Tyrannia

by Alan Deniro

  Drexley told us that it would take about three days, through some astrolabe sixth sense of his, I didn’t know, to reach the Blake system.

  Five hundred light years away. Whatever. More important, the gang forgot to pack much food. Now that was bright. Some crackers, some ten-year-old dehydrated gelato in the crawlspace that functioned as the “pantry.”

  The group of us sprawled on the curved couches on the edges of the bridge. I settled down slowly on my own couch, crossing my legs and straightening out my dress. Kathy was the only black sheep, because he had to be, in order to pilot us. This was his hour of no small glory. The shepherd-link shone in his face. The jewels coating his hair fractured and resonated, no doubt triggered by the contact by the shepherd pricking his mind, and the mind was attached to the skin and therefore his hair, wasn’t it? It was all connected.

  “Good girl,” he kept muttering, annoyingly.

  In this environment, the pack of people let some measure of their guard down. The angles of their sprawling were still artful, don’t get me wrong, they were always artful. But a layer of varnish peeled off. I was always observant about other people’s varnish.

  America yawned and put her infrared sensor hands under the couch, as if there was a laser missile under there. Her hands, which once seemed breathtaking, now seemed vaguely stupid. But I didn’t blame her much for her hands; maybe her parents insisted on them. Parents were always insisting on accessories. Zenith Marie played with the belt attached to her hair. “This is so fucking boring. Lund, tell me why we did this again?”

  “We thought it would be violatory.” Smart boy, he had brought a megazine to read and watch, a Persian woman reading infernokrusher poetry.

  “Violation of what? Drex? Any answers?” Zenith said, crossing her arms.

  Drexley stared off into the bridge crux. “What?” he said. “Yes, exactly as you said.” Drex started staring at Kathy in this really unreasonable way. Kathy was off in his own world of course. As if Drex was sizing up whatever Kathy had to give him. And it scared me to think of what Drexley might have needed.

  America bit her lip and leaned her head back.

  It was a maelstrom of nothing.

  What did I expect—running around the halls and tagging the walls with expletives and feedback alphabets? I wasn’t twelve, I was seventeen.

  “Well, the least someone could have done was to bring some drugs.” The voice was mine, but it didn’t feel like my mind constructing these things to say, and then ordering my jaw to say them. Not at first.

  “If there’s no drugs, you know,” my voice continued to say, “to help with staring at the shepherd, kind of like lava flows, then what’s the point? Why am I here?”

  And I didn’t even do drugs or secrete them.

  They all stared at me. Kathy giggled from the bow, but not at me. America started smiling, not toward Kathy but at me, and I knew I had moved myself from the void to some place not quite a void in some of their eyes.

  “I’m going to take a walk to the engine room,” I said. “And then find the standard-issue gelato, and try to cook something.” My hands were on my hips and they were looking at me with some inner awareness of their own condition. I was like a lens. Anyone had the potential to have that effect on anyone else; all it took was a bit of practice in front of a mirror.

  “Things get weird near the engine room,” Drexley said, still staring at Kathy, who wasn’t paying attention to any of the subtle shifts in autochthonous power structures going on, the bastard. I wanted him to be proud of me. I still didn’t quite feel comfortable enough to nick Drexley’s name to “Drex.” “The walls are thinner there. Wherespace pours in there.”

  America stood next to me, stretching her arms and clapping once. “But that might be interesting. Come on, Drex.” She was speaking to Drex but put a hand on my shoulder. It was cool, almost cold. Drexley, instead of consenting with our constitutional, remained still. But that was fine, the way a thin bandage was fine. Lund and Zenith Marie arose too. There was a mission, however simple, and I led them into the heart of the mission, however childish to Drexley’s eyes.

  Crawlspaces. Humming walls, shit-brown supply boxes. Motivational etchings. Very erratic gravity in places. Zenith Marie bit her lip.

  What was left to discover?

  It became clear that the Gray Freighter wasn’t particularly spaceworthy. More of a training vehicle. I was a trainee, of some sort.

  There was that to discover.

  The engine room was a misnomer, imagine that. It was mostly an empty room. “Shepherds provide the interaction between anarchy and panoply,” one of my teachers once told me. I finally understood what she meant. Rooms changed properties during wherespace. And Drexley was right—things could get weird in the engine room. A wire birdcage was on the floor, as if forgotten there by ornithologists. Its small hinged door was open. The three who came with me weren’t talking, but I at least was included in that silence. I wanted inclusion. Lund wiped his nose, which made him look a lot younger than he probably was. America was out of breath, pressed her reddening hands to her face. “Hello?” Zenith called out, expecting an echo, receiving none. Everyone had done something sardonic and/or intriguing in the engine room, all except me.

  Then I realized they were staring at me. The air was hot and thick and I wasn’t sure if it was from the wherespace leaking in or from everyone’s eyes on me. A point right below my collarbone started to tingle.

  “What?” I said.

  America leaned toward me by a few millimeters. There was a hairline crack in the air above me, and a shimmering hem of purple, and I knew that was from the wherespace or the shepherd, which meant that the air was literally hotter simply from their staring, and that was a pretty interesting trick of time and space.

  “Can I, I mean we, see your, um, parts?” America was quiet and all vulnerable sounding, but with a suddenness of a door being thrown open, perhaps never to be closed again.

  “Parts?” I said. Inklings of their talk-context floated inside of me, but not to be grasped.

  “How do you say it?” Lund said. “Look, you’re intersex, right?”

  That word, said in front of my face with great infrequency in my life, was formulated even less in my own head. I started laughing, trying not to make it sound harsh—it was hard to know how these newfound peers would misinterpret.

  “What?” America said.

  “You want to see them?” I said. Guidance counselors from Li Po—I mean, from my hive on Li Po—told me that, yes, people would find my ilk strange, perhaps a little lewd.

  Well, tough, I said at the time, but sex rarely came up at the Chartering, as I kept my distance from pretty much everyone. Except with Kathy, of course, and I did desire him—or at least I did before I stepped on the Gray Freighter. But even he didn’t ask me too many questions about “the parts” in our lunch study sessions and fencing lessons. Now, as he was lost in shepherd-thought, guiding the ship, did he even see me at all?

  These three were scrying me, that was for sure. America’s bare shoulders had a damp glisten on them. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said in a whisper.

  “I’m not. Maybe . . .” I trailed off and turned my head to the empty bird cage, which was a metaphor provided by Kathy’s shepherd to show how the ship’s propulsion worked. It was the shepherd’s totem. Maybe I expected it to have a bird, but then I thought that an empty bird cage was probably a better metaphor for me. “Maybe it’s strange that I don’t think I’m strange.”

  “You’re not strange,” Lund said, and I realized that all three of them—and probably Drexley too—were scared, and lonely, and not really glamorous at all. Except for perhaps a small, inner glamor, and anyway, we all had that. They wanted me to be the comet streaking across their vision, giving them a portent of something inside of them. I knew this. It d
idn’t upset me. It only made me wonder whether these people could have been comets for something inside of me, or whether they were actually inert, and lackluster at the core, and tricking me.

  Somehow, the patterns of our breaths were all matching.

  Then the ship rocked and for a half-blink, everything inverted. The space between us shrank to millimeters, expanded to kilometers, and then resumed some semblance of normality. Whatever “normal” was in wherespace. Although everyone looked a little dazed, no one said anything about it. So I didn’t either. And besides, it happened right before the good parts.

  What was a little cosmic flux, right?

  “Well,” I said, gathering myself again, “I tell you what. Why don’t we switch clothes? Why don’t I wear what you’re wearing, Zenith?”

  “Me?” Zenith said, hand to her heart, and why was a fetching girl like that acting demure all of the sudden?

  “You and you and you. All of you. Why not? Switch off. Here you can wear my dress, Lund. It seems like a fair trade. And you can stare at me all you want when I’m changing, I guess.”

  America shrugged and raised an eyebrow at me. Halfway between the phrase “I guess,” she was already taking off her tunic top and tossing it to me, her whole infrared body glistening. I smiled and peeled off my gossamer dress and chucked my sandals toward Lund. Clothes started flying everywhere off bodies, and arcing across the engine room. Zenith unhooked her belt from the tips of her hair. Her heavy black clothes could have stopped fragmentation bullets; they were like something from a Panoptikon agent’s battle wardrobe. It smelled like her skin. When I slipped and strapped them on, the inner shell warmed and melted and conformed to my body.

  “You look pretty mean,” Zenith said, laughing, but not unkindly.

  The wherespace was in the room like incense. In some ways, the space-time continuum acted like a drug, releasing the inhibited from our chains of shyness.

  In a minute we were all changed up. Breathless, I realized it was possible that they had never seen each other naked before in unison, that they were shier than I was about flesh.

  A strange thought.

  A stranger thought: I wasn’t really aroused by any of this.

  Still stranger: they didn’t seem to be either. This, then, must have been truly novel for them, this role reversal and this restraint. I stopped worrying about whether they liked me or not and took in the slow pulse of the moment.

  They were just clothes, after all.

  We looked at each other. Lund had his hands crossed at his stomach. My opalescent silk dress reached to his mid-thigh. Glimmering tattoos of mythological beasts—unicorns, hippogriffs, extinct orcas—pranced up and down both of his legs.

  “Cute tattoos,” I said. He blushed but smiled.

  Everyone was then sitting on the floor, leaning against the walls, careful not to jostle the birdcage. “Where did you grow up?” Lund asked me.

  “Li Po,” I said. “In the City of the Sextant.” I had brief visions of home: my family of forty renting a swan pond for the day, the vendors who sold cinnamon gelato (God, how I craved gelato at that moment!) along the cross-hatched boulevards, the earnest prime schoolteachers who didn’t know what to do with me.

  “Were you born . . . this way?”

  “Yeah, my parents are intersexed too. It’s a colony of them. I mean, us.” Detachment from my upbringing.

  Zenith Marie’s body was turning indigo. Perhaps she was imagining my family as being a continual circus. I could have assured her there was nothing that unusual about us.

  Then, just as I was going to ask them about their lives, because I was dying to, Kathy strode into the room with a hurt look on his face and a limp, with Drexley a few steps behind. Zenith’s body cooled a few shades.

  “What do you think my girl wants?” Kathy started shouting, voice cracking, tears streaming down his face. The shepherd must have still been crammed in his head. He hopped on one foot, sashaying his disheveled dress, trying to put on a show. But he was in pain, from something I couldn’t see. I assumed, at first, it was a “shepherd thing.”

  “Girl?” he incanted. Everyone was silent. “Girl?”

  He clutched his head, tried to seem playful. His words slurred. It scared me. He really didn’t know how he sounded. Twirling, he was desperate for notice and not given notice because of the desperation itself.

  Hello, Kathy, I know you’re in there, I wanted to scream at him. I know it.

  The birdcage appeared to be larger, though I could have been imagining it.

  Drexley also ignored Kathy, though he turned away with an almost tusk-like sneer. “What’s going on?” he said. His face was beaded with sweat. “Why the hell are you wearing each other’s clothes?”

  “We’re going on,” Lund said, a little defiant, crossing his legs “and why don’t you relax and stay awhile, Drex?”

  “No way. I want all of you to robe and go.” His eyes grew colder. “Robe and go!” And then he looked at me for an instant, his eyes searing me. The three others did stand up, and I did reluctantly as well. Kathy continued prancing as everyone remained motionless, almost hunched underneath Drexley’s gaze. America found some gum from a tooth implant of hers and started chewing. She was beautiful. All of them were beautiful, each caught along the edges of their own quirks. I wanted to tell them that, as some way to commemorate that moment, but instead I decided to stand up and nod at Drexley’s leering face. Everyone else kept their heads down, the moment gone. As Kathy sidewinded backward and forward, Drexley put a hand on his shoulder, clenched like a talon. He thought he had control of Kathy. And if he had control of Kathy he had control of the ship.

  “What the hell are you looking at?” he asked me. He spat at the ground toward me.

  The ship buckled again, and I snapped. When he started to turn away, certain in his subduing, I tackled him from behind. The dimensions of the engine room shifted. The birdcage that was behind us was in front of us. I could feel Kathy’s shepherd in the room. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling as we fell to the ground. I had caught his body totally off-guard, because he was woozy for a few seconds. Zenith’s body armor increased in mass—maybe wearing such professional-grade gear had made her feel safer—and I knocked the wind out of him. The birdcage had quadrupled in size, and before Drexley could blink, he was inside the cage. I shut the door.

  Everyone was speechless, except for Kathy, who screamed and ran back toward the bow of the ship.

  I was breathing hard, doing my best not to run after Kathy.

  “Let’s go,” I told everyone, “before he wakes up.”

  Everyone nodded, eying the cage.

  I think a lot about how I came to the Chartering “rescued” because of latent telepathic ability. In some people’s minds I was saved from a hovel of the intersexed! Elders at the Chartering kept telling me my cognitive scores were excellent, that it was not a problem that I had no shepherd yet, that some of the best telepaths in the history of the Parameter were tardy with their shepherd-bonding. As we ventured back to the bow, I thought for the first time that maybe a few of them internally linked my latency with the fact that I had a penis and a vagina. Which was ridiculous. But no more ridiculous than my peers giving horse names to shepherds.

  I also believed that Zenith Marie and America and Lund didn’t feel like they knew me until we traded our clothes, and this had nothing to do with telepathy—that awesome, frightening ability gave no connection. The only person on the Gray Freighter engaged with telepathy at the time, Kathy, was out of our orbit entirely. Thinking about those cruel orbits gave me headaches, and sucker-tackling Drexley didn’t change the fact that I wanted telepathy with a shepherd of my own so very badly.

  Drexley began shouting at us all to let him go shortly after he came to. I told my new friends—for we were friends, after what we had shared�
�that I thought Drexley was dangerous, and would hurt Kathy if he had the chance, and definitely me, and who knew who else on the ship. No one was safe. And I wanted to think that Kathy’s shepherd, in that engine room, had wanted Drexley contained there, that in a primordial way it was trying to protect Kathy from whatever anguish Drexley had inflicted upon him.

  We took turns to feed Drexley the gelato we scavenged, but he refused. He must have had an endo-hydration and food source that he had kept secret.

  Explaining why I felt like I needed to keep Drexley locked up to the others took a while aboard the Gray Freighter, but hearing Kathy sobbing in his quarters was the real proof. I also laid out to the other three why naming shepherds things like Appaloosa and Jackie was chic yet astoundingly dumb. By the end, when we came out of wherespace after a couple of days, and a cordon of police rockets had surrounded our drop-point in the Blake system, they ended up agreeing with me.

  And as the customs agents bound our hands and led us roughly to a holding ship, I wondered: would all of us move in the same spheres at the Chartering after this?

  Still, when they booked us, we were all grinning. That had to count for something, right?

  And that was that. It wasn’t, however, quite as that-was-that as I thought it would be. There were a couple of other stories intertwined with this one, but none quite as important as my last story.

  I could talk about the struggles of keeping Drexley hostage for two more godforsaken days in wherespace, until he finally, barely, settled down. I’d tried to talk with Kathy in wherespace, but he was distraught and trying to do his best to keep the wherespace journey intact, so I didn’t want to bother him too much.