SURDSTUM
A science fiction novel by
Jeff Provine
CHAPTER 1
Loustor Taikees sat alone in his room. The shades were drawn as a wall against the world. The only light came from a dim bulb hanging low from the ceiling. He liked the dark. It helped him to forget the world around him. The world had all but forgotten him. Sometimes he thought it would be best if the lingering memory of the real world were gone. Then he could float off into the void, alone forever.
“Lou?” A call rang up from downstairs. Loustor sighed and ignored it.
He sat in a low wooden chair under the suspended bulb in a faint circle of light, just enough by which to read. There was a book in his lap, a thick biological encyclopedia meant for students years older than he was. Books were everywhere in the dusty room around him, some shelved neatly, others scattered on the floor, and still others sticking out from every corner in tall piles. The titles ranged from archaic philosophy to children’s adventure stories to modern engineering texts. He owned hundreds of paper tomes, and he had read and reread each of them time and again. Other than the shelves for the books and the chair in which Loustor sat, the room held only a little bed and a dresser whose drawers stuck open.
“Lou?” The voice rang out again. He looked up this time, frowned, and returned to his book. Another few minutes of unfeeling silence passed.
“Loustor Taikees! You hear me?” the voice from downstairs called out, louder than before. Loustor stopped his hand at the cry and looked up. His mouth opened to yell back a response, but he could not make any words. With a sigh of self-defeat, he turned back to the book.
Loustor tossed the encyclopedia onto his bed and climbed out of the low chair. His muscles were sore from sitting in the rigid chair for so long. He crossed slowly to his dresser and opened the topmost drawer. Pulling out his small hand mirror, he stepped back to his circle of light.
Loustor raised the mirror above his head, twisting it till he caught an angle where he could look up and see the reflection of the tiny stalk beyond his cranial ridges. There it stood, lifeless and useless, as it had all of the other many times he had looked at it before. His memories of the horrid little thing were quickly forgotten, creating the ignorance that was the only thing that spared him from total misery. Loustor was glad that it was behind his head, far out of view. It was out of sight, but never out of mind.
When he had had his fill of staring at the thing that was as much a torment as it was a part of him, Loustor lowered the mirror and looked at himself squarely in the face. He was not a bad looking Asperian, he reminded himself. His eyes were violet, a standard color, but still appreciated. His skin was soft but tightly held onto his face. The cranial ridges on the top of his head were not overly stated, just large enough to be a superstitious sign of intelligence. His nostril that pointed down beneath his eyes was seemingly perfect, large enough to be recognizable without flaring wide at every breath. Even his ears were fine, pointed at the edges just as normally as those of any other Asperian.
If he took the mirror at a slant beneath his chin, he could look down at it to see his reflection without the horrific withered stalk. As he stared at himself from this angle, he could almost imagine that he was normal. Slowly, a smile came onto his lips, something that happened rarely and usually at something clever or humorous in fiction.
And then, as slowly as it had come, the smile slid away. Loustor knew he was not normal and he would never be. He tossed the mirror away and turned his back with his arms crossed, resolutely barring out the delusion, however joyous it might momentarily be.
It was that tiny difference that separated him from the rest of Asperianity. It was just a simple little deformity, a lack of a perception, and everyone else in the world looked down on him because of it. Other than his withered stalk, he was perfect. Loustor had grown tall and strong, his skin was dark and green, full of chloroplasts, and he was clever. His other five senses had increased themselves to make up for the lost telepathy, giving him acute hearing and sight that rivaled the tekke bird. But all of it was for naught. Without a proper node, he was less than Asperian, somewhere between a mindless animal and an infant transmitting its first thoughts.
Just as he was sitting back into his low wooden chair, a knock sounded on the door to his room. As he looked up, it opened let in a burst of light from beyond. Loustor blinked against the flood of bright light from the hallway. He went blind for a moment, though he did not know whether it was from the brightness or the rage at having someone penetrate his private sanctum.
When his dazzled eyes cleared, he looked up to see a note in his face held out by his younger sister. Antreeka watched him as she bit on her lower lip and clutched the note between her fingers. Loustor stared at her for a moment before he took the scrap of paper from her hand. He did not know what it was about her, but she always seemed frightened around him, as if she thought he were about to leap up and bite her.
“Dinner is ready,” the note read simply. Loustor nodded after reading it. He looked up at Antreeka, who nodded back and scampered out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. A stream of light from the hallway spilled into the room, a vortex that would lead him into the real world from the quiet of his little cave.
Pulling himself up from his chair, Loustor stepped softly on the wooden floor planks to the door and slipped out into the hallway. He walked robotically, washed his hands in cold water at the bathroom sink, and trudged down the stairs of the family house with banging steps. Despite the rumbling in his stomach, he did not feel hungry. Loustor could not remember the last time he truly felt like eating. Feasting was associated with happiness, while Loustor fasted with the mourning.
By the time Loustor arrived at the table, his father and brother were already there. Neither of them looked up at him as he came to his chair. His father was hidden behind a newspaper riddled with headlines of war, its green cellulose crinkling as he thumbed through the pages. His brother, Pallis read through a packet of governmental information cards. He was in the lengthy process of trying to decide what apprenticeship he should take, a decision that would spell out his career for the rest of his life. Loustor dreaded the day he had to choose a pointless career to match his pointless existence.
Pallis Taikees, older than Loustor by two years, was the pride of their father’s heart. He excelled in school with excellent marks, popularity, and more than one provincial championship in waterball. Loustor had never gone to a real school. The closest thing had been his vocal education classes that lasted until he was only twelve years old. They were all but useless to him, since his mother was the only other person he knew that took the classes, and she was not very good at it.
“Lou?”
Loustor looked up at the sound of his mother’s voice. “Yes?”
“Lou come here carry bowl,” she called from the kitchen.
Rolling his violet eyes high into his green eyelids, Loustor stood from the table and trudged out of the dining room into the family kitchen. His mother was at the stove, dishing out the broth and crustacean meat for the meal, while Antreeka pulled strands off a huge leafy stalk for vegetables. They were silent as they worked, probably enjoying a happy chat through shared thoughts while Loustor stood by dumbly.
“Carry bowl,” his mother said, turning to him and pointing to the vessel filled with the white broth. She paused, trying to think of a word, and at last said with a smile, “Table.”
“Yes, Mother,” he replied, carefully sounding each syllable as a lesson to his dull-mouthed mother. Loustor took the bowl in his hands lethargically and trudged back toward the dining room. The broth smelled good, like a cookout at the seashore, but somehow it sickened him.
A mule, Loustor thought. That’s what I am to this family: a mule.
His mind raced back to the chores levied on him. It was he who cut the lawn, moved furniture, and helped with whatever cleaning needed to be done. Antreeka and Pallis could not be bothered with it, of course. They were always too busy with schoolwork like any normal Asperian would be. But not Loustor, since he was scarcely more than an animal from the beginning.
Caught up in his own thoughts, Loustor did not see the edge of the hutch sticking out in front of him as he turned through the door into the dining room. Just as he moved within sight of his brother, the wooden ledge struck Loustor on the right elbow with a loud cracking sound. A hot bolt of pain shot up from Loustor’s arm, and he let out a screech. Instinctively, his right arm dodged away from the pain, throwing the bowl onto its side and tossing out the white soupy contents. Eyes wide, Loustor watched as time seemed to slow itself to magnify the horror of the event.
The white mass hung in midair for a moment, shifting and flowing as it spun. At last gravity caught up with it, and the fluid flew on a spiraling trajectory directly for Pallis. The older boy looked up slowly as a shadow suddenly came over his face from the broth eclipsing the light above. His eyes grew as wide as Loustor’s, but he did not even have time to let out a shout before the white liquid crashed onto his body.
Just as time had slowed down, it now leaped ahead, and everything seemed to happen to Loustor at once. The broth covered his brother’s face and shoulder, dribbling down the front and side of his brown shirt and staining it white. Pallis immediately leaped up, gasping at the hot broth and struggling out of the shirt to which it clung. Loustor’s father looked up from his newspaper, black eyes wide and shocked. Twin calls of horror came from the kitchen where Antreeka and Loustor’s mother stood, mouths agape at the mess. Loustor merely stood there, looking at the misery he had created, the half-empty bowl still clutched in his left hand. The warm, spicy smell of the broth filled the room.
It was then that the eyes of his family began to dart back and forth, as they did whenever Loustor did something. His father looked to Pallis and then at Loustor’s mother, while she looked from Pallis to Loustor and back again. The eyes of Pallis and Antreeka shot around the room, looking from each member of the family to the others. They were thinking to one another, Loustor knew that much, but he was deaf to their conversation. His imagination filled the wide gap of silence, telling him a story of disappointment he was sure happened again and again.
He could only dream of the condescending thoughts streaming through the air between his father and brother, each with his black eyes locked onto the other’s as Pallis clutched his steaming, ruined shirt. His mother’s violet eyes, meanwhile, would lock onto Loustor’s miserable face, and she must have sighed in her mind and complained of her fate as the mother of a surdstum. Antreeka’s softer violet eyes would spin around the room, pleading with each family member. Loustor could almost hear her thoughts imploring her parents to just give him up and send him away to a colony for those without telepathy.
The imaginings of terrible thoughts filled up Loustor’s mind to the point that he could no longer stand it. His muscles twitched anxiously. His own eyes began to dart around the room, watching as the rest of his family thought words about him that he would never be able to hear. Soon his mother would say something in her broken, dull speech, most likely giving him a punishment for being careless. The waiting was worse than any punishment she could have bestowed upon him.
Loustor stood here, quivering, watching the eyes look forth and back and then finally settle on him, whispering thoughts. He snapped, his eyes wide and fearful of the painful silence. Without even acknowledging what he had done, he set the bowl on the floor and fled the dining room. He dashed into the hallway, ducking onto the stairs and hurrying to escape to the haven of his room. His footsteps pounded on the wooden stairs, the first real sounds he had heard since coming into the silent world of his telepathic family. The loud thumping rang off the walls, and Loustor smiled. It was something he could hear, something he could understand, something that did not exile him from the world around him.
When he came into his room, Loustor slammed the door behind him and pressed himself against it, breathing hard more out of fear than the hurrying away from disaster. It had been an accident, he was sure of that at least. Steadily, the security slipped from him as he looked at his hands, spackled with little white dots of the spilled broth. He swallowed and wondered if it had truly been an accident. The whole day had been spent by himself, bored, locked in his room. He had read, yes, but nothing real had happened. Had he been so subconsciously desperate for any kind of interaction that he would have assaulted his own brother?
Loustor shook his head at himself and sighed. Bending his knees, he slid down the door on his back till he sat on the floor, head resting on his crossed arms. The room was dark, and Loustor furthered his exile from the light by closing his eyes. He would not have done such a thing. It was an accident. He envied Pallis, but he did not hate him. Pallis was the incarnation of the perfect model for young Asperians, and Loustor was the opposite, an outcast who at best could only leach off society. But he did not hate him.
Suddenly, there was a knock on his door. The vibrations shook the wood against his back, causing him to shiver. Loustor’s ears perked. Slowly turning, he pulled himself to his feet and opened the door.
Standing in an outline of the hallway light, Antreeka looked with mournful eyes toward the darkness that surrounded Loustor. He watched his little sister produce another note and hold it out to him.
She probably thinks I’ll lunge at her next, Loustor thought at he looked at his sister’s worried face. He took the paper slowly as not to scare her, and looked at it.
Written in his mother’s tightly looped letters were the words, “Come back to dinner.”
Loustor only shook his head. He could not bear to face his family. Slowly, he crushed the note in his hand and shrunk into the darkness away from Antreeka. The girl looked at him with her brow crossed fretfully, and at last she left the doorway. Loustor shut his door firmly and turned to face the shadows of his inner sanctum. He liked the dark. It helped him to forget the world around him.
As he stood there, he slowly came to realize the need for light. He flipped the switch to activate the bulb hanging above his head. It was a dim light, at least. Slinking back to his wooden reading chair, he sat and folded himself over. He wondered what dinner would have been like if only he had not been so careless. Perhaps it would have been just the evening for him to write out all of his thoughts and feelings to the family. They could have done the same, and perhaps he finally would be accepted. Still, he would not be normal, which was all he could dream.
Loustor’s wonderings slid back to his younger days at the School for the Nontelepathic, the only time in his life when he was normal. The school was funded with money provided by the government, most likely through some bill that a legislator promoted to make himself look like a philanthropist to his voters. It was under-funded, of course, despite the school’s constant demand for more attention. The truth was that people simply did not want to think about the poor few who were trapped in a silent world without telepathy. Loustor himself did not want to think about it.
Times at the school were good, though never great. The few teachers spent most of their time with the majority of the students, beings whose minds were malformed to the point that they would never be capable of simple arithmetic. Loustor, as simply someone whose Prosechum Node was dead, was one of a few who easily learned the few subjects of reading, writing, and speaking for communication. He had even outshone the other students, but this had only contributed to his exile from the other surdstums who looked at him with jealousy and contempt. While they played games and ran around outdoors, Loustor was left mainly to himself. Even among the other freaks like him, he was alone.
At least there he was not hopeless, Loustor reminded himself. He took a book from one of his shelves and opened it, flipping through the pages till he found the little pamphlet inside. When he had graduated from the School for the Nontelepathic (long after he had completed their entire curriculum and began teaching advanced subjects to himself), the principal had given him this pamphlet, detailing the several colonies around the world where surdstums lived. The idea of leaving home forever sickened his stomach, but for the four years since he graduated, he had never thrown away the pamphlet.
Running his fingers over the crisp, aged paper of the pamphlet, Loustor let his imagination roam about such a place. It would be strange, but, of course, any new place is. Life would be slow compared to the real life without any telepathic communication pods, telepathic alarms, and even the many psychiatrists who worked their telepathic medicine. Loustor sighed. He scarcely had any idea what a real life like that was, so it would not be any difference to him. But there would be speaking. Everyone would speak and hear with hundreds of voices communicating all around the colony. That thought at least filled Loustor with a bit of awe.
Shaking his head at himself again, Loustor sighed determinedly. He was miserable here, and the worst that could happen would be for him to be miserable in a colony. At least there he could hear people when they shared scornful remarks about him. And, maybe, he might even be happy.
“So that’s it then,” Loustor muttered to himself. “I’ll go. Tomorrow. Forever.”
He opened the pamphlet carefully, stopping for a second whenever a loud crinkle came from the much-pressed paper. Looking through the pages, he skipped the introduction and the diplomatic, meaningless words about the enjoyment of living in such a place, even for those marginally nontelepathic. Toward the end of the pamphlet, he settled onto a map and list of colonies. All were in out of the way places, leftover land that no one else had ever wanted. There was one in the north, where long winters would freeze any Asperian not used to the cold, two others in the far south with desert winds and scorched sands. A fourth was simply a block of apartments and offices set aside in the capital city, a place Loustor shuddered to imagine. The fifth, though, looked like a reasonable setting in the forested highlands near the Blue Mountains. Loustor had never been there, or much of anywhere in fact, but the land was still very natural with a mild climate, something he envisioned as very livable.
Loustor nodded at the picturesque and uninformative photograph of the edge of a wooden lodge with two cheerful-looking Asperians walking nearby. This “Valysia” was where he would live out his life as someone normal, even if it were merely normal in an abnormal place. He could find a job, even as menial labor till he convinced an employer of his talents, and from there he could build up his own life. It would be almost as if he were a perfectly normal person.
There was suddenly a knock on the door, louder than before. Loustor jumped in his seat. His hands raced to fold the pamphlet back into the book that hid it and throw it aside. He looked up just as the door opened and Loustor’s mother’s head appeared surrounded by a halo of bright light from the hallway. She frowned at him and stuttered as she struggled to remember her speaking lessons.
“Loustor come dinner now,” she said softly. She opened the door wide and leaned against the frame.
Loustor simply shook his head.
“Now,” she said, still softly but with a firmer tone. “Loustor needs dinner.”
He sighed and stood slowly, almost as if it pained him to obey. Loustor knew she was right and trying to do what was best for him. Still, he swallowed nervously at the thought of facing his father and Pallis again.
His mother led him down the hallway and the stairs, at last coming back to the dining room that had been hastily cleaned. The lingering scent of spilled crustacean broth still hung in the air. Antreeka, Pallis, and their father were sitting at the table, already eating what remained of the broth. Pallis had on a new shirt, and he glanced up scornfully as Loustor entered the room. Slowly Loustor sat, and the meal began.
Dinner was quiet, as it always had been for Loustor. His family looked up at one another, sending telepathic thoughts that he would never hear. His father would ask Pallis and Antreeka about their days at school, but he never inquired about Loustor except by a written note that always seemed to come as an afterthought. Loustor had once asked to go to real school, long ago when he was young and naďve. Both his parents were quick to dispel his dream by telling him it was totally out of the question.
The conversation went on in wavelengths invisible to Loustor. He sat patiently, forcing himself to eat and pushing his food around the plate with his knife out of boredom till the meal was done. No one knew what he was thinking. Part of him knew that no one cared what he thought.
Tonight Loustor’s thoughts were full of plans for his escape and journey to Valysia. He would take the money he saved and a few most precious possessions and sneak out early in the morning, after his father left for work but long before his mother expected him to awaken. He could find the proper train at the station to take him out of the city and deposit him at the terminal nearest Valysia. Then he would somehow find his way to the colony itself and out of the telepathic world forever.
Soon the silent meal was over, and Pallis and Antreeka left to do the homework demanded by their schools. Loustor’s father fell back to his reading of the news, and Loustor’s mother looked after the dishes. Loustor began to slip away, but a broken call from his mother asked him for one final chore of clearing the table.
It did not matter. He could push himself for one more deed of mindless labor. Tomorrow he would disappear.