Worlds

by Eric Flint

  Les Six started to ask who the "Captains of Industry" were but before they got well started the rune jumped up, exclaimed "too many questions! too many questions!" and started scurrying off to the—east?—west?—whatever. After a moment it stopped, turned back, and shouted: "I'll show you! I'll show you!"

  And so it was that eight human idiots and a salamander down on his luck found themselves trailing after a lippy rune across the Realm of Words for what seemed an eternity until eventually we came to a slight rise in the "landscape" from the "top" of which we were treated to the vista of—

  —a vast jumble of giant factories, stretching as far as the eye can see.

  " 'Orrible!" croaked the first.

  "A vision of Hell itself," groaned the second.

  "No vision!" countered the third.

  "Hell itself!" mourned the fourth.

  "Don't mourn!" cried the fifth.

  "Organize!" bellowed the sixth.

  And with no further ado the half dozen halfwits charged down the slope, capering and cavorting like so many tots in a toy store.

  "I'll take that one!" cried the first, pointing to a huge, smoke-belching factory bearing the proud logo I. G. Sprechenindustrie.

  "I'm for General Words!" hallooed the second.

  "I've a yen for Nouns R Us!" hollered the third.

  "Me for Microspeak!" cried the fourth.

  By the time the fifth and the sixth added their bits to the round, they were too far off to hear. But, judging from the directions they were taking, I thought the fifth had set his aim for the huge International Business Mots complex and the sixth seemed to be wavering between General Linguistics and LTVerbs.

  "Idiots!" screamed Magrit. "Morons!"

  "Them, too?" asked Γ.

  "Now what?" wondered Gwendolyn.

  "Save the runes," moaned the rune. "Save the runes. Look! Over there! See what I mean!"

  In the distance, we saw a long train of wagons hauling up before a huge stockade. Within the barbed wire compound I could see a bunch of grimy barracks and what looked like smokehouses. With the nonchalance of long habit, burly guards were herding little runes out of the wagons and through the gates.

  "What are they handing the runes?" asked Gwendolyn.

  "They say it's soap!" cried Γ. "But it's a trick! It's a trick!"

  Suddenly, one of the smokehouse chimneys belched a great plume. Γ shrieked. "They're melting us down! They're melting us down!" It clutched Magrit's leg.

  "Save the runes," it moaned, "save the runes."

  I could see it coming a mile away. I tried to whisper sweet reason into her ear but the old witch was getting her dander up. And who was there to help me advance the voice of sanity?

  Gwendolyn? Hah! Hah! The Agitatrix herself!

  "You know," mused the damned lady wrestler, "maybe Les Six have the right idea. And besides, what else have we got to do?"

  A moment later she was striding off. "I'm for that one!" she announced, pointing to a great ugly heap of a factory called UmlautMobil.

  "As for us," said the witch, "it's the stockade. Let's see what these bums are up to."

  "Us?" I cried. "Us? What have I got to with this madness? I'm an intelligent amphibian—the pinnacle of evolution! What natural selection hath wrought!"

  Unheeding, Magrit waddled down the slope. I would have jumped off her shoulder and hid somewhere but I hate to walk and, besides, where was there to hide? Not a mousehole in sight.

  Behind me, I heard Γ moaning: "Save the runes, save the runes."

  I twisted my head and glared back. "Fuck the runes! And the horse they rode in on!"

  Turning around, I could see the stockade looming larger and larger.

  "Save the salamander," I moaned. "Save the salamander."

  3

  Well, there's good news, bad news, and terrible news.

  The good news is that Magrit landed a great job almost as soon as we walked into the door of UmlautMobil. She was shooting for some kind of low level chem lab job, but the company president wouldn't hear of it. No, no! Seems that humans hardly ever apply for a job in the Realm of Words on account of there's all these words ready and eager to do the coolie work, so the company president was only too delighted to offer Magrit a plum job as his executive secretary. Easy work, great money, perks you wouldn't believe ("of course your salamander can have his own desk!"), the whole bit.

  The bad news is that in order to get the job Magrit had to hump the company president.

  The terrible news is that she turned him down.

  I couldn't believe it!

  "Oh, sure," I complained bitterly, as she stalked out of the building, "God forbid you should put out for a respected pillar of the community. Oh, no—not Ms. Morality! Not Ms. Pick-and-Choose! Drooling, gibbering lunatics, sure. Young windbag apprentices, sure. Drunken sailors on leave, sure. Hordes of flea-bitten barbarians, sure. Escaped—"

  "Three barbarians are not a horde!" she snapped.

  "Those three were!"

  "That creep!" she snarled. "That drooling old lecher!"

  "Wolfgang drools worse—"

  "Wolfgang drools cute! The rich fatboy drools rich fatboy disgusting!"

  "So what? Concentrate on the adjective: rich. We're in the 'realm of words,' Magrit—nouns and verbs don't count."

  Well, as you can see, I won the argument hands down, but it didn't do me any good since once Magrit gets set on a course, that's that. Logic, reason, common sense—out the window!

  Oh, well. It's the hallmark of sane salamanders that we adjust instantly to reality, no matter how grim. So I took it in stride when Magrit gave up the silly idea of going back to work in a factory (oh, yes, she's a true-blue prole by origin; that's what explains her low tastes, even for a witch) and decided to resume her normal trade. Even though I knew we'd be lucky not to starve to death since all of our customers would be words and what, I wondered, would words need with a witch?

  Quite a bit, as it turns out. Mostly fortune-telling. It seems words are all convinced that after they're made they're going to be sent somewhere which they call the "Realm of Reality" where they will be—you're going to love this—words, what else? They say they're where words come from. Anyway, the point is that lots of them want to know exactly where they're going to wind up.

  It's kind of pathetic, actually, especially for all the "thes" and "ands", each and every one of which is convinced it's going to be the key word in the key sentence which—you name it!

  Which, of course, Magrit was more than willing to do, gazing into the crystal ball that she picked up years ago in a junk store.

  "I see a man—he has a full beard, a lofty brow—a very lofty brow—he's sitting at a desk; he's writing—what? Yes, I see it now—he's writing a great novel—no! It's going to be the greatest novel ever written, probably; certainly the longest. He's finished the book! Now, he's scratching his head; stroking his beard; pursing his lips thoughtfully. What can he be—oh, I see it now! He trying to think of a title for the longest, greatest novel ever written. Yes, yes, it's coming to him now. He writes the first word—War. Yes, that's it. Now he's really thinking hard, really hard. Suddenly—his eyes light up! Yes, he has the second word of the title—and it's—yes! yes! It's you! It's you! War and—"

  And (pardon the pun) another happy customer trots off. Well, not trots actually, since words don't have legs and feet so they move around in the weirdest ways imaginable, but you get the idea.

  The truth is, Magrit's lousy with a crystal ball. She usually reads palms or tea leaves when she tells fortunes, but words don't have palms and they don't drink tea. They don't drink anything, as a matter of fact, or eat—which makes the bosses happier than clams.

  When they discovered this fact, Les Six really hit the roof. No sooner did they get off work on their first shift than they all headed for the gin mills, only to discover that there weren't any. Soon enough, they were crowded into Magrit's parlor, bitterly expressing their complaint. They started with l
ofty political principles:

  The first: " 'Tis a plot to keep the wages down!"

  The second: "As 'tis well known that the variable portion of the capital—"

  The third: "—more commonly known as the wage bill—"

  The fourth: "—is regulated by the necessity to reproduce the working class in its historically determined standard of living."

  The fifth: "The which, in this benighted place, approximates the living standard—"

  The sixth: "Of stones."

  Soon enough, however, they got down to the gist of the matter, which (I will summarize a mound of verbiage) was that inasmuch as it was widely known that drink is the curse of the working class, the downtrodden masses in the Realm of Words had been foully deprived of their curse in addition to the blessings of life which are, as a matter of course, naturally denied the proletariat.

  As always with Les Six, complaint soon led to action. Magrit's little parlor was located on the bottom floor of one of the many tenements in one of the many slums which surround the word factories. In a matter of days, Les Six obtained the floor above from a landlord who, though grasping, was the word "butterfingers." Within days thereafter, they had transformed the seedy dump into an even seedier gin mill and were ready for the business which they confidently expected their daily agitation on the job would soon drum up.

  I thought they were nuts, and was highly amused, until they turned out not to be nuts and I got dragooned into being the bartender. I couldn't believe it! I mean, what possible use could words have with booze? Or coffee, and damned if Les Six didn't add on a coffee house. ("Keeps the high-falutin' intellectual words out of our hair.")

  But, practically overnight, The Gin Mill and Pretentious Coffee House became the center of social life in the slums. Which tells you all you need to know about social life in the slums of the Realm of Words. I thought I was going to die of overwork.

  I complained to Magrit, but the rotten witch had already jumped aboard the bandwagon. Now she was telling all her customers that when they went to the Realm of Reality they were all going to be words spoken by profane proles hunched over their alepots in taverns, plotting and planning the revolution. No sooner did they leave her parlor than the cretins (words are not bright) piled into the saloon, eager to prepare for their future life.

  Words are weird. Must be why humans like them so much. I remember one in particular—"because." It insisted on shortening itself to "be," so that it could go around bragging that it was a rebel without a cause.

  The whole set-up in the Realm of Words is weird. (Our part of it, anyway—later, we found out that the Realm of Words has lots of different levels. All of which are weird.) There's a handful of humans who own all the word factories. Where they came from, nobody knows, and the owners aren't talking. Under them, there's a class of parasite words who lord it over all the other words. They toil not, neither do they labor. They are called the Proper Words, and they are all capitalized.

  The common words do all the work, which consists of rendering raw material (mostly hot air, but with lots of scrap words thrown for good measure—runes, obsolete and archaic words, passe slang, etc.) into shiny new words. The shiny new words are immediately put to work, while the worn-out old words are "retired" to a giant complex called the Happy Home—which, to a salamander, looks remarkably like a blast furnace—where they are shortly thereafter "elevated" to the "Realm of Reality," rising thereto on a vast column of—can you doubt it?—hot air.

  Into this weird but efficient set-up, Les Six and Gwendolyn charged like the proverbial bull in a china shop. If it had been Les Six alone, things would have just gotten rowdy. But when you added Gwendolyn to the stew! There's a good reason the porkers all over Grotum have a price on her head that's only a few pennies less than the one on The Roach—and only a small part of that's due to the numerous porkers she's gutted over the years with her cleaver. No, the real reason is that the woman is a fiendishly good agitator, propagandist, organizer, you name it.

  The first thing she did, naturally, was call for the unity of all oppressed and exploited common words. No mean trick, that, let me tell you. Words are even worse than people when it comes to figuring out ways that this group is better than that group. The nouns detested the verbs and vice versa; their sidekicks the adjectives and adverbs positively hated each other; the pronouns always tried to get cozy with the nouns but the nouns referred to hanging around with pronouns as "slumming;" among the verbs, the third person singulars were considered uncouth; on and on.

  Then, to boot, the words were further disunited by the rampant animosity among the different fonts. Helveticas despised Century Gothics who loathed Britannic Bolds who detested Courier News. All regular fonts considered all bold fonts (even their own) to be hopelessly low-class, and as for italics—I remember one italic word (indeed, I think it was) bitterly complaining to me over its alepot:

  "It's a dirty rotten stereotype! It's not true that all italics are part of organized crime!"

  Anyway, sooner than you would have thought possible Gwendolyn managed to convert a bunch of new words to her viewpoint, and the next thing you knew leaflets were being passed around all over the slums with slogans like:

  FONTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

  THE PARTS OF SPEECH, UNITED, SHALL NEVER BE DEFEATED!

  Within a week, she had Committees of Correspondence organized all over the place; within another week, she had all the Committees organized into cell structures. Within a month, she put together a full-fledged insurrectionary movement.

  Sometimes, I think that woman's not playing with a full deck.

  I tried to reason with Magrit:

  "It's all nuts! I let it go back in the real world, on account of I have a soft spot for humans, handicapped as you are with mammal habits and brains. But this is going too far! What do we care about a bunch of words, anyway? When you prick them, do they bleed? No! Utterly impervious to pain and hardship. Do they starve? Nope—can't eat anyway. Sure, they're overworked and underpaid, but so what? What else are words good for? And besides, the whole reason we came to this Godforsaken Realm of Words in the first place was to rescue Shelyid and them. What happened to that, huh? Think of the poor dwarf! And the Kutumoff youngsters! Why—right this minute, they're probably in dire peril of their lives! We should be off to their rescue!"

  "And just how do you propose to do that?" demanded the witch. "We wound up here because that stupid Wolfgang babbled in an unknown tongue and planted us in the middle of nowhere. Do you have any idea where Shelyid and the Kutumoff kids are? And if you do, do you know how to get there from here? Well? Speak up, Wittgenstein!"

  "I'm your familiar, remember. You're the witch—the 'proper' witch, no less! You're the one's supposed to know how to get your way around."

  "Well, I don't," she grumped, and then she started making noises about how if the sorcerer Zulkeh were here he'd probably know the answer and at that point I realized the poor old woman had lost her mind and it was hopeless. Imagine! Actually wishing the windbag were around!

  Her conclusion was that since we were stuck here anyway, we might as well start a revolution since this place needed it as much as anywhere. To which I made the sane response that there'd be trouble since this place had powers-that-be as much as anywhere and they wouldn't like it. But I might as well have saved my breath.

  And, sure enough, trouble came. As soon as the company owners figured out what was afoot, Les Six and Gwendolyn all got fired. That, as they say, was locking the barn door after the horse got out, since by that time Gwendolyn and Les Six had already organized the factories they worked in and now they were free to concentrate on agitating all the rest. Which they did, needless to say.

  Next, the bosses—they're a sorry lot, bosses, dumb as frogs—set their company goons on Gwendolyn and Les Six. That resulted in a lot of thug words being turned into ex-thug letters.

  Finally realizing that the usual methods weren't going to work, the bosses whistled up the officia
l authorities, who promptly responded by sending the police into the slums to round up all agitators and malcontents.

  The police were a riot, as always. They came in with their shields, batons and helmets: þôlìçê! and went out (ρϖ∫ιζε¡) better educated.

  "It'll be the fascists, next," predicted Gwendolyn, and, sure enough, it wasn't long before we started hearing about a word called "mustache" that was making a lot of noise about what it called "the subjunctive problem." The mustache had a whole crowd of lumpenproletarian words gathered about it, with all the silly buggers coloring themselves brown instead of black.

  To my outrage, I got sent in as a spy. So there I was in a big square, a disgruntled salamander if there ever was one, watching this jerk word jerking around other jerk words. "Mustache" was up on a podium and it was haranguing the mob, calling for the extermination of all qualifiers: