Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  “But where is his arm? It’s not always here!” I said, but then I instantly regretted my words when I saw the depressed, shrinking look on Chen’s face.

  I was still struggling to believe what was happening: when Chen and I had gotten stranded in another dimension and he had gotten hurt there, that wound up an even weirder experience than I’d thought. What the fuck was next?

  *

  I finally said to Chen that he should go rest in his and May’s apartment on the first maintenance deck; Chen left with Shirley and Nellie a moment later. Then I spoke with Jim, alone.

  I fell back hard into my black captain’s chair and said, “Chen has only recently gotten married. He’s my friend and my primary pilot. If you tell me there’s nothing you can do for him, I’m going to kick you off this ship. What the fuck are you here for?”

  “Just to keep an eye on things,” Jim said in his flat way.

  “As in, keep an eye on us and on what we know?”

  His head shook, slowly. “No. That’s not true. I really am sorry for what’s happened to Chen.” Jim looked down at his device again. “We’re working on coming up with options as a treatment—”

  His voice broke off because Geena had just walked onto the bridge. She hadn’t been here before when the extra crew had shown up to check on Chen.

  “What’s going on?” Geena asked now, her blond-haired head shifting back and forth between me and Jim. “May was flying up the steps, crying. I ran into Shirley and she told me Chen’s been injured.”

  I shook my head fast. “He’s not injured. He’s developed a problem with his injury from our Rintu trek.”

  Geena’s mouth made a large O, and her brown eyes fell on Jim again, and softened slightly, as they would usually do when they were fixed on him.

  Inwardly, I sighed and groaned; outwardly, I told Jim to keep working on Chen’s problem. I wanted to speak with Geena alone, and I was hoping Jim would get the message in the hard eyes I turned on him now.

  However, he didn’t budge from near my chair. Instead, he said, “I’ve told you that I lost contact with the Keepers for weeks. That I got in touch with Thura today is good timing.”

  “Isn’t it,” I said, my voice coming out a little suspicious-sounding.

  An abrupt sigh from Jim now. “They were doing legitimate, very important work elsewhere while we were on Earth. I do not maintain constant contact with them.”

  “Well, maybe you should. Maybe then someone would have noticed what was happening to Chen’s arm.”

  Since Jim had come onto my ship as a crewmember, he’d stopped wearing an orange worker-suit and had started wearing normal human clothes—and now his back in his brown shirt straightened. “Having Keeper material inside you is an honor.”

  “I think the jury’s out on that, and it’s Chen’s right to determine if there’s any ‘honor’ in this. Now,” I said in a harder way, “I need to speak to Geena, alone.”

  Jim nodded, but, I thought I saw a small frown around his mouth as he walked off the bridge—and I realized then that he had barely looked at Geena the whole time the three of us had been speaking.

  When I turned back to her, I could tell by her drooping shoulders that the conversation had upset her. Unfortunately, I had to query her now anyway. “Do you think Jim’s telling the truth?”

  Geena’s brown eyes shot to my green ones—and then her head jerked into a nod, her messy blond curls shifting up and down against the collar or her white shirt. “He was never a dishonest person, and I don’t get that from him now either.”

  “Neither do I, unfortunately,” I said on a frown. “I wish he was lying about Chen’s arm, and it would just right itself back to being human. I suspected that what happened on Rintu wasn’t over yet. That would have been too easy.”

  Geena’s eyes seemed to have slipped back into herself, and her mouth sagged a little, from the weight of disappointment, apparently.

  I couldn’t help frowning again. “The worker training’s not going well, huh?”

  She pressed a hand to her forehead. “He’s pretty much stopped bothering training me because I suck at it. There are too many distractions here, and he’s not a trainer. He told me he’s really just responsible for representing the Keepers to other species—he’s like a diplomat—”

  Geena stopped talking because my loud bark of laughter interrupted her. “If I ever wondered whether the Keepers have common sense, I now have my answer. Who put him in charge of socializing with others?!”

  Geena was shaking her head and rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. “He said Kostas did.”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head.

  “He does make me wonder sometimes why I ever got involved with him. But I’ve known him for so long—at least I knew the Jim he was before all of this.” Geena spread her arms, then dropped them, seemingly in defeat.

  I felt bad for her; I felt really bad for May, who was no doubt upstairs with her husband now. Her husband and his non-human arm.

  I closed my eyes and sighed, but Geena wasn’t privy to my thoughts; she apparently thought I meant my sigh only toward her situation with Jim. “I’m sorry, Lydia—” she said now “—I feel like I’ve made extra complications on here—drama—”

  My eyes snapped open. “Don’t worry about it. It hasn’t affected your doing your job, or my opinion of you. You have enough to worry about, between the dining room and dealing with Jim so much directly.” I looked at her eyes more closely. Then I said, in a softer voice: “Sometimes in life, you just can’t get everything you want.” Her eyes closing now, she nodded, soft and slow. “The universe is so big,” I continued, “and there are so many other men out there….”

  Her eyes opened. “I know, but I’m not looking for a one-night stand. I’ll be forty in a few years. I’m too old to keep up the pace of doing one-night stands around the galaxy.” She twisted her hands together. “When I saw him again on Rintu—I don’t know. Something happened. That I lost him hurt more now than it did then.”

  “Hindsight can do that. So can nostalgia, especially in middle age. I still think you should look elsewhere. Maybe what you’re feeling isn’t as real as you think. I feel really bad that you’re kind of forced to deal with him now, because he was kind of forced to come onto this ship. But, well, maybe that’s changed—is he contributing anything here? Do you think so?” Several expressions whipped across Geena’s face—expressions that contradicted each other. I raised a quick hand, said, “No, don’t answer that. I know you can’t easily do that. Tell you what—I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but both Babs and that guy Cambridge from Genteran Station are on board. The cargo crew should be done soon with the delivery. I thought maybe you could get dinner on the tables for right after that—can you?”

  Geena straightened up and smiled a little as she said, “No problem, Captain.”

  *

  “I take a nap for a few hours and all hell breaks loose,” Gary said to me later.

  We were in his room on the first quarters-deck; my room was down the hall, and the quarters here were in a separate wing from the dining area. Both wings ran along the center of the ship because parts of the long side edges of the Demeter were blocked off behind walls and fields: those areas housed the top retractable nozzles at the front and the back of the ship, which nozzles extended from engineering upward.

  The night before, Gary had been up late fixing our new reactor-bot in engineering; the bot wasn’t made as well as the one we’d lost on Genteran, so he had been working on overhauling nearly all of the new bot’s programming.

  No matter that he had gotten more sleep today, his face still looked tired to me now, and when he’d just finished showering, which should have perked him up. He moved over to his closet to pick out a change of clothes, and I walked into his bathroom to pee in his toilet, and wash my hands and face at his sink.

  When I finally walked out into his bedroom area again, he was dressed in a cream-colored fitted shirt and brown jea
ns. I sighed as I looked over his body—and as I remembered that I was going to the dining area in my wrinkled shirt and leggings. I wasn’t in the necessary state of mind to change my clothes….

  Now I told Gary, “What you said before—I wouldn’t characterize today as a hell for everybody. But it is for Chen and May, yeah.”

  Before I had come up here, I talked with May in the cargo bay; her eyes were red from crying then, but, true to her competent form, she and her workers had made such great progress on the unloading that they were done in record time—which meant we could lift off very soon. However, I decided not to do that for two reasons: I wanted everyone to have a pleasant, non-vibrating dinner in the dining room, and I still hadn’t decided what to do about Babs and Cambridge.

  On my way up from the cargo bay, I ran into Karen, who told me she’d finished working on repairing the vacuum-like device that was used for flushing the curon engine. Since then, she’d been keeping Babs and Cambridge company in the lounge near the dining room. My crew and I rarely used the lounge because most of the time we would gravitate to nearer the food. But now that there were more people on board than normal, spending more time in the spacious lounge made sense….

  Gary and I finally left his room and walked to the lounge; I stood in the doorway, looking inside the big round room. It was decorated in mostly silver, white and black. It was more modern-looking and therefore colder-looking than the dining area, but when the lounge was filled with people, as it was now, that certainly warmed it up; it seemed that half my crew were here—to see Babs, apparently.

  She was sitting at a round table with a bunch of the crew, and, going on her flushed, surprised face, she hadn’t expected such a warm welcome.

  As Gary and I stepped into the room, Geena came up behind us and said, “I’ve retracted the booths and set up three long tables in the dining room, so we could all sit together, Captain. I think that would be a good idea.”

  “So do I!” I said, turning around and smiling at her.

  *

  With most of the dining-room booths pushed out of the way and into the walls, the dining room looked like a big long hall—with three tables in a line down the center of it. The tabletops were covered with dinnerware and silverware and a bunch of centerpieces, containing whole fruits and edible flowers.

  I smiled at my crew as they began to fill the seats; Shirley sat between Babs and Cambridge. Shirley had been in the lounge with them, and, apparently, she still couldn’t stop talking about her trip to Earth. She’d been doing it ever since we’d left there.

  “It was amazing!” she said to Babs now. “A little sad too—the way other animals are usually living on separate acreage from humans because many humans had behaved terribly to them.”

  “It’s better for everybody,” Babs said. “The people on Earth can make environmental repairs without disturbing even more sensitive areas where other animals are breeding.”

  Shirley nodded at her. “That’s one good thing about space travel: we’ve been able to expand into places where there was no life. Maybe it’s more environmentally responsible. At least I like to think so—assuming we haven’t been disturbing anywhere’s evolution—like we’ve prevented new life from developing,” Shirley finished, her mouth finally becoming a crooked line across her face.

  “We’re doing the best we can to live better now,” I said, sitting down to the right of Gary and across from Babs. “We’re clearly not the only species who migrates to other planets. That seems to be a habit of living things when they have the technology to do it.”

  “Will Chen be eating with us?” someone asked from one of the other tables. I raised my head to look over my crew, but I couldn’t see who had spoken. Several conversations were going on around the tables now, and Geena and Brayburn were laying platters of food and drink onto the tabletops.

  I grabbed a bottle of wine, opened it and poured some for Gary, then for me. My hand shook on my narrow blue glass as I sipped the sweet dark liquid. It made my tongue tingle, and I took a deep breath as I lowered my glass to the table.

  “Chen!” several people suddenly said in a happy way, and my head shot to my right, toward the front area of the dining room, where Chen and May had just walked in. May was wearing a dark jumpsuit and a small smile on her face; Chen had changed his shirt to a long-sleeved black one, and the smile on his face was a shaky one.

  I got up from my seat fast, rushed over to one of the vacant chairs, then brought it to the front short end of my table, perpendicular to my seat; Gary took a cue from my behavior and got another chair for May to sit beside Chen.

  “Hey, thanks,” he said to Gary, Chen’s shaky smile widening.

  My crew grew quieter while Chen and May sat down, but someone finally turned on music with a driving beat, and I could both hear and feel the room relax again.

  Back in my seat, I smiled at Chen and quickly squeezed his left hand with my right. “I’m glad you came down—the wine’s great, by the way.”

  “Good,” Chen said, “because I really need it right now.”

  I nodded fast at him and poured him a glass of the wine, struggling to keep my hand steady; I really didn’t want him to see me shaking. Unfortunately, he did.

  “You all right, Captain?” he asked me on a frown.

  “Oh,” I said, waving at the air as if nothing was going on with me. “I just want you all to enjoy this. We don’t often get a break to all sit together!”

  A bunch of my crewmembers lifted their wine glasses my way and said, “Cheers, Captain!” And I smiled and laughed.

  May was smiling, too, as she pulled apart a piece of bread over her dish. “Matt should be here shortly. He wanted to make one last pass over the hangar before he locked the bay door.”

  Babs raised her head and looked at me. “Oh—Lydia—Cambridge and I didn’t get our bags from the lockers in the station.”

  I shook a hand at the air for the second time that night. “Don’t worry—Matt can let you out after dinner to go get your stuff. But there’s really no rush because I’ve decided to stay the night here.”

  “When did you decide that?” Gary asked me.

  “Just now,” I replied, tilting my glass toward him, then toward one of the full wine bottles. “No flying tonight. We’re too busy enjoying ourselves.”

  Babs sat forward toward me. “Thanks, Lydia—for everything!”

  I was smiling widely now. “You’re welcome. You and Cambridge can stay for however long you want to work here. I’ve just decided that too,” I said, surprising myself, yet somehow feeling that taking on these two both new and old people was the correct thing for me to do.

  “Cheers again, Lydia!” Cambridge said on a grin before he drank from his wine glass.

  “We’ll work out the details tomorrow,” I said, smiling back at him. “I need to let the two of you in on some important things, but no more work-talk now—ah, here’s Matt. Everything all right?”

  “You bet, Captain,” Matt said, grinning, as he sat in one of the free chairs at my table. He was quite tall and really large-framed, and the seat was too small for him to be comfortable.

  I called to Geena, asking her if she could bring him one of the armchairs from the lounge.

  As Geena walked out of the room, Karen walked in, and her blue eyes were shining tonight. Steve came in behind her, carrying the armchair for Matt. When Steve slid the chair over to him, Steve’s head turned toward Shirley, but there was no room near her. The two of them often ate together—

  A fork dropped to the floor near my legs—Chen’s fork.

  Chen was right-handed, but tonight he had been eating with his left, good hand.

  I picked up his fork from the floor, and as I straightened up, I leaned near to him and asked, “Your hand okay?” I didn’t have to say which hand.

  He nodded at me fast. “I’m just—I’m just trying out using my left hand more, like when I had the cast on, just in case….”

  I saw something in his eyes n
ow: worry. “You’re not going to lose the use of your right arm. I won’t let that happen. But, Chen, I’m thinking that maybe we can drop you and May on Aper-Minor for a rest—or maybe back on Earth.”

  He laughed a little. “Captain, again it feels like you’re trying to get rid of me!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Come on now. I want you to be comfortable—that’s all.”

  “I think I’d just like to keep working, you know? I don’t want this to mean that much.”

  I flushed at his words: I had done the wrong thing. I had been trying to accommodate his new problem, when, clearly, he just wanted to forget about it.

  I nodded at him now, managing a small smile; then the awkward moment between us passed, and everyone at the table, including Chen, began to enjoy the dinner even more.

  *

  When the dinner was over, it was still pretty early. Babs and Cambridge went back into the station to get their bags, and most of my crew either remained in the dining room using the eating tables as game tables, or they went into the lounge to chat, watch movies and have coffee.

  I, however, was standing in the lounge yawning, but I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to go into my cabin and shower, then spend quality time with Gary….

  When I had finally finished showering in there, I walked out into my bedroom, where Gary was waiting on my bed—a naked Gary, in other words.

  I hadn’t drunk much alcohol at dinner because I didn’t want to be out-of-it bombed now. I wanted to be close to Gary. No matter the great dinner we had just enjoyed, I had been feeling a bit raw all day….

  I slid onto my bed, on top of Gary. The hairs on his chest tickled my skin, and I laughed a little, then wrapped my arms around him. “You sexy hairy beast, you,” I said, feeling his rumble-of-laughter response.