Kitman Versus The Squirrels

A novel. With some squirrels in.

<< Chapter 8 >>

In Which Our Protagonists Explore A Strange New World.

Nothing.

Absolute dead silence.

Is what we heard.

No wind, no insects, no creaking of branches. The only sound to be heard was the sound that we had brought with us. It was as if God had hit the Mute button on existence.

Arthur C. Clarke, in his break time between discovering distinguished but elderly scientists and sufficiently advanced forms of technology, noticed the phenomenon of silences at parties, when due to statistical aberration all the conversations in progress come to a stop simultaneously. The experience is striking and highly creepy — that of a silence almost solid, a non-physical but no less real entity that comes and goes by its own prerogative, some strange congealed pre-echo of the end of time.

Apparently this forest was its crash pad, because what we were hearing was the silence of all tomorrow's parties, the silence that could be cracked but never broken...

Except, apparently, by a heartfelt sigh from twenty feet above us.

It was the sound of a mortally wounded piccolo, passionate and musical and desperately sad, and it inflicted a paper cut on my soul.

Kitman and I looked up into the branches above us and said, simultaneously, "Is there anything I can do?" — because when you're on the receiving end of a sigh like that, there is no other conversation opener.

There was a sort of soprano bassoon noise of surprise from above, and the branches rustled, and a small bit of white paper came fluttering down out of them. Kitman dove for it; I reached into my shirt pocket for a pen in the event that it was an organ donor card to fill out; we put our heads together to look at it.

It was a business card:

...all printed in lettering so embossed as to suggest sarcasm.

Kitman and I gave each other the eyebrow raised and fixed, and then gave it to the branches above us.

"Um," said the branches.

I could just about make out a smallish person-shaped form stirring above them, and opened my mouth again just in time to have a fragment of pine cone land in it.

"Pleh," said I.

Kitman said "Hello, is that Noel Quillie up there?"

There was a moment or two of purely conventional silence, and finally a purely conventional sigh. "Yes, I'm afraid so," said the voice.

"Can we be of assistance?"

"Um, possibly," said the voice. "This may or may not sound bizarre, but would either of you happen to be a...giant squirrel, or something along those lines?"

"We're primates," said Kitman. "Will that do?"

"Well, it's just that I'm stuck up this tree," said our correspondent. "And I thought you might...well, climb up and rescue me. Or something. Not to be speciesist or anything..."

We looked at the considerable quantity of bare trunk between ourselves and the apparent Noel Quillie.

"Climbing up is a bit out of the question," said Kitman, "but we'll sort you out, never fear." He started rummaging through his supplies.

"I had considered jumping," said the apparent Noel Quillie.

"Twenty feet to the ground?" said Kitman, taking off his backpack. "I wouldn't."

"We could could make a pile of soft mosses, heather and other bracken, " I said conversationally.

"True, " said Kitman, presumably on the grounds that it was true, "but it would take far too long to build one big enough, target-wise." He directed his voice upward. "Hang on, I'm working the problem."

"Okay," said the voice from on high.

Kitman handed me a collapsible fishing rod. "Assemble this, would you?" he said, and stepped behind me to pull a coil of rope from my own backpack — a coil of rope I did not recall packing, as a matter of interest, and one which would explain the, in retrospect, significantly heavy nature of said backpack.

"Am I your beast of burden, Kitman?" I said, screwing cylinders together obediently.

"Only because you put on the wrong backpack," said Kitman, and handed me a small lead weight. "I think you can work out the next part," he said, and set about turning the rope into a lasso-like structure.

"Only once have I ever molested the piscine population," he said while I tied the weight to the end of the fishing line. "I was four years old, and the person who was teaching me the use of the fishing rod went to great lengths to transfer a crappie from his hook to mine without me noticing. I managed to let the victim escape entirely by my own raw ability. But I do remember the basics of casting. Are you done? Good."

He took the proffered rod from my hand and called up into the tree: "Would you mind getting close up against the trunk, please? I'd hate to do you a damage while rescuing you."

I heard some rustling from above, accompanied by an "Oh, dear," and a larger pine cone that bounced off my head.

Kitman wiggled the rod about in a businesslike manner. "Right," he said, "here goes —" and with a measured flick-fling sent the lead weight arcing up into the air and over the occupied branch (after only four additional attempts).

After I tied the rope to the twine, Kitman reeled both of them over the branch.

"In case you haven't worked it out for yourself," said Kitman to the tree-trapped, "the general idea is that you put one foot into the rope loop and then hang onto the rope while we lower you to the ground."

"Oh, is that what you had in mind," said the voice, sounding much relieved.

We took a firm hold of our end of the rope. "At your discretion, " said Kitman, and, after a bit of maneuvering to get the positioning right, events unfolded as they should, right up until someone let the rope slip and I got a faceful of plummeting rescuee.

"Good catch," Kitman failed to say, which was a disappointing lack of recognition especially considering it was he who had let the rope slip, but understandable because of the boggling that had caused him to do so.

"Um, thanks for helping me get down," said the rescuee.

Which was an odd thing to say, given that he was, as intimated earlier, a duck.

I lowered him the rest of the way to the ground and tried to stare politely.

In fact he had only down: no feathers, just green fuzzy fluff, longer on the top of his head and parted so neatly I felt instinctively that his mother had done it.

He was wearing a blue string tie, a white shirt, a Ping-yellow jacket and pants, and blue flip-flops.

He looked up at us and took a deep breath before sticking out his right hand. "Hello," he said. "I'm Noel."

As previously noted, Kitman is a genius. This means that while conventional minds, such as my own, are hung up on basic issues and running through useless internal monologues like "Good lord, is that a talking duck? is that really a talking duck? why is he wearing a string tie?", his has drilled through the minutiae and gotten straight to the really interesting questions.

"Why are you speaking English?" demanded Kitman.

The duck's eyes widened and he took a nervous step backward. "B-bonjour," he stammered, "je m'appelle Noel...?"

"That's not any better," said the fascinated Kitman, going through the kind of restrained head-bobbling you do when trying to peer down someone's throat without being obvious about it.

"J'ai un stylo bleu! — I'm sorry! I had only one year of French!" Noel took another step backward.

"My friend is not criticizing," I interjected. "He's merely excited."

"By all means!" said Kitman, with a shocked look. "I do apologize for disturbing you. You're the best thing that's happened to me all day!"

"I am?"

"Yes, and that's saying a lot," said Kitman. "—It's just that the form of spoken language reflects the vocal anatomies of the beings that speak it," he added by way of explanation. "It amazes me that a being without, for lack of a better word, lips, should be able to make use of labials such as occur in the word 'be'."

Noel blinked and frowned. "I hadn't thought of it that way," he said, having no trouble with the 'th', much to Kitman's delight. "We all speak English at home and no one thinks it odd. Except the ones who speak other languages of course."

"Aha!" said Kitman. "You must have some form of bifurcated trachea, or a tympanum." He took a few steps back and bent sideways, still bobbing and weaving.

I took the opportunity to introduce myself. "And this overinquisitive gentleman is my associate Kitman," I added. "How did you get stuck up there, if I may inquire?"

"How?" Noel started to look up into the tree we'd gotten him out of, but seemingly lost interest halfway and ended up just staring into the distance. He slowly raised a finger to his bill. "I went to bed," he said. "I turned out the light. I was lying there...and the next thing I knew I was clinging to a branch." He tucked his arms behind his back. "I'm guessing this is a dream. It would explain everything neatly. Like how you knew my name."

"Oh," said Kitman. "No, you dropped this."

He held out the card that had fallen.

Noel looked at it...and though I'm not an authority on avian facial expressions, I got the distinct impression that bitterness was trying him on for size. "Ah," he said, "not my preferred type of dream, at least." He looked down and prodded the mosses, heather and other bracken with a moody toe. "Anyway, there I was, up a tree with no way down. And that was fine, it didn't seem to matter, it was a nice tree, and I was quite enjoying myself for a while...if the word while applies. It seemed like hardly any time at all — except when it seemed like I'd always been there, and then it seemed like no time at all."

He continued staring at the ground, looking puzzled. "And then something changed."

Kitman nudged me. "What?" he said.

"I don't know. But then I started getting hungry — and you know the rest."

I said, "Would you care for a cheese, pickle, tofu and mustard sandwich?"

Noel looked up at me in surprise. "You're offering me my favorite sandwich! All the more reason to think I'm dreaming. But why can't I wake up?" He kicked at the trunk of a pine tree. A pine cone fell and bounced off my head.

Kitman stared at Noel thoughtfully. "Williams?"

"Yes, Kitman?" said I.

"Never mind."

"Right ho," said I, and watched him open up his backpack, which is to say my backpack, and dig around in it.

"Noel," he said, "I assure you that you're not dreaming. And since any random dream character could say that, I will now offer conclusive proof." And he presented Noel with the copy of TEAPOTS ON STUN that I had brought along.

Noel frowned at the cover, which depicted the crew of the starship U.S.S. Franchise being confronted with an alien threat in the form of what appeared in fact to be a silver cow-creamer, and then looked up at Kitman with sudden insight.

"Ah!" he said. "You mean—"

"Precisely, " said Kitman. "It's impossible to read in your dreams. Too computationally expensive, wakes too much of the brain for it to remain unconscious."

Noel flipped the book open, squinted down at a random spot in the text, opened his bill as if to recite —

— and disappeared.

The book fell to the ground with a plop.

Kitman gave it the eyebrow raised and fixed for a moment before picking it up and brushing the mosses, heather and other bracken from the cover.

There was a piccolo sigh from twenty feet above us.

"Hm," said Kitman.