Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (50 page)

“So what’s next, little dude?” the Pogocashman asked. “We’ll drop Mr. John at the nearest town, then fly to the moon, right? With some guy named Griff the Hippo?”

Quidprobe shook his head. “I doubt the hippogriff will be available to us, since we no longer have a horse to trade for it. The fair Bradamant will not wish to ride into battle on a steed as stenchful and unpleasant as this ogre.”

“Me can hear you,” rumbled Caligorant from immediately beneath Quidprobe’s dwarfish bottom. “Me find that hurtful.”

It took them several days to find their way across the wilds of Ethiopia—or at least this imaginary version of Ethiopia—to the mountain atop which Quidprobe believed they would find the Earthly Paradise. He could only hope he was right, since this particular location had never been written into Anderson’s original work, and only faintly implied by its connection to the rest of the Matter of France, but hoping and guessing was all the sub-sub-manager had been doing since he’d been thrust into this ruptured story, anyway.

The Pogocashman, buoyed by his victories, spent much of the journey explaining to Quidprobe how he had been inspired by tracts like
The Sales Pyramid
or
Think Accessories to “Add” Value.
Somehow the whole of his philosophy seemed to come down to telling people, “I have a handbag for you that would go great with those”—an eldritch phrase of indubitable power, at least according to the Pogocashman. Quidprobe could only shrug—that was one thing that having shoulders was good for, anyway—and hope their luck would continue to hold, although he thought it unlikely. For one thing, the saints that inhabited the Earthly Paradise were likely to be a fearfully rules-oriented bunch, and he suspected they weren’t going to like the Pogocashman’s rather freewheeling approach to the Matter of France.

His retail philosophies finally exhausted, the Pogocashman was now engaged in his newest pastime, spitting for distance and accuracy from the summit of the giant’s shoulders, each expectoration accompanied by the odd, ritualistic chant, “Got you again, Vader!” It was hard to believe the Pogocashman was a genuine bull organic, his sperm coveted by all the females of his species, but there had to be evolutionary subtleties that Quidprobe could not grasp. He was beginning to think that for all his years studying them in preparation for his job, he would never really understand non-symbolic life forms.

Another trudge up another long hill, the giant moaning and grumbling all the way—“Caligorant want to lie down.” “Caligorant foot hurt.” “Me hungry again.” It was worse than working a lonely Sunday shift with Little Ed, who had the conversational skills of a snappish dog.

“So, what’s up this mountain, anyway?” Pogo asked Quidprobe.

“I told you,” the dwarf said. “It’s the Earthly Paradise. It used to be the Garden of Eden.”

“So,” Pogo said hopefully, “like a restaurant or something?”

The little man sighed. He did that a lot. Pogo was beginning to suspect the dwarf had asthma, like Little Ed. Or at least like Little Ed claimed he had: Pogo thought it was funny how Little Ed only had asthma attacks when it was time to clean the lavatory. “Not anything like a restaurant,” the dwarf explained. “It’s where the saints live. Is knowing that not part of your human religious rituals?”

“Don’t know.” The closest Pogo had ever come to church as a kid was when his electrician father had installed a forty-watt light bulb in a manger for the local church’s Nativity Play. The bulb had been Baby Jesus. When the play was over, Pogo’s dad had brought it home. “Here,” he had told Pogo. “Go bury this in the backyard and see if it comes back to life in three days.” His dad had moved out a few weeks later and Pogo had never asked him exactly what he had meant.

As they climbed, Pogo couldn’t help noticing that the foliage was growing more lush, the sights more lovely, and even the smells more pleasant. Grass as green as AstroTurf grew everywhere, and bright flowers pushed their way up between the stems, colorful as an Easter sales display. The bees were big as sparrows but mellow as old hippies, and the sun shone warmly everywhere but the cool, inviting shade beneath the majestic trees growing beside the track.

“Wow,” Pogo said, paying his highest compliment to natural beauty. “Somebody ought to build vacation condos here and start a time-share business. They would totally clean up.”

When they reached the summit of the hill, they discovered a grassy plain of a grandeur that matched the approach, and at the center of it a vast palace that looked to be carved from a single ruby.

“Behold,” the dwarf said. “The Earthly Paradise.”

“Wow,” said Pogo. “That’s bitchin’!”

“Me hungry again,” said the giant.

As they grew closer the palace became no less amazing, sunlight glinting from every angle and facet so that the castle sat in a sparkling red glow. As they reached the palace’s tall gate, it slowly rose to reveal a white-bearded man who looked to Pogo like nothing so much as a skinny Santa Claus. The man greeted them warmly, although he did seem a bit taken aback by Caligorant.

“Come,” he said. “Enter and make yourselves welcome, travelers. Refresh yourselves. Your . . . steed . . . will be seen to as well. What would you eat and drink? The Lord’s bounty is such we can give you whatever your heart desires.”

“Little fat women,” said the giant promptly. “But young. Me like them crunchy, not chewy.”

The bearded man suppressed a shudder. “Perhaps we can find a suckling pig or two for your mount,” he told Pogo. “So few of our guests eat pork, anyway. It’s a desert-tribe thing.”

“You are the holy Evangelist, aren’t you?” asked Quidprobe, who was trying to brush his tangled whiskers into a more respectable shape. “John the Baptist, as some call you?”

Pogo had thought John the Baptist was some kind of southern university, but the man nodded. “It is true: I am he that trumpeted the coming of our Savior. And now that you have come to us, pious Astolfo,” he said, this time talking to Pogo, “the saints and I will try to help you accomplish your quest, for your liege Charlemagne is dear to us, and his kingdom the bulwark of Christendom against both the Saracen and the treacherous fairies.”

Pogo had walked past a club in Hollywood once and a very tall woman had tried to get him to come inside. He’d almost gone in, too, until he’d got close enough to see the woman’s five-o’clock shadow. Pogo Cashman might not know what Saracens were, but he knew all about treacherous fairies.

The saints came out to meet them—not marching in, as Pogo had hoped, but walking like normal people. Still, they seemed nice, if a trifle on the quiet side, and the food they laid out on the long table in their splendid dining room, although a plain meal of butter, bread, honey, and some kind of vegetable soup that didn’t even have alphabet noodles in it, was as tasty as anything Pogo had encountered for a long time. Thus, when they showed him and Quidprobe to a clean, warm room with two beds, Pogo was ready to drop immediately, but the dwarf seemed determined to talk. “They’ll want to make certain you’re a shriven and holy knight before they help you get to the moon,” the dwarf said, clearly worried. “Saints are supposed to be big on things like that.”

Pogo yawned. He wondered if Buzz Aldrin’s golf club was still lying around up there. Maybe he’d get to hit a couple of drives. Once he’d realized that the astronauts were not going to be attacked by moon men, the golf part had been the one thing about the whole Apollo mission that had caught his imagination. But when he asked the dwarf about it, Quidprobe only seemed irritated.

“By Dunsany’s Jodphurs, are you even paying attention, Pogocashman? This isn’t your world and that isn’t your moon—in fact, it’s not even a real moon, it’s a medieval moon filtered through at least two or three different storytellers. It’s probably made of some kind of cheese. No, I don’t mean that, and don’t you dare ask me the question I can see forming even now.”

Pogo grunted his disappointment. “So?”

“This religious thing truly worries me. Anderson’s story-structure allows you some leeway to make mistakes, but they were expecting someone with an elementary knowledge of things like history and science that you don’t seem to have.”

“I’m doing all right so far . . . !”

The dwarf waved his hand. “Yes, yes. But you’re going to have to talk to the saints about your love of Christ and your holy vows as a knight before they help you. How are you going to get through that with . . . what did you call it?
Guidelines for Retail Management
?”

“Well, then tell me what to say!”

“You don’t understand.” The dwarf was sitting on his own bed now, his feet dangling well above the stone floor. “I studied story construction. My background is in themes and influences, in the sometimes very thin line between homage and plagiarism. Religious instruction is not my field!”

“Okay, yeah. That’s kind of a drag.” But Pogo was too tired and too full of good food to worry about it. He only wanted to sleep. “Don’t sweat it, little dude. I’ll figure out something to tell them tomorrow.”

“You don’t ‘figure out’ how to talk to the saints about religion,” said Quidprobe in the helpless tone of a veterinarian trying to get a particularly stupid pit bull to let go of his arm. “These are the founding fathers and mothers of the Christian religion. It’s all they think about!”

But Pogo Cashman had shut his eyes.

Somehow, though, despite the great and comfortable weariness that it was his greatest wish to surrender to, Pogo couldn’t fall asleep. The idea that he would have to pay for this hospitality by answering questions about something he knew next to nothing about was beginning to trouble him, too. He doubted they would consider the story of his dad’s light bulb enough to get him off the hook. Also, now that he was having his first comfortable night in a while, Pogo was perversely beginning to miss his tiny apartment and especially his television and stereo, and wondering if he would ever get back. The experience hadn’t been too bad for an acid flashback, which he had been assured back in high school consisted mostly of imagining you could fly and then jumping out of tall buildings, but it was definitely short on the modern conveniences. How long had he been here, anyway? How many episodes of
WKRP In Cincinnati
had he missed? John the Baptist was all well and good, but Pogo needed a weekly dose of Johnny Fever.

Quidprobe said he needed help from these religious guys to finish his quest, so he obviously wouldn’t be getting to see Loni Anderson in her tight sweater unless he convinced them. He hated dealing with people who wanted him to learn a bunch of shit that only they cared about. In fact, it reminded him more than a little of one of his supervisor’s Sunday Schools, a nightmarish event that happened every couple of months where he kept all the employees in the store for hours after closing time, making them take tests about stock numbers and the “Courtesy Checklist” and learn slogans like “Remember the G.S.M. FAT! (Greet, Seat, Measure—Fit, Accessorize, Ticket.)” As manager, Pogo usually had to do the lion’s share of work at these meetings, and sometimes even lead them while the supervisor watched him like mall security following a shoplifter. The only way he had found to escape the worst of these Sunday School sessions was to throw another employee under the bus, usually by saying something like, “Gee, sir, I’m having trouble getting Fernando to understand the value of bringing a packet of socks with every shoe he fits. Maybe it’s the language barrier.” This despite the fact that Fernando had been raised in Northridge and spoke English at least as well as Pogo—better if you counted all that grammar stuff. “I’m out of my depth, sir,” he would tell the supervisor while Fernando pleaded with his eyes to be spared. “Perhaps you could show us the best way to get through to him.”

Which was usually enough to light an evangelical fire in the supervisor’s eye, and then Pogo could kick back and watch poor little Fernando get put through two hours of hell in his place, learning how to foist off expensive tube socks on various customers who were acted out by the supervisor.

Which wasn’t that bad an idea for his present problem, now that Pogo thought about it. Of course, Fernando, the perfect victim, wasn’t here, and Pogo was nervous about how he would get back home without Quidprobe, but that didn’t mean a suitable subject couldn’t be found . . .

“Oh, yeah,” he told John the Baptist when he had been ushered in to see the venerable Evangelist, “I’d totally love to talk about my holy vows and how hard I’ve been shrivening and everything, but first I need your help with a little religious matter. Kind of a spreading-the-faith problem, if you get what I mean.”

The old man’s eyes glinted like those of an avid shopper spotting a two-for-one table. “Spreading the faith? Why, yes, I suppose I’d be the one to ask!” John the Baptist tried to chuckle affably, but it had a slightly hungry sound. “Not meaning to toot my own horn, of course, but that’s pretty much what I’m known for. Of course, all these centuries living here, waiting for the Last Judgement and surrounded by those who are already saints, I don’t get much call to practice my trade . . . ” His hand fastened on Pogo’s; it was kind of alarming how hard the old man squeezed. “Tell me, how can I help, my son?”

“It’s not me, sir, it’s . . . it’s the giant.”

John’s eyebrows climbed several centimeters nearer to Heaven. “Really? That monstrous creature is desirous of joining the fold?”

“Oh, sure, yeah, I think so . . . but maybe this isn’t a good time, with you needing to talk to me before you send me on to the moon, and, like, Charlemagne in so much need and everything.”

“Nonsense,” John said firmly. “Always time to assist an errant soul looking to find its way to the bosom of our Almighty Father.”

“Well, I can’t help noticing that Caligorant talks about being hungry all the time, and I’m beginning to think he means in a kind of, um, spiritual way. Do giants have souls?”

“That is in dispute,” said John, his eyes growing distant. “In fact, this might be a fascinating opportunity to determine . . . ” He trailed off, then made an effort to focus again. “I’m sorry, but we really should discuss your quest first, then perhaps we can find time to pursue this interesting sideline afterward. Now, perhaps you can tell me about the religious training of your youth—were you a squire to a pious knight?”