Episode 8. The Sea Pig And the Sun: Replacing the Humans
--
Series Guide: List of All Episodes
Vi lies star-fished on the car seat, recovering. Drawing deep shuddering breaths.
Wick climbs into the front seat and puts his arms around her. “I love you,” he says. “Poor Vi. How can I help?”
“I’m a salmon up a river who spawns and dies,” groans Vi.
“Don’t say that,” goes Wick, dizzy from the smeel. “Don’t die.”
Vi tugs at the damp edge of her skirt.
“I need a shower,” she says. “Bigtime.”
Waama the sea pig eme is listening. The Mercedes drenches Wick and Vi with sprays of warm water.
Vi rubs her face and body with shaky hands. And then she begins laughing, her gaiety edging towards the edge. Wick does his best to sooth her.
An immense blast of warm air surrounds them, followed by fluffy towels that scroll out from a sudden slit. Wick rubs Vi’s hair. Her mood settles.
“Did it hurt a lot?” asks Wick.
“Not really,” says Vi. “But horrible to think about. Nasty parasites. Those emes, they were worming into the eggs while they were still inside me. I hope — I hope they don’t expect any mothering. I mean, you might say they’re my babies, right?”
Wick mirrors the thought. “The ones who flew out of Koral’s mouth — they’re my babies.” He pauses, thinks better of it.. “Not really the same.”
“No,” Vi shortly says.
People are staring at them, but they’re not pressing in. Smeel has things mellow. The Los Perros High band kicks into a tune that’s wholly new to the world, a mélange of tones and volumes, with no regular time signature — like the aleatory slamming of an unhinged shutter in a storm. Even so, there is a certain coherence, an aura, a sense that this tune is a fanfare of greeting, an obbligato of arrival.
The musicians are being coached by their little eme dolls. And the spectators with little people on their shoulders are dancing very strangely in the street.
Are the emes meant to be bosses, parasites, spies, helpers? According to Qoph and Koral, Waama wants the emes to live in meatie copies of humans so they can all fly to the Sun.
“But why isn’t there a little eme-doll on me?” asks Wick.
“Duh,” says Qoph. “I’m your eme. I’m already in place. Imitating you.”
“But you’re big, and the new emes are small.”
“They’ll turn into big meaties pretty soon,” says Qoph. “Will you like that better?”
“I’ll like it better if you don’t fuck Vi again,” says Wick, veering off topic.
“And what about you getting on Koral?” puts in Vi. “I don’t want to see that again, either.”
“What’s the diff,” says Koral. “You two are so possessive. It’s just flow.”
“Hey, thar!” interrupts Soxx Whitsett. She’s leaning into the Mercedes, a little zonked from the smeel. Her full-grown eme double is standing right behind her.
“Lilith likes this,” says Soxx. “The Liliths of the field toil not, neither do they nor. She has a deep-sea crab’s view of the world. Pinching and scuttling.”
“Is Lilith with Waama too?” says Qoph.
“We saw her in the multi lounge,” Koral tells her husband. “Don’t you ever notice anything?”
“I’ve known Waama for a long time,” says Lilith.
“Just remember that I’m the team leader,” says Koral. “If you make trouble I’ll kill you.”
“All you need is love,” says Lilith. She and Soxx laugh like nihilistic hyenas. Or, no, like reckless artists.
Standing erect, Koral calls out to the crowd, “It’s time to grow!”
The tall trombonist in the band has an eme doll in her grip. She’s the one who was teasing the cow. The doll twists free, hops onto the pavement, and dances a jig. With each step of the jig, the doll grows. All around them, the 99 other little eme meaties are doing the same, wriggling themselves into full human size, and growing appropriate clothes.
Shrieks and whoops, pandemonium and joy. The Los Perros High band gets back to work, playing even wilder then before, and now with twice as many musicians. The meatie copies have sprouted instruments from their hands. It’s the climax of the dissolution of the Labor Day parade.
“Waama wants them to dance around the park fountain,” Koral tells her companions. “All the human targets and their copies. You can help, Lilith.”
Koral is wearing her flirty look. Kind of incongruous, coming right after her death threat. Her face is amazingly flexible.
“Koral is good at this,” observes Soxx. “Her face is very flexible.”
Koral warps her lips and sounds a bosun’s all-hands-on-deck call. “To the fountain!” she yells, her voice like a bell.
Waama widens her tweaked body. By now she’s more like plush furniture than a car. Qoph, Vi, and Soxx are in the front seat, with Koral, Wick, and Lilith in back.
The smeel pod hisses. The ethereal fluid has rarefied into something less like smoke and more like oxygen. You hardly know that you’re breathing this smeel. Until you do.
The sea pig Mercedes rises into the air and, merrily rocking, floats fifty yards to the park. The meaties and their human partners cavort in her wake, raucous as a Mardi Gras crowd.
Thanks to the emes’ tweaking, the fountain in the park is a plume thirty feet high. And they’ve flattened the fountain’s statuary to the ground. The Los Perros High band honks a second-line Aztec two-step.
The human/meatie pairs circle the fountain, humans on the inner side, meaties on the outer. Turn by turn the humans spiral inward, like stars captured by a galactic black hole. Their bodies fade and fact, disappear. But they’re not quite dead. They’re still conscious minds, moving patterns within natural phenomena, housed in the niches formerly occupied by their partner eme.
Contrariwise, the eme-hosting meaties spiral out to the safety of the park’s edge and sit on the low wall. In effect they’ve swapped places with their partners: the humans live within natural processes; the emes live in meat bodies.
Wick and Vi fight back an atavistic herd-mentality urge fact, to follow their fellows into the doom-zone of the fountain’s central mist. But they sit tight in the sea pig Mercedes, clinging to their meatie doubles Koral and Qoph. And the Soxx/Lilith pair stay put as well.
Wick uses his vibes to observe the disintegrated humans’ new homes. The girl trombonist is a pattern within a burrowing sand crab, a twirler is a gracefully swaying tree, the mayor is emulated by a barking dog, a beauty queen is a wind-blown scatter of sand on Seabright Beach. The emulation processes flit by. A jerky mechanical elevator. A crackling radio broadcast. A decaying mound of newsprint. A sneeze of bosons, quarks, and malcontent radiation. A drifter’s watchcap with flames around the edge. Flight trails of hummingbirds. A beetle’s iridescent sheen. A patch of sun on a stucco wall. Fitful traffic in a two am intersection.
The human emulations are patterns within these natural processes. And, yes, they occupy the slots where the emes used to live. And yes, the emes are patterns within Los Perros meaties — such as the meaties who now comprise the Los Perros Band. As Koral predicted, the band has changed their tune — to a funeral dirge, played sideways. The smeel pod fumes on.
