“Baa-daa-doosh,” Cal corrected. “Cheesy-Weesy would be ridiculous.”
There was a general murmuring again. This time the consensus was that the whole story was pretty ridiculous, and the name of the planet wouldn’t really have made it any more so.
“Anyway, I’m looking out the window and I see my guys are in trouble. I don’t know all the details of what’s going on yet. I mean, I’ve got my suspicions…”
“You’ve got your suspicions that because they were late to the worship bell, an angry cheese god is demonstrating its wrath?” asked Ibarra.
“Exactly,” said Cal.
“How could you possibly have suspected that?”
Cal shrugged. “I don’t know. Call it women’s intuition. That’s not the point. The point is, my guys were in trouble. One of the little purple ones is, like, plastered to the ground by Brie, or whatever. The others are trying to pull him—or her—free, but they’re not having much luck. I have this nagging feeling that I might be in some way at least partly responsible for what was going on, so I go out to help,” he said. “At which point, they all immediately begin hitting me with sticks.”
“Where did they get the sticks?” asked Tanis.
“Doesn’t matter. Again, not really the point of the story. The point is, I bravely shrugged them off like a champ, then I pulled that little purple fella out from under the cheese. You know, all heroic-like? I slung him over my shoulder and ran him right back inside the house.”
Cal sighed. “Turns out it wasn’t his house. I’d got the wrong guy. They all look pretty much the same, so it was an easy mistake that anyone could’ve made.” He looked around the table. “It wasn’t racist. That’s what I want to be clear about. They genuinely do all look the same. Apart from the colors, I mean.” He hesitated. “And their faces are different, and they vary in size, but other than that they’re identical.”
Splurt rippled.
“And their voices, yes. Their voices are all unique. But other than those few details…” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, because everyone who was out in the square all came piling into the house behind me. They shut the door and barricaded it, and suddenly everyone is crying or screaming or shouting questions at me and… Well, know what? I’m going to skip on through this next part to hurry this up.” He looked around the table. “Unless anyone really wants the fine detail?”
“God, no!” spluttered Bethany Anne, and there was another general murmur of agreement.
Cal looked briefly offended, but quickly buried it beneath a lopsided grin. “OK, so blah, blah, blah, town council, blah, blah, blah, hand me the death sentence, blah, blah, blah, gods and worshipping and all that stuff,” he said. “They tell me they’ve angered the cheese god, and that it’s somehow my fault.”
“It was your fault,” Tanis pointed out.
Cal made a weighing motion with his hands. “Well, that’s a matter of… No, you’re right, it was totally my fault,” he admitted. “But while they were talking, I could only think of one thing.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Star Trek.”
He was met by a few blank looks from the others, although not as many as he had been expecting. “It’s a TV show. It deals with this sort of thing all the time. Primitive race, vengeful god. Yadda yadda. They come across this stuff every week, and so I think – if this were Star Trek, what would really be going on. You know? Like what would be the twist?”
“Similar to ‘movies’ and ‘sci-fi,’ then?” Tanis asked.
Cal drummed his hands on the table. “Yeah, exactly. Anyway, that’s when I crack the case. That’s when everything slots into place. There is no cheese god. Of course there isn’t. I mean, that’s crazy. Obviously, what we’re dealing with is an evil sentient computer that’s using the townsfolk as slaves. Got to be, right?”
Nobody leaped to agree with him.
“Right. So I explain my theory to them. It takes a while, because they’d never heard of Star Trek. I thought if I sang them the theme tune they might recognize it. You know—doo doooo do-do-do-do-doooo—but nope. Not a clue. Just blank faces all round. They also had no idea what a computer was, or any understanding of the concept of evil, so that didn’t exactly help matters, either.
“Eventually, though, I managed to persuade them that what they thought was an angry cheese god was merely a malevolent intelligent machine that was making them do its bidding. Possibly from the future, I hadn’t yet established that.”
“And was it, Captain Kirk?” asked Amanda.
Cal raised his eyebrows. “Hmm? Oh. No. No, turns out there really was a cheese god. What are the chances, right? Big guy, too. Real mean. I was right in the middle of explaining my plan to find the evil computer and force it to define love, when he tore the wall off. Just tore that sucker right off. Boy, did I have egg on my face,” Cal said. “And cheese. Mostly cheese, actually.”
With a sharp jerk of his head, Cal drained the last of his drink. “He must’ve been twelve feet tall, and maybe half that across the shoulders. Other than that, he was pretty much what you might expect. By which I mean he was made entirely out of cheese. And not even nice cheese—that crusty stuff with the blue veins in it. You know, French or whatever? The guy—and I can’t stress this enough—he stank.
“And so he’s just standing there with half the wall of this little orange dudes house in one hand, glaring in at me. He’s not the only one, either. I can feel all the jelly beans giving me the stink-eye, too. Someone mutters something about Star Trek, but I ignore it. I rise above it. Now isn’t the time. There’s a cheese god on the doorstep, and he’s baying for blood.”
“What did you do?” asked Tanis, barely containing her laughter.
“What do you do when faced with any angry god?” asked Cal. “I kicked him square in the balls. Just a straight-on, full-force toe punt to the danglies. I mean, that’s just standard operating procedure, right? It’s textbook.”
He winced. “Sadly, it turns out cheese gods don’t actually have balls, so it kind of backfired. And with him being so soft, my foot got stuck somewhere around his lower abdomen, which meant I had to hop around while I tried to pull it free. It wasn’t my finest moment.”
Cal was sitting upright in his seat now. The others suspected—and quietly hoped—that he was closing on the end of his story.
“So, the jelly beans, they’re all bowing and scraping and doing their worshipping thing, and I’m hopping around with my foot in the cheese god’s guts. I’ll be honest, I didn’t fancy my chances. The cheese god, he’s bunching his big Gorgonzola hands into fists and spitting curses at me, or whatever, and I’m thinking, ‘Yep, this is how I die. In a tiny little house, ankle-deep in a god made of Camembert.’”
He shrugged. “Guess there are worse ways to go, but I had my crew to think about, you know? And this little guy.” Cal reached up and gave Splurt a pat. “I had to get out of there. I had to beat this thing.”
Cal leaned forward and lowered his voice. “That’s when I remembered the oven.”
A few confused expressions looked back at him. “What oven?”
“The oven. The oven I crashed into on the way down. Were you even listening?” said Cal. He tutted. “Anyway, it’s right behind me, so I manage to hop toward it, pulling Big Cheesy with me. I put my hand on the door and—yes! It’s warm. Hot, even.”
“So, you cooked it?” guessed Tanis, chuckling constantly now.
Cal deflated a little. “Well… I mean… Yes. It was a little more dramatic than that, but yes, that’s the gist of it. Me and the cheese god wrestled for a while, then I shoved him into the oven, butt-first. You know, like that fairy tale?”
Tanis choked down her laughter. “There’s a fairy tale called ‘Butt First?’”
“What? No! I mean like in the fairy tale where they put the witch in the oven. Cinderella, or whatever.”
“’Hansel and Gretel?’” Amanda offered.
“Gesundheit. But yeah, it was just like that, except this time it wasn’t a witch
.” His voice became a dramatic whisper. “It was a cheese god!”
“I think we’ve already established that,” said Ibarra.
Cal held up his hands. “Just making sure we were all on the same page,” he said. “Anyway, to cut a long story short…”
“This is the short version?” gasped Ryck.
“To cut a long story short,” Cal said again. “After I’d taken care of the cheese god, the jelly beans started worshipping me. Crazy, right? They said I was their new cheese god. They made me a crown and everything. I mean, crowns are usually for kings, I know, but I didn’t really have the heart to tell them. They all seemed so excited.”
He leaned back in his chair again. “They were halfway through the coronation ceremony when I woke up.”
A silence fell around the table. It was quite a heavy, oppressive sort of silence filled with potential danger.
“You woke up?” Tanis abruptly stopped laughing. “What do you mean, you woke up?”
“Turns out the leech-thing’s venom? Brings about vivid hallucinations. Really weird stuff. It seems that while I thought I was helping save the village of jelly bean people, I was actually naked on a clock tower shouting ‘I’m Cheeses of Nazareth!’ at the top of my voice. In the end, Loren had to shoot me in the tits with a tranquilizer dart to get me down.”
Amanda snorted with laughter.
He began lifting his shirt. “You can still see the scar.”
“Wait, so… What are you saying? None of that happened?” Terry demanded.
Cal paused, one nipple uncovered. “Hmm? No, it… Wait.” He looked around the table. “Were these supposed to be true stories?”
“Yes!”
“Kinda.”
“Oh.” Cal lowered his shirt again, then quietly cleared his throat. He smiled, a little less confidently than before. “OK. So, this one time, me and the singer, Ozzy Osbourne…”
Terry banged his fist on the table, making Cal jump and all the glasses rattle. “Next!”
Interlude
BOB listened to Cal speak, then ran a diagnostic on its translation programming. It had understood each word Cal had spoken, but it wasn’t sure it understood what exactly had been said. Much of it defied a logical explanation, given the human baseline the Collector had downloaded into it.
“I still don’t know what that grubbing thing is on his shoulder,” the general muttered to the colonel.
“So, ask.”
“Eh. Doesn’t matter, I guess.”
“That’s Splurt,” Amanda said. “I don’t think we need to know anything else beyond that, really. He’s a cute slimeball. Does he, er . . . she . . . or it, I suppose, speak at all, Cal?”
“Not in the traditional sense,” Cal said. “By which I mean not at all.”
BOB knew that the same effect that made them simply accept that they’d walked into an interdimensional bar was also affecting their overall curiosity. Back in their home universes, each of them would have challenged Cal about his companion, but in the bar, no matter how extraordinary the being was, they would be hesitant to challenge its existence.
Which meant BOB wouldn’t find out either. That wasn’t part of its programming. Curiosity, was, however, that which made it better able to serve the Collector’s needs. That curiosity was not going to be satisfied in this case.
Ibarra signaled for BOB’s attention by tapping his glass to indicate he needed another. He had a full bottle in front of him so BOB didn’t understand why he wanted a new glass, but humans didn’t seem wedded to logic so it brought him a new glass.
Making Merit
By Richard Fox
Marc Ibarra knocked back another shot of Macallan, and his cheeks flushed with warmth as the potent potable hit his system. He looked down the table at Bethany Anne and Amanda. He got BOB’s attention, then tapped a fingernail against his shot glass. The android produced a twin and set it in front of Ibarra.
Ibarra poured most of a shot into the new glass and slid it toward Bethany Anne, who wasn’t looking in his direction.
BOB and Ibarra traded a glance as the shot slid straight for the edge of the table, but the woman made a deft catch without looking. She downed the shot in a smooth motion, then looked over her shoulder at Ibarra. At his bottle, to be precise.
She excused herself from her conversation and stood up, then made her way around the table to Ibarra.
“Think I’ve got a chance?” Ibarra mumbled to BOB.
“No.” The android left and went behind the bar.
Bethany Anne slammed the shot glass down next to Ibarra.
“You are an idiot,” she declared.
“You sound like my first ex-wife.” Ibarra lifted the carved glass bottle slightly off the table. “Another?”
“Yes, another. Can’t have you risking something so exquisite on a stupid bar stunt,” she said.
“That’s where you’re wrong, my dear.” Ibarra poured shots for them both. “No risk was involved—I knew you’d catch it. And my sliding skills improve after the first few rounds. I also become a better dancer and singer as bottles get empty. Scientists are baffled.”
“They’re not the only ones.” Amanda smirked.
Bethany Anne raised an eyebrow at him and downed the next shot.
“I’m trying to decide what the bigger lie is.”
“Just be glad this isn’t a karaoke bar—you should hear me sing Total Eclipse of the Heart in a duet. But I knew you’d catch the glass, since you remind me of an old employee,” Ibarra said.
“Bonnie Tyler!” Cal exclaimed, jumping to his feet. He jabbed a thumb toward the blob on his shoulder. “Splurt does a fonking incredible Bonnie Tyler. Watch this.”
He gave Splurt a little dunt with the side of his head. “Go on, buddy. Show them your Bonnie.”
Splurt’s round eyes flitted across the faces of the others around the table and he shuddered gently.
“He’s shy,” Cal said, and sat down again. “But trust me—it’s incredible.”
Bethany Anne looked baffled for a moment, then returned her attention to Ibarra.
“You mention an ex-wife, karaoke, and a presumably female employee… If this is leading to a pass at me, you’re off to a very bad start. Your booze is your only redeeming quality at this point.” She placed her glass on the table and got another refill.
“Being the richest man on Earth tends to break the ice most days,” Ibarra said. When Bethany Anne frowned at him and shrugged, he pulled back slightly. “What? The Marc Ibarra? Ibarra Industries? Stadiums? Nobel prizes?”
She looked up slightly, then shook her head again.
“I’ve got my own line of deodorant, for God’s sake. If my publicist wasn’t dead I’d fire him. Bah!” Ibarra swished the whisky bottle. “Now, Shannon…she knew who I was.”
Amanda leaned forward and whispered in a loud voice that carried clearly across the table, mimicking a certain yellow cartoon father. “I think he likes you.”
Tanis snorted and signaled to BOB for another cup of java.
“This employee of yours…what’s the similarity? And if you get all ‘creepy old dude’ on me I’m taking that bottle—and I’ll break a few of your fingers as an object lesson.”
“You’re both killers,” Ibarra said.
Bethany Anne paused for a moment, then sat down in the chair next to Ibarra’s.
Amanda said, “I think that applies to most people around this table, but like Tanis mentioned earlier, they were all very, very bad people,” she added earnestly. “So let’s hear about this killer, then.”
“I’ve known plenty in my time,” Ibarra said. “Your run-of-the-mill street thugs. Military types. The corporate espionage guys, and more than one cartel sicario. Had to hire security after my first IPO made me a billionaire at twenty-five. Couldn’t get by with hefty bald dudes with goatees. You upset a number of legacy industries, you make enemies. But the true artists in their chosen medium…” He wagged a finger at the table. “They don’t work for
silver. They work for ideals.”
“You’ve got me so wrong. So very wrong,” Bethany Anne said.
“I’m still breaking this liver in.” Ibarra swayed slightly on his stool. “My tolerance is low, and there’s plenty more time for poor judgments.”
She took the bottle from him gently and pushed it toward BOB, who poured them both another shot and replenished a few other drinks around the table.
“You’ve got until I finish this to get interesting,” Bethany Anne said. “Although most of the time when I’ve been in drinking challenges the other person can actually hold their liquor.”
“You carry yourself like Shannon,” Ibarra said. “Rather, how she carried herself when she could take her mask off. First time I saw her was in Las Vegas. You see a looker like that at one of the big casino bars and you can make assumptions… Well, it was Vegas, after all.”
“You made that assumption?” Bethany Anne looked around the table and raised her glass to her lips.
Amanda leaned toward Tanis. “I’m making the assumption that he likes her better than me or you.” She winked.
“Good,” Tanis replied.
“No, no, I knew she was there to kill me,” Ibarra said, ignoring the byplay.
Bethany Anne set the glass back down.
“But she wasn’t armed—no electronics on her at all. Big room with dozens of witnesses,” Ibarra said. “She wasn’t subtle. I don’t know how you women do it, but when you want a man to notice you walk you can just flip a switch. Suffice it to say she made an entrance the whole room noticed, myself included. You think death will be a dude in black robes with a scythe, not a looker in something red and sheer. Granted, I didn’t know how she was going to pull off my untimely end at that moment. Figured it out later.”
“You were in a room with someone you knew was there to kill you? I can’t tell if you’re brave or you love your drinks way too much.” She kicked her shot back and signaled to BOB to pour another. “This whisky is phenomenal.”
“Whisky is whisky,” Ryck muttered. “Just something to get you drunk.”
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