Angry Young Spaceman (26 page)

Over the empty snack skins of our party, amazed at how little dark circled her eyes, I asked her if I could kiss her.

Her silver eyes became round mirrors. “Kiss?” her lips said.

I nodded, feeling defeated already. I looked to see if there was a tentacle within reach that I could hold, but they were circled around her.

“Sam,” she said. “When do you go to Earth?”

“Seven months,” I said immediately, having done the math.

“Is not good,” she said. “In seven months... I be so sad.
Miserable
. You know?”

I knew all too well. I got up and felt my head spin. I gathered the garbage and got rid of it. I went back and found I couldn’t sit down, my heart was too heavy and I was sure that if I sat I would never rise again.

“I’m sorry, but I’m exhausted. Very tired,” I said, so childish-feeling I was unable to meet her eyes. “I think I’m going to sleep. OK.”

She nodded, still unbelievably perky. “OK. I will stay?”

“Of course,” I said. “Wake me when you want to leave.”

The droid came alive and started to clean the crumbs around Jinya. “
No!
” she said to it with a laugh, as if she was scolding a child.

I fell into bed, leaden, not even bothering with the curtains. I lay there, listening for any further sounds from Jinya, feeling like one of the Armoured in a sepulchral embrace. And then I went to sleep.

“...there room?” she asked. I looked up, and moved over.

“Sure,” I said, giving her some of the white comforter.

I looked at her head on the pillow for a moment and I guessed she was finally tired too, and felt a bittersweet feeling that she had decided it was safe with me.

After a moment, she turned on her side to face me, a tentacle or two brushing up against human skin unnaturally sensitive. Eyes closed, her lips were inches from mine. Then they weren’t. It was a dry kiss and her eyelids didn’t even flutter. If not for the tentacles gently stroking my arm like underwater reeds, I may have not tried again.

Her lips moved slightly apart this time, and her nostrils moved.

Again. And again, and I felt them move this time, and I brought a hand up to stroke the side of her face, her earhole. She moaned.

I touched her headcrest, soft and hard and finely rippled, and rested my cheek on her shoulder. I moved my hand down the front of her shift and was gently rebuffed. “No,” she said, as if half asleep.

An hour later the morning light woke me. I pulled the white comforter over our heads and looked at her some more. Bathed in white, luminescent, I tried to remember what she had looked like in the bus station, when she had been merely pretty, and couldn’t. The impossible beauty of her at that moment was to be the image that would haunt me forever.

“Thank you,” I whispered, kissing her cheek.

She turned her head to face me. “You are very honest when I ask you when you go. Most offworlders would say ‘Baby baby, I’ll take you with me.’”

She saw the good things in me, the things that mattered, and I felt unreal and chosen. It was suddenly there, taking the form of a lump in my throat, making my nose tingle. “I... love you,” I said, before it went away.

She buried her face in the crook of my arm and I felt her sigh.

Seven months.

fifteen

It was weird to see a droid completely still. By this time, it was fully constructed, and we moved along beside it as it slid along on the conveyer belt.

I tried to remember a time I had ever seen a completely still droid. That was the thing about droids, they were always sweeping, moving, lifting...

“
Ag!
” said Jinya’s brother, yanking his tentacle from under my foot.

“
I am tremendously sorry,
” I forgot his name. Oh fuck— “
honoured brother,
” I said, just as he was beginning to look at me.

“
It is less than nothing
,” he said, while moving away from me.

“You are too clumsy,” said Jinya, poking me in the ribs.

“You’re right,” I said.

“
No English,
” said her brother, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I didn’t want to apologize again, so I watched the droid. It must have been nearly done, but I had thought that a dozen times already and then there would be a metal coating added or a screw tightened—

“SELF-DIAGNOSTIC!” the droid blared, becoming a blur of motion and flashing eyes. I leaped back to avoid its whipping metal tentacles. Jinya also jumped back at the same time so I luckily avoided squashing her tentacles.

“Wow!” she said in English. I said the same in Octavian, and this won a small smile from her brother.

Emboldened, I asked him,
“Why
diagnostic”?

“
The droids test themselves,
” he said, looking at me queerly. “
English word.
”

I wanted to know why it was an English word, not what it meant. I nodded sagely, deciding the answer wouldn’t be worth the effort of clarification.

The droid, finished with its flailing around, rolled off the belt and away. We walked around the end of the belt and it was a relief. I had never walked with Octavians in such close quarters before. In fact, I was surprised we were allowed to walk in the small gap between the conveyer belt and the wall. I was pretty sure the same thing would be illegal for safety reasons on Earth.

Not that there were any factories on Earth, besides the image and photon shops. Which was why I asked Jinya so many questions about it that eventually she asked me if I wanted to visit it.

I had, a few years back, been fascinated by a clip I had seen of a jetpack factory. Not just because I was obsessed with all things jetpack, it was the noise and the movement and the mirror copies of the gleaming object. They didn’t have self-testing, obviously, but that was even better — I remembered telling Lisa that I had found my dream job until I found out that they used nearby Ikkilians to test fly ‘em. Stupid horse-heads, how—

“SELF-DIAGNOSTIC!” blasted through my thoughts. I jumped again, smiling apologetically as her brother looked back with raised eyecrests.

He said a word quietly to Jinya that I didn’t understand, who linked tentacles with him as they walked along ahead of me. “
He’s too sensitive,
” he said. She slapped him on the shoulder.

I pretended not to hear.

We caught up with our droid, who was now on another belt busily building a box around itself. Up ahead I saw that the belt led up the landing ramp of an industrial saucer like the one I’d seen in the cucumber fields, only shinier.

“
Before I saw same saucer for cucumbers,
” I ventured.

Her brother looked at me, nodded. “
It’s good for cucumbers. Terrible for droids
.”

He didn’t elaborate, only watched the droid assemble the box as it moved towards the lip of the belt. It didn’t look like it was going to finish in time, and it also looked like it dropped into nothing, and for some reason these possibilities made me nervous. I wanted the factory to work properly, flawlessly.

I suddenly realized why it wasn’t good for droids. “
Square boxes, round saucer,
” I said.

He seemed to notice me for the first time. “
Poor use of space
,” he said, nodding.

“
Inefficient,
” I said, using one of the impossible sounds. I threw it out there, pretended I was watching the box and didn’t notice his surprised face. It was gratifying to see his mild surprise — he had been brusque with me, not rude but a little dismissive, and so I guess I wanted to impress him.

Octavians usually hated me or loved me on sight, because of what I represented. I knew that it was a tricky situation. As I was an offworlder “friend” of his sister I expected to have to win him over. I would have found ingratiating behaviour not just weird, but a little nauseating.

Hostility would also have been upsetting, although the way Jinya had insisted that we go to the factory led me to assume that it would be OK. It was actually better than OK — I instantly liked him for being an engineer who didn’t give a damn about me, going about his business without a thought of Earth.

Well, other than an English word blared every 25 seconds.

The box finally went over the lip. A few seconds later there was a splash. Was the saucer flooded?

I looked at the two of them, but they didn’t seem to be disturbed by this.

“
Why did it
” I didn’t know the word for splash so I just made the sound with my mouth.

Jinya laughed, and her brother smiled. “
It’s normal
,” he said.

Jinya repeated my splash sound. “We say
poosh
,” she said.

“Poosh!” I repeated dutifully, then looked seriously at her brother. “
How long have you been an engineer?”

“Ten years
,” he said.

I thought about complimenting him on how young he looked, but adopted his no-bullshit attitude instead. “
Is it interesting
?”

He looked at me and nodded. “
It’s a small factory so I get to do a lot of jobs. Some are boring, but some are very interesting.
”

Encouraged by getting two entire sentences out of him, I prodded. “
Like what?
”

He blinked slowly, a surprisingly handsome grin growing on his face. “
Sometimes the droids malfunction. Most of the time they are too responsive. Any sounds make it move strangely
.”

“They dance, Sam!” said Jinya, her face glowing.

“
We stand around and sing traditional songs, and clap. It is very hilarious.
”

“
Songs like ‘Bubbles Over Plangyo’?
” I guessed.

“You know, Sam?” Jinya said, astonished, pulling on my arm.

“
No,”
he said, “
It’s too sad. Happy songs,”
he said, singing a few notes and pop-clapping as an example.

“I see.”

“Tell him about the time when you were a hero
,” Jinya urged.

He shook his head, and went back to the belt.

“There was a crazy droid,” Jinya said, her tentacles rippling like they did when she was really excited. “And... he ran up to people and hit them!”

“Dangerous,” I said.

“Very dangerous! Everyone went away. But the droid break everything. So, elder brother shot it in the eyes.”

“With a zap gun?” I asked, aiming my gun-shaped finger at her.

“No... before, you know?”

I shook my head. Her brother was peering under the belt.

She licked her lips in concentration, and the moistness of them drew me in instantly. “The gun that makes droids.”

“Oh, the bolt gun,” I said. It had fired the small metal plugs through metal with a violence that had also made me jump.

“Yes!” she said brightly. “Bolt gun. He used it to kill the crazy droid. Very good, I think.”

He was walking back towards us. “He is very brave,” I said.

“Yes,” said Jinya, looking proudly at her brother.

“
No English
,” he said gruffly, grinning.

***

On the bus back to Plangyo I felt the stress in my bloodstream dissolving into small ineffectual particles. It was a bit of a surprise that there was so much there, it having built slowly on the way there — even if Jinya had made it sound like no big deal, just something interesting to do, I still knew that it was quite serious to meet a family member on Octavia.

I looked at her briefly, making like I was looking out the window, taking in her peaceful face like a sedative. Her brother had a similar look, but not her sudden bursts of excitement to balance it — with him I felt observed and found slightly lacking. Or I did at first. Now I told myself that by the end, he had warmed to me.

“I like your brother. He is... diligent,” I said, willing her to say something about how he liked me, too.

“Yes. Very diligent,” she said.

I watched the countryside slide by. I could see a loading saucer far away, made normal-sized by the distance.

“Too serious, though,” she said, shaking her head. “You are very different.”

“I’m serious.”

“No!” she said, squeezing my arm. “You are foolish. Very foolish!”

I looked at her fondly, smiling foolishly, my lips within kissing distance of her forehead.

“Is better,” she said, then let go of my arm and wrapped her tentacles around herself, chastely. Which was lucky for her.

The familiar first signs of Plangyo — the police station, the sauna, the restaurant — passed by. I could read them now even though the fancy lettering made it difficult, but since I had first known them as a pattern of colourful shapes they remained that way.

We careened into the bus station and got off.

The bus bubbled away. “I must to class,” she said.

“I think I’ll go home to study,” I said. “Because I am very diligent.”

“No, you are foolish!”

We made further arrangements and I left, feeling a warm happy feeling that I was at a loss to explain. I imagined writing Lisa about it:
I like it when she calls me foolish.
I could hear her groaning thousands of parsecs away, and I smiled on.

I was headed in the general direction of the grocery store when I felt a tug on my leg. The tentacle belonged to a youngish looking man who sat in a round shallow saucer like the one we had used to move the toilet.

“
Four of my tentacles are dead
,” he said, his head lolling.

“
That’s terrible,”
I said.

He let go of my leg. “
A bus hit me on the road near
Kindah.”

“
I live near there,”
I said nodding. “
It is very dangerous.
”

“
A bus hit me in the head,
” he said. He smoothed back his headcrest with a tentacle and showed me a purple scar that wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the milky eyes it arched over. “
Four of my tentacles are dead
.”

I looked around, at a loss. There were a few curious people on the street watching. I took out some beeds and handed them to one active tentacle. He held them for a second and then they fell, all but one landing in his dish.