Jim Baen's Universe

Serials - parts and parts.

Fish Story, Episode Thirteen, The Plot to End the Universe

Written by Eric Flint, Andrew Dennis, Dave Freer

“Do I hear a motion to dispense with all old business, and move right to new business?” asked the eurypterid, Gardner Flowers. He was back to his normal role as chaircreature of the A-Team.

“So moved,” said Rebecca York, the female of the three mosasaurs.

“Second,” chimed in the octopus named Guilherme.

“All in favor?”

Every limb went up, be that a fin or a tentacle or, in the case of me and Stephen Speairs, an arm. I believe I could make a pretty good case, if one presupposes widespread intelligence in many species, that natural selection will drive toward making a predisposition to dispense with old business genetically hard-wired. The same with reading of the minutes of the previous meeting, of course. At a guess, creatures who persist in wanting minutes read and old business droned over are not only damaging their reproductive chances by a ghastly waste of time and energy, but, probably still worse, are most likely running foul of a rapidly developing preference in sexual selection.

(Quick question. Your mating instincts are up and running, you’re at a meeting, and you need to choose between two possible targets for your affections. One of them wants to move the meeting along and the other insists on dragging out everything. Which one becomes the most likely focus of your attention?)

“Motion passes unanimously,” Flowers announced. Asnip, the plesiosaur, dutifully recorded the results.

“New business?”

“Move that aliases be changed,” said Rebecca York. “Leaving aside the need to confuse the agents of Cthulhu, I’m sick and tired of being named after a town in England. That whole island sucks. If it was Rebecca New York, I could live with it. At least New York has good kosher delis.”

I tried to visualize a mosasaur dining at a deli in New York. And . . . couldn’t. Not even in Brooklyn.

“Second?”

“So moved,” said Dave Pettibone. “I could live with my current alias, but I’m sick and tired of having to remember that ‘Lavanya Vijayaraghavan’ isn’t a girl.”

The other male mosasaur seemed to jeer at him. “You just envy my imagination.”

“Order, please,” said Flowers. “All in favor of changing aliases?”

Again, the vote was unanimous—except, this time, Stephen and I abstained. When Flowers gave us a questioning look, I shrugged. “These aren’t aliases to begin with. They’re just our names.”

“Doesn’t matter with them anyway,” said Pettibone. “They’re the only two hominids in the ocean anywhere within miles of the World-Tree. Not likely that Cthulhu’s agents will have any trouble figuring out who they are, regardless of their names.”

Some of the other members of the A-Team looked dubious. At least, insofar as I could discern any emotion on the “faces” of prehistoric monsters, giant octopods and giant turtles. But nobody seemed inclined to argue the point.

“I suppose,” said Flowers. “Do we allow everyone to pick their own alias, or do we distribute them by lot?”

“By lot!” said York forcefully. “Last time we let people pick their own, and look what this doofus over here”—she wagged a flipper at Vijayaraghavan—“did with it. Enough’s enough.”

That got a unanimous vote also, except for Vijayaraghavan.

“Motion passes,” announced Flowers. “Matthew, hand out the names, would you please?”

Asnip ducked his snout back into his pouch and came out with a cluster of little slips of paper. Well . . . something that looked like paper, anyway. It probably wasn’t, since I couldn’t see any signs of deterioration from being immersed in salt water.

The plesiosaur flipped his head, the slips went flying, and slowly settled to the floor of the tree fort. As they landed, Asnip read the results and assigned the names to the creature who was nearest to the point where the slip fell.

“Okay, let’s see . . .” The first two slips fell closest to the turtles. “Guilherme Gosling, you’re now Andrew Allport. Ben Boals, you’re now Martin Bonham. Got that?”

He moved over to the slips that had fallen nearest to the octopi. “Geraldine Mendoza, you’re now Kasza Anderson. That’s spelled ‘s-z-a,’ don’t screw it up. Jonathan Bolder, you’re now Matthew Duncan. And Edmond Hallahan is Robert Hedin.”

Now the plesiosaur moved toward the three mosasaurs. “Dave Pettibone, you’re H.K. Ward.”

“What does ‘H.K.’ stand for?”

“Whatever you want, I guess.”

“Halloween Kibbitzer,” suggested the other male mosasaur, snickering. At least, I think that was a mosasaur’s version of a snicker. Think of a locomotive blowing its nose.

“Laugh now, wise guy,” said Asnip. The plesiosaur peered down at one of the slips, then back up at Vijayaraghavan, then back down at the slip again. “Can’t be helped. It’s for sure the closest to you. So you now glory in the monicker of Branislav Slantchev.”

“Huh? What kind of name is that?”

“Sounds Rooshan to me,” said H.K. Ward, formerly Dave Pettibone. He made that same locomotive-blowing-its-nose racket that I took for a mosasaur snicker. “I’ll see if I can dig up a ton of beets to make you some borscht.”

The plesiosaur had moved on to the female of the trio. “And as for you, the lady-formerly-known-as-Rebecca-York, you’re now Anabelle Lacharité. That’s an acute accent over the final ‘e,’ not a grave.”

She looked triumphantly at her two male cohorts. “Ha! Me, I got class.”

“What about us?” asked the eurypterid.

“I figure this slip’s the closest to you, Gardner-Flowers-that-was, so you now go by the name of Earl Manning. And me . . .” His head moved back and forth between two slips, very studiously. “Hard to tell which is closest to me, but I figure... this one. So I’m now Robert C. McClelland III.”

The mosasaurs peered at him skeptically. “That seems like an awfully fancy monicker to come up just by accident,” grumbled Slantchev. “Suspicious, you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you,” pointed out the new Earl Manning. The eurypterid raised its telson. “Attention! If there be any objections to the new aliases”—here he gave Slantchev a look that you might have called “fishy” if Manning were a fish—“serious objections, to be precise, then speak now or forever hold your piece.”

Anabelle yawned, a sight which, when done by a mosasaur, is actually quite terrifying. “Ah, who cares? We change aliases about once a month, anyway.”

“Be more like once a week, now,” said one of the octopi. I wasn’t sure which one. “What with us working against Cthulhu instead of for him.”

Stephen cleared his throat. To my astonishment—was he mad? gone completely bonkers?—he said: “Speaking of which, could someone explain to me exactly why you’ve decided to plot against Cthulhu instead of continuing to work for him?”

The assembled monsters in the tree fort—prehistoric monsters, you might recall; gigantic; toothed; clawed; fanged; tentacled; if you can think of a manner in which human flesh might be rent and torn asunder, rest assured that one of the creatures there possessed it in full measure—stared at him as if he were bereft of his senses.

Or as if he were a morsel of food. I sidled away from the madman. Perhaps they might overlook me in the feeding frenzy.

Then the monsters stared at each other. Then the female tylosaur now known as Anabelle Lacharité gaped her maw. For a moment, I was sure I was a dead man, until I realized that was apparently the Mesozoic version of a grin.

“That’s right, now that I think about it,” she said. “We never did get around to explaining to the new members—”

“Probationary members!” barked the tylosaur now known as H.K. Ward.

“Quite right!” chimed in his male mate. “Their vote is advisory only. Not binding on the team.”

Lacharité gave them an exasperated look. “I wouldn’t make too much of that technicality, boys. Seeing as how we’ll be depending on the new probationary members for the critical part of the next operation.”

I really, really, really didn’t like the sound of that. “Operation” implies . . .

Commandos do operations. The SAS does operations. Delta Force does operations.

Ichthyologists, in stark contrast, do studies.

Worse still were the implications of the phrase “critical part.”

Operations have critical parts. Desperate adventures have critical parts. Matters of life and death have critical parts.

 In stark contrast, the only “critical parts” of fish studies are arguing with your co-authors over name precedence in the byline.

“And what’s that all about?” demanded Speairs, as if any sane man wanted to know.

Lacharité looked back at him. “Well, it’s like this. We would have cheerfully remained as loyal subordinates of Cthulhu—”

“Sure would,” said Ward.

“Pay’s great, work’s easy, the benefits are gold-plated,” chimed in Slantchev.

“Even had an early retirement plan,” whined one of the octopi.

“—except we found out the monster-god had let his deity status go to his head,” finished Lacharité.

“Classic case of megalomania,” said the plesiosaur sadly. “Of course, gods are prone to that.”

“What’d he do?” asked Speairs, as if we actually wanted to know. I desperately needed a drink.

“What he did—what he’s planning, rather—is to take this ‘primordial slime’ business seriously.” McClelland III shook his head, which is quite an operation when you’re a plesiosaur.

“Excuse me?”

The eurypterid provided the answer. “It’s like this. As long as that ‘primordial slime’ stuff was just, you know, a vague and general goal to be aimed for in the far distant future, fine and dandy.” The sea scorpion wagged