by Ira Nayman
“Yes, yes!” Noomi answered.
“Mmm. You have an advanced case of product placement,” Barbara explained. “It used to be confined to movies, but it has now spread to Web sites, blogs and, yes, even novels.”
“But, if that’s true, why didn’t I just do it?” Noomi wanted to know.
“Kott-Ya Industries, the wholly owned subsidiary of MultiNatCorp that produces…the soda product in question, stiffed the publishing company,” Barbara stated.
“What?”
“They had a change in management,” Barbara explained. “The new K-Y Industries CEO believes product placement in tweets is the way to go, so he cancelled the check. Our publisher was furious, let me tell you, so they decided to pull the plug on the product placement in the novel.”
“Hunh! The new economy is tough!”
“Tell me about it!” Barbara agreed. “Now the author has to make money on the strength of his writing alone! Good luck with that!”
“How do you know this?”
“Oh, dear,” Barbara told her, “you know I have access to a wide variety of levels of reality!” Noomi nodded. After a couple of moments of contemplation, Barbara added, “It’s probably for the best.”
“How so?”
“Product placement is usually not very well integrated into the story,” Barbara stated. “Because of this, it tends to stop the forward movement of the narrative, which results in a poorer work of art.”
Noomi and Barbara exchanged knowing, guilty glances. Barbara hastily said: “So, dear, you were just about to tell me something disturbing about your day?”
“Yeah,” Noomi, returning to character, answered. “This afternoon, I watched a cat being blown up for no good reason.”
“Science always has its reasons,” Barbara told her. “Most of the time, they are not for mere mortals to know. Some day, you will realize that this is probably for the best.”
“We’ll see,” Noomi mumbled.
“Now, to get the ostensible purpose of this meeting out of the way,” Barbara stated, “Inspector Crash Chumley is a keeper. Don’t worry about him. I know, I know, he has a ‘history.’ Who doesn’t these days? But, this one is a fighter. Stay with him, and I think he will surprise you.”
“How do you know?” Noomi asked.
Barbara gave her the “My ways are like god’s, but more mysterious” look. Noomi nodded in submissive acceptance.
The waitress returned and put the food on the table in front of them. Giving the women an “I can’t believe you don’t want a Burpsi Cola” look, she unenthusiastically said, “Enjoy your meal,” and walked away.
“Somebody appears not to have gotten the memo,” Barbara commented.
“Yeah, well,” Noomi replied, “if she doesn’t drop the post-modern, self-reflexive attitude, somebody is not going to get a tip, either!”
Barbara smiled indulgently.
As the two women began to eat their meals, Noomi’s face lit up. “I did something I think you’re going to be very proud of.”
“I’m proud of everything you do,” Barbara told her in a tone of voice that actually said, “tell me more.”
Noomi described how she had used a chopstick to set off a mine that killed a man.
“Hmm…” Barbara said when she had finished. “Specious Matumbe once killed a man by using a chopstick to fire a semi-automatic rifle, but I don’t believe the two situations are comparable. Let me take this to the Sisterhood Ruling Coven; if they see things the way I do, you can expect your invitation to join, in the mail, within two weeks.”
Noomi beamed.
“Now, tell me everything that has happened,” Barbara commanded. Over dinner, Noomi recounted the various adventures that had made up her and Charlemagne’s investigation.
After the stories were told and the dishes cleared, the waitress sullenly asked, “Would you like anything else?”
“A coffee, please,” Barbara politely requested.
“Would you like –” the waitress started.
“Just a coffee,” Barbara assured her.
“But, we have –” the waitress tried again.
“Just a coffee,” Barbara repeated.
“I…I’m not sure we do that,” the waitress stated.
“See what you can do,” Barbara smiled at her. The waitress wrote on her pad and, feeling that some burden she didn’t even know she had been suffering under had been lifted, walked away from the table with a jauntier step than she had had in weeks.
“I’ll have one, too!” Noomi shouted after her.
“Now, then,” Barbara recapped. “You have: a dead body slumped over a modified Home Universe Generator™; somebody who seems to have changed the device so that they can use it to manipulate people in other dimensions; and the person who started the whole thing appears to have been using it to jerk you around.”
“Why –” Noomi started, but, just then, the waitress placed a cup of coffee in front of Barbara.
“Here you go,” she said, a little stunned. “I…I didn’t realize we even made this.”
“Can you get one for my friend, as well, please?” Barbara smiled upon her again.
“It would be my distinct pleasure,” the waitress beamed and left.
“You’ve got to teach me that Jedi mind trick,” Noomi said in awe.
“There’s no trick,” Barbara smiled. “I just have a…forceful personality.”
Noomi shook her head and asked what made Barbara think that she was being jerked around by their adversary.
“Noomi, Noomi, Noomi,” Barbara Noomi, Noomi, Noomied her. “You were given a signal to follow that led you to four realities where you found four versions of you that represented four different aspects of your Get a Life avatar! There isn’t a computer in the universe powerful enough to calculate the odds of that. Whoever you’re looking for found you first, and has been toying with you ever since. Did the name of either you or Investigator Chumley appear in public at all?”
“No,” Noomi responded. Then, quickly added: “Yes. Charl – ash – Crash – he gave the standard ‘No comment’ comment to an Alternate Reality News Service reporter.”
“Here you go,” the waitress said, putting a cup of coffee in front of Noomi. “It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it,” the waitress mused, “how much more there is to learn about even things we take the most for granted?” Then, she sauntered – yes, that is the only word that can properly describe it – sauntered back to the kitchen, Noomi and Barbara watching in fascination as she went.
“There you go, then,” Barbara finally broke the spell. “She found out about Investigator Chumley, connected him to you and used her machine to mess with your head. QED.”
“She?” Noomi asked.
“She,” Barbara affirmed, and all the light seemed to drain out of the restaurant (which had nothing to do with Jedi mind tricks and everything to do with the force of Barbara Brundtland-Govanni’s personality – unless it was the restaurant turning down the lights to generate a more romantic mood and save on its electricity bills – special effects can sometimes be ambiguous that way). “My nemesis. Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency.”
Chapter Twelve:
Noomi Is Not in This Chapter (Unless You Consider Annoying Interruptions To Somebody Else’s Story And A Brief Bit At The End As Being “In”)
Once upon a time there was –
“You can’t start a story that way!” Noomi protested.
I can’t?
“Absolutely not!”
Why not?
“It’s…it’s childish!”
It’s a time-honoured tradition.
“For children!”
Would you like to tell the story?
“I don’t know the story!”
Of course you don’t. Whose story is this, anyway?
“Well, okay, yours, but –”
When you’re experienced enough to tell stories to people you’ve mentored, you can start them any way you like. Until then, you should rea
lly listen more.
“Okay,” Noomi backtracked. “Right. Sorry.”
Once upon a time, there was a young woman named Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency, yes, of the Scarborough Chicklins-Montmorencys. Marcy’s father, d'Artagnan Chicklins-Montmorency made his first fortune in a treatment that smoothed out the wrinkles of the skin of dogs like Shar-Peis, then turned around and made his second fortune in hyper-air injection dongles for homeostatic framistats. Marcy’s mother, born Alexandriana Redpath-Flickr, of the Calgary Redpath-Flickrs (but nobody except Uncle Fredo held that against her, and he had Curator’s Femur, so everybody gleefully, if mournfully, ignored him), worked with many charities. She was especially attracted to – and worked very hard for – mauve ones.
Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency could have been anything she wanted. Legal schools threatened to sue her if she didn’t enrol in them. The deans of several medical schools threatened to commit suicide if she didn’t go to them. Nickelback agreed to stop touring if she would be a groupie for the band. Joining the Transdimensional Authority was her way of giving her privileged family the finger. A perfectly formed and manicured finger, to be sure, risen in a poised and well-considered gesture of defiance, but a gesture of defiance nonetheless.
I first met Marcy when I taught second year Murphy’s Law at the Alternaut Academy. Yes, yes, I know – that has always been Professor Flauffer-Nuttiere’s class. But, that was the year poor old Maurice got something in his eye and had to take sick leave. It took doctors a year and a half to remove it – it turned out to be Donald Trump’s ego. In the meantime, I took over the teaching of his courses.
Marcy used to get the other students’ attention by coming to class wearing a fur stole over her jeans and t-shirt and quoting Ronald Reagan out of context. She got my attention by knowing how to apply the Serenghetti Effort Diffusion Axiom to interdimensional travel before I had even finished explaining what it was. When she was a child, she had been put through a battery of tests and it was determined that she had an IQ of 180.
“IQ tests are flawed,” Noomi interjected.
Funny how many people say that when they discover somebody else’s IQ is higher than their own…
“Hey! An IQ of 167 is nothing to sneeze at!”
Good to know that your intelligence doesn’t give other people the common cold.
“Oh…go on with the story!”
Although she was short – five feet three inches tall in her mother’s army boots – Marcy was also very fit. She claimed it was from bench pressing polo ponies. I rather doubt that. Polo ponies are rare and expensive, and you wouldn’t want to risk having one break its leg if it was dropped suddenly and awkwardly. I suspect Marcy bench pressed cows – if they were dropped suddenly and awkwardly and broke a hoof, they could always be slaughtered for their meat – but she was too proud to admit that she exercised using such a common creature, so she claimed to use polo ponies instead. At the time, it seemed like a harmless enough conceit, although it was an early indication of the pride that would be her downfall.
So, Marcy was smart and – you know what? That was too pat. Pride wasn’t exactly the cause of Marcy’s downfall. And, even if it was, how could anybody have foreseen that from an innocent exaggeration – if it even was an exaggeration? I mean, we all are proud at one time or another, right? And, often, rightfully so – we have every reason to be proud when we have accomplished something amazing. Or, am I being too easy on myself? Am I just rationalizing missing an important indication of what was to follow? Or, worse, am I overanalyzing what would, in a more third persony account of events, be a minor part of the overall story? I see you nodding in agreement. Overanalyzing it is.
So, Marcy was smart and physically fit. In addition, the standard Binet-Headroom psychological profile she had filled out before starting classes at the Alternaut Academy indicated that she was borderline sane – one of the most emotionally stable cadets we had ever allowed into the Academy, actually. Of course, later, when we were investigating what went wrong, we found that she had had a microphone implanted behind her ear and was being fed the answers that would make her look most normal: neurotic, with a soupçon of paranoia. Hee hee. Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency was a resourceful young woman – you have to give her that. Ahem! Of course, the Academy…the Academy tightened up the psychological testing procedures after that.
With all this going for her, the Inner Council of the Outer 12 of the Recommendations Sub-committee of the Membership Committee of the Arcane Sisterhood suggested that I invite her to join. Yes, yes, I know that you think the lines of command of the Arcane Sisterhood are too complex. And, it is true that our organizational chart only makes sense when viewed in 12 dimensional space. Still, these are traditions that have been handed down to us from the beginnings of the Arcane Sisterhood that have been lost in the mists of time – all 37 years ago – and to question them would be to invite chaos into our world. Chaos, I tell you!
So. Yeah. At first, Marcy was skeptical: “Why would I want to join a super-secret women’s organization with a complex organizational chart? I have already been a member of the Girl Scouts.” I explained that our goal was to help the Transdimensional Authority track down the most ruthless inter-universal criminals and, where they couldn’t go, bring the criminals to some kind of justice ourselves. She wasn’t impressed. I added: to get an invitation to the annual Arcane Sisterhood Bacchanalia and Rewards Ceremony? Apparently, she had been to the Oscars. I tried again: for the travel? After all, we could take her places nobody else could. She told us all her boyfriends said that and never delivered; she was tired of the disappointment. So, I used the one temptation that I knew she would seriously consider: if they ever found out – which they couldn’t because the effectiveness of the Arcane Sisterhood would be undermined if its existence were ever made public – but, if, by some unfortunate set of circumstances, they ever did find out, boy, would her parents be pissed.
Well. She agreed to join on the spot.
You’ve been through it – you know how it works. Marcy attended class at the Academy during the day and trained with us during the evening. She was especially attentive to the lessons on the 236 ways to kill a man with chopsticks – ah, ah, ah. I know that when you were going through training, we taught you that there were 237 ways to kill a man with chopsticks – like you, Marcy found a new one. She was quite the student.
In her final year, I was working with the Transdimensional Authority on a particularly odious case of trans-universe organ smuggling. Church organ smuggling, actually. It was odious because the journey always left the musical instruments with a harsh, vinegary smell. The TA had been investigating the church organ smuggling ring for over two years – every time we thought we were getting close to the leaders, we found there was another layer of criminals. It was like peeling the layers off an onion. We were dealing with a church organ smuggling onion ring.
The lead investigator on the case was Boolie Blitzen. He was a typical Authority investigator – dark glasses and short hair, thick neck, thick head – yes, I see in your eyes that you know the type. I will say this about Boolie: I have seen the man chew through walls to get to a suspect. You wouldn’t have thought it possible, given his small, genteel, one might almost say feminine mouth and generally poor oral hygiene. But, there you are. The man’s teeth had their uses.
The Transdimensional Authority was alerted to the problem when an unauthorized transdimensional signal went from Earth Prime to Earth Prime 7-0-9-6-2-4 dash omicron. Investigating, Boolie found that that planet was inhabited by ten foot tall gas creatures called the Gillie-Nockura, creatures for whom music from the church organ was a drug. He should have confiscated the stolen organ and brought it back to Earth Prime, but the gas creatures had psychic powers; they managed to convince him that Maggie Q was waiting for him back home, but that she wouldn’t be waiting for him long, so he had to get back right away. Like, right away. It took Boolie two weeks of intensive therapy before he was strong enough to stop tweeting
Maggie Q asking what she was making them for dinner. (Maggie Q was very good about it. Her publicist put out a press release saying how much she admired our brave men and women in uniform, but adding that, if Boolie didn’t stop tweeting her, she would get a restraining order out against him. Very gracious.) Senior officers at the Authority considered sending an assault force to get the stolen organ back from the Gillie-Nockura, but they decided it wasn’t worth the negative publicity; what organization wants to be known as a haven for celebrity stalkers?
Working the case back on Earth Prime, Boolie discovered that the organ had been stolen from a small church in rural London, England. Asking around, he was led to Freddy Glopthorpe, a small time pest control extortionist. Glopthorpe readily admitted to stealing the organ, but couldn’t remember who had paid him to do the job. Apparently, somebody had tampered with his brain: every time he tried to remember details of the organ theft, he called up scenes from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman instead. Glopthorpe was ultimately convicted of trafficking in stolen goods and sentenced to five years in prison, but he is expected to get time off because his portrayal of Willy Loman in the Courtyard Players’ production of the play is so moving.
Of course, nobody expected the church organ smuggling to end just because one of the thieves at the bottom of the food chain had been captured. And, sure enough, a couple of months later –
“Hey,” Noomi interrupted. “Were you on the case at that point?”
No.
“Then, how do you know what happened?”
What?
“That’s the problem with first person narration, isn’t it?” Noomi mused. “You are limited to what the character – that’s you – could realistically be expected to know – that’s…nothing?”
Well, there’s knowing and then there’s knowing…
“What does that even mean?”
Sigh. Look. You know how the Transdimensional Authority works: for every hour you spend investigating you have to spend a day filling out paperwork. When I came on the case, I read everything that had been written, so I got a pretty good idea of what happened before I got there. Does that explanation satisfy your literary skepticism?