Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (59 page)

“Where?” Geoffrey asked.

Tom stepped to the window beside the navigator. He scanned the sky, locating where the light had been and checking the area where he expected it to be. The blinking light had vanished. “No sign of it,” he said.

Geoffrey shrugged. “Must have been your imagination.”

Susan lay in bed, her thoughts swirling cheerfully, drunkenly. It had been such a confusing evening. She kept thinking about Mary Maxwell. She was just as Max had described her.

As Susan drifted to sleep, she thought about Max’s pseudonyms. It made sense that they would show up. Max had named them, Max had believed in them. So here they were. Just as naming the Flaming Rum Monkey had caused it to come into being.

It made sense. Not that hard-edged logical sense that Harry had always favored, but a fuzzy, intuitive sort of sense. The sort of thing that Harry would say made no sense at all. It made sense to her, and that was enough.

She fell asleep, soothed by Rum Monkeys, lulled by the gentle rocking of the ship. She dreamed that she stood on the recreation deck, surrounded by wolves.

The animals were all around her, but they weren’t paying any attention to her. They were exploring the area, sniffing the stacked deck chairs. One of them found a towel and picked it up; another grabbed the free end, beginning a tug of war that involved several animals.

A big black male pawed at one of the ropes that held a net over the swimming pool. When she stepped toward him, he looked at her expectantly, wagging his tail.

“You want to go swimming?” she asked the wolf. She always talked to dogs. The wolf kept wagging his tail.

She circled the pool, untying ropes. At the last rope, she hauled the net out of the pool and piled it on the deck. The first wolf was already in the water. Another joined him as she watched.

She sat on the deck by the pool, dangling her legs in the water and looking up at the stars. The UFO was there, a blinking golden light. She wondered whether there was a pattern to its blinking. Was it trying to tell herself something?

In her dream, she heard a sound—someone opening the door that led out onto the recreation deck. The wolves had already found the stairs at one end of the pool and gotten out. As she watched, they blended into the shadows. She wondered if she should go with them.

Pat opened the door to the stateroom quietly—but even so, she disturbed Susan. Susan did not wake, but she turned over in her sleep, leaving the dream behind. The wolves fled into the shadows. The recreation deck was empty.

Things are a little strange aboard the
Odyssey.
And the strangeness seems to center on our friend Max Merriwell, the man with too many names.

Earlier tonight, Frank Robinson, the bartender at Aphrodite’s Alehouse, made the world’s first Flaming Rum Monkey—a lovely, tasty, and dangerous drink. Frank invented this drink because a woman named Mary—the same Mary that Susan met in Hamilton—requested one. Mary told Susan this was a drink that didn’t exist. Mary had come up with the name and had decided to look for a bartender who could make one.

All well and good.

Then Max ambled into Aphrodite’s and asked what that flaming drink was. He seemed startled and pleased to learn that it was a Flaming Rum Monkey. “That’s Mary Maxwell’s favorite drink,” he said.

Strange. A woman named Mary asks for a drink that Max invented for a pseudonym named Mary. A product of the imagination takes on reality. The only question is: whose imagination was it? Max’s or Mary’s?

Then there is the matter of the Clampers and the elephant. Susan mentioned that
Wild Angel
describes a jailbreak involving a group of Clampers and an elephant. Tonight, the Clampers on board the
Odyssey
were celebrating some event from the Gold Rush involving a jail break with an elephant.

They weren’t at all clear on the details. I asked three of them and got three different versions of the story—all including an elephant, a jail, an orphan, and a lot of drinking, but differing in other respects.

Max told us that he made up the story about the elephant and the Clampers. And when he found out that the Clampers told a similar story as historical fact, he smiled and had another Flaming Rum Monkey.

Susan disappeared with her friend Mary; Tom went off in search of Susan; Ian and I stayed in the bar with Max, drinking Rum Monkeys and talking about coincidences and dreams. After Max went to bed, Ian and I stayed up, drinking Rum Monkeys and talking about the intriguing Mr. Merriwell.

As I jokingly told Ian earlier, Max lives in a vortex of potentialities. He spins around and flings out possible realities, inhabited by Mary Maxwell or Weldon Merrimax, populated by wolves and flying saucers. From what he told Ian, he’s been living alone in a Greenwich Village apartment for the past couple of decades. Plenty of time to generate possibilities.

And now these possibilities are manifesting themselves. Why?

After a few Rum Monkeys, Ian was claiming that all the strange events could be blamed on the Bermuda Triangle. I had had a few Rum Monkeys too. Under the influence, I proposed a more scientific explanation: Max is a man who is in touch with many potentialities. He ordinarily exists in a stable state, but something has destabilized the system.

I wonder if that destabilization has something to do with my friend Susan. I have always thought that Susan had more than her share of unrealized potentialities.

All properties of quantum entities or systems are emergent properties—things that are about to happen. That’s Susan in a nutshell. She’s loaded with emergent properties.

One other thing: when two quantum systems meet, their potentialities overlap to make a new, combined system that has different properties than either of the original systems. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Could it be that the quantum aspects of Max’s life have met the quantum potentials of Susan’s and stirred up something entirely new? Could it be that I’ve had too many Rum Monkeys? Doesn’t matter. It’s bedtime. Here, for future reference, is the recipe for a Flaming Rum Monkey, courtesy of Frank Robinson, Mary Maxwell, and yours truly.

“I thought I was safe,” Ferris said. “I didn’t realize …”

“You find monsters where you least expect them,” Gyro said. “That’s just the way it works.”

—from
The Twisted Band

by Max Merriwell

Tom woke up sneezing the next morning. He skipped his morning rounds and headed straight for his office. When he arrived, he was sniffling and wondering whether he could go back to bed. No such luck. He already had a dozen messages from the purser’s office. Passengers with cabins on the recreation deck had been complaining of strange sounds in the night. “Drunks outside my window howling like a pack of wolves,” one said. “Some idiots howling,” said another.

Wolves, Tom thought, remembering Susan’s drunken ramblings of the night before. A pack of Clampers, most likely. Tom checked the security log. The guard patrolling the recreation deck had found the net off the main pool, something that happened every now and again when some drunken passengers decided to go for a midnight swim. The guard had put the net back in place, checked the deck for any passengers, and found no one.

Tom went to the recreation deck. The sky was overcast; the sun was a hazy patch of light beyond the gray. It was unlikely that the passengers would be rushing to the pool, but Ernesto, one of the deck stewards, had just finished putting out all the deck chairs. When Tom hailed him, he was placing a fluffy white towel on each deck chair, preparing for an eager throng of passengers. Ordinarily, Ernesto was a cheerful fellow, but that morning he was not smiling.

“Good morning, Ernesto,” Tom greeted him.

“Not a good morning,” Ernesto said, shaking his head. “Not good at all.”

“What's the trouble?” Tom said, expecting to hear that passengers had been partying on the recreation deck the night before and had left a mess. It happened—drunken passengers, broken bottles, dirty glasses.

“Animals!” Ernesto said, scowling. “I don’t know what they were doing last night.”

Tom nodded sympathetically. “They left a mess, did they?”

More than a mess, apparently. It took a while for Ernesto to describe all the things that had been done. The pool was full of hair Ernesto showed him the pool filter. It was clogged with short white, gray, and black hairs. Ernesto showed him a towel that had been torn in several places.

Ernesto told him that someone had peed on the deck. “Not just in one place,” he said in an outraged tone. “But there and there and there.” He waved his hands to indicate several spots around the pool. The deck was wet where Ernesto had hosed it off. “There is a restroom just inside the door over there,” Ernesto said, waving his hand. “Just a few feet away. And that is not the worst of it.” Ernesto beckoned Tom to a nearby trash bag, opened the top, and gestured for Tom to look inside. In the white trash bag was a pile of what was unmistakably shit. Dog shit, by the look of it, from a very large dog. “Who would do such a thing?” Ernesto asked. “Animals!”

Tom had no answers for Ernesto. He told the irate deck steward that he would arrange for extra security staff on the recreation deck. He called the purser’s office and told them the same thing.

Drunks, he figured. A drunken party that broke up just before the security guard came through. A drunken party of older men who were shedding their gray and white hair. A drunken party of men who liked to tear up towels and had no compunction about where they peed.

Of course, that didn’t explain the dog shit. Tom shook his head and blew his nose. The head cold was making him feel slow and stupid. There had to be a reasonable explanation. Once or twice, a crew member had smuggled a pet on board: a kitten once, a toy poodle another time. But the turd in the trash bag hadn’t come from a toy poodle. That had come from a sizable animal, too big to be easily smuggled aboard.

Sure, it looked like a pack of wolves had been swimming in the pool and marking their territory on the deck, but that made no sense at all. There had to be an explanation, but he couldn’t come up with it just now.

That morning, he met with security staff and told them about the problems on the recreation deck. He told them about the dog shit by the pool and advised them to keep an eye out for dogs. He in creased the patrols on the recreation deck.

Not much else he could do.

Susan’s eyes felt gritty. She had woken that morning with a dull pain in her head, the aftermath of too many Flaming Rum Monkeys. Ibuprofen had reduced the headache to a distant sort of throbbing—still there, but far far away.

She didn’t feel quite herself. The rumble of the ship’s engines was a steady trembling in her bones; it set her nerves on edge. She felt the movement of the ship as it rose and fell on every swell, a subtle shifting that left her disoriented and uneasy. She wasn’t hungry—her stomach was unsettled.

She and Pat had skipped breakfast, stopping by Apollo’s Court just long enough to pick up some coffee. They hurried to the library for Max’s workshop and walked in a few minutes late. Max was already lecturing.

“Fiction is about people. As a writer, you use words to create people that live in your reader’s mind. When people read your story, they should believe in the characters you created. They should feel that they know these people.”

“How do you create people that the reader can believe in? You describe these people; you show how they react to events around them; you show them interacting with other people. These are all ways to make your characters real in the minds of your readers.”

Susan sipped her coffee, wishing she had a firmer grip on her own reality that morning. Her memories of the previous night were somewhat blurry. She vaguely remembered talking with Mary. She remembered talking with Tom about
The Twilight Zone.
The one thing she remembered quite clearly was drinking Rum Monkeys.

She blinked, aware she had lost track of what Max was saying. He was giving them a writing exercise.

“I want you to think back to the last time you witnessed an argument,” Max said. “It doesn’t have to be anything major—just two people disagreeing about something.” He paused, giving people a moment to think.

Susan remembered seeing Mary talking to Weldon in Penelope’s, gesturing angrily. That had been an argument, she thought. “Now think about why the people were arguing,” Max said. Susan frowned. She didn’t really know why Mary and Weldon were arguing. She didn’t know what Mary and Weldon were doing on board. There was so much she didn’t know.

She raised her hand timidly. “I don’t know what the people were arguing about,” she said. “I saw them arguing, but I didn’t overhear what they were saying.”

“That’s perfect!” Max said. “That gives you more room to play with. You can make up the rest.”

Susan nodded, doubtful but willing to try.

“As a writer, you need to think about why people do the things they do,” Max went on. “That understanding is important to creating convincing characters.” He leaned back in his chair, studying the group. “A cop once told me that there are really only three criminal motives: money, sex, and power. I would add a couple of other motives. Love—though if you’re feeling cynical, you can put that down as a subset of sex. Desire for fame—though some would say that’s a subset of power. Curiosity—that’s an important one in science fiction.”