Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 1

by Eric Flint

  The only bit they get right is the patrons. After all, Sheila was in.

  In truth, the motorcycling fraternity, while apt to be a little boisterous after a few drinks, tends in the main to like good-quality beer in pleasant surroundings with no interruptions to the serious business of sinking pint after pint. So should anyone be unwise enough to start a brawl, he will find that his tendencies to violence are curtailed, very rapidly, by the application of just sufficient force to pitch him headlong into the middle of next week. Frequently, the applier of said force need not even set down, nor spill, his drink to do so.

  Finally, the ominous silence and threatening stares bit can be disposed of neatly with two short phrases, thusly: jukebox full of heavy metal and, further: Real Ale. I need not dilate much on the business of the jukebox, save to note that no silence can be considered ominous with the magnificently camp Saxon as a backing track. Nor, for that matter, can it be considered silent.

  Real Ale deserves mention here. It is a truth seldom disputed that the general run of British beer is pretty damn good. Sundry Europeans do better lagers, the Irish have mastered stout beyond the ken of other races, and there are other excellent brews from points around this globe of ours. But for sheer depth and variety of beer-drinking experience there is nowhere like dear old Blighty.

  Yet even here there is a yen for further and better things, a striving for unattainable perfection in a pint glass, and to this end the Real Ale movement—no artificial aids, no synthetic raw materials—was founded.

  The stuff's potently dangerous, too. It doesn't seem any stronger than the mass-produced and often perfectly acceptable stuff. It just tastes better. A lot better. And goes down easier. And since It's often on proper pumps, not the gas-powered kegs—which I'd suspect of being the Devil's work but I rather imagine His Infernal Majesty probably draws the line well before that—it goes down a lot easier, too.

  Oh, damn it all, I shall simply have to digress at this juncture. Look, you can use a bottle of carbon dioxide to force beer out of a keg if you want. I'm not going to stop you. I just don't want to be around you, and, not to put too fine a point on it, downwind of you. That gas has to go somewhere, right? Also, the upwelling of the noxious gas from your throat—assuming you are belching and not exploding right there in the pub—does unpleasant things to you. You get insensible with drink (rather than just drunk, which is fine and dandy) a lot faster on the gas-keg stuff.

  Not so with Real Ale. You don't notice how bladdered you're getting until the eighth pint or so, when you suddenly realise how much you've actually had while enjoying a convivial evening.

  At which point it can go one of two ways. You can bid the company good night, wend a pleasant way home o'er field and moor, sleep the sleep of the just and awaken feeling little the worse for wear since you didn't just drink eight pints laced with artificial colours and preservatives and probably monosodium glutamate into the bargain.

  And, perhaps, in some isolated community of eremites on a remote island in the North Atlantic, there is someone who actually does this. The rest of the world looks into the bottom of the eighth pint glass and remarks "good stuff, this" and gets on with the second half of the evening. This frequently ends—true stories all—in trying to teach sheep to sing, deciding that a little rock-climbing at four in the morning while drunk is a good idea, or asking a bobby if his head goes all the way to the top of his helmet. Oh, how we laughed on our way to the cells.

  For cultural reasons that I'll not go into here mostly because they're pretty boring, bikers like real ale. So a biker pub will have about three times the variety of any other establishment, and some of them will lurk like land mines for the unwary drinker with alcohol percentages as much as twice the strength of mass-produced beer.

  Such was the scene as I emerged from the traps, discreetly checking the adjustment of my dress. A few hardy souls awaiting the lunchtime pies and determined to lubricate their throats ready for the repast, tattoos much in evidence—for once, Sheila did not stand out from the crowd—and Modi and Magni getting their drinks in at the bar. Now, although they'd come under the influence of a culture that consisted entirely of teenage boys—in spirit if not chronology—they were, in fact, thousands of years old and of divine origins to boot. So there is no excuse for what they were doing.

  "Sheila," I murmured discreetly as I joined her at the table, "have you told them about that stuff?"

  "I like to think of it as an interesting test of divine omnignizance," she said, her smile even more unduly malicious than ever.

  I looked again. There, at the bar, were two Norse gods. Presently in leathers and studs and, bluntly, not much removed from the rest of the clientele. They looked younger, of course. A lot younger, which might have proven an interesting diversion if they'd been carded, but then biker pubs tend not to bother much anyway. The kind of underage drinker who's not intimidated by a roomful of Hell's Angels and similar types is also the kind who'll be sensible about things. And given the trend—then in its infancy—of putting engine management computers in everything that travelled on wheels, the older bikers liked to have a few teenagers around the place to deal with "that Japanese crap," as they were wont to refer to it.

  Returning to the point at hand, Modi and Magni were double parked, with two pints apiece of cloudy yellow fluid. Remember what I told you about Real Ale? The Dog and Bikechain also served a couple of lines of Real Cider. Now, I know some of you colonial sorts think "cider" is just the name for apple juice and "hard cider" is what you get when you ferment it a little, but I'm here to warn you not to be misled. Real Cider is best handled with care, no matter what the label says. Drinking it is like having your brain shelled by 155mm high-explosive apples.

  The brand Modi and Magni were drinking like it was apple juice is notorious for its deceptive qualities. One pint, and you were a king. Two pints, and you were a god. Three pints, and you were—personal experience again—a simple shepherd named Jethro, whiling away the downland afternoons amid the sun and the breeze in the company of your chorus of singing sheep. It was only a short step below Scrumpy in the Kahnian hierarchy of drinking, roughly equivalent to theatre-level nuclear strikes.

  (Scrumpy, Real Cider for Real Men, fermented with Real Meat in the barrel, is the drinking equivalent of strategic thermonuclear exchanges. About the only way you can get drunker is on peanut-butter-and-151-rum cocktails. To finish off the thermonuclear war metaphor, this is the one that leaves the horribly mutated survivors scrabbling in the ruins for cockroaches to eat.)

  "Should we stop them?" I wondered aloud, mentally reviewing the merely mortal tomfooleries of my nights on the stuff. "Never mind what'd happen if we had two drunk gods around the place. I've been hoping we could talk them out of this fool stunt we agreed to and if they get a load of Dutch courage down them, that's going to be hard."

  "I thought you'd say that," Odin said, sitting down next to me with a glass in his hand, "so I thought I'd remind you that I still have eyes everywhere. And some of then really do say nevermore."

  I began to stammer out a protestation of innocence, but the Aesir-turned-gameshow-host had vanished in some divinely ineffable manner.

  "No, you've not got the Dee-Tees," Sheila said, and I noticed that she was looking a little pale. "He really did just appear to you."

  "Bugger," I said, "I think It's time to get a good solid load on, then. See if the pies are on, I'll get a round in."

  I shall not record Sheila's comments on the unlikeliness of this eventuality. They were defamatory, unladylike, and hurtfully accurate. In my defense I will say that I was, in fact, scared shitless.

  * * *

  The next hour or two passed in an agreeable blur of real ale and the jukebox on random play. Oh, and a pie or two. We talked around the problem, but didn't really approach the heart of the matter, which was that we had a probably insane deity watching over our shoulder while we took on a serpent that was destined, according to legend, to destroy the world. And if
I'd divined the meaning of certain cryptic remarks I'd heard during the previous episode correctly, this was scheduled for 2012. A comfortingly long way off from the perspective of the early nineties, I think you'll agree, but looking a little more, shall we say, immediate at the time of this writing.

  Be that as it may, as real-ale-fueled bonhomie took hold I found myself warming somewhat to Modi and Magni, even though they had every appearance of teenagers. They were, in fact, several thousands of years old. And damn my eyes if they couldn't hold their drink like gentlemen. I'd heard of Valhalla's feasting and boozing and such and the game with the lady's pigtails and the axes, and it seemed like it was a more dignified affair than I'd been told. Certainly more dignified than the average legal knees-up, which have been known to end with senior judges puking in gutters.

  Anyway, it was Sheila who got us back on topic. "We're going to need a boat," she said.

  "You mean a bigger boat," I averred. This particular meme was going even then, in the time before the dark times, before the world wide web, before AOL. After all, the movie in which it had, in fact, never been said, had come out over fifteen years previously. And a powerful film it had been. To this day, I won't have water by me, lest there be sharks in it. Sharks can't swim in alcohol, too low a specific gravity. They either sink or can't breathe, I forget which. Or possibly they just become too mellow to qualify as actual sharks and expire from semantic confusion.

  "I've got a bigger boat," someone said. I looked around for the source of this gravelly interjection.

  "Hang on," I said, "aren't you dead?" Not only had I seen him expire on the silver screen several times, I knew for a fact that he'd passed away in real life as well.

  He laughed heartily. "I don't play a fisherman in the movies, I am one in real life. The actor died, I live on."

  "Well, we've met one Ahab already," Sheila put in, "the tale wants little but we meet another."

  I harrumphed. "If Ricardo Montalban pitches up, I quit and Odin can sue my pasty white English ass."

  "Call me McCann, here and now; It's the name I go by," said our new friend, "and I've got some worms I can put in your ears if you really want me to." The resulting leer was one that still troubles me in the small hours of the morning on nights when the pills aren't working.

  "Hold on," Sheila said, banging her pint down in the universal rhetorical signal for Serious Point Being Made. "We've already run into one Ahab so far in this business. Two if you count that idiot Hudson. So you've got about thirty seconds to get yourself taken seriously, mate."

  "Ah, well, you've met the game-show host that's grandfather to these two?"

  We nodded. The Norse reprobates in question took the opportunity to make assorted devil-horns gestures to remind us of their presence.

  "Well," McCann said, "I'm the same sort of thing. And since the last big outing for my own personification was the movie you keep referring to, though can't say I cottoned to it myself, that's what I end up looking like. You think there are any white whales in nature? There wasn't even one in Melville's fine opus. Still, the great white whale ended up white. I hear from our wood-butcher friend from Minnesota that you've met Richard Milhous Moby as he's taken to calling hisself?"

  Further nodding, and in my case assessment of the likeliest routes to the nearest exit, allowed that this was indeed true. And I was beginning to warm to McCann at that, he not sharing the popular prejudice against Melville much as I did. Just so long as he didn't start mangling "Farewell and Adieu" in my hearing.

  "Well, back in the day, when it was just me and him in the South Sea fishery, he was as ordinary a whale-fish as you could imagine. Oh, there was a madman or two after him, and those are your modern-day Ahabs, but I was there as the spirit of man's vengeance on the fishy fiend. Been doing that for, oh, the longest time." He grinned the grin of ages long-gone.

  "Mammal fiend," I put in. I'd been at pains to make that point last time around, and damn me if I wasn't going to get it in again.

  "It's got fins and it swims," McCann said, waving the point aside with as fine a display of Beer Wisdom as I'd ever seen. "It's a fish."

  "Seagoing mammal or fish," I replied, "It's still aquatic, and that means hunting it requires a boat. A fishing boat if one can be found of suitable size, although if you can manage some manner of battleship I think we might have enough boat. Barely. I've seen this fish."

  "Sheeeee-it," McCann said. "Didn't I say I'd got a bigger boat?"

  "How did you know we needed a boat?" Sheila asked, picking up on a point that had evaded me entirely.

  "Man like me, he gets to hear about these things. I got told you needed a big fish hunted."

  "Told by who?" Modi asked.

  "By whom, " Sheila corrected him, causing him to adopted the chastened-teenager mien again. Deity he might be, but the heavy metal culture he was one of the gods of was profoundly scared of girls. She returned her regard to McCann. "The question stands, who told you?"

  Again, that grin of deep, deep time. "Don't need t'be tole, missy," he said, "Comes to fishing, man like me just knows. The Essex was sunk, I was there. Hemingway's Old Man of the Sea, I cut bait fer him. You went after the Pike, I was there."

  "Didn't see you," I grumped.

  "There could've been a brass band playing and a chorus line of badgers doing the can-can and you'd've missed 'em," McCann said, betraying a knowledge of that night's adventures not quite canny for one not present. "Drunk, y'see? And still a civilian."

  "You could've helped out," I said, still a little miffed.

  "I did. Didn't you find yourself having a few extra drinks that night? Weren't you drawn to that river? Gotta keep that ineffability goin'. 'Sides, you need a good load of drink down you for this manner o" fishing."

  Now Sheila was glaring hard at him. "I think you need to explain all this," she said, with a vocal talent that showed that the legal profession's gain was the schoolmarming game's loss.

  McCann's first response was a long and wheezing laugh. "You never noticed how fishing's a drunk's game? Mental vibrations, missy, mental vibrations."

  My respect for the gnarled old salt went up a notch or two. "Missy" applied to Sheila was pretty close to male chauvinist condescension, and that was a subject on which she had Views, not to say conditioned reflexes of gratuitous violence.

  Sheila's eyes narrowed. Clearly her goat was not to be got this afternoon, although there was a definite tone of menace in her tone, with a side order of I will be raising that with you later, sunshine. "I say again, explain. What vibrations? Why drink?"

  "The Enemy," McCann said, "is opposed to all manner of thinking. Philosophy. Higher truth. Reason. They can smell it. Hemingway was right about that, at least, even if he couldn't string a decent sentence together. To catch fish, you have to be as simpleminded as a fish. They can smell sentience, and that's how they know their enemy. You can plan your fishing all you want, but when you're on the water, you've to empty your mind. Drink's the best way." Again, that grin that echoed of eons not kenned by the wit of mortal man. "So if you were going to trouble the Pike in his fishy lair, you had t'be drunk."

  I nodded. "Logical," I said. Of course, no logic is any better than its premises, and at least one or two of the ones McCann was occupying were perhaps not in tenantable condition. "Still, we're no closer than we were to the issue of, for one, a boat of sufficient size or any reasonable plan for laying this serpent to rest. I presume we can't kill it?"

  McCann shrugged. "We can try, but you can't kill it completely. It's as much idea as sea-serpent. Can't kill ideas." He shrugged again.

  Of course, this was in the days before the Internet evolved enough to kill ideas stone dead, emasculating them into meme-hood, pasting them over a million pointless blogs until they smeared into the grey nothingness of cliché. It may be that LiveJournal and MySpace are the greatest weapons humanity has ever devised in the fight against the insidious predators on human thought that regard us, with their cold and cool intelligences
, as wanton boys do flies. What price the fanatic when the object of his fanaticism turns up as the results of on-line quizzes?

  But I digress.

  "Supposing," I said, "we ignore the fishy part of the serpent and just try to weaken the idea? Make jokes about it, send it up, alter perceptions?"

  "Take too long," Sheila averred, waving a hand in the direction of Modi and Magni. Each of them was working on a fourth pint of snakebite—a mix of bitter and cider, and dangerous stuff—made with cloudy cider, just to make it more dangerous still. "Look at these two. How many centuries before they changed into this?"

  They looked back glassy-eyed, and I noticed that the devil-horns gestures were getting a little wobbly. "About another pint and a half before they're single-celled life-forms, the rate they're going," I said, "but I take your point. Still, the fact that the project is going to take years shouldn't daunt us unduly. Nothing worthwhile was ever done quickly, and all that."

  "And of course, you're in the warm and dry while you scribble away." There was a tone of accusation in Sheila's voice that betrayed an essential unfairness in her attitude to gender roles. All very well for her to insist she didn't have to be trammelled by traditional feminine roles, but just you try and be less than a manly man in her presence.