Kleptoby Catfish Russ |
Table of Contents Installment 2 appears in this issue. |
installment 3 of 4
* * *
Sure enough the giant Grasshopper lumbered into the room and craned its head and forelimbs that bristled with tines. It had high fore legs and long splayed back rear legs. It moved by pulling itself along the floor with its elbows. It hissed and moaned and whistled through vents along its long bristly spine. It had some kind of breathing apparatus around its two bulbous segmented eyes.
No, Roscoe thought, this was Praying Mantis Man. Wow. A realization just hit him. The godlike powers of Jelly Man showed Roscoe his first actual weak point. Something else he picked up in the Big House. He clearly telepathed the word “locust” and “Grasshopper man.” That means he reached into my mind, and picked out the wrong word.
OK. File that away and don’t dwell on it. Jelly Man seemed reserved, standing back in a corner of the bigger outer room, and just shining and glowing like a Lava Lamp. After what seemed like a lifetime of Praying Mantis Man circling the fishbowl and feeling for a way in, it finally barked or sniffed or something... loudly, and its meal appeared. So, the meal itself dropped out of nowhere. Like everything Roscoe saw for the last few weeks he observed a new animal, this time a dog sized pinkish squirming larvae, covered with a thick leather like outer skin and the discomforting habit of literally squealing like a panicked stuck pig.
Praying Mantis Man waited for no one to sit down or even to use a fork. He leaped onto the helpless limbless thing and turned and twisted and dug and scraped into it and sucked and chewed and ripped and snorted every last bit of it save for the leathery skin, which it tossed aside like a pizza dough.
“Would anyone like to see a dessert menu?” Roscoe asked out loud.
Jelly Man hovered and seemed top shine light on Roscoe, as if to stop and stare angrily at a child that has misbehaved in front of company.
Afterwards, the hosts seemed to communicate back and forth for a few minutes. Praying Mantis Man stared at Roscoe for a while and then turned and exited through a hole that appeared in the wall.
“Jelly Man, was that a he or a she?”
“Something far worse,” said Jelly Man.
“He likes you. He asked me if he could buy you. I said I would think about it,” Jelly Man glowed.
“Tell him he’d be much happier with the pig larvae. I mean I have scabies.”
Jelly Man floated in the air, and glowed. “In return for your complete freedom, and I mean freedom to do what ever you want, Marvin, even a life inside a simulacrum that makes you into a sexual superstar, or the president of the world, whatever is in our powers, there is something you must do.”
Again, Roscoe was struck by the absolute honesty and majesty of it all.
“Grasshopper Man is trying to acquire a very important piece of technology. But you, Marvin, you are going to do what you did at the refreshment center where you used to work... You are going to steal it. “
Jelly Man disappeared.
“Well now I know what he’s keeping me for,” Roscoe thought out loud.
Part Three
Time passed and little happened. One day Roscoe had the notion that he would like his circadian rhythms back, and sure enough the lights in his fishbowl dimmed and brightened to match day and twilight and night and morning and so forth.
One night Roscoe noticed that the ceiling in the outer room turned transparent and he saw the stars for the first time. It made him tear up. He wasn’t sure why exactly. Because he was not homesick at all. Of course the stars were absolutely beautiful. There was another solar system and a purple and yellow gas cloud nearby, frozen silent, stretched across the sky. This he could never witness from home. The morning came with a soft pink light. Then the ceiling closed and back to the light-without-a-source.
Jelly Man had been absent for a while. In fact, after the visit by Praying Mantis, there had been no one around at all. Food or approximations thereof appeared on his tray when he was hungry. Every once in a while a glowing Silicoid probe shows up, scans light across the room, and then disappears. Other than that, there was little to do.
Born paranoid, Roscoe thought Jelly Man was trying to starve him for attention. Or maybe he was just observing, looking for mistakes or weaknesses.
The very last conversation he held with Jelly Man began with a reasonable question: “Why do you need me to steal anything? Don’t you have the technology to steal it yourself?”
Jelly Man glowed and sparkles as he hovered. “The very act of taking the device leaves traces, even if we were to use a Quantum Entangling Device, it would leave a trace of the type of technology we used. That would tell investigators how much the weapon cost and who could afford it. Quantum Entangling Devices rely on radio isotopes to generate the needed wave function fields. Radiation leaves its own traces. I could go on. But you comprehend this, don’t you?”
“Here’s what I comprehend. They would never suspect me.”
“Correct,” thought Jelly Man.
“Eventually I will train you to exist in the Krig environment, and what the device looks like.”
“Why are you so afraid of this thing?”
“It is not your concern. I would concentrate on two things, Marvin, if I were you. What it is you really want after you complete your task, and completing your task.”
* * *
One ‘day’ Roscoe woke up and saw Praying Mantis Man outside his fishbowl, quietly looking in. After a moment Roscoe decided it appeared to be another Praying Mantis Man with a slightly different crown and different coloring around the breathing vents.
On the table, sat a box. It spoke in a staccato machine voice. “Touch the box.”
Roscoe touched the box, and could hear a recording, repeating itself. “Come with me. Come with me.”
“OK, I get it. How do I get out of here? Who are you? Where is Jelly Man?”
“Come with me,” the voice chimed. Praying Mantis pointed behind Roscoe. Roscoe turned, there was a large chamber, like an outhouse but with few features other than a seat. Roscoe picked up a bag that Jelly Man supplied and filled it with clothes and other knickknacks.
“Sit in the Traveler. Take the voice box. You need nothing.”
“Where we headed?” Roscoe protested.
“Sit in the Traveler. Take the box.”
Not much on conversation, thought Roscoe. Well, he’d been sold.
Roscoe sat in the outhouse and apparently fell asleep clutching the voice box. He dreamt he felt acceleration, although he could not determine exactly where he was. Some undetermined time later, Roscoe awoke on a bed in a dark room that looked and felt a bit more like a room. The gravity was a little different here. He was lighter. The air pressure was increased, and his ears were stuffy and popping. He was under an actual quilt, or at least it felt like a quilt. The wall edges had molding and flourishes that he had seen in the Airport terminal and in his aunt’s house.
Again, Roscoe assumed that they had reached into his mind and chose images and replicated them. He almost got up and examined the details, but was too tired.
Or perhaps they made him sleep. He wasn’t sure.
He awoke inside his room and looked around. There were lots of t-shirts folded... but they were placed in the wastebasket. There was a tube of toothpaste sitting on the bathroom counter. Upon further examination, the toothpaste it self was just some kind of goo.
More mistakes, Roscoe thought. Copies of limited perceptions. Approximations of his memories. Thank god the toilet worked.
The light changed dramatically and Roscoe and his new room seemed to be floating now in midair, rising and falling slowly.
He was a gathering of sorts. Lots and lots of Praying Mantis people.
Roscoe sat back on his bed and watched in amazement as a long row of Praying Mantis people peered through the now transparent ceiling. He heard their chirping and watched as they seemed to loom too close to him with quadra-set compound eyes, and this time they were breathing air similar to his own. Some sort of barrier above him kept their air separate from his, but he could smell the new air when the ‘party guests’ pushed their big insect heads in.
OK, now I am being shown off, Roscoe concluded. No sooner did he imagine this than his chamber rose into the air and now entirely transparent, he and his now transparent room floated through a larger interior chamber, meticulously appointed above him with what looked like silk curtains and quilts hung from stone fixtures in beautiful patterns of browns and greens. In the corner, an open fire pit. Hundreds of these Praying Mantis people loomed outside the chamber as it seemed to hover past a long inspection line. He touched the voice box and could hear snippets of translated conversation.
“What kind of being is this?... where is it from?... who found this?... how much does this cost?... the Silicoids have a being just like this in captivity... is this a second one?”
He saw some of the same pig-larvae things that the Krig fed on outside his fishbowl, all of them in large sauce pans over coals, laying splayed out on their sides, many had been ripped into. Other dead animals hung from long ropes and dripped body fluids into waiting glasses and goblets held out by the insects.
Hope I’m not a hors d’oeuvre, Roscoe thought. His heart began to race.
Roscoe did think one thing was weird... he should have had some training on the thing he was supposed to steal and how he was going to steal it. What happened to all that? Now he conjectured why so much time had passed and he had not heard from Jelly Man or received his training. Now he thought, the Praying Mantis man had him stolen from Jelly Man.
Maybe he did something to Jelly Man.
Perhaps Grasshopper Man had kidnapped Roscoe.
But why? Obviously it was the new machine that was the issue, not me, thought Roscoe. Why steal me? Just to be aggressive? Could I possibly have anything these beings actually need, other than the need to show me off to large parties of giant insects?
The party lasted for what seemed like forever.
He missed Jelly Man. A floating, glowing supercomputer. That’s how bad it was.
He missed the smell of piss in the hallway in his 56th Street apartment.
On second thought, it wasn’t that bad. After some time, Roscoe slept from exhaustion.
* * *
The Eridani Prime Minister was poised in Space Port to jump to the Krig system. The Space Port orbited far outside the Eridani Sun and automatic sun shields in the observation port protected customers of any race or species from its rays. In an adjoining bay, Silerians were awaiting a shipment of junk to be hauled off through the Quantum Jump device. The gravity in their bay was heavy and the air pressure crushing. Other species had to be protected as well from each other’s environments. The Silerian ship was a large square box that basically stored large ships or engines or other detritus from machinery and warfare and even the effects of a bad Jump.
On an image device over the Eridani jump helm, a figure appeared. It was the Silerian. “The Car Tarsus Ra node has been erased.” The message sender was the commander, and looked like what might be called a combination between a whale and an upright reptile. Some Silerians were bilaterally symmetrical, some were trilaterally symmetrical. This one looked like a Komodo Dragon with an enlarged cranium, but it had little rank. This was a ship that hauled old satellites and space junk out of orbit for resale. “That is the story on the webnet. Some think the culprit was the little specimen he had announced. The one from the galaxy edge.”
The Eridani Space Port Commander announced to the Eridani Prime Minster who was poised to jump to the Krig system: “Incoming Jump Vessel: the Silicoid Proconsul and Acting Council Head Car Tarsus Tha is arriving in a centicycle.”
“Well, now I have an excuse to avoid a trip to the Krig Proconsul,” the Prime Minister announced to his entourage. “Tell him we have been delayed by guests. He will be angry when this trip is delayed. He will think we are hiding something.” Two of his assistants broadcast his messages as he commanded.
He signaled back to the garbage scowl, “Why are you spreading this gossip on a secure line, Ensign?”
“Please forgive the intrusion Sir. By the way, I am a Commander. But I have other things to sell. I have radiation baffling so thin it can be installed with an aerosol can. I have Weak Force batteries that will run out when the universe fades...”
What is a Black Marketer doing this close to a state vessel? The PM thought. Silerians, the PM thought, are just like Krigs, all this obsession with money and status. The only exception is that the Silerians did not start wars.
“...also... I have samples of MUzat gases that are hallucinogenic to carbonoids... I have Silicoid high speed calculators that simulate personalities so closely you won’t notice the difference. I have weapons of all kinds... new Plans for a Quantum Phase Shifter...”
All activity on the bridge halted when this came through.
The Prime Minister’s assistant called for Security. The Garbage scow was surrounded by Eridani Security devices and taken into dock, and the Prime Minister told his assistant, “Good work. Meet Car tarsus Tha, delay him. I have to see what this means. Contact the Chief Physicist and have him meet me in the brig and bring a Silerian translator and the contact the Silerian embassy.” With that the Eridanis unhooked harnesses and settled back onto the planet surface back to the Labs Complex.
“Buy the plans and bring them to the lab,” the PM ordered assistants. He stopped and spoke to one of his Historians “note that the erasure of Car Tarsus Ra needs to be promulgated to the rest of the Council. Note also, he was a friend, and I hope this replacement, Tha, has a clue as to what is happening.”
“Noted, Prime Minister.” The Historian floated behind the PM as protocol demanded.
Copyright © 2005 by Catfish Russ
