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

they’re leaving tonight?” said Babs. “Maybe they’re worried the Snookses are going to hassle them. You’re right, Yoke, we should talk to them about plutonium. But maybe first we need another beer.” Babs was feeling merry. She gave Randy her biggest smile. “I loved the juggling, Randy.”

“You got me in your spell, Babs,” said Randy gamely. “How soon we goin’ back to your place?”

“If you’re not going to talk to the Metamartians, then I will,” said Yoke, about to take off after the aliens. But suddenly her face changed. “Look—”

“Oh God” said Babs.

Up above the stage the air was looking oddly warped. And the Uffin’ Wowo blimp—good lord, it was swelling up to the size of a refrigerator, the size of an automobile, the size of a house! It wobbled hugely down and then—as in some fabulous stage-magic illusion—the spotted blimp split open to reveal a dog, a thin woman, a plump woman, and—“Phil!”

screamed Yoke, running toward the stage. “Ma!” The air above the stage rippled, and then the space of the room was normal again. The shock of the miracle made Babs feel hollow inside. Or like it had shaken loose some deep part of her. Without really knowing why, she was weeping. Randy seemed equally overcome. He threw his arms around her.

“I love you, Babs,” he said into her ear.

“You do?” said Babs. “You do?”

Phil, February 26

Phil woke up late Thursday morning, at peace with the world. Da was dead, yes, but in the end his death seemed to make sense. Phil’s dreams last night had included Da. Da was happy. He was inside the SUN, yet still flying toward it, as if the center of the SUN were unreachable. In Phil’s dream, the SUN was a point of light inside a cloud of glowing butterflies.

Phil’s dream conversations with Om last night had been the best yet. He’d learned to understand the way that Om spoke in glyphs, in concept blocks, expressing many variations of a thought at the same time. He was bursting with new information. Today was going to be a good day.

For once Tempest and Darla seemed sober, and Darla was even dressed—wearing the purple caftan he had made her.

“I dreamed Om said she’s putting us back today,” said Darla. “Did you dream that too? Tempest can’t remember.”

Seeing Tempest reminded Phil of what she’d done to his face, but when he felt around his eyes, yesterday’s scabs were gone. As well as remembering the dream Darla was asking about, he remembered that in one layer of his dreams Om had been healing him.

“Yes, I did dream Om is going to put us back,” Phil answered Darla. “She had us inside her so she could figure out our circuitry—and now she’s done. She said from now on she’ll just watch people through their allas. She’s going to set us back down.”

“Anywhere she drops us is faaahn with me,” mewed old Tempest. “Why you lookin’ at me so funny, Phil?”

“You don’t remember trying to claw my eyes out?”

“We—We was fightin’ over a doll?” said Tempest, glancing around for Humpty-Dumpty, who was, of course, nowhere to be found. Tempest looked strung-out and querulous. “Young fella like you shouldn’t of been pickin’ on a naahce ole lady like me.”

Phil didn’t bother answering that one. “Om said she’d home in on Da’s wedding ring,” he told Darla. “She likes to have a specific thing to go for.”

“Kurt’s wedding ring?” said Darla. “He wasn’t wearing any in here. You know where it is?”

“I do,” said Phil. “It’s inside a pet DIM blimp I made. I called it the ‘Uffin’ Wowo, not that it really is a wowo, it’s just a blimp. It’s aboard the _Anubis, _which is beached in the mud at San Francisco. A bunch of moldies use the _Anubis _for a nightclub.”

“Stuzzy,” said Darla. “I’ve never been to San Francisco. Your father’s wedding ring, huh?” She paused for a second. This morning her expression looked composed and intelligent. “You know, Phil, there’s something we should fab about, especially since you’re such a good friend of Yoke’s. It’s—the gunjy way I’ve been acting in here—I mean with your father and everything—Phil, you have to viz that I flat out thought we were dead, so—”

“I can forget it,” said Phil.

“Especially don’t tell Yoke,” said Darla. “She’d flame me. My little darling does have a temper on her. If she found out that when I met her boyfriend I was lifted and naked and—” Darla broke off, laughing. “I’m glad we fabbed about this.”

“And you say good things about me to her too,” said Phil.

“You _are _good,” said Darla. “But, no, I won’t praise you to Yoke or it might turn her against you. I’ve always had to handle that girl with kid gloves. You know how it is. Your dad felt a little the same way with you. He was wonderful. His sacrificing himself like that—I bet that’s what turned Om around.”

“Where is Kurt?” wondered Tempest. She was sitting on the oak trunk holding Planet and tremulously trying to light a cigarette.

“He jumped out of Om’s hole to fly into the SUN yesterday,” said Phil flatly. “You helped him.”

“Don’t blame _me. _Hell with you.” Tempest clammed up and looked away, squinting her eyes against her tobacco smoke.

Phil turned back to Darla. “I had so many dreams last night, Darla. I saw Da, and then Om was talking to me about him. She says she didn’t urge him to jump at all, that you and Da just found that idea in your own heads. But, yes, in a way, Da jumping really did make Om decide to set us down. It impressed her, and made her feel sorry, and—I don’t know—it was such an intense moment that now Om feels like she knows what makes us tick.”

“Whiyun we supposed to land?” whined Tempest, hunching over something in her lap.

“I think tonight,” said Darla. “It’s just coming back to me. Om showed me this previz flash of how we’d come down. Something about a dark room. A stage? And don’t you be getting spun again today, Tempest, I see that wine. Give it here, cruster. That’s xoxxin’ right, I’m pouring it out. Whirl, whirl, whirl, Om’s magic rays are turning it into air. We’re not gonna come knuckle-walking out of here tonight like Shasta ground sloths, you wave?”

While Darla kept an eye on Tempest, Phil went to peer out of Om’s flaw again. Sticking his head out, he remembered something else Om had told him. The flaw was one of Om’s “fingernails.” A shelf sticking out of the smooth curve of the powerball fingertip that contained them.

Phil looked ana past the vast, curved pink forms of Om’s body, visualizing the SUN’s bright orb as a cloud of winged souls. Da in there too. Hi, Da. Looking kata, Phil once again studied the three pairs of tendrils running from Om’s body kata to the Earth. Two gold-colored, two silvery, two coppery. He and Om had talked about those tendrils in his dreams last night. What Om had said about the tendrils had been esoteric, but Phil had been able to follow it. Having Da say Phil was smart had loosened up Phil’s old mental block against mathematics. The tendrils were in pairs because they were loops. Each pair was a loop like the handle of a coffee cup—with Om the cup, and the loop a handle that had been stretched like taffy, stretched all the way kata to touch the space of Earth. The tendrils were “hypercylindrical vortex threads”—like four-dimensional smoke-rings or tornadoes. The big new insight was that where these threads intersected the space of Earth, they looked, to the Earthlings, like cylindrical tubes: one gold, one silver, one copper. And these three tubes were allas: Yoke’s gold alla and, according to Om, two additional allas that she’d recently allowed the Metamartians to make. A silver alla for Babs and a copper alla for Randy Karl Tucker. The vortex threads carried energy and information back and forth between Om and the allas.

Most important of all, now that Phil understood what the allas were, he knew how easy it was to split one in two. And with this new knowledge, he was quite sure he could use Yoke’s alla to make one of his own—Om willing.

Phil squinted kata toward where the alla-threads met the cross section of Earth. Slowly, slowly, Om was moving them closer. Closer to Yoke. He prayed for their landing to come soon. As he was watching, a new pair of alla-threads appeared, purple ones. Someone else on Earth had just gotten an alla. He wondered who, but the only way to ask Om would be to fall asleep and dream. And he wasn’t tired.

Phil had lunch with Darla and Tempest, played with Planet, looked out the flaw some more, showed Darla and Tempest his alien “fishbowl,” examined Starshine’s old wowo, thought about flying machines, and carved a little on the oak tree with his fuzzy alien pocketknife. The way the knife worked was that its little metal tentacles would pick away at something to carve out the shape you wanted. It didn’t have any kind of DIM hookup; you controlled the little feelers by turning the knife this way or that. Phil carved “Yoke” and then started on a bas-relief of her face, as best he could remember. The carving wasn’t coming out all that well, but learning to use the knife was a pleasant enough way to pass the time.

And then, finally, there was a _pop _and a dark ball appeared in the midst of their hyperspherical space, off to one side of the oak. Phil pushed off from the oak, drifting toward the black ball. “Come on, Darla,” he called. “This is the exit. You too, Tempest. Bring the dog.”

The women hauled themselves up the trunk and pushed toward the black sphere as well. Nobody doubted that this was their salvation.

As they entered the dark ball there was a hyperdimensional switcheroo. The space inside the dark ball became their space, and the Om space they’d come from became the inside of a small bright ball behind them.

As they switched spaces, there was a stretching and pulling in Phil’s guts again, but he didn’t mind. Anything to get back home. Darla and Tempest thumped into him; Tempest was carrying Planet. Phil was worried the women’s impact might knock him out of the dark space, but he stayed well within it.

It wasn’t completely black in the new space, there was a dim yellow glow, with spots. The bright ball of the space they’d come from was shrinking. Still visible within it were the warped tiny images of the oak tree and Starshine’s wowo. Now that they were inside the dark space, it seemed ever brighter, and no longer so round. It was longer than it was wide, and dim yellow with spots on it—

“We’re inside my blimp!” exclaimed Phil, and then—_pow—_the spotted blimp burst. Phil clearly heard the _ting _of his father’s wedding ring falling to the platform of the stage they landed on, and then Planet started barking. There was a spotlight shining down on them and a few people staring up, very surprised, but where was—

“Phil!” screamed Yoke, running toward the stage. “Ma!”

“Yoke!” Da’s wedding ring was right down there by Phil’s foot, the ring finally unknotted by this last disturbance of space, and Phil scooped it up before Yoke jumped onto the stage. He hugged her and kissed her, and before Yoke could say much more of anything else, he put the ring on her finger and said, “I want to