by Jenn Thorson
Rolliam Tsmorlood slammed a fist into the terminal and the whole ship dropped into subservient acquiescence. The walls stilled. From the floor, a screeching turbine wound down to a whimper. Bertram peered from under the protective shelter of his own elbow, his right ear ringing.
The captain answered it. “Protostar model 340-K,” he explained. “Very rare. Only two others still operational cross-galaxy.”
“The computer system?” Bertram asked.
“The ship,” the man said, tapping something into the terminal. Bertram sighed. His mind, he was learning, was riddled with muddy recesses. And he supposed he’d need to produce some solid theories about the origin of this one, if he ever planned to write that book.
Maybe the black-clad alien was symbolic of Bertram’s fear of the unknown. Or of mortality. Or a lifetime of repressed, pent-up hostility. Maybe even resentment, he considered, of the very same high-powered educational system that had driven him to madness in the first place.
Of course, if Bertram were a Freudian, he’d have theorized that the captain was the Id, the personification of the dark, untamed part of the mind responsible for basic human drives. Only Bertram wasn’t a Freudian. And, anyway, he’d never pictured the Id quite so brisk and sarcastic.
Bertram made a mental note to include a Freudian among his book’s support staff.
“So, it’s pronounced … ‘Tssssmore-lood,’ huh?” Bertram said, attempting that slight click of the “T” he’d heard the man do. A “T” that was there, but not there, sliding into the “S” like it depended on it for survival. The result sounded a lot like somebody had just cracked open a new bottle of soda-pop. “Rolliam.”
The alien raised a suspicious, almost translucent eyebrow. “Rollie, if you must,” he mumbled. He gave Bertram barely a glance before returning to the computer.
Rollie. Didn’t sound quite like the kind of nickname you’d readily associate with a six-foot-four, weapon-wielding, alien ex-con. Also not very Iddish … Idly … Idesque. Bertram shrugged and offered his most affable smile. “So, Rollie. I was wondering: what exactly were you in for?”
Silence. Stillness. Only Rolliam Tsmorlood’s weird gold-orange eyes moved as they flicked across the data on the screen.
Bertram hesitated. Should he repeat the question? What if he hadn’t heard? Then again, if he had, what if Bertram accidentally ticked off the most volatile part of his own mind? What then?
After a moment, Bertram cleared his throat and tucked the smile back on. “Um, on Rhobux-7, I mean. What … what were you—”
“Forced entry into private property. Illegal seizure and removal of goods. Use of unlicensed armament with criminal intent. Three points of assault …” Rollie Tsmorlood glared at the screen and scrolled the images down.
Bertram nodded, wishing he hadn’t asked.
Rollie tapped the screen, selecting something from the page, which began to load. “Um, unauthorized combustion of a Non-Organic Simulant,” he continued. “Failure to extinguish said Non-Organic in a ‘No Combustion’ zone. Failure to surrender on command of RegForce Officer. Seizure of official armaments. Attempted fragmentation of a RegForce Officer. Inadvertent detonation of livestock. And willful destruction of a Regimental Enforcement vehicle.”
“Ah,” said Bertram.
“Kidnapping a member of the Wykanian royal party,” Rollie went on absently. “Removal of said royal personage outside Realm of Regality in violation of Farquotch Treaty of 35,272. Irreparable damage to third-party flora vending establishment. Leaving planetary atmosphere without proper clearance. Abandonment of Royal Personage outside regal no-fly zone. Piloting interplanetary cruise vessel with lapsed inspection. Piloting ICV with lapsed registration. Piloting ICV that no longer meets GCU ICV Travel Bureau Safety Standards Regulations. And Navigating While Inebriated.” He leaned back in the chair, still contemplating the screen.
“Let me guess,” said Bertram, “you pled innocent.”
The captain’s eyes flicked up distractedly. “What? Oh. No. The NWI was complete rubbish but …” Something whirred from the computer unit and he sat up to face the monitor. “Right, well, Tryfling, looks like this is it.”
A new screen had formed, one of flashing oranges and lime greens. The writing was just out of focus, characters that seemed beyond Bertram’s mental grasp by only the breadth of a cognitive fingertip. It was close, so close. There was too much animation. There were photos of well-lit food and drink Bertram couldn’t make sense of. A video played, featuring life-forms he couldn’t understand. It was too much at one time. The whole thing made him flinch, twitch and squint.
“Like I said before, we’re dealing with Podunk-17,” Rollie explained. “Not much to work with, really, in terms of options. In fact, this is the only boozer I could find on the Podunk Uninet. So, what say you, Ludlow?”
One meaningless symbol after another covered the screen. And still the flashing greens and orange and a swirl of garble. Bertram tried to unfocus his eyes like he’d done for those 3-D books that had been so popular in the 90s. Maybe that would help.
“Ludlow?” The voice was concerned.
The gum, Bertram thought suddenly. The gum would have made the difference.
And it was amazing, he considered, how this dream state was such a sucker for detail! Most dreams would have let the fact that Bertram had never really chewed the gum just blow on by—one insignificant moment in a string of nonsensical, ever-shifting scenes. But not this one. He’d experienced nothing like it before. He genuinely began to believe he should have chewed the gum.
He subtly touched his shirt pocket and felt the cylinder’s smooth form through the plaid flannel. It was still there: remarkable! And more surprising, it hadn’t changed into a garden slug, a toothbrush, a copy of his fourth grade report card or a million other non-sequiturs that any other dream would have effortlessly tossed into the mix.
All he needed now was the right moment to get the gum, without tipping his hand. He just hoped he could recall enough of these details for a later, more thorough examination.
If he ever came out of it, that was.
“Imagine: only one canteen on the whole planet, and in this day and age, too,” Rollie was still marveling. He had pulled up what looked like a navigational program and was shuffling through virtual star charts. “That’s why it seems zonked to me—them sending you to Podunk to start your World-Saving and all. I mean a place like that, so new to the GCU and suspicious of everybody; they’re not exactly going to greet a Tryfling with osculation and open upper limbs.”
Given the creatures he’d seen so far, Bertram viewed that as a plus.
But amusement had overtaken Rollie’s angular features. “Fact, more I think on it,” he said, “almost sounds like the Seers sent you somewhere knowing full-well you’d get into trouble.”
Still chuckling, he clicked on the coordinates and the terminal began to rev itself up again. The walls wobbled. The floor joggled. Another compartment opened up and spewed.
Then with a second click, all of the ship’s dials neatly reset themselves.
“We’re off, Ludlow,” Rollie announced.
Oh, I’m off, all right, Bertram thought. In fact, it was the first sensible thing Rollie had said to Bertram since they’d met.
Bertram peered out the portal window and watched the stars whiz past. It reminded him of the starfield screensaver he’d had back in the day. The one where pixilated celestial bodies soared out of the blackness of space, while the customized words, “Cognitive psychologists do it from memory” regularly jogged into view. A little bit of psych major humor there, he recalled, smiling to himself.
His friends had found it hilarious.
Bertram turned from the twinkling cosmic vista before him, feeling wistful about this lack of reality. “Ah, to be the first person from my planet with real answers to the mysteries of intergalactic space travel. Now that would be cool. I mean, we’ve been theorizing about it for decades. Imagine being able to say on
ce and for all, ‘Yes, wormholes exist.’”
Rollie had spread his gunbelt and all its cases across a table, along with a number of small tools. With a fine brush, he was intent on removing particles from the workings of one of the guns. “Well, you could say it.” He looked up and blinked. “’Course, why would you?”
This wasn’t quite the response Bertram had expected. “What, are you saying there’s nothing to String Theory?”
The pilot didn’t bother to look up this time. He blew away some dust. “I suppose it keeps a lot of your people busy. And life-forms need employment.”
“But they’re working with Superstring Theory now.”
Rollie gave a sharp laugh. “That’s what I’ve always liked about you Tryflings. Just enough knowledge to make a really good mess of things.”
“But—”
“Just leave it, Ludlow. I don’t have that kind of fragging time, and it’s a lot to ask of your Tryfling brain right off the launch.” He rested the gun and brush on the table, and motioned at Bertram with a twitch of long, bony fingers. “That thing the Seers gave you. Let me see it?”
Bertram found himself clutching the item around his neck in paternal hesitation. “They said to keep it with me always. They said to lose it would be ‘peril.’”
“You don’t know peril, mate. Hand it over,” Rollie said. The expression on Bertram’s face must have been one of reflexive horror because the alien gave a tired sigh. “I just want to look at it, Ludlow. I’m not going to do anything to it.”
Slowly, Bertram pulled the cord up over his neck and handed the yellow thing to him.
As Rollie set it on a table and frowned, Bertram edged over to get a better look. “You really don’t have any idea what it is?”
The kidnapper removed a thick-lensed object from one of the belt cases in front of him, and hooked the device over an ear. He squinted in the light, rolling the grooved, vaguely dirigible-shaped item in his hands. “Dunno. But it’s organic, that’s for sure.”
“It is?”
“It’s not molded. It’s got individual cells. Looks vegetative. But that doesn’t quite look like a cell wall to me. I can’t really be sure.” After a moment, Rollie handed Bertram the yellow thing and peered at him through the microscopic lens. One golden-orange eye, rimmed in pallid lashes, was magnified many times from its match and to startling effect. “It’s alive, anyway.”
“Alive?” The idea that all along he’d been wearing an unwieldy accessory that was alive was somehow unsettling. He suddenly didn’t like the feel of the Yellow Thing in his hand; it seemed greasy and a little like it might be trying to breathe. “Alive …”
“Alive as you or me.” Rollie removed the eyepiece and popped it back into a case. “Well, you. Not an overtly evolved life-form, and …”
Bertram ignored the comment. “Could we scan it?” he suggested, looking around the ship’s cabin. “You don’t happen to have an x-ray machine or an ultra-sound or something?”
“On a Protostar 340-K?” Rollie clapped him hard on the shoulder, nearly jarring the Yellow Thing from his hands. “Ludlow, the joy of owning this finely-tuned example of classic, high-tech design is in not being burdened by all that fancy, unnecessary equipment. It flies the way it does because it’s so spare. It’s got none of those extras to weigh it down that so many fools insist on these days.” He began to slide the items into the gunbelt one by one. “Frankly, I was probably overdoing it by installing the bucket seats, the hot plate, and the Uninet system. Still,” he said, “it makes the place home.”
“It’s alive,” Bertram murmured again, just to hear it aloud. “Great.” This was the trouble with this dream. He never knew what direction things were going to turn. Try as he would to clinically-distance himself, he kept finding himself involved, curious, or—as he replaced the Yellow Thing around his neck—disconcerted.
Like right now, he didn’t particularly like the way the Yellow Thing thumped against his chest. It sounded a little hollow inside, like it was a husk. Or a pod. Or a cocoon. Some outer shell designed to protect something vulnerable inside. As it grew, and changed … and waited …
Perhaps for the single right moment?
Bertram winced, wishing he hadn’t gone to that sci-fi marathon down at the SuperSaver theater last week.
“So it’s alive.” Rollie shrugged. “That’s all right, though, innit? Least you’ve got yourself a friend, more or less. And you’ll be needing the company soon, anyway. We’re almost to Podunk.”
“We are?”
“Yup. And there, young Tryfling, me and you will be parting ways.”
If they had simply disembarked from the ship onto a terrain that looked like, say, downtown Pittsburgh, Bertram Ludlow might never have questioned it. He might have surrendered to the illusion, strode into the bar, ordered the $2 draft and settled in to watch the game.
But when they landed, the meager space-port was a cluster of rounded buildings laced together with thick, strange shrubbery, crossed by a still, alien street and rimmed with a small array of silvery wheel-free vehicles. Three steps down the ship’s ramp, Bertram was greeted by a breath of the most pure oxygen that had ever filled his lungs. He had never breathed so well, so deeply, bringing a clarity of mind and a lightness of spirit like none since his last intra-mural tennis match.
He could almost taste this air, like sweet mountain water to a thirsty man. Crackpot celebs paid the big bucks for oxygen therapy in Hollyweird, yet here Bertram Ludlow was getting the good stuff for one ticket to a mind melt.
Then the wind shifted and the smell went barnyard. Not so inspiring, Bertram admitted. But still very sensory-oriented. He made a mental note of it.
Bertram’s alien companion, however, didn’t seem to notice the air or anything else, instead pressing onward into the domed little town. He paused only to target a brightly-lit structure, and in a moment, he threw open its door like he was a regular.
A few steps behind, Bertram jarred to a halt in its threshold.
It was the Murray Avenue Tavern.
Simulated dark wood paneling wore water-damaged, curling veneer, as genuine replica antiques fought to cling tight. Neon logos blinked and bubbled in familiar fermented revelry. In the half-light, it was all there: the bar on the left, tables on the right, a game room tucked in back and the jukebox in the corner belting out 80s hits. Even now, as the door swung shut behind him, the machine cranked out J. Geils’ “Centerfold” and Bertram Ludlow was overcome by a brief, inexplicable homesickness for the world he’d never left.
“The Murray Avenue Tavern. I came here every semester, right after finals,” Bertram told Rollie’s back. “I watched that big screen during the Stanley Cup playoffs. For God’s sake, I met a terrific girl here once.”
Rollie sniffed. “Not fragging likely.”
“You’re just not seeing me at my best,” assured Bertram.
And it was only as Bertram began to drone along with the jukebox that he realized: he and Rollie really weren’t talking about the same thing. Something, he began to sense, was deeply wrong with this place. Something almost as off as his own singing.
First of all, the music’s key didn’t fit. The melody turned around in it just fine, but it never quite clicked—a note shy here, a beat off there. Just enough to draw attention to the fact the lead singer crooned from that jukebox in some deceptive, alternate tongue. It was the simple case of a Peter Wolf in cheap clothing, and Bertram’s blood ran cold.
Bertram’s eyes now flew to the tavern walls and he saw the items hanging there in organized chaos weren’t the croquet mallets, elixir ads and antiquated garden implements he’d grown to expect. This was a different clutter: metal pointies, wooden swirlies, and reverently-framed stills of beings, the likes of which made a carnival freak show look like Ward Cleaver’s annual Christmas photo. Even the neon signs, he realized, were impostors of the beer logos he’d come to know. But every time he just about got a handle on their meaning, it broke off.
; His hand flew to his shirt pocket, half-expecting its contents to have vanished now that he wanted them most. But the cylinder was still there. So he rolled out two of the three remaining pieces of Translachew gum, and crammed both into his mouth, bracing himself for the chew. As his taste buds passed out and his uvula trembled, he diverted his attention to the big screen, where players of a six-legged variety were either wearing terrific protective equipment, or bearing exoskeletons. They swung giant metal ladles and some of them surfboarded on air.
“It seemed like the Murray Avenue Tavern,” Bertram mumbled through the gum.
Having commandeered a table in a far corner, Rollie dropped down in a chair, back to the wall. “Guess it’s not totally surprising,” the man in black said contemplatively. “Backspace cultures do tend to have commonalities. Things that hold ’em back from joining the GCU.”
“The what?”
“Greater Communicating Universe.” Rollie pushed a chair out for Bertram with the toe of his boot. “Least this place is in transition. You know: using the Uninet, no one shrieking at the sight of us.”
“You get that reaction a lot?” Bertram glanced around the room at the other patrons. They were largely humanoid, but hardly human. Mental demons and disturbed nightmares with twisted faces and extra limbs that made Rollie Tsmorlood, with his angular features and jack-o-lantern eyes, look like Mr. Rogers. Yep, if there were any shrieking to be done, it should start here. He just wished he’d picked up on it sooner.
