FSF, September-October 2010

by Spilogale, Inc

  Rosie nudged him away, fiercely whispering in his ear that this wasn't the time, wasn't the place, and when had he ever spoken about such a thing to her.

  The Five Wise Buddhasaurs took over from Mahler. It was difficult to figure which songs Diogenes favored; he never claimed one or another to be his favorite. But they noticed that his head bobbed a little more, his smile brightened, when he heard “The Sugar Foot Strut,” and another old tune, “Everything's Made for Love.” With the help of a little sampling, the five of them on their tiny plastic instruments carried the tunes and even managed to interpret the harmonies with a minimum of their customary dissonance.

  For the eulogies, most of the saurs wanted Preston to go first, but he deferred to Doc. Dr. Margaret had already insisted that the humans would speak only after all the saurs had their chance.

  Doc walked slowly to the front of the assembly, his tricky left leg proving more tricky than usual.

  "And keep it short!” Agnes bellowed from the back of the room.

  "When we came into the world,” Doc began, “our meaning was assigned to us by our makers and our owners. When we were no longer needed our meaning evaporated—until we came here. Now we live for ourselves and for each other. No one typified this better than our friend Diogenes. It may be too much to ask that we should all live like he did, but at least we can honor how he lived, and that he lived, and keep our love for him alive. And by doing so we can keep his love for us alive as well."

  Bronte looked around the room and nudged Kara with her tail.

  "Where's Axel?” she whispered.

  Kara shook her head. “Is he still upstairs?"

  "He must be."

  "Doesn't he know we've started?"

  "Maybe he doesn't want to come down. This might all be too much for him."

  "I'll check on him,” Ms. Leahy whispered back to them. “I don't want you to miss anything.” She stood and quickly went upstairs.

  The eulogies continued. No one wished to say too much or speak for too long. Many of the little ones were too embarrassed to know what to say or to say anything at all, but as some made the effort others followed. Mostly, they said, “We love you, Dio,” or, “We miss you."

  Tibor came up in his hat and a white ribbon around his neck.

  "On behalf of the consolidated worlds of the Tiborean Realm, Tibor wishes to express their great sorrow at this loss."

  Hubert pushed Hetman's bed up before the coffin.

  "Perhaps his heart failed him, but it never failed us."

  Sluggo mentioned the extra care he took when handling the eggs and the egglings.

  Preston recalled how, when he was working on a novel, Dio would often show him a book, or even a passage somewhere, that related to what he was writing. “How he knew what I was working on, I'll never know."

  Jean-Claude and Pierrot remembered the time they ordered the box of steaks from the Idaho Steak Ranch and hid it under the big atlas. “And he didn't get mad!"

  Ross put down his parsnip, came up and sang “I'm An Old Cowhand.” No one knew why but no one stopped him, though Agnes turned away for the duration of the song. When he finished the song he said, “Good-bye, Dio,” and went back to his parsnip.

  Bronte and Kara came up with Guinevere between them.

  "I know it's Diogenes we're here for,” said Bronte, “but I think we should thank Tom and Dr. Margaret for everything they've done."

  In the back of the room, a spiked tail thumped against the floor.

  "And I think it would be a good idea,” said Kara, “if we name the next eggling Diogenes, in honor of our friend."

  Most of the saurs nodded or voiced their approval.

  As Agnes moved to the front of the room, Ms. Leahy came in with Axel on her shoulder. When she placed him on the floor he started to run toward the coffin.

  She grabbed him gently and placed a finger in front of her lips. “Ssshh. Wait until Agnes is finished."

  Agnes looked around the room at all the gathered saurs and stopped as she reached Axel, who bobbed impatiently, waiting for his turn.

  "Humans always talk about the ‘next world’ and the ‘afterlife,'” Agnes said. “They also say that ‘animals’ can't go there, that only humans can. Well, it's a crock! And if there is such a thing, they can keep their damn afterlife! There's plenty more who deserve it than a bunch of stupid humans! Dio doesn't deserve this. It's just...it's...just wrong!"

  She stormed off to the back of the room, not facing the coffin. Sluggo tried to touch his head against hers but she nudged him away.

  When Agnes finished, Axel looked up at Ms. Leahy as if to make sure it was okay to speak now, but hardly waited for any nod from her before running up before the coffin, turning around and raising his forearms.

  "Hey guys! I gotta tell you about what Geraldine told me last night!"

  The saurs looked at Axel more attentively, as if they felt a sudden surge of energy. It had been a long afternoon, with everyone talking and everyone sitting. Only Agnes seemed to resist, though she slowly swung her tail around and turned her head back to look.

  "Geraldine said, ‘Time doesn't die,’ and I didn't know what she meant until Hetman explained it to me.” Axel pointed to Hetman's bed. “It means that time is like—space! You can see space—like stars and galaxies way, way out there—but you can't see time. Like, Hetman can't see us, but we're here. We can't see time, but it's there! So Diogenes is still alive, back there in time! And maybe we can't see him anymore, but he's still there!"

  The assembly looked at Axel. And every mouth, for whatever reason, seemed open—wide.

  But not as wide as Axel's.

  "We can't go out to the stars because we don't have the spaceships yet. Someday we'll make them and go out to the stars. Maybe someday we'll make time ships, too! And we can go back and see Dio and tell him all the stuff we wanted to tell him. And maybe we can take Dio in the time ship and bring him back here! And we can go back and forward—all the way to the future!"

  Ross took his parsnip and held it horizontally. While making a “Zzzzzz-ing” sound, he held out the parsnip and said, “Time ship! Woooohh!"

  "A time ship!"

  Little ones like Symphony Sid and Arthur Rackham Rex muttered, “Time ship!” A few more squeaked, “Time ship! Time ship!” until it became a kind of chant that filled the room.

  "I sent a message to the Space Guys! I asked them to help me build a time ship because Space Guys know all about that! When they travel through space they go faster than time! I saw it on the video!"

  The “Time ship!” chant grew louder. Leslie, Guinevere, and the two other egglings ran up to Axel as if he might pull out a time ship from somewhere behind him.

  Doc made a sort of worried gasp of a sound and looked around at those he thought of as the “saner” elements of the saurs: at Preston, Bronte, Kara, Alphonse—several others. They looked back at Doc the same way: as if to ask, “Should we...say something?"

  Preston shook his head. “Let the moment be."

  "But—” Kara looked at the little ones bobbing their heads with the “Time ship!” chant. “—it's a kind of madness, isn't it?"

  "So is hope."

  Agnes didn't bother to look at anyone else or weigh the issue of what constituted what. She slowly, directly, marched up to Axel, brows down and tail up.

  "The only space your Space Guys occupy is in your head!” She turned around and faced the assembled saurs. “He's been sending his damn messages to these Space Guys for months! Has he once—ever!—gotten a message back? Have they left so much as a mail on the computer, saying, ‘Oh, sorry. We've been on vacation in Bermuda. So nice to hear from you.’ Has anyone ever seen a Space Guy?"

  Axel, drooping a little under the barrage, mumbled, “Yes. Maybe. But it could have been a frog, too."

  "A frog!"

  "But, like that storm the other night—we knew it was there even if we were all hiding under the blankets. Except when I got up and saw the lights flashing in
the window. And I saw you with your head under Sluggo."

  The little ones giggled.

  "It was the noise from the thunder!” Agnes looked at them indignantly and raised her tail. “That has nothing to do with it!"

  "The Space Guys are there like the storm was there!"

  The “Time ship!” chant rose up again, if a little more restrained. Ross tapped Agnes on the snout with the tip of his parsnip.

  "Time ship!"

  She batted it away but relented, muttering, “Lunatics! Idiots!” all the way to the back of the room.

  The Five Wise Buddhasaurs, eyes shut tightly as they played, launched into “West End Blues.” Even with the aid of their synthesizers and sampling, the trumpet introduction sounded a little more like a fall down a flight of stairs than a stirring ascent and descent through a scale dappled with blue notes. But the steady tempo shifted the mood back to a sober, but not solemn, median.

  Rotomotoman rolled to the front of the room. At first he faced the coffin, saluted and turned around. The display screen on his cylindrical torso displayed two words: Diogenes. Good-bye.

  "Sometimes,” Ms. Leahy said to Tom, “I envy your job. Other times—I don't know how you manage it."

  "I don't know if I manage it.” The words were self-deprecating but his expression, to Ms. Leahy, was grateful.

  "More often it manages you,” said Dr. Margaret. “And me. All of us. I don't know why."

  "It's because,” said Ms. Leahy, “much as we don't want to admit it, we're waiting for the Space Guys too."

  Tom, Dr. Margaret, Ms. Leahy, and Miss Wonderleigh took the coffin outside. The Buddhasaurs played their version of “West End Blues” again as the saurs filed out behind them.

  The coffin rested on a strange metal gadget Miss Wonderleigh had brought. The gadget would slowly and smoothly lower the coffin down into the grave, then retract and be pulled up by Miss Wonderleigh.

  Tom looked around at the gathered saurs and humans. The silence at that moment seemed awkward. Everything that anyone wanted to say had been said inside. But there they all were, outside, before the grave, waiting for what came next—and there was no way to get to what came next.

  Until Bronte sang: “Yar-wooo!"

  The saurs turned to her. A few of them immediately replied, “Yar-wooo!” while others hesitated, or started with the first note, or couldn't bring themselves to sing at all.

  "It's a song,” Bronte explained to Guinevere. “When we were first created in the factory/labs the humans taught it to us. It was part of our imprinting and training. We were supposed to sing it to the children and they used it in all the advertising. It's a silly song. It's not a very good song, but it's simple and it's one we all know."

  Bronte and Kara sang together: “Yar-wooo!"

  A few more saurs joined in: “Yar-woo!"

  And a few more: “Yar-wooo!"

  Until all the saurs joined in. Ms. Leahy had started in with Bronte almost immediately. Dr. Margaret joined, then Tom—even Miss Wonderleigh (it didn't take long to figure out even if one had never heard it before). Carolyn stepped out from behind the backhoe, reluctantly, but even she began to sing in a husky, off-key voice.

  "Yar-wooo! Yar-woo! Yar-wooo! The dinosaurs love you!

  "Yar-wooo! Yar-woo! Yar-wooo! The dinosaurs love you!"

  After the song some of the saurs went back inside. A few more waited until the coffin was lowered into the grave before returning to the house. Some stalwarts—Doc and Preston among them—remained until Carolyn pushed all the dirt back into the hole she had dug only that morning.

  "I remember now what I was thinking yesterday afternoon,” Doc said to Preston. “Before all this happened. It seems absurd now, and it drifted so quickly out of memory it can't have any consequence."

  "What is it?” Preston stared at Carolyn, patting the dirt down carefully with the back of a shovel.

  "It seemed to me, at the moment, that perhaps we weren't mere accidents of nature. It's possible that we are...inevitable."

  Preston stared at the mound of dirt before him. Carolyn took out a handkerchief and dabbed at her forehead, got into the backhoe and drove it to the trailer hitched to the back of the van.

  Hubert turned around and headed inside. Big Sam the stegosaurus and the brown triceratops, Dr. David Norman, followed. He let the egglings ride on his back all the way into the house, with Kara and Bronte at his side.

  "It's a crazy notion,” Preston said, placing his forepaw on Doc's back as he turned around. “But it's a crazy world."

  That left Agnes, Sluggo, and Axel the last ones at the grave, staring at the dirt mound.

  "I hope he liked the ceremony,” Sluggo said.

  "How would he know?” Agnes's voice wasn't as sharp, or as loud, as usual. And yet her words were as hard as ever.

  "Would have liked the ceremony, then."

  "I don't want to leave him,” Axel said.

  "He'll be here.” Agnes looked away from the grave, out to the west. The sky was red, and pink, and a creamy sort of yellow. And above it was a blue that grew ever deeper and darker.

  She also saw what might have been a light—a flicker of movement between the tree trunks. Maybe an animal. Maybe more idiot humans. The Reggiesystem would keep them out. She said nothing to the others.

  "We'll always be able to come here, so we can remember him,” Sluggo said to Axel. “We won't really leave him and he won't really leave us."

  "We better go in,” said Agnes. “It's getting dark. Cold."

  No one moved.

  "Axel, all that stuff you said in there.” Agnes was still looking at the sunset. “You know it's total crap, don't you? Time machines? You're going to build a time machine? You know people have been talking about time machines for hundreds of years. You see any time machines lying around here? You think you can make a time machine?"

  "I don't know,” Axel said. “I want to make a time machine. A time ship!"

  "Fine. Right. And that stuff about ‘time doesn't die.’ Do you think that's true? Where did you get such a stupid idea?"

  "Geraldine said—"

  "Geraldine! She was making fun of you! She makes fun of all of us! You're going to believe someone who asks you if you're stupid every single day?"

  "She wasn't making fun of me!” Axel shook his head. “Not this time! She said time doesn't die, and the universe—"

  "The universe is going to die too! The Earth is going to die, and the Moon and the Sun and the other planets too. The stars will burn out like candles, and there go your galaxies and everything else, including time!"

  "If everything dies,” Axel said, “then we all die, and Dio won't be so alone."

  "Dio is not alone! Axel, he's not anything anymore! He was alive, now he's gone, and that's it! Finish! End of Story! And when the time comes it will be the same for all of us."

  "I think you're wrong,” said Sluggo.

  "What?” Agnes said, at full volume, with maybe even a little bit more.

  "You're wrong, or at least you're not right. Not completely. Dio is still something. He's everything he ever was. That doesn't change because he's dead."

  "That doesn't make him any less dead now!"

  "I think it does. We remember him."

  "Until we die. Then that's over. And who will remember us?"

  "I don't know,” said Sluggo. “Maybe it's like what Doc said. We're only looking at it in a small way—just how it affects us. But that's not everything. Maybe what we all do makes up the universe, big as it is and as little as we are. We're still part of it. We make it what it is, no matter when we're alive, or when we die."

  Sluggo waited, but he heard no reply. He couldn't remember a time when he'd said so many words without being interrupted. For a moment he was afraid that something might be wrong with Agnes.

  He waited a little longer for her to tell him he was an idiot before he asked, “Does that make any sense?"

  "No.” Agnes curled her tail around and clawed at the lawn
with her spikes.

  Out in the west, the red had dimmed to an ember color, surrounded by an undiluted indigo. The woods formed a ragged black outline below it.

  "It makes so little sense it's like making no sense at all,” Agnes said. “You've been chewing on some funny plants. You're—you're an idiot!"

  Sluggo nodded, feeling strangely relieved. There were enough changes to contend with. Not having Agnes call him an idiot would have been one change too many.

  "It's not a stupid idea!” Axel said. “Time doesn't die! Even if the universe stops, time doesn't die!"

  "Everything dies,” Agnes said with the weariness of someone repeating the same directions over and over again. “Like the sun going down now, and night comes. It's that inevitable."

  "But at night you see the stars! And space! And the whole universe out there! You can't see it in the daytime!"

  "You won't be seeing any stars when you're dead.” Agnes turned away from them. “I'm not saying that it's good or that I like it. It just is, okay? It's better to know it than pretend it's not true. I wish it wasn't true, but it is. I'm sorry."

  "Agnes, what did you say?” asked Sluggo.

  "What?"

  "I thought you said you were sorry."

  "Yes. That's what I said. Are you going deaf? I said I'm sorry! Now let's get back in. It's already dark."

  The three of them didn't move. A chilly breeze started and grew stronger.

  "You know,” Sluggo said to Axel, “maybe you don't have to make a time machine. Maybe we're the time machines."

  "Space and time!” Axel said. “Time and space!” He looked up at the early stars, now clearly visible. “The universe is—"

  "We know!” Agnes groaned. “We know!” She took a few steps closer to the grave.

  "Dio,” she said. “This is stupid. I know you can't hear me. I have to say it. I want to see you again and I know I can't and everything else is crap and I don't care!"

  She looked at Sluggo and barked, “Believe anything you want! I don't care!"

  She looked at Axel. “And you! Go ahead! Build your damn time machine! Jump into it and take yourself someplace where I'll never have to listen to your insanity again! I don't care!"