Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“What are you guys talking about?” asked Willow, wandering up to the group. She had a glass of white wine in her hand and her voice was shrill. “Help yourself to the refreshments before they’re all gone. The Bass parents made a very nice buffet. And this wine is from Doctor Peck’s own vineyard. It was Kurt’s favorite. Eat, drink, and be merry.” She looked far from merry.

“It was a nice ceremony, Willow,” said Tre carefully.

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” said Willow. “Considering that your shitty wowo killed him.”

“Tre thinks it wasn’t really the wowo itself,” put in Phil. “He thinks it was a creature from the fourth dimension that the wowo attracted.”

“Big difference,” said Willow.

“Maybe you could grow a new husband,” suggested Kevvie. “Like Yoke’s father is doing.”

“I assume Yoke is this little chippie here? How many people did you bring along, Tre? I mean besides the moldie. Do you think this a fucking hairfarmer beach party?”

“I’m sorry, Willow,” said Tre. “We’ll go now.”

“Good!” Willow burst into tears and Jane held her, letting Willow’s metallic blonde head rest on her shoulder.

Cobb appeared in the driveway just then. Tre and Terri murmured a quick good-bye and went to meet him. And then, before Phil could really say a proper good-bye to her, Yoke was gone too.

“Ooops,” said Kevvie, rolling her eyes and grinning. She never knew what to make of big dramatic situations. At a time like this, Kevvie’s cheery emptiness was kind of a relief. Phil linked arms with her and walked back to the buffet.

Phil thought about Yoke all the time for the next few days—whenever he wasn’t worrying about the wowos or thinking about his father. He’d hoped that with the old man dead, there’d be nobody nagging him to make something of himself. But the memory tapes were playing on. Thinking about Yoke was much better. Phil thought about Yoke so much that when she turned up at the LoLo restaurant on Thursday, sitting at a table right near the kitchen, he almost wasn’t surprised. Just, “Whew, here it is.”

“Is this the guy?” Naranjo was saying, Naranjo the waiter who’d called Phil out of the kitchen. “Is this the hombre you lookin’ for?”

Yoke was all smiles, sitting at a table with two guys and a woman. Phil recognized two of them: Saint and Babs Mooney, regulars in the San Francisco art scene. “Hi, Phil!” called Yoke. “I was hoping I’d find you here. Can you come out with us later?”

“He gotta stay and scrub a lotta potatoes,” said Naranjo. “He’s just an assistant chef. He gonna be here till about three maybe four a.m.”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Phil. “It’s great to see you, Yoke. Hi, Saint. Hi, Babs. I’ll be through at eleven-thirty. It’s ten now, so take your time eating and I can leave with you. With any luck, you’ll be tonight’s last customers. Things are really slow.” A big storm had come in off the Pacific this afternoon and it was raining like people were up on the roofs with hoses. You could hear the splashing of the water through the glass of the windows. “You haven’t ordered yet, have you?”

“How’s the squid?” asked the fourth member of the dining party, a tenor-voiced fellow with shoulder-length red-blond hair that was very straight and fine. “Do you serve it with tentacles?”

“Sure,” said Phil, taking an immediate dislike to the man, probably because he was sitting next to Yoke. “We’ve even got ink. But I’d recommend our deep-sea oarfish today. Brought in by a moldie this afternoon, he caught it himself. You can’t catch an oarfish with ordinary techniques; it swims too deep. It has a nice firm flesh from living at such a high pressure. If you like, Yoke, I’ll make it in a special sauce with sherry, cream, and chanterelles. Some saffron basmati rice and asparagus on the side. A few black cherries in the sauce for the sweetness and the color. And a Belgian endive salad with fresh-roasted red bell peppers and a mustard vinaigrette.”

“Ooh,” said Yoke. “That sounds delish. I’ve read those fancy food words, but I’ve never eaten them.”

“Should we all have the same thing?” said Saint. “Babs? Onar?” Babs nodded, but the handsome, long-haired Onar insisted that he be served squid. “Stir-fry it in canola oil,” he instructed. “All tentacles. And don’t let them get rubbery.”

“Gnarly, sir,” said Phil.

Naranjo jotted down the order and went off to serve another customer. Phil lingered, gazing at Yoke, admiring her.

“Did you bury your father’s ashes?” asked Yoke. “And the knotted ring? How did it go?”

“Having my dad die hurts more than I ever imagined it would,” said Phil. “Today it’s been a week. Yeah, I buried the ashes and the ring. I dumped the ashes out of the box; there weren’t many of them. I almost wish I’d kept the ring. I need to think about it some more. Maybe I should have paid more attention when Da tried to teach me about the fourth dimension.”

“I was so sorry to hear about your father, Phil,” put in Babs Mooney.

“Yaaar,” chimed in her brother Saint. “Poor Kurt. It would xoxx to get chopped up by a hyperspace blender.” Babs and Saint had DIM lice in their hair, colorful little bugs that moved around on their scalps like tiny cars in traffic, arranging their hair in filigrees that could variously resemble paisley, crop circles, or herringbone tweed. Programming the lice was one of Saint’s art projects.

“I have a theory about the wowo,” proposed Onar, holding up a bony finger. “The wowos were a representation of the Klein bottle, were they not? Two Mobius strips sewn together?”

“I guess,” said Phil. “But it was just a goof. An illusion.”

“Perhaps the models set up a morphic resonance. Reality is, after all, a consensual hallucination. If enough people see something as a Klein bottle, then—voila—it’s a Klein bottle. It’s not impossible to be killed by a dream.”

“Don’t make it a New Age fantasy, Onar,” reproved Saint. “This thing was real.”

“Reality is a hobgoblin for small minds,” said Onar mildly. Yoke giggled. She seemed to find Onar entertaining.

Phil got the head chef to let him prepare most of the food for Yoke’s table. He cooked with fervor, and the meal was a big success. Around midnight he and the four guests stepped out of LoLo together. It was still pouring rain. Yoke did something with her uvvy as they stepped outside, and a moldie suddenly came bouncing up the street, sending out great splashes of water with each jump. It was Cobb Anderson.

“Thanks for waiting, Cobb,” said Yoke. “What did you do?”

“Oh, I was going around town with Randy Karl,” said Cobb. “And then we split up and I was hanging out with some homeless people in an alley off Columbus Street. Talking with them. One of them was a very intelligent fellow. It’s not so much that the homeless are crazy and addicted, it’s that they don’t have money for rent. Just that one simple lack. We need to find a way to make cheap housing for the poor. But hey, just for right now, let me be your umbrella.” Cobb stuck up his arms, and his tissues flowed upward, spreading out and thinning to make a giant umbrella that they could all stand under, the five young people in a circle around the moldie. “Better hold up the edges,” said Cobb. He’d used so much of his body flesh in the umbrella that his head had sunk down to chest-level.

“Where’s Randy now?” asked Yoke.

“By now I imagine he’s found a moldie hooker like he was looking for. I really should get that boy up to the Moon to be with his father. Eventually. Randy’s in no rush to go.”