“Senseless violence,” said Shimmer. “How typical. What’s the matter with you men anyway? We’ve been trying to calm things down, but it seems to be hopeless. All we’re asking today is that an Earthling accompany us as we move on. We want to take one of you who knows us a little bit. If we simply abduct some random human, they’ll be too frightened to help us. And not everyone can dream in the right way. Phil’s our first choice because his dreams are just right. Om’s been looking through people’s memories. Those mountains you always dream about, Phil—they point toward two-dimensional time.”
“I can dream as well as Phil can,” said Cobb, his voice loud and firm. “I dream about mountains all the time. Leave the young folks alone.”
“The great old man,” said Peg.
“He not human,” said Siss.
“Yes he is,” said Shimmer, cocking her head as if listening to an inner voice. “In fact, Om says he’ll be fine. She hadn’t thought to look before, but her records show that Cobb’s dreams are just as useful Phil’s.”
“Moldies dream?” Darla whispered to Yoke. “I didn’t know that.”
“Of course we do,” said Isis Snooks, overhearing. “What did you think we were? Machines? I’m glad Cobb is doing this. It’ll get us some xoxxin’ respect.”
“Come aboard, Cobb,” Ptah was saying. “We’ll fly to the outer atmosphere and power up to just below the speed of light. Once we get enough readings, we’ll chirp into personality waves and really be on our way. We’ll show you how.”
“If I come, will Om turn off the allas?” asked Cobb.
“Om is ready to do that,” said Shimmer. “By now she has collected a complete enough set of human memories. She’ll remember your race forever. She only hopes you don’t feel you’ve been cheated once the allas are gone. But the constant killing and the explosions—”
“I suppose we’re too primitive,” said Babs sadly.
“It’s not just that,” said Josef. “It’s that one-dimensional time isn’t a good place for realware. Some of your bombings weren’t even deliberate. Apparently people have started setting off bombs by accident in their dreams. The more that people worry about bombs, the more bombs there will be. Your human dreaming is a risky business. Although Metamartians don’t dream, we’ve occasionally had runaway alla misuse, our own epidemics of mass hysteria. But for us a global disaster doesn’t much matter—because we have so many strands of time. No, I’m afraid that at this stage of your culture, and with your uncontrolled dreaming, your single line of time is simply too fragile for the allas. You do well to want Om to take them away.”
“Then it’s a deal,” said Cobb. “I’ll come with you and dream the way toward two-dimensional time. And you’ll ask Om to take away the allas.”
The Metamartians were silent for a moment, communing with Om.
“Everyone sure they don’t want no more alla?” called Wub-wub. There was another explosion outside, this time closer than before. “Om wants to know.”
“No more alla!” screamed the crowd.
“Hurry up,” cried Yoke. “Do it now! And have Om take away the alla-made weapons like Shimmer said she could.”
“So be it,” said Ptah.
Yoke felt a wriggling in the pouch at her waist. Her alla, and everyone else’s, was gone. The air filled with a palpable sense of safety and ease. The people and moldies laughed and hugged each other.
“Lez go, boss,” said Wubwub to Cobb. “Know what I’m sayin’?”
“Oh, Cobb,” said Yoke, kissing the old man moldie.
“It’s fine,” said Cobb. “I’ve hung around Earth long enough.”
“It would be easy for me to use your software to make a new one of you to live here,” Willy told Cobb. “We have your software stored on an S-cube.”
“Please don’t do that,” said Cobb. “I don’t want anyone bringing me back to Earth again. I’m done here. I’ll travel on with the Metamartians, but when this trip plays out, I want to finally make it into the SUN.”
“He’s right,” said Yoke. “Cobb deserves his chance to go to Heaven.”
“Good-bye everyone,” said Cobb. “And bless you, my children.”
He strode up into the saucer with the Metamartians. The hotel wall wavered again, and the flashing disk of the saucer vanished into the heavens.
It was a perfect day. The newlyweds’ eyes were soft, their kisses wet, their hearts free, the big world real.
Afterword
I just finished rereading the four Ware novels for this omnibus edition. The books had been scanned from the old paperbacks, and I had to correct a number of typos that had crept in. Being a writer, I can’t reread something of mine without seeing things to fix, so I made a few small tweaks as well—making the novels consistent from one to the next, and smoothing the flow. But don’t worry, the old outrageous scenes are all here in their full rough vigor.
It took me about twenty years to write these novels, and it’s an odd experience to fast-forward through them in a few days. Naturally, I ask myself what the books were in fact about. I see three main threads: consciousness, drugs, and eyeball kicks.
The consciousness thread explores what it takes for something to support a mind. Software (1982) suggests that your mind as a software pattern that could run on a robot body. Wetware (1988) points out that DNA is a tweakable program, so you can in fact grow a new meat body for your software to live in. Freeware (1997) proposes that aliens could travel as radio signals coding up the software for both their minds and their bodies. And in Realware (2000), the characters obtain a device which can create living beings from their descriptions.
The drug thread asks how the humans and other beings of the future will get high. What kinds of visions will they have, and what kinds of problems? As the inevitable consequence of getting older, my attitude towards drugs shifted a little over the course of writing the four Ware books. In the second two volumes, the characters are having more problems with their drug use and by the end—incredibly—Sta-Hi himself gets sober. Even so, right up to the end of Realware, I remain devoted to breaking free of consensus reality, and to the dadaist humor and skewed dialog that emerges from the stoner mind-set.
The eyeball kicks thread is about depicting the gnarly, trippy scenes that might occur in a future where we’re mashing together different notions of consciousness with a countercultural attitude. I put a lot of energy into certain set-piece scenes and iconic images—I think of the two moldies juggling each others’ bodies as sets of balls, the birth of Manchile after a nine-day pregnancy, Randy Karl Tucker tripping on camote with his moldie girlfriend wrapped around his head, and, of course, the Little Kidders preparing to eat Sta-Hi Mooney’s brain from his skull with cheap steel spoons.
How did I end up writing these strange novels?
At age sixty, in 1974, my father, Embry Cobb Rucker, had a heart attack. In order to replace his clogged coronary arteries, his surgeon turned to bypass surgery.
This operation was still quite new. They opened up Pop’s whole chest, leaving a vertical scar at least a foot long. The drugs and the trauma had a bad effect on him. He had tortuous, freaky dreams that set him to crying out in his sleep.
Pop’s brush with death seemed to change him. He grew a white beard. He’d show me the scar on his chest and run his finger along it like undoing a zipper. “This is where they opened me up,” he’d say in a tight voice.
His sense that he was living on borrowed time made him unhappy with his lot, and less patient with my mother. He fell into an affair with another woman. My parents divorced in 1979—and they never spoke to each other again. Mom even had her wedding melted into a puddle of gold that she occasionally wore as a pendant. It was awful.