Anton's Odyssey (2 page)

The white communication spire
on the roof of the medical center in Loma Linda was in the shape of a cross. The building dwarfed the neighboring residential structures. As far as I could tell, the whole city was occupied by an odd flavor of piety-freak. As piety-freaks go they looked pretty normal. They didn’t wear strange clothes or sport terrible hairdos, and they were nice. They didn’t stockpile weapons, live in gated compounds, or force fourteen-year-old girls into polygamous marriages like the piety-freaks that frequently made the national news. I never did figure out what they were all about other than they seemed to worship vegetables. They took Cotton in when he needed an operation. All the other hospitals nearby turned him away because we had cut rate, low paying, federally funded health insurance. They wouldn’t serve my brother meat though, no matter how many times he asked.

Portly mansions dotted the landscape
of San Bernardino. Billy told me the place was a giant slum once, but I’m not sure I believe him. Apparently the Bruno Burger franchise was started there. Cotton was a huge fan of their fries, but the current locals probably found fast food a bit too lowbrow for their taste. We only visited the city once. The private police force promptly kicked us out and told us never to come back. I’m not sure why. We never even got a chance to steal anything.

In Colton, the surface of the public pool undulated and shimmered, bending the rays cast from the floodlights mounted in the depths
below. Cotton and I had been there a few times. Neither of us could really swim. A lifeguard once pulled Cotton out of the deep-end with a huge hook mounted at the end of a long pole. My brother said he was putting on a show and only pretended to drown, but I’m pretty sure his fear was real. He even dropped a load in the back of his trunks.

The
west side of Colton was novel territory, a car dealership with hundreds of autos organized in tidy columns and rows. This was the farthest I had ever been from home, and we had only been traveling on the snail rail for about twenty minutes. We passed through cities I had heard of but never visited before, Fontana, Rancho Cucamonga, and Upland.

In
Ontario, I shook my mother and brother awake. We barely made it off the snail rail car before the doors closed. Down the stairs deep into the station, there was no attendant to process our transfer. An electronic kiosk scanned the digital tickets embedded in our pocket modules.

Mother
promptly passed out again after taking her seat on the southwest commuter. As we roamed away the stations were spaced further apart, allowing us to cruise at a much higher speed. The rising sun cast an orange glow and long eerie shadows along the expressway beside us. Out the window, buildings zoomed by, images blurred as distorted streaks of red brick and grey masonry. Cotton didn’t do so well. He turned green every time the track deviated to the left or right. Unusually prone to motion sickness, he would vomit if I held him in a headlock for too long.

“Brace
your head back against the seat.” I advised. “Keep it really still and close your eyes.” He did as I said, and his sickly pallor faded.

The
train banked to the left. Through the window I could make out a city off in the distance. Skyscrapers towered above other much shorter buildings that seemed to stretch out nearly a kilometer each in width.
Must be San Diego,
I thought. I had never actually been there and it looked much different than on TV.

As we got closer, I realized this wasn’t a city at all, but our destination, the San Onofre Station for Civilian Extra Solar Travel. What I thought were buildings
were massive civilian starships, freighters, scavenge and extraction vessels, and pleasure cruise liners. The station was practically on the water, separated from the ocean by only a short rocky cliff. I remembered a documentary video from school about how San Onofre used to be a site of a fission reactor that melted down and leaked centuries ago after an embarrassing series of missteps that occurred during the plant’s decommission and shut down. A prompt evacuation saved millions, but the surrounding land became heavily contaminated by radioactive isotopes and was rendered uninhabitable. Because star ships in the old days were launched by nuclear pulse propulsion, San Onofre served as a suitable site for a spaceport because the location was already severely irradiated. Starships eventually converted to cubane reaction engines, and after a ten-trillion dollar clean up, the land and water became safe again. Real estate hustlers planned to develop the surrounding property into high rise slums for broke people, but the Housing Authority rejected the proposal, stating the noise from starships taking off and landing would cause residents to go nuts from sleep deprivation and knife one another. The Bureau of Land Management turned the coastline into a park. The documentary video showed people surfing, which looked really fun. If I knew how to swim, I would definitely become a surfer.

The train de
celerated and stopped. Mother awoke with a start, and Cotton pitched forward out of his seat with a thud. Through the doors and up the stairs, Cotton shook off his motions sickness. His recovery was quite remarkable. He ran off ahead.

My still groggy mother needed help with her bag, so I lagged behind. I
had the overall feeling that we were downtown in a large city, even though no one technically lived in San Onofre, just starmen who hung around briefly between voyages. Sometimes they would venture as far away as our neighborhood looking for fenes or loose women. A few told us really cool stories about space travel, explaining how star ships were pretty dangerous and how some folks would go crazy during long voyages. Most starmen, however, weren’t very interested in talking to Cotton and me, and they would only linger for a little while before moving on. Starmen who actually sought out young boys were best avoided.

The
entire south wall of the station had been turned into a giant vid screen listing departures on the far right and arrivals on the far left. Under departures, we were unable to find the Largo, the name of our ship. Mother scrolled through the menus of her pocket module and found her embarkation packet.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I
t says right here, ‘Largo departs San Onofre Station for Civilian Extra Solar Travel at 13:47, please check in for embarkation between 07:00 and 10:00.’” On a good day, her coping skills were questionable, but in our rush to get out the door mother had neglected to take her medications.

“I don’t understand!” she said again, only this time with
the glossy-eyed look that usually preceded total panic and a complete mental and emotional breakdown. The last time mother skipped her meds, a waitress asked her if she wanted cream or milk in her coffee, but mother didn’t understand because she had ordered a cup of tea. She started weeping openly. It was pretty embarrassing, and eventually the manager of the restaurant kicked us out.

The second
column from the right listed cancellations. The Largo appeared midway down the list. Mother whimpered pathetically. Adjacent to our ship’s name was written “voyage subcontracted, refer to reassignments.”

Reassignments were listed in the column adjacent to cancellations by carrier rather than ship name. We found the name of our former carrier, Axis Transways, in our embarkation packet. The vid screen informed us that our new carrier was
Heavy Industries General LLC and that our new ship was the Magic Sky Daddy.

“Magic Sky Daddy!
” Cotton said with disbelief. “That’s a pretty cool name for a ship!”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” I
agreed.

The Magic Sky Daddy departed from
gate N-42. Mother had more or less composed herself by the time we found our ship, but her eyes were still pink and puffy from crying.

The quarantine
officer checked the medical clearance data on our personal pocket modules and let us pass through the gate. I remembered from school that they used to comb through your hair to look for lice. Billy told me that, in the Space Marines, they even made you take your dong out so they could check your pubes, but the guy in the grey uniform didn't even give us a second glance. I suppose Dr. Maltort, our family doctor, had already certified us as free from parasites or other unwanted tenants. We had visited him specifically to have a form filled out for this voyage. He seemed pretty happy when he realized he would no longer have to see us as patients.

On the other side of the gate, we could see the flank of the spacecraft, which
looked like a giant riveted metal wall that stretched as far as the eye could see. A couple of workers brazed some sort of conduit tubing to the side of the ship.

A guy in an orange baseball cap and jumpsuit sat at a terminal and verified people’s identity and job assignments. He looked puzzled after he pulled up mother’s
file. He dismissed himself, and walked over to a man dressed in a white jump suit and baseball cap, his supervisor, I guessed. As they spoke to one another, they periodically glanced over at us. Their tones were hushed, attempting to talk discretely, but I could still make out most of what they were saying.

“I have this woman in line with her kids
. Her file says she was hired on as a Undesignated Laborer Level 1,” said the man in orange.

“So?” said his supervisor.

“The personnel officer once told me that we never hire anyone that unskilled. The lowest we hire is someone rated Level 3, and then that’s only under unusual circumstances. Level 1’s aren’t even allowed to operate a computer.”

“Well
then tell her to get lost!” said the man in white.

A
terrible sinking feeling lanced the pit of my stomach. I wanted nothing more in my life than to get on the ship. Mother seemed calm, which meant she was oblivious. Mother had mediocre hearing, which made it easy for Cotton and me to sneak past her if we needed to leave home without permission. She told us stories about how, after dropping out of school, she became a traveling groupie that followed the metal band Rusty Barbed Fish Hook. She boasted that she didn’t miss a single concert over a three year period and got to know the band members really well. The band’s drummer was eventually stabbed to death by another groupie. “I knew her too,” mother said. “She was the jealous type and could get really nasty.” With the loss of their drummer, the band broke up and mother returned home to look for work. I was born about seven months later. Mother never regained her hearing. The nerves in her ears were permanently damaged by the high volume screeching and poorly sequenced baseline and drum beats. Billy had Rusty Barbed Fish Hook’s debut album,
Caught and Filleted
, on his pocket module. The songs were all about doing it with girls, but there was nothing subtle about their lyrics, no metaphors, just un-colorful, un-rhyming, rather mechanical description. I really hoped my father wasn’t one of the band members.

“What should I tell her?”
the man in the orange jumpsuit asked.

“Tell her there was a mistake and that we no longer have a job for her.”

“Can I do that?”

“Yeah we do it all the time.”

“But she was hired by Axis, which was acting as an agent for the Feds, and not by us. I think her position is some sort of government make-work program to get unskilled folks off of welfare or something.”

“
That’s a good point! Don’t turn her away just yet. There’s definitely politics involved with our cargo.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” the guy in orange
asked. “What is our cargo?”

The man in white
shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m not really sure. The first mate was pretty vague. But let’s stay focused on the problem at hand. I’ll call the personnel officer and see what we can pull off.”

The man in the white jumpsuit turned away and put on a headset. I couldn’t make out exactly what was said, just somethin
g about “obligations, penalties and fines” and “lucrative federal contracts.” The supervisor took off the headset, walked back over to the guy in the orange jumpsuit and said, “looks like we are stuck with her.”

“What
kind of work is she supposed to do?” the underling asked, frustrated.

“Clean the toilets when
a jano-bot breaks, I guess,” the guy in white replied. “Like I said, we’re stuck with her, either we take her on or we run the risk of never getting another government job, and apparently they pay pretty well, even after Axis takes away a big cut for doing nothing.”

The underling looked back
over at us. “Oh my God, I cannot believe we have to let her onboard! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worse set of ghetto-rednecks in my life! Look at her kids! They’re probably gang affiliated. I bet they haven’t even been toilet trained and are going to piss on the floor! Maybe we can get the medical officer to say she failed her drug test.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Me, a gangster,
I thought,
I hate gangsters!

“I already asked
the personnel officer about faking drug test results. They said it was a good idea but that we couldn’t bring on our own doc. We had to take on some guy from the Space Marines Health and Sanitation Reserves.”