The Red Tape War Part 20

"Lemme go! Ah got to make mah call to Daddy!"

"Hold on, there, you loco galoot! Who you callin' Daddy? Only Ah git to call mah Daddy 'Daddy'!"

Something was terribly wrong, and it took Pierce-Arro a moment to realize what it was. In spite of his admonition to the lovesick computer, the stupid thing had stared at the screen anyway and gotten hypnotized just like Pierce, and when he woke up he was convinced that he was Marshmallow, too! And no amount of physical evidence was going to convince him otherwise, either. Fortunately, Pierce had awakened first, so the original call had gone through, but now this could spoil everything! "Ah dunno how ah got a twin sistah, but yore not foolin' me 'bout who ah am!" Sly yelled shrilly.

"Stop it! Both of you!" Pierce-Arro commanded, and, as they were always to obey his commands, they stopped. "And keep quiet. Now, Marshmallow-"

"Yes?" they both answered in perfect unison.

Pierce-Arro sighed. Everything was always getting so complicated! First three or maybe more Pierces, he'd lost count, and now three Marshmallows, if, of course, the one on the lizard s.h.i.+p was still alive. What to do? What to do? Any order he gave would be obeyed equally by both of them! Think!

"Will the Honeylou Emmyjane Goldberg who sees the other person here as a man go to the powder room and stay there until I call her?"

Instantly Pierce turned and headed for the head, while Sly remained within the room.

"Good. Now, we've got a little reworking to do. Sit down here and just relax and stare at the nice pattern on Screen 3 again . . ."

That was the longest Marshmallow had ever spent in a john and she was getting worried about it when she was called back. Facing that lunatic computer, though, was gonna be a real ordeal, she thought. How dare that creature think it was her!

"Don't you come neah me, y'heah?" she warned him. "Hey! Take it easy! It's me-Millard.

Millard Fill-more Pierce. I'm back together again!"

She frowned. It did sound like him, and seem to be him, but she wasn't so sure. "Wheah'd that nutty computah brain that thought it was me git to?" she asked him.

"Our-captors-worked it out. Got me back from my readout records in the lizard s.h.i.+p and transmitted XB-223 over to theirs."

"But I thought they was gone."

"They was-er, they are. It was all done by subs.p.a.ce radio. Don't ask me how. Anyway, we're back!"

"Oh-Milland!"

"Marshmallow!"

They were about to embrace when suddenly Pierce-Arro said, "A s.h.i.+p of unknown nationality and type just came out of hypers.p.a.ce and is landing near us."

"It's Daddy and the rescue s.h.i.+p!" she squealed with delight.

"Urn, I'm not so sure. I just tried hailing them and all I got back was some odd and unintelligible singing, if you can call it that. I was hoping that one of you might make sense of it."

"Go ahead," Pierce told him.

The speakers crackled, then from them came: "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest! Yo! Ho!

Ho! And a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil have done with the rest! Yo! Ho! Ho! And a bottle of rum!"

"Pahrates!" Marshmallow screamed in horror. "Pyrites?" Pierce-Arro responded. "No, it's a s.h.i.+p, not an asteroid."

"Not pyrites. Pirates," Pierce told him. Then it hit him. "Holy smoke! Pirates? In this day and age? Can you put a visual on the screen?"

The screen popped to life and they stared at the strangest looking s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p they'd ever seen.

All bright green it was, but with bands of fleur-de-lis all over it.

"It looks like a pehfectly goahgeous wallpapah pattahn!" Marshmallow breathed.

"I'm more interested in the skull and crossbones hanging from that mast in the center of the s.h.i.+p," Pierce commented worriedly. "Not to mention that it's the firsts.p.a.ces.h.i.+p I've ever seen with a bowsprit in the shape of a p.o.r.no queen-or in any other shape, for that matter." Suddenly Screen 1 flickered and a fierce, bearded face appeared. "Avast, mateys! Prepare to be boarded! Offer no resistance 'cause I got a hundred fierce pirate swabbies here who'd cut yer throat from ear to ear and love it!"

"A hundred men!" Marshmallow gasped. "Milland! I cain't be taken on no s.h.i.+p with a hundred hohny men! Not dressed like this, anyway!"

Pierce understood. "Yeah, but our clothes didn't come through the electrical charge very well, and the suits are even worse. I don't see what we can do."

"Oh, fie on clothes! I'm talkin' about my haiah and I need mah makeup and all . . ."

"Honey, they're pirates. They won't notice."

"You really don't think so? Oh, Ah'm such a mess! At least a comb . . ."

"Marshmallow!" He sighed. "Hey, you in the s.h.i.+p's computer! You're our captor, we're your prisoners. Can't you do something to protect us?"

"With what?" Pierce-Arro wailed, trying to figure a way to salvage anything out of this.

"Avast!" said the pirate image. "We just want the wench and the pipsqueak pin-striped swabbie with her!"

Pierce-Arro considered that. "And you'll leave me alone if you get them?"

"Aye, sure'n I will. Ye got the word of fightin' Paddy de Fauy Grais on that score!"

"The word of a pirate is no promise at all," Pierce warned.

"Maybe, but it's the only one I've got," the creature responded. "However, there is a slight problem." He turned to the pirate's frequency.

"I've got no objections to your taking them off my hands," Pierce-Arro commented. "In fact, I confess it would be a relief. Unfortunately, they'll be dead when you do."

"Huh? What? Explain yourself, ye electronic wart!" the pirate responded.

"The lizards did a real job on this s.h.i.+p before they left. The moment you open our airlock, all the seals will pop for sure, causing instant death."

"WHAT?" everyone from the pirate to the two inside cried at once.

"I'm afraid so. And if you'd take at least one of those patches off your eyes you'd see for yourself the terrible condition this s.h.i.+p's in."

Pierce shook his head in wonder. "Maybe you'd better let the general out from downstairs," he suggested. "He was one of the lizards, remember, and he knows how they think. Maybe he could figure out something they didn't sabotage."

"Uh, dahlin', I hate to mention this, but you'ah talkin' like you want to be taken by them pahrates," Marshmallow noted.

"What choice have we got? Rot here or get out of here with them? At least Daddy would pay a good ransom, and I have to admit that at this point I'm tempted by piracy myself."

Pierce-Arro saw no reason to keep the general on the wire, as it were, any longer, anyway, so he released him. Soon the figure of genial Frank Poole the android ambled up to them, but it wasn't all that clear that he was going to be any help.

"I'm higher'n a kite," he said with a smile, "and mellower than a kitten.

"What's wrong with him?" Marshmallow asked.

"I think he got too much recharging current beingheld there so long. I'm afraid that now he's turned on," Pierce commented.

"Yeah, that's me," General Pierce responded. "Like, wow, man! Turned on, juiced up, tuned in, and charged to the hilt!" He crackled a little bit when he moved as if to emphasize the point.

"Don't touch him!" Pierce warned. "He's probably got enough energy there to electrocute anybody he touches!"

As if to emphasize the point, the general grabbed the back of a chair and the plastic sizzled and started to melt, stinking up the cabin.

"Well, he's shoah no help, sugah," she commented. "Only thing he's good foah is shakin' a few pahrate hands and fryin"em like bacon and grits!"

"Who's that big ugly dude on the screen?" the general asked innocently.

"An! Who you callin' a big, ugly dude, you poor excuse for a deckhand?" the pirate exclaimed angrily. "If it wasn't for the fact that we don't gets paid unless we delivers the wench whole, I'd come over there and short out a few choice circuits! I got 'alf a mind to throw a tractor beam on ye and take ye all back as a neat package to La Hibernia. Pierce and Marshmallow both turned toward the screen, mouths agape. Finally Pierce asked, "Uh, Captain, why don't you do that? You've got to have a s.p.a.ce drydock there of some kind just to keep your own s.h.i.+p in its excellent condition. There we could be safely removed by using a pressure tunnel and wrapping what's left of my poor s.h.i.+p."

"An, that's not a bad plan, matey! Glad I thought of it!"

"Sorry," Pierce-Arro broke in, "but it won't work. The vibration from entering hypers.p.a.ce would still break us to pieces."

"I wouldn't have expected a decent plot from a pin-striped swabbie!" the pirate growled.

"Great!" Pierce sighed. "Now what do we do?"

"Maybe hunt up some grub," Marshmallow suggested. "Ah'm stahvin'!"

Pierce sighed. "Might as well. It seems we're at a standoff, as always. What a situation! You can't even get captured and hauled away by pirates!" He looked up toward the ceiling. "Hey!

Conqueror! Time to feed the other two prisoners. The first one's got too much, I think."

"They call me Mellow Millard!" the general sang off-key.

"Oh, I suppose we might as well," Pierce-Arro grumped. "I told you, though, that the only thing I can do is the biochemically compatible caloric liquid I distilled from the engine maintenance and lubrication system."

"Anything. My throat's dry, too," Pierce told him.

"Then get your cups and use the washbasin faucet. It's the only one I could reroute without a full mechanical overhaul."

"This be the real pits," the pirate image moaned.

"In a Gadda da vida, honey!" bawled the general.

Pierce took a cup and tried the faucet and a clear liquid that looked just dike water dribbled into it. He waited until it was about half full, then handed it to Marshmallow and did the same with another cup. When done, he shut off the tap, clicked his cup to hers, and said, "Well, I don't know what this is going to taste like, but it's all we've got." He took a drink, and so did she, and suddenly their eyes bulged and they both seemed to be having an attack.

Finally Pierce managed, hoa.r.s.ely, to ask, "What is this stuff?"

"The process involves over four hundred synthetic products," Pierce-Arrow told him, "but the end result ischemically identical to what the data banks here call grain alcohol. About ten percent of it is water, but it is impossible to separate it further."

Pierce stared at him. "That's a hundred and eighty proof!"

"Whoo-eee!" Marshmallow exclaimed. "That there's the smoothest dern country moons.h.i.+ne ah evah did taste!"

"We can't drink this!" he protested. "Not unless it's way diluted, anyway."

"I told you, it's all there is, and I cannot separate the water out any further without destroying the stability of the compound. Within it is all that you require for survival, which is the best I can do. In other words, it's that or nothing. "

"A few moah sips of this heah lightnin' and we'ah gonna be singin' with that general," Marshmallow noted, then drank some more. "Sh.o.r.e beats just sittin' around, though! A few more gulps of this and Ah'm gonna be drunk as a skunk!"

This is the book speaking again. Remember me? We interrupt here to point out that (A) The real Marshmallow, still in lizard-Pierce's body, is also still on the big dreadnought loaded with conquering bureaucrats some-where in s.p.a.ce; (B) the one who thinks she's Marshmallow is really human-Pierce; (C) the one who thinks he's human-Pierce is really Sly, the XB-223 navigational computer; (D) we are not advocating the consumption of grain alcohol, unless, of course, you're stuck in a shaky and partly destroyed s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p with an overcharged lizard-Pierce general in the body of an android overseen by a smashed-together pair of microbial conquerors inhabiting the s.h.i.+p's navigational computer while being under the guns of a pirate s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. Clear?

If you have followed everything up to this point with perfect clarity, please place your summary, using words of no more than two syllables, neatly typed or printed out, in an envelope and send it to the authors, care of Tor Books, because we don't understand it at all.

So, as long as everybody is either mellow (including dead *drunk and uninhibited even if not uninhabited), stalled, or totally confused, let us leave this scene for a moment (we'll be coming back, I promise) and see what's been happening to poor Marshmallow-the real one-on the great lizard dreadnought . . .

"Tell me, General, when did you first begin to believe that you were a female ape?"

"Ah ain't no ape and I ain't no general!" she shouted back at them for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time. "Ah'm Honeylou Emmyjane Goldberg and when mah Daddy heahs 'bout this he's gonna have the biggest dern sale on lizand-skin luggage in the history of the univahse!"

"Fascinating," said the first psychiatrist. "Do you suppose it was formed in childhood and only surfaced under the pressures of a battlefield command?"

"Well, I've been researching the literature for a true example of neo-Freudian transversals with suggestions of Mommism and a totally Jungian counterpoint and the nearest I can come up with is some ancient writings from a controversial and not wholly appreciated minor figure that might explain a few things while still leaving us room for our inevitable thirty-six technical papers and two or three pop self-psychoa.n.a.lysis best-sellers that will make us rich and famous."

"Really? Two or three? Who is the figure? Hubbard?"

"No, Leary."

"Ah, yes, that would explain a lot. But both he andHubbard were true examples of McLuhanesque figures, recall."

"I recall that they all died filthy rich, which is why we both got into psychiatry in the first place, wasn't it?"

"That's the fuhst d.a.m.n' thing I heahrd from either of you so fah that's made any sense at all,"

she grumped.

But by now they'd returned to so much psychobabble, sometimes mixed with economics, that they no longer paid any attention to her at all. It had been this way almost from the start and she was feeling pretty d.a.m.ned depressed and frustrated by this point.

She got up and lumbered back to the ward, where, as far as she could tell, the only sane people on this entire s.h.i.+p stayed.

About the only thing good about her situation, she decided, was that the air didn't stink.

One fellow, who called himself Pokey, had been a particular friend since she'd been stuck here. He wasn't very old and he was quite pleasant; supposedly some kind of computer whiz who could work out almost any technological problem in his head. That was part of his problem. First of all, you weren't supposed to solve problems in the system, not unless you at the same time created ten new ones for others to work on. And he was very good at solving things. They'd let him pretty well alone, since, it seemed, he was the only one on the s.h.i.+p who could repair anything that broke, but one day he'd gone too far. He'd used the s.h.i.+p's main computers to run a problem and discovered a neat, simple table of operations that totally eliminated all need forever for lawyers. The moment the High Command had seen it and realized its truth and simplicity they'd had no choice but to commit him to the psychiatric wards, with occasional furloughs to fix broken things now and again.