by Warren Fahy
“This is their reply to you. Don’t you see?”
“They can go to hell!”
“You can’t bargain with them. They have your son, Maxim! They have Alexei. He will be next!”
Maxim’s seventeen-year-old son had disappeared eleven days ago while hiking in the Himalayas. Russian newspapers had quoted anonymous officials who speculated that Maxim Dragolovich had many enemies, and if he wanted to see his son again, he should turn himself in and face justice in Russia. Though it had been delivered by television and newsprint, it was not a subtle ransom note. His friend Akiva had published Maxim’s “response” to them in his own newspaper last week, quoting Maxim’s declaration that Russia would reap what it had sown if his son was not returned to him unharmed.
“Maxim,” Galia coaxed.
“No one can leave,” Maxim whispered. “Guard every entrance. Send this message, through one of Akiva’s newspapers,” he growled quietly like a dormant volcano, alarming Galia now. “If they touch my son, vengeance for their fifty million murders will rise up across Russia and swallow them all. No one, and nothing, will be spared.”
“Chief, I can’t—”
“Tell them!”
“Boss…”
“Tell them to check their fucking mail!”
MARCH 17
3:32 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Four hendros and three humans watched the news with the volume muted.
On the seventy-two-inch screen in Hender’s living room, a red chyron flashed in the lower corner: KREMLIN FIRE! Onscreen a fire blazed out of control over the white façade of a stately building by the banks of the Moskva River. Black smoke and red flames poured from hundreds of windows as cameras in helicopters panned the scene.
Kuzu pointed. “Fire on building,” he grumbled.
“Building on fire,” Andy Beasley corrected absently.
“Huh?” Kuzu recoiled. He didn’t like English; it was stupidly inflexible.
“Yes,” the other sels said between mouthfuls of popcorn, correcting Kuzu. “Building on fire.”
Kuzu pursed his lips, his bristling fur flushing purple.
“Turn it up,” Joe said.
A hendro snagged the remote with one hand and raised the volume:
“… the iconic building, one of eighteen in the Kremlin complex, now seems to be a total loss.”
“I must say, it seems almost impossible that such a building could perish.”
“Do you believe foul play was involved in this, Dr. Aaronson?”
“Who can say, but a building as important to the operation of the Russian state—well, it’s simply inconceivable that in this day and age such a structure could be totally destroyed by fire. At the very least, it’s a grave embarrassment for the Russian government. I think we simply must allow the possibility of some kind of deliberate action.”
“Do you suspect terrorists might be involved?”
“As I said, I don’t think we can rule anything out at this time.”
“Thank you, sir. Noted Kremlinologist and author, Dr. Mitchell Aaronson. We now move to our Moscow correspondent, Amy Schuster. Amy?”
“Wow,” muttered Andy. “That sucks!”
“Yeah,” Bo grumbled, frowning.
Officially, the isolated base that was the hendros’ undisclosed location had been out of use for decades. In fact, it had steadily hosted top secret research programs right up to the present day. Visited daily by unlogged flights ferrying unlisted employees to and from Las Vegas, this dry lake bed in the Nevada highlands was encircled by high-tech surveillance devices that could detect approaches and departures of any living thing larger than a rabbit for miles around. Almost inaccessible due to its geography alone, this godforsaken spot was centered in a sun-broiled wasteland larger than Connecticut. Moreover, “Area 51,” as it was designated, had been credited with too many tall tales for anyone to believe the hendros were here, which made it the perfect place to hide them.
One of the base’s giant hangars had served as home for the sels before their large habitat was erected near an airstrip along the northern edge of the lake bed. The stadium-sized Mylar tent they now lived in was inflated with cooled air and resembled a Jiffy Pop popcorn package. To ufologists who spied it through telescopes sizzling on the desert flat it looked like the mother ship itself, which military intelligence had concluded would evoke the most advantageously hysterical response. Those who worked there dubbed it “the Zoo”—some because of their disdain for its inhabitants and some because of their respect for them.
“Hey! Call Hender so we can start the movie,” Bo said.
Joe nodded and reached for the intercom.
3:34 P.M.
The 1st Darkness
Clouds came before the waves came, 142,221,201 years ago. The waves tore one of the nine petals of our land, which I will call Henderica for humans, into the poison sea. Only songs speak for those lost sels, written down in the Books long after they were all gone.
Read from tablets copied from poems based on legends, sung, remembered, written, and repeated through a dozen darknesses, our history is now stored in tunnels deep in the sinking fragment of our world. The Books are there, but no one can retrieve them for a hundred years, since the humans dropped their bomb.
It was my job, passed down from forever, to copy each chain of pages before they crumbled. It took me 3,000 years. And I remember every word.
Hender read over the first entry of his book, making corrections with three hands clicking the keyboard simultaneously on his MacBook Pro. He could speak and write more than two hundred sel languages, most of which were now long dead. Yet, after mastering all those archaic languages, in all their quirks and mutations, English was still a daunting challenge for him.
Sels were solitary souls. They usually had children when they were tens of thousands of years old, so language had become a tool more for thinking than for communicating. For the last seventeen thousand years, Hender had been the only interlocutor among them, as each spoke a different language. They had paid him a yearly tribute in case they needed him to translate some rare interaction or dispute between them. At times, one of them had found an ancient artifact with writing that they had brought to him to translate.
To humans, Hender spoke English shockingly well after only six months. He was, the humans quickly realized, a linguistic savant. He seemed to have learned some French, a little Italian, German, and even Russian and Japanese during this same time. He continuously taught the other sels English, since they had decided they needed a common language, something they had never had before, in order to communicate with humans and each other in their new and disturbing circumstances.
Hender signed his entry Shenuday Shueenair. It was the nearest phonetic spelling of his short name. He didn’t mind being called Hender, as Andy had named him. He liked it, actually. And he didn’t mind being referred to as he or she or hendro, either. Humans used all those names, and many others, to refer to the sels, even though sels were hermaphrodites. He had suggested that humans use sel, which was simple enough to say and ancient enough to have a connection to the languages of all five sels, each of whom was the last of an ancient tribe.
Hender was used to many names that meant the same thing. When the things that words named were changed, however, they became lies, he realized now. If a sel lied to another on Henders Island, it could mean instant death. Lies were murder in the world he came from. All this had been troubling him lately.
Hender scanned the crude imitation of his treno tree around him that was made of concrete, rebar, and gunite. Under the Mylar sky, humans had re-created five scaled-down treno trees like the ones they had lived in on Henders Island. The sels were bewildered with gratitude by the strange gesture. But they were beginning to wonder whether humans had liberated them or imprisoned them, instead. They were not allowed to leave, though the humans kept telling them it was for their own good and that it was temporary—a concept that was difficult for them to understand,
especially as the days marched by.
A beam of sun swept through the oculus of blue sky in the center of the silver dome. The gold shaft of light poured through Hender’s window over the translucent fur on the back of four of his hands that framed fossils he had collected from his island, which he had laid out on his desk next to his computer. Nell, Geoffrey, and Andy had helped him rescue the fossils while they were escaping from the island. Illuminated by the sun, the fragments of Henders Island were “museum-quality replicas” of the originals, Andy told him. The humans were keeping the “real ones” for study. The ones they returned to him seemed exactly the same, but they were made of something else. They were like food made of stone, or stones made of food. Everything in his world was being replaced with something else that humans called by the same name.
Most of the sels’ possessions had never been returned to them. Andy, who was the first person they had met on Henders Island and who was now one of their full-time companions, explained to Hender that their things were “pilfered” somewhere along their journey from Henders Island and that some had been sold for huge prices on the “black market” and on online auction sites before the “authorities” were able to stop it.
The voice of Joe, one of the two navy officers assigned to the sels, buzzed through Hender’s intercom. “It’s showtime in three minutes, Hender!”
Hender closed his MacBook. “OK, Joe.” He descended from his room, his six hands doubling as feet. His legs rolled like a pianist’s hand down the winding stairs until he emerged into a replica of a B-29 fuselage—a little larger than the real one that had pierced his tree house over half a century ago on Henders Island. The others were waiting for him.
Hender scanned the magazine pages and product packages he had stuck to his walls and ceiling, on which he had plastered the garbage he had collected on his beach while studying humans from afar, to remind him of his home. He felt disoriented, his arms reaching out like buttresses to steady himself.
“Come on, Hender!” Bo sat with the other sels on his long red sofa in front of Hender’s giant HDTV.
Andy and Joe fussed at a kitchen counter behind the sofa. “Popcorn’s done!” Joe announced, taking a large bowl out of the microwave. “What did Steven Spielberg call the shark in Jaws?”
“Bruce,” said Bo from the sofa.
“Damn, too easy.” Joe regretted wasting his turn. Joe and Bo were pop-culture trivia rivals who were locked in perpetual combat. They had lots of time on their hands in the “Hendro-Dome,” as they called it, after being indefinitely assigned to this duty ever since contact with the sels on Oahu. In addition to their other duties, they had become emergency handymen and assistants, as well as security, keeping people out and, perhaps, the hendros in. With the desolation and heavy security around the base, their duty wasn’t terribly pressing. The sels had no desire to leave their air-conditioned dome to cross the simmering desert, and nobody could possibly reach them here.
After the sels’ intense objections, supervising officials had agreed not to subject them to a rotating staff. Hender had explained to the humans that sels needed to meet and know each person individually and that they were intimidated by groups and by strangers. Moreover, the sels were not used to having people leave them. Ever. Until death, that is, which was a very rare and traumatic event in their experience.
Though they were largely independent and nonsocial, they valued the few individuals in each other’s presence to an extreme degree. The absence of Nell and Geoffrey while on their honeymoon had been explained to them many times, but still it filled them with dread that they could be gone for two whole weeks.
Andy served them a platter of barbecued spiger brochettes that he had cooked in a George Foreman Grill. “Eat up! We’ve only got a few hundred pounds of frozen spiger steaks left, so savor the flavor.”
Hender smelled the roasted spiger meat with a melancholy pleasure. This meat had been made available to the sels to brighten their mood on special occasions, carved from three spigers killed, sawed to pieces, and dipped in vats of liquid nitrogen before being transported off the island only hours before its destruction. Airlifted to the freezers on board the USS Philippines Sea, where most euthanized specimens had been taken for later study, a ton of the meat had found its way into the larders of their kitchen at the base.
Hender smiled at the humans’ gesture. They did not realize that, except for Kuzu, sels rarely ate spigers, any more than humans ate lions. But it was a nice gesture—and an exotic delicacy that all the sels enjoyed. Their usual diet now consisted of shrimp, mantis shrimp, crab, peanut butter, cashews, chickpeas, pill bugs, chicken liver, and a continually broadening diet of copper-rich human foods that were deemed safe through testing and tasting by the sels.
“Did you read chapter nine after the changes Nell and Geoffrey made, Hender?” Andy asked. The three humans had been working with him on a Field Guide to Henders Island.
“Not yet, Andy,” Hender said, standing still in the doorway.
“We don’t understand how disk-ants became nants, symbiants, and arthropalms. A little more on that would be awesome.”
“Symbiants aren’t disk-ants.” Hender sighed, his fur color dimming. The “symbiants” that Andy referred to were, in fact, microscopic relatives of disk-ants, the latter being a particularly terrible species from Henders Island. But the symbiants were quite different, beneficial organisms that for millions of years had lived in the fur of sels and other large animals like an exterior immune system fending off the island’s myriad predators. This immune system had been stripped away when they were showered with salt water at Pearl Harbor. As a result of losing their symbiants, the sels now required high-powered showerheads to cleanse their fine spinelike fur and exfoliate their skin. And still they suffered side effects, including fatigue and depression as their skin’s ability to absorb oxygen was compromised.
“Why don’t we start the movie?” Hender said.
“Finally!” said Bo from the couch.
Joe presented a giant bowl of popcorn, and as fifteen sel hands simultaneously grabbed handfuls with their two opposable thumbs, the popcorn disappeared except for one popped kernel. Andy ate the last kernel and Joe got out a few more packages of popcorn.
“Go ahead, Bo,” Joe said.
Bo started the movie as Joe put more popcorn in the microwave.
“Come on, Hender,” Andy said from the couch.
Hender nodded, watching the titles appear on the wide television screen. The 3-D HDTV was like a window into a different world. The sels, with their eyes that filtered polarized light, did not need to wear the glasses the humans wore to see the images in three dimensions:
A Zero-Leeds Production
ALMOST EARTH:
HENDERS ISLAND
A clip of Cynthea Leeds, the tall, statuesque neurotic who had produced the reality show that first encountered Henders Island, appeared: she was speaking frantically on the prow of the show’s ship, the Trident. She was one of those who surrounded the sels in a human shield as the navy’s ships closed in. Hender remembered the event more vividly than the video on the screen and resented how the video changed things from his memory, chopping up moments and rearranging them. Words appeared on the screen as Cynthea shouted them: “These are the amazing people of Henders Island!” She had said those words, he remembered, on that day. It was fascinating to him the way humans substituted movies for truth and made things happen after they had really happened.
“Here it comes,” piccoloed Durlee-Ettle Mai, who was the green and yellow hendro. Her name sounded like a clarinet riff. The humans called her Mai, and she insisted on being called she. Mai giggled on the sofa. It was a sound like an alternating buzz and whistle that communicated her amusement across species very effectively. She hunched over the coffee table as she took apart a wristwatch and put it back together while watching the documentary with her other eye and snacking on honey-dipped spiger nuggets rolled in pepper.
Kuzu buzzed deeply
. “Your move, Bo.” The large sel’s fur coat was splattered black, purple, and gold, like a Rorschach test over his muscular frame. Three chessboards were on the coffee table in front of him. Kuzu enjoyed chess, having learned it from Bo, and now carried on three games: with Hender, an inattentive Andy, and the humiliated Bo, who wished he had never taught the sel how to play the game.
Hender watched the TV screen:
“… here are the people of Henders Island. They were saved because humanity recognized one of its own that day, despite a barrier of species that seemed to separate us forever. This is not only the story of how we rescued them. It is the story of how they may have rescued us.”
“Oh, brother!” Andy blew a raspberry. He pushed back his long kinky blond hair, and laughed. Cynthea’s cutthroat showmanship had grated on him from the beginning when they were filming SeaLife. She had singled out Andy to be the show’s comic relief from the start, which he found out after viewing episodes since returning from the expedition. He resented her greatly for this. On the other hand, since the reality show had been the reason he reached Henders Island, Andy was grateful to her for casting him. The hendros had become the only family he had, and the only people on Earth who really cared about him, other than Nell and Geoffrey.
The hendros clapped wildly, a human custom Andy regretted they had adopted, since only five sels had thirty hands to contribute to every ovation. Footage of Kuzu, taken a few months ago by Zero Monroe, one of SeaLife’s cameramen, now appeared on the large screen. Kuzu’s full name appeared in a chyron:
KUZU-THROPINSALUSUVORRATI-GROPANINTHIZKOLEVOLIZIM-STAL
The camera zoomed in on the hulking sel.
“His full name is too long to pronounce: his occupation was hunter and inventor on Henders Island. He crafted traps and weapons used by sels on Henders Island for millions of years to catch their food.… He is Kuzu, and he is over ninety thousand years old. Brilliant and brooding, this brawny sel spends his time learning English along with his fellow sels so that they can persuade humans, someday, to set his people free.”
