About the Author
Nicholas Fisk's real name is David Higgenbottom. Born in London in 1923 he has worked as an actor, photographer, journalist, lecturer and a musician. He has been an editor and publisher as well as one of the most popular authors of Science Fiction and Horror stories over the past three decades. He has written over forty books and several television scripts.
Summary
• In Cutie Pie, the author describes the capture of an extra-terrestrial creature and his experiences on earth. The emphasis is on the basic human connection between the infant Winters and Cutie Pie, the E.T. creature. Indirectly, the author means that creatures living anywhere on any planet have some basic common human characteristics similar to the ones possessed by human beings.
• The scientists on earth built a space ship-Questar, which accidentally captured a creature living on the planet Quta-pie. When this extra-terrestrial creature was brought to earth and shown on T.V; Ch-tsal, at once became the darling of the spectators. They found him cute because of his shining feathers with shimmering patterns displaying rainbow colors. He had a curved, cosy, and rounded body, dark liquid eyes. He had bushy little hands, complete with thumbs that cutie pie used with astonishing speed and skill. Cutie Pie became an instant celebrity - he was a commercial success sold as Cutie Pie dolls, colouring books, tee-shirts, fan clubs, cereal cartoons, cartoon serials etc. Everyone wanted to touch him, see him, hold him. He was given a proper name - Ch-tsal - and put in a glass prison because he could live only in an environment similar to that on Quta-pi. The glass prison was a kind of scientific tomb which had a temperature of 180oF, 98 per cent humidity and an atmosphere of hydrogen, oxygen and careful proportions of a dozen exotic gases.
• Though Ch-tsal was captured from Quta-pie, the planet was not really his home. He merely chanced to be on Quta-pi. His elders had sent him there for his initiation; he went out as a boy and was to return as a "man", after having faced difficulties and dangers in strange places. Questar chanced to travel to Quta-pi and in scooping soil, rock, shale etc from it as samples, scooped Ch-tsal too.
• Ch-tsal remembered the scientists or inmates of Questar-silver creatures with bubble faces. He had become unconscious, but now he was in prison of the scientist jailers, white-clad men with tubes and goggle faces. He knew that these jailers didnt mean to torture him. He couldnt talk to them because he had no vocal chords; he could only look past their goggle glasses into their eyes, begging them to understand, but they could not.
• Ch-tsal groomed his feathers because they were filters, temperature - controllers, respirators etc. His whiskers were receiver's antennae, language carriers, voice, life-line. These linked him to his people and he had to keep them in working order by grooming. But unfortunately in the glass prison, these did not work. So he had to face a lot of miseries - he was deaf, dumb, alone, cut off from his land, his people.
• However, Ch-tsal fought his despair with all the courage he could muster up. His five stomachs, and numerous organic filters helped him to stomach the food and atmosphere supplied to him. He used to sleep and dream of his home. But on the nineteenth day of his captivity on earth, Ch-tsal awoke to a horrifying calamity.
• His jeweled feathers from his back and sides and down from his body had fallen out in the night. This calamity was as bad as it would be if humans suddenly found one day that they had hair - coarse hair all over their bodies. This loss of hair made him feel naked and hideous. His feathers were to him what clothes were to human. To lose his feathers was to lose himself. To become naked was to become a monster.
• He felt hideous and close to death. He crouched in a corner of his glass prison. He realized how powerless he was now. The scientists working on him also pitied him but they too were powerless.
• One day, two scientists came to Ch-tsal to try a change of diet. They examined him through the glass of their gas-mask goggles and hastened to get out because strange gases began to seep in through their masks. One of them pressed the button that closed the glass wall. The food bowl jammed it which caused a gap. Ch-tsal then escaped into the human world through this gap.
• Ch-tsal sensed that he could breathe in the air and the temperature was pleasant. He would have sent a message of thanks to his god, but his whiskers, his voice, were gone.
• Soon he began to explore the world around him. He found food in Mrs. Chats worth's house. He tasted cacti and put some into his bag. Now he wanted a friend desperately as he was very lonely. He saw a cat with fur. But the cat attacked him with its claws. He questioned the creature with his mental power and found it useless because the cat had only simple, crude thoughts - comfort, hunting, mating, food etc. He also came across a dog, but it too was useless for him.
• Then Ch-tsal felt rain and saw that his muzzle had some tiny, wire like projections - He was happy because his feathers were growing. But he was still looking for a friend and soon he found a small baby Christopher Harry Winters, who was of the same size as he was and completely naked. He learnt that Winters was an ungrown specimen of the senior species of earth. When winter's mother picked up the baby, waves of love and maternal emotions flowed between Winters and his mother which Ch-tsal recognized by his own experience.
• One night, Ch-tsal made his way into Christopher's nursery and lay down by Winters. He asked him to talk to him and hearing him, Winters smiled in his sleep. From Winters, Ch-tsal learned what it was like to plunge through a great wave, to hunt down animals in dark forests, to shoot an arrow knowing where it would hit. He also learnt of the glories of battle, the terrors of defeat, the chill wickedness of snakes, the smell of wood smoke etc.
• In turn, Ch-tsal told Winters of the building of crystal cities, of creatures in caves, of the pioneer ships that opened up the galaxy, of the Venus invaders and how they were defeated, of the five ways of knowing god, of the taste of a certain food that grew only when the planet's three moons were full.
• Both Ch-tsal and Winters underwent a great change after their meetings and talks. Now Winters often laughed and gurgled, bubbled and pulled his mother's hair. Ch-tsal's feathers and whiskers grew. He searched for food and exercised vigorously when Winters was four months old, Ch-tsal's feathers were so splendid that they gathered in the darkness. One particular night, he heard his mother's voice faintly, brokenly. Ch-tsal was overcome with joy and forgot all caution. He became a firework, a bombshell, spinning and zooming and bouncing off tree trunks. When two young poachers saw him, he beamed a single pulse of ecstasy so powerful that they fell backwards. One fine day, Ch-tsal was gone , the scientists stared at burnt grass in a roped-off area where his spaceship landed to take him back home. No one knew what became of Cutie Pie.
• Only-one person on earth knew, however, that was Winters, but he was too young to talk about Ch-tsal. He tried to tell his mother, but the mother only half-believed him and scolded him on listening to him, coaxing him to drink up his milk.
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