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As if in confirmation, there was a roaring behind the hall door. The hall roof had given way as well. It sounded like the end of the world.

"How do we get out of here?" shrieked Je

"And I want to go home to Santa Cruz," wailed Terri.

"Through this door for the garage," said Corey, crossing the kitchen and opening a door that led to an upward flight of stairs. "Everyone hurry on up there and put on a bubbletopper. The whole garage is an air lock."

Corey went last, closing the kitchen door and the staircase door behind them.

The seven humans wriggled into the waiting bubbletoppers, Corey still carrying his rath and Jubjub bird. There were more ominous crashes and roars from the isopod. Once they had the bubbletoppers on, they switched to uvvy communication and Corey cycled the garage's big air lock door open.

"Adieu," said Frangipane, humping out to the open surface of the Moon and preparing to fly away.

"Good luck," added Je

"We did our best," said gleaming Ormolu.

And then, in a puff of dust, the three moldies had jetted away, arcing off toward the Nest.

"Let's get clear of the isopod right away," uvvied Corey. Darla and her family got on one of the moon buggies, while Corey, Willy, and Terri got on the other.

They floored the accelerators and the buggies darted out across the dusty surface of the Moon.

Yoke was driving again, with Joke next to her and Whitey and Darla in back.

Darla turned to stare back at the isopod, and as she watched, the ragged hole over the conservatory and hallway ripped farther open. The entire remaining part of the dome gave way in a great burst of frozen air, with clothes, furniture, and huge branches of the marijuana trees tumbling up through the lunar vacuum.

"So much for your blowout-proof design, Willy," said Corey's slow ironic voice.

"Oh well. I was thinking about moving back into Einstein anyway."

A voice suddenly crackled over Darla's uvvy and over the uvvies of the others.

The voice of Shimmer.

"Well done," said Shimmer. "You chose an optimal thread."

"Shimmer," uvvied Joke, craning her head back and looking upward. "Where are you?"

"I'm a hundred and fifty miles straight up from the Moon. It's an interesting view."

"Are you angry that we killed your friends?" asked Darla. "Are you going to get even with us?"

" 'Kill,' " said Shimmer musingly. "The word means a lot to you, doesn't it?

Your spacetime is so—so poignant. To live with the immediacy of total a

"Please don't hurt us," uvvied Willy. "Darla and the others were only scared that you aliens would overwhelm our little civilization."

"Darla was right," said Shimmer. "From what I hear, it's not a pretty thing for a civilization as undeveloped as yours to become a Decryption node." "But how did you escape, Shimmer?" Whitey wanted to know. "I kept aiming right at you, but then you were never there when I shot."

"Even though your alternate worlds are unreal, I can still see them," said Shimmer's voice. "All I had to do was to keep picking the correct bending of my world line."

"So what are you going to do now?" asked Joke.

"I might visit Earth for a while," said Shimmer. "But don't worry. Sooner or later, I'll chirp out of here. You do not welcome me, and I do not wish to overstay. Although one-dimensional time has a certain fatalistic glamour, it's not a spacetime configuration I'm prepared to inhabit forever."

"Could you do us one favor?" put in Terri.

"Maybe."

"Kill that other Quuz-thing."

"I was already pla

"Let me try to save him!" cried Whitey.

"Shut up!" said Darla, who'd never much liked Stahn. "It's too late, Whitey, and you'd probably get killed. Shimmer—could you kill Quuz and code up Stahn and chirp him out of here? Then it wouldn't be like he really died."

"I could do that," said Shimmer. "I can do almost anything. Stahn would become a personality wave. In the fullness of transfinite cosmic time, he'd Decrypt somewhere and somewhen else."

"Oh, don't do that," said Willy. "Please listen to me. It's my fault that Stahn got into this in the first place. Gurdle-7 and I had this stupid idea that it would help to have Stahn inside the first moldie that we did a Decryption on.

But apparently it didn't help at all."

"So what are you asking me to do?" said Shimmer.

"Ferry Stahn down to us," said Willy. "He doesn't want to live somewhere and somewhen. He wants to be here and now. Like any other person. Kill Quuz and bring Stahn the rest of the way to Einstein, Shimmer. Fly him down inside you."

"Shimmer doesn't want to do that," snapped Darla, feeling guilty for being so nasty, but letting it out anyway. "It'll take her too long."

"Oh, I have all the time in the world," laughed Shimmer. "It'll be an interesting challenge to kill the Quuz without killing Stahn. I'll fly back here and drop him off at the Einstein air lock. If I flew very fast, I could have Stahn for you by the time you get there yourself. In half an hour. But the acceleration would kill him. Kill. There's that word again." Shimmer gave a buzzing, chiming laugh and broke the uvvy co

CHAPTER ELEVEN. STAHN. NOVEMBER 7, 2053 - DECEMBER 2053

So there was Stahn hurtling through cislunar vacuum, Stahn wrapped inside the fifteen kilograms of imipolex that had once been Wendy and which now was Quuz.

They weren't talking anymore, but Quuz had kept their uvvy link jammed open for maximum access Stahn could sense Quuz's consciousness all around him as intimately as if Quuz were breathing in his face.

Stahn hated Quuz. Quuz had killed Wendy, and thanks to Stahn's having foolishly shown Quuz the communication protocols, Quuz had taken over all the moldies in Blaster as well.

Being forcibly linked to Quuz reminded Stahn of how it had felt when he'd been a slave worker in the pink-tanks—a meatie with a robot rat remote of Helen the bopper in place of the right hemisphere of his brain. While flashing back on that ugly memory, Stahn had unwisely vented rage at Quuz, right after Quuz took over Wendy's and Blaster's imipolex. From that point on, Quuz had dropped all verbal communication.

For the last few hours, Quuz had seemingly been in a meditative state, calling up memories of the Sun. The solar images came across the wide-open uvvy as a seductively rich animated virtual reality. Stahn guessed that the colors might correspond to different intensities of X rays and gamma rays, that his perceptions of currents in the virtual fluid around him might represent plasma pressure waves, and that perhaps it was showers of neutrinos that were being presented as the surging roar that sounded like breaking surf or like wind in trees. Isolated in the midst of this rich input, Stahn's mind began willy-nilly to impose familiar interpretations on the unearthly scene.

At first, for instance, Stahn felt like he was floating in the ocean, snorkeling through some vast tropical reef alive with eels and anemones. And then it started feeling like being outside, like walking in an autumn forest, a peaceful country woods with purling brooks and friendly rabbits that spun on their tails like whirling dervishes. With a sun overhead. A sun in the Sun? There was no reasoning with the images. The trees began to move like big jolly writhing worms. Completely against his will, Stahn felt himself wanting to dance with them.

There was an occasional skirl of line noise as the system repeatedly retweaked the interface to Stahn's occipital lobes to make the visions the more obscenely rich and glorious Stahn tried to hold back the sinister ecstasy, tried to focus on the reality of his current situation.