Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

Ms. Teta found two sets of swim-fins, snorkels, and masks. Yoke and Phil walked down the steep steps to the water, followed by Cobb. Josef rode clamped to the strap of Yoke’s bikini. The Tongans weren’t interested in swimming. And the moldies Tashtego and Daggoo were content to remain puddled atop the island in the sun.

Phil and Yoke slipped into the water together, while Cobb and Josef swam off on their own. Phil felt as if he’d been transported to heaven. The bottom was white sand, and the water incredibly clear. The knobs of small coral heads dotted the bottom, each head surrounded by a school of luscious-colored fish. There were fluttering sea anemones as well, huge irregular pink ones quite unlike the small door-stop sea anemones of California. Striped clown fish idled in the tentacles of the anemones, darting forward as if to greet Phil—though when he looked closer, he saw that their smiling faces were split to reveal tiny rows of teeth. Far from greeting him, they were defiantly defending their turf. Here and there on the bottom were giant clams, meter-wide behemoths with great, crenellated shells. They rested partly open, with the shell gaps revealing incredible fleshy mantles that were differently colored on each clam: some blue, some green, some purple, all of them wonderfully iridescent.

Rising up off the shell of one giant clam was a bumpy stag-horn coral. The clam and coral made a marvelous, unbalanced composition, something nobody would ever think of designing, yet something with a beautiful inner logic. One single fish lived in the branches of the coral. Phil’s soul overflowed like a wineglass in a waterfall. How to contain so much beauty?

He followed Yoke to perch on a big coral head, catching his breath.

“This is paradise, Yoke.”

“Yes,” said Yoke. “It’s good to share this with you.” They kissed again, this time much longer than before.

For the next forty-five minutes they paddled around, chatting and getting to know each other better. The more Phil talked with Yoke, the more he liked her.

Like Phil, Yoke was into being clean and sober. And she shared Phil’s contempt for conventional goals. “It’s like society wants you to be a machine,” was how Yoke put it. “Programmed to ignore everything besides the one thing they use to control you. Money or clothes or drugs or group approval. People don’t see that the real world is all that matters.” But unlike Phil, Yoke’s contempt for society made her invigorated, not paralyzed. “There are so many things I want to do.”

“When I wake up each morning, I always think it’s going to be a nice day,” said Phil. “That’s my basic take. Instead of thinking that I have to do something to make the day be good. It’s already perfect. I don’t have to do anything at all. In fact if I do anything, I’m likely to fuck up.”

“Oh no, Phil,” said Yoke. “We have to work on the world. It isn’t perfect at all. What about the news on the uvvy?”

“Well of course I never watch news,” said Phil. “News, commercials, mass entertainment—they’re all the same. Buy and eat and shit and buy again.”

“Yeah, all the ways to avoid being aware,” said Yoke. “It’s crazy. You think it’s bad here, you should see the Moon. There’s so much virtual reality there. On Earth you’ve got more Nature.”

“Most people ignore Nature,” said Phil. “Except for worrying about weather disasters. But, hey, we shouldn’t be talking about ‘most people.’ That’s a trap too. My goal is not to get sucked into anything. Just hang back and stay calm. I don’t have to fix anything but myself. The rest of the xoxxin’ world can xoxx itself some more.”

They were standing in waist-deep water. Yoke splashed her face to reset herself. “I love the surface of the water, how the reflections make darker and lighter blues where it undulates. All this analog computation for free.”

Phil accepted the change of subject and they looked at the water for a while. Now and then he glanced up at the island. Sometimes Kennit or another guard would be looking down at them, but not always.

Phil and Yoke waded over to the island’s narrow beach to rest, out of sight from the people above. Cobb flopped down on the beach a little ways off to sun himself, and Josef busied himself crawling around at the edge of the water, investigating tiny forms of sea life. Yoke used her alla to make them a bottle of fresh water.

“This alla is such a powerful thing,” said Yoke, passing Phil the bottle. “With some practice I could use it to model almost anything.”

“Go beyond the catalog?”

“Yeah. I think I told you before that I’m into figuring out algorithms for natural processes, Phil? Like a coral reef. That would be so wavy to figure out how to grow one. The individual polyps swimming around and landing. I could make one with real coral polyps, and I could make another with imipolex DIM polyps. Sort of like the worms and fabricants that Babs Mooney designs. And, God, there’s so much I can do with plants. What a sea of bioinformation there is on Mother Earth.” Yoke smiled, lost in happy thought.

“Speaking of Babs, I’m a little worried about that Randy Karl Tucker staying with her,” said Phil after a while. “Right before I left , Randy was bragging to me that he was going to get Babs some superleeches.”

“That would be bad news,” said Yoke. “But I know Randy a little. He talks tough, but he means well. Usually.” She smiled at Phil and stroked his hand. “What’s your dream of what you’d like to do? Own a restaurant?”

“No ambitions, no goals,” said Phil. “I just want life hassle-free. No, I can’t see running a restaurant. Feeding hungry cranky greedy people every day? Why? I guess deep down I feel like there should be something important I could do, but I don’t know what it is. I’m scared there isn’t anything at all. I did have these pet blimps I was really into. Kind of stupid.”

“You were going to show them to me, but—”

“Kevvie,” Phil winced. “Yeah, I built the blimps myself. You don’t see many big blimps around because they’re slow and they don’t always go where you expect them to. Helium’s pretty cheap, even without the allas. The real problem with blimps is that the wind blows them around. I keep thinking I might invent some way to beat the wind. And then maybe I could go into business selling my blimps. But I know that sounds dumb. Like all my ideas.”

“No, it sounds floatin’,” laughed Yoke. They kissed for a while, then got up and stretched. The sun was getting too hot.

“What now?” said Phil. “Go back up?”

“I think we should sneak off,” said Yoke. “It bothers me for them to think they’ve got us trapped here.”

“Where would you want to go?” asked Phil.

“Anywhere. I don’t like the idea of spending the rest of the day sitting around that house with two maids and four bodyguards watching me.

This trip is my vacation. I want to look at Neiafu. Hey, Cobb, Josef, come over here.”

Hearing Yoke’s call, the two came over.

“Could you fly us over to Neiafu?” Yoke asked Cobb.

“They’d see,” said Cobb, pointing upward. “Tashtego and Daggoo would come after us. I don’t want to get in a fight with them. They’re mean motherfuckers.”

“We could go underwater like a submarine,” suggested Phil.

“They could still see us,” said Cobb. “This water’s really clear. I’m sure they’re watching that we don’t move away from the island.”

“They will not see you if you are not where they look,” said Josef. “And this is what I know how to do.”

So Cobb stretched himself thin enough to wrap around Yoke and Phil, with Josef on the inside with them too. Josef hooked into their uvvy connection and gave them a view of his odd way of seeing things.