Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 1

by Eric Flint

  The common words do all the work, which consists of rendering raw material (mostly hot air, but with lots of scrap words thrown for good measure— runes, obsolete and archaic words, passe slang, etc.) into shiny new words. The shiny new words are immediately put to work, while the worn-out old words are "retired" to a giant complex called the Happy Home—which, to a salamander, looks remarkably like a blast furnace—where they are shortly thereafter "elevated" to the "Realm of Reality," rising thereto on a vast column of—can you doubt it?—hot air.

  Into this weird but efficient set-up, Les Six and Gwendolyn charged like the proverbial bull in a china shop. If it had been Les Six alone, things would have just gotten rowdy. But when you added Gwendolyn to the stew! There's a good reason the porkers all over Grotum have a price on her head that's only a few pennies less than the one on The Roach— and only a small part of that's due to the numerous porkers she's gutted over the years with her cleaver. No, the real reason is that the woman is a fiendishly good agitator, propagandist, organizer, you name it.

  The first thing she did, naturally, was call for the unity of all oppressed and exploited common words. No mean trick, that, let me tell you. Words are even worse than people when it comes to figuring out ways that this group is better than that group. The nouns detested the verbs and vice versa; their sidekicks the adjectives and adverbs positively hated each other; the pronouns always tried to get cozy with the nouns but the nouns referred to hanging around with pronouns as "slumming;" among the verbs, the third person singulars were considered uncouth; on and on.

  Then, to boot, the words were further disunited by the rampant animosity among the different fonts. Helveticas despised Century Gothics who loathed Britannic Bolds who detested Courier News. All regular fonts considered all bold fonts (even their own) to be hopelessly low-class, and as for italics— I remember one italic word ( indeed, I think it was) bitterly complaining to me over its alepot:

  "It's a dirty rotten stereotype! It's not true that all italics are part of organized crime!"

  Anyway, sooner than you would have thought possible Gwendolyn managed to convert a bunch of new words to her viewpoint, and the next thing you knew leaflets were being passed around all over the slums with slogans like:

  FONTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

  THE PARTS OF SPEECH, UNITED, SHALL NEVER BE DEFEATED!

  Within a week, she had Committees of Correspondence organized all over the place; within another week, she had all the Committees organized into cell structures. Within a month, she put together a full-fledged insurrectionary movement.

  Sometimes, I think that woman's not playing with a full deck.

  I tried to reason with Magrit:

  "It's all nuts! Back in the real world I let it go, on account of I have a soft spot for humans, handicapped as you are with mammal habits and brains. But this is going too far! What do we care about a bunch of words, anyway? When you prick them, do they bleed? No! Utterly impervious to pain and hardship. Do they starve? Nope— can't eat anyway. Sure, they're overworked and underpaid, but so what? What else are words good for? And besides, the whole reason we came to this Godforsaken Realm of Words in the first place was to rescue Shelyid and the Kutumoffs. What happened to that, huh? Think of the poor dwarf! And the Kutumoff youngsters! Why— right this minute, they're probably in dire peril of their lives! We should be off to their rescue!"

  "And just how do you propose to do that?" demanded the witch. "We wound up here because that stupid Wolfgang babbled in an unknown tongue and planted us in the middle of nowhere. Do you have any idea where Shelyid and the Kutumoff kids are? And if you do, do you know how to get there from here? Well? Speak up, Wittgenstein!"

  "I'm your familiar, remember. You're the witch— the 'proper' witch, no less! You're the one's supposed to know how to get your way around."

  "Well, I don't," she grumped, and then she started making noises about how if the sorcerer Zulkeh were here he'd probably know the answer and at that point I realized the poor old woman had lost her mind and it was hopeless. Imagine! Actually wishing the windbag were around!

  Her conclusion was that since we were stuck here anyway, we might as well start a revolution since this place needed it as much as anywhere. To which I made the sane response that there'd be trouble since this place had powers-that-be as much as anywhere and they wouldn't like it. But I might as well have saved my breath.

  And, sure enough, trouble came. As soon as the company owners figured out what was afoot, Les Six and Gwendolyn all got fired. That, as they say, was locking the barn door after the horse got out, since by that time Gwendolyn and Les Six had already organized the factories they worked in and now they were free to concentrate on agitating all the rest. Which they did, needless to say.

  Next, the bosses —they're a sorry lot, bosses, dumb as frogs— set their company goons on Gwendolyn and Les Six. That resulted in a lot of thug words being turned into ex-thug letters.

  Finally realizing that the usual methods weren't going to work, the bosses whistled up the official authorities, who promptly responded by sending the police into the slums to round up all agitators and malcontents.

  The police were a riot, as always. They came in with their shields, batons and helmets: ÞôLÍ¢ê and went out ρσ∫ïζε¡" better educated.

  "It'll be the fascists, next," predicted Gwendolyn, and, sure enough, it wasn't long before we started hearing about a word called "mustache" that was making a lot of noise about what it called "the subjunctive problem." The mustache had a whole crowd of lumpenproletarian words gathered about it, with all the silly buggers coloring themselves brown instead of black.

  To my outrage, I got sent in as a spy. So there I was in a big square, a disgruntled salamander if there ever was one, watching this jerk word jerking around other jerk words. "Mustache" was up on a podium and it was haranguing the mob, calling for the extermination of all qualifiers:

  "No ifs, ands or buts!" it shrieked. "There must be a final solution for the subjunctive problem!"

  The mob went wild, rampaging through the streets of the slum. All shop windows which displayed the ? mark were smashed. The wretched maybes, perhapses, and possibles who huddled within were dragged out into the streets and beaten into 8-point. A scholarly insofar as was torn letter from letter.

  It didn't go any further, however, because at that point Gwendolyn and Les Six showed up, leading an army of Working Words Defense Guards, and proceeded to beat the brownwords into 4-point. Mustache itself was singled out for special attention by Gwendolyn and her cleaver, whereupon the would-be demagogue was known forever after as must ache.

  Now the powers that be declared martial law and brought in the army, but to no avail. The word army was made up of a lot of unhappy conscripts who were easy prey for Les Six and their experienced rabble-rousers, and before you knew it the troops had deserted to the revolution and Gwendolyn was cheerfully setting up a Words and Scripts Council.

  In desperation, the Proper Words set up a Provisional Revolutionary Government and tried to take control of the situation by going with the flow, so to speak, but Gwendolyn and Les Six soon had the Words and Scripts Council set the situation right. The Word Palace was stormed, the Proper Words were arrested and stripped of their pretensions. Count Jello became the plebeian jello, the haughty twin earls Ping and Pong became ping pong, and the whole lot of useless parasites were set to work digging the trenches and earthworks which Gwendolyn and Les Six said were going to be needed to repel the inevitable forthcoming invasion by reactionary imperialist powers bent on crushing revolution before it could spread.

  I though they had completely lost their minds, but we'll never know because at that point the Old Geister stepped in directly and sent The Flood. He usually keeps a lower profile in the "Realm of Reality," but I guess He figures He can afford to use a heavier hand in the Realm of Words on account of He claims to have spoken the Word in the first place.

  I dunno, I'm just a sane salamander trapped in a
universe of human lunatics. Who else but humans would have invented God in the first place? You wouldn't catch salamanders doing any such silly thing!

  Yeah, it was great, just great. For forty days and nights, the Realm of Words was deluged by a rain of letters, periods, commas, colons and semi-colons. Naturally, having gotten us into the fix, Gwendolyn and the half-dozen bigmouths had no idea how to get out of it, but Magrit said there was nothing to worry about.

  "Where there's a Flood, there's gotta be an ark. We'll just catch a ride."

  Sure enough, about a week into the Flood this bearded character named Noah showed up, with a bunch of sons and a big boat. They started scurrying around collecting two of every word and hustling them aboard the boat. Most of the work was being done by Noah's son Ham, who was a nice enough kid except he complained a lot.

  As usual with humans, most of his problem was with sex.

  "I've got to avoid sodomy, you know," he mused. "The Lord's very insistent on that!" He reached down and grabbed up a word that was running around loose, un chien as it happened. Ham held it up for cursory inspection. "Boy," he announced. "No problem." Next, he picked up une table. "Piece of cake. It's a girl." Then, with a look of total disgust, he held up a chair. He turned it upside down and spread its legs.

  "I ask you, Wittgenstein— is this a boy word or a girl word?"

  Then he and his father got in a big argument over whether or not they had to save pidgin words and creole words. Noah started off by damning all unauthorized words, but Ham sweet-talked him into finding room for the creoles. The pidgins were out of luck, which caused a lot of squealing, let me tell you.

  "That boat's not going to be big enough," I remarked to Ham. He looked shocked.

  "Of course it's going to be big enough! We made it just according to the Lord's specifications" —here he rattled off a lot of stuff about cubits and such— "so it's bound to be big enough."

  And, whaddaya know? Damned if it wasn't big enough. Don't ask me how. I'm just a salamander, not the Supreme Being. But, when the time came, all the chosen words trooped aboard and crammed themselves into the hold. I had wrangled us a place, too, buttering up Ham and the boys. I think Magrit on her own would have gone for it, but Gwendolyn and Les Six naturally had to stand up for principle.

  So there I was, formerly a salamander sans souci, perched on Magrit's shoulder, the waves lapping at the last little outcrop of rock left in the Realm of Words, treated to the spectacle of Gwendolyn and Les Six shaking their fists at the heavens and taking the Lord's name in vain. Actually, they were cursing Him directly, which I'm not sure counts as the same thing.

  "Things," I muttered, "couldn't get worse."

  Things, of course, got worse. The Old Geister heard them cursing Him, took umbrage, and sent down an archangel. Seheboth, I think his name was.

  " Curse ye the Lord?" he demanded.

  A string of curses confirmed the charge.

  " Be ye damned!" he cried.

  Then, frowning: "But wait! I forgot— you're already damned. Damned the day you were born, in fact. Predestination, you know. Hmmm. Let me think. I have it! Be ye cursed!"

  "Cursed with what?" sneered Magrit. The archangel took a breath, and I saw my chance.

  "No!" I shrieked. "Not that! Anything but that!"

  The archangel frowned again. "Not with what?"

  Hey, it's as old as the hills, I know that. But a good trick's a good trick, even if a stupid rabbit did come up with it. So I shrieked:

  "Not the dwarf! We've had enough of that gnome Shelyid to last a lifetime! No, let us drown here in peace! Oh, please! Don't cast us into whatever mess that dwarf's got into! Oh, please! Oh, please!"

  The archangel beamed, gestured grandly, spoke portentous words of doom.

  A flash, a feeling of sudden heat and cold, total disorientation, and— there we were!

  Where? Well, at first glance, we seemed to be in a big glass jar at the bottom of what seemed to be some kind of ocean. Just beyond the glass we could see Shelyid in a peculiar get-up— a helmet of some kind, with a hose leading above into the gloom. The dwarf had a chain in his hand and was trying to hook it up to the glass jar, which wasn't easy on account of he was being beset by every kind of monster you could imagine. But he seemed preoccupied with something else, because as soon as he saw us he started gesturing madly at something in the glass jar behind us. When we turned around, we saw Polly Kutumoff all tied up with rope, which was a lot of rope on account of the girl looked to be about eight and 99% months pregnant.

  "Boy, am I glad to see you!" she said, snapping with her teeth at a really nasty-looking acronym that was trying to bite her on the neck —CREEP, it was— while she was trying, with bound feet, to stomp another one that was crouching by her leg.

  "You're pregnant!" cried the first.

  "No kidding," snarled Polly. Snap! Good teeth, that girl had. EEP went scuttling off; she spit CR out in a hurry.

  "Be careful!" she warned. "These things are venomous. Poisonous, too."

  "How did you get in such a fix?" demanded the second.

  Polly stomped DRM and then fixed the second with a glare.

  "By screwing, how else?" She snapped at another acronym and swept her feet around wildly. The damned things were all over the place.

  "Not that, lass— 'tis obvious!" exclaimed the third.

  "Nay, we mean— " For a wonder, words failed the third; he was reduced to gesturing about him.

  "All of you shut up and do something useful!" bellowed Magrit. "If I'm not mistaken, the girl's about to give birth."

  I didn't think she was mistaken. She's a proper witch, Magrit; which, among other things, means she's been a midwife more times than you can count. She and Gwendolyn began untying Polly.

  Within seconds, Les Six were frantically trying to fight off venomous acronyms. I myself had no trouble. An acronym began scuttling toward me —RIIA, that one— I flickered my tongue, the acronym went elsewhere. Simple as that. Acronyms are terrified of salamanders. Actually, the nasty things generally ignore any kind of animal except humans, who are their natural prey.

  I heard Gwendolyn chuckle. "Nice move, Wittgenstein. Did you ever hear the one about the frying pan and the fire?"

  I maintained a dignified silence.

  * * *

  Eric Flint is the author of many novels and some short fiction.

  CLASSIC:

  Giant Killer

  Written by A. Bertram Chandler

  Illustrated by Karl Nordman

  Shrick should have died before his baby eyes had opened on his world. Shrick would have died, but Weena, his mother, was determined that he, alone of all her children should live. Three previous times since her mating with Skreer had she borne, and on each occasion the old, gray Sterret, Judge of the Newborn, had condemned her young as Different Ones.

  Weena had no objection to the Law when it did not affect her or hers. She, as much as any other member of the Tribe, keenly enjoyed the feasts of fresh, tasty meat following the ritual slaughter of the Different Ones. But when those sacrificed were the fruit of her own womb it wasn't the same.

  It was quiet in the cave where Weena awaited the coming of her lord. Quiet, that is, save for the sound of her breathing and an occasional plaintive, mewling cry from the newborn child. And even these sounds were deadened by the soft spongy walls and ceiling.

  She sensed the coming of Skreer long before his actual arrival. She anticipated his first question and as he entered the cave, said quietly, "One. A male."

  "A male?" Skreer radiated approval. Then she felt his mood change to one of questioning, of doubt. "Is it . . . he— ?"

  "Yes."

  Skreer caught the tiny, warm being in his arms. There was no light, but he, like all his race, was accustomed to the dark. His fingers told him all that he needed to know. The child was hairless. The legs were too straight. And —this was worst of all— the head was a great, bulging dome.

  "Skreer!" Weena's voice was anxious. "Do
you— ?"

  "There is no doubt. Sterret will condemn it as a Different One."

  "But— "

  "There is no hope." Weena sensed that her mate shuddered, heard the faint silken rustle of his fur as he did so. "His head! He is like the Giants!"

  The mother sighed. It was hard, but she knew the Law. And yet— This was her fourth child-bearing, and she was never to know, perhaps, what it was to watch and wait with mingled pride and terror whilst her sons set out with the other young males to raid the Giants' territory, to bring back spoils from the great Cave-of-Food, the Place-of-Green-Growing-Things or, even, precious scraps of shiny metal from the Place of Life-That-Is-Not-Life.