"Shut th' fuck up, Gyp," interrupted Buttmunch, but it was too late.

"You killed my father?" Terri screamed. "You scummy mucus slugs killed my dad?"

"Dom fuckin' burned Aarbie twice," snapped Gypsy. "Me and Buttmunch were just youngsters anyhow. You don't like it, spoiled little rich bitch Terri Percesepe, then why don't you go on and jump off the ship. Or maybe I should crawl over there and teach you a fuckin'—ow!"

"I'm right next to you, Gypsy," said Xlotl's voice. "And so's Monique. Push harder, Monique." In the background, Blaster started laughing.

"Hey, quit it!" yelled Gypsy. "Help me, Buttmunch! They're trying to squeeze me in half!"

"You be nice to Terri," said Monique, her voice tight and hard as she and Xlotl hour-glassed Gypsy's waist. "Or—"

"Hey, hey, hey," interrupted Stahn, trying to be senatorial. "Simmer down over there. We've got six more days ahead of us. Make them stop, Blaster!"

"I wouldn't dream of it," chortled Blaster. "The fighting dogpile is an essential stage of my moldies' journey to liberation. Xanana and I will keep an eye on Terri, won't we, Xan'?"

"Of course. But frankly I'd rather not have to be Terri's life support for the whole way. The whole whole way. The whole whole whole way. Someone else should do it for a while. Monique. After all, it's Monique who got our family into this. Whoring for that Heritagist zerk Randy Karl Tucker."

"You're a real DIM head, Monique," put in Ouish, who was squeezed up against Xanana. She wormed out a long tendril and gave Monique a sharp poke.

"Fightin' dogpile," repeated Blaster happily. "You're a spunky bunch of recruits."

"Um, speaking of Heritagists?" uvvied a new voice. "This is Jenny from Salt Lake City?" The visage of a lank, immature country gal appeared in the shared uvvyspace. "Hellooo there! You guys ought to realize that some of us so-called Heritagists are really and truly working for the Nest."

"Oh God, not her again," said Stahn. "I've heard enough for now, Wendy."

Wendy closed their connection and they went off-line.

The better part of a week went by, and Stahn started feeling a lot healthier.

Having the drugs leave his system felt like having shiploads of life come up a river to be unloaded on his front steps. Big bales of L-I-F-E. Stahn remembered once again that his worst times sober were better than his best times high.

Whenever things started to lag, he and Wendy would make uvvy calls.

The day before Stahn and Wendy were due to land, Jenny's uvvy presence popped up again. It was while Stahn and Wendy were talking to Blaster.

"Hi, gang," said Jenny's callow giggly voice in the common uvvyspace. "Good news, Wendy, I've just arranged for you to download your personality for safekeeping, in case something happens to you during landing."

"That sounds like a good idea," said Wendy. "But no way am I downloading to Salt Lake City."

"Heavens no," said Jenny after a pause. "You'll download to the Nest. You've heard of Willy Taze? One of his friends in the Nest is a moldie called Frangipane. Frangipane is all set for you. Speak up now, Frangipane. Don't be shy!"

"Yes, I'm here," said a clear sweet voice with a French accent. "I am logged on to your uvvyspace. Bonjour, tout le monde. This is Frangipane in the Nest. I have an S-cube all prepared for you, Wendy." Frangipane resembled an oversized exotic orchid; she was a chaotically pulsing construct of delicately shaded ruffles and petals.

"Well, okay then, here I come," said Wendy. There was a slow hum for several seconds while she sent her info across the short clear span of space down to the Nest. "All done," said Wendy then, fairly chirping with enthusiasm. "My, that felt good! I'm so much more secure now. Too bad we can't do the same for Stahn without taking him apart."

"We can talk about that on the Moon if he has interest," said Frangipane. "My lover Ormolu has some knowledge of the lost wetware arts." Ormolu waved from the background. He looked like a blobby gilt cupid from an antique clock.

"Put a cork in it," said Stahn. "I don't want to get vivisected the way Cobb Anderson did."

"What about me?" interrupted Blaster. "Why doesn't the Nest ever do a pre-landing backup for me or my recruits? Aren't I as important as Wendy?"

"You are too big, Blaster," said Frangipane. "And no, you are not really so important, I regret to say. In any case, I don't have the resources to make any other backups. Your new recruits should just be happy that we have jobs for them."

"Xoxx you, then," said Blaster. "I don't need your help anyway. I've made this landing without a problem plenty of times."

"That's right. And you should not have a problem today."

"Yeah, and just to make sure and keep it that way, I'm not taking any more calls. I don't feel good at all about getting uvvied by your Heritagist friend Jenny while I'm in landing countdown mode. I'm going to take this up with the Nest Council later." Huffy Blaster went off-line.

A few hours later, just before Blaster was scheduled to land, Wendy and Stahn got a call. They expected it to be Blaster, but it was Frangipane, her petals blushing and a-flutter.

"Bonjour," said the moldie. "There's no good way to explain about this, Wendy, but it seems we in the Nest are finally ready to attempt a full Gurdle Decryption with a moldie as host. We have tested it on some Silly Putters this morning, and now we're going to try it on you. It seems safer with you out in space, and with wise old Senator Mooney inside you. Be of good courage!"

A sudden sharp crackle of petabyte information hiss came over the uvvy—a virus!

Stahn told Wendy to turn it off, but Wendy was already gone. The noise lasted for what seemed like a very long time, the sound so densely fractal and impossible to ignore that Stahn started hearing nutso voices in it. And there was nothing to do but grit his teeth until finally the connection broke. And then Wendy started making a noise; long, slow, rising whoops, each about one second long.

"Whooop whooop whooop whooop—"

"What's the matter, Wendy?"

"Whooop whooop whooop whooop whooop whooop—"

Frangipane's info had set Wendy to shivering. She was so tightly linked to Stahn that he could see down into her and feel it like it was happening to himself.

Piezoplastic vibrations deep inside Wendy were crisscrossing and spewing cascades of phonons down into the live net of her quasicrystalline structure.

And the structure was spontaneously deforming like someone was turning a dial on the Tessellation Equation, causing the structure of Wendy's plastic to slide-whistle its way up the scale through 4D, 5D, 6D, 7D… on and on, with each level happening twice as fast as the one before, so that—it felt like to Stahn, at least—Wendy was going through infinitely many dimensional arrangements in each second. And then starting right up again. Whooop whooop whooop whooop.

Wendy's imipolex was like a scanner going over and over the channels, alef null channels zeno-paradoxed into every second and suddenly—Stahn flashed an eidetic mental image of this—a cosmic ray in the form of a sharp-edged infinite-dimensional Hilbert prism slammed into Wendy and lodged itself in her warm flesh, working its way through and through her like a migrating fragment of shrapnel. The shudderingly rising dimensionality of Wendy's quasicrystalline structure caught the wave of information and amplified it. The info surfed Wendy's whoop and blossomed suddenly inside her like a great still explosion in deep space.

"*Ffzzzt!* crackle gonnnnng—hello, I am Quuz from Sun."

At first Stahn was in denial. "Aw, Wendy, why you gotta lay such a weird trip on me, us floating here in outer space halfway to the Moon, I mean what the—"

"What manner of creature are you—Stahn Mooney?"

The sincerity of the question struck a chill into Stahn's heart. "Stop it, Wendy! Wendy?"