“Daughter,” Iloh said as they ate their breakfast. “I understand that you have a day off from school?”
Jellia choked down the egg she was eating. They had very strange eggs on this planet! “Yes, Ska-drek.”
“Well, then, I will be taking you shooting. Even if you prefer not to go around armed, it is my plain duty to make sure you know how to use a gun.”
“Umm,” she looked back and forth from him to her mother, who looked annoyed but said nothing. “Very well. When?”
“When you have cleaned up from breakfast and freshened. Wear a working skirt, if you please.”
“Yes, Ska-drek.”
And so it was, two hours later, that she sat in a called skimmer with Iloh. “Where are we going?”
“We are going to have a very intensive lesson,” he said. “I have reserved us a slot downtown.”
Well, Jellia was none the wiser, but she supposed she would find out when she got there.
The shuttle settled down in front of an enormous building, and Iloh calmly walked her into the ‘armory’ door in the front, one of a dozen different doors. “Ah, is this my client?” she heard, and turned to see an older ska coming up.
“Yes,” Iloh said. “We will need to outfit her, and then exhaust her.”
She glanced at Iloh, appalled, but the man was coming toward her. “Drendon Johnson, Arms Master,” he said, and kissed her ‘instructor to instructed’.
“En-kesh Jellia Kiladi,” she said, kissing back ‘instructed to instructor’.
“Come here, kesh. Let us get you armed. I will leave the choice of color in your hands, but I would recommend a kesh-i’s three weight. Come and pick out your style.”
Jellia did her best not to glower at the idea that there was a ‘kesh-i’ weight. Why didn’t they just put a weight on them, and everyone could get a weight that suited them?
And, of course, he took her to a ‘Kesh-i’ rack, and all of the guns were in ‘kesh-i’ colors. Well, that wasn’t fair. Most of them were in brighter colors than the ‘kesh’ rack, but it was stupid of her to complain about what she would probably have chosen anyway. But she wasn’t going to pick the pink one! No matter how much she liked them.
“That one,” she said, pointing to a white gun with nice beige highlights.
“That is our third best seller to kesh-u-i,” he said. “Let’s test out a number three.”
He took a gun down and handed it to her. “Swing it up and down a few times. Don’t worry, this is a dummy model. It can’t fire.”
Jellia put it down at her hip and lifted it up. “Good, again,” he said, and she did it a few more times.
“That seems about right,” he said. “Now let’s work on the grip.”
She followed him into the next room, where there was this bizarre stick sticking up out of some machine. “Grab this, please. Right hand… you are right handed?”
“I can use both hands,” she said. “But my right hand seems right for this. No pun intended.”
She grabbed the stick. “A little higher, and squeeze.”
She moved her hand up and squeezed, and then squealed and took it away. It had started to move!
“Put your hand back, please. It’s just measuring your grip.”
She put her hand back and waited an uncomfortable few seconds while the stick squished and moved under her hand.
“Very well,” he said. “Next room.”
The next room held the actual guns, and he took a beige model from the ‘kesh-i 3’ bin and then went over to a cupboard, waited, and then it opened and he took out… the grip?
He snapped it in place. “Here, try this.”
Oh, my! It fit perfectly. “It’s fine,” she said.
“Ok, now, holster.”
The next room held holsters and, after quite a bit of discussion, she got one that went across her chest and under her arm. “Try this, and then we’ll try a hip holster.”
She felt very strange as she hooked it on, Ska-drek helping.
“Now we have fun,” he said, and took her out a door, down a long cooridor, through another door, and into… a world?
“Like our sim?” he asked. “Your ska-drek has asked for a crash course, and says you are gun averse, so we will start here. This scene deals with animals. Nasty animals. Hopefully you won’t mind shooting them.”
“Animals?” she asked, and then a rather large and ugly looking lizard lifted itself out of the grass.
“Shoot centre mass,” the instructor said, as the lizard ambled its way toward her.
It took her ten tries before she finally started hitting it in the center of its chest. she knew where each shot had gone, as the sim lit up the ground or sky where it went. And five more before it fell down.
“Next,” the man said, and this time the lizard came from the left, and she started hitting it with her second shot.
“Now aim first for one of the legs,” he said, and the third lizard got up.
Well, that worked. She hit the leg with the second shot, and the lizard stopped moving so well, and she killed it.
Ten more lizards and she felt she was doing pretty good. But the next one leapt from the ground, roaring, and charged at her.
“Ahh!” she screamed, firing wildly. The lizard made it up to her, swiped at her, and she felt a bizarre feeling across her chest and fell down.
“Get up,” the instructor said. “Try again.”
She got shakily up to her feet and had just realised that she wasn’t actually hurt, and that the lizard was gone, when another one got up, again roaring and charging. This time she hit his leg, and leapt out of the way, firing at him and hitting about half the time.
Seven more lizards, from all directions, and she had got it down. The leg shot and move was critical. And then… a cat leapt up! A big cat and kind of slow and she just managed to kill it.
The instructor didn’t comment on the cat, but kept up a running commentary on how she was holding the gun, how she was moving, how it didn’t do any good to be afraid…
An hour later she had killed every creepy animal she could imagine, and some that she still couldn’t. Those spiders. And Iloh and the instructor had just walked quietly along.
“Now, that was the easy part,” the instructor said, and the scene suddenly changed to a street scene in some beautiful city. “Let’s take a break.”
“Oh, yes, please!” she said, and they sat at a table and ordered. She was tempted to get some hard, but she ordered a mango soft.
“For this next part,” the instructor said. “You will be shooting people. We will start with people who look very threatening, and move to people who seem pretty normal.”
“Do… are many people shot, here?”
“Very few.”
“Then why are we practicing this?”
“We also have very little crime… because so many people are armed.”
When they got up from their little cafe, the world changed. Changed into a dark and forbidding set of city streets, with trash and worse all over.
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Contract marriage is an adult dystopia examining the issues of marriage. Like 1984 and Brave New World, Contract Marriage treats the relations between the sexes as a fundamental aspect of how a society is formed and, thus, how a society can go wrong.
Unlike those dystopias, Contract Marriage isn’t all horrible all of the time. The characters for the most part have a good time and get along in their society. But the issues of sexuality, of marriage or not, monogamy or not, faithfulness or not, and gender roles… keep coming up and causing tension and conflict and joy and pain.
My desire is that my readers would be thinking along with my characters about these issues and perhaps even arrive at the same place (minus the flying cars).