Strange Tails

“Nothing good ever comes of these,” opined Squirrel, gazing at the multistory pod park above him.

“Couldn’t rightly say,” replied Eric the Ethereal, munching impassively on a bamboo shoot. The panda sat at some sort of control desk looking like a Care Bear driving a crane.

“You’ve never been to the movies? Viruses. Aliens. Aliens in your belly. Computer malfunctions. Usually computer malfunctions. All those warnings you’d think people would’ve wised up by now, but no, suspended animation, what a great idea, put me to sleep in a test tube, what could possibly go wrong? Idiots.”

“Probably a different kettle of fish in the movies,” offered Eric.

Squirrel thought about this. “Wouldn’t that make the tea taste funny?”

“Maybe. Just comedies then.” Eric took another ruminatory chomp on his bamboo stump. “Makes sense, if you think about it.” He was clearly thinking about it. “Ship’s too big just for weapons ‘n’ stuff. No one saw any aliens. Cryotubes would’ve been my guess all along. No one asked me, though.”

“Makes you wonder, eh?” said Potbelly, feeling left out of the conversation.

“About what?”

“About … things. Like, what might have happened had the humans known about this early on, about not being killed but kidnapped?”

“That’s what you wonder about? I thought I heard a grinding noise.”

Potbelly sighed. “It was a rhetorical question. You don’t have to answer.”

“What’s the point of a question that doesn’t have to be answered?”

“See, now you’re getting it.”

“I am?”

“I have to sit here until everyone’s in a tube,” interrupted Eric, pulling another bamboo shoot from a basket under his chair. “’is ’ighness said so. Everyone’s gotta be tubed.”

“Well I’m not getting in,” insisted Squirrel.

“But you’ll die,” said Potbelly. “Your life span isn’t as long as Itchynuts’s.”

“I don’t trust him. The only one left awake? If Michel was here he’d tell you. Remember that 2001 movie? A space leprosy? Rhino takes over the whole ship.”

“A rhino?”

“It was something like that.”

“Think I saw that one,” munched Eric. “Name was Al. Had the monkeys in it, like your friend up there.”

“Snodberry?”

Eric waved a half-gnawed bamboo shoot towards a prominent red button and hit it. The floor leapt up at great speed taking them too, all bar their stomachs that is, which decided instead to mosey around at ground level for a wee bit longer. Barely a second later the floor decelerated to a stop. At rest they stood before something resembling a large mason jar full of orange hair. When Potbelly’s internals caught up with her, she had finally enough anatomy to speak.

“Oh Snodberry,” she keened, nudging the glass with her snout. “Is he OK? He’s not breathing.”

“Suspended animation,” declared Eric. “Yer animation is suspended. Clue’s in the name.”

“Wow,” was all Squirrel could manage, his vocabulary having decided to mosey around on the ground floor for a wee bit longer too.

“Clever stuff, right. Gotta respect yer aliens.”

“Being clever doesn’t make you right,” stated Potbelly.

“Being clever with lasers probably does.” Eric jabbed his ever-shortening bamboo stalk towards an adjacent empty pod. “So, ’op in.”

Potbelly turned to Squirrel. “Are you sure you won’t come in with me?” she asked. “It was why I went back for you.”

“Let me think. Remember when I was sure going back for a spider’s-leg-in-a-Twinkie was a bad idea? Remember when I was sure leaving the Silence before it was charbroiled into history was a good idea? Remember when—“

“Yes, I get it. But what will you live on?”

“Call me picky, but I was thinking food.”

“How do you know there’ll be food?”

“You thinking Itchynuts is on a crash diet?”

“No, though it’s not like he couldn’t do with one.”

“I’ll keep Stinkeye company. He’ll have it tough. Rest of his life chaperoned by a walking illustration of the word pompous and a couple of incompetent fish. Hey, with their memory, imagine how many times I can tell them the same joke. Maybe I’ll explore the spaceship. There could be a mini bar.”

Potbelly furrowed her brow. “I forgot about Stinkeye, that’s selfish of me. Imagine what lay in wait for him now. Especially with you around. The destiny of the entire planet resting on his ability to withstand a lifetime full of terrible knock-knock jokes. And what happens when he … passes on? Do the fish live longer?”

“They’re so dim they probably forget to die.”

“Our whole future resting on their little shoulders. Do they even have shoulders?”

“I shall do my bit to assist the mission, conserving fuel by lightening the pantry payload.”

“I guess when I wake up then we’ll have everyone else back together. Snodberry. The Nevermore animals. All the humans too, at least, when we figure out how to wake them up.“

“Nice. You’ll all be one big nuclear family.”

“A social unit based on Uranium-239 and Uranium-233 in the thorium cycle?” ruminated Eric, between chomps, and without drawing breath. “Nah, them days are gone.”

Potbelly stared fixedly at Squirrel. He shifted uneasily under her gaze.

“OK, I’ll stay,” she decided. “On one condition.”

“What?”

“You never repeat the one about the butler and the soggy carrot.”

“Oh! The one where the maid says ’oops where’s me beaver’ and then—“

“What did I just say?”

Squirrel made a zipping motion. “Hey, maybe we could open a frequent flyer account. Do you think they have duty-free?”

Eric, done waiting for them, popped in the remainder of his bamboo shoot and munched it with great depth of thought. He rose to enter the open cryotube. “Can’t sit here all day,” he said, though if anyone looked like they could, it was him. “Some of us prefer not to die in the cold empty expanse of space. Peculiar like that, some of us.” He pointed behind him as he rose. “The big yellow button, bottom left. When I get in, press it.”

Squirrel turned to Potbelly. She nodded. He hopped up to the console.

“Ready?” asked Squirrel, his right foot poised above the button.

“Hang on,” Eric replied, fishing something out from behind him. It was a long, tuberous, woody-looking shoot. “Midnight naughty snacks,” he grinned.

“Hey, where’re you getting all this bamboo from? The food store?”

“Food store? Nah. Not a crumb in the entire place.”

“Wait. Didn’t you hear our conversation about the useful role food plays in survival?”

“Oh, you can have all the food you want, yes.”

“Are you messing with me? I warn you, if there’s a temperature setting on this thing, I will find it.”

“Replicator. Far quarter of the ship.”

“Replicator? What’s that?”

“You’re not very good at this whole clue’s-in-the-name thing are you.”

“It replicates food,” guessed Potbelly. “So we didn’t bring any actual food?”

“I didn’t see you dragging in a bag of potatoes.”

“Interesting,” she said. “Why would they need replicators if the humans were all asleep? Are they for the aliens? Are you telling me there could be aliens on board?”

“Not on this one. Found nothing. Unless the aliens are very, very tiny of course. I mentioned that to Mildred but she laughed. Well, she hissed, but I knew what she was doing. Don’t know what’s so funny, I mean, big buttons on the terminals, granted, but if a few of them got together and jumped up and down they could—“

“They could be hiding.”

“Maybe. Well, I guess you’ll find out one way or another. Itchynuts reckons no, but wake me up if you find them. Especially if they have laser guns and pointy teeth. I have a snack left, be shame to waste it.” He wiggled his bamboo.

Squirrel kicked the big yellow button and the cryotube doors slid to a close. Eric sucked in his white, bulbous stomach to give them a fighting chance. When he breathed out, what he lost in height next to Snodberry he matched in hirsute compaction. With a cheeky wink he froze, mugging at them through the glass, bamboo shoot wedged tightly against his chin.

Potbelly turned to Squirrel. “We need to speak to Itchynuts,” she said.