The Get Even Bird Read online

  I hesitated. I did explain a lot of things to Will. Plus, I had given the girls in the dissidents' school a sort of sex talk. They had mostly blushed and giggled which made me feel really awkward. Will wouldn’t do that.

  Doc interrupted my thoughts. “Or, you can let Will find out by accident – after it’s too late.”

  I turned around and walked back to the fire. Doc sat by himself in the shadows, and after a bit, I forgot he was there. Science. That’s all it was.

  # # # # # # # #

  It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Will had taken a little biology but the IOF had left out any topics about human sexuality. I just filled in some gaps. Afterwards, Doc sauntered over and sat down in his spot next to me. I squeezed his hand and went back to cuddling with Will, glad that the ordeal was over.

  “So Melissa. How would you feel about becoming pregnant?” Doc’s voice stomped all over my peace of mind.

  I wanted to roll over and pound him. I actually did turn towards him and then saw his Cheshire cat grin and the wink. I rolled back into Will’s arms and thought about it. Why shouldn’t I tell Will how I felt? So, I did.

  “I’d hate it. Right now, I’d absolutely hate it.” Then I listed all the reasons, and because I knew how Will thought, I numbered them from 1 to 10. Then, because Will is Will, he started asking me questions, starting in order with #1. Doc disappeared back to the other side of the fire at some point, but I didn’t notice that until we were on reason #6 – Being too big to escape a trap. I had assumed that Will knew what a pregnant woman looked like – I had been around them all my life. But, Will had never seen one. Doc got up, grabbed two short chunks of firewood, stuffed them under his shirt, and showed Will how a pregnant woman walks when she’s in her final trimester.

  Will was surprised a second time when I gave him reason #9. A newborn baby cries a lot, loudly, and cannot be left alone. Will was quite subdued after I asked him how we would ever be able to fight the DPS if the two of us had a baby that we had to care for.

  I had thought of an extra reason by the time we finished discussing the first ten. “Will, pretend that you're away on some operation against the DPS. While you’re gone, they find our camp, ambush me, and steal our baby. They leave a note for you in the camp. Zurt! Turn yourself in or your baby dies. What would you do?”

  Will got all white and didn’t answer.

  “You know this is something Zzyk would try to do if he ever found out we had a baby.”

  Will nodded. “What happened to you when they took the baby?”

  “They took him over my dead body.”

  Will didn’t say anything.

  “Zzyk promises you that he won’t harm the baby if you co-operate. All you have to do is put on a brain-band and work for him.”

  “He’d probably be lying, right?”

  “He’d probably keep the baby hostage in case you got out of line. But, he’d only let you see your baby once or twice a year.”

  “He really would kill the baby if I didn’t come in, right?”

  “You know the answer to that. What are you going to do, Will. Save yourself or save your baby?”

  “I’d turn myself in.”

  “So would I,” I said.

  Back to the Table of Contents

  Chapter 4

  From Will's journals: November 6, 2081.

  I woke to the sound of distant scraping sounds. Izzy was lying on her side, an arm cushioning her head, and still sleeping. All three of us had curled up close to the fire last night and we had taken turns feeding it. It was dead now, but with the sun up, we'd be warm enough soon. Doc was gone. I looked around and saw him down by the lake. The scraping sounds were coming from there.

  When I reached the lake, Doc stopped scraping and held up a stick with a sharpened end. “You know how to fish with this, Will?” I nodded and he handed the spear to me. Doc picked up another sharpened spear and we both waded into the lake, stopping only when the cold water was up to our knees. I had noticed the rock that he used to sharpen the sticks and that made me realize that he had no gear whatsoever. Not even a knife. Which means that the roaring fire that he started last night had been done the ancient way as well.

  We stood motionless for a while. There didn’t seem to be any fish in this part of the lake – I certainly wasn’t seeing any.

  “Did you get all your questions answered last night, Will?” Doc asked. “I have a bot back at my cache that has lots of information. I could lend it to you, if you wanted.”

  “I’d like that, Doc” I said. “I didn’t want to ask Izzy a lot of questions.”

  He nodded and we went back to staring at the clear blue water.

  After a while, I glanced over at Doc. He had his arms crossed against his chest with the spear nestled between his two forearms. His eyes were closed! I think he may have been whistling. “Aren’t you looking for fish, Doc?” I asked.

  “I prefer to fish with my eyes closed,” he said cryptically. “Gives the fish more of a chance.”

  Well, that gave me a chance to ask some questions that I knew I shouldn’t be asking, but thought it would be OK because Doc had volunteered to give me information without me opening up the subject. I opened with, “Are you supposed to kiss with your eyes shut or open, Doc?”

  He did a little double tweet-tweet whistle, and said, “Don’t expect it matters one way or the other.”

  “Izzy closes her eyes,” I said, hoping that would prompt him to talk some more about closing or not closing eyes.

  “Mmmm,” was all he said.

  “I’ve tried it both ways but I don’t know which is the right way to do it.”

  “Don’t think there are any actual written rules.”

  “Oh,” I said. That was disappointing. “Your bot doesn’t have any rules about kissing?”

  “No. I'm quite sure that it doesn’t.”

  “Not even about holding hands, or hugging, or when it’s alright to put an arm around a girl. Nothing like that either?”

  “Nope. Not a single rule. Is that what you were expecting?”

  “Sure. When we were growing up, we were given printed rules all the time. How to hold your fork; how to make your bed; how to brush your teeth. Why wouldn’t there be a set of rules on kissing?”

  “Never thought much about that. Wouldn’t kissing be just like breathing?”

  “But, there's a rule on breathing." He looked doubtful, so I quoted it. "Always breath with your mouth closed unless you’ve been exercising in which case it’s alright to breathe through your mouth until you’ve caught your breath."

  “I guess kissing isn’t like breathing.”

  “No. It’s way harder,” I said. So, I told Doc about my research study. How I had established at least nine different variables that impacted on the action of kissing, starting with whether the girl was on your left side, your right side, or directly in front of you; how you tilted your head; how hard you pressed; where you put your nose; how long you held the kiss; what you do about breathing; and so on.

  “Nine different variables. My goodness. I never realized.”

  “That’s only if you’re standing still. There’d be more variables if you were walking and kissing at the same time. I don’t think I could walk and kiss at the same time. It’s too hard to remember what to do.”

  “So, when you’re getting ready to kiss Melissa, you’re actually thinking about these nine variables and doing it sort of like step 1 – do this, step 2 – do this, step 3 – do this and so on?”

  “Now I do that, yes. But I didn't before. When I kissed her the first time, it all happened too fast to think. One second I was looking at her, the next second I was kissing her. But then, I found out I was doing it wrong. And, I couldn’t find any rules about kissing, and I certainly couldn’t let Izzy know that I was looking for information about kissing, so I decided to solve it like I solve all my research. Create a mental spreadsheet of all the options, test each variable individually, map out the res
ults, and analyze the data until I can see the solution.”

  “You’re actually kissing Melissa, recording the results in your head, changing a variable, trying it again, over and over and over?”

  “I have to! How else can I find out how to do it properly? If there were rules, I’d follow them, but I can’t find any rules!”

  “How did you learn that you were kissing badly?”

  “Izzy ran away crying.”

  “How will you know when you’ve learned to kiss correctly?”

  “Izzy won’t run away crying. I’ve made the criteria for success quite observable.”

  “Yes, I see that. Tell me more about Melissa running away crying.”

  So, I did. I remembered each time very clearly. I mean, no one would forget making his girl friend run away crying. Strange. I had never thought of Izzy as my girlfriend, but I guess she was. I also told Doc everything I had learned from my research, and how I had finally found a variable that seemed to be working.

  “What’s variable six again?” Doc asked.

  “Lip pressure. If I press hard enough on Izzy’s lips, she won’t cry. But, if I press lightly, it doesn’t seem to matter if I tilt my head to the left or to the right, or if I have my arms around her waist or her shoulders, or if I do anything else differently. Eventually, she’ll push me away, and she’ll be in tears, and then she’ll run away.”

  “And you like kissing her hard on the lips?”

  “No, but, at least she doesn’t cry.”

  “And the reason you don’t talk to Melissa about this is…”

  “That would make me a pervert, Doc.” I was surprised. I shouldn’t have had to explain becoming a pervert to a medical person. “Only perverts talk to girls about sex. It’s even risky reading information about sex, but since I’m researching without doing any actual reading, I think I’ll be OK.”

  “Too late now, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve already talked to a girl about sex. So, you must already be a pervert.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “Last night. With Melissa. You talked about how babies are made. You talked about sex. According to what you just said, that makes you a pervert. Makes her one too.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you feel any different now that you’re a pervert?”

  I shook my head No.

  “Perhaps, it’s a delayed reaction.”

  I watched the water. Looking for fish, but wondering when I would change into a pervert. How would I change? How would Izzy change? How long would it take?

  “Are you a pervert yet?”

  I looked up to find Doc holding three small dead fish. “Caught these before you got up,” he said.

  “No, not yet. At least I don’t think so.”

  “You should have changed into one by now. The two of you certainly talked enough about it.”

  Doc started walking back up to the camp with the fish. I ran to catch up.

  “Tell me, Will. What would you do if you were testing a scientific theory and the results didn’t match with the theory in spite of repeated tests? What would you think?”

  “The theory might be wrong?”

  “Uh huh.” Doc switched the fish to his left hand, and clapped me on the shoulder with his right. “Melissa ever tell you that I used to play a lot of hockey when I was a kid?”

  “No, why?”

  “I have an old hockey injury.” Doc gave me a hip check into a bush. “Oops. Never know when this old hip is going to act up. Hard to control it some times.”

  I grabbed his offered hand and pulled myself up. He smiled at me and said, "Got’cha.” I had played that game with Izzy. So, I waited a few seconds and tried to give him a hip check back. It was like hitting a cliff.

  “Mosquitoes must be hatching early this year. I could have sworn I felt one bite me.”

  Doc talked about hockey all breakfast long. It’s a game where people skate around on ice and try to shoot a hard rubber pellet called a puck into a mesh net. Said that he used to play it on outdoor rinks in Calgary. Told us all about the rules – like hip checking, off-sides, and icing the puck which doesn't actually involve freezing it. I’ve learned to recognize when I’m being teased. People skating on ice! In Calgary! On an outdoor rink! Doc has quite the imagination.

  # # # # # # # #

  I watched as Doc and Izzy headed up the mountainside for a couple of hours of father-daughter time. Doc hip-checked Izzy into the bushes partway up the hill. Then, she took a running start and tried to shove him off the trail but couldn’t budge him at all, which made me feel better. She resorted to trying to trip him, but he wasn’t falling for that either. Finally, she jumped onto his back, wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her out of sight. I heard her yelling “Gidy’up” as they turned the corner. I went down to the lake to try out Doc’s spear in a different spot.

  Izzy and Doc returned after a couple of hours, but they didn’t have a lot to say about what they had seen. “Just a bunch of trees,” Izzy said which wasn’t like her. I showed them the fish that I had cleaned. Doc wasn’t hungry – “still working on the big breakfast” – but he did want to pick up the pack he had cached. Izzy gave him her pinky-ring so that he could use the sky-sling. I guess she had already told him about the commands because he flew it with its top open around the camp just fine. I agreed that it would make sense for Doc to swing around and pick up some gear from our camp too, although I told him that it would take him most of the afternoon to do all of this because he’d have to make a number of trips. Doc said he didn’t mind and he did appear to like flying because he looped up into the air and did a high speed pass through the camp just above our heads, yelling “Yahoooooooooo” the whole time. We watched him lower the lid and wink out of sight. Then, we strolled back to the campfire and I began preparing our lunch.

  After lunch, Izzy said that she’d shave some wood so that we’d have it ready when we needed it. I was leaning against a tree, while she was sitting on a fallen tree peeling a dead branch. I offered to help but she wanted do this by herself since I had made lunch. I don’t know how we got onto the topic, but she started explaining why she had been acting so strange lately about us kissing. She said that she had been terrified about becoming pregnant and had worried that we might make that mistake if we did too much kissing. But that was only part of it. She stopped at that point to work around a tough knothole. Izzy had her head down and was concentrating on shaving her branch the whole time we talked about this, not just when she was digging out that knothole. Probably so that her knife wouldn’t slip which was a good idea because she has a sharp knife.

  Then, she told me how she ending up crying and running away because I was such a good kisser, and how she wanted to never stop kissing me, but she thought that it was wrong for her to have these feelings because only bad women liked … fooling around she called it. She had grown up knowing that dissident men beat their wives and forced them to have sex with them. Any dissident woman who actually liked sex was considered to be a… very bad woman, she finally said. She had thought that she was turning into one of those women but couldn’t stop herself from wanting to kiss me back. At about that point, Izzy started to attack her branch and I didn’t want to distract her, so didn’t say anything.

  In a bit, she started talking again. Doc had asked her a question this morning that had made her think. He had said: “How long do you think the human race would have lasted if both men and women didn’t enjoy sex?” Then, he told her that she knew the dissident movement was full of a bunch of wackos, so wouldn’t it make sense that they would be nut-jobs about their attitudes towards sex too? She and Doc spent most of their hike just walking and talking about what was normal. That was why she couldn’t describe where they had gone.

  I started to say something, but she held up her hand and I waited. She put her knife down, but still didn’t look up at me. “I still feel terribly awkw
ard talking to you about this Will, but now I know that it’s normal for me to feel the way I do. I know that I weirded out on you and I’ll try not to do that again. I’m sorry if I made you mad at me.”

  So, I told her about my research project on kissing and the nine variables, which made her smile and she actually looked at me. I also told her how I thought I would become a pervert if I asked her any questions about it. Also said that Doc had helped me realize that the IOF had lied about people becoming perverts if they thought about sex. She seemed surprised to hear that Doc and I had talked. I said that I knew now that I should have just asked her. She said that she probably would have made an excuse not to answer me. She didn’t want to talk about it before either.

  “But, you’d answer now?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  So, I thought about how to make it as scientific as possible. Just like Izzy had done last night. I chose to ask about variable #6 – lip pressure – because that seemed to be the most crucial one. “Do you like it when I kiss you hard?” I asked.

  “No," she said. “It hurts my lips.”

  I wanted to ask her how hard I should press, but wasn’t sure what measurement scale to use. I finally resorted to using the unreliable on a scale of 1 to 10 approach.

  She looked down at her branch again and I thought she was going to begin shaving it again, which was absolutely the last thing I wanted. She surprised me instead. “Perhaps, you could show me what a 3 is?”

  So, I did. She couldn’t make up her mind between a 2 and a 3, so I had to repeat them a number of times. At one point, she caught me with my eyes opened, and she said that she liked it better when I wasn’t watching her. I found it better with my eyes closed too, which was good because now I had defined two of my variables. After a while, I forgot about the variables. At one point, she became all agitated and she pulled away and scrunched her head under my chin while she fluttered both her hands on my chest really fast. But she didn’t run away. And, she didn't cry. In a few minutes she muttered, “End of the first period,” which she said she must have thought about because of Doc’s ramblings about hockey. She explained that hockey players would play a game of three 20-minute periods but would take breaks between the periods so that they could rest. “Perhaps it would be a good idea if we did the same?”