The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  “Here’s heat,” said Cobb, and immediately his flesh grew pleasantly warm. “But I’d rather not light up. I don’t want the denizens of the deep getting too curious about us. Just keep looking through my sensors. I’ll dial my sensitivity down into the infrared.”

  Gazing through the uvvy, Yoke could see the featureless vertical line of laser light leading down as before. She stared into the abyss, searching for a sign. Time passed, perhaps as much as an hour. Now and then a flicker of small jellyfish flew past, and occasionally an angler fish or a big-mouthed gulper eel.

  “We’re at five miles,” said Cobb. “I’m holding up fine.”

  Yoke felt oppressed by the sullen weight of so much pressure. The flecks of sea life sped past like snowflakes in a viddy snowstorm. Far, far below was a hint of pale light. But before Yoke could ask about it, there was a distraction.

  “Squid!” exclaimed Cobb, and, yes, all of a sudden there were squid everywhere. Big ones, small ones, and huge ones. The largest one looked to be some two hundred feet long. Its body was like an arrow, a great tapered cone tipped with two wild wavy fins. The fins fanned in rapid undulations, driving the squid toward them. Its immense round eyes looked frighteningly intent. Cobb had piqued its interest. Eight of the squid’s ten tentacles were clenched into a tidy sheaf, but its two extra-long ones were reaching toward them like hungry arms. Cobb and Yoke plummeted past the giant squid, but it sped down after them, its fins flapping like flags. Now one of its fiendishly long arms slapped against them. Cobb’s flesh shuddered.

  “Oh no,” said Cobb. “Brace yourself, Yoke.”

  And then the squid was upon them. Its bunched tentacles writhed apart to reveal a vile huge beak. Yoke could hear the scratching of the beak against the hardened rind of Cobb’s outer skin.

  “Oh, Yoke, I can’t get loose without—” Cobb began, but just then the giant squid released them and jetted away fins first, propelled by a blast of water from the huge siphon next to its beak. A moment later Yoke could see why. A sperm whale went bucking past, its great flukes madly beating. The squid’s speed was no match for the whales’. The leviathan opened its long, narrow, big-toothed lower jaw and clamped the squid crossways. The monstrous tentacles lashed about, seeking purchase on the whale’s great blocky frame.

  Cobb and Yoke continued to sink, and Yoke stared upward at the whale and squid as, incredibly, the whale swallowed the violently squirming squid whole, leaving only a few tentacles dangling from its mouth like live macaronis.

  “We’re here!” cried Cobb just then. Looking down, Yoke saw a wall of white light come rushing up at them. There was a clunk as they hit something, then a wild explosion of air bubbles, and then they dropped through a hundred feet of empty space to plop onto—a grassy meadow?

  Cobb’s body opened up like a blossom spreading its petals. Yoke stepped free to find herself standing in a diamond-roofed dome of air: a half-sphere dome like on the Moon, several hundred yards across, with the deep black sea outside. They’d fallen in through the roof, but whatever hole they’d made had instantly healed itself.

  Cobb drew himself back into his old man form and stood by Yoke’s side. Far from being ocean-floor ooze, the ground underfoot was springy green turf bedizened with wildflowers. The air was fresh and dry, though perfumed with tangy odor of moldies. The light seemed to come from all around. And Shimmer and five others of her kind were coming across the field toward them.

  The aliens had shiny imipolex bodies like moldies, but iridescent, luminous, and shaped with infinite perfection. Two were formed like humans, and four like animals, with each shape an archetypal paradigm, a Platonic ideal, perfection incarnate. Shimmer resembled a marble Venus, and her partner was a bronze Apollo. The four animals were a unicorn with yellow-blond hair, a gem-like beetle, a muddy black pig, and a pale green python—each of them the correct size for the creature epitomized.

  “Greetings, Yoke,” said Shimmer, reaching out her hand. Her voice was sweet and resonant. “I especially wanted you to come, because you’re the most reasonable and sympathetic human I’ve met. I’d like you to be the first to test out something we want to give your people.”

  Yoke took Shimmer’s hand and squeezed it. The other aliens gathered around.

  “Ptah,” said the man, shaking Cobb’s hand. His voice was a warm rumble. The four animal-shaped beings greeted them and named themselves: the unicorn Peg, the iridescent beetle Josef, Wubwub the pig, and the snake Siss.

  “Where do you come from, Ptah?” asked Cobb.

  “We’re all from the same place,” said Ptah. “All six of us. It’s in a different domain of the cosmos. We travel as encrypted signals inside cosmic rays. Personality waves. They’re like gamma rays but with a higher-dimensional component. Shimmer here’s been decrypting us into moldie flesh one at a time. We had this idea that each of us form our body into a different shape. I was the first one she brought in. Josef’s the most recent arrival—he talks a lot. He’s just as smart as us, even though he’s small. He found a way to miniaturize the moldie information representation.”

  “But what’s the name of the place you come from?” pressed Cobb.

  “You want one single name?” asked Ptah, smiling.

  Wubwub made a sound like electric guitar feedback. Siss added a series of clicking sounds. Peg tacked on the sound of a gong being struck, and tiny Josef put in a clap of thunder. Wubwub stretched out his snout and made a sound like wind moaning in the trees. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed as if the aliens were making fun of Cobb’s question.

  “Oh, why not say we come from—from Metamars,” said Shimmer. “And we can be Metamartians.” She turned to Ptah. “Cappy Jane’s employer is called Meta West Link, you know. ‘Meta’ means ‘beyond.’ Like metaphysics.”

  “Yes, I am coming from very meta,” said Josef, his voice loud and firm. For whatever reason, he chose to speak with a German accent. “And only just now have I arrived, as Shimmer has said.” He lifted his wing covers and buzzed through the air to land lightly on Yoke’s wrist. “This seems a very marginal place.” His eyes twinkled and the little fans of his antennae waved. “From the little bit that I am able yet to see. It’s so curious, this one-dimensional time. For your people I think death must be very frightening?”

  “Duh!” said Yoke. “Death’s not frightening for you?”

  “In two-dimensional time death isn’t so much of an issue,” said Josef. “Yes, perhaps I die in one time-line, but I’m still alive in another.”

  “Not here you aren’t,” said Yoke. “I could squash you and that would be that.”

  “Now, now, Yoke,” said Shimmer. “I’d just been telling my fellows how kind you are. There’s no need to be afraid of us. We don’t plan to stay on Earth for very long. We’re nomads and this is only one stop on our endless journey of discovery. How do you like these temporary bodies we’ve made ourselves? We’re imipolex with algae and mold nervous systems like your moldies. We programmed our personalities right into the limpware.”

  “How many of you are going to come here?” asked Yoke. “Six is one thing, but six billion would be—”

  “Too many?” asked Siss the serpent, then laughed. She sounded Chinese. “No worry, Yoke. Only one more of us going come. We form a family of seven, make a baby, help Om memorize all about your race, and then we move on and probably no Metamartian ever come here again. Your world not so very nice, I think. You know, Shimmer, I thinking perhaps we should be more small. Could we be ant, Josef? So tiny as germ?”

  “I ain’t gonna be no ant,” interjected Wubwub, who’d been rooting in the sod. He used a kind of black rapper accent. He looked up at them, a few tubers hanging from the side of his mouth. “I’m too important for that, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Too fat,” put in Siss the serpent, striking at the pig’s side.

  “Me and Josef are the ones gonna help Cobb and Yoke out through the wall, ain’t we?” said Wubwub, twitching the snake free. “Gimmie respect.”<
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  “Cease your soothsaying, O Swine,” said Peg. “It’s time for Lady Yoke to bleat her plaint.” The unicorn spoke as if at a Renaissance Faire, with the speech mannerisms that Yoke and her friends called “swilly.” With her flowing long blonde hair, the swilly unicorn reminded Yoke of a teenage girl enchanted by all things medieval. Her horn was shiny red like glossy lipstick.

  “Thank you so much,” snapped Yoke, not really understanding what they were talking about, but having a vague sense she’d been insulted. “What I want to say is that I hope Siss is telling the truth. And even six or seven of you could be a problem, frankly. If you start changing things, it could ruin our ecology. Your technology might overwhelm our civilization.”

  “Indeed it will,” said Peg. “But is your way of life so fine? Dare to dream of more than grubbing in the mud. Yoke, we bring you the power to alter matter with a touch of mind. This is a power our god Om bestows upon us—a power she now sees fit to grant to you. You’re lucky. Thanks to Shimmer’s having been decrypted here, Om has noticed you. Your race will live as sorcerers.”

  “I suppose that sounds nice,” said Yoke uncertainly.

  “Give Yoke her alla now, Shimmer,” said Ptah. He kept glancing around expectantly, as if someone or something else were about to appear.

  “Yes,” said Shimmer. “Om willing.” She rubbed her thumb against her palm, and a little hollow gold tube appeared in her hand. It was almost cylindrical, with four smooth indentations like a hand-grip. “This is Om’s gift through me to you,” said Shimmer, and handed the object to Yoke.

  The alla fit Yoke’s hand comfortably. It had a live, vibrant feel to it. Looked at more closely, the substance of the alla tube was not gold—nor was it any other substance Yoke had ever seen. It felt smooth, even slippery. Another odd thing about the tube was that, rather than being a fixed color of gold, it was repeatedly flickering through a cycle of perhaps thirty subtly different shades.

  As she held the alla in her hand, Yoke felt a link between it and her uvvy. “Greetings,” said the alla. “I’m ready to learn your mind.” Yoke uvvied her agreement to this—not that she was sure what she was agreeing to. The alla showed her an image for half a second and asked her to name it and give a memory association. The image was a circular pattern with colored patches.

  “A chrysanthemum,” said Yoke, thinking of the first flower she’d ever grown.

  “Next,” said the alla, and for a quarter of a second it showed an image of a crooked forked line.

  “A crack in a wall,” said Yoke, recalling the wall by the side of her childhood bed.

  “Next.” Each image was being displayed for half as long as the one before. This one was a uniform patch of rough texture.

  “Moon-dust,” said Yoke, though not out loud, as this was starting to happen faster than speech. She was thinking of a particular patch of moon-dust and how she’d gotten obsessed staring at it after she’d read a book on mineralogy.

  More and more images came, each twice as fleeting as before—and at the end of a second Yoke felt as if she’d given the alla an all but infinite amount of information. She thought of the old Zeno paradox about fitting an arbitrarily large number of events into a unit of time: a half plus a quarter plus an eighth plus a sixteenth plus a thirty-second and so on—no matter how many terms you stick in, the sum is always a bit less than one. Each new step only uses up half of the remaining time. How many images had the alla just shown her?

  “Now I’ll learn your body,” said the alla, and Yoke felt an incredible series of tingles and twitches—in her guts, in her chest, up and down her arms and legs, inside her head, and in the muscles of her face and fingers.

  “You are now registered as my sole user for life,” murmured the alla softly. “Feel free to select something from your catalog.”

  “Think of something you want,” said Shimmer. “You think to the alla through your uvvy. Josef and Ptah made a human-style catalog for it. Oh, that’s right, we have to copy the catalog to you. I hope you have a lot of clear memory space in your uvvy?”

  “I should,” said Yoke. “It’s a yottabyte model.”

  “Here it comes,” said Josef.

  And then the alla catalog was stored in Yoke’s uvvy. When she accessed it, the display showed an amorphous, featureless object, waiting for Yoke to tell it what to become.

  “Ask for a sweatshirt?” suggested Cobb, who stood absently twining his fingers in the blonde mane of Peg the unicorn. “You look a little chilly.”

  Yoke thought of a fleecy white pullover she wished she’d brought along from the Moon, and now her uvvy formed a mental image of a somewhat similar sweatshirt, a precise, detailed image seemingly called up from its internal catalog. The image wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind, but by mentally pushing at it, Yoke was able to slide about through similar catalog entries till she found something that was a very good match for what she wanted. And once she’d picked her sweatshirt design, the alla adjusted it to be a custom fit for Yoke’s body.

  “Now say, ‘Actualize!’ “ said Shimmer. “You can say it out loud or just think it. That tells the alla to make a physical copy of the design.”

  Yoke said, “Actualize.” A sudden mesh of bright lines appeared in the air in front of the alla, hanging there like a three-dimensional wire-frame engineering spec. A web of dark membranes appeared within the virtual sweatshirt, dividing and subdividing. There was a little puff of breeze, and then the bright lines disappeared and a fluffy white sweatshirt dropped to the ground.

  “This must be what Onar meant by realware,” breathed Cobb. “Direct matter control!”

  Yoke turned the little alla so she could see through the length of its hollow tube, careful not to put it too near her face. Seen through the hole, the room seemed to be endlessly spinning around the alla’s central axis. Whoah. Yoke looked away.

  “Yes,” said Josef. “What the alla makes is realware. You could call the alla a tool for realware engineering. Figuring out the designs for the realware takes some work. But the alla itself is a magical gift from Om.”

  “You got the alla from Om?” asked Yoke. “And Om’s your god? Your god actually does things that are real?”

  “Is your very world not real?” asked Peg.

  “Well, yes,” said Yoke. “But—”

  “Om a medium-size god,” said Siss. “Not like the big White Light that make everything. Om kind of curious. She like to learn all about different races of beings by giving allas to them. Long time ago, some other aliens bring Om and allas to the Metamartian race, and now we bring Om and allas to you. Pass it on. More is merrier.”

  “But what is an alla, exactly?” asked Yoke, looking down at it.

  “The alla is part of Om,” said Shimmer. “A vortex thread that loops out of her body to cross our space. When Om gives you an alla, she learns all about you—and you get to have a magic wand. It’s a fair trade. Everyone benefits.”

  “One question,” said Cobb. “Josef just said the alla transmutes matter. But when it made Yoke’s sweatshirt out of air, there wasn’t enough air inside that bright-line mesh. Not enough mass to match the sweatshirt.”

  “No problem,” said Josef: “If there aren’t enough atoms within the target region, then extra ones are drawn in. That’s why one often feels a little puff of wind.”

  “Before we let the alla spread to all humanity, Om wants us to test it just with one person,” said Shimmer. “And I picked you, Yoke. The alla has registered itself exclusively for your use.”

  “Shimmer chose you as a maiden pure of heart,” said Peg. “Worthy of a magic wand. Nobler than that Tongan King.”

  Yoke put on her shirt. It was an exact replica of the preview image the uvvy had shown her. To get her arms through the sleeves, she passed the alla from hand to hand rather than setting it down.

  “That right,” said Siss, attentively watching. “Hang onto alla very careful. It no use to other people, but even so, they might try to steal. You should mak
e pouch for it and wear at your waist.”

  “It’s mine to keep?” said Yoke, staring down at the alla. She thought of orange juice, and her uvvy displayed a catalog image of a squeeze-bottle of juice. Without saying the word out loud, Yoke thought, Actualize. A pouch-shaped web of lines formed near the end of the tube; the pouch webbed over and cleared to produce the bag of juice. Yoke caught it as it dropped from the air; she held it to her mouth and sucked at it. Delicious. She gave a happy guffaw. “Hey, you’ve got my xoxxin’ vote!”

  The beetle Josef had flown off while Yoke was pulling on her sweatshirt. Now he flew back and perched on Yoke’s breast like a brooch. He glittered many colors in the light.

  “The allas will make your Earth a paradise,” the man-shaped alien named Ptah was saying. He was jouncing back and forth excitedly. His eyes were wide and glowing, as if he were expecting some great event.

  “But we do have a problem, Ptah,” said Cobb. “What about those people who’ve been getting killed? Like Darla and Tempest Plenty and Kurt Gottner? Is there some connection between those things and your coming here?”

  “Om,” said Siss. “Connection is Om. And don’t worry, those people not really killed. You going see example right now. Om sometimes reach into space with her fingertips to take someone. Om fingertips have round shape we call ‘powerball.’ ”

  Just then Ptah let out a whoop. “It’s time!” he sang. “Om’s about to take me. Thank you, Josef! Farewell, Shimmer.”

  The Metamartians backed away from him. Wubwub pushed against Cobb and Yoke’s legs, herding them along.

  “I’m ready, Om!” shouted Ptah. He sounded ecstatic.

  “Make a copy of yourself, Ptah,” cried Shimmer. “We need one of you or we’ll be back down to five!”

  Just then something popped into the air next to Ptah, a spherical zone of warped space—something like a giant, airy lens.

  “Look out!” cried Yoke, but rather than running, Ptah seemed to split himself in two. Or, rather, the air next to him shimmered and a fresh copy of Ptah was formed: another perfectly formed, bronze-colored, imipolex man. The new Ptah ran over to stand with Cobb, Yoke, and the other Metamartians, while the old Ptah stretched his arms up toward the mysterious ball of curved space.