The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (ebook reader 8 inch .txt) 📕

Yoke,” snapped Darla. “A lesser woman would have gone crazy. Now stop grilling me and let me look for my new clothes.” She stood up and marched off , holding her alla. She had only the slightest limp from her missing toe.

“You know what I’m going to do?” said Cobb, fondling his alla. “I’m going to invent a bacteria that eats the stink right off the moldies. It’s high time. Call it the stinkeater germ. Hey, Darla, I’ll come sit with you. You can be the test-sniffer.” Darla made a face, but Cobb followed her across the room.

“Good thing Randy didn’t hear Cobb’s plan,” Yoke said to Phil. “Randy likes the way moldies smell right now.” Babs and Randy, on the other couch, were deeply engrossed in a personal conversation.

“I’m surprised that your alla remembered the necklace and the ring, Yoke,” said Phil, scooting even closer to Yoke and touching the gold band around her finger. “It must update itself all the time. And you got all of your memories back too? You remember right up to the last instant?”

“I remember,” said Yoke, bracing herself.

“I meant what I said,” said Phil. “I’d like to marry you.”

Yoke slipped the ring off her finger. “This is too big for me, you know. And it’s your father’s.”

“But I want you to have it,” said Phil. “That is, if—”

“Oh, I don’t know, Phil. Yes, I like you very much, but what’s the big rush? Don’t pressure me. It’s all too much for one day. And you keep this ring, I don’t want it, it’s kind of creepy.” She peered down at its inscription. “The writing’s still backward.”

Phil took the ring and read the engraving. ” ‘wolliW morf turK oT,’ ” he said. “At least it’s unknotted.” He pocketed it. “The necklace looks really good on you. You notice how the shape of the gem changes as well as its color? Dynamic Metamartian realware. You’ll keep it, won’t you?”

“Okay,” said Yoke, glancing down. “And now let’s stop negotiating. I’m tired. But I’m afraid to go to sleep. Being dead wasn’t all sunny and nice, you know. There were bad things too. Things like demons. I’m sure I’m going to dream about them.”

While Yoke and Phil were talking, Babs and Randy finished their tête-à-tête and now they were standing up.

“Good night, guys!” sang Babs. “We’re going to hit the hay. We’ll start handing out allas in the morning.” She and Randy disappeared behind a floor-to-ceiling curtain of red and yellow moiré silk, presumably to share Babs’s canopy bed.

Darla and Cobb were over in the kitchen part of the room chatting. Darla was sipping at a split of champagne and alla-making outfit after outfit, asking Cobb’s opinions about each one. Cobb was screwing around with some cryptic biotech machinery that he’d alla-made. Each time Darla would ask Cobb about an outfit, he’d ask her what she thought of the smell of some fresh sample of gene-tailored mold.

“Let’s get in bed together?” suggested Phil.

“In here?” said Yoke, rolling her eyes toward her mother.

“We can alla-make ourselves a nest. Like what I used to live in at Calla and Derek’s.”

“Where Kevvie probably is right now. That pig. What happened to her after she killed me?”

“Haresh kept us from getting to her. But then the aliens took off in a flying saucer. Kevvie wanted them to take her with them, but they didn’t. We didn’t try to do anything to her yet because we wanted to hurry back here and make a new realware you. We just left her there on the Anubis.”

Yoke felt a stab of fear. “What if she comes to get me again? Shouldn’t you call the Gimmie?”

“Oh, not the Gimmie,” sighed Phil. “And then everyone finds out about the allas? I’ll do something to Kevvie myself tomorrow morning. Maybe I’ll take her alla away. But I don’t think we have to worry right now. If I know Kevvie, she’s back at Calla and Derek’s, trying to snort her way to the bottom of an alla-made mound of gabba. Saint and I’ll go over there tomorrow morning and we’ll take her alla while she’s still passed out. Okay?”

Yoke found Phil’s calmness maddening—but it was contagious. “Okay,” she said, leaning against him.

“Now let me make us that nest.” Phil gazed thoughtfully at the girders supporting the warehouse roof.

“Not up there, Phil. Put it where Ma won’t be staring at us. In fact let’s put it outside. In the alley.”

So they stepped out the warehouse’s side door into a deserted, dead-end alley. It was raining. Phil held out his pale gold alla and formed a control mesh in the air. Raindrops fell through the mesh, twinkling in its light. It took Phil a minute to get the structure fully imagined. Finally he said, “Actualize,” and a cozy-looking box was resting on the alley’s cinders; it was pentagonal like a shingled wren’s house, with a big round door on hinges and a triangular window next to the door.

“I had the alla put rubber cushions under it, Yoke, so we don’t get cold. See?”

“Don’t come a-knockin’ if this nest’s a-rockin’.” Yoke giggled, feeling relaxed for the first time since she’d popped back. “Looks like Babs and me are gonna scooore!” She stuck her head back into the warehouse. “Hey, Ma, good night!”

“You’re sleeping outside?”

“Phil made us a little house. You can use my bed. Just for fun I made it a bunk-bed like Joke and I used to have at home. It’s in the corner over there. Cobb will show you.”

“How cute. Well, good night, dear. What a scare you gave me today. Thank God you survived. I’m going to uvvy Whitey in a few minutes.”

“Don’t whip him up too much about Kevvie. Just say I’m fine and tell him hi from me. The big news is that _you’re _back, Ma. He’s going to be so glad.”

“I hope so.” Darla’s face hardened a little. “I might just blow Kevvie’s head off tomorrow morning. And as for your father—he better not be with one of his little chippies.” She held out her arms. “Give me a kiss.”

So Yoke walked across the room and kissed her mother good night, and then went back outside to get into the little nest-house Phil had made them. Phil had put a bed in their nest, and three lit candles for light. They lay there cuddling for a long time, talking a little, and then, finally, they made love.

“That was even nicer than I expected,” said Yoke when they were done.

“Me too,” said Phil. “I love you, Yoke.”

“I love you.”

“June wedding?”

“Maybe.” Yoke found herself smiling uncontrollably. “We’ll see. What’s going to happen to everything in the meantime? After everyone gets an alla.”

“We’re really going to give them to everyone?”

“We were talking about that while you were gone,” said Yoke. “If other people can’t get allas, they’re going to kill us to take ours away.”

“Does getting killed matter? If your alla can bring you back?”

“If someone shreds you with like an O. J. ugly-stick, and then your alla asks them if they’d rather actualize a new Phil or register the alla for themselves, they’re not going to make a new you.”

“And—_myoor!—_I just thought of something,” said Phil, running his fingers through his blond hair. “When your alla brought you back, Yoke, it made a realware copy of you just the way you were before you died. And that was fine—since you were in perfect health right up until the instant Kevvie turned you into air. But if I bleed to death from an O. J. ugly-stick attack, then when the alla actualizes a fresh Phil, it’s gonna be me lying there all trashed and bleeding to death—and I die all over again.”

“Gnarly! It would be torture!”

“Actually, I have a feeling that recorporation only works if it was an alla that killed you in the first place,” said Phil. “It’s probably a kind of fail-safe feature to keep the allas from becoming a weapon. I think the aliens would have told us if an alla also had the effect of making its owner immortal.”

“Why don’t you ask Om?” said Yoke. “Didn’t you say she’d been talking to you?”

“Yes, I could hear Om when I was inside her, up there in hyperspace. But even there I could only do it when I was dreaming. I don’t think I’ll be able to hear her at all down here in regular space.”

It was raining hard now, and the drops were drumming on their little roof. The window was open a little to let air in, with a red silk curtain over it for privacy. Yoke alla-made herself an orange.

“Want some?” she said, peeling it by the warm candlelight.

“Thanks. This is such fun. I’ve never been so happy. It was good to see my dad.”

“What was that like?”

“He was nice to me,” said Phil. “And I told him I was sorry I’d been mean to him. He told me I was smart.”

“I knew that already.” Yoke smiled and touched Phil’s cheek. “Are you going to use your alla to make blimps?”

“I have been thinking about it. I have an idea how to keep blimps from getting pushed around by the wind. People are always looking for new ways to fly. Getting a moldie to carry you isn’t that pleasant. I mean, then you have the moldie to deal with. It’s like taking a cab instead of driving.”

“I don’t understand why people don’t use DIMs to make big brainless flapping things that aren’t moldies. Kind of like Randy’s giant snail?”

“The problem is that safely flying a person takes enough mass and enough computational ability that you’d have to give a flapping thing a fairly elaborate mold-based nervous system. And then it would end up turning into a moldie and not being willing to work for you. A blimp’s brain can be a lot simpler. My secret is that I’m going to give my blimps a kind of _hair. _But what giant snail of Randy’s are you talking about?”

Yoke was expecting to start laughing about Randy again, but her recent contact with the White Light had sapped the meanness right out of her. The story ended up coming across as something pathetic that had happened to a friend.

“Poor Randy,” said Phil when she was done. “What a story! If all the snail needed to do was to repeat things and to crawl on him, it could perfectly well be a wad of dumb imipolex with a DIM. Like those little dinosaurs Babs just made. The mind boggles at the kilp that’s gonna come down when everyone gets an alla. What was all that talk about plutonium on the Anubis?”

“Cobb told Siss to tell Om to not let people make atomic bombs,” said Yoke. “Just in case. We feel like everyone on Earth should get an alla—and there’s bound to be someone who would make an atomic bomb on purpose. And even if there weren’t, somebody might worry about it so much they’d end up accidentally making an atomic bomb themselves while they were dreaming. Having a really bad dream.”

“Isn’t there a way to turn off your alla before you go to sleep?” asked Phil.

“You just take off your uvvy,” said Yoke.

“Oh, right. Which of course I always do.”

“Once I forgot and slept with my uvvy on and people were coming into my dreams. Pervs. Some of them make a point