"Um-hmmm!" uvvied Jenny, displaying her teenage girl icon as she butted into the conversation. "I've got your little wife right inside me, Tre! Too true!"
"I'll call you again when I get some privacy," said Terri. "It looks like we'll be landing down at Corey's soon. Apparently some of those alien things are inside it. Wish me luck. And—and good-bye, darling, just in case. I've always loved you. You've been good to me." She waited the two and a half seconds for Tre's wet-eyed good-bye, and then she pushed the virtual button to end the heart-wrenching call.
They were arcing down toward a small crater filled with a shiny dome. Corey Rhizome's isopod. The moldies turned their ion jets back on to brake the fall.
When Terri had composed herself again, she asked Willy a question.
"Did you really use Tre's Perplexing Poultry to design the Stairway To Heaven?"
"Yes," said Willy. "We had all the pieces, and we couldn't quite fit them together. But once Jenny showed the information to Tre, he knew what to do.
Not that he realized what we needed it for. He's such an N-dimensional artist that he did it for free. He wanted to do it."
"You ripped him off?" demanded Terri.
"If there turns out to be a profit in it, I'll try and see that he gets a share."
Now Jenny spoke up again, still using her prairie girl icon. "It's a real pain talking to Earth from up here, isn't it, Terri," she uvvied chattily. "What with all those two- or three-second waits. I talk to Earth a lot and—you know me, once I get going, I like to just fabulate on and on.
Yadda-da-dadda-da-dadda."
Her ion jets were blasting harder and they were falling slower and slower.
The Moon's horizon was rising up around them again.
"Are you nervous about going to Corey's?" asked Terri.
Jenny chose to ignore the question. "Um, so like I was saying," she continued.
"Those light-speed waits are such a bother that I found a way around them.
Though a flesher probably wouldn't be able to do what I do."
"Do what?" asked Terri, staring at the way that the isopod dome bulged out of its little crater. They were lowering down toward a spot a few hundred feet to the crater's side.
"Do what Jenny does so she can gossip with Earth as fast as she likes. I have a remote slave simmie of myself running inside one of the Heritagists'
computers in Salt Lake City! And my simmie's smart enough to think a few seconds ahead or even to say stuff on her own. That way when I talk to people like your husband, they don't realize that I'm a moldie on the Moon. Your husband's a real cutie, by the way, Terri. I bet he's such a good fuck."
"What would you know about fucking?" demanded Terri, surprised enough to momentarily forget about the aliens in Corey's dome.
"You'd be surprised. Um-hmmmm! Those Heritagists think my simmie is something that works for them, and they're always getting it to, um, investigate the sexual shenanigans that their ministers get up to? It's nasty work, but I like it a lot. Humans are just too funny. You should have seen this one man Randy Karl Tucker I used to work with. Come to think of it, I guess maybe you've met him? Randy Karl is Willy's son, though Willy doesn't like to talk about it."
"Shut up, Jenny," said Willy.
"Yes, Jenny," said Gurdle-7. "Please shut up. The most important meeting of all time is about to happen."
The four moldies landed in the dust near Corey's isopod, kicking up a spray of moondust that quickly fell back down.
Hearing about Randy Karl Tucker had inflated a balloon of anger in Terri's chest. "It's Randy Karl who kidnapped poor Monique and got me into this mess in the first place. I can't say that I like the sleazy things you've been responsible for, Jenny. Some of your Santa Cruz moldie pals murdered my father five years ago. You loonie moldies should leave Earth the hell alone."
"Oh now, don't be getting on your high horse, Terri. We're all in this together.
More than ever, now that Gurdle-7's great invention has brought the aliens to meet us. Gurdle-7's my husband, you know."
"I bet he's such a good fuck," said Terri.
"Will you two stop it!" hissed Willy.
In silence they made their way toward the bulging dome. Willy led them to a notch in the crater's edge where a narrow strip of the whole height of the dome wall was exposed. A stone ramp led down to an air lock at the level of the isopod's ground floor.
"I'll bring you into the air lock, Willy," said Gurdle-7. "But then I think I'll come back outside."
"We're waiting outside too," chimed in Frangipane and Ormolu.
"Fraidy cats," said Jenny. "Party poopers. I'm going aaall the way." On the last word, her voice broke into a dry frightened squeak. She made a throat-clearing noise and continued. "Jenny likes to be the first to know!"
"It's odd how they're not responding to my uvvy signals at all," said Gurdle-7 quietly as he and Jenny humped into the air lock. The lock hissed full of air, and the moldies disgorged Willy and Terri. "Well, I'll be right outside, Jenny," continued Gurdle-7, worming out through the lock's airtight outer sphincter.
"I'll count on you to stay in constant uvvy touch with me."
The air lock's inner door swung open, and there stood a figure of unearthly beauty—a woman like a classic marble statue, though made of supple imipolex.
Her flesh glowed with a mild internal light; her pale skin was as a seashell's iridescent lining.
"Welcome," she said. "Willy, Terri, and Jenny. In your system of air-pressure modulations, my name might go like this." Her whole body seemed to vibrate, and the air filled with the piping of flutes, the whining of sitars, and the gentle resonations of a gong. A sound that rose and fell and left Terri hungering to hear more.
"A shimmer of sound," murmured Willy.
"Then let Shimmer be my human name," said the goddess. "I much prefer that to Clever Hansi. Please enter and join us. Corey is here, also his friends Darla, Whitey, Yoke, and Joke. And a large number of aliens. I'm listening to everyone's conversation at once, and it's very exciting."
Hardly knowing what to say, they accompanied Shimmer down the isopod hall toward a hubbub of voices. "It sounds like they're in the conservatory," Willy said to Terri. "I used to live here, you know. Shimmer, I can't believe that you're what's become of Clever Hansi. Clever Hansi was half your size. Just a little Silly Putter doorgirl."
"I helped myself to thirty kilograms of Corey's extra imipolex," said Shimmer.
"We aliens divided up all the extra imipolex stored here and made ourselves decent-sized bodies. There's twelve of us. We decided it would be diplomatic to take on human forms."
"Corey let you help yourself to the imipolex?"
"We did what we liked. Corey spent most of the day hiding from us in his bathroom and in his kitchen. He just came out a little while ago."
"Hi, Willy!" called everyone as they entered the high-ceilinged conservatory, a cool airy room with three soft couches and potted plants everywhere. The conservatory's transparent ceiling had a system of lights and louvers designed to simulate the ordinary cycle of a twenty-four-hour Earth day. There were straw rugs on the stone floors, and in the center of the room there was a large carved stone fountain—the only fountain in existence on the Moon. Terri had seen a picture of it once in an article about reclusive limpware tycoon Willy Taze.
The couches were arranged around the fountain like three sides of a big triangle.
Scattered about the room were eleven more human-shaped imipolex aliens like Shimmer. They were sitting on the floor—some near the fountain and some near the edges of the room—animatedly passing back and forth hundreds of S-cubes that they'd gathered from around the isopod. And seated on two of the couches were five humans.