by Huskyteer
“Er, fine.” He said. He did feel better now that he’d bathed and put on some clean tights. His head was clearer than it had been for the informal debriefing, too. “I’m fine, ma’am.”
“That’s good to hear. I bet you’re looking forward to some rest after all that. How would you like to take it on deck nine?”
“Ma’am?” Ben had to repeat the question in his head to make sure he heard it right. Deck nine was the most protected area on the entire ship, and, apart from its tenders, only queens of the highest tiers of command were allowed to go there. He knew he had heard correctly and understood what was said. Even so, he couldn’t believe his ears.
“The Captain is pleased with you,” the voice said. “He wants you to come as soon as you’re finished.”
“Oh, shit. I mean, right. Right away. Ma’am!”
There were no further instructions. He hastened to finish dressing and walked out into the hallway as though on air; all he could think, over and over again, was “Deck nine, I can’t believe it!” The elevators wouldn’t even stop there unless the Captain punched a special code into the system, and the entrances were guarded by Seraph autonomous security drones that would carbonize any unauthorized person who tried to enter. He was intimidated by the thought at first, but when he stepped into the carriage and saw a 9 light up on the display, all the concern went out of him. It was alright now. Everything was going to be alright. Three minutes later and he was standing in the garden.
Cold sleep did not prevent time from working its ruin on things, and while it slowed the aging process considerably, it would not have done to send a ship out with only a store of seeds, resilient though they might be, for a journey of indefinite length. The solution was this: a modest, carefully tended ecosystem in the heart of the ship that ensured a diverse array of viable seeds with which to set down the foundations of a colony. Without the garden, their mission meant nothing. They couldn’t afford the risk of letting people come and go as they pleased, that was why it was kept with such vigilance.
Ben was no poet, no eloquent words crossed his mind, but he drank in the sights even as precursory tears threatened to make the seeing difficult. Hidden projectors turned the ceiling into a sky, complete with sun and clouds in motion. He had seen image files from their homeworld, but they did not do justice to the experience. There were sounds he didn’t know, bird calls and the buzzing of insects, whether from speakers or kept specimens, he didn’t know and didn’t care. There was so much green, green everywhere, and flowers of blue and gold and coral. The only grey in that place was his uniform. Had there really been a world that looked like this? He fell to his knees, too awed for anything else. Only then did he truly comprehend the spiritual disease afflicting the crew, the awful, half-formed knowledge that drove so many to depression and suicide.
“This is what we’ve lost,” he said, tears now flowing. “And this is what we hope to find again.” In his thoughts, he added, My God, we really are alone!
“Hello, Ben, this is your Captain speaking. We want to thank you for your work and let you know that C block and deck seven are now in full lockdown. They won’t be going to war anytime soon. Are you enjoying the garden?”
He hadn’t spotted any telecom, but the voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. The Captain had a bizarre way of speaking even compared against the clipped accent of the other officers, sounding much like a commercial airline pilot, not that Ben knew what that was. Whether this was a feature of caste or an individual foible, he was not in a position to say, but reckoned it was the prerogative of captains to speak as they pleased. So, he did not ask about it, neither did he look up.
“It is—” he said, struggling to find a word strong enough for what he felt, but he could not and had to settle. “It is beautiful. Thank you.”
“Good, good. Take your time, have a look around. And please, feel free to eat any of the fruit you come across, but do me a favor and stay away from the apples. I have a thing about those.”
“Oh, uh…ok. Sure.”
“Now listen, Ben, I’m gonna let you in on some very choice information. They’re not visible to the naked eye yet, but our instruments have detected three red suns, all close together, you know, relatively speaking, annnnnd we’re gonna go check ’em out, yeah. Now, if you’ll look to your left—”
“My God,” Ben interrupted. “Are you sure? We’ll see them up close?” He looked up at the false sky. The tears had stopped.
“We’re certain, yes. As for you getting to see them…? Not as such, no. Even in cold sleep, you’ll have turned to dust by the time we get there. Some of your great-grandchildren might see them, though.”
“M-My what?”
“Oh, no one told you yet. Well, you’re going to become a queen.”
“Queen.” An unpleasant fluttering passed through Ben’s stomach as he uttered the word. He suddenly felt he would very much like to lie down.
“You have good genes, Constable,” the Captain explained. “But genes aren’t enough. You’ve always been dutiful and what you did today was very brave. The short of it is, we need more people like you. So, congratulations! Rest up, now. Someone will come for you later.”
The telecom went silent. Him, a queen? Maybe in a few years, but not now! It entailed more than switching pronouns; the hormonal changes would affect both behavior and physiology. He would become aggressive, but that wasn’t the problem. Apart from gaining bulk (of which there would be plenty), his hips would widen to ease the birthing of pups and his torso would lengthen to accommodate them. None of this was even mentioning the process of putting the pups in his belly in the first place. It was an honor, yes, but all he could feel was disgust at the thought.
The elation he had felt earlier crumbled away in seconds. Dizzy, he fell onto all fours and dry-heaved.
“You’re going to become a queen,” the Captain had said. It had not been a request. He could protest as long as he wished, but sooner or later his instincts would compel him and he would cave to the social pressure, like he’d always done. So, it was either become a queen, or finally surrender to the long-unvented hopelessness in his heart and wilfully bring his story to a close. And just like that, he made his choice.
He didn’t want to be a queen and he didn’t intend to let it happen. What was the point? A red dwarf couldn’t support a colony. A star like that is too cool to warm a planet at any real distance, any closer and the gravity would siphon off the atmosphere. Everyone knew that, they were just afraid to say it! Why should he have to go along with this farce, trading his youth for childbirth, squirting out litter after litter so that they, too, could someday grow to realize how empty and meaningless it all was? It had to stop.
Since the day he was born, it had always been about colonization, about “we” and “us.” Once, just this once, he was going to say, “I!” He was going to shout it so loud it would rend the ship to splinters. He got up and walked purposefully towards the security doors, dusting his hands.
First, he would need a bolt rifle. The computer might still send him to deck thirteen if he boarded an elevator, if not, he could just go to deck twelve and find an access tunnel. If he bolted the fence, he should be able to overload the circuit, trip the breaker. After that…
He waved his wrist over the scanner, but rather than chime before unlocking the exit, it beeped twice and nothing else happened. He tried again, to the same result. Frustrated, he pushed in on the panel, it slid back and to the side with a whir, revealing a numerical touch pad. The keys were stiff under his fingertips from lack of use as he entered his registration code, which failed to achieve the desired result. It was the same with the emergency override he had learned as part of his training. Again and again he tried until finally, he slammed his fist into the keys hard enough to split his knuckles open. The doors remained unmoved.
It made sense when he thought about it, they couldn’t have queens coming and going at will without some sort of escort; they were too valuable. Th
at rule apparently applied to nominees as well. Defeated, he slumped against the wall, trapped and without a single thing he could do about it.
* * * *
Back in corridor B, the thing that men called Mastema (whose true name cannot be rendered in this language, but sounds a bit like a steam-whistle crossed with a berserk cicada cry) groaned to itself. That spark gun had badly singed its insides, especially the back of its throat. It hurt, but the tissue would regenerate in a short while, so that was of no importance. The wrinkle-rats had had their little show; now that they believed the threat had passed, it would be left to its own devices.
It took the workstation (they all looked the same, the deserted lab was full of them) from the hiding place behind the wall panel. Sooner rather than later, but not yet, it would straight-wire it into the ship’s network, just like Yakub had been kind enough to demonstrate. Yakub had been alright, for a wrinkle-rat, Mastema might have felt bad about eating the guy if it were capable of things like remorse and regret, or morality.
The light from the monitor half-blinded it as it opened the laptop. That wouldn’t do, so it adjusted the brightness down with the tip of a claw. That much, it had figured out how to do on its own: not much of a feat, but other, better tricks would follow once it had finished decoding the word-drawings and really gotten the hang of the computer. Both processes were well underway, but there was no hurry. It had all the time there was.
* * * *
He knew what it was, but had never seen, much less felt, sleet before. Even when escorting survey teams across frozen seas, he had worn an environmental suit; he had never in his life experienced such intense cold as he did on this planet—for it was some planet he walked now, the gravity was far stronger than it had ever been on the ship, which made his movements slow. Walking was like trying to swim through taffy.
The only light was what he brought with him. LED in hand, he raised his other arm to shield his eyes from the wind-lashed particles of ice and grit. There was rain in the downpour, too, it soaked right through his uniform and turned the black sand into a freezing slurry that got in between his toes and clumped on his bare feet. Frost formed on his whiskers. How did he get here? Where was his environmental suit? Why was he walking around without shoes? He couldn’t have answered any of these questions. For the moment, he just focused on the difficult progress and hoped to stumble onto some sort of shelter.
He wandered long and aimlessly, stupefied, ’til, with his legs on the verge of giving out, he came upon an outcropping of rock that might once have been a mountain, but had been worn away by wind and rain to its present state. Deeply pitted by this erosion, there were numerous shallow niches where he might take cover. He circled around the base until he found a particularly roomy alcove facing away from the gale. Once inside, he sat down in the dark sand and drew his knees up to his chest, shivering. He left the LED on beside him; the light caught on metallic flecks mixed in with the sand, which glittered like silver, and it formed an elongate semicircle on the rock wall opposite. There was no way he was going to turn it off, the mere thought of enduring the night and its vicious storm terrified him and that glow, faint though it was, made him feel a bit safer.
Time passed (how much, he didn’t know) before he became aware that he was no longer alone. Looking up, he saw a familiar pair of red eyes hovering in the air just beyond the edge of the flashlight’s beam. Oddly, he wasn’t afraid, it seemed natural that Mastema should be here with him in this place. The creature made no attempt to advance on him. He could not see its body.
“Where are we?” Ben asked.
“My home,” Mastema said in that strained, brutal mockery of a voice, white shark-teeth flashing in the shadows. “Your destiny.”
“How did we get here?”
Rather than answer, Mastema turned to look out into the storm, far away, over the blank and level landscape Ben had just crossed. When next it spoke, it was quieter than what he had grown used to, perhaps even reflective.
“Our sun was dim, but…our atmosphere trapped the warmth. Then the warmth became too much. We had no technology to warn us…our star was dying. We hid away.”
“I don’t understand,” Ben said, “Where could you hide from something like that without leaving the planet?”
Mastema had given at least a dozen different (and contradictory) stories to the researchers regarding its origins. In one, he was a criminal marooned on a sterile planet as punishment, in another, he was a deity discarded by a people on their transitioning to a more scientifically-minded culture. Yet, for whatever reason, Ben felt certain that what he was hearing now was the absolute truth.
“Down. Deep into the earth,” Mastema said. “We slept. We waited for coolness. When we woke, all warmth had gone. Our world had died. One by one…the others went.”
“Where did they go?” Ben asked, eyes wide, nose and whiskers twitching, enraptured with the sad tale. Before that moment, he would have met any suggestion that he might empathize with that monster with the coldest laughter. Even now, what he felt was not really kinship, but more like pity. Mastema continued:
“We fell upon one another. Mothers fed on their young…sustenance for hibernation…the long sleep. They hoped the warmth…would return. So, they slept, waiting for so long…their bodies turned to stone. The rain washed over them…wore the stone away…into black sand. I alone remained.”
“My God,” Ben whispered. Mastema laughed then, an abhorrent sound like some rhythmically cracking glacier, hard and joyless.
“God? He had forsaken us. He has forsaken…you.”
Ben wondered if the story could really be true. While he didn’t have the impression Mastema was lying, certain details of the story didn’t add up. How much of that sand had he walked over? A couple of kilometers, at least, and while his visibility had been limited, he had no reason to think there wasn’t a lot more of the stuff, enough even to stretch from one horizon to another. Surely, he decided, Mastema’s people could not have been as numerous as that. Moreover, it was quite impossible to have this sort of weather without a star to drive it, was it not? And so, Ben inferred the fact of the matter.
“This is a dream,” he said.
“Life is a dream,” Mastema countered, mouth curving into a grisly smile as the clouds began to rain down fire. “The dream…is almost…over.”
* * * *
The fire of his dream turned out to be red light shining into Ben’s cell from the hallway, bleeding into his mind through his eyelids. He sat up and tried to shake the sleep out of his head. He’d been locked up for just over a week, ever since he’d told that doctor where his syringe full of hormones was going to end up if he didn’t “step right the hell off.” Now the door was agape and the emergency lights were on. He slapped himself lightly on both cheeks to make certain he was awake before stepping out.
There was no guard, no one at all as far as he could see, only pulsing red light and open doorways. Now, that was odd. Those doors would ordinarily have been closed. It was then that a voice came in over the telecom, all panic and fluster:
“All security personnel to the armory! This is not a drill! Non-essential crewmembers are to clear the corridors, this is not a drill! I repeat…”
“Hmm.” It might have been because he was drowsy, but he felt detached from the proceedings, more curious than alarmed. He went over to the nearest telecom and punched in the number for E block’s security station with one hand and covered his left ear with the other.
“What’s the situation up there?”
He didn’t recognize the voice on the other end. He sounded young and must have been little more than a pup, someone yet to take his first cold sleep. “Someone’s hacked the door codes! C block and deck seven are heading for the armory and all the security stations are locked down! We’re trapped!”
“Yeah?” Ben said, smiling faintly. “How does it feel?”
“Sir?”
“How does it feel to be trapped?”
“
What are you talking about?” the young constable asked. “Who is this?”
He didn’t answer, but walked away from the telecom without turning it off; the junior on the other end kept right on talking even as Ben passed out of earshot. Somewhere nearby, the next hallway over, maybe, someone screamed before being silenced.
What had happened was plain enough. He remembered the way Yakub’s workstation (or one he was meant to think was Yakub’s) had seemed to appear suddenly in Mastema’s claws, like sleight-of-hand. It would have been easy to make the switch in that darkness. He had never really confirmed that the workstation he destroyed was the right one, had he? He grinned to himself and nodded approvingly at the ploy. It had all been for show.
It was surprising, however, that Mastema had managed to decode the alphabet in such a short space of time. It may have been the case that a would-be suicide had offered to help in exchange for Mastema’s “services.” An illustrated children’s textbook would have been enough. Ultimately, it didn’t matter how it had been done: it was done and now there would be consequences.
It seemed to Ben that Mastema would come to him first, a visit to its so-called friend, maybe a little payback for that incident with the bolt rifle. If it had mastered the computer to the point where it could use a decryption AI, then learning the whereabouts of a given crew member would be like child’s play. It was too big to cram into a regular elevator carriage, though; it would have to use the freight elevators. There was one a mere stone’s throw from where he was standing and, sure enough, he saw by the numbers displayed above the doors that it was active, coming up.
Ben stripped away his clothes as he watched the numbers tick. It seemed the proper thing to do, somehow. At last, his grey world would see a splash of red. Four decks to go. Three. Two…
“The dream is over,” he said. The doors chimed and opened.
LASSIE, GO HOME!, by Jaleta Clegg
