The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

“What a stench!” exclaimed Onar, peering into the shower. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to save him? That’ll never work.”

  “Why shouldn’t I try?” snapped Yoke. “Do you want to just let him die? Don’t bother to answer. And stop staring at me.”

  “You shouldn’t waste your time,” said Onar. “I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. An overdose of betty. All of his fungus nodules are bursting out with spores, and the spores are going to poison him. Kiss the old duffer good-bye, Yoke. We’ll find you another dive-moldie. Oofa’s expecting us at nine sharp.”

  “Sure she is,” said Yoke. “On the dot. Get out of here. It was a big mistake to sleep with you. Onar the one-minute wonder.”

  “Goood morning,” said Onar, and left the room.

  More and more of the dark dust, the spores, was coming out of Cobb. Some of the dust wafted up toward Yoke. She put a wet washrag over her face to keep from getting lifted. She kneaded Cobb harder and harder.

  Finally the old man’s moldie flesh was pink again. His tissues drew back into the shape of a human. He groaned and got to his feet.

  “Man. What a burn.”

  “You’re all right now?” asked Yoke. Even though Cobb smelled awful, she hugged him. His flesh was cool and smooth.

  “When we go in the ocean I’ll really clean myself out,” said Cobb, hugging her back. “Thank you, dear Yoke. I think you saved my life. That green moldie woman, that Vaana, she smeared much too much betty on me. Crazy. Like there was no tomorrow.”

  Yoke got out of the shower and began toweling herself off. “She was trying to kill you, Cobb. She’s the King’s girlfriend. She must have flown straight to the Happy Club after I left the palace.”

  Cobb remained in the shower stall, flexing his body to squeeze out a little more of the spore-darkened water. “So the King wants me dead,” he said finally. “Did he mention why?”

  “Last night I thought it was because he thought you’d talk too much. Now I’m thinking maybe it’s because he didn’t want you here to protect me when I dive down to see Shimmer today.”

  “Shimmer,” said Cobb. He stepped out of the shower, looking vague. “Yoke dear, you’re going to have to repeat what you told me in your room. Your words flew past me like a flock of hummingbirds. Shimmer’s an alien, right? And when you say alien, you mean an honest-to-God extraterrestrial?”

  “Duh! Shimmer was one of the alien personality waves who decrypted into moldie bodies at Willy Taze’s house in November. My parents killed all the others. And Shimmer got away. She’s living down in the Tonga Trench. The King says Shimmer’s bringing in a bunch of her relatives to live here. And for some reason she wants to meet with me.”

  “Real aliens!” exclaimed Cobb. “At last! I’d love to meet this Shimmer.”

  “You’re in no condition.”

  “Hell, I’m not. Buy me some quantum dots to get my energy up, Yoke, and I’ll be good as new.” Cobb stretched himself to an alarming height, then snapped back like a rubber band. “It’s fuckin’ great to be alive.”

  “I’m scared Shimmer might get me, Cobb. When I woke up this morning I started thinking about the four-dimensional things that ate Kurt Gottner and my mom. If that’s what really happened, then maybe those things were from the aliens. Shimmer comes from a place where there’s two-dimensional time.”

  “If Shimmer could kill Kurt in California and Darla on the Moon, then she could kill us right here and now if she wanted to,” said Cobb. “So why not go and have a talk with her face-to-face? What does she look like?”

  “She’s in a moldie body. She has such a huge intelligence that her body’s perfectly formed. It’s like she’s consciously aware of the curvatures of each square millimeter of her surface. She’s inhumanly beautiful, Cobb. Like a glowing marble sculpture.”

  “Wow,” said Cobb, visibly tweaking his body shape as if trying out the idea of making himself look divine. “Do I look good enough to meet her?”

  “You look fine,” said Yoke, even though Cobb only looked like a stocky, freckled white-haired old man pulling in his stomach. “Let’s go back to my room. You stick with me before something else happens to you.”

  Yoke put on her new purple Santa Cruz bikini and a long chartreuse T-shirt. She and Cobb went out into the guest house common room. It was a bare old room, beautified by bowls of water with hibiscus blossoms floating in them. Mrs. Yoshida and her cook Waloo were serving breakfast: coffee, papayas, and toast. Mrs. Yoshida was a trim, no-nonsense lady with her hair in a black bun; Waloo was calm, smiling, and stocky. Onar was sitting at the table in a fresh clean sport shirt covered with satellite weather photos of the South Pacific, all blues and whites and grays.

  “Feeling better, Cobb?” said Onar.

  “Vaana dosed me,” said Cobb. “Do you know where Yoke can buy me some quantum dots?”

  Onar shook his head and began, “And I’m afraid that’s—”

  But Mrs. Yoshida interrupted him. “I can sell you some dots, Yoke. My husband, bless his soul, bought too big a supply of them for his boat and they’re just sitting on a shelf in a magnetic bottle. You pay cash?”

  “I’ll do a transfer,” said Yoke, picking up her uvvy. “How much?”

  “Hold on,” said Mrs. Yoshida, and disappeared into the kitchen, quickly returning with a shiny gray bottle. She shook the little bottle and held it up to the light. “The meter says there’s half a terawatt left. You want it all?”

  “Yeah,” said Cobb. “If it’s too expensive for Yoke, my grandson Willy can pay you back.”

  “Like he’s really going to want to pay all your bills,” said Yoke. “But sure, let’s do it. Pop loaded up my $Web account for this trip. He’d definitely want you healthy, Cobb.” She glanced at Onar, who looked to be bursting with objections. “You haven’t met my pop, Onar. And you better hope you never do.”

  “Whitey’s a bad-ass,” agreed Cobb. “For true. By the way, Onar, why do you think Vaana tried to poison me?”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean to,” said Onar. “She’s just wild that way. Ever since she’s moved in with the King.”

  “I think it is a crying shame,” put in Waloo, setting out some fresh toast and coffee. “HRH should be making a prince. We don’t like our Tu’i Tonga to be a cheeseball.” She favored Yoke with a frank, inquisitive gaze. “Are you that way with your moldie?”

  “God no,” said Yoke. “Only men are skanky enough to fuck plastic.” The women laughed.

  Yoke donned her uvvy and completed the purchase of the quantum dots. Mrs. Yoshida handed Cobb the magnetic bottle. He grew a thick funnel shape out of the center of his chest and poured the quantum dots into it. They sparkled like iridescent dust and sank into his tissues.

  “Spinach!” said Cobb, flexing like a bodybuilder. His biceps swelled to the size of hams; his legs grew sinewy as tree trunks. “Boing and a boing and a ya-yahoo! Should I torture loverboy till he tells us all his secrets?” He took a step toward the seated Onar.

  “Can everyone calm down?” snapped Onar. “I still think it would be better for Yoke to dive inside of one of our local moldies today. In case something goes wrong. Get away from me, Cobb. You reek.”

  Yoke waited until Mrs. Yoshida and Waloo were out of earshot and answered Onar in an angry whisper. “You want to have Tashtego or Daggoo offer me up to Shimmer like a human sacrifice! Trussed on a platter with an apple in my mouth.”

  “We just don’t want there to be any trouble,” hissed Onar. “And Cobb’s always spelled trouble. In all of his lives. We only want for today’s meeting to go smoothly and for Shimmer to give you the real ware.”

  “What’s that?” asked Cobb, too loud.

  “I don’t really know,” said Onar, stubbornly staring down at his cup. “Hurry up and eat your breakfast, Yoke. Cobb, why don’t you wait on the porch so I can drink my coffee without vomiting.”

  And then they were out in the Sea Cuke dive boat: Oofa, Yoke, and Onar; Daggoo, Tashtego, and Cobb. Tashtego and
Daggoo looked like cannibals, like fierce harpooneers from an old-time whaling ship, their imipolex skins intricately worked with tattoos. Daggoo was huge, coal-black with wild kinky hair; the imipolex of his earlobes swooped out into shapes like gold hoop earrings. His tattoos were raised white lines, seemingly of scar tissue. Tashtego was coppery in color, with long blond hair; his tattoos were polychrome fractals. Both of them had slim hips and muscular bodies. Though Tashtego was large, Daggoo was half again as big as Tashtego. Daggoo wore blue swimming trunks, while Tashtego wore a woman’s red bikini with the bra-cups stuffed with two pairs of socks. The skin of Tashtego’s face was colored to give the effect of orange lipstick and turquoise eye shadow. The crotch of his bikini bulged as if covering a large penis.

  Yoke ended up sitting next to Tashtego in the bow of the boat. Behind them sat Cobb and Onar, and in the stern were Oofa and Daggoo. After leaving the Nuku’alofa harbor, the boat circled around to the south side of the island, there to rise up on its hydrofoils and speed southeast across the open ocean. They slowed down once to view a pair of spouting sperm whales. Yoke wanted to dive in and get a good look at them, but Onar urged Oofa on.

  By eleven a.m. the sun was incredibly hot and bright. The water-jet motor was whisper-quiet; the only sound was the hissing of the hydrofoils through the sea. For no particular reason Tashtego was making a great show of combing out his matted blond hair—really just strands of imipolex, of course—and one of his undulating arms bumped Yoke on the shoulder. Hard.

  “Why behave like a fakaleiti?” snapped Yoke. She felt anxious and irritable; the light breakfast had worn off. “It doesn’t make sense. A moldie is whatever sex it decides on at birth. So you’re a male moldie, fine. If you wanted to, you could shape yourself like a human woman. Why take on the form of a man impersonating a woman? It’s stupid.”

  “Fakaleiti make happy thing happen,” said Tashtego, archly looking down at his false breasts. As part of their images, he and Daggoo insisted on speaking a barbaric pidgin English. “Tashtego boom boom boy girl.” He threw back his head and cackled. His teeth were as sharp and pointed as if they’d been filed. “You no dive in me today, Yoke? Me open up very good.” Tashtego playfully split himself slightly open along a heretofore invisible seam down the front of his body. Like a clam cracking its shell open for a bit of water.

  The appearance of the savage Tashtego’s halved face was deeply disturbing. Yoke shook her head and looked away. “I’m diving in Cobb and that’s final.”

  “I’d like to dive in you, Tashtego,” said Onar, who was eavesdropping over their shoulders. “I want to come along. More sunscreen, Yoke?”

  “Thanks.” It still seemed odd to Yoke to be bare beneath the sun. She was following the fair-skinned Onar’s regimen of frequent applications of lotion. “How much further are we going?” she asked. “I don’t see anything but open sea. We’re going so fast that we must have come seventy miles by now.”

  “Oofa?” called Onar.

  But Oofa was asleep, lounging back against Daggoo’s sun-puddled body. Onar had to shake Oofa’s bare foot to rouse her.

  “No problem, soon come, the boat knows where to go,” mumbled Oofa, rubbing her eyes and looking around. “We’ll be near our dive-site when you can see ’Ata over there. And then you look for something like a lily pad.” She waved her hand toward the starboard and relaxed back against Daggoo’s smooth black flesh.

  “’Ata is the southernmost island of Tonga,” explained Onar. “The deepest part of the Tonga Trench runs right past it. The Vityaz Deep. Better than six miles to the bottom. That’s where Shimmer is.”

  Yoke felt a hollowness in her chest. “We’re supposed to dive down six miles? I’d need a submarine for that. A bathyscaph, not a moldie wet suit.”

  “I be hard as you need, Yoke,” leered Tashtego. Daggoo let out a carnivorous yelp of laughter.

  “It’s true,” said Cobb. “We can switch our imipolex to a rigid form that’s stronger than diamond. The loonie moldies taught me all the tricks.”

  “Why can’t Shimmer just swim up to meet us?” wailed Yoke.

  “She’s shy,” said Onar. “And, look, on the horizon over there, it’s ’Ata! And here’s Shimmer’s antenna. Heave to, Oofa!”

  The boat came to a stop and sank down to bob in the slow ocean swells. Floating in the sea near them was a thick fleshy disk of silvery imipolex. Its upper surface was cupped like a parabolic dish.

  “Ahoy, Turklee,” called Tashtego, waving his snaky arms.

  “Hello,” sang back the lily pad. “Shimmer’s expecting you.”

  “Is that thing a moldie?” asked Yoke.

  “Sure,” said Onar. “Her name’s Turklee. I think the King mentioned her to you last night. The fourth moldie in the know. Turklee’s working as a transducer for Shimmer. Radio waves don’t travel well through water, you see. Turklee uses blue-green laser light to send signals down to Shimmer’s lair. Shimmer needs a good link because she’s pulling in so much bandwidth through Cappy Jane.”

  While Onar talked, Oofa rummaged in a cooler chest and took out a bunch of bananas and a bottle of water to pass around.

  “I can hear Shimmer,” said Cobb suddenly. “She’s talking to us. Oh how strange. This is wonderful. Hello, Shimmer. Put on your uvvy, Yoke.” Tashtego and Daggoo were grinning and nodding, enjoying Shimmer’s signal too.

  “What if she blasts me like Onar did yesterday?” asked Yoke.

  “Be gentle, Shimmer,” said Cobb. “The person you’ve been asking for is going to come on line. Oh yes, that’s perfect. Try it now, Yoke.”

  So Yoke put the uvvy on her tender neck and right away she could hear Shimmer’s voice, a sound like the piping of flutes, the whining of sitars, and the gentle resonation of a gong.

  “Hello, Yoke. You were kind to me on the Moon. I’m grateful that you’ve come to see me. Let’s plan your dive.”

  Now Shimmer began sending images of divers, figures against a dark undersea background, drifting down next to the blue-green shaft of Turklee’s laser beam. In the images, Cobb was shaped like a sphere, with Yoke crouched within him like a tadpole inside a frog’s egg. The pictures were clear and beautiful but with a curious multiplicity to them. Like seeing two or three or twenty things at once. In some of the images Onar and Oofa were also present, riding inside Tashtego and Daggoo, and in one of those images, Tashtego bit a hole in Cobb’s surface, causing him to collapse and to crush Yoke into bloody pulp.

  “Yoke must come alone,” said Shimmer.

  “The King wants me and Oofa there too,” protested Onar through the uvvy, his voice like the chirp of a persistent cricket.

  Now one of Shimmer’s images showed Onar and Oofa following Yoke. The blue-green laser beam intensified, twitched, burnt holes in Tashtego and Daggoo.

  “You will stay on the boat,” said Shimmer.

  So Onar told the others that they wouldn’t be going down.

  “That’s fine,” said Oofa, settling back into her seat.

  “HRH pay us imipolex all the same,” said Daggoo.

  “Bugger all,” muttered Onar.

  “Are you ready, Yoke?” asked Cobb.

  She looked around at the sloshing sea, at pale angry Onar, at lithe Tashtego and massive Daggoo, at calm Oofa and pink old Cobb. The sunlight on the water was beautiful. It would be so odd to die here.

  “Don’t worry, Yoke,” said Shimmer, as if sensing Yoke’s thoughts. “You won’t die at all. I’ll help you find true happiness.” She sounded so kind and wise that Yoke believed her.

  “Okay,” Cobb was saying. “Get on top of me now.” The moldie had puddled himself out on the deck like a pancake with a little hump in the center like a footstool. Yoke fit her palladium filters into her nose and sat on the imipolex hassock. Cobb’s flesh swooped up around her, sealing itself up to form a translucent sphere. Tashtego and Daggoo whooped, their voices muffled by Cobb’s body, and then there was a jarring bump and a splash. Cobb’s flesh held onto Yoke’s body to
keep her from being thrown about.

  “I can’t see anything, Cobb,” protested Yoke. “Make yourself transparent!”

  “I can’t when I’m in this rigid mode,” said Cobb. “But you can use your uvvy to see what I’m seeing. Just focus.”

  They were floating just beneath the surface. Yoke put her attention into her uvvy, and now she could indeed see a remarkable view of the water’s underside, all live and sparkling in the sun, a restless mirror. Cobb moved his gaze about in synch with Yoke’s head motions; it felt like she was freely looking around.

  Yoke could see the bottom of the Sea Cuke boat, also the heads of Daggoo and Tashtego, who were hanging over the edge to stare at them. Turklee the lily pad antenna was floating off to one side, a dark disk on the silver surface. A bright, narrow beam of blue-green light emanated from Turklee’s underside. She had a ring of webbed duck-feet constantly paddling to keep her centered over Shimmer’s location. A few good-sized fish hovered in the shade of the lily pad moldie, nibbling at whatever marine algae had begun to grow on her. Looking down, Yoke’s gaze followed the crisp line of laser light to where it disappeared into the featureless depths. Six miles! Her stomach knotted like a fist.

  There was a great splash from above. Tashtego and Daggoo were wrestling a huge weight over the edge of the dive boat for them; it was a massive pyramid of pig-iron with a handle at the apex. Cobb bulged out a hand to take hold of the dive-weight, the others released it, and then, as abruptly as stepping off a cliff, Cobb and Yoke were plummeting down into the abyss, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until soon they’d reached their maximum speed, with the downward pull of their weight just balanced by their friction with the water.

  Their passage through the water made a low, thrumming sound. Cobb’s flesh seemed to grow ever denser and more compact. Yet the pressure inside the spherical shell of his body stayed normal; Yoke didn’t have to clear her ears as she’d had to during her Santa Cruz moldie wet-suit dives.

  Quite soon it was pitch-dark in the Cobb bathyscaph. “Can you make some light for me?” asked Yoke. As she spoke, her teeth began to chatter. “And heat. It’s getting colder every second.”