Happy Snak

by Nicole Kimberling

  She had arrived from Mars, but that was only a layover, which she didn’t think warranted this kind of staring. She stared back at them. A giddy, childish feeling of excitement surged through her.

  Spiraling openings of mysterious chambers perforated the shell wall. Vibrant purple and green foliage dripping with humidity drooped down across the water’s surface. Fist-sized insects flew from the centers of enormous fleshy flowers that dotted the walls. Slender trees grew up toward the mossy roof. Gaia gaped at a group of little half-sized Kishocha pogs with cute, nubby cranial tendrils. The pogs screamed in terror when she laid eyes on them.

  Then she saw a huge, red octopus in a tree. It slithered like a collection of glistening snakes from one branch to another, caught one of the iridescent insects flying past and devoured it in one gelatinous gulp. Its large luminous eyes swiveled from side to side and then it flung itself out of the high branches into the air. Gaia’s eyes widened in horror at the imminent death of the confused mollusk. They widened still further when the creature stretched out all its tentacles, caught the air in its webbing and popped open like a parachute. It drifted gently down to the water, swiveled beneath the surface and was gone.

  Gaia noticed that she was drooling and crying simultaneously. Her jaw had dropped open for so long that a thin trail of saliva dribbled down her lip. Her eyes stung. She blinked and wiped away the drool then the tears.

  As if her movement released them, the Kishocha around her began to move again. They talked quietly as they jostled past each other. None of them went into the water near her. Several of them got out, though.

  Then the guards arrived. At least twenty of them dove into the water from all sides, harpoons in hand, circling her and Wave. Wave went limp. Wave’s white body floated like a corpse beside her. All around, and even beneath her, menacing guards pointed their harpoons at her. The water went quiet except for the sound of one voice. Face down and limp, Wave chirped pathetically. Gaia hoped Wave was explaining their presence here. Wave’s speech went on for some time. Gaia did not move. She floated, flaccid, just like Wave. She’d seen what happened when one provoked a guard.

  Suddenly, a low grumble filled the water, and all noise but the popping of her rebreather ceased. The low sound increased, filling the water entirely, like the bellow of Tibetan horns. The sound kept coming until Gaia could feel it in her bones. Her ears rang and even her blood shook. The guards around her floated passively to the surface. The anemone-things darted back into their tubelike bodies. Fish scattered. The red octopus Gaia had seen before lunged backward into a crevice.

  Looking down the waterway, Gaia saw a massive shark round the corner. Its skin was glossy black. It swam with an open-mouthed frown, row upon row of teeth curling back into its huge jaws. Gaia’s heart began to pound, hammering against the sheer power of the sound and the terror at the sight of the shark. The beast approached, then sank to the bottom, circling.

  Once she pulled her eyes away from the shark, Gaia realized Oziru had arrived. Oziru wore bands of pearls wrapped around its arms and legs, and gold around its throat. It floated toward her upright, like an angel might float downward from heaven. Behind it swam two smaller sharks festooned with huge diaphanous fins, like angelfish. The black shark beneath her still circled.

  How could she have thought that she could just come into the Kishocha sector and casually ask Oziru about the stoning? How could she have assumed that she could ask Oziru anything? When the Kishocha was on land it was statuesque, but in the water, Oziru was like a god. Oziru’s eyes locked on hers. Two other high-pitched notes cut through the low bellow. Pain shot through Gaia’s eardrums. Then all sound abruptly ceased.

  Gaia thought she might be deaf.

  Two round, higher notes rang through the silent water. One thin, high, popping note emerged from Wave. Oziru drifted upward to the surface. Gaia felt the alien tap her on the head. She lifted her face from the water, disengaged her mouthpiece and disgorged her liquid in an unlovely retch.

  The once lively corridor was dead silent. All Kishocha lay prone on the walkway, like corpses on a battlefield. The water was thick with Kishocha bodies, just floating there. No one moved. No one spoke. The only people even daring to breathe were she and Oziru.

  Oziru’s head floated above the water’s surface, its cranial tendrils writhing slowly atop the water.

  “This is very unplanned, Gaia Jones.” Oziru’s voice was low, but didn’t make her bones throb and quiver. She was still frightened, though. Her mouth, in spite of all the water around her, felt dry.

  “I—” Her voice came out in a whisper. She cleared her throat. “I needed to see you.”

  “In regard to what thing?”

  “I have something to give you.” She couldn’t make her voice any stronger. She reached under her wetsuit and pulled out the object Kenjan had given her. It was a shell or tooth with a single character scratched into it. She handed it to Oziru, who took it, then stared at it for a long time. Gaia’s heart felt like it was going to burst. She could see the water rippling around her chest each time her heart beat. Her body stiffened and she began to sink.

  Oziru seized her painfully around the arm and pulled her up to the surface. “You should relax in the waters, Gaia Jones, or you will sink, and you are a drownable thing.”

  Two of Oziru’s tentacles slithered out and around her body and held her upright. Their grip was crushing.

  “I was—” Gaia began, but Oziru raised a silencing hand.

  “Do not speak. We will go to my garden, and you will tell me your reasons there.”

  Chapter Twenty: Motions of Language

  Oziru headed their procession, swimming more slowly than Wave had during their initial descent into the Kishocha sector. Gaia gripped Wave’s forearm, reassured to feel its touch. Wave held her tighter than before. They swam in the shadow of the black shark. Behind them, the ranks of Kishocha guards swam like a school of heavily armed fish.

  Gaia had been near sharks before but was never complacent with the idea of them. The shark above them was clearly much more intelligent than the Earth variety. It obeyed Oziru’s orders. It had a spotted tongue. It was named Sudden Red Crush.

  Before they’d submerged, Wave had warned Gaia against making any quick motions toward Oziru while Sudden Red Crush was in attendance.

  Gaia squeezed Wave’s arm again. Secretly, she hoped Wave would hug her back, but Wave didn’t. Belatedly, the thought seemed to occur to the alien to squeeze Gaia back. Wave clenched its arms in a short, mechanical way as if it was practicing some new language that it didn’t understand.

  Because of Wave’s soft demeanor, it was easy to imagine that the Kishocha’s body would be correspondingly giving. It was not. Nothing but sinewy muscle composed Wave’s body.

  Gaia watched the shark’s tail swish lazily through the water. The procession swam this way for a while, keeping close to the surface. Then they dropped downward into a swift current. Gaia guessed that this was the highway of the Kishocha sector. They moved so fast that Gaia couldn’t focus on anything that wasn’t straight ahead of her. A few minutes later they pulled up from the current.

  Wave tapped her arm and pointed ahead to a massive purple and orange siphon. It hung like a flaccid cave, but rather than being dark inside, it was gloriously bright. Oziru swam inside, trailed by Sudden Red Crush. Gaia and Wave followed, riding the shark’s powerful wake.

  The water grew clearer as they progressed. It became invisible as air—if air had been almost indiscernibly pink. The inside walls of the siphon glowed phosphorescent blue. The procession emerged in a massive chamber, so deep and so tall that Gaia could see neither the floor nor the ceiling. The water darkened beneath her to a deep red-violet. Sudden Red Crush veered downward, descending until it became nothing but a tiny black silhouette against a field of red-violet darkness. Huge spiraling structures rose from the unseen depths. Wave swam toward one, and Gaia realized that the structure was quite distant and bigger than her original est
imation. It was easily the width and breadth of the Coke Tower, and much higher. Each twisting shelf was engulfed with life. Pink and orange sea fans adorned the edges like lace on a cuff, while bulbous, thick-trunked trees grew from the upper ledges.

  Oziru came to rest on the edge of one of the shelves. She and Wave alighted beneath Oziru. The incline was very slight, as if she stood on a low hill. Water lapped at her shoulders. The normalcy of something solid beneath her feet was relieving. Gaia tried to pull away from Wave, but the Kishocha held on to her, waiting.

  Oziru sang out a series of long, piercing notes of gradually descending pitch. Its cranial tendrils moved in a kind of synchronicity just as the copious arms of an Indian god might move. They formed signs, twisted and formed other signs. Gaia realized suddenly that some of the shapes were like the motion of Kishocha letters.

  Wave directed her vision downward. Far below them, Gaia saw a huge siphon gasp open. One after another, other siphons yawned agape.

  The water pulled downward. Gaia clutched Wave’s arm and looked back up to Oziru’s form silhouetted against the light at the surface. She felt as though she was rising, but the water level was dropping. Oziru twisted once and the downward current of the water intensified. She saw Wave’s toes gripping the bumpy coral on which they both stood.

  Oziru continued to sing, its tentacles signaling in an arcane language. Oziru began to slowly spin, gradually increasing in speed like an ice skater until the alien was nothing but a whirling blur. Gaia felt herself being pulled off the ledge. One of her feet slipped. Instantly, Wave pushed her down flat against the coral and lay atop her. She gripped on to the rough knobs of coral. Gaia’s arms shook from exertion. Then she was no longer underwater. She could still hear singing. She looked up and saw Oziru, whirling in thin air, six feet above the ledge where she and Wave lay.

  Gaia spit out her mouthpiece, coughed and looked back again. Oziru floated in midair. Oziru’s tentacles flung themselves straight out and the alien slowed and descended, coming to rest an arm’s length from her.

  Gaia looked down over the edge and saw the water’s surface just below them. The air suddenly filled with wet popping noises as the octopi that had been stranded out of the water leapt outward and drifted, like a shower of vibrant umbrellas, toward the water. The creatures rained down from far above, where a thick white mist obscured the chamber’s ceiling.

  “I thought,” Oziru said, “that you might be more comfortable in the dry.” Gaia looked back at Oziru but was too overwhelmed to say anything. Wave shifted off her but remained prone.

  The knobby coral Gaia desperately gripped began to vibrate. She let go, and it sprang open. Brilliant, fleshy yellow petals burst out of it. The whole bed of coral suddenly wiggled and shook, exploding into bloom. Color spread like a stain all around her, curling up the gentle incline until it twisted out of sight around the curve. Enormous white butterflies launched themselves out of crevices Gaia had not seen. They fluttered in reckless craziness out among the still-descending shower of octopi, who ate as many as they could catch.

  Looking out across the vast chamber, Gaia counted at least ten islands like the one she stood on rising up through the heavy mist. Some of them were nothing but hazy gray shadows; others loomed closer. She couldn’t see the outer walls of the chamber.

  She should sit up and say something intelligent. Sitting up was easily accomplished, but she could neither find words nor the impetus to speak. She’d thought that her capacity to be amazed into stupidity had been fully extended in the corridor. She’d been wrong.

  Gaia jumped at the sound of an enormous splash, then another. She turned and behind them she saw that the nearest island was, unlike the others, utterly black and devoid of life. It protruded from the water like a decayed tooth. As she watched, a whole side of the coiled shelf cracked and a house-sized chunk plunged into the water below. Gaia felt a light spray from the huge wave that rippled across the red water.

  “I suppose it is natural for you to stare at the lovely and dead Kenjan’s home, though it is a mournful place to rest your vision.” Oziru’s voice was only inches from Gaia.

  “I’m sorry.” Gaia was surprised she could still speak. “I didn’t mean to stare.” But she didn’t stop. At the base of the blackening pillar, a new pink column twisted upward, its tip just breaking the surface of the water. At the top Gaia saw a blue siphon from which pink water gushed. “Is that structure a replacement?” Gaia pointed to the new spire.

  “When it is finished it will house my next consort,” Oziru said.

  Next consort? She didn’t think she’d inform Kenjan. She thought of the letter dangling in Wave’s loose grip and hesitated, considering for the first time whether this was in any way appropriate. “Have you picked the new consort?”

  Oziru looked at her for a long moment, and Gaia wondered if she hadn’t just made some terrible blunder. Finally it spoke. “I do not choose. The stars decide this. I have spoken to the priests in our home waters. They say Seigata is fit to bear young.”

  Gaia didn’t know whether to say “Congratulations” or “I’m sorry” or nothing at all. She chose the last.

  The letter flopped and struggled.

  Gaia swallowed, then held out her hand to Wave. Wave knew what she wanted and gave a moment of silent resistance before finally passing the bag to her. “Oziru. I have a letter for you.”

  She handed Oziru the letter. The Kishocha unfurled the letter across its lap, holding the edges to keep the letter from struggling. As it read, Oziru’s cranial tendrils curled around in front of it, almost like a child curling a hand in front of a note written during class. Oziru hunched. Then the Kishocha stood, walked the few feet to the edge of the shelf, knelt and put its head underwater.

  Gaia glanced askance at Wave, who lay prone on the ground.

  “Exalted Oziru is calling someone, maybe,” Wave whispered.

  Oziru pulled its head out of the water and hunched protectively over the letter again. It turned briefly to stare at Gaia as if she was a dangerous contagion, then turned back to the note.

  She broke out in a prickling sweat. “Am I in trouble?”

  “No,” Wave said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, Honorable Gaia,” Wave said.

  “So you don’t know who Oziru called?” Gaia sensed she was beginning to babble.

  “No, I do not.” Wave shot her an evil glare from between the petals of a fleshy flower. Wave gnawed nervously on one of the inner leaves.

  Gaia lapsed into silence. Oziru continued to ignore her.

  According to her watch six minutes and forty-five seconds passed.

  Gaia began to relax. She leaned back and stared up. This could not possibly be sunlight, yet the light that radiated down from the ceiling was very like sunlight. Though diffuse and not warm, the light was enough like the sun that Gaia had the glorious feeling of being outside. Even the breeze felt natural. She felt like she was again sitting on an enormous boulder on the shores of the Pacific—if the Pacific had been bright red and full of flying octopi.

  Gaia felt a tug at her tank. She expected to see Wave subtly trying to get her attention. Instead, a purple-spotted octopus sat next to her as a large, expectant dog might. One sucker-intensive arm curled up around her diving tank. The octopus looked her in the eye and yanked on the hose again.

  “Hey!” Gaia grabbed the tentacle. It curled around her hand. Gaia jerked backward. The octopus jerked her forward. Wave lunged forward and flicked the octopus on the head.

  “No treats for you. Bad beast. You go.” Wave kept flicking the octopus between the eyes, not hard, but persistently. “No tug-tug game.” The octopus gave one last, listless tug at Gaia’s arm then undulated into the water.

  “How long is Oziru going to read that?” she asked. Wave shrugged and lay back down.

  Gaia stared at the disintegrating black ruins of Kenjan’s former home. The section that had sheared off had exposed a string of interior chambers. Most looke
d like furniture of some kind, but one chamber was full of large cogs. Gaia squinted, as if that would sharpen her already perfect vision. The cogs and gears were connected to each other in a medieval-looking fashion.

  She asked Wave the purpose of this rambling machine. Wave told her that it had no purpose, except to move itself.

  “Lovely Kenjan liked to play with human technology. It said that to understand one must go back to the beginning. Lovely Kenjan’s favorite toy was a printing machine. It is in a lower chamber so you can’t see it. Lovely Kenjan was carving the holy Kishocha letters so that it could print. It made letter blocks for noble Oziru’s name and its own name and for love, and printed it.”

  “That’s really sweet.” Gaia thought obliquely of Fitzpatrick. She should call him, but what would she say?

  “It was defiance-sweet.” Wave’s voice dropped lower. “The Holy had called for Kenjan to give reason it should continue as consort when Kenjan was barren as the void. Kenjan printed this letter many times, each exactly the same without making a single holy gesture. It printed on dead-things—worse than dead-things. It printed on something, which had never even been alive. This was very blasphemous like—” Wave searched for a metaphor. “Like…I cannot think of anything so bad as this that one could do in Happy Snak.”

  “What did it print on?”

  “Plastic sheets, like the ones in front of the cold-case of Happy Snak,” Wave said, sighing. “Those make me so nostalgic.”

  “Kenjan never accepted the holy words of priests as from the lips of the god,” Oziru interrupted. Gaia’s cheeks flushed in embarrassment. She hadn’t realized the alien was listening or could hear them. Oziru remained sitting in its hunched position. “My beloved Kenjan thought it understood the god better than they did.”

  Oziru ran its hand across the surface of the letter. The letter trembled.

  “No surprise that Kenjan should still struggle after death. This letter is proof that a disobedient spirit continues to resist through eternity.” Oziru straightened up. “Gaia Jones, you will never bring writing done by the ghost to me again. You will never tell anyone of this letter’s existence. You will forget that you saw it.”