Zollocco: A Novel of Another Universe by Cynthia Joyce Clay Page B

Leaving this room, an image came to mind of snakes swimming out of the drains. I explored the building some more, opening another door at random. It too was a bathroom, with one tub, one toilet, and one sink, decorated with a theme of blue snakes. The faucets were shaped like snakes. The tiles had entwined snakes as emblems. The shower nozzle was shaped like a snake with an open fanged mouth for a spout. I shut the door and hurried up some stairs. This whole experience was weird. Why was every door I opened the door to a bathroom? I decided to go up on the roof to survey the campus. If I ever were to escape, I would need to know the lay of the land. I found a stairwell and climbed. The elaborate hardwood staircase came to an end on the top floor. Surely there would be some stairs to get to the roof? There was a door on the final landing, probably this would be a rickety attic stairway hidden by the door. I opened the door. It was too dim to see, and since no one was about, I turned on the light, the switch being to the left of the door. It wasn't a stairway at all. It was a shower. A simple, clean, unadorned shower. Now I really had the creeps. I ran down the stairs imagining that a snake with a tuft of hair on its head had slithered out of the drain, reared and grinned at me.
"Soon," it hissed.
I ran all the way to my cell, leaped into my bed, and cursed that I had neither sheets nor blankets to pull over my head.
As the days went by, my language learning progressed. I was taught the accouterments of civilized behavior--table manners, how various objects were used, gestures in greeting, how to wear the different kinds of dress, and the intricacies of social formalities regarding gender and age.
One morning I awoke from a bizarre dream. I dreamed the snake with a tuft of hair on its head, as I had imagined before, had showed me a bathroom, and as I watched,hundreds of snakes curled out of the drains. A huge snake slithered out of a toilet.
"Prepare to leave," the snake with the hair on its head said.
"When we swarm through the halls, you may then escape. Find the metal snake which chariots between worlds."
The next morning, as I was putting on my socks, Raiboothnar came into my cell.
"Come with me," she said in her dour way.
We went down the red hallway, and then the blue, the green, through the window-sided yellow hallway, and into a room of stone. Three men were seated at a table with papers before them. Two other men stood behind them. These two wore the gray uniforms the people of the spaceship had worn. This made me very anxious. As Raiboothnar and I entered, her favorite teaching assistant nodded at her and stepped outside the door. Raiboothnar sat down in a chair facing the table and the men. There was no chair for me.
The one young man on the panel spoke up, "This is no Zitam. This is a human being!" The two men behind him stirred with menace in their movements. The man on the other side of the table was much older, wore more formal, expensive clothing. His white hair was carefully coiffed. This white haired man sat carefully hunched over his paunch as though movement were a commodity that only wrinkled clothes and jarred schemes. He sat with his profile to Raiboothnar and me, facing his two associates at the table. He lifted his chin ever so slightly to speak, but his eyes flashed, shrewdly surveying the room.
"It was found in the woods, in a tree. If it were human it would have sought out civilization."
Now the central figure at the table spoke. He was fat, had curly brown hair, glasses, and waved one arm listlessly when he talked. His jowls flopped smugly as he spoke. "Can it speak?"
Not being an `it', I answered, "Raiboothnar can speak, yes."
"This should be sufficient proof gentlemen that it is not a human, it couldn't understand your simple question," smiled Raiboothnar.
The young man retorted, "I don't agree, her answer -- "
"That is irrelevant," cut in the fat man, "What should concern us here is that we have