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One: First Impressions

Korojun, Shelswun, Intergal 24:1:62174

Bolas Stefan Scharo stumbled through the alley, incoherence mounting. Aggression surged among other base emotions. He lifted his leg to stomp on a glass bottle.

Unfortunately, the container hadn’t been made of delicate glass, a somewhat extravagant material on Shelswun. The plax refused to break under his boot. Instead, it rolled slightly along the littered pavement.

Bolas Scharo rolled with it. The alcohol had cut away his typically-acute motor control. The bottle repelled the invasion. His right foot slid off the sleek surface of the bottle and shot towards Shelswun’s dirty sky.

His left foot followed.

Gravity guaranteed that some part of his stocky anatomy touch the world’s artificial surface. With both feet airborne, his buttocks quickly made the needed contact.

The bottle laughed at him in muffled feminine hysteria.

His eyes crossed as he tried to follow the path of the rolling bottle. He branded the bottle with choice vulgarities as he reached after it.

The laughter gasped, stopped, then became a taunting chuckle.

"Laugh, wench," he rasped as his fingers tightened around the cylinder with his last coordination. The laughter ceased with an abrupt choke.

"Laugh at me, will you?"

"No–I wasn’t–really," the bottle’s soft voice swirled around him.

"Yes–" He cocked his arm back. "–you–" He jerked his arm forward. "–were!" His fingers released.

No longer laughing, the bottle struck the cracked stone wall. Immediately it bounced back, swirling in violent rotation, coming back at him with a circular sneer on its lips. The bottom struck his forehead squarely. Sober, Bolas would certainly have stood firm against the strike. Perhaps he would have blinked dumbfoundedly, but a man of his strength and stamina would have stood tall.

Sober didn’t even approach his slurred vocabulary at the moment.

His head fell back. His body followed, and for the second time in the confrontation, his feet shot skyward.

The bottle burst into further uproarious laughter that mocked, teased, and provided just enough spite for him to stay conscious. With supreme effort, he rolled off his back, onto his hands and knees. He crawled after the bottle as it rolled into the center of the alley, laughing the whole way.

He slipped and landed face-first in a greenish puddle.

The bottle’s noise changed, from "hohohohohoha!" to even more vulgar "bwaahahahaha!"

Slumping through the collected mire, he crawled after his tormentor. This one he could deal with, and shut up, with his own bare hands around the bottle’s little throat. He’d teach this bottle to lure him from his more accustomed haunts to the slums.

"You’re going to hurt yourself," the voice warned between guffaws.

"No. I’m going to hurt you."

"Oh!" The bottle seemed to take the threat more seriously. He heard her feet scuffle a step back.

Diminishing vestiges of his last consciousness correlated the noise of the fleeing footsteps to the bottle’s absolute lack of feet resolute lack of movement.

Pollution splattered from his face as he jerked his head up.

The blurred figure stared at him with a mixture of fear and bemusement.

The aggression turned to stimulation as if someone had affixed a low-volt electrode to his shaft. In his mind’s inability to grasp more than one thought at a time, he forgot the bottle. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but that didn’t particularly matter to him in his present condition. Light shone from a window behind her just enough to outline her seemingly-shifting figure among her dirty coveralls. Two sacks hung from her stiffened hands. The alcohol passing between his brain cells shifted the rounded bundles from their true position alongside her thighs to more desired positions centrally below her shoulders. In his current neighborhood and mindset, he could only assume that she dared approach him for a single reason.

"H-hey, b-baby." He stuck his tongue all the way out and curled it towards his nose, smacked his lips loudly and slurred. "H-how mush? Much."

She shrieked in insult. Then, seemingly faster than she could have fired a lasertron blast between them, she dropped one sack, drew an overripe motom from the other, and hurled it.

Following the bottle’s ample example, it struck him squarely on the forehead. Seeds splattered. It only then occurred to him that such women rarely shopped for vegetables on the job. The bulk of the split and bleeding fruit clung to his forehead. Juice ran down his nose.

"I’m sorry."

She thought he sounded like a pathetic little child. His diminutive voice both lowered her defenses and drew pity for the slime covered drunk. She took a soft step forward.

Bolas looked for spiked heels to lengthen the appearance of her legs, but saw only unfashionable and well worn flat shoes. The change in light cast more of a still-blurred sight of her face. She hadn’t applied thick chemical cosmetics. This woman, for all her drunkenly distorted features, looked more beautiful for the lack of artificial accents. His tastes generally ran in those directions. Bolas Scharo had learned early in life, the more of a multi-colored mask the woman wore, the more artificial the character beneath the mask. In his present condition, additional colors would have only made his mind and sight and stomach reel more violently than they already did.

She leaned forward. He couldn’t discern the surprise that distorted her face with pulling muscular contractions. "You’re the governor-prince Scharo!"

The one side of his face that was not completely benumbed rose in an attempt for his most dashing smile. "And-nd you’re b-beeee-autifullll." He stuck his tongue out and tried to curl it upwards in an invitation, but it just hung from his mouth like a thirsty Dogomon’s.

"You’re a gabbo!" she shrieked.

As if charmed by her curse, he passed out. The clinging fruit buffered his head from striking the pavement too hard.

 

***

 

Korojun, Shelswun, Intergal 24:1:62174

Veronika Masi Webster struggled with her burdens to the door. At times Governor Scharo’s second grandson regained glimpses of consciousness, enough to mumble incoherent questions or help her along with movement of his own legs, but those awakenings proved too brief to provide actual aid. Huffing and puffing, she leaned him against the wall cornered to her door and let her bundles drop to the pavement. She kicked cigarette filters and a bottle from the step and looked to his dirty face with a helpless nod. She’d just swept that morning.

Without her support, he began to slide off the landing. She wedged her foot beneath his. His lower body slumped towards the door until it crashed. She fumbled in her pocket for her passcard and nodded to him again.

"I’ll bet your home sees you coming, identifies you, and opens the door automatically. Welcome to the fair city of Korojun, where we can’t even have keypad locks ‘cause people’ll watch for your code so they can break in–like they’d get anything of value anyplace here."

She fumbled with the lock, having to swipe the card four times and hit the reading box before it opened. By that time she had been sufficiently frustrated to distraction. When the door slid open, Bolas fell into the apartment with a thud.

"Ronnie? You all right?"

The moment she had dreaded had come. The memory of the bedraggled zabu kitten she had brought home as a child haunted her. "It’ll bring pests!" her father had shouted. "The things are diseased! We can’t afford t’feed it ‘til someone steals it for a good meal of fresh meat! Out it goes!"

"Yes, Daddi. I’m all right. I, well, brought comp’ny. Uh, and they were out of fresh motoms."

The burly man lifted himself out of his chair and looked across the cramped cubicle. "Who? Where? And why didn’t you get canned?"

"He’s on the floor. They didn’t have canned."

"This better not be another zabu. You tell Giy that I’ll box his ears, he don’t git some motoms."

"It’s a man. The last one he had got crushed."

A shocked look spread across Blane Webster’s tight-skinned face. Veronika wasn’t sure if it was the man or the motom, and figured it to be a combination of the two. Her father had clung to her more desperately since the divorce. As if preparing himself to better deal with this unwanted visitor, he rolled up his sleeves past dye-stained hands, then strode forward.

"Ya’ve got t’improve your taste in men, ya want my approval," he said of the prone man.

"Daddi. He wasn’t doing well. I thought he’d get hurt out there."

The greatest impediment to Veronika’s dating had been the sheer fear her father easily provoked among the slyly motivated. With a sweeping motion he hoisted Bolas off the floor, jabbed the door open box with his wide elbow and began a backswing to pitch Bolas out. "Nope. He’ll be hurt when I bounce his sorry clunes ‘cross the road!"

Veronika grabbed her father’s thick arms before he could release Bolas. "Daddi, stop! Look at him!"

Webster grappled the man in his arm. "Yeah, Ronnie. Ya got something you wanna tell your ol’ man?"

"He’ll be killed out there!"

"I don’ care ‘bout that! That there looks suspiciously like a motom on his head!"

"We had a misunderstanding!"

"So ya knocked him cold with my last motom?!"

"Look at him!"

"I’m lookin’, but I only see a motom that shoulda been on my dinner plate!"

"This is Bolas Scharo! You pitch him out over your motom, he’ll be ransomed and killed out there!"

Webster peered at Bolas for a moment as he tried to fit the name. Once he did, he dropped the young man as if his skin had grown hot. He took a step back, as if Bolas would explode like an over-ripe motom. He punched the door control box closed then whirled to his daughter. "Ya stupid, gel, bring him here? They’ll be lookin’ for this one, an’ they’ll find us here, an’ they’ll execute us because you knocked him out with my motom!"

"I didn’t knock him out with your motom! He’s drunk. He could be governor of Shelswun one day! I couldn’t leave him on the streets of Korojun to be picked clean!"

"One wrong non-hu, they’ll pick his bones clean an’ dip him in a motom sauce! So long as they’re not eatin’ him on my doorstep!" He punched the door box and heaved Bolas from the floor.

Veronika tapped the door closed as her father pitched Bolas forward. The door closed first. Bolas bounced off it and back to the floor. Enraged red-faced, Webster turned to his daughter. "Ya min’ me, gel! Yain’t t’old!"

Veronika’s greatest distinction in Korojun was that she was perhaps the sole person able to stand up to Blane Webster without immediate breakage or bruise. For all the rugged mannerisms that helped defend his place in Shelswun’s working class, Webster’s neighbors considered him one of the pillars of Korojun’s community, so far away from Kapital, where people like Bolas belonged. "You taught me do what’s right. I’m doing what’s right, ‘cause this here’s our world’s prince! We’ll stick him on Mard’s old couch ‘til he sleeps it off!"

Arms crossed before him, Webster puckered his chafed lips. "I sold Mard’s cot after the li’l teat ran off."

"Then we’ll put him in mine!"

"Oh no ya won’t, li’l gel!"

Veronika flushed, not for her father’s implication, but for her suppressed desire of it. "I’ll sleep on the floor!"

"Ah, no! I mayn’t rec’nize this one like you, but I sure know what I’ve heard ‘bout this one! Yain’t staying where he can reach down an’ touch things that don’ belong t’him! Ya’ll have yaself on the far side o’my cot, where I can break this one’s arms, he tries."

"I’ll fix dinner while you put him away," Veronika said calmly. "Face down, over the edge." Ungently, Webster scooped Bolas by the scruff and seat and sacked him towards Veronika’s small room while she opened the door to get the groceries. Two figures ran down the street, each carrying one sack. Veronika shrieked. "Our bags!"

Blane Webster threw Bolas across the room and onto the tattered couch and sped for the door. He grasped the simulated wood sofa leg left by the door and bolted into the street after his dinner. Confident their meal would not be lost, Veronika stepped towards the prone man. She couldn’t help but notice the strong curves of his legs, the solid muscle of his chest, or anything in between. "Daddi’ll put you right when he gets back, Bolas Scharo! Me, I’ve had about enough of you!"