Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (64 page)

The Rattler had once been human, but the Resurrectionists had dismantled her body and given her a new one of an original design: half organic, half mechanical. Rattler’s spinal column stretched the length of a metal frame, supported by magnetized wheels, protected by the burnished steel carapace that housed her organs. She had half a dozen eyes set on stalks that swiveled, like the turret eyes of a chameleon. Metal arms equipped with mechanical claws extended from the front and sides and back of the frame.

Susan wet her lips. She had finally reached the part about monsters, and she found it a little disturbing. She glanced at her audience. Jody was paying close attention, eyes wide and fascinated.

The Rattler had escaped the Resurrectionists’ labs and lived in the hold of the ship. She was more than a little bit mad. She hated the Resurrectionists, but she had developed a hatred of their human victims as well. She knew that they had something she lacked, something that the Resurrectionist had stolen from her during her reconstruction. She wanted to take Bailey apart to see if he had what she needed.

Susan found herself thinking of the monster that she had written about, the one that lurked in the darkness and threatened women who had ventured out where they shouldn’t be. It seemed that her monster shared some attributes with the Rattler. With an effort, Susan kept her attention on the story she was reading.

Bailey was a resourceful norbit, and he managed to escape the Rattler. With the aid of a cyborg spaceship, he rejoined his friends and went to the planet Ophir where he met the Curator, an elderly woman who collected alien artifacts. Susan was startled to read the Curator’s name: Pat Murphy.

Susan glanced up and saw Trudy, waiting in the doorway to reclaim her charges. “Hey, kids, storytime’s over.”

“But wait,” Jody said. “We have to find out what happens next.”

“You’ll find out tomorrow,” Trudy said briskly. “But Halloween is almost here and it’s time to make Halloween costumes.”

On her way back to her stateroom, Susan passed Aphrodite’s Alehouse. As she walked by, she glanced through the door and saw Max at the bar, drinking alone.

She hesitated, then stepped inside. The bar was quiet—just a few people at the scattered tables. “Hey, Max,” she called. “I was just reading
There and Back Again
to the kids at story hour. They love it.”

Max looked up from his glass of brandy. “That’s nice,” he said. She sat down on the bar stool beside him. He had the relaxed look of a man who had been drinking steadily for a while. He took another sip of brandy.

“I was surprised you had another character named Pat Murphy,” she said. “There was a Patrick Murphy in
Wild Angel
. And in
There and Back Again,
the Curator was named Pat Murphy.”

Max shrugged. Susan got the impression he wasn’t really paying attention. “Its a common enough name,” he said.

“I met an old woman named Pat Murphy yesterday who looked just like the Curator. I talked with her about Pataphysics.”

Max sipped his brandy but did not reply. Frank Robinson, the bartender, came over. She thought he looked relieved to see her. “So nice to see you,” he said. “I thought Max could use some company. What would you like to drink?”

“Just sparkling water, thanks.”

While Frank was filling her glass, Susan asked Max, “Do you have any idea why there’d be a pataphysician named Pat Murphy on board?”

Max shook his head, staring down at his glass of brandy. “I have no idea,” he said. “Unless it has something to do with the quantum vacuum.” He looked up and met her eyes. “I’ve been thinking about the quantum vacuum,” he said slowly. “Considering its implications. I’ve been telling Frank about it.”

Frank looked, Susan thought, a little spooked—like a man who has been listening to ghost stories in a dark room. Not convinced, but not entirely comfortable, either. “Max has been telling me that everything in the universe is just ripples,” Frank said to Susan.

“That’s what Pat said,” Max muttered. “Patterns of dynamic energy. Shifts and tweaks in the underlying field. Nothings permanent; everything’s changing. It’s a great cosmic dance of changing realities. And that’s all right with me. No surprises there. But I don’t like that business of virtual particles becoming real. She says that can happen. A virtual particle can steal the energy of a real particle and become real. I don’t like the sound of that.”

Susan frowned. “He's talking about quantum mechanics,” she told Frank. “It’s all stuff that’s too small to see. It’s not like it’s the real world or anything.”

Max raised his eyes to meet Susan’s. “That’s not so,” he said earnestly. “Quantum mechanics is at the heart of everything. The particles that make up everything in the universe are just tweaks in the field of the quantum vacuum. This bar …” He thumped on the polished teak. “This glass …” He tapped his brandy snifter and make it ring softly. “You. Me. We are all made up of particles that are just tweaks in the quantum vacuum.”

Frank shook his head, looking at Susan. “I’m just a simple bartender and it sounds like fairy tales to me.”

“The quantum vacuum is empty of things, a blank, a featureless void,” Max went on. “It’s empty of things, but it’s filled with potentialities. Like a blank page, filled with possibilities, waiting to be called forth. Weldon Merrimax, Mary Maxwell, Max Merriwell—so many possibilities.”

“Some possibilities are more real than others,” Susan said. “This bar, this glass, you, me—we’re really here.”

Max shook his head, gazing at her owlishly. “Just tweaks in the vacuum,” he said. “Called up in dreams. Always changing.” He swayed on his stool. “Nothing you can count on.”

“I wonder if you might want help Max get back to his cabin,” Frank suggested softly.

Max could walk, though Susan had to hold his arm to keep him on course. He fumbled in his pocket for quite a while, but managed to find his cruise card and use it to open his stateroom door. Then he muttered something about getting ready for dinner, and lay down on his bed. She covered him with the blanket from the foot of the bed and left him snoring quietly.

“What is the best defense against murder?” the woman asked the pataphysician.

Gyro looked up. “Of the nineteen strategies for defense,” he said, “the best is running away. Or, more simply, not being there is the best defense.”

—from
The Twisted Band

by Max Merriwell

The real trouble didn’t start until later that evening.

Dinner was relatively civilized. Charles dominated the discussion by complaining bitterly about the weather. Charles seemed to hold Tom responsible for the cloudy skies, asking repeatedly when Tom thought it would clear up. Tom was still recovering from his cold. He had to keep asking Charles to repeat himself, telling Charles that his ears were stopped up.

Charles was perfectly willing to repeat himself. Susan was impressed that Tom managed to remain so calm, explaining patiently that the weather was not within his jurisdiction as security officer. Charles went on to talk about how much better the weather had been when they had cruised with another cruise line.

After dinner, Tom disappeared—heading for bed, Susan hoped. There was a party scheduled for the Atrium. At about ten o’clock, Susan, Pat, and Ian stood on the second level of the Atrium, gazing down at a towering pyramid of champagne glasses that sparkled in the overhead lights.

Ian explained the workings of the champagne fountain to Pat and Susan. At midnight, champagne would be poured into the top glass, until it cascaded over the rim to fill the glasses below. When those glasses overflowed in turn, they would fill the glasses below them. Eventually, every glass in the pyramid would be filled with champagne.

“So what happens between now and midnight?” Susan asked. “We’re in for some spontaneous, organized fun,” Ian said. “First, there’s a limbo contest. Then the winner of the limbo contest will lead a conga line, dancing to the music of the Twisted Band.” Ian gestured to the dance floor, where a guitarist, a sax player, and a steel drum player were setting up their equipment. “Then, for the grand finale, the winner of the limbo contest will be the first to pour champagne into the fountain.”

“This should be interesting in an anthropological kind of a way,” Pat said. “The limbo contest will be a hoot, and the Bad Grrl can make fun of it all later.”

Susan shook her head. All through dinner, she’d been wondering how Max was doing. For the first time that afternoon, the writer had seemed genuinely concerned about what was going on aboard the
Odyssey.
She couldn’t manage much enthusiasm for a limbo contest. “Let’s go down to the dance floor where we can see better,” Pat said.

“You go on,” Susan said. “I’ll just watch from up here. Maybe I’ll go for a walk.”

It took a little persuasion, but eventually Pat and Ian headed for the dance floor, leaving Susan by herself. It had been a long day, beginning with her breakfast conversation with Max about Weldon, the power of names, the
I Ching,
and the creative process.

She watched Pat and Ian make their way down the spiral staircase, through the crowd of passengers in evening dress, and to the edge of the dance floor. It was easy to follow Pat’s progress; her brilliant blue hair stood out in the crowd.

On the dance floor, Gene Culver had the microphone and he was encouraging the crowd to dance the Macarena, which blared over the loudspeakers. The people on the dance floor had begun to dance in a self-conscious sort of way.

Susan surveyed the crowd and spotted someone she recognized: the elderly Ms. Murphy who had known so much about Pataphysics. The dancing spread, moving outward from the dance floor into the rest of the room. Viewed from above, it was a staggering spectacle of gyrating hips and waving hands as bald men in tuxes and ample women in sequins danced with enthusiasm. As Susan watched, Ms. Murphy headed toward the doors that led to the Promenade. Susan watched her for a moment, then caught a glimpse of someone else moving purposefully through the dancing crowd.

Weldon Merrimax was following Ms. Murphy as she headed toward the door. There was something ominous about his concentration on the woman. The elderly woman didn’t know she was being followed. It didn’t look good.

Susan looked for a security guard, but didn’t see one. She looked for a way to get down to the Promenade level and intercept Ms. Murphy, but the spiral staircase was crowded and the dance floor was worse. She hurried to the glass elevators, but there was a crowd waiting there. Glancing to one side of the elevators, she spotted a door labeled “Emergency Exit.” Without hesitation, she opened the door and headed down the service companionway, passing a startled looking waiter carrying a tray of drinks. “This will take me to the Promenade level, won’t it?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and she hurried past before he could stop her.

Jason Jacobs, the leader and songwriter for the Twisted Band, watched the limbo contest with thinly disguised loathing. He did not belong here, he thought. It was a cruel set of circumstances that had brought him to the
Odyssey.

He had been working on a graduate degree in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and playing music in his spare time. A scout for a record company had heard Jacobs’ band playing at a San Francisco club. The scout had been extravagant in his praise of the band. He’d bought them drinks, promised them a record contract, said that they’d be an overnight success.

At that time, Jacobs hadn’t been getting along very well with his dissertation advisor. Jacobs’ dissertation dealt with the patterns of rhythm and melody that appear in ritual situations. He had studied the music used in Inuit shamanistic ritual and Voodoo ceremonies, Hopi dances and the gospel tunes sung in charismatic Christian sects.

In his study, Jacobs had found that certain patterns of rhythm and melody affect the human nervous system, inducing trance states that lead to the internal physiological repetition of the rhythm. Jacobs had become fascinated with these rhythms, incorporating them into his own music. His advisor had suggested that he might spend his time more profitably documenting his findings in the literature, rather than dabbling in pop music.

So the day after his meeting with the scout, elated and hung over, Jacobs told his dissertation advisor that he was fed up with the university’s chickenshit attitude and he was moving on.

He had planned to take the music world by storm. But the scout was fired by the record company and no one else at the company seemed particularly interested in Jacobs’ band. The band had landed a few club gigs, but that hadn’t been nearly enough to pay the rent.

The sax player had a friend who knew someone who worked for Odyssey Cruises. And the steel drum player had heard rumors that London clubs were more receptive to new talent than the American clubs. One thing led to another and all those things led to this: Twisted Band was playing on the
Odyssey,
en route to London. And here he was, watching a buxom lady in a purple velvet gown and a white-haired lady in sequins limbo for the honor of leading a conga line.

The song that Jacobs had selected to play for the conga line that night was a new composition that incorporated the rhythms and melodies of ritual music. Jacobs surmised that this song, which he had titled “Dance All Night,” would serve as a superstimulus for dancing. The crowd would not appreciate the artistry behind the composition, Jacobs reasoned, but at least it would get them to dance. That would make the cruise line happy, which would be useful if the band needed to arrange for a ride back to the States at some future date.

Jacobs watched the end of the contest. The white-haired woman—remarkably limber for her age—wriggled under a bar that was a good two inches below the buxom lady’s best.

Gene Culver announced the white-haired woman as the winner, holding her arm aloft like the referee at a boxing match. Then he announced that Twisted Band would play an original dance tune, composed just for the conga line.

Twisted Band began to play, starting with a simple rhythm line on the steel drum. The guitarist echoed the rhythm, adding a simple, repetitive melody. The sax joined in, and then Jacobs began to sing: