Too confused to do anything but lie there and thrash, ow, Stahn began to die, but then, at the last moment, the Happy Cloak flowed out over his whole body, making itself into a warm air-filled spacesuit.
There was the sweet energizing smell of clean air. Stahn’s eyes flickered open. The part of the Happy Cloak in front of his face was transparent; he could see out. There was a series of sharp pains in the back of his neck. The Happy Cloak was plugging its microprobes into his nervous system.
Hello, meatie, came the Happy Cloak’s sweet voice in Stahn’s head. I am pleased to ride your body once more. Much has changed.
“Call me Stahn. I must bring a wendy intact to Einstein. Helen’s orders.”
That is untrue. The boppers are all dead. Take me to the light-pool so I can feed. Then I can help you.
“Fine.” Stahn decided to think and say as little as possible. He got to his feet and wondered which way to go. Wendy was around here someplace, but he kept forgetting which direction was which. “We’ll come back for Wendy later, right?”
Come. The Happy Cloak spacesuit nudged Stahn towards Helen and Ulalume, lying there on the floor. By selectively stiffening itself, the Happy Cloak could control which directions Stahn could move in. He had no desire to approach Helen’s dangerous pod, but then he was leaning over her and touching her. Her mottled flickercladding blinked rapidly—as if talking to the Happy Cloak. He laid his other hand on the inert Ulalume, and her cladding responded in the same way.
Carry my fellows to the light-pool, said the voice in Stahn’s head. They are hungry, too. The Happy Cloak flickered strobily at the bodies of Helen and Ulalume, and then the two weird sisters’ skins slid off , exposing the hard blank bodyshells underneath. The shells weren’t quite blank: threads of gray-yellow fuzz projected out of the microcracks at the joints. Chipmold. It had strangled the boppers’ processors long before they could begin to synthesize the proper antigen. Humans had the edge on them there, with their bodies’ built-in wetware labs. The boppers’ hardware was slushed, though their limpware—their symbiotic imipolex skins—seemed to be actually enjoying the mold. Stahn stooped and picked up the two wriggling imipolex sheaths. They weighed very little in the weak lunar gravity.
Thank you. The Happy Cloak wasn’t running him as Helen had; it was simply nudging him and making suggestions. It was happy to see through Stahn’s eyes and have Stahn carry it.
“Which way?”
Follow the star. Your Wendy will wait. We’ll save her and Darla too.
A blue line drawing of a stellated dodecahedron appeared in Stan’s visual field. Sometimes he’d lose sight of it, but if he turned his head back and forth he could always find it. He followed the star out of the lab, down a short corridor, and out into the huge open space of the Nest. Stahn paused, looking this way and that, still having trouble seeing anything on his weak left side. The Nest was roughly conical in shape, with a vast shaft of light coming down its central axis. For a terrified moment, Stahn felt as if he would fall upward along the Nest’s pocked, towering walls.
The light-pool is ahead.
Stahn followed the blue star down a street with shops and boppers. The Nest had become a ghost town; all the boppers were motionless. Some of them must have depleted their batteries, for their skins were blank and empty. But most of them still had some juice, and their blotched claddings pulsed in asymmetric harmonies. They seemed to have enough photosensitivity to be able to converse among each other, at least after a fashion. Over and over, Stahn’s Happy Cloak would flash a special stroby way, and an immobilized bopper’s skin would slither off for Stahn to carry.
Finally they were at the light-pool, a great round patch of sunlight some fifty feet across. Dozens of paralyzed boppers crouched there, as well as scores of flickercladdings who’d laboriously crawled there on their own. The claddings looked like bright slugs. When Stahn tossed down his bale of claddings, many of the others came inching over to “talk.” Stahn lay down to rest while the Happy Cloak around him ate its fill of light. The Happy Cloak cradled Stahn and fed him air. Its guileless microprobe outputs were bright and happy.
Stahn fell asleep and dreamed.
He was on a red rocky field, maybe Mars, though there was air, thin clean mountain air. The sun was small and hot. He had wings, huge imipolex wings. He was not alone; there were other humans like him, all partly clad in Happy Cloaks with great glider wings. Wendy was there, and Whitey and Darla. “Yay, Stahn,” they yelled with laughing voices. “Come on!” They ran down a slope and leaped off the edge of the cliff the slope ended in, leaped out and circled like swallows over the great bright city in the rift .
The scene shifted, and he was back on Earth, deep undersea, dressed in a knowing imipolex diving suit beefed up to the size of a dolphin. Wendy was a plastic dolphin beside him, skirling chirrups. They arced into a juicy drift of squid.
He was in space, mellow with amines, drifting like a spore.
He was skittering across the heavy methane atmosphere of Jupiter, straining his senses downward to catch the mighty songs of the Great Old Ones below.
Come, Stahn. Let us be on our way. We’ll get Darla and Wendy and walk to Einstein.
Stahn opened his eyes and sat up. Such sweet dreams. Helen had never let him dream, not for a month.
His Happy Cloak felt livelier; its renewed energies put a real spring in his motions. His left side was working much better. He leaped to his feet and stretched. The loose limpwares flickered at him, wishing him well. Two of them crawled closer, begging to be picked up.
I have showed them how to be spacesuits, said the voice in Stahn’s head. Bring them and follow the star.
The spiky blue line shape appeared in Stahn’s visual field, and he bounded along after it, carrying the two extra Happy Cloaks under his arm. First they’d save Darla. That was a good idea, and only fitting, as it was Stahn’s fault that she’d been taken captive.
With part of his right brain missing, Stahn still didn’t have a clue about which way was which. But he didn’t worry about it too much. He knew that, just as limited damage to the left brain can knock out your ability to speak, limited damage to the right brain can destroy your ability to form mental 3D simulations of your surroundings. He’d get some new brain tissue from ISDN or, hell, he’d just keep this wavy Happy Cloak.
The blue star twinkled, and the voice in his head said, I am pleased.
They were in a kind of factory district now; huge idle buildings that must have been chip-smelters. They came to the Nest’s wall, balconied like a highrise. A series of powerful leaps took Stahn up five levels, and then he followed the star down a short series of branching tunnels that ended with a single open door.