by J. S. Morin
As the door closed behind him, he muttered, “And they’re welcome to you.” Let some other Carl deal with her.
# # #
Around the house, Rhiannon was low-key, sarcastic, and sweet in her own way. But as Lloyd watched her on stage, he would hardly have known her as the same woman. She transformed. A corded microphone in her hand, she stalked the stage in a baggy shirt and jeans, draped in necklaces and bracelets. Swaying and shaking her hips to the hired backup group, she bantered with the audience before starting to sing.
The club aboard the luxury starship Jefferson was dimly lit except for a stage alive with spotlights. Waiters milled among the tables, taking drink orders and removing empty glasses, oblivious to the show. Microphone in hand, Rhiannon was the center of attention, accompanied by a pair of laaku guitarists—one of whom sang backup vocals—and drummer in a psychedelic shirt and dark glasses.
Lloyd had heard the song before, but only as Rhiannon sang it. He understood that she only performed songs by long-dead artists, but she knew them inside out. Hopefully he had done a good enough job remembering the instrumental pieces that she wouldn’t doubt the authenticity of her band.
♪ I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on, and take it ♫
♫ Take another little piece of my heart now, baby ♪
It had never been Lloyd’s style of music—too harsh and unpolished—but hearing it in Rhiannon’s husky voice had been wearing down his bias. He’d built up a small library of songs to memorize for this occasion, enough to fill a set list plus encores, along with a few likely candidates in case she decided to improvise.
If only he had the time to just sit here and watch. Merely being here was an indulgence, one that he could not prolong indefinitely. Mordecai The Brown had an army parked on his mental doorstep. The wily villain had more psychic fortitude than he had imagined possible. He had changed majors at Oxford to avoid the telepathic communications requirements needed for entry into the Masters of Terraforming program. How was a Bachelor of General Magical Studies threatening to repel Lloyd’s mental invasion?
Swirling the amber liqueur in his tumbler, Lloyd wished it were real alcohol. His mind was wound too tight for imaginative thinking just then. Whatever trickery Mordecai was pulling would have to remain a mystery until the Convocation dissected his thoughts. The prospects of dragging him before an inquest dimmed as more reports came in from the front lines. A waiting army, fortifications, and a stalwart wizard overlooking the battlefield promised a battle that would not end quickly. What should have been the Battle of Little Bighorn was starting to look more like Thermopylae.
One of the bouncers slipped quietly to his table side as Rhiannon finished her song. “Boss, we’ve had a guy snooping around, looking to get in here.”
Blast that Ramsey! “What did he look like? My height, average build, thin neck, and blue hair?”
The bouncer paused a moment. “Naw. I’d have noticed blue hair.”
Of course Ramsey wouldn’t flaunt it. But if the bouncer had to think about it, chances were it was Carl trying to get to his sister. “If he tries again, just break his neck.” One dead mental image wouldn’t be permanently damaging. He could still live up to his end of the bargain if he eliminated one or two of them.
# # #
Pilot Carl sat in the cockpit of his old Typhoon III, a vintage model that was nearing obsolescence the day he first climbed into the cockpit. How Lloyd had found the specs for one was beyond him, but it was close to the real thing—just close enough to piss Carl off. The flight controls felt like amateur simulator parts; every console displayed useless drivel. How any of the others were taken in by their respective ruses was a mystery, if Lloyd had similarly botched the details of their mental prisons. He was finger painting in the Louvre.
“Blackjack, tighten up that formation,” a bland baritone ordered over the comm. It was holovid-quality comm chatter, but the sound quality was authentic enough. For once, holovids had gotten something right. However, there was nothing authentic about the orders themselves.
Supposedly Carl had been reactivated into Earth Navy under some obscure law he’d never heard of. That was Lloyd’s gag. Stripped of his rank, he’d been shoved into a new squadron as Lieutenant Ramsey and rushed off to battle a Zheen advanced scouting force. Fine, he could almost buy that line. But the problem was that they were seconds from engagement and still flying formation like migrating geese.
“Yo, Commander,” Carl replied. “Thinkin’ maybe we oughtta call the break.”
“Negative, Blackjack,” the commander replied. “Maintain relative position and cut the chatter.”
Carl got it. Lloyd had a scenario playing out. He was the director of the prison play, and Carl was both the star and the high-risk inmate. Other Carls had quietly reported in, spilling the details of the prisons the rest of the crew had endured. If he had his guess, once the shooting started, it would be an endless dogfight where shots never seemed to hit Carl’s ship. Urgency, distraction, and a focus on a task of Lloyd’s choosing—those were the hallmarks of the captivity the others had faced.
“No can do, Chief,” Carl said. It was time to tear up the script and force the director to adjust on the fly. Jerking the flight stick, he swung his Typhoon around and took aim at his own squadron mates.
“Blackjack! What are you doing?” the commander shouted over the comm. “Fall back into formation immediately.”
“I’m not Blackjack anymore,” Carl replied, firing off a shot that splashed against the commander’s shields. “I’m Chupacabra Yeti, the mythical ace pilot. Now that you know my identity, I can’t let you live!” He fired another few shots, all solid impacts, but the commander’s shields didn’t waver. Lloyd obviously had no idea the dissipation rate on a Typhoon’s shields, or Carl would have dusted the squadron leader.
“Blackjack! Come to your senses, man! We need you for this mission. The Zheen will—”
“Booo-ring,” Carl replied. “I must have dusted dozens of those guys in my first tour. I got the medal, the rank bump, and the girl at the Angry Parrot the night we got back. It’s all old news. Now if those were Enyar…”
Carl waited, snapping off haphazard shots at anything he could put his sights on and rolling out of the way of everything fired back at him. It was like a sim slowed down to kiddie difficulty. He couldn’t lose.
“Commander,” one of the other squad members said. “My sensors are picking up Enyar engine signatures. Those aren’t Zheen at all!”
“Hear that, Blackjack? Now form up and let’s dust those dog-men.”
They were practically in visual range. Carl didn’t know much about sensors or how they worked, but he damn well knew more than Lloyd. There was no way that a Typhoon was going to confuse a Zheen teardrop fighter with one of the beetle-like Enyar crafts referred to by ARGO pilots as a Ticks. The Zheen used ion engines like ARGO, while the Enyar used some sort of semi-magical reactionless drive that no one had figured out yet, last Carl knew. Lloyd was grasping at straws.
“Nope,” Carl said. “Turns out, I wasn’t in the mood for Enyar, either.”
“Blackjack—!”
“Chupacabra,” Carl corrected.
“Lieutenant Ramsey, either form up or face a court-martial!”
Court-martial? He’d fired on ARGO vessels. They should have ganged up and dusted him on the spot already. ARGO high command would have handled any court-martial posthumously.
“Sorry. No can do.”
Carl hit the eject on his Typhoon. Let Lloyd figure out what to do about that.
# # #
A single, hooded bulb cast a circle of light encompassing eight faces. Beyond, there were other such lights, scattered around a room of indistinct proportion, but cast only silhouettes of the other denizens. Dead center beneath the only light that mattered was a pile of poker chips. Around that pile were cards and smaller piles belonging to the seven opponents Gambling Carl faced.
If it weren’t for the fact that
he knew it was all fake, Carl might have stuck around a while. It was as if someone had taken the bad luck so common to the real world and trimmed it down—a bonsai tree of perfect luck, just enough losing to feel real, but none of the heartbreaking bad beats that ruined a night of poker.
The cast of characters was right out of a pulp gangster holo. To his left, a bald guy with a cigar and a tumbler of scotch. To his right, a slick-haired punk in a two-piece suit with his shirt half unbuttoned, reeking of cologne. Then there was the man in the cowboy hat, the skinny one with the perpetual forced smile, the guy in the suspenders and visor who played sleight of hand with his chips, and the fellow in the panama hat with the holster that peeked out from inside his coat when he reached to bet. And directly across from Carl, the blonde in the low-cut black dress that he couldn’t take his eyes off—her name was Roxanne. Carl wondered if she was the backup plan, in case poker alone wasn’t enough to keep him distracted.
“I raise,” Carl said. He had been dealt three jacks and hadn’t lost with anything even half so good all night. The pot was already his, if only his opponents knew it.
Players tossed their cards away with varying degrees of disappointment, disgust, and frustration. Roxanne held hers up and studied them. “I don’t have enough chips to call,” she said, glancing over at Carl’s bet and heaving a sigh designed to draw eyes away from the action. “Is there… anything else I can bet?”
“Nope,” Carl answered instantly. It was either that, or roll his eyes. What had Rhiannon been telling Lloyd about him? Short term, his luck with women had never been so bad that he’d resorted to winning them at poker games. It was certainly more reliable than his luck at poker games. “Take out a loan from someone or fold.” Lloyd had apparently never heard that the Ancient West rules went out of style centuries ago; table stakes should have allowed Roxanne to call with what she had against a fraction of Carl’s bet. But since Lloyd apparently knew nothing of poker beyond the textbook rules of five-card draw and whatever he’d gleaned from Jesse James holos, Carl took the pot.
The deal passed to Carl. He shuffled like a Vegas dealer, with speed and deftness that he couldn’t manage in the real world. With casual flicks, he sent a single card to each player, then scattered the rest face down in the middle. “Fifty terra ante. The game’s Go Fish.”
“What?” the guy in the panama hat asked.
“Ain’t heard of that,” the cigar smoker added.
Carl took a moment to explain the rules, and the other seven players reluctantly agreed after he called it a common form of poker played in the navy. He couldn’t wipe the grin off his face as a group of supposedly hardened criminals and degenerates played Go Fish for money.
Poker resumed after the deal passed on, and Carl had to admire Lloyd’s resourcefulness. It was going to take more than off-the-cuff rule changes to knock him off script. Carl played the next few hands absentmindedly, thinking of the best way to cause chaos in Lloyd’s prepackaged world.
When the deck next passed to Carl, instead of shuffling he threw it over his shoulder. Seven sets of eyes watched it sail, but none of them made a move to retrieve the cards. Seconds later, someone reached past Carl to set an identical deck in front of him. All he saw was a tanned hand with a wedding ring and a suit sleeve with diamond cuff links. The deliverer was gone by the time Carl turned to get a better look.
“All right,” Carl said with a sigh, picking up the cards. “This time the game is… on hold while I go take a leak.” He stood and tucked the deck into a jacket pocket. With the lampshade below eye level, the room felt dark. Aside from the little islands of light that marked each table, the rest of the card room was penumbral. There was no signage, no waitstaff, and hardly any room to move.
Carl weaved his way among the tables. He didn’t care where there might be a washroom; that was just an excuse. What he really wanted to find was the exit. The big, wide world had more to strain Lloyd’s brain than the limited confines of a hotel casino. All the chips had been marked with “Royal Resort,” giving Carl the impression that there was at least more to the building than just a poker room. Even getting into the hotel proper would have been a step up.
But Carl must have walked for half an hour before he gave up on finding an end to the sea of card tables. Lines of a song played in his head regarding a hotel that he could never leave. Not wanting to spend his efforts on a fruitless search, he headed back to find his own table and resume the game. He noticed an open seat at a nearby table and figured that one table in this place was as good as another.
“Welcome back,” Roxanne said, biting her lower lip. “We missed you.”
Carl did a double take. He couldn’t have gone in circles that whole time. He got up and found a seat at the next table over.
“What’s your problem, buddy?” the cigar smoker asked. “Got ants in them pants of yours?”
“Just deal,” the slick-haired punk with the open shirt said.
“Fuck this,” Carl muttered under his breath. Creepy recursive sub-universes were the stuff of cheesy mind-bending horror holos. Without any warning to his fellow players, he climbed onto the table, knocking the hanging light aside to swing wildly. Shadows bounced and wavered in a chaotic dance to match Carl’s attempt at a jig, jostled anew at each flailing gesticulation. Cards and chips flew, and drinks spilled.
The other players shouted for him to get down or swore at him for upsetting their refreshments or chips. But none of them moved to stop him, and in this fantasy world, he wasn’t getting tired either. Lloyd was just giving up and letting him do what he pleased.
# # #
Lloyd’s college pub was seeing more patrons than it probably had since the last time it actually existed. The Carls had gathered up the crew and brought them all here—except Mort. The big guy was on his own and probably holding it together better than the whole lot of them combined. Good thing, too, since Carl had his hands full—all eight of them—with his bewildered charges.
“What are you doing to get us out of here?” Tanny asked, sitting at the bar ignoring a pint of ale.
“Where are we, exactly?” Esper asked. “Is this Lloyd’s head or Mort’s? If it’s Lloyd’s, why can’t he find us here?”
“Aren’t any of you bothered by the fact that there are four motherfucking Carl Ramseys here?” Roddy shouted. He glared through the glass bottom of his empty pitcher. “I can’t keep drunk enough to deal with this.”
Mriy snarled something in her own language, but without the translator-charmed earrings—stranded back in the real world on their real bodies—Carl didn’t understand a word of it.
“Yeah, I completely agree,” Sarcastic Asshole Carl said to Mriy. “What the hell is she yammering? English, Miss Throat-Ripper. How about you try it.”
“He doesn’t mean to be hurtful,” Vaguely Pious Carl said, putting a hand on Mriy’s shoulder. “I apologize for—”
“Can it, both of you,” Outdoorsman Carl said, standing with his foot up on the seat of a chair as if he’d killed it and was posing for a trophy picture. “We need to stick together. Once Mort deals with Lloyd, he’ll come rescue us. For now, we sit tight, and I’ve got more Carls out searching for Rhiannon and a way out.”
“More Carls…” Roddy muttered, shaking his head.
“In the meantime,” Ladies Man Carl said softly across the bar to Tanny. “We can catch up on old times.” He wiped the bar with a rag, moving it in slow circles as if he might have actually cared whether an imaginary, abandoned pub was clean. With a subtle theft, he topped off Tanny’s ale from the nearest tap.
Tanny glanced from one Carl to the next, before finally settling on Ladies Man with a suspicious glare. “What’s the deal? Why the sudden nostalgia? I know that look, Carl. It ain’t happening.”
“What’s so sudden?” Ladies Man asked. “I keep this side of me buried—have for years now. It’s always been here, though.” He poured a tall glass from the same tap for himself. “Cheers.” He clinked his glass against Tan
ny’s and drank.
“Shouldn’t you be… I dunno… helping?” Tanny asked. She took a reluctant sip.
“I am.”
“I mean them,” Tanny said, waving her glass toward the rest of the crew. Of all of them, only Kubu seemed content, collapsed in a nap after eating the contents of the pub’s walk-in cooler.
“Noise,” Carl said. “Let them make their noise. It’s not getting them out any faster, and trust me, I’m working my ass off other places in Lloyd’s head. But here, we’re just passing the time. And I can think of lots better ways to pass it.” He reached a gentle finger under Tanny’s chin and guided her eyes to meet his. “This is just a dream, after all. Can’t dreams be all we’ve ever wanted?”
He could see in her eyes that her resolve was breaking down—or rather the barricades she used to block the roads leading in and out of resolve. Tanny was forgetting the reasons they’d split; he recognized that old fire burning in the depths of those eyes. It was a fire he worried would burn out someday, but for today, an ember still smoldered. He blew on it, to see if it still had any life left.
# # #
The club was packed. The tentative, sparse early evening crowd had swelled to a raucous full house. On stage, Rhiannon was sweating under the spotlights as she belted out song after ancient hit song. It didn’t matter anymore that the band was flat and the shouted requests got repetitive. Everyone was letting loose and living in the moment. The crowd sang along with the chorus.
♪ Don’t you want somebody to love? ♫
♫ Don’t you need somebody to love? ♪
♪ Wouldn’t you love somebody to love? ♫
Lloyd snorted, remembering the name of the original artists. “Jefferson Airplane…” the things they used to call singing groups in Ancient Earth. He had been feeding her requests via the audience from Janice Joplin, Heart, Carole King, and Fleetwood Mac. For the Mobius crew, their individual cells were meant to be temporary holding pens. It wouldn’t matter whether they believed in the reality of their experience when it was over; it made things simpler for Lloyd. For Rhiannon, Lloyd wanted a perfect little respite from reality, something she would remember fondly and believe every minute of. Keeping up that level of verisimilitude was exhausting. Soon, he’d confront Mort, and it would be time to find Rhiannon a solitary repose, something calming and easy for Lloyd to maintain—a spa massage or a drunken stupor, perhaps.