“I have something distressing to report,” began What-the-Dickens, but Old Flossie nudged him and hissed in his ear, “Are you incapable of remembering the rules? You don’t speak until you are asked a question.”
“What’s the report, stump mistress?” asked Doctor Ill.
“Most of the agents returned with their matériel. The rogue element here, What-the-Dickens, arrived more or less on time, having secured the teeth of both clients.” Old Flossie sounded impressed despite herself. “The rookie on probation is late and presumed incompetent.”
“She’s probably dead by now,” said What-the-Dickens hotly. “Her name was Pepper.” He realized his mistake. “Is Pepper. Her name is Pepper.”
“She didn’t quite have the goods, did she?” remarked Doctor Ill.
What-the-Dickens construed this as a question, and answered it. “I think she did,” he stated. “She took care of me when we first met, though I’m sure I dragged her down. Then in her makeup mission, she was given a second assignment. We even managed to finish that task, too, and get back on time. I mean, I did, on her behalf.”
So I’ve decided not to lie, he observed to himself. Well, might as well be banished for telling the truth.
“You worked together.”
“Is that such a big deal? You gave her two missions: two agents working together did the job. Two equals two.”
“Hmm,” said Old Flossie. “They say a lot of things about what equals what, but does it add up to anything? Stuff and nonsense. Math is a myth, as Doctor Ill always says.”
“Well, together we fulfilled her requirements,” continued What-the-Dickens. “So though she is presumed dead by now, I want to petition that Pepper be granted her license anyway.”
Doctor Ill’s eyebrows went up. “What good does it do to grant a license to a corpse?”
“Honor,” said What-the-Dickens. “Honor, and memory, I guess.”
“Forget it,” said the crown. “You’re getting above yourself, little orphan boy. Leaving your wild calculations aside, you might as well know that I set her a daunting task to teach her a lesson. To fulfill two missions — intentionally sited at a great distance one from the other — was a virtual impossibility. She couldn’t achieve those tasks even with your illegal help.”
“But she did — or we did, I mean,” he said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Are you saying you set her up to fail?”
“She needed taking down a peg. She didn’t have the right stuff, I’m afraid, and I had to prove it to her. If you come back in her stead, with both teeth claimed at the correct outlets — well, it only proves you cheated in some way. It isn’t possible for a skibberee to cover so much ground in such a short time.”
“Well, I had help,” he began to explain. “The slipstream of a truck on the highway — and a bird of my acquaintance —”
“You protest none of my assertions, I see. Also you proudly claim credit for breaking the rules. Skibbereen don’t work in pairs and they don’t accept help from strangers.” Doctor Ill rubbed the back of one of his ears and looked weary.
“A truck isn’t alive, and the bird was no stranger; she was my stepmother, in a very incidental manner —”
“We don’t accept help. I appreciate that you’re a slow learner, and inexperienced in the ways of our trade, but even so.”
“All these rules. You train up Agents of Change,” he begged. “So, why not change?”
“Silence.” This was not so much thundered as sighed. “I can see I’m going to have to discuss colony policy with you if you’re to be an Agent of Change.”
“What?” said What-the-Dickens.
“Ask no questions,” said Old Flossie automatically, though she sounded surprised herself.
“Well, it appears there is a position open,” said Doctor Ill. “You’ll be on probation, of course. It takes a while to get licensed. But you seem like Agent material.”
As simple as that. I’m in, he thought.
“You’ve got something rather magnificent in your arms,” continued the crown. “Tribute, I imagine. What is it?”
“The tooth of a wild beast.”
Doctor Ill scratched the stump of one of his missing legs. “Where did you come across it?”
“I extracted it from the mouth of a tiger.”
“Hah! A likely story. Still, it’s impressive.” Doctor Ill picked it up and whistled at the weight. He tilted the tiger tooth toward the cage where his mouse was penned.
The mouse reared back in terror, squeaking.
“This could come in handy, I see,” said Doctor Ill ruminatively. “If we ever found ourselves needing to attack another colony, we could mount this on a stake and carry it like a totem. It would terrify those libertines over at Watermill Corners.”
“If we’re so small — so fragile — why do we attack one another’s colonies?”
“It’s the economy, stupid,” said Old Flossie. “Supply and demand and consolidation of resources. It’s all an accounting problem when you get down to it.” She sounded somewhat tired, for the first time. “All in good time, you’ll learn. Little by little. Small doesn’t mean tender.”
“It doesn’t add up,” said What-the-Dickens forthrightly.
“What does?” she snapped back. “That things should ‘add up’ is a whole lot of hooey, if you ask me.”
“If we’re so small and scared and mean,” countered the orphan skibberee, “why do we bother? Why do we do it? Why do we put wishes in the way of humans, where they can find them and use them? To spend our time that way seems too noble, when those humans hardly deserve wishes of any kind!”
Doctor Ill had finished tucking the tiger tooth on a shelf of mementos, where it looked truly terrifying. But his expression, when he turned back, was anything but dreadful.
“Dear boy,” he said. “It is really very simple. We plant the possibility of wishes coming true only in the paths of human children. Children still trust that when they wish on something bright — a birthday candle, a penny in a fountain —”
“A shooting star,” interjected Old Flossie.
“— that their wish will come true. Wishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then — when they have grown — they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm — greed, that kind of thing — but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better.”
“But what is in it for us?” demanded What-the-Dickens. By now he was cross nearly to the point of tears. “Everything in our life is a trade, I’ve learned. What do we get out of it?”
Neither Old Flossie nor Doctor Ill spoke for a moment. “It cheapens skibbereen to talk about it,” said the stump mistress in something of a growl. “We struggle to be proud, even if we’ll never be mighty. The truth is this: We skibbereen have very little lives, but see — we can sometimes do some good.”
“And why do we bother?” concluded Doctor Ill, rhetorically. “I don’t really know. Because it helps our little lives seem less small, perhaps. That is all.
“Anyway” — he clapped his hands, startling Muzzlemutt — “welcome to our small, small life here at Undertree Common. May you be as happy as it is socially useful to be.”
He looked as if he were about to grasp What-the-Dickens’s hands. But skibbereen don’t touch each other, as Pepper had often said, so Doctor Ill merely clasped his own hands and rubbed them vigorously, as if congratulating himself on his speechifying.
“What I’m wondering about Pepper —” began What-the-Dickens. Before he could stutter his question to its conclusion, however, the fireflies in wall recesses began, suddenly and in unison, to blink. They flashed a sequence of cool-water colors, from baby blue to electrified cobalt.
“Blue alert!” brayed Old Fossie.
“Enemies!” hissed Doctor Ill, nearly turning blue himself. “Foreign agents breaching our borders! To your
stations, kinmates!”
What-the-Dickens, still rubbing his wing tips in disbelief, was abandoned as Old Flossie and Doctor Ill half ran, half flew, so helter-skelter that it was more like skelter-helter. Right out the door of the office. This is to say, Old Flossie ran and Doctor Ill flew, for although he lacked the use of his legs, his wings still worked just fine.
Enemy attack! thought What-the-Dickens. So soon after being conscripted. Wouldn’t you know it.
Could it be a ruse to test my civic loyalty? That would be just like them. . . .
Nonetheless, he hurried up to the cage of the mouse. He fiddled with the gate and flung it open. “You better skedaddle while the skedaddling is possible.”
But the mouse had been in captivity too long, and he was terrified of the tiger tooth. Of course he would be! Mice didn’t even like cat’s teeth, did they, and this was a tooth of the crown cat.
What-the-Dickens didn’t have time to be persuasive. “Sorry, mate,” he said to the wee timorous beastie. “The coast is clear, so I’ve gotta scram. Best of luck to you and all that.”
The mouse said, Luck? What’s luck? No one heard him but What-the-Dickens. But the orphan skibberee could not afford the time to decide whether he was imaging what animals could think or he was actually hearing them. The alarms were now blinking in the corridors as he hurried after the crown and the stump mistress. Flashes of acid yellow striped the blackout darkness.
What-the-Dickens caught up with Doctor Ill and Old Flossie as they skirted the edge of the auditorium.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of skibbereen had already rushed into the semi-darkness, linking their arms and swaying back and forth. Onstage, Silviana was carrying on as best she could given that the props of doll head and toothbrush brigade were absent. “The scientist, see, had a problem with his overbite as well as a pair of rogue incisors, see. His diction was lousy. . . . Edith didn’t hear ‘true fritillary.’ She thought he said, ‘Tooth fairy.’”
“Tooth fairy,” murmured the audience, pacified just enough to keep from screaming.
Silviana gestured to Doctor Ill by shaking her hands theatrically; she seemed to be saying, Release me from this obligation! But perhaps she was just saying, Stay and see how well I can perform under duress!
As he followed along, What-the-Dickens couldn’t help thinking that it was easier for him to guess at the perceptions of animals than at the thoughts of his own kind.
Silviana looked worried. But how could that be? She had no doubt.
What-the-Dickens pursued Doctor Ill and his associate as they plunged into a dark passage corkscrewing downward.
“Where are we going?” he asked, when he finally caught up with them on the straightaway.
“You? I didn’t call for you,” said Doctor Ill. “Well, you can help by lending some muscle, as long as you’re here. We’re going to sneak a good look from the observation deck and see if we can determine the nature of the invasion. I hope it’s not that ghoulish colony over at the human cemetery.”
“Grave End, you mean,” interjected Old Flossie.
“Right. Northwest Sector, Division X. They’re a morbid and a bellicose lot, and they’ve had designs on our digs for a while.”
“Doctor Ill, surely our sentries in the field would have given an earlier alarm?” asked Old Flossie.
“Unless they’ve been dealt with by superior forces mounting a surprise attack,” said Doctor Ill coolly. “It’s been known to happen.”
They reached a tall shaft, greenly lit. What-the-Dickens guessed it must be a hollowed-out tree that hadn’t yet fully died. The circumference of the shaft wasn’t wide enough for a skibberee to open his or her wings to fly straight up. Instead, the shaft was supplied with a makeshift elevator.
Old Flossie climbed into a bucket made out of a paper coffee cup, with a picture of the Parthenon printed on it in deep blue ink. Several pieces of dental floss, threaded and knotted through holes punched beneath the ribbed rim of the cup, rose up into darkness overhead. Other pieces — perhaps the returning ends of those same ascending strands — hung down. These dangling strands finished in nets fastened around small stones, which hung like the several pendulums of stilled clocks.
“If you’re coming, come; put your back into it,” cried Old Flossie to What-the-Dickens. He climbed aboard.
“Wait,” called a voice. Silviana appeared, flustered and out of breath.
“You’re supposed to be distracting the timid,” snapped Doctor Ill. “Are you abandoning your station?”
“I have no doubt,” said Silviana, and she climbed aboard without waiting to be invited.
“Six, sixteen, seventy-six, heave!” cried Old Flossie. What-the-Dickens watched what the others did, and he did the same. He grabbed a pebble-cord and pulled it hand over hand, looping the cord about his forearm. They all let the pebbles drop below, and the cup lifted jerkily up. Hand over hand they hoisted themselves aloft, using pulleys mounted overhead.
“Don’t go! I’m coming too!” screamed yet another voice, and Clea — the banker with the pipe-cleaner spectacles — appeared beneath them. But she was clocked by one of the lowering pebbles, and they heard no more from her after that.
“It’s been years since a breach of our defenses,” muttered Old Flossie between her teeth. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when it happened again. I wanted to be dead by now.”
“Shut up,” counseled Doctor Ill between gritted teeth.
They reached a landing station — an old knothole in the trunk. They looped the cords tightly around the thread spools nailed laterally in place for just such a docking maneuver.
Then, one by one, they climbed out through the knothole onto a limb that served as a lookout high above the stump.
“Oh, mercy’s sakes,” said Doctor Ill.
It took What-the-Dickens a few seconds to make out what was mesmerizing the others.
The body of a skibberee was laid to rest on the stump runway, curled up on itself.
“It’s Pepper!” cried What-the-Dickens. Old Flossie whirled on him and slapped him across the face, then whipped a finger to her lips, indicating Silence!
What-the-Dickens tried to brush past the crown, but Doctor Ill put a strong hand on his shoulder. “It’s not safe; it could be a trap,” he whispered.
“You’re not supposed to touch me. Let go. She might still be alive!” said What-the-Dickens, and broke free.
“It’s the wind shaking her corpse. You’re mistaken. Don’t you dare,” advised Doctor Ill, but the rogue skibberee did dare. He threw himself off the limb and swept in a descending half circle, coming neatly to rest on the runway. My landing has improved, he thought. For once I didn’t collapse on her and hurt her. Anyway, maybe she’s already dead.
“Pepper! Speak to me,” said What-the-Dickens. But Pepper seemed to be beyond language.
Had she been able to fly home on a damaged wing? It must have taken everything out of her. Had she then perished on her own doorstep, of fatigue and war wounds?
Skibbereen don’t touch each other. He knew that now, but he felt her wings anyway. They were cool and dry, like silk leaves.
But her slim wrist was still warm. What did it mean?
“She needs your attention, Doctor Ill,” called What-the-Dickens. “She might still be alive. I can’t tell.”
He looked up. Even knowing what the crown looked like, and where he stood, What-the-Dickens couldn’t locate Doctor Ill among the foliage. How well a motionless skibberee is camouflaged. . . . Hidden, and forbidden.
There was no sound of the footfall of infantrymen, no buzz of skibbereen attacking from the air. Only the morning wind among leaves, the hoot of a car horn on the cloverleaf, the belch of a frog digesting a bit too much swamp water.
Doctor Ill will be torn, thought What-the-Dickens. He’s not a bad skibberee, and he has a weight on his shoulders. The good of the colony is his obligation.
And perhaps he thinks it is a trap. After all, something set off some ala
rm or other.
But here she is, trembling in the dawn light, alive or dead or halfway in between. Even if she has been stripped of her name, and her chances of advancement.
“She’s one of ours,” he called again. “Please.” Then, courteously and in case it made a difference, he corrected himself. “She’s one of yours. Even if she’s dead, she belongs to the Undertree Common in a way I never will, even now.”
“Aha,” said a voice like thunder. “It’s true! There are more of you!”
What-the-Dickens felt a striated cloud made of clammy pinkish ham close about him. He nearly passed out from the smell of pencil shavings, Ivory soap, buttered toast, and last year’s acorns penned up in a cigar box. The smell, you guessed it, of human boy.
It must be Gage. Gage Tavenner. That kid Gage had brought Pepper back. Did he mean to exchange a dead skibberee for a live one? He was cupping What-the-Dickens in his moist hands, lifting him in the air, and bringing him near the furnace of peanut butter breath.
“She said there were more,” said Gage. “Hi, you.”
“Let him go,” came a small but bellowing voice. The crown was breaking silence. Breaking the rules. “Put him down, you overgrown cad.”
“Another one! The place is crawling with them,” said Gage.
Doctor Ill darted into view and took up a military position. His porcupine cane doubled conveniently as a rapier.
What-the-Dickens rubbed his eyes. The crown was flanked on one side by Silviana, prancing prettily in the air as if on an invisible miniature pony, and on the other side by Old Flossie, who proved it was possible for skibbereen of certain healthy proportions to hover with their arms folded across their bosoms.
Brave souls, he thought. This Gage could wipe them out of the air with a single swipe of his elbow.
“Leave him be. Just set him down gently and nothing will happen to you,” said Doctor Ill. “Did you hear me, you lump? You lummox?”
“Okay, okay. Hold your horses.” Gage set What-the-Dickens back down on the stump. The uppers from Undertree Common descended, and at touchdown took their places near the orphan skibberee. They stood together — rather uncomfortably close for skibbereen — as Gage in striped pajamas knelt in the weeds that grew near the stump.