Angry Young Spaceman (13 page)

Matthew said with a smirk, “Yeah, you knew Sam was a pug back home, right?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Hugh. He looked kind of hurt, and I felt my trusty blowtorch rage sputtering into death. “You know, (hic) my family would have been much happier if I had been born looking like you, Sam (hic).”

My aggrometer needle jumped to life.

He saw my twisted lip and went on. “I don’t talk about it much,” Hugh said apologetically, “But my parents are really well off. Obscenely so, really. And everyone on the moon is beautiful, since the main industry is media. So... plain people stand out.”

“What about the tourists?” asked Matthew.

“They’re busy being milked in the hospitality zones,” Hugh said. “The propaganda about it being sealed for disease prevention is nonsense. The truth is that people like my father’s father wanted plainness to be the mark of the idle rich.” He fiddled a little with the dials on his wristphone. “This is my mother.”

We looked as the small image flickered and sharpened, a grey pinched-mouth old woman.

“Wow,” Matthew said, “Mom’s pretty ugly.”

“No, merely plain,” he said. He fiddled some more. “Dad, on the other hand...”

I looked away before the image was fully formed. Matthew gaped at it.

Hugh’s brow raised, a pleasant arc. “Dear old Dad’s majestic ugliness means that no one mistakes him for a working man. Naturally,” he said brusquely, tapping the picture away, “I was a huge embarrassment to them.”

There was so much rawness in that admission I couldn’t meet his eye. I looked out, instead, across the cavern. On a nearby ledge I could see an Octavian couple fanning out round sitting disks, their picnic basket at the ready. She, slim and pretty — he, rotund and funny. Their laughter reached us a few seconds after it left their mouths.

“Hey look,” Matthew said, pointing up. From a tiny hole there slid a chain of Octavian schoolgirls, tentacles linked. Each new too-big body emerging was a shock, a magic trick, and the chain spun and giggled and then suddenly stopped. At the top, a boy held onto the ledge and ignored the whiny pleas that he let go. I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I imagined it would be a mischievous grin.

“How can he hold them up?” Hugh said.

“It must be the density,” I guessed.

Then the chain disconnected and the individual girls floated down, their tentacles spreading out to slow them like clothless umbrellas. The whines stopped and it was silent for a moment, as they fell, and we watched without a word.

The boy remained stuck at the top, with the one girl he was holding flailing her tentacles at him. He let her go, then dropped himself.

“I thought she was gonna ink him,” said Matthew.

“Well, I understand it’s kind of rude. The equivalent of farting on someone.”

Before the boy hit the ground, one of the girls let loose a big ink cloud that he couldn’t help but hit, then skittered away.

Hugh and Matthew looked at me.

“Well,” I said, “they
are
farm kids.”

Now that they were closer, we could hear them speaking. I strained to interpret what they were saying. One of the girls was saying how boring Earth was.

“They keep saying Earth,” said Matthew, picking up pebbles and throwing them through the air in a superslow arc. “Are they talking about us?”

“Mr. Zik told me the nickname of this cavern is ‘Earth
.’
‘Cause of the green bottom and blue roof. I don’t think they’ve seen us.” Our ledge was slightly lower than theirs, though plainly visible. “They have a different name for us, anyway. Koogeem.”

Hugh was lying on his stomach, staring at the Octavians with a half-lidded gaze. The boy was running after the inker and the other girls protected her.

“Nice, emotional play. Octavians must be fun to teach,” he said, leaning his head against his hand with a sigh.

“Yeah, they’re OK,” I said. “The Armoured must be well behaved, at least.”

“Well, their armour adjusts them if they’re not,” Hugh said. “But it’s so awful. Their pale little expressionless heads stick up from their armour like mushrooms. There’s this one boy who cries all the time. No sound, just his eyes streaming constantly. One day I asked him why he was crying and he said that he wanted to be stripped like his mom.”

“Oh man,” Matthew said. “That’s shitty.”

“His suit immediately put him to sleep, and another teacher came in to carry him out. He told me not to worry.” Hugh turned his head away, his voice thick. “He said it was... normal.”

“Sounds like we’ve been discovered,” Matthew said. I could hear
Koogeem Koogeem
in the distance, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Hugh. His body was shaking a little, and I didn’t think it was the hiccups.

Matthew, oblivious, walked over to the edge of the ledge and gave the crowd an expansive wave. He was immediately paid in excited screams. While he was faced away I leaned over and patted Hugh on the shoulder. “S’OK, man.”

He stiffened at this. “Don’t you want to punch me anymore?”

I felt a little bad. I shrugged, but he couldn’t see that. He sat up and rubbed his face.

“Hello!” one of the girls yelled.

“Hello you foxy babes!” Matthew responded.

Hugh snorted.

“Matthew, what the hell, man, I gotta work here.”

Matthew turned around. “Don’t worry. Think of what it would translate as.” The boy bellowed a hello that sounded like a threat and Matthew ignored him, tired of the sensation he was creating. “So weren’t you ever tempted to become a big-time mediastar, Hugh? Just say fuck your snobby family and make some serious creds? That’s what I woulda done.”

Hugh nodded. “I wanted to be an actor for a while. But not because of the money — I’ve always been rather stupid about money, really — I thought I’d find... people like me. I grew up on the Slackwater comedies, the arch humour and the genuine feeling of the characters.”

I nodded. I liked them, although their relentless refinement started to grate after a while.

“So I ended up getting into the school where the Slackwater actors actually trained. And the people there were beautiful,” he shook his head, “so darkly beautiful. I walked through the school on my first day and my feet never touched the ground.”

I noticed the couple with the picnic basket were having trouble pouring tea, the Zazzimurg glinting across the cavern. I saw Matthew looking at it too.

“Gotta piss,” he said, looking around. The ledge was pretty stark, no cover at all.

“Don’t do it here,” I said, looking across at the kids. “It’ll just be this big cloud at this density.”

He made an annoyed noise. “Ah, I’ll just go back up to the tunnel.” He started climbing the wall, pulling himself up by his hands. It looked rather impressive.

When he got high enough to make me nervous, I looked back at Hugh. “I gather your first impression of the school didn’t last, eh?” I said.

Hugh shrugged. “On my second day I talked to them, and found them aloof. I was discouraged, naturally, but this was to be expected.”

“You couldn’t expect them to just accept you easily,” I said.

Hugh nodded. “I found my manner put them off. I had a bearing and poise that I shouldn’t have been able to mimic until second or third year. They suspected I had received early training, and I didn’t want to reveal my high beginnings. So I developed a... reputation. People fell silent whenever I was around.”

He sat up. “It went on for weeks. It was fairly torturous. I wanted to be loved by them, after all. One of the women there was brave enough to indulge her curiosity about me and we became involved. She was extremely beautiful and extremely dull, and at first I thought it was this latter quality that made her throw in her lot with me — she had nothing to lose, being the dimmest of her peers.”

I glanced up at Matthew, now using hands and feet to climb slowly towards the hole, less cocksure than when at a lower density. I smiled at his needless caution. “Go on,” I said, waiting for his story to roll past another ten beautiful but undeserving women.

“There was a Roman-nosed rival for her affections. This finally made me worth talking to. He took to insulting me, to mocking me. It was appalling,” he said, looking down intensely at the ground.

“Sure,” I said.

“No, it wasn’t
hurtful.
It would have been one thing to be cleverly put down, to be nicked by
bon mots
or... incisively sliced. But these were comments of the crudest calibre, utterly infantile. Comments unworthy even of our friend Matthew, there...”

I smiled. Matthew was wiggling his way into the hole high above, his legs kicking, looking like the wall was eating him.

“And people laughed like these brutal banalities were the height of wit. There was something horrifying about those sculpted lips pushing out such pedestrian nonsense. Of course, I had no response. I was destroyed, socially. But more significantly, my hopes of finding common souls were destroyed.”

“Hmm,” I said, thinking about my more successful quest for tribe.

“I became a ghost walking around the school. The conversations didn’t die on my approach, and so I got to listen to vacuous stupidities which simply deepened my gloom. Nattering about clothing without talking about aesthetics; they discussed scandal after scandal, but never ethics; drinking and self-destruction without nihilism; sport without catharsis.”

Above us, Matthew reappeared and jumped, curling himself into a ball. I realized that Hugh was speaking differently than he would have if Matthew was here.

“I quit before the first semester was over, and gave up the idea of finding my people for a while. Then a friend of mine told me about the Unarmoured looking for English teachers...”

Matthew uncurled himself in a sudden explosive move and landed.

“...they just seem like angels to me, you know?” Hugh said, looking at me with sad eyes.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“You talking about Octavian hookers again?” Matthew asked.

I smirked. “Right in one.”

Matthew looked at Hugh. “You and 9/3 should have come along with us that night in the big city.”

“Yeah, what did you end up doing, anyway?”

“Not too much...” Hugh said.

“So what did the big guy say when you called him?” said Matthew. “What was his excuse for not coming?”

Hugh scraped some gravel into a pile with the flat of his hand. “He didn’t give one. He’s kind of mad at me.”

I blinked. “Really?”

“What for?” Matthew said, his eyes narrowed.

“It’s... complicated.” Hugh said, his bangs falling over his downcast eyes.

Matthew made an annoyed noise and looked at me. I shrugged.

“So do you guys have plans for the break yet?” Matthew said.

We talked about it for a little while — it was still a ways away, but it was pretty exciting to talk about the planethopping we could do. Every so often I’d catch Hugh looking into the distance, but his melancholy didn’t inspire my usual irritation. I thought about him explaining to his terrifying father why he wanted to go to teach English to the Unarmoured, and conversations dropping away when he entered the room. His bird-bones seemed more fragile than irksome to me then.

nine

“Gunge forbly?” I said, staring at the little prick.

He looked to his friends, who covered their gleeful anticipation with their tentacles.

“
Gunge forbly
?” I said, approaching the kid’s desk. He bowed his head, his head crest dipped, but I could tell by his face that he wasn’t really all that sorry.

I hated punishing them, but I wasn’t gonna be called the unpleasant smelling peelings of a sweet potato. I looked at him severely and made the gesture that meant
come with me.
It’s a kind of patting of the air — obviously, the curled beckoning finger means as little to them as the expanding of tentacle suckers means to me.

The class was more attentive than it had been all period, of course, as the boy slowly glided to the front. Some of the other teachers would grab the offender in their tentacles and whack the child against whatever surface was available.

It wasn’t the violence that I disliked — I knew better than most that in the right context it could focus a discharge that was quite healthy. But this was institutionalized violence, always directed against the powerless for “their own good,” and it left a bad taste in my mouth. So I had my own tricks.

I took the blackboard brush in one hand and spun the skinny brat around with the other. Then I patted his head with the brush, making a small black cloud — not unlike an ink cloud. Surprised laughter ensued, and I pointed the foul-mouthed boy back to his seat. Defeated and humiliated, he trudged back, waving his tentacles around his head to get rid of the cloud.

I continued the lesson, asking the students “What Number Is It?” going up and down the rows to make sure that the smart kids didn’t dominate the class.

“Et.”

“Eight.”

“...Et.”

“Eight.” I looked out at the class, and said it in the
repeat after me
fashion. “Eight.”

“
Et.
”

The bell sounded, and I smiled. Last class of the week. I looked down and put my things on top of each other, unnecessarily, but it’s the body language that matters. “Bye,” I said and waved.

“Bye teecha,” bellowed the boy who annoyed me earlier. I ignored him, as I’ve come to ignore everyone who thinks English sounds better yelled, but I allowed myself to be stopped by a girl with an Intergalactic Cool Youth sticker on her recorder. She gave me a tiny grey creature, carved from coral, and a tiny smile. I thanked her, told her it was beautiful. Her tentacles twitched nervously, and she seemed to want to say something.

I pointed to her sticker. “I.C.Y. are very good!” I said.

Her eyes bugged out. Her friend, excited by this, said, “I.C.Y.... Octavian pop group.”

I mimed someone playing the synthitar. They laughed. “I.C.Y.... Number One,” the original girl said quietly.

I took my leave then, having thoroughly proven how cool I was.

Back in the teacher’s room, Mr. Zik was waiting for me. “They have called ablout the toilet,” he said.