Midnite Moving Co

Michel woke and looked down from the tree he slept in.  He rarely slept in the same tree for more than a week, as he could damage it. He was sleeping in the tallest tree in CRAB Park to stay close to George’s apartment, so he could keep watch on George.

He could see the ocean.  There was always the possibility she could swim into the harbour to see him.

More fool George, to spend money on shit like an apartment. With his hair out he didn’t even have to get wet in the rain if he didn’t want to. And cable? — which Michel was convinced was among the last of the really great corporate scams — why bother with it? He’d once watched a lot of TV but it was mostly to see what people were thinking was important, and then he realized that none of it was. His preference for carefully curated personal interactions over media reasserted itself in the 1990’s, and he’d never bothered with anything but radio news since. 

He stretched out his arms and legs and performed a controlled fall like a Jacob’s ladder down the trunk of the tree. Sometimes he went for a run and a dunk in the morning, but not always. He silently and invisibly raided one of the trash bins for his breakfast. His nutrition buds told him what was necessary, and he ate it. 

Humans made such a big deal out of food that he felt sorry for them. Obviously their evolutionary path was much more sociable, and there wasn’t really a moral problem with it, but being that dependent on other people for something without which you’d die in less than six weeks gave Michel the shivers, so he avoided dependency. He silently and invisibly defecated and buried it.

Sixers vary widely in their sleeping habits. Watermorphs sleep in the ocean. Most of the four-legged versions of the landmorphs sleep on the ground, and any birdmorphs sleep in trees or on rooftops if trees are not available.

Jesse, hearing this, asked what the hell happened during thunderstorms.

“Nothing. I love thunderstorms.”

“What happens if you get hit by lightning?”

“I die, probably. It’s one of our swears, ‘rocks and lightning!’ ‘cause they’re just about the only two things that can kill us.”

“Hunh! Bullets can’t kill you but lightning can!” Jesse said in wonder.

“Oh, I’d have a tough time if somebody hit me with a few quick rounds from a 50 cal,” Michel said, placidly.  “Or a drone strike. That’d make me hop around for sure. Buckshot’s nothing, just makes me clang for a while after.”

“Clang?”

“You know, echo,” Michel said, illustrating this by cupping his hands, palms together, about 15 cm apart and shaking them.

“I don’t echo inside; I’m not hollow,” Jesse said.

“Neither me,” Michel said. “And that’s not quite right ‘cause you’re a tube. But at least you know what’s inside you. I got no clue. Could be ghosts and water beetles and cupcakes, for all I know.”

“Don’t you have a heart? And I don’t get how you can both eat and shit without having a tube to do it with.”

“I don’t know if I do have a heart, and I don’t know if I don’t have one. Just know that everything works,” he said, and slapped himself.  There was a loud reverberation, as if a gong had been struck.  Jesse inserted his fingers in both ears and waited for the noise to die down.

“You say you don’t breathe.”

“No lungs,” Michel said. “Talk with a diaphragm.”

“You live on Earth, but you don’t breathe air.”

“Most of us live in the water. Never been a big fan. Did I tell you I swam out to meet Kima and by the time I got there I was so fuckin’ tired I couldn’t mate?”

Jesse burst out laughing. “You’re kidding.”

“No. She was pissed.”

“This face is not surprised,” Jesse said, pointing to it. “So is she the greatest, or what?”

“Don’t know ‘bout that, cause I don’t know ‘em all, but of the ones I ever met, she’s the greatest.”

Michel remembered the conversation with his usual good humour.  Kima had only been mad for about ten seconds and then she was dying to talk to him. Her brain seemed like an elaborately geared toy that was going to catch fire from being spun up so high, so it was good thing she was sitting in four degree water all day. He had fondled her for hours, which was amusing in itself, while she talked. Her English was getting better, but she rattled at him in a disorienting mix of the language of light and Greek, sometimes at the same time, until he could feel his ability to keep up drop into unfathomed incomprehension.

It was obvious why George needed her for the project.  He still wondered why they’d picked Vancouver when Halifax was a better choice, but you couldn’t go up against the two of them once they’d made a decision.  Halifax at least he could keep living in Montréal and visit, but nobody had thought of his needs when they’d committed to this ‘logistical challenge’. This was George’s way of saying he was declaring war on the laughably named Western Civilization while hoping that nobody important or possibly nuke-tossing noticed. So far it was fine, or so George said. Michel was not a deep thinking individual, but he was no fool, and he wanted to practice the well known human aphorism Trust but Verify.

Today was the day he was going to hang out with George and see what he did all day.  He had this big plan, which he and Kima and possibly Hermes and others had been dragged into, but Michel was still not clear on what was happening. He had no fears for himself, but Michel didn’t think much of George’s plans for his human acquaintances, and wished to satisfy himself that George wasn’t marching them all off a cliff.

Still silent and invisible, he dodged early morning traffic and crossed a few streets. There was an almost dead man in the alley he cut through to get to George’s apartment building. He stopped for a minute to look at him, and then remembered that George had insisted that the MMCo staffers all start carrying Narcan.

Colour slid back into the man’s cheeks. He gave an almighty snort and sat up so fast he would have done credit to a Sixer.

“Hi,” Michel said. He had taken the form of a feminized angel, just for laughs. “If you walk with me now, I’ll take you to the hospital and you can get clean. If you don’t, in about half an hour the Narcan will wear off and your high will come back, and your breathing will go away.”

“Lemme die,” the man said, leaning his head back into the scummy brick.

“As you wish, human,” Michel said, like a true stuck-up ass. “I have places to be anyway.” All Sixers who dealt with humans on a regular basis knew ‘the sandwich’, which was a three part illusion. The side facing the human you were talking was real enough to trick human vision, but not quite dense enough to fool another Sixer. The side facing the outside world shows nothing but the street scene, with the human, less the Sixer; once again, good enough to fool all but the most unusual human, but as subtle as a flare gun to another Sixer. In the middle, it was your normal human illusion, or whatever suited you. If you didn’t have to move, you could keep it up all day. If you did have to move, it was easier to make a ‘bubble’, which was your normal invisibility pushed out just enough to accommodate your human chum.

“Are you really an angel from Heaven?”

“Are you really a drug addict from Edmonton?” Michel responded, having stealthily turned his new friend’s pockets. He could already feel the man’s breathing slow again. He needed a drip, in hospital, or he was going to die. “God damnit,” Michel said, irritated that he might miss George. “I gotta make a phone call.”

“You’re not an angel!”

“Jesus Christ,” Michel said. He appeared to pull off a wing feather and handed it to the man. It was actually a swan’s wing feather. He tried to keep a couple in stock. “Fine. I’ll make a phone call and you can die while I watch. This day was a write-off anyway.”

The conversation took place in Greek.

“Don’t leave yet,” Michel said.

“I have appointments all day starting in half an hour, so, no, I’m not hanging around for you,” George said. “I was about to jump in a cab.”

“Give me the address and I’ll meet you there.”

“You already met Cy,” George said. “It’s his house in North Van.” He provided the address.

“I had a different face,” Michel said.

“He’s okay with that. Explain it once and he’ll be fine.”

“One of the smart ones,” Michel said.

“See you there,” George said, and hung up.

Michel said to the man, “Let’s take a ride.”

The poor man shit himself in terror as Michel tucked him into one of his pockets and started to trot toward Burrard. They were not even a kilometre from the St. Paul’s Hospital emergency entrance. Flat out, he could make it in seven minutes, slower, obviously than it would have been if he wasn’t carrying 140 pounds of shit and regret.

As he crossed Robson Street the man passed out again. Michel started squeezing him to keep air going in and out, since humans, the poor dears, aren’t much good without air. In the parking lot Michel snuck behind a truck so that when he emerged, transferring his cargo from his pocket to his arms, he looked like a regular citizen trying to help this poor sick man. While yelling for Narcan, he suctioned off as much of the shit as he could out of respect for the staff. Then he ran down a corridor at random, found a blind spot to vanish in and a safe place to dispose of the shit.

“Finally back on my own schedule!” he said. He waited until somebody triggered the emergency sliding doors and then ran back up Burrard. 

He turned right on Canada Place and bounced over various obstacles while fare jumping, until he was balanced on one of the Seabus masts.

He’d had a nice break on the Seabus, after playing ambulance, and felt all of his good humour and good sense marshalled around him. He’d arrive a little late, but that would be fine; George would find calmly sociable and useful things to say, maybe explain that he, Michel was his chief sexual rival, except that since he’d come to town, the two of them had been going at Kima like ants on fallen fruit with no sign of babies.

Michel couldn’t transfer a sperm packet big enough to start a pregnancy, and George couldn’t transfer one at all, and got madder than hell if you even mentioned it. Michel hoped that while coaching his lawyer friend on Michel’s many interesting qualities George would have to say something about his reproductive bobbles, because if he really was close to this human, as close as he claimed, he’d have to say something. It would be embarrassing to George, and that made any mockery of his own troubles worthwhile.

It amused Michel and he and George were on opposite ends of an emotional and physical spectrum, but comfortably friends. It hadn’t always been so, but George was nothing if not pragmatic, and had forgiven Michel for taking bad advice and trying to kill him back in the day.

If he was George, he’d have been preparing for the meeting since daybreak, rehearsing and trying various things in his mind.  There would be agendas, occluded and competing and colliding and colluding, and Michel thought it would all be horseshit.  There were two things in his life right now, and everything else was a sunny expanse of boredom and pointlessness.

There was sneaking around the city at night moving furniture, which he never in a dozen lifetimes would have guessed provided the right amount of work-related mayhem and routine for his sadly deranged personality, and banging Kima, or trying to. Even making a commitment to not making a commitment was too much for him; he was content to fall into the work while making the occasional half-hearted effort to understand what George was doing, and the crazy places that Kima’s brain was taking her while supporting George’s work.

According to George, the lawyer (who was ‘one of the finest Canadian jurists of all time’ according to Maclean’s, which to Michel was like saying he was something excellent and yet rationally undesirable) was sick and maybe dying, and his wife was definitely dying, and that irritated Michel.

Most Sixers had a distaste for humanity’s folkways of death that was blatant, bigoted, unrepentant and immune to even gentle admonishment. If you’re going to die, get it over with! — only a fool lingers once the pin has been pulled. Sixers died abruptly and completely, although you usually got a little notice so you could say goodbye, if you cared to. That was a natural death.  An unnatural death sent you away quicker than a lightning strike.

After a fine run, which included slapping a bear on the ass (it treed itself with a confused bellow, circled the top of the snag and mimicked a KFC bucket), Michel reached his destination. He was about to knock on the door when George who must have been taking invisibility lessons from Kima, forestalled him. The pain was stark.

“Ow ow ow shit fuck,” Michel said in English, but quietly. George’s hair had formed a clamp and pinched his three hairs. Michel mastered the urge to bob like a panicky spider on a thread and stayed still and quiet.

George’s voice, calm in Greek: “Cy is key to my plans, dead or alive, but if you scare him or do anything to hurt him or anyone in this household, or if you do anything puckish and droll and ignorant, I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.”

“You’re the boss,” Michel said, and tried to force a link. George, annoyed, slapped him off, and reefed just a bit on the three hairs. 

“Eee,” Michel squeaked.

“I’m not your boss, and I never will be,” George said.

“You have literally got me by the short hairs.  I don’t know how much more of a tyrant you could be,” Michel said. He kept his tone humble. “Then there’s my paycheque.”

“Thank Cy,” George said, releasing Michel. “He’s the one making it all possible. I mean it.  No funny business.”

“Sheesh, what a grouch,” Michel said. His hairs were screeching at him, and he tried to think calm thoughts back to them. They entered the house, George determined, Michel, his jolly mood destroyed, with foreboding.

Cy and Colin were waiting for them in the living room off the main entrance. “Cy, may I formally present to you my friend Mikhael, who goes by Michel Calabria. Michel, Cy.” Cy stood, with some effort.

“I met you at the crime scene,” Cy said.  “I won’t shake your hand.”

“I changed my appearance to avoid the attention of the authorities,” Michel said.

“Michel, may I present Cy’s grandson Colin, who’s assisting his grandparents, and us.”

“A pleasure,” Colin said. He was tall and pale and looked snarky.

“Sure wish I could change my appearance,” Cy said. “It’d be great if it was a transferrable skill.” He frowned a little.

“I don’t know how I do it, so I doubt I could teach you,” Michel said.

Colin spoke. “Why do you have that outrageous French accent when George speaks perfect English?” Cy looked down for a moment, and then raised his gaze to Michel.

“To get up the noses of stupid Anglos,” Michel replied.

“It’s deliberate?” Colin considered this, and then smirked as George said, “Very.”

“George says you’re difficult but fun,” Cy said after a pause.

“That was very honest and kind of him,” Michel said.  “But you could pretty much say that about any Sixer.”

George pulled a face.  “My mother?” he asked with some heat. “My grandmother?”

“I said pretty much. Isn’t that a qualifier? Besides, I only ever met 44 other Sixers, and got a whiff of mebbe half a dozen more, which leaves about 250 unaccounted for.”

“If that’s indeed the final count,” George said gloomily.  “Another sticking point with humans.  Once they find out we’re here, they’re going to want a head count, and that will be impossible.”

“Always more questions than answers with you folks,” Cy said.

“Say Sixers, ‘you people’ and ‘you folks’ have othering connotations which we wish to avoid,” George said.

“Why don’t you just take over the planet and cut the politically correct crap?” Cy asked. He put his hand on his knee as he sat down. His grandson Colin came forward and arranged cushions, and then left the room after nodding to both George and Michel. Michel decided to like him. Jesse had been impressed; they’d gone out drinking at least once and Jesse had come back somehow looking both thoughtful and smug.

“S’what I keep telling him, but he doesn’t want to, and I don’t want to either,” Michel said, “Since it seems like a lot of work.” He once again tried to link with George. Perhaps thinking Michel would leave in a snit if he shook him off again, George allowed the link. Their conversation thereafter had a dimension Cy could not perceive.

“What do you want out of this?”

“Me? I want George to go into space and leave me alone with Kima! Then I’m hoping we go back to the Margin, or maybe Alaska, open a poutine shack….”

“If Kima will go,” George said through the link.

“Your assistance is to ensure that George leaves Earth,” Cy said.

“At this rate he’ll never go. Strap your ass to a Chinese rocket and beat it!”

“You understand ballistics at least as well as I do,” George said pointedly.  The sub-rosa battering he was getting in the language of light didn’t help. With rising annoyance, he said, “Killing a group of taikonauts and — not to put too fine a point on it, but myself as well! — would not get me into space and it would be a great loss of the limited treasure humans devote to science as well as cutting short my life, much against my wishes.  I can’t pull a “Space Bat”, clinging to some part of a rocket like an asylum-seeker sneaking a lift in a the wheel well of a jet.”

“You’re the only Sixer I ever met apart from George and Hermes,” Cy said.  “As far as I know, you’re the only three Sixers on Earth. Without human help George’s rocket trip will never happen.”

“You met Hermes,” Michel said slowly. George looked bland. In the language of light he told Michel to quit struggling and try to look like a good minion. Michel’s response was as rude as he could make it in the language of light, which is a language structured around ideas, objects and testable reality, not personalities and feelings. Michel slumped, very slightly, but it was enough to show, for the moment at least, they were going to do it George’s way.

Michel, accompanying the statement with an invisible flick to George’s centre-line, much the same in intent and pain as snapping an elastic, “I’m going to help George with his project.  I’ll go where he sends me and do what he tells me, and if either of us make babies with Kima, we’ve promised to protect any of Kima’s babies, whoever made them, against humans and Sixers.”

“Oh.”

“That was the deal. I don’t want to attend any fucking meetings. I’m here because I was curious to see what shenanigans you were getting up to, but it all seems to be happening here is careful planning and I got no time for that shit.”

“Michel being a reactive sort of person,” George said.

“I am right here! I got legs, and just because you got hair you can’t control doesn’t mean I couldn’t kill you, just that it would be harder.”

“This is your closest Sixer ally,” Cy said heavily.

“What good are you to George, old man? I can keep my head in an emergency, can you?” Michel dropped his appearance.

George sighed. In solidarity with Michel, and in part to prevent him from leaving, he dropped his appearance as well.

Seen side by side, the differences between the two aliens were stark. Michel was taller, broader and a few shades darker, his centre-line spangled with silver dots. George was a paler beige, with pink blotches around his hairline and less defined markings on his centre-line, and rotund, as if someone had superimposed the outline of the Michelin Tire Man on his form. His hair formed a gently moving, shining black nimbus around his head.

Staring at where Michel’s now absent eyes had been, and showing no sign of anything but tightly controlled anger, Cy said, “I’m at the end of my life. I’ve dragged my wife, who’s dying upstairs, and my grandson, who’s immolated his own career on the bonfire of George’s promises, by their lapels, into what will be one of the defining events of the twenty-first century, even as I ready to depart from life.”

Cy was just getting warmed up.

Fucking humans, thought Michel.  Bags of blood, bone and air, with air being their defining weakness. Get to the fucking point.

“The concept of public service is laughable to you, pointless to you, but I have served my city, and my province, and my country since I was old enough to understand what it means.  I’ve had to re-cast and re-conceive that service many times, as my understanding of the world has grown. Now I’ve been presented with the opportunity to prevent possibly thousands upon thousands of human beings from dying. I have a chance to prevent my city from burning down. I may be dying myself, but if I can prevent this horror from unfolding I’m prepared to sacrifice everything I love to make that happen; my wife and my grandson have agreed to help because they don’t want Vancouver to burn down either.”

“Today I learned that George is essentially in this alone; that your assistance is conditional upon no more substantial a foundation than that provided by your concupiscence and the vanity you feel for your species as a whole. The sacrifice I have been called upon to make, and am still willing to make, is meaningless to you, and you seem to have no understanding of either our reasoning or our goals.”

“Ever seen a city sacked?” Michel asked after a tense pause.

“No.”

“I have. Don’t tell me I don’t know what can happen.”

“In Turkey?” George said suddenly.

“During the Great War, yes.  Of course they only sacked the Armenian quarter, so I s’pose I should have been more specific. They killed a lot of people, burned a lot of houses, raped a lot of boys and women, and marched a lot of old people down the road until they died. I have lived on this earth almost twice as long as you, and I don’t need a fucking lecture about how upstanding you are. If you think that you and I are different from each other you’re wrong. We’re both sentient beings with something resembling free will – perhaps free range of motion is a better way of putting it – and we’re both getting used by this asshole.” Here he flung out a tentacle and looped it rapidly around George’s non-existent neck several times and pulled him closer. He tried to give George noogies, but his hair fended him off.  “Ow! That you can drape your fine sentiments in lacier language than me don’t make you smarter or prettier or morally superior to me. You’re supposed to find the legal language to take care of some parts of this shit pile of a plan, and I’m here to prevent our closest human friends from getting killed or dying in a blacksite jail when it’s learned they’ve been contributing to an international criminal conspiracy for years.”

“Those someones include your grandson, my coworker Jesse, and a whole bunch of other people I can’t talk to you about.”

Michel continued.

“Of course, please add to the total of all the humans I’m s’posed to keep alive — after the collapse of civilization and you fuckers all starting to eat each other — all of our previous clients, which is flattering, but there’s only one of me and I take time off to bang Kima, plus I do like to see my ma once in a while, so if people are going to be assholes someone else is going to pick up the slack, and that means we’re gonna have to be extra squishy cozy with the cops.  I fucking hate cops. So George here —“ and he slapped him to produce that strangely metallic, echoic ringing sound Sixers get when they strike each other ‘just so’ — “when he’s first telling me his plan and he described that one of the first things he was gonna do was suborn the cops, I think to myself  — where’s he gonna get that kind of money? To be honest I think judges are mostly scumbags, too, but I’m willing, since George speaks so highly of you, to cut you some slack. Oh, I nearly forgot I’m also supposed to help plan out how to secure the city from possible air attacks without actually advising the Canadian Forces to fatten up their local presence, not that an angry gnat couldn’t fart them out of the sky.”

Cy found that he had no response to this he could trust, and said nothing. 

Michel unlooped his arm.

He said, “If you want to meet other Sixers, don’t bother.  Me, Kima, George and Hermes are the only ones who’ve either lived human or committed to the plan.”

George broke in. “Seriously, Cy, you don’t want to meet my grandmother.”

“Or that little shit Theo. I hope you’re keeping tabs on that asshole, I don’t want him in Vancouver,” Michel said.

“Another of Kima’s suitors?” Cy said, raising his eyebrows delicately.

George gave a small cough.  “He would like to think so.  It is Kima’s decision of course, and Michel and I have no say in her choices.”

Cy raised his eyebrows even higher. “I doubt that, somehow. Well, Michel, now that George is getting what he wants from you except your agreement not to whinge, will you join us for our information update?”

“I don’t like meetings,” Michel said. “But I wouldn’t mind finding out why George thinks you’re so special.”

Cy laughed. “I’m not special. I’m available. And I know a lot of important people.”

“First up,” George said, shifting his tone and asserting control.

“Citizenship,” said Cy, obediently.

Michel continued his freestyle kibitzing. “What? Why even bother with that?” Michel said. “From a cultural standpoint it would be regressive to ask Canada for citizenship. We are citizens of the world.”

“Nope,” Cy said.

“Sure we are,” Michel said.

“What you are, my glabrous new friend, is an animal. You have no legal protection whatsoever.  You are not a person, and therefore you have no rights.”

“Most people don’t think that way,” Michel said, frowning. “Like, anybody who meets me. And I got three hairs,” he added, since he hadn’t enjoyed being called hairless.

“If I shot you in the doorway of my house, to give an unlikely but instructive example, and you died, which I understand is very unlikely indeed, I’d face no legal consequences except under sections 86 and 87 of the Criminal Code of Canada.”

“Horseshit,” Michel said comfortably. “The secret police would jail you for years for shooting an alien, on slapped-together charges. There are no civil rights left in this country anyway.”

“Firearms stuff,” George said. He’d memorized the CCC, since the app worked too slowly for his agile mind, and there was no proper search function.

“Wish I’d had your memory when I was in school,” Cy said, “And ever since, as well,” he added with mild envy. He tried to resume his lecture, and as he took a breath, Michel broke in again.

“Can’t you just make Sixers a protected species?” Michel asked. “I thought that could happen with an Order-in-Council.”

“It’s not good enough,” George said. “However cute a beluga is it can’t own property, intellectual or otherwise, or transfer it, or bank, or get a drivers licence, or any of that.”

“Can’t get sued, either,” Michel said, trying to find the bright spot.

“Is he like this all the time?” Cy asked George.

“Sometimes I’m horny, rather than talkative.  It’s better than violent and inconvenient,” Michel said. He reverted to his human appearance, and with relief, George joined him.

“You’re trying to rattle me,” Cy said.

“No, I’m done trying that,” Michel said. “I still don’t understand why George thinks you’re a Rosetta Stone with an Antikythera device on top.”

“He likes me.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Michel said. “George likes everybody.”

“I said I’d help him before he asked.”

“Humans help each other to the point of death every damned day.”

“Why don’t you try asking George?” Cy said, the anger resurfacing.

“Where’s the fun in that when I can get you going? Okay, I’ll bite.  George, why him?”

“Because Conspirator Zero told me to.”

“What?” Michel and Cy said simultaneously.

There was a long pause.

“I was under the strong impression that you researched me for a long time before you approached me,” Cy said, keeping his voice cold and quiet.

“I was given your number by a man who met you twice, once in civvies and once for court,” George said.

“Christ, that could be about a hundred thousand people,” Cy said, baffled.

“Well then — I imagine his identity will stay secure. I can’t even tell you why I can’t tell you who he is.  Or was.  He’s dead now.”