“I’m still not supposed to lift anything heavier than a cat,” she explained. Her own symbiote, a little terrier, was still in a kind of hospital itself, having gone into deep shock when Lyn Chow had nearly been killed. It was similar to what had happened with Ray’s pair of squid.
Once again, Helmore Bracken, Chairman of the Directors’ Council for the Otherworld Museum, was just taking his leave as we arrived. We’d seen his veek out front, a big, gray shiny luxury machine, driven by a hairy sapient native to the highest mountains in the world. With us, the chairman was insincerely polite, but he didn’t try to make any small talk.
When you’re a dog, you might not be able to see quite as well as the other sapients about you (the Elders—rather, their insectoid surgeons—had done what they could to correct that), but you can hear, and especially smell things that others can’t and don’t. I was surprised that this Helmore hadn’t pitched a tent in Lyn Chow’s front garden. He was certainly pitching one under his expensive bespoke tunic.
Reebie—Lyn Chow’s little jumping spider friend from the other side of the world, Rebul Grop Thiekul—was there, too, still taking good care of Lyn Chow, or at least keeping her company, and probably protecting her from the amorous pleadings of the overly well-dressed chairman. She went to put the tea kettle on for the third time this afternoon.
All of the medical trappings and appliances had vanished from Lyn Chow’s house, at least to the naked eye. To the naked nose, however, the whole place still smelled like a hospital, and somewhere, I could hear the humming of some kind of remote life support equipment—I don’t have any idea what it was for—but both females smelled very nice.
Go ahead and say it: I’m some kind of pervert.
After assuring himself that she was up to it, Eichra Oren wanted Lyn Chow to tell us, one more time, about what she’d seen, not during the attack, but on her trip to Asteroids. So we heard all about the colossal viewing room again, the six-foot millipede engineers, the abyssal flatworms, and the elephant civilization. Some sapients seemed to have evolved from gray rats, or horseshoe crabs, and others from my fellow canines the coyotes. I think that my favorite species called themselves the Poulii, flying bat-like sapients who walked around—pretty clumsily, Lyn Chow told us—on what you might call their “wing elbows”, and used their feet for hands. They were still hunter gatherers.
Lyn Chow was clear-eyed, level-headed, and linear, her answers sensible and matter-of-fact, although I could tell—the same way I knew that Helmore Bracken was hot for her—that she would have preferred an even more intimate and private conversation with Eichra Oren than this one. I hadn’t expected this line of inquiry. In fact, I’d thought this was a social visit, and hadn’t expected any line of inquiry at all. But it all made sense once the boss asked his next question.
“Think about the entities who attacked you, Lyn Chow,” he told her. “Did you see anything like them while you were out there in the Asteroids?”
A peculiar expression passed across her pretty face. “No…but now that you mention it, they did seem familiar, somehow. I wasn’t surprised to see them, the way a person can be with a new species, sometimes.”
“You didn’t have a sense that you were seeing them for the first time?” He leaned closer to her, looking deeply into her eyes. I could hear her heart beating faster, and detect a strong whiff of human pheromones. Love in bloom. I’m not knocking it. I’m just describing it.
She blinked. “That’s exactly right. What does it mean, Eichra Oren?”
The boss stood up and set his teacup down on the little table. My doggy senses told me he was not altogether unmoved by those big brown almond eyes and Lyn Chow’s other assets. His mother would have loved this.
“What it means,” Eichra Oren told her, his voice a little husky, “is that, as thoroughly pleasant as this visit has been, Lyn Chow, as much as it pains both Sam and me to leave the two of you ladies,” He spread his hand to include Reebie. “Duty calls, and we must be moving on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Wheels Within Wheels
“IT SEEMS TO ME,” SAID MISTERTHOGGOSH, “THAT TWO questions arise.”
The old boy spoke to us from his home off the southern shore. On the old-fashioned screen that we were using in JakDav Hoj’s pathology laboratory, he looked relaxed in front of his “desk” and was enjoying beer.
“I concur,” Semlohcolresh agreed with his fellow nautiloid. “The first question being whether these flatworm descendants have been brought to this universe by somebody else, or they have brought themselves.”
The big mollusc was on the water side of the glass in Hoj’s lab. The baggie held in his tentacle was full of tea and wrapped in heat shimmers. Earl “Gray” would have been appropriate, but it was almost certainly kelp. The Elders seemed to get a lot of mileage out of that one soggy vegetable. It was the nautiloid equivalent of peanuts or potatoes.
“And the second question,” Eichra Oren suggested, “is what they’re doing here.” My boss was sitting on a tall metal chair at the bench, sharing whiskey with our host, who sat on a tall chair opposite him. I occupied the third tall chair and had a bowl of whiskey of my own, but it was fairly hard to enjoy because it pounded so hard on my olfactory membranes.
“They don’t seem to have any qualms about killing folks, which makes them bad guys as far as I’m concerned.” That was my two coppers worth.
“As far as anybody civilized is concerned.” The voice had come from the floor. I looked down to see an exceptionally large housecat that had entered the room as quietly as if it had walked through the wall.
The animal regarded me for a moment. “What are you looking at, Rover?”
Hoj put his feet on the floor and stood. “Gentlebeings, allow me to introduce Mikado, my associate. Mikado, this is Eichra Oren and Sam.”
“People who know me call me Mike. You don’t know me that well.”
The cat, who hopped up onto the chair that Hoj had vacated, was enormous, sixteen inches tall at the shoulder, with a head the size of a grapefruit. He was close to four feet long, at a guess, from nose to tailtip. From his brown, gray, and black coat color, he was what cat people call a “tabby”, and he was polydactylic, with six toes on each foot. His thick, banded, heavily-furred tail looked like that of a raccoon. He probably weighed twenty-five pounds, and every bit of it muscle.
I’d hate to meet an animal like that in a dark alley. I know plenty of people who keep cats, including Eichra Oren’s mother. In many ways, they may be evolution’s greatest success, and I’ve always found them interesting. But I’d never seen one this size that was a symbiote.
Hoj dragged another chair to the lab bench and sat.
“Actually, there’s a third question,” said Eichra Oren after a moment. “How have they managed to get here without making lots of noise?”
The boss was right. The signal-stealing racket that Misterthoggosh and his business partners had launched a few years ago was situated way out in the Asteroid Belt—despite the nautiloids’ intense hatred and fear of all things outer space—precisely because of all that “noise”.
I said as much—except for the part about signal-stealing.
“Ripping a hole,” Misterthoggosh acknowledged, “in whatever separates one universe from another, consumes more energy than most civilizations are capable of generating. And that energy doesn’t go quietly.”
“I’ve seen videos of the process,” Mikado volunteered. “Poking a hole through the wall of reality. I noticed that it’s undertaken remotely.”
“Damn right,” said Hoj. “Nobody—even those who love space exploration—wants to be within a thousand miles of that when it happens. The heat and light are intense enough to blind you—to fry your eyes and boil your brain—just before it vaporizes your head, leaving your shadow on whatever you happened to be standing in front of.”
“That’s only for an aperture big enough for microwaves,” the cat added.
I said, “You can shield whoever or whateve
r you bring across, and shut the process down the very instant they’re clear of the aperture. If you couldn’t, then none of us—you, Hoj, Eichra Oren, and I, and maybe half a billion other sapient species on this version of Earth, terrestrial and marine—would be here. But it’s still spectacularly conspicuous, especially if you were to try it anywhere on a planet’s surface.”
“Which is precisely how it was accomplished at the time of the original Appropriations,” said Misterthoggosh. “The debt assessments that arose, simply from that single aspect of it, were an absolute nightmare.”
Semlohcolresh said, “Indeed,” shuddering as if at a bad memory.
“Maybe there’s some simpler, subtler way to do it—” Eichra Oren began.
I said, “Given these wormy guys, there has to be.”
“But if there is,” Mikado observed, “you Elders don’t know about it.”
Misterthoggosh flicked a tentacle with annoyance. “No, we don’t. We are striving—which is to say my engineers and physicists are—to discover or invent a quieter, more efficient interworld process, but I’m assured the accomplishment is still decades, perhaps centuries away.”
“More’s the pity,” Semlohcolresh agreed. “And yet our lack of substantive progress in the field isn’t particularly difficult to understand, my friends. Since the Great Restitution, there seems to be little interest left among our people in refining or advancing the technology.”
Maybe, I thought, that had something to do with the fact that the original inventors and operators had kidnapped millions of sapient individuals from all over the cosmos, and then killed themselves, afterward. Or their debt assessors had. But I kept the thought to myself.
“With certain notable exceptions,” insisted Misterthoggosh, indicating himself with a tentacle. “But let us return to the point. The comings and goings of these odd creatures whom other cultures call ‘Grays’ should have been noticeable, even if one were living in a coral farm, in an underwater cave, here at the bottom of the Inland Sea.”
The pathologist protested. “I wouldn’t call them odd. They’re really quite elegant, biologically, and apparently with enough on the ball to be better at inter-universal transportation than we are, ourselves.”
“Which would seem to constitute,” said Misterthoggosh, “another good reason for tracking these creatures to their lair, wherever that may be. I find it hard to credit, but if their technology is indeed superior to our own, as it appears to be, then one way or another, we might well benefit materially from a more intimate acquaintance with them.”
That put images in my head that I wished it hadn’t.
“Let’s have a closer look.” Hoj issued verbal instructions to his computer, tapped with his fingertips on the image filling the screen. The flatworm disappeared, replaced by an incomprehensible field of letters and numbers in the ancient nautiloid form, rather than in Antarctican.
More tapping, more instructions. The strange-looking letters and numbers soon replaced themselves with clusters of differently colored balls, representing atoms within molecules. The molecules transformed themselves into spheres, arranged in the familiar double-spiral ladder pattern of deoxyribonucleic acid, the “secret” underlying all known lifeforms.
Next, the molecular ladder broke itself in half, right down the center, attracting other colored balls from somewhere, and soon, where there had been one partial string of DNA, stretched from edge to edge across the screen, there were now two ladders, then four, then eight, then sixteen, until, as the viewpoint backed off further and further, the entirely screen was filled from corner to corner with replicated DNA.
The viewpoint retreated even more, and before very long a surface became visible, the texture of living tissue which differentiated itself into a tubular torso, thin, oddly-jointed limbs, three-fingered hands and toeless feet, an outsized head on a pencil neck with large black eyes and only vestigial traces of other features. The entity now rotating slowly on the screen possessed no navel and had no visible genitals.
Suddenly, its face filled the screen and screamed “Boo!”
Everybody jumped.
“Sorry,” Hoj chuckled. “I couldn’t resist.”
“Is it possible to explore the organism’s internal anatomy?” asked Misterthoggosh.
“Coming right up,” Hoj replied. “What kind of section?”
“Longitudinal,” Eichra Oren suggested. “Right down the middle.”
“Done.” And so it was.
“Name of the Hammer! I’ve never seen the like of that!” This from Semlohcolresh, and I took it seriously. He was very old and had seen a lot. The thing displayed in front of us wasn’t organized inside like anything I was familiar with, either—at least nothing you could see without a magnifying glass. Exactly like its planarian ancestor, it wasn’t hollow like all of us; it had no body cavity. It was as solid, side-to-side and, as it developed, front to back and head to toe, as a turnip.
Hoj zoomed in. “The texture’s quite a bit different here inside the head, where one would assume the higher nervous functions are located.”
“Yes,” Eichra Oren said. “And you can see a kind of granularity spread throughout the entire organism. Can you ascertain its chemical characteristics?
Labels sprang into being on the screen, hundreds of them, all too tiny to read until Hoj zoomed in further. “Do you need me to change languages?”
“No—look at this. It’s acetylcholine. That’s cholinesterase. If this were a jellyfish, I’d call it a neural network. I think that’s insulin. Chlorophyll? No lungs in the chest, but almost microscopic ducts everywhere from the surface, deep into the center of the thing. All of its functions seem to be distributed evenly throughout its body.”
“It breathes with its whole body,” I observed. “It probably hears and smells with its whole body, too, the way we feel with our whole bodies.”
Eichra Oren said, “It probably lies down in its food to eat.”
“And wallows,” I added.
“Ugh,” said the cat.
Somehow, it had gotten late.
We were still far from agreement, two humanoids, their symbiotes, and a couple of ancient nautiloids, concerning what to do about our little problem. It isn’t every day that your homeworld gets invaded by aliens.
Or gets worms.
Apparently the next step, at least for Misterthoggosh and his investment partners, would be to contact experts in various fields, fill them in on what was happening, and see what they had to suggest. I had my doubts about this: to me it sounded like they were summoning shamans.
Or lawyers.
From what I’ve seen in the Otherworld Museum and elsewhere, it appears to me that deferring to expertism is the quickest, most efficient, and most reliable method known to sapientkind (to coin a phrase) of reducing your entire civilization to smoking, radioactive rubble.
I wasn’t shy about saying so, either. Of course they ignored me. They’d be sorry, I reckoned, when the first nuke went off. But they wouldn’t be around to apologize, or I wouldn’t be around to apologize to.
Or both.
When they’d all talked themselves half to death, our respective bosses, Mikado’s and mine, had gone upstairs and outside for a smoke. I don’t believe that Semlohcolresh had asked them to. His ventilation system was certainly up to dealing with a couple of cigars. But the two men had just wanted to sample the night air, and maybe watch the fireflies.
I wouldn’t have objected to a healthy portion of that, myself—giving the cigar a pass—but I had been wondering all night why Mikado seemed so hostile toward everybody, especially to me. Being the individual that I am, once the humanoids were gone, the nautiloids had retired for the nonce, and it was just us symbiotes, I just asked the question.
The big cat blinked, as if surprised that anybody would simply come straight out with it. The voice his implant generated was deep, mellow, and ironic. “Well,” the creature replied, after giving it a moment’s thought, “we felines do have a
certain…reputation to maintain.”
Yes, it was a reputation that, in several alternities where cats were associated in folklore with the forces of evil, had gotten them all rounded up and burned en masse. But I refrained from saying it. Instead: “And this was duly decided at the 10,000th annual Interworld Cat Conference?” I inquired. “Was it by voice vote, or did you keep a tally?”
He laughed—purely an implant artifact—and replied, “To be perfectly truthful, sir, it’s a test that’s sort of built into us by evolution, and almost perfectly reflexive on our parts. We’re small as solitary predators go, and forced to proceed on whatever evolutionary advantages we can seize for ourselves. If another individual can be easily intimidated, then he probably isn’t worth knowing. But if he gives as good as he gets, then he’s a potential friend. You, my good Oasam Otusam, are a cynic, which tells me that you’re a disappointed romantic.”
“I won’t deny it.” It was too true. No thumbs and I like human females.
“But between a healthy circumspection and returning tit for tat, you have managed somehow to split the difference. Quite unexpected, actually.”
“Which means?” I asked, suspicious.
“You’ll do,” said the cat, hopping down from the stool. “You’ll do. Come on. I’ll make it up to you. Let me show you my favorite thing.”
We left the pathology lab and walked down the corridor for some distance—it was a big place, this underground, underwater estate—glancing from time to time through the big glass wall on our right, into the saltwater-filled part of Semlohcolresh’s home. It was quiet at this time of night, and, except for a big plecostomus scrubbing algae from the glass, not a creature was stirring, not even a sea scorpionoid.
Finally we went up half a flight of steps where, attached to the glass on the other side of the wall, we saw a transparent box (nearly invisible, as its refractive index was quite close to that of the water it was in) in which a dozen small, extremely colorful fish—neon tetras, clown loaches, orange swordtails, angels, ghotis—were swimming. It was the nautiloid equivalent of keeping a cageful of birds.
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