Tyrannia (15 page)

Kathy was in a black/silver dress and his beard had tons of prismed jewels embedded in the wiry hairs. The dress was slinky, I guess, but not fitting him particularly well. He waved. It was possible he was looking up my own slinky dress through the translucent pod bottom.

He waved again. I opened my mouth to shout something out at him (why did I suddenly want him, the stooge? Was it his beard and blackened dress?). But he turned around and four other students from the Chartering milled around him at the pit of the vertical tunnel, already listless. I felt like the child keeping up with the larger kids, already I felt this. At the same time, a doddering alum—easily a century and a half old—must have lost motor control, because her pod started skidding down the transparent wall-face. Outside, a shepherd came near the window but darted away again, leaving a vermillion trail. A soothing emergency light bathed everyone’s face in red. Kathy’s friends started laughing at the alum’s loss of control.

A little cruel, a little cruel.

As the emergency crews rushed in and started resuscitating the apparently dead woman, I set the pod down and stepped out into the group—the pack?—of my fellow students that Kathy had brought along. I was disappointed in him; we talked about making out, how that could have been an important portal into a deeper type of friendship. And I wanted some privacy/solace with him, if he had any to provide. Apparently he didn’t, because he’d brought along those fellows.

They didn’t seem like fellows. Their gazes treated me askance, if they treated me with looks at all. I recognized them, of course, the school wasn’t that big, but at the same time those people seemed to me to be as weird as shepherds, maybe moreso.

Yet they waited for me. I couldn’t tell them apart, at first.

Kathy took the crook of my arm.

What made me stick around, what made me not blurt out a stupid excuse and slip away, was that Kathy sometimes said truly profound things, and I would realize weeks later that he was actually trying to be tender to me, profundity only being an afterthought. “Your hair is like a cauldron wrought from air,” he said once, touching my red ends. I was waiting for a moment like that from him at that moment, but it was pretty clear he didn’t want to go any further; at least, not with me. It was pretty unclear whether he ran into this pack in transit or whether this was the plan
all along.

“We’re going,” Kathy said, more like announced, “to ride one of the shepherd ships. I thought you’d be game.” I decided that it would be a good thing to nod, so I nodded. Default smirks arrived on the faces of the others.

I realized that part of that glaze on their faces was a shepherd-gaze, that each was paired with their own shepherd. I was the oddfellow out.

“Let’s go,” Drexley said, hugging his fish-scaled arms. “It’s cold in here. And boring.” I knew his name was Drexley because his name tag said so. Below his name was a disclaimer that only FRIENDS could use his nickname “Drex.” Below that was a ledger showing his exact net worth at that moment. It was lots of boon. Drexley started laughing. His voice pierced. Other names were given to me in hasty introductions: Lund, Zenith Marie, America.

This group that Kathy brought to me, then, had punctured through the barrier of telepathy and were tied to shepherds. I hadn’t. How could I have said no?

I didn’t want to say no.

Drexley called his shepherd Thousandhorse. Lund called his shepherd Anatolia-Blossom. Zenith Marie called her shepherd the Boxer. America called her shepherd Jackie. Boy, girl, boy, girl.

These weren’t the names the shepherds gave to themselves. The gang wouldn’t reveal those names to a semi-interloper like me.

We walked in a cluster, a closed fist of bodies out of the Flowering Ape. I tried to mimic their easy gait, and in the corridor, I noticed the wide eyes of the old alums, gripping drink bulbs and probably wondering, who are these people, who breathe the same air as me, so young, so very young?

And that, I had to admit, made my toes warm.

We walked to the docking bay, opposite the school. There were no cobras waiting to pounce on me there.

Along with his fishscale arms, Drexley had a fake lazy eye. Lund’s teeth were coated with a substance that made them shimmer like shepherds. Zenith Marie wore a heavy belt around her thin hips (which held up pants that were like custom-made battle armor) that attached to a knot in her long coarse hair, ensuring proper balance. America had infrared sensors on the tips of her fingers. These were cultivated nuances. I guess mine was that I had no apparent quirks, no set-design to call my own.

Yet it was still hard, despite how strange they were to me, to tell the four of them apart. It was easy to notice that Kathy craved the pack. He wasn’t quite a full member; apparently, he would have to ignore me a lot more to get there. They were assessing him, and so he acted louder, laughed at mild jokes a half-second too quickly and a half-second too long. But in some secret self-part that he won’t let anyone see, he was shriveling, a wilting boy in a beautiful dress.

That probably made me a . . . sidekick, then. A familiar. A creature not-yet-with-shepherd summoned.

It wasn’t until I was actually on one of the docked rockets that I realized they were—I mean, we were—not supposed to be there. We were trespassing and what kind of shit was Kathy getting me into?

It was a small ship, shaped like a dart, coated in mock-quicksilver. The smallest class of rockets. Outside the bridge, a couple of shepherds loomed, swirling around the ship, called the Gray Freighter, now that was a good sign, in slow motions. The shepherds’ colors were vivid and all over the place. Then a third shepherd shot forward. Kathy’s face got all scrunched, like he was concentrating on something inside of himself but also at a point, say, between his big toe and middle toe. Like there was a coin or a little toy there.

Then I realized he was talking to his shepherd, the one who had just come, Bazzarella. Soon there were five shepherds swirling around the docked ship. They were all assembled like the humans were: Thousandhorse, and Anatolia-Blossom, and yes, the Boxer, and you too, Jackie, shepherd of America. What was going to happen next? The air on the bridge smelled like ozone, as each made connections with their shepherds. I kind of felt sad for the shepherds and I shuffled my feet. If shepherds had emotions (hypothetically) I was sure they wouldn’t have appreciated telepaths ascribing false identities to them, including the whole boy-girl divide.

It
was
a divide, wasn’t it? I didn’t know where I stood on that divide. Or maybe I was in the middle, falling into the chasm.

I wanted to know the shepherds’ secret names. I didn’t ask, though, and no one noticed my shuffling and moping. After about three minutes of this concentration, America whispered, grunted really: “Which of you will bait-take?”

Kathy started cackling. He spun around and around, and the others didn’t seem to mind. They let that display of emotion by the neophyte pass. “Bazzarella will hitch with us.”

“That’s fantastic,” Drexley said, unenthusiastic. Kathy touched my shoulder; a familiar but at that point vague gesture. He craned his head up and said—maybe to the vacuum, or the Parameter itself, certainly not to any of us—“What do you think my girl wants?” Girl being his shepherd. I stifled saying something to Kathy and instead gazed at all those assembled, and looked in each telepathy-occupied eye, and asked out loud what the hell was going to happen next.

They noticed me for the first time, really noticed me. Fine. That shouldn’t have been that surprising. They really didn’t make formal introductions in the first place. But the fact that their faces were exactly the same as before was a little disheartening. They wanted me to believe shepherds overwhelmed normal discourse for them, which was bullshit. My professors conversed with shepherds during class while chiding us to pay more attention—did we realize how important we were for the well-being of the Parameter?—and they didn’t bat an eye.

America’s eyes twinkled. “It’s spontaneous. Everything needs to be spontaneous. We can’t predict what will happen next.”

“What?” I said. I looked around the bridge of the Gray Freighter. Kathy was shuffling toward the control crux. His shepherd was blotting out the light of the others.

“Someone’s . . . one of us has stolen a series of passcodes,” Zenith Marie said. “I’m not telling you which of us, because that would get any one of us into trouble. Not the least of which you.” She bent her arms back and Drexley put his arm on her shoulder. He was the only one truly serious for a few seconds, and that too passed. “So we’re . . .
what’s the word?” Maybe Zenith Marie had a dictionary implant. She tussled her blond hair and said, “Joyriding.”

“I don’t know,” I blurted out when the cordon around me faded. They started wandering around, like blissful zombies. Lights and spherical grids engaged and started humming. Spaceship-type things started happening. I didn’t move. I supposed that running away and alerting authorities would have been a strong, morally upright choice. My parents, any one of them, would have been proud of such a choice. A virtuous nectar would form on the tip of my tongue.

However, nothing of the sort happened. I downcast my eyes and gave a smirk, but stayed inside the confines of the bridge.

After we launched (my sixty-third time. I kept track of such things), Lund, up to that point silent, leaned over the makeshift couch toward me and said, “What were you smirking about before? Right before we left.”

His eyes were blue. He was cute and I hated, at first, thinking that.

I said: “Because we’re going to be in so much trouble that it’s not worth worrying about,” and that, at least, was not bluster.

We accelerated to ten percent the speed of light, the shepherd around the ship started getting brighter, and we were in wherespace, which no one could ever really see that well, because the shepherd always kind of blocked the view.

Then it dawned on me: wherespace was pretty boring. Unless you were the telepath whose shepherd surrounded the rocket, of course. Then it was all colored waterfalls of the mind and tangled nuances of shepherd-speak—not that I would have known. But for passengers without any particular place to go, well, it was like riding a planetary elevator ferry just for the sake of the ride.

Moreover, the Gray Freighter was pretty crummy to begin with. The walls were molded with scoured antimon residue, and the air felt full of atrophy. Or at least bacteria. The square windows were tiny, barely wide enough for me to view the shepherd aura protecting
and transporting the ship through wherespace. The colors were pretty pretty, scampering yellows and mauves, but it was like being locked in a hostel with the Wang Wei Falls outside the window, with five kilometers of falling, graceful water just out of reach.

Drexley told us that it would take about three days, through some astrolabe sixth sense of his, I didn’t know, to reach the Blake system.

Five hundred light years away. Whatever. More important, the gang forgot to pack much food. Now that was bright. Some crackers, some ten-year-old dehydrated gelato in the crawlspace that functioned as the “pantry.”

The group of us sprawled on the curved couches on the edges of the bridge. I settled down slowly on my own couch, crossing my legs and straightening out my dress. Kathy was the only black sheep, because he had to be, in order to pilot us. This was his hour of no small glory. The shepherd-link shone in his face. The jewels coating his hair fractured and resonated, no doubt triggered by the contact by the shepherd pricking his mind, and the mind was attached to the skin and therefore his hair, wasn’t it? It was all connected.

“Good girl,” he kept muttering, annoyingly.

In this environment, the pack of people let some measure of their guard down. The angles of their sprawling were still artful, don’t get me wrong, they were always artful. But a layer of varnish peeled off. I was always observant about other people’s varnish.

America yawned and put her infrared sensor hands under the couch, as if there was a laser missile under there. Her hands, which once seemed breathtaking, now seemed vaguely stupid. But I didn’t blame her much for her hands; maybe her parents insisted on them. Parents were always insisting on accessories. Zenith Marie played with the belt attached to her hair. “This is so fucking boring. Lund, tell me why we did this again?”

“We thought it would be violatory.” Smart boy, he had brought a megazine to read and watch, a Persian woman reading infernokrusher poetry.

“Violation of what? Drex? Any answers?” Zenith said, crossing her arms.

Drexley stared off into the bridge crux. “What?” he said. “Yes, exactly as you said.” Drex started staring at Kathy in this really unreasonable way. Kathy was off in his own world of course. As if Drex was sizing up whatever Kathy had to give him. And it scared me to think of what Drexley might have needed.

America bit her lip and leaned her head back.

It was a maelstrom of nothing.

What did I expect—running around the halls and tagging the walls with expletives and feedback alphabets? I wasn’t twelve, I was seventeen.

“Well, the least someone could have done was to bring some drugs.” The voice was mine, but it didn’t feel like my mind constructing these things to say, and then ordering my jaw to say them. Not at first.

“If there’s no drugs, you know,” my voice continued to say, “to help with staring at the shepherd, kind of like lava flows, then what’s the point? Why am I here?”

And I didn’t even do drugs or secrete them.

They all stared at me. Kathy giggled from the bow, but not at me. America started smiling, not toward Kathy but at me, and I knew I had moved myself from the void to some place not quite a void in some of their eyes.

“I’m going to take a walk to the engine room,” I said. “And then find the standard-issue gelato, and try to cook something.” My hands were on my hips and they were looking at me with some inner awareness of their own condition. I was like a lens. Anyone had the potential to have that effect on anyone else; all it took was a bit of practice in front of a mirror.

“Things get weird near the engine room,” Drexley said, still staring at Kathy, who wasn’t paying attention to any of the subtle shifts in autochthonous power structures going on, the bastard. I wanted him to be proud of me. I still didn’t quite feel comfortable enough to nick Drexley’s name to “Drex.” “The walls are thinner there. Wherespace pours in there.”