Escape from the Pipe Men! Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Sample Chapter from WUFTOOM

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  CLARION BOOKS

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2013 by Mary G. Thompson

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Thompson, Mary G. (Mary Gloria), 1978–

  Escape from the Pipe Men! / Mary G. Thompson.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Ryan and Becky live as human exhibits in an intergalactic zoo until their father is poisoned and they must journey across the universe seeking the cure, aided by an odd assortment of other beings.

  ISBN 978-0-547-85905-7 (hardcover)

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 3. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction. 4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Zoos—Fiction. 6. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.T37169Esc 2013

  [Fic]—dc23 2012022615

  eISBN 978-0-547-85913-2

  v1.0613

  For my dad

  One

  “RY-AN.” THE PIPE MAN spoke from its square silverish mouth near the ground, below all sixteen of its many-shaded purple eyes. The eyes were set in a vertical row down its tall, thin, body, a perfectly round, gray cylinder that made it look exactly like a giant, living pipe. I recognized this Pipe Man from the many times it had visited me in my zoo sector. Next to it, a little Pipe Man, only five eyes tall, stared at me with all five eyes wide open.

  “Hon-tri-bum,” I said to the tall one. I smiled at them, trying to open my lips wide in a square shape, the way they did.

  The five-eyed Pipe Man smiled back at me.

  Hon-tri-bum blinked all sixteen of its eyes at the same time. It always blinked more than the others. I got the impression that it was thinking, really trying to study me.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the little one, using their language.

  The little one angled all five eyes upward and blinked at Hon-tri-bum. I wondered what their relationship was. All the many times Hon-tri-bum had come to visit me before, it had been alone.

  “Go on,” Hon-tri-bum said.

  The little one looked back at me. It closed all of its eyes at once, then opened them again. All of its eyes were bright blue.

  Hon-tri-bum’s top two eyes squinted, and its top several inches scrunched together like they were made of dough. I recognized the Pipe Man laughter.

  “It’s scared. It has never seen a member of a from species before today.” To the Pipe Men, everyone who wasn’t a Pipe Man was a from. Hon-tri-bum turned to face its little friend. “It won’t hurt you. Anyway, it can’t get out. See?” It faced me again and leaned the top of its body toward me, exposing the faint pinkness inside the mouthlike opening. Though when they were standing up straight, their tops looked like hollow round holes, they were surprisingly malleable. The Pipe Men could open and close these holes like mouths. You could say they actually had two mouths, the one at the bottom of their bodies, which they spoke out of, and the one at the top, which they used to pick things up and eat. Of course, they called eating drinking, since they had no teeth and ate only their special soup. Now Hon-tri-bum rapped the outer edge of its top-hole gently against the invisible glass, making a slight ringing sound. When it lifted its top-hole up again, it left a tiny white line of drool that seemed to hang on nothing in the air.

  As the two Pipe Men stood there watching me from outside the glass, I felt the cold brushing of the message wind across my back. It was saying that it was time for dinner, time to go home.

  I took three even steps backward and raised my hands above my head.

  Hon-tri-bum made a sucking sound and bent its top-hole toward the little one. The little one hopped a little and stretched out vertically, making its five eyes separate from one another.

  I almost laughed, but caught myself. I could not ruin the departure ritual. I stood up on my tiptoes, closed my eyes, and pursed my lips. Then I brought my hands sharply down and pinned them to my sides. I bowed forward at the waist, as far as I could go. After a lot of practice, I was now able to make my head almost touch my legs. With my head still down, I shuffled backward as quickly as I could. After I had put the appropriate distance between myself and the Pipe Men, I pivoted 180 degrees, stood up straight, and walked at a respectfully slow pace toward the portal.

  A minute later, I felt the light shock of the portal as I passed through it, and then the change in the texture of the air. The portal, now behind me, was black and solid-looking. You couldn’t see through it from either side, but if you touched it, your hand would pass right through. I was now in the closet in my living room, in my house at 362 Ash Street, Forest Hill, Oregon, United States of America, Earth.

  “Ryan!” It was my mom, calling from the kitchen.

  “I’m back!” I yelled. I opened the closet door and walked out into the living room.

  My seven-year-old sister, Becky, was sitting on the couch, watching TV. It was a Pipe Man show. Becky was just starting to learn their language, so she was watching it in English. I heard the female announcer’s lilting computer-translated voice.

  “Sleep is no wasted time with idle dreaming for the Masters. The Masters perform a miraculous wealth of complex tasks while sleeping, including valuable scientific research . . .”

  “Becky,” Mom called, “go ahead and pause that for now. You can finish it tomorrow. It’s time for dinner.”

  Becky rolled her eyes at me, and I laughed. We had both seen the same show a million times. The Pipe Men made all the froms in the zoo watch each show a certain number of times, and all the shows had to be played in the right order. After the first few times, it got a little old.

  In the kitchen, Mom had laid out our dinner on the table. Dad was standing next to his chair. I didn’t need to see him because I had already smelled him from the living room. He stank with a weird metallic odor.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. “How were the rats today?”

  Mom frowned. “Call them Brocine, honey.”

  Dad shook his head. “Well, they were their usual uninteresting selves. Lying around and doing nothing. After a second week in that sector, I understand even less why the Masters care about them. I guess it’s not for me to say, though.”

  “Maybe they’ll have you go back to the Horn-Puffs soon,” said Mom.

  “Oh, that would be grea
t,” said Dad. “Did you know, the Horn-Puffs eat only a single species of soft-bodied insect? Just one thing, every day for their whole lives.”

  Becky snickered, and I tried to hold back a smile. Dad had made that same comment almost every night he’d come home from working in the Horn-Puff sector. After all that talk, I almost wanted to try one of these “soft-bodied insects” myself, just to see what all the fuss was about.

  “Now, take your places before it gets cold,” said Mom.

  Becky and I got behind our assigned chairs, and Mom laid the final dish down on the table before taking her place. She nodded at us.

  We all turned abruptly around and raised our arms over our heads. Then we brought our arms down, tight against our bodies, and bowed low.

  “For all we have, we thank them,” said Mom. “For all we are, we owe them. For all they ask, we give them.” Mom clapped her hands together once.

  In unison, Dad, Becky, and I lifted our heads up, jumped 180 degrees, pulled our chairs out, and sat down.

  Two

  WE WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO LOOK at the Pipe Men spectators who stood outside the glass while we were inside doing lessons with our Pipe Men tutors, and we weren’t allowed to talk to the spectators until it was time for the afternoon performance. But now that I was getting fluent in their language, it was impossible not to overhear.

  “On top they are called arms, and on the bottom, legs,” said a short one with only eight eyes. I recognized this one from the many times it had come by our sector and given the same speech. “Since they have no assistants, they need these extra pipes to move and drink.”

  The spectators murmured. I could feel the dozens of eyes on me. It made it hard to concentrate on the math lesson that Yel-to-tor, my tutor, was giving me. The equations were hard enough without people talking about my body parts while I was trying to work. I let out a sigh of frustration.

  “Let me see,” said Yel-to-tor.

  I pushed my notebook toward the Pipe Man and twisted it around so it could see.

  Yel-to-tor bent its top four pea-green eyes over my paper. Then it bent all the way over the table and picked up my pencil with its top-hole. “Here.” It tapped my equation with the pencil. “This is a material transposition of the primary and final variables. You should not still be making this mistake.”

  “What?” I was learning the mathematical terms as we went along, and I had never learned them in English. I had to not only figure out what material transposition and all that meant, but also keep all the inflections and pronunciations straight. I sighed again.

  Yel-to-tor scrunched its top-hole around the pencil and let out a wheezing rush of air. It made a sound like the wings of a bird flapping. The tutor set the pencil on the table, and where it had been inside the Pipe Man’s top-hole, it was covered in light white drool. “It’s almost time for your performance. We will do this again tomorrow.” Yel-to-tor propelled away from me. Like all Pipe Men, it moved by hovering above the ground and floating on a jet of air that it expelled from the bottom of its pipelike body. As it propelled, the edges of its bottom-hole wrinkled with effort and flapped a little with the jet of air. Yel-to-tor propelled toward the door that led through the invisible glass barrier, out into the viewing lane. I wouldn’t have known the door was there if I hadn’t seen the Pipe Men go through it, since it was as invisible as the rest of our cage. Yel-to-tor tapped on the air once with its top-hole, waited a second, and then propelled through.

  Becky had been working with her tutor, Bre-zon-air, at a table a few yards away from us. Now she came walking across our sector, her feet squishing into the rubbery artificial ground. We both had to wear special boots to keep from bouncing and slipping. Lately, she’d been working on language for two hours every morning.

  “I learned how to say ‘You make good soup!’” Becky said as she reached me.

  “Thank you, you also make a pleasant brew,” I said, bowing low.

  Becky bowed back at me and giggled.

  “Bless my eyes, it can speak!” said a Pipe Man from outside the glass. It had ten eyes and was as wide-eyed as the little five-eyed one had been the day before.

  “Amazing,” said its companion. “Look—they are about to drink.”

  While we’d been working with our tutors, Mom had come back from the Pipe Man soup kitchen to make us some human food. Two sandwiches were sitting on two regular human plates, on a small table right in front of the invisible glass.

  Several more Pipe Men joined the two who were already watching us.

  Becky and I threw our hands up, then bowed down, facing the spectators.

  “They’re so amazed by how we eat,” said Becky, taking her seat.

  “I guess you’d find us interesting, too, if you had no teeth and all you ‘drank’ was soup,” I said.

  Just above the top of the tallest Pipe Man, several wires were strung over the lane. They moved slowly, pulling along containers shaped like little teapots. Every once in a while, one of the wires would stop moving, and one of the teapots would pour its contents into the open top-hole of a spectator. That was all we knew of Pipe Man eating habits.

  “What is that you’re drinking?” asked a spectator with only six eyes.

  “When we drink something solid, we call it eating,” I said. “It’s called a sandwich.”

  “Sandwich,” said Six-eyes. It pressed its eyes against the glass, distorting its features.

  I opened my mouth wide and showed my teeth, then took an exaggerated bite. This caused three more spectators to press their eyes up against the glass.

  Becky giggled at them and waved.

  We both kept eating, taking large bites and chewing obscenely. If we’d done this at dinner with Mom and Dad, Mom would have given us the death stare. But here, we were supposed to exaggerate everything. I swallowed my last bite, pushed away from the table, and stood up.

  “Oh!” a Pipe Man exclaimed.

  “Becky, let’s exercise our appendages!” I said. Becky knew this Pipe Man phrase because we’d practiced it. We were supposed to act as if this was how humans normally behaved, never mind the fact that, of course, no one else on Earth knew Pipe Men existed, much less spoke their language.

  Becky stood up, leaving a bit of sandwich on the plate. Three of the Pipe Men leaned toward it, top-holes dripping tiny amounts of drool. Their eyes blinked rapidly in succession. The rest of the Pipe Men pointed all their eyes toward us.

  “One, two,” I chanted, kicking a leg up, then punching an arm out.

  “One, two!” Becky shouted. She jumped in the air, raising her arms.

  “One, two, three!” I cried, bouncing on one leg and kicking the other leg out. I had to wave my arms to keep steady.

  “Dance!” Becky cried. She began running around me in a circle, pumping her fists up in the air.

  “That’s not dancing!” I said.

  “You dance, I run!” she puffed, making another round.

  “Dance,” I said very slowly, for the Pipe Men’s benefit. Then I stood up on my toes like a ballerina, touched my hand to my head, and slowly twirled.

  “Hoof, hoof, hoof!” the Pipe Men chanted. The word didn’t really translate. All I knew was, it was some kind of expression of approval.

  When she got back around in front of me, Becky stopped and reached out a hand for our special hopping-together show. The Pipe Men loved it. But then Becky’s face turned pale.

  “What?” I turned to see what she was looking at.

  Mom was rushing toward us from the portal that led to our Earth house. She was crying.

  “Mom! What’s wrong?”

  “Ryan . . .” Mom was sobbing so hard that I didn’t understand anything except my name.

  “What is it, Mom?”

  “. . . the Brocine . . . poisoned noses . . .”

  “Is it Dad?” Becky burst into tears too.

  “Mom, what happened?” I asked.

  “One of the Brocine babies poked him with its nose. It jabbed him with it
s spike out of nowhere. He—he’s alive, but he won’t wake up.”

  “Where is he now?” I was aware of all the Pipe Men still watching us. Even more had crowded around since Mom had come running out. They didn’t make any noise, just stared at us, rapt.

  “Our parent was hurt in an accident,” I said to them. “Mom, where is he?”

  “He’s in the ward. The hospital. He won’t wake up.”

  “But you said he’s alive. They’re helping him, right?” I asked.

  Mom nodded and wiped her eyes.

  “Then we’ll go see him. If they’re working on him, I’m sure he’ll be fine. I bet he’s even waking up right now.”

  Mom seemed to get herself together a little. She took Becky’s hand and nodded at me, eyes wet. Becky and I weren’t supposed to leave our zoo sector during the day. In fact, we weren’t supposed to leave our zoo sector at all, unless it was just to go back to our house. In our hurry, we even turned our backs to the Pipe Men, forgetting all about the ritual.

  Three

  TO GET TO ANY PLACE besides our zoo sector on O-thul-ba, the Pipe Man planet, we had to go back into our house through the living room closet, and then into the closet in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Their closet led into a passageway. I’d only been in there a few times before, and that was right after the Pipe Men came, when I was younger than Becky. Dad had told me never to go back without him or Mom. He’d said that I would get lost and never find my way home, and we’d get in trouble with the Masters. So far, I’d been too scared to disobey him.

  I hesitated at the bedroom doorway. “Did they say it was okay to bring us?” We were only going to go to a different part of O-thul-ba, not to any of the from planets, but still, I didn’t want to get in trouble.

  “I didn’t think to ask about it,” said Mom.

  “Do you know where the hospital is?”

  Mom sniffed. “My daughter was born there. It’s not something you forget.” She squeezed Becky’s hand. “Come on, we’re all going to go see him.” She walked into the closet and through the blackness at the back, pulling Becky with her.