FSF, October-November 2008 Read online

  "I hear you was missing from your trailer for a while, Miz Zeringue. You remember anything about that?"

  She frowned. “No, I really don't. I remember my trailer was unlocked one night, and that scared me a little. I thought about going back for the guard, but then I thought, ‘Oh heck, I been so tired, I bet I just forgot to lock it.’ So I went in. And the next thing I remember, I was walking down this blacktop road, feeling kind of, you know, disorientated, and then the National Guard came by. I asked them how I got there, but they didn't seem to understand me."

  The interview continued for another fifteen minutes without turning up anything solid. Except for one thing—last night she'd had a bad dream in which somebody named Evert ("You know, like Chris Evert, only he didn't pronounce it right") had been coming to do something that scared her. But she woke up before he got around to it, whatever it was.

  "What this Evert looked like?” Fournet inquired.

  "I never actually saw him. I just heard this creepy voice say he was coming."

  "Creepy voice, huh?"

  "Sort of cold and dead. You know, like the voice on the phone that says, ‘Your call is very important to us.’”

  Before exiting the hospital, Fournet spoke to the harried-looking psychiatric resident who'd examined Mrs. Zeringue. He confessed that the case puzzled him.

  "I figured she must have had an episode of stress-induced amnesia. Lots of stressed-out people wandering around these days. But she was missing for two weeks, so that explanation washes out. Oh, she's amnesic all right, but the case is totally atypical. Barring a brain injury or tumor that doesn't seem to exist, amnesia shouldn't last that long. I just don't know what happened to her. That business of talking backward—that really got me. Yet her CT scan's normal. In fact, everything's normal, except—"

  "Except what?"

  "Well, besides talking backward, she kept clearing her throat. An ENT checked, and there was a small amount of bruising inside her trachea, about what you'd get from having an endoscopy."

  He explained the term, then hurried off about his business, which seemed to consist of nothing but crises.

  At noon Fournet again joined D. J. for lunch at Ya Momma's. To the hovering waiter, who since yesterday had changed his apron but kept his liver spots, he said, “Shrimp po'boy, large size, dressed, with extra mynez."

  Having made sure that D. J. would get his money's worth when he paid for the lunch, Fournet took out his notebook and reported everything he'd learned about the missing people, the thirteenth trailer, and so forth. At the conclusion he groused, “I might of known you'd hand me something wacko."

  "Ain't nobody better than you, Alphonse, when it comes to wacko cases,” D. J. assured him. “So whatchoo gonna do next?"

  They discussed the question while downing two Turbodogs each. Then the food arrived. While D. J. nibbled his relatively modest oyster loaf, Fournet used Tabasco and ketchup to complete a monster sandwich comprising a halved French loaf, twenty-four large fried shrimp, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and gobs and gobs of extra mayonnaise. Then he devoured it all, down to the last flake of crust.

  His meal would have left an anaconda inert for a month. Fournet, on the contrary, felt ideas beginning to percolate the more he ate. That comes, he told himself, from eating brain food, and he resolved to ask Alma to fry him a half-dozen catfish for dinner. Finally he spoke.

  "You asked me what I was gonna do next."

  "Yeah. So?"

  "Right now, I'm gonna go home and have me a nap. Good food desoives to settle. Then this evening after dinner, I'ma go out and visit trailer parks. One by one them rent-a-cops are gonna walk around with me and count their goddamn trailers, and if they find an extra, I'm gonna walk into it and see what I find."

  "Well, you be sure and take your personal Glock."

  D. J. specified personal because Fournet, as a mere Special Deputy, wasn't authorized an official firearm. D. J. had, however, gotten him a concealed-weapons permit.

  "Wouldn't leave home without it,” Fournet assured him.

  D. J. ordered a last beer for each of them, and when the bottles arrived, raised his and toasted Fournet. “Whenever the young guys at Headquarters ask me where I loined po-leecing, I tell ‘em I had me a great partner who taught me everything I know."

  Fournet was not embarrassed by the praise. He merely acknowledged the salute by raising his own Turbodog. Facts were, after all, facts.

  * * * *

  The first four parks yielded nothing but the glaring tedium of white cubes under vapor lamps. It was in the Seventh Ward, in the same park where Mrs. Zeringue had lived, that a new rent-a-cop—a glum, somewhat toadlike gent named Scramuzza, wearing the uniform and shoulder patch of the Junkyard Dog Protective Service—reluctantly counted his trailers, and came up with one extra.

  "Now how the hell that got in here?” he demanded.

  Fournet might have said something about fishermen who like to return to spots where they've had a bite before, but instead decided to get rid of the guard. Uniform or not, shoulder patch or not, to him the guy was a civilian, and therefore by definition worse than useless if for any reason things got rough.

  He said, “Maybe you better get back and watch the gate. We don't need no strangers waltzing in to complicate things."

  He watched Scramuzza waddle away, staging a kind of flicker-on, flicker-off departure as he vanished into the ebon shadows of trailers and reappeared in the shafts of cold light between. Then Fournet turned back to the trailer in question. It looked exactly like any other FEMA trailer except, as Scramuzza had pointed out, that it lacked the essential power and water and sewer hookups, and was therefore unfit for human habitation.

  He checked and reholstered the Glock under his armpit, climbed the two metal steps to the door, and touched the knob. It turned smoothly, the door opened, and he stepped into—or rather, as he discovered, through—a panel of darkness. A sudden flare of intense light forced him to blink, and when his eyes opened—

  * * * *

  He was standing on an immense plain, sandy and painfully bright, even though no sun was visible. Far off, dust-devils whirled and dispersed, formed again and repeated their dance into oblivion. Like them, Fournet did a slow rotation, finding no trace of the trailer—or anything else—except more dust and sunless light.

  Confronted with such a backflip in reality, a man of earlier times would have gone into fits. But Fournet—both a cop and a survivor of the Twentieth Century—had been programmed all his life to expect miracles, especially unpleasant ones. True, his heartbeat rose and his palms felt slick, but he ordered himself to calm down. He thought he knew where he was.

  "Now how,” he demanded, “did I get to Roswell Frigging New Mexico?"

  He was still awaiting an answer to this question when a shining cube emerged from the ground, shedding sand and dust and taking form as a penthouse like the one at the top of an elevator shaft.

  Two gleaming metal doors opened, and a small personage stepped out. With a bobbing walk that caused him to flounce his gleaming cloak of emerald feathers, he approached Fournet and paused, cocking his head with its two button-bright eyes first to one side, then the other. A flexible extension resembling a beak opened, and a lilting, bubbly voice not unlike the liquid accents of a mockingbird emerged.

  "Fear not,” piped the creature. “You have entered a civilized realm where it will be your great joy to assist the progress of science. You may call me Mr. Green."

  "What else?” muttered Fournet.

  So he wasn't in Roswell. He took a deep breath and argued down a moment of rising panic. He told himself that, yeah, being a victim of alien abduction wasn't exactly lunch at Ya Momma's, but it wasn't inconceivable, either. In fact, it was a lot like late-night TV, just better colorized.

  This reflection stopped him from shooting Mr. Green—Fournet's usual response to the unexpected—and yet things were sufficiently disturbing to make him slide his fat right hand under his two-button wash ‘n’ we
ar jacket, grip his Glock, snap off the strap covering the holster with his thumb, and prepare to open fire at the first sign of trouble.

  "Please to step this way, my good sir,” the creature was burbling along. “Our building is the most prominent in this great city."

  Again Fournet searched the vacant distance, looking for the great city but not finding it. Mr. Green proceeded to clear things up.

  "It extends some ninety-seven stories down, and its architecture is generally admired. I must apologize for bringing you in via the basement, but do not despair. You are bound for a brief stay in gleaming laboratories where comfortable, fully anesthetized experimentation upon your body will help us prepare yet another entry for our great online encyclopedia, Anatomy and Physiology of Five Hundred More or Less Intelligent Species. Pray step this way."

  "Whoa!” thundered Fournet in his best cop voice—abrupt, gravelly and intimidating. The limits of Mr. Green's command of English immediately became apparent.

  "Woe? Woe is you? Do not feel that way, good sir. You will be returned exactly to your point of departure, unharmed and with all incongruous memories erased."

  "Not woe,” said Fournet with disgust. "Whoa, like stop. Foist of all, you don't really retoin people to where they come from. You put Miz Zeringue ten miles away where she coulda been mugged or raped, except that the muggers and rapists from that neighborhood all got flooded out, so they still in Houston and Little Rock."

  "Oh dear,” said Mr. Green. From the cloak of feathers emerged two damp-looking seven-toed hands, which he began wringing. “Oh dear, oh dear. We must have drifted from our coordinates. How terribly blush-making."

  Despite the enormous disadvantages Fournet faced—finding himself in another world, dimension and/or universe—the cop suddenly felt a surge of confidence. Whatever in the hell else he might be, Mr. Green was a wimp.

  Fournet took a menacing step forward. “And I ain't here to assist your goddamn encyclopedia.” He pulled out his temporary ID with his left hand and flashed his badge. “I'm here in an official capacity, see? I represent the, uh—"

  Chief of Detectives didn't seem impressive enough, and mayor, governor, president—even Rex, King of Carnival—seemed somehow to fall short when dealing with aliens.

  "I represent the Emperor,” he averred, “and he wants to know what the hell you thinking about, snatching his subjects without his permission."

  "Oh dear,” said Mr. Green for the third time, and wrapped his arms around his upper body. Though probably a mere instinctive self-protective gesture, the move caused Fournet more alarm than any threat could have. Plump as Mr. Green was, his pale thin forearms wrapped seven times around him.

  "Jeeeeeesus Key-rist,” Fournet muttered. “A four-foot-high parakeet made of rubber bands. I never seen nothing like that, even on Dr. Who. What the hell I'ma put in my report, assuming I ever get to make a report? They'll think I'm nuts at Tulane and Broad."

  But that was no reason to let Green off the hook. Taking a deep breath, Fournet again stepped forward, forcing himself almost into the alien's spongy beak. Glaring down at him, he barked, “Well?"

  "I must,” the creature warbled weakly, “take you to our Official Spokesman, whose mastery of your primitive yet complex tongue will enable him to explain the situation far better than I."

  "About frigging time somebody did,” growled Fournet, and allowed himself to be bowed into the shining cube.

  * * * *

  The elevator had a very peculiar motion. At times it seemed to be moving sideways, and there was at one point a loop-de-loop feeling, after which Fournet found that down had become up—or, at any rate, that his head rather than his feet was now leading the way toward his destination.

  The shining doors opened on a kaleidoscope of senseless patterns, which spun, righted, and resolved themselves into a room somewhat like the behind-the-counter workspace of Fong's X-Quisite Hand Laundry in Algiers. A stainless-steel track hung from the ceiling, along which bundles wrapped in translucent plastic moved from right to left at a slow but steady pace.

  The conveyor halted, and from between two bundles emerged a being that looked somewhat human, though only in the limited sense that a porcelain figurine looks like a shepherdess. Unlike Mr. Green, who—whatever else he might be—was clearly a living creature, the faux human spoke in a manufactured voice exactly (as Mrs. Zeringue had said) like the telephone voices that offer callers a menu that never quite meets their needs.

  "You wish to enter a complaint?” it asked. Mr. Green stepped back a pace, happy to let the android (or whatever it was) field Fournet's wrath.

  "Yeah. I do.” Fournet then repeated his line about the wrathful emperor.

  "What is your emperor's name?"

  "Bush the Second."

  "The name is not unfamiliar. However, we have almost completed our studies and contacting him now would be superfluous."

  Fournet hardly registered the refusal. He was staring at the now motionless bundles, and suddenly demanded, “Hey! Are those people?"

  "Some of them."

  "Look—what the hell is your name—"

  "You can call me Mr. White."

  "Well, White,” said Fournet, drawing his Glock, “you got about six seconds to try and convince me you ain't running a slaughterhouse here."

  "These entities,” said Mr. White, gesturing at the bundles with a cool white porcelain hand, “are not dead. They have merely been everted—that is to say, turned inside out—and packaged in an anesthetic solution whilst awaiting examination."

  "Oh well, that makes it okay,” said Fournet, with heavy irony. “So whatchoo been everting people inside out for anyway?"

  "It makes their anatomy and physiology so much easier for our scientists to study. Following examination, they are reverted and returned unharmed to preset coordinates in their own sector of the multiverse."

  Fournet received this information with the incredulity of a bellboy gazing at a dollar tip. “How you can turn people inside out without killing them?” he demanded.

  "The bubble universe in which we reside is a nine-dimensional topological space where such eversion is possible, indeed routine, because of the perfect elasticity of what I suppose you would describe as ‘matter.’ The relative rigidity of your universe was at first quite confusing to us. In an early experiment we tried to evert a brahma bull through his posterior aperture, and as a result our laboratory had to be rebuilt practically from the ground down.

  "Fortunately, we have learned from our first crude efforts, and have now refined our technique. As a courtesy to Bush the Second,” Mr. White went on, “I will introduce you to a recent acquisition, so that you can see he is quite unharmed."

  White gestured, a trapdoor appeared to open in midair, and a young man thumped down on the floor. He sat up, evidently dazed, and Fournet had leisure to note the F-word tattooed in Gothic lettering on his forehead, the varicolored plugs and rings inserted into his lips and ears, and his dreadlocks splashed randomly with bleach. He wore clothing pre-dirtied and pre-torn by the manufacturer, including clown pants with the waist adorning his crotch and crotch embracing his knees. His underpants had apparently been made from the altar cloth of a desecrated church—at any rate, they bore the inscription IHS. His T-shirt read bluddy slawta.

  "Oh shit, it's a effing cop,” groaned Bluddy. “Every effing place I go there's effing cops, even effing here!"

  White very properly ignored him. “And this is our everter, Grot."

  Out of the shadows advanced an organism that, like the duck-billed platypus or the Compassionate Conservative, appeared improbable at first glance and still more improbable at second glance. Seemingly an uneasy cross between a very large chicken and the business end of a squid, Grot grasped the floor with skinny four-toed feet, while his five sucker-laden tentacles spread and writhed. Four small golden eyes like the brass buttons on an expensive blazer gazed at Fournet without expression.

  Bluddy continued to babble, even though nobody was p
aying attention. “Eff aliens, eff cops, eff every effing thing,” he declared, in a passionate statement of his basic philosophy of life. But to enunciate it in Fournet's presence was a mistake.

  "Why don'tcha,” the cop suggested to Mr. White, “tell Grot to show me how he does it? On this guy here, for instance."

  Mr. White gestured commandingly. Bluddy let out a yelp, which was unwise, because Grot seized the opportunity to shove a tentacle down his throat. After a long moment filled with gargling sounds, Grot everted the rapper with one smooth yank.

  "Soitny see what he's made of,” murmured Fournet, noting the rapper's shrunken heart, diseased liver, and swollen spleen.

  Meanwhile Grot plucked a transparent sack of anesthetic goo seemingly out of midair and dropped the rapper in. Another stage-magician pass with an unemployed tentacle caused the appearance of a small, gleaming mechanism that he ran along the top of the sack, sealing it with a hiss and the smell of seared plastic. Finally, he hung the bundle from an alligator clamp on the track. The track gave a lurch, and the parade of everted beings moved slowly on to whatever awaited them in the laboratory.

  Anxiously, Mr. Green asked Fournet, “You perhaps find the process moderately sick-making?"

  "Not after all the raw ersters I've ate. I guess Bluddy's clothes and shoes are inside out, too?"

  "I presume you refer to the coverings, exterior, artificial, with which your species comes so strangely equipped?"

  "Yeah. Them."

  "I suppose so,” shrugged Mr. Green. “As a life scientist, I am not concerned with artifacts."

  Fournet had about two dozen more questions to ask, but putting them into words presented an unexpected problem. Suddenly he'd begun to feel unwell.

  He did manage to ask Mr. Green why he'd selected New Orleans for his fishing trip, and when he was going to quit snatching its already battered citizens. In reply, Green launched into a warbling disquisition, the basic idea being that disaster sites always made good places to look for laboratory subjects because with lots of people gone a few more were seldom missed, and—