CHAPTER FIVE
Wanliet and I met at the Clear Spot, a surrealistically clean and well-lighted place that he had picked out because he wanted to avoid his usual haunt, the Pompadour Swamp, and also because it was near one of the openings to the surface. He was a funny sort of ascetic, I figured, but just how funny I had no idea yet. I’d gotten there a little early, so first I went up a few steps and watched the moonlets of Mobahey’s rings race across the darkening sky, irregular boulders tumbling through the heavens.
By the time Wanliet came to my table I was drinking some liquid product of the area called vagahey, made from the essences of local succulents and cacti. It’s an odd thing, but in places like the Clear Spot even water has an artificial taste to it, so I avoid it and sample the local beverages. I wasn’t sure if this Mobahey vagahey I’d started with was a quality example or not, but I didn’t care for it. For his part W drank quetali, which is the same thing as vagahey, I think, after more fermentation and distillation, and when I switched over to his choice it turned out that the extra time and attention was just what the vagahey needed to get rid of the stickers. After a few more samples I even developed a taste for the stuff, but this all took a long time, and because Wanliet’s take on things was hard to translate to mine, the minutes were equal parts enlightenment and aggravation. I wanted answers, and he either couldn’t or wouldn’t give them to me. Finally I’d had enough of his coy games.
“Okay, Wanliet, I stuck my neck out with you to get this, this, treasure, and what’s it turn out to be? What the hell was this all about? I mean, okay, so we found the treasure, near as I can tell. But what exactly is it that we found out there, Wanliet? What is this damned treasure?”
“You tell me. Tell me the whole journey, every detail. Because that’s part of what you found out there.”
“You’re a lunatic! Man, this wasn’t some mystic vision quest! If I tell you everything that happened we’ll be here for hours, and it’s mostly unimportant drudgery, anyway. I ate dust, I kicked and coaxed and threatened the beasts and Jedub and Lordano – well, okay, same difference there – all that and waaaay too much sun and heat. You were out there, you know what it’s like.”
He smirked. “You barely missed the hot season, just before you got here and found me.” He paused a bit, tilted his head. “But I’m thinking somebody’s had too much to think.” He nodded sagely, leaned forward and went on, his hands gesturing, elaborating.
“Look, the tale’s in the details, the details are the tale. Now, did you bring my map, so you could show me everything?”
Far from getting clarity, I was getting frustration. “No, you weirdo, your map was a joke! It was huge! What’s the point of a map almost as big as the territory? And, anyway, you were there too, weren’t you? That was you ducking behind boulders out there, right? Or was that some other hatted weirdo out there?”
“You miss the point, because your thoughts are pointed. What’s the value in a map any smaller than what I gave you?” he shrugged, his gravelly voice sounding very reasonable. “There’s no zing, no tang, it’s a mess without zest, it’s like it’s dehydrated. I’ll grant you, on Mobahey that’s not as great a loss as on some other planets, but still, it’s lost with some cost. This planet’s far richer than any two-D picture.”
“Ya know, W, since forever they’ve had electronic maps with scrolling displays that show any place in the universe, in any scale you want. What made you stick with that old folded paper thing?”
“Those other maps, they’re all too flat. What about the essences, the perfumes and textures that also let us sense where we are? How can you savor the flavor of the neighbors, the scents of piquant sequins of dust and stars that’s always surrounding them and thars? Any map can tell you how far it is to somewhere, but what if it’s too near from here to there, and too far from near to here? Then where are you?” and then he settled back like that settled things.
“Look,” I hissed, “you grizzled old freak, we weren’t out there to do some study of Mobahey, or to find enlightenment, we were out there to grab a treasure. And now I want to know what in space it was we brought back! If I’m going to cheat Stanley of his treasure, I want to make damn sure it’s worth it! Otherwise, our deal’s off, and Stanley can have his precious balls!” This was almost the same demand Jedub and Lordano had made of me, which flashed in the back of my mind as I spoke, and next I realized that if W was taking my role, then I was taking the role of Jedub and Lordano, and… no, no, no, I had to shift, change my focus, keep talking and stop thinking, or the other way around, so I calmed down and changed my fulcrum. “Okay, W, you first. You tell me how you came up with this map in the first place.”
“There’s a cave, a hole in a hill, where I hid from a storm like a mole you can’t kill. Inside the cave in a kind of a nave were strange symbols and paintings and what you’d call writing, I guess, and I sensed also power, a wowser like a dowser in the deeps. Mobahey had no aborigines, what was their source, and of course I had to unscrew the inscrutable, so I sat and I sat and I stared and I peered and I pored on the weird and I wondered and pondered and blundered and wandered and, in a timeless time I began, barely, to understand. These beings were great, and joyous, and I began compiling a dictionary of their symbols, which I called in a flashback a Maguffin’s Reader, like kids used to get. That’s when I figured out there were some power objects, spheres to fear, globes to love, two on Mobahey and a third some elsewhere. My map was vague, because these Maguffins see the universe differently than we do, as all energy and light and vibration, so I had to try to match this up with the dirt and rocks of Mobahey.”
“So there’s a third ball?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think. Hard to say, really, but the MFs – that’s what I began calling the Maguffins in my talks with myself – like things in threes, triptychally.”
“You talk to yourself? I’m never have guessed. And do you have any idea what any of them do, these balls? What we can do with them?”
“Ideas, yes, but not to share, must beware of careless sharing. Neither bare nor share when others can hear.”
Remembering what Jedub’s loose lips had wrought I nodded, sagely too I hoped, and then once I saw Wanliet was done I shrugged in resignation and began describing and elaborating on our journey, keeping Wanliet’s caution in mind.
W made sure my tongue did not stick nor my throat dry out during the hours we sat, and that quetali grew on me, or at least I learned to ignore its nastier aspects. So W asked questions, I answered and filled out the tale and filled in the picture, and I began to get a hint of an inkling of the most unconventional and fantastic treasure we’d brought back.
“And where are they now? Somewhere safe?”
“Hell, W, you could put those things in the middle of the town square for a week and they’d be safe, unless some kids wanted to play with ‘em. Nobody has a clue what they are.”
Wanliet got a canny smile. “You might think so, so you might think.”
Abruptly he tilted his head like he’d heard something. “Time to go,” he abruptly said.
“Sure, lemme pay up, hit the head and then I’m ready to go. But where do you want to go from here? The Pompadour Swamp? Or is it that you need to check on your treasure tonight? Can’t it wait?”
“No. Now. Now we can go.”
I wasn’t comfortable rushing out but figured I could wait to piss ‘til we got to my room. We stepped out the door into that triangle of light that wedged from doorway into darkness, then past the striped light of shuttered windows and into the warm breezy dark.
Within just a few steps Wanliet stopped and seized my arm, halting me too. He listened, looked up, then at me. Through the opening to the surface, almost overhead, I sensed a darker shadow shifting, blotting out the night as it moved across the opening above. “Hear that? The whirring drazy hoops? They’ve found us!”
“A blimp?” I laughed. “That’s what you’re worried about? That’s hardly a pursuit vehicle or an assault craft, W!”
“That’s not a blimp, it’s a dirigible, fast and bulbous and deadly. But more than a threat it’s an omen. Things will move at a very different speed from here on, faster and nastier.”
“Blimp speed? I hope I can handle the rush!” joked the quetali from my lips.
“And I hope you enjoyed your quiet time in the desert, and relaxing in The Clear Spot, because now it gets rotten hot. Let’s go to where our ‘X’ marks the spot, find out where our exit’s got.”
I had a moment of clarity where I wondered what Wanliet had been drinking, and if it gave him acute vision or visions. Either way, we were heading out in a hurry. And here, I guess, is where the story starts to get really strange, maybe even rotten hot like the man said. Suddenly I was plunged into a story I hadn’t shaped, and that ‘lost’ feeling I’d had before – well, it got worse. It’s never completely gone away since. This, I realized later, is what comes of tapping at keystones of stranger’s tales, testing people and situations that are best left untouched.