Human Says

Chapter 5 of the science fiction novel Elis Royd

Elis Royd

Chapter Five

Human Says

Buhwa and Moony were being over-assertive, as children are wont to be, but it just wasn’t fair to little round Luhluh, whose narrower female hooves were poorer negotiators of roots and muck. The males stopped at the top and glared back, wide forehooves on plump hips.

“Move it, Slim!” called Buhwa. “The Earthmen won’t wait all day, y’know. Let’s get rolling!” To make his point he clasped his knees and went bouncing down the grade like a loose medicine ball. Moony giggled and rolled after him. Luhluh sobbed and dropped to all fours--but no one could see her now. Keeping low, she half-galloped, half-clambered to the top.

Below was just another trough, followed by a small rounded hillock. That show-off Buhwa, inspired by a good push-off with a little english, was using his momentum to go for a clean roll-and-wobble with a half-pirouette finish. “All the way!” cried fat foundered Moony, but Buhwa came up short by a dozen feet, and had to dig in before whirling back. Still, it was a good roll; one Luhluh could never equal. So she went for the quick comic break, somersaulting on her butt and crown, clipping Moony just as he turned to investigate her approaching thunder. She knocked him a good twenty feet, straight into a rock grybbet’s vacated nest. Luhluh nervously giggled over her shoulder while he fiercely chased her up, cursing like a human. But then Moony was laughing too. Not to be upstaged, he made a great show of his navigational prowess, using his elbows for side-to-side thrusts while bounding up titanically on his thick shiny hams.

“There!” they heard Buhwa shout, and quickly joined him atop the hillock.

Below stretched the magnificence of Earth Administration, Elis Royd’s original gated community. Off in the distance lay the mall-like weighing station of Exxona, and, farther along, the tiny hamlet of Doopont.

Just outside EarthAd’s East Gate was an engaging arrangement, a kind of picnic spread: two long draped tables, one with place mats, bowls, and utensils, the other with steaming kettles. The drifting aromas of mashed potatoes and cornbread almost made Buhwa pee with want. Moony began to hyperventilate. Luhluh speckled furiously.

“Look!” Buhwa whispered, pointing at a few human figures moving languidly between tables. The children instinctively huddled. Those humans were dressed surreally--the men in dark outfits with broad white collars and wide-brimmed hats, the lone woman in a full-length dress and snow-white bonnet. “Like I told you,” Buhwa panted, “it’s a special human holiday, and it’s real important to ’em. So don’t goof it up!” He punched Moony on the rump, but before Moony could hit him back he’d begun an easy downhill roll, throwing on the brakes every few yards. After a moment of uncertainty, Luhluh and Moony followed course.

Bert was first to notice. He called to the others and, a big holiday smile on his ruddy white face, cheerfully banged a ladle on a pan’s copper bottom.

The children came down like gigantic croquet balls; Buhwa still in the lead, Luhluh and Moony close behind and to the sides. They rolled into a group, maybe twenty feet from the tables, and shyly rose to all fours.

“Kids, kids!” Bert yodeled. “Don’t be bashful! Today’s all about friendship, about good neighbors, and, gosh darn it…healthy appetites!” The other humans grinned to the lobes and gestured to a bench at the sitting table. It seemed all right; the kids slowly tumbled over.

“I’m Bert!” piped the vocal human. “But just for today it’s ‘Pilgrim Bert’. And that’s Pilgrim Michael, and there’s Pilgrim Marianne. Do you kids know what a Pilgrim is, and how the Pilgrims made today so especially wonderful?”

The kids admitted they didn’t, and were, to be brutally honest, far more interested in the quivering treats than in their host’s marvelous rant. One by one they draped their pudgy limbs over the bench and heaped themselves into sitting positions. Mountains of mashed potatoes peeked back over the cloth. Luhluh almost fainted at the spectacle.

“Help yourselves, children!” Bert cried, even as they stuffed their big round faces. “And don’t spare the butter and gravy!” When the plates were slurped clean, and the children were leaning back dreaming only of more, Bert said, “There’s plenty to come, kids; all you can eat. Pilgrim Marianne’s stirring it up now. But in the meantime, why don’t we introduce ourselves, get in costume, and learn what this fantastic day’s all about! By the way, thanks so much to your parents for answering the summons and allowing you to come. We’d hoped there’d be a whole lot more of you, but the party’s still young.”

“Actually,” Buhwa muttered, “we had to sneak out.”

“Ha!” barked Bert. “Pilgrims already! Anyway, now that you know us, what’re your names?”

“Buhwa.”

“I’m Luhluh.”

“Moo--ny.” The first syllable was accompanied by an accidental gravy fart, awesome even for a gamer like Moony. Buhwa and Luhluh giggled nervously, then embarrassedly stuffed their hooves in their mouths.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Bert assured them. “We all know that’s just royd for ‘thanks’. But before the second course you have to get in costume so we can play a real fun game called ‘Human Says’.”

“Human says?” Luhluh echoed.

“That’s right. It goes back hundreds of years, to the great planet Earth herself. It was a game all the Pilgrim children loved playing, so it’s just perfect for today, which is our annual celebration of the Earth holiday known as ‘Thanksgiving’. First,” and he scooped some little outfits off the other table, “you put on these costumes.”

“Funny!” blurted Buhwa.

“No, son,” Bert said. “Not funny. These are turkey costumes, and the turkey was considered a noble Earth bird. ‘Turkey’ is what you call someone you admire; someone who’s a real winner. And today you guys--Buhwa, Moony, and Luhluh--all get to be our Honorary Thanksgiving Turkeys!”

“Yay!”

“Now, these fat little hats go on your fat little heads. They have these fleshy things that hang over; they’re called wattles. The outfits are covered with what were known as feathers, and they include these fun parts by your arms called wings. Now go ahead; put them on. That’s right. So, Luhluh, what do we do next?”

Luhluh shyly peered between her dangling wattles. “We eat?”

“No, honey; not yet. We still have to learn the rules of the game. And here’s how it goes: whenever I, Michael, or Marianne--or, indeed, any Earthman--says ‘human says’ followed by a command, you guys have to do what he says. Okay? Okay! I told you this was gonna be fun! So if I say, for instance, ‘human says gobble!’, you guys go ‘gobble, gobble, gobble’! That, by the way, is Earthman for ‘eat up!’ Parenthetically, it’s also the patriotic call of the noble turkey. So what do you say?”

“Gobble, gobble, gobble?”

“Not yet, kids. I didn’t say ‘human says’. Gosh, is this ever gonna be fun! So, are you guys ready? Well, then…human says gobble!”

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”

“Good! Marianne, let’s lay out that corn now, shall we? And look--what’s this? Yams! Yams are sweet potatoes, just as sweet as you little guys. It’s what all the Pilgrims ate when they sat down for dinner with the turkeys. And here’s cornbread and cranberries and heaps of piping hot beans smothered in cheese; all reconstituted from the stores in EarthAd’s warehouses and cooked up by Good Pilgrim Marianne just for today. Take a bow there, Pilgrim Marianne! You deserve it. Aww, she’s blushing. Just like you, little Luhluh! Well, not exactly like you, of course. She’s blushing a generous rose, but that’s because her complexion’s such a lovely shade of white. You’re more of a grotesque fecal brown, Luhluh; typical of roydal melanimic resynthesis.”

“Huh?” said Moony.

“Just holiday talk, son. What’s important is we’re white, and you’re…not.”

Buhwa impulsively raised a hoof. “How come white skin only comes from Earth, Pilgrim Bert?”

“That’s an interesting question, Buhwa. Something to do with virtue, I suppose. But back when the original Thanksgiving celebration took place, all men of Earth weren’t white-skinned like me.”

The children traded stares of awe.

“You mean…” Moony ventured, “you mean they were royds?”

Bert laughed. “Oh, no, no, no! They were humans, but they were discolored, and so they needed our help. Of course we were glad to give it to them.”

Bert rapped a knuckle on the table and looked querulously at Pilgrim Michael. “Y’know, Mike, this just might be a good opportunity, on such a very special day, to give these wonderful kids a little history lesson.” He spun back around. “Hands! Hands! Who wants to know how this all came about?”

“Yay!”

“Okay. Pilgrim Marianne is going to pass around some hot cornbread with butter and honey so you can eat while you learn. So human says ‘gobble’!”

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”

“Good. Now, the wonderful white Pilgrims set off across a big lovely body of water called an ocean. On Earth, the water just sits on top of the land; it’s not pumped up and recycled like it is here. The Pilgrims drove on top of that ocean to search for hungry children they could treat to celebration days. They traveled in a big happy boat called the Mayflower. But they weren’t the first humans to ‘sail’ across the ocean; that honor goes to Mister Christopher Columbus, another wonderful white human. He came with a whole lot of friends on three pretty ships, called Niňa, Pinta, and Santa Maria.”

“¿Niňa?”

Bert leaned down and pinched Luhluh’s tummy until she giggled. “That means ‘little female’, just like you, you yummy little treasure, you. I could just eat you up, you’re so cute. Niňa,” he sang, “Niňa, Niňa, Niňa! Now eat your corn, sweetheart.”

“Pinta?” wondered Moony.

“A popular kind of bean. Now eat yours before they get cold.”

“Santa,” Buhwa tried. “Santa Maria?”

“The wife of a wonderful old Earthman who comes down chimneys to bring gifts to hungry children.”

“What kinds of gifts?”

“Oh, candy, cookies, delicious yams. Lots of yams. And corn, plenty of hot buttered corn. Don’t forget the noodles. Oodles and oodles of noodles.”

“Oodles!” Luhluh exploded. “Oo-dles of noo-dles!”

“That’s right. And, of course, mounds and mounds and mounds of stuffing.”

“Stuffing?”

“Sure. Stuff. Stuff you stuff in your chubby little mouths until you’re stuffed. Pilgrim Marianne!”

Pilgrim Marianne, dressed to the nines for the part, came up smiling and balancing a massive platter heaped with steaming stuffing.

“See?” said Bert. “Cooked bread with berries, celery, spices--oh, boy! I see some bright-eyed little pilgrims here! Human says ‘gobble’!”

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”

“So back to our story. The Pilgrims fed all the humans on the other side of the ocean until they were just as happy as happy can be. These red humans, who were called Indians, begged the Pilgrims to allow them to repay all this wonderful, wonderful kindness. But white humans are very timid, and were embarrassed by so much gratitude. Finally they agreed to bring over all their millions and millions of white friends and turn the whole continent into a coast-to-coast megalopolis in honor of their friends the Indians. They even renamed the land ‘America’, which is white human for ‘Our Friends, The Indians’.

“The Pilgrims’ descendants made America into a lovely ‘Happy Hunting Ground’ for the Indians. But they realized it was a super-big country and--clean your plate, Luhluh--there were other non-white humans who would be much happier if they could only join the white humans. So they got in some more pretty ships, and sailed to a big land called Africa, where the black humans lived.”

“Wow-ow!” Moony belched. The children all giggled.

“Oops,” Bert said. “Sounds like you’ve got a hole in your tummy, son. Better plug it up with a biscuit. What does human say?”

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”

“The wonderful white humans brought back as many black humans as they could get their hands on.” Bert ticked off points on his fingers. “They fed them, educated them, showed them how to pick cotton, let the females sleep in their beds, and taught the males how to fight and play sports really, really good.”

“Wow!”

“Yep. It was lots and lots of fun. Eventually the white humans even let them drink from their fountains, and gave them their own special bus sections. Boy, were the blacks ever happy. But as the years went by, America became very, very crowded, and the black humans had to go away.”

“Where’d they go to,” Luhluh wondered, “Pilgrim Bert?”

“Well,” Bert said, “we’re jumping way ahead here, sweetheart, and I don’t think it’s something children will understand. But since we are jumping ahead in our narrative, let’s jump all the way to Earth’s 22nd Century; only a couple hundred years ago. By then Earth was so crowded the bad humans across the oceans said they couldn’t live with the good white humans anymore.”

“So what happened then, Pilgrim Bert?”

“Well, Buhwa, they had to go away too. And plenty of them were white. But they were bad white humans, with bad religions, and bad languages, and bad political ideas. All those bad ideas went away with them, along with all the bad yellow and brown humans, until only good white humans were left on Earth, and the only language was English, and the only religion was Christianity. And Christianity is a good religion, and English is a good language, because they’re the religion and language of the Pilgrims, and the Pilgrims were good. And that’s why we’re all so happy, and that’s why we’re having this super-duper Thanksgiving celebration day. Whew. That was a long story, but I think I got in everything. Eat up!”

“‘Super-duper’!” Moony giggled, laughing soup out his snout. He guiltily slurped down his cranberries.

“But Pilgrim Bert…how come…” Luhluh mumbled while tentatively partitioning her stuffing into little snortable piles, “how come all the non-white Earthmen were so bad?”

“Because, sweetmeat, they had all those bad ideas I told you about, and just couldn’t accept that the only right thing to do was whatever the good white humans told them to do.” He glanced over at Pilgrims Michael and Marianne, suddenly very busy with the pots and pans. “Y’know, guys, without their having a basic understanding of genetics, this is gonna be a lot tougher than I thought.” He looked back. “You see, honeyhocks, white humans are forced to struggle under this terrible weight known as ‘White Human’s Burden’. That means it’s their destiny, their Humanifest Destiny, to save all the lower races and species from themselves. Lower races and species lie, scheme, and seduce others into doing what’s bad. Ugh. They even take advantage of children, by telling them things that will just lead them to ruin. But white humans have a special gene that causes them to do only the right things, and the very best white humans have what’s called a ‘super gene’, which makes them organize all their inferiors in the very best ways. Now think about it, tubbycakes, doesn’t it make sense to have the finest species in charge?”

“Um, Pilgrim Bert,” Moony ventured, “did Mister Wilde have this super gene?”

Bert irritably knuckled the table. “Governor Wilde was not a happy man, Moonpie. He knew something--a dark secret, a terrible truth--something way, way bigger than his personal wants and dreams.”

The children leaned closer. “What dark secret, Pilgrim Bert?”

“Well, and it absolutely pains me to reveal it--don’t avoid that pumpkin pie, Luhluh--but Governor Wilde, through his diligent research into making a happier world for those living outside Administration, discovered that a dirty gene; one of those hormonal regulators carried only by non-white humans, had somehow been imported from Earth. Believe it or not--this dirty gene had lain dormant for dozens of generations until it finally woke up and infected the local royds. You can read all about it over at Royd Weigh-in--c’mon now, Buhwa, that macaroni salad won’t eat itself--but for now let me just simplify by saying that our dear Governor Wilde, heartbroken over the plight of his beloved royds, took it upon himself and three fellow royditarians to put the infected locals out of their misery, thereby preventing an asteroid-wide epidemic. A pandemic. You see now, kids? Saved from yourselves, saved from yourselves. Dip your yams in honey, Moony; otherwise they’ll just dry out.”

“But, Bert,” Buhwa said, “I mean, Pilgrim Bert…how come Mister Wilde and his friends had to torture all the royds and burn down their homes and kill their horses? And why did they hang them from the trees instead of leaving them on the ground? And if humans are so wonderful, how come they keep all the good food inside EarthAd while we have to eat snagroots and bug poop? And why do--”

“Human says gobble!”

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”

“Now children, there’s one more member of the party I’ve yet to introduce. Kids, this is Pilgrim Chef, or Chef Pilgrim as we like to call him. Chef’s a wizard with the forks and knives--why, he’s the guy who put the ‘cut’ in cutlery.”

A fat little moustachioed man with a big white mushroom hat now peered over Bert’s shoulder, his expression liquid with brotherly love. When he saw the children cringing there his face lit up like a crematorium.

“Chef’s going to make you guys Thanksgiving stars,” Bert said.

“But how about all the other humans,” Moony mumbled. “I mean, you four aren’t the only ones who celebrate, are you?”

“Oh, of course not, apple-bottom! All Earthmen celebrate this day, every year.” He ground his teeth. “But the Council, bless its legislative little heart, yesterday moved all the meat to their Ballroom, and declared the rest of EarthAd a Thanksgiving meat-free zone.”

“Meat!” Luhluh belched. “You mean…you mean…humans eat meat?”

Bert mirrored her expression. “I know, I know: the thought of consuming flesh just makes me want to puke! And how wise of you to see it that way. You’re such a morsel. So…are you guys ready for another history lesson? Who wants to hear how the noble white politicians saved the universe from the evil brown immigrants?”

“Not now,” Buhwa moaned. “I…I have a tummy ache.”

“Me too,” Luhluh breathed.

“Serves you both--” Moony tried, and nearly rolled off the bench.

“Children, children! Don’t forget what day it is. Human says ‘gobble’!”

“Gobba--ub*bba--gobba…”

“Okay, I think you chubs have had enough. Mike, help me get these little guys up on the table.” The two men carefully lifted the children one by one and gently placed them in nice comfortable aluminum pans. “Let’s get these costumes off--give ’em some air. There we go.” Pilgrim Bert looked down kindly. “There’s only one sure cure for a tummy ache, and that’s a good old fashioned butter belly rub. Now hold still, you three, while we massage this in. Luhluh, don’t lick. There. Now a little salt and some spices and--voila, turkeys! Happy Thanksgiving!”