Unidentified Funny Objects 2 (22 page)

Next month the book club is reading
Fried Green Tomatoes
.

I suggested they do it at Glip’s house.

Story notes:

The opening line of “The Haunted Blender” came to mind while I was watching a band my partner said reminded her of “Smelly Cat” from the TV show Friends. I’d thank them for the inspiration, but they might not appreciate the publicity. From that line grew the further adventures of the character introduced in “The Day the Repossessed my Zombies,” my story in the first Unidentified Funny Objects anthology.

K.G. Jewell lives and writes in Austin, Texas.  He has never lost a cage match.  His website, which is rarely updated, is 
lit.kgjewell.com
.

Tim Pratt

If you find yourself squatting over a pit toilet while wearing stiletto heels, you’ve made a few bad choices at some point during the evening. I could have taken off my shoes, but then I’d be barefoot, in the woods, in the half-light of a lantern dangling from a tree branch, standing in whatever you can expect to find on the ground around an artisanal hand-excavated poop hole.

Apparently there was a fashion for high-and-low cultural juxtapositions in this particular dimensional node, hence a full fancy-dress party being held in and around a homemade earth-and-sod house lit only by torches. The hors d’oeuvres were processed cheese foam sprayed on mass-produced crackers, served on silver platters passed around by leggy supermodels dressed in hair shirts and stinking rags, plus prune-wine brewed in a ramshackle still and passed around in crystal goblets. Let me tell you something: prune wine goes right through you, so I didn’t even have to pretend I needed to use the facilities when the time came to get in position.

The pit toilet was well back in the woods, some distance behind the sod house, but it nevertheless came equipped with a scrupulously polite bathroom attendant—he was standing on the lowest branch of a nearby tree—dressed in a green velvet tuxedo and prepared to offer towels, breath mints, and cocaine on demand. Interdimensional travel is often way more boring than you’d expect, but this was not one of the boring times.

Earlier, when I was mingling among the partygoers—the worst human beings this node had to offer—a guy wearing a moth mask had lunged over to me drunkenly, tried to touch my cheek and slurred, “Your skin… so beautiful… like porcelain…”

I’d knocked his hand aside and said, “My skin is like the stuff toilets are made out of?” Proving that I’d had a way overly optimistic idea about the quality of the local toilets.

My business done, I scuttled away from the pit, tugged my rather ephemeral underwear back up around my hips, and pushed down my iridescent black dress, wondering how long I could plausibly pretend to be adjusting my garments before the attendant got suspicious about my loitering. Then I heard the sound of a human badly imitating an owl, which was both a good and a lousy signal to use in this node, since owls had been hunted to extinction here in a weird sports-and-dining craze some years earlier.

I reached into my purse for a can of aerosolized knock-out gas and sprayed it into the toilet attendant’s face. He fell over, spilling cocaine and mints everywhere. Before I could blow out the lantern, a man wearing a skintight rubber outfit that covered his entire body except his crotch and ass appeared from around a tree, coming to avail himself of the facilities, and I sprayed him, too. Luckily the nostril-holes, which were the only openings in his mask/hood combo, allowed sufficient airflow to knock him out, too. He fell upon the unconscious attendant in a way that formed a rather suggestive tableau, but I mean, how could he not?

Then I blew out the lantern, and my light-compensating contact lenses (acquired in a better universe than this one) kicked in, giving me creepy green night vision. I could clearly see my partner and our prisoner approaching through the trees. (Okay,
senior partner
, but I refuse to be called “sidekick” or “assistant” or “Gal Friday” or “padawan” or any of the other crap Kirtley tries on me).

Kirtley was presenting as female tonight, mostly, with blown-out blonde hair and significant bosoms, but with a little five o’clock shadow, too, just by way of fucking with the gender binary essentialists. Kirtley comes from a world where body modification is pretty much as common as dying your hair, and Kirtley claims not even to remember Kirtley’s own original birth sex—if it even fell firmly to one side or the other—and always marks “Not Applicable” on forms that ask for gender, generally just prior to setting the forms on fire, because seriously, you think we go around filling out forms? (In case you’re wondering, the only acceptable pronoun for Kirtley is “Kirtley” so get used to seeing that word. Kirtley Kirtley Kirtley.) Kirtley was frog-marching the party host, a brutal pink-haired warlord named Princess Stephanie, who’d dressed for tonight’s celebration of conquest in a gown of shimmering green silk accented by a string of “pearls” carved from the bones of her vanquished foes. Stephanie was groggy, presumably drugged, but not so insensible that she couldn’t carry her own weight, more or less.

“Portal, please,” Kirtley said, and I tossed the marble into the pit toilet and counted “one-two-three.”

The telltale “pop” of displaced air told me the portal was open, and when I looked into the pit I saw a shimmering blue horizon, thankfully above the level of the pool of pee-and-poop at the bottom of the hole. I jumped in, emerging in the wrong orientation and rolling through the tall grass as my momentum sorted itself out. I was followed a moment later by the jumbled tangle of Princess Stephanie’s cattywampus limbs. Kirtley managed to sort of sidle through the portal and didn’t even lose Kirtley’s balance in the process. Annoying as hell, but Kirtley had been at the interdimensional-secret-agent thing a lot longer than I had. I’d get the knack of being smooth in all situations someday.

Kirtley reached through the portal and plucked the magic marble—which was neither magic nor a marble—then tossed it to me. I never understood how you could reach into another dimension and pull the doorway to that dimension
out
—it seemed like pulling a hole out of a hole—but whenever I demanded an explanation Kirtley just rolled Kirtley’s eyes and said “Science.”

Princess Stephanie groaned, and I pondered the array of movement-control techniques I had at my disposal, but there was no need: Kirtley was already pulling the retgun from its undimensional hiding place, drawing forth the long-barreled, absurd-looking weapon from its invisible holster in a fold of twisted space at Kirtley’s hip. The basic shape of the retgun was consistent—grip, trigger, barrel two feet long—but everything else about it shimmered and shifted, from sci-fi ray gun to Old West shooting iron to steampunk cog-pistol to ritual sidearm of the Ballardian Bleakness Corp to model of a gun carved out of pale white soap. Princess Stephanie blinked up at Kirtley and said “Wha?” in a way that made me wonder how she’d managed to subjugate all those continents, but it’d probably been decades since she’d had to subjugate anything personally; once you reach a certain level, you’ve got people to do the subjugating for you.

“Boom,” Kirtley said, and squeezed the trigger.

This time the retgun emitted a cloud of glitter and sparkles and confetti, hitting the princess full in the face. She sneezed, wiped sparkles out of her eyes, then stood up, groggily, and said, “Damn, I drank too much apple brandy last night. My husbands and wives are going to kill me.” She gave us a little wave, said, “See you at the next hootenanny,” and lurched off across the grass in the general direction of a sprawling farmhouse/compound on a hill. Already my memories of her horrible history of atrocities were starting to fade, replaced by memories of a drunk woman we’d met in a field. If we stayed in this node too long, her contagious backstory would infect my brain entirely, too, and I’d forget all about her true history—though Kirtley was immune to having Kirtley’s memories rewritten, as the one holding the gun.

“You give her a good life?” I asked. “Because she doesn’t much deserve one.”

Kirtley put away the retgun and snorted. “Yeah, I set the phaser to ‘fun.’ Nah, it’s a fairly neutral bit of continuity. She’s still Princess Stephanie deep down, no matter what she thinks her name and backstory are now, so she’ll probably claw her way up to the position of First-Over-Wife in a few months, and from there to Head-of-Household, Island-Inclusive, but the damage she can do is pretty limited in this world. There are only about five thousand humans on this entire island, and the sea is full of ‘monsters’—quasi-sentient area-denial weapons from a war centuries ago—so she won’t be voyaging off to other continents and causing any trouble. Besides, a big group family will have plenty of infighting, backbiting, betrayals, alliances, lies, and scheming, so maybe that’ll keep her occupied.”

“Poor bastards.” I looked up at the farmhouse and thought of them having to deal with the bomb dropped into their lives that was Princess Stephanie, and worse, having her wormed into their memories and personal histories like she’d been there all along.

“The good of the many outweighs the whatever.” Kirtley spat, grinned, and said, “Let’s roll on out of here.”

I tossed the marble and opened a portal to our interdimensional spy/crime-fighter lair, because my life was just exactly that cool.

That was the last of the good old days. Just before the Prime Army came to screw everything up with the truth and its consequences.

THERE WAS A GUY SITTING in Kirtley’s chair right in front of the meta-map console, dressed in a suit of lightweight armor that was heavy on the chrome ornamental spikes, his face painted with red and black tiger-stripes. He flipped through an old-school cardboard folder in his lap for a moment after we popped through the portal, then glanced up at us like we were shifty salesmen interrupting his important spreadsheet bullshit or something.

“Mmm,” he said. “There you are. I am a Profound Imperator of the Prime Army.” He inclined his head toward me. “You are Consuela Inez Gonzalez, AKA ‘The Gen To End All Gens,’ correct?”

I glanced at Kirtley, who was frowning but not throwing slurry bombs or unleashing a brace of collapsible mecha-ferrets, and I decided to keep things civil instead of plucking any of the grape-sized hallucinogenic grenades from my purse. “I don’t know who that Consuela person is, but yeah, I’m The Gen.”

He made a mark in the folder, then glanced at my partner/mentor. “And you are… oh, I can’t possibly read off all these aliases and pseudonyms and code names and call signs and noms de guerre. Save that for the trial transcript. What name are you using these days?”

“Kirtley,” Kirtley said curtly. (Sorry, sorry. I promise not to do that sort of thing again.)

“Ah. We don’t have that alias on file. Thank you. You know how the Prime Army values the completeness of its records.”

“You should leave,” Kirtley said, and took out the retgun. “Unless you want to be… oh, how about our butler?”

“We could totally use a butler,” I said. “I am really sick of having to do all the butling around here myself. I buttle my butt off.” Kirtley says wordplay is the lowest form of humor and I say what the hell does Kirtley know and then I kick him in the shins.

The Profound Imperator looked around our totally sweet cave, lit by floodlights set at dramatic angles among the stalactites, the whole place stuffed with high-tech gear liberated from a thousand dimensions, and did a full lip-curling sneer. “This cluttered void doesn’t need servants. It needs to be filled with concrete. It’s a sinkhole waiting to happen. But that’s moot. The two of you are now in the custody of the Prime Army, answering for crimes that include—”

“You have no authority here,” Kirtley said.

“Wherever I go, I carry the full authority of the Prime Army. Which is actual authority, backed by actual force, unlike your own. Now, please, allow me to read the charges—”

“Butler it is.” Kirtley squeezed the trigger, and the retgun emitted a sound like a dinner bell ringing, and I waited for the memories to flood in, reminding me that this tiger-faced dude was our butler, had
always
been our butler, complete with colorful and plausible backstory about why he was dressed like such a moron, probably as some sort of penance or because he’d lost a profoundly ill-considered bet.