“Sure, sure.”
Two boys broke out in a fight. Just as I felt, Lem put her arms around me. One of the brawlers fell into a violinist, and was thrust back into the clash. People whooped and hollered, as the two blackened each other’s eyes, until one of the bruisers was too broken and bloody to fight, and Timmet and Trager flipped the projector on to a new preshow.
This time we saw a ghost planet, already dead. Skeleton cities, dried canyons where rivers had once flowed, all living things long ago turned to dust. I wondered, how far away would we have to skip to catch the light and witness the downfall of this civilization?
A tornado lashed the land. Lem traced a finger around my forearm and looked up at me with a devious smile, “Your brown skin’s turned pink. Give it more time and it’ll be as sexy as mine. But…in the meantime, it’s looking a little bare.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She jabbed her fingernail into my forearm, “Let’s modify. You’re lacking…tattoos, piercings, implants.”
I laughed nervously. What would my dad think? He was dead. And my mother? Who cared what she thought. “And you have a needle and ink, or some rusty implant gun?”
She smiled, “I told Todd to bring some. He’s just as talented an artist as you. He’s got clean stuff.”
He wasn’t. And he didn’t.
A violin screeched. A quake split a dead desert. And a needle pierced my skin. I’d decided on a tattoo of a planet, and was told it would look cool. It felt like a knife scraping, cutting, digging at my arm. I emptied half a jar of piss alcohol down my throat, lit a synth-cig, and watched the panning ruins of a ghost planet.
When the outline was done, Todd snatched my alcohol and splashed it on my arm.
The lights dimmed. The show started.
Then another show. And another.
So we went on, in whatever abandoned skip stations we found, for months, our posse slowly growing by word of mouth and the handouts I’d designed. Each show a memory with a different tattoo, piercing, scar or glowing implant. The pigs busted us sometimes, catching a few kids too drunk, stoned or slow to skip away.
Our lightshows became more frequent; we needed researchers who knew when and where cosmic tragedies had happened, and people good with equations, and techies, and musicians.
I’d go to school on occasion to recruit. Other than that, school meant nothing to me, the show, everything. Our enclave of misfits grew, as did my bond with Lem.
And as I spent the next months skipping across the galaxy with our gang of outsiders, my yearning for Earth waned; the memories of grass underfoot and wind brushing skin, once vivid, now faded. But did any of that matter?
Mom didn’t have a chance at getting us back to Earth. And I was too busy seeing new worlds to care if she did. I was in a river, slow flowing but with a current too strong to fight. Sure, I could swim for the bank, but oblivion was beautiful. The shows began to blur into each other, sometimes a planet died—war the killer one show, nature the next—sometimes it was just a city, occasionally a malfunctioning skip station.
They mixed like a trillion wisps of smoke commingling, fornicating, trapped in a room of flickering light. It was intoxicating, addictive.
Tattoos crawled up my arms, piercings punched holes through my skin, flashing implants danced up my spine. Friends came and went, but Cox and Lem were always there, never missing a show. True friends, true cohorts.
Then came one show, one particular show, where I realized the dreams of my father’s death had stopped entirely, shoved aside by the preparation and intoxication of the lightshows.
It started like all other shows. Rodney’s band played as friends skipped in from across the galaxy to a cramped room just warm enough to make sweat bead above the brow. The preshow flickered—a junked satellite station spinning in and out of orbit only to be drawn by its planet’s gravity and eaten in fiery gulps by its atmosphere.
Lem bit my lip and whispered something in my ear. Timmet and Trager tinkered with the projector, finalizing calibrations. Boys almost old enough to be men rolled about kissing girls who were almost women.
Somewhere, someone was in a classroom learning something.
The screen skipped. I felt a sense of familiarity. Earth, and a station just above it, round with vast clear windows, greenery on the inside. My stomach knotted itself. When was this? Where were we? How many light years from Earth? One? Two? How long had I been in interstellar space? In the skip stations? How old was I? Fifteen? Couldn’t be older than sixteen, but what’s a year and a half when you’re in a thousand different stations, light years from the embrace of seasons?
In my mind’s eye I saw my father on his death bed, weeping sores covering his skin, just as he was after the rescue team had skipped him back to Earth. He babbled, the radiation sickness frying him from the inside out. On the screen an infrared filter spotted a solar flare lash the station like a whip. The telescope zoomed in. Masses of doomed men and women pounded at the domed windows.
It was a research center, the same one dad had worked at.
What was I doing here? Watching people die? I wanted to stand up, to skip off, just…leave.
Lem felt the muscles in my back tense. I looked down at her hand on my arm. Grey. And so was my arm, except for the tattoos, all up and down my arms. When had I gotten those? In that sobering moment, I couldn’t remember half of the scribbles. An Earthen landscape sprawled across my left bicep, horribly inked by someone who’d never stepped foot on a planet. Who had done that one? Surely, not me. Hopefully, not me.
In the waning light, my tan was a figment of the past, a figment of Earth spinning below the domed station on the screen. I was a corpse, just like the rest of them, not an outsider. And we were kids no longer.
I tried to stand. Lem pulled me to her, licked my ear, “Baby it’s just getting good.”
“I think I should leave.”
I could hear her smile. “You can’t leave.”
Curtis C. Chen
Zugzwang
Originally published by Daily Science Fiction
“You lose,” Lieutenant Darrow said. “Again.”
He tipped over Erin’s game piece, the one they were calling the king. Ton-Gla-Ben wasn’t exactly like chess, but the mechanics were very similar, and the actual Quggano names were mostly unpronounceable by humans.
Erin hated chess. She also hated being stuck in this cargo bay, with the ship’s first officer running her through a crash course in alien game theory.
“How long have we been in here?” Erin asked.
Darrow checked his wristcom. “Not that long.” His atypical lack of precision meant it was longer than he wanted to say.
“This is useless,” Erin said.
“You just need more practice.” Darrow swept up the pieces. “Let’s try a different opening.”
“Tell me again why we can’t just cheat?” Erin asked. “I wear a hidden micro-cam, you coach me through an earpiece?”
Darrow shook his head. “The Quggano are honorable, and they enforce honor in others. The competition chamber is fully radiation-shielded. And you’ll be naked.”