Angry Young Spaceman (22 page)

Matthew laughed. Behind him I could see through his walls and across the street, where Squidollians passed by. “What you up to?”

“Not much, just going through junk mail. Lazy Sunday. You?”

“Recovering from last night. Went out with this guy from the town. I think he’s a pimp.” Someone on the street behind his head stopped and peered in. He was looking straight at me, it seemed.

I looked back at the Squidollian. Eventually Matthew looked back, then shrugged wearily. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

Dustfish didn’t seem so bad, suddenly. Matthew turned off the visuals.

“Doesn’t it drive you crazy, the see-thru walls?” I said. I had taken to answering the phone audio-only because, otherwise, wrong-numbers tended to call back — with their friends. Free entertainment!

“Eh, there’s always night time. You adjust
.
”

When I looked back at it, I realized I had read the ad wrong — it actually said
Blind Youth
, not
Wealth.
It was interesting how similar the two words were in Octavian. I tore out the word for
Youth,
along with the model’s silver eye. It made me think of Jinya.

“I had my first language lesson with that girl I was telling you about.”

“Did you come to an... arrangement?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re meeting again on Monday for a lesson.”

“Where at?”

“My place.” Before he said what he was bound to say, I took the conversation in a different direction. “She had this guy with her this time — her senior — but I guess I passed, because she called me this morning to suggest my place for our next meeting. And he’s not coming...” I put the eye on an ad for a jetpack so it looked like the jetpack rider had a giant eye for a head. “...I actually asked her if he was.”

“Good,” Matthew said.

“No man,” I said, “No it’s not. I shouldn’t care.” I put the eye above the jetpack guy and now it looked like the moon. “I... I mean, what’s the best scenario here? I fall for a girl who I can only communicate imperfectly with...”

“Who can you communicate perfectly with, Sam? No one, that’s who.”

“Yeah, but...”

“Seriously. I got a lot of grief for going out with Ranni. Guys calling her a war bride and shit. People figured the only reason I was going out with her was because she was pretty. That’s why I started going out with her, sure, but... there’s more.”

He paused. I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not going to get sappy, but there’s more. Her parents —”

He stopped. I turned towards the speaker, wishing I could see his face.

“I just think it’s great, is all,” Matthew finished. “If this girl likes you, don’t fucking analyze it, man. Just... ride it. Ride it for all it’s worth,” he said, switching into lecher mode.

I thought about her tentacles wrapping around my legs on the upstroke. “That’s another problem altogether. You know about copulation and Octavians...”

“That shit?! That’s pre-war stuff. This is modern Octavia. There’s some kind of suppressant they use now. Look into it...”

I barked out a laugh. “Oh yeah, I’m gonna ask Mr. Zik tomorrow, ‘I’m planning to have sex with one of your women and I was wondering...’ It’s not like I’m hanging around with the town pimp.”

“I don’t know for sure if he’s a pimp,” Matthew said. “I just
hope
he is.”

“How can you say that shit, man,” I said, “A second after talking about Ranni?” I was about to say
so tenderly
but I wanted to keep it light.

“Yeah yeah.”

“Maybe I’m the weird one. It just seems wrong. It’s probably got to do with my mom. She cheated on her girlfriend of about twenty years, who practically raised me, to go out with this jackass who dumped her after a month.”

“It just doesn’t seem wrong to me,” Matthew said. “I don’t tell Ranni because I know her feelings would be hurt, not because I feel guilty. Fuck, I
wish
my mom had broken up with my dad. It would have been great. Instead she just sat there and took his shit.”

“Huh,” I said, rolling up the jetpack ad and holding it over the incintube, waiting for the intake to pull it from my grasp. When it did, it looked like it was flying away. “You know what I wish?”

“That you were fucking that girl right now?”

“Well, other than that.”

“What?”

“I wish I had a jetpack.”

“Me too,” Matthew said sincerely. “With this atmosphere you could make an atomic cell last like two months. Twice as long as on Earth.”

“And they’re pretty cheap, too. Doesn’t make any sense though. It’d cost way too much to ship back after I’m done.”

“Maybe you’ll be staying longer than you think.”

I laughed. “Just so I can get a jetpack? Don’t think so.” I thought about the way Jinya had giggled when I asked if she was coming alone.
Only me
, she said.
It is OK?
I smiled. “Don’t think so,” I said again.

“I heard you the first time,” said Matthew. “And I didn’t believe you then, either. Did you have one at home?”

“Yeah. Just a single-thruster one, though.”

“Knew it,” he said. “You pugs and your jetpacks. Polish it every week?”

“Pretty much.” My stomach was growling. I checked the time and found out why, got up and wandered into the kitchen. “But I wanted to leave all that stuff behind, anyway. Strip myself clean of the... old.”

“Why?” Matthew asked from the kitchen speaker.

I threw some food in the last clean pot. “Well, it doesn’t mean anything here. I wanted to be open to new stuff, I guess.”

“You brought your aggrometer...” said Matthew.

“Yeah, well, most people just think it’s a watch.” Part of me was uncomfortable about talking about this, especially with an outsider. But part of the change I imagined was about being friends again with people who weren’t pugs.

“You know, right before I left, I noticed they were selling pre-stained pug jackets—”

“Yeah yeah that’s great,” I said, turning on the stove with a sharp twist. “I’d rather not hear about that kind of shit, OK?”

There was a pause. “OK.”

“It’s just not a casual topic of conversation to me, is all. Sorry.”

I stared into the pot, stirring it, feeling the silence like an indictment of my intolerance. Why should I care if they were making pug into a joke on a planet a million parsecs away?

“Oh! Hey, so — holiday plans!” said Matthew. “You’re still up for planethopping, right?”

“You bet,” I enthused.

“Man, I been thinking about that. I haven’t been on a holiday for almost ten years. And that wasn’t even really a holiday.”

“Where’dya go?” I said, lying on the floor and looking at the roof. No video had its advantages.

“Well, we were
supposed
to go to the rings. Saturn. But when we get there, Dad gets all excited. I thought it was strange, ‘cause he was always an unhappy bastard. But instead of going out surfing, we stayed in our rooms until night.”

“You were in an orbiting station and didn’t go out?”

“You thought the trip to Octavia was boring — try being eleven and trapped in a room without windows, thinking about how you could be having fun on a glider instead of staring at your spazz of a dad.”

I laughed.

“So we go to sleep, and Dad gets us up in the middle of the night. My mom is worried right away, ‘Oh no not again.’ And I know something’s wrong because he’s rubbing his finger stumps which he only does when he’s nervous.”

“Like... were they scabby or...?” I had never seen a wound heal naturally, and I had an unsavoury image in my mind.

“No, they were medvac’d. He just refused to get replacements. He was just being an idiot.”

It occurred to me that there was probably more to it than that. “So something’s up, and then...?”

“Yeah, we’re all just standing there in the apartment. My sister was really little at the time, so my mom was just carrying her.”

“You have a sister?”

“Yeah and she’s a real hot snog thanks for asking. Anyway, the door stands open and there’s one of the Unarmoured there in one of those bullethead andy bodies, like the one at the party.”

“Really!”

“He just motions us to follow, with that creepy smile. I’d never seen one of the Unarmoured before — just heard about them in the war news, how there was fighting between them and the Armoured. I was for the Armoured ‘cause they had the coolest tanks. This one looked just like the guys on the news, with the dumb little capes. Do you remember?”

All I could remember was the famous clip of the group of the Unarmoured meeting a phalanx of Armoured, the one where the Unarmoured with the egghead lifted his hand and the Armoured fell like dominoes. “I think the capes were supposed to be a representation of their real bodies, all wispy and gossamer.”

“I thought they looked wimpy. Anyway, the Earth Council had declared the conflict stabilized by this point and so it was confusing to see this guy in... uniform, I guess. And he was looking at me real closely when we were sneaking away. He was talking to my dad but he was looking at me.”

“So did he whisk you away in his ship and teach you the secret Unarmoured handshake?”

“No, we didn’t get into a ship at all. We all suited up and stepped outside. He had access to an airlock — could have done some serious damage if he wanted. In fact, that’s what I kind of thought we would be doing. It made more sense than us going to this nice Floatel — Dad was always raging about people going on holidays and stuff. It made me feel really sick. Why was my dad such a maniac?” He paused.

“And?”

“I was thinking about all those nice things and people getting sucked out into space... then the airlock closed. I felt better, but still shitty. The rest of them had started flying towards Saturn.”

Something clicked in my head then, something about the war and Saturn. Something about it being impossible to keep under surveillance.

“They were coaxing me to follow but I just had my arms folded and was just floating there. They were upside down to me, and they looked pretty stupid that way. That made me feel a little better. Of course, it was just a matter of time before I fired up the boot blasters.”

“It had boot blasters?” I said, instantly envious.

“Serious boot
and
palm blasters. Crazy thrust. So I caught up with them, passed them, pretended I knew where I was going. I wanted to lead, I didn’t want to remember they were there, I wanted to be alone rocketing across the galaxy. It was such a sweet suit. Fully loaded. Weapons. Whoever these guys were—”

“Weapons?”

“Yeah. Offline, of course. Lucky for Dad.”

“So you get there—”

“Well, the Unarmoured guy tried to keep up with me at first but I kept pushing harder, until he just gave up. He kept us on course, right into the gaseous layers of the planet. Eventually we came to this ship—”

“A ship
inside
Saturn,” I said, disbelief frank on my face. “That’s impossible for a number of reasons. Is this story going to end with ‘and then I woke up’?” He had had me going until then.

“I didn’t know it was impossible, so I didn’t ask.”

“What kind of ship was it?” I quizzed him.

“I don’t remember,” he said after a moment.

“So this Squidollian agent you were with—” I said.

“Unarmoured,” Matthew corrected.

“Well, at least you remember your lies,” I said. “And your dad was missing how many toes?”

“Fuck off!” bellowed Matthew.

I laughed and laughed some more.

Matthew turned the vid on, gave me the finger, and turned it off again.

“Anyway, I don’t think we’ll be going to Saturn, if that’s what you’re hinting,” I said.

“You know where we should go?” said Matthew, sounding composed. “Pleasureworld 33!”

As Matthew talked on, weighing the pros and cons of the different possibilities — i.e., the likelihood of getting laid vs. the likelihood of getting killed — I felt grateful to have Matthew in my sector. I realized I had spent most of my life hanging out with people who had the same opinions as me, and when their opinions changed we could no longer stand to be around each other. But with Matthew, our differences were blatant, and yet we tried to figure each other out, and made excuses for each other. Our friendship was the answer to a mathematical equation, and we worked backwards from there to find the question that fit.

After we said our good-byes and I had my dinner I peeked at the time tentatively. It was earlier than I had hoped. The evening stretched in front of me and I knew only a few hours of it would be occupied by studying Octavian. So before it got any darker I lit out for a little wander.

I locked the door and walked out. I stood at the road, looking one way then another, having nowhere to go. Just standing there, thinking about how time had become a burden. Then, by habit, I walked towards the school.

I tried to remember when I had been too busy. In my last year at school I spent all my time doing pug stuff, in secret. I was ridiculously busy, but also, I remembered, ridiculously happy. I had just started going out with Lisa. Discovery ended it all.

“Teecha! Hello!”

I turned towards the sound gratefully. I had reached the school on automatic and there were a bunch of students on the field. I lifted my hand to wave and felt my Earth identity slide off my shoulders. I am an English Teacher.

“Hello!” I called back, stopping.

The game paused for a bit as they watched me watch them, and then some impatient boy yelled at them to start. They did, and after a second I realized they were playing soccer.

That is, they were playing with a soccer ball and following the general rules of soccer. But the game they were playing was an entirely different thing than it was on Earth. The ball was completely concealed beneath one boy’s tentacles, so it was a bit of a shell game just figuring out who had it.

He moved slowly towards the goal, while his opponents slipped tentacles past his guard until one finally yanked it out, like the cork of a bottle, and immediately passed it off in a smooth rolling movement.

This guy opted for speed and held the ball aloft in one tentacle and skittered like crazy for the other goal. I approved of this method rather than the stealth of the first boy so I hoped he’d get it in. The goalie prepared himself by hanging from the top bar and spreading his tentacles to a surprisingly wide extent. The star shape reminded me of a Christmas tree decoration, and it was so striking I nearly missed seeing the shot.