Quozl

by Alan Dean Foster

  His sister. The entire improbable business had nothing to do with the long-departed High-red-Chanter and his mate. It was his sister. This was how she dealt with the trust of Runs-red-Talking and the colony. This was how she kept the great secret—by splashing it all over the airwaves every Saturday morning, indoctrinating the youth of America in the ways of the Quozl. Everything Runs-red-Talking had told her, everything she’d been able to glean from her brother’s previous four years of contact, all the long conversations she’d held with members of different surface study teams, was all there on the screen rendered in cheerful pastels for anyone to see and absorb.

  No wonder she’d done so much sketching.

  He knew she’d been making a living writing for television, but she always named a company, never a show, and he’d never bothered to inquire deeply, being too wrapped up in his own studies. He regretted his lack of familial curiosity even as he wondered how long this had been going on. Probably the show was produced right here in L.A., though there was the matter of all those oriental names. Perhaps actual production took place in Japan, or Taiwan. It was time to find out.

  His first thought was to call the local network affiliate which showed the program, until he remembered that it was Saturday. Business offices would be closed. He’d have to wait until Monday morning. There was an optional one P.M. seminar but that could wait. Everything could wait.

  For lack of anything better to do he dressed himself, wondering how his sister was capable of such complete betrayal. Revealing the secret to a friend or two he could understand, but to put the entire colony on television? Beyond belief!

  Too late to do anything about it now. The genie was out of the bottle. She’d delivered up the Quozl for more than thirty pieces of silver, much more.

  Was it all the result of artistic frustration? He could remember Mindy yelling aloud when unable to compose the right sentence, or when she couldn’t think of the proper word, or when a page didn’t read back right. Could recall her endless efforts to finish a novel. All those years of struggling to make it as a writer, of humiliating visits to their parents to ask for still another loan whereupon her mother would sigh and come up with another few dollars, another pitiable check, insisting quietly and unconvincingly that this would be absolutely, positively, the last time they could help her out. The rejections coming in the mail, one close upon the posting of the next.

  She’d sold a couple of short stories to magazines that paid in copies and criticism, two or three magazine articles for three-figure paybacks, and one lamentable concept for a slasher film that never got beyond the talking stage. Yet she struggled on. To her mother she showed perseverance, to her father unremitting stubbornness.

  Then the big breakthrough which he heard about only casually. A writing job with some big production company. No movies, just television, but nice, steady, well-paying work. If Judas were alive today, Chad thought grimly, would he have a piece of the ancillary rights to the story of the crucifixion?

  Story editor. He wasn’t sure what it meant but it sounded impressive. A credit all to her own, that lasted a few nanoseconds longer than most of the others.

  Come to think of it, she had said something during a holiday dinner about writing specifically for children’s television. Since she hadn’t elaborated he hadn’t inquired. To him children’s television meant Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow on PBS, not Saturday morning cartoons.

  He slammed the door as he exited his apartment, wondering how he was going to restrain himself for the duration of the weekend. He considered confronting her immediately. She had a fancy house somewhere out in the west Valley. But it would be better to beard her in her lair, at the studio where she worked, where she couldn’t flee as easily. Find out where she performs her perfidy, he told himself. Confront her there. He exited the building fuming. Despite the fact that he was not an especially impressive physical specimen, the pedestrians who saw his face made it a point to give him plenty of room on the sidewalk.

  There was nothing else he could do, not even anyone to share his fury with. Not that it mattered anymore. Why try to conceal the Quozl’s existence when everything there was to know about them was right there for anyone to see every Saturday morning at eight o’clock? The greatest secret on Earth sandwiched in between screaming ads for syrupy cereals and plastic avengers.

  It was easy to find out where she worked. All he had to do was call his mother and ask. Controlling his tone while he put the question was much harder.

  So it was that on Monday morning next he found himself pacing the false tile floor of the reception area in a new, slickly decorated building in Encino, when what he should have been doing was dissecting microorganisms at UCLA. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they made him wait.

  For years he’d had to listen to his parents brag to their friends of their daughter’s success in the fiercely competitive world of television. And what about their son, the brainy one? Oh, him. He was working on his advanced degree. Still. If only they knew, Chad thought, that his sister’s achievements lay in her ability to plagiarize and adapt, not in originality and invention. That her clever tales were stolen from alien storytellers and her character designs sketched from life.

  The office whose confines he paced like a caged bobcat was decorated with framed animation cells taken from the company’s many programs and features. Most were utterly unfamiliar to him, depicting superheroes, funny animals, and distorted children. A few, however, were taken from the Quozltime show and these drew his attention. The unnatural shapes, the amplified speech and cute names and other changes did not surprise him. This company was not in the business of making documentary films.

  The magazines arrayed on the coffee tables were alien to him: Variety, The Reporter, American Cinema, Animato. As he paced the room people came and went, sometimes dropping off packages at the receptionist’s window, other times making pickups, occasionally vanishing into unknown regions through a single back door. None of them wore a suit or tie.

  After a while the receptionist glanced out at him and said, “You can go back now, Mr. Collins. Straight down the main corridor to the end, turn right, last door overlooking the courtyard.”

  He hesitated at the doorway. “What number is her office?”

  She smiled at him. “There’s no number. Her name’s on the door.”

  Her name is on the door, he thought. Why not? Wasn’t she the story editor? She did more editing than anyone imagined, he reflected as he strode past tiny rooms overflowing with piles of books, drawings, posters, sketches, and magazine cutouts, past people hunched over angled boards beneath intense little lights. Strange machines hummed and whirred and bulbs strobed unexpectedly.

  Few of the doors were closed. Among them was the one with his sister’s named emblazoned across it. Automatically he raised a hand to knock, then said the hell with it and walked in.

  It was unexpectedly spacious, an enclosed palace compared to the cubbies he’d just passed. There was a couch, a few chairs in skeletal Danish Modern, an equally spindly desk. Framed cells hung on the walls. Not all were from the Quozltime show. The big glass window provided a view of a sunken courtyard lush with palm trees, philodendron, and hibiscus, a rectangular tropics circumscribed by a sea of concrete. The carpet beneath his feet was shaggy contoured white, in imitation of a dozen flayed polar bears.

  The two garbage pails were empty because everything was piled on the desk. Some of the items he recognized from childhood: a favorite doll, a tired sneaker. The desk was in the shape of a large “U.” A typewriter rested on the right, a computer keyboard and terminal to the left. His sister sat in the middle, surrounded and protected by her electronic flanks. She looked up with a startled smile when he entered.

  “What a surprise! You should’ve called so I’d known you were coming, Chad.”

  “So you could’ve met me somewhere else?”

  “Actually I’m surprised it’s taken you this long.”

  “I’ve been sort of
busy,” he replied laconically. “You don’t get a Ph.D. in biology by faking your lab results, and unlike certain other professions, you can’t borrow the basics from other people.”

  “This isn’t how I wanted this to start off, but since it already has, why don’t you at least sit down and make yourself comfortable?”

  “I may never be comfortable again, thank you. I’d rather just stand. If I sit down I might get my strength back, and if I get my strength back I’m liable to punch something.”

  “It’s a wide desk. I don’t think you’ve got that much reach. I’m not worried, Chad. You can talk about it all you want, but you’re not the violent type.”

  “I’m glad you’re not worried. Would you be worried if I went straight to your boss and told him what you were doing?”

  She smiled. “And what am I doing? What would you tell my boss?”

  Hard to hide pure bluff. It gleamed like polished coal, with its own unmistakable inner light. He couldn’t tell her boss a damn thing, of course.

  “How could you do it?” was all he could finally say, staring evenly over the desk. “The Quozl,” he lowered his voice, “they trusted you. Runs-red-Talking and Blue-watches-Time and all the rest. They trusted you with everything: their history, their stories, their very existence. And you betrayed all that. For money.”

  She wasn’t smiling anymore. “Did I?” She picked up a pencil and began chewing on the eraser, a childhood habit she’d been unable to break. Between the typewriter and the terminal he wondered what use she had for a pencil.

  “Am I supposed to argue with you?” He looked away from her. “You’ve given away the Quozl. You’ve told the whole world of their existence. All those sketches you made, all those notes you took, it was with this in mind all along, wasn’t it? You were never really interested in the Quozl for their own sake, you were only intrigued by their commercial possibilities. Have they been profitable for you?”

  “Not much use in denying it,” she told him evenly.

  “How long? How long have you been writing about them for others?”

  “Ever since that first summer. The idea of using them and their stories as the basis for a kidvid struck me the instant I saw them, but I wasn’t sure what approach to take or how to write a pilot and bible. I had all winter to think about it.

  “By the end of the second summer I had enough material for a proposal. I took it to my agent. She thought we might get a movie out of it. It didn’t kick around very long before Barbara Hammer, who’s in charge of production here, had it on her desk. She called me in and asked for three scripts. That took another winter. The show sold immediately. We’re into our second season and gearing up for the third. Quozltime’s been number one in its time slot ever since it went on the air.” There was wonderment in her voice.

  “Nobody expected it to do what it’s done. The spin-offs, the ancillary rights have been unreal. We’ve got companies, big corporations, bidding against each other for a slice of the action.”

  “I saw some of the stuffed toys.”

  “Oh, good. Nice, aren’t they? Have you seen any of the McDonald’s glasses yet?”

  McDonald’s glasses! He turned back to her, more numb now than angry. “It really doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? Your betrayal, what you’ve done? It means nothing to you at all. You talk of money, not trust. As far as what’s going to happen to the Quozl, you could care less.”

  “On the contrary,” she said with unexpected passion, “I care very much. But you tell me what’s going to happen to them. You’re the bright kid, the one who always brought home the good grades, the one Mom and Dad always patted on the head. You tell me.”

  “They’re going to be overrun. They’re going to be put under heavy guard and watched all the time and poked and prodded and examined. The government will quarantine them until it can make up its collective mind what to do with them. Then the xenophobes will start squawking about an invasion, and the rednecks will start loading their hunting rifles and making reservations for flights to Idaho, and the televangelists will scream about godless aliens, and …”

  “Calm down. None of those things are going to happen. Because nobody knows anything about the Quozl except what they’ve seen on television. The government doesn’t know the Quozl exist. The rednecks and the televangelists and the xenophobic types don’t know the Quozl exist.”

  He gaped at her. “I don’t want to shatter the neat little illusion you’ve constructed for yourself, but you’ve put them right there on Saturday morning television for everyone to see. It’s only a matter of time before the dangerous types figure everything out.”

  “Really? Before they figure out what, Chad? That a Saturday morning kid show about friendly aliens is based on reality? How are they going to do that? As far as any other human being is concerned, the Quozl are nothing but a product of one writer’s imagination. Mine. How many of the shows have you actually sees? Not many, I’ll bet, or you would’ve been here sooner. How many?”

  He found himself studying one of the courtyard palms. “Well only one, so far.”

  “One. If you’d been watching since the start of the first season you’d know that none of the episodes say anything about a Quozl colony hidden in the Idaho mountains. None of them mention their arrival on Earth. That’s one of the beauties of children’s television. You put something on the air and it exists as of that moment. There’s no need for history or explanation. Even if I had mentioned the actual colony it wouldn’t matter because nobody would take it seriously. This is kidvid, Chad. Not Masterpiece Theater.

  “The Quozl in the show live near a small town in Southern California. I used Ojai for my model, but it could be anywhere. They interact freely with kids and act like overgrown adolescents themselves. They’re about as much like the real Quozl as the Care Bears or the Smurfs.” She rocked back in her chair.

  “They’re no more real to this audience, no more betrayed, than if Sylvester and Tweety Pie were thought to be living secret existences in Greenwich Village. They’re less real to the kids who watch the show than are Henson’s Fraggles. They’re not even puppets; they’re two-dimensional drawings. As for the adults, the only time they think about Quozl at all is when their kids are bugging them to buy the latest book or action figure or stick-on.”

  He stared at her. “You can’t believe it’s going to stay that way forever.”

  “Why not?” Her smile was back. “Chill out, little brother. The Quozl’s secret is as secure as it ever was. Nobody suspects their existence now any more than they did twenty years ago. The Quozl are cartoon characters that I invented. Nothing more. You’re the only human being who knows otherwise, and you’re not going to tell. So what are you so worried about?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m worried about! I’m worried that …” He stopped in mid-worry. The inescapability of her logic was oppressive.

  If he or anyone else was to suggest that the Quozl were anything other than animated fictions they’d find themselves locked up for observation.

  “You’re not going to get away with this.”

  “Of course I am. I’ve been getting away with it for three years and I’m going to continue to get away with it for as long as the show runs. If we’re lucky, five or six years. Then the Quozl will fade away like most other kid shows. It won’t matter because by then I’ll be an established name in the industry.”

  She was perfectly right, of course. There was no way he could stop her, no way he could punish her. “You’re not going back to the lake,” he told her lamely. “You’re not going to see Runs or any of the others ever again.”

  “Of course I am.” Her smile widened. “I need material for the next season. We’ve already been picked up, by the way. The third year’s the key when it comes to residuals. Do you have any idea how much money we’re talking about here, little brother?” She leaned toward him and he drew back as if from something covered in spines.

  “Look, you’ve been crawling back and fort
h to school in that beat-up old junker of yours, running on regular and prayer. That’s when it wasn’t in the shop and you had to find a bus. Why don’t you go buy yourself something new? Pick out whatever you like and have the dealer charge it to me. It’s the least I can do. If it hadn’t been for you I’d never have found out about the Quozl and there’d be no show. I’d still be trying to sell that stupid novel and magazine articles at a hundred bucks a pop. How about,” she asked him with a twinkle in her eyes, “a nice new Corvette?”

  She couldn’t have broken his train of thought any more effectively had she shot him. He swallowed.

  “That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar car.”

  “No problem. It’ll put a dent in my bank account, but like I said, you deserve it, and with the show already renewed there’ll be plenty of money coming in. Those stuffed toys you saw, the game board, the action figures and drink glasses, I’ve got a piece of all that.”

  “As the ‘originator,’” he said sarcastically.

  “Yeah, that’s right, little brother. I’ve bought Mom and Dad a few things.”

  He nodded. “You sent them on that trip to Europe last year, didn’t you?”

  “Sure. They could always get places because of Dad’s job, but they could never afford to stay in the nice hotels, eat in the good restaurants. This time they could. I took care of that. Why shouldn’t I take care of my little brother as well? If you don’t want the Corvette, how about a new Taurus or RX-7? You can use the difference to get yourself a new tv, a vcr, or a computer that didn’t come out of a cereal box.

  “I should have made the offer before, but I was always afraid you’d ask where the money was coming from. No reason for holding back now.”

  “You’re so altruistic, so thoughtful. I may puke. I’m not taking any of your tainted money, Mindy.”

  “Tainted?”

  “You’re exploiting trust for money.”