With their usual blinding speed, the Makers had set up a little changing tent right in the shallowest part of the water. It looked like an old-timey one from a hundred years ago, the kind of thing one sees in old beach photographs. Art Deco stood by in the water. He was holding a boxy contraption in one of his many retractable limbs.
Mandy stepped out wearing one of the many potential outfits we’d put in there for her: a sarong around her body and hips, leaving bare caramel shoulders and thighs for me to not look at directly under any circumstances whatsoever. So chunky. So gorgeous.
“Nice,” she said, and looked down at her outfit. It was pale linen, or something, and there were piles of it in the Observatory. It was tough and easy to clean. I’d made several pairs of board shorts with the stuff.
I looked at her feet, at the rocks. “Need shoes?”
“No, I can just…you know, toughen up. I have a little bit of leeway with these bodies.”
I gestured to the Maker nearby. “Mandy, this is Art Deco. He’s Observatory Chief Engineer.”
I formed glyphs on my skin, with some concentration, and positioned my limbs in a way that mimicked the Maker language of glyphing: Friend. Strong. Ally. Water.
Mandy laughed, sounding shocked. “What’s that? What are you doing?”
“Introducing you.”
“Is it a dance battle?”
My face got hot. “No…it’s not dancing. This is a way I can form words in their language. I don’t know how to glyph yet.”
The distant Radio translated through the jungle for Art Deco: “Proposal: immediate commencement of substantive data exchange regarding spheres of concurrent authority and influence.”
She goggled. “You speak their language. I’ve tried to before but got nowhere, I almost thought they didn’t have any.”
“They do, it’s just nonverbal. They form their souls into complex shapes. Visible for a long way underwater if you’re in the right spectrum, and super efficient. One glyph is loaded with information.”
“Is that what these are?” She leaned in a looked at my chest. I gazed at the horizon to avoid the temptation of a cleavage peek. I knew the moving designs covering my skin flitted and reformed: spirals, hexagonal grids, fractals, characters in languages I didn’t know. They glowed blue-green, even in the sunlight.
My face got hotter. But I concentrated: an anime ink drawing of Mandy herself swirled into being where she was looking. Two pigtails, round face, smiling eyes.
“Holy…wow, Owen.” She raised her hand to touch her portrait, then dropped it before she made contact. “Wow. How’d you get like this?”
“Wasn’t easy. Art, what do you have there? Oh, is that ready?” I thought about offering to take the box from him, but knew better. It was Art’s project and he’d demo it for us. “Okay, come with us if you’re all set.” I beckoned. He understood that gesture; we’d been learning a lot from each other.
Mandy saw the extensive work being done by the Gardeners. The stepped rice paddies, the irrigation trenches, lined with stones that formed alien mosaics in vibrant colors.. She made appreciative noises at the vertical gardens exploding with flowers, and at the alarmingly large Bees who tended them.
“Who are these guys?” she asked. She wasn’t remotely nervous around the huge insects; I’d forgotten that Mandy was invincibly unhurtable, more or less.
“Big Smart Bees. Schmendrick and the Radio want me to say Beeniuses. I don’t know how to talk with them, exactly. They pollinate everything here and work with the Gardeners. They don’t sting, but they’re armed. So…you know, be cool.”
She held out a hand to one of the Smart Bees. It landed on her palm, busily patting her fingers with its antennae. It was roughly the length of her small hand. This one had a tiny knapsack, a ball of thread and a little knife strapped in various locations on its body. After investigating, it droned and bumped away to the rainbow of color in the vertical garden.
Mandy turned to me, eyes wide, beaming. “So cute! And it didn’t try to kill me!”
“Yeah, we seem to have worked out a truce.” I showed her the back of my left hand; a leafy green bandage was stuck there. “Had some misunderstandings.” I’d also almost lost an eye, but didn’t say that part.
We made our way to the Observatory entrance. “Radio, please grant the Undine whatever reality alteration procedures she requires.”
“Owen’s message was received.”
“Who was that?” Mandy was in an interesting state. She’d started out pleasant, polite. Now she was fascinated. Her eyes were wide, and she seemed to be perpetually battling a smile and losing.
“Oh…boy, that’s a question. It’s the Green Radio. At first I thought it was a magic superpower thing. But that’s not it at all.”
“Owen was correct,” the Radio said. Its voice echoed from the curving black walls of the Observatory. “Owen was rarely correct, so this occasion was notable, perhaps worthy of commemoration.”
I sighed. “Yeah, yeah. How’s the invasion fleet doing?”
“The invaders had barely survived passage through the territory of the Ammonite Priestess. They were traversing the perilous reach of the Copycat Eel!” A dramatic musical sting.
“Thanks, man. Let me know if anything changes please.”
“That stupid Eel,” Mandy grumped. “But I’m betting it’ll wipe those idiots out and still keep yelling food food food even after it eats them all.”
“The Eel was nowhere to be seen,” said the Radio approvingly. It played a bit of music, one that sounded like a comically sad laugh. Wah wah wahhhh.
“That’s great! Good cop bad cop worked out, I’ll tell Schmendrick.”
We were in the main dome of the Observatory. Its crazy, ornate golden machinery packed the floor, but the hemispherical ceiling was currently free for the balloonish Gardeners to drift about in. They were, of course, finding ways to make things grow in here.
The interior of the Observatory had been a rather nasty, dusty labyrinth when we’d first gained entry. Now it was becoming an indoor arboretum, a sci-fi steampunk botanical garden. Deliberate waterfalls and narrow aqueducts filled the space, supported by solid bamboo scaffold. Hydroponics, they told me. It was good work.
Mandy was looking everywhere at once. She couldn’t stop smiling, those cheeks bundled up with excitement. She’d gasp and laugh when she saw this or that bit of Gardener expertise. One waterfall ran a little paddlewheel. A miniature spaceport-looking thing operated as a landing spot for Big Smart Bees. The Radio was playing something I hadn’t heard from it before: a woman singing about work, about a five o’clock whistle on the blink.
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“Owen talk please.” It was Husband Schmendrick. He had orange tabby-cat markings, and was a little smaller than his spouse. I handed him the tooth of the Copycat Eel. I suppose he must have liked it, but was too anxious to say so.
“Nest is good,” he began. “Thank you for nest.”
“Great, man. What else can I do for you? Excuse me please, Mandy.” Husband led me away a short distance, a very human thing to do for a private conversation. We stopped at the Inverse Kinematic Driver, which looked like a jukebox to me. I knelt to look Husband in the eye and petted the top of his head, which was something the Hunters seemed to expect from me.
“Hurts.” His ears went down. His green eyes got big and sad. “Schmendrick hurts.” I got the story out of him: his spouse was in pain from pregnancy, and I assumed she hadn’t wanted to trouble me with it during our meeting with the Eel. Schmendrick was a tough cookie. But her back hurt, her belly hurt, her neck hurt and she was mad at her husband.
“Got it.” I’d been reading up on this; the Observatory had a lot of books. Many, many books. I’d been able to get through them with the help of the Radio, and there were other things in the dome that made learning easier. I yelled for Gary.
I glanced at Mandy. She was standing rapt in front of the worried Husband, and now she faced the horror of Gary.
“You are a fool,” he said by way of greeting.
“We have a Hunter with pregnancy pain. Do you have any chamomile or aloe vera?”
“Witness the moronic Steward, poisoning his friend in her time of need. THIS is the proper remedy.” And he handed over a little jar of ointment.
I passed it to Husband Schmendrick, who wasn’t allowed to go near the Gardeners. They thought his people were monsters, but Gary also acted as a pharmacist for them. Husband bowed once, a human thing he’d seen me doing around here, and ran like a dog on fire to his lady.
“You don’t eat it,” I called after him. “You rub it on her where she hurts, Husband!” I turned to Gary. “Is that right?”
“Even the foulest pool of ignorance can reflect the moonlight of wisdom.”
“Good to know. This is Mandy, the Undine. Mandy, this is my dear friend Gary. He loves me.”
“Unpleasant Steward odor, redolent of decay and evil,” Gary said, and drifted up to work on some kind of pipe system.
“Hold on, Art’s project is done and he needs to show you.”
I formed glyphs with my body as well as I could. Show. Work. Good. Mandy started clapping and shouting Hey! Hey! Hey! In rhythm.
“I’m not dancing,” I said. “I'm not.”
“I’ll say! Nice to meet you, Gary.”
Gary paused. At least two of his many eyes inspected Mandy. “Nightmare from the deep, here to slay us. Or damage our crops!” He sounded bored with the first option, then panicked at the second.
Mandy grinned. Her fists went to her hips (which I noticed had the fabled Dips of legend, to my delight). She was about to cut loose on him with some kind of verbal bodyslam, and I didn’t need Gary throwing fertilizer at an ocean goddess today.
“Don’t mind him, he’s just mean. You get used to it.” I beckoned, and Art Deco clattered forward with the box he’d been carrying.
“Hateful armored crustacean, feasting on carrion and horror, unwanted, unwelcome and unloved.”
“Gary, cool it before you say something rude. Art’s got something you need to see. Are you looking? Gary, come down here. GARY.”
The living balloon dropped its tools with a theatrical clatter. Its spherical body noticeably shrank as its membrane contracted, and it sank to our level.
Art Deco held the box with one of his main claws. A second one emerged from a little hatch and took hold of a rounded handle. It pulled, revealing the handle to be connected by a blue string. The claw let go, and the handle snapped back to its original position on the box.
An elegant propeller, possibly a foot across both insect-wing blades, popped from the box. It spun smoothly, making a strong breeze I could feel from my position across from Art. The box was silent, and the propeller kept going and going as we watched.
“That’s great work, Art. Don’t you think so, Gary?”
“I love it,” shouted Mandy, who looked quite entertained by the exchange.
“Vicious machine, assembled by demons.” But Art was offering the box to Gary, and he’d stopped the propeller. Gary hesitantly took the box with one of his armored three-fingered grabbers and pulled the string.
The propeller spun. Gary’s big body moved in the direction the propeller was pointing. He picked up speed, and soon was zipping around the dome, dodging plumbing and hanging vines. The Radio started in with a song about a Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. I applauded, mostly for the benefit of Art, who knew what the gesture meant by now.
Art boomed through the Radio: “Instruction: Engage manual interface protrusion with surface pressure response to terminate kinetic energy generation.”
I shouted up to Gary: “Art says to find a button and press it to stop.” I hoped that wasn’t too alien a concept.
Gary was far away, but I could see him immediately lose momentum. He pulled the string again and buzzed down to meet us. He seemed to be showing off, and spun in place. He started bumping into his own mad science equipment, knocking things over and spilling some glass containers of God knew what, and then seemed to calm down.
More from Art: “Optimization-Query: Requesting submission of theoretical enhancement for improving operational efficiency while maintaining acceptable tolerances. Goal is mass-production.”
“He’s offering to make it better for you, do you have any suggestions? And then once you’re satisfied, he and his bros want to make them for all the Gardeners here.”
Gary said nothing. He cradled the device in the crook of one of his multiply-elbowed arms. He approached Art Deco, and with one of his chitinous, iridescent hands, patted Art’s shell, three times, tap-tap-tap. Then he said: “Only a dangerous, unskilled FOOL would neglect the idea of storage.”
“Good point. Show him one of your tool belts, Gary. Dammit, hold still…Why are you like this, dude?” Because I wanted to point at the tools Gary kept in little holsters attached to his five limbs, and Gary started smacking my hands away.
I’m afraid it looked like we were having a slap fight. “Beat that ass, Gary!” said Mandy, who seemed to be enjoying herself immensely.
It ended when Gary tried to use the spinning propeller to cut through my wrist. But the blades were soft and floppy, as I’d requested of Art’s guys, since a delicate living balloon didn’t need to be waving a deli slicer around.
But Art spoke: “Implementation-Affirmative: Proceeding with construction of personalized device retention apparatus. Gratitude-indication for suggestion.”
“He says he’ll do it. I don’t know how much time…oh, he’s starting on it right now.” Because Art had unfurled five more limbs and each one held an elegant bronze tool. “Okay, look, I’d like to go visit Schmendrick upstairs, you guys work it out. Yell for me if there’s a translation issue.”
Gary moved to his workbench, which was mostly the floor, said something nasty about everyone, and hunkered down with Art Deco. It seemed to be going well enough as Mandy followed me upstairs.
“That was really nice of the guys,” I said. “Two days ago we almost lost two Gardeners; the world they come from just doesn’t have much wind. It blew them out to sea and we had to go pick them up again before the Eel got ‘em. Poor things were terrified.”
She was having a little trouble with the weird, nonhuman stairs and the lack of railing. I reflexively offered a hand, forgetting that was a very forward thing to do, and she took it. Cold skin. She asked, “Who started the rescue of the Gardeners?”
“Well, me. It was my fault, I should have looked after them better. Gary’s very protective of his people, in my defense, and always told me to go away. Then off they went, blown to the horizon. He was a mess.”
“You started the propeller project.” She was looking smug about something, making eye contact. I’d been defeated, or something? Human behavior, always incomprehensible.
Speaking of which. “Have you ever talked with any Cazador people? The Hunt?” I did some of the Cazador speech: their name for themselves. It sounded like yap yap wowwow (cough.)
She shook her head, possibly trying not to smile again.
“They’re really tactile. You have to pet them and talk to them. They expect it, and get really sad if you don’t. When they’re sad it’s just awful. Is that cool?”
Big smile. “Oh my god, let’s hurry!”