“I’m sure by now that you’ve observed the circular form against the wall of the abyssal trench.” I become aware of Misterthoggosh, talking to everyone aboard the submarine. “At the moment, all you can see through it is the rock wall behind it, It is not so very different from the interdimensional portals that we ourselves have constructed out among the asteroids. When activated, it becomes a doorway, a kind of, well…a ‘probability broach’ the technicians call it, a hole, as it were, through the very fabric of alternity, a passage between what is, and what might have been. Although the parties on either side of it, of course, will have varying opinions as to which universe is ‘real’.”
An image of Misterthoggosh formed in my mind. He was sitting at the bottom of his watery environment, on a carefully groomed bed of fine, white sand. A couple of little striped fish pecked at bits of algae on his shell. Before him on the floor lay a panel, serving as a desk.
“It is from over on the other side of that hole in probability, that our new enemy has come. When he activates this device again, and opens the door, I mean to slam it shut with one or both of the nuclear devices I’ve brought.” He pointed a palp at one of many buttons on his desk.
“You know you can’t do that,” said a second voice grimly. It was Eichra Oren’s. “We’ve been through this before.” I sent my implant searching for a camera that would show him. When it did, he was in the water with Misterthoggosh, wearing his tunic of office, carrying his fearsome sword in its sheath over his left shoulder. His voice was artificial, implant-generated. His teeth held a mouthpiece attached to a small horizontal cylinder containing perhaps an hour’s worth of oxygen.
At that moment, another alarm went off, and we were given a view of the Grays’ huge device, opening with a coruscation in the center of blinding, multicolored light. Misterthoggosh raised an anticipatory tentacle-tip.
Eichra Oren drew his sword and leapt, or as close to it as possible underwater, to the top of the Proprietor’s great spiral shell.
Almost as if he hadn’t noticed the human standing atop him with a sword far sharper than any razor, Misterthoggosh reached out with a tentacle—Eichra Oren swept his blade at it, but his arms and sword were too short—and pushed the button. Everybody saw the first bomb launched toward the portal. Before anyone could stop it, it burrowed into the interdimensional tunnel, followed closely by the second atom bomb.
Treemonisha headed straight to the wall, to one side of the portal, to avoid the blast that emerged from the Grays’ device. We only felt one explosion, which meant that the portal had closed before the second bomb went off. The earth shook, momentarily overcoming the vessel’s inertial dampers, The submarine was pelted by rocks falling down the canyon wall, All of the Grays’ lights went out, so our vessel played its mighty floodlights over the scene. There was much less damage to be seen than I might have expected—most of the force must have been expended on the other side—but nothing here seemed to be moving.
“You’ve killed them!” Eichra Oren shouted, “Hundreds, maybe even thousands! And who knows how many, innocent or guilty on the other side!
He jumped to the sandy floor to confront the monster, his sword of office shouldered like a ball bat. “Misterthoggosh, we must now discuss this grave and fundamentally unpayable moral debt you have incurred!”
He rested his sword-point on the exact spot nearest the mollusc’s brain.
Misterthoggosh took him by both wrists. “Not them, young human, him.”
“Him?” He strained against the Proprietor’s grasp. Both entities trembled with the force of their deadlock and made straining mental noises.
“Or her, or it, however it likes to think of itself. We have been attacked by a single organism, not thousands. And I hardly think I’ve killed it, Eichra Oren. I don’t even know if that is possible. All that I’ve done today is to have clipped its claws. Now put down that Hammer-damned abalone knife of yours, and try to reason this out with me.
“Will you have beer?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Normalcy
“YOUNG HUMAN,” COMPLAINED THE GIANT MOLLUSC, “YOU were about to kill me. Another half-second, the briefest of thrusts, and you would have ended my life. You touched me with the tip of that damned sword of yours. I can still feel where it lay upon my flesh, pressing inward.”
We were all sitting, Eichra Oren, Eneri Relda, Lornis Adubudu, and little old me, in one of a dozen or so inter-environmental conference rooms that Treemonisha had to offer, small, intimate, cozy, warm or cold as the mood moved its current occupants, equipped with wonderful furniture, easy communication with the household staff, including food services, and constructed with one big floor-to-ceiling transparent wall that looked into a similar compartment on the water side of this deck.
That, of course, was where the Proprietor was speaking from. Aelbraugh Pritsch was half-floating beside him in a sort of weird bird-brained diving suit, clearly wishing he was over here with us landlings.
Eneri Relda’s egg had hatched. Lornis’ companion Mio seemed fascinated, and was playing with its tiny fingers, toes and wing-hooks.
Eichra Oren, his face almost touching the window, shook his head slowly. “I have already acknowledged my error, Misterthoggosh. I will not apologize for having done my job as appeared appropriate at the time. You requested a p’Nan debt assessor. Would you have had me act otherwise?”
The old cephalopod was as close to the thick transparency as his employee. “On the contrary, son. Had you been right, I would have had to pay. I do wish you’d nicked me a little, so I’d have a scar to brag about.”
I could provide a scar, I thought, for each of you. But they were both laughing, now, Eichra Oren with his handsome head back, roaring, the old ammonite making similar noise as his great coiled shell rocked and shook. It was purely learned behavior. A social nicety. Nautiloids don’t laugh, they don’t have the respiratory equipment.
“Will you have beer? I’m exploring something called milk stout.”
My boss assented enthusiastically, directing an inquiring look my way. I responded with as close as I can get to a shrug. Why the Hammer not?
“What is it with men?” Lornis asked in an annoyed voice. She sat beside me on a long black settee made of some sort of cultured insect leather, “One moment it’s deadly conflict. The next they’re drinking buddies!”
My turn to laugh. “Remind me to tell you about threat display rituals sometime. They evolved to prevent more sperm-bearers from being killed in combat than is absolutely necessary. It isn’t anything that comes naturally to females. You’re the babies’ last line of defense and far more dangerous—nothing at all between ‘Off’ and ‘On’.”
“Oasam Otusam!” she scolded me. “That’s horribly misogynistic!”
“And possibly racist, too,” I told her, “seeing as how your species does a few male-female things differently. But it was merely an observation, Lornis. Take any complaints up with Mother Nature, or Auntie Evolution, not with me. For the time being, I think you should just embrace the moment, sit back, and have a nice beer with us, don’t you?”
She gave her head a shake, momentarily creating a lovely corona of auburn, russet, and blood red. “It’s very tempting, Sam. But my people don’t do at all well with alcohol. It instantly erases all of our inhibitions.”
I moved closer. “Tell me more.”
To my surprise it was mid-afternoon on the surface when we reached it. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. The Captain announced that he’d retracted part of the canopy on the uppermost deck, and dropped the force-field, except where it provided shelter from the wind of our passage.
Eichra Oren, Lornis, and I moved our little party to that deck and invited Eneri Relda, Squee-elgia, Aelbraugh Pritsch, and Renner and Bask. A quantity of beer was consumed. Lornis stuck with tomato juice, poor dear. I don’t know what safely intoxicates her folk except life, maybe.
Despite pressing business, Misterthoggosh attended the party elec
tronically, and after a while, the Captain himself came up to be introduced to the legendary Eneri Relda, among other things. He was the biggest spider I’d ever seen, shaggy gray, as big as a bison. His name was Toknoi Elaun and he said he came from a long line of ship’s masters.
Some time after dark, with the lights of Treemonisha’s home port glimmering in sight on the horizon, I contacted Natsromy Ram to see if she were free this evening. She was, very fortunately, and I arranged for her to pick me up at the quay and take us home. Eichra Oren could get back there on his own, and my quarters have their own private entrance.
As my feet finally touched solid ground, I saw that Renner was right behind me. He handed Natsromy a big container with a swinging handle. “Bolhabaissa,” he explained. “Fresh.”
“You enjoy, now.” The tiny tickle of thought was from Bask.
I was so startled, I didn’t know how to reply, except for “Thank you, both,” in the Original Tongue. I guess we had all sort of saved the world together, Renner and Bask, not unimportantly, from Treemonisha’s galley.
Natsromy parked her cute little veek beside my door. We went inside and had a long, wonderful night of bolhabaissa and each other.
The next morning, I left an exhausted (if I do say so, myself) Natsromy to sleep and went through the house to ask it to make us some coffee.
As the aroma of the stuff began to circulate, there was a noise at Eichra Oren’s door. Out popped Lornis, in the act of wrapping one of Eichra Oren’s tunics about her otherwise unclothed body. An extremely pleasant sight. Her hair was tousled, but then her hair was always tousled.
Mio swung down to greet her from somewhere in the rafters.
She was followed by a yawning Eichra Oren, already tunic-clad, but with equally messy hair. “Do I smell coffee?” he asked no one in particular.
“Yes, sir,” said the house. “I’ve a delivery for you at the front door.”
Natsromy—freshly showered, dressed, and smelling even better than the coffee—came through my door at that moment, nodded politely to Eichra Oren, gave Lornis a little look of impressed surprise, and then came to me. She knelt and ran her fingers all over my head. Not for the first time, or the last, did I wish that my brain and its cybernetic appurtenances lived in a body more like Eichra Oren’s.
Although I’d settle for thumbs.
“You suppose you could spare me a cup, dear? No sugar, just sweet cream.”
“I know.” That would make the coffee exactly the color of her skin. She also had startling blue-gray eyes and freckles scattered lightly across her nose and cheeks. At twenty, Natsromy was already more woman than most women ever manage to be. She was very pleasant to look at and had a Master’s degree in Applied Hedonics from Lamplight University.
The boss said, “Hmmm. All right, let’s see what this delivery is.”
He and I went to the door. He cautiously opened it—there were people who would be happy to know that he was dead. Leaning against the hinge-side jamb there stood a very familiar-looking five string banjo.
“Hammer and Forge,” I said, “Does this mean—?”
“Could mean lots of things,” he said, bringing it in with him. My nose told me that it was indeed the instrument from the cabin. I could smell the woodsmoke on it. We then had to explain the significance of the banjo—the story of Meerltchirt and Shaalara—to Lornis and Natsromy.
“There’s no mystery here, at all—they’ve eloped!” she exclaimed. “She didn’t eat her fiancé after all! They’re honeymooning, or whatever spiders do, in the mountains on the North Western Continent! How perfectly romantic!” Lornis threw her arms around Eichra Oren’s neck. He grinned, put both his arms around her, and kissed her tenderly.
“What’s with all this?” I asked. “I thought you two weren’t physically compatible.”
She gave me an enormous smile. “We worked something out.”
ALSO BY L. NEIL SMITH
Pallas (Book I of the Ngu Family Saga)
Ceres (Book II of the Ngu Family Saga)
Sweeter Than Wine
Their Majesties' Bucketeers
Tom Paine Maru—Special Author's Edition
The Venus Belt
The Crystal Empire
Brightsuit MacBear
Taflak Lysandra
Hope (with Aaron Zelman)
Down With Power: Libertarian Policy
in a Time of Crisis (non-fiction)
L. Neil Smith, Blade of p’Na
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