Universe Vol1Num2

by Jim Baen's Universe

  "He was rolling around, trying to stand up, falling over, and the water was boiling around him," said Kevin. "And out in the deeper water I saw that big dark shape rising. Obviously the commotion was attracting it. Maybe it figured that Dexter was an injured animal or something."

  "I was, dammit!"

  "Now I was not going to let the monster catfish take my buddy, not without at least getting him to hold the hook while he was being swallowed," said Kevin. "So I jumped down there. Which turned out to be the luckiest decision I have ever made, because someone on the ridge, the owner or one of his game guards, started shooting at us."

  "Oh come on! Not likely," I said, as if the rest of the ancient mariner's story had been. "For what reason? For trespassing? Come on. Tell us another one."

  "Poaching," explained Kevin. "This is in a country where poachers use AKs, and shoot first. This isn't Fred from the village just nicking a few grouse or bit of venison from some bloated landowner. It is high value organized crime. Poachers are after rhino-horn or ivory and it is shoot-first-ask-questions-later stuff. If we hadn't been so totally bladdered we wouldn't have dreamed of doing what we were doing."

  "The weirdest thing about the whole scene," said Dexter, "was that before those shots I was wrestling with the catfish. And just after it happened the fish went limp. I don't think anything hit the fish, but maybe in my shock I'd smashed it against a rock or something. Catfish are nearly impossible to kill, but you can stun them."

  Kevin nodded. "We kind of both stopped thinking at that point. Well, if we'd been thinking we wouldn't have been there. As it was we just ran."

  "Ran—lugging that fish between us," said Dexter shaking his head. "I don't know why we didn't drop it but . . . well let's be honest, we weren't being too logical. I blame that mampoer. And the adrenaline. If I'd been thinking at all I would have dropped the fish and grabbed my pants. But as it was we were deep in the trees about five hundred yards from the waterfall before I ran out of breath. There we were, on the run, shaking, scared—and me with nothing but a fish to wear. The bastard on the ridge had lost sight of us. . . . Actually, he probably hadn't intended to hit us, just to frighten the shit out of us, in which he had succeeded admirably. He was still loosing off a few random shots so there was no way I was going back for my clothes. Near the river the bush was thick. Thorny as hell of course, but we were fairly safe unless they came down there looking for us, which I figured they probably would do, but it would take them a while to get there."

  "We decided to follow a run-off gulley away from the valley. When they came to look for us, we didn't want to be there any more. It was unsociable, but I have found I get like that when people are shooting at me. It was, like most of the decisions we'd taken that day, superficially sensible."

  Dexter snorted. "Depending on your definition of sense or if you were not wearing trousers while trying to carry a large floppy slimy fish up a valley full of haak en steek thorns, jiggyjolas—what you'd call brambles—and nettles. I know nettles. I'm a lousy botanist but I'll never forget them after being caught short on a field-trip and thinking those furry leaves would make a great substitute for the 'loo paper I didn't have. I remember those leaves well. I have reason to never forget them."

  He winced at the memory, before continuing. "I still clung to that fish. I'd lost my clothes, damn near my life, the big one had got away and all we had to show for it was this fish. At least it was ten times the size of the fish in the brood stock pond. Actually by the weight of it it might well have been a record. And it was all I had to wear. We hadn't heard the sound of shots for some time, and so we decided to get out of the impenetrable undergrowth and risk slightly more open ground. And then Kevin froze. I nearly rammed a catfish spine into his back. I started to swear—"

  "Did swear," said Kevin, trying to look deeply shocked, and also failing at that.

  "And then I shut up. Because just above the Grewia bush was a pair of horns. All we could see were the tips. I'm not kidding. They were at least two yards from tip to tip. We're fish people, not big game zoologists. But even we knew that big solitary buffalo are the worst and the most dangerous kind of buffalo. This one must be enormous with horns that size . . . and I hoped like hell that it was solitary. It could only run after one of us, and I hoped it would be Kevin. If only that had been a loaded catfish."

  "We'd still have been standing there to this day," explained Kevin, "Frozen like a pair of statues holding a fish, if the right hand horn hadn't moved off . . . Showing us a different left-hand horn . . . and the face of a wildebeest. What you'd call a gnu. Two complete large mammal ignoramuses us, we couldn't even tell the difference."

  "They don't have fins," said Dexter, dismissively.

  Kevin nodded in agreement. "And everyone—even us—knows that a gnu is quite the nicest creature in the zoo. But that was enough for us. We had figured out, finally, that being here was as dumb as rocks, and if we didn't get shot we might just get taken out by the wildlife. We made a beeline for the fence—"

  "Which was when we saw the error of our ways," said Dexter. "The reason the dangerous wild animals were in and not roaming Van der Plank's orchards: the twelve-foot electric fence. Now I don't know if you English people are familiar with the electric stock fence. It's got a pulsed charge, high volts, low amps, shouldn't kill you unless you have a heart condition, but not the sort of thing you'd want to touch twice, let alone try and climb through. Mostly the fences have low strands a few inches apart, and the spaces get wider as the fence gets higher. At waist high, they're about six inches apart. Not easy to get through. Still, about five yards from the fence was the dirt road, safety, and a way back to our vehicle and some clothes. So we got clever. We collected a bunch of dry dead branches, and by wedging one in the chest-high wire, and raising it a few inches we could then raise the next one down a few more inches with the next piece of branch, and so on. They were old, rotten termite-eaten branches and it took us a while, but we rigged a gap that a man could step through cautiously. Kevin tried it out and he got through fine. Then it was my turn. I didn't have any undercarriage protection, so I was being very cautious. I didn't want any dangly bits having a shocking experience. What I hadn't figured on was the fact that I had this big floppy fish with me. I was halfway through and I asked Kevin to come and take the fish—which he did, reaching through the fence. But the tail touched the wire as he took it. It made slimy, wet, good contact."

  Kevin raised his eyes to heaven. "And then we had a divine moment. We had a fish resurrection. The fish I was holding went from limp to thrashing like a mad thing. I was getting shocked every time it touched the wire, and every time it touched the wire it did an imitation grand-mal epileptic seizure and tried some air-swimming—lashing that tail around and making more contact with the fence. In this thrashing process it slapped Dexter and he forgot he was straddling an electric fence and he stood up, and grabbing the fish. The dead branch construct collapses and three of us—the fish, Dexter and me are doing a St Vitus' dance with the fence."

  "Somehow we ended up, all three of us, on the right side of the fence, sitting in the middle of a dusty road, under the threshing fish. A fish that wanted desperately to return to the fishy waters of its birth and get away from these lunatics."

  "And then," said Kevin, "barreling along the road comes a taxi. Now this is not one of your civilized black cabs that will just overcharge you and bore you to tears with their charmingly informative conversation. This is not even an after midnight minicab driven by a kat-chewing Somali refugee. This, my friends, is a South African taxi. It's a minibus, officially designated to hold fifteen people. When two of them crashed in Maritz street they hospitalized forty-seven, and at least ten passengers just walked away. The vehicles are the last word in racing heavy-duty off-road 4X4 go-anywhere cars, only topped by the company car. They have four bald tires, more pirated and stolen parts than Blackbeard, they're held together with fence-wire and spit, and they are all driven by future world champion ral
ly drivers, if they live through the next ten seconds. Oh, and the drivers are all armed to the teeth in case of deadly danger, like another taxi stealing their fare. Taxi war shoot-outs are a regular feature of South African newspaper stories. If you see one of these vehicles, run away. Well, run, if you're not sitting in the middle of the road in a shocked and dazed state under a squirming slimy catfish, that is. We just, all three of us, managed to roll to the edge of the road and get left in a cloud of choking dust. And then the vehicle skidded and swerved to a halt. We thought we had a lift, and I was just standing up saying to Dexter that maybe we should rather walk, anyway . . . when the occupants of the taxi fell out of the door."

  He grinned at the dreadlocked Dexter, who was looking at the ceiling. "There was Dexter dressed in his best fish . . . and there were at least twenty elderly to middle-aged large Zulu mamas in their blue and white Apostolic Zionist church finery—which is a special uniform outfit that makes sure no one can see anything indecent like an ankle. They all had these big blue and white golf umbrellas. They took a long look at the prince of modesty and they charged in, swinging their umbrellas, ululating and yelling at the nudist pervert. I behaved like a true drinking friend and sat on the edge of the road and watched him try to hold a fish over his head, his little buttocks twinkling in the sun as he ran from a mob of rampaging blue behemoths. I laughed until I thought I'd die.

  "He took shelter in a culvert pipe that went under the road. They didn't want to get their finery dirty, but they took turns for a good ten minutes at trying to poke him out with their umbrellas."

  Dexter shook his head. "There I was at the mercy of the mob, lying in a pipe which had been half filled with mud, with about two inches of clearance above my head, if I held it sideways, in about an inch of glutinous frog-filled water, clinging to a now water-revived catfish, with umbrella ferrules poking at my feet. It was not a happy place to be, I promise you. Anyway, a little later Kevin came along and told me they'd gone. And so had the damned catfish. Now I was not, at this stage, about to give up on that fish. Not after what we'd been through. It was going to be injected with pituitrin before nightfall! So I leopard-crawl squirm after it. Down this end the pipe was about three quarters mud, and I couldn't quite get a grip on its slimy tail. So I yelled to Kevin to come and grab it at the other end of the pipe. And then something squirmed past me and over my foot—not the catfish because I was touching the bloody thing's tail. It's a snake, I figure. I don't know, it might just as easily have been a leguvaan, a monitor lizard, but I have a thing about snakes. I wasn't going to stay in that pipe, and I wasn't out going backwards either."

  Kevin's shoulders shook. "The pipe just about erupted. One moment, there I was standing in the ditch and the catfish head was sticking out of this half-pipe full of mud, and I was just getting a grip on it, and the next moment there was this scream fit for Halloween Three and Dexter came out of there like a champagne cork in a shower of yellow mud. He was gibbering like mad and he clung onto to me like a sailor does to his wife after three months at sea. And then we looked up and realized that this big white Mercedes had quietly driven up and two blond beautifully coiffured women were sitting there staring at us with their mouths open.

  "We all looked at each other in one of those frozen long, long moments, and then before I could say anything, or Dexter could cover his dignity with a fish, the driver wound down her window, and a flood of expensive scent and air-conditioned air came washing out over us. In a voice that could be used to counter global warming the woman says 'Sies!' In case you couldn't guess that means 'sis!' but in Afrikaans, which has a lot more feeling than you can cram into English. 'What do you think you are doing?' she asks. The make-up on her face was plastered on as thick as the clayey-mud was on us, but it was possibly more carefully applied. It was cracking at the edges from her sucking lemons expression.

  "Now, there I was, standing in a ditch next to a rural public road clutching a five foot struggling fish, covered in mud, with a naked man clinging onto me. What sort of answer did she think she'd get? I didn't like her tone. It offended my mampoer impaired dignity. So I said 'Darling, what does it look like? But now that you're here, get your kit off and join us. Dexter can have you two. I think I'd rather go on having it off with the fish.'"

  He took a pull of his beer and jerked his thumb at his partner in crime. "Dexter blew her a kiss and she did a damned good imitation of a catfish."

  "I didn't think anyone's mouth could go that wide. We gave her a fine one fingered salute," said Dexter, "while the two of them gaped at us."

  Kevin nodded. "It must have taken her a good minute to find her wits. Then she screamed: 'I'm going to find my husband to come and have you arrested!' And she floored it and left us in the dust."

  "We took cover after that," said Dexter. "If we even thought we heard a car, but we only had about half a mile to walk to the farm gate. And then we knew we were home free, as it was Sunday and only our friend Van der Plank was around. We were starting to feel quite triumphant. We had overcome! So, instead of putting the fish into the hatchery and digging out some clothes, which is what I had thought was a good idea, we walked up to Van der Plank's thatched gin-palace and pounded on the door, proudly holding the fish between us like a very muddy, slimy medal of honor."

  Kevin smiled reminiscently. "The door opened and we spilled into the white flokati carpets out of the bright sunlight dazzle . . . and the two elegantly dressed women from the Merc started screaming at us in chorus. That's when we dropped the fish. Onto its back. It flipped over, and, as if it was returning to primal waterweed, it set off with a slime, mud and blood trail across that white fluffy carpet, straight for Van der Plank's wife and daughter."

  "Being real he-men we turned and ran like hell," said Dexter. "We got into the truck and got out of there as fast as it would carry us. Didn't stop until we were just off the freeway, when I got into some trousers, before, as our luck would have had it, we got stopped by a traffic policeman."

  Kevin threw up his hands. "There was nothing else we could have done anyway. 'Cause when we dropped the fish onto its back we realized that he would pretty useless as a mama-brood-fish."

  Dexter nodded. "We really should have checked the sex of that fish a little earlier."

  ****

  "An amazin' tale," said MacParrot. "Och, the part aboot the catfish bein' related to the Loch Ness monster. Happen I've some pictures—"

  "Last orders please!" shouted the barman.

  In twenty minutes we'd be out in the cold night air of South London. We needed fortification against that. Or so we thought anyway. When I got to the bar the barmaid leaned over and pointed to a chubby little fellow resting in the corner. "The man wants a word. About fishing, he said."

  It would seem that mine host, the owner of the pub, had long ears. Closing time meant closing time unless you were invited to stay after the doors are locked. In which case it is a private party, at least in beady eye of the law . . . It's a fiction you can get away with sometimes. It turned out that Kevin and Dexter had not been the only ones listening in to the tales of others, and that mine host was part of brotherhood of the angle.

  There is always an angle, especially at about one- thirty in the morning after a large number of pints. And the ancient mariner's crew had shed his catfish, but mariner himself still wore the tooth-scarred submersible about his neck.

  Of course, the tooth-scars on the submersible are nothing compared to what the Loch Ness Monster could have done to it. But that is another tale, along with our encounters with that secretive organization, the Brotherhood of the Angle. The story of lock-in and the great Loch Ness fishing expedition is not one lightly embarked on. That's for our next episode.

  ****

  Eric Flint is the author of many novels and some short fiction. He has also edited a number of anthologies. Dave Freer has written a number of novels and short stories. Andrew Dennis has co-authored books with Eric Flint. This is the first time the three have worked toget
her.

  To see Eric Flint's works sold through Amazon, click here

  To see Dave Freer's works sold through Amazon, click here

  To see Andrew Dennis' works sold through Amazon, click here

  To read more work by these authors, visit the Baen Free Library at: http://www.baen.com/library/

  Introducting

  Stories Title: Decaf and Spaceship, To Go

  Author: Katherine Sanger

  Illustrated by Barb Jernigan

  I always knew the world would end while I was trapped in the Starbucks' drive through. With as much time as I spent there, the odds were definitely in its favor. But it still surprised me that afternoon to see the silver, egg-shaped craft materialize in the parking lot next to me.

  I placed my order at the little voice-destroying speaker box and pulled forward. The woman in front of me was already at the window. She had her door open (poor depth perception, I guessed), and I heard her complaining.

  "No, no, it was an iced vanilla chai soy latte and a hot vanilla white mocha chai soy latte." She was still shaking her blonde bouffant head when her Suburban vanished, taking her with it. Before I could exhale the gulp of air I had taken when the SUV had popped out of existence, something appeared in the line ahead of me.

  The first word that came into my head was "alien." The second, third, and fourth were "oh my God."