The Ware Tetralogy

by Rudy Rucker

  “My brother and I went there right before I moved in here,” said Babs. “Just to look it over. It seemed kind of sad. Lots of xoxxy people. If we go over there, I think we should have a plan. We’re supposed to beg the aliens to tell us how to make an alla with the alla? And to block plutonium?”

  “Begging is about all we can do,” said Yoke. “We can’t really threaten them or anything. I mean, they have built-in alla power, and they can see a little way into the future. No way we can hurt them.”

  “Maybe I can get Siss hot for me,” said Cobb. “When Randy and I got onto Kleopatra and Isis the other night, Kleopatra said I was good. I think Siss is kind of interesting.”

  “Who knows, Babs, if we beg, maybe the Metamartians will help us,” put in Randy, eager to move the conversation forward. “From what Yoke and Cobb say, Om does plan for everyone to get the alla. And it’s not like she’s out to destroy the planet. All Om wants is to memorize us each and every one. It’s like the allas are the ultimate reward for filling in your questionnaire.”

  “Do you think you can handle being on the Anubis, Randy?” asked Babs. “Without going on another sporehead cheeseball rampage?”

  “If you with me, girl,” said Randy sticking out his hand. “You all I see. We’ll leave Willa Jean here to watch over things.”

  Phil, February 23-25

  Phil spent four days in the powerball—from the Monday when Yoke flew back to San Francisco through the Thursday when things came to a head on the Anubis. The first three days went as follows:

  Monday

  While his dad guzzled wine with Darla and Tempest, Phil pulled himself to the other end of the oak tree. Right near the last branch was the flaw in their hyperspherical space. Things looked funny near the flaw. Goaded on by the inane chatter of the drunk pheezers, Phil got a firm grip on the branch, took a deep breath, and pushed his head out through the hole.

  His viewpoint swung about with uncontrollable rapidity, like the view from a video camera left running while it dangles from a wrist-strap. Phil saw an endless landscape of curved pink surfaces—it was a bit like an ant’s-eye view of a million-mile tall woman’s body, not that the surfaces had the order and symmetry of a human form. Awed and dizzy, he let his eyes follow along six metallic tendrils that led out of the cosmic pink form. The tendrils eventually ran into a great circular expanse of rock and mud that wavered and became a disk of water. When Phil turned his head a bit farther, he saw blinding bright light. Around then, Phil’s face began to feel frostbitten and he realized he was desperately out of breath. For one panicked instant he couldn’t figure out how to pull back his head—so formless and disorienting was hyperspace. It took a special effort to remember to bend the arm belonging to the hand holding the branch. This quickly brought his gasping head back in through the hole. Anxiously, Phil patted his face, but the skin wasn’t frozen, just very cold.

  He needed something like a limpware bubbletopper space-suit if he were going to explore out there. But it seemed futile to try and find a human spacesuit in Om’s Metamartian alien alla catalog. The “yam-snoot” Tempest had fed him—had that even been food? His mouth felt greasy and nasty.

  Phil’s eye fell on the Humpty-Dumpty doll, big as a watermelon. It was made of good moldie imipolex and could, in principle, serve as a spacesuit. But would he be able to get it to stretch itself over him? It didn’t look very intelligent. Silly Putters weren’t exported to Earth from the Moon, so Phil had never actually handled one before. They were said to be poised halfway between DIMs and moldies in intelligence. Supposedly, the famous inventor Willy Taze had developed an algorithm to keep them from unexpectedly tunneling into ungovernable moldie consciousness.

  “Come here,” he said, beckoning ingratiatingly to the Humpty-Dumpty. The fat egg smiled uncertainly. Phil decided to try uvvying into it. The mind of the Humpty-Dumpty was what one would imagine the mind of a dog to be: a simple, affectless reflection of the passing scene. “Come here,” repeated Phil. “I need for you to help me. Come on, Humpty. Come to Phil.” Slowly the egg inched closer along the branch.

  “Can you wrap me up?” asked Phil, forming a mental image of a man in a bubbletopper. “Can you act like a spacesuit and give me air?”

  Humpty-Dumpty’s face split in a big smile, and it uvvied back something that sounded like prerecorded ad copy. “Yes, Humpty-Dumpty can act as a spacesuit. Every genuine Corey Rhizome Silly Putter doll is usable as an emergency bubbletopper. It’s just another reason why every loonie family should own at least one!”

  The egg waddled closer, opened its mouth wide and gently bit onto Phil’s arm. And then its plastic flesh liquefied and flowed all over Phil, sealing him up inside a full-body suit. Cheesy-smelling air trickled out of an indentation over Phil’s nostrils, and the imipolex over his eyes became a transparent visor.

  Grabbing the branch again, Phil stuck his head out into hyperspace for a second time. Again, the first thing he saw was a great expanse of pink—it had to be the body of Om.

  In an effort to keep his viewpoint from thrashing about, Phil made every effort to hold perfectly still, even though he was holding onto a drifting tree with a dog and three drunk old people at the tree’s other end. Phil tried to compensate for the jiggling by turning his head this way and that, but he couldn’t quite put it together. No action seemed to have the expected consequence; it was like trying to do something with his hands while watching them in a mirror. Everything was upside down, backward, and maybe even inside out.

  Even so, he was able to get a better look at some of the things he’d seen before. He found that when he unexpectedly lost sight of something, he could wobble his head to scan back and forth to find it. Wobbling had the additional effect of sometimes showing him a series of views that his mind could integrate into a solid whole. Some of the endless pink surfaces were spheres that seamlessly blended together—surely these were views of the hyperspherical powerball finger of Om whose hypersurface enclosed the rest of his body. And the pink curves beyond the spheres? Further sections of Om’s body—Phil got the feeling she was astronomical in size.

  When Phil glanced down at himself, he discovered a truly gnarly sight. Where he’d expected to see his chest and shoulders, he instead saw a cross section of his body. One part of the image was regularly twitching, and the twitches matched the beating of Phil’s pulse, clearly audible in the hush of hyperspace. The twitching thing was his heart. But in this odd view, his heart appeared not as a whole organ, but as a cross section, a muscular ring filled with surging blood.

  Next to the heart were cross-sectional views of his flexing lungs, which looked like ovals of fractal broccoli. And arranged outside his innards were layers of muscle inset with circlets of bone—rib sections. The pink curve of the powerball’s hypersphere blocked any view of his stomach and its contents.

  Now one of the geezers heavily bumped the tree, and Phil completely lost his orientation. The same intense bright light as before glared in his eyes. Phil squinted against it, trying to make out some detail. As he looked into the light, he picked up a sense of serenity and grandeur. Wobbling his head to scan the adjacent environs of hyperspace, he made out a flickering around the light, as if things were swarming into it. What a fine thing it would be to fly ana into the Divine Light.

  But now heavy hands grabbed Phil’s waist and pulled him back in. It was Da, drunker than before. Phil felt like hitting him. Stupid old man.

  “You have to be more careful or you might fall out,” Da was saying. “Good thing I thought to check on you.”

  “I was doing fine,” said Phil, pushing the cowl of Humpty-Dumpty off his face. The Silly Putter assumed its duties were over and crawled off, firming itself back into its original form. “Leave me alone, Da,” continued Phil. “We’ll talk after you sleep.”

  “I’m tired of sleeping,” said old Kurt. “That’s when Om always comes for me.”

  “Just get away,” said Phil, and pushed himself off from the tree, floating out into
an empty region of the hypersphere. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted. He used Om’s invisible alla to make himself a cup of water, and drank it greedily. That lightened the unpleasant load of the yam-snoot in his gut. He closed his eyes and let his limbs go slack, missing Yoke and thinking about the new things he’d seen. Before long he was asleep.

  Tuesday

  Tempest woke Phil by tapping his mouth with one of her greasy food-spindles. “It’s a new day, Junior. Hope you ain’t still mad at your Dad. Here’s a naahce yam-snoot for your breakfast.”

  “Xoxx it, Tempest, I can’t eat this scuzzy kilp. Show me where in the alla catalog you found it. There’s got to be something better.” Though Phil was quite hungry, his queasy stomach categorically forbade any further yam-snoot.

  “Hyar ’tis,” said Tempest, and she uvvied Phil a bookmark into Om’s alien alla catalog.

  None of the objects near the yam-snoot seemed to be food at all; indeed, Phil soon got the impression that the yam-snoot was in fact a Metamartian cleaning product. “God help me,” he sighed.

  And the instant he said that, the catalog altered its display to show a veritable buffet table of pleasant, normal-looking breakfast food: fruits, breads, cheeses, and pouches of juice.

  “Actualize,” said Phil quickly, and the cornucopia of food floated around him and Tempest. “Thank you, Om.”

  Phil listened for an answer, but he couldn’t seem to hear Om while he was awake. The dream conversations with her last night had been intense. Yes, Om had been talking to him most of the night, avidly going over all of the memories and impressions that she could dredge out of his twenty-four years of life. It was like the time he had tried camping out with Kevvie, and she’d stuck a methedrine patch on herself for the hike and then forgotten to take it off. Though unlike Kevvie, Om had wanted him to do most of the talking. Tell me this, tell me that, and when you said that other thing, what exactly did you mean? No wonder he still felt tired.

  But the breakfast foods were delicious. Tempest, Darla, Kurt, and Planet the dog joined in. And afterward, when everyone skulked off to relieve themselves, Om turned their waste right into air. Phil could pee, and the stream would just vanish into breezy nothingness a few inches from the tip of his dick.

  “No drinking for me today,” intoned Da solemnly when they drifted back together. “My son and I have to talk.”

  “The fourth dimension,” said Phil. “It’s real.”

  “That was a good idea of yours to use Humpty-Dumpty for a spacesuit,” said Da. “I didn’t think of that. I’ve only grabbed two quick peeks out of the hole so far. It scares me shitless.”

  “But it’s what you’ve been talking about your whole life,” said Phil. “Hyperspace! Some of the things you taught have been coming back to me. I was seeing cross sections of my body, and I saw a whole lot of different spheres that must have been sections of this hypersphere.”

  Kurt looked uneasy. “I—I don’t remember if I brought this up yesterday, but—don’t you think it’s at least possible that we’re dead? That this is an antechamber before we go on into the Light? That’s why I can’t get too enthused about anything. You know I hate religion, Phil. It’s not my bag. I thought that when I died everything would be over. And now it looks like I might end up facing the fucking God of the rednecks.”

  “The Metamartians say Om is God. So maybe we’ve already met God. In our dreams. She talked to me all night long. Asking about life on Earth.”

  “You too, huh?” said Kurt. “In my worst moments I think Om is St. Penis-at-the-Pearly-Gates’s assistant, deciding whether or not to send me to Hell. But mostly Om’s been picking my brain about mathematics. It was the wowo that got her attention. Advanced as they are, the Metamartians never happened to make this particular model of the Klein bottle. It reminds Om of her—childhood? That’s not the right word. Origin, maybe.”

  “She didn’t tell me anything about her origin.”

  “She says there’s a higher-level God that she comes from. And that’s the God I’m worried about. He’s supposed to be made of Light. I think maybe I saw Him when I peeked out into hyperspace. Light with a capital L.”

  “I saw that Light for a long time yesterday,” said Phil. “There were wonderful vibes coming off it. I’m not scared of God like you, Da. I even pray sometimes.”

  “You’re a better man than me, son. I wish I could be more like you. But I’m too old to change.”

  “It’s never too late.”

  Kurt put his hands to his head. “What a hangover. So the Light didn’t dart over and grab you when you looked at it? Let’s go stick our heads out and have a good look around. I’ll try using Humpty-Dumpty like you did. If there’s any way for us to get back to Earth, it’s got to be through that hole.”

  So Kurt and Phil got hold of Humpty-Dumpty and took turns looking through the flaw in the hypersphere. Kurt finally agreed with Phil that the Divine Light had good vibes.

  “It doesn’t feel like a judgmental God,” allowed Kurt. “It feels like a God of Love. Like the Light cares and wants to help me. Weird.”

  “I think we get to decide what our God is like,” said Phil. “God is so different from us that any of our notions is inadequate. So why not assume God is good and loving? All right, Da, I see your expression, I’m not going to harp on this, I don’t want to sound like the usual bullshitting religious pricks. Next topic: Do you have any ideas about that big disk of rock and mud that sometimes looks like water?”

  “Those are slices of the Earth,” said Kurt. “It’s good they’re so detailed. That means we’re not at a very great hyperspace distance from home.”

  “Earth!” exclaimed Phil. “Teach me some math, Da. I need a refresher course. Why do Earth and my body look like cross sections? Talk about A Square.”

  Kurt smiled. He loved to talk about A Square. “All right! So think of A Square on a sphere floating above the plane of Flatland. We’re the same, with every dimension one notch higher. We’re on a hypersphere floating ana the space we come from. A Square’s sphere has a little ledge on it, a place where he can slide his eye corner off. That’s like Om’s flaw. When A Square wags his eye back and forth, what does he see?”

  “Weird shit,” said Phil.

  “Indeed. Let us analyze. When we look at the world, we see little 2D patches on our 2D retina, and we use these to build up a 3D image of a world. A Square sees little 1D patches on his 1D retina—imagine that his retina is a line at the back of his 2D eye—and he uses those to build up a 2D image of a world. But when he’s up above Flatland looking down, he doesn’t see Flatland as a whole. Instead he sees what’s in the particular 2D world of his eye plane. The plane of his eye intersects the plane of Flatland in a 1D line. A cross section of Flatland. And if the cross-section line intersects some Flatland object, then A Square is seeing the innards of that object. In the same way, the 3D space of your eye intersects the 3D space of our ordinary universe in a 2D plane. And that’s why you’re seeing slices of innards.”

  “Whew,” said Phil. “It’s easier to see it than to talk about it. I saw a cross section of my heart. Did you look down at your chest. Da?”

  “I did. Right down into my tired old ticker. And when we look down at Earth, we see cross sections of the Earth. We see these giant disks of dirt or water. It depends where our eye’s 3D cross section of 4D hyperspace happens to intersect the 3D Earth in a 2D plane.”

  “Yaaar,” said Phil. “But why is the inside of my heart lit up? You’d think it would be dark in there.”

  “That must be because there’s a four-dimensional light in hyperspace,” said Kurt. “From that divine Light we saw.”

  “The SUN!” exclaimed Phil. “Cobb Anderson talked about it at your funeral. I asked him what it had been like to be dead. The God-Light must be what Cobb called the SUN. Capital S-U-N.”

  “The SUN,” said Kurt. “That’s a good name. As long as you understand that the SUN has nothing to do with our regular Sun.”


  “The SUN’s light is inside everything,” said Phil slowly. “It’s like our world is made of stained-glass pieces with the God-Light shining through. A cathedral window lit by the SUN. How can you be scared, Da?”

  “You know,” said Kurt after a long pause, “I have this feeling I should fly into the SUN. Maybe if I sacrifice myself, then Om will let you go.”

  “Oh man, with you getting so wrecked all the time, you don’t know what you’re talking about anymore,” said Phil. “Put that shit away. I’m gonna look at the Earth again. Crawl on me, Humpty-Dumpty.”

  With his father hanging onto his legs, Phil leaned way out of the flaw in Om’s hypersphere. He flopped around until he saw a huge disk of rock and dirt; this time he noticed a glowing region at its distant center. The Earth’s core. Now Phil began delicately wobbling his head to make the cross-sectional disk smaller and smaller. Right before it disappeared it became a great lake of water. He moved back the way he’d come, and this time he could see that there were some bumps off on one side of the water, some circles of dirt and—yes!—some angular shapes that must have been the cross sections of buildings. He studied it for ten or fifteen minutes, minutely adjusting his angle and focusing all of his attention down into the squares. There were moments when the image bore a more than passing resemblance to a map of San Francisco. Yoke had said she’d wait for him there. Oh, Yoke.

  Da pulled Phil back inside and took another turn with Humpty-Dumpty. He said he wanted to get a good look at the SUN. After a few minutes he came back inside the hypersphere looking very jangled.

  “I do believe it’s happy hour,” said Kurt. “God, I wish I had some pot.”

  Sure enough, three minutes later Tempest and Darla floated over with fat reefers burning in their lips.

  “Looky what I just found in the catalog!” twanged Tempest. “It’s like Om’s learnin’ herself to make ever’thang we need. This is Heaven, ain’t it?”

  “Or Hell,” said Phil, and pushed himself away.

  Wednesday

  Phil woke up earlier than the others. He put on Humpty-Dumpty and got to work trying to see San Francisco again. This time he took closer notice of the six metallic tendrils leading kata from Om toward Earth. The tendrils seemed to be in pairs: two were golden, two silvery, and two copper-colored. All six led down toward the grid that seemed to be San Francisco. Was there any chance he might glimpse a slice of Yoke? Phil asked Om for help.