Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

He rolled over on his side, taking a mental inventory of himself. He felt pretty good. He was all through with school. He sat up on the edge of his bed and looked around the garage—at his dresser and desk sitting among the drums of raw pipe plastic and the cabinets of plumbing machine parts. His clothes hangers dangled from a wire slung up under the ceiling. Sue’s truck and Lewis’s hydrogen cycle were gone. Randy had a stubborn erection; the sensory amplification of his hangover/stoneover made him riggish. He decided to go on over to Honey’s; today was her day off .

Randy put on a sleeveless T-shirt, baggy shorts, and plastic sandals. He ate some milk and bread out of his mother’s fridge and ambled down the street toward Honey’s.

It was a hot Kentucky day, the air so thick with humidity that your skin got slick with sweat if you moved fast. The cracks in the old concrete streets and sidewalks were lush with weeds. Gnats whined everywhere. The weeds and the bushes and grasses exuded a steamy warmth. Each of the Shively houses was like the one next to it, each the same ceramic-coated box, each with a slightly different trim pattern around the front door.

Honey was home all right, but when Randy walked in, she turned red-faced and tearful. “Don’t come near me!” cried Honey. “No more! All them things you and me did was wrong, Randy Karl!”

“Now what are you talkin’ about, Honey? Are you mad Sue wouldn’t let me ask you to the graduation?”

“Everything we done was wrong!” repeated Honey. “Especially the things with Angelika and . . . and with Sammie-Jo. Dr. Dicky Pride at the Shively Heritage House told me so. Yes, when you and your mamma didn’t ask me to your graduation last night, I went to the service at the Heritage House. And now I’ve done been born again. I was up past midnight with Dr. Pride a-prayin’ over me.”

At first Randy thought Honey was playing with him, and he began to beseech her and to abase himself like she’d taught him to do. “Forgive me, Mistress Honey. Your will is my will. Do anything you like to me,” said Randy, groveling at her feet and unzipping his fly. “But, um, please do something . I’m horny as hell from all that beer and snap I had last night.”

“Only thing you and me might ever do together again, Randy Karl Tucker, is goin’ to meetings over to the Shively Heritage House,” said Honey, flouncing to the other side of the room and sitting down in a straight-backed chair with her arms crossed. “I’m through bein’ the goddamn Whore of Babylon. I’ve cleansed my body’s temple.”

“Um—what about Angelika and Sammie-Jo? Can I have ‘em?”

“Dr. Pride said I should bring them to the Heritage House, but—yeah, you take ‘em. I’d be ashamed to bring them in. What if Dr. Pride asked me to hold them up and like go, ‘This is my dildo that my boy toy and his mommy and me fucked each other with so many taahms, and this is the sheet I used to piss on him with, and—’ ” Honey’s voice broke into shrill brittle laughter—or was it tears?

Sitting in the chair across the room, she stretched out her trembling arm to point at the closet where she kept her imipolex sex toys. “Take ‘em the hell out of here right now, Randy Karl! Take ‘em and git!” She began crying hard, and Randy tried to pet her, but there was no way.

He took Sammie-Jo and Angelika home and masturbated with them. It was okay, though nowhere near as hot as it had always been with Honey at the controls. Angelika and Sammie-Jo weren’t smart enough to be really fun. For the first time Randy started wondering what it would be like to have sex with fully intelligent and autonomous moldies instead of with these imipolex DIM-equipped toys. After he’d come, he washed Angelika and Sammie-Jo, let them lay out in the sun for a while, and then put them in the back of one of the cabinet drawers near his bed in the garage.

Randy kept on mooning around Honey’s the rest of that summer— mowing her lawn, doing her dishes, anything at all—but to no avail. The only thing Honey liked to do anymore was to go to meetings at the Shively Heritage House. So in August Randy started going with her.

Randy was certainly no Mr. Sophisticated, but he’d never seen such a bunch of losers, geeks, and feebs as he found at the Heritage House meetings—all the people raving about Jesus and the Heritage of Man and about how much they hated the moldies. The Heritagists were highly exercised over the Moldie Citizenship Act that Senator Stahn Mooney of California had managed to railroad through Congress back in 2038. Even though Mooney had been out of office for years now, Congress still hadn’t mustered the will to repeal that hellacious moldie-lovin’ Act. What an outrage! Another big area of interest was, of course, all the perverse permutations of sex made possible by moldies, uvvies, and imipolex.

Randy would try and catch Honey’s eye sometimes when Dicky Pride would go off about moldies and imipolex—Randy fondly remembering the steamy sessions with Honey and her toys—but Honey would just look away. Her small mind had shifted gears and there was nothing to do about it.

Meanwhile Randy was doing more and more plumbing. The customers Sue had given him were passing his name on to their friends; he was known for doing fast, solid work for the best price around. He was a whiz with the pipe-gun. But it was getting really hard to live at home. Lewis was in his face all the time, acting like he was Randy’s father or something—what a joke. Lewis had picked up some kind of drug habit, a cocaine analog called pepp. Like coke, pepp had the effect of making stupid people think they were smart. And the smarter Lewis felt, the more insufferable he became. It was time for Randy to move out, but now it turned out that Sue didn’t want him to, and she was stalling on the master plumber’s certificate to keep Randy at home.

At Christmas, Honey’s mother in Indianapolis died of cancer, and Honey, the sole child, moved there with her new Heritagist girlfriend Nita to take over her mother’s comfortable estate: a paid-up retrofitted tract home near the Speedway and a well-deployed range of cash credits on the $Web. Dr. Dicky Pride alerted the Indianapolis branch of the Human Heritage Council, and they were prepared to welcome the grieving Honey and Honey’s companion with open arms.

When Randy heard Honey was moving, he went over to her house and asked her if he could leave town with her and Nita. But Honey chose to be a real bitch about it.

“Face it, Randy, you was nothing more than my boy toy. A kid I liked to piss on. Get over it. It was only because of Sue that you was important to me. And by the way, you can tell Sue she’s a cold-hearted xoxxin’ bitch.”

This was way too frank. Randy felt small and used, used and abused. His poor young heart broke clean through that day, and felt like it would never heal again.

What with his nonexistent social life and the bad situation at home, Randy kept going to the Shively Heritage House meetings that winter. No matter what he thought about the Heritagists’ beliefs, he had the ability to blend in with them real well. He’d seen an uvvy show once about some beetles that live in anthills because they can trick the ants into feeding them. The Heritage House was an anthill Randy could live in.

Dr. Dicky Pride liked asking Randy to repair little things, and soon—it wasn’t clear which of them originally proposed it—Dr. Pride arranged for Randy to move into the Heritage House as a “seminarian.” The Heritage House—really just an oversized Shively home—had a big garage with a second floor, and Dr. Pride turned the garage over to Randy rent-free.

Sue gave Randy some of her older plumbing equipment, and Randy used his savings to buy his own pipe-gun and his own whipped-to-shit panel truck. The day Randy moved out, Sue finally pulled the right strings to get Randy his master plumber’s certificate.