The Weevil Saga

My old bud Wilmo (we call him Mighty Wilmo, or Wilmo the Magnificent... I don't know what his real name is, but that'nt so unusual these days) Wilmo buzzed me a week ago Friday with this truly wild tale he'd heard, and a proposal to make a wildman power trek to the Deep Dark North, the Great White, Yo Canada!

Wilmo's a born networker, the only person I ever saw who could keep both ears to the ground and never stop moving. Everything from shooting the curl on the Wild World Web to shooting the breeze with strangers at Motor Vehicle (sometimes he just goes there to hang) and every half-stop in between are the components of his vocation. He hears more stories and bits and bytes and odd scraps of information, pieces them, matches them, dips 'em, flips 'em and flies 'em, and when he finally nails it down, I've never known him to be wrong, or to exaggerate that much. He can tell what matters and what don't, and what's true and what's not.

He was a little vague about how exactly he got the bulk of this story, short on details as it was. But the truth is that the Great Fumigation forty-five years ago when Weevils were booted off Earth, and the destruction of pretty much every last trace of them, had an unexpected effect: People who remembered it told stories, handed them down, swapped them and embellished them. The oral tradition that grew had its practitioners, but the important thing was to tell the story, not credit the source; crediting the source could get someone in trouble.

Not much is known about the Weevils since they were shot off in rocket ships. The planet-wide government blackout of news about the bugheads continues to this day. They keep the traders isolated and make sure they spend most of their time flying the wormhole routes with their cargo, so they don't "infect" the rest of us earthlings with tall tales and loose talk. About all anyone knows for sure about Weevils, aside from their love of digging and tunneling, is that they pass the time building these crude rope-and-pulley devices called Bugbots that look like giant insects. Sounds kind of tribal and pathetic, but I still think Weevils are cool. Don't know what I'd do if I ever met one face-to-face though.

I knew Wilmo called me because I'm a writer, or at least try to be. Ever since before I left home in Missouri and tried to convince New York City that I was The Greatest, I've written Compulsively, if not Greatly. Well, Wilmo likes my stuff, but mostly he knew that any real journalist wouldn't touch a Weevil story with a ten-foot taser. Even now, and even though Earth trade with Arthropoda has made a lot of millionaires, and even though no one but the Traders have seen a Weevil up close in forty years, most folks hate Weevils. Just hate 'em.

Now, Wilmo has never claimed to love Weevils exactly. It's more like, no, it's EXACTLY like an obsession. If he'd lived back in the bad old 20th century, he for sure would've been losing sleep over that Kennedy assassination thing. For him, the Cosmic Puzzle is Weevils. I guess that's love.

It made the most sense to make the trip almost entirely on foot, with Power Shoes. the Canadian Civil War had been going on for about three years now and the border was legally uncrossable. The war was an ugly affair really, not a shot fired the whole time. The skirmishes so far had involved a series of increasingly rude memos and faxes between Ottawa and Quebec, neither side willing to give an inch or even use the other side's language. Brutal!

The story that he told me, as unbelievable as it sounds, was that traces of a Weevil village were found in western Canada. Now, everyone knows that Weevils built their shantytowns around waste dumps, and weren't fussy. No, no. That's what no one will admit: the toxic waste dumps didn't just magically vanish. The Weevils did it somehow, and we owe them bigtime.

Wilmo's story goes that Canada didn't want to own up to this one particular waste dump for what were, I'm sure, highly admirable reasons. So wonder of Wonders, bits of one Weevil shacktown had survived in a remote area, forgotten in the war hysteria, I guess.

Any government on Earth would happily execute anyone with this knowledge, cheered on by patriotic and fearful citizens everywhere.

Of course we had to check it out, dude!