Lantern Road: 8 by Cullen

by John T. Cullen

  They clinked glasses.

  Aptath spoke softly. “You know what decided me on you? You know what made me want to trust you with this information? It was the way you insisted on a proper burial for those two Fril people. The child will be very sad, but it is expected he will live despite his sickness, and at least he will be able to visit their grave. You are an honorable man, Jory O'Call. You are a fine human. I will enjoy working with you."

  Jory said “Thank you.” He waggled his near-empty glass. “Time to go back for more.” He sipped the last few mouthfuls tenderly, savoring every molecule. “I think I can taste Earth. I can taste real sunshine."

  * * * *

  Jory learned the trade of an Astropath. Soon enough, as they prepared for the next skip on the surface of space and time, Malinu and Kinkidai and Nolani invited him for the first time to help. Together, they steered through the critical interstices that could either throw them into some forever loop where they would die, or skip them through a tight, efficient course to the next point on the invisible surface. In their virtual world, the black goggles made their path a tunnel of fine, light circles. Everything was a metaphor—the ship, the surface, the contact point, the trajectory. At first, everything happened too quickly for Jory to comprehend. He gripped the arm rests and hung on as he seemed to flash at breakneck speed toward the uniformly charcoal-gray surface. As he drew near, the surface took on characteristics—bumps, ripples, hooks, holes, all mathematical artifacts that said, essentially, ‘if you touch here, you blow up.’ Each type of characteristic had its own meaning, which the astropaths instantly recognized and for which they knew how to compensate.

  The ship was a red quadrille that fled over this landscape. What looked like a red grid-echo rippling over the surface distortions was not a shadow thrown behind, but a projection moving ahead—'if you go near here, sense or calculate what will happen.’ Vertical blue lines converged with horizontal green lines at rapid speed, often faster than the eye could follow. The astropaths were able to take all these variables and, in the power grid of their brains between their keradz plates, arrange them tighter and tighter as the ship approached the critical Skip Step, until the ship was once again headed out on a new trajectory. Malinu told Jory: “It's like running a race. You have to bring a ball to the other end, but you may not carry the ball. You have to keep hitting the ball with a paddle so it arcs up, then down again, where you hit it back up. That's very difficult to do, say for several klix. Imagine how easy it would be to hit the ball on a wrong trajectory. If it drops once, you lose. The rules are kind of like that here, only the price of losing is death for all of us."

  While he learned astropathy, Jory also began to understand how far his intellectual and social skills were removed from those of his fellow humans on the ship. Nobody here was interested in the court game of putting together strings of two or three line poems in ancient Oban. Many of these humans conversed on a level far below his, and yet he felt belittled and isolated. He didn't understand a thousand of their nuances, glances, small gestures, grunted syllables for this or that.

  In his isolation, he fit in (reluctantly) with the other three astropaths. All three were unmarried. Malinu and Kinkidai were friends who liked to play casta, an ancient game with a 64-square board and two opposing armies of little wooden pieces including a king and a queen. They sometimes also played a 512-square variation that had 8 levels instead of one. For social life, the two men would visit Long Street, a pleasure district in any ship. The Dora Mora's Long Street was a block long and had six places to take a limited variety of mild recreational drugs, like alcohol. One place was for women only, another for men only, and the rest for various gender combinations.

  Several times, Jory accompanied Malinu and Kinkidai to these bars. Jory enjoyed the drinks, and the women were delightful to look at, but astropaths were hardly sex symbols, and the women shrugged them off. After a while, Jory grew tired of these places. He began to long for the journey to be over so he could set foot on planetary soil somewhere, and he knew that was a bad attitude for an astropath. Given his deformity, that was really the life he'd been designed for. Maybe someplace a surgeon could be found who'd cut these things out of his skull and repair his brain. Malinu shook his head when Jory voiced the thought one night, and Malinu said: “You can't escape it. It's you, and it would kill you if they took this gift from your brain. Our ancestors were ruthless."

  Then Jory had an affair with Nolani. It began one night when Jory, Nolani, and the two male astropaths were walking home from work. Malinu and Kinkidai wanted to go to Long Street. Jory thanked them and said he'd rather not. Nolani offered to walk home with him while the other two left.

  Nolani was his height, but thin, with shiny black hair. Her skin was pale as a riverbank mushroom on Oba. He was lonely, and he suspected she was too. There was a special glow about her skin as they walked slowly, talking about everything and nothing, about music and space and small pets. He kept looking at the skin on her arms, seeing every tiny hair, every spot and blemish. He noticed for the first time that she affected a bracelet made of several colored threads twined into one. Suddenly he became aware that, under those loose overalls, walked a female form with soft spots and swaying parts that were designed to arouse him.

  They walked on the long alley on the outer side of the human work deck until they had gone all the way around the ship. Then they climbed up a deck and walked around the ship a second time. Here and there they passed pseudo-windows that picked up light on the outer skin of the ship and transmitted the light through the ship's hull, to be reassembled as a picture on the inner surface. At other times, they passed small shops with glowing neon signs. They passed one or two bars where women's hard laughter poured out.

  Then, because there was really no place else to go, they came to her quarters and she let him in. She served icy beer. They sat in her sunken living room and watched a funny motion picture in which the hero and heroine kissed often. The hero had to rescue the heroine from her silly attraction to a handsome charmer who was actually after her money.

  Somewhere during the second half of the picture, Jory slid closer on the couch to Nolani. She did not move away. He put his arm around the area behind her back, and she stayed put. He could see the frozen way she held herself, the way her eyes grew wide and her mouth dry as she stared at the big screen. He settled back and lightly pulled her by the shoulders. She settled against his side, her hands and head on his chest. She was surprisingly light and dainty. After a time, he grasped her shoulders with the lightest of touches and guided her to him so that they kissed. Her tongue was surprisingly firm and hungry. She rose and dropped the overalls around her feet so that she wore only flimsy undergarments; her breasts were small and needed no support. He touched her legs, admiring the sheen of her skin in the flickering colored lights of the movie. She turned slightly, and he found himself looking toward the flickering light source between her legs. Thoroughly aroused, he took her hips, gently, and pulled her toward him. She knelt down and undid his overalls and pulled them off, down his legs. Then she explored him with her fingers and lips. The screen went dead except for a silent and unending stream of reddish light particles, not unlike on a journey through space, while Jory and Naloni had sex on the couch. She was slight but strong. She was passionate, but in a noncommittal way that lessened his pleasure slightly. He felt relieved and pleasured and at ease afterward, and would have fallen asleep, but she insisted he go to his quarters. This baffled him a bit, but he staggered home and fell asleep alone in his bed.

  They spent several evenings together, always with that long walk, and then the movie ritual, followed by sex, and then his return home alone. While he enjoyed her in a limited way, Jory began to sense an emptiness about his affair with her. It was going nowhere, and neither of them really wanted it to. He supposed she must see him as a rude ex-slave from the island of Oba on the moon Shur. In his turn, he simply did not see in her the qualities that would attract him—as Ramy,
for instance, had.

  Jory busied himself as much as possible with catching up on the school learning he'd missed—and it was frustrating because he had almost no foundation. Had he been a mere riverbank nah on Oba, there would be no hope for him. Because he did live in a castle, and could recite from memory the entire canon of Oban literature in Classic, Middle Period, and Modern forms, he did have a foundation of discipline and memorizing. Gradually, as the mendz flashed by, he surpassed Nolani at astropathy. His school learning began to grow close in some areas to the learning of the humans raised on Ruandap.

  Jory found a cap he could wear, a wool cap designed for cold planet air, and its ear flaps coincidentally also covered his keradz. He began to visit the library and any social events he could find himself invited to. Gradually, he built a small, loose circle of acquaintances around a club whose members did strenuous cycling and jogging in the Dora Mora's inner gravity mill. He found it very difficult to penetrate their social sphere. The men were distant, the women generally cold. This began to change as one of the more attractive women invited herself along with Jory on a group walk. The woman's name was Ohella. She was a slim, perky brunette with a blunt freckled nose and a sassy mouth. She was an apprentice machinist on the factory floor, and had rough hands to show for it. She introduced him to the ship's human swimming pool, which was a revelation to Jory. He loved the water. She taught him swimming, and, after a light supper and a glass of wine at her place, how to do ‘go around the world.'

  While he was seeing Ohella, Jory fortuitously learned that Nolani had been involved in a long-term affair with Malinu, who, because he was much older, let her play around on the side. Just as Jory turned off to Nolani, Ohella stopped seeing him.

  Another young woman appeared in Ohella's place—Katjina, a blonde with limp, straight hair that gleamed like gold foil. She had strong thighs and a flat stomach. Her small, round breasts, slightly pendulous, were the only soft spots on her limbs or torso—except of course her wet place that she took him to explore.

  After a while, Katjina seemed to find a boyfriend—who, oddly, had been there all along—and it was Moryah's turn. She was small and dark-skinned, like Josenda, and had a full figure that did not display much energy. She quickly went away, replaced by another, and another.

  This life became more and more empty for Jory. He could not seem to go below the surface with any of these people. The women would have sex for a few weeks and drift on. For a long time, he thought that was how they lived. Then he began to notice that one or another of the women took up with the same boyfriends they'd had before. The men tended to be cold toward him, and gradually he dropped out of his clubs one by one, until the library was his only social life. Even there, he found women to take to bed. In his heart, he only wished to find one he could love with the same deep affection he'd had for his Ramy. But there would never be another Ramy, nor for that matter another Oba, or Shur, or childhood as a castle pet.

  One day, as he lay in his quarters reading, came a knock on the door. He rose, slipped on his wool cap, and opened. Josenda stood outside, wearing a dark blue off-duty jump suit. “Hello,” she said with a smile as startled as his, “I haven't seen you in a while, so I thought I would check up on you.” She seemed nervous or something.

  “Come in.” He let her in and closed the door.

  “This is a nice place.” Something was wrong.

  “Thank you.” He wondered what it was.

  “Can I sit down?"

  “Sure.” He folded up the unmade bed so it became a couch. He went into the kitchen to heat water for tea. “How have you been?"

  She seemed to deflect his question as she sat down on the couch and rubbed her hands together as if creating sparks for a fire. “So! What passes in your life?"

  It took but a minim for the water to boil. “Lemon or kivi?"

  “Plain."

  “How unexciting.” He brought two teas—both plain—and handed her one. Then he sat down in an easy chair nearby. “Are you well?” The conversation seemed to go in circles.

  “Well,” she said biting her lower lip, “yes. I'm going to be changing ships. We're going to arrive at Kandor 3c in another month, and I—well, I'll be leaving the ship."

  “For another ship?"

  “Yes. I will be on another ship."

  “And your husband?"

  “He'll—he'll be on another ship. Tell me, how's the astropath game?"

  “I've learned many remarkable things,” he said. He felt sad that she seemed to have broken up with her husband. He felt at ease with her, like an old friend. He took the cap off and laid it aside. “I've become more and more like you people, and yet these big ugly calluses will always make me different."

  “Is there a woman in your life yet?"

  “There have been some, but they seem to leave soon. Am I rude somehow?” He leaned forward anxiously. “Josenda, tell me honestly. What is it? I sense the men hate me, and the women seem to want me for a time, but then—well, I can't quite figure it out. Maybe you'll help me."

  She rose and walked toward him. “Sure. I'll help you, but there's really nothing to help. You're fine the way you are. Maybe you are just too sensitive."

  “That might be it,” Jory said dubiously.

  She took his hands in hers and pulled him up. “Why don't we just go out and have a drink and loosen up? It seems depressing in here."

  “Oh, all right,” he said cheerfully.

  At the door, she turned ironically. “Aren't you forgetting something?"

  He followed her gaze to the bed, and there lay his cap. “Oh, the cap! Yes!” He put it on. “With you, I'm so relaxed I forgot about it. Don't want strangers to stare, do we?"

  They walked to the lift, rode down to the human work deck, and found a tiny corner snack stand. It was always night here in the factory womb of the ship, where workers toiled to keep the ship's parts repaired, and made manufactured goods from raw materials picked up along the ship's travels.

  “I don't have much time,” Josenda said, using traditional wooden sticks to slurp down noodles. She grabbed quick sips of her white wine. Jory nursed a dark beer. For the first time, she was being really friendly, and yet somehow it didn't wash with him.

  They made small talk, and he found her steering him back to his place. As they entered, she said: “I'll bet you never guessed that I'm a trained masseuse."

  “I would not have guessed."

  “I'm going to run the hot water for a bath. Go get undressed and come when I tell you to."

  He watched her walk away into his bathroom. He waited, motionlessly.

  “Okay!” she called.

  He walked slowly into the bathroom. For a moment, he was blinded by steam.

  She had stripped off her clothing and left it on a chair. She wore a white terry towel that covered her breasts and torso. Her black curly hair glistened with swarms of tiny water droplets. She looked surprised. “I said to drop your clothes."

  “Josenda,” he said, advancing on her, “you're not separating from your husband, are you?"

  “What do you mean, Jory. Don't look at me that way."

  “I'm not looking at you any way. I have no argument with you. I am being treated like some sort of—of—farm animal by all of you.” He saw himself as a fuzzy outline in a foggy mirror, but that alone was enough. He tore the wool cap off. “I'm a fool. People are laughing behind my back. The women want my sperm—why?"

  “Darling."

  “Don't—."

  She held up her hands in a stop-motion. “All right. Jory, we're coming into port, and some of us are moving on. Do you know what it's worth to have a child like you? Captain Aptath would pay a fortune. He would raise you in the best of care, educate you, feed you—."

  “That's already been done to me once, Josenda. I was sold by my parents. I lived in a castle. You would have been a river rat or worse, but I would have ridden by in a carriage with my mistress. I can recite the hundred lays of Moti-Nolo, a thousand kjir
old series of children's stories, but I myself never had a childhood. Is that what you want for your child?"

  She hung her head. “I was hoping you would understand. Meikol and I—my husband—we would raise the child ourselves. It's not like you think. Here the parents stay with a special child. Your child would get everything in the world, including our love and devotion."

  Jory picked up her clothes and threw them into her arms. “Get out of here. You people make me sick. I am a freak, but you want a child by me who will be equally a freak. You lie in my face. Maybe you lie to yourself too, but how could you love a child who looks like me?"

  “Please."

  “No. Get out. Go be ashamed if you have the capacity to."

  In his anger, he didn't wait for her to leave, but went out to his kitchen. His fingers shook as he tore off a piece of bread to chew nervously. He heard her rustling in the livingroom. He did not want to see her naked, for fear he would weaken.

  “Goodbye, Jory.” She seemed to wait.

  “Go away."

  He heard her rustle into her clothing. Then he heard the door open and shut. She'd left the towel thrown on the living room floor. He rushed and locked the door. This was worse than being on Oba, he thought as he sagged against the door. Only these were not Shurians—these were his own people. Or his own kind. Perhaps they were no more his people than were the Ruandap, though they were all one kind—from Earth.

  * * * *

  Jory worked harder than ever. He came to accept the detente between Malinu and Nolani, but he did not sleep with her again. That kept Malinu cordial, and put Nolani at ease, because she had tired of Jory and did not want to juggle more than one relationship. Jory guessed she'd gone through a similar gyration with Kinkidai, but didn't ask.