Derby is also like life in that it becomes your life. We practice three times a week, we have meetings every Tuesday, and we do appearances for publicity and charity. Well, that’s how it was on the team I was on before, which was in a major metropolitan city that I moved out of under such circumstances that I no longer refer to it by name. I usually just call it Hastur. If you get that joke, consider yourself high–fived.
Here in Alexandria — which the locals charmingly refer to as “Alec,” as though the town was their sarcastic younger brother — there aren’t quite as many opportunities for public appearances. There isn’t even a proper rink for us to skate in, so we hold our bouts in an old Quonset hut out beyond the power plant. On the Monday after every bout at least one person comes up to me at work and tells me they were going to come but they couldn’t find the place. Under other circumstances that would sound like the Minnesota version of a polite excuse, but I believe it. The top of our wish list is a neon sign, but we need to make some money first.
Which is why we agreed to this away bout with the Stellar Swarm Rollergirls. Really, it’s why Lewd–a–Fisk agreed to it. Lewd–a–Fisk is our Events chair, and she said the money was too good to pass up. Transportation provided, a 60/40 revenue share — the 60 going to the winner — and 5k guaranteed? That’s more than the Douglas County Rollergirls made all last year. We’re a volunteer–run non–profit; we could use the bump. It’s one of those things that might be a little too good to be true, which is what Joan Deere starts saying to Lewd–a–Fisk at around 3:30, when the bus that was supposed to take us to Lyra is an hour and a half late.
“This guy didn’t say he was a prince or anything, did he? That he was coming into an inheritance in a few weeks? You didn’t front him five hundred bucks so that he could pay you back with interest?”
“Come on, Joan.” Lewd–a–Fisk is my derby wife, which doesn’t mean what you probably think it does, at least not in this case. It’s just sort of a buddy system, really, and I feel obligated to stick up for Lewdy even if I’d rather be on my couch having a margarita and watching some awful science fiction thing on cable. Instead we’re waiting — fifteen skaters, minus the usual volunteers and camp followers — in front of our Quonset hut headquarters in the blaring heat of a Minnesota August. You’d never think it — at least, I never did — but the summers here are as brutal as the winters. We’d wait inside, but it’s even hotter in there.
“Look, I met Mr. Kevinson, all right?” Lewdy says. “He’s a bit eccentric but he checks out. I called the Babe City Rollergirls and they sort of laughed, but they said he was legit.”
“Something’s not right, because I’ve never heard of Lyra, Minnesota,” says Spermicidal Tendencies. She’s been saying it for two weeks now, ever since we put this on the schedule, but before anyone can tell her to shut up, a rumble and a gasp echo across the asphalt, and a bus pulls into sight. It looks like it was painted by the Electric Mayhem under the competing directions of Ziggy–era Bowie and Graffiti Bridge–era Prince. It’s the kind of thing you can’t possibly take in all at once.
It hisses to a stop, and the door swings open to reveal a person wearing silver coveralls, a furred cape, and a battered white top hat over shades and a veil of curly black hair.
“Sorry I’m running a skad late,” the person says. I don’t like to make assumptions about anyone’s gender, and there’s more than a little bit of mixed signals at work here. “Let’s get your baggage into the hold and take off.” I don’t see their hands move, but they must have pressed a button somewhere, because the luggage compartments underneath pop open.
Lewdy steps up to say hello, so I guess this is the notorious and objectively eccentric Mr. Kevinson. A few of the girls are staring. You’ve got to be a little bit open to freakiness to be a derby girl, but Mr. Kevinson is not the sort of person you see in Alexandria, ever, and some of the team comes from towns even smaller than that. As the resident big–city veteran of queer proms and fetish nightclubs, I figure maybe this is a good time for me to take the lead.
“Mr. Kevinson.” I offer my hand and he covers it with both of his. His skin is brown and warm. “I’m Huggernaut. I hope we can still make the bout on time.”
“Lickety–split.” Mr. Kevinson’s voice is like Barry White and Dusty Springfield licking honey off of each other. He smiles, or at least he forms his mouth into a crescent; his eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses and there’s something synthetic about the way his skin wrinkles. Too much makeup, I decide, and stow my gear underneath.
Normally we prefer to convoy to the away bouts in our own cars, but Mr. Kevinson had told Lewdy that parking was limited at the facility, so we agreed to be driven. It’s a luxury we’re not accustomed to, or at least it seems that way until we’re all settled in and the restraints drop down over us. Not bondage–type restraints, but roller–coaster–type restraints, padded steel that pushes down against my shoulders, lets up slightly, and then locks into place. Lewdy and I are seated right behind the driver. I try to kick at the back of his seat, but it’s too far.
The girls start swearing, but they’re quickly drowned out by a sound like when your dog barks at the vacuum cleaner, only amplified about five hundred times, and that’s when it occurs to me that maybe the name Stellar Swarm is more descriptive than we realized and perhaps Lyra is not a town in Minnesota after all.
“It’ll just be a skad,” says Mr. Kevinson, as the ground falls away and Gs press me against my seat and push the breath out of me. Barry and Dusty continue to make sweet love as the light outside fades from bright and humid to blue and vaporous to cool and glitter–dark, but I’m not really hearing what Mr. Kevinson is saying because I’m distracted by thoughts of A) death, B) interstellar slave trafficking, and C) bloody retribution against the Babe City Rollers if I’m ever within a light year of Bemidji again.
Lewdy and I find each other’s hands and squeeze. Since we’re right behind the driver’s seat, we get a full view of Mr. Kevinson as he stands up with his back to us and shudders. There’s a click, and then the cape bulges out and falls away as something like an oversized Weeble floats out from behind it.
You know what I mean when I talk about Weebles, right? Those egg–shaped, bottom–heavy toys from before cable? I spend a lot of time with these girls, and the time I feel oldest is when I drop some joke or some cultural reference and I get silence and blank stares. I say girls — it’s in the team name, after all — but our ages range from nineteen to forty–seven. Anyway, I’m old enough to remember those Weeble commercials, the ones where they wobbled but they didn’t fall down, but this is a little different, because there’s something inside the Weeble. It’s maybe two feet high, and I’d say it resembles a weasel except that it’s blue, has one leg, appears to be hairless, and is steering a floating egg.
It hovers in the aisle just out of my reach while the body with the cape and the hat sits back down in the driver’s seat. “I apologize for the deception,” it says in a voice like Dusty reaching orgasm while sitting on Barry’s face. “Sadly, we find it to be necessary for your planet. Lyra, as you may have realized by now, is not a town in your fine state.”
Spermicidal Tendencies shouts from the back of the bus: “I fucking told you!”
“It is, rather, what you on your planet refer to as a Dyson swarm, surrounding a largely overlooked star in the vicinity of Vega. I own a roller derby club in the swarm, which is where you’ll be skating tonight. I assure you that the terms of your contract will be honored, you will be well treated, and you will be returned to your planet by no later than 0800 local time tomorrow morning.
“We’ll be traveling about twenty–nine light years, which will take approximately thirty minutes. I suggest that you relax and enjoy the journey.”
We start making some alternative suggestions, but before Mr. Kevinson — if that is his real name — can be properly insulted, things get weird. I don’t mean implausible or unlikely, I mean trippy. Everything gets bendy and indis
tinct, like we’ve all been colored outside the lines. I feel Lewdy’s fingers squirming in my own, and I try to let go of her hand, but it’s like our knuckles are fused and the bones in my arm have disappeared. I spend a few minutes trying to untangle us, and I should be panicking, because this is wrong in so many ways, but it’s not freaking me out like it should. I’m so liquid that a part of me is worried that I may have pissed myself. I’m thinking about the way Mr. Kevinson has a body that he can just float out of whenever he likes. Maybe he’s got other bodies around, or maybe he can make alterations to the one he has whenever he feels like it.
This is something I think about a lot, because I wasn’t born in a girl’s body. Notice that I don’t say I wasn’t born a girl, because I fucking was. I spent twenty–eight years thinking I was trapped in my body before I got up the courage to start changing it. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t waited so long. Sometimes I wish I could mold myself like Silly Putty, to be more of the person I know I was supposed to be. So that’s what I spend the rest of the trip to Lyra doing, thinking malleable thoughts.
It doesn’t work, but when we come out of whatever–that–was I feel calm. I turn and look at my hand, which is still clasped with Lewdy’s and in no danger of becoming bonded. I squeeze her hand and smile at her in a way that I know I’m going to be embarrassed about once I come down from this hyperspace drug.
Mr. Kevinson’s voice comes over the speakers — I don’t see the blue weasel anywhere, so maybe he’s floated back into the driver. “Ladies,” Mr. Kevinson says, “welcome to the Lyra Swarm.”
It’s like a disco ball, if you made each of the mirrors the size of a small planet, put a gap of about ninety–three million miles between each of them, and put the light on the inside. That, and either put them in fixed orbit or create some insanely complex and dangerous orbital matrix, and make about a third of the mirrors solar collectors that transfer energy to the rest of the swarm wirelessly or through some other ingenious and unlikely technology. Hey, I may teach drafting at a technical college, but I read.
“Technically I think that’s a bubble,” I say.
“True, Madame Huggernaut. It started as a swarm, but over the centuries it’s become a bubble. Over a trillion beings live here, of more than ten thousand species. Which reminds me: in a compartment in the seat arm you’ll find some translator putty. Stick it between your cheek and gum and the nanites will do the rest. Now I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m quiet for a moment while I dock with the Apex Jump.”
The putty he mentioned looks pretty much like chewing gum. I slip it into my mouth and feel it start to dissolve. It tastes like pickles.
Lewdy elbows me in the side. “Don’t put that in your mouth! It might be a Roofie!”
“Oh.” I reach into my mouth, but the putty is already gone. I guess the hyperspace high has worn off, because all of a sudden I feel like dirt. It’s almost fifteen years since I transitioned, but I was socialized as a man for almost twice that long, and I still have blind spots about being a woman. Fortunately, Lewdy seems to be wrong; as far as I can tell the putty hasn’t done anything at all.
Mr. Kevinson steer us towards a platform in the shape of a massive banana yellow skate wheel. The outer rim of the wheel is lined with what I assume are docking bays, and we maneuver toward one of these with more grace than I would expect of a bus. The bus slows, straightens, and sets down with an efficiency that’s almost insulting to the blissful experience of getting here. The docking bay door clunks shut and air fills the space so quickly that the windows fog up.
The restraints release and lift away, and the door hisses open. I struggle to my feet — it’s a little bit of a surprise to find they’re still there — and stomp to the front of the bus. Mr. Kevinson’s vehicle/body is strapped in, but clearly there’s no one there. The head tilts to one side, and when I pull aside the fur cape there’s a cavity in the back the size of a three–foot egg.
“Where is he?”
“Mr. Kevinson had some urgent business to attend to.” This new voice is like playing cello with a piece of French toast. I turn around and see an… alien, I guess I have to say. It looks kind of like if you took a short, somewhat rotund man with a heavy beard, glued long white hair everywhere that the beard didn’t cover, and then shaved the beard.
“Who are you?” I say.
“I’m Mrs. Danielson,” the thing says. “I’m your liaison.”
I stand there for a second wondering why it is that this five–foot–tall space yeti speaks with a Southern twang until Lewdy elbows me and whispers, “Since when do you speak space yeti?”
“Go take your putty,” I tell her. To Mrs. Danielson I say, “Give us just a moment, please.”
“Certainly.”
The team is staring at me like I’m going to start vomiting fire hydrants. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, all right?” I say. “I don’t know how the fuck to get back. We need to be able to communicate. I’m fine. Take the putty.”
“I was supposed to text my folks directions to the place,” says Spermy.
“If you can get a signal here, go ahead,” I say. “Just tell them to hang a left at Hercules.”
So they take the putty, or at least some of them do, and the rest of them at least pocket it. Then we file out and start unloading our luggage while Mrs. Danielson shakes everybody’s hands.
“You’re being stupid calm about all this,” Lewdy tells me.
The truth is I’m freaking out, not with fear, but with excitement. I probably should be scared, but I’m in outer space! I’m a space traveler; we all are. Neil Armstrong hasn’t got shit on us. Well, except for the part where he and Buzz and Michael Collins did at least some of the driving. Any one of us could take him on skates, though.
“If you’ll just follow me, I’ll show you to Locker Room 12B,” says Mrs. Danielson. “It will go more quickly on skates.”
We look at each other for a moment. Then: “Lace up,” says Joan Deere, my co–captain. “We’ve got a bout to win.”
Ten minutes later Mrs. Danielson leads us out of the docking bay and into the most spectacular spectacle you’ve ever laid spectacles on. The interior of Apex Jump, as it turns out, is ringed by a mile–high wall of docking bays, habitats, and terraces, and centered upon an open, multi–level concourse leading to and from a glass–dark hub that extends all the way through the platform like a black tower. Sun shines on vegetation growing in parks the size of parking spaces and hanging from trellis–like awnings. Vendor carts stand under these, veiled by leaves and flowers, selling things that resemble food in every way but their colors. Other vendors hawk programs, glowsticks, smart tattoos, branded clothing, mood–altering substances, and a thousand other things.
The vendors themselves are even more interesting than their wares. Two balls of light hover over a display of crystal cylinders, extolling their virtues in waves of color that I somehow understand as words. A bowl of water the size and shape of a basketball holds a murky, bubbling liquid from which five slithery appendages rearrange a display of holographic video projectors. Something I take to be a marble pillar spins with a stony rumble as we approach and offers me an ice cream cone. But none of that captures the strangeness, because we are weaving through a crowd of beings of every size and color and shape and substance, walking or slithering or crawling or hopping or flying or skating, or floating along in vehicles like Mr. Kevinson’s egg except filled with liquids or gases of unearthly hues. Some resemble animals or objects that I can name, some I’m not even sure I see in any real way, they are so far outside of any context that I know.
Something with wings and eyestalks and a tail about twelve feet long lurches into my path, and I have to brake to avoid running into it.
“Oh my God,” it says, or at least the translator nanites tell me it’s saying, “are you Huggernaut? I saw the streaming footage of you skating against the Windy City Rollers when you were still on the Hastur team.” It doesn’t say Hastur, of course, but like I said I don’t spe
ak the name of my former dwelling place, not even when I’m repeating fan squee from creatures who live twenty–nine light years distant.
Somehow, this is the most normal thing that has happened to me since I stepped onto Mr. Kevinson’s bus.
“Hi,” I say. “Yes, we’re here to skate against the Stellar Swarm.”
“I’m sooo excited that you are here!” it says. “Good luck tonight! I’ll be cheering for you.”
Lewdy elbows me as we resume following Mrs. Danielson through the crowd. “You’ve got fans on Deep Space Nine?”
“Like I knew? Besides, this shit is more Farscape, if you ask me.”
Let me be clear: I love Lewdy, but I am not in love with her. She has a husband and a little girl, and I love them too. When I moved to Alec I was angry but I was also really damn sad. I don’t want to get too much into it, because it still hurts. Let’s just say: I had a derby wife, a real one. And then she decided that not only did she not want to be my wife anymore, she didn’t want me in derby. For a long, excruciating season I fought her off the track as she turned our friends against me. Not all of them, just enough that I could see that it was tearing the league apart. What hurt the most was that when I left, no one tried to talk me into staying.
I moved to Alec because it was far away and they didn’t have a team. Except that it turned out they were starting one, and they nearly wore out my doorbell asking me to join. It took some convincing, but I’m so glad I said yes. Like I said, life knocks you down and you get the fuck up. Lewdy and the other girls gave me a home, and this one I plan to hold on to.
“This way,” says Mrs. Danielson, pointing. “Take it all the way down and turn left. I’ll be by to check on you before the bout.”
A minute later we’re zooming down a lazy spiral ramp in a line. The gravity here must be a little less than Earth–normal, because we don’t pick up enough speed for this to feel dangerous. Joan turns the descent into a back–to–front, the girls at the rear passing all the way to the front, each in turn. It’s a good idea; focusing on the drill helps keep the sensory overload of the station around us at bay.
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