Angry Young Spaceman (4 page)

“Not too bad,” I said. “Not really specific enough, though. How was yours?”

“Similarly inadequate,” he said, looking at his nails. “Everyone going to planets with dominant symbiotic species were thrown together. Very little was said about my planet, not that much is known about the exact relationship between the Unarmoured and the Armoured.”

“Other than that the Unarmoured write better love songs than the Armoured,” I said, smiling a little. Hugh was obviously going out of his way to talk to me, but there was no need to make it overly easy for him.

He looked at my face and seemed to be trying to see if I was making fun of him. “Yes. A lot can be gleaned from their art. In fact, most of my studies dealt with extrapolating societal norms from their verse.”

“Huh,” I said non-committally, thinking about how many women would love to talk with Hugh about his poetical extrapolations. As if he read my mind, Hugh suddenly left.

Later that day I sat with him during dinner. He seemed happy to see me.

“Samuel,” he said with a nod. It was potatoes done lunarian style, with sweet onion bulbs, so Hugh had a huge plate of it.

“No way you’ll finish that,” I said.

Hugh shrugged and grinned, scooped his fork in.

“So what interests you so much about the Unarmoured?” I said, determined not to let my petty jealously get the best of me.

Hugh’s face lit up, and he set his fork down. “It’s the extremity of the situation. They’re given the choice between being stripped down to a cloud of nerve endings — the ultimate in vulnerability — or being strapped into a mechanical block, a suit of armour — the ultimate in defence.”

“I find it amazing they co-exist peacefully,” I said.

“Or do they?” said Hugh, pointing a finger at me. “There have been rumbles about the exact nature of their symbiosis ever since the part the Unarmoured played in the war. But to me their governance is less important than their symbolic value. Defenceless and free, or armoured and trapped? Isn’t it a delicious analogy for the social mask every sentient being chooses?” He lifted his hands up as if to frame the question.

I shrugged. I doubted many people would enjoy being a delicious analogy.

9/3 sat down, foodless of course. “That sounded interesting,” he said. Ever since Hugh had fallen asleep in 9/3’s arms they had been close. Go figure.

“Just talking about the Unarmoured,” Hugh said. “The only thing I’m an authority on.”

A group of lunarians walked by and waved at Hugh. He waved back distractedly, looking around. “Where’s Matthew?” Hugh asked. “We could have our whole sector crew here.”

“He went bowling with a bunch of people. To that place we passed on our way back from that green planet.”

Hugh’s eyes widened. “The one with the bowling pin carved out of a meteorite? Blast, I wanted to check that out.”

“It’s gotta be two meteorites stuck together. It’s too huge,” I said.

“He said he wanted to send a picture of it back to his girlfriend,” 9/3 said.

After a moment, Hugh said cautiously, “I know very little about relationships on your planet, 9/3.”

“There are no relationships on Roboworld. Officially.”

“Officially?” I asked. “So there
are
relationships.”

9/3’s eyes blinked assertion.

Hugh said, “I met a roboman who seemed to travel endlessly. He talked about being involved with an offworlder. He said he didn’t want to go back to Roboworld.”

“Really?” I said.

9/3 said, “It is unacceptable for a roboman to have singular emotional congress with another. Those who do are said to be defective, and treated accordingly.”

Defective. That made me feel a little sick.

Kalen passed by at that point, one of the Earthlings with an eye on Hugh. “Hey Sam. Hugh.” We nodded, Hugh scraping up the last of his potatoes. “Lunarian style,” Kalen pointed out.

Hugh flashed her a brilliant smile. “Right you are.”

Kalen patted 9/3 on the head. “Hi 9/3-0001!”

“Hello.”

“See ya later,” she said, and sauntered off.

No one said anything, the clinking of fork against plate being the main sound. 9/3 finally broke the silence.

“Flirt.”

three

“Do you realize there’s a low level hum coming from your torso?” I asked him, finally.

We had been waiting for a full hour, and that weird hum had been there the whole time.

“Oh. Sorry,” 9/3 said. “I did not notice that.”

I felt bad, snapping at him like that. “It’s my nerves. Just a little worried that our co-teachers haven’t shown yet.”

“I am, too. That is what caused the sound — it is an imperfectly muted warning alarm caused by stress.”

Huh. I didn’t know robomen got nervous. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there’s a human brain swimming around in that iron case. Not that that made them human, exactly, but it looked like some things still held true.

The transfer spaceport was quite dead, which was good. It was a small place and I didn’t think I could take Montavians crawling all over me. There were a lot of them, but not enough for their famed different-concept-of-personal-space to kick in. Montavians and Octavians passed by in equal numbers.

The Octavians, naturally, were of particular interest to me. They lay on their sides on their floating platforms, their bodies insupportable in the oxygen atmosphere. They were soupy bags of flesh, a single tentacle raised to the controls. I stared at them openly, thinking that this spaceport may be the last place that I could look at them as aliens. Soon, I’d be the outsider.

9/3’s nervous hum started up again. I looked at him and it stopped instantly.

I chuckled. “Hey, 9/3, if you had Richardson in front of you right now, what would you do?” 9/3 had been suspicious of the co-ordinator’s competence since the beginning, and now that he had warning alarms going off because of him...

The roboman’s arm stretched out and a flame-thrower nozzle protruded past his tri-pincers. The pilot light popped on like an exclamation mark.

“I would think of something,” he said.

I barked a laugh. 9/3’s static-tinged voice suited his low-key dry wit perfectly. The people passing by were staring openly at us now, veering away, and you couldn’t really blame them. When 9/3 retracted the nozzle, the people-flow straightened out.

“I have already filed reports with the four most relevant agencies.”

“Good,” I said. “You can add my name to that letter.”

There was a pause as he did just that, his eyelights going offline briefly.

The loudspeaker spoke in a language I couldn’t understand, but some nearby Montavians cocked an ear. “Ah, Montavian,” I said wisely.

9/3 looked at me. “It is good you have been studying. Without a translator, you will need it.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“I have heard that some co-teachers have a very low level of English and must rely heavily on the translators.”

Nothing good would come out of my mouth, I knew, so I clenched my teeth.

“Why are humans so inefficient?” 9/3 pondered.

“Why are
blockheads
so fucking
blockheaded
?” I exploded. Twenty-eight hours on a ship, and now this crap?

9/3 looked at me, and I stared back at him.

“I did not mean you,” he said.

“Well... you don’t even know it was Richardson’s fault,” I said. “It could be your host.”

“It would have to be both our hosts, then.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. Fuckin’ Richardson. Probably on the vapours when he made the arrangements, the goddamned...

“Maybe,” 9/3 said slowly, “they do not recognize us.”

I snickered. “Yeah, we’re kind of hard to spot.”

“Ha ha,” 9/3 said. 9/3’s laugh always cracked me up, so we were in the middle of a laughter avalanche when our hosts finally showed up.

They were the only Octavian-Montavian pair I had seen, so I waved on a hunch. They waved back in the slightly loose way that people from non-waving cultures do.

We snuffled and chortled our way to a full stop by the time that they got across the room. Maybe it wasn’t the most professional, but it was better than catching us while I was spouting xenophobic slurs or when 9/3’s flame-thrower was activated.

I checked my watch. Dead on the hour. I looked at 9/3 and his eyes flickered, his way of nodding.

“Richardson gave us the wrong time,” he grated so that only I heard.

“Very glad to meet you,” my Octavian co-teacher said, after positioning his platform so his head faced my way. He lifted his head a few inches, with great effort. “I am Laz Cha Zik. You may call me Mr. Zik.”

We had split off to meet our hosts privately. I heard 9/3 address his co-teacher, a tall Montavian (almost 3’6”) in another language. The munchkin looked relieved.

I fought an urge to apologize immediately for not having a translator, and instead just introduced myself and stuck out my hand. Mr. Zik’s tentacle waved out and slapped into my hand. It was dry, but there was a slight stickiness that I had been warned about.

Luckily. Because if I didn’t know that it was from micro-suction cups, I would have obeyed my instincts and wiped my hand on my pants. Wars have been started for less, and it would certainly make for a less-than-auspicious beginning to a working relationship.

“So...” said Mr. Zik.

9/3 and the munchkin were talking a mile a minute.

Mr. Zik smoothed his head crest, then said, “Shall we go?”

“Sure,” I said, turning to 9/3. He was setting the Montavian on his shoulder. The Montavian smiled at me and fiddled with something behind the roboman’s head. 9/3’s neck hissed briefly.

“So, I’ll uh, give you a call,” I said to 9/3, wondering what in the hell was going on.

The Montavian clambered back to the ground. 9/3 lifted his head off and handed the cube to his co-teacher. “Yes. I will stay in touch,” he said, from the tiny man’s arms.

The Montavian nodded to us and left with 9/3’s head. 9/3’s body sat for a few more seconds, then stood up and walked in the opposite direction.

I looked at Mr. Zik and said, “Weird!”

He took a second to process it, then said: “Yes.”

***

We walked through four entire docking bays before we found it. They were smaller bays than at an intergalactic spaceport, but weren’t by any means small. Mr. Zik tried to keep his platform at a regular speed, but kept shooting ahead.

“How was your trip?” he asked.

“Kind of rough. I drank too much coffee and so I couldn’t sleep.”

“Ah,” he said. “Coffee.” He made a hissing sound. “Drinking coffee makes me... jumpy?” He looked at me.

I didn’t know what he was asking me.

“Is that right?” he asked. “Jumpy?”

“Yeah, that’s right, jumpy.” I said authoritatively. The teaching had begun! “They had hoses on the ship where you could get any beverage you want, so I drank too much. I love coffee.”

Mr. Zik nodded. We stopped in front of a large gold saucer. “There is no coffee on Octavia,” he said, perhaps sadly.

“Oh,” I said, certainly sadly.

Mr. Zik pushed a button somewhere on his person and there was a bleep. The ramp started to lower.

“This is a nice saucer. I haven’t seen rocket thrusters on a saucer before.” I pointed to them, two large chrome pipes right below the back window.

Mr. Zik paused on his way up the ramp. “No,” he said. “They aren’t rocket thrusters. They’re... thrusters.”

“Another... kind of thrusters?” I fished.

“Yes!” He continued up the ramp and I followed him. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember the word for the kind of thrusters.” He made the hissing sound again, which I decided was probably a laugh.

“That’s OK,” I said. “Your English is very good.”

“No,” he said. “It’s very blad.”

The cockpit had been rearranged to facilitate the platform. He moved in close to the control board and his tentacles swept out across it in a languorous way. We were airborne in half the time a human would need to take off.

“Wow,” I said, as we manoeuvred through the asteroid belt that surrounded the station. “Having eight appendages is really useful!”

He laughed softly, his head still on its side, watching the viewscreen. “It is useful for driving... not so useful for walking.”

“Well, knowing how to walk isn’t very important for people on Octavia. Most humans can’t swim very well.”

He watched the viewscreen and said nothing. I waited for a while, to see if the conversation was paused or finished. I knew there were questions I should be asking, but I was so tired my brain felt like there were cables cut in it, the frayed ends sparking. I looked out the window and thought about how good it would be to get some sleep.

Traffic was really light, just the occasional saucer passing us every couple of minutes. Saucers were very popular here; they never really sold well on Earth because the first models were all manual control and got the rep as being death-traps before the fully automatic ones came out. But I always liked them — one of my best friends in high school had built one from scratch, pretty much, for shop class. He had to keep it at school, though, ‘cause his dad was a bigot who thought that driving anything without a motor meant you were an alien sympathizer.

“I went on a road trip in a saucer once. My friend Pete was a really good pilot.”

“Why did your friend fly a saucer?” Mr. Zik asked.

“Why? ...Uh, well, they’re really cheap. A lot of students get them because they don’t need fuel and you can fit a lot of people in them.”

He nodded. “I see.”

I thought about telling him about how the young people also like how it pisses the xenophobes off, but decided against it. “A lot of my friends swear by them. Do you know that phrase?”

“Yes. ‘Swear by them.’”

“Yeah, they think they’re more reliable than floaters.”

Pause. “Yes. More reliable. More efficient, too.”

It had become quite busy, saucers on every side. Gold was most common, and the rest were silver. It was an odd feeling, because I was used to floater traffic with only the occasional saucer thrown in. As well, the guy behind us was really close. I was about to mention it when I noticed we were just as close to the guy in front.