Beep, page 11
And with that truncation, she pushed me down into her noopsook, hand strong as any aunt’s.
To follow the nobleman, who walked at a good clip, would not have been my approach. But mine was still available, if need be: flee. I mooded that concept hard. Inga yawned, a sign that she was allowing in the thought, also that she was an animal like any other, and exhausted. She slowed, slowed some more, and then, in an unnatural dip in the unnatural terrain, a dip that put us momentarily out of sight of the grunters behind us, she very suddenly darted east, brilliant child graced with instinct (which, in a way, is mood), ran us down the most obscure of three paved paths, past more birds in very high cages.
“Skaw, skawwww!” they shrieked, “Freemonkeeeeee!”
Oblivious, my beautiful friend sprinted past a number of lazy-paced you-mee mommas pushing strawlers, that you-men baby smell, past various imprizzoned ungulates all burping gasses, finally up a climbing zigzag starway and into a moon-o-rail, Inga called it, a kind of trayn without wheels, a giant caterpillar-ish. The disembodied god voices were getting familiar: “Please find a seat and stay seated. Dars are closing now.” And we did find seats, and the dars did close (speaking of prophecy), very comical view of the strangled noble meeting his guards at a dead end on the wrong path, pointing up at us. Each of the large guards had that brooch of silver on his chest. They ate well, these ones, and were not the fastest in the jungle, clearly.
They talked into their collars as we sped away, afraid to look at one another.
From the moon-o-rail Inga pointed out deer or maybe horses with freakishly long necks and prettily patterned fur—how I wanted to climb them and ride atop!
“Freemonkey!” one of them moodled freely, then her herd of five as well, deep neck bows.
“Chiraffes,” Inga said. “From Afrigga.”
“Haha, chiraffes,” one of them said. “We are High Looks, and look out for us, for we see you up there!”
The High Looks turned back to plucking stray leaves, heads in the highest branches they could reach, which of course they’d picked clean. Only slowly I saw that their freedom was contained—barriers of meddle and shocks, half hidden, defined a finite veldt, the illusion of freedom if you weren’t the one contained.
Around a mudless pond three giants loomed, gray and wrinkled with madly extended anteater noses.
“Elephumps!” Inga cried as the moon-o-rail slowed.
“Freemonkey,” they trumpeted, feeling my girl, gazing up.
Inga held me tight, didn’t want me jumping.
I gave a magnamimous wave, just being ironic, but the elephumps didn’t seem to take it that way, bowed to us, scraped the dry stone with tree-stump feet. The biggest, moodheart clear female, rose, stepped forward, tears in her eyelashes, suddenly, runnels of tears down her dusty cheeks, following wrinkles, leaving trails.
“We are the Gray Walkers,” she sobbed. “And, Freemonkey, if you set us free, free as thee, we have the strength to free others, and will march where the battle leads.”
“Soon,” I said, starting to feel my own moodheart grow, my sense of mission expanding with it, overtaking me—Inga, too, she gasping with it, her own blooming mood. The ripples of sympathy all around us grew to waves, waves to tides, tides to great world currents, voices from the everywhere, a kind of singing, the multimood, the world in chorus, no chaos.
But something more intimate, too: “They’ve taken my baby,” the Gray Walker matriarch moodled, so gentle, so soft, she in her onlyness. “The you-mens. They speak in kind tones, wind from their lungs, they even bring melons, and wash us with hozes, which are sad you-men trunks, cool splash, warm splash, then this: they’ve taken my baby.”
The others mood-muttered, all sorrow.
The moon-o-rail started up again all on its own, moved us slowly along.
“Sorrow,” I said to the gray ones. Then, surprising myself: “Be ready.”
A small spotted herd of leapers raced up to see us. Again I waved, again creatures bowed, scraped at the hard earth.
“Anteloop,” Inga said.
“Leapers, caught in a canyon,” they said in unison, beautiful moodle, a song: these ones had stayed sane. “We await,” they said, then leapt away.
The moon-o-rail picked up speed. No one else was aboard, or at least not aboard our vertebra of the caterpillar. And below, speeding now, the Bronzoo floor, which was the commandeered surface of the plamet, just a few groups of you-men visitors, not their fault, well dispersed, in fact themselves on display, then a large group of ssscoola kibs, likely the Catholics, whacking each other with colorful sticks. Wolfpack in an enclosure, awful doggish things, screeching at one another and, as I now saw, electro-separated, the you-mens protecting their prizzoners from one another, thwarting the order.
At last the undulating conveyance came to a stop, the dars swishing open—a different place than we’d embarked, as if the moon-o-rail were a sideways El Vator. Bronzoo was big as the world had once been, but so degraded, a kind of garbled quotation. No time for such thoughts, as Inga leapt from the trayn and hurried down a starway to a path, no one following. She pulled up at another carved board, more weatherbeaten than the first, equally friendly mood.
“Monkey Howzz!” she cried, pointing at the carving, words dug from old wood. A kind of moodling from trees departed. But something else, when you looked: face of a monkey, also carved, hard to decipher at first, then obvious: monkey, male, its expression meaning this: Stay out. Plus an air-o, as Inga called it. She hurried us in the direction it foretold.
Chapter Twenty-One
The old uncles often said the you-mens were once part of the intuitive concatenation, the interbraided hitherto—the monkey chain, we smalls liked to call it, the fulsome communication of all things living—make that all things, since all things live, background vibrations in normal times, foreground in times of emergency, then life itself during disaster: being is all one. It was the goers that separated themselves from all the rest of the world, a false elevation that came in curious antiwaves, these overachieving stagger-clowns separating themselves from not only the true world but from themselves as well, creating the two kinds of you-mens, goers and growers; or maybe three, one old aunt liked to say.
The third she called the sensitives, and these were those who still had monkey sense, which was the same as lizard sense, and the same as rock sense and clam sense and mosquito sense and tree sense and tapir sense and mushrooom sense and trogon sense and plankton sense, that thrum that keeps us all connected and behaving, even while eating one another (as the eagles like to say)(and I, too, say it, Beep, who ate a lizard once named Jack, and didn’t Jack yell and curse as I bit him!)(but I only ate Jack, didn’t threaten every lizard on the glope!).
Hungry, hungry monkey, speaking of Jack.
Inga, surely a sensitive, relearning her moodle in our small emergency, hid in an alcove formed by a black-meddle barrier and a go-stone wall and peeled me a banana, took half herself, which we monkeys call monkey share. My you-men friend and I ate. As always I was beguiled by Inga’s blue eyes, this you-men child so much larger than I, who had begun to know my thoughts. We heard a shout, the crackle of a woggie-toggie, Inga called it.
“Monkey,” the dear calm girl said, “I believe we are in trobble.”
From two directions came the huffing blue guards, the strangled nobleman, several younger nobles, and now a rank of adolescent-seeming you-mens dressed in green like our initial guide, perhaps footmen, finally a woman, pure alpha, marching in heavy footwear, the better to kick butts. They approached Inga as if she were an injured animal on the forest floor: cautiously, slowly.
“Don’t move, young lady,” one of them said tersely, the big man in blue with the glittering brooch on his chest, total goer.
“You didn’t pay,” one of the Greenies said kindly, obvious grower. “You lied and slipped under the gayt. Then you ran from these officers.”
“Is that all?” Inga said. “You think a ssscoola-girl snuck in? Don’t worry, my parents will re-imburst you.”
“And, apparently, you have a monkey,” the officious one with the brooch said.
“I was gonna say,” the Greenie said. He didn’t like the blue ones, either.
Impossible to read the power structure—all betas but with alpha acts? The female, dressed in carefully matching gray wrappings and eye-wimdoes, an aunt if ever there was one, stepped straight to Inga, stern but kindly. “Don’t be afraid, young lady. We’re here to help.”
“I have no monkey,” Inga said. She pulled her noopsook from her back and opened it for them: no monkey.
Because I’d pulled myself up and out of the bag she’d cleverly slung over her shoulder at their approach such that I could climb unseen down her back and over the spikes and spears of the black-meddle barrier she leaned on, through a hedge, then upply into the trees. The nice aunt, we could both see and feel, wasn’t nice. The male you-men in blue with the brooch was deeply bored and thus dangerous. The mild male Greenie was my best bet. I crept out on a long branch and over them, crouched and expelled a turd, which fell end-over-end and landed neatly on the woman’s head. My urine hit the one in blue straight in the face as he looked up.
And I was right, in the confusion the man in green simply let Inga leap the black-meddle barrier and shove herself through the hedge, little athlete.
“East!” I cried. “East, east, east!”
“Hoo-hoo,” Inga shouted back. “Hoo-hoo east!” Distinctly, she’d moodled east!
The alpha aunt pawed poo from her ’do, the brooch fellow wiped his eyes, swearing and apologizing for swearing at the same time: auntie poo, she was the power person.
The male Greenie, that sweet you-mee, said, “She’s like a monkey herself!” Meaning Inga’s leap, but also covering for having let her go.
They searched the tree branches and building rooofs as if Inga might be up there.
I remembered what Goddess Greta Thunberg had said: “It’s up to the kibs!”
From my vantage it was easy to see where the girl had gone: she’d followed a minor go-stone path that the Greenies must use, a way for those jailed jailers and their tools (carts and hozes and diggers and climbers and colorful coils of vine) to lurk unseen behind the structures they’d stuffed with sad animals. From there she’d climbed a gate and found her way east indeed, waited now among you-men ssscoola kibs and several teechas, suffer-consumers listening to a noblewoman, who pointed blithely into a compound full of miserable dog-things called dingoes.
“Freemonkey is here,” a free chipmunk named Megsy chipped, then repeated. Her fellow rodents picked up the chant, wee mouse voices and the stammering of rats and then even some of the squirrels, then all of them, the dingoes raising their heads in hope, the rodent message, they who could never be prizzoners, not in this zzoo, the message going round the local forests, carried by all the least animals, carried by the trees themselves, echoing then, out through every forest and into the distant world, also around Bronzoo, and you heard it spread among the species: “Freemonkey!”
C’est moi!
“What the hell is happening,” one of the Greenies said.
“This zzoo is going nuts,” one of the blue guards said.
“Nonsense,” said their aunt. “They’re only stimulated by the change in routine.”
Haha!
But in the excitement I’d lost sight of Inga.
Megsy the chipmunk, loving an escape, reported the girl’s progress chippingly. “Girl, girl!” she cried, passing the word back.
“Girl, girl, girl!” the squirrels cried. From the pitch and travel of their chatter I gleaned Inga’s direction, and while the squirrels disturbed the branches over the officials for me, keeping their attention, I raced through the canopy after her.
Not far and I spotted her amid a ssscoola group. She’d turned her jagget back to red, smart girl, wore her beetza hat backwardly, those fiery braids a giveaway, even if her powerful energy hadn’t been an easy beacon. I leapt to a bale of dried grasses in front of her, leapt onto her shoulder.
She wasn’t even surprised. “Beepie,” she said.
Startled by my own emotion, I pressed my forehead to hers, and we held that pose a moment.
“Where,” she moodled clearly, said it in wind-voice, too: this was urgent, no time to nuzzle.
I could smell the way and pointed: Monkeys ho!
The kib in front of us turned to make a face at something boring the noblewoman was saying, shrieked at the sight of me.
Inga bolted, speed of a warrior, and I was her rider, braids for reins.
The monkey spoor weakened, dissipated, the way no longer clear. Worse, I smelled cat, uh-oh. Then heard cat, not like the cats of the Corcovado but something bigger, bolder, a roar, and not just a roar, but my new moniker: “Freemonkey!”
Inga pulled up sharply before the cat’s awful stone pound, a kind of pit and moat, fire vines easy to spot, and black-meddle bars strategically placed. The enormous lazy cat sauntered close as he could.
“If I may,” he said, rumbling basso-profundo, toss of the once-glorious mane.
“Oh!” Inga cried.
“I am Lion,” said the cat, still proud.
Inga stood back at all the roaring, only so much she could understand. “I am girl,” she said. And then she repeated it, wind voice and moodle both, garbling-ish but sensible: “Inga!”
“And the famous monkey,” said the big vain cat.
“Lion, far more famous,” I said, “though none where I come from.”
“Can you help us?” Inga said. “We’re here in search of what are called squirrel monkeys.”
“We are not natural friends,” Lion said. “You you-mens, not at all, you monkeys, maybe in a pinch.”
I said, “You would eat us if you could, I understand.”
“Yes, ’twould be ill-advised to leap down in here. Ill-advised and delicious, my wee scrumptions. But today though you’d defecate upon this abject head given the slightest opportunity, we are friends. Today, Freemonkey, I beseech thee, it’s time for a plan. We must all rise together: the you-mens, this one included, suicidally greedy, pathologically cruel, inexplicably self-entitled, will take us with them to their hell.”
“Calm,” Inga said. “Calm Rex!” So that’s what the carved sigh’n said, more symbols, beyond the need of sensitives, a monkey might think, but Inga quite fond of her own expertise: “Sweet Rex.”
“The name is Lion!” Lion roared.
I, too, hate when my name is got wrong. I could see his tonsils down in there, the uvula, the pulsating tissues of his throat, not particularly scary, given the circumstances, that diabolical barrier between us.
“Bad Lion,” Inga said. And thought she’d reached him: he did stop.
I said: “Do you know where the monkeys are?”
And then a purr: “Free me, Freemonkey, and I’ll walk thee there.”
I gave a deferential bow, said, “And how am I supposed to free you, in the first part, and trust you, in the second?”
Lion was not offended. He only said, “I’ve a thought been burgeoning since we first felt thy presence, thy coming, the glory of thine arrival, long prophesied, even we prizzoners aware, that voice in the wind, heralded not only by tree rodents (our friends who can’t be imprizzoned!): there’s an entrance in back of my crypt here that the keepers use. They call themselves keepers, such hubris! We do not call ourselves kept!”
“Calm, Rex,” Inga said, the brave one.
“She calls me Rex,” Lion roared.
“The sigh’n says Rex, Your Majesty, says it in symbols.”
“‘King,’ it mean,” Inga moodled unmistakeably.
Lion thought about that, the unfathomable goers! Then: “The you-mens, dear monkey, dear girl who begins to understand. There are empathetic, compassionate ones here, too. Many are angels, know mercy, bringeth succor, water, too.”
“Sensitives,” I said.
Lion harrumphed. “Not many,” he said. “And few in the crowds that come and stare and call me Rex!” He gave a mighty roar.
“Calm,” Inga said. A group of you-men wee-bees led by a Miz Britt of their own suddenly rounded the corner. Soon it would be the angry noblemen, their guards.
Lion caught my urgency, said, “That back entrance to this prizzon of mine will be open. The greenies are in and out of there all day. As if kindly, they bringeth my meat that way. They come to clean the cage—they spray it the way the Gray Walkers taught them. But first they entice me into my sleeping rooom with meat, and hungry, I go.”
“Poor Lion,” Inga moodled, getting the name right. “Lion full shame!”
“Yes, full—look how I’ve lived these thirty winters.”
“It’s no Lion fault,” Inga moodled, so clearly, heart like the sun.
Lion was rueful, shook his great head: “I should have eaten them all. At first I was in a smaller enclosure—there have been improvements. All because sensitive humans raised a ruckus. How do I know this? I know this somehow. Sensitives pass, you learn things from their emanations. These thirty winters, thirty springs, thirty summers, thirty autumns, sensitives have passed me notes upon waves of empathy. I and the other cats here, we have learned something of you-men ways and bided our time. For what, we didn’t know till now. Because now we do know: it was thee we awaited. Freemonkey!”
“Lion wait Beep,” Inga mooded, powerful in her understanding, usage growing.
The kibs pressed up against the black-meddle bars, mayhem among them, their collective thoughts mayhem, too.
“Not one in a thousand,” Lion moodled clearly. “Dost thou know what a thousand is? A thousand is how many you-mens come through Bronzoo every hour on a warm summer’s day. One amongst them, on average, being sensitive.”
“Monkey bad at math,” Inga moodled.
“Monkey doesn’t know what math even is,” I said.
“Fine levity,” said Lion. “Now but listen Freemonkey: there is an object that jangles and dangles, that opens our doors, nothing I can manage—but a monkey, thou hast hands! In some fashion the keepers manipulate—that quite literally means they useth hands!—manipulate this jangler-dangler business and the door poppeth open! Lioness doubts me, the sub-alphas argue, but it is the truth. The greenies hang this strange object among other strange objects on a board over the dezzk they all sit at—the dezzk, they call it, but it’s only another slab of tree. They often have beverages there, or burn paber sticks and suck at them, fools for gods. The gayt—see it, that one just there, with the little window and the bars of steel? That standeth between me and the frosty world. I am of the earnest opinion that jangler-dangers would help.”
