Chapter 12
The Calm Before
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Now that Tom and Abby had learned the Gracchian alphabet and learned how to spell simple words, Ms. Tavish started them on slightly more complex books. One of them involved mythical creatures from Gracchus legends. Termex, gibbles, niss, yalu. All of these were frightening, hulking beings who preyed on the unwary. Usually the tales involved a Gracchus who didn't listen to good advice and foolishly wandered off where he shouldn't. The similarity to Earth fairytales was striking. Then there was the class of nasty creatures that floated among the treetops: ikola, duvex, traca. These somewhat resembled ghosts but were much more vicious. Abby didn't much like these tales, especially the stories about the floating spirits.
At least when she needed to ground her mind again, there was always math. That was enough to bring anyone back to reality.
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The Ellsworths received another missive from Prospero. A few weeks ago, Prospero had reported that he and a few of his Gracchus friends were visiting the Grand Canyon. Prospero sent pictures, including one of him perched on top of one of the patient mules used to transport visitors up and down the steep trails. When Abby and Tom had visited the Grand Canyon a couple of years ago, Dad had made them hike on foot. He'd pointed out that the people on mules tended to be very large. Now Tom commented that the mule looked happy to have someone as small and light as a Gracchus on its back.
Abby thought the mule looked sad, as mules always do.
This latest communique from Prospero involved a neighborhood dog.
When Tom and Abby got home from school, it was waiting in the whirlibox. Abby picked it up and began reading.
"It's from Prospero," she announced to Tom. "Oh, no. He's having problems with Sunflower. I think it chased him, maybe bit him."
The Kennedys lived three doors down from the Ellsworths' house back on Earth. They had a chow dog that was the terror of the neighborhood children; the dog had the good sense not to pick on adults. Last summer, Sunflower bit Abby and spent two weeks in the pound where it bit another dog. Dad had pressed charges against the Kennedys, but they had received a stern warning from the municipal court judge, nothing more. It might have done more good if Dakota and Preston Kennedy had been the ones to spend two weeks in the pound; Dakota and Preston were free spirits who didn't believe in chaining up their dog, but perhaps they could have been made to see reason. Now it seemed that the dog was on the loose again.
Abby read the whole note out loud:
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To: Oliver Ellsworth and Progeny, Gracchia (000010101010)
From: Prospero, Earth (000010111000)
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My friends, are you enjoying the air of my Gracchia? I hope you received the two-dimensional images of my excursion to the Grand Chasm. ("I think he means Grand Canyon," Abby said). I send you regards. I need your advice in dealing with our neighbors' wolf descendant known as 'Sunflower'. It believes I am a prey object and has treated me accordingly. The neighbors are unresponsive to my requests for restraint of this animal. Your laws are numerous but unclear; am I allowed to use my Xenoth on the creature? Thank you for your wise counsel.
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"Xenoth? What's a Xenoth?" Tom said.
"I don't know, but I wish I could have used one on Sunflower," Abby said. "Maybe it'll send him to the moon."
"I'll ask Luke. I'll bet he knows."
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Over at the Whipples' house, Luke was in his bedroom working on a model airplane. He was close to finishing it; the body was built, the wings and tail attached. Now all that was left was some of the painting details and the careful application of the stickers. The plane was a replica of the Bell X-1, the airplane Chuck Yeager flew to break the speed of sound, Luke explained. He was into antique machines and had other models on the shelves around his room, old cars and ships and other airplanes and rockets. Tom looked at the Bell X-1 with interest. It looked like a rocket laid on its side complete with a sharp nose. The wings were almost an afterthought. Tom knew that wasn't true, but that was how it looked. It was hard to believe that in less than a hundred years, they'd gone from breaking the sound barrier to going faster than light across the galaxy. No, that wasn't quite true either. Humans didn't go fast now, exactly; they just were able to go through a quantum loophole. It wasn't the same.
After Luke had finished pointing out the Bell X-1's many interesting features, Tom asked, "Have you ever heard of a Xenoth?"
"Why?" Luke was interested. "Do you have one?"
"No. But the Gracchus renting our house back on Earth wants to use one on the neighbor's dog," Tom explained.
"I hope he does," Abby interjected. "Sunflower's a really nasty dog."
"Xenoth is just the brand name. They make these things that strap onto your arm like a wristwatch but look like miniature rockets. The ones I've seen can shoot out a sticky foam that hardens around whatever it hits. Instant freeze. Another kind gives out a sonic shriek when a button is pushed. I've never heard it but supposedly its so bad that people, um, crap all over themselves." Picking up a pair of tweezers, Luke carefully applied one of the insignia stickers to a wing, an encircled star with short striped bands to either side of the circle.
"Ugh!" Abby looked disgusted.
"I've heard they have other types, too," Luke said as he finished smoothing out the sticker.
"Like what?" Abby asked.
Luke shrugged. "Kimmy at school says that the Gracchus have a model that dissolves stuff."
"Ick. Dissolves like acid?" said Abby.
"No, the thing just disappears. We were talking about it one day-- this was before you guys came-- and Luis said that it must break apart the molecular bonds. I don't know if he really knows or is just guessing." Luke was now ready to apply the decal to the tail of the plane, number 6062, just like the original.
"So when Prospero asks if he can shoot one at Sunflower, what kind of Xenoth is he talking about?" Tom asked.
Luke thought about it as he carefully finished smoothing down the number. There. He was finished. Luke put his completed model up on the shelf next to its brethren in miniature. Finally he said, "I kind of doubt he'd dissolve the dog permanently. I'd bet that he has one that shoots foam."
Abby was a little disappointed.
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Luke walked Tom and Abby back to their house to get outside for a bit after finishing the close-up work on his model and to give his eyes something else to focus on other than small details. Luke seemed preoccupied.
“Is anything wrong?” Abby asked. She hoped that for whatever reason, the Xenoth thing wasn’t a more serious issue than Luke had let on.
“No, not wrong exactly. It’s just that Mom and Dad are considering becoming permanent resident s on Gracchia, not just temporary. They love it here, and Dad says that teaching about Shakespeare to a whole new group of minds reminds him of why he wanted to teach in the first place. I know he didn’t much like working for he university back home. He was always getting headaches, really bad migraines.”
“Don’t you want to stay here?” said Tom.
“It’s great. Mom and Dad don’t worry so much, and so they let me go out and do stuff without having to know every single minute what I’m doing. Still, I’d always known that we were eventually going back to Earth. It takes some getting used to,” Luke explained.
“Will you be a citizen, too?” Abby asked.
“A permanent resident, not a citizen. Or at least not yet. Citizen is a step above resident. I asked my Dad about the difference, and he said that citizenship has to be earned or something like that. This was right after he told me that we’re probably not going back to Earth after all, and I wasn’t listening that closely.
“At least we’ve passed the smell test already,” Luke joked.
“What smell test?”
“Didn’t you
know? The Gracchus all have a great sense of smell; I’ve heard it’s even better than a dog. When you applied to live on Gracchia, you had a visit from a Gracchus. They like to know what you smell like before they’ll grant final clearance.”
Abby was bewildered. “But the only one who visited us was Prospero and he was there to see if we could swap houses.”
“Count on it. He was giving you the smell test. If you hadn’t passed, if he didn’t like the way you smelled, you wouldn’t be here now.”
“Besides, Ab, then we had all the Gracchus over for a picnic,” Tom pointed out. He wasn’t as bothered by the idea of a smell test as was Abby.
Luke went on, “My Dad has the theory that the Gracchus change their names so easily because their real identity, for them, is tied up in smells rather than a name. ‘A name is more like an accessory instead of a defining label,’” Luke quoted in an imitation of his Dad’s voice.
Abby thought about this. At least they’d passed. In some ways, Gracchia felt so comfortable that she forgot that it was a foreign planet, that there was much they didn’t know about life here.
Abby and Tom wondered what it would be like to never go back to Earth. There were some things that they missed, like television and the movies, and they especially missed Gemma. Still, in some ways it would be hard to leave Gracchia. After only a little more than two months, it felt like they’d always been here.
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Several days passed before the Ellsworths learned of the disposition of the Sunflower Case. Oliver had transmitted a message back to Prospero telling him to enlist Gemma’s help. She was on the scene and could evaluate the best course of action.
Oliver knew how direct and unsentimental Gemma was. For a grandmother, she could be singularly bloody-minded.
As it turned out, Prospero froze the dog with foam from his Xenoth, then with Gemma’s help, delivered Sunflower to the front lawn of Preston and Dakota Kennedy without further explanation. Eventually, a vet was able to free the frozen chow dog with a carefully wielded chisel. Aside from the stench of being enclosed in foam for a day, the dog appeared to be unhurt aside from having a new fear of small, furry people.
As Gemma wrote, “The Kennedys could and did ignore disgruntled neighbors. But now that their nasty dog has been dealt with directly, they’re keeping it in its own yard. Prospero has made more than a few friends among the neighborhood children.”
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The one other item of note that late Spring was Abby’s discover that Pip was smarter than she might have guessed.
One cool, overcast afternoon, Abby was doing math homework out in the courtyard. Ms. Tavish had a sparing hand with the homework, especially with the younger students, thank goodness, but Abby didn’t have a natural knack for mathematics. So sometimes she would have to do extra work just to keep up in geometry with Sara and the Birnbaums. Abby didn’t particularly like this, but she accepted it. She was better at learning Gracchian than Tommy was, so that helped even things out.
Several weeks earlier, Abby had emptied her bag of glass marbles into the courtyard pool. Abby had never been interested in playing marbles, but she had bought them simply because she loved the way they looked. They were beautiful marbles in the four basic colors: blue, green, yellow and red. They were clear except for small sparkles in their depths. Abby had spread them throughout the courtyard pool, and they did add a pretty note when the sun was shining down into the water, and the marbles sparkled back in their bright colors.
Abby, was seeking some distraction from the tedium of doing geometry proofs (why did she have to prove anything? It had all been done before). Gazing down into the courtyard pool, trying to see Pip, Abby noticed that the marbles had been arranged in a pattern. She went to go get Tom.
“You didn’t do that, did you?” asked Tom.
“Of course not!” Abby was indignant.
“I wonder what it means. I’m going to go get Luke.”
Luke was fetched from his home to see the marvel in the Ellsworths’ pool.
“What is it?” Abby asked. “Have you ever seen an octopus do this before?”
Luke shook his head. “Never. Maybe we should ask the Gracchus.”
Pip the octopus had collected most of the colored marbles and arranged them in two piles. This was interesting enough, perhaps he liked the sparkly colors and was hoarding the marbles much as a magpie back on Earth would collect pretty things. But what was really remarkable was that Pip had separated them out by color. There was a pile of the green and the blue marbles on one side of the pool and the reds and yellow were on the opposite side.
“You know, I think the piles are by the tunnel entrances,” Luke observed. See the blues and greens are by the tunnel that leads over to my house. Westward.”
“And the yellows and reds are by the tunnel that goes over to Mr. Neudel’s house!” Abby said.
“Wow. So does that mean that octopuses have a sense of direction? Or is it something else?” asked Tom.
“I don’t know. I’m going to put some marbles in our pool too and see if he does the same thing over there,” Luke said.
“This means an octopus can see color. Pip must be able to tell the different colors apart if she can sort them like this,” observed Abby. “Cats are mostly colorblind,” she added.
When Luke added marbled to his courtyard pool, Pip did the same thing over there, and it did seem as if the octopus was using it to mark direction. The greens and blues were placed by the most westerly tunnel, and the reds and yellows were by the easterly. Abby would test Pip by putting more marbles in from time to time, and pip always sorted them in the same manner. Abby also noticed that there seemed to be fewer marbles in the pool than there were originally, and she wondered what Pip was doing with them. Obviously, the octopus was taking them somewhere, but why? Was Pip sharing them with friends? Abby’s questions would go unanswered until the summer.
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The next few weeks passed without incident both for Prospero and the Ellsworths. The season evolved into the period called Full Bloom by the Gracchus which marked the height of springtime. The main topic of conversation among the children of the Wooster School, and indeed in most of the city of Aurelia, was the upcoming Bonebreaker Race.
Even Oliver’s landlord was caught up in race fever. One day, Oliver was walking to his office when he glanced up into the woodworker’s shop. Flora was wearing a scarlet hat, a little thing with a big blue tassel on top. The tassel, a wonder of shiny blue silk, was almost bigger than the hat. Oliver stopped in to see what could inspire such a display of sartorial splendor.
“My team is a favorite to win the Bonebreaker Race this year according to the prognosticators. These,” she gestured to her hat, “are our colors. Blood in the arterial and venous.”
Heavens. “You’re a big fan?”
“Everyone is, in some way or another.” Flora was engaged in hand-carving a curvy, sinuous chair with three massive legs. The whole chair was large, probably sized for one of her Nawak customers. The chair was formed entirely out of a single piece of wood, dark cinnamon colored with fine cream veins running through it. It was a striking piece even in its unfinished state. Flora had roughed out the approximate shape and was now using finer tools to further carve the legs.
“Rumor is that you’ve joined a team,” Flora said.
Oliver admitted that he had.
Flora’s eyes twinkled and the tassel on her hat bobbed. “We approve of people—how do you Humans say it?—jumping in with both feet.”
Oliver wondered, not for the first time, just what he was in for.
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Over the next few days, Tom, Abby, and Oliver noticed more people in the street with odd things hanging around their necks or strapped around their bodies. There were skulls, small stuffed animals and little bouquets of flowers. Once Tom saw a miniature tree in a pot balanced on top of someone
’s head. Upon inquiry, all these things turned out to be symbols of favored teams. Apparently, the colors that Oliver’s landlord had been wearing were the most subtle way of indicating a preference.
The town of Aurelia too was decorated in advance of the big day. Many shops and houses were decked out in swags of color or special LED light displays, somewhat like Christmas lights back on Earth. One fan even put out a series of statues of orange and black salamanders in front of her house. This house was near the Wooster School, and Tom and Abby passed it daily on their way to school. One morning, they noticed that the statues were all wearing hats with miniature trees on them, the symbol of a rival team. The hats were gone by the time they walked home.
Ms. Tavish never held school on Bonebreaker Day; it would have been an exercise in futility since the whole town of Aurelia shut down. No shops were open, no one was at home. Everyone gathered along points of the race course to spectate, to offer help, to mislead the rival teams if possible.
By the even before the Bonebreaker Race, it seemed as if the whole town were vibrating from the excitement of the inhabitants.
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Far Travels, The Gracchian Adventures, Book One Page 12