Memoirs of a Timelord (6 page)

       

       Once Veena and Aldoo showed up, school began to change.  Devices training gave way to Skiff training that was supposed to give way to Primary Space Travel, followed by Tactical Weapons School, then finally Galactic Transport School.  In total it was over fifteen Terran years of flight school, interspersed with about a dozen other classes.  It sounds like fun, but it was hell.  Fascinating, but some damned hard training.

       But it all started with the Skiff.  Think of an X-15 crossed with a jet ski and you'd be on the right path.  She was little, two people max.  Agile and quick on the acceleration.  In my old life I had driven a lotta hardware, but the best jet fighter on Earth wouldn't hold a candle to the Skiff.  Veena and I had so much fun on that thing.  We used to scrape the sky by taking her up in this parabolic arc that just touched the edge of space before we'd drop straight down like a Kamikaze.  What a screamer she was, the Skiff, not Veena.  Naw, my sister from another galaxy loved the plunge.  Once we started diving, she'd lean forward into the controls with her teeth gritted and a smile three feet wide.  The skiff was easily our favorite homework.

       Aldoo didn't have to take Skiff training because he'd had experience with better ships back in his old life.  He had actually skipped a lotta coursework, being from a much higher technological era than either of us girls.  He avoided most of Devices Training (lucky bastard) and basic Astrophysics.  I kinda started to get a vibe that he didn't much like talking to us cave women, sorta an air of superiority.  Y'know?  Not that I couldn't really blame him.  Veena and I were amazed by the simplest things back then.  We were both from bass-ackwards civilizations on the edge of their own industrial revolutions.  Hell, we got excited over the skiff.  Back where Aldoo comes from they let children ride those things at amusement parks.

       So it didn't take long for me to start thinking he was a little stuck up.  Asshole from the future.  No, correction; really dreamy looking asshole from the future.  There was just something about him that drove me to distraction.  Geeeze, I had no control over my hormonal system at that point in my development.  I'd forgotten how it felt to be that physical age again.  I'd gotten pregnant with Cassie when I wasn't much older than this, and in a war zone, no less.  

       So after getting hammered in some excruciating courses like astrophysics, and few that were just downloads of mind-numbingly boring data, I got my first break since the Skiff; Music class.  Seriously...a class where I had to sit around and listen to music.  At the time I saw no downside.  I'd drink Cree and rock out.  The Boss had an astounding collection, and the House could play music so loud that you felt it in your morphic bones.  Sure, some of the alien music was a little weird, but still it was the easiest class I'd been in yet.

       Then one day I get a visit from Aldoo.  

       "Master DorLek has asked me to inquire of you for tutoring assistance." He seemed to almost stutter at the request.  

       At the time I took this for pride, his having to bend that stiff neck of his to ask for help from the cave girl.  He was future-boy, he knew how to use a Yort energy splitter without losing any fingers.  I just naturally figured he hated having to ask a primitive like me for help.  

       "I am having a great difficulty with...music." He spoke as if the word held blasphemy.

       Now right here I gotta take a segway to give you some perspective.  See, Veena and Aldoo were from the same species, but that was the end of the similarities.  Veena came from a time when they had to shape-shift to survive. They had a few alien contacts and had hungrily soaked up their music and culture.  Veena's generation enjoyed new experiences and sought them out whenever possible.

       Whereas Aldoo came from a time when the Saik had encountered and copied thousands of species. Their people were scattered throughout the galaxy on millions of worlds. But after a millennia of gorging on vast databases of every imaginable species, extinct or extant, his people had become disparate and jaded.  

       What you have to understand about most morphic beings (class IV and below) is that when they join your society they don't do it to take over the world.  They adopt the lifestyle and live among you like productive members of society.  After a generation or two of complete submersion they begin to forget what it was to be Saik.  So with their people scattered all over the galaxy, they had begun to fragment as a society.  Think about it, they had copied so many other cultures that they didn't even remember their own.  That's when the Revivalists took power and began the Hajj Conservative Revolution in an attempt to reclaim the former glory of the Saik Empire.  

       See, just about the time Aldoo was born, the Conservative Revolution was full swing.  They banned morphing beyond a few approved skins native to their home world.  Other xeno distractions they outlawed in their religious fervor were multiplistic duplication (sex), foreign entertainment media (movies) and music.

       See, we humans take music for granted.  We can both appreciate it as well as write it.  We naturally assume that other species should get Hendrix or Joplin, but they don't always.  The Saik were a species that could appreciate music, but were not naturally inclined to it.  In other words, they could be taught to enjoy music, but not in a million years could a Saik ever write music (they are notoriously bad singers too).  A century before Aldoo was born, his people were musically mature.  But the Revolution banned alien distractions, so drugs, sex, and rock n' roll were outlawed, literally.

       So pretty boy knew bupkis about music.  I couldn't help but smile as I thought to myself; now there're two things I could teach him.  Coming from a culture where everybody has vast piles of digital music, I assumed it'd be easy to find a genre or two that he liked.  

       Right away I pulled out the classics and blasted some Smooth by Santana.  I was really grooving to the song but Aldoo just stood there stiffly.  He didn't want a beer, and he didn't want to sit down.  I could tell this song wasn't working for him so I switched it up with some Everlast, but that made him even edgier.  I tried some Stones on him but the beat of the drum seemed to intimidate him.  After that I threw in some Mamas and Papas and he seemed to almost respond to that.  At least he stopped inching towards the door.

       "So how'd that make you feel?" I thunked a beer down on the counter as I cast a wary eye upon him.

       "It was nice." He answered neutrally.  The same answer he had given every other time I'd asked him.   

       "That's not what I'm asking.  Tell me how did that song make you feel so I can home in on your tastes?" I grabbed a spot on the barstool that grew up out of the floor at my command.

       "It made me feel...normal." Aldoo seemed mystified at my exact meaning.  

       I sat back with a grimace on my face as I gave it a thought.  From what I'd read about quasi-musical species, until I find the genre that clicks for him, music would just be a series of noises to Aldoo.  Never having tried the stuff, he failed to understand what all the fuss was about.

       I had no idea what he'd like so I was all over the road with different music.  Played some Reggae, Caribbean, a little Garth, and all of the Divas: Mariah, Whitney, Aretha, Julie Andrews, and Elton John.  But nope, no interest from the big guy.  Hell, I even tried to chat him up just to get the guy to chill a little.  

       Getting a little flustered, I scanned the thousands of musical genres available at my disposal.  It occurred to me that mebbe he wasn't getting it because he wasn't letting his feet explain it to him.  Immediately my finger settled on exactly the right track.  It was precise, melodic, and the perfect Waltz.   I just grabbed the big lug and yanked him onto the dance floor.

       "See, you just step with the music.  You hear that beat?  One two three, one two three.  That's a Waltz." I gave him a leering smile as I watched his biological indicators spike.  I could see with my eyes that the guy was practically on overload.  He'd been a year or more in his new human body and I think he was going a little buggy.  I know I sure as hell was.

       "I'm not required to complete any courses on dance." He pointed out as I pulled him along across the floor.

       "See, that's the thing about music, you gotta let it move you.  Just go with the flow, let the music take over." Winking, I tried to set him at ease.

       Without even asking, I tapped into his systems and changed his outerwear to a tuxedo.  That's the thing about being morphic; you don't actually wear clothes because the clothes are just part of you.   

       Aldoo looked better than a plate of hors d'oeuvres in that tux.  I was just admiring how well he filled his jacket when he returned the favor by switching my outerwear to a little black dress that barely covered my ass.  I woulda objected except that I looked really good in that dress.  Shoes were okay, but that dress made me look sensational.  Right away I could feel this sense of contagious lust from Aldoo, like he was broadcasting it from a big radio tower or something.  It was the strangest thing I'd ever felt, like I was sharing his emotions.  And I'm not talking about some topical effect, whatever he was doing...I was about to chip a tooth I wanted him so damned bad.  Oooooooh I wanted him...

       See, I didn't know what was going on because I wasn't that far into my studies, I hadn't learned about Emanations yet.  What're Emanations?  Didja ever know someone who told you they could see your aura?  Well they were prolly fulla shit.  But the truth is that all living things have an aura of some type.  Really it's just a natural dissipation of their ambient energy, but if you have the right equipment set for the right frequency and wavelength you can detect it.  With my DuNai eyes I can actually see it, measure its intensity, frequency, and spectrum.  I'm telling you, these enhanced eyes are really something else.

       So what in the hell does an aura have to do with anything?  You gotta remember that a big part of a Temporal Editor's job is influencing people to do things you need done.  The Onkx allows us to take an emotion like happiness and broadcast it to others as a way to motivate people to our needs.  You can also emit other feelings too, like fear or terror.  It's a helluva tool/weapon.  A trained 'lord can send you running for fear of your life without even uttering a word, just blast you with auric energy of the right flavor and you crap your pants right there.  Well Aldoo, being the bright-boy, had studied ahead in the syllabus.  So for the last year or so he had been bombarding me with emanations of a romantic nature.  I had no idea he had been doing it, all along I'd simply assumed it was just my Latin libido making me climb the walls every time I saw those broad shoulders.

       But whenever he did that, I naturally broadcast back my own feelings of lust without even knowing I was doing it.    So between us we had been blasting each other with gigawatts of pure lust and desire in this feedback loop.  It had been driving us crazy for months.  My heart was telling me to jump his bones, but my eyes were telling me that he looked down on Veena and me for being primitives.  Truth was, Aldoo was just lousy with people.  Under all that pretty scenery, the guy was really just a geek with all of the classic social awkwardness you find in the highly intelligent.  Add to that the fact that I had been transmitting my emanations with such amplitude that I was probably rattling his teeth every time I got close.  The little black dress was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

       And that's where it all unraveled.  There on the dance floor, in the middle of Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz, we finally gave in to our primitive sides.  And lemme tell you, all those months of anticipation made the event more like atomic fission than mere sex.  You'd have thought someone set off a nuke in my apartment.  

       The months that followed were a lotta fun.  Aldoo did finally learn to appreciate music and I got to appreciate Aldoo.  Even if we weren't a perfect match, we were gonna enjoy it while we could.  A quick comparison of our auras showed that we were poorly matched, not even the same color...and his frequency was completely asymmetrical to mine.  But we didn't care.  We were two people who had been lonely long enough that we were willing to pretend, at least for the time being.  It didn't hurt that he looked so damned good in a tux.  Hell, Aldoo woulda looked good in a gunny sack.  In fact I didn't care if he wore clothes at all, honestly.  It just felt nice to have someone to cling to for a while.  It got lonely in that big 'ol house.  I'd been doing this apprentice gig for a decade now.  A girl's got a right to kick up her heels every ten years or so, eh?

       

       

       I'd finally outgrown the Skiff when I decided it was time to build my own hot rod.  After all, I had the technical training, and the equivalent of the Library of Congress loaded into my brain, so why not?  At the time I thought it was an original idea, to take the best technology from each of the prime races and build one hell of a fast ship.  But when the Boss stopped by to admire my work I found out just how un-original my idea was.

       "When I built my first Shiirrek, she was not entirely different from your ship." DorLek ran his fingers lovingly over her surface. "Eventually, most students build one.  It is a psychological indicator that they are ready to advance in their studies."

       "I just wanna drive fast with the top down." I pretended that he had not just been 100% correct in assessing how I was beginning to feel about living at the house.  Sure, it was a magnificent place, like living in a palace, but I was ready for more.  I wanted to get out and start looking for home.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I couldn't possibly make it home from another galaxy in my hotrod (or any conventional ship for that matter), but at least until then I could have some fun on the weekends.  Besides, if you could build a really cool spaceship, wouldn't you?  If you're still reading this memoir then the answer is prolly a resounding yes. Hell yes!