The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

“The Metamartians claim I won’t be dead. That I’ll be in a bubble in hyperspace. But I—I don’t really believe it. The fourth dimension is bullshit. I’m just glad I met you, Yoke. I always said my life was good, but it wasn’t really until I met you. At least we had one day together.” Phil thought he saw something flickering out over the water. An isolated glint of strange perspective. “It’s coming for me, whatever it is. And, Yoke, it was definitely Om that got Darla. Shimmer told her to. Stay away from the Metamartians, or they might kill you too.”

  “Wait, Phil, wait. How is it that you might not die?”

  “Some crufty math fabulation. I’ll find my way back if there’s a way. Here it comes.”

  “I’ll wait for you in San Francisco.”

  “I love you.”

  The powerball came in across the water, low down at Phil’s level, flying straight at him. Phil braced himself, wrapping his arms tight around his knees. The powerball looked like a big, glowing crystal ball, reflecting and refracting light, though not so smooth as a glass ball, perhaps a bit more like a drop of water.

  As it drew closer there was an odd effect on the rest of the world: things seemed to melt and warp, distorting themselves away from the magic ball.

  Closer and closer it came, yet taking an oddly long time to actually arrive. It was as if the space between Phil and the ball were stretching nearly as fast as the ball could approach. The ball was like a hole opening up in the world. Everything was being pushed aside by it; the sky and waves were being squeezed out along its edges.

  Phil looked back over his shoulder; there was still a little zone of normality behind him—the nearest section of the rocky cliffs looked much the same. But so strong was the space warping of the powerball that the beach to the left and right seemed to bend away from him and, as Phil watched, this effect grew more pronounced. In a few moments it was as if Phil stood out on the tip of a little finger of reality, with the glowing powerball’s hyperspace squeezing in on every side. Back there at the other end of the finger, back in the world, Wubwub and Shimmer were peeking out of their cave entrance watching him, the cowards. He fought down an urge to run at them, and forced himself to turn back to face the engulfing ball. What could he see within the ball? Nothing but funhouse mirror reflections of himself: jiggling pink patches of his skin against a blue background filled with moons and stars—his shirt.

  And then, like a mighty wave breaking, the warped zone moved over Phil. He felt a deep shock of pain throughout his body, as if something were pulling and stretching at his insides. His lungs, his stomach, his muscles, his brain—every tissue burned with agony.

  “Phil! Phil!”

  Phil didn’t dare turn; he felt as if the slightest motion might tear his innards in two. But, peering from his pain-wracked eyes, he realized there was no need to turn, for with the powerball centered on him, his view of the world had changed. The entire world was squeezed into a tiny ball that seemed to float a few feet away from him like a spherical mirror the size of a dinner plate. And there in the little toy world, like animated figurines, were Cobb and Yoke. Running toward him. Phil instinctively reached out towards them but—swish—something flashed past his fingers like an invisible scythe. And then—pop—the little bubble that had been the normal world winked out of view, and Phil was alone in the hypersphere of the powerball.

  Phil’s guts snapped back to normal; the pain and its afterimage faded. He found himself comfortably floating within an empty, well-lit space that contained glowing air, his body and seemingly nothing else. The Metamartians had been right, up to a point, but where were the others that had been swallowed? When the powerball finished examining him, would he dissolve?

  “Hello?” called Phil. “Om?” No answer.

  The space bent back on itself so that Phil saw nothing in any direction but endless warped barbershop images of himself, of his sunburned hairy limbs and his billowing shirt’s blue field of moons and stars.

  Phil remembered one of his father’s stories about A Square stuck to the surface of the sphere, with all of his A Square light-rays traveling along great circles of the sphere’s surface as well. In every direction, A Square sees only himself. Here in the hypersphere of the powerball, Phil could see the back of his own head, the blond hair shaggier than he’d realized. He wondered if he’d meet Da soon.

  Since there were no other objects in the space with Phil, it was hard to tell if he could really move. But after a while he noticed that the space wasn’t completely uniform. There was one particular spot up ahead where the images of himself were always fractured. He wanted to go over and look at this little flaw, but at first he couldn’t think of any way to move. Finally it occurred to him to throw one of his shoes over his shoulder. Sure enough, the shoe-toss set him drifting forward in the direction of the flaw. Just as he got within arm’s length of the special spot, his shoe came tumbling toward his face—the shoe had traveled clear around the little hypersphere of the power-ball. Phil moved his head to one side, and the shoe grazed his shoulder, which slowed his forward motion.

  He stretched out his hand toward the flawed region. As his fingers entered the crooked space they disappeared. Phil convulsively pulled his hand back; there was no damage to it. He felt into the flaw again and wiggled his fingers. An odd sensation: his fingers couldn’t find his thumb, and his thumb couldn’t find his fingers. Just then the shoe came orbiting past again and caught him full in the chest. He drifted away from the anomalous spot with, whew, all of his fingers still intact.

  A little later Phil started being hungry and thirsty. He wondered how long he’d been in here. He consulted his uvvy for the time, but its clock was stuck at 11:37 a.m.—presumably it hadn’t received any update signals since he entered the power-ball. He made a halfhearted attempt to make an uvvy call to Yoke, but as he’d expected, it didn’t work. Any signals he could send would circle around and around his hypersphere just like the rays of light. But then he noticed something new in the uvvy. It was showing him just the kind of amorphous mental image he’d seen when he tried to use Yoke’s alla. It seemed as if Om had a built-in alla he could use!

  Phil tried to nudge the alla catalog’s grayish start-up image into a representation of food. But Om’s catalog for this alla wasn’t for humans, it was for aliens—presumably for Metamartians? Though he was trying for the image of an apple, he ended up with a representation of a spiky red leathery thing that was—what? The alla catalog was multisensory, so Phil took a virtual sniff of the possible fruit; it had a faintly acrid odor, but maybe that was just the smell of the rind. Phil said, “Actualize.” He wasn’t sure if anything would happen; after all, Yoke’s alla had refused to obey anyone but Yoke. But the powerball’s intrinsic alla seemed willing to work for him. A brightly outlined alla mesh formed and—whoosh—the spiky pouch became real.

  When Phil hungrily pulled one of the spikes loose, sick yellow cream dribbled out of the rip in the tough red skin, stinging his hand. A reek like ammonia assaulted his eyes and nose. Phil focused in on his uvvy and wished very hard for the alien pod to disappear. To his relief, an alla mesh formed around the fruit and it reverted to air, taking most of the corrosive smell with it. Maybe he wasn’t hungry yet after all.

  He gave up on food and wandered about in the mental maze of the alien alla catalog, marveling at wonderful baubles and bizarre forms. He even actualized three of the objects for himself.

  First, there was something resembling a little pearl-handled pocketknife, but when he folded out the single “blade,” it revealed itself as a waving broom of tiny metallic tentacles, each of them subtly articulated. Resisting the temptation to touch the metal fuzz, Phil folded it back away and pocketed the object.

  Second, he actualized a golf-ball-sized sphere that resembled perhaps a goldfish bowl with luminous fish in it. Not that they were really fish; they were more like plankton. The little globe was velvety black with bright, glowing globules and disks within. The odd thing about the globe was that its image kept c
hanging according to subtle cues that Phil could barely tell he was giving. Every time he moved his head, the bright little creatures inside the globe would swim to one side or the other. And every time he focused on one particular little denizen of the bowl, that “fish” would seem to swell up in size, and all the others would rush away from it.

  Third, Phil picked from the catalog a necklace with a single large gem that seemed to embody an endless variety of possible formations. It was a ruby, emerald, diamond, sapphire—all of these, one after the other, and more. Not only did the gems color change, the cut of its shape kept shifting as well. It was gorgeous. Phil vowed that if he ever saw Yoke again, he’d give it to her.

  Though Phil still wasn’t ready to try tackling any more alien food, he was getting seriously thirsty. He found his way to a part of the Metamartian alla catalog that seemed to be devoted to beverages. Using the uvvy’s virtual odor feature to avoid drinks that smelled like gasoline or acetone, he was eventually able to actualize something that seemed to be a flagon of water.

  Carefully he tasted of it, and it was indeed plain water, so he drank it down, then used the alla to turn the empty flagon back into air.

  Phil looked around the alla catalog a little more, trying to figure out the appearance of the Metamartians in their home world—if indeed the catalog was for Metamartians and not for some completely different kind of alien. He couldn’t find any pictures of intended users of the catalog, but he did stumble across an area with what seemed to be clothes. The aliens seemed to wear loose robes or caftans, things with a head hole and two arm holes. There was nothing like trousers and nothing like shoes.

  After a while Phil tired of exploring the alla catalog, and he simply hung there doing nothing, looking back on his life. What had he made of his twenty-four years on Earth? He’d survived childhood, his parents’ divorce, his overbearing father. He’d gone to UC Berkeley for two years, but when he was twenty he’d gotten sick of jumping through the hoops. The hoops weren’t his, they were societies and his father’s. Bogus. He’d dropped out, getting a series of kitchen jobs, eventually becoming the assistant chef for a top restaurant. Big whoop.

  One other accomplishment was that he had stayed Straight Edge: clean and sober. But what else had he ever done? Was it really enough to be serene and balanced? Da certainly didn’t think so. And deep down, Phil wasn’t really so serene. Deep down he was frightened.

  It would be nice to have a family and children someday; the worst mistake he had made along those lines was to hook up with Kevvie. At least that was over. And he’d almost had a chance at Yoke. But now his life was apparently done.

  Phil let himself imagine what he might do if he got a second chance. Hang onto Yoke for sure. And what else? Cook for a day-job, but maybe finally try and move on. Dare to express himself. With blimps? Who could tell? Could be that now he’d never know. Phil sighed, making an effort to free himself of self-pity. He said a simple prayer: “God, please help me.”

  Usually a prayer like this would dissolve out into the glowing aether of the great buzzing world-mind. Phil would feel the better for it, but there wouldn’t be any obvious response. It was just something he did. He murmured the prayer again, felt more centered, and dozed off.

  He hadn’t slept for long when his prayer seemed to get a very literal answer. The hypersphere began talking to him. “So you’re ready to move on?” came a rich, thrilling voice, the voice of Om. “Here we go.” A dream: But then Phil woke to the sound of a pop near his feet.

  When he looked down he saw a tiny ball with some people in it. Was he coming back to Earth? The little ball grew up toward him very fast, and as it engulfed him, there was another stretching sensation in his viscera, though not quite so violent or prolonged as before. And then the queasy pain was over. But Phil wasn’t back to Earth. He was still in a hypersphere, only it was six or seven times bigger than before. Phil’s hypersphere and a larger hypersphere had joined together like a pair of soap bubbles merging. Like two fingers of Om’s “hand.”

  The new space smelled of dog, moldie, sweat, and alcohol. It held half an oak tree, and perched in the tree were a bony crone in overalls and a plump, nude matron. There was a big bright wowo, an egg-shaped moldie, and an orange and white collie-beagle dog as well, the egg with a colorful belt—or cravat?—around his middle. But all this was just a flash in the background, for right up in Phil’s face was none other than—

  “Da!”

  “Phil! Oh no, you can’t end up here too! Your poor mother.” Phil’s naked father gestured awkwardly. His left hand ended in a scabbed stump. “I’m scared about what comes next.”

  Phil spoke the biggest thing in his mind. “I’m sorry I was mean to you the last time we talked, Da.”

  “Oh hell, I started it by picking on you. What you said to me was nothing. I shouldn’t have taken it so hard. Of course I forgive you! But, hey, you can’t very well say the fourth dimension’s bullshit anymore, can you?” There was alcohol on the old man’s breath.

  “Your poor hand,” said Phil. “Jane says your wedding ring is already proof of the fourth dimension.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Kurt.

  “You didn’t know? When this ball chopped off your hand, your wedding ring got knotted. And then later it flipped into its mirror image.”

  “Gnarly!” Kurt looked ruefully at his stump. “It’s healing up really well. Maybe it’s like the way a corpse’s fingernails grow fast. Old Tempest helped with it a lot. Let me introduce you. Darla, Tempest! This is my son!”

  The two women scrambled closer through the oak tree, which provided a handy method of moving around in the hypersphere. Though Darla was nude and a bit overweight, she seemed unembarrassed about it. She had a wound on her foot; it looked like one of her toes was missing. Tempest was a lively old woman in overalls. She was carrying a half-empty squeeze-bag of wine. The women greeted Phil with avid interest. Clearly everyone in here was getting cabin fever.

  “Your old man’s been telling me about you,” said Darla. She talked like a hipster. “That’s wavy that you’ve got alky-junky genes. I can really relate. And hats off for being Straight Edge. I’m gonna clean up too one of these days. Kurt and I were thinking it could be stuzzy if you met one of my daughters.”

  “I did meet Yoke,” said Phil. “At Da’s funeral. She came with Tre and Terri Dietz. In fact I was just now visiting her in Tonga.”

  “My funeral!” interrupted Da, totally into himself as usual. “Was it big?”

  “I think I dreamed about you asking me this,” said Phil.

  “And maybe I dreamed about me asking you,” said Kurt. “I’ve been having crazy, lucid dreams in here. It seems the whale talks to Jonah.” He looked around, a bit wild-eyed. “I think this hypersphere is alive, and it comes into my brain when I’m sleeping. But now we’re awake. Tell me about my funeral!”

  So Phil told his father all about it. The part Da liked the best was how Phil had buried the ashes by the oak tree.

  “You’re a good son to have done that. I bet some of the ashes were Friedl’s. That dog.” He gestured at the great twisted trunk with its branches and dead leaves. “So this is our special tree? Small world.”

  “Too dang small,” said Tempest in her Florida cracker accent. “Can I finally get past howdy and ask some questions? I happen to know Darla’s Yoke too, Phil. Just before this here ball done gobble me up, I was a-visitin’ my niece Starshine in Santa Cruz while Yoke was a-stayin’ with Starshine’s neighbor. You sweet on that little Yoke, Phil? She’s a honey. Smart as a whip too.”

  “I like her a lot,” said Phil. “We were about to have a really great time in Tonga.”

  “What’s Tonga?” asked Darla.

  Darla was so nude and female and voluptuous that Phil was embarrassed to look directly at her—but Da was staring at her all the time. And now Da put his arm around her waist as if to steady her. Gross.

  “Tonga’s a cannibal island,” said Tempest. “Don’t you kn
ow nothing, Darla? Go on, Phil. Tell about you and Yoke in Tonga. Were you two shacked up?”

  “Back off!” said Phil, desperate to change the subject. This was turning into real torture. And there was no way to escape. Desperately he fixed his eyes on the hypersphere’s other two occupants. “You got a dog and a Silly Putter in here?”

  “That’s Planet and Humpty-Dumpty,” said Tempest. “Planet’s my good boy. Come here, Planet, come to Auntie Tempest.” Clumsily the dog clawed his way through the branches of the oak tree, finally losing his footing and flying through the air to bump into Phil, tongue and tail wagging. Phil and the dog drifted around the whole hypersphere, coming to rest back at the splintered base of the oak tree with the others.

  “What were you and Yoke doing in Tonga?” asked Darla as soon as Phil caught his breath.

  “We’ve only just met,” said Phil. “We were getting to know each other, and snorkeling, but then I ran into Shimmer and some other Metamartians.”

  “Metamartians?” spat Darla. “Is that what they call themselves?”

  “Shouldn’t there be one of them in here with us?” asked Phil, continually avoiding looking at Darla. “A Metamartian named Ptah?”

  “Darla and me done chased his ass outta here!” cackled Tempest. “I got the magic wisher to make us some grain alcohol to set him on fire.” She patted the uvvy on the back of her neck. Phil noticed that Da and Darla didn’t have uvvies. They’d both been abducted at night. “Couldn’t catch him nohow,” continued Tempest, “but he got so sick of it that he done took off out the hole. Ptah said pfuck it!”

  “There’s a hole up there where you can stick your head out,” explained Da, pointing toward the other end of the tree. “Into raw hyperspace. Very creepy.”

  “You said you dreamed this hypersphere talks to you,” said Phil. “Does she call herself—”

  “Om,” said Kurt, just as Phil said it too. “Yes, she calls herself Om.”

  “The Metamartians call her that,” said Phil. “She’s their god. Wherever they go, Om comes too. She scooped you up because she was curious about the wowo.”