Fighting Gravity (2 page)

The image in the mirror was worse than I’d expected. I was dirty, tousled and bloodied, and my shirt was torn. Instead of attending school that day, I’d worked in Mrs. Frann’s garden—she was nice and patient, and paid well. My skin was coated with dirt, and there was a collection of it under my fingernails. I’d acquired a bloody nose in the scuffle, and a solid line of dried blood ran down to my chin and decorated my shirt. The seam at my shoulder had ripped.

I attacked the whole mess with soap, stepped back and confronted the mirror again. I was cleaner than usual. There was dirt I couldn’t get out from under my fingernails, and my efforts had done little more than lighten the color of the blood on my shirt.

I was even more nervous and afraid than I had been before. I no longer looked like a tomcat fresh from defending his territory, but still, clean or not, I looked nothing like the children out in that room. I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t one of them.

Riding a rush of anger and fear, I rallied all my courage and left the washroom.

Kirti looked up from her chess board and smiled. She stood and approached me again with determination. I got the impression that she was shy by nature, but not allowing herself to act that way.

“So you’re Jacob?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She smiled again.

The eyes of all the children in the room were on me and it wasn’t polite interest. Children do rejection very well; very clean and straightforward. None of the pretense adults muck it up with.

I stiffened, strode forward, and plunked down in a comfortable armchair in the middle of the room. I looked back over at Kirti, daring her to join me.

She started toward me, but a boy—nine or ten, I guessed, with night-black hair and pale skin—plopped himself down in a chair across from me before she could get there. “So, was it a good fight? Tell me it was a good fight. And you won, right? What did the other guy look like?”

This wasn’t right. Almost all of the children were reacting to me as I expected them to. This boy’s open and casual friendliness didn’t fit, but I trusted his sincerity for some reason I couldn’t name. Probably not astute character judgment on my part so much as a desire to be accepted; throwing a bone to the gnawing loneliness in my gut.

“Well, it wasn’t really a fight,” I shrugged. “Just stupid shit.”

The other children gasped and it took a moment for me to figure out why. But I saw it on their faces, the self-righteous censure. I’d clinched it in one of the first dozen words out of my mouth. It didn’t matter what I said now, nothing could win them over. I’d always be that kid, the outsider. A destabilizing force introduced into a precisely calibrated system.

The thrill of control shivered through me. Whatever I chose to show them now was what they would believe of me, so long as it was close enough to their expectations. There was power in that—the general choosing where to make his stand.

So I told them.

The boy in the chair leaned back, a huge smile spreading across his face. “I wish I’d been there to see you punch a policeman.”

I’d been right about this boy. The other children were disdainful, but this boy had seen me for what I really was and accepted me anyway.

The other children melted away, talking or making rude noises. Only Kirti and the friendly boy stayed.

“I’m Wong Chuk Tsuen,” he said, reaching across the space between us with his hand extended. I shook it. His grip was firm, sure. “My friends call me Chuck.”

“Jacob Dawes. My friends call me Jacob.”

“Good to meet you, Jake.” He grinned.

The easy chatter with Chuck soon made me forget being angry or sad or afraid. He had a way about him that made me feel as if I’d known him forever, like the way he’d already assigned me a nickname.

Chuck got up and wandered off and Kirti settled into a chair at one of the chess boards near me.

I sat across from her. She watched me, though not like the other children. She seemed to be looking for things about me to like, rather than the other way around.

It wasn’t that she made me feel uncomfortable, but I felt like I had to say something, to be polite. To give her reason to stay.

“I had to leave my sister with my ma.”

She didn’t even look confused at that odd wording. “Is she older?”

I shook my head. “She’s five.”

Kirti nodded. “My sisters are older than me. Teresa’s twelve and Jane’s fifteen.”

“You got along with them OK?”

She made a noise of agreement. The kind of noise you make when you don’t want to speak because you’re trying not to cry.

I picked up a rook. “I’ve never played real chess.”

“My dad’s a local champion,” she said. Her face brightened, then clouded again.

“You like your dad?”

“Yeah, my dad’s the best.” She swallowed hard, like she was fighting back something and started to talk about her family. She spoke of her sisters and her mother, her voice warm and wistful, but there was a special something when she spoke of her father. I wondered what that would be like, a father you weren’t afraid of, that you liked, who was nice, even.

After a while, a bell rang. I followed Kirti from the lounge and into a large dining room. A huge table dominated, with seats for two dozen people.

It was a polished dark wood—real wood. The chairs had tall backs and plush seats, which I thought was crazy in a dining room where food could spill on them. The table was set with gleaming silverware, crystal goblets filled with water, and heavy china plates with cloth napkins perched like birds in the center.

It seemed like a scene plucked out of earlier centuries. Nowhere in the room were any of the more practical, utilitarian plastics and metals I’d always been surrounded by. I took a seat like everyone else and watched as the director offered a blessing.

This was a new experience. Religion, even the Empire’s secularized version, was foreign to me.

Everyone bowed their heads. “We remember with gratitude all that we have and can have and do because of our great Empire. May the emperor live forever.”

The children all repeated the last line and it was over. My first impulse was to laugh. Who lived forever? You’d think these people—the greatest minds of our time—wouldn’t express such nonsensical ideas.

It was true, though, that we belonged to the Empire now. It was the emperor who would provide for and keep us. So while it was strange and smacked of superstition to me, I felt grateful and beholden in a way that made the blessing somehow appropriate.

I still remember the meal with perfect clarity. Serving men and women entered the room with huge dishes overflowing with foods of all kinds. I had never seen anything like it. Crusty breads slick with butter, dishes of meaty potatoes, two different kinds of vegetables and a salad, a plate of juicy beef slices and another of glazed pork. They brought milk for us children and wine for the director and the man who had been with him at my apartment—who kept casting fearful glances at me, as if I might jump him at any moment.

I forced myself to take portions no bigger than the other children did. Others were taking seconds, but I knew enough to take only a few bites more of my favorites. Eating myself sick and ruining this incredible feast was unthinkable. I savored each and every bite as if I’d never eat that way again.

-

That night, after we’d been sent to find our bunks, I lay awake a long time staring at the low ceiling above me. The bed was more comfortable than any I’d ever slept in and was larger than the one I’d shared with Carrie the night before.

My chest hurt when I thought of her. Carrie was brave, but she was only five. And she and Ma had been my responsibility. Who would take care of them now?

I didn’t think, at the time, about how I’d only been a year older than Carrie was now, when Father was taken away and I’d assumed that responsibility for myself. Of course, in reality, I’d assumed it much earlier. The first time I’d put myself between Ma and my drunken father’s fist, I couldn’t have been more than four.

And it wasn’t as if I’d been given a choice about leaving. Still, I felt like a traitor, abandoning them.

It had been quiet for a while, save for the occasional snore, when I heard a strange noise. Concentrating, I realized it was muffled crying. I crawled out of my bunk and stood in the aisle to listen. The sound wasn’t coming from any of the nearby bunks in the boys’ section.

I slid open the door to the girls’ and located the sound. I looked at the indicator on the outside of the bunk and saw it was Kirti’s. I tried the privacy screen and found it unlocked so I slid it open. Kirti turned with a shocked gasp, but when she saw it was me she turned her face back to the wall and continued sobbing. I crawled into the bunk and slid the screen closed behind me. Taking her in my arms, as I had done with Carrie many times, I hugged her close until she cried herself out. I stayed long enough to be certain that she was asleep before I eased myself out of the bunk and returned to my own.

-

In the morning when I returned from a trip to the bathroom, I found a set of clothes on my bed. I picked them up and held them against me for size. They were a bit long in the leg, too wide at the shoulders, but appeared to be new. I didn’t know where they’d come from but wasn’t about to turn them down no matter who had left them for me. When I rolled up the sleeves and pant legs, they fit well enough. I folded my own clothes to put them aside. I had swiped a picture on my way out of the apartment, and now I took it from the back pocket of my discarded pants. It was one Carrie had drawn, of her and me, holding hands. I was still looking at it when Chuck passed by.

“Hey, they fit!” He beamed. No condescension or superiority, just simple satisfaction in a gift appreciated.

I folded the drawing away quickly and smiled at him. “Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate the loan.”

He waved that away. “Eh, keep ‘em. My parents went overboard, and I can only wear one set at a time, right?”

I was accustomed to anonymous charity, but not gifts. I felt awkward and embarrassed, though he obviously did not. I was rescued by the bell announcing breakfast.

The day passed much as the first one. And though Kirti spent plenty of time with me throughout the day, she never once alluded to the events of the night before, and so neither did I.

Around midmorning, Director Kagawa entered the lounge with a dark-haired boy at least a head taller than I was. He had to have been one of the oldest children eligible for this Selection.

“Children,” Director Kagawa began, “meet your new classmate, Sasha Popovich.” We chorused a greeting. At the director’s prompting, Sasha proceeded to detail his various academic accomplishments and recognitions. He was very pleased with himself in a way that set my teeth on edge. If this was the normal form of introduction, no wonder the other kids looked at me like I had two heads. As if, covered in dirt and blood, I hadn’t been strange enough to them already.

I managed to avoid Sasha until after lunch. Another new boy, Anwar, was brought in less than an hour after we ate. He was small and quiet, pale and thin. His voice was shaky and barely above a whisper when he spoke at the director’s prompting. His list was more impressive than Sasha’s, though he looked younger, and I watched Sasha make derisive faces during Anwar’s recitation. I already didn’t like Sasha, but this made me angry.

When the director left us, Anwar burrowed into a chair in a corner of the room. Sasha’s voice, as he mocked Anwar’s accomplishments to one of the two boys he’d acquired as cronies in the space of a few short hours, was meant to carry.

I’ve often wondered what scientific principle governs the acquisition of hangers-on in relation to a bully. It seems as predictable as any established scientific law I’ve yet encountered.

Anwar, red-faced, was trying to pretend he didn’t hear. When Sasha started toward the corner of the room where Anwar sat, I stood up to block his path.

“Leave him alone.”

Sasha looked down at me. “Get out of my way, lepton.”

I stood my ground. The other kids were watching us now. He started to move around me, pushing my shoulder to move me out of his way. I grabbed the front of his shirt and stopped him with a hard jerk. “Leave him alone.”

Sasha took two fistfuls of my shirt and hauled me off my feet. “Get out of my way.”

My hands were balled into fists. “You don’t want to do that,” Chuck offered from behind my shoulder. “Jake took out a policeman yesterday. I don’t think you want to mess with him.”

Sasha shot me a surprised look, but dropped me. “Who cares about that smear,” he said to his buddies as he walked away. I started to follow, but Chuck had a hold of my sleeve.

“Enough,” he whispered. I turned to him, wanting to shake him off, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was eyeing Sasha, measuring and considering. “He’s not worth it. Not yet, anyway.” He met my eye and grinned.

I couldn’t help but smile back. Sasha avoided me after that, and I him. I wish I could say that lasted, but it was true at least for the rest of our trip.

Lying in my bed that night, I made myself stay awake. Before long, I heard what I’d been listening for. I snuck into Kirti’s bunk as I had the night before and held her while she cried, returning to my own bed only when she was asleep.

-

Two days passed. We picked up two more kids, one each day. At dinner, the director informed us that we would stop the next morning at a docking area where we would pick up the last three candidates who had arrived from off-planet. By early afternoon we would be at the IIC.

An excited ripple passed through the room and conversation dimmed from exuberant to reserved and solemn. The seriousness, the finality of it all hung in the air.

When we went to bed that night I waited for the sound of Kirti’s sobs. They didn’t come. I slid out of my bunk anyway and peeked into hers. She was still awake and crying, quiet, halfhearted sniffs. I climbed in and sat crossed legged on the end of her bed. “Better?”

She shrugged. “I’m fine. Of course I am.” She said it as if she’d always been fine, even when she’d shaken, sobbing against me. I recognized this—strength as a deliberate choice, rather than a genuine feeling. Kirti was new to it, though, and stubbornness alone was sustaining her. I took her hand. Silent tears slid down her cheeks but she neither looked at me nor spoke. As she drifted off to sleep, I tried to ignore the voice that snarled at me about a sister left behind with no one to hold her hand as she cried.