2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Read online

  “Construction paper and building bricks?” the server asked. “We do not have such building materials. And your request does not answer the question of grreeeeen. If you cannot properly explain it, you will be imprisoned.”

  Little Sister thumped her fists on the floor. “How can you not know what green is? It’s a color just like all the others. Some apples are green, and some grapes.”

  The server whirred in all the walls.

  The grave keeper stepped forward. “My own blasphemy calculations are rising. I do not know any of the things this Earthling mentions. Shall we imprison them for however long it takes their circuits to rust?”

  “Computer chips!” Little Sister screamed. “Ellen and I were trying to get at the green chips inside the rover when you found us. Surely you know what computer chips are!”

  The server rumbled, and the lights quickened their blinking. The heat rose to a blazing level of discomfort. Ellen heard the fan in the hallway rev up.

  “You would disassemble one who has come to its final rest in the resting place of the surface? You must be some sort of virus to perform such foul surgeries. Lock them up!”

  A siren sounded through the building, and the tromping of boots on steel floor reverberated into the server’s room. Ellen and Little Sister cowered on the floor while three sentry robots marched in. They each held some sort of silver gun in their three-fingered hands, and the soles of their feet were covered with rubber grips like tires.

  “Come with us, do not resist,” said the one in the lead. Its voice was monotonous.

  It reached out to grasp Little Sister by her shirt.

  “Wait!” Ellen cried. “Green is like matcha. I forgot I had it in my backpack left over from the tea ceremony. We don’t need building bricks or anything to get home.”

  She looked around the room, unsure where the server’s eyes were. “Is that acceptable? We’ll go home and never come back to bother you about green stuff again.”

  The server hummed. “A ceremony we understand. We will have one here tomorrow. But this teeee, I cannot calculate. Is this more blasphemy?”

  Ellen stomped her foot and screamed. “How about this? You all come with us back to our ship, where I’ll show you the tea ceremony. You’ll see what green is, and then we can go home.”

  If the server suggested that demonstrations were blasphemy, she would do something drastic, like eat her shoes.

  After a long moment of whirring and blinking lights, the server delivered its verdict.

  “My guards and the grave keeper will go with you to see this teeee ceremony and grreeeeen. They will then decide what percentage of your words is blasphemy and whether you should be locked up until your circuits rust.”

  Ellen’s whoop of victory stopped in her throat when the guards clamped their three-fingered hands around her arms and marched her and Little Sister back down the corridor.

  At least they were headed back to the ship, where they could attempt an escape plan.

  …………………………

  Out in the cold, red dust fields again, Ellen and Little Sister trudged before their robot captors. The plateau and the ship lay just before them, blurred by the dusty wind.

  They passed by the old rover, and Little Sister sighed.

  “It would be so great to get that thing working again.”

  Ellen shrugged and clambered up the side of the plateau. When she reached the top, she stretched a hand out to Little Sister.

  The four robots came up as well, the grave keeper moving faster than the guards with his specialized feet.

  “Show us this grreeeeen teeee ceremony, Earthlings,” said the lead guard once everyone had reached the top. It waved its silver gun at the wreck of their spaceship.

  Ellen bit her lip at the sight of the wreckage. “Do you think you can fix the thruster and the fuel tank?” she asked Little Sister, keeping her voice low.

  Little Sister circled the ship and nodded.

  “Okay,” Ellen said. “I’ll get the stuff from my backpack, and you work on that.”

  She fumbled with the toy box lid and tugged her backpack out from the co-pilot’s seat. It scraped against the cardboard side some, but she got it up and slung over her shoulder with a grunt.

  The tea cups clinked as she walked back to where the robots waited.

  “I’ll have to do a short version of the ceremony,” Ellen explained as she dug the tea items out. “We don’t have a hanging scroll, or any flower arrangements, and my classmates already ate all the sweets you’re supposed to serve. But we’ve got enough matcha powder to make the tea.”

  The robots craned over her as she arranged the tea bowl, the whisk, and the tea scoop with the container of powder on the flattest part of the ground she could find. Luckily, Ellen had some water left in her bottle she could use to make the tea. She tried to ignore their curious stares, but she couldn’t help feeling like every move she made had an impact on her ability to get herself and Little Sister out of this situation and back home.

  Finally, Ellen couldn’t take their hovering anymore. “You four sit down in front of me while I make the tea.”

  The four robots looked at one another, then followed her instructions. They sat in a perfect line, the three guards looking like they’d just come off an assembly line they were so identical. The grave keeper held itself a little less stiffly, leaning forward with its binocular eyes pushed out to get a better look.

  “When will you show us grreeeeen?” it asked. Ellen thought its voice sounded breathless. Was it excited?

  “Right now,” Ellen said, lifting the matcha container. She pulled the lid off and tipped it over the tea bowl. She shielded the rim of the bowl from the dusty wind, not wanting to lose any of the precious powder. It would be their rocket fuel, after all.

  All four of the robots made a crackling sound in their speakers, and Ellen looked up to see them reel backwards in obvious shock. Then they leaned forwards.

  “It exists,” said the guard leader. “The Earthlings were not lying about the grreeeeen.”

  “Our big brother will be pleased!” said one. The third guard nudged it with its elbow and hissed, “the server.”

  “So we can go home?” Ellen asked, pausing in her preparations.

  “Show us the teeee, I want to see it,” said the grave keeper. It snaked its binocular eyes over to peer into the tea bowl.

  “Stop that,” Ellen chastised, slapping the eyes away. “You’re getting in the way. I’ll show you the tea, so long as you promise that we can go home afterwards.”

  The grave keeper retracted its eyes, and the guards gave her synchronized nods.

  “Once you prove that teeee is real, too, you can go. My report will inform the server of the two concepts, and the information you give us will be added to the database for the whole of robotdom to peruse.”

  Ellen looked into the tea bowl where the pile of green powder waited to be turned into tea. Her performance of the tea ceremony here would inform all the robots on Mars? A shiver of nerves ran down her spine, and she chewed on her lip.

  The idea of the robots missing information, like the scroll and the flowers, made her uncomfortable. If Ellen was going to share a piece of her Earth culture, she wanted to share all of it. She pictured herself demonstrating the whole ceremony to a crowd of enraptured robots, and a surge of pride zinged through her.

  And if she could wear a pretty kimono, that would be even better.

  “Maybe... we could come back some time to show you the whole thing,” she suggested. “We could show you other stuff we do on Earth, too.”

  “Yeah, like baseball and other colors you don’t know about,” Little Sister shouted from behind the ship.

  The grave keeper nodded, and the guards agreed.

  “We can show you some of our ceremonies, too, like the Festival of Calculations or the Energy-Saving Fair,” said the grave keeper.

  “Those sound like a blast!” Little Sister said.

  Smiling, Ellen
picked up her water bottle and the whisk and made the tea with a gusto she hadn’t felt for the ceremony before.

  As the robots beeped and made calculations over her tea, and when the six of them poured their cups of tea into the repaired fuel tank, she understood what her mom must have felt when she shared their culture with the kids at school.

  …………………………

  “Mom?” Ellen cried as she rushed into the house, leaving Little Sister to go through her landing checklist with the spaceship by herself. “Kaa-san?”

  “I’m in the kitchen,” mom replied in Japanese. She sounded tired amidst the banging and burbling of dinner preparations. “Did you do your homework? You have Japanese School tomorrow.”

  “I know,” Ellen said. “I was hoping you could help me with my project. I want to learn how to do the tea ceremony really well so I can show my friends after school tomorrow.”

  Her mom smiled. “Of course I’ll help you, Eriko.”

  Ellen grinned and looked out the window. A yellow banner stretched across their neighbor’s back yard, ready for a party.

  She couldn’t wait to go back to Mars.

  Pax

  Eric Del Carlo

  Eric Del Carlo’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds and many other venues. He has written novels with Robert Asprin, published by Ace Books and DarkStar Books. His latest novel, an emotionally charged urban fantasy entitled The Golden Gate Is Empty, which he wrote with his father Vic, is forthcoming from White Cat Publications. Eric lives in his native California. Find him on Facebook for comments or questions.

  “You’d flip this” — and I flicked the plastic wall switch upward — “and that would come on. It’d be light.” I was pointing to the ceiling fixture, which of course hadn’t come on.

  I’d done this a thousand times before. My pack just looked at me like they always do, not understanding. It’s hard to admit sometimes: they will never understand.

  We were hitting a row of suburban houses that led down into a cul-de-sac where a fire had taken out everything except for some concrete walls. The pack was excited, and I had to keep them from running around, keep them focused — so I really shouldn’t have been distracting them with this same old talk about light switches and electricity and How the World Used to Be.

  I walked them through the rest of the house. It smelled musty, which was good. It meant no doors or windows had been open in a long time, and that meant no other pack had hit it before us.

  “Love the surbs! Love the surbs!” Timmy said, bouncing on his bare toes. I try to get them to wear shoes, but they outgrow any pair so quick, and anyway they’re used to going barefoot.

  “Settle down, Timmy. Open up that cabinet behind you. See what’s in there.”

  The pack liked coming down from the hills to these suburban streets. Sometimes it was everything I could do to keep the bolder ones from sneaking off by themselves. I tell them over and over that it’s safer in the big isolated house we have up on the peak. With the trees and grass so tall around it, you can’t tell it’s there. But they are young, and they like adventure. They call this place “the surbs.” They make up lots of names for things, even though I try to teach them everything right. I’ve never told them any cuss words, but they’ve started to make up their own.

  “Wow!” I suddenly heard from the garage. It was Lydia. She’d gone ahead, out of my sight.

  I hurried, telling the others to stick with me. I didn’t like the excited sound of Lydia’s voice. I stopped in the doorway into the garage, and my breath froze in my lungs. Lydia grinned wildly. She was holding — or trying to hold — a shotgun in her thin little arms. The cab door of a pickup truck was open, and she must have taken it off the gun rack.

  “Cool!” cried Timmy, peeking around my side.

  “Hoddy!” yelped Abda. It was another of their made-up words.

  I got to Lydia in what felt like one leap, snatching the big brute weapon out of her grip. She flinched like she thought I was going to smack her, and I sure was tempted to. Instead I realized this was a “teachable moment,” as my mom used to say. I have to think like that with all these young ones.

  Raising the gun high over my head, I said loudly and sternly, “What is this?”

  The pack went quiet. They all know my mad voice. Lydia sucked in a breath like she was about to cry.

  “What is it?” I repeated, voice echoing sharply off the garage walls. The shotgun was heavy, but I kept holding it up.

  They looked at the floor. Lydia bit down on a sob.

  A clear piping voice said, “It’s a gun.”

  The others shrank back, leaving Elwood alone in the doorway. He wasn’t tall, wasn’t stronger than the others, but he was smart. I had tried to teach the pack to read, and Elwood was the only one who’d even understood the basics.

  “Woody’s right,” I said. “It’s a gun. And what do I say about guns? What does every one of you know about guns? Huh? Lydia, you want to tell them?” I knew I was picking on her when she felt bad, but I had to do it, even if it made me feel bad too.

  Lydia put her freckled hands over her face and started really crying. Her curly red hair bounced, and her tiny shoulders shook.

  “Do not pick up a gun. Do not touch a gun. Do not even look at a gun.” It was Elwood again, reciting like he was in school, if there were still schools. He looked right at me as he said it. There wasn’t any sass on his face, but it still felt as if he was making some sort of challenge to me.

  I looked back at him for a few seconds. He didn’t blink; just watched me.

  I had to get on with it. “That’s right,” I said, then threw the shotgun into the pickup, slammed the door and ordered everybody out of the garage. We finished loading supplies into our sacks, and I marched the pack right out of “the surbs,” back up into the hills where we’d been living for about four months. Next month it would be two years since the Big Sick. I’ve tried to teach my kids about anniversaries, but they don’t really understand calendars and dates. Or maybe they just don’t care. To them, a year is made up of seasons, not stupid numbers.

  …………………………

  We’d gotten a good amount of food cans, and I cooked up pots of soup and stuff. I had to wait until after dark so the smoke going up the chimney wouldn’t show. They all wanted to eat it now, why isn’t it ready now? Sometimes they just drive me crazy.

  The warm food made them sleepy, which was what I wanted. The house had several rooms and enough beds and other places to sprawl out, and I finally got the whole pack down and sleeping.

  I had a bedroom just for me. I deserved it. I read a book by candlelight, then put my head on the pillow and pulled the bed’s covers over me.

  I fell asleep, but I dreamed about the Big Sick — real bad, specific dreams, about my own family — and I woke up sweating and couldn’t get back to sleep.

  The first I’d ever heard of the Big Sick must have been on the news, or other people worriedly talking about it. It probably all sounded far away to me. When cases started appearing in our country, even in the big city closest to where we lived, it still wasn’t real, not until somebody I knew — sort of — got the disease and died from it.

  It happened to a man my dad had gone to school with, who he still saw from time to time at the car dealership where the guy worked. I can still see Dad’s glazed eyes as he came into the kitchen and said, “Ernesto...the plague got him.” In fact, that very scene had just turned up in my dreams, except Dad had kept on reciting more names after that, some I knew, some I didn’t. And while he was talking, the green-black sores started spreading all across his face and arms, and his flesh was falling away in ugly hunks, and he just kept naming names until his jaw fell off and I’d woken up.

  The Big Sick. There were other names for it, complicated scientific ones, but everyone I knew called it the Big Sick. Sick because people got sick, obviously. Big because it was everywhere, all over the
world — but also because it was only the big people who got it. The adults.

  I heard a soft knocking at the bedroom door. Relighting the candle, I frowned. I had tried to teach the pack old social skills, even though it was kind of pointless. But I couldn’t remember ever telling any of them about knocking on a door.

  “Come in,” I said. The windows were black. It must be the middle of the night. I suddenly realized there might be trouble, and I started sharply off the bed as the door opened.

  Elwood stood looking up at me.

  “Woody...why’re you up?”

  “I heard you cry out, like you were having a nightmare.” He had thin dark hair and a fading birth mark on his forehead. His dark brows arched over sharp intelligent eyes. “I want to talk to you about the guns. I think we need to have some and to know how to use them.”

  It was more than a little dismaying to hear, especially the way he said it, so matter-of-fact. “Guns are dangerous,” I said.

  “Of course they are. That’s the point. We can be dangerous to other packs.”

  “You’re all too small for guns.” I felt off-balance, like I was apologizing.

  “Some of us could handle pistols.”

  “We don’t need to be dangerous to other packs,” I said, my voice getting louder now, angrier.

  “Sure we do. If another pack threatens us, we can be stronger than them.”

  “We don’t fight other packs. I’ve told you that. We just go.” Which was how we had ended up here. We had been miles away to the south, living off of what was left in a Walmart, when another pack showed up. “Hey, look at where we’re living now. Isn’t this a great house?” It was, probably the best place we’d had yet, but I knew I shouldn’t be arguing with Elwood. He should just do what I said.