BOB's Bar

by Michael Anderle

  “We get back to the ship and call Nathan, and he’s not surprised to hear we didn’t kill that minister. ‘What the fuck, Nathan? I’m not happy.’ Let me tell you what he says.”

  Terry stopped to take another drink. BA had her elbows on the table.

  “He says, “Life is full of tests. When people we trust ask us to do something that goes against our soul, the very best of us will find a way out; accomplish the mission while staying true to ourselves. I knew you wouldn’t kill him. I knew it, but I needed all of us to know it. My daughter’s life is in your hands. If she can’t be here, then you are the one I want her to work with.’

  “I am flattered, but I still think the test was a jagoff move. Not Char. She leans close to the screen and says, ‘You’re going to pay the fifteen percent to that guy, and the extra five comes to me because I talked him down from twenty.’”

  Terry leaned back, and everyone looked at him.

  “That’s a load of crap,” Ibarra said.

  “Of course, it is. I’m in a bar drinking beer, and I’m a Marine. What the hell else did you expect? And I don’t care what you say—I like Metallica and Willie Nelson.”

  “I’m a fan of the Cranberries, myself. I like a bit of heavy metal too, though,” Amanda said, smiling.

  Bethany Anne checked a pad on the table before her. Dex had joined the Federation after a board vote turned unanimous after weeks of dissent.

  She smirked.

  No shit . . .

  Interlude

  “Good shit,” the general told the colonel as the two clinked glasses.

  The programming was working well. The patrons seemed to have accepted this construct as their reality.

  As soon as BOB thought that, the universe’s perversity revealed itself.

  “So, are we just going to ignore that thing on his shoulder?” General Lysander quietly asked Colonel Walton, pointing at Cal.

  “I think he’s cute,” Amanda said.

  “It’s only a mild biological threat.” Tanis hid a smile behind her hand. “I’m sure if we all wash good and long afterward no one will catch what it has.”

  BOB had noted the luminescent green being on Cal’s shoulder, but its programming was only keyed to humans, not other beings, and the green organism was no more extraordinary than anything else BOB had observed during its many missions. Now that the humans had noted it, though, it fell within BOB’s purview.

  What was it?

  The Cheese God of Baa-Daa-Doosh

  By Barry J. Hutchison

  Cal swirled the last dregs of blue liquid around inside his glass. He didn’t know what this stuff was, exactly, but it was pretty pleasant. Or pretty pleasant once you got past the paralysis, facial numbness, and the feeling you were being consumed by fire from the inside out, at least.

  No matter how far he tipped his head back, that last viscous coating of the stuff refused to dribble into his mouth. He wasn’t about to let a little thing like that beat him, though. After all, if the mountain wouldn’t come to Muhammad…

  He had just finished tonguing out the inside of the glass when he became aware that everyone around the table was watching him in silence.

  “Thanks for the heads-up there, buddy,” he whispered, shooting the blob on his shoulder an accusing glare. His face split into another of his well-rehearsed grins, and he set the licked-clean glass upside-down on the table.

  “Is it my turn?” he asked.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Amanda told him.

  Cal drummed his hands on his knees a few times and considered which story to tell. When they’d first gotten started he’d been sure he was going to tell them about being chased by Ozzy Osbourne that one time, but now that he’d heard some of the other tales he didn’t think that one was going to cut the mustard.

  It wasn’t like he was short of stories, of course. Since the whole mistaken-identity/abducted by aliens/accidentally saving the galaxy thing, he’d had his fair share of adventure. He’d battled assassins, been to parallel worlds, and even died for a while.

  He’d also seen a fifty-foot-tall Dorothy out of The Golden Girls fighting a pack of Space Bears, but he reckoned most of this audience was unlikely to really understand the reference. The Dorothy reference, that was. They’d probably be familiar with Space Bears.

  “We don’t have all day.” Bethany Anne rolled her finger in a ‘get going’ gesture. “Wouldn’t want to suddenly disappear and miss this story,” she added.

  “OK, OK. Here’s one,” Cal said. “This is… Well, it’s going to blow your socks off. I don’t want to oversell it, but—”

  “Get on with it!”

  “Right. Right, gotcha.” Cal leaned back in his chair and spread his arms as if he were about to deliver a sermon. “Let me tell you the story of the Cheese God of… I don’t know. Cheesy-Weesy.”

  Tanis raised an eyebrow. “Cheesy-Weesy?”

  “Well, obviously that’s not its real name,” Cal said. “I don’t really do ‘names’. That’s Mech’s job. He stands in front of the screen and reads stuff out. You know, like planets we’re about to land on or whatever?”

  Cal leaned forward again and dropped his voice, as if he were letting them in on some great secret. “We could just read it ourselves—it’d be easier, to be honest—but it gives him something to do. Keeps him happy and out of mischief. You know what I mean?”

  His chair creaked as he leaned back again. A frown troubled his brow. “What was I saying again?”

  “The Cheese God of Cheesy-Weesy,” sighed Ryck.

  “Right!” said Cal. “Wait, no. Baa-daa-doosh. That’s what it was called. I remember, because it sounded like drums.” He mimed striking two invisible drums and a cymbal. “Baa-daa-doosh. Ever heard of it?”

  There was a general murmur indicating that no, no-one had heard of it.

  Cal shrugged. “Can’t say I’m surprised. It’s not great. If there was a PlanetAdvisor website it’d be a two-star. I mean tops.”

  There was another general murmuring, this time indicating that Cal should probably get on with it.

  “OK, so this was a while back, when I was still pretty new to this whole space thing. Me and the team – Space Team we call ourselves, what with us being in space and all – me and Space Team, we were helping deal with some… I don’t know, leech-things,” Cal said. He held his hands a foot or so apart. “They’re like yay-big, purple, and spit venom out of their eyelids which, I don’t know, kind of seems like a design flaw if you ask me.

  “Anyway, they had pretty much overrun this little town, and we’d been hired to get rid of them,” he continued. “Not exactly our usual remit—we’re much more a kind of zooming-around-the-galaxy-getting-into-scrapes-and-escaping-by-the-skin-of-our-teeth sort of outfit, but the money was good, and we were broke.

  “And it was all going fine. Mech and the others, they were dealing with the leech-things, and I was taking more of a supervisory role some distance away behind a big rock, when BAM!”

  He banged his fist on the table, trying to make the rest of the group jump. None of them did.

  “One of the suckers pounces on me,” Cal said. “Did I mention they can jump? Well, they can. Don’t ask me how, since they don’t have legs, so your guess is as good as mine. But the point is, one of them jumps on me and starts fluttering its eyelids until I’ve got a face full of leech venom.”

  “Nasty,” said Amanda. “What happened?”

  “Did you kill it?” asked Bethany Anne. “And if so, with what?”

  “Not exactly,” Cal admitted.

  “Then what did you do?” she asked, curious.

  “I explosively soiled myself and passed out.”

  Someone snorted—Cal didn’t see who.

  “But, you know, in a really heroic way,” he added, waving his hand dismissively. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point isn’t what happened to me before I got the faceful of leech gunk, it’s what happened to me after.”

  Several chairs creaked as th
e others, despite themselves, began to look interested. Cal raised a hand and snapped his fingers. “BOB. Any chance of another…?”

  A drink was deposited on the table before he finished speaking. BOB nodded politely, then retreated as silently as he’d arrived. Cal raised the glass briefly, then, having learned from his previous mistakes, took a sip.

  “I woke up falling,” he continued. “I had no idea where I was, but I could see there was a wooden roof coming up beneath me, and it was coming up fast. I knew I had five, maybe six seconds to come up with a plan.”

  “And did you?” Terry Henry asked.

  Cal shook his head. “I had six seconds. What was I supposed to do, grow wings? No, I went straight through it head-first.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Then through a wardrobe, then the floor below it, then I smashed into this sort of metal oven thing. Then I blacked out for what I believe was quite some time,” he continued. “When I woke up that second time, I was lying on a rug looking up at a hole in the ceiling with this little guy sitting on my chest.”

  Terry pointed to the blob on Cal’s shoulder. “That little guy?”

  “Hmm? Oh, no. This is Splurt,” said Cal, as if that explained everything. “A bigger little guy. Like a, I don’t know, maybe a tall dwarf.”

  Concern flashed across his features. “Can we say ‘dwarf?’ Is that the one that’s allowed? I forget. Let’s just say like a fat eight-year-old, only orange.”

  “Orange?” said Ibarra.

  “Yeah. Really orange, like… Well, like an orange, I guess.” Cal looked around the table at the others. “Ever wake up with a fat orange eight-year-old on your chest?”

  The others were quick to confirm that they hadn’t.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t recommend it. It kind of takes your breath away,” Cal told them. “Literally, I mean. For a little guy, that dude was heavy. Big thighs.”

  He sipped his drink again. “Anyway, I tried to throw him off, but turns out the guy has tied my hair to the floor. I know…crazy, right? He’s actually tied the individual strands of my hair to hundreds of these little hooks he’s screwed into the floor beside my head. I mean, who does that?”

  “Fat orange eight-year-olds?” Amanda guessed.

  “Yeah, well this one did,” Cal agreed. “I started shouting and warning him he’d better get off me or there was going to be trouble, and that’s when I saw the rest of them.”

  Bethany Anne’s right eyebrow raised. “The rest of who?”

  “The rest of his family. They’re all roughly his size, only different colors. There’s a blue one, a green one, and two who are different shades of purple. They’re hiding over in the corner, and they look scared. I mean, these little dudes are terrified. And they’re looking at me like I’m somehow the bad guy!”

  “You did fall through their house,” Tanis pointed out.

  Cal blinked. “Huh. Yeah, good point. That hadn’t actually occurred to me.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Orange Dude starts slapping me around. He’s whacking me across the face with his little fat hands and he’s shouting, only I can’t really hear him because my ears are still ringing from where I hit my head multiple times.”

  Cal motioned toward the corner of the bar, like the scene was playing out before him. “And his wife over there—I mean, I assume it was his wife, it could’ve been his brother for all I know—she starts egging him on. So she—or he, gender isn’t easy to guess with those little guys, since they all kind of look the same—she’s hollering at him to finish me off, and he’s slapping me across the face like there’s no tomorrow, and that’s when I realize.”

  “Realize what?” Bethany Anne asked.

  “They tied up my hair. They didn’t tie up my hands,” Cal said. “I know, pretty major oversight, right? If it was me, I’d have started with the hands, then moved on to the feet, and only done the hair if I’d had a lot of time left over. Like, a lot of time.”

  He shrugged. “Not that I’m complaining. Having my hands free turned out to be pretty useful. I grabbed the guy by the throat and started choking the life out of him. Just squeezed his neck until it looked like his head was going to pop.”

  This seemed to satisfy the Marines. “Finally, some backbone,” Ryck grunted.

  “Hey, thank you, uh, space-army guy,” Cal said.

  “He’s a soldier,” Amanda commented, winking at Ryck.

  “Marine!” Ryck corrected her.

  “Soldier of the sea, yes,” Amanda said, smiling.

  “Ugh.” Ryck sighed in dismay. “So, you were saying you grew a pair,” he said, turning back to Cal.

  “Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I was crying, and screaming, ‘Why are you making me do this? Why are you making me do this?’ over and over, but know what? I’ll take the compliment.”

  He took another sip of his drink, gave it a few laps of his mouth, then swallowed with a grimace. “Anyway, that’s when everything started to get weird.”

  Bethany Anne snorted. “When it started to get weird?” she asked, taking a sip of her own drink. “I thought this shit was already weird.”

  Tanis shrugged. “I was in a place not unlike that on Cruithne once.”

  “There was a sound from outside, like a bell. But not an old-fashioned bell, I mean like a modern brrrrrr sort of school bell. The others—the ones I wasn’t currently strangling with my bare hands—they all looked worried for a second or two, then they piled on and started laying into me. They pulled the orange guy free, then they all scurried to the door and ran outside.”

  Cal gazed down at the tabletop, lost in thought. Splurt rippled gently, then rubbed itself against Cal’s cheek.

  “Was there a problem? I thought you’d just broken free?” Ryck asked.

  “The alarm had stopped. That was the problem. I’d held onto the guy too long, see? They didn’t make it in time.”

  The others had picked up on Cal’s hushed tone. Silence descended on the table.

  “See, it turns out the… I don’t know, Baa-daa-dooshians, they’re a religious lot. And not like, ‘Hands up if you love Jesus’ religious, I mean crazy religious,” Cal continued. “Like, they think there’s a different god for everything. There’s a god of tables. A god of toilets. A god of…” He frowned, then pointed to Terry. “Name a thing. I’ve run out.”

  “War,” said Terry.

  Cal rolled his eyes. “Well, obviously they’ve got a god of war. I meant name something stupid.”

  Terry resisted the urge to say, “You,” or “This story.”

  “Small dogs,” said Bethany Anne.

  “Yes! Thank you. A god of small dogs,” said Cal. “Technically ‘small space dogs,’ but good suggestion.”

  He nodded graciously, which made Splurt fall off and splat onto the table. Everyone watched with varying degrees of horror and amazement as the little green blob pulled itself back together and returned to Cal’s shoulder.

  “Oo-shite, are you okay, little fella?” Amanda said, reaching out to pat the little snot-ball affectionately.

  Despite having no other features but its two bulbous eyes, Splurt somehow managed to look embarrassed.

  “They’re sort of hedging their bets, I guess,” Cal explained. “With the gods, I mean. There might be a god of breakfast cereal, or sidewalks, or buttons, so they don’t want to risk incurring their wrath by not worshipping them. They see religion as kind of like an insurance policy, and in order to stay covered by all those different gods they have to stick to a very strict worshipping timetable.”

  Cal winced, just a little. “And I’d made them miss their two o’clock.”

  He exhaled slowly, shook his head a fraction, then pressed on.

  “Anyway, so I manage to unhook my hair from the floor. Mostly by forgetting it was tied up and sitting up suddenly, which isn’t something I’d recommend. I go to the window to look out, and there’s this little town square outside. It’s pretty cute. Everything’s small. Dwarf-sized. Or child-sized, or whatever we decided on.


  “In the middle of the square are hundreds of the chubby little multi-colored guys, all bowing and dancing and chanting and whatever. It looked like someone brought a pack of jelly beans to life and dressed them all in little pants.”

  “Yeah, this is just like that place on Cruithne,” Tanis commented

  Cal smiled wistfully. “I could’ve watched that all day.”

  The smile didn’t last, and it wasn’t long before his face grew more serious. “But then, just as they seem to be reaching the big finale—it happens.”

  Bethany Anne put her hand to her forehead, wondering if it were possible for her body to have a headache due to a story. “What happens?” she asked, not having a clue what the answer might be.

  “Cheese.”

  Yup, Bethany Anne thought, not a selection on my list of top one thousand possibilities.

  Everyone around the table shot everyone else around the table a sideways look.

  “Cheese?”

  “That’s right. Cheese. It starts falling from the sky. Boosh. Splat. Thoom. I’ve never seen anything like it. It just comes raining down. Huge dollops off the stuff, like three or four buckets-worth at a time, splattering all over the square,” Cal said. “I see four of five of the jelly beans go down under man-sized globules of it. Some of the others start running and screaming. A few keep dancing and bowing, putting more effort into it now, like they can somehow make up for whatever they’ve done wrong. They get taken out a few seconds later by a downpour. Spoosh.”

  Cal made a gesture designed to represent a large amount of cheese falling onto a small person, but it wasn’t particularly effective and went completely over the heads of pretty much everyone present.

  “See, it turns out that because my guys—by which I mean the guys whose house I’d fallen into and gotten into a fight with—because they were late, they’d angered one of the gods. And not just any god.”

  “A cheese god?” guessed Amanda.

  Cal blinked. “Right. How did you know that?”

  “Well, one, it’s raining cheese, so there’s that,” Amanda explained. “And two, you called the story The Cheese God of Cheesy-Weesy. Either of those were a pretty big clue.”