Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“The business I’m down here for—my business with the King—it’s rather hush-hush. Can you promise me that you won’t talk to anyone about what you see and hear? If you can help me out on this, there might be some rather substantial rewards for you. But you mustn’t tell.”

“Oh yeah?” said Yoke. Now that she was primed to kiss Onar, she was having trouble focusing on what he was saying.

“Not Cobb, not your parents, not Tre and Terri, no one,” whispered Onar as he put his arms around her. “Not yet. Eventually, everyone will know. And they’ll be glad. I promise you. It’s a wonderful surprise.”

“All right,” said Yoke, and pressed her lips to his. It was romantic here in the marble Tongan dark. Onar smelled good and his body felt strong and lithe. It was pleasant to embrace him. They kissed for a minute, and then Yoke broke it off, feeling guilty about dancing on Mr. Olou’s grave.

Outside they found Kennit standing in the street, talking with a couple of other Tongans. He walked over to Onar and Yoke.

“Good evening. You are ready?”

“There’s been an accident, Kennit,” said Onar. “Mr. Olou is dead. He suffered an attack while we were using the uvvy.”

“So it comes to that,” said Kennit, his face clouding over. “You left him inside?” He walked over to rattle the ministry door, which had locked itself behind Onar. Kennit called something in Tongan and the men he’d been talking to came over, opened the door and went inside.

“Poor Olou,” sighed Kennit. “You can make a police report tomorrow, Mr. Anders. But now we must go to see the King.”

“Why isn’t Kennit more surprised?” hissed Yoke to Onar as they were settled into the back of the little car. “And what was that pale vine? What exactly is your job, anyway?”

“At Meta West they call me the anteater,” said Onar with a little smile.

“Meta West Link sells transmission time between the Earth and outer space. Mainly the Moon, but Mars and the asteroids too. My job is to keep cryps, phreaks, and ants from siphoning off free bandwidth.” He opened his mouth and waggled his long, pointed tongue. “The ant’s nightmare; the virgin’s friend.”

“Onar don’t.”

Kennit turned onto the main street of Nuku’alofa, a dirt road lined by high wooden sidewalks like in an ancient viddy of the Wild West. There was a traffic-jam of cars, pedestrians, moldies, and bicycles; it seemed that everyone on the island was out on the five-block main drag. Though it was early in the evening, a few of the Tongan men seemed extremely drunk. Recognizing the car as the King’s limo, one of them leaned over to peer inside. The car was so small and the man so big that he had to bend practically double. One of his friends shoved him and he lost his balance and fell down. Great whoops of laughter.

“Tongans used only to go crazy on Saturday nights,” said Kennit gloomily. “But now we do it on Friday as well. Evil times.”

“Kennit doesn’t drink,” said Onar. “He’s a Mormon. Although he does play cards. I’ve seen him.”

“Very many Mormons in Tonga,” said Kennit.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them,” said Yoke. “Is that a religion?”

“Oh yes,” said Onar. “And they own the world’s largest asimov computer. A machine under a mountain in Salt Lake City.”

“I have heard of that big slave computer,” said Yoke. “Cobb’s simulation lived inside it for a while.”

“You’re thinking of the Heritagists’ asimov computer,” said Onar. “Which is also under a mountain in Salt Lake City. I have a theory that the two are one and the same.”

“I went to college in Salt Lake City,” said Kennit, inching the car forward. “The South Pacific program at Brigham Young University.”

“Do you dislike moldies, Kennit?” asked Onar.

“Yis.”

“Will you stop changing the subject, Onar?” put in Yoke. “Finish telling me what you’re doing here and what happened to Mr. Olou.” Outside the window now was a Tongan food store, an open-air stand with shelves full of canned meat and muddy yams.

“Very well, Yoke. Let’s do Telecommunications 101. For short distances, an uvvy signal hopscotches from one uvvy to the next. Completely decentralized. For longer distances, the signal zooms up a thousand miles to a cheap little saucer-sat and gets bounced back down. Ever since the 2030s the saucer-sats have been imipolex jobbies that fly up to space by themselves. There’s millions of them by now. The size of dinner-plates, as smart as cockroaches, and easy to order around. You saw some of them on our flight here.”

“Right,” said Yoke. “Cobb ate one of them.”

“That was a very moldie thing for Cobb to do,” said Onar. “Moldies are such scavengers.”

“So anyway,” said Yoke. “Now you’re going to tell me that since Meta West Link handles Earth-Moon signal transmissions, that means they have some really big saucer-sats, right?”

“Right-o,” said Onar. “We call them sky-rays. Like manta ray or stingray? Big soft flappy things. They weigh a ton instead of a kilogram. And, unlike the little saucer-sats, they need a fungus-algae nervous system. Once you get that much mold-infested imipolex together, it’s bound to wake up. And since we already know how to talk to moldies, it makes sense for the sky-rays to be made up of moldies. A sky-ray is twenty or thirty moldies stuck together to make one of those group creatures we call a ‘grex.’ You don’t really own a sky-ray, it’s a team that you hire. The moldies get paid in imipolex and they take turns working. Which is why you see so many of them hanging around Tonga. They come down here to breed, for one thing.”

“And why Tonga?”

“The sky-rays stay in geosynchronous orbit; they circle the equator at some twenty-two thousand miles up. That’s the altitude where the natural orbital speed exactly matches the rotational speed of the Earth. Geosynchronous means they’re always above the same spot. Now, thanks to some clever international politicking by HRH’s grandfather back before the millennium, the Kingdom of Tonga owns the best geosynchronous satellite slot for the South Pacific.” Onar scrunched down and pointed up through the car window. “She’s always right about there. Cappy Jane. Straight up, and a little to the north. She looks like a giant patchwork stingray. A harlequin. All of the Earth-Moon transmissions for this part of the world come through Cappy Jane.”

“Mr. Olou mentioned her,” remembered Yoke. “He said someone’s been running pirate signals through her.”

“Exactly,” said Onar. “Cappy Jane’s been losing some twenty percent of her bandwidth. The pirate signals go back and forth between Cappy Jane and a spot right near Tonga itself. So Olou called for the anteater!” Onar opened his mouth as if to display his tongue again, but stopped himself, thinking better of it.

Kennit was through the worst of the traffic now, driving rapidly past a series of small houses with showy tropical plants in their yards. “That’s the Tongan cultural center on the left,” said Onar, going off topic. “I must take you there, Yoke; they have a wonderful show. Everyone gets a chance to drink some kava before it starts. Gives a very nice buzz.”

“So that pale vine was a copy of one of the pirate signals?” asked Yoke doggedly. Keeping his hand down in his lap, Onar pointed at Kennit and didn’t answer.

Yoke’s head was pounding, and Kennit was driving much too fast for comfort. Up in the cone of the headlights she saw a low black animal with floppy ears and a long snout, standing alertly by the road as if waiting for the car to pass. “What’s that!”

“A pig,” said Onar.

“They’re not pink?”