Realware

"The Metamartians say Om is God. So maybe we've already met God. In our dreams. She talked to me all night long. Asking about life on Earth."

"You too, huh?" said Kurt. "In my worst moments I think Om is St. Penis-at-the-Pearly-Gates's assistant, deciding whether or not to send me to Hell. But mostly Om's been picking my brain about mathematics. It was the wowo that got her attention. Advanced as they are, the Metamartians never happened to make this particular model of the Klein bottle. It reminds Om of her--childhood? That's not the right word. Origin, maybe."

"She didn't tell me anything about her origin."

"She says there's a higher-level God that she comes from. And that's the God I'm worried about. He's supposed to be made of Light. I think maybe I saw Him when I peeked out into hyperspace. Light with a capital L."

"I saw that Light for a long time yesterday," said Phil. "There were wonderful vibes coming off it. I'm not scared of God like you, Da. I even pray. It helps me stay sober."

"You're a better man than me, son. I wish I could be more like you. But I'm too old to change."

"It's never too late."

Kurt put his hands to his head. "What a hangover. So the Light didn't dart over and grab you when you looked at it? Let's go stick our heads out and have a good look around. I'll try using Humpty-Dumpty like you did. If there's any way for us to get back to Earth, it's got to be through that hole."

So Kurt and Phil got hold of Humpty-Dumpty and took turns looking through the flaw in the hypersphere. Kurt finally agreed with Phil that the Divine Light had good vibes.

"It doesn't feel like a judgmental God," allowed Kurt. "It feels like a God of Love. Like the Light cares and wants to help me. Weird."

"I think we get to decide what our God is like," said Phil.

"God is so different from us that any of our notions is inadequate. So why not assume God is good and loving? All right, Da, I see your expression, I'm not going to harp on this, I don't want to sound like the usual bullshitting religious pricks. Next topic: Do you have any ideas about that big disk of rock and mud that sometimes looks like water?"

"Those are slices of the Earth," said Kurt. "It's good they're so detailed. That means we're not at a very great hyperspace distance from home."

"Earth!" exclaimed Phil. "Teach me some math, Da. I need a refresher course. Why do Earth and my body look like cross sections? Talk about A Square." Kurt smiled. He loved to talk about A Square. "All right! So think of A Square on a sphere floating above the plane of Plat-land. We're the same, with-every dimension one notch higher.' O

We're on a hypersphere floating ana the space we come from. A Square's sphere has a little ledge on it, a place where he can slide his eye corner off. That's like Om's flaw. When A Square wags his eye back and forth, what does he see?"

"Weird shit," said Phil.

"Indeed. Let us analyze. When we look at the world, we see little 2D patches on our 2D retina, and we use these to build up a 3D image of a world. A Square sees little ID patches on his ID retina --imagine that his retina is a line at the back of his 2D eye --and he uses those to build up a 2D image of a world. But when he's up above Flatland looking down, he doesn't see Flatland as a whole. Instead he sees what's in the particular 2D world of his eye plane. The plane of his eye intersects the plane of Flatland in a ID line. A cross section of Flatland. And if the cross-section line intersects some Flatland object, then A Square is seeing the i

"Whew," said Phil. "It's easier to see it than to talk about it. I saw a cross section of my heart. Did you look down at your chest. Da?"

"I did. Right down into my tired old ticker. And when we look down at Earth, we see cross sections of the Earth. We see these giant disks of dirt or water. It depends where our eye's 3D cross section of 4D hyperspace happens to intersect the 3D Earth in a 2D plane."

"Yaaar," said Phil. "But why is the inside of my heart lit up? You'd think it would be dark in there."

"That must be because there's a four-dimensional light in hyperspace," said Kurt. "From that divine Light we saw."

"The SUN!" exclaimed Phil. "Cobb Anderson talked about it at your funeral. I asked him what it had been like to be dead. The God Light must be what Cobb called the SUN. Capital S-U-N."

"The SUN," said Kurt. "That's a good name. As long as you understand that the SUN has nothing to do with our regular Sun."

"The SUN's light is inside everything," said Phil slowly. "It's like our world is made of stained-glass pieces with the God Light shining through. A cathedral window lit by the SUN. How can you be scared, Da?"

"You know," said Kurt after a long pause, "I have this feeling I should fly into the SUN. Maybe if I sacrifice myself, then Om will let you go."

"Oh man, with you getting so wrecked all the time, you don't know what you're talking about anymore," said Phil. "Put that shit away. I'm go

With his father hanging onto his legs, Phil leaned way out of the flaw in Om's hypersphere. He flopped around until he saw a huge disk of rock and dirt; this time he noticed a glowing region at its distant center. The Earth's core. Now Phil began delicately wobbling his head to make the cross-sectional disk smaller and smaller. Right before it disappeared it became a great lake of water. He moved back the way he'd come, and this time he could see that there were some bumps off on one side of the water, some circles of dirt and--yes! -- some angular shapes that must have been the cross sections of buildings. He studied it for ten or fifteen minutes, minutely adjusting his angle and focusing all of his attention down into the squares. There were moments when the image bore a more than passing resemblance to a map of San Francisco. Yoke had said she'd wait for him there. Oh, Yoke.

Da pulled Phil back inside and took another turn with Humpty-Dumpty. He said he wanted to get a good look at the I SUN. After a few minutes he came back inside the hypersphere looking very jangled.

"I do believe it's happy hour," said Kurt. "God, I wish I had some pot." Sure enough, three minutes later Tempest and Darla floated over with fat reefers burning in their lips.

"Looky what I just found in the catalog!" twanged Tempest. "It's like Om's learnin' herself to make ever'thang we need. This is Heaven, ain't it?"

"Or Hell," said Phil, and pushed himself away.

WEDNESDAY

Phil woke up earlier than the others. He put on Humpty-Dumpty and got to work trying to see San Francisco again. This time he took closer notice of the six metallic tendrils leading kata from Om toward Earth. The tendrils seemed to be in pairs: two were golden, two silvery, and two copper-colored. All six led down toward the grid that seemed to be San Francisco. Was there any chance he might glimpse a slice of Yoke? Phil asked Om for help.

"Can you move us closer, Om?"

There was no audible answer, and Phil expected none. In last night's dream conversations, Om had explained that she was accustomed to talking only to Metamartians, to beings who lived in endless layers of parallel time. Om's utterances were so diffuse that a human needed to be asleep in order to achieve a state of mind subtle enough to hear her voice.

But even though the waking Phil couldn't hear Om's answer, he could see that his request had been noted, for now the grid pattern of San Francisco began to expand. The crazy, shifting angles of the cross-sectional buildings were no more than a few thousand yards off. Phil felt sure Yoke was down there. What if he jumped kata toward her? This might work -- or it might not. He might end up like an animated sidewalk painting of a man with all his i