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Blast Off

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EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TWO

Outside, Jammin’ Jenny took off. No need to watch her home break apart. She whipped through the asteroid belt, boulders bobbing past her as she rushed them. Pebble eddies spun in her wake. But as she heard the final crack, Jenny slowed, shoulders hunched. She punched at the space around her, and shivered. Even though things were cold here so far from Paltry, the smallest of the known suns, she’d never noticed it before. Now what? She peered down the long, dim corridors of dust and rotating debris, then started. The Outer Asteroids were always empty. So who was this? 

    She ducked behind a nearby dust cluster to study the situation, then snorted. It was just an old man sitting on a quark bench wedged between two craggy Kuiper boulders and obviously looking for some teeth to chew with. His hair hung like dangling electrical cords and his face sprouted whiskers in uneven constellations. He was wearing a mantle made of star trash and broken molecules that had seen better days. The bench was popping in and out of existence, leaving him temporarily suspended but floating calmly in the space stream. He must’ve lost his way and sat down for a breather. Hardly anyone made it this far. Why would they? 

    Jenny shrugged. It had nothing to do with her. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone, anyway. Revving up her board, she sped past him, then stopped. Something made her stop. “Hey!” She spun around, shouting. “What’d you do that for?”

    The old man looked up at her, eyes glinting in the mercury light. He was sucking on something in his mouth that, he somehow made clear, was more interesting than she was. She stuck her hands on her hips. “I beg your pardon?” he asked mildly.

    “You made me stop!”
    He swallowed, taking his time about it. She watched his Adam’s apple take a slow ride up and then down again. “My dear girl,” he went on calmly, “trust me when I tell you that no one could make you, of all people, do anything.”

    Jenny narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?” Was school   looking for her already? Seemed hard to believe.

    “Ah,” he said, exhaling a spicy, gooey breath. Her stomach growled, breakfast now fading on the horizon. “She does think,” he continued, watching for her reaction.

    “Of course I think!” retorted Jenny. Jupiter! How had this conversation gotten started, anyway? “Look, I’m going now.” She had a lot of things to do, such as building a new house.

    “Jammin’ Jenny,” he called after her in a singsong voice. “Why are you in such a hurry?”

    “How do you know my name?” Jenny spun around. Behind her silhouette of scrappiness and gumption, dust particles drifted by aimlessly. A thousand possibilities were colliding in her mind, none of them good. Silence. She could almost hear the planets spinning, but of course they were too far away. Well, she thought, it didn’t matter what he knew, he’d never figure out where she lived, especially since she didn’t anymore. “Who are you?” she repeated. The words fell like the leaden rain on some planets.

    Orbiting deep in their sockets, his eyes seemed to pin her in place. “They call me, well, many things,” he murmured, “but let’s just say I’m a kind of lord.”

    Now she’d heard it all! “Royalty?” she scoffed. Definitely not from school.

    “Not in the ordinary way,” he hedged, “of a far more important order, in fact.”

    “Oh yeah,” she shot back, “and I’m the Queen of Libra.”

His chuckle sounded like bones breaking. “They were right. You do have spirit.”

    “`They’?” This didn’t sound good.

    His attention returned to the object in his mouth. “Delicious!” he exclaimed. With great ceremony, he reached into the dirt-colored sack sitting on the bench beside him,  took out a candy in rustly paper, and slowly unwrapped it. Jenny’s mouth watered with each crinkly sound. “Have one?” he offered.

    Jenny’s stomach leaned in sympathy. She came closer. “You know my name?”

    He nodded, swallowing. “I know a great many things. Such as what you’ve been up to recently.”

    She squirmed. They couldn’t find out about her mom. They’d send her away, probably to live with one of those snot-nosed kids in her class. She’d never get to ride the solar waves again. She wouldn’t be there if her mom came back.

    “Who are you?” she asked again, this time in a whisper. He was close enough to touch and seemed very, very ordinary despite his stringy hair and uneven whiskers. Not from school, just somebody’s grandfather out for a long walk. Well, old people could be like that. She believed, actually, that it was just a ginger chew he was so occupied with.

    He moved over, patting the seat beside him as the quark bench popped back into view. Jenny eyed it suspiciously. She didn’t trust the things made from these jumpy particles. She did enough moving around herself to like her furniture to stay in one place. This stuff was popular at school, though: put the new kid on a quarky seat and watch what happened when it disappeared. She shifted uncomfortably, remembering. It didn’t seem to bother the old man though. Unconcerned, he went on snacking, smoothly riding on thin space when the bench disappeared again. Her stomach rumbled. Reaching into the sack again, he pulled out a bullet-sized sweet and held it out to her. It glistened amber in the stolen light and made her think of aged, dimming stars and distant quasars. The way things stood, it would be a long time until her next snack. Timing her move, she plopped down. After all the space travel, it was nice to sit, and the floating wasn’t too bad either. 

    “Thanks,” she said, pulling off the wrapper and tossing the candy into her mouth. They munched together. Suddenly nothing she needed to do seemed so urgent any more. It felt like the two of them could just drift here for all eternity (which, without a course laid in, was likely to happen).

    “So, your Highness. . . .”

    “`Your Lairdship’,” he corrected, but congenially.

    “Do you spend a lot of time at court?” She chewed. The universe seemed so very wonderful at the moment.

    The Laird chuckled again, and she wondered how it had ever sounded like bones crunching. It was more like gates opening, and clouds thinning, and every true thing that ever was coming clear.     “I’m not really from that royal circle,” he conceded.

    “No?” They had all eternity. Had she ever been in a hurry? She held out her hand for another sweet. Smiling with the warmth of a dying sun, he gave it to her.

    “Let’s just say I run a different little part of the star system. I call it little, although some would say,” he expanded, “that it’s the most important part of the galaxy.”

    “Oh?” It hardly seemed to matter. Neither did everything else that had, so urgently, up until a moment ago. She sat back. The bench was more comfortable than she’d imagined and a gentle wash of space buoyed her up when it disappeared. Had she ever worried? The sugary light of a thousand stars seemed to be spreading at leisure through her body.

    “You’ve probably never been there.”

    “No?” She frowned. How did he know where she’d been or not?

    “It’s quite off the beaten path,” he admitted, “but I must say we like it that way.” He glanced sideways at her with brittle-crack eyes while appearing to enjoy the view. Two jet-stream rocks collided, sending off a terrific fan of mineral shards. A satellite wing somersaulted slowly past them, its planetary flag long ago worn off. Jenny’s frown deepened. What was he talking about? But the candy was peppering the back of her mouth in a most absorbing way.  

    “In fact,” the Laird said lightly, “you must visit someday. What are you up to now? We seem to have so much to talk about. And this old bench is hardly the place.” He gestured dismissively. “The bus is expected soon, and then it will start to fill up.”

    Jenny stiffened. There hadn’t been a bus stop here for as long as she could remember. In fact, she didn’t think there’d ever been one. She rubbed at the surface beneath her when it next appeared and pulled her fingers away. They were smudged. She wasn’t much of a stickler for the white glove treatment, but this stuff seemed to have been painted on, and recently.

    “Look, I just left a place,” she protested, “where they said we had `a lot to talk about’ too.” 

    “Heavens!” he laughed delectably, “that was clearly a place where they didn’t understand you.” Jenny settled back a bit. He sure got that right. He waved a crabbed hand breezily. “Mine’s quite different, mine’s an educational institution. . . .”

    “A what?” Jenny interrupted. Wasn’t that some grownup word for `school’? “I’m not going back to any school!”

    He sighed, looking as old as the nearest meteor and twice as worn. “Yes, my dear. That’s just the point: you will go back. So,” he said, turning crafty, “why not to my planet? Hmm?”

Jenny stood up. The gingery sweet left her senses. Last she’d checked, she wasn’t anybody’s “dear.” And why did grownups always say they knew more about your life than you did? “Look, thanks for the treat, Gramps, but I’ve gotta get going.” She pulled away, but he grabbed her wrist hard, not seeming to care that he hurt her. In that moment all planetary rotation stopped. She was sure of it. The comets ceased to hurtle. Satellites halted in their orbits. Breaths were held in a million atmospheric lands. Only the suns continued to burn, hot, vicious and deadly. “I said,” she repeated slowly, “I’m leaving now.”

His gaze cut into her. She wondered how she had ever thought he looked ordinary. “What do you want, child?”

Her eyes widened. Nobody asked her stuff like that. “Easy,” she shot back, “I want to get out of here!”

    “No!” he commanded, tightening his hold. “Not that! I mean, what do you really want? In your deepest, secret heart?”

She blinked. Jupiter! What kind of a question was that? She tried to twist her hand out of his grip, but it clung like the vines her mom had always hacked away from the air vents. “I want . . . to have my mom back! To get someplace and not have to leave again,” she shouted. Let him try to give her that. He looked surprised, or maybe just annoyed. She couldn’t tell which. She didn’t care. “I just want,” she spat out, “to go HOME.” She didn’t mention she’d have to build it first.

    “Home!” He chuckled. “If that’s all you want, I can offer you. . . .”

    “No!” she cried, jerking free. He couldn’t. What she’d had was far better than anything he could come up with. Or that anyone else could, for that matter.

    The Laird dropped his hand and stared at her, making no move to stop her as she moved away. Instead he smiled slowly, teeth glowing like old cheese in the gloom. “Here then,” he said, tossing her the sack of ginger candies. “Take these. In case you get hungry later.”