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"It's not my fault I love you, Je

"What's going on?" demanded Joke

"Oh, these dooky slugs are in some kind of tussle," said Darla dismissively.

"Gurdle-7 and Ormolu are both hot for Je

"Hello, Darla," said Shimmer, but Darla acted like she was too busy staring at Je

"You're saying you love me?" Je

"This oughtta be very weightless," Whitey a

"Do you know any floatin' chaotic attractors, Ormolu?" shrilled Je

"What the hell is wrong with you moldies?" said Willy, turning away from the aliens to yell angrily at Je

On her couch, Terri sat up and rubbed her eyes. Darla shifted the needler to her lap and prayed that Terri wouldn't take it into her mind to walk between her and the four aliens by the fountain.

Ormolu's upper body shuddered and broke into threads that began looping around in hypnotic weaving patterns of standing waves, like a hydra head of a thousand thin filaments, with the envelopes of the filaments' motions forming a hallucinatory shape of warping, mutating curves "Big xoxxin' deal," griped Yoke. "That's nothing compared to what Syzzy here has been telling us about—"

"But wait!" called Corey, still standing off by the door that led from the conservatory to the hallway ."Everyone watch very closely to see what Ormolu does next!"

"Oh, I am so ready!" screeched Je

At this signal, Frangipane, Je

The only problem was that the fourth alien kept moving out of the way each time that Darla or Whitey shot. It was Shimmer. No matter how hard you tried to shoot her, Shimmer was always just out of the line of fire. Whitey stood up and moved around her, blazing away with the ugly stick, but hitting Shimmer was impossible. She wasn't moving particularly fast, but magically, effortlessly, as if by repeated strokes of luck, Shimmer was never in the spot where a flechette or needler beam ended up.

Darla glanced over to the far wall—Je

She struck Darla's hand, and the bliste

Darla clawed for it, but Joke kicked it aside. Shimmer was standing right in front of them by the fountain.

"We missed one!" shouted Darla to the three moldies. "We missed Shimmer!"

A dozen pellets of imipolex whistled past Darla's head. Shimmer bent slightly to one side and lifted her leg, all the poofballs missed her and burst harmlessly into flames against the fountain's basin. Whitey got around behind Joke, Yoke, and Darla to shoot the ugly stick toward Shimmer some more and completely missed her again and again. Shimmer turned and ducked and hopped and pirouetted, moving in dreamy slow motion, always in the right place at the right time. The room was filling with thick black smoke, oily with plastic and—Darla realized in a sudden wave of disorientation—loaded with the psychedelic vapors of camote.

A rapid breeze swept by Darla, fa

"Everybody out now!" Corey was yelling. "We have to seal off the smoke!

Everyone out in the hall so I can seal the door!" The bewildered Terri was already over there with him.

Darla seized Joke by the wrist and dragged her toward the door. Whitey had hold of Willy and Yoke Ormolu, Je

All the while, Corey kept yelling for them. "Hurry up! The ceiling could blow out any time!"

As they made their way, the smoke grew thicker. Whitey went last, still firing his ugly stick back into the room, hoping to hit Shimmer. When Darla made it to the hallway, she gasped down some of the less smoky air and turned to stare into the inferno of the conservatory.

In the center of the room, on top of the fountain, stood Shimmer, staring calmly at them. Two heartbeats passed, Darla shouted, and a volley of poofballs and flechettes shot toward the alien. But by then Shimmer had sprung high upward and turned on the ion jets in her moldie body's heels. The conservatory roof shattered and a huge rush of wind slammed the conservatory door shut with a deafening thud.

The door to the conservatory held firm, but on the other side of it there were alarming crashes and screechings as the room's air rushed out into the vacuum, whirling the objects in the conservatory about like a cyclone.

"This isopod is really blowout-proof, isn't it, Willy?" said Corey, shouting to make himself heard over the chaos in the next room.

"That's how I designed it," said Willy. "But I've been wrong before. The farther we get from the conservatory, the better. Let's head down the hall, close the hall door, go through the kitchen, close the kitchen door, and then go up the stairs to the garage. There's a bunch of bubbletoppers in there and two moon buggies. So come on, let's move fast down the hall. Whose idea was it to kill the aliens?"

"I'll take the credit," said Darla, trotting along beside Willy. "I'm part Native American. We know a lot about cultural imperialism."

"You have a point," said Willy. "But Gurdle-7's going to be furious."

"Gurdle-7's dead," said Whitey.

"I think you're a bitch, Ma," said Joke. "The aliens were beautiful. They had so much to teach us."

"Well, there's still two of them left to learn from," said Corey, ushering the group out of the hall and into the kitchen. "There's still Shimmer and the Wendy version of Quuz."

"We still gotta fly up and kill Quuz and save Stahn Mooney!" exclaimed Whitey.

"Are you moldies ready for that?" "We've helped enough," said Ormolu. "I'm scared that Shimmer's going to do something bad to us now."