"You think you'll get into a super-secret senior society like Skull and Bones like this, Sandy?" I go. Well, maybe he could.
Finally, unable to withstand the fury of my psychological attack any longer, he scrambled to his feet, uttered a long, ululating, despairing cry, and hurled himself over the brink of the demonically gleaming well. I heard his shriek echo from the walls for what seemed many minutes. With his last ounce of humanity, Sandy had sacrificed himself for us.
Then there was like this silence, okay?
The floating paisleys had disappeared. The sense of foreboding gave way to, well, boding. The permeating atmosphere of absolute evil lifted. Rod got to his feet, shaking his head. "What . . . what happened?" he goes.
I took him by the hand. "Come along, dear," I go. "We have a long bike ride home."
And that, pretty simply, is how I overcame the worst that the ancient, amorphous, deathless, eldritch, gibbering gods of Elsewhere and Elsewhen threw at me. I guess I'm just too solidly centered in Real Life to be driven crazy by a bulbous and mouldering octopoid. I figured I chased them all back to Massachusetts, where they belonged.
* * * * *
SO, SHE GOES, "what do you think?"
"What do I think?" I go. "I think my life is over. I think my husband has left me for his receptionist, I think my baby son doesn't have a father anymore, I think I may have to move in with Mums and Daddy practically forever, and I think I don't give a good goddamn what you do with your sword."
Muffy just stared at me for a moment. "Do you mean it?" she goes.
"Yeah, I mean it."
"I mean, like you've been testy before, God knows, but I could always count on you, Bitsy."
"Elizabeth, please. Call me Elizabeth."
Muffy looked like a shelf of books had dumped on her head. "You'll get over it," she goes. "Sure, you will."
I dabbed at my nose with a tissue. "Go haunt somebody else for a while," I go.
She smiled sadly and shook her head. "I'm going to go find Rod Marquand, and we're going to continue our everlasting romance, and we're going to get married and be happy forever, and I'm going to want you to be my matron of honor, so you've got to get over this depression, Bitsy. C'mon, just cheer up!"
I almost threw a shoe at her, except I didn't have a shoe. She blew me a kiss, walked out of my bedroom, and I haven't seen or heard from her since.
Thank you, Lord.
* * *
A Little Lagniappe
"Lagniappe" is an old French word still in use in southern Louisiana. It means "a little something extra." Like in the good old days, when a baker would toss in a free thirteenth doughnut when you bought a dozen.
I wrote "Maureen Birnbaum's Lunar Adventure" a number of years ago, just for a science fiction convention's program book. I forgot about it entirely until I began putting this collection together, and I thought I'd toss it in just for fun.
The story's for Reginald Bretnor, who perfected the form.
* * *
Maureen Birnbaum's
Lunar Adventure
by Elizabeth Spiegelman
(as told to George Alec Effinger)
HERE 'S HOW MUFFY BIRNBAUM ruined my life again. About three years had passed since her ichorous meeting with the Mollusk-Arthropod Yuck Monsters from Beyond Space and Time. I had already begun to slip in to an always-dangerous sense of security, believing that Maureen had kept her word, gone off Planet X with the love of her life, and was busily raising young Muffins like a normal person.
In her words, N. S. L. No such luck. I'd just looked at my watch, so I knew it was almost precisely noon. I was sitting in a pink molded-plastic chair, waiting for my job interview at some manufacturing firm. I was applying for the position of Pocket Fisherman assembler. It was a high-tech, high-skill job that commanded your basic minimum wage.
About 12:03 I saw Maureen Danielle Birnbaum de-whoosh noisily into the blue plastic chair beside me. "Sorry I'm late," she goes. She was out of breath.
I didn't say anything. I pretended I didn't know her. She was wearing her gold brassiere and G-string, carrying Old Betsy, her broadsword, in one hand and a NASA spacesuit over the other.
"Wait 'til I tell you—" she goes.
"Please, Maureen, don't talk to me. They'll think I know you. I'm desperate for this job."
"If ifs money, honey," she goes, "I can pry loose another emerald for you. No big deal."
I glared at her, remembering what had happened with the last emerald. Then I stood up and walked to the receptionist's desk. "Will it be much longer?" I go.
She goes, "Let me see." She talked to someone on the phone, hung it up, and muttered, "it'll be just a few more minutes."
I just nodded. I went back and sat down beside Muffy, but I didn't give her so much as a sideways glance. I couldn't help hearing her moving account of her personal conquest of the moon, though. You'd think she would've been just a little embarrassed.
Not Muffy. Never Muffy.
* * * * *
SO AFTER THE battle was over and my psychological wounds healed, I decided to whoosh out of the recent past and maybe try to find Mars again. I know I said I was going to forget about Prince Van, but I felt I owed him at least a tearful goodbye. It was just that he had been so overawed by me sexually that I had just a teensy amount of guilt about ruining him for the rest of his life as far as other women were concerned.
Anyway, from the Earth's 1966 I aimed at Mars, but I landed instead inside this big old domed research station on the moon. Now, you know and I know we don't have a research station on the moon. And like at first I thought it was, you know, a secret Russian thing or something. There was one large building inside broken up into separate laboratories, and like another building that was the dormitory and cafeteria and all. I wandered around, wondering where everybody was. I went through what looked like a chemistry lab, and then a geology lab, and all these other boring super-science setups. After a while I figured out that everybody must be asleep. It was the middle of the "night" there. So I left the lab building and checked out the other one. There was a coffee pot set up in the cafeteria, so I sat at a long table and drank a cup and thought. Like I can't remember the last time I was in such a fully beige place. B-O-R-I-N-G, all right? In an hour or so this guy comes into the cafeteria, gets himself a cup of coffee, looks at me and nods, and goes out. Like, who did he think I was? He didn't even wonder how I got into this big dome on the moon. You know, do they get a lot of visitors just dropping by there or what? That had me like totally freaked.
This place was so bogue, like they had a soda machine that sold only two things: Diet Water and New Coke, can you believe it? Like being on the moon wasn't bad enough. And there were Trivial Pursuit games sitting in their boxes on every table, as if they hadn't already memorized every one of the damn answers.
On a bulletin board was a mimeographed—mimeographed, Bitsy!— newsletter dated August 21, 2019, so I was truly back in the future, but not in the far future, like after the nuclear free-for-all I now knew was coming . . . sometime. This green dome belonged to the "Project Hephaestus, Joint NASA-Private Sector Lunar Industrial Feasibility Experiment 3, Col. Robert L. Jennings, Project Director." It was nice to know that when I found my way back to 1993, I could look forward to at least another twenty-six years until the Edgartown Regatta would be canceled due to inclement glowing mushroom clouds.
More people began coming in and getting coffee. It was fun to watch. This was the moon, right? The gravity was teeny compared with even the low gravity there was on Mars. The coffeepot was specially designed with a bigger pourspout, but you still had to wait until the coffee felt like doing its thing. You held the cup real close and tried to like glug it out. It moved slower and splashed higher. It took a while to get the hang of it. I didn't bother.
When it was officially morning or something, the kitchen help showed up and started cooking. Like this L.I.F.E. mission had brought their own little old cafeteria ladies. They must have hired th
em right out of some high school, because they had a little board set up with white plastic letters for the menu and everything. Before they changed it, it said Dinner: Salisbury Steak, Choice of Veg $6.26. Cafeteria food will not be a Miracle of the Future, honey, but inflation will be there to make us feel right at home. I did not have salisbury steak among the Horseclans, for which I suppose I must thank the nuclear war; no titanic cataclysm is so bad that it doesn't have its good points. I got in line and got ham and toast and eggs and grits. I tried to separate the stuff to find out what an individual grit was, but like I couldn't do it. I didn't want to eat it, anyway.
After brekky, this Colonel Jennings gets up and makes a speech. He tells us how wonderful we all were, and we applauded. He told us news from Earth, about how the New Orleans Indians had beaten the New Jersey Yankees in a doubleheader and were now in first place. Apparently that was the most important thing on everyone's mind. I don't know, sweetie, I feel about baseball the same way I do about grits. Unless you're a major American literary figure or Huey Lewis and the News, baseball is like, you know, for geeks. But then I remembered I was in the future, and when you're in the future you have to live according to their ways. Who knows, maybe back home they had substituted the sports pages for the bicameral legislative system or something. We might wake up one morning and find the government divided into the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, and the NCAA.
So this Jennings dude starts to give all the labcoats in the audience their instructions for the day. It felt like homeroom, you know what I mean? Turns out that the scientists were mostly of the rocks and stars variety. For obvious reasons, I guess the what-you-call life sciences were like thinly represented. Actually, there was only this doctor and a pharmacist's mate along to take care of accidents and emergencies.
At the end the colonel goes, "The topographic survey people have requested additional manpower to help open up Area 76B and adjacent Area 78A. There seems to be some anomaly, but it will take a good deal of careful toothbrushing before anything is known for certain. If you can spare an hour from your own research, Miguel and his crew will certainly appreciate your unskilled labor. See him and sign up. I guess that's all."
I just followed the slim stream of other volunteers. Hell, I nearly busted my copious buns getting over there. Like this was a chance to get out of the dome and cruise the surface of the moon, right? You don't have to twist my arm twice. So all the rest of the people are uniformed in white outfits with nametags, and I'm in leathers, chain mail, and hefting a saber and broadsword. But the only person who looked at me weird was Miguel himself, and he only made a quick little frown, then shrugged and put my name on his list. I don't know, maybe he thought the saber was like a long, thin slide rule or something.
Picture me kicking up a little moon dust, hopping around and getting an earthtan. I planned what I was going to say: "This is one small step for Maureen Birnbaum, like a giant leap for, you know, Maureen Birnbaum." But when the time came, I forgot. The moon is just slightly awesome. Dead, gray, and filthy, but awesome. I was supposed to have my own spacesuit, but like I didn't, so I "borrowed" one. I hoped the real owner wouldn't need it for anything while I was using it. I didn't have all that much concern for the real owner, 'cause like the inside of that suit smelled like the ladies' room of some grody stable preserved in muck for a hundred years.
Oh, I found out that I couldn't wear Old Betsy inside the spacesuit. I felt like whoa nelly! naked without her.
Miguel let us get our bearings, but like the closest to bearings I ever got was "up, down, here, there." Miguel held this big old chart and pointed. "Due north," I heard him go in my helmet radio. We booked it maybe a couple hundred yards, then Miguel goes, "All right." I couldn't see any way he could tell we were where we were supposed to be, but he had the map and I didn't. Still, all the holes in the ground and all the chunks of rock looked the same to me. Well, I'm not a scientist. They probably had names for all those chunks of rock. Like Larry and Curly and Moe and Whitney Houston or something.
So like I see right off what the "anomaly" was, and all the rest of us volunteers saw it, too, and we all went like "Yipe!" It looked like mondo cruddy remains of an old, old campsite, like those prehistoric men left all over Earth. But this was the moon, right? I wanted to ask Miguel what the hell it was doing here, but Miguel probably didn't know, either. There were burnt-out campfires and piles of megaold garbage, broken up pots and things, even bones and skulls, and these spazzy drawings and markings. We all were, you know, stunned and speechless and all, and we didn't have Idea One about what to do next. So we did what Colonel Jennings said: we spent the hour going through the moon dust with toothbrushes, and making no particular progress at all. I decided that come "nightfall," when all the good little scientists were tucked in, I was going to come out here by myself and look around. I mean, I didn't have a dorm room or anything, I was going to have to sleep in the cafeteria. Which is what I did. Go out and look around by myself, I mean.
The next morning, the L.I.F.E. people ate breakfast and got to their tasks. Colonel Jennings asked again for volunteers to sort out the anomaly, and like I wasn't doing anything else so I figured okay, I'd help. I climbed into another spacesuit—and believe me, the second one wasn't any sweeter-smelling than the first. What we need, I think, is a lemon-freshened space program—and trundled out to the digs like one of the Seven Dwarfs. Our fearless leader, Miguel, came to a sudden stop when we got there. He just stared for a long while, muttering angry-sounding Spanish things into his open microphone. Then there was a little peace, and finally an explosion: "Who had the goddamned nerve to come out here and screw up the greatest scientific find of the twenty-first century?"
I figured the twenty-first century was only like nineteen years old, right? There'd be plenty of time to have another great scientific find somewhere else.
Everybody just stood there, shocked or embarrassed or angry. Miguel glared from one of us to another. After a while, my innate honesty and the Code of Champions required that I like raise my hand. "I did it," I go. All the other spacesuits turned to look at me. I felt like so bagged out.
"And who are you?" Miguel goes.
"Maureen Danielle Birnbaum," I go.
"What department?"
I thought fast. "Security," I go.
"And you don't know a damn thing about the proper procedure to preserve and study an ancient habitation site such as this. You should have stuck to your field of expertise. Why couldn't you have let the work be done by people who've been trained for it?" I didn't want to mention that like we didn't have any of those with us on the moon.
Well, okay, like I mentioned it, really quiet, though.
"We do have photographers. We could have laid the groundwork for a more specialized and better-prepared team."
"Yeah," I go, "I guess so."
Everybody moved closer to the site to see like what I'd done. Yesterday there had been these yucky heaps of body parts, mounds of half-eaten creatures—mostly bone but with some dried stuff still clinging to them, on account of millions of years without air—and these puny old weapons that like couldn't cut through a soggy rabbit or anything. I had cleared the bones away real nice, carted off the trash piles, and tossed it all into some deep old craters a little ways away, out of sight. I thought I'd improved the cheerfulness of the whole neighborhood.
One of the volunteers goes, "Now it looks like some shabby slum dwelling on a hillside above Rio."
I didn't buy that, 'cause like I'd brought out decorative stuff from the mission dormitory building. I put dried straw flowers into two rude, mud native bowls. I hung up reproductions of famous paintings—Van Gogh's Sunflowers and a Degas ballet thing and something by Magritte. The whole site was now nice and clean and livable. Maybe it was a scientific goof, I don't know. I'm just a fighting woman.
"Why, why, why?" goes Miguel. "Have you no concept of the tragedy you've caused here, of the humiliation we'll all have to face when the world hears about t
his?"
"Hey," I go, "like I'm real sorry, all right?"
"No," he goes, "it isn't all right."
"I just got rid of all that useless, broken, discarded junk. I don't see what you're so all-fired angry about. What good was it all? We have better discarded junk on Earth, just tons of it. It was just ugly, pointless grunge."
"Ugly? Pointless?" Miguel goes. "Don't you know the first axiom in the study of a new primitive society? These items are clues to their entire culture. Where the hell did you go to school? Didn't anybody ever teach you that mess is lore?"
Mess is lore, I'm so sure.
That did it. I just turned my back and stomped toward the dome in regal silence. Perfect posture, icy hauteur, all that superior stuff. I passed through the airlock, stripped off that skanky spacesuit, and kissed off the moon forever. I whooshed myself right out of there, like I didn't care who saw me go.
* * * * *
I WAS SITTING across the desk from some junior executive type, who was studying me as if I were a couple of long blonde hairs on his poached egg. He didn't seem happy, but I guess that's what he was paid for. He goes, "Why do you think assembling our Pocket Fisherman is the right job for you?"
I was going to tell him that it was a job any idiot could do with his brain turned off but I really needed to have an income and I didn't care what I did. I go, "Well, sir, I'm sure that—"
That's when Muffy burst in. She'd left the spacesuit outside, but she still made quite a first impression in her warrior-woman garb and the goddamn broadsword. "Listen here, pal," she goes, marching right up to the guy's desk. "Bitsy is a modern woman who has taken charge of her life. She's capable of filling any position in this monkey ranch, including yours. I just want to make sure-"
Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordperson Page 16