The Lion and the Lizard
Page 1
THE LION AND THE LIZARD
TIMELINES #2
Nathan C. Brindle
Curmudgeon Press
Thirty years ago, Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., AKA The Lion of God, had a pretty exhausting week.
Her world was invaded by time-traveling soldiers, she was nearly turned into human toothpaste by an experimental dimension jumper when she went to find her parallel "Dad," who just happens to be able to borrow a Space Force fleet to come and take out her world's invaders . . . and then she found out she was considered by those same invaders to be a saint in their odd religion, and one of the targets of their invasion. If that wasn't enough, she nearly fell completely out of the universe into a time rift, being saved only by the skin of her teeth by her parallel "Dad".
After all that, learning she was going to be the one to bring universal healing and long life to the human race in her particular timeline was just the icing on the proverbial cake.
Anybody else would go home, turn off their phone, pull all the blinds, lock all the doors, and take the rest of their life off. But Ari isn't "anybody else". And her cult of admirers across two timelines won't take "nobody home" for an answer.
Fast-forward thirty years. Scientists have detected radio transmissions in an unknown language from several hundred light years away. And now she's been asked to use her special "saintly" skills as demonstrated on her last "mission" to make first contact with whoever they are.
And that's only the beginning.
Looks like Ambassador Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., is going to have another pretty exhausting week. Or six.
Copyright © 2021 Nathan C. Brindle
All Rights Reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover image made with DAZ Studio 4 Pro
with thanks to my DAZ mentor, Geoffrey A. Edwards
Cover font: Hammersmith One
Yes, the cover is something of an homage to Keith Laumer.
Version 1.0, published March 2021
http://nathanbrindle.com
Also by Nathan C. Brindle
The Seasons Series
Saving the Spring: A short fantasy
A Midsummer Night's Hunt: A short fantasy
The Timelines Saga
The Lion of God
The Lion and the Lizard
The Lion in Paradise (upcoming)
The Lion and the Darkness (upcoming)
Timelines Shorts and Novellas:
The Reason (prequel short story)
A Fox in the Henhouse (novella)
A Dragon in the Foie Gras (novella)
To my lady wife Sally
who puts up with my crap.
I love you :)
Table of Contents
The Lion and the Lizard
Prelude: Follow Your Heart
Chapter 1 Ah, SimCentral, We've Got A Problem
Chapter 2 So Much For That Family Reunion
Chapter 3 Shipsuits, Butterbars, and Commissions, Oh My
Interlude: Till It Bleeds
Chapter 4 Sure, Milk Run, If By Milk Run, You Mean . . .
Chapter 5 Signs and Countersigns
Chapter 6 Comings and Goings, and Always Too Soon
Interlude: The End of the Dream
Chapter 7 To Be Detected Is To Be Targeted Is To Be Made To Squeal Like A Little Girl
Chapter 8 Stop Lollygagging And Get To Work
Chapter 9 Water, Water, Everywhere
Interlude: Between the Devil and the Deep Dark Black
Chapter 10 Shizzle Me This
Chapter 11 Rotation Ain't All It's Cracked Up To Be
Chapter 12 Morally, It's A Problem Of Ethics
Interlude: The In-Between
Chapter 13 Arrivals, Proposals, and Departures
Chapter 14 Party Planners Я Us
Chapter 15 Off To See The Lizards
Interlude: Time to Dance
Chapter 16 Meet, Greet, and Overheat
Chapter 17 Truths and Consequences
Chapter 18 Well, That Was Unexpected
Postlude: Saint and Prophetess
A Preview of A Fox in the Henhouse
About the Author
The Lion and the Lizard
I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed . . .
— Deuteronomy 30:19
See, I set before thee today
Life and death, the blessing and the curse:
The Water of Life, or the Pew of Death.
Be mindful, therefore, of which ye choose.
— Ariela Rivers Wolff,
United States Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Xzl5!vt
A diplomat? They made her a diplomat? God, we're all dead.
— John C. Wolff, SGT, USMC (ret.) to John C. Wolff, GySGT, USMC (ret.)
Prelude:
Follow Your Heart
Personal Diary of Ariela Rivers Wolff, Volume 59
24 May 2047
At Home
. . . which is saying something, since I'm hardly ever at home anymore. Well – at Mom and Dad's home, anyway. They don't live north of Indy, anymore. I guess that was one of the "glitches" Other Dad made when he birthed this timeline – they still had all the money, just didn't have the property down on the lake. Wonder what that says about Other Dad's subconscious, PTSD-infused mental meanderings.
Today I close out this fifty-ninth volume of my voluminous diary. Which is pretentious bullshit, since I didn't start writing a diary until I was in the first grade. Or maybe second. I'd have to go look. Anyway, I've always started a new diary on my birthday, so the 59th year of my life is about to come to a close, and the 60th is about to open.
In the 60th year of my life, I, on the other hand, do still live north of Indy. After 2017, I was sort of persona non grata down in the Bloomington med school labs. I don't really know why – it's not like the atomic bomb going off down on the lake was my fault, except maybe in a metaphysical sense. And Dad bought the land down there after the state put it up for auction, and built essentially the same estate Other Dad's parents built there some 70-odd years before. But I digress. The Indy med school was happy to have me transfer my work up here, particularly after I unveiled the antithanatic nanos and needed a place to continue working on them. Of course, if Bloomington hadn't been such a bunch of fucking snits about the bomb, they'd have had that business and prestige.
Well, mostly prestige, since the things are public domain. But they don't even have the nanos down there, I refused to give them a research license because they were assholes and threw me out before I could even open my mouth to say, "new discovery, you don't want to miss out!"
At least they didn't revoke my Ph.D. Or my M.D. Not that I wouldn't have sued their asses off for that . . . and won. We were on a strictly cash basis at that point – I paid them an inordinate amount of money for crappy lab space in one of the oldest buildings on campus. Which was why it had all those south-facing windows that blew in when the shock wave hit. Well, 'twas another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
But that's not why I'm writing. Arghh! I'm getting like Dad and Uncle Chris, digressions on digressions. Is this what getting old without getting aged is going to be like?
Anyway, tomorrow is m
y birthday party. Except I don't have birthdays. Hate them. All that fuss over nothing. Well, sure, Mom had me and that was a lot of work, first carrying me around for nine months, then getting me to adulthood without managing to kill myself in some novel and fascinating way. (I am my father's daughter.) But we're having a party and a family reunion. Sort of. Other Dad and Kat, and Other Chris and Other Alicia, are coming over from the other timeline. I heard that Other Dad and Kat had a baby boy about six months ago, so I guess I sort of kind of have a half-brother in the other timeline now, to go along with my two existing half-brothers and my sort-of stepbrother here. Well, theoretically, I guess I have the same half-brothers and sort-of stepbrother in the other . . . no! No! No more fucking digressions, damn it!
The main thing I'm concerned about is my mother. She has a crush on Other Dad. Which I suppose makes a certain amount of sense – he and Dad are genetic time-twins, with similar but still significantly-differing paths through life. I already mentioned we didn't live down on the lake until after the bomb. Dad was a Marine like Other Dad, but he only served eight years, got out as a buck Sergeant, and married Mom. Other Dad tried to get . . . shit . . . Other Mom, I guess, to marry him, but she turned up her nose at him until it was too late and he married Kat instead, but only after he'd served almost four enlistments and got out, injured, as a Gunnery Sergeant with the Navy Cross. (I didn't know this the first time we crossed paths, didn't know the difference. I do now!) Kat was his physical therapist, and I guess it was like the guy who liked the razors so much, he bought the company . . . he liked Kat so much, and she liked him back so much, that they fell in love and got married right about the time Other Mom had decided maybe Other Dad wasn't such a bad guy after all. Then Other Mom had various adventures and misadventures, and finally died from lupus about three years before the point in our timeline where I crossed over to the other timeline and met Other Dad.
Which is why our timeline exists – Other Mom dying, that is – and why Mom has a crush on Other Dad, because he still thought enough of her by the time he and Other Chris invented the singularity drive and its rotational variant, that he came back in his 2044 to 1984, before the timeline split, and convinced her she shouldn't live her life like Other Mom did. Took her and showed her Other Mom's grave and everything. And that's when the timeline split. So, Mom didn't instantly give Dad the stink-eye when they were introduced to each other a couple of weeks later in Mom's 1984, and they ended up married and had me. Of course, Other Dad put his finger on the scale, and without her knowledge, gave Mom a minimal course of nanos in a beer he gave her to drink. Sigh. Can you say "malpractice?" I knew you could.
What I really, really hope is that Mom won't make a spectacle of herself while Other Dad is here. But I don't actually think there's much chance of that.
I have no idea what I'm going to do when I bring Fred home and introduce him to her. The embarrassment will no doubt be huge. At least Dad – who caught me years ago at something I probably shouldn't have been doing – was able to keep his mouth shut, and Mom never found out. No chance of that with Mom once she finds out about Fred.
Well, that's it for year 59 and volume 59. Maybe next year will be calm, cool, and collected, and I can finally tell Mom and Dad I want to get married. Dad will at least be happy it's to a man. Not sure he was sure which way I'd flip, after, erm, the incident.
And no doubt I have now evoked Murphy and the Emperor, both.
See you in the next volume!
Personal Diary of Ariela Rivers Wolff, Volume 60
25 May 2047
At Mom and Dad's on the Lake
Aw, prairie shit.
That's all for now . . . busy! No thanks to Murphy OR the Emperor . . .
Chapter 1
Ah, SimCentral, We've Got A Problem
The being known as "Bob" to the humans – because his actual name was written in glyphs and was made up of seventy-six individual phonemes, most of which were entirely unpronounceable by the human speech system – slithered back into his workspace in the heart of the Great Simulation's Central Control, took up his usual perch where he could see his holographic workstation as well as most of what was going on in the rest of Control, and glanced idly with three of his six eyestalks at the agenda for the day. Meanwhile, he used the other three eyestalks to read his inbound correspondence, which had built up a bit during the rest cycle he'd taken after having to deal with the humans. Going into hibernation and operating at a simulant species' faster time rate was always exhausting, and this group of simulants had really managed to sidxz the opqizbd. He'd come back with enough new work and research directions to keep six of his people busy . . . er . . . the equivalent of 24/7/365, for years.
And the beer, chips, and pub mix had been extraordinary.
So he was pretty excited about the whole new project he was going to set in motion, that shift, or at least he was until he read the first message in his queue.
"They want us to what?" he gasped. Insofar, of course, as his species gasped.
Bob was . . . well . . . an alien. Obviously. Of course, Bob did not think of himself as an alien. Bob thought of himself as a . . . oh, hell, you won't be able to read or pronounce that, either. Suffice it to say that where humans are vain and naïve enough to think of themselves simply (and chauvinistically) as "people", without reference to the possibility that there might be other sentient species out there who think of themselves, in much the same manner, as "people", pretty much that's what Bob's "people" thought of themselves, too.
Of course, Bob's people knew better. They ran the Great Simulation. Which at last count was tracking several billion sentient species across a mind-numbingly huge expanse of quaternary logic, which was even bigger if you considered that the fourth logic dimension was time, and the Great Simulation had been running for ten to fifteen billion years . . .
. . . so far as Bob's people knew. By the best count available, they were the forty-second race to run the Great Simulation, having been brought in by the . . . shit, that one can't even be written down, let alone read or pronounced, even by Bob's people, so let's just call them "the FortyFirsters". Anyway, the FortyFirsters had brought Bob's people in as apprentices a few million years before, and when Bob's people were ready, the FortyFirsters had handed everything over to them and retired. Which was precisely what their predecessors had done with them, and so on, and so on, all the way back – presumably – to the Originators, whose name, species, form, and motivation to create the Great Simulation in the first place, were hopelessly lost in the mists of time.
And the Great Simulation itself, which was at least semi-sentient in its own right, either didn't know or wouldn't say. Though it did hint that the Originators, finding themselves completely alone in the cosmos, might have begun the Great Simulation in hopes of populating the universe with more and different life forms.
Their forty-two successor races had all been carefully tended and groomed within the Great Simulation, and when the time had come, their status as simulants had been upgraded to that of truly corporeal species in the Originators' universe. Don't ask how. At this point, it's still beyond human understanding. But it seems as if the Originators found a way to graft a virtual trunk line running in the Great Simulation directly onto the machinery of their bare-metal space-time. Yeah. Think of a virtual trunk as a virtual machine, running under a hypervisor on a bare metal computer, and then you take that virtual machine, lock, stock and barrel, out of the hypervisor, transplant it to the bare metal, and run it in parallel with all the other physical trunks (processes, units, services, whatever floats your boat) already running on that bare metal machine. Voila, a new race exists in space-time, complete with its planets and stars and galaxies. Hey, honey, we've got company!
Confused? Yeah. So were the humans Bob was interacting with. And they were pretty smart cookies – for humans.
Which was nothing, compared to Bob, who was Lead Developer for the Great Simulation, and probably knew more about it than any sop
hont currently incarnate.
And Bob was confused, to say the least.
He got on the phone and rang up . . . look, I'm doing the best I can here with concepts you'll understand, so give me a break, okay? He got on the phone and rang up the secretary of the Board of Regents. "This is the Developer. I need a meeting with the Chairman as soon as possible, regarding his message this morning."
"The Chairman will speak with you now. Please hold the line."
Bob impatiently waited the requisite amount of time which ensured he knew his place, after which the Chairman came on the line. "Ah, Developer, good morning to you. I hope you did not have to wait long."
Bob ground his teeth, silently. (He did have teeth. Many of them.) "No, Chairman, thank you for taking my call."
"Certainly, Developer, now what can I do for you?"
"I'm curious about this request from the Board of Regents. Normally the Regents do not interfere in feature development, and while this is an unusual request, it is really an Operator-level task as opposed to a feature which requires engineering and development time. Any Operator on our staff should be able to accomplish what you have asked, though I am sure they will query this office for confirmation and reasoning."
"The Regents believe it is time to begin selection of the next species to run the Great Simulation," replied the Chairman. "To that end, we wish to test two species, both of which have demonstrated aptitude for such management, and both of which you have interacted with personally."
"But Chairman," protested Bob, "that is a process that will take thousands of years. I do not see how this proposal will advance the process in any material way. Moreover, you propose breaking the one timeline at a point a million of their years ago and merging it with the other timeline at its present day. What happens to the million years of development in the first timeline? This seems to me to be a violation of our program ethics."