Game Over

Chapter 20





A PARADE OF trumpeting elephants sent us sprawling against the walls amid a confetti storm of flower petals. Never before had anything like this ever been experienced inside the Fujiya Hotel—or, really, anyplace on this side of the planet.

“Gathering Day!” screamed Pork Chop, jumping up and down on the credenza next to me. She was too young to have experienced the last one. To clarify, Alpar Nok, my home planet, circles its sun a little more slowly than Earth does. About twelve times more slowly. So a single Alpar Nokian year is about twelve Earth years long.

You might think maybe this would cause us to have more holidays, but, in fact, we have fewer. So when one happens—and Gathering Day is the biggest of them all—it’s a pretty massive thing. Think Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Eid ul-Adha, Fourth of July, Bastille Day, Boxing Day, Chinese New Year, Easter, Diwali, Mahavir Jayanti, and your birthday all rolled into one.

My mother dodged an elephant and climbed up next to me with tears in her eyes.

“You remembered, Daniel,” she said, so softly I could hardly hear her over the trumpeting pachyderms and, now, the polyphonic strains of the Bryn Spi Philharmonic Orchestra.

Bryn Spi is the capital city, the center of Alpar Nokian culture. It’s where the very best of our artists, musicians, and entertainers gather. And, considering that there’s never been a nonmusical, nonartistic, nontalented Alpar Nokian, that’s saying something.

To hear just one Bryn Spi musician is an amazing thing. To hear a gathering of the hundred best performing the most beautiful and touching piece that has ever been composed, the Departed Symphony, is completely soul lifting. It’s a celebration and a remembrance of lost Alpar Nokians—humans and elephants alike. Needless to say, the song got a lot longer after First Strike, the horrible attack on our planet by the Outer Ones that resulted in the decimation of our species.

Legend has it that the symphony is so affecting that it causes people to have visions. Seriously. I don’t remember much from my last Gathering Day (when I was a toddler and by then living in Kansas), but they say you can’t be exposed to the song and not have an out-of-body experience: seeing dead relatives, conversing with famous Alpar Nokians from history, or some other grand and enlightening vision.

Within a minute, even tough-as-nails Willy had tears streaming down his face. And I was just starting to go off into la-la land myself. I was beginning to smell the gunjun flowers of my home planet’s high mountain plains and was even starting to see a herd of elephants coming toward me—when there was a knock on the door.

I quickly muted the orchestra, hid the parade, and leaped across the room, pressing myself along the wall next to the door.

Everybody was looking to me for some sign. I waved them into defensive positions. It was unlikely to be a noise complaint—I’d of course soundproofed the room so that the noise of this holographic parade wouldn’t send hotel management into conniptions—but, then, who could it be? The only certain thing was that the visitor was uninvited.

And, quite possibly, most unwelcome.