Realware

"Good day, Phil," said Josef. "I present you the other Metamartians."

"What are you guys really doing here?" asked Phil when the introductions were done. "What are you after?"

"We're like tourists on a road-trip," said Shimmer. "Except that we're never going home." She looked like a soft Greek sculpture, like Venus. Phil would have liked to touch her. "Like so many others, our race evolved to the point where we scattered out into the cosmos as personality waves, a bit like cosmic rays. It's rare that there's a --a 'radio' that can 'play' us. But we have an endless amount of time. Sooner or later one always gets lucky. Last November, as you must have heard, Willy Taze and the loonie moldies found a way to decrypt a number of extraterrestrial beings into imipolex bodies."

"It was a disaster," said Phil. Though Shimmer's voice was mesmerizing in its musicality and beauty, Phil found himself wanting to argue with her. "One of you destroyed the Moon's spaceport. Hundreds of people died."

"Yes," said Shimmer curtly. She seemed to have adopted a beautiful woman's high self-regard and low patience. "But the single warlike alien who ran amok was no Metamartian. All of the peaceful extraterrestrials were indiscriminately murdered by humans --under the leadership of Darla Starr. I alone escaped. And it was I who eliminated the last vestige of that single warlike alien. But I don't ask for your gratitude -- no more than you would seek praise from an ant. Or from a bacterium."

"We understand why y'all fought back," put in Wubwub. "But we be good guys, know what I'm sayin'?"

"I still don't get what you're doing here," said Phil.

"I said that we're tourists," said Shimmer. "But it would be better to call us nomads. We live in transit, and whenever we can, we form a little family and mate. Yes, whenever one of us manages to incorporate somewhere, we immediately try and build up a family of seven of our fellows. Bringing in more Metamartians is what I've been doing for the last few months, Phil, as you can see. There's six of us now, and soon we'll be seven. Seven provides the ideal resonance for reproduction, among other things."

"A bunch of nomads looking to get laid, huh?" said Phil. "Didn't I hear Josef say something about helping Om? You're really missionaries, aren't you?"

"Missionaries?" laughed Shimmer. "Every traveler is a kind of missionary, no? But, yes, it's true that our god Om follows us wherever we go. And, yes, we do help Om to give allas to the civilizations we discover. It's win-win. The alla-registration process allows Om to obtain software copies of the individuals who accept her gift--and everyone does accept. Receiving the power I of the alla is the greatest gift a being can have. So now you I know a Metamartian's entire agenda. First, to find a world where one can decrypt; second, to assemble a family of seven; third, to spread Om's allas; and fourth, to move on. There needn't be any problems at all when Earth is visited by the right kind of extraterrestrial, you see."

"What about my father getting killed?"

"We'll get to that in a minute," said Shimmer, the music of her voice gone a bit dissonant. "Can you please stop interrupting? I want to fill you in on what I've been up to, all right? Just very briefly. I flew from the Moon to the Earth and I made a I deal with the King of Tonga to use his Cappy Jane satellite as an ante

"Om is what you call the powerball, right?" said Phil. "Can > you explain what happened when it got my father?"

" 'She,' not 'it,' " said the bronze Ptah. His body echoed Shimmer's perfection of human form. "Om is the God of Meta-mars. She lives in the higher dimensions. Our race first reached a working relationship with her some thousand of your years I ago. Some other aliens brought her to us. Om lives outside of ordinary space and time. Whenever one of Om's people travels somewhere, a manifestation of Om comes there as well. Our god follows us. She can appear in various guises, but most commonly she shows herself as a four-dimensional hypersphere."

"Four-dimensional?" murmured Phil uneasily. He sensed the imminence of a batshit math-rap, bound to make him feel dumb.

"Jawohl," boomed the German-accented Josef. He was perched on Shimmer's lovely shoulder. "I am taking this question. Although I feel that Om is surely of an infinite dimensionality, she usually enters space as a powerball. Her surface is : a bounded region of three-dimensional space that has no edges: a hypersphere. Do understand that the fourth dimension of space is not to be confused with any dimension of time. If you doggedly wish to refer to your time as the fourth dimension, then the powerball can of course be called five-dimensional. But it makes an easier ma

"I'm not going to touch that one," said Phil, momentarily distracted from finding out about his father. "Let me ask this instead. If Om can jump all around the cosmos, why do you travel as personality waves? Why not just ask Om to take you where you want to go?"

"We never know where we going in first place," said Siss. "What we do is to chirp into personality wave, let wave travel to place where it get decrypted into body, to find family there, to teach about Om, and then to chirp further. Travel is our way."

"But what does Om want?" asked Phil. "Why did she swallow up Ptah and my father?"

"Om is curious about everything," said Josef. "Your father caught her interest with his wowo display. Om thought this was a very interesting patterning of space. So one supposes that she had a curiosity to get a better acquaintance with your father. She could perhaps return him to the world at some time. As for why she ate the original Ptah -- Ptah?"

"Om wished to see what kind of body a Metamartian on Earth might occupy, so one of us was selected," said Ptah. "The trip into hyperspace was painful for my original self, yes, but it was an honor. Om chose me at Josef's suggestion; Josef knows I come from the noblest Metamartian stock. The little beetle says he admires me --and I suspect that he envies me as well. His choice only heightens my glory. All must recognize that it was I, Ptah, who once led the most harmonious weave of lives in our two-dimensional time, and it is I, Ptah, who has been the first to travel from Earth to the bosom of Om."

"Well-spoken, Ptah," said Peg. The unicorn had a contralto voice and a theatrical way of talking. "Isn't it droll how one chains one's words together here? Like threading pearls upon a necklace. Phil wots not that the Metamartian mode of speech is as a fractally branching fan."

"Yadda yadda yadda," said Phil. "Why do you have to keep jabbering about math?"

"When she talk about a fan, she mean Metamars be in a place where time spreads out nice and fat," said Wubwub comfortably. "Like it supposed to be. In fat time, no one thing really matters, know what I'm sayin'? It's grim and down to live the way you do, Phil. One poor little time thread all by its lonely self. You folks deserve to have the allas."

"You said it was your fault the powerball killed my father," Phil said to the pig. "Tell me more about what happened!"

"He ain't dead," said Wubwub. "You got dirt in your ears, my man? Your daddy's in hyperspace. When Om sweep through your space it like someone's hand scoopin' up a water-strider bug. One second the bug on the water, second later it on the back of the hand. One second your Daddy in bed, next second he on Om's powerball. He probably just kickin' it. Om's powerball got light and air, and a built-in alla for food."