Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (51 page)

“Oh, definitely.” Inwardly, Pogo was cursing. He’d had the Baptist on the hook, he could tell.
C’mon, Cashman
, he told himself.
Like the Kirby Shoes manual says—“Nothing shows if you don’t close.”
He cleared his throat. “I mean, yeah, we totally have to deal with the important stuff first. And I’m totally going to answer your question, too. It’s just that . . . well, he cries at night. When he thinks no one is around.”

“The giant?” asked John the Baptist in tones of astonishment. “He laments his state?”

“Cries about all the innocent people he’s eaten, yeah, absolutely. You should talk to him about it. I really think he’s, like, all ready to come to Jesus.” He wondered if lying like this was a sin, but since this was only a made-up version of John the Baptist, and he was lying to him about a made-up giant, too—well, how bad a sin could it be?

“Clearly I must speak with this deluded creature,” said John, standing up and brushing off his crimson cloak. “Not to mention that the prophet Daniel, who has always been
very
certain of who and who would not be redeemed, would be most . . . instructed if I should convert the creature.” His eyes gleamed. “And smarty-pants Isaiah would be pretty surprised, too . . . ”

“Um, just to warn you, he won’t . . . admit it or anything. I mean, he’s really stubborn.” Pogo forced a laugh. “Ha ha! You know these giants! You’ll have to keep after him. It may take a while.”

John seemed full of energy and high spirits. “No fear—after all, we have until the Second Coming!”

Pogo almost had to run to keep up with the ancient Evangelist, who seemed to be heading right for the stables, so keen was he to begin the ogre’s conversion. “But what about me getting to the moon?”

“Don’t worry,” John called back over his shoulder as he broke into a run. “I’ll have one of the grooms hitch up the chariot for you. Practically drives itself . . . !”

As the golden chariot was tugged into the sky by the four ruby-red horses, and the ground fell away with sickening speed, causing Quidprobe to grab the railing and gasp at the unfamiliar (and queasy) feeling of acceleration on organic skeletal structure, he could still hear the giant bellowing far below.

“No! Shut up and leave Caligorant alone! ‘Suffer little children’ only good part!”

Quidprobe looked down at the retreating ground once, then decided not to do that again. Instead he tried to focus on the great, pale orb of the daytime moon, which was growing larger every moment.

“Are the horses going to be able to breathe?” the Pogocashman asked. “Like, in space?”

Quidprobe shook his head, although he was mildly impressed with the question: the Pogocashman hadn’t shown much interest in such practical things to this point. “This is based on the medieval imagination, not reality,” he said. “Point one—these horses are magical flying horses, so they can probably breathe where we’re going. And, if we’re lucky, so can we.”

“Huh.” The Pogocashman looked down at his armor. “Hadn’t thought about us. This isn’t exactly an astronaut suit, is it? Pretty cool, though. I mean, if I was twelve again I’d think this was the greatest thing ever.” His bemused smile didn’t last long. “Right now, though, I’m just kind of wanting to go home.”

Quidprobe sighed. “When I was a youngster, I dreamed of being the world’s foremost jelly-tube architect. I never imagined I’d be flying around in the open air, wearing a body with bones in it.”

“Poor little dude,” the Pogocashman said, patting him on the head in a way that made Quidprobe’s dwarf-whiskers bristle. “Don’t sweat it—we’ll get out of this okay. You said it’s a story, right? Stories always end happy.”

Quidprobe was glad none of his colleagues from the Existential Despair Division were present. Clearly the Pogocashman was familiar with only the most elemental kinds of fictional universes. A moment later, though, Quidprobe realized that he desperately wanted the Pogocashman to be right.

By the Silver Buttocks of Eddison and the Smoking Jacket of Cabell!
he thought in sudden horror.
What if this is one of those stories where the companion dies?

Quidprobe spent the rest of the ride sitting in the bottom of the chariot trying not to hyperventilate.

The surface of the moon was even crazier than Pogo had thought it would be, like the abandoned set to some ancient black and white movie, with bits of ruined walls and statues poking through shifting dunes of sand and the Earth hanging close above their heads in a most disturbing way. The saint who rigged up the chariot had told them to head toward the highest hills, and soon they were standing on the peak of the highest looking down into a bowl-shaped valley which from this distance appeared to be nothing so much as a badly tended landfill littered with a zillion odds and ends. They left the chariot on the hill and made their way carefully down the slope.

“So this is it?” Pogo asked as they neared the lake of bric-a-brac. “We’re supposed to find Roland’s brain in all this?”

“Everything here is something that someone on earth lost,” the dwarf explained. “That was Ariosto’s idea, anyway. The saints said all the lost wits are in one part.”

“Ah, I got it, just got to find the right section. Like Men’s Casuals, or Children’s.”

Quidprobe looked puzzled, but Pogo was on familiar ground now. He scrambled a little way back up the slope and began to scan the valley, looking for clues as to how the merchandise was inventoried. In his store, they kept all the similar things together, so all the men’s black dress shoes were in one area, all the brown ones beside it, and a little farther away, the men’s casuals and sport shoes. It shouldn’t be too hard to make sense of this, if he could only recognize what the various objects were.

“Start walking around,” he called down to Quidprobe. “Tell me what some of this stuff is.”

The little man began an awkward tour through the mounds, calling out what he found to the best of his ability to recognize it. “Lost keys!” he shouted as he stepped through a field of clinking bronze and iron. “Letters!” he yelled, then picked one up to read a few lines. “The prose is quite romantic—think this might be lost loves.” He trudged along, stopped to shade his eyes against the Earth-glare. “There’s a mountain over there that looks like it’s made of . . . suitcases and steamer trunks. Goodness, it’s quite big!”

“Lost luggage, I bet,” Pogo called. “Keep going!”

The dwarf picked his way through artifacts both real and imaginary—the collars of thousands of lost dogs and cats, a lake of corroded clocks representing lost time, and an even larger sea filled with silver and gold coins and paper money, perhaps the monetary losses of drunkards and gamblers. For a moment, Pogo considered slaloming down the sandy hill and filling his pockets with some of those coins—the gold itself should at least be worth something—but since Quidprobe kept telling him this was all imaginary stuff, he doubted it would come back with him . . .
if
he even made it back home, that was.

Immense piles of bent swords and broken arrows which might represent lost battles or lost nerve; delicate masks cracked and dirtied—Quidprobe guessed they might have something to do with lost reputations—and an immense, uneven field of toys and dolls that the little man suggested might stand for lost innocence, the dwarf listed them off and Pogo took note, trying to see something like the organizational grid he had learned in his management training workbook:
Knowing Your Inventory = Sales Power!
As the timeless day wore on and he could begin to make out some patterns, he scrambled down the slope and joined the little man. All of the saddest and most personal things seemed to be clustered at one end of the immense sea of lost wages, savings, and livelihoods, where the coins glittered like the foamy caps of frozen waves, so he led Quidprobe there and they began to search every mound, puzzling for long minutes sometimes over what the objects might represent.

“Hey, Dickrobe,” he called. “I think I found something!”

“It’s Quickpoop!” snarled the little man, kicking something in his irritation. “No, Quidprobe!
Quidprobe!
See what you’ve done! I don’t even know my own name anymore!”

“Whoa. Mellow, dude. I was just messing with you.” He’d actually figured out the dwarf’s correct name several days ago, but it was more fun to make up new ones, especially because each time he pretended to get the name wrong, Quidprobe squeaked like a rubbed balloon. “Anyway, I think I might have found what we’re looking for—it’s a bunch of little jars with people’s names on them.” He bent and picked one up, read the carefully engraved label. “Who’s Em-pee-dockles?”

“Empedocles—Greek philosopher,” called Quidprobe from somewhere on the far side of a heap of lost opportunities. “Jumped into a volcano to prove he was a god.”

“Was he?”

“No.”

“Jackpot!” Pogo picked up another. “Pie-thuh-gore-ass?”

“Pythagoras. Another brilliant thinker, except he thought beans had little human souls in them.”

“Okay, this is looking good. Joan of Arc?”

“Heard voices,” said Quidprobe. “Trusted the English. Crazy as a coot.” The dwarf sounded much more cheerful. “Hold on, I’ll come help!”

As he and the little man clambered over the mounds of shifting glass jars, each one filled with a cloudy but slightly luminous liquid, a label caught Pogo’s eye. He picked it up and examined the jar, which was larger than most of the others, although still no bigger than a soft-drink can.
CALIGULA.
He knew the name—it was a dirty movie about some emperor guy who had sex with everything that moved and a few things that didn’t; there had been ads all over one of the men’s magazines Pogo kept in a box in his closet. If this was that Caligula guy’s wits, did that mean his memories were inside it, too? Pogo lifted the jar up and tried to stare into the shifting fluids, hoping for just the faintest visible scene of a Roman orgy, but no matter how he stared he couldn’t make out anything but the cloudy liquid.

“Oh! Oh!”
Quidprobe began to shout quite close by, startling him. Shamed, he hid the Caligula jar.

“What? What is it?”

“By the Hierarchies of Heinlein, I believe I’ve found it! Come over here!”

Pogo made his way across mounds of shifting cut-crystal jars to the dwarf’s side. The little man was holding up a container nearly as large as Caligula’s. Pogo squinted at the silver name-plate and shook his head in disappointment. “No, man, this belongs to some dude named ‘Orlando.’”

“That’s the Italian way of saying Roland,” the dwarf told him. “And look at how big it is! It’s his, it must be!”

By the little guy’s excitement, Pogo could tell that Quidprobe was feeling ready to go home, too. “Well . . . cool, then, I guess. Let’s take it and get going. Good job.” But Pogo was a little sad he hadn’t found it himself. After all, wasn’t
he
supposed to be the hero of this story?

“Well, it was nice of those saints guys to let us hang onto the chariot,” Pogo said, staring over the side as whatever ocean stretched between Ethiopia and Charlemagne-land rolled away beneath them. “So where are we headed now?”

“Paris,” said Quidprobe. “The fairies and the Saracens have it under siege, and only Roland can save the day.”

“Right.” Pogo squinted at a sailing ship far below, so tiny he half-expected to see someone wading after it, trying to recover it and put it back into its bottle. “What’s a Saracen, again?”

“The villains in this particular epic,” the dwarf told him. “Non-Christians.”

Pogo thought guiltily of his own meager forty-watt faith. “Right. Damn those Saracens.”

After some time had passed, they swooped down over fields of ripening grain, gliding so low that Pogo could see workers looking up in astonishment. It was kind of cool, really, riding in a flying chariot. He wondered if he would be rewarded for bringing this Roland guy back his brains. Maybe Charlemagne would give him a castle of his own and a bunch of servants. If he got to keep the chariot it would be even better. All it was missing to be the near-perfect ride was a righteous sound system, so he could swoop down on bad guys blasting “Smoke on the Water” at concert volume . . .

But really, I’d rather go home
, he had to admit.
Somewhere they already have stuff like James Bond movies and car stereos and onion rings. Somewhere I know how things work.

At last, they reached Paris, where the twin armies of Islam and Faerie had surrounded the city walls like coffee grounds filling the sink around a failed garbage disposal. As they flew over, many of the enemy troops pointed up at them, shouting curses and firing arrows, but the flying horses nimbly avoided the hostile shafts and then brought the chariot swooping down over the walls to land in a commons at the center of the city where the tents of the besieged army were massed, their many colorful banners trembling in the breeze like (Pogo couldn’t help thinking) the triangular pennants of the world’s largest used-car lot.

When they landed, the dwarf announced who they were and they were taken by a company of armed men to the king.

Seated on his throne, armored all in gold, gray-bearded Charlemagne looked noble enough to make Pogo instantly wish to enroll in whatever management training courses he offered. Now
this
was what a supervisor should look like!

“Our thanks, noble Duke Astolfo,” the king said in a voice almost exactly like the dad from Bonanza. “You have done us a great service by freeing Prester John, and soon may prove to have done an even greater one, if you can bring back the wits of our greatest paladin, Sir Roland.”

Pogo mumbled that the king was welcome.

“Already the messenger pigeons tell me that Prester John has brought his armies to bear on both Duke Aelfric’s Faerie and Agramant’s infidel lands,” Charlemagne continued. “Both have already lost much of their stomach for this siege. I think if Roland should be returned to health and bring his mighty blade Durendal back to my service, their resolve should quickly crumble.”

“But where
is
Roland, your Highness?” asked Quidprobe.

“Ranging all across Paris like the madman he is, destroying property and the lives of those who try to restrain him. I have asked my bravest knights to harry him hence, with trumpets sounding, so that we may try this sovereign cure you have brought us for his broken wit.” He paused. “Hark? Do you hear? Even now he comes toward us.”