Kitman Versus The Squirrels
A novel. With some squirrels in.
In Which The Solution Presents Itself.
This was it, this was the point where Kitman would reveal the solution he'd been cogitating upon in the background, and...what?
"I beg your pardon?" I said. "Do I have any suggestions?"
"I must admit to being stumped."
"That's not funny."
"Wasn't it?"
"No."
"Ah well." He leaned up against the wall and folded his arms.
"So we're trapped?" I said.
"Oh. No. We can vaxillate out of here to several locations. But then what?"
I tried to think of something we could do once we had escaped. "Well, ideally we'd stop the squirrels."
"Yes," said Kitman. "A key point. I've got a partial solution, mind you — and it's a beautiful solution, sweet and simple — but it's unimplementable."
I stared at him until he continued.
"We want to stop the squirrels, which probably implies catching them, so what we want is a squirrel siphon." He pulled a napkin from his pocket and scribbled on it. "See?"
It was a doodle consisting of a squirrel, a dotted outline of a squirrel, and an arrow pointing from the former to the latter. "It's a bit conceptual," he said. "Allow me to explain." He pulled the vaxillator out of his backpack and showed me a glowing cloudlike image. "This is the resosignature of the Id-squirrel. Those four interlocked antennas really did the job, by the way. Much better solution than alligator clips."
"Okay," I said. "And?"
"I thought you'd never ask. Through a simple inversion and amplification of the Id-squirrel resosignature —" he pushed buttons, doing exactly that; the colors on the screen reversed, and became vastly more intense — "we create what can be described as negative squirrel potential — an area of less than no squirrels. That's the dotted outline, here."
I looked at the napkin again. "You're right, it is a bit conceptual."
"Which is only fair. Anyhoo, we simply use a reifier to manifest that field of negative squirrel potential and vacuum the little devils up. I'm assuming of course that the others are substantially identical, but then they are near-identical triplets. All I need to do is design and build a reifier. And I've got a whole backpack full of science stuff to do it with."
"Okay," I said. "What's the hold-up?"
He sighed. "I've been thinking and thinking, but thanks to one thing and then another the situation has become so...I hesitate to use the word normal while standing inside a transdimensional maple tree...so normalish that I can't design a reifier. I really thought I'd come up with something at the last minute — but all I've got is a technobabble concept. Apparently it's something that now can't happen. Other than that it's the ideal solution."
He inhaled to sigh again...
...and said "Hmm."
"Hmm?" I said.
He turned his gaze to the floor. "Hmm," he said.
"Hmm?" I said.
"Experimentation is the first breath and last gasp of science," he said, softly, and not to me. "Valid observation always, always trumps theory. Evidence above all. What works, works."
And then he did, in fact, sigh — grimly.
He reached into his jacket.
He pulled out a pad of paper and a pen.
He held them out to me.
"Here," he said. "Write us out of this mess."
"Hah?" I said.
He continued to hold the pen and paper out to me. "Kuan Kuo said Nash Mider and Noel dreamed something like a world into existence. You brought our duplicates into existence just by telling a story. So write me a reifier."
I stared at the pad and pen. He wiggled them at me.
"Well?" he said. "My genius has struck out. You're our only hope."
It was ludicrous. "Kitman —"
"Come now, Williams!" said Kitman. "I don't ask for much, I'm not demanding; I don't throw a fit in the absence of differential equations. I'm not proud, I'll solve anything. And if the problem is tractable only in terms of mystic trash — whether that's exerting sheer force of will until beads of sweat stand out upon your brow like Green Lantern, or writing your way out of the hole through symbolic manipulation like some literary cargo cultist — then that's simply what it takes, and so be it. So in this case you are my last-minute solution."
I took the pad and pen, as there didn't seem to be any alternative.
I opened the pad to a blank page, and I stared at it, and wondered how this could possibly work.
"Nash and Noel," I said, "just sort of dragged a collection of pre-existing images together. When our duplicates showed up, that was mostly done by the environment."
"Duh!" said Kitman — and when Kitman says duh, it means so much more than when any normal person does. "That's the whole point of technological science, you know — getting the universe to do the work! Just write me a narrative. If we're lucky, the universe will meet you halfway, and the two of you will get together and make me a brainchild in the form of a reifier!"
And somewhere in the back of my mind a notion crawled into sight.
Maybe, the notion went, you're looking at this the wrong way around.
Kitman's right, but in the wrong way. You don't need to make a brainchild — you don't need to pull a solution out of a hat — because you are the solution.
Every time reality bent, it bent to benefit you. Every time.
What made all this possible?
When did the journey begin?
I cast my mind back...and it hooked a lunch box.
•
"Do you remember my Charlie Brown lunch box, Kitman?" I said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"My family moved to Abelton Park because my parents didn't like the school system where we lived. We moved into our house the last week in August and school started the first week of September.
"Hah...?"
"First day of school in first grade," I said, beginning to doodle on the notepad. "Lunchtime recess. I remember crossing a schoolyard full of strangers I didn't dare speak to. I remember sitting down on an empty bench. I looked down at my lunch box, and it was a Charlie Brown lunchbox. And I knew — I knew — that the way I felt right then would be the way I would feel for the rest of my life. Alone and empty, just like Charlie Brown."
Kitman stared at me. "I don't remember any such lunch box," he said, after a while.
"That, Kitman, is because you blew it to tiny little bits that very afternoon."
"I did?"
"It took us half an hour to pull all the shards out of the back door. Which is why your parents ended up replacing it with the sliding door in the first place, not to mention telling you to build yourself a lab, rather than using the back porch."
"Oh," he said, in the tones of Marcel Proust after eating an entire box of Lorna Doones. "Oh. Yes. That lunch box. You know, I still think that could have worked... Did I ever apologize for that, by the way?"
"You didn't have anything to apologize for. You blew up my fate. You sat down next to me on that bench. You asked me if I'd mind participating in a scientific experiment.
"And I have never, ever felt alone or empty again."
I must record that he blushed.
"You take in strays, Kitman. It's your character. It's your character because you grew up with the World Tree in your back yard. And so did I, pretty much. It made both of us.
"And it's been nudging us all this time to get us to where we are right now."
"All right," said Kitman, "so what's the upshot? It's been guiding our path this whole time, what does it want?"
I showed him the doodle I had drawn.
"Oh," he said. "Well. Of course. We can manage that, I suppose."
