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"Flapper gets lots of energy from the Sun up here, and she stores it as quantum dots. Don't forget, a mole of quantum dots is no bigger than a hundred nanograms. And Flapper's going to give me a whole gram! We'll have a full tank of gas, big guy."

"Yes, Wendy, here come your quantum dots," sang Flapper. "I'm spraying them into your flesh. And now I'm nearly ready to birth you!"

By craning his head back, Stahn could see down the tu

"Straighten out your neck, Stahn," said Wendy, her voice vibrant with energy.

"It's time for me to go rigid." She squeezed very tightly around Stahn and made the imipolex of her flesh as stiff as steel.

Flapper started a great loop-the-loop to bring her underside uppermost. As she rose to the top of the loop, she bunched her body into a huge mass of muscle and pushed.

Stahn and Wendy shot out from Flapper with incredible speed; the strength of the g-forces was such that Stahn fainted dead away.

When he came to, he was staring out into black starry space. Wendy had lost her rigidity, and Stahn could look down past his feet at the great planet Earth falling away or crane his head back and look up toward the disk of the Moon.

The Sun was hidden behind the Earth for now.

To maintain Stahn's temperature, Wendy had silvered her surface inside and out; except for the half-silvered patch over Stahn's eyes. Stahn spent some time moving his arms and legs and marveling at the multiple reflections of himself, the Earth and the Moon. How beautiful it was. But how lonely. He was all by himself, hurtling farther and farther away from home, with nothing but a moldie

'Cloak for company. Tumbling through the dark, forever alone.

"This is like a bad dream," said Stahn.

"I like it," said Wendy. "Are you warm enough?"

"I'm fine." The silvered imipolex kept Stahn comfortable, and the air in his nose was fresh and cool.

"Should I worry about radiation?" asked Stahn. "About cosmic rays?"

"Let's put it this way: your odds of cancer are going to be a little higher after this trip. And cosmic rays can have an effect on moldies too. But we'll just have to grin and bear it and hope for the best, I suppose."

"Can you feel how hard I'm gri

"It'll do you good, Stahn. You need the detox."

Stahn thought longingly of his pot at home and his liquor cabinet and his squeezies of snap and gabba. He loved all drugs except merge. He'd been through a bad experience with merge—the time that Darla had overdosed him on merge back on the Moon. By the time that bummer was fully over, Stahn had lost the entire right half of his brain. What a burn.

"Uvvy the kids, can you do that? And then we should uvvy Whitey Mydol on the Moon. He should know that we're coming. I guess we'll be landing on the Moon the day after Blaster and Terri, right? A week from now?"

"Right. We're traveling along a seven-day Earth-to-Moon spacetime geodesic just like Blaster is. He's a day ahead of us, yes, and we can keep checking with him.

He'll be our closest neighbor most of the way."

"We can uvvy him and everyone else as much as we want to?" This thought was somewhat comforting. Not to be wholly alone in the void.

"Well, uvvying costs us a trillion quantum dots per second per call."

"You're ru

"You're not going to have enough for keeping me warm and for braking our descent?"

"Not to worry," giggled Wendy. "Flapper gave me like ten-to-the-thirtieth quantum dots. That's enough energy for over a quadrillion hour-long uvvy calls.

So now let's call the kids."

"Yes yes, do it. You talk to them first so that they know right away that you're okay. You threw quite a scare into them."

So they talked to the kids. Babs was crying and Saint was near tears himself; Wendy's abandoned body had just died. The conversation went on for a while and finally they all felt pretty solid again.

Next they uvvied Whitey. They were still close enough to the Earth that there was a noticeable two- or three-second lag in round-trip transmissions to the Moon, so that call didn't amount to much. And then they tried Blaster.

"Hi, guys," uvvied Blaster's deep voice. "Welcome to the worm farm." Blaster himself was a presence made up of four or five permanently fused moldies, but his psychic uvvyspace arched out to include the minds of the shanghaied moldies he had aboard. And down under Blaster's basso profundo and the excited chatter of the moldies was Terri Percesepe.

"Hi, Terri," said Stahn. "It's Stahn Mooney."

"Oh good," said Terri. "Tre said you'd arranged to ransom me. But I don't understand the uvvy image I see. Are you—are you out in space?"

"Yeah, I got abducted too. By my own wife, Wendy."

"Wendy meat Wendy?" asked Terri. "Who Tre's always doing the ads about? I don't get what's going on."

"We're going up to the Moon so I can get a new flesh body," said Wendy. "How is it for you guys inside Blaster, Terri?"

"It's kickin'," put in one of the moldies. The uvvy image of Blaster showed a writhing knot of moldies, all slowly crawling about while keeping Blaster in the same overall shape. The moldie talking to them was bright yellow with green-and-pink fractal spirals. "This is Sunshine fabulating atcha. My man Mr.

Sparks and me are drifters, but will work for imipolex."

"Mostly we been wandering up and down the streets of Santa Cruz stealin' shit and doin' odd jobs to score betty," amplified Mr. Sparks, a red snake decorated with yellow lightning bolts. "Blaster says we'll like it on the Moon. Lotta lifty action there. Not to mention a good chance of finally hooking into enough imipolex to have a kid."

"My family is not happy about it," said another voice. "I am Verdad, this is my wife Lolo, and -these are my in-laws Hayzooz and Mezcal." Verdad and his family were blobby in shape and colored in brown-and-green earth tones. "We have been farmin' the fields for five generations. We are not enjoy in' this change very much. I think there is nothin' at all we can grow on the Moon."

"Muy malo," grumbled Hayzooz. "This is some ugly kilp. Why don't you let us fly back to the Earth, Blaster?"

"We're already in orbit," said Blaster. "We're coasting. The only way you chukes'll get enough quantum dots for a return flight is to do some work on the Moon. But, believe me, you won't want to go back. You'll love it in the Nest.

You can work in the fab growing chipmold. Or in the pink-tanks growing organs.

Or learn some hi-tech trades. You're moldies, for God's sake, not flesher dirt farmers."

"We are goin' to miss the rain and the soil and the little growin' things."

"The purity of the Moon is good," said Blaster. "It is an ascetic spiritual path, but a highly efficacious one."

"I don't care how spiritual it is, as long as I can get that fresh imipolex you promised," said the voice of a pale white moldie covered with pimply red spots and with a sharp beak at one end. "Buttmunch here. Gypsy and me are five years old and our upgrades are just about worn out. We've been rogues our whole lives, spent a lot of it underwater. We help smugglers bring things in and out of Davenport Beach, and this last time we got careless and a flesher zombified us.

But Blaster says on the Moon we'll get new imipolex and heavy-duty tu

Swimming through rock and getting good bucks. It's a new lease on life."

"Yaar, I'm for it," said Gypsy, who was flesh-colored and covered with fingerlike bumps like the underside of a starfish. And like on a starfish, each flexible little finger had a sucker at its tip. "But even so I wish we could snuff that dook Aarbie Kidd for putting the superleeches on us. Remember that very first job you and me did, Buttmunch? The real tasty one in Aarbie's cottage? When we offed that Heritagist asshole Dom Per—"