Realware

"Look out!" cried Yoke, but rather than ru

"I envy him," the new Ptah said to Shimmer. "But I'm happy to help you reach the necessary seven to mate." He looked down at his new body approvingly. "I wasn't quite sure our replication procedure would work in this part of the cosmos." Ptah turned to Yoke, noticing her worried expression. "My original self will begin screaming now, Yoke, but don't worry, it's just a way to blow off a little physical discomfort. It'll look like he's being killed, but really he's just moving into a higher dimension."

The bright, shifting sphere darted to the original Ptah, and he became part of the round spatial anomaly. His beautiful, symmetric body puffed out as if inflated. And as predicted, he began to scream in pain. "Om kreet!" he shrieked. The great round anomaly of the powerball's space was inside of the original Ptah; his imipolex flesh was stretched out across its surface. A powerful glow emanated from his distorted face; his eyes were as lambent coals. "Om kreet, kreet, kreet!" A dreadful sound. His swollen form was starting to dwindle.

"Are you exactly the same as the old Ptah?" Yoke asked the new Ptah.

"Yes," said the new Ptah. "It's very easy for us to make realware copies of ourselves. We simply alla up an identical copy-each of us has an alla nestled within his or her body, you see. I'm used to seeing copies of myself go away. Remember that on Metamars we lead incalculably many parallel lives."

"What's going to happen to the old Ptah?" asked Yoke.

"Om wants to examine one of our Earth-style moldie bodies," said Josef. "The old Ptah will go to a kind of chamber inside Om, probably with the others. And then I imagine he'll move on. Into the Light."

Watching the old Ptah's apparent agony, Yoke wondered if this was what had happened to her mother. Was there any chance that Darla was anything other than dead? And what did Josef mean by the "Light"? Suddenly it looked as if the power-ball might be drifting their way.

"No," groaned Yoke. She and Cobb began ru

Soon they'd reached the diamond-hard wall of the dome. Wubwub sniffed at the ground and pushed himself against Yoke's legs, herding her a few yards along the curving edge of the wall.

"Stop it!" said Yoke. Across the meadow, the tiny shrunken powerball was darting about erratically, but it wasn't heading their way.

"Just a little to the right," said the black pig, insistently pushing Yoke with his snout. Finally he stopped. "This be the spot."

"Listen to me," said Josef. The lustrous beetle was still perched on Yoke's boob. "We are going to take down the dome now. The water will rush in."

"We'll be crushed!"

"Not if you get inside Cobb and stay at this precise spot," said Josef. "Wubwub will help push you in the right direction when the water comes. Remember that we can see a few minutes' worth of all the possible futures. Hurry, Yoke. Get inside of Cobb this very instant!"

Cobb flopped himself flat on the ground next to Wubwub, and Yoke sat down on him. She was still holding the alla. The old Ptah had stopped screaming. The five other Metamartians were standing by the dome's pure diamond wall as well, waiting.

"I will come with," said Josef, his legs clinging to Yoke's pullover. "And the others will organize a new node. Now that we've made contact with you, Yoke, we don't want the King to know where we are anymore."

The noble Wubwub stood firm at Yoke's side. He was lightly poised on his trotters, with his vigilant snout tracking the distant powerball's moves. "Rest of us movin' somewhere fresh. This place got bad juice now, you know what I'm sayin'?"

Cobb sealed himself up, and Yoke switched to viewing through Cobb's sensors. There was a pop and the last trace of Ptah and the powerball disappeared. Wubwub braced himself firmly against Cobb, pressing the bathyscaph against the dome's wall. The other Metamartians were braced against the wall as well, all of them ready to spring out into the sea.

And then the dome disappeared and six miles worth of water came rushing past them, crushing the air within the bubble into incandescent white light, illuminating for an instant, like the first flashbulb since creation, the dark ooze of the primeval ocean floor.

CHAPTER THREE

PHIL

February 21

Friday night Phil dreamed about his father again. In the dream he and his dad were sitting in a greenhouse full of orange nasturtiums and jasmine vines. Old Kurt was wearing his teaching clothes. His arms were missing. The jasmine smelled like musk, like rotten incense.

"The wowo took them off," said Kurt, his empty jacket sleeves flapping. "But they're healing fast." Blood was seeping through the shoulders of the jacket. Made anxious by his father's wounds, Phil looked down at his own body. He was dressed in his sleeping outfit, a long T-shirt. He could see the individual hairs on his legs. One of his hands was clenched into a fist; when he opened it, the knotted, mirror-reversed wedding ring was there.

"I can't decide if I'm really dead," Kurt was saying. "Did I get a stuzzy funeral? Big tears? Bunch of drunks?" All the while the dusty orange nasturtium blossoms were singing in tiny, high voices, with the jasmine blossoms harmonizing a background.

"It was heavy, Da," said Phil, and the heavy gold ring tumbled from his hand.

"Gold from the roots," said Kurt. "Marry her."

The smeary music of the flowers was vibrating Phil's sinuses in a way he couldn't bear. He was crying. He tumbled off into jumbled dreams of mountain climbing.

When Phil woke, his father's knotted wedding ring actually was in his hand. He'd fallen asleep holding it. Was he crazy? He had to get rid of it today. Fuck this suicide shit.

It was ten a.m. and Kevvie was still unconscious. She didn't have to go in to work today because yesterday she'd gotten fired. Trying to get over the hangover from her Thursday night merge session with Klara Bio, Kevvie had stolen a bunch of Tendur painkillers from one of her lady clients, and the sharp-eyed old woman lodged an instant complaint. The geezer-sitter service had sent a dragonfly to sample Kevvie's blood on her way out of the client's building, and she'd failed the test big time. The service wouldn't stand for geezer sitters taking off their clients' drugs. So last night a resentful Kevvie had blown it all out on quaak and Tendur, and was completely twisted by the time Phil got home from work. He'd found her chasing after Umberto with a butcher knife yelling "Off with his head." Normally Kevvie was harmless, but when she was lifted enough she could get into a scary evil queen trip. This morning she looked like a nodded-out junkie, her mouth wide open and drool all down her chin. One of her hands was still soft from an ill-considered three A.M. splash of merge.

"It's over," Phil said softly to himself, and then he said it again, a little louder. "It's over, Kevvie. I'm not carrying you anymore." She snored on. Could he get her to move out? That would be hard. There was no formal lease, and Kevvie had been splitting the rent with him for the last ten months. Though Phil had built the birdhouse a full year before Kevvie moved in with him, she was likely to argue that by now it was hers as much as his. Which left only one alternative.