Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“Well, nobody’s paying me,” said Yoke. “I’m kind of a software artist. I like to think of algorithms for simulating natural processes. I plan to try and model some Earth things while I’m here.”

“I’m a geezer-visitor,” said Kevvie. “I go see old people all over San Francisco. They have little DIM machines to take care of them, but they don’t have anyone to talk to them. It’s sort of like being a sex-worker, except there’s no sex. I have a girlfriend who’s a sex-worker. Klara Blo. She and I had bacteria-style sex a few weeks back. Have you ever tried bacteria-style sex, Yoke?”

Phil groaned inwardly. This was a new obsession of Kevvie’s and she was always talking about it. “Bacteria-style sex” was the current expression for getting in a tub with someone and taking the drug merge to make your bodies temporarily melt together. Phil refused to do it, because he figured that just one pleasure rush could blow him off the Straight Edge and down into the addict’s regimen, wasted twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Kevvie had started out Straight Edge like Phil, but she’d started dipping and dabbing six months ago, and now she was getting worse all the time.

“I wouldn’t want to,” Yoke was saying matter-of-factly. “I think it’s skanky. My parents have been merge addicts since before I was born. Or were. My mother Darla died two months ago. That’s something I wanted to talk to you about some more, Phil. The thing that killed Darla could have been the same thing that killed your dad. And maybe Tempest Plenty too.”

“I’ve got it!” interrupted Kevvie. “Flying saucers took them! Have you ever seen a flying saucer, Yoke?”

“I saw the real aliens who were on the Moon in November,” said Yoke. “But they didn’t come in any flying machine. They travel in a form like radio waves.”

“I don’t buy that,” said Kevvie, with irrational vehemence. Phil realized that she was lifted. “If those things you saw were really aliens, there has to have been a saucer that they came in. They use a special metal. I bet ISDN or the Gimmie is covering it up.”

“There goes a saucer now, Kevvie,” said Tre, pointing up at the sky. “Yaaar.” He had long, tangled, sun-bleached hair and he wore weird little brown sunglasses over his no doubt bloodshot eyes. Once he’d gotten Kevvie to start staring upward, Tre looked back down. “What Yoke was talking about, Phil, is that Darla and Whitey had a wowo in their cubby. Only nobody saw Darla dying, so it didn’t occur to anyone that the wowo might have been involved. I should have thought of it when Tempest Plenty disappeared last month. She was the aunt of our neighbor Starshine Plenty; we were putting Tempest up in one of our spare rooms.”

Phil could tell Kevvie wanted to butt in and say something else dumb, but Terri spoke first. “Tempest was this colorful redneck pheezer,” said Terri. “A dynamo. Mean as a snake. A lifter. She liked to work on Starshine’s garden, always talking a mile a minute, whether or not anyone was listening. And then one morning she was gone, along with Starshine’s wowo and Starshine’s dog Planet. Starshine figured Tempest had taken the dog and the wowo back to Florida. She says most of the people in her family are like that. Rip something off and head for home.”

“The wowo Tempest took was in Starshine’s garden,” continued Tre. “It was the best and biggest wowo I ever made, but the base only weighed a couple of pounds. Tempest loved to look at it, especially when she was lifted. And she was crazy about that dog. So what Starshine thought seemed reasonable. We were like, ‘So what, at least Tempest’s gone.’ But then Willow saw the wowo swallow Kurt and I put it all together. I switched off all the wowos that I’ve distributed.”

“How did you manage that?” demanded Kevvie.

“All of my Philosophical Toys maintain an uvvy link to me. That way I can send out upgrades and—in the case of a catastrophe like this—I can shut them down.” Although Tre looked like a Santa Cruz lifter, his Philosophical Toys had made him reasonably wealthy, and he ran his business in an orderly and efficient way. “I’ve been wanting to ask Willow for a really detailed description of how it went down. But I don’t want to tweak her out.”

“You should see what Jane has,” said Phil. “Hey, Jane!”

Jane was still in conversation with old Isolde and Hildegarde, and she gave Phil a sisterly “How rude!” kind of look, a big jokey frown. Isolde and Hildegarde used the interruption to begin creeping toward the buff et.

“What?” said Jane, giving Phil a gratuitous poke in the ribs as she joined them.

“Show Tre the ring.”

“Way eldritch,” said Tre as soon as he saw it. “Knotted in the fourth dimension. Like a calling card. Like it wants us to know.”

“It?” said Phil.

“The thing that came through the wowo. It couldn’t have been the wowo itself that ate poor Kurt—a wowo’s just a hollow of a self-everting Klein bottle geometrized in this tasty gnarly way that Kurt dreamed up. The wowo must have attracted something.” Tre gave a kind of shudder and hugged himself, looking around. “It could be inches away from us right now. Watching.” He handed the ring back to Jane. “I wouldn’t keep this near me if I were you.”

“You take it, Phil,” said Jane, handing it off like a hot potato. “Bury it with Da’s ashes. If we need it again we can always dig it up.”

“Like the goldfish,” said Phil, referring to a dead goldfish that he and Jane had buried one winter, only to dig it up every few days to look at the progress of its decay.

“It doesn’t feel right not to have all of Da to bury,” said Jane. “Willow said the ashes are just part of his hand. Maybe the rest of him is in the fourth dimension.”

Phil put the knotted ring in his pocket next to the box. Some of his father’s stories about the fourth dimension were coming back to him. A four-dimensional monster would be able to touch the ring in his pocket without coming through the fabric. Even if he were to put the ring inside the box, a four-dimensional creature could still reach it, just like you can touch the middle of a sheet of paper without coming through the paper’s edge. If the four-dimensional creature could see everything, what good would it do to bury the ring?

“There was a weird dimensional thing about Darla too,” Yoke was telling Jane. “She disappeared on Christmas Eve. My dick of a father had left her alone, he was out with a girlfriend or something. Poor Darla. All Whitey could find of her was this little gory patch of blood. And then Whitey starts saying he’s going to grow her back. He has a fairly recent S-cube of her personality, and he’s gonna use her DNA to fast-grow a new body, a young sexy one of course. But when he gives some of Darla’s blood to a pink-tank worker, about half of the DNA in the blood turns out to be backward. Clockwise twisties instead of counterclockwise.” Yoke made mirror-twin helix motions in the air with her hands. “When I told Tre about it, he said that maybe some of the DNA had been flipped over in the fourth dimension.”

“Your father is growing a new copy of your mother?” asked Kevvie.

“Clear,” said Yoke. “The new Darla’s gonna have a bitchin’ real meat body, not an imipolex fake like Cobb’s. Whitey’s had a lot of fights with boppers and moldies. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if Darla came back pure moldie. This way she’ll have a meat body, although her personality will have to be off in a kind of moldie scarf that she wears all the time. A Happy Cloak.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before,” said Kevvie.

“Oh yeah they have,” said Yoke. “You’ve heard of Stahn Mooney. Used to be a Senator? His wife Wendy is made of a meat body with a moldie Happy Cloak that drives the body. Of course Wendy’s ‘Cloak is really just a moldie that doesn’t have any of the original Wendy’s personality at all. But we’ll have Darla’s personality in her ‘Cloak to start with.” Suddenly the confidence drained out of Yoke’s voice. “I hope it works. I miss her.”