Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (31 page)

Suvinder didn’t know how to respond. He saw that now, with the chairs cleared away, his elephant was the last one on the grounds. It approached and stood a short distance off, its dark skin gleaming with rain.

“I’m quitting my job,” he said.

“What?”

He sat down again and stared into the grave. “I’m gonna sell my half of the company—to my partner. He’s wanted to have his own thing for a long time anyway. Besides, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, Sarah. It really isn’t.” He looked up at her. “I was thinking I might move back out west, start again.”

She offered him her hand. “Maybe now’s a good time to start again.”

“Maybe,” he said. He put his hands on his knees and stood on his own. He walked to his elephant and touched it for the first time, running his fingers over the flank. The skin was warm and wet and rough. He turned back to Sarah. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift to the reception.”

Originally published in On Spec
Fall 2005 Vol 17 No 3 #62

Robert Paul Weston
is the author of several award-winning novels for children and young adults, including
Zorgamazoo
,
The Creature Department
, and
Blues For Zoey
. His short fiction has appeared in
The New Orleans Review, Kiss Machine
,
Postscripts
, and others. He lives in London, England.

Hugh Spencer

Hey Squiffy:

Sorry to hear about the bowel infection. Even sorrier to hear that it’s one of the intelligent ones.

Just how intelligent do you think? If you’ve got one of the stupider batches I’ve heard that you can sometimes pacify them by watching sitcoms from the 1960s and early 1970s. Not
Dick Van Dyke
or
Green Acres
, because there’s some hidden smart stuff and surrealism in some of those.

No. Try the blandest thing imaginable—like
The Brady Bunch
or
The Partridge Family
. That ought to settle ’em down. No, scratch
The Partridge Family
, I hear it’s a bit dangerous if the bugs go totally comatose.

Otherwise, how is the mutation coming along? Not too fast (because we’ll miss you), I hope. Not too slow either (because that would be boring).

Everything is such a question of fucking balance these days.

Cheers,

Andrew:

I agree with you on your last point. You have to keep on evolving but not so much that they don’t know where to send the bill for the Science Fiction Book of the Month club.

Can you believe that such a quaint institution still exists?

Anyway, to answer your main question: the process seems to be moving along pretty well. The bacteriological route is uneven and kind of painful, but what can I say? The price was definitely right.

Maybe I should have done what you did and gone the technological route.

Have they moved you on to any new simulators?

Best,

Hi Squiffer:

They put our whole team into the most advanced model of our oldest and most obsolete simulators. I think that’s better than being assigned to the least advanced model of the middle-range systems. But you know what a dangerous optimist I can be.

I can be realistic too. Which is why I know there’s absolutely no way some guy from the suburbs of Steel Town is going to get hold of any exotic tech. At least not this fast.

Our trainer explained that could be some kind of an honour. “An unusual challenge for advancement.” Which is boss-code for “this job is going to be so boring that it will fossilize your brain or so dangerous that it will melt your gonads.”

Maybe both.

Anyway, the “unusual challenge” is trying out some Super Culture chatter that might be some technology teaching software. Of course, it could be random eruptions of interstellar gas. Our team gets to figure out which.

No problem, it only ought to take twenty, maybe thirty years.

Even if it does turn out to be something meaningful, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the information will be anything particularly important. It could be blueprints for the intergalactic equivalent of those little plastic tabs for bread bags.

Then again, it really might be some profound existential insight. Real meaning of life stuff. We’re talking at least 80 million civilizations and a shit load of space and eternity.

Profoundly yours,

Andrew:

I had a great dream last night.

I was back in our old house in Saskatchewan. It was the dead of January; snow everywhere, about three in the morning. You know, one of those unbelievably black, bleak and frigid nights.

I really miss them sometimes.

Anyway, I turned away from the kitchen window for a second to take a sip of cocoa, and when I look out again, there’s this amazing shifting wall of aurora borealis everywhere. Along with the electrical crackling in THX sound and it’s like high noon with an ultraviolet sun. Then the effect fades and it goes back to night again. But it’s hardly black out there now. I’m looking at some planets—gas giants—floating over the snowdrifts. Five different variations of Jupiter out there—the multicoloured bands of gas take up over a third of the sky.

Which makes a striking contrast to the outline of the old Greek Orthodox church on 105
th
Street.

Un-fucking-believable
. . . as I believe the Bard once put it.

I suspect the dream was some kind of psychic compensation for a longstanding disappointment that we never got any
Big Ships
.

The dream also helped me not worry so much that I’d completely forgotten Annie’s eighth birthday yesterday. I can understand how you can evolve beyond some old friendships, but forgetting about your kids? Another downside of this Process, I suppose.

Speaking of which, I’ve got to go now. The bacteria have reached a developmental phase that makes me extremely flatulent. I’m still connected enough to my family to notice that they dislike it if I don’t deal with this problem in the bathroom.

Got to pass some gas on my way to the stars.

Bloatedly,

Squiffoid:

Sorry about your fart-attacks. Hope you got around to fixing the bathroom fan before all this started.

Are you still ticked about the lack of Big Ships?
Get over it, guy!

Maybe what I’m about to tell will be a bit of a consolation. Probably not, because it’s happening to me and not you, it’s just likely to tick you off even more.

But what the hell, I’ll tell you anyway. The software we’re using to drive the simulators is indeed meaningful. It seems to be some kind of mission programme in a solar system that we’ve never heard of.

Holy shit!
The graphics! The sounds! The motion commands!

Sweeping, swooping, blasting our way through multi-coloured rings of interstellar dust, crashing through the core of an exploding sun.

Hate to say it, but these shows make your Saskatchewan dream-scape sound pretty lame.

It’s not quite a fleet of UFOs hiding behind the moon or Gort on the White House lawn, but I’m definitely living some kind of a classic sci-fi movie here.

Sorry, I know this must sound really insensitive. It’s just that we’re having so much fun here and I’m sure once Central Administration finds out that we’ve got something interesting here, they’re bound to take it away from us.

With apologies,

Andrew:

Thank you. I really appreciate how you’re trying to help me hang on to my basic humanity by annoying me as much as possible. It’s almost working.

You helped me to remember that I really, really still want those Big Ships. I want to see them
personally
. I’d even settle for getting goofy sunburn like Richard Dreyfus in
Close Encounters
.

Any kind of Significant/Transcendent Experience would make me feel better about what’s happening in my real life.

I’m becoming a serious asshole.

I’m pretty sure it’s a side effect of the Process.

God, I hope this is a side effect of the Process.

I know all the books say you shouldn’t use your emerging abilities without training and in particular you shouldn’t do so with family and friends present. But these things creep up on a person.

At first it was small stuff, subconsciously implanting a desire in my oldest’s mind to finish his homework and go look for a summer job. Then you start suggesting that broccoli is actually a Slurpee from 7-Eleven. Eventually you’re levitating your kids to bed at 9 p.m.

Harmless, right?

Not really.

Yesterday my youngest left all his Power Rangers stuff scattered all over the floor of the family room. It was bath night and I went in there looking for him.

What happened next was all my fault. I shouldn’t have gone in there with just my bare feet.

Those action figures have a lot of pointy bits.

Well, my enhancements just snapped on and I melted all the toys in the basement.

Just like that.

The books do say that some “powerful affect-based manifestations are likely to occur,” but I always figured that my advanced mental powers would be a very calm and cerebral thing. Think about it, the Process is supposed to come from some higher civilizations somewhere in the Galactic Core. I mean to me that implies thought, rationality, reason.

To me, it does not suggest that I would suddenly lose it and reduce the proceeds of the last three Christmases to smoldering pools of plastic.

Maybe my deduction was more of an assumption.

The next thing that happens is that my eight-year-old is standing in the doorway. He saw the whole thing. You can imagine the waterworks that Pat and I had to deal with.

Could you imagine if Derek had actually been in the room when I did that?

I could have melted him!

The next time I go in for more prescriptions, I’m going to ask for more than something to deal with the flatulence.

Take care,

Squiff:

I don’t know about those Big Ships, but I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with some damned
fast
ships here.

I’m still having a lot of fun. I seem to have mastered the speed and directional controls for whatever kind of vehicle this is supposed to be. Last week we got a memo from the Lab, telling us that they
think
that we’re running training software for some kind of spacecraft.

Well,
duh
!

Then they went on to tell us not to be alarmed if the instruments on our consoles started to change. The alien software is making some suggestions to our sim hardware.

This is just so cool.

Do you remember that old MG Roadster that I fixed up for your old girlfriend? The red thing that had the running boards?

It was a loud and beautiful pig of a machine and if you stroked it right and said nice things it would do anything for you. (A lot like your old girlfriend, as I recall.)

Whatever craft we’re simulating is a lot like that old MG. Except that it’s capable of moving faster than light and I think it can travel through time. Which means that if you steer it just right, the chronometers will tell you that you’ve arrived before you left.