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  “You are as crazy as you look, earth-walker,” the Commander stated. “If I were the Queen, I’d throw you to the mud slugs and have done with you.”

  “But you are not the Queen,” Uniqua pointed out. “If she makes all the decisions here, then we should speak with her right away. Hopefully, we will be dealing with someone who has some brains.”

  To make the story slightly shorter, our friends were escorted to the headquarters building and detained for some time while the Commander contacted her superiors. The sending of messengers back and forth ate up a lot of time, and Uniqua chafed at the loss of time and thought that if she could speak to the Queen directly a lot of time could be saved. But that is the way of most creatures, including we human beings. We do not like to seem foolish in front of our bosses or our teachers or even our friends. We do not like to make mistakes, even when the so-called “mistake” is the right thing to do. Eventually, the Queen became tired of sending and receiving all these messengers and demanded to see the prisoners right away, so the Commander escorted the trio through the city to the palace.

  A city is a city, I always say. Cities differ by the shapes and sizes of the buildings. Almost all big cities have tall buildings, called skyscrapers, and some are built in interesting and odd shapes. But for the most part, human cities exhibit blocks of habitation that are either laid out horizontally or vertically. Then, to facilitate traffic between buildings there are streets and highways, most of them laid out in parallel lines, alternately crisscrossing for easy access. Some are diagonal; some even make a circle.

  But in this city of the Submarians, there were no streets because the inhabitants could swim above the buildings. If we humans could fly, we would probably not have to build streets either. Plus, the buildings that housed the Submarians exhibited an architecture that more resembled natural coral or rock outcroppings. One impressive structure looked like bubbles stacked one upon another, and since it was the tallest of all the buildings in the city, the twins thought it must have been a kind of surface-scraper, even though its topmost bubble did not even come close to the surface of the lake.

  As the Commander escorted the trio above the city, she started to descend only when they neared the center of the city. Here a building that appeared much like someone had dropped a huge brick onto the floor of the lake sat. Now another strange thing about the Submarians was that, even though they built their buildings upward, they liked to live underground in huge caverns beneath the lake floor. This brick was merely the topmost part of the palace, while the main structure of the palace had been built deep underground.

  While the trio swam over the city, they did not see very many Submarians, but as they approached the front doors of the palace, there were a great many of these people gathered together. News of their arrival had attracted a throng of on-lookers in addition to the many guards that protected the palace. It was then that our friends could see that the Submarians were of many different colors and hues, and the crowds looked like one huge jumbled rainbow. But they did not have time to observe much else, for they were hustled through the doors and deep into the palace.

  The inside of the palace was quite palatial. I know that it seems that I use the same kind of word all of the time, but when I think of palatial I think of large spaces decorated with lots and lots of valuable things. In human palaces, kings and queens love to collect rare woods, gems, ivory, and precious stones to decorate their walls and rooms. This form of wealth is also used to demonstrate their power as well as their majesty. In the Submarian palace, there were indeed pearls of great sizes, but these people had a greater desire to collect and maintain the true wealth of the sea and all other bodies of water. Corals of many different colors grew throughout the palace, sculpted in not only pleasant designs but also functional for use as tables and couches. Schools of exotic fish swam freely in some rooms, including some creatures that could otherwise be dangerous to meet in open and unprotected waters. The twins sometimes felt that they had entered an underwater, living aquarium, for these creatures had not been hunted and mounted on walls, like you might see in a human palace, but allowed to roam freely in a habitat created especially for them.

  Deep underground in the queen’s throne room, Queen Piscis awaited, reclining on her red coral throne shaped and maintained in the form of a huge dancing porpoise. In stature, she was probably among the smallest of her kind, which is the exact opposite you might expect of a queen, and her scales radiated a deep purple hue, the color that marked her as royalty. She stirred only slightly from her position when the twins and the Unicorn were ushered into her presence. Indeed, all of the people—ministers, secretaries, members of the royal family, and other important people—assembled in the throne room with her moved visibly to have a better look at these earth-walkers.

  “You will show a proper respect for our queen,” the commander warned Uniqua, having briefed her on the proper way of greeting Submarian royalty during their swim to the palace.

  The twins waved their arms out to their sides as if they were large manta rays soaring through the depths of the sea. Then they moved their arms in front of them, palms up, and made beckoning movements, bending the elbows, towards their mouths. Then they raised their arms and placed their palms together and plunged them downwards, as if they were diving, and then wriggled them together as if they were a pair of eels swimming alongside each other. Finally, they bowed at the waist to the queen and straightened themselves up again.

  An audible sigh rippled through the crowd, a sign that they were pleased that the twins had greeted their queen with much respect.

  As for Uniqua, she merely stood on all four legs and slightly dipped her horn in the direction of the Queen.

  “I have heard much about you,” Queen Piscis spoke, her voice deep for a creature so small. “And yet, I know nothing about you.”

  “If it would please your Majesty,” Uniqua responded, “we would answer every question you might have and more. We would if time allowed. But we are on a quest we hope that you will grant. You see, we haven’t much time in your world.”

  “Time is irrelevant,” Queen Piscis interrupted. “Time is a tool. The fool believes that time uses the person. The enlightened person uses time and thus controls the flow of time.”

  “Begging your Majesty’s pardon, but do you mean that you can control not only the usage of time but also its duration? Is not time merely a measurement of how long one might complete a task or how long one needs to—say—walk across the room?”

  “The enlightened person uses time to either speed up or slow down what is necessary,” the Queen answered. “I know a little of your world, earth-walker. You require time to measure what must be done. Thus, you need hours to tell you how much you need to do or accomplish. Here, in my world, we use what must be accomplished to allot the time. In your world, a year might pass. Here, it might be the blink of an eye or an eternity.”

  “Yes,” Uniqua began rather dubiously, “be that as it may. The earth-walkers who hold our friends hostage believe that if we do not return tomorrow that they will hurt our friends.”

  “What time is it in your world now?” the Queen asked patiently.

  “To be honest, I have no idea. We measure the hour by the position of the sun in our sky.”

  “Then, you do not know if you have already spent one of your minutes or several of your days in my kingdom.”

  If you will remember, I did warn you that time is not necessarily measured the same all over the Island. But even Uniqua did not recognize this, and it came as a kind of shock to realize that the deadline the Colonel had given her might already have been passed.

  “Then,” Uniqua said hesitantly, “I will hope that we have only been in your kingdom a short time.”

  “Do you then not enjoy being in my kingdom?”

  Uniqua realized that she was falling into a verbal trap. She had hoped that she might converse with the Queen, tell her of their mission, retrieve the magic potion that would grow th
e Colonel a tail, and then return to the surface and rescue her friends. She had to be very careful with how she spoke lest she anger the Queen. And, then, she and the children would never get out of the lake and finish their adventure.

  “This is my first time in your kingdom, your Majesty,” Uniqua answered carefully. “Truly, I wished that I had come here long before and could have stayed to enjoy your company. Much learning could be shared. So, now that I have come, it is not from any dislike of your kingdom that I wish not to stay long but from an urgent necessity to save my friends.”

  The Queen effortlessly rose from her porpoise lounge and floated towards the children. “You have not spoken. Who are you?”

  “I am Karen,” the girl answered.

  “I’m Carl, your Majesty,” the boy added.

  “Kurn and Kurl,” the Queen repeated in her own dialectal way. “You are earth-walkers, but you are not of the Island.”

  “That is true, your Majesty,” Karen stated. “We live on the ocean though. Our father is an oceanographer. He studies the ocean and everything that lives in it.”

  “Oh?” The Queen took a keen interest in this fact. “Does he study the water to perhaps exploit the creatures that live in it? Perhaps to enslave the ocean for his bidding?”

  “Oh, no, your Majesty,” Karen was quick to point out. “He wants to save the ocean. My Father believes that if we—uh—earth-walkers do not protect the ocean, then we earth-walkers will soon die. We need the ocean as much as we need the air we breathe to live.”

  “Your father sounds like a good man,” the Queen observed. “There are not many like him, I’m afraid. Most earth-walkers would simply use the ocean as they have used the earth: as huge waste refills. They plunder the ocean as if it had no bottom and would be plentiful forever. They destroy so much of its beauty—so much of its irreplaceable wealth. These earth-walkers make me very angry—and very sad,” she added after a pause. “It is because of their kind that I have no love for earth-walkers, and so often I am moved to make war upon them, if I could.”

  She turned to Uniqua. “Although you are an earth-walker yourself, surely you know that the earth-walkers who walk on two legs like this Kurn and Kurl exploit your kind as well. Yet, you accompany them. You aid them. Why is it that your kind has not turned against the earth-walkers with two legs?”

  “Because, your Majesty,” Uniqua explained, “as you have learned, there are two kinds of humans. There are those who would destroy their own home out of greed and ignorance. But then there are those who have tried to understand their home and realize that there is a greater balance in the world than they can totally understand. While humans regard themselves at the top of the animal world, they need and are needed by all the animals of the world. Some animals provide food and materials to survive in the world, and these are well provided for and protected by humans. Other animals protect humans, and, in turn, are provided for and protected. Animals, such as myself, are rare in the real world, but when we lived in that real world, we guided and protected humans until they had no need for us any more.”

  “Still, if the humankind, as you call them, were to begin to slaughter all the animals and the creatures of the sea and ruin the Earth, would you not rise up against them and fight back?” the Queen challenged.

  “I pray that such a day will never come.”

  “So do I,” the Queen agreed. “Yet, the intrusion of these humankind troubles me. In the long history of our kingdom, very few earth-walkers have dared to enter our lake. Most have stayed on the surface. A few have dared to dive under the surface but not so far as to trouble us, although all have made mischief by killing and taking the simple creatures of our kingdom. But until this day, no earth-walker has ever dared to come into the city until you arrived.

  “Now, what am I to do with you?” The Queen returned to her throne but did not lie on it but remained standing. “The one thing in your favor, Kurn and Kurl, is that your father appears to be more of a friend to our creatures, and you may have learned from him. The second thing in your favor is that you have the loyalty of another earth-walker who has forgiven you the crimes of humankind. But, on the other side of the scale, you have trespassed in our territory, and that cannot be forgiven so lightly. You have seen too much, and you know too much to just allow you to return to the world of the earth-walkers.”

  “We are willing to make a pact,” Uniqua spoke up. “We will make a bargain. If you will help us in our time of need, we will promise you to keep secret of everything we have seen and learned today.”

  “Such words are easy to say but hard to keep. Would you think I should be so foolish as to believe that you would keep your words? Even the porpoises and the whales cannot keep secrets long, and I regard them as the wisest creatures I have ever known.”

  “What would you need that would convince you that we will keep our end of the bargain?” Carl asked. “Short of keeping us here forever and ever.”

  The Queen looked at Carl for several moments before answering. “We do have a very serious problem,” she confided. “Our lake—our kingdom—is shrinking everyday. You see, a long time ago, our ancestors made a pact with the Portal-makers in Portaland, a country just to the east of our lake. These Engineers designed a portal that brought fresh seawater in from the ocean. But that portal is broken, and we have been unable to fix it. We also have not been able to contact the Engineers to come and fix it. Now, as to the shrinking, our lake drains into the great marsh that sits on the east side of the Mountain of Power, and as our lake drains, it is becoming more and more polluted. In a very real way, we are slowly dying.”

  “Where does the water go after it reaches the marsh?” Carl asked.

  “Deep underground,” the Queen answered. “It slowly seeps through the bedrock and fills the rivers and lakes of the underground. We believe this water eventually returns to the ocean. So, you see, if our lake is not replenished by the ocean, soon there will be no lake and no more Submaria.”

  “We could go to the Engineers and ask them to fix it for you,” Karen suggested.

  “Still, even if we believed that you would do this for us, how will we know that you will keep our secrets?”

  “There is no way to know this,” Uniqua interjected. “There is no magic that will either ensure honesty or dishonesty. There is something that is both non-magical and yet magical in its own way, and that is trust.”

  “Trust is something very precious here, too, but rarely is it given except among good friends and with reason to give that trust.”

  “If you will trust us, even though you do not know us well enough to be your friends,” Karen ventured, “you will know that you have earned that trust when we ask the Engineers to repair your portal and return your kingdom back to health.”

  “Would you be willing to die if you should not live up to that trust?” the Queen asked darkly.

  The twins looked at each other with a twinge of fear passing between them. Carl nodded, and Karen answered for the both of them. “We are.”

  “Now wait just a minute,” Uniqua choked.

  “No, Uniqua,” Carl rejoined. “We made a solemn promise to help Cassandra. We made a solemn promise to the Colonel and to save our friends. We might die in the attempt to keep our promises to both. We can promise these Submarians to help them, too. If we die, we fail. But my sister and I do not believe we are going to die, ‘cause we intend to succeed.”

  “What is this promise you made to this Cassandra, and who is this Cassandra?” asked the Queen.

  “She is a Dragon, your Majesty,” Uniqua answered. “The children intend to ask Lord Power to release her parents from their captivity.”

  “And this Colonel?”

  “He is a human who wants to have a tail,” Uniqua expounded. “He is leader of these Guerrillas who hold our friends hostage until we return. He threatens them with harm unless we return very soon. He feels that he cannot be truly one of his Guerrillas if he doesn’t have a real tail, and that is the reas
on why we came into your lake in the first place.”

  Queen Piscis stared at Uniqua for a moment and then—surprising everyone—laughed. “How strange, even for an earth-walker. And how would he grow this tail?”

  “I believe that if you will give us a potion,” Uniqua said, “that will cause him to grow a tail, then he will be truly happy and release our friends.”

  Queen Piscis laughed heartily again. “You are very shrewd, Unicorn, and your knowledge of magic is very deep indeed. You would bargain this potion to make a two-legged earth-walker more like a four-legged earth-walker for the lives of your friends and yourself and a promise to go to the Portal-makers on our behalf.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell, your Majesty.”

  “Consider it done.” Her tone spoke of finality. “There shall be one condition, however. You must agree to eat one of my pearls first. Each of these pearls holds a spell of death. Fail in the attempt to help us, and you will die. Succeed in helping us, and the spell will dissipate and not harm you. Are you still willing to make the bargain?”

  “We are!” said the twins almost in unison.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PORTALAND

  Just what the Queen meant about time being used to get things done, neither the twins nor Uniqua were really sure. For the trio, it seemed to them that it took quite a long time—whenever you have to wait for anything to be done, whether it is thirty minutes or two hours or even half a day, it always seems to take forever—for the Queen to order her physicians to make a special potion for the Colonel. And what also makes waiting seem even longer is when you have nothing to do. The children and the Unicorn were still considered to be prisoners rather than guests in the palace, and so they had nothing to do but wait in the throne room until the potion was ready. Worse, the Queen left the throne room, and all the people in her court—probably also bored from just looking at our friends—I mean, when you go to the zoo, how long do you really want to just watch or stare at the creatures in their cages—they also left. So, our friends were left all by themselves with just the guards to watch over them and make sure they did not go anywhere. Carl lay down on the floor and decided to take a nap, but he couldn’t really; he was worried about Cassandra and the Rabbits, and the floor, being hard and cold, was not very comfortable. Karen just sat near him. She did not feel like talking for she was just as worried as her brother for her friends on the surface. And, Uniqua stood very quiet, trance-like, as she passed the time.