by Rudy Rucker
"There'd still be zoning laws in any case," mused Yoke. "That would put some limits on the houses. If the gimmie could enforce them. And there's a limit to how big a volume the alla can transform at one go. A cube something like forty feet on a side."
"But even so, everyone would build out to the legal max," said Babs. "They'd alla up their giant houses one section at a time. And homeless people would pitch houses for themselves just anywhere, even though they don't own any land. But that's actually good, isn't it? No more homeless."
"Squatters deluxe," mused Randy. "They wouldn't need no plumbing hookups. Use the alla to fill your bathtub, and use it again to make the dirty water go away. Wouldn't be so bad. You could put up a house anywhere. Use the alla to make batteries for any electricity you needed."
"But what kind of kinky kilp would psychos make?" said Babs. "A thousand ton turd in the middle of Union Square! A statement turd, you wave? And of course there'd be giant crucifixes everyplace. And just imagine solid, three-dimensional graffiti. You try to open your front door and there's a fifteen-foot solid chrome freestyle 'Yuki 37' in the way." Babs laughed again.
"Actually I can't wait to see it."
"People could alla that kilp back into air," said Yoke. "If everyone did it as a matter of course, then cleaning up wouldn't have to be anyone's full-time job. It wouldn't be as hard as picking up litter, you wave. You'd only have to look at something and wish it away. You said turds, crosses, and graffiti? You forgot porno and political ads. Uh-oh, I'm seeing another problem. What if someone allas something that you like into air. Like your new car, Babs --someone could vaporize it because they don't like the way it looks. Just like you'd get rid of a giant turd."
"If she saved a software map of her buggy, she can alla it back whenever she needs it," suggested Randy. "Parkin' is hell in this city anyhow. Just turn your car back into air instead of parkin' it. Long as you got the alla and the software map, you only need to bring back your realware when you actually wanna use it. In the end, the allas should be good for Nature. We won't have to manufacture nothin'. You want paper or lumber, you alla it up, 'stead of cuttin' down a live tree. Alla up oil instead of drilling for it. No more factories!"
"This is making me dizzy," sighed Babs, putting her hands to her head. "It's like a beautiful dream. If only people can -- oh, wait, what about nuclear explosions?"
"That could be the biggest problem of all," said Cobb. "It would be easy to alla up a twenty-five-pound ball of plutonium. A supercritical mass. Instant atomic bomb."
"Shit," said Babs. "There's got to be a way out. Will the alla actually make plutonium? Let's check."
Randy, Babs, and Yoke uvvied inward, examining their alla catalogs, and sure enough, plutonium was listed.
"Don't try making any of it," cautioned Cobb. "It's highly poisonous, even in small amounts."
"We have to get the aliens to talk to Om," said Yoke. "To tell Om not to let the allas make nuclear fuel. Uranium, plutonium--no evil heavy metal. Om ought to be able to control what the allas can do. They're all connected to her, you know."
"Yes," said Babs. "And then everyone gets an alla."
"Here we are gettin' all worked up," said Randy. "And we don't know how to copy no alla in the first place.
"The Metamartians do," said Cobb. "Remember, Yoke? Josef said they know how to use the alla to make an alla. We should ask them how to copy the allas and at the same time get them to tell Om to not let allas make uranium or plutonium. Let's go to the Anubis now!"
"Have you ever been on the Anubis before, Babs?" said Yoke.
"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 one 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 hyper-sphere 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. It helps me stay sober."
"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 Plat-land. We're the same, with-every dimension one notch higher.' O
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 ID patches on his ID 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 ID 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."
