Another day came when the elderly couple was not up to telling stories, so all the invited guests scattered to join the hundreds of other visitors who were busy enjoying the attractions of Siminia Three Planet Station.
Rini smiled, seeing their three passengers, monkey mammal, bird, and snake, head off side-by-side to explore the theme park.
“They’re getting to be fast friends,” Mati observed.
“Yeah. Ashley’s a little embarrassed by it, but all three of them love it when they don’t have to work on their essays so they can go off together.”
“Kolarrr’ka’s little harem.”
Rini laughed. “I don’t know about that! ”
Mati joined him in laughter.
“What do you want to do?” Rini asked to change the subject.
“Um . . . something easy. That one where we needed gloves and ropes took more energy than I have today.”
Rini was content. He would have been happy sweeping floors with his beloved Mati.
They wandered the streets and alleys of Olde Towne, peeking into shops where the remaining goods were now museum pieces. Restaurants had all the original furnishings and decorations, but the only food was from a Nebador nutrition cabinet. Theaters displayed the original plastic projection films on reels, brittle with age, but the show could still be watched on a Nebador
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display screen.
At the very end of a tiny alley, something grabbed Mati’s interest and almost pulled her in against her will. While she grinned with excitement, one foot already in the door, Rini took the time to read the sign. “Journey Through Time. Completely restored by Nebador technicians. No dangers.
No special equipment needed. ”
He looked at her and nodded.
The lobby was once a maze of ropes to keep hundreds of monkey mammals occupied while the attraction within struggled to keep up with their numbers. Now, the ropes had been rearranged so a large equine or fanator could walk right in.
The journey began high in the shadowy branches of a primeval jungle. A mixture of detailed sculpture, subtle lighting, painted backgrounds, and moving projections brought the scenes to life. The wild creatures of the air and the denizens of the forest floor lurked everywhere, calling to each other in harsh voices, and often showing long, sharp teeth. They acted, until the very last moment, as if whatever walked on the carpeted path would be their next meal, bones and all. An emergency exit allowed the faint-of-heart to leave the attraction early.
Mati grinned at Rini. “This is fun! ”
Soon a strong monkey mammal with golden-brown fur appeared in the trees. Lightning struck one tree, and he bravely grabbed a burning branch, then swung through the forest with his torch, sending all the dangerous animals screaming for their lives.
Mati was wide-eyed.
Rini just smiled.
The forest became an idyllic paradise of deer and rabbits nibbling grass.
Furry monkey mammals tended orderly gardens, built cozy thatched cottages, and played in the forest with the harmless wild creatures.
“That is so wonderful!” Mati declared. “I wish our kingdom could have been like that.”
Rini raised his eyebrows.
The ground shook and miniature volcanoes spewed simulated molten
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rock. Determined monkey mammals used tame elephants and other large beasts to drag huge blocks of stone to channel the lava. Power plants sprang up to turn the heat into electricity.
Mati grinned. “See what people can do when they work together instead of buying and selling each other as slaves?”
Rini knew it wasn’t meant to be a question, but he nodded anyway.
Teams of happy craftsmen began building modern cities that glowed with lights and buzzed with trains and cars. Everywhere, monkey mammals shook hands and worked together to build bridges, schools, libraries, and Similand itself.
“Wow,” Mati breathed. “No slavery, no crime, no poverty. Look, even the mayor’s helping to build a school, and all the monkey-mammal children with different fur colors are playing together nicely!”
Rini smiled, completely happy with the idea.
Finally, a simple rocket blasted off, carrying two brave monkey mammals toward the stars. The lighted scenes and projections ended, and a large display room contained all the great discoveries of Siminia Three science and technology, in glass cases, so Similand guests could continue to feel pride in the accomplishments of their ancestors throughout the ages.
After silently wandering around the display room for a quarter hour, Mati started to frown.
Rini noticed and looked at her.
“Something’s wrong,” Mati eventually said.
Rini nodded slightly, but didn’t say anything.
“If everything was so wonderful, how did they get to . . . where they were when Jimox and Teina were young, making biological weapons of mass destruction in secret laboratories?”
Rini cracked a slight smile, but remained silent.
“If they were making weapons, there must have been a war. If there was a war, they couldn’t have been so good at getting along.”
Rini nodded slowly.
Suddenly Mati dashed back into the attraction. The control systems didn’t seem to care which direction a visitor went. They sensed her presence, and
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activated the lights and projections as she entered each area.
Mati gazed at the pastoral scene of people gardening and children playing with wild animals. Rini joined her.
After a minute of staring with wrinkled brow, she sighed. “Something’s missing here. I learned in Psychic Development that people don’t just become all goodie-goodie when they no longer have to fight to survive. If they’re smart, they direct those instincts into sports and other stuff.”
“Makes sense,” Rini said.
Mati strode farther back through the attraction, stopping at the primeval jungle where a monkey mammal first tamed fire. “If this is even partly true
. . .”
She dashed forward in time again, stopping at the lava channels. “Okay, the taming-fire theme comes up twice. I have no problem with that.”
She returned to the pastoral scene. “But I happen to know, from universe history classes, that people don’t subdue all the dangerous wild animals without going through a long period — usually thousands of years — when they use and abuse everything, including the most harmless of animals, and including themselves.”
“Like with slavery,” Rini whispered.
“Yeah! And that’s . . . totally missing.”
Rini let a long moment pass. “Do you think . . .”
She looked at him as he searched for the right words.
“. . . they left something out of the display, or just never actually got to, you know, where they wanted to be in the development of their civilization?”
As Mati thought about his question, she walked backward and forward through the entire attraction again. Rini stayed at her side. She stopped at the last scene, a modern city buzzing with happy, peaceful citizens.
“They got there technologically — you know, buildings, electricity, trains, cars, and all that. We’ve seen the ruins, museum pieces, and a few preserved buildings. That part of the display is true enough.”
“But . . .” Rini prompted softly.
Mati re-entered the display room. “There’s nothing here about weapons or wars, especially biological weapons. They didn’t get to where they wanted to be in their hearts. They were good at telling stories, like all sapient peoples,
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so they told themselves stories about who they wanted to be . . . and that’s what they put in this whole attraction. That’s all they put in it.”
After a long moment, Rini said, “I agree.”
After a few more minutes wandering around the display room, Mati and Rini stepped through the exit door and emerged into the sunshine. One more Nebador sign faced them.
“The scenes you just witnessed are not historically accurate,” Rini read.
“They depict the myths that the former civilization liked to remember, and teach to their children. In many cases, they did not even record the actual, often embarrassing, events of their history. ”
“Thought so,” Mati said.
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Chapter 26: Water, Water Everywhere
Jimox and Teina were still shivering slightly from the morning coolness, so they selected a bench in the warm morning sun. “Now can we tell them about your fantastic water system?”
She kissed him. “Okay.”
“Back when I was still scratching my head over how to fix the fence, Teina quickly figured out the water pipes inside Similand. But she just didn’t have much water to work with . . .”
Morning sun streamed through the windows of the Kid’s Motorway station, so Jimox sat up and stretched his brown furry arms. Teina was still in dreamland, so he looked over the shelves of food and supplies all around him, brimming with everything that had survived the seven or more years since they were packaged.
A few minutes later, Teina stirred, heard the little gas camp stove hissing, and turned over. “What’cha making?”
“Oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar.”
“Mmmm! Count me in!” she said, sitting up. “What are we doing today?”
“Up to you. It’s a water-project day. Besides, I can’t do any more on the fence until we get more wire. It’s on the scrounging list.”
“Hmmm . . .” she began, stretching and pulling on clothes. “I guess we know everything there is to know about the pipes and valves in Similand. We have to find that water company office and figure out where the water’s
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coming from.”
“Bikes and day packs?”
“Yeah, and flashlights. All your can openers, of course.”
Jimox smiled and glanced at his leather bag of pry bars and bolt cutters.
“Oatmeal’s ready.”
As always, they walked the outside of the concrete building to see if anything had found a way in, and might be waiting for them inside. Finding the building secure, they looked for an entry point that would allow them to close it again. Jimox settled on a metal loading-ramp door, and went to work.
An alarm screamed at them, until its old batteries died about twenty seconds later. In that time it tried desperately to call the police, but couldn’t get a dial tone.
“The ghost of a machine,” Jimox mused, “trying to do its job one last time.”
Teina blinked. “A little sad. Let’s unlock the front door and bring the bikes in.”
Light streamed in through the glass doors of the carpeted front lobby, illuminating the vending machines and a three-D model of the entire water system. Shoulder to shoulder, they studied it.
“Doesn’t tell us much more than we already know,” Teina concluded. “I can’t tell which of the three reservoirs in the hills is ours. I’m gonna have to find real maps and charts.”
“Let me know if I can do anything. In the meantime, I’ll harvest the vending machines.”
The thirteen-year-old monkey mammal girl began walking the corridors, looking for the map room.
An hour later, she spread out four huge charts on the carpet. Jimox placed drink cans on the corners so they wouldn’t roll back up, and Teina crouched on the floor and peered at them. “Okay, now we’ve got every pipe and valve.
Here’s Similand, with a big water main going in. Would you grab the blue highlighter and follow that pipe?”
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“Sure.”
She moved to a different chart. “Now I can see the big pipes coming from the dams. This one goes off south, so it can’t be ours. It has to be one of these two.”
Jimox looked up. “Okay, I came to the edge of my chart. What about the dam closest to Similand?”
“That’s just emergency overflow from this one, and doesn’t connect to the water system. Would you trace the pipe from the middle reservoir? Orange, please.”
Jimox switched markers and began coloring.
“Yeah. Okay, I see how these charts match up.”
“Wrong reservoir again,” Jimox announced. “It just turned and went straight north.”
Teina looked. “Okay, I’ll color this pipe yellow, you continue the Similand pipe onto this chart, and we’ll see what happens.”
Their lines got closer and closer, until they came together at the matching edges of two charts. They looked at each other. Jimox suddenly felt a burst of courage, leaned forward, and kissed Teina on the cheek.
“Why did you do that?” she asked with a trembling voice.
“Because I have the most wonderful friend that anyone could ever want.”
She blushed and blinked. “Okay . . . um . . . it looks like our water is coming from Pine Canyon.”
Jimox grabbed his day pack, unfolded a street map, and looked at the roads between the water company office and the reservoir. “About an hour and a half from here. We could go today, if you want.”
An hour and a half of pedaling brought them to the lower end of a dirt road that wound steeply up into the hills. Another hour of pushing their bicycles revealed the bottom of the dam, and a water filtration plant.
Inside the building, plenty of water was flowing into the concrete filter tanks, but the sand was so caked with algae that the water just sheeted across to the overflow channel.
Teina frowned. “I’m not exactly sure how this is supposed to work, but it obviously isn’t.”
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Jimox nodded. “Sorry about my bad time estimates.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s see what we can see at the top.”
Half an hour later, the top of the dam spread across the canyon to their right. Ahead of them, if they looked down, a few hundred yards of stagnant green water and weeds sat in the bottom of the reservoir, with a stream feeding it at the far end.
“Eeew,” Teina remarked.
Jimox frowned. “I’m glad we haven’t been drinking from our little trickle in Forestland.”
She nodded, then looked at the sun, already getting low. “We need a couple of days to figure this out.”
They both looked around, and quickly spotted the caretaker’s house, nearly hidden in a cluster of trees. Luckily, he hadn’t been home on Burning Day.
“You were just thirteen,” Mati said, looking at Teina with an understanding smile, “same as me when I became a response-ship pilot.”
Teina grinned back. “For the next year and a half . . .” She stopped when her breath gave out, and looked at Jimox.
“For the next year and a half, we had to find and close about a thousand valves, all going to neighborhoods with burned houses where the water was just leaking into the ground. We opened man hole covers and crept into dark tunnels, pried locks off little concrete buildings covered with stickers, and tried not to turn off the water going to Similand.”
“We accidentally did, about five times!” Teina added.
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Jimox put his arm around her. “Slowly, the water pressure here came up.
Today, all the ponds are full, and the fountains, waterfalls, and streams are flowing with fresh water, day and night. There’s drinking water and wash water, and it all comes from the same reservoir!”
“And the filter works!” Teina added, then started coughing.
“She worked on that for a whole day every time we went to the dam, which was about once a month. She was as determined as I was about the fence, and made several improvements in the design.”
“You’re embarrassing me. As soon as I raked off the algae, it started working. Now there’s a specialist from Nebador who keeps it in good shape.”
She paused to cough. “But we wanted to tell them how we hooked up with Nebador.”
Jimox took on a stern expression. “Not until we tell them how we came to live in Fairy Castle.”
Teina grinned. “You’re right. Our story wouldn’t be complete without that.”
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Chapter 27: Rini’s Investigation
Rini had been in a very thoughtful mood ever since he and Mati explored Journey Through Time. So at the lunch break, and again that evening, he declared that he needed to spend time in some museums. Mati had already had her fill of museums, so she and Sata dashed off toward Machineland.
Rini was glad he was alone. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, and had a hunch it might take a while to find.
Siminia Three Planet Station and its retreats contained dozens of museums, as they were now the only buildings of the old civilization that were maintained. The retreats, like Paradise Lodge, held a few paintings and sculptures for decoration, Rini knew, but most of the museum pieces were right here.
The first four museums, each of which took him more than an hour to browse, did not get him any closer to his goal. The paintings, sculptures, and books were all very beautiful, certainly worthy of preservation, and made him sad to think that the civilization that created them was gone. But they didn’t shed light on the big question he had been pondering ever since Journey Through Time.
He exited the last museum on a tiny side street of Olde Towne, and happened to glance toward the end of the narrow alley. Beside a large trash can, he spotted a small door with an even smaller sign beside it. His curiosity piqued, he approached.
Below the original lettering in the dead language now spoken by only two
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elderly people, someone had inscribed a translation in the language of Nebador.
“Famous Movie Sets,” Rini muttered to himself.
He pushed on the door. Its rusty hinges complained, but allowed him to enter.
With his bracelet light, Rini peered at arrangements of fancy furniture, re-creations of famous rooms in old-fashioned palaces and modern offices, and laboratories where scientists discovered the secrets of nature.
Something creepy about most of the laboratories caused Rini to raise his eyebrows.
He continued deeper into the dark building and discovered more and more movie sets that involved glass tubing and flasks, strange electrical panels with huge switches, and beds where a monkey mammal could be strapped down.
Rini
swallowed.
Occasionally he came upon the plush office of a famous leader, or the polished wooden bar from an old drinking saloon, but soon another laboratory would appear, even more gruesome than the last. Cages held plastic animals, fear showing in their painted eyes. In one lab, a mock-up of a full-size monkey mammal was strapped down, tubes in its arms and electrodes on its head. Its artificial eyes, too, were wide with fear.
Rini shivered and felt his stomach churn.
After two hours in Famous Movie Sets, Rini took a deep breath. He felt sure he was getting closer to what he was looking for, but needed to continue following the clues. Unfortunately, all the signs inside this museum were only in the language of the dead civilization.
After another moment of thought, he dashed back through the entire building, taking a photograph of each laboratory set with his bracelet, making sure to include the sign that revealed the name of the movie.
Evening was deepening into night as Rini stepped into the control room in the Fairy Castle tower. Rrr’tana the station host was in the lounge area teaching a pair of reptilian assistants the landing procedures for arriving
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ships. A small ursine was at the monitor desk scanning visual scenes from around the planet station. Another stood at one of the eight windows, the one that looked out over Machineland.
Rini found a seat in a corner and waited until Rrr’tana was free. A while later the bird sent his new helpers out to observe fully-trained assistant hosts in the process of landing a large ship. Finally the host looked at the freckled lad and bowed.
“Do you know the old language of Siminia Three?” Rini asked, standing up.
“I can read it, bok, but only Jimox and Teina can speak it properly.”
Rini touched some keys on his bracelet to transfer the images to a monitor.
“I’d like to watch as many of these videos as I can.”
Rrr’tana nodded. “We probably have them. I need to observe this landing, then I’ll transfer them to Manessa.”
“Thank you!” Rini said as he bowed to the station host.
Rrr’tana stepped to a window as Rini bounded down the steps to see what Mati was doing.
After rowing around Forestland Lake by lantern light with Mati, dancing under the World Tree to some recorded music from the former civilization with Mati, Sata, and Ashley, and finally whizzing down Ice Mountain in a bobsled with Boro, Rini arrived back at the Manessa Kwi feeling quite ready for bed.
“I have the twenty-one videos you requested,” the ship informed him.
After kissing Mati good-night, Rini couldn’t resist the temptation to creep back up to the passenger area.
None of the movies had been translated into the language of Nebador, but Rini wasn’t worried. He wasn’t looking for factual information. He wanted to feel, with his heart, if maybe the monkey mammals of Siminia Three had created the disease that destroyed their civilization in fulfillment of some longing in their collective subconscious.
As the third video was ending, Rini glanced at the open hatch and noticed that dawn light was in the sky.
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A few minutes later, Mati came up and snuggled into the passenger seat with him. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
Rini
nodded.
