Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

by Spilogale Inc.

  There were five of us, SeePee, moi, two Paleo Boys, and our glorious leader herself. She had picked us, but only SeePee and I had met one another before she called us together to begin planning our field trip. We would barely have a chance to learn names and match them to faces before the transition from the Holocene to the Silurian.

  Not that the Paleo Boys wasted any time cornering me. I knew from the moment I laid eyes on them they were jerks; it's this talent I have. The giant stinky one offered me his hand (clammy, as it turned out—big surprise there), and neither of them had to say a thing because their thoughts couldn't have been plainer if the words had been printed on their foreheads in block letters—Oh boy, a hot young Paleo chick, I want to be teamed up with the hot young Paleo chick!—but the other, weedier Paleo Boy, Centipede Sam, went ahead and said, "Hey there, you're the only woman."

  "But, sirrah, false," I said, or words to this effect, "for is not our own glorious team leader the Wasp Woman?" That's what we called our glorious team leader, though not to her face.

  Centipede Sam giggled, my first experience with this particular annoying habit of his, and said, "Well, I mean, among us troops. I've always felt that the earth sciences could do with the woman's touch."

  Ha ha and ha. "By the time this thing is over," I said, "my legs'll be as hairy as anyone else's, and my socks will smell as bad." Probably a mistake, I thought as soon as I said it: some guys are into that kind of thing.

  "Do you know our other teammate?" said Fungus, breathing at me.

  "Probably not even as well as I know you. Probably not even enough to say 'get lost.'"

  "His name's Bon-bon Chitty-chitty-bang-bang or something like that."

  "SeePee!" I yelped. "Yes, I do know him!" Praise be, I thought, I am saved. SeePee B—(the first letter of a Laotian name on which, born 'n' bred Midwesterner that I am, I could never get a grip) Chittaphong-Phommahaxay. We had met as undergrads at Cornell. He was the ugliest human being I'd ever seen (Paleo Boys not counting as human), frog-faced, round-bodied, and long-limbed, as well as one of the smartest and most considerate people I'd ever met, and the only man I'd have done anything in the world for. Short of sleeping with him, that is.

  "Well, whoever he is," said Fungus, "the Wasp Woman knows her stuff. She recognizes talent."

  After seeing these Paleo boys, I would have begged to differ, but SeePee made up for a lot.

  "What did you bring to do," asked Fungus, "when the weather turns bad on us or it's just time for a break?"

  Probably he hoped against hope I'd say something titillating like, A vibrator and a big stack of girl porn, but if so I devastated him by saying, "I never travel without a great fat Russian novel. By the way, I'm a dyke."

  Fungus's eyes got big and Centipede Sam said, "Interesting conversational gambit," and they did me the honor of shambling away and gradually taking their miasma with them. I knew their tiny brains were afire, though, or at least smoldering with groundless hope and fanciful speculation. My heart sank when I calculated the prospect of getting teamed up with either of them.

  Well, I figured sisterhood is powerful and the Wasp Woman, being arguably as much woman as wasp, would understand if I went and told her I might have a problem with either Paleo Boy and could I please be teamed with SeePee, whom I knew to be cleaner and more socialized and had long suspected might even be gay. After all, I figured, she was an old hand at this sort of thing, she surely knew the rules of fieldwork and would never try to violate them. One of the most important rules is, The second-best combination for pairs is a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman ( the best, a homosexual man and woman, is just too much to hope for); the worst pairing is a heterosexual man and a homosexual woman.

  So I did go and tell her, and she said, without a whole lot of sympathy, "I have to assign you a partner on the basis of your specialties, not personal compatibility. All of you have valuable careers ahead of you—that's why I want you to go with me," and as she went on she got this very slight edge in her voice, like, Don't start bothering me with trivialities or my full waspishness will come out. I had had some experience with that. "We're on a shoestring budget, we have a certain amount of work we're supposed to get done within a certain period of time. Everything else, and I mean everything, is secondary. I expect you and your assigned partner to hammer out some kind of relationship in the field that permits you to complete your assignments in a professional manner, and incidentally does not conclude with your killing each other. Luck of the draw. Sometimes you click, sometimes you clash. Is there anything else you want to talk about?"

  "No," I said, and thought sniffily, So much for sisterhood, and effected my retreat in semi-good order. Being asked to go on this Paleozoic jaunt was a major deal career-wise and you can bet I had no intention of jeopardizing my chances by being a pain in the boss's skinny ass.

  One day before we were scheduled to report to the jump station, the Wasp Woman took me aside and said, "I'm going to put SeePee in with you." How much my going to her before may have influenced her decision, I can't say. I didn't care. Right then I could've kissed her, but didn't, because I wanted to keep the Paleo Boys guessing.

  I was still congratulating myself when the five of us reported to the jump station. While we were standing around waiting to go through, Fungus sidled up out of nowhere like the Thing from Beyond and gave me a crooked smile like the Thing from Beyond with Sex on the Brain. "Just curious," he said, trying very very very hard to be ingratiating and failing most wretchedly, "are you really a, you know?"

  "That's for me to know and you never to find out," and away he shambled again.

  Just before I went through the jump station, third in line after the Wasp Woman and SeePee, Fungus and Centipede Sam staged a little bragging contest, exchanging amazing facts about their specialties to impress me.

  As the jump-station tech started to take me in, I looked at the Paleo boys and told them, "Wow. Listening to you two talk about mold and poisonous arthropods really makes my nipples hard."

  WELL, THE OTHER RULE about assembling field teams is, Don't send three people out together because invariably two of them form an alliance against the third. I should have known my luck wouldn't hold: Centipede Sam got a mild concussion making the jump and landed in sick bay aboard the big Navy ship that services the Paleozoic expedition; the Wasp Woman delivered herself of some inspired cursing and told Fungus to stick with SeePee and me until Centipede Sam could rejoin us. And so, SeePee and I did in fact form an alliance against him.

  Not without good cause, you understand.

  This happened on our fourth night ashore. We had pitched our tents far back along one of the headlands bracketing the marsh that gives the base camp its nickname: Stinktown. The Wasp Woman being excused menial labor, we three underlings drew straws to determine the order in which each of us had to play chef. We'd all been in the field before, so we all knew not to expect haute cuisine; generally speaking, as long as the food's edible and nourishing, you put up with it. Then, four nights into the first week, I'm walking by the cook tent we'd set up, it's Fungus's turn to cook, and he's sitting on a camp stool picking at his foot.

  Without preamble, he asks, "What's your opinion on Objectivism?"

  "Isn't it that philosophy that's tailor-made for narcissistic sociopaths?"

  Fungus frowns, catches himself, goes back to grinning as though he still somehow expects me to fall down in front of him at any moment and start lubricating at the prospect of eight seconds' worth of bucking and grunting.

  "Rather a harsh and ignorant judgment," he says, "on the most influential system of thought ever conceived."

  "Some system. 'I, me, myself, I've got mine, Jack, hounds bite the laggards, devil take the hindmost.' I know quite enough men who make a practice of selfishness. I don't need to know any who're selfish on philosophical grounds."

  "But you're so intelligent. You—"

  "Don't try to neutralize me with niceness."

  "Well, I think you're
just wrong. Perhaps we can discuss it at length sometime. I'm sure I could show you the error of your thinking."

  "That would be really altruistic of you," I say, "but altruism is immoral." And then I finally ask him, "What are you doing to your foot?" and he says, "There's a type of fungus here that grows on everything. Plants, animals, other fungi, metal, my person. My very own very particular person. Ointments and ultraviolet lamps don't bother this fungus nearly as much as they ought to. I've come four hundred million years to fall victim to the great-grandpa of athlete's foot."

  "Thanks so much for sharing that with me." I look around at the cooking utensils, the half-prepared dinner, and my stomach is starting to roil, because Fungus just keeps talking and picking at his foot.

  "You'd think," he goes on, "Silurian-vintage fungi wouldn't know what to do with mammalian tootsies. Must be some weird mutant preadaptation."

  "Did you just now actually say 'tootsies'?" And I reach into a trunk and grab a couple of meat bars—making sure the seals are intact. I go and find SeePee and hand him one of the bars and sit down beside him. "Dinner's on me tonight," I say.

  "I don't understand."

  "Eat first. Horror story later."

  Okay. So, taking it from the top, Fungus waddled up and said, "You'll never guess."

  SeePee barely glanced at him. I let the silence drag itself out for several beats, though I knew a Paleo Boy couldn't be put off by anything as subtle as an obvious, total lack of interest. In case you're wondering why, given a choice between eurypterids and Paleo Boys, well, it's no choice. But Fungus stood there giggling like a big mutant squirrel and finally I had to say, "What?"

  "The Wasp Woman's got a boyfriend. She's in love!"

  I said, without conviction, never mind enthusiasm, "Good for her," and reached for another eurypterid.

  "You'll never guess with who."

  "Whom." I took my time examining this particular eurypterid before dropping it into the tank for females.

  Fungus pretended we were begging him for details. He said, "The Acid Drip!"

  Short for Mister Post-Nasal Acid Drip Himself.

  SeePee shot me a look from under his eyebrows that was as skeptical as I felt. I glared hard at Fungus. "You are talking about the head of the astronomy team?"

  "None other."

  "And our own glorious leader?"

  "The same. The one and only."

  "Together. The two of them."

  "Yeah, can you imagine?"

  I wanted to say "No way!" but also didn't want to give Fungus the satisfaction of knowing he had aroused my curiosity. Just having to use the word "aroused" in any context involving Fungus made me nauseated, so I reached for another eurypterid. The Wasp Woman and the Acid Drip weren't merely the respective heads of the paleontology and astronomy teams, they were their twin terrors. She was a demanding taskmistress and a prickly perfectionist, with a tongue that could strip the asphalt off a mile of two-lane blacktop. He openly despised geoscientists, biologists, and everybody else this side of celestial mechanics. His group had staked out the heights of the headland, where they could literally as well as figuratively look down on everyone else.

  To SeePee I said, "He's making this up." I wouldn't have put it past a Paleo Boy.

  "I got it," Fungus said, "straight from the horse's ass's mouth."

  "Brilliant if labored metaphor."

  "The Acid Drip and me were both down at the pier, waiting for the supply boat. When it comes, there's our own glorious leader in it, and she waves to us, you know. Waves. And the Acid Drip waves back."

  "Now I know you're making this up."

  SeePee said, "That doesn't seem like her at all. Or him." He sounded fairly weirded out, which was just how I felt.

  "Lemme finish," said Fungus. "I sort of half-turn to him, he's standing right next to me, see, and I say something about how she always makes me think of a strip of beef jerky."

  "Gallant as ever."

  "Yeah, well, he gives me that look of his. You know that look of his."

  "Like he turned over a rock," I said, "and you crawled out."

  SeePee grunted softly. "Like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice ?"

  "Huh?" Fungus and I said in an isolated incident of fellow feeling.

  "Darcy," said SeePee, "in Pride and Prejudice. "

  (Later I asked SeePee to tell me who Darcy was in Pride and Prejudice. He looked at me reproachfully and asked, "Have you never read Jane Austen?" and I looked back at him defensively and said, "No, but I'm not some illiterate, you know, I have read the Brontës." He laughed. "The Brontë sisters were crazy women who wrote about crazy people, but, ah, Miss Austen," and he pulled this really ratty-looking printed-on-dead-tree-matter book out of his seabag and flipped a few pages and showed me the part where catty Miss Bingley disses Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy, whom both young women have the hots for. Miss Bingley teasingly reminds him that he thought Elizabeth rather pretty at one time.

  "Yes," replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, "but that was only when I first knew her, for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.")

  But right then, for maybe six, seven, eight seconds, Fungus and I just gaped at SeePee, and then Fungus finally managed to nod and said, "Yeah, whatever, it was his look. And he's just as stiff as if he had a ten-foot iron rod up his butt. And he moves off, and as the boat ties up, he gives her his hand to help her out of the boat, and they go off chitchatting, arm in arm, happy as can be. It was like she didn't even notice I was there."

  "Well, you are beneath notice," I said. "Beneath contempt, at least."

  "Funny, Tammy."

  "Don't call me Tammy. Tammy is not a diminutive form of Tamiko."

  "Sure thing, Tam Ee Koh. Well, to continue. As they went off, I heard him ask her was she still going to visit him at the observatory tonight."

  "Some observatory," I said, "a big hole in the ground,"—which was true. The big hole in the ground was the future site of the radio observatory, a natural depression back on the ridge currently under improvement by a construction team. But I really only said anything to buy myself a couple of moments in which to think.

  "My guess," said Fungus, "is she's going to let him show her the stars, if you follow what I'm saying."

  "Get out of here," I told him. "SeePee and I have work to do, and we can't do it if you make us puke more than usual."

  Fungus grinned and sauntered away with a "Check with you later."

  "I don't believe it," I said to SeePee.

  "But," he said, absently regarding the tanks, "she has been acting strangely all this week, now that I think about it. I've hardly heard her snap at anyone."

  "Even if it wasn't her and that stargazer, what can a paleontologist and an astronomer find to talk about?"

  "The same thing men and women always find to talk about," he said. "The beginnings of things."

  "But—"

  He gave me a reproving look, and as he stuck his hand back in among the eurypterids he said, "In June the tortoise grows elate and walks on the tips of his toes."

  "Huh? Is that Darcy again?"

  "Gilbert White."

  DAY FOLLOWED DAY without further untoward incident, Centipede Sam recovered from his time-travel-induced headache and joined us in the swamp, and SeePee and I, relieved of Fungus's constant presence, fell to our work with a will. Then the Wasp Woman asked me to accompany her back to the base camp, that sat about a half-mile away on a sliver of dry land squeezed between the rocky headland and the broad, stinky estuarine marsh. We had spent the night before crating specimens and loading them on a cart which we would have to lug ourselves, like medieval French peasant women. The menfolk evidently had more important work she wanted them to do.

  It was early evening. After much huffing and puffing, we delivered our crate to the pier, signed a slew of forms, and then the Wasp Woman turned to me and asked, with what was, for her, unnatural friendliness, "Are you hungry? Do you w
ant to eat Navy chow for a change? Ogle a sailor or two?"

  "Well, the chow will be a change."

  "Go on. I'll catch up with you later." Just like a big sister telling a little sister to go on, have fun, I trust you, be home by midnight.

  I sat in the mess tent for a while after I had finished eating, then walked out and looked around. She had made herself scarce. Fortunately the camp is laid out on a square grid, and there are lights strung on poles to help folks avoid blundering off into the marsh. There is also a path up the side of the ridge, leading over the crest to the observatory, and some thoughtful individual had even strung a line along it you could use as a handrail, and lights so you wouldn't blunder off the path and roll down the side of the ridge into the marsh.

  And coming along the path was the Acid Drip.

  Now, I am not by nature a snoop, but I confess: I was on fire with curiosity. I hung back and let the Acid Drip pass me in the twilight, and then I slipped along behind him.

  He went past the verge of the camp, where the ground slopes off into muck and green slime, and there was the Wasp Woman, waiting for him. She extended a hand which he took, and they moved together, kissed enthusiastically, and then turned to watch the sun slipping down behind the headland on the far side of the estuary. I didn't care to eavesdrop, I had already seen all I needed to see, but just as I started to turn away I saw the Wasp Woman lean her head against his shoulder and saw him put his arm around her.

  Then I felt a bad sneeze coming on, and clapped a hand over my nose and mouth, and faded well back in among the tents before letting go.

  After dinner the next night (it had been SeePee's turn to cook, always a plus) and several drinks, I made bold enough to say, "It's true."

  Quizzical looks from SeePee, Fungus, and Centipede Sam rewarded my observation.

  "I saw them last night. The Wasp Woman and the Acid Drip. I guess they thought they were being discreet, but it was obvious they're dead goofy gone on each other."