Worlds

by Eric Flint

  "No ifs, ands or buts!" it shrieked. "There must be a final solution for the subjunctive problem!"

  The mob went wild, rampaging through the streets of the slum. All shop windows which displayed the ? mark were smashed. The wretched maybes, perhapses, and possibles who huddled within were dragged out into the streets and beaten into 8-point. A scholarly insofar as was torn letter from letter.

  It didn't go any further, however, because at that point Gwendolyn and Les Six showed up, leading an army of Working Words Defense Guards, and proceeded to beat the brownwords into 4-point. Mustache itself was singled out for special attention by Gwendolyn and her cleaver, whereupon the would-be demagogue was known forever after as must ache.

  Now the powers that be declared martial law and brought in the army, but to no avail. The word army was made up of a lot of unhappy conscripts who were easy prey for Les Six and their experienced rabble-rousers, and before you knew it the troops had deserted to the revolution and Gwendolyn was cheerfully setting up a Words and Scripts Council.

  In desperation, the Proper Words set up a Provisional Revolutionary Government and tried to take control of the situation by going with the flow, so to speak, but Gwendolyn and Les Six soon had the Words and Scripts Council set the situation right. The Word Palace was stormed, the Proper Words were arrested and stripped of their pretensions. Count Jello became the plebeian jello, the haughty twin earls Ping and Pong became ping pong, and the whole lot of useless parasites were set to work digging the trenches and earthworks which Gwendolyn and Les Six said were going to be needed to repel the inevitable forthcoming invasion by reactionary imperialist powers bent on crushing revolution before it could spread.

  I thought they had completely lost their minds, but we'll never know because at that point the Old Geister stepped in directly and sent The Flood. He usually keeps a lower profile in the "Realm of Reality," but I guess He figures He can afford to use a heavier hand in the Realm of Words on account of He claims to have spoken the Word in the first place.

  I dunno, I'm just a sane salamander trapped in a universe of human lunatics. Who else but humans would have invented God in the first place? You wouldn't catch salamanders doing any such silly thing!

  Yeah, it was great, just great. For forty days and nights, the Realm of Words was deluged by a rain of letters, periods, commas, colons and semi-colons. Naturally, having gotten us into the fix, Gwendolyn and the half-dozen bigmouths had no idea how to get out of it, but Magrit said there was nothing to worry about.

  "Where there's a Flood, there's gotta be an ark. We'll just catch a ride."

  Sure enough, about a week into the Flood this bearded character named Noah showed up, with a bunch of sons and a big boat. They started scurrying around collecting two of every word and hustling them aboard the boat. Most of the work was being done by Noah's son Ham, who was a nice enough kid except he complained a lot.

  As usual with humans, most of his problem was with sex.

  "I've got to avoid sodomy, you know," he mused. "The Lord's very insistent on that!" He reached down and grabbed up a word that was running around loose, un chien as it happened. Ham held it up for cursory inspection. "Boy," he announced. "No problem." Next, he picked up une table. "Piece of cake. It's a girl." Then, with a look of total disgust, he held up a chair. He turned it upside down and spread its legs.

  "I ask you, Wittgenstein—is this a boy word or a girl word?"

  Then he and his father got in a big argument over whether or not they had to save pidgin words and creole words. Noah started off by damning all unauthorized words, but Ham sweet-talked him into finding room for the creoles. The pidgins were out of luck, which caused a lot of squealing, let me tell you.

  "That boat's not going to be big enough," I remarked to Ham. He looked shocked.

  "Of course it's going to be big enough! We made it just according to the Lord's specifications"—here he rattled off a lot of stuff about cubits and such—"so it's bound to be big enough."

  And, whaddaya know? Damned if it wasn't big enough. Don't ask me how. I'm just a salamander, not the Supreme Being. But, when the time came, all the chosen words trooped aboard and crammed themselves into the hold. I had wrangled us a place, too, buttering up Ham and the boys. I think Magrit on her own would have gone for it, but Gwendolyn and Les Six naturally had to stand up for principle.

  So there I was, formerly a salamander sans souci, perched on Magrit's shoulder, the waves lapping at the last little outcrop of rock left in the Realm of Words, treated to the spectacle of Gwendolyn and Les Six shaking their fists at the heavens and taking the Lord's name in vain. Actually, they were cursing Him directly, which I'm not sure counts as the same thing.

  "Things," I muttered, "couldn't get worse."

  Things, of course, got worse. The Old Geister heard them cursing Him, took umbrage, and sent down an archangel. Seheboth, I think his name was.

  "Curse ye the Lord?" he demanded.

  A string of curses confirmed the charge.

  "Be ye damned!" he cried.

  Then, frowning: "But wait! I forgot—you're already damned. Damned the day you were born, in fact. Predestination, you know. Hmmm. Let me think. I have it! Be ye cursed!"

  "Cursed with what?" sneered Magrit. The archangel took a breath, and I saw my chance.

  "No!" I shrieked. "Not that! Anything but that!"

  The archangel frowned again. "Not with what?"

  Hey, it's as old as the hills, I know that. But a good trick's a good trick, even if a stupid rabbit did come up with it. So I shrieked:

  "Not the dwarf! We've had enough of that gnome Shelyid to last a lifetime! No, let us drown here in peace! Oh, please! Don't cast us into whatever mess that dwarf's got into! Oh, please! Oh, please!"

  The archangel beamed, gestured grandly, spoke portentous words of doom.

  A flash, a feeling of sudden heat and cold, total disorientation, and—there we were!

  Where? Well, at first glance, we seemed to be in a big glass jar at the bottom of what seemed to be some kind of ocean. Just beyond the glass we could see Shelyid in a peculiar get-up—a helmet of some kind, with a hose leading above into the gloom. The dwarf had a chain in his hand and was trying to hook it up to the glass jar, which wasn't easy on account of he was being beset by every kind of monster you could imagine. But he seemed pre-occupied with something else, because as soon as he saw us he started gesturing madly at something in the glass jar behind us. When we turned around, we saw Polly Kutumoff all tied up with rope, which was a lot of rope on account of the girl looked to be about eight and 99% months pregnant.

  "Boy, am I glad to see you!" she said, snapping with her teeth at a really nasty-looking acronym that was trying to bite her on the neck—CREEP, it was—while she was trying, with bound feet, to stomp another one that was crouching by her leg.

  "You're pregnant!" cried the first.

  "No kidding," snarled Polly. Snap! Good teeth, that girl had. EEP went scuttling off; she spit CR out in a hurry.

  "Be careful!" she warned. "These things are venomous. Poisonous, too."

  "How did you get in such a fix?" demanded the second.

  Polly stomped DRM and then fixed the second with a glare.

  "By screwing, how else?" She snapped at another acronym and swept her feet around wildly. The damned things were all over the place.

  "Not that, lass—'tis obvious!" exclaimed the third.

  "Nay, we mean—" For a wonder, words failed the third; he was reduced to gesturing about him.

  "All of you shut up and do something useful!" bellowed Magrit. "If I'm not mistaken, the girl's about to give birth."

  I didn't think she was mistaken. She's a proper witch, Magrit; which, among other things, means she's been a midwife more times than you can count. She and Gwendolyn began untying Polly.

  Within seconds, Les Six were frantically trying to fight off venomous acronyms. I myself had no trouble. An acronym began scuttling toward me—RIAA, that one—I flickered
my tongue, the acronym went elsewhere. Simple as that. Acronyms are terrified of salamanders. Actually, the nasty things generally ignore any kind of animal except humans, who are their natural prey.

  I heard Gwendolyn chuckle. "Nice move, Wittgenstein. Did you ever hear the one about the frying pan and the fire?"

  I maintained a dignified silence.

  THE RATS, BATS & VATS SERIES

  Author's note:

  I do a lot of collaborative writing, but almost always with novels. Short fiction, I usually write solo. The one exception is my longtime writing partner Dave Freer, with whom I've written several pieces of short fiction, ranging from short stories to novellas.

  The novella that follows is the first story in our Rats, Bats & Vats series, which also contains the novels Rats, Bats & Vats and The Rats, the Bats & The Ugly, as well as the novelette "Crawlspace" (published in Jim Baen's Universe magazine

  Genie Out of the Bottle

  Prologue

  "When shall these three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"

  The dark, hook-nosed lab-coated woman looked as if she might have been one of the witches. And, had this been one of the world of Harmony and Reason's updated Shakespearean plays at the New Globe theatre, the setting too would have seemed appropriate. What she leaned over was no cauldron with simmering eye of newt and toe of frog, but three tissue-cloning vats with their attendant electronics and glassware.

  The fetuses developing under the glass covers all looked like unborn rats.

  One of them was.

  Mari-Lou Evans, once, twenty-four frozen light-years ago, of Stratford-on-Avon, and, like her boss, a loyal part of the New Globe Thespian society, knew her prescribed reply. "When the hurlyburly's done, when the battle's lost and won," she intoned sepulchrally. Then she sighed. "If it ever is, Sanjay. If we don't just lose."

  The colony's chief biologist shrugged and pulled a wry face. "Do you think I'd be playing God if we faced any real alternatives?" She pointed to the third breeding vat. "No need for another standard human control, Mari-Lou. We won't be breeding up any more vatbrats for a while. We need to gear up the equipment for mass production of that long-nose elephant-shrew mix. The army has put in impossible demands for quantity. If it tests out fine on emergence, then we're going to have to set up a production line for the creatures."

  The chief geneticist nodded. She pointed to the third vat. "The ultrasounds of the bat's gastrointestinal development don't look good, Sanjay. We're going to have to tinker and tweak those genes a bit more in my opinion. Perhaps cherry-pick from the Tadarida. It's the size problem. The bigger bats are fruit-eaters, not insectivores."

  "Destroy the fetus and start again, Mari-Lou. Make it smaller if need be. The army will just have to take what it can get."

  It was the geneticist's turn to pull a wry face. "I hate pulling the plug at this stage."

  "And I hate making them intelligent . . . to go and be cannon fodder. I hate implanting alien-built software and cybernetics that I don't properly understand into their heads. But we don't have a lot of choices. Humans are too slow to produce, and the Magh' are advancing faster than we can retreat, never mind stop them. The council of Shareholders are now talking about introducing compulsory conscription for everyone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Even that won't be enough. We need more fighters."

  The geneticist knew that for a truth. The Magh' tide, even with the assistance of the alien Korozhet and their wonderful new devices, was proving very difficult to stem. She shifted subject. "What are you planning on using for language download?"

  Her fellow amateur thespian shrugged. "It's just got to be a spoken source of vocabulary in computer-friendly format for the voice synthesizer. We're a bit short of material so I was going to download the Complete Shakespeare, and the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan recordings. That should do."

  Mari-Lou couldn't help but smile. "Shakespearean rats, imagining themselves to be Julius Caesar."

  Sanjay acknowledged a hit. "Well, they'll make good soldiers anyway."

  She was wrong about that. Both language and genetics shape character. They made merry wives, bawds, rogues and rude artisans, or occasionally pirates. The rats were great Magh' killers.

  They made terrible soldiers.

  * * *

  In the months that followed, conscription was introduced. So, to the front lines, went the newly produced and uplifted elephant-shrew troops with their soft-cyber implants. Despite the fact that they weren't even rodents, everyone called the small Siamese-cat-sized creatures "rats." The rats and conscripts slowed the advance of the insectlike Magh' invaders . . . but it wasn't stopped. Rumor had it that genetically modified and soft-cyber uplifted bats were about to be added to the war effort. The colony, planned as the new Fabianist utopia in which harmony and reason would finally triumph, seethed with such rumors. It also seethed with frenetic parties, and young men and women in ill-fitting new uniforms.

  Harmony and reason were notably absent.

  1

  A small plane rose slowly, her twin airscrews biting the thicker-than-earth air. The colony—mankind's brave leap into the future—had meant that they had to live in the past. Technology had to be self-sustaining without the interreliant industries of Earth. Some things had gone back a long way—like the propeller-driven aircraft.

  Conrad Fitzhugh looked out through the hole in the rear fuselage where the rear door had once been. There was smoke on the southern horizon, where the front lines lay. They'd taken Van Klomp's plane for a look. The alien invaders' scorpiaries had spread their red spirals, twinkling behind their force fields, all the way to the Arafura Sea.

  Fitz pulled his gaze inward. He'd see the war front soon enough from a lot closer. He looked nostalgically at the battered little aircraft, and at his fellow sky divers. This would be the last jump for most of them. Bobby Van Klomp had finally gotten the go-ahead to form a paratroop unit. Collins and Hawkes were on a final pass from OCS before being posted to the front. Young Cunningham had just gotten his call-up papers. And Conrad had finally decided to join the next intake at OCS in three weeks' time, despite Candice. He'd have to explain to her tonight. He'd already booked a private table at Chez Henri-Pierre.

  He tightened his harness. One of the best things about skydiving was that it stopped him thinking about her, at least for a while. Every man needs a rest from confusion.

  * * *

  Confusion, smoke, dust and fear. And a dead twitching thing, ichor draining from the severed chelicerae to mingle with the blood in the muddy trench. Pseudochitin armor couldn't cover the 'scorps' joints. And, once they'd learned to operate within the constraints of a personal slowshield, none of the Maggots, not even the 'scorps, could match rat speed. But there were always so many of them.

  Ariel twitched her whiskers and fastidiously began to clean them. All the Maggots here were dead. So were the human troops.

  Another rat sauntered across the trench, pausing to rifle a dead second lieutenant's pockets. He shook his head glumly at the pickings. "I' faith, these whoreson new officers aren't any better than the last lot. Poorly provisioned. What's a rat to loot in such poverty?"

  "You could try looting a Maggot, Gobbo," said a plump little rat leaning against a sandbag stack, picking her teeth with a sliver of trench knife.

  Gobbo grunted. Shoved a few things into his pouch and tossed the rest. "Even thinner pickings, methinks, my little Pitti-Sing."

  The plump little rat considered Gobbo from under lowered lashes. Gently arched her long tail. "Of course, if it is less thin pickings thou art after, I wouldn't try a Maggot," she said archly.

  A rat peered out from a bunker. A particularly long-nosed rat with a rather villainous cast to one eye. "Zounds! 'Tis all done then? I fought them off bravely."

  Ariel and the others snickered. "In every doughty deed, ha, ha! He always took the lead, ha ha!" she caroled. No sensible rat wanted to fight Maggots, but Dick Deadeye took discretion to the ridiculous.r />
  Deadeye drew himself up. "I was foremost in the fight!"

  Ariel snorted. "The first and foremost flight, ha, ha!" she said, showing teeth.

  Deadeye certainly wasn't about to ruin his reputation for staying out of trouble by rising to the bait from this particular rat-girl. Ariel might be smaller than most, but she made up for it with pure ferocity. He took in the scene instead. The dead lieutenant, with his turned-out pockets, the several dead human grunts, a dead 'scorp and the body parts of several more of the aliens. "Methinks we'd better send a runner back to let them know we need human reinforcements."

  Rats had no problem with Deadeye's being a coward. It was his being a brown-noser that was going to get him killed. "Art crazed?" snapped Ariel, irritably. " 'Tis fully two hours to grog ration. What need have we to alert them before 'tis needful? They'd make us work."