Realware

So Cobb and Yoke cautiously buzzed the navy ship, Yoke averting her eyes from the avid gray sharks who'd eaten Onar.

Captain Pulu waved a friendly go-ahead. They landed long enough for Yoke to outdo herself by making a perfect one-meter gold cube, weighing in at just under twenty tons. The cube was quite the elegant objet d'art.

But, in the event, making so massive an object out of thin air was fairly drastic.

As Yoke later calculated, if one kilogram of air takes up a cubic meter, twenty tons of air takes up a cube some twenty-seven meters on a side. A volume the size of a ten-story office building. Fortunately, she thought of making herself a pair of earplugs before she did it.

The whirlwind of so much air being sucked into the alla-cube made a thunderclap that knocked Cobb and Yoke off their feet. The ocean sloshed sullenly and some loose debris blew off the deck. But nobody was hurt, and the ship's hull didn't burst, and the captain didn't shoot at them, and Yoke and Cobb flew on up into the sky, leaving the Tongans with nearly one hundred million dollars worth of gold.

"But wait, Cobb," said Yoke as the ship began to dwindle below them. "We have to stop by the place where we slept last night. I want to bring my souvenirs."

"What souvenirs?"

"Oh, just some little things. Come on, Cobb. We'll do it fast." Ms. Teta, the housekeeper with the glossy bun, greeted them. She was dozing in the shade with the cook and the maid. "You want lunch today?"

"We're going home," said Yoke. "We're all finished."

"You been back for a while?" asked Ms. Teta. "I thought I heard you in your room."

"No, I've been out on the ship with the King all morning."

"Well, maybe it was your boyfriend."

"Um, maybe?" said Yoke, her heart beating faster. She opened her room's door with a mixture of hope and fear. But it looked the same as before, except that the beds had been made.

"So what are we taking?" asked Cobb.

Yoke picked up her glass sculpture and the looped metal band with the ants embossed on it. Phil had been with her when she'd made them. She spotted Phil's dirty shirt from the day before, picked it up and sniffed it. His smell. She wrapped it around the sculptures. And there was the big green bean Phil had been so proud of. Of course, that had to come too. Yoke's eyes filled with tears. Last night had felt like the first of an endless series of similar nights --hard to believe it could have been the only one.

"Let's go, Cobb."

As they arced up into the sky, Cobb used telephoto vision to peer down at the beach where the aliens had been. Yoke shared in his vision via the uvvy. It looked like a pelican rookery and UFO landing field down there, with all the Cappy Jane birds and the giant disk. And --

"Oh Lord, they caught them," said Yoke. "Why didn't they run away!" Cobb's telephoto vision had a nearly unlimited zoom ability; Yoke was able to dial it up to see that the Cappy Janes had captured all seven Metamartians down there. They had Shimmer, Ptah, Peg, Siss, Wubwub, a new one that looked like a man-sized bird and --dialing up the magnification a bit more -- Yoke could even see that one of the Cappy Jane birds was holding the little beetle Josef. The Cappy Janes kindled a fire in which the seven unresisting aliens were consumed.

"It's hard to believe," said Cobb.

"Maybe it has something to do with coming from two-dimensional time," said Yoke.

"They might not have much of a survival instinct? But that's not how I saw Shimmer acting that time on the Moon. It's weird. But, oh Cobb, with the aliens gone, how can I ever get Phil?"

"I don't know," said Cobb. "Could be you'll have to give up on him. There's more fish in the sea, Yoke." He powered up for a bit longer, finally reaching a point where he could cut off his jets and let them coast along their trajectory.

"I just noticed that the Cappy Janes are locked onto our location," Cobb said.

"They're tracking us. Unless we do something, they'll track us all the way to San Francisco. And eventually hunt us down."

"Can you make yourself invisible?"

"I can block the Squanto ID locator signal I'm putting out, but then they might want to follow us in person. One of them might tail us."

"Why don't we send off a decoy? I can alla you some imipolex and you can copy yourself just like the Cappy Janes did."

"Two--two of me?" said Cobb hesitantly. "I'm not sure I'm in a mood to reproduce."

"Can you just make a dumb minimal clone that sends out your Squanto signal and flies -- I don't know -- out into space or something?"

"I could do that. In fact we can send Squanto on a trip to the Moon. That'll make sense to them, even if the 'Sue and Squanto' cover breaks down. The Moon is exactly where you might expect Cobb and Yoke to go. Tell you what, Yoke, use your alla to customize a piece of imipolex shaped exactly like me. And I can put a partial nervous system into it. The air's very thin up here. Anything you make will just coast along next to us. Can you stick your alla out through my skin?"

"1 don't need to stick it out. I can move the control mesh to wherever I like. There it is." A bright-line copy of Cobb's form appeared next to them, and then -- whoosh -- it was virgin imipolex.

Cobb stretched out a mold-filled tendril and began programming his dummy.

"Something else, Yoke," he said after a minute. "I think you should make a big piece of human flesh that we can seal inside him so he looks like he's still carrying you. In case the Cappy Janes really focus in on him."

"There's no human flesh in the alla catalog. The Metamartians didn't want it to be easy for us or the moldies to try and use the alla for reproduction. But, hmm, they do have a human skeleton. Remember, it's like every possible catalog in the world got folded into the master alla catalog. And this skeleton I'm looking at is like what you buy to use for anatomy classes. I guess it's kosher for the alla, since dead bone doesn't have living cells. And, oh wow, of course it's tweakable. I can make it just the same proportions as me!"

"Do it."

"I'm getting it ready in my head. The way you do realware, Cobb, is you completely get your image all together before you make the mesh and actualize it with the alla. Instead of just making a naked skeleton, I'm going to wrap the skeleton up in something of about the right density. I could use bologna but -- " Yoke suddenly giggled. "How about tofu! Sue Miller as the ultimate vegan!" Another whoosh, and there was a tofu-and-bone fake Yoke flying along next to them.

The fake Cobb opened up and sealed itself over the fake Yoke. Cobb turned off his own locator ID signals and brought up the dummy's signals at the same time. And then the fake Yoke and Cobb --or the fake Squanto and Sue Miller --blasted on up away from them, presumably tracked by the Cappy Jane's surveillance signals. The flight back to San Francisco was uneventful; Yoke slept most of the way. She woke as they plummeted down toward the thumb of the San Francisco peninsula. The sun was setting and the buildings of San Francisco looked lovely and gold.

"Back to Babs's?" asked Cobb.

"Yeah," said Yoke. "I like her. And she seems to have a lot of room. I hope she doesn't mind putting us up."

"She talks tough, but she's a soft touch," said Cobb. "Hell, she's even letting my great-grandson Randy stay there. I like Babs too. Wait till she sees your alla!"

"We should keep that quiet for now, Cobb. I don't want to end up in the middle of another feeding frenzy."

Nobody paid much notice when they landed on the dead-end street with Babs's warehouse. There was a homeless woman fishing in the bay, some kids working on an ancient old truck, a woman bent over her garden, a long-haired boy sitting on some steps strumming his guitar, a man walking down the street with a bag of groceries. And now here were Cobb and Yoke again, back in the thick of it. They walked in through the open garage door to Babs's warehouse. The little plastic chicken Willa Jean cackled a warning. Randy Karl Tucker looked up from a nanomanipulator, surprised to see them. "Shit howdy! I thought you'd be gone till next weekend, Cobb."