Mio, the Talapoin, fed up with being pushed around and joggled, and apparently less enamored of humanoid feminine pulchritude than I am, leaped to the edge of the roof, perching there like a little fuzzy gargoyle.
Our nautiloid host lay mostly in the water, eyes, a few tentacles, and the top third of his multicolored shell sticking up out of the surface. With one tentacle wrapped around a beer baggie, the great mollusc was in full expostulatory form, starting in what felt like the middle.
“It seems to me,” he declared to one and all, “that once we jettison all that is extraneous, we are still left with three problems.”
All around the colossal mollusc, the crowd acted as if they didn’t have any problem at all, let alone three. They all seemed to be talking and drinking and laughing as if they were at a cocktail party—which was more or less true, I suppose—but the difference was that they could “hear” their ammonite host perfectly by way of their implants and were paying him more attention than appeared to be the case.
“Two of these,” he continued undauntedly, “were anticipated from the outset. Indeed, one is the reason we committed to this undertaking in the first place. And both of those are in process of being dealt with.”
Somebody gave a lone, drunken cheer.
“The final difficulty, I am chagrined to confess, was unforeseen, and regrettably, we can go no further with our plans until it has been resolved.”
That shut the gathering up. These people all had money invested in Misterthoggosh’s various undertakings, or jobs as undertakers. Now the old boy was telling them this particular venture had hit some kind of snag.
As to that unforeseen problem Misterthoggosh had mentioned, the boss and I had left our alien prisoner (whatever he or she or it was) in the custody of the flock of dinosaur/bird persons—not Aelbraugh Pritsch—who’d met us in the garage. I sincerely hoped Old Wormface would be properly taken care of. A great many of the guests here this afternoon would be wanting to ask it questions before this day was ended.
I hoped they’d have more success than we had.
“The first problem,” continued Misterthoggosh, taking a draw on his drink as he spoke via implant, “is that a medium-sized asteroid in one of the alternative universes we’re aware of—the very universe, in fact, to which my friend Eneri Relda and her people were born—appears in no other universe we have seen. The phenomenon is absurdly, ridiculously unheard of. It is the Great Mystery we are determined to solve.”
The number of alternative universes is supposed to be infinite. An asteroid like the one he described should have existed in a cluster across probability, distributed along a normal curve. But there was nothing normal about this situation. Absolute uniqueness of this kind was highly unprecedented, and relatively silly. Me, I happen to like silly, but most individuals, especially business folk, don’t seem to tolerate it very well. On the other hand, there had to be a reason for it, and Misterthoggosh believed that it might be profitable to find out.
Those beings who were capable of vocalizing set up a low murmur, auditory and electronic, that he was compelled to wait out. Luckily, at least compared to anybody else, after half a billion years of sapience, nautiloids are an amazingly patient people—although most other Elders regarded Misterthoggosh as an impetuous risk-taker and adventurer.
“The second problem—please keep in mind that our observations in this regard are from unbeinged remotely controlled devices—is that the civilization native to that stretch of alternative reality, once again, the species of Eneri Relda and her son, my friend Eichra Oren has begun to make itself a factor. Following a regrettably brief, but enlightened period of increasing international peace, individual freedom, social and technological progress, and, of course, splendid prosperity, it now appears, inexplicably, to have regressed, turned itself backward, toward an unusually pernicious variety of violent oppression, suppression, and repression, referred to locally as ‘Marxism’.”
Some inebriated somebody mumbled something about having seen some of this Marx guy’s movies, which Misterthoggosh wisely ignored. The wise and ancient cephalopod struck me more as a Three Stooges type, anyway.
“We’ve seen exactly the same thing happen in a thousand different continua,” declared a voice I recognized. It was our new friend from Lanternlight, the tour guide and “taxi”, Scutigera, most of his thirty-foot length invisible behind a little copse of mimosas planted in another corner of the yard. “‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ no more than an awkward attempt to cloak banditry, murder, and rape in the garment of legitimate ideology—and a vile credo best suited to leaches, mosquitos, vampire bats, lice, bedbugs, and intestinal parasites, certainly not to sapient beings.”
Quite a speech for a thirty-foot centipede. Several individuals laughed a dozen different ways, from each according to his species. I deduced from this that none of them were descended, evolutionarily, from leaches, mosquitos, vampire bats, lice, bedbugs, or intestinal parasites.
Misterthoggosh agreed. “They are, of course, perfectly welcome to do that to themselves. The trouble is—setting aside for a moment the atrocities they customarily inflict on those among them who do not wish to live a collectivized life—such regimes become dangerous to innocent bystanders once their political and economic policies fail to produce a paradise on Earth. Then they blame anybody and everybody for their failures, rather than face the simple fact that their ideas are stupid.”
“You’re quite right,” a being who looked fantastic even to me had spoken up. It was a six-foot insectoid resembling a praying mantis, dressed up in the usual outfit of hundreds of strips of colored cloth. “Their leaders typically lash out whenever their cherished theories collapse, slaughtering their own people, sometimes by the tens or even hundreds of millions, or waging mindless wars against neighbors who, ironically, almost invariably have identical economic and political philosophies.”
“Unfortunately so, Doctor,” another person agreed. This one looked a bit like a thick gray blanket in a thin, clear wrapping, a distant relative of Ray, the late, lamented mantoid. My implant told me that she was a female named Remaulthiek. “I have made it my personal task to study this odd species closely. Predictably, they have equipped themselves with powerful fission and fusion explosive devices that are ultimately capable of rendering their entire planet uninhabitable. They’ve even used them against one another once or twice in recent decades.”
There was an odd sort of a collective gasp as everyone among the gathering digested this bit of information. Thermonuclear explosives were old news, of course, in the ancient civilization of the Elders, but they were employed exclusively for demolition and construction, mostly off-planet by non-nautiloids. According to the most fundamental precepts of p’Na, weapons of indiscriminate lethality can never be used, since the only justification for violence is when somebody else—some specific individual—has initiated violence against you. It is generally agreed to be a physical impossibility to put such devices to tactical use without injuring or killing totally innocent bystanders.
And doing that is morally unacceptable for any reason whatever. Period. Offering weasel-words like “collateral damage” as an excuse will only get you the Assessor’s blade, an ending much cleaner, at least in this canine’s opinion, than you deserve. Once that principle had been established among them, the Elders never fought another war. So far, their “Armistice” has lasted for a couple hundred million years.
We heard another voice, that of a second nautiloid bobbing in the Proprietor’s pool, another friend from Lanternlight, Semlohcolresh. “To make things even more complicated and dangerous, these people have achieved an elementary form of spaceflight and are now rumored to be interested in the same rogue asteroid that we are, in their case as a potential source of wealth or knowledge, possibly enough to make up for the utter imbecility of the political claptrap they have chosen to believe.”
“Very common behavior among failed command economi
es,” observed Remaulthiek. “Even when they find wealth, their economy soon destroys it.”
“But the worst”, said Eichra Oren’s mother, stepping out of the house, a delicate-looking drink in hand, “we haven’t even gotten to yet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Out of the Abyss
“THE WORST”, EICHRA OREN’S MOTHER HAD SAID, “WE haven’t gotten to yet.”
“Indeed we have not,” Misterthoggosh agreed. “Perhaps you would be good enough to describe the most recent and ominous developments to everyone.”
Eneri Relda nodded. “Several of our friends and associates have experienced savage attacks by what appears to be a previously unknown species, from a previously unknown alternative universe. I am informed on good authority—that of Lyn Chow of the Otherworlds Museum and Observatory—that they are the sapient descendants of ordinary flatworms, a common variety of Platyhelminthes, a bit better known as planaria.”
“The kind of thing children play with in biology class,” somebody said, “that you can cut in half and both halves will grow into new individuals?”
“The very thing,” Eneri Relda answered. The being that had asked was a poriforan, sort of a sapient tubeworm, evolved to live on land. She went on to describe what had happened to Lyn Chow, in details both Eichra Oren and the victim herself had given her. The badly-wounded curator was apparently listening in on this meeting, but she was still far too weak to contribute much to it. Feeling her presence in the background, I nodded a mental hello and received a warm, sweet-scented response.
“Permit me to add,” said Misterthoggosh, “that these attacks appear limited to those who have acquired an interest in my current enterprise.”
A little creature who closely resembled a large watermelon covered in human fingers—only the entire organism was various shades of purple—waggled up comically to address Eichra Oren’s mother. “My own species achieved sapience almost as early as the Elders,” it declared.
I wasn’t quite sure how that was relevant. Perhaps it thought it was establishing some kind of seniority. I remembered now that they were close relatives to sea cucumbers, and that somehow they too had evolved into land-dwellers tens of millions of years before insects had been first to emerge into the air on more familiar versions of Earth.
“Can you tell us more of the nature of these attacks, Honored Cosapient?” the peculiar creature asked, arranging its stubby tentacles in what my implant informed me was a formal expression of solicitude.
She smiled down at the creature and stepped closer to the pool, taking a chair near its edge. “Indeed I can, Wuzh Blano, Honored Friend. I was myself attacked earlier this morning, at my home, by several of these flatworm beings—Grays, I believe they are being called.”
I didn’t have to look at Eichra Oren to feel his surprise, and a slight indignation that his mother hadn’t called on him. It passed quickly. He knew as well as I did that Eneri Relda was the hardy pioneer type who much preferred taking care of herself to yelling for help. I never knew anyone who loved life and embraced it the way she did. Almost alone among her people, she had regarded their escape from Antarctica—and their later Appropriation by the Elders—as an adventure.
In her mind’s eye we could all see the Grays coming up out of the sea, apparently without a thought of staying low or seeking cover. They strode straight up the beach, climbed the salt grass-covered slope behind her house, and came over the back wall. Alarmed by her vigilant—if not downright paranoid—reptiloid symbiote Nalanaed, she had been observing their implacable approach from behind a heavy curtain drawn across a big sliding glass door at the back of the house.
When she finally stepped out, they all raised the weapons they had been carrying (her symbiote, of course, fled), but the human woman was considerably faster than they were. Eneri Relda’s first several shots seemed to have little or no effect, although she could easily tell where the creatures had been hit. She could see daylight through their wounds.
As they returned fire, she was forced to take cover herself, crouching behind a heavy stone planter in a cloud of dust and flying pottery fragments as she wrenched the collimator of her weapon around, burning the web of her left thumb in the process, to widen its lethal beam.
The enemy weapons seemed to be kinetic force projectors—not entirely unheard of in the Elders’ civilization—rapidly demolishing Eneri Relda’s cover. Abruptly she stood up, taking two of the invaders at the same time, spraying their charred remains against a battered rear wall. Her weapon was identical to the one she’d given Eichra Oren.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the boss readjust his own pistol.
Two down, then, and four more to go. Eneri Relda pivoted on a toe a few degrees and treated the next two the same way. Although they’d been scrambling hard to put some distance between themselves, they’d been too slow, vanishing simultaneously in gouts of flaming carbon dust.
She looked around for the remaining pair and in that instant heard an avian scream from inside the house. Somehow they’d gotten past her—a side door, probably—and were inside. “Squee-elgia!” she cried as she whirled, reentering the house behind the front sight of her pistol. She felt a pang in her mind that could only mean one thing. “Squee-elgia!”
“They are very hard to fight,” Eneri Relda told us. “More or less oblivious to wounds unless you destroy them completely, and fully as well-coordinated as any flock of birds or school of fish. My poor symbiote was killed, and my personal assistant, after bashing one of them to paste with a heavy potted plant, seriously injured. I killed the last one, myself. Squee-elgia is now in the Place of Resting and Healing.”
Personally, I would not miss Nalanaed, a kind of flying snake from some unlikely alternative universe somewhere. Four feet of liverish, hot-blooded parthenogenic reptiloid indisposition that generally absented herself when visitors arrived. I was glad Squee-elgia had survived. She was silly—although she didn’t know it—and I liked her.
“Is it your intention to imply, Eneri Relda,” Semlohcolresh rose from the pool a little, and took a sip or squirt or whatever from a flexible container of wine. “That these entities are a part of a hive mind?”
Eneri Relda frowned a little as she gave the matter consideration. Finally, she looked up at the big mollusc. “I believe they may be more independent than, say, ants, or bees, or termites. But no, I don’t believe that they are fully individual in character like all of us here. A sapient colony of mole rats or prairie dogs that are not sapient, themselves, perhaps? It’s entirely possible that we’ll never know.”
I thought I saw Misterthoggosh paying special attention to what she said. I very nearly spoke up about the specimen we’d brought with us, but felt Eichra Oren in my mind, for some reason telling me to stop.
“As you may be aware,” Semlohcolresh told the gathering, I, too have been attacked at my home in Lanternlight. They arrived by veek, about twenty of them, and were it not for the determination and bravery of my dear employees—” He used a tentacle to indicate the pathologist Jakdav Hoj and his feline companion Mikado. The tentacle in question happened to be wrapped around the deeply spiral-cut grip of a large particle blaster. “—never to overlook the splendid competence of the Dumu Weapon Manufactory, we might well have been overwhelmed.”
Again there were vivid pictures in our heads, a jumbled montage from the minds of all three, Semlohcolresh, the Denisovan Hoj, and his big, fierce housecat. I found the whole thing invigorating, myself, but there were groans from other quarters. Some of those who were capable of it held their hands to their heads. Off in a corner of the yard, a delicate soul of some kind could be heard, vomiting on the grass.
“As Eneri Relda indicated,” Semlohcolresh’s laboratory technician told everyone, “penetrating weapons—needle-beamers, bullet-flingers—aren’t particularly useful. What you really need is something with a broader effect, like a broadbeam blaster or a short shotgun. The kitchen sink might work. And it helps if they’re carrying
or wearing something dense—a belt buckle, for example, or maybe just a full equipment bag—that you can hit easily and break up into secondary projectiles.”
The cat said, “They—”
It was the shortest remark I ever heard him utter. In that instant an enormous BOOM! came from the back of the grounds, toward the sea. Beneath our feet, the entire structure of the patio heaved and shook. Something had landed on the beach, a massive cylinder the dull color of burned iron, with bluntly-pointed ends. Fifty feet in diameter and at least six times as long, one end lay smoking in the shallows, salt water lapping at it tentatively. The middle section rested on the sand. The other end lay in a big divot it had slammed out of the salt grass.
I supposed it might have blasted up out of the water, like a breaching submarine. If it had fallen from the air, I hadn’t seen it coming. It was so massive, I’m not sure what the air patrols could have done about it anyway. The G-forces inside must have been crushing.
A seam opened from one side of the front end to the other, making the object look like a giant, blind, grinning worm of fire-blackened steel. Water blasted out, under high pressure. A section of retaining wall vanished in a cloud of dust and smoke, lethal fragments flying everywhere. It was almost endearing, the way Grays seemed to like explosives. Several individuals were struck down. Through the dust cloud, familiar figures emerged from the cylinder, grim gray figures in grim gray coveralls, bearing short, two-handed weapons of some kind.
I jumped onto a heavy glass-topped table so I could see better. Down toward the beach, rank after rank of the silent alien invaders were coming out of the cylinder. Eichra Oren drew his little pistol, holding it in his left hand, as his razor-sharp sword whistled from its scabbard and he swung it over his head in his right. Across the pool, his mother produced her nearly identical pistol, and the two of them fired their first shots at almost exactly the same fraction of a second.
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