by Ira Nayman
“I guess…”
So. A couple of months later, another unauthorized transdimensional transmission was picked up with the same energy signature as the first. This time, it went to Earth Prime 4-0-3-3-2-9 dash alpha. The predominant species on that planet is a race of 20 foot tall wind-up mechanical men. Apparently, one of them, a wealthy industrialist who had made his fortune in baby powder, wanted the organ to replace his failing voice box. When Boolie confronted him about the theft, the mechanical man swore he thought the deal was legitimate, and had the papers to prove it. The “papers” he gave Boolie turned out to be the manual to an Atari 2600 computer game console. The Transdimensional Authority investigator had to explain to the mechanical man the meaning of legal ownership. Contrite, the mechanical man agreed to compensate the church for the stolen organ and gave Boolie the name of the man who had supplied him with it.
Otoko M’bangie was the mayor of a small Welsh village the name of which I cannot even begin to be able to pronounce – it contains 27 consonants and 1 vowel and begins with the letter G – so I will spare you the trauma of my trying. He seemed to be an upstanding citizen, but he had a secret habit of betting on croqrickuet matches. In fact, he owed a Namibian croqrickuet gambling cartel enough money to power New York state for 23 days. And, that’s in the watt/hours of almost 20 years ago, so you can imagine what the debt would be worth today! Boolie immediately raided M’bangie’s mansion, but he was too late; his cover blown, M’bangie had become a liability to the smuggling ring. They pickled him. Pickled him like herring.
Church organ smuggling is an ugly business that ultimately destroys the lives of everybody it touches.
That was about the time the Arcane Sisterhood took an interest in the case. They asked me to conduct a parallel investigation. They’re like that. I’m not. As far as I’m concerned, parallel investigations meet at eternity, which is a lot longer than I plan to be on this job. I immediately contacted Boolie and explained that it would be best to pool our resources. He said he would get a contractor on that right away. I explained the concept of pooling resources to him. He sniffed and said he had never heard that idiomatic expression before.
Did I…mention the wall chewing thing?
We worked on the case together for several months. Three church organs were stolen in that period and, each time we found them, we discovered somebody higher up in the onion ring. Hmm…just thinking about it makes my mouth water. Next time we meet here for lunch, I’ll have to get…salsa. What was I say – oh, right. We had gotten about halfway through the onion ring when – you know, this has given me an idea for dinner tonight. I think I’ll make myself…soy burgers on wheat-free gluten buns. Yeah. That should be tasty. Then, the Alternate Reality News Service caught wind of the investigation, and put Alfredo Soss-Tiramatsui on the case.
Soss-Tiramatsui was the Alternate Reality News Service Performance Benchmark and Dissociative Disorder Reporter. Soss-Tiramatsui was a small man with a variable accent – he reminded me a lot of Peter Lorre, but without the actor’s child-like sense of wonder. Or, purple hair. We should have known something was wrong with Soss-Tiramatsui – why would a performance benchmark and dissociative disorder reporter be working on a story about a church organ smuggling onion ring? Mmm…that reminds me – I’m planning my daughter Barbara’s wedding – not that she is dating anyone, but a good mother needs to be prepared – you know how it is – okay, you have no children, so you don’t know how it is – but you might one day, at which point you will look back on this conversation with a knowing nod of the head – I should put something tasty on the menu. Something simple. Something everybody can enjoy. Something like…hummus. Yeah. That sounds good. Now, where was I?
“You teamed up with an Alternate Reality News Service reporter, I’m guessing?”
Right. We did. He proved very helpful in giving us leads in return for a scoop when we caught the bad guys. Over the next couple of months, we kept climbing up the smuggling onion ring. It was hard, greasy work, that climb, but we thought we were really getting somewhere.
Then we hit Earth Prime 7-0-3-1-0-6 dash epsilon. It was a lush green version of earth, with an overabundance of flora and fauna. Obviously, humanity there had never discovered anything more than primitive tools, so it didn’t evolve into…well, us. Earth Prime 7-0-3-1-0-6 dash epsilon was a perfect nexus for all sorts of smuggling, being human habitable but barely inhabited by humans. It also had a wealth of untapped resources that made it ripe for plunder.
The church organ in this case had been delivered to a small tribe in what, on our Earth, would be South Africa. The people were called the “Il Pepalle,” which means The People. Using a portable field Home Universe Generator™ to communicate with a Transdimensional Authority translator on Earth Prime, we had a talk with the leader of the Il Pepalle, a quaint old gentleman named Shaman Phil.
“My people have lived in this valley for more generations than there are ticks on the fleas on the backs of the monkeys in the trees,” Shaman Phil told us in his quaint old idiom. “Many years ago –”
“Wait a second! Wait just a second!” Noomi exclaimed. “Are you…embedding a flashback within a flashback?”
You have a problem with that?
“Using a pretentious literary device that has the potential to totally confuse the audience? You bet I have a problem with that!”
How pre-modernist of you. Look, it’s a short flashback, so bear with me.
“Many years ago,” Shaman Phil, ignoring the interruption, continued, “an object fell from the sky. It was unlike anything that Il Pepalle had ever seen before. It was like a tree, but with the roughness removed. And, it had teeth like the tusks of the wild boar, only no mouth. And, when you touched the teeth hard enough, it made a strangling noise. And, when you bit into –”
“I get it!” Noomi stated. “It was an organ. An organ had fallen out of the sky. And, they worshipped it because it had come from the heavens. I saw The Gods Must Be Crazy – I know how these things work!”
…Okay, spoilsport, it was an organ. Where it came from we may never know. The Il Pepalle didn’t worship it, though. They thought it was a tree that had fallen from grace with its god and had been punished by being made so ugly. Out of pity, they brought it soup – which they quickly noticed it never ate, so they ate the soup for it. The women of the tribe wove earmuffs for it, for which it never thanked them. Miffed at its discourtesy, the Il Pepalle decided to ignore the object, thinking that that would teach it a valuable lesson in gratitude. Instead, the Il Pepalle promptly forgot that it was there at the edge of their village.
“Many time later,” Shaman Phil picked up the story, “a man came to the village. He looked a little bit like one of Il Pepalle, but nobody had ever seen him before, so we were pretty sure he wasn’t one of Il Pepalle. He was tall; we are short. He had red hair; our hair is black. The skins he wore were not made of dead animals like ours, but of some blend of the magical ingredients dacron, nylon and polyester. He –”
“He was from the organ smuggling onion ring!” Noomi tried to speed the story along. Unsuccessfully.
“Using a combination of hand gestures and grunts,” Shaman Phil told us, “the man informed us that he could give us more trees. This puzzled us because, of course, we had all the trees we needed around us. He went away, and, when he returned, he brought with him many other men like him and another deformed tree. He showed us how this one could make pleasant happy sounds when you tickled its teeth in the right way. In return, he asked our permission to take shiny rocks out of the mountain. We gave the man our permission – of what use are shiny rocks? But the joke was on him – we didn’t own the mountain – we didn’t have anything to do with it!”
“Yeah,” Noomi said with a decided lack of enthusiasm, “Shaman Phil sure put a quaint old one over on that city slicker, didn’t he?”
I will act as though I didn’t hear that – it does infuriate you so. We got a sketch artist to work with Shaman Phil on an i
mage of the red-haired man over the portable field Home Universe Generator™. We had never heard of a red-haired man in our investigations before this – he could have been high up in the onion ring. As we were concentrating on generating the sketch, we didn’t notice the rustling in the trees. Just as we were finished, two laser blasts shot out of the trees, one at Boolie and one at me. The last thing I remember before blacking out was Shaman Phil commenting, “Is that how they play tag where you come fro –”
I woke up in a TA hospital a few hours later. The Transdimensional Authority had sent an emergency rescue squad to get us as soon as the laser fire had died down…plus two or three hours for the paperwork. Most of the laser blast aimed at me had been deflected by the chopsticks I always keep close to my heart – I will never complain about non-wooden Asian eating utensils again in my life! Boolie…Boolie was not so lucky – the shot that hit him severed his spinal cord. He would never chew through walls again. Unless they were handed to him by a nurse.
As best anybody could guess, we had just had the bad luck of having one of the smugglers show up while we were questioning Shaman Phil. It happens.
I decided to show Soss-Tiramatsui, the reporter, the artist’s sketch of the red-haired man. Having investigated the case for months, he might have seen the guy somewhere. But, I didn’t want to go alone, and all of the Transdimensional Authority investigators were working other cases or, so they told me – so I decided to ask Marcy Chicklins-Montmorency to accompany me. It was a simple task – very low-risk. Or, so I thought. She was eager to go – getting out of a lecture on Transdimensional Traffic Equivalence Calculations may have had something to do with her decision.
We arrived at Soss-Tiramatsui’s condo early in the afternoon. It was small but nice. Homey. The samurai swords on the kitchen wall made it feel like home to me, anyway – to Marcy, maybe, not so much. When we showed him the artist’s sketch, Soss-Tiramatsui frowned, then asked us to follow him into his study.
The room looked like the bridge of a star ship. A small but nice star ship. A homey star ship. With samurai swords. On one wall was a Home Universe Generator™; on another was a Dimensional Portal™. This was during a period when the Alternate Reality News Service experimented with allowing its reporters to work from home. They said it was to give their journalists more flexibility in finding their optimal work-leisure-rhinoceros balance, but, as it turned out, the Alternate Reality News Service was just trying to make a buck by renting out the newly freed up space in the Gerlentner Building to the World Brutal Sports League. Be that as it may, there were a lot of other gadgets, gewgaws and goohickeys in the room. Marcy seemed especially taken with the Latte Lover 2300e, but she was trying to be a professional, so she said nothing.
“Is this the person you’re looking for?” Soss-Tiramatsui said, pointing to a red-haired man on the screen of his Home Universe Generator™.
Marcy and I looked at the image. It could be. The artist’s sketch wasn’t especially detailed and the Home Universe Generator™’s image wasn’t that sharp. “Who is he?” I asked.
“Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet,” Soss-Tiramatsui told us. “He is a ‘seller of antiquities and antiquater of sales.’ I don’t know what that means, either. I’ve had my eye on him for quite a while. He is rumoured to have been involved in various shady dealings on Earth Prime, but witnesses have a habit of dying or losing their memory before trials – he’s a walking amnesia generator, he is – so he’s never been convicted of anything.”
“What is he a doctor of?” Marcy asked.
“Ancient Egyptian pornographic hieroglyphics,” Soss-Tiramatsui answered.
“This is great information,” I said. “It could be just what we need to crack the case. Thanks. Come on, Marcy.”
“You’re leaving?” Soss-Tiramatsui, seemingly disappointed, asked.
“We’ll process this information,” I told him. “Put some tabs on him while we’re building our case. When we’re ready, we’ll bring him in for questioning.”
“No, no, no,” Soss-Tiramatsui insisted. “You should bring him in now. If you wait, he may get wind of your investigation and disappear! Then, you’ll have nothing!”
“And, you’ll lose your scoop,” I pointed out.
“What?” Soss-Tiramatsui seemed a bit stunned, but he recovered quickly. “Well, yeah, sure, there’s that, too, but I…I…I want to see a terrible criminal brought to justice. It’s the justice thing, see – that’s what’s so important to me right now. The…uhh…the justice angle.”
I looked at Marcy. Her face was a mask, but her eyes said, “You want to take me on a real case to arrest a real criminal? Oh, yes, yes, yes, please, say you will, please, please, please, please, pretty please!”
I don’t know why I agreed – eyes are useful, but they’re not exactly the brightest organs on the face, if you get my drift. Maybe the five pleases impressed upon me how badly she wanted to go. Still, the argument to catch Dr. Dicksheet before he realized that we were on to him made sense, so I responded, “Okay. We’ll go out and capture him just as soon as we get back to the TA off –”
“Are you sure you should wait even that long?” Soss-Tiramatsui insisted. “I mean, I’ve got a Dimensional Portal™ myself – here. Right here. In this very room. See? I could feed the dimensional coordinates from the Home Universe Generator™ to the Dimensional Portal™ – you could be there and have the bad guy in handcuffs in seconds. What do you say? Sounds good, right? Right?”
I didn’t have to look Marcy in the eye – I knew what her eyes would make of this. Not exactly good investigative protocol, I knew, but it’s not like secret societies like the Arcane Sisterhood were big on paperwork.
“Okay,” I unenthusiastically agreed. “Let’s get us a bad guy.”
Soss-Tiramatsui programmed his Dimensional Portal™ and pushed the big red button. We walked through it into what we thought was going to be an alternate Earth.
Instead, we ended up in the * UNHINGED ZONE *.
When interdimensional travel first became a reality, people moved freely between seven different dimensions. Unfortunately, nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to causal relationships within these realities, so –
“I know all this,” Noomi objected. “It’s taught to every first year cohort at the Alternaut Academy.”
I know you do, dear. But, for the story to be complete, I really must explain –
“No, no. Really, you don’t,” Noomi insisted. “I already know that when transdimensional traffic was unregulated, people crossed their own and other people’s timelines without any concern for how it would affect their universe. How, under the weight of a growing number of time paradoxes, linear causality in the seven affected universes essentially collapsed, leaving them places where, moment by moment, you never knew what would happen. I know that this is why the Transdimensional Authority was set up and why traffic between dimensions is closely monitored – we wouldn’t want reality to fall into chaos across the Multiverse. Of course, by the time the Authority was functional, it was too late to save the seven original universes, so they were called the * UNHINGED ZONE * and ruled off limits to transdimensional travelers under the Treaty of Gehenna-Wentworth. Really, you don’t have to tell me all thi – why are you smiling?”
You just filled in the necessary background information for me.
“Dammit!” Noomi exclaimed. “I hate exposition!”
At first, Marcy and I didn’t know where we were – it looked like an ordinary movie studio backlot with drab grey brick buildings, people driving around in golf carts and a woman wheeling a rack of clothes towards us. However, I immediately observed several things that made me question the reality we had been sent to. Upon closer inspection, the birds flying overhead turned out to be shaving cream tins with wings. Odd, but not unprecedented. The woman walking towards us had the depth of paper. Different, but I had been to universes with paper-thin creatures myself, so I thought nothing of it. Then, I noticed the clothes: spacesuits
mingled with dancers’ tutus and Victorian frocks were hung next to togas from ancient Rome. I tried to imagine a film in which all of those costumes would be appropriate, and I couldn’t. That was when I realized that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
“Marcy!” I shouted, “Get into a spacesuit! Immediately!”
“What – ?” she sputtered.
“If you value your sanity, just do it!” I commanded.
Stripping down to our underwear, we grabbed spacesuits off the rack and put them on. The paper-thin woman tried to put up a fight, but we knocked her down and put pebbles on her; as long as she stayed two-dimensional, she was effectively overcome. To Marcy’s surprise – but not mine – the spacesuits were fully functional.
“Aren’t they just props?” she asked.
“Not here,” I responded. “We lucked out by having them so close to hand. Marcy, we –”
Before I could finish, Al Gore walked up to us. “I would like, if I may,” he interrupted, “to explain to you exactly why global warming is a hoax. You see –”
I didn’t have time for this, so I punched Al Gore in the face. He dropped like a rock. “We’re in the * UNHINGED ZONE *,” I told Marcy. “Anything is possible here.”
Marcy’s eyes widened. She had obviously been given the lecture about the * UNHINGED ZONE * in her first year at the Academy, too. “We’re in a contained environment,” I told her. “That should shield us from the worst effects of the breakdown in causality.”
A spider with Al Gore’s face landed on my shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t want me to tell you about the hoax of global war –” I brushed it off.
“But…what will we do?” Marcy asked. I could tell that terror and professionalism were fighting it out inside of her, and that terror, although nominally under professionalism’s command, was seriously thinking about ignoring professionalism’s orders and running amok. It didn’t help that a single cloud over a nearby building was raining kittens and a cloud over the building next to it was raining puppies. I hated it when metaphors were literalized in alternate realities; I could only imagine what Marcy thought of it.