Kharmic Rebound

by Yeager, Aaron

  “You’ll like it here,” Ilrica explained. “We have representatives from all the best game in the galaxy. Utorians, Galavans, even Almos. It’s like an all-you-can-hunt smorgasbord.”

  Gerald glanced over at her. She had a dangerous light in her eyes. “You’re joking right?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Oh good.”

  “I had to swear an oath not to hunt any of you prey species while I’m here. It would bring shame upon the Bertulf if I broke my word.”

  His eyes grew wide. “Oh.”

  Next she dragged him across the quad and through a hedgerow to a fractally-colored domed building. Deep throbbing music came from inside, and the scent of wines and sweets wafted from within.

  “This is the Eligiya Hall. With so many different religions, pretty much every day falls upon someone’s holy calendar. To keep things tidy, all of the celebrations are held here. It’s pretty much a constant party. Just make sure and read the guides posted before you enter, or you may find yourself sacrificed to some statue. It’s happened before. Sometimes we even have one of the gods show up to attend, and that’s always exciting.” She leaned in closer. “But seriously if they do, don’t bug ‘em. Don’t ask ‘em for an autograph, don’t ask them for a picture. They’re sick of all that stuff, and if you tick em off you’ll spend the rest of your life as a frog... and that’s not a metaphor. We had a kid last year that tried to argue scriptures with NeoThema The Great. We’re still finding bits of that kid here and there. Anyway, the schedule fills up pretty quick, so you’ll want to plan ahead if you want to use the hall to worship whatever god you fancy.”

  Gerald coughed. After running so far he could barely breathe, she didn’t seem winded in the slightest. “Soeckism is a philosophy, not a religion. We don’t have a deity, although we do have enlightened ones that we venerate and pray to for guidance.”

  Ilrica took both his hands and looked him in the eyes. “That is so amazing. I find your beliefs completely fascinating.”

  Gerald frowned. “You’re just trying to be nice to me so I won’t tell anyone about the skiv accident.”

  “That is exactly what I am doing,” she said, pinching his cheek. “You’re so cute. Ooh, let’s go to the cafeteria next!”

  “Wait...”

  But it was too late, they were off like a rocket. She ran up along the wall as if gravity simply didn’t exist for her, leaping out across a sand garden, then climbing up the sheer glass wall. Gerald felt like his arm was going to come out of its socket.

  The kitchen area protruded out into the spacious cafeteria like a horseshoe.

  “Five hundred forty-five different species here at Central Exeter, and these chefs work round the clock to prepare haute cuisine for each of their distinct pallets,” Ilrica explained, handing him a tray.

  “Wow, that’s impressive.”

  Gerald had never seen so many different kinds of exotic foods in his life. Tanks of swimming creatures, bubbling stews swirling with glowing mist, trays of living noodles. All the strange and exotic spices kind of fused together into an aroma which was both bizarre and heavenly at the same time.

  “Central Exeter is a marketplace of philosophies and cultures. They stress respect and tolerance for all,” she explained as they walked. “Seriously, don’t go over to that aisle. That is where the carrion-eaters are served.”

  She shivered. “Bleh. Nasty people.”

  “Wow, look at this, little dried baby alligators,” he said, pointing to a barrel.

  “Kamanchhi, so what?”

  “No, it’s just I’ve never seen alligator-like thingies that small, and there’s a whole barrel of them with a scoop. Just like gummy bears.”

  Ilrica snatched up a bat wing from a tray and began nibbling on it. “You wanna try some of them?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, grabbing the scoop.

  While she prattled on, he searched through the rows of fresh produce, finally settling on a little root vegetable that smelled like a cross between a turnip and feet.

  “Aren’t you going to have anything?” he asked as they approached the register.

  “I only eat what I hunt. The free range cafeteria is outside.”

  “You really weren’t kidding about the hunting, were you?”

  When he reached the register he found it abandoned. He peeked behind the glowing monitors floating in the air and saw an adorable little purple kitten sitting on the stool.

  “Aww, that’s cute, someone brought their pet with them.”

  “Who are you calling a pet?” the kitten spat. “My people are warriors. We have conquered hundreds of worlds over the millennia.”

  “Hi Esma,” Ilrica said, leaning over Gerald’s shoulder.

  The purple kitten bowed formally. “Your people hunted alongside us during the Age of Ragnarok, you have my respect.” Esma turned back to Gerald. “We crap bigger than you.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said, swiping his I.D. through the reader and scurrying away. The reader heated up and then died, letting out a whif of smoke.

  “They really do, too,” Ilrica added as she sat down, the chair reforming itself to comfortably match her body shape. “Their physical bodies are only how they manifest on a planet. Out in space, their true form is over a hundred meters tall.”

  “That’s amazing.” Gerald paused as his chair fluctuated for a few moments, then took the shape of a bicycle seat. He lifted the hem of his robes and awkwardly straddled his legs over it to sit down as best he could.

  “So, do you like me yet?” Ilrica asked, intentionally batting her big emerald eyes.

  “You’re not very subtle are you?” he said, taking a bite of the turnip-thing. “Woo! That is pungent.”

  She leaned back and laughed. It was sharp and predatory. “Subterfuge is a tool of the weak. A true hunter has no need for it.”

  “I see.”

  “But seriously, you’re not going to tell anyone, right?”

  He picked up a dried Kamanchhi. “I dunno, wouldn’t that be a kind of subterfuge?”

  The humor left her face. Her tall ears dropped in irritation.

  Gerald chuckled. “Yeah, sure, why not?”

  She smiled. “Good, let’s go to class, then.”

  “Wait, I haven’t finished my...”

  She grabbed his hand and they were off again.

  When they reached the classroom, Gerald had twigs and leaves in his hair from being dragged through a tree in the courtyard. He moved to clean them out, but Ilrica didn’t give him a chance.

  “Go ahead and introduce yourself, I have a couple errands to run. If they call out my name, just say I’m here.”

  “But...”

  The door swished open and she pushed him in. Before he could say anything it was closed again and she was gone.

  Gerald turned and found the classroom eerily quiet. All the students sat silently in their customized seats. Their eyes closed, their breathing rhythmic. At the head of the class stood the teacher, likewise eyes closed and silent.

  In the far corner sat a student with bright red skin like a fire-engine. The three seats around her were empty, as if there were a buffer between her and the rest of the class. Gerald felt like his footsteps sounded three times louder than normal as he walked over to one of the empty seats.

  The seat, little more than an egg-shaped lump in its inert mode, reacted to his presence and reformed itself into the shape of a bicycle seat.

  “Someone needs to change the setting for humans,” Gerald quipped to the student as he sat down, but she was completely unresponsive.

  For several agonizing minutes Gerald sat there in complete silence. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. It was five kinds of creepy, and it made his skin feel itchy, like he felt whenever he passed through an old cemetery or listened to a Justin Bieber song.

  Scratching his arm, Gerald leaned over and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Gerald Dyson. I’m new here, nice to meet you.”

  This time the red-skinne
d student opened her black eyes and turned to him. “Why are you speaking to us?” she asked.

  Self-consciously he scratched the back of his neck. “Well, I’ve been told classmates should be friendly to one another. I just wanted to know your name.”

  She raised a black eyebrow. “You do not know us?”

  “Well, no,” he chuckled. “That’s why I asked.”

  She looked at him curiously. Her eyes were black on black, like colorless marbles. Larger than human eyes, he could faintly see his own nervous reflection in them.

  “Trahzi,” she said at last.

  “Trahzi?”

  She nodded. “We are Trahzi.”

  Gerald offered to shake her hand. She looked at him distastefully.

  “We do not like to be touched.”

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hand and faking a smile. “It’s nice to meet you Trahzi.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Why would it be?”

  “Well... ah...”

  Without saying anything else, she turned back forward and closed her eyes again. Gerald flicked the translator he wore on his ear a couple of times, thinking there was something wrong with it again. It kept translating ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ when she spoke.

  The teacher at the front of the class opened her eyes and noticed him sitting there.

  “Oh my, I’m so sorry I didn’t notice you come in. Everyone, we have a latecomer here in class today.”

  At that all of the students seemed to come to life as if she had thrown a switch. They removed the cables from the back of their necks and turned around, greeting him half-heartedly in a variety of fashions. None of them seemed pleased to see him.

  “I am Ms. Stubbs, and I teach your homeroom, she said with a demure little smile. “Why don’t you come up and introduce yourself to the class?”

  “Sure, that doesn’t sound awkward at all,” he whispered under his breath as he got up off the bicycle seat and walked up to the front of the class.

  It felt like there were a thousand eyes on him, and when he passed a student with segmented eyes like a fly, he realized that might literally be true.

  “Hello everyone,” he said, making sure to pause so their translators could download his language from Central. “I know that a lot of you are wondering why I’m here, and to be honest I’m asking myself the same question. I have no idea why I’m here. As far as I can tell, there has never been a human student, and being the first is a lot of pressure, but I am happy to be here. I know humans don’t have a very good reputation in the Alliance, but let me assure you, I don’t consider myself any different from the rest of you, and I ask only that you afford me the same courtesy. I look forward to working together to become the best that we can be. Let’s all graduate together with honors.”

  Feeling quite pleased with himself, he thrust one hand in the air and finished his introduction with a “Woo!” half expecting the others to join in, but none of them did.

  Earth? came a voice from inside his head. Gerald’s eyes darted around looking for a source, but could find none. Isn’t that the planet that joined the Alliance then spun apart?

  The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was unnerving to say the least.

  A student in the front row stood up and a window appeared in the air above her, indicating her grades and current ranking. Gerald couldn’t make out much of it, but he recognized the large symbol meaning “number one” next to her name.

  Ms. Stubbs, as Class Representative I must protest, came the voice again. Somehow Gerald knew it was coming from this student, even though her mouth didn’t move when she spoke.

  “Cha’Rolette...” Ms. Stubbs began, but she cut her off.

  You will refer to me as Madam Ssykes, Duchess, or not at all. Are we clear?

  “Yes, Duchess,” the teacher apologized with a hasty bow.

  Cha’Rolette turned to Gerald and looked him over judgmentally. Her uniform was adorned and personalized with jewelry. There was something regal about the way she held herself, and something smug about the crooked smile on her lips. She looked surprisingly similar to a human except for her skin, which was a light green hue. Her hair was a darker green, which she wore in styled ringlets on either side of her face.

  As our teacher it is your duty to guard our reputations, and protect us from anything that would threaten them, is that correct? Cha’Rolette’s voice echoed, even though her mouth remained closed.

  “Yes, Duchess.”

  I have worked long and hard to earn my place here, but if word gets out that I am classmate to a game addict, then surely even a low-birth such as yourself can see how that association would reflect poorly on me.

  Gerald held up his finger. “Actually, I’ve never even played True-Life.”

  It was then that he realized that what he thought was hair wasn’t hair at all, but some kind of smooth tentacle that grew out from her head. Without looking at him, her ringlet unwound itself and formed into the shape of a hand motioning for him to silence himself.

  You will speak when spoken to, her voice echoed. Or, do they not teach manners on Earth anymore?

  Gerald thought. “Actually I don’t think they teach anything anymore. The last schools closed years ago.”

  Cha’Rolette looked at him sharply.

  “Sorry, I talk when I’m nervous.”

  See that you correct that habit.

  Another student stood up and a ranking window appeared over his head. “Tomar Keendland, currently ranked third,” he said, his large elephant-like ears hanging back over his shoulders. “I agree that Dyson has no place here among us, but that is only an opinion, isn’t it? We should withhold final judgment until he is tested and ranked as we were during the evaluation ceremonies.”

  Ms. Stubbs looked to Cha’Rolette for approval.

  Noblesse Oblige, Cha’Rolette said, flicking her ringlets back with her hand. It is the responsibility of the nobility to set an example for the others to aspire to. Let him take the tests and sift himself out of our presence.

  Cha’Rolette and Tomar sat back down, and as Gerald returned to his seat. A window appeared over his head, all the values set at zero.

  “Boy, they really take this ranking stuff seriously,” he whispered to himself as he sat back down.

  “While the testing protocols are brought up, you are welcome to join in on our discussion,” Ms. Stubbs said sweetly. “Link to Central channel roku. We are currently reviewing Calatarian case law and proconsul court rulings up to and including the modern era.”

  All the other students unwound the cables from their desks and plugged them into the back of their necks. Gerald sat down, looking at the lonely cable poking out from the top of his desk. For a moment he considered saying nothing, but the teacher noticed and denied him the chance.

  “Is there something wrong? Why are you not plugging-in?” she asked with one eye cracked open.

  Gerald cleared his throat. “Well, because humans can’t do that.”

  Everyone turned around and scowled at him.

  “Y-you’re kidding, right?” Ms. Stubbs said, trying to laugh it off.

  He slapped the back of his neck, showing that there were no implants there. “I mean, I could jam it in my nose, but that’s about it.”

  The teacher stared at him in disbelief. To emphasize the point, he pulled out the cable and put the end in his nose. “See? Nothing.”

  Suddenly every student in the class stood up and began protesting. Their ranking windows filled the air above them, their voices rolling over and fusing together into a kind of squall that vaguely reminded Gerald of seagulls. He had never been overly fond of seagulls, but at that moment, he would have given anything to be back at the shores of the Great Salt Lake listening to the gulls. Sure, the lake was fetid and stinky, little more than a natural cesspool, but by Soeck’s pedestal, it was his cesspool.

  “Um, Mr. Dyson,” came the panicked voice of his teacher above the students. “I think you’d b
etter go see the Director and see if you can straighten this out. Yeah, I think that would be best for everyone involved.”

  Gerald glanced over at Trahzi, who was the only one still sitting at her seat, eyes closed amid the chaos.

  “Only three minutes and I’m already being sent to the director’s office,” Gerald joked with her. “That’s got to be some kind of a record.”

  Trahzi ignored him.

  Chapter Five

  After Earth joined the Alliance, her media industry experienced a brief but powerful surge in popularity. This was largely due to cultural misunderstandings. Timmerons assumed the Pauly Shore movies were deep political metaphors, and debated them endlessly, while the people of Koab took the writings of Jane Austen to be something akin to cautionary fairy tales for children. The tide of Earth’s extraplanetary success turned during an interview on Newsgrid Live, in which Stephen Spielberg was forced to admit that Saving Private Ryan was not, in fact, meant to be taken as a zany comedy. Within the year, Hollywood had all but completely vanished, unable to rival Gorakian productions, which boasted budgets in the trillions of credits. At the date of this writing, only David Hasslehoff remains a prominent Earth-born celebrity, posthumously enjoying an unparalleled singing career on Olt’Ta, where he is being considered for sainthood.

  -A Tourists Guide to Earth, 2nd edition, page 278, Valium Press

  Gerald found that he had quite a bit of difficulty telling the passage of time without being able to see his sun. The small waiting room they had placed him in had no clock, and while he could see out into the quad through the window, he still had no idea how many hours long a day was on this particular planet.

  He just knew it had been quite some time, and he was getting very bored.

  Outside on the grass, he watched Cha’Rolette sit beneath an orange-hued tree and eat lunch with her underlings, Tulda Bora and Kamanie Dissilva, the beta and gamma females that always seemed to be part of those kind of groups. Like human females, Gerald noticed that they limited themselves to three members, despite the fact that there were several other girls hanging around at the fringes, obviously hoping to become permanent members if the opportunity arose. This is because any female group of four or more is destined to fracture and split into smaller groups—what Gerald called his ‘female critical-mass theory.’