Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder)

by Scott Rhine

“You’re sick.”

  He blew the shavings off his pencil point and smiled.

  Noticing his bruised and butterfly-stitched eye ridge, she asked, “How’d you get hurt?”

  Not wanting to remind her of the rape or make her feel any guiltier, he muttered, “It happened right after I got my crutches.” He held out one to demonstrate. “I’m bad with doorframes. Don’t worry; hockey hurt worse than this.”

  She leaned in to examine the injury and surprised him by kissing the injury the exact same way Trina had. “I didn’t ask her to do that,” Zeiss announced to the students milling around.

  After she dumped her gear on the bottom bunk, Red whistled for attention. “All right, you guys, listen up. Z, give us the lecture. I know you’ve done all the research. Don’t piss me off later by telling me I’m doing it wrong.”

  “If I’m going to instruct, I should wait until our final student arrives,” Zeiss objected.

  Red whispered, “But shouldn’t you give us some kind of edge for being early?”

  “This isn’t a competition. You’ll succeed only through balance and cooperation.”

  “Fine, I’ll wait,” she said, wandering into his room. “Books? Honest-to-God paper books? Risa would freak.”

  “No e-readers allowed here either,” Zeiss explained. “I brought a few newspapers and magazines. I’ll loan them out as I finish them.”

  She looked at the math and science titles and wrinkled her nose. “If we run out of toilet paper, maybe.”

  “Why are you being so negative?” the TA asked.

  “I lost my place on the Sunday practice rotation. I’ll have to wait another semester before I get to fly with Lou and impress him with how great a pilot I am.”

  “You have years to show him. Right now, you need to rest.” He pulled out one tome, and said, “Here. This is one of the most exciting action books of its era, written by the governor of Maine.”

  “Ben Hur? Grandpa said the movie won a lot of awards, but wasn’t it black-and-white? Wait, you have some Clancy in that stack. Gimme.”

  “After you finish Ben Hur,” he asserted. He handed her a dictionary. “You’ll need this for the vocabulary.”

  Red stuck out her tongue.

  Soon after, Kaguya arrived carrying a purse. One guard trailed behind her, hefting three suitcases, while a second man pushed a monstrous, meter-high electronics console, studded with knobs, lights, and levers. “There you go, Miss Mori. Anything more we can do?”

  “Thank you,” Kaguya said, kissing her finger and touching the cheek of the one who’d asked. He shivered, bowed, and departed. She tipped the one with the bags. He started to object until he saw there were two zeroes on the bill. Once the guards were out, the front airlock clicked shut, cutting off all contact with the outside world.

  The Japanese heiress wore a gold ensemble that displayed the maximum amount of leg. The three male students fell over themselves competing to carry her belongings to the room.

  “Why can she bring that and I can’t have a stupid tablet?” hissed Red.

  Zeiss shrugged. “For the next two weeks, I am not a TA. I don’t have to worry.”

  “Daniel-san gave me a waiver,” Kaguya said, twirling her hair. “It has no computer screen, no clock, and I use it for my sculpting. He thought it might be soothing for everyone.”

  When Red heard something thump in her room, she ran to look. Someone had placed her belongings on the top bunk. Her sparring helmet had dropped into the trash. She growled at the trespassers. “Out. Time for briefing. We’ve already spent twenty minutes longer in this prison than she has.”

  Zeiss was working a Sudoku when Red cleared her throat.

  Like a bored tour guide, he recited, “This exercise was started because of the moon base disaster a few years ago. They reached Lagrange orbit but didn’t have the fuel or heat shields to return to Earth. They had to dangle over hell in a leaky bucket for two weeks until rescue arrived. This simulation will give you a small taste of what they went through. It’s all in the brochure.” Zeiss looked up—from their blank expressions, no one in the front row had read ahead. He sighed. “There are ten simplified control stations around the common area. If something is a little out of alignment, a warning ping sounds. To fix it, you hold down the button until the light goes out. It could take a few minutes. If we have a critical failure, an alarm sounds until the item is repaired. I’d suggest we keep someone awake in the control area at all times.”

  “There are thirty-five disaster scenarios they could hit us with at any time to shake us up,” said a student in a military uniform and navigator’s bars.

  To Red, Zeiss said, “Hire this man. Green here not only aced my class, but I’m betting he’s the only one who brought the brochure with him.”

  An embarrassed sequence of looks confirmed this guess. Zeiss shook his head, returning to his puzzle. “Eat when it comes through the side door. Find your center. Stick to a fixed schedule. Don’t sleep all the time or you’ll lose perspective and depression will set in. Exercise for serotonin. Learn to meditate. Let anger flow through you. If you attempt to exit or assault another student, you wash out of the program. I brought paper course materials if anyone’s interested in reading ahead in their normal classes.”

  Then Zeiss walked to his room.

  “Wait, are we supposed to just sleep eight hours, work out, study, and eat?” asked a bald Indian man the others called ‘Cue Ball’. “No movies, no TV, nothing?”

  The blond Swiss teacher said, “It won’t kill you. Other than Sundays, that’s been my life for the last twenty years.”

  “I brought cards,” announced Red.

  “I have music,” added Kaguya, hopping into her room to get the music console.

  “No other advice?” pleaded Zeiss’s roommate, Ernesto.

  “No sex. In this environment, it’s worse than playing with petrol.”

  “Challenge accepted,” whispered Kaguya in her room.

  Red, who’d come in for the cards, intimated, “There’s no way you’ll break down Mr. Rules.”

  “All men crumble before me.”

  “He’s different,” The girl smiled and explained how Zeiss spent his weekends with Sojiro. “So he’s just a teensy bit . . .”

  “Gay? That means he’s part het, and one part is all I need,” Kaguya said suggestively.

  “He’s hand-writing his mother a letter right now. He gets bundles of them from her when the mail plane comes.”

  “That’s a sign of respect. You can tell how a man is going to treat his wife by watching the way he treats his mother.”

  “I warned you.”

  ****

  After dinner, Zeiss lingered in the dining area to socialize and read the mail he’d received through the meal hatch.

  “How come we didn’t get mail?” asked his roommate, Ernesto.

  “Did you ask your friends to take turns writing you every day?” replied Zeiss. “I did.”

  “How do we know you’re not here as a plant, to spy on us?” Ernesto countered.

  “I’m on suspension,” he replied.

  “Prove it.”

  Zeiss walked up to a poster that read, “The acid used in colas must bear a hazardous materials placard when transported.” He ripped it off the wall and tore it into strips. “I’m sick of those things.”

  “You rebel,” giggled Red.

  “Good enough for me,” said Kaguya.

  “I hear he let a Rex beat the shit out of him to save some students; he can sit at my table any day,” said the mil navigator. Red furrowed her brow.

  “How do we choose the four players?” Kaguya asked quickly.

  “I’ll sit out and watch for now,” Zeiss volunteered. “I might make some tea.”

  “Me, too,” said the Japanese heiress. “I’ll put the music on.”

  Zeiss put a kettle on the stove and sat in the low, comfy chair. He laid his crutches on the floor and warned the others not to trip on them.

  �
�Why no clocks?” asked Green.

  “Same reason they don’t have them in casinos,” Red guessed. “No limits or reminders of the outside world.”

  Kaguya sat behind Zeiss on a barstool so she could get a better view of the game.

  “These are synth vocals,” noted Red.

  “They’ve had those for years. It’s like speech recognition in reverse,” said Green.

  The Japanese heiress shook her head. “Imaja is the first program of her kind. She blends parts of five different women using the Fortune compositing algorithms for voice instead of body image. This way, artists are truly the products of my father’s company. You wear the sound print like a glove. It’s more like audio-sculpting at this point, and several of the voices are proprietary. I use my own voice as the core, but eventually we can substitute any competent studio singer.”

  Zeiss turned to listen better to her and got an eyeful of leg. He turned back to the game quickly.

  Cue Ball scoffed, “More like a puppeteer. It has no soul!”

  “Everyone else seems to enjoy well it enough. It makes contract negotiations with our bigger stars a lot easier when they know that they could be replaced next.” Kaguya hummed to the suggestive music, making it difficult for Zeiss to read.

  As they played, a course-correction light pinged on. The light vanished after Kaguya pushed the button for thirty seconds. “Easy,” she bragged.

  “Try the Jack,” Zeiss advised the Indian student. “Finesse it.”

  When Green was shuffling the deck for the next hand, Kaguya asked, “Z, have you heard my album before?”

  Zeiss wasn’t comfortable with the tone. It implied she would gush over whatever he said next. He tried to remain neutral “I’ve only seen the cover in the BX. It was called Change?”

  The singer shook her head. “It’s pronounced Chong Uh,” she said, making a slight hip thrust with the sound that caused Green to spray cards all over the tabletop. “Kaguya is the Japanese goddess of great beauty who launched into the sky from Mount Fuji—a corruption of the Chinese word for immortality. Chang’e is the Chinese version of my name, their moon goddess. She’s a rabbit.”

  The woman placed a heel on his shoulder. “See?”

  There was a tattoo of a stylized bunny on her ankle. Zeiss could also smell perfume. “Why is it upside-down?”

  She smiled. “Because it’s designed to be admired by the man holding it in the air, kissing it.”

  The tea kettle whistled, and Zeiss hobbled over to the stove. “I’ll take this in my room.”

  “Subtle,” muttered Red.

  ****

  All the male students did exercises together the next morning. Cue Ball complained, “I had two emergencies last night. On the second one, there were two lit at the same time. I almost couldn’t reach two buttons at once. I had to hold that one for ten minutes.” He pointed to the blue button over the sink.

  “That’s the water system,” explained Ernesto. “It’s finicky.”

  “Get some sleep after calisthenics and breakfast,” suggested Zeiss. When he went into the ladies’ bedroom for the requested wake-up call, Kaguya was laying on top of the sheet in a ‘nightgown’ not much bigger than a wash cloth that did nothing to hide her lacy underwear. He stared in disbelief for several moments before turning around and clearing his throat. “Red, breakfast.”

  By midday everyone except Kaguya was lining up for the books that Zeiss brought. She was working on a new album. The first track was a cover of “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”. She bopped to it whenever she met Zeiss in the common area.

  The group settled into a dull routine.

  By lights-out on the third day, however, Red had been kicked out of the card club for counting. “But they’re my cards,” she protested.

  “Vegas rules,” Kaguya told her.

  As Red stormed to Zeiss’s room to complain, the pilot shouted, “Patsy Cline! Your super-secret voice is Patsy Cline. My grandpa listens to her all the time.”

  Red slammed the TA’s door with a growl.

  Zeiss transferred the anger to himself when he insisted loudly, “Open that back up, please. Propriety.”

  “Argh!” she bellowed. “Isn’t that the fifth pot of tea you’ve had today?”

  “I’m on a roll on my dissertation. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “What is it about that bitch that sets my teeth on edge?” she shouted the insult so that the people in the other room could hear.

  “Don’t use abusive language toward people you have to live with,” he said calmly.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “You really want to know? Because it works best if you figure it out for yourself.”

  “Tell me!”

  “She’s just like you,” Zeiss said, not looking up from his calculations.

  The girl slapped him on the cheek and stormed out of his room, slamming her own door next. Kaguya poked her head in a moment later. “I take it you stood up for me?”

  “I told her the truth.”

  She could see the red mark blooming on the side of his face. “I know she’s a friend. That had to hurt.”

  “I can take it.”

  Kaguya kissed the red mark, and he could smell her perfume. “I’ll talk to her.”

  After she walked out slowly, Zeiss began doing push-ups.

  An hour and much shouting later, a tear-stained Red crept back to his room. “Hi,” she said meekly. “May I come in?”

  “If you’re not going to hit me again.”

  More tears leaked out. “That’s not fair. Mori told me about Alistair . . .”

  He put a finger over his lips and nodded to the men gathered to listen on the other side of his door. She gave him a hug. “I’m sooorry,” she sobbed. After several sniffs, she leaned back again. “But that comment hurt.”

  “Have you found a counter-example to disprove it?” Zeiss asked, irritated. “You’re always competing and don’t know when to stop: secretive, obscenely rich, spoiled, entitled, multi-talented, above the rules, the center of your own distorted world. Everything always comes easy. The mountain always has to come to you . . .”

  Her mouth gaped, but Red couldn’t say a word to contradict him. He stopped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t bring any pain meds and I’m cranky. Forget I said anything. I deserved the slap.”

  She sat there, stunned for a minute. “But you count cards, too.”

  “It’s not about the counting. I use it to help people, not crush them. When you do that, you’re no better than a schoolyard bully.”

  “You’re rich, too, you hypocrite,” she said.

  “No. Now that I’m done with school, all my trusts went toward my mom’s assisted-living fund. Anything that’s left will go to my sister. Nobody ever showed her how to so much as go to a grocery store for herself. That’s why I try to help the people here fish for themselves. There’s still hope for you.”

  Because Red wanted to slap him again, she left. On her way through the common area, she hissed to Green, “What’s his problem?”

  “The letters from his mom didn’t arrive like normal Monday. He can’t use a computer or call to find out why. It’s very stressful.”

  She buried her head under her pillow for a long time.

  ****

  The next morning, while Zeiss was getting tea, Red noted a new letter and scooped it up. “Hey, this is from Risa. She lost thirty pounds this year and over break a boy offered to drive her home? Why is that a big deal?”

  “It’s a euphemism,” explained Green.

  “You know, meet her at a party, give her a ride, drive her home afterward,” said Ernesto, with a grin.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Red complained.

  “My mail,” said Zeiss blandly, not expecting to be heard. “Private. None of your beeswax.”

  Kaguya sighed. “Thirty pounds is a huge deal. Though I doubt you’ve ever experienced that at fifteen. She’s saying that she feels incredibly flattered
that a boy at the party wanted to have sex with her.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not fifteen,” Red said, reading further.

  “By telling me, she’s hoping I’ll let it slip to Herk and make him jealous,” Zeiss said, steering the subject to safer waters.

  “Z, why is she asking you for help? She’s my friend.” Out loud, she read, “Papa was furious when he saw my C+ in honors calculus. I never should’ve let Red badger me into taking it with my load.” Red looked up from the paper. “My friends come to you for advice about dealing with me?”

  The room cleared.

  Zeiss dunked the teabag. “If you’re going to commit the discourtesy of reading someone’s mail, at least read all of it. I was in the middle of a reply.”

  Red shuffled the papers and read, “Dealing with your roommate takes a firm hand, not unlike a hammerhead shark.” Someone barked with laughter from the other room. “Sometimes, you need to smack her on the nose to get the ‘no’ across.” Her face clouded with rage.

  Calmly, he said, “Keep going.”

  Raising her voice, she read, “But with all her faults, she is the best kind of friend.” Red stopped, confused. “When a member of her family needs something, she focuses that formidable will to helping. Next time, rephrase your refusal as a need for more study time. If you didn’t ask, you can’t blame her. She is who she is, and that’s why you love her.”

  She froze, processing the bizarre compliment.

  “I thought of a difference,” he said, “between you and Kaguya.”

  “She’s pretty?”

  “No, Mira. You both are. She’s just older. The difference is that you apologized. She never would; we’re all just an audience for her.”

  “What do I do now that I can’t play cards?”

  “I could teach you Go.”

  “I’d like that,” replied Red.

  Listening in, Kaguya vowed to seduce him just so she could leave him a ragged ruin.

  ****

  At the end of week one, the shower stopped working, causing shrieks from Kaguya who’d been shampooing her hair at the time. Red kept secret that the kitchen sink still worked just so she could force the woman to use the water in the toilet tank. While they were wrestling with the plumbing, the air conditioning failed. The heat had everyone on edge.