Angry Young Spaceman (5 page)

“Sit down and connect your seat blelt,” said Mr. Zik. “We are ablout to enter the stratosphere.”

I did just that, thinking about how pleasantries disappear with the stress of speaking another tongue, and suddenly noticed something.

All the signs in the saucer, down to the little seat-adjuster, were in English.

“Why are the signs in English?” I blurted.

“They are made for explort,” said Mr. Zik. “We will reach the entry ploint in four, three, two, one, now.”

The gravitational shift felt like a too-tight halter-top. The idiot behind us got even closer and I was sure he was going to be up our ass. I was alternately watching him (his outer shell was starting to glow with the heat of re-entry) and squeezing my eyes shut (they always give me problems during gravitational transitions) so I guess I looked a bit frenzied.

“Are you OK, Sam?” Mr. Zik said worriedly.

I wrenched my head to point it at him. “Uh...” I said, staring at the Octavian. The grav did funny things to his skull-free head, pulling back the skin of his face against soft cartilage. His eyeholes were huge and cavernous, his mouth grew larger.

“Are you sick?” he asked. “The gravity will blee normal soon.”

His head returned to normal as the gravity lessened, but I could still see it.

“I’m fine, really. I was just shocked...” I stopped. What was I gonna say? That he looked a bit like a monster?

“I am sorry. The gravity is very... plowerful.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I am very sorry.”

“No problem, it’s my fault.”

He slapped a few controls. “Are you ready?”

I nodded. We dropped like a rock, aerodynamics eventually turning us sideways. It was hard to gauge how close we were getting to the water, because we were approaching the landless side of Octavia so there were no landmarks to gauge our distance or speed. The viewscreen was a solid blue-green for twenty minutes.

As soon as we hit the water the thrusters came on. Bubbles whooshed out of the pipes behind us. “Ah,
hydro
thrusters,” I identified.

“Yes,” Mr. Zik said. “Hydro. I forgot. My English is not so good.”

I shook my head no.

The saucer traffic was just as tightly packed underwater. We were headed down in a diagonal, but there was no scenery to speak of this high up. I tried to keep my eyes open but the drone of the hydrothrusters eventually had their way with my exhausted self, and I nodded off.

***

I had an anxiety dream about being torn apart by aliens with squashed-skull faces, and woke up a little contemptuous of my subconscious’s lack of imagination. We were level now, and were going through what looked to be a small town.

“Where...” My mouth felt weird. My whole face felt weird, actually. “What?” I moved my arm around and watched Octavia’s atmosphere ripple faintly.

“I filled the cablin with our water. I was told it was easier for humans to adjust to our atmosphere when they sleep. Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, breathing in the water oxygen, in and out, in and out, letting it fill my nose and lungs. I had only panicked once, back in orientation, and that was because I was still feeling the side-effects of a chemical cocktail Matthew had made for me the previous night.

I looked at Mr. Zik, upright for the first time. The points of his headcrest bobbed slightly and were much healthier-looking than when they had been strands hanging limply over his platform in the oxygen atmosphere. The platform had been tucked out of sight somewhere and Mr. Zik reigned supreme from his cockpit chair.

My feet felt funny, and I realized I was wearing cotton socks. Odd that I would remember to water-treat all my clothes but the socks, but I didn’t mind the discomfort — it drove home the fact that I was somewhere very different.

“Where are we, exactly?” We were passing the buildings too quickly to see anything but ribbons of coloured light.

“We are in Plangyo.”

Plangyo. I had first seen the name four months ago, on my work contract. It was hard to believe I was actually here. I stared at the viewscreens with a new intensity.

Mr. Zik, noticing this, slowed down. Storefronts selling unknown products represented by mysterious colourful pictures. A building with a crest on the gates and a guardhouse that could have been an army base or city hall. A block of apartments, with kid-sized saucers tied to the balconies.

We turned into a small apartment building and parked. Mr. Zik lowered the ramp and gracefully left the saucer with a kind of skipping lope. I stood carefully and followed, hanging on to the handrails and getting my sea feet, appreciating the reversal of our comfort levels.

Most people I talk to back home are under the painfully ignorant assumption (painful for me too, since these people are my friends and I expect better from them) that the atmosphere of Octavia is the same as the oceans of Earth were before the draining, except you can breathe in it. And I have to say, “No, look, it’s got stronger gravity. It’s almost exactly half-way between swimming and walking.” Really, though, it’s incredible how much Earthlings don’t know.

I was walking so slowly that the ramp started to retract before I got to the bottom. Mr. Zik started fumbling for his key chain but I jumped — enjoying my slow movement through the atmosphere — and landed on my feet, socks squelching.

He led me into the apartment and turned the light on. There were a few pieces of furniture there, which I was happy about, because we were warned that we were guaranteed an apartment but not necessarily furnishings.

“I’m sorry, blut I must go now. Tonight, I will come black and help you clean the aplartment,” Mr. Zik said.

I wandered into the bedroom. The bed was a simple single, but that night my wearied brain couldn’t have seen a finer object.

“Tonight I will be asleep. In that bed.” I said, pointing demonstratively.

“Yes, of course, you are very, very tired,” said Mr. Zik, and his hiss-laugh. “Call me for anything, even a small thing.” He left, pulling the door shut behind him.

I took off my clothes and was in bed before they had floated to the floor.

***

“Flsfjhas lsfheriheu fjshflahdoe Sam Breen. Fheoi ejkthjad goirteoi gdkgjvn?”

Underwater! drowning! I’m fucking drowning!
I frantically started swimming for the surface.

My flailing got me about three feet in the air before I remembered where I was. I floated back to my bed, weighted by shame and blankets.

“Flsfjhas lsfheriheu fjshflahdoe Sam Breen. Fheoi ejkthjad goirteoi gdkgjvn?”

Quick, what was it? How do I say
yes
? What’s Octavian for —

“En,” I said, screwing up the intonation completely.

The vidphone lit up the room, and an Octavian’s face started to fade in.

“Visuals off, visuals off!” I yelled, pulling my sheet up to my chin. Was it even Mr. Zik?

“Uhh... falfje elrelj,” said the person on the screen. The vidphone image faded out.

“I am sorry,” Mr. Zik said. “Did you wake up?”

“Yeah, it’s OK. What time is it, anyway?”

“It’s nine o’clock, Plangyo time.”

I set my watch, something I’d avoided doing since I left the orientation. I was going through so many systems, some that didn’t even keep time, that there had been no point in doing it before now. I noticed the needle on my aggrometer had registered my waking terror.

“Your luggage has come. It is outside.”

I started pulling on clothes. “Right now?”

“Yes. Can I come to your aplartment?”

“Uh... I guess so.”

Pause. “Is it OK?” he asked.

“It’s fine, come over,” I said, smoothing out my blanket.

The speaker clicked off without a good-bye.

I went to my front door. The windows were letting in a blue-green light, and my suspicions were confirmed about just how dirty the living room was.

When I opened the door, a line of droids buzzed in.

“Ido?” they said, in turn. They each carried a box of stuff, and I recognized the scrawl on top as my own. “Ido?”

Ido?! What was — oh yeah! “Where?”

I tilted the box of the nearest one so I could read it.
Kitchen Crap.

I pointed towards the fourth and last room in my apartment. I was a little scared to check it out, considering how nasty-dirty the rest of the place was. I pointed the other droids on their way.

Other than the little trails of bubbles they left, and the fact that they had metal tentacles instead of arms, they were pretty standard-issue droids.

Or so I thought. One of them, on their way out, brushed my sleeve — and didn’t apologize. Not in any language. That was surprising.

A noise from outside distracted me. I looked out the window. Mr. Zik was getting out of his saucer. He hurried to my door.

He surveyed the scene. “Good,” he said. “I was worried you would have trouble.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “They said ‘ido,’ and I knew that meant ‘where?’”

“Very good, very good.” He looked around, then quietly ordered the droids to do something. They all pulled an attachment from a small compartment in their backs and used it to clean the floor.

“Great!” I said. “I didn’t know they could do that. Droids on Earth are a lot more job-specific. They can only do one job,” I clarified.

Mr. Zik nodded. “Octavia was very ploor until this century. We could not afford too many droids.”

I happily watched the little guys go about their work. I had been wondering how I was going to go about cleaning in an aquatic atmosphere, and now I didn’t have to bother.

Mr. Zik just stood there. I didn’t know why he had come over, exactly, and I couldn’t ask him without feeling rude. “I’m going to look at the kitchen,” I said to him, pointing at it. “I haven’t seen it yet. I went to bed right away last night.” I put my hands together and rested my head against them in the mime for
sleep
.

Mr. Zik didn’t react, just followed me. I realized how stupid it was to mime for a person who obviously understood English perfectly. Also that I had no idea of how Octavians slept.

The kitchen was pretty much like an Earthling kitchen. Mr. Zik floated by me and started opening up cupboards, two or three at a time. In one of them, he found a bottle. “Ah, Zazzimurg!”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a... tea. Traditional Octavian tea.” He shook it and watched it settle, opened it and sniffed it with his stubby nose. “And it isn’t too ripe.”

“Let’s make some,” I said, eyeing its dark brown colour with caffeine lust.

While he busied himself with that, I rifled through the cupboards. There was quite a bit of stuff there, although most of it didn’t have any English on it. “What’s this?”

“It... is a kind of Octavian flour.”

I picked up a box with a cartoon chimp on it. The green chimp looked half-way between insanity and ecstasy. I angled it his way.

He laughed. “Ssss-sss-ss. Candy. For children.” He was holding the teapot with one tentacle, the kettle with hot water in another, and the bottle of distillate in another above his head. With the end of that tentacle, he unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle.

The distillate came out in a thick brown stream, moving with unnatural slowness, arcing towards the teapot. Then he started to pour the boiled water, which came out equally slowly, gleaming carved silver. After he stopped pouring the distillate and before it entered the pot there was a second when it was a stream unconnected to anything, like a bent rusty bar.

I watched it, mesmerized. I knew liquids would look different poured through a soluble atmosphere, but I never imagined it’d be so beautiful. Mr. Zik had put the bottle away and shut the cupboard by the time both streams had entered the pot. He sealed it, breaking my gaze, and set it down on the counter. I stared at it like it was a genie’s lamp.

“Is that...” I mumbled, “is that a ritual?”

Mr. Zik was putting the kettle away. “Ritual? No,” he said. “It is just making Zazzimurg.”

One of the droids came in and said something to Mr. Zik. He nodded and the droid bobbed off. I wondered why it hadn’t talked to me. Was it programmed to favour Octavians? That was illegal, but possible...

“What are your plans for today?” he asked me.

“Um, nothing really. No plans.” Other than cleaning this place from top to bottom, unpacking...

“Would you like to go on a trip?”

“Uh... sure?”

“Wonderful.” He waited a second and looked around the kitchen. “Can I use your vidphone?”

“Yeah, of course.”

He turned on the vidphone and spoke with another Octavian, one wearing a rainbow coloured bandanna who gesticulated a lot. I poked through the cupboards.

Something was happening in my brain. I was able to note an outlandish bandanna on an Octavian without it registering how odd that was. Now that I did register it, though, the first thing that came to mind was how hilarious my friends back home would find it when I told them.

And that wasn’t quite right either.

***

We had been on the bus for four hours before I cracked.

“When will we arrive, Mr. Zik?”

My voice was very conspicuous. Four people looked and a half-dozen more wanted to. It wasn’t as if I was the only one speaking — there were two guys up near the front who were really loud, and attracted no looks despite their volume.

Mr. Zik told me that we’d be there in two hours. I didn’t ask where
there
was.

The seats were really quite appropriate for human dimensions. After four hours, however, the differences became more significant. I wondered how 9/3 was doing in the land of the munchkins. 9/3 didn’t have to worry about leg cramps, mind you. The image of 9/3’s body walking headless through the spaceport came to mind, and I made a mental note to call him when I got back.

If
I got back. It was Friday, and I figured there was a good chance of getting back for Monday. But for all I knew, I wasn’t scheduled to start work until the following week. I really didn’t know anything. What prevented me from asking was one of the things they had taught us at orientation.

“With many cultures, you’ll find that their concept of duty is far more important.” This was from a tall thin man just back from a year of teaching. “For instance, the Squidollians take being a host very seriously. Amongst a group of friends, they’ll take turns being host — and the host pays for everything, arranges everything, takes all the credit and blame for everything. And being an offworlder means that you’ll probably never get the honour of being a host.” A happy murmur went through the room.