Interstellar Pig

by William Sleator

  "Of course you can," Manny assured me.

  "You'll have to play again," Joe said, with a kind of forced heartiness.

  "You're part of it now."

  Zena watched me silently as I left.

  Mom and Dad—or, as I was beginning to think of them, the new Mom and Dad—once again plied me with questions about the neighbors. They behaved as though I had just spent the evening with celebrities. Mom, who was still rather envious, refused to believe at first that we had done nothing but play an imaginary space game. She childishly accused me of hiding something, until it became obvious, when I began to describe the game, that I was telling the truth. "Well, it certainly is very generous of them to stoop to entertaining you with that kind of kid stuff," she said. "But don't expect it to go on. By now, they must be dying for some mature, sophisticated company, I would think."

  I got away from them as soon as I could. In my bedroom, my wet jeans, still draped over the chair, had made a blue puddle on the floor.

  Then I remembered the little box in the drawer—the box the neighbors were looking for.

  I had just assumed that when they didn't find it, they would think someone else had found it years ago. At least I hoped that's what they would think.

  They wouldn't suspect naive innocent little Barney. Or would they?

  Was that why Zena had called me a liar and a cheat? How suspicious of me were they? Then I thought of how I still had the document, and felt cold all over.

  As soon as they noticed it was missing—if they hadn't noticed already—they would know I had found the box. Zena had said she could be very mean when people hid things from her. I believed her.

  I put on a pair of cotton pajamas, closed the door of my room, and took the box out of the drawer. I sat down on the bed and looked at it carefully for the first time. It was, as it had originally appeared, a tarnished black metal box. But now I saw that it was a box with a hinge, and a lid, and a simple latch that held the lid in place. It opened easily.

  The bundle inside was wrapped in old, yellowed pages from some book—the few legible remnants of archaic type were proof of their age. The only reason there was any paper left at all f was that it had been protected by the box and the trunk and the boards on top of them. There was nothing as convenient as a date on the pages, but they did seem to indicate that the bundle had not been disturbed for quite some time. I tried to unwrap the papers carefully, but they disintegrated at the lightest touch. And my hands, shaking with excitement, were clumsier than usual.

  Was it possible that this actually was the trinket the captain had mentioned, the ornament the brother had taken from the murdered sailor?

  And that perhaps, when they got home, the captain had hidden it in the trunk on the island? Was I the first person who had touched it since then?

  There was no hope of preserving the old papers. I tore them away and lifted out what was inside.

  It was a small round object that fit easily in my hand, lightweight. Its surface had not cracked or split with age, nor had the paint faded. It was a garish pink, as flawless and glossy and smooth as if it had been painted yesterday. My excitement drained away. This couldn't be the old trinket after all, despite its wrappings. It was obviously too new. Disappointed, I turned it over. Then I cried out.

  There was a face carved on this side, nothing but a rigid, slightly smiling mouth under a single wide-open eye. The lips and eye were sculpted in sharp relief. The vertical iris, inlaid in bright silver, gave the eye a piercing alertness. Crude as it was, the thing seemed alive. And it was the brutal wrongness of it, the mouth smiling with such placid idiocy, noseless, under the solitary gaping eye, that made the face so repellent.

  The Piggy.

  10

  But it couldn't be the real Piggy-

  The silver eye stared into mine with keen perception; the lilting mouth seemed to be trying not to laugh. Just in time I heard footsteps and slithered under the sheet with my findings.

  The door creaked open. It was only Mom.

  "Barney, I thought I heard you .... You're as white as a sheet! What's the matter?"

  My face was too burned to be white, but I could feel that the blood had drained from it. "Nothing, I Just came to an exciting place in my book," I said. Luckily, there was a paperback opened on the bed.

  "Well, you've had an exhausting day and I don't want you staying up late reading. I’ll be back in ten minutes to make sure your light's out." She started leave, then turned back. "And I think you'd bet-take it easy tomorrow. You've been overtaxing yourself."

  "Okay," I agreed, picking up the book.

  As soon as she left, I pulled The Piggy out from under the sheet. The interruption had brought me back to the real world; I could look at the face now without feeling crazy. It was the unexpectedness of finding it, so soon after playing the game, that had given me such a jolt.

  It was just a missing piece from a board game, that was all. There was nothing sinister about that. A little toy sculpture of The Piggy card. Naturally the neighbors, addicts of the game that they were, would be eager to get it back. The game wouldn't be right without it. You couldn't play Scrabble correctly without all the tiles.

  But how often did you search out a missing Scrabble tile by finding it mentioned in a hundred-year-old document? A document that directed you to a place you had never been before? A piece of a futuristic science fiction game, not even on the market yet, "misplaced" where it had not been disturbed for decades.

  The intelligent deformed eye knew exactly what I was thinking; the leering mouth mocked me. I covered it with my hand.

  My next impulse was to run right over and give it to them. "Here, take it, it's yours, I don't want anything to do with it," I would say, thrusting it at them. And be rid of the pink and foul and mischievous thing, with all its impossible connotations.

  Then I could stop worrying about it, because of course they would leave, immediately. This was what they had come here to find. And once they had it, they wouldn't tell me the truth about what it was, or how the whole puzzle fit together. They wanted to keep their true purpose a secret. Otherwise they could have simply asked me if I'd found anything like The Piggy at the very beginning:

  But they hadn't. They searched the entire house, cleverly sidestepping all of my questions. They had avoided telling me anything about why they were really here, including me only as a fourth player in a make-believe game. And if I gave them what they wanted now, I would never find out anything else.

  I gritted my teeth, unfolded my hand, and stared down at The Piggy again. It was repulsive, all right, but that was the least important thing about it.

  What was I so afraid of, anyway? What was it going to do to me? Why give it up now? It was ugly, but it was good—it was what everyone wanted. It was the prize.

  And now I had it, and they didn't.

  Suddenly I felt like Luap as his IRSC zoomed to 3.9. And I only had a minute to look at the document before Mom came back to check that the light was out.

  I got it from the drawer and hastily reread the relevant parts. "A trinket" was all the captain had said about the object his brother had found. About the "sailor" he had taken it from, he was more specific: "greenish, reptilian hide"; "some invertebrate organism, gelatinous, sluglike, protruding from the cracked, blackened lips"; "the third eye." This was not the only place I had run across that description. Luap!

  I put The Piggy and the document under my pillow and turned out the light.

  The captain had believed he was describing a hallucination. But his description of the murdered sailor, who had been carrying the trinket, tallied precisely with the character Luap in the game.

  And then I remembered Manny saying, just a little while ago, "The fifth-dimensional matrix didn't help Luap very much. "That's what got us into this whole mess. ..."

  Then Zena had shrilled at him to shut up. And Manny had seemed horrified at his blunder. And I had been confused, because Manny's remark hadn't made sense in the conte
xt of the game we had played. "A game we played the other day,"

  Joe had explained.

  A real game, perhaps? Like the board game, but with a real Piggy, and real space travelers? A game in which the not very bright Luap had used the fifth-dimensional matrix to travel back to 1864— and then lost The Piggy when his blood boiled in the South Pacific climate?

  I felt as though I were being rational now. But I had come back to the same insane idea that had hit me when I first saw The Piggy. It was impossible, it was totally fantastic. And yet I could come up with no other explanation that made sense of everything, that was so simple and direct.

  I made an agreement with myself to think of it as merely a hypothesis—that was the rational thing to do. Then I lay there in the dark, alert, growing more and more excited. And more impressed with myself. If the game was real, then, ignorant though I had been, I had still done exactly what I should have done in order to win. I had managed to get my hands on The Piggy. How could I have considered running over there like a baby and handing it back to them? It looked horrible, but what it really meant was safety. And now I had it under my pillow.

  Then my thoughts swerved again, and I had the sensation of a hand drifting along my spine in the darkness. Yes, The Piggy meant safety—but only at the end of the game. The rest of the time, The Piggy meant danger. The Piggy was what all the players wanted. "You will stop at nothing to gain possession of it," I heard Zena saying, yesterday, on the sunny patio.

  It wasn't sunny now. I lay there and listened to the gravelly wet rumble of the surf, to the wind breathing in the marsh grasses. There were no sounds of automobiles or radios, only the mindless screaming gulls. Outside, the night would be broken only by a few distant, unreachable pinpoints of light. Unless, of course, the neighbors were still awake in their pink cottage, the picture window casting its pale distorted oblong across the lawn. I thought of the last gray patches of daylight on the ice cap of Teon and the cliff shadows sweeping over them. I felt as isolated as Luap standing there. The neighbors' cottage was so very close—closer even than Zulma and Moyna hurtling out of the sky, swooping quickly down for The Piggy.

  "It's only a hypothesis, you jerk," I whispered to myself, huddled under the sheet, my head pressed against the pillow. The pillow was thin, the objects underneath it lumpy. But where else could I put them? Where else would they be safe when Zena, or Manny, or Joe, or all three, came creeping in?

  Zena and Manny and Joe, who made a different impression on everyone. I remembered the disguise card I hadn't used, the card that gave the player the ability to resemble the inhabitants of a foreign planet. Did the neighbors have such equipment? And if so, what did they really look like? Was that rustling noise the curtain, or was it Moyna floating in the window? Was it one of her talons that seemed to be hovering just above my neck?

  But Moyna couldn't exist. She was biologically hopeless as the slugs in the book I had been reading, nothing but a character in a game. Zulma and Jrlb didn't rent cinder-block cottages on the beach, or eat bagels and cream cheese for breakfast. And there was no planet called Earth in the game, and no human characters—no Barney, no Mom and Dad.

  It was childish of me, but the thought of the two of them in the next room did give me a certain comfort. Mom and Dad were too ordinary, even dull, to exist in a universe in which Interstellar Pig was possible. And anyway, they wouldn't let anything happen to me; they were both light sleepers.

  If they were still asleep, that is, and not dead. Moyna could move very quietly. And lethal bacteria were quieter still. Maybe it would be a good idea to get up and check on them, just to make sure they were still breathing.

  But if I did that, it would be as good as admitting that I really did have something to be afraid of. There had to be some other explanation for The Piggy and the captain and all the rest. In a minute it would come to me; then I would be able to relax and go to sleep.

  But it didn't come. And the effort to find it only kept me wide awake. After a while, I could no longer prevent myself from looking at the bedside clock. It was 3 A.M. That was depressing. On the other hand, if the neighbors really were going to attack, wouldn't they have done it by now? Why should they wait? They were probably just asleep. And I could find out easily enough by looking out the window, to see if their lights were out. Then I'd be able to stop torturing myself.

  I got up and tiptoed to the window and looked out. I groaned quietly and covered my eyes with my hand. All the lights in the cottage were on. Now I was beginning to feel angry. Why couldn't they just go to bed at a reasonable time like everyone else, instead of staying awake and making me worry?

  But maybe they had just forgotten to turn the lights out. I looked again. I couldn't see inside. There was a kind of shadow in the patch of light on the front lawn. Probably that maroon plastic chair—it was squat and lumpy enough.

  Then the shadow waddled, bulbous and spiderlike; something thin and segmented quivered beside it, as though it was gesturing with one of its legs.

  I was back under the sheet, clutching the pillow. Mom and Dad, Mom and Dad in the next room, I kept reminding myself, meanwhile imagining the creatures next door planning their strategy. The attack would have to be soon, while it was still dark, and Zulma's eyes would give her an advantage. I should be back at the window, preparing to defend "Hie Piggy. More nervous than ever now, I listened for the sounds of scrabbling feet, for the rhythmic hiss of breathing gear.

  The next time I opened my eyes, gray light was coming through the window. The sun was rising. I got up again. And now the cottage windows were dark.

  Then I did sleep fitfully for a few hours. It was midmorning when I awoke.

  Sunlight beat against the windows, the room was stifling and I was drenched in sweat. I didn't feel rested at all, my sunburn hurt worse than ever, and now, in addition, all my muscles were sore from yesterday's exertions on the island.

  But in the sunlight I was able to look back on my fears in the darkness as imaginary, the result of the neighbors' addictive, hallucinatory game. I vowed not to indulge in the game for another day or two, at least. Today I would take advantage of my condition and play the invalid. I would stay at home, avoid the neighbors while I sorted things out, and let Mom feed me and take care of me.

  I yawned, and then climbed out of bed as delicately as an old man with arthritis. I limped around, getting out of my pajamas and into a pair of shorts. Mom must have heard my footsteps, because a moment later she knocked at the door. "Can I come in, Barney?" she said.

  "Sure." I arranged myself back on the bed, trying to look weak.

  I had never been happier to see Mom's ordinary, homely face as she came into the room. Only now she seemed so girlishly excited that she was hardly homely at all. She wore a new outfit, white shorts and a middy blouse, and she had tied a bright silk scar around her head. Her skin was finally beginning to look tanned instead of pink— the color gave a youthful quality to her middle-aged features. "I was hoping you'd get up soon," she said. "I didn't want to wake you, you seemed so exhausted last night. How do you feel?"

  "Not so great," I said, feeble but brave. "I think maybe I should take it easy, maybe just stay around the house—"

  "I think that's exactly what you need," she burst in, hardly giving me a chance to finish. "There's some granola, and some sandwiches in the fridge for later, so you should be fine until we get back. And please don't go out in the sun."

  I sat up quickly on the bed. "Get back? From where?"

  "Oh, those marvelous friends next door, they're so thoughtful!" she gushed.

  "They had plans to go sailing with the Powells today, but now two of them can't go—some kind of business calls they have to wait for. So one of the men—Joe, the big handsome one—invited your father and me to go instead. With the Powells, can you imagine? All my friends will die!"

  "The Powells?" I said. "Who are they?"

  "Only one of the oldest families on this part of the coast." Mom looked in the mirror over
the dresser and adjusted her scarf. "They're supposed to have the most fabulous summer house. You have to summer here for years before getting an invitation from them. And Joe says we'll be sailing way out in the ocean, not the bay." She sounded like a fourteen-year-old.

  "But wait a minute," I said."Don't you think . . . I mean, are you sure ... I mean, out on the ocean, if a storm comes up, will you be safe?"

  She laughed. "Barney, it's the most gorgeous day we've had yet. Now you take care of yourself. I've kept Joe waiting long enough, waiting for you to wake up."

  "But... but what about..." I couldn't think of anything to say, except that I didn't think they'd be safe with Joe, and I didn't want to be left alone. But I couldn't say that.

  "We'll be back before dark, Barney. Have a restful day," she cried gaily, and left.

  I sank back onto the bed, feeling more tired than ever. The pattern of yesterday's game seemed to be repeating itself: Joe out of the way, but Zena and Manny—or was it Zulma and Moya—to contend with. In my exhausted state, one of them would have been more than enough. And how soon would it be before they came swooping down? I turned over and tried to go back to sleep.

  11

  I was awakened by a crash downstairs.

  I lay there, my heart pounding. There were no footsteps or voices. Despite the crash, the house was empty.

  But not quiet. The windowpanes rattled in my room, the kitchen screen door was banging, the thudding of the surf sounded as close as the front porch. And it was strangely dark outside, though the clock told me it was not quite 6 P.M.

  I raced to the window. The sky boiled with thick purple clouds, the usually placid bay seethed with foam. Beside the marsh, the stunted scrub pines were bent over and trembling. And the Volkswagen—with Joe and Mom and Dad—had not returned.

  I raced around the house, shutting windows against the first raindrops. I picked up the living room lamp that had awakened me when it had been toppled by a gust of wind. Then I struggled to find a station on the radio that was not obliterated by static, listening continually for the Volkswagen. Finally I managed to find a crackling voice bleating something about small craft warnings. It was lucky the storm had come so late in the day. They would have been back on shore before it got rough. They were probably on their way home this very minute.