Angry Young Spaceman (14 page)

“Great!” I said.

“Let’s go,” he said with a little bit of a question in his voice.

I was a little surprised. It was the middle of the day, and I usually had to kill time at my desk.

“No more classes for you and me,” he said, “ssss-sss-ss.”

We got our jackets and left, making a detour at the principal’s office. He was listening to the newsfeed and staring into space when we interrupted him. Mr. Zik cautiously told him about the toilet, and the principal made something that sounded like a joke about human strangeness. I pretended to understand nothing, telling myself that I would put up with any number of dumb jokes to be free of the insanity that was Octavian plumbing.

“So, you have been in Plangyo a month,” said Mr. Zik as we left the school. I automatically headed towards his saucer but he redirected me. “It is quicker to walk.” He removed his tin of chewing tobacco from his pocket. “Bad hablit, I know.”

“Has it been a month already?” I said. I watched him unscrew and lift the lid in a smooth movement, a little transported by the grace of the alien everyday.

Just outside the gates of the school there were a few boys who found our sudden presence alarming. They ducked into a store. Mr. Zik ignored them, and, I noticed, quickly put his tin away.

“Mr. Zik, I wanted to thank you for being such an excellent host. The time has gone fast because you have made it very easy to adapt to life here.”

A smile lit up his face and he glanced at me shyly. “It is my duty. Duty is very implortant to Octavians.”

“You have done more than your duty, I think.”

He shook his head, still smiling.

We walked by a field of cucumbers, two or three old folk working away. A saucer bubbled by overhead from the school’s direction.

He laughed. “Vice-principal leaves early too.”

The bubbles rained down on us.

“Today a student called me ‘gunge forbly,’” I said.

“He is a blad student,” Mr. Zik said with a laugh. “Very blad. Did you hit him?”

I wondered if Mr. Zik hit his kids. It was hard to imagine. He told me once, during a beating that had happened in the teacher’s room that it was OK because Octavians didn’t have bones. I told him the punishment I meted out. “I saw how they hated being sprayed with ink, in the caves.”

Mr. Zik nodded. “You are very smart, I think. And your Octavian is very good!”

I shook my head, aping his modesty. I
had
been ripping through my lessons, but what else was I supposed to do at night? I wrote all my letters during the day.

“Gunge forbly is not a polite word,” he said, and we laughed. “Who taught you?”

“Mr. Kung,” I said. He had given me a pretty thorough lesson in profanity — the majority of the words leading back to the tentacle that was used as a sex organ,
oogma
. I had found it interesting that it was just a tentacle until it was being used for sex.

“Last time, Mr. Kung was the host for the English teacher.”

“Really?” I said. “I am more lucky, I think.”

We suddenly were in the market, stalls to each side. It was the weekly market day, and thick-skinned farmers watched me with grimness or joviality. I tried to understand what they were calling out but I couldn’t decipher their accent.

“They are surprised to see you,” said Mr. Zik.

I could pretty much predict what my presence would do to school boys and girls, but the responses from the old folk ran the gamut from friendly to astonished to terrified to furious. I wondered if they were mad about the war — but I had been told it was mostly city-folk that had been affected by that.

A woman tapped my shoulder and put a piece of fruit in my hand. It looked like an inside-out pomegranate. I tried to hand back the beaded fruit, but she curled her tentacles back in refusal. With a gaptoothed smile, she said something I didn’t understand.

“She says it is no cost,” said Mr. Zik. “Free!”

I looked back at her with a smile. She was looking elsewhere, her eyes in the free float of senility. I thanked her loudly enough for all to hear.

Mr. Zik nodded at the woman who ran the restaurant where we often went for lunch. She was sitting in the curled up way of relaxed Octavians, but raised herself to greet Mr. Zik in a politely formal way. Mr. Zik didn’t live in Plangyo — he lived in a nearby city — but he was known in the town, since he had taught their children for almost ten years.

“You are respected in Plangyo,” I said as we left the market.

Mr. Zik blinked and said, “I am a teacher.”

We arrived at the post office, and went in. I had already been here a few times, to send letters, and I bowed a greeting to the nice lady who had helped me on those occasions.

Mr. Zik spoke very quickly in Octavian to her, making a large box shape with his tentacles. She made an
ah
sound of realization (perhaps a universal word) and slid to the back room.

“It was sent from Artemia.”

I nodded. That was a relief. It would have been embarrassing if they had had to ship it from off-planet.

“It is the only Earth-style toilet on Octavia, I think,” said Mr. Zik.

The toilet came out of the back, hauled on its antigrav disk by a strapping young lad with acne. It sat there like a throne, white and sparkly. I quelled an urge to hug it.

Mr. Zik signed for it with a press of his tentacle (the thin one used for you-know-what) and we were off. It slid through the door with an inch to spare. I looked back to wave at my friend, but she was already back at work.

Outside, Mr. Zik adjusted the strap so it went across his chest.

“Can I help you pull?” I said, when I realized we were going to drag it home.

“No. It’s easier for one plerson,” he said, starting to walk towards the market. The toilet seat bounced up and down, so I walked beside it and held the lid down with my hand. It made me feel like I was doing something.

We came to the market. I could see Mr. Zik was a little winded, breathing hard. I thought of pushing from behind but I had my fruit in one hand, and I couldn’t put it in my pocket. I wished I had thrown it away before all these farmers were around to see.

I felt like a total ass, toilet lid in one hand and inside-out pomegranate in another, jogging behind Mr. Zik. And how must he feel, dragging an alien shitter through the public market like some kind of service-issue droid?

We passed the restaurant, where the woman still chatted with her friend. Passed the vacuously grinning old woman, lifted my fruit to show I hadn’t even considered throwing it away. Passed through the entire town, who, instead of the hoots of derision and hilarity, remained as composed and nonchalant as I have ever seen. Even knowing some of the language, Plangyo remained indecipherable to me.

I looked at the back of Mr. Zik’s head as he chugged along, tentacles pulling the body that pulled the disk.
Powered by 100% Hi-Octane Duty
, I thought in amazement as we headed for home.

***

I’d finished dinner and did all the studying I was going to do. I was sanitizing the dishes, at a bit of a loss, sensing loneliness in the other room waiting for me. Then I remembered the moviedisk Lisa had given me before I left.

It was still there, in the side pocket of my now-empty suitcase. I set the size to 50%, popped out the centre and tossed it towards the centre of the room. It floated to the floor so slowly that I thought for a second that it wouldn’t land with enough force to activate, but then the familiar rays of light shot out from the edge and my room was suddenly populated by three-foot-high people.

“...mind if we record this?” Skaggs was saying to the young blond kid. “It’s Sam’s first scrap, eh?”

The blond kid shrugged, looked behind him at the other people he was with. “Ye want a record of the worst arse kicking you ever got, it’s fine wi’ us.” I saw myself tentatively raise a hand to the group.

A guy came through my ceiling and landed heavily on his boots in the midst of the two gangs. He flicked off his jetpack and pulled off his goggles. His brogue cut through the exchange of insults starting to fly between the two groups. “We’ve got a guid twelve minutes before the next skyeye sweep. Noo weapons or biomech implants are present.” He shucked off his jetpack and set it aside, continuing despite a decided lack of attention. Insults were flying, anger was rising. “Noo biting. Noo kicking. Noo bloody mercy.”

Two or three fights broke out at this point. Skaggs threw a wild punch at the blond kid, and it barely skinned her. She came back with a solid blow to the solar plexus.

Little Sam was sort of standing there, a half-smile on his face, bouncing up and down on my toes and shyly looking over at the Scottish pugs.

I sat down to watch it, fascinated despite myself. I had always been a little contemptuous of the idea of recording the fights, but here I was. I looked at my younger self — who was checking his brand-new aggrometer, waiting for the needle to red zone of its own accord — and recalled that moment with an incredible clarity.

I had felt like a total idiot. Lisa and Skaggs had convinced me to come, and I had been quite fascinated by the idea. But the reality of it left me standing awkwardly in the middle of a seething, pounding, cursing mob.

I leaned forward and changed the disc to 30%. The whole rooftop became visible, and pretty much everyone had paired up except me. I could actually see Skaggs shooting concerned looks back at me right until he got a haymaker that made him pay attention. Lisa was focused on taking down a guy about twice her size. I was watching her, concernedly, and then she looked over at me and waved.

I couldn’t hear it on the recording, but at the time I remember hearing her nose crunch under the big guy’s rock of a fist. He laughed a snorting laugh as she fell on her ass, holding her hand under her spurting nose. “Ach, the wee lassie canna fight!”

Guilt and rage combined to rocket me at the guy, throwing punches at his chest and face at the same time. He weathered my flailing attack and then casually boxed my ears. As I reeled back in pain, he tilted back his head and laughed. Lisa, her face streaked with red, had a fist waiting for him when he finished. One that sprung up from the soles of her heels and totally clocked the big guy.

“Reet you filthy pugs,” said moustache man a second later. “That’s it. Two minutes for medvac.”

Lisa took my arm and led me over to the line-up. People were casually chatting, the Scottish and Canadian accents had vanished along with the hostility. Accents weren’t a foolproof way to tell enemy from friend, but visual indicators were too risky.

I set the moviedisk to 75% and turned up the volume, to see if I could hear what people were saying.

Lisa was letting the blood flow freely from her nose, leaning forward so it didn’t get on her shirt. She was really excited about knocking out that big guy, because the Scottish pugs were notoriously hard. She grabbed my arm and said that she couldn’t have done it without me. I beamed foolishly.

“One minute,” the moustachioed man yelled. I zoomed back out, to see several people fire up their jetpacks and take off like shaky dragonflies. The big guy and other knockouts were getting medvac treatment by people with hand-held units. After most people had been under the lamp, I was struck with how normal and average everyone looked. Those ridiculous jackets and bully-gloves being sported nowadays went against the entire —

Ah, the hell with it. It was all a lie, anyway. I leaned forward and popped the centre back out and I was alone in my room again.

***

“Hey, little guy,” I said to the resident of Plangyo least likely to speak English. He was a small creature that resembled half a walnut shell, if a walnut had hundreds of tiny tendrils to whisk around back alleys on. And was about a human handwidth in diametre.

I was back in the same place where the market was, although now, being night, I was the only person around. Well, the only big person.

I held out my hand, wished I had something to offer him. He faced me, floating there, but didn’t move towards me. His eyes were round and white and the black pupils floated all over, independent of each other.

I didn’t know it was a he, really. I didn’t know if it ate anything. I stood and walked on, boggling at the fact that there was another species co-existing with the Octavians, and this was the first I’d heard of it.

I was looking in the window of a store that sold kid stuff — all your basic Intergalactic Cool Youth needs met here — when the little dude shot past me. He used a propulsion system as well as the tendrils, but the pressure was so low — him being so small — that bubbles didn’t even form.

He went down an alleyway, and I was tempted to follow. Maybe his home? His speckle-shelled little offspring would approach me, cling to my shoe in the manner of the unkicked. I would prove myself worthy of trust.

I paused, looking after it, and then I remembered that I was on another planet. The Starscouting rule about dark alleys and avoidance of them seemed to apply. What would I do with a half-shell friend I couldn’t talk to, anyway?

I looked up at the surface-sky. There were no moons or other celestial bodies, obviously, but the wan purplish-gray light was wonderfully foreboding. I thought about how I would love someone to come by and throw a punch at me so we could battle it out right here. I imagined the big Scottish pug, who I’d never seen after the first scrap. There were even boxes and shit to throw. It would be so great.

***

Mrs. Ahm lifted my tie in a finely tapered tentacle and admired it. “It is a very nice colour.” (It was a steel grey. Well, Earth steel grey. Here, steel was more of a black.)

I might have mentioned how I admired the unnerving blue of her eyes. Hell, I might have caught up her tentacle and caressed the row of tiny suction cups which were said to be so sensitive. I might have, but then she said:

“I will have to buy one for my husband.”

I shrugged. “They can only be bought on Earth,” I said, continuing to eat.

The older teacher returned from the washroom and settled back into her spot with a smile. I couldn’t remember her name despite it being, I knew, a short and common one. I smiled back, guilty.