Whispered Magics

by Sherwood Smith

  Except for the Vmmm, of course, but the Vmmm doesn’t need to breathe. A capsule of carbon dioxide once a lunar orbit, and the Vmmm is fine.

  “Third planet in from the primary. . .” Teer said, scanning. “Noot! Slow us down! We’re approaching way too fast! We’ll bounce off the atmosphere and back into space!”

  “I’m trying,” I yelped, braking us hard. Energy was disappearing fast.

  I used the atmosphere itself as a brake, looping tightly round the planet twice. When our speed was not going to cause us to burn up on entering the planet’s atmosphere, I dropped us toward the planet, this time using the atmosphere to help brake us despite how hot it made the outside of the scoutcraft. We had very little energy left, just enough to land us.

  I cut in the thrusters at the last possible moment, and once we’d gone aerodynamic, it was time to look for a place to set down.

  “Life form readings,” Kikinee chirped. “Lots. Especially in these areas with all the cubes.”

  “Must be domiciles.” The Vmmm’s voicebox vibrated warningly. “Avoid those.”

  “Keep us cloaked until the last moment,” Thisko warned. “And keep us high enough to cool off the exterior of the craft!”

  “I see a nice space there, past those tall things that look like giant vorch,” I said, steering the craft down in a gentle circle. “Right next to the water.”

  “Trees,” Teer said, peering into his viewer. “I have the language converter working. Those tall, rooted things are called trees.”

  “Shall we talk to them?” Vmmm said.

  “I don’t trust life forms that don’t move,” Smelch added mournfully.

  “According to the computer, the life forms that have audible language have two legs—”

  “Like those ones?” Thisko looked down through the viewscreen. “Look at them, running about on the green filaments.”

  “Grass,” Teer said, working quickly. “And the life forms are the youth of the local sentient species.”

  “Like us!” I cried.

  “Not like us, Noot,” Teer said warningly. “They aren’t cadet-scouts in the Interplanetary Trade School.”

  Thisko waved his tentacles. “This is true,” he said. “Supposedly these life-forms have not traveled to other worlds. That’s what a Class Five means.”

  No one spoke for a long time. Class Five! So primitive! We couldn’t imagine what it could be like not to travel to other worlds—not to even know about them.

  “Tell us more about these life forms,” Kikinee chirped.

  “Well, they come in two kinds,” Teer started.

  “A perplexing arrangement,” Smelch commented with pity. Its world has only one kind of people: after twenty years each citizen has an egg, and that’s that for family.

  “Boring,” Thisko said, his tentacles vibrating. On his world, there are five kinds of people, and a young person might change two or three times before deciding whether to be a her, a him, a lon, a ril, or a zee.

  And when you want to start a family, you have to have all five together, at least one of each kind. Family life on Thisko’s world is very, very complicated.

  “The types are called ‘boys’ and ‘girls,’” Teer went on. Teer and I nodded. We have the same on our world. The males stay home in the hive, and we females go out to work.

  “Which one is which?” Kikinee whistled, bobbing near the viewscreen.

  “They all look exactly alike to me.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Smelch sighed. “We don’t dare stay long enough to interact with them. We’ll be in bogs of trouble as it is.”

  The Vmmm hummed briskly, “Smelch is right. Let’s get what we need and lift again, before we really start breaking the Fourteen Laws of Interference.”

  Before anyone could speak, the ship, which had been zooming along fairly quietly, gave a bleep, and a zoop, and thunk! We landed on the grass not far from the water.

  “Our ship’s energy is zapped,” I said.

  “Then we’re zapped,” Smelch moaned.

  No one answered.

  Because the cloaking device was still working, as yet the young life forms had not seen us, and for a short time we watched them running about, kicking at a round shape. I was wondering what to do now.

  “They really are all exactly alike,” Teer said. “Look! They all have two legs, two arms, two eyes—”

  “One nose,” Kikinee offered. “That’s at least a bit of variety.”

  “Only if others of them had four noses, or six, or three,” Smelch said, rubbing two of its noses. Growing extra noses is common on its world. They are all enthusiastic about smell-o-vision there.

  “They aren’t completely alike,” Kikinee whistled. “The faces and hands and the filaments atop their heads—fur?”

  “Hair,” Teer said, looking into the computer. “Hair on top.”

  “Well, the hair seems to be brown and black and yellow and there’s a red one. But their fur looks like various shades of brown. Kind of boring, to be mostly the same color. Not a green or a blue in sight.”

  “Or even a handsome purple, like us,” Teer said, pointing at herself and me.

  “That’s not fur,” Vmmm said. “That’s a kind of flimsy carapace. Not solid like yours.”

  “It’s not a carapace,” Kikinee put in, “it’s a little like feathers—”

  “It’s skin,” Teer corrected, looking into the computer. “And the cloth is called clothing, for protection and social signaling.”

  Everyone spoke at once. “What’s that?”

  “Decorative protection?” Teer asked, tapping at the computerpads.

  “Weird,” Kikinee hooted.

  “Embarrassing,” Thisko pronounced. “I would not like to have to wear strangely colored plant fibres over my pelt. What if you can’t get your tentacles free when you need them?”

  “These beings don’t have tentacles,” Smelch said sadly.

  “Poor things,” Thisko said, but softly. Rule One of the Nine Rules of Polite Interaction is not to brag about your race’s attributes—and Rule Two is not to comment about another being’s lack.

  “Only one nose,” Smelch grumbled, breaking Rule Two again.

  No one said anything more about noses. We were all too shaken up by our close call.

  “We must plan.” The Vmmm’s voice hummed like a hive of stickle-insects, a sure sign zir was upset. It’s not safe to get the Vmmm upset.

  Everyone was quiet for a moment.

  I said, “Our first need is energy.”

  Thisko said, “Scanning for sources . . . ah. Next to the water. This light brown stuff is full of it. We’ll have to filter . . .”

  “That’s sand,” Teer said.

  On our world, we have lots of sand, but it’s not brown, it’s purple—like us. Thisko’s world is all ice, and they live in towers.

  “What if it’s valuable?” Kikinee chirped. “We ought not to just take it. Then we are breaking the First Rule of Equitable Trade!”

  “But we haven’t anything to offer in return,” Teer said. “We’re on a scouting assignment, after all, not a trade assignment.”

  Silence again.

  We turned to the Vmmm.

  “We will have to speak with the life-forms,” the Vmmm hummed, louder than before.

  That hum made us scramble into action.

  Thisko decloaked the ship. Teer programmed the computer to translate the local language. Kikinee let down the ramp. We all breathed the air, which smelled of salt and herbs. then Smelch sneezed, and three of its noses flew off, one of them landing outside on the grass.

  “Eeeeuw! What’s that!” one of the life forms yelled, pointing at Smelch. The computer translated the language into our headsets.

  “Looks like a ball of guts with body parts stuck all over,” another said.

  “That’s Smelch,” I said carefully, and the computer’s Translator took my words and broadcast them in the local language. “It needs to retrieve its noses.”

&n
bsp; “Wow! One of the giant purple lobsters talks English!”

  “Extra noses? That’s disgusting,” a fourth life-form started, but a tall one, with dark skin and hair, waved a hand and the others stopped talking.

  “Not where it comes from, I bet. We might be the disgusting ones.”

  The other life-forms looked at us quietly. We looked back.

  “AyYesha is right,” a little one chirped in a voice kind of like Kikinee’s. “Me, I think they look kinda cool. All of ’em! Are you guys, like, in a movie or something?”

  “Movie,” Teer said, tapping her belt computer. “Oh! It’s an entertainment form.”

  “Like smell-o-vision,” Smelch said, sounding happy for once.

  “We need an energy source,” I said. “Silicon.”

  “Sand is full of it,” the life-form called AyYesha said.

  “We know,” Kikinee chirped, fluffing his feathers. “We wish to effect a trade.”

  “What do you got?” a small life form asked.

  “Just a sec,” AyYesha said, stepping forward. “We should introduce ourselves. I’m AyYesha, and here’s my little sister NaTasha. She’s Laurie, and those boys are Adam, Mick, and Kenji.”

  AyYesha was a girl, then. Teer said, “We are Teer and Noot, here’s Kikinee, and Thisko, and Smelch. Inside is the Vmmm.”

  “The what?” Adam asked.

  “The Vmmm,” I said. “Every ship has one.”

  “May we look inside?” AyYesha asked.

  “Please do,” Thisko said, glad that things were starting out like a proper trade ought to.

  The boys and girls swarmed inside the ship, curious about everything, some using their arm-digits to touch things. AyYesha moved very slowly, examining everything with close attention.

  “Wow, look at that computer,” Kenji exclaimed, and Laurie expressed enthusiastic agreement, “I could use one of those!”

  “It smells so good in here,” NaTasha said to me.

  “That’s the Vmmm,” I told her. “They get CO2 once a month, and the rest of the time they spurt out pure oxygen. Unless they get angry.”

  “You mean they fart good air?” Mick asked, making a hooting noise. “Where’s this guy hiding?”

  “The Vmmm is fixing the energy compartment,” I said. “And zir is not hiding, they just don’t come out into the light. It hurts them unless they wear a coating of light-blocking alloy. But zir is listening. The Vmmm always listen.”

  AyYesha turned from studying our piloting console. “You mean they are telepathic?”

  We looked at one another. “The Vmmm seem to hear one another no matter where they are,” Thisko said, waving two tentacles. “But I don’t know if they hear us when we don’t speak.”

  “So, what shall we trade you for your sand?” Teer asked. “We must get it loaded and converted.”

  “Your flight tech,” AyYesha said quickly.

  “This computer,” Kenji said almost as fast.

  Thisko and Teer said to the rest of us in our Universal Trade Language, “Remember Class Five!”

  We weren’t even supposed to be talking to these beings, much less trading for technology they didn’t have.

  “Don’t tell me,” Adam said. “You got these rules, right?”

  “How did you know?” I asked. “Have you heard of the Interplanetary Trade School?”

  The two biggest, AyYesha and Adam, looked at each other.

  Behind, I heard the Vmmm humming.

  Kikinee whistled his ‘I hear trouble’ whistle.

  “No,” AyYesha said at last. “We haven’t. We didn’t even know that other life exists. Some of our scientists don’t believe it.”

  “And won’t, even if we try to tell them,” Adam added. “Who believes kids? They’ll just turn us over to a counselor.”

  “Or tell us to stop eating so much junk food,” Kenji added in a sour voice.

  “Junk? Food?” Smelch’s mournful voice interrupted. “Do you consume recyclables? Sounds very efficient.”

  “Nope,” NaTasha said, giggling. “Food that tastes good, but doesn’t make you grow or anything. Parents hate it. Except for the kinds they like to eat.”

  “Ah, like nid-nuts,” Teer said, and I clacked our mandibles in agreement.

  “But if we show them some cool kind of new technology, like how this ship works,” Mick said, waving his arms, “then they have to believe us! And we can get to space sooner!”

  “Who says the government won’t just sit on it?” Adam said.

  “Capture this ship on your phone, and post on YouTube,” Kenji said, turning to face him. “If we trade for their tech, then everyone can make a space ship.”

  “And what then? Take our wars into space? Gangs staking claim on the moon?” AyYesha said. “Look, guys, we got enough problems on our planet. I think we’re going to have to solve them before we get into space, or we’ll just have bigger problems and drag all these others into them.” She waved at us. “I’m not sure I even want to put this on YouTube. I’m glad I don’t have my phone.” She touched her brightly colored clothing that covered parts of her skin, and left the rest bare.

  “Since we left our phones in our backpacks, it’s a waste of time talking about it,” Adam said, waving his digits behind them at a square domicile a distance away, as the rest of his friends bobbed their heads up and down. Then he said, “The question is, what should we trade? Teer said they have to trade.”

  “The sand is free for everyone,” AyYesha said. “We can’t really trade something that doesn’t belong to us anyway, that belongs to the whole world. So it’s a gift. ”

  Laurie shrugged. “At least we got to see them. And we know that they exist. That’s pretty cool.”

  Behind us, the Vmmm’s hum had stopped.

  “Here, let’s all help them load sand,” Kenji said.

  We all worked together scooping sand into our energy converter. It stripped out the silicon and spat out the sand again, which landed back on the shore, slightly lighter in color but otherwise unharmed.

  As we worked, Mick gave a quick glance inside our ship then said to me in a soft voice, “What happens if that Vmmm thing gets mad?”

  “Zir emits sulfur instead of oxygen.”

  “Sulfur farts?” Mick said, making his eyes go round and his mouth squeeze up like a molting plip-bug. “Whew! Let’s keep this guy happy, definitely.”

  Behind us, Thisko gave a muffled laugh.

  “Done,” Teer called, reading her belt console. “The energy compartment is sealed, and we have plenty of energy.”

  “We had better go,” Kikinee said.

  “Cloaking on,” Thisko added.

  Now only our ramp was visible. The rest of the ship was a blur, reflecting the surroundings. We retreated up the ramp, leaving the boys and girls standing on the sand, watching.

  “Good-bye,” Adam said.

  The little ones all waved. AyYesha now had her arms folded. Her black eyes did not blink as she watched.

  “Farewell,” I called, and closed the ramp.

  Thisko’s tentacles worked at the navigation console, and Teer and I sat at the piloting controls. As our ship quietly lifted to a height at which it was safe to fire the thrusters without burning anything below, we all watched the beings dwindling in size until they were invisible against the sand.

  Then I cut in the thrusters, and we zoomed upward over the great blue expanse of water. As we rose, the Vmmm’s voice came, “A job well done.”

  Then a sweet infusion of oxygen came wafting through the ship, and as we raced into the darkness of space, the stars clear and sharp, the Vmmm added, “AyYesha, the Gift-Giver. We must remember that name. I believe we will see her again.”

  The Love that Dolls Talk

  Though Kate was all the way upstairs in her bedroom on her bed, she could hear her mother’s angry voice.

  “Jen! Have you been messing with your sister’s dolls?”

  Kate just barely heard Jen’s voice. “No! I dunno how it
got there! But I’ll put it back.”

  Tromp, tromp, tromp, click-click. That was the door handle. The door opened, then came the scrunch scrunch of cautious feet on the new carpet.

  Kate opened her eye. Jen reached up to put the Princess Polly doll back on the shelf next to the row of others. Jen wore a Disney Princesses t-shirt. Shorts. Brown hair in three braids today. The middle braid reached her waistband in back.

  Then she whirled around so fast that all three braids whizzed out, kind of like a kid helicopter. There was Jen’s face, round, brown eyes. Who was she being today? Kate didn’t care.

  Jen grinned. “Your dolls been walking around the house?” Her mouth pruned up in fake disgust. “Think Princess Polly was looking for the bathroom? Princess Poopy,” Jen added, snickering.

  Kate wondered if she’d thought bathroom jokes were that funny when she was in fourth grade. Yeah, probably. Right now she couldn’t remember, but she was used to that, too.

  What she did remember—just now, she realized—were little voices during the night. It hadn’t been a dream. She’d heard them. Hadn’t she? Dreams and real used to get mixed up, but she was learning which was which.

  “Want anything?” Jen asked, putting her hands on her hips. “TV on?” She pointed up at the corner, where Uncle Tad had put a TV, just like in her hospital room. “Can I get you anything?” She fingered the book lying on the little table beside Kate’s big hospital bed. “Read you another chapter? I can read that book. I read it when you were, um, gone.” Jen talked quickly. “It’s kinda old-fashioned, but I liked the part when Anne smacked her slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head.”

  Kate wiggled her fingers sideways. Everyone knew that meant No.

  “Okay.” Jen shrugged, chewed her lip, then she ran out, thump thump thump, forgetting to close the door.

  The thumps went all the way down the stairs, then turned to slaps on the tile by the front door, where you turned to go into the kitchen.

  Jen’s voice floated up the stairs again. “Kate still won’t talk to me. She won’t even let me read.”

  “It’s all right. We’re to expect that.” Mom’s voice went high—almost as high as Jen’s.

  It was strange how sounds were different from each room. Kate had never noticed that Before. She thought of her life as Now, and Before. Before, she hadn’t heard things like she did Now. How everyone’s voices were different for each room. How Jen’s voice was so light, and easy to listen to—like sunlight. Like water and sunlight. But when Mom’s voice was high, it reminded Kate of crying.