by Geoff Rodkey
“I don’t mind,” said Ezger. “I look very handsome in mine.”
“Shhh!” The broadcast had switched to a Zhuri government official making an announcement:
“…all restrictions on the use of venom are suspended. Everyone agrees the human animals are a threat that must be destroyed.”
“This is amazing news!” Marf exclaimed.
I was shocked. “They’re telling people to kill us!”
“Don’t worry about that. Ezger’s right—they’ll never find us here. And this news is truly amazing!”
“How is telling people to kill us ‘amazing’?”
The newscast switched to a shot of a massive swarm. At first I thought it was the one from the prison.
“The other two humans are currently being held…”
“Because it means—” Marf began to explain.
“Shhhhh!” hissed Ila. “It’s our parents!”
The swarm was so big that it was hard to tell what the Zhuri were swarming. All I could see beneath the horde was the pulsing blue glow of an electric fence under attack.
“…spaceport to depart from the planet. But the human animals are causing such strong emotion among the Zhuri public that all traffic in and out of the spaceport has been halted…”
“They’re attacking Mom and Dad!” Ila cried.
We all stared closely at the swarm and the fence lighting up beneath it. “That’s definitely the spaceport,” Ezger said. “They’re probably being kept in a hangar under that fence. Immigration must be protecting them, or the fence would’ve come down already.”
“We’ve got to do something!” I yelled.
“But that’s the amazing part,” said Marf. “The government’s about to collapse on its own! We just have to wait it out.”
“How do you figure?”
She pointed at the screen with a big, stubby finger. “Look at what’s missing from this scene: soldiers. There weren’t any outside your prison either.”
“So?”
“So the government’s abandoned the one job they were put in power to do. The whole reason the traditionalists took over from the progressives was to prevent swarms from ever forming. That’s why they tried to eliminate emotions in the first place. And on the rare occasions in the past twenty years when a swarm’s started to form, they’ve always sent soldiers to zap everyone back into line.
“But they’re not even trying to stop these swarms. The government’s encouraging them! They’re so scared of the emotions you humans might stir up, and so desperate to get rid of you, that they’re practically begging the swarms to destroy you! It’s the exact opposite of what people expect from their leadership. And once everyone’s calmed down in a day or two, the whole planet will be so ashamed of itself for what the government’s allowing to happen that they’ll replace it with new leaders from the other faction. Just like they did after the Nug massacre.”
As I realized what that meant, my whole body started to shake with fear. “But they’ll kill our parents!”
Marf’s eyes scrunched up in a pained look. “That is the one downside. And I’m terribly sorry—”
“WE’VE GOT TO STOP THEM!” screamed Ila. She pointed to the control panel. “Fly us to the spaceport!”
“That’d be madness,” Marf replied. “Look at the size of that swarm! And it’s only going to get larger—you think all those Zhuri who were swarming the prison are just calling it a day and heading home? By the time we get to the spaceport, it’ll be twice the size. Your parents will likely be dead already. Then the swarm will turn on us.”
“I don’t care! I’m flying us there!” Ila yelled, running for the controls.
“Good luck starting the engine,” Ezger told her.
“There’s got to be something we can do!” I told Marf.
“There is,” she said. “We wait here. Within a day or two, the government will collapse, and a new one will form. They’ll let your whole ship full of humans land! It’s what you’ve wanted all along.”
“WE CAN’T LET MY PARENTS DIE!”
“I know it sounds awful—”
“FLY THIS THING!” Ila screamed at Marf, pounding the control panel in frustration.
“To where?” Marf asked her. “Certain death? If we went to the spaceport, what good could we possibly do?”
I stared at the swarm on the TV. It was pulsing with rage—there were so many of them, all lunging in unison at the fence, that they looked less like a hundred thousand Zhuri than a single giant, seething animal.
It was the nightmare version of the dreamy, shimmering crowd that had danced to Ila’s music in the lunchroom.
What if…?
“What if we turn the swarm?” I asked.
All three of them turned to stare at me. “Music’s incredibly powerful to them. Right? That’s why the government’s so scared of it. So if we went there and played music for the swarm—something calm and soothing—maybe we could stop it. Turn that anger into something positive. It’s possible, right?”
Marf didn’t say anything.
“Right?” I repeated.
Marf let out a deep, rumbling sigh. “Maybe. It’s hard to know. No one’s ever tried anything like that. And do you have any idea how dangerous it would be? To play music loud enough to be heard over the sound of that swarm, we’d have to fly in very close. And the spaceport’s not like the prison—it has defenses to protect it from air attack. If we show up and start buzzing around in the sky, they’ll try to shoot us down with pulse weapons.”
“ ‘Try’? Or ‘will’? Can’t your fancy pod protect us?”
“Maybe. I can’t be sure. I’m not even sure if it’s possible to turn the swarm. But if we just stay here, eventually the government will fall—”
“And our parents will die!” Ila screamed.
“And if we go to the spaceport, we’ll die with them!” I’d never heard Marf’s voice reach such a high pitch. “It’s very risky!”
“No offense to you humans,” said Ezger, “but you’re really being stupid about this.”
“What if it was your parents?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Krik aren’t sentimental like that. My parents would be mad at me if I did try to save them.”
I turned to Marf. “What about yours?”
She sighed again, so heavily that her whole body rippled. Then she crossed over to a storage cabinet.
“COME ON!” Ila screamed.
“Stop yelling at me,” Marf scolded her. “It’s not helping.”
She opened the cabinet and pulled out the same red-and-gold guitar that the government soldiers had taken from our house. She headed back to the control panel, holding the guitar out for Ila.
“Hurry up and tune this,” Marf said. “Once we take off, we’ll be over the spaceport in a few minutes.”
Ila’s eyes lit up. “How did you get it back from the government?”
“I didn’t. I made two of them and kept this one.” She looked at Ezger. “Are you coming with us? Or do you want to get out of the pod now?”
Ezger looked out the window at the scattered boulders on the canyon floor. “You mean, would I rather go sit alone on that rock…or fly into a swarm of a quarter million screaming Zhuri armed with pulse weapons and just sort of hope the little human music machine magically turns them peaceful?”
“You don’t have to be so negative,” Marf told him.
Ezger opened the pod door. “Best of luck. You’re all out of your minds.”
As we flew away, I had to admit Ezger looked very comfortable sitting alone on his rock.
ILA WAS SITTING in the back of the pod, tuning the guitar as a tiny microphone drone hovered in front of her. I was up front with Marf, looking out over the darkening city as we rocketed across it in the twilight.
; “The microphone’s not working!” Ila yelled.
“I haven’t turned it on!” Marf yelled back at her. “Don’t worry—the external speakers are quite powerful. When the time comes, they’ll be able to hear you.”
Then she turned to me and lowered her voice. “The hardest part in all this will be dodging those pulse weapons. They’re likely to start firing as soon as they realize who we are.”
“And if one hits us, we’ll blow up?”
“Not instantly. The pulse will just disable the engine. The blowing-up part will happen when we hit the ground.”
“So how do we avoid that?”
“By not staying in one place long enough for the weapons to target us. Once we’re over the swarm, I’ll program the pod to change its location a few times a second. That should keep us safe from the pulses. Unfortunately, it also means we’ll have to black out the windows.”
“Why?”
“Because human and Ororo brains can’t process such quick changes in their visual environment. Thanks to the ship’s inertial buffer, we won’t feel anything. But if we looked out the window, we’d get so disoriented that we’d vomit all over ourselves.”
“If we can’t look out the window, how are we going to know if the music’s working?”
“We’ll keep the TV on and hope they keep broadcasting live.”
I checked the screen above and behind Ila. The news was showing a live feed of the swarm at the spaceport. Just like Marf had predicted, it was getting larger by the second as a steady stream of Zhuri joined it, probably from the group that had attacked us at the prison.
Marf raised her voice, calling out to Ila. “Twenty seconds! Are you ready?”
She strummed the guitar. “I hope so.”
I went back to sit across from Ila. “Anything I can do for you?”
Blackout shades came down over all the windows, shutting us off from the outside world. Ila looked alarmed—she hadn’t heard Marf’s explanation. “Why is that happening?”
“Ten seconds!” Marf called out.
“It’s too long a story,” I told Ila. “Don’t worry about it.”
Marf cut off the sound on the TV—and, for the first time, I heard the noise of the approaching swarm. As we zoomed in and the screams rose in volume, I looked back up at the TV. There were so many Zhuri clustered together now that I could barely see the glow from the fence they were attacking.
“Five…four…,” Marf called out.
The glow from the fence flickered, growing much brighter for an instant. Then it vanished.
The swarm had broken through the fence protecting Mom and Dad. I gasped, but the sound was drowned out by the rising noise of the crowd.
“Three…two…”
Ila saw the look on my face and turned around to see what I was staring at. The swarm was collapsing inward as the Zhuri at the bottom of it rushed into the empty space to attack the hangar where our parents were being held.
“…one…” I could barely hear Marf’s voice over the shrieks of the swarm.
“OHMYGOSH!”
“Don’t look!” I yelled at Ila. “Just play!”
“Microphone on!”
A green indicator lit up on the drone mic as the stink of Zhuri anger began to fill the pod. We were right on top of the swarm now.
Ila stared at me, her eyes wide with fear. The shrieks of the swarm were deafening. Hoping Marf’s speakers were loud enough to cut through the racket, I pantomimed strumming the guitar.
Ila didn’t move. She just kept staring at me in horror. I pantomimed strumming again.
C’mon, Ila! Play!
She squeezed her eyes shut and swept her hand down on the opening chord of “Under a Blue Sky.”
The speakers were every bit as loud as Marf had promised. The sound was so huge that it made my ears ring.
Ila flinched at the volume but kept playing.
I looked up at the screen. Our pod blinked into view, a tiny drop above the ocean of angry Zhuri. It showed up so fast that it seemed to have come out of nowhere.
Then, just as quickly, it disappeared…only to reappear again, above and to the left of where I’d first seen it.
It vanished again…reappeared…vanished again…
In less than two seconds, the pod changed positions half a dozen times, moving in random directions at speeds so fast that the Zhuri TV camera couldn’t even record the movement.
It was obvious why Marf had to black out the windows. Thanks to the inertial buffer, I didn’t feel any of the changes in speed and direction. But just watching the pod zip around on TV made me woozy. Looking out the windows, even from the corner of my eye, would’ve been unbearable.
As Ila’s amplified chords crashed like waves in my ears, I tried to ignore the pod zipping around and watch the swarm’s reaction instead. It seemed to contract on every downbeat, lunging farther down toward the hangar. On the upbeat, it expanded again.
A burst of white light appeared in the sky above the swarm, winking on and off like a strobe. Another one followed it, in a different part of the sky. Then there were three at once, going off in a cluster like flashbulbs, so bright that they left spots in my eyes.
They were firing at us.
Within a few seconds, so many pulses were flashing on the TV screen that I couldn’t have located our pod in the middle of them if I’d tried. All I could see were the swarm and the bursts of pulse weapons above it.
Ila reached the end of the “Blue Sky” guitar intro, opened her mouth, and began to sing.
Well, the nights have been black
And the days have been gray
A shiver went down my spine. It had been ages since I’d heard my sister sing live, and I’d forgotten how powerful her voice was, especially when it was being amplified to a hundred times its normal volume.
When Ila’s vocals reached the swarm, it shuddered like it had been hit with a hammer. On the third line of the vocal, it started to sway.
Until the singing started, the swarm’s energy had been mostly up and down, pressing its attack on the hangar below. But as more and more Zhuri began to fall under the spell of Ila’s voice, its energy shifted sideways. Slowly but surely, the swarm began to move in the same left-right-left shimmy that I’d seen in the cafeteria.
The smell of gasoline still filled the pod, but honeysuckle and mint were starting to compete with it.
When Ila got to the chorus, she changed a single word:
I want to live under a green sky
Don’t want to numb the pain just to get by
As it swayed, the swarm began to expand upward. The Zhuri were gradually shifting their attention from the hangar below them to the music that was pouring out of the speakers from above.
It’s working! She’s turning the swarm!
Ila leaned over her guitar, eyes closed, blind to everything except the song she was singing. The drone mic hovered in the air at chest level, halfway between her mouth and the guitar’s sound hole.
I looked back at Marf. She was fussing over the control panel. When I turned again to look at the TV behind Ila, the swarm had expanded up to fill most of the empty sky where the pulse weapon’s bursts had been winking on and off.
Then the image disappeared, replaced by a Zhuri newscaster in some kind of TV studio. Whoever was in charge of the broadcast had stopped showing the swarm live.
They’d been trying to prove to the whole planet just how violent and terrible emotions were. But what was happening now wasn’t terrible at all.
It was beautiful.
So they’d shut off the cameras.
We were winning.
Ila was on her third verse. I couldn’t see the swarm anymore, but I could smell it—and while the gasoline was still strong, the honeysuckle and mint were slowly starting to overpower i
t.
As she went into the bridge after the third chorus of the song, Ila opened her eyes for the first time. She saw the grin on my face and relayed it back to me with a smile of her own.
Then the pulse weapon hit us.
It must’ve knocked out the inertial buffer, because suddenly I was upside down on the far side of the pod, with a searing pain in my side from having been thrown against the back of a chair at high speed.
Then a second pulse hit us, and we fell from the sky.
BZZZZZT!
BZZZZZT!
I was lying in a heap on the floor of the pod, squashed against the base of a chair. Somewhere, a fence was buzzing.
The windows were still blacked out. An emergency light was on, giving the whole compartment a sickly green color.
The swarm had turned again. Outside, they were screaming.
Inside, it stank of gasoline.
I got up onto my knees. Everything hurt.
There was blood. Not all of it seemed to be mine.
Ila’s legs were sticking out from behind a chair. I crawled over to her.
“Ila? Ila!”
She raised her head to reveal an ugly, still-bleeding gash that ran across her temple into her hairline. Her eyes opened just wide enough to look at me.
“Muggh.” She shut her eyes and slumped back down again.
BZZZZZZT! BZZZZZZT!
The screams were getting louder, and the buzzing was getting more frequent. The swarm was stepping up its attack.
“Ila? Can you still sing?”
Her eyes fluttered.
“Ila!”
“Nuugh.”
“Get up! Please?”
She wouldn’t answer. But at least she was alive.
BZZZZZT!
BZZZZZT!
BZZZZZT!
I staggered to my feet. Marf was in the front of the pod, her body drooped over the control panel. As I made my way over to her, I almost tripped over the guitar. It was broken in half, the neck hanging by the strings from its cracked body.
“Marf!”
Her eyes opened. “MRRRRMMMM.”
I waited for the translation in my ear, but it didn’t come. My earpiece was gone, lost somewhere in the wreck of the pod.
