ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE BEARS

Tom Holt

Tom Holt (b. 1961) has a remarkable capacity for producing an incredible diversity of humorous fantasy novels. Expecting Someone Taller (1987) was the first, followed by Who's Afraid of Beowulf? (1988), Flying Dutch (1991), Ye Gods (1992), Faust among Equals (1994), Djinn Rummy (1995), Paint Your Dragon (1996), Open Sesame (1997), Wish You Were Here (1998), Only Human (1998) and many more. Comedy plays with the emotions, and some of the best comic writing often counterbalances humour with pathos. Despite the amusing premise of the following story I also found it remarkably poignant. See what you think.

Not all the fearful monsters there need fill you full of dread;

The demon-flies speak English, and they love to scout ahead.

The mantacores will pull you through the swamp and through the mud--

But the little fuzzy animals will drink your blood.

--Frank Hayes, "Little Fuzzy Animals"

Captain's log, deep space exploratory vehicle Zarathustra. Date and location unknown.

Slade paused and looked back over his shoulder. Far behind him in the bay, the ship was sinking; only the engine nacelle was still visible through the cloud of swirling steam. He thought about the effect of seawater on a neutronium pulse reactor manifold, and scrambled behind a nearby rock.

Just in time. The ground shook like a laughing jelly, as most of the contents of the bay reared up into the air, hung for a moment and came down again in a hammer-heavy shower, drenching Slade to the skin. He'd been brought up in England, so he didn't mind that particularly; but the thought that the ship was gone for ever hit him so hard that he staggered and sat down hard on some unfamiliar species of jellyfish.

(And that was just the coffee machine. Just as well he'd had the wit to jettison the engine cores while they were still in orbit.)

Wherever this was, it had suddenly become home.

Pity about that.

He looked around. Seen from one perspective, it was fortuitous to say the least that he'd contrived to crash-land on a planet that was, at first sight, virtually indistinguishable from Earth. Most planets, he knew for a fact, weren't. Further, he had to admit that pitching on a planet that apparently teemed with organic life was a stroke of luck. The percentages were all against that; statistically, he ought to be either completely submerged in corrosive gases or standing on something that looked like post-industrial Cleveland. Instead--well, it could be a lot worse.

On the other hand...

Well, the ship was gone, and walking home from here wasn't a viable option. It was something that all spacefarers had nightmares about, usually after a late dinner of freeze-dried chicken korma--stranded on an alien world with nothing but an environment suit and an emergency toolkit. There had, of course, been a briefing about just such a set of circumstances at the Academy. He could remember the exact words.

Find a cliff and jump. You'll be better off.

Nothing if not succinct, those Academy briefings. But there didn't appear to be any cliffs in these parts, and besides, he wasn't quite ready to give up.

Captain's log, resumed, he dictated into the portable recorder. Ship lost, am stranded on unknown planet. Rest of crew presumed dead. Unable to salvage anything from ship. Bummer. End log.

The ground rose steadily in front of him, and on the crest of the rise was a wood. Shelter, he thought; probably food and building materials as well. Without looking back, he started to walk.

The trees looked for all the world like good old Earth pines, and the smell brought back a flood of childhood memories, most of them to do with rained-on picnics, arguing parents and getting lost in woods. Situated as he was, however, the concept of lost didn't have a whole lot of relevance; he couldn't bring himself to worry about it, in the same way that Joan of Arc, about to be roasted alive at the stake, probably wasn't too fussed about being out in the sun without a hat. He walked for about an hour, idly noticing that the wood seemed remarkably clear of brambles and undergrowth. As far as he could tell, it extended for at least a hundred acres. But it was unnaturally quiet; no birds sang, nothing moved except the tips of the branches as the soft breeze played around them. No beetles, even. Very strange.

Then he heard a woman scream.

He looked round, trying to gauge the direction; at which point, he saw her. She was human--also tall, young, blonde, dressed only in a few scanty rags. Although she was barefoot, she ran as if she was wearing three-inch heels. Her fingernails were that perfect elongated oval shape that usually only occurs in nature within walking distance of a beauty parlour. Once, she stopped to look over her shoulder; then she screamed again--"Eeek," she said, quite distinctly--and fell over a tree root.

Slade sat up on his heels. I could get to like it here, he thought. Obviously, evolution on this planet followed different rules--if he'd been a native of these parts, Charles Darwin would have given up on biology and gone into the tortoiseshell comb business--but who says things always have to be the same? In the country of the dumb, the half-witted man...

Then he heard another sound; faint and far away, but woodland acoustics are notoriously tricksy. It was like the distant popping of corks.

Way to go, Slade thought; he stood up and hurried toward the woman, noticing as he went that her hair was straight and looked as if she'd just spent three hours in a salon chair. "Excuse me, can I help..." he said, but she stood on one foot staring at him, her mouth open, a total lack of understanding behind her ocean-deep blue eyes.

Hey, Slade thought, maybe this isn't a planet after all. Maybe I just died and went to California.

The popping-corks noise was getting closer now; the woman heard it and went "Eeek" again. She tried to run, but her ankle was obviously giving her grief. "Here, let me give you a hand," Slade said, but she still didn't seem to understand; and it wasn't just the words, it was as if language itself wasn't something she was familiar with. Not just California, Slade muttered to himself. A couple of specific square miles around Malibu. He suppressed a big grin and started to walk forward--

--Just as a bunch of enormous bears appeared over the lip of a patch of dead ground, no more than twenty-five yards away. They were, to put it mildly, not like any other bears he'd seen before. For one thing, they were big--nine or ten feet tall--and they were standing upright, just like humans. Furthermore, they were wearing little short, tight red jackets (which reminded Slade of something he'd seen, years ago, but he couldn't quite think what) and they were carrying what looked like...

...Pop-guns. Yes, those little wooden tube things with a plunger in one end that fire corks. Slade stood and stared, rooted to the spot. Some party, even by Californian standards.

Then one of the bears saw him, raised his pop-gun to his shoulder and fired. Maybe he snatched the shot at the last moment; hard to say. At any rate, the cork missed Slade's head by the width of two fingers, whizzed past his ear and hit a tree; which sagged and fell over.

Some cork.

Slade had the wit to duck; just in time, because the other bears were shooting at him now. "Get him!" one of them roared, and three of the monsters lurched toward him, stuffing fresh corks into the muzzles of their weapons as they advanced. Not Malibu, then, Slade thought as he jumped up and started to run. More like LA. A cork hit the ground a foot or so in front of him, spraying him with shredded leaf-mould.

Fortunately, the bears couldn't manoeuvre very well among the trees, and he managed to lose them; or, at least, they got bored and gave up. When he was sure it was safe (relatively safe), he crept back to a high point overlooking the spot where he'd seen the girl, tucked himself in behind a tree-stump, and looked down.

The sight he saw was amazing: there was a whole mob of humans there now, all dressed in the same sort of rags, some of them screaming (but he couldn't make out any words; and then he remembered that he'd been able to understand the bears). They were being driven steadily inwards by a surrounding ring of the giant bears, who were shouting and firing their pop-guns in the air; others were cracking whips. It was like an armed uprising in Santa Claus' toy factory.

They were making the humans climb trees.

What the hell? Slade thought; and he noticed a low, ominous humming noise, like a giant underground generator--except that it seemed to be coming from high up in the treetops. Not a generator. Bees.

The humans had obviously done this before, although (equally obviously) they weren't enjoying it a bit. As they reached the upper branches, great clouds of bees sailed out like fleets of tiny nano-warships, completely enveloping the climbers. Slade could hear the screams, and the occasional thump as one of them lost hold and fell. The bears didn't seem in the least concerned about that; they were watching the climbers and grinning.

It was a matter of numbers; for every three climbers engulfed by bees, one made it through relatively unscathed to the hives lodged in the high forks; long enough to tear a hive out and drop it to the ground, where it cracked open. Honey, Slade realized. Why am I not surprised?

He didn't stay to watch the end. It wasn't a pretty sight, and he'd seen enough. Somehow, by God knows what freak of natural selection, on this planet humans were the dumb beasts and bears were the dominant species. Huge great big golden-blond bears, in cute little red jackets.

What's more, they smelled awful. So, he realized, did the whole planet; a foul stench of violets, lavender, rosewater and forest-fresh pine needles. He shook his head, took one last look at the red-coated, sleek-furred bears, and put his hand firmly over his nose.

"Pooh," he said.

How long he wandered alone in the forest, he didn't know. Since he had nowhere to go to, moving about was pointless in any case--not to mention extremely dangerous, if there were any more bear raiding-parties loose. But the thought of keeping still and hiding didn't appeal, somehow--maybe he was still just human enough to retain a trace of hope, like the last smear at the bottom of the honey-jar...

He didn't see the trap until it was too late, by which time the rope had tightened around his ankle, the bent sapling had straightened, and he was hanging upside down in the air. Marvellous, he thought; and then the bushes parted, and two creatures emerged. They were upright, about his own height, bright pink, with perky little ears--

Piglets?

--Except that they were wearing clothes; bizarre outfits, bright red, like body-length nappies. And they were talking, in words he could understand.

"What an extraordinary specimen," one of them said. "Look at the clothes it's wearing."

(Gimme a break, Slade thought.)

"And its eyes," said the other one, looking at him with its head slightly on one side. "To look at it, you could almost imagine it was sentient."

The other piglet laughed. "There you go again," it said. "That silly sentimental streak of yours. Come on, I'll lower the rope while you get the tranquillizer ready."

"Hey!" Slade shouted. It was hard to sound authoritative when he was dangling in the air like a rep's jacket in the back of a Ford Orion, but he put a fair amount of effort into it. They were, after all, only piglets. Weren't they?

The taller piglet stopped. "Extraordinary," it said.

"I've always thought that some of them have the ability to mimic speech," the other one said. "I'm convinced that with a little patient training--"

"You two," Slade yelled. "Get me down out of this thing, will you?"

The two piglets stared at him as if he'd just jumped up out of a cake. "Amazing," the tall one said.

"I told you, didn't I?" the other one replied. "It's the eyes, you know."

"Will you two quit fooling about and--" Which was as far as he got, before he heard the faint hiss of the tranquillizer, and darkness came up all around him.

He was in a cage.

As cages went, it wasn't so bad. It was high enough to allow him to stand up straight. There was a large bowl of water in the corner, and plenty of space to walk about. Compared with, say, an apartment in Tokyo it was lavish.

But it was a cage, the sort of thing you'd keep a pet animal in. Or (Slade shuddered at the thought) a laboratory specimen.

"Hey!" he yelled.

The cage was in a cave, and the only other occupant was one of those damned bears, which lifted its head and stared at him. "Shuddup," it growled; then it went back to its mindless humming. There was, Slade noticed, a pop-gun lying across its knees.

"Excuse me," he said.

"Shuddup," the bear repeated, scowling. "Who said you could talk, anyways?"

Maybe it was the way it said it; definitely a hint. Something about the idea of a talking human obviously bothered the hell out of the bear. Even over on the other side of the cave, Slade could almost feel the tension. "Tweep," he said. "Tweep tweep. Eeek."

The bear relaxed a little, looked away and hummed a little louder (tumpty-tum-tum, tumpty-tum-tum, tumpty-tumpty-tumpty-tum-tum; at the back of Slade's mind, a minuscule tendril of memory stirred uneasily). Slade turned his back to the creature and sat perfectly still, studying the construction of the cage. It was made of massive logs crudely but efficiently lashed together with strips of pale yellow rawhide (best not to think about that); without tools--

Tools. He remembered.

The emergency toolkit had gone; the pocket was empty. That was seriously worrying, if the guard bear's attitude to an apparently sentient human was anything to go by. Even if he could somehow explain away a plasma cutter and a sonic wrench as primitive dress accessories, the mere act of explanation wasn't going to make things any better for him.

"Human."

Instinctively he swung round, remembering too late his resolution to act dumb. Oh well; no point now in pretending he couldn't understand.

It was the piglets, the ones who'd snared him.

"You can understand what I'm saying, can't you?" said the tall piglet.

"Tweep," Slade replied, but his heart wasn't in it. "Tweep. Eeek?"

The piglet frowned. "Human?"

Slade reached a decision. The thought that he might be able to communicate, something he felt a desperate need to do, outweighed the warnings his instincts were yelling at him. "Tweep," he said, nodding sideways in the direction of the guard. "Tweep tweep."

"What? Oh." The piglet nodded, its eyes full of wonder. "You there," it called out. "Why don't you take a long lunch? We can look after the specimen."

"Got my orders," the bear's voice growled.

"Well, I'm giving you some more." The piglet's tone of voice spoke volumes about social hierarchies; a command, but Slade could feel the apprehension. Obviously the piglets were nominally higher rank, but still afraid of the bears. "Go and get something to eat, take a stroll, whatever. We'll be fine."

Slade didn't look round, but he could hear the thump-thump-thump of the bear's heavy paws. Even at that moment he couldn't help thinking: Bears don't move like that, they're gracefully efficient hunter-gatherers, their design honed down and streamlined by millions of years of trial and error. These bears waddled, as if they were afraid that anything more energetic would split their seams.

"It's all right," the piglet said, "he's gone. Well, you really are an exceptional specimen, human. In all my years in the profession--"

"Slade. My name is Slade."

"Slade." The piglet thought about that. "That's not very cute," it said.

He felt as if he'd just been hit over the head with a fish. "Cute?" he repeated.

"Cute," the piglet said. "You do know what 'cute' means, don't you?" it continued, and its tone of voice suggested that it was dealing with a concept that was vital; perhaps even holy. Imagine an evangelist describing his god, or an accountant explaining the importance of keeping all the relevant receipts, and you'll get the idea.

"Yeah, I know what 'cute' means," Slade replied. "You're cute," he added, with a slight shudder. "Even the goddamn bears are cute. You make it sound like it's important."

The piglets looked at each other. They were--shocked.

"It's all right," said the short one, after a long moment of silence. "It's only a human, I don't suppose it really understands what it's saying."

"You're right. But you--" The piglet was scowling at him. "Don't you ever say anything like that again, do you hear? It's going to be hard enough to keep you alive as it is, a talking human and all. It's all right with us, we're scientists, but if you suddenly start blaspheming where other people can hear you--"

Slade nodded. "Sorry," he said.

"You should be." The piglet was wiping its dear little snout with its funny little paw. A million animators working together for a thousand years couldn't have contrived a sweeter, more touching gesture. Slade felt like he'd just eaten a whole jar of marshmallows.

"I didn't realize it'd upset you," he said. "You see--" (How to put it?) "You see, I'm not actually from round here. I'm--"

"I knew it," the other piglet interrupted excitedly. "Of course, it's from the Outlands. That's right, isn't it, human? From across the great desert? There is another country out there, and that's where you're from."

Shit, Slade thought. "In a manner of speaking," he said. "Look, guys, do you think you could possibly see your way to--?"

"Tell me." The piglet was gazing at him with a terrible urgency in its little button eyes. "Tell me, human; where you come from--are there mice there? Mice that talk?"

"And funny little baby deer," added the other piglet anxiously, "who slip on the ice and bump their noses?"

"And white dogs with black spots? And mermaids? And flying elephants with enormous ears?"

A very disturbing idea freed itself from the sludge at the bottom of Slade's subconscious mind and started to drift slowly towards the surface; but he forced himself to ignore it. "In a sense," he replied. "It's true, I have seen things like that. A long time ago," he added, with a slight shudder. "But that was in another country, and besides--"

The piglets were staring at each other. "I know it's a terrible risk," said the tall one, "but we can't keep this to ourselves."

"But what if the bears--?"

"I don't care," the tall one interrupted. "Don't you see? It's living proof, there really is life outside the valley; and once they see it for themselves, with their own eyes--"

The short piglet nodded, as if reaching a truly momentous, split-the-atom decision. "You're right," it said, "of course. We'll have to tell Professor Eeyore."

The old grey donkey stared at him through the bars, and he winced as if he'd been burned. The sheer malevolence of its unwavering stare reminded him uncomfortably of his ex-wife's lawyer.

"Remarkable," it said at last. "Who else have you told about this?"

"Nobody." The piglets couldn't bear to look the donkey in the eye. Slade could see their point. There was something extremely disconcerting about the creature; misery fermenting into insanity. Something about the name, too... It belonged somewhere back in time, along with the smell of the pine needles.

"And have you tested it yet?" The donkey's voice was low, almost feverish. "Does it float?"

The piglets looked at each other. "Actually, Professor," they said, "no, we haven't. We were more interested, actually, in this possible missing-link aspect; you know, the great desert, the possibility of there being somewhere else..."

They tailed off. The donkey's stare seemed to soak up words like absorbent kitchen towel.

"So you haven't tested it," the donkey said slowly, rolling its long, sad eyes. "Well, we'd better do it now, then, hadn't we? Of course, it's too much to expect that anybody else would think of a perfectly obvious thing like that."

There was terror in the piglets' eyes. "But Professor--"

"Now."

"Yes, Professor."

Slade watched anxiously as they unlocked the cage door. "What's he talking about, do I float?" he asked, but they shushed him.

"Just don't say anything, all right?" whispered the short piglet. "It's going to be all right. Potentially," it added. "I mean, who knows? Maybe you do float, at that."

Somehow those weren't the most reassuring words Slade had ever heard in his life; but it wasn't the time to argue the point. If they were opening the cage, he was getting out; and once they were outside the cave, if he couldn't give two piglets and a broken-down old donkey the slip, then he wasn't the man he thought he was.

(Although he wasn't sure about that. In fact, he wasn't sure he ever had been...)

The daylight nearly blinded him; and while he was still dazzled, he heard bear voices. "Chief," one of them grunted.

"You." No question about it, there was no hint of reservation or fear in the donkey's voice when he spoke to the bears. "Arrest these two. They're blasphemers and abominators. And put a set of chains on that human; I don't want it getting away."

There was nothing Slade could do. Should've known better, he rebuked himself, as the manacles snapped shut around his ankles and neck. They were as bright and shiny as a new pin, with specks of glitter on them. Nothing I could've done, anyhow.

The bears marched him through what he took to be some kind of settlement. At any rate, there were strange, rickety structures up in the branches, and some of the trees had little (cute little) painted wooden doors let into them (although the colours were--well, strange; bright reds and yellows and livid greens, and all so goddamn shiny... Even Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen in his wrath never abused primary colours to quite such a ferocious extent). The clearing was crowded with animals; mostly bears, some lounging around aimlessly, others squatting on the ground with their muzzles buried in jars. Here and there he noticed a handful of rabbits--huge rabbits, with hoes and forks over their shoulders, talking at the tops of their high, folksy voices. At one point, he and his convoy were nearly trampled underfoot by something stripy and incredibly fast; but Slade didn't even want to think about what that might be.

It was a long, silent march, out of the forest into the encircling mountains beyond. The donkey led the way, setting a pace that the rest of the party were hard pressed to match. Both piglets radiated misery and doom, the bears were sullen and Slade knew better by now than to say anything. All in all, he hadn't been on a hike this depressing since his childhood holidays in Wales.

After climbing for an hour up a steep, rocky trail, they came to a deep gorge, at the bottom of which a river bounced and hissed through high, jagged rocks. A rope-bridge spanned the gorge, threadbare and crazy. The donkey stopped.

"Now we'll see," it said.

Even the bears looked nervous. "We going across that, chief?" one of them grunted.

The donkey grinned. "Only about half way," it replied.

It was at that point that the penny dropped in Slade's mind. It dropped down uncounted years, freefalling from generation to generation, from a time so far away as to be completely alien--more so than the talking donkey or the bears in red jackets who chased humans up trees. Slade was well aware that he didn't have a clue what it meant. It was like unearthing some incredibly ancient artifact whose purpose had been lost and could never be worked out from first principles. All he had was a word.

"Poohsticks," he said.

The donkey slowly lifted its head. "I was right, then," it said slowly. "It's true. You're the spawn of the Child. Do you understand what that means?" he asked of the two piglets, who huddled in quivering terror against the rock face behind them. "No, of course you don't. You call yourselves scientists, you conjured up such pretty dreams of a land far away across the burning sands; an enchanted place where a boy and his bear are forever playing." That was completely lost on the piglets--and Slade too, of course--but the donkey didn't seem particularly bothered. "A talking human, you thought," the donkey went on, its eyes fixed on the white spray lashing the rocks below, "how wonderful. Perhaps one day all humans can be taught to talk, and then they can take their place in a universal brotherhood of sentient species. Idiots," the donkey sighed, flexing its chest so much that a seam appeared between its neck and shoulder, from which poked out a tiny curl of white fluff. "Oh, you sneer at them" (with a nod toward the guards) "when you know they're not looking, you call them bears of very little brain and repeat the ancient slanders you learned at your grandfathers' trotters; but no bear ever dreamed of consorting with the spawn of the Child, or turning his back on Cute. Which is why I say," he added, his black button eyes suddenly hot with fury, "Cute may forgive you, but I never will."

"Excuse me," said Slade.

The donkey turned (a process involving a six-stage manoeuvre in the cramped confines of the bridgehead) "Well?"

"Sorry to be a pest," Slade said, "but would you mind explaining all that? You see, I haven't got a clue what you're talking about."

The donkey stared at him, then started to laugh. "You know," it said, "I think I almost believe you. Now wouldn't that be a fine irony: for the spawn of the Child to have forgotten the Story. It's too good to be true, of course. And besides, you've already proved that you know the Word."

"You mean 'poohsticks'? Hey, I don't know why I even said that, really. In fact, it was more like a sneezing noise--"

"It's in your blood," the donkey replied solemnly. "You are what you are. But tell me, do you really not know the Story?"

"Once, long ago," said the donkey, "before the river gouged out the valley, even, there was another human who talked, just like you do. He was only a cub, a Child; but not only did the animals who lived in the wood spare him, they accepted him as one of their own, an equal. I know it's almost impossible to believe," the donkey added, as the bears made hostile noises, "but that's what the Story said. The Child talked; and not only that, the animals listened to what he said, because he taught them the word of Cute. He and no other.

"It was the Child who first dressed up the bear in his smart red jacket, ordained for the piglet that absolutely ridiculous outfit that you all wear today. He laid down that the Tigger shall bounce and the Rabbit shall upbraid him for it. He decided that the mother should be Kanga and the baby Roo. Everything we are, even the bear's love of honey and humming, we had from him. He was our god. He gave us the Cute.

"Because of him," the donkey went on, "everything we say, do and are is just ever so slightly wrong. Because of him, the owl can't spell its own name. Why? Because of him, we believe that the north pole is a piece of wood stuck in the ground--we know perfectly well what the north pole really is, but even so, we must believe or else die the hideous death of the heretic. Why? Because of him, we have to sit on chairs that don't fit us at tables that aren't suited for our anatomy; we have to wear clothes we don't need and eat food that slowly poisons us--have you any idea" (the donkey almost howled) "how painful it is to eat nothing but thistles?--and live all our lives in some kind of hideous mockery, all because of what he taught us; the Cute. That was the Child, the talking human. And that," concluded the donkey, staring at Slade with such raw hatred that he covered his face with his hands and looked away, "is why humans must never be allowed to talk again--

"Unless," it went on, its voice suddenly soft, "they float."

Slade uncovered his eyes. "Excuse me?" he said.

The donkey's sigh came right up from its fetlocks. "It was written," it said simply. "There was a time when the Child grew angry with the first donkey and hurled it from the bridge into the great chasm. But when the donkey hit the river, it didn't sink; instead it floated on its back under the bridge with its feet sticking up in the air, and the Child looked upon the face of the waters, and behold, it was very cute. So the Child spared the donkey, the first of my line; and ever since we have vowed that if ever the spawn of the Child comes into our hooves we would show it the same mercy, no more and no less."

"All right," Slade replied, glancing down at the deep pool directly under the bridge and thinking of the flotation control modules built into his environment suit. "I don't have a problem with that. Okay, how do we do this? Do you want me to jump, or would you rather push? Either way's cool with me, it's entirely up to--"

"No!" broke in the taller piglet. "We can't let you do this. It's a sentient creature, Professor; it has a mind, possibly even a soul. For all we know, all the humans have souls. You can't--".

"It's all right, really," Slade tried to say. "I honestly don't mind. In fact--"

"Blasphemer!" The donkey pawed at the rocky track with its paws. "How can you say such things? Can't you see this abomination for what it is?"

"It's not an abomination!" shouted the smaller piglet. "It's--dammit, I think it's cute! I mean," it added, as the other animals, including the other piglet, stared at it in dumbstruck horror, "look at its dear little face. And its funny little crinkly pink paws. And the adorable way its sweet little nose turns up at the end..."

"Enough!" The donkey was beside itself with fury now. "I won't hear another word of this. Bears, throw that--that animal off the bridge."

"No!"

"Oh, not you as well," groaned the donkey, as the taller piglet stationed itself between the bears and its diminutive colleague. "That one too, then. Both of them. In your own time," it added irritably, as the bears hesitated. "Go on, that's an order."

The bears were looking at the donkey. "But Chief..." one of them said.

"Well? What?"

"You can't throw piglets off cliffs, Chief. It ain't right."

"Piglets is cute too," the other bear pointed out. "Ac'shly, piglets is reely cute."

"Could I just mention here that I really don't mind--?" Slade tried to say; but they weren't listening.

The donkey was lashing its tail, which came loose. Quickly, a bear pinned it back on. "I think they's cute too," it mumbled.

"Listen to yourselves!" howled the donkey. "You heard what it said, the abominations it uttered. How can something like that be suffered to live? Off the cliff with it, right now, unless you two want to go the same way."

"How'd it be," Slade persisted, "if I jumped and the rest of you stayed here? That way--"

With a turn of speed Slade would never have thought it capable of, the donkey charged. With the first heady impetus of its charge it butted the tall piglet backwards over the bridgehead stay. With a chilling "Eeek!" it wavered and fell.

"Oh my God," howled its fellow, "you killed Piglet. You ba--"

The donkey charged again; but the piglet took precisely one step to the left, allowing the donkey to pass neatly under the rope and over the edge. Just as it was about to vanish from sight, however, it lashed out with its tail, entangled the other piglet's leg, and dragged it off the ledge. The two animals fell together, their screams mingling into one cry of terror and abruptly ceasing. The two bears, meanwhile, hurled themselves against the rope and leaned over, either making a last vain effort to catch them or getting a grandstand view--the outcome was the same, whatever their motivation; the bridge buckled and twisted under their considerable weight, and they slid under the rope and down into the chasm. A second later, Slade heard the splash.

He waited for the bridge to stop swaying; then he edged his way onto it and looked out over the other side, watching as the current swept the five animals away towards the grinding ferocity of the rapids. They were, he couldn't help noticing, all bobbing along on their backs with their paws in the air. They looked--

--Kinda cute.

He could have walked for a week, three weeks, three months; he neither knew nor cared. When he was hungry, there were nuts and berries. When he was thirsty, even in the middle of the great desert, he found convenient waterholes and oases, complete with modular palm trees of regulation height and shade diameter. He wasn't in the least surprised.

Beyond the desert was another country. He found talking animals there too, different in some respects but basically similar; all of them cuddly and furry, all of them cute. Beyond that country was another country, and another beyond that, all slightly different, all pretty much the same. He passed through a country where the animals sang as well as talked--there was a panther and a bear and a snake and lots of extremely irritating monkeys, and none of them was particularly pleased to see him. When at last he reached the sea, he met talking dolphins and talking whales and even a talking crab, which he managed to tread on before it got too painfully on his nerves. Everywhere he went, every damn thing talked, except the humans; and they were all dumb. Really, really dumb. And that, too, figured.

One day, months or years later, he walked along a beach in the bright sunlight. He was alone; not a talking seagull or chatty killer whale in sight. As the sun rose higher, he looked around for somewhere to shelter from the heat, and happened to notice a small, round knoll sticking out of the side of the cliff. It was pleasantly cool under the lee of the mound, and Slade lay on his back for a couple of hours, his eyes closed. He drifted into a doze, until the sun moved down the sky and the slight change in temperature suggested to him that it was time to move on.

He opened his eyes; and for the first time noticed a shape. Why it attracted his attention he wasn't quite sure; it was little more than a vague, almost fractal suggestion of familiarity, but once he'd noticed it, somehow he couldn't pass on without investigating further. Picking up a piece of driftwood, he began to pick away at the loose sand. After a while he stopped and stared, then began shovelling madly, as if his life depended on it.

An hour later he stood in front of what he'd uncovered, the driftwood forgotten in his hand. It was a statue; a huge black plastic representation of a highly stylized mouse's head, with round ears and eyes and nose, a perky, toothy grin on its curved lips.

Thousands of years fell away, as if they'd never been.

Slade sank to his knees and began to sob uncontrollably. At last, he slumped forward, covering up the shattered plaque, on which he'd seen the words "Welcome to the United States of Disn--".

"You fools!" Slade shouted to the unheeding sky. "You did it. You finally did it!"

He lay on his face in the sand, weeping like a child; while above his head, the great plastic mouse smiled its implacable smile.