The True Meaning of Smekday (27 page)

“Name,” said Mitch. I was staring at the pine trees and snow-speckled mountains through a window and wondering why I’d thought Arizona was all cactus and sand dunes. It took me a few seconds to recognize that he was asking me a question.

“Oh, um. Gratuity Tucci.”

He glared at me over his clipboard. “I don’t have time for jokes?” he said. “I have a lot of people to see? What is your name.”

“Gratuity. G-r-a—”

“That is not a name.”

I frowned. “Isn’t that sort of between me and my mom?”

“Uh-huh? And is this your mom?” he said, motioning at the policewoman who had pulled us over and was now in the corner trying to keep J.Lo entertained without speaking or making any sudden moves.

“Wow,”
I said. “You are good. Here I am, looking for my mom, and you find her before I even leave the building.”

“I have a lot of people to see?” Mitch said again. “For the time being I am going to put you down as Gratuity.”

“It’ll have to do.”

“Last name.”

“Tucci.”

“Middle initial.”

“I don’t have one.”

Mitch looked at me like I didn’t have a middle name on purpose.

“What is the name of the person or persons you wish to find.”

“Lucy Tucci,” I said. “My mom.”

“How old is she.”

“Uh, thirty.”

“And what is the nature of your relationship with Lucy Tucci.”

“Ummm, pretty good,” I said. “I mean, we fight sometimes—”

“No,” said Mitch. “No. Who is she to you. What is your connection.”

“She’s my mom. I’m her daughter.”

Mitch scribbled on his clipboard. I suddenly remembered a promise I’d made.

“Oh! And can you also find, uh…Marta! Marta Gonzales. And when you do tell her Christian and Alberto are safe and living under Happy Mouse Kingdom.”

You could actually see a little part of Mitch die inside. He hugged his clipboard against his stomach.

“There is no form for that,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “could you—”

“If there’s no form, I don’t see how we could possibly…Michaels? See if there’s a form for that?”

“Yessir,” said one of the men in suits behind him before hustling away. Up to now I’d assumed they were just back there to catch Mitch if he fell over.

The policewoman walked up and said, “Your brother is eating pencils.”

“He’ll do that,” I answered.

“You know,” she said, “you should put your mom’s name on the Lost List.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mitch. “You may as well tell her to throw darts at a map.”

“What’s the Lost List?” I asked.

It seemed that Americans were not waiting for the Bureau of Missing Persons to find everyone for them. Some people had taken to carrying lists of names around. Everyone had ten names, and when they got a new one it was added to the top and a name was crossed off the bottom. As they went about their day they might call out, “John Hancock looking for Susan B. Anthony,” or “Buddy Holly looking for Ritchie Valens.” If you heard them and you knew a Susan B. Anthony or a Ritchie Valens, you’d stop and tell them what you could.

“A lot of people have been reunited that way,” said the woman.

“Do what you like?” sniffed Mitch. “Okay? But the Bureau is the simplest, fastest way of finding missing persons I know about. Now here’s your ticket,” he said, handing me a blue slip of paper.

It read,
CASE FILE
#9003041-
CHARLIE BRAVO
in black ballpoint, and under that,
LUCY TUCCI, MOTHER OF CLAIMANT
. On the reverse was a coupon for a car wash.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“Hold on to that,” he said. “You won’t be able to claim your mother if you lose it. Check back with us in ten to fourteen business days.”

They learned to really hate me at the Bureau of Missing Persons. I did not check back in ten to fourteen business days. I checked back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. All the while J.Lo and I lived in Slushious, just outside of town. They wanted to find us something better, but I resisted. We moved around a lot so we wouldn’t be too easy to sneak up on (J.Lo had to get out of his costume once in a while), and we used the showers and bathrooms on the university campus. I registered Mom with the Lost List people. They had a sort of office in the back room of an empty pet store. There weren’t many working phone lines yet, but they had a shortwave radio. This was different from a regular radio in two ways I could tell. First, you could talk into a shortwave. If someone else was listening to your frequency, they could hear you, and the other Lost List offices in other cities always listened to the right frequency. Second, people who use shortwave radios
really like
shortwave radios. I had to listen to this pale guy named Phil talk about his for forty minutes.

J.Lo and Pig and I got on okay. We were out of food, but there was plenty of milk shake. J.Lo was right about that. Most communities near cities had teleclone machines for water and food, but people were trying to farm anyway, because the milk shakes tasted like whipped cardboard.

In the evenings, J.Lo worked on the teleclone booth. I kept coming back to the charred and broken corner of the cage.

“Is it missing something important here?” I asked finally. “Is the damage bad?”

“I do not believes so. Probably only lost a couple of nozzles. Still workable. Hold the flashlight still, please.”

“Are you sure? I mean, if we ever try this thing, I don’t want to teleport out the other side missing a foot or something.”

“You will have on both feet. The damage, it is lucky, actually. It disenabled the receiver.”

“That’s good?”

“That is good. With no receiver, no mores Gorg could be made, or teleported. With no receiver, the Gorgship could no send the self-destruct command. Hm.”

“So if the Boov hadn’t damaged the booth just right, the Chief never would have been able to steal it in the first place. And you can fix it?”

“Sh,” whispered J.Lo. “Concentrating.”

He looked over every inch of the cage, the machinery, the bits he’d disassembled and set aside. He put the whole thing together in a matter of minutes, then took it apart again.

“I cannot understands,” he said finally. “It is just as a Boov telecloner. It is alls the same.”

“There must be
something
different.”

J.Lo didn’t respond. He crouched by a nozzle and frowned at it.

“I bet they all got out of Roswell,” I said. “The guys had that car. And they’d have the Chief’s truck, too.”

J.Lo whacked the nozzle with a stick.

“Plus the Party Patrol car,” I added. “Did you leave the key in it?”

“Hm?”

“That key you made for the Party car. Did you leave it in the ignition?”

“Ah. Yes.”

“So they could have used that too,” I said. “If they wanted.”

Nearby, two crickets were talking back and forth, again and again, same question every time:

Are you there?

Yes. Are you there?

Yes. Are you there?

Yes. Are—

J.Lo smacked himself in the eyes.
“It is alls the same!”

“Shhh!”

He pored over the booth, brushing his fingertips across the nozzles, mumbling to himself. The crickets picked up where they’d left off.

“Well, you said it still has to be connected to a computer, right?”

“Yes,” said J.Lo. “By signal. But this makes no difference.”

“But…” I said, “couldn’t a computer keep track—”

“No,” said J.Lo. “No no no. Is too complicated. No Boov has ever built a computer so powerful as to keep on track all of the participles of a person.”

“Not even one of your gas-cloud computers?”

“Not even. To be safe enough, this computer would have to being thousands of times larger than a Boov ship. Than even the
largest
Boov ship. If it even could be done. Who would build such a thing? Where would a person keep it?”

“It would really be that big?”

J.Lo chuffed. “It would have to be alike a small moon!”

We each stared at the other without speaking. Even the crickets stopped chirping. Then we both turned at once and looked at the small purple moon hanging over Mexico.

“You don’t think…” I said.

“No,” said J.Lo, but he sounded less certain. “The electric brain would have to take up the most of the ship. No space for alls the Gorg and supplies.”

“How many Gorg and supplies do you need when you can just clone more?”

“Hm.”

“This is good,” I said. “If you’re right, then you can fix the receiver and build more teleclone booths, and we can use them, too. Humans will be able to use the Gorg’s own computers against them.”

“Possibily.”

“We’re gonna have to tell someone. Soon. Maybe someone at the Bureau of Missing Persons. I was planning on maybe dropping by there tomorrow to see if they found my mom anyway.”

We did go to the bureau the next morning, but the offices were empty except for the suit man named Michaels.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said without any hint of surprise in his voice. “We haven’t found your mom yet.”

“Yeah, well, not to be rude,” I said with a wave of my arm, “but it doesn’t look like you guys are trying very hard.”

“Tch. It’s just because of the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

Michaels grinned. “I thought everyone knew. The meeting with the Boov representatives on the quad. It’s going on right now.”

“What are the Boov meeting with us for?” I wondered aloud. We were walking to the center of campus to check it out.

“Maybies we should tell these Boov about our telecloner,” said J.Lo.

I wasn’t crazy about that idea. I couldn’t blame J.Lo for still wanting to think the best about his own people, but I thought the Boov might just arrest J.Lo, use this new information to beat the Gorg, and go on treating us humans like the rejects they thought we were.

There was a big crowd of people on the quad—a thousand at least, facing a plywood stage. And on the stage stood five Boov. One of them had fancier clothes than the rest. He was speaking to the crowd.

J.Lo gasped.

“Smek!” he whispered. “It is Captain Smek himself!”

“They are a horrible sort,” Smek was saying, “and will not show the Noble Savages of Smekland the respectfulness that you have enjoyed fromto the Boov. The Gorg are known acrosst the galaxy as the Takers, and they canto only take and take and take!”

The Boov guarding Smek snapped their fingers again and again. It’s what the Boov do to applaud.

J.Lo was shaking and pushing up against me. I kept a hand on his shoulder and steered us to the back of the audience. “We knows of the meeting between to the Gorg and Smekland leaders yesterday,” said Smek. “The Gorg have probabilies made for you some fancy promises. Do not be believing them! They lie! They will enslave your race, just as to they have done so many others! They will destruct our world!”

There was a lot of grumbling in the audience. Smek was not a popular guy around this part of the Milky Way, for obvious reasons.

“In closing,” said Captain Smek, “the Boov are beseeching you: do not give up to the Gorg our world because of petty grudgings! Fight with us—”

A guardBoov whispered something to Smek.

“Fight
alongside
us,” Smek said, “for a brighter, shiny Smekland!”

The guardBoovs snapped their fingers again.

Smek took a breath.
“Repito. Señoras y Caballeros del Estado Unido de America—”

“Fat lot of good this’ll do,” I whispered to J.Lo. But I would be wrong about that. Some people would end up joining the Boov to fight the Gorg. Not that it made any difference.

Folks were already leaving, talking among themselves, mostly about how they didn’t believe a word of it. A few gave J.Lo weird looks, but there was plenty of reason for that without suspecting he was a Boov. It might seem crazy that we passed him off as easy as we did, but I think people mostly see what they expect to see. You could look at us and suppose we were a girl and her alien friend wearing a Halloween costume in August, or you could see two kids being kids. Which would
you
see, honestly?

“Don’t look at him,” one mother even said when she noticed her daughter was staring at J.Lo. “He’s just trying to get attention.”