Realware

by Rudy Rucker

  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. 1 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?

  'To, 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 t
hem 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."

  "We understand why y'all fought back," put in Wubwub. "But we be good guys, know what I'm sayin'?"

  "I still don't get what you're doing here," said Phil.

  "I said that we're tourists," said Shimmer. "But it would be better to call us nomads. We live in transit, and whenever we can, we form a little family and mate. Yes, whenever one of us manages to incorporate somewhere, we immediately try and build up a family of seven of our fellows. Bringing in more Metamartians is what I've been doing for the last few months, Phil, as you can see. There's six of us now, and soon we'll be seven. Seven provides the ideal resonance for reproduction, among other things."

  "A bunch of nomads looking to get laid, huh?" said Phil. "Didn't I hear Josef say something about helping Om? You're really missionaries, aren't you?"

  "Missionaries?" laughed Shimmer. "Every traveler is a kind of missionary, no? But, yes, it's true that our god Om follows us wherever we go. And, yes, we do help Om to give allas to the civilizations we discover. It's win-win. The alla-registration process allows Om to obtain software copies of the individuals who accept her gift--and everyone does accept. Receiving the power I of the alla is the greatest gift a being can have. So now you I know a Metamartian's entire agenda. First, to find a world where one can decrypt; second, to assemble a family of seven; third, to spread Om's allas; and fourth, to move on. There needn't be any problems at all when Earth is visited by the right kind of extraterrestrial, you see."

  "What about my father getting killed?"

  "We'll get to that in a minute," said Shimmer, the music of her voice gone a bit dissonant. "Can you please stop interrupting? I want to fill you in on what I've been up to, all right? Just very briefly. I flew from the Moon to the Earth and I made a I deal with the King of Tonga to use his Cappy Jane satellite as an antenna to find some good personality waves. I picked up ! Ptah's signal first and then Peg, Wubwub, Siss, and Josef. And of course soon after I was decrypted, Om asked for a local being to examine. For my birth offering, if you will."

  "Om is what you call the powerball, right?" said Phil. "Can > you explain what happened when it got my father?"

  " 'She,' not 'it,' " said the bronze Ptah. His body echoed Shimmer's perfection of human form. "Om is the God of Meta-mars. She lives in the higher dimensions. Our race first reached a working relationship with her some thousand of your years I ago. Some other aliens brought her to us. Om lives outside of ordinary space and time. Whenever one of Om's people travels somewhere, a manifestation of Om comes there as well. Our god follows us. She can appear in various guises, but most commonly she shows herself as a four-dimensional hypersphere."

  "Four-dimensional?" murmured Phil uneasily. He sensed the imminence of a batshit math-rap, bound to make him feel dumb.

  "Jawohl," boomed the German-accented Josef. He was perched on Shimmer's lovely shoulder. "I am taking this question. Although I feel that Om is surely of an infinite dimensionality, she usually enters space as a powerball. Her surface is : a bounded region of three-dimensional space that has no edges: a hypersphere. Do understand that the fourth dimension of space is not to be confused with any dimension of time. If you doggedly wish to refer to your time as the fourth dimension, then the powerball can of course be called five-dimensional. But it makes an easier manner of speech to use 'the fourth dimension' for the extra dimension of space."

  "I'm not going to touch that one," said Phil, momentarily distracted from finding out about his father. "Let me ask this instead. If Om can jump all around the cosmos, why do you travel as personality waves? Why not just ask Om to take you where you want to go?"

  "We never know where we going in first place," said Siss. "What we do is to chirp into personality wave, let wave travel to place where it get decrypted into body, to find family there, to teach about Om, and then to chirp further. Travel is our way."

  "But what does Om want?" asked Phil. "Why did she swallow up Ptah and my father?"

  "Om is curious about everything," said Josef. "Your father caught her interest with his wowo display. Om thought this was a very interesting patterning of space. So one supposes that she had a curiosity to get a better acquaintance with your father. She could perhaps return him to the world at some time. As for why she ate the original Ptah -- Ptah?"

  "Om wished to see what kind of body a Metamartian on Earth might occupy, so one of us was selected," said Ptah. "The trip into hyperspace was painful for my original self, yes, but it was an honor. Om chose me at Josef's suggestion; Josef knows I come from the noblest Metamartian stock. The little beetle says he admires me --and I suspect that he envies me as well. His choice only heightens my glory. All must recognize that it was I, Ptah, who once led the most harmonious weave of lives in our two-dimensional time, and it is I, Ptah, who has been the first to travel from Earth to the bosom of Om."

  "Well-spoken, Ptah," said Peg. The unicorn had a contralto voice and a theatrical way of talking. "Isn't it droll how one chains one's words together here? Like threading pearls upon a necklace. Phil wots not that the Metamartian mode of speech is as a fractally branching fan."

  "Yadda yadda yadda," said Phil. "Why do you have to keep jabbering about math?"

  "When she talk about a fan, she mean Metamars be in a place where time spreads out nice and fat," said Wubwub comfortably. "Like it supposed to be. In fat time, no one thing really matters, know what I'm sayin'? It's grim and down to live the way you do, Phil. One poor little time thread all by its lonely self. You folks deserve to have the allas."

  "You said it was your fault the powerball killed my father," Phil said to the pig. "Tell me more about what happened!"

  "He ain't dead," said Wubwub. "You got dirt in your ears, my man? Your daddy's in hyperspace. When Om sweep through your space it like someone's hand scoopin' up a water-strider bug. One second the bug on the water, second later it on the back of the hand. One second your Daddy in bed, next second he on Om's powerball. He probably just kickin' it. Om's powerball got light and air, and a built-in alla for food."

  "My father's alive?" exclaimed Phil, finally getting it. As when Jane had uvvied him with the news of Kurt's disappearance, he felt a dissonant mixture of emotions. Joy that his father could be saved. Relief that the old man's forgiveness could still be obtained. An impatient weariness at having to deal with him all over again. And a primal horror of meeting the undead. "Up in hyperspace?"

  "It's called 'ana,'" said Ptah. "Not 'up'. We've investigated your scientific literature, and 'ana' and 'kata' are the names of the directions of the fourth dimension."

  "I know th
at," sighed Phil. "My father was a math teacher. I've been dreaming about him a lot. Do you think Om can affect my dreams?"

  "I no know," hissed Siss. "Metamartians have no dream, Phil. Metamartians live in endless parallel worlds--no need dream world. Wubwub right, most likely your father alive, and is together with a few others Om take."

  "Like my original self," said Ptah.

  "And two women," said Wubwub. "Yes indeed. First thing Om did was scoop up that juicy Darla. Yoke's ma. Om got old Tempest too --and, let's see, got Tempest's dog, a toy moldie, and part of an oak tree. How I be so wise? Each time one of us get corporated here, Om ask the new Metamartian what be the most stuzzadelic sample she might scoop up. Om always do that. Likes to see the world through a spang fresh eye, know what I'm sayin'?"

  "Would you like each of us to tell our story?" asked Siss.

  "Not really," replied Phil. He felt dizzy and confused. Surely they were lying about Da. "I have to think about what you told me. It's too wiggly. I want to go back out onto the beach."

  "Oh tarry in our sea cave just a bit longer," said Peg. She was in fact standing so as to block the passage where Phil had entered. Her horn, though red and swilly, was also quite sharp and long. "What does your poet say? Till human voices wake us and we drown.' Marvelous beads of meaning, each just so." She lowered the horn and fixed Phil with her great blue eyes. "Phil, you should harken to our tales while there's time."

  "I'll tell first," said Shimmer, "Attention, please!" She drew herself up and laid her hand stagily upon her breast. "My powerball swallowed a miniature moldie from Willy Taze's isopod. What they call a Silly Putter; it's like a doll or a pet. Between a DIM and a moldie. This particular one was named Humpty-Dumpty. It happened to be the first living thing I laid eyes on -- at least I thought it was alive--so I pointed it out to Om."

  "And then Shimmer made me tell Om that--" began Ptah.

  "The way you got here was as a copy of the original Ptah," Shimmer interrupted Ptah. "You didn't tell the powerball anything. So I'll tell the original Ptah's story." She cleared her throat, struck a new pose and continued talking. "When I decrypted Ptah, I was down in the ocean and there really wasn't much of anything around for Ptah to tell Om's powerball to swallow. Ptah may think he's perfect, but he's not all that creative. So I suggested that Ptah tell Om to get Darla Starr on the Moon. Space doesn't mean much to Om, she can spang out a powerball wherever she wants. She's our god on Metamars, and now we're way across the cosmos, but as soon as one of us is born, why there's Om to greet us. Om can go anywhere. Praise Om."