by Geoff Rodkey
I was trying to remember where Mom and Dad had put the backup screens they’d brought with us when I heard muffled voices coming from the earpiece in my hand. I stuck it back in my ear.
“This is my voice….”
“THIS IS MY VOICE….”
“Thees ees my voeeece….”
“Thizzz muh voice….”
The Ororo seemed to be testing out my translator’s different voice signatures. She flipped on the screen’s external speaker and cycled through a few dozen of them, occasionally mumbling questions for the Krik, who answered them with his usual snappish growls.
Then, suddenly—
“GZZZRKKK.”
“Yes! I want that one.” A grumpy old comedian’s voice came through my earpiece.
“MRRMMMM.”
“Very well. And this will be mine.” It was the low-pitched, sexy-sounding rasp of a famous actress.
The Ororo replaced the back of my screen, returned the tools to the Krik, and handed the screen to me.
“Here you are,” she said through my translator. “Now it works. I told you there was nothing to fear. Although of course you couldn’t understand what I was saying. My name is Marf. And this is Ezger.”
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Lan.” I tried not to sound as confused as I felt. She’d barged into my house without asking and had practically robbed me. But she sounded friendly—or at least her voice signature did.
“What kind of food do you have?” Ezger asked. He hopped off the chair and headed for our kitchen.
“Just some human stuff,” I told him. “It’s not very good.”
He jumped up on the kitchen’s countertop and started to rummage through the upper drawers.
“Please don’t do that!”
He ignored me. I didn’t want to get in a fight with somebody who looked capable of swallowing my head, so I turned my attention back to Marf the Ororo.
“How did you fix the translator so fast?” I asked her. “The human engineers on our ship said it’d take weeks.”
“Do you understand mathematics?”
“Kind of.”
The corners of Marf’s mouth turned up in what seemed like a smile. “The average Ororo is seven thousand times as smart as the average human. Does that answer your question?”
“Pretty much.”
A loud crash came from the kitchen. Ezger had accidentally pulled a drawer off its runner.
“The food’s in the third drawer down on the right,” I said. “Yes, that one.” He pulled out a container of Chow.
“I apologize for Ezger’s manners,” said Marf. “For a Krik, he is very polite. But that is not saying much.”
“Who sent you here?” I asked.
“No one,” said Marf. “That was a lie I told the guards so they would not know I overrode the security features on the fence. But don’t worry—you are safe from the protestors. Only the Ororo are clever enough to override a fence, and none of them would bother to come here except me.”
I had so many questions that I almost didn’t know where to start. “So…why did you come here? Just for the food?”
Ezger sniffed the Chow and made a face. “That would have been a big mistake,” he growled. “This food looks terrible!”
“We came to convert you to our religion,” Marf told me.
“Really?”
“Oh yes!” Marf’s mouth turned up even further. This time I was sure it was a smile. “Its rituals are very painful. As part of the initiation, Ezger will have to chew off one of your arms. But you will find great spiritual meaning in your suffering.”
A little surge of fear shot straight to my brain. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “But I already have a religion.”
“That is fine,” said Marf. “I was only making a joke. Do humans have jokes?”
“Yes! Do you?”
“Marf does,” said Ezger. “But her jokes are never funny.”
“Only because you have no sense of humor, Ezger,” Marf told him. Ezger shrugged and went back to examining our Chow with a look of disgust.
“I thought people on Choom didn’t like jokes,” I said.
Marf shook her enormous head. “Oh no. The Zhuri government doesn’t like jokes. But that is very different. Tell me a human joke.”
“This food is a human joke!” Ezger barked. He held up the Chow to show Marf. “It looks like feces!”
“It tastes like it too,” I admitted.
“Ah!” Marf’s big, dark eyes grew even bigger, and her smile widened as she put her giant, warm hand on my back. “Now, that is a joke.” She turned to Ezger, who was shoving the Chow back in its drawer without closing the container. “You see, Ezger? I am glad we came. I told you the human would be entertaining.”
“So you’re here to…be entertained?”
“That was my hope. Choom desperately needs entertainment. You have no idea how boring this planet is.”
“This kitchen is certainly boring,” Ezger grumbled, sticking his head into an empty cabinet. “Don’t you have any food that moves?”
“No. Sorry about that.”
He pulled his head back out and shook it in disappointment. “Then there is no point in staying. Marf, can we leave now?”
“We only just got here!” said Marf. “I have not even asked to borrow the human’s screen yet.” Ila’s screen was still lying on the dining table. Marf picked it up with her massive hand. “Is this an extra one? May I take it with me?”
“I’m sorry. That belongs to my sister.”
“I will give it back to her at school tomorrow morning. I just want to study it.”
“Marf will definitely return it,” Ezger told me. “Will you please loan it to her so we can leave?”
“Ezger, you are being very rude,” Marf scolded him. Then she picked up Ila’s screen. “So may I borrow this?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, “but I can’t let you. My sister needs it to communicate.”
Marf reluctantly set it back down. “I told you I will give it back. Do you not trust me?”
“I do!” I said quickly. “I just, um…”
The truth was, I didn’t. Marf could tell I was lying.
“It’s because that Hooree person told you I’m a criminal, isn’t it?”
“No!” I yelped. “I mean…he did say that. But I didn’t believe it.”
“Good. Because it is not true at all.”
“Yes, it is!” barked Ezger. “You are definitely a criminal! You break laws all the time!”
“I only break silly laws,” said Marf. “Not important ones.” She turned back to me. “I do wish you would trust me. After all, I trusted you enough to come here even though my television says you are a violent murderer.”
“It does?”
“Yes. But don’t take it personally. According to the television, all humans are violent murderers.”
Ugh. “Do a lot of people watch television?”
“Of course! Everyone does.”
“How can I watch it? I’d like to know what they’re saying about humans. But I haven’t even seen a television on this planet.”
“Are you stupid?” Ezger asked me. “There is one on your wall.”
He marched over to the couch. On the floor in front of it was a hex-shaped tile in a slightly different shade of beige from the rest of the tiles.
“Just press this three times.” He tapped on the mismatched tile with his foot—one, two, three—and a section of floor in front of the couch opened like a trapdoor. A meter-long control panel rose up from the open floor while a giant screen appeared on the wall opposite the couch.
On the screen, a Zhuri stood in front of a three-dimensional model of the planet, pointing to the bottom of it.
“Storms at the southern pole will weaken ove
rnight…,” he was saying.
“There are four channels,” Marf explained. “This one is weather. There is also the news channel, the ‘clearing the air’ channel, and the Krik channel.”
“The Krik channel is the best,” said Ezger. “It is all cooking shows.”
Marf trundled over to the control panel and showed me how it worked. “This button changes the channel, this is the volume, this pauses and rewinds, and this turns the unit off.”
I watched the Zhuri on the screen give his planetary weather report. “This is unbelievable. We’ve been living here for days, and we had no idea there was a TV in the wall.”
“I suppose you will want to watch it now,” said Marf, “so we will leave you alone.”
“Finally!” grumbled Ezger, heading for the door.
“You don’t have to leave!” I said. “I’d much rather talk to you than watch TV.”
“Don’t worry,” said Marf, waddling after the Krik. “We can talk again tomorrow during the midday nutrition. It was very nice to meet you, Lan human.”
“Just Lan,” I said. “Please come back anytime!”
“Not if you don’t get better food, we won’t,” growled Ezger.
“Oh! Wait!” As Ezger held the door open, Marf turned to look back at me. “Speaking of food,” I said, “do you know how we can get more of the Ororo food? We love it, but we ran out.”
“I can get you as much as you want,” Marf told me. “For a price. How about a ten-day supply for eight hundred rhee?”
“I’m sorry—what are rhee?”
Ezger snorted. “ ‘What are rhee?’ Ridiculous. I’ll be in the pod.” He disappeared out the door.
“Don’t touch the flight controls!” Marf called after him. Then she sighed. “Ezger is a very bad pilot. But he thinks he is a very good one. It is a dangerous combination. Where were we? Oh yes—rhee! Rhee is money.”
“Oh.” That took the air out of my sails. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any money.”
“Then I am sorry too,” said Marf, “because I can’t give you food without payment. I am a businessperson. It was bad enough that I fixed your translator for free. Enjoy the television! Goodbye.”
Just like that, she was gone. Seconds later, I heard the thunderclap of their pod crossing the fence and wondered how she’d been able to override its security code.
There were a lot of things I wondered about her and Ezger. Their whole visit had been so strange and sudden that I felt like I was in a state of mild shock.
Then I sat down on the couch and turned my attention to the TV.
I was about to get a whole lot more shocked.
THE FIRST THING I saw when I switched past the weather must’ve been the “clearing the air” channel. It was a plain beige background, broadcasting a low yeeeeehheeee white-noise whine that I guessed was soothing to the Zhuri.
The next one was the Krik channel. It was a close-up of one of the wriggling yeero vegetables. An unseen Krik’s hand cut into it with a knife as he snarled instructions:
“We’re going to cut right across the grain here, then shove our spices in real deep for a flavor explosion. KA-BLAM! But don’t cook it for too long, or it’ll lose its wriggle….”
Finally I got to the news channel. At first it was broadcasting video of an enormous spaceship orbiting some kind of gas-giant planet while an announcer explained the situation:
“Due to continued atmospheric disturbances on Zemrock Six, yeeneeree gas capture operations were suspended for the ninth consecutive day. The interruption has led to an increase in yeeneeree raw-material prices of almost forty percent….”
After that there was a story about pod manufacturing that dragged on forever and was basically impossible to understand. I was about to change the channel back to the Krik cooking show when the segment ended, and they started talking about us.
It began with a clip of Ila and me arriving at school that morning.
“Under an agreement made many years ago, the four human animals entered schools and workplaces for the first time today….”
“Ila!” I yelled, loud enough to wake my sister. “Come see this!”
I watched us greet Hooree, Iruu, and the principal at the school’s front door while our guards stood watch behind us. There was no sound, so you couldn’t tell from the clip that there were screaming protestors just a few yards away.
“The two younger humans enrolled at the Iseeyii Interspecies Academy. While no acts of violence were reported, everyone agrees the humans are impossible to educate.”
The image switched to an interview with a Zhuri student. At first I didn’t recognize him. But then I heard the little-old-lady voice signature come through my translator, and I realized it was Hooree.
“The human is very primitive,” he told a news reporter. “The learning specialist explains concepts, and it understands nothing.”
“What?” As big a jerk as Hooree had been, I couldn’t believe he’d insult me like that on television.
Ila appeared at her bedroom door, squinting and scowling like I’d just woken her up. “Was somebody here? And what are you yelling—” Then she saw the TV. “Ohmygosh! Where did that come from?”
“Shhhhh! Just watch!”
The video switched to a shot of Mom walking into a large building, trailed by two armed guards.
“Due to their low mental ability, the adult humans were assigned jobs in the waste-removal and mortuary sectors. This afternoon, security forces were called to Waste Facility Seven Six Seven, where one of the humans attacked a Zhuri supervisor.”
The image switched to some kind of industrial site. Against a backdrop of building-sized machinery, half a dozen Zhuri with weapons led Dad away as a group of Krik looked on.
Dad’s hands were stuck inside some kind of toaster oven–sized handcuffs, and the whole left side of his face was bright red and badly swollen.
Ila and I both screamed at the sight of his injury.
“AAAIIIEEEE!”
“OHMYGOSH! OHMYGOSH!”
The video cut away from Dad to show a wasteland of churned-up ground and barbed wire. It looked like an old Earth film of a World War I battlefield.
“Everyone agrees such violence was predictable…,” said the announcer.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO DAD?”
“I don’t know!”
On the screen, men with guns emerged from trenches to shoot at each other, and I suddenly realized it actually was an old Earth film of World War I.
“Humans are an aggressive and emotional species, whose violence is so extreme that they destroyed their home planet….”
“Ohmygosh…,” Ila whispered in horror as the World War I footage gave way to a more modern war, with fighter planes dropping bombs on a jungle village…then a firing squad of soldiers, shooting unarmed civilians…then a nuclear bomb, exploding over a city….
“As these images from the ruined human planet show, they are unfit to live among the civilized people of Choom. While everyone agrees the Unified Government was correct to honor its promise to offer the human reproductive unit refuge on a trial basis…”
Two martial-arts fighters squared off in a ring, beating each other senseless….Then a man in a clown suit slashed a woman with a kitchen knife….
“That’s a HORROR MOVIE!” I yelled. “It’s not even real!”
“Shhh!”
“…everyone also agrees the experiment in human resettlement will fail, and the hundreds of humans currently in orbit above Choom will not be allowed to land and further disrupt our peace. Stay tuned for more updates on the human threat.”
The story ended, and the video switched to a shot of dozens of Zhuri flitting through the air and shrieking as they passed a suswut disc back and forth.
“In last night’s regional suswut semifinal, Team
Eight Four defeated Team Eight One by a score of three thousand six hundred and twelve to…”
“What did they do to Dad?” I hit the pause button and started to rewind back to the footage of Dad’s injury.
“Have you messaged him?” Ila went back to the dining table to get her screen.
“Twice. Him and Mom both. They haven’t answered.” I found the segment of Dad getting led away by guards and replayed it. The second time around, the injury to his face looked even worse. Watching it made me sick to my stomach.
“Where’s my screen?” Ila said from behind me.
“It’s on the table.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It’s right there—” I turned around to point at the spot on the table where Marf had left Ila’s screen.
It wasn’t there anymore.
“Oh no…”
“What?”
“Marf stole it.”
“What?”
We spent the next half hour yelling at each other, rewatching the horrifying news clips on Zhuri TV, and frantically messaging Mom and Dad with a growing sense of panic that didn’t let up until we finally got a reply from Mom:
Your father is ok sorry we couldn’t respond sooner home ASAP love mom
They came home twenty minutes later. Leeni was with them. Dad’s face was bandaged, and so was the upper half of his left side. Even bandaged up, he looked much worse than he had on the TV.
“Ish okay,” he slurred through his swollen mouth. “Doeshn’t even hurt zhaht mush.”
I could tell he was lying.
“The venom’s effect should decrease over time,” said Leeni. “Hopefully, in the morning, you will have recovered.”
“What happened?”
“Your father got assigned to a Krik garbage crew,” Mom explained. “And their Zhuri supervisor doesn’t like humans.”
“The supervisor will be reassigned,” Leeni told us. “This will not happen again.”
“On the TV it looked like Dad got arrested,” I said.
Mom nodded. “He did. The supervisor claimed Dad tried to attack him. But the Krik who were there stuck up for Dad.” She looked over at the TV. “Can I watch the news report?”
