Realware

by Rudy Rucker

  "Praise Om," murmured the other Metamartians comfortably.

  "Why eat Darla?" asked Phil.

  "Why Darla?" said Shimmer. "You might jump to the conclusion that I was angry with Darla for trying to kill me. But of course no human could ever hurt a Metamartian anyway. And I really wasn't angry. That's not a Metamartian emotion at all. I just thought that Darla was the fiercest, most interesting human I'd seen so far. Yes. I was torn between suggesting her and Stahn Mooney, as a matter of fact, but Darla seemed more spirited. And you don't have to look so impatient, Ptah, because now I'm done. Peg?"

  "When I was reborn on Earth, Om asked me what was interesting, and I knew not what to say," said the unicorn. "She showed me that she already had Humpty-Dumpty and Darla. Within our sea-dome I could only see Shimmer, Ptah, and the grass. I humbly asked Om what she herself longed to behold next. Om granted me the image of something she had seen in Darla's room, a merry shape yclept a 'wowo.' Om coveted a wowo. So I hastened to enter your Web, where I sought the bravest wowo in creation. This wowo of all wowos I found upon the greensward of a woman named Starshine, in the hamlet of Santa Cruz, California. And thither did I direct Om's gaze. It came about that Starshine's aunt, a crone named Tempest Plenty, was tilling the earth there in the company of a dog named Planet. Joyful at the girth of the wowo, Om took so bosky a powerball scoop that she snared those two as well as the wowo prize. I've told my tell, let Wubwub speak as well."

  "Now Om just fascinate with that wowo; she asked me to find the brainiac what dream it up," said the black pig. "And that be Phil's dad. So Om done gobble down Kurt Gottner and half of his wiener-dog Friedl --I say half because that wiener-dog fuss so much she got pinched in two. Old Kurt's hand got rotorvated as well, and the space-waves knotted his wedding ring, which leads straight into the next tale, you know what I'm sayin', Siss?"

  "Om not really ask me what to do either," sang the pale green snake. "She already decide to go flip Kurt's ring to make another sign and see if any humans get excite. I do give her small idea to swallow some of oak tree so she can find out about plant."

  "I'm last," said the iridescent beetle Josef. "And I told Om to swallow Ptah. It was time for her to take one of us, so why not the most perfect?" There was perhaps a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  "Who you think be next?" Wubwub asked Phil. "We wonderin' 'cause we 'bout ready to decrypt Metamartian number seven. And like we been tellin' you, every time there someone new, Om celebrate by eatin' something."

  "Don't do it!" cried Phil. "She might get Yoke!"

  "Cappy Jane has a nice new Metamartian personality wave prepared for us to incorporate, Phil," said Shimmer. "We're not about to waste it. It's important that there finally be seven of us. A complete family." The bland sweetness of her voice sent chills down his neck. "Sit back and watch."

  Phil shoved Peg's horn to one side and tried to push his way past her into the passage, but Wubwub nudged the backs of Phil's knees in just the right way to make him fall down. Siss the snake was on the ground to cushion his fall--and to wrap herself around him.

  Lying on his back, Phil noticed for the first time that the light in the cavern was coming from a small hole up above, a hole that opened to the sky. Shimmer used her body's internal alla to project a bright-line cube that actualized itself into a knee-high block of imipolex. "All right, Cappy Jane," called Shimmer. "Beam it down." Some signal must have come to her from the satellite then, for as Shimmer laid her gracious hands upon the cube of plastic, the stuff began to twist and writhe. A figure formed and rose up in the shape of a man-sized bird, a black and white Indian mynah bird with yellow feet and a great yellow beak. Its dark head was decorated with a pattern of yellow feathers that made it look as if it were wearing a burglar's mask.

  The mynah cocked its head and stared at them with its bright, inhuman eye. It made a preliminary cawing noise that sounded almost like "Hello." Phil felt like the bird was about to peck him. "Let me go!" he cried, struggling against Siss's tight coils.

  "Not yet," said the snake. "We no want you go shit crazy."

  Shimmer must have uvvied some information to the mynah, for now its demeanor grew less blank, a subtle effect achieved by a softening of the lines of its beak.

  "Good afternoon," said the giant mynah. It cawed to clear its throat, whistled a few musical notes, listened to the echoes, and spoke again. "Something's badly wrong here, isn't it?"

  "We're in a land with but one line of time," said Peg, gesturing with her red horn. "This is all there is. Seek as you will, you'll find no other time but the short woven threads of brief ghost futures. Praise Om that you've come, for now we are seven and soon we can mate."

  "Who--Who is seeing this for real?" asked the mynah, tentatively stretching out its wings. "Why this very one thread?"

  "Ain't got no notion," said Wubwub. "Could be the Light do it. What you gonna use for a name, mynah bird?"

  "Call me Haresh," said the mynah. "An Indian name. I find it most oppressive here. It is jolly good that we are seven. We'll help Om, and mate, and then we'll chirp further." The bird twitched his head as if hearing something. "Om is speaking to me. It is almost time for her manifestation. I must pick something. She has already swallowed a Metamartian?"

  "Yes," said Ptah. "Me. So don't do that again."

  "This here is a 'human,' " said Wubwub, using his snout to nudge Phil's foot.

  "Om got three of those already, but might be she want some more."

  "How soon is the powerball going to spang out?" asked Phil anxiously. "That's the word you use, right? 'Spang.' Floaty word. You guys are so brilliant. Let me go, Siss!"

  "Not till powerball come," said Siss. "Om still looking things over, waiting for Haresh form some impressions of world. Since we see little bit of future, we going know just before Om decide. But until then very hard to guess what she going to do. Om follow odd kind of logic. Odd for you, not quite so odd for us. Logic of higher dimensions. Like human dream maybe."

  Siss kept chattering, and Phil had a bad feeling about what she was getting at. He kept thinking about the sequence of what Om's powerballs had swallowed so far: a toy Humpty-Dumpty moldie near Shimmer on the Moon; Darla near a wowo on the Moon; Tempest Plenty and Planet and a big wowo in Santa Cruz; Kurt Gottner and part of Friedl in Palo Alto; half an oak tree near Kurt's ring in Palo Alto; Ptah; and --

  "Yes, she going to take you, Phil," said Siss, suddenly slackening her coils.

  "Run."

  "Praise Om," said Peg. "She calls Phil to be with his father."

  "Don't wrassle with her, Phil," said Wubwub as Phil got to his feet. "If you wrassle Om, you end up like that wiener-dog, know what I'm sayin'? When Om come, you just ball yourself up and let her gulp you down. Look out fo' the churnin' when she break free."

  "Will it hurt?"

  "I think very much," said Siss. "Run, Phil, run! I no want powerball come near me."

  "Thanks for nothing," snarled Phil, aiming a kick at Siss but--of course--the prescient snake flipped her body to where Phil's foot wasn't.

  "You have but two more minutes," said Peg. "Pray use them nobly." So Phil walked out of the cave to the beach and sat hunkered there, staring at the blank sky and the eternal waves, no different than before. And now he would probably die. So this is how it happens, thought Phil. It's not really so hard. Part of him felt weary, paralyzed, and almost glad.

  But there was another Phil that knew he hadn't really started to live yet. He called Yoke on his uvvy. She picked up almost immediately. "Phil?" Behind her Phil could see laboring Tongan sailors and the great open hold of a ship. Vaana and the King were there as well.

  "Hi, Yoke. The powerball is about to get me. I'm on the beach at the other end of the island. The aliens are holed up in a cave here. They just decrypted a new Metamartian, and Om's going to celebrate by swallowing me."

  "Oh noooo!" Yoke's face bunched up and she burst into tears.

  "I love you, Yoke."

  "Don't die!"

&n
bsp; "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 crafty 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 changing according to subtle cues that Phil could barely tell he was giving. Every time he moved his head, the bright little creatu
res 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.