Chapter 8
Whark!
“I take it back!”
The forest was hundreds of feet below Tippi, and sunlight was everywhere.
“I HATE PICNICS!”
Xoz wove across the sheer cliffside, shuttling her between his tentacles. He hugged her to the stone, fast and close.
“Close your eyes if it’s too exciting,” advised Lina-2, from the memory crown.
“Drink your fear!” said Xoz. “Let it hydrate your design!”
As her old life was hidden behind a shrub, Tippi looked to the horizon. It stung, so she found Xoz. He was slithering in nanocarbon at an 89° angle, carrying the bat and an aminosphere bandolier.
She looked down, accidentally.
“Heights are worse than depths!”
“Try to find Antares in the morning glow,” tried Lina-2. “The supernova’s visible in the daylight.”
“It’s a smudge to me!”
“Tips, if you bite my suit again, I’ll bite you.”
“No biting!” said Lina-2.
The sunshine crept under Tippi’s eyelids.
It was a novel sensation, but most things were.
Their last night in Wee Sheol was a loud one, between the solar shade trying to open 7.1%, and the staccato splat-splat of the vittles sluice.
The slowest protocol liquefied anything to arrive at the droneport, so Xoz broke for the cistern to retrieve aminospheres: maintaining 10 miles of contact with Tippi’s diadem, but losing Lina-2 upon leaving the memory crown’s 50-yard reception radius.
The teacup hypermini spoke plain when she missed her naps.
“Do you think we’re going to die out there?” she said.
“No,” said Lina-2.
“What makes you say that?”
“The hard part’s already done, from where I’m sitting.”
“You are sitting in my hat.”
“Exactly!” said Lina-2. “The most difficult step!”
“Explain.”
“Tippi, who knows what’s happening out there? We have seven days to figure that out. Where would we be if Antique Ops stored Xoz’s stockings one shelf higher?”
“Why, I’d be eating crickets, next week.”
“Yes! Further, your crown’s diagnostics came up clean! Your hat’s so old, it’s making Xoz insecure. My ignorance is at an all-time high, but I do know we’ve vanquished our first foe: the serendipity of shelving. That’s my case study, and it gives me optimism.”
“Plus, we know Xoz.”
“In his heyday, he was a renowned ordeal.”
The Cute Pals enjoyed a silence, or at least as much as the megalith engines would allow.
“What if you fall off of my head?”
“You’ll just have to pick me up.”
Tippi felt a warm breeze. Two noises washed over her: a burble and a weee. The ground was soft and firm, like an unburstable bubble: pulsating, ever so slightly.
She opened her eyes to an afternoon light, and examined her surroundings.
She was levitating over a river, between two steep hills. Her dry hooves hovered over the sun-dappled water. The foliage was a mix of ostentatious and skeletal, and it was all too pretty to inspire panic.
This must be the Lenapewihittuk, and I’m above it.
After a minute, Tippi puzzled it out: she was standing inside Xoz, who was invisible.
Xoz was bivouacked in the shallows, his stocking permitting a wild posture. He was folded into a fortress, and Tippi was atop translucent tentacles, and beneath puckered crag. His arms were columns, sky-colored and splayed wide, affording a modest moat.
Two clues informed her eureka. First, Xoz’s invisible meat threw a wonky shade. Tippi had limited experience with daylight, but the odd shadows were too prominent to ignore. Also, the mollusk couldn’t hide his beak, and it hung next to her, like a moldering gemstone.
She’d never seen his beak. It was bigger than her skull, and full of poison.
“I can feel your hooves,” clacked the beak.
Xoz was using his beak to create the illusion of speech, so Tippi did the same.
“What do you call this shape?”
She allowed one big sentiment to spill out, because syllables were work.
“The Xozebo. The wisest posture, given our mission.”
“Our mission?”
“Clean my body sock, move surreptitious. That’s the thing with land, you accrue schmutz.”
Tippi saw a cloud, then a sparrow, flit across his camouflaged skin. The bat and the aminospheres held the beach, amid a nonchalant whine of biomass: weee.
His submerged tentacles lit up.
“I’m the best stealth tech $10.9 trill can buy. They juiced my pigments, which made me better at hiding than the average octopus. They left out the dermal recall, which is fine by me, because I don’t need some nerd manifesting his mail on my bag-”
“Tippi, you’re awake!” interjected Lina-2.
“Lina-2! How do you like the outside world?”
“It’s cooler than expected, and, lo, a robust insect population! The ecosystem’s a potpourri: natural, betinkered, and new! I can’t even explain the gnats. It even appears Lymantria dispar dispar crawled back from the pit, we have Étienne Léopold Trouvelot to thank there-”
“Wait, if I was napping, then whose eyes-”
“Lina-2 was in mine,” said The Xozebo. “Your hat needs someone’s optic nerves.”
“When will you sleep?”
“I’ll figure it out. Lina-2, any dregs of civilization?”
“Nothing yet.”
“What’s the last thing you heard?” said Xoz.
“It was 4,000 years back.”
His beak opened into a soundless scream.
“It felt so incidental at the time!” insisted Lina-2.
“Now you tell us?” said the beak.
“It was a facility, in the Poconos. Someone said it’d ‘be 11:00 OM at the tone.’ I called back, and everything was offline.”
Tippi’s eyes settled on a busy glade. The bugs couldn’t have been happier: weee.
“Any mammals?” she asked.
“Not yet,” said Lina-2.
The sunset was something.
Now that his suit was clean, Xoz had traded discretion for bold spring hues. The mollusk galloped southbound on the towpath, river to the right. Tippi sat on his crag with the bat and aminos, as they bounded down the pebbly flat.
According to Lina-2, the local birds were “wilded manica, messenger and household breeds.” The fish were probably “a reseeding, good for them!” The amphibians were “astoundingly poisonous given the latitude,” and Xoz expelled two frogs.
The towpath rolled empty and uninterrupted, through brush and gravel.
“First day down,” said Xoz. “I scaled a mountain.”
“And I was there!” said Tippi. “Do you want an aminosphere?”
“Those frogs stole my appetite. I tasted wood for the first time today.”
“And?”
“Came out with the frogs.”
The far treeline went impenetrable, but their path held dusk. They ran by wide fields, golden carpets of grass and scattered flowers.
“Scars of industry,” said Xoz. “I’m picking up interesting metals in the dirt. Nothing too nasty, but appalling bouquet.”
“You can still taste things with your suckers?” asked Lina-2.
“I’m basically licking the world through microplastics, which, hey now, I am not tasting!”
“How can you taste plastic with plastic?” wondered Tippi.
The Sun ceded the day, and a mineral shimmer erupted from the towpath.
“The soil is brimming with expensive alloys,” said Lina-2. “Veins of platinum, titanium, and gold: undisturbed, unnatural. Xoz, any ideas?”
“Outside of ‘they were grinding up spaceships for fun,’ you got me.”
The clearings glistered, trading the pastoral for a misty electric. Tippi was so entranced, she didn’t see the insects drift to the towpath, drawn to the glow.
Whark! she cried.
Her gullet was full of bugs. This was untenable, so she chewed.
“They’re edible!”
A moonlight congregation hung over the path, slaying and mating. Tippi opened her mouth again, until she hit the Whark!
“Picnic!” she said, loading up on the slow, flaky ones.
Xoz joined the feast.
“Manna! Ambrosia! Dragonflies!”
Half of his arms clattered down the towpath, while the other four turned thin air juicy. Their appetites barely left a mark, as there was no shortage of revelers.
“I’m not seeing any bats,” said Lina-2. “Curious.”
“I have a bat,” said Xoz, waggling his implement.
“This is no time for The Homophone Game. Anyway, these insects aren’t afraid of us. They don’t know to be.”
“All hail the conquerors of the protein road! Fly your bloodline up my beak!”
Tippi yawned, and Whark! Her teeth were full of thorax.
She curled up next to the bat and slept. Xoz felt like a raspberry coated in a thin layer of slate.
Tippi woke up five times to inhale insects. But the sixth time, it was at the prodding of Lina-2.
“Tippi, you need to see this.”
“Pass the peas, please.”
“Tips! Up!”
She wrestled her eyes open. On the other side of the river was a sprawling meadow with a stone tower, drenched in dawn.
“I’d like to say it’s a century shelter,” said Lina-2. “But it postdates my logs. Nonetheless, I’m seeing traditional Neo-Massive flourishes, namely-”
“Let’s go,” voted Xoz. “Look at that crumble around it. That’s old sapiens lodgings. If anyone’s home, they’re antisocial or dead.”
“There could be useful clues, or souvenirs-”
“Fancy that, I have seven arms who need souvenirs.”
As Lina-2 extolled the virtues of a polite introduction, Xoz forded the river, and the spray roused a comatose Tippi.
Whark?
“Pillage!” screamed Xoz. “Presents!”
They breached the opposite bank, and Xoz chucked The Cute Pals on some lichen. He rushed the monolith, bat at negotiating speed. The terrain gave him minimal cover, so he stretched himself flush against the fieldstones.
Lina-2 was desperate for an agenda without beatings.
“We don’t know what this is!”
“How?” balked Xoz. “It’s a day down the road from us!”
He vaulted upon the tower. Six tentacles held the weathered stonework, and two chiseled away with the bat.
“No need for that!” said a stranger.
The newcomer was in Tippi’s memory crown: his presence rich, like a chocolate persimmon.
“I can sense you smashing about. We can talk instead.”
Xoz addressed the skyscraper.
“My name is Doctor Dirt, and this is my bat. We have come to negotiate the terms of your surrender.”
“Traveler, my name is Big Rehoboth, and I couldn’t fight if I tried.”
Lina-2 took violence off the menu.
“Good morning, Big Rehoboth, I am Lenapewihittuk Institute Neural Arbiter, and I’m here with a Sus domesticus commodus and Enteroctopus dofleini retiarius.”
Tippi put her hoof to the monolith.
“Hey bud, I’m Ethel Apple. They say I’m a known quantity around these parts.”
“You can’t fool me, Tippi!” beamed Big Rehoboth. “You’re everyone’s favorite pig!”