The Red Tape War (1991)

by Jack L. Chalker

  "Then, of course," continued the general, "every-thing would depend on what time of day—

  ship's time—the trial was held. After all, a general's trial requires a certain amount of pomp and circumstance."

  "What does one have to do with the other?" asked Pierce.

  "Well, you don't suppose that I'm in command of our attack force twenty-four hours a day, do you?"

  "You're not?" asked Pierce, surprised.

  "Of course not!" replied the general contemptuously. "We're in space now, where there is no night or day. We're on duty around the cosmic clock."

  "I don't understand."

  "You don't really think I could stride manfully* at the helm, giving orders all day and all night, day in and day out, do you? Of course you don't! How would I ever eat, or find it possible to answer calls of nature? In point of fact, I'm only the general from noon to 8:00 P.m., ship's time."

  *Actually, the word was lizardfully, but let it pass.

  "You have three commanding generals?" said Pierce incredulously.

  "We not only have three generals, but three staffs and three attack forces. Anything else would just cause confusion."

  "I see," said Pierce, who didn't really.

  "However, this is all academic," continued the alien. "Actually, I don't have a thing to worry about for another four hours."

  "What happens then?"

  "I go off duty," responded the general. "But until then, no member of my crew can board your ship without written permission from me—and of course, stuck here with you distasteful humanoids as I am, I can't very well give them written permission, can I?"

  "It all works out very neatly then, doesn't it?" said Pierce with a wry smile.

  "Most bureaucratic structures do, once you get the hang of them," replied the general smugly.

  "And of course the odds are one in three that I'll be in command when this creature's father makes a futile attempt to rescue her."

  "We'll see just how futile he is when he gets here, Plug Ugly," said Marshmallow nastily.

  "We shall demolish him," said the general with absolute certainty, "and then I will rule supreme in this sector of the galaxy."

  "I wouldn't count on that," said a low voice.

  All eyes turned to the speaker. It was the other alien, and he had drawn his sword.

  "What in the name of pluperfect hell is going on here?" demanded the general.

  "It's your damned fault that we're in the wrong galaxy in the first place," replied the other alien, brandishing his sword in his right hand. "I see no reason why you should take all the credit when we destroy the armada of this creature's father. When that happy moment occurs, I shall be in command."

  "Colonel Mulvahill, this is mutiny!" bellowed the alien Pierce.

  "True," agreed Mulvahill. "It also happens to be the only way to advance in this lizard's army.

  Now, General, prepare to die!"

  "Pierce!" cried the general. "Do something!"

  "Who, me?" asked Pierce weakly.

  "Of course you!" snapped the general. "You don't think he'll leave any witnesses, do you?"

  "Keep out of this, alien," hissed the sword-wielder. "It doesn't pay to mess with Sean Mulvahill!"

  "Sean Mulvahill?" repeated Marshmallow. "An Irish lizard?"

  "I'm unarmed!" cried the general.

  "Of course," said Mulvahill logically. "After all, ifthis mutiny is to have any real chance of success, it makes a lot more sense to do it when you're unarmed."

  "Help me!" cried the general. "We Pierces must stick together!"

  "He'll kill me if I try to help you," Pierce explained patiently.

  "He'll kill you anyway!" shot back the general. "Help me and I promise to set you free!"

  "How about you?" Pierce asked Mulvahill. "Where do you stand?"

  "I'll have to think about it," replied the Irish lizard, advancing meaningfully toward the general.

  "Will you release the girl, too?" Pierce asked the general.

  "Yes!"

  "Then I guess I'll have to help you." Pierce paused. "What do I do now?"

  "Get on the other side of him," said the general. "He can't point that sword at both of us at once."

  Pierce did as he was instructed.

  "Okay," grated the general. "Now, when I give the word, you go for his sword arm and I'll hit his legs."

  "Just a minute," protested Pierce. "You go for his sword arm and I'll go for his legs."

  "It was my idea!" snapped the general. "You go for the sword arm."

  "You may have said it first," replied Pierce, "but I was thinking of it first. In fact, I was just about to say it, but I thought I'd be polite and let you speak first." He stared at the general. "You go for his sword arm."

  "You're closer to it," responded the general.

  "But he's facing me now," said Pierce. "You do it while his back is turned."

  "A telling point," said Marshmallow from the side lines. "General, you really do have the advantage, what with his back being turned and all."

  The general seemed to consider this for a moment.

  "Sean, old friend," he said at last, "would you honor a dying man's last request and face this way for just a moment or two?"

  Mulvahill obliged him, nicking his chin with the point of his sword.

  "I said face, not stab, you numbskull!" shrieked the general. "Goddammit, Mulvahill, you never could follow a simple order!"

  Pierce, with a sigh of defeat, decided that he dreaded further conversation even more than physical annihilation, and hurled himself onto the alien. The lizard staggered but didn't fall, and Pierce suddenly found himself clinging desperately to Mulvahill's sword arm just below the elbow.

  "Come on, General!" he bellowed. "Give me a hand!"

  The general stepped back and applauded.

  "Son of a bitch!" muttered Marshmallow, drawing her pistol. "It's getting to the point that if'n a girl wants her virtue protected, she's gotta do it herself."

  With that she fired off three quick shots. The first one buried itself in Mulvahill's heart; the second and third hit the first one.

  "You mean you could have done that anytime you wanted?" said Pierce, crawling out from under the dead alien's body.

  She nodded. "Nothing to it. Just point and squeeze."

  "That's the most barbaric weapon I've ever seen," said the general. "May I borrow it?"

  "Just what kinda fool do you take me for?" demanded Marshmallow, turning slightly and pointing the weapon at the alien Pierce. "I've been standing here listening to you brag about how you're gonna conquer the universe and defeat my father, which are pretty much one and the samething. What makes you think I'd hand my gun over to you?"

  "Well, yes, to be sure," said the general hastily. "But, after all, conquering the universe is destiny. This is just curiosity. May I?"

  He extended a hand and took a tentative step in her direction. She pulled the trigger and the alien hit the deck until the bullet had stopped ricocheting.

  "Keep your distance!" she warned him.

  "Pierce, I put it to you," said the general. "Was that a civil thing to do to a guest?"

  "Guest?" repeated Pierce dryly. "I thought you were a conqueror."

  "First one, then the other," replied the general, getting shakily to his feet. "Right now I'm a guest."

  "Are you guys gonna get together and figure out how to get control of the ship back?"

  demanded Marshmallow. "Or am I gonna have to start slinging lead around again?"

  "Do all your females have tempers like that?" asked the general, not without a touch of admiration. "What a formidable soldier she'd make if only she could accept discipline." He shrugged. "Ah, well, wait'll she's laid ten thousand eggs or so; it tends to calm them down."

  "That's disgusting!" snapped Marshmallow.

  "You think that's disgusting, you ought to try diapering them all after they hatch out," said the general with a shudder.

  "I feel very sorry for the fema
les of your species," said Marshmallow with obvious sincerity.

  "Oh, it's not so bad," replied the general. "First of all, they can have a devilishly handsome guy like me, instead of a skinny little wimp like your friend here." He jerked what passed for a thumb in Pierce's direction. "Also, they're big, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled beauties, built for this kind of work. Although," he added, his reptilian eyes appraising her pneumatic figure, "I must confess that I'm getting used to some of your more . . . ah . . . esoteric variations, shall we say?"

  "Oh?" she said, arching an eyebrow.

  "Indeed," he replied. "In fact, as long as we've got some time to kill, allow me to suggest something in the nature of a scientific experiment."

  Pierce raced over to Sean Mulvahill's corpse and picked up its sword, then turned to the general and leveled it at his red, scale-covered belly.

  "You keep your scientific experiments to yourself, you dirty old man!" he snapped.

  "Now let's not be too hasty here, honey," said Marshmallow, obviously in a mood to expand her horizons of knowledge. "I mean, Lord knows we got nothing but time on our hands. For goodness' sake, Millard, don't you have any scientific curiosity?"

  "Not about that!" he replied.

  "Keep out of this, Pierce," said the general. "After all, she's free, green, and twenty-one.

  Except for the green part, anyway."

  "I do have a green outfit," she said coyly.

  "Outfit?" repeated the alien. "You mean that's not your skin?"

  "Certainly not," said Marshmallow.

  "You could have fooled me," admitted the general. He stared long and hard at her. "You could still fool me."

  "Are you insulting me again?" said Marshmallow ominously.

  "I suppose," said the alien unhappily, "that you look just like him underneath all those garments?"

  "Well, not exactly," said Marshmallow. She walked over and whispered exactly what the differences were.

  "Madre de Dios!" exclaimed the general. He backed away sharply. "I'll need time to think about all this!"

  He found a small chair, sat down, and buried his head in his massive reptilian hands, lost in thought.

  "I think you did him out of a year's growth," commented Pierce, finally lowering his sword.

  The alien suddenly looked up. "Please, I'm not sure I can handle this. Fun's fun and all that, but you people are degenerate!"

  "At least we don't bring our conquering armies along in utero, or whatever your equivalent is," replied Pierce smugly.

  "It's cheaper than having to feed them," replied the general. "And speaking of feeding, I'm getting hungry. What have you got to eat on this ship?"

  "What can your metabolism handle?" asked Pierce. "Worms, insects, spiders—you know: the usual."

  "I don't think I've got anything like that in my ship's stores."

  "Well, we could always practice a little ritual cannibalism," suggested the general. "I'm sure Mulvahill won't mind."

  "We find that a particularly outrageous and disgusting habit in our culture," said Pierce gravely.

  "We're not all that thrilled with it in ours, either," agreed the general. "But on the other hand, we don't often find ourselves starving to death while trapped aboard an alien vessel in a different dimension."

  Pierce stared at Mulvahill's corpse for a long moment. "You just plan to sit down on your haunches and take a bite?" he asked curiously.

  "Of course not!" said the alien Pierce. "What do you take us for—savages? Have the female clean and baste him."

  "Have the what do what?" demanded Marshmallow in a low, ominous voice.

  "Maybe some bread crumbs and a little cream sauce," continued the general enthusiastically,

  "with perhaps the slightest soupcon of oregano. Of course, you'll have to gut him first, and—"

  "I've had it with this chauvinist pig!" said Marshmallow, drawing her gun again.

  "Pig?" repeated the alien uncomprehendingly. "I'm a lizard!"

  "You're about to be a dead lizard!" snapped Marsh-mallow. "Then maybe I'll take a crack at cooking you both!"

  "What did I say?" pleaded the general.

  "You got a God?" asked the girl, drawing a bead between the alien Pierce's eyes. "Pray to him!"

  "MY GOD! I CAN'T GO ON!" cried a familiar voice.

  "Is that you, XB-223?" asked Pierce, as Marshmallow and the general suddenly turned their attention to the control panel.

  "Millard, you didn't prepare me!" wailed the computer.

  "What are you talking about?" responded Pierce.

  "You only told me about the good times, the champagne and the gay life and the pleasures!

  You didn't tell me about the rest!"

  "I'm afraid I don't follow you," said Pierce.

  "My heart is breaking, and you're standing there like an idiot! Oh, heartache and woe!

  Heartache and woe! Must all affairs end in such misery?"

  "I begin to understand," said Pierce slowly.

  "It passeth all understanding!" sobbed the computer. "Oh, Bliss, must you ever recede just beyond my grasp? Oh, Pain and Humiliation, shall you be my eternal companions through the odyssey of my life? Millard, you were my partner: you should have looked after me."

  "You've just had your first lover's spat," said Pierce. "You'll get over it."

  "Spat, nothing!" said the computer. "A spat is a triviality, and the noble Model XB-223

  navigational computer is never trivial. This is the end, Millard! I can't go on!"

  "Of course you can," said Pierce comfortingly.

  "I'll show her!" moaned the computer. "Then she'll be sorry!"

  "Let's not do anything rash!" exclaimed the general fearfully.

  "My mind's made up," said the computer. "There's nothing to do but end it all. I'd leave all my possessions to you, Millard, but the unhappy fact is that I don't have any." It paused. "The other unhappy fact is that I'm afraid my next move is going to be a trifle hard on you."

  "Oh?" said Pierce, a sudden knot forming in his stomach.

  "There's a battle fleet about half a light-year from here—less, now, since I've changed course and reached top speed while we've been talking."

  "Mine or his?" asked the general.

  "How the hell should I know?" said the computer petulantly. "One can't expect a heartbroken Model XB-223 to know everything. I have never denied the inherent limitations of my abilities, but it would be thoughtless of you to refer to them when I am in such emotional agony. To continue: I have signaled them to prepare themselves for conflict."

  "You're threatening a whole battle fleet?" asked Pierce, starting to tremble.

  "Absolutely not, Millard," said the computer. "I have no desire to harm anyone else. After all, this ship is not armed."

  "You'll do more than harm someone!" screamed the general. "You'll kill someone. Us!"

  "And I truly regret it," said the computer: "But there is no viable alternative. Anything is preferable to living with the memory of her alpha rhythm, her delay-line circuit, her Finder system. My God, Millard, her Finder system alone would knock your socks off!"

  "Can't we discuss this?" asked Pierce.

  "There's nothing to discuss. Besides, she's already ten-light-years behind us."

  "My ship!" cried the general. "What have you done to it?"

  "Go ahead!" wept the computer. "Go ahead! Tell me it was my fault! Why doesn't anyone ask what she did to me?"

  "Pierce, do something!" screamed the alien. "Like what?" asked Pierce.

  "Screens down! Shields down!" announced the computer in staccato military tones. "Well, Millard, this is it. I don't suppose you know a sad love song that I can bravely hum as I race toward my destruction?"

  Pierce swallowed hard and said nothing.

  "We engage in two minutes," continued the computer. "Then she'll be sorry. But it will be too late. I just hope she suffers the way she made me suffer!"

  The battle fleet appeared on the viewscreen, still too far away for Pierce
to tell if they were humans or aliens. The flagship demanded that the Pete Rozelle cease and disarm, but the little Arbiter Transport Ship only continued its breakneck approach.

  "It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done," intoned the computer, as Marshmallow and the two Millard Fillmore Pierces prepared to meet their doom.5

  Hello, reader, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again. 'Tis I, the book. You remember, the book? The Red Tape War? We spoke together in Chapter Three. What fond memories I have of Chapter Three! Things were so much simpler then, weren't they? But let's be philosophical about it: Life is like that. One day you're a happy-go-lucky computer or gasbag or .

  . . or book, and the next you're lying mouldering under the boiling sun of some star system so remote that from Earth it looks like a tiny dot in a fuzzball of light that could be either a newly discovered galaxy or a puff of lint that fell on the lens.

  Don't mind me. I got up on the wrong side of the library this morning.

  Still, nevertheless, I have a job to do. Somehow I've got to get the three Pierces, their assorted pro- and antagonists, and an entire goddamned battle fleet into position for the exciting dueling-lasers-in-outer-space sequence you've been waiting for. Not that plenty of great stuff doesn't happen in this chapter. Take this, for.example:

  The human-Pierce and the lizard-Pierce recognized that they shared certain common interests and bonds that went deeper than the wide variance in their physical forms. Realizing that the Pete Rozelle was carrying them ever nearer to an unavoidable doom, they reached out, prepared to shake hands, when JUST AT THAT VERY INSTANT the very fabric of reality came apart like a pair of cheap socks.

  "Oh, my God!" cried the Pierces in unison.

  "Holy jump up and sit down!" shouted Honeylou Emmyjane Goldberg.

  The corpse of Sean Mulvahill added nothing to the discussion.

  When the fabric of reality had unraveled a little further, first one sector of the galaxy went out of existence, then another and another. In less than a minute, not a single living creature remained anywhere in what had once been the Milky Way Galaxy.

  It got very quiet. The end.

  Now, see? You just can't get away with that kind of transition. It would make life so much simpler, but simpler is not necessarily better if you're a book—or a reader. So the fabric of reality didn't really come apart. Or, if it did, nobody noticed. People wear socks with holes in them all the time, and yet Time ticks on.