Angry Young Spaceman (33 page)

Everybody had been furious. Seth was finished after that. He couldn’t walk down the street without being taunted by “Bootboy! Whither thou?” I had felt sorry for him at the time, but after the Pug Swindle news hit, he had a sneer and a jab for everyone.

As unpleasant as it was, I was glad I had a complete memory of the whole time. I dreaded the sappy sentimentalism that seemed to be an inevitable chemical process of the human brain. I wondered what Skaggs was doing now — selling pre-stained pug jackets to wannabes? That had a kind of mean, hard-edged appeal to me.

Jinya appeared out of the haze, stopping as she saw me, then moving faster. Her excitement made me smile, and I watched her approach, her silver eyes downcast.

“Sam!”

“
I like your headcrest,
” I said. She had done something new with it, and it came out in expansive waves.

“Oh! Too big...” she said, touching it with the tip of a tentacle. We walked towards my place.

“
Beautiful,
” I said. “
Did your exams succeed? I mean, did you succeed in your exams?
”

She nodded. “
I did fairly well.
”

We chit-chatted, mostly in Octavian — we’d agreed to talk in English until her exams were over to keep her in training. I loved to hear her talk Octavian — her English was cute, but didn’t do her intelligence justice. It was her turn to giggle at my fumbled phrases.

I pulled out my key and unlocked my door. “
This week, your professor has been calling me a lot. I have been avoiding the vidphone
,” I told her.

We went in and my vidphone was flashing a message. Jinya laughed, and said a phrase in Octavian I didn’t understand.

“You cause it, because you say it,” she said. I nodded and repeated the phrase, then tried it out in a few situations: If I talk about bad weather, and then the weather becomes bad?

“Exactly right!” she said, her eyes bright. She put her bag down.

“I almost said, ‘If I talk about rain,’ but it doesn’t rain here.”

“No, on Octavia it only,” and then she said the word for excessively humid weather. “But I have seen rain on movies. Is romantic.”

“
It is only romantic in movies
,” I said. “
In real life it is wet, only.
”

She laughed and took out some bottles of ujos and some snacks.

“
Joy! An ujos party!
” I said. “
Because of the end of your studies!”

“But, I can’t get too drunken. I must go parents’ house tomorrow,” she said, glumly.

“
Maybe I will meet your parents, someday,
” I said.

“
Perhaps,
” she said, opening a blue package of Delicious Things. “
Someday
.”

I wondered at her reluctance, but also at my probing. Meeting parents on Octavia was the first step on the path to marriage. Considering I had four months left of my contract, why was I even saying these things?

I took a Delicious Thing as Jinya rooted around for glasses. I slapped the vidphone and the professor’s face appeared, complete with hat. I wondered if he thought that would win me over. He seemed a bit drunk. He told me how great it would be if I called him. Jinya came in and gave me a drink.

“He is drunken!” she said, and started laughing. The professor was talking to someone offscreen, and then he pulled the speaker into range and wrapped his tentacles around him.

“Oh! Professor Long!” she exclaimed. “Octavian teacher!” He was, indeed, talking in Octavian, entreating me to call them. Then, partially because Jinya’s professor was leaning on him so heavily, he fell over. With no one in the shot, the message automatically stopped.

Jinya laughed and went to play it again. “So stupid!” she said. “
I’ve never seen Professor Long so drunk!
”

I presumed this meant she had seen her other professors drunk before. I pictured them meeting to discuss me and getting so excited about it that they needed to talk to me immediately.

It was a little overwhelming, but at least they looked like fun.

“
That’s why you should have a wristphone
, s
o you don’t miss calls like these
,” she said, quite seriously.

“
That’s why I don’t have wristphone!
” I said. “
I told him a week before that I would call him after the holiday
.” I didn’t know what I was hoping to figure out in that time, but I figured a bit of delaying couldn’t hurt. “
It’s a foggy situation,
” I said.

She nodded. “Because many people are proud,” she said. “
They don’t think offworlders can speak Octavian.
”

In my worries about cultural protection and wallens, I hadn’t even thought of hordes of irate Octavians out for my dry skin. Pleasureworld was looking better all the time...

The professors fell down again. Amazingly, she started it again, settling back into her seat with her drink and watching it like it was a movie.

By the fourth repetition, I was howling as loud as her, eyes brimming.

nineteen

We lay side by side on top of the coral reef, my face slack-jawed with pleasure.

Jinya laughed at me. “
A smile is no stranger on your face.
You know? Is Octavian phrase.”

I looked over at her, the slight shift causing the rippling beneath me to change direction. “Oh my god, that feels so good. Earthling phrase.”

She giggled. “I remember that one.”

I laughed loudly, surprised at her bold reference to our interspecies experiments. My laughter didn’t infect the old ladies waiting in line — in fact, their faces darkened as if they somehow had divined our lewd talk.

I sat up slowly, so as to not tear up any of the bright orange coral from the reef, enjoying the little popping sensation along my bare back. I pulled on my T-shirt and we moved on. I put a pair of beeds in the bulb the white-eyed ancient keeper clutched and we walked into the tunnel. He nodded his thanks.

“
He’s blind, did you see his eyes?
” Jinya took my hand when we were out of sight. I kissed her forehead.

“
Blind but not deaf, daughter. I heard that kiss!
”

Her tentacle tightened around my hand and we started to run. “
Sorry, grandfather!
” I called back, hoping the tunnel’s echo concealed my accent. I wondered if kissing in the Living Gardens was even allowed. We squeezed by two more groups of Octavians and a group of Squidollians, one of whom took a picture of us.

We emerged into another roofless plateau, but this one was much bigger. I stood at the tunnel entrance, entranced. The round hills of softly moving coral were infinitely garish and gorgeous at the same time.

Jinya tugged my hand and I let her drag me past the hills while the dozens of Octavians and occasional Montavians looked on. I couldn’t help but admire her quiet courage, because I knew that she fought not only the disapproving eyes of strangers but also the inner voices of Octavians that she respected and loved.

In front of a hill, a purple one that was as high as my shoulders, we stopped suddenly. So suddenly that I knocked Jinya a bit. She made an annoyed sound and poked me in the armpit.

“
The colour of this coral is familiar,
” said Jinya, looking at me. I shrugged — it was the shade of my first toy floater, but I knew that’s not what she meant. “
My brother! His eyes!
”

I nodded, although I had been more concerned with avoiding the droid parts whizzing by on the belt at the time. Stepping back, it did look like a half-buried eye, if you could ignore the gently undulating fibres that grew out of it. Jinya touched the blindly groping fibres with her own fluid tentacle, and I was struck by the planetary affinity.

So of course, Jinya tore a strip off of it. The fibres on the entire hill stood up rigidly, a shock to the system. She ate some of it. She offered some to me but I refused it, looking around to see if anyone else had seen her.

“
I like it raw
,” she said. She saw my expression. “
Don’t worry, it’s not trained.
”

Evidently, the coral that had massaged us had been specially trained by the Gardeners. But the fact that it could be trained, and its reaction to being torn, made me uneasy.

“Hello!” said someone from behind. I raised a hand to give an obligatory wave and found myself waist-to-face with a beaming Montavian. “Are you from Earthling?” he said.

“Uh, yes,” I said.

“We are from Montavia,” he said, indicating himself and an even smaller person.

“It is obvious?” said the smaller person.

“Obvious, yes,” said Jinya with a laugh.

He introduced himself — a long name that I immediately forgot — and his son. They worked for the government. We stood there for a moment, smiling at each other. I was intrigued — I’d never felt this kind of goodwill from a Montavian before.

“My friend teaches English on Montavia,” I said. “He is a roboman.”

The father nodded quickly. “Yes, I heard!” he said, touching a tiny ear.

“My friend saw...” the son said. “Uh... roboman at a building conversation.”

I nodded. 9/3 took an interest in architecture.

“Restaurant?” said the father.

“Robomen don’t like restaurants,” I said.

The son and father took a second to translate. “No, you and you...”

“
Do you want to have dinner
,” I asked Jinya who was already nodding. “OK,” I said.

“OK!” they said, chuckling. “Let’s go!”

We walked away together. The son walked beside me and the father started chatting to Jinya.

“Yes, uh... robomen hate restaurants,” he said. “Obvious!” He looked up at me with eagerness, his little legs almost a blur as he easily kept up.

I smiled and laughed, even though 9/3 actually put up with our trips to restaurants without complaint. Just like he put up with being disassembled by irate Montavians week after week. I couldn’t put up with that shit.

I looked down at the son, who was biting his lip in an effort to think of English conversation. Dad and Jinya were chattering away ahead of us.

I had mercy. “How old are you?” I asked.

“I am 12 years old,” he said. “But I am small.”

I smiled.

“Every Montavian is small,” he said, looking up. From my perspective, he seemed to be nothing but an impish grin and a triangle-blur of legs. “I am very small. Teeny?”

“Tiny,” I corrected.

He nodded quickly, his face falling, repeating it.

“But you are very fast! And your English is excellent!” I said this loudly enough so that his father heard.

His father looked back and said something in Montavian that echoed broadly in the tunnel — it sounded foreboding, but most everything spoken in munchkin tongue did. The son’s face didn’t change.

“How long have you speak Octavian?” he asked.

“A few months,” I said.

“Months?” he said. His pointy eyebrows got more pointy. I imagined that his father had been talking English to him in the womb, so I didn’t ask.

“Why do you learn English?” I asked him instead.

“It’s very important... for many things. Especially business.”

“Do your friends speak English?”

He nodded quickly. “For school we must learn.”

“Is it fun?”

He gave an adultish shrug. “One of my friends is very superb at English. We talk about... secret things... and sometimes jokes. No one understands.” He laughed.

The Living Garden may have been a boring obligatory family trip for an Octavian, but for me it was awe inspiring. Appalling, too, in a way, since it showed how beautiful the landscape could be through the whole planet, if the coral plants weren’t killed off by saucer exhaust and general habitation.

I wondered if the Gardeners were angry about it. As we walked into the expansive eating area, I noticed several Gardeners moving around with bowls of food, passive and benign expressions on their faces. The food, I decided, was sprinkled with something that would slowly dissolve the eater’s insides. Their smiles anticipated the time, twenty years from now, when the people they served would explode and the coral plants inside would be free, riotously free to grow wherever the body lay.

“What?” said Jinya, poking me. The father and son were looking at my crooked dreamy smile as well.

“I’m just hungry,” I said, protecting my stomach from Jinya. And I was. The smell of the cooked seaweed was making me salivate. The father had secured some seats and was waving us over.

I settled into my indent and took out my fork. As if on cue, the son and father took out spoons with serrated tips.

“Fork, right?” said the son.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve never seen your utensil before.”

“Pample,” he said.

We sat there for a second, which I spent hoping that he wouldn’t ask to try my fork, and then considering whether they considered their tool the superior one — Montavians were infamously arrogant in this department — and if they expected me to be sitting here ashamed by the inherent
wrongness
of the fork. Thankfully, silence reigned.

Jinya looked towards the bowl, which was making its slow way down the blindingly white table. “So hungry!” she said, and we all murmured agreement. It was hard to think of anything else, and I shifted my fork, imagining shovelling food into my maw, but then stopped lest I revive the utensil discussion.

A Gardener, barely out of his teens, flung dishes at us from his four precarious stacks before moving on. Despite the atmosphere, they came at us at quite a speed. The father reached up to grab his just in time. Then he proudly looked at Jinya, who hadn’t noticed him doing anything unusual and just looked back. He looked down finally, obviously feeling silly, and I suddenly liked him immensely.

The food came — a simple fare of seaweed, rice, and boiled coral — doled out by Gardeners. I had never had coral — it was sweetly rich and had a weird texture.

“Do you like coral?” asked Jinya, watching the father eat it with gusto. Octavians always seemed surprised when offworlders liked their food.