Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (23 page)

But guts don’t fall into that category. My intestinal tract was already healing. As long as I didn’t transform back into human form until it was done, I’d survive. The process was very painful, but it really wasn’t any more dangerous for me than a root canal.

I didn’t think the Lords of Xibalba would know that, however. As deities went, these were some real lowbrows.

Sophia held the intestines high in her left hand, tilted her head, and squeezed some of the blood into her mouth. I don’t think she hesitated more than a split-second, if she hesitated at all. Even in my pain and dizziness I was impressed.

That done, she cast the piece of gut aside as if it were so much trash and sprang to her feet. Before we’d entered the 4-G House, Sophia had taken a couple of the emergency stimulant pills she’d had in her supply kit. The chemicals would wear out in a few hours, at which point she’d be completely exhausted. But for those few hours, the pills gave her an enormous amount of energy.

It took about ten minutes for the effects to kick in. Right about now, in other words.

Oh, she was leaping and springing all over the place, gibbering with zeal and glee. To all outward appearances, a woman reborn. True, if you looked closely you’d still spot the bruises. But we’d figured the Lords of Xibalba wouldn’t notice them at all. Why would something that looked like a chunk of shredded meat left out in the sun too long even think about a measly little bruise?

Me? I was already healed. The truth is, if I hadn’t still been putting on the act of being at death’s door, I’d have already been up and moving about in human form.

Eventually, Sophia left off her capering and came over to me. Then, she started waving the still-bloody machete around and chanting what sounded like really serious incantations. I found out later they were actually curry recipes, spoken in the Caribbean Hindi dialect found in Suriname and Trinidad.

When she came to the climactic finale of her peroration, she spread her hands wide and shouted “
Arise, reborn!
” in standard English. Then, for good measure, repeated it in Xibalba gibberish.

My cue. I rolled up onto my paws, Sophia used the flash, and a few seconds later I was back on my feet as a human being. To all outward appearances, completely unharmed.

Sophia started gibbering again. She’d now be telling them how we were going to charge back outside, knock down whatever other pitiful tests they had worked out for us, gather up the human parts we’d come for—boy oh boy are you guys screwed—and then come back and deal with them, dirty lousy conniving stinky cheaters that they were.

There was silence for a moment, when she finished. This was the critical moment. Would they fall for it . . . ? Or would they call our bluff?

If the latter, we’d have no choice but to return to our own universe with our mission unaccomplished. Or only partly accomplished, at best. We were simply too beat up to keep going for much longer. Being a therianthrope, I’ve got a lot more stamina than most people. But there are limits, even for weres. And Sophia would be completely out of gas, once the stimulants wore off.

I didn’t think they’d be very smart, though, gods or not. You have to figure that a deity who embodies ulcers just isn’t going to measure up intellectually against a god or goddess of wisdom. Or a reasonably bright twelve-year-old kid, for that matter.

And this was a mythos that took blood magic more seriously than any other the human race has ever produced. The thought of being completely revitalized by blood sacrifice would be incredibly attractive, even to godlings.

They started gibbering at Sophia again. She gibbered back, making a big show of appearing reluctant and hesitant. Their gibbering got more and more animated until they sounded downright frantic.

Finally, bowing her head, Sophia yielded to their demands. She pointed to the lord on the far left of the group and motioned it into the center of the chamber. The creature—this one was the god of lice, I think—squirmed and oozed its way forward.

Once it arrived in position, Sophia wagged her finger at it and gibbered sternly. She’d be telling the critter—and all the others listening—that it couldn’t expect as quick a recovery as her loyal minion had made. Being as I was accustomed to the process and they weren’t.

Gibber, gibber, gibber. The machete came up, came down. Since she had no idea which portion of the creature’s horrid body held critical parts and which didn’t, she just sawed away merrily once she got inside. After a minute or so, she hauled out a quivering chunk of who-knows-what-and-I-don’t-want-to-know, and held it over the god’s analog to a mouth. There was a bit of guesswork there too, but it didn’t really matter because it was pretty obvious that the monster was already dead or as close to it as you could ask for.

Still, good theater is good theater. She took the time to squeeze out some blood—blood analog, rather; don’t ask—into the gaping orifice before she cast it aside and summoned another of the lords to come forth.

Which, it did. Eagerly, in fact. She repeated the same process, again and again and again, allowing for the variations needed because no two Lords of Xibalba had the same form or anatomy.

It was a good thing she was on stimulants. That was more hacking and hewing of flesh—flesh analog, rather; really don’t ask—than a meatpacker did in a full day’s work.

Believe it or not, the Lords didn’t get suspicious until there were only two left. But Sophia managed to sweet-talk—okay, sweet-gibber—one of them into undergoing the “revitalization” process. The one left finally realized that something was amiss and started putting up a fight. But this one was apparently the god of athlete’s foot. A puny critter, when all was said and done. Measured, at least, by the standards of a two-hundred-and-forty-pound Deinonychus.

But I didn’t eat the organs. Organ analogs, rather. Really really really don’t ask. Even theropods have limits.

So ended the Lords of Xibalba. For a time, anyway. Given the underlying premises of this region of Hell, they’d almost certainly come back eventually. Reborn out of pain and suffering, so to speak. But that would take quite a while; far more time than we’d need to find and collect all the body parts we needed to bring back.

Then, we finally got a break. Within half an hour we came across the rest of Rick Boatright’s body. It was wandering around the area with a gourd where the head used to be.

The gourd had facial features painted on. Someone, presumably a Lord of Xibalba or one of their agents, had even carved out a rough mouth.

The thing could talk, after a fashion. I couldn’t understand a word it was saying, but Sophia got that look of intense concentration again and we were off to the races.

Boatright—or should I say, Boatright-analog?—led us to the rest of his party. Their pieces, rather. Eventually, we collected them all and brought them back to the clearing in front of the 4-G House.

Unfortunately, for all her quasi-magical linguistic powers, Sophia wasn’t an actual witch. If she had been, she could probably have figured out a way to return to our own universe from where we were. As it was, neither of us knew any better way than to return to our arrival locus. The State Department’s witches would be keeping watch at that location and would be ready to draw us back into our own universe.

That left the problem of how to haul the stuff there. Whole or in pieces, four human bodies still weigh the better part of half a ton. If it were absolutely necessary, I was strong enough that I could probably carry it all back to our arrival spot. But I sure didn’t want to.

Fortunately, there was an obvious alternative. We had the makings for a travois and the dumb beast to haul it.

Rick Boatright. His body hadn’t been harmed and with a gourd for a head, he wasn’t likely to argue his way out the task.

He didn’t even try. He just picked up the travois handles, lowered his gourd, and set off after us.

Along the way, we stopped at the pit to pick up Sophia’s sidekick. By then, Ingemar had drunk all but a handful of the Four Hundred Boys under the table. (Figuratively speaking. They’d actually been drinking from troughs made out of—never mind. Don’t ask.)

I wasn’t surprised. Despite the nickname, “black elves” are actually a variety of dwarves. No one in their right mind gets into drinking contests with dwarves.

5

It was slow going,
of course. That would have been true over the best ground, much less this muck. But eventually we got there, the State Department’s witches were indeed keeping a watch, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves back where we’d started.

“Oh, yuck!” screeched one of the witches, scurrying away from the travois.

Which . . . was a real mess. That part of the hell universe took death and dismemberment in stride, so to speak. That’s the reason you could plant a gourd on the shoulders of a decapitated man, paint crude facial features on it, and expect it to walk around and even talk after a fashion.

But once we arrived back home, the conditions of our universe took over. The results were . . .

Unfortunate. Let’s put it that way.

The first thing that happened was that the gourd rolled off Boatright’s shoulders and Boatright’s body collapsed to the floor. The gourd wound up underneath one of the chairs against the far wall and Boatright’s body started spreading across the floor.

As did the body parts of all of his companions, oozing out of the travois. The technical phrase is
advanced and enhanced decomposition produced by infernal conditions.
Colloquially known as Quick Rot.

Too bad for Boatright and his crew, of course, but from the cold-blooded standpoint of
Realpolitik
the outcome was just as good as if we’d brought them back alive. Not even the harshest Scandinavian or Slavic deity would fault us for the demise of the Boatright party. Such beings took violent death as a matter of course. What mattered was whether honor, just retribution and clan vengeance was satisfied. Bringing back all the corpses and putting paid to the Lords of Xibalba did that just fine.

Sophia told me a few weeks later that human embassies touring the so-called “morally neutral” portions of the nether regions universe were being feted everywhere they went. Especially in those mythos which placed a premium on sneakiness, treachery, and guile. Which was just about all of them.

Our first date went well, I thought. Extremely well, in fact. But I was clearly in for a protracted period of emotional exercise and probable exhaustion. The new lady in my life is never at a loss for words.

Fortunately, I have a theropod’s stamina.

AFTERWORD:

I’ve always
enjoyed Poul Anderson’s stories, which I started reading as a teenager. And in his case, I enjoyed just about everything he wrote.

That’s unusual. With most authors I enjoy, I really only like a portion of their work. One story or novel but not another; one series or setting, but not another. With Anderson, I can’t think of one that I didn’t enjoy.

So, when Gardner Dozois asked me to contribute to this anthology, I had to think about it. Not
whether
I’d contribute something—that would be a pleasure—but in which of Poul Anderson’s many universes.

It finally came down to a choice between the world Anderson created in
Operation Chaos
and the one he created in
The High Crusade.
(
Three Hearts and Three Lions
was a close third.)

In the end, I opted for
Operation Chaos.
I enjoy
The High Crusade
every bit as much, as a story, but I’d find it somewhat awkward to write my own story in that setting. More precisely, I’d find it difficult to write a story in that setting that stayed true to Anderson’s own vision of it. And doing so, I think, is important for this kind of anthology.

I never met Poul Anderson, and never corresponded with him. But it’s obvious just from reading his work that he had a different view of the political history of the human race than I do. He had a soft spot in his heart for feudalism. It might be better to say, was attuned to what he saw as its advantages. You could see that not only in
The High Crusade
but in such stories as “No Truce With Kings.” That went along with an elegiac attitude toward the grandeur of dying regimes, which of course runs all through his massive Dominic Flandry series.

Me? I think the best thing about the medieval period is that it’s gone. And as much as I enjoyed each and every one of the Flandry stories, the truth is, deep down inside I was always rooting for the Merseians. The fading glories of the Terran Empire, so far as I was concerned, were just the trappings of another rotting, decadent empire. Pfui. History is littered with the cruddy things. Good riddance.

I’m sure Anderson and I would have spent a number of pleasant hours wrangling over the issues involved, if we’d ever met. Unfortunately, that can’t happen now. And I wasn’t comfortable at the idea of writing a story for an anthology commemorating an author that, no matter how subtly or indirectly, constituted a tacit critique of his work.

It’s too bad, in a way. I would have had fun writing a story about the stalwart and quick-thinking alien peasantry rising up in rebellion against tyrannical and dirt-stupid human barons . . .

But, what the hell. I knew I’d have just as much fun writing about shapechangers and witches in the world of
Operation Chaos—
and
that
story was one I could write completely and fully in Poul Anderson’s own spirit.

Such was my intent, at any rate. You’ve now just read the story, so you can decide for yourself if I succeeded or not.

—Eric Flint