Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (46 page)

“So . . . ” said Digry at last. His bubbling voice seemed so loud in the silence after their boss’s retreat that even Quidprobe, reorganizing his splayed pseudopods on the floor beneath his chair, could hear every word clearly. “What do we do next?”

“I hear there might be a few openings in the Department of Pointless Philosophical Rambling,” ventured one of the sub-managers.

By the time young Quidprobe had finally managed to clamber back up onto his slippery seat, the conference space had emptied and a large, shouting mob was forming around the copying device as his fellow managers and sub-managers hurried to update and dispatch their resumés.

“Truly ye remember naught?” asked Ludo, his face scrunched in dismay like an old paper bag. “Not y’r dalliance with the fair Alcina? How the sorc’ress tired of ye and turned ye into a wee myrtle tree and the a’ the hounds would make water upon ye?”

“Huh?” Cashman was doing his best to understand the dwarf, but the little fellow was clearly suffering from some kind of head injury himself: some of his words sounded like English, but the rest were gobbledygook that sounded like the excitable guy on Star Trek. “I don’t know, man. Can we eat now?”

“Nae, we cannae eat yet.” He hadn’t called Pogo “M’lord” in a while. “I’ve had nae chance to find victuals, have I?”

“Vegetables? Can’t we get some real food? Like burgers? Or pizza?”

“Victuals! I said ‘victuals’! Are ye daft?”

“I’m not deaf. I’m not even nearsighted, dude. How come you can’t talk like a normal person—like me?”

“Like ye? Like
ye
?” For a moment Ludo seemed angry enough to walk off and leave Pogo in the woods alone, but then he flopped himself down beside the sandy trail and folded his short legs under him. “Go tak up yon shield,” he said.

Shield
at least was a word Pogo recognized. He lifted the big hunk of wood and metal off the saddle horn of the black horse. He didn’t have to reach as high as he expected to, and his hands seemed bigger and stronger than he remembered. He was beginning to wonder if the world around him wasn’t the only thing that had changed. “Yeah?”

“Luik on yon painted crest. Tell us what ye see.”

Pogo decided he must mean the painted front of the shield, so “crest” must mean the advertisement on the front, like the stripey Adidas flower. “Yes,” he said. “The crest. I see. Very interesting.” The design was weird and old-fashioned, a huge trademark of crudely painted lion-type creatures alternating with what Pogo was pretty sure was the New Orleans Saints football team logo. He stared as hard as he could, but it yielded up no secrets. “And . . . ?”

“Do ye ken it not?” Ludo asked. “The three lilies and three leopards of England? The token of your father the king?”

“My father is a king?” As far as Pogo knew, his father was a guy who painted faces on rocks he found at the beach and sold them to tourists.

“Aye, and ye have a grave duty to a’ of Christendie. Can ye truly remember naught?”

The communication thing was beginning to be a problem. “I gotta be honest, Louie. I didn’t understand a thing you just said.”

The dwarf stared at him for a moment, then went off muttering and sat on a fallen tree, pulled out a huge pipe, lit it and began to smoke like a man who was in a hurry to achieve lung cancer.

Quidprobe was the only person left in the conference room. He might even have been the only person left in the entire building. His coworkers had hurried off to renew old friendships in other departments that might have openings, or establish alibis for where they had been when the wrong personnel requisition got approved for the Anderson world, anything but dealing with the actual problem.

Well
, Quidprobe thought,
let them. I’m not like that. I’m a fellow who solves problems instead of running from them.
Also, he didn’t know anyone in any of the other departments very well. In fact, after a short hundred years or so in the job, half the people in his own section still didn’t know Quidprobe’s name.

Fnutt’s universal viewer was still sitting on the conference space table and Quidprobe was curious to see what was going on with the botched transfer. Perhaps this Cashman creature would turn out to be just as good as the one everyone had expected to enter the fiction-world instead—perhaps everything would turn out all right after all, and all the veteran department managers had panicked needlessly. And if he brought them this good news, perhaps Quidprobe himself would get some of the credit. He even let himself fantasize for a moment that this could be the start of big things for him—a raise, maybe even a promotion. By the Peerless Punctuation of Poe, wouldn’t that be grand! He could get himself a new exocontainer that wouldn’t break down half the time, and maybe even some top-of-the-line rigid graspers. Wouldn’t the folks back home stare and jealously emit phosgene when Quidprobe came back to visit and told them he was a supervisor! And when he whipped out his fancy new graspers and . . . and grasped things, well, his old classmates would just froth themselves with jealousy.

After all, he thought, dialing through the various Poul Anderson worlds, past the speeding
Leonora Christine
and Dominic Flandry, leaving behind the modernist creations and moving farther and farther into the more primitivist inventions such as
The High Crusade
and
The Man Who Came Early
, how hard could it be to succeed in an environment as primitive as the Matter of France, where people couldn’t even remove their heads without incurring permanent damage? The Pogocashman organic might not be all that advanced himself, but at least his civilization had discovered things like nuclear power and canned foods.

At last the focal window located the
Three Hearts and Three Lions
world and dilated wide so that Quidprobe could get his first look at the Pogocashman creature. The Pogocashman’s Assisting Character—a construct named “Ludo”—was trying to teach him how to fight with the ancient weapon known as a sword, which apparently was the main form of social intercourse in primitive France, but the Pogocashman was sitting on the ground whimpering in pain, his hands bloody.

“You’re supposed to hold the
other
end,” the dwarf said wearily.

Quidprobe had a sudden powerful urge to look over his own rather slight resumé to see what needed updating. He stabbed at the button to close the focal window, but the machinery was made for more conventionally rigid digits than Quidprobe’s and he wound up pressing the button beside it as well. He had only a moment to stare at the label under the accidental button, which read “INTERVENTION—Do Not Engage Without Departmental Permission!” in boldly emphatic symbols in several appropriate languages, then Quidprobe abruptly found himself drawn into an infinitely long thread and then pulled through an infinitely narrow (and infinitely painful) needle’s eye before the darkness swallowed him.

Pogo could only stare. The dwarf, who a moment before had been glaring at him in that way of his which was already becoming sadly familiar, had abruptly straightened up and made a noise like a hamster clubbed with a tennis racket, then dropped to the earth in a heap. Now he was lying there looking quite dead. Pogo was just wondering if he needed to find Disneyland security or something when the dwarf groaned and sat up.

“Where am I?” the little bearded man asked, looking from side to side. Then he saw Pogo and groaned again, this time even louder. “‘Intervention’! Oh, Lolitas of Leiber, I pushed the ‘Intervention’ button!”

Pogo wasn’t sure what the little fellow was babbling about, but he was pleased by the sudden change in the dwarf’s speech. “You stopped talking funny!”

The other stared for a moment, his mouth working deep in his beard, then he sighed and said, “Right. I’ve replaced the Assisting Character and the machines have keyed my dialect to the Main Character’s own form of speech. Just as well. I never understood that detail of the original story, anyway—why would a French dwarf be speaking with a Scottish burr?”

“Huh?”

The dwarf stood up and slapped the dust and sand from his trousers. “Very well, let’s figure out how we’re going to get this fixed so we can both go back home. We’re in some serious difficulty here, and changing dialects is the least of our problems.” He turned to Pogo. “Let me ask you one important question first, creature. Is there
any
chance at all that my managers are wrong and you’re really Castlemane from the SAS? Special Air Services? Does that mean anything to you?”

Pogo thought hard. “When you’re on a plane and they bring the cart with the drinks on it?”

“Excrement of Ellison.” The dwarf sat down again, this time with a thump. “They were right. Ah, well, we might as well make the best of this. My name is Quidprobe . . . ”

“Huh? I thought it was Lego or something.”

“Never mind what it used to be, it’s Quidprobe now. And you are the Pogocashman, correct?”

“Uh . . . yeah. I manage Kirby’s Shoes in the Victory Mall. In the Valley . . . ?”

The dwarf shook his head. “But this still doesn’t make much sense, even if someone sent the wrong form—usually the obvious mistakes get thrown back by the machines before they’re executed.” He turned to Pogo. “Is there a reason the multiverse should choose you instead of the right fellow, or was it just a really, really unfortunate clerical error? Have you ever been involved in dimensional slippage before?”

Pogo shrugged. “Well, I guess I experimented a bit during high school. I mean, like, didn’t everybody?”

The dwarf sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “I’ve only had a head for a few minutes, and already I have such a headache. So that means you don’t know anything about the madness of Roland or Charlemagne, or any of this, do you? And I’m guessing that you don’t know who Roland is, the character you’re supposed to help, or Charlemagne, the character
he’s
supposed to help. And so of course you also don’t know how important all this is—do you?”

Pogo looked at him seriously, really trying, trying to focus on the important things. “Uh, no, not really. Hey, before you fell down and started talking normal, didn’t you say something about dinner?”

“Do you understand now?” Quidprobe had put it in the simplest possible terms—words and concepts so basic that even an infant of this backward existential plane could understand it. He fixed the organic creature with a hard glare. “It’s important that you do.”

The Pogocashman smiled hesitantly. “Can you run that all by me again, man? I think I missed a little of it. Sorry. I’m really
hungry
, man.”

Quidprobe sighed. “Very well—but pay attention this time, will you? Stop swinging that bladed weapon around before you cut your own head off.”

The Pogocashman blushed and slid the sword back into its scabbard. “Sorry. Who did you say you worked for? The Department of Fixable Universes?”

“
Fictional
Universes. The Department of Fictional Universes, Crossover Division, Poul Anderson Subdivision. And you’re right in the middle of three of them, at least.” Quidprobe scratched at his face, distracted by the borrowed body he was wearing. It was strange to have his brain perched in a round box of bone at the top of a fleshy stalk like this, and the hairy tendrils on the dwarf creature’s face itched him horribly. “This is a mess, that’s what it is. The chosen Main Character was supposed to be this Castlemane fellow, who was crossing over from your organic world into a fictional universe created by the famous science fiction writer Poul Anderson, which itself was a version of the fictional universe called the Matter of France. With me so far?”

The Pogocashman looked interested. “What
is
the matter with France? I mean, some of that stuff they eat, like frog’s legs . . . ”

“
Of
France. The Matter of France. It’s like the French version of the King Arthur stories, except instead of King Arthur and his knights, it’s Charlemagne and
his
knights—Sir Roland, Sir Roger, Duke Astolfo, Holger the Dane, all those legendary characters.”

The creature nodded cheerfully. “Okay. I’m totally with you, man. Sir Loin and Chateaubriand and the rest.”

Quidprobe ground his teeth together for a moment—another odd sensation, like having an oral cavity full of stones. Patience, he told himself. This poor creature has to live with teeth
all the time.
“But this isn’t even Anderson’s version, you see—it’s some other lesser writer’s version of Anderson’s version. And somehow when this idiot anthology writer started his story, instead of this Castlemane fellow crossing over from the real world into the Anderson universe,
you
showed up instead. So instead of a problem-solving engineer and man of action, we have . . . ” He broke off. No need to rub it in. “Do you know
anything
about engineering? Physics? Anything at all?”

The Pogocashman considered. “I got a participation ribbon in science once. See, I was making this volcano for the science fair, but I was late for school, so I figured I could mix the baking soda and vinegar first and it would save time when I got there.” He shrugged. “It sort of exploded—my backpack, but they gave me the ribbon anyway before they sent me home . . . ”

Quidprobe winced. “Yes. Well. Science not a strong point, then. But we have bigger problems at the moment.”

The creature nodded more emphatically. “Yeah, man. Like getting something to eat, right?”

“No!” Quidprobe was beginning to understand that this was going to be even more difficult than the series of impossibilities he had already conceded. “No, like figuring out how an unprepared cipher like you is going to help the great Roland get back his sanity and save this world from being conquered by the forces of Chaos. And beside your complete lack of scientific knowledge we have no other tools but Astolfo’s enchanted horn and a book of useful spells—both of which are in your saddlebag, by the way, so don’t lose them.” But it had suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t listening to his Main Character as carefully as he should. This Pogocashman was a creature not of the symbolic plane like Quidprobe himself, but of the physical: perhaps all his talk of hunger was meaningful. Perhaps he really did need some kind of organic sustenance—perhaps he would even be more responsive once he’d taken in nutrients.