Quozl

by Alan Dean Foster

  “You be careful out there,” she warned him as she opened the door to admit the first burst of sunshine. “Remember: no mountain climbing. Just walk where it’s open and easy. Eat sensibly, not just the candy and cookies. And drink plenty of water.” Ignoring his protests she adjusted the cap he wore. “Stay out of the sun as much as possible.”

  He backed away, rearranging the cap so that the brim once more covered his neck instead of shading his face. “Mom, I’ll be fine. Really.”

  “Be sure you’re back on time.”

  “Hey, I can tell time by the sun, Mom.” Of course he also had the ten-dollar watch which had replaced the three-dollar job of years earlier. “Don’t worry.”

  “I won’t,” she lied. “Which way are you going?”

  “Down along the lake, then up the stream.”

  “Which stream?”

  “The big one, to the west. Maybe I’ll discover its source.”

  She couldn’t repress a smile at that. “Maybe you will. If you do, what will you name it?”

  “I dunno. Lessee. The Nile? No, that’s been used.” He was grinning broadly. “Congo? Nope. I know! Maybe I’ll call it—Alice April Springs.”

  “That would be nice.” She was surprised at the lump that formed in her throat. “Go on now, if you’re going. You don’t want to waste the sunlight.”

  “No. Thanks for the food an’ stuff, Mom.” He kissed her quickly, slipped his thumbs under the shoulder straps of his pack and hiked it higher on his back, and strode off accompanied by the spirits of Cook and Hillary.

  His mother walked out on the porch and watched him until he turned west to follow the lakeshore, vanishing behind the trees. Damn him, she thought, for growing up so fast. I’m running out of kids.

  As he matured, Runs-red-Talking grew solemn. His change of personality was surprising to his friends and relatives. Instead of playing, he spent most of his free time in meditation. This pleased his instructors if not his companions. He just wasn’t fun anymore. Gradually they stopped inviting him to join in their group coupling practices and chase games in the lower Burrow levels.

  Not that he was abnormal; simply quiet and introspective. Several philosophers noted his expanding knowledge of the Samizene and suggested he make supervisory meditation his profession, but he preferred to work with his hands. The quality of his repairs was unsurpassed, especially for one so young. Instead of fixing something, he meditated over it until he was certain of the solution. Only then did he begin to work. As a result he was somewhat slower than the other repair techs, but when he fixed something, it stayed fixed.

  In his attention to studies he displayed greater maturity than his colleagues, for whom young adulthood was still a time of play. While they devoted themselves to dance and the arts of personal adornment he pored over schematics and recordings that dealt with circuitry design and replacement.

  Shops in Burrows Two and Three were now turning out advanced components without the help of the Sequencer’s original designs. Runs dedicated himself to learning everything about them, the better to be prepared to fix them when they failed. He had a genius for locating trouble before it occurred. His intuition saved potential downtime and won him numerous awards. Those who had scoffed at his dedication were now praising him.

  He was tinkering with a stalled scooter when its attractive owner ran a hand down his back to tweak the tip of his tail. Her name was Half-stripe-Missing, and she was no stranger to him.

  “Why not come visit me tonight?”

  Runs glanced up at her. She’d been a frequent coupling partner for half a season and he was not yet tired of her, nor she of him.

  “I can’t. I have scheduled meditation. I am only a third of the way through the Milian Cycle.”

  “The Milian Cycle can wait. I cannot.” Half-stripe-Missing was little interested in philosophy.

  “It’s something I must do,” he said simply.

  Her ears flipped down to cover her eyes, then straightened in a gesture whose meaning none could mistake. “You’re a strange one, Runs-red-Talking. Even when you are coupling I sense disinterest. I don’t understand you.”

  “That’s not surprising.” He tried to inject some levity into a conversation that was disintegrating rapidly. “Sometimes I do not understand myself. Burrow Three’s philosopher says …”

  “You rely too much on philosophy and not enough on action.” It was rude of her to interrupt but he did not counterattack. Instead he stepped aside, replacing his tools in his workbelt. She made no move to re-enter his Sama, for which he was grateful.

  “There. All fixed.”

  “Thank you.” She climbed back atop the battery-powered vehicle. “Now try repairing yourself. I’m going to find Stands-blue-Razor and see if he wants some company for a while. Meditate on that!”

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted to see you,” Runs murmured.

  It was not the response she’d hoped for. She was soon gone, as was the pang of regret he always felt at such times. It wasn’t that he was uninterested in her; simply that he had more important matters to attend to.

  Having been reserved well in advance, his favorite meditation chamber awaited him. The empty, domed room was four body lengths in diameter, the prescribed size to permit maximum contemplation. Walls, dome, and floor were stained beige. Except for the meditator the room was occupied only by a single circular woven mat which had been manufactured in Burrow Four. It was a near-perfect copy of the traditional sij bark meditation mat. As sij trees grew only on distant Quozlene, this one was made of plastic.

  He squatted on the mat and carefully placed the small bowl he’d brought with him off to his left, within arm’s reach. It held nutrition cubes of many colors and values, arranged for maximum visual impact. Next to it he placed a cone-shaped bottle, precisely two finger lengths from the bowl. It contained a refreshing liquid.

  At his tone the door shut tight behind him. No one would dare disturb him now. Settling back on his heels in the ancient contemplative posture, he silently regarded the wall before him. His hand fell to touch the mat by his right knee. A small display screen rose from the floor.

  As he chanted, it displayed the subject for today’s study. The chamber darkened as airy music issued from concealed speakers. Peace came. Floor, walls, and dome vanished, to be replaced by blue sky and drifting clouds. He was floating over a forest on Quozlene, trees reaching for him with hauntingly familiar branches and soft leaves encountered only in recordings.

  As he drifted lower a small village hove into view. It was filled with Quozl busy at their daily tasks. All wore ancient costume.

  Tilting to his left he found himself over water. In the sheltered cove the village fishers were taking leave of those who would remain behind. Males and females leaned on poles, pushing the wide, flat-bottomed boat out into the shallow waters of the bay. There was much elaborate waving of jewelry and scarves.

  Abruptly he found himself in the boat, perceived but ignored by those around him. He could smell his ancestors: their unscented muskiness and pungent genitals. It was nearly lost in the rank odor of gutted fish and oil. The designs shaved into their fur were crude and primitive.

  He watched thoughtfully as they set their nets. After a while he rose to pick up the cone bottle and bowl of concentrates. Walking through his ancestors, the gunwale of the boat, and the bay beyond, he advanced until he was halted by a solid obstruction: the far wall of the meditation chamber.

  A panel came away beneath his skilled, trained fingers, to reveal a dimly lit hole in the middle of the ancient sea. Beyond lay a service crawlway layered with conduits. Bending to slip through the opening, Runs carefully replaced the panel behind him.

  His shoulder pack lay a short distance away. He added the contents of the meditation bowl to the pack, poured the liquid in the cone bottle into the flexible fluid container that would ride close at his side. Behind him the instructive tale of the Milian fisherfolk unraveled unobserved. It was an important story, wort
hy of extensive contemplation. None would dare break in and interrupt him.

  At the end of the crawlway he had to remove another panel. The gap seemed too small to admit a nearly adult Quozl, but Runs-red-Talking had spent many hours in physical training enhancing his flexibility.

  Pushing his pack ahead of him he advanced rapidly along the tunnel. He knew the way well enough by now to travel without light, marking his progress by counting to himself as he crawled. When a second shaft intersected the first, he turned down it, wriggling forward like a fish in a water-filled tube. Smooth metal pressed tight around him. His hips barely fit.

  The narrowness of the tunnel didn’t bother him. Claustrophobia was an alien concept to people whose ancestors had originally lived in burrows beneath the earth. It took some time for him to reach the first main tunnel, where he was welcomed by a blast of cool air. It was a relief to rise on hands and knees. After pausing to run through several stretching exercises he continued on his way. Only when he was finally able to stand did he remove the service belt from his pack and secure it around his waist.

  When he reached the first intake he started climbing, fitting his feet into the narrow service steps slotted into the side of the spacious shaft. Fist-sized service lights provided just enough light to see by. He ascended carefully yet rapidly, conscious as always of the fact that it was many levels to the bottom. Cooled air rushed past him, drawn from the surface by multiple vacuum fans far below.

  He passed numerous side shafts that fed air to the different levels of the Burrow. All were of lesser diameter than the main intake. When he could climb no higher he stopped, his heart beating against his ribs, certain as always that this would be the day he would be found out. But the only other sound in the shaft was the rush of air past his ears and the deep hum of the intake machinery.

  Above lay a circular section of selectively permeable plastic designed to blend indistinguishably with the surrounding surface of Shiraz. Air could get through but nothing else. He had reached the topmost step.

  Overhead, the preliminary intake fan whirred at high speed and in near-absolute silence. The huge but light blades could slice a careless Quozl in half without slowing. They could be halted for repair work, but doing so without authorization would invite the attention of puzzled inspectors. Runs-red-Talking had no intention of alerting his co-workers to his whereabouts.

  Beneath his jumpsuit he wore a thin, undetectable harness of his own design. From his pack he removed the service gun, attaching one end of the plastic wire spool to his harness and the other to a suction dart. Taking careful aim, he fired. The soft discharge was lost in the whir of the fan.

  The dart struck the far wall and adhered to the smooth metal. Runs checked the ring where the line attached to his harness a last time, took a deep breath, reciting a favorite line from the Sixth Book, and stepped off into nothingness.

  His braced legs absorbed the shock as he slammed feetfirst into the far wall. There was the usual moment of terror when he feared the dart might not hold, the sigh of relief when it did. He began climbing, pulling himself up the line until he hung close to the dart. After reeling in the excess he rested a moment, catching his breath, hanging in emptiness suspended solely by the thin wire.

  Removing a small tool from his service belt, he ran it over the wall of the shaft in a predetermined pattern until he was rewarded by a soft click. A small hatch popped open to reveal a gap in the otherwise unbroken metal. Runs pulled himself inside, reaching out and back to exhaust the vacuum from the dart and remove it from the wall. After securing the hatch behind him he turned to begin crawling up the slightly sloping tunnel.

  No metal or plastic walls enclosing him here, only the bare rock he’d laboriously tunneled through over the preceding cycles. As he progressed, the acuteness of the slope he was ascending increased.

  There was no electronically operated, camouflaged door at the end of the tunnel. After exiting he spent several hours replacing the dead leaves and branches that concealed the opening. A quick inspection of his surroundings confirmed his solitude. There was no one outside and he had not been followed. Nor would he stumble into an official expedition leaving or returning by way of one of the now monitored exits, as he had so many years ago. He followed their schedules religiously and departed on his own journeys only when he knew no other Quozl was likely to be abroad.

  He had his own exit, carefully excavated and maintained using common repair and maintenance equipment. His alone. It belonged to him and the spirits with whom he meditated, and they weren’t going to expose him.

  It was night. Everyone knew and respected his off-duty marathon meditation sessions. Sometimes they lasted for several days. His piety was oft remarked upon. When finished he would emerge from the meditation chamber fit and refreshed. None realized it was not meditation on the Milian Cycle which so rejuvenated him, but rather his delightful, solitary walks across the invigorating, unique, remarkable, and highly proscribed surface of Shiraz.

  His Shiraz, as he’d come to think of it.

  X.

  CHAD’S CONFIDENCE WENT down with the sun. All well and good to assure your parents of your unmatched courage, quite another to find yourself out in the woods alone, miles from the comforting confines of the cabin. He was alone in the forest with the animals who had lived there since before man. Would they take exception to his presence?

  Now that it was growing unimaginably, impossibly dark he wished he’d brought the tent despite its weight. Though the walls were made of insubstantial fabric, they would serve to shut out the night. His sleeping bag and rain flap would only block out the darkness behind him and over his head. Movement on either side or below his feet would be inescapably visible.

  During the day the woods had been full of color and song. Now things were on the move that did not speak to each other, small shadows with flashing eyes that darted furtively from rock to tree. The crickets and the owl, the frogs that lived in the nearby stream, these were familiar, comforting sounds. It was the noise of brush being shoved aside, of leaves rustling as spirits squirmed past them, of great unseen wings beating the air, that sparked a young imagination which refused to rest.

  He hadn’t planned on building a fire. His sleeping bag would keep him cozy-warm and fire-building was hard work. His tuna-fish sandwich supper required no heating. But he built a blaze anyway, hurriedly gathering bits and scraps of wood and dumping them atop a bed of pine needles. He sacrificed a dozen matches before the miniature pyre reached for the sky. The relief he felt in the presence of light was no less than that of early Cro-Magnon.

  The fire was not big enough to make any truly dangerous animal hesitate, but it was sufficient to force the shadows back into the trees. They were the real threat.

  The stream behind him ran fast and deep. It would shield him from any unnameable horrors trying to approach from that direction. Its watery roar was comforting. With the fire at his front and the water at his back he climbed into his sleeping bag and began skinning a Hershey bar. He would eat the sandwich next, deliberately reversing the usual order. The gesture of independence made him feel better.

  It was a moonless night and he wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or disappointed. The shadows kept their distance. He tried to concentrate on the impossibly bright stars which spilled like sugar across the black velvet sky. After a while the brightness blurred and ran together to form a pale opalescent veil over his eyes.

  The sound of splashing woke him. He blinked in the uncompromising light of morning, shooting up in bed so fast that he knocked the rain flap askew.

  Turning to the river he saw nothing. The noise could have been made by a large rock tumbling downstream. The sun hurt his eyes and he blinked them clear, dizzy from waking up so quickly. Nothing came stomping through the stream toward him; no grizzly, no runaway elk. There was only the roiling glassiness of the water itself.

  As he turned to check the smoking residue of his fire he heard it a second time.

  A
gain he saw nothing, but this time he struggled determinedly out of his sleeping bag and into his jeans, walking toward the river until he was standing on a flat piece of granite that protruded into the water. The current had excavated a deep pool here. It would be a swell place to swim if you didn’t mind the cold. Absently he bent to gaze into the depths.

  With a shout he leaped backward. Then he cautiously returned to the edge. Whatever was down there wasn’t coming after him, gave no sign of ascending. It lay on the bottom, staring back up at him while thrashing its limbs uselessly. Tiny bubbles rose from its small mouth in a steady stream. It looked almost familiar. No, he decided, it was familiar. He’d seen it once before, long ago, when he was just a kid. It was the creature he’d never quite been able to convince himself had been a figment of his imagination. Or else it was another one just like it.

  “What are you doing down there?” He yelled at the top of his lungs in hopes of being understood above the river’s roar. The creature continued bubbling at him. “Are you all right? Are you hurt? You’re gonna freeze if you stay down there.” He felt no fear, only concern. “Well, if you just want to lie down there, that’s okay with me.”

  This statement resulted in many more bubbles and a rather more energetic waving of the slim, furry arms. Same as before, he noted: seven fingers on each hand.

  “I’m not coming in after you.” Chad was insistent. “Do you want to come out? If you do, then why don’t you start swimming?”

  It struck him that perhaps the creature didn’t know how to swim. At thirteen Chad didn’t realize that another animal’s lung capacity might be inadequate in relation to its weight to create natural buoyancy, something humans took for granted. It did occur to him that it might be injured and that its wounds might not be visible.

  He knelt to splash river on his face, banishing the last vestiges of sleep. Steeling himself against the cold, he lay flat on the rock and shoved his arm as far into the water as he could. The chill raced up his shoulder.