Beep by Bill Roorbach

Author:Bill Roorbach [Roorbach, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2024-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

That you-men afternoon, every sort of loudness, every sort of smell, once bright, almost warm, began very slowly to darken and cool, the sun setting behind the cliffs of dwellings opposite the zzoo. Those few you-mens we encountered turned and ran, scooping up their young (goers, likely), or pointed and shrieked in delight (growers), or pressed their hands into pyramids of welcome (O, sensitives!).

Certain kibs slipped their elders’ grips and ran to greet us, the cats twitching their tails as before any meal but restraining themselves. Freemonkey, myself, needed feline help if I was to fulfill whatever on Aarth prophecy they’d heard, likely from squirrels, who can’t be trusted, and who were in fact preceding us overhead in the tree branches, firing off bulletins that would circle the glope: “Freemonkey has freed the cats!” “Cats and monkey headed for destiny!” “Good is the prophecy that prepares!” Abstractions travel best, we all know.

I had lost the scent of monkeys but now caught a darker simian smell, something familiar, so like the stench the big, truculent howlers left behind when we in our greater numbers managed to chase them from our trees. Our cats led us directly to the smell, a grand dar of thick old meddle in a building made of pretend rock.

Lion clawed at the dar leaving gouges.

“No,” I said. “Let us hurry to the backroooms, where the Greenies go: there are passageways, I hear them echo, just as in your former abode.”

And over the black-meddle barrier I went—Freemonkey!—and having learned how to unlatch the dar, several complicated meddle parts that followed a you-men logic, the voice of the ironstone still alive in there, muted and abused, stoical, though, stuff of the Aarth.

The dar, also meddle, different song, swung open, and our stately procession entered you-men space.

Occupado!

Two young Greenie males and a young female, mating age but no sign of the males having battled each other, nor having mated at all recently, in fact wearing their green wrappings tightly closed on their bodies, those same wimdoe-like shields over their eyes, their eyes magnified, respectively freakish blue, warm brown, nighttime black. The males by the smell had not peed their hands (and their feet, forget it, dressed in tough fabrics)—perhaps younger than I thought.

Our procession was silent. The female only looked up because Inga cleared her throat.

“We’re looking for the monkeys,” my girl said.

“Wait, what?” the first male Greenie said, ol’ blue-eyes.

The female quickly fingered her proto-mooding device, the woggie-toggie, and a voice came on, officious, a voice we could hear: “Come in, Janie.”

“We’ve got a few cats loose!” Janie blurted. “Mayday. Mayday!”

A little rhyme, lacking meter.

And then from the you-men point of view you saw the problem—these apex predators blocking the only way out.

“Young lady. If you could step over here,” Janie said to Inga, wind-voice quavering. “You’re in grave danger.”

“She just wants to help me find the monkeys,” I said.

Lion shook his mane in a laugh, said, “Their fear maketh good sense. These Greenies know we’ve reason to be angry.

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