Kir Bulychev - Alice - The Girl From Earth

“No.” I said.

“Too bad.” The snake answered, but found a cube of sugar somewhere else.

On seeing the sugar the sphere showed purple highlights.

“He’s happy.” The snake said. “He is a pretty boy, isn’t he?”

“Very pretty.” I agreed.

“We constantly expose them to new sensations on purpose, in order to get unusual colors. If you’d like I can hit him? He’ll become a superb shade of black.

“No, don’t.” I said. “Would you be able to sell him to us for the Moscow Zoo?”

“No.” One of the snake’s heads answered, at the time the other was silently hanging down. “Perhaps we can do an exchange?”

“But I don’t have anything to trade?”

“We’ll take one of these, this little creature here.” The snake said and pointed a dozen or so extensors at Alice.

“Can’t be done.” I said, trying not to get angry, in as much as I had myself only recently taken a sapient being for a non-sapient bird. “This is my daughter.”

“Foo! What a horror!” The snake shouted angrily. “I shall call a Trade Supervisor immediately. This is absolutely forbidden!”

“What is forbidden?” I asked.

“It is forbidden to deal in one’s own progeny. Giving them in exchange for animals is also forbidden. Didn’t you bother to read the Rules posted at the entrance to the Bazar. You are a monster and a barbarian!”

“Nothing of the sort.” I broke out laughing. “I would have as much success selling Alice as she would me.”

“That would be worse.” The snake shouted, clutching the colorful ball of the Empathicator to its side; the Empathicator, evidently, had become terrified and turned white with red chevrons along its back. “A daughter selling her own father? What is the universe coming to?”

“Honestly,” I implored, “we are not selling each other. On Earth, in general, it is not accepted for parents to sell their own children, or for children to sell their parents. We just came here together to buy some rare animals for our Zoo.”

The snake thought about it a while and said:

“I really don’t know enough about your species to know if I should believe you or not. It’s better to ask the empathicator. He is that sensitive.” He bent both heads to the Indicator and asked him:

“Can this strange being be believed?”

The empathicator turned emerald green.

“As strange as it may sound, he affirms that you can be believed.”

Then the snake grew quiet and said in quite a different tone:

“But you do want me to give you to them?”

The empathicator turned gold like the rays of the sun.

“He wants it very much.” The snake said, his voice drenched with emotion. “Take him before I change my mind. And yes, this booklet “Feeding your Empathicator, and keeping him in the best color.”

“But I don’t know what I can give you in return.”

“Nothing.” The snake said. “I did, after all, insult you with my suspicions. If, in return for the Empathicator, you will agree to forgive me, I will be delighted, at least until evening.”

“Not really,” I said. “I wasn’t at all insulted.”

“Not in the least.” Alice said.

Then the snake rippled the mass of its extensors and the Empathicator’s globular body flew into the air and landed in Alice’s hands. The Indicator remained gold, except along the spine where blue ripples ran up and down as though they were alive.

“He is satisfied.” The snake said and quickly crawled away, not listening to our protestations.

The Empathicator jumped down from Alice’s hands and walked beside us, rocking back and forth on thin straight legs.

Coming toward us was an entire family of Audities. A large male with ears larger than an elephants, his wife, and six small children. They carried a canary in a cage.

“Look.” Exclaimed Alice. “Isn’t that a canary from Earth?”

“Yes.”

“This is not a canary.” The father Audity said severely. “It is a bird of paradise. But it is not at all what we had really wanted to buy. We were searching for a real Blabberyap.”

“And not found one.” The little Audites said in chorus, raising a storm with their ears.

“There isn’t a single Blabberyap.”

“That is astonishing!” The Audity woman said. “Why in the past year the Bazar was half filled with Blabberyap birds, and now they have quite vanished. Do you know why?”

“No.” I said.

“We don’t know why either.” The Audity said. “So we had to settle for a Bird of Paradise.”

“Papa,” Alice said when they had gone, “We need a Blabberyap bird.”

“Why? I was amazed.

“Because everyone needs a Blabberyap.”

“All right, let’s go in search of a Blabberyap.” I agreed. “Only first I want you to look at the Sewing Spider. And if they’ll part with him, we are definitely going to buy. Our Zoo has dreamed of having one of those for a long, long time.”

Alice and I traipsed our way around the whole bazar, buying at least seventeen different animals and birds for the Zoo, the vast majority of them totally unknown on Earth and never before seen by human beings. Alice asked each and every trader or collector:

“But where can we get a Blabberyap bird?”

Their answers were all the same:

“The Blabberyaps stopped laying eggs.” One said.

“The Blabberyaps have all died out from some mysterious illness.”

“It’s impossible to capture a Blabberyap bird.”

“Someone bought up all the Blabberyap birds on the planet.”

“There never were any such birds as the Blabberyap anyway.”

And many, many other answers. Nor, for that matter, did we understand how the disappearance had taken place. Everyone recognized this as fact: earlier, the Blabberyap had been one of the most common of birds and everyone loved to keep them at home and in zoos. But over the last year nearly all the Blabberyaps had simply vanished. Gone. Dissapeared.

It was said that people went from house to house and bought Blabberyaps. It was said that someone stole the Blabberyaps from the zoos. It was said that all the Blabberyaps in the Blabberyaperies had contracted some sickness or other and died.

The more hopeless finding a Blabberyap became, the more Alice wanted to get a look at the bird.

“But just what is a Blabberyap, I mean?” I asked Krabakas of Barakas, whose acquaintance I had just made.

“Nothing really special.” Krabakas answered politely, swaying at the end of his blue tail. “They talk.”

“Parrots talk too.” I said.

“I don’t know anything about parrots. Perhaps parrots are what you call our Blabberyaps.”

“Maybe.” I agreed, although parrots could hardly have evolved on this planet. “Where would they have come from?”

“What I don’t know, I don’t know.” Krabakas of Barakasa said. “Maybe they originated on this very planet. I have heard that Blabberyaps are capable of traveling between the stars and always return to their home nest.”

“If you can’t find us a Blabberyap, we’d better return to the ship.” I told Alice. “All the more because your Empathicator is starving.”

The Empathicator heard my words and as a sign of agreement became a bright green.

We turned toward the entranceway and immediately Krabakas’s cry from behind stopped me. He hung over the cages like a blue whirlwind.

“Hey!” He shouted. “Earth humans! Come back here right away!”

We returned. Krabakas had wound himself into a little ball from excitement and said:

“You want to see a Blabberyap? Well, consider yourselves fabulously lucky. I have a fellow here hiding behind these cages who brought a real, fully grown Blabberyap bird to the Bazar.”