“Smell!” he demanded in a sharp, nasal voice. “Smell! Smell!”
“What?” Slue gasped, terrified.
“Smell!”
“What am I supposed to smell?”
“Oh, go ahead!” Tseehop interjected. “Jessker here wants to be a perfume maker when he grows up. He’s always trying out his new creations on everyone.”
Slue was about to take a sniff, then stopped herself.
“Wait. This isn’t some kind of ‘drug thing,’ is it?”
Within the eruption of laughter that followed, she heard several voices assuring her no, no, this is not a drug thing, no, no, don’t worry...
She looked over at Hieronymus. He had a broad smile on his face.
“It’s totally safe, Slue. Jessker is a true artist of odor.”
She leaned forward. The small silver box was very pretty, but Jessker’s fingernails upon it were horribly dirty, with purple gunk under each finger nail. She parked her nose over the open top.
She sniffed.
And then she nearly vomited. It was an odor of rot she never even knew existed — of soiled fermentation, musky, dead, and sour and intense. It was by far, for that quick half second, the worst moment in her entire life. Whatever that odor was, it made her see death and the rotten oblivion it left in its wake.
“Ugh!” she cried out loud, humiliated. “Ugh! Ugh!”
The Loopie crowd burst into hysterical laughter once more. All of them, laughing at her, including Hieronymus, who had his arms around Clellen, both of them balancing each other to keep from toppling over.
The offending Loopie with the beard, Jessker, had already disappeared.
Slue’s eyes were all watery behind her goggles. “You are sick!” she screamed at them all. “Sick! Sick in the head!”
“Let’s see your eyes!” someone in the crowd yelled out.
“Yeah,” another Loopie added. “Mus won’t show us his eyes, you show us yours!”
This only inspired a counter reaction from some other Loopies.
“No! Don’t tell her to do that!”
“Let’s see them!”
“Don’t! She takes those goggles off, we’re all dead!”
“That’s not true, you know. I heard that the eye color makes you high.”
“It makes you dead. That’s what it makes you!”
“Remember what happened to Lester two years ago!”
“Lester died of an overdose of Buzz!”
“He died of exposure to the devil color!”
Four of them began swinging at each other with fists.
Tseehop shook her head back and forth, staring up at Slue.
“You, fungelina, are in a lot of trouble. You call us sick. Then you get four of us to fight over you. You really must be some kind of demon.”
Slue was petrified. Hieronymus stopped laughing and started to walk forward, slightly worried.
“I think she’s a demon, too,” an extra-loud voice from the destroyed counter announced. “Just like Mus. He’s a demon. A demon from the far side of the Moon.”
“Wait, you’re a Topper,” Plennim piped up with his scratchy voice.
“And how do you know that Slue is a Topper?” Clellen interrupted, fists on her hips, turning to face the scratchy-voiced boy with the oil stain on his shirt. “Mus would never be friends with any snobs like that!”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Plennim said. “All I heard was that there was this hot-looking One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl who had blue hair who was in the Topper classes.”
Clellen shook her head. “You’re on Buzz, that’s what’s up your face, scratchy.”
Plennim was quick with a retort.
“I’m not on Buzz, you kazzer-bat!”
“Who are you calling a kazzer-bat, you little lice baiter!”
“You, ping-slud, go wrap yourself in a big fat kank!”
The ensuing fight between Plennim and Clellen diffused the uncomfortable attention Slue was getting from the assembled Loopies. She was amazed at the chaotic way they all communicated with one another. One sentence, followed by a retort, followed by overwhelming physical action in the form of violence or wrestling. Everything was extreme. Strange insults she had never heard before. She had no idea what they were talking about. She watched the fight between the boy and the girl — it was horrendous, loud and brutal, and the other students barely paid attention to it after the first twenty seconds. Hieronymus finally went up to her, a slightly embarrassed look on his face.
“I’ll bet, I’m sure, this is probably a little strange…”
“Loopies?”
“I…you see, I am really bad in math. And science.”
“Loopies.”
“They’re not really that bad.”
Slue looked beyond his shoulder and watched Clellen poke Plennim in the face with the end of a chair leg.
“I am obliged by the school to take remedial math and remedial science. And remedial shop, and home preparation. I spend half my day in the Loopie section.”
Slue stared at him, and her breathing quickened. She quickly turned her back on him and left, at first walking, then running.
The next day, Slue spoke to the teacher, requesting that she be assigned another partner to work with on a completely different book. The teacher paired her up with the boy named Poole, who was absolutely pleased to collaborate with the beautiful blue-haired girl.
She refused to even look at Hieronymus, never mind speak to him. She was determined to never speak to him again.
Two weeks later she sat in the back of the classroom and watched as Hieronymus gave his dissertation on the two versions of The Random Treewolf all by himself. Her throat felt heavy with a slight choking sensation. She disliked him now. She even wondered if she hated him. He spoke to the class with such a marvelous exactitude. It was both wonderful and brilliant, and for the first time in her life she was glad to have those goggles covering her eyes, preventing the others from seeing how incredibly moved she was.
chapter four
Windows Falling On Sparrows could not wait to get away from her suffocating mother and her doltish, dimwitted father. Managing to last the entire fourteen-hour journey from the Earth to the Moon, confined to a small family cabin, stuck with them, was a genuine miracle.
True, what a fantastic thrill to ascend into the sky like that. To keep going and to look out the window and watch her city shrink into a glimmering puddle of lights till it just meshed with all the other puddles of lights on the surface of the worn-out continent she came from. It was a profound experience, entirely ruined by her mother asking dumb, nosy questions about school exams, homework, and that boy in her class named Cornelius. He’s a really nice boy, you should go out with him instead of some of the riffraff you seem to be interested in. Endless questions that were so utterly boring. If you haven’t noticed, Mom, we are in space, for the first time in our lives, can we please NOT talk about my school or who you think I should date? It was a tall order. Her mother, Exonarella, had such ambitions for her youngest daughter that she often slipped into the very tiresome mode of living vicariously through her sixteen-year-old. She was a nervous woman. She wanted her daughter to be successful and independent, and, as a result, just like Windows Falling On Sparrows’ two older siblings, all she managed to do was to drive her away with her constant micromanaging of every detail of the poor girl’s life.
The family cabin vibrated. After two thousand years of space travel, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was still leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. Sedenker, Exonarella’s husband and the father of the suddenly annoyed I-hate-everything teenager, was vastly relieved that he had taken an extra strong dose of E-94, a prescribed drug for space travel. It was excellent for those with motion sickness who might normally vomit during their first space fight. It blocked out all anxiety. It also blocked out his nagging wife, who immediately turned to him after finishing her argument with Windows Falling On Sparrows.
“When are you going to get
a job?” she demanded.
They felt the vast ship turn and thrust as the view of stars in a hazy purple field replaced the filthy clouds they rode up through.
“You’re asking me about that now?”
“I don’t know how we are going to survive next month,” she declared with a sudden urgency.
“That’s why I think,” her husband said under his breath, "this whole vacation to Saturn is one of the dumbest things…”
Predictably, that remark made her angry.
“No. I’m sorry! We are not getting into that again. My brother got us these tickets for free. We should be grateful to him. How often in life do we get a chance to do something as wonderful as this?”
Sedenker passively sat back, which was something he was very good at. Thank God, he thought to himself as his wife launched into one of her non-stop lectures on his many shortcomings. Thank God I have motion sickness so I can get that dose of E-94 and I don’t have to listen to her for a change. He looked in her direction. Her mouth moved with furious intention. When he couldn’t hear anything, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
The family was indeed on their way toward the rings of Saturn, to a resort on Titan called Chez Cracken San. They were riding in the Ragmagothic Chrysanthemum, a vast Mega Cruiser. Several thousand passengers were on board. The three of them had a small family cabin all to themselves, which was fine for the quick journey to the Moon, but Windows Falling On Sparrows was already dreading the three-day trip to Saturn, where they would be cramped in there together, her mother in her face, inquiring about this, lecturing about that, dreaming out loud about everything else. And her father — the complete opposite. So stuck inside his interior depressive neurosis, they could go ice skating on the rings of Saturn and he wouldn’t even notice. He’d been without a job for three years. When she forced herself, she had vague memories of a happy and contented man she used to call Daddy. But this guy, all he did was look for jobs and get nothing. Loser. Hard to believe it was the same man.
“Did you take E-94, Daddy?”
“Yes I did, Windows Falling On Sparrows.”
“So you took drugs.”
“In my case, it’s not drugs. It prevents me from getting sick when going up into space.”
“But you’ve never been in space before, so how would you know?”
“I get sick when I ride the bus. I think that’s a pretty good indicator.”
“Your eyes are all red.”
“I guess they are.”
“If you take E-94, then you smoke Buzz, you can die from an over-dose.”
“Is that so? Well, no need to worry about me, then. Its not like I’m going to go around smoking Buzz anyway.”
The magnificent curvature of the Earth suddenly appeared as they broke through the highest clouds, leaving the atmosphere. It was an overwhelming sight for the family. Their first time in space. They all grew quiet. Strange muffled sounds were heard within the body of the Mega Cruiser. The window afforded a view that all the media imagery in history could never truly capture. There they were, finally, off world. The initial feeling was always the same. Wonderment. Followed by a dreadful realization of extreme and total self-insignificance. Followed by a profound sense of accomplishment. Followed quickly by a return to whatever Earthbound petty worries and personal bickerings and mediocre obsessions occupied the individual before this enormous leap past the stratosphere and into the heavenly forever, filled with billions more stars than the vague few one can see from the muddy, soot-choked planet.
Sedenker took Exonarella’s hand in his own and he inhaled a deep breath through his nose.
“This ship smells wonderful, doesn’t it?”
She glared at him for two contemptible seconds, then focused on her daughter.
“Is Cornelius your boyfriend? Yes or no.”
Because the family had these free tickets, they were subjected to certain inconveniences that usually came along with anything that might be as cheap as an all-expenses-paid trip to Saturn’s rings. They were allowed almost no luggage. There was a set time period and a set schedule of flights that could not be changed. There were only three tickets available, so the couple’s older two children, their son, Squirrels Running On Highways, and their other daughter, Dolphins Tangled In Nets, were told to stay at home, which they agreed to with a surprising enthusiasm. In fact, when her parents told Windows Falling On Sparrows she would be the one taking this long voyage with them, she slammed her bedroom door and screamed how it wasn’t fair! and sulked for days. Sedenker and Exonarella thought she was simply being a drama queen over nothing, but in fact, she was annoyed at missing, again, all the secret wild parties her two older siblings were going to organize the moment their parents left the apartment.
Her dismay was short-lived, disappearing as soon as she understood the itinerary, which her mother almost canceled the trip over.
“We have to stay on the Moon for two days!” Exonarella complained. “In a hotel in LEM Zone One! That horrible, sleazy place! What was my brother thinking! How can he give us tickets like this! I want us to go directly out to Saturn! Not spend a moment in that hellhole!”
“These are free tickets,” Sedenker commented. “I don’t think we should complain.”
“It’s a horrible place,” his wife shot back. “A wicked den of thieves and prostitutes and sick people. I’m canceling. I’m calling my brother, and we are not going.”
“Okay,” was her husband’s reply, as he honestly did not care. Exonarella was a woman of many prejudices, and Windows Falling On Sparrows could never understand where she got them from. Her mother was never clear as to exactly why she had such a negative opinion of the Moon, especially since she had never been there herself. Windows Falling On Sparrows, on the other hand, was thrilled by the prospect.
The Moon. A bad place.
On the other hand, Chez Cracken San, a resort over by the Rings of Saturn, was guaranteed to be a touristic, shopping-mall experience of living death. Exactly the kind of place her mother would love. A plastic, prefabricated, and controlled environment with piped-in music, about as exciting as an elevator. No wonder her uncle gave those tickets to them — only losers went to places like that. Only adults, especially older ones, went on these voyages. She would be the only teenager, surrounded by lecherous middle-aged men in toupées who wouldn’t stop staring at her while their brain-dead wives all chatted with each other about their sons and daughters and which ones went to medical school and which one was a lawyer. She was going to suffocate to dear death, especially knowing her older brother and sister would have moved all the furniture out of the living room and turned their fat into a non-stop rave festival by then. Everyone was going to be there, except her — she would be stuck between Mom and Dad and their dumb petty arguments over nothing. Confined to close quarters with her overbearing mother and passive-aggressive father…
Rings of Saturn? So what? SO WHAT!? I’ll go there when I’m old!
Touristic. Waste of time.
But the Moon. Especially if they were really supposed to stay in a hotel in the infamously sleazy LEM Zone One! It would be easy — she would escape from her parents and wander around LEM Zone One just like the girl in that film Blood Crater, the one starring Janet Xan, who infiltrates a Sea of Tranquility mob family and ends up killing three hundred gangsters in a casino lobby. Or like the woman in Cheap Cheat Chuck-Off, who starts off as a prostitute who gets stabbed by her pimp, only she comes back later and cuts his head of then kills all of his henchmen with a machine gun, also in a casino. Windows Falling On Sparrows was a big fan of violent Lunaxploitation films, so the chance to see this infamous part of the Moon was very compelling. All her friends would be so jealous.
And there was also another reason.
She had a deep fascination with One Hundred Percent Lunar people. What she had heard about them was both remarkable and strange. At school, for years, there were endless rumors about these bizarre people who lived on the Moon,
that they had to wear goggles because there was a color in their eyes no one was allowed to see. That they saw invisible colors enabling them to look into the future.
And, the most fascinating rumor of all: One Hundred Percent Lunar People, with their ability to see all of that, were the only ones who were able to pilot all the fast stellar ships, including the Mega Cruisers. Only their eyes could transform the bending of unseen light across outer space into safe passageways through the solar system. Only they could see the pathways of the planets over the incredible distances.
All of this was just rumor. But she did have a friend of hers named Slaquenn who, as it turns out, had a cousin who was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. And something terrible indeed happened to that boy to support the rumors.
Her friend nervously explained it one day. She was a classmate. It happened during a field trip their school took into the countryside to explore the overgrown ruins of a city that had been destroyed several centuries earlier. The two of them wandered of from the rest of the class. The air smelled of the usual mix between burnt plastic and sour foliage. Slaquenn insisted Windows Falling On Sparrows follow her to an isolated area because she had something really important to tell her. Windows Falling On Sparrows assumed it would be nothing more than her latest secret crush on some unobtainable boy. She followed Slaquenn to a spot beneath an ancient elevated highway, its concrete and steel structure now just a collection of cracks and rust. Sufficiently isolated, Slaquenn told Windows Falling On Sparrows the incredible story of her cousin.
Don’t tell anyone what I am about to tell you, Windows Falling On Sparrows. I have to be quick, and I have to tell you before I change my mind. I have a cousin. His name is Bik. He is ten years older than we are. I never really knew him, but I did visit him once, a long time ago on the Moon. The Moon, by the way, is a very weird place. Never go there. Anyway, Bik is my father’s nephew — the son of his brother. Don’t tell anyone this, but Bik is what they call a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. I never completely understood what that really meant, but these are people who are born on the Moon and can somehow, and no one knows why, see colors that normal people cannot. They also have to keep their eyes covered because if you look at them in the eyes, you can get brain damage or you can become crazy. This is all a big secret. These people, like my own cousin, are not allowed to leave the Moon. The last time I saw him was nine years ago. I was seven. He was seventeen. I traveled to the Moon with my parents to visit our relatives there. It was a very nice visit, but it was strange to meet my cousin, Bik, who always wore these strange goggles. I was very young, and I just thought he was about to go swimming. Right after we left, Bik got himself into a load of trouble. He was arrested for purposely showing his eyes to someone. He was sent to a prison on the far side of the Moon. No one was allowed to have any contact with him. Not even his family. His parents tried to visit him, but they were threatened with arrest if they continued to try. Then, the government insisted that Bik had never existed in the first place. All records of him, his school records, his hospital records, everything vanished. His mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital for imagining that she had a son. His father, my uncle, was sent to prison for subversion. He’s been there ever since. Meanwhile, Bik has been officially erased. The lunar government is very stubborn, and eventually, after years of trying to find out what happened, my father gave up. Then, just as we were ready to accept the harsh reality of Bik’s disappearance and the imprisonment of his parents, something else came up to throw us all into excessive turmoil. Six months ago, my aunt, this is my father’s sister, who is also Bik’s aunt, had to fly to Mars for some kind of business meeting. She was on a Mega Cruiser. Halfway out there, the ship collided with a comet, and an S.O.S. was sent out. A rescue ship was called. Luckily, the damage was not too severe, but the passengers were all herded into lifeboats anyway just in case things got worse. Now, usually during a voyage on a Mega Cruiser, passengers are never, ever allowed to come into any kind of contact with the actual pilots — you know, the people behind the steering wheels who directly drive those things. No one knows why. Some kind of law. However, during an emergency, all that protocol breaks down, and my aunt found herself squeezed in with the captain and fifty others inside one of the ship’s front corridors. Everyone was in a panic because of the comet — my aunt said that everyone was convinced that that Mega Cruiser was about to fall apart. So thought the captain, who was highly agitated. He was yelling and barking orders at the entire panicking crew. Then he demanded to see the pilots. He shouted out loud, “Bring me those Pixiedamned goggle-eyed One Hundred Percent Lunar idiots who have ruined my ship!” and then she couldn’t believe it, from a hatchway, her nephew, my cousin Bik, shows up with another One Hundred Percent Lunar Man. The captain threatened to toss them back to the prison on the far side of the Moon. “What good is your wacko vision if you can’t even see a comet — that’s why we have you creatures driving our ships! To avoid this!” My aunt tried to get my cousin’s attention, but he was dragged away, and the captain realized that he had spoken too much in front of too many passengers. Later, after the emergency was neutralized and the passengers were transferred to another ship, my aunt made thousands of inquiries and she came up with the same brick wall each time — that her nephew never existed, and no, the pilots are not One Hundred Percent Lunar People.
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Page 8