“Oh, I have three Silly Putters—sort of like pet moldies. They’re a little smarter than animals. Come on out, guys. Terri won’t hurt you. Line up so she can take a look at you. Front and center! Now, Terri, I hope you’re not off ended by the way Elvira looks. I’m—I guess some people would say I’m—”
“Just hand me the towel, okay?”
Willy gave Terri the towel. She quickly dried herself and pulled on the T-shirt and the shorts, eyeing the Silly Putters all the while. From smallest to largest, they resembled a tiny voluptuous woman clad only in boots and gloves, a winged green dragon with a long scaly tail, and an apple-cheeked gnome with a full white beard cropped short and tidy.
“These are Elvira, Fafnir, and Doc,” said Willy. “They’re not able to talk, but they can obey lots of commands. Show Terri how you water the plants, Fafnir. Fafnir, water plants!”
Fafnir waddled forward and sucked a deep draught from the water of the pool—the constant refiltering had already removed the soap and dirt from Terri’s bath. Flapping his leathery wings in an awkward, comical blur, Fafnir rose up like a hummingbird and began spewing small dabs of water into each of the hanging plants.
“Do you have any injuries, Terri?” continued Willy. “Your knee looks kind of banged up. Doc’s got a complete set of healer tools, and he knows how to use them, right, Doc?” Willy pointed to Terri’s knee, which was indeed dark with a spreading bruise, and commanded, “Doc, heal!” The gnome stepped forward, grinning and nodding, and before Terri could slap him away, he’d laid his hands on her knee and done something tingly that made the pain go away.
“I guess I don’t have to ask what Elvira is for,” said Terri. Hearing her name, Elvira started up a spirited little dance, flinging her arms from side to side in a showy, abandoned way that Terri found intensely annoying.
“Elvira cheers me up,” said Willy evasively. “She’s what they call a femlin. Are you hungry? Elvira or Doc can get you something.”
“What kind of food do you have? Do you have vegetables or fruit? I’ve had nothing but moldie juice for over a week. But I’d rather help myself. I certainly wouldn’t want to eat anything that’s been touched by Elvira.”
“If that’s the way you feel,” said Willy stiffly.
“It’s the way any woman would feel. You’ve been living alone too long, Willy. For God’s sake, tell that thing to stop dancing. I don’t have to put up with this.”
“Oh, whatever. Elvira, hide!” The femlin went back behind the couch. Willy sat down in the easy chair and gestured toward the food pantry. “So eat something. You’re hungry and cranky. I got fresh fruits and veggies delivered from the greenhouse today.”
Terri found herself a banana and a bunch of strawberries. She ate them with wheat germ and runny tofu. Delicious. While she ate, Willy stared off into space, listening down into his uvvy.
“Can I uvvy my husband now?” asked Terri after she’d finished. “He must be worried sick.”
“Um, yeah,” said Willy, coming back from wherever he’d been. “I’ve got an extra uvvy that you can use. I invented the uvvy, you know. I’m not just some crazy weirdo, Terri.”
“I know that, Willy. I guess maybe I was a little short-tempered just now.”
“Well, I’m glad to have you here,” said Willy and handed Terri a green uvvy.
Donning the uvvy felt like opening her eyes and discovering a roomful of surprise-party guests. The presences of Willy, Gurdle-7, Frangipane, Jenny, and Ormolu were close by, and beyond them lay a vast churning crowd of other moldie minds. It seemed like everyone in the nest was uvvy-connected to everyone else. Hundreds of voices were talking at once, but via some multiplex uvvy magic, Terri could follow the threads of the conversations.
The two main questions being discussed were (a) how to prevent Wendy-Quuz from triggering another catastrophe and (b) what to do with the new Gurdle decryption technology. Most of the moldies were for sending a smart bomb to annihilate Wendy-Quuz and for never using Gurdle decryption again, but Willy and Gurdle-7 were arguing that the technology was too important to ignore.
“It’s safer than you realize,” Gurdle-7 was uvvying to the Nest moldies as Terri tuned in.
“Quuz killed my husband at the dome this morning,” responded an angry red moldie who resembled a crab.
“Not all of the personalities we decrypt will be like Quuz,” insisted Gurdle-7. “Most of them will be intelligent and full of useful information.”
“Useful like ‘Sun wants eat Moon’?” hooted another voice.
“Just listen for a minute,” said Gurdle-7. “This morning before the Wendy experiment, we did a test on some Silly Putters. Frangipane sent the Stairway To Heaven program to infect twelve of the Silly Putters in Corey Rhizome’s isopod.”
“You’re crazy, Gurdle-7!” raged the red moldie. “The infection’s going to spread! We ought to kill you!”
“The infection, it is not spreading,” volunteered Frangipane. “And I will recount why. It is that Rhizome’s Silly Putters have decrypted into some aliens who are mature, evolved beings. They are very glad to be able to decrypt here. They speak of our Earth-Sun system as a ‘new node’ and they are concerned with finding a way to ‘ensure the integrity of this new node.’ They are not clumsy babies from the Sun like Quuz. They are elegant old minds from deep in the space.”
“What’s to stop them from uvvying Einstein and running the Stairway To Heaven on every Silly Putter and DIM in town?” demanded a moldie who looked like a cholla cactus with braidlike green arms.
“That’s not what they want,” said Gurdle-7. “As a matter of fact, they destroyed Corey Rhizome’s uvvy. In the spirit of frankness, I suppose I should announce that Corey did infect one single Silly Putter in Einstein. But that Putter was instantly killed by its owner, Darla Starr.” Great moldie cries of fear and anger followed.
“I didn’t know that,” said Willy across the hubbub. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now,” said Gurdle-7. “Corey’s had two calls since the infection, and I monitored both of them. First he called Darla Starr, and then after the aliens took his uvvy away, Corey used a regular old vizzy phone to accept a call from Darla. During the second call, I had the opportunity to notice that the aliens were very interested in the fact that two of Corey’s Silly Putters had turned out to be immune to the Stairway To Heaven infection. The aliens wanted Corey to hand those last two Silly Putters over for examination, but Corey wouldn’t. It became an issue. In the end, the aliens got their way, and Corey’s vizzy phone got broken. That’s why there haven’t been any more calls.”
“The rath and the Jubjub bird!” exclaimed Willy. “Yes! They’re immune because they have cubic damping! We have to go to Corey’s isopod and get that algorithm. I can’t remember the exact details, but I can find them out by looking at the rath and the Jubjub bird. And then maybe we can use cubic damping to make all the moldies safe from the Stairway To Heaven.”
“Frankly I’d be a little leery of going in there with those aliens,” said Gurdle-7. “Until we have more information. But I could take you as far as Corey’s air lock.”
“Gurdle-7 is a filthy coward!” hollered one of the angry Nest moldies.
“We should bomb the Rhizome isopod!” yelled another.