Jim Baen's Universe

Serials - parts and parts.

Fish Story, Episode 4

Written by Eric Flint, Andrew Dennis, Dave Freer

Illustrated by Barb Jernigan

So back into the churnel we went—which, from this side as well as the one we'd entered in South London, took the form of a broom closet.

When I commented on the fact, Dryck Spivey made a little moue of distaste. "I'm afraid it's essential," he said, as he led the way into the closet. He had to duck his head steeply in order not to disarrange his turban. "The use of any other camouflage is unwise, in this solar system. If there are agents of the Ostracoderm Equality League anywhere within four astronomical units, they will most likely come to investigate. Fortunately, they cannot abide the smell of ammonia."

"Huh?" said Sheila, as she followed Spivey into the closet.

The pub owner James Watters came third, with me after him and Dexter Guptill on my heels. "They've not been cleared for this yet," muttered Watters. I don't think he intended me to hear that.

I thought the statement nonsensical myself, but wasn't sober enough to worry about it. It was my turn to undergo again the bizarre experience of traveling through the churnel.

More bizarre still, this time around. While everything around me was still black, with that unsettling sense of being somehow digested, I suddenly heard shouts and cries . . .

Behind me, I suppose. It was hard to say.

I recognized Dexter's voice, and thought I recognized that of Steven Speairs also, although I wasn't positive. But all I could hear were fragments of whatever they were shouting.

"—is it doing here?"

"—told you that submersible would—" That was definitely Guptill.

"—no sense at all—"

"—your fucking fault—" Guptill again.

The rest was lost. Just an inchoate series of unrecognizable sharp sounds. Curses? Wails? Who could say?

In my defense, I did give some thought to going to their rescue from whatever it was that was besetting them. But the idea was hopeless. There was no way to tell directions in the churnel. I had no idea where they were.

The thought was admittedly brief. Once I saw that slight crack of light I'd been looking for, I was desperate to reach it. In whatever manner one moves in the churnel—it seems to be an odd sort of wriggling scramble, as if one were a bit of food attempting to escape a swallowing gullet—I made my way to the light and burst through into the room beyond.

Another pub. I let out a groan. More precisely, another misbegotten "theme pub"—English, this time, not Irish—about as authentic as a movie star's teeth.

I turned around and stared at the churnel exit. Another broom closet, sure enough. The door was closed, however, and though I watched intently, it remained closed.

"Where are Steven and Dexter?" I demanded. "And the others?"

"Give it up," said Watters. "If they're not out by now, they're lost. The churnel does have its perils and misfortunes."

"A pity, indeed," said Spivey. His headshake was a careful thing, perhaps because he feared he might disarrange the turban. "But if one insists on feuding with submersibles, what can one expect?"

He turned away and bestowed a gleaming smile on the man standing behind the bar. "Mario! How nice to see you again!"

The bartender was a squat fellow dressed in leather and a scowl. "Fuck you, Dryck." He'd been wiping the bar with a small towel, which he now waved at me and Sheila. "Did I invite you to bring these Neanderthals into my pub?"

I laughed. Quite gaily.

Not because I was immune to insult, but because I had Sheila Rowen at my side.

Her scowl was to the bartender's as the great maelstrom of Norse legend is to the pitiful swirl of a toilet flush. Three strides and she was at the bar, reaching over with a left hand whose reasonably feminine size was a complete mismatch with the forearm from which it extended. A clutch, a heave, and the squat loudmouth was being hauled into harm's way. The harm itself taking the form of Sheila's purse, whose strap was even now sliding easily—oh, yes, it was a well-practiced motion—from her shoulder, down her arm, into her other hand, the great weight-lifter biceps and triceps and whatnot bringing the purse back for a death-dealing wallop . . .

Did I mention the weight of the thing? Rowen frequently won bar bets by challenging feeble men to lift it with only one hand.

The purse had reached the full extent of the backswing, now. It was coming forward . . .

Alas. One of the patrons intervened. A redhead, even burlier than Sheila. He came out of his seat much faster than you'd expect from a man of his size. Laughing, he caught the purse by the strap just as it was starting its downswing and held it fixed in place.

"Leave off, girl! If you obliterate the dolt, we'll have to mix our own drinks."

He had a slight accent, which I couldn't quite place. Not any variety of American dialect, though, I was sure of that.

Sheila glared at him, but the redhead's grin never wavered. "Do you want to have to mix your own drinks? The state you're in, who knows what horror you'd come up with. Nice tattoos, by the way. The one on the bicep. Got that in Liverpool, didn't you?"

Sheila looked down. "Yes, as a matter of fact. How'd you know?"

"Recognize the work. Got one there myself." The huge redhead let go of the purse strap and lifted the sleeve of his T-shirt. On his shoulder was a tattoo whose lettering did in fact look very much like Rowen's All Men Are Mortal.

His was less refined, though. Giants and Wolves Suck. It's amazing the lengths to which sports fans will take their silly rivalries.

At least Sheila had been diverted from her homicidal purpose. She heaved the bartender back across the bar. "Watch your mouth in the future, shorty."

Scowling at her, Mario rubbed his throat. "Fucking lady weight-lifter."

"Yes. Exactly."

Spivey had reached the bar, his gleaming and mustachioed smile in place. "I believe the introductions were never properly completed. Sheila Rowen, Mario Jori. Mario, Sheila Rowen."

They glared at each other. Dryck ignored it all. "Some drink, Mario! We've just been through the churnel."

Mario now glared at him. "Have they been cleared? I want a straight answer, Spivey, none of your Hindoo gobbledygook."

"Such a lowbrow." Spivey reached up and felt around for a moment in the folds of his turban. His hand emerged holding a thin card of some sort, about the size of a business card but seeming to be a lot glossier.

He held it up right in front of Jori's beady eyes.

"You can read?"

"Fuck you. Of course I can read." From the time it took him to finish reading whatever was on the card, though—not to mention the way his lips moved—it seemed clear enough that though Jori possessed the skill he was none too adept at it.

Eventually, he was done. Still scowling, he went back to wiping the bar top. "Fine. So you're an authorized recruiter. Ask me if I'm impressed."

He might not have been, but I was. Alarmed, rather.

So was Rowen.

"And what's this?" she demanded.

We were both lawyers, after all, as inebriated as we might have been at the time. No lawyer above the level of the lowliest ambulance chaser, no matter how drunk, would not instantly recognize the implications of the term "recruiter."

The stem is the verb to recruit, after all, and the verb cries out for both subject and object. Recruit whom, and to what?

Sheila had been in the process of sliding her purse strap over her shoulder. Now, as if by a volition of its own, the strap was back in her hand, the purse beginning to swing back and forth much like a cobra's head sways as it fixes its target.

I cleared my throat, the process reminding me of life's priorities. "I need a drink," I said forcefully. No quite as forcefully: "I must insist on an explanation, Mr. Spivey. You are an authorized recruiter for . . ."

By now, Watters was at the table where the big redhead had resumed his seat. He pulled out a chair and joined him.

"Don't be stupid," he growled. "The Ancient Order of the Angle, what else? Also known as the Brotherhood. Although"—he gave Sheila a respectful glance—"that's more in the way of a nickname than what you'd call a real formality."

She sneered at him. "Ask me if I care—since I've no more intention of joining this fishy club of yours than I do of joining the Temperance League." She pulled out a chair at the same table and sat down. "I need a drink. And don't anyone tell me it's my round. I'm not in a friendly mood." If proof of that were needed, the Purse of Death was planted right on the table, not down by the chair legs where Sheila normally kept the hideous thing while in convivial company.

"I'll buy," said the redhead cheerfully. "Beers all around, Mario!" he boomed. "The best the house has."

Jori's scowl, I'd concluded by now, wasn't so much an expression as the permanent fix of his face. He started filling beer steins from a spigot. "What the house has is tap beer. Take it or leave it."

I took a chair, digging into a pocket for my cigarettes. Having extracted one, I proceeded to light it.

"No smoking!" cried out Mario. "You're in Los Angeles now, buddy. We got laws. We care about the environment and our personal health."

I stared at him, dumbfounded. "This is a pub."

"So?"

"A place where men and women come to ingest a toxic substance, of their own free will. A substance called alcohol; known to science and recognized in law as being dangerous under any circumstances, deadly under some, and potentially addictive. Are you seriously advancing the claim that you have a right to poison yourself in a healthful manner?"

"Absurd," Sheila agreed. She'd extracted her own coffin nail and was lighting it up. "Like passing a law permitting suicide so long as you use a razor blade instead of a gun. The illogic makes my head hurt."

By now, Mario had finished filling the steins and was bringing them over to the table. "Look, I don't make the laws," he growled. "You can't smoke in here."

Sheila was still not quite over her temper. "And who's going to make me stop, shorty? You?"

Jori plunked down the steins and sneered right back at her. "Don't need to. The Harpies'll be along any minute. If we were just a little ways up the road, near their lair in Santa Monica, they'd have been here already."

"Here they come, in fact," said Watters, wincing.

The redhead reached back over his shoulder and hauled something off the backrest of the chair. I hadn't noticed it before. It was a great heavy leather thing, about the size of Sheila's purse. When he lifted it onto the table, however, I saw that it was simply a carpenter's tool belt, albeit much larger than the average.

He was pulling out some earplugs from one of the pouches. "Got some extra pairs, Dryck, James. Want 'em?"

"Please," said Spivey, shuddering a bit. He took the small devices from the redhead, quickly lifted the edge of his turban, and shoved them into his ears. By the time he was done, Watters already had his in place.

I wasn't paying much attention, however. I wasn't even paying much attention to my mug of beer. Because, to the side, I'd spotted the most horrible apparitions seeming to emerge from nowhere.

Like ghosts, if ghosts could be pickled.

There were three of the horrors. The first bore the appearance of a middle-aged man dressed in a suit, his face heavy with stern condemnation. The second, dressed in exercise clothing, that of a woman on the verge of middle-age whose taut face and muscle tone indicated that she was devoting half her waking life to denying the fact. The third, a young man of perhaps twenty dressed in shorts, flip-flop sandals and a tank top. His hair was blond, his eyes were blue, his nose was snub, and his expression that of vacant self-approval.

I recognized them, of course, from the legends. The dread Harpies indeed, the fearful trio.

Official Disapproval. Mature Self-Discipline. Untainted Youth.

"Youuuuu caaaaaaaaan't smooooooke in heeeeeere. . . ." they wailed in unison. "It's forbiiiiiiddddennnnnn. . . ."

"My boooooooody is a temmmmmmple," came a little coda from Untainted Youth.

As one, Rowen and I puffed vigorously.

Mature Self-Discipline shoved her face forward. Ghastly thing, the flesh so tight over the bones I would have suspected cosmetic surgery if she were anything other than a Health Harpy. In her case, though, it was surely due to an hour's worth of face exercises every day.

"Your second-hand smooooooooke is shorrrrrrrtening my liiiiiiife. . . ." she moaned.

"Oh, I hope so," said Sheila, blowing smoke at her.

Mature Self-Discipline wailed and drew back. Official Disapproval billowed to the fore.

"It's a seeeeeeeeeerious menace to society and the enviiiiiiiiiiironment. . . ."

"Oh, that's nonsense!" I snapped. "I can't imagine a sorrier exhibition of ecological ignorance. For look you, sir—what is, without doubt or question, the single greatest peril to the global environment?"

The three Harpies stared at me.

Untainted Youth began a tentative moan. "Secccccccond-hand smoooo—"

"Ridiculous!" I waved a finger under his insubstantial little nose. "Ask any biologist, any ecologist. Any educated and informed environmentalist."

I took the time for a quaff of beer. Then—as I feared, it was American beer, as thin as a politician's virtue—I sneered at Youthful Vigor. "Idiot. The great threat to the environment is people. We're breeding like rabbits, multiplying with wild abandon, overflowing the globe."

"Filling every ecological zone and niche," added Sheila. "No, say better—wrecking and ruining every ecological zone and niche."

"Absolutely correct," I said. "We are the ultimate alien invasive species. Destroying all life forms in our path. And why?"

Sheila picked it up perfectly. "No natural enemies."

"Exactly," I said. "But nature is crafty and cunning. So, in self-defense, she created tobacco—and thus, the cure from within: the disease."

As one, Sheila and I blew smoke over the hideous shapes. "Think of us as thinning the herd," I said.

"A newly evolved top predator," Sheila agreed, along with a smoke ring. "A boon and a blessing, from the standpoint of the overall ecology, however gory and gruesome be the immediate effects."

With a despairing wail, the Harpies vanished.

Jori stared after them. For once, the scowl on his face was gone, replaced by astonishment.

"You did it!" he cried. "I didn't think it was possible."

Spivey, Watters and the redhead were pulling out their earplugs. "Impressive, I admit," said Dryck.

The redhead chuckled. "I think that calls for a round of drinks on the house, Mario."

"Sure does." He was already headed back to the bar, pulling out a hidden cigarette on his way.

The intervention of the Harpies had diverted us momentarily, but Sheila and I were both lawyers. Minds like steel traps. So we returned immediately to the important issue at hand.

"Ancient order be damned," I announced. "I don't care if you've got mystic symbols and insignia, secret handshake, the lot. I'm not volunteering for anything."

"Me neither," said Sheila.

Spivey smiled. Watters and the big redhead grinned.

"Chumps," sneered Jori, around his cigarette butt. The bartender had finished pouring the steins and brought over the beers. Then he went back and rummaged behind the bar, emerging with a large ashtray. When he placed it on the table I saw that a large label was wrapped all around the side.

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING. The traces of second-hand smoke emanating from this device may ruin your home team's chance of winning the pennant race and encourage the rise of false messiahs.

Jori dragged a chair from a nearby table over to our own. For some reason, the movement caused me to notice for the first time that the bar was empty except for us.

"Ha!" I sneered back. "Your idiot English theme pub décor doesn't exactly pull in the customers, I take it."

"Don't be stupid. We're in Venice, California."

"I thought you said this was Los Angeles," protested Sheila.

The sneer now seemed as permanently fixed on Mario's face as the scowl had been earlier. "It is Los Angeles. Stupid Brit tourist. Never been here before, I take it? Los Angeles is a mystic entity. A virtual city, as it were. It's got a name, true enough—even got elected politicians—but no actual existence in the material world."

"Certainly not!" chuckled Spivey. "I have never met a person yet who was from Los Angeles. No, they are from Venice or Chatsworth or Hollywood or West Los Angeles or South Central—anywhere but 'Los Angeles.'"

"Well, sure," said the redhead. "Even Southern Californians have a sense of shame. Only a trace, of course. The climate saps shame the way a desert saps water."

Mario chimed in, still sneering. "Any other time of the day or night this joint is jumping." He hauled the cigarette out of his mouth and used it to point at the redhead. "The bikers left the moment he came in. They're scared of him."

The redhead's grin widened. "Don't know why."

Mario grunted. "Ask the EMTs, they'll tell you." His cigarette was now waved in Spivey's direction. "And the druggies split the minute I told them he was coming."

Sheila peered at Dryck. "Why are they afraid of him? Is it something about the turban? They think he's a terrorist?"

Spivey got a pained look on his face. Mario barked a laugh.

"No, it ain't that," he said, shaking his head. "I told you, lady. You're in Los Angeles, not some hick town in the Midwest. Any druggie here can parse the difference between a Hindoo and any variety of Moslem in a heartbeat, especially Sufis. God help you if they get started on Christians."

He jabbed the cigarette toward Spivey. "It's that he drives them nuts. Starts reciting the Upanishads to show them why they're a bunch of ignorant airheads."

"Letter perfect," agreed Dryck. "Being, first, as I have a fluency in Sanskrit and they do not. Being, second, as I have a brain and they do not."

Sheila shook her head. "Recite from the Upanishads all you want. I'm still not volunteering for anything."

"Me neither," I echoed. Rowen and I have never been a romantic item—not even close—but on some matters we are like man and wife. A horror of pro bono work being one of them.

Mario barked another laugh. A series of them, rather. The sneer never wavered throughout. "Don't get it, do you?"

The redhead cleared his throat. "I'm afraid the issue of 'volunteering' is a moot one. The Brotherhood of the Angle doesn't accept volunteers, anyway."

"Certainly not!" exclaimed Dryck. "A most untrustworthy lot, volunteers. First, because what is freely offered can also be freely withdrawn. Second, because they are patently mad. No, no, my dear friends. You've been drafted."

Sheila and I stared at him.

"We're conscripts?" she asked.

"Exactly so."

She and I now stared at each other. After a few seconds, she shrugged. "Well, I suppose that's all right, then. Since my ethical principles haven't been violated. I warn you, though. Conscript or not, I bill by the hour."

I was no longer exactly drunk, since one of the churnel's side effects is the peculiar ability to leech alcohol from a human body. So it seemed, at any rate. But I was certainly not what you'd call sober. So, though I wracked my brain trying to find a coherent argument against allowing ourselves to be