Pim and the Enyons

by R. C. Capasso

Loud music filled the room, making it hard to hear anything else. Pim moved forward to turn it up a notch. She knew the Enyons liked it best when the walls throbbed with sound.

Pim would do anything for the Enyons. Tonight, the three of them sat in a row, their large bald heads slightly nodding. They were having a party. And there was no one near to complain about the noise.

Most beings could not tell Enyons apart. Truthfully, very few inhabitants of the multi-species settlement on Kapo-3 even bothered to look at them. The Enyons managed waste disposal. They were the rag-and-bone pickers of the galaxy. Being their assistant put Pim so low on the social scale that she basically tunneled under society.

But Pim loved the Enyons and cherished their quite evident individual personalities.

The Captain had a flair for the dramatic. He had the air of a natural leader when he uttered whistling sounds through his small mouth. Pim could listen for hours. “I’ve gathered nut shells in the Wiston everglades, cleaned radiation from a dozen starships and recycled volcanic ash for the Alsonn,” he trilled proudly. “I lost a hand rounding up fire straws, but isn’t this one grand?” He’d hold up an arm ending in a dinged-up platinum prosthetic with attachments that opened and closed like a Swiss army knife. He never spoke of the period when he retrieved bodies from battlefields on Kandary, but Pim had glimpsed his discharge tablet.

Widow Lin felt Pim had possibility. “Yes, real possibility, dear,” she wrote. The Widow could speak — in fact she talked aloud to herself constantly — but to communicate with others she wrote small spidery messages in cannegi juice ink on a series of notebooks she wore in pockets all over her long gowns. The day she started a notebook for Pim alone, tears of belonging flooded Pim’s eyes. “Real possibility,” the Widow wrote every few days, although Pim did not know what possibility that could possibly be.

Terence was the sage of the group. Although he was the youngest, everyone still deferred to him. Yet he never offered a single word of information or advice. A typical dialog ran this way:

Captain: “I’m thinking I should sell those old oil drums to the Spelachs for housing. They’re not too sticky.”

Terence: (Complete silence)

Captain: “You’re right. The Spelachs deserve better. Perhaps I should turn the drums into instruments for the Corps marching band.”

Terence: (Continued silence)

Captain: “Oh, you’re saying I ought to make them into planters for Widow Lin’s garden. Terence, my boy, you’re brilliant!”

The Captain would bow to Terence, his prosthetic making light circles in the air. In fact, Terence was always right.

Terence had nothing to say to Pim, of course. But if she ever felt sad or doubtful about herself, as even a grateful, loved and accepted adolescent might, just sitting near him made her eventually think of better things.

The music rattled the walls, sending their rescued knickknacks and treasures dancing on the shelves. Music gave the Enyons their greatest joy. Enyons came from a dead world where there were no sounds of motors, no birdsong or howling wolves. Dry oceans crashed no waves, and the storms did not keen around buildings where every structure was falling to dust. It would take quite a wind to make noise just by brushing past a thin Enyon body. The wind never tried.

So music was their rich food, their passionate embrace, their reward, dream, and indulgence. The louder the better.

Pim played it for them. Every night, after they’d come home from their labors, she would take their filthy, radioactive uniforms and hand them clean, decontaminated garb. She would serve them cantova soup and fresh pan bread and sit at table with them. Before she started to wash the pots, she would turn the music on.

With mixed genetic makeup, Pim had ears that might some day go a little deaf. But that was a price she would pay gladly, to be part of the household, the non-Enyon that was treated like one of the family. If any of them, scooping up the refuse, ever found a discarded ribbon, a legible book, or a picture where you could trim off the blackened edges, they brought it back for Pim. If they could have given her new things, they would have scrimped to do it. But Enyons did not go into stores. If they could have sent her to a wonderful school, they would have done so. But there were no schools. They gave her what they had: themselves and their good spirit.

The Captain sometimes declared she was a princess waiting to be found.

Widow Lin wrote that she must remember them someday when her great possibilities came to fruition.

Terence benevolently said nothing.

Pim knew in fact that she was a foundling, an abandoned toddler picked up by the Captain from a trash heap on the east edge of the settlement. Part human, part Kelgian, mainly Laan. A mixed breed no one wanted in an expanding universe. A universe growing ever farther apart. With beings becoming more and more strangers to each other, smaller and smaller in each other’s eyes. Losing each other in the distance, as they clustered nearer to their own kind.

But Pim could see the Enyons, and they could see her. What did a slight ringing in your head matter, when someone saw you? Pim stuffed cotton in her ears and smiled at the Captain. He raised his platinum bottle opener. The volume was just right.

* * *

The last song ended, and they turned to smile at Pim.

She wasn’t there.

The Captain stood and wheeled around slowly. No sign of Pim in the shack. No echo of her voice or her step. He and Widow Lin called for her, while Terence fingered the damp dishcloth. Although it was dark outside, they opened the back and front doors to see if, despite her usual habits, she’d gone out for a breath of night air.

The Captain found the note on the back door. “Leave it at the spring or you’ll never see your slave again.”

Widow Lin picked up the paper, fingers trembling. She could not believe that anyone would use writing for so foul a purpose.

They didn’t know what “it” could be, but there was no question. The Captain rolled in the oil drums and lined them with ragged tarps so that the object demanded by the kidnapper would not be damaged. They took everything they owned — everything they had found or made with their own hands, everything but the very boards of the shack — and piled it all into the drums. Each of them wheeled or dragged a drum to the spring, the only one for miles around, a landmark known to all on Kapo-3.

Breathing hard and with trembling hands, they emptied the drums and, by the light of a lantern, lined up their worldly goods on a strip of grass beside the spring. At the touch of each object, they wondered if it could be the price of Pim’s return. Nothing had ever seemed so precious before.

They turned, then, empty-handed, leaving the drums and the lantern as well, and shuffled toward home. But for the first time ever, they took separate paths.

Widow Lin went back to the shack. Tearing apart each notebook, she wrote over and over. “Pim is not a slave. She is our dear one.” She tacked the sheets to the doors and windows and tied them on the branches of the stunted trees and shrubs all around the house.

The Captain went to the trash heap at the east side of the settlement. He had found Pim there once, and he needed so much to find her now.

Terence went just a few yards away from the spring and found a low rise in the ground. He lay down behind it, hiding himself, and began to watch.

Few beings passed by during the night, and fewer still paused to stare at the strange display of objects. One Spelach stopped, fingered one of the oil drums, and tapped it lightly with his claws. He stood so long that Terence twitched to jump out at him but, at length, the Spelach left. After an hour he returned, carrying a burlap sack. Terence held his breath. But the Spelach emptied the sack, removing one by one a collection of cans, shells, bits of glass and gendoor plumes. He arranged them carefully, took a step back, surveyed his contribution to the display, nodded and walked away.

The sun was beginning to lighten the sky when a small pale figure trotted toward the spring, halted, looked around, then tiptoed closer. It might have been a Kelgian; it was hard to tell. It moved past the big items, shoved aside a couple of books, and snatched something in its fist. Terence couldn’t see; that might have been where they put the collection of pretty stones. The figure pulled the object close to its face, turning it in the faint light, then gave a sort of hop and sped away.

Terence rose and followed without a sound.

The creature cut cross-country toward an outcropping of rocks where transients set up pods, tents and lean-tos. It dove into a listing cabin, emerged a moment later with a pack on its back, and ran away from the sun. The cabin door remained half open and, in a moment, Pim appeared, blinking.

Terence ran and caught her in his arms. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She looked up, tears halting among her lashes at the sound of his voice. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

They walked back past the spring and the collection of their possessions. Pim stopped and stared, turning to Terence, who shrugged. She bent and picked up their music maker.

They reached the shack as Widow Lin stood at the door, underlining the words on her notes: “dear one.”

They didn’t have the door closed before Pim asked, “Where is the Captain?”

No one knew. So Pim turned on the music, loud enough to make the walls shake.

The Captain heard and came running. If the music was back, so was his Pim.

From then on, though it wasn’t necessary to Pim, they all took turns doing the dishes. She sat in the middle of them when the music played. They set the volume to suit her and played her favorite song first.