by Rudy Rucker
When they were halfway back to Neiafu, Lata rode past them, jingling his bell. And then things started to go crazy. Somehow everyone in every house they passed had heard of their miraculous gift. Men, women, and children streamed out, mostly in good Sunday clothes, offering presents. Shells, flowers, woven mats, even cans of beans and meat. It became hard to move forward. Just to get the people to back off, Yoke recklessly popped a dozen bouncy kickballs out of her alla, each with a different pattern, followed by gallons and gallons of ice cream. But the people were clamoring for something really good. Yoke made some gold bracelets and then—the biggest crowd-pleaser of all—a score of brand-new uvvies. Many of the Tongans didn’t have uvvies yet.
By the time they got back to the harbor, a full-blown mob was squeezing in on them. Someone tried to grab Phil’s lofa bean, but he hung onto it. He thought to uvvy for Cobb, and the old pheezer moldie came surging out of the ocean like Neptune come to rescue his children. Yoke created three dogs, who came into existence wildly barking—clearing out some space for Cobb. Cobb wrapped his arms around them and shot up into the air. But now Tashtego and Daggoo were homing in on them.
“Josef’s gone!” Yoke exclaimed, touching her ear. “I don’t know how to escape them, Cobb!”
Cobb dove down into the harbor water. He covered them over and fed them air. But now here were the coppery Tashtego and big black Daggoo, clamping tight bands around Cobb, Yoke, and Phil. The five of them swam back to the island together, staying beneath the surface so it wouldn’t be easy for the agitated locals to pursue them. Phil still had his lofa bean and Yoke still had her shells.
“I hear you’ve started a riot in Neiafu,” Kennit said frowning when they arrived. “On the Lord’s day. You have done exactly what you were forbidden.”
“So?” said Yoke. “What are you going to do about it?” And to that Kennit had nothing to say. Nobody quite knew how to deal with Yoke’s defiance.
“The ship is going to be a day late,” said Kennit finally. “We’ll be asking you to create the imipolex tomorrow morning.” And that was that.
Phil and Yoke had supper with the Tongans at a long table on the veranda, real Tongan food prepared by Ms. Teta. Fish, taro, and squash. Kennit didn’t seem to carry any kind of grudge, and the other Tongans were friendly as well. They enjoyed teaching Phil and Yoke things about Tonga—the history, customs, geography, and language.
While they talked and ate, Cobb was hanging out with Tashtego and Daggoo off at the edge of the clearing. Despite old Cobb’s misgivings about the Tongan moldies, the three of them seemed to be getting along very well. Indeed, from their hoarse cackles, it seemed likely that one of them had brought along some betty.
Soon it was full night, with an incredible clear sky. Phil was intoxicated by the stars, the full moon, and Yoke’s low voice. And then it was time to go to bed.
“Now I am not going to do it with you tonight,” said Yoke as they closed the door to her room. “I want that clear. I don’t want to make a mistake and rush things. So no pushing, okay?”
“That’s fine,” said Phil. “I’m just happy to be with you, Yoke. We have plenty of time—I hope.”
Phil took a shower and put on boxer shorts and a T-shirt for pajamas. Yoke was in a nightgown, sitting at a table playing with her alla. She’d just made a big rough prism of green glass with little whorled bubbles in it. The glass sat on one fat edge, rising up maybe ten inches. It had some funny little peek-through windows cut into it. The glass was smooth on one side, nubby on the other; it was something that Phil’s hands instinctively longed to touch. He reached out to caress it.
“It’s beautiful, Yoke.”
“Thanks. This alla—it’s the ultimate art tool. I can make anything that I can think.” She closed her eyes, looking inward. A control mesh of bright lines formed above the tabletop, a foot-wide knot of twisting curves. There was a whoosh of air, and a ribbon of smooth metal formed inside the cube, a Mobius strip with comical hieroglyphics of ants embossed all along it. Yoke cocked her head, critically examining her creation.
“Did you know we have ants on the Moon, Phil? They snuck up there. I should have made these guys thicker.”
“Can’t you revise it?” Phil asked. “My housemate Derek, he says that his sculptures do half the work themselves. Like he’s talking with them. He keeps looking at what he’s made and changing it. I do that with cooking too. Taste it, spice it, taste it, spice it.”
“Good idea,” said Yoke. She popped the same shimmering bright-edged control mesh out and positioned it around the ant Mobius strip which she then—whomp—turned back into air. Now she made the ant-shapes in the glowing mesh bulge out a bit more and said, “Actualize.” The Mobius strip was back, but with its ants much more swollen, bulging out of the metal ribbon into high relief. “Yes,” said Yoke, setting down the alla. “Thanks, Phil.”
“Can I try using the alla now?”
“Shimmer said nobody can use this alla but me,” said Yoke possessively.
“She’s not here watching us, is she? Come on, Yoke, let me try.”
“Don’t break it.” Yoke handed Phil the little gold-colored tube. It sat in Phil’s hand, subtly flickering. Phil held it up and looked through it—and saw a dizzying view of the room eternally spinning.
“It’s like staring down through a tornado,” he said. “How do I make it do something?”
“You have to uvvy into it,” said Yoke.
Phil tried, but the alla gave no response.
“I guess it’s registered only to respond to my uvvy signals,” said Yoke. “You’ll have to uvvy to me and I’ll pass your signals to the alla.”
Phil tried for a minute to organize this connection but he couldn’t do it.
“I hate this software bullshit,” he muttered.
“Let me,” said Yoke, and in an instant she had herself hooked in as an intermediary between Phil and the alla.
“Hello,” the alla seemed to say in a squeaky cartoon voice inside Phil’s head. It displayed an image of something that wasn’t anything in particular: an amorphous gray glob, roughly spherical, floating against a white background.
“Think your target to me,” said the alla voice.
Phil could think of nothing better than that he’d forgotten his toothbrush. The gray glob elongated itself and grew bristles at one end. Its color and dimensions remained—indeterminate. At the slightest push of Phil’s velleity, the specific features of the toothbrush warped this way and that.
“Really sensitive, huh?” said Yoke.
“It’s like I’m exploring toothbrush space,” said Phil, finding more and more qualities to vary. Tuft stiffness, handle bend, transparency, bristle density—it wasn’t like he was fully imagining the toothbrushes himself, it was more like surfing through an incredibly vast multidimensional online mother of all catalogs.
“Try and actualize one,” said Yoke. “It might work.”
“I want that one,” said Phil to the alla, and a mental image of an excellent green toothbrush froze in place. “No, wait, let me personalize it.” With a special effort of will, Phil stamped his name on the image’s handle and filliped its tip with a nonstandard kink. “Now make that sucker for me, little alla. Actualize.”
But nothing happened. Wish as he might, Phil couldn’t force the magical lines of bright mesh to appear.
“I guess I have to say it,” said Yoke.
“That is correct,” squeaked the alla. “I allow only one registered user.”
“So actualize the toothbrush already,” said Yoke, and Phil’s toothbrush dropped into his lap.
Phil handed the alla back to Yoke, who quickly returned to revising her two sculptures. Popping out the old mesh, dissolving the existing version, adjusting the mesh, and making a new one. “The alla remembers the exact format of each of the things I’ve actualized,” said Yoke. “So it’s easy to keep changing them.” She adjusted the bends of the metal loop, and shaved bits off the curved sides of the big glass
prism.
Phil set his lofa bean down next to Yoke’s sculptures and tried to get her to admire it some more. He didn’t like for the alla to be getting all the attention. The bean was something remarkable that he himself had found. “What a beautiful green color our lofa bean is, Yoke.” Yoke was tired of talking about the bean, but Phil kept on trying to riff on it, trying to get Yoke to look at him. “Could it be the larva of an alien centipede? The bean’s vine was hanging right down out of the sky. Jack and the Beanstalk! What if it splits open and eats my brain tonight, Yoke?”
“It would get a small meal!” laughed Yoke. “Just kidding. I like your brain, Phil.” She set down the alla, slipped into her bed and turned out the light.
“Good night, Yoke,” said Phil, getting into his own bed. “It was a great day.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Phil. And, um, what I said when we closed the door—I didn’t mean that you can’t kiss me good night.”
February 23
Phil dreamed about his father again, but when he woke Monday morning, the details faded out of his memory. Outside there were voices on the veranda, one particularly annoying voice the loudest: Onar Anders, saying something about tea, about the best way to make it.
Phil looked over at Yoke’s bed; it was empty, the flipped-back sheets a gentle outline of her slender frame. And the lofa bean? It was sitting quietly on the night table, green and vegetal.
Phil put on the shorts Yoke had made him and a clean dark blue silk sport shirt that he found in the closet. It was quite a large shirt, patterned with suns and stars; perhaps it belonged to the King. Outside it was already mid-morning. Clear sky and a gentle breeze. Yoke, Onar, and the four Tongan bodyguards were at the long table on the veranda drinking tea and coffee. Cobb was also present, but Tashtego and Daggoo weren’t around.
“Ecce homo,” said Onar. He was wearing a white yachting cap with gold braid and a stiff bill. “Behold the man. Welcome to Tonga, Phil. Glad to see you could get some time off from your menial job.”
“Xoxx you, Onar. Hi, Yoke. Man, I slept well. You’ve got a great room, Yoke. I found this nice shirt in the closet. What’s happening?”
“The Tongan Navy ship finally got here,” said Yoke. “I’m supposed to fill it up with goodies for the King. I like that shirt on you, Phil. It’s—heavenly.”
“Royal duds,” said Phil, flapping the great garment. “Is filling up the ship going to take us long?”
“Well, I’ll be making the gold and imipolex in slugs small enough for people to carry. So I’ll have to make a lot of them. It might be a couple of hours. Do you want to watch?”
“I’m sorry, but Phil can’t come aboard the navy ship,” interrupted Onar. “Security, don’t you know?”
“Bullshit,” said Yoke.
“HRH insists,” said Onar. “And he promises not to lecture you about what you did in Neiafu yesterday. Some of the locals even took pictures of you, but thanks to the ID virus, all the images show Sue Miller. You can still be anonymous and keep your alla, Yoke. We’ve done all this for you. Be a sport, and help us. It’s thanks to the King that you met the aliens and got the alla in the first place.”
“What do you think?” Yoke asked Phil.
“Whatever you say,” Phil answered, feeling himself slide into his old passivity. “I’ll miss you, but I can keep myself entertained. I could do some snorkeling maybe. Or go to Neiafu and see what’s down the road in the other direction. If you think you’ll be safe.”
“I’ll bring Cobb along for protection,” said Yoke. “And that’s final, Onar.”
“Let me check,” said Onar, and silently consulted the uvvy he was wearing on the back of his neck. “Jolly good,” he said a minute later. “Ms. Yoke Starr-Mydol and her moldie Cobb are cordially invited aboard His Royal Highness’s flagship. Shall we go down to the launch? If you like, Phil, we can drop you off at Neiafu.”
To avoid the danger of the locals coming after Yoke again, the launch dropped Phil at a deserted private dock rather than at the main Neiafu dock. Phil waved as the launch sped out to the big Tongan Navy ship floating in the harbor. Little Yoke. Maybe he should have insisted on sticking with her. But Phil knew he wasn’t good at arguing. Oh well.
Phil strolled up to the main road and turned right. He passed a few locals. They all smiled and nodded, recognizing him, but there was nothing like the excitement of yesterday. Evidently everyone knew that although Yoke was the Queen of the Alla, he was only her Prince Consort. Nothing special.
Phil was intrigued by the thin black pigs he saw everywhere. All of the Tongans’ houses were dirty on the outside from the pigs rubbing themselves on the walls. He tried to pet one or two of the pigs, but they were extremely wary. And some had tusks.
As he continued to walk, the houses gave way to trees and fields. In one field he noticed a hut as primitive as any he’d ever imagined—what the Tongans called a “fale.” It had palm-trunk posts holding up a roof of palm fronds. The walls were woven matting, with a big gap in place of a door. Sitting on the ground in front of the house were the loveliest people Phil had ever seen, a man and a woman, the woman with a baby at her breast, the three of them looking supremely content. They noticed Phil, but didn’t bother to wave. The Edenic family made Phil think of Adam and Eve. Would it really be a step forward for them to have an alla?
He walked on and came to a field with a low wall around it. Within the enclosure were long mounds of gravel decorated with colorful patterns of pebbles and shells. The dimensions of the mounds and the faint odor of corruption told Phil this was a graveyard. A thin young woman with a pack of children was working on one of the graves; she was sweeping it with a stick broom and burning the rubbish in a small fire. Seeing Phil look at her, the woman made a gesture he hadn’t seen before. She held her hand palm up, slightly cupped, with the fingers stiff and outspread, and then flipped the hand down toward him, a bit as if sowing seed. The gesture definitely meant “go away” rather than “come here.” Could an alla have saved the life of the person whose grave she was tending? But why bother? thought Phil. There’s always more people, and everyone has to die.
Phil’s easy, callous thought stumbled over a fresh burst of grief for his father. There were always more people, but no more of Da. He’d been a jerk, but Phil missed him. Dead forever. Life was short. Phil wondered how Yoke was doing on the King’s ship. Maybe he’d uvvy her in a little bit.
Now Phil came to a little village, a cluster of fales. Beyond the village was a low hill, and beyond that the ocean. Phil decided to walk through the village to the water. As he walked past the fales, a group of children came after him, shouting and laughing, three or four girls and a boy. “Palangi,” they called him, which Kennit had said was Tongan for both “ghost” and “white person.”
Phil asked the children to catch a piglet so he could pet it, but they wouldn’t. Perhaps they were afraid of the tusks. The boy, about four, had fun poking at Phil’s back with a long and disturbingly sharp stick. The girls asked Phil’s name and had him spell it for them and then they danced around him saying, “Phil, Phil, Phil.” Defining him here. It felt like being awake inside a dream. The border between life and dream seemed so elastic these days.
When he got to the top of the rise, the children went back to their fales, and Phil picked his way down to the rocky beach alone. Brittle sea stars were everywhere on the shallowly covered stones, striped snaky things, most with two or three arms in a hidey-hole and the other arms lashing about. Thank you, God, thought Phil as he looked at the calm waves coming in. Thank you for making the world.
Something nudged his leg. A pig?
“Yo, Phil,” said the black pig. “I’m Wubwub. Hate to tell you, man, but I’m the brother what turned Om onto your Da. I found the wowos on the Web and told Om the news. But maybe there’s a way you can help yo’ da come back, you know what I’m sayin’? C’mon in here, see our new node.”
The pig trotted down the beach and disappeared into a hole in
the rocks, seemingly an entrance to a cave. Phil came along into the dark, holding out his hands so as not to bump his head. The passageway twisted a bit; there was light ahead—and the rank smell of moldie flesh. Phil followed Wubwub around a last turn and found himself in a well-lit rocky grotto the size of a room. Six figures were in there; most prominent was a pale, nude woman—the famous Shimmer! In addition to her and Wubwub the pig, there was a handsome bronzed man named Ptah, the blonde unicorn Peg, a thick serpent called Siss, and Josef the beetle. All of them had moldie bodies.
“Good day, Phil,” said Josef. “I present you the other Metamartians.”
“What are you guys really doing here?” asked Phil when the introductions were done. “What are you after?”
“We’re like tourists on a road-trip,” said Shimmer. “Except that we’re never going home.” She looked like a soft Greek sculpture, like Venus. Phil would have liked to touch her. “Like so many others, our race evolved to the point where we scattered out into the cosmos as personality waves, a bit like cosmic rays. It’s rare that there’s a—a ‘radio’ that can ‘play’ us. But we have an endless amount of time. Sooner or later one always gets lucky. Last November, as you must have heard, Willy Taze and the loonie moldies found a way to decrypt a number of extraterrestrial beings into imipolex bodies.”
“It was a disaster,” said Phil. Though Shimmer’s voice was mesmerizing in its musicality and beauty, Phil found himself wanting to argue with her. “One of you destroyed the Moon’s spaceport. Hundreds of people died.”
“Yes,” said Shimmer curtly. She seemed to have adopted a beautiful woman’s high self-regard and low patience. “But the single warlike alien who ran amok was no Metamartian. All of the peaceful extraterrestrials were indiscriminately murdered by humans—under the leadership of Darla Starr. I alone escaped. And it was I who eliminated the last vestige of that single warlike alien. But I don’t ask for your gratitude—no more than you would seek praise from an ant. Or from a bacterium.”
