Angry Young Spaceman (2 page)

“Yeah, I’ll see, for real. I won’t be some jacked-in jack-off, pulling his pud to four-second-old relays.”

It was a cheap shot — two actually, ‘cause if he worked here then his comm set-up
was
probably really slow — but I was suddenly dying to box this guy’s ears. My resolution to leave my pugilistic habits behind were quickly dissolving in a red haze. Checked my aggrometer wristwatch — I had the time and adrenaline to crack this guy’s head before I caught my flight.

I looked at his greasy hair and loose mouth and waited for him to give me an excuse.

A minute passed. Nothing. I checked my aggrometer, and my levels had dropped below optimum. Reluctantly, I got up. Grabbed my suitcase.

“Thanks for the beer, asshole,” I said as I turned away.

A few steps from the door there was the familiar music of cheap bar glass smashing against... what was that? I turned around. Ah. Fuckwad had thrown his glass into the display of expensive liquor bottles. His back was to me, and his arms were crossed in a sullen way.

The charliebot was immobile. One of the lights in his neck switched from green to red. I heard the tally as I shoved my way through the door.

“You owe the bar 450 credits for the damages incurred.”

It made me smile, but it wasn’t a real smile, just skin pulled tighter.

***

A few steps outside the bar I switched hands again.

“Carry your bag, sir?” The luggage-droid hovered like a vulture, its claws slowly opening and closing in anticipation. I hefted my suitcase and started moving. If you slowed down or faltered, the droids were all over you. I prided myself on striding through these places without ever giving them an excuse to pounce, the cred-gobbling little bastards...

It was a bit of a walk, but it was good to walk off the adrenaline. I wasn’t used to having it course through me unused, and I felt my jaw clenching as I imagined that xenophobic jerk back at the bar “helping” with the various species that used the spaceport. I was still amazed that I had walked away from a fight — a first for me. Not like a pug at all, I thought with grim happiness, not at all what you’d expect a pug to do.

It excited me, this new course of inaction. Maybe I
could
leave it behind.

I walked the last few steps sort of shuffle-pushing my bag into the line, staring down a droid who veered off as it realized I was in a line-up and therefore not in need of service. I watched it go, its red cap wobbling, wondering why I got so worked up. It wasn’t so much the droids themselves, but rather what they symbolized —

Join the moneyed class and you’ll never have to sweat again.
My mom’s world. I grimaced as I surveyed the line, separating the haves from the have-to-sweats. An old human sat on his trunk festooned with stickers, shifting it along every minute or so. A grey Urasan, horn-shaped lips twitching as she flicked through her pad, was attended by a droid. The only toss up was a young woman in formfitting sports gear and a large backpack. Looking closer, however, I saw the slight haze that betrayed antigrav cells sewn into the lining. Rich.

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 — out 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?”