The Light Years

by R. W. W. Greene

  “Asking you this was Mom’s idea, but any advice for a soon-to-be husband with an interesting girlfriend?”

  Dooley grunted and turned to the small counter behind the bar. “I want you to try something.” Adem heard the bustle of a mixed drink being prepared. “It’s new.”

  “Make sure you use my stuff,” Adem said. “The booze Tully turns out always tastes like he strained it through one of his socks.”

  “That’s because he does.” Dooley turned, drink in hand and placed it on the bar in front of his son.

  “I can’t believe you keep inflicting these things on us without ever trying them yourself.”

  “It’s haram.” Dooley crossed himself. “My sainted mother paid good money to raise me Muslim. I promised her alcohol would never pass my lips.”

  Haram and halal. Adem’s childhood had been full of those words. Asking questions, halal. Defying orders, haram. Picking on younger siblings, haram, unless it was fun to all parties, then it was halal. On Earth the words might have had the force of law, but on the Hajj they’d been Dooley’s shorthand for how to be a good person.

  Adem picked up the drink and sniffed it. “Smells spicy.” He took a cautious sip and held it in his mouth. His eyes and nostrils flared, and he swallowed hard. It was hotter than rocket exhaust, and swallowing made it worse. The drink traced a line of fire down the back of his throat. When it hit his stomach, the heat turned to instant nausea.

  “What the hell did you give me?”

  Dooley chuckled. “Wait for it.”

  The nausea and shakes subsided quickly and were replaced by a warm glow that seemed to fill Adem’s entire body. He felt relaxed and rested.

  “Think I should put it on the menu?”

  “What the hell is it?” Adem wiped sweat off his face.

  “I just invented it. I call it An Arranged Marriage, because that’s what it will be like if you’re lucky. If not,” he picked up his bar cloth again, “it will be hard on both of you. She’ll be leaving everything she knows and casting her lot with a bunch of strangers. Worse. Her parents cast it, and there’s bound to be some resentment over that. I wouldn’t expect to be getting along with her right away. You’ll have to win her over.”

  “Sounds like I have it pretty easy.”

  “You haven’t had much of a life.” Dooley’s right eyebrow went up. “You’ve spent what? A year off this ship? And most of that was in dry dock when you were thirteen, and we needed an overhaul. She’s been living on a planet that’s been growing and changing all along, surrounded by new ideas and new people coming in and out of her life.” He polished the bar unnecessarily. “We’ll be like dinosaurs to her. Or ghosts, maybe. Your great-grandmother was on one of the last boats off Earth. That was a millennium ago. Ancient history to your bride, but to you it’s family. The way we do things up here is going to seem impossibly new and incredibly old at the same time. How’s she going to feel when she finds out one of her husband’s last sweeties was a boy?”

  Adem sputtered. “You can’t possibly think she’ll be a fundamentalist!”

  “Maybe not, but she’s been bound to one world and things change fast down there. What might be okay one decade is frowned upon or forbidden the next. And she hasn’t been living in a box all this time. She’s a teenager now. Who’s to say she hasn’t been finding lovers and love of her own? She’s likely to have as much baggage as you do by the time she boards.”

  “I don’t have baggage.”

  “Says you. I think you were sweeter on Sarat than you let on.” He hung the bar cloth on the sink and untied his apron. “I have to close and do a shift in the med center. You want another drink?”

  Adem eyed his cocktail glass fearfully. “I’m all set.”

  Dooley came around the bar and handed the apron to Adem. “Take over. Make sure poor Tommy gets back to his cabin.”

  “You make it seem impossible that any of this is going to work.”

  “Guess it’s too late to run, isn’t it?”

  HISAKO

  Age seventeen

  The stillbirth of my fairytale stained my dress crimson

  And I will be dragged to the Underworld with it.

  Let the Greek tragedy begin

  Without comedy or wit.

  I am the passive daughter of Mother Nature

  Spotted in the fields by a cradle snatcher.

  Was it six pomegranate seeds or three?

  Will winter fall in my absence,

  Or did Demeter forget her empathy?

  Now I stand at the altar stiff as a painted corpse.

  The hollow space buried in my ribcage may ache,

  Yet I will smile in ivory tulle and champagne silk.

  I won’t shiver with each breath I take.

  My eyes won’t fill with glitter and stars like the other girls.

  I can’t speak any louder,

  Nor cry underneath pretty pearls

  And Zeus could not be prouder.

  I closed the hand-bound book. There was a song in there somewhere, but fuck proud father figures. Mine was in jail again, hauled in as part of a random sweep. Wrong place, wrong time, he said. My mother disagreed: wrong place, wrong company. They hadn’t talked since they locked him up, so my father sent me a message asking me to take care of his book. He was afraid Mom would trash it. I’d been carrying it around ever since. It was stupid, but it felt like a talisman. If I kept it safe, he’d find his way home.

  Johnny took a drag of his cigarette. “It’s got to be you, Sako. Maki can’t carry a tune in a cargo pod. He’s holding us back.”

  Maki and I had been on-again, off-again for years. He played better when we were on, but there are only so many sacrifices a girl should have to make for her band. Johnny was taller and had more tattoos. His grin was infectious and made parts of me want to smile along. Not my heart though. It was in the contract. I leaned back against his legs. He was sitting on the couch, and I was on the floor in front of him in case he wanted to play with my hair. He said he liked it long. “If I take over the guitar, who is going to play keyboards? You?”

  “I could learn.” Johnny failed to blow a smoke ring. His name wasn’t really Johnny, but he preferred it to Jean-Paul and got touchy if anyone called him that. Johnny was more punk, he said. His parents were loaded and had bought him an apartment on the other side of the crater from them. It was a good place to hang out and practice.

  Ramona laughed, making her green mohawk shake. She held out her hand for Johnny’s cigarette. “Sako’s been playing for years. It would take you at least that long to get as good as we need you to be. Stick with the drums.” She puffed on Johnny’s cigarette and watched the smoke as it rose to the ceiling.

  Smoking was new to me, and I hadn’t decided if I liked it yet. My brand was odorless, but Johnny preferred the cheaper, old-fashioned variety. I could taste it on his breath whenever he kissed me, and I wasn’t sure if I liked that either. I scratched the corner of my eye, careful not to smudge the heavy eyeliner I’d started wearing last year. I wasn’t sure why I bothered to try saving it. I’d have to scrape it all off before I went home, or I’d get an earful from my mother.

  Ramona stubbed out the cigarette. “We could go into La Merde.” The snarl she usually wore tended to look fake, unlike the smile that lit up her face when she wasn’t paying attention. “I hear they have some radioactive guitarists down there. I saw a documentary on it.”

  I’d seen the same documentary. A well-heeled camera team had gone into the squalor to reveal the “Magic of the Square,” a place in the center of La Merde where the refugee kids went to make art, love, and music. Already one of the bands featured on the documentary had a rich patron and was recording in a studio uptown.

  “We’ll get shot then stabbed,” I said. “Bad idea.”

  Johnny flexed a well-muscled arm that had seen no work other than the gym or holding a drumstick. “No one’s going to mess with us. We’re way too badass. I vote we do it.”

  “We�
��re not even old enough to cross the checkpoint alone.”

  “Fake IDs,” Johnny said. “I know a guy. I can have some for us by next week. I just need a photo and a copy of your biometrics.”

  “How much?” Ramona said.

  Johnny flapped his hand lazily. “I’ll take care of it. We’ll aim for going in on a Saturday afternoon when it’s not so crazy.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “They either work all week there or they don’t work at all. There’s no way to predict a quiet time to visit.”

  “Look who’s suddenly an expert,” Johnny said. “Have you ever been there? I have. Lots of times.”

  “Doing what?”

  The edge of La Merde was now right up against my apartment building, but all I knew of the area was what my parents had told me. My father had been mugged half a dozen times on his way home from his meetings. He might have been dumb about some things, but he always made sure his drinking money was the only thing they could steal off him.

  “Parties, mostly,” Johnny said. “Crazy ones. No one complains if anything gets broken or killed. I’ve had a couple of girlfriends out there, too. You’d be shocked if you knew what they’d do for a couple of credits.”

  Ramona laughed like a stripped gear. “Those weren’t girlfriends, honey.” She flashed a look at me. “You better have him tested before you get too close to him.”

  “Do I look diseased to you?” Johnny flexed again. “They were girlfriends. I just helped them out with rent or groceries. Bailed one girl out of jail once. Small shit.”

  “What happened to them?” I said.

  “Stuff,” Johnny shrugged. “One died, I think. Just disappeared. Another one got pregnant. She claimed it was mine and wouldn’t get rid of it. My parents sued her, then I don’t know what happened.”

  “Probably nothing good, you asshole,” Ramona said.

  “Wasn’t my fault. I offered to sneak her into a clinic up here. Get her breasts enlarged while we were there.” He sighed. “She told me to fuck off and die.”

  “Hey, let’s get some practice in. We’re a band not a therapy session,” I said.

  Johnny was an asshole, but that made it easier. I could have loved Maki if he hadn’t been such a puppy. With Johnny there was no chance.

  He picked up his drumsticks and twirled them, nearly losing them in the process. “So, are we doing the La Merde thing?”

  “Yeah. I’ll get you the information by this weekend. Ramona?”

  The tall girl stretched and walked to the mike. “I’m in. But Johnny better come through with the bail money if this goes bad. I don’t want my parents finding out.”

  Johnny laughed. “Nothing is going to happen when you’re with me. They love me down there.”

  I filled in for Maki on the guitar. I was way better than he was, but it wasn’t my first choice. Johnny was a shitty drummer. I caught Ramona’s eye after the first song, and we switched our monitors to the output from her reader and played along to the drum machine. During shows, we sometimes cut Johnny’s mikes so the audience couldn’t hear his playing. He was so rhythm deaf he never noticed. We played through our entire set list twice and broke for the night.

  “That was awesome.” Johnny wiped sweat off his face with a hand towel. “We should bring all of our shit down to the Square and show those dirty birdies how we do it uptown.”

  Ramona’s eyes widened. There was probably no better way to get us laughed at and chased out than to play with a drummer who couldn’t keep time.

  “Maybe later,” I said. “This is a scouting trip. We’re looking for someone good, not showing off.”

  “Suit yourself. You staying over tonight?”

  “My mother would shoot me.”

  “Is she like two hundred years old or something?” Johnny said. “Tell her you’re going to stay with Ramona.”

  I put my hand on his chest. The sweat on his body was starting to cool so it felt clammy instead of slick. “Tomorrow night, okay? I’ll tell her Ramona and I are having a sleepover and come over here.” I looked at Ramona for support. “Is that all right?”

  She shrugged. “So long as you cover for me when I want to fuck someone.”

  “No problem.” Ramona had never been to my house, and, if I had anything to say about it, she never would. “You ready to go?”

  Ramona picked up her bag and coat. “Can we split the cab back? If I go over budget again, my mother is going to ground my account.”

  I tallied all the money I had in my pocket. I had just enough to make it to midtown where I could grab a shuttle the rest of the way. “Sounds good.”

  Ramona used her reader to summon a cab. Johnny and I fooled around while we waited. He was a good kisser. He swatted me on the ass as I walked out of his room. “Better see you Friday, Sako. Johnny might get a little restless if he doesn’t get a chance to play.” He tried to grin it off, but he was serious. He had plenty of money to throw around and could easily get a dozen girls to come back to his grotto with him.

  “Wouldn’t want that to happen, stud.” I stood on tiptoes to kiss him again and grabbed his testicles hard enough to let him know I was serious, too. “You get lonely, I start looking for a new drummer.”

  His face was still. He knew I could do him a world of hurt with just a little more pressure. “Friday, then,” he said.

  “Friday.” I turned to Ramona who was fighting to keep a straight face. She’d seen me handle guys before. Drummers were plentiful, and, while Johnny was hot, he wasn’t so sexy that I was going to put up with a lot of bullshit. “Late Friday. I have a science fair I have to win.”

  Ramona finally let herself laugh when we were safely in the cab. “I thought he was going to shit himself when you grabbed him like that.”

  “My band. My rules,” I said.

  “Are you really going to stay with him Friday night?”

  “Probably. It’s not like we haven’t had sex before.”

  “When have you had time?”

  “We were fooling around on Maki. That’s what got him so upset.”

  “Maki’s in love with you.”

  I lit one of my odorless cigarettes. “I hear that happens.”

  She threw her head back. “Are you really cool with going into La Merde for a talent search?”

  “Sure. A lot of kids go down there. It will be like a safari.”

  “We’re hunting wabbits,” she said. It was a line from one of the songs she wrote for the band. She’d based it on an ancient cartoon she watched as a kid. It was about this guy with a giant head who wanted to kill and eat a furry. It was probably a sexual thing. Ramona bummed a drag off my cigarette and made a face. “I don’t know how you can smoke these.”

  “Maybe we should work as an all-girl band. Change the name to something better.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. There are way too many dicks in this band. How does The Sandcats sound? It’s like people think we’re pets, but we’re really poisonous.”

  “I like it.”

  “How ‘bout, if Johnny survives the trip to the Square, we broom him at the first opportunity?”

  “Works for me.”

  Johnny was lucky on Friday, or maybe I was just bored. I don’t know. I liked sex. Sure, it could feel good, but there were ways to get that without putting up with someone else. What I liked about it was how vulnerable the guy got when I put my hand on his cock. No matter how much bravado they had before, they turned into little boys afraid I was going to laugh at them. It was a stupid kind of power, but I didn’t have so much of it that I wasn’t going to enjoy the little I had. Johnny and I fucked and then we watched a movie. I slept in his bed and asked him to sleep on the floor. He was all “I’ve tamed the she-beast,” but he was the one sleeping under a blanket on top of ceramic tiles. I gave him a pillow.

  I had a bunch of projects due, so we didn’t get together in person during the next week. We had one rehearsal via our readers, which made it easier to ignore Johnny’s shitt
y drumming and met up Saturday afternoon in the commercial district, a couple of blocks from the border.

  The commercial district wasn’t impressive, no matter how many of my classmates were panting for a job there. It was just a bunch of tall, ugly buildings with unkempt parks crammed in every couple of blocks. There were people sleeping in a few of them. I wondered if we should call security, but Ramona said we should let them sleep. She said they looked peaceful.

  We waited on a bench in one of the empty parks until Johnny sauntered up. He was dressed in a dusty-looking black outfit and the ugliest boots I’d ever seen. “You ladies ready?” he said. He winked at me.

  I covered a yawn.

  “Do you have the passes?” Ramona said.

  He patted the pocket of his vest. “Aren’t you worried you look a little too nice for this trip?”

  “We look normal,” Ramona said. “You look like someone from a Fall-of-the-Earth stim.”

  The material of his vest was so thick it was nearly armor. “This is how they dress in there. I’ll blend in.”

  “Where did you get those boots?” I said. They were gray, and bumpy like they had acne.

  He propped one up on the bench so we could get a closer look. “Like them? They’re real sandcat. My dad got them for me.”

  “They’re beautiful.” Ramona elbowed me in the ribs. “I think I saw some just like them in a museum gift shop.”

  “Was it the Museum of Bad Ideas? I think I saw them, too.”

  “Fuck you,” Johnny said. “Do you know how much I had to pay for these passes?”

  “Let’s see them.”

  Johnny pulled the ID sticks out of his pocket and handed them around. They looked okay to me, but Ramona laughed again. “These cases are at least twenty years old. You think we’re all going to pass for our late thirties?”

  Johnny flushed. “The guy did say we’d be better off going through with a group.”