The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (most important books of all time .txt) 📖

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.

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.

CHAPTER TWO

RANDY

September 2048 – April 2051

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