by Eric Flint
"Mine's a pint," I said, out of habit.
She shook her head. "Give him an Irish coffee. I want him wide awake and drunk. And now, start telling me the story. Leave nothing out. You were on the Flying Dutchman, with Paul Bean. Geologist."
"Good man. Can't sing and he's not God's gift to Shanghai poker. That was fashionable right then on the Flying Dutchman. Very suntanned, but that could be because he lost his shirt on a pair of queens early on, apparently. I was very sober, very hungover, face down in the scupper somewhere in the mid Niobraran sea when I met him. He told the wisest thing that I have ever heard."
"What?" she asked.
"Ah. He said: 'Don't play Shanghai with Asrael Hands.' Hands was the ship's gunner, as well a card-sharp of note. If I'd listened I'd have kept my shirt too. He also told me that I had to get on my feet, because Van der Decken was going to put the old tub about, and it was man the capstan winch or I wouldn't get blue balls."
"Er . . ."
"Yeah that's what I thought too. It turned out that it was gin. Bols. Dutch stuff. We got rations. Van der Decken did a fair bit of trading across time and space. He had a cargo of narwhal horn for the treefort. They use them as nails. Van der Decken was looking for more time out from them. They haven't figured out he's sold them enough spars, masts and deck-planks to build another three Flying Dutchmen. But it's good for sales, saying that'll sink the old tub if he parts with as much as another plank. He has the crew painting 'Der Vliegende Hollander' on all sorts of flotsam that we pick up. If it was drifting about, we picked it up, rough-sawed it into planks, and sold it the treefort.
"Anyway to cut a long story short we found some floating remains near the tree. Paul fished them out with a boat-hook. Very herring-scented, they were. It was the remains of big fish—rather like a tarpon with teeth—and some flotsam that might have come from it. There was no wood, but a small walrus ivory chess set, a mobile and a copy of 'Teach yourself Swedish for Dummies,' a wallet with ten kroner in it, all sealed off in a large latex item, if you take my meaning. A very large latex item. It also happened that the wallet had a card in it for exotic massage, and a library card with the owner's name and address. Van der Decken got the loot of course—He'd seen Paul fish it out."
I paused, drank some of the Irish, and explained. "And when he got to the library card, we got orders to set the sails. Get every inch of canvas out. When you find Cthulhu's library card you really want to return it, as soon as possible. An evil ammonite God set on returning the world to primordial slime needs lots of reading matter. Old Van der Decken wasn't stupid enough to be picking any enemies, not with having to sail the seven seas for eternity. He was even neutral with the Ostracoderm Equalization League."
"That's not easy."
"You're telling me," I said, wondering how she knew. "I never knew lack of a jaw could make a species so inclined to take legal action. Anyway, Van der Decken has had a few centuries to work out his way between here and elsewhere . . . and to get us to R'lyeh, that bleak and ancient harbor—one of the few the Dutchman can get near—and usually tries to choose not to. The booze is a terrible price. And you don't want to think about the women. They have way too many legs and have inherited group memory. That's a combination to make strong men blanch and run, even if they like sheep and are not at all proud about crossing the species line. So Paul Bean and I went for a walk. Sober. This is proof that there is no greater folly than overpricing alcohol. And the trouble with the non-Euclidean geometry of lost R'lyeh where the dead Cthulhu lies dreaming . . . or at least cursing his missing library card, is that it's a good place to walk away from. We came to a charming little lava-sand beach—where the sand is black and still has glass sharp edges, is washed by a sluggish, glutinous surge, and—to make it a real winner with British tourists—is surrounded by a brooding cliff. Can I sell you package tour?" I said, noticing that my glass was mysteriously full. The world is full of wonders.
"Go on."
"And that was where we found the crashed flying saucer. Neat little racy sports coupe spacecraft—you know, seats two aliens and two legless, or tentacle-less or pseudopod-less spawnlings. Red. With black trim and leather seats from some nameless starbeast. No sign of the driver. I guess we should have left it well alone. But I haven't seen many in Hartlepool, and almost none in daylight. It was Paul who found the replicator. It was in the trunk. Interesting looking curly-whirly device, like a Klein bottle made by an epileptic glassblower, with a few extra loops, with a large scoop and a whole bunch of odd little holes. The alien must have had thin fingers. Or a beak. I decided we might as well take it back with us, as the ship had plainly been there a long time."
"How did you know that?"
"It had barnacles growing on the rear fender. They don't grow overnight, you know. Anyway, Paul suddenly had a nasty thought and realized that Van der Decken might sail off and leave us there. There are a lot of places we'd happily have jumped ship, but we really did not want to be stuck there. Worshiping Cthulhu is the only way to get fed. Food on the Flying Dutchman comes down to weevily biscuit, ropy salt pork, rats, occasional albatross and fish. But at least the captain made sure we got our grog. It's Genever, but it kept the crew from mutiny . . . So we legged it back up a narrow little gully to the top of the cliffs and then on down towards the wild gaiety of R'lyeh, with its dank and slime and rotten seaweed bouquet. Got there just in time too. Van der Decken was all set to sail. We did a couple of storms, frightened the bejasus out of a few yachtsmen, and then hit one of those calm spells. We were in the Black Sea—or at least a parallel Black Sea, which was funny in itself, seeing as it was the prime fish of the Black Sea that led me to get drunk enough to take a berth with the Dutchman in the first place. Some of the crew were off in a longboat trying to harpoon fish. I was fishing. Paul was sitting there trying to make what we'd decided was the alien's CD player give us a few tunes. He'd got a fish-spine and was poking around in the holes. Some lights came on, but we had lights but no music. Now, Paul had been eating a ship's biscuit. Well . . . eating in a manner of speaking. You could suck on them for days, and the weevils were good bait.
"He put it down on the scoop edge of the alien whatchamacallit.
"'You stole my biscuit,' he said to me.
"'I did not.' It was ship's biscuit. We'd even sold them to the treefort as planks. It was not much of an incentive to theft. Now, to be honest, if it had been gin, that would be another matter.
"'Well it's gone.'
"And that was true enough, too. 'Maybe the alien CD player ate it,' I said to Paul.
"'Funny ha ha.'
"I picked up the fish-bone. 'Let me see if I can get it to play the biscuit rhapsody.' I poked it into the first hole on the left, and the whole thing lit up. A kind of mauve color. 'See,' I said . . . and it opened another hole on the far side and squirted some half-chewed lime green leaves, with loads of little puce eight-legged caterpillar things on them. Live caterpillar things. Now you must understand the thing was transparent. There was no way those leaves and caterpillars were inside it. It didn't take us long to figure out that we could get it to turn ship's biscuit into lime green leaves and caterpillars. And it wasn't a big step from there to making it change ship's biscuit into a whole bunch of things which were nearly as appetizing as ship's biscuit. Looked like Mr. Alien had been kind of fond of live insecty sort of food. It was a good party trick though. And we were pretty bored. It took us about a week and three hundred ship's biscuits to find out how to program it—by accident—to change ship's biscuit and weevils into . . . ship's biscuit and weevils. It was pretty neat, really. It wasn't a long step from there to figuring out that it would—if you did it right—turn ship's biscuit into any other sort of food that you gave it a model of. It wouldn't do gold coins."
"You can't eat gold coins."
"Yeah. We figured that out. And we got busted by the cook for stealing ship's biscuits. We'd only got away with it for that long because no one had ever bothered before. We got hauled up i
n front of the captain. It was going to be the cat. Van der Decken ran a good tight sixteenthth century ship—which meant kissing the gunners's daughter and the zevenstaart—the Dutch variant of the cat-o-nine-tails—but just with two less tails—for thieves . . . only just then there was a hell of a shout from the bowsprit. Everyone ran to see what was up. Let go of us. It wasn't as if we could get away. Someone managed to harpoon a Beluga sturgeon. It was Asrael Hands, drunk as usual, and he'd been super-lucky. Severed the big fish's spine. Even for a three-mast ship, that was a lot of fish. About two tons of it. And she was full of eggs too. And therein lay our downfall."
I sighed. "I need more violent alcohol for this."
"Stroh 80?"
I shuddered. Nodded. 160 proof spiced rum should just about do it. "Van der Decken broke out the Genever to celebrate. And somewhere in that combination, disaster was born. I was the one who knew how to salt caviar, so I guess it was probably me. I made some of the finest quality Malossol caviar . . . just lightly salted, that was gray, almost pale blue, big four millimeter grains . . . Top quality. The stuff that you could get five thousand dollars for four grams. It is worth more than gold, and getting more pricy by the year. And here I was, with at least three quarters of a million dollars of the stuff . . . and nothing I could do with it. I can't remember how many glasses of Genever we had before one of us . . . and I really don't remember who . . . had the bright idea of putting a sample into the replicator. It wasn't going to help us a lot because when Van der Decken sobered up he would remember those biscuits."
I sighed. Took an unwary mouthful of Stroh 80 . . . choked a bit, gestured wildly for a chaser . . . After half a beer I continued: "So there we were, looking at caviar and the replicator . . . and Paul says to me: 'So we can turn ship's biscuit into caviar . . . why don't we turn caviar into ship's biscuit? We'll tell the skipper we were just trying to solve his rations problem.' It was such a good idea."
"Well?"
"The thing should have come with a warning label that said: Do not attempt to manipulate alien machinery with a fish-bone while under the influence of medication, drugs or alcohol. It broke. Inside the thing. And now we couldn't change the output program. All it would do was produce utterly useless 5,000 dollar Malassol Beluga caviar. So we cried in our Genever. And then Paul said to me: 'why don't we go and talk to Van der Decken while he's still plastered, and see if there is somewhere he can sell this stuff. He sells everything else.' Which he did, despite being cursed and trapped in an endless eddy in space-time. So we went to see the skipper. And I told him I had something that could make him rich. He wasn't too impressed when I showed him a thimble-full of high quality Beluga caviar. 'Ja. Zoe you soften buckshot with zoute and fish oil.' or something like that. Only then I pointed out that if we could get it to the right market, it was worth a bit more than gold, weight for weight. Then we showed him the replicator. He didn't have any biscuit, so we used a piece of moldy cheese. It made Beluga caviar out of it. Then he poured some sour wine in. It made Beluga caviar. Then he poured in some seawater . . . and it still made Beluga caviar. Then he really got interested. You might think money was of no interest to someone who was damned to sail eternally, but Van der Decken was a merchant captain of the old school. Really old school. And provisioning a three-masted ship for centuries, even on weevil-infested biscuit and gin was expensive. He had contacts though. He could get the jars and he reckoned he could get the stuff to market. What did we need? Besides an absence of zevenstaart? Old Van der Decken was not too good with mechanical devices, and didn't know much about caviar, and didn't have connections in the trade, which I do, so I negotiated a load of perks and even a cut of the profits. R'lyeh had contacts with the rest of the world and I figured, with enough money . . . maybe we could get off the Flying Dutchman."
I drank, and chased, the rest of the rum. "It was all done with the best of intentions, really. The road to hell is paved with a thick layer of caviar. We made—and offloaded at R'lyeh the first half ton load, all by hand—which was hard work, and we were the skipper's blue-eyed boys. Old van Der Decken took us to . . . well, I won't tell you the exact year the world ends, but it is soon—we figured we'd ride the dropping supply and still strong demand among the ultra-wealthy. We made a mint. I had gold jingling in my pockets.
"'We could mechanize. Get a bit of a production line set up,' Paul said to me as pulled out to sea from there with a full two tons of tiny bottles and the equipment to keep the stuff cool. I mean, we could just as easily have sat in R'lyeh harbor, and hauled up buckets of seawater, and produced caviar right there, but Van der Decken was leery about letting Cthulhu into the secret. Cthulhu just got the Beluga part of it all, so he was cool. Anything that involved whaling was good as far as he was concerned.
"So we set up a processing plant, below decks, aft. Chiller in the hold . . . the only issue was how we got the water to the replicator. We drilled a hole through the hull and pushed a pipe—facing forward—out of it. We'd figured wind power would push seawater up the pipe as the ship moved forward, and send the water into the input hopper, especially with the nice new cowling we'd built for it.
"It nearly worked a treat too. We were well above the waterline, and speed of the Flying Dutchman wasn't quite enough to do more than force a trickle of water out of top of the pipe into the replicator. Still, we had caviar streaming out, as the water streamed in.
"And then the wind picked up and we had the crew in a production line canning top quality caviar, packing it on pallets, taking it to the chill-room that we had set up in the hold. We were cruising along, happily, and in business. Now that we'd got it all set up, it took us two hours to do what had taken us two weeks before.
"Still, it worked well. I figured a two week cruise, and I'd be able to retire, just before the bum fell out of the Beluga caviar market. I even got to feel quite good about what I was doing for the conservation of an endangered species.
"What I hadn't calculated on was that output was just a fraction up on input on the replicator. The caviar was just a tiny bit less dense than the water with this salt content.
"The other thing we hadn't thought of was that the Flying Dutchman sails the storms. Storms that take it in and out of our world. And R'lyeh is in the mighty Southern Ocean. A really stormy area. Well, Van der Decken latched onto a cracker of a storm. Wind rising, seas like mountains—the sort of thing he was absolutely at home in, and that his cursed ship could not sink in or break up in . . . . Or had been at home in, before we converted his ship into a caviar factory.
"With the storm-wind pushing us and Van der Decken stealing men off the canning production line to trim the sails . . . the Beluga caviar was building up. And with the wind starting to blow a gale . . . We just couldn't keep up. Caviar was fountaining out of the output hopper. Paul tried to get to the input pipe to stop it. But the caviar had been spilling over the edge of the output and with the rolling around pitching, the pipe was half buried in lightly salted fish eggs. Some of them were even going pack into the hopper and that just made it produce faster.
"You can imagine us sliding in the fish oil from the burst caviar grains, trying to fight our way through the stuff to get to the pipe. And with the production line stopped it was just building up faster and faster. We were wading though thigh deep caviar . . . and that is when it really got out of hand. It was pouring pack into itself, and getting more water too, and coming out in a solid high speed stream of finest Beluga caviar. We barely got out of the processing room with our lives, and up onto the rolling deck.
"Only it was still making caviar. And it had to go somewhere. There was a back porthole in the processing room in the stern. And it was squirting out caviar, faster than a bad curry leaving. The processing room must be just about solid crushed caviar, I reckon, never mind water coming in the three inch pipe because the ship was moving forward, it was sucking water by now. We should have taken the Zevenstaart. We'd be keelhauled for this. Only . . . Captain Van der Decken had his own proble
ms. Like he was no longer running before the gale. The sails weren't pulling the ship . . . no, they were acting like parachute brakes. Next thing they were in tatters, and the Flying Dutchman was up on the plane, skimming and crashing through wave tops driven by her new Beluga caviar inboard jet drive. She wasn't designed for that, and Van der Decken was having a hell of a time with the ship. But the cursed timbers couldn't shiver apart, and the caviar had to go somewhere.
"Paul Bean says to me 'we have to stop it somehow.' So I asked him 'How? The replicator seems to derive its energy from the material it passes through itself. We can't get down there. We can barely stand up on deck.' So we went to talk to Van der Decken. And it just got worse. He laughed at us. 'Ja. This is finally my release. The ship, her very timbers are cursed. They cannot be broken. I cannot beach my vessel and I cannot wreck her. Do you not think I have tried, Ja-nee? She will sail the storms of the seven seas with me until der are no more seas to sail. Maybe when the water is all fish-eggs, it ends, ja. This is the end. Armageddon comes,' he said. And the mad bastard was happy about it. So stop worrying about nukes, global warming and all the other favorite doomsdays."
"But you're still here?"
"Ah. But that's another story. A longer one, involving sea serpents, gods, a goat and a monkey. Did you know that it is possible if not pleasant to swim in caviar?"
She looked very thoughtfully at me. "I think I have heard enough," she said. "How about if we . . . go outside. Take the air."
"Where to? I mean, where do you want to take the air to? We could slice it and carry it. It's damn near solid out there. The fog is down." Yes. I was that drunk. A beautiful woman asks you to go for a wander with her, and you argue about it.
"Oh, I think I could find a good place," she said, standing up, showing me her legs. The mystery taxi (the one that arrives in all bars just after ten with a cargo of gorgeous women) must have arrived while we were drinking. She'd been good looking before. Enough to make me cautious. Now I followed like a lamb. Out into the darkness between the sodium glow of fog-shrouded streetlights toward Victoria dock. The cold damp air didn't sober me enough. I thought I'd get a little closer.