Angry Young Spaceman Read online

  Despite it, I considered chatting her up — just to kill the boredom of waiting in line — but I couldn’t think of anything to talk about beyond the health dangers involved in having cells so close to her spinal fluid.

  A few minutes later I was at the counter.

  “Destination?”

  “Octavia.” I waited for the slight, obscurely gratifying shock that I had come to expect. Nothing. Not even a raise of the eyebrows — only a flicker of the light running over the surface of her eyeballs as she accessed the file retinally.

  I wondered why her indifference to my destination was so deflating.

  I had decided to go for a bunch of reasons, most relating to my dislike of Earth. I chose the most remote planet I could figuring that it’d be the least like the self-proclaimed centre of the universe. But over the past few months, people had responded to the news with shock and wonder: “Really? Golly, how brave of you!” and all that. I had made the decision alone, but it had been bolstered by people’s gratifying reaction.

  “Mr. Sam Breen. You have a week stopover on Polix.” She blinked up some more data. Her lashes were lovely, and the way she stared through me to the data made her look dreamy.

  “How did you know —”

  “There’s only one human traveller to that destination.”

  “So I guess you don’t see a lot of people going to Octavia,” I said, fishing.

  She shook her head. I smiled, secure again.

  “I started a week ago,” she said.

  My smile broadened in appreciation of my pathetic neediness.

  “Are you travelling with zap guns, cultural products, registered technology?”

  “Yeah, my Speak-O-Matic,” I said, looking at my single suitcase.

  Oh shit.

  “I’ll need to scan it, sir.”

  I rewound my recent activities frantically. I had set it on the bar stool...

  Shit shit shit.

  “Sir?”

  I lifted my suitcase onto the platform automatically.

  “I’ve left it in the bar,” I said. “I...”

  Her eyes widened. “You left a... you should go back.” She looked at me sympathetically, but I felt no satisfaction in piercing her veil of boredom. “I’ll send this ahead, and if... when you get your item, I can register it.”

  She tapped my bags with a wand and they became enveloped in black plastic, then the platform dropped out of sight. I took the flight card from her and walked away from the counter. There was no point in running, I told myself, it was either there, or it wasn’t.

  I started running.

  The frothy glass that glowed above the entrance to the bar grew bigger and bigger as I dodged luggage-droids and nearly stepped on a family of Plevs. How was I gonna teach English to kids when I couldn’t even speak —

  The door of the bar slid closed behind me, and my eyes adjusted to the dim light. Three humans were chatting quietly a few stools down from where the xenophobe and I had been sitting.

  I walked to the stool where it should have been, hope draining out and self-loathing filling the empty space.

  “Whattalitbe, buddy,” the charliebot said.

  “Did you see a Speak-O-Matic in a triangular case—”

  “We can’t be responsible for items left on the premises,” it said, starting to polish a glass.

  I looked over at the humans, who had heard the exchange. One of them shook her head.

  A trip to the lost-and-found office revealed that items of that cost were rarely returned, and that the number of employees who wore grey body-suits numbered in the hundreds. I took a seat in the waiting area, watching families reunite and break apart.

  One recently reunited family of metal triangle people sat down beside me and started tinkling to one another. Two little ones had bravely taken the chair next to me. They were swivelling towards me and talking, and my casual curiosity as to what they were saying swelled up; and was suddenly smacked down by the reality of the situation.

  I can’t believe I lost my fuckin’ brand new Speak-O-Matic.

  Suddenly the lovely tinkling became too much to bear, and I stood.

  ***

  It was the longest line-up I’d ever been in in my twenty-three years, and there was a long way yet to go. In the distance I could see the glass tube that arched over the landing pads and kissed the rocket ship.

  The shock of losing my Speak-O-Matic was wearing off. I was calculating how long I had worked at the foundry to earn the credits it cost: three months, I figured. I imagined pounding my friend in grey for about three months, to even the score.

  A part of me, the stubbornly pug part, was grumbling: If I had left him in a bloody heap in the first place, he wouldn’t be sneaking off anywhere for a while.

  We finally turned the corner and started moving through the tube. The rocketship was this old model, but still shiny — a classic, and I was excited despite myself. The last time I went offworld, it was in a ship just like this one, and I had been amazed by the size. I had known the toy I had at home was smaller, but I had expected something just a little bigger than the family floater.

  Now I was amazed at how small the rocketship seemed, in comparison to the endless line of people. How were we all gonna fit in that skinny thing?

  The tube vibrated a bit as another rocket blasted off. The ignition fire whipped shadows on and off the faces of the other people in the line. Other than the occasional alien, they were mostly human — not a single Octavian in the lot. I looked back as far as I could, then forward as much as I could — nope. And it wasn’t as if they were hard to spot. I guessed I’d have to wait to meet a live Octavian, face-to-face.

  Not that I’d be able to communicate with them anyway. Damn it!

  two

  Hi Lisa,

  Nice punch. Haven’t you heard that pug is dead?

  No, I’m not on Octavia yet. All us new English teachers have a week of orientation on this dinky little planet before we’re flung to the stars. It’s OK, though, the gravity’s awesome. At the end of the day I’ve got so much energy left I’ve just got to go out and hit the local bar. Their most tolerable local brew, Poikapoik (means “mighty king killer”), has a kick you remember well into the next day. The illustration on the bottle is a pile of smoking bones with a crown on top, as if His Royalness has just been energy-fragged. The bartender told me that the original king was actually eaten alive, but the natives are always trying to freak us out with their cannibalistic stories...

  Back to the gravity — cool for Earthlings, not so cool for lunarians — it’s actually higher grav than on the moon. One or two of the thinner ones actually had to be sent back because of organ problems. The rest of them are just tired all the time. Between their thinness and exhaustion, when a trooper of a lunarian actually hits the bar with us they usually end up hitting the pavement, too. Poikapoik is quite a bit stronger than what they’re used to.

  Amongst the more predatory of the Earthlings, this was really good news. Who didn’t grow up with a crush on one of the bird-boned lunarian mediastars, with their grace and thin angular beauty? (Guess that’s why people are said to be “mooning after” someone...)

  A real conversation: “Hey Julia, how’d it go with your lunarian boy last night?”

  “Well, he had two whole bottles of Poikapoik...”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Yeah. When we got down to it I found out it kills more than mighty kings.”

  Some of the lunarian women are really attractive, but they’re so tired all the time — and seem a little nervous around Earthling men — that I haven’t been seriously smitten. And you know how I hate that flowery, excessive way lunarians talk.

  In fact, that’s how I met my first friend here. There was this beeeyoutiful moonboy whispering on about something at dinnertime with, like, eight Earth girls hanging on his every word. After he said “the most atrociously designed springboots ever to grace the planet’s surface” I checked my wristwatch aggrometer — o
ut of curiosity, Lisa, just to see.

  The guy next to me asked me what it was, and I tried to tell him, but the shrill laughter from the lunarian’s entourage drowned me out. I watched the needle move a little closer to the red zone, then repeated myself. “It’s just a wristwatch with an aggrometer feature added. It gauges levels of aggressiveness in the wearer.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s a pug thing,” he said. “My friend had one, but it was bigger and had a holo readout. Went on his chest.”

  “Well, then your friend wasn’t much of a pug,” I shot back. “The idea was that it wasn’t flashy. Those morons who walked around with black eyes and idiotic gloves didn’t have anything to do with the pug I knew.”

  He raised his hands. “Did I say he was my friend? He was actually more of an acquaintance. Sort of an enemy, really.”

  Matthew’s the only guy here with shorter hair than me. We walk around the place like Stumpy and Stumpier, yelling “You want to get to hell, you gotta get through the burny bits!” at inopportune moments. It’s fun.

  Sam.

  ***

  It was four in the morning when the room’s speaker snapped to life.

  “...Breen Samuel, you have a call from... Earth, America, New York—”

  “Patch it through.”

  Lisa’s voice came through. “I’m not getting a visual.”

  “There’s just a speaker here,” I said. “You know what I look like.”

  “I’m imagining you with hair all flattened and pillow creases in your face.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What kind of place are you in? They have visuals on prisonships, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Prisonships? Who do you talk to there?”

  “Uh... never mind. My attorney —”

  “Lisa, why are you calling me? Do you know how expensive it is?”

  “My work’s paying for it. We do a lot of business in that sector, so no one’ll notice.”

  “Nice.” I relaxed.

  “By the way, what the fuck are you doing there? Anything important? Other than drinking and stalking lunarians?”

  “We have classes and stuff during the day. About the planets we’re going to, the culture there and that kinda crap. But we’re grouped together in sectors, because it’s usually one person per planet—”

  “You’re the only person going to Octavia?” There was a satisfying measure of concern and awe in her voice.

  “Yup. Might be the only offworlder there. Other than the occasional tourist. So the classes are kind of pointless, because it’s so general. I’ve been trying to get a jump on the language, though.”

  “Why bother? With your swanky new Speak-O-Matic —”

  My stomach lurched as I remembered. “I lost it.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause. “Sam? I’m waiting for the punchline.”

  “I put it down in a bar and that was the last I saw of it.”

  “...Aw, man.”

  “Yeah. So luckily the Octavian language is hypothetically compatible with a humanoid brain. That’s about all I know so far.”

  “They can’t send you home for not having a translator, can they?” she asked.

  “No, it’s not an official requirement,” I said. The topic exhausted me, so I chose a new one. “Oh, I know why you’re calling prisonships... it’s a new boyfriend, isn’t it?”

  “Funny you’d say that. I gotta date tomorrow night. He’s taking me to a dance recital in Persia.” There was a lilt to her voice that was either excitement or crowing.

  “What!?”

  “That’s right — you’re in the theory stage, while Lisa Industries has already moved to the development phase. I’ll let you know how it goes. And of course, since I’s goin’ out first, I actually dumped you.”

  I smiled in the darkness. “Like hell! We had a mutual —”

  “Mutual’s boring. As soon as I hint how delicately I let you down, and your subsequent offworld retreat —”

  “I’ll just get on the horn right now and tell everyone I’m snogging lunarian models —”

  “But you’re hopeless at lying, Sam, that’s what I always liked about you.” She yawned and I wondered what time it was there.

  “And you’re hopeless at being evil, Lisa, that’s what I always blah blah blah. Hey, you know how they say blah blah blah in Octavian? Allum allum allum.”

  She barked with laughter. “Well, I’m glad you’re learning how to be flippant in another language.” She paused. “I’m going to miss allum allum allumming with you, Sam. We’ve hung out for what — three years now?”

  I thought back to when the Prague scrap had been. “Yeah.”

  “Anyway, this has been a standard business call length, so gotta go. Have the widgets arrived at the docking bay, Mr. Breen?”

  “They certainly have. I’m one happy customer, Ms. Kamac.”

  The speaker clicked. I scooted under the sheets some more and looked up at the ceiling, where the light from outside had stamped oblong rectangles.

  ***

  Near the end of orientation we went on a field trip. It was with the three other guys who were going to my sector: Matthew (who I already knew), Hugh (the irritating lunarian at the table when I met Matthew) and 9/3 (a roboman who, like most robomen, scared and impressed me).

  “I’m so thrilled you’re coming with,” Hugh said to the roboman as our shuttle shot out into the black expanse. It was the first thing any of us had said, so it sort of sat there.

  “Why?” the roboman replied. His voicebox needed calibrating, it was really staticky.

  “Well, what with robots being so much faster and stronger than humans,” quoth the prettyboy. “It offers me a level of comfort.”

  The roboman’s square head swivelled to stare at the guy.

  I just sat there, motionless. I dared a glance at Matthew, who was also frozen, his eyes noticeably bugging.

  The lunarian noticed the red lights glowing at him. He shifted uncomfortably in his restraints.

  “I am a roboman.”

  “Precisely, that’s—”

  “Not a robot. That is your word for a robotic slave with no brain.” His head didn’t move.

  “Oh. But—”

  “We have a word for humans, but I do not use it... for politeness’ sake.” I half-hoped he’d say it: fleshpots. I’d never heard a roboman say it, ‘cause usually if they did they were just about to attack you.

  His head swivelled back into place with a sharp hydraulic whine.

  “I’m sorry,” Hugh said, his eyes downcast. “I just...” he trailed off, which was a good idea, ‘cause I noticed the roboman’s eyes flicking to red again.

  “Well, I’m Sam. Sam Breen, Earthling. Toronto, specifically. It’s on the N.Y.C. line,” I clarified.

  “Matthew Chan. I’m from Earth, too. The eastside. Asia.”

  The roboman and the lunarian looked at each other and the lunarian tilted his hand. The roboman said, “I am from Roboworld. My name is Nine slash Three dash zero zero zero one.”

  “You’re from the progenitor line,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  The lunarian looked confused at this, and said softly, “I’m Hugh. From Darkside.”

  There was a silence.

  “So,” I said to 9/3, “What’s your function?”

  Matthew rolled his eyes at my robo-savvy chit-chat. There was a pause, so I looked over at 9/3. His eyes appeared dimmer.

  “I have no function.”

  Matthew’s eyebrows lurched in surprise, as did mine. No function?!

  It was a trip destined for social blunders, it seemed. We spent the rest of it in silence, watching the green planet grow from a pebble to something much larger.

  ***

  Matthew had one arm around 9/3’s shoulder and one around Hugh’s. They were smiling and sweating; even 9/3’s metal seemed to glisten. Behind them was a valley of obscene lushness, a smooth green made softer by the mist.

  “OK?” I asked, amazed by Matthe
w’s ability to put his arm around anyone for the sake of a picture.