The streets of New Boovworld were all narrow and clean. In a city where everyone took public transport and all the big vehicles floated overhead, the strips between houses and buildings were only as wide as a driveway and smooth, with rounded sides. They were filled with Boov on foot. Occasionally a scooter went humming by.
The street right ahead of me was lined with what looked like giant gumball machines—pedestal bases with flap-covered entrance ramps, topped by big frosted globes. Kind of grim-looking light gray gumball machines, mind you, like if the glass weren’t frosted you’d see that all the gum was unflavored and beige.
“Are those houses?” I whispered to Bill.
YES.
The alley where Bill and I were crouching was pretty dark, but it was also an alley with a sucktunnel at the end of it, so I wasn’t expecting much privacy. Sure enough, it wasn’t more than a minute before a Boov turned my way, and there wasn’t any place to hide.
The Boov wore a real wiggly outfit and had one of those little winged armadillo things on a leash. He paused a few feet away from me and scowled at his pet. The armadillo noticed me right away.
“Get on with it already,” the Boov told the armadillo. “Debate is starting soon.”
The armadillo lifted its tail and dropped something blue out its backside. It looked like a racquetball. And bounced like a racquetball, and rolled to the side of the alley like a racquetball.
“Good boy,” said the Boov, and when they turned to leave again, he saw me.
He froze. The armadillo thing beat its little wings and strained at the leash, wanting to sniff me or bite me or make me a racquetball or whatever.
I glanced at Bill, who was hovering over my shoulder, and then I gave the Boov a reluctant wave. The Boov’s eyes shifted between me and the racquetball.
“I was going to pick it up,” he told me. I didn’t say anything. “I wasn’t going to leave it,” he added, and pressed his sleeve; a rubber glove snapped up over his hand. “See now?” he said, retrieving the dropping and putting it in the pocket of his coat.
“Okay,” I said.
He frowned at me. “You are a human,” he said. “That is weird.”
Then he dragged his armadillo back out into the street.
I exhaled. “All right,” I said. “That could have gone a lot worse.” I looked at Bill. Bill looked at me, I think. “Still,” I said, “if I keep getting noticed like that, people are going to talk. Word’ll spread back to Smek, right? I need a disguise. Let me tell you what I’m thinking.”
I told Bill what I was thinking. So if anyone was watching from the street about a minute later, they would have seen a five-foot-tall bubbleperson mosey out of the alley. If anyone had been watching from the street.
“Going out of business sale!” I said, hoping people would mistake me for a talking billboard and therefore ignore me. “Everything must go!”
But the street was empty.
Not that I noticed this right away—my face was covered in layers of tiny bubbles. I probably waddled around shouting for another minute or two. But eventually I said, “Bill? Can you uncover my eyes?” Bill, who was perched atop my head, snapped his antennae. The fizz pulled back from my face.
Yep, empty. Just a couple of odd birds on a signpost.
“What...happened to everyone?” I whispered. As it turned out, I got my answer a moment later when a little drone passed overhead, scaring the birds. They glided off on kite wings like flying squirrels.
“HighBoov debate starting in thirty-seven seconds!” blared the drone as it appeared over the street and disappeared behind a gumball house. “HighBoov debate starting in thirty-three seconds!”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, all right! ’Bout time something went my way.”
I searched the street. Opposite the side with all the gumball machines were larger buildings that I’d learn later were the Gorgwar Veterans’ Clubhouse Number 17 and a condiment silo. Everywhere there were signs: some bubbly, some flat and covered with writing and pictograms. They arched over the street and jutted off every building, like fins. I remembered that this city had only been finished for a year—nobody had grown up here; nobody knew their way around. Lucky for me.
I said, “Bill? That little symbol in the corner of all the signs looks almost like ‘Sector Three.’ But it isn’t, is it?”
NO.
“Does it say ‘Sector Two’?”
YES.
I smirked and looked behind me, where I could still just see the bald curve of the HighBoovperial Palace in the distance.
“Betcha anything that’s Sector One back there. I think we need to keep moving away from the palace.”
Which we did, cutting directly though the narrow gap between two gumball machines, then two more, then across a street, repeat. I still wasn’t a hundred percent used to the gravity, and the occasional misstep sent me careening off one house or the next, which only made me want to run faster, which only made me bump into more houses. And despite it all I was wheezing. Bill gave me a look. Which was probably all in my head, since he didn’t have a face.
“It’s harder than it looks,” I panted. “Maybe the air’s thin here or something.”
We passed a red dirt lot that was tangled with branching stalks of transparent tubing, all growing up from bell jars on the ground. Here and there a segment of tubing lit up like the whole mess was filled with fireflies. I didn’t slow down enough to figure it all out. We must have passed fifty houses before I stumbled into the open of another street and found our way blocked.
An absolutely colossal building hunkered on the other side, maybe five stories tall but about a hundred wide. Like a skyscraper on its side. I guess I’d already gone native, because I thought it was weird looking for being boxy. Boxy, but not plain: it was covered in cream-colored puffy pads like it was quilted. My mom had a tissue-box cover like that; I guess it was the same kind of thing. Ramps curved up to it from every direction.
I bent at the waist, huffing. “Need a minute,” I told Bill.
Strangest of all was that this building didn’t have a sign on it anywhere. What it did have was something like a shining metal eye set in its front, and this was swiveling around and casting a spotlight all over the street. It made me anxious; I stiffened and hunched low, looking back the way I’d come, when it abruptly shifted and fixed its gaze right on me. There was a flash.
“MUSEUM OF NOISES,” said a voice.
Then the eye beam resumed searching the boulevard for someone else to look at. I glanced at Bill.
“Did you hear that?”
NO.
“I think it said, ‘Museum of Noises.’”
After a few seconds of giving the rest of the street the crazy eye, the beam came back to me. Flash.
“MUSEUM OF NOISES,” I heard again.
“I think this is the Museum of Noises,” I told Bill. I stared at it a second. “Let’s cut through, if it’s open.” I’d really lucked out with this whole debate thing, but I knew enough about Boovish technology to not assume that the people in these gumball houses couldn’t see me just because I couldn’t see them.
“MUSEUM OF NOISES,” the eye beam told me.
“Yeah, got it,” I said.
We hustled up one of the ramps, and a door opened on its own. I stepped through and into a big oblong foyer with an information booth and doors and ramps leading everywhere. It was as empty as I’d been hoping. Quiet. A sudden tick of the foundation settling, nothing more. There was a smaller eye beam inside the entrance, and it turned to face me.
“HORK HORK HORK huk HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK hahn hahn HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK mahaign HORK huk HORK HORK HORK HORK HORK,” said the eye beam. It sounded like a hundred cats all throwing up at the same time. Which is not empty talk—I heard that once.
The beam kept shooting me barf noises while I read a nearby plaque. Like in the exhibit at the palace, the signs here were written in Boovish, English, and Chinese. Not good English, mind you: there were some translation problems. I don’t know how good or bad the Chinese was, but as languages go, I don’t think it’s supposed to have so many smileys.
WELCOME!NOW Human or
humanslanguage-learner to the
MUSEUM OF NOISES. As you saunter
throughinto our many room and bodegas,
electrical eyes will study your
progress and beam to you a secret
hullaballoo! whenfor you are humid.
A fat time for all.
At this momentnow you are enjoying the
greeting-call of the
Goozmen of Gooz-7. For learning more
about the Goozmen,
kindly visit Flatulenture! on Level 2.
I moved through the foyer, far enough from the plaque that the eye beam stopped horking at me. Another picked up my movement and made some kind of birdcall. I passed into the next room, and a third sent a trickling sound that made me realize suddenly that I hadn’t peed in kind of a while. I was wondering what to do about that when a fourth eye beamed me a new noise that might have meant something okay to Boov but on Earth is NOT COOL.
I found a Boovish bathroom, the less said about which the better.
I stumbled through a room tiled with rubber cushions that honked and whistled when you stepped on them. And you couldn’t not step on them. A bright scoreboard on one wall kept a tally of the tiles I honked and whistled, and at the end it played a sad tubaharp noise and announced, “YOU HAVE SAVED ZERO BABIES.”
The next room was a gift shop.
Then there were some exhibits about other alien races J.Lo had told me about, like the Mah-pocknaph’ns, who can only speak telepathically, through living puppets. Or the Habadoo, who believe there is a name that, if ever uttered, would destroy the universe. The Habadoo all claim to know it, and they all vow to never say it out loud.
After that there was another gift shop.
Then a supercomputer that was attempting to create new noises no one had ever heard before. Then an exploration of the philosophy of noise, with questions like “If a koobish falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” (answer: no, not really) and “What is the sound of one hand snapping?” (answer: snap). Then there was a statue of a Gorg that you were encouraged to make whatever noise you liked at. I passed it quietly.
Then a gift shop.
At the other end of the gift shop was a map of both the museum and a little of the surrounding area. It was here that I learned that I was just one room away from the Green Exit, and that I’d actually been in Sector 3 for a couple of exhibits now, and that visitors were discouraged from turning left out the Green Exit because that way was all work camps and a detention nub. Success! I nearly skipped through the next corridor. It opened onto a room that was wide and round and empty and tall.
I stopped abruptly. The scuff of my sneaker echoed back and forth in stiff little whispers.
High above the center of this big bell-shaped chamber was a marquee that read THE SOUND OF SPACE. It wasn’t like the other exhibits. It didn’t have any electronic eye, just four helmets hanging down from accordion tethers around a little center pedestal. To hear the sound of space you apparently had to put one of these helmets on.
“That’s dumb,” I whispered to Bill. Bill didn’t have an opinion about it. I was going to have to pass these helmets to get through the room, but I wasn’t tempted. “There is no sound in space,” I told Bill.
I walked right through the center of the room. The helmets were hanging so high I wouldn’t even have to duck. As I approached, each helmet dipped to meet me, but like any good city girl I avoided eye contact, didn’t take a flyer, didn’t stop to sign the petition or listen to the hard-luck story. They reeled up again after I’d passed.
At the Green Exit I looked back. “I don’t get it,” I said. I returned to the pedestal, and a helmet lowered itself, slowly, like it was worried I’d make it look foolish again. I read the English inscription on the pedestal as a cool plastic pate settled on my head and arms flexed inward to cradle my ears.
Todaynow, the Boov are nearly 8 million solar lengths from home, I read. That is fifteen light-years. That is 142 trillion kilometers. That is 88 trillion miles.
The helmet on my head began to hum softly.
The Boov will never again see that motherworld that made us, it continued, and which we then treated shabbily, and did not respect, and was later then forfeit. The Museum of Noises introduces to you the Sound of Space, withto evoke the vast distance inbetween the Boovish peoples and our lost HOME.
That was everything on the plaque. Then a pair of blinders flapped down to cover my eyes, and the hum of the helmet fell away, and I heard nothing.
Not a recording of nothing, but actually nothing. The earpieces somehow canceled out the sounds of the air, and Bill’s faint whirr, and distant noises I hadn’t even realized I was hearing until they were suddenly gone. I heard nothing. Just my heartbeat.
“Big deal,” I whispered. The sound of it was all inside my skull, and surprisingly loud. Cowed, I fell silent again and listened. I wondered what I was supposed to be thinking about. I wondered if I was supposed to remove the helmet myself or if it was a moment-of-silence kind of thing; I’d just have to ride it out until the helmet decided I’d searched my soul or whatever. My big dumb soul.
I couldn’t tell if Bill was still there. I couldn’t tell if any walls were still surrounding me. I might have been anywhere; I might have been home. Fell asleep with my headphones on again, I thought with a smirk.
When it came, it came without warning. I thought it was going to be a yawn. Something ordinary but unstoppable, rising up from my chest, seizing control of my mouth and eyes. Just a yawn.
Oh, I thought suddenly. I’m crying.
Inside my blinders tears pooled and escaped, drawing shameful lines down my cheeks. Like coward’s war paint, I thought angrily. For J.Lo’s rescue I needed battle cries, not the regular kind. I sat heavily on the floor, sobbing, trying to catch my breath.
I stayed there a while, and cried, and thought about vast distances.
Then the blinders flipped up, and the hum returned. I frowned and blinked into the dim light.
“THANK YOU FOR VISITING THE MUSEUM OF NOISES,” said the helmet. Some flutey music played. “AS YOU LEAVE THESE VAUNTED HALLS, REMEMBER THAT NOISES ARE NOT JUST FOR MUSEUMS. YOU MAY MAKE AND LISTEN TO NOISES ALL THROUGHOUT THE YEAR.”
I ripped the helmet off my head and threw it carelessly to the side. It retreated back up to its station.
I pressed my palms against my eyes and heard Bill whirr close.
“Something’s wrong with me, Bill,” I said, breathing hard and sniffling.
Bill sank down to the level of my face, looking wobbly through my tears. He swiveled around and popped a bubble against my nose.
I laughed, and sniffed, and pulled my hands across my eyes. After a minute I stood.
“Let’s go get my friend and get out of town,” I told Bill.
YES.