Livingston said, “Nothing’s the go-to-hell matter, Mother. I’m just fucking hungry. For tacos.”
Livingston, despite not being very good at it, loved to swear.
And even though Livingston was hundreds of centuries old by human standards, he still had that fatal teenage flaw of being unable to hide guilty lies in front of his mother.
Rowan, who had endless experience with teenagers—despite that by Queen Dot’s standards he was only minutes old—saw this and attempted to deflect the line of interrogation. Also, Rowan happened to have been in the room when Livingston was hiding under my bed after having been caught with Parker.
Rowan said, “Tacos are an interesting choice, Queen Dot.”
“I told you: Tacos are the best thing in the universe. I invented them. I invented them, but I hate cooking for myself. You can’t expect me to cook, can you? I invented everything important you humans have ever utilized. And, damn, you creatures evolved slowly!”
Rowan cleared his throat behind the drape of his napkin. “Everything?”
“Beginning with the Ouija board and ending with a stupid little gimmick called thumbphones,” Queen Dot said.
“The Ouija board?”
“And tacos, can openers, and thumbphones.”
“Tacos.”
“They’re the primary reason why we keep returning to Earth. And now it’s all gone to shit, hasn’t it?” Queen Dot said.
Rowan nodded. “I suppose it has. So you’ve been to Earth a number of times?”
“Thousands and thousands.” Queen Dot said. “Haven’t we, Livingston?”
“It’s easy enough to blend in,” Livingston said. Then he liquefied his body and turned into a mirror image of Rowan.
Rowan was not pleased. He arched the eyebrow. Livingston switched back to a blue, fifty-five-thousand-year-old teenager.
“And the best place in the entire universe,” Queen Dot continued, “is—was—an all-inclusive resort hotel in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Now, also, all gone to shit. I need a cigarette.”
“On behalf of human beings everywhere, please accept my apology for the tacos and the beach,” Rowan said.
“Pfft! It’s not like we didn’t see it coming for centuries! I started it! And ‘human beings everywhere’? What are they in number? Five?” Queen Dot asked.
“Dad’s fucking mad about that shit,” Livingston said.
Queen Dot said, “I might explain, inasmuch as it no longer matters, that my husband, King Carlos, was entirely responsible for you life-forms over two hundred thousand years ago, after a transgression with a hairy bipedal thing in a cave. So disgusting. So primitive.”
“I think it’s fucking balls as shit,” Livingston said.
Queen Dot fired a horrified and angry look at him.
Livingston slunk down in his chair.
Queen Dot leaned over the table and put her face inches from her son’s. “Livingston! Did you have sex with one of those . . . those things today?”
And Livingston cascaded to the floor in an embarrassed puddle of blue pudding.
Queen Dot pushed her chair back, stood, and began stomping down into the pool of Livingston on the floor, splashing blue muck everywhere. “No! You bad, bad, dirty boy! What have I told you for thousands of years about having sex with life-forms? No! No! No!”
“Mom! I’m sorry! Ow! Mom! Quit it! Mom!” cried the puddle on the restaurant floor.
Just then the music ended, and a caravan of wait staff snaked behind the half-trousered and weeping Milo through the islands of empty tables, bearing plate upon plate of tacos, and a half dozen bottles of champagne.
We ate, and the last two human boys in the galaxy got very drunk on champagne.
There was something to be said for the tacos at Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique, even if they were something that Billy Hinman and I never would have ordered. Rowan looked confused as far as eating strategies were concerned, and although he matched us glass for glass with champagne, as always Rowan never changed.
He did attempt to eat his tacos with a fork and knife, however.
Jeffrie said, “This is the first night since we’ve been here that I feel I can actually relax.”
And Meg told me, “Thank you for saving us.”
I shook my head. “We—I—didn’t save anything. It’s completely my fault we’re stuck here.”
“It’s kind of my fault, to tell the truth,” Billy said.
Queen Dot and Livingston, who had gathered himself together after the scolding he’d received from his mother for having sex with a life-form, ate like completely uncivilized animals. They got bits of food all over themselves, and scattered shreds of tacos across the table and onto the floor. They could each drink an entire bottle of champagne without taking a breath, and they burped and farted without restraint.
Billy took another sip of champagne and said, “Just like etiquette class. Right, Cager?”
Lourdes never stopped dancing, even when the band wasn’t playing.
When drums beat and the orchestra launched into a number called “Sing Sing Sing,” Lourdes threw herself onto her back and began scooting around the dance floor, writhing and shrieking, “I’m a snake! I’m a dancing snake! Yeee! Yeee! I can’t stop myself!”
“Champagne plus Lourdes plus this music equals we should all get up and dance again,” I said.
And Billy Hinman said, “As Lourdes would say, Yeee! Yeee!”
The four of us all danced together, circling around the snake/cog/cruise director who was always in an extremely good mood.
As final New Year’s Eves go, it was a great night.
In Which We Find Out Where King Carlos Is and Suffer a Blow to Our Self-Esteem
It turned out that Queen Dot, Livingston, Gweese, and King Carlos were actually machines—not life-forms.
And King Carlos had been here on the Tennessee with them all along. He happened to be the giant blue fetus Queen Dot and her sons had been flying inside for countless thousands of years.
So I asked Queen Dot this: If King Carlos was the big baby, and also some weird kind of liquid machine-person, why couldn’t he simply form his own seal on the air-lock docking port, as opposed to making their son do it?
And Queen Dot, who was as condescending and full of herself as if she had been born a Messer or Hinman, told me: “That isn’t how you raise children! They need to develop values and discipline, and there are few methods more effective for achieving those goals than serving as a gasket!”
Billy Hinman, who was more than a little bit drunk, said, “Holy shit. Fifty-five thousand years as a motherfucking gasket around his dad’s face.”
Which made Jeffrie laugh.
But when I asked Queen Dot where she and her family came from, she launched into an extremely irritated and patronizing response that pretty much covered the entire history of our solar system and life as we know it.
At one point she said, “Look, young child, it can’t possibly matter to you where, exactly, we came from. And let me tell you why.”
And when Queen Dot said “Let me tell you why,” she turned her arm into one of those curled-up paper party blowers and unfurled it until the end tickled my nose like a flickering snake tongue. It also honked at me.
“Okay,” I said. I was feeling generous—and buzzed—enough to let Queen Dot tell me why it didn’t matter where they came from, and why I was a young child.
“It doesn’t matter, quite simply, because of this: Around two hundred thousand years ago, the first Homo sapiens developed as a result of a filthy act of commingling—uploading, as you might say—that I’d just as soon forget about, but it’s quite impossible, because I never forget anything. Never.”
Queen Dot glared at Livingston, who had recently attempted uploading with Parker but was interrupted by me and the real, fully dressed, Billy Hinman. Livingston started to get a little bit drippy but managed to contain himself without puddling down to the floor beneath our table.
She continu
ed. “Given your species’ most advanced level of technology at the present, if you were able to launch a ship that could travel to our home planet, it would not even be halfway to its destination in another two hundred thousand years, by which time Homo sapiens will entirely cease to exist. Human beings, like all life-forms on your stupid little planet of taco makers, Ouija board dupes, and thumbphone addicts, will be extinct well before you would ever be able to personally encounter other life-forms! Pfft! Life-forms are so . . . so . . . meaningless and without purpose!”
Billy Hinman said, “Ouija boards?”
Queen Dot pressed her spiderlike hands onto the table. Here was someone whose ego could possibly eclipse Dr. Geneva’s. The queen’s hands pooled outward into a perfect rectangle—a Ouija board, complete with planchette, alphabet and numbers, sun, moon, and GOOD BYE. Then the letters rearranged themselves in front of our eyes:
RABBIT & ROBOT
And Billy said, “If my hands could do stuff like that, I’d never be lonely again.”
Queen Dot glared at Billy Hinman. The letters on the Ouija board seemed to sprout upward into wriggling masses of tiny blue worms that scattered out all across the table and dripped down onto the floor of Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique before slithering off in all directions.
“I gave you all your great machines,” Queen Dot, whose hands re-formed into their arthropodal, ghastly blue hooks, said. Then she waved across the table and said, “You things would never have gotten here for another hundred thousand years if not for me. I gave this all to you. You creatures are so woefully stupid, you invented canned foods a good thirty years before creating a device to open them! Ridiculously moronic!”
I leaned over to Meg and whispered, “If I didn’t have to download some pee so bad, that probably would have hurt my self-esteem.”
And Meg told the queen, “But you had to have come from somewhere.”
Rowan made his little ahem sound that always meant he had some vital point to offer. “Certainly it was some species of life-form that created you originally.”
“Nonsense!” Queen Dot said. “I’ve always been puzzled and amused by the human obsession with wondering where things come from. The Creator! Dung and hoo-haw! It’s so utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. You, for example, all came from King Carlos’s monkey penis, which is as humiliating for me to admit as it must be for you to confront. As for us—we have the capacity to create ourselves. We can make whatever we want, including talking, hairless monkeys from out of our penises, if that’s what we decide to do.”
And Jeffrie whispered, “Well, why don’t they make their own damned tacos, then?”
So here we were, sitting down with God, basically, at the final New Year’s Eve for all eternity, in a restaurant called Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique, on a ship called the Tennessee that was orbiting the moon.
Who knew?
Billy Hinman said, “My father’s company makes talking monkeys—um, made talking monkeys. There’s a whole deck of them here on the Tennessee, called World of the Monkeys, where you can shoot at them.”
“Ah, yes,” Queen Dot said. “That’s exactly why we’ve come back to your planet. Well, that and the tacos.”
“You want to kill some monkeys?” Billy asked.
“Don’t be stupid! It’s the machines. You’ve gone as far as we can allow you to go with them. You made machines that can make better machines and code themselves. This is cosmically prohibited by edict. We had to come back, and fortunately for us you human beings have destroyed your planet, and by doing so have spared us the chore,” Queen Dot lectured.
“And you’ve destroyed all the motherfucking tacos, and Playa del Carmen.” Livingston waggled a scolding blue finger at me.
“Yes. Those too. Stupid humans,” Queen Dot said.
“Why don’t you make your own tacos?” I asked. I thought it was a reasonable enough question, given the capabilities the liquid people—godlike machines—obviously possessed.
“I’ve tried to, thousands of times. It’s just not the same,” Queen Dot said.
Billy Hinman nodded. “It’s like sandwiches. Nobody makes sandwiches that taste as good as Rowan’s.”
I nodded agreement.
“So this means you are a sort of machine police?” Rowan asked.
Queen Dot jammed two more tacos into her mouth. She sprayed bits of meat and wet cheese with shards of fried tortilla in humid clouds like a small hurricane as she spoke. “We must protect our own interests, which include halting the evolutionary development of potentially competitive machines. It’s as simple as that. There are, after all, only so many tacos to go around, so to speak.”
Then she farted, and the band began playing “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
I wanted to dance again, but I was too fascinated by Queen Dot—and simultaneously repulsed and frightened—to get up. Also, I was pretty sure that Meg was flirting with me, because she had her hand on my knee, which also made me not want to stand up, because Eli and Parker would undoubtedly notice something south of my cummerbund that my tuxedo pants didn’t conceal very well.
And that was when Queen Dot said, “And that, my poor, stranded life-form, is precisely why we’ve done a bit of advance planning, if you will, and infected your machines here with this peculiar appetite for eating one another, as opposed to eating tacos. It’s brilliant and hilarious all at the same time!”
Queen Dot had been responsible for turning the cogs of the Tennessee—the last cogs anywhere in the universe—into cannibals.
“That shit was all me,” Livingston said. “I was the fucker who sent the Worm here.”
“He’s such a clever boy,” Queen Dot said.
Herman Melville Would Be Pleased
Wheee! Wheee! Whoopeee!” Lourdes shrieked from the dance floor. Her skirt had come completely off.
I was mesmerized.
I was also ashamed of myself for feeling so turned on by what was basically a vibrating toaster oven with a wig.
This was how it was going to be for all eternity, I decided.
There was a loud commotion behind us, and a tremendous splashing noise. When I looked back to where Parker had been standing beside the aquarium, I saw that Clarence—our old maître d’—had managed to climb up the side of the fish tank and had thrown himself into the water. He quite obviously didn’t know how to swim, which was probably of no consequence, since he was a cog.
“Cager? What’s going on?” Parker said.
I held up my hand in a drunk-guy calming gesture. “It’s okay, Parker. You can stand over here by us if you’d like. I think he’s just hungry.”
Clarence, writhing spasmodically in the tank, was trying to grasp hold of one of the little sperm whales.
“I have an erection,” Parker said.
“Whatever. Shut up, Parker.”
Unfortunately for Clarence, who could not swim anyway, his body began immediately filling up with gallons of water that poured into him through the massive opening where Captain Myron had eaten his face and throat.
Clarence sank.
It was in many ways a gruesome sight, watching Clarence scratch at the glass from his position of hopelessness at the bottom of the aquarium. It was morbid, simply because cogs look so much like human beings—life-forms—which is why the rational parts of my human brain had to keep voicing the repetitive mantra “You might as well be looking at a desk lamp someone tossed into a storm drain.” But Clarence was saying something too, which none of us could hear or understand. Maybe he was explaining the physiology of sperm-whale penises.
Herman Melville would be pleased.
A seahorse fluttered over to Clarence and began nibbling away at one of the former maître d’s eyes.
Seahorses have very small mouths.
“Isn’t that spectacular?” Queen Dot said.
Clarence scratched at the glass and gargled something to us.
“It’s kind of disturbing,” Meg said.
Queen Dot b
urped loudly and stuffed another taco into her slimy blue mouth. “Nonsense! It’s spectacular, and I said so! It’s only a matter of time until all your machines here have eaten one another!”
Billy Hinman, who was pretty good at math, raised his hand politely and asked, “What about the cog who eats the next-to-last cog? Won’t there be at least one left?”
Queen Dot glared at Billy.
He was right.
Then she looked accusingly at Livingston, who immediately liquefied and splashed down to the floor, all around our shoes.
Queen Dot was very mad. She stood up, tipping her chair backward. “I do not appreciate being corrected by an impudent little life-form.”
Then, in a flash, Queen Dot turned her entire head into the face of a massive blue crocodile, and she snapped her teeth twice—Clop! Clop!—in the air in front of Billy and Meg. It was terrifying to see. Then she quickly transformed back into the crowned Queen Dot, all regal, stuck-up, and pissed off as ever. She grabbed the sack of food that was sitting on the vacant seat beside her and said, “The only reason I don’t destroy this entire little moon you’re living in is that the tacos here are incredible. As for me, I’m leaving this shitcan!”
Then Queen Dot stomped out of Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique.
The band stopped playing.
Lourdes, in the heat of religious ecstasy, was lying, half-undressed, in the middle of the dance floor, pulsating like a large mechanical earthworm. “Wheee! Cheepa Yeep! Yippee yeee! This is the best dance ever!”
And the blue puddle of glop on the floor said, “Is she fucking gone yet?”
Eaters and Feeders
Queen Dot, King Carlos (the big flying fetus), and their son, Gweese (the gasket), departed from the Tennessee without so much as saying good-bye.
They also left without taking their other son, Livingston, with them.
I can’t say that anyone minded Queen Dot’s absence. She was loud and pushy, condescending, and completely self-absorbed—kind of like any real, living human being would be when given half a chance.
Queen Dot, stomping her blue feet and hefting a giant bag of food for Gweese, made her way down to the lower west skybridge and climbed inside King Carlos’s baby mouth, followed by her gasket son, and they vanished into the darkness of space.