Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

  He scratched a bit of tobacco from his tongue. “Yes.”

  “And you’re planning to answer all my questions with that single word?”

  “Yes—er, no. Sorry, I’m just preoccupied. Something nice for lunch, I think, and plenty of coffee, then we’ll visit my mother. Along the way, I’ll try to answer all your questions as well as my own.”

  Serenaded by busy bees and birds we made our way downhill.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cafe Atlantis

  THE PLACE WAS SIX TABLES SMALL, LOOKED LIKE IT WAS constructed of adobe brick, and sported fishing nets for curtains, decorated with colored glass floats, sand dollars, sponges, and the occasional dried starfish.

  The soft breeze that came in through the open windows was laden with sea salt and the not-unpleasant smell of seashore decay. Eichra Oren disposed of his cigar before we crossed the threshold. We sat and watched the little harbor across the road where fishing boats were hurrying in, ahead of a thunderstorm that would soon be arriving from the continent next door. I love a sight like that, brilliant blue sky contrasted with a leaden line of storm clouds, deep purple-black and brilliant green bands of sandbars alternating in the water. Yes, I can see in color, thanks to the Elders for having tinkered with my doggy genes.

  The menu, hand-written on a slate standing beside the door, was offering baked flounder today, stuffed with shrimp, crab, celery, bread crumbs, and many another wonderful delicacy. My favorite—although whatever I happen to be eating at the time is usually my favorite. On another day, it might have been brown bean soup, lamb stew, or pork cutlets with sweet red peppers. I was tempted to order a picon cocktail, but had work to do later on, and thought I’d better pass.

  The owner-chef, a big, dark, hugely-muscled individual with a blue granite jaw, impressive moustaches, and monumental eyebrows, knew us well. He had greeted Eichra Oren like a long-lost cousin, which, in point of fact, he was. All of the Homo-supposedly-sapiens in this corner of alternity are related to each other, their ancestors having been aboard an overcrowded couple of sailing vessels trying to escape the catastrophe of the Lost Continent, when the Elders Appropriated them.

  In the background, a jai alai game was playing openly on the audio. If the proprietor had really cared, he would have listened on his own personal implant. Eichra Oren favored the red snapper, a deep water mainstay that may have come off one of the boats—bright colored lateen sails of a design older than time, backed by catalytic fusion engines the size of a fist—that we were watching that very afternoon. Everything on the menu was guaranteed never-frozen and stasis-free.

  The landlord and head chef, the estimable Renner B’z’tirf had made certain there were no bones in my portion, and poured wine—a nice plain rough red—into a saucer for me. I sat up as neatly as I could in a chair across the table from my boss and delicately lapped up food and wine. The only thing that could have made it better was if I’d had thumbs.

  Everything is better with thumbs, I’m certain of it.

  I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so I had more flounder for dessert.

  And more wine.

  Along the road between the cafe and dockside, what looked like a snake riding a bicycle flashed past, a common enough sight in the Elders’ civilization. There was almost no other vehicular traffic at this season and time of day. Gulls circled overhead, making a lot of racket, and a couple of brown pelicans fished the waters below them. I watched a cormorant plunge into the water and emerge with a wriggling herring.

  I don’t need my mouth to talk and don’t have the vocal equipment for it in any case. Any thoughts I want conveyed are relayed from my implants to speakers in my collar. Eichra Oren and I continued our conversation.

  “So what is it, exactly, that you suspect, Boss? Or can you talk here?” I tossed an invisible eyebrow over my shoulder at our large, lantern-jawed host, who, unmusically humming some unrecognizable ditty, was laboring away in the kitchen, separated from the rest of the restaurant by a counter. I think he was preparing for the dinner crowd.

  His symbiote, a Great Pyrenees half again my size named Bask, lay in a cool back corner of the tiny dining room, pretending to ignore us. I knew he thought that, because my breed had come off the boats with the first humans in this world, I was stuck up and wouldn’t speak to him. But in fact, the reverse was true, Bask wouldn’t speak with me. Eichra Oren had explained that sometimes people—even dogs—who thought of themselves as lower class could be more jealous of their position in the social whirl than those they perceived as upper class.

  “Renner is an old friend of my mother’s,” Eichra Oren reminded me. I knew what that meant; most folks would never have believed it. “He’s trustworthy.”

  Cynic that I am, I wondered about that. The Elders had discovered a way around the aging process four hundred million years ago, and had passed that and many another benefit along to the persons from other realities whom they’d Appropriated several eons later. Eichra Oren’s own mother, for example, had been a teenage girl aboard one of the brave little ships that had sailed north when the snow began falling on the southernmost continent and didn’t stop falling for a couple of centuries. Although she’d feel slighted if you said she didn’t look a day over thirty, the reality was that she was fifteen thousand years old.

  Fifteen thousand years.

  Although Renner B’z’tirf had been among the tarry-handed ship’s crew, he could often be seen holding forth at one of Eneri Relda’s evening parties. She’s the least class-conscious individual I’ve ever known. He plays mandolin, knows more dirty songs than anyone I’ve ever met.

  Eichra Oren went on. “It’s the Elders.”

  The Elders. Even Bask’s ears had perked up at that one.

  Imagine what somebody somewhere had called “intellects, vast and cool and unsympathetic”: engineers, scientists, philosophers, but with a low taste for outrageous colors, spicy food, music of every kind from everywhere in the known universes, swashbuckling, and very good beer.

  Brewed from kelp—I’d almost had some of that with lunch, too.

  Now imagine a garden snail, wearing a colorfully striped, coiled shell—but the size of a small personal vehicle, featuring ten long, squid-like tentacles sprouting from a face that, evolutionarily, had started as a foot, right in front of the eyes, of which there were two, incredibly large, slit like a cat’s or a goat’s, and surprisingly expressive. Unlike those of their relatives, the chambered nautilus, whose eyes are open to the sea, theirs are covered by tough, bright corneas.

  The giant molluscs, sometimes known as nautiloids or ammonites, had first evolved to sapience half a billion years ago, making them the earliest species on any known version of this planet to have done so. So far—at least according to the geniuses at the Otherworld Museum—their crosstime explorations hadn’t run across anybody older.

  Don’t get me wrong. The famous Otherworld Museum is just about my favorite place to be on a rainy afternoon, or any afternoon for that matter. I go there as often as I can, knowing that I will never see everything if I spend the remainder of my life roaming its glass and granitic floors.

  Fortunately for me, it isn’t located in one of the larger cities on this version of the planet—not very large, mind you, compared to those on other versions; the total land population has been estimated at a few hundred million at most (how few, nobody knows; it would be considered an invasion of their privacy to attempt to count them), and the vastly more numerous underwater folks have excellent reasons for disliking cities—but in the hills above the little town where we were eating lunch today, a brisk hike from the house I shared with my boss.

  The Otherworld Museum is a vast collection of open spaces and buildings, the result of several plantings over many centuries, some of them piled on top of one another, others sprawling out in every direction, like a heap of gigantic melons at harvest time, crowned by a single, shining, completely transparent twenty-story multifaceted spheroid, intended as a reminder that there is
an infinite number of universes.

  Outside, there are parking lots and landing pads for visitors. Inside, except for the transparent section, of course, it is dry, quiet, cool, and dim, enhancing the visitor’s appreciation for the tens of thousands of displays. It’s the kind of place that seems automatically to inspire individuals to take soft steps and whisper.

  Nobody is altogether certain, in the million years or so that the Elders were collecting, exactly how many individuals, from exactly how many cultures, on how many alternative versions of the planet were Appropriated. It’s said that careful records were kept. On the other hand, it’s also said that some efforts were spent destroying those records before the Appropriators finally gave in and Did The Right Thing.

  All this has resulted in lots of confusion, and full employment for scholars whose job it is to untangle the complex history of the Appropriations.

  An excellent example of both—the confusion and the scholars—may be found in the highly attractive person of Lyn Chow, curator and director of the Otherworld Museum, who is considered, in the effort to tidy up the record, something of an anomaly herself. Back when her people were Appropriated, they were up in the northeast corner of the supercontinent, carving their first jade ornaments and dying their clothing red. They were most certainly not aboard the ships of Eichra Oren’s ancestors, so the question remains, who Appropriated them, and when?

  Lyn Chow may be as much as a head shorter than my boss, extremely slender, but with plenty of subtle curves. Everything she does is graceful, as if the background music of her life, music only she can hear, came from the ballet. Mine comes from a wrecking yard. She has lovely cheekbones, perfect skin, and huge almond eyes that look on you with a kind of scientific curiosity, but never in an unkind way. Her voice is light, musical, and she’s the best-smelling human I’ve ever met.

  I had to shake my head and blink to get back to the subject at hand.

  The Elders themselves aren’t featured much in the Otherworld Museum, because, well, not everything is about them. But their natural history is remarkable for a couple of items. First, they evolved long ago as involuntary natural telepaths, among themselves. I don’t mean that psychic or paranormal stuff. Some part of their nautiloid brains naturally generates long radio waves, the evolutionary history of which has something to do with their very complicated reproductive biology.

  The other remarkable item is their discovery and domestication—underwater—of fire. I’ve never had an explanation for it that I understood or believed. The truth, whatever it may be, is deeply buried in some five hundred million years of mythology and fossilizing sediment. Even so, a preponderance of their technology—my boss’s house, for example, and his office, not to mention the Otherworld Museum—is biological, rather than mechanical, avoiding any need for fire.

  Like I said, after they engineered a way to reach thousands of worlds of alternative probability, for something like a million years they collected—“Appropriated”—millions of specimens of sapient beings, from thousands of younger species, like Eichra Oren’s and Shaalara’s, who, along with our cephalopodical hosts, now comprise the sum of civilization—the Elders’ civilization—as we know it today.

  “The Elders?” I repeated. I liked how it made Bask twitch.

  “Specifically,” he answered, “one Elder in particular, a sinister fellow named Misterthoggosh, who maintains a villa here, just east of town.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Ze Beeg Squeed”

  “ONE ELDER IN PARTICULAR,” EICHRA OREN HAD JUST informed us, “by the name of Misterthoggosh, maintains a villa near here, just east of town.”

  The image that the boss showed me in his mind, via implant, was of a very large, rambling, low-lying structure, standing on a low bluff just above the sandy beach: several wings of stuccoed adobe under red tile roofs with deep, overhanging eaves. The place could be seen from the same coastal road running by us here, at Renner’s restaurant, but it was surrounded on three sides by many acres of neatly-trimmed green.

  “A two level villa,” I told the room. “Half of the place will be underwater, the other half high and dry.” I added the image, mostly imagined, I admit, of another large structure sitting on the sea floor a few hundred strides from the beach. “Surf and turf. I’ve heard of him.”

  “Zo ’ave I!” came a loud voice from the kitchen area back of the counter. It was followed by a long series of highly violent chopping noises. I had no idea whether he’d received the images we’d been exchanging.

  “Renner!” the boss and I said simultaneously, and in exactly the same tone. I added, “Do you make a habit of eavesdropping on all your customers?” To be fair, it would have been impossible not to eavesdrop in the tiny cafe. I don’t know where he got his accent. Maybe from a catalog.

  The big man stuck his big, bearded jaw over the counter. “Can I ’elp ’aving good ’earing?” He did, in fact, have an earring—and a big cigar wedged permanently in a corner of his big mouth. He pointed a big dripping cleaver at my boss. “And ’eez mothair would want me to drop ze eaves, eef hair favorite leetle boy considair messing wees Ze Proprietor.” You had to concentrate to extract meaning from his rented accent.

  Eichra Oren sighed and shook his head, “That’s what they call him? The Proprietor?” He reached into his tunic pocket and extracted a cigar of his own, which lighted itself when he gave the shiny band a twist.

  “Zat’s what ’e call ’eemself,” Renner replied, emphatically chopping a fish. “I myself call ’im ze Beeg Squeed.” Coming from a brilliant seafood chef, did that qualify as a compliment or a death threat?

  “Well, you all understand,” said Eichra Oren, “that I have no case whatever, no paying client, nothing at all to offer even the faintest, feeblest standing in any sort of investigation. But I am concerned, nevertheless, Renner, Sam, Bask, deeply concerned. There are extremely peculiar stories flying about everywhere, whispered rumors about the ‘fiendish machinations’ of the villainous Misterthoggosh, reputed prince of criminality, and certainly the spider at the center of the web.”

  He took a long draw on his cigar, and exhaled.

  “A beeg, soggy spidair,” Renner observed, dismembering another helpless fish, a nasty-looking thing that told me Renner was preparing his great specialty, bolhabaissa, famous on every continent of this world. It deserved to be famous across the entire multi-universed continuum.

  Bolhabaissa is a seafood stew made with many different kinds of fish—mostly bony or spiny local ones—and various shellfish, with vegetables. Flavored with herbs and spices native to this area of the supercontinent, notably garlic, orange peel, basil, bay leaf, fennel, and saffron, it’s traditionally served with grilled slices of bread spread with a thick sauce of olive oil, garlic, saffron, and hot red pepper.

  You can never know exactly what you’ll find in bolhabaissa—or what will find you—maybe scorpionfish, maybe sea robin, maybe giant eel, golden bream, turbot, monkfish, mullet, or hake. The shellfish may include sea urchins, mussels, a couple of different kinds of crabs, langoustine, even octopus. The chef may simmer leeks, onions, tomatoes, celery, and potatoes together with the broth which is usually served first in a bowl containing the bread and sauce, with the seafood and vegetables served separately in another bowl or on a platter.

  He makes a batch up about once a week. Otherwise I’d start having withdrawal symptoms. For some reason I’m particularly fond of sea urchin.

  Pushing that to one side, I asked, “What kind of stories do you mean?”

  “What kind of criminality?” Renner wanted to know. Only he’d said “creemeenaleety”.

  Bask yawned, put his muzzle on his forepaws, and closed his eyes.

  My boss said, “Misterthoggosh is the presiding director of a huge business conglomerate that pipes in all varieties of entertainment and so-called news from thousands of other alternative universes, through pinhole aperture fields and relays safely located in the Asteroid Belt. There’s nothing wrong wi
th that, of course, unless you want to argue the fine points of interdimensional copyright—which doesn’t in fact exist. Everybody seems to love it. I even watch some of it, myself.”

  Actually, he watched quite a lot of it. He seemed to be especially fond of stories involving rotting bodies, coroners. and crime scene investigators. It was the dinosauroid species who did them best. I have no idea why. I was only grateful that you couldn’t smell any of it.

  “But there’s a persistent story floating around,” Eichra Oren went on, looking really worried now, “that this Misterthoggosh wants to take the idea further. A whole lot further. He wants to establish a permanent base over on the other side—on one of the other sides, anyway—and send his scientists and other specialists, and their families, as well, over there to live and work in it for extended periods.”

  “Ahonh! We all know how zat turned out ze first time!” Did Renner somehow avoid dribbling cigar ash into his customers’ food, or was it one of his secret ingredients? I had to admit he had a point, even if he’d made it in an accent he’d gotten from a secondhand store somewhere.

  The Elders calculate that they’ve been sapient for something on the order of half a billion—that’s five hundred million—years. After thousands of centuries of trying out just about every economic and political modality conceivable to the mind of mollusk, they’d finally settled—not without a great deal of blood in the water—on a diffuse, leaderless, centerless civilization in which the rights of the individual come before any other consideration. In the Elders’ world, nobody gets elected First Cephalopod or crowned King of the Krakens.

  The Elders believe that an individual’s rights can only be threatened by force or the threat of force. This has long since become formalized as part of a doctrine they call p’Na, under which it is considered an axiom that nobody has the right to initiate physical force against anybody else for any reason. Even proposing that such a heinous thing be undertaken—or hiring somebody else to do it—is severely frowned upon. Severely. The act of self-defense, on the other tentacle, not constituting an initiation of force, is heartily encouraged.