Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

The air lock’s inner door swung open, and there stood a figure of unearthly beauty—a woman like a classic marble statue, though made of supple imipolex. Her flesh glowed with a mild internal light; her pale skin was as a seashell’s iridescent lining.

“Welcome,” she said. “Willy, Terri, and Jenny. In your system of air-pressure modulations, my name might go like this.” Her whole body seemed to vibrate, and the air filled with the piping of flutes, the whining of sitars, and the gentle resonations of a gong. A sound that rose and fell and left Terri hungering to hear more.

“A shimmer of sound,” murmured Willy.

“Then let Shimmer be my human name,” said the goddess. “I much prefer that to Clever Hansi. Please enter and join us. Corey is here, also his friends Darla, Whitey, Yoke, and Joke. And a large number of aliens. I’m listening to everyone’s conversation at once, and it’s very exciting.”

Hardly knowing what to say, they accompanied Shimmer down the isopod hall toward a hubbub of voices. “It sounds like they’re in the conservatory,” Willy said to Terri. “I used to live here, you know. Shimmer, I can’t believe that you’re what’s become of Clever Hansi. Clever Hansi was half your size. Just a little Silly Putter doorgirl.”

“I helped myself to thirty kilograms of Corey’s extra imipolex,” said Shimmer. “We aliens divided up all the extra imipolex stored here and made ourselves decent-sized bodies. There’s twelve of us. We decided it would be diplomatic to take on human forms.”

“Corey let you help yourself to the imipolex?”

“We did what we liked. Corey spent most of the day hiding from us in his bathroom and in his kitchen. He just came out a little while ago.”

“Hi, Willy!” called everyone as they entered the high-ceilinged conservatory, a cool airy room with three soft couches and potted plants everywhere. The conservatory’s transparent ceiling had a system of lights and louvers designed to simulate the ordinary cycle of a twenty-four-hour Earth day. There were straw rugs on the stone floors, and in the center of the room there was a large carved stone fountain—the only fountain in existence on the Moon. Terri had seen a picture of it once in an article about reclusive limpware tycoon Willy Taze. The couches were arranged around the fountain like three sides of a big triangle.

Scattered about the room were eleven more human-shaped imipolex aliens like Shimmer. They were sitting on the floor—some near the fountain and some near the edges of the room—animatedly passing back and forth hundreds of S-cubes that they’d gathered from around the isopod. And seated on two of the couches were five humans.

“This is Terri and Jenny,” said Willy. “Terri, this is Corey, Darla, Whitey, Joke and Yoke.” Terri sized them up. If muscular old Whitey were to get a tan and to shave off the groovy mohawk that ran all the way down his back, he could maybe pass for an aging surfer, but Corey looked like an unsavory old stoner, even grottier than Willy—no wonder they’d been roommates. Corey had two imipolex pets on the couch next to him: a giant-beaked little bird and a small green pig. As for Darla, well, the woman looked outrageously sensual—obviously she was very comfortable in her own skin, though just now her eyes were blazing with some kind of fear and rage. Darla’s twin daughters Joke and Yoke were cute and lively, Joke in bright punk rags with a blonde-and-purple hairdo, and Yoke dressed moonmaid-style in a flowing dress and silver boots. Joke was sitting next to Corey and toying with Corey’s plastic pets.

The humans in the room looked small and ordinary compared to the aliens. Like Shimmer, the aliens had all taken on the forms of classically proportioned humans. Apparently they were eager to fit in. Looking at them, it was like being in a fantasy viddy about the Greek gods on Mount Olympus—or in a soft -core porno viddy. They were too, too perfect. The fountain tinkled pleasantly as the aliens continued absorbing information from the isopod’s S-cubes, lounging about like wise philosophers.

Willy and Terri sat down on the empty couch and carrot shaped Jenny writhed over to inspect the aliens. “So, um, where are all you guys from?” she shrilled.

“They were just telling us,” said Corey, his voice slow and amazed. “They’re from all over the place. Six are from our own galaxy, one’s from a star in the Andromeda galaxy, two from the Crab Nebula, one from NGC 395, one from a quasar, and Clever Hansi here is—”

“I’ve changed my name to Shimmer,” interrupted the glowing goddess and made the chiming sitar noise again.

“Okay,” said Corey. “I wave. Shimmer here is from the farthest away of all—she’s from an inconceivably distant wrinkle of the cosmos where space and time are different.”

“Yes,” said Shimmer. “Where I come from, time is two-dimensional.”

“What does that mean?” asked Terri.

“You might think of it this way,” said Shimmer. “Haven’t you ever wondered what your life would be like if you made some different decision?”

“Sure. Like if I hadn’t gone swimming off after Monique, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes. Now suppose that all of your alternate lives were real. There would be, oh let’s just say zillions of them—think of each of your lives as a thread and of your zillion possible lives as making up a fabric of parallel threads.”

“That’s two-dimensional time?” put in Willy. “But maybe I do have lots of parallel lives I’m not able to perceive. What I know in each life is still just one-dimensional. Past/present/future. I don’t experience a second time dimension.”

“But I’m not like you,” said Shimmer. “In my part of the cosmos, we are aware of all our parallel lives. In each of the lives, you’re aware of all your other lives. It’s just one you across all the lives. There’s the past/present/ future, but there’s the other axis, I don’t know what to call it in English.” She made a droning, gonging noise.

“The whatever axis,” suggested Corey. “It runs from maybe to what-if.”

“Fine,” said Shimmer, not cracking a smile. “In our two-dimensional time, we are consciously aware of all the parallel lives that we’re simultaneously leading. Our experience in each of the parallel lives informs our behavior in all of them. Our memory is two-dimensional—from past to present and from maybe to what-if. It’s not such a huge deal, by the way, when one single thread of our lives ends in death—not as long as there’s still a zillion others But eventually we too lose everything. As you age, you start losing life threads in whole chunks, the fabric tatters out to a few ragged tags and strings. I must say it makes me rather anxious to be living here as a single isolated time thread. Your world of one dimensional time is frightening and pathetic.”

“It made me ‘rather anxious’ to be in the spaceport dome when your pal Quuz stomped it,” spat Whitey, who was sitting on a couch between Darla and Yoke.

“You were in the spaceport?” said Terri. “I was inside Quuz! It was terrible. Shimmer, why aren’t you trying to eat everything like Quuz?”

Shimmer made one of her glowing musical noises, and one of the other aliens spoke up, this one shaped like a purple Apollo.

“You can call me Zad,” he said, setting down the S-cube he’d been perusing. “I’m from a planet near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. A watery planet, where I was something like a giant squid. I’ll be eager to travel down to Earth’s oceans soon. You ask why we twelve aren’t trying to eat everything? The thing is, every sufficiently advanced civilization in the universe finds out about personality transmission via cosmic rays. But some become advanced in that kind of way before becoming—morally responsible. Quuz was like that. From your own Sun. Whenever a node for personality wave decryption arises, the keepers need to be on guard for beings like that. Fortunately we were able to keep Quuz from transmitting that Stairway To Heaven to us and taking us over. Thanks to the rath and the Jubjub bird.” The two little pets were busy fighting and snapping at each other on the couch between Corey and Joke, and now Zad stretched his arm out into a tentacle shape long enough to tweak the rath’s tail and to make it hoarsely squeal.