Valimarron

I wrote this in middle school, so it feels goofy to me, as all old works do. Be sure to let me know what you think, and how it might be improved and/or expanded upon! The title is quite random - possibly stolen.

< The vilification of sentient life isn't simply a theory to be explored or a historical phenomenon. It's happening. It happens. >

< Says who? >

< Look up from your little quandaries. It's there. >

< Again, who is to say? >

< … If not you, who else? >

        Iggan was quirky, and he delighted in it. As a matter of fact, he squawked of it if it so pleased him. Unfortunately, it pleased him often. That was the very problem Qin was unconsciously having now, and he realized that it was a problem that wasn't quickly tapering from its audacity. By audacity, Qin thought, he really meant loudness. Increasing loudness. Loud, loud, LOUD!

       "What's a bumblebee to do if it loses its bumble?" Yelled Iggan, whose voice was lent an effect as though it were coming out of a tunnel as Qin came out of his reverie.

Iggan, as he called himself, was a furry little ball of a brownish, thick coat. He survived on a mixture of dog chow and old socks, though the socks were likely of an antagonistic taste. His unpleasant texture (On which he often prided himself) was a deterrent to anyone hoping to treat him like a household pet. Or anyone hoping to strangle him, much to Qin's greater temptation and to his disappointment.

       "What's an Iggan if it's dead?" Asked Qin, his face entirely resolved.

Iggan paused. His precarious perch atop a pile of research books suddenly swayed, but for once he was not the cause. With a muffled yelp, he surfed rather clumsily a distance of maybe seven feet atop the torrent of paper and binding. Qin showed no alarm, rather smugly ignoring the whole situation. If there was one thing he understood from his ancient, diluted Chinese heritage, it was karma.

       With a slight groan, Iggan could be heard making muffled, unintelligible complaints to his captive bindings. Qin forced himself to lose his smile just in time for Iggan to scramble out of the drift and triumphantly pose atop a copy of Ape Intelligence: A Case Study by an obscure, worldly professor of some sort.

       "'Twas knowledge that saved me, and 'twill be knowledge that be my death," He bellowed.

       "Far past the time of reckoning for a great poet, poor soul," Qin responded.

       "Who cares about poets anyway, they're a dime a dozen."

       Qin smiled at the rhyme. "You just paid homage to at least one of them, oh furry one."

       Iggan scoffed. "Forget it," he mumbled in defeat. Little interest, he thought, seemed to be present here anymore. "I'm not staying where I'm not wanted," he proclaimed.

       "Then don't come back," retorted Qin. It was a threat that held no water with him, and he wanted Iggan to know it. "I've no use for anyone who disrupts me and shreds my books."

       Sulkily, Iggan retreated from the conversation, though he was much more reluctant to retreat from the room. He scuffled over to the dimly lit bookshelf at the far end of the quiet room and curled up on the floor. Qin called it the library; Iggan, however, called it the cave, citing that there was only one bookshelf and scarcely anything on it to read.

       Qin returned to his thoughts. There wasn't a light on in the room, only dots and patterns fixated above the barely schoolhouse-sized desk at which he sat. He pondered their position, imagining himself suspended in midair, though not over a computer terminal. He was more attracted to flying about the stratosphere of a world, any world – it didn't matter to his imagination. The thought had sold itself to his subconscious, which returned to it often in times of boredom or even of duress. It was freedom, and as far as he could tell it didn't actually exist – which made it all the more tantalizing.

Iggan stirred little throughout the rest of the night. Qin, however, laid his head upon the desk many a time only to raise it again a few short hours later. It was difficult to live under the bear of something he didn't have the ability to describe, probably because it was the lack of something that bore down on him so relentlessly. His ancestors had lived in a time of great space and endless horizons. They had witnessed the sun rise every day and fall every night. They had felt the wind and touched pure soil. Qin could only imagine the existence of wind, and horizon was as abstract to him as philosophy to a gorilla. It was hard for his body and spirit, after many generations tempered by the atmosphere and life-giving ecosystem of earth, to physiologically adjust to an environment with neither sunrise nor wind nor even soil.

       Qin, however, only knew the immediate effects of his physiology's disorientation – and that was an acute inability to sleep. His gaze wandered to Iggan, and he speculated what it would be like to just sleep like that, not to constantly rise and fall from something other than breath, from a yearning for something he didn't even know. He would ask in the morning – if it ever came.

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   Light, though perhaps not as humans imagine it, filtered wearily into the library. Iggan receded further into the remaining shadows unconsciously, until finally he shuddered and awoke, touched by the dreaded rays. He first noticed that Qin was snoring unevenly, head balanced atop his chin on the desk in an odd display of fragile peace. Iggan poised himself, not unlike a pet, but not unlike a dangerous predator either. Each vertebra was lightly stretched in line, each tuft of fur prickled and settled in a little wave. Completing his nearly religious morning routine, Iggan yawned loudly and tested the ground, as if it may not be solid. Assured that it was still firm, he took a few steps into the light and squinted at Qin, who was still ever so carefully balanced. He snorted, startling Iggan, who slinked out of the room in an awkward regression to evolutionary instincts of survival, though also in search for food. Scuffling through the corridor, he shortly reached the equally cramped kitchenette and dining room across the way, past the (also cramped) bedroom that had seen less sleep than Qin in the time Iggan had known him.

       "What sounds good this morning?" Iggan asked himself. With delight, he discovered a box of cereal and some only slightly expired milk, which he proceeded to mix into a chunky, repugnant mixture despite his lack of opposable thumbs. He may not have been far evolved, but he was intelligent and resourceful, with the gag reflex of a housefly.

       If it weren't for Qin's reluctance to check the spoiled milk the day before, he may have gotten a few hours more sleep. As it was, the potent stench wafted through the corridor with such strength as to oust garlic from its throne of rancid odor. 

       "There surely isn't much worse a guy could wake up to," he thought. Even as he thought so, however, he disbelieved it. He knew Iggan was being well-mannered, in his own way, not to get anything more distasteful drifting through their cramped living space. Somehow that still wasn't very comforting.

       Qin shuffled rather quietly, as opposed to the click of nail on wood that accompanied Iggan's scurrying movement. His socks slid across the carpet of the library, a low carpet that felt as much like the wooden floor of the corridor that Qin noticed it only in the slightest of ways when the scenery about him changed. This morning, he felt numb.

       As Qin's shuffling became more audible, Iggan paused between the intake of breath and his next spoonful. The result would have seemed incredibly rude to any previous generation, but Qin was unfazed. In a way, manners seemed unimportant now. So trivial were they to begin with, that the increased scope of life almost made them obsolete. Language and communication barriers would not make for an open development of relationships with other self-aware species, and as such had slowly drifted from the human colloquium.

       If he ever knew of this development, even subconsciously, Qin did not show it. It was not as deep-rooted as the need of an all-illuminating sun and a horizon that could betray the curvature of a solid planet, nor was human social boundary as noticeable to begin with as a lack of magnetic gravity or the existence of intelligent furred animals.