Pet Peeve (10 page)

“Uh—”

“Kitty got your tongue, bilge for brains?”

“I think I have the idea,” Hannah said. “Let's see if I can do it.” She concentrated.

A picture appeared on the spherical screen surrounding them. It showed a stork flying through the air, a bundle suspended from its bill. In a moment the scene filled in from the edges, and they seemed to be floating invisibly next to the moving bird.

Goody was amazed. This was three-dimensional animation, evidently evoked from Hannah's thought. It was as real as it could be.

The stork came to a village in the jungle, and glided down. It located a particular tent and dropped the bundle before its front flap, then winged away.

The bundle bounced and fell open. A human baby was revealed, bawling lustily. A little girl, with a pink ribbon in her wisp of hair, upset about being bounced on the turf.

A barbarian woman come out. “Look!” she exclaimed. “The baby has arrived!” She picked up the little girl and took her into the tent. “We'll call her Hannah!”

This was the delivery of Hannah Barbarian! Goody was amazed all over again.

The sequence continued, fast forwarding through the early years. It seemed that every member of the village lived only to go out, seek adventure, fight monsters, and defeat civilization wherever it was encountered. Hannah was an apt pupil, soon learning to swing her little sword hard enough to brush back the barbarian boys who sought to bully her. Soon (it seemed) she made her first foray on her own, going out to slay a small dragon who had steamed the toes of one of the village steeds.

As a young adult she went on longer and fiercer adventures, developing her talent. After several years on an unusually challenging excursion she returned to the village—and was appalled. The villagers had become calm and satisfied, their wildness dissipated. In fact they were tame. Nothing she could say could rouse them. It seemed that a malign spell of civilization had been cast over the village.

There was nothing to do but depart before the awful satiety overcame her also. So she went out on her own, as a singleton barbarian wench, having adventures galore. Goody was amazed by the number and violence of them; she could have had a whole history book to herself. Until at last she got bored and made a pretext to see the Good Magician.

Goody tuned out of the reprise of their recent adventures. Now he knew more about Hannah. But one thing bothered him, and as the presentation concluded he asked it: “Why didn't you ask the Good Magician for something to banish the spell on your village?”

“Because I was too barbarian crazy to think of it.”

So she had wasted her chance for a relevant Answer. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“I'm not. This is a better adventure than whatever else I might have had. Maybe I'll find something for my village along the way.”

Now it was the parody's turn. Goody insisted on that because he was afraid that otherwise the obnoxious bird would renege.

The peeve's scene opened out. This was a harpy's nest in a tree in the forest. An egg was just hatching, and the mother harpy was swearing a blue streak in pleasure. The streak overlapped the nest and dangled down to the ground, radiating blue. That attracted the attention of all the other harpies in the area, and they flocked in to witness the event.

But when the shell cracked asunder and the chick emerged, what was their horror to see that it was not a harpy but a full-fledged bird. Recessive genes had fouled up the egg, and there was no human element.

Not quite so, Goody realized as he watched. The parody had harpy parents, and harpies had distant human ancestry, therefore souls. So the peeve had a soul. And a voice. Two human elements that hardly registered ordinarily, because the voice was so negative.

Naturally they promptly kicked the foul chick out of the nest. It bounced on the ground, peeping pitifully. It would have perished, had not an allegory wandered by, searching for meaning in obscure parallels, and mistaken it for a parable. It was actually a pretty poor excuse for a parable, in fact almost a parody. So the allegory gave it to a family of parodies, who raised it with their chicks. Thus it became a poor parody, and quite bitter about it. But it did learn to talk, and alleviated its ire by cursing all others around it. This tended to make it unpopular with the other parodies.

Once it was grown and its wings fletched so it could fly, the parodies ejected it. The peeve was on its own, and still not very happy about it. It wandered wide and far, rejected by all it encountered. Until it found its way into the demon haunts.

As it happened, the demons were having a big event. Demon Professor Grossclout was celebrating the ten-thousandth student he had flunked out of demon school for having a skull full of mush. All the demons were there, along with lesser lights from the marching foothills of Mount Parnassus, and even a few mortal folk. And the peeve.

A rubber band was set up, elastic loops playing musical instruments. Folk were wiping their faces with napkins, and of course falling asleep along with their relatives; that was the magic of nap-kins. There was weather dancing, with some ladies with sharply pointed bosoms putting on cold fronts, and others warm fronts with rounded bosoms. Incumbents argued with succumbents, the latter always yielding in the end. In short, it was a great party.

Then the peeve started talking. “You call that music?” it demanded. “I've heard better on toilets. You call that dancing? You'd do better with hotfoots. You call yourselves demons? You're just coagulated smoke.”

The demons weren't pleased, but no one wanted to spoil the occasion, so they stifled their natural reactions.

Then Grossclout stood to make his address. “Friends, Demons, and Countrymen,” he began.

“What a pompous rear!” the peeve remarked.

The professor paused. “Do I hear a mush-skull?”

“It's your bloated behind that's filled with mush, freak.”

There was an awed hush. No one dared speak to the fearsome Grossclout like that!

The professor peered around, spotting the bird. “One more peep out of you, featherhead, and I'll banish you to Hell!”

The peeve let out something slightly louder and considerably smellier than a peep. There was a gasp, not just of shock.

That did it. Grossclout gestured, and the bird found itself in Hell.

Hell was not the nicest place to be. There were a number of brutish creatures there, and it was too hot. But mainly it was boring, because nothing ever changed, except for the arrival and departure of individuals. No one could be insulted, because all of them were damned anyway.

The parody had plenty of time to think. It realized that it had made a mistake that had resulted in its getting sent here. It resolved to correct that error, so as never to be sent here again, assuming it ever got out.

The mistake was in the way it had insulted people. It had been crude about it, and finally one of them had gotten the parody back. That was no good.

So it decided to fix that problem. Instead of insulting others using its own voice, which wasn't very good anyway, it would insult them using its companion's voice. That way the other person would get the blame, leaving the peeve in the clear.

Satisfied, it practiced emulating the voices of others. When it got good enough to promote face-breaking fights between friends, it knew it had perfected the ploy. Of course soon enough they caught on, and started ignoring its taunts. But that was a problem of familiarity, rather than competence. New territory would ameliorate it.

Yet the bird remained in Hell, unable to insult innocent folk, as none here were innocent. That was the heck of it.

Some time later the Gorgon visited Hell and took pity on it. She had a thing for animals, especially snakes, because her hair was snaky. The bird sounded snaky when it perched on her coils. She took the parody out and left it at the Good Magician's castle. That was fun at first, but then the Magician, his five and a half wives, and other members of his household got savvy, and could no longer be riled.

And so it came to the present. Goody was glad to have the peeve's personal history, as it explained a lot.

Then it was Goody's turn. He rehearsed his early, middle, and late history, seeing it animate in the theater.

Was it enough? Goody was nervous as the scene faded, revealing the empty sphere.

“Here is your program,” the goblin robot said, handing him a small flat package. “Assemble the tools, place it beside them, and it will proceed on its own. It is self-activating.”

That seemed almost too simple, but he had to trust that it would work as represented.

“Are we ready to return?” he asked Hannah.

“More than ready,” she agreed. “This mechanical world gives me the creeps.”

“And you are already too creepy, Barby doll.”

They took hands and released their hold on Robot World. Immediately they puffed into demonlike smoke, expanding hugely, and floated right off the planet.

They expanded past moon after moon, each one larger, until at last they came to the largest of all: so big that all they could see were several reposing giants. Two were human women; one was a goblin man. One was a desultory green bird.

Those were themselves!

Their diffuse soul substances sank into their gross bodies. Goody suffered a moment of panic as he seemed to be suffocating; then he got control of his body and looked out.

“You're back,” Princess Ida said.

“No thanks to you, royal pain!”

“We're back,” Goody agreed. He found the package in his hand, its substance thickening as it gathered material into itself. “Thank you.”

In due course they were on their way back to meet with the dragons. “A question,” Hannah said. “Do we need to trek all the way back to where we were? Why not summon the dragons here?”

“Because you're too stupid to think of the obvious, bawdy babe.”

“Let's find a convenient spot and do it,” Goody said.

They followed the enchanted path until they were clear of the castle area, then found a peaceful glade.

Vortex! Vertex! Goody thought.

Very soon the dragons appeared. “We were tuning in on the castle environs,” Vortex said. “We see you have a program.”

“Yes. I'm not sure it's enough, but it's what they offered.”

“Let's find out,” Hannah said. “First we need to assemble the required things. A lever, wheel, heat, lens, copper powder, iron, and something else.”

“Input/output module, dummy,” Goody's voice said.

“That's it, whatever it is.”

“I know where one is,” Vertex said. She slithered into the ground and disappeared.

“I can make a lever,” Hannah said, drawing her sword and hacking a twig from a small poet tree, trimming its poem leaves off to make a miniature pole. Goody saw the poems fall to the ground and was sorry for the waste; a good poet tree was a creative thing that could answer questions written in verse on leaves with new poems.

“All that work to make a toothpick!”

“I can make a wheel,” Goody said, and set about fashioning one from an old rim of a small branch of a defunct beerbarrel tree. He fashioned a little stand for it so that it could turn on its axle.

“And a spinner,” the peeve said contemptuously.

Vortex located a hotbox for heat, and Hannah picked a lens from a spectacle tree. Goody found a cache of copper powder by the roots of a copper plant. Vertex returned with the module, which looked like a metal bird dropping with wires poking out of the sides. Hannah hacked a branch off an ironwood tree and added it to the collection.

“What a mess of junk!”

Following instructions, they set up the lever on a cleared spot of ground beside the wheel with the lens mounted on it, and hotbox, iron, and module, then sprinkled copper powder so that it dusted the dirt between objects. Finally they laid the square program in the center; it was somewhat floppy but settled down well enough.

“Now what? This will never work.”

The lever moved, poking the wheel, which turned. A beam of light from the sun shone through the lens and focused on the iron, which heated and began to melt. The hotbox melted the copper powder, which formed into copper rivulets that networked the site. Some connected to the module, which seemed to animate though it did nothing they could see. Melted iron flowed into a pattern of wires, levers, and wheels that emulated the original ones. This spread to encompass the module, which disappeared into the innards of the tangle.

“Does anyone have any idea what is happening?” Hannah asked.

“The thing is mindless, so we can't fathom it,” Vortex said. “But we presume it is assembling itself into a construction robot.”

“Ludicrous!” But even the parody seemed impressed by this particular magic, which was unlike any other they had seen.

At last the tangle extended sticklike legs and walked around the site. It had small iron arms, and a head dome with a face-plate. It squatted and ejected the module. Then it walked to a clear patch of ground and used a limb to scratch a little picture: a blob, an arrow, and a circle.

“What does it mean?” Goody asked.

“That's akin to barbarian symbol language,” Hannah said. “It means 'take me to your site.' That must be the finished construction robot.”

“But it's so small!”

“Size matters less than proficiency,” Vortex said. “We shall take it to our nest site and see how well it works.”

“If you are satisfied,” Goody said dubiously.

“We have no reason to doubt the competence of the machines of Robot World,” Vortex said. “They must have seen our requirement in the experience renditions you made there, and devised a program to make what we need. Certainly you have done your part, Goody Goblin.”

“Fat chance of that!” his voice said.

“We regard our deal as consummated,” Vortex said. He put a foot on the little robot and nosed into the ground. In four-fifths of a moment plus a trice both dragons were gone.

“Good riddance!”

“That was interesting, taken as a whole,” Hannah said. “What next, for us?”

“Now we head back into the Region of Madness to see if we can find a good home for the peeve.”