Angry Young Spaceman (6 page)

“Yeah well, it cuts both ways,” he said. “You’ll never pay — and you’ll never really belong. Anyway, have some faith in your host. Often offworlders badger the host with questions about everything, and this can be taken as a kind of insult — ‘cause you’re basically questioning their ability as a host. Here — on Earth that is, not
here
here, I think I’m home already — saying someone’s a bad host is kind of a joke. There, it’s... not.”

“Are you uncomfortable?” asked Mr. Zik.

“No, it’s not so bad,” I lied. “Maybe I can put my legs out here...” I stretched them out in the aisle, watching for a reaction. A little girl, who was playing with a little human doll, looked at me and then back at her doll. She seemed to make a connection, but stayed quiet about it.

But why was the doll not shaped like an Octavian? I watched how the girl played with it: moving the doll through the air in the slightly wavy way Octavians moved, using its legs to pick up things as often as the arms.

There wasn’t anything in the orientation against asking toy questions, so I went for it. “Mr. Zik, aren’t there Octavian dolls?” I nodded towards the girl as I said it.

He nodded. “Yes. The human dolls are very popular. More popular.”

“Huh,” I said. No further conversation ensued. I may have gotten the impression that all Octavians were closed-mouthed but for the two polar opposites of Mr. Zik at the front of the bus. And in fact, the whole bus refuted the idea that Octavians were the same — there was every shape and size.

Every Earthling has seen a beautiful Octavian model — her shapely upper torso ending in suggestively undulating tentacles, her mysteriously pupil-less eyes and an upswept headcrest — but she bore little resemblance to the people on the bus. Closest were the two giggling schoolgirls, make-up-less and plain, who kept looking back at me. The old man two seats over was terrifying to me, his head a withered old balloon and the soft skin that ridged the top of his head lined with purple veins. And there was a middle-aged guy in a suit and tie who was so fat even his tentacles moved sluggishly. Despite his appearance, the round crackers he was eating made me think about how hungry I was.

I watched the scenery in an effort to take my mind off my stomach and my bladder. The huge pink and grey columns of rock and the scrub brush were good for about thirty minutes before I started thinking viciously intolerant things about people who didn’t have bathroom breaks.

The bus headed off the main throughway.

“Great!” I said.

“Yes, we will stop to use the toilet. Are you hungry?”

“I’m starving!”

Mr. Zik stared at me blankly.

“I’m not really starving, I just feel like I’m starving.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “Starving. Ssss-sss-ss.”

A second after I said “starving” I had been worried he would take it as a criticism of his hosting, but evidently he wasn’t that sensitive. I relaxed a little.

We piled out of the bus and I headed towards the bathroom with an icon of an Octavian with thick tentacles (thinner tentacles and cocked head indicated the female) and I got into a booth. Poised on tiptoes, I whipped out my johnson and let it fly.

It was easier than it would have been in an oxygen atmosphere. I’d say about 80% accuracy. 85%, even. Not bad for a first try. And I wasn’t the only one to have missed the hole in the wall today, either — why did they make it s’damn small? But compared to a lot of alien toilets, this one was only mid-range challenging. At least it stayed stationary.

I left the booth, washed my hands and walked out, hearing a few indecipherable comments and laughter in my wake. I found Mr. Zik outside the restaurant and we went in. There were a couple of policemen eating soup over a small table, their zap guns holstered. They stopped eating to watch me walk to the counter.

When the counterman turned around, Mr. Zik pointed to himself and said something. Then he pointed to me and said something else. I smiled uneasily.

“Sligllgy blick?!” asked the counterman, his eyes wide..

“En, sligllgy blick. Koogeem.” Then they laughed together.

“Koogeem” meant “offworlder.” I smiled and nodded, repeating my mantra: Trust your host, trust your host.

The counterman prepared the food and brought it to us, two plates of seed-speckled seaweed, red dumplings and other vegetables that I didn’t recognize.

“Oh Kay?” said the counterman when he gave it to me.

At first I thought he was speaking Octavian, but then I figured it out and nodded.

“OK!” he confirmed, and the policemen behind us laughed.

I kept telling myself that I was lucky to be on a planet with human-suitable food, even if I had to eat a lot of it by Octavian standards. I took my fork out of my pocket and started eating.

I knew this would cause a bit of a stir. We had been warned that a fork may be mistaken for a weapon and so it was best to start eating with it immediately. The policemen made gestures towards it and looked to be deciding who should ask me about it. I ate quickly and kept my head down.

“They think your fork is very interesting,” Mr. Zik said.

“Really?” I said, eating faster.

I was just trying to buy myself some time. I’m not going to dwell on it, but Octavians are messy eaters by our standards. We’ve all heard the stupid sea-monkeys-in-a-posh-restaurant jokes, and there is an element of truth to them.

One of the policemen, in an endearingly bashful way, sidled up to me. I kept eating. Then he said, “Can I... food-tool?” His friends were watching intently.

Mr. Zik said something to him. The policeman quickly slurped the remaining food off of his tentacle-ends and then held one gleaming one out. I scraped the last bit of food into my mouth and gave him the fork.

His friend, mouth ringed with soup-stain, came over to get a look at it.

“Fork,” I said, pointing at the silver utensil.

“Fork?” he said. I confirmed. He said “Gheithih fork, eoituihvv slork!” to his friend and Mr. Zik laughed, too.

“It sounds like a word in Octavian,” Mr. Zik said.

I nodded.

The policeman feinted at his friend with the fork and his friend jumped back.

I waited for their fun to be exhausted, wondering if I’d ever get it back. How much would it cost to get a new one sent here?

Now he was using it to pretend to eat from an empty plate, though it seemed to be more to get the feel of it rather than mock me.

I belched quietly, realizing I had hardly tasted my dinner in my rush but that one of the vegetables had left a pleasant aftertaste. Mr. Zik finished his food and put his plate to one side. They saw that as a sign and handed the moist fork back to me. I took it with the tips of my fingers, which would have been rude if they had understood it as a slight.

“Good-bye,” I said.

The one who had first approached me stuttered out a good-bye, much to the amusement of his friends.

***

The saucer’s acoustics seemed to be designed to amplify the noise-sound Mr. Zik made.

I looked back out at the countryside and tried to reconstitute my shattered daydream. Scenery of this sort was new to me: the grey hills of coral rock sparsely dotted by pink and green bushes were a sharp contrast to stimulus-rich Earth. Every half an hour or so we’d pass through a town, a welcome rush of people and buildings, and I’d scour them for a bizarre storefront or a mysterious activity that would keep my mind busy until the next town. Because the space between each town was so long and empty, the trip reminded me more of space travel rather than any trip I’d taken on Earth.

We were headed for the surface. Mr. Zik and his friend Mr. Oool had promised something “very interesting” and “wonderful” there. Mr. Oool, who we had met up with last night, was having no trouble sleeping despite the occasional bump and noise-sound. What I had mistook as a bandanna on the vidphone was actually traditional Octavian garb — the multicoloured scarf went around the neck and also entwined itself around all eight tentacles. Often Mr. Oool would chew on it thoughtfully, which I suspected wasn’t traditional.

We passed over a whole row of the green bushes, and their vines stretched out to us in our wake, wiggled and floated back down to the ground. Small round forms that had been scared out by the sudden animation went back under the bushes. What were they? I was about to ask Mr. Zik about them when I was struck with the regularity and the abundance of the bushes.

“Are these... farms?” I asked him, incredulous.

He nodded. “Octavia makes all its food on Octavia.”

I almost said what I was thinking — too bad — when I realized there wasn’t any embarrassment in his admission. How outrageously inefficient! I thought to myself.

“That’s why... no coffee,” said Mr. Zik with a smile. “Sorry.”

“No, don’t apologize...” I said, thinking to myself:
The only reason we have it is because people like Mom keep the Neb slave planets producing it...

Mr. Oool came awake with a hacking cough. “Hello,” he said.

“Good morning,” Mr. Zik and I said in tandem, and then we all laughed.

“Are we to the destination?” Mr. Oool said. We had been travelling for two hours already — on Earth, we could have done a world tour. It was a real conceptual puzzle: Octavia was half the size of Earth, and yet felt twice as big due to the transport systems and the low population density.

“We are very close. You are like the child, I think,” said Mr. Zik to Mr. Oool. “Always ask, to the destination? To the destination?”

Mr. Oool had a laugh twice as big as his body merited. “Ftehui iruet faeiu?” he said in a whiny voice, poking Mr. Zik in the neck. “Ftehui iruet faeiu?”

“Are we there yet?” I guess-translated, and Mr. Zik confirmed it.

Making an impressed noise, Mr. Oool asked me if I spoke Octavian. I laughed and shook my head. “You have a translator?” he asked.

My good humour shrank under this cold reality. “No,” I said, watching Zik from the corner of my eye. He didn’t react for a second, then he did.

“At home? You have?” he said, looking at me directly for the first time this trip.

“No,” I said, looking out at the town we were bombing through.

No one spoke.

Mr. Oool took his scarf out of his mouth. “So, you learn Octavian. No problem.”

“Yes,” I said, foolishly grateful. “Yes.”

Mr. Zik’s face was expressionless. A few seconds later he made the nostril sound, and my heart jumped because I thought he was going to say something.

A few minutes later he parked and we got out. It was exceptionally bright and humid at this elevation, and there were quite a few people milling about. Mr. Oool immediately went to buy us bladders of iced Zazzimurg tea at a concession stand, and then we went through the ornate gates.

“The Line,” pronounced Mr. Oool, pointing up at the lettering on the gates. It was only then that I noticed the sky. When you look up on Octavia, you usually see an indistinct grey-blue haze, with no discernible horizon. But suddenly, the horizon was there, a few feet from the top of the gates. “Wow!” I said, starting to point but then, feeling dumb, let my finger drop. It was just the Line, after all.

We walked a bit more into the park and came across a titanic statue of an Octavian in bleached coral rock, some of its tentacles unfurled to the ground and some of them lifted to where the water met air.

Where breathable water met unbreathable air. It made me dizzy to think about it. Mr. Oool and Mr. Zik simply began loping up the nearest tentacle, and I followed them.

“When you say ‘Don’t mention it’ what does it mean?” asked Mr. Oool, his eyes bright, handing me a bladder of iced tea.

“What?” I asked, looking away from the kids playing on the uplifted tentacles to meet his eyes.

“‘Thank you.’ ‘Don’t mention it.’ You know?”

I looked at Mr. Zik for guidance but he was in his own world, sucking at the corner of his bladder.

“Oh,” I said. “It’s like, ‘You’re welcome.’”

“Same-same?” he said, his blue-black eyes fixing on me. “No difference?”

Well, there are certain nuances and connotations
— I thought, and stopped myself. “Uh... well, no, there is a small difference.”

He waited. A kid hanging on to his father’s back yelled something at me when they went by on their way down.

“‘Don’t mention it’ means that it is a very small thing, too small to say thank-you for,” I said, warming up a little. “It is more polite.”

“I understand,” said Mr. Oool, and he looked like he did.

“That’s an excellent question,” I said, meaning it.

Mr. Oool laughed and slapped Mr. Zik, repeating the word “excellent.” Mr. Zik responded with something that made Mr. Oool explode with mirth. I was glad to see Mr. Zik had a sense of humour, even if I didn’t understand it.

We crossed onto the second tentacle — this one was a little thinner, only about four people could walk abreast — and I made sure I was near the middle. It made me a bit nervous, even though I knew that a fall from this height wouldn’t kill me unless I died from embarrassment. An old Octavian couple passed by and said something that made Mr. Zik look at them sharply.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“To know the time,” he said. I glanced back, caught them staring at me.

Now that we were close, I had trouble taking my eyes away from the Line. It was a giant wavy mirror that stretched over the entire world. I could see, distorted but distinct, the three of us walking together — or rather, the smooth slide of the two of them beside my jerky bipedaling.

We got to the tip of the tentacle. The Line was perhaps four inches above my head, a reflection of my face etched in silver. It looked faintly absurd, my average flattened features on such a gorgeous canvas, but I couldn’t look away. My neck muscles were beginning to complain about the constant tilt, so I looked around at the other three tentacles that were raised up to The Line.

All had kids on them who pushed their tentacles into the Line’s surface. Their parents, having done the same as children, watched on passively, indulgently. The surface gave, stretched astonishingly, but didn’t tear. One stone tentacle was so close to the Line that the children mashed their faces against it, their soft heads twinned and intent. I wondered how my more solid skull would fare.