by Greg Bear
“Who are you?” Pogo asked him. “And how did I get to Disneyland?”
“I ken that land not,” the small fellow said. “But ye know me sure, lord. Ludo, yer ain sworn vassal.”
Pogo was really beginning to worry now. He had never had the greatest imagination (except during his youthful days of pharmaceutical exploration) and if he was imagining all this, that had to mean a pretty severe head injury.
And I never got my lunch, either, he thought sadly. Now I’ll probably spend months eating hospital food. “Okay, Lou,” he said, trying to be a good sport. “Then if this isn’t Disneyland, where are we?”
The dwarf frowned, obviously concerned. “The forest of the Ardennes, Duke Astolfo. Sure ye must recollect!”
“Duke Astolfo?” The name was sort of familiar—a relief pitcher for the Angels, maybe? Professional surfer? “Hey, should somebody call an ambulance? Because I think I might have a brain injury or something. Or could you kind of steer me back to the mall, at least? I manage Kirby Shoes—you know it? Across from Orange Julius, next to J.C. Penney?”
Ludo shook his head. “This is nay guid and the dark will soon come. We maun make camp.”
“Yeah. So is there a snack bar or a store or something around here? A minimart? ’Cause I never got any lunch today.”
But the dwarf only shook his head again and helped Cashman to his feet. He was stronger than his size would have suggested. “Can ye ride, m’lord?”
“On a horse?” Pogo examined the huge, black beast. Horses didn’t look anywhere near so big on television. “I don’t know. Is it hard?”
Supervisor Fnutt had called a sudden and mandatory meeting for all management personnel. Even sub-sub-manager Quidprobe, the new kid in the office, knew that had to be a bad sign.
All the dozens of managers and sub-managers of the Crossover Division of the Department of Fictional Universes were crowded into the conference space, although most of them looked as though they would rather be pretty much anywhere else. Fnutt the supervisor was pacing back and forth at the front of the room—or what would have been the front if the Department of Fictional Universes had been in any way compelled by Euclidean geometry.
“This is bad!” Fnutt squealed. The supervisor was a small green fellow with a small green mustache and a tendency to become shrill. “Very, very bad!” At the moment, he was in danger of shattering every coffee cup in the room. “How could this happen?”
“Does it matter?” asked Bardler, who managed the Matter of France, his tone heavy with doom. “It’s happened. It’s too late now to do anything but watch the destruction!”
Quidprobe, a sub-sub-manager in the Poul Anderson subdivision, with untaxing maintenance duties in the seldom-accessed Ariosto section of Anderson’s Matter of France, raised a rubbery, three-fingered hand. “I still don’t understand what happened.”
“One of your boss Digry’s idiot clerks sent the wrong personnel request,” Bardler snarled, “and so some idiot named Cashman—a shoe store manager, no less!—was dispatched to Anderson’s medieval France for a tricky assignment, instead of the guy who was supposed to go, Porter Gervaise Castlemane, an English chemical engineer and former SAS officer.” Bardler scratched both his noses. “Who would have been perfect by the way. Castlemane can kill a man with just his fingertips.”
“Yes, we sent the wrong initial request,” bubbled Quidprobe’s boss, Digry, “but then one of your idiot clerks didn’t see our Correction Form!” Digry was so upset his face was pressed against the window of his tank and his nicitating membranes snapped up and down like windshield wipers in a deluge. “We spotted the mistake in moments. We sent the proper MP-362A immediately. But someone in your office must have been taking a nitrogen break.”
Bardler didn’t seem to have an argument at the tip of his feeding tube, so he just scowled.
“Stop! We’ll figure out what went wrong later!” Supervisor Fnutt was getting dangerously squeaky again. “Right now we have to think of something to do about this . . . catastrophe!”
“Can’t we just reverse it?” asked Quidprobe. He’d been less than a century on the job—very young by departmental standards—but he was ambitious, as the young often are. As far as he could tell, the other managers uniformly loathed him for it.
“It doesn’t work that way,” screeched Fnutt, his mustache writhing like a caterpillar on a griddle. “Departmental regs say that once the personnel unit has been transferred into the fictional world, any change of plan has to go to the top for approval. The very, very top.” Just the look on Fnutt’s face was enough to make even the most hardened of department employees moisten with fear where his, her, or its limbs attached. “So either we call the big boys right now and tell them we have royally screwed the tetramorph or we have to leave him there.”
“And if we leave him there, everything else will go wrong,” said Bardler darkly. “Roland will stay insane. Nobody will save Charlemagne from Agramant and Aelfric. Christendom will totter and fall.”
“But it’s only a crossover story about the Matter of France, one of Anderson’s old books—in fact, what we’re dealing with here isn’t even an actual story by Poul Anderson!” said Quidprobe. “I was looking over the order this morning. It’s only some kind of pastiche for an anthology based on his work—and not very closely based, either, I couldn’t help noticing. I suspect the guy writing it is a bit of a hack. So who cares?” But when Quidprobe saw the look on the faces of his superiors his cheerful smile faltered and he blanched right down to his basal chromatophores. “Uh . . . what don’t I understand?”
Supervisor Fnutt was clearly doing his best not to lose his temper, but some of the more veteran managers looked like they were already wondering if they would get time off to attend Quidprobe’s funeral. “Listen . . . youngster. What you don’t understand is that when something goes wrong enough with an important creator like Anderson’s version of a world, the problem will ripple out from there.”
“Ripple?” Quidprobe looked around.
“It means, you bottom-hole-breather,” growled Bardler, “that when this Cashman guy fails, it’ll infect the entire Matter of France. The whole thing! Not just Anderson’s version, but Ariosto, the Song of Roland—which is, incidentally, the oldest surviving piece of French literature—and who knows what else.” Bardler was getting angrier as he spoke, and Quidprobe was now doing his best to slide under the table, but fear had made the sub-sub-manager rubbery and he was going horizontal as much as vertical. “A few weeks from now,” Bardler shouted, “Charles the Great will probably be known as Charles the Loser!”
Even Quidprobe’s boss Digry looked anxious. “That bad? Really?”
“You knock the pins out from under Charlemagne and after a little while, there goes Arthur and the Round Table, too!” Bardler declared with a certain grim satisfaction. “And then—goodbye, English literature! Farewell, Western European Humanism! So long, it was fun! Write if you find work!”
“Enough!” squeaked Fnutt.
Bardler dropped back into his chair and subsided into scowling silence. All around the long table managers and sub-managers shifted uneasily, thanking whatever they prayed to that they were not in Quidprobe’s now rather viscous seat. In fact, Quidprobe wasn’t in it either: he had finally managed to slither onto the floor.
“It’s your orb and your game now,” Fnutt told them with dark finality. “As far as I’m concerned, this meeting never happened. And when I’m ready to send my report at the end of the day, I don’t want to see any loose ends that I’ll have to report to . . . you know who.” Fnutt rose to his full, if unprepossessing height, and marched out of the conference space, followed a moment later by his mustache.
“So . . . ” said Digry at last. His bubbling voice seemed so loud in the silence after their boss’s retreat that even Quidprobe, reorganizing his splayed pseudopods on the floor beneath his chair, could hear every word clearly. “What do we do next?”
“I hear there might be a few open
ings in the Department of Pointless Philosophical Rambling,” ventured one of the sub-managers.
By the time young Quidprobe had finally managed to clamber back up onto his slippery seat, the conference space had emptied and a large, shouting mob was forming around the copying device as his fellow managers and sub-managers hurried to update and dispatch their resumés.
“Truly ye remember naught?” asked Ludo, his face scrunched in dismay like an old paper bag. “Not y’r dalliance with the fair Alcina? How the sorc’ress tired of ye and turned ye into a wee myrtle tree and the a’ the hounds would make water upon ye?”
“Huh?” Cashman was doing his best to understand the dwarf, but the little fellow was clearly suffering from some kind of head injury himself: some of his words sounded like English, but the rest were gobbledygook that sounded like the excitable guy on Star Trek. “I don’t know, man. Can we eat now?”
“Nae, we cannae eat yet.” He hadn’t called Pogo “M’lord” in a while. “I’ve had nae chance to find victuals, have I?”
“Vegetables? Can’t we get some real food? Like burgers? Or pizza?”
“Victuals! I said ‘victuals’! Are ye daft?”
“I’m not deaf. I’m not even nearsighted, dude. How come you can’t talk like a normal person—like me?”
“Like ye? Like ye?” For a moment Ludo seemed angry enough to walk off and leave Pogo in the woods alone, but then he flopped himself down beside the sandy trail and folded his short legs under him. “Go tak up yon shield,” he said.
Shield at least was a word Pogo recognized. He lifted the big hunk of wood and metal off the saddle horn of the black horse. He didn’t have to reach as high as he expected to, and his hands seemed bigger and stronger than he remembered. He was beginning to wonder if the world around him wasn’t the only thing that had changed. “Yeah?”
“Luik on yon painted crest. Tell us what ye see.”
Pogo decided he must mean the painted front of the shield, so “crest” must mean the advertisement on the front, like the stripey Adidas flower. “Yes,” he said. “The crest. I see. Very interesting.” The design was weird and old-fashioned, a huge trademark of crudely painted lion-type creatures alternating with what Pogo was pretty sure was the New Orleans Saints football team logo. He stared as hard as he could, but it yielded up no secrets. “And . . . ?”
“Do ye ken it not?” Ludo asked. “The three lilies and three leopards of England? The token of your father the king?”
“My father is a king?” As far as Pogo knew, his father was a guy who painted faces on rocks he found at the beach and sold them to tourists.
“Aye, and ye have a grave duty to a’ of Christendie. Can ye truly remember naught?”
The communication thing was beginning to be a problem. “I gotta be honest, Louie. I didn’t understand a thing you just said.”
The dwarf stared at him for a moment, then went off muttering and sat on a fallen tree, pulled out a huge pipe, lit it and began to smoke like a man who was in a hurry to achieve lung cancer.
Quidprobe was the only person left in the conference room. He might even have been the only person left in the entire building. His coworkers had hurried off to renew old friendships in other departments that might have openings, or establish alibis for where they had been when the wrong personnel requisition got approved for the Anderson world, anything but dealing with the actual problem.
Well, Quidprobe thought, let them. I’m not like that. I’m a fellow who solves problems instead of running from them. Also, he didn’t know anyone in any of the other departments very well. In fact, after a short hundred years or so in the job, half the people in his own section still didn’t know Quidprobe’s name.
Fnutt’s universal viewer was still sitting on the conference space table and Quidprobe was curious to see what was going on with the botched transfer. Perhaps this Cashman creature would turn out to be just as good as the one everyone had expected to enter the fiction-world instead—perhaps everything would turn out all right after all, and all the veteran department managers had panicked needlessly. And if he brought them this good news, perhaps Quidprobe himself would get some of the credit. He even let himself fantasize for a moment that this could be the start of big things for him—a raise, maybe even a promotion. By the Peerless Punctuation of Poe, wouldn’t that be grand! He could get himself a new exocontainer that wouldn’t break down half the time, and maybe even some top-of-the-line rigid graspers. Wouldn’t the folks back home stare and jealously emit phosgene when Quidprobe came back to visit and told them he was a supervisor! And when he whipped out his fancy new graspers and . . . and grasped things, well, his old classmates would just froth themselves with jealousy.
After all, he thought, dialing through the various Poul Anderson worlds, past the speeding Leonora Christine and Dominic Flandry, leaving behind the modernist creations and moving farther and farther into the more primitivist inventions such as The High Crusade and The Man Who Came Early, how hard could it be to succeed in an environment as primitive as the Matter of France, where people couldn’t even remove their heads without incurring permanent damage? The Pogocashman organic might not be all that advanced himself, but at least his civilization had discovered things like nuclear power and canned foods.
At last the focal window located the Three Hearts and Three Lions world and dilated wide so that Quidprobe could get his first look at the Pogocashman creature. The Pogocashman’s Assisting Character—a construct named “Ludo”—was trying to teach him how to fight with the ancient weapon known as a sword, which apparently was the main form of social intercourse in primitive France, but the Pogocashman was sitting on the ground whimpering in pain, his hands bloody.
“You’re supposed to hold the other end,” the dwarf said wearily.
Quidprobe had a sudden powerful urge to look over his own rather slight resumé to see what needed updating. He stabbed at the button to close the focal window, but the machinery was made for more conventionally rigid digits than Quidprobe’s and he wound up pressing the button beside it as well. He had only a moment to stare at the label under the accidental button, which read “INTERVENTION—Do Not Engage Without Departmental Permission!” in boldly emphatic symbols in several appropriate languages, then Quidprobe abruptly found himself drawn into an infinitely long thread and then pulled through an infinitely narrow (and infinitely painful) needle’s eye before the darkness swallowed him.
Pogo could only stare. The dwarf, who a moment before had been glaring at him in that way of his which was already becoming sadly familiar, had abruptly straightened up and made a noise like a hamster clubbed with a tennis racket, then dropped to the earth in a heap. Now he was lying there looking quite dead. Pogo was just wondering if he needed to find Disneyland security or something when the dwarf groaned and sat up.
“Where am I?” the little bearded man asked, looking from side to side. Then he saw Pogo and groaned again, this time even louder. “‘Intervention’! Oh, Lolitas of Leiber, I pushed the ‘Intervention’ button!”
Pogo wasn’t sure what the little fellow was babbling about, but he was pleased by the sudden change in the dwarf’s speech. “You stopped talking funny!”
The other stared for a moment, his mouth working deep in his beard, then he sighed and said, “Right. I’ve replaced the Assisting Character and the machines have keyed my dialect to the Main Character’s own form of speech. Just as well. I never understood that detail of the original story, anyway—why would a French dwarf be speaking with a Scottish burr?”
“Huh?”
The dwarf stood up and slapped the dust and sand from his trousers. “Very well, let’s figure out how we’re going to get this fixed so we can both go back home. We’re in some serious difficulty here, and changing dialects is the least of our problems.” He turned to Pogo. “Let me ask you one important question first, creature. Is there any chance at all that my managers are wrong and you’re really Castlemane from the SAS? Special Air Services
? Does that mean anything to you?”
Pogo thought hard. “When you’re on a plane and they bring the cart with the drinks on it?”
“Excrement of Ellison.” The dwarf sat down again, this time with a thump. “They were right. Ah, well, we might as well make the best of this. My name is Quidprobe . . . ”
“Huh? I thought it was Lego or something.”
“Never mind what it used to be, it’s Quidprobe now. And you are the Pogocashman, correct?”
“Uh . . . yeah. I manage Kirby’s Shoes in the Victory Mall. In the Valley . . . ?”
The dwarf shook his head. “But this still doesn’t make much sense, even if someone sent the wrong form—usually the obvious mistakes get thrown back by the machines before they’re executed.” He turned to Pogo. “Is there a reason the multiverse should choose you instead of the right fellow, or was it just a really, really unfortunate clerical error? Have you ever been involved in dimensional slippage before?”
Pogo shrugged. “Well, I guess I experimented a bit during high school. I mean, like, didn’t everybody?”
The dwarf sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “I’ve only had a head for a few minutes, and already I have such a headache. So that means you don’t know anything about the madness of Roland or Charlemagne, or any of this, do you? And I’m guessing that you don’t know who Roland is, the character you’re supposed to help, or Charlemagne, the character he’s supposed to help. And so of course you also don’t know how important all this is—do you?”
Pogo looked at him seriously, really trying, trying to focus on the important things. “Uh, no, not really. Hey, before you fell down and started talking normal, didn’t you say something about dinner?”
“Do you understand now?” Quidprobe had put it in the simplest possible terms—words and concepts so basic that even an infant of this backward existential plane could understand it. He fixed the organic creature with a hard glare. “It’s important that you do.”
