Angry Young Spaceman (30 page)

“Yes, blut my English is blad.” The other two laughed.

“It’s OK,” I replied, my smile forgiving, “
I like to practice my Octavian
.”

“
You need to
,” said Annoying Girl with a smile.

“
How is your English?”
I enquired mildly.

“Good,” she said. The girls laughed. “Very good.”

“She lying!” said Smart Girl.

The conversation continued down this path for a while. It turned out the other two girls were cousins visiting from Artemia — which explained why I hadn’t seen them around before. The one who liked me had nothing interesting to say, and even the one who didn’t like me had only her coy spunk, which got old really fast.

They drank their Zazzimurg and eventually left, and I thought about how different that conversation would have been at the time when I first arrived in Plangyo. Not knowing Octavian, our conversation would have been limited to “You are beautiful,” “You are handsome,” “I love you,” and a whole lot of giggling. I would naturally have assumed the beautiful girl had a formidable intelligence. Not knowing they were related, I would have seen her friendship with the chubby girl as proof of an admirable willingness to choose friends for something other than accessory value. I would have never known that she was here on vacation, and spent a painful week afterwards hoping to see her in Plangyo.

I looked on that alternate universe Sam and it was so tangible, so predictable, that I found it hard to believe that it wasn’t real. That I had found someone to love, and someone had found me loveable, on a planet where I was a freak — that seemed to be far more bizarre.

A group of kids came in, shocked into momentary silence by my presence. I began to regret my decision to come here so early. I kept forgetting that a tea house here was not a café on Earth, where I was ignorable enough for it to be an introspective space.

I looked away from the kids and the door. A minute or two later, someone was tickling my shoulder.

I smiled and whacked at the tentacle poking into the hole in my sweater. It had to be Jinya, and I was ashamed at my slovenliness and happy she was finally here—

The old lady giggled and pulled her tentacle away.

I stared at her, stunned. I recognized her as the heavily made-up owner of the tea room. What did she want?

She pointed at the hole again. I nodded. Did she think she was telling me something new? I looked at it again, tucked in the loose threads as if it helped.
Fuck, there’s no way that Jinya’s friends aren’t gonna notice this...

The owner was making motions with her tentacles. Then she actually started taking off her blouse. I shook my head desperately, no, and she insisted, yes, and started trying plucking at my sweater.

Don’t ask me why I just didn’t ask her what she wanted. It was one inexplicable gesture after the next, and in my anxiety I actually forgot I could speak Octavian. 100% of my brain was dedicated to deciphering this crazy lady’s demands.

At this point, her group of cronies were watching and laughing. She was frustrated by this point and muttered “
Take it off!
” to herself.

This was all I needed to remind me. “
Why?
” I asked her in Octavian.

“
We will
blachet,” she said, using a word I didn’t know.

“
Eh?
”

“
Fix!
”

Oh. I looked over at the cronies, and one held up some sewing.

I figured, it’s not like I can look any stranger to these people. I pulled off my sweater. She whisked it away, staring at my chest.

I crossed my arms. I didn’t know what she was staring at — the hair? My nipples? Out the corner of my eye I could see her making chest-high motions to her cronies. They burst out laughing.

I looked away. It wasn’t so bad, just a bunch of old ladies. Luckily there was no one else in the tea room.

Then Mrs. Ahm came in with her husband.

I would have ducked but I was facing the door — I’d chosen it so Jinya didn’t miss me. She said something excitedly to her husband and then waved to me. I waved back.

Mr. Ahm’s eyes bugged out when I exposed my chest and I quickly refolded my arms. Mrs. Ahm didn’t seem to notice until she got closer.

“Oh! Sam, why do you no clothes?” she said, her careful English scrambled by the shock. Her tentacles fluttered.

I looked over at the cronies bitterly, who were chatting merrily about something else.

“Why do I have no shirt?” I said, adopting my teacherly-corrective tone.

“Yes, why?” she said.

“It is a holiday on Earth. No Shirt Day. You know?”

She shook her head slowly, no. Damn. I was hoping she’d fake it, and we could help each other lie.

“It is a special day to celebrate freedom. Freedom from clothes. It is a symbol.” I glanced towards the door, knowing Jinya and her professors were bound to walk through at any time.

Mrs. Ahm was nodding. “Very interesting.” She explained briefly to her husband. He tried to put a blasé, cosmopolitan face on but failed. He watched my arms constantly, trying to catch another peek.

“Mrs. Ahm is one of my best students,” I said to Mr. Ahm. He jerked his gaze up at my face guiltily. “Hello,” he said.

“My husband is very bad at English,” she said.

He nodded. “Blad.” Then he put his tentacle out to shake. “Nice meet you.”

His tentacle waved there for a second and I discovered I was as unable to resist this social imperative as I was unable to resist gravity. I gave it a quick squeeze and pump and returned my hand to its obscuring duties.

But not quickly enough. Mrs. Ahm’s eyes were moons.

“Are you here for tea?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ahm said. “Tea.” She smiled weakly. “Bye-bye.”

They moved off to the furthest corner of the room.

If I hadn’t had to walk right by them, I would have gone and grabbed my sweater back. As it was, I looked at my tablecloth and wondered if it would at least cover my offensive midriff. What was the deal with that? I wonder if Jinya would have the same revulsion? Oh fuck, she was gonna freak out to see me here half-naked, I had to do something—

The owner dropped the sweater on my table, and I pulled it on in a gasmask scramble. It was backwards, naturally, so I switched it around without taking it off. I thanked the owner profusely, pretended to look at the stitches appreciatively.

I chanced a glance over at Mrs. Ahm’s table. Mr. Ahm was listening to his wife talk, watching my every move. He was probably a cop or something. I tried to remember if she had ever said anything about his job. It was probably illegal to be topless on this planet — I knew I had never seen an Octavian bare-chested.

I saw Jinya at the door and stood up right away. I touched my sweater anxiously, as if it may have disappeared. I left the beeds in the cup — which isn’t rude, just a way to make sure they don’t roll away — and walked towards her.

“Let’s go,” I said, worried that someone would yell out what a freak I was, or communicate that through some Octavian eye-language I didn’t know.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m late.”

I laughed. “That’s OK.”

We left the building. It was bright out, and I noticed a group of my kids. They gave me a cool nod, and went back to chatting, a tall boy placing his tentacles behind his neck in affected languor. I felt a little miffed at their casualness.

The guy with the pastry stand did a double take and greeted me as I went by, and I happily reciprocated.

“You want?” said Jinya, stopping.

“No no,” I said, pulling us on. “Just saying hello.”

“Mm.”

I stopped. “Do you want?”

She tilted her head and smiled. “Yes, but... too fat.”

I turned us around and ordered a bag, counted out the beeds. “I’ll eat the fat ones,” I said.

The bus was pulling into the station in a shower of bubbles. We rushed to catch it. I pushed Jinya on first. “Hurry, you’re too slow!” I joked.

She giggled but even her transcendent radiance wasn’t enough to combat the annoyance of the sour-looking bus-goers, unhappy at being delayed by an offworlder and even less happy that he was with an Octavian girl.

We had to sit beside one particularly pinch-faced old ape who stared viciously at Jinya as the bus pulled out.

“Fuck, these people are old and ugly,” I said conversationally, looking around and meeting the stares with a pleasant smile.

She slapped my hand lightly. “I agree,” said Jinya. “This old man... too ugly!”

“He’ll be dead soon,” I said.

My grin angered the old coot. “
Who is he?
” he demanded of Jinya.

She smiled and looked down, silently.

“
I am Sam Breen. It is none of your interest. You are not her father.
”

The old man ruffled, his nostrils twitching. “
All Octavians are family.
”

“
All right, Dad,
” I said, using the very informal. “
Can we have some money?
”

I had been saving that one. Two old ladies behind him laughed. One of them turned and poked him in the earhole. He cursed her nastily, but she cackled on. Then she got up and headed for the door. He followed her and they got off the bus when it stopped.

“Husband and wife,” Jinya said. “She is very lively!”

Outside he was yelling at her. She laughed for a while but when the bus pulled away she started the ugly-yelling too. I wondered what my smart talk would cost her in the end. No easy victories here.

Jinya curled a tentacle around my hand and I squeezed it, sliding the pad of my thumb across it. I couldn’t be bothered looking around to see what kind of attention we were gathering. I flipped her tendril over and put my fingertips on the suckers, pulled them off, the light suction like secret kisses.

“So we will meet your English professor?”

“Yes! Yesterday, he come up after class: ‘Jinya, remember tomorrow we meet. Mr. Sam is special case.’ I say ‘No! Just Sam, not Mr. Sam!’”

I smiled. “You teach the teacher?”

Delight flashed from her. “Yes! He very embarrassed. ‘Oh, I forgot.’ He is worried because you come, but also excited.”

“He is worried because I am a native speaker?”

“You are an English Test for him. Your name isn’t Sam, it is Test!”

We laughed and sat in silence for a while, but it felt good. It was a full silence, quite different from our silences earlier on when I desperately tried to think of something to talk about.

We were coming into the crest of the valley that the university was nestled in, the round white main buildings looking like spores on the beds of coral. The coral looked red from a distance, but as the road dipped down the walls were more purply-blue close up.

I had gone by it a few times with Mr. Zik, but this was my first visit. We slid by the small stores and restaurants that grow around any university and I looked at the occupants with interest.

The bus pulled in and we got off. It idled there, oozing tiny bubbles, the driver seeming to linger — I didn’t blame him, Plangyo was dull in comparison. The station was polka-dotted by bright circles of young folk waiting for buses or for their friends to arrive.

As we walked through the small streets serving the university, I remembered how much I enjoyed being around people my own age. Small towns like Plangyo were filled with the very young and the very old — most of the successful middle aged people headed towards the cities, and the young folk lived in places like this. The occasional older professor was always accompanied by a few students, who looked like they were cheerily escorting the man out for violating the age laws.

I caused the usual commotion as I walked with Jinya, who pointed out her favourite restaurant (unremarkable looking except for the overflowing crowd) and the droid shop her brother’s pal owned. Every minute or so she’d run into a friend, and they’d exchange quick bows.

I’d follow their conversation for a while, but it was so rapid and the content so polite that I would just wait until the body language turned towards me. She introduced me as a friend, and I always greeted them with the honourific which was funny and flattering to them.

I was happy to see that she acted no differently with them than she did with me. She would say something about the person we had just met, but it was usually pleasant, or tempered with something pleasant. “Not good English, but she is very cheerful!” was about as critical as it got.

I found it a refreshing change from typical Earth cynicism. I remembered how Lisa and I would cut people up into manageable pieces; push how far we could take being clever and nasty without being outright hurtful. Of course, the more clever our quip the more likely that it would get repeated, eventually to the person who inspired it. It was like building weapons and telling yourself you made them for their beauty, the sleekness of their design... I was glad and amazed that Jinya was so continually positive.

Well, until you leave
, the nasty voice in me quipped.

“It is good that you greet properly,” she said, looking at me seriously.

“Naturally.” I looked at her and smiled, felt like taking her tentacle and then didn’t. I didn’t know how the general university population would see our appendage-holding, and the idea of her pulling away was too painful a possibility.

“Not natural for Earthlings. Thank you,” she said, twining up my arm and giving me a squeeze that made a smile pop out on my face.

We went through a gateway made of the same white material as the domes — close up, it looked like it might be bleached, sanded coral — and we were inside the university grounds. A droid bobbed in front of us for a few seconds while it scanned and Jinya designated me as her visitor. I couldn’t tell if it was armed, but it had eyes.

“There is some problem with student terrorist,” Jinya told me.

We walked by a soccer field and a very suggestive fountain before getting to the smaller of the two domes. There was a cleaner droid on it, scuttling over the curved surface in a way I’d never seen a machine move. Sometimes the limitless manifestations of droids made me shudder; sometimes I thought the Luddix Federation wasn’t altogether wrong.