The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  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.

  “No
t 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.”

  “Maybe Corey’s not the only thing I’m upset about!” sobbed Darla. “Maybe there’s lots of other things I think we should do something about. Hold me, Whitey!”

  Whitey put his arms around Darla and she pressed herself against him, putting her mouth right next to his ear.

  “Please don’t start acting like talk-viddy dregs!” exclaimed Joke. “Can’t we be rational? I have so many more questions for the aliens. Like you, Shimmer, you said you were made of a zillion parallel lives—I want to know what kind of individual creatures were living these lives. Squids or insects or artichokes or sunspots or what?”

  “My individual beings were animals a lot like humans,” said Shimmer. “But they could equally well have been rivers or trees.”

  “Trees!” exclaimed Willy. “I love trees.”

  “The moral is that everything is conscious,” volunteered a pink woman alien. “And everything is alive. My name is Parella. I come from a planet of crystals. Syzzy may think your time is slow, but I think it’s fast.”

  “I just thought of something,” interrupted Whitey, with Darla still leaning against his chest. “Stahn Mooney’s still out there inside some Quuz-infected imipolex. When he lands—like fourteen hours from now—when he gets close enough, his Quuz is likely to do a repeat of what Blaster did today. Or worse. What if Stahn were to come down on the Einstein dome and do a Pied Piper number on all the Silly Putters and DIMs in there? Mongo xoxx.”

  “It’s so weird about Quuz,” said Terri sleepily. “I’ve always had such good feelings about the Sun. But now—now whenever I look at the Sun, I’ll know that it wants to eat us.”

  “Quuz has to be stopped,” said Darla.

  “I’d be glad to fly up and destroy the Quuz,” said Syzzy. “I hate primitive sunspot creatures like Quuz.”

  “Floaty, but I think it would be better for the humans and moldies to handle it,” said Whitey. “We’re more familiar with the way things work here. Also I’d like to try and do this without killing Stahn. He’s an old friend of mine.”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m too tired to help,” Terri heard herself saying. And it was true. She was slumped back onto her couch and her fluttering eyelids kept trying to close.

  Now Jenny and Corey returned with the three other moldies. Corey had gotten Ormolu and Frangipane to give him their weapons for safekeeping. He was casually carrying the heavy needler and O.J. ugly stick in one hand.

  “Hey, Corey,” said Whitey. “Why don’t you and me and these four moldies fly up and save Senator Stahn? We could leave in like two hours.”

  “I don’t want to go,” said Gurdle-7.

  “Look, you stinky slug,” snarled Whitey. “You’re the smart one who got us into this mess. You have to go.”

  “No,” said Gurdle-7. “I want to stay right here and exchange information with the aliens. I’ve been working all my life for this.”

  “I don’t want to leave either,” said Willy.

  “So let them stay,” said Corey. Terri happened to be drowsily staring at Darla just then and she noticed Darla giving Corey a charged intent look. “You and me, Whitey, we can do it if Jenny, Frangipane, and Ormolu are willing. I can fly in Frangipane, you go in Ormolu, and Jenny can bring Stahn back. It’d be perfect that way.”

  “Copacetic,” said Whitey.

  “But what occurs when the Wendy-Quuz sings the Stairway To Heaven to us?” protested Frangipane. “Directly to us from very close up.”

  “Haven’t you been monitoring Jenny’s uvvy? Our alien friends figured out how to use the rath and the Jubjub bird to vaccinate themselves against the Stairway To Heaven virus,” said Corey.

  “How would we install it on ourselves?” asked Ormolu uncertainly.

  “Well, the aliens did it alone, but I think you moldies will need for me to help you,” said Corey glibly. “Let’s just take the magic pig and bird back into my limpware studio and I’ll fix you right up. Come on. You come too, Gurdle-7.”

  “Yes yes, I want the vaccination so that I can teach it to all the moldies in the Nest,” said Gurdle-7. “Then they won’t be angry at me anymore. By the way, Corey, do you have some extra S-cubes so that I can download a copy of my Stairway To Heaven program? There aren’t any copies of the documentation left anymore. Those paranoid Nest moldies blew up my lab.”

  “Sure, I’ve got the equipment for that too,” said Corey. “Come on, you four moldies.”

  “I’ll help,” said Whitey. “I’ll carry those weapons for you, Corey. You grab the bird and the pig.”

  “I want to watch too,” said Darla. “I haven’t walked around in this house for such a long time.” Corey, Whitey, Darla, and the four moldies clumped off down the hall, Corey carrying the rath and the Jubjub bird and Whitey carrying the needler and the ugly stick.

  “We’ve heard from Shimmer the 2D-time humanoid, Zad the squid, Syzzy the quasar vortex, Takala the mantis, Bloog the jellyfish, and Parella the crystal,” Willy said. “How about you other six aliens?”

  Though it was some of the most interesting information she’d ever heard, Terri couldn’t keep her eyes open, and she drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DARLA

  November 6, 2053

  Darla’s grandmother’s family were American Indians from the Acoma pueblo near Albuquerque. From listening to her Indian relatives, Darla knew all too well what it meant to have a powerful alien culture arrive. She knew all about the greed, the disease, the cruelty, and the heartless disdain for the native culture. “Give us your gold; we’ll give you disease; your religion is evil; support our parasitic priests.” Finding the aliens in Corey’s isopod filled Darla with a deep visceral loathing. But she knew better than to prematurely show her feelings.

  Under the pretext of having a fit over Joke and Corey, Darla got herself into Whitey’s arms and whispered into his ear: “We have to kill the aliens.”

  She could tell from Whitey’s body language that he understood and agreed. And when Corey came back with the four moldies and the needler and the O.J. ugly stick, Darla sensed that Corey too knew what had to be done.

  Corey and Whitey led the way off down the hall toward Corey’s studio, followed by the four moldies, with Darla in the rear. Trying hard to keep her voice even, Darla made housewifely commentary on the features of the isopod.

  “That’s nice to see your giant marijuana plants are doing so well in the grove out there, Corey. How tall are they? And I see you’ve still got your velvet paintings up. I always liked that one of the nuking of Akron.”

  “Yeah,” said Corey. “I put a lot of myself into that picture. I went to high school in Akron. I hated it, of course, but sometimes I’m sort of sorry those Yaqui rubber tappers blew it up. Odd as it sounds, when I lived in Akron, I used to dream about blowing it up myself. Like precognition. In one dream I was in the middle of this big Akron stadium with a white-painted fat-boy H-bomb and there were thousands of people in the seats watching me and they were chanting, ‘Light the Bomb!’ Look, see how I worked a shattering stadium into the corner of the picture?” They’d stopped walking, and Corey was standing there, happily studying his art. “And your picture’s over there, Darla.” He pointed to an oversized velvet painting that showed the mirror-clad figures of Stahn and Darla at the mouth of the Nest. “See the stars in the reflections? And the little Earths?”

  “That seems like so long ago,” said Darla. “It’s been a while since I did anything heroic. Wouldn’t it be nice to be heroic again, Whitey?”

  “I hear you,” said Whitey, and they started walking again.

  “I’m the one who’s going to be the hero for this year,” said Gurdle-7 smugly. “Isn’t it amazing to have the aliens here? Just think of all the advances that they’ll bring us. And think of how many more aliens the
re are for us to decrypt—cosmic personality waves are flying past us all the time.”

  “I think getting vaccinated against the Stairway To Heaven is a very good idea,” said Frangipane quietly.

  “Yeah,” said Ormolu. “I’m freakin’. What if the aliens start getting greedy to do lots and lots of Gurdle decryptions? What if some decrypted lobster-thing gets real eager to fab with another lobster-thing from the same planet and starts doing thousands of decryptions, waiting for the right one? Who decides how much of our imipolex the aliens are allowed to use? What if they want to use up all of the resources in the whole solar system?”

  “They cleaned out my stash of flickercladding without even asking,” said Corey. “They beefed themselves up to seventy kilograms each. That’s a lot of bucks.”

  “And what if another Quuz-type alien gets decrypted and kills even more of us?” said Jenny. “I hate to tell you, Gurdle-7, but decryption is turning out to be a xoxxin’ bad idea. I know we worked really hard on it, but . . . ”

  “You’re too cautious,” snapped Gurdle-7. “You sound like a filthy Heritagist. Are you so frightened of transcendence?”

  “Here’s my limpware studio,” said Corey, opening a door. He tossed the rath and the Jubjub bird in and let them start running around on the floor, chasing each other as usual. Whitey and the moldies followed him, and Darla came in last. The room held some fairly sophisticated design tools. There was a large industrial-looking machine in one corner, a couple of workbenches with things that looked more or less like power tools, and shelves along the walls laden with cans, bottles, tubes, and boxes.