"Take a bite and I'll tell you."
"My mother used to say that too."
"And you hated her for it, didn't you?"
I didn't answer that. It was none of his damn business who I hated or not. Or maybe it was his business. I knew what they were doing here; trying to get me to lower my guard.
"Go ahead, Jim. Try it. We don't poison our guests any more." I wasn't reassured, but my knife and fork were already slicing off a piece of the red meat.
It looked like it should be as crisp as bacon, but it wasn't; it had the chewiness of beef jerky, but it wasn't tough-and it had a rich, sweet flavor. I cut a second bite. "Reminds me of lamb," I said, chewing.
"Nope. Bunnydog. Good, huh?"
I gulped---and swallowed in spite of myself. "You mean, like Mr. President?"
Ray turned to the woman on the other side of him. "Is this Mr. President?" He pointed at the plate.
She shook her head. "Oh, no; that's Pinky. Orrie ate Mr. President last night, at the Revelation. We're going to pick a new president tonight."
"Again?" asked Loolie, chewing loudly.
"Loolie, don't talk with your mouth full," Ray cautioned her, then turned back to me. I must have been looking a little green, for he said, "I know, Jim. I went through the exact same thing just a few months ago. Look . . ." He put his hand on my arm and his expression went serious. "We're designing the future of humanity here. Change causes upset. But we're willing to have upsets along the way, because the changes are so important."
I swallowed hard. I took a drink of purple juice. It wasn't grape, but it was sweet and it was cold-and it gave me a chance to choose my words carefully. I looked at Ray and said, "What if I don't like the changes? What if I don't want to be a part of the process?"
He shook his head. "You're already part of the process, Jim, because these changes are inevitable. The only choice you get is what part you want to play. You can be a part of the process that resists-that is, you can be one of the pebbles that gets rounded smooth by the action of the stream-or you can be part of the stream." He patted my arm. I thought about decking him, but it wouldn't accomplish anything. "Jim, let go of everything you think and know and look and see what's really so. You might be surprised."
I didn't answer him. I didn't look at him. I stared at my plate and wondered what else I had eaten. The orange mash, for instance? Crushed insects? I pushed my plate away. I wasn't hungry any more.
"Can I be excused now?" Loolie asked. One of the bunnydogs was already taking her plate away. "Jim, you want to see my zoo now?"
"Jim's not through eating yet, honey."
"Yes, I am." I handed my plate to another of the bunnies. It sniffed at the strips of meat, then gobbled them enthusiastically and scampered off.
I stood up slowly. I felt like I was walking on razor blades. I chose each word carefully. "Yes, Loolie-please show me your zoo."
I had to get out of here. Now.
An old man of Texas named Tanners
was notorious for his bad manners.
When he noticed the start
of an imminent fart,
he'd announce it with bullhorns and banners.
12
The Zoo
Never trust a grapefruit
-SOLOMON SHORT
Five steps from the table and I had a worm on my tail. Two more steps and it was at my side. Sput-phwut; it blinked. Its eyes were huge. "Grruppt?" it asked.
I looked at Loolie. I looked at the worm. I looked back at Loolie. "He's my bodyguard, right?"
She nodded solemnly. "His job is to keep you from getting hurt. "
"Why am I not reassured by that?"
"Huh?"
"Never mind." Sarcasm was not meant for six-year-olds. "Come on, Wormface, Wormfoot, Wormtongue, whatever your name is."
"His name is Falstaff," said Loolie.
"Falstaff?"
"Uh-huh."
"Why is he named Falstaff?"
"Jason says it's 'cause he farts a lot."
"Oh really?" I looked at the worm.
The worm blinked and made a noise from its nether orifice: Platt!
I took a step back and waved my hand in front of my face. "Jeezis-!" My eyes were watering. "That's incredible!" I said. "That could blister the paint off a wall."
"Yeah," grinned Loolie. "His are the stinky kind."
"Whyn't we just call him Wormfart?"
"I wouldn't call him that," Loolie said, her eyes round.
"Why not?"
"He doesn't like it." There was something about the way she said it.
"Oh." I looked at the worm again. "Uh, well . . . all right. Come on, Falstaff."
The worm chuggled and humphed and followed after us.
As soon as the worm saw where we were headed, it settled itself peacefully on a sunny patch of blue lawn and became a big purple meat loaf. It would watch from there.
Loolie's zoo was inside a building marked Shangri-La Recreation Room. It was set apart from most of the other buildings. As Loolie started to open the door, one of the libbits pushed its way in past me. It was a large, pig-like thing; most of its face was snout. It snuffled around the room like a vacuum cleaner, ignoring both Loolie and myself.
"That's Hoolihan," said Loolie. "She goes wherever she wants and does whatever she wants. She doesn't listen to anybody. She likes to come in here and sweep the floor. Come on."
The zoo filled the recreation room. It was obvious that these people revered everything Chtorran. There were three long worktables supporting a row of unmatched terrariums. There were also two rows of potted plants and shelves with wire cages along two of the walls. Somebody had spent a lot of time setting this up.
Loolie turned on a light and I moved from cage to cage, peering in curiously. There were three furry blobs in one of the cages. One was purple, one was brown, one was red. They huddled together in one corner of the case.
"If you put your ear close, or if you put your hand in, you can feel them purring." Loolie put her hand against the case.
"I know. They're called meeps."
" 'Cause they go 'meep meep'-right?" Loolie asked.
"Right."
"They don't do anything," said Loolie. "Just eat and sleep and purr. They eat lots of everything. They're not real fussy. They don't taste real good, but you can eat 'em if you put ketchup on 'em. You gotta cook 'em first. They make lotsa babies though-like mice. We feed 'em to Orrie and Falstaff and Orson. Orson's the biggest. He eats everything, but he likes meeps best."
"Of course. They're bite-size."
Loolie laughed. She thought that was a funny joke.
In the next cage were several night-stalkers of various sizes. They looked like little vampires, the old-fashioned Dracula kind, not the Chtorran kind. "We keep 'em here till they get big enough," explained Loolie. She held a hand off the ground to indicate how high they would stand. Knee high. "That one's Bela, and that one's Christopher, and that one is Frank. Once they're em-printed, Jessie says, they'll stay real close to here to hunt. Jessie says we need to have more night-stalkers than we have 'cause they're good at catching rats and gophers. They like meeps too."
"You said you had a vampire?"
"Oh, yeah; but you'll have to wait and see it at night. It sleeps in the day. Maybe you'll be lucky soon and you'll get chosen to feed it." She said it as if it was an honor.
I'd heard about vampires. I hadn't seen one yet. They were shroud-like creatures-silken veils that floated on the wind. They dropped from the sky onto cattle and horses and attached themselves to the poor creatures' skins to feed. Somehow, they became part of the animals' circulatory systems. They would feed for a while and then, when satiated, would float off again into the night. In return for the meal, they would leave the victim's bloodstream full of alien parasites and organisms. Cattle usually sickened and died within a week of a vampire attack. Vampires had been seen as big as bedsheets.
"This is just a little one," Loolie said, holding up her hands. L
ittle? Loolie was holding her hands about a meter apart. "We gotta grow it bigger afore it can be any real useful. I got to feed it once," she bragged.
"What an honor," I said drily.
Loolie didn't hear me. She was pointing. "And over here, we got a baby gorp. He eats garbage." She wrinkled her nose. "He stinks, doesn't he?" It was hard to tell what the gorp looked like; it was curled up in one corner of its pen, sleeping, but Loolie was right: the creature had a stench like an outhouse.
"And we got some toe-hoppers and lollapaloozas and screaming meemies and hair-pullers. . . ." These were all insectlike things. The latter looked like moths with claws. The screaming meemies were noisy little insects with air bladders. They sounded like cockroach-sized fire engines. "They pop real nice if you step on them," said Loolie.
"Ugh!" I said, pointing. "What's that?" It looked like a piece of red slime with a bad cold.
"Those are fugglies. The red one is a female."
"The species is doomed," I said, shaking my head. Or maybe they mated in the dark. No. Nothing could be that desperate to reproduce.
"They don't taste very good either," said Loolie. "We don't know what they do yet, but Jason says it's got to be important. Otherwise they wouldn't look so awful."
"Right. It makes perfectly good sense to me."
"And over here, we got some wormberry bushes and mandala flowers-have you seen mandalas?"
I nodded. I'd seen them in the wild, dripping from the forest like a crown of gaudy jewels.
"Jason wants to cover the whole camp in mandalas someday. Only it can't be for a while yet, 'cause there's still too many people who still believe in the You Ass of Hey."
"Uh-huh." I was mastering the art of the dry, noncommittal response. It would be stupid to do anything else. Loolie's loyalties were obvious. So was her enthusiasm. I didn't know whether to feel sorry for her, angry at what Jason and Jessie had done, or jealous because she at least knew what her life was about.
"Oh-and,over here, Jim, over here. Have you seen this? We got a baby shambler bush. Soon's we can build a corral, we're gonna put it outside; but Jason doesn't want it wandering off yet, 'cause it might get eaten. Or raped. Or worse."
The bush was standing in a large, square, wooden enclosure; it was two meters to a side, nearly a meter high, and filled with earth. The bush itself was rooted near the center. It wasn't much larger than a potted geranium and it looked very small and out of place sitting in such a big pot of earth. It looked harmless. Hell! It looked cute!
When they grew bigger, shamblers could be as tall as eucalyptus and as leafy as willows; in fact, most shamblers looked like tall hulking clumps of walking ivy. They were dark silhouettes of fear, dripping with clusters of wide, purple-black and midnight-blue leaves; their branches were streaked with pink and white and blood-red veins. They were terrifying to see even when they were standing still.
But this one-it just looked silly. Its leaves were still fuzzy pink clusters. The little bush looked like it was wrapped in fluffy feather boas. It looked like a geranium playing dress-up in mommy's best furs and rhinestone shoes.
I'd seen shambler bushes from a distance. We'd also seen pictures of a shambler colony exploding, or swarming-or whatever it was they did. We'd seen what happened to the men that had been attacked as well. We'd found their remains with the cameras. And Jason wanted a tame shambler!
For what? A weapon?
Why bother? If you had tame worms, you didn't need anything else.
Besides, how do you train a walking tree? For that matter, how do you train a worm?
Loolie was saying, "Jason thinks this shambler will be a tall one. The tall ones are best, they can go as much as a killo-mere a day. But this'un's just a baby still. It doesn't even have any tenants yet. Jason says we gotta get it outside soon. It's okay, you can come closer. It won't hurt you."
She pointed. "See here? The leaves'll get bigger and darker when it gets bigger. We saw a herd of shamblers once, but Jason wouldn't let us go near 'em, 'cause they didn't know who we were."
"Mm," I said. I squatted down low to see if I could see the roots of the bush, see how it balanced itself, walked, took nourishment from the ground-anything. I wished for a video setup. We could have made time-lapse studies of the shambler to see exactly how it walked.
I realized I was jealous of Loolie's zoo.
"Jim?" Loolie was calling me. I turned to face her and nearly jumped out of my skin. She was holding a very large, bright red-bellied millipede. It was crawling all over her, up her arm, across her shoulders, down her other arm and back up again
"Uh, Loolie," I held my voice calm. I didn't want to alarm her or startle the millipede.
"Don't worry, Jim. It knows me. But you shouldn't come any closer. Not yet. You still smell like Earth. In a few weeks, though; after you've been eating tickleberries and softcorn and everything, you'll smell right. This is Gimmee. We call him that 'cause he always wants more. Jason says he's a gimmee pig, so that's how he got his name."
"Ah, I see. Yes. You're making me very nervous with that, Loolie. Would you put it back?"
"Okay. " She returned Gimmee to a large wire cage. There were several other millipedes in there as well. She paused to let them sniff her fingers and then she stroked them and called them by name. "They're really very friendly, once you get to know them," Loolie said.
"Uh-huh," I nodded nervously. No problem. I could change my shorts later.
There was a sudden rustling and grunting noise at the far end of the room and Loolie went to investigate.
"Ah ha!" she said. "I caught you!" She was waving her finger at something.
I came up behind her to see one of the skinny red bunnymen energetically mounting Hoolihan and pumping away at the libbit like a frenzied little sex fiend. Its-his?-eyes were glassy.
"Lennie!" Loolie shouted. "You're disgusting! You're a pig! Don't you ever stop?" She looked to me and made a gesture of great exasperation. "Lennie fucks everything he gets near."
"Maybe he's training to be a lawyer," I said.
"What's a lawyer?" Loolie asked.
"Never mind. They're big and ugly and mean and they don't have any friends." Hmm, maybe this was paradise.
Loolie wasn't paying attention. "Lennie, you stop that!" She stamped her foot. "Lennie! You remember what happened to Casanova, don't you?"
Lennie was beyond hearing. He was having too good a time. The libbit didn't look all that unhappy either.
Loolie sighed loudly, "Now, I'm gonna have to tell Jason, so he can decide."
"What to do about Lennie?" I wondered if Lennie was going to be elected president soon.
"No. What to do about Hoolihan." Loolie pointed at the libbit. "We gotta decide whether to mate her again so she'll have baby bunnies, or whether to keep her corralled so she'll have baby libbits."
"Excuse me?"
Loolie looked impatient. "Don't you know anything? Bunnydogs like to fuck each other, but some of 'em grow up to be bunnymen and then they like to fuck libbits. If a bunnyman fucks a Iibbit, it makes baby libbits."
I was still trying to pick up my jaw when Loolie added, "Well, that's not actually correct. Jason says I gotta speak correctly. If one bunnyman fucks a libbit, it makes a baby libbit; but if two bunnymen fuck a libbit, it make baby bunnies."
"Oh," I managed to say.
I wished I were in Denver. I wished I were in Oakland. I wished I could talk to Dr. Fletcher right now and tell her what Loolie had just told me.
How stupid we'd been!
We'd been keeping all the creatures separated from each other. No wonder they'd never reproduced-bunnydogs and bunnymen and libbits were all the same species!
Libbits were females and bunnymen were males-they were such disparate animals, they couldn't possibly be related, but they were!
How did Jason discover all this?
How much more did these people know? And how could I get them to teach me?
And-how could I get out of here to get the
information to those who most needed to know it?
A woman who wanted to see,
if she stood up, how far she could pee;
had pardon to beg,
when it ran down her leg,
and formed icicles off her left knee.
13
Definition of a Monster
"I've known for years that I have no humility. It's a virtue, to be sure, but I can live with it."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Ray told me I had the freedom of the camp. I could go wherever I wanted, look at whatever I wanted.
The only constraint was a simple one, but effective. Falstaff, the Chtorran who sat by the door was my constant companion. He was a fat flabby creature, even for a Chtorran, with an annoying tendency for ruminative noises and questioning chirps. He followed me everywhere, grunting and wheezing, blinking and farting; he was a symphony unto himself, a movable feast of dark intestinal noises and incredible purple smells. I hoped to God that wasn't his language. Some of those smells could uncurl your hair.
To his. credit, though, Falstaff was a remarkably patient monster. ;,He stayed with me all afternoon while I prowled the range of the camp.
My explorations were not entirely random. I was trying to estimate how many people there were in this camp, how many vehicles, how many weapons and what kind. I didn't like the numbers I kept coming up with. This was too well organized a band. And there were too many references to other bases of operation and hidden caches of supplies and weapons.
I guessed that there might be thirty or forty adults here and maybe half that many children. Bunnydogs? I wasn't sure. I'd seen at least thirty. And at least a dozen bunnymen: Vehicles? Two more jeeps, at least, and another couple of trucks and a bus.
Wherever I went, people waved and smiled to me and asked me how I was getting along. I felt guilty for hating them and gave them cautious waves and token smiles.
The weird thing was that none of these people seemed to have any intention at all of reprogramming me, or awakening me. Or whatever it was they called it. They just wanted to befriends with me.
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