by Geoff Rodkey
“It’s possible. I did say that Ororo have a very dark sense of humor. But just to be on the safe side, don’t tell anyone about this conversation. Or about the fact that you’re selling all the Birdleys episodes to me.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I’m sorry—but if they’re that illegal, I can’t sell them to you. The government’s already looking for a reason to kick us off the planet. If somebody got busted with Birdleys episodes, it’d be obvious they came from us. So I’d pretty much be destroying the whole human race.”
Marf nodded rapidly, her skin rippling from the movement. “That is fine. I completely understand. Please forget I ever said anything about buying the videos, and don’t speak of this to anyone.” She patted me on the leg. “Also, dinner is no longer free. Let’s watch another episode.”
“Wait—dinner’s not free anymore?”
“Of course not. That was a promotional offer, designed to influence your decision in selling me the videos. If you still wish to eat Ororo food at our house, you will have to pay me a thousand rhee. Plus five thousand for your father’s medicine.”
“Oh…” A sinking feeling started to spread in my stomach. “The thing is, I don’t think we actually have money? So…”
The corners of Marf’s big dark eyes crinkled in a smile. “I thought you could tell when I was joking.”
“I can! Some of the time.”
“Don’t worry. We will give you the medicine for free. And the dinner too.”
“Thank you so much! Hey—if you let us take home the leftovers? I’ll give you all the Birdleys episodes for free. And you can sell them to anybody you want.”
Marf’s eyes widened. “Is this true?”
It was my turn to smile. “Of course not! Can’t you tell when I’m joking?”
Marf smiled back, even wider. “I enjoy your company, Lan human. It will be a real shame when I am forced to kill you.”
“I know, right? Hey, in all seriousness—should I delete these Birdleys episodes from my screen? Like, would the government kick us off the planet just for having them?”
Marf shook her enormous head. “Don’t worry about that. At least not until I’ve seen all the episodes. Please, play another one.”
I cued up the next episode and settled back into the auto-massaging couch, feeling more hopeful than usual about Planet Choom. The news about The Birdleys being illegal was a little scary, but I felt like I had at least one superintelligent giant marshmallow on my side.
Until she killed me.
But I was 98 percent sure she was joking about that.
Or maybe just 95 percent. Either way, my odds were pretty good.
AFTER MOM GOT home, tired and aching from a long day at the morgue, we all put on our best outfits, and Marf led us out the door and across the red lawn to her pod. As we approached it, the door hovered open in a dramatic-sounding whoosh.
Mom paused at the threshold and peered inside. The roomy interior was covered from floor to ceiling with some kind of luxurious-looking fuzzy purple fabric, and the seats gently rippled with the same auto-massaging substance as our beds and couch.
“Oh my,” said Mom. “This is quite a ship.”
“YEEHEEHEE…!”
“STOP! YOU CANNOT BOARD THIS POD WITHOUT APPROVAL!”
The two guards from the front of our house were flitting toward us, weapons at the ready.
“I am so sorry—” Mom began to say.
“They have approval,” said Marf, talking over her. “Please check your assignment roster.”
One of the guards flitted over to their much plainer pod, parked by the side of the house. He opened the door and checked a screen inside. Then he called out to his partner:
“The Ororo is correct. The humans have been authorized to attend evening nutrition in Lot Seven Nine Nine.”
“We will have to escort you,” his partner told us.
“I am sorry, but there is not enough room in my pod,” said Marf, practically shoving us all inside. “You may follow behind me.”
Without waiting for an answer, Marf shut the pod door on the guards and pressed a button on the control panel. Instantly the pod shot fifty yards straight up, passing through the fence with an even more explosive BZZZZZT! than usual.
It stopped as fast as it took off, hovering in midair for half a second. I had just enough time to look down and see the guards below us racing for their own pod before we took off again like a rocket.
Moments later, we were hurtling over the city so fast that the buildings passed by in a blur. The strangest thing about it was that nothing inside the pod was affected by the sudden changes in speed. When it leaped into the air, we should’ve all been flattened to the floor—but I didn’t feel more than a soft flutter in my stomach. And when the pod zoomed away, I would’ve expected us to be knocked backward like bowling pins against the rear wall. Instead, there wasn’t even a mild lurch.
My family was as bewildered as I was.
“How is it,” Mom asked, “that this pod seems to defy physics?”
“The technology is called ‘inertial buffering.’ It is difficult to explain in a way you would understand,” Marf told her.
“Ororo are seven thousand times smarter than humans,” I explained to Mom.
She nodded. “Interesting. And how did you get authorization for us to go to dinner at your house?” she asked Marf.
“That is also difficult to explain,” said Marf. I suspected she’d gotten the authorization the same way she’d gotten the clearance code that allowed her pod to cross our fence—in other words, illegally—but I kept my mouth shut. As scared as I was of the Zhuri government, I didn’t want to risk missing an Ororo meal.
Besides, now that we were in the air, if we’d broken the law, it was too late to do anything about it.
Ila sank into one of the massaging chairs and looked around. It hadn’t taken much convincing to get her to leave the house once we’d explained that we’d be eating Ororo food. “This is a really nice pod,” she said.
“Thank you!” Marf beamed. “I paid for it myself. I am a businessperson.”
“Really? What kind of business?”
“I sell things. Mostly small gadgets and toy robots that I’ve made.”
And illegal videos…if I’d let her, I thought as Marf lumbered to the rear of the pod and opened a small cabinet door along the bottom of the back wall. A two-foot-tall Krik replica made of silver steel poked its head out of the cabinet. Ila was the closest to it, and she yelped in surprise, stumbling backward as the Krik robot moved toward us, snapping its jaws and growling.
“Don’t be afraid,” Marf told Ila. “It only eats metal.”
She reached into a dish on the control panel, picked up a tiny circuit board, and tossed it at the robot, which jumped up to catch it in midair. It chomped down on the board, chewing noisily as it retreated back into its cabinet.
“Wow,” said Ila.
“My friend Ezger does not like my robots,” Marf said. “He is a Krik, and he thinks I am making fun of his species with them.” Marf paused. “Of course, he’s entirely correct.”
“Is it common for Ororo and Krik to be friends?” Mom asked. “I’d been told there were some…issues between your people.”
“You mean that they were fond of eating us?”
“Yes. That seems like a real obstacle to healthy relations.”
“It was at first. But the Ororo solved it many generations ago. We genetically manipulated our fat cells to render them poisonous to the Krik. Now, if a Krik eats any part of an Ororo, it will die instantly.”
“Is this another joke?” I asked.
“Not at all. It was a creative solution to a serious public health problem.”
Just as suddenly and smoothly as it had rocketed up to speed, the pod came to a stop, and
we descended into an Ororo subdivision that looked exactly like the one we lived in, except that all the houses seemed to have people living in them.
“And here we are,” said Marf with a smile. “I wonder how long it will take your guards to catch up to us.”
* * *
—
MARF’S HOUSE WAS identical to ours…if ours had been taken over by mad scientists who’d installed wild-looking gadgets and machinery everywhere. Her parents, Ulf and Hunf, looked just like Marf, except older, larger, and less blue-tinged.
“Welcome to our home,” said Ulf, the mother. My translator gave her a warm, pleasant, suburban-mom-on-an-old-TV-show voice signature. “We were very pleased when Marf messaged us that you would be eating here tonight.”
Hunf’s signature was an older man’s slow drawl. “I hope our daughter didn’t try to charge you money for the food,” he said with a sideways glance at Marf.
“No! Not at all,” Mom assured them.
Hunf turned to Dad. “Before we eat,” he said, “would you like an antidote for your venom poisoning?”
“I’d lurrv thaht,” slurred Dad.
In the space of ten minutes, Hunf scraped a DNA sample from Dad’s tongue, analyzed it, designed a medicinal cream that would counteract the venom without side effects, and manufactured eight ounces of it using some kind of biochemical kiln the size of a shoebox.
Dad rubbed some of the cream into his skin, and the bright red swelling began to go down almost immediately. By the time we sat down to dinner a few minutes later, his left eye had reopened, and he could talk and eat normally again.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” he told Hunf.
“It was trivial,” Hunf replied. “When you leave, you should bring the rest of the cream with you.”
“Do I need to keep using it?”
“No. But you will need it when you’re attacked again.”
When? Our eyes all widened. But before Dad could ask a follow-up question, Ulf ushered us to the table.
“Why don’t we eat?” she suggested.
* * *
—
THE MEAL WAS even more delicious than our last experience with Ororo food. There were twenty different flavors, and more of each one than we could possibly finish. We did our best not to eat like starving dogs, but we probably failed.
Ulf and Hunf didn’t seem to mind. “You should take the leftovers home with you,” Ulf said.
“Thank you so much!” Mom gushed. “We are very grateful to you for your kindness.”
We all echoed her. “Yes, thank you!”
“Thank you so much!”
“This is wonderful! Thank you!”
“It is trivial,” Ulf said. “But you are welcome. Your situation is difficult, and we are glad to help.”
“I am wondering,” Mom asked, “if you have any advice for us? We could benefit greatly from your wisdom.”
“What do you wish to know?”
“How to persuade the Zhuri that we are peaceful, so they will allow humans to stay here.”
“But you are not peaceful,” Ulf said.
Mom didn’t expect to hear that. None of us did.
“We are peaceful,” she insisted.
“As individuals, perhaps,” said Hunf. “Not as a species. You destroyed your home planet. What could be more violent than that?”
“But we’ve learned from this tragedy. And we have renounced violence, now and in the future.”
“You may wish that to be so,” said Hunf. “You may even believe it. But it isn’t true. Your species simply hasn’t reached that stage of social and emotional development.”
“In our case,” Ulf explained, “it took the Ororo more than a thousand generations to fully abandon our violent instincts.”
“Yet even now,” added Hunf, “I still wish to remove the wings of any Zhuri who parks his pod in my assigned space.”
“My husband is joking,” said Ulf.
“Only a little,” Hunf said.
“I don’t believe humans are incapable of change,” Dad announced.
“I don’t believe that either,” Hunf replied. “But such fundamental change rarely happens quickly. Humans are likely to be violent for many generations to come. But that is not the true obstacle to your finding a home on Planet Choom. The Krik and the Zhuri both have violent tendencies, yet they manage to live in peace. And Zhuri weapons technology is far superior to yours—human violence is no real threat to them. It’s simply the excuse they have chosen to justify denying you refuge.”
“But why?” Mom asked. “If they don’t fear our violence, then why do they wish to keep us out?”
“Because they fear the emotions you might create among their people,” Ulf said.
“That is the primary reason,” Hunf agreed. “But there is also an element of genuine concern for your own safety. The Zhuri are very fearful of causing another tragedy like the one that befell the Nug.”
The four of us looked at each other. Mom said what was on all our minds. “What did happen to the Nug? I’ve asked this question many times, but I’ve never gotten an answer.”
The Ororo’s eyes all widened. “Oh dear,” said Ulf. “No one told you about the Nug?” Her enormous head swiveled to look at her husband.
Hunf let out a deep, rumbling sigh. Then he pushed his chair back and rose heavily to his feet.
“When you finish your food,” he said, “please join me on the couch. This will be easier to understand if you see the video.”
THE MASSIVE ORORO couch was big enough for all seven of us. Ulf and Hunf sat on the far ends, with Marf next to her father and my family wedged in the middle, looking (and, at least for me, feeling) like little children alongside the giant Ororo. Using a remote control, Ulf clicked through the interface of a Zhuri video library on the wall-sized TV screen as Hunf lectured to us.
“In most societies,” he explained, “there are two basic forces in conflict: progress and tradition. They battle for political control. When progress has the upper hand, there is growth and change. But when that change comes too quickly or causes problems, tradition takes over to act as a stabilizing force.
“The Zhuri—who rule Choom because they outnumber the Ororo and Krik six hundred to one—are a hive species. Their biology makes cooperation sacred to them. They can’t stand the thought of conflict. Perhaps you’ve noticed their strange insistence that ‘everyone agrees’ about everything?”
We all nodded. “Oh, sure.”
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t conflict. It just means the Zhuri pretend it doesn’t exist. When the traditionalists are in control, as they are now, everyone claims to agree with them about everything…until the situation is reversed, the forces of progress take over, and suddenly everyone’s in full agreement with the exact opposite of what they agreed the week before.”
Ulf interrupted him. “I’ve found the video, dearest.”
“Don’t play it yet, my precious. I haven’t finished lecturing our guests like a pompous know-it-all.” Hunf smiled at us as he narrowed his giant eyes in what looked like a wink, then continued. “Twenty-odd years ago, the progressives had been in charge of Choom’s government for nearly a century. They received a distress call from the Nug, who were being driven from their home planet by an invader. The government offered them refuge here. Such offers have been a matter of policy since the Zhuri themselves arrived as refugees a thousand years ago.
“But they didn’t simply invite the Nug out of kindness. The government also believed they had something valuable to offer Choom’s society. The Nug prided themselves on their performing arts. Song and dance in particular were vital to their culture. The Zhuri had very little experience with that sort of thing.”
“They’re awfully boring in that way,” Marf piped up.
Hunf nodded in agreement with his daughter. “It’s true. As a species, they’re quite dull. No music, dance, drama, architecture, painting, sculpture—they just plod through life and lay eggs, really. But they’d begun to see this as a shortcoming in themselves. Partly, that’s because we Ororo had been living among them for a while, and they’d seen how much art and culture improved our own quality of life. We’ve always had tons of it. But when we immigrated to Choom, we didn’t share our art with the Zhuri, because they clearly had no taste for it. We even kept our television system separate from theirs.”
“Ororo television has dozens of channels,” Marf chimed in. “But no one can watch them except us.”
“It’s for the best,” said Ulf. “Some of our programming seems quite strange to non-Ororo. It even seems strange to me sometimes.”
“So the Nug arrived on Choom,” Hunf continued, “eager to share their art with the Zhuri—and the Nug weren’t boring at all! Quite the opposite. They held festivals of dance that lasted for days.”
“We didn’t care for the Nug’s dancing,” Ulf said. “We can move if we have to, but we’re more of a couch species. The Zhuri were quite taken with it, though. It turned out they had a real knack for mass dancing. For them, it was like their swarming behavior, only positive—joyful instead of violent. At first it seemed as if the Nug might trigger a real transformation in Zhuri society.”
“But then”—Hunf raised his hand in a dramatic gesture—“the Nug held their Festival of Wailing.”
At the mention of it, all three Ororo sighed heavily.
“It was one of their oldest traditions,” said Hunf. “They held one every five years, for ten days at a time. And it was horrendous.”
“I’ve cued it up on the TV,” Ulf said. “Would you like to see a bit of it?”
“Of course! Please,” said Mom.
Ulf pressed a button on her remote. On the wall screen, a vast plaza appeared in the heart of a Choom city, surrounded by the usual honeycomb-shaped beige buildings. The space between them was black, wet, and roiling. It looked like a stormy ocean of oil.