Angry Young Spaceman Read Free Page A

longest line-up I’d ever been in in my twenty-three years, and there was a long way yet to go. In the distance I could see the glass tube that arched over the landing pads and kissed the rocket ship.

    The shock of losing my Speak-O-Matic was wearing off. I was calculating how long I had worked at the foundry to earn the credits it cost: three months, I figured. I imagined pounding my friend in grey for about three months, to even the score.

    A part of me, the stubbornly pug part, was grumbling: If I had left him in a bloody heap in the first place, he wouldn’t be sneaking off anywhere for a while.

    We finally turned the corner and started moving through the tube. The rocketship was this old model, but still shiny — a classic, and I was excited despite myself. The last time I went offworld, it was in a ship just like this one, and I had been amazed by the size. I had known the toy I had at home was smaller, but I had expected something just a little bigger than the family floater.

    Now I was amazed at how small the rocketship seemed, in comparison to the endless line of people. How were we all gonna fit in that skinny thing?

    The tube vibrated a bit as another rocket blasted off. The ignition fire whipped shadows on and off the faces of the other people in the line. Other than the occasional alien, they were mostly human — not a single Octavian in the lot. I looked back as far as I could, then forward as much as I could — nope. And it wasn’t as if they were hard to spot. I guessed I’d have to wait to meet a live Octavian, face-to-face.

    Not that I’d be able to communicate with them anyway. Damn it!

two

    Hi Lisa,

    Nice punch. Haven’t you heard that pug is dead?

    No, I’m not on Octavia yet. All us new English teachers have a week of orientation on this dinky little planet before we’re flung to the stars. It’s OK, though, the gravity’s awesome. At the end of the day I’ve got so much energy left I’ve just got to go out and hit the local bar. Their most tolerable local brew, Poikapoik (means “mighty king killer”), has a kick you remember well into the next day. The illustration on the bottle is a pile of smoking bones with a crown on top, as if His Royalness has just been energy-fragged. The bartender told me that the original king was actually eaten alive, but the natives are always trying to freak us out with their cannibalistic stories...

    Back to the gravity — cool for Earthlings, not so cool for lunarians — it’s actually higher grav than on the moon. One or two of the thinner ones actually had to be sent back because of organ problems. The rest of them are just tired all the time. Between their thinness and exhaustion, when a trooper of a lunarian actually hits the bar with us they usually end up hitting the pavement, too. Poikapoik is quite a bit stronger than what they’re used to.

    Amongst the more predatory of the Earthlings, this was really good news. Who didn’t grow up with a crush on one of the bird-boned lunarian mediastars, with their grace and thin angular beauty? (Guess that’s why people are said to be “mooning after” someone...)

    A real conversation: “Hey Julia, how’d it go with your lunarian boy last night?”

    “Well, he had two whole bottles of Poikapoik...”

    “Uh oh.”

    “Yeah. When we got down to it I found out it kills more than mighty kings.”

    Some of the lunarian women are really attractive, but they’re so tired all the time — and seem a little nervous around Earthling men — that I haven’t been seriously smitten. And you know how I hate that flowery, excessive way lunarians talk.

    In fact, that’s how I met my first friend here. There was this beeeyoutiful moonboy whispering on about something at dinnertime with, like, eight Earth girls hanging on his every word. After he said “the most atrociously designed springboots ever to grace the planet’s surface” I checked my wristwatch aggrometer — out of curiosity, Lisa,