Angry Young Spaceman (17 page)

“Oh?” I mumbled through a mouthful of food. That sounded complicated.

“At the moment, because the language is believed to be unique, certain cultural activities that would otherwise be illegal are permitted. And some sites are funded by the Earth Council.”

I nodded, remembering Mr. Zik saying something about Earth in connection with the giant statue at the Line between water and air. I had dismissed it at the time, assuming that Mr. Zik was mistaken — yeah, right, the selfless Earth Council was giving money away.

“Who is your teacher?” 9/3 asked.

“You’re looking at him,” I said. “Mr. Zik loaded my pad up with a full tutorial, and I’ve been working at it most nights. Beats staring at the wall or running up long distance bills.”

“Really?” he said. “Your vocabulary base is probably pretty small, then.”

I nodded, untruthfully.

“A few memorized phrases,” he said, and my pride rankled. “It is just as well. I would have to register you immediately otherwise.”

I nodded silently, happy I had kept my mouth shut. With 9/3 I knew that thought and action were near-simultaneous.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something way taller than the rest of the Octavians around us. I looked over and saw what I first took to be a humanoid, but then realized it was a pair of glinting steel legs with a glass bubble torso. Inside the bubble was an Octavian.

“Wow!” I said. “Neat!”

9/3 looked over — that is, his head floated up, turned, and set down again. “Yes. They are Squidollian walkers. The bubble is filled with the user’s natural atmosphere. A Squidollian visitor had one with a translator built in.”

The legs loped on, moving quickly and fairly dexterously. “With English?”

“No.” 9/3 said. “I said it was Squidollian. It would be far too expensive for them to mass produce.”

“I thought the Squidollians were very prosperous.”

“Since the Intergalactic Trade Commission adopted English as the official language, they have been less so. And the copyright fees on translators outside the Earth colonies are deliberately prohibitive.”

“Deliberately?” I said.

9/3 snorted, a static buzz. “Of course. In fact, after the war there was an attempt to designate Roboworld as non-English. It would have meant we would have had to pay to speak our native tongue.”

“What?!” I said. That was news to me. “That’s just xenophobic bullshit! You’ve got human brains!”

“Yes. It was bullshit.” It was funny hearing 9/3 swear. “Once it was proven that the brains that we grew in the biovats were actually more purely human than Earthling brains — statistically, because of your interspecial mixing — the Council dropped their case.”

“I never even heard of that,” I said, revolted by the profit-mongering. “No wonder robomen hate Earthlings.”

“Robomen don’t hate Earthlings,” he said — I thought out of habit. But then he added. “Many robomen view the Earthling as a little brother who refuses to grow up. Earthlings are even referred to as Little Brothers, in slang. The plans of the Council were not generally known on Roboworld, anyway. My special interest has always been intergalactic relations.”

“I thought information was... heavily monitored on Roboworld,” I said, not wanting to say
censored.

“All stimulus deigned to be superfluous is restricted,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. “When I was not assigned a function, my access to various things was increased.”

“Yeah?” I said cautiously. “I always wondered about that. Did you decide to come out here because you didn’t have a function, or...?”

“I was sent by Central Authority,” 9/3 said. “Robomen do not do things simply for experience, as Earthlings do. As strange as I am among robomen, I would find that purposelessness to be extremely unpleasant.”

The stream of Octavians had been replaced by a stream of Montavians, the tiny little men marching in the opposite direction, their little metal boxes swinging from little fists.

“So... do you think you were sent because of the relations between the two planets? Montavia and Roboworld?” I didn’t want to seem like a total dummy — a total Little Brother — and I knew there was some connection between the two. What was it?

“Perhaps.” 9/3 said, watching the stream of munchkins. “The Montavians make the best tools in the galaxy, and we buy exclusively from them.”

That was it. Tools.

“I believe I am the first roboman to ever live on Montavia. The children run behind me in the streets.”

“Same here,” I said, grinning.

“They run with their small toolboxes, and if they catch up they start to disassemble me.”

It was funny. It was awful. Awful funny. My face reflected both, simultaneously.

“Ha ha,” said 9/3, and I joined him.

I always had a good time with 9/3, as different as we were. It made me think about how narrow my social sphere had been at home. “How old are you, anyway?”

“51 Earth years,” said 9/3.

“Man, we’re so different,” I said. “It’s amazing we get along so well.”

9/3 paused. “Yes.”

The door that I had come out of opened again and released a wave of Octavians into the opposing stream of Montavians. It just looked to be bad timing, because the Montavian wave was nearly finished, but neither group wanted to pause. I immediately tensed up, oddly protective of my prone Octavians in the midst of the pushy munchkins.

Sure enough, one of the Octavians was knocked off his platform and disappeared below my line of vision. None of the Montavians were stopping, and a few seconds later they were all gone. The Octavians, heaps of weak flesh that they were, couldn’t help him. I got up and ran.

I slowed to a walk, thinking,
I shouldn’t interfere, I don’t really know what’s going on.
Behind me I could hear an alarm go off at the kiosk and remembered the stolen food in my gut. I started running again, as the chamber door opened and more Octavians came out.

I ignored the alarm and dodged my way to the centre of the stream. He had his tentacles on the platform and was attempting to pull himself up, the platform tilting with his effort. He wasn’t getting stepped on, as I feared, and I lifted him up — so light! — and set him on his platform. It was a little embarrassing to be cradling an adult, and I could only imagine how he felt.

He turned his head to look at me and said thank-you in Octavian. I told him it wasn’t worth thanks (the polite Octavian response) and he took me at my word, speeding off. I escaped the stream with only one minor collision.

I went back to the kiosk where 9/3 waited. “Did you pay?” I asked.

He nodded. “Just in time. The droid was powering up its stunner.”

I had been hit by one or two of those in my day. I laughed weakly. “Thanks.”

9/3 said, “You reacted very quickly.”

I thought about how, back in the old days, I could be asleep when I got the call. Forty-five seconds later I’d be flicking the ignition on my jetpack. Seven minutes after that my boots would hit the ground where the scrap was, and I would be in there cracking jaws no more than a minute later. 0:08:41 was my record.

It was amazing how quickly you could react, when you believed in something strongly enough. Even if that something wasn’t worthy of belief.

The kiosk droid came up to me and treated me like a new customer. When I waved it away, still deep in reverie, the stool hissed to the ground. I attempted to sit in another one and it collapsed too. 9/3 laughed, until the droid cleaned the counter and pushed him off. He fell halfway to the ground before his antigrav kicked in.

“Have a nice day,” said the droid.

I stood there, arms folded, looking at 9/3’s bobbing head.

“And you thought this place was boring,” he said.

eleven

I felt a little nervous asking. It was like questioning the floor you’re standing on.

“Why did you want to learn English?”

Mr. Kung glanced at Mr. Nekk and poked at an earhole. Mrs. Ahm got that intent look. There was always a pause, and I’d taken to looking out the window in a pensive pose.

It was a tough question, and not just language-wise. I didn’t expect Mr. Kung to suddenly realize his whole life had been playing a small part in a colonial conspiracy, and break down crying. I had my own reason for asking. I thought it might give me insight into Jinya, the woman I had met at the bus station. She had called my vidphone when I was on the meteor with 9/3. I had no idea what she wanted — for that matter, I didn’t know what I wanted.

“I was... skilled at English,” said Mr. Nekk. “When I was young, English was very fascinating.”

I was again impressed by Nekk’s vocabulary. I got up and wrote
fascinating
on the small board. Above it I wrote
very interesting
.

“Fascinating means very interesting,” I said. Kung and Ahm nodded, Kung more energetically and untruthfully. “Fascinating,” I said in the repeat-after-me voice.

“Fasnating,” they said. Nekk didn’t repeat, just sat there in a smug way.

“Why did you want to learn English, Mr. Kung?”

“Fasnating, too,” he said, continuing his tradition of answer-theft. I idly wished
too
was more difficult to say.

I looked at Mrs. Ahm, who was formulating an answer. I realized I was impatient, that I really hoped to learn something.

“English is very modern. I am a modern woman. I think.”

Jinya thinks of herself as a modern woman, probably.

Kung said in Octavian that modern women are good to—

“English!” I snapped.

“Sorry.”

“Are modern women strong women?”

Ahm nodded cheerfully. “I think!”

“Are women more interested in English than men?” My eyes wandered back to the window, where a line of students had intertwined their arms to form a long line. Other kids were climbing from one end to the other. Before I could figure out why, Mr. Nekk set his words out in front of me.

“English is very plopular with Octavian women bleecause it is good for teaching. Women teachers are very respected.”

I shrugged. “Men teachers, too.”

“No,” Mr. Nekk said, repeating it to Kung in Octavian. Kung shook his head. “Teaching is the blest job a woman can get,” he said. “Blut men can do bletter jobs. Men teachers are not respected.”

Kung said
less important than wallens
in Octavian.

“Yes. They mock us,” Nekk said, his face bitter. “They say we are no better than the wallens, garbage eaters.” Wallens, Mr. Zik had told me, were the little half-shell creatures I had spotted in the alleys of Plangyo.

This was pretty interesting. It made Mr. Nekk’s annoying bossiness seem a little desperate, a way of salvaging some dignity — and Mrs. Ahm’s cuteness seem a little affected, deliberate.

I looked at her. She nodded. “It is very difficult to be a teacher.”

So Jinya was ambitious enough to compete for the best job on the planet. Out the window, the line came around in a circle and tightened until it was a huge pile of kids.

“What are they doing?!” I said.

Kung looked and said a word I didn’t know.

“A game,” said Mrs. Ahm.

Kung got up, suddenly active. He twisted two of his tentacles together and pulled them. They stretched an unpleasant amount. Then he released them with a cavalcade of pops and his tentacles flew out. Then he pointed at the kids.

I looked at them. I looked back at him.

“Stress,” said Mr. Nekk.

“What?” I said, baffled.

Mr. Kung enlisted Mr. Nekk, who tentatively offered up his skinny frame for a demo. I was willing to drop it but obviously Kung wasn’t — his eyes were alive.

“Is it like an Earth game? Football?” I said.

“No,” Kung said, intertwining arms with Mr. Nekk.

“It is a war test,” said Mrs. Ahm. “To practice for war.”

Kung waved his arms, whipping around Mr. Nekk until I feared for his spotty grey appendages. Suddenly there was a tearing sound — I was sure it was Nekk getting dismembered, but it was the sound of suction cups popping in a series.

“I win,” said Kung, looking at me hopefully. “OK?”

I looked back at the window. Now the line of kids was an undulating snake. I couldn’t see any possible relation.

“Oh, I see,” I lied.

Kung made a satisfied grunt and sat down. Mr. Nekk just sat down.

I didn’t want to bring up the war, but Mrs. Ahm’s mention of the game being practice for it tempted me. I hedged a little. “The game is traditional?” I pinched myself for slipping into simplespeak.

“Yes, we stopped the monsters with that game,” said Ahm, also entwining her smooth and lovely tentacles.

I suddenly imagined sucking on one of them, suction cup on tongue, sex fantasy shrapnel, and pinched myself again. “Are the monsters,” I held back
extinct
, “all dead?”

“On this side of Octavia, yes,” she said, a little guarded.

“You are lucky to have so many native species alive,” I said. “Dolphins, wallens...”

“We love wallens,” said Mr. Nekk. The others laughed. It was a little confusing — trash eaters in one breath, and this in the next. Was he actually attempting sarcasm?

“Delicious,” said Mr. Kung, fucking up even the simplest English words.

“What do you think?” said Mrs. Ahm, with a funny smile

“About wallens? I think they’re cute.”

“No,” Mr. Nekk corrected. “About Octavian Sokchu tradition.”

“I don’t know much about Sokchu,” I said. Specifically, all I knew about the high holiday was that we got the day off.

“We eat wallens,” Mr. Kung said, opening his unpleasant maw and shovelling in imaginary food.

I chuckled a little. “You eat
with
wallens,” I corrected, imagining a kind of interspecies banquet that had some kind of history behind it.

“No,” said Mrs. Ahm.

I looked at Mr. Nekk. “We kill them. We cook them. We eat them,” he clarified.

“Oh,” I said, my head spinning a little. “Well.”

I looked out the window, but there were no students to distract me. I tried desperately to think of anything other than their little bodies piled up on a platter, tails hanging dead over the edge.