Smek for President, Page 2

  “Yes. This thing.”

  He was futzing with these crazy-big thrusters he’d attached to the back of the car. He didn’t need Mom’s permission. Now that his mind was set on hashing things out with Smek, he was going with or without me.

  “You know I practically took care of her before the invasion, right?” I added. “She had me when she was pretty young. I think in her mind she was still the community-college girl whose life I ruined.”

  “Tipmom does not believe you ruined her life,” said J.Lo as he cranked on a bolt. I stood behind him, feeling kind of hovery and unhelpful. The garage door was open, and the garage air thick with dusty light. J.Lo had piles of tools and garbage everywhere. At least three unfinished projects stood or leaned or lay indecently on the floor with their hatches open. Mom knew to park her Honda in the driveway if she didn’t want to find it suddenly glow-in-the-dark or fitted for skis.

  “Whatever. Anyway. At some point during the invasion Mom turned into a, I don’t know, responsible person. Like a reverse werewolf. I can’t get used to it. She’s got all this newfound Momness, and she likes to try it out on me every time I want to do anything fun. Well,” I said. “If I’m all grown up earlier than she wanted, it’s her fault, is what I’m saying.”

  “Tip should do now whatever Tip is wanting to.”

  “Uh, pretty much, yeah. Right.”

  “If Tip to wants to take a trip, Tip should trip.”

  “Basically.”

  “If in schooltime Tip wants some schooltime off, she takes it off.”

  “I know when I need a personal day.”

  “If she says, ‘I am going to spend my college fund monies on a baseball ball—’”

  “It was signed by Jackie Robinson!” I said. After a moment I added, “It was supposed to have been signed by Jackie Robinson. Okay, that one might have been a mistake.”

  J.Lo finished draining the car’s oil and started spraying some kind of foam up in there.

  “We got most of my money back,” I reminded him.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, ‘Jorkie Rombison’...what kind of name is that?”

  “Tipmom warned you about the baseball ball,” J.Lo mentioned with a kind of verbal shrug.

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “She’s an expert, she’s been scammed so many times.” I paced. “She couldn’t even see through Dan Landry’s act, you know? So.”

  In the silence that followed, it was hard not to notice what an amazing spaceship Slushious wasn’t. Still too much Ford Falcon and not enough Millennium Falcon.

  “So isn’t the car a little leaky for space travel?”

  “Ahanow. Watch,” J.Lo said. He clapped, and a glassy film shot out from the base of the thrusters to form a bubble that enveloped the entire car. Or almost the entire car—there were little round gaps here and there. J.Lo frowned, clapped again to retract the bubble, then clapped a few more times until he finally had a solid casing.

  “That inspires confidence,” I said.

  “It only needs adjusting. It will be ready.”

  “And what if we feel like applauding something on the way?”

  “We will have to try not feeling like that,” he replied. “Wait. ‘We’?”

  “Yeah,” I said, chewing my lip. “Mom’ll let me go; you’ll see.”

  * * *

  “Looksee,” said J.Lo now, in space. I sat up and found him pointing out the passenger-side window. “Jupiter.”

  I guess we weren’t passing very close. It looked like a distant moon.

  “Do you want me to take a picture?” asked J.Lo. “For Tipmom? Not every humansparent has a picture of her daughter posing with Jupiter.”

  “That’s...okay,” I said. “She knows what Jupiter looks like.”

  I felt like J.Lo was eyeing me. He said, “I guess she does do.”

  “It’s just that she doesn’t think space is such a big deal,” I added.

  “This is why she changed her minds about you going, probablies.”

  “Probably. I didn’t ask.”

  “Yes. But you did ask her again if you could go. Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “I am only checking.”

  “Sure.”

  I hid behind my book again. J.Lo coughed.

  “Because when we left,” he added, “she said, ‘Have fun at Splash World.’”

  “That was a figure of speech.”

  “Ahyes. I am still so bad at those.”

  * * *

  New Boovworld used to be called Titan, back when it was just one of Saturn’s moons. And let me make up for all my wet blanketyness earlier by telling you that Saturn is breathtaking. It’s totally ridiculous. You might as well be flying toward the whole idea of space.

  Does that make sense? Ask a person to draw “space” and they’re gonna draw a planet with rings around it. Going to space for the first time and getting to see Saturn is like visiting America and watching a bald eagle plant a flag on top of the Statue of Liberty.

  After we’d learned that the Boov were going to leave Earth for Titan, the Chief had taken J.Lo and me to look at Saturn through a telescope they had on the university campus in Tucson. It had looked hazy, pale—it wasn’t the best telescope, and there are much better pictures of Saturn in books. Still, there’s something about seeing it with your own eyes.

  “My turn,” J.Lo had said, fidgeting.

  “My people called it Séetin,” said the Chief. “Until the white man stole it from us and renamed it.”

  I turned away from the eyepiece and frowned at the Chief. “Until...what? How can that be true?”

  The Chief was smirking. “It isn’t. I’m just messing with you.”

  And now, as we skimmed over the planet’s icy rings, I said to J.Lo, “I wish the Chief could have seen this.”

  He’d died over a year ago, at the age of ninety-four—just a few months after the Boov had left Earth.

  “I do also,” said J.Lo. “He would have liked Saturn.”

  I wiped my eyes. “Or, you know, he might have yelled at it to stop blocking his view of Uranus,” I said. “You could never tell with him.”

  “Yes.”

  I spotted New Boovworld then, just a dot in the distance. There was something off about it.

  “Is it...It’s inside a bubble too,” I said.

  It was opaque enough that you could just barely see the moon concealed inside, like a toy from a bubble-gum machine. They’d enclosed an entire world. For protection?

  “It’s for helping warm up,” said J.Lo. “Is cold, this far from the sun.”

  I suppose it was—we’d been running the heater the whole way.

  We couldn’t just fly into the bubble, apparently. We’d have to park Slushious on the outside and leave her there while we took a bus down to the surface.

  “Remembers,” said J.Lo. “We are in parking spot number -π/73034.”

  He pulled the car forward until its bubble touched the bubble that surrounded New Boovworld. Then they kind of stuck together, and merged. There was a round opening where they intersected.

  “I don’t like this,” I said. “I thought we’d have the car down there.”

  “It will be fine. EveryBoov uses public transport when he can.”

  “It’s just that we have kind of a history of leaving places in a hurry. Happy Mouse Kingdom that one time? And Roswell? We even had to hightail it out of Philly after you said the Eagles were lazy.”

  “I only meant actual eagles. Those mens misunderstood.”

  Through the hole in the bubble I looked out through the clouds to the yellow surface of New Boovworld. It was making me feel sick, this perspective. I was looking directly out the windshield but I was also...looking down? Like straight down at the planet? We were far higher than any airplane, twenty miles up. There weren’t any other spacecraft parked immediately to either side of us, but I could see some other little Boovish cruisers anchored in the distance. J.Lo always liked parking S
lushious by itself so it wouldn’t get any door dings.

  J.Lo gazed down at New Boovworld too. “Looks like they have really fixed the place up nice,” he said.

  He was wiggling a lot, looking kind of fluttery. I guess he must have been excited. I didn’t see him signal or anything, but almost immediately this long hot dog of a ship approached, curving along the inside of the sphere.

  “Whoop,” said J.Lo, and he followed this with the Boovish word for helmet. The familiar fishbowl snapped up all around his head. Then he said something else and it turned blue. You had to really be looking just to make out his gray face through the tint.

  The hot dog ship pulled up and halted with a sound like chshhhhh. I guess buses make that noise no matter where you are. Through the long tubular bubble of it I could see a few other Boov holding on to straps above their heads: Boov in rumpled outfits, with tanned faces, back from vacation. Another Boov in a shiny rubber uniform stepped from the front of the bus onto a little platform.

  “Maap ba pop umana,” she said.

  “Ba-aaaaaa,” J.Lo answered. “Map.”

  “Habana?”

  “Pa-pop Smek Wanyeah.”

  “Wah maaaaa maa pop aaah ba muham­banay,” said the Boov. “Pop pop. Ha ha manaah ah gom humaba ma-ah naaaa­aaaaa­aaaaa­aaaaa pop ruh snap pop gah-ha baaa pop blan pop mam wan hamba hamba hamba muhna mam am mnaaa­aaaaa­aaaaa­aaaaa­popaa­aaaaa­aaa sumaminay.”

  “Map,” said J.Lo.

  She stood aside and motioned us onto the platform.

  We stepped inside the bus and held on to a waist-high bar as it got moving again. The Boov in the uniform came alongside me with something like a hot-glue gun in her hand.

  “Muhaha ba snoo pop pop baaa,” she said, and I flinched when she brought the little gun up to my spine.

  “OW!” I said as a sharp pain took root in my neck.

  “Ham tamaa sahpop ha but if pain persists or he develops garblemouth he should see a doctor.”

  “She,” said J.Lo. “Tip is a girl.”

  “Really,” the Boov replied, looking me up and down. “Weird.”

  I reached up to touch the spot where I’d been burned, and my fingers found a new little mole there, right on my backbone. We were descending through the clouds now, and with nothing else to look at, the Boov on the bus were all staring at me.

  The Boov who’d mole-gunned me looked at J.Lo and asked, “How much benzene can she drink?”

  “No amount of benzene.”

  “She will have then to take these pills. And this is her collar.”

  She handed J.Lo a white plastic collar with a round metal dog tag, and he handed it to me. I just stared at it.

  “What,” I said.

  The Boov eyed me. “Is the translator not working? This. Is. Your. Collar.”

  “Tip, please to put it on. You are embarrassing me,” hissed J.Lo.

  “Fine,” I sighed, and fastened it around my neck. “Guk,” I added as the collar tightened itself around my throat.

  I tried being angry about it, but the truth was I’d noticed something that made me want to cut J.Lo a little slack: when he’d spoken to me, he’d switched to English. Even though the mole made it so he didn’t have to. It was just one of those pointlessly polite little gestures, like holding someone’s car door or blessing sneezers. It was sweet.

  “Please hold on to the handrails provided,” said the driver, in Boovish. “We will be on the surface shortly.”

  Meanwhile, I had no idea what my dog tag said. The translator mole didn’t seem to work on the written word. J.Lo had made me a bunch of Boovish flash cards that I’d been meaning to get around to studying, but I was still pretty much illiterate.

  The shuttle rumbled, slightly. Then we made a real gut-pumping drop below cloud level, and I got my first good look at New Boovworld.

  The nicotine-yellow surface was blistered with buildings that looked like they were made of glass and rubber. Bony plastic towers pointed like fingers at the sky, next to fat plastic globes and marshmallow shapes. A few of the structures looked like grounded ships—like they used to be the same kind of big hose ships that once filled the skies over Earth but were now moored and spreading their tentacle roots into the Titan soil. Next to these, little orb houses clumped like caviar. Geodesic cloning towers overlooked a kidney-shaped patch of green, dotted with fleshy trees and covered in dark little shapes. Dark little moving shapes.

  I pointed. “Are those koobish?” I asked J.Lo.

  “Yes. Happily grazing. I cans not wait to eat myself a piece of one.”

  “You will have to wait,” said a Boov behind me. “There are no koobish on this shuttle bus.” He waved his arm at the rest of the shuttle bus to prove his point and yep, no koobish. “You will have to wait until we land, and then you may locate a suitable koobish, and eat part of that koobish.”

  “I know this,” said J.Lo. “I cannot wait.”

  “But you will have to wait,” said the Boov.

  I ignored them and watched the window as we neared the surface. The air above was fizzy with bubbleships. And still more bubbles were arranged like constellations overhead: bubbles stacked to form slender columns, bubbles grouped like a solar system, a huge bubble trailing dotted lines of bubbles like a jellyfish. I knew from the Boovish occupation of Earth that these were probably just signs. Huge billboards spelling words and phrases in the spaces between the towers—towers that stretched so sharp and tall, like they were aching to pop something. And the Boov were building downward, too: an open chasm revealed brawny struts, thick pillars, and subbasements, and sub-subbasements, and sub-sub-subbasements. All of it a gaping mouth, spewing weird gases. And everywhere, lakes. Dark steaming lakes with tattered edges, connected by crooked little rivers.

  “But you will have to wait,” the nearby Boov was saying, and J.Lo broke away to join me at the window.

  “New Smek City,” he said. “The national capital.”

  “Man,” I said. “You guys name everything after him.”

  J.Lo shrugged. “He has been HighBoov all my whole life. He will be HighBoov until he dies.”

  We landed in an open square. Well, not a square so much as a nonagon. Filled with Boov, and signs, and advertisements and, around the edges, lines forming in front of open holes in the ground.

  It was all very, very orange. The sky was lit like a dying jack-o’-lantern. The sun hung just over the horizon, directly between two icicle towers, as if it had been installed there. And on the opposite side of the sky: Saturn. Just hanging out, no big deal. Its rings tilted crosswise like it was propped up on its elbow. Practically winking at you.

  Then my view of Saturn went wobbly as a trail of Boovish bubble letters settled in front of me—sort of a transient billboard or something. So I looked around some more, at the people.

  I saw my first Boov kid. A teenager, maybe—looking lost, reading signs, blinking a lot. It was a little shorter than the others, with just the slightest nub of tadpole tail sticking out the back of its head. I saw Boov in rubber uniforms, Boov in T-shirts I couldn’t read, a Boov leading this little flying armadilloey-looking thing on a leash. I seemed to be in everybody’s way. They bumped into me, but Boov are mostly air—I outweigh your average Boov by like sixty pounds—so it was kind of like walking into the middle of a pillow fight.

  Or maybe I should say that I outweigh a Boov by sixty pounds on Earth. The gravity was totally different here. I took a step and ended up doing the long jump into a cart selling M’Plaah milk.

  “Tourists,” muttered someone.

  “Sorry,” I said, picking up the milk bottles. “Sorry.”

  It was hard to tell with his helmet all dark, but J.Lo seemed to be watching a sign like a huge TV. I walked gingerly over to him and tested out my vertical leap.

  “Ohmygosh,” I said. “I think I can dunk. I think I can dunk and there isn’t a basketball court for a billion miles.” Then I took a huge misstep and ran into a drinking fountain.

  J.L
o helped me up. “How is this not bothering you?” I asked.

  “Eh, the Boov, we are used to these changes. We repressurize our air bladders, we retain a little water; it sorts itself out.” He looked back up at the billboard.

  “Is that Smek?” I asked. I recognized the fancy clothes.

  “Yes.”

  The ad played a loop of the captain smiling and waving, smiling and waving. There were shapes all over it, too, but of course I couldn’t read those.

  “What does it say?”

  “‘Four more years,’” said J.Lo. “That is strange.”

  “Just four? Is he retiring?”

  “Wellnow. Remember that New Boovworld is in orbit to Saturn. Saturn’s year is aslike thirty Earth years.”

  “Wow, seriously? You mean it takes New Boovworld thirty years to go around the sun.”

  “Yes.”

  “So...what’s so strange about Smek wanting four more years? That’s gotta be the whole rest of his natural life.”

  J.Lo was still watching the screen. “Not strange that he wants this. Strange that he is asking.”

  Then the Smek ad went wobbly and that same string of bubbly letters got in my way again. Like it was following me around.

  “It is following you around,” said J.Lo.

  “What?”

  “Some billboards? If they are noticing you looking at to the same place for more than a couple of moments, they are designed for to block your view.”

  I tried to turn my head, and the bubbles followed. “So why does it seem like it’s only bothering me?” I asked.

  “Every other Boov knows to waggle his head and blink a lot. Confuses the signs.”

  “You’re not doing that,” I pointed out.

  J.Lo reached up to tap at his helmet’s dark glass.

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  There were other ads—some kind of skin cream, a carbonated drink that apparently makes your head bigger, even an ad starring Dan Landry. It was hard to follow without the captions, but the message seemed to be that he’d defeated the Gorg thanks mostly to a particular brand of breath spray.

  “This way,” J.Lo said, taking my hand. He led us to a line of Boov who were waiting in front of one of the holes in the ground. J.Lo pointed to the sign over the hole. “HighBoovperial Palace,” he said.