The Ware Tetralogy - Rudy Rucker (popular ebook readers .TXT) 📗

Darla followed Rainbow to the rear of the shop. There was no door there, only a rock wall with pegs holding cheap moongolf equipment. Rainbow did a coded tap-tap-ta-tap-TAP-ta-ta against one edge of the wall, and it swung open, revealing a bright-lit room whose far end tapered off into a dim rock-walled corridor. A thin, greasy-haired little man sat on a couch in there, wearing earphones and watching _Bill Ding’s Pink Party _on a portable vizzy. He had pockmarked skin and a pencil-thin mustache. There could be no doubt that he was Rainbow’s mate.

“This is Berdoo,” Rainbow told Darla. “He’ll take care of yew.”

Berdoo pulled off his earphones and gave Darla the once-over. Though his features formed the mask of a frozen-faced tough guy, he looked pleased at what he saw.

“Now yew behave yoself, Berdoo!” giggled Rainbow. She stepped back from the open wall and… _oh please no _… Darla’s legs trucked her on in. “Baaah,” said Rainbow and swung the wall door closed.

Berenice stood there alone with Berdoo, guardian of the hidden hallway to hell. He looked like a pimp, a grit, a Hell’s Angel gone a bit mild with age. Once again her hand spelled out E-M-U-L. Berdoo just sat there looking at her for a minute, and then he got up and took off all her clothes. Darla’s limbs helped him, but then, before Berdoo could push her down onto the couch, Darla’s left hand gave him a hard poke and spelled out N-O.

“No?” said Berdoo. His voice was a hoarse whisper, with a cracker accent like Rainbow’s. “What kinda bull is this, Emul?”

Darla’s body leaned over and took the merge flask and the $20K out of her shirt’s pouch. She gave them to Berdoo. He counted the money and sniffed at the merge.

“Wal, ah guess thass killah enough, Emul, but this old dawg sho does lahk to roll in fresh meat.”

Two fingers pointing down—thumb and forefinger looped. N-O.

Berdoo sighed, then tossed the merge and money into an open wall safe over the couch. He went around behind Darla and lifted her hair to check out the zombie box. “Naahce work,” he muttered, jiggling it a bit. He got some dermaplast and pasted a bit of it onto Darla’s neck, just to make sure the junction was secure. Finally he gave Darla’s buttocks a lingering, intimate caress and seated himself back on the couch. “Thass it, hunnih. Baaah.”

Darla loped on down the corridor, which grew narrower and rougher as soon as she left Berdoo’s office area. A pale light strip ran along the ceiling, eight feet overhead. Each of her rapid lowgee bounds took her right up against the light strip, and Darla grew disoriented from the steady motion and the rhythmic pulsing of the light. Would it help if she fainted? For a moment she did seem to lose consciousness, but it made no difference. The zombie box kept her body moving with the tireless repetitiveness of a machine. The corridor stretched on and on, mile after mile. With her legs numb and out of her control, Darla soon began to feel that she was falling down and down the light-striped hallway, endlessly down some evil rat’s hole.

Rat, thought Darla bleakly, I wonder if that’s what they’re taking me for, to get a rat in my skull. How ever will that feel? Like this, maybe, with a robot running my body and my head thinking its same old thoughts. But it’ll be worse, won’t it, with half my brain gone. Was Whitey coming? He would have tried the Tun first, wouldn’t he, and then he would have looked up and down the Markt and not seen anything. Maybe those children would tell him they saw her in Little Kidder Toys. Cute children they’d been, oh, if only she could really have had a child with Whitey, instead of ending up like this, people had always treated her bad just because she had big boobs, that was it really, a not-too-bright girl with big boobs didn’t have a chance, though Whitey always treated her nice, he did, and, oh man, was that rotten creep Stahn Mooney going to get it. If only they didn’t make her a meatie and send her out after Whitey, if only…

Darla drifted off into a kind of doze then.

When she woke up, she was in a stone room with one glass wall. It was like a pink-lit aquarium of air. It had furniture more or less like her and Whitey’s cubby. She was lying on the bed. Her neck hurt in back. She reached to feel herself… she could move her arms again! Her neck was bare, with a fresh scab. Was… was there a rat in her head?

“Hello, Darla,” said a box across the room. She hadn’t noticed it before. Its surface was a mosaic of red-yellow-blue squares, with one section coned into a speech membrane. “Darla with her eyes all dark, all wild and midnight, all apple tree and gold, no false pose and camp, oh Darla. I’m Emul.” Square-edged little bumps moved back and forth along the box’s surface. “You beautiful doll, your hair, your scent and slide, you dear meat thing, please trust me.”

The box grew arms and legs then, and a square-jawed head. Darla sat up on the edge of the bed and watched it. “I want clothes,” said Darla.

“Wear me, Dar. I’ll lick your snowy belly and nose your every tiny woman part.” Emul flicked one of his arms and it flew off  to land on the floor. As Darla watched, the arm’s component blocks split and resplit, folding here and flexing there. In a few moments, the arm had turned into a kind of playsuit: baggy blue-red shorts topped with a stretchy yellow tunic.

“I… ” Darla stepped forward and poked the garment with her toe. It didn’t do anything, so she went ahead and put it on. It was imipolex, warm and well-fitting. She paced off the room’s dimensions—five paces by four. There was an airlock set into one of the stone sidewalls. She rapped a knuckle on the hard glass wall in front. There was a kind of laboratory outside, with a few other boppers moving around. She turned and stared at Emul. He’d grown another arm to replace the one she was wearing. With clothes on, Darla felt more like her old self. “What do you really want, Emul? No more pervo spit-talk. I could get real mental, scuzzchips.” She picked up a stool and hefted it.

Emul tightened up the features on the head he’d grown. Except for the RYB skin coloring, he looked almost human. “In clear: you are pregnant with Whitey Mydol’s child. Mamma mammal’s mammaries swell. I have an extra embryo I’d like you to carry to term. Pink little Easter baby jellybean. I would like your permission to plant it in your womb.”

Instinctively Darla put her hands over her crotch. “You want me to grow an extra baby?”

“Twins, Darla, yours and Whitey’s, Berenice’s and mine; I’ll make love to you or do it like a doped-up doc, I don’t care either way, your way is my way, you can watch me all you want.”

“And then you’ll let me go? You won’t put a rat in my skull? I’m not supposed to stay here for nine months, am I?”

“Ah… possibly, or until it’s safe as houses in Einstein. I’ll let you leave with absentminded pumping legs, Dar. A double stroller for the chinchuck twins, and you all your own homey self. Proud Whitey handing out cigars.”

“Right. You better hope Whitey doesn’t decide to come here and get me, bitbrain. Whitey does what’s necessary, and he never says he’s sorry. Never.”

Emul made a noise like a laugh. “That’s my lookout, spitfire. Will you spread?”

“It won’t hurt?”

“Your way is my way.”

Darla sighed, slipped her playsuit back off and flopped down on the bed. “Just get it over with. Just slip it in.” She parted her legs and cocked her head up to watch Emul. “Come on. And don’t talk while you do it.”

Emul grew a stiff penis and stepped forward. The blocks that made up his body smoothed their edges off, and he slipped into her like a plastic man. His penis seemed to elongate as it entered her; it reached up and up, bumped her cervix, and slid on through. A fluttering feeling deep in Darla’s belly. It felt almost good. Emul’s imipolex lips brushed her cheeks and he detumesced. He drew back out of her and stood up. “Hail, Darla, full of life. Blessed be the fruit of thy magic star-crossed bod.”

Darla lay still for a minute, thinking. Finally she sat up and put her playsuit back on. Emul had turned back into an RYB box with a speaker cone. She looked him over, considering. “I’d like a vizzy, Emul. And food. You can bring me food from Einstein, right? I’d like about fifty dollars of Chinese food and a twelve-pack of beer. Some weed, too, and you gotta rig me up a showerbath. Maybe a little quaak… no, that could hurt the babies. Beer, weed, Chinese food, a vizzy and a shower. I’ll think of more stuff later. Get on it, bop, make me comfortable.”

“Whatever you say, Queen Bee. You want, you get.” Emul bowed deeply and disappeared into the airlock.

CHAPTER TEN

ISDN

January 27, 2031

Stahn was so merged that even his bones were melted. Darla had hit him with a hundred times the normal dose. He dissolved into the clear white light and talked to God for the second time in a month. The light was filled with filigreed moiré patterns, infrared and ultraviolet, silver and gray. God’s voice was soft and strong.

“I love you, Stahn. I’ll always love you.”

“I’m a screwup, God. Everything I touch turns to garbage. Will it be like this when I die?”

“I’m always here, Stahn. It’s all right. I love you, no matter what.”

“Thank you, God. I love you.”

A long timeless peace then, a bath in God’s uncritical love. Clear white light. But bit by bit, God broke the light into pieces, into people and boppers and voices from the past and from the future, all woven together, warped into weird, sinister loomings:

“Here, Stahn, let me check you over for existence. Me existing with mikespike skull. They have tract homes for a person killing GAX. I am two knobs in half half your head. We value information over all this chauvinism, soft, wet, limp, I mean the Happy Cloak. Old Cobb wiggly in here tonight. I’m Wendy, naw, I’m Eurydice, dear Orpheus. Even Ken Doll seems to sing when you get rich. You take that first into slavery, to quit fact. You can go they know it. Chipmold oxo, Whitey a natural next. Gawk a clown to me. But score, while you can still talk. It’s so wiggly on Mars. Wave on it together in slices. We can learn which soul ain’t never ate no live brain before. If the head’s shot, sell the bod. I am hungry, I am pleased, I hope you trust nothing. Dream on, exile, sweet body and brain are mikes. ISDN she you, voluntary meatie? Why did you say I was your wife? Noise is like spaceships existing on chips. Hi ‘surfer. God can be very ruthless. Think I was human again, Stahn Junior? Are you in dutch with logically deep information?”

Oh God, oh Jesus, oh what does it mean? Now there was something… poking at Stahn. Seasick waves jittered back and forth through his melted flesh. His eyes were merged down to photosensitive patches; he