Angry Young Spaceman (28 page)

I shook my head.

“It is very good,” said Mrs. Ahm. “You should look at it.”

“Watch it,” I corrected.

Miraculously Kung had followed the conversation and he said to the others that I wouldn’t be able to watch it because it was in Octavian.

“Well, I’ll get my girlfriend to translate,” I said.

“Girlfriend?” said Kung immediately.

“Last year, I try to learn to dance,” Mr. Nekk said. “Because Octavian dance is very wonderful and splendid.”

Didn’t Octavians get stiff when they got old? I suddenly didn’t care about the girlfriend hinting anymore — this was better. I looked at Mr. Nekk’s pinched lips and tried to imagine him spinning, turning, whipping into a frenzy.

“Is Jinya your girlfriend?” Mrs. Ahm asked, finally.

“Are you a good dancer?” I asked Nekk. I had never seen Octavian dancing before, so I imagined him stuffed into a tutu and doing pirouettes.

“I am a terrible dancer,” said Mr. Nekk, and he actually looked sad. “If I had children I could teach them, but I am blarren.”

I didn’t correct him.

“So no one will keep Octavian art alive.”

Mrs. Ahm leaned over and gave him a playful little push. “I think, today, that Mr. Nekk is too unhappy. Young people like to dance.”

Ah,
I wondered to myself,
but do they dance Octavian-style or Earth-style?

***

Intergalactic Cool Youth obviously ruled this planet.

On my way home from school that day I stopped in at a store dedicated to teen idols and saw their faces everywhere. There was Shy Guy and his bashful grin; the outrageous poses of Wild Guy; Wit Guy’s splayed tentacles and hilarious hat; Sexy Guy’s hypnotizing gaze; and the almost visible unpredictable electricity of Mood Guy. I loved them all, in my own way.

Their music blared out at me as I walked down the aisle. There were bins full of tiny crystal statues of them — probably manufactured by the slave Neb planets, given the detail — and I had to suppress an urge to bury my hand in them up to the elbow. Each member had his own bin and his own colour. I unobtrusively returned the one or two stray I.C.Y. that had emigrated, just for the visual pleasure of seeing each bin a clean solid colour. I took one at random, thinking that I’d give it to the little rock-headed girl if I could do so without making everyone else jealous.

There was a blue holo of them in concert that caught my eye, and the price-tag made me laugh.

“
It sings
,” said the attendant who had mistranslated my laughter as
How wonderful, exactly the price I wanted to pay!

She pushed a button and the base of the sculpture began playing the song that was playing on the loudspeakers, only quieter. I enjoyed the effect of the same songs playing at once, and pointed up at the speakers.

“
It’s a very popular song
,” she said, with a cute smile.

I immediately compared her to Jinya — she was almost as attractive, and her headcrest was very stylish.

“
I’m looking for a poster for my girlfriend
,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. I
was
getting it because she had said that my walls were blank, but that wasn’t the same as getting it for her. Maybe I mentioned her to make up for my wandering eyes.

She nodded, and walked me over to a selection. I followed, watching her move and telling myself maybe it was normal to compare women of the same species, because they were similar after all.

I looked through the posters and found one I liked. It was a shot of all the boys hanging by their tentacles in what looked to be an ancient Earth jungle — I liked it because it was unlikely for all kinds of reasons, and it had the silver English words “Because Intergalactic Cool Youth” almost obscuring the picture. The one where they all were pointing eight zap guns each at the camera was also really good. I bought them both.

***

Jinya’s laughter flowed from the bedroom. It made me smile as I poured the Zazzimurg tea. I put the pot back and picked up the cups, enjoying the warmth of them — my apartment was cold, and I didn’t really know why. I hadn’t figured out the heating system entirely.

“You are very foolish!” she said, standing in the doorway.

I handed her the tea and shrugged. “Why?”

“Intergalactic Cool Youth poster is for Octavian schoolgirls!”

I walked by her, stepping over her tentacles, and went to look at the poster. I had hung the jungle scene above my bed. I set my tea cup on the bed stand too close to the edge and I saw it starting to tip.

It would have been futile on Earth, but on slo-mo Octavia I was able to grab it and only a blurp of tea got over the rim. I was able to feel surprised that my instinctive reactions were attuned to being here — that I had even bothered grabbing for it — before the blurp hit the ground.

“Clumsy, too!” she said, sliding into my bed. “Is cold.”

I watched her getting cozy, her tentacles rippling under the covers, and suddenly didn’t mind my apartment being chilly. But I stood there for a moment, sipping my tea and looking at the poster as if it was a piece in a museum.

“Don’t look!” she said. “Is foolish!”

“Where are they?” I asked, pointing at the jungle.

“Is not interesting!” she said, hitting the cover.

“I went to a planet like this,” I said.

“Earth?”

I looked at her, a little surprised. “No. When I was training to be an English teacher I went there.”

“I saw pictures like this from Earth,” she said.

“They are very old pictures,” I said. The idea of the creeping green taking over the cities made me shudder a little.

I finished my tea and set the cup down. I sat on the bed, flicked off my shoes. I sat there for a second.

“It’s very cold,” I said, as if that was the only reason, and got under the covers.

I lay there for a second and then turned on my side to face her.

“I know it’s for schoolgirls,” I said. “It is very interesting to me because I.C.Y. are always happy. Our pop music stars pretend to be tough or angry.”

“Yes!” She turned her head, but I was too close, and she turned her head back shyly. “I.C.Y. are always cheerful. Too cheerful. Is not real.”

“I like sad music, too,” I said.

“Sometimes on the bus, I listen to sad musics. I watch the ground go by... I think about... old friends... or a boy... or my grandmother...” She smiled a sweet smile that pulled my heart like taffy, looking down towards the foot of the bed.

“Me too. On Earth, when I am on a bus and it is raining, the water hits the window. The water makes pictures on the window. It’s very beautiful.”

“Oh Sam! Do you know ‘opatio’?”

I shook my head.

“Down far in the caves, it is like water.”

I presumed she meant how the atmosphere became as dense as Earth pools at a certain depth.

“My father is diver. For Octavian pearls.”

“I remember.”

“When I was a children he took me to the opatio. All around, the air is very deep? Thick! The air is thick.”

She made a hard-to-breathe face and I nodded.

“So when you move, it is like pictures. In the air! Very surprising!”

I imagined the cave that we had explored. Further down, on a ledge that we couldn’t see, stood young Jinya and her dad. He spun his tentacles out suddenly and ripples emanated towards the four corners of the planet. She threw her tentacles up and the ripples travelled up, up, up until they washed over me a decade later.

I smoothed her headcrest and kissed her cheek. She closed her eyes, and slipped a tentacle into my hand. I turned her head towards me and kissed her lips.

I pushed up against her and planted a kiss on her earhole. She made a little
oh!
sound and squeezed my hand. I slid one arm behind her neck and let the other slide down over her body. Her shirt buttons gave me a little resistance, but she didn’t, her eyes silver slits. Up and over her breasts, over her tummy, and — with a little thrill — into the alien part of her, where legs should have been but weren’t.

Stroking the part where her waist became tentacles, I picked one and held it at the root, then slowly drew it up. Her suction cups plucked at me as my hand travelled the length of it.

“Are you nervous?”

“A little,” she whispered with a giggle.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Just tell me when to stop.”

“OK.”

I kissed her neck, still holding the tentacle. The tip twitched a little, and I kissed it. I thought back to the times I had looked at Jinya’s tentacles with lust and felt desire surge up. Then I took it in my mouth and sucked it, feeling the suction cups along it try to latch onto my tongue.

Jinya laughed, but it was a ticklish laugh. I let her pull her tentacle out and it went with a slurp, and it writhed there in the half-light, glistening.

“Very strangey!” she said after a moment.

I shrugged, feeling a heady mix of horniness and shame. “I’m a strange guy.”

She was caressing me with four or five tentacles, one or two of them in the danger areas — not that it was likely that she knew where those were.

I knew more than her in that respect, thanks to Lisa. But not much more. She had spent most of her letter discussing whether or not Octavians were descended from humans, or vice versa. Whether they were octosapien or not didn’t hold too much interest for me, since I figured it was a line of study hugely biased depending on your pro-monkey or pro-octo agenda. Finally, the last line read: “Oh yeah — the females do have a meaty hole which is roughly compatible with the human specs. Still no hard data (so to speak) on the modern-day after-effects of couplings on the female.”

I had to smile at the memory of Lisa’s classy wording.

“What?” said Jinya.

I didn’t want to admit that I was thinking about an ex. “Something funny happened at school today,” I said, and it was true.

“What was?”

“I played a word game with the students. They had to come up with English words from their memory. I called the game ‘Memory’ and wrote it on the board.”

“Yes! Games are good, because they very competitive.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. I had learned that the quickest way to get them to pay attention was to divide them into teams. It was a kind of black magic, though, and one side-effect was that the boys were a lot more engaged than the girls.

Jinya moved closer and put her head in the crook of my shoulder. “And?”

“Well, every letter got one point. I played the game in all three of my classes. The smart class, the middle class, and the dumb class. Who do you think got the most points?”

“The smart class?”

“Nope. The middle class had almost twice as many points.”

She made the Octavian sound for
huh
? Her head lifted to look at me and I kissed her forehead quick. She made the Octavian sound for
oh
! and then slapped me lightly.

“Why?” she asked.

“They were...” I didn’t know the Octavian for cunning, only
clever
. “Do you know cunning?”

She was laughing. “Yes! Like clever! How cunning?”

“The smart class came up with good words like ‘apple’ and ‘school.’ They were thinking very hard. But the middle class were cunning...”

She laughed again at the use of the word.

“...because they found words on their clothing. English words like ‘Galactic’ because the brand of his hat was ‘Galactic Trendy Boy Love’. And the funniest was when they used the name of the game, that I had written on the board. ‘Memory. Six points teacher, six points!’”

“Too cunning I think!” she said. “They are not school smart, but they are cunning!”

“Exactly!” I said. Buoyed by this success, I went even more abstract. “I thought, ‘This is cheating, because they are not using their memory. But cunning is very important. Maybe it is more important than English.’ So I gave them the points.”

“Oh! You are right. Because... they are not good at English. So maybe... they are business, or shopkeeper.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment, because I was overcome by this absurdly massive crushing gratitude that I was beside this beautiful, soft, wickedly intelligent woman. I felt love, but immediately I wondered how much of it was because of my isolation. Before it could be cut to pieces by the crossfire of my analysis, I told her that she was so wonderful.

She made a happy sound, drew a tentacle across my chest. It tickled, but I was smiling anyway.

“You too,” she said.

Six months.

***

We were inside a massive mechanical clock, and everywhere munchkins were dancing.

On the cogs. All over the metal frame work. There was even a few writhing on the pendulum as it swung back and forth. I have no idea how they got aboard it.

I had never seen Montavians dance. I thought 9/3 had been joking when he told us where we were going. I looked at him now, and he answered my stricken look with a shrug of his android body.

“You complained that the last place we met was boring.” He had adjusted his voice so it was plainly audible above the music without yelling.

Matthew was looking around and grinning like he had been told he had inherited a jeevesatron. He said something to me I couldn’t hear. I cupped my ear.

“At least now I don’t have to hear any more about what’s-her-name!”

“It’s Jinya, you bitter motherfucker!”

He made a can’t-hear-you gesture and danced off.

I took a breath and yelled at 9/3, “Are all Montavian—”

9/3 put his hand on my arm. “You do not need to yell.”

“Oh.”

I looked over at Matthew, who was dancing to the tick-tock music like he had been born into it. He was looking around himself in wonderment. And he had every reason to — I’d never seen Montavians do anything but fix stuff and then go to the next place to fix more stuff.

But if Matthew was enjoying seeing their squat little bodies jack and bounce, they were equally amused by his grotesquely elongated limbs moving about. But this mutual appreciation was not to last.

“He is not broken hearted,” 9/3 said.

I shrugged. “Yeah, he’s taking it pretty well, I guess. Maybe they weren’t that serious.”