The Miek Shall Inherit

WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT??

The demand from the alien trade delegation did not pass through the transvoice, did not even arrive in words, or any sound at all, but rather in a gigantic and perfectly formed ideogram that whomped down on the minds of Captain Abbie Kryler and her adjutant Wong Abdoul like a five-ton blanket of plutonium. Syntax aside, though, the meaning was unmistakable.

“Holy Shit!” muttered Abbie as she registered the nonverbal message. ‘’These critters are telepaths on steroids!”

CRITTURS?? STEROIDS??

“Perhaps we should absquatulate and reassess, ill-fated captain!” Abdoul suggested nervously.

Rewhomp!

WHAT’S FUZZ?

“Huh?” queried Abbie. She had had a headache ever since landing on this planet, and was having trouble concentrating. The perpetual whine in her head felt like tinnitus, only twenty times louder—and now this! Was the transvoice even working?

Whomp again!

WHAT’S FUZZ BETWEEN US!

Once more, a message delivered like a punch to the brain in what seemed like pure high-volume thought, without identifiable grammar or format—yet instantly understood. Hmmm…Captain Abbie Kryler knit her brows. Fuzz? Was there some transmission interference here? Was Abdoul correct? Was it time to take a step back and re-evaluate?

Whomp! Whomp!

NO! NO! DON’T GO! EXPLAIN FUZZ!

“Ummm…. Okay, give us a mo….” Abbie put a hand to her head and turned to Abdoul.

“Let’s think this through. They’re obviously telepaths, so we can translate their thoughts and instantly understand them, but—”

“—they don’t understand us clearly, my perceptive captain,” Wong suggested. “So perhaps they do not use language as we do, or perhaps they don’t see it, like a goldfish doesn’t see water, or—”

“—So-o-o for them,” Abbie extrapolated, “our use of language is a cloudy lens? But why?”

“Perhaps, my analytical captain, although we can hear them,” Wong continued, “our responding thoughts are so closely woven to the silken web of our words, that they perceive the structures of language as ‘FUZZ—and cannot clearly hear us!’” 

Whomp!

WHAT’S LANGUAGE?

The delegation consisted of a slender pink creature, a squat purple one, and something green that seemed to consist mostly of teeth. They stood still and silently, waiting for an answer. Captain Abbie and Adjutant Wong stared back through the glass of the expeditionary pod.

Whew! Abbie blinked and thought for a moment. Understanding massive instant thought projection was not difficult, but it was an unsettling experience. 

“Okay… okay…” She turned to Wong and reasoned out loud. “So what you are suggesting is that as our English language evolved over the centuries in mysterious ways, and that swimming through the current of history, it developed myriad nuances, grammatical enigmas, inherent contradictions, and ambiguous elements sustained by quotidian usage that have become so deeply entrenched in the way we think and communicate —”

“—that a telepathic alien intelligence sees it as a kind of fog, or ‘Fuzz,’ my discerning captain,” Abdoul concluded. “So, they can communicate clearly to us—brain to brain without any formal use of language, but the delivery of our eloquently tailored and comprehensive thoughts, expressed to them in immaculate sol system English, are imperfectly clouded by the linguistic means of our delivery. And since they don’t use language per se, the transvoice is useless. Oh wise and beautiful captain! What shall we do?”

Abbie knit her brows. “There are important trades at stake here, Wong—but we can’t become telepaths. How do we make this work?”

Wong struck a thoughtful posture, shutting his eyes and putting his long slender fingers to the sides of his head. Captain Kryler was right. The ship needed lots of water, plus an additional supply of the rare isotope tinntanium 426 needed to maintain the faster than light drive. Water they could acquire easily enough from local sources, but the ship’s sensors indicated that the best supplies of 426 were located in proximity to local alien population concentrations. For trouble-free acquisition, two-way com was absolutely vital.

“Give them language, esteemed Captain?” he suggested.

“Wow! Great idea, Wong! You’re a genius! Let’s give them English!”

Abdoul rose an eyebrow. In spite of her casual style of speaking, Captain Abbie was well known to be obsessed with all forms of English, especially of the antique variety, and Wong himself was partial to flowery exercise of the mother tongue, but this seemed like an unusual step.

“Pardon me my complimentary captain,” he ventured, but what sort of English? Solsytem standard? 21st century tweet? Postmodern? Valley Girl? Middle? Antique?”

“All of it,” Wong, “But we’ll frontload the good stuff: literature, style, grammar!”

“Asimov? Kafka? Kerouac? King?

“Certainly!”

Wong’s voice rose an octave.

“Shakespeare? Simak? Dickinson? Bombeck???”

“Yup! All those guys—and gals.

 Wong began waving his arms theatrically.

“Elements of Style? Chicago Style? Coventry Patmore’s Essay on English metrics???”

“Sure. Old, new, in between. Whatever we have. It’s all in the ship’s library, isn’t it?”

“Linguistic origins? Media? References??!!”

“Stop fussing, Abdoul! Give them the full monty!

Belatedly the alien delegation chimed in.

FULL MONTY???

“Merciful Heavens, Idioms too!!??” In consternation, Wong Abdoul clutched his sequined turban in both hands. Such a drama queen, Abbie thought.

DRAMA QUEEN??

NEVER MIND, Kryler thought back to slim pink and company.

JUST FUZZ!

The squat purple thing waddled forward and extended a pseudopod.

GIVE FUZZ!

“But how?”

 NOT TO WORRY—CAN ACCESS!

Hmmm. Some sort of biotech Access?? Deciding to risk it, Abbie nodded to Abdoul, who extended the pod’s robot arm to place a com chip in the moist cup of the purple thing’s appendage while Abbie placed an order to the ship’s library:

“Deliver all files in English, past and present, anything you’ve got. Front load literature, grammar and style.”

Delivery began immediately. The purple thing shook as the data pulsed into it and through it. In fact, the whole delegation seemed to be vibrating, and a shiver seemed to engage the entire landscape behind them.

Abdoul clutched Abbie’s arm. “Feels like an earthquake! Are you sure about this, my audacious captain?”

“Hey—we are just gifting them our beautiful native tongue, Wong. What could possibly go wrong?”

After an unnervingly long interval, the vibration stopped. There was an eerie calm then, like the aftermath of an earthquake, or the sea before a storm.

OOOH!! MUST DIGEST!!

The slender pink creature took a step forward and made a kind of “Miek! Miek!” noise, which was the only word-like utterance they had thus far heard on the planet. It seemed to be an all-purpose expression, but in this context, it seemed to indicate “See you later if you’re lucky!” or something of that nature. As the delegation rapidly dissolved into the vegetation, Abbie thought, as crisply and clearly as she could. OKAY! SEE YOU LATER THEN!

******

Hours later, still waiting, Abbie and Abdoul sat in the cockpit lounge of the old FTL-fitted cruiser called The Last Resort, listening to the soft thunder of the vintage coffee machine. Abbie was burying herself in the study an ancient poem called “The Wreck of The Deutschland,” while Wong stared out a port screen at a rainbow of colors swarming across the surface of the planet.  Disquietingly, the landscape that previously been mostly a dull and variegated green was now a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of color.

“It would appear,” my dear captain, “that our gifts have produced significant and possibly irrevocable changes in the planet of our host,” Wong observed, as he sipped his cup of Martian Red Mountain.

“Not necessarily, could be something seasonal,” Captain Kryler declared, displaying the calm sense of confidence that she had acquired since being elevated to the nominal captainship of The Last Resort, one slight compensation she had garnered from their forced exile from Solsystem.

Wong Abdoul pawed skeptically at the ever-present chili stain on his silk kimono, an ineluctable remnant of the legal covenant dictating costume that still clung to him as a former proprietor of a Planet Pawn franchise owned by the Xoollian consortium back on Urth that had thrust both them—along with the dreadful artifact known as the Xugslith far out into space.

“Full planet scan,” Abbie ordered the ship’s computer. “Seasonal, mineral, animal, vegetable—anything that might impact our trade imperatives. Anything we’ve missed. Make it comprehensive and quick!”

As they settled back to wait again, Abdoul gave her that “Here we go again” look over the rim of his coffee cup. Undeniably the ship’s planet pit stop pattern was unfolding as it had many times before.

Would this time be any different?

Employing a technique borrowed from 20^th century anthropologists back on old Urth, The Last Resort would typically land on a planet populated by intelligent beings and containing water and supplies of 426, lay out a variety of gifts in the area of habitation, and wait for the natives to emerge from hiding to access the bounty. From that point forward, cautious contacts and useful trade interactions could evolve.

Typically, trade goods included antique entertainment mods (ancient Grateful Dead concerts and Rocky and Bullwinkle vids were always popular!), cheap shining jewelry, assorted cutlery, and the dreaded Xugslith itself, which seemed to endlessly fascinate all species that looked upon the deadly box, with its snaky, rippling blue surface, and deadly irresistible charm.

“Do you miss it?” asked Abdoul, as though he were reading her thoughts.

“At least we get a vacation from the damn thing,” she snapped. 

This was a sore spot between them. Miss the Xugslith?  Not for long. The Xugslith had a reliably evil history of returning to its previous chain of ownership in time and space, bearing with it ever greater potentials for disaster. It was the Xugslith, in fact, that had welded the destinies of these two reprobates together, and sent them into exile, wandering through the home galaxy, assigned caretakers of the dreaded Xoolian artifact that no one wanted, and everyone wanted to be rid of.

That was why the Xugslith’s original alien owners, the Xoolians, now resident in Solsystem after their ship had crashed on Mars years ago, had sent the hateful and indestructible artifact into galactic exile, drafting Abbie and Wong to be its caretakers on this hastily arranged exit from Solsystem. The eventual return of the indestructible Xugslith to the Xoolians was probably inevitable over time, but at least, the Xoolians had figured, they would get a vacation from the damn thing!

Although Abbie Kryler was nominally captain of The Last Resort, the faster than light (FTL) navigation through the Milky Way was really executed through an unholy alliance between the ship’s autopilot, and the dreaded Xugslith itself; that snaky-surfaced purple canister that was both their guide and nemesis as they wandered among the stars; seeking out systems which harbored not only needed materials, but also intelligent life; because, after all—from the Xugslith’s point of view—what was the point of inflicting suffering on inanimate targets that were incapable of understanding the disaster that had befallen them?

Abbie Kryler had been chosen for the strange and dangerous task of escorting this ultimate anti-McGuffin into exile, because she had inadvertently accepted ownership of it in a moment of drunken stupidity at the WIT’S END tavern on Solsystem roid #666; a fateful event that had no doubt unfolded because of her own well-documented affinity for engaging disaster, and because of the Xugslith’s subsequent attachment to her due to that affinity.

And Wong Abdoul, the cloned proprietor of the Planet Pawn franchise on the roid where Abbie had first taken her alarming new acquisition for appraisal, had been assigned co-babysitter of the horrid item by his Xoolian masters (who owned Planet Pawn, as punishment for not getting Abbie off system with her deadly cargo fast enough.

But the Xoolians had granted the unfortunate pair a few compensations for their martyrdom, which, after all, had provided those mysterious aliens a much-needed vacation from their ancestral nemesis, until the day when it would inevitably return. Abbie and Wong’s stewardship of their deadly cargo had permitted them to escape punishment and incarceration in Solsystem for the crimes for which they had been either guilty or framed, and allowed them to enjoy a modicum of worn luxury on the old refitted tourist cruiser called The Last Resort as it peregrinated among the stars, powered by a Xoolian gifted FTL (faster than light) drive. On the negative side, babysitting the Xugslith as it journeyed across the milky road was like living with a ticking bomb that might explode at any moment.

As an item in the gift array, however, the Xugslith offered a considerable if unscrupulous trade advantage. At first, all intelligent beings were fascinated by the mysterious box with its snaky cerulean surface, but they soon discovered that soon after taking possession, terrible things began to happen. Soon afterwards the giftees would scamper back and beg the off-planet gifters to take back the dreadful gift—and then the real bargaining for supplies could properly begin!

******

After a wait of several hours, the comprehensive report on the planet came in from the ship’s cyber banks—and the results were more than a little bit alarming. The planet on which they had arrived was infested with a wide variety of life forms infected with a virus that had cursed all of it, from tiny lichens to giant amphibisoars, with the horror of telepathic consciousness. So that, for example, the psychic screams of the forests that closely resembled clumps of giant broccoli echoed in the brains of all sentient beings as those giant vegetables were munched upon by gargantuan herbivores. In turn, herbivores large and small were telepathically vocal in their objections to being chomped on by the planet’s carnivores; and those carnivores shrieked silently in their sleep, since the rootlets of the giant broccoli considered sleeping carnivores a source of succulent nourishment, and frequently crept through the rich living soil (running the gauntlet of querulous hungry bacteria in the soil) to invade the caves of predators in search of snacking opportunities.  Thus, the wheel of life, death and consumption on the plant, was a loud and squeaky one, with all of its telepathic life forms perpetually shrieking mentally in horror as they were consumed by others, and howling in succulent joy over their own eating opportunities. Hence the headachy mega volume tinnitus-like whine in the brains of off-planet visitors that Abbie had been trying to drown out since landing with the last of the ship’s good wine.

“Perhaps, my incautious Captain, we should have run this scan before contacting the natives?”

“Shut your face, Wong.”

“Should we henceforth call this planet ‘Sentience,’ my oversensitive captain?”

The captain sighed. “’Madness’ might be more appropriate, but okay. It’s gotta to be called something.” She addressed the air overhead: “Ship’s computer: Name this rock ‘Sentience’ in all com and records forward and back, stat.”

Wong Abdoul gazed out the vidport at the increasingly colorful turbulence of Sentience with a touch of uncertainty. The destinies of Captain Abbie and Adjutant Abdoul had been inextricably bound together ever since they had been forcibly exiled from Solsystem in THE LAST RESORT with the Xugslith in tow. By necessity, the two exiles had come to a working accommodation, Abbie discovering that Wong Abdoul was an eccentric, but shrewd counselor, and Wong having learned that Abbie Kryler, in spite of her affinity for antique literature and serial disaster, was really a pretty smart cookie.

 “The impact of our linguistic gifts might be greater than we had initially anticipated, my over-confident captain!” Wong observed.

“Yeah, it might at that.” Abbie’s face fell into a dep frown, and Wong knew that something else was bothering her.

“Is it possible, my over-anxious Captain, that the telepathic abilities of these creatures will allow them to ascertain our motives in giving them the Xugslith?”

“Doubtful, Wong. There is plenty of dense FUZZ around our thoughts to mask our devious intentions, which it will take time for them to penetrate. Also, their telepathic abilities no doubt vary from species to species and are probably dampened by various matter interfaces.”

“Mountain ranges? Broccoli forests, Ship hulls?”

“Exactly. They may figure out soon that the Xugslith is a poisonous acquisition, but by then it will be too late.” 

******

 Two days later, the exterior cams revealed that a new delegation had arrived. This time it was all slim pinks chanting in high squeaky voices: “MIEK! MIEK! NOW WE SPEAK!”

“Full audio today!” Abbie observed.

Wong nodded in agreement, but his face bore uncertainty. “It would appear that language is establishing a toehold, my audacious captain—but to what end?”

“Can’t be bad, Abdoul. They don’t look angry.”

How could she tell, Wong wondered? as they exited to meet the locals, fully suited, and packing cautionary armament.

 This time, one of the pinks, no longer naked, but adorned with an ersatz Elizabethan ruff and gloves fashioned from some kind of vegetative material, stepped forward, bowed, and spoke out loud in a high pitched, and almost musical voice.

“Greetings, scary beneficent monster gift givers of alien shit ship! Oh, so many thank you sirs or lady things for deadly weapon fuzz that has put Miek! Miek! Miek! pretty pink things to pecking order planet top!”

“Mother of Morg!” Abdoul whispered. “They really speak now!”

“Oh yes! Speak now! Speak now! Smart Mieks quick learn better daily! Daily!”

 Subsequent conversation revealed that the arrival of language had indeed elevated the Mieks (for so they now called themselves) to a much higher pecking and consuming order on Sentience. In fact, they were now, in their terminology, “high muckety muck Mieks.”

It turned out that the most successful survivors on this telepathically saturated planet were not the toughest, meanest or thickest skinned species, but rather the most annoying, and that the introduction of language had greatly weaponized that particular talent of the Mieks, who were now able to keep parasites at bay by engaging in excruciatingly boring dialogs, and could now drive off predators with the ferocity of their puns, the latter of which were so toxic, that now even the most aggressive carnivores would flee in terror when a Miek cleared its throat.  All very interesting in a sort of twisted way, but hardly germane to acquiring a needed supply of isotope 426.

“We are pleased that you are pleased—" Abbie ventured, as the situation became somewhat clear, “but we are most anxious, oh magnificent Mieks—”

“—to receive gifts in return,” Abdoul appended. “There are rocky soils in your neighborhoods which contain a substance we need, and we seek your assistance in acquiring it here on Sentience.

“Oooh! Sentience! Sentience!” chanted the Mieks in chorus. “Lovely new name for home of pretty pinks. Yes, yes, trade thing! We think about trade thing soon. Yes!”

“And how do you like the Xugslith, my pretty pink Mieks?” Wong asked slyly, before Abbie could stop him.

“Love pretty blue box! Love! Love! Little blue god, yes? But you love not! Why not? Pretty pink Mieks wonder why?”

“About these needed soils,” Abbie interjected quickly, “How soon can we expect to—“

“Sure, sure, not to worry. Trade soon quickly, quickly!” Lead pink declared. With that, the Miek delegation scampered back into the giant broccoli forest.

 “It would seem,” Wong observed, after a pregnant pause, “that on this planet, the Xugslith does not seem to be having its usual disastrous effects.’

“Give it time, Wong. Have faith in the little monster. Xugsy likes to play with its food. In a day or two they will give us anything we want to take the damn thing back.”

“I hope you are right, my courageous captain!”

“I may screw up a lot of stuff, Wong, “Abbie snapped, “but I’m always right about the Xugslith.”

******

In the two days of waiting following the negotiation, Abbie was in a foul mood. Crew and serverbots scuttled hurriedly out of her way as she stomped the decks in silent frustration. Her head ached interminably from the tinnitus-like babbling of the planet’s thought stream, as it flowed like a dark current just beneath the surface of her thoughts. The volume increased daily, and she drank too much wine to drown the sound and the uncomfortable feeling that something was unfolding on Sentience that she did not fully understand.

 And that was not all that depressed her. This long, mostly boring exile had taken its price. Their wanderings through the Milky Way had now stretched into months, years, or perhaps even decades. Hard to tell, given that FTL travel had an odd way of warping the consciousness of passengers, blurring the fugit of tempus and the character of personal space, making it hard to know, for example, whether you had slept with a given member of the companion crew, or were about to do so, and in what nook of the ship you had done the nasty or not, or were about to—or whether in these strange off-Urth peregrinations through the ether of the galaxy, you might simply have made the liaison in a different time space string, or made the whole thing up, or were on the verge of doing so.

As she thought this, circling past the lounge for the hundredth time, Abbie peered over the lip of her wine glass in transit, and saw that Abdoul was beaming at her cheerfully as if reading her mind. Ye Gods! Hopefully not!!

******

The new delegation was again all Mieks, and this time, they looked a bit grim. The pink with the now ragged muff stepped forward, and began speaking rapidly out loud in almost cogent English.

“Us can, with all too reasonable dispatch, supply weird alien space things with water and whatever they desire, Us requests only one small thing in return!’

“And what might that be?” Captain Kryler asked innocently.

“Weird alien space things know perfectly well!” the Miek snapped squeakily. “Stupid us to take possession of scary blue box. Wish to cease possession and give bad thing back!”

 The mental sigh of relief from Abbie and Wong was loud in the minds of Mieks, and a wave of anger slammed against the surface of their suits as their minds were whacked with a streaming scenario of all the terrible things that had been happening in the thought ocean of Sentience since the MIEKS had taken possession of the Xugslith and English! 

 Some of the worst new novels ever written had been absorbed by millions of species—who (to their horror and dismay) had been unable to purge them from their consciousness. A plethora of new poetry had also been unleased, which tended to be painfully epic and horribly metered; with content that compared unfavorably with Dodgson’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” The plays were worse, trending toward long, boring and heavy footed Euripidean style dramas, instead of the airy Aristophian confections that Abbie might have preferred. In summary, myriad beings on Sentience had become authors, critics, and poets of massive output and minimal merit—and the resulting intra-planetary FUZZ was thunderous and mind deafening!

And that was not the worst. One bilaterally configured species had decided to communicate only in palindromes, which seemed to work perfectly for them, but made communication with anyone else almost impossible. In addition, several nasty wars had broken out between different “churches” of belief regarding the appropriate rules for the pluralization of possessives, a matter that the Chicago style manual had never managed to resolve. One species of giant chameleons had exchanged their traditional camouflage for cartoon dramas on classical themes, supplemented with flatulent audio. One dreadful drama about a tragic Scottish monarch, featured Daffy Duck as “Macbeff.” 

In these, and many other respects, the importation of English and associated entertainments had been catastrophic, scarily similar to the disasters documented by Prescott and others on old Urth, in which viruses and diseases carried into the “new world” by European invaders had decimated Native American populations and destroyed entire cultures. In brief, while the Mieks were still mighty muckety mucks, the empire they had inherited was in serious disarray.

 When the thought torrent finally ceased, Abbie and her adjutant breathed a sigh of relief.  But as if on cue, a dark shadow passed over the red sun above. Simultaneously, a soft brown globe, the size of a tennis ball, rimmed with tiny leaf-like wings landed on the sleeve of Abbie’s space suit and chortled softly there.

“Aww, how cute!” Abbie declared, glad of the distraction. “What is it? Seems friendly!”

“Calls theyselves Yggdrasil,” lead Miek replied. “Bigguns upstairs not so friendly!”

Looking up, Wong and Abbie saw that what blocked the sun was not a cloud, but a mass of huge floating brown globes undulating its way toward the horizon.

“High trees loving old English stuff,” Lead Mike explained, “Norse roots! Dream of Rood! Beowulf!”

“Sacred trees and monsters….” Abbie said under her breath. “Caedmon preserve us!”

“But what—how— “Wong began, when a loud moving picture was thrust into their heads, telling them the history of the balloonatic herd drifting through the purple sky overhead.

Once they had been dirt bound like the giant broccoli, but their vegetable rivals had crowded them almost to extinction; so they had evolved long, umbilical-like stems topped with buoyant gas filled bulbs at their tips to lift their foliage above the forest canopy toward the light of the red sun. Then over time, they learned how to detach themselves and float to higher elevations where they could propagate their species in environments too cool for other arboreal competitors.  And eventually they learned to live and reproduce in the sky exclusively, descending only to suck nutritious saps, vampire-like from the trunks of their old enemies.

“Little ones friendly, Mom n’ Dad not so much,” the Pink appended.  “High ones think weird creepy aliens Grendel-like. You not like big Yggdrasils much either! Mieks can tell.”

“You got that right,” Abdoul muttered under his breath, looking up with apprehension.

With a trembling hand, Abbie brushed the baby Yggdrasil from her sleeve, which squeaked and warbled reproachfully as it drifted away hurting her head, which still hurt from the sudden mental downloads.

“What about our supplies??!! She demanded crossly.”

“When take back nasty blue box??!!”

“When we get what we need, dammit!” She handed over a chip. “Here are the specs of the soils we need.  Two days max! Step on it.”

“You take nasty blue thing off Sentience?”

“Once we get our dirt. Not a second sooner!”

Without word or thought, the Mieks evaporated back into the landscape.

“What the hell, Wong,” Abbie confessed. “I thought I was doing the right thing!”

The next two days in a fog of trepidation. The sinister unfolding events on Sentience had arrived on top of everything else that hovered over them; the imminent and inevitable return of the Xugslith, the lingering and seemingly endless exile from Solsystem and homeland Urth, the disorientation of post-FTL flight that descended on them at every planetary pit stop.

For Abbie, the space/time hangover was an elastic jelly through which she now drifted, deck to deck, in a haze of drugs, alcohol, and metaphysical reflections. If life in the home system had felt claustrophobic, due to the inability of human scientists to invent their own FTL drive and escape the ecliptic, Ms. Kryler had discovered that achieving that escape did not substantially mitigate the sensation.

A long dead poet she had been reading lately, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had once declared that “the mind has mountains,” but those mountains had shrunk into molehills in the vastness of the abyss in which THE LAST RESORT now drifted like a mote of dust. If anything, she felt that while destiny had awarded her a few creature comforts and a measure of control, her inner self felt more compressed than it had when she had been a penniless space tramp hopping from asteroid to asteroid in the belt around Sol, in flight from Old Urth authorities and the collection sharks of Cosmocredit.

At the beginning of her exile, she had been excited about the opportunity to explore the universe, to go where no human had ever gone before, ta da, ta da—but increasingly now, or what passed for now, she had the feeling that the galaxy, exponentially larger than the tiny solar system in which she had been born, was simply a larger prison than the one from which she had escaped, offering only rare delights in a sea of matter and energy that might be  endlessly unique, but often boring.

******

Another wait ensued. Not longer than the ones before, but full of fearful reflections. After two days, several small mountains of black and brown soil appeared in front of the ship, escorted by a hostile looking delegation of Mieks and some gigantic Reptilian escorts. For security? Intimidation?

NOW TAKE BACK BOX!!

…they whomped.

“Oh well, it was nice while it lasted,” Wong murmured, as he sighed, and extended a robot arm to take repossession of the Xugslith, whose cerulean surface squirmed in ecstasy on its return to the “nest.”

GOODBYE FOREVER!

— whomped the Mieks, as they fled with dignity back into the kaleidoscopic vegetation of Sentience.

******

After the soils had been onloaded and the tinntanium 426 had been extracted, the ship offloaded waste, activated antigrav, and went in search of water. Shortly thereafter, Abbie and Abdoul watched silently as ship umbilicals sucked thousands of gallons of water from a subterranean lake. During the extraction, the ship shook as it was dive-bombed kamikaze style by furious Yggdrasils whose brown entrails periodically trickled over the vid ports.

“It would appear, my all-seeing captain, that our welcome on Sentience has run its course!” 

“Good thing they are little more than just giant puffballs!” said Abbie, as the whiskey in her glass shimmered with each recurring impact.

“A bit messier than puff balls, my understating captain!”

Finally, the hoses retracted, and the ship began to rise into the purple sky, seeking to clear the atmosphere and slip into the star streams where the FTL functioned best.

In the corner of the lounge where they sat, watching the surface of the planet shrinking below; the Xugslith coiled and recoiled its azure tentacles within the Pandoran parameters of the box-like field in which the Xoolians had constrained it, signaling that its joy in homecoming had been replaced by a mood of anger and frustration.

Observing this new behavior in their prodigal ward, Abdoul finally broke the silence. “It is fair to suggest, my impulsive captain, that in steering the autopilot to this particular planet in this remote nook of the galaxy, given the fondness of this artifact for sowing discord and disaster wherever it goes, that our malignant artifact took advantage of your love of English and vintage literature to inflict our linguistic imperfections on an innocent biosphere, in the same way the little army of Cortez introduced the cold virus to the new world when it invaded the Aztec empire in—“

“—That is indeed the case,” Kryler cut in crisply. “The little monster scored big time on that one.”

“So why is it, my all-seeing captain, that our Xugsy is so sulky now?”

The gaze that Kryler bestowed on the ancient artifact that had saved her from the worst that could have happened to her, and had delivered the worst to so many others, was not unlike that that a woman might deliver to a beloved but mischievous pet.

“Because,” she explained, “I have just sterilized the water supply we just took on board, multiple times!”

Both Wong’s eyebrows rose questioningly.

“The Xugslith had a two-purpose agenda in bringing us to Sentience,” Abbie explained. “First, to deliver English and generate carnage here on Sentience, and secondly to infest this ship’s water supply with telepathic virus carrying microbes that would have penetrated our filters, infecting us, and ultimately returning with us to Solsystem, eventually making every living thing telepathic, not only on old Urth, but throughout the ecliptic!”

“But that would be one—" Abdoul started to say—when the full ramifications hit him, “—huge disaster!!”

Captain Kryler quietly poured Abdoul a second glass of Plutonian Scotch. Both took a swallow of that delicious and dwindling resource as they contemplated what might have happened. If they had eventually returned to Solsystem, infecting earth with the ubiquitous telepathy of Sentience. If everyone in their home system had suddenly gained the capacity to know what everyone else was thinking! If it became possible for everyone to know anything.  If people knew what politicians were planning. If spouses knew their mates had been unfaithful or were about to be. If students knew the answers to exams before they were given. If the Real intentions behind every treaty and contract were laid bare. If the guilty and innocent suddenly had nowhere to hide. And if this all had been unleashed on an unprepared population—given too little time to adjust. Murder! Riot! Carnage! Genocide!

“Given the experience on Sentience, have you lost faith in the virtues of language, my eloquent and well-read captain?” Wong enquired. “Or confidence in your native tongue?”

“Absolutely not,” Captain Kryler said softly, sipping her scotch as the tinnitus in her head slowly melted into the past. “We still need FUZZ to frame and filter the world so it doesn’t overwhelm us. Truth and beauty still lurk beneath the surface of our words.”

THE END

Bio: Rod Clark is the editor of ROSEBUD MAGAZINE, a print lit magazine. Issue #69 has just been released.

E-mail: John Roderick Clark

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