Pandemonium (11 page)

“Come on, Hender!” Bo sat with the other sels on his long red sofa in front of Hender’s giant HDTV.

Andy and Joe fussed at a kitchen counter behind the sofa. “Popcorn’s done!” Joe announced, taking a large bowl out of the microwave. “What did Steven Spielberg call the shark in
Jaws
?”

“Bruce,” said Bo from the sofa.

“Damn, too easy.” Joe regretted wasting his turn. Joe and Bo were pop-culture trivia rivals who were locked in perpetual combat. They had lots of time on their hands in the “Hendro-Dome,” as they called it, after being indefinitely assigned to this duty ever since contact with the sels on Oahu. In addition to their other duties, they had become emergency handymen and assistants, as well as security, keeping people out and, perhaps, the hendros in. With the desolation and heavy security around the base, their duty wasn’t terribly pressing. The sels had no desire to leave their air-conditioned dome to cross the simmering desert, and nobody could possibly reach them here.

After the sels’ intense objections, supervising officials had agreed not to subject them to a rotating staff. Hender had explained to the humans that sels needed to meet and know each person individually and that they were intimidated by groups and by strangers. Moreover, the sels were not used to having people leave them.
Ever
. Until death, that is, which was a very rare and traumatic event in their experience.

Though they were largely independent and nonsocial, they valued the few individuals in each other’s presence to an extreme degree. The absence of Nell and Geoffrey while on their honeymoon had been explained to them many times, but still it filled them with dread that they could be gone for two whole weeks.

Andy served them a platter of barbecued spiger brochettes that he had cooked in a George Foreman Grill. “Eat up! We’ve only got a few hundred pounds of frozen spiger steaks left, so savor the flavor.”

Hender smelled the roasted spiger meat with a melancholy pleasure. This meat had been made available to the sels to brighten their mood on special occasions, carved from three spigers killed, sawed to pieces, and dipped in vats of liquid nitrogen before being transported off the island only hours before its destruction. Airlifted to the freezers on board the USS
Philippines Sea,
where most euthanized specimens had been taken for later study, a ton of the meat had found its way into the larders of their kitchen at the base.

Hender smiled at the humans’ gesture. They did not realize that, except for Kuzu, sels rarely ate spigers, any more than humans ate lions. But it was a nice gesture—and an exotic delicacy that all the sels enjoyed. Their usual diet now consisted of shrimp, mantis shrimp, crab, peanut butter, cashews, chickpeas, pill bugs, chicken liver, and a continually broadening diet of copper-rich human foods that were deemed safe through testing and tasting by the sels.

“Did you read chapter nine after the changes Nell and Geoffrey made, Hender?” Andy asked. The three humans had been working with him on a
Field Guide to Henders Island
.

“Not yet, Andy,” Hender said, standing still in the doorway.

“We don’t understand how disk-ants became nants, symbiants, and arthropalms. A little more on that would be awesome.”

“Symbiants aren’t disk-ants.” Hender sighed, his fur color dimming. The “symbiants” that Andy referred to were, in fact, microscopic relatives of disk-ants, the latter being a particularly terrible species from Henders Island. But the symbiants were quite different, beneficial organisms that for millions of years had lived in the fur of sels and other large animals like an exterior immune system fending off the island’s myriad predators. This immune system had been stripped away when they were showered with salt water at Pearl Harbor. As a result of losing their symbiants, the sels now required high-powered showerheads to cleanse their fine spinelike fur and exfoliate their skin. And still they suffered side effects, including fatigue and depression as their skin’s ability to absorb oxygen was compromised.

“Why don’t we start the movie?” Hender said.

“Finally!” said Bo from the couch.

Joe presented a giant bowl of popcorn, and as fifteen sel hands simultaneously grabbed handfuls with their two opposable thumbs, the popcorn disappeared except for one popped kernel. Andy ate the last kernel and Joe got out a few more packages of popcorn.

“Go ahead, Bo,” Joe said.

Bo started the movie as Joe put more popcorn in the microwave.

“Come on, Hender,” Andy said from the couch.

Hender nodded, watching the titles appear on the wide television screen. The 3-D HDTV was like a window into a different world. The sels, with their eyes that filtered polarized light, did not need to wear the glasses the humans wore to see the images in three dimensions:

A Zero-Leeds Production

ALMOST EARTH:

H
ENDERS
I
SLAND

A clip of Cynthea Leeds, the tall, statuesque neurotic who had produced the reality show that first encountered Henders Island, appeared: she was speaking frantically on the prow of the show’s ship, the
Trident
. She was one of those who surrounded the sels in a human shield as the navy’s ships closed in. Hender remembered the event more vividly than the video on the screen and resented how the video changed things from his memory, chopping up moments and rearranging them. Words appeared on the screen as Cynthea shouted them: “These are the amazing people of Henders Island!” She had said those words, he remembered, on that day. It was fascinating to him the way humans substituted movies for truth and made things happen after they had really happened.

“Here it comes,” piccoloed Durlee-Ettle Mai, who was the green and yellow hendro. Her name sounded like a clarinet riff. The humans called her Mai, and she insisted on being called
she.
Mai giggled on the sofa. It was a sound like an alternating buzz and whistle that communicated her amusement across species very effectively. She hunched over the coffee table as she took apart a wristwatch and put it back together while watching the documentary with her other eye and snacking on honey-dipped spiger nuggets rolled in pepper.

Kuzu buzzed deeply. “Your move, Bo.” The large sel’s fur coat was splattered black, purple, and gold, like a Rorschach test over his muscular frame. Three chessboards were on the coffee table in front of him. Kuzu enjoyed chess, having learned it from Bo, and now carried on three games: with Hender, an inattentive Andy, and the humiliated Bo, who wished he had never taught the sel how to play the game.

Hender watched the TV screen:

“… here are the people of Henders Island. They were saved because humanity recognized one of its own that day, despite a barrier of species that seemed to separate us forever. This is not only the story of how we rescued them. It is the story of how they may have rescued us.”

“Oh, brother!” Andy blew a raspberry. He pushed back his long kinky blond hair, and laughed. Cynthea’s cutthroat showmanship had grated on him from the beginning when they were filming
SeaLife
. She had singled out Andy to be the show’s comic relief from the start, which he found out after viewing episodes since returning from the expedition. He resented her greatly for this. On the other hand, since the reality show had been the reason he reached Henders Island, Andy was grateful to her for casting him. The hendros had become the only family he had, and the only people on Earth who really cared about him, other than Nell and Geoffrey.

The hendros clapped wildly, a human custom Andy regretted they had adopted, since only five sels had thirty hands to contribute to every ovation. Footage of Kuzu, taken a few months ago by Zero Monroe, one of
SeaLife
’s cameramen, now appeared on the large screen. Kuzu’s full name appeared in a chyron:

KUZU-THROPINSALUSUVORRATI-GROPANINTHIZKOLEVOLIZIM-STAL

The camera zoomed in on the hulking sel.

“His full name is too long to pronounce: his occupation was hunter and inventor on Henders Island. He crafted traps and weapons used by sels on Henders Island for millions of years to catch their food.… He is
Kuzu
,
and he is over ninety thousand years old. Brilliant and brooding, this brawny sel spends his time learning English along with his fellow sels so that they can persuade humans, someday, to set his people free.”

“There ya go!” Bo said. “Not bad, eh, Kuzu?” Bo tried to give Kuzu a high five.

But the large sel looked intently at the screen with one eye as he reached out with two unfolding arms. “Bishop takes pawn, checkmate; queen takes knight.” Kuzu exchanged pieces on Andy’s and Bo’s chessboards. He loved playing Andy, who lost with great melodrama.

“Oh,
crap
!” Andy shriveled. “I’m
never
playing this
goddamned game
again!”

Kuzu honked with pleasure.

“Oh, jeez,” Bo groaned as his own predicament dawned on him.

Hender scooped three handfuls of Joe’s fresh batch of popcorn and finally strode forward. “Red pawn takes knight,” he piped softly. “Check, Kuzu.” He climbed over the back of the sofa to sit between Kuzu and Andy.

Kuzu’s fur flashed yellow sparks as he twisted his head and glared at Hender’s pawn standing where his knight had stood. Kuzu won at chess 80 percent of the time—except when he played Hender, who won 50 percent of the time. Hender hated chess 100 percent of the time.

Nid pointed at the TV screen as Cynthea’s voice intoned:
“This is Moodaydle Nid, the orange sel, a musician. He recently released a single of a traditional melody passed down through his family for six million years.”

They heard a clip of the song that sounded like echoes of wind.

“Nid is 16,511 years old.”

“Wooo-hooo!” Nid warbled.

The hendros applauded to see Plesh, the artist among them, wave paintbrushes at the camera, followed by Mai, the doctor, who worked in the lab with the human scientists testing foods for sel allergies.

“All of the sels have become rich overnight with deals to use their images for product endorsements around the world. But they have few ways to spend their newfound wealth, since they cannot leave the place where they have been hidden.”

“When leave, Andy?” Mai said irritably.

“When go?” Nid pressed.

“Why not now?”
Kuzu growled, vibrating the air as he moved his queen. “Checkmate, Bo.”

“Damn!” Bo said, stung by Kuzu’s board-traversing gambit. “I never should have taught you this fricking game, Kuzu. You
like
it too much.”

As the documentary came to a close, Cynthea urged viewers to write to their representatives and petition for the sels’ freedom. Then she pitched a sel plush toy, some of the proceeds from which would go to a nonprofit organization called Save the Sels.

“Oh, my God,” Andy choked. “Sell the sels is more like it!”

Hender reached out to move his rook: “Checkmate, Kuzu,” he said softly.

The birdsong doorbell Hender had purchased from the Sharper Image catalog trilled a lark call as Kuzu glared at Hender.

Joe and Bo opened the door a crack. After a moment, Bo called, “Uh, some folks are here with some news for us. Should I let them in?”

“How many?” Hender asked.

“Two.”

Hender looked at the others and, after some haggling, waved them in.

A man and a woman in dark-blue suits entered the room, visibly trying to suppress their bulging eyes as they saw the sels. The usual condescending friendliness they got from visiting officials was noticeably absent this time, however. These visitors cut straight to the point.

“I’m Special Agent Jane Wright, and this is Special Agent Mike Kalajian, of the Central Intelligence Agency,” said a sharp-eyed, short-haired woman. “It’s a great honor to meet you—the greatest honor in my life, actually. I think I speak for Agent Kalajian, as well. We have very good news for you,” Agent Wright said.

“Well,” Agent Kalajian said. “Hender, you have officially been invited on a trip to London. And we really think that it’s a good idea for you to go.”

The two agents stared in wonder at the five hendros. For their part, the hendros gave them credit for not fainting, which a lot of humans did upon meeting them.

“Go on,” Hender said.

Agent Wright reeled to hear him answer her. She gulped and continued. “You will be representing all of the sels, Hender.”

“Representing?” Hender asked. “What does that word mean again?”

“Um,”
said Jane Wright, glancing at her partner. “It means that you will be able to speak for the other sels to human leaders, who speak for humans.”

“Hender will speak for us?” Nid said.

“Yes,” Agent Kalajian said.

“How?” Mai complained, confused.

“Hate represent!” Kuzu rumbled, crossing four arms, his fur flushing purple, red, and yellow streaks.

The large brow wedges over Hender’s eyes, which were actually ears, pointed down between his eyes, an expression Andy recognized as distress.

“Why not all go?”
Kuzu’s voice exploded in the room, taking everyone aback.

Jane looked at her colleague in fear, then at Andy. “Humans are being careful, Kuzu,” she said softly.

“Will you come with me, Andy?” Hender asked.

“Well—sure, Hender.” Andy looked at the agents. “Right?”

Agent Kalajian looked at his partner and nodded. “Absolutely!”

“Why not
us
?” Kuzu’s rumbling baritone rattled their bones. Four of the large sel’s formidable arms opened twelve feet as he spread twenty fingers in the air.

Jane Wright somehow squeezed out her reply: “Because humans are afraid of you.”

“One step at a time,” Andy said calmly. “OK, Kuzu?”

The warrior sel regarded Andy with one eye as he glared at Hender with his other. “They think we are spigers, Shueenair,”

“We have to show we are not,” Hender said.

The two sels shared a challenging look that ended in a stalemate.