Escape Pod, page 5
Heh. Turns out the goat’s an old breed, incidentally. Real old, even before spending two hundred years in the deep freeze. She and her kid’re literally the last two of their kind. The pilot’s daddy was an Extinctioner. So, y’know, they say the universe has a way of sorting these things out. He’s stayin’ on the planet and we’ve got samples so we can sequence the DNA and keep this breed from goin’ the way of the Percheron.
Explanatory note: The Percheron is an extinct domestic horse breed.
Rub it in, why don’t you?
And me? Oh, I’m fine. Did a little more fallin’ over in the last few days than I like, but the goat kept the kickin’ below the knee. Delivered my baby just fine. Little girl. Sweet thing, but Grandma Ruby’s gonna do most of the raising of her. She talked me into having the girl in the first place. I’m really a lot better with goats.
Does this conclude your incident report, Doctor Hollowmas?
Yeah. You got any follow-up questions, you send a human to ask me, you hear?
Thank you for your cooperation. This Incident report has been taken using the I-Witness program from your friends at Taxon Interrogation Software.
At Taxon, Clarity is Our Business!(TM)
… Says you.
Tim Pratt is so prolific, I’m not sure when he sleeps. He sees the absurdity of everyday life, and he’ll bring it to your attention by putting people in extraordinary circumstances. Usually those people are witty. Sometimes they’re also compassionate. One of our fan favorite authors, he’s appeared on Escape Pod since Episode 8—that’s from way back in 2005, when people listened to podcasts on their iPods. He wrote “A Princess of Nigh-Space” for this anthology and cooked it up with all the ingredients he’s best known for. With great pleasure, we bring you this original story from him.
DIVYA
A PRINCESS OF NIGH-SPACE
TIM PRATT
There was a business card stuck in the crack between the door and the frame when I got home from another too-long day at the office. I plucked the card out, annoyed, assuming it was some stupid advertisement, but the thick black Gothic lettering caught my eye:
BOLLARD AND CHICANE
OBSTACLES REMOVED BURDENS SHIFTED TROUBLES UNTROUBLED
With a phone number underneath.
There was small, neat, and slanted writing on the back, in pen: “Dear Tamsin: Our condolences on the loss of your grandmother. We can help settle your estate. Call soonest.”
“Granny isn’t dead,” I said to no one, and then my phone buzzed with an incoming call.
* * *
With the travel, and the funeral, and the lawyers, and the police investigation, and having to take time off work (and of course the startup where I bashed code was getting ready for its IPO, and of course “my grandmother died” sounded like a college-student-level excuse, although “my grandmother was murdered in a home invasion” was a little different), it was weeks before I actually made it to Culver House. The ancestral heap stood on the edge of a sagging damp town in the Midwest, where I grew up and lived until I fled to college. I hadn’t been back in the six years since, because why would I return? My only living family was Granny, brilliant and independent and remote and endlessly annoyed at raising little orphaned me. I didn’t come back for holidays because she didn’t celebrate any, calling them, “American fripperies,” even Christmas and Easter. “Granny, they celebrate Christmas back in Croatia, too,” I would argue, and Granny would say, “Not in the part I’m from, they don’t.”
I sat behind the desk in my grandmother’s study that evening and opened the top drawer as the attorney had instructed, revealing an envelope with Tamsin scrawled across the front. My legacy, or at least, the non-monetary part of it; I’d gotten the other part already. The money I was expecting to make when the company I worked for went public was a bit less exciting now that I’d inherited my genius Granny’s considerable estate.
The envelope had been torn open, though, and instead of a letter from the woman who’d raised me at cold arm’s length, I found a business card, another version of the one I’d discovered at my house. This one said:
BOLLARD AND CHICANE
PESTS REMOVED OFFENSES REDRESSED KNIVES SHARPENED
On the back, in that neat handwriting, I read: “You really should call us, miss. Mr. B.”
Okay then. First I called my high school boyfriend, Trevor, who still lived in town and had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail around his neck, and liked guns. I’d dated him mostly to annoy Granny, but he’d been fun, the way doing meth and committing arson are probably fun, and he still had a thing for me. “I think I might have some trouble over at the house, Trev,” I said.
“I’ll be right there.” He hung up without asking any questions. That’s a good quality sometimes.
Then I called the number on the card. A voice so deep and sonorous it sounded like a yeti with a head cold said, “Miss Culver. It’s an interesting last name, Culver. There are various possible origins. The old English, ‘culfre,’ meaning dove, possibly used as a term of endearment, possibly referring to someone who was lovesick. Or the French, ‘couleuvre,’ meaning snake. Or it could be related to, ‘culverin,’ a kind of early handgun, a precursor of the musket, and later the name for a cannon. Which do you think your grandmother was thinking of when she chose that name for her new life in her new world?”
I could not have given fewer shits about the etymology of my surname. “Who is this?”
“This is Mr. Bollard. My associate Mr. Chicane is here as well.” I heard a scraping in the background, and a clatter, and then Mr. Bollard sighed, but not, I think, at me.
“I don’t want to know your name. I want to know why you left me business cards, why you broke into my grandmother’s desk, and what you took from me.” The lawyer who’d handed over the key said Granny had left a precious family heirloom in the desk for me, but he didn’t know the details.
“All excellent questions,” Bollard said. “But you should ask a different one first. You should ask, ‘Where are you, Mr. Bollard?’”
“Fuck off,” I said.
“I’ll pretend you replied, ‘Where are you,’” Bollard said. “And that you didn’t inherit your grandmother’s poor manners. If you’d asked me what I asked you to ask me, I would have replied: We are here. We are in the basement. We are waiting by the door.”
“I’m calling the police,” I said.
“Why would you want Mr. Chicane to murder a bunch of perfectly nice police officers?” Bollard asked. “We don’t want to hurt you. We just want your help. It’s in your best interest. Your grandmother wasn’t helpful at all, and look what happened to her. Now. Are you coming down, or shall I send Mr. Chicane up to fetch you?”
I cut the connection and picked up Granny’s letter opener—actually a misericorde from the thirteenth century, a slender knife designed to stab through the gaps in a knight’s armor. It was just like Granny to use it to open bills and junk mail. I held the knife tight and crept to the study door, listening.
There was plenty to hear, because Culver House is a rambling three-story Victorian with various newer additions, and it creaked and groaned and settled constantly, especially up here on the top floor. If some of those creaks were the mysterious Mr. Chicane coming to get me, I couldn’t tell. I decided to call the police anyway. It would take them half an hour to show up, but at least if I got murdered before then, the cops would know the names and phone number of my murderers, and probably Granny’s, too. I dialed 9-1-1, and Bollard answered. “I don’t want to murder any police officers either,” he said. “No one is paying me to do that today. Please come downstairs. You’re wasting time.”
“Why aren’t you the cops?” I sputtered.
“Your grandmother had access to technology she didn’t sell to the government or Silicon Valley, miss, and some of it has wonderful applications, like intercepting calls to those I’d rather not have called. We—”
I cut the connection again. At least I’d gotten through to Trev. He’d show up faster than the cops, but in the meantime, I didn’t want to stay in the study, where Bollard and Chicane would probably look for me first.
I went onto the landing and down the stairs to the second floor, then past my old room, left unchanged since I departed, not as any sort of shrine, but because Granny didn’t care about any part of the house other than the kitchen, her own bedroom, and her study… and the basement, which I had literally never entered, because that’s where Granny did her experiments and invented her inventions, and it was too dangerous, and too delicate, and was always locked. I’d been interested in finally getting a look at the place, but the presence of probably-murderers down there did a lot to dampen my curiosity.
I went down the second-floor hall to the back stairs, where I could descend to the kitchen and slip out the side door and get away.
There was a man at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. My body was already fizzing with fight-or-flight chemicals, and seeing a stranger in the house made me feel like my brain was going to vibrate out of my skull.
He was thin, dressed in a baggy tweed suit, and had a big head irregularly occupied by tufts of hair, with dried blood crusted all down one side of his face. When he saw me, he did a little capering dance in place, hooting and giggling, then he pointed one long finger at me and held it for a moment.
“Mr. Chicane?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He leapt forward, scampering up the stairs on all fours like a bounding dog.
I took out Granny’s knife and stepped back, but he was so fast—he barreled into me and drove me to the ground, knocking the breath out of my body and the misericorde from my hands. He hooted in delight as I struggled to get away. Up close I could see his features were all lumpy and potato-like, his eyes not quite on the same level, his nose mostly just two holes in his face, his lips thin, his chin nonexistent. Under all the old blood, I could see a cratered dent in the side of his head big enough to stick the end of your thumb in. He seemed like a badly made doll of a person.
He was strong, though, all cords and wires and bony limbs. He pinned both my wrists to the floor over my head, giggled in my face, and reached into his jacket with his free hand. I thrashed and twisted, expecting a gun, a blade, a hypodermic needle—but instead he took out a business card, and held it inches above my face. I had to cross my eyes a little to read it, but once it came into focus, it said:
BOLLARD AND CHICANE
MURDER ARSON REGIME CHANGE
I took a deep breath, which required breathing in his raw-meat-and-onion reek. “Okay. I get it. What do you want from me?”
Chicane deftly flipped over the card, revealing another handwritten message: “We need to open a door. We have one key. You have the other. Join us downstairs.”
“I don’t have any key!” I shouted.
Chicane tapped me on the nose with the business card and waggled his eyebrows and grinned. His teeth were wrong: too numerous, too sharp, too many colors. He was drooling, and if I stayed under him much longer, that drool would drip onto my face.
“I’ll come down!” I said, turning my face away from his stinking mouth.
I heard a hollow metallic thonk. Chicane collapsed on top of me, then rolled off bonelessly. He had a new dent on the back of his head to match the first one. I wriggled away, snatched my knife from the floor, and looked around.
Trevor stood at the top of the stairs, holding an aluminum baseball bat. He was wearing dirty jeans and a white undershirt and his boots were untied—he must have rushed over here as soon as I called.
I hugged him hard, because Trevor always responded well to physical encouragement. “Trev! Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming.” I looked at Chicane and kicked him in the side, but he didn’t stir.
“Course I came,” he said. “It’s you and me. T-N-T.”
Oh, god, I’d forgotten that nickname he had for us—T-N-T, first we get hot, and then we explode. Teenage horniness is so embarrassing.
His face got serious. “I’m real sorry about your granny. Who’s this little weasel?”
“I think his name is Chicane, but—”
Trevor took a step back. “Wait. Chicane. As in Bollard and Chicane?”
“You know them?” He knew plenty of local scum, but Bollard and Chicane sure didn’t seem local.
“Do I…” His eyes went glazed and faraway. “Bollard and Chicane. The Two. The Crush and the Bite. The Bad Neighbors. The Ones Who Come After. The Ones Who Come After You. Do I know them? Do you know the boogeyman, I mean, do you know—they’re from the old country. They shouldn’t be here.”
“The old country? You mean Croatia?”
“Croatia?” He blinked at me, then looked back at the man on the floor. “She never told you? You, wow, it shouldn’t be me—”
Trev had never been the most articulate person. That wasn’t one of the things I’d ever needed or demanded from him before, but I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Start. Making. Sense.”
His focus snapped to me. “First we get out of here. Then I’ll start making sense.”
* * *
We raced away without any bother from Bollard, who was presumably waiting for me to be dragged down to the basement any minute. We rode ten minutes in silence in Trevor’s truck, then sat in our old booth at the Chickenarium, where the vinyl was just as torn and the Formica just as smudged as it had been in high school. I got the chicken and waffles, and he had the chicken-fried steak with fries and cluck sauce. He passed me his flask under the table and I took a slug of something brown that was probably distantly related to bourbon.
“Making sense time,” I said. I kept the flask.
“Your family doesn’t come from Croatia,” Trev said. “They come from another plane of existence.”
I looked down at the flask. “How much of this did you drink already?”
He sighed, and sat up straighter, and it was weird—like slouching, mumbling, all-mischief-and-malice Trev was a costume he’d been wearing, and he’d shrugged it off and let it fall to the floor, becoming someone more serious. “Listen to me. This isn’t the only world. It’s not the only universe.”
“You’re talking about parallel universes? Or, what is it, the multiverse?”
“Sort of. Basically. It’s more like reality is a big stack of paper, and every piece of paper has a different world on the front and back, so some worlds are close to others, and some are far away, and sometimes you can poke a hole through the paper and travel from one to another. We call that stack of worlds nigh-space. Your granny, and your parents, and me, we all come from the world next door.”
“And you?” Trev was many things, but delusional was never one of them. He’d had a clear-eyed understanding of himself as a thrill-seeking dirtbag.
“And me. Your granny brought me over when I was twelve and you were ten, and paid off a family to raise me.”
“You mean… your foster parents.”
“That’s them.” He poked at his food but didn’t eat. “My family got into some trouble back home, and they were vassals of your family once upon a time, so somebody called in a favor, and they sent me here. The only requirement was, I had to watch over you. Remember when you had trouble with those bullies, and then you didn’t anymore?” He touched the snake’s head on his throat. “This tattoo is the symbol of fealty to your family. Your granny insisted I get it as soon as I was plausibly old enough.”
Vassals? Fealty? I shook my head. “Trev, you’re not making any sense. You and me dated. Are you telling me Granny set that up too?”
“No, that part just kinda happened. I couldn’t believe you’d look twice at someone like me. Back home, I wasn’t even high-status enough to clean out your garderobe.”
How did Trev know the word, “garderobe”?
“When we started going out, your Granny mostly thought it was funny, but also useful. She made a point of disapproving of me loudly, so you’d like me better. When we were together, I was able to look out for you better, not that you needed much help by then. Remember that guy you punched in the throat when he grabbed your ass at the reservoir?”
“Let’s forget memory lane for a minute. Go back to this stuff about another world.”
“Oh, sure. The old country. It’s a lot like this world, geography-wise, even some of the languages and stuff, because it’s… basically, it’s the next sheet of paper, so our worlds are on facing pages, like. Worlds get weirder the farther out you go from your home space. The old country is politically regressive by your standards, controlled by powerful ruling families, dynasties and that, but it’s a lot more advanced technologically.” (Did Trev just say, “politically regressive”?) “That’s how your granny got so rich over here. She brought some of the least disruptive tech with her when she fled, and sold it to the locals.”
I didn’t believe any of this, but I did like the idea that Granny wasn’t the genius she always claimed to be. “Why did she flee?”
He took a sip of water. “I was like five when this stuff happened, so don’t expect political analysis or whatever, but your parents were in one of those ruling families I mentioned. Some shit went down, assassinations and betrayals and alliances shifted, and your parents got killed. People were hunting little three-year-old you, too, hoping to exterminate the line, or maybe make you a hostage, I don’t know. Granny decided to take you away someplace you’d be safe until the situation stabilized—protecting the heir. Since your family was one of the few with the technology to travel through nigh-space, she took you someplace really safe. The original idea was to bring you back at some point, let you take your rightful place, but the politics stayed in flux for a long time, and your granny started to like it over here. Less hassle, even if it is pretty primitive by our standards. She told me that when you were older, she’d give you the key to the door and tell you the whole story and let you decide whether to return and try to get back the ancestral vaults and all or not.”
