Among The Stars

by Robin Banks

  “You’re telling me that you’re too bright to be a teacher?” he sneers.

  “Nah. My brain’s just wired too weird for that. And Alya told Lara – that’s Raj’s stepmom, the scientist – and she got curious and decided to take a look at me, ‘cause that’s the kind of thing she does. We got talking about the work she does, which she doesn’t get much of a chance to talk about because most people don’t really understand it. I’m used to not understanding shit so it didn’t bother me any, so we kept talking. It turns out that sometimes I can see connections between things that other people miss. I can spot problems. Like, if they’re trying to terraform and it’s not working, or shit keeps getting thrown out of whack, sometimes I can look at it and work out what needs tweaking.”

  “So you’re a scientist now?”

  “Oh hell no. I just look at problems and somehow I can come up with answers. More often than not they are the right answers, or a right answer, anyway. I dunno. Lara’s still trying to work it out. She says that it’s something to do with my brain thinking in circles instead of straight lines and hyperfocusing on details and stuff like that. Non-standard wiring.”

  “Well, shit. Being a paranoid obsessive sonofabitch is a marketable skill now?”

  “Apparently. Weird, isn’t it?”

  “Man, I make a living dangling from the ceiling. Tell me about weird.”

  “Still beats mining.”

  “No shit.”

  We’ve both calmed down now. I’ve not seen the guy in two years and it feels like yesterday. It feels like we just picked up where we left off – well, no, maybe a few weeks before where we left off, because I’m not killing him. Not even tempted.

  Well, maybe a little.

  The music in the show changes and he shakes himself off. “Shit, I gotta go. How do I look?”

  “Like a third-rate man-whore with way more muscles than brains. But your make-up is fine.”

  “Thank you. I guess.” He stares at the floor. “So, you’re gonna be around later?”

  “Can’t. I got a lift in.”

  “Oh. Ok.” He nods curtly and starts walking away.

  “But I could probably swing by tomorrow.”

  “Yeah?” He’s nearly smiling now. It’s not a great smile – there’s way too much hurt in it, still – but it does go all the way up to his eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “Alright then.” My brother walks off towards the backstage and leaves me sitting there, so fucking confused about what life has thrown at me and how I feel about it that I don’t know which way is up.

  I need to go and find my people before Alya sends out a search party, though, so I make my way back to the foyer. I hesitate about cutting through the gap with the big top. This is not my place anymore and the shortcuts aren’t meant for me. Then I figure that dressed as I am and with the company I’m keeping I could probably take a piss in the middle of the ring and nobody would lift a finger to stop me. Looking vaguely important has its advantages, I guess.

  I sneak into the big top. The guys on doors don’t even get up. There’s no way in hell anyone could have heard me over the noise of the show, but Alya turns around immediately to eyeball me. She sat herself on the back row of ringside, which is very, very silly because she’s so damn small that there’s no way in hell she can see a damn thing from there. She stares at me so hard that she must be seeing all the way through me. I smile at her to let her know that I’m fine, but she just narrows her eyes and looks at me even harder, clearly ready to throat-punch the world on my behalf. Raj is sitting next to her, obviously. He noticed her noticing me and turned around too with that braced, hard look he gets when he’s about to happen at somebody. I look at the two of them and my smile gets real, because this is solid, this is something I can lean on.

  I think then that maybe, just maybe, it’s ok that I don’t have any more of a clue than I did when I was sixteen, or eleven, or six. That the more I see of life the less I understand it. I think that maybe having a clue is not what it’s all about, because life goes and turns good things into bad and bad into good till there’s no way of telling what’s what. At most you can tell where the fuck you are at any one point in time, and even that is touch and go. So maybe the trick is coming to terms with not having a clue, with the fact that everything is ending and beginning on you all the damn time, whether you like it or not, or never really ending at all. If the difference is only in how you look at it, why even bother to try and work it all out?

  But the show music is building up now and the lady on the silks is wrapping herself round and round. I recognize what she’s doing and I know what’s coming next, because I’ve seen it a ton of times. She’s going to drop all the way down. I know she won’t hit the floor, but every single time it catches my breath, every single damn time it’s just as amazing as the first time I saw it, every single time I see it it’s the first and only time I’m going to see it that time. This moment is the only moment I’ve got. That may be a very clever observation on my part or it may be bullshit, but this isn’t the time to work it out because she’s gonna drop any second, so I shut the fuck up thinking.

  Glossary

  ‘ATR’. All-Terrain Rovers. Six-wheeled vehicles designed for passenger and cargo transport both in- and out-bubble. The out-bubble versions are independent habitats.

  ‘Bubble’. An artificial dome designed to allow human habitation of planets where the local environmental conditions (atmosphere, temperatures, radiation, etc.) would otherwise be deadly. A portabubble is a bubble designed to be transportable.

  First, second, and third class. The class system harks back to the time when humanity first took to space. In a nutshell, the first class owned the ships, the second class bought their tickets, and the third class worked their way on board.

  ‘Groundling’. A person who has never been to space.

  ‘Grub’, ‘grubber’. Someone who moils about in the dirt, i.e. someone who lives on a colony on a planet rather than an artificial environment. Alternatives: ‘dirtsider,’ ‘colonist.’

  ‘Holos’. 3-D photographs.

  ‘Out-worlder’. On a colony, someone who was born anywhere else.

  ‘Psi-gifted’. Someone who possesses unusual mental powers, such as telepathy, true empathy, precognition, telekinesis, hypnosis, etc.

  ‘Threedees’. 3-D movies.

  ‘Tuber’, ‘tube people’. Someone who lives on an artificial habitat in space. Cylindrical space stations are called ‘tubes’ because of their shape, but the label of ‘tuber’ is also applied to people who live on a torus.

  Discography

  Apropos of nothing, here’s a list of the music I listened to while writing this.

  Uncle Tupelo – No Depression

  Uncle Tupelo – Still Feel Gone

  Uncle Tupelo – March 16–20, 1992

  Uncle Tupelo – Anodyne

  (If Luke ever formed a band, that band would be Uncle Tupelo.)

  Bacilos – Solo Un Segundo - Lo Mejor De Bacilos

  (For me, being in circus was precisely like the first 30 seconds of “Tabaco y Chanel”.)

  Caetano Veloso – Caetano E Chico Juntos E Ao Vivo

  Caetano Veloso – Circulado Vivo

  Hedningarna – 1989–2003

  Hedningarna – Hedningarna

  Hedningarna – Hippjokk

  Hedningarna – Kaksi

  Muzsikás – Máramaros: The Lost Jewish Music Of Transylvania

  Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds – Tender Prey

  Operation Ivy – Energy

  Son Volt – Trace

  Sting – The Last Ship

  T-Bone Burnett – True Detective Season 1 [Soundtrack]

  Tabla Beat Science – The Tala Matrix

  Tuomas Kantelinen – Mongol [Soundtrack]

  Various Artists – Dead Man Walking [Soundtrack]

  The memory chips Raj gives to Alya contain:

  L’Arpeggiata – Landi - Homo fugit velut umbra

  T
alisk – Abyss

  Matisyahu – Youth

  Royal Street Orchestra – Live at Utopiastadt

  Raj’s song for Alya:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgN7gUcmfp4

  About the author

  Robin Banks finds writing in the third person intensely creepifying, so I won’t.

  I was born a while ago, and these days I don’t regret it too often. A fan of peregrinations with a terrible tendency to get myself marooned, I currently dwell with an excessive number of dogs right at the end of the big cabbage field. That’s the big field with the cabbages, not the field with the big cabbages. Don’t be silly.

  I enjoy road trips, dogs, guitars, and getting into scrapes. My favorite writers are Tom Robbins, Spider Robinson, and Matthew Stover, Rory Miller for non-fiction. I refuse to be landlocked, because you need to have some standards. I like Irish coffee with condensed milk in lieu of cream. You can’t help some people.

  There is a rumor going around that I might in fact be a collection of raccoons hiding inside a hoodie, but that’s not been confirmed to date, possibly because I bite.

  I ran away with the circus when I was 35. That’s not the standard age for jossers to join a show, but that’s when I got the chance, so I took it. It was the best mistake I ever made.

  I’ve never been happier than when I was travelling with a show. For the first time in my life I was part of a real community: a group of people whose lives are fully intertwined, and who are aware and respectful of that fact. I was surrounded by people who are truly alive. I was never, ever bored. Circus life can be hard, repetitive, and endlessly frustrating in a myriad ways, but for me it’s the best life there is.

  I left after a year, for various reasons, and then proceeded to mess up my life in a way that prevented me from going back. I worked in circus part-time for a while, but that is nothing like travelling with a show. I regret leaving circus to this day, and will probably regret it forever. Some love affairs carry on long after the break-up.

  This book has nothing to do with my life on show and the people I met there. It is a work of fiction. Tigers do pee on people on purpose, though. They’re sneaky like that.

  If you enjoyed this, please check out:

  https://www.facebook.com/HeinleinsFinches

  https://godsbastard.wordpress.com/heinleins-finches

  With many thanks to Sjoerd Bergstra, Shane Michael Murphy, and Mary Kogut, who suffered through the first draft of their own volition.

  Last Song,

  the third book in the Heinlein’s Finches series,

  will be available on Amazon as a kindle book and in paperback.

  Here’s the first chapter as a sampler.

  Year 2481

  Terran Standard

  1. Luke

  It’s a good plan. Simple, too. All I have to do is get to breakfast before anyone else is up, have a coffee or three, push my food around my plate for a bit, and get the hell out before anyone has a chance to collar me. By anyone, I mean Alya. Everyone else is worried about me, I know that. I’m as sorry about that as I can be, but I can’t blame them. I’d be worried about me too, if I could care. Alya, though, she’s worried and mistrustful. I’d say that she’s bossy, too, except that saying ‘Alya’ and ‘bossy’ in the same sentence seems redundant.

  Even Alya wouldn’t stoop to asking the staff how many mouthfuls of food actually passed my lips, though. That’d just stir up more talk, and that’s the last thing any of us wants right now. So, if I get in and out of there quick enough to miss her, all she’ll know is that I’ve had my breakfast, even if all I actually did was rearrange it. I probably won’t have the chance to get enough caffeine on board to manage what passes for normal functioning on my part, but I could always ask for some to take to work with me. It wouldn’t be that much trouble for the staff to find me a flask. Even if it was a hassle, ever since all that shit went down they bend over backward to avoid being around me. They’d send me off with a meal for four on gilded plates if it got me out of the house faster. So, yeah, it is a good plan. It covers all the bases. It should work.

  It doesn’t.

  I barely have a chance to sit down and start inhaling my coffee when Alya turns up, looking undercooked. Her face has that half-finished look she gets when she’s not had enough sleep. It reminds me of the Good Bad Old Days, when exhaustion was built into our lifestyle. Back then I never realized how bad she looked because I never got a chance to see her looking well. Now that I do, it’s quite a shock.

  I ought to feel bad about that, too. A few months ago, if she woke up this early she would have just turned over and gone back to sleep. Hell, Raj would have found a reason to keep her in bed even if she couldn’t sleep. He worships the ground she stands on, but he prefers it when she’s lying down. Now, though, she’s up and about at this ungodly hour and I know it’s my fault. The woman’s on my ass like a coat of paint.

  I don’t feel bad, though. Partly it’s because I can’t, ‘cause I just don’t have it in me right now, and partly it’s because even half-finished her look is fully ominous. She sits herself across the table from me nursing a coffee of her own. There’s no way she could possibly know what I was plotting, but I know she does: the glint in her eyes tells me so. It also tells me that, however clever I might think I am, she can outscheme me without trying. She’s a pro, I’m a kid, and that’s how it’s going to be forevermore. I’d resent her less if she wasn’t kinda right.

  I sigh in my coffee. I breathe in a reminder that she’s my friend and I love her, even when I can’t feel it. I breathe out any hope for a smooth start to the day. I ponder all the while, and not for the first time, what the scores on her psi-tests were, because this kind of thing is happening too often to be a fucking coincidence. I brace for another uncomfortable conversation. Then I catch Alya staring at my plate and smirking.

  Fuck. I picked my breakfast based on how easy it would be to smear it around the plate and make it look at least half-eaten. Now I’m faced with a plateful of slops. Posh slops, obviously, the finest slops credit can buy and much better than someone like me has a right to expect, but slops nonetheless.

  That’ll teach me to think I’m smart. As if I didn’t have enough evidence to the contrary.

  I load up a forkful of whatever the hell the yellow stuff is. I’m just about to shove it in my mouth when Alya sighs.

  “There’s bacon out there, you know. And if you asked them, they’d make you a waffle. Or pancakes. Something that doesn’t look recycled, anyway.”

  “Nah. This is fine. I have to get to work soon, anyway.”

  “No, you don’t.” She puts her cup down and stares at it as if it had personally insulted her. “I bumped into Lara yesterday – or rather, she bumped into me. She wanted to talk to me because she’s worried about you. She’s worried about the hours you’re putting in when there are no urgent projects, among other things. A whole host of other things. And before you get tetchy, she only talked to me because she tried talking to you already and it did no good.”

  I nearly feel that blow. Dress it any way you like, Lara went behind my back to Alya. I know we’re not equals – Lara is my boss, after all – but I thought she respected me. Fuck it, that’s not true: I thought we were friends. I need to cut that shit out.

  One less person I can count on. Yeah, I can feel this blow alright.

  I look at the forkful of food hovering in mid-air in front of my face. Just thinking about swallowing it makes me feel sick.

  “Luke?” She says it in a tone that begs me to look at her. No good can come of that, though, so I don’t.

  “Alya?”

  She taps the rim of her cup. I’m braced for another one of her talks, but she just lets off a long sigh.

  She doesn’t say anything for a while. I manage to eat a few mouthfuls of the yellow slops – eggs, or their nearest approximation, as it turns out – without gagging. My chest is starting to tighten up again. I know it’s all in my head, but it’s making
it difficult for me to get any air in, let alone swallow. I gotta do it, though. It’s enough that I’ve got Alya out of bed this early, enough that I’ve got Lara on my case.

  “Your coffee. You’re drinking black coffee.”

  I was so focused on trying to breathe around the pain in my chest that her voice startled me into looking at her. I really wish I hadn’t, because now I can’t look away.

  “Yeah,” I nod.

  “I’ve never seen you drink black coffee.”

  “You’re seeing me now.”

  “Got any sugar in it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why?”

  I can’t think of a single good answer to that, so I tell her the truth.

  “I couldn’t be bothered with it, is all. It’s not a big deal.”

  “You’re up hours before you need to be so you can get to work before your time starts to do stuff that doesn’t need doing for ages. You’re eating the gods only know what, when there’s some of your favorites out there; and I know this because I’m the one who asked for them to be there. You couldn’t be bothered with the effort of lifting a jug of creamer and dropping a few lumps of sugar into your own cup. And it’s not a big deal. Ok. I guess if we can’t manage three impossible things before breakfast, we can at least aim for three improbable ones at breakfast.”

  I try to smile at her. “Sorry. I missed that reference.”

  “I miss you. That’s all. I’m scared, and I miss you.”

  There’s an edge of desperation to her voice. Hearing that ramps up the pain in my chest.

  “Alya, it’s alright. I’m just… I’m up early because I couldn’t sleep. So I’m tired, I’m not really in the mood for food, and I couldn’t be asked messing around with my coffee. It really isn’t a big deal. I’ll go to bed early tonight and I’ll be ok tomorrow.” If I get back from work late and go to bed early I’ll be able to avoid the family altogether, but I don’t have to tell her that.