Fugitive From Asteron (2 page)

Chapter 3

The reception I received from my commander left me unable to
walk. He discharged me from my pilot’s post for insubordination, cowardice in
battle, sabotage, and other crimes—and he argued forcefully for my execution.

But Feran decided to spare my life.
I could only wonder at his reason. His untold acts of violence against real and
imagined insurrections had depleted the population, especially the young men
like me, causing a scarcity of Asteron’s strongest laborers. Was this why he
let me live, I wondered, or was it due to the peculiar interest he seemed to
take in breaking my stubborn resistance to his will? In any case, I was given
the new job of cargo carrier at the space center, and my specific assignment
was to service Feran’s ship.

I was transferred to the space
workers’ quarters and spent my first days in the room for attitude adjustment,
where I became a frequent visitor. When I had recovered enough to function, I
was released from my cell and assigned a pallet to sleep on in the great room
of the men’s section. There I took my place on the straw-covered floor among
three hundred others. Keeping us all together in one room promoted equality and
fairness, we were told. It also made it easier for the guards to watch us.

Gone was the comfort in which I had
previously lived. Even though everyone on Asteron was supposed to have the same
living conditions, Feran favored certain groups—like the pilots essential to
his government—and provided them with real beds, heating, hot water, and other
luxuries unavailable to most other citizens.

I adjusted to the squalor of my new
living conditions, but the loss of flying was harder to accept. Instead of
soaring across the sky, I now crept along the ground. I serviced Feran’s ship,
delivered items around the city on errands for my superiors, appeared at
meetings to discuss
The Daily Word
, and ate the dried morsels once used
for animal feed but now given to us to stave off starvation.

My dream of space travel refused to
die. In fact, it was constantly stoked by the sleek feat of alien engineering
that was Feran’s spacecraft. I learned everything I could about the spacecraft,
a gateway to mysteries outside the tight perimeter of my life. I furtively
observed the engineers testing the systems, and I memorized their access codes
whenever I had the opportunity.

My yearning to explore other worlds
was especially aroused when Feran returned from one of his trips to planets
unknown to us. On that journey he brought back two heavy crates. As I was about
to remove one from the cargo bay, it talked to me—and in my own language.

“Water, water,” the crate whispered
in a weak male voice.

I looked between the wooden slats
of the box to see the silhouette of a male humanoid, his face hidden in the
darkness. When I brought water in a paper cup, five shaking fingers emerged from
the dark crate to accept my offering through one of the slits. I heard him gulp
down the water, and then his hand reappeared, giving me—of all things!—a gold
coin.

“Thank you, son,” the faltering
voice said.

I hesitated.

“Here, take it.” He moved his hand
insistently until I accepted the coin. I quickly concealed it in my pocket
before anyone noticed. I was still kneeling at the crate, trying to get a
better look at the peculiar alien, when Feran entered.

The calm, smiling countenance he
liked to display in public had vanished. A sneer and wild eyes edged by jagged
eyebrows revealed his inner fury. His shiny black hair looked like a military
helmet above his gaunt face. He leaped toward me and grabbed my throat, then
banged my head against the floor. “Get away from there!” he bellowed. “How dare
you meddle in my affairs, animal!”

Although it was against the law for
us to talk to aliens, Feran’s anger over my contact with his boxed captive
seemed excessive. He towered over me, punctuating his message with kicks to my
ribs. “One day, I will send you for treatment with the calming probe!”

I gasped in horror, for many rumors
were whispered about the calming probe, but because I had delivered medical
supplies to the Mental Health Caring Center and done my own probing, I knew
what occurred beyond the creaking doors that rebellious citizens disappeared
behind.

The calming probe, I had
discovered, was a surgical instrument that removed pieces from the front of a
citizen’s brain, troublesome chunks of tissue that made the person defiant.
When the doctors inserted the instrument at a specific angle and depth, they
could avoid death by hemorrhage—usually. At best, the probe produced a tranquil
citizen who followed orders and performed useful work. At worst, the probe
produced an imbecile that officials had to dispose of quietly. In either case
the patient was deemed cured because the disobedience, rage, and violence were
no longer a menace to society.

As I faced Feran and his
unspeakable threat, my mouth hung open and my eyes widened in unveiled panic. I
had never before displayed this abject terror when Feran had threatened me.
Like an animal smelling a scent that pleased it, Feran smiled at my unguarded
moment of horror. “
Now
I know how to make you obey,” he said, quite satisfied
with his discovery. “You show no fear of beatings or dying, but now I know! One
more misstep, and you will be brought to the health center for your curative
treatment.”

For that particular misstep, Feran
summoned the guards to school me, so I supposed the beating I received was the
only skill they had learned in school. After my lesson, I spent yet another
night in the room for attitude adjustment. Lying on my face and shivering that
night in the cell, my body swollen with wounds, I wondered about many things.
What was a human doing in a crate? Why did he utter useless words like
thank
you
? Elders on Asteron occasionally used that expression, but it must have
become obsolete, because no one had ever thanked me for anything, nor had I
thanked anyone.

And why did the alien call me
son
?
I knew of the old custom in which a couple lived separately from others and
raised their children themselves. But that practice was outdated on Asteron. Because
our leaders provided the children with nourishment, schooling, and other
necessities, it seemed that raising them in the public compound they called
Children’s World was a better way to ensure their proper upbringing, as well as
to foster equality. Was the boxed alien from a primitive culture that had not
yet advanced to our stage? Why did he speak our language? And why did he give
me a coin?

I knew that coins had once served
as money and that primitive people used money to buy things that they called
possessions. But I had no need to buy anything because everything on Asteron
was free, and, besides, there was nothing to buy. Why was I so interested in
keeping a coin that was of no use to me?

And if money was a corruption, why
did our leaders covet it and seek it from the aliens they despised? I wondered
why aliens were allowed to come here to mine the gold on Asteron, which our
leaders seemed unable to extract themselves. The money our rulers received from
the aliens’ mining operations had built the space center and fed our people.
But now the once-plentiful mines were on the brink of depletion—and Asteron was
on the verge of starvation. Were our spirits on the brink of depletion too? I
had many questions but no answers.

As soon as I was able to sit up
that night, I hid the coin underneath the inner sole of my shoe, where it
formed a shiny circle nearly as large as my heel. I had been punished for my
misdeed, but the coin was worth it! I now had a curious object from another
world. What was this world like? Would I ever know?

When I returned to work, I warned myself
that I could not sway in the slightest from Feran’s commands for fear of the calming
probe. But even before he made his vile threat, one magnetic presence was
gripping my life, pulling me out of alignment.

It was someone I had encountered:
an exceedingly ugly, traitorous, and irreplaceable female named Reevah. Being
different from others merited official disapproval on Asteron. In practice,
though, we excused many for being different, such as those who lacked brains or
sense. But Reevah’s manner of being different was inexcusable. Whereas most
Asteronian females had brown hair, Reevah’s was the color of the newly minted
gold from the alien mines, and it plunged down her back in a liquid flow of
curls. Whereas the features of other females lacked symmetry, Reevah’s seemed designed
by an engineer: Her full lips, straight nose, and giant piercing eyes were in
perfect balance. And Reevah was taller and thinner than the others, with longer
legs and fuller breasts than they had. By the standards of our world, Reevah
was ugly.

To make matters worse, she seemed
to revel in her ugliness, resisting attempts to make her blend in. Reevah would
forget the scarf she was supposed to wear on her head; she would forget to
confine her hair with clips; she would become sick on hair-cutting days and
miss her assigned time; and she always seemed to have problems locating the
larger sizes of clothing that masked her exceedingly female form. Besides these
flaws, Reevah had an odd manner of staring straight into people’s eyes. Such
was not the way on Asteron, where we were taught to look down.

I had seen Reevah at meetings we
attended to discuss
The Daily Word
, but we had never spoken until the
day I delivered cargo to the foreign agents’ quarters, which housed the elite
group of spies who traveled to planets beyond our homeland. I knew nothing of
the spies’ activities, only that Feran favored their group above all others.

I had arrived during the janitors’
cleaning period, so some of the doors were open. I peered into the rooms to
find only one bed and—shockingly—a bath. After delivering my goods to a supply
room, I was startled to find Reevah, in a janitor’s gray uniform, staring at me
from the hallway.

Although the spies’ work areas were
cleaned by robots as a security measure, such a luxury was unaffordable in
their living quarters. Their residences were cleaned by human janitors, and
Reevah was one of those workers. Brushing past her in the hallway on my way
out, I felt the whisper of her breath in my ear.

“I saw a sight from an alien
world,” she said.

I stared at her, astonished.

“I peeked inside an open door and
saw a spy watching a most unusual movie on her monitor. I had never seen
anything like it. When the spy noticed me staring, she ordered me back to work
and closed the door.”

I listened intently.

“I must meet you to tell you what I
saw.”

“Why do you want to tell
me
?”

“Because you are one of the ugly
ones.”

I had avoided Reevah because to
look at her was to think thoughts that could be dangerous. But at that moment
in the hallway, Reevah and I warmed the column of air between us until it rose
above our heads, and we were pulled together in its place.

I arranged to meet her at a window
of her quarters during the nightly blackout, a time when we could avoid the
security systems and slip away for a while unnoticed.

That night I propped a bundle of
straw under my blanket to make it look like my body was still lying on my
pallet, and I secretly exited a window of my domicile. The task went smoothly,
for it was not the first time I had performed it. I walked to the dark gray
building with smudged windows that was the janitors’ quarters. In a little spot
along the colorless wall, I saw a band of gold hair radiating around a gray
kerchief. Reevah was waiting by a window for me.

I did not want to involve her in my
misdeeds, I told myself, but this was the only way we could talk. Seeing each
other alone required permissions that were not granted to citizens like us who
were troublesome to their superiors. As I walked toward Reevah, the thought of
punishment haunted me. Every rustle of a leaf or movement of a ground animal
filled me with fear. But that was before I pulled her slim body down from the
window and brought her along a dirt path through the trees to a nearby lake.
There we were alone.

The spot I chose was a grassy
clearing near the water, where a line of dense shrubbery blocked us from view
of the town. On past occasions when I could get away from the eyes that
constantly watched me, I had gone to this spot alone to gaze at the stars and
wonder what secrets they held.

On that warm night, the moons of
Asteron bathed Reevah’s face in soft light. She eagerly explained that she had
seen on the spy’s monitor two alien humanoids, a man and a woman, and they were
dancing. A narrator was describing the movie as a study in primitive cultures.
Reevah said she tried to ignore the narrator’s voice because under it she heard
music playing in the movie.

“Yes,” she insisted, “aliens who
resembled us danced to music.”

I was astonished.

“There were no soldiers marching,”
she continued. “Why do we play music only on military occasions? The aliens
found another use for their music. It was soft and light, and it lifted their
steps as the wind lifts the leaves.”

In a sweet voice that seemed to
enfold me, Reevah hummed the alien music and began to dance on the grass. Her
soft voice and graceful movements strangely gripped me.

“And the aliens not only resembled
us but also spoke our language. Can you imagine that?” She gasped. “But they
closed the space between their words. They said
eim
instead of
I am
,
and
weer
instead of
we are
. Their words flowed so easily, like
the notes of a song. They made our words seemed stilted, as if we speak the way
we do to avoid talking to each other.”