Complete Stories (142 page)

The Yotsa 7 would have been a great product—but it worked too well. The night of their doomed celebration party at Bloviation’s three-room office suite, Mark’s chief exec Beryl had popped up a news feed on the video screen. Mark, Beryl, and Lester gazed at the politicians through their quantum-computing lorgnettes.

The Yotsa 7’s semiotic analyzer showed jackals, hyenas, hogs—and even such invertebrates as jellyfish and leeches. What made this especially intense was that the perhaps unsurprising slurs were documented by subsidiary veils of information containing legally actionable data. Exulting in the power of the Yotsa 7, Beryl threw herself into Mark’s arms and kissed him. And that’s when Laura had walked in.

By the next morning, Bloviation was in a shambles. Beryl and Lester were both out. Bitter and resentful, Beryl put Lester up to sharing some of their newfound political dirt via an anonymized blog—that had been tweaked to show a clear trail leading back to Bloviation. Patriot Act time! The feds were at Mark and Laura’s apartment that evening. The Yotsa 7 technology was classified as top secret, and all their work was impounded.

“Imagine this device in the hands of America’s enemies,” one agent had declaimed.

“
You’re
the country’s worst enemies, and I can actually
see
you holding it, so I don’t
have
to imagine!”

In his subsequent fury, Mark had made some threats and charges that the feds had taken quite seriously to heart. He and Laura were charged with libel, with sedition, and possibly with treason—which could carry, in certain contexts, a death penalty, with or without a trial. Mark and Laura hadn’t stuck around long enough to learn the full details.

Mark’s ultrageek connections had fixed them up with new identities, including paper trails, searchable records, passports and some air tickets to Scandinavia. Possibly they were going to stay here for quite a long time.

Mark wrenched his mind back into the present. Like some old-time courtier, he flipped open his lorgnette, swiveling the quasicrystalline lenses from the quantum-computing handle. Holding the spectacles to his eyes, he gazed down into Laura’s
God Bøk,
focusing on a dense, eccentric, fractal blot.

Mark stopped his prancing. What the hell was this? Shelled around the image on the page, Mark saw a damp dungeon hall, dimly lit by glowing mold, with a beautiful naked woman supine upon a stone altar. The long-haired woman was none other than the self-possessed Ola from the lobby! Leaning over her and thrusting his body into her soft bays and grottoes was a creature with hideously fluid limbs. As if in a nightmare, the beast’s thick, warty neck turned and he stared directly at Mark. Both Ola and the monster were seeing Mark for real, seeing Mark in all his—

“Yoo hoo!” It was Laura, down on the lawn, calling up to him. “Are you coming or not, cranky pants? We slept through lunch, so we might as well take a walk before dinner.”

“Hang on!”

Mark stashed away the Yotsa 7 and hastily dressed. What a creepy vision of that wormy, squiggly man. But Ola—she was hot! How could he face her now without blushing or smirking? Had the
God Bøk-
triggered semiotic scene been a glimpse of the past, the future—or some purely hypothetical scenario, a sex fantasy inherent in his own mind? There was the neural entanglement angle to consider…. Mark ineluctably flashed on his prior random glimpses of
shokushu goukan
, or Japanese tentacle porn. Had the Yotsa 7 dredged this kind of imagery from its semiotic data base? Or was there something real to be discovered? Too many possibilities, too many questions….

Laura would have some insights. She’d always been his sounding-board, his confidante—till their absurd falling-out. But to confide in her now would be to admit the existence of the suppressed, illegal and smuggled Yotsa 7. She’d ream him a new blowhole, right? Or would she? Hard to say….

Still dithering, Mark reached the reception area and, with gratitude blooming in his heart, found the desk untenanted. No embarrassing confrontation—yet! Ola must be preparing a meal, or changing bedsheets, or keeping accounts. Or trysting with an alien? A one-woman enterprise demanded a lot!

For a moment the intensity of the Yotsa vision rushed back on him—the dripping water in the dungeon, the mossy sheen upon the stones, the mixed smell of mold and sexual perfume—was there any chance that the vision had been as accurate as a video feed and that, therefore, Ola was even now reaching an unimaginable climax? He almost seemed to hear a rhythmic cry penetrating through the floor boards—or rather, to feel it in the soles of his feet.

Outside, the vibrant, maritime-scented air and penetrating sunlight cleared the fantasies from his cortex. The afternoon seemed made of exotic crystal. Of course he’d tell Laura everything! They still were husband and wife, right?

Mark took Laura’s arm in his, like courting Victorians strolling down some seaside boardwalk.

“Let’s get away from the hotel a little. I need to tell you something private.”

Laura eyed him with amusement and curiosity. “You’re not going to reveal you’re gay, are you? That it was really Lester Lo, not Beryl, you were after?”

Happy for the light banter, Mark blew her a raspberry. “If you suspect I’m secretly gay after all these years, I’m obviously falling down on my duties. Consider our session just now a preview. We’ll see about a main event tonight.” This was good. This was solid ground.

They followed a narrow, sandy trail affording well-framed views of the exquisite Norwegian countryside. After ten minutes walking, during which Mark refused to reveal anything, they came to a stone bench on a sloping meadow with a pleasing prospect upon the fjord. The waters were deep, even here at the fjord’s tip, and the facing granite cliff plunged straight into the depths.

Something made Mark inspect the bench for any odd lichen patterns analogous to the quasi-organic blobs in the
God Bøk
. Satisfied that no alien patterns lurked, he sat himself and Laura down, then launched into his confession about the cached Yotsa 7 and what it had shown him back in the hotel room.

Laura pondered Mark’s story intently, then said, “We have to ask first whether we completely trust the Yotsa 7. After all, it was still in the beta stage, never totally debugged.”

“You’re not mad at me for holding back the one unit?”

“Of course not! We worked hard to create our brainchild, only to have it stolen by those brutal G-men jerks who only want to kill us. I wish I’d kept one too!”

“Well, I’d stake a lot on the integrity and accuracy of the software—and of the sensing and display mechanisms too. Lo was a genius. If Yotsa shows us a vision of Ola about to be ravished or eaten by some seaweed man—that’s gotta mean something. Especially since the vision is wrapped around a pattern in your
God Bøk
. It has some heavy-duty resonance with the reality of the situation here. In our shoes, we can’t afford to overlook anything.”

“Maybe we need to ask Ola outright what she knows about the
God Bøk.
That is, after you show me that scene through the Yotsa.”

“My god, of course! Just ditch any cringing and pussy-footing.” Mark leaned over to kiss Laura. “That’s one reason I’ve always loved you, you’re so direct.”

“‘Only go straight,’” Laura said, quoting a Korean Zen Master whom she’d studied in her college days.

And, as always, Mark countered with a Marx-Brothers-style corny joke, one that bitterness had prevented him from making recently: “I’d like to get something straight between us.”

Smiling and holding hands, they made their way back to the hotel, this time taking a long way round the fields and pine groves. They got back with a half hour to spare before supper. They were planning to go upstairs to Room 3 to see what else the
God Bøk
might have to show them, but they were intercepted by Ola, as trim and tidy as before.

“I invite you now for drinks and snacks, yes?”

“Okay, that’s fine,” said Laura. “I’m starved.”

Relaxing into the flow of events, the couple let the petite, clear-skinned Ola lead them into a parlor of shiny chintz armchairs and shelves of antique brick-a-brack. A decanter of wine sat on a little table with five of the smallest glasses that Mark had ever seen. Rare, or extremely potent, or both? Ola doled out a driblet for herself, two for Mark and Laura, and two for a frail and elderly Norwegian couple who spoke no English. No further glasses of wine were to be offered. And a little dish holding precisely four round crackers served as the snack portion of this collation.

Ola gave a little speech, saying everything in both languages, which meant the orientation took considerably longer than expected, especially because the old Norwegian couple kept interrupting Ola with what seemed to be corrections and second thoughts. But Ola treated the old pair kindly, even lovingly, going so far as to give the old woman a reassuring pat on the hand.

In any case, the information on offer was interesting, and it seemed to bear intriguing connections with Mark’s vision. The Hotel Fjaerland was an ancient structure, rife with exotic legends, and human habitation on this site stretched back even further. But—despite what Mark and Laura had decided on the bench—he didn’t feel ready to question Ola about the accuracy of his Yotsa 7 revelation. His brief sexual fascination with her was dying out. Despite her gentleness with the old Norwegian couple, the young woman seemed increasingly odd and alien, a
Sound-of-Music
archetype filtered through a
Tales From The Crypt
comic.

When Ola had finally concluded her info-dump, the four guests were allowed into the dining-room, where the hostess served out cauliflower soup, smoked fish, new potatoes, and lingonberry pie. Mark managed to buy a full bottle of wine before Ola disappeared into her own private recesses of the hotel.

“Now we can talk,” said Laura. “This soup is really nasty, isn’t it?”

“Cauliflower should be banned,” agreed Mark. “Where do they get off calling it a vegetable? That was some weird stuff that Ola told us, huh?”

“Her spiel was better in Norwegian,” said Laura. “What I could understand of it. Ola and those old people have a weird local accent.”

“I caught one phrase,” said Mark. “The
ålefisk mann
. The eel man. That’s a hella close fit with what I thought I saw through the Yotsa.”

“It sounded like she was telling that old couple they’d be happy and safe if they fed themselves to the ålefisk man,” said Laura. “I must heard it wrong. I gather she has some serious history with those two geezers. I think maybe they’re related to her. “

Mark glanced over at the tremulous oldsters, barely picking at their food. “I wonder what they’d think about about Ola getting it on with the ålefisk man?”

“I was expecting you to say something to her about that, Mr. Straight Shooter.”

“Hey—we missed lunch. I was in a rush to get in here for the chow. This fish isn’t bad. If it is fish.” Mark shoved aside his potatoes and started in on his lingonberry pie. “Seafood and pie in Norway, baby, the land of the midnight sun. And, look, there’s a big golden ingot of that smoked fish on the sideboard. And another whole pie. We can have as much as we like. Unless that old Norwegian couple stops us. And unless Ola comes back. I was so hungry I spaced out on some of her rap. Why was she talking about the ålefisk man in the first place?”

“I think it’s local color thing. Like the sea serpent in Loch Ness? The ålefisk man is said to live beneath the waters of the Fjaerland fjord. He brings joy and wealth to his true believers.”

“You know what I’m thinking now?” said Mark, refilling their glasses. “Maybe my vision was dredged out of the local tourist web-sites. The Yotsa always looks online.”

“And maybe you added the naked Ola by yourself,” said Laura. “Desperate horn-dog that you are.”

“Desperate for you,” said Mark politely. “More smoked fish and lingonberry pie, my sweet?”

Ola was still nowhere to be seen. The Norwegian couple left the dining-room precipitously, as if to take advantage of some elderly early-bird special on sleep. Mark heard them tottering down the stairs into the hotel basement—perhaps they’d gotten a cut-rate room below?

Left on their own, Mark and Laura wandered outside into the unending daylight. They collapsed onto a bench, recovering from their heavy meal, hoping for more love-making, but for now just watching how the sun idled across the mountain peaks, never quite going down.

“Hello!” came a clear voice from just behind them. Ola. She was standing in a dark stone arch set into the foundation wall of the hotel. For a moment, the shadows of the arch lent her skin a squamous sheen. She’d let down her brown hair, and her wavy tresses reached nearly to her waist—just as in Mark’s Yotsa vision of her. But she wasn’t nude, she was wearing a flowing cream-colored gown with a Pre-Raphaelite look.

Stepping forward, Ola lost the alien, depraved look, and became once more all simple virtue and innocence. She pouted and wagged her finger at Mark. “A friend told me you were spying on him and me. Maybe we are a little flattered.”

“You, uh, what do you mean?” said Mark, temporizing. Ola’s eyes, blue and deep as the waters of the fjord, held him with a magnetic force.

“I know about your special lenses,” said Ola, lowering her voice and drawing closer. “That type of crystal vibrates so sympathetically with our regions. And the fancy handle! So much thinking squeezed into so tight a space.” Her words held sexy subtexts that had Mark tingling from groin to gut.

Ola patted a lumpy fold in her dress. “I fetched your aid from your room.”

“You can’t just go rooting through our luggage!” protested Laura.

“Indulge me, Laura, and we three will join in joy very soon,” said Ola with an arch smile. “With a fourth partner, my special friend, who governs all that happens here.”

Ola drew out the Yotsa 7 and shook the lenses from the handle. “Very elegant. I would like our clever Mark to look at something. I saw my dear friend at naptime today, you know, and he says he is posting an invitation to you.”

“Posting it where?” challenged Laura.