“Now we can tell them about meeting Nebador, right? ” Teina begged.
Jimox smiled and looked at his listeners. “Except for the plague, and the quake, that was probably the biggest scare of our lives, and it all started at the very top of the World Tree . . .”
The Castle Kitchen buzzed with activity. The official souvenir album of Fairyland played over speakers hidden in the huge wooden beams. Just outside, through the open doors, the Goblin Fountain trickled and splashed in the golden rays of sunset. Teina dashed in with a bowl of fresh greens.
Jimox, wearing a chef’s hat, stirred his macaroni and cheese. “It needs a little garlic powder, I think.”
Teina pulled a cutting board close to Jimox, under the one working light bulb. “Yum, I love macaroni and cheese! And today I’m using one of our precious jars of marinated artichoke hearts,” she said, twisting it open.
“How’s the battery?” she asked, glancing up at the light.
“This one’s pretty good, but we don’t have many like it left. We could eat outside . . .”
“Sure. I just need to pick a few bugs out of the salad.”
Jimox declared the macaroni ready, shut off the bottled-gas stove, and tossed his hat aside. With trays in hand, they turned off the light and music, and headed out into the warm summer evening.
The Castle Kitchen had tables both inside under the thatched roof, and
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outside around the Goblin Fountain. Although the two permanent residents of Similand ate somewhere different almost every meal, sometimes outside the theme park, the Castle Kitchen was closest to their dwelling in Fairy Castle.
“It’ll be a beautiful, star-studded night!” Teina declared, looking up at the sky. “Wanna sleep in the Eagle’s Nest?”
“Yeah! I’ll get the binoculars!”
They carried flashlights, but the twilight allowed the pair to make the climb without them. Starting at the Olde Towne entrance to the World Tree, ramps, ladders, and balance beams with hand rails took them higher and higher into the great artificial tree. Balance beams without hand rails, and swinging ropes, were both tempting, but they knew the safety nets were rotten, and suspected the ropes might be getting that way.
They passed under roller coaster tracks and over water flumes, the tracks silent for the last twelve years, the flumes dry for just as long.
Eventually they came to the highest point on the World Tree, the Eagle’s Nest, the goal of all young climbers from the day the park had opened. Few under eight years of age had ever made it. Even many over eight had discovered a previously-unknown fear of heights at about one hundred and fifty feet, and taken the nearest slide to lower, less frightening, levels.
Teina and Jimox, now eighteen and twenty-two by their reckoning, hardly gave it a thought.
In the Eagle’s Nest, tightly-latched ice chests opened and sleeping bags came out. From another, dried fruit emerged. Jimox pulled the binoculars from his day pack, and Teina got out a night-vision scope, less powerful in magnification, but able to gather much more light.
They began with a familiar routine, first scanning their entire beloved Similand for dogs.
“Raccoon over in Machineland,” Jimox announced.
“Over by the roller coaster ruins? Yeah, I’ve seen him. There’s that orange cat that works the birds around Forestland Lake.”
Satisfied that their precious animal-proof fence was doing its job, they turned their attention to the outside world.
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Although it had little practical purpose, this part of their routine was deeply rooted in their childhoods. Without exchanging a word, they peered at the streets and highways, the inter-city rail tracks, the airport several miles away, and the seaport near the horizon. Finding nothing, they exchanged viewing tools and looked again. Both of them sighed.
“Why do we keep doing that?” Teina asked.
Jimox thought for a long moment. “Hope . . . and fear.”
Teina chuckled. “Hope that we’re not alone. Fear that we’re not alone.”
Jimox nodded, then lay back on his sleeping bag.
Teina took the night-vision scope again and looked at the tall buildings of downtown Westron, several missing since the quake.
Jimox frowned with thought. “If we saw someone, I’m not sure which emotion I’d feel most. So it’s probably best that there’s no one.”
Teina spoke while continuing to look through the night-vision scope.
“Except there’s a flying saucer over downtown, shining a light onto the buildings.”
They didn’t sleep that night.
With the binoculars, they determined it was a sphere, not a saucer. Its bright light seemed to penetrate dirty glass, curtains, maybe even solid walls.
Jimox scanned Similand to make sure they hadn’t left any lights on anywhere, and they agreed not to use the flashlights.
They felt fear . . . and hope.
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, the sphere lowered itself to the ground, very close to the train station, Teina guessed, possibly right in the parking lot.
Still, they couldn’t sleep.
They talked about what they would do if the thing moved toward Similand.
Thoughts came to them, of hiding in deep, dark basements or tunnels. More thoughts came, of welcoming the aliens, and fixing them macaroni and cheese.
As the sun rose, they munched dried fruit and took turns watching. At least one of them kept an eye on downtown constantly. The other occasionally
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scanned all other directions.
About mid-morning, the sphere rose from the train station.
It didn’t move toward Similand. Instead, it began poking into the mountain canyons north of downtown.
About noon, it disappeared into Oak Canyon, and a few minutes later, a wall of water came gushing out of the canyon, nearly filling the banks of the river that usually held only a trickle.
“I think it zapped Oak Canyon Dam!” Jimox yelled.
Teina took the binoculars, just in time to see the sphere emerge from the canyon and hover over the river. “It’s out. It’s looking at the river, I think.
Whoa!”
“What?”
“It just shot straight up into the sky, almost faster than I could see, like here to the moon in one second flat!”
Jimox searched the sky with his eyes, but found nothing.
For the rest of that day, one of them stayed in the Eagle’s Nest, scanning the horizon and the sky, while the other descended to get food and drink, water gardens, or tend solar panels and batteries.
They stayed up there all the next night, taking turns watching downtown, Oak Canyon, and everything else. Their bodies forced them to sleep a little.
Their minds still raced.
The next morning, they both realized the danger.
“Oh, no! Our dam in Pine Canyon!”
Jimox and Teina had just worked for five years to turn an abandoned theme park into a beautiful oasis. It was their home, and neither one wanted to give it up.
These thoughts led them to realize that they weren’t going to hide. If the ship came back, it was only going to mess with Similand, or Pine Canyon Reservoir, over their dead bodies.
They spent time every day and every night watching the sky. At least once a day, they climbed the World Tree and scanned the horizon from the Eagle’s Nest. While they watched, they talked.
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After cooling off from their initial reactions, they both admitted that there could have been a good reason for blowing up Oak Canyon Dam. Maybe the quake had damaged it, and it was about to burst. Maybe the aliens thought everyone was dead, and wanted to help the place return to a natural state.
“Well,” Teina began. “We’ll just have to tell them that Pine Canyon Dam is being used, won’t we?”
Jimox lowered the binoculars and looked at her.
“What colors of paint do we have?” she continued. “You know, really bright colors.”
Jimox grinned with understanding.
While looking over the paint cans in the theme park maintenance buildings, they discussed what to say.
Teina was in favor of trying to figure out the aliens’ language. She had seen books on crop circles that attempted to attach meanings to the different shapes that had mysteriously appeared in farmers’ fields for centuries.
Jimox pointed out that the books were mostly guessing, and if they did that, they could just as easily be saying, “Please Blow Up This Dam.”
Teina
sighed.
Eventually they settled on a waterproof bright-red paint used for lines on roads. It would stand out well against the concrete on top of the dam. They also decided to start and end their message with spirals, the most common design from crop circles, but use their own language in between.
With child trailers behind both bicycles, filled with paint cans and brushes, they struggled to pedal even on the level streets. On the slightest slopes, they had to walk. The steep dirt road up to the dam took four trips.
An entire day was consumed by sweeping the top of the dam, but they felt good knowing they were there, ready to shout curses or throw rocks if the ship should approach. They also had guns, but didn’t have much hope of winning a real battle against aliens.
Another half day, with measuring tape and chalk, saw their message laid out as neatly as possible in big letters.
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Finally, they got busy painting, while still watching the ground for dogs and the sky for alien space ships.
Boro laughed heartily. “It’s a good thing it’s just Nebador out there, and not the big, bad aliens you were imagining!”
Teina’s grin was missing several teeth, but her eyes sparkled.
“We hardly slept for a week,” Jimox explained, “fearing they would come back, blast the dam to pieces, then come and suck out all our juices.”
Mati snickered. “We’ve seen creatures who would do that, but they’re gone now . . . except a few wandering through deep, dark inter-stellar space.”
“I’d like to hear that story!” Teina said, coughed a few times, then looked at Jimox. “But we should finish ours first.”
He kissed her. “Luckily, we only had to wait a week, but when the life-monitor ship Toria Ralora arrived, it just hovered about twenty meters up, right over the Forestland plaza, where landing circle B-One is today.”
“Drove us crazy for three days!” Teina managed to say.
“We later found out they had watched us paint the words on the dam from orbit, got a language specialist, figured out what it said, and followed the water pipes with their sensors. Then they just hovered.”
“There was a reason . . .” Teina started to say, but couldn’t finish.
Jimox waited for her to recover. “But we didn’t know what it was until . . .
several days later. So the life-monitor ship just waited. At first we watched from hiding places. Then we stood out in the open. Finally we threw a few rocks, but the ship was too high.”
Teina grinned and most of the listeners chuckled.
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“At last, we were so frustrated that Teina stomped out there, right under the ship, and shouted . . . do you remember what you said?”
She nodded. “You tell them.”
“She
shouted,
GET YOUR SLIMY GREEN ASSES DOWN HERE SO WE
CAN SEE YOU! ”
The entire crew of the Manessa Kwi, the ursine healer, a reptilian assistant host, and about eight others who had gathered around to listen, all howled or shook with laughter.
Jimox and Teina both sat grinning, basking in the memory of one of the most important moments of their lives.
As soon as quiet returned, Jimox finished the story. “Half a minute later, the ship landed, and the ramp nearly scared the pee out of us. A variety of critters emerged, most of whom our animal-proof fence was supposed to keep out.”
Teina couldn’t help but laugh, but soon regretted it.
Jimox held her close. “We were half-expecting to be blasted by ray guns.
Instead, all the people from the ship, both crew and specialists, bowed to us.”
