by F P Adriani
“Why?” I asked her as she passed me. I followed her and my crew back through the arched doorway to the room with the cushions, and then Kostas rushed around the crowd of us, so she could lead us through another doorway to yet another cavernous room.
This one was emptier than the cushion-room, however, with only one table and a few cushions on the floor in here—ah, someone must have done something from somewhere to change the space because the wide wall in front of us began sliding along the floor. I thought we’d find another room beyond the opening, but what we actually found was a gigantic view of space, as if the Monument had just been opened to the outside.
I stumbled back from the view; so did my crew. For a heart-pounding instant, it seemed we’d be sucked out.
“How did you do that?” I said, spit flying out my shocked mouth. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”
Kostas flashed me a twisted mouth. “Dramatic as well as imaginative.”
She turned back to the opening, and my crew and I quickly calmed down: clearly, if we had just been exposed to space, we would have been dying by now. But we were fine.
“Give us a closer view, Devin,” Kostas said, although I couldn’t see Devin anywhere in the room.
I did, however, see something else: a jagged bright spot on the right side of the view of the cosmos. As I stared at it, the bright spot suddenly expanded to fill most of the wall, revealing that the spot was actually a massive, cubic structure. It was a powdery gray color, and there were deep, uneven grooves over its surface, as if someone had been maniacally carving up the giant object with a spoon. The view suddenly moved into a close-up shot—there was movement on one edge of the cube’s front, and then the sparkling silhouette of a Keeper became clear.
“You complained about your ship,” Kostas said, “and I’m sorry for the damage landing in here caused. But there was zero subterfuge on our part. We simply messed up with the numbers we gave you because we’ve been distracted by something else. This—” her hand jerked toward the opening “—is what we’ve been distracted by.
“The device you’re looking at is an old weapon. We towed it to inside the anomaly so we can take it apart without being observed. The weapon will no longer work—as a whole, I mean. But the parts—the parts can be used to make other weapons. We must carefully dismantle the cube down to its atomic components by hand, because if we use more advanced technology on it, we’re afraid we might lose control of it and it will begin spinning away from our grasp and into another dimension. Though the cube will no longer work as a whole mechanism, it still has a massive amount of energy locked inside, some of which is what we Keepers call ‘pure energy’.
“Dismantling the structure will take us a few more days. You can see one Keeper working on it there, but, right now, the cube is actually inside a complex dimensional field, and there are about three-thousand Keepers going in and out of it.”
I couldn’t take my eyes from the scene out in space. “I hope you Keepers won’t be putting the remnants of this in The Hall Of Devices.”
Kostas tossed me a look. “Of course not. We’ll be recycling the atoms.”
“Into what?” someone asked.
“Into energy. The atoms are not a normal form of atom, and they will still possess nearly all of the energy of the former cube, but the energy will be dispersed among various containment fields so will be safe to be around. We Keepers can disassociate matter of any kind down to its most fundamental components at the smallest of measures, and we can obtain enormous amounts of energy that way. This is how we power many of our structures. But, we’ll discuss more of that later, once you hopefully begin training here. Devin, close the opening.”
When the view of the cube began fading, I sighed, feeling a bit disappointed. Then I began thinking about that training word….
“So, are you going to take us on that tour?” I finally asked.
And Kostas replied, “I wondered if seeing the cube might be enough for you to get the picture.”
“I’m starting to,” I said, frowning slightly, but to myself really.
*
Kostas had made the correct move in showing me the cube: my first glimpse of it had somehow changed something inside of me; or, at this point, I was so worn out by recent events, I was too tired to fight anything anymore.
I asked Kostas to take us on a tour of the Monument later. “We really do need to get some rest,” I said.
Kostas led us back toward the hangar now. As we moved, from on my left, Chen said, “So, Kostas, how big is this ship really? It seems like you barely took us anywhere.”
“You’re correct,” Kostas said.
I glanced at Chen, my eyes falling on his right arm. His dark sleeve covered the area, and I realized now that I’d totally forgotten about his problem. It was on the tip of my tongue to demand more answers from Kostas about that, but the rest of my crew was here, and I didn’t want to embarrass Chen.
Gary came up on my right side, very close, and he must have seen something in my profile. “What is it, Lydia?” he whispered. “You look confused.”
“Aren’t you?” I asked him.
A sigh was his only response.
*
When Kostas and my crew and I reached the hangar where the Demeter was, I turned to Kostas and said, “There’s something I don’t understand: I know you were busy elsewhere, but why the hell didn’t you just pull my ship in with a tractor beam?”
“Actually, our gravity field did do some of that, but, in our distraction over the cube, we neglected to adjust for the size of your ship. It’s not something we’ve ever needed to do: we have other ships inside this one, but they are quite small. We do not entertain company here. We have never before accepted occupied alien crafts into our city-ships.”
“Thanks for calling me an alien, Kostas,” I said, my mouth tilting into an ironic slant.
Her head turned my way more. “You know that I’m often speaking for the Keepers.”
“I was actually trying to make a joke and lighten the mood between us.”
Her head slowly nodded at me now, the dark waves of her hair shimmering like satin in the golden light from above…. I lifted my head toward the light now, but my eyes couldn’t seem to pinpoint a light-source inside the murky field of yellow above us.
I shrugged, my eyes finally turning toward Babs, who was standing on the Demeter’s ramp with her gaze focused on Kostas—like, really focused on her. Babs’ lips had fallen open. She must have noticed I’d been watching her: she quickly moved her eyes to another part of the mammoth hangar.
“Well, we’re calling it a night,” I said on a sigh, turning back to Kostas. “I’m sure you’ll be here in the ‘morning’.”
“Yes,” Kostas said, nodding.
*
“What an insane day,” Babs said to me when we were in her new room on the Demeter. “Even when I was running around Genteran chasing the Ghost, I could go back to a station and things would be normal there—of course they were boring, too.”
I smirked. “Yeah, we haven’t had the boring problem on the Demeter in a long time.”
“Lydia, it looks like we’re all at a major, MAJOR crossroads here,” Babs said. Her two beige travel bags and her silver suitcase were on the bed, and she was removing clothes from the bags and stuffing them into the brown dresser on the side wall.
There was an easy chair with soft, red upholstery near me. I fell back onto that comfortable cushion, finally pressing a hand to my forehead. “I can’t speak for everybody on here. I don’t even know what to say to Gary about this.”
“I’m almost positive he’ll go wherever you go. I honestly don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner: you and Gary are meant for each other. I really wish I could find something like that,” Babs finished, and the sad tinge to her voice pulled my eyes up toward her.
“Babs, there are billions and billions and BILLIONS of people in the universe now. And half of those people are women.”
“
Yeah, but the problem is: most of them are straight. It’s harder when you’re not; right off the bat, the odds of your finding someone really compatible with you are smaller. There are a smaller number of possible personalities who’ll fit with yours. If you’re an oddball person and gay, your pool of mates to choose from winds up being pretty small. When relationships break up then, you don’t know if you’ll ever be in another one again.”
“Babs, everyone has that problem.”
She had been placing a t-shirt inside the dresser, but she nodded tiredly now. Then she walked back to her suitcase and removed a small, clear container. At first I only glanced at it, but something green inside it was shining so brightly that my eyes went to the container a second time and finally saw what looked like elongated pellets inside. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh,” Babs said, moving the container till it was closer to beneath the central track-lights on the ceiling. “These are stool samples from Genteran.”
My eyes widened. “Babs, you crazy lady, are you telling me you brought the turds of Genteran’s Ghost onto my ship?”
Babs cringed—then she laughed, loudly, and lifted her container a little in my direction before placing it on top of the dresser. “You’re gonna complain about that when we’re sitting on a city-ship with a bunch of monotone humans speaking for a race of sparkly aliens who want us to save the universe from a collapsing framework in space?”
“Well,” I said, “when you put it that way.” I rolled my eyes now, punctuating the motion with a slow head-shake. “The Keepers and the workers are truly unreal. And now they want me of all people to join them. You’re right: things can’t get any stranger at this point.”
“I must say, though, that Kostas—wow.” Babs sighed as she sat back on the edge of her bed. “What a gorgeous head of hair, and those cheekbones and eyebrows—she looks like an ancient Greek god.”
I just stared at Babs for a moment, because the person she had described didn’t seem like the Kostas I knew. But then, duh, I didn’t really know her.
I did know Babs, however. “Well,” I said again, “I must discourage you from any sexy thoughts there, Babs. It’s bad enough that Jim has driven Geena up a wall. If you know what’s good for you, don’t get involved with a worker—if they would even get involved with you. Of course that’s yet another reason why I don’t want to become one of them.”
“Me either,” Babs said, and she sighed again, running the fingers of both of her hands through her bob of dark hair, then over her temples, as if she had a headache.
I jumped off my chair. “Babs, it’s time for me to leave you alone. Get some sleep. I’ll know—and figure out more by morning.”
*
For once lately, a prediction of mine was spot on.
Gary spent that night with me in my cabin, and we talked for hours, hashing out the potential difficulties in whatever direction we now chose to go toward the future. But once I fell asleep and had slept for quite a lot of hours, I felt as if I could make a decision with a clearer head—and I felt like making a decision. I only hoped my crew felt the same.
As soon as I showered and got dressed, I went to my bridge and called everyone down to the cargo bay. However, right before I was about to leave the bridge, I walked back to my chair and turned on the front viewscreen.
I looked out at the hangar; it was still huge, it was still golden, and, as far as I could see, my ship was still the only one in the area.
When I finally walked out the bridge doorway and into the hall, I wondered if my looking at the hangar was because I had been hoping that yesterday had all been a dream, or if I had been hoping it wasn’t.
*
“I’m sorry, Captain, but I want to leave,” one of my crewmembers, John, said in a firm voice when we were finally inside the cargo bay.
I had hired him as a temporary worker before the Rintu trek; then I’d had to make him permanent. Now, he didn’t want to be a part of my ship at all.
He had been doing odd jobs in engineering; fortunately, Cambridge had joined my crew now, so I wasn’t worried about a loss of technical workers getting jobs done.
Still, John’s not wanting to stay on my ship bothered me—though this time I wasn’t bothered by a very personal attachment being broken up; John hadn’t been on my ship that long.
But, basically, I just never wanted a flow of people away from my ship for any reason. Once you’ve been inside one place for a long time and you’re completely dependant on it for your survival, you do develop a certain rapport with the others around you. When you lose some of them, the results of the equation you all make when you’re added together changes, and your workflow shifts….
I sighed, looking around the cargo bay; every single member of my ship was in here now, and for over two hours we had been discussing what to do about the Keeper situation. John wasn’t the only person who wanted to leave; Andrea from the cargo bay also didn’t want to work with the Keepers.
“They frighten me because I can’t understand them,” she said now.
“Maybe it’s just that you need to spend more time around them,” Shirley said, from right beside Andrea.
But Andrea only shook her brown-haired head rapidly. “I didn’t mean there’s some solution to that—I mean I don’t think we can understand them because we’re different species.”
“We might not be able to ever—you’re right,” Babs said. “But then how much do we really understand humans? Every once in a while, I look in a mirror and I don’t know who that chick with the fabulous slick black hair is.”
A few people laughed, and I smiled in Babs’ direction.
“I don’t find this funny,” Andrea said, and I really didn’t appreciate her sour tone, or her sour face. She’d been a member of my crew for a few years now, and I couldn’t recall her having been dourly uncooperative before. If she kept up with the attitude, I wouldn’t be sorry to see her go…. How could she even get out of here? That was the question.
“I don’t know,” Matt said from quite close to me. “I’ve slept on this now, and I’m wondering if I should give it more time on the city-ship—and I still don’t like the thought of the mind-wiping crap.”
“No one said your minds would be wiped if you left,” Kostas’ voice suddenly said into the cargo bay.
I frowned. “Can’t you just come in the room, with your whole self?”
“I didn’t want to do that without your permission,” she said, and I was glad that she’d said that.
“Open the door, Matt,” I said, and he walked over to one of the wall control-panels to open the outer bay hatch.
I watched Kostas stride up the ramp and into the bay. Her hair looked messier than yesterday, and one of her hands rubbed at her eyes, as if they were tired.
“If some of you want to leave now,” Kostas said as she lowered her hand, “you can leave on another ship—the Keepers do have a few human spacecraft you can use. Or, of course, you can take the Demeter.”
“No way,” I practically growled. Her respect before for my ship had made me glad; now she was giving out itineraries for it. “I give the orders here. And I’m not staying on this ship of yours without another way off.”
“I was only suggesting what the options are,” Kostas said, her mouth twisting at me a little. “And, as I’ve said, Captain Zarro, we have other Keeper ships inside this one.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how to operate those.” I moved closer to Kostas. “But that’s irrelevant at the moment, because here’s the thing: nearly everyone here wants to remain, so I’ve decided that I’ll try out working on the Monument. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. But, I’m telling you right now, Kostas: I’m sleeping in my own bed. And if we change our minds a few days from now or whenever, we want to be able to leave.”
Kostas nodded. “All right. As you wish.”
“So when can John and I get off of here?” Andrea asked, looking at me, then at Kostas, then back at me again.<
br />
“You may leave right away,” Kostas replied.
“What about our memories?” Andrea said, a tremor in her voice now.
“You’ve all misunderstood what we would do: we wouldn’t be removing anything from your brains. We would only apply a field that would make the information about this city-ship and what you’ve experienced and heard here much more nebulous; your memories of us will just be minimized. I have a question for the two of you, though: can you fly a ship?”
“Yes, I can,” Andrea said.
“I know enough to manage,” John added.
Kostas’ back in her red worksuit straightened. “All right then. Come with me so we workers can do the memory-block procedure.”
Kostas walked back out the cargo-bay hatchway, and Andrea and John followed her.
Shirley’s widening blue eyes stared after them. “I can’t believe they’re leaving. I really think they’re making a mistake.”
There were under-the-breath murmurs of agreement from around the room.
*
My crew and I remained in the cargo bay, talking in more detail about the near future.
Matt said then, “Well, if I find I can’t stand it on here, then I’ll be getting the memory-burying too. Christ, what wonderful choices we have.” His gray eyes rolled. “The death of the universe, or the Keepers going at our memories with a ‘minimizer’.”
I frowned, but not only at what Matt had said: if at some point I decided against staying on the Monument, then I’d need to go back to my normal business with the Demeter, and that meant if I left things hanging there now—as in, if I left jobs hanging—my reputation would slide downward. I remembered the commitment I’d made for a new deal with the planet Armine, but now by staying on the Monument, I was effectively saying “no” to the Armine deal, and without even telling the planet’s powers-that-be….
