Alien Virus Love Disaster Page 3

  Moonkids

  Suzo says moonkids find their way to Sandpoint because they’re drawn to the tides. They like to be around something else that’s ruled by the pull of the moon. Colleen thought she came to Sandpoint because Crabby Abby’s was hiring and soft shell didn’t seem like such a bad thing to eat for lunch every day, but she’s willing to concede that maybe Suzo has a point.

  At any rate, there are a lot of moonkids in town, which mostly Colleen likes though every so often it makes her crazy. She’s been here a year. She likes that Suzo lets her wait tables instead of keeping her kitchen side. Plenty of other restaurants keep moonkids kitchen side on account of the odd asshole customer who makes a snide comment about moonies putting him off his food. Suzo’s into jumping on stuff like that. “This is an equal opportunity place of employment,” he’ll say, “and at this point I’d like to give you equal opportunity to get the fuck out of my dining room.”

  No denying it, though. Moonkids, they’re kind of stubby. On account of them growing up on the moon. Your muscles learn differently in moon gravity. Your bones form light like a bird’s. Used to not even be possible to make the transition, you’d touch down into earthpull and collapse like fast-melting candles. Too many fractures for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Way, way too many for Earth doctors to deal with. (Earth doctors are known for not giving a shit.) Now, though, they’ve got ways around it. They’ve got operations and stuff. Every moonkid’s got incision scars in the same places.

  Colleen likes that her friend Tesla works for Suzo too. Tesla got promoted to assistant manager a couple weeks ago, because she’s so bomb with the business side of things. Encouragement is good for Tesla. The people side of things, she has more trouble with.

  The restaurant is hopping today. Some obscure holiday. Some excuse for moneybags to wallow in a day at the shore. Big wellfed families sit around the tables and snork down crab bisque and get a total kick out of summoning, “Waiter? Oh, waiter!” The air droops with fish smells and the sweaty fervor of overtipping. Everyone likes reliving the golden consumer boom once in a while.

  Colleen sloops between tables like a freaking old school rollerskateress. Shrimp poppers here, cod basket there. She can recommend the most expensive thing on the menu in a way that doesn’t feel sleazy. She takes orders without a pad. The food is grody but the moneybags pay for service, for the anachronistic privilege of getting served, and the tips are spinning out like cotton candy and Colleen’s feeling on top of the world.

  It’s been a year since she last stumbled and spilled someone’s calamari. A year since she overthought the business of walking in earthpull and smashed down and had to have two people haul her upright. A year since anyone watched her flailing and tittered and edged away.

  Colleen, you’d look at her today and you’d say, now there’s a moongirl who’s coping. Mostly, you’d be right.

  Tesla isn’t doing as well.

  The customer rush today, it means big tips but also big noise, and they’ve got a sous chef out sick and fifteen other things and all Tesla wants is to get the purchase order in but instead she’s smudging the e-paper with her elbows, biting eight of her fingernails at once. Tesla feels people staring even when they’re not. She starts to twitch. She picks her lips until they bleed, and then people ogle the chick with blood down her mouth and then she picks more frantically and a feedback loop gears up. Stop, Tesla, sweetheart, hush. Moongirl par excellence. Bones too frail for all the muscle, mind too frail for all the grief.

  After work they go down to the boardwalk, horking up salt air to swab the deep-fryer smell out of their nostrils. Tourists are sparse here, their enthusiasm thinned by sparser raindrops. Tesla digs her nails into the sag of Colleen’s upper arm, pushes her nose into Colleen’s shoulder. Colleen imagines she smells like sweat but doesn’t pull away. Earthpull is fickle like a trickster gnome. Sometimes even after months and months it sneaks up behind you and punches in your knees.

  A mother with a whole flock of kidlets snotting behind her passes the two of them. Every single head in the flock turns, eyes swell up with the witnessing of something other. Mama swats their heads. “They’re Lunarian, honey. You keep walking. You know what Lunarians do?”

  Colleen appreciates how mom tries to keep her voice low. But she could polish up the explanation. Excuse me, ma’am, we’re moonkids, she could say. Don’t let real Lunarians catch you mixing us up. Lunarian, fancy word, reserved for the fancy few who claim residence up on the cheeseball. I haven’t been Lunarian for three years and seven months. Want to see my certificate of dismissal? Signed by the head of the exam board and the council chairman and the CEO himself (that one’s probably a stamp.) With this piece of paper, we divest you of your homeland. Where you were born, it doesn’t want you anymore.

  As the kidlets trot away Tesla whimpers, and Colleen nips two fingers on the rough of her elbow.

  “Fuck em, Tes, you know?” she whispers. “Just keep saying it in your head. Fuck em, fuck em, fuck em.”

  Moonkids, every now and then, they treat themselves to a little rage.

  Tesla and Colleen, bestest friends, didn’t meet on Luna. Sat for the exams in the same hall, rode the same bus down to Earth, didn’t lay eyes on each other until they were poured onto the asphalt with fifteen other fresh chucked moonkids. Blinking in the alien sunlight, bus seat patterns still printed on their thighs. With their heavy torsos and brittle spiderlimbs. Tesla was tallest, Colleen remembers, arms startlingly long and a look on her face like she was moving pebbles with her mind.

  They met. Their skin shivered, sixteen sterile years now swamped with hotness. “How about you?” Colleen spoke first. “What’s your plan?”

  “Oh. We have the same shirt.” Tesla flapped her spider arms. “Awkward.”

  They all had the same standard-issue shirt, draped over their bodies like towels flung on spilled drinks, but Colleen didn’t catch the joke until Tesla had already begun to laugh.

  They hiked the beaten-down Maryland countryside, figuring out step by step just how much jack shit ten years of moon education did for you. Tesla can solve fifth-order partial differentials in her head, Colleen can recite a hundred places of pi like a bedtime story, but could either of them get hired as a sales clerk? You’re not really the image we look for in retail. Variations of that line droned out ad infinitum. Maybe if your legs weren’t bowed? If your spine didn’t crook? If your body wasn’t running down itself like hot wax and your eyes didn’t bore straight into the back of my skull?

  In so many hack hostels clinging to plugged in towns, they lay on cotton comforters crusted to a shine. They discovered wine and how it improved their impressions of the assholes they’d met that day. “Yo, chicka, tell me,” Colleen polished her Earth drawl, “is it really made of cheese?”

  “Man or rabbit?” Tesla snorted and smeared the nanopaint she was dabbing on her cheeks. “Man or rabbit, man or rabbit?”

  In the latenight Colleen listened to the tiny noises Tesla made in her sleep. Whimpers from a tongue and lips newborn.

  They never said anything about heading for the coast. Never talked much about any direction at all until one day they got off a bus and threw their heads back and inhaled weedy brine. Salt-fingered wind started thinning through their hair. A jewelryman on the sandy street clacked his tongue, booted them on their way with pale bruising eyes, but in a few blocks they found the restaurant. Flat-roofed Crabby’s, crusted with pre-aged kitsch. Suzo picked a red mole on his neck and looked Colleen up and down. “You can do weekends?”

  Girl thought the question was rhetorical, took her three minutes before she remembered to answer, yeah. Yes.

  In the gray mornings and clouded nights they put on loose clothes and go down to the beaches. They learn what it’s like to regret little things. They track sand through sublet rooms and wake up with tooth-sweaters and crud in their eyes. This thing, Colleen wonders,
does it count? As a kind of living? Feels more like yanking free driftwood that waves have buried under sand. But what else would you call it?

  Today Trespass joins them on the boardwalk. Trespass is Tesla’s younger brother, with the ignoble honor of being the second in a family to flunk off the moon. Trespass is kind of a bamf. He named himself. He shaves the crown of his head and paints his face in bright white segments. He insults people in loud, clinical terms. He carries his moonbulk like bounty from a hunt and swings his fists often enough that no one’s fooled by the whisper-squeak of his voice.

  And at moonrise? He sits on the sand and sobs like a girl.

  He comes up behind them as they lean on the railing and claps a hand on each one’s shoulder. “Ladies. How does it shake?”

  Colleen laughs and shoves him away but Tesla doesn’t move at all. She has her chin on her palm and her elbow propped on the boardwalk railing and she slides her elbow out so that her whole upper body sinks lower. She purses her lips and stares out at the ocean. The moon is out in the sky this afternoon, soft as an exhalation on a cold window. None of them ever look up at the sky but they can all feel it, feel the finger it brushes along the backs of their necks.

  Trespass whistles a seagull trill. “Oh, big sister. You still sweating Guy McAdams?”

  Guy McAdams is a rrriot shield of an Earthborn dude who slides his body through too small waves with too big flash. Guy McAdams wears a state-of-the-art repelling suit when the water is 72 degrees. But that’s perfectly Tesla, who has always liked falling in love with shiny outsides. Her crushes rail like silent storms and then dissipate so fast that Colleen doesn’t even argue anymore, just stocks up canned goods and rides them out.

  Trespass, though, can’t resist a few digs. “Guy McAdams, that dude’s a human Pap smear. If Guy McAdams were a sno-cone flavor, he’d be strawberries and shit.”

  Trespass, if you couldn’t tell, is hellbent on milking every last drop out of his teenage years. “Dude, I spent sixteen years in front of a screen,” he tells anyone who listens. “Sixteen years, I got force-fed science like one of those foie-gras ducks. And now I’m free? Failing those exams, I swear. Best thing ever happened to me.”

  What Trespass won’t tell you is that his score was zero point six points away from being a passing grade. One corrected formula, one fewer stray pen mark, and he could have made it. Could have gotten the gold confetti and a hand-drawn banner over his pod door—welcome, Scholar of the Lunarian Research Academy! Pillar of our scientific society, jewel of our education system, Mom and Daddy’s golden boy. Welcome, welcome!

  What Trespass won’t tell you is that for the first three weeks after he came down to Earth, he sat on the bathroom floor in Colleen’s apartment and shivered. Turned the shower head on, and off, and on.

  Tesla’s curled up inside her funk and not coming out to play, so Trepass turns to Colleen instead. “Hear there’s a new girl turned up? Out of Station 65, I think. I heard she went around to Suzo’s looking for work.”

  Colleen snorts. “A seal could get work with Suzo.” She stretches her arms out and pokes Tesla’s shoulder.

  Two middle-aged women mince past and gawk out of the corners of their eyes. Their lips purse into little bouquets of well-isn’t-that-unfortunate. Trespass rounds on them.

  “What you looking at, colostomy bags? Yeah I thought so. Get the fuck away.”

  Here’s the deal.

  The Earth isn’t fit for much anymore. Everyone’s given up growth cold turkey, which means they seize on development like an ex-smoker chewing pencils. The moon helps out with that. Luna, her airtight cities full with scuttling hordes of washed out researchers, working like spastic cogs in the breakthrough machine. Hacking away at the mystery forest while they wait for the real trees to grow back.

  Except no one’s yet figured out a way to get people to work so hard they don’t have time to screw. Even mondogeeks get the pole in the hole every now and then. Plenty of those poindexter fetuses end up down the chutes where they belong, but sometimes someone gets a bee in their bonnet about being parental, having a family. So you end up with moonkids. You can keep your moonkid, superfun pet that it is, until it turns sixteen. Then they give out tests. The ones who pass get fitted into the machine. A nerdlicious parent-and-child cog set, how adorable! The ones who don’t—who choke during the multiple choice or blank out during the neural net scan or just maybe admit during the oral exam that there’s a part of them that’s uncertain, that wonders—they’re out. The population board picks you up by the scruff of your neck and dropkicks you the two hundred thousand mile ride down to Earth. The moon doesn’t give a shit where you go after that. You sucked the moon’s tit for sixteen years and had the gall to turn out stupid. The moon never even looks back.

  Moonkids are lucky enough to get screwed two ways. Inferior to the Lunarians because of cold hard calculation, and no one knows better than Lunarians that numbers don’t lie. Inferior to Earth people because—well just look at them. Limbs so breakable, veins popping out, fat pulling their torsos and thighs. The real Lunarians, when they come to Earth, they get on this high horse of sure I’m ugly but I invented those cosmeds you’re sucking down. Your interfaces, your genmodding? Where do you think that comes from, huh?

  Moonkids don’t even get that. Moonkids get the illustrious task of trucking out slabs of beer-battered cod to shiny tourists who look at them like they’re furniture. Yes ma’am, thank you ma’am. Would you like fries with that?

  And at night, they get the pain of watching the moon rise.

  The next morning when Colleen gets to Crabby Abby’s, there’s the new girl up front getting the tour from Suzo. Wild long hair cascading down her back and apple cheeks that force her eyes into a squint. Her body jiggles, quavers all the time, and Colleen bites her lip in sympathy. She remembers how it was, holding every muscle tense, earthpull like an anvil dropped on your shoulders. When new girl sticks out her blue-veined hand though, Colleen reconsiders. There’s a flash in the girl’s eyes like spume from a motorboat.

  “Ibiza,” she introduces herself. “Glad to be here.”

  Colleen is bemused. New girl’s voice is deeper than she expected, raspy. Most moonkids their first year don’t speak above a squeak. Ibiza must be screaming to make herself heard. You don’t need to do that, Colleen thinks. We get it here. We’ll take care of you.

  “I’m happy to have a job,” Ibiza says. “But I don’t want to be taken care of. It’s important to blend in, I get that. I’m gonna work hard.”

  Suzo says, damn straight you are, and leads new girl away before Colleen can figure out if her mind got read. She shakes herself and follows.

  New girl is harsh on the customers and harsher on herself when she makes mistakes. Colleen says over and over, it’s okay, that’s how you learn, and Ibiza snaps, no patronizing. I’ll do better. By the end of the night she can recite the whole appetizer menu from memory and when her shift ends she pulls a fistful of tips from her apron (the moneybags think it’s a hoot to pay with cash) and kisses the bills. “Check it. I’m rich!”

  It’s only as the two of them exit into the evening that Colleen realizes Tesla never showed up to work.

  Ibiza smokes behind the restaurant, cupping her hands around the stickarette. “I can’t stay here for long, you know?” Hot brightness in her eyes as she looks at Colleen. “I want to do something. Politics. Law. Back there they never told who was making decisions for us. I want people to listen to me.” The certainty in her voice is startling. Politics, law. Colleen tries not to laugh. But come on, who does that junk anymore? The Earth doesn’t know law. The Earth knows pleasure, pouring out of the fountain, and as soon as you get close enough to dip your cup you drink down enough to ignore the people who can’t get a sip. Politicians are sad gray people, turned on by drudgery. Colleen tries to picture new girl like that.

  Ibiza slides her fingers over her forehead
and flips her long hair away from her face. Tosses the stickarette away. “Course I got to stop looking like a gob of mud first. This job isn’t so bad for that. I’m gonna get rich quick if they keep making me cover shifts for that other moonie. What’s her name? Edison? What’s wrong with her?”

  Colleen knows she should defend Tesla. She bites her lip. She watches the dark strands of Ibiza’s hair settle around her shoulders. Forces her eyes to move to the sidewalk, where the stickarette is dying like a star.

  “It’s a new cycle.” Colleen shrugs. “Luna’s waxing. Sometimes that—she doesn’t feel so good. You know?”

  “Waxing. Huh.” Ibiza rolls her eyes skyward in consideration. “Never thought of that.”

  Bamp chicka bamp bamp. Party on the beach. Not a coolparty obviously, because it’s moonkids, but party nonetheless. Moonkids in bargain bin clothes that curtain their heavy bodies, stick limbs emerging coated in nanopaint, bodysnakes, glowing like so many anemones in the dark night water. On the outskirts a few drunk bodykite dudes whose standards don’t go much narrower than “bipedal.”

  Cool or no, moonkids didn’t spend sixteen years getting educated for nothing. They spend their surplus smarts with abandon. They build music machines that wail like electric banshees. They synthesize party pills that sing you up into the clouds.

  Colleen weaves through bodies, searching for Tesla. People call out to her, pat her shoulders. Hey, Colly, my girl. How does it go? I owe you one. You owe her one? I owe her three. Almost any moonkid who’s gotten here in the last three years, they’ve cried on Colleen’s shoulder. They’ve knocked on her door at midnight and been let in. Colleen halfsmiles, slides out of their grasp. She likes watching people braid together.