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

“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.

Randy lived alone up in the room over the Heritage House garage, and for sex he still had Angelika and Sammie-Jo. Whenever Randy asked them to, which was just about every night, Angelika would turn into a vaginal sheath with an extra flap that would ruck up tight and caressing around Randy’s balls, while at the same time Sammie-Jo would smother Randy’s face with a divinely smelly moldie hood pursed into folded, female shapes. When he was finished, Randy always made sure to open the window wide to air out the toy moldies’ cheesy reek. And in the mornings he let the algae-veined limpware goodies “feed” by sitting out in the daylight while he dressed and had breakfast.

One rainy night in March, there were footsteps up the stairs to Randy’s room just as Randy was in the midst of an onanistic sex party. A passkey slid into his lock and the door swung open. A trapezoid of light came in from the stairwell to lie across Randy Karl’s engorged nudity.

“Hi, Randy.” Dr. Dicky Pride stepped into the room, closed the door behind him, and turned on the light. “Don’t be embarrassed, son. I expected to find you this way. I’ve been able to smell what you do up here nights. And of course Honey told me all about you.” Dr. Pride was carrying a pink imipolex dildo, slender and not so long as Angelika. He waggled it rakishly, then ran his nose along the length of the moldie imipolex penis— sniffing it full savourily. Though it was a cold night, Dr. Pride’s face was damp with perspiration.

“Isn’t he a beauty, Randy Karl? I call him Dr. Jerry Falwell.”

“What do you want?” said Randy, pulling his bedsheet up to his chin to cover him and Angelika and Sammie-Jo. “You shouldn’t of barged in here, Dr. Pride.”

“Struggle though we might, we’re both miserable cheeseballs, son. We’ve got to stick together. Do me like you did Honey. Or I can do you. You’re a very attractive and virile young man.”

“I ain’t gonna do nothing with you, Dr. Pride. You’ve been good to me, I know. But I just ain’t interested in sex with people no more, and if I _was _a-goin’ to do anything, it would be with a woman. I’ll move out of here as soon as you like. But no way am I a-stickin’ Dr. Jerry Falwell up your butt for you. Now, please git on out of here and leave me alone.”

Randy and Dr. Pride didn’t explicitly mention the incident to each other during the following days, but they both agreed that it was time for Randy to graduate from being a seminarian and to leave the Shively Heritage House.

“You ought to go on a mission, Randy Karl,” suggested Dr. Pride. “The Human Heritage Council is very well connected—and I’m talking worldwide. We’ve got Heritage Houses and missionaries everywhere. The Council can act as a very effective placement service. I’ve already sent in my very top recommendation for you, by the way. Uvvy in to the Council’s central server and see what they can find for you. A spirited young man like you needs to get out and see the world!”

Dr. Pride left Randy alone with the Heritage House uvvy, and Randy logged into the Council’s central machine, a huge asimov slave computer located under a mountain in Salt Lake City, Utah, just like the Mormons’ genealogy computer. The uvvy fed Randy an image showing an a-life clerk in a sterile virtual reality office. The clerk was meant to look like a wholesome young daughter of the Great Plains, but the illusion was unconvincing. The computation was crude enough that Randy could see the facets of her body’s polygonal meshes, and several of the facets were incorrectly colored in. For a few moments the figure sat stiff and blank, but then some signal from Randy’s uvvy animated her.

“Hello there,” she said. Her voice was shrill and perky. “You’re Randy Karl Tucker from the Shively, Kentucky, Heritage House, I believe? Yes? Terrif. You can call me Jenny. How can I help you?”

“Um, I’m a-thinkin’ about gettin’ out of town,” said Randy. “Like a mission or a job somewheres else? I’ve got me a master plumber’s certificate.”

“Yes, we already have that information, Randy.” Jenny woodenly pretended to look through some papers on her desk. “Master plumber is very good. And your minister Dr. Pride speaks very highly of you. I wonder—could you tell me frankly what you think of him?”

“Well, he’s a good preacher. He packs ‘em in.”

“We’ve heard some rumors that he’s a… cheeseball?”

“I ain’t never had sex with him, and I don’t plan to. So don’t ask me. Just help me get to heck outta here.”

“What kind of sex do you like, Randy?” Jenny morphed her faces’ polygons into a conspiratorial smile. A few of her cheeks’ smaller triangles flickered to dark, making it look as if Jenny had blackheads. Or stubble. “You can tell Jenny. Jenny knows lots of secrets. Do you like toy moldies?”

“Looky here, I thought this was supposed to be a job-search session. And what if I am interested in moldies? That’s a good enough reason to be a Heritagist, ain’t it? Just like it’s all drunks that goes to AA.”

Jenny emitted a laugh. “I won’t pry any further, Randy. I just wanted to make sure you don’t mind being around moldies and imipolex. Because the job I’ve found for you—have you ever heard of Bangalore, India? Look.”

A world globe appeared in front of Jenny and rotated to bring India into view, hanging like a fat udder from the Asian landmass. A little red dot pulsed down in the center of the teat’s tip.

“It’s on a plateau and has a pleasant climate,” said Jenny. “It’s quite modern and Western, very high-tech. It’s one of the only cities in India that sells beer on tap. Hindustan Aeronautics is there, also Indian Telephone Industries, Bharat Electronics, and Emperor Staghorn Beetle Larvae, Ltd. The world’s