Chapter Twelve

There were rocky gradients, there were structures, there were meddle poles, there were bodies of water. There were dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of you-mens, all tottering foolishly, too proud to put their hands to the ground, swaying this foot to that, some slapping past on rubber platforms called snikkers, huffing comically.

I tried to mood my Inga: Were we questing, or simply circling?

Nothing in reply: we weren’t on that level, not yet.

Goer juveniles kicked a bladder of some kind. Fragrance of nonmonkey food, Inga hurrying toward the scent—I’d not seen her olfactory sharpness till then. But perhaps not definitive; perhaps, in fact, she knew right where the food was to be found, was not properly foraging but recalling satisfaction. So, to those uncles who claimed the you-mens had no memory (proof being their constantly making the same errors), I say this: You were wrong. Inga gave the man chits of paber and he gave her a curious growth, some kind of root, heavily dotted with salt. Inga smeared the thing with yellow mud the man gave her from a squeezable, then effortlessly, mightily, she tore the thing into parts. One of which she offered me, sticking it into my face under the canopy of my strawler, merriment.

“Prezzel,” she said.

The yellow mud smelled so strongly of seeds, the salt heavy as upon a stick from the ocean, the mushrooom, or root, or whatever it was, tasting like the white part of samweedge, but dense. Not a root. And not quite food, not quite not.

“The squirrels mentioned peanuts,” I slow-moodled.

But Inga only gave a push, and the strawler leapt ahead, cold breeze in my monkey face. I took the opportunity to jettison the prezzel, and oblivious, Inga raced onward.

Everymonkey knows that all things are in moodly communication at all times, and not only like with like. And though this natural law seemed at best barely true for most you-mens, when I shrieked it seemed to mean to Inga just what it meant to my troupe back home: Stop! I see food!

She stopped. She’d understood.

I jumped from the conveyance still holding Whale (who’d provide some cover, I felt), plucked the fat slug from where it had slimed its way onto the treacherous black pavements of the you-mens and gotten stalled.

I offered it to Inga, of course, and oh my, the face she made, priceless. I was beginning to find her beautiful in the manner of all friends, which is to say most things alive, the naked you-men ugliness breaking as she burbled with mirth and pretended to retch.

The slug took no notice of her but mooded, “Bless you monkey for ending my misery on that sidewalk,” and then I said the universal thanks, which amounted to enjoyment of the snack, appreciation of the gastropodic sacrifice. I waggled the slug and popped it in my mouth, that delicious muddy-soft and moist delectation.

“Off to the next incarnation,” moodled the food.

Famous last words.

I was delighted as well that Inga hadn’t become unhinged by my leaving the strawler but remained just as cheerful as ever. Clearly the quest continued. And therefore I leapt right back onboard, carrying Whale, who was not real, I had come to understand, but who’d been imbued with the stuff of life by Inga’s adulation, imagination, mood. And the mood was compassion, nothing less, and thus esteemed, Whaley lived.

Japanese simians in the park apparently. But you couldn’t believe a squirrel—they kept chattering overhead, all one voice, one conversation, such that you felt you were being accompanied by Squirrel One, but Squirrel One was all squirrels, and all squirrels were one, uncommonly connected, the plural squirrel.

“Is that a monkey?” a passerby exclaimed.

“Bitty Twin,” Inga said soberly, jolting the strawler to speed, and we hurried along.

I suppressed protest. I, Beep, was a monkey, no Bitty Twin, and no squirrel!

O, dear Inga, learn this: trees are connected, more than mere forest, their roots entangled, their thoughts carried by the mycelium of fungi, every fallen leaf mourned, all the knowledge of the web of life carried in calm concentration through time so deep that memory only glances from it. To speak with the leafies you didn’t mood or wind-talk but only awarenessed among them, and I asked if the claim that there were simians in the park were true, and further that, if so, we be guided through Inga’s empathy to their location.

And there arose a vibration, a thought moving through not only the trees but all things green, and all things. The forest always knows you’re coming, and that’s how the rocks know, and so the lichens, the mosses. First, I was led to understand something: many of the trees were still asleep from the cold season. The acidic ones were wide awake, though, and needled me: “You’re a squirrel monkey. We’ve known your kind. Tiny and trusting.” They knew, too, that I was on a quest. “You’ve taken the detour that is yet your path” was the message, typical tree stuff.

“I’m no squirrel,” I said.

“There’s a zzoo,” Inga said suddenly, reading the mood unbeknownst. “Do you want to go? We can see the seals from the fenz!”

Seals were wet doggs, that much I knew. Fenz, that was foreign.

But simians were there, too, Japanese or no.

Inga laughed, oblivious in the you-men way of nearly everything. But not of the current message. The wilzz of the Bitty conveyance sang, and Inga sang, too, her movements hyperspeed, at least as observed in relation to tree time.