"You fucked him?" screeched Darla, turning around to stare at Joke's blankly reflecting bubbletopper in the backseat.
"I think she's teasing you, Ma," giggled Yoke, piloting the buggy over the lip of one of the larger craters crossed by the broad beaten-down trail to the spaceport. "But I don't know for sure. Joke won't tell me."
Darla stopped staring at Joke's mirrorball head, relaxed into her seat, and sighed. The buggy flew a hundred and fifty feet through space before landing on the crater's bottom. The oversized DIM-equipped tires adaptively cushioned the landing and the buggy began tearing across the vast dusty flat of the crater floor.
Darla started goofing on the black lunar sky with its scarf of stars and the distant blue Earth. Today was one of those times she could see New Mexico.
She mused on her past and present. Whitey was the love of her life, but of late he'd seemed inattentive. He was always off working for ISDN or something; he didn't tell Darla many details. There was an annoying sexual presence among the ISDN
people Whitey hung with, the sexy young morphodite Lo Tek, and Darla had a bad feeling about Whitey and Lo Tek's relationship. Not that Darla herself didn't now and then catch the odd random fuff with old Spanish pals like Raphael, Rodolfo, or Ricardo. Whitey had recently stopped speaking to Ricardo, conceivably on account of Darla, but xoxx that, Darla and Whitey weren't married after all, they weren't realman and realwoman, not yet and not never—they were still wavy x's on the ever-surfest urge of mighty merge's teachings.
Darla turned her gaze back down from the sky and watched the pocked moondust crater floor rushing toward them and somehow through them and out. The stark Sun cast an ink-black razor-edged shadow of them that raced along on Darla's side of the buggy. The shadow was angled forward slightly ahead of them, with Darla's round head shadow on top, the round black shape undulating across the plain like a creature in a two-dimensional world—whup—here's a depression—whoah—here's a rise. The crater floor ramped upward; Yoke slewed the buggy into a well-worn track that curved up to a low spot in the lip; they shot over the lip, making a hundred-foot leap and bouncing down with a stuttering washboard effect as the DIM tires shed the shock.
Now Darla could see the small glint of the spaceport dome, maybe two miles away.
As well as a terminal, the dome served as a market; it would be full of moldies, visiting from their great underground Nest to make business deals with humans.
The DIMs around Darla right now—in her uvvy, in the buggy's tires, in her bubbletopper's air regulator—these were still working fine, but something had happened to her Silly Putter. What if something bad had happened to the moldies as well? How would it be to step into the spaceport dome with the moldies gone completely batshit?
"You know, Joke," remarked Darla, trying to sound casual. "As long as we're wearing uvvies, I think maybe you should call Corey to see if he's all right.
Yoke and I can listen in. I've got to find out more about what's happening to the Silly Putters."
"Floatin'," replied Joke. "But why don't you admit that you want me to uvvy Corey so that you can nose and long-tooth about whether or not we've fucked."
"You're such a nasty little chippie sometimes," snapped Darla. "I don't know where you get it."
"Another thing, Ma," said Joke. "Didn't you just finish telling us that Corey's uvvy sent you a virus? What if he sends us a virus out here? Our bubbletoppers might stop working."
"Well—hang up real fast if you hear something like a crackle," said Darla.
"If worst comes to worst, we can run our bubbletoppers on manual," said Yoke.
"Like they teach you in space-certification class."
So Joke told her uvvy to call Corey, and moments later Corey picked up. With their uvvies linked, Darla and her daughters could channel Corey together.
"What?" screamed Corey. "Who the fuck is it?" Instead of using his uvvy, Corey was yelling at an ancient tabletop vizzy phone with a wall-mounted camera and a broken screen. The brah's only incoming info was audio. The vizzy's camera showed Corey slumped at a filthy round kitchen table with the rath and Jubjub bird on top of the table, scrabbling over mounds of tattered palimpsest. The table was further cluttered with ceramic dishes of half-eaten food, the no-video vizzy, a clunky Makita piezomorpher, some scraps of imipolex, and, of course, Corey's vile jury-rigged smoking equipment.
The Jubjub bird opened its mouth hugely and clapped it down on the rath's curly tail. The rath outgrabe mightily, combining the sound of a bellow, a sneeze, and a whistle. Corey winced and leaned forward into his smoke filter to take a long pull from his filthy hookah.
"Corey," spoke up Darla before Joke could say anything. "I've been worried about you." "Darla?" Corey drew his head out of the fume hood and, shocking to see, there was thick gray smoke trickling out of his nose and mouth. "What happened to Rags, Darla? I can't see you anymore because Clever Hansi took my uvvy away right after I talked to you this morning. She said she couldn't allow the risk that I'd infect any other people's Silly Putters. Things are fucked-up beyond all recognition. How did you deal with Rags?"
"I killed him with the needler, no thanks to you. Is Clever Hansi one of your Silly Putters? The two that I can see look normal." The rath extricated its tail from the Jubjub bird's beak and reared back to drum its green trotters on the Jubjub's minute, feathered cranium. The Jubjub bird lost its footing and slid off Corey's table, taking a stress-tuned lava cup with it to clatter about endlessly in the low gravity. The rath outgrabe triumphantly, and the Jubjub bird let out a deep angry caw.
"It's funny about those two," said Corey. "Whenever the others try to infect them, they shake it off. They're stupid, of course, but certainly no stupider than the Jabberwock or the borogove. I think maybe they're immune because Willy used a cubic homeostasis algorithm on them instead of the usual quadratic one.
It's been a while. I made them for Joke and Yoke's eleventh birthday, remember?"
"You and your gunjy pedophile Bandersnatch," uvvied Darla nastily.
"The Bandersnatch is bad news," said Corey. "I admit it. Now more than ever.
He says he's Takala from the Crab Nebula. My Silly Putters say they're from all different places in the universe. Clever Hansi and the Bandersnatch are the leaders. They keep trying to get hold of the rath and the Jubjub bird to examine them." On the floor, the Jubjub bird and the rath were vigorously playing a game of full-tilt leapfrog; repeatedly smacking into the walls and then bouncing around all over the kitchen floor, cawing and outgribing and biting at each other. "The aliens have taken over my studios and all my equipment. What if they're building some kind of magical supermachine? And they won't even let me watch." Corey crumbled a small bud of something tasty into the bowl of his water pipe.
"How did you get out of your bathroom?" asked Darla.
"I decided I needed a smoke badly enough to risk my life. And then, after I got high, I decided that even though my Silly Putters have turned into starry aliens, they're probably not dangerous."
"They're not dangerous?"
"Not right this minute—or so it would seem. I wish Whitey or some other people from ISDN would come over here. Don't you know where the fuck Whitey is?"
Suddenly the door to Corey Rhizome's kitchen flew open and in marched a sturdy little figure who looked like a woman butler. Although her breasts moved about like a naked woman's, her skin was patterned as if she were wearing a tuxedo.
She had a broad friendly mouth.
"Be reasonable, Corey Rhizome," said the Silly Putter. "Give us the rath and the Jubjub bird. We seek only to ensure the integrity of this new node."