with the logo of the Daffo Deli down on Beach Street. He looked solemnly up from his cup, only to lose his composure and break into a cackle at Monique’s beckoning gyrations, for now Monique was milling her arms and flinging them out like a pom-pom cheerleader.

“ You’re a peppy hunk o’ cheese, ain’t you,” said Tucker. “To hell with what your boss says, Monique. You show me a good time, and I’ll pay you plenty.”

Monique undulated forward across the motel room’s carpeted floor, standing right up against the man, opening her skin fissures to release an even headier mixture of her bouquet. “Can you authorize a charge to your account now, Randy?”

“How?”

“I’m the bookkeeper as well as the maid, Mr. Tucker. Will you authorize the charge?” Monique reached out and undid one of the buttons of his long-sleeved white plastic shirt. His gray pants and black plastic belt were as cheap-looking as the shirt. His hair was short and unclean. His thin skin was spotty from acne and a faded tan, and Monique could see his faintly pulsing blue veins beneath the skin’s surface. His nose was a bit crooked, and he had a large Adam’s apple.

“Um, all right,” the man mumbled reluctantly. “But put it down as, as . . . “

“I’ll just average it into your like room rate?” said Monique. “It won’t show. But you have to come out and say just what it is that you want me to do.” Monique smiled hugely and released a cloud of spores. “So that you can’t frame me for prostitution. In case you’re a like Heritagist? So now please tell me what you want, Randy.”

“I want you to blow me, damn it. And what’s wrong with Heritagists anyway?”

“That’s what you are?”

“I ain’t sayin’ that I hold their beliefs. But I knowed a few of ‘em back in Shively. The Heritagists have done me some good from time to time.”

“What would they think about your wanting to have sex with a moldie?”

Tucker sighed. “They’d understand it perfectly—why the hell you think they talk about it so much? I’m way past that loser guilt shit, Monique. All the things I’ve done—it’s hard to believe I’m only twenty-one.” Tucker stared intensely at Monique, as if trying to read her mind. Finally he reached some internal decision and looked away. “Let’s just say I’m a peculiar man, and I got my needs. Can we git started now?”

“Love to,” said Monique drily. She finished unbuttoning Randy’s shirt, and now she undid his pants. She paused, looking at him. He was weedy and thin, but with a certain amount of muscle. She was going to have to be sure to get a tight choke hold on him when she went up his nose and punched into his cranium.

Now he lay back on his bed and Monique pressed against him, letting her tissues flow and reshape to mold themselves so as to fully envelop Randy’s private parts. Sexually, it meant no more to her than pushing a wheelbarrow would mean to a human. Monique set up some caressing rhythms, trying to rock the weight up to speed.

While Tucker wheezed and twitched in mounting excitement, Monique set her right forefinger to growing like a vine. She twined it up along Tucker’s torso and wrapped it once around his neck.

Feeling leery of starting to choke Tucker right away, Monique went ahead and slid the tip of her four-foot-long finger into Tucker’s nose, at the same time setting some chaotic ripples onto his genitals. But now, instead of lying back in blind ecstasy, Tucker suddenly sat up and started clawing at his face and neck.

“What the hell you think you’re doin’ in my nose, bitch? Thought you’d give me a thinking cap, didn’t you!” Weirdly enough, he sounded not so much angry as excited, and he made a rattling noise that sounded almost like a cackle.

Monique tightened herself around his neck as much as possible and punched her tendril with all her might against the spot high up at the back of Tucker’s nose. But it wouldn’t give! She punched and punched again, but it was like Tucker’s skull was patched with titaniplast or something— Monique couldn’t get in!

And now Tucker had wormed his right hand between Monique’s noose and his throat, and she couldn’t choke him anymore. With his left hand, he yanked Monique’s tendril out of his nose. He got to his feet and started kicking at Monique’s body. Monique squeezed his testicles so hard that he screamed and fell sideways, crashing into the desk and plopping the uvvy and its holograms to the floor. This was turning into a full-scale disaster. If Monique ran off now, Tucker would tell people about Monique’s attack on him and she’d be hunted down and exterminated. She had to finish him off!

Tucker was on his back now, and Monique was on his nude body like a savage vampire slug. There was a fight scene playing on the hollow too, which seemed to be drowning out Tucker’s cries so far. Or maybe all the people in the nearby rooms were out on the beach where they belonged, instead of lurking inside waiting to have sex with a moldie like this skungy Heritagist bastard—

Tucker had hold of his travel bag now and was fumbling to unlatch it. A gun? A gun couldn’t hurt a moldie. With his left arm out of the way, Monique was free to shove a fat tendril down his throat. She’d been on the point of calling Xlotl for help, but now she was sure she was going to win. There was a good weak spot in the skull right behind the roof of the flesher’s mouth, and it wasn’t armored like the spot in his nose. Bye, flesher. But just as Monique began to push, something leapt out of Tucker’s suitcase and slapped up against her—and everything changed.