Parallel II: Quantum Weirdness

[rvm45]

Parallel II: Quantum Weirdness





Chapter One



Grainer hurried through his shower, though his inherent cleanliness and adherence to routine made any real hurrying problematic.

Tonight was Friday—payday and date day.

Tonight he planned to ask Mary to marry him. He worked hard, though sporadically, and he’d squirreled enough to buy a three thousand dollar ring for Mary.

Mary told him that her first boyfriend left her at the altar when she was only nineteen years old. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a Minister, he had left her for another man.

The experience had soured her on God and men and she’d spent the last twelve years seeking solace in the crack–pipe and in the arms of other women.

But she’d said that she really loved Grainer and she was ready to go back to church and live right again.

There was something about black women.

Around women of his own race, Grainger felt awkward, tongue-tied and trollish.

He could step up to the plate and get a modest game on with black women—not that he ever took courtship lightly. Finding a wife and raising a family was far too important an undertaking to be trivialized.

Mary’s roommate Katherine frowned ominously as he stepped into the apartment.

Katherine belonged to one of the other “Churches of God”—there was a bewildering array of them.

She made it plain that Grainer was crude and loutish, belonged to the “wrong” Church of God and was a bad influence on Mary.

Grainer knew all about forgiveness. He thought that it was one of the primary tenants of Christianity. God could forgive someone and make him new and whole and clean again in the twinkling of an eye.

People often took longer to forgive—if they forgave at all.

Katherine looked down her haughty nose at Grainer while he tried to ignore her.

“Come outside. I need to discuss something with you,” Mary said.

It was drizzling rain outside and a cold wind blew.

“Katherine says that I can’t see you anymore,” Mary said.

“What in the seven burning Hells does Katherine have to say about it?” Grainer asked.

“Katherine pays the rent. Katherine buys the groceries. Katherine buys my clothes.

“Now Katherine says that I have to choose between you.

“It is obvious to me that Katherine loves me more than you do. She spends far more money on me than you ever do. You’re good for forty or fifty dollars a week tops,” Mary said.

“Katherine doesn’t love you more than I do. Her parents are multi-millionaires for cryin’ in a tattered kerchief! They keep her checking and charge accounts full of money,” Grainer said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Mary said. “If you truly loved me, you’d find some way to get me everything that I want or need, whether you had money or not.”

Grainer’s software looped a few times considering the illogic of Mary’s last pronouncement.

He decided on one last desperation play.

“You told me that I needn’t be jealous of Katherine. You said that she was straight and just doing her Christian duty by you…” Grainer sputtered.

“I was surprised too, but she said ‘Put out or get out’ and I can’t afford to get out right now,” Mary said.

“Are you sure that you’re doing the right thing?” Grainer got out between teeth clenched in agony.

Grainer felt like he’d been kicked in his jewels and then absorbed two hard solar plexus blows on the way down.

“I’m not at all sure, even now…” Mary began and then paused.

“Mary please! I’m in for the long haul. David Wilkerson says these same-sex unions rarely last…”

At this point, Katherine interrupted him.

“Are you ready to go to the Lily Pond?” Katherine asked.

“The Lily Pond” was a local gay bar. Grainer was surprised a wolf in Christian sheep’s clothing like Katherine would chance being seen there.

He wondered how they proposed to get there. Katherine’s car was in the shop. Mary was too shiftless to have a vehicle.

At that moment in time, Grainer wouldn’t have consented to transport the pair, even if the alternative was having his eyes gouged out with a melon scoop.

But it was only a few blocks to the bar after all. The two women joined hands and walked briskly away. After a few steps, they started skipping. That was, he later decided, just to rub it in.

Grainer didn’t know how long that he stood in the cold drizzle and cried his eyes out—but afterward, something had been washed forever from his make up.


***************** ************ *********

The man, or manlike creature, moved on all fours through the jungle undergrowth.

He ate grubs and the inch and a half long red fire ants. He seemed indifferent to the pain of the fire ant’s stings.

When he found a tuber, he’d dig for it. When he came to a berry-bearing patch, he’d stand upright to get all the berries within reach. Most of the time he crawled.

He stumbled upon the half-rotted carcass of a pig. He lowered his head and gnawed the putrid maggot filled meat much like a Dog might have.

A large male hyena trotted down the trail. Burroughs had thought the hyenas were cowardly and only ate the remains of other’s kills. Most others shared his opinion.

Only after wildlife scientists started using infrared cameras did they realize what a fierce fighter and efficient predator the Hyena was. Its bite was markedly more powerful than a lion’s.

A hyena could crunch a cape buffalos’ femur without straining.

However their iron guts could absorb most anything and they weren’t averse to having an entrée of half-rotten carrion when the opportunity arose.

The hyena leaped on the four-legged creature to either kill him or drive him from the remains.

At the last instant, the creature realized his peril. He seized the hyena in mid-leap.

As the hyena felt the creature’s hand close upon its windpipe like a steel vise, it realized that there were clamps even more powerful than a hyena’s bite.

The creature hooted apishly in triumph and happiness. He would eat well for a few days now. The hyena’s carcass would become ever more rank, but he had ceased being finicky long ago. He couldn’t remember a time when he would have hesitated to eat worms or grubs or maggot-infested flesh.


************** ************ ************


Many maneuvers are reputed to lead to happiness: prayer, meditation, scholarship, sex, and the acquisition of worldly goods, or seeking power over others, even gluttony.

Grainer had pursued several of the options. None of them seemed a very reliable transport to satisfaction.

He fell back on the one thing that he knew brought satisfaction, however briefly or at however high a price—his solution was drugs.

Grainer traded his pick-up for a non-descript vehicle of fairly new make.

He bought him a good quality suit, black trousers, black boots, black suit jacket and some sort of brightly colored turtleneck.

He cashed in Mary’s ring and he went on a long cocaine binge along with occasional shots of heroin or morphine, and an occasional judicious shot of alcohol.

When he’d looked like a working class redneck, everyone had hassled him. Now he had respect, he became an occasional broker—always striving to be on the outer edges and never to repeat a pattern.

“Don’t do that here,” The fellow begged Grainer with wide eyes that rolled nervously. “I don’t want an O.D. at my pad.”

Grainer fixed the man with a contemptuous gaze.

“That’s what its about baybee! We’re all just looking for a graceful way to make it through the sky and over to the other side.”

This time Grainer made it to another side, even if it wasn’t “The other side.”

**************** ************ **********

“Like wow man! This is like Psychedelic—and it is like so real…” Grainer thought.

He felt light and the air felt thick and heavy. He perceived a green jungle all around him—like something in one of the “Jungle Jim” movies that he’d loved as a boy.

Some kind of haint or hobgoblin rooted through the weeds one side of the trail for a while before swapping sides. He looked like he was feeding.

Then some sort of misshapen wolf tried to attack the shambling creature.

The snuffler abruptly morphed into a humanoid and started strangling the hyena—yeah, it was a hyena—not even bothering to use his other hand.

The hyena died with a barely audible whimper.

“Die by the Sword,” Grainer thought.

It wasn’t a bad way to go, everything weighed together.

Then the biggest jet-black seven hundred pound caricature of a bloodshot and bloodthirsty gorilla roared and shambled down the jungle trail.

Grainer felt his lips pull back to expose his teeth dramatically.

“Wow, that was some excellent whip I just mainlined,” Grainer thought.

He didn’t feel the least bit frightened and a pleasant electric goose-pimpled sensation engulfed his whole body.

He nodded off-handedly to the humanoid.

“It’s cool dude. I got this one,” Grainer said graciously.

He had two four inch Smith and Wesson .44 Magnums in a dual shoulder holster under his jacket.

Wait a moment. When had he rolled his sleeve down and re-donned his jacket? Well, he must have.

But if the .44 Magnums didn’t make this nightmare good, he was willing to get up close and personal with a Bowie.

He felt like he was both in a berserker and transcendentally happy all at the same time.

A two shot double tap through the creature’s open mouth settled it nicely, when one of the bullets partially severed the spine.

As the anthropoid hit the ground, Grainer was suddenly obsessed with a desire to take the huge fangs for a trophy.

Twenty minutes later, he was in possession of several fangs and teeth, and coming down off his high.

He started feeling a bit queasy. When he saw the humanoid biting big chunks of flesh off the foul-smelling hyena, Grainger was sick to his stomach.

Something to eat was generally the ticket to settling a sick stomach. Grainer decided that he was unlikely to find a Pizza Hut anywhere in this astonishingly real hallucination.

He severed a rear leg off the anthropoid and started a small fire.

“When does night fall?” He asked the humanoid.

“It’s always high noon here. You’re from Earth aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I came from Earth—I guess. You mean that I ain’t there anymore?” Grainer said.

“Not in Kansas anymore either,” The creature said.

“Who or what are you?”

“My name is ‘Rubenstein’. I was once a tyrant, but lately I’ve been a very benevolent dictator of a very large African Empire,” Rubenstein said.

“Well okay then, but your kingly robes be kinda like filthy your majesty,” Grainer said.

“No, no! Down Ward is a king. I’m a dictator,” Rubenstein insisted.

“Well what are you doing rooting around in the chigger weeds?”

“I need to find Down Ward.”

“Dude, it’s like that away,” Grainer said, while pointing his thumb at the ground.

“Not ‘Downward’ ‘Down Ward’…My friend…my enemy. He cut my arms off, you know,” Rubenstein said.

“Right about here,” He pointed two or three inches down his forearm.

“But when they replaced them, the bone and muscle goes clean up to my shoulder.”

“Sounds like a bloodthirsty bastard,” Grainer humored him.

“No, no I shouldn’t have blinded his daughter.

“That was all long ago, on Earth. Here Down Ward restored my kingdom when he could have killed me.

“If I could find Down Ward, he would help me regain my kingdom again.

“The Virgin Queen—she’s a goddess now, don’t you know—she came leading a huge continent of Unborn in their golden vimanas.

“She exiled Rubenstein. Now Rubenstein lives like an animal.”

“How long ago was this?” Grainer asked.

“Centuries, maybe millennia—who knows. It’s always high noon here. Without a timepiece, it’s easy to lose count.

“You think not?

“Four fifths of my body is cybernetic. The rest has been tweaked a half a dozen different ways.

“Wait until the Ape-Man retrovirus starts changing you. All the mangani are infected,” Rubenstein said.

“The gorilla?” Grainer asked.

“If you’re going to live in this jungle, you ought to be able to tell a mangani from a gorilla.

“But wait until your feet start to turn to hands and a Methuselah with five dozen eyes brings you the psychedelic plum to fully initiate you,” Rubenstein warned in dire tones.

“Man, I hope I can remember some of this stuff to tell my friends when I wake,” Grainer said.

“You won’t wake from this dream,” Rubenstein said. “But for now, sleep.”

Grainer had been fairly coherent throughout, but as the first stages of sleep claimed him, he began to feel drunk.

“One thing that you have to understand above all else: Mary is bad. Mary is very bad,” Grainer insisted to Rubenstein.

“Indeed, Mary is evil personified,” Rubenstein humored him.

When Grainer woke, he had all his faculties intact, but he was still in the jungle with a strange cyborg named “Rubenstein”.

Rubenstein had rapidly recovered most of his reason with someone to speak to.

He’d broken off a seven-foot long quarterstaff and gnawed a point on one end with his unbreakable silver teeth, and then he’d fire-hardened the point.

He’d stood guard while Grainer slept.

“Next time we decide to crash, we’re not going to do it in the middle of a wildlife trail,” Rubenstein said. “That was Pure-Dee stupid.

“How many cartridges do you have?”

“Enough,” Grainer told Rubenstein.

“And yet, eventually we’ll have to trust each other,” Rubenstein said. “Do you know how to make a bow and arrows?”

“Who doesn’t?” Grainer said.

“I never learned to make one worth having. We’d be considerably better armed with bows.”

“This dude who cut off your hands—what kinda hard core butcher is he?” Grainer asked.

“He’s a Minister of the Gospel and a man of peace. His daughter is a genius who can shred time and space with the power of her mind.

“The War Tawn worship her much as the Unborn worship The Virgin Queen—except she doesn’t seek to be worshipped.

“Her mother is my first cousin. I’d give her five-to-one against that ape you shot—bare-knuckled,” Rubenstein solemnly avowed.

Grainer couldn’t be sure when the man was jesting or off in cloud la-la land and when he was serious.

He’d resolved to wait and see.


.....RVM45

[rvm45]

Chapter Two



In the year 171 AAW (After the Aerial War) Missionary Belinda Cutter prepared to head back to Earth to pick up more refugees while The Maestro remonstrated with her.

She specialized in transporting the down-and-out to Second City—at least most of them were down-and-out.

America—for the most part—had been built by folks who’d blown it in Europe. Later a steady stream of Asians who hadn’t been conspicuously successful back home contributed to the mix.

The Maestro wasn’t worried what the influx of the déclassé would do to Ward’s city-state. He worried about The Society’s machinations becoming public on Earth.

The good Missionary transported ever larger numbers of folks from Earth. There was a limit to how many folks could vanish in a year and not cause some sort of unwelcome scrutiny.

At least he’d been able to persuade Missionary Belinda to spread her net wider the last few decades. At first she’d only recruited North Americans. Lately she’d branched out and started recruiting in Jamaica, Haiti and India.

She’d added Australia, New Zealand and Russia the last thirty years or so.

Since the Missionary opened her own portals and blazed her own eccentric trails through hyperspace, he couldn’t do much but try to reason with her.

Belinda Cutter could be very difficult to persuade betimes.

“You need to lay down a trail and follow it—like a Railroad track,” The Maestro lectured her.

“Hyperspace will never settle back into its old predictable, non-turbulent state if you and your daughter and Down Ward keep the pot on “High-Boil”.

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing,” The Missionary deadpanned. “And you might want to talk to your psychotic granddaughter.”

“O, if only I could speak to her. Who would have guessed that The Virgin Queen had such power in the void?” The Maestro commiserated.

Travelling through inter-dimensional space had always been extraordinarily safe all through The Society’s thousands of years of world hopping. The danger had always started when one arrived, not in transport.

However when the Missionary and several assistants vanished without trace, it was widely assumed that she’d succumbed to some sort of arcane and obscure maelstrom of her own unintentional creation.


*********** **************** ***********


“We seem to be on Earth in 1830,” Missionary Cutter said to The Society Liaison.

“It seems highly unlikely that we are on the true Earth,” Dill said. “The complexities of time travel are daunting.”

“What then?” the Missionary asked.

“We’re probably on a world that paralleled the true Earth exactly until the precise moment that we set foot on it. A grain of sand moved a hair’s breadth is more than enough to result in a vastly different world line.

“From the moment we touched down, things were never going to be the same,” Dill said.

“I haven’t quite mastered the calculus and geometry of parallel hyperspace,” The Missionary said. “But isn’t it almost impossible to travel this close to the true world line and not be sucked into the mainline?”

“Tell me about it. You do realize that the term ‘true world’ is mathematical and not metaphysical?”

“Meta-who?” The Missionary said.

“These world lines are perfectly ‘real’. They are just much less robust than the Mainline.”

“Whatever…” The Missionary said.


************** ************ ************


Khoral was my sole surviving crony from the old days—The Exodus, the battles with The Unborn, the founding of Second City.

Second City became a city-state covering almost as much area as Texas and I was king.

Other city-states grew up all around the huge fresh water lake—over five times as large as Lake Superior and shaped roughly like the continent of Africa back home…

Coincidentally, I think. You can’t be certain of such things here though.

And of course it was my rotten luck to be acclaimed king of all the other kings—emperor if you will.

I tried hard, but codes, customs, ceremonies and traditions accrued like plaque on artery walls or barnacles on a pier.

By 367 AAW, ruling had become a massive burden and a crashing bore.

Khoral had resigned as president of the Royal Tawn Council over a century earlier. One of his descendants—I forget how many “greats” removed—now filled his place.

I’d installed a rigid system of “Right of Primogenitor” and after Sabrina was lost on a jungle vacation with her husband Jan and her stepson Long, I had no descendants to hand the baton—or the scepter—to.

I’d wanted the Royal Tawn to rule and leave humans free for higher pursuits anyway.

I decided to leave the throne vacant and go on an extended jungle holiday with my old friend Khoral—who still had the same boon that he’d had when I first met him.

I meant to come back in a year, maybe two, to check how smoothly the wheels of state were turning…

But you know how one thing leads to another. It was almost twenty-five years when I came back to my kingdom.


****************** ************** ***********

I looked at Khoral and gave a theatrical shrug.

Tawn aren’t capable of much facial expression, but they learn to read human expressions if they’re around people enough.

They had managed to expand the city more than tenfold in the quarter century that I’d been gone. They’d built a sixty-five foot stonewall around the whole lobstrousity—wide as a two-lane road on the top.

I wasn’t as concerned about the wall as I was the checkpoints everyone had to go through to get into the city.

I itched to reclaim my throne and put a firm heel down on this nonsense.

When Khoral and I came to the head of the line, I saw that they had one of the Tailed Folk in a cage beside the gate. He was naked, covered in scabs, scars and open sores. Since he was naked, I could see that he’d been castrated.

“We don’t allow you Tawn scum into our city,” the guard told Khoral. “Go away, or I’ll have you thrown into a cage with the tailed animal. They aren’t allowed inside either.”

“How about Ape-Men or Golden-Eyed you pestilent knob-gobbler? I’m both and I am your rightful sovereign.

“I demand that you give the proper obeisance, let the tailed one out of that cage, throw this gate open and escort me to the throne room,” I said while slapping his head with one palm and then the other.

“Down Ward!” the tailed one roared.

“Thomas! Is that you? What has this place come to?” I asked as the guard went limp.

You can’t tell me that there wasn’t something already wrong with his neck. A normal man’s neck doesn’t snap that way from a few open-handed tolchocks.

Khoral was never a diplomat like me. He threw one of the guards against the wall hard enough to leave a bloody smear as his lifeless body slid down the granite wall.

Then he bit the heads off of a couple the guards—literally…

I grabbed the iron bars of the cage they had Thomas confined to and ripped them wide enough to let him out.

The Tailed Folk may be many things. Weak or cowardly are not among those things.

I knew Thomas as a mild mannered, white lab-coated geek that liked to cook up neat gadgets with my daughter.

As he exited the cage, despite his weakened condition, he ripped the throat out of a guard with his enormous fangs, and seized the man’s cudgel. He spun into a low defense and used the bludgeon to crush a guard’s kneecap. When the man fell, he crushed his skull almost casually.

Those folks could have invented “Monkey-Style Kung Fu.”

As I whipped out a .357 Smith and Wesson in my left hand and a Smith and Wesson .45 ACP Revolver in my right hand and took down ten foemen with twelve shots…

It hit me—these lopslickers didn’t have Guns.

What sort of flip-silly shabnasticator puts unarmed guards to man a checkpoint?

I holstered my Revolvers and fired out three magazines full of .45 ACP from my stag handled 1911A1. I let the first two magazines fall to the ground.

At the moment, I had magazines to spare.

I grabbed Thomas and threw him over my shoulder. A Tailed Folk is not going to win any foot races.

I hollered at Khoral and started running toward the tree line that reached to within a mile of the city.

I ran with the two hundred and forty pound Thomas on my back. Khoral had the two hundred and sixty pound Jaze on his back.

We almost made it to the tree line when a few scattered shots fell all around us.

Once under cover of the trees, I unlimbered my .303 Scout-Modified Enfield and started picking off the soldiers as they advanced.

“Why are you shooting at them?” Khoral asked.

“They hissed me off,” I said.

Just then Khoral slumped to the ground. One of the errant shots had hit him near dead center.

“Pond and Honour!” I screamed.

Khoral was the last true friend that I had left. If he died from his wound, I decided that I’d raze the whole damned city in retaliation.

I’d never been to the healing world.

Complex doesn’t begin to describe the difficulty of opening a portal to a world that is known to one only by a huge sheaf of equations.

I grabbed hold of Time and Space and leaped blind.


***************** ************* **********


“We have arrived in Georgia on the eve of the of the Cherokee Trail of Tears for a reason,” Missionary Cutter told her cadre.

“Surely you’re not going to try to transport the entire Cherokee Nation,” Dill said.

“One Hundred and thirty thousand folk? No, I don’t think so,” The good Missionary replied. “We’ll never persuade all those folks to travel with us. I’ll consider anything over eighty thousand to be a bonus.

“We’ll also wait until we’re ready to leave and then buy up as many slaves as we can afford. That way we won’t have to feed or house them until the last moment.

“Might as well set some slaves free while we’re rescuing Cherokee, “ Missionary Cutter said.

Dill felt like his head would explode trying to picture such a huge mass moving through the vortex.

The Missionary intended to take her charges directly to Second City. But she urged them to bring as much of their livestock, tools and weapons as possible.

Being a refugee was bad enough. Being a poor refugee was worse.

When they ended up in some heretofore-unexplored portion of the African Ringworld, Dill was tearfully glad that they’d made any safe landfall at all.

At least the Cherokee were in a game-rich forest where the weather was always balmy, rather than starving and freezing along the trail to Oklahoma…

But Missionary Cutter didn’t like to do things by half.

The path to Second City seemed blocked for some obscure reason but the path to Wardsville was open.

As a close associate of Down Ward and The Maestro, The Missionary had unlimited credit in Wardsville.

She bought over ten thousand Enfield Rifles, wagon loads full of ammunition, several thousand assorted Handguns and Shotguns, along with tools—files, pliers, sheers, hammers, anvils, taps and dies, plows, seeds, anything that she thought might prove useful to a fledgling civilization.


She also rounded up a few hundred skilled craftsmen along with the usual assortment of adventurers and malcontents.

The folks had thought she was preparing a second Exodus, but when she had all her goods and people assembled in one place, she simply transported the whole lot through hyperspace…

One thing that never occurred to her was to ask someone the date. If it had, then she’d found that she’d unaccountably slipped forward a few hundred years.

Three years later, Wardsville fell to the Unborn led by The Virgin Queen and Missionary Cutter’s Exodus was largely forgotten in the uproar that followed upon the fall of the city.

**************** ********** ***************


The way to Second City stayed blocked. She never managed to travel to Wardsville again either.

She wanted to go home. Her daughter was there along with her intended. Her Church and her friends from The Quest were there—minus the few veterans of The Quest that traveled with her.

Maybe, she thought, if she could get back to Earth Prime, she could retrace her path to Second City.

She landed in an alternate Ireland in 1847 in the midst of the Potato Famine.

A hundred thousand starving Irish were welcomed into the Cherokee Nation.

Every time she tried to return to Earth Prime, she ended up with more refugees: The Sioux, Comanche and Apache nations, Confederate soldiers who felt dispossessed, An assortment of Ronin she collected over several centuries along with a far larger number ready to move elsewhere after the wearing of the Swords was banned.

She made several trips to collect all the refugees from the fall of Rhodesia. Over a half million souls would have swamped the city in its earlier days—but her arrivals all came just when the city had grown enough to absorb the surplus.

She collected tens of thousands of SS Troopers from Siberian Death Camps oddly paired with an equal number of Jewish women from a sexually segregated NAZI concentration camp in a deviant time line.

Thousands of Tie-Dyed Hippies disappeared into the odd cult of “The Travelling Missionary” before the government caught on and stormed the communes—but no trace of the leaders or their followers were ever found.

She transported Esquimaux and Vikings, Hackers and Luddites…

And out of the Glorious chaos a nation emerged.


**************** ************ ***********


Grainer sat working on a buffalo rib with a small Buck Knife he carried.

“What are you doing?” Rubenstein asked.

“Making arrowheads,” Grainer said.

“Don’t you s’posed to make them from flint?”

“That’s one way. I’m no hand as a flint knapper. I’ll make our points from bone. Wish I had a small saw blade though,” Grainer said.

Rubenstein held up a silver hand. His index finger shifted and morphed into a small saw blade.

“Like this?” he asked.

“Can you make it a little finer?” Grainer asked.

Rubenstein adjusted the blade.

They soon had a good pile of triangular bone arrowheads.

“That is like far out!”

“You aren’t repulsed?”

“Nah.”

“But would you trade your hands for hands like mine?”

After a moment’s pause to think, Grainer answered.

“Nah, but if I ever needed a prosthetic…

“How do you do that?”

“I’m not sure. I had the hands for decades before it came to me. After Down Ward made the voice leave my mind, I was a lot clearer on many things…and then there’s the I.Q. enhancers and the psychedelic blitz when Down Ward took his city back from my forces,” Rubenstein said.

Grainer looked at his newfound friend and shuddered wondering how much of the man’s psychotic ravings had any basis in reality.

“Rubenstein my man, can you turn all your fingers into knife blades and drive them in like ‘This’,” Grainer asked.

“I’ve never thought about it. Let me see,” Rubenstein said.

“Freddy Kruger man!” Grainer enthused.

Rubenstein sat staring blankly for a couple minutes.

“Yes, I remember watching those old movies. It was very long ago though.”

“Can you do Wolverine claws?”

After a moment trying to remember, Rubenstein produced a creditable set.

“One more. Can you turn your foot into a razor-edged scythe as you do an upward hook kick?” Grainer asked.

Rubenstein did that too.

“Dude, it is like: Why are you eating grubs and carrion? You need to be at the top of the food chain!”

“I still want a bow and arrow,” Rubenstein insisted.

“I’m gonna make you a set. Don’t be getting on my nerves or I’ll have to give you a whipping,” Grainer told him.

“Tomorrow, we need to find something dead. I’ll show you how to make a bow trap and we’ll catch one of those huge turkey vultures that are everywhere,” Grainer said.

“What for?”

“Fletching,” Grainer said. Then seeing the blank look on Rubenstein’s face, he added, “You know, like feathers—makes the arrows fly straighter.”

“Okay, I got that.”

“My feet are killing me,” Grainer said.

“I told you that you were metamorphosing into an Ape-Man.

“Ape-Men can fly. I’ve been exposed to the retrovirus, but I can’t fly because I don’t have the feet for it,” Rubenstein said.

Grainer thought Rubenstein was freaking again.

“Like this,” Rubenstein said while pointing to one of his bare silver feet.

He concentrated and morphed his foot into a fair approximation of an Ape-Man’s foot.

“You’re saying that I’m going to develop prehensile feet? And you can’t ‘fly’ because you don’t have prehensile toes? But you have a set on that foot now.

“Just remember how you did it and do the other foot that way too…”

***************** *************** ***********


Mond had taken a long sabbatical with his adopted kin, the mangani. He knew that he’d been gone for a long while, but he had no idea how long.

The jungle spoke to him in some vague imprecise and non-verbal fashion.

There was a pair of potential Ape-Men near. This time the process needed to be expedited because events were racing to a…

To a something.

Mond’s Methuselah showed up followed by two exceptionally large Methuselahs.

Mond’s Methuselah was very large, even as Methuselahs went—largely because Mond was very, very old and Methuselahs never ceased growing…

But these were very large Methuselahs to bond with neophytes.

Yes indeed, time to gather up some plums and search out two new comers.

As Mond prepared to leave, the whole tribe prepared to come with him.

The language of the great apes was rather limited and allowed scant differentiation of subtle ideas.

Mond often felt that that the mangani were smarter than their language allowed them to demonstrate.

Mond was stronger and smarter as well as more nimble than any mangani. Nonetheless, he’d learned very long ago to avoid the endless hassles of leadership.

The King of Mond’s tribe looked Mond in the eyes and communicated mind to mind with him the same way Mond’s Methuselah communicated.

“We too have a stake in this,” The King told Mond. “Ordinarily we plant the seeds and nothing more is required of us…

“But dark days are ahead. We are going to fight.”

Mond wasn’t incautious enough to imagine he’d seen it all. He did accept that he wasn’t going to see new and novel sights terribly often at his age.

Seeing hundreds of mangani, each one prepared to go to war…

Seeing hundreds of mangani, each one paired with a Methuselah…

Mond had never before seen a mangani paired with a Methuselah—much less hundreds upon hundreds of the pairs.

That made up for many centuries of monotonous sameness.



.....RVM45

[rvm45]

Chapter Three




We landed right in the middle of a street.
Someone noticed that Khoral was bleeding profusely and within seconds the orange-robed Healers surrounded us.

After they had his bleeding under control, they did a double take on Thomas and started examining him.

All the Healers don’t speak English—and their Spanish is so garbled that you’d almost think it was a third language—as if a third language was possible.

They took Khoral away on a gurney.

The Healers treat everyone who comes to them. They never turn anyone away. They accept donations but never charge. They are incorruptible and I had no qualms about leaving my best friend to them.

A high-ranking Healer in lime-green robes strode up to me.

“Are you The Emperor Down Ward?” he asked.

“I may be the ex-emperor, but yes,” I said.

“You had the right physical parameters and when they told me that you were rather emphatic trying to speak Spanish to the Acolytes…

“We have every hope that the Tawn will recover. It is fortunate that he had two hearts. The one will be quite sufficient to support him while he convalesces and the second heart regenerates.”

Now I’ve killed a few Tawn. I’ve seen Tawn—both friend and foe—slain. It had never occurred to me to dissect one to see how they were put together.

“Tawn have two hearts?”

“No. Many who have been infected with the Ape-Man retrovirus develop a dual circulatory system—though not all.

“It’s not an easy modification for a body to make once it is grown.

“You have two hearts for instance. Didn’t you know?” The Healer said.

Fancy that!

“The Tailed one…

“Tawn and boons are both related to humans—that is, The Unborn drew generously on human DNA when they made them.

“The Tailed Ones are a natural race—whatever that means—and they aren’t even remotely similar to humans…

“And yet they can be indwelt and improved by the Ape-Man retrovirus. If you wish the Tailed One to re-grow his manhood, the best solution would be to infect him,” the Healer said.

I drew a Knife with a modest blade and slashed my right palm. I handed the Thomas the Knife.

“Do it to it,” I told him.

We clasped hands “blood-brother” style. That would almost certainly infect Thomas but tradition is for the subject to drink a bit of the Ape-Man blood too.

The Tailed Folk have a long prehensile tail that is longer than their torsos. Forget Dog’s tails. A tail strong enough to support over two hundred pounds needs to be thick. They taper, but two thirds of the way to the tip they’re still thicker than most men’s wrist.

They have long arms with over-sized hands and short stout legs with up-sized versions of their hands for feet.

They have necks like Bulldogs—well over twenty five inches around—beetling brows and huge fangs as big as my ring finger.

And they “Fly”—that is, they are able to tap into something inherent to the ringworld that allows them to “Semi-Levitate”…

I had always assumed that they already were infected with the Ape-Man retrovirus.


************** ************ **********


Jaze refused to leave Khoral’s side even momentarily, but as he recovered I toured the Healer’s world a bit—sometimes with Thomas, sometimes alone.

Up until I broke things wide open, there were fifty-seven worlds that The Society traveled to. All of them shared some broad similarities to our Earth—the so-called “Mainline”.

If they did not have at least some points of similarity, then they probably wouldn’t have been accessible the first time someone blazed a trail there.

On the Healer’s world it was a bit warmer than Earth and all of the polar icecaps were melted. Only about half the planet’s surface was dry land.

I’ve seen geological maps of Earth’s Antarctica. With all the ice removed, it would be a close-knit group of archipelagoes with many bays and fiords reaching far inland.

Here, even with the higher sea level, there is a solid continent similar in size and topography to our frozen continent.

I’d read that even our Antarctic would be reasonably warm in the summer months, if the blazing white snow cover didn’t reflect most of the light and heat back into space.

Our own Antarctic is also very dry—the snow having accumulated over many centuries.

The vast majority of the population on the Healer’s world lives in the Antarctic. Summers are long and hot—and there are three months of “midnight sun”.

The winters are long and cold of course.

The land is fertile and rainfall during the growing season is adequate.

There are plenty of other places on the Healer’s world where men could live, even with the higher temperatures and sea levels, but even the Antarctic here is sparsely populated.

There is something odd that I’d gleaned studying The Society’s histories of the fifty-seven known worlds.

On each of them except our world, mankind reached an equilibrium population. Technology also peaked and improved very little thereafter.

No other planet shows signs of ever having supported over six hundred million people.

Of course the system of new worlds that my cousin is exploring don’t quite fit that description, nor do any of the ringworlds—but they are both new to The Society.

The Maestro claims that The Egyptian Ringworld shows multiple signs of having been a very advanced technological society, and that it has been retrogressing glacially for millennia.

Whether inter-dimensional trade will halt, reverse or speed their decline won’t be known for a very long time.

Then there’s Earth—The Mainline. Are we different, or are we heading for a fall?

Once again, only time will tell.

************** ************** ************


They use woolly mammoths in the cities here much as we use our elephants. They raise heavy beams and such for construction work and they draw some of the heavier delivery wagons.

They could use higher tech solutions, but they feel that the mammoths are their old friends and partners. Instead of trying to replace them, they strive to find more ways they can take part in the city’s life.

The Healers are also very keen on ivory. Their mammoths feel honoured when they harvest the tusks from the dead for later use. They feel a part of their departed lives on in the ivory.

And of course there are wild Mammoths and elephants. With their satellite tracking, it would be very rare for a fallen wild animal’s ivory to go un-harvested.


***************** *********** *********


“I need to talk to you, Down Ward,” the senior Healer in the lime-green robe said. “By the way, my name is ‘Ague’.”

“Odd name for a Healer. In English ‘Ague’ is a fever,” I noted.

“What year do you think that you were in, when you tried to enter your city and reclaim the throne?”

“380—maybe 390 something AAW?”

“Try 2711 AAW,” Ague said.

“I didn’t enter any portals until I came here. I surely haven’t frittered away over two thousand years in the jungle.

“But you expect me to believe that somehow I slipped that far forward without noting it?” I said.

“But what about Thomas? Surely he’s not as old as a Sequoia tree?” I objected.

“The Tailed One found his own fault in space-time to fall into. We may never know all the details. His mind is not terribly linear,” Ague said.

“Everything and practically everyone you ever knew is dead or destroyed or devolved into something you’d hardly recognize.

“The Unborn have raised the stakes. By now The Virgin Queen will be fully deified.

“No, I share your monotheism—but she will be so powerful that she deserves the appellation of ‘goddess’ with a lower case ‘g’, of course.

“She and her minions have taken Wardsville over a thousand years ago.

“She controls much of what you called ‘Mercator Earth’.

“Second City and the entire Second Empire have become decadent. They are reluctant to give up today’s pleasures to prepare for tomorrow’s battle.

“All your old allies are gone.

“You don’t have to go back to fight a hopeless battle. You could live out your life here, on another planet even a heretofore unexplored territory on the African Ringworld,” Ague said.

“Dudes, it is like: I’m going back. I got nowhere else to go. My home is gone, but those who’ve inherited the ruins will have to pay me in blood,” I told my friends.

“I left something in Second City,” Thomas said.

“I left everything that I knew and built a new home. In the unlikely event that we survive, we’ll build another home,” Khoral said.

Jaze roared.

“In that case, I’m coming with you,” Ague said.

He cast his robe aside. His disrobing revealed a pair of ivory handled 1911A1s in holsters attached to his trouser’s belt as well as a Double Edged Weapon that was a rather long Knife or a fairly short Sword.

“I didn’t mean to influence your decision until you’d committed.

“Let me explain something to you. The secrets that the Healing Guild protects…

“Our newest inductee would die horribly before he’d reveal our most minor secret.

“It isn’t a choice. We’re under compulsion.

“I can’t share anything with you, for instance, even if I wanted to and was convinced it was for the best.

“Thomas and your daughter managed to weaponize the skin of her silver eyes to make armor for your airships.

“We were absolutely astounded at that feat.

“Your armor was vastly inferior to what The Unborn were using—but it was good enough—at that time.

“I knew that we couldn’t do much for Thomas—yet he was taken deep into the heart of our compound…

“He intuits much.”

*************** *************** *********

Rohann worked at his Lathe with a detached feeling of contentment.

His ancestors were equally composed of American blacks from Earth and African blacks from The African Ringworld. A few Indian ancestors had given him his name and perhaps some errant Caucasian somewhere in the old family tree had bequeathed him his piercing blue eyes.

Humans from Earth and from the ringworld weren’t precisely identical—but close enough for government purposes—certainly similar enough to be cross-fertile.

Rohann lived in a small red brick African village that was without electricity, except for a couple of compounds with generators, that belonged to a couple of the wealthier clans.

He was a Gun Maker.

****************** ************ **********

Down Ward had written a slim book titled “The Principles of Governance.”

In the book he’d said that the bedrock of every just government was the right of every free man to bear Arms. Without that freedom, all else was void and meaningless.

He’d also stated, with his typical absolutism, that the day that a state proposed any restriction on personal Weapons, that it was time to scrap that state and start over.

In the modern world, Firearms were tightly regulated in the large cities and townsteads throughout The Second Confederation.

Scholars and antiquarians argued that Down Ward was a shadowy figure from the founding of Second City, shrouded in legend and myth. Perhaps he’d never existed at all.

The gentle collared clergy, supported by generous stipends from the state, claimed to have irrefutable proof—based on semantics and linguistic analysis—that the King James Bible that Down Ward was said to have set so much store by, was a complete confabulation.

Mathematicians and physicists had weighty arguments that proved that the whole idea of planets, much less alternate universes was sheer nonsense.

One thing all the cityites agreed upon was that Down Ward’s archaic notions were completely unworkable and totally irrelevant to modern society.

Things were different in the sticks and hinterlands like the small village where Rohann lived.

Men openly carried Pistols and Revolvers on their belts in the sticks—even in the small towns. They often wore more than one Handgun as well as Bowie Knives, Tomahawken and even an occasional Sword.

There were frequent independent churches that still preached from the Bible, where preachers shouted and sometimes stomped, jumped or pounded their podium for emphasis, where exuberant manifestations were regular events.

And the people in the rural areas looked upon the cities as modern day Sodoms ruled by power hungry committees of morons and peopled by eunuchs.

Down Ward—legendary or not—had gone to some effort to insure that Gun Making became a cottage industry throughout his city-state, nation and eventually empire—and as far as he could spread his influence—even beyond his boundaries.

It was insurance against the possibility of an Anti-Gun state arising some day in the future.

Rohann had inherited this tradition from his fathers.


*************** ************** *******


Rohann’s father had been a farrier. His mother’s people were farmers, though a great grandfather, who’d died a decade before Rohann was born, had been a watchmaker.

But he’d been drawn to the Gun Maker’s art from his early childhood.

Although there were less than five thousand people in the little red brick village, there were two Gun Makers.

The O’Tooles had a small factory where over two-dozen men worked at steam-powered Lathes driven by overhead power belts.

They batch processed and turned out Smith and Wesson style double action Revolvers, Colt style single actions, 1911A1s, Mac 10s, double barreled Rifles and Shotguns, pump Shotguns and bolt action Rifles.

The O’Tooles turned out surprisingly many Firearms from their small factory and they were all first rate. No Gun lover could say that the O’Tooles produced anything but first-rate Weapons.

But Rohann was called to another field of endeavor.

He had apprenticed to an old Gun Maker named “Rab”.

Rab worked alone. He made his Guns one at a time, or at most, a few at a time. He engraved his Guns and sometime inset precious metals or gems. He made grips and stocks from a variety of exotic materials.

Rohann’s first task had been to build his own foot-powered Lathe.

He’d labored long and hard cutting an Acme screw from a piece of bar stock with hand tools.

His first successful attempt at an Acme screw was still a bit rough. He was discouraged because he couldn’t even start learning to build Guns until he’d finished his Lathe.

Rab had smiled at his effort and sent him to buy an assortment of screws and other fittings from the O’Tooles.

“I wanted to test your determination. You will become much more skillful with hand tools over time and if you ever need to make a Lathe without even a single Acme screw to start with, you’ll know how,” He’d told Rohann.

Rab had declared that Rohann was a Master Gun Maker before Rohann’s eighteenth birthday. Rohann was twenty years old and he’d been running the small shop on his own for over a year, since Rab had died.

************** ************** ***********


“This should be a cake walk,” Ernie said to his “Buddy” Micah.

“How so?” Micah asked. “The villagers outnumber us almost five-to-one.”

They were both clad in black from head to foot with only a small oval around their eyes exposed.

“They don’t have Assault Rifles like these,” Ernie brandished AKR 91. “They don’t have armor, artillery support or grenades. They’re not expecting attack and they’re not organized. I’m going to enjoy this.”

Micah gave his partner a quizzical glance.

Either Ernie was nervous and trying to sound confident…

Or perhaps he was a sadistic chucklehead.

Then again, the conditions weren’t mutually exclusive.

“What is that fellow doing,” Ernie asked while passing Micah his binoculars.

Micah saw one of the villagers wearing new denim jeans and a colorful flowing silk shirt perform a ceremony as he dipped Pistols one at a time into a wooden trough that was full of water.

“He’s baptizing his Guns,” Micah said.

“What is that? Some kind of heathen mumbo-jumbo?”

“No actually, it’s Christian based. Down Ward said that plastic Guns are evil, because a plastic Gun has no soul.

“Some of his more literal readers concluded that if their Guns had souls that they ought to be christened.

“Most of the practitioners believe that it is simply a ritual, but one that contributes to Right-Thinking towards their Weapons.”

“Stupid hayseeds! O please hurry up and give the signal to waste these hicks,” Ernie prayed to no one or no thing in particular.

************* ************* *********

Rohann finished baptizing his latest batch of custom Revolvers and sat down to a late—for him—evening repast.

The sun was always straight overhead and since few in the village bothered with timepieces, distinctions like, “Late or Early” and “Morning or Night” were rather arbitrary.

Rohann found that he felt better and produced more Guns if he ate and slept on a regular schedule for the most part.

He was getting ready to take off his good clothes prior to lying down when they soldiers started shelling the village with mortars to soften it up for the invasion.



.....RVM45

[rvm45]

Chapter Four




Grainer’s suit jacket was a distant memory. He’d cannibalized the knitted turtleneck for a number of purposes. His “T” shirt clung to him in tatters. He’d cut his pants off at mid-calf simply because nothing had remained below that point but raveling.

Fortunately, his boots and his Gun leather were still serviceable.

He and Rubenstein carried well-made recurve bows. Grainer had made several bows and his skill had increased markedly with each effort.

Grainer carried over a dozen arrows in a quiver made of some sort of antelope skin that was striped like a zebra.

Rubenstein carried ten arrows in a quiver that he’d perversely chosen to make from hyena hide.

Rubenstein didn’t mind running around in a loincloth with his bare chest and thighs shinning where God and anyone else who cared to look could get a clear view of them, but Grainer felt undressed unless his thighs and torso were decently sheathed.

The pair stood contemplating what was obviously a work of man—or some other sentient species—right in the heart of the primeval forest.

There was a circular stone arch. Each stone would have weighed tons and the stones were brilliantly white and polished. But apart from size, the structure resembled one of the ornamental round arched entranceways to a brick walled garden.

There was a cluster of hieroglyphics over the threshold.

“I can’t quite make out what the glyphs say,” Grainer said.

Rubenstein laughed.

“Like you can read hieroglyphics!” Rubenstein scoffed.

“I can,” Grainer said without offense. “When I were but a wee lad, my aunt bought me a coloring book that gave the basic phonetic system—you know—write English words in code using Egyptian symbols.

“I stuck with it over the years. Egyptian Hieroglyphics are easier to master than Kanji or Hindi script…

“But these aren’t standard.”

Something struck the smooth stone close to Grainer’s head. There was an immediate sound of ricochet and an instant later, the boom of a distant and very high-powered Rifle.

“Pond and Honour!” Grainer expostulated.

Rifle bullets from multiple closer and less powerful weapons fell all around them.

Three or four-dozen men in raggedy uniforms screamed challenges and battle cries and rushed to close with the two friends.

“Brigands,” Rubenstein said.

“Do it to it,” Grainer said.

Then the gateway started throwing arcs of static electricity every which way.

The center of the round opening turned opaque and milky white and an instant later it turned blacker than any natural black.

Rubenstein unleashed a torrent of arrows and managed to hit a client in the torso with each shot—though the immediate put-down power of the arrows was somewhat lacking.

He slung his bow over his quiver as he fired his last arrow and turned each of his fingers to fearsome seven inch long; razor edged sickles and started shouting some tribal death song that he’d picked up somewhere.

Then Grainer thought that he’d deciphered part of the portal’s arcane and uncouth hieroglyphics.

Grainer knew there would be no reaching Rubenstein while the man was in a berserker. Rubenstein was still somewhat mental—especially when he fought.

On the other hand, Grainer wasn’t about to desert a friend.

Grainer hit Rubenstein low and from behind. He lifted him over his shoulder and took a half a dozen quick back steps into the gaping portal.

He’d never before been called upon to lift his friend.

He’d supposed that Rubenstein’s silver arms and legs were heavier than an equal volume of molten lead.

Lifting a three hundred pound Rubenstein when he’d thought to lift a five or six hundred pound Rubenstein had seriously thrown Grainer off balance.

“Where the Hell are we?” Rubenstein screamed.

“Yes, we’re The Hellarwees!” Grainer enthusiastically agreed.

“I meant, where are we going?” Rubenstein explained a few moments later, after he was calmer.

“Don’t know,” Grainer’s disembodied voice responded.

“We’re either going ‘downward’ or we’re going to meet Down Ward.

“Are you sure he’s sane?” Grainer added.

“Rubenstein is not sure that you’re sane,” Rubenstein grumped. “Pick Rubenstein up and cast him into an untried portal…”

He was upset enough to have momentarily resumed speaking of himself in the third person.


***************** ************ *******


So almost two thousand years had passed.

God alone knew what that would do to the availability of ammunition.

I had the Healers round up three or four tons of ammunition and Guns. Most of it was already packaged in waterproof cache tubes.

Everyone on what we call “The Healer’s World” weren’t Healers of course.

Ague had six Acolytes who’d chosen to accompany him, but there were also four times that many natives who’d decided to join us—along with a few Egyptians and Society members that felt they had a stake.

And there was Khoral, Jaze and Thomas…

And a small herd of mammoths, believe it or not.

If man or a beast decides to throw his life away fighting hopeless odds, then that is his geas.

That is his destiny.

I would never deny anyone their destiny.


************** ************* ****************


I tried to transport us back to the same general area we had come from.

My Methuselah and Khoral’s would be close and we’d be in striking distance of Second City.

Yeah, tell me about it.

We came down in the center of some ancient ruins in the middle of the jungle.

I had no idea if Second City lay to the north, south, east or west.

There weren’t even legends of an ancient city like this one.

The ruins sprawled over a couple of square miles or more. Since many of the buildings were still usable, we decided that we might as well set up headquarters in one of the deserted buildings and start sending out scouts in the four directions.

Several Society Acolytes set about making some very detailed measurements that might at least give us some sort of idea what part of the rim that we were on.

The rim is over three times the Earth’s width and somewhat larger in circumference than the Earth’s orbit.

It is quite possible to be so far away from a given point on the rim, that you can’t walk there in a single human lifetime, or several human lifetimes for that matter.

So far as that goes, some points are too widely separated to fly from one to the other in a super-sonic jet in one lifetime—even if you never stopped to refuel.

This place is big.

*************** ************** *************


Another time, Rohann might have decided to ignore the mortar fire.

He would have picked up his Rifle and charged the surrounding jungle knowing that he’d die well before he got halfway there.

Today he felt that getting killed early in the engagement was not his geas.

He fell to the floor and pulled his mattress on top of himself.

The mortar fire was highly unlikely to go on forever. Sooner or later, whoever was shelling the village would call a halt.

Then they would either invade the village to complete their reign of terror or they would fade into the jungle, satisfied that they had already achieved their purpose.

Either way, Rohann would have an opportunity to retaliate.


********** ************** *************

Micah’s platoon stormed the village. He and Ernie took turns guarding the other from sneak attack and laying down suppressive fire for each other as they leap-frogged through the ruins of the village.

The troopers followed the old time traditional house-clearing etiquette rigidly: Throw at least one fragmentation grenade into every room or even semi-alcove before entering.

When in doubt, throw several grenades.

When the squad ran short of grenades, a quick call on the radio brought more promptly.

At that point in time, grenades were considerably less expensive than troopers.


************ *********** ***************


Late in the cleaning up stage, Ernie and Micah became momentarily separated from their squad and then from each other.

Ernie emerged from a partial building dragging a teenaged woman.

The orders had been emphatic. No prisoners were to be taken.

The woman was half-naked. Though her skin was ebon her hair was very straight and very red. The way Ernie yanked her this way and that by her hair, it was undoubtedly her own.

Ernie forced her to her knees and held a grenade to her head to try to coerce her into performing a sex act.

“Dumb-ass!” Micah shouted. “What if she refuses? You gonna blow your asstifidity away just to blow her brains out?”

He was furious. This was damned unprofessional and Ernie’s lack of attention to detail could get them killed—or worse yet, court marshaled.

Five children ran out of the same building that Ernie had dragged the Woman from.

The largest was only about four and a half feet tall.

“Let my sister go!” He shouted as he charged Ernie with a foot-long butcher knife.

Ernie turned with his barn door still open and his pony’s head still peering out, and dropped the boy with a vicious butt-stroke to the temple. He finished the recumbent child off with a dramatic butt-smash to the head and then he turned to bring his Rifle to bear on the four other children.

“To a short life—and a merry one,” Micah thought as he blew Ernie’s brains out.

He noted with the odd clarity of adrenaline rush, that Ernie had never pulled the pin on his grenade.

He quickly relieved Ernie of his Rifle, bayonet and any loaded magazines that he still possessed. He scooped up the grenade for good measure.

“Can you use this?” Micah asked the girl, while holding up Ernie’s Rifle.

The girl was already pilfering Ernie’s sidearm.

She looked at him with her head all-askew.

“Well I reckon,” She said.

“I’ll try to get y’all to the woods, but the odds are against us,” Micah said.

One of the children had picked up the butcher knife. One of the other children had vanished momentarily into the house. He emerged with a tiny child-sized Rifle and a rolled blanket. He pressed a paring knife into the smallest girl’s hand.

“Hang onto that. Remember what Papa said about gutting someone who tries to molest you,” he said.

They hadn’t taken a dozen paces when the rest of Micah’s platoon came running up while firing.

A single trooper had witnessed Micah’s mutiny and had gone running to summon the rest.



************** ************** ***********


Rohann had assumed a good sniper’s post and had just witnessed the whole confused realignment of fealty.

He remembered his father quoting the “Hagakure”.

“Start on one end of the foemen and start cutting them down. Don’t stop until they cut you down in turn.”

He calmly eliminated eight of Micah’s former platoon mates before anyone noticed that there was another player who had dealt himself into the game.

Micah lobbed his grenade to good effect.

Meanwhile the red-haired woman and the child with the .22 Rifle mowed down the foemen with almost supernatural accuracy. They both stayed on semi-auto and they both shot like practiced snipers.

With the remnants of the platoon eliminated, Rohann joined the motley force.

“Alberta,” he acknowledged the woman.

He had never liked Alberta O’Toole, but the destruction of their home went beyond such things. At that point in time, he would have died to protect her and her four cousins.

“Come with me Rohann—you too,” She added to Micah, “If you want to live.”


************** ************* ***************


She led them to a hidden trap door that led to a voluminous tunnel.

The tunnel led to a small room where arms and other supplies were stockpiled.

“The O’Tooles were the best and most prolific Gun Makers in this district,” Alberta said.

“At least the best production Gun Makers,” She amended with a condescending smile at Rohann.

“And unlike Rohann, we’ve been at it for generations. One of the tenants says to cache arms and other supplies against dark days and turbulent times.

“Arm yourselves, we can’t stay here long,” She said.

Rohann filled a pack with .303 ammo, concentrated rations and jerky-jerky.

He picked up a 1911A1 almost as if it was unclean. He stashed multiple magazines and .45 ACP ammunition in his pack.

“I suppose that you’d prefer to carry one of you own Guns,” Alberta sniffed with a superior air.

“Here,” she said while holding out a double shoulder rig with two fat pearl handled revolvers loaded into the twin holsters.

She halted and pulled the rig back just out of Rohann’s reach.

“On the condition that you quit handling that .45 as if it were a fresh cow pie. My grandfather tuned it.”

Rohann nodded his emphatic agreement.

He recognized the Revolvers—two five-shot .45 ACP breaktop Revolvers with three-inch barrels. They were essentially double-action only upsized H&R Autoejectors.

They were elaborately and lovingly engraved and bright nickeled.

He shrugged into the shoulder rig and strapped the 1911A1 on his waist with renewed confidence.

Alberta’s grandfather, Harold O’Toole’s skills with Autopistols were legendary.

“You are only a soldier, so you know very little about Guns,” Alberta said to Micah.

“Carry this for now and we’ll try to teach you to shoot them well later, if we live that long,” She added.

She handed Micah a pack that was heavy with Handguns and ammunition. She also handed him a tactical vest weighted down with loaded magazines for his AKR-91.

“How? These Rifles and ammunition are restricted,” Micah sputtered.

“We’re arms merchants. Can you say ‘Black Market’? Can you say, ‘Pirated’? Can you say, ‘High volume of fire, mass-produced piece of excrement?’” Alberta said with her sarcasm turned all the way up.

“Time to boogie,” Alberta said.



.....RVM45

[rvm45]

Chapter Five





Jim hung by his tail and watched the humans for hours on end.
There were humans in the jungle surrounding the ruins. The local villagers were cannibals—with filed teeth and necklaces of human finger bones.

They were generally inbred, given to multiple festering and disfiguring afflictions and they practiced cruelty as if it was a religious obligation and life’s greatest pleasure all at once.

Woe betide the Tailed Folk who fell into their clutches.

These folk though, wore clothing and had strange weapons and other devices.

Jim knew what boons were. They made good pets when they were pups, but they generally became too surly and violent to keep as adults.

He had never seen anything at all like Khoral. The uncouth creature looked somewhat like a mangani, but with an extra long and thick bull-neck topped with what looked like a giant canine’s head and having a great pushed-in undershot snout for a face.

The monster frequently barked and growled at the men, but they paid scant heed.

Eventually Jim realized that the men spoke to the monster in one tongue and he answered them in an entirely different tongue—one that his vocal apparatus could handle.

As fascinating as all these things were though, Jim was most fascinated by Thomas. Here was one of his own kind inexplicably allied to humans. He spoke their tongue. He carried their weapons. He even wore clothes like the humans.

Eventually the call of Jim’s belly superseded his desire to observe the humans.

Fruits and nuts were reasonably available in the ruins, though trees bearing edibles were relatively sparse there.

A dozen bananas, some over-sized pecans and a couple smallish oranges later, Jim was still hungry. His body craved meat.

He went to one of the small pools. He cut a piece of bamboo with a flint knife. He forced the pole to split about a foot back, and then he split each half into fourths.

He ended up with four slats on the end of his pole. He bound the outside with plant fibers to prevent the splits from progressing any farther and drove a round wedge into the center to force the four slats apart.

Finally, he carved a double barb on the end of each slat.

He had a fish spear or frog gig now. It wasn’t terribly durable, but he could make a replacement as quickly as he’d made that one.

Unfortunately, there were no fish or frogs in the small crystal clear ponds that dotted the city.

There were super-sized mud puppies with bodies as big as a Dachshund’s and tiny little arms and legs.

The mud puppies were ridiculously easy to catch, but they were covered in a foul slime that made them impossible to eat, much less to keep down.

Jim industriously made a small smokeless fire.

His folk forbade the use of fire—presumably because the smoke might draw humans. Jim was living as a loner though and he could do as he pleased.

Though as a loner, he was equally prey to humans and his own kind if he should be discovered.

An hour of gentle roasting caused the slime to dry and slough off the amphibian. Jim carefully peeled the skin—thickened and toughened by the heat—and ate the pure white and tasty meat within.

With his belly quieted by being filled with animal fat and protein, Jim found a few more fruits and nuts to snack on later as he watched the humans.


**************** ************* *************


Sabrina swung casually through the treetops.

On Earth she would have weighed a bit over two hundred pounds. She had the physique of a hard training and hard juicing female bodybuilder—though she was natural, at least so far as steroids…

On the African Ringworld, with its gravity a bit less than seventy percent of Earth’s, she weighed a bit less than one-forty.

But there was more to it than that.

Something in the structure of the ring world itself allowed her to “fly” when she tapped into it.

Her apparent weight and inertia varied from moment to moment. Sometimes she had the apparent mass of one of the larger fifty-pound monkeys—never more than that—usually less.

Sometimes she could leap and glide as if she weighed no more than a flying squirrel.

As she flitted from branch to branch, a huge python snatched her on the fly.

The snake was far larger than anything that could exist on Earth. Even with the ringworld’s light gravity and very thick and rich atmosphere, the snake’s size was astounding.

Indeed, Sabrina would be little more than a snack for the giant snake.

The thing was, Sabrina had no desire to nourish the snake at all.

She managed to draw her sawed-off Roadwarrior style double barrel 12 Gauge and pushed the muzzles tight against the base of the serpent’s skull. She fired both barrels with muzzle contact.

Shooting anything with the muzzle firmly against the skin greatly magnifies the tissue damage as the high-pressure gasses follow hard on the heels of the bullet and rip their own swath of destruction.

A .38 Special or 9mm shot that way might rival a 12 Gauge’s effect.

With the 12 Gauge, there was no common caliber to compare it to.

The bottom line was that Sabrina severed the python’s spine and paralyzed it from the neck down.

That really wasn’t a final solution to her situation though, since the snake’s giant jaws continued to crush her.

Her Shotgun flew from her hands and went clattering down the rocky cliff below.

She hissed a few unladylike words at the loss of her Shotgun.

The snake slowly unwound from his perch with no muscular control to keep it suspended.

Only as the snake slid off his perch completely did Sabrina realize that she was on the side of a huge drop-off.

Snake and ape-woman fell into the cleft together.

Sabrina’s ability to “fly” protected her from hurting herself regardless of what height she dropped or fell from.

Her ability would have availed her naught if she’d crashed into a brick wall at sixty miles per hour.

The big snake would have tremendous momentum when he hit the ground. If Sabrina couldn’t get loose before they hit the ground together, she was afraid that the snake’s momentum would squash her flatter than a grape.


*********** *************** **********


“Are there any psychoactive substances in the jungle?” Grainer asked Rubenstein.

“Do you need a vacation from reality?” Rubenstein spat.

Rubenstein was still in a foul mood over having been carried into a strange vortex.

“No. It is like: I think I’m already tripping,” Grainer said.

Rubenstein, who’d been trying to sleep, rolled over to see what Grainer was raving about.

There was Mond from the old days, riding his semi-sized Methuselah. He had his habitual double barrel 10 Gauge slung across his back and he’d started carrying two big Revolvers on his belt.

Rubenstein could accept running into Mond again. Nothing was terribly improbable about that.

Behind Mond though, was wave after wave of the rare Methuselahs. Many of the Methuselahs bore a great ape—one of the mangani—on its back.

Females and young brought up the rear riding regular jungle elephants.

“Rubenstein,” Mond greeted him with no outright hostility, even if there was no warmth.

“Mond. This is my friend and partner ‘Grainer’. He’s not a gangster or a storm–trooper. He’s newly come to this world and doesn’t deserve to be judged by his association with me,” Rubenstein said.

“You have changed. I would have judged your friend on his own merits even without your request.

“Your concern does you credit though. It makes me more at peace with the course my geas sets me on.”

Mond gestured and a very large example of a Methuselah was brought close to Grainer.

The beast’s huge head was covered randomly with many eyes of every size and description…

A disconcerting number of the supernumerary eyes focused very strongly on Grainer.

“My companion tells me that you enjoy altering your perceptions by chemical means.

“You are in luck,” Mond chuckled.

A few moments later, Grainer had been persuaded to mount the giant beast. He sat with a big willow basket full of rather large and very fragrant purple plums.


******************* ************ *********


“Your companion will take you into the jungle. The plums will help re-wire your cortical neurons so that you can communicate with him, and the jungle and your geas,” Mond said.

“How long will that take?” Grainer asked.

“A month? Six weeks? If it takes a year, or a decade or a century—We will be here awaiting your return.

“Things proceed at their own pace here. God never falls behind with his projects,” Mond answered.

“Rubenstein?”

“His transformation will be more difficult and fraught with risk. He’s very old—centuries. He has been closely allied with evil in his past. His sanity hangs by a thread and there is very little of him that is still human…

“Still, I’m led to attempt a healing. He may not survive though,” Mond answered.

“He is my friend. Abuse him and you will answer to me,” Grainer said.

“What caliber are those Revolvers?” Mond threw in as a non sequitur.

“.44 Magnum. Why?”

“You won’t find much .44 Magnum ammo on this world. That’s okay though—cause we have plenty of hot-loaded .44 Specials. I’ll loan you a couple hundred rounds.”


************** *********** ******************


There was no night on the African Ringworld. It was always high noon. The only relief from the continual tropical sun was the occasional rainstorm or hurricane.

Consequently, many native ringworlders were easier to intimidate with darkness.

Mond was very old and he was very brave. He’d been to dark places before.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t a foolish to use darkness as one weapon against him.

Mond dreamed. Even as he dreamed, he knew that he was in a dream. Furthermore he knew that this dream was going to turn evil soon, but he was powerless to wake.

Mond found himself on a ringworld much like his own. Here the sun never shone though and darkness was eternal.

“In the real world, such a place would be frozen solid,” Mond rationalized.

“Not necessarily,” a sinister Voice argued. “There is a shield that blocks most of the heat from your sun, lest it eventually fry your world.

“The shield also absorbs much of the ultraviolet and some cosmic rays as well.

“Some of it is rebroadcast as more red and blue light—the frequencies that fuel photosynthesis.

“Much of the energy is stored though. It could be tapped under the right circumstances,” The Voice argued with Mond.

“What could thrive on such a world?” Mond scoffed.

“You’d be surprised,” The Voice said.

Mond’s senses expanded to include infrared and electromagnetic fields.

For as far as the eye could see, there were very slow growing fungi and mushrooms of various descriptions.

Here and there were great gelid and leprous-looking slugs as fat as Mond’s thigh very slowly grazing their way through the fetid browse.

Great creatures from mankind’s deepest nightmares stalked some of the slugs.

“Cut down the available energy and things proceed at an eminently controllable pace,” The Voice said.

Mond wanted to shrink from all contact with the filthy unclean world, but then he realized that he had no body and was only a disembodied awareness…

And only his mind would be contaminated.

“This is the future of your world—despite your best efforts to prevent it,” The Voice said. “The near future.”

“Give me Rubenstein! He is mine!” The Voice shrieked.

“He isn’t mine to give,” Mond answered disgustedly.


“And I give you nothing—nothing—not even fear.

“The sleep confused me momentarily shade, but there is an attack you cannot counter. I bid you begone in the name of Jesus!”

Mond woke momentarily. His contempt for the Voice was so manifest that he rolled over and went right back to sleep.

But a restful sleep was not Mond’s destiny that day.

“That was clever, but it won’t work with me,” The Virgin Queen said. “I am a product of science not the occult.”

Mond pursed his lips in contempt.

The Virgin Queen walked into Mond’s field of view.

She was as white and shiny as a statue made of the purest polished limestone. Her every feature was perfect in a cold and icy kind of way.

“I will defeat that Voice. I will defeat Down Ward, Sabrina, Belinda Cutter, The Maestro, Rubenstein and you Mond.

“The Unborn worship me as a god. The tiny remnant of Mankind and Tawn and any other sentient creatures that I deign spare will worship me too.

“I will burn and gouge every eye that your Methuselahs grow and harness them to pump sewage.

“Now I adjure you to speak only the truth to me.

“Admit it, you will feel a certain satisfaction losing to me,” the goddess said to him.

“You are a fool,” Mond said. “Man is a fallen being. God forgives, but deep inside each man, he hates himself for his fallen state.

“But what God has blessed is clean indeed. I have lived millennia. I have had sufficient time to come to terms with guilt for things long since mended.

“Guilt won’t work with me.

“I am guiltless.

“It won’t work with Down Ward either. He may not feel guiltless, but in his rages he is far more powerful than you.

“Besides, you call yourself ‘The Virgin Queen’ but I know your one true name and it will give me power over you when I voice it,” Mond said.

“You couldn’t possibly know that name and if you did, you wouldn’t dare voice it,” The Virgin Queen raged.

“Your one true name is ‘Bitch’ and I bid you begone Bitch!”


************ ***************** *************

Mond came awake with his large Bowie in his hand.

One of the apes was shaking him and telling him that the two former humans had returned as full-fledged ape-men.

“How long did I sleep?” Mond started.

There was no use confusing the mangani with questions of time. They had very little sense of time.

He had slept through the entire transformation process.

Somehow his psychic battles with the Voice and The Virgin Queen had kept them distracted while Grainer and Rubenstein were vulnerable.

As Mond had once read in a book from Earth that Down Ward had gifted him long ago:

“When the going gets Weird, The Weird turn Pro.”


.....RVM45