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The Realm of Words

Damn Les Six. The way I see it, it's all their fault. Sure, you could blame Wolfgang. Humans would. That's because their minds are twisted and whenever disaster strikes—which for them, is about twelve times a day—they're always trying to figure out who's to blame by looking to see who caused it.


Idiots, the lot of them. The more educated they are, the worse. The real eggheads among them go so far as to prate on and on about the sufficient versus the necessary cause—blah! blah!


Who cares who causes a disaster? What's important is—who's responsible for getting me caught in the middle of it?


The lousy drunks, that's who. Ever since we arrived in the Mutt, Les Six have been acting like the world's just one giant party. Yesterday they kept me fetching alepots until midnight. And they started drinking at noon!


True, I didn't have to listen to the windbag today. I don't care what Magrit says about the so-called "best actual sorcerer in the world." Zulkeh is a windbag, windbag, windbag, windbag. That's it—pure and simple—question closed.


But it wasn't all that great. The reason I didn't have to listen to the windbag is because Zulkeh was holed up all day with the other windbags, plotting some idiot scheme to travel to the "Realm of Words."


No kidding. I'm serious. Can you believe it? Why would they need to travel to the Realm of Words when they already live in it twenty four hours a day? Not only that! Everybody else seems to think this project is a really grand old idea—Magrit and Gwendolyn were talking about it all day! And when Les Six finally stumbled into the salon around mid-afternoon, belly-aching about their hang-overs (for which, naturally, the only cure is more drink—Wittgenstein! fetch us some alepots!), no sooner do they let out their first collective belch than they start prattling about the prattler's project!


I'm not sure what's worse—listening to a windbag talk or listening to people talk about a windbag.


Then, of course, once Magrit saw Les Six knocking back their alepots, naturally she suddenly developed an overwhelming thirst. Even Gwendolyn got in on the act. So there I was, racing back and forth all day from the salon to the kitchen fetching alepots, when if it hadn't been for the souses I would have been somewhere else, when Wolfgang ambled into the room.


At first, I was a little relieved. It'd mean more alepots, of course, but I figured Wolfgang's babble would distract the others from babbling. And I'd rather listen to a babbling idiot than to idiots babbling.


Besides, I was hoping Wolfgang would start feeling Magrit up and the next thing you'd know, they'd be off to the sack. Then Gwendolyn'd leave, and I'd only have to fetch alepots for Les Six.


I had every reason to hope, too. She's a proper witch, Magrit, I'd be the last to deny it, but she's also a complete slut. Of course, they're all sluts, human beings—male and female both. Never act rationally about sex, the way amphibians do. Civilized, we are. A clutch of eggs in the water, a quick spray of sperm, and that's it. None of this sloppy disgusting stuff—and they say we're slimy! But, I suppose you can't blame them, handicapped by nature the way they are. Evolution reached its peak in the Age of Amphibians, and it's all been downhill since. Humans are just a stupid accident of history. Hadn't been for that comet—


Well, what's past is past. Anyway, it didn't work out that way, because no sooner did he sit down than Wolfgang started moaning and wailing that the dwarf Shelyid—he's the windbag's apprentice—and the two Kutumoff brats had gone after the windbag into the Realm of Words. (I'd thought better of that little guy. But he's only human, even if he is a dwarf.)


Uproar! Uproar! Uproar!


I could see the disaster coming, and there I was! I started looking for a mousehole but I was handicapped what with the alepots I was carrying. Before I could dump them Magrit snatched me up.


"No you don't, you mangy little lizard!" she hollered, adding insult to injury. "You're coming with me!"


"Where?" I demanded, as if I didn't know.


"We've got to go rescue the poor little tykes!"


Me, I would have let natural selection take its course. And what was the fretting for, anyway? If Shelyid had survived years in the company of the windbag, I didn't see where a little trip to the Realm of Words could hurt him any. And what did I care about the Kutumoff brats? The boy was about as interesting as an encyclopedia, and the girl—well, if Polly Kutumoff had been a proper salamandress, of course, I'd have told all kind of lies about being the most degenerate salamander who ever lived so's I could cash in on the Kutumoff Grand Old Tradition, but the truth is that swaying hips and batting eyelashes don't do a thing for amphibians.


I tried to explain all of this to Magrit, but she wasn't having any of it and Gwendolyn was getting downright peevish with me. So I shut up. I'll take my chances with Magrit, but Gwendolyn's a different story. Woman scares me and every amphibian I know. Even the dumb frogs down at the Old Mill Pond call her The Knife. (Her knife itself they call the Edge of the Known Universe.)


Now everybody was charging around all over the Kutumoff mansion. The Kutumoff elders showed up, demanding to know what all the ruckus was about. When they heard, Madame Kutumoff immediately started wailing and wringing her hands. (Best hand-wringer I've ever seen, by the way. Really world class.) Papa Kutumoff, on the other hand, reacted kind of oddly. He just got this little smile on his face and wandered off muttering something about his boy getting into his first real scrape and his girl being a chip off the old block. Whatever that means.


For a while I started getting my hopes back up, because soon enough it became clear than nobody had any idea exactly how they were supposed to carry out this "rescue." First they charged over to Uncle Manya's mini-mansion and stormed into his library and started ransacking all his papers until they found the windbag Zulkeh's formula lying right there in plain sight on top of the desk where I'd seen it straight off but kept my mouth shut. Then they tried to read the formula and was that ever a laugh! Humans are all windbags at heart, but there's still a whale of a difference between the Genuine Article like the wizard Zulkeh and a bunch of boozy wannabes.


Then they charged back to the Kutumoff macro-mansion and stormed upstairs into Magrit's room and Magrit started consulting her grimoire and brewing up potions and what not and was that ever a laugh! Mind you, the old witch is one of your all-time potioneers. She could whip up something that'd make a scorpion fall in love with a rock and the scorpion would die of heartbreak because she'd whip up something else that'd cause the rock to have a heart attack. But travel to the Realm of words? No, no, no, no, no, no. No such potion. No such spell. No such hex.


That requires Grade A, officially-approved, pedigreed, certified, documented, diploma-ed, Zulkeh-style WINDBAGGERY.


But then, just as I was starting to feel relieved, I also started getting a bad feeling. Some of that came from watching Gwendolyn, who, since she doesn't know zip about magic wasn't trying to figure out a way to travel to the Realm of Words but was just relieving her tension by sharpening her knife which is already as sharp as a razor and I could tell she was getting to the point where she was just going to have to try the edge on something and whenever humans get to that point it seems they always remember that you can cut off an amphibian's tail without doing any "real damage" since the tail will grow back, which is true, but it hurts.


But mostly it was because I had a bad feeling about Wolfgang, on account of the way he was drooling.


Now, your humans always think that since Wolfgang's a drooling maniac and he always drools that it doesn't mean anything. But what'll fool a dumb human won't fool a salamander for a minute. There's drool, and there's drool. Even people who ought to know better don't really listen to the lunatic when he tries to tell them about the twin powers of madness and amnesia. But I know that particular drool that he always starts doing whenever he's going to spring some sly one. It's especially disgusting, even for Wolfgang's drool, which is especially disgusting, even for an amphibian who doesn't have that silly human aversion to slime.


But it was obvious to me. I didn't know the ins and outs of it, of course. After all, I'm as sane as a salamander! But one thing was clear as a bell.


Wolfgang Laebmauntsforscynneweëld was about to spring something. And whatever it was, it was going to be crazy.


Really crazy. I mean—demented.


Sure enough, Wolfgang suddenly started raving about applying his twin powers of madness and amnesia and Magrit blew her stack at him and Wolfgang got insulted and started whining.


"Well, I was going to go with you, but since you're going to be that way about it you'll just have to go without me! And it's just as well! Doctor Wolfgang Laebmauntsforscynneweëld has an upcoming appointment with God's Own Tooth himself, you know, and he insisted that I had to come along. Of course, I escaped from the asylum so I wasn't going to go but now I think I will! So there!"


Magrit started hollering that he was a crazy lunatic and what did he know and Wolfgang started smirking and then—I knew it!—he started babbling in an unknown tongue.


I hate it when he does that. Magrit hates it too, because she can't understand him. That's the only part I like about it. I hate it because past experience has taught me that when Wolfgang starts babbling in an unknown tongue sometimes it's just because he's an idiot and other times it's because he's applying his twin powers of madness and amnesia and humans can laugh at him but not me because—


—everything started getting hazy!


The universe started spinning around!


I heard voices everywhere!


 


Sure enough. There we were. Not Wolfgang, just like he promised. But there was Magrit, and Les Six, and Gwendolyn—all of whom deserved it—and there was me, who didn't.


In the Realm of Words.


2

Only humans would come up with a name like that. Sounds majestic, doesn't it—the "realm", no less. And—oh!—so refined!—"of words," no less.


Let a salamander tell you the truth.


The Realm of Words, at first sight, is nothing but a barren desert stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see, and that's very very very far indeed on account of there is no actual horizon in the Realm of Words due to the fact that (as it might fairly be called by a clear-headed amphibian) Blatherland is flat.


You heard me. Flat—as in, not round; as in, not a sphere but a table.


How far does it stretch? Who knows? Who cares?


There is neither day nor night, since there is no sun. Light is provided by the Great Lamp in the Sky, which may either be fifty miles high and five miles wide or fifty miles wide and five hundred miles high or—your guess is as good as mine. No doubt the windbag Zulkeh would have performed experiments, but none of the company I was with was so inclined.


At second glance, the barren desert was not entirely barren. At a great distance, we spotted some mounds. Since they were the only thing visible on the plain, we headed off in that direction.


As we got closer, the mounds resolved themselves into great piles of letters. Great piles of the letter O, to be precise, stacked up in pyramids:


            o o o
        ooo ooo ooo
    ooooo ooooo ooooo
ooooooo ooooooo ooooooo


 


After we stared at these piles for a bit, trying to figure out what they were, we heard a whimpering noise coming from underneath one of them. We investigated. (Rather: I watched; Magrit bossed; Gwendolyn and Les Six rummaged around.) Soon enough, Gwendolyn crawled out from under the pile holding two little p letters and one big one that looked kind of scarred up, like this: P. The little ones were wailing and the big one was blubbering "don't kill us, don't kill us!"


"I'm not going to kill you," growled Gwendolyn. That set them all wailing even louder, which isn't surprising if you've ever heard Gwendolyn growl.


"And there's no way to kill a letter, anyhow," added Magrit.


"Is too," sniveled a little p.


"You chop 'em wid a knife," sniveled the other, "just like the one the big mean lady has."


"Just like happened to everyP else," sniveled the P.


We stared at the piles of Os.


(Hell with it; looks silly; I hereby declare that the plural of O is Oes.).


"You mean—" exclaimed Magrit.


"It was the Horde what done it!" cried out the P. "Massacred 'em all! Made a pyramid of their heads! Me and the little ones is all that survived, because I hid them under me and the Horde thought I was dead."


A sad tale, a sad tale—but then! Will wonders ever cease? Of a sudden, all the piles of Oes started quivering and jerking around and suddenly collapsed into a great disgusting mass of Oes squirming and squiggling all over the landscape.


"Look! They're not dead!" shrieked one of the little ps.


(Looks silly; I hereby declare that the plural of p is pees.)


(No, looks obscene; I hereby declare that the plural of p is pese.)


"Ghosts!" shrieked the other.


"Oh, stop that!" snapped one of the Oes. "We're not ghosts, we're Oes."


It seemed to examine itself. I think; hard to tell; no eyes.


"Yuck!" it exclaimed. "How are the mighty fallen!" Then, philosophically: "Could have been worse, I suppose. They might have split us lengthwise and made us all into Fs." It shuddered. (And there's a nauseating sight, let me tell you, watching an O shudder.) "A fate worse than death!"


"Look on the bright side!" exclaimed another of the newly-revived Oes. "They always say vowels have more fun!"


In an instant, the cry went up, and before you knew it the whole teeming mass of Oes were—what? Let's just say they seemed to be having an orgy and leave it at that. Hard to tell, really.


"Don't watch, children!" hissed the surviving elder P, shepherding the little ones away.


"Now what?" demanded Gwendolyn. She glared at Magrit.


"What are you glaring at me for?" snarled Magrit.


"Who else is there to glare at so maybe they'll come up with an idea for what to do next?" She glared at Les Six. "The Beerbelly Boys?" (They looked offended.) She glared at me. "The Tail That Talks?" (I'm sure I looked nonchalant.)


Magrit threw up her hands. "I'm a working witch, dammit! I'm not some kind of philosopher! I can't make heads or tails out of this place!"


Gwendolyn got a wild and wicked look in her eyes.


"What the hell, why not?" she mused.


It never fails to amaze me how fast that woman is. I mean, even though she looks sort of normally attractive in a female human way except that she's oversize, Gwendolyn can benchpress six hundred pounds. So you wouldn't think the monster could move like a mongoose but she can. Oh yes she can.


The next thing I know she snatched me off of Magrit's shoulder and tossed me high (way high!) up in the air. Spinning and twirling around! Of course, I landed on my feet (cats have got nothing on salamanders), but even so I was outraged. Incensed!


I made my feelings clear, but Gwendolyn ignored me. Rather, she ignored my words. She was scrutinizing my tail.


"That way!" she announced, pointing along the direction my tail happened to be lying.


The whole idea was idiotic, but nobody saw any point in arguing. Not even me. Actually, after a while I decided to be flattered. After a little while longer, I decided there was a profound lesson here: a salamander's tail is worth more than eight human heads.


On and on we trudged. (They trudged; I rode on Magrit's shoulder). On and on they trudged. On and on they trudged. On and on—you get the idea.


After who knows how long, the landscape started to change. Say better—there started to appear the resemblance of a landscape, since you can't hardly call Pure Flat Flatness a "landscape." Not much, mind you—just the occasional stone here and pebble over there, until finally we came across some ruins.


Ruins of what? Don't ask me. Ruins of ruins, looked like.


Then—a sepulchral voice.


"Save the runes," it moaned. "Save the runes."


A rune came out from the ruins.


"Save the runes," it moaned again. "You can start with me. I'm Γ."


"Who?" demanded Magrit.


"Γ." It seemed to shrug. "If you want to be formal about it. My friends call me Γrank. Or Γran, depending on what sex I am."


"Which sex are you, then?" asked Gwendolyn.


"What are you, stupid or something? If I'm Γrank, I'm male; if I'm Γran, I'm female. Once I had a friend who needed his soul saved, so I was Γra. Which reminds me—" Here it started moaning again: "Save the runes, save the runes."


"Save you from what?" growled Gwendolyn. She was starting to get testy, I could tell.


"From extinction, what else? What are you, a moron or something?"


"How about I call you Γrankfurter," she cooed, fingering her cleaver.


"Nay, lass!" protested the first of Les Six.


" 'Tis low! 'Tis low!" disapproved the second.


"Haute cuisine—that's the ticket!" exclaimed the third.


"Γilet Mignon!" enthused the fourth.


"Γillet of Γish, rather," opined the fifth.


"Properly Γlayed and Γried," qualified the sixth.


Magrit intervened. "Easy there! Γrank doesn't mean any harm, do you now, lad? It's just his way, that's all."


Γ apparently decided to fall back on his stock in trade.


"Save the runes! Save the runes!"


Magrit waddled over and patted the creature. "There now! There now! It's all right—you can tell me all about it. Save you from what, exactly?"


Terminal idiocy, it seemed. Immediately the rune lipped off again.


"What are you, another moron? From—"


It got no further, of course, because Magrit gave it one hefty wallop and knocked it Γlat. (Sorry. I couldn't resist.)


"Don't get Γresh with me, you little Γreak!" she bellowed. "Keep a civil tongue or I'll turn you into Γlapjacks!"


"Yes, ma'am!" squeaked the twit.


"Good. Let's try again. Save you from what?"


The rune snuffled. "Extinction, that's what. They're rounding us all up and turning us into"—a shudder—"scrap. And then they're melting down the scrap and turning it into"—a wail of horror—"common ordinary letters!"


"Who's doing this?" demanded Gwendolyn.


"What are you, a—" It paused, found wisdom. "The Captains of Industry, that's who. And their goons."


Les Six started to ask who the "Captains of Industry" were but before they got well started the rune jumped up, exclaimed "too many questions! too many questions!" and started scurrying off to the—east?—west?—whatever. After a moment it stopped, turned back, and shouted: "I'll show you! I'll show you!"


 


And so it was that eight human idiots and a salamander down on his luck found themselves trailing after a lippy rune across the Realm of Words for what seemed an eternity until eventually we came to a slight rise in the "landscape" from the "top" of which we were treated to the vista of—


—a vast jumble of giant factories, stretching as far as the eye can see.


" 'Orrible!" croaked the first.


"A vision of Hell itself," groaned the second.


"No vision!" countered the third.


"Hell itself!" mourned the fourth.


"Don't mourn!" cried the fifth.


"Organize!" bellowed the sixth.


And with no further ado the half dozen halfwits charged down the slope, capering and cavorting like so many tots in a toy store.


"I'll take that one!" cried the first, pointing to a huge, smoke-belching factory bearing the proud logo I. G. Sprechenindustrie.


"I'm for General Words!" hallooed the second.


"I've a yen for Nouns R Us!" hollered the third.


"Me for Microspeak!" cried the fourth.


By the time the fifth and the sixth added their bits to the round, they were too far off to hear. But, judging from the directions they were taking, I thought the fifth had set his aim for the huge International Business Mots complex and the sixth seemed to be wavering between General Linguistics and LTVerbs.


"Idiots!" screamed Magrit. "Morons!"


"Them, too?" asked Γ.


"Now what?" wondered Gwendolyn.


"Save the runes," moaned the rune. "Save the runes. Look! Over there! See what I mean!"


In the distance, we saw a long train of wagons hauling up before a huge stockade. Within the barbed wire compound I could see a bunch of grimy barracks and what looked like smokehouses. With the nonchalance of long habit, burly guards were herding little runes out of the wagons and through the gates.


"What are they handing the runes?" asked Gwendolyn.


"They say it's soap!" cried Γ. "But it's a trick! It's a trick!"


Suddenly, one of the smokehouse chimneys belched a great plume. Γ shrieked. "They're melting us down! They're melting us down!" It clutched Magrit's leg.


"Save the runes," it moaned, "save the runes."


I could see it coming a mile away. I tried to whisper sweet reason into her ear but the old witch was getting her dander up. And who was there to help me advance the voice of sanity?


Gwendolyn? Hah! Hah! The Agitatrix herself!


"You know," mused the damned lady wrestler, "maybe Les Six have the right idea. And besides, what else have we got to do?"


A moment later she was striding off. "I'm for that one!" she announced, pointing to a great ugly heap of a factory called UmlautMobil.


"As for us," said the witch, "it's the stockade. Let's see what these bums are up to."


"Us?" I cried. "Us? What have I got to with this madness? I'm an intelligent amphibian—the pinnacle of evolution! What natural selection hath wrought!"


Unheeding, Magrit waddled down the slope. I would have jumped off her shoulder and hid somewhere but I hate to walk and, besides, where was there to hide? Not a mousehole in sight.


Behind me, I heard Γ moaning: "Save the runes, save the runes."


I twisted my head and glared back. "Fuck the runes! And the horse they rode in on!"


Turning around, I could see the stockade looming larger and larger.


"Save the salamander," I moaned. "Save the salamander."


3

Well, there's good news, bad news, and terrible news.


The good news is that Magrit landed a great job almost as soon as we walked into the door of UmlautMobil. She was shooting for some kind of low level chem lab job, but the company president wouldn't hear of it. No, no! Seems that humans hardly ever apply for a job in the Realm of Words on account of there's all these words ready and eager to do the coolie work, so the company president was only too delighted to offer Magrit a plum job as his executive secretary. Easy work, great money, perks you wouldn't believe ("of course your salamander can have his own desk!"), the whole bit.


The bad news is that in order to get the job Magrit had to hump the company president.


The terrible news is that she turned him down.


I couldn't believe it!


"Oh, sure," I complained bitterly, as she stalked out of the building, "God forbid you should put out for a respected pillar of the community. Oh, no—not Ms. Morality! Not Ms. Pick-and-Choose! Drooling, gibbering lunatics, sure. Young windbag apprentices, sure. Drunken sailors on leave, sure. Hordes of flea-bitten barbarians, sure. Escaped—"


"Three barbarians are not a horde!" she snapped.


"Those three were!"


"That creep!" she snarled. "That drooling old lecher!"


"Wolfgang drools worse—"


"Wolfgang drools cute! The rich fatboy drools rich fatboy disgusting!"


"So what? Concentrate on the adjective: rich. We're in the 'realm of words,' Magrit—nouns and verbs don't count."


Well, as you can see, I won the argument hands down, but it didn't do me any good since once Magrit gets set on a course, that's that. Logic, reason, common sense—out the window!


Oh, well. It's the hallmark of sane salamanders that we adjust instantly to reality, no matter how grim. So I took it in stride when Magrit gave up the silly idea of going back to work in a factory (oh, yes, she's a true-blue prole by origin; that's what explains her low tastes, even for a witch) and decided to resume her normal trade. Even though I knew we'd be lucky not to starve to death since all of our customers would be words and what, I wondered, would words need with a witch?


Quite a bit, as it turns out. Mostly fortune-telling. It seems words are all convinced that after they're made they're going to be sent somewhere which they call the "Realm of Reality" where they will be—you're going to love this—words, what else? They say they're where words come from. Anyway, the point is that lots of them want to know exactly where they're going to wind up.


It's kind of pathetic, actually, especially for all the "thes" and "ands", each and every one of which is convinced it's going to be the key word in the key sentence which—you name it!


Which, of course, Magrit was more than willing to do, gazing into the crystal ball that she picked up years ago in a junk store.


"I see a man—he has a full beard, a lofty brow—a very lofty brow—he's sitting at a desk; he's writing—what? Yes, I see it now—he's writing a great novel—no! It's going to be the greatest novel ever written, probably; certainly the longest. He's finished the book! Now, he's scratching his head; stroking his beard; pursing his lips thoughtfully. What can he be—oh, I see it now! He trying to think of a title for the longest, greatest novel ever written. Yes, yes, it's coming to him now. He writes the first word—War. Yes, that's it. Now he's really thinking hard, really hard. Suddenly—his eyes light up! Yes, he has the second word of the title—and it's—yes! yes! It's you! It's you! War and—"


And (pardon the pun) another happy customer trots off. Well, not trots actually, since words don't have legs and feet so they move around in the weirdest ways imaginable, but you get the idea.


The truth is, Magrit's lousy with a crystal ball. She usually reads palms or tea leaves when she tells fortunes, but words don't have palms and they don't drink tea. They don't drink anything, as a matter of fact, or eat—which makes the bosses happier than clams.


When they discovered this fact, Les Six really hit the roof. No sooner did they get off work on their first shift than they all headed for the gin mills, only to discover that there weren't any. Soon enough, they were crowded into Magrit's parlor, bitterly expressing their complaint. They started with lofty political principles:


The first: " 'Tis a plot to keep the wages down!"


The second: "As 'tis well known that the variable portion of the capital—"


The third: "—more commonly known as the wage bill—"


The fourth: "—is regulated by the necessity to reproduce the working class in its historically determined standard of living."


The fifth: "The which, in this benighted place, approximates the living standard—"


The sixth: "Of stones."


Soon enough, however, they got down to the gist of the matter, which (I will summarize a mound of verbiage) was that inasmuch as it was widely known that drink is the curse of the working class, the downtrodden masses in the Realm of Words had been foully deprived of their curse in addition to the blessings of life which are, as a matter of course, naturally denied the proletariat.


As always with Les Six, complaint soon led to action. Magrit's little parlor was located on the bottom floor of one of the many tenements in one of the many slums which surround the word factories. In a matter of days, Les Six obtained the floor above from a landlord who, though grasping, was the word "butterfingers." Within days thereafter, they had transformed the seedy dump into an even seedier gin mill and were ready for the business which they confidently expected their daily agitation on the job would soon drum up.


I thought they were nuts, and was highly amused, until they turned out not to be nuts and I got dragooned into being the bartender. I couldn't believe it! I mean, what possible use could words have with booze? Or coffee, and damned if Les Six didn't add on a coffee house. ("Keeps the high-falutin' intellectual words out of our hair.")


But, practically overnight, The Gin Mill and Pretentious Coffee House became the center of social life in the slums. Which tells you all you need to know about social life in the slums of the Realm of Words. I thought I was going to die of overwork.


I complained to Magrit, but the rotten witch had already jumped aboard the bandwagon. Now she was telling all her customers that when they went to the Realm of Reality they were all going to be words spoken by profane proles hunched over their alepots in taverns, plotting and planning the revolution. No sooner did they leave her parlor than the cretins (words are not bright) piled into the saloon, eager to prepare for their future life.


Words are weird. Must be why humans like them so much. I remember one in particular—"because." It insisted on shortening itself to "be," so that it could go around bragging that it was a rebel without a cause.


The whole set-up in the Realm of Words is weird. (Our part of it, anyway—later, we found out that the Realm of Words has lots of different levels. All of which are weird.) There's a handful of humans who own all the word factories. Where they came from, nobody knows, and the owners aren't talking. Under them, there's a class of parasite words who lord it over all the other words. They toil not, neither do they labor. They are called the Proper Words, and they are all capitalized.


The common words do all the work, which consists of rendering raw material (mostly hot air, but with lots of scrap words thrown for good measure—runes, obsolete and archaic words, passe slang, etc.) into shiny new words. The shiny new words are immediately put to work, while the worn-out old words are "retired" to a giant complex called the Happy Home—which, to a salamander, looks remarkably like a blast furnace—where they are shortly thereafter "elevated" to the "Realm of Reality," rising thereto on a vast column of—can you doubt it?—hot air.


Into this weird but efficient set-up, Les Six and Gwendolyn charged like the proverbial bull in a china shop. If it had been Les Six alone, things would have just gotten rowdy. But when you added Gwendolyn to the stew! There's a good reason the porkers all over Grotum have a price on her head that's only a few pennies less than the one on The Roach—and only a small part of that's due to the numerous porkers she's gutted over the years with her cleaver. No, the real reason is that the woman is a fiendishly good agitator, propagandist, organizer, you name it.


The first thing she did, naturally, was call for the unity of all oppressed and exploited common words. No mean trick, that, let me tell you. Words are even worse than people when it comes to figuring out ways that this group is better than that group. The nouns detested the verbs and vice versa; their sidekicks the adjectives and adverbs positively hated each other; the pronouns always tried to get cozy with the nouns but the nouns referred to hanging around with pronouns as "slumming;" among the verbs, the third person singulars were considered uncouth; on and on.


Then, to boot, the words were further disunited by the rampant animosity among the different fonts. Helveticas despised Century Gothics who loathed Britannic Bolds who detested Courier News. All regular fonts considered all bold fonts (even their own) to be hopelessly low-class, and as for italics—I remember one italic word (indeed, I think it was) bitterly complaining to me over its alepot:


"It's a dirty rotten stereotype! It's not true that all italics are part of organized crime!"


Anyway, sooner than you would have thought possible Gwendolyn managed to convert a bunch of new words to her viewpoint, and the next thing you knew leaflets were being passed around all over the slums with slogans like:


FONTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!


THE PARTS OF SPEECH, UNITED, SHALL NEVER BE DEFEATED!


Within a week, she had Committees of Correspondence organized all over the place; within another week, she had all the Committees organized into cell structures. Within a month, she put together a full-fledged insurrectionary movement.


Sometimes, I think that woman's not playing with a full deck.


I tried to reason with Magrit:


"It's all nuts! I let it go back in the real world, on account of I have a soft spot for humans, handicapped as you are with mammal habits and brains. But this is going too far! What do we care about a bunch of words, anyway? When you prick them, do they bleed? No! Utterly impervious to pain and hardship. Do they starve? Nope—can't eat anyway. Sure, they're overworked and underpaid, but so what? What else are words good for? And besides, the whole reason we came to this Godforsaken Realm of Words in the first place was to rescue Shelyid and them. What happened to that, huh? Think of the poor dwarf! And the Kutumoff youngsters! Why—right this minute, they're probably in dire peril of their lives! We should be off to their rescue!"


"And just how do you propose to do that?" demanded the witch. "We wound up here because that stupid Wolfgang babbled in an unknown tongue and planted us in the middle of nowhere. Do you have any idea where Shelyid and the Kutumoff kids are? And if you do, do you know how to get there from here? Well? Speak up, Wittgenstein!"


"I'm your familiar, remember. You're the witch—the 'proper' witch, no less! You're the one's supposed to know how to get your way around."


"Well, I don't," she grumped, and then she started making noises about how if the sorcerer Zulkeh were here he'd probably know the answer and at that point I realized the poor old woman had lost her mind and it was hopeless. Imagine! Actually wishing the windbag were around!


Her conclusion was that since we were stuck here anyway, we might as well start a revolution since this place needed it as much as anywhere. To which I made the sane response that there'd be trouble since this place had powers-that-be as much as anywhere and they wouldn't like it. But I might as well have saved my breath.


And, sure enough, trouble came. As soon as the company owners figured out what was afoot, Les Six and Gwendolyn all got fired. That, as they say, was locking the barn door after the horse got out, since by that time Gwendolyn and Les Six had already organized the factories they worked in and now they were free to concentrate on agitating all the rest. Which they did, needless to say.


Next, the bosses—they're a sorry lot, bosses, dumb as frogs—set their company goons on Gwendolyn and Les Six. That resulted in a lot of thug words being turned into ex-thug letters.


Finally realizing that the usual methods weren't going to work, the bosses whistled up the official authorities, who promptly responded by sending the police into the slums to round up all agitators and malcontents.


The police were a riot, as always. They came in with their shields, batons and helmets: þôlìçê! and went out (ρϖ∫ιζε¡) better educated.


"It'll be the fascists, next," predicted Gwendolyn, and, sure enough, it wasn't long before we started hearing about a word called "mustache" that was making a lot of noise about what it called "the subjunctive problem." The mustache had a whole crowd of lumpenproletarian words gathered about it, with all the silly buggers coloring themselves brown instead of black.


To my outrage, I got sent in as a spy. So there I was in a big square, a disgruntled salamander if there ever was one, watching this jerk word jerking around other jerk words. "Mustache" was up on a podium and it was haranguing the mob, calling for the extermination of all qualifiers:


"No ifs, ands or buts!" it shrieked. "There must be a final solution for the subjunctive problem!"


The mob went wild, rampaging through the streets of the slum. All shop windows which displayed the ? mark were smashed. The wretched maybes, perhapses, and possibles who huddled within were dragged out into the streets and beaten into 8-point. A scholarly insofar as was torn letter from letter.


It didn't go any further, however, because at that point Gwendolyn and Les Six showed up, leading an army of Working Words Defense Guards, and proceeded to beat the brownwords into 4-point. Mustache itself was singled out for special attention by Gwendolyn and her cleaver, whereupon the would-be demagogue was known forever after as must ache.


Now the powers that be declared martial law and brought in the army, but to no avail. The word army was made up of a lot of unhappy conscripts who were easy prey for Les Six and their experienced rabble-rousers, and before you knew it the troops had deserted to the revolution and Gwendolyn was cheerfully setting up a Words and Scripts Council.


In desperation, the Proper Words set up a Provisional Revolutionary Government and tried to take control of the situation by going with the flow, so to speak, but Gwendolyn and Les Six soon had the Words and Scripts Council set the situation right. The Word Palace was stormed, the Proper Words were arrested and stripped of their pretensions. Count Jello became the plebeian jello, the haughty twin earls Ping and Pong became ping pong, and the whole lot of useless parasites were set to work digging the trenches and earthworks which Gwendolyn and Les Six said were going to be needed to repel the inevitable forthcoming invasion by reactionary imperialist powers bent on crushing revolution before it could spread.


I thought they had completely lost their minds, but we'll never know because at that point the Old Geister stepped in directly and sent The Flood. He usually keeps a lower profile in the "Realm of Reality," but I guess He figures He can afford to use a heavier hand in the Realm of Words on account of He claims to have spoken the Word in the first place.


I dunno, I'm just a sane salamander trapped in a universe of human lunatics. Who else but humans would have invented God in the first place? You wouldn't catch salamanders doing any such silly thing!


Yeah, it was great, just great. For forty days and nights, the Realm of Words was deluged by a rain of letters, periods, commas, colons and semi-colons. Naturally, having gotten us into the fix, Gwendolyn and the half-dozen bigmouths had no idea how to get out of it, but Magrit said there was nothing to worry about.


"Where there's a Flood, there's gotta be an ark. We'll just catch a ride."


Sure enough, about a week into the Flood this bearded character named Noah showed up, with a bunch of sons and a big boat. They started scurrying around collecting two of every word and hustling them aboard the boat. Most of the work was being done by Noah's son Ham, who was a nice enough kid except he complained a lot.


As usual with humans, most of his problem was with sex.


"I've got to avoid sodomy, you know," he mused. "The Lord's very insistent on that!" He reached down and grabbed up a word that was running around loose, un chien as it happened. Ham held it up for cursory inspection. "Boy," he announced. "No problem." Next, he picked up une table. "Piece of cake. It's a girl." Then, with a look of total disgust, he held up a chair. He turned it upside down and spread its legs.


"I ask you, Wittgenstein—is this a boy word or a girl word?"


Then he and his father got in a big argument over whether or not they had to save pidgin words and creole words. Noah started off by damning all unauthorized words, but Ham sweet-talked him into finding room for the creoles. The pidgins were out of luck, which caused a lot of squealing, let me tell you.


"That boat's not going to be big enough," I remarked to Ham. He looked shocked.


"Of course it's going to be big enough! We made it just according to the Lord's specifications"—here he rattled off a lot of stuff about cubits and such—"so it's bound to be big enough."


And, whaddaya know? Damned if it wasn't big enough. Don't ask me how. I'm just a salamander, not the Supreme Being. But, when the time came, all the chosen words trooped aboard and crammed themselves into the hold. I had wrangled us a place, too, buttering up Ham and the boys. I think Magrit on her own would have gone for it, but Gwendolyn and Les Six naturally had to stand up for principle.


So there I was, formerly a salamander sans souci, perched on Magrit's shoulder, the waves lapping at the last little outcrop of rock left in the Realm of Words, treated to the spectacle of Gwendolyn and Les Six shaking their fists at the heavens and taking the Lord's name in vain. Actually, they were cursing Him directly, which I'm not sure counts as the same thing.


"Things," I muttered, "couldn't get worse."


Things, of course, got worse. The Old Geister heard them cursing Him, took umbrage, and sent down an archangel. Seheboth, I think his name was.


"Curse ye the Lord?" he demanded.


A string of curses confirmed the charge.


"Be ye damned!" he cried.


Then, frowning: "But wait! I forgot—you're already damned. Damned the day you were born, in fact. Predestination, you know. Hmmm. Let me think. I have it! Be ye cursed!"


"Cursed with what?" sneered Magrit. The archangel took a breath, and I saw my chance.


"No!" I shrieked. "Not that! Anything but that!"


The archangel frowned again. "Not with what?"


Hey, it's as old as the hills, I know that. But a good trick's a good trick, even if a stupid rabbit did come up with it. So I shrieked:


"Not the dwarf! We've had enough of that gnome Shelyid to last a lifetime! No, let us drown here in peace! Oh, please! Don't cast us into whatever mess that dwarf's got into! Oh, please! Oh, please!"


The archangel beamed, gestured grandly, spoke portentous words of doom.


A flash, a feeling of sudden heat and cold, total disorientation, and—there we were!


Where? Well, at first glance, we seemed to be in a big glass jar at the bottom of what seemed to be some kind of ocean. Just beyond the glass we could see Shelyid in a peculiar get-up—a helmet of some kind, with a hose leading above into the gloom. The dwarf had a chain in his hand and was trying to hook it up to the glass jar, which wasn't easy on account of he was being beset by every kind of monster you could imagine. But he seemed pre-occupied with something else, because as soon as he saw us he started gesturing madly at something in the glass jar behind us. When we turned around, we saw Polly Kutumoff all tied up with rope, which was a lot of rope on account of the girl looked to be about eight and 99% months pregnant.


"Boy, am I glad to see you!" she said, snapping with her teeth at a really nasty-looking acronym that was trying to bite her on the neck—CREEP, it was—while she was trying, with bound feet, to stomp another one that was crouching by her leg.


"You're pregnant!" cried the first.


"No kidding," snarled Polly. Snap! Good teeth, that girl had. EEP went scuttling off; she spit CR out in a hurry.


"Be careful!" she warned. "These things are venomous. Poisonous, too."


"How did you get in such a fix?" demanded the second.


Polly stomped DRM and then fixed the second with a glare.


"By screwing, how else?" She snapped at another acronym and swept her feet around wildly. The damned things were all over the place.


"Not that, lass—'tis obvious!" exclaimed the third.


"Nay, we mean—" For a wonder, words failed the third; he was reduced to gesturing about him.


"All of you shut up and do something useful!" bellowed Magrit. "If I'm not mistaken, the girl's about to give birth."


I didn't think she was mistaken. She's a proper witch, Magrit; which, among other things, means she's been a midwife more times than you can count. She and Gwendolyn began untying Polly.


Within seconds, Les Six were frantically trying to fight off venomous acronyms. I myself had no trouble. An acronym began scuttling toward me—RIAA, that one—I flickered my tongue, the acronym went elsewhere. Simple as that. Acronyms are terrified of salamanders. Actually, the nasty things generally ignore any kind of animal except humans, who are their natural prey.


I heard Gwendolyn chuckle. "Nice move, Wittgenstein. Did you ever hear the one about the frying pan and the fire?"


I maintained a dignified silence.


 


 


 


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