" 'Cause they go 'meep meep'-right?" Loolie asked.
"Right."
"They don't do anything," said Loolie. "Just eat and sleep and purr. They eat lots of everything. They're not real fussy. They don't taste real good, but you can eat 'em if you put ketchup on 'em. You gotta cook 'em first. They make lotsa babies though-like mice. We feed 'em to Orrie and Falstaff and Orson. Orson's the biggest. He eats everything, but he likes meeps best."
"Of course. They're bite-size."
Loolie laughed. She thought that was a funny joke.
In the next cage were several night-stalkers of various sizes. They looked like little vampires, the old-fashioned Dracula kind, not the Chtorran kind. "We keep 'em here till they get big enough," explained Loolie. She held a hand off the ground to indicate how high they would stand. Knee high. "That one's Bela, and that one's Christopher, and that one is Frank. Once they're em-printed, Jessie says, they'll stay real close to here to hunt. Jessie says we need to have more night-stalkers than we have 'cause they're good at catching rats and gophers. They like meeps too."
"You said you had a vampire?"
"Oh, yeah; but you'll have to wait and see it at night. It sleeps in the day. Maybe you'll be lucky soon and you'll get chosen to feed it." She said it as if it was an honor.
I'd heard about vampires. I hadn't seen one yet. They were shroud-like creatures-silken veils that floated on the wind. They dropped from the sky onto cattle and horses and attached themselves to the poor creatures' skins to feed. Somehow, they became part of the animals' circulatory systems. They would feed for a while and then, when satiated, would float off again into the night. In return for the meal, they would leave the victim's bloodstream full of alien parasites and organisms. Cattle usually sickened and died within a week of a vampire attack. Vampires had been seen as big as bedsheets.
"This is just a little one," Loolie said, holding up her hands. Little? Loolie was holding her hands about a meter apart. "We gotta grow it bigger afore it can be any real useful. I got to feed it once," she bragged.
"What an honor," I said drily.
Loolie didn't hear me. She was pointing. "And over here, we got a baby gorp. He eats garbage." She wrinkled her nose. "He stinks, doesn't he?" It was hard to tell what the gorp looked like; it was curled up in one corner of its pen, sleeping, but Loolie was right: the creature had a stench like an outhouse.
"And we got some toe-hoppers and lollapaloozas and screaming meemies and hair-pullers. . . ." These were all insectlike things. The latter looked like moths with claws. The screaming meemies were noisy little insects with air bladders. They sounded like cockroach-sized fire engines. "They pop real nice if you step on them," said Loolie.
"Ugh!" I said, pointing. "What's that?" It looked like a piece of red slime with a bad cold.
"Those are fugglies. The red one is a female."
"The species is doomed," I said, shaking my head. Or maybe they mated in the dark. No. Nothing could be that desperate to reproduce.
"They don't taste very good either," said Loolie. "We don't know what they do yet, but Jason says it's got to be important. Otherwise they wouldn't look so awful."
"Right. It makes perfectly good sense to me."
"And over here, we got some wormberry bushes and mandala flowers-have you seen mandalas?"
I nodded. I'd seen them in the wild, dripping from the forest like a crown of gaudy jewels.
"Jason wants to cover the whole camp in mandalas someday. Only it can't be for a while yet, 'cause there's still too many people who still believe in the You Ass of Hey."
"Uh-huh." I was mastering the art of the dry, noncommittal response. It would be stupid to do anything else. Loolie's loyalties were obvious. So was her enthusiasm. I didn't know whether to feel sorry for her, angry at what Jason and Jessie had done, or jealous because she at least knew what her life was about.
"Oh-and,over here, Jim, over here. Have you seen this? We got a baby shambler bush. Soon's we can build a corral, we're gonna put it outside; but Jason doesn't want it wandering off yet, 'cause it might get eaten. Or raped. Or worse."
The bush was standing in a large, square, wooden enclosure; it was two meters to a side, nearly a meter high, and filled with earth. The bush itself was rooted near the center. It wasn't much larger than a potted geranium and it looked very small and out of place sitting in such a big pot of earth. It looked harmless. Hell! It looked cute!
When they grew bigger, shamblers could be as tall as eucalyptus and as leafy as willows; in fact, most shamblers looked like tall hulking clumps of walking ivy. They were dark silhouettes of fear, dripping with clusters of wide, purple-black and midnight-blue leaves; their branches were streaked with pink and white and blood-red veins. They were terrifying to see even when they were standing still.
But this one-it just looked silly. Its leaves were still fuzzy pink clusters. The little bush looked like it was wrapped in fluffy feather boas. It looked like a geranium playing dress-up in mommy's best furs and rhinestone shoes.
I'd seen shambler bushes from a distance. We'd also seen pictures of a shambler colony exploding, or swarming-or whatever it was they did. We'd seen what happened to the men that had been attacked as well. We'd found their remains with the cameras. And Jason wanted a tame shambler!
For what? A weapon?
Why bother? If you had tame worms, you didn't need anything else.
Besides, how do you train a walking tree? For that matter, how do you train a worm?
Loolie was saying, "Jason thinks this shambler will be a tall one. The tall ones are best, they can go as much as a killo-mere a day. But this'un's just a baby still. It doesn't even have any tenants yet. Jason says we gotta get it outside soon. It's okay, you can come closer. It won't hurt you."
She pointed. "See here? The leaves'll get bigger and darker when it gets bigger. We saw a herd of shamblers once, but Jason wouldn't let us go near 'em, 'cause they didn't know who we were."
"Mm," I said. I squatted down low to see if I could see the roots of the bush, see how it balanced itself, walked, took nourishment from the ground-anything. I wished for a video setup. We could have made time-lapse studies of the shambler to see exactly how it walked.
I realized I was jealous of Loolie's zoo.
"Jim?" Loolie was calling me. I turned to face her and nearly jumped out of my skin. She was holding a very large, bright red-bellied millipede. It was crawling all over her, up her arm, across her shoulders, down her other arm and back up again
"Uh, Loolie," I held my voice calm. I didn't want to alarm her or startle the millipede.
"Don't worry, Jim. It knows me. But you shouldn't come any closer. Not yet. You still smell like Earth. In a few weeks, though; after you've been eating tickleberries and softcorn and everything, you'll smell right. This is Gimmee. We call him that 'cause he always wants more. Jason says he's a gimmee pig, so that's how he got his name."
"Ah, I see. Yes. You're making me very nervous with that, Loolie. Would you put it back?"
"Okay. " She returned Gimmee to a large wire cage. There were several other millipedes in there as well. She paused to let them sniff her fingers and then she stroked them and called them by name. "They're really very friendly, once you get to know them," Loolie said.
"Uh-huh," I nodded nervously. No problem. I could change my shorts later.
There was a sudden rustling and grunting noise at the far end of the room and Loolie went to investigate.
"Ah ha!" she said. "I caught you!" She was waving her finger at something.
I came up behind her to see one of the skinny red bunnymen energetically mounting Hoolihan and pumping away at the libbit like a frenzied little sex fiend. Its-his?-eyes were glassy.
"Lennie!" Loolie shouted. "You're disgusting! You're a pig! Don't you ever stop?" She looked to me and made a gesture of great exasperation. "Lennie fucks everything he gets near."