Jola

Jola

For as long as I could remember, Jola had been my friend. From the very first day we met, small children playing in the back streets of the immigrant compound, we were closer than siblings, and because neither of us had brothers or sisters, our mothers smiled and said how healthy it was that each of us had found something outside our own little worlds. And it was true that, while we had each other, neither Jola nor I painted rude words on walls or smoked foul-smelling drugs on street corners; we preferred to play our fantasy games of princes and princesses, dragons and castles, knights and dragons. Jola had the quickest imagination of any child in the compound, and I adored him for it.

When we were approaching our teens, we began to attract attention from the adolescents in the compound. Large boys with long, greasy hair would lounge in the alleyways between the shacks and hurl abuse at passing couples, taking macho pride in the expletives and sexual innuendo that pervaded their language like the drugs in their bloodstreams. I watched them with childish fascination, and was often surprised by how often the crude words seemed to be accompanied by thoughts of desperation, of hope that a girl’s boyfriend would try to knock some sense into their surly heads. But when they caught sight of Jola and me, all I felt from them as they shouted obscenities at us was fear and loathing.

I didn’t dare talk to Jola about it, because he often said I read too much into people’s words and I could think of no worse hurt than his disapproval, so I tried to ask my mother. “Maybe you and Jola shouldn’t spend so much time together,” was all she said.

The empty blankness of her words and my pre-adolescent hormones combined to make me suddenly angry.

“And why not?” I shouted at her. “Maybe you’d prefer I end up like those boys? Maybe you want me doing drugs, prostituting myself in alleyways? Jola’s the best friend I’ll ever have. We’ll probably get married when we’re old enough!”

My mother hit me then, squarely around the face. “Don’t you dare even suggest that!” she hissed, and her thoughts were nothing but panic that I could not understand. Jola didn’t understand either, when I told him. “I wouldn’t mind marrying you,” he shrugged. “Of course,” he added, and his eyes were sly, “you’d have to grow a bit first. I can still lean my elbow on your head.” And that’s what he did, and I tickled him, and we never mentioned it again while we lived in the compound, even though I knew he thought about it sometimes.

I thought about it all the time, and it was the first thing on my mind when I got my chance to leave the immigrant compound. The Central Earth Government decided to solve the refugee problem by phasing the refugee children into normal society, so, two at a time, teenagers from the immigrant population were given scholarships to top universities and sent on their way. I was selected at sixteen, as the winner of an essay competition, and I insisted that Jola accompany me in my new life. My demand resulted in mounds of paperwork and more than one odd look, but Jola got his scholarship and his freedom from refugee status. And so the two of us set out to learn how little we really knew of the world outside the compound.
From the first day to the end of the first year, Jola and I were so drunk with the sights and sounds of monorails, holographic displays, neon lights and high-rise buildings that we were blind to the people around us. We clung to each other for safety when the bustle of the cities became too much, comforting each other with touch and thoughts, and burying ourselves in our studies as soon as we escaped the busy streets. I majored in History, and Jola chose Politics; Jola said that it was because I had my head in the past while he had his feet in the present. “So where’s your head then?” I asked him playfully.

“Somewhere in the Oort Cloud,” he said, and I laughed because he had taken Astronomy as a minor and loved to make me feel inferior by confusing me with cosmic geography. I responded for a while by quoting poetry, but in his books being an English minor didn’t count for much. Instead I dragged him into discussions of the overlap between history and politics: I asked him once if he knew the date that Earth first made contact with an alien species.

“Fourteenth of October, 2237,” he answered, “and next you’re going to ask me what’s so interesting about that date?”

“No need, I know it. On the same date, precisely ten years later, Earth declared war on that same species; on the same date twelve years after that, the CEG signed a peace treaty with that species so that twelve hours later the two of them could declare war against the next sentient species on the block.”

Jola looked out of the window of our study room. “You know, Ali,” he said, “I wonder if the war ever really stopped.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Our grandparents were the refugees from that first war. Two generations later we’re only just starting to leave the compounds, and even so…” he trailed off, looking down at his hand as he flexed the long fingers in his lap.

“Don’t say it, Jola,” I whispered, knowing what he was thinking.

“We can’t hide from it, Ali,” he said. “I’m not as sensitive as you, but even I can tell what people are thinking when they see us. Maybe we should not have left the compound.”

“At least here we have a hope in hell of doing something,” I retorted. Jola didn’t say anything, just looked at me, but I didn’t have to read his mind to know that I had just kindled a fire there. If I knew Jola, he would do something.

Perhaps I was more aware after that, or perhaps it was the change in CEG administration that altered the balance of opinions on the street, but after our first year’s exams and the Eurasian elections I started to sense the hostility when Jola and I walked the city streets together. Nowhere did I see another couple like us, and it was just as well because it could have caused a riot. People of all kinds stopped what they were doing to stare at us and think hostile thoughts, and by our second year’s exams the obscenities had started to fly, less crudely than those of the boys in the compound but with greater accuracy. More often than not, the cries of “freak” and “enemy” would be levelled at me, while Jola was ignored completely, and the underlying hatred was so overwhelming that I could never decide which of us was meant to be the more offended.

The year Jola and I graduated, the Eurasian president was assassinated and war was declared again, the same as in 2247. I was frightened, but Jola decided the time had come to act. While I stayed on at the university for a postgraduate, Jola left to infiltrate the political anthill. Switching my major mid-course to politics, I arrived on the scene just in time for a barrage of inflammatory essays and passionate speeches from the friend I loved so, and my heart swelled with pride and with fear for him as Earth swung between hatred and admiration for Jola’s outspokenness.

Early in the morning on October fourteenth, 2319, Jola came to visit me at the university. I knew before he spoke what he had come to tell me, and I fell down sobbing and begged him not to do it.

“Ali,” he said gently, helping me up, “people like us are dying in their thousands because sentient life cannot see past differences in appearance. I have to give this speech today. I will be killed for it, but there are things that must be said, and I am the best person to say them.”

“I would have married you, you know,” I whispered, wrapping my arms around his waist and burying my face in his broad chest.

“Unlikely,” he answered, smiling and stroking my hair. “We could never reproduce, and even if we somehow managed it, our children would almost certainly be sterile.”

“Yeah, well,” I sniffed, “that’s just the risk you take when you meet someone from another planet. I love you, Jola.”

“I love you too, Ali,” he said. “Goodbye.”


I watched Jola’s speech from the safety of the wallscreen in my room. I watched with pride and with love as he spoke words of power and of peace, his tail lashing and his smoky blue fur bristling. I watched with tears in my eyes as, even as Jola cried out for acceptance and love between human and alien, a hand jerked out from amidst the crowd and hurled a bomb at the platform where Jola stood. And in that moment before he died, I heard Jola’s voice in my head, saying again that he loved me.

The war ended that day, a non-aggression pact signed just hours after Jola’s death. I was sought out and regaled as a heroine, the only normal human brave enough to display her friendship with an alien. And as I was publicly honoured and showered with praise and admiration, I never stopped wondering whether humankind would have reacted differently had they known that I was as alien to them as Jola. Had they known I was a telepath, I would probably have shared Jola’s fate.