No Small Bills Page 13

  For the first few minutes.

  Repeatedly.

  “Ow.”

  “Yes, ow, we got it,” Tall growled. “Trust me, we’re all feeling it.”

  I had my head between my knees and didn’t bother to look up. Actually, I wasn’t sure I could. I think somebody may have removed my spine in there at some point, and replaced it with a spastic porcupine.

  “Why the hell,” I moaned when I was able to form coherent sentences again, “would anyone voluntarily drive this thing? It should be some form of punishment for violating galactic traffic laws—“Oh, you’ve got twenty speeding tickets and four major collisions, if you want any sort of vehicle you’ll have to use the Manic Slingshot Deathbridge.” Okay, mostly coherent. I groaned again.

  “I pushed it to its maximum speed,” Ned managed to whisper between his own groans. “Normally it wouldn’t be that . . . abrupt.”

  “Abrupt?” I’d have glared at him if I could have moved. “I’m pretty sure the left half of my body is still back there somewhere. I only hope it catches up before the right half falls apart or something else wanders in and replaces it.” The idea of having only half a duckhead was even worse than the reality of having a whole one, and I quickly shook that idea off, then wished I hadn’t. Shaking hurt.

  “We have arrived,” Mary reminded us, though her voice was tight with pain too. “That is all that matters. This discomfort will soon pass.” It sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as us, so I didn’t bother to ask for her definition of “soon.” I just hoped it wasn’t being measured in geologic epochs.

  Several more minutes passed that way, with groans and whines and curses interspersed with occasional grousing. But finally I managed to bully my neck muscles into getting back to work. They didn’t have much choice—I was starting to get lightheaded.

  So I lifted my head, slowly and carefully, and looked around.

  Then I looked around again.

  “Say,” I asked no one in particular, “what’s this matrix thingy supposed to look like, anyway?”

  “It’s a grand confluence of universal truths, all coalesced into a single coherent structure,” Ned replied. “Kinda like one of your Earth power plant’s control stations, with levers and buttons and monitors everywhere.”

  “Oh.” I blinked a few times. “So it doesn’t look anything like a small desert island, then?”

  “Not even remotely. Why?”

  “Because I think we made a wrong turn somewhere. Or took the wrong bridge.”

  Ned grunted and let out a string of curses I couldn’t decipher as he hoisted himself into a sitting position and peered about, squinting. Then his curses got louder. There were a few in there I did recognize, and I wished I hadn’t.

  Tall levered himself up as well, and I gave Mary a hand. All four of us stared.

  “Definitely an island,” Tall agreed after a few seconds.

  “Thanks for confirming that,” I snapped. “What gave it away, the sand under our butts or the water all around us?”

  Because it wasn’t just an island, it was the kind of island you see in movies and commercials. Perfect white sand, a few brave palm trees or coconut trees or something—and nothing else.

  Nothing but water. Clear blue water, a few shades deeper than the clear blue sky.

  And all around us. Like, not more than ten feet from us at any point. By craning my neck—and I regretted that immediately—I could see the other side of the island. Hell, if I’d been able to stand up I could have walked to it. Or possibly just fallen over onto it.

  “This,” Mary summed up for all of us, “is not the matrix.”

  “Yeah, I figured that much.” I glared at Ned. “What’d you do, decide we needed a little tropical getaway first?”

  Ned glared right back at me. “Do you see pretty island girls in grass skirts bringing us fruity drinks in coconuts? Do you? No? Then this isn’t my idea of a tropical getaway!” He had the Rubik’s cube pancake out again and was fiddling with it. “I don’t know what happened,” he muttered as he tinkered. “I programmed it to bring us straight to the matrix.”

  “Maybe it moved,” I suggested. “When was the last time you visited it?”

  “One does not simply visit the quantum fluctuation matrix,” Mary scolded. “It is off-limits to all but its caretakers except in times of significant crisis.”

  “Like now, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve never been there?”

  Mary frowned. “No.”

  “Ned?”

  He shook his head, still not looking up from the key. “Never had a reason to go,” he admitted.

  “So we don’t actually know for certain that you had the right address for this thing?”

  “Not for certain, no,” he reluctantly agreed. “But it’s the one they gave me.”

  “Okay. So we should find somebody to ask, somebody who can confirm if they screwed up somehow or if it moved or something.”

  Ned finally looked up. “That could be a problem.”

  Tall sighed. “What’s wrong now?”

  “Look around,” Ned told him.

  He did. So did I. I saw the same stuff I’d seen already: water, sky, and sand. Plus three trees.

  And nothing else.

  It took a second for that to sink in. “Where’s the bridge-cluster-thingy?” I demanded when it did.

  “Yeah. That’s the problem.”

  “Whaddya mean, ‘that’s the problem’? Where’d you park the damn thing?”

  Ned looked really embarrassed. “I, uh, didn’t.”

  “You didn’t what?”

  “I didn’t park it.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” All three of us were glaring at him now. So were the three suns overhead, but they were glaring at all of us equally so that didn’t really count.

  Ned took a deep breath. “I set the Dreymar Suspension Cluster to bring us to the matrix,” he explained slowly. “I disabled a few of the safeties so we could get the maximum speed out of it.” He mumbled something.

  “What was that?”

  “I forgot to reset the inertial dampener to compensate,” he repeated just loud enough for me to make out.

  “Which means what?”

  “We, ah—slid off.”

  “We slid off.”

  “Yes.”

  “Off a hyperspeed bridge-cluster-thingy.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was aimed at the matrix.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where we need to be going.”

  “Yes.”

  I glanced around quickly before focusing my ire on him again. “So this place—we basically fell out of the car while it was hurtling down the superhighway, and this is where we rolled to a stop?”

  “That’s pretty accurate, yeah,” Ned agreed. “Fortunately the Cluster has built-in gravitic displacement chutes, so in case of an accident its passengers are ejected but at sub-relativistic speeds which then reduce further until they’ve normalized with the local velocity.” He saw the utter confusion battling anger in my eyes. “We landed intact, instead of becoming galactic roadkill.”

  “Depends upon your definition of ‘intact,’” I argued, “but yes, at least that’s something. So we fell out and wound up here. And the car kept on going?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “So we’re stuck here. On this little tiny island. On some wacky world with”—I glanced up to confirm it—“three suns. Without a ride. While the universe is under attack.”

  He sifted sand through his fingers and stared at it. “That’s about it, yeah.”

  I collapsed back on the sand. “Nice. Well, at least we can get a tan while we WAIT FOR THE UNIVERSE TO END!” I’d have tried to throttle him but I wasn’t sure I could raise my arms properly yet. Hopefully there’d be time enough for that later.

  “Look on the bright side,” Ned offered weakly. “We’re a lot closer to our destination now.”

>   “Yeah? How close?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” he admitted. “I’d need a better reading on our current location to be sure of that. But definitely closer.”

  “Is it behind those trees?” I managed to jerk my head in their direction.

  “Uh, no.”

  “Is it floating just offshore?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Is it buried in the sand beneath us?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “So being closer DOESN’T EXACTLY HELP US, DOES IT?”

  Ned hung his head.

  “Okay, enough—stop yelling at him.” I was surprised enough by Tall’s interruption that I stopped. At least long enough to glare at him instead.

  “Why should I?” I demanded. “He screwed up! And now we’re stuck here!”

  “Maybe we are,” Tall agreed. “And yeah, he screwed up. Big-time. But we all agreed to take that weird-ass bridge thing. And we all agreed we needed to reach the matrix as soon as possible. Ned was just trying to accomplish that. So he made a mistake. We all make mistakes. Cut him some slack, and let’s focus on what we do next.”

  It was the longest I’d ever heard him talk. The longest any of us had. I’d actually started to think he couldn’t say more than ten words at a time, due to some obscure government regulation somewhere. And I had to admit, what he said make sense. Even if I didn’t want to hear it.

  “Agent Thomas is correct,” Mary said. Figures she’d be quicker to forgive than I was. “Ned did his best, and we have all made errors along this journey. The important thing now is to figure out how to leave this place and continue toward the matrix as soon as possible.”

  “Yeah yeah, all right.” I gave Ned one last glare before relenting. “I guess it’s no worse than making an entire race spend centuries wanting to kill you.”

  “Thanks.” Ned gave me a half-smile. “You’ll have to tell me the rest of that story at some point.”

  “I will,” I promised, heaving myself back up to a sitting position. “Over lots and lots of beer. Provided we survive all this.” I looked around us. “Okay, so we’re on a tiny little island somewhere in the middle of an ocean on a planet with three suns. What do we do now?”

  “Swim?” I tried giving Tall the stink-eye but he played innocent. And given that this may have been the first time on this entire whacked-out trip that he cracked wise like that, I figured he ought to get away with it.

  “Works for me,” I agreed. “Hell, I’m built for it.” I deliberately rubbed the tip of my bill. “No wings, of course, but I’m a damn good swimmer now. The only problem is, you bozos’d never be able to keep up. And where would I be going, anyway?” I surveyed our surroundings. “There’s nothing out there as far as the eye can see. So going for a dip might be refreshing for the first hour or two, but then we’d be floating with no land to come back to, and no closer to getting off this waterworld.”

  “Our first step should be establishing this planet’s coordinates,” Mary suggested. “Once we know those we will have a better idea of our general location, our distance to the matrix, and what steps must be taken to bridge that gap.”

  “Fair enough.” I frowned at the sand below us. “So how do we figure that out? There isn’t anyone here to ask, and it’s not like we’ve got a map.”

  “I may be able to figure out what planet we’re on,” Ned offered. “I’ll need to know everything we can about this place first, though. So examine everything with all your senses and tell me whatever you learn, even if it seems obvious.”

  “Uh, okay.” I crouched down and ran my fingers through the sand. “There’s sand here. It’s really fine, not coarse at all, and almost white.”

  “The sky’s blue, lighter than Earth’s but a comparable hue,” Tall commented. “And we’ve got three suns here, one big and two small. The big one”—he squinted up at it— “looks like a typical red, probably a Class-C like ours. The two smaller ones are paler, almost white—I doubt they’re white dwarfs, though, so just standard dwarf stars.”

  Okay, that was way more impressive than my observations about the sand. Ned nodded, too. “That’ll definitely help narrow it down.” He fiddled with one of his doodads. “There aren’t that many triple-star systems, even in the core. What else?”

  “The water’s a deep blue,” I said quickly. “But clear. No major waves, no whitecaps. A gentle rolling motion. Looks deep, too.”

  “There is no major technology within one hundred miles,” Mary announced. The three of us stared at her, and she smiled. “The air is crisp and clean, with no trace of ionization,” she explained. “Almost every technology involves some form of burning to release energy, and that would produce a particular odor. It is absent here, completely so.”

  “Right, so no heavy tech.” Ned was twisting and tapping his toy. It looked a lot like a man playing the spoons. And sounded suspiciously like “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain When She Comes.” “Mostly water, three suns—yeah, only a few dozen planets like that between that weigh station and the matrix.” None of us wanted to bring up the chance that we had wound up overshooting our target, or veering off in the wrong direction.

  “There’s trees,” I pointed out, gesturing behind us. “I wouldn’t know a palm from a birch if they walked up to me and handed me their astrological charts, but those look tropical to me. They look a lot like ones we’d see on Earth, actually.”

  Tall took two long steps and was next to the nearest tree. “Coconut,” he stated, resting one hand on its trunk. “Definitely.” He squinted up at the top. “And there are even coconuts up there now.”

  “Really?” I grinned. “Great, I’m starving!” Hey, that breakfast was a long time ago! And we’d been through a lot of stress since then.

  Tall wrapped his arms and then his legs around the trunk and shimmied up it, graceful as a snake. When he was high enough he reached out and plucked one of the nice big green coconuts from its stem. He dropped it down onto the sand, repeated that with a second one, and then lowered himself back down after them.

  “Smells like a coconut,” he informed us after a quick sniff of one. The tree’s trunk was rough and even had what looked like overlapping shingles all the way and all the way around. Tall eyed one of those, then took the coconut in his hand and slammed it against the trunk, right on the top ridge of one of those shingles. We all heard a loud crack, and saw that he’d split the coconut partway through on both sides. Then Tall gripped the two sides, one in each hand, and twisted. I heard a louder pop and a tear, and then Tall was handing Mary and I each a half of a coconut.

  “Thanks!” I took my half eagerly and studied it for a second. Inside the green outer shell was the wrinkled brown inner shell I’m more used to, and inside that was a thick slab of milky white coconut meat, and cradled by that maybe three ounces of almost clear coconut milk. It looked just like the ones I’d seen as a kid when my uncle used to sometimes bring back real wild coconuts, and smelled exactly the same, too. Sure, I realized there was a chance it would be some kind of alien fruit that could have nasty effects on me, or even kill me.

  But right now I didn’t care. I tilted the whole thing up to my lips and drank down the coconut milk, then used my fingernails to dig out pieces of coconut meat and toss them down my throat. It wasn’t as sweet as I’m used to from coconut, but it was also extremely fresh and very thirst-quenching and really tasty.

  Tall had already split the second coconut and given half to Ned, and for a minute all you could hear over the gentle waves was slurping and chewing and swallowing.

  “Ah, I feel better!” I said after I’d dug the last of the meat from mine. “Thanks, man.” Tall nodded and continued consuming the last of his. “So, Ned, learn anything from the coconut you just ate?”

  Ned wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. “I did, actually.” He checked his gadget. “Fourteen of the possible planets couldn’t support this kind of plant life. Which leaves twenty-three others.”

&n
bsp; Okay. Time to get serious about this. I walked over to the edge of the water, squatted down, and thrust my bill into it. After a second I swallowed, then straightened up again. “The water tastes funny,” I told him. “Almost sweet, like fluorinated water. Warm, of course. No salt, either.”

  “No salt? Hmmm.” Ned twiddled the technostick a bit more. “Of those twenty-three, eight have fresh-water oceans.”

  “Down to eight? Nice!” I wiped my bill with the back of my hand. So drinking the water had helped. Excellent. And we’d tried the coconut, too. What else was there around here? Water, trees, sky—

  —and sand.

  I eyed the sand dubiously. Who knew where it’d been, how many others had walked across it, and how many had peed on it or let their pets do the same? I shuddered. I had to stop scaring myself all the time! It was ridiculous, not to mention mean. What’d I ever had against me, anyway? Instead, before I could think of more reasons not to do it, I bent down and stuck my bill into the sand, then sucked some into my mouth.

  “Okay, that’s weird,” I commented after a few seconds.

  “What’s weird?” Tall asked. I could tell from his face that he wished he’d thought of eating sand. Well, ha ha!

  “It’s almost . . . sweet,” I told him. I tried a little more, and actually now that I wasn’t so worried and could study the taste better it really was a little sweet. “Less like sand and more like . . . sugar.”

  Tall clearly didn’t believe me, because he scooped up a big handful and nibbled some before offering the rest to Mary and Ned. Both refused, Mary apparently not wanting to eat something we’d just been walking on and Ned preferring to hunt and gather his own food. But Tall nodded once he’s swallowed a little bit.

  “It is sweet!” I wasn’t sure why that blew his mind but clearly it did.

  “Sugar-sand,” Ned said, licking the last of it off his chin. Whoa. “Excellent! Only two planets match all the other details and have sugar-sand.” Then he frowned. “Uh oh.”

  “Uh oh? Why ‘uh oh’?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  He lowered his little toy. “Well, there are only two planets it could be, really. One of them’s way off the elliptical from our projected path—we’d be almost as far away as we were before. The other’s a lot closer—only a star system or two off, actually. But . . .”