by Larry Niven
Of course I rang the authorities, but as I wrote previously they have ignored me thus far. I’ve been out to the shed several times since then to give it more of my medication, and it still has not roused. My wife has no knowledge of its presence, and I don’t believe she is becoming suspicious yet. All appears normal at home and I have managed to remain calm. Last night, after dinner, we sat and read in our front room, dressed in our smoking jackets and sipping a fine Bordeaux. As usual, we shared an uncomfortable silence as we puffed on our pipes. My love was not speaking to me. She’d spent much of the afternoon searching the house, rummaging behind the cushions and lifting the sofa to check under it. One of the antique silver lipsticks her mother left her is missing, and I, apparently, am somehow to blame. As we sat I offered her a smile, but she only glared at me for perhaps the fiftieth time that evening. I was going to risk saying something romantic when I suddenly realised I needed to check on the alien before bed. I closed my book, put down my pipe and rose.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she roared.
“I think I may have left the shed unlocked. I’m just going to check.”
“That’s the third time you’ve checked it this evening. Are you losing your mind?”
I didn’t respond. There is no correct response when she’s like this. The easiest way out would be to simply gouge out my own eye with a fork. But not even I am prepared to do that. I crossed the room to leave. She bared her teeth and growled.
When I returned from checking on the still comatose alien, she’d gone and closed the bedroom door behind her. I made myself comfortable on the sofa and tried to sleep.
And that brings us to the present.
My warring days are over now, there’s little excitement for me anymore. The closest I have to a thrill these days is when my loving wife returns after several hours from teaching self-defence at the local boys’ grammar school and releases me from where I’ve accidentally locked myself in the utility room. Ahhh, the bittersweet joy of seeing her face as the door is finally unlocked and swings open.
I realise my service to Her Majesty is all but done and there is little I can offer of myself in these twilight years, but I can do this one final thing. I can inform you of this imminent alien attack, and offer you the creature I have captured.
Now it’s up to you to use this knowledge to protect our once great empire.
Yours sincerely,
Brigadier Arthur Charles Holbrook (Ret.) DSO, OBE, MC
p.s.—As I write this, the village Constable has just been speaking to my wife at the front door. Apparently a couple of houses in the street were burgled yesterday. I presume it’s the work of those ‘hoodies’ chaps. I therefore urge that you send someone straight away. It would be dreadful if one of those thieving lads were to break into my shed, discover the creature, and accidentally release it.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 7
Copyright © 2014 by Steve Cameron. All rights reserved.
The Spinach Can’s Son
by Robert T. Jeschonek
I am the can of spinach in a sailor man’s hand. He squeezes, expecting me to burst open and launch a blob of green power into his gaping maw.
But I do not burst. He gets no mouthful of spinach, no surge of energy pumping up his arms to three times their size. That’s not how it works on this side of the tracks, my friend.
You’re not in the funny pages anymore.
Potpie the Sailor tries again with both hands, straining for all he’s worth. “C’mon, ya ratfinsk!” He squints up at the threat looming before him, the whole reason he needs his spinach. “We’ve gotsk to drive this she-hag off me boat!”
What threat could be awful enough to strike fear in the sailor man’s heart? Is it Bobo the comic-strip bully, back for another knock-down, drag-out?
Not even close.
The figure standing before Potpie and me isn’t a drawing at all. There’s nothing pen-and-ink about her. “Sir!” She’s a three-dimensional woman in what looks like a spacesuit out of a 1950s movie—silver metallic tights and a bubble helmet. Her black hair is arranged in tight waves beneath the glass. “Please, calm down! I just want to ask you some questions.” She pulls a photo out of a pouch on the belt slung diagonally over her hips. “Have you seen this man?”
“Never seen ’im before in me lifesk!” Potpie squeezes me harder than ever. I try my best to help, pushing from within, for one simple reason.
I recognize the man in the picture, with his dark brown hair and square-jawed features. I know him like I know my own self, in fact.
Because he is myself. Myself in another life.
And I know her, too. Her name is Molly. She’s my wife.
And I know why she’s after me.
“Take another look, please,” she says. “It’s urgent that I find him.”
Potpie shifts the corncob pipe from one side of his mouth to the other without ever touching it. “I ain’t seen him, she-hag!” He shakes a fist at her. “Now putsk ’em up!”
Molly takes a step toward him. “You’re sure you haven’t seen him?”
Potpie scrambles backward, knocking over a stack of spinach crates. Crying out, he puts me to the only use he can think of—hurling me right at her.
Molly ducks, and I go sailing over her head. It’s not a clean getaway, though; the bracelet on her wrist starts beeping as I pass.
Here in the Underfunnies, I’m an anomaly, a deformity in the panel geography—the panelography—and her equipment has detected me.
Good thing a true Panelnaut like me can swim the currents here like a dolphin through water. Focusing my energies, I dive deep into the sea of words and images, hunting a good place to resurface.
Found it. I cross the borders in full flight and land with a shock that takes my breath away.
This time, I am the brick in the hand of a mouse.
I bounce lightly in his grip as he jounces along through a strange landscape, surrounded by abstract objects straight out of a surrealist painting. He gives off a thick smell of stinky cheese and whistles a jaunty tune from his pointy gray snout.
I know him well—Ixnay the Mouse. Once again, I’ve gravitated toward my favorite stomping grounds, the panelography of the early 20th century. In this case, the Hazy Kat strip.
Or should I say, the Underfunnies version of that strip. The reverse of it, the flip side where things don’t work the way they should. The negative space that accrues in the collective unconscious of the readership around these tiny, panel-bound stories. The land of things unsaid and hopes unrealized.
For each time Potpie the sailor pops open a can, gobbles the spinach, and beats up the bully, we know in our hearts there must be times when the can doesn’t open. That’s just the way life works. And our expectations create this flip-side place that until recently no one knew about.
I am a Panelnaut, an explorer of this place. Though “fugitive” might be a better word for what I’ve become.
“Boy,” says Ixnay. “Have I got one cooked up for that idiot cat this time.” He hops up on what looks like a warped sundial and calls out into the hot wind. “Oh, Haaazyyy!”
Without delay, the creature known as Hazy Kat comes bounding over the horizon. She’s wearing a polka-dot scarf and matching tutu. “Comink, mine treasur-ed pession flour!”
“Make it snappy, willya?” hollers Ixnay. “Yer burnin’ daylight here!”
Hazy flops to a stop in front of us and gapes with a love-struck goofy grin. “Dost Rumeo have a heart-wiltin’ sonnet plucked out to make his Joliet swoon’st?”
“Ohh, yeah.” Ixnay turns me over in his grip. “Ya ever hear of iambrick pentameter?”
Hazy claps her paws together and giggles. “Butter ’course, o bard o’ the mousehole! Hit me with that iambrick pentagrammer to yer li’l ol’ heart’s continent!”
“You asked for it.” Ixnay hauls me back, ready to throw. “Be sure to notice the rhythmic counterpoint of strike and release. Or should I say the oppo
site?”
At that exact moment, Molly flashes to life between us and Hazy. The second she materializes, her bracelet starts beeping.
She points her wrist in my direction and nods. “I know you’re here, Everett. You’ve figured out how to assume local forms, haven’t you?” Watching the bracelet, she walks toward us. “You’re inside the mouse, aren’t you?”
Before Ixnay can say a word, Molly suddenly snaps backward. As she drops to the dusty ground, I see Hazy has her paws on her.
“You stays awake from my lettle Ixnay mouses!” Hazy flaps her paws like pancakes at Molly’s helmet. “He is my preshiss poet and certifiable booblekins! Don’t try steelin’ his heart, you hussy!”
“Everett!” Molly shoves the cat away and scrambles to her feet. “I’ve come to talk to you! You sent me a message through the comic strips—our prearranged emergency signal! Don’t pretend you didn’t!”
She’s right, I can’t, because I sent it. But the signal wasn’t a cry for help—it was bait. All part of the secret I’ve been keeping.
“I’m serious, Everett.” Molly takes another step toward us. “I’ll do what it takes to get through to you.”
Ixnay just watches, juggling me from hand to hand. “Whoever this dame is, I gotta admit, I like her style.”
Hazy, never much good in a fight, weakly bats at Molly’s calves. “‘Ev’ritt,’ you say? Is that some other word for ‘mouses’?”
“Shut up, cat!” says Molly. “Everett, listen …”
Ixnay’s little mouse heart thumps like a big bass drum. It pushes out his chest in the shape of a cartoon heart as it throbs. “I think I’m in love!”
Naturally, this makes him raise me into throwing position again.
Molly sees the danger but doesn’t stop talking. “It’s time to come home, Everett. You can’t keep running away.” She spreads her arms wide. “We both miss him, Everett. But you can’t make things right on your own.”
I want to tell her how wrong she is, but I don’t get the chance. Ixnay whips me at her glass-helmeted head before I can get the words out.
“Sech fe’rce percision!” says Hazy Kat. “His peshion must be deeper than I yimagined!”
As I blast toward her helmet, I focus my strength on changing course. Ixnay’s throw is off, which helps; in the Underfunnies, things don’t work the way they normally do, including his brick-pitching aim.
So I fly wide and hurtle on past, soaring through the ochre skies … casting my mind toward another refuge. I’ve gotten so good, I find one instantly, and I set my sights.
But I wait another moment to dive. Because the truth is, I’m not trying to lose her at all.
Her bracelet has alerted her to my presence in the brick, and she charges after me, calling my name. Calling another name, too.
“Henry’s gone, Everett!” That’s what she says just before I dive. “I miss him, too! But we need to move on without him!”
She’s wrong. Dead wrong. And I’m going to prove it.
When I’m sure she’s got a lock on me, I throw myself into the panelography. I ride the swirling currents of the Underfunnies, swooping away from the bizarre realm of Hazy Kat.
As I travel, I think of Henry. I think of our son. I remember how miraculous he was, how full of life and personality from the day he was born. I remember his bright blue eyes fixing on me with pure love and expectation. The way his lips moved as he repeated the things I said, as if he were memorizing each and every word.
He was the greatest thing to ever happen to me, to us. A dream come true—a dream I’d never known I had until he arrived.
A dream that ended the day he died.
I remember the sound of screeching tires, the screams of Molly as she ran. But never a sound from Henry. Not even a last gasp of breath when I got to his side in the street. Only silence from him.
And only blame between Molly and me. Blame become hatred, hatred become rage. I threw myself into my work, pioneering the exploration of the richest vein of the Underfunnies, born of the comic strips of the early 20th century. Anything to lose myself in the black and white of simple line work, the discoveries of Subtextual Space. Anything to forget Henry and stay away from Molly.
And then, one day, I got The Idea. And I knew it would work. It will work, if only I can get her to where she needs to be.
Suddenly, the flow of my thoughts is interrupted as I pop free into a fresh setting. I feel the tingle of something sparking on my body—the crackle of a tiny flame burning at one end of me.
This time, I am a lit stick of dynamite in the hand of a child.
“Zo!” says the little boy, a chubby creature with thick hair as black as his old-fashioned waistcoat. “Vhat do you say, Fritzie? Vill der Admiral like zis special bratwurst ve have for his dinner?” He holds me up and grins.
“Oh, ja,” says his brother, also chubby but with blond hair and white coat. “I zink maybe he von’t haff zo many chores for us tomorrow, Helmut!”
We’re in a kitchen, surrounded by the smell of cooking sauerkraut. The boy’s Auntie toils away on the other side of the room, stirring a bubbling pot. Her work is never done, taking care of the mischievous and ungrateful Schnitzeljammer Brats.
“Time to serve der first course!” Blond Fritz grabs a plate and holds it out.
Helmut drops me on the plate with a devilish smile. “Vhat a lovely presentation! Der Admiral ist sure to ask for seconds!”
“Ja!” Fritz laughs. “Thirty seconds till she blows!”
With that, they march me out through the swinging door to the dining room. The Admiral awaits them, sitting at the table in his seaman’s cap and scrub-brush mustache.
“Dinner iss served!” Fritz plunks the plate in front of him.
“Bomb Appétit!” says Helmut, and then he catches himself. “I mean Bon Appétit!”
The Admiral doesn’t seem to notice there’s dynamite on his plate instead of bratwurst. He raises his fork and knife, ready to dig in …
But before his utensils make contact, his cap leaps off his head and flops down over me. Cut off from the air, my fuse fizzles and stops burning with just an inch to go.
Then, I hear her voice—Molly’s voice, speaking from the substance of the cap. “You’re not the only one who knows how to manipulate the supertexture of the Underfunnies!”
I’m surprised. Following me into the panelography is one thing; possessing resident iconography is quite another.
Apparently, my wife did her homework before she got here.
“Now listen to me,” she says. “I want you to come home with me, Everett. You’ve been in here too long.”
For the first time since she found me, I answer her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh yes, I do,” she says. “Don’t you think I tried to hide from the world, too? Don’t you think I wanted to run away and never come back—never remember what happened to Henry? Don’t you think I loved him, too?”
Her words settle around me like comic strip snow. Should I remind her, again, that I was trimming hedges in the back yard when it happened, and she was the one who was supposed to be watching him when he wandered into traffic? That she was the one who turned her back to talk to a neighbor when she should have had her eyes glued to Henry at all times?
Only if rubbing salt in the wound is my goal. “Leave me alone,” I tell her. “Go back to reality.”
“I’m not leaving without you. That’s final.” Just as she says it, she’s lifted away, leaving me uncovered on the plate.
Fritz makes a grab, but I dive out of the realm of the Schnitzeljammer Brats before his pudgy hand can touch me. I’ve got to keep moving, keep running, keep drawing her along in my wake.
Until it’s too late to stop what I’ve got planned.
It wouldn’t be enough to tell her the story straight up, to tell her The Idea I’ve set in motion. I can’t take the chance she won’t believe it’s possible, that she won’t cooperate.
Not to me
ntion that it breaks every tenet of the Panelnaut protocols. Protocols that I helped create.
Diving through the foamy black-and-white tides toward my next destination, I remember the early days of exploration. I wasn’t the first to discover the Underfunnies, but I found the first doorway and made the first trip inside.
It was so thrilling back then, such a novelty—plying the byways of this vast psychic substrata. Jumping into manifestations of comic strips from various eras, existing side-by-side with beloved characters as well as obscure ones. Before long, I discovered I hadn’t accessed the primary reality of those strips, but a flip-side echo where nothing works the way it should—a negative space where expectations can’t be trusted. The place where Potpie’s spinach can won’t burst on cue, where Ixnay the mouse can’t toss a brick on target, where the Schnitzeljammer Brats’ dynamite sticks won’t stay lit.
Did I understand the full implications back then? Hell, no. The best I thought we Panelnauts could do was influence the collective unconscious—plant messages that guide humanity toward a state of peace and harmony. We wrote protocols forbidding extreme intervention, anything that disrupted the essential integrity of the panelography.
And now I’m throwing them all away. The ultimate disruption is in motion; every moment brings it closer to final fruition.
And I’m the one who engineered it. I’m the one who knows how close we are to the grand finale.
Very close, now. It’s time to pick up the pace.
I need to move her along quickly, not give her time to think or catch her breath. I need to flash like a skipping stone from world to world to world until we reach the last one.
The one I’ve prepared.
So I fling myself out of the current and surface in another place. This time, I’m a cigar in the mouth of Moo Mullet, rascally gambler and ne’er-do-well. Seconds later, I hear Molly’s voice coming from the black derby hat on Moo’s little brother, Kozy.
