“Hello, Naag,” I said.
You should have seen him spin around. The centrifugal force of it restyled his hair. I decided that it suited him.
“How are the Catholics?” I said.
He went white. “They’re wonderful,” he said. “I like the Jewish mothers, too. And most of the rest of humanity in fact. Although some of the marketing people make me nervous and I try to steer clear altogether of Los Angeles.”
I shook my head. “It’s crap,” I said. “You’re xenoforming Earth.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. What is it this time? An ocean planet for the Hyrrions? Or what about something hotter, for the Nuwa Chythicans?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, really? Then why did you break in?”
He looked down at the screwdriver he still clutched. I saw his eyes go hard.
“Don’t even think it,” I said. At the same time, I pressed a short gray cylinder up against his head. “You know what this is?”
He rolled his borrowed Earthling eyes to get a look at it. “A psychological injector?”
“Good. You know what’s in it?”
“How many guesses do I get?”
“Forty millicogs of pure, uncut forgiveness from the Monks of Xalia.”
“You didn’t even let me guess.”
“The most guilty beings in existence,” I went on. “They think everything’s their fault.”
“Even shaving?”
“Especially shaving.”
“They sound fantastic. I’ll have to visit sometime. Bring the kids. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
I shoved him up against the wall. “They train themselves for centuries in self-forgiveness. It’s painstakingly harvested and concentrated in mental collectors. Do you have any idea what this stuff does to Naags?”
He did, evidently, because he dropped the screwdriver, and he didn’t fight me when I used the cord from one of the Venetian blinds to tie him to the credenza.
“No, no,” he said. “Never mind me. I’ll be fine. You go have your fun. I like being tied to the credenza.”
I didn’t listen, as on the one hand, this was typical behavior for a Naag and on the other I had locked myself in the bathroom, where I’d dropped a tab of standard issue, psychoactive, prepaid calling acid. It was time, in other words, to call the cavalry and I planned to do it through a telecommunicative hallucination.
The walls melted. My head became a spray of huckleberries. The huckleberries grew and morphed into an office with a few inspirational wall hangings, a potted plant from the Dehutan sector, a desk, and, sitting at it, Remsee, my superior.
I use that last term lightly. You see, Remsee was a Wiee—a form of life evolved entirely from hand puppets. It was called inanimate evolution and it was all the rage some centuries ago. Manufacturers had started it to get their products to improve themselves by natural selection. They’d introduced accelerated recombinant evolution into household objects, then let nature take its course. The craze had ended in a flurry of lawsuits when a politically active band of intelligent suppositories attacked a ladies’ historical society luncheon, but certain vestiges remained.
“Xzchsthyl!” Remsee said. “It’s great to see you!”
I stayed wary despite this pleasantry. It was said the Wiee had no innate intelligence and so derived mental nutrition from the minds of everybody they conversed with. The process was not fully understood, but every time I talked to Remsee I had the distinct impression I was getting dumber.
“Where are you?” Remsee said.
“On Earth. Remember? I was sent to catch the Naag?”
He tipped his head to one side, making his eyeballs jiggle. “Oh, right. I hear they’ve got some wonderful hands on the planet.”
“I’m a poor judge,” I admitted.
“Fantastic knuckles,” he went on. “Very good bone structure. Some of the fingernails can snag, I hear, but wonderful overall.”
“Right. Listen, Remsee, I caught the Naag.”
“An aunt of mine got a job there working with a ventriloquist. Totally freaked everybody out. What did you say?”
“I said I caught the Naag. I’ve got him in custody.”
He looked thoughtful. He managed that by scratching the red fur of his forehead. “Right, right,” he said. “Xenoformer, isn’t he?”
“One-hundred plus worlds,” I said.
He nodded. “I remember. Thing is, Xzchsthyl, you’ve got to let him go.”
I couldn’t get sense out of that comment any way I looked at it. It was like drilling for orange juice inside a goat. “Did you say, ‘let him go?’ “
“I did.”
“But he’s a known xenoformer. And he plans to xenoform the Earth. Under article six million three hundred thousand eight hundred and fifty-two, any planet hosting indigenous intelligent life—”
He was nodding like people do when they can afford to concede your point because theirs is bigger. “And the human race does not meet the criteria for intelligence.”
I was mouth breathing by then. “Come again?”
“The council held a special meeting,” Remsee said. “They cited strip malls. Overdevelopment. Pollution. And Minnesota.”
“Did you say Minnesota?”
“Mmm. The council thought Minnesota was a particularly dumb idea.”
All the strength went out of me. It was obvious enough what had happened. The Naag had bribed someone. It wouldn’t be the first time. Only a year ago, for example, I’d nailed him for xenoforming a small reddish-brown world out by the Crab Nebula, and the judge had thrown the case out, saying the witnesses for the prosecution were a bunch of no good clowns. He had a point—they were second-rate performers from the victim planet. Kept snapping the bailiffs suspenders and throwing cream pies at the jury. But the Naag had also bribed the judge, and the larger issue was, the Naag had money. In the face of that, a mere bureaucracy is helpless.
“You’re to return to base immediately, Xzchsthyl,” Remsee said. “And bring a couple of hands back with you if you get the chance.”
I tried to talk some sense into him, but he was adamant, and by the time we disconnected I could not remember how to tie my shoes.
After my talk with Remsee, I stood looking through the bathroom window. In the playground near my building, a little crowd of children played. They were singing, laughing, jumping rope. One of them pushed another’s face into a mud puddle. They reminded me of another child, on another planet, many years ago. That other child was me. Granted I’d had several limbs, an exoskeleton, and had propelled myself around by means of air expelled through one giant nostril, but I’d been just as oblivious and innocent.
The Naag had xenoformed my homeworld all those years ago. His modus operandi then had been to move in, drive up the property values, slaughter 98 percent of the indigenous population, and then experience vague guilty feelings afterward and let the survivors open up casinos by way of partial restitution. My family had only made it out by becoming excellent croupiers, although I never mastered that particular skill myself—a fact that almost killed my father. Literally. The dice we used weighed several tons and I fumbled one and dropped it on his thorax.
I’d been chasing the Naag ever since, with gills one month and tentacles the next and feathers the next until I could not remember what I had originally looked or felt like. And finally, I had begun to see that I would never catch him. Because xenoforming paid well. Because he could afford the bribes. Because (as they also say on Earth) money talks, and there’s another corollary concerning ambulatory bovine fecal matter.
But I decided, then and there, looking out my rented bathroom window at those laughing Earthling children—playing, jumping, sticking chewing gum in one another’s hair—well, I decided Earth was off limits to the Naag. And if I couldn’t stop him legally. . . .
I went back to the living room and aimed the psychological injector at his head.<
br />
“Call it off,” I said.
“Call what—”
“The bribe.”
“What bribe?”
“I mean it, Naag. I’m not afraid to use this.”
He took a second, apparently to gauge how serious I was. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll help you. But I can’t call off the bribe. It’s too late for that now.”
I paused, my finger trembling on the trigger. “I’m listening.”
“The human race. You can get them legally protected.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “They produce the cure for chronic ullnik.”
Chronic ullnik. A terrible and fully hypothetical disease. It attacked organs that its victims had never bothered to evolve. The phantom pain was said to be excruciating.
“The human race produces the cure,” the Naag went on. “By accident. It is a mix of waxy yellow buildup, unsightly nail fungus, and household soap scum. I came across it by accident in a public lavatory.”
“And you expect me to believe that?”
“I’ve got proof. It’s with my partner.”
“What partner?”
He answered rapidly, possibly because I’d put the injector’s business end in his left ear. “The Sublukhar,” he said. “I’m working with the Sublukhar.”
I shuddered when I heard that. I knew the Sublukhar as well. Another xenoformer, huge and sluglike, brutally efficient.
“She’s outside of town,” the Naag went on. “At a place called Breakneck Mountain. The Earthlings call it that because a cow fell off it once and broke its neck. If you ask me it is a lucky thing for the local civic organization that it didn’t break its reproductive organs. That would not have sounded half so rustic.”
“What’s she doing there?” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “You know how Sublukhar are. Temperamental, but excellent with machinery. She’s setting up the xenoforming equipment. And doing other things.”
I grabbed my jacket and a blaster. “What kind of things?”
“Unnatural things. With monkeys. But I don’t ask questions where the Sublukhar is concerned.” He frowned. “You’re not going to leave me here, are you?”
I didn’t answer. I just headed for the door. If the human race really did hold the key to curing chronic ullnik, my troubles were as good as solved. If I could get the proof ... get it to Remsee ... no bribe in the universe would stop me from saving Earth.
“Well, that’s fine,” the Naag called after me. “The rope is starting to rub my wrists raw, but I don’t mind so much. And anyway, I’m sure you’ve got more important things to think about.”
Breakneck Mountain rose out of suburbia, an undeveloped pile of rock and tree, a lonely shred of evidence that Earthlings were intelligent. By the time I reached it, night had fallen from it like a cow, and it hung caught and broken in the thousand orange streetlights bordering the highway.
I parked in the breakdown lane and climbed the slope, ascending through the musky darkness in between the trees. Near the top, a blue haze filtered through the branches. I crept forward, catching glimpses of machinery. I approached a clearing. In the center of it loomed the Sublukhar. She squelched, cursing, glistening, tinkering with something. For some reason I could not yet fathom, monkeys hung from branches overhead.
I stepped into the light.
“Nice night,” I said.
She spun around fast for a Sublukhar, her knobbed antennae shrinking. “Well, well. The great Xzchsthyl.” She pronounced it wrong. “I thought you’d be slimier.”
“I haven’t been feeling well,” I said. I’d never met her before, but I knew all about her. She was of a race of incredibly possessive sluglike creatures. They had no word for “yours” in their language, but over seven thousand words for “mine.” When the concept of property possessed by others was first explained to some of their linguists, they laughed hysterically for weeks and finally had to be hospitalized.
“I hear you’re xenoforming Earth,” I said.
“That’s the plan,” she admitted, gurgling at me. “We’re going to turn it into a filing planet.”
“Filing?”
She nodded her slick and eyeless head. “In three days’ time, the machinery you see around you will create the cataclysmic, simultaneous appearance of over three trillion billion trillion manila folders, burying every major landmass on the Earth. It’s for the Griggons. You’ve heard of them?”
I hadn’t. “I’ve been busy lately.”
“An interesting civilization. They reduced forty centuries of history and learning down to a simple, beautiful mathematical equation, then misplaced it. They keep hard copies of everything since then.”
“And Earth is going to store those copies.”
“Only G through K. We’ll need other planets to take up the rest. That is,” she added, “if I can get the job done.”
“Something wrong?”
“I’m having problems,” she admitted. “And I don’t mean you.” She swung her head in the direction of the device she’d been repairing. “I was supposed to be in human form three weeks ago, but my ZrrfCo Somatorific here is on the fritz. Keeps turning everything to monkeys.”
That explained a lot. But she was still slithering slowly toward me, so I held my blaster up where she could see it. “That’s far enough,” I said. “I’m here about the cure for chronic ullnik.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so? It’s over there, in that compartment.”
I looked where she had gestured, and saw a hatch in one side of a domed machine. I kept one eye on her and walked to it. I had to scare a crested gibbon away, but I popped the hatch, pulled out a manila folder, and looked inside.
I am no scientist, but the papers in the folder seemed to be the real McCoy. There was even a budget analysis of the cost of harvesting the cure for chronic ullnik. Evidently the Naag had thought about selling the cure himself, but had decided he’d make more money from the xenoforming.
This was it. If I could get this evidence to the government, they’d have to protect the human race. I’d stop the Naag. I was so excited by the prospect that I completely failed to notice that the Sublukhar had pressed the button on her defective ZrrfCo Somatorific, and that I was standing in the active area.
Metamorphosing into a monkey stands low on my list of enjoyable sensations. Growing the hair was the worst part—like someone pulling a million needles out of all the pores on my entire body, all at once. I had to bite the Sublukhar in order to escape, and all the other monkeys chased me through the canopy. I did manage to get away with the evidence, but I was in no condition to drive, and don’t even talk to me about the use of public transportation as a monkey. I particularly and personally hated it because, although I had never met an Earthling monkey myself, I had spent three weeks as a binkled ape one time on Ratcheon in punishment for excess parking violations, and my love of primates was, therefore, a sickly thing at best.
“You’re looking well,” the Naag said when I came in through the window.
I screeched at him.
“I see your point,” he said. “We’ve all got problems. Look at me. I’ve been tied to this credenza for hours. Not that you care about my suffering, of course.”
Trying to guilt me again. Typical. I pivoted on my knuckles and loped into the bathroom, leaving him behind. Once there, I dropped another tab of prepaid calling acid, and after staring at the pretty colors that resulted, I found myself face-to-face again with Remsee.
“Good God,” he said, doing an exaggerated double take. “Xzchsthyl! Is that you?”
I screeched. The hallucination compensated, translating. “That’s right,” I said.
“My God. What happened?”
“I’ve been turned into a monkey.”
He nodded. “Parking violations,” he said knowingly.
“Not this time. But never mind that now.” I held up the manila folder.
“What the hell is that?” he said.
“Evidence.
The human race produce a cure for chronic ullnik. We’ll have to protect them now, Remsee, intelligent or not.”
He grabbed our mutual hallucination of the manila folder and leafed through its contents. Then he looked relieved. “Thank God,” he said. “I was beginning to think I’d never get a crack at those hands. I was looking through your research this morning. I found—I think it’s called a television show. They called it Howdy Doody . . .”
I was feeling dumber already. I cut him off before he could get into it. “I’ve got to go, Remsee. Just send backup, will you? I’ll have to bring in the Naag and his partner and I’m in no condition to do it alone.”
We disconnected. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust Remsee . . . Okay, it was. Either way, I made a few more calls, and showed the evidence about the cure to other higher-ups within the government. Things were looking up, in other words. I sat down on my rented Earthling couch and waited for the cavalry. I picked at fleas to pass the time.
I had run out of fleas some hours later and I was starting to get nervous. Especially nerve-racking was the look on the Naag’s face. If he grinned any wider, he’d be in danger of an embolism.
“Anything seem strange to you?” he said.
I thought about it. Apart from my having been turned into a monkey, there was the lack of a patrol troop materializing in the living room.
“They’re not coming,” the Naag positively gushed. “And do you know why?”
I was starting to have my suspicions, to tell the truth.
“It’s because your friends know by now I’m on your side. By now, they’ve got a message from the Subluk-har. They know that I have every reason to protect the human race.”
I hopped up on the armrest, glaring at him.
“Oh, yes,” he said. He cocked his head. “The human race. Don’t they strike you as odd?” He tried to stand up, but the ropes jerked him back down. He went on talking anyway. “Think about it. After a billion years of competitive evolution, with organism after organism fighting for a niche here, a niche there, one species out of countless others wins the game in an evolutionary eyeblink.”
It did seem strange to me. But I’d been busy tracking down the Naag and hadn’t thought about it much.
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