“Well, there’s no chance until you’re fifteen, I’m telling you. And if you don’t believe me, you can go ask Africa.”
“I believe you,” he mumbled furiously, angry mostly at himself for not checking. His own mam would have told him if he’d asked. And he wouldn’t soon forgive the coach who hadn’t told him, either. Just wait until next year when they asked him to be on the team and he told them no. He’d switch to Settlement Four, that’s what he’d do. “What do you want to fish for.”
“Creelies. Mam said she’s been hungry for creely legs for ages.”
“That means climbing all the way up to the Gobbles.”
“Doesn’t take any more energy to climb the Gobbles than it does to play scissor hockey all afternoon,” she told him sarcastically.
“Maybe that monster that got Sam is up there. Have you thought about that?”
“Sam killed it, Jep. And everybody’s looked everywhere for more of them, and there aren’t any. If anybody thought there were more of them, we’d be confined to settlement, and nobody’s said one word about that.”
Jep scowled at her, conceding the point. “Have you got bait?”
“I’ve got half a poultry-bird, cut up in pieces, then left out for a couple of days.”
Jep made another face and went to get his jacket, thinking about creelies. In the Archives, creelies were listed somewhere between octopuslike and lobsterlike animals, in that they had both tentacles and a jointed exoskeleton—which they sometimes left to wander around in the nude—but they were fishlike, too, for they had fins and scales and almost an endoskeleton as well. The finned, scaled, tentacled critter moved around under the banks of mountain streams, sometimes in its hinged, legged shell, and sometimes, sans shell and sans legs, it just swam off naked while the legs and shell stayed under the bank. A neuropad at the top of each leg matched up to a neuropad on the body, and when the animal entered its exoskeleton, it simply reestablished neural contact. The legs had a separate heart-lung system as well, to protect them during long separations. There was some controversy among the biologists as to whether the creelie was actually one animal or two, acting in symbiosis.
Whether one or two, the object in creely fishing was to attract the creature, naked or housed, to a blob of half rotted meat. If the creely was in its shell, one pulled it out of the shell and dropped the tentacled creature back into the stream while retaining the shell and legs. If one caught it nude, one tied a thread to it and let it flee back to its legs, then pulled it out and stole the legs. A nude creely was inedible, but the detached legs were delicious. Those arguing that there were two animals involved used this fact to telling effect. Those arguing for one animal pointed out that the nude creely soon grew new legs and a new shell. Those not bothering to argue ate the steamed legs with butter and a touch of sour juice from the thick leaves of the cit tree, amid much gourmandish delight.
Bringing the spice of danger to the sport of creely fishing was the possibility of fishing up a creelylike creature that, when separated from its legs, sprayed an unpleasant and foul-smelling irritant in all directions. This creature, differing from the creely only in insignificant details of tentacle arrangement, was called a bomber. Both Jep and Saturday had been sprayed, more than once, but not for several years.
“What you’ll do today is catch a bomber,” Jep announced as they went toward the mushroom house to fetch the half-rotted poultry-bird. “Only, you won’t get it all over you. You’ll get it all over me.”
“I haven’t done that since we were ten,” Saturday protested. “And I didn’t do it purposely.” She opened the door to the mushroom house and took a lantern from the rack by the door.
“You got it all over Willum R., too.”
“He forgot about it. He doesn’t keep reminding me all the time the way you do. Willum R. is a true friend,” she said loftily.
“I only remind you to focus your mind, Saturday Wilm. That’s what you need, focus.” He followed her down the aisle, stepping in the puddle of light she allowed him from her lantern.
“I don’t need any more focus than you do,” she said, throwing a fresh-picked mushroom at him, which bounced harmlessly off his head and rolled away down the stone-floored aisle between the beds. “Your mom tells my mom all the time that you’re a scatterhead.”
“Who’s a scatterhead?” He leapt at her in a low tackle, knocking her down and sitting on her. “Now, who?”
“You.”
“Not me.”
“Let me up, you loader-bottom. You weigh a ton.”
“One kiss, that’s the price.”
“Oh shit, Jep.”
“One.”
“I’m not old enough for kissing.”
“That depends who wants one.”
“Just one.”
He took his toll chastely, not trying for any ardent effects. He liked kissing Saturday and didn’t want her offended at him. He liked hugging her even better, because she was soft and sort of supple in ways he wasn’t. He tried a hug when he’d finished with the kiss, then let her up.
“If my mom knew you were all the time kissing me, Jep Wilm, she’d baby-proof me so fast …”
“Kissing!” he cried, red-faced. “That’s all.”
“Well, just don’t get any ideas.”
He glared at her. “Saturday Wilm, I’ve had that idea about you ever since I was about nine, but I’m not going to do anything about it yet.” He helped her up. “And when I do, we’ll both know about it in advance, believe me.
She flushed, not willing to tell him she’d had the same idea. She had gone so far as to consult the Archives from the information stage at the school, to determine whether there was any genetic problem with the Wilm family, and to consult her own birth records to determine whether, by any chance, she and Jep had the same progenitor. They didn’t. Jep was Sam Girat’s get, which everyone
