Authors: Susan Juby
Fon had no idea what she was up against.
Bright whispered for Pinkie to bring the new jetpack. Pinkie twittered and some lights on her panel flickered, a sure sign the bot was anxious.
“Don’t worry,” whispered Bright. “I’ll be carrying my shield in case anything goes wrong.” She didn’t mention that she had not taken the jetpack to be inspected, as per rule 46:2.6 in the
Party Favour Gear Safety Handbook
concerning altitude-related gear. A person couldn’t let rules get in the way of earning credits.
Bright finally ventured a glance over at Fon just in time to see her dressing-mate pull her halo up over her head and click it into place. The halo was two sizes too small and made it impossible for Fon to turn her head properly. To look to the side, Fon had to crane her whole body and wrench her shoulders around. The halo was dented and bent and covered in pink twinklers, several of which were burnt out. The semicircle of light-encrusted wire and plastic framed her head and was attached to the straps of her Baby SWAT
dress (black, made of Kevlar, with ceramic plates in strategic places, as well as extra cut-outs to avoid any sense of privacy or propriety).
Halos had gone out of style three months before, after two water-based favours at the House of Splash got electrocuted during a shift and took a client with them. Now, only aging favours in marginal clubs wore them. Fon, who was the opposite of aging and marginal, was the only favour outside the House of It who could pull off a vintage dysfunctional gear inversion with a non-ironic twist. Her natural elements were excellent and her surgeries were the best. Even more pronounced was Fon’s positive attitude. In the vanity lights of the dressing room, Bright could practically see the waves of enthusiasm coming off her dressing-mate.
“Looking good,” said Bright, trying to make her voice sound sincere.
“Thank you!” said Fon. “I love my halo. It’s one of my best features!”
Bright stopped herself from telling Fon there was a difference between a feature and an accessory, partly because she wasn’t sure she was right.
Bright was just getting out of her chair when the Mistress appeared in the doorway. The Mistress was a tall, jaggedy woman, said to be almost twenty-three, which might as well be thirty. When Bright had first started at the House of Gear, purpose had radiated off the Mistress just as it did off Fon. Lately, however, she seemed distracted and showed signs of age-related wear.
As always, she wore a diving suit. Scuba look allowed her to keep a canister on her back. Everyone loved to speculate about what kind of gas she kept in it.
The Mistress stared in Bright’s general direction for a long, unfocused moment. Then she grabbed the black plastic hose draped over her shoulder and inhaled deeply from the mouthpiece. Her face slackened and her gaze slid into some space deep within herself.
“Get your gear on …” she muttered.
“And get ready to party!” shouted Fon.
“Exactly,” said the Mistress. “Exactly right.”
With that, the Mistress stepped out and off to the side of the dressing-room door. She hit the speaker button on her neoprene suit and yelled, in a surprisingly strong and clear voice: “Introducing Bright! Here she comes! On shift now! Let’s hear it for BRIGHT!”
Bright snapped into her strut walk and shrugged the jetpack onto her shoulders. She threw jazzy hands at the crowd (a move that was blowing up this week). She made sure to angle herself toward the right cameras. She busted out a triple shoulder shrug (a sure-fire winner since last Tuesday) and an over-the-shoulder Hey You! glance (a risky choice because it was nearly a month old). Then she continued to strut toward the corner launch. A favour couldn’t take too much time to get down, because other favours were lined up in their rooms, ready to come on shift, and nobody liked a launch hog.
At the edge of the launch pad she ignored the slide pole, the rope, the swing, and the glass platform, all of which were ready to take her down to the floor of the Choosing Room.
She swept her arm theatrically, as though knocking those options out of her way. The crowd, already roaring, went crazy when they realized she wore a jetpack.
The sound washed over her: the crowd’s approval was the best feeling in the world. Aside from some of the mind alter mixes, which were extremely great too.
Bright gave jazzy hands once, twice, three more times and then threw herself into the air from the seventh floor. The crowd screamed in terror and delight. Already, order wands were popping on like stars in night videos.
Bright held the small controller in her right hand and hit the top button. The jetpack engaged and she shot sideways. Her thumb moved to the middle button and suddenly she was going up, up, up. At the ninth tier she could see favours giving her the flat eye as she rose past their dressing rooms, the pack giving off a gassy buzz at her back.
Take that, ‘itches! she thought.
It was time to swoop low over the crowd before doing her flips.
Bright eased her thumb off the middle button and onto the one that was supposed to slow her ascent. Her body dropped into a free fall. She jabbed another button—she wasn’t sure which one—and her body jerked sideways.
She took a deep breath and hit the Controlled Descent button. She wished she had paid more attention to which buttons did what. She’d been too busy working out how best to display her chain mail dress. She felt herself hanging like a broken doll from her harness, her balance and poise completely destroyed from being tossed around so much.
Her head hung limp against her shoulder. She thought her neck might be sprained or broken, but she couldn’t feel anything. She was glad she’d taken the extra Party Prep pill before leaving her dressing room. The pack jerked her up, down, sideways, and around. But she wasn’t giving up. She would
never
give up! She was going to make the jetpack worth every single credit she’d spent on it.
Bright took a deep, nauseated breath and hit all the buttons at once. That was the cue for the jetpack to propel her in two or three large circles. Instead, it whipped her end-over-end so fast that her legs and arms got whiplash trying to keep up. To make matters worse, she wasn’t held aloft as she rotated like an old-fashioned meat substitute on a rotisserie, but instead kept falling and flailing. Falling and flailing.
People in the crowd screamed as she spun out of control and dropped closer above their heads.
They ran away. Bright used every bit of her strength to find and press another button. Any other button. As her trajectory slowed, she gritted her teeth and tried to straighten her head. But the jetpack held her in a twisted, off-kilter hover before failing entirely. She plowed into the corner like a cheap skiddle and lay in a heap on the floor, trying to catch her breath. She moved her head and limbs to make sure nothing was broken. Then she glanced up to gauge the crowd’s response. They had thirty seconds after a landing to officially register their order.
All over the room lights winked off, until it was dark but for the dance lights.
A moment later, the Mistress’s powerful voice pierced the throbbing music from above.
“And now, FON!” she cried. “Put your wands in the air for FON!”
Every order wand in the place lit up before Fon even cleared the dressing room.
Bright crawled to her knees and convinced her wrenched neck to hold up her head. She saw Fon poised on the platform, wearing a jetpack Bright had never seen before. Fon held a microphone to her lips.
“Let’s do the jetpack and do it right!” Fon shouted.
The crowd roared like a single eager being. Fon leapt off the railing. She flew so fast that her halo left a light trail behind her, as though her head were on fire with pink lights. She slowed, executed three lazy, perfect somersaults followed by a precise pair of aerial figure eights, then drifted to the floor, glorious in Kevlar, her perfectly tinted legs set ablaze by the insistent illumination from the floor, where every wand was lit and bobbing frantically as the clients put in their orders, hoping they had enough credits to spend the night dancing and having a blast with Fon.
Bright sank back down, unstrapped her jetpack, and sighed heavily. That was the last time she would ever buy a jetpack on sale.
Grassly pushed himself away from his worktable. He felt like sweeping his tools onto the floor as a grand gesture, but he didn’t want to make a mess that he’d later have to clean up.
Instead, he checked the surveillance feed and stared at the images of favours and clients doing the slip slide with a triple twist. He was instantly entranced and jumped up to follow along with their steps. As hard as he worked on the light, he worked even harder at his dancing, but he still couldn’t figure out how to do the triple twist. The ancestors, while perverse in countless ways, had incredible dance skill.
He was tucked away in his workshop, hidden deep in the recesses of the House of Gear, working on the latest version of the light. Undercover among the last remnants of the ancestors, he was finding his Sending far more challenging than he’d imagined. The ancestors truly were the most annoying creatures in the Charted Territories. Trying to copy the relentless innovation and athleticism of their dancing was the only thing keeping him sane. The dancing also helped him, at least for brief periods, to forget the many complications of his two-year odyssey to save the ancestors.
For starters, the substance he’d used to seal his ship to the skin of the Store—the seal that prevented the lingering biotoxins from the war-ravaged environment from slipping inside and killing everyone—was being eaten away by the poisons. He’d miscalculated just how polluted Earth was and how long the seal would have to last. In addition, the ancestors’ behaviours and mores were nearly impossible for a rational being to understand, even though their main communication and data system, known as the feed, was not difficult to hack. Worst of all, the light was giving him trouble.
The idea for the light came from the ancestors’ own historical documents. When Grassly had reached low Earth orbit, he’d discovered a small group of abandoned ships endlessly circling the devastated planet. Inside one of those ships were the corpses of several ancestors and the partial remains of a single book. All that was left of
Enlightenment Made Easy: Follow Your Inner Angel!
by Sally Lancaster was the front cover and the first few pages, most of which were taken up with compelling testimonials like “This book literally saved my life!” and “I was blind before I read this book and now I see the light!” According to the embossed words on the cover,
Enlightenment Made Easy
had sold over forty million copies.
The remaining pages of text spoke of the need for all of humanity to become “enlightened and seek a new beginning in new lands.” That sounded exactly like what Grassly had in mind for them. Sally Lancaster claimed humans had only to “see the light to become ready to move to the
place where all good things are possible.” Only when everyone had “migrated to the light” would humanity be healed and ready to begin anew, “bathed in the healing of angelic illumination.” There his understanding faltered. He didn’t know what “angelic” meant, but he felt he got the gist of her argument.
The book’s cover showed a man falling to his knees in front of a brilliant beam of light and a woman in a pair of high-waisted blue slacks walking directly into it.
Grassly felt his discovery of the book was a sign as to how he should proceed. After all, Sally Lancaster was a distant relation, of sorts. She was a human. He was a 51. His people, fifty-one of them, had been rescued from Earth in the mid-1970s. They were taken from the fourth floor of a nightclub in New Jersey in an incident that came to be called the Great Nightclub Disappearance. In fact, they were rescued from their sad, limited existence by a powerfully philanthropic, advanced alien species called the Xnxnga (pronounced Ex-in-Ga).
The Xnxnga, who looked like anteaters, only friendlier and larger, transported the fifty-one to an idyllic (at least from a 1970s human perspective) planet called H51, where they developed a technologically and sociologically utopian society and received the gift of accelerated evolution. Only a few decades after they left the faltering Earth, the 51s and their descendants underwent the sort of profound transformation experienced by many advanced species: they became One.
When they turned fifty-one years of age, the 51s merged physically and psychologically into their familial
group, joining the group mind known as the Mother. The fifty-one Mother consciousnesses were housed in towering black pyramids located in the majestic red rock desert in the northwestern lands of H51. As you might expect if you’ve ever met a mother, the Mothers were a powerful presence in the lives of their offspring, except during a single life phase: the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sending, which took place when 51s were on the cusp of adulthood, somewhere between their seventeenth and twenty-first years, depending on their maturity level.
The Sending was another legacy from the Xnxnga. Young 51s on a Sending left their planet, and sometimes their galaxy, with the goal of discovering, rescuing, and, if necessary, rehoming endangered species from other planets. The experience was meant to solidify their self-esteem, which was considered the critical prerequisite for a successful life.
In order for a 51 to complete a successful Sending, the species being saved had to actively participate in its rescue. For instance, the original fifty-one had willingly gone with the Xnxnga when they mistook the ship parked on the roof of the nightclub for another dance floor.
The ancestors were notorious throughout the Charted Territories for having destroyed their planet and every other living thing on it. Every young 51 knew that the ancestor population was on the verge of extinction and lived inside a single dwelling called the Store, into which they had withdrawn at the time of the Great Corporate Retreat. But they were considered beyond hope—beyond Sending, if you will.
Had Grassly fully understood what he was getting himself into, he might have chosen his Sending more wisely. As it was, a lesser-known trait of the ancestors had greatly influenced his decision. They were reputed to be superb dancers, and Grassly yearned to be a great dancer. Of course, he also wanted to have one of the most impressive Sendings ever. What better way than to rescue a species considered doomed and, if possible, learn their dances? What a boost to his self-esteem and that of his entire family!