The Space Opera Novella

by Frank Belknap Long

  Uzmet nodded grimly. This was Crevbnod doing, all right. Handling meant wear, in time lessening the lead enough for the tovh to bear it away. And handling kept the vicious circling bullroaring on, for lead rubbing off on the hands contaminated food and led to poisoning—ay, and to the need for more rubbing of amulets.

  The whole thing would’ve ended when the amulets ran out, for though the Capellans were able to mine lead and fashion new circlets they couldn’t replace the gems. But someone said that there might be another way: what might not go up might well go down. And that was where the shulwijies came in.

  And here the keeper broke off and glared at Xij.

  Pretending not to notice that he was drawing the notice of others with the clinking, Xij counted out a number of coins. He crossed to a slot machine that Uzmet only now saw and fed it. It regurgitated a small pig of lead.

  He hefted it and scowled.

  “Making them smaller and smaller.”

  “You know our lead is petering out,” the keeper said reprovingly. “Well, I suppose you want a shulwijy?”

  Xij opened his mouth. Without waiting for an answer the keeper entered the high-fenced enclosure and took hold of a shulwijy. He was too dim-sighted to make head or tail of the beast at first and had a time leading it out.

  Xij took it over. He held out the pig. “Here,” he said ungraciously.

  The keeper took the pig and rubbed it, though he asided to Uzmet that he couldn’t say how much good it really did. Disease still saddled them—he himself had a touch of it, and just glance at that beggar. But you had to agree the miraculous maintaining of the shulwijy count was a sure sign of something.

  Xij hopped impatiently, jingling, until the keeper finally handed back the little ingot. Then he motioned to Uzmet and started off, the shulwijy plodding until he gadded it into eagerness with the pig.

  When they were out of ear-shot of the keeper, though Uzmet’s back still felt within eye-shot, Xij said sullenly, “I was going to tell you all that.”

  “Goes without saying,” Uzmet said soothingly. “But you didn’t let him tell me what part the shulwijy plays in your super—your beliefs.”

  Xij smiled reminiscently. He grew blithe. “Better mind your footing. You can trip and—”

  Endorsing which, the going toughened as the town taffied out that road they trod. The sun poised its glint overhead when they came to a hole in the ground, seemingly augered to infinity. A phalanx of Capellans waited at the rim. Their dull eyes gleamed when they saw the lead, and they togethered around Xij. Tremblingly each of them fondled the lead.

  The shulwijy turned its eyes trustingly on Xij as he manipulated the pig into a horseshoe-shaped collar and fitted it around the beast’s jowls.

  Xij patted the shulwijy lovingly, and it was heart-breakingly clear to Uzmet that there was something worth saving in Xij’s people and—he silently defied the image of his Chief—if he could work to that end he would. Xij gave the beast another pat, one that put it into the pit.

  After long long listening, a hollow barathrum! of bethudded beast.

  The watching Capellans sighed up a breeze, then turned and dotted the landscape back toward town.

  * * * *

  Trying to contain himself, Uzmet said, “The lead would have fallen of its own weight. Why did you shove the shulwijy too?”

  Xij explained it away. The shulwijy had to go—partly as a magical ingredient because of its visitant associations, partly as ballast (though after what Uzmet had just said it seemed a rather weak reason), but mostly as the first flesh to sop up any disease that might seep out of the lead.

  “Why did you take of your few coins and buy that pig of lead, and why if you fear healing did you handle it?”

  Xij said weightily, “One must do as most do.” He made sure they were alone and smiled scapegraciously. “Besides, they reward such doings many times over. And as for the handling—” and in grandiloquent silence he peeled off transparent gloves—“A trick of the trade.”

  A floating kidney of a cloud cast its shadow over them and Xij suddenly shivered. He gazed townward and said, “We’d better get indoors before it rains. Are you coming?”

  Uzmet hesitated.

  “To tell the truth,” Xij said, “I want to get back before darkness falls and the howling of the shulwijies for their missing begins. Our wise ones say the howling makes the spirit of the missing materialize and that is the way the shulwijies maintain their numbers. Strange tracks appear and disappear along this road, as if the lost shulwijy was materializing by halves. No one goes wandering when the shulwijies howl.”

  “All the same, I think I’ll stay a while.”

  Xij opened his mouth, shut it, shook his head, and left.

  He was a dot when Uzmet forced himself to focus his spy-ring upon the shulwijy’s remains. What he saw astonished him.

  The beast was whole and sound. The last of the lead was vanishing into its mouth. It stood ruminating and spitting out impurities.

  And Uzmet saw as in a lightning flash a vision of shulwijies chomping the glaze of his craft—the lead glaze, extra nutritious, no doubt, with the cosmic radiation that had altered its properties.

  Drops puddled a great grayness around him and wrinkled it as if they were dark thoughts. He zipped up and waited. The rain stopped and clammy darkness closed down. Then from pit and zoo yawping reached him, ending on a note of triumph as the moon rose.

  The shulwijy moved. It leaped from one thin ledge to a higher until it was out of the pit. And leaving groups of imprints—hind feet before forefeet—far apart, it bounded amazingly away.

  Uzmet sloshed after it for a moment, then followed it with the spy-ring. At the zoo, with a lazy liquid motion, it lifted lightly over the high enclosure. Uzmet pitted his feet against the mud.

  The moon was long gone and the shulwijies were at their yawping again when Uzmet reached the zoo and broke in. His craft opened to his coded tapping. Its innards were intact. He grabbed a crowbar and braved the shulwijy din.

  He jimmied the vending machine and stowed all but one pig of lead in his craft. That one he used to lure a still yawping shulwijy aboard. He gave thanks that its drooling oiled its hoarseness.

  It was dawning when he squeezed out to shoo the other shulwijies away. He was ready to blast off. But he hesitated to squeeze inside again. It was crowded in there. Altogether too crowded. With a sinking heart he remembered the journey in. The journey out would be twice as bad. Could he take it?

  He broke out in a sweat. The keeper, not seeing the gate was open, was trying to unlock it and let in Axos and Znassos and Xij. Xij saw Uzmet and hailed him.

  With a shulwijy-class leap Uzmet made it to his craft. Before closing down the hatch he rose to wave farewell. But he saw them closing in and he resumed his seat and zoomed into the curdling Milky Way.

  * * * *

  “Hum. Now we’re getting somewhere. I feel sorry for Uzmet, of course. But they say he’ll get over yawping like a shulwijy.”

  “Hum. That yawping twice a night shows the shulwijy is cocked to herald two moons.”

  “Hum. Don’t be so sure, Could be two crossings of one moon.”

  “Hum. Well, anyway, the labsters have worked out from the shulwijy’s body structure the gravitational pull of its native planet, and from its juices the chemical make-up—”

  “At one stage of its evolution at least.”

  “—of its native seas, and from its spectral reactions the type of sun it normally blinked at—Class S.”

  “Hum. S for Smack. What’s the whole of that mnemonic again, the one for remembering the sequence of classes of suns?”

  “Hum. Ah. O,B,A,F,G,K,M,R,N,S. ‘Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now. Smack!’”

  “Harrumph. Well, now we know the what of what we’re hunting. Enough time and box-tops and we’ll learn the where.” />
  “Hum. Ambiguous, that Smack. Kiss? Or Slap?—Miss Jaxin.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Please step into my office.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Click, click, click, click, click. “Yes, sir?”

  “Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now.”

  Smack!

  CHAPTER V

  In 2825, Ubrem Ogg, DSX Agent 1999, landed on Eta Normae II and primly picked his way across the pocked landing field. At first he affected not to hear the shrilling of the adrobots.

  But one adrobot by its dignifiedly modulated tones caught his ear. Though a competing adrobot was trying to jam its message, it was bravely telling in a stiffly decorous style the manifold virtues of Ergggerrr’s Custom Tailoring.

  Yes, it would be fitting, Ogg thought, before going about his sizing up of Crevbnod sowing on this planet, to buy a suit of native weave and cut. It would make him stand out less.

  And disdainfully ignoring the cajoling and threatening of the competing adrobot, which to judge by its coarse manner obviously represented an inferior product, he stepped into Ergggerrr’s adrobot. Armor closed around him and he gazed boredly through a slit at monotonously streaking landscape.

  A sudden jolt shivered the landscape. The adrobot of the rival outfit had overtaken them and was trying to hijack Ogg. In the ensuing running battle Ergggerrr’s adrobot sustained several more jarring hits. But it gave as good as it got and in the end sent the foe limping away.

  Then it rattled into a friendly service station to replace a missing screw. A mechrobot turned screws on a lathe until it came up with one that would fit snugly. And then the adrobot was again rolling smoothly, the mechrobot looking after it neon with satisfaction.

  There was no more trouble; the adrobot delivered Ogg safely. With a series of flourishes the master tailor himself, Narlebb Ergggerrr, produced a ball of twine, laid off the distance from the Adam’s apple of Ogg to the belly button of Ogg, snipped the twine, scribbled upon a tag, and with another bit of string tied the tag to the length he had snipped. Meanwhile his apprentices were following suit and in no time at all a string of strings representing the saliences of Ogg’s anatomy fluttered off to the cutting room. And soon Ogg was trying on the suit.

  Through the apprentices’ mistaking several of the pieces of string tying the tags to the pieces of string that were measurements, for the pieces of string that were measurements, he was in at one ear and out at one elbow. Still, as that sort of thing seemed to be the prevailing style, he wasn’t too embarrassingly aware of standing out, and he paid up and left, sure it was worth every hard-earned boxtop it cost.

  The blare and glare of traffic told him what the main line of work was. All sorts of charlatans were availing themselves of adrobots. “More quacks than Macdonald’s farm,” Ogg muttered, or thought he muttered—in the blasting that was going on he couldn’t be sure.

  His new suit would have made him look inconspicuous enough if he were moving in a throng. But he had the walk almost to himself. He halted. It sounded as if somewhere a bomb had gone off.

  He stopped wondering how far away it was. There was peril nearer at hand. He moved as fast as was in keeping with the maintaining of his dignity. It wasn’t quite fast enough. He got out of adrobot crossfire and away with a whole skin, but a stray shot burned away part of his suit.

  He would have to repair to Ergggerrr’s. He strode rapidly back toward the shop, his cheeks flaming though he felt a breeze.

  He stopped in shocked dismay.

  There was no Ergggerrr’s. An explosion had gutted the shop. In the smoking debris stood Ergggerrr, his hands wringing sweat. Apprentices moved around in varying degrees of daze, picking up charred shreds of cloth and carefully putting them down again. An old assistant was running madly about, whipping string from place to place, measuring distances on the air.

  Ergggerrr at length managed to concentrate on what Ogg, with a great summoning of patience, was saying. But he indicated the shreds and shrugged. He said unfeelingly, “You’ll have to wait until we raid Their warehouse.”

  Ogg inflated dangerously. It was a conspiracy to rob him of his dignity. He glared around at the scene.

  Two apprentices were netting the mad assistant. All at once his eyes went sane.

  “I’m all right,” he said wearily, and he sank to a pile of rubble. He gazed around and took in Ogg’s plight. He hesitated, then reached into an inside pocket. There sounded a fusillade of crackling that made everyone else duck. His ancient hand drew out a coeval parchment. He unfolded it, making another fusillade, and regarded it for a moment. His eyes streamed silver threads. Then he held it out to Ergggerrr. “You might make do with this,” he said in a shaking voice.

  Ergggerrr frowned at the curlicues covering it.

  Ogg said quickly, “I don’t care whether the design matches exactly so long as it does the job.”

  Ergggerrr seemed disappointed in Ogg. But he shrugged and waved the piece to an apprentice, who took it and Ogg’s suit and vanished.

  Waiting, Ogg poked morosely at the litter. His probing brought to light a painting.

  Ergggerr seized it with a glad cry and sank to his knees. “His Highness,” he breathed, and he gently wiped it.

  “Your ruler?” Ogg stared at the subject of the painting. “Odd shape his head has.” Quite conspicuous.

  “A nice shape.” Ergggerrr swung his body between the painting and Ogg.

  “That’s what I meant. I never saw a head with such a nice long peak.” Much too conspicuous to be in good taste.

  “Really?” Ergggerrr brought the painting around again. “Yes, our Director was one of the first heads of state to come to a point and I believe he still holds the record. Ah, yes, it takes me way back. I can remember seeing casts of His Highness squirming in his crib, his tiny fists reaching up to his crown—a gilded circlet with a strange flashing stone. And I can recall marveling at the tides of the throbbing fontanel and wondering at the first beginnings of the peaking at the bregma. Ah, the changes I’ve seen! No more mass producing! Everything custom built! Some have seen better days, so they say.” He nodded at the ancient assistant, who was sitting silently amid the rubble as if reminiscing, “But these times suit me.” He broke off as an apprentice returned bearing Ogg’s outfit. “Ah, we’ve mended it, I see, and it looks as good as new, if I say so myself.”

  Ogg hastily donned it and gratefully paid up. As he stepped self-possessedly out through what would have been the door an adrobot streaked past, greeting him with a burst of humiliating laughter. “An Ergggerrr suit! Ergggerrr suits are lousy suits!” Ogg reddened and stepped hurriedly back inside.

  At Ogg’s distraught urging, Ergggerrr kindly put off the raid he and his helpers were planning, so the Ergggerrr adrobot might deliver Ogg to the landing field.

  * * * *

  “I warn you, Ogg, I’m taping this in case I have to bring you up on charges.”

  “Yes, Chief. Quite proper, Chief.”

  “Hum. Now why did you end your mission before you even began it? You know how few we are and how big the job is. Ogg, I was counting on you.”

  “Sorry to let the DSX down, sir. But it was quite impossible for me to stay there and maintain my dignity. Sir, I hope you understand I wasn’t thinking of myself as an individual. I was thinking of myself as representing Man.”

  “Do you understand that Time is breathing down Man’s neck? Everywhere we keep running into dead ends. And here, just when you had a promising lead—I’m talking about that crown jewel; it sounds to me like a tovh—you had to abandon it. And why? Because you were afraid of bruising your feelings! Ogg, Ogg, Ogg! Hum. But recriminating gets us nowhere. Isn’t there anything—anything—you can add?”

  “Only that the place is swarming with those who fatten on superstition. More adrobots huckster for the pseudo-sciences than for any other sort
of product or service. Phrenologists head the list. This one is ‘by appointment to’ one Director, that one is ‘by appointment to’ another Director. Every court has its Royal Phrenologist to keep tab on the Heir Apparent’s pate and let the Royal Bureau of Standards know when it reaches its peak.”

  “Hum… I’m waiting.”

  “Sir, I’ve told you all I know.”

  “Hum.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, to have to say I didn’t stay to find out more. But that place is too much for me. I’d rather face a firing squad.”

  “Hum. Stand up and turn around,” Y-yes, sir.

  Crackle, crackle.

  “Hum. Move it over in front of the decoder.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Crackle, crackle, crackle.

  “Hum. Better bend over a bit.”

  Crackle.

  “Hum. Now don’t stir. I’m turning on the scanner. Hum. Nothing. Ah, well. You can straight—”

  “Please forgive delay. Had to orient to upside-down reading matter, will now begin to translate—”

  “Hold it, Ogg!”

  “—Message.

  “News format, masthead reads quote These Times unquote. Item reads quote gvizfuz city comma five-oh-fourday comma twenty-eight-oh-one period press release from space visitors colon quote we are happy to answer your many kind requests and tell you what we think of your culture period but first we want to thank the welcoming committee dash a truly noble group of great scientists dash for showing us about period peace be upon professors avyafss comma idginaa comma and dybdivv exclamation mark new paragraph

  What we have seen has impressed us very much comma but nothing more than your sterling character period your character is such that we know we would affront you should we try to hold back our few unflattering but well-meaning words of advice period new paragraph it seems to us you are losing sight of the real value of measure period new paragraph