Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Instead of being on top of the struggling Randy Karl Tucker, Monique was curled up on the floor beside him. His voice was inside her, whispering to her. She could make no move without his permission. Even her thoughts were not fully her own.

“Yeah, you just lay still for now, Monique,” Randy said, getting to his feet. “Nice li’l tussle you put up there.”

A lively little two-legged imipolex creature was strutting back and forth on the floor like a chicken. It was the thing that had jumped at Monique. “Back in the bag, Willa Jean,” Randy told it. “You done good. You pasted that superleech on her just in time.” He coughed and went into the bathroom to drink some water. The chicken stood there staring at Monique. It had a fuzzy purple patch on its back. It moved tentatively closer and gave Monique’s face a gentle peck, then a harder one, gouging out and absorbing a little strip of Monique’s imipolex.

“Back in the bag, Willa Jean,” repeated Randy, coming out of the bathroom. “Now.” The creature hopped into Randy’s bag and he closed it back up.

Randy dug in his pocket and examined a couple of small purple patches of imipolex he found there. Then he picked up the room’s uvvy and called someone, using a voice connection alone.

“Aarbie? Randy here, ole son. Got me one. How soon can y’all get the boat out there? Copacetic. I’m startin’ now.” He turned off the uvvy.

“We goin’ for a swim,” Randy told Monique, this time without speaking out loud. “We’ll walk outside and you’ll rickshaw me down to the cliff at Steamer Lane. We gonna step lively so your boss don’t stop us.”

Monique had a sudden hallucination of the seabed lying all uncovered, with gasping fish lying on their sides and octopuses slithering about and great windrows of kelp filled with starfish of every color. She felt floppy and without force; she felt like a jellyfish.

“Up and at ‘em, Monique.” The voice goaded her upright, and she made her way out of Room 3D with Randy Karl Tucker close behind.

Tre was sitting in front of the motel office, but Monique walked right past him. Randy had some brief discussion with Tre behind Monique’s back, and then Randy jumped onto her, riding her like a beast of burden. They raced down the hill to the water’s edge, then hurried the half mile north to Steamer Lane.

“Now you be a wetsuit for me,” Randy told her and forced Monique to flow out around him, forced his nasty body all the way inside her. They dove off the cliff.

The water broke around Monique in a dizzying explosion of color and light. She was hallucinating again. A whirlwind of pure energy boiled around her and through her. In the boiling she forgot herself entirely for a time and then, as the roar damped down, Monique realized she’d been swimming for ages; she could feel it from the fatigue in her body. The seabed looked odd; it was patterned with a grid like a map, and the fish around her seemed to have human faces. In the same dreamy way, the kelp plants seemed to be made of gears and metal.

And then she stopped, and near her was a white boat. Sun-dappled wave crests marched out to the horizon and suddenly she noticed something amazing, a great poisonous green bulk hanging over the water near the boat, a spot she’d seen but not registered before. It was a great translucent green whale hanging there in midair, and now that Monique saw it, the whale began to fall, its flukes threshing the air. “You gonna follow that,” said the enemy who was nestled inside her, and the whale jumped backward in time, its great tapered tail rising up out of the water in an arc with the huge striped belly and giant mouth coming after, the whale hanging there in the air, smiling so strange and friendly that Monique began to laugh and laugh. She laughed so hard that her back split open, and the evil white worm man popped out of her and swam to the boat.

“Follow the whale,” the man called, and now the dreamy ghost of a whale moved forward again in time, diving into the water, sounding for the ocean’s very floor, with Monique swimming after, swimming down and down toward the whale’s glowing green light.

Randy Karl Tucker grew up near the Dixie Highway in tacky Shively, down in the southwest corner of Louisville. About a century earlier, the Dixie Highway had been the main road into town from the army base at Fort Knox, thirty miles south of Louisville, and Shively had been a place where soldiers would come to taste the calm pleasures of civilian life—or to gamble at Churchill Downs and get drunk and sleep with floozies. Many of the soldiers ended up marrying Shively women; over the years it became a solid little community, with its full share of godless lowlifes, professional Christians, and dazed white trash.

Randy’s mother Sue Tucker was bi, on the butch side, though cutely tomboyish to some male eyes. She was a master plumber with her own business that she ran out of her truck and her little house’s garage. Mostly she did repairs, though now and then she’d do contract work for remodeling.

Sue didn’t like to talk about Randy’s father, but children hear everything, and over the years Randy had learned that his father had been a random guy who’d happened to make it with Sue in the course of a big sex party at the La Mirage Health Club in downtown Louisville on Halloween, 2031. According to Sue, the guy had been masked behind a flickercladding Happy Cloak, disguised as a woman, in fact, and she’d never found out who he was.

There were men around when Randy was quite young, but at the time he entered adolescence, Sue Tucker was in lesbian mode. One of Sue’s favorite girlfriends was a femme named Honey Weaver—a stocky bleached-blonde waitress with large breasts and a weak chin. Soon after Randy’s sixteenth birthday, Sue Tucker selected Honey to be the one to instruct Randy Karl about sex, the idea being that, as a lesbian, Honey would teach Randy a proper respect for women.

“Randy Karl,” Sue said one September afternoon in 2048 after coming home to find Randy squirmingly watching porno on the uvvy once again. “Turn off that kilp. It’s antiwoman.”

“Oh, come on, Sue.” He always called his mother by her first name. “It don’t hurt none. At least let me do it till I need glasses.” He was a mournful-looking lad with a long, thin face. He hadn’t gotten his growth yet and was only a little over five feet tall. He wore his hair in a flattop. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and khakis; the khakis had a nasty bulge in them from Randy’s watching the filth on the uvvy.

“Randy Karl, it’s high time you learned what’s what. I want you to go on over to Honey Weaver’s right now.”

“Huh? What for?”

“She’s having a problem with her drain. You can fix that for her, can’t you?”

Randy had often helped his mother on jobs, but this was the first time she’d offered to let him go out on his own.

“Will I git paid union wage?”

“And then some.”

Randy put together a toolbox and walked down the street to Honey’s—she lived two and a half blocks away in a house exactly like the Tuckers’: a three-room bungalow with cheap ceramic siding and a concrete front stoop.

Honey came to the door in a loosely fastened pink wrapper.

“Oh, hi there, Randy. Sue told me you were on your way. I just changed out of my waitress clothes. Come on in.” As she opened the door, her wrapper slid a bit farther open, and Randy could see her bare breasts and a flash of her pubic hair. “What you starin’ at, boy?” said Honey with a gentle laugh. “Ain’t you never seen a live woman before?”

“I—” choked Randy, setting down his box of tools with a clatter. “Honey, I—”