I was watching TV, sitting on an uncomfortable stool inside the uncomfortable home of the Boov who’d come out of the garbage submarine. I leaned back from the screen and exhaled.
“Oh, thank God,” I said. “Pardon my language.”
I was rubbing my throat—because my dog collar was tight, but also in sympathy for J.Lo’s vocal cords, which I didn’t realize were in his armpit. I was foggy on Boovish anatomy at the time; their insides are like balloon animals and crazy straws.
“Yes!” said the garbage Boov as he came around to the back of the TV. “Is it not excellent reception? Just a tinysmall crack in the display. It is fall-on-your-face crazy what peoples throw away.” He paused, and gave me a sidelong look. “But I suppose I do not have to tell you that,” he added.
After a little mental Ping-Pong I figured nothing good could come of telling him that I hadn’t been thrown away, exactly, that I’d escaped down here on my own. “Totally crazy,” I agreed. “I’m sorry, I’ve already forgotten your name.”
“Funsize. And you are Grace!”
“Right.” Grace was an old alias. When the moment came, it had been the first thing to pop out of my mouth.
Funsize wore gloves and something like a balaclava over his head—a dark wet-suit kind of material with portholes for his eyes. He’d built a pagoda out of trash, and it was surprisingly pretty. It stood down the hill from the chomping mouths and used a rough stone wall for support. So I guessed we were underground. Beneath the palace. The tiered roofs of the pagoda were shingled with bits of shiny metal and strung all over with strips of crinkly plastic. Every now and then a gust of hot air belched through, and when it did the plastic whipped and crinkled and sounded like rain. Inside, the pagoda was damp and cool. Funsize had a water cloner and a dozen patchwork fans made out of this or that. A thick pillar ran up through the center, so he’d arranged his secondhand furniture around it. And when I say “secondhand furniture,” I mean chairs without seats, a stool with a single leg that you sort of balanced on like it was a giant thumbtack, that sort of thing. When Funsize invited me in and told me to get comfortable, I chose the cushiest-looking footstool in the place, but that turned out to be just a big mushroom.
Funsize was hopping around the inside of the pagoda, showing me things, stuff he’d made from other stuff. I had no idea what any of it was supposed to be, or had been.
“So...” I said. “Were you thrown away too, then?”
Funsize stopped. “Yes. Thrown away like garbage. A criminal, tossed onto the scrap heap like a heap of scrap. Discarded by society.”
There was a stiff little silence here, so I complimented his hat.
“Thank you. It keeps my head in.”
“I really like your house, too,” I said. “But I have to get out of here. I have a friend in trouble, and...” I sighed. “I think I’m going to try to save him.”
Funsize fiddled with gadgets. “Another...hu-man like you?”
“No—a Boov, actually. One that I met when you guys were on my planet.”
“Ahyes. And this planet...” he said. “It was the last planet? The one before we came to here?”
“Yeah. Earth. You didn’t see it at all? Not even on your TV?”
“The television was not yet working. But...no offense, please, but there was no reason to look at this Earth. We Boov, we always went to a new planet, and got chased away by Gorg, and found another new planet again. Why get used to the view? No, we Boov always moved on.”
“Until now, you mean.”
“Yes, until now.” He got kind of starey. He was careless with the gadget he was holding, and it dropped off a table onto the floor. “Now it seems we will stay.” He looked at me. “I had a friend once, you know.”
“Uh, yeah? What, uh, what happened to—”
“It was her job also to collect the garbage. We did this together. We emptied the waste bins and took all the trash to the lowest part of the ship, where it would be mashed up and used for telecloning.”
“Right,” I said. “Wait—for what?”
I’d thought I understood how telecloning worked. You had one thing on one side, and the telecloner made more of it on the other side. But you only have to type that out once to realize you don’t really understand it at all. Regardless, I’d eaten telecloned milk shakes and water for months after the invasion.
“The garbage slop is processed and made ready for teleportation to any telecloner,” Funsize explained. “Then the computers rearrange it into what is needed: fuel, or food, or—”
“AAAAAgross,” I said, circling the room with my hands over my ears. “Gross gross gross gross gross gross—”
Funsize covered his ears and fell into circling behind me. “Grossgrossgross! Grossgross!” he repeated, happily, until we sort of petered out at the same time.
“Ahh,” he said to me. “You know, that is the sort of thing we could be doing every day if you stay down here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t. I have to help my friend. What happened to yours?”
Funsize looked out a window of his pagoda. “Her punishment ended, and she was permitted to have a better job. So. I went on collecting the trash alone, until one day they built the garbage tubes, and then the trash collected itself. Still Funsize was needed to shovel the slop. But later still the Boov come here, to this new world, and now they no longer even care about reusing the slop. Now they have a whole moonful of resources to teleclone with. Now they can hollow this world out and fill it up with their slop. And all because of him.”
Funsize scowled at the TV. He’d turned the sound off, but they were playing the same footage of J.Lo getting dragged off to prison again.
“This time it was he who told the Gorg where we were. This Jail-oh. He who led the Gorg to these hu-mans. Did you know a hu-man named Don Laundry found a way to defeat the Gorg? Now they will never come back, maybies. Without Gorg to take our planet, we will get to use our own planet. Now no one needs Funsize anymore.”
Man, I can think of at least a couple people off the top of my head who you oughta be mad at before J.Lo is what I might have said if I hadn’t minded Funsize guessing that J.Lo was that friend I’d been talking about.
“Hollow out the world?” I asked. I didn’t understand this whole operation.
“Yes,” said Funsize, brightening a little. Civic pride, despite everything. “The garbage is sent down garbage tubes to the chompers, where it is chomped into slop. Yes? Some of the slop is burned to power the diggers—do you hear that humming? Then the diggers dig out the world and send the dirt rubble up tubes to the surface to form hills that can be covered with fancy houses. Whatever slop is not burned fills the hollowness and prevents the planet from getting crumplepits.”
“Crumplepits,” I said.
“Crumplepits,” he agreed.
“Oh.”
He smiled—just a little fake smile, like a model for a bigger smile that hadn’t been built yet. “Is very efficient, yes? The way they replace Funsize and make his life meaningless.”
“Hey...” I said, wanting to say something. “That Dan Landry...he’s a joke. I...I bet the Gorg will come back and invade you guys again real soon.”
“Do you think it?”
“Sure. And you know...I bet the other Boov just forgot you were down here. They were probably busy with moving, and ruining all our stuff on Earth, and everything. If you help me get aboveground, and out of the palace...I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you with Captain Smek.”
Funsize gasped. “You know Captain Smek?”
“Sure.”
“Are you friends?”
“Why, just an hour ago he was saying what a tragedy it would be if I had a horrible accident and died!”
“Wow! And you think he would have pity on old Funsize?”
“Why not?” I said. I got up to leave, though I didn’t really know yet where I was leaving to. “You’re a good guy, right? I don’t know what you did to get...you know, sent down here in the first place, but any Boov would be impressed with all this stuff you’ve made. Right?”
“Right!” Funsize answered.
“And this house you’ve built? Uhmazing.”
“Thank you!”
“I like it ’cause it looks like these houses they have on Earth, in Asia. Pagodas.”
“Pa-GOH-das!” said Funsize.
“That’s right.”
“And these pagodas on Earthinasia...” he said.
“Uh-huh—”
“They are also secretly death rays for shooting up fiery vengeance at those smug surface Boov who have forgotten you?”
Garbage rustled in the distance. I coughed.
“You know,” I said, “I’m going to have to look that up.”
“Fine, fine. Okaythen, follow me—I will show you how to get upstairs.”