"This is Terri and Jenny," said Willy. "Terri, this is Corey, Darla, Whitey, Joke and Yoke." Terri sized them up. If muscular old Whitey were to get a tan and to shave off the groovy mohawk that ran all the way down his back, he could maybe pass for an aging surfer, but Corey looked like an unsavory old stoner, even grottier than Willy—no wonder they'd been roommates. Corey had two imipolex pets on the couch next to him: a giant-beaked little bird and a small green pig.
As for Darla, well, the woman looked outrageously sensual—obviously she was very comfortable in her own skin, though just now her eyes were blazing with some kind of fear and rage. Darla's twin daughters Joke and Yoke were cute and lively, Joke in bright punk rags with a blonde-and-purple hairdo, and Yoke dressed moonmaid-style in a flowing dress and silver boots. Joke was sitting next to Corey and toying with Corey's plastic pets.
The humans in the room looked small and ordinary compared to the aliens. Like Shimmer, the aliens had all taken on the forms of classically proportioned humans. Apparently they were eager to fit in. Looking at them, it was like being in a fantasy viddy about the Greek gods on Mount Olympus—or in a soft-core porno viddy. They were too, too perfect. The fountain tinkled pleasantly as the aliens continued absorbing information from the isopod's S-cubes, lounging about like wise philosophers.
Willy and Terri sat down on the empty couch and carrot shaped Jenny writhed over to inspect the aliens. "So, um, where are all you guys from?" she shrilled.
"They were just telling us," said Corey, his voice slow and amazed. "They're from all over the place. Six are from our own galaxy, one's from a star in the Andromeda galaxy, two from the Crab Nebula, one from NGC 395, one from a quasar, and Clever Hansi here is—"
"I've changed my name to Shimmer," interrupted the glowing goddess and made the chiming sitar noise again.
"Okay," said Corey. "I wave. Shimmer here is from the farthest away of all—she's from an inconceivably distant wrinkle of the cosmos where space and time are different."
"Yes," said Shimmer. "Where I come from, time is two-dimensional."
"What does that mean?" asked Terri.
"You might think of it this way," said Shimmer. "Haven't you ever wondered what your life would be like if you made some different decision?"
"Sure. Like if I hadn't gone swimming off after Monique, I wouldn't be here."
"Yes. Now suppose that all of your alternate lives were real. There would be, oh let's just say zillions of them—think of each of your lives as a thread and of your zillion possible lives as making up a fabric of parallel threads."
"That's two-dimensional time?" put in Willy. "But maybe I do have lots of parallel lives I'm not able to perceive. What I know in each life is still just one-dimensional. Past/present/ future. I don't experience a second time dimension."
"But I'm not like you," said Shimmer. "In my part of the cosmos, we are aware of all our parallel lives. In each of the lives, you're aware of all your other lives. It's just one you across all the lives. There's the past/present/future, but there's the other axis, I don't know what to call it in English." She made a droning, gonging noise.
"The whatever axis," suggested Corey. "It runs from maybe to what-if."
"Fine," said Shimmer, not cracking a smile. "In our two-dimensional time, we are consciously aware of all the parallel lives that we're simultaneously leading.
Our experience in each of the parallel lives informs our behavior in all of them. Our memory is two-dimensional—from past to present and from maybe to what-if It's not such a huge deal, by the way, when one single thread of our lives ends in death—not as long as there's still a zillion others But eventually we too lose everything. As you age, you start losing life threads in whole chunks, the fabric tatters out to a few ragged tags and strings. I must say it makes me rather anxious to be living here as a single isolated time thread.
Your world of one dimensional time is frightening and pathetic."
"It made me 'rather anxious' to be in the spaceport dome when your pal Quuz stomped it," spat Whitey, who was sitting on a couch between Darla and Yoke.
"You were in the spaceport?" said Terri. "I was inside Quuz! It was terrible Shimmer, why aren't you trying to eat everything like Quuz?"
Shimmer made one of her glowing musical noises, and one of the other aliens spoke up, this one shaped like a purple Apollo.
"You can call me Zad," he said, setting down the S-cube he'd been perusing.
"I'm from a planet near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. A watery planet, where I was something like a giant squid. I'll be eager to travel down to Earth's oceans soon. You ask why we twelve aren't trying to eat everything? The thing is, every sufficiently advanced civilization in the universe finds out about personality transmission via cosmic rays. But some become advanced in that kind of way before becoming—morally responsible. Quuz was like that. From your own Sun.
Whenever a node for personality wave Decryption arises, the keepers need to be on guard for beings like that. Fortunately we were able to keep Quuz from transmitting that Stairway To Heaven to us and taking us over. Thanks to the rath and the Jubjub bird." The two little pets were busy fighting and snapping at each other on the couch between Corey and Joke, and now Zad stretched his arm out into a tentacle shape long enough to tweak the rath's tail and to make it hoarsely squeal.
"Cubic damping," said Willy.
"Yes," said Shimmer "After we took the rath and the Jubjub bird from Corey, we were able to extract the limpware hack from them to make our new bodies impervious to the Stairway To Heaven program. We protected all the DIMs in here too. We barely got it done in time Before Quuz's attack."
"Yes indeedy," cried Jenny. "That's exactly the same idea Willy had. Will you show us moldies the trick too?"
"Certainly," said Shimmer.
"If you'd explained why you wanted the rath and the Jubjub bird in the first place, then maybe I wouldn't have been so scared of you," said Corey.
"He attacked me with a knife," volunteered a third alien, a shiny black man.
"We saw that over the vizzy," said Yoke. "Were you the Bandersnatch?"
"Yeah. But I like the name Takala now. I'm from a planet of jungles and giant insects. I was something like a praying mantis. When one of us becomes old and wise enough, we eat the right substances and enter the proper state of mind to chirp. When you chirp, your soul leaves the planet as a personality wave."
"Can humans chirp?" asked Willy.
"Maybe we could teach you how," answered Takala.
"What does it feel like while you're flying along in the form of a cosmic ray?" probed Willy.
"Let me talk now," said another of the aliens, a glowing orange woman. "I'm Syzzy, the one who comes from the quasar. Not all star creatures are as crude as Quuz. My race consists of vortex tangles a bit like Quuz's race of sunspots, but we are so much more evolved. Quuz was like a tube worm, and we are like superhumans. I just can't believe what low temperatures you live at here. And how slowly Willy Taze asks what it's like to travel across intergalactic space as a cosmic ray? Here's an uvvy image."
Terri turned on her uvvy and absorbed Syzzy's imagery. She felt a sensation of cavernous emptiness, she felt herself to be in a vast dark space specked with bits of light that grew with unbelievable speed into bright shapes like pinwheels and smudges and grains of rice, orangey-yellow with warmth, the flocking shapes singing blissfully into the cosmic Void, making a sound like a deep echoing "Aaaauuummmm." She held onto the sound and leaned back into the couch, feeling mellow and very tired.