Chapter Four
Pranks and Predestination
Jenna had been a little girl. She lived in a wood, near a beach, by the ocean. She lived with her grandfather, who had been the most magical person she had ever known. He had been old when she was born and he got older while she grew, but he never looked bad. Wrinkles didn’t make him ugly or make his gray eyes any less bright. Even when he lay dead in front of her, he still didn’t look faded or tired. Even his dead body was completely lovable to her.
Her memories of him were like polished brass, beautiful and clear. When he slid his fedora onto her little-girl head, she knew that he was the person who loved her best in the whole world. When he looked at her, he saw a star. When he picked her up and tossed her in the air, she was better than an eclipse, because she threw more than just his line of sight into shadow.
His eyes looked at her differently than anyone else’s because he knew. He knew what she was and what she might someday have to do. He told her mad stories that she never doubted because the black crown she kept secret from everyone was on her mind constantly. It wasn’t normal and it meant something. She had to look like everyone else, and fit in with them. Anything that didn’t fit the definition of normal had to be cut out. Grandpa helped. He helped until three years ago. He was in his nineties, and she was in her twenties. Her parents had been unhealthy and passed away when she was young. Her grandpa had outlived them until he couldn’t live anymore either.
Everyone closely related to her was gone.
Now Jenna was gone too.
***
“She wasn’t ready to meet me,” the parrot-like voice agreed sadly.
“She had to see you sometime. She was never going to be ready. They don’t have people like you on Earth yet,” Armen explained.
“I’m okay,” Jenna said, rubbing a new painful place on the side of her head where she had fallen when she saw Favel.
He wasn’t weird, she reminded herself. He was an octopus, but he was the most beautiful octopus she had ever seen. The thing that made her fall over was not the sight of him itself, it had been what he did with his whole skin four seconds after she saw him. When he came in, he had smooth blue skin, and his eight tentacles were strong and firm like he was as good at holding himself up out of the water as well as in the water. His eyes were completely black and were placed closer together on his body than other octopuses who had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree line of sight. His eyes were binocular, which made them more like a human’s in their placement. His mouth was under his tentacles, so she couldn’t see it. She spasmed in terror when his skin suddenly changed texture and color all at once. He had been smooth but suddenly became rough all over. He had been blue but became black and white. It was like she had been looking at an octopus and then was looking at an angry demon.
She hit her head on a light fixture above the headboard.
“I’m so sorry, Madam Diplomat,” he said, the sound of his voice coming from under his tentacles. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. I stepped in something gritty and it gave me the willies.” He was trembling slightly at the idea. “I reacted badly.”
“You’re speaking English?” she asked.
“Favel is special. He has lungs as well as siphons, so he is able to speak our language. Most Octavians can’t.”
“But how are either of you speaking English?” Jenna asked Armen pointedly.
“English is a language Adamis leaders plant on planets when their development passes a certain point. It makes communication much smoother when they’re finally ready to join the land of the living skies. English people in England didn’t think of it, they just slowly accepted it, pulling words from other languages. They think they’re so clever. There’s a whole team orchestrating it from Mars.”
“Oh,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Favel. Do you shake hands?”
Armen facepalmed himself.
“Don’t be so skittish, Armen,” Favel said, with an inflection in his voice Jenna didn’t understand. “I’ll explain myself to her and she will be a lady of the court in no time.” He turned to Jenna. “I have what you call taste buds on the suction cups on my tentacles. I taste everything: the floor, doorknobs, electronic devices, and everything else I touch. That was why the thing on the floor disgusted me so much, but I think you’d prefer it if I didn’t taste you.”
She nodded, in complete agreement.
“I appreciate that all of this is very strange, which is why I’ve brought you a gift.” One of his back tentacles brought a little black velvet jewelry box forward and presented it to Jenna.
She stared at the box, unable to lift a hand to take it.
Favel snapped it open and she saw the largest and most beautiful pearl she had ever seen.
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Jenna glanced between the octopus in front of her to the contents of the velvet box. “No, I will not marry you,” Jenna said with an air of finality.
“It’s not a ring!” Favel rushed to explain. “It’s not a ring! Giving this to you is not a marriage proposal! It’s an earpiece!”
“Calm down, both of you,” Armen said, coming forward and snatching the device from the box. “He’s just trying to dress it up.”
Armen sat down on the bed and pointed to his own ear. He had a solid metal ball in the crevice of his ear. It filled the first two chambers of his ear like an earbud, but it fit so much better.
“I have one too. It’s connected to a personal assistant. You can ask him questions about anything and he’ll provide you with as much or as little information as you want. He’s here to help you become accustomed to this place. Well, not just this place, but everything, including your role here. Once you get used to him, you’ll love him. Yours is called Sardius. Mine is called Jisbet. Would you like to try it?”
Jenna looked at it, smacked her lips unpleasantly, and realized that her bun felt abnormally heavy. “Is it a real pearl?” she asked.
“Yes! It is a pearl pulled from the bottom of the Boratic Ocean on Octavia Prime. A rare treasure to be given to an Adamis woman,” Favel said.
“I thought it would be a diamond,” she said, taking it.
“Would you rather have a diamond?” Favel squeaked.
Armen leaned in. “Diamonds are rocks on Octavian worlds. There are entire beaches made up of them. On Octavia, you want pearls. They are much less common. Put it in your ear. We’ll just have you try it out for today. If it goes well, we’ll glue it in your ear tomorrow.”
“Glue it?” she asked distastefully. It looked like an enormous pearl with a shiny earplug attached to it. Looking closer, she spotted a few metal knobs protruding from the pearl in a circle around the earplug part.
“Trust me. You do not want it falling out. When I activate it, try talking to Sardius. He’s one of their best.”
Armen slid it in her ear, but Jenna had to adjust it several times to get the fit she wanted. Armen turned it on and she waited.
“Good morning, Jenna,” came a smooth voice in her ear. “Welcome to Octavia Three, the moon of many lakes. I am Sardius, your assistant. May I say what an honor it is to be present for the first contact between you and the illustrious people of Octavia?”
“It is an honor to meet you too,” Jenna said mechanically. Then she thought to ask a question about her grandmother, the source of all this kerfuffle. “Did Letty Osirus wear an earpiece like this?”
“Letty Osirus wore five assistants over the course of her service,” Jenna heard Sardius say privately through her new earpiece. “Would you like a brief history of them?”
“Yes.”
“The first one was Harvek. He was lost over the desert sands of Octavia Eight in the battle of Hitcom 64. He fell out of Letty’s ear when she was hanging over the edge of a sky ranger 54 meters a minute from full speed. His unit was cracked and he was cooked in his own device.”
“So, he was with her?” Jenna asked.
“Naturally.”
“The second one was Ustus. He was released from service after eight years, as is Octavian tradition. The third was Vlak, who passed away in an accident that remains somewhat mysterious to this day.”
Jenna felt a little strange listening to the narrative while Armen and Favel watched her, but she was supposed to acquaint herself with Sardius so she let him continue.
“The fourth was Sopex 1 who served another eight years before retiring. The last was Jix who accompanied Letty to Earth and continued with her until the device was sadly destroyed.”
“When will I get to meet you?” Jenna asked after she had been brought up to speed.
“We have already met,” Sardius explained patiently.
Jenna rolled her eyes. “I haven’t seen you. Have you seen me?”
“I can see the inside of your ear in order to monitor your ear health, so I can recommend ear treatments whenever you should require one. I can also see a hundred and fifty degrees in all directions outside your ear. I can also see you whenever I can access or hack a camera that is pointed at you. I can also find you via satellite when you are outside.”
Jenna looked at Armen, who was looking slightly uncomfortable. “Where are you right now, Sardius?”
“I’m in your ear,” he replied. “Was that not explained to you?”
“No. It wasn’t,” she said, immediately pulling the earpiece from her head. “Care to explain this?” she asked Armen, who had been pacing.
“Sardius is a very small octopus. So small that what you are holding is his house, his place of business, and where he will live his entire life. We can’t really take a picture of him because his house is sealed. He has everything he will need in it until he dies. He could take a picture of himself and send it to you if you’re very interested, but…” Armen took his phone out of his pocket and scrolled briefly until he found a picture. “His species looks like this.”
Jenna looked at it. He looked like a transparent octopus with no obvious eyes and only a black beak floating in the middle of an empty-looking body.
She rubbed her eyes. “That’s not Sardius though?”
“No. Just an octopus of the same species. Jenna, I don’t understand. Weren’t you taught about all this by your family on Earth?”
She rolled the pearl earpiece around in her palm. “I was taught some things, like that I was going to need to have a strong stomach in case anything like this ever happened. I hoped it wouldn’t. I never knew my grandmother, Letty Osirus. My father was supposed to be like her, but the… thing… the crown… didn’t work on him. My dad only let them try it on me because he didn’t think it would work.”
“I wonder why it wouldn’t attach,” Armen said reflectively. “I’ve never heard of someone who couldn’t be crowned before. I wonder if it was because they already had eight diplomats in place and so the system wouldn’t let them crown a ninth diplomat. These people are obsessed with the number eight, the way humans are obsessed with the number ten.”
“Ten? How are humans obsessed with the number ten?”
“Because Adamis have ten fingers and ten toes they’re obsessed with the number ten. Their whole numeric system is based on it. The Octavians are obsessed with the number eight because they have eight tentacles. Are you going to put the earpiece back in?”
She looked at it. “Please tell me exactly what is expected of me today and I’ll tell you what I can do and what I can’t. Pretend I don’t know anything. Pretend my family didn’t teach me to be part-octopus and that I’m a complete newbie.”
Armen nodded, his expression obviously divided and experiencing conflicting emotions. Half of him was delighted to be the one to know everything and explain everything. The other half of him was pitifully disappointed Jenna wasn’t more knowledgeable. It meant there was so much more work for everyone to do.