Realware

by Rudy Rucker

  "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, seeming])' 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, Sh
immer," 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."

  "Here's heat," said Cobb, and immediately his flesh grew pleasantly warm. "But I'd rather not light up. I don't want the denizens of the deep getting too curious about us. Just keep looking through my sensors. I'll dial my sensitivity down into the infrared."

  Gazing through the uvvy, Yoke could see the featureless vertical line of laser light leading down as before. She stared into the abyss, searching for a sign. Time passed, perhaps as much as an hour. Now and then a flicker of small jellyfish flew past, and occasionally an angler fish or a big-mouthed gulper eel.

  "We're at five miles," said Cobb. "I'm holding up fine."

  Yoke felt oppressed by the sullen weight of so much pressure. The flecks of sea life sped past like snowflakes in a viddy snowstorm. Far, far below was a hint of pale light. But before Yoke could ask about it, there was a distraction.

  "Squid!" exclaimed Cobb, and, yes, all of a sudden there were squid everywhere. Big ones, small ones, and huge ones. The largest one looked to be some two hundred feet long. Its body was like an arrow, a great tapered cone tipped with two wild wavy fins. The fins fanned in rapid undulations, driving the squid toward them. Its immense round eyes looked frighteningly intent. Cobb had piqued its interest. Eight of the squid's ten tentacles were clenched into a tidy sheaf, but its two extra-long ones were reaching toward them like hungry arms. Cobb and Yoke plummeted past the giant squid, but it sped down after them, its fins flapping like flags. Now one of its fiendishly long arms slapped against them. Cobb's flesh shuddered.

  "Oh no," said Cobb. "Brace yourself, Yoke."

  And then the squid was upon them. Its bunched tentacles writhed apart to reveal a vile huge beak. Yoke could hear the scratching of the beak against the hardened rind of Cobb's outer skin.

  "Oh, Yoke, I can't get loose without--" Cobb began, but just then the giant squid released them and jetted away fins first, propelled by a blast of water from the huge siphon next to its beak. A moment later Yoke could see why. A sperm whale went bucking past, its great flukes madly beating. The squid's speed was no match for the whales. The leviathan opened its long, narrow, big-toothed lower jaw and clamped the squid crossways. The monstrous tentacles lashed about, seeking purchase on the whale's great blocky frame.

  Cobb and Yoke continued to sink, and Yoke stared upward at the whale and squid as, incredibly, the whale swallowed the violently squirming squid whole, leaving only a few tentacles dangling from its mouth like live macaronis.

  "We're here!" cried Cobb just then. Looking down, Yoke saw a wall of white light come rushing up at them. There was a clunk as they hit something, then a wild explosion of air bubbles, and then they dropped through a hundred feet of empty space to plop onto--a grassy meadow?

  Cobb's body opened up like a blossom spreading its petals. Yoke stepped free to find herself standing in a diamond-roofed dome of air: a half-sphere dome like on the Moon, several hundred yards across, with the deep black sea outside. They'd fallen in through the roof, but whatever hole they'd made had instantly healed itself.

  Cobb drew himself back into his old man form and stood by Yoke's side. Far from being ocean-floor ooze, the ground underfoot was springy green turf bedizened with wildflowers. The air was fresh and dry, though perfumed with tangy odor of moldies. The light seemed to come from all around. And Shimmer and five others of her kind were coming across the field toward them.

  The aliens had shiny imipolex bodies like moldies, but iridescent, luminous, and shaped with infinite perfection. Tw
o were formed like humans, and four like animals, with each shape an archetypal paradigm, a Platonic ideal, perfection incarnate. Shimmer resembled a marble Venus, and her partner was a bronze Apollo. The four animals were a unicorn with yellow-blond hair, a gem-like beetle, a muddy black pig, and a pale green python -- each of them the correct size for the creature epitomized.

  "Greetings, Yoke," said Shimmer, reaching out her hand. Her voice was sweet and resonant. "I especially wanted you to come, because you're the most reasonable and sympathetic human I've met. I'd like you to be the first to test out something we want to give your people."

  Yoke took Shimmer's hand and squeezed it. The other aliens gathered around.

  "Ptah," said the man, shaking Cobb's hand. His voice was a warm rumble. The four animal-shaped beings greeted them and named themselves: the unicorn Peg, the iridescent beetle Josef, Wubwub the pig, and the snake Siss.

  "Where do you come from, Ptah?" asked Cobb.

  "We're all from the same place," said Ptah. "All six of us. It's in a different domain of the cosmos. We travel as encrypted signals inside cosmic rays. Personality waves. They're like gamma rays but with a higher-dimensional component. Shimmer here's been decrypting us into moldie flesh one at a time. We had this idea that each of us form our body into a different shape. I was the first one she brought in. Josef's the most recent arrival --he talks a lot. He's just as smart as us, even though he's small. He found a way to miniaturize the moldie information representation."

  "But what's the name of the place you come from?" pressed Cobb.

  "You want one single name?" asked Ptah, smiling.

  Wubwub made a sound like electric guitar feedback. Siss added a series of clicking sounds. Peg tacked on the sound of a gong being struck, and tiny Josef put in a clap of thunder. Wubwub stretched out his snout and made a sound like wind moaning in the trees. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed as if the aliens were making fun of Cobb's question.

  "Oh, why not say we come from -- from Metamars," said Shimmer. "And we can be Metamartians." She turned to Ptah.