Year Zero (30 page)

The whole setup was as cozy as a Scandinavian mountain town on Christmas Eve. And everywhere—the major tunnels, the tributaries, and all of the public spaces—was thronging with energized, gibbering Decapuses. Our group got some curious looks as we passed through. But most of the Decapuses were too engaged in each other to give us much attention. I couldn’t imagine any one of them drooping lifelessly over a Kenwood tape deck. But I guess we all have a work persona.

After a few minutes we entered a spacious cavern. It was about fifty feet tall, and broad as a small city square. The Boss pointed at a box-shaped building about the size of a suburban garage right in the center of it. “They’re in there,” he said.

As we approached the building’s front door, a passerby pointed at Manda with seven limbs, and made an excited gibbering sound. Its companion pulled a stereopticon out of a sort of marsupial pouch, consulted it, and gibbered something back. At that, they started jumping up and down, making high five–like moves with their limbs. Then they took off at a dead run.

The Boss looked at Manda. “So. You’re a singer?” he asked.

“Yes, actually,” she said. “Did those guys … recognize me or something? I’m not exactly famous.”

“Well, from what they said, you’ve got an album out on Merge.”

Manda nodded. Merge is in fact her label. They don’t
put a ton of money behind their artists, but have enough indie cred to affect the tides.

“We distribute everything on Merge,” The Boss said. “That puts your music into over four hundred billion galaxies. And while you’re no Arcade Fire, some of the kids around here listen to everything that’s local.”

“There’s a lot of local music in New York,” Manda said, clearly astonished by all of this.

“No, I mean locally local.” He pointed up toward the city’s surface with several limbs. “As in midtown-ish. You live in Murray Hill, right? These kids are loyal to their neighborhood. Anyways. Let’s go in and see those two.” He led us up to the main door, which snapped open to admit us.

Özzÿ was stationed right inside, next to a small table that stood at about hand height to him. He was shifting several coasterlike pads around its surface very carefully. Paulie was hovering like a hummingbird about five feet above him, peering intently at a long series of thumbnail images that were beaming out of a small stereopticon that was draped around his neck. Each image seemed to depict a tiny document. An enlargement of one was floating above the rest—a page that looked like it was written in Russian.

“Paulie, you got visitors,” The Boss announced. When Paulie saw us, he dropped halfway to the ground from shock, then fluttered to a safe landing. Özzÿ continued shuffling his coasters, ignoring us.

“Paulie, so good to see you again,” I boomed. “How goes the, uh—unlimited energy project?”

“Who’re you to ask?” Paulie turned to The Boss. “And whaddaya doing, bringing humans in here?”

“They knew the access code, so I let ’em in,” The Boss said hotly. “Rules are rules. And that’s the rule!”

“The energy project, Paulie?” I repeated. “Details, details.”

Paulie glared at Pugwash. “Tell your cousin to quit buggin’ me. Or my deal with you is off.”

“He’s not actually my cousin,” my cousin said, following our script. “I just know him through work. I made that cousin stuff up because I wanted you to think he was a liar, so you might make me your partner instead of him.”

“Yeah, right,” Paulie chuckled. “I don’t have time for none a you.” He made a quick gesture with his wing, and Pugwash vanished.

“Where’d you put him?” I asked in a shocked tone.

“Wh-what’re you still doin’ here?” Paulie asked in an even more shocked tone. He looked around wildly, and saw that Manda was also still with us. “And
you
?”

“Dammit, tell me where you sent my c—colleague,” I demanded (almost blowing everything by calling Pugwash my cousin).

“I dunno—somewhere in midtown. Wherever the shortest Wrinkle connection would put him,” Paulie said. “But why are
you
still
here
?”

His growing panic made me realize that things were going even better than I’d hoped. It seemed that the Guild had, in fact, given Paulie the power to Dislocate, or Wrinkle beings without their permission. And he’d apparently just tried to Dislocate all of us up to the city’s surface. But since Manda and I were carrying the Guardian’s “Foilers,” we couldn’t be sent anywhere against our will. And Paulie surely knew that only Guardians have Foilers.

Time to spook him even more. I bent down and ran my hand across the floor. “Hey, Boss. This floor feels really nice.
What’s it made out of?” As I said this, Manda started strolling around the transit bay, turning her head to and fro with every step. She was still capturing everything she could on the stereopticon.

“Some nanosubfiber, I think,” The Boss said, utterly confused by all of this.

“Well, it feels so silky soft, I just have to see what it’s like to walk on it.” I removed my shoes. As I pulled off my socks, Manda averted her gaze per my request—but Paulie fluttered up a few feet to get a better view. As soon as he saw my sixteen toes, he dropped halfway to the floor from shock again.

I took a few steps. “Wow, this nanonanofiber is fabulous, Boss—I should get some for my apartment.” With that, I put my shoes and socks back on, and Paulie started fluttering around in anxious little circles. He had plenty of reasons to be nervous. My toes had just identified me as a Perfuffinite—so I couldn’t be the ordinary human that Pugwash had portrayed me as earlier in the evening. And since I’d definitely been living on Earth since long before Carly and Frampton knocked out the Townshend Line, I pretty much had to be one of the mysterious “trespasser” aliens who arrived in 1977. That, and the bizarre immunity that Manda and I had to Dislocation, would have made it seem virtually certain that I was a Guardian after all.

“So, Paulie,” I pressed. “The energy project. Tell me more. And please—use my title. I’d hate to have to incinerate you for disrespecting me.”

Paulie landed and stared hard at the ground. “Right to silence, Your Illustriousness. I ain’t sayin nothin’ without no lawyer from the Guild.”

“Then why not
sing
something?” I jeered, angling to enrage
him into saying something stupid. “Oh, that’s right—no one wants to hear your singing anymore. Do they?”

The physiological differences between Paulie’s species and our own parrots must be significant. Because over the next several seconds, his feathers went from canary yellow, to bitter orange, to kamikaze red. As he spun through the color wheel, Paulie started vibrating with rage—much as Özzÿ had when Manda taunted him. But he held his peace.

I turned to his sidekick. “How about you, Özzÿ? Why don’t you tell me about your little table?”

Özzÿ pushed the coasterlike things around it more frenetically. “I’ve never seen you, never ever, not even once in my life, Your Illustriousness,” he wheezed.

Ah yes—I’d talked him into keeping Paulie in the dark about our first meeting. Well done, Özzÿ. Glancing at my watch, I decided to quit while I was ahead. I was supposed to meet Carly and Frampton in Warcraft in less than an hour. And my work here was done, since Paulie clearly wouldn’t be trying anything rash until after tomorrow’s episode of
Sonny & His Sirelings
proved that I wasn’t a Guardian after all. I turned to The Boss. “These two aren’t talking, so please take us back to the surface.”

He nervously consulted his stereopticon. “That might be tricky. It turns out that it’s … a little crowded outside.”

“A little crowded?”

“Maybe a lot crowded.” The Boss walked over to one of the walls. “Now, don’t panic. This’ll be like a one-way mirror. No one outside can see us.”

He waved three of his limbs in a complex pattern. With that, the walls and the ceiling all vanished, and we beheld … 
every Decapus on Earth
. They filled the entire cavern, and
every tunnel feeding into it. The floor was completely invisible beneath their tightly packed bodies.

“Whoa,” Manda said.

This being my first spontaneous subterranean alien mob, I was briefly terrified. But then I realized it was a
peaceful
spontaneous subterranean alien mob. No one out there was pushing or shoving. A few were chattering, but most were silent. And everyone was holding limbs with three or four neighbors in a way that was almost reverential. Then I noticed the first placard. It looked like a slapdash sign made by one of those Meadowlands drunks who paints his face green, and sobs when the Jets lose. It featured three hand-drawn glyphs—an eyeball, a Valentine-like heart, and a ravenous fish. Scanning the crowd, I saw a few similar signs, as well as a banner that was covered with a vertical cascade of words: Musical, Angellic [
sic
], Nice, Debutantey, and again, Angellic (and again, [
sic
]).

I turned to Manda. “Hey, it looks like you’ve got some … fans.” The eyeball, heart, and toothy fish had to mean “I Love Shark.” And the first letters in the cascade of words spelled out M-A-N-D-A.

“Holy shhhhhhh …” She didn’t finish the thought, but I got the gist.

Paulie had put two and two together as well, and turned to The Boss. “You coulda warned me that you’d brung your colony’s favorite singer down here.” He was testy, but had more or less reined in his temper (and his feathers were almost back to their normal yellow color).

“I didn’t,” The Boss said defensively. “She just became their favorite singer a couple minutes ago.” He went on to tell Paulie about the sighting that occurred as we were approaching his work space. “My team says that after that, the news
that an actual singer had actually come to the actual cavern spread like lightning,” he concluded, consulting his stereopticon. “Even though most folks hadn’t heard of her, the whole colony naturally started listening to one of her songs. And it’s already the biggest hit down here since ‘Macarena.’ ”

Paulie instantly relaxed and got a blissed-out look on his face. “God, I love that song,” he whispered huskily.

“Don’t get me started!” They both sighed and gazed absently into the distance—The Boss mouthing the words to the Macarena song, and Paulie miming the steps of the Macarena dance.

“Gggggggggh!”
Something about this fascinated Meowhaus.

“Maybe next time, we can get Los del Río down here,” Paulie said wistfully.

“Are they the ones who sing ‘The Macarena’?” I guessed.

They both looked at me like I’d crashed the State of the Union and asked who the loudmouth at the podium was. “
The
Macarena?” Paulie asked. “
The
Macarena? It’s
Macarena
! No goddamn definite article, you troglodyte! And yes—Los del Río is the band behind the greatest dance song since the Big Bang.”

“Pardon my ignorance, but I was raised by wild dogs. Now, tell me how you’re getting us out of here? And don’t forget to call me Your Illustriousness this time.”

Since there’d be no getting through Manda’s adoring public, we quickly agreed that the only way out was a Wrinkle. Paulie figured out that he could place us within a block of where he’d put Pugwash. And this time, we let him send us.

“Seriously?
He
canceled
it?” I leapt to my feet and did a little jig that looked even stupider on my Warcraft avatar’s brawny green body than I expected. Carly celebrated by having her Blood Elf avatar flash me with that pornographic chest. Then Frampton’s Death Knight leapt toward me with his right hand overhead. I bounded toward him and met the high five, briefly forgetting that my actual body was surrounded by the fragile flotsam of Pugwash’s live-in scrapbook of an apartment. Out there in reality, my hand connected with something that felt indigenous and expensive—silky fibers arrayed on some sort of twig skeleton that I smashed to atoms.

“Dammit,” Pugwash’s disembodied voice whined from outside our Warcraft scene. “That merkin stand was from
Borneo
!”

“Sorry, dude,” I said. “But saving the world calls for a bit of celebrating.” I’d just learned that Paulie had canceled the inbound Wrinkle that Carly and I had seen in the queue at pluhhhs base. Since he’d surely rebook it once
Sonny & His Sirelings
made it clear that I wasn’t a Guardian the following morning, I’d only saved the world for ten or eleven hours. But it was a start.

“So tell me more,” I asked Carly’s virtual tart.

“Well, from the timing records that pluhhhs gave me, I can confirm that Paulie booked the Wrinkle right after your idiot cousin told him about your childhood.”

“Why are you calling my cousin an idiot?” I asked. The answer to this was self-evident. But Pugwash could only hear my end of the conversation, and I thought he’d enjoy knowing what the most famous babe in the universe had just called him.