The Ware Tetralogy, Rudy Rucker [inspirational books TXT] 📗

them, at the misty trees and the people outside. “This is what there is. We’re like ants under lichen. Actual organisms crawling around in this shallow layer of fuzz on the Earth.”

“Lichen?” smiled Yoke, wiping off her eyes. “I just saw natural lichen for the first time this week—forest lichen instead of the stuff  inside moldies. Terri took me on a tour of the Big Basin redwoods. The ranger said, ‘Alice Alga took a _lichen _to Freddie Fungi, and ever since, their marriage has been on the rocks.’ ” When Yoke hit the “lichen” pun, she giggled and raised her eyebrows.

“Or maybe we’re like beetles under bark,” said Phil, trying to stay poetic and serious. “Or rabbits in a briar patch. I keep having this funny vision of how glued to the Earth’s surface we are. And how shallow the atmosphere is. Gaia’s skin.”

“I totally know,” said Yoke in a heavy Val accent. Phil couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or if that was a way she really talked.

Outside, the last speaker had finished and people were standing up and starting to mill around.

“Everyone’s going to hit the canapés now,” said Yoke. “Big-time. Before the crowd gets here I need to go to the bathroom.”

“So that’s why you asked if I’m a teacher,” said Phil. “It’s up those stairs, Yoke.”

“Thanks, Phil. It’s nice to meet you. Let’s talk some more in a minute.”

Phil watched Yoke go up the stairs. She had a high, perfectly rounded butt. But she moved up the stairs very slowly, taking one step at a time. It was so painful to watch that Phil looked away for a minute. When he looked back, Yoke was at the top. She smiled and waved as if she’d just mounted some great peak.

“Oh there you are.” It was Kevvie, chewing a stick of celery. “Why’d you run off in the middle of the service?”

“It was getting to be too much for me.” Phil glanced up the stairs. No more Yoke. He sort of didn’t want her to see him with Kevvie. “Let’s go out on the porch.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something about your father’s ashes?”

“Oh God, I forgot.”

Phil hurried back down the steps to where his family stood around the rug on the ground. The reddish madrone wood of the miniature eight-sided box made Phil think of a stop sign.

Angular little sister Jane hugged Phil. Willow gave him a brittle smile. Eve, Isolde, and great-aunt Hildegarde each gave him a kiss. Rex shook his hand and clapped his shoulder, Aunt Zsuzsi patted his cheek, cousins Gina and Mary smiled sadly.

Kurt had often said he wanted them to dig his ashes into the soil under a certain big oak tree in a park near Palo Alto, he and the kids had strolled there together many times. The tree was split near its base into a pair of great twin trunks. Phil had been placed in charge of informally sneaking the ashes into the public land, so now he put the flat little box in his coat pocket. Eve had forced him to buy a suit for the funeral; it was the first time in his life Phil had ever worn one.

They stood around for a bit, sadly reminiscing. Jane recalled how Kurt had always rhapsodized about the oak tree, how he’d gone on about fractals and gnarliness and self-organized criticality.

“I remember another thing Da used to say about that tree,” said Phil. “He talked about how the week before the psychologist C. G. Jung died, Jung had a dream about an oak tree blown over in a storm with great nuggets of gold found twined in its roots. ‘I want to be remembered like that,’ Da always said. ‘That my life sent down deep roots that pulled up gold.’ ” Phil sighed heavily. “I don’t know if he really made it.”

“Of course he did,” said Isolde. “Think of his students.”

“And who knows what the wowo will lead to,” said Rex. “Don’t underestimate your old dad, Phil. He was a pisser, but he was deep.”

“Your father loved you very much, Phil,” said Willow reproachfully.

“When he wasn’t too drunk,” muttered Phil.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Speaking of wowos, look at this,” said Jane, hurriedly getting something out of her purse. “Willow gave this to me.”

There was knotted little bit of metal in the palm of Jane’s thin little hand—a gold ring tied in an overhand knot with no sign of a break or a weld. Like a tiny sculpture.

“It’s his wedding-ring,” said Willow. “The rent-a-cops found it on our bedroom floor. If you look closely, you can still make out the inscription, ‘To Kurt from Willow.’ It’s creepy the way it’s knotted. I don’t want it.”

“I think it’s been knotted in the fourth dimension,” said Jane. She’d always been a better student of their father’s ideas than Phil. “In the fourth dimension you can knot a closed loop by lifting part of it ana out of our space, moving it across, and then pushing it back kata into our space.” _Ana _and _kata _had been Kurt Gottner’s special words for the four-dimensional analogs of up and down. Jane looked at Phil with intent eyes. “This means the thing that ate Da comes from a higher dimension.”

“Oh sick, there’s a moldie here,” interrupted Kevvie, sniffing the air. She looked around. “Over there with Tre and Terri Dietz. Who invited a moldie?”

There was indeed a soft -looking figure standing with Tre and Terri Dietz, a plastic moldie shaped like a barrel-chested sixty-year-old man, white-bearded and white-haired, a man with a big head and high cheekbones, his skin somewhat papery in appearance. Even without the smell, you could tell he was a moldie from how flexibly he moved. Yoke was standing next to him, chatting and laughing with a bottle of soda in her hand. She looked like a fashion model.

“I think that’s—you know—Cobb Anderson!” exclaimed Phil, glad for the distraction. Growing up as Kurt Gottner’s son, he’d heard enough about higher dimensions to last him a lifetime. “We’ll talk about it later, Jane.” He hurried over to the other group, glad for another chance to be with Yoke.

“Hi, Phil,” said Yoke. “Cobb, this is Phil Gottner. Phil, this is Cobb Anderson. Cobb flew me down here from the Moon. He’s here to pick up one of his relatives from Santa Cruz. His great-grandson.”

Phil was surprised. ‘You’re from the Moon, Yoke?”

“Duh! Why do you think it took me so long to walk up those stairs? I could see you feeling sorry for me. Well, I’m getting stronger every day.”

“Hello, Phil,” said Cobb, insisting on shaking Phil’s hand. His imipolex moldie flesh was cool and slightly slippery. “Tre says your father was a great man. I hope you don’t mind my coming to the ceremony. I’m just so happy to be out with people doing regular things. I haven’t done anything normal in I don’t know how many years.” He had a hearty, booming voice with a crackle in the lower registers. His speech membranes couldn’t quite reproduce a true human bass.

“I don’t mind if you’re here, Mr. Anderson, it’s an honor. My father would be happy. But there are a lot of the people at the Bass School who really hate moldies. Not that you’re a moldie exactly. I mean, at least you started out as human.”

“I’m like a Wal-Mart greeter now,” rumbled Cobb. “If that means anything to you. Pure plastic.” He turned his massive head, slowly looking around. “Now that you mention it, Phil, I do notice a few frosty stares. I’ll just take a little stroll around the neighborhood. This is Palo Alto, eh?

Pretty snooty. I can see why my great-grandson didn’t want to come.” Cobb smiled, bowed, and undulated off down the school’s gravel driveway.

“I don’t get how he could fly you down here from the Moon,” Phil said to Yoke.

“I was inside him. Like the wendy meat in a California corn-dog!”

“Yoke’s been walking around the Santa Cruz Boardwalk absorbing Earth culture,” said Terri. “She and I made friends when I was up on the Moon, so I invited her to stay with us when she came down.” Terri was a trim, deeply tanned woman with straight dark hair and pink lipstick. Bright golden DIM beads crawled slowly about in her hair.

“Terri’s teaching me about diving,” said Yoke. “I love being underwater. Everything alive all around you. I want to go to the South Pacific pretty soon. Earth is wonderful. And not just the water. The sky!” She gestured upward. A low gauzy cloud was drifting against a background of distant high clouds that rose like mountain ranges to a tender patch of blue. “How can you mudders ever get anything done? Whenever I look at the sky I forget all about whatever I’ve been doing. Such stuzzy soft fractals.” But now her attention returned to Phil. “What kind of job do you have?”

“Non tech. I’m a cook at a three-star San Francisco restaurant named LoLo. My father was disappointed in me. But I’m good at what I do.”

“We hardly have any restaurants on the Moon. Most people just eat food-paste from the tap. And raw fruits and veggies from week trees.”

“Well then, Yoke, our food’s another mudder thing you can enjoy learning about. I’d love to cook some special dishes for—”

“Hi, I’m Kevvie Inch,” interrupted Kevvie, suddenly appearing between Phil and Yoke. “Phil and I live together. Who are you?”

“I’m Yoke Starr-Mydol. I’m from the Moon.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“Oh, tourism, self-improvement. I’m interested in the ocean.”

“You don’t work?”

“Well, nobody’s paying me,” said Yoke. “I’m kind of a software artist. I like to think of algorithms for simulating natural processes. I plan to try and model some Earth things while I’m here.”

“I’m a geezer-visitor,” said Kevvie. “I go see old people all over San Francisco. They have little DIM machines to take care of them, but they don’t have anyone to talk to them. It’s sort of like being a sex-worker, except there’s no sex. I have a girlfriend who’s a sex-worker. Klara Blo. She and I had bacteria-style sex a few weeks back. Have you ever tried bacteria-style sex, Yoke?”

Phil groaned inwardly. This was a new obsession of Kevvie’s and she was always talking about it. “Bacteria-style sex” was the current expression for getting in a tub with someone and taking the drug merge to make your bodies temporarily melt together. Phil refused to do it, because he figured that just one pleasure rush could blow him off the Straight Edge and down into the addict’s regimen, wasted twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Kevvie had started out Straight Edge like Phil, but she’d started dipping and dabbing six months ago, and now she was getting worse all the time.

“I wouldn’t want to,” Yoke was saying matter-of-factly. “I think it’s skanky. My parents have been merge addicts since before I was born. Or were. My mother Darla died two months ago. That’s something I wanted to talk to you about some more, Phil. The thing that killed Darla could have been the same thing that killed your dad. And maybe Tempest Plenty too.”

“I’ve got it!” interrupted Kevvie. “Flying saucers took them! Have you ever seen a flying saucer, Yoke?”

“I saw the real aliens who were on the Moon in November,” said Yoke. “But they didn’t come in any flying machine. They travel in a form like radio waves.”

“I don’t buy