by John Daulton
So he was going to die. He sighed. He thought they might be going to kill him by mistake. Maybe they didn’t understand what his helmet had been for. What a terrible way to go.
“I can’t breathe out there, you know?” he said.
The creature, as usual, made no response.
They waited there for several minutes. Altin realized the clouds were getting closer. And closer. Soon they were in them, and Altin could see nothing but red-and-gray mist. It reminded him of his first explorations of the gas giant Naotatica back in his home solar system, now so very far away.
Something scraped against the hull beneath him, a dull sound blown up to his ears on an updraft.
He looked down and saw that something was coming up the wall. It was another alien, though this one entirely different than the others he had seen. It was much smaller. No more than fifty or so paces long—large by comparison to his tiny human body, but minuscule compared to his original captors. The newcomer appeared to be made of the same sort of mucous material as the bigger ones, but it had no billow and no bulbs. It was longish, with three eyes—left, right, and center—and its not-quite-cylindrical body tapered to a tail that ended with a hook. It had three long tentacles emerging from beneath its eyes, like a mustache with only three long hairs. It was with these that it climbed the wall, gripping it with its little suction cups. On the hook at its hind end—and, by comparison in size to the hook itself, barely appearing more than a tiny droplet of milk—was Altin’s spacesuit helmet.
“I hope you’re not going to throw me out,” Altin said upon seeing it. “Because I’m not leaving without Orli.”
Chapter 9
The lady they gave Pernie to be her fake mother leaned down and buttoned the top button on her uniform collar. The woman’s breath smelled like mint. It always smelled like mint. Or sort of like mint. Mint in that fake way people on Earth made fake natural stuff. She handed Pernie a navy-blue sweater to pull on over the light blue shirt. It was itchy and way too hot.
The woman, Sophia Hayworth, stood and watched as Pernie wrestled with the stupid sweater. Once it was on, the woman reached behind Pernie’s head and pulled her long ponytail out from under it, letting the golden waves fall free, still nearly halfway down her back. Pernie wouldn’t let them cut it.
“Well, don’t you look smart,” Sophia Hayworth said in that chipper voice she always used when talking to Pernie. She smiled down at her, obviously pleased, like someone who has just finished putting together an arrangement of flowers that came out nicely.
Pernie turned and looked at herself in the wall monitor that doubled as mirror. She looked dumb. The shirt was dumb and the sweater was dumber. The plaid skirt was dumb too, hanging down to her knees, of which there were about two finger widths visible before they were consumed by dumb blue socks that itched just like the dumb sweater did. The shoes were the dumbest. They were shiny like polished leather, but made out of something fake. The soles were hard and made out of some dumb Earth material that was too slick to grip the ground very well.
“I can’t run in these,” she said for the fifth time since having been fitted in them.
“You won’t need to run in them, sweetheart,” Sophia Hayworth said. Every time she talked, her voice was just like a children’s song. It made Pernie want to punch her in the throat, even if she was trying to be nice. Pernie’s fake mom lifted up a pair of blue-and-white shoes made out of something else that was fake. “These are your running shoes. You’ll wear them when you have gym.”
“I don’t want to have gym,” Pernie said reflexively. “I hate gym.” She didn’t know what gym was, but some things had to be said on principle.
“Well, I’m sure you feel that way right now,” said her fake mother. “But you will see.”
There was a bunch more of that sort of thing that followed, and eventually Pernie was taken out of the blocky gray house in which she now lived—Sophia Hayworth told her it was “paid for,” which Pernie was made to understand was an important thing. They walked three blocks down one street and two blocks up another. They sat together, Pernie and her fake mother, until a vehicle came along on quiet black wheels and parked in front of them. On the side of it were the words Carson-Millerton Junior Military Academy, painted in black upon the gray-and-blue side of the vehicle. Her fake mom had been teaching her to talk and read for the last three days, in anticipation of school starting. She was picking it up fast. It had helped that she’d learned a little while helping Orli Pewter learn to speak the language of Prosperion, but Pernie was a quick learner too. She was going to learn all their words, and all their science too, but she wasn’t going to tell them that.
“Here’s your bus,” Sophia Hayworth said. “It will take you right to school. You see in the front that it is bus number thirty-five. Remember that number. That’s the bus you’ll need to get on to come home. I will meet you here this afternoon.”
“What if I don’t want to come home?” She said the last word derisively.
“Then you can sleep in the streets where the other stray animals live, eat garbage, and hope nobody runs over you with their car.”
If that was supposed to scare her, it didn’t. Pernie could teleport right through one of those dumb cars. If she could blink away from an elven spear, she could blink away from something like that. Although she had promised Djoveeve and Seawind that she would not cast any magic while she was here. “Not one word. Not even telepathy,” Djoveeve had told her. “It’s part of the agreement made by Her Majesty herself. So your promise is the promise of a future Sava’an’Lansom made to the Queen of Kurr.” Pernie had agreed to it even though she was mad at Her Majesty for not saying goodbye to her when she left the throne room that day. But she understood that queens could be very busy sometimes, so she supposed it was all right if they were rude occasionally. Pernie was rude sometimes, too, so she didn’t think it was fair to stay mad at the War Queen.
“Fine,” she said in her best Earth words. She wore a translation pin buttoned to her collar. One of the enchanters she’d come to Earth with a few days ago had enchanted it with the Greater Common Tongues spell. He’d done it for everyone in the box with her, the teleportation chamber the TGS had sent them in.
Sophia Hayworth’s husband, a man named Don, had given her a little device that was hardly bigger than the tip of her thumb. It had a curving bit of fake wire—they called it plastic—that wrapped around her ear. The device had a fat, white button that pulled out on a length of metal thread. If Pernie put the button in her ear, the device translated words for her as well. But it was slow, and it was weird listening to people say something in one language and then have it spoken right on top of that language in another. She thought it was a pretty poor substitute for the translation spell, so she left it in a drawer in the room Sophia Hayworth had given her to use.
The door to the vehicle opened, and an older man who looked in some ways like a much older version of Roberto smiled down at her. “Well, howdy,” he said, seeming very happy. “Welcome to Earth. You know you are my very first Prosperion passenger.”
Pernie shrugged. She looked to Sophia Hayworth, who placed a hand gently on her back and nudged her toward the steps that would take her up into the bus. They sure didn’t use any horses on this world.
“Go on,” Sophia Hayworth said. “Don’t be afraid.”
Pernie spun on her. “I’m not afraid,” she said. She wasn’t either. To prove it, she climbed right up the stairs.
The driver was still smiling, like it was his birthday or something. She turned and looked down a long, narrow aisle that divided rows of seats on either side. There were at least thirty other children staring back at her. Some were very little, like maybe only five or six years old. Others were older than Pernie by four or five years, maybe even as old as seventeen or eighteen. Every one of them looked at her like she was painted pink and green.
She looked down one row and back up the next. A little girl Pernie’s age stared at her with eyes s
o wide Pernie thought they might roll right out of her head. The girl saw Pernie looking at her, and her eyebrows ran and hid beneath bangs that were slightly arced and cut perfectly straight across her forehead. Pernie realized that the girl, and the rest of them, were all dressed exactly the same as Pernie was.
“Arrr!” Pernie growled at the girl. She feinted, like she might lunge into the seat at her. The girl screamed and slid against the side of the bus, hitting it with a thud and no room to run.
“Hey now, you be nice,” said the bus driver. “You want to make a good impression here on your first day. That’s no way to make friends.”
Pernie turned a bored look on him. “I don’t need friends,” she said. “I’m only here to learn.”
There was an empty seat three rows down on the left. She went to it and sat down near the window as the door swung shut. She was sure she saw Sophia Hayworth sigh.
Chapter 10
Pernie sat at a little square table that was attached to its own seat. They called it a “desk,” but it didn’t look like one. Someone had made the whole thing all one piece, and she couldn’t move the chair closer at all. The desktop lit up and glowed, and she could move images around with her fingers. All the other students in her class had desks just like it, though they were all much better at using them than Pernie was.
It wasn’t much different than the tablet Orli Pewter had let Pernie play with back at Calico Castle, and it wasn’t much different than the interior wall of her room at Sophia Hayworth’s house. She knew how to make things move. What she didn’t know was how to stop from opening up the wrong things.
The teacher talked very fast, and Pernie didn’t even know what half the things she was telling them to do meant. The translation spell worked perfectly fine for most things, but there were some concepts that Pernie simply had no contexts for. Things that were completely alien. Things like “drag and drop” and “copy and paste” meant nothing to Pernie. And when the teacher would give out what were obviously simple requests, Pernie would get lost. She couldn’t find anything to paste anywhere, and there were no symbols that looked like glue bottles or even a dead horse. It was all so confounding, and she knew it was because she didn’t know all the little things.
She’d looked to the girl on her left, but that one was pointedly looking anywhere but at Pernie. She’d looked to the girl on her right, and it was much the same, though Pernie caught her staring out of the corner of her eye every time Pernie turned to look at her. The boy behind her looked just as scared as the girl on the bus had looked, and the girl on the bus was the girl sitting in front of Pernie. There wasn’t even anyone she could ask. And she damn sure wasn’t going to raise her hand and ask out loud. They all wanted her to be stupid, Pernie could tell. And she would rather die than give them that satisfaction. She’d just have to figure it out herself.
Fortunately, the teacher was a nice lady and didn’t say anything about how terrible Pernie was at everything. When it came time to show answers on the big, whole-class monitor that crossed the front of the room, the teacher had mercifully disabled the feed from Pernie’s desk.
It was pretty embarrassing anyway. Pernie knew that the big black rectangle on the wall display—third from the bottom and second from the right—was hers, because it was the only big black rectangle on the whole board. The rest of the surface was lit up with colorful rectangles, each with answers written in bright white Earth letters that glowed. The other students knew it too, but nobody said anything. Pernie thought that was smart of them because she didn’t want to have to break anyone’s leg. She knew that would be a bad way to start out in Earth school.
“Be careful and be patient,” Djoveeve had said. “It’s frightening to go somewhere completely new. Do you remember how you felt when you came to String last year? Well, it will be just the same on Earth. Perhaps even more so. The ways of an alien world will be disorienting. So remember your breathing techniques. Stay calm. Keep your magic in your mouth and your fists in your pockets, little Sava. Promise me.”
That had been the first of the five hundred billion times Djoveeve had made Pernie promise not to do magic or hurt anyone.
After a while, the class broke for what the teacher called “recess.” All the kids got up and started moving toward the door. Pernie stayed where she was and tried to figure out the desktop screen. There had to be a way to make it go back to what the teacher kept calling the home screen. But which stupid icon was it?
She pressed one twice in a row. It opened up a new screen that started playing a video. She knew how to close it, so she did. She double-tapped another, and it opened up four new boxes, which everyone called windows. She tried to close that, but the one she touched started a whirring sound that Pernie could feel vibrating through the desk.
A thin layer of the desktop make a clicking sound, and it swung up, a section all along the far edge of the desk and about two hand widths high. Now there was some kind of contraption being depicted like an illusion spell in the air, sort of hazy, but floating there above the desk. Pernie recognized that it was showing some kind of space machine design.
“Stupid old—” she started, but cut herself off.
A boy coming up the row on her right, headed out to “recess,” stopped and placed a hand on either side of the image floating in the air. “Like this,” he said, moving his hands together until both palms pressed flat. “Holographic stuff all closes like this. Hands together, then push it back into the desk.” He pushed one hand down, flat against the middle of the desk. The little section of the surface closed itself with a few seconds of whirring and another click. “See?”
She looked up at him, frowning. But he only smiled back. “I’m Jeremy,” he said. He reached out a hand for her to shake. “My granddad is the custodian here. Everyone calls him Gabby. That’s why I can afford to come.”
Pernie frowned again, different this time. He could afford to come because everyone called his grandfather Gabby? Pernie was sure she was never going to understand this world.
“Don’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “They all looked at me like that last year.”
“Like what?” she said.
“Like they look at you. But it’s okay. I’m not afraid of Prosperions. I’ve already read everything on them. I am going to go there someday.”
“Humph,” Pernie said. But she decided he was probably nice. “So what does this thing do?” She pointed to the green ball with the little white line. “It keeps opening other stuff, and I can’t make it go away.”
“Oh, that’s your global-net access icon …” he began. They spent their recess getting Pernie settled in on her desk.
Chapter 11
“I assure you, my friend,” the man called Jefe repeated, “we have no concerns about the accident. We are all in new territory with this.” He smiled reassuringly beneath a mustache that was thick and long, the shiny black ends pulled out and waxed, shaped into upward-curving hooks. Black Sander watched Jefe’s eyes for signs that the words hid the reality, but there was nothing glimmering in those brown orbs but glee. The man was happy with what he’d gotten, despite the damage to some of the contents in the crate.
“I appreciate your patience with us,” Black Sander said. He looked behind him at the wreckage of the wooden crate and the body of the boy. Pieces of the older orphan lay in a gory heap on the basement floor. Part of him hung out of the cinder-block wall, strips of red meat looking like something wolves have been chewing on. Black Sander knew the rest of the body was somewhere in the earth outside the basement, pulped most likely and fertilizing the lawn. “We have to be careful which teleporters we employ, and the War Queen has her eye on everything. My employer assures us that there is another we can bring in for future casts, and we’ll make smaller loads from here on out.”
“Yes, yes, I understand completely.” Jefe stepped to Black Sander and put a hand on his shoulder. He had to reach up to do it, as he was a good deal shorter than the Prosperion. “I have read abo
ut your TGS operation. It seems your transportation guild has all its teleporters working on platforms. It is good that you have found any of them for our work here.”
“The TGS has always been a stingy and controlling entity. As a subset of the Teleporters Guild, it’s got astonishing authority even over its own parent guild. It always has, being the primary means of modern travel across Prosperion, but with the mechanisms for traveling across the stars being put in place, I am sure the TGS will become nothing but unbearable in time. My sources tell me they even make the Queen uncomfortable.”
“Yes, I can imagine it is true. They are in a position of great importance in the galaxy now. And it’s a kind of importance that your War Queen will have a hard time controlling one day. The NTA cabrones here on Earth are at their mercy as well. Your TGS will be a great force in the galaxy very soon.” His eyes glinted as he said it, and Black Sander had to grin. Here was a man who understood power.
“They will. Of that there is no doubt. We’ve taken steps to get our people on the inside.”
“This is good,” agreed Jefe. The blue-eyed El Segador standing beside him nodded as well. “But now is a good time to set plans in motion for the alternatives.”
Black Sander grinned again. “You would have us move more quickly than my employer would. You are the dragon to her dire rat.”
Both Earth men laughed at that. They said something together in the language they called Spanish, and then Jefe said, “I like that. I like the things you say, Prosperion.” He looked back to the wreckage, then to the young orphan and the old prostitute, the latter now on her feet, though looking wobbly. She leaned against a wire birdcage that had been brought down to replace the one that had been destroyed by the errant teleport. Only one of the little birds had survived.
