Since we had been sitting on the ground for hours playing chess, we decided to rest our butts by lying in our hammocks. Izzy brought hers into the same tree as mine. She was close enough to kick my hammock whenever I muffed a song. Fortunately, I had made the cable long enough so I didn’t have to keep repairing the connection.
# # # # # # # #
I was washing the supper dishes while Izzy lay in her hammock. She was using her collapsible scope to supervise my work. I even had to hold each dish high in the air and turn it so that she could see both sides. One time, I left a big gob on one side, but she didn’t say anything. I figured that she was just pretending to be obnoxious.
“You mentioned something about giving me a chance to redeem myself?”
Izzy grabbed something and tumbled out of her hammock in a free fall descent. “For times when you have to make a quick exit,” she explained when her toes bounced lightly off the ground.
I watched as a handle recoiled. “How much cable?” I asked.
“I only have fifteen-meters on this hammock. It adds too much weight otherwise. You could probably do something similar but even better with your filament, couldn’t you Z-man?"
I started to think about that – the whole hammock could be…. I come back to the real world when Izzy started to tap on my head with the clean pot. “Earth to Z-man, Earth to Z-man.”
“Uh, sorry.”
“Connect us back together. We’ll play real chess.”
“What does Earth to Z-man mean?” I asked as I was fiddling with the filament connector. She wanted to lie in the hammocks again. Then, we could just go to sleep after we had played our game. I didn’t say that it would still be too early for sleep.
“When the Unfair Society wanted to talk to their astronauts, they’d have someone say something like Houston to Armstrong and that indicated that the astronaut, in this case, Armstrong, should answer the person who was calling from Houston.”
I guess I snorted out loud because she looked annoyed for a second. Well, it was an obvious attempt to distract me with a ridiculous idea! I ignored her and concentrated on the game. It lasted over four hours. I won eventually, but it was the hardest game I had ever played.
“Good game, Champ” she said, took the cable out of her head, and rolled over. “Your debt is wiped out.”
She was asleep in minutes. It took me a lot longer.
# # # # # # # #
A strange dream woke and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So, I just lay in my hammock thinking about the dream. I must have been about three years old. Perhaps, four years. It was my birthday and my volunteer-father had brought me a jigsaw puzzle as my gift. It was the first puzzle that I had tried with over two hundred pieces so I was concentrating on it real hard. I remember thinking that it was very difficult. It was a seascape with a lot of dark blue waves at the bottom. The top was the light-blue sky. A gray whale was jumping out of the ocean and I had completed that part first.
I managed to finish the ocean next – there were pieces of seaweed, ducks, and some foam from the waves to help. The last part – the sky – was very hard. Probably about 80 pieces. All exactly the same colour. I had figured out that I would have to use the shape of each piece as the clue. I’m sure an adult could have done it quickly, but it took me a long time. I had one piece left, and I was looking at my volunteer-father feeling pretty proud of myself as I put it in. It didn’t fit!
Turning the piece around didn’t help. I stood up and tried jamming it in with both thumbs. The piece just sat there, half in and half out. I resorted to pounding it with my palm – it had to fit! My caretaker started to approach me – he had my brain-band activator in his hand. I knew what that meant.
My father held up his hand and the caretaker stopped. “Let him have this emotion,” he said and the activator disappeared into a pocket.
I remembered crying for a while.
My father picked up the mangled jigsaw piece and straightened it out. “Zurt, do you think that this puzzle can be solved?”
I looked up, wiped my tears away with the back of my hand, and nodded. He wouldn’t have given me a broken puzzle for a birthday gift.
“Then, since the last piece doesn’t fit, that must mean that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. Look for a piece that doesn’t quite fit.”
I stared and stared. It had to be in the sky so I only had to look at the top half of the puzzle. I put my face up real close and went row by row until I found one piece that had a little empty space where there shouldn’t have been any space. I ended up re-doing about thirty-pieces and when I put the last piece down on the puzzle, it fit perfectly. I looked up at him and he nodded at me. I felt really happy and I saw the caregiver reaching into his pocket. My father held up his hand again and I was allowed to enjoy the moment.
In the dream that woke me up, I had been holding a mangled piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The piece had the words Cool, man, cool printed on it.
Back to the Table of Contents
Chapter 11
Izzy recommended that we put more distance between us and Calgary, so we were moving north and making steady time. She didn’t think that we needed to hide our trail, so we were walking comfortably through some lightly forested mountains. Izzy was able to hit targets a good 150 meters ahead of us, so we attached a very long strip of filament to an arrow that she stuck into a tree at chest level, and we used the line for carrying our packs. I set the velocity so that we were able to walk comfortably beside them. Right now, we were brain-connected. She was humming to some music of the Beatles. I was mostly ignoring the music in my mind and was trying to think.
Izzy was a really confusing person. She was the best chess opponent I had ever faced, but she was very undisciplined in her behaviour. I couldn’t understand how you could be both smart and undisciplined. I thought I should learn more about the person who was trying to deliver me to the DPS which, by the way, was not going to happen today. We had renewed our promises.
“Why are you so weird?” I asked, after pausing the music at the end of a song.
“Excuse me! I don’t insult you!”
“But, it’s not an insult if it’s true. I just wanted to know how you could grow up to be so weird.”
“You could have used another word. Independent, perhaps? Unconventional? Even intriguing? Do you think I’m intriguing?” She did her eyelash batting routine again so I knew that she wasn’t mad.
“No, you’re weird,” I concluded objectively after considering the choices she had given me. I then listed all the things I had seen her do that qualified as weird. I had categorized them already so I gave them to her in numbered sets and subsets. She didn’t seem impressed with my categories. When I was finished, I asked, “Why did the IOF want you to have such…”
“Appealing idiosyncrasies?”
“Hardly appealing.”
“Endearing eccentricities.”
“Not endearing either.”
“Quixotic quirkiness?”
“If the word quixotic actually exists and is another word for obnoxious.” I wasn’t trying to be insulting. She was smiling at me when she was making the ridiculous suggestions. She had explained about teasing, so I knew that it was like a game she wanted me to play. I made sure I smiled back.
“Warm whimsicalities?”
“Weirdness, I suppose. Were you always like this or did they have to zap you a lot?”
“I was given special treatment from an early age. Just like you.”
“I wasn’t given special treatment. I was treated just like every other student.”
“Nah, you weren’t. You want me to prove that you’re weird?”
“I know I’m a Z, so that means I’m a passive loner. I have a full set of strong, medium and weak genes. I could give you my gene profile, if you wanted. But, I’m not weird.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
She always did this. Turn things around. I w
as trying to find out why she was weird and suddenly I was the one being accused of being weird! We walked along for a bit. She started singing the chorus to Don’t be Cruel by Elvis but changed the words to Don’t be Weird. Now the song didn’t make any sense! “You see, that’s just plain weird changing that song,” I told her. “Nobody is that different.”
“So being different is the same as being weird?”
“Yeah, I guess. You’re different in every way I can imagine. For example, you don’t hide your anklies, but you refuse to take off your top. Girls go topless all the time, especially in the summer. They have nothing to hide. Girl chests look exactly like guy chests. Why are you so different?” I was getting a little exasperated. Why couldn’t she admit that she was weird?
“Why should I hide my ankles? Girl ankles look exactly like guy ankles.”
Now she was just being ignorant! “No they don’t!”
“How many girl ankles have you seen, Z-man! How do you know they’re different?”
“I haven’t seen any except yours, but everybody knows that a girl with big anklies, well she’s going to be… “
“Good at sex.”
“Yeah.”
I rolled up the filament that Izzy had just ripped out of her head. We walked for a while in silence.
“Guy ears look the same as girl ears,” she shot at me.
That gave me a perfect opportunity to use her argument on her. “How many boy ears have you seen?” I challenged. “How do YOU know they’re different?”
“I’ve seen plenty. They’re exactly the same. I’ll prove it. You take off your ear-gear and put your ear against mine. I bet'cha our ears are almost exactly the same.”
“Pervert!” I gasped. I couldn’t believe that she’d suggest such a monstrous thing to do! I slowed down so that she’d be well in front of me.
She sensed what I was doing and slowed down. I slowed down some more. She peeked back at me and slowed down some more. I slowed down some more. Eventually both of us were standing motionless in the middle of a trail. The packs continued on without us until they bounced off a tree.
She turned to face me. I set my feet to repel her in case she had a sexual fit and tried to strip my ear-gear off. Our health bots had warned us about uncontrollable sexual urges.
“Z-man, the ear is shaped the same whether or not it is attached to a guy or a girl’s head.” She was facing me from about two-meters away. She wasn’t getting any closer but she did have a finger pointing at my nose. I kept my eyes on her hands while she continued. If they changed into claws...
“Big people of both genders have slightly bigger ears. Small people of both genders have slightly smaller ears. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”
“Wrong! A guy with big ears is better at sex than a guy with little ears. Everybody knows that.”
“Have you read anything scientific that proves that? You’re the science man, can you prove it?”
“Well, no, but that’s because brain-bands will zap if you do too much research on sex. That’s because people who know too much about sex turn into perverts.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that!”
“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that something like an ear or an ankle can predict how good you are at sex?”
“Hey, I didn’t make the human body! It’s true. Everybody knows it.” How could she not see that?
“So, if everyone believes it, that makes it true?”
Why would she say that in such a sarcastic way? I tried to make the illogic of her argument clear. “It’s true, and because of that, everyone believes it.”
“You’re weird!” she accused and started walking backwards along the trail. “Weird, weird, weird,” she whipped each word at me while simultaneously snapping her arm at me so that she ended up with her index finger pointing right at my face.
“Am not, am not, am not.” I shot back, walking towards her and pointing my finger at her face too.
“Are too.”
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
“Am not!”
“Are too!"
“AM NOT!!!”
“ARE TOO!!!"
Then, she turned around and stormed off the trail and into the woods. “Am not,” I muttered, but I was the only one close enough to hear my brilliant closing argument.
# # # # # # # #
Ignoring Izzy as best I could, I reached the tree where our packs had stopped. I unhooked my two packs from the filament but I didn’t see why I should take Izzy’s off, so I let it hang there while she thrashed around in the woods. There wasn’t much point in continuing on by myself. She could make faster progress with her single pack than I could with my pair, so I had no chance to escape from her. Instead, I lay on the ground, my head resting on a pack. Waiting for her to come to her senses. Instead, she climbed a tree halfway up the hill and sat in the fork of two branches, glaring at me. I glared back at her for a while, but she was too far away to get the mental message I was sending, so I quit transmitting after a while and closed my eyes. I thought of all the things I should have said – things that would have convinced her that she was weird and I was not.
After a while, I heard some rustling. She had dropped out of her tree and had relocated a little closer to the trail. Her back was turned now. Doing the same thing as me probably. Pretending to sleep, but still re-living the argument.
We sat like that for a while. I started getting hungry, so I rustled around for a bar. Not chocolate. That would make me feel good. I didn’t want to feel good. I would have liked to have some trail mix, but that was Izzy’s. I grabbed a strawberry bar instead. It was my least favorite.
I looked at the back of her camouflage hat. She was probably hungry and thirsty too. She wasn’t going to come near her pack while I was here. At least, that’s what I wouldn’t have done. I found another strawberry bar, grabbed the canteen hanging on the outside of her pack and walked half of the distance to the spot where she was busy ignoring me. I found a bare spot between two lodge-pole pines, lobbed her food and water to the base of the second tree, and plopped down at the first.
I studiously ignored her as she picked her way through the bushes, sat down, and took a long pull on the canteen.
“If I was talking to you, I’d say Thank you.”
“Mphh,” I replied. She was sitting cross-legged, attacking the bar. Her pant legs had risen all the way up to her shin, and both her lower legs were fully exposed. What with all our talk about forbidden parts of the body, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her anklies. They seemed to be the same as mine, but I couldn’t look for long without feeling guilty. I guess part of me was expecting a lightening bolt from my brain-band. I tried looking up at the sky while I munched, but that gave me a crick in the neck. Or, maybe I was just using that as an excuse to stare, because my eyes kept shifting back to her legs. What was I supposed to do for the rest of the trip? Look up at the sky while we walked? I shifted the front part of my ear-gear down over my eyes and munched more contentedly.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I heard her say. Then there were some noises of someone walking angrily away, some rustling in a distant backpack, and then a quieter return. “I’ve put some sheaths on, Z-man. You can look now without fear of becoming a pervert.”
I lifted a corner of my ear-gear. She was wearing black, shapeless sheaths. I lifted the rest of my blindfold back to its normal position. “If I were talking to you, I’d say Thank you.”
We ground away for a while.
“They’re just ankles, Z-man. Really, that’s all they are.”
“Not to me, they aren’t.”
More grinding.
“You’re right, Z-man. They’re just ankles to me, but they’re forbidden anklies to you. I’ll wear sheaths from now on.”
“Thank you.”
More grinding. If food bars had been less dense, we might never have had the rest of this conversation.
<
br /> “I’m not interested in your ears, Z-man. To me, they’re just ears. I’m not going to attack you. You’re safe.”
I made drinking motions with my hand and she tossed the canteen over. A bag of something followed. Trail-mix.
“I don’t like the strawberry flavour,” I said. “Trail-mix is much better.”
“See, we can agree on something.” She started digging a hole with her knife and I threw her the remainder of my bar and she buried both. My stomach was all knotted up – I couldn’t chew on the bar any more.
We tossed the trail mix bag back and forth for a while. It would have been easier to sit closer, but I wasn’t going to make the first move. Apparently, she felt the same.
“It’s not right what they’ve done to you, Z-man,” she said in an almost normal voice.
“Who did what to me?”
“Your instructors. The DPS. The IOF. It’s not right what they’ve done to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“They messed with your emotions; they messed with your brain. You can’t help what they did to you.”
“I know the brain-band stopped me from having any strong emotions when I was growing up. But, I’ve done some stupid things without it. I think I tried to punch out a tree a couple of days ago. Today, I was so angry, I wanted to throttle you so that you’d listen to reason.”
“Really? You could do that?”
“Not now. But, I might have earlier. I’m not used to being angry. I can’t control it.”
“I got angry at you too. My mother says that red hair gives people a temper.”
“What’s that have to do with you?”
“Nothing, I guess. She probably meant when you see red. I was seeing red at you too.”
“But you have a brain-band, so you wouldn’t have been allowed to hurt me. Your brain-band programmer would have put in those commands at least. I think people could be very dangerous without a brain-band.”
“I’ve known some like that.”
“When?”
“When I was working. You know. Catching dissidents.”
We tossed the trail-mix back and forth for a bit. “Finish it,” she said. “No point in packing away an almost empty bag.”