Ibyabek Page 6

  “No, it’s one of Mom’s. I - wasn’t supposed to bring my own lens. I thought it’d be fine, a lot of people miss the skylace awfully but I don’t all that much, but - I took this one to show you.”

  “It’s interesting,” said Kyeo, instead of It’s beautiful.

  “I mean, the idea is you turn it on, not just look at it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get on the skylace from here,” admitted Sarham. “It might want access codes or something.” He tapped the surface of the rectangle with two fingers and the beribboned pattern was hidden by milk-white and a slowly turning image of a planet.

  “Is that Kular?”

  “Yeah.”

  The image changed, a geometric pattern of colors Kyeo couldn’t interpret at all, and Sarham poked one, and it changed again, and Sarham said “Yep, it wants an Ibyabekan ID… sorry.”

  “I have an Ibyabekan ID.”

  “You don’t think it’d get you in trouble?” Sarham asked, shying away a little, pulling back the lens.

  “No,” said Kyeo, already halfway through extemporizing an explanation for his father about how this was somehow “encouraging”, and Sarham gave him the lens.

  Kyeo’s ID unlocked the skylace bobbin in orbit above them, and it spun them onto what must be the default Kularan site, a startlingly boring text box.

  “What do you wanna see?” Sarham asked softly.

  “I - don’t know,” said Kyeo. “What is there? What did you want to show me?”

  Sarham looked at the empty text box. He put the lens down on his knee and looked up at the treetops. “I guess I was imagining there’d be a hundred things you already knew you wanted. Maybe there aren’t. I watch movies, at home - and write messages to my friends - I order food sometimes, which will not work at all here -”

  “Messages to your friends? About what?”

  “Uh,” said Sarham, and he picked up the lens again, went back to the geometrical display, poked a triangle, logged in to something. “I don’t remember what I last talked to people about, but I can get my history…” Names in Kularan skated past under Sarham’s fingertips. He chose one.

  Kyeo could read the Kularan all right, though it was harder with a lot of the formal markers and particles they had in class material, and some of the words he didn’t know at all, maybe derived from different pidgin source languages instead of the ones his textbooks marked as standard. He picked his way through it. Someone was asking Sarham are you almost home and Sarham replied yes and he says he isn’t - there Kyeo didn’t know the word - so thank you very so extremely much my friendfriendfriendthing except that last part was written with sarcastic-looking diacritics connecting all the different emphasis particles and various synonyms for “friend”, to what was presumably some sort of rhetorical effect.

  “What does the word mean there -” Kyeo began, but Sarham had swept the messages away, nearly dropping the lens in the process.

  “Whoops,” said Sarham in a high voice. “Uh you were asking what my friends and I talk about - I guess we talk about, uh, movies, and where we’re going to meet, and how we’re doing -”

  “There was a word I didn’t know,” Kyeo said.

  “Just one, uh, wow, your Kularan must be great,” said Sarham, “do you want to switch to Kularan, we could practice -”

  Kyeo looked at him. He wanted to back off, all his social instincts were telling him not to push on it, to let the deflection stand, but the substance of this snatch of organic Kularan conversation was eluding him without the word. He said neither yes nor no.

  “My friend set me up with his cousin,” said Sarham, collapsing a little under the silence. “The cousin wasn’t interested, my friend made a mistake.”

  “Oh,” said Kyeo, and then, “I see,” and, “I have heard that on United Kular boys are sometimes that way but did not know the word.”

  “- is there an Ibyabekan word? I don’t know one,” murmured Sarham.

  Kyeo shook his head, and then, as though falling, succumbing to some shift in gravity, he leaned forward, and he kissed Sarham.

  Sarham made a little noise, a wonderful little noise Kyeo wanted foolishly to set to music, and kissed him back.

  Apparently it was true that sometimes on Kular boys kissed other boys after all. Apparently also Kularan boys would sometimes put their hands on those other boys and pull them in closer, with their fingers interleaved with hair, clenching in fabric. Apparently boys from Kular were very rewarding to kiss.

  Kyeo didn’t know how long he had been experiencing this fascinating truth when Sarham pulled away, retracted his arms back into his lap. Kyeo leaned after him, caught himself, sat up straight. Sarham had his eyes clenched shut and his lips a little apart, like he was about to say something, but he didn’t, for a long moment.

  “Sarham?” said Kyeo, quietly. Sarham, are you okay - Sarham, what’s wrong - Sarham, kiss me more -

  “We can’t,” said Sarham.

  “We just did,” said Kyeo, almost indignant.

  “We mustn’t,” clarified Sarham, “I, I, your dad told you to be here, you don’t - you don’t have -”

  “I wanted to,” Kyeo insisted. His father wasn’t some kind of perfect anti-compass who would never tell him to do anything that he wanted to do. Later his father would send him to a hospital to be cured of his philosophical malady and Kyeo would probably want that too because by then Sarham would not be around to be encouraged any more.

  “Maybe,” said Sarham, whose eyes were still closed.

  “Why won’t you look at me?”

  “If I look at you I’ll kiss you again.”

  “You could just kiss me again,” said Kyeo reasonably.

  Sarham shook his head. “I - it’s a bad idea - do you want to see anything on the skylace, I can’t be sure I’ll be able to swipe it again -”

  Kyeo took the offered lens from Sarham, didn’t check himself when he wanted to let his hand linger a moment in contact, but didn’t escalate either. He looked, blankly, at the geometrical screen. Poked a circle inside a rectangle inside a square, and found a gallery of photographs. There were menu items, at the bottom of the screen, but Kyeo saw the first photograph and pushed it aside for the next and he never paid the buttons any mind.

  Sarham and a dozen other people on some kind of open-topped car, descending a hill, arms flung up while water splashed around them and their mouths all opened in shrieks of delight. Sarham and a friend taking a picture of themselves on a bridge over a river, full of boats, reflecting a thousand lights from twin rows of buildings down each side. Sarham with some little child on his shoulders, both cackling. Sarham and his parents in a botanical garden, surrounded by flowers. Sarham floating in a zero-g room full of colorful padded objects while strangers flew behind him in the background. Sarham in a restaurant with a bunch of friends, food heaped in front of them, tables and tables and tables behind them packed with families and couples and groups, so packed some of them were standing by the bar. Sarham on another planet shown with rings behind him - Sarham in a fancy coat at some sort of holiday party - Sarham receiving an award on stage with classmates all around applauding - Sarham in dozens of outfits, dozens of places, with dozens of people, smiling, smiling, smiling.

  Had all this happened?

  This many things?

  “Are they real?” he heard himself ask.

  “They’re real,” said Sarham, in a soft broken voice. “They’re all real. There’s more. Those are just the highlights the app uses as wallpaper when I open it. Do - do you believe me, that they’re real, and not - like the village -”

  “The village?” asked Kyeo, feeling empty. Small. Overwhelmed. Poor.

  “They have us in a village that they want us to think is normal, like everyone on Ibyabek lives that way all the time, and they put people in it, and pretend they live there,” said Sarham. “The village… exists. You can go knock on the walls. But we can tell - it’s different. It’s like - look at this.” He tickled the lens and it popped up a photo of a shelf of packages. “That’s the tofu section,” Sarham went on. “Of the grocery store where my family shops. I went out for a few things and they didn’t have my mother’s favorite kind. I took this to send her so she’d see what was in stock so she could point me to what her second choice was. I had to take two pictures,” he skipped to the next one, clearly taken just to the left of the first, there was overlap, “because it didn’t all fit in one shot easily.”

  Kyeo skipped to the next picture. It was Sarham in some deliriously crowded building with high swooping ceilings, art glass dangling from the ceiling to make an air-bordered mosaic in the shape of a swan, trees growing indoors. The depicted Sarham had a backpack on, and a suitcase with wheels, and out the window behind him was a space shuttle.

  “That’s from when we left for here. I posted it where my friends could see as a goodbye,” Sarham said.

  “Why did you come here?” Kyeo asked in an airless whisper. He looked up at Sarham’s face, his real face, not the rueful smile he’d made for the camera in the shuttleport, and - Sarham was crying. Not sobbing, but there were tear tracks down his cheeks.

  “To be with my parents.” Sarham took a deep breath. “To - learn. About what it’s like here. To meet - I didn’t know about you specifically, but - you.”

  “To meet me and show me pictures -”

  “I didn’t have that in mind at first. I -”

  “BOYS,” called Suor’s voice, from the edge of the trees.

  Sarham swore - or so Kyeo surmised, since he did it in Kularan. He jabbed the lens till it went blank again. Stuffed it in his pocket.

  “BOYS,” came the call again. “COME BACK NOW.”

  Sarham swore again, dropping his face into his hands.

  “They caught you?”

/>   “I think so. That or something’s on fire. I’ll be in trouble - they might send me home -”

  “Kiss me goodbye,” said Kyeo.

  Sarham looked up.

  “He doesn’t know how far we walked, how long it’ll take us to come, he won’t know - if you’re going to have to leave it doesn’t matter anyway what he said - I wanted to - kiss me goodbye.”

  Sarham didn’t have to be told a third time. He took Kyeo’s face between his hands and kissed him, hard and fast, and then -

  - squared his shoulders, let him go, and obeyed the voice.

  Kyeo looked at his hand, wondering what it would be like to hold, but that he didn’t ask. They were going out of the trees and back into the glorious civilization of Ibyabek, now. No more skylace, no more kisses, no more time.

  * * *

  Kyeo returned to school, thinner and quieter. He was in a lower merit class with boys he’d never met before, but it was at least the same school, which was very generous of the People after all his mistakes. Sometimes he saw Soh and Imyu and other boys he’d once had classes with across the cafeteria but he didn’t try to talk to them. Having ultimately admitted to the philosophical educators that in retrospect he had had the problem since well before meeting the offworlder, Kyeo could acknowledge that it would be a shameful lack of discipline to try to speak to any boy he had ever looked at in that way before. Better to start fresh with his new and better tested commitment to right philosophy, with new classmates he had formed no habits with.

  He ate his bread as though it was baked fresh and dripping with honey butter. He drank his soup down to the last drop. He was far too well trained to ask for anyone else’s leftovers. It would be unworthy of a grateful son of Ibyabek.

  The first time the water came cold out of the shower, he wept, but he did it silently, and without flinching away, so no one could tell. Or if they could they said nothing.

  Kyeo studied, ferociously, to catch up. He could not be promoted into Merit Class 1 again before his old friends graduated, but they were a year ahead of him now and he could work his way back up. He could with enough work lose only that year and not the entire shape of his life. Five years on he’d be like anyone else in Ibyabek’s military service, cured and readjusted and trained and ready, and he’d be past all his troubles and all the hard work of overcoming his weakness, and he would be contributing and happy and married and settled into his place in the world.

  By the time the term was out he had turned in six of his classmates for various contraband and curfew violations.

  They weren’t even on complicated missions to suborn offworld visitors. They were committing petty vandalism against the glorious edifice of Ibyabek for chocolate and to deprive themselves of sleep. Kyeo had let things slide, sometimes, before, had considered these little flexibilities no real assault on the power and integrity of his planet, but if he had transgressed -

  If he had gone without bread to better shape himself into an upright man of the kind his people expected - if he had stood, awake, in light that never flickered, battered by recitations that never faltered -

  - then these stupid children could take their demerits, and if the Academy of Merit was not the flawless jewel it said it was, at least it would present a flawless facet to Kyeo, as everyone he might lay eyes on buttoned up their uniforms more perfectly and kept their conversations free of allusions to what teachers they bribed and what tests they cheated on and what pornography they were hacking the skylace connection to deliver.

  The stupid children could support Kyeo in his desperate quest to never need a second course of treatment. They could be set dressing to his burning need to fall back into a world where Ibyabek was the storied treasure of the Glorious Leader, envy of the galaxy.

  He tried not to remember the pictures, which were probably all painted fever dreams anyway. He tried not to remember Sarham’s name.

  * * *

  Kyeo graduated and put in six months’ work in a planetside shipyard, one of the best possible assignments to receive going into a military career because he’d be able to observe details of how the ships were put together. He fetched and carried for the welders, learned to clip wires into place and calibrate sensors, spray-stenciled the name of the vessel onto panel after panel of plastic and metal. When the assignnment was over he went directly to basic training with no stop at home. There was nothing he had to say to his parents and nothing they had to say to him. It wasn’t the Stone Age. He didn’t need his family, he had the People, and his family had made it perfectly clear they were willing to yield him up thereunto, so that was that.

  In his cohort in training he was not the only person who had been through some kind of supplementary education. Kyeo told himself it was beneath him to wonder what the others had done, when they, as he, had clearly been deemed rehabilitated by the experts. But most of the class were new to the sleepless nights, the short rations, and did not acquit themselves well at first. It was good to take on these challenges and become accustomed in a safe environment, their sergeant explained. The enemies of Ibyabek would not wait for them to rest. The enemies of Ibyabek would not take pity on their empty bellies when disrupting supply lines that brought meals to the supply stations or cutting off their vessels’ access to their pickup.

  Kyeo and his fellow veterans waited for the rest to catch up until they could all function on three days of water fast with six non-consecutive hours of sleep. The enemies of Ibyabek didn’t push their recruits this hard, the sergeant told them. They were soft and weak and decadent. By becoming hard and dangerous and disciplined the Ibyabekans would defeat them. Even if they found themselves in a battle where - despite Ibyabek’s overwhelming technological and strategic superiority - they were locally outnumbered and ill-positioned, their training would allow them to carry the day.

  Ibyabek was not at war with any of those enemies at the moment. Most of the military held the border of Ibyabekan space in routine beats, making sure they were close at hand in case anything broke out, and otherwise chasing after fleeing criminals and traitors, or beating back smugglers and agitators looking to land on Ibyabekan soil and infect it from the inside. But there was always the possibility that diplomacy would fail, that greed-blinded foreign powers would want what Ibyabek had -

  (Kyeo’s vision swam, for a moment, as he fought against remembering a picture of a city on a river, lit up -)

  - greed-blinded foreign powers would want what Ibyabek had and make a move, and then the sons of Ibyabek would be called upon to give their lives to defend it. Were they ready? They’d better get that way, because their enemies wouldn’t give any warning.

  Kyeo looked at another recruit the wrong way in a moment of inattention. He turned the water in the shower cold, cold, cold, even though the heater was working fine. He had to be ready. Everything Ibyabek had was his to defend and if he wasn’t a soldier he had nothing left.

  * * *

  Kyeo was assigned to the Five Virtues and hummed rather than sang when the rest of his unit raised their voices to celebrate their departure from spacedock. His voice had a gravelly quality to it that didn’t yield to coughing or water, like it was trying to prove to a long-gone listener that he had repeated what he was meant to repeat enough times.

  But he knew the tune to the Anthem of the Bright Way, because of course he did, and he hummed it, almost smiling. Everything had turned out all right, and he was in uniform, aboard a ship, headed for the Middle Sohaibek demilitarized zone’s edge to make sure the Outer Sohaibekans didn’t send any ships through without going through proper channels and inspections. They might have to perform those inspections themselves at some point, but they didn’t have any scheduled. It was expected to be a routine posting. They’d sleep, they’d eat, they’d maintain the ship and watch the sensors and perform their drills.

  For six months they did this.

  Kyeo, greener than most of the crew, had mostly menial duties, but also - he thought because of the Sebe Luk part of his name, not that anyone said this to him - he was receiving on-tour training in the military communications protocols. He sat with Officer Tahn for part of each day while he decrypted messages from Ibyabek and the station outposts and the other ships. Kyeo watched over Tahn’s shoulder as he converted a transmission sent from People’s Law and ran it through all the steps to render it as plaintext.