The View From the Seventh Layer

by Kevin Brockmeier

  Nothing had changed while he was away. The science labs, the corridors, the onboard lighting—they were all the same. The Keptin ate his meals in the mess hall. He practiced his target shooting on the phaser range. He played cards in the recreation lounge. He knew exactly where he would find his crew when they were off duty: his science officer would be meditating in his quarters, the doctor reading in the ship's library, the helmsman pruning his plants in the botany lab. At night, as he lay with his head pressed against his pillow, he could hear the quiet, pulsing hum of the warp nacelles through the hull of the ship. The sound reminded him of the ocean waves along the California coastline, just a few blocks from the Academy. He would fall asleep imagining what it must have felt like to be one of those fish that lived in the shallows, sailing in and out with the changing of the tide.

  In short, he became absorbed again in the details of his life. The weeks moved forward with a singular swiftness. One day he was surmounting a few minor difficulties to deliver a shipment of vaccine to the Tau Ceti system, and the next he was evading a fleet of battle cruisers on his way to a rendezvous with the starship Potemkin. He attended a performance of a Shakespeare play, led a landing party through the rocky cliffs of Planet M-220, and docked at a star-base for deflector repairs. He challenged Commander S. to a game of three-dimensional chess, and when the Keptin lost, as he usually did, he congratulated the Commander with a glass of spice tea, though in the privacy of his heart he had to admit that he found the look of joyless accomplishment on his face infuriating.

  He was sure that he would stop thinking of Sirius soon, and yet, as the months passed, he realized he was dwelling on the memory of his visit there more and more. He would be riding the turbolifts or standing over the tactical console on the bridge, and suddenly he would hear the fountain trickling in the plaza, smell the strong vanilla scent of the perfumery, see the shadows of the trees swaying like the long necks of water birds, and it would seem to him that he was there again, on the Pleasure Planet. He knew that he had been bored for much of his stay there, bored and listless, slowly growing drunk as he drowsed in the heat of the multiple suns, but in his memory the resort was purged of all its tedium and hollow agreeability and it became something extraordinary. There was the Earth restaurant across the street from his hotel, for instance, which served the best grilled mushrooms he had ever eaten so far from home. There was the gentle breeze that cooled him as he walked along the beach. And most of all there was Raïssa. He thought of her constantly. He would look back on the afternoon they spent walking beneath the waterfalls together and remember how the mist had made her skin glisten when she crossed into the light, how her voice had sounded in the stillness of the mountain trail, how she had stopped by the chain of pools just to tell him that it was her favorite time of day. He would remember these things, and he would smile to himself. He couldn't help it. He would smile again as he thought about the way she rose onto her toes the first time he kissed her, as though she wanted him to toss her into the air. Sometimes his collar would kink against the back of his neck when he turned his head, and he would imagine he felt the touch of her fingers there, tickling him from behind, her pet tribbles purring in the background as she gave him a massage. Could it really be that he was destined never to see her again? He had been so brusque with her, so unresponsive, but for the life of him he couldn't remember why. When he thought of her now, he felt nothing but love. “You're a good man,” she had said to him. “You're so kind to me, so tender,” and he knew that it wasn't true. She was the kind one, she was the good one. But now that she was gone, he wanted to be the man she had deluded herself into believing he was. He wanted a second chance.

  He began to dream about her. He imagined they were married and raising two children, who were also named James and Raïssa, and the tenor of his dreams followed him into the waking world. Once he was on a shuttlecraft with his chief engineer, embarking toward a vessel that was in need of transporter repair, when he found himself fantasizing about what it would have been like if he had never become an officer and she had never married her husbands back on Arcturus. The engineer had to call his name several times before he heard him. “Sir? What are your orders, sir? Earth to James.”

  The Keptin was embarrassed. “Full impulse, Scotty. Maintain current heading.”

  “Aye, sir,” Scotty answered, and though he did not say anything more, the Keptin could tell that he was wondering what was wrong with him.

  There was no one he could talk to about Raïssa. Sometimes, walking through the recreation lounge, he would overhear some of the ensigns bragging about their romantic conquests and he would long to join in, to say to them, “I met the most amazing woman on Sirius last summer. The way she looked in the morning, with her hair all in a tangle—my God, if only you knew,” but it would have been a breach of decorum to mention it, as well as a breach of integrity. He began to experience stomach cramps—hard, lancing pains that seemed to come from out of nowhere. He scheduled a visit to sick bay, but the doctor couldn't find anything wrong with him. He gripped the Keptin's shoulder as he was leaving. “Jim?”

  “What is it, Doctor?”

  “I say this to you as the ship's chief medical officer. You should take it easy on yourself.”

  “Understood.”

  What was wrong with him? He had experienced some of the finest moments of his life onboard his ship, and yet somehow it wasn't enough. Everything seemed thinner than it had before, as insubstantial as tissue, as though he could take hold of the world he knew and with one good tug it would all fall apart. The whole of space was visible outside his window, and yet it was entirely without meaning.

  So it was that when ordered to take the ship to a cometary cluster that was passing within a light year of the Arcturus System, he hesitated only a moment before directing the navigator to make a short detour. “Bearing three twenty mark fifteen,” he ordered, and then, “At the helm, Lieutenant. Warp Seven.”

  “You realize that if you follow that heading, you'll be taking the ship to Arcturus,” the science officer told him.

  “I'm aware of that, Mr. S.”

  “Arcturus is not on a direct course with the cometary cluster, Captain.”

  “We should have time to make a brief stop.”

  The Commander raised an eyebrow but made no further comment.

  The Keptin wasn't sure what he would say to Raïssa. Perhaps there was nothing to be said at all. He knew only that he wanted to see her again.

  She had given him her address before they parted on Sirius, saying, “I'll never go anywhere, and you'll never be able use it, but I'll feel better if you know where I am,” so he was able to find her house without difficulty. It was constructed of a local stone he had never seen before, red with a powdery-looking texture, the blocks fragmented with dusky green veins that he mistook for creepers of moss at first, though they were actually streaks of clay. It was a carnival house, he thought, twice the size of the other buildings on the block, the house of a person who had a great deal of money to spend but very little taste—her first husband, the cargo trader, he presumed.

  And yet the idea that she was there inside it somewhere, padding through the kitchen, perhaps, or sitting behind the yellow window on the second floor, gave the house an aura of mystery and fascination, as though some formative religious ritual were being enacted behind its walls, a sacrament from which centuries of observance would descend. To the Keptin it was the most important building in the city. He considered knocking on the door, but it occurred to him that one of her husbands might answer, and he didn't know how he would explain himself if that happened. Also, he couldn't help but think that simply arriving on her front porch after so long, waiting with his hands behind his back like a salesman or letter carrier, lacked the proper sense of drama. He wanted to see the changes that took place in her face when he appeared someplace she would never have expected to find him. Only then, he thought, would he know what to say to her.

  As he stood a
cross the street trying to decide what to do, a woman came out of the house hauling three large black plastic trash bags. A few tribbles fell out of the neck of one. She stooped over to jam them back inside. She was straightening onto her feet again when he approached her. “Excuse me. Can you tell me whether the lady of the house is in?”

  “You don't really think anyone would be at home on a day like this, now do you?”

  “Why?” he asked. “What's happening today?”

  The trash bags were wiggling in her grip, and he could hear a faint gobbling noise coming from inside them. “It's the first day of the festival, of course. Miss Raïssa is there along with the Misters. Nobody would miss the first day of the festival, only a poor cleaning woman like myself.”

  He thanked the woman and set out at a brisk walk. At the end of the block, he caught a hovertrain that ferried him over the city and dropped him off at the festival gate. It was an outdoor event with rides and games and concession stands where craft vendors sold jewelry and clay pots from open-walled tents. Above him he could see rows of lights glowing by the hundreds, tied to thin white strings that crisscrossed over the pathways in a jiggling net. A man in a credit-exchange booth called out to the passing crowds. A barker in a striped red suit stood next to a wheel of fortune, spinning it around so that it clacked to a stop after one or two lazy rotations. A child ran past the Keptin licking a confection of bright yellow sap from a stick. All in all he was reminded of the state fairs he had attended as a boy in Iowa.

  It took him more than an hour of wandering from tent to tent before he finally spotted Raïssa. She was standing between two men at a ring-tossing booth, an older gentleman, with thin legs and a barrel-shaped chest, who must have been her first husband, and a younger one, with a wooden crutch under his arm, who must have been her second. While the first husband paid for a set of rings, the Keptin watched Raïssa take the other's sleeve and point out something she had seen across the distance of the fairway. She leaned into him and smiled. For a moment the Keptin was convinced that she had fallen back in love with the man, that she had forgotten their time together and that he was now dead to her, but then her husband nodded dourly and turned away, and the tiredness seeped back into her posture. The effect was so familiar to him that he regained his confidence. He moved into Raïssa's line of vision and winked at her. She brought her hand to her throat in astonishment, took a half-step back, and dropped the carved wooden sehlat she was carrying. She was about to say something, it seemed, but then she looked in terror at her two husbands and quickly back at the Keptin with a nervous, excited, bewildered, appraising glance.

  He motioned for her to follow him. He kept walking across the lane, weaving past a cigarette trader and a group of Rigelian tourists. Then he stopped behind a refreshment booth. After a moment Raïssa came after him.

  “What are you doing here? You can't be here.”

  His heart was pounding. “Don't be angry with me. I had to see you.”

  “Angry? I'm not angry.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she made a gesture he had never seen her make before, cupping his chin in her palm and shaking her head. “But if my husbands find out about you—if anyone sees me with you and tells them—oh God, what are you doing here?”

  “I've asked myself the same question, believe me. I thought I would know what to say when I saw you, but now . . .”

  “Where's your ship? Your crew?”

  “I left them waiting in orbit.”

  She sounded crestfallen. “You're not staying then. You're going to leave me.”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  “Yes, oh yes, James, but you can't. It's too hard. It would hurt too many people. I've wanted to see you again ever since the day we left Sirius. You're the only thing I've thought about. A hundred thousand times I was sure I glimpsed you out of the corner of my eye, but it was always somebody else, just a trick of the light. Those have been the only meaningful moments in my life since I came home—the times when I thought I saw you and my heart started racing.”

  It was late afternoon, and the longneedles were biting, but the Keptin hardly noticed them. As he stared at Raïssa, she seemed to become the still point of the swirling crowd, all those vendors and carnival barkers and endlessly moving families. In that same instant he understood that he was in love with her. He wondered how it had happened. She was no different from the thousands of other women he had known, or so it seemed, and yet the sound of her voice, the globe-shaped earrings that bumped against her neck when she turned her head too quickly, the split-second smile she gave whenever he said her name, meant everything in the world to him. To think that when they said good-bye on Sirius he had imagined he would soon forget her, and that he had greeted the prospect not with dread but a feeling of liberation. He kissed her, and once again he felt himself becoming two separate people—one infinitely heavy, the other as thin and light as air. But she broke the kiss and pulled away.

  “We can't. There are too many people.”

  He felt a terrible cold sensation of emptying out, as though everything inside him, his heart and his blood and his bones, had been phased suddenly out of his body, dematerializing in a long stream of matter. “I don't want never to see you again,” he said.

  It was the closest he had ever allowed himself to come to a declaration of love.

  “Then I'll visit you. I'll charter a ship, and I'll visit you. But my husbands will be looking for me soon. You have to leave now,” she pleaded. She squeezed his hand, holding it to her chest for a second. “I don't see how either one of us will ever be happy again. But I promise I'll come, James. I promise,” and she hurried off into the motion of the fair.

  For a moment the sunlight struck her orange dress from behind, and he could see her legs scissoring away beneath the fabric. He watched as she waded into the crowd, becoming a lifted neck and a curved wing of shoulder, the few stray pieces of her he was able to glimpse through the interspaces of all the other bodies. Then finally, inevitably, she disappeared. iv.

  IV.

  There was a part of him that had never returned from his visit to Sirius, a certain presence of mind he had never been able to recapture, and following his trip to Arcturus, he began to wonder if he would ever see that part again. For some reason he had imagined that it would be easier to rejoin his life onboard after he spoke to Raïssa again, but it soon became obvious to him that he was mistaken. The only time he was entirely at home with himself was when she was onboard the ship with him.

  She was able to visit him a few weeks after he saw her at the fair, and again a month later, and after that whenever he was traveling close enough to the Arcturus System for her to make the trip without arousing the suspicion of her husbands. Though he could not conceal her presence from the crew, he made it clear that he was reluctant to discuss her with them. It was not that he was ashamed of their relationship, or uneasy about its consequences, but that she had become the most precious thing in his life on a foundation he only barely understood. He had adopted the habit of silence as a convenience when he believed he would never see her again, and he was afraid that changing that habit, changing anything at all, would tear down some secret bearing wall and leave the two of them in ruins.

  He was always surprised by the feeling of loneliness that came over him after she left. She gave him one of her tribbles as a going-away present—to keep him company, she said—but though it was soft in his hands and it purred whenever he stroked it, it was a feeble substitute, and he shut it in his spare room along with a few large bags of grain and forgot about it. Whenever Raïssa was gone, he missed her, and whenever she was onboard the ship, he thought about her continuously, anticipating the moment when he could hand control of the bridge over to the duty officer and meet her in his quarters or the recreation lounge. What was she doing? he wondered. What was she doing right now? Was she painting in the art studio? Was she thinking of him?

  These were the questions he was asking himself the afternoon an unusual ener
gy jet appeared a few thousand kilometers off the ship's port bow. He looked at the image in the main viewer. “It seems to be some kind of complex plasma pattern,” Lieutenant U. said.

  “Or it could be a noncorporeal life form,” proposed Commander S. “May I suggest we scan the phenomenon with an ionizing beam.”

  The Keptin ordered his helmsman to make the scan. After the computer had completed its analysis, he told him, “Energy scan shows no sign of sentient activity, Captain,” and the Keptin said, “Nevertheless, we should exhaust every option. Lieutenant U., open a channel to the phenomenon on all hailing frequencies.”

  And all the while he was wondering whether Raïssa was reading a book or watching the stars pass outside the window, napping in his bed or taking a sonic shower.

  He had another life hidden beneath the surface of his life as an officer, and it seemed to him that that other life contained the best part of himself. He was a smaller man there and a better one—a man who experienced everything not with more depth but with more exactness, as though his ego had been polished away until it exhibited the world like a fine lens. And yet this better man was concealed from everyone around him, concealed even from Raïssa, though he was fastened to her by a thousand strings. The Keptin was someone other than who he appeared to be when he was striding through the ship with his phaser in his belt and his shoes tight on his feet, filling every corridor with the sound of his voice. His crew did not really know him. Neither did his family, and neither did his closest friends. He shone at his brightest only when no one was watching—and so, he presumed, did everyone else.

  When he got back to his quarters that evening, Raïssa was laying out a meal of roast fowl and egg broth. Her face was pale, her features tight with sadness, and for a moment she would not meet his eye. She put the last plate on the table, came over to the bed where he was taking off his shoes, and embraced him. It was the third day of her visit, and they both knew she would be going home soon.