The Other Normals (10 page)

“Mortin Enaw, you and your associates are under arrest.”

I’M READY TO RESIST. I SIT UP, BRING MY fists to my face, and, even though I’m facing two fish-men and one octopus-man (and even though my ankle is still tied to a rope), move my hands in little circles like a boxer. I figure I’ll wiggle out, jump at the octopus-man, push him into the thakerak, and hit it so it sparks up again. With luck it’ll zap him back to Camp Washiska Lake, where counselors or a SWAT team will deal with him. Then Mortin and Ada and I will handle the others. As I play through this scenario, I realize I’m not treating the World of the Other Normals like a hallucination, or a dream, or even real life; I’m treating it like a game. Games prepared me for it. And it has something to win—the princess, whoever she is, or Ada, who is a princess as far as I’m concerned.

Ada mouths at me, “Don’t move.” I put my hands down.

“You’re suspected of performing unlicensed tweaks, Mortin,” the octopus-man says, “and considering
him
”—me, as indicated by tentacle—“I’ve got ample evidence to bring you in. Plus Ryu tells me you’ve spoken with questionable tone about the Appointees.”

“I’m trying to
help
the Appointees! I’m trying to get the princess
back
!”

“Mortin … such a sad, delusional case. You used to be one of the brightest minds in correspondence, one of Sulice’s youngest field operatives, and here you are, descended into madness at the hands of that most plebeian substance, earthpebbles.”

“Shut up!” Mortin lunges forward before Ada can stop him. In a blur, the octopus-man shoots out a tentacle and wraps it around his wrist, twisting him off balance. He lands on his tail; with a quiet
crick
, his lighter cracks apart.

“No! That’s vintage!”

The octopus-man restrains Mortin’s wrists with one tentacle and his ankles with another. He pulls out his sword with one of his buff human arms and points it at Mortin’s neck while the fish-men aim their spears at his chest.

“All right,” Mortin says. “I surrender. But don’t hurt the boy; it’s vital that he return to Earth to complete a mission.”

“Nobody’s returning anywhere! Handcuff this criminal and get him out of here!”

The fish-men advance on Mortin, kneel down, and babble at each other in a rotten, wet language. They snap cuffs on his wrists and ankles. One of them throws him over his shoulder. Mortin looks desperately at me and Ada as he’s carried off. “Ada, get him back to Earth! Explain about the princess!”

The door slams. Mortin’s gone. The tentacled man steps
toward me. With one tug, he undoes the rope around my ankle. It flops on the table. “Ow!” I curse myself for saying something so wimpy in front of Ada and Ryu, who’s smiling at me in a way that demands a girder be pushed at his face.

“You’ll be getting further explanations from
me
,” the octopus-man says. I grit my teeth. Jake taught me once how to deal with cops: first, treat them as deferentially as possible; second, lie about everything.

“My name’s Officer Tendrile,” he says. “What’s yours?”

“John … Johnson,” I say. Will it work? In Creatures & Caverns, the determining statistic for whether someone believes your lies is Personality. Pekker Cland is Personality 5.

Officer Tendrile wraps a tentacle around my left wrist, snaps it over to my right, and squeezes both. He feels cold, damp, and strong. Where his suckers bite into my skin, a sharp burn, like sandpaper, runs up my arms. Blood escapes from under his tentacle.

“Aaagh!”

“Listen to me.” He moves close. His big pecs twitch. Behind him, Gamary looks guilty. “I’ve never had a problem with humans. I don’t like running spears lengthwise through their digestive cavities, or feeding them to sand sharks, or just plain eating them, like my servant here.” Next to him, the remaining fish creature gnashes his teeth, revealing a forked black tongue. “But if you start lying to me, things will get very unpleasant for you very quickly.”

“Don’t hurt him!” Ada says. “He’s sensitive!”

“I don’t need to be lectured by an
attey
!” Officer Tendrile snaps. “You witches think everybody’s so sensitive. He looks fine to me. Guard! How’s that blood taste?”

I stand stock-still as the fish creature comes up to my wrists, bends down, and licks the blood seeping out from under Officer Tendrile’s coiled tentacle. He nods and grins.

“Strong blood, strong body,” Officer Tendrile says. “Don’t listen to these conjurer scum. You’re just fine, Mr....”

“Eckert. Perry Eckert.”

“That’s better. Guard?”

The fish creature cuffs my hands behind my back. My blood clings to the cool metal.
Do something, Perry!
Pekker Cland wouldn’t give up in this situation! He’d bust out with a pep talk from Sam. But now the fish creature is cuffing my ankles. “No, wait, I’m—
ow!
” I stagger and fall. I land on my shoulder next to the destroyed remnants of Mortin’s lighter. “My ankle’s injured!”

“Suck it up,” Officer Tendrile says. “What’s the matter with you?” He puts a tentacle under Ada’s face. “And
you.
What a well-formed piece of equipment! You could be making big money dancing Upper.”

Ada moves her lips around like she’s thinking of a witty comeback. I glance at the splintered lighter behind me—a small scatter of wood and metal slivers. I roll my cuffs against it. Some pieces get picked up by the blood that’s congealing on me and stick to my skin. I don’t know why I do it. Maybe I’ll be able to help Mortin put the lighter back together later.
Ada unleashes her comeback—but it isn’t words. It’s spit.
Splat.

“Cuff ’er!” Officer Tendrile wipes off his mustache. The fish creature secures Ada’s wrists behind her back and kicks her notebook across the room. He has tawny human feet.

“Hey!”

“Get them out of here! Let’s go!”

“What are we being arrested for?” I insist.

“For being yourself.”

The fish creature wraps his scaly arms under my armpits and flings me onto Gamary’s back. I cough into his coarse okapi hair. Ada is next, but she gets tossed on in the opposite direction, so that all I see are her shackled feet. She has normal feet—everyone in this world seems to go barefoot—but her toenails are silver, with small glittering sparkles.

“I like your toenail polish,” I say. I know it’s good to give girls compliments.

“Shut up!” Officer Tendrile says. He slaps me across the face with a tentacle. “Move!”

Gamary lopes forward. Ryu stays at the thakerak. “Well done,” Officer Tendrile tells him. “Have a good time checking out New York, and I wish you luck with your movie-making rock-star career.”

“Cool, Officer.”

Punk
, I think.

“It’s not polish,” Ada says quietly. “I’m an attenuate other normal. Our nails are like that.”

She wiggles her toes. The light that shines through the water glints off them. Despite myself, despite the situation, I blush, and I’m glad she can’t see as Officer Tendrile leads us out of the thakerak chamber into

MOST OF THE TRAVEL THAT TAKES PLACE between Earth and the World of the Other Normals happens in Subbenia, centrally located, where Mortin brought me when he took me over. The city stretches from under the Great Beniss Basin to its shores to the mountains that surround it, and, as is true in New York, cities that are economically dependent on travel and free enterprise are homes for disease, crime, adventure, and very odd smells, which smack me in the face as Gamary carries me down the passage from his thakerak-for-rent to the central market of Penner. Penner is a giant subterranean chamber, two hundred feet tall and several city blocks long, filled with bickering, chattering, otherworldly creatures in an open-air flea market.

“Jeez,” I say, straining to take it in between coughing fits into Gamary’s hair. It looks like the farmers’ market in Union Square, except instead of just having beards and tribal earlobe inserts, the people are monsters—strange variants of the things I’ve read about in Creatures & Caverns.

Some look like Mortin, with red skin, yellow hair, and tails—and there are many who smoke pipes like him (although
I don’t see any with tail lighters; maybe that
was
vintage). Some look like Ada and Ryu (“attenuates”?), with pale skin, blue hair, pointed ears, spindly bodies, and twinkling fingernails and toenails. Some are aqua blue with throbbing gill slits on their necks in large glass collars full of water.

Then there are the ingresses, the hybrids. Each is part human and part something else. I see okapicentaurs like Gamary; fish-men like the guard who strides beside me (who, although he looks fishy, seems fine breathing air); octopus-men like Officer Tendrile (who all appear to be cops); proper horse-bottom centaurs, who look tall and regal and (I admit) sexy; fauns with goat legs and human bodies; men with dog heads that slobber and bark at one another; and men with large, bumpy, moist-looking frog heads.

The ceiling, like the inside of the thakerak chamber, is a giant glass sheet under bright blue water, which makes the chamber feel like a bizarre aquarium where the creatures have escaped and decided to sell things. Different stands offer pottery, rugs, books, fruit, jewelry, weapons, and medicine. Everyone wears getmas or kilts or robes. I see no women. I see no shoes.

Creatures crowd Ada and me as we’re paraded through, smoking, spitting, blabbing in different languages, mostly English.
Why English?
I assumed before that everyone spoke English because this was happening in my head, or because it was a setup for a cruel psychological experiment, but no psychological experiment would involve construction of a set this elaborate, and when it comes to dreams … I was never
this successful with women in my dreams. I know I haven’t succeeded with Ada in any way that a healthy heterosexual male would count, but she
has
looked at me, and I
have
given her a compliment, and she has touched my arm, and this is better than I usually do, even in my dreams.

Let’s assume that what Ada says is true: I’m in an alternate universe that split off from Earth and then reconnected after millions of years. Did the creatures learn English from
us
? Maybe they just like English. I wish they weren’t speaking it, though, because I can understand what they’re saying about Ada:

“—look at the little one—”

“—she’d fetch a good price—”

“—it’s tight like that—”

“—Officer Tendrile, let me sketch you, sir, twenty
di
—”

I hear this word
di-
a lot in the rattling conversation of the market. It’s the beginning of one of the words my brain can’t conceptualize, so every time I hear it, it remains an untended prefix, but it’s easy to tell from the context what it means.

“Dumplings! Fresh dumplings here! Two
di-
!”

“Taxes! Getchyer taxes done here! Don’t let the Appointees take your
di-
!
Hai hillai!
”

Among the many stalls in the market, the ones with the longest lines advertise, in plain English, “correspondence services
.
” I’m not sure what it means, but as the crowd mobs us, we slow down, and I find myself hanging next to two creatures on line. The first is an aqua man with neck gills under a glass
collar; he has a row of gold and silver rings on each gill slit. The second has a frog head.

“
Riggity buggle
,” the frog-man says.

“We’re trying one more,” his companion says. “But if we can’t hack it, you’re going to have to settle the case.”

“
Buggle!
” the frog-man says.

“Whose fault is it, huh? Did I try and lick someone inappropriately?”

“Mr.... ah … Officer Tendrile?” I call out. “How come everyone’s speaking English?”

I’m hoping the question will flatter him. A certain type of cruel intelligence is flattered by questions. I’m right; he lights up. “The Appointees assigned English two hundred years ago. I never liked it. Dirty language. Too many words.”

“People just took it up?”

“We listen to the Appointees here. Who do you think makes this a males-only marketplace? That’s how you keep a society strong.”

“Where are you taking us?”

He smiles and
slucks
away. We pass coopers, tailors, and blacksmiths. One person reminds me of Pekker Cland—a red-skinned smith with a semicircle of axes spread out in front of him, negotiating with a dog-head. The dog-head sniffs at me as I pass; I sniff back. There’s a lot to smell, especially when we pass the food stalls, which sell a plethora of variations of meat on a stick. There’s meat on a stick dusted with pepper powder, meat on a stick drizzled with orange sauce, meat on a stick fried
golden brown and contorted into long looping shapes.... The odors hit me in waves: barbecue, cardamom, cinnamon, onion, char.... Among them are smells I’ve never dealt with before: nasty impossible smells like peanut-butter shrimp and sautéed sour milk clump.

We come to the end of the market chamber. Gamary stops. I’ve gotten used to his harsh hair; my neck hurts from craning it to see everything. In front of us, I spy a gigantic wooden door.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Officer Tendrile says to Gamary. His guard hoists me and Ada off the okapicentaur’s back and flings us on the ground, which is coated with the grunge of innumerable bare feet.