Tyrannia

by Alan Deniro

  Parka was melancholic, but not just for geopolitical reasons. He realized that this might be one of the last times of relative normalcy with his good friend.

  “Yeah,” Jar said. “You make a good point. Maybe I’ll stay too. And learn how to properly ride a motorcycle and do a wheelie.” He laughed and then downed his beer. “Come on, Sharon,” he said. “Finish your drink.”

  They rode for an hour in silence through the empty desert, and could see the Tree from many kilometers away. A towering, shadowy shape. Sooner rather than later—Sharon wasn’t exactly following a speed limit—they could see the enormity of the living structure. Parka stood up in the car, letting his body poke out of the shorn top, letting his wings free.

  “Holy shit,” Jar said.

  The Tree was as tall as the highest peaks that the Being had dessicated, many kilometers high. And the Tree was on fire. Smokeless fire. The tree pulsated with orange light. The branches were leafless, but they spiraled in gargantuan yet intricate patterns.

  About a thousand meters away, Sharon stopped the car. Everyone got out. The walking sticks encompassing Sharon, or perhaps embodying him, were glowing in syncopation with the Tree. Then it became clear that the Tree was made up of billions of the walking sticks.

  There were many other abandoned vehicles all around the Tree in a ring.

  “Why are the walking sticks doing this?” Jar whispered.

  Parka shook his head but didn’t say anything. He had no idea.

  Sharon turned to the two of them and said, “We need you two, the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jack Nicklaus of interpersonal diplomacy, to carry a message back to your people. You will relay terms for peace.” Sharon began walking toward the Tree.

  “Wait, Sharon,” Parka said. “What will happen if we do?”

  “What will happen if we don’t?” Jar said.

  Sharon paused for a second and said, “My name’s not Sharon.” Then he began walking toward the Tree again.

  Parka watched him for a little while, and looked at Jar, who shrugged.

  “Who the hell knows,” Jar said.

  As the general and the golfer followed Sharon to the base of the Tree, Parka swore he heard Sharon, who wasn’t in fact Sharon, humming a tune, one of Toby Keith’s more recent songs about exile on the moon and earthly liberation. Or maybe it was only the sound of the walking sticks and the desolate wind making music together, which wasn’t meant for a stranger like him, wasn’t for him to understand.

  The Flowering Ape

  I sprinted through the translucent tube with the curfew avatar slithering behind me. I had a date that night with Kathy at the Flowering Ape, and I wasn’t going to be late for him. Even if kissing him never materialized.

  I could hear the avatar hiss. The foot traffic was light in the tube, just a few drunken lovers laughing at the mega-cobra as it tried to catch up to me. The previous year, in an effort to curb truancy from the Chartering School for Young Telepaths, they’d switched from a lumbering golem-type creature to a giant cobra for patrolling the tubes between the space stations. They thought it would be “scarier,” instilling fear in our young hearts. Whatever. The avatar was pokey, which was all that mattered to me.

  Just as I was losing my breath, I finally saw the friendly confines of the Flowering Ape. I smelled it too. Hot taffy. Surface-distilled vodka. A perfume called Crushed Dreams. My monthly pass grafted to my pinky, I extended it and jumped inside the barrier, the door whisking me through. The cobra reached the door a couple of seconds later. Knowing it would be repulsed, it growled (a flaw in the gene design, I guess) and turned away.

  I sighed, looking for Kathy, kind of glad to be there but also a little desultory. Despite its alleged function as an amusement park and semi-illicit hangout, the Flowering Ape wasn’t very amusing. Its glass slides and rafters, curved with transparent spacescapes, were full of centenarians floating to the observation decks, dictating now-memoirs to their off-world agents. A lot of them were alums of the Chartering, where I was learning how to meld with the shepherds. I hadn’t had the privilege of that experience yet. Sometimes it took time, my teachers always told me.

  So instead of thinking on all that was troublesome, I instead found an empty pod for two and waited for my lover, Kathy. Or rather, my “lover,” Kathy.

  Kathy was late. He was either late or he never arrived at all—and yet which do you think I would rather have had? Waiting, I daydreamed about Kathy kissing my neck in a corner of the Ape. Maybe I’d kiss his neck too, and touch that sensitive spot on his left knee that he was always talking about. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone any further—we weren’t technically a couple after all—but it would have made me happy for a time, being close to someone, especially someone who seemed to like me. Maybe we’d have a drink together if we weren’t too tired afterward, and talk about what telepathy all meant, and what the shepherds meant to him, to me.

  Bored, I slid my pod upward, with little poofs of the anti-gravity jets, while the alums jostled their pods, racing them vertically. Shepherds swam in the vacuum above me. I saw their diaphanous edges shift around. The aliens—the reason I was in school in the first place—were powerful hypnotists, even though they really didn’t mean to hypnotize. They (and we, the telepaths) made interstellar travel happen. A shepherd, with a telepath’s guidance, enveloped a spaceship and sent it on its merry way across wherespace to the other planets of the Parameter.

  It was a very convenient form of space travel.

  I hadn’t been chosen by a shepherd yet, and seventeen years old was kind of late for that kind of choicelessness, but I couldn’t do anything about it happening until it happened. Kathy liked to talk about his shepherd Bazzarella all the time. He treated shepherds like horses, and made up names for them, and called them “boys” and “girls,” though shepherds didn’t have any boy or girl parts.

  “Well, they reproduce, don’t they?” I could hear his voice in my head, but it wasn’t really him (the telepathy’s only with shepherds, not with people, after all), but rather a kind of mental image I kept of him. I wasn’t sure if keeping that image in my thoughts made me creepy. I wanted to argue with this Kathy-thought-projection that the shepherds weren’t either boys or girls. How could they be? But then, speak of a devil, Kathy was actually at the base of the windtunnel entrance (he was a senior, and had no curfew. He might have petted the cobra on his way to the Ape). It was really him, pointing up at me, and I really didn’t feel like arguing with my own thoughts anymore.

  Kathy was in a black/silver dress and his beard had tons of prismed jewels embedded in the wiry hairs. The dress was slinky, I guess, but not fitting him particularly well. He waved. It was possible he was looking up my own slinky dress through the translucent pod bottom.

  He waved again. I opened my mouth to shout something out at him (why did I suddenly want him, the stooge? Was it his beard and blackened dress?). But he turned around and four other students from the Chartering milled around him at the pit of the vertical tunnel, already listless. I felt like the child keeping up with the larger kids, already I felt this. At the same time, a doddering alum—easily a century and a half old—must have lost motor control, because her pod started skidding down the transparent wall-face. Outside, a shepherd came near the window but darted away again, leaving a vermillion trail. A soothing emergency light bathed everyone’s face in red. Kathy’s friends started laughing at the alum’s loss of control.

  A little cruel, a little cruel.

  As the emergency crews rushed in and started resuscitating the apparently dead woman, I set the pod down and stepped out into the group—the pack?—of my fellow students that Kathy had brought along. I was disappointed in him; we talked about making out, how that could have been an important portal into a deeper type of friendship. And I wanted some privacy/solace with him, if he had any to provide. Apparently he didn’t, beca
use he’d brought along those fellows.

  They didn’t seem like fellows. Their gazes treated me askance, if they treated me with looks at all. I recognized them, of course, the school wasn’t that big, but at the same time those people seemed to me to be as weird as shepherds, maybe moreso.

  Yet they waited for me. I couldn’t tell them apart, at first.

  Kathy took the crook of my arm.

  What made me stick around, what made me not blurt out a stupid excuse and slip away, was that Kathy sometimes said truly profound things, and I would realize weeks later that he was actually trying to be tender to me, profundity only being an afterthought. “Your hair is like a cauldron wrought from air,” he said once, touching my red ends. I was waiting for a moment like that from him at that moment, but it was pretty clear he didn’t want to go any further; at least, not with me. It was pretty unclear whether he ran into this pack in transit or whether this was the plan

  all along.

  “We’re going,” Kathy said, more like announced, “to ride one of the shepherd ships. I thought you’d be game.” I decided that it would be a good thing to nod, so I nodded. Default smirks arrived on the faces of the others.

  I realized that part of that glaze on their faces was a shepherd-gaze, that each was paired with their own shepherd. I was the oddfellow out.

  “Let’s go,” Drexley said, hugging his fish-scaled arms. “It’s cold in here. And boring.” I knew his name was Drexley because his name tag said so. Below his name was a disclaimer that only FRIENDS could use his nickname “Drex.” Below that was a ledger showing his exact net worth at that moment. It was lots of boon. Drexley started laughing. His voice pierced. Other names were given to me in hasty introductions: Lund, Zenith Marie, America.

  This group that Kathy brought to me, then, had punctured through the barrier of telepathy and were tied to shepherds. I hadn’t. How could I have said no?

  I didn’t want to say no.

  Drexley called his shepherd Thousandhorse. Lund called his shepherd Anatolia-Blossom. Zenith Marie called her shepherd the Boxer. America called her shepherd Jackie. Boy, girl, boy, girl.

  These weren’t the names the shepherds gave to themselves. The gang wouldn’t reveal those names to a semi-interloper like me.

  We walked in a cluster, a closed fist of bodies out of the Flowering Ape. I tried to mimic their easy gait, and in the corridor, I noticed the wide eyes of the old alums, gripping drink bulbs and probably wondering, who are these people, who breathe the same air as me, so young, so very young?

  And that, I had to admit, made my toes warm.

  We walked to the docking bay, opposite the school. There were no cobras waiting to pounce on me there.

  Along with his fishscale arms, Drexley had a fake lazy eye. Lund’s teeth were coated with a substance that made them shimmer like shepherds. Zenith Marie wore a heavy belt around her thin hips (which held up pants that were like custom-made battle armor) that attached to a knot in her long coarse hair, ensuring proper balance. America had infrared sensors on the tips of her fingers. These were cultivated nuances. I guess mine was that I had no apparent quirks, no set-design to call my own.

  Yet it was still hard, despite how strange they were to me, to tell the four of them apart. It was easy to notice that Kathy craved the pack. He wasn’t quite a full member; apparently, he would have to ignore me a lot more to get there. They were assessing him, and so he acted louder, laughed at mild jokes a half-second too quickly and a half-second too long. But in some secret self-part that he won’t let anyone see, he was shriveling, a wilting boy in a beautiful dress.

  That probably made me a . . . sidekick, then. A familiar. A creature not-yet-with-shepherd summoned.

  It wasn’t until I was actually on one of the docked rockets that I realized they were—I mean, we were—not supposed to be there. We were trespassing and what kind of shit was Kathy getting me into?

  It was a small ship, shaped like a dart, coated in mock-quicksilver. The smallest class of rockets. Outside the bridge, a couple of shepherds loomed, swirling around the ship, called the Gray Freighter, now that was a good sign, in slow motions. The shepherds’ colors were vivid and all over the place. Then a third shepherd shot forward. Kathy’s face got all scrunched, like he was concentrating on something inside of himself but also at a point, say, between his big toe and middle toe. Like there was a coin or a little toy there.

  Then I realized he was talking to his shepherd, the one who had just come, Bazzarella. Soon there were five shepherds swirling around the docked ship. They were all assembled like the humans were: Thousandhorse, and Anatolia-Blossom, and yes, the Boxer, and you too, Jackie, shepherd of America. What was going to happen next? The air on the bridge smelled like ozone, as each made connections with their shepherds. I kind of felt sad for the shepherds and I shuffled my feet. If shepherds had emotions (hypothetically) I was sure they wouldn’t have appreciated telepaths ascribing false identities to them, including the whole boy-girl divide.

  It was a divide, wasn’t it? I didn’t know where I stood on that divide. Or maybe I was in the middle, falling into the chasm.

  I wanted to know the shepherds’ secret names. I didn’t ask, though, and no one noticed my shuffling and moping. After about three minutes of this concentration, America whispered, grunted really: “Which of you will bait-take?”

  Kathy started cackling. He spun around and around, and the others didn’t seem to mind. They let that display of emotion by the neophyte pass. “Bazzarella will hitch with us.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Drexley said, unenthusiastic. Kathy touched my shoulder; a familiar but at that point vague gesture. He craned his head up and said—maybe to the vacuum, or the Parameter itself, certainly not to any of us—“What do you think my girl wants?” Girl being his shepherd. I stifled saying something to Kathy and instead gazed at all those assembled, and looked in each telepathy-occupied eye, and asked out loud what the hell was going to happen next.

  They noticed me for the first time, really noticed me. Fine. That shouldn’t have been that surprising. They really didn’t make formal introductions in the first place. But the fact that their faces were exactly the same as before was a little disheartening. They wanted me to believe shepherds overwhelmed normal discourse for them, which was bullshit. My professors conversed with shepherds during class while chiding us to pay more attention—did we realize how important we were for the well-being of the Parameter?—and they didn’t bat an eye.

  America’s eyes twinkled. “It’s spontaneous. Everything needs to be spontaneous. We can’t predict what will happen next.”

  “What?” I said. I looked around the bridge of the Gray Freighter. Kathy was shuffling toward the control crux. His shepherd was blotting out the light of the others.

  “Someone’s . . . one of us has stolen a series of passcodes,” Zenith Marie said. “I’m not telling you which of us, because that would get any one of us into trouble. Not the least of which you.” She bent her arms back and Drexley put his arm on her shoulder. He was the only one truly serious for a few seconds, and that too passed. “So we’re . . .

  what’s the word?” Maybe Zenith Marie had a dictionary implant. She tussled her blond hair and said, “Joyriding.”

  “I don’t know,” I blurted out when the cordon around me faded. They started wandering around, like blissful zombies. Lights and spherical grids engaged and started humming. Spaceship-type things started happening. I didn’t move. I supposed that running away and alerting authorities would have been a strong, morally upright choice. My parents, any one of them, would have been proud of such a choice. A virtuous nectar would form on the tip of my tongue.

  However, nothing of the sort happened. I downcast my eyes and gave a smirk, but stayed inside the confines of the bridge.

  After we launched (my sixty-third time. I kept
track of such things), Lund, up to that point silent, leaned over the makeshift couch toward me and said, “What were you smirking about before? Right before we left.”

  His eyes were blue. He was cute and I hated, at first, thinking that.

  I said: “Because we’re going to be in so much trouble that it’s not worth worrying about,” and that, at least, was not bluster.

  We accelerated to ten percent the speed of light, the shepherd around the ship started getting brighter, and we were in wherespace, which no one could ever really see that well, because the shepherd always kind of blocked the view.

  Then it dawned on me: wherespace was pretty boring. Unless you were the telepath whose shepherd surrounded the rocket, of course. Then it was all colored waterfalls of the mind and tangled nuances of shepherd-speak—not that I would have known. But for passengers without any particular place to go, well, it was like riding a planetary elevator ferry just for the sake of the ride.

  Moreover, the Gray Freighter was pretty crummy to begin with. The walls were molded with scoured antimon residue, and the air felt full of atrophy. Or at least bacteria. The square windows were tiny, barely wide enough for me to view the shepherd aura protecting

  and transporting the ship through wherespace. The colors were pretty pretty, scampering yellows and mauves, but it was like being locked in a hostel with the Wang Wei Falls outside the window, with five kilometers of falling, graceful water just out of reach.