Complete Short Fiction, page 51
“Now, Matthew, boy, why don’t you let me ask the questions?” He thrust his swollen face into mine: perfectly human-looking except for the wedge of radio-frequency-sensing spines in the middle of his forehead. And the multifaceted eyes, of course, but that you get used to. His belly shifted under his brightly colored uniform. I didn’t so much as glance at it, which would have set him off for sure.
Captain Gorf turned to the [Hic]Kang doctor. “We’ve had our eyes on you for a while, don’t think we haven’t.”
“Yes, yes, yes. Inoculation of Brakhma’s Disease? Dissolves all connective tissue—very relaxing. Very, very. Yes?”
“Bribery’s no good, Boneyard. You’ve been circumventing Techimport restrictions. Smart, real smart. It’s a new one on me, that’s for sure, using a phony cure to—”
“Yes, yes, yes? Auxiliary sacral infoprocessor? Excellent in ego-suppressed sexual circumstances. . . .”
“Listen, keep your inhaler out of my reproductive processes, hear me?” Gorf was really mad now. His belly churned like a couple of cats in a sack going two falls out of three. I should have warned the [Hic]Kang beforehand, but there had been no opportunity. Both Mercado and I backed slowly away. Gorf had been known to shoot microwaves out of that forehead antenna assembly of his, so you kept on his good side unless you wanted your frontal lobes cooked over easy.
The [Hic]Kang blithely ignored Gorf’s body language. He rattled his skeletal structure, a sound like a marimba orchestra falling through a plate-glass window. “Yes, yes, yes! Suppress malfunctioning reproductive brain? Calm life? Yes?”
That gave Gorf pause. “Can you really—”
“Don’t listen to him, you asshole!” his belly shrieked. Tiny, delicate claws parted his shirt, and a single eye on a stalk poked out. “Can’t you see he’s just giving you a line?”
Gorf pulled at his shirt, embarrassed. “Shut up, goddammit!”
“You die on this miserable planet and what do I do? Trot over to a multispecies whorehouse? That’s a real sensible reproductive strategy.”
Gorf was the only Bryrbashi on Earth, though he was an extremely defective example of the species, probably the reason he had been exiled to this backwater. More than most species, the Bryrbashi separated thought and sex, going so far as to turn reproductive functions over to an independent segment of the body, a segment managed by a distinct genital nervous system. Bryrbashi reproduced only after death, when the reproductive segment, quiescent until that point, reached consciousness, moved independently, and took care of business, carrying its genes into another generation.
Except that in Captain Gorf’s case, a childhood accident had brought the genital nervous system into consciousness without the usual death and separation. As a result, he had two separate brains: the one in his head, with its mind on higher things like arresting Techimport violators; and the one in his gut, concerned only with surviving long enough to reproduce. It was surprising how much he got done under the circumstances.
“Let’s discuss this later. . . .” Gorf wrestled with his belly.
“No, it’s about time you—look out, for God’s sake! Are you trying to get both of us killed?”
Gorf leaped back just as a huge device suitable for picking up suborbital shuttles reached down and scraped the ground where he had been standing, sending sprays of sparks across the floor.
Chaos filled the medico-office as every surgical device in the place came to life and reached for the nearest squadguy, resulting in yelps, shrieks, and one ludicrous high-pitched giggle.
Mercado and I had been expecting something. We ducked, rolled, and scooted out the door fast enough that we could have used re-entry shielding on our foreheads. The Mercadomobile made tracks out of Bugtown.
Jesus!” Mercado leaned on the outside of the comm booth. “This is no time to have a chat with your wife. You’re in the wrong line of work, you know that, Matt? You should be knitting cute sweaters for Gorf’s genital homunculus.”
“Quit dribbling your buttocks, will you, Merc? I’m calling Cynthia for a good reason. Or do you have some fantastically detailed scheme of what we should do next?”
He didn’t. I closed the comm booth and let him fume.
The system searched. Cynthia was usually to be found at the end of a long chain of bizarrely structured logical inferences, associative pathways the comm net itself seemed perplexed by.
A whistling sound, and a huge cavern appeared around me.
“Cynthia? Are you there?”
Clanging metal, pounding hammers. “Matthew? Is that you?” And Cynthia appeared, her hair outlined by the glare of some distant forge. She wore a coverall that hugged her curves. She smiled at me, then looked concerned. “Where are you?”
“Outskirts of Bugtown. I don’t have a lot of time. I need some information.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Matt, honey. Don’t get brisk with me. You run out of the house without an explanation—”
Mercado drummed his fingers on the outside of the comm booth. I kicked back and he stopped.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said, because she had a good point. “But I have a real serious problem I have to get through if I’m going to get home.” I peered past her at the huge underground space. “By the way, where are you?” Flames rose behind her. The place looked dangerous.
She grinned. “It’s that hn’ga egg problem. I think I’ve just about got it licked.”
“Still?”
“It turned out to be bigger than I thought. There are some interesting fractional-dimension consequences. . . .”
Leave it to my wife to find fractional-dimension consequences to someone else’s lunch. “Can we talk about it later? When we have some more time?” I said, talking over what had become a steady drumbeat from the impatient Mercado. “Do you know anything about inversion modules?”
“Matthew! Tell me you’re kidding. You could get into a lot—I mean a lot—of trouble.”
“I may already be in a lot of trouble. I don’t have time. We have a non-communicator with important information and I’ve been advised that that’s the only way to get it out. I need to get it. Soonest, sweets, I’m not kidding. Do you know?”
Something about Cynthia, she can spend all day discussing some little point from every angle—if you have all day. When you’ve got to go so fast you burn Cherenkov lines, she knows it. She put a finger to her lips thoughtfully, then tapped her teeth with her fingernail. “Of course I know. On the east edge of Scumburg there’s a waste metal dump. Be careful, hon, lots of radioactive/toxic dust, the housekeeping’s a disgrace. It’s run by a man named Paratha Amara, one of my basal-equipment suppliers. Nervous man. Paranoid, you might say, but trustworthy. Tell him I sent you and he’ll let you take a ride on his surplus Brain Whiz. Is that what you really want to do?”
I sighed. “Yes, dear, I’m afraid it is.”
A huge shambling creature covered with clanking chains and other ironmongery rose up out of a hole near Cynthia on some sort of hydraulic lift. Blue flames rose up beneath it, and some of the chain links across its broad back glowed red.
“Done!” it cried, in a disconcertingly tiny voice.
Cynthia turned away from me for a moment. “Good. Could you set it—no, I don’t want to hold it, thank you, it’s at the melting point of lead—I’m carbon-based, remember?”
“Most sorry!” The huge thing set a new-forged metal device down on a rock cube, then lumbered off, ripples of superheated air roiling up from its back.
Cynthia bent over, straight-backed, and came back up with a pair of long tongs. She picked up the complex object and examined it. Sheens of light played along its subtly rippled surfaces. She set it back down and looked over her shoulder at me. “Will you tell me about it later?”
“Of course, of course. What is that thing?”
“It’s a single-crystal gear box for Fungo’s griddle. Well, that’s one of the things it is. You know how Mlaumnre dislike single-purpose mechanisms.” Mercado started pounding on the comm booth with both fists. Cynthia brought her wide eyebrows together. “And what’s that?”
“I have to go.” I didn’t want to. I wanted to find Cynthia and go home, sit on our flexible ablative shield, and never go anywhere else again. And there was something else I’d meant to ask her. . . .
She took a deep breath. “Okay. Kiss?”
I kissed the air soulfully.
“No, no.” She grinned. “Let’s grab some illegal bandwidth, a couple of variable sensory channels. Just a second.” She pulled a control sphere out of her coverall and began fiddling with it.
“Cynthia, playing with the network is dangerous. The Loyrdgee frown on—”
“Don’t worry so much, sweetie.”
“Someone has to.”
The image clarified and gained depth, and I began to feel the great extent of the Mlaumnre labor cavern she was in. How the hell had she gotten in there? It was beyond any security I had ever been able to penetrate, deep in the heart of Landing City. I could smell the stink of smelting metal and feel the warm winds from the blazing forges somewhere down below.
Cynthia crooked a finger. I leaned forward. So did she. And, for just a second, I felt the delicate warmth of her lips against mine. “Hurry home,” she whispered, and vanished.
Paratha Amara?” We’d been wandering in the huge junkyard for almost an hour, our arms weary from TzinTzin’s weight, and had at last found a living being, an ancient brown man covered with thin, fuzzy hair like a newborn.
“Yes?” He looked suspiciously at TzinTzin’s blanketwrapped bulk. “What do you want?”
“We need . . . we need to make . . . an investigation, you might call it.” I was suddenly bashful. “Of a non-compliant subject . . . via inversion.”
“What the hell—? Get out of my yard. I run an honest operation—”
“I’m sure you do. Cynthia said it would be all right. I’m her husband.”
His attitude changed immediately. “Ah, any husband of Cynthia’s is a . . . how is she? One of my best customers. Very best. Does she need any low-melt slide alloy? A new supply just came in. Quite reasonable.”
“She’s fine.” I was always impressed by how many people my wife knew, and how weird they were. “We’re in a bit of a hurry. Can we, ah . . .”
He shrugged. “If you wish. Is that the subject? Bring him this way, please.”
Amara strolled around a vast machine and into the mouth of a vast ventilator tube, where he was engulfed by darkness. We followed. Inside, the duct was irregularly lit by giant bugs with bioluminescent abdomens. As we passed each one, it lowered its glowing rear section and looked at us. At first I thought that they were bred to be of service and were graciously lighting our way, then I realized that they were examining us to see if we were worth eating. Each clacked its titanium mouthparts in disgust and disappointment and jerked its bulb-butt back to the roof of the duct.
“Here.” Paratha Amara stopped next to a length of grated industrial catwalk supported at either end by a bent and battered metal sawhorse. “Here it is.”
“This is the Inversion Module?” I asked. Makeshift cables snaked from the catwalk bench to a complex metal cage, interrupted occasionally by featureless translucent cubes of various colors. The space above was huge and invisible, its size only guessable by the way it absorbed sound. A tiny glowing point infinitely far above might have been a manhole, or perhaps some lazy underground sun.
Amara turned to peer at me, suspicious again. “Are you sure you’re Cynthia’s husband?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“What’s her favorite color, then?”
“What’s—Jesus, how the hell should I know?” But even as I said it, I felt a slight chill. I loved her. But, her favorite color? I really had no idea. I hid behind bluster. “And what business is it of yours?”
“Unless you tell me, you can’t use the machine. It’s mine, and I won’t let you use it. Because it’s mine. Mine!”
“Cynthia said you would . . . damn.” I took a guess. “Blue. Teal blue.”
“No, it isn’t!” He yelped triumphantly. “It’s red. Scarlet. You’re not her husband, you’re an impostor!” He danced in triumph at having trapped me.
“Listen—”
“No, no, I won’t—gack!” He choked as Mercado grabbed him by the throat.
“Turn the machine on and get the hell out of here,” Merc said through clenched teeth.
“I just wanted to be sure!” the unfortunate Amara squeaked.
“Well, you’re sure.”
“I am. I am!” Paratha Amara turned on the Inversion Module, checked its levels with every appearance of care, and ran away, back up the ventilation duct toward sunlight. His figure disappeared in the darkness.
I looked in awe at Mercado. “I didn’t know you took things that seriously.”
He didn’t look at me. “I’m sorry I wouldn’t let you keep talking to your wife. Let’s get to work.”
We stepped into the metal cage and turned it on. Then I lay down on the uncomfortably safety-ridged catwalk and slid, unwillingly, into TzinTzinatty’s internal universe.
Some of my colleagues have told me that the Inversion Module was invented around Aldebaran as an instructive entertainment device intended for children. Others maintain that it was designed as something quite different: a torture device for political prisoners who had violated the peculiar Aldebaranian family codes, which forbid direct modes of address between parent and child.
I know the truth of it: it is both. Aldebaranians have excellent reasons for despising and fearing their children, who are savage and merciless sadists until well into reproductive age, when they shed their carapaces and razor claws to become responsible citizens. Torturing his offspring in the guise of instructing them is the only satisfaction an Aldebaranian parent gets.
I found myself walking a windswept mountain ridge, dramatically colored but obviously infertile land opening out to either side. The ridge was razor-sharp and I could balance on it only with difficulty, placing one foot directly in front of the other. Wind howled. Lightning slashed the sky.
After a moment, I realized that the wind was howling words. “No, I do not need an implanted organic magnetic field sensor. Inability to detect field lines is normal to my species. Stop that! My skull plates are fused through normal development.”
“TzinTzin!” I called into the wind.
A condor swept out of the clouds and plucked me off with its huge claws. Sky and rock whirled around me. “I’m late to a meeting with my friend Matthew and his wife, Cynthia. Just solve the problem I came here with . . . yes, iron is normally present in my blood, thank you. Leave the pancreas alone! It is not a malignant growth.” The condor dropped me into its nest, where its offspring, car-crushing trucks with gigantic metal-spiked wheels, roared toward me as the stadium crowd cheered. I floored my miserable Ford Fairlane but knew that I was doomed. “But you may be able to help me with this bio-encryption scheme of mine. It will impress my friends. All we have to do is . . . scalp hair is not a symptom of endocrine imbalance. Honest!”
I downshifted and swerved left to avoid the bloody trenches of the Western Front. Concertina wire gleamed in the harsh sunlight. Fokker triplanes dove to strafe. I could see the pilots’ long silk scarves trailing out behind. “TzinTzin, listen to me! You’re in deep yogurt! Your [Hic]Kang doctor’s treatment has left you a mess. We’ve got to get you cured. What happened?”
Serpents slithered out from under the car’s hood and began to eat the Sun. Aztec priests pounded drums and gongs to make them go away, but they started in on the Moon and the Pleiades. Little glittering drops fell from the corners of the serpents’ mouths as they feasted and became the suburbs of New Jersey, glowing snugly in the newborn night. I parked the Ford and ran into a donut shop in Passaic. Apple fritters exploded into mushroom clouds as I looked for a phone.
“Matthew!” TzinTzin finally recognized my presence. “Where are you? Where am I?”
“You’re a mess. You look like somebody’s old leftovers.”
“Oh, and I suppose you’re some kind of Adonis.” He sounded hurt. “Just because your wife is beautiful—”
“I’m sorry!” The coffee roaster trundled over and began to French roast my skin. I could feel my essential oils coming to the surface. I licked my lips and tasted hazelnut. “Please, TzinTzin,” I screamed into the lolling shiny mouth of the phone receiver. It slobbered and tried to kiss me. “I have to know what happened at the [Hic]Kang doctor’s office. Where did his data go?”
A jet of steam, and I slid through the floor into a vast bubbling sea. Giant colonial creatures writhed beneath my feet, entire worlds, entire whirling galaxies contained within their crystal skin. The water became glassy smooth, the smoothness of sick water about to puke. Far off in the distance, farther away than the orbits of the planets, a giant tsunami rose, fragments of cities and mountain ranges swirling in its bulk.
“It was a great plan, Matthew. Brilliant.” On the tsunami I could see the tiny figure of a surfer. I recognized the small frame, bony and vulnerable in its pink-flamingo-patterned swim trunks. It was TzinTzinatty in his normal, human form. “It was a piece of Ee-Ee biotech. I encrypted it in my own body. The best piece of smuggling any of us has ever done. A whole new ball game. Right?”
“Right! So how do we get you out of your Epsilon Eridanean code?” Things in the water plucked at my feet.
“That damn [Hic]Kang quack! Just because I had a little medical problem I wanted him to look at . . . dimensionally manipulate the unlocking genes. The data is . . . Jesus!” The tsunami loomed overhead, forming the dome of the world. TzinTzinatty toppled tiny, flailing off its crest. “. . . Cynthia. . . .”
“This is no time to discuss your crush on my wife, TzinTzin!”
“. . . has the data. . . .”
The wave crashed over me.
I found myself staring up into the darkness, ridges of the catwalk pressing into my back. Lights flashed somewhere overhead. I blinked at them and tried to figure out where I was.
