His first milestone was self-defense. He would have preferred to have no need for self-defense. But as he had said in at least thirty of his videos, “My hope is not only to meet you but also to join you on your peaceful missions of exploration and discovery.” And as he had also said, if less frequently, “Who knows what may happen on these missions? Suppose, for example, that our vessel is overrun by members of a pre-industrial species. How will we respond? With deadly force? Unthinkable! So you will understand why I have immersed myself in non-lethal combat techniques developed on my planet over many dark and strife-torn centuries.”
And now, here he was, beginning his final self-defense class. Final and also crucial. The only one in which the students would have a chance to try out all the moves their instructor had taught them in the eleven weeks since the course began.
Since the instructor would likewise be free to employ these moves, each student was equipped with a helmet and mask, plus a small sofa’s worth of cushions below.
Nevertheless, the arriving trainees slouched. They hugged the walls. They fidgeted mutely with their straps. And why? Just because of the random kicks their teacher was jackhammering into the air around him? Just because of his enormous arms and glowering bald head? Or was it, perhaps, because of that comment a few weeks ago, when he had let slip that on his way to becoming a special forces commando in the old Soviet Union, he had learned to kill a person with his bare hands twelve different ways?
None of this fully explained, however, why Aleksei Kosovitch’s students seemed less like self-defenders, more like crash test dummies awaiting their turn in the subcompact. The main reason was Aleksei Kosovitch’s clothes. For faced with the certainty of thirteen violent confrontations, with thirteen adults, some of them reasonably athletic, he had donned not a puff of padding, just a bandanna, a pair of black sweatpants and a faded gray muscle shirt with the letters USSR on the front and rear.
“OK, class. Leessen up,” he called out finally, once everyone had grown even more nervous. “I have for you beeg question. How you learn anything if you have fight in nice gym, with nice pillows, with nice teacher like me never hurting you very much?”
He pointed to a window. “Real fight happen out there. No pillows. No nice teacher. So what you do?”
A perplexed silence met this question, followed by a mumble. Aleksei pounced. “Of course!” he declared. “You practice. You practice with muscles, but . . . you also practice with head. How I mean? I mean when ees your turn, you take five seconds and imagine in head most horrible situation, most horrible opponent. That ees what you fight.
“OK. Amy. You first. Let’s go.”
Amy, all five foot one of her, concentrated grimly, summoned her worst nightmare—which happened at that moment to be a bald Russian in a gray muscle shirt—and set loose a desperate flurry of punches. Aleksei parried for about a minute before dispatching her into a classmate.
“Not bad,” he said. “Cleeff, now you.”
The young man who had been standing next to Amy crouched as if beginning a race, vividly pictured his most profound fear, which coincidentally also happened to be a bald Russian in a gray muscle shirt, and flung himself forward, first running then flying as Aleksei kicked his legs from under him.
“Come on, Cleeff. What ees matter? Well, too late. You dead. Next!”
And one by one they charged . . . and fell. Or flew. Or flipped. Until . . .
One of them held back—unwilling, apparently, to do as instructed.
In fact, he was trying to do as instructed.
Exactly as instructed.
But that, unfortunately, was taking longer than five seconds.
“Oh, Shmeeshkees,” said Aleksei who, weeks ago, had identified this round-faced, round-bodied individual as looking more like a pudding than anyone he had ever met. “You not afraid, are you?”
He waited a bit longer, grunted and shifted his attention.
“OK, never mind. Miri, you—”
“The matter,” said a voice, “and I’m only saying this once, you slimy sac of space debris . . .”
Aleksei studied the mask these words were coming from, trying to determine what they might mean.
“The matter,” said the voice again, only now considerably louder, “is that you’ve got my ship!”
“Your what?”
“My ship!”
“Your sheep?”
But he could ask no more because at that moment the pudding attacked, truly attacked, with wildness—kicking, punching, grabbing—none of these moves familiar since, actually, they weren’t moves at all, just explosions of motion, but explosions so unexpected the instructor briefly lost his balance, stumbling backward, dropping to one knee. Whereupon the pudding leaped . . . and landed, clasping his opponent's head with his thighs, hanging down his back and pummeling his buttocks, all the while screaming the most astounding things such as “What have you done to my crew?” and "Tell me now if you value your reproductive appendage!"
“Get off me!” bellowed Aleksei, while bucking and twisting to throw the weakling clear. For some reason, however, the weakling would not be thrown. On the contrary, he grabbed his teacher around the waist, and then, with scissoring thighs, began rolling and unrolling that teacher’s ears—a most unpleasant sensation.
Aleksei went for the hands. With a quick twist he detached them from his belly, but as he did so the thighs clamped on his head. He reached for the thighs, but they started scissoring again, as the hands reclasped around his middle. He stood up. He lurched about. But the bandanna had slipped onto his face, and he could no longer see where he was going. He tried backing into a wall and backed instead into students—students transfixed by what seemed, from their perspective, to be a person with a bottom for a head and two waving antennae.
There remained, it appeared, only one option. Yes. Yes. He had to apply one of the twelve moves. But no. Wait. There could be consequences. Yet if he did nothing, did not somehow turn the tables . . .
It was then that a sadness came over Aleksei Kosovitch—a deep melancholy that revealed the origins of his present career. For he had not expected his life to unfold as it had. But ever since the late twentieth century, ever since the dark days of Reagan and Gorbachev and the fall of communism and the rest of it, he had found his sole moments of happiness when he was beating up Americans. And now? Not to have even that? But to be the one getting beaten? In his own classroom? By a pudding!?
It was . . .
It was reality, that’s what it was. Another tentacle of the current reality.
Just as it was reality when he heard himself moaning, to his own appalled amazement, “Da, OK, I give you back your sheep.”