Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

A few minutes later six of the Metamartians were the shape and size of well-proportioned humans resembling, respectively, a marble Venus, a bronze Apollo, a pig-man, a devil-girl, a snake-woman, and a bird-man. For his part, Josef stayed resolutely the same.

“I’ll observe,” said Josef. “A deep participation is not my style. I’ll be the fly on the wall. The beetle.”

“Haresh looks like that Egyptian god,” said Yoke. “Thoth.” The Metamartian had left his head exactly in the shape of a bird’s. “What a birdbrain.”

“Zoom!” exclaimed Babs. “Egyptian! You Metamartians can go join the Snooks family on the Anubis. After last night, Cobb here must know those moldies pretty well. Right, Cobb? You can tell Thutmosis and Isis Snooks that these six are friends of yours just down from the Moon and that they’re looking for work.”

“Work doin’ what?” asked Wubwub suspiciously.

“Oh, the Snookses are into all kinds of things,” said Cobb. “You can tell them you’re a—a burglar, Wubwub. Just secretly actualize things like liquor for the Anubis bar and say that you stole it. And that can be your contribution to the family. You don’t necessarily have to fuck the cheese-balls, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“ I’m not worried about that,” said Shimmer, staring down at the sleeping Randy Karl Tucker. “It might be fun.”

“I’m going to call Theodore right now,” sighed Babs, walking off toward the front of the warehouse.

“Babs likes Randy,” Yoke explained to Shimmer. “It makes her unhappy to think of him having sex with you. So don’t do it, please.”

“Oh!” said Shimmer. “I hadn’t realized.”

“It’s not our affair if the vile youth lacks wholesome passion for Babs,” said Peg snippily.

“What kind of sex system do you Metamartians have?” asked Yoke. “Do you have any kind of clue?”

As usual, Josef wanted to be the one to answer the question, but Siss made as if to swat him.

“I the one who sexy, Josef. You let me speak.”

Siss had a face of pale humanlike skin with large, almond-shaped eyes. Her nose was little more than two flattened holes and her mouth was immensely long and thin-lipped. Instead of hair, she had a skull-fitting hood of shiny green snakeskin that flowed down to join the snakeskin which covered the rest of her body, save her hands, which had humanlike skin and long green fingernails. The hood had a dramatic widow’s peak in the middle of her forehead. Siss looked decadent, Asian, androgynous.

“We have something like boy/girl too,” she explained. “One got stick, one got hole. Each of us is ‘stick’ in some lives, ‘hole’ in others. Many lives across two-dimensional time. Stick to hole, hole to stick, like big crocodile sex zipper.” Siss showed her fangs and made a gentle biting motion, her long curved fangs sliding into matching sockets in her jaws. “Everyone both girl and boy.”

“But there’s more to it than that,” piped up Josef. “We zipper together in loops of seven. Why seven? It has to do with a feedback resonance in the strange attractor of our metagenome. In ancient times we mated only on Metamars, but now we’ve chirped out into the cosmos. When seven of us nomads can meet and mate—it’s a wonderful thing. Seven of us landed here, but eight of us shall leave.”

“I for one am eager to be getting on with our adventures,” said Haresh. Other than Josef, he looked the least human. “Can we go and meet the Snooks family now?”

“Stay uvvied in with me.” said Cobb. “If they ask you any hard questions, I can feed you the answers. Now is a good time to show up. Most of them are going to be asleep or hung over. Remember, you guys come from the big Nest on the Moon. And you’re going to promise to give the Snookses half the imipolex you earn, in return for them letting you join their family.”

“Let’s do it!” said Shimmer.

They waited by the warehouse’s front door until they could see a time-line in which no passersby would notice them. Cobb and the six big Metamartians jumped out onto the street with little Josef buzzing along above them.

“Look at them go, Yoke,” said Babs, just ending her uvvy call with Theodore. “What a sight.”

“ Anubis, ahoy!” said Yoke. “We better not stare after them. We don’t want it to be totally obvious that your warehouse is where they came from. How was Theodore?”

“Oh, fine. Thrilled that I called. We made a date, not a dinner date, a meet date. We’re going to meet at the Fillmore and see Larky’s brain-con­cert. Larky’s this guy who uses really big sheets of imipolex for his audio and video. Sort of like Saint and Onar were doing the other day, but more professional. I like Theodore—I guess.”

“I told Shimmer to leave Randy alone,” said Yoke.

“What? I don’t believe you, Yoke. What’d she say?”

Yoke put on her Val voice. “Shimmer was like, ‘Oh I didn’t know.’ And that swilly Peg is all ‘It’s not our problem.’ And I’m like ‘Do you have any clue about sex?’ And Siss goes, ‘We’re bi.’ But then Josef says they do it by sevens.”

Babs laughed and gave Yoke a hug. “Whatever. Randy is pretty skanky. Let’s get our allas and do art!”

“What about Randy’s alla?” said Yoke.

“Maybe we should take it away?” said Babs. “Maybe give it to someone else?”

“At least hide it for now,” said Yoke. “He might do something really gnarly with it if he’s still lifted when he wakes up.”

So they tiptoed back to Yoke’s sleeping corner. Willa Jean had perched herself on Randy’s chest, as if guarding him. Though Cobb and Randy hadn’t yet fixed up a new DIM link between Randy and the plastic chicken, Willa Jean was still quite loyal to the Kentuckian.

Yoke held Willa Jean’s beak shut while Babs took Randy’s alla out of his pocket.

“This is what happens to stoned rednecks,” hissed Babs, pocketing Randy’s alla. “Their powers disappear.” Willa Jean let out an outraged cackle when they released her, but Randy slept on unperturbed.

And then Yoke and Babs went out to the front of the warehouse and started making things.

“I’m kind of waiting to see what’s going to happen next,” Yoke was saying. It was two days later, Thursday, February 26, 2054, about two in the afternoon. Yoke was on the uvvy with her twin sister Joke on the Moon. The to-and-fro response time for a message was about five seconds, due both to the large Earth-Moon distance and to the intricate diffusion-en­cryption software they were using for the call. Diffusion-encryption sent each byte of the message along a different path—to prevent there from being any traceable signal binding the speakers together. It took a lot of computation.

With the five-second lag, the best way to converse was to take turns sending long blocks of speech and images. It was more like a fast E-mail exchange than a normal conversation.

Yoke continued her turn: “Babs and I have been making the best things. I already showed you some of my static sculptures, but now let me show you one that moves.” The uvvy transmitted the images direct from Yoke’s vision centers. She was looking at a sweeping loop of shiny wire with bright shapes sliding along the wire. “I made this on Tuesday. The rail is chrome steel and there’s a linear induction field in it. The power comes from a quantum-dot generator embedded right inside the rail. The shapes are the Platonic and Archimedean solids, remember them?” Two of the polyhedra collided and reversed directions. They swooped along the track’s twists and loops, rising and falling. The beautiful, shiny polyhedra were tinted crystal, grown around magnetic metal cores. “It’s a magpie kind of thing. And I keep making myself more clothes. Look at my outfit.” Yoke stepped in front of a fancy full-length wood-framed Art Nouveau mirror to show off her latest clothes, a short thin red leather jacket over baggy shin-length pants and a white T-shirt inset with lace spirals. “And Babs made a bunch of furniture. Like this mirror for instance. It was from a Sotheby’s auction catalog. And she made a silk couch with ants embroidered all over it and a canopy bed. I made myself a bunk bed like we used to have on the Moon, only big enough this time. The thing Babs is proudest of so far is over here, check it out. Like a glass bowl of living spaghetti.” Yoke pointed her gaze at a cubical quartz box holding a wriggling mass of imipolex worms of every color and thickness. The sharp edges of the square box contrasted with the lively antics within. “Babs could never have afforded this many plastic worms before. I think there’s two hundred thousand of them, all custom made by her—well, you can tell the alla to make a whole lot of copies of something in a row, but I guess that’s still custom. Custom mass-produced? Anyhoo, see how the same-colored ones band together and flow along like gouts of lava? I love it. Okay, now you talk.”