Anton's Odyssey (8 page)

My brother and I resumed trying to shoot baskets. This time I shot free throws and Cotton caught rebounds. A stray ball bounced into our corner at the same time I threw a pathetically short air ball. Cotton found himself between the two bouncing balls and picked up the wrong one. It was an expensive ball made from real leather and not one of the cheap rubber ones that had the words “Magic Sky Daddy” stamped under the valve.

“That’s my ball!” said a tall boy. The baby fat around his chin suggested he was about a year younger than I, two years older than
Cotton. He wore a spotless white athletic training shirt, the kind that reflects heat back to the body when it’s cold out and dissipates thermal energy when it’s hot. I had always wanted one, but it cost more than my mother could make in a week (when she actually worked). The shirt wicked the sweat off the kid’s torso, and the exaggerated surface area of the protruding nano fibers caused the water to evaporate quickly. The escaping water vapor created the illusion of smoke, as if the kid were smoldering. Cotton ignored the kid and admired the beauty of the leather ball.

“That’s my ball kid,” the smoky kid repeated. Cotton finally looked up.

“Come on,” I said. “Give him his ball back.” Cotton tossed the ball lazily at the tall kid. It bounced short and wide. The kid had to chase it down.

Cotton and I resumed shooting baskets, missing most of the time. The leather ball bounced back into our little court a second time. Again Cotton caught it and just stood there looking at it, fascinated.

“Damn it kid, give me my ball back,” the tall kid shouted, “and throw it right this time.” Cotton completely ignored him, turning the ball over in his hands, taking in every minor detail of the magnificent basketball, the bumpy texture of the animal hide, the sunken lettering, the perfect roundness of the valve. The kid walked over and snatched the ball from Cotton’s hands. He tucked the ball under his arm.

“I was just looking at it,” Cotton protested.

“Well it’s not yours to look at, douchebag!” the kid snorted rudely.

Cotton took a step forward, “I just wanted
to see —” but the kid shoved him back with his free hand. Cotton kicked the kid in the shin, and the kid dropped the ball so he could grapple Cotton unencumbered. An obvious neophyte to scuffling, the kid tried to knock Cotton over by driving his shoulder into Cotton’s chest, a terrible mistake that negated his height advantage and placed his center of gravity quite literally in Cotton’s hands. Cotton grabbed the back of the kid’s expensive shirt and inverted it, pulled it up over the taller kid’s head. As the kid struggled, Cotton spun so that he was no longer supporting his opponent’s weight. Blind and off balance, the kid took a few quick steps but couldn’t control his forward momentum. He crashed head first into the bleachers. Other kids encircled the ensuing melee and began shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Unharmed, the tall kid got back on his feet, but before he could fix his shirt, Mr. Fox had pushed his way through the circle of excited kids. Pointing at the door, he screamed at Cotton angrily, “Get out! Get out!” Purple veins bulged in his forehead.

Cotton complied, and I followed close behind, knowing that it was futile to point out to Mr. Fox that the kid in the fancy shirt was equally culpable. Cotton could care less about getting kicked out of the gym. He got kicked out of places on a weekly basis. In the passageway, he grinned.

“I could have taken that guy easy if that teacher dude with the funky hairdo didn’t stop me,” Cotton declared.

“Yes,” I agreed, “and he would have deserved it too.”

“He was much bigger than me, but he didn’t seem very tough.”

“I imagine a lot of the kids here talk tough but aren’t tough at all. They’re not at all like the kids from our old neighborhood.”

Cotton smiled widely. He finally understood we would no longer have to live in fear of the goons and gangsters who terrorize
d our old neighborhood.

“Be careful,” I warned. “Don’t go around starting scuffles just for the fun of it. Didn’t you see how Mr. Fox blamed you even though that other kid started it?”

Cotton nodded. We had both accepted life wasn’t fair long ago. Without realizing it, we were pushing rules to the limits in a subconscious effort to figure out how to game the system.

The door to the gym burst open behind us, and Hammond came running out.

“Man, you totally took Charlie to school,” he said, beaming at Cotton and slapping him on the back with approval. “That kid totally deserves it too. Always walking around with his nose in the air, thinking he’s something special ‘cause his dad’s first mate.”

Oh that’s not good,
I thought,
at least things didn’t get too far out of hand.
Back home, I saw Cotton act like a gangster once when he was really upset. He stomp a kid’s head, and the guy’s teeth chipped as his face bounced off the pavement. If Cotton busted Charlie’s fine teeth, the first mate might very well turn the ship around for the sole purpose of evicting my family. Worse yet, the crew might shoot Cotton out the airlock and make it look like some sort of accident.

“You guys going to sneak back in?” Hammond asked.

“Probably not a good idea,” I said. “Mr. Fox will give us hell if he catches us.”

“Well, I’m done lifting weights. You guys can hang out at my place.”

Hammond’s living quarters were at least twice as big as ours. Neither of his parents were home. I asked him what his parents did, and he told me his mother worked in the mess hall as a cook. His father was a technician in the engine room.

“He might even get rated able starman next voyage,” Hammond said, beaming with pride, “then he’d get a white jump suit, and we’d get to move into an even bigger place.”

“How do the able starmen keep those white uniforms so clean?” I asked.

“Some ships issue suits that are
self-cleaning, coated in nano particles or something. We don’t have those here.” he said. “Although, sort of the point of the white clothing is to show that you don’t have to do the dirty work anymore. But on this ship, they always run with a bare minimum of crewmembers. My dad says it’s to save money. Even the able starmen have to do some of the nasty jobs sometimes. The suits look good now because we just picked up new ones back at port. Just wait a few months, even with regular laundry service they get all stained and start to turn grey. If a bunch of people die, the crew can get stretched really thin, and the white suits get really nasty from all the extra work duties.”

“People die out here?” I asked. There was a loud crash. Not interested in our conversation, Cotton attempted to amuse himself by stacking Hammond’s chairs end to end. The top chair had gotten away from him.

“Your brother always like this?” Hammond asked, mildly annoyed.

“Naw, he just gets into mischief when he’s bored. You got any comic books?” I asked. “We need something to keep him occupied.”

“Yeah, good idea, I got some old ones from when I was a kid.” He stood up, and I followed him into his room. Hammond recovered a box from under his bed. “I got some skin mags too,” he said. “Wanna give your brother a skin mag?”

“We better not,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Cotton had discovered girls yet. The results could be unpredictable.

Most of Hammond’s comics were in excellent shape without any wrinkles or creases. I asked if he had any damaged ones, and he found about three that didn’t have any collector value. He gave them to Cotton as a gift. Cotton was thrilled. He lay on his stomach in the middle of the floor and lost himself in the gory graphics.

“So people get killed out here?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, happens all the time. Dad said because this ship is registered in Liberia and because we never stay in port for more than twenty-eight days, we aren’t subject to a safety inspection by the NSSA.”

“NSSA?”

“National Spacecraft Safety Administration. They make sure your cubane is in the right sort of canister and you got your radiation shielding in the right place. Technically we are supposed to follow NSSA regulations, but with no safety inspection at port, there’s no real enforcement. My dad told me about this guy in the engine room a few voyages back who got his jump suit caught on the flywheel of a zero friction kinetic energy reservoir. Ripped off his arm, and he bled to death. It was really nasty! Dad said if they followed NSSA regulations on machine guarding, the accident wouldn’t have happened.”

“That’s really messed up!” I cried.

“Yeah, and after that three other guys died in a cubane explosion. With four men down, the engine room was really shorthanded, so they made dad work twenty-twenty-tens.”

“Twenty-twenty-tens?”
I asked. “What’s that?”

“That’s when they make you work for twenty hours, rest for four fours, work for another twenty hours, rest for another four hours, and then work another ten hour shift.”

“What happens after the ten hour shift?”

“You crash hard for fourteen hours. When you wake up, you start over again with another
twenty-hour shift. Dad always did all right, never did need much sleep, but this other guy, he couldn’t hack it and started taking fenes. Got all strung out and paranoid. Said he needed fresh air and shot himself out the airlock.”

“That’s messed up!” I repeated. I had always associated fenes with people who lived in dilapidated shacks and had rotten teeth. I
had no idea people used them in space. “How did he get the fenes?” I asked. “Do people sneak them aboard?”

“I suppose some people might stash fenes in their luggage, but the truth is they got all the ingredients you need to make fenes right here on the ship. Dad said some of the chemicals they keep aren’t even used in space travel. It’s almost like they keep them around ‘
cause they want you making fenes.”

“Why would they want you to use fenes?” I asked. Fene users back home were always knifing each other.

“Makes you work harder if you don’t get too strung out.”

“Yeah but won’t the ship get in trouble.”

“Naw, not really. Dad says as long as they do piss testing before we take off and they have written anti-drug rules, the ship can’t get in trouble. He said if you get injured while using fenes, the ship can even charge you to see the doc instead of letting you see him for free through workers’ compensation. And if you get killed while using fenes, the ship doesn’t have to pay your family your death benefit.”

“That’s messed up!” I cried again.

We left Hammond’s place around 19:00, hoping to get to the front of the line at the mess hall before the dinnertime rush. As we hurried down the passageways, Cotton huffed and puffed.

“I’m getting fat and out of shape,” he admitted.

“That’s what happens when you eat ten servings of meat a day,” I said insightfully.

“Well not any more. I’m going to eat nothing but oatmeal three times a day ‘till I’m back down to sixty-five kilos.”

“Yeah, good luck with that!” I said sarcastically. “You’re not going to lose any weight that way unless you cut out the salt and butter too!”
Dr. Zanders would be proud of me
, I thought.

“Then I won’t add any salt and butter!”

To my amazement, Cotton stuck to his diet for weeks and the kilos melted away. He didn’t exactly become trim, but was able to slim down to his pre-embarkation state of pudginess, which was a marked improvement. Most people, including our own mother, thought my brother was mentally subnormal, suffering from some sort of traumatic brain injury or congenital cognitive impairment. The truth, however, was that very few people were willing to look past Cotton’s grimy, unpolished surface. On occasion, my brother could pull off some amazing feats of willpower, which is why I suspected that deep down Cotton was actually pretty normal, maybe even gifted.

Back on Earth, if you got suspended from school, they sent you home for a few days and you get to chill out and watch TV. I didn’t mind the punishment at all. In space, they had what they called in-house suspension, meaning you had to sit in the Information Technology Archives all by yourself and study, which was extremely tedious.

I was sentenced to in-house suspension despite what I considered at the time to be severe mitigating circumstances. Franklin, the smart 6
th
grade kid in 7
th
grade math, started tormenting me as early as the second day of school. Initially, he would just call me “stupid” when the teacher wasn’t looking, and that I could ignore. Kicking the ass of a kid that small poses no real challenge, isn’t very fun, and generally loses you respect from your peers.

The third day of class, Mrs. Hallisworth put a problem on the vid and asked me to stand up and solve it in front of everyone. The problem was “n+1=3, what is n?” I told her I didn’t know the answer, and she said, “If you did your homework last night you would?”

“Ma’am I didn’t do my homework last night,” I said.

She was taken aback, almost like no one every admitted to not doing their homework before. She asked me to guess, so I guessed, “
n equals 1.”

“So one and one are three, Anton?” she asked, and everyone in the class started snickering.

“No ma’am,” I said, “one and one are two.”

“Perhaps, Anton, you should be more diligent about doing your homework from now on.”

I said I would, and Mrs. Hallisworth told me to return to my seat. As I sat down, Franklin turned his head and whispered the words, “You’re an ignoramus.” I shook my fist at him, but he looked rather un-intimidated.

Every time I got a question wrong, which was anytime Mrs. Hallisworth asked me a question, Franklin would insult my intelligence. I tried warning him with death threats after class, but they only seemed to embolden him.

By the time Cotton had lost his weight, Franklin was no longer whispering insults but rather saying them aloud for the rest of the class to hear. Sometimes Mrs. Hallisworth would try to punish Franklin by making him solve the next problem. He invariable got the question right, though, which only made me more angry.

By the time the ship stopped accelerating, and we cut off our electrostatic ion thrust
ers, Franklin started adding, “your brother is stupid,” to his more routine insults. To make matters worse, Franklin always got 100% on his quizzes. I hoped they would promote him to eighth grade math, but I had no such luck. Emboldened by Franklin’s bravado, some of the other puny kids who sat nearby started whispering insults at me as well.

The day after the ship suffered its first work-place death, some poor sap in an orange jumpsuit fell down a hatch in the engine room and landed on his head, Franklin pushed his insults to a limit I could no longer ignore. As we reviewed for an upcoming exam, I butchered another math problem. To my horror, just as I put my foot in my mouth and answered terribly wrong, I realized it was the same equation I had missed weeks before, “n+1=3, what is n?” The class was in uproar, hooting and hollering at how dumb I was. Mrs. Hallisworth yelled at the class to settle down. With a sigh, she asked me to return to my seat. Franklin turned and said softly, “I hear your mother is even more stupid than you!”

A kid can fail to do his homework. He can turn a blind eye when his brother doesn’t do his homework, but he cannot choose his mother. It was bad enough a total prick like Bob the steward could push my mother around, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let a bunch of puny kids do the same. Incensed, I decided at that moment I would no longer tolerate Franklin’s flapping lips and venomous tongue.

Five minute later, Franklin turned his head t
o say, “your momma’s a whore,” an escalation of his insults so obvious, even I saw it coming. I timed my jab to coincide with Franklin’s silent “w,” smacking him in the mouth when he lips were open. Even if Franklin hadn’t fallen out of his chair and cried like a little girl, I still would have gotten caught because I had neglected to wait until Mrs. Hallisworth had turned her back.

“Anthony, did you just punch Franklin in the face?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am.”

After stammering, at a complete loss for words, she dismissed me to see Mr. Yongscolder. Mr. Yongscolder was pissed and called me a bully for punching a kid four years
younger. He turned red and started sweating and even looked kind of pale and sick. I wanted to tell Mr. Yongscolder that I had demonstrated considerable restraint by waiting several weeks for Franklin’s insults to escalate and that, in a sense, Franklin was the one acting like a bully, but I was concerned by the way Mr. Yongscolder was clutching his chest. I decided anything I said would only make matters worse, and sat silently as Mr. Yongscolder passed down a sentence of ten days in-house suspension.

Hammond laughed until his sides ached as I told him the whole story and about how Franklin was dazed at first after I hit him and then just started screaming his head off.

“Ten days in-house!” He shook his head. “That’s a tough break buddy, but you did the right thing. You let some puny kid like Franklin put your momma down in front of the whole class, your ass is pretty much candy for the taking.”

I agreed with his eloquent assessment of the situation. He gave me one of his skin mags. “It’s an oldie but
a goodie! You’ll like it I’m sure. I swiped it from my dad. I think he’s been hanging onto it for like fifteen years. Make sure you stash it in your school bag.” I told him I didn’t have a school bag so he gave me his old one and promised he’d sneak out of class to visit me. Regrettably, the Information Technology Archives were near the mess hall, so Sergeant at Arms Boldergat caught him in the passageway, and Mr. Yongscolder gave him detention.

First day of my sentence, Mr. Yongscolder escorted me to the ship’s archives and told the archives clerk that I had in-school suspension for the next ten school days.
The archives clerk was a middle aged lady who, just liked Mary the medical assistant, didn’t have to wear a jumpsuit. As a matter of fact, she looked a lot like Mary, only a bit older, a little less saggy, and with a little more facial hair. I hoped that by the time I turned seventeen I would have a moustache as thick as hers so that I could buy cheap beer and sell it to my classmates at a considerable markup.

Mostly the archives housed super quick computers that contained processors over a million times faster than those found in a typical pocket module. Gretchen, the clerk, would not let me use one though because I was being punished by Mr. Yongscolder. I had to sit at a standard display and port my module.

In the back of the archives were stacks of old hard copy books. The librarian at my old school explained that, in the olden days, hard copy books were the norm. As digital readers became more popular, books became quite rare. However, the government prints to hard copy really old information that it considers very important. That way the information persists in physical form as digital copies get purged from computers because of lack of interest or because the format becomes obsolete and unreadable with the most recent digital readers.

There was a surprisingly high amount of traffic in the Information Technology Archives. People would drop by between shifts to browse through digimags or use the
super-fast computers to beam messages to loved ones back home. Gretchen would often help guys in white jump suits or khakis find technical journals. Through eavesdropping, I learned that the ship and its engines were so old that almost all of the relevant technical information had been shelved as hard copy books. A few times, Dr. Zanders would run in, grab a hard copy medical journal and run out, setting off the antitheft alarm by the exit. The archives clerk never chased after him though, so I guessed Dr. Zanders was pretty reliable and returned the journals when he was done. One time, he wore a surgical cover and a mask that were splattered with blood. I was never alone in the archives, so I couldn’t exactly take out Hammond’s skin mag.

I spent the morning doing my English schoolwork, which wasn’t too bad. We had to read this really old story about this guy who falls off an ocean ship and swims to an island, and this really prosperous guy who owns the island hunts him like an animal. The writing assignment that followed was to discuss whether or not the story had any social merit or if it was just cheesy escapist literature. I wrote how the story was important because it kept me interested in English. I wrote how, the year prior, I had to read this long book about this easy girl who got knocked up by some piety-freak. Only, the book was real boring and didn’t describe how the couple did it but instead talked about how the community ostracized her yet she became a really good person. I wrote that, if I had to read another book like that, I would completely give up on the English language and resort to grunting and pointing as my sole method of communication. Thanks to the exciting short story, however, I was inspired enough to try my quill at poetry. (Of course, I omitted from the essay how I completely lacked poetic talent and would probably end up writing about Cotton’s persistent flatulence, rhyming “gas” with “ass” and “smell” with “unwell”). Ms. Gross gave me a B minus,
saying I was the only one in the class who argued favorably about the story. She said I shouldn’t write academic papers in the first person or use vernacular expressions like “piety-freak,” but I was pretty pleased with the grade.

My math homework was pretty easy because the display I was using didn’t override the math processor function of my pocket module.

After lunch, that nerdy guy from homeroom, the kid with the thin neck and thick glasses, sat down at the next table. He brought with him a portable computer, probably the fanciest one I had ever seen. I guessed that it was probably as fast as the super computers in the archives. It must have cost his momma a fortune.

I wasn’t sure what the stick geek kid was doing there because he seemed way too well behaved to be in in-house suspension. The archives clerk kept beaming at him like he was the pride and joy of the ship. I guessed he was doing some sort of independent study program. The clerk called him “Allen,” so I astutely figured out that was his name.

The vid screen on his portable unit was so big that I could easily see what he was up to. Mostly he did school work, advanced science and math that was so advanced there were no numbers, just some kind of foreign lettering. Every now and then he’d take a break and pull up schematics of military gear. I would have preferred boob shots myself, but the guns were pretty cool.

Something very strange happened around 14:30. I finished my all my assignments and had nothing to do. It was the first time in my l
ife I had ever been caught up with my schoolwork. Honestly, with nothing else to distract me, the work really wasn’t very difficult. I sent Mr. Yongscolder a message telling him I was done with my work and asked if I could go home. He wrote back to explain that, not only did I have to stay until school was finished, I had to sit there another thirty minutes for even considering going home early when I should be feeling remorse for what I did to Franklin.

With nothing to do, I watched the geeky kid’s vid screen. He was watching some sort of science program. The volume was turned down but I could still hear the narrator. The content must have been pretty basic because even I could follow most of the talking points. I guessed that the geeky kid was watching the show for fun and it wasn’t part of his assignment.

“Ever use the word ‘Einstein’ to mock a friend who goofs something really simple?” the narrator droned. “A long time ago, calling someone an ‘Einstein’ was actually a huge compliment and not an insult at all, which underscores how our understanding of Albert Einstein the scientist has changed so dramatically in the last two hundred years.” The program went on to talk about Einstein’s early years, about how he liked to ride his bicycle, and how he was really into this one girl, and how he had to leave town because these guys were trying to kill him. The geeky kid wasn’t really paying attention though and opened up a program in the lower left hand corner that showed one of those old cowboy guns with the cylinder in the middle that spun around. When the narrator resumed discussions of Einstein’s scientific achievements, which seemed a lot less interesting to me than stories about goons trashing his house and running off with his violin, the geeky kid turned off the program about cowboy guns and started paying attention again.

“Building on the work of Planck and Maxwell, Einstein developed his Theory of Special Relativity,” the narrator explained.
“Seemingly sophisticated at first, relativistic physics fundamentally constrained modern thought for over a century. The idea that no particle could accelerate faster than the speed of light and that time itself had no fixed reference made long distance space travel seem futile. Programs to send astronauts beyond the near reaches of our solar system were ridiculed by the scientific community and were never funded by governments. The major flaw in Einstein’s work was not discovered until the mid-twenty-second century when a young student at Abraham Baldwin Polytechnic Institute in Tifton, Georgia, accidentally chased a stray cat into a vent of a particle accelerator.” The narrator blabbed on and explained the mechanism used to make particles move faster than the speed of light and describe how that principal applied to space travel. I wasn’t paying very close attention because I found the material pretty boring. I watched the minutes tick away and didn’t stay in the archives one second longer than required. For all I know Allen stayed there until midnight designing space engines.