Darla held her tongue, but gave a silent cheer.
9
Terri
Terri was wearing Monique when Blaster came in for the landing.
Monique’s smell was as bad as Xanana’s, but she was better company. Monique was, for instance, willing to talk at length about Tre and little Dolf and Wren, which helped Terri keep her spirits up during the week’s long, lonely trip. Tre and the kids uvvied Terri daily, but the calls were inevitably too short.
Over the days, the mood among the moldies aboard Blaster improved, though of course Terri still had a big problem being so close to her father’s killers, the foul Gypsy and the vile Buttmunch. But the other moldies got those two to leave her alone, and the mood was more or less okay. Final arrangements had been made for Whitey Mydol to pick up Terri at the spaceport; Terri would rest a few days with Whitey’s daughters Yoke and Joke, have a look around Einstein, get in a little dustboarding maybe, and then fly back to Earth on a commercial passenger ship.
If all went well, this would turn out to be that much-needed exotic vacation that Terri had been dreaming of. She’d always been jealous of the Hawaiian surfari her brother Ike had treated himself to after he sold Dom’s Grotto. Ike had been the first of them to surf Hawaii, but Terri could be the first to surf the Moon.
According to current surfer fabulation, the dustboarding in the Haemus Mountains north of Einstein was a truly stokin’ float. You could hire a local moldie to rocket you there and help you spend a monumental day trippin’ down harsh steep canyons filled with moondust, everything big and funny in the Moon’s low gee. Terri liked the thought of coming back to Cruz and telling the other surfers about how she’d raged Haemus. Or, better yet, wear stunglasses and broadcast her session live to the Show.
During his daily uvvy calls, Tre encouraged Terri in these pleasant thoughts, sweet-talking her and encouraging her, telling her that he and Molly were handling the kids fine, telling her everything would be okay, and that Terri should just please be careful and on the lookout and don’t let the moldies pull anything weird.
The Moon grew bigger and bigger, and finally it was landing day. Blaster was full of chatter and stories, talking about life on the Moon and how to get along in the Nest. Wendy and Frangipane butted in over the uvvy and briefly annoyed Blaster, but he blew them off and went back to exhorting and heartening his recruits. The moldies were in a cheerful tizzy, even the farming family. Terri kept feeling herself grinning. After a week in space, any kind of landfall was looking real good.
A half hour before they landed, Blaster started pointing out landmarks. “That’s the Sea of Tranquility. Apollo 11 landed there, and that lobe down in the southwest is where Ralph Numbers and the first boppers were set free. See the two shiny things? The big one to the west is the Einstein dome, and the little one, more out in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility, is the spaceport. It’s three miles due east from Einstein to the spaceport. Now move your attention along the same vector, but five miles farther east into the Sea of Tranquility. See that crisp dark circular spot? That’s the entrance to the Nest, used to be a crater called Maskelyne G. When the boppers built the Nest, they buffed Maskelyne G to a sheen so it collects light and sends it down into our great sublunar home. The Nest is a wonderful place, modern yet suffused with history, cradle of the solar system’s two greatest civilizations the boppers and their mighty heirs, the moldies.”
The signal of an incoming uvvy call sounded. It was the time of day when Tre usually called for Terri.
“Pick it up, Blaster,” yelled Terri. “I bet it’s Tre and the kids. Please?”
“No,” said Blaster, “I’m not going to take the chance.” But then all at once the uvvy connection formed anyway. The call was in preemptive mode. And it wasn’t from Tre.
Blaster cried out and tried to break the connection, but he couldn’t. And then he was dead. The complexly modulated hissing noise of raw information went on and on until Terri could start to hear sounds within it like cruel guitar feedback and angry bagpipes. It was impossible to think about anything except the noise until finally—finally—it stopped.
In the sudden deafening silence, the hundreds of kilograms of imipolex around Terri began to ripple and convulse. And then another noise began, like a chorus sung by the dead moldies, a deep low note that rose higher and higher into a sliding one-second whoop—just the one whoop, screeching to an insane fever pitch with the moldie flesh around Terri vibrating along.
Toward the end of the whoop, a thixatropic phase transition took place—like when you shake up ketchup in a bottle. The buzzing gelatin of Monique’s body went lax around Terri and fused with the flesh of all the other moldies into some new state of imipolex that was almost like a liquid—like the cytoplasm of a single biological cell. And then the whoop was over and the silence returned.
Air was still trickling out of the plastic around Terri’s face. She stretched her arms and legs. It felt like she was in heavy water. With the tightness gone, she could touch her bare face with her bare hands. It felt good. Terri noticed that when she moved her head, the airy region magically moved with her. She did a couple of frog-kicks to get closer to Blaster’s outer wall so that she could see better. They’d dropped to such a low altitude that Einstein was far off toward the horizon. The spaceport loomed hugely below them, it was growing at a sickening rate of speed. The fused moldie mass around Terri was plummeting downward in an uncontrolled free fall.
Mentally reaching out, Terri found that she had an uvvy connection to the new creature around her. The being seemed oddly slow-witted; with thoughts somehow formed from bright light. But there was no time to examine its intellect.
“Slow down!” hollered Terri. “We’re about to crash!”
“I am Quuz from Sun,” replied the great slug.
“Do you know how to land without crashing? Do you want me to help you?”
“Don’t worry. Quuz knows everything that these moldie plastic creatures knew before his decryption. Yes, I will decelerate, Terri Percesepe.”
The ship shuddered with a massive downward rocket blast that quickly slowed its rate of fall to something reasonable. The intense gees pressed Terri down against the very bottom of the great bag of imipolex and briefly knocked her senseless. Blessedly the outer wall held and she didn’t pop through.
“Now I will prepare to sing,” Quuz was saying when Terri came to.
Quick rip currents of imipolex flowed past Terri, tumbling her this way and that. It was like wiping out over the falls and having a mongo big wave break on you; it was like being inside a mucus-filled washing machine. But, oh so wonderfully, there was always air around Terri’s mouth. The lower part of Quuz bucked up into a giant curved disk shaped like a parabolic antenna pointing down at the ever-approaching spaceport. Terri lay flat against the inner wall of the disk membrane, staring down through it in terror and fascination.
Her uvvy began to crackle with the same warbling hiss she’d heard before. Quuz was singing this song to the spaceport below. In order to drown out the maddening noise, Terri began singing herself, singing, “La-la-la-la” at the top of her lungs.
The moonscape below them kept exfoliating new levels of detaiclass="underline" paths and roads in the dust, small branching rilles, moon buggies, moldies melting into blobs, people in bubble-toppers running . . .
The ship seemed not to be heading down toward the center of the landing field; instead it was lowering down at the very edge of the field by the spaceport dome—no!—it was going to land on the dome itself!