The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (13 page)

I saw three sucker-covered tentacles shoot toward the windshield, and Driver jerked the wheel to avoid them. In front of us, I could see the Foloptopus's beak, and the metal slivers of other ill-fated spaceships caught in the corners of its mouth.

“Here goes, hold on,” said Driver, slapping a square button at the base of the dashboard.

Cad threw open the bathroom door, holding an electric razor.

“What the
hell
is going on out here?” he said.

“I'd get out of the restroom if I were you,” said Driver. “You don't want any splash back.”

The bus surged forward and I lost my grip on the pull-up bar. I tumbled through the air and smacked the wall. I heard Walter
baaaaa
ing as his body thudded against the walls of the closet, and I saw Skark soar across the room and whack into Driver's bassinet, snapping it with his body, spraying splinters into my face.

Outside, there was a tremendous
squish
sound, and the bus came to an abrupt, merciful stop. Everybody was alive, barely.

Somehow, Driver, Cad, and I were piled on top of each other in the back corner of the bus, with Cad at the bottom of the tangle of bodies, his face wedged in Driver's buttocks.

“This…is…horrible…,” said Cad, muffled.

Skark came to the rescue, grabbing Driver and Cad and pulling them to their feet, allowing me to roll to freedom.

The bus started rocking, and from outside came a chorus of voices and
whoooooo
s:

“Skaaaaaaarrrrrk.”

“You've been my hero since I was two hundred years old, man.”

“I've loved your music since I was a toddler in the pouch.”

“Skark. I think you're my dad. I'm not even kidding. My mom has pictures of the two of you at a motel….”

I peeked out the window and saw that fans wearing Perfectly Reasonable T-shirts were surrounding the bus.

A chest-high android pushed its way through the fans. It looked like it had been constructed from hardened gelatin, its partially translucent skin revealing an inner metallic structure, while its head contained two asymmetrical eyes stacked on top of each other, giving it the appearance of an old stereo speaker. It started slapping the side of the bus with its semitransparent palm.

“You're
late
,” said the android. “You're supposed to be
onstage
now.
Your crew set up hours ago, where were you? Get ready and get
out there.
”

“You were supposed to
sedate
the Foloptopus before we arrived,” said Driver. “It's in our
contract.
Do you know the damage you've caused to this bus?”

“Not as much damage as I'm going to do to you unless you start playing
now.
You think it's cheap to lease space inside a Dark Matter Foloptopus? No
wonder
your band has a reputation for being unreliable.”

“We're
here
, aren't we?” said Driver.

“Maybe, but if you're not out there in ten minutes, you're not getting paid. I already contacted your lawyer, so you better
hustle.
”

That struck me as interesting—the android had contacted the band's
lawyer.
Assuming the lawyer didn't have his office
inside
the Dark Matter Foloptopus, which seemed like an unlikely place for a firm, it meant that the robot had somehow reached out to another planet.

I whispered to Cad under my breath: “How, exactly, did he contact your lawyer?”

Cad looked at me like I'd suffered a head injury. “Do I have to explain the concept of a phone to you? I know you're from a hick part of New Mexico, but come on.”

“There are phones that can make calls between planets?”

“You're on a
bus
with the technology to bounce between
solar systems
in a few hours,” said Cad. “You don't think these aliens have figured out a way to make long-distance calls?”

At the front of the bus, Driver was reading a voluminous contract while the android stood next to him, pointing at provisions buried deep in the back.

Driver frowned. He checked his watch and turned to the rest of the band.

“The promoter is right. If we're not onstage in ten minutes, we default on our fee, which means we won't have enough money to get to the next gig.”

“You're that broke?” said the android, genuinely surprised. “I thought the stories about your finances were just rumors. How could you possibly lose all the money you've earned over the years?”

“It would take me a hundred lifetimes to spend my savings,” said Skark. “Now show me to the stage and let's see if we can make this Foloptopus explode from the vibrations.”

“It says in the contract that if we kill the Foloptopus, we also don't get paid,” said Driver.

“Then we'll stun it a bit,” said Skark. “It'll be dramatic.”

“If you hurt it in any way, you only get half your fee,” said the android. “You can imagine the veterinary costs for providing medical care to a creature like this. Nobody wants to lose this venue.”

“Fine. As an animal lover, I will do my diligence to make sure this noble creature emerges unscathed. Now please, show me to the stage. I burn for my fans.”

I was upset with myself for not even
considering
using something as basic as a phone to contact Sophie, but back on Earth I wasn't accustomed to looking at stars as places that could be contacted on a whim. I needed to erase the demarcation line I had drawn in my mind between our planet and space and assume anything that had been figured out in our solar system had been figured out somewhere in the rest of creation a
long
time ago.

My plan was to call the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species and simply explain that the Jyfos took the wrong girl and that I needed her back to go to prom and that they should keep her away from the multitudes trying to kill her in the forced Darwinism of their misguided nature game.

However, there was a problem with my mission to find a phone—even though I now knew that there had to be at least one
somewhere
in the Foloptopus, since the android had made a call, I couldn't find it. Cad hadn't been kidding when he said Skark was trying to make the Perfectly Reasonable seem tougher by booking the band to play inside the Dark Matter Foloptopus. Compared to Berdan Major Arena and its luxurious spread of backstage food, the conditions here were primitive.

The lining of the Foloptopus's gut was peppered with half-digested chunks of a charcoal-like substance—the dark matter from which the Foloptopus derived its name, I guessed, perhaps reacting with its digestive enzymes—and every few hundred feet I found myself stepping over a skeleton wearing a
tattered rock T-shirt or holding a flask embossed with the logo of some alien metal group.

Clearly, only a certain hyperintense kind of band played gigs inside the Foloptopus. It seemed like the Perfectly Reasonable was out of their comfort zone, from what I had seen at the first show. While the band members were talented, I wouldn't have described them as
tough.

The stage on which the Perfectly Reasonable was performing was in the back of the creature's stomach, and in front of it was an audience that seemed surprisingly large, considering the difficulty in reaching the venue. If I'd had to guess, I would have put the crowd size at two or three thousand fans—enough to make the belly of the Foloptopus look full. In order to create space for the crowd, workers had constructed a wall to hold back the Foloptopus's stomach acid. Green and yellow bile was lapping against the top of the wall, which looked like it needed to be ten feet higher, in my unprofessional opinion. When the Perfectly Reasonable started their show, I could see the wall shaking every time Driver hit the drums.

I was getting a bad vibe from the Foloptopus. All I wanted to do was locate a phone, make my call, climb back onto the bus, and wait out the gig until we could get the hell out of this place.

I was hustling through the Foloptopus, looking for anything that might resemble a communications center, when I saw what appeared to be a fat-necked ostrich sitting on the same kind of cinder block that had been used to construct the wall, drinking a bottle of brown, brandylike liquid. He was wearing a tool belt
and his feathers were soiled. There were burn marks on his thin legs, which I guessed might be from the stomach bile. I walked over to him.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you work here?”

“I
do
work here, as a matter of fact,” he said, shaking his head in disgust and taking another swig from the bottle. “Can you believe this is my
job
? Humping construction in the gut of an animal like this? I screwed up my life somewhere along the way, man.”

“Don't say that,” I said, mostly because I didn't want to listen to a drunk complain about his life when I had something important to do.

“Why wouldn't I say it?” he said. “Everybody else does—my parents, my friends—so why shouldn't I? I'm saving up to use one of the time machines in Galaxy MC5-39133, so maybe I'll be able to solve my problems then, if I can ever manage to get an appointment. It seems like
everybody
in
creation
is trying to fix bad decisions they've made. I'm Thighbone, by the way. That's my nickname, because I've got these ugly legs. But you don't care. I don't see why you would, we just met.”

“I'm sorry about the state of your life, Thighbone,” I said. “We can talk about it more later if you want, but I need to find a phone to make an important call, and there doesn't seem to be one around.”

“You can use mine if you need it,” said Thighbone. “I bought an unlimited plan so I could talk to my girlfriend every night, but she broke up with me for molting in her apartment.
It was just
normal shedding
, but she thought I was going bald, and it turned her off. Romantically, you know. If that's a deal breaker for a girl, it's a deal breaker.”

“Deal breaker. Sure.”

“It's these stupid superficial problems that you never see coming. We'd always had intimacy issues, but does it look to you like I'm going bald? I don't see it.”

Thighbone leaned forward so I could look at his scalp. His girlfriend was right, no question about it—a circle of missing feathers on the crest of his head revealed the bare pink skin underneath. He had to have been in heavy denial not to acknowledge it, but if I wanted to use his phone, I didn't see the advantage in telling him the truth.

“I'm not noticing any baldness,” I said.

“That's what I'm
saying.
I don't
get
it. Sometimes I think that she wanted out of the relationship and made up an excuse. But I'm glad we broke up. No, I love her. No, I'm glad we broke up. I don't know. I'm a mess. I'm sorry, I'm distracted. Who are you trying to call?”

“The Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species.”

“Ah, let me tell you—I've been down
that
road before. I hope you're not trying to buy a human as a pet, because I gave it a shot when I was attempting to win my girl back. They won't sell.”

“I'm not trying to buy a human as a pet. I
am
a human, so that would be a little perverse.”

“That's what I was thinking, but hey, to each his own. Everybody has weird things that they're into.”

“
They accidentally picked up my prom date and I need her back.”

“Accidentally? No no. The Jyfos don't pick up anybody accidentally. Did they pass you over or something?”

“They did, as a matter of fact.”

“I wouldn't take it personally. They probably just found something in your genes that they found alarming.
Something
in your DNA must be mutated to form that strange body. Do you have a Certified Receipt for the girl?”