by Rudy Rucker
"Terri! Are you okay? Where are you?"
"I'm inside a moldie who just flew out of the moldies' Nest, Tre. We're going to the dome of a man named Corey Rhizome." Another long pause. Terri noticed that Willy and the four moldies were eavesdropping.
"Oh, darling." Tre was sobbing. "I heard about Blaster crashing into the spaceport and I thought—"
"I surfed my way through it," said Terri, her own tears starting to flow. "It was terrible. And things still aren't too glassy." They'd risen up to nearly a mile above the Moon now, the four moldies flying in formation.
"1 love you, Terri," said Tre's dear voice.
"I love you too. Give the children a big kiss from me." Another two-and-a-half-second wait.
"I will. But tell me more about what happened, Terri. The only news we're able to get about it is dooky kilp from freelance newsies in Einstein. Why did Blaster crash? And what happened to all the moldies at the spaceport?"
"Willy Taze and a moldie called Gurdle-7 invented a kind of program that changes the dimensions of imipolex or something. And that makes the moldies get possessed by like alien personality waves. Gurdle-7 said you helped them, but how?" Now Gurdle-7, Jenny, Ormolu, and Frangipane cut back their power and let themselves coast up to the top of a huge flight parabola.
"My God!" came Tre's reply. "They must have used my N-dimensional Perplexing Poultry design! Someone or something called Jenny showed me Ramanujan's Tessellation Equation, and I designed the new Poultry for her. Is there maybe a Jenny up there?"
"Um-hmmm!" uvvied Jenny, displaying her teenage girl icon as she butted into the conversation. "I've got your little wife right inside me, Tre! Too true!"
"I'll call you again when I get some privacy," said Terri. "It looks like we'll be landing down at Corey's soon. Apparently some of those alien things are inside it. Wish me luck. And—and good-bye, darling, just in case. I've always loved you. You've been good to me." She waited the two and a half seconds for Tre's wet-eyed good-bye, and then she pushed the virtual button to end the heart-wrenching call.
They were arcing down toward a small crater filled with a shiny dome. Corey Rhizome's isopod. The moldies turned their ion jets back on to brake the fall.
When Terri had composed herself again, she asked Willy a question.
"Did you really use Tre's Perplexing Poultry to design the Stairway To Heaven?"
"Yes," said Willy. "We had all the pieces, and we couldn't quite fit them together. But once Jenny showed the information to Tre, he knew what to do.
Not that he realized what we needed it for. He's such an N-dimensional artist that he did it for free. He wanted to do it."
"You ripped him off?" demanded Terri.
"If there turns out to be a profit in it, I'll try and see that he gets a share."
Now Jenny spoke up again, still using her prairie girl icon. "It's a real pain talking to Earth from up here, isn't it, Terri," she uvvied chattily. "What with all those two- or three-second waits. I talk to Earth a lot and—you know me, once I get going, I like to just fabulate on and on.
Yadda-da-dadda-da-dadda."
Her ion jets were blasting harder and they were falling slower and slower.
The Moon's horizon was rising up around them again.
"Are you nervous about going to Corey's?" asked Terri.
Jenny chose to ignore the question. "Um, so like I was saying," she continued.
"Those light-speed waits are such a bother that I found a way around them.
Though a flesher probably wouldn't be able to do what I do."
"Do what?" asked Terri, staring at the way that the isopod dome bulged out of its little crater. They were lowering down toward a spot a few hundred feet to the crater's side.
"Do what Jenny does so she can gossip with Earth as fast as she likes. I have a remote slave simmie of myself running inside one of the Heritagists'
computers in Salt Lake City! And my simmie's smart enough to think a few seconds ahead or even to say stuff on her own. That way when I talk to people like your husband, they don't realize that I'm a moldie on the Moon. Your husband's a real cutie, by the way, Terri. I bet he's such a good fuck."
"What would you know about fucking?" demanded Terri, surprised enough to momentarily forget about the aliens in Corey's dome.
"You'd be surprised. Um-hmmmm! Those Heritagists think my simmie is something that works for them, and they're always getting it to, um, investigate the sexual shenanigans that their ministers get up to? It's nasty work, but I like it a lot. Humans are just too funny. You should have seen this one man Randy Karl Tucker I used to work with. Come to think of it, I guess maybe you've met him? Randy Karl is Willy's son, though Willy doesn't like to talk about it."
"Shut up, Jenny," said Willy.
"Yes, Jenny," said Gurdle-7. "Please shut up. The most important meeting of all time is about to happen."
The four moldies landed in the dust near Corey's isopod, kicking up a spray of moondust that quickly fell back down.
Hearing about Randy Karl Tucker had inflated a balloon of anger in Terri's chest. "It's Randy Karl who kidnapped poor Monique and got me into this mess in the first place. I can't say that I like the sleazy things you've been responsible for, Jenny. Some of your Santa Cruz moldie pals murdered my father five years ago. You loonie moldies should leave Earth the hell alone."
"Oh now, don't be getting on your high horse, Terri. We're all in this together.
More than ever, now that Gurdle-7's great invention has brought the aliens to meet us. Gurdle-7's my husband, you know."
"I bet he's such a good fuck," said Terri.
"Will you two stop it!" hissed Willy.
In silence they made their way toward the bulging dome. Willy led them to a notch in the crater's edge where a narrow strip of the whole height of the dome wall was exposed. A stone ramp led down to an air lock at the level of the isopod's ground floor.
"I'll bring you into the air lock, Willy," said Gurdle-7. "But then I think I'll come back outside."
"We're waiting outside too," chimed in Frangipane and Ormolu.
"Fraidy cats," said Jenny. "Party poopers. I'm going aaall the way." On the last word, her voice broke into a dry frightened squeak. She made a throat-clearing noise and continued. "Jenny likes to be the first to know!"
"It's odd how they're not responding to my uvvy signals at all," said Gurdle-7 quietly as he and Jenny humped into the air lock. The lock hissed full of air, and the moldies disgorged Willy and Terri. "Well, I'll be right outside, Jenny," continued Gurdle-7, worming out through the lock's airtight outer sphincter.
"I'll count on you to stay in constant uvvy touch with me."
The air lock's inner door swung open, and there stood a figure of unearthly beauty—a woman like a classic marble statue, though made of supple imipolex.
Her flesh glowed with a mild internal light; her pale skin was as a seashell's iridescent lining.
"Welcome," she said. "Willy, Terri, and Jenny. In your system of air-pressure modulations, my name might go like this." Her whole body seemed to vibrate, and the air filled with the piping of flutes, the whining of sitars, and the gentle resonations of a gong. A sound that rose and fell and left Terri hungering to hear more.
"A shimmer of sound," murmured Willy.
"Then let Shimmer be my human name," said the goddess. "I much prefer that to Clever Hansi. Please enter and join us. Corey is here, also his friends Darla, Whitey, Yoke, and Joke. And a large number of aliens. I'm listening to everyone's conversation at once, and it's very exciting."
Hardly knowing what to say, they accompanied Shimmer down the isopod hall toward a hubbub of voices. "It sounds like they're in the conservatory," Willy said to Terri. "I used to live here, you know. Shimmer, I can't believe that you're what's become of Clever Hansi. Clever Hansi was half your size. Just a little Silly Putter doorgirl."
"I helped myself to thirty kilograms of Corey's extra imipolex," said Shimmer.
"We aliens divi
ded up all the extra imipolex stored here and made ourselves decent-sized bodies. There's twelve of us. We decided it would be diplomatic to take on human forms."
"Corey let you help yourself to the imipolex?"
"We did what we liked. Corey spent most of the day hiding from us in his bathroom and in his kitchen. He just came out a little while ago."
"Hi, Willy!" called everyone as they entered the high-ceilinged conservatory, a cool airy room with three soft couches and potted plants everywhere. The conservatory's transparent ceiling had a system of lights and louvers designed to simulate the ordinary cycle of a twenty-four-hour Earth day. There were straw rugs on the stone floors, and in the center of the room there was a large carved stone fountain—the only fountain in existence on the Moon. Terri had seen a picture of it once in an article about reclusive limpware tycoon Willy Taze.
The couches were arranged around the fountain like three sides of a big triangle.
Scattered about the room were eleven more human-shaped imipolex aliens like Shimmer. They were sitting on the floor—some near the fountain and some near the edges of the room—animatedly passing back and forth hundreds of S-cubes that they'd gathered from around the isopod. And seated on two of the couches were five humans.
"This is Terri and Jenny," said Willy. "Terri, this is Corey, Darla, Whitey, Joke and Yoke." Terri sized them up. If muscular old Whitey were to get a tan and to shave off the groovy mohawk that ran all the way down his back, he could maybe pass for an aging surfer, but Corey looked like an unsavory old stoner, even grottier than Willy—no wonder they'd been roommates. Corey had two imipolex pets on the couch next to him: a giant-beaked little bird and a small green pig.
As for Darla, well, the woman looked outrageously sensual—obviously she was very comfortable in her own skin, though just now her eyes were blazing with some kind of fear and rage. Darla's twin daughters Joke and Yoke were cute and lively, Joke in bright punk rags with a blonde-and-purple hairdo, and Yoke dressed moonmaid-style in a flowing dress and silver boots. Joke was sitting next to Corey and toying with Corey's plastic pets.
The humans in the room looked small and ordinary compared to the aliens. Like Shimmer, the aliens had all taken on the forms of classically proportioned humans. Apparently they were eager to fit in. Looking at them, it was like being in a fantasy viddy about the Greek gods on Mount Olympus—or in a soft-core porno viddy. They were too, too perfect. The fountain tinkled pleasantly as the aliens continued absorbing information from the isopod's S-cubes, lounging about like wise philosophers.
Willy and Terri sat down on the empty couch and carrot shaped Jenny writhed over to inspect the aliens. "So, um, where are all you guys from?" she shrilled.
"They were just telling us," said Corey, his voice slow and amazed. "They're from all over the place. Six are from our own galaxy, one's from a star in the Andromeda galaxy, two from the Crab Nebula, one from NGC 395, one from a quasar, and Clever Hansi here is—"
"I've changed my name to Shimmer," interrupted the glowing goddess and made the chiming sitar noise again.
"Okay," said Corey. "I wave. Shimmer here is from the farthest away of all—she's from an inconceivably distant wrinkle of the cosmos where space and time are different."
"Yes," said Shimmer. "Where I come from, time is two-dimensional."
"What does that mean?" asked Terri.
"You might think of it this way," said Shimmer. "Haven't you ever wondered what your life would be like if you made some different decision?"
"Sure. Like if I hadn't gone swimming off after Monique, I wouldn't be here."
"Yes. Now suppose that all of your alternate lives were real. There would be, oh let's just say zillions of them—think of each of your lives as a thread and of your zillion possible lives as making up a fabric of parallel threads."
"That's two-dimensional time?" put in Willy. "But maybe I do have lots of parallel lives I'm not able to perceive. What I know in each life is still just one-dimensional. Past/present/ future. I don't experience a second time dimension."
"But I'm not like you," said Shimmer. "In my part of the cosmos, we are aware of all our parallel lives. In each of the lives, you're aware of all your other lives. It's just one you across all the lives. There's the past/present/future, but there's the other axis, I don't know what to call it in English." She made a droning, gonging noise.
"The whatever axis," suggested Corey. "It runs from maybe to what-if."
"Fine," said Shimmer, not cracking a smile. "In our two-dimensional time, we are consciously aware of all the parallel lives that we're simultaneously leading.
Our experience in each of the parallel lives informs our behavior in all of them. Our memory is two-dimensional—from past to present and from maybe to what-if It's not such a huge deal, by the way, when one single thread of our lives ends in death—not as long as there's still a zillion others But eventually we too lose everything. As you age, you start losing life threads in whole chunks, the fabric tatters out to a few ragged tags and strings. I must say it makes me rather anxious to be living here as a single isolated time thread.
Your world of one dimensional time is frightening and pathetic."
"It made me 'rather anxious' to be in the spaceport dome when your pal Quuz stomped it," spat Whitey, who was sitting on a couch between Darla and Yoke.
"You were in the spaceport?" said Terri. "I was inside Quuz! It was terrible Shimmer, why aren't you trying to eat everything like Quuz?"
Shimmer made one of her glowing musical noises, and one of the other aliens spoke up, this one shaped like a purple Apollo.
"You can call me Zad," he said, setting down the S-cube he'd been perusing.
"I'm from a planet near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. A watery planet, where I was something like a giant squid. I'll be eager to travel down to Earth's oceans soon. You ask why we twelve aren't trying to eat everything? The thing is, every sufficiently advanced civilization in the universe finds out about personality transmission via cosmic rays. But some become advanced in that kind of way before becoming—morally responsible. Quuz was like that. From your own Sun.
Whenever a node for personality wave Decryption arises, the keepers need to be on guard for beings like that. Fortunately we were able to keep Quuz from transmitting that Stairway To Heaven to us and taking us over. Thanks to the rath and the Jubjub bird." The two little pets were busy fighting and snapping at each other on the couch between Corey and Joke, and now Zad stretched his arm out into a tentacle shape long enough to tweak the rath's tail and to make it hoarsely squeal.
"Cubic damping," said Willy.
"Yes," said Shimmer "After we took the rath and the Jubjub bird from Corey, we were able to extract the limpware hack from them to make our new bodies impervious to the Stairway To Heaven program. We protected all the DIMs in here too. We barely got it done in time Before Quuz's attack."
"Yes indeedy," cried Jenny. "That's exactly the same idea Willy had. Will you show us moldies the trick too?"
"Certainly," said Shimmer.
"If you'd explained why you wanted the rath and the Jubjub bird in the first place, then maybe I wouldn't have been so scared of you," said Corey.
"He attacked me with a knife," volunteered a third alien, a shiny black man.
"We saw that over the vizzy," said Yoke. "Were you the Bandersnatch?"
"Yeah. But I like the name Takala now. I'm from a planet of jungles and giant insects. I was something like a praying mantis. When one of us becomes old and wise enough, we eat the right substances and enter the proper state of mind to chirp. When you chirp, your soul leaves the planet as a personality wave."
"Can humans chirp?" asked Willy.
"Maybe we could teach you how," answered Takala.
"What does it feel like while you're flying along in the form of a cosmic ray?" probed Willy.
"Let me talk now," said another of the aliens, a glowing orange woman. "I'm Syzzy, the one who comes from the quasar. Not all star
creatures are as crude as Quuz. My race consists of vortex tangles a bit like Quuz's race of sunspots, but we are so much more evolved. Quuz was like a tube worm, and we are like superhumans. I just can't believe what low temperatures you live at here. And how slowly Willy Taze asks what it's like to travel across intergalactic space as a cosmic ray? Here's an uvvy image."
Terri turned on her uvvy and absorbed Syzzy's imagery. She felt a sensation of cavernous emptiness, she felt herself to be in a vast dark space specked with bits of light that grew with unbelievable speed into bright shapes like pinwheels and smudges and grains of rice, orangey-yellow with warmth, the flocking shapes singing blissfully into the cosmic Void, making a sound like a deep echoing "Aaaauuummmm." She held onto the sound and leaned back into the couch, feeling mellow and very tired.
"That's only a nice picture," protested another alien form, this one a green man. "You can call me Bloog. I lived as something resembling a floating jellyfish in the atmosphere of a gas-giant methane planet. What Syzzy shows isn't really correct. When you travel at the speed of light, then there's no experience of time passing. The trip feels like one single undivided gesture.
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 Jenny. "I'm uvvying Gurdle-7, Frangipane, and Ormolu that they should come in."
"Hold on," said Corey, "I'll walk to the air lock with you and look them over."
He and Jenny disappeared off down the hall.
"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."