Angry Young Spaceman (35 page)

“Too tight?” she said, curling a tentacle between the strap and my business.

I smiled weakly. It was all I could do.

She loosened it bit. “Have a good sleep,” she said, with a dazzling smile.

I was worse off than before. I watched the stewardess move away. My mouth was dry again. I didn’t know why Octavians didn’t bother to cover up the place where all their tentacles met — that slippery nexus. Where, I knew now, it all happened. Where a tentative finger sliding across could draw forth the sounds that swirled in the ear, drowned the brain.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” said Matthew, the cloth sensemask in his hand. “What are you staring at?”

“I don’t want to have sex with anyone on this trip,” I said desperately, incoherently.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. It’s not like you gotta get your passport stamped LAID before you leave the planet. Now me,” he said, pulling down his beverage hose and taking a pull. “I plan to break a few records.”

“They have records posted?” I said. It was an interesting, if slightly grotesque idea.

“Personal records,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to compete with that guy over there.” He chinned to a large-eared fellow who was snoring with his mouth open.

“Seriously,” I said.

“So did you have a good time at that garden place?”

I nodded. “A little too good.”

He gave me a serious look. “Is she fixed?”

“Fixed?” I said.

“Yeah. A friend of mine told me that his brother went out with an Octavian for a while, but she was a widow, so she had been fixed.”

All this time Matthew had had inside information? “What do you mean, fixed?”

“Their word for it. Squidollians and Octavians have this thing that they die after they give birth. A hormone is released. They lose their appetite, and eventually starve to death.”

“I heard that,” I said uneasily. “Always? Like what if someone... feeds them?” I thought about having to encourage someone to eat, everyday. Someone who didn’t really want to eat.

“Not if they’ve been fixed. Then the hormone isn’t released. Squidollians are fixed at birth now. But Octavians still have to get their parent’s approval. It’s pretty conservative, not like modern Squidollia.”

I thought back to last night with a flashbomb of guilt. But we hadn’t, I told myself.

At least, I didn’t think we had.

More flashbombs went off as I imagined Jinya at her parents place, listlessly moving the food on her plate around. Her mother’s concerned look. Her brother’s dawning realization...

“I don’t think she’s fixed. There’s something awful about that word.” I said, annoyed. “It’s like if they don’t have mating patterns like humanoids they’re broken. Why is Earth the standard for the universe?”

Matthew rolled his eyes. “You sound like my dad. What’s wrong with Earth? You’d rather have your girlfriend die?”

“You’re an idiot,” I said, pretending it didn’t splash terror in my face.

The Squidollian stewardess came by. Despite a characteristically flat, extended head she was quite attractive.

“I was wondering why there is no Pono tea,” he asked her, actually batting his eyes — for my benefit, I can only hope. “It’s my favourite. Squidollian tea is the best.”

She frowned. “Is not popular. Is not a galactic beverage,” she said briefly and whisked away.

I smirked at him. He shrugged. “It usually works.”

“Did you talk to your dad before you left?” I asked.

“No way. His last messages got weirder and weirder. I ended up erasing them without even listening to them. I don’t know,” he said with a concerned look. “He was always nutty, but I’m afraid he’s lost it. Which is too bad.”

It was an interesting difference between him and me. We both disliked a parent, but he was moving into a phase of pity, almost sympathy — I wondered if I’d ever feel that way about Mom, that detached. I remember how she had reacted when she found out I’d been a pug:
Well, if it interests you that much I can call a few friends of mine who are in subcultural design
...

Trying not to think about it — I didn’t need any more adrenaline running through my system — I asked Matthew about his dad’s warnings.

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, it was stupid. One sounded like a doom and gloom horoscope, and then he was on about his conspiracies... he sounds like he needs to get his brain soaked again, the last treatment’s worn off.”

I thought about the story he had told me about his last vacation. “Did he suggest we meet up with his Unarmoured friend to hang out on the rings instead?” I teased.

“That was real. I —” he saw my smirk and stopped.

“Go on,” I prompted.

“Fuck you!” he yelled.

9/3’s eyes lit up. No one else reacted.

“Our ship’s been hijacked by Unarmoured terrorists,” I told him. “We’re headed for the Neb galaxy. Right Matthew?”

Matthew was smiling and biting his lip and giving me the finger.

“I have informed Roboworld that this ship has been hijacked. We will be intercepted and destroyed in two hours.”

Oh. “I... was joking.”

“I know. ‘Unarmoured terrorists’ is an oxymoron,” said 9/3.

“Did you clear it with Roboworld, this trip I mean?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. He started a system check: his pincers twisted, his elbows bent. “I was surprised they cleared it.”

“Maybe it has something to do with your function?”

His arms lifted, as much as they could in his bracket. His head swivelled. His eyes cycled: red, green, white, off.

I gave up waiting for a response. I admired his silence. It was intriguing to think he might be called into action suddenly. Matthew involved in intergalactic espionage was ludicrous; with 9/3 it was something you suspected all along.

Of course, perhaps he would be called into action to eliminate a threat to Octavian sovereignty. I had trouble imagining him lasering me, though. I looked at 9/3’s square head, the weld marks like scars along the edges. I’d never looked at the welds before, and I wondered if they were different on each roboman. I lifted my hand to touch them.

9/3 moved it away. “What are you doing,” he said, tonelessly.

I realized I had been about to, well, stroke his face. “Nothing,” I said, ashamed to admit I had been thinking of him as an insensate object. Then again, why would he care? Why did he move away so suddenly?

“Man, the first thing I’m gonna do is get me some real food,” Matthew said, his eyes wistful. “Number two: get me a beer that I don’t have to squeeze out.”

“What’s the diff?” I said, exasperated at Matthew’s Earth-centrism. “It’s the same rotting barley.”

“Yeah, but,” said Matthew. “there’s nothing like a cold bottle. Even a can. But a soft bladder? All I can think about when I’m drinking on Squidollia is how I’m squeezing one bladder into another bladder...”

I laughed, glad to see him chipper again. It was good that one of us was excited about it.

“Number three—” he said, staring off into lewd space.

“You’ll go for a refreshing swim,” I said. “Right? Submerge yourself in water for a change?”

“Ha ha,” said 9/3.

“What are you going to do?” I asked 9/3.

“Pleasureworld is geared towards humanoids,” he said. “It should really be called Meatpleasureworld.”

We laughed hard, shocked as always by 9/3’s irreverence. The stewardess climbed by, smiling nervously at us.

“But there is a small oilpool that has my name on it.”

“Well, your serial number,” Matthew piped up.

“Yes. ‘Has my name on it’ is a colloquial English expression,” 9/3 mock-explained.

That started a series of English teacher in-jokes that lasted until the stewardess came around to tell us we were landing soon. I looked out the porthole at our destination and thought that it wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

***

I was wrong.

***

I was sitting in front of the desk, watching Matthew grow. The window was massive, covering most of the wall I was facing. I was surprised that a planetary emergency ship like this would have niceties like a good view.

Matthew was now twice as big as the rocketship we had come in on. It stood beside him like a younger brother. He looked pretty scared, focused on staying still and upright.

A young man came in, his recorder-pad embossed with the Earth Council crest. I hadn’t seen that in a while. I hadn’t missed it.

He extended his hand, gave me a quick pump. “OK Sam,” he said, sitting down behind the desk. There was a bit of the air of a doctor about him. He saw me staring at Matthew.

“Maybe we should move to another room,” he said, his voice concerned.

“No,” I said quickly. I had spent the first ten minutes after we had been netted and dropped in the ship feeling completely blind and almost delusional. It was better to see what was happening, how it was happening.

“Now we haven’t got very much time here,” the young man said, staring at his pad and holding a tuft of his blond hair in his hand. He turned his sharp eyes on me. “Matthew is growing exponentially. There’s a chance we can get him back to normal if we can get some critical information from you.”

I nodded, looking out at Matthew. Giant naked Matthew. He was looking at his hands and arms with the same puzzled expression that he’d worn when we’d first gotten off the rocketship.
I feel weird...
he had said, and I almost missed him saying it in the roar of the beachfront, the screech of the gulls.

“Now 9/3-0001 has said that the two of you were quite close.”

I nodded, trying not to show that I realized that he had used the past tense.

“We need to know anything he may have mentioned about Saturn or Jupiter. Anything. A comment about a trip there, a family friend who worked there, anything,” he said, the look of concern on his face a little too laboured.

I sat silently. Did they have any intention of getting him back to normal? Or was this some kind of trick?

His wristphone spoke. “Target is on the move.” I watched Matthew turn slightly, carefully, squinting at something in the distance. The side of his foot knocked a concession stand slightly askew. He glanced down at it, appeared to consider bending down to right it, then didn’t. He moved his pale shoulders uncomfortably.

He realized that the word “target” had shut me up. He sighed, his voice a little harder. “Look, it looks like he was foetally modified for a site-triggered mutation. There were a handful of them that weren’t accounted for after the war. Quite alarming, but not terribly dangerous. But a few of them also carried an atomic payload.”

I wondered what Matthew’s dad was doing right now. Was he eagerly watching the newsfeed for reports? Was he holding a bottle in a two-fingered grasp and crying? Was he going about his normal day, oblivious? What kind of man would condemn his son in the womb?

I looked at Matthew, who was obviously exhausted. He was as tall as the mountains pictured on the promotional poster, and the top of his head was getting wispy with cloud, catching in his hair. He wasn’t appreciating that, but he was nervously watching the ships going by to net another load of people, as if he suspected they would soon be turning on him.

“I need to know if he was on Jupiter or Saturn. This is important, Sam.”

The window flickered and I realized that it was a viewscreen. I looked at Matthew and had the sudden realization that this wasn’t Matthew at all. It couldn’t be. Who ever heard of people growing up to the clouds? It was absurd.

“Sam, I need your help here.”

Did he think repeating my name made him more trustworthy? It didn’t even look like Matthew. His nose was different. I started to smile, amazed that they had almost tricked me.

“Are you OK?” he said. Anger and concern fought for the right of his face.

“I’m fine, now,” I said, smiling bigger. They had the fake Matthew crouch a little as he approached the cloud line, playing like he had trouble breathing. When he was leaning over, he started to smile, then leer.

He was staring at his crotch. He said something that I couldn’t quite catch.

The young guy’s wristphone spoke again, but I missed it. I was watching the fake-Matthew stand up, to his full height. His shoulders were wreathed in clouds, but his face was clearly visible. He lifted his arms and pumped them in a victorious way, repeating what he had said a second before. This time I could read his lips clearly.

“My cock is huge!”

Well. It was Matthew, after all.

I looked at the young guy and he was frantically speaking into his wristphone. He was looking at me and holding his hand out as if to pull the answer from me.

“Saturn,” I said.

Outside, looking woozy from a lack of oxygen, the real Matthew collapsed onto his knees. The land around him jumped from the impact.

“Goddamn it, that’s the continental plate busted,” yelled the young guy, gritting his teeth as he stared at the scene. “We have a no-payload mutator here, folks, act accordingly.”

He grabbed his recorder-pad and strode from the room, slapping the door locked as he went.

They left the viewscreen on to let me watch Matthew be carpet-bombed, to see the little puffs flower between the bony knobs of his spine.

***

9/3 was the only other occupant of the shuttle. I was still in magnashackles but he, of course, was not. I was marched into a chair and then the guard sat me down hard.

“Enjoy your flight, scum,” the guard said with a lazy grin.

The shuttle door hissed closed too quickly for my spit-gob to reach its target.

9/3 looked at me and sighed. It sounded just like the door closing and I smiled a mean smile at 9/3’s expense. Blood and sweat dripped a stinging cocktail into my eyes.

The shuttle softly pushed away from the prisonship.

9/3 got up and rattled through the emergency box. He took out a medvac.

“Why are you so stupid, Sam?” asked 9/3. He trained the ray on my face.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “I’d rather bleed.”

9/3 ignored me and continued, moving from my face to my hands. Then he went and returned the device. He sat down, heavily.

“I have not been in a shuttle since the day we went to the forest planet. The four of us.” He sat perfectly still, perfectly boxy, not looking towards me. “That was a very special day.”