Realware

He followed Yoke to perch on a big coral head, catching his breath.

"This is paradise, Yoke."

"Yes," said Yoke. "It's good to share this with you." They kissed again, this time much longer than before.

For the next forty-five minutes they paddled around, chatting and getting to know each other better. The more Phil talked with Yoke, the more he liked her. Like Phil, Yoke was into being clean and sober. And she shared Phil's contempt for conventional goals. "It's like society wants you to be a machine," was how Yoke put it. "Programmed to ignore everything besides the one thing they use to control you. Money or clothes or drugs or group approval. People don't see that the real world is all that matters." But unlike Phil, Yoke's contempt for society made her invigorated, not paralyzed. "There are so many things I want to do."

"When I wake up each morning, I always think it's going to be a nice day," said Phil. "That's my basic take. Instead of thinking that I have to do something to make the day be good. It's already perfect. I don't have to do anything at all. In fact if I do anything, I'm likely to fuck up."

"Oh no, Phil," said Yoke. "We have to work on the world. It isn't perfect at all. What about the news on the uvvy?"

"Well of course I never watch news," said Phil. "News, commercials, mass entertainment--they're all the same. Buy and eat and shit and buy again."

"Yeah, all the ways to avoid being aware," said Yoke. "It's crazy. You think it's bad here, you should see the Moon. There's so much virtual reality there. On Earth you've got more Nature."

"Most people ignore Nature," said Phil. "Except for worrying about weather disasters. But, hey, we shouldn't be talking about 'most people.' That's a trap too. My goal is not to get sucked into anything. Just hang back and stay calm. I don't have to fix anything but myself. The rest of the xoxxin' world can xoxx itself some more."

They were standing in waist-deep water. Yoke splashed her face to reset herself.

"I love the surface of the water, how the reflections make darker and lighter blues where it undulates. All this analog computation for free." Phil accepted the change of subject and they looked at the water for a while. Now and then he glanced up at the island. Sometimes Ke

Phil and Yoke waded over to the island's narrow beach to rest, out of sight from the people above. Cobb flopped down on the beach a little ways off to sun himself, and Josef busied himself crawling around at the edge of the water, investigating tiny forms of sea life. Yoke used her alla to make them a bottle of fresh water.

"This alla is such a powerful thing," said Yoke, passing Phil the bottle. "With some practice I could use it to model almost anything."

"Go beyond the catalog?"

"Yeah. The alla is the ultimate tool. I think I told you before that I'm into figuring out algorithms for natural processes, Phil? Like a coral reef. That would be so wavy to figure out how to grow one. The individual polyps swimming around and landing. I could make one with real coral polyps, and I could make another with imipolex DIM polyps. Sort of like the worms and fabricants that Babs Mooney designs. And, God, there's so much I can do with plants. What a sea of bioinformation there is on Mother Earth." Yoke smiled, lost in happy thought.

"Speaking of Babs, I'm a little worried about that Randy Karl Tucker staying with her," said Phil after a while. "Right before I left, Randy was bragging to me that he was going to get Babs some leech-DIMs."

"That would be bad news," said Yoke. "But I know Randy a little. He talks tough, but he means well. Usually." She smiled at Phil and stroked his hand. "What's your dream of what you'd like to do? Own a restaurant?"

"No ambitions, no goals," said Phil. "I just want life hassle-free. No, I can't see ru

"You were going to show them to me, but--"

"Kevvie," Phil winced. "Yeah, I built the blimps myself. You don't see many big blimps around because they're slow and they don't always go where you expect them to. Helium's pretty cheap, even without the allas. The real problem with blimps is that the wind blows them around. I keep thinking I might invent some way to beat the wind. And then maybe I could go into business selling my blimps. But I know that sounds dumb. Like all my ideas."

"No, it sounds floatin'," laughed Yoke. They kissed for a while, then got up and stretched. The sun was getting too hot.

"What now?" said Phil. "Go back up?"

"I think we should sneak off," said Yoke. "It bothers me for them to think they've got us trapped here."

"Where would you want to go?" asked Phil.

"Anywhere. I don't like the idea of spending the rest of the day sitting around that house with two maids and four bodyguards watching me. This trip is my vacation. I want to look at Neiafu. Hey, Cobb, Josef, come over here." Hearing Yoke's call, the two came over.

"Could you fly us over to Neiafu?" Yoke asked Cobb.

"They'd see," said Cobb, pointing upward. "Tashtego and Daggoo would come after us. I don't want to get in a fight with them. They're mean motherfuckers."

"We could go underwater like a submarine," suggested Phil.

"They could still see us," said Cobb. "This water's really clear. I'm sure they're watching that we don't move away from the island."

"They will not see you if you are not where they look," said Josef. "And this is what I know how to do."

So Cobb stretched himself thin enough to wrap around Yoke and Phil, with Josef on the inside with them too. Josef hooked into their uvvy co

Normally when Phil would imagine the future, he'd see a single mental movie of himself going ahead and doing something. But now, thanks to Josef, he was seeing his immediate future as --oh, a mansion with many rooms. In some of the rooms Tashtego and Daggoo zoomed down on Cobb and rousted them, but in a few of the rooms Cobb swam on undisturbed.

They zigzagged across the harbor from coral head to coral head. At one tricky point, Josef's vision showed them as apprehended in all the futures but one. So they picked the one, which meant that Cobb suddenly dove down to the bottom of the water and burrowed into the mud. A bit later the futures started opening up again. Cobb swam in close to the shore and lurked beneath one of the docks of Neiafu until there came a moment when nobody was looking that way. Cobb disgorged Yoke and Phil, who scrambled onto the dock. Yoke used her alla to quickly make them some bland shorts and T-shirts. She and Phil walked up the dock's gangplank to Vava'u, looking like ordinary yachties come ashore for a bit of sightseeing. Cobb waited in the water, and Josef hung from Yoke's earlobe like a cu

They looked at the few small, utterly nontouristy stores, closed for Sunday. Ca

"Let's go in here," said Yoke, indicating a small, blue-painted wood building: the Bounty Bar. They sat down by a window; at the next table were two tipsy wharf-rats, one a dark-ski