“So why is there a Leonardoin on this planet, if they renounce space travel?”
Carol gagged for a moment on the stench that apparently surrounded her. “Bear with me, Spence. I know that plate in your head makes it hard to think straight, and more on the plate anon. To finish this thread, the Leonardoins, having lived long with technology and coming to see it as soulless depravity, were mindful of the awesome responsibility not to create madness and horror worlds such as those based on Survivor re-runs and the cell-phone wars of old Earth. A messianic figure appeared to them at that time and founded the bellflower cult as a perfect avatar of their trans-technological aspirations. The flower, like the lotus, arises from the mud under cold dark waters of the material world and blooms above in supreme consciousness.”
Spence was starting to feel hungry for pizza. “And the point is?”
“Grykalizyfst.” Carol began to fizzle out. Then she snapped back. “Can you hear me now? Good.”
She went on, looking worriedly over her shoulder and dabbing a perfume-filled hanky at her nose: “The Leonardoins, having understood the power of ugly memes, realized that, in the wrong hands, this knowledge could encourage madmen and outlaws to actually build such cosmos on purpose. If they perfected interdimensional travel—and it's the next big thing, believe me—they'd have their own private gulags. To prevent miscreants from discovering this dangerous knowledge, the Leonardoins shunned all outside contact and presented a hostile front to any colonization or interaction. To put it in Hindu terms....”
“Oh please do.”
She gave him her famous stink eye. “Brahma is the good guy, the creator. But the bad people are the avatars of Shiva, the destroyer. And Vishnu is the maintainer of everything that is. To be frank, he's on the verge of being shit-canned.”
Now she was talking more like the old Carol. “So the Hindus had it right, huh?”
“Don't be a ninny. Nobody had it right. We're talking in metaphor here.”
Oh oh. Spence's gut started to tense. What was a metaphor again?
“Zifrigulzed.”
He stretched out a hand. “Carol! Don't fade! Hold on...”
“I'll try!” Wind blew her cloak behind her and her hair fell upwards as she labored to go on.
“I love you, Carol.”
“Never mind about that now. You have to migrate up the shells of the universe.”
“Huh?”
She shook her head. “Spence, Spence. You've been given an enormous task, maybe the biggest that ever existed. But you frankly aren't up to it. You're maybe the best agent in the cosmos, given Plibix's situation....”
“Which is?”
“No time. You may be the best we've got, but you haven't seen the competition. The Sentinels, for instance. This isn't the only cosmos, if you haven't been paying attention lately. You have to migrate your understanding. Bust out of that dead-pan super-hero silliness and become fully formed.”
Spence rolled his eyes. “You haven't gone back to that spooky Church of Universal Potentiality, have you?” In the past, Carol had indulged in an unseemly penchant for silliness.
“No.” She looked around her, as if there was something around her. “I'm just trying to keep it simple. If you want the math...” She saw him wave the offer. “Very well. The point is, my darling, that you need to figure things out. Even Parapara has only limited understanding of what we're all up against. She gave you the lead on this op, but that doesn't mean she trusts you. As a test, both you and Plibix got the egg, to see which one of you would try to use it for personal gain. Plibix stole the egg. But was your innocence in the matter due to moral intention or were you just clueless? In any case, Plibix, I fear, is the wrong one to have such power. You, my dear, are the right one. You are the last hope.”
He rubbed the sore spot in the back of his head. “But what am I supposed to do?”
Carol grimaced. “How the hell am I supposed to know? I've been cooped up in this ratty place for years with Timmy and Todd skating the channels while I'm still reading the manual. I feel like I've left my brain in a bucket somewhere, while you're out having adventures in one of the nice universes.” Her voice rose like a clothes dryer on final spin. “And now you want me to do your work for you. I just can't cope anymore, Spence.”
Spence's reaction to Carol's distress was the same one he always had when she exposed her feminine vulnerability. He thought of other things. How meeting the supposed blue bellflower cabal had been an obvious decoy to bring them into the clutches of the Leonardoin priest. How this Leonardoin was breaking the rules of low tech purity, and was exploiting a McDougal cult for his own purposes. How Plibix had the egg that Spence should have had. How Jen could have killed him in her guise as Patsy—or as his doctor after the plasma blast—but refrained. A true believer in Leonardoin purity? Or what?
No one seemed to be playing with a full deck, yet everyone expected him to conjure a royal flush.
Carol had at last gotten hold of herself. “You've been blind, Spence, and stupid, too. This is your chance to be more than you've been. Crying over Rufus is a step in that direction. Your emotions and thoughts are chaotic. That's good. You've got to flush the old black stuff from your heart, Spence. Parapara sent you to Wolfe-Dexter IV to give you a chance to normalize and adjust to the task ahead. But what did you do instead? Justified yourself, hunkered down, kept on with the old agent bullshit track.”
Even Space-Op was bullshit? Maybe that was the first shell of knowledge, to see all bureaucratic black-ops as dead ends. But what was the second shell? How many were there? And just how much of a stupid fuck was he?
Carol looked behind her. When she turned back her face was bleak. “Break through, my sweet. Break through. Perceive that even an egg may deceive. Perceive that you can't synchronize clocks across sidereal and multiverse time. One day early and the multiverse with its billions of souls is lost. One day late, ditto.”
“Ditto?”
“Dryittooo.” Her hair looked like snakes, then like her usual big hair, then like elephant ears. She was gone.
A movement in his peripheral vision. Patricia stood, as real as a bird in the right tree. Making a “shhh” sound with her finger, she beckoned Spence toward the altar.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter 8: Altar Ego
by Stephen Leigh and S. L. Farrell
“Where the hell have you been?” Spencer asked Patricia. “Where'd the Leonardoan go?”
“I lost him,” Patricia admitted, frowning. “The same suds on cheap beer trick that they pulled on Boganda, only this time without Plibix's claw—evidently the Leonardoan did it himself. Poof; gone. But he left this behind.” She held up her hand; a blue bellflower was wilting rapidly in her fingers. “The flower was on the ground where he'd been standing. It was cold when I picked up, and fresh—it's definitely the Leonardoans who are smuggling the flowers.”
“And the way it vanished?”
“I think they're bending light,” Patricia said firmly. “Kind of folding the world around them so we can't see them, even though they're still there. That's how they got Boganda, too—just wrapped him up so we couldn't see to help him and grabbed him. I didn't want them doing that to me, so I headed back here.”
Spencer grimaced. “You can't bend light. Only incredibly massive objects can bend light. That doesn't sound like a reasonable explanation to me, Patricia. There's something else going on. Alternate dimensions. Rips in the fabric of the universe. That's what Plibix does, after all.”
“That's what Plibix says he does,” Patricia responded. “As it happens, I don't think he really knows—it's just something he can do, and I think it's just the same folding light trick. I mean, come on, Spencer. Alternate dimensions are more reasonable than folded light? I think your Occam's Razor is on the dull side.” She inclined her head toward him. Even in the darkness of the false Stonehenge, he could see the hard, unsympathetic glint in her eyes. “By the way, I could have
sworn I heard you talking with Carol.”
“I was,” Spencer admitted. “At least I think I was. Then again, I thought you were Patsy Klein, so I'm not certain I want to trust my judgement much. Frankly, it's getting hard to keep a handle on what's real and what's not.”
“Well, she sure sounded like Carol; she had that annoying little ‘I-know-better-than-you-do’ whine down so well. I never understood what you saw in her, or what she saw in you, for that matter. So where is she?”
Spencer started to answer, then found that none of the responses he formed seemed to make much sense when he actually tried to form them into words. “Well ... It's ... complicated. Something about creating shells of new universes and, umm, alternate dimensions.”
“So she's in another dimension and just popped in to chat.” Patricia didn't bother to conceal the mockery in her voice. “Uh-huh. And dogs can talk.”
“Athally, day tan.”
The muffled voice came from the altar. Both Spencer and Patricia spun around; Spencer had to admit that Patricia had the better reflexes of the two of them; not only did she turn faster, but she had a stun-dart in her hand when she finished. All Spencer had for defense was an open-mouthed expression of surprise.
The sacrificed Pooperanian was sitting up on the altar, the blood still dappling its brown-and white coat. As Spencer watched, the animal wrinkled its pug snout and spat the bellflower from its mouth. “That's much better,” the dog said. “Bellflowers make my tongue swell up. What I meant to say was ‘Actually, they can.’ Especially Pooperanians. Under the right circumstances, of course—which is when we're freshly dead—and then only when there's something worth saying.”
“Son of a bitch,” Patricia muttered.
“Correct,” the Pooperanian answered, “though I don't know what genealogy has to do with this. But be that as it may, you did the ritual, so what is it you wanted me to tell you?”
“But we didn't Oof!” The last word was an explosion of breath as Patricia elbowed Spencer in the ribs. “Damn, that hurt, Patricia!”
“Sorry,” she said without any sorrow in her voice at all. “My arm must have slipped.” She smiled sweetly at the dog as she stage-whispered urgently to Spencer. “The Leonardoan performed the sacrifice, so he wanted something this dog knows. I'll bet he was planning to come back here when the dog wakes up, but he must have sensed me following him. We don't have much time—he'll be be coming back with reinforcements.” Patricia took a step toward the dog, watching them quietly from the stone slab. “What my colleague was saying,” she said to the Pooperanian, “was that we didn't sacrifice you just to exchange pleasantries. We're actually in a bit of a rush, and we certainly don't want to waste your time or your words, so if you'd just tell us what we wanted to know...” Her smile widened. “I'm sure we'd be able to find a nice treat for such a good dog.”
The Pooperanian sniffed wetly. “And you humans wonder why dogs bite.” He shook himself as if he'd just come in from the rain, sending blood droplets spattering. Spencer hopped backward; Patricia just looked down at her bagaloons and grimaced.
“I just had these dry-cleaned,” she said, looking at Spencer, whose dodging hadn't managed to spare his bagaloons either. “This line of work's dreadfully hard on clothes.”
“Clothes are overrated,” the Pooperanian said. “They just get in the way.”
Spencer found himself nodding agreement; it was a thought he'd had often enough. “This is fascinating,” he said, “but it's getting late, as Patricia here said, and we really need to be going.” Considering that both the Leonardoan and Boganda had vanished here, Carol was wandering through the shells of the universe (whatever the hell that meant), they were talking to a dead dog in the middle of the night, and the Leonardoan might show up with friends, Spencer tended to agree with Patricia that this didn't exactly seem to be the safest place in the galaxy to be standing. Besides, reality seemed too ... fluid here. Spencer rubbed his head; his brain seemed to be throbbing under the plastic plate in his skull, a dull doom, doom, doom in time with his pulse.
“Then get on with it,” the Pooperanian ssid. “You're supposed to ask me the questions, then I answer in a cryptic manner.” His head inclined and his hind leg scratched behind his ear. More blood spattered, and the head wobbled alarmingly, a gaping wound opening and closing in the dog's throat. “That's the way oracles work. Don't you read the classics?”
“Fine,” Patricia said. “Then tell us who was behind the murder of the SpaceOps agents on Leonardo.”
The Pooperanian gave a high-pitched yap. “That's not a very clear question,” he whined. “Do you mean literally behind or the person responsible? Because that's two different people.”
Patricia sighed. “The person responsible.”
“Ah.” The Pooperanian's ears went erect and the dog seemed to stare at an invisible biscuit being held just out of its reach. “You seek the one who is many. You seek that which is winter but is contained in the hands of a sun.”
They waited. The Pooperanian remained silent, his tongue out and panting. “That's it?” Patricia said at last. “That's all you got?”
“I said it would be cryptic. But it's the truth.”
“No wonder they killed him,” Patricia muttered to Spencer. “'Cause I'm about to do it a second time.”
While Patricia spoke, the pounding in Spencer's head continued to worsen, and he began to feel a strange prickling down his spine as if every one of the many hairs on his back was standing up straight, as if someone were standing right behind him.
He started to turn, but even as he did, he felt a hand on his shoulder, digging into his skin with sharp claws. Like the suds on cheap beer, the replica of Stonehenge vanished around him, there was a burst of incredibly cold air and a flash of blinding white light, and he was...
...elsewhere.
“Here,” someone said in an impossibly deep and booming voice. “Take this. Gently now, you don't want to break it...”
Spencer felt something being pressed into his left hand. He blinked away the worst of the purple afterimages, and glanced down. He was holding an egg. Then he looked up and saw the creature who had given it to him.
“Oh, hell,” he said.
The thing smiled, revealing distressingly pointed rows of ivory-brown teeth snagged with bits of might have been rotting meat, if Spencer could judge from its breath. “Well, that's not quite accurate. But you're close...”
His head was pounding now and the plate seemed to be almost hot against the back of his head. "Any depraved thought, if powerful enough, can create little hells, new universes of suffering.." Carol had said that. Spencer was afraid he'd just discovered that she was right. The creature in front of him was definitely in the classic demon class: red, scaly skin; horns; pupils the same violent red as the skin; a long tail ending in a leaf-blade barb. Whatever it was, it was definitely male, since it seemed to believe in clothes about as much as a Pooperanian. All it was missing was a pitchfork. And flames. Hell seemed a bit chilly to Spencer, actually.
“A constant forty degrees Fahrenheit,” the creature said, as if reading Spencer's thoughts. “Keeps the eggs fresh, you know.” He held out a hand, the long fingers of which ended in curved talons. “The name's Paddy O'Mullin.”
Spencer tentatively shook the demon's hand. “Irish?”
“Partially. Along with some Andromedan, a bit of Kirinyagan, a touch of Neweden, and a dash of Leonardoan on my mother's side. But you know what they say: if you have any Irish blood in you at all, you're green all the way through.” Paddy smiled.
Spencer decided not to make the obvious comment. Paddy seemed pleasant enough, but it didn't seem to be a survival trait to insult the man who'd just snatched you into his dimension. “How did I get here?” Spencer asked instead. He refrained from adding “And how do I get out?”
“Oh, Carol mentioned that this would be a good place for you.”
“She did, eh? I'll have to remember to thank her properly the next time I s
ee her.”
“She said you needed to learn about an egg, and well...” Paddy grinned and shrugged. “This is just the place for that.”
Spencer glanced down again at the egg in his hand. It seemed an ordinary sort of egg, a spotted brown extra-large. “And why is that?”
Paddy grinned. “Oh, you see, it all started some two hundred and fifty-four years ago. I was working on our family's egg and dairy farm on Goldmeadow: thirty years old, unmarried, spending my days with chickens and cows and wondering whether I'd left my brains in a bucket for staying there. I'd made up my mind to leave. When I told my mum that, well, she damned near exploded. She handed me an egg from her basket and said ‘All right, Paddy, I'll give you a chance. If you can balance this egg on its narrow end, you can go with my blessing. But until you do, you'll stay here.’ I agreed. It seemed reasonable enough at the time ... at least until I gave it a shot. Ever tried balancing an egg on its end?—it's just not possible. I tried and tried, and I got angrier and angrier and started thinking the nastiest, most awful depraved thoughts about what I wanted to do to her ... and one night, as I was in my room still trying to balance that egg and thinking, I felt the world bubble up around me. All of a sudden, I wasn't on the farm anymore at all. I was here, and looking like this. And I've been stuck here ever since. My own private little universe, where I can do whatever I want, even reach out and grab the occasional person for company, but a place I can't leave myself until I balance the egg on its end. I've been at it now for over two and a half centuries.”
“Two and half centuries?”
Paddy spun his tail idly. “Well, not constantly, of course. That'd be pretty boring. But every day, at least for a bit. Here, give it a shot yourself...” Paddy waved his hand, and a table appeared in front of Spencer, with two chairs set on either side. Paddy took one; Spencer sat across from him. “Go on,” he said.
Spencer took the egg in his hand and placed it carefully on its end. He held it there with a forefinger, steadying it and trying to find a balance point. When he thought he'd found it, he let go. The egg tipped over and rolled.
The Omega Egg [A Fictionwise Round Robin Novel] Page 8
