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

“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?

“Yo, 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 them 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’re the 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 soft ware copies of the individuals who accept her gift —and everyone _does _accept. Receiving the power of the alla is the greatest gift a being can have. So now you 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 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 Metamars. She lives in the higher dimensions. Our race first reached a working relationship with her some thousand of your years 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