Chapter 5 #16
This conversation is getting decidedly weird.
I’m not sure what to do with a Kodiak who actually speaks to me.
I take his manicotti pouch out and shake it.
It scalds the pads of my hand, but I keep it in my grip.
“With the number of calories you must burn, you’d have to eat quite a few of these to put any real weight on. ”
“Yes, that is true,” he says, getting into his pouch a little easier this time around. He savors his first mouthful. “This is tasty even by Earth standards. I would order this food in a restaurant. Really I would.”
“That makes me pretty concerned about your Aurora dining options.”
“Someday I will invite you to my half of the ship for gruel and you will know how well you have it here.”
“Don’t tempt me,” I say. Invite you to my half of the ship. The idea catches my breath.
“It is not actually gruel I eat,” Kodiak says. “But I thought I would play into your elitist assumptions.” He points to the ceiling window, where we can see his empty treadmill across empty space. “I think you see plenty of what happens on my side.”
I pull my own pea slurry out of the heater. “Are you going to keep aiming right into the discomfort zone? Is that your goal tonight?”
Kodiak chuckles, clearly pleased with himself. “It’s just a treat to see a pretty boy squirm.” He rolls up a sleeve and flexes. “You like that?”
“Enough,” I say. My voice comes out unexpectedly sharp.
Kodiak flexes the other arm. “What, you want to see some more, poly?”
I’m not even sure what he means by “poly,” but I don’t like his tone at all.
I ignore him. Having to avoid Kodiak’s eyes now brings a feeling close to embarrassment.
I hate that he’s made me feel this way. All the same, I realize this is mostly about his discomfort.
He probably doesn’t allow himself to enjoy being attractive.
A waste of a perfectly good source of self-esteem.
Kodiak watches my face. “So. Are you gay or bisexual or what?”
I can’t help but laugh. It’s like we’re in some historical fiction. “Those terms,” I tell Kodiak. “Just stop. You’re embarrassing yourself, Mr. Dimokratía.”
“Oh my God, so sensitive,” he grumbles, letting his sleeves fall. “You are all the stereotypes of Fédération in one.”
I have no doubt anymore that he’s goading me.
But I refuse to be goaded. “Please do call me sensitive, since it’s the insensitive who deserve criticism,” I say primly as I prepare myself a tea.
I close the cabinet without offering Kodiak one.
“It’s my sensitivity that’s tasked with keeping us alive, that puts me in point position once we do make contact with Minerva. ”
“If we make contact with Minerva,” Kodiak says as he hunkers into his food.
Now I can’t hold back. “I guess sensitivity isn’t required for manual labor,” I say, watching him so I don’t miss any bit of his reaction.
Not even a pause in his eating. A monologue runs in my mind: I’m one of the most famous people in the world.
My classmates fell over one another to get a taste of me.
Maybe he isn’t impressed by my status. Maybe I don’t need it with him.
Maybe he won’t be disappointed if I turn out to be ordinary after all, despite everything he’s heard.
“There is only virtue in bodily toil,” he finally says, swallowing. “. . . and you’re watching me again.”
“Look, you’re pretty much the only game in town, if you’re the sort who’s even remotely into human contact,” I say. “So yes, I’m looking at you. Looking at one another is what humans do. You’re allowed to look at me, too.”
“Thank you, that is most kind,” he says into his food, with a terrible imitation of the poshest sort of Fédération accent. The way I and Minerva and the OS talk.
As he gets meaner, I get touchier: this feedback loop will eventually lead to open conflict, so I decide to break it. “What happened to your arm?”
“My arm?” Kodiak asks, tugging his sleeve farther down so it covers his triceps. “What do you mean?”
“While you were mocking me by flexing. I saw a scar.”
“No,” Kodiak says, “you saw no scar.”
“Who do you think you’re kidding right now?” I ask.
He shakes his head, placing his dinner back on the table.
Heart racing, I raise Kodiak’s sleeve to expose the soft inside of his upper arm, tracing my finger along the valley between his muscles. I track the scar until it reaches his elbow.
Kodiak gently removes my finger, cups it into my palm, and places my hand on the center of the table. “That. It is a scar, you are right. It is so small that I barely notice it.”
I shake my head. That scar is not small. “Maybe you’re the computer program. You are the most closed-off human being I’ve ever met.”
“Born and bred that way,” he says proudly. “I would like a tea too, please.”
At least Kodiak said “please.” I reach into the cabinet. The good-host urge is hardwired into us Cusk children. A bunch of us in each generation wind up diplomats.
Kodiak strains, and I imagine that he wants to make more conversation but is grasping for words and sentences. “I have had this mark for so long that it’s easy for me to forget. No one has ever asked me about it, but no one asks anyone about anything in training.”
“It’s all men, in your training?”
“Yes, of course. It has always been that way. Not for you?”
“Of course not. We sent Minerva Cusk to settle Titan, right? My class was mostly women. It was a bit controversial that I was chosen for this mission, actually.”
Kodiak looks me up and down. Then he shrugs. “You are a Cusk. Of course you got the position. And if Dimokratía is going to send a male, Fédération has to send one too, so there are no little space babies.”
My face burns. I really don’t want to fight right now, but he’s making it hard. “So your scar . . . ,” I prompt, setting Kodiak’s tea down before him. He goes to sip it. “It’s not properly steeped yet,” I tell him. “I’ll let you know when it’s time.”
He places his hands in his lap obediently, like a chastised kid. This might be the first tea he’s ever had. It makes me want to ruffle his hair. “The story of my scar,” he says. “It was after a pool bash, and we were down to two, so you know, that’s what happened.”
“I understood precisely nothing that you just said,” I tell him, cupping my tea and curling my legs up under me. “Start with the ‘pool bash.’ What’s that?”
“You do not know what a pool bash is? Clearly we are much better at collecting information on Fédération training than you are at learning about Dimokratía.”
“You’re avoiding my question.”
He drums his fingers. “Yes, I noticed that I was doing that, too. I will work on being more direct so we can be friends.”
That sets my shoulders tensing up, but then I see he’s serious, and my body softens. I wave him on.
“The pool bash. As you know, we start training at age four, leaving the orphanages to live in the cosmology academies.” He chuckles, I’m not sure what for.
“For the next eight years, we are all built into the best little spacefarer soldiers we can be, learning gymnastics, science, engineering, combat. We practice in zero g, orbiting often so that movements in space will be second nature.”
“Like riding a bike,” I say.
“Functioning in zero gravity is not at all like riding a bike.”
“No, that’s an expression. Never mind. Please continue.”
“Thank you. Once we are twelve, the culling begins. The class must go from one hundred fifty down to twenty or so. There are many ways to fail out and be placed in military or civil service instead, but the most frequent is the ‘pool bash.’ We are strapped into a mock spacecraft that is suspended a hundred feet over a pool with wave generators. The lights go out, and the craft is dropped into the pool. We have to get out of the underwater wreckage in the dark and make it to the edge, all with twenty-foot swells.”
“Some cadets drown?” I ask, putting my forkful of pea slurry down.
“We are well-trained survivalists by this point. It is rare that someone drowns. No, before the exercise begins, the instructors throw iron keys into the black water, and you must have one to be permitted to leave the pool. There is always one fewer key than there are cadets.”
“So someone gets eliminated each time.”
“Yes, and sometimes a student gets so tired that they give themselves up so they don’t drown. Then they must leave the program, too, and the game ends for the rest of us. Do we watch The Mummy now?”
“Not yet. You haven’t gotten to the part about your scar.”
“Right. Okay, I will tell you now. I was usually one of the first out with my key.” I don’t find that hard to imagine.
“But one day I was unlucky. My biggest rival kept pushing me away, and I fought with him over a key, but he got out with it, and when I turned around there were two of us in the pool, and only one key left. We fought for it, in the underwater wreckage. I don’t remember the fight very well.
By the end my arm was broken, but the hand at the end of that broken arm still held the key. ”
“You fought hard enough to break your arm?”
He supports his upper arm in his other hand so he can get a better look at the scar. “I think it was technically the wreckage that broke it, but I fell into that wreckage because Celius Li Qiang had me in a headlock and was drowning me, so yes, you can say it got broken in the fight.”
I cough. “I want you to know that even though my exams in my training were mostly essays, some of them were very hard.”
Kodiak chuckles. “You are joking, but I am sure that I would have found them hard. I might not have survived so long if our exams had been essays instead of fights for survival.”