To: My Reckless Spawn
Inscribed by: Your Loving Father, taking breakfast in the garden and whistling peace that the Glaemryn do not engage the Whocullo Army above our estate and factories, lest our production be set aflame, on this fourteenth day of Webince, in the 198th Year of our Hierophants.
Finally awake, eh? Decided to pry that lazy husk out of bed? I jest, of course, dear son. But only partwise. Is it not time that you begin to act as an adult? To learn the ins and outs of one career or another? Have we overburdened you with education, that you flail about so blindly? Your mother certainly thinks so, as does Manikin Lash.
And do not blame his lack of vocal observation on rusted chutes or pollen-choked aerophones! You’ve seen as well as I that he nods along each time I admonish your behavior.
You are probably thinking: ‘What does my doddering father know? This old fool is as sharp as a sack of wet rabbits.’ But you’d be wrong, boy. I once displayed a keen knack for caddish, juvenile amusements, not to mention petty indiscretions of dubious legality. In truth, the wild days of my youth reveal your rebellions as paltry whisps.
And yet my greatest accomplishments flow from other fonts. So let this story indicate how intrepidness, rather than revelry, leads to life’s truest thrills.
For proof: above me, as I write, the Glaemryn appear from ambush like so many monarch butterflies. Their sea-green bottle-glass skin, their tiny, fine otterheads dressed in steel, their tea-tables set for war.
It is no coincidence, of course, that the summer I recollect most fondly is that Glaemryn Summer of 141. I had not seen the Glaemryn Clouds since I was a child of 10, and at 18, having spent the intervening Octave of my life in blindfold that I might better focus on my whistle-craft, I was rabid to witness the Glaemryn migration with my own sensitive eyes.
You’ve never seen them at peace, my boy. You would never guess their comportment, their miniscule grace. Tiny neighborhoods floating down from stratospheric wind streams, quaint houses constructed of bird feathers, grass, flower petals, slips of foil. The Glaemryn, no larger than field mice, emerging from their wind-nestled dens to visit with their neighbors. Walking as if the ground was not empty air, as if they and their homes did not spin continuously in the wind.
I spent every spare moment of that summer with my lover (your mother) in the hammock outside the hut I shared with my parents.
In the evenings, especially, hot and dry but the two of us still sweaty, we enjoyed the Glaemryn Clouds. The Glaemryn drifted low, and the cygnets often waved at us before their parents scolded them to silence and disregard. We are but fish to them, of course. And it is hard to tell now, what with their helmets, but their hair is as varied as ours, and distinct from their downy fur. This reveals, I think, a kinship with us grounddwellers. As if we share a relation, long past, an ancestor of both Mothergreen and sky.
On one particular evening, as I composed a ditty for my lover, ready as ever to spring from embrace should either of your grandparents suddenly appear—the rumor of our family’s leopard-blooded progenitor never being so proved to me as during the lavender sunsets of summer, especially during early Nonce, with the steamdrift from the gracip farms fuzzying the drumlins—we witnessed a terrible phenomenon.
We thought at first it was a flock of birds heading south for better climes.
“Their wings do not flap,” said my lover.
“And their arrangement is arithmetically uniform,” I remember remarking.
“The Whocullo Triumph!” she exclaimed, just as a squad of the Whocullos veered off the main troupe. Toward, perhaps, the Glaemryn neighborhood.
Coming as they did every five years, I’d not seen the Whocullo Triumph since before my Octave. Your Aunt Yeldin used to torture me with descriptions of their blank marionette faces and strange, hanged bodies. Even when they marched, she said, they were only gibbeting. Where did the mind live? In the body or in the kite? In both?
The Triumph soared in marital lines far higher than the Glaemryn preferred to float. That we called it a “Triumph” was no surprise, now that I could see. For the very set of their postures evoked victory. And, sharp-sighted as I was after all that darkness, I could make out the decapitated heads of enemies on the fore of their crafts. Visages of a species I could not recognize. Other enemies in other air stratums, perhaps, or wherever else the Whocullo Army ventured in the intervening quinquennial.
Their column halted. The little marionettes about-faced. A half-dozen kites, tiny bodies hanging below, closed distance on the oblivious Glaemryn.
The Glaemryn must have mistaken that perfect tonality for bird call. I was struck dumb by the beauty of the whistling. From it we drew our own ancestral tones, that unattainable sublime I’d been searching for in my Octave. And in that sound how could I find anything else but a shred of Divinity? Even just then, prior to the horror.
Before I go further, I must make a fact clear to you, my son, so jadedly petulant, so dredged of awe and fascination by our violent era: the Glaemryn could not have expected an attack. A Glaemryn Summer had never coincided with a Whocullo Triumph. Their historical cycles made a conjunction mathematically impossible. Sooner could there be a synchrony of day and night, of summer and winter.
Thus, it was nothing for the Whocullos to settle silently among the Glaemryn. It was nothing for the Whocullo marionettes to bind the tea-drinking Glaemryn by wrists and ankles, to stuff bits between Glaemryn teeth and press their long facehoses over Glaemryn lips and suck, suck, suck.
The Whocullo did this all without expression. Could I, human, not understand their alien aspect? Or were there smaller, more emotive creatures, faces wracked with ecstasy and guilt, within the clockwork armor?
It lasted only a few minutes. Afterward, we went to the river and watched the tiny bodies sink.
This day would turn out to be the beginning of the rest of my life, of course. But at that moment my regret was keen. It was no coincidence that the Whocullo attacked that Glaemryn cloud at that particular moment. For my whistling, honed to the edge of excellence by an Octave of blindness, must have been too alluring a sound for the Whocullo to resist. Or else why would they, in short order, call upon me?
That next day, your Aunt Ringchim happened to be returning from Mivin. She invariably went on foot, not having any trust for gracips after an incident in her youth. I met her at the door of our hut, against which she leaned her walking stick. A unibrowed head hung from the stick. It glistened as if honied.
“Your culling went well?” I inquired.
“Middling,” she said. But she flicked the mummified head affectionately. It clacked against the sprig of beads. Her vertebral necklace and toe-earrings swung in the motion, too.
I’d never had the courage to ask how she went about her harvest. But this head, now seeming to stare at me, would soon shrink and join the rest in the bead cluster. At night, sometimes, they snored. In the daytime they were silent, with one eye open.
“You look well, younger brother. How are you finding the world? Bright?”
For she’d not seen me since my Blind Octave.
“Splendid. I had never taken you for so brawny, older sister, nor so battle-scarred.”
She flexed. Blushed.
I could not contain myself any longer. “Now, hold your big city tales awhile. For you would not believe what my lover and I saw…”
As I regaled her with the story of the Whocullos attack, we walked to the nearest lagoon. You know the one: south of the manse, that the servants swear none may enter without risk of partial dismemberment. At the very least.
During my blindness, Ringchim and I often lunched there, and this was my first time seeing it in eight years. Ah, that you had taken the Octave as I did, and my sisters, and my parents before me, and theirs before them! To see daytime again is to be reborn.
I goggled at the muttering highshrooms and spittle trees drizzling their sap, at chromatic reefs edging the steaming lagoon, at the crimson and jade fish dazzling the water in meteoric streaks. All while your aunt railed at the incompetence of the Heirophants.
“How could they not have predetermined this? What are the Countenant’s doing, if not counting? You know, in Mivin, there’s no law against the old Emperor’s Calendar. In fact, they yet—No! Bite that meat-flapper, younger brother, for we aren’t blaspheming if there’s nobody around to hear. You must admit that the old Emperor’s Calendar has none of the skips, jumps, added months, or intention-reversals of our capricious Calendar of the Heirophants.”
She sat down on a rock where the lagoon met the river. The river burbled with vigor to match the arthropods scuttling hither and thither along the reefs. Years before, when she’d not yet been jaded to the craft, Ringchim would whistle the fish to the surface and the arthropods to the lagoon’s edge and let whichever creature was biggest have a meal. The eventual result was a discomfiting retinue of gargantuan beasts lurking about.
“Wait a moment.” Your Aunt Ringchim had a twinkle in her eye. “Your lover? Who is this lucky young thing?”
But I did not have immediate opportunity to apprise her of that farmer’s daughter, a gracip-maid who each morning expressed the gracips, wiped them down, and then gave the antsy ones a brisk ride around the property before setting them to pasture. Before dawn, mind you, she began this work. Which is just an aside, son, and meant in no way to impact your sleeping schedule.
I lacked opportunity because an arthropod three cubits long and as wide around as my thigh had skittered up to display its mandibles. Your aunt kicked it in the head—she is truly the most magnificent of us siblings. And, as she tore its chitin open to find those glands which secrete hallucinogenic poison, I told her all about the woman who would become your mother.
“And do you make song for her, brother?” Ringchim washed her hands in the lagoon. “Show me what you’ve learned, then, in all this sight-silence.”
I was only too happy to display my skills. Soon I would begin the journeyman project I’d been planning the last couplet of my Octave: to carve a fipple that could make exact reversal of the note blown into it. Every curling bore and teardrop key had appeared to me during that inspirational blackness.
I licked my lips and tied my blindfold.
But I’d only just begun to whistle when my sister said: “Oh my.” I heard twin splashes that could only mean she’d shot to her feet.
My sister, a Culler certified by the Doyens of that discipline in Sungar-Lee, with the reflexes of a leopard and the lungs of a songbird, carrier of that awful walking stick, surprised to interruptive rudeness.
Carefully, slowly, I removed my blindfold.
Two Whocullo kites hovered before me. The marionettes dangled from their umbilicals.
They were near to me as this letter that I write upon. To my knowledge, your Aunt Ringchim and I were the first grounddwellers to be afforded this honor of proximity.
The marionettes, indistinguishable from one another, were as tall as my middle finger and their kites were as wide as my spread hand. Both figure and craft were made of the same materials—perhaps canvas, perhaps hide, with icicles or pistons of glass to connect this or that junction.
The marionettes jerked to the underbelly of one craft and removed a bundle. They held the top of the bundle and unfurled it. Written there was a message:
The Whocullo let the message flutter to the ground. Their crafts soared upward; their tiny marionette bodies pulled to the sky as if on hooks.
My elder sister, your Aunt Yeldin, was miffed at the Whocullo’s selection. “An idiot,” she called me. “An impetuous, be-hormoned child with a peculiar journeysmith project and a lack of work ethic to complete the errand.”
This to my parents, your grandparents, master Whistlesmith’s both. Yeldin had just recently achieved journeysmith status by the creation of a bone-carved vocslayp-call. However, she did not yet possess the contemplative, less-verbose nature of a mastersmith who might communicate by trill and pipe rather than ugly uttered prose.
“TweeReep Twipee,” whistled Mother. Father nodded his support. Since the whole family happened to be home, we were setting for dinner—Ringchim had slain several beasts for our meat.
“Thank you, wise begetters, for that vote of confidence,” I said.
Yeldin did not relent. “Why not me? I am a fully realized journeysmith. Additionally, my journeysmith whistle is useful—”
I scoffed. “What cause would you ever have to tame a vocslayp? I’d rather ride a wave of cockroaches.”
Yeldin poked her finger into the air. “Zounds, brother! I’ve regrettably apprehended the counter to your journeysmith whistle: just play the opposite note.”
“ZipWhipZooood,” whistled Father, ominously.
We hushed. Even as adults, we feared his pronouncements.
In the corner of the kitchen, under what remained of afternoon’s light reflected off the sunmirror, your Aunt Ringchim and I reviewed the Whocullo missive.
“That they refer to me as ‘Comrade’ feels a good sign,” I said, “for it implies—”
“Comradery? You do not say.” This from Yeldin.
“It’s the location part I’m worried about,” said Ringchim. “For how can we keep you safe if you go off with them?
“WheecyZeep,” Mother whistled.
“I won’t let anything happen to him,” said Ringchim. Cool as she was, she swelled with pride at Mother’s trust. There’d been quite the to-do when she’d cast aside the family vocation for her soul’s task.
“Doubtless I should attend as well, in case your art is not sufficient to save your life,” said Yeldin.
But I ignored her. Father was serving the stew, newly meated. I tasted flavors from days and weeks past, for this stew was perpetual and had bubbled on our hearth since my memory’s beginning.
After we ate, I walked through the field nearest the house. The very same garden I write in, now, I think.
A Cloud of Glaemryn twirled over the river. Though I could see no trace of their dead, the Glaemryn gathered at the edges of their tidy streets and peered into the water far below them. They began to sing. Or else the wind sang for them.
Ringchim and I waited in front of the house. Mother and Father and Yeldin, armed with malignant whistles should the meeting sour, remained inside.
Clouds hid the dawning sun. Sky and Mothergreen alighted gray and wistful and seemed to stretch on forever.
The Whocullo flew in against this gray. Six lonely kites descending until, at once, they disgorged their marionettes in a spritz of wet mucous, a glop of which splattered my knee. It was stingingly cold.
“Good morning,” I said.
The Whocullos whistled. Or, I should say, they each turned a screw on their stomachs, and air escaped from the gridirons above their trunks. They pressed their fingers to keys beneath their chins—this is what made the whistle.
It was clear enough they were trying to communicate. I sought to mimic their noise. When I did so, they ceased—frustratedly, I couldn’t help but think—then turned from us and began to whistle at one another. Far more varied was their communication, and in great earnestness. Like virtuosic viulists, they played their fingers into arm cooks and wrists cleaves, twanged the strings stretched across their drum tight stomachs, sidestepped into passing breezes to accentuate their points.
Finally, a Whocullo turned toward me. It pointed at itself. Then it pointed at me. Then it lay on its stomach. Or, rather, it tilted forward so it hung stomach-down.
The other Whocullos circled their prone companion and grabbed it by the shoulders and legs.
Ringchim’s countenance darkened. “I cannot abandon you, brother.”
“Yet, they cannot carry the both of us.” But I was struck by sudden inspiration. Note, here, my boy, what I said earlier about thrill’s progenitor, intrepidity.
“I hereby declare a new journeysmith project: the creation of a brass whistle in style of the Whocullo,” I vowed, with my fingers to my lips in symbolic whistleform and my other hand in the fingerset of ancestral promise—you know the one.
From the house I heard a proud “TwillEep” and a worried “UuouooEee.”
As well, Ringchim was impressed with my gambit. For nobody may interrupt a Whistlesmith initiation.
She sheathed her knife. “If you insist on this course, I must acquiesce to your solitude,” she said.
“I do.”
I lay on my stomach.
“Good luck, younger brother,” said Ringchim.
Tiny shadows floated above me. Their hands were cold and wet and numbing.
And next thing I knew I was no longer near the holy ground at all, but at least a hundred yards above it. The sensation was of jumping except if you never stopped.
I tumbled in and out of awareness as we shot through the sky: the sense of immense blue above gray. Of purifying, scalding warmth. Of cloud-cities. Of crystal-cities made of sunlight. Of harrying birds and buffeting wind streams and, once, far off, a Glaemryn neighborhood converted to a flying fortress.
Then, suddenly, it was over. I lay on the ground. Or, rather, a spongy substitute.
I ventured to look around. It appeared I’d been taken to a Whocullo base. Upon this surface—indistinguishable to Whocullo skin in material and color—Whocullos marched in efficient formation. Behind skin windscreens loomed shadows far larger than any kite I’d come across. Hanging below them, like windchime udders, scores of Whocullo mannequins.
My carriers had not abandoned me. Rather, they ringed me as guards. I remained silent that my barbaric ejaculations wouldn’t call even more attention to myself, for other Whocullos approached. Though these Whocullo were swiftly redirected by my guard, they were so intent that I began to feel rather unsafe.
The guards let me down the widest skinroad. I took six steps before we halted. Before us yawned a vast opening. It was nearly half my height and so for them it was cathedralic.
It was mimed that I should sit. I did so.
The maw before us gaped yet further, unveiling grotesquely until it overarched my head and swallowed me as if it were a tent. The sun shone through in bronze.
From deep in the recesses of this space crawled a type of Whocullo I had not yet seen: four-legged, attached by trace to the sledge they pulled, their umbilicals woven into a gangline.
Strange as these Whocullo were, what lay upon the sledge was far more surprising.
A man. A human, like me or you.
The tunnel disgorged him the way a python might puke an immensely fat fawn.
“Hello!” I called out. “Sweet Superior bless us. It is succor to meet mine own species upon this sky perch.”
But the man did not answer. He was naked, regrettably, and in the process of his ejection from the tunnel he fell from the sledge. As he rolled, a Whocullo levitated from between his legs—I had not seen it previously for his voluptuousness—while two less dexterous Whocullos were crushed beneath his body.
The other Whocullos paid this no mind. Truly, son, I do not know if they care one whit when their kin dies. Of course, they don’t like to lose! So, they must have a survival drive in there, deeper down. But I have often wondered: what is deeper than the individual? A question you might ponder as you reflect on your future.
Once righted on his sledge, the Whocullos towed the man as close to me as any man would be when talking to another.
“Sir?” I inquired. My excitement had largely abated. Not only from the discomfiting atmosphere, but also the lack of elocution from my new companion.
The man took several deep breaths. His beard hung long but without the side-whiskers you and your comrades affect, these days, my boy. His scalp was spotted. His fingernails were chewed into points. He broke wind, briefly and quackingly.
“Had you no mother to teach you grace?” I asked. “Speak in return, when a fellow speaks to you!”
Only, I did not yet understand. Two untethered Whocullos scrambled atop his visage. They pressed their trunks to the man’s lips.
I could hear the inner workings of their ‘breath’: cranking springs, twisting axles, rods a’pumping. The experience pushed the naked man into an ecstasy that was impossible to miss.
The twin Whocullos straightened. The first, standing on the man’s chin as an explorer stands atop a mountain, played its fingers over its neck keys. Its trunk erected, but to my shock what came from that bugle was no whistle at all, but the deep voice of a human man.
“Welcome, Floorian. I am called Cartwright. This is my compatriot, Pleat.”
“Oh, very welcome,” said Pleat, sitting on the man’s forehead and dangling his feet off the side.
“I thank you for the hospitality,” I said, attempting bravado. My voice did not echo in this chamber but sunk into the membrane; as if the Whocullos would save my words, too, for later use.
“We understand that it is your custom to provide visitors victuals for both rumination and imbibement. As we do not consume in your fashion, we regrettably have naught to present.” Cartwright sounded apologetic.
Not so, Pleat: “And since you cannot perform the Penul, we can only bestow the following proposal.”
This was evidently an amusing comment, for the goggling Whocullos twittered wildly.
“Rather,” said Cartwright, rearing up from the man’s mouth, playing his wrist and elbow keys at speed, “we hope you will consider a proposal, and forgive us for our inability to adapt to your ways.”
“Please, go on,” I said.
Pleat—or perhaps Cartwright, for I’d lost track in their uncanny tandem of pace and breath—said: “From your perspective, on the Floor, the Glaemryn are a peaceful and bucolic species. For at the airbed, it is balmy. This disposes the predator to coziness. But you do not know them as we do. You do not know how they kidnap us while we Idle. You do not—”
Pleat ran out of breath. Cartwright continued: “—know that in the upper strata, the Auroral Layer and even in the lower reaches of the Celestial Ionism, they are no more than rapers and pillagers. To reach this height they must wear our skin for warmth. They even flaunt their abominable trophies around you Bigs. You may have noticed their tablecloths.”
I tried to recall the texture of the Glaemryn tea tables.
“Thus,” said Pleat, “we must fight as nature dictates, or else be exterminated.”
“This is no mere quandary, but crisis,” said I, shrewdly, buying myself time to compose a response. Despite my cool exterior, I was as nervous as a pup slayp in eagle season. Do not forget that I was a year younger than you are, now, alone, huddled inside a floating amber womb conducting negotiation with clockwork sprites.
“And I want to thank you for using me as an earpiece for your complaints. I hope we can forge a strong alliance between human and Whocullo.”
“We are happy to hear this,” said Pleat.
Cartwright’s tiny frame clicked militantly down the man’s heaving chest.
“Listen, boy, for I shall speak in ways my overpolite comrade will not: we prefer not to tinker in the affairs of Floorians, sullied as you are. But our hand forces us. We ask not for friendship; we ask for infrastructure to win our war. To that end, we offer seed capital for your new business: to manufacture whistles and whistle-adjacent equipment.”
I’d been wrong: by the tone of disrespect, that was Pleat.
Cartwright blew a long note through the tonehole on his shoulder. “While uncouth, my associate utters truth.”
Sensing the dire straits of the Whocullos, I deployed my negotiation acumen. “And if I decline?”
Abruptly, all whistling stopped. I hadn’t realized the casual symphony of the spectators until, like bird song, its absence alerted me to its former ubiquity.
Pleat could not smile, for the planes and cavities of its visage were fixed, and neither could he frown.
“If you decline our offer, then we will move on to your surviving family members. I believe all are Whistlesmiths? Your contiguous marionette fabrication yelled this fact—"
“Sister,” said Cartwright.
“Your sister yelled this fact as we conducted you.” Pleat angled itself sideways, leaned against the membrane, and played keys up its left flank:
“I am a journeyman Whistlesmith while my brother is naught but a wind chime!”
Yeldin’s voice, echoing from the Whocullos gridiron.
Pleat played again and this time her voice dissolved midway into musical tones.
“Should I go missing here in the vast, cloudy sky, ask my eldest sister for assistance, for she is the superior Whistlesmith” I said, but sweetly, for if I were to be exterminated here by these miniatures then at least I could send them in Ringchim’s direction by way of comeuppance.
“We seek not to harm you,” said Cartwright. “If only you would agree.”
“In such case, I accept,” said I.
And, just like that, my son, I negotiated our family’s fortune.
Pleat and Cartwright turned toward me, stiff as little toy soldiers, and performed a strange, three-part bow. This perhaps being a cue, six pallbearing Whocullos trotted from the cavern. The pallbearers flipped the lid, and, to my pleasure, no dead puppet lay inside.
Instead, the casket was filled with riches.
Gold and silver spooled like thread. Droplets of diamond and ruby, of stones that I could never sell for they have no price on Mothergreen. The box itself was of celestellar metal. I have still never seen so sizable a hunk.
I made to thank Cartwright or Pleat, but they were already enjoined with the crowd. The skin-canvas receded as a beetle folds its wings. I was bathed in sunlight. The mouthpiece-man shrunk from the light, twisted onto his stomach, and scooted back into the deflating fold.
Then he nodded at me, briefly, a gesture which I returned gratefully.
Before he was lost in the membrane, I spied the bedsores marring his back. And as I fell asleep that night, in my own home, among people my own size, I couldn’t help but think of the old stories my grandmother had told.
Those of children disappearing after each Whocullo Triumph.
The Whocullo treasure proved enough seed capital to buy my first two factories, refurbish them, and begin production on Whocullo designs.
Even as a family of Whistlesmiths, we had no inkling of the lethality in sound. The Whocullo operated under different constraints. It was not long before my personnel produced miniscule objects of impressive perniciousness. Once, for instance, a window in Factory #1 was left open for the breeze. The force of balmy spring wind through a tin whistle slew six laborers, left twelve maimed, and vanished another.
A few years later came the Manikin. Not long before your time, my boy. The Whocullos taught us the secrets of construction; how to awaken the material, how to allow the moss and mud and fur its own mind.
Manikin Lash himself ran the factory floors for years—how do you think he earned his name? As I write, he putters through the garden, watering the perennials, those violet riots, the creopsis, and sprinkling poison around the red and lavender astilbe that will, we hope, prevent arthropods from climbing into the petals.
In any case. One morning, as I walked to my office, a flock of Glaemryn raiders plummeted onto the train of a Whocullo Triumph. They were each as large as my fist and translucent as green church windows. With razors they slit the umbilicals, with pins they repeatedly stabbed the kite pouches.
It was a perfectly executed ambush—a dozen Whocullos killed, and a message pinned to the handless, footless form of the thirteenth.
This message has gone down as one of the premier phrases of this century, as you well know, for you are no fool, but rather an ignoramus (note the distinction as a compliment, son, for ignorance is chosen, and I sincerely hope that your natural aptitude might someday overwhelm that choice).
The message read:
“We, the People, will treat with the Unpeople.”
The details of the peace talk were established. The Glaemryn General “He With A Hollow Heart Who Exacts Revenge Nonetheless” would be the premier Glaemryn representative. Before the war, his vocation has been gardening and his name “Plants A Lot,” but since then he’d become a scourge upon the Whocullos. That he was offering amity came as a shock to us all. The Glaemryn, it was thought, lacked technology but possessed the ferocity and guerilla tactics to prolong the war indefinitely.
Along with the General “He With A Hollow Heart Who Exacts Revenge Nonetheless” and his staff, the Glaemryn would bring a human representative. We gladly acquiesced to this idea—to treat between humans would allow less contact, and therefore less strife, between Whocullo and Glaemryn.
So, there I was, a mere lad, in a grounded Whocullo skintent, dressed to the gills—for I wore the neck sash requisite of the Puce Sash level of decorum—set to depart for a neutral location to treat with the Glaemryn.
I was careful not to touch the membrane, for I’d grown superstitious of it. With me were a dozen Whocullos and three sleeping vagabonds who’d lately been lurking around the foundries for warmth, the month of Nocte being colder and wetter than usual.
A Whocullo wearing a human toenail around his neck blew a slow whistle. The other Whocullos disgorged from their kites or else floated to attention. They began to take breaths from the vagabonds, four to a man, tiny birds at a cracked-lipped fountain. Full as they were with human breath, they flew neatly out of the tent.
I followed. Intent, truly, on attending the peace summit. Whoever the Glaemryn had selected for their ambassador was doubtless a reasonable person, just as I was. Perhaps this meeting could not only end hostilities but be to both of our benefits. For, no doubt, this Glaemryn minister was availing himself to the entrepreneurial aspects of their relations as much as I was. Production of Whocullo technology need not cease simply because the war was over. Why not deviate to alternate manufacture?
But, as I’m sure you well know, I did not attend the meeting.
Even then, my truancy was much reported on, gossiped about, and rumormonged. Oh, how could a hearty young industrialist such as Greegvortintorian Maquentine flee at the opportunity to end this bloody conflict? The answer was simple, according to the prattling rabble: I had been tipped off to foul play.
I understand their assumption. Truly, I do, even as erroneous as it is.
Now. With years of contemplation. At the time, of course, I was enraged. And let me tell you, boy, a few vociferous negators found themselves with broken limbs and bruise-blackened abdomens.
But I rode out those dark days. It helped that even while my reputation plummeted, our stock rose, for we could barely keep up with the Whocullo demand for weapons.
Nobody bothered to ask me the truth. And the truth was that I’d had a feeling.
The feeling was that on the way to meet the Whocullos, along the roads where the farms meet the jungle, I’d seen my lover bending over to whisk the parpelstrains which had infested her annual flowers. The sway of her hips… the way her hands worked the flower stalks… well, I am only human, and so, instead of continuing down the farm road, into the field, to the weeping willow tree which was to be the peace summit site, I turned the other way, toward the jungle and the rivers, where my lover, your mother, and I did our best to create you, dear lad, though we would not succeed for several more years.
The peace summit was bombed, of course, and the saddest death was that of the boy ambassador to the Glaemryn, so designated because he’d been the winningest roedice player on a streetcorner that the war council happened to float over.
That the Glaemryn laid the blame upon our side is rank calumny. For as you well know, the Glaemryn who bombed the meeting were an extremist faction. The very same that have taken over since “He With Hollow Heart Who Exacts Revenge Nonetheless” perished in the blast. Do not let their tears trick you, boy. They grieve not their erstwhile leader but only feign it to garner public support.
So, how’s that for youthful indiscretion? If not for my neglect of the peace conference, I would have perished, and thus never increased our fortune by production of the Whocullo designs.
Also, of course, you would have never been born.
Instead, you have grown up with nary a care. Moreover, you are set to receive this defense manufacturing empire upon my eventual demise. But did you know, my boy, that the Maquentine family stew yet boils? I keep one cook always attending it, in a chamber behind our kitchen, on the same hearth that it has boiled for generations.
Well. Muse on that, boy. I hope you can still learn a lesson or two from your old man, considering how accustomed you’ve become not only to magnificent terror but also the intricate planning and infrastructural scaffolding which hoists the sublime, such that the described miracles may not even penetrate your saurian-like skull.
Do not be willfully confused as to my meaning and, as such, continue to play truant. Now is the time to screw yourself into the labor. Just like my luck once played its hand, so now does yours.
Which is all to say: if you do not meet tomorrow’s dawn with me at Factory #3, uniformed, with quill and ink to take notes, then I’ll throw you into the windbag pen with the wastrels and criminals. To hear my own son’s voice, parroted back at me from so tiny a frame, would doubtless disturb me half as much as it would you.
With Grudging Affection,
Your Father,
Vort Maquentine
J.M.J. Brewer (he/him) is a staunch supporter of nature conservation. You can find more of his fiction at jmjbrewer.com.
Read J.M.J.’s story in Propagule 3 here, and his story in Propagule 6 here.