Angry Young Spaceman (15 page)

Mrs. Ahm said something quickly to her, motioning at my tie, using the words for Earth and only. I was hoping that they wouldn’t flip it around to see the Made on Octavia tag. “This is a great restaurant,” I said distractingly.

“Sank you,” said the older teacher. “It is very traditional.”

It was pretty fascinating. The room was small and cave-like, if you were used to caves with windows. The floor was covered with a soft lichen that glowed, providing the light, and instead of sitting disks there were shallow indents where the lichen was mostly rubbed off.

“I wish that my apartment was more traditional,” I said.

“I like the modern apartments more,” said Mrs. Ahm. “I am modern woman.”

“Why do you like the modern ones better?”

Mrs. Ahm crinkled up her nose and tore up some lichen with her suckers. “This smells bad.”

“It does?” I said, lifting up a snuff to my nose. It faded once plucked, but didn’t smell.

“When it gets older it does,” said the older teacher, adjusting her hat. She had an old-lady hat with flowers on it. “But she should not say that.” She batted Mrs. Ahm lightly. “It is very important to our history.”

Mrs. Ahm’s eyes widened. “You know? The story?”

“
His
tory,” the other said.

“Well, about five hundred years ago...” Mrs. Ahm started, then immediately consulted with the other teacher. A young, bored looking woman came in and removed empty dishes from the table. I didn’t rate a look, and I pitied her for being so self-involved that even a freak didn’t entertain her.

“So,” Mrs. Ahm started again. “We had a war with monsters.”

I nodded, so well trained that not even a smile crossed my lips.
It’s those monsters again, izzit?

“The monsters lived in Playgi, and at night they came to Artemia and killed everyone!” Mrs. Ahm made an explosive movement with her tentacles.

The older teacher was looking at my fork, which was sitting on the table.

“Everyone?” I said. “All?”

“No...”

When Mrs. Ahm was looking for a modifier, the older teacher reached out tentatively for my fork. She looked at me and I assented with a nod.

“Almost everyone,” Mrs. Ahm said excitedly. Then she noticed that the other teacher’s attention was elsewhere, and she faux-snapped at her in teacher-tone to
Pay attention!

We all laughed at this, and I felt really happy to actually get an Octavian joke. They looked at me and I proudly explained that I also told my students to pay attention. “How did you stop the monsters?”

“The farmers planted lichen everywhere. Many many farmers died. Then the lichen grew... and started to... bring light,” she said.

“Glow,” I said.

She nodded, but I don’t think she knew the word. “Then the monsters couldn’t hide in the dark. Then the soldiers killed them.”

The older teacher smiled. “Farmer’s War.”

“Yes, we call it Farmer’s War.”

I nodded. I tried to think of a comparison to something on Earth — the
yes that is like our...
syndrome — and came up blank. The only war that mattered was the one that essentially brought about Earth’s ownership of the rest of the galaxy. The one that brought me here.

The one that was still going on, in a way.

“Shall we go?” proposed Mrs. Ahm. “Class will start soon, I think.”

In the front room of the restaurant, the elder teacher pointed out a painting on the wall. “Monsters,” she said.

There was a group of dolphins there, facing a group of Octavians, but I didn’t see the monsters. “Where?”

She poked one of the dolphins.

I walked out a little dazed. “Are they all dead? The monsters?”

“No,” said Mrs. Ahm. “They hide on the west side of the planet.”

“Small,” said the other. “A small amount. Is not too dangerous.”

As we left, I wondered how many species lived on this planet, anyway. What was the history of those little half-shell creatures? Had they fought against the Octavians too? Or were Octavians monsters to them?

We took the saucer back to the school. I had agreed to be a special guest in Mrs. Ahm’s class in exchange for a lunch at a traditional Octavian restaurant. It had come up during a workshop when I said that many people took me to an Earth-style restaurant because they thought I’d like it better.

The two women were talking about a fellow teacher they called stupid-fat-man — I took it to be a nickname — and the upcoming holiday. Mrs. Ahm wanted to go to explore a certain cavern, but she couldn’t for some reason I couldn’t understand. Her baby was involved.

I really enjoyed eavesdropping, especially when it wasn’t about me. I didn’t feel it was dishonest, since I used enough Octavian during the workshops that it was pretty obvious that I was progressing rather quickly. Finding I had a talent for it was an unexpected surprise, akin to finding something you need in a junk drawer. My spoken Octavian was still child-like, mind you, and it kept me humble.

“Do you understand?” asked Mrs. Ahm, who wasn’t driving.

“A little... why can’t you go exploring?”

The elder teacher made a surprised sound. She didn’t go to the workshops, so expected me to be totally ignorant. I was only partially ignorant now — although this class today would prove how far I had (or hadn’t) come.

“I need someone to protect my baby.”

“A baby-sitter,” I supplied.

We arrived at the school. I looked around, quite interested in seeing the differences between it and my Plangyo school. If anything, this town was even more remote than mine (well, “mine”) and it was famous for a method of boiling vegetables. I decided that that was lamer than being famous for an actual vegetable.

We rushed straight to class, bypassing the tedious introductions to everyone in the staff room, and the class had obviously not been expecting me.

The girls froze. I slid the door shut, and turned to face them. I smoothed out my tie and said hello.

All hell broke loose. A kind of wailing started up, a keening that grew to an almost unbearable pitch and then dropped back down. A girl stood up and screamed
Ohmigod
and collapsed back to her seat, her tentacles flung over her head.

Mrs. Ahm raised her hand with a tolerant smile and told them to begin the class. Everyone sat down.

One tall girl sat and then rose. She told the class to pay attention. Everyone was quiet. Then she told them to bow. They did, in sync.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Ahm. “Will you sing a song?”

That was odd,
I thought, since the singing was usually reserved for the end.
Oh well, here goes nothing
...

A girl got up and made an entry at the control panel, and music started.

That’s not the song I want to sing —
I thought, then the girls started to sing. I noticed some of them read from their recorders.

“Do you like this song, Sam?” asked Mrs. Ahm. “It is very popular on Earth, I know.”

I nodded. It was a song by the Zylophonix Corp. It sounded funny, though. “What clone group was this recorded by?”

She gave me a worried look. “I think... it is illegal.”

I realized she was serious. I felt a moment of exhilaration at the idea that Octavia was so remote it was even outside the copyright planet sweeps.

“Don’t tell my principal,” she said.

“Oh, no,” I said, listening to the girl’s sweet voices mangle the lyrics. I decided not to tell her about the interstellar tribunal on bootleggers, and boggled at the idea that she was risking her life for a teaching aid without even knowing it.

What kind of planet made rules about the songs you can sing? The same one that copyrights its language, then makes it the universal tongue of trade, I guessed. I felt a surge of hatred for Earth, and imagined my home planet blowing up and breaking —

“Are you Pan Venrugie?”

Who? One of the girls was standing. It was question time, I guessed. I hoped my anger hadn’t been visible on my face.

“I am Sam Breen.”

“Maybe... you are the brother of Pan Venrugie,” she said, pronouncing the P sound as so few Octavians could. “The actor.”

I imagined explaining that I preferred to spend my spare time punching people in the face rather than watching the latest mediastar implode. “Sorry,” I said.

One of the girls activated a small holo from her ring, and held it up for me to see. Pan (I assumed) did a little dance, and from the ghostly rendering I could see absolutely no resemblance. However, we both had legs rather than tentacles, and so I was the closest person to Pan they’d ever see in real life.

I suppose I should have nodded and smiled. I shook my head. “Pan is from the moon,” I said, “where all the bird-boned mediastars are made.” I pointed to myself. “I am from Earth, where the
real
people live.”

Glancing at Mrs. Ahm’s creased brow, I mercifully simplified. “Pan lives on the Moon. Sam lives on Earth.” Which wasn’t true, but it was understandable, and I was rewarded by a good percentage of nodding heads and
ahhs
.

I told them All About Sam. I got them to guess how long it took on a rocketship to get to Octavia. I told them how I loved Octavia. I told them how I had a friend on Montavia who was a roboman, and got them to draw a roboman on the board. I told them any silly shit that came into my head, as long as it was simple, as they gazed at me adoringly and scrambled to answer my questions. That ate up half the class.

Then, when most other teachers would have let the students ask questions for the rest of the class, Mrs. Ahm told them that there were questions on their recorder-pads based on my little talk. Whoever answered the most questions, she said in Octavian, would get a kiss from me.

This introduced a volatile chemical into an already unstable compound. They started asking questions in English and frantically inputting.

“Do you understand what I said?” she said innocently.

“I hope you win,” I said, equally innocently.

“Oh! Only the students,” she said. She hit me on the arm. “You are bad,” she said, but smilingly.

Why was I flirting with a married woman? I wondered idly. It had just come out of my mouth. I had listened to Matthew’s schemes of infidelity with a scorn... an interested scorn, mind you. I supposed that forgetting my Speak-O-Matic was one of those blessings in disguise — learning the language kept me out of trouble, anyway. That jogged my memory.

“So will the students want me to sing a song?” I said casually.

Her eyecrests spiked. “You?”

I shrugged. “OK.”

She immediately asked the class and the keening began, chatting amok.

I went to the control panel and punched in 66945.

The song was called “Full of Happiness,” and it was clear by the stunned looks on the girls faces that they couldn’t quite believe they were hearing the beginning chords of their favourite famous hit pop song.

“This is a song by I.C.Y.,” I said, eliciting a piercing scream from somewhere in the back.

I had been practicing the Intergalactic Cool Youth song for the better part of a month — ever since I had been asked by the kids in Plangyo to sing a song. The only tricky thing about it was that the song used both the echoey
thac
and the
op
sound which, as I had been warned, were impossible for Earthlings to make.

But about a week ago, I had discovered that tapping my front tooth with my fingernail made the echoey
thac
sound. And a couple of silly whacking combinations later, I made the echoey
op
by lightly slapping my cheek while pursing my lips in an O shape.

So I sung the song for them, and my heartfelt rendition made them squirm with adoration. My sound-substitution made them scream with laughter.

I thought it was funny. I didn’t
intend
to change Octavian society.

The only hint I had was when it was over, I looked over at Mrs. Ahm and saw her worried face. She smiled quickly, but there had been fear there.

ten

Outside the bus station was one of those half-shell creatures, scooting around the garbage. I crouched near it and held out my hand, talked to it. Its tail snapped nervously as it spun around, its eyes floaty. I took a step towards it and it shot off down the road.

I heard laughter from the station. There was a group of kids watching me. I straightened up and wished I was going somewhere else.

The station was an old structure, mostly coral with steel reinforcements added. I entered it with a neutral expression and looked briefly at the kids laughing. They weren’t my students — a few years older, but still no more than fourteen, two boys and two girls. I sat down, catching the words “dirty” and “Earthling” out of their conversation.

Letting my expression harden, I focused on the signs directly across from me.
Something something open door
said one;
Artemia express hour-something
. I told myself it was better to learn the language, even when I had to put up with bullshit like this.

Some joke involving “garbage” was told. A taboo involving the little half-shell creatures, maybe? The idiots didn’t know what a wonderful thing it was to have more than one native species; how humans studied the species that had once lived on their planet with reverence and feelings of loss. What a nice thing it was to think that you could share a planet, learn from each other! Not that the half-shells wanted anything to do with me, I thought, feeling my expression grow colder.

When the lepers run from your touch, now
that’s
alienation.

I was ready to bridge the intergalactic gap with a right hook — the cold fury had crept its frost over my better judgement — when I realized they weren’t talking about me any more. I looked at them. The boy who was talking loudest, a tow-headed short kid, seemed to be focused on a somewhat pretty girl who wasn’t paying attention to him.

I’d have been a much better pug if not for this empathy thing (Fast fists, cold heart/That’s what sets a pug apart).

I looked around at the other people in the terminal. An old woman watched me, a bag of cucumbers hugged to her chest. A middle-aged guy with a suitcase. And beside me, on the bench, was a stunning young Octavian woman.