Jim Baen's Universe

Serials - parts and parts.

Fish Story, Episode Twelve: Make It More Complicated

Written by Eric Flint, Andrew Dennis, Dave Freer

“Tolerated to be it is not!”

I stared at the snake.

So did Mademoiselle J.

So did Agent 544.

So did every agent or agent supervisor or busybody or be-damned-politician-on-a-junket in the chamber hollowed out of the side of the chasm near the bottom of the Marianas Trench. When you’re the size of a globe-girdling reptile, you get paid attention to when you holler.

“Will you cease and desist from your Teuton imitation?” demanded Mademoiselle J. “It is so annoying.”

The giant serpent’s expression looked confused, for a moment. “But I wasn’t . . . Oh.” He turned his head and looked back at his tail. Which wasn’t there because it was in front of him, because it was encircling the world. “Sorry. I forgot I’d gotten twisted up a bit. Syntax flows where the body goes, as they say.”

Sulkily, he added: “I still think the Teuton way of handling the logic is superior. Start with the focus of the thought instead of beating your way around it.”

“You would,” muttered Agent 544. She—I think the agent was female, anyway; hard to tell with life forms from Beta Coronae—swiveled her eyestalks to study the snake. “But I don’t, and I’m the ranking agent supervisor here. So we’ll use my preferred syntax, given that we’re required by treaty regulations to use one of the native tongues.”

She gave the assembled agents and supervisors and assorted busybodies—of which she was one herself, you want my opinion—and be-damned-politicians-on-a-junket a cold stare, and then swiveled the eyestalks back to Mademoiselle J.

“Finish the report.”

“Nothing much to add.” The snotty teleost pointed a fin at me and said: “Little Dickie and his hominid buddies screwed the pooch. That’s about all there is to say on the matter.”

Somehow she managed to convey a sneer, even though teleosts don’t have lips.

I can’t stand teleosts. The bastards are all hardcore racialists, I don’t care what claims they make otherwise. Official philosophy of the True Meme Alliance be damned. So far as the teleosts are concerned, the only true meme adherents are real fish—and when you get right down to it the only real fish are bony fish. So any time anything goes wrong, they immediately put the blame on the lesser breeds.

Fortunately, everybody else detests teleosts too. For sure and certain, Agent 544 did, seeing as her species evolved in tide pools and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the fusiform ideal. “Ideal,” as least, so far as most fusiform members of TRUMA are concerned.

Not me, though. Whales are as a fusiform as you could ask for, sure. But I think all of the philosophical trappings surrounding the—hold your breath and take your pick:

Great Cause

Great Galactic Cause

Chthonic War

Anti-Chthonic War

War to End All Wars

War to Make the Universe Safe for the Three Dimensional Meme Ideal

(You Name It and Some Fishy Doofus Has Come Up With It)

(My personal favorite: Crusade for the Right to Flow)

—are a crock.

And they make fun of chthones for being hopeless schematics!

Ha! As if our side is any better!

Oh, let me count the ways . . .

We can start with the fundamental dispute. What is it—precisely—that defines Our Side in the conflict to begin with?

The teleosts, of course, have a simple answer: It’s the fish of the universe against the land-dwellers, with your various flighty types flapping around somewhere in the middle, but since their total biomass is pitiful anyway, who cares what they think?

From there, of course, all their racialist logic follows. “Fish” being defined somatically, it follows that some fish are inherently fishier than others. Bony fish are therefore at the center of the definition of Fishdom—you may as well say “at the top,” thank you very much—and all the others fall somewhere below. Next come the various lesser forms of fish, like sharks and rays. Then come creatures with fish shapes but who aren’t really fish—whales like me and ichthyosaurs fall into this category—and then come critters who are even less fishy-looking but are at least clearly swimmers—think plesiosaurs, here, or seals or penguins—followed by a rapid decline into the ranks of those primitive beings whose only real claim to being part of “Fishdom” is simply the crude fact that they usually dwell in water.

But teleosts are dimwits, as everyone knows except teleosts themselves. And ostracoderms, of course, which is why the silly buggers waste their time with an Ostracoderm Equality League—there’s also an Equalization League, and puh-leese don’t ask me to explain the distinction since life is too short as it is—given that nobody except teleosts cares about their armor in the first place. And who cares what teleosts think, since—

See discussion of “dimwits,” above.

Moving somewhat up the intellectual ladder—not much, but some—we come to the various strains of political thought which focus on somatic form rather than content, so to speak. They usually go by the name of “fusiformists” or “the torpedo school.” What matters, these savants would have it, is that the species in question is adapted to the demands of three-dimensional travel through a fluid.

Needless to say, there’s an extremist branch of this political tendency which would eliminate the need to specify “through a fluid” and would therefore automatically enroll all avian critters in The Great Cause. But given that your average bird is a bird-brain, this school of thought is tiny and risible.

No more risible than your other fusiformists, though, if you ask me, since this entire philosophy falls into the same racialist logic as the teleosts, albeit in a somewhat more sophisticated manner. Mind you, this is not sour grapes on my part. We whales are always welcomed as fully qualified equals by any fusiformists.

But it’s still silly—as Agent 544 would be the first to tell you. And let me here go on record stating that while I consider Agent 544 an obnoxious busybody and wished at this very moment that she was pestering some other agent somewhere else, preferably very very very far away, the reason she was obnoxious in the first place was because she had an actual functioning brain in her oh-so-very-non-fusiform head.

Something which could not be said of all too many fusiform critters. If you don’t believe me, try having an intelligent conversation with a tuna.

Then we come to those various sects—a multitude here—which would locate the essence of what makes our side “our side” not in any particular shape of being, but in the essential difference between our locale and that of the Great Enemy.

Put simply, our side lives in the water and Their Side lives on land.

Alas . . .

First—as Agent 544 would explain to you again, in her inimitably annoying manner—this neat and simple definition fumbles badly with all the many species who fall betwixt and between. Dwellers in tide pools, amphibians of all sorts, you name it. And lest you think these ambivalent types can be dismissed as inconsequential, I need to point out that the most recent galactic survey carried out by the (supposedly non-sectarian and non-denominational although I have my doubts) Sidereal Marine and Aquatic Institute records well over eight thousand intelligent amphibian species and slightly less than five hundred intelligent tide pool species in this galaxy alone—and that’s before we even wander into the nebulous terrain provided by worlds of myth and legend and fantasy.

So, no, I’m afraid defining “our side” simply by reference to water just doesn’t cut it.

The most sophisticated school of thought, and the one toward which I’d be inclined myself if I gave a damn, are those who would locate the ineluctable animosity between Us and Them as being the product of an inherent antagonism between those beings for whom reality is ultimately two-dimensional and those for whom it is three-dimensional.

The “dimensionalists,” they’re called, or sometimes the “meme school.” You can think of them as the Vedantists of our side in the brawl.

They’ve even managed to get a watered down version of their viewpoint adopted as the official philosophy of The Cause, since it has the great advantage of being so vague that it offends nobody in particular—especially when you toss the great means-anything-you-want-so-it-means-nothing weasel term “meme” into the bargain.

It also has the great advantage—very useful in time of war—of providing an automatic rationale for victory going to Our Side. After all, the universe is three-dimensional, not two-dimensional. And it therefore stands to reason that We—not the primitive and benighted chthones—are destined to rule it.

But I could care less.

Me, I’m in it for the money. Fish and their cohorts pay better than chthones. Simple as that.

Don’t ask me why. It’s just a fact. My own theory is that sentients who are restricted to a two-dimensional plane are just naturally inclined toward being tightwads. Probably has something to do with evacuation disorders, all bound up the way they are with gravity’s demands.

Whatever, the fact remains. If you’re a professional secret agent, like me and all whales I know except a handful of right whales with (like most right whales) a deficiency in left-side cortical material, you’ll take advantage of the fusiform silliness to land a nice-paying gig with one of the fish outfits.

Any of them, really. There are a jillion, on account of fish and their fellows are even more inclined toward sectarianism than chthones are. Pretty much all of them pay decently, and a fair number pay downright well.

My outfit being one of those. If you’re curious, it’s the Interstellar Counter-Chthonic Agency. Usually called the “Ickies” by their disgruntled rivals, of whom there are many.

(This year. Last year and for several years prior to that I was on retainer for the Cnidarian Anti-Defamation League, until the misers got sticky