The Hunt for Reduk Topa

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “Today’s security scan is sponsored by Ringclean Fresh Wipes. Smell the freshness. Feel the freshness. Taste the freshness.”

  Cal and Loren exchanged glances but chose not to pass comment. Splurt was nestled in his usual position on Cal’s shoulder, but half-turned so he could keep close watch over Loren.

  “I’m fine, Splurt,” Loren said. “Seriously. You don’t have to keep staring at me.”

  “Security scan complete!” Perko announced. “No narcotics, other contraband, or contagious diseases detected. You are now clear to… A, enter North Logus. B, ask for information. C, return to ship. D, hear these options again.”

  “What do you think? B?” Cal asked Loren. “Or A? Should we just go A and wing it?”

  “You are now clear to… A, enter North Logus. B, ask for information,” Perko repeated.

  “No, let’s be sensible for once. B,” said Cal. “Let’s go B.”

  “C, return to ship. D, hear these options again,” said Perko, beaming from ear to digital ear.

  “B,” said Cal.

  Perko smiled expectantly.

  “B,” Cal repeated, with slightly more emphasis. “Ask for information.”

  “As you wish, pardner!” chirped Perko. “Where have you come from today?”

  “What’s that got to do with…?” Cal began, then he shook his head. “No. We want to ask you information.”

  “I’m Perko, your friendly animated assistant!”

  “We know,” said Loren.

  “B,” said Cal.

  “You are now clear to… A, enter North Logus…”

  “Jesus. Is it me?” Cal asked. “Am I saying it wrong?”

  “B, ask for information. C, return to ship. D, hear these options again.”

  “B!” said Cal, enunciating it as clearly and as loudly as he could. “Fonking B.”

  “Great choice!” said Perko.

  “Finally!”

  “You chose… D, hear these options again!”

  “No! No, I didn’t! I chose—”

  “A, enter North Logus. B—”

  “OK. Fonk it. A. We choose A,” said Cal. “We’ll figure it out when we’re in there.”

  “Ask for information. C, return to ship—”

  “A! A, A, A. We choose A,” said Cal. He thumped a fist on the wall. “Just open the fonking door.”

  “Sorry, pardner, I’m afraid I didn’t get that,” said Perko. “Would you like to ask me for information?”

  “Yes,” said Loren.

  “No,” said Cal, who now just wanted the whole hellish ordeal to be over.

  Loren turned to him. “What? I thought we were going to—”

  “Great choice!” chimed Perko.

  “Christ, what now?” Cal groaned.

  “You chose… C, return to ship! Very well! Have a nice day, pardner. Come back real soon.”

  The face went dark. Cal and Loren both stared in silence at the spot where it had been.

  “I fonking hate this place,” Cal muttered after a while.

  At the sound of his voice, the face reappeared. “Hi there! I’m Perko, your friendly animated assistant.”

  A light appeared above the face and began to wash over Cal and Loren. “Today’s security scan is sponsored by Ringclean Fresh Wipes. Smell the freshness. Feel the freshness. Taste the freshness.”

  “Yeah,” Loren sighed. “Me too.”

  Several long, frustrating minutes later, Perko eventually grasped their desire to choose ‘A! Option fonking A, you animated piece of shizz!’ He slid aside and the wall parted, revealing a much larger room filled with people and, through the windows beyond, the towering splendor of North Logus.

  Tall, twisting spires stretched toward the azure sky, their surfaces shining like polished silver and gold. Flying vehicles, no larger than cars, weaved between them, gliding smoothly in their hundreds, all banking and twisting in turn like the body of a giant metal snake.

  It all looked so clean. So high-tech. So futuristic.

  “Now, this is more like it,” said Cal, buzzing with excitement. “This is what I call an alien city. Fancy towers. Pointy bits. Flying cars. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This place is perfect.”

  He let out a gasp. “Wait! I bet they have one of those mind-reading restaurant places. You know, like Nana Joan’s? Man, that would be awesome. I’m going to think about Five Guys, just in case.” His eyes widened. “No, wait! In-N-Out Burger! No, wait! Both!”

  Loren’s eyes crept to his stomach. He’d switched out the bloodstained Betty White t-shirt for one featuring a cartoon image of a semi-naked Danny DeVito, and had assured Loren that it was hilarious. Miz had made some comment about it being a self-portrait, but Cal had laughed it off. They were nothing alike. DeVito was shorter and had less hair, for a start.

  “Maybe you should really concentrate on a salad bar,” Loren suggested.

  “It’s travel weight,” Cal insisted. “It’ll—”

  “Fall right out of you. Right,” Loren replied. “Let me know when it’s going to happen and I’ll stand back.”

  Keen to change the subject, Cal looked around the room. It resembled an airport arrivals area, with hundreds of people bustling around, most of them dragging floating suitcases behind them from clips attached to their wide belts.

  The belts were a common theme. In fact, the fashion of the place looked quite samey in general. There were a lot of shiny jumpsuits, spiky haircuts, and high collars going on, and Cal wondered if there was some sort of reunion happening in town for former members of 1970s Earth glam rock bands.

  Aside from a few outliers who Cal guessed were probably tourists, everyone was wearing bulky goggles on their faces. They covered them from midway up the nose to halfway down the forehead, and when Cal got a better look at a pair as someone swept past him, he noticed that there were no lenses, just a blank sheet of metal or plastic.

  “How do they see?” wondered Loren, watching the crowds.

  “Probably with their ears, or fingers, or some weird alien shizz,” said Cal. “Best not to dwell on it or it’ll creep us the fonk out.”

  Standing on his tiptoes, he peered over the sea of spiky haircuts. “I think I see the way out,” he announced. “There’s a door right over…”

  He stopped when a metal box the size of an old-style portable TV came flying up and stopped in front of them.

  For a moment, the screen remained dark, then a series of lights appeared, forming an irritatingly familiar face.

  “I’m Perko, your friendly animated assistant!” it announced. “Welcome to Immigration Control. Please answer the following multiple-choice questions.”

  Cal groaned. “Jesus.”

  “Question one,” began Perko. “Of twenty-six…”

  Back on the Currently Untitled, Tyrra and Miz sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table in silence. Miz drummed her claws on the tabletop. Tyrra used her tongue to dig around in the gaps between her teeth.

  Somewhere further back in the ship, Mech stomped around doing whatever repairs he could while he waited for the new warp disk.

  “So,” said Miz. “

  Tyrra finished exploring her tooth gaps and looked across the table. “So.”

  “You want to, like, do something?” Miz asked.

  Tyrra gave a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know. Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like, training, or whatever?” Miz suggested. “Like fight training?”

  Tyrra thought about this, then shrugged again. It was even less enthusiastic than the last one had been, which was really saying something.

  “I guess so.”

  “We don’t have to. We could, like, do something else. Or, you know, just do nothing.” Miz’s snout furrowed. “I don’t really care. You’re the one who kept going on about training all week.”

  “Yes. It is vital. To fight is the Symmorium way,” Tyrra said, almost on auto-pilot. She shifted awkwardly. “It’s just… it gets kind of…”

  �
��Kind of what?”

  “Boring,” said Tyrra, the word slipping out despite her best efforts to stop it. Once the box was open, though, there was no closing it again. “I know I asked you to help me train, but I’m bored of fighting all the time. I do not even take joy in hurting the human now. I merely pity him, like one would pity a pet, or an idiot.”

  “He will totally love hearing himself described like that,” Miz said, her lips curving into a smirk. “You should tell him that when he gets back.”

  “I will,” said Tyrra.

  Miz adjusted her slouch into a different, not quite as slouchy one. “So, what do you want to do instead of training?”

  “I don’t know,” Tyrra admitted. “Training is all I have known.”

  Her dark eyes met Mizette’s. They were usually devoid of most emotions except those immediately connected with violence, but now there was something almost hopeful about them.

  “What do you like to do?” Tyrra asked. “When not in battle, I mean.”

  Miz opened her mouth to respond, then hesitated. What did she like to do?

  She quickly made a mental list of her favorite activities. It was quite a short list. ‘Sitting down’ featured in it twice, and the rest of the entries were mostly variations on the word ‘sarcasm.’

  “Oh, you know, the usual stuff,” she offered.

  Tyrra leaned closer, her voice taking on an excited breathless edge. “Like what?”

  “Just, like, you know,” said Miz, waving a clawed hand.

  The Symmorium girl gave a brief shake of her head. “I do not know. What? Name some things.”

  Miz stared back, like a rabbit that had been caught in headlights while taking stock of its life choices. Or, more accurately, its lack of them.

  Seriously? Did she do anything? Surely she enjoyed something that didn’t involve making disparaging remarks about others or resting in a chair.

  “Might I suggest something you enjoy, ma’am?” asked Kevin.

  “Uh, yeah. Sure. Whatever,” said Miz, trying to hide her visible relief.

  “I seem to recall you mentioning that you were fond of star charts,” Kevin said. “I believe you said you found it therapeutic to plot courses between distant systems, avoiding as many naturally occurring obstacles as possible.”

  Miz gazed blankly up at the ceiling.

  “You got really rather animated about it,” Kevin insisted.

  Miz continued to stare.

  “Or was that Mistress Loren?” Kevin wondered. “You know, on reflection, I think it was. Apologies for the intrusion.”

  Mizette rolled her eyes—something else that had made it onto her short list of hobbies—and then reluctantly lowered them to Tyrra. The girl was still watching her expectantly, waiting for an answer.

  “Math,” said Miz, clutching desperately for an activity—any activity.

  Tyrra frowned. “Huh?”

  “Math. We could do math,” Miz said. Cal’s words rang loudly in the mostly empty space inside her head. “It’s, like, important. Or whatever. Everyone needs to know math. We should totally do math.”

  Tyrra’s bench creaked a little as she sat back and contemplated this. “Math,” she said, rolling the word around inside her cavernous mouth, as if tasting every letter. “I have heard of it, but have never tried it for myself.” Finally, she nodded. “Yes. Let’s do that. Let’s do math. It sounds fun.”

  “Oh, totally,” said Miz, relieved that her boundless apathy and lack of motivation was no longer under scrutiny. “It’ll be great.”

  She looked to the ceiling. “Kevin?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do you know, like, math stuff?”

  “I can run twelve bajillion calculations a second,” Kevin replied.

  Miz waited.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a yes, ma’am,” Kevin confirmed. “I know ‘math stuff.’”

  “OK, that’s awesome. Can you teach Tyrra?” Miz asked.

  “I can certainly give it a try.”

  “Cool,” said Miz. “And, like, is ‘bajillion’ even a real number?”

  “Oh, it’s a very real number, ma’am,” said Kevin. “It’s arguably more real than the other numbers, in fact. And I know all the numbers. Six. That’s one. And one, in fact. That’s two.”

  Miz blinked slowly. “Right…”

  “Two examples of numbers, I mean. I’m not saying that one is two,” Kevin explained. “The point is…”

  He hesitated.

  “Actually, I don’t recall what the point is, but I’m sure it was a good one,” Kevin said. “Now, if everyone would be so kind as to settle down and face this way…”

  A slide was projected onto one of the kitchen’s white walls. It showed a series of bewildering looking equations, all upside-down.

  “Then we shall begin.”

  If anything, their second encounter with Perko had been even more frustrating than the first—something which Cal would have said was impossible just ten seconds before the immigration interview had started.

  Each of the questions came with a number of possible answers, and each answer then drilled down to a deeper level of questioning related to the initial choice. At least, that was the theory. The questions were all simple enough—Where have you come from? What is your business on Logus? Are you here with the intention of committing a crime or terrorist offences?—but the process of answering them was made tediously painful by the grinning Perko and his inability to follow basic fonking instructions.

  At one point, somewhere around question Seventeen C (ii), Loren had been forced to hold Cal back and stop him from challenging Perko to a fight. During the argument that followed, the timer had elapsed on the immigration quiz, and they’d been forced to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

  But then, finally, they made it. They answered the questions to Perko’s satisfaction, he wished them a safe onward journey, then he fonked off to make someone else’s life a living hell for the next forty minutes.

  Cal had immediately sprinted for the door and out onto the street before any other friendly animated assistants could intercept him.

  Outside, his stress quickly started to ebb away, as the warmth of the afternoon sunshine caressed his face. He stood there, eyes closed, face upturned to the heavens, just enjoying the sense of freedom. The sense of liberty. The sense of not having Perko misunderstanding every single thing he said and going back to the start every two minutes to begin over.

  The sidewalk was soft and spongy beneath his feet, like the rubber mats often placed under playground equipment in the hope that children would miraculously bounce, rather than shatter every bone in their bodies when they plunged from the top of the climbing frame.

  All around him, the glam rock goggle army swarmed in all directions through the wide, traffic-less streets, their eyes covered by those windowless headsets they wore. They swerved to avoid him whenever they drew close, backing up his theory that they saw with some other part of their body. Otherwise, there was some extremely lucky guesswork going on.

  “So, where to first?” asked Loren, stepping onto the sidewalk beside him.

  As she did, a purple-skinned man in a garish suit jacket and, to Cal’s mind, the least convincing hairpiece in the history of the universe, jumped out of the crowd brandishing a round object in the palm of one hand and staring at it intently.

  “Hey!” the man yelled, stopping directly in front of Loren.

  Splurt reacted instantly. He launched himself off Cal’s shoulder, expanded rapidly, then flomped down over the man, encasing him from head to toe in a mound of gelatinous green gloop.

  Trapped inside Splurt’s body, the man’s eyes flicked up from the device in his hand, gazed briefly and hopelessly out at Cal and Loren, then returned to their original position. A single bubble rolled up from his mouth and went plomp when it reached Splurt’s surface. When it popped, Cal could’ve sworn he heard the word, “Help.”

  “Hey, buddy
, I don’t think he was going to hurt us,” Cal said, smiling reassuringly at Splurt. “Great reactions, though. Top marks. But, I think you can safely let him go.”

  Splurt remained motionless for a while, his eyes rotating between Cal, Loren, and the man currently trapped inside Splurt’s own body.

  He rippled faintly.

  “No! God, no, don’t do that,” Cal said.

  Splurt wobbled.

  “No, it won’t grow back,” Cal said. “Just let him go before he suffocates. If we later decide that, yes, in hindsight we should rip his head off, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Splurt stood his ground for a few more seconds, then sproinged into the air, shrank to normal size, and splatted onto Cal’s shoulder.

  Once Splurt was settled, Cal reached up, carefully removed the toupee from Splurt’s head, and replaced it on the head of the man in the awful jacket. The man said nothing, but adjusted it absent-mindedly, never once tearing his eyes away from the device in his hand.

  “Sorry about that. You startled him,” said Loren. “Are you OK?”

  “What?” He spared her the briefest glimpse. “Uh, yeah. Yeah,” he said, still distracted by the object he held. “I’m fine. Map?”

  Loren frowned. “Sorry, what?”

  “Map,” said the man. “You want a map? I got maps. I’m the map man.”

  “They have a map man!” said Cal, in a way that suggested this was the most adorable thing he’d ever heard.

  “You want one?” asked the map man.

  “Uh, yes. Sure,” said Loren, but Cal quickly stepped in.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let’s not rush into this. Let me handle this. I’ve dealt with his type before,” said Cal.

  Loren frowned. “Map men?”

  “Not… No, not map men specifically. I’ll be honest, I’ve never actually heard that term until now.” Cal’s eyes narrowed. “I mean charlatans. Con men.” He eyeballed the map man. “How much?”

  The map man said nothing, just chuckled gently as he stared at the device.

  “Hey, guy. Guy!” said Cal, clicking his fingers in the man’s face. It seemed to temporarily break the spell, and the man looked up, annoyed.

  “What is it?” he asked tetchily.