Randoms

by David Liss

  It also turned out that my [pizza] was pretty good. The blue part of the toothpaste was something not completely dissimilar to cheese, and the white part was some kind of sauce, entirely unlike tomato, but not bad in itself. The exterior was flaky, more like a pastry, and the whole thing tasted like pizza the way a banana tastes like an apple, but even so, on its own terms, it did the job. And it was alien food, which earned it points.

  The three of us were talking and laughing like we’d known each other for years. And then we were interrupted.

  It was the deer guy. “Hello again, Tamret.”

  Her ears pivoted sharply a beat before she turned her head.

  He was standing by the table, looking at us, maybe deer-smiling. I don’t really know. His voice was smooth and kind of breathy. “You said you were going to introduce me to your friends.”

  “I never said that,” she told him, turning away.

  “Actually, you did,” he said, his voice still completely relaxed. “I know you all come from different worlds, and there are different rules, but here in the Confederation, you don’t make friends by lying to people.”

  “I never lied,” Tamret told him. “You said you wanted to meet my friends, and I responded vaguely because I could see you were pushy, and it’s best not to tell pushy people no outright. It just makes them pushier.”

  “Come on,” he said in the untroubled voice of a guy who expects everyone to see things his way. “Just a little chat. Where’s the harm?”

  “The harm is I don’t want to,” she told him. Her voice was firm, but she didn’t bother to make eye contact. “Now go away. I’m with my friends, and you’re being kind of a creep.”

  “I’m not a creep,” he said. “I’m a data collector. For News Output Three Seventy-One, which, if you kids had been here longer, you would know is the most respected news output on the station.”

  “And how long would I have to be here to care?” Tamret asked.

  He shook his deer head, like we were all sad and pathetic. “I’m trying to help you, let you tell your stories the way you want them told. You kids are of interest to the media, so you might as well control how you come across. You’re Ezekiel Reynolds, right?” he said to me. “Let’s talk about how you destroyed that Phandic ship. Was it defenseless, as people are saying? Were you hoping to kill everyone on board?”

  “No comment” was the best response I could manage. I barely even made eye contact with him.

  “People are saying that you are a recreational assassin on your home world,” the reporter or data collector or whatever he was continued. “They say that everyone commits murder there. Is it true?”

  Enough of the bashful business, I thought. I looked up and met his brown deer eyes and tried to think of something cool to say, something that would impress my new friends. “Go away.”

  Okay, so that could have been done better.

  The deer guy sort of half shrugged. He had this whole cutesy coy thing going on that I couldn’t stand. Or maybe that was just how deer guys were. “You can talk to me, or I can send some messages and fifty data collectors will come through the front door before you can even call an elevator. Whichever way you want to go, that’s fine.”

  Steve dropped one of his rat things back into the goldfish bowl. While it tried to scurry under its remaining fellow protein clumps, Steve slowly wiped his hand on his napkin and then stood. He was considerably younger than the deer guy, and certainly shorter, even if you didn’t count the antlers. For all that, he held himself like he was completely unintimidated.

  “My friends made it clear they don’t want to talk,” Steve said. “Now you’re threatening us. It’s time to go.”

  The deer guy looked at the rats in the goldfish bowl and scrunched up his face in distaste. “A predator species. Fantastic. As far as I’m concerned, you’re what’s wrong with the Confederation.”

  “And as far as I’m concerned,” Steve said, “I don’t give a toss. Walk away, mate, and don’t come back. And don’t send any of your reporter friends looking for us. Otherwise I may just have to come looking for you. We’ve got animals that look like you on my world, and I have a feeling you just might be a little bit delicious.” He flicked his tongue in the air.

  The deer guy backed away without another word and hurried out of the bar.

  Steve sat down, grabbed a rodent from his bowl, and gestured at Tamret with it. “That, love, is what I can do. I can scrap. You got Zeke there for long distances, but close up, I’m your bloke.”

  “You just threatened to eat that guy,” I said. “And he’s an adult.”

  “Maybe we eat adults on my world,” Steve said. “Maybe we don’t. He doesn’t know, does he?”

  “That was pretty good,” Tamret said, nodding appreciatively. “I think we’ll keep you.”

  It was also not lost on me that it had been Steve, not me, who had stood up to defend Tamret. I’d cowered in my seat. Okay, maybe not cowered, but I hadn’t been all tough and reptilian Jason Statham like Steve. I’d been too intimidated by the data collector being an adult and having antlers and knowing how things worked around here. Next time, I vowed, I would take charge.

  Tamret now raised her glass again. “Here’s what I say. All three worlds. That’s the deal. We watch each other’s backs, and we all get in. The kids in our delegations may be complete jerks, but we carry them, so we all make it.”

  We clinked again.

  Tamret looked at me, meeting my gaze, and then turned away like something embarrassed her. Maybe I’d been staring a little too hard.

  I had the feeling she expected me to make a toast, so I raised my glass. “I’ve never met a Ganari. It looks like maybe I never will, but on the shuttle I watched get destroyed, there were four kids, just like us. One of them would be sitting here with us right now if he or she or it hadn’t been murdered.” I raised my glass a little higher. “The Ganari.”

  “The Ganari,” they agreed in unison.

  It was the best moment I’d had since leaving home. For a moment I forgot about the rejection and the danger and the terrifying brush with death. For that instant, being in outer space was exactly what I had hoped it would be.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  I met Steve and Tamret the next morning for breakfast in one of the government-complex cafeterias, a large open space filled with important-looking beings, every one of whom made a conspicuous effort to pretend it was not looking or perceiving or pointing its sensory stalks at us. Maybe it was just me they were pretending to ignore. After all, Steve and Tamret hadn’t blown anyone up.

  Tamret’s dark hair was a little messy, and I got the impression she was the sort of girl who had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, but she’d managed to throw on what would have been called a summer dress on Earth. For my part, I figured I’d start things in style and wore my red classic Trek T-shirt with the insignia over my heart.

  The less said about the things Steve ate for breakfast the better, though I will mention that the food did not want to be eaten, and Steve had to remove the stingers before he could pop the things in his mouth. And while he was happy with the selection of seemingly living goodies, I was a little more challenged. American breakfast preferences were nowhere to be found, and I found nothing like dry cereal or eggs or waffles. There were strangely shaped fruits and vegetables—as well as plants that were clearly neither—and I decided to make a point to try as many of them as my HUD would let me eat over the course of the next year. The most popular breakfast food in the Confederation seemed to be endless styles of porridge made from grains and plants. I helped myself to a bowlful as well as a plateful of slices of blue fruit wedges streaked with yellow stripes. They were pretty but fairly mild in taste. I wasn’t ever going to crave this food, but at least I wasn’t going to starve.

  After we ate, we headed for the classroom, which
was a whole lot like an Earth classroom: chairs, a lectern, and screens for projecting data. This was my first chance to get a look at the rest of the Rarel and Ish-hi delegations, and they were as unfriendly as the rest of the human delegation. Also, to make things even more relaxed, Ms. Price would be sitting in on every session. She glared at my T-shirt but said nothing.

  Tamret and Steve and I sat in the back, like the bad kids. The other humans were sitting up front. Charles, wearing a polo shirt with his private school’s logo on it, looked eager to learn. Mi Sun sat quietly and remained utterly unreadable to me. Nayana had a smile plastered to her face, but it looked phony, like something she slapped on while pretending not to notice lurking photographers from Chess Monthly.

  “They’re never going to accept you, you know,” Tamret said. She was running her fingers through her hair, trying unsuccessfully to tame it.

  “What?” I hoped blushing didn’t translate.

  “Those people from your planet,” Tamret said. She was now glaring at Nayana, who noticed and glared right back. Tamret accepted the challenge and kept her eyes locked until Nayana looked away. “You like that one, don’t you?”

  “I don’t,” I said quietly. “Unkindness to randoms, remember.”

  Tamret shook her head, like she found me deeply disappointing. “You shouldn’t be so obvious.”

  • • •

  The amazing thing about school is that you can move it from a stuffy classroom in a crumbling and moldy building into a futuristic government compound on an ancient space station, you can replace your range of usual student types with aliens, you can introduce advanced technology, and for all that, it manages to retain its essential school-like nature. You sit in a chair, you listen to a teacher, and you wish you were out of that room doing something else.

  The three other Ish-hi were hard to read: Joe, the other male, and Jill and Ann, the two females. They all dressed similarly in their tail-accommodating tunics, and I had a hard time telling them apart. The truth was, I hard a hard time telling Steve from any of the rest of them at first until I made a point of memorizing subtle color patterns on his scales. I was suddenly a little more sympathetic to the trouble he’d had distinguishing me from Charles.

  “What’s with your names?” I asked Steve after I’d been introduced to his delegation.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Yeah, single-syllable names were popular for kids our age.”

  “But those names are all . . .” I was floundering.

  “All what?” Steve demanded, looking perhaps a bit defensive.

  “Never mind,” I said, deciding that I would have to accept the Ish-hi names as one of the galaxy’s many mysteries.

  The Rarels were easier to keep track of. Other than Tamret, they all had reddish-brown fur, and I wondered if Tamret belonged to a minority ethnic group or if there were just different fur colors like there were with house cats back home. The other Rarel girl, Thiel, was taller than Tamret and had russet hair, just a little darker than her fur, and she always wore a sour, superior expression that reminded me a little of Nayana. Tamret told me that Thiel was the daughter of one of her world’s most famous [whittlers]. Apparently, carving shapes from wood was a huge deal in their culture, and Thiel’s father was like royalty. Thiel herself was considered something of a [whittling] prodigy and somewhat famous, and she carried herself as though she expected everyone to be in awe of her at all times.

  Then there were the two boys. Semj was smaller than the two girls, and Tamret said he was supposed to be some kind of engineering genius. He kept to himself, and almost never seemed to seek out company, but the others in his delegation consulted with him the minute there was anything in doubt. He was smart, and they respected him for it.

  Ardov was taller than I was and broadly built with wide shoulders and a thick neck, like he was destined to play Rarel football. He wore a tight short-sleeved shirt and pants made out of a dark black fabric, and he had a face that was action-hero handsome, rugged and square-jawed, with high cheekbones and piercing emerald eyes. Like Mi Sun, he was a martial-arts master back on their home planet. He was also a national champion in something called War Etched in Stone, a sport in which contestants pummel each other in a pit while simultaneously solving high-level math problems. Right away I noticed that he tended to scowl at Tamret, like he found her disgusting. He caught me looking, and shot me a look like he hated me. At that point I decided to hate him right back. I figured it would save me time down the road.

  Once we got started, Dr. Roop explained that the purpose of the class was to teach us about the operations and functions of the station as well as the history of the Confederation and the larger mystery of the Formers. He stood in front of the class in one of his dark Confederation suits, arms behind his back, neck stretched high. My own neck was going to get sore from looking at him.

  “Most of you have gained several levels already,” he said, trying not to gaze in my direction, “but don’t think it will be this easy from here on out. The first five take virtually no effort. The second five require somewhat more. Moving from ten to eleven, you will discover, takes a great deal longer.”

  Try blowing up a starship, I thought. That packs the points on.

  “You will have to work hard to earn each level,” he continued. “You have a year to gain a total of eighty levels per group. It is extremely challenging. Almost half of all delegations fail. Don’t ever relax or rest on your laurels. No matter how close you are, do not assume you will reach eighty levels until you have them. And keep in mind that no one will try to obstruct or hinder you, but no one will help you either—no one but me. I will gladly assist your work toward your advancement, so don’t hesitate to ask. I am the only ally you have, and I am everyone’s ally equally.”

  Dr. Roop explained the best ways to go about earning experience points. We could book time in the sim rooms, learning more about starship operations. There were computer-programming rooms, which allowed us to rack up points by writing computer code. Then there was the sparring room, where we test our combat skills against either real or simulated opponents. If we were in a less-violent mood, we might visit the research facilities, where we had the chance to work on math and engineering problems. Much to my surprise and happiness, we also had the option of playing strategy games, such as Approximate Results from Endeavors. The important thing was to gain skills that would make us of use in the Confederation, but there was no clear program of study, and those individuals or groups who could not figure out how to gain points would be left behind.

  Then he ended the session by assigning us about 150 pages of history to read for the next day. “Keep in mind that learning about Confederation history gets you experience.”

  We rose from our desks and Dr. Roop called me over. He saw that Ms. Price was eyeing us, so he kept his voice low. “No one believes you are still at level one at this point, and it’s starting to draw the wrong sort of attention. Go up to about six or seven for now. Don’t ever pull ahead of your classmates, though. And do it before 1600 today.”

  “Why, what happens then?”

  “You are meeting the chief justice of the Xeno-Affairs Judicial Council,” he said. “It is time to discuss the legal and political implications of your actions on the Dependable.”

  • • •

  Steve and Tamret were waiting for me in the hallway. Dr. Roop hadn’t said the meeting with the chief justice was a secret, and I planned to tell them, but not in front of everyone else.

  “What did he want? And how do you tell him apart from her lot?” Steve pointed a scaly thumb at Tamret.

  “You think we look the same as Dr. Roop?” she asked, scrunching up her face.

  “It’s all that fur.”

  “You haven’t noticed that his neck is like a quarter of his body size?” Tamret asked.

  Steve cocked his head as he considered this information. “Yeah,” he s
aid thoughtfully. “I reckon that’s true.”

  While they were talking, I was watching Charles, Nayana, and Mi Sun heading in our direction. Nayana stopped, and then the other two walked on and she came back.

  “May I speak to you for a moment?” she asked, and so that no one would mistake her for a nice person, she pretended not to see Steve and Tamret.

  I was not about to make my only friends on the station move, so I walked twenty feet down the hall with her. “What’s up?” I said, pretending that deliberate contact with a member of my species wasn’t a big deal for me.

  She looked down. Her cheeks darkened in what might have been a blush on a girl who, on occasion, experienced sympathetic feelings. “You received my note?”

  “Yeah. Thanks?” Did I need to thank someone for thanking me?

  “You couldn’t trouble yourself to write back?”

  “You told me not to speak to you.”

  “In public,” she clarified. “It’s rather rude not to write back to someone who is risking her reputation by being nice to you.”

  “Ah,” I said, because it was the cleverest thing I could think of.

  “I just,” she began, and then shook her head. “I’m quite unhappy about how we have treated you. I wanted you to know that.”

  “Really?” This was interesting. Maybe if Nayana was beginning to soften, the others would too.

  “I asked that we include you in our leveling projects, but I have been outvoted, I am sorry to say. Ms. Price was particularly adamant. I am certainly not used to my opinions being disregarded in this way,” she added, like maybe this was the real point.

  “Um, okay,” I said, no doubt proving her faith in me was warranted.

  “I do not make a habit of sticking my neck out for others.” She stood there, as though she were a bellhop waiting for a tip.

  “Thank you?” I ventured.

  “You are most welcome,” she said and then hurried off after her friends.