Fugitive From Asteron (10 page)

“What do you mean?” I asked,
startled.
Does she know I am being pursued?

“There’s one thing you’re
not
allowed to do here, and it’s the thing you seem intent on doing,” she said
sternly. “You’re not allowed to go around assaulting people. The police will
arrest you if you do.”

“But is it not the
police
who do most of the assaulting?”

Kristin shook her head at me
wearily.

My tension eased the moment we rose
above the trees and floated through the clear sky in Kristin’s plane. With
superb precision, she traced patterns in the air over the ocean. She made
circles with perfect curves and squares with sharp corners. We rolled and spun
in every direction until the empty stretch of clear sky apparently became too
tame for the keen reflexes of my daring pilot. She took me to a deserted
mountain range a distance from the city. There she dived into canyons and
climbed over cliffs, with ground and streams below me, then sky below me, then
all of it spinning together in a stunning swirl of river, rock, and sky. I
wondered if it was the light-headedness from racing through negative and
positive
g
-forces that made me want to fly forever, never to touch the
ground again, never to hear anything but the steady buzz of the engine and the
eager laugh of my pilot.

After Kristin left the mountains
and flew upright for a stretch, I asked a few of the questions stirring in my
mind.

“Kristin, how is it that you speak
my language?”

She laughed. “
Your
language, as you call it, originated here on Earth. English is spoken on other
planets that trade with us and send people here, but it’s
our
native
language.”

Remarkable! The tongue my teachers
called Asteronian was a language from Earth called English.

“But you don’t use contractions,”
said Kristin, “like the word
don’t
for
do not
. We contract
our words all the time. You speak more properly.”

I had another theory. “Just less
frequently. Where I come from, we do not need to condense words because we have
so little to say. Maybe contractions have been lost in our speech because we
talk so seldom.”

“Maybe on Earth we talk too much. I
know I’m guilty.” With one hand on the controls, Kristin raised her other hand
to cover her mouth.

My mind raced back to a scene in
which I had to speak out, to shout, but— “Do not gag your mouth!” I pushed her
hand down with a jerk that surprised the both of us.

“Alex, what’s wrong?” she asked
quietly, her eyes searching my face for a response I did not offer.

I realized my hand was squeezing
hers tightly. To make up for my awkward behavior, I eased my grip, stroked her
hand softly for a moment, and then released it.

“Do you have a military on Earth,
Kristin?”

“Of course. Just about every
country has its own military. There’s also an alliance that most of Earth’s
nations belong to, which was formed to defend our planet against an alien
attack, but we’ve never had one.”

“Does the military not stop alien
spacecraft that are entering Earth’s atmosphere?”

“Only if they’re armed. Our sensors
can detect all known military weapons. If the ship has none of them, it’s free
to come and go as it pleases. If aliens come in, they’re processed at the
centers we have for that, and we help them find work.”

“What if the alien craft has no
weapons but perhaps has spies? Would Earth’s military not want to stop it?”

“We haven’t had any wars in a
hundred years, not since the Reckoning. Besides, we have the best forces in the
galaxy. Nobody’s going to attack us.” Kristin waved her hand to dismiss the
notion. “No one here worries about that.”

“What is the Reckoning?”

“Well”—she pursed her lips as she
formed her answer—“it was a time in history when Earth took account of its
ways. It marked the end of an old order and the beginning of a new one. We have
an air show to celebrate it every year. I’m flying in this year’s show.”

Kristin turned her craft back
toward the ocean, where the fireball that was the Earth’s sun hung near the
horizon, with thin bands of gold-tinted clouds layering the sky.

“What does
MAS
mean?”

“How do you know about that?”

“This morning I saw those letters
on your jacket.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “
MAS
stands for ‘Merrett Aerospace Systems.’ That’s the name of the company I work
for. See?” she pointed to a sealed plastic water bottle fastened to the side of
the plane that also had the letters
MAS
printed within the silver
rocket.

“What do companies do here on
Earth?”

“They provide useful things, like a
certain kind of product or a service that they sell to others. That’s how they
make money. We call that ‘doing business.’ ”

“How did MAS get permission to
perform business on Earth?”

“Nobody needs permission.”

“Oh?”

“There are a lot of companies on
Earth. MAS is a big company with different divisions. I work in Space Travel.
We transport people and equipment to places beyond Earth. We take crews to
space stations, or workers to industrial installations on other planets. Our
group also deploys satellites and conducts space exploration. We also run a
weekly shuttle to the lunar cities. I’m in training to become a space pilot.”
Kristin spoke about being a pilot with an excitement that I could understand.

“Why does your company place its
name on your jacket?”

“MAS puts its name on lots of
things—shirts, jackets, hats, pens, you name it. Its logo is the initials in
the silver rocket, which means its name is written in a way that’s unique to it
and stands out. It’s like a signature, a special way of signing your name.”

As our bodies hung inverted at the
top of Kristin’s perfect loop, I thought of how everyone on Asteron was forced
to dress in gray to blend in equally with everyone else. Here it was not only
the people that were unique but also the companies they formed. The companies
also tried
not
to blend in but to stand out and be different.

“We give a lot of this stuff out to
the public and to the people we do business with, our customers. They don’t
have to deal with us, you know; they can go to other companies that do what we
do. So it helps to get our name out. It’s good for business. That’s called ‘marketing.’
”

Why would Feran curl his
disgusting hand around a pen from this company?
I wondered. “Does MAS do
its business with other planets?”

“Yes.”

“Which ones?”

“A lot of them—most of them.” An
angry edge suddenly sharpened her voice. “But not Asteron, of course.”

“Why not Asteron?”

“Most of Earth’s companies don’t
trade with Asteron.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t approve of Asteron.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story, but they’re not
like us.”

Why, I wondered, did the name
Asteron drain the smile from Kristin’s face? “Do you know the ruler of
Asteron?”

“No.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No.”

“Does he come here?”

“No.”

“Does anyone from Asteron come
here?”

“No. They’re very secretive. They
don’t let any refugees out, and very few escape, so we don’t know much about
what goes on there.”

“Do you know anyone from there?”

“No, and I don’t want to. Well,
only Mykroni, my boss, who escaped from there. But he’s been on Earth and
working for our company for twenty-five years, and he’s my father’s close
friend, so I don’t hate him.”

“But you hate Asteron? Why?”

Her smile vanished and her face
tightened into a solemn look at what I thought could be a memory that disturbed
her. “They do terrible things.”

“To you? Did Asteron do something
to you, Kristin?”

“Hey, I thought we were having
fun.” Her voice told me that this topic was finished. Her face held a sadness
that I did not understand and that she would not explain.

“So how do you like this plane?”
she asked, changing the subject.

“I like it indeed. Is it made by an
Earthling company?”

“Yup. The company’s name is Taylor,
see?”

She pointed to a name on the side
of the instrument panel, a name I had seen before. I had flown crafts like
Kristin’s in Asteron, although they were less sophisticated models that I was
sure she would consider outdated.
How does Feran get these planes?

“Kristin, could Asteron get Earth’s
products anyway, even though you do not trade with them?”

“I suppose they could buy our stuff
from other planets that we do trade with, sure, or else from the few companies
here that deal with them.” She looked at me suspiciously. “Say, why do you ask?
You said you were from Cosmona, didn’t you?”

I did not reply.

“But you couldn’t be from Asteron.
You’d have no way to get here. I mean . . . Alexander, are
you keeping something from me?”

I looked into light brown eyes that
had the shadings of the Earth’s fertile soil, eyes that announced her feelings.
I did not want to lie to such eyes, but I could not give out information about
my past while Feran was pursuing me.

“Yes, Kristin, I am keeping
something from you.”

“Hey, just what do you mean?” she
asked suspiciously.

“I mean . . . I
can fly.”

“Can you?” Her face brightened
again.

“And I can fly this plane.”

“Really?”

“And I indeed would like to fly
this plane.”

“Are you serious?”

“You will see that for yourself.”

“Go ahead, captain.” The plane had
dual controls, so I began using mine as she released her hold on hers.

So Feran somehow managed to obtain planes
and possibly other things manufactured by Earth’s companies, even though they
did not want to deal with him. He probably was trying to buy something from
MAS. Maybe he was
at
MAS, trying to convince someone to do what
Kristin called business with him. Maybe he got one of the company’s pens and a
folder and notepad. That was all. Surely he could not try to harm a company
from a planet with a stronger military. Even he was not that stupid, I assured
myself. And surely none of this posed any threat to Kristin. But then, what
reason did she have for . . .

I could not think of such matters
anymore, because I was feeling the superb sensitivity of a stick that seemed to
move at the moment of a change in my intention, before it reached the nerves in
my wrist. I performed a few simple maneuvers, and then as I got used to the
plane, I traced more complicated patterns. I did many of Kristin’s maneuvers,
adding extra rolls and spins, increasing the speeds, pushing the maneuvers to
the limits of my own imagination. When I was ready, I headed back to the
mountains. I liked the landscape, especially as it became a liquid smear of
climbs and dives, of stalls and spins, of cliffs and streams when I engaged in
what Kristin had called playing. Somewhere on the edge of consciousness, I
could feel her looking at me, stunned. I glanced at my speechless companion to
be sure she was not blacking out from the maneuvers.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded, staring at me, her eyes
now unblinking.

Then I forgot Kristin, the Earth,
and the universe, itself. I had no room in my awareness for anything more than
the superb feel of the plane racing through the air with the life and will that
I gave it.

My hands almost touched each other
around Kristin’s slim waist as I helped her out of the cockpit and onto the
grounds near her garden. When we sat on the grass, she spoke for the first time
since I had taken the controls:

“Alex, my gosh! When you started
flying, I tried to put your technique into words. I mean you were skillful,
very skillful, but there was more to it. You have a style to your flying. When
you performed my own maneuvers, I saw your style more clearly. Where I did one
slow roll, you did two quick ones. Where I made a smooth turn, you made a
sudden one. Where I pushed the stick easy, you pushed it hard. Where I
descended smoothly, you dived faster and steeper. When I fly, it feels like
dancing. But when you fly, it feels thrilling, aggressive, almost violent.”

“Your flying has superb rhythm and
grace,” I said.

“And yours has . . . anger.
Do you feel angry, Alex?”

“Yes.”

She waited, but I volunteered
nothing further.

“Is that why you don’t smile or
laugh?”

“I am not like Earthlings.”

“What do you mean? I know there are
different species of humans that evolved on other planets, but they look
different. You look like us. You’re
Homo sapiens
like us, aren’t you?”

I shrugged my shoulders in
ignorance of what I was. I wondered about the knowledge Feran withheld from us,
knowledge about our nature and that of other humanoids. Why was it that only
certain Asteronians, like spies or doctors, received biological information,
and only in secret? The rest of us were told merely that aliens differed from
us in every fundamental way.

“But you
feel
things,”
Kristin said, perplexed.

“Not the way you do.”

“In your flying there’s . . . passion.”

I thought of the untroubled smiles
and easy laughter of the humans here. Their manner was completely foreign to
me. “I do not have the same . . . mental . . . abilities . . . as
Earthlings.”

“But you have incredible
flying
ability! Have you tried to find work through the Center for Alien Orientation?”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll grab you up in a
minute. Do you realize how
valuable
your skills are and how much
money
you can make? There are companies working with the alien center that’ll offer
you a job as a domestic pilot to fly around Earth, which I think is kind of
dull. My company is the only one around here that trains pilots for
interplanetary travel. There you get to fly amazing spacecraft and go to exotic
places. You encounter all kinds of terrain, atmosphere, weather, gravity, and
other alien conditions. And there’s also the fun of maneuvering through zero
g
’s
in space. Skillful pilots are in big demand at MAS.”