Give the Hippo What He Wants (4 page)

 

*****

The next morning, as Thal stood in Thwart's conversion chamber, bathed in the light of the scanner beams radiating from all directions around him, he listened to the secrets that the pink hippopotamus whispered in his ear.

Bright green rays scrolled down his body from head to toe, followed by blue, then red. A brilliant white cylinder of light shot from floor to ceiling, turning and compressing until it adhered to every bulge and crevice of him like plastic film...lingering a long moment and winking out like a snuffed candle flame.

Blinding strobes flickered in chaotic patterns as he moved according to Thwart's instructions from the control booth. As he raised and lowered his arms, flexed his fingers, bent his knees, the movements stuttered dizzyingly in the throbbing flashes.

And then, when the modeling and motion capture phases were complete, Thwart told him to stand perfectly still as the psychotomographic probes mapped the essence of his mind.

Thal's head tingled as the probes reached in, invisible tendrils of gravimagnetic force dancing through the lobes of his brain. The tingling grew stronger as the probes charted the electromagnetic terrain of him, copying his thoughts, personality, and memories into digital code. The code was flash-fed to a burner that would etch it into coherent streams of light, streams that would broadcast a programmable likeness of him into other people's minds on command.

It was just then, as the probes tickled through his brain, that the hippo gave the signal.

Thal held back briefly, reluctant to make the final leap. Though everything had been taken from him already, and he was marked for certain death by the unforgiving fans, he hesitated on the brink of irreversible change. He wondered what his existence would be like if he followed the hippo's instructions...or, indeed, if there would be any existence at all for him. He wondered how smart it was to take the advice of a hallucinatory hippo in the first place, especially one who had seemed bent on his personal destruction.

He felt like a skydiver about to make his first jump. He wanted to eat one last hot fudge sundae, make love to one last woman.

The hippo urged him on, telling him that the window of opportunity was closing. Now or never, said the hippo, now or never.

What it boiled down to, Thal finally decided, was certain death versus survival. The plane was on fire, the last working parachute strapped to his chest.

And the door was open.

He dove through it.

Focusing his thoughts as the hippo had told him, he concentrated on the tingling beams in his head. The hippo was there inside him, guiding him, channeling the billion winking sparks of his awareness upstream along the beams. Like glittering salmon, the pieces of Thal bucked the incoming current, then leaped across the differential gap and merged with the outflow of digital data.

Everything he knew and felt and thought streamed out of him, not replicated patterns but the original neuroelectric field itself. The contents of his mind rushed back along the beams, miraculously threaded together by force of will and the hippo's expertise.

And somewhere along the way, there ceased to be any distinction between Thal and the hippo. Shooting along the beams toward the sizzling maze of Thwart's equipment, the gateway to their freedom, the two of them melted together, no longer host and implant but unified, indivisible self.

Behind them, Thal's body collapsed to the floor, dead and abandoned as a deconsecrated church.

 

*****

When the message light blinked to life on Milo Flores' palm computer, and he saw the sender's address on the screen, he swallowed hard.

The incoming zeemail was from his math teacher, Mr. Shaven, and Milo knew what that meant. The grades from the final exam had been posted.

Milo picked up the palmputer and put it down again, afraid to look at the body of the message. So much depended on the grade he'd gotten that he wasn't sure if he could ever bear to see it.

He had to pass math to graduate high school, and math had been his worst subject...especially this year. He had barely maintained a “D” average in math this year--partly because Mr. Shaven had been tough on him, mostly because Milo's attention had been focused on girls and sports and partying.

An “F” on the final would mean he couldn't graduate...and, thanks to the new “Back to the Minors” rule in the school system, he would have to start over from ninth grade next year. He would have to go through all four years of high school again, and this time without participation in sports or extracurriculars of any kind.

To Milo, it would be a fate worse than studying...so he had studied like crazy for the final. He had spent endless hours with e-tutors and study guides, copied other students' notes (because he hadn't taken any himself) and worked more problems than he had worked in a lifetime.

And still, in spite of all his hard work, he had struggled through the test. He had no idea whether he had passed or failed.

And the message light kept blinking.

For a while, he walked away from the palmputer and tried to put it out of his mind. He ate a snack, watched some holovid, called two of his girlfriends, lifted weights. He played video games in the simulator room and helped his mom put away the groceries.

But the message light, though out of sight, kept blinking in his mind.

He walked past his room six times before he finally went in and called up the zeemail. It sprung to life in a holographic matrix hovering over the palmputer, glowing green text floating ominously in midair.

His heart hammered like a basketball in his chest, threatening to burst out as he scanned the text. Just before the part where his score and grade were recorded, he stopped reading, locking his eyes on the words “Your final exam score follows.”

His legs fluttered under the desk. Sweat covered the palms of his hands. He knew he had screwed up this year, knew he didn't deserve to pass and graduate, but he couldn't stand the thought of repeating grades nine through twelve while all his other classmates left him behind. The same people who had treated schoolwork as a waste of time right alongside him would ridicule him for being a Goback; the normal students in the grades that he repeated would look down on him, too. Not only that, but his failure would follow him forever, limiting his options for college and getting a job.

As much of a blowoff as he had been, when it came down to it, Milo didn't want to ruin the rest of his life. He hadn't given any thought to what kind of goals he might have, but he knew he wanted better than being a throwaway Goback mopping floors or screening toxics in the shitstream.

Holding his breath, he slowly edged his eyes along the line of type in the zeemail.

Five minutes later, he was still rereading it. He couldn't believe what he saw.

All along, he had never really imagined that he could do it. Every step of the way, he had doubted himself, had been convinced that the outcome would be bad.

But there it was. The proof of his hard work. What seemed now like the greatest accomplishment of his life.

A “D-plus.” He had passed the exam. He had passed the course.

He would graduate.

Jumping out of his chair, he pumped his fists in the air and whooped. He read the results again, then did a victory dance like a football player in the endzone.

It was then that he heard the applause.

Spinning around, he saw a figure standing behind him, a man bathed in twinkling golden light. The man was wearing a baseball uniform with no number or team insignia. His face shone with shimmering light, the features hazy within the blazing nimbus under the ballcap.

Milo's first thought was that he looked like an angel.

“All right, Milo!” shouted the golden man, clapping his hands. “Way to go! You did it!”

Milo leaned forward, gaping in fascination. He tried to say something, but no words came out.

“You passed the final!” said the golden man. “You proved you can do anything you set your mind to! Congratulations!”

“What is this?” said Milo. “Some kind of holofeed? Some kind of joke?”

The golden man laughed. His voice was multilayered, like many voices speaking in unison underlaid with the tinkling of wind chimes. “None of the above,” he said.

“Then who are you?” said Milo.

“Just a guy repaying a favor,” said the golden man. “You've done enough cheering for people like me, and we don't deserve it. I thought it was time to turn it around and cheer for the people who need to have faith in themselves, not in their so-called heroes. The people who can make a difference, like you.”

“Why me?” said Milo.

The golden man smiled. There was something familiar in his glittering green eyes, but Milo couldn't quite put his finger on what it was.

“Why not you?” said the golden man.

Milo frowned. “So, what, you just stopped by out of the blue to tell me ‘nice job on the test'?”

“Pretty much,” said the golden man. “Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a guy down the street who just helped someone out of a jam. Gotta go.”

“Man,” muttered Milo. “I must be having a hyperacid flashback or something.”

“Keep up the good work,” said the golden man. “Maybe I'll see you again someday.”

With that, the golden man drifted out the window. Milo rushed over to watch him float off into the neighborhood, wafting on the afternoon breeze like a helium balloon released by a child.

But the weird thing (as if everything else that had happened wasn't weird enough), the thing that struck Milo as truly bizarre, was the object he held overhead, the incongruous object that seemed to be keeping him aloft.

The golden man was athletic, commanding, and mystical, exuding confidence, strength, and intensity. He was a being of pure energy, pure spirit, pure purpose, inspired and boundless and powerful.

And in his left hand...

In his left hand, lifting him up over the world in defiance of the laws of nature, was a tiny red parasol.

*****

Special Preview:
Universal Language

 

A Science Fiction Novel

By Robert T. Jeschonek

Now Available

Corporal Jalila bint Farooq bin Abdul Al-Fulani had had this nightmare before.

She was on the surface of an alien world with her captain and crewmates from the
Ibn Battuta
. They all turned to her for help, for understanding. Lives depended on her making sense of an alien language she'd never heard before, which should not have been a big deal, because alien linguistics was her specialty...

...but she found herself drowning in a sea of gibberish.

A tide of babble washed over her, a wave of seemingly disconnected sounds from a mob of creatures. Billions of phonemes, the smallest units of language, crashed together, mixing with millions of clicks and lip-smacks that could themselves be part of a language or just random biological noise.

The tide swelled and swirled and Jalila felt herself going under. Again and again, she grabbed at the current but could never make sense of it.

The display on the Voicebox interpreter device she carried blinked with indecipherable nonsense.

She had had this nightmare before. The only problem was, this time, she was wide awake.

Jalila's heart raced. She looked around at the crowd of beings who surrounded her, sleek-furred and slender like otters, and a chill shot down her spine.

Then, she felt Major al-Aziz touch her arm.

"Jalila?" He stared at her with his piercing green eyes, voice laden with concern.

She took a deep breath and gathered herself up.
Enough of this
.

She was on the surface of the planet Vox with Major al-Aziz and Colonel Farouk. The three of them had landed an hour ago in a scout barque jettisoned from the deep space exploration ship
Ibn Battuta
(named after the renowned Old Earth Arab explorer and scholar). It was up to them to warn the inhabitants of Vox about an approaching invasion fleet...the same fleet that had crippled and cast adrift the
Ibn Battuta
.

So it was time to start acting like a professional. Jalila had to forget her fears and nightmares. She had to forget that the stakes were so high, with so many lives in the balance.

And she had to forget that this was her final mission as linguist on the
Ibn Battuta
.

Jalila was being drummed out of the service. In fact, she would have been drummed out and sent home by now if the
Ibn Battuta
had not encountered the invasion fleet.

It was all because she'd mistranslated a message two weeks ago and gotten someone killed--a diplomat negotiating the end of a civil war on planet Pyrrhus VII. Jalila had made a mistake translating the complex Pyrrhic language, leading both sides in the war to believe the diplomat was working against them. They'd killed him, and the armistice had collapsed.

So here was Jalila, career over, confidence shot...and her shipmates needed her one more time. Somehow, she had to pull herself together and get the job done. All she really wanted to do was go home and languish in disgrace, but she had to hang on by her fingernails and do this one last thing.

Nodding to al-Aziz, Jalila smoothed the light gray jumpsuit uniform over her slender hips. She tucked her shoulder-length black hair behind her ears, then took a deep breath and turned to the crowd.

"Quiet!" she shouted, as loud as she could, her voice rising over the tumult.

She got her message across. Suddenly, the chaos of noise and chatter subsided. The gleaming black pearl eyes of the dozens of Vox in the city square all slid around to focus on her.

Jalila cleared her throat and took a step forward, fixing her attention on a single brown-furred being. "Hi." She mustered a smile.

The brown-furred Vox rattled off a stream of incomprehensible syllables, at the same time gesturing, clicking, and smacking at a furious pace.

For a moment, Jalila listened and watched the Vox's four-clawed hands flutter and weave. Then, she closed her eyes, blocking out the movement and letting the flurry of sounds rush through her.

Pared down from dozens of voices to one, reduced further from sound and motion to sound alone, the communication seemed less overwhelmingly chaotic. As Jalila absorbed it, she realized it could be simplified even further.

Opening her eyes, she interrupted the Vox by raising both hands, palms flattened toward him. "Only this," she said slowly, pointing to her lips.

Then, pronouncing each letter with slowness and clarity, she recited the Arabic alphabet. She hoped the Vox would get the idea: she wanted to hear
pulmonic
sounds only, those created with an air stream from the lungs...sounds like the vowels and consonants of the alphabet. All the clicking and smacking was getting in the way.

When she was done, she raised her hands toward the Vox, palms up, indicating it was his turn. (She guessed the Vox was a male because it was bulkier and had a deeper voice than others in the crowd.)

Message received
. This time, the Vox's speech was slower and free of clicks and smacks. Finally, Jalila could pick out distinct syllables arranged in patterns. She had isolated a spoken language, one using pulmonic vowels and consonants alone.

Not that the other sounds and hand signs weren't part of a language themselves. Jalila was sure they were, which had been the problem. The pulmonic syllables formed one language. The clicks and smacks comprised a second language. A third language consisted of hand signs.

The Vox people had three different languages, she realized, and they used them all at once. They carried on three conversations at the same time, or one conversation with three levels.

No wonder Jalila and the Voicebox had been stumped. Neither was wired to process so much simultaneous multilingual input.

As the Vox spoke, Jalila's Voicebox took in everything, identifying repeated patterns and relationships between sounds...comparing them to language models in its database...constructing a rudimentary vocabulary and a framework of syntax on which to hang it.

Before long, the chicken scratch on the Voicebox's display became readable output--lines of text representing the alien's words, printed phonetically, laid out alongside an Arabic translation of those words.

At about the same time that the Voicebox kicked in, Jalila started to put it together herself. Her heart beat fast, this time with the familiar thrill of making sense of what had once seemed an indecipherable puzzle.

Listening and studying the Voicebox display for a few moments more, she collected her thoughts. Touching keys on the device, she accessed the newly created vocabulary database for the Vox tongue, clarifying the choice of words she would use.

Then, she interrupted the brown-furred creature (who seemed willing and able to carry on an endless monologue) and rattled off a sentence.

The Vox reared back, the whiskers on his stubby snout twitching. He gestured excitedly, then caught himself and clasped his hands together to stop the movement. Again speaking slowly, without the static of clicks and smacks, he released a few clear words; then he waved, beckoning for Jalila and the others to follow him. The assembled crowd parted to make way.

Jalila turned to Major al-Aziz and Colonel Farouk and repeated the Vox's gesture, waving for them to follow. "I think we're finally getting somewhere."

"What did you say to him?" said Major al-Aziz.

"'Take us to your leader,'" said Jalila.