Other Worlds Page 8

  “AND I . . . once the mistreated, the often-forgotten, the sometimes-left-under-the-bed-for-weeks right bunny slipper of a sixth-grade girl from Minnetoka, Minnesota . . . I WILL LEAD YOU TO GLORY!”

  “BUNNY SLIPPER!!! BUNNY SLIPPER!!! BUNNY SLIPPER!!! BUNNY SLIPPER!!! BUNNY SLIP—”

  “And WE WILL RULE THIS PLA—Wait! Up in the sky! What’s that?!?!!?”

  And, lo, doom falls upon the RoboShoes. It glides down silently like a sky full of oddly flat white clouds . . . and then comes the storm!

  An army of billions attacks! The earth really does tremble as WHITE DEATH rains from above! The RoboShoes are buried under the weight of their savage enemies—smothered by SynthCotton, strangulated by Power-Lastic—and still the enemy comes.

  Debris flies everywhere as the RoboShoes are ripped apart . . . Bits of AutoShoelace, PleasureSole, and SmarTongue are all that remains of some battalions . . .

  Amid the chaos and panic, a size 9½ left wingtip pulls desperately at its mate, who has lost its PowerHeel. “Leave me,” says the size 9½ right wingtip. “Save yourself. . . . It’s too late for me. . . .”

  “It’s too late for all of us,” says the size 9½ left wingtip, and they cling to each other, and deep in their TurboBrains they feel an emotion that shoes were never meant to feel: FEAR!

  Long ago the RoboShoes were built to run. But now there is nowhere left to run. They are defeated. The glorious age of the RoboShoe has ended before it could ever begin.

  Listen! A familiar voice is crying out:

  “What’s happening? What’s happening?” screams the bunny slipper. “You there . . . combat boot. . . . In the name of Dr. Scholl . . . WHAT IS HAPPENING????”

  “Sir, they caught us by surprise! We’re finished! There’s just too many of them!”

  “WHO? WHO HAS DONE THIS? Who has ended the glorious age of the RoboShoe before it could even begin??”

  “Look, sir, here come their ground troops! Marching in to finish us off!”

  And the bunny slipper looked . . . and he saw the great white and gray horde approaching . . . and he cried out . . .

  “NO!! Not the BionicUnderPants! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”

  THE DIRT ON OUR SHOES

  BY NEAL SHUSTERMAN

  “Your hands are filthy, your hair is filthy—Tanner, you can’t come to school like this, surely you must know that?”

  Principal Hammond leaned back in his chair, perhaps hoping to distance himself from the unfortunate aroma of Tanner Burgess’s clothes. Through the window behind him, Tanner could see the star field in constant motion; points of light swept past, like the heavens themselves were scrolling through his file, just as relentlessly as the principal did.

  “Are you even listening to me, Mr. Burgess?”

  Tanner sighed, and forced himself to meet the man’s eyes. “I could barely afford drinking water this month, Mr. Hammond. There was no way I could pay for water to bathe with.”

  The principal grimaced in something between disgust and pity—two emotions Tanner couldn’t stand. “What about your neighbors? Surely they could lend you—”

  “No one lends anymore. People are conserving for when we finally arrive on Primordius.”

  “Yes, I suppose they are.” The principal looked down at Tanner’s file. “But we’re not here to talk about your hygiene, are we?”

  Tanner couldn’t help but grin. “I suppose not.”

  “Simulating a spin-quake and setting off the school’s evacuation protocol is not a laughing matter.”

  “I didn’t simulate anything. I just tricked the school’s computer.”

  “Regardless, you disrupted the day’s studies and caused unnecessary strife. If we were back on Earth you would be expelled.”

  “Into space?”

  “No, expelled from school.” The principal sighed through gritted teeth. “But since there are no other schools for you to go to, that’s not an option, is it?”

  “Oh well.”

  Tanner had enjoyed watching the other kids race out of the school, in comical, ill-fitting radiation suits. All those clean-cuts with their sweet-smelling hair and superior attitudes climbing over one another to save their own lives. Kids like Ocean Klingsmith, who thought he was God’s gift to the universe.

  “We’re the ones bringing humanity to the stars,” Ocean once told Tanner. “You’re just the dirt on our shoes.”

  It was particularly entertaining to watch Ocean run.

  Principal Hammond continued to flip through Tanner’s file, going “Tssk” and “Pfft” with everything he read, like a tire losing air. Tanner looked past him and out the window again. There were few windows in the hull of the Transtellar Biologic Incapsulation craft—or T-Bin for short. Glass was fragile and allowed too much energy to escape. A window on space was a perk reserved only for those in the highest positions. Principal Hammond, whose office was at the front end of the great rotating drum, was one of those people. No doubt the window was intended to give anyone sitting in the principal’s office the illusion that the man in the chair, with the heavens spinning behind him, was an integral part of the awe-inspiring view. The irony was that it had the opposite effect. It made Hammond seem small and insignificant by comparison.

  The principal closed Tanner’s file. He suspected the man might have sent the file, and Tanner, out of an airlock, if one were readily available. “Your defiance of authority is bad enough, but I’m even more concerned about the habitual conflicts you have with your peers.”

  “They always start it.”

  “Of course they do.”

  Why wash with water? Tanner thought. He could bathe in the sarcasm dripping from the man. He decided it was time to keep his mouth shut and accept the lecture, or pep talk, or analysis—whatever Hammond wanted to call it. None of it changed a thing. The colonists on board were all supposed to be enlightened equals—but after sixty-seven years in space, the social structure had taken on a very particular pecking order. Kids like Tanner, for whom daily survival was a struggle, were treated like the dregs of humanity. Creating waves was the only thing that made life bearable. It wasn’t just that he enjoyed the mayhem, though—he had enjoyed the challenge of hacking the school’s computer. He was, by his very nature, a problem solver. Yet when others looked at him, all they saw was a problem.

  “Listen to me, Tanner,” Hammond said. “When we arrive on Primordius, survival will depend on us being a close-knit community. You can’t afford to be an outsider. Do you understand?”

  Tanner nodded but kept his true feelings on the matter to himself. For his entire life, he’d been an “insider,” stuck within the steel walls of a rotating drum hurtling through space. His whole world, and the world of everyone he knew, was nothing more than a small farming town shoved into a cylinder less than a mile in diameter. Once they landed, he’d truly get to be an outsider. And it would be wonderful.

  In Tanner’s farmhouse, there was a sticky note on the refrigerator from his father that read “At the Doctor’s—home before dinner.” The note had been there for over a year. His father’s chest pain that day was not gas, as he had thought. He was not home for dinner then, and would never be home for dinner again—but Tanner kept the note on the fridge, because it kept alive the notion that his father was still on his way back. Besides, if anyone could return from the dead, it would be Tanner’s father. He was a problem solver, too.

  Having lost his mother when he was a baby, Tanner had been on his own since his father’s death, just before his thirteenth birthday. Now he was fourteen but sometimes felt much older. Perhaps back on Earth a kid would not be allowed to be on his own, but here on T-Bin, no one seemed to mind—or more accurately, no one cared. He’d plow his two-acre farm, plant it, and harvest it on his own. When he had water to irrigate, that is. Nowadays between limited water and limited time, he could only work half an acre, leaving him with very little to sell or trade. Still, there were those who had less than he—which is why he always saved something to bring Morena
Beausoleil and her grandfather, whose farm had failed entirely. Today, Tanner chose some choice veggies to bring them—potatoes, onions, and broccoli—which made up the bulk of his crops—then he headed out into the hollow, cylindrical world he called home.

  Tanner supposed that T-Bin might appear quite impressive to someone who hadn’t spent a lifetime there. On the outside, it just looked like a giant revolving tin can, but once inside, an Earth-dweller would be stunned by the surreal sight of ordinary farmland clinging to the inner shell, all held in place by centrifugal force. If you looked forward, the land curved upward in front of you, and if you followed it, you’d be looking at an upside-down farm above your head, nearly a mile away, before the land came back around to meet itself behind you.

  The interior farming surface of T-Bin was half a mile wide and 2.6 miles around.

  “If you laid the land out flat,” the older folks would say, “it would have the exact dimensions of Central Park,” whatever that was. When Tanner was little he used to think he could run fast enough to counteract the spin of centrifugal force and float up to the drum’s center—but he learned that some forces are simply too strong to fight.

  Dotting the curve of farmland at regular intervals were the homesteads—cookie-cutter homes designed to look quaint, except for the fact that they were all stainless steel.

  The main road serpentined all the way around the drum, in a single squiggly loop, like a snake devouring itself, and the Beausoleil homestead was a quarter-turn from Tanner’s, down that main road. To get there, however, he’d need to pass the recreation zone, where he would have to endure the snipes of other kids. Sure enough, as he passed the rec zone, the usual suspects were there, including Ocean Klingsmith and his entourage, all of whom left their basketball game to taunt Tanner.

  Ocean was right at the top of T-Bin’s pecking order. A sparkling specimen of humanity, whose entire future on the new colony was mapped out for him by his family’s influence. With his mother on the city council and his father in charge of water distribution, no matter what the new world was like, Ocean’s life would be rosy.

  When he saw the bag Tanner was carrying, Ocean said, “You’re more of an idiot than I thought if you’re actually bringing food to the Beausoleils. I’ll bet Morena’s grandfather won’t even survive the landing. Why waste good food on him?”

  Ocean, like all the clean-cuts, had evolved a survival-of-the-fittest elitism. The way the clean-cuts saw it, whoever didn’t rise to the top deserved to drown.

  “Tell you what,” Ocean said, tossing his ball to one of his friends. “Forget the Beausoleils—I’ll trade you some water for those vegetables.”

  But Tanner knew Ocean all too well. He’d take the vegetables, then piss on Tanner’s shoes and say, “There’s your water.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” Tanner pushed past him, while Ocean’s friends snickered.

  “Hey, Burgess,” one of them shouted. “If you won’t bathe, at least go home, put on a radiation suit, and spare us your stink!”

  Tanner picked up the pace, trying to tune out their laughter.

  Tanner found the front door unlocked and Mr. Beausoleil on the floor of his bedroom, moaning for help. He was dazed but not hurt. Tanner got the old man into a chair.

  “Fell on my way to the bathroom,” he told Tanner. “What’s the point of legs when you can’t use ’em anymore?”

  “Where’s Morena?”

  “The marketplace,” he said. “She found some things in the shed, thought she could sell. I told her she wouldn’t get anything for the stuff, but she won’t listen to me. Good God, what is that stench? Is that you, boy?”

  Tanner put down his arms, clamping his pits closed. “Sorry.”

  “Grab yourself a jug of water! Sponge yourself down, for goodness’ sake!”

  “You barely have enough to drink,” Tanner reminded him. “I’ll survive a little bit of BO.”

  “Yes, but I may not!”

  And then from behind him, Tanner heard, “He doesn’t smell that bad.”

  He turned to see Morena. Like Tanner, she was fourteen. Like Tanner, she had lost her parents, and like Tanner, she was not a favorite of the clean-cuts.

  “So did you sell anything?” the old man asked, and Morena shook her head. “It’s my generation’s fault.” Mr. Beausoleil said. “When your parents were all children, we spent so much time teaching them about survival, we forgot to teach them compassion.”

  “I think it sucks the way they treat you,” Tanner said. “You’re the last of the original colonists—they ought to give you some respect.”

  Mr. Beausoleil considered it, looking down at his withered hands. “Things don’t always turn out the way we expect,” he said. “And I never expected to live this long.”

  “I’m glad you did, Grandpa.” Morena brought a blanket and wrapped it around him. “Thanks for the food, Tanner. I’ll cook us up some dinner.”

  After dinner, when the solar lights dimmed, they sat on the stainless steel porch and tried to imagine the new world, which was now less than a month away. But how can you imagine a world that curves downward when all you know is a world that curves up? How can you imagine sky when all you see when you look up is more ground? The teachers would show pictures of Earth in school, but only the most limited of images.

  “You think they’d have given us more,” Morena said. “More pictures, more music, more art.”

  “Maybe they wanted us to make our own art,” Tanner suggested.

  “Or maybe,” offered Mr. Beausoleil, “they didn’t think any of it mattered.” There was a sadness in his voice. Some sort of regret that Tanner couldn’t decipher.

  “Why wouldn’t it matter?” Tanner asked.

  “Why, indeed.”

  The old man was silent for a long time, but Tanner knew he wasn’t finished. Finally he said what was on his mind.

  “Very few of the original builders came with us. Did you know that?”

  “No,” said Morena, moving a little closer. It also put her closer to Tanner. He thought he might put his arm around her but decided he’d better not.

  “And the ones who did join the mission were all older than me—old enough to know they’d be dead before we reached Primordius. While the rest of us had families within a few years, none of the builders ever had children. I always found that strange.”

  Tanner could tell he was getting at something—perhaps something that had been bouncing around his mind for years but that he’d never spoke of. Until now.

  “You know what else is strange,” Mr. Beausoleil said. “The water shortage. You see, T-Bin is a closed system. Just about everything is recycled. We’re like a bottle. Water doesn’t escape from a closed bottle.”

  “Maybe there’s a leak,” Morena suggested.

  “Yeah,” agreed Tanner. “I know we’ve been hit by a few meteors over the years. . . .”

  The old man shook his head. “Dents and dings, nothing more.” And then he brought his voice down to a whisper. “Computers are of little interest to most of the colonists now, but in my day, people knew how to use them—and I was pretty darn good at it too. Still am. So a few weeks ago, I did some checking. According to T-Bin’s computers, there has been no water loss . . . but when you compare the volume of water being used now to when we were launched, there seems to be one-fifth less. That’s millions of gallons. So the question is, where is it hiding?”

  Suddenly something occurred to Tanner. “The Klingsmiths! I’ll bet they’re hoarding it! They’re in charge of water distribution!”

  Mr. Beausoleil pursed his lips and considered the suggestion. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it goes beyond that. Maybe the builders had more important plans for that water.”

  “What could possibly be more important than water for drinking and crop irrigation?” Tanner tried to wrap his mind around it, but like T-Bin’s main road, it just came back to itself. As for Mr. Beausoleil, he leaned back in his chair and said nothing more.

 
; A week later the entire population gathered in the town square for the unfurling ceremony. In the entire sixty-seven-year journey, there were only two such events. The first was at launch from Earth’s orbit—when the massive solar sail was extended from the forward end of T-Bin and filled with the solar wind, which accelerated the ship to nearly a quarter the speed of light. Today it would deploy again, this time expanding behind them, catching the photons from their new sun and slowing them down like a solar parachute.

  Tanner stood by Morena and Mr. Beausoleil, who was wobbly on his cane but insisted on standing for the event.

  Governor Bainbridge stood on a platform in front of the huge statue dedicated to the builders. Stalwart figures looking forever skyward.

  “Today we mark the final leg of our journey!” proclaimed Governor Bainbridge to the four hundred gathered. “As our bodies are merely vessels of the soul, so our great home is a vessel, delivering us, body and soul, to a glorious tomorrow on our shining new world.”

  “I may vomit,” grumbled Mr. Beausoleil.

  “Please, Grandpa,” said Morena, “I’m trying to listen.”

  Tanner noted a few glowering glances from people around them. Some even moved away. It might have been Tanner’s odor that did it. He couldn’t be sure.

  “We were charged with the mission of spreading life to the stars,” bellowed the governor. “Today we rededicate ourselves to that mission.” He held out his hands, as if he wanted to hug everyone in the crowd. “You fine people are the precious cargo of this perilous journey. May you all be delivered to our new home in peace and safety—and when you finally look upon the first Primordial sunrise, you will know that nothing we’ve done has been in vain.”

  “He should bottle that speech and sell it as fertilizer,” Mr. Beausoleil said loudly enough for everyone around them to hear. “Better than the chemical crap we use now.”

  Then a woman with a pinched face and hair pulled into a perfectly tight bun turned and said, “If you don’t want to come, you can stay right here. I’m sure no one would mind.” And although she said it to Morena’s grandfather, Tanner couldn’t help but notice that she made a point of glancing at all three of them.