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

“I’ll try a jellyfish next,” said Yoke. “They’re so beautiful.” She used the alla to create a little aquarium, then projected into the water a bright-line disk-shape that actualized into a clear bell of jelly—which began steadily beating. “Can I change its color?” wondered Yoke, and produced a shocking pink jellyfish—which quickly dissolved into rags and tatters. She tried a series of variations on the catalog jellyfish, but none of them so much as twitched.

“Life is hard, Yoke,” said Josef. “And so is wetware engineering.”

The unsuccessful customized jellies were floating on the aquarium’s surface. Yoke alla-converted them back into water and filled the tank with a selection of other standard catalog life: some more jellies, a shrimp, a clam, a scallop, and a few tropical fish.

“Can the alla make an alla?” asked Phil. “That’s the biggest question of all, isn’t it? Like in the fairy tale where someone wishes for more wishes.”

“Yes,” said Josef. “There is a way to use an alla to make another alla. And sooner or later one of you will learn the trick of it. But I am not intending to be the one to teach you. It is better that the knowledge should come to one of you directly from Om.”

“Do you plan to give out more allas?” asked Yoke.

“As Om wills it,” said Josef. “First we want to watch a bit what Yoke does. And then we’ll test it with a few more individuals. And then I suppose Om will tell you how to spread the allas to everyone, human and moldie alike. I think it should work out for the best, but it’s hard to be sure. We’ve never seen a place like Earth, you know. You can’t imagine how really pathetic your one-dimensional time appears. I hope that the allas can really help you.”

“Hoes for the savages,” said Yoke. “Farming tools. What’s in it for Om?”

“Om collects copies of sentient beings,” said Josef. “By giving out allas and having the users register themselves, Om obtains the exact information codes of the users. As for your analogy to farming, perhaps an alla is more like a bulldozer than like a hoe. Restraint and caution will be called for. Especially for a race that’s limited to a single dimension of time.”

“You think there’s a chance we’ll kill ourselves off with the allas, don’t you?” said Yoke. “Is that what you actually want? So that the Metamartians can take over the Earth?”

“Yoke, we already told you that we plan only for one more of us Metamartians to arrive here,” said Josef. “Once we are seven, we will have reached the canonical family size. We’ll conjugate to create a fresh Metamartian and then we’ll move on—provided we can figure out the right direction toward a region with two-dimensional time. No Metamartian would want to stay here.”

“We still haven’t talked about the killer powerballs,” interrupted Phil. “What’s the story with them?”

“The powerballs are but manifestations of our god Om,” said Josef. “Be assured that Om is no killer. Those whom Om touches are elevated, not destroyed.”

Before they could press Josef any further, a large Tongan man came walking over from the veranda. He wore a white shirt, a necktie, and a blue skirt. He was squinting in the bright sun.

“Hi, Kennit,” said Yoke. “This is my friend Phil. I want him to stay here with us.”

“Yis,” said Kennit. “I’ve just been in contact with HRH and he has no problem. Would you be willing to have Phil stay in your room? That way we won’t have to wonder which shell conceals the pea.”

“All right,” said Yoke, looking down at the ground. She’d been making lizards and mice and rabbits. They were darting around under the table. On top of the table she’d alla-made a cheerful potted orchid. “The room has two beds. Can I make you anything with the alla, Kennit?”

“No thank you. HRH says the Tongan Navy ship will be arriving in the harbor today. We would like you to fill its hold with gold and imipolex during the night. Will this be agreeable?”

“Can we do it, Josef?” asked Yoke. “Does the alla have enough energy?”

“Quark-flipping is like jujitsu,” said Josef. “As if to look at something and then to look at it in a different way. In and of itself, it costs nothing to interconvert protons and neutrons. But, yes, reassembling particles into different sorts of atoms can either create or absorb energy, even if one uses higher-dimensional shortcuts. Om acts as kind of bank for these transformations. Energies flow back and forth through the higher-dimensional vortex threads which connect Om to the allas.”

“It sounds too good to be true,” said Phil.

“Consider this: ‘The world exists.’ I think that also sounds too good to be true,” said Josef. “Why is there something instead of nothing? Why is Om? We are only lucky.”

“I want to take Phil snorkeling now,” said Yoke. “All right?”

“Yis,” said Kennit. “But if you should meet anyone, don’t be showing off the alla. We don’t want our people to become overly excited. Would Phil like to use Tashtego or Daggoo?”

“I only want to swim with a face mask today,” said Yoke. “I don’t want to bring along any strange moldies. Just Phil and Josef and Cobb and me. Cobb can protect us.”

Ms. Teta found two sets of swim-fins, snorkels, and masks. Yoke and Phil walked down the steep steps to the water, followed by Cobb. Josef rode clamped to the strap of Yoke’s bikini. The Tongans weren’t interested in swimming. And the moldies Tashtego and Daggoo were content to remain puddled atop the island in the sun.

Phil and Yoke slipped into the water together, while Cobb and Josef swam off on their own. Phil felt as if he’d been transported to heaven. The bottom was white sand, and the water incredibly clear. The knobs of small coral heads dotted the bottom, each head surrounded by a school of luscious-colored fish. There were fluttering sea anemones as well, huge irregular pink ones quite unlike the small door-stop sea anemones of California. Striped clown fish idled in the tentacles of the anemones, darting forward as if to greet Phil—though when he looked closer, he saw that their smiling faces were split to reveal tiny rows of teeth. Far from greeting him, they were defiantly defending their turf. Here and there on the bottom were giant clams, meter-wide behemoths with great, crenellated shells. They rested partly open, with the shell gaps revealing incredible fleshy mantles that were differently colored on each clam: some blue, some green, some purple, all of them wonderfully iridescent.

Rising up off the shell of one giant clam was a bumpy stag-horn coral. The clam and coral made a marvelous, unbalanced composition, something nobody would ever think of designing, yet something with a beautiful inner logic. One single fish lived in the branches of the coral. Phil’s soul overflowed like a wineglass in a waterfall. How to contain so much beauty?

He followed Yoke to perch on a big coral head, catching his breath.

“This is paradise, Yoke.”

“Yes,” said Yoke. “It’s good to share this with you.” They kissed again, this time much longer than before.

For the next forty-five minutes they paddled around, chatting and getting to know each other better. The more Phil talked with Yoke, the more he liked her.

Like Phil, Yoke was into being clean and sober. And she shared Phil’s contempt for conventional goals. “It’s like society wants you to be a machine,” was how Yoke put it. “Programmed to ignore everything besides the one thing they use to control you. Money or clothes or drugs or group approval. People don’t see that the real world is all that matters.” But unlike Phil, Yoke’s contempt for society made her invigorated, not paralyzed. “There are so many things I want to do.”

“When I wake up each morning, I always think it’s going to be a nice day,” said Phil. “That’s my basic take. Instead of thinking that I have to do something to make the day be good. It’s already perfect. I don’t have to do anything at all. In fact if I do anything, I’m likely to fuck up.”

“Oh no, Phil,” said Yoke. “We have to work on the world. It isn’t perfect at all. What about the news on the uvvy?”

“Well of course I never watch news,” said Phil. “News, commercials, mass entertainment—they’re all the same. Buy and eat and shit and buy again.”

“Yeah, all the ways to avoid being aware,” said Yoke. “It’s _crazy. _You think it’s bad here, you should see the Moon. There’s so much virtual reality there. On Earth you’ve got more Nature.”

“Most people ignore Nature,” said Phil. “Except for worrying about weather disasters. But, hey, we shouldn’t be talking about ‘most people.’ That’s a trap too. My goal is not to get sucked into anything. Just hang back and stay calm. I don’t have to fix anything but myself. The rest of the xoxxin’ world can xoxx itself some more.”

They were standing in waist-deep water. Yoke splashed her face to reset herself. “I love the surface of the water, how the reflections make darker and lighter blues where it undulates. All this analog computation for free.”

Phil accepted the change of subject and they looked at the water for a while. Now and then he glanced up at the island. Sometimes Kennit or another guard would be looking down at them, but not always.

Phil and Yoke waded over to the island’s narrow beach to rest, out of sight from the people above. Cobb flopped down on the beach a little ways off to sun himself, and Josef busied himself crawling around at the edge of the water, investigating tiny forms of sea life. Yoke used her alla to make them a bottle of fresh water.

“This alla is such a powerful thing,” said Yoke, passing Phil the bottle. “With some practice I could use it to model almost anything.”

“Go beyond the catalog?”

“Yeah. I think I told you before that I’m into figuring out algorithms for natural processes, Phil? Like a coral reef. That would be so wavy to figure out how to grow one. The individual polyps swimming around and landing. I could make one with real coral polyps, and I could make another with imipolex DIM polyps. Sort of like the worms and fabricants that Babs Mooney designs. And, God, there’s so much I can do with plants. What a sea of bioinformation there is on Mother Earth.” Yoke smiled, lost in happy thought.

“Speaking of Babs, I’m a little worried about that Randy Karl Tucker staying with her,” said Phil after a while. “Right before I left , Randy was bragging to me that he was going to get Babs some superleeches.”

“That would be bad news,” said Yoke. “But I know Randy a little. He talks tough, but he means well. Usually.” She smiled at Phil and stroked his hand. “What’s your dream of what you’d like to do? Own a restaurant?”

“No ambitions, no goals,” said Phil. “I just want life hassle-free. No, I can’t see running a restaurant. Feeding hungry cranky greedy people _every _day? Why? I guess deep down I feel like there should be something important I could do, but I don’t know what it is. I’m scared there isn’t anything at all. I did have these pet blimps I was really into. Kind of stupid.”

“You were going to show them to me, but—”

“Kevvie,” Phil winced. “Yeah, I built the blimps myself. You