“I don’t feel tired. It would be fun to walk around and look at the old buildings.”
Mrs. Morgan laughed. “I’m afraid you might be disappointed in our simple village, child. We don’t have any buildings in Pacific Grove that are more than thirty years old.”
“Right,” said Amy. “Anyway, I’d like to walk around, maybe get a bit of fresh air.”
“I certainly think you’ve had enough fresh air for a few days, but as you wish.”
“Me, too,” said Three from the door of the parlor. “I want to go.”
The Chinese clothes were gone, and in their place Three wore a white blouse with pale blue pinstripes and tiny pearl buttons down the front, above a dark gray skirt of heavy wool and brown pointed boots that buttoned up the side. Her pale blonde hair had been washed, brushed, and pinned at the back of her head in a bun.
Mrs. Morgan shook her head. “Such energy! If only I had that same youthful vitality. Very well––attack the town, you giggling valkyries.”
Amy, Three, and Lim left the house and walked down Forest Avenue. The dirt lane passed through the commercial center of the village on a kilometer-long slope to the ocean. As they strolled closer to the ocean, the dull and regular thunder of waves on the shore increased, along with the number and variety of Victorian houses.
“Something wrong?” asked Three.
Amy shook her head. “It’s this place. This is where I grew up, but it’s not the same.”
“Of course not! This is like the land of the cave people. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some hairy ape in a tiger skin dragging a woman by her hair.”
“Number one, we don’t have tigers in California,” said Amy. “And number two, that cave man dragging thing is probably made up.”
Three cracked her knuckles in a very unladylike manner. “Made up or not, I hope someone tries it. I haven’t had a good fight in weeks.”
Lim glanced sideways at the pair of teenagers. “These are the strangest girls I have ever met,” she murmured to herself in Chinese.
Amy pointed at a white two-story house as they walked by. “I remember this place, but everything around it is different. No electrical wires strung across the sky. No Volvos and BMWs parked along both sides of the street, without even room to walk between them.”
Three nodded. “Flying cars are the worst, slamming down everywhere. Listen, just forget about it. Once we put our plan into action, we’ll be rolling in more credits than a dog has fleas.”
The street descended the hill and ended in a junction with the appropriately-named Oceanview Avenue. The dirt road curved along the rocky, uneven coast, and the girls joined a steady stream of casually strolling men and women. A pair of men with cigars in their mouths raised hats to the girls as they walked by, and the smell of burning tobacco mixed with the wet, fishy smell of the sea.
“This is Lover’s Point,” said Amy. “I recognize the beach and the rocks on the point.”
“It is called Lovers of Jesus Point,” said Lim. “The Christian people liked to give it that name.” The Chinese girl waved at a two-story building above the sand. “That is the bathhouse. It is very popular in the summer. The boats with glass bottoms are there on the small pier. Can you see them? My father says they are not good for fishing.”
Amy pointed at a Japanese-style building made of white plaster and dark brown wood in the center of the small peninsula.
“Is that a Chinese temple? That’s totally new to me.”
Lim smiled. “It is Japanese and a teahouse. When it is open, you can have tea and small Japanese food.”
“Weird,” said Three. “Looks like an oil-change place to me.”
The teenagers stopped on the street above the bathhouse, where a small beach curved west along the piled rocks like a fishhook. Each of the girls watched the waves foam onto the sand and hiss away, lost in her own thoughts and the warm fishiness of the sea breeze.
Amy shaded her eyes and stared out to sea and the gray line of clouds.
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” said Three. “But you have to move on. We have to move on.”
“You’re right––I don’t want to hear that.”
The railroad tracks ran along the coast, passing Lover’s Point and the small wooden passenger depot, and continued through a lumberyard and wide pastures dotted with a herd of black and white cattle.
Amy and Three followed Lim to a large white rectangular building that stood at the edge of the wide grasslands. They covered their noses at the sharp smell of cow manure and the thick, fungal odor of hay.
“What’s this joint?” asked Three.
Lim bowed. “Bodfish Diary. We can buy cheese and milk and butter.”
“Wait––this is the where the municipal golf course is in my time,” said Amy. “They should have never gotten rid of the cows. Hilarious. Imagine if some rich dude’s golf ball landed in a pile of manure!”
Lim stared at Amy. “What’s a golf?”
“Yeah,” said Three. “Or ‘manure.’ You can’t expect us to understand words like that.”
Amy sighed. “Never mind. Let’s finish the shopping.”
AMY NOTICED a strange package on Mrs. Morgan’s kitchen table when they returned. Tied with brown string, the bundle was about the size of small pumpkin and wrapped in coarse burlap.
Mrs. Morgan took the butter and milk from the girls, and stuffed them into the top of a waist-high wooden box. Cool white vapor floated out from the interior, and puffed away as she slammed the lacquered wooden lid.
“Is that a refrigerator?” asked Amy. “I didn’t know you had those back then. I mean, now.”
Mrs. Morgan smiled. “I’m not certain what you mean, dear. It’s an icebox.” She opened a large door at the lower front of the cabinet, and pointed at a square block of ice. “Not as fancy as what I’m sure you girls have in New York, but it works.”
“Cool,” said Three.
“Yes, it keeps everything very cool.”
“No, I meant––”
Amy elbowed Three in the ribs. “Don’t try to explain,” she whispered.
The Chinese girl, Lim walked to the kitchen table and pointed at the burlap package.
“Is this a delivery? Where should I take it, Mrs. Morgan?”
The older woman smiled. “Your father came by and brought it for Amy and Teresa. Apparently, it washed up on shore, and he thought it must have come from the shipwreck.”
“Really?!!”
Amy leaped at the package and unwrapped it in a flash to expose the gleaming silver cube of the transmogrifier. Apart from a coating of sand and a few scratches, the heavy cube was as featureless and shiny as before.
“A carbon converter?” said Three. “I didn’t know you had one of those!”
Mrs. Morgan frowned. “Yun Chow might have been mistaken. Are you certain it belongs to you? It doesn’t look like anything a young lady would have in her possessions.”
“Um … it’s a lamp,” said Amy, and touched the smooth top. “But I think it’s broken.”
Three pointed to a corner of the cube. “No, it isn’t––I can see the power light blinking right there. Green means the nuclear core is stable.”
Mrs. Morgan shook her head. “Teresa, my dear, I have no idea what you’ve just said.”
Amy smiled nervously and wrapped up the transmogrifier in the burlap cloth. She stuffed the heavy package into Lim Chow’s arms and pulled the Chinese girl and Three into the sitting room away from Mrs. Morgan.
“Take it as a gift,” she said to the Chinese girl. “But you have to always keep it a secret, and never tell anyone about it, even your family.”
Three stamped her foot. “You can’t give it to her,” she whispered. “In a backwards place like this, a carbon converter could make us rich!”
“Her father saved your life and mine,” hissed Amy. “I want to help people for once, instead of helping myself.”
“Why do I have to keep a lamp secret?” asked Lim Chow. “It
is a very common thing to have.”
“Because it’s not a lamp,” said Amy, and prodded the package in Lim’s hands. “It’s a … magical box that changes whatever you put on top into a cupcake. Put something like a rock right there, and after a few seconds, it will disappear. A cupcake will come out the side over here. Never touch it when it’s working, unless you want your fingers to become tiny cupcakes.”
Three shook her head and walked away. “Great. Just great.”
Lim Chow bowed in front of Amy. “Thank you. Please tell me, what is … ‘cupcake?’”
Chapter Eight
Many parsecs and dimensions ago, One had traded twelve slaves to a shady Kapetyn dealer for a pair of punishment cubes. Designed to treat the mental illnesses of cats and dogs through a combination of sensory deprivation and virtual reality projections, the large boxes were easily modified into an instrument of torture.
One stood outside the door of the punishment cube, her arms crossed and eyes fixed on a screen on the corridor wall. The image of a gray cat curled up into a ball flickered on the display.
“Traitor,” One said with a sneer.
She walked a few paces down the corridor to an identical display next to another sliding door, and watched a tan and black Siamese cat squirm inside an empty metal cube, his mouth open in a terrible snarl. His eyes were shut and spittle drooled from his open jaws.
Wilson trotted up to One and twitched his furry black tail.
“Is it working?”
One shook her head. “First tell me you’ve caught the flying pest.”
The black cat hung his furry head. “Not exactly, my Lady.”
“Don’t mumble! Yes or no?”
“No,” whispered the cat.
“And why not?”
Wilson sat on the deck and rubbed his furry face. “The tiny thing flew into the ventilation system! We thought about pumping the gas we use to poison space weevils into the vents, but that would have killed everyone on board, it being the ventilation system and everything.”
“A wise decision.”
“Then, I discovered that the little flying woman had raided our supply of chocolate. I came up with a plan to trap her using candy as bait. Sadly, she had eaten every single molecule of sweets. All we had for bait was a wad of used bubble gum that Murphy found under a chair in the cafeteria. That didn’t work.”
One turned red and pounded a fist on the wall. “All of my chocolate?!! Do you know what that means? I’ll squash the little thief like a rotten tomato!”
“Yes, my Lady,” said Wilson nervously. “After that, reports of the flying pest popped up all over the ship, from the laundry room to the engine compartment. But now …”
“Spit it out!”
“We haven’t seen the flying thing or heard a peep for hours. Maybe she escaped the ship, or died. No living creature can eat that much chocolate and survive, not even an exalted goddess like yourself, my Lady.”
One sighed and ran her fingers through her blonde hair to straighten it.
“Stop groveling. Why don’t you reprogram one of the portable scanners to look for chemical traces of sugar? You’ll find the body, whether it’s alive or dead.”
“Of course, my Lady! Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you’re as dumb as a bag of hammers?”
Wilson bowed. “Of course, my Lady. Silly me.”
“To return to your original question,” said One. “The punishment cube is functional, but the doltish cat inside isn’t talking, even when confronted with his greatest fear.”
Wilson glanced between One and the display screen on the wall, his long whiskers twitching.
“What fear would that be, my Lady? Freezing to death? Spiders? When he puts his hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was his best friend’s face?”
“You’ve been watching too many old movies,” said One. “His greatest fear is working behind the counter of a Slurp ’N Derp. Of all the possible phobias, this genius MacGuffin is horror-stricken at the thought of menial employment. An intellectual powerhouse forced into serving overpriced fish sticks and salmon gum to bored cats who only stop at his repulsive gas station because it has a toilet. He’s terrified at not being able to do his research––research stolen from me because of my idiotic, lazy crew. I should freeze and grind the lot of you into one enormous Slurp ’N Derp.”
“Slurp ’N Derp isn’t that bad,” said Wilson. He licked his lips with a pink tongue. “I could go for a box of fish sticks and carton of pond juice right now, with an extra pump of tasty pond flavor!” He noticed One’s steely-eyed gaze boring a hole through his head, and laughed nervously. “Of course, I was joking! It was a joke that I just made. I made it, and it was a joke. Joke! Ha, ha, ha … Joke?”
One rolled her eyes. She pressed a button below the display with a gleaming chrome finger of her mechanical arm, and leaned close to the image of the writhing Siamese cat.
“Had enough, MacGuffin? Tell me what you know about dimensional physics, and I’ll take away the pain. You’ll never have to serve egg creams or wash out the nasty toilet after a dog has used it, ever again. How does that sound? If you can’t say anything, just bang your head against the nearest hard surface. Twice for yes, once for no. How about any part of your body? MacGuffin, listen to me! Gah!” One slapped the wall in frustration, and stared down at Wilson. “Stay here and watch the prisoner. If anything spews out of his disgusting mouth like, ‘I give up,’ or ‘I surrender,’ or ‘Turn it off, turn it off!’ then come and find me.”
“If he says those things, should I turn it off, my Lady?”
“Yes!”
“What if he screams ‘gurgle, gurgle, gurgle’ and his head explodes? That can happen with too much time in the cube, or ‘the hot box’ as we like to call it. Come to think of it, too much pond juice also causes head explodation.”
One leaned over the black cat and scowled. “If any ‘explodation’ happens to either of my prisoners, it’ll be your turn in the punishment cube. Two weeks this time!”
Wilson stood on his furry hind legs and saluted. “Yes, my Lady!”
One resisted the urge to stomp back to her quarters, and simply walked away. Not because it would have been inappropriate to lose her temper in front of Wilson––she did that all the time––but because stomping across a metal deck in four-inch heels was impossibly bad for the ankles.
She wound her way through a maze of narrow corridors inside the Hare Twist, squeezing past large pipes, bundles of electrical wiring as thick as an elephant’s trunk, and bare light bulbs swinging from the ceiling. At one point, she had to jump to the side to escape a sudden and copious spray of black liquid from a leaking pipe.
One sighed and rubbed at a tiny black spot on her blouse. “If the engine starts on that water-logged ship of MacGuffin’s, I’m moving all my furniture and research equipment there and scuttling this interstellar garbage can. Designed by dogs means only good for dogs.”
A pair of cats in orange uniforms and black berets stood at either side of a tall, red-painted hatch. Both saluted as One turned the wheel-handle and stepped inside her quarters.
Her office and bedroom were decorated in a style which could only be described as “corporate vampire.” Heavy mahogany furniture upholstered in blood-red velvet clashed with cubist paintings and meters upon meters of soft black curtains on the walls. Dozens of artificial candles wavered, their orange light fluttering to mimic real flames. Scenes from cameras inside and outside the ship played on large displays placed at eye-level around the walls.
One slipped out of her high heels with an exhausted sigh, and strolled lazily across rugs made from polar bear, tiger, and lion hides.
Philip sat on the couch in the bedroom, head in his hands and sock-clad feet on a garish Tau Ceti rug decorated with stripes and interlocking spheres. At the sound of footsteps, he stood up.
“Thank you for the gift of clothing, Madame,” said Philip, pointing to his button-down shirt and
coffee-colored trousers. “And for rescuing me. This charity puts me in your debt.”
One smiled. Like a tigress after a satisfying meal, she stepped slowly across the carpet and stroked the teenager’s cheek.
“So young,” she murmured. “Even younger than when I first met you.”
Philip pushed away her hand. “I apologize, Madame, but I don’t believe that we’ve met.”
“Our souls have been together,” said One, reaching out again to touch Philip’s ear. “We have known each other forever, a pair of living forces that can be no more separated than day and night, sun and moon, asteroid miner and space weevil. I am she, and you are he.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m Amy Armstrong, and you’re Philip.”
“With all due respect, Madame, you’re not Amy Armstrong.”
One frowned. “I promise you, I am. And what is this ‘Madame’ business? Is it because I’m a grown woman standing in front of you, not a schoolgirl barely out of diapers? Are you afraid of the fact that I have more life, beauty, and vigor than the weedy child you call ‘Amy?’”
Philip pushed her hands away and backed up as One flirtatiously touched his face and hair.
“Speaking of that matter, Mada––I mean, miss––I would appreciate it very much if I could disembark this craft at the nearest coast, at your earliest convenience. My friends are lost at sea and I absolutely must search for them.”
One sighed. “I’d like to help you, dear Philip, I really would, but I’m afraid your search would be in vain. An unknown type of explosion caused your ship to crash and sink into the ocean. I’m sure you knew that already. I sent two platoons of my best-trained swimmers, but despite our best efforts there were no survivors. This came as an utter shock to me, and now to you.”
Philip’s cheeks turned red. “What?!! Impossible. All they had to do was swim. Swim up! And Nick? I saved her myself, by shoving her into my pressure suit!”
“Interesting,” said One. “By the way––and this is just theoretical, because the tiny woman is definitely dead––if Nick was wandering around this ship, is there something you could use to find her? Maybe a secret code word? A weakness for some kind of food that’s not chocolate? Or candy of any kind?”
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