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Like an athlete making a perfect move in the zone. It takes, strictly speaking, no subjective time at all. It's a radical discontinuity, a Dirac delta, a nonlinear spike, a shock front." He tossed Syzzy an S-cube he'd been looking at.

"I'm using language that I found in here, Syzzy."

"This is so ultrawavy," exclaimed Je

"Hold on," said Corey, "I'll walk to the air lock with you and look them over."

He and Je

"Do you really, truly think Corey is attractive?" Darla said to Joke after Corey was out of the room. "Is this what I raised you for!?" Her voice was shaking with extreme emotion.

"Hush, Ma," said Joke.

"Not now, Ma," added Yoke.

"Joke's all grown up, Darla," said Whitey. "There's nothing we can do about it if she likes Corey. The less we say about it, the sooner she'll get over it."

"Maybe Corey's not the only thing I'm upset about!" sobbed Darla. "Maybe there's lots of other things I think we should do something about. Hold me, Whitey!"

Whitey put his arms around Darla and she pressed herself against him, putting her mouth right next to his ear.

"Please don't start acting like talk-viddy dregs!" exclaimed Joke. "Can't we be rational? I have so many more questions for the aliens. Like you, Shimmer, you said you were made of a zillion parallel lives—I want to know what kind of individual creatures were living these lives. Squids or insects or artichokes or sunspots or what?"

"My individual beings were animals a lot like humans," said Shimmer. "But they could equally well have been rivers or trees."

"Trees!" exclaimed Willy. "I love trees."

"The moral is that everything is conscious," volunteered a pink woman alien.

"And everything is alive. My name is Parella. I come from a planet of crystals.

Syzzy may think your time is slow, but I think it's fast."

"I just thought of something," interrupted Whitey, with Darla still leaning against his chest "Stahn Mooney's still out there inside some Quuz-infected imipolex When he lands—like fourteen hours from now—when he gets close enough, his Quuz is likely to do a repeat of what Blaster did today. Or worse. What if Stahn were to come down on the Einstein dome and do a Pied Piper number on all the Silly Putters and DIMs in there? Mongo xoxx."

"It's so weird about Quuz," said Terri sleepily. "I've always had such good feelings about the Sun. But now—now whenever I look at the Sun, I'll know that it wants to eat us."

"He has to be stopped," said Darla.

"I'd be glad to fly up and destroy the Quuz," said Syzzy. "I hate primitive sunspot creatures like Quuz."

"Floaty, but I think it would be better for the humans and moldies to handle it," said Whitey. "We're more familiar with the way things work here. Also I'd like to try and do this without killing Stahn. He's an old friend of mine."

"Don't look at me. I'm too tired to help," Terri heard herself saying. And it was true. She was slumped back onto her couch and her fluttering eyelids kept trying to close.

Now Je

"Hey, Corey," said Whitey. "Why don't you and me and these tour moldies fly up and save Senator Stahn? We could leave in like two hours."

"I don't want to go," said Gurdle-7.

"Look, you stinky slug," snarled Whitey. "You're the smart one who got us into this mess. You have to go."

"No," said Gurdle-7. "I want to stay right here and exchange information with the aliens. I've been working all my life for this."

"I don't want to leave either," said Willy.

"So let them stay," said Corey. Terri happened to be drowsily staring at Darla just then and she noticed Darla giving Corey a charged intent look. "You and me, Whitey, we can do it if Je

"Copacetic," said Whitey.

"But what occurs when the Wendy-Quuz sings the Stairway To Heaven to us?" protested Frangipane. "Directly to us from very close up." "Haven't you been monitoring Je

"How would we install it on ourselves?" asked Ormolu uncertainly.

"Well, the aliens did it alone, but I think you moldies will need for me to help you," said Corey glibly. "Let's just take the magic pig and bird back into my limpware studio and I'll fix you right up. Come on. You come too, Gurdle-7."

"Yes yes, I want the vaccination so that I can teach it to all the moldies in the Nest," said Gurdle-7. "Then they won't be angry at me anymore. By the way, Corey, do you have some extra S-cubes so that I can download a copy of my Stairway To Heaven program? There aren't any copies of the documentation left anymore. Those paranoid Nest moldies blew up my lab."

"Sure, I've got the equipment for that too," said Corey. "Come on, you four moldies."

"I'll help," said Whitey. "I'll carry those weapons for you, Corey. You grab the bird and the pig."

"I want to watch too," said Darla. "I haven't walked around in this house for such a long time." Corey, Whitey, Darla, and the four moldies clumped off down the hall, Corey carrying the rath and the Jubjub bird and Whitey carrying the needler and the ugly stick.

"We've heard from Shimmer the 2D-time humanoid, Zad the squid, Syzzy the quasar vortex, Takala the mantis, Bloog the jellyfish, and Parella the crystal,"

Willy said. "How about you other six aliens?"

Though it was some of the most interesting information she'd ever heard, Terri couldn't keep her eyes open, and she drifted off to sleep.

CHAPTER TEN. DARLA. NOVEMBER 6, 2053

Darla's grandmother's family were American Indians from the Acoma pueblo near Albuquerque. From listening to her Indian relatives, Darla knew all too well what it meant to have a powerful alien culture arrive. She knew all about the greed, the disease, the cruelty, and the heartless disdain for the native culture. "Give us your gold; we'll give you disease; your religion is evil; support our parasitic priests." Finding the aliens in Corey's isopod filled Darla with a deep visceral loathing. But she knew better than to prematurely show her feelings.

Under the pretext of having a fit over Joke and Corey, Darla got herself into Whitey's arms and whispered into his ear: "We have to kill the aliens."

She could tell from Whitey's body language that he understood and agreed. And when Corey came back with the four moldies and the needler and the O.J. ugly stick, Darla sensed that Corey too knew what had to be done.

Corey and Whitey led the way off down the hall toward Corey's studio, followed by the four moldies, with Darla in the rear. Trying hard to keep her voice even, Darla made housewifely commentary on the features of the isopod.

"That's nice to see your giant marijuana plants are doing so well in the grove out there, Corey. How tall are they? And I see you've still got your velvet paintings up. I always liked that one of the nuking of Akron."

"Yeah," said Corey. "I put a lot of myself into that picture. I went to high school in Akron. I hated it, of course, but sometimes I'm sort of sorry those Yaqui rubber tappers blew it up. Odd as it sounds, when I lived in Akron, I used to dream about blowing it up myself. Like precognition. In one dream I was in the middle of this big Akron stadium with a white-painted fat-boy H-bomb and there were thousands of people in the seats watching me and they were chanting,