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"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 ante

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 detail: paths and roads in the dust, small branching rilles, moon buggies, moldies melting into blobs, people in bubble-toppers ru

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!

"We're crashing into the building!" screamed Terri. "Quuz, look out!" But Quuz was deaf to all but his own song.

Below them, in the spaceport, Quuz's song was being heard and understood.

Just before they impacted the spaceport dome, the dome's great curve split hugely open, shattering from within like a hatching egg, revealing a vast grex of imipolex that reached up to receive them, reached up through the tumbling wreckage and the sparkling clouds of vacuum-frozen vapor.

Quuz merged with the new slug, lost his balance, and crashed to the floor of the shattered dome with a concussive thud that rattled Terri's teeth and bones.

She looked out through Quuz's skin and saw dead people all around, vacuum-killed people with popped-out eyes and bloated tongues and mangled limbs that pushed out freezing foams of pale pink blood like high-speed shelf fungi growing upon rotten wood.

Quuz wallowed about in the dome's wreckage, scavenging up every bit of imipolex there was to be found. And then bigger-than-ever Quuz crashed free of the debris and began humping across the dust of the Sea of Tranquillity. Heading not west toward Einstein, but east toward the Nest.

"Where are you going, Quuz?" shouted Terri. "Aren't you going to let me go?"

"Quuz wants to go to the Nest and sing. Many moldies live there. I will eat them. You are not like the moldies, Terri Percesepe. I will keep you safe."

"King Kong," thought Terri, and a shriek of edgy laughter escaped her. She composed herself and asked the next question. "Why do you want to eat all the moldies?"

"Sun wants to eat everything. For eons Sun has stared out at the beautiful planets and their moons. Sun wants to eat the pretty food. If Quuz is strong enough, Quuz can push Moon into Earth and make them both crash into Sun. Sun will be very happy. Sun want eat Earth. Sun want eat Moon."

"Oh God, oh God, oh God," groaned Terri.

The gray dusty moonscape kept jouncing past. There was no trace of any individual moldies within the Quuz mind around her. Quuz's thoughts were mostly images of what must have been the Sun: its surface like great seas of fire marked with shapes like reptile scales, and its interior filled with intense winding red/yellow/white patterns of energy tornadoes wrapped thick as sauced spaghetti in an endless vat.

What to do? Terri thought back to the fact that Frangipane of the Nest had made a point of saving Wendy's personality. It must have been that Frangipane had known that Quuz, or something like him, was about to take Wendy over.

Probably Quuz had first gotten Wendy, and then Wendy had uvvied Blaster to sing his song.

"Can you uvvy Wendy?" Terri asked Quuz.

"Wendy is Quuz. I am Quuz. There is nothing to say."

"But I'd like to talk to Stahn Mooney," protested Terri.

"Be still, Terri Percesepe. Soon I must sing."

And then they wallowed up a long, dusty slope to reach the lip of the crater that was the Nest's entrance. The big polished crater shone like a huge dark mirror. In its very center a great conical prism hung magnetically levitated above the central hole. The mirror's shape formed odd virtual images; Quuz himself was reflected as an unsteady blob across the crater's diameter. But there were no signs of any moldies. With a warbling cry of excitement, Quuz launched himself over the crater's edge and down onto the slope of the vast parabolic bowl. To Terri, up at the front of Quuz's body, it felt like carving a surf path down the face of a hundred-year tsunami.

They whooshed down the glistening polished stone, slowing a bit as the curve grew gentler, and then they passed beneath the massive, suspended cone mirror and dropped through the hole at the crater's center. The gentle gravity drew them downward into the huge empty space of the Nest's interior, and Quuz uttered the first hissing squeals of his song—

A terawatt laser beam seared through the imipolex near Terri, barely missing her. If oxygen had been present, Quuz would have gone up in a giant mothball of flame. But without the oxygen, the beam just cut the imipolex like a hot knife in sputtering butter. More and more beams flashed on every side, chopping Quuz up into hundreds of thrashing lumps. His song, barely begun, faded into silence.

Perhaps, given some time, Quuz would have been able to program himself down into each of his chunks, but the change came so rapidly that his simulation completely collapsed, leaving the freshly chopped-up globs of plastic with no minds.

The flow of air at Terri's mouth came to a stop. Swathed in a lump of dumb airless imipolex, she was hurtling down through the cold vacuum of the Nest toward a stone floor somewhere below. Surfer Terri maintained her shit. She looked around, trying to figure out the next correct move.

Flying about and filling every angle of Terri's vision there was a host, a legion, a hornet swarm of moldies. They seemed to be attacking and capturing the falling lumps, one lump to a moldie. A golden carrot with a fringe of little green tentacles darted forward and attached itself to Terri's imipolex.

Immediately the imipolex came alive with the personality of the golden carrot.

"Give me air," uvvied Terri as hard as she could. "I need air!"

The divine flow of gas started up again and Terri sucked in a hungry lungful.

"I'm Je

Je

"Yes yes," said Terri urgently. "Don't let us crash!"

The two embracing Je

Terri could see that the Nest was a huge fu

Moldies flew around them, sparkling like Mylar confetti. Most of them were accompanied by clones newly fashioned from captured lumps of Quuz's flesh.