My gun wasn’t a retgun. Kirtley gets the retgun. My gun was a regular pistol, filled with blanks. But the blanks were tipped with short-term exotic matter bridge generators, keyed to specific useful universes—like miniature marbles, but they burn out after one use. I’m pretty sure the bridge I hit the Profound Imperator with took him to a world where even the grass is carnivorous. Kind of mean, but it can’t be all jellybeans and rainbows, even when you work for the non-existent secret service of an imaginary utopian/anarchic society.
I twiddled with the spatial field generator at my waist—the controls were invisible, just like the folded space it generates, but you learn to do things by touch—and stepped through an undimensional portal into a ten-by-ten room that’s pretty inexplicably walled in fake wood paneling, with water-spotted acoustic tile on the ceiling and a shag rug that looks like it’s been chewed by goats on the floor. As always, the place gave me the major-major creeps, because it was impossible not to think about what was beyond the walls, which was probably nothing. Not even empty space. And yet, sometimes, there was this horrible low-pitched buzzing, and things tapping on the walls from outside… There was a reason we didn’t use the inside of our bag(s) of holding as our lair.
In addition to heaps of miscellaneous crap in boxes, the marble and the retgun were there, hovering docilely in mid-air next to what looked sort of like the mouth of a ventilation shaft high up on the far wall, identical to the shaft on the other side, which I’d arrived through. I reached my hand through the far shaft and poked Kirtley hard in the gut. I heard him grunt. “You alone?” I said.
Another grunt, but it seemed pretty affirmative to me, so why not. I twiddled with the field generator and the ventilation shaft expanded to a me-sized rectangle, and I stepped through.
Kirtley’s holding cell was way scarier than mine, with gore-encrusted hooks on chains dangling from the ceiling and a tray covered in rusty tools and a cage full of mechanically-augmented rats with drillbit teeth. Kirtley was tied to a chair, with pretty limited mobility, which maybe explained why Kirtley hadn’t just snatched the marble from the bag of holding and jackrabbited off to an entirely other universe. Or maybe Kirtley didn’t want to leave me. Who knows?
Kirtley was bleeding from the nose and lip and one of Kirtley’s eyes was getting a pretty good bruise around it, but I didn’t let Kirtley’s sorry-looking state sway me from my irritation.
“Kirtley,” I said curtly (sorry, I did it again, I can’t help myself, last time, I promise), “You are a lying sack of crap and you overwrote my brain with some fake backstory about clockwork tyrants and I don’t even know why I should let you out of here.”
“All those things are true,” Kirtley said. “But in my defense, my mission was to murder you, so overwriting your brain was actually the more merciful approach.”
“Just tell me you made me someone more awesome when you zapped me?”
“You are intrinsically just exactly as awesome as you are,” Kirtley said. “But I gave you a backstory that made for a way better story than the one boring reality wrote for you.”
“So who was I, really? Do I even want to know?”
“You were someone the Prime Army wanted dead. So that speaks pretty highly of your character.”
That much, I knew. I tested a question in my mind and decided to let it out: “Did I leave much behind? I mean… did I have a family?”
Kirtley looked away. “Ah. Not. Ah. Not after the other agents of the Prime Army were done with them. No.”
I shook my head and began to untie Kirtley. “You didn’t have the right to do that. To take my memories away.”
“In my further defense, you asked me to. I rescued you from the purge, and you were pretty broken up—you wanted to take revenge, but you didn’t want to have night terrors and a black hole of grief at the center of your being. You asked if I could make you happy, and I said I couldn’t make you anything other than what you were, essentially, but I could make your circumstances better, and see what kind of person you’d be in a different situation, one where you overcame tyrants and kicked ass instead of losing everything you loved. And it turns out: under all that you’re a pretty happy person. And you made me a better person, too—”
“I would find those facts incredibly reassuring, Kirtley, if you hadn’t demonstrated a giant history of lying to me all the time.” I untied the last knot holding him, and he stood up, groaning. I reached into the folded space at his side and snatched out the retgun and the marble both. “I oughta zap you with this thing.”
He nodded solemnly. “Believe me, it’s crossed my mind to ask you to do that very thing. I wouldn’t mind being a different person, sometimes. But I figured one of us should know what the hell is actually going on. I’m sorry I lied about us being secret agents, but it just seemed more cool than revealing that we’re freelance vigilantes making it up as we go along. Plus, you argued with my missions less when you thought they were delivered from some wise AI central control.”
“You’ve lost that trump card, Kirtles. I’ll want a bit more input going forward.”
“Okay. I propose our next plan is to get the hell out of here—”
“Agreed,” I said. “Then maybe we’ll steal a spaceship. Haven’t done that in a while.”
“A joyride could be just the thing to clear our heads—”
Light dawned. I get inspirations like dogs get ticks, and this was a good one. “Nope. I changed my mind. Scratch spaceship theft. We’re going to go out into the multiverse and find a promising node, and then we’re going to establish the Sublime Union of Ethical Anarchy and Sustainable Hedonism. For really reals. It doesn’t look like anybody else is going to get around to founding it, and it’s too good an idea not to make real.”
“How do you propose we do that?”
I brandished the retgun. “We find a bunch of supergeniuses in the gulags of the Prime Army, exfiltrate them to a nice warm universe, and make them think they’re already in the midst of founding the sublime empire.”
“That’s so crazy…” Kirtley began.
“That it just might work?”
“I was going to say, ‘just so batshit crazy, really, full stop, that’s all.’ It’s also kind of morally questionable, and I realize I’m an ex-assassin saying that, but still—I don’t mind shooting the retgun at horrible people, but if you want to recruit good people, it seems a bit messed up to force them into a non-consensual continuity—”
“So we’ll stick to evil scientists, then, and retcon in a heel-face-turn in their backstory, a nice little redemption arc, some motivation to change their ways. Or if they’re too deep-down vindictive, we’ll work in some good excuse to overthrow the Prime Army, some personal grudge they have to work out—that’ll make them work harder.”
“As far as plans go, I’ve heard more solid ones…”
“It’s not as good as randomly kidnapping tyrants and getting captured by the Prime Army?”
“We weren’t captured for long,” Kirtley said defensively. “And it wasn’t my plan.”
“We need a bigger picture, Kirtley. At least, I do—all this time I thought I had one, that I was working toward a larger goal. If you don’t want to join me, I’ve got the retgun right here, I could make you think you’re joyfully settled down with Princess Stephanie’s extended family, or make you a happy well-adjusted assassin in the Prime Army again, killing for God and country—”
Kirtley harrumphed. “The Prime Army doesn’t believe in God, exactly. They worship the personification of the strong anthropic principle in His aspect as a great armored death beetle—”
“Pretend I am cocking the magical gun and pointing it at your non-magical face,” I said.
“Okay! Okay. I’m in. Why not. Sustainable Hedonism. It’s a noble goal to probably get murdered for.”
“Good.” I holstered the gun. “And from now on, you’re the sidekick. I make the plans. This partnership is officially a Gen-ocracy, starting this very moment. ”
“Now, really, it would be a mistake to ignore my years of practical experience in espionage and survivalism and morally defensible murder—”
“Shut up, Kirtley,” I said curtly, and Kirtley shut up. (Last time. Really.) I dropped the marble and we traveled into the hope of a better world.
Story notes:
I wrote “The Retgun” as a sort of gonzo homage to the sprawling, weird science fiction I adore, and naturally sprinkled it with references to great writers—notably the late Jack Vance and Iain Banks, who could both be very funny in very different ways.
Tim Pratt's stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and other nice places. He has won the Hugo Award for his short fiction, and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards. His latest collection is Antiquities and Tangibles and Other Stories. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, writer Heather Shaw, and their son. For more, visit www.timpratt.org.
THE DIPLOMAT’S HOLIDAY
By Heather Lindsley
The Telvarian Diplomat dropped her bag on the marble floor and allowed the thud to complete its echoing roll through the hotel lobby before shouting, “Where the hell is the porter?”
Three days, she had. Three days to be rude. To be unreasonable. To shout and swear and…
The Diplomat smiled.
Not Smile 47-R, only a touch haughty, used to silence an insecure opponent. Not Smile 23-H, indicating mildest disbelief and thus an invitation to further argument. Not even Smile 6-A, slight and mysterious, the workhorse of any Transgalactic Diplomat’s repertoire, an all-purpose concealer of ignorance, of irritation, of intention.
This was the infrequently used 108-C, a wide, wolfish grin. It revealed everything.
“I said,” she bellowed—bellowed for the first time in nearly two years—“Where the hell is the porter?!”
Out of the corner of her eye, the Diplomat saw the concierge holding back a porter by the sleeve. She knew what he was waiting for. Her smile grew larger before twisting into a snarl.
“Porter!”
The concierge released the porter’s sleeve, accurately judging the climax of the Diplomat’s tantrum. The Diplomat would remember his expert attention when it was time to tip.
Tips came at the end of the stay, of course, when diplomacy was back at work. The hotel staff knew this, and waited through the storms of bad behavior. Stress has to go somewhere, they agreed, and Diplomats had very stressful jobs. The fate of the Transgalactic Empire balanced on their somberly clad shoulders, weighing them down as heavily as their elaborate ceremonial headdresses.
The porters took the bad behavior from the Diplomats, like they took their bags, and then passed it on themselves, to husbands and wives, children and pets, and, less frequently, to revolutionary activities. One porter swore that was the surest way to pass the oppressive weight back to the Diplomats, where, he insisted, it belonged.
Like the Diplomat, the hotel’s revolutionary-minded porter was on holiday. The porter who stood before her glower actually enjoyed their visits. Vacationing Diplomats tended to be both promiscuous and lazy about finding partners, a boon to like-minded hotel staff.
“Finally,” the Diplomat huffed. She disengaged herself from her massive horned hennin, pins and bolts thoughtlessly dropped to the floor. The headdress’s bifurcation was reminiscent of the Kargelian forehead, the swaths of green waxsilk both a concession to the modesty of the Declor and an indication of power to the people of Antoc IX.
The Diplomat lifted the hennin and thrust it at the waiting porter. Soft, golden tresses snaked to the Diplomat’s shoulders and down her back, then joined the hardware on the floor when she pushed off the wig and ran her hands through a mass of short-shorn ebony spikes.
She stretched her neck and eyed the porter while he staggered under the weight of the headdress in his arms.
“Amateur,” she snorted over the crackle and rasp of her vertebrae, and he knew he would not be invited to her bed.
THE DIPLOMAT WAS PROUD of her calling. Like all Diplomats she’d been recruited as a child and spent decades in training before she was allowed to even attend a negotiation of any importance. In her first years she’d learned the habits of a dozen cultures, then learned to respond to them with hundreds of precisely catalogued maxillofacial expressions cross-referenced against their interpretation by as many species.
She’d graduated with honors to the language of bodies, spoken with limbs of varying numbers, colors, and articulations. Candidates who dropped out of the Institute at this stage went on to become the finest actors in the Empire. But the Diplomat had progressed to the next level. She not only spoke the language—she knew what to say.
She knew how to negotiate.
Diplomacy had saved the galaxy from the bloodsport of war and the inevitable conflicting needs and desires among and within cultures. The fact that it required absurd hats and near-constant reserve was a small price to pay.
The Diplomat routinely rescued entire planets from violent oblivion. Her performance was always flawless… until her last negotiation, when she made a small slip. She was just a bit too eager in the matter of a Serkhanthian mining site.
She needed a vacation.
Ten years ago such a mistake would have blown the negotiation and demoted her to Actor, but not now. Now she had a reputation.
The negotiator across the table noticed the mistake, the Diplomat was sure, but he hesitated, doubting that a Diplomat of such stature would make so obvious an error. It must be a trap, a gambit, he decided. He let it pass.
The Diplomat did not, of course, allow herself any of the catalogued smiles.
CASUAL ALCOHOL WAS FORBIDDEN to a practicing Diplomat, and ceremonial alcohol secretly counteracted with a few drops of Ilarian Buzzkill. The Diplomat’s next stop after examining her room was, therefore, the hotel bar.
She found several other vacationing Diplomats there already—she recognized them by their bad behavior and the bruises and scrapes they wore like the gray and purple ribbons of honor pinned to their ceremonial robes every other week of the year. Healing treatments would be applied when it was time to go back to work and not a moment before.
A woman wearing a Zartanish halter top and fierce expression 152-S blocked her path, obviously disinclined to move even if the Diplomat was inclined to ask her politely. The Diplomat made her way through with a quick exchange of bruises.
The shoulder check was a promising start, and the night was still young.
She saw another Diplomat at the bar and reflexively concealed her expression, then reasserted her freedom with a long, slow grinding of teeth. Only three months before he’d been on the opposite side of an exquisitely mannered and deeply vicious legislative exercise.
He obviously didn’t want her to sit next to him, so she did.
He turned to her, his face alive with far more distaste than he’d revealed in seventy-nine hours of negotiation.
“Shouldn’t you be sitting in the ‘No Conscience’ section?”
“I’ll sit wherever I damn well please,” she said. “It’s a Free Autonomous Governance Zone.”
“No thanks to you,” he said.
“Bite me,” she said.
So he did.
She pulled her arm back and lunged at him. “You son of a Lweghalese dogworm!”
They kept their hands around each other’s throats as they knocked over barstools, spitting, gasping, clawing.
“Hey, you two!” the bartender called out as she sprayed them with Nitreian soda. “Get a room!”
So they did.
THEY FOUGHT OVER WHOSE room it would be, because they both wanted the privilege of residing in the inevitable wreckage. He ended the debate in the corridor by throwing her over his shoulder. She bruised the hell out of his kidneys on the way.
“Knock it off,” he said. “I need those to pee.”
“I know,” she
said with another solid punch.
They swung like a twisting pendulum between fighting and sex, sex and fighting, until they exhausted themselves and came to rest on the mattress that at some point in the frenzied proceedings had been torn off the bed.
“That was great,” she said, falling into his arms.
“You’re amazing,” he said, rolling on top of her.
“Can you? Again? So soon?” she said with undiplomatic surprise.
“Try to stop me,” he said.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said.
They went another two rounds before she left him snoring gently through a swollen nose.
“I TRUST MADAM ENJOYED her stay?”
The Diplomat smiled 93-Z: sincere, relaxed pleasure. She’d just come from the spa, where in addition to a last massage and a Prizian fleshmite exfoliation, she’d had a mani, a pedi, and a minor injury healing, mostly for the brawl she’d started in the bar the night before.
“Yes, thank you.” She slid an envelope across the desk. “If you could make sure the staff on this list are credited with the amounts noted?”
“Of course. And if madam would care to review this list of damages…” The concierge passed the Diplomat a souvenir scroll.
“I see you’ve included the destruction of the Rytalian Singing Fountain, but there’s no charge.”
“Yes, madam. One of your colleagues insisted it come out of his deposit. He was most adamant.”
“I’m sure he was.”
She left the hotel refreshed, revitalized, and once again ready to carry the weight of her headdress and the Transgalactic Empire.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER THE Diplomat found herself opposite a familiar face at the negotiating table. They’d been called to resolve the renewal of hostilities between the Dlarmonic Trade Federation and a loose alliance of Xithanian rebels. He chose, in classic Xithanian style, to greet her with the slightly smarmy 87-L. The Diplomat created a moment of uncertainty with a fractional response delay followed by the mildly amused 12-B.
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