After hours of pulling the cart through the dark alleys, accidentally selling two oranges, and getting as far as possible away from our jailbreak, we needed a rest.
“We have got to get out of the open,” I told him when we had an alley to ourselves for a moment. “Don’t you think? Don’t you think they’ve probably told everyone to be on the lookout for humans by now?”
“Lookthere!” he said, peeking through a gap in the lid. “Try that door!”
It was a typical little bubble house, up a ramp about ten feet from the street, with a wriggling heap of koobish out front. J.Lo explained that the owner must get regular koobish delivery, but since the koobish were piling up on the doorstep, he probably wasn’t home. I dragged us both up the ramp, thinking it couldn’t possibly be as easy as just trying the door, but then we did and it was. Apparently nobody locks their homes on New Boovworld.
So I finally got a shower and a full night’s sleep.
I dreamed my mom was running for Mom. She’d thought it was a lifetime appointment, like a Supreme Court justice, but now elections were coming up and she had competition. I never could get a good look at this competitor. Like, they’d show her on TV, but the camera was always blurry, or else my eyes were. And all I’d make out was a shape, a Bigfoot, a Loch Ness Monster.
Mom and I were staying up all night making campaign posters with student council–quality slogans like MOM upside-down is WOW! and Mom for Mom: it Just Makes ¢ents, whatever that meant. Soon I couldn’t read the sign I was making at all. Which got me anxious, because I knew they were expecting me to read it in front of everybody, and then it turned into one of those stage-fright dreams where I was up at the podium and didn’t know what was expected of me.
Silence in the audience. Silence plus a cough, which was worse. And my mom standing at the other podium, across the stage from me, mouthing the word Why? with the strangest look on her face….
And that was what I woke to. On the floor I woke, with a foam pillow under my head and a koobish sniffing my hair.
I rolled over and looked up at the koobish. Its walleyed oven-mitt face stared back at me. “Morning,” I said.
“Maa-ah.”
The koobish moved on—and now I had an unobstructed view of the bedroom mirror, and of the stupid decision I’d made about my hair when I was tired.
In my sleep I’d forgotten that I’d lost an Afro puff when that masked Boov had shot at us. Where once I’d had a little topiary ball, now I had a radar dish. So after my shower I’d asked J.Lo to find me a scissors or something to even it out, and consequently I had two radar dishes.
But he’d used those scissors to get my collar off, too, so that felt good. He took it apart and stripped the wires out of it, mumbling something like, “For to magnetizing the humblescrews.” At the time I was too busy falling asleep to care.
I got up and looked around the bubble house.
It was like this: The outer walls were a big fishbowl that cycled air in and out and filtered it and made it room temperature. The innermost layer of the glass was also bioluminescent—did I spell that right? It was glowy. It did this neat trick where it shone, facing in, so that the rooms all had this nice Christmas-light glow but people outside could only see frosty brightness. J.Lo told me that if you stared at any point on the wall long enough, it turned transparent to let you see outside, so I tried not to do that.
Inside the fishbowl were a number of ramped platforms and a couple of smaller bubbles for the bedroom and bathroom. The shower was an antigravity capsule in which you got sprayed by a thousand nozzles in every direction and was more fun than a ride at Happy Mouse Kingdom.
I descended the ramp from the bedroom to find J.Lo and about a half dozen koobish. The koobish were just milling about, nuzzling things. They were making the room smell like bleach.
“You are up!” J.Lo said with a smile. A big curved screen was silently playing a cooking show behind him. This screen was linked by silver tubes to a liver-shaped plastic box, which J.Lo had disassembled on a blanket in front of him.
“Hey,” I said. “You get any sleep? Have you been watching the news?”
“A little sleep. I had to been watching the news, but it was alls same-o same-old. Here.”
He tapped at something inside the box, and the screen flipped through a couple more cooking shows before settling on a news station. Smek was holding a press conference in that same big office of his we’d visited earlier. J.Lo turned up the sound.
J.Lo turned the sound down. “I can begin it over from the start, if you like,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Where’s Bill?”
At the sound of his name the little bluzzer bluzzed into the room.
HELLO.
“Hey, Bill! You look better!”
YES.
“I could to unpoke some of his dings and swab out his foozpipe,” said J.Lo.
“I was going to recommend that,” I said. “Is it...is it normal for him to be like this? Are billboard bluzzers usually this smart and helpful?”
NO.
“Not usualies,” J.Lo agreed. “But this sort of thing can sometimes to happen. If a robot is for too long frustrated at its job.”
Bill was slaloming in and out of koobish’s ears. They tried to nip at him as he passed.
“I don’t understand that,” I admitted. “Frustrated?”
J.Lo set down the pieces he was fiddling with. “Yes. Aslike...a robot who always wants to do, but it cannot do. When we wants to do something but cannot, that is when we think. When our consciousness awakes up and stretches its arms. That is when we imagine, and plan, and dream about the undone thing. Ignored for too long and not able to show anyBoov his message, Bill developed a bug. Some bad code. A...glitch.”
I felt weird talking about Bill right in front of him like this. After he zoomed up the ramp to the bedroom, I said, “A glitch? Bill can think. Like he’s alive. He might be as smart as a person—that’s not a glitch.”
J.Lo gave me a sad look. “Peoples are glitches,” he said.
He returned to his work. “Their worlds do not want them,” he continued. “A fox? It knows how to be a fox. Any koobish is the number one expert at being a koobish. But peoples? Boov and humans and Gorg and Habadoo and suchlike? We are the only ones who don’t know how to be. Who do not know the right things to do.”
I didn’t know what to do or say for a minute, so I sat down next to the blanket. As the koobish shifted around, I saw more things—appliances, computers, and whatnot—all with their cases opened and their insides disassembled.
“So,” I said. “Are we sure the Boov who lives here isn’t coming home soon?”
“Pretty sure. I found his itinerary in his message box: Mr. M’Pillowclock is spending two Earth weeks camping on Mars with his work group. He just forgot to cancel his koobish delivery.”
“And so you’re taking all his stuff apart for him...why?”
J.Lo grinned. “Just working onto a couple of projects. Do you remembers when I mentioned about to making a time machine?”
My insides felt ten times heavier. “You’re making a time machine?”
“Eh. I am only playing around.”
I looked around at all the parts. “So it’s possible? Time travel?”
“To the future?” said J.Lo. “Yes. Always. We do it alls the time, in miniature ways. But to the past? Also yes. But harder. Takes a crazy lot of power. Anyone who has ever traveled in a faster-than-light starship has traveled backward in time a little. And I believe such a person has then a Time River that flows through alls their past selves. Such a person could swim against the current of that river, and revisit events that have already beforenow happened to them. But it takes a buffaload of energy to swim against the current.”
“I keep meaning to talk to you about that word of yours,” I said. “‘Buffaload.’ The term is ‘buttload,’ pardon my language. There’s no such word as ‘buffaload.’”
“I invented it! It means a buffalo’s load.”
“Whatever—so could I go back in time?” I asked, because maybe I could visit the past and talk both of us out of coming here to New Boovworld in the first place.
“No, you could not,” J.Lo said with an apologetic smile. “You have not a Time River, because you have never traveled faster than light.”
“Not even on the trip from Earth?”
“Not even for a moment, no.”
We stared at each other for a bit; then he shrugged and went back to his tinkering. One of the taller koobish walked over to where I was sitting and didn’t stop until he was standing directly over me like a canopy bed.
“J.Lo,” I said, “you can’t go back in time.”
“Probablies not. I mean, I think the theory is good, but where would I get so much energies?”
“Mah!” the koobish agreed. I shoved it away. It made a noise like fuff and wandered off.
“No,” I said. “I mean...you can’t. If you go back and make it so you never sent the signal, then...then you and I would probably never have met! And it was only together that we figured out how to defeat the Gorg!”
J.Lo looked up. “But without the signal there would have been no Gorg to defeat.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they would have found you guys again anyway.”
J.Lo nodded. “Or maybies they never would have found us guys again.”
After I was rough with that one koobish, all the others seemed to make a point of bumping into me.
“Anyways,” said J.Lo. “You will like this big-time.” He held up a springy set of plastic teeth, like a big hair clip. “Waveform device!”
“Waveform device!” I cheered as a koobish head-butted me.
“Yes!” said J.Lo.
“I don’t know what that is!” I said.
“Ah. Well. I made it fromto Mister M’Pillowclock’s microwave, and some other things. When I clamp it on to these tubes, I will be able to broadcast a message. Break into all the live video feeds, probablies. And send my message into everyBoov’s message box, alls at the same time.”
“Hm,” I said. Usually in stories when someone interrupts all the TV broadcasts it’s to threaten to poison the reservoir or something. “What are you going to tell everyone?”
“I’ll to explain about the antenna-farm mistake, and figuring out about cloning and teleporting, and sending the Gorg packing with all those cats. Captain Smek will not be able to silence me if everyone knows.”
So that’s what we did. The little liver-shaped box he’d been playing with had a tiny camera and a microphone, like a laptop. J.Lo clamped the waveform dealie on the cables, and suddenly there was his face on the TV. He flipped the channels and they all showed his face, plus the occasional koobish wandering through the background.
And he told them his story. Our story. In his own language he told all of New Boovworld our story, and he even waved me over to share the camera with him. I think I mostly fidgeted and nodded from time to time. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. After a bit Bill flew into the frame and settled lightly on my head.
J.Lo was silent a moment. It made me uncomfortable, so I said, “Yeah,” and then a koobish ran into me.
“That is all,” J.Lo finished, and he unclipped the waveform device.
Immediately the television switched back to its regular programming. A Boov chef holding a knife and a fish said, “Are we back? What was that?”
In the bubble house I smiled at J.Lo. “You did really good,” I said.
“I sent it also to Tipmom’s e-mail,” he said, grinning. “It will take maybe an hour to get there, but—”
I leaned over and hugged him. The koobish came up from all sides and smooshed us.