The Mammal Cage

"The Mammal Cage" is the fifth story in Of Seaweed and Chocolate, but it's also the first. Fifth is where it fits in the sequence of the book, but it was the first one written. And it's also one of the original two Chuzek stories that formed the foundation for all the others.

If you haven't read Of Seaweed and Chocolate yet, don't worry. This is a spoiler-free zone. 

In "The Mammal Cage," Piper Craven wakes up in a desert badly sunburned and finds herself among strange people in a world not suited to human life. The locals save the alien primate's life and shelter her from the deadly sun. But when they can't figure out what to feed her, her life is once again in danger. 

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that this story won a contest, and that it was this win that encouraged me to write more Chuzek stories. 

While readers have compared the story to The Twilight Zone, it was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that planted the idea (in case you haven't noticed yet, this book owes a LOT to DS9). For those unfamiliar, DS9 is set on a space station that formerly belonged to Earth’s rival power, the Cardassians. 

Every time I watched, I couldn't help the persistent thought that the story would have been a lot more exciting if it had been set back when the Cardassians had been running the station--especially since at that time, they had been at war with us Humans. 

(Apparently, the writers of DS9 thought the same thing, because eventually there would be another war with the Cardassians, and they would take their station back, and it was indeed very exciting. But I hadn't seen those episodes yet.)

So while I watched the story that was playing on TV, I daydreamed the story that was playing in my head. Episode after episode, I would imagine myself stranded on enemy turf, suspected of being a spy or saboteur and unable to prove my innocence. 

I wanted to write about it, but a daydream is not a story, and a premise is not a plot. Who is on the space station? Why? How did they get there? What happens next? How will the situation be resolved? I would need to answer all these questions before I could make a story out of the idea.

I explored a variety of storylines in a variety of settings, both Star Trek and not. The one thing they had in common was a displaced human in a hostile place. And I ended up with so many stories about "Kidnappings, Traps and Dead-End Situations" that I started a collection. (The second edition of The Thirteenth Snare is coming out next year.) One of these explorations was "The Mammal Cage," and of course it didn't go into that collection because it started a whole universe of its own. 

It's sort of your typical alien-encounter story, but with a twist, because here the alien is a human and the ordinary hometown she lands in is not Earth. I also wanted to make it different in another way: I was tired of reading about people from different planets speaking the same language and somehow knowing certain basic things about one another from the moment they first meet. So while Piper speaks in this story, and the people of the new world also speak, they do not speak with each other. A disorienting sense of confusion and clouded understanding carries through the story.

And I chose the name Piper because of the poem by Celia Thaxter, "One Little Sandpiper and I." The poem gives me a haunting feeling that feels expressive of the way "The Mammal Cage" opens . . .

. . . with one little Piper on the sand, alone under a vast unfriendly sky.