Free Firmin by Sam Savage Page B

as infants, extraterrestrial changelings, to be reared by unwitting Earth mothers as their own. Hence the book’s title. When these changelings reached adult-hood, masters of Earth’s language and customs, with friends and associates - and even siblings and parents - among the dominant species, they would be perfectly placed to serve as mediators between earthlings and Axions.
     
    It seemed like a good plan, but unfortunately, despite the decades of orbital snooping and analysis, the Axions’ robotic probes had made a stupid mistake, wrongly concluding that the earth’s dominant species was the Norway rat. As a consequence of this error, one day in 1955 a dozen unwitting female rats welcomed into their nests an equal number of protoplasmically morphed Axions, now indistinguishable from the rats’ natural offspring. The Axion children soon recognized the mistake. Yet the bewildered changelings - led by the dashing Alyak - valiantly tried to carry on with the mission of making contact with the dominant species, which they now saw was the humans. The rest of the book was taken up with detailed descriptions of their gruesome deaths at the hands of this merciless species, even though the real rats, who still thought of the Axions as their own, made noble and self-sacrificing attempts to save them. Each time an Axion was murdered on Earth, exact imagery of his death was transmitted telepathically across the galaxy to Axi 12, and so horrible were the pictures that they roused even the peaceful and ethically superior Axion public to fury. Though it took their spaceships a few years to reach Earth, when they got there they turned it into a fireball. Hence the burning cities on the cover. In the epilogue, set in 1985, all humans have perished, along with all other large carnivores, while on the charred crust of the ruined planet, the Norway rat rules unchallenged.
     
    I closed The Nesting and sat on it. I was on the verge of tears, and next to Jerry’s name I posted the words SOUL MATE and SOLITUDE. I understood now that he needed the big wire basket on the front of his bicycle just to cart around his enormous despair and that the eye that looked off to the side was staring out at the blank nothingness of human life and the infinity of time and space, a nothingness and an infinity that he had brought together in his book under the name of the Great Empty. And you can imagine the sort of boost the novel gave to my own self-esteem. No more damp spots in the jungle, no more meaningless words and gestures - I had a whole new story. To the labels of PERVERT, FREAK, and UNNATURAL GENIUS, I could now append the justificatory adjective EXTRATERRESTRIAL. It helps a lot, on lonely nights, to be able to look up at the stars and see them not as flakes of burning ice in the Great Empty but as the window lights of home. Unfortunately, being an extraterrestrial does not confer any of the practical advantages of wealth or fame, nor does it at all increase the likelihood of your getting through the day without some calamity falling on your head. And besides, I never really believed the story.
     
    During business hours, when I was not asleep or hanging out of the Balloon, you could find me on the Balcony. Nothing that happened in the store below escaped my scrutiny. When Norman made an especially big sale, ringing it up on the ornate antique cash register that stood on a stand by the door, I clapped my paws and silently shouted, ‘Way to go, Norm!’ Cheers from the Sidelines of Life.
     
    Pembroke Books was a big store - four rooms full of books, not counting the basement - and Norm knew it like the back of his hand. But even he was fallible. Occasionally he sought and did not find, stabbed and came up empty. When this happened, it was painful to watch. I remember one time in particular. The quarry was the slim Ballad of the Sad Caf’ . The pursuer was a dwarf, a young woman dressed in a camel’s-hair coat so large it hung around her like a