The Ware Tetralogy - Rudy Rucker (popular ebook readers .TXT) 📗

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, Shimmer,” 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. Two 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. “Cappy Jane’s employer is called Meta West Link, you know. ‘Meta’ means ‘beyond.’ Like metaphysics.”

“Yes, I am coming from very meta,” said Josef, his voice loud and firm. For whatever reason, he chose to speak with a German accent. “And only just now have I arrived, as Shimmer has said.” He lifted his wing covers and buzzed through the air to land lightly on Yoke’s wrist. “This seems a very marginal place.” His eyes twinkled and the little fans of his antennae waved. “From the little bit that I am able yet to see. It’s so curious,