Makers loitered about on the beach near the downed Iron Conclave vessels, giant nightmare crustaceans with wild parade-float shells. The Art Deco individual was positioned in a way that seemed significant; while his four associates were inspecting the crash site, he was aimed away from them and parked near the treeline, apparently waiting for me.
“Radio, what’s this?”
“With tremendous shock, Owen suddenly realized that his incredible friend the Green Radio had no inkling as to why the Makers were present. Owen had great difficulty believing the amazing Radio had any limitations at all! He was stunned! Flabbergasted! No matter how minor––”
“All right, thank you.” I sat down in front of the lead Maker with the Art Deco rivets and little building on top. The one with the shell that had a message from another Owen Mateo Walsh, to the current version of Owen Mateo Walsh.
I wondered if these guys had an internal skeletal structure; crustaceans on earth never got this big, and certainly never hauled around metal housing.
I couldn’t see its face or if it even had one. Just the smooth contours of its machined and curved shell. But I could see its soul in there, with Bonus Content vision. Exceedingly complex, right-angles forming and fading, elaborate fractal hexagonal matrices pulsing and blinking. While the creature itself was motionless, its soul was an intricate, seething mass of energy and action.
“Good morning,” I said. “Radio, I know you fetched these guys and they saved me from a mean talking fish. Can you convey my gratitude?”
“Owen says good morning and thank you,” the Radio said.
“I could have done that.”
“Their understanding of verbal communication was exceedingly simple. The Radio had been able to convince them to aid you, for a distress call is fairly straightforward. And it could be that gratitude is something universal to people in the Slice.”
“Okay, that’s nice. What do they want? Can you translate what they say, if I can’t tell them anything?”
“To a certain extent. The Maker present was glyphing the following message: ‘Requisition: All salvageable bauxite, fifty percent gibbsite, fifty to fifty-five percent aluminum oxide exceeding 250 grams per cubic meter, under three percent silicon dioxide, Mohs hardness one to three, bulk density six to nine grams per cubic centimeter.”
I frowned. It was a lot, but the words requisition and salvage stuck out. “They want this stuff here. The Conclave junk. We aren’t really doing anything with it at the moment. It’s kind of dangerous having it here; what do you think, Radio? Schmendrick?”
“Makers peligro,” Scmendrick said. I stroked her head, scratched her ears. She leaned into it. “Peligro, danger. But not bad.”
The Radio translated again: “Proposal: Six-member team offers Observatory restoration. Services: micro-fissure repair, bond reinforcement, enhancement and repair of inorganic superstructure. Estimated completion: 94 hours. In exchange: salvage rights to crashed craft. Salvage duration: 5 days max. You retain five percent for analysis.”
I looked at the Observatory dome. It was still a mess. “They have a deal,” I said. “Can you convey that to them, please?”
“You have a deal.”
“You know what, Radio, sometimes your jokes are so damn stupid–”
“Acknowledgment: Offer acceptance noted. Gratitude expressed. Request: Implementation of proprietary restoration protocols mandatory for optimal results.”
“Great job. I hereby allow them to use their spells or whatnot to make it happen. Thanks, Radio. Good girl, Schmendrick.” I scratched her back at the base of that heavy tail, then stopped. She shot me a dirty look and I kept scratching until she was satisfied.
The Makers began looting the corpses of the fallen Iron Conclave ships. There were flashes of magic, or some sort of extra oomph involved, but mostly it just seemed like they were unscrewing things and stacking them off to the side.
“Radio, I thought of something. Do you have evidence that these people will use this stuff to hurt anyone?”
“Owen knew that the Makers were, in fact, muy peligroso. Exceedingly dangerous, as the being he’d named Schmendrick had indicated.”
“I remember that. And the rockets. So they definitely will hurt people, correct?”
“The likelihood was strong.”
I thought about that for a while. I needed allies. Mostly I needed muscle. I needed people who were smarter than me, that was for sure. “Will they hurt anyone I like?”
“Maker culture revolves around creation. Owen knew he’d given them more exotic raw materials than they’d be able to harvest on their own over a very long span of time. It could be argued that Owen had made not just allies today, but cultists.”
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As Schmendrick and I watched the Makers reduce the ships to fragments and haul those fragments out to sea, clouds rolled in. A light drizzle became a lightning-filled downpour.
It was bad. The sky was dark in the middle of the afternoon. The rain stung, and the wind came hissing in from the west. I looked longingly up at the windows of the Observatory, still the only real shelter, still locking me out.
The Makers kept at their task; they were amphibious, after all. But the Hunt screamed and complained at the lack of shelter. I waded into the lagoon and awkwardly carried the metal sheet with the Big Broadcast painted on it into the forest near the Radio.
It made a decent shelter when propped against the stone the Radio currently infested. The entire pack huddled under there, curled up against one another.
The Radio had stopped playing its music. “Fool!” it said, using the voice I’d come to think of as owned by Gary the Mean Balloon. “The wretched Human has had hours to prepare, and there are no flood mitigation structures!”
“Didn’t you yourself chase me away from your stuff just this very morning? I seem to remember being physically assaulted.”
“EXCUSES!” shouted Gary. “There is no excuse for lack of preparation! AGAIN you fail us!”
“When exactly did I fail you the first time? Oh, never mind, man, let’s do this.”
I followed Gary to what looked like really nice rice paddies, still in progress. The Gardeners were good at their stuff, no doubt about it. But the current storm was overwhelming the delicate stepped ponds that marched up the hillside. I could see why Gary was panicking. This had been a lot of work.
The steps were sloshing over with too much water. It looked like the entire arrangement was about to go sliding down the hill.
“I need a shovel,” I said to Gary, who handed me a little garden-trowel sort of thing from his tool belt. “No, dude. Like this but bigger, my size.”
No good. I ran to the Makers and described what I wanted. They gave me three of them in roughly thirty seconds, sturdy metal handles and tough blades for digging.
“Okay Gary, how about making a drainage ditch?”
“Do ANYTHING, Fool! ANYTHING! FOOL!”
I got into it. Nothing like heavy landscaping in a tropical storm “Gary, don’t you know how to handle this sort of thing already?”
“The world-of-trees is nothing like this nightmare place. The Good People have never experienced this horror. Now they hide in the forest, waiting for death and doom to take them, betraying with COWARDICE.”
Sure enough, I spotted the rest of Gary’s people clumped under a dense patch of jungle. The lightning flashed and thunder boomed, and they squashed closer together. They made no move to help Gary.
As I shoveled, they watched. That’s all. Fair enough; they’d had a rough couple days. “Just you and me, chief, we got this.”
I dug where he indicated. He didn’t understand pointing as a gesture; he took my shovel and demonstrated where he wanted me to dig.
I still could do more than he could, what with my human shoulders, long human arms and cool new shovels. So we spent the storm in the mud.
With her pack in its meager shelter, Schmendrick showed up and help supervise what I was doing. She had no idea about any of it, at all, even had to ask me what the shovel was for. But she still screamed instructions. Occasionally she was right.
“No,” said that male voice from the nearby observatory dome. “Oh god, no! Where is this place, why god why?”
“Come down here in the mud and help us,” I called up to the windows.
“Ah, god, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry please!”
“It’s cool, man, these things happen,” I said.
“Human monster in rock,” observed Schmendrick.
“Yeah, do you know anything about it? Is he like, a magic guy, one you can get at?”
Her voice got grim and serious. “All are prey to the Hunt.”
“You’re badass, Schmendrick.”
She posed dramatically in the rain without a hint of irony. Probably.
It was getting dark. The Gardeners busted out their little berry-light necklaces again; this time I got two, one for my neck and one to tie to the end of my shovel so I could see where it was digging. Schmendrick screamed until she got one.
We worked, and worked, late into the night. Gary never let up with his verbal abuse, but he also never stopped hustling. He constantly grabbed bits of bamboo and wood, lashing them together with vines or strips of bark, and strange alien architecture would spring up, guiding flood waters around his crops. Gary was a professional.
The radio was ominously quiet. Usually one could rely on it for commercials selling alien cosmetics or toiletries, and of course the usual big band music. But it wasn’t even playing its awful eee-yagh song.
There is an unfortunate fact of life I need to share here. It’s important. Ready? People sing to their pets.
Yes, it’s strange and often horrible, but there it is. I’d sung to my dog Molly when she’d been around. My mom had sung to her cat, Frodo. It’s just something Human people do, okay? Cut me some slack. And it’s not like I ever sing or dance or fool around with any other human stuff when actual humans are around. I have standards.
Anyway Schendrick wasn’t a pet. I didn’t know what she was. She was a small vicious alien creature who liked to be petted, and that seemed to fit whatever mental niche I required to start belting out work songs.
I started with “Schmendrick is a Good Girl,” just making it up. Followed by “Schmendrick Bites You With Her Face.”
Schmendrick yapped and howled along with me in her high coyote voice. The two of us were awful, but it made the time pass.
“Our enemies rejoice in your ceaseless screaming,” Gary said. I got louder; so did Schmendrick.
The rain was pelting down hard, stinging and mean. I couldn’t think of any more songs. Unconsciously I finally started going through the Radio’s terrible ee-yagh song, the one I’d had drilled into my head hour after hour, the one in a complex inhuman language that contained a scream in the lyrics.
I got through it once, then twice. We were winding it up and reached the scream part; I pointed at Schmendrick and we both went EEE-YAAGH! She was better at it than I was.
Then shit got real, because it turns out that song was the password to the Observatory.