Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson

  I’d always prided myself on being unprejudiced and insistent on subjecting everything to rational analysis. I’d feel better about this except that the one exception sometimes made me wonder if there might be something wrong with me.

  That’s because the exceptions are outright psychopaths. To use the technical term, people who exhibit Anti-Social Personality Disorder. ASPD, for short.

  No, I kid you not. For reasons that are presumably obvious, the DIA doesn’t advertise the fact. We get enough accusations of being crazy as it is. I will add that psychopaths employed as guides by the DIA in the hell universe are strictly consultants, not employees of the department.

  Still, it makes me wonder, sometimes. Especially when I discover, as I have on several occasions, that my own reactions to hell-universe geometic shifts—HUGS is the inevitable acronym; hey, look, we’re a government agency—are more reliable than those of my psychopath guide.

  Just to make something clear before we go any further, psychopaths are not necessarily serial murderers or even especially dangerous. It’s the killers who get all the publicity, but the fact is that most psychopaths go through life without ever running afoul of the law. Quite a few are successful corporate CEOs, in fact.

  Thinking about psychopaths naturally brought me to the inevitable end point of this meeting. Frank was bound to give me the assignment of tracking down Boatright and his people and hauling them (or what was left of them) out of the hell universe.

  Not all psychopaths are the same. Most of them—well, all of them, really—are thoroughly detestable people. But they are also usually charming, on the surface, and some are more charming than others. If you were lucky, the expedition might be short enough that the charm didn’t wear off before the underlying personality emerged.

  “Is Walt Boyes available?” I asked.

  Frank shook his head. “No, he got arrested again.”

  “Too bad.” I started working my way alphabetically through the list of psychopath guides. I didn’t get any farther than David Carrico, though, before there came the sounds of a ruckus in the receptionist’s office beyond the door.

  “Yes, I know he’s in a meeting,” said a loud female voice I didn’t know—and from its unpleasant edge, didn’t want to. “That’s why I need to get in there right now, before any further damage is done.”

  I heard the voice of Frank’s receptionist, Mrs. Graves, although I couldn’t make out more than one word in three. “ . . . can’t . . . have to . . . proper . . . hey!”

  A moment later the door opened. Burst open, almost. A female—presumably the source of the unknown voice—strode into the office.

  She was good-looking, in an intense sort of way. Somewhere in her early thirties, very dark hair, almost black, cut short; equally dark eyes; a slim but unmistakably female figure. All of it set off in a gray business suit cut along the same severe lines as her hair.

  “Frank Pianessa?” she asked, looking at him. It was more in the way of a statement than a question, though. Before Frank’s glare could turn into a verbal response, the intense black eyes were focused on me. “And you’d be Anibal Vargas. I’m assuming you’re the one who’ll be going on the expedition.”

  “What expedition?” growled Frank. “And just who are you to be asking in the first place?”

  “I’m Sophia Loren, from the State Department. Please spare me the wisecracks. That’s what my parents chose to name me and I’m too stubborn to get the name changed. As for the expedition, let’s not play games. The one we’re about to send off to snare Rick Boatright and his maniacs.”

  Frank’s temper was rising, but my own was actually subsiding. Her comment about stubbornness concerning her name predisposed me in her favor. I’d grown up in a mostly Anglo neighborhood where my schoolmates—the ones who read, anyway, and those were the ones I hung out with—could never resist wordplay on the name “Hannibal.” It didn’t help that my high school girlfriend’s last name was Alps.

  “Assuming for the moment that such an expedition is in the works,” Frank said, “what’s it to you?”

  “Are you serious? These people are planning to form an alliance with a non-human being from an alternate universe. A very powerful being. Of course the State Department is concerned.”

  Since this was not an unreasonable point, Frank reined in his temper and leaned back in his seat. “All right, I can see where State is legitimately involved. I assume you’re concerned that such an alliance might upset the balance of power between Heaven and Hell.”

  “Nonsense,” said Loren, waving her hand brusquely. “That’s just Steven Matuchek’s speculations based on—what, exactly?” With a slight curl of the lip: “His great knowledge of the Most High and the Most Low, deriving from his expertise in lycanthropy?”

  Being a wereperson myself, that last remark brought my initial dislike for the woman back to the surface. Before I could say anything—if I decided to at all, which I probably wouldn’t—Loren continued.

  “The balance of power between the Highest and Lowest is far beyond our ability to affect significantly. If at all. But that says nothing about the ongoing struggle between the universes on a variety of lower levels. And on a number of those levels, the Boatright expedition could very well inflict a great deal of harm.”

  “On what?” demanded Frank.

  She gave him the sort of look that is either bestowed on slimy disgusting creatures oozing from beneath a crevice, or people whose security clearances may not be up to snuff.

  Frank recognized the look, naturally. “Give me a break,” he said. “My clearance when it comes to infernal affairs is as high as it gets.” He jerked a thumb at me. “So’s his. That still leaves ‘need to know,’ but I presume if we didn’t need to know you wouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

  He had her over a barrel and she knew it. That was obvious from the look on her face. It was the sort of expression people had just before they underwent a root canal or divulged state secrets to someone in another agency.

  “Yes, you’re right. The reason Boatright poses a threat is because his expedition might cause problems for one of our existing alliances with forces in the netherworlds.”

  We both stared at her. After a couple of seconds, Frank said: “What alliances are you talking about? We don’t have—”

  Again, she made that abrupt gesture with her hand. “Of course you don’t know about them. They’re top secret and until now, there was no reason the DIA needed to know. Since you do know as of this minute, however, we can at least dispense with the nonsense of using lunatics as our guides in the hell universe. It’s amazing you people get anything done.”

  I decided she really was an unpleasant woman, good looks or not and charming name or not. On the positive side, that would make my life easier, since I was obviously going to be dealing with her whether I wanted to or not.

  When a heterosexually inclined single man like myself comes into contact with an attractive woman roughly his own age, an unstable situation automatically emerges. Unless he’s taken holy vows, at any rate. First, curiosity demands to be satisfied. Is she herself heterosexually inclined? If so, is she single? If she is involved with someone, is the relationship officially monogamous? If so, is she open to cheating? If she is, do you want to get into that potential mare’s nest?

  It’s exhausting just to think about it, especially because it may not stop there. If the answers are any one of yes, yes, no, yes and maybe, then the single heterosexually inclined single man has to go to work. Which can be really exhausting, usually unsettling, and often confusing.

  But this situation was going to be no sweat. Since the answers across the board were: “Who cares? I don’t like the damn woman anyway.”

  Frank’s scowl was back in full force. “If you think I’m going to send one of my people into the hell universe with no better guide than an IPS gadget, you can damn well think again.”

  “No, of course not. The things are well-nigh useless.” She turne
d, stuck fingers in her mouth, and blew a whistle.

  A really impressive whistle it was, too, especially for a woman. The last woman—well, girl—I’d known with that good a whistle was Allison Alps. I felt my resolve to dislike Loren crumbling again.

  There came another ruckus in the receptionist’s office. Again, I could only catch one word in three. But I probably wasn’t missing much in the way of intellectual content, because what I did hear was: “. . . hey! . . . you don’t . . . hey! . . . you can’t! . . . what do you think . . . ? . . . hey!”

  The door opened again and a creature waddled in. It stood about three feet high, was about three feet wide, and looked vaguely like a cross between a goose and a small troll. I recognized it as a svartálfar. They’re sometimes known as “black elves,” even though the color of their skin is slate gray. The darkness being referred to is a matter of the soul, not the body. They’re generally nasty and invariably obnoxious. Most people don’t associate with them willingly. I wondered why she did.

  “You called, babe?” The creature twisted its long neck so that its grotesquely ugly face was cocked sideways as it looked up at Loren. Below the immense nose, thick lips twisted into a leer. “Finally getting horny?”

  “In your dreams.” Loren nodded toward me. “Meet Anibal Vargas. He’s the agent from the DIA who’ll be going with us. Mr. Vargas, this is my associate, Ingemar.”

  The creature now twisted the neck to bring its black and beady eyes to bear on me. It was the eyes more than anything—combined with that grotesque neck, of course—that brought the image of a goose to mind. There really wasn’t anything very avian about the little monster.

  “Hannibal, is it? I hope he’s cannae-er than he looks.”

  I’d heard that one as far back as the ninth grade. But I hadn’t expected to hear such an educated pun from something that looked like this creature.

  “Be polite,” said Loren.

  “Why?” sneered Ingemar. “He’ll just be another furball, like almost all these DIA field types. Dumber’n rocks.”

  It was true that most DIA field agents were therianthropes of one kind or another. People with degrees in sorcery or accounting tended to gravitate toward the FBI. But, true or not, I decided this snotty bastard needed to be put in his place right here at the outset.

  Besides, the wisecrack about “furballs” was irritating.

  I always wear were-adaptable clothing on the job, so I didn’t need to strip. I just popped out my Polaroid flash, turned it on myself, and made the change.

  The transformation is very quick although it seems much longer to the one undergoing the process. It wasn’t more than a few seconds later that I came erect in my were form.

  “Arkh!” squawked the little monster. He scrambled onto the filing cabinet against the door, that being the highest ground in the office.

  Fat lot of good it would have done him. I swiveled my head to gaze upon his partner. To her credit, Sophia Loren hadn’t budged. She might have paled a little, although it was hard to tell with her olive complexion.

  “I guess ‘nice doggie’ would be even more inappropriate than usual,” she said. She turned to look at Ingemar. “Do you really think he can’t get to you up there?”

  The svartálfar gibbered something that sounded Germanic although I didn’t recognize any of the words. Loren shook her head. “What difference does it make how high he can jump? He’d just bring the cabinet down.” She studied my feet. “It’d be interesting to watch, actually.”

  This woman was quite confusing. I had a feeling my future might have some emotional exercise in it, after all.

  2

  “I didn’t know it was even possible,” said Loren the next day, as we waited for the State Department’s witches to finish the ritual that would send us into the hell universe. We were using them instead of their DIA equivalents because the powers-that-be had pronounced this expedition to be under State’s jurisdiction and control. Officially, I was just on loan as a field agent.

  “I knew any sort of prehistoric therianthropy was rare,” she continued, “and I just assumed they were all mammalian.”

  I shrugged. “Most are. Or I should say, almost all the few which exist are mammalian. But there are a handful like me.”

  “All velociraptors?”

  “All dromaeosaurids, is the right way to put it. Velociraptors properly so-called were about the size of a turkey. The laws of physics, including conservation of mass and energy, aren’t violated by therianthropy. A person who turned into a velociraptor would have to weigh no more than thirty to forty pounds.”

  “Okay. And that makes you . . . ?”

  “I’m listed on the agency rolls as a Deinonychus antirrhopus. But the truth is, there’s a lot of guesswork involved. Nobody really knows for sure.”

  I started to add something, but then saw that the sorcerers had reached the end of the ritual. I felt the universe beginning to swirl around us, in the by-now very familiar sensations of interplanar travel.

  “And here we go,” said Loren. She turned to her nasty little sidekick. “Are the goats ready?”

  “Teach grandmothers to suck eggs,” muttered Ingemar. He held up a sack and whacked the side of it. A couple of bleats emerged from within. “See?”

  If you’ve read Steven Matuchek’s account of the expedition he and his wife Virginia undertook into the hell universe to rescue their infant daughter, you’ll remember his depictions of the terrain there. Those depictions are about as accurate as everything in his book. True as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go as far as most people think it does. There’s no such thing as “the” terrain of Hell, any more than there is such a thing as “the” terrain of Earth—or Mars, for that matter. In fact, the variation is a lot greater than anything you’ll find in our own universe.

  Because the witches had used personal possessions of Boatright in their cantrips, we came out in the same place in the hell universe that Boatright and his party had. Part of the cantrips also involved sending a homunculus through first to test the terrain’s survivability in crude physical terms. The thing is mindless since its brain is no bigger than a pea, but its morphology and metabolism is otherwise completely human. They leave the homunculus in hell for twelve hours—hell time; it’s only a second or two in our own—and then see what shape it’s in when they bring it back. That’s to make sure the party that goes through next won’t immediately drown or suffocate in a vacuum or get poisoned by the atmosphere.

  But beyond that, we had no idea what sort of environment we’d emerge in, and I was prepared for anything. So, it seemed, was my State Department companion. She’d exchanged her severe business suit for an explorer’s jumpsuit that was cut every bit as severely but displayed her figure a lot better. I’d known already that the figure was slim, but now I could see that there was muscle there as well. Hers was the sort of slender build that came from a lot of exercise, not just genes and a good diet. Her gear wasn’t too bulky and the only visible weapon was a machete slung across her back. Still, it must have come to somewhere around twenty pounds, and she was carrying all of it without apparent effort.

  So far, so good. There didn’t seem to be much chance that she’d just physically collapse under the strenuous conditions in the hell universe. I’d been worried about that. Foggy Bottom types like to sneer at we lowbrow DIA gorillas, but most of them think a strenuous workout consists of carrying a martini from one room to another in a diplomatic soiree.

  I still had no idea what sort of experience she had in hell conditions. When I’d tried to enquire, she’d refused to answer. Politely, but I might as well have been interrogating a fire hydrant.

  In the event, we arrived in a fetid jungle—just barely this side of a swamp. The soil underfoot was only “solid” in a technical sense. Walking on it would exhaust us within half an hour.

  I turned to my companion and cocked an eye at her. Loren had insisted that she could and would provide transportation once we got to Hell.

&
nbsp; She studied the terrain for a few more seconds, her lips pursed thoughtfully, and then said to Ingemar: “What do you think? I’m inclined toward the carpet myself, although the goats could probably manage the howdah.”

  The black elf peered suspiciously at the sky. What little he could see, which wasn’t much given the solid low overcast. “I don’t like the looks of it. Could be anything up there. I say we go with the howdah. It’ll be slower but the goats can manage.”

  They sounded for all the world like a golfer and her caddy discussing which iron to use. After another few seconds and some continued lip-pursing, Loren nodded. “All right, let’s do it.”

  With no further ado, Ingemar upended the sack in his hand. Two little goats fell out. I mean, little—neither one of them stood more than eight inches high. At a guess, they weighed about the same as small dogs. These were supposed to be our means of transportation?

  “Stand back,” Loren said, giving me a light warning push with her fingers. After I took a couple of steps back, she stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled. A really piercing whistle, this one was.

  The goats started growing. Really fast. Within fifteen seconds, they were both the size of elephants. Their morphologies changed as they grew also. By the end, they were still recognizably goats but their legs were disproportionately thick and their feet bore a closer resemblance to those of an elephant or a rhino than a goat’s.

  While that was happening, Ingemar had kept shaking the sack. The next thing that came out was a weird-looking contraption that looked like a scrunched-up haversack. By the time the goats finished their transformation, the haversack had turned into a howdah. Well . . . that’s pushing it a little. Let’s say it had the same resemblance to a proper howdah that a good tent has to a house. Still and all, it was clearly something a couple of people could ride in comfortably enough, even perched on top of a goat-cum-elephant.