Rudy Rucker - The Ware Tetralogy

“If you’re not going to talk to the Metamartians, then I will,” said Yoke, about to take off after the aliens. But suddenly her face changed. “Look—”

“Oh God” said Babs.

Up above the stage the air was looking oddly warped. And the Uffin’ Wowo blimp—good lord, it was swelling up to the size of a refrigerator, the size of an automobile, the size of a house! It wobbled hugely down and then—as in some fabulous stage-magic illusion—the spotted blimp split open to reveal a dog, a thin woman, a plump woman, and—”Phil!”

screamed Yoke, running toward the stage. “Ma!” The air above the stage rippled, and then the space of the room was normal again. The shock of the miracle made Babs feel hollow inside. Or like it had shaken loose some deep part of her. Without really knowing why, she was weeping. Randy seemed equally overcome. He threw his arms around her.

“I love you, Babs,” he said into her ear.

“You do?” said Babs. “You do?”

Phil woke up late Thursday morning, at peace with the world. Da was dead, yes, but in the end his death seemed to make sense. Phil’s dreams last night had included Da. Da was happy. He was inside the SUN, yet still flying toward it, as if the center of the SUN were unreachable. In Phil’s dream, the SUN was a point of light inside a cloud of glowing butterflies.

Phil’s dream conversations with Om last night had been the best yet. He’d learned to understand the way that Om spoke in glyphs, in concept blocks, expressing many variations of a thought at the same time. He was bursting with new information. Today was going to be a good day.

For once Tempest and Darla seemed sober, and Darla was even dressed—wearing the purple caftan he had made her.

“I dreamed Om said she’s putting us back today,” said Darla. “Did you dream that too? Tempest can’t remember.”

Seeing Tempest reminded Phil of what she’d done to his face, but when he felt around his eyes, yesterday’s scabs were gone. As well as remembering the dream Darla was asking about, he remembered that in one layer of his dreams Om had been healing him.

“Yes, I did dream Om is going to put us back,” Phil answered Darla. “She had us inside her so she could figure out our circuitry—and now she’s done. She said from now on she’ll just watch people through their allas. She’s going to set us back down.”

“Anywhere she drops us is faaahn with me,” mewed old Tempest. “Why you lookin’ at me so funny, Phil?”

“You don’t remember trying to claw my eyes out?”

“We—We was fightin’ over a doll?” said Tempest, glancing around for Humpty-Dumpty, who was, of course, nowhere to be found. Tempest looked strung-out and querulous. “Young fella like you shouldn’t of been pickin’ on a naahce ole lady like me.”

Phil didn’t bother answering that one. “Om said she’d home in on Da’s wedding ring,” he told Darla. “She likes to have a specific thing to go for.”

“Kurt’s wedding ring?” said Darla. “He wasn’t wearing any in here. You know where it is?”

“I do,” said Phil. “It’s inside a pet DIM blimp I made. I called it the ‘Uffin’ Wowo, not that it really is a wowo, it’s just a blimp. It’s aboard the Anubis, which is beached in the mud at San Francisco. A bunch of moldies use the Anubis for a nightclub.”

“Stuzzy,” said Darla. “I’ve never been to San Francisco. Your father’s wedding ring, huh?” She paused for a second. This morning her expression looked composed and intelligent. “You know, Phil, there’s something we should fab about, especially since you’re such a good friend of Yoke’s. It’s—the gunjy way I’ve been acting in here—I mean with your father and everything—Phil, you have to viz that I flat out thought we were dead, so—”

“I can forget it,” said Phil.

“Especially don’t tell Yoke,” said Darla. “She’d flame me. My little darling does have a temper on her. If she found out that when I met her boyfriend I was lifted and naked and—” Darla broke off, laughing. “I’m glad we fabbed about this.”

“And you say good things about me to her too,” said Phil.

“You are good,” said Darla. “But, no, I won’t praise you to Yoke or it might turn her against you. I’ve always had to handle that girl with kid gloves. You know how it is. Your dad felt a little the same way with you. He was wonderful. His sacrificing himself like that—I bet that’s what turned Om around.”

“Where is Kurt?” wondered Tempest. She was sitting on the oak trunk holding Planet and tremulously trying to light a cigarette.

“He jumped out of Om’s hole to fly into the SUN yesterday,” said Phil flatly. “You helped him.”

“Don’t blame me. Hell with you.” Tempest clammed up and looked away, squinting her eyes against her tobacco smoke.

Phil turned back to Darla. “I had so many dreams last night, Darla. I saw Da, and then Om was talking to me about him. She says she didn’t urge him to jump at all, that you and Da just found that idea in your own heads. But, yes, in a way, Da jumping really did make Om decide to set us down. It impressed her, and made her feel sorry, and—I don’t know—it was such an intense moment that now Om feels like she knows what makes us tick.”

“Whiyun we supposed to land?” whined Tempest, hunching over something in her lap.

“I think tonight,” said Darla. “It’s just coming back to me. Om showed me this previz flash of how we’d come down. Something about a dark room. A stage? And don’t you be getting spun again today, Tempest, I see that wine. Give it here, cruster. That’s xoxxin’ right, I’m pouring it out. Whirl, whirl, whirl, Om’s magic rays are turning it into air. We’re not gonna come knuckle-walking out of here tonight like Shasta ground sloths, you wave?”

While Darla kept an eye on Tempest, Phil went to peer out of Om’s flaw again. Sticking his head out, he remembered something else Om had told him. The flaw was one of Om’s “fingernails.” A shelf sticking out of the smooth curve of the powerball fingertip that contained them.

Phil looked ana past the vast, curved pink forms of Om’s body, visualizing the SUN’s bright orb as a cloud of winged souls. Da in there too. Hi, Da. Looking kata, Phil once again studied the three pairs of tendrils running from Om’s body kata to the Earth. Two gold-colored, two silvery, two coppery. He and Om had talked about those tendrils in his dreams last night. What Om had said about the tendrils had been esoteric, but Phil had been able to follow it. Having Da say Phil was smart had loosened up Phil’s old mental block against mathematics. The tendrils were in pairs because they were loops. Each pair was a loop like the handle of a coffee cup—with Om the cup, and the loop a handle that had been stretched like taffy, stretched all the way kata to touch the space of Earth. The tendrils were “hypercylindrical vortex threads”—like four-dimensional smoke-rings or tornadoes. The big new insight was that where these threads intersected the space of Earth, they looked, to the Earthlings, like cylindrical tubes: one gold, one silver, one copper. And these three tubes were allas: Yoke’s gold alla and, according to Om, two additional allas that she’d recently allowed the Metamartians to make. A silver alla for Babs and a copper alla for Randy Karl Tucker. The vortex threads carried energy and information back and forth between Om and the allas.

Most important of all, now that Phil understood what the allas were, he knew how easy it was to split one in two. And with this new knowledge, he was quite sure he could use Yoke’s alla to make one of his own—Om willing.