For the Love of Gelo!

by Tom O'Donnell

  Taius thought for a moment, then he answered. “You all would have been interrogated. If you had any value as hostages, you would have been imprisoned.”

  “And if we had no value as hostages?” I asked.

  “You would have been executed,” he said. Nicki, Becky, and Little Gus shook their heads in amazement.

  “Um,” said Eyf from above.

  Taius looked confused. “This is what happens when weaker species choose to battle the Dominion,” he said with a shrug. “Everyone knows it.”

  “Stop explaining,” I said to Taius. “You’re not helping your case.” His mouth twisted into a snarl, but he heeded my advice and said nothing. The Vorem might be good at conquering planets, but their people skills needed a lot of work.

  The humans and I huddled and spoke to one another in their language so that Taius wouldn’t understand.

  Eyf circled overhead. She seemed particularly agitated by all our arguing. “Um,” she said again.

  “Taius is a creep,” said Becky, “plain and simple.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know about this, Chorkle,” said Hollins. “Is he up to something?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think so,” I said. “I believe he’s desperate.” It might have helped to tell them I’d just seen him blubbering like a larvae, but I had given Taius my word I wouldn’t tell. And the humans probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

  “Then as much as I hate to say it, it seems like using his tracker—his zowul thingie—is the only way,” said Nicki. “For now, Taius’s goal happens to align with ours. It makes sense.”

  “Come on,” said Little Gus. “We’re really going to trust somebody with red eyes? Seriously? Red eyes?”

  “I don’t like it either,” said Hollins, “but what other choice do we have? How else do we find Kalac and the others?”

  “We could do Gus’s stick thing again,” grumbled Becky.

  “You liked the stick thing?” asked Little Gus. “I call it Little Gus-ing which way to go!”

  “No,” said Becky. “I don’t like the stick thing. I’m being sarcastic. You’re acting super weird, dude.”

  “What?” cried Little Gus. “Nothing. Not me. Weird? No. What?”

  Becky squinted at him before speaking to the rest of us. “Trusting Taius Ridian is a mistake,” she said.

  “Teddy Roosevelt once said, ‘The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything,’” said Hollins.

  “Little Gus once said: ‘People with red eyes are bad news,’” said Little Gus.

  “Look, it might not be a good option, but at this moment it happens to be our best. We have to do it,” said Hollins as though this was the final word on the matter.

  “What are you? The boss? Shouldn’t we vote on it?” asked Nicki with a hint of irritation in her voice.

  “Yeah, fine,” said Hollins. “Let’s do that.”

  “Eyf, do you want to vote?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “but um . . .”

  We voted. It was three to two. Nicki, Hollins, and I voted in favor of following Taius. Little Gus and Becky voted against. Of course, I hadn’t told them that I’d already given Taius my word. All the while, he watched us with a look of contempt on his face.

  “Um, look, excuse me Chorkle and Homo sapiens,” said Eyf, landing nearby. “But soon it will be nightfall.” It was true. We’d wasted half the day looking at maps and debating. It was time to get moving. Every minute we dallied might make all the difference.

  I approached Taius. He sat on a flat rock, legs crossed, eyes narrowed. His pack was on the ground beside him. “Okay, Taius,” I said, “lead the way.”

  Hollins stepped up from behind, holding Eromu’s blaster in his hand. “Nice. Or does zapping,” he said to Taius in poorly accented Xotonian. For once, though, his meaning was utterly clear.

  Taius stood and picked up a walking stick—about as tall as his shoulders—off the ground. Then he smiled with a flash of pointed white teeth. “Good,” he said. “I thought you were going to stand around blathering all day.”

  “Watch it,” said Little Gus. “Blathering is what makes humanity great.”

  Taius eyed the little device in his palm, and I heard the faint chime of the Phryxus II’s beacon. Then he started off through the forest. The rest of us followed behind: four on foot, one on fel’graz, and one flying through the air.

  I turned back for one last look at Oru. The mesa on which it sat rose straight up from the forest floor. The sheer walls of its cliffs were riddled with rectangular caves and choked with creeping vines. I suddenly realized that the bluff I was looking at wasn’t a natural landform at all. It was an ancient skyscraper.

  Chapter Twelve

  As we traveled, a very curious thing began to happen. With every kilometer we put between ourselves and Oru, Eyf opened up a little bit more. At first it was an unprompted statement here or there. Then the occasional personal anecdote. By sundown she couldn’t stop talking.

  “And one time I was flying, and I saw a cloud, and the cloud looked like a foot, but I knew it wasn’t because obviously it was just a cloud. . . .” She kept up a continuous stream of chatter as she glided through the blue branches above our heads.

  “Good story,” said Little Gus wearily.

  “It seems like nobody’s ever talked to her before,” whispered Nicki.

  “She’s trying to fit a lifetime of conversation into one single day,” said Becky, rubbing her forehead.

  “And I was just looking at it, because how often do you see a cloud that looks like a foot?” Eyf continued. “And the answer is: sort of often. Maybe once every three days? But there’s no guarantee—”

  “Can you just be quiet!” snapped Taius. “For one minute!”

  Eyf whimpered from the branches and was silent.

  “Hey,” yelled Becky. “She can talk as much as she wants!”

  Taius glared at her.

  “Eyf, keep telling us about the foot,” said Becky.

  “First off,” said Eyf, “it wasn’t a foot. It was a cloud that looked like a foot. . . .”

  We were an odd polyglot group. When the humans and I spoke among ourselves, it was in their language—to the total exclusion of Eyf and Taius. When Eyf or Taius needed to communicate, it was all in Xotonian, which meant that Hollins couldn’t always follow. We were four species speaking two languages. Somehow, though, we seemed to manage.

  Now the sun had dropped below the horizon, and the sky—when we could see it peeping through the forest canopy—was a far deeper shade of purple streaked with bands of crimson. By my chronometer, we’d been walking for more than four hours.

  “And then another time I saw a cloud, and it wasn’t really shaped like anything, but I didn’t—um, we should stop,” said Eyf, actually interrupting herself as she alighted on a rock ahead of us. “For the night. This is a good place. A very good place.” She waved toward a massive tree behind her. It was the biggest I’d seen yet on Kyral—one hundred twenty meters tall and probably forty meters around the trunk. It was covered in knotty bark—so blue it was practically black—and lined with branches as thick as usk-lizard tails.

  “If by ‘stop,’ you mean ‘stop telling that boring story,’ then I’m all for it,” snapped Taius as he checked his zowul. “But we still have more than three hundred kilometers to go, and we wasted too much time today. We should keep walking through the night to make up for lost time.”

  His direct attention startled Eyf. “But Kyral is a very dangerous place in the darkness,” she squeaked.

  “Maybe you’re just a coward,” said Taius, moving toward her. She cringed backward.

  “Funny you should call her a coward,” said Becky, stepping between them, “since you’re the one who’s been hiding for the last three months.”

  “That wasn’t because I was a
fraid!” he cried. “It was part of my plan. To get back to my battle cruiser!”

  “I see,” said Becky as she looked around at the dark forest. “So how did that plan work out for you?” she asked. Little Gus snickered. Taius scowled.

  “I’m as eager as anyone to keep going,” I said. “But Eyf is the only one of us who knows anything about this world. If she says we should stop, then we should listen to her.”

  “Well, this looks like as good a place as any to camp,” said Nicki. “I can start collecting wood for a fire—”

  “No, no, no, no,” said Eyf, hopping up and down with panic. “No fires in this forest!”

  We all looked at her. Hollins approached and spoke to her gently and semi-correctly in Xotonian: “Of no fire. Having why this, tiny bird-face? Of.”

  She took a deep breath. “Uji, Esu, Abi, and all the other clans,” she said with a fearful wave toward the sky. “If they saw, they would swoop in and attack us on sight. Take us prisoner or worse.”

  “But the Aeaki sleep at night, don’t they?” I asked.

  “Yes, mostly,” she admitted, “but we should not take chances. I am more worried about the other things that a fire would attract. Hungry, creeping things. Beastly things.”

  “Sounds like a load of garbage to me,” said Taius.

  “Good thing nobody asked you,” said Becky.

  “Okay, so we pitch a camp with no fire,” said Nicki, shrugging and tossing her pack down. “We have our thermal blankets. If we get too cold, we can just do jumping jacks.” Nicki started to push a mound of dried leaves together for a bed.

  “No, no, no,” said Eyf, “not on the ground.” She pointed to the huge tree that towered over us. “Up there. We roost.”

  “I’m a legate of the Vorem Dominion,” said Taius. “I don’t ‘roost.’” He dropped his walking stick to the ground and slumped down at the base of the trunk.

  “I wanted to say the same thing,” whispered Becky to me, “but I can’t agree with him.”

  So the rest of us scaled the massive trunk. The bark provided handholds that even the clumsy humans could grasp. About ten meters up, Eyf deemed it safe to stop.

  “Interesting,” said Nicki, looking down. “Just high enough for the fall to kill us. We might crack our skulls open. Or injure our spinal—”

  “Good night, everyone!” said Hollins, loudly cutting her off.

  We each picked one of the tree’s massive branches to sleep on. Taius remained on the ground, occasionally looking up at us and shaking his head.

  I shifted and found that ultimately there was no comfortable way to sleep in a tree. In fact, I worried that I would stay awake all night. I rolled over again. Below me I heard Little Gus’s voice. Very quietly, at almost a whisper, he was singing an old human song called “Georgia on My Mind.” Perhaps he hoped that Pizza might hear? I settled in for a long and sleepless night.

  I was awakened by a bloodcurdling wail from somewhere out in the forest. My eyes, well adapted to darkness, saw nothing. I stayed put, too afraid to investigate the sound.

  When morning came, we all found that Taius Ridian had joined us in the tree. He never spoke of it, and even Becky resisted the urge to taunt him. I guessed that all of us had heard that same awful noise.

  Away from the others, I asked Eyf about it. “What was that scream last night?”

  “A rahk,” she said with a shudder, and she pointed to the soft loam at the trunk of the tree. All around it were the same deep, clawed tracks that we’d seen near the Oru hunting trap. Each was as big as any five human footprints. Whatever a “rahk” was, one had been sniffing around the base of the very tree where we slept. As a courtesy, I didn’t mention this to the others. I figured I was already scared enough for all of us.

  We walked onward through the forest, following Taius. Every so often he would stop and listen to the faint chime, take a reading, and make a few adjustments. He reckoned that if we kept up a good pace, we could reach the beacon in eight days. He also expressed extreme doubt that we would keep a good pace.

  The morning mist burned off, and by midday the air of the forest was warm and humid. Once, we rounded a bend and disturbed several winged reptilian creatures as they ate. Ugly as the little gray-skinned scavengers were, their meal proved more disturbing: decaying Aeaki remains. On wooden stakes were three of their skulls, mostly picked clean. The bare white bone gleamed in the sunlight.

  Eyf picked up a faded gold feather from the ground. Then she found a purple one and held the two together. “Uji,” she whispered. “We are in their territory.”

  “Who did this to them?” I asked.

  Eyf shrugged. “Esu? Abi? Yko? Even Oru, maybe. We should get away from here. Quick.” Not even Taius disagreed.

  Once we’d put a few kilometers between us and the clearing, we stopped for a break. We sat on a little hillock in the sun to rest our legs and fel’grazes, respectively. All around us pieces of rusted metal and broken chunks of concrete poked up through the foliage.

  I touched my own thol’graz and yelped. My whole skin hurt!

  “Wow, Chorkle, you’re roasting,” said Nicki as she looked at me.

  “I guess living in a cave your whole life, you didn’t get the chance to work much on your base tan,” said Becky. “You’ve got a sunburn, pal.”

  I looked at my i’ardas. They were now approximately the color of a Feeney’s Original Astronaut Ice Cream bar.

  “How do I unburn myself?” I asked. I tried camouflaging myself a number of different colors, but each one still had a distinct rosy tinge. And my skin still hurt.

  “You can’t. All you can do is cover up,” said Hollins. “Here, use this.” He reached in his pack and handed me a spare human thermal blanket.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!” I squealed as I tried to wrap it around my i’ardas. “That’s making it worse!”

  “I know it hurts, but you have to keep the sun off. Otherwise you’ll be the color of Little Gus’s hair by the end of the day,” said Hollins.

  “I say go for it, Chorkle,” said Little Gus. “It’s pretty much the best color. I call it ‘flaming marinara.’” He took a bite of his charred creature on a stick, chewed once, then spit it out.

  As the rest of us ate our seeds and nuts, Eyf happily regaled us with more stories from her life.

  “And I looked in the hollow log, and the only thing that was in there was just moss!” she said with a big laugh. Believe it or not, she had already told this thrilling tale once before.

  “Eyf,” I asked her, thinking of the three skulls, “why do the Aeaki seem to distrust each other and fight among themselves so much?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Aeaki always fight. Kill those with different feathers. Sometimes there are alliances between clans, but they always break up real quick. Then it’s fight, fight, fight again. Only in Hykaro Roost do they not fight, because it is a holy place.”

  “The Aeaki might be a bunch of savages,” said Taius, “but at least they’ve figured out the truth of the universe. It’s kill or be killed. Strength or weakness.”

  “If you think that’s the truth of the universe,” I said to him, “then I feel sorry for you.”

  “When the Vorem Dominion attacked your asteroid,” he said, “what did you Xotonians do?”

  “We fought back,” I admitted.

  “Then you’ve proven my point.”

  “But the Vorem Dominion didn’t have to attack!” I cried. “The Aeaki don’t have to kill each other just because they have different feathers! It’s a choice.”

  “It is?” said Eyf.

  “Tell it to those three lucky Uji we saw earlier,” said Taius, ignoring her. “Ask them what choice they had.”

  We sat in silence for a while until Nicki spoke. “Eyf,” she said, “if you’re not an Oru, what are you?”

  Here, for the fi
rst time in a day, Eyf seemed reticent. “Nobody knows,” she said at last. “Before I hatched, there was a big battle. All the clans nearby fought each other for many days. Nobody remembers why they were fighting, or maybe they don’t tell me. The Oru and the Uji won, though—they were allies then. Many, many, many Aeaki died. When it was done, among the bodies they found an egg. But nobody knew whom it belonged to.

  “Azusu decided to wait for the egg to hatch. If it had green and black feathers or yellow and tan or any other colors but Oru orange and red, she would have killed the chick inside.”

  “That’s horrible,” said Nicki.

  Eyf shrugged. “But the egg was me,” she said. “And my feathers have no color. Just white.” She held up a little wing as proof. “So Azusu didn’t know what to do. I was not Esu, Abi, Yko, or any other clan anyone had ever heard of. So she decided to let me live with the Oru in their village, even though I am not one of them. She is not so bad.”

  “But they treated you like garbage!” said Becky.

  Again, Eyf shrugged. “Better than being dead,” she said.

  That night we made camp in another tall tree. This time, Taius made no argument.

  “We should keep watch,” he said. “We don’t want to get caught unawares.”

  “Yeah, I don’t like the thought of you being awake while I’m not,” said Becky.

  “Fine with me,” said Taius. “The rest of you can take shifts while I sleep. As long as someone is keeping a lookout.” And he rolled over and went to sleep.

  Becky grumbled, but in fact she had gotten exactly what she wanted. So Eyf, the humans, and I divided the night into six one-hour shifts, one for each of us.

  I took the first watch. It was uneventful, and I found my mind wandering. I thought of Kalac’s beacon chiming away somewhere in the darkness. I looked up at Gelo, glowing brightly beside Ithro in the night sky. Had Hudka been arrested by the glorious Imperator Sheln? Was my grand-originator languishing in prison with the captured Vorem legionaries? I thought of Azusu and bands of colored Aeaki clashing in battle and then finding an egg in the aftermath, a new life on a field of death. I thought of Vorem fire raining from the heavens. I thought of Taius, crying in the woods.