by Greg Bear
The Pogocashman smiled hesitantly. “Can you run that all by me again, man? I think I missed a little of it. Sorry. I’m really hungry, man.”
Quidprobe sighed. “Very well—but pay attention this time, will you? Stop swinging that bladed weapon around before you cut your own head off.”
The Pogocashman blushed and slid the sword back into its scabbard. “Sorry. Who did you say you worked for? The Department of Fixable Universes?”
“Fictional Universes. The Department of Fictional Universes, Crossover Division, Poul Anderson Subdivision. And you’re right in the middle of three of them, at least.” Quidprobe scratched at his face, distracted by the borrowed body he was wearing. It was strange to have his brain perched in a round box of bone at the top of a fleshy stalk like this, and the hairy tendrils on the dwarf creature’s face itched him horribly. “This is a mess, that’s what it is. The chosen Main Character was supposed to be this Castlemane fellow, who was crossing over from your organic world into a fictional universe created by the famous science fiction writer Poul Anderson, which itself was a version of the fictional universe called the Matter of France. With me so far?”
The Pogocashman looked interested. “What is the matter with France? I mean, some of that stuff they eat, like frog’s legs . . . ”
“Of France. The Matter of France. It’s like the French version of the King Arthur stories, except instead of King Arthur and his knights, it’s Charlemagne and his knights—Sir Roland, Sir Roger, Duke Astolfo, Holger the Dane, all those legendary characters.”
The creature nodded cheerfully. “Okay. I’m totally with you, man. Sir Loin and Chateaubriand and the rest.”
Quidprobe ground his teeth together for a moment—another odd sensation, like having an oral cavity full of stones. Patience, he told himself. This poor creature has to live with teeth all the time. “But this isn’t even Anderson’s version, you see—it’s some other lesser writer’s version of Anderson’s version. And somehow when this idiot anthology writer started his story, instead of this Castlemane fellow crossing over from the real world into the Anderson universe, you showed up instead. So instead of a problem-solving engineer and man of action, we have . . . ” He broke off. No need to rub it in. “Do you know anything about engineering? Physics? Anything at all?”
The Pogocashman considered. “I got a participation ribbon in science once. See, I was making this volcano for the science fair, but I was late for school, so I figured I could mix the baking soda and vinegar first and it would save time when I got there.” He shrugged. “It sort of exploded—my backpack, but they gave me the ribbon anyway before they sent me home . . . ”
Quidprobe winced. “Yes. Well. Science not a strong point, then. But we have bigger problems at the moment.”
The creature nodded more emphatically. “Yeah, man. Like getting something to eat, right?”
“No!” Quidprobe was beginning to understand that this was going to be even more difficult than the series of impossibilities he had already conceded. “No, like figuring out how an unprepared cipher like you is going to help the great Roland get back his sanity and save this world from being conquered by the forces of Chaos. And beside your complete lack of scientific knowledge we have no other tools but Astolfo’s enchanted horn and a book of useful spells—both of which are in your saddlebag, by the way, so don’t lose them.” But it had suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t listening to his Main Character as carefully as he should. This Pogocashman was a creature not of the symbolic plane like Quidprobe himself, but of the physical: perhaps all his talk of hunger was meaningful. Perhaps he really did need some kind of organic sustenance—perhaps he would even be more responsive once he’d taken in nutrients.
Quidprobe strode to the edge of the clearing and looked around until he detected the life-signature of a small creature, a rodent with a bushy tail. He caught it with a quick grab of his still-unfamiliar hands, carefully crushed its skull so it wouldn’t suffer, and then dropped it in the Pogocashman’s lap.
“Um . . . ” The recipient looked with dismay at the gooey mass. The tail was still twitching fitfully. “Isn’t there any way to . . . um . . . cook this?”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Quidprobe. “Start a fire. The oxidation process should char the meat efficaciously.” He was tired—the transition into this physical body had taken a lot out of him, and carrying around the weight of a skeleton was extremely wearying. “I wish you success in your consumption.”
“Huh?”
“By Howard’s Holy Haunches, you do say that a lot, don’t you?” Quidprobe’s patience was growing thin; he desperately wanted to rest the clumsy organic body and put his mind to work. “Go ahead and consume that. You’ll need your strength—our task here won’t be easy and we’ll both probably die horribly.” He rolled himself up in his cloak and stretched out on the soft forest earth. “Which is only slightly better than having Supervisor Fnutt angry at me. But of course, I’ll likely get both.”
Pogo had dropped out after the first day of Boy Scouts when he realized there were no snacks at meetings and they all seemed really fired up about taking a fifty-mile hike. Since he hadn’t stuck around to earn his camping merit badge he wasn’t really certain about the best way to cook a smashed squirrel.
The fire had burned down nearly to ashes, just a few smoldering coals. Pogo tossed in a couple of small twigs but they were green and wouldn’t catch. He went to the saddlebag, being very careful not to startle the scary big black horse, and looked for anything useful. He found a cow horn with silver decorations on it and a seriously old-fashioned book—the dwarf had said it was something about spelling. Pogo squinted at the strange writing and couldn’t make out any of it, but he didn’t really care anyway—he already knew how to spell. Hell, he’d spelled “Mississippi” right once in fourth grade, in front of the whole class, which was pretty good for anybody!
He tore a page out of the book and held one corner to the coals. The piece of rough, thick paper caught with a strange green-blue flame, and for a moment he thought he could hear voices whispering in the wind, but then the page was gone and the voices were too. He wadded up several more pages and kept tossing them in until the fire was really burning, then jammed the squirrel onto a stick and poised it above the flames. It actually smelled pretty good except for the burning fur, and he began thinking it would be nice to have something to drink as well.
After a short search he found one of those Renaissance Fair squirt bags hanging on the saddle. When he squeezed it something like honey-flavored vodka jetted into the back of his throat—that which didn’t go down his chin or onto his chest—and it took him a while to stop coughing. The medieval booze wasn’t Southern Comfort or anything but it was still pretty good, but Pogo wished he had something less messy to drink it out of. As he sat smelling the squirrel, now bubbling nicely, he suddenly thought of the horn. Wasn’t that what those old-timey guys drank from in all the movies?
He squeezed some of the honey-stuff into the horn and it promptly ran out the narrow end and into his lap. He took another messy swallow from the bag to help his imagination, and sure enough, he soon had an idea. The binding of the book was held together with some kind of glue, so he peeled some of it away, wadded it up, then poked it into the narrow end of the horn. It held pretty well, and now he could use the horn as a drinking cup.
Swigging from his horn and moving the squirrel around the fire to keep it from burning, Pogo began to feel like a true knight of the Olde Tymes. Enough honey-stuff and he didn’t even mind burning his fingers on hot squirrel meat.
Food in his belly and a nice buzz starting, he sat for another hour or so drinking and feeding the rest of the book to the fire. The colors and whispers and shapes that rose up with the smoke were as entertaining as any double-feature at the Reseda Drive-In.
“Time to go,” the dwarf said loudly.
Pogo skinned his eyes open a crack. For some reason, the sun was up. “Man, Quickpoop, not so lo
ud!”
“Quidprobe. My name is Quidprobe.” The little guy didn’t sound happy. “Get up. We have to save Roland and yesterday was all but wasted.”
“Amen to that.” Pogo groaned and sat up. He was lying beside the ashes of the firepit and realized he must have passed out there. The empty bag and the horn lay beside him, both covered with a surprising number of ants. He staggered to his feet, gingerly brushed off the busy little insects, then snuck the two objects back into the saddlebag. The dwarf reminded him a little of his old high-school math teacher and Pogo didn’t want him any grumpier than he already was.
“You said this Roland guy went crazy?” Pogo asked when they were riding again, the dwarf perched on the saddle in front of him. Pogo didn’t really care about Roland, but he was trying to distract himself from the immense, huffing monster of a horse and the way that its bumping progress made his head and stomach feel, which was not too great. “Really crazy? Was it, like, a drugs thing?”
“No, it was a ‘love thing’,” the dwarf told him. “For love of the fair Angelica, Roland has lost his wits. Now the greatest knight in Christendom has become a violent madman. He has killed hundreds of his own allies—destroyed whole towns! Worse than that, the pagan armies of King Agramant, aided by Duke Aelfric’s evil fairies, have besieged good King Charlemagne in Paris. If Roland cannot be returned to sanity to fight for Charlemagne, more than Paris will be lost.”
“Wow,” said Pogo. “Like what else?”
“Everything,” said the little man. “If the armies of Chaos triumph over Charlemagne here, then soon King Arthur and his Round Table will fall, too. Folktale and myth will totter. Soon all the most important tales of Western civilization will collapse. Juliet will not love Romeo. Faust will not make his bargain. Robin Hood will be executed by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Even little Oliver Twist will die a pauper.”
Pogo did his best to sound intelligent. “Yeah. Wow. And that’s all bad stuff, huh?”
Quidprobe made a noise of frustration. “And of course Starsky and Hutch will be killed in a fiery automobile crash.”
“Oh, no! Not the Torino!” Pogo almost fell from his saddle. “All because of me?”
“Unless we can do what needs to be done, Pogocashman. Unless you can fulfill Duke Astolfo’s destiny by recovering the hero Roland’s wits and restoring him to sanity.”
Pogo considered this awesome responsibility. “So how are we supposed to cure this Roland guy of being crazy?” he asked the dwarf. “Therapy or something? Because I don’t know much about that stuff.” He pictured himself taking notes on a pad while a man in armor wept on a leather couch. “Or should we just take him to a real doctor . . . ?”
“His wits are utterly lost. They must be recovered, as I told you. That means we have to bring them back to him.”
“Bring them back?” Pogo frowned. “Where are they?”
“On the moon.”
“So, hey, Quillpod,” he asked some time later, “if we’re in one of those fairytale things, why don’t we just hurry up and fly to the moon?”
“My name is Quidprobe and it doesn’t work that way,” the dwarf explained through clenched teeth. “Quidprobe. Please remember. And the reason we can’t just fly to the moon is that the rules of these things say you have to earn your passage. You’re a knight, after all, the great Duke Astolfo of England—you have to do some courageous knightly deeds.” The dwarf thought for a moment. “Or at least that’s how it usually works, but I think we’d better just try to avoid getting messily killed and hope we get lucky somehow with the whole moon thing.”
Messily killed. That sounded even worse than We can still be friends, which up to now had been Pogo’s least favorite phrase. “So where are we going?”
“Well, we’re making a very wide detour around the house of Caligorant the ferocious, people-eating giant, then we’re heading north. Somewhere along the way you’re supposed to get a flying horse and give Rabican here”—he gestured at the huge steed beneath them—“to fair Bradamant. Then you help out Prester John, King of Ethiopia, and afterward you can ride the flying horse to the Earthly Paradise. The holy folk who live there will help you get to the moon.”
“Whoa. Sounds like a lot of commuting time,” Pogo pointed out. “Why don’t we just phone some of them and ask them to meet us somewhere?”
The dwarf shook his head and made a little gurgling noise. “That six thousand years until I retire is beginning to seem like a long time.”
They rode for most of the day until the sun was low in the sky and the forest had largely given way to a flat, desolate countryside haunted by croaking ravens and the cries of other, stranger creatures. The ground on either side of them was wet and treacherous, the path so narrow that Rabican could scarcely put one hoof in front of the other. Pogo had long since digested the apples he had scavenged for lunch and was seriously wondering why no one in this place had ever thought of a restaurant, let alone a drive-thru, when the dwarf suddenly reached out and grabbed Pogo’s arm.
“Rein up, Pogocashman,” he said. “I think I may have made a mistake. We’re supposed to be going around the swamp, but instead it looks like we’re heading right into the middle of it.”
Pogo was trying to pay attention to the little man but he was distracted. All day long wasps and bees had been swarming around his saddlebags and he couldn’t figure out why. He kept fanning them away but they kept coming back. Right now a particularly large bumblebee was climbing his arm like an angry ball of lint. “And that’s bad?”
“Balls of Blish, yes, that’s bad! That also means we’re heading right toward Caligorant!”
The bumblebee finally sputtered into the air and then landed on the saddlebag again and crawled inside. Pogo exhaled. “And who’s he again?”
“Only the nastiest giant in all these parts, an ogre who eats knights the way the other folk eat salted nuts. He owns the unbreakable Net of Vulcan and he hides it in the dirt near his house, then chases travelers into it.” Quidprobe suddenly began to squirm sideways in the saddle, trying to look back past Pogo. “And if we’re in the swamp, then we’re already too close to him.” He stiffened. “What’s that out there? Do you see that?”
Pogo turned to look over his shoulder. “What? That big boulder?”
“That’s not a big boulder. This is a swamp. Have you seen any boulders this afternoon? It’s a giant trying to hide in a very flat place.”
Pogo felt a cold chill go up his back. “Yeah, it does sort of look like that, now that you mention it.” And then the boulder stood up and began hurrying toward them, the ground shaking with each huge step. “Oh, shit, what do we do?” Pogo squealed. “What do we do? It’s coming!”
“Use the book of spells!”
“The what? That book? I burned it!”
Even with the ogre bearing down on them, the dwarf turned to stare at him in astonishment. “You burned the book of spells?”
“I thought you said it was a spelling book! I needed to cook the squirrel.”
“We’re in a forest, literally surrounded by wood, and you burned the book of spells? You idiot!” Quidprobe sounded more like Pogo’s old math teacher than ever. “Quick, blow the enchanted horn! Its noise terrifies everything that hears it!” A look of panic crossed his wizened face as he saw Pogo’s expression. “May the Large Lizards of Le Guin defend us—don’t tell me you burned that too!”
“No, no!” He pulled the horn from the saddlebag. “Here, see!”
Quidprobe stared, wrinkling his nostrils. “It stinks of mead! And why is it covered with insects?”
Pogo tried to shake off the stinging bugs, but they clung fiercely. The giant thundered toward them.
“Me so hungry!” the ogre boomed in a voice that made Pogo’s bones vibrate. His mouth was huge and his teeth were yellow and jagged. “Food, don’t run!”
“Blow the horn!” screamed Quidprobe. “What are you waiting for? Oh, why couldn’t you have been a chemical engineer or something useful . .
. ?”
“I’m trying!” Pogo shouted, and it was true; he had been blowing into the horn with absolutely no result. Pogo was beginning to feel that plugging the end with gooey book-glue might have been a mistake.
“Look out!” Quidprobe leaped off the saddle as the giant stretched his vast and dirty hand toward them. Pogo threw himself after the dwarf, still clinging to the magic horn.
“Little men not fall down,” boomed Caligorant in a disapproving tone. “You run. Make more entertaining.”
Pogo had the horn against his lips once more and was blowing as hard as he could, puffing until his cheeks ached.
The giant paused to observe him, a look of confusion and hurt on his wide, ugly face. “Why you not run? Better you run, fall in net, then me eat. Fun for everyone!”
Pogo took a moment’s rest from his fruitless blowing. His head was swimming and he felt like he was going to pass out. “No . . . thank . . . you . . . ” he panted. “We don’t want to be eaten.”
“Me think you unreasonable,” said Caligorant, spreading his tree-trunk arms. “But me guess me eat you anyway.”
A close-up look at the giant’s hideous maw was all Pogo needed to decide to start blowing again. Just as he was certain his brains were going to fly out of his ears before he could coax even a squeak out of the horn, the hardened plug of glue popped out of Pogo’s horn and, covered in confused ants and angry hornets, shot up one of Caligorant’s huge and hairy nostrils.
“Owwwwooooooooo!” bellowed the giant, leaping up and down and slapping at his sinuses in dismay. “Beeeezzz izzz in nozzzzze! Beeeeeeeezzzzzz!”
Pogo and Quidprobe managed to scramble out of the way, but noble Rabican was not so lucky: the ogre came down with one foot right on top of the great black warhorse, squishing it quite flat.