by Rudy Rucker
“I wouldn’t want to,” Yoke was saying matter-of-factly. “I think it’s skanky. My parents have been merge addicts since before I was born. Or were. My mother Darla died two months ago. That’s something I wanted to talk to you about some more, Phil. The thing that killed Darla could have been the same thing that killed your dad. And maybe Tempest Plenty too.”
“I’ve got it!” interrupted Kevvie. “Flying saucers took them! Have you ever seen a flying saucer, Yoke?”
“I saw the real aliens who were on the Moon in November,” said Yoke. “But they didn’t come in any flying machine. They travel in a form like radio waves.”
“I don’t buy that,” said Kevvie, with irrational vehemence. Phil realized that she was lifted. “If those things you saw were really aliens, there has to have been a saucer that they came in. They use a special metal. I bet ISDN or the Gimmie is covering it up.”
“There goes a saucer now, Kevvie,” said Tre, pointing up at the sky. “Yaaar.” He had long, tangled, sun-bleached hair and he wore weird little brown sunglasses over his no doubt bloodshot eyes. Once he’d gotten Kevvie to start staring upward, Tre looked back down. “What Yoke was talking about, Phil, is that Darla and Whitey had a wowo in their cubby. Only nobody saw Darla dying, so it didn’t occur to anyone that the wowo might have been involved. I should have thought of it when Tempest Plenty disappeared last month. She was the aunt of our neighbor Starshine Plenty; we were putting Tempest up in one of our spare rooms.”
Phil could tell Kevvie wanted to butt in and say something else dumb, but Terri spoke first. “Tempest was this colorful redneck pheezer,” said Terri. “A dynamo. Mean as a snake. A lifter. She liked to work on Starshine’s garden, always talking a mile a minute, whether or not anyone was listening. And then one morning she was gone, along with Starshine’s wowo and Starshine’s dog Planet. Starshine figured Tempest had taken the dog and the wowo back to Florida. She says most of the people in her family are like that. Rip something off and head for home.”
“The wowo Tempest took was in Starshine’s garden,” continued Tre. “It was the best and biggest wowo I ever made, but the base only weighed a couple of pounds. Tempest loved to look at it, especially when she was lifted. And she was crazy about that dog. So what Starshine thought seemed reasonable. We were like, ‘So what, at least Tempest’s gone.’ But then Willow saw the wowo swallow Kurt and I put it all together. I switched off all the wowos that I’ve distributed.”
“How did you manage that?” demanded Kevvie.
“All of my Philosophical Toys maintain an uvvy link to me. That way I can send out upgrades and—in the case of a catastrophe like this—I can shut them down.” Although Tre looked like a Santa Cruz lifter, his Philosophical Toys had made him reasonably wealthy, and he ran his business in an orderly and efficient way. “I’ve been wanting to ask Willow for a really detailed description of how it went down. But I don’t want to tweak her out.”
“You should see what Jane has,” said Phil. “Hey, Jane!”
Jane was still in conversation with old Isolde and Hildegarde, and she gave Phil a sisterly “How rude!” kind of look, a big jokey frown. Isolde and Hildegarde used the interruption to begin creeping toward the buffet.
“What?” said Jane, giving Phil a gratuitous poke in the ribs as she joined them.
“Show Tre the ring.”
“Way eldritch,” said Tre as soon as he saw it. “Knotted in the fourth dimension. Like a calling card. Like it wants us to know.”
“It?” said Phil.
“The thing that came through the wowo. It couldn’t have been the wowo itself that ate poor Kurt—a wowo’s just a hollow of a self-everting Klein bottle geometrized in this tasty gnarly way that Kurt dreamed up. The wowo must have attracted something.” Tre gave a kind of shudder and hugged himself, looking around. “It could be inches away from us right now. Watching.” He handed the ring back to Jane. “I wouldn’t keep this near me if I were you.”
“You take it, Phil,” said Jane, handing it off like a hot potato. “Bury it with Da’s ashes. If we need it again we can always dig it up.”
“Like the goldfish,” said Phil, referring to a dead goldfish that he and Jane had buried one winter, only to dig it up every few days to look at the progress of its decay.
“It doesn’t feel right not to have all of Da to bury,” said Jane. “Willow said the ashes are just part of his hand. Maybe the rest of him is in the fourth dimension.”
Phil put the knotted ring in his pocket next to the box. Some of his father’s stories about the fourth dimension were coming back to him. A four-dimensional monster would be able to touch the ring in his pocket without coming through the fabric. Even if he were to put the ring inside the box, a four-dimensional creature could still reach it, just like you can touch the middle of a sheet of paper without coming through the paper’s edge. If the four-dimensional creature could see everything, what good would it do to bury the ring?
“There was a weird dimensional thing about Darla too,” Yoke was telling Jane. “She disappeared on Christmas Eve. My dick of a father had left her alone, he was out with a girlfriend or something. Poor Darla. All Whitey could find of her was this little gory patch of blood. And then Whitey starts saying he’s going to grow her back. He has a fairly recent S-cube of her personality, and he’s gonna use her DNA to fast-grow a new body, a young sexy one of course. But when he gives some of Darla’s blood to a pink-tank worker, about half of the DNA in the blood turns out to be backward. Clockwise twisties instead of counterclockwise.” Yoke made mirror-twin helix motions in the air with her hands. “When I told Tre about it, he said that maybe some of the DNA had been flipped over in the fourth dimension.”
“Your father is growing a new copy of your mother?” asked Kevvie.
“Clear,” said Yoke. “The new Darla’s gonna have a bitchin’ real meat body, not an imipolex fake like Cobb’s. Whitey’s had a lot of fights with boppers and moldies. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if Darla came back pure moldie. This way she’ll have a meat body, although her personality will have to be off in a kind of moldie scarf that she wears all the time. A Happy Cloak.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before,” said Kevvie.
“Oh yeah they have,” said Yoke. “You’ve heard of Stahn Mooney. Used to be a Senator? His wife Wendy is made of a meat body with a moldie Happy Cloak that drives the body. Of course Wendy’s ’Cloak is really just a moldie that doesn’t have any of the original Wendy’s personality at all. But we’ll have Darla’s personality in her ’Cloak to start with.” Suddenly the confidence drained out of Yoke’s voice. “I hope it works. I miss her.”
“What are you guys talking about?” asked Willow, wandering up to the group. She had a glass of white wine in her hand and her voice was shrill. “Help yourself to the refreshments before they’re all gone. The Bass parents made a very nice buffet. And this wine is from Doctor Peck’s own vineyard. It was Kurt’s favorite. Eat, drink, and be merry.” She looked far from merry.
“It was a nice ceremony, Willow,” said Tre carefully.
“You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” said Willow. “Considering that your shitty wowo killed him.”
“Tre thinks it wasn’t really the wowo itself,” put in Phil. “He thinks it was a creature from the fourth dimension that the wowo attracted.”
“Big difference,” said Willow.
“Maybe you could grow a new husband,” suggested Kevvie. “Like Yoke’s father is doing.”
“I assume Yoke is this little chippie here? How many people did you bring along, Tre? I mean besides the moldie. Do you think this a fucking hairfarmer beach party?”
“I’m sorry, Willow,” said Tre. “We’ll go now.”
“Good!” Willow burst into tears and Jane held her, letting Willow’s metallic blonde head rest on her shoulder.
Cobb appeared in the driveway just then. Tre and Terri murmured a quick good-bye and went to meet him. And then, before P
hil could really say a proper good-bye to her, Yoke was gone too.
“Ooops,” said Kevvie, rolling her eyes and grinning. She never knew what to make of big dramatic situations. At a time like this, Kevvie’s cheery emptiness was kind of a relief. Phil linked arms with her and walked back to the buffet.
February 19
Phil thought about Yoke all the time for the next few days—whenever he wasn’t worrying about the wowos or thinking about his father. He’d hoped that with the old man dead, there’d be nobody nagging him to make something of himself. But the memory tapes were playing on. Thinking about Yoke was much better. Phil thought about Yoke so much that when she turned up at the LoLo restaurant on Thursday, sitting at a table right near the kitchen, he almost wasn’t surprised. Just, “Whew, here it is.”
“Is this the guy?” Naranjo was saying, Naranjo the waiter who’d called Phil out of the kitchen. “Is this the hombre you lookin’ for?”
Yoke was all smiles, sitting at a table with two guys and a woman. Phil recognized two of them: Saint and Babs Mooney, regulars in the San Francisco art scene. “Hi, Phil!” called Yoke. “I was hoping I’d find you here. Can you come out with us later?”
“He gotta stay and scrub a lotta potatoes,” said Naranjo. “He’s just an assistant chef. He gonna be here till about three maybe four a.m.”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Phil. “It’s great to see you, Yoke. Hi, Saint. Hi, Babs. I’ll be through at eleven-thirty. It’s ten now, so take your time eating and I can leave with you. With any luck, you’ll be tonight’s last customers. Things are really slow.” A big storm had come in off the Pacific this afternoon and it was raining like people were up on the roofs with hoses. You could hear the splashing of the water through the glass of the windows. “You haven’t ordered yet, have you?”
“How’s the squid?” asked the fourth member of the dining party, a tenor-voiced fellow with shoulder-length red-blond hair that was very straight and fine. “Do you serve it with tentacles?”
“Sure,” said Phil, taking an immediate dislike to the man, probably because he was sitting next to Yoke. “We’ve even got ink. But I’d recommend our deep-sea oarfish today. Brought in by a moldie this afternoon, he caught it himself. You can’t catch an oarfish with ordinary techniques; it swims too deep. It has a nice firm flesh from living at such a high pressure. If you like, Yoke, I’ll make it in a special sauce with sherry, cream, and chanterelles. Some saffron basmati rice and asparagus on the side. A few black cherries in the sauce for the sweetness and the color. And a Belgian endive salad with fresh-roasted red bell peppers and a mustard vinaigrette.”
“Ooh,” said Yoke. “That sounds delish. I’ve read those fancy food words, but I’ve never eaten them.”
“Should we all have the same thing?” said Saint. “Babs? Onar?” Babs nodded, but the handsome, long-haired Onar insisted that he be served squid. “Stir-fry it in canola oil,” he instructed. “All tentacles. And don’t let them get rubbery.”
“Gnarly, sir,” said Phil.
Naranjo jotted down the order and went off to serve another customer. Phil lingered, gazing at Yoke, admiring her.
“Did you bury your father’s ashes?” asked Yoke. “And the knotted ring? How did it go?”
“Having my dad die hurts more than I ever imagined it would,” said Phil. “Today it’s been a week. Yeah, I buried the ashes and the ring. I dumped the ashes out of the box; there weren’t many of them. I almost wish I’d kept the ring. I need to think about it some more. Maybe I should have paid more attention when Da tried to teach me about the fourth dimension.”
“I was so sorry to hear about your father, Phil,” put in Babs Mooney.
“Yaaar,” chimed in her brother Saint. “Poor Kurt. It would xoxx to get chopped up by a hyperspace blender.” Babs and Saint had DIM lice in their hair, colorful little bugs that moved around on their scalps like tiny cars in traffic, arranging their hair in filigrees that could variously resemble paisley, crop circles, or herringbone tweed. Programming the lice was one of Saint’s art projects.
“I have a theory about the wowo,” proposed Onar, holding up a bony finger. “The wowos were a representation of the Klein bottle, were they not? Two Mobius strips sewn together?”
“I guess,” said Phil. “But it was just a goof. An illusion.”
“Perhaps the models set up a morphic resonance. Reality is, after all, a consensual hallucination. If enough people see something as a Klein bottle, then—voila—it’s a Klein bottle. It’s not impossible to be killed by a dream.”
“Don’t make it a New Age fantasy, Onar,” reproved Saint. “This thing was real.”
“Reality is a hobgoblin for small minds,” said Onar mildly. Yoke giggled. She seemed to find Onar entertaining.
Phil got the head chef to let him prepare most of the food for Yoke’s table. He cooked with fervor, and the meal was a big success. Around midnight he and the four guests stepped out of LoLo together. It was still pouring rain. Yoke did something with her uvvy as they stepped outside, and a moldie suddenly came bouncing up the street, sending out great splashes of water with each jump. It was Cobb Anderson.
“Thanks for waiting, Cobb,” said Yoke. “What did you do?”
“Oh, I was going around town with Randy Karl,” said Cobb. “And then we split up and I was hanging out with some homeless people in an alley off Columbus Street. Talking with them. One of them was a very intelligent fellow. It’s not so much that the homeless are crazy and addicted, it’s that they don’t have money for rent. Just that one simple lack. We need to find a way to make cheap housing for the poor. But hey, just for right now, let me be your umbrella.” Cobb stuck up his arms, and his tissues flowed upward, spreading out and thinning to make a giant umbrella that they could all stand under, the five young people in a circle around the moldie. “Better hold up the edges,” said Cobb. He’d used so much of his body flesh in the umbrella that his head had sunk down to chest-level.
“Where’s Randy now?” asked Yoke.
“By now I imagine he’s found a moldie hooker like he was looking for. I really should get that boy up to the Moon to be with his father. Eventually. Randy’s in no rush to go.”
“Cobb’s talking about his great-grandson,” Yoke explained to the others. “Randy Karl Tucker. He’s a cheeseball from Kentucky. He lives in Santa Cruz. Tre and Terri Dietz hate him. Randy kidnapped one of their moldies by putting a superleech on her. The new kind of leech-DIM. But now Randy says he realizes it was wrong. Cobb’s supposed to take him to the Moon to meet his father.”
“What is this ‘DIM’ that everyone’s always talking about?” asked Cobb.
“It stands for ‘Designer Imipolex’, Cobb,” said Yoke. “It’s what everyone uses instead of the old-time silicon computer chips anymore. A DIM is made of imipolex with some mold and algae in it. Just like your new body. You were out of it for a looong time, weren’t you?”
“I’m still out of it,” said Cobb. “That’s another reason I want to have a good look around dear old Earth before I go back to the Moon. And , like I say, Randy’s in no hurry either. He’s been busy spending the money his father keeps sending him. Sad to say, Willy’s a little reluctant to meet his only son. At this rate, poor Randy could wind up being a remittance man—someone whose father pays him to stay away. I’ve told Willy he should be more excited about Randy, but so far Willy doesn’t want to listen to his Grandpa. I think he’s been on the Moon too long.”
“Why didn’t Randy come along for dinner?” asked Phil.
“Hell, he was in too big a rush to get to that scurvy place in North Beach,” said Babs, laughing. “Real Compared To What. Can you even imagine? Randy’s certainly a man who knows what he wants. Admirable, in a way.”
They walked down the sidewalk as a single group dome. The plan was to go back to Babs’s space in a warehouse not far from Phil’s. Yoke, Cobb, and Randy were spending a few days with Babs. The rain made a nice reverberating sound against Cobb�
�s taut moldie flesh, which smelled like a dank basement. Phil managed to be next to Yoke, though Onar was on her other side.
“So you’re into helping people now, Cobb?” asked Onar. “Is this a result of some experiences you had while you were dead? And what was that like?”
“My original human personality was stored on an S-cube for over twenty years,” said Cobb. “And, yes, that was more or less the same as being dead. That me is dead forever, and it’s the same as the me right now. Memories of it? A big white light. The SUN. Endlessly falling into it, but never reaching the core. A cloud of other souls around me. The end of time, forever and ever.”
“You mean ‘Sun’ like our home star?” asked Phil.
“No,” said Cobb, “I mean capital S-U-N. At least that’s the name I use. The Divine Light, the universal rain that moistens all creatures. The SUN is a little like the eye on the top of the pyramid on the old dollar bills. Except SUN isn’t about money, the SUN is about love and peace.”
“Oh look,” said Babs, changing the subject by noticing a shop window, and the group stopped to gaze in. Colorful felt hats, each a single pastel shade, were suspended in the window, funny and bright, with an intricate patterning in their fabric. “I’m getting so into fashion,” added Babs. “I’ve been designing lace. It’s too bad nobody ever wears lace. They should.” Babs herself wore a silky shawl of thick, intricate nonrepeating lace. A mantilla.
“How did that work, your getting an imipolex body?” Phil asked Cobb.
“It was interesting,” said Cobb. “These two loonie moldies each started running a simulation of me. They pulled me back from the SUN. They were running two simulations of me so they could compare and contrast and get the parameters tweaked. And meanwhile they had a new imipolex body ready for me. So there were two simulations of me waiting for the one body. I and I got into a telepathic uvvy link so that we could merge and share—instead of doing sudden-death musical chairs. From that merging experience, and from being with the SUN, I got the conviction that each of us is the same person. And that’s why we should be really kind. Which answers Onar’s question of why I want to do good.”
