12

The Zoo

Five steps from the table and I had a worm on my tail. Two more steps and it was at my side. Sput-phwut; it blinked. Its eyes were huge. "Grruppt?" it asked.

I looked at Loolie. I looked at the worm. I looked back at Loolie. "He's my bodyguard, right?"

She nodded solemnly. "His job is to keep you from getting hurt. "

"Why am I not reassured by that?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind." Sarcasm was not meant for six-year-olds. "Come on, Wormface, Wormfoot, Wormtongue, whatever your name is."

"His name is Falstaff," said Loolie.

"Falstaff?"

"Uh-huh."

"Why is he named Falstaff?"

"Jason says it's 'cause he farts a lot."

"Oh really?" I looked at the worm.

The worm blinked and made a noise from its nether orifice: Platt!

I took a step back and waved my hand in front of my face. "Jeezis-!" My eyes were watering. "That's incredible!" I said. "That could blister the paint off a wall."

"Yeah," grinned Loolie. "His are the stinky kind."

"Whyn't we just call him Wormfart?"

"I wouldn't call him that," Loolie said, her eyes round.

"Why not?"

"He doesn't like it." There was something about the way she said it.

"Oh." I looked at the worm again. "Uh, well . . . all right. Come on, Falstaff."

The worm chuggled and humphed and followed after us.

As soon as the worm saw where we were headed, it settled itself peacefully on a sunny patch of blue lawn and became a big purple meat loaf. It would watch from there.

Loolie's zoo was inside a building marked Shangri-La Recreation Room. It was set apart from most of the other buildings. As Loolie started to open the door, one of the libbits pushed its way in past me. It was a large, pig-like thing; most of its face was snout. It snuffled around the room like a vacuum cleaner, ignoring both Loolie and myself.

"That's Hoolihan," said Loolie. "She goes wherever she wants and does whatever she wants. She doesn't listen to anybody. She likes to come in here and sweep the floor. Come on."

The zoo filled the recreation room. It was obvious that these people revered everything Chtorran. There were three long worktables supporting a row of unmatched terrariums. There were also two rows of potted plants and shelves with wire cages along two of the walls. Somebody had spent a lot of time setting this up.

Loolie turned on a light and I moved from cage to cage, peering in curiously. There were three furry blobs in one of the cages. One was purple, one was brown, one was red. They huddled together in one corner of the case.

"If you put your ear close, or if you put your hand in, you can feel them purring." Loolie put her hand against the case.

"I know. They're called meeps."

" 'Cause they go 'meep meep'-right?" Loolie asked.

"Right."

"They don't do anything," said Loolie. "Just eat and sleep and purr. They eat lots of everything. They're not real fussy. They don't taste real good, but you can eat 'em if you put ketchup on 'em. You gotta cook 'em first. They make lotsa babies though-like mice. We feed 'em to Orrie and Falstaff and Orson. Orson's the biggest. He eats everything, but he likes meeps best."

"Of course. They're bite-size."

Loolie laughed. She thought that was a funny joke.

In the next cage were several night-stalkers of various sizes. They looked like little vampires, the old-fashioned Dracula kind, not the Chtorran kind. "We keep 'em here till they get big enough," explained Loolie. She held a hand off the ground to indicate how high they would stand. Knee high. "That one's Bela, and that one's Christopher, and that one is Frank. Once they're em-printed, Jessie says, they'll stay real close to here to hunt. Jessie says we need to have more night-stalkers than we have 'cause they're good at catching rats and gophers. They like meeps too."

"You said you had a vampire?"

"Oh, yeah; but you'll have to wait and see it at night. It sleeps in the day. Maybe you'll be lucky soon and you'll get chosen to feed it." She said it as if it was an honor.

I'd heard about vampires. I hadn't seen one yet. They were shroud-like creatures-silken veils that floated on the wind. They dropped from the sky onto cattle and horses and attached themselves to the poor creatures' skins to feed. Somehow, they became part of the animals' circulatory systems. They would feed for a while and then, when satiated, would float off again into the night. In return for the meal, they would leave the victim's bloodstream full of alien parasites and organisms. Cattle usually sickened and died within a week of a vampire attack. Vampires had been seen as big as bedsheets.

"This is just a little one," Loolie said, holding up her hands. Little? Loolie was holding her hands about a meter apart. "We gotta grow it bigger afore it can be any real useful. I got to feed it once," she bragged.

"What an honor," I said drily.

Loolie didn't hear me. She was pointing. "And over here, we got a baby gorp. He eats garbage." She wrinkled her nose. "He stinks, doesn't he?" It was hard to tell what the gorp looked like; it was curled up in one corner of its pen, sleeping, but Loolie was right: the creature had a stench like an outhouse.

"And we got some toe-hoppers and lollapaloozas and screaming meemies and hair-pullers. . . ." These were all insectlike things. The latter looked like moths with claws. The screaming meemies were noisy little insects with air bladders. They sounded like cockroach-sized fire engines. "They pop real nice if you step on them," said Loolie.

"Ugh!" I said, pointing. "What's that?" It looked like a piece of red slime with a bad cold.

"Those are fugglies. The red one is a female."

"The species is doomed," I said, shaking my head. Or maybe they mated in the dark. No. Nothing could be that desperate to reproduce.

"They don't taste very good either," said Loolie. "We don't know what they do yet, but Jason says it's got to be important. Otherwise they wouldn't look so awful."

"Right. It makes perfectly good sense to me."

"And over here, we got some wormberry bushes and mandala flowers-have you seen mandalas?"

I nodded. I'd seen them in the wild, dripping from the forest like a crown of gaudy jewels.

"Jason wants to cover the whole camp in mandalas someday. Only it can't be for a while yet, 'cause there's still too many people who still believe in the You Ass of Hey."

"Uh-huh." I was mastering the art of the dry, noncommittal response. It would be stupid to do anything else. Loolie's loyalties were obvious. So was her enthusiasm. I didn't know whether to feel sorry for her, angry at what Jason and Jessie had done, or jealous because she at least knew what her life was about.

"Oh-and,over here, Jim, over here. Have you seen this? We got a baby shambler bush. Soon's we can build a corral, we're gonna put it outside; but Jason doesn't want it wandering off yet, 'cause it might get eaten. Or raped. Or worse."

The bush was standing in a large, square, wooden enclosure; it was two meters to a side, nearly a meter high, and filled with earth. The bush itself was rooted near the center. It wasn't much larger than a potted geranium and it looked very small and out of place sitting in such a big pot of earth. It looked harmless. Hell! It looked cute!

When they grew bigger, shamblers could be as tall as eucalyptus and as leafy as willows; in fact, most shamblers looked like tall hulking clumps of walking ivy. They were dark silhouettes of fear, dripping with clusters of wide, purple-black and midnight-blue leaves; their branches were streaked with pink and white and blood-red veins. They were terrifying to see even when they were standing still.