Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  Andrea and John finally came back to the cargo bay; they seemed the same as before, though less grumpy on Andrea’s part, which was good.

  Kostas’ voice came into the cargo bay again: “Andrea, John, the effects of the treatment will not show up till the two of you are out of the anomaly. Gather your belongings and I’ll take you both to one of the human spacecrafts.”

  Andrea and John left the bay again, and I told Kostas I wanted to watch them fly away in the ship. “Can I talk to them once they’re out of the anomaly? I want to make sure they’re all right.”

  “That’s fine,” Kostas said. “When they’re ready to go, meet me outside your ship in the hangar, and we’ll go to one of the viewer-rooms.”

  *

  When my crew and I were finally standing inside the hangar, saying goodbye to Andrea and John, I felt as if I’d somehow missed making a connection with Andrea while she had been working on my ship; I also felt as if John never really wanted to make any connections on my ship. He had, after all, only been a temporary spaceship worker when I hired him, and he’d only become a more permanent worker on the Demeter because of a freak outside event. Maybe that he was leaving was a sort of righting of the recent events we’d experienced.

  The other formerly-temporary crewmembers, especially Nellie and Brayburn—they had worked out much better. They were always quite eager to get involved with whatever tasks people were working on. And I hoped that eagerness would continue into the future, into the unknown future.

  *

  I was walking behind Kostas out of the hangar now. Gary was on my right; Shirley and Babs were on his right, and the rest of my crew were behind us.

  We all walked across the small meeting room, then through a doorway on the left side of the room, then into a series of large rooms, one of which contained several Keepers. All of them were wearing orange robes, but their shadowy heads beneath the hoods of their robes turned in our direction as we walked by.

  “Shouldn’t they be working on the cube?” I asked.

  “They’re taking a break,” Kostas said over her shoulder.

  I noticed Shirley’s head whipping around as we all walked, and that brought me back to more carefully observing our environment, which made me realize that the contents of most of the rooms I’d been to on this ship were just fucking amazing.

  Wherever there were consoles, the large buttons on the super-streamlined structures were always arranged in such a clear, orderly fashion, and there seemed to be endless settings for the various viewscreens on the walls, which screens displayed crystal-clear views of space from numerous angles.

  Kostas was finally standing in an oblong room, in front of one of the largest consoles I’d seen so far on this ship; she turned on a conventional-looking wall-viewscreen above and behind the console, so we could see Andrea and John on their new ship.

  Kostas now said that the environment around us would be masked into looking like the Demeter’s cargo bay. “I’m setting up a duplicating field.”

  I flashed a look her way, wondering how she knew enough of my bay to convey an accurate image of it, but her attention was focused on her console. Then she said, “Operating this type of panel will be the first thing we—I—will teach you. You’ll find this arrangement of communications-controls in various areas on the Monument. This button let’s you choose from many types of signals to send and receive, and there are multidimensional options, because ‘the electromagnetic spectrum’ is not really a flat range across the universes; it is a vast, multidimensional phenomenon characterized by qualities other than wavelength, frequency and energy.

  “I’ve now contacted Andrea and John by sliding this lever. And this button will accept the video and audio from Andrea and John’s ship in specific.” Kostas’ fingers finally pushed a square blue button; then John’s and Andrea’s faces appeared on the screen.

  They were sitting behind electronic panels in the central part of a small, bright bridge; the style of it looked familiar to me. I noticed a large plaque in the back of the bridge—oh, the ship was a Harmon-series craft….

  On the screen, Andrea smiled at us. “Hey, everybody—greetings from the Alabaster, and thanks for giving us this ship, Lydia! I know it’s small, but having even a small one has always been a dream of mine—not that I’ll be in space often. I just want the mobility of it all if I decide to move away from wherever I’m at. Thank you for understanding.

  “I never said anything to you, but, for a while now, I’ve been feeling like I want to put down roots somewhere. I think I’ll go see my cousin on Diamond. Ever since last year, she’s been asking me to help her out—she owns a big electronics store, and she wants me to co-manage it with her.”

  “What about you, John?” I asked.

  He grinned at the screen as he sat back in his chair. “The ICFC credits you just gave us are gonna be a big help—Andrea gave me hers, and she’s gonna keep this ship. I’m probably going to do this mining training course on Diamond. I think you know I’ve always been interested in geology. It was on my work-history papers.”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling a little.

  I talked a bit more with the two of them, and when we said our goodbyes and the viewscreen finally went black, I turned to Kostas: “Your actions made me look like such a generous captain. I feel like shit that I can’t give everyone a ship-sized parting gift and a huge amount of ICFC credits.”

  “Showing you up wasn’t my intention,” Kostas said.

  “Well, I’ll get over it,” I replied.

  *

  “How did the Keepers get the ICFC money?” Shirley asked me a little later.

  We were in my ship’s dining room, eating at a booth table. Shortly after my crew and I had said goodbye to John and Andrea, Kostas said something urgent had come up about the Keeper work on the cube, and she couldn’t take us on a bigger tour right then. She was supposed to come get us all later….

  I shrugged at Shirley across from me. “You know the way the Keepers are. Sometimes it seems like they can make anything happen. But, I’m guessing that the human workers probably made the credits happen.”

  “Do you think Andrea and John’ll be all right on the Alabaster?” Geena asked me from beside Shirley.

  I had just stuck a crispy piece of potato into my mouth, and I chewed it for a moment before I spoke again. “I don’t know. When they were up there on the screen, I remembered they wouldn’t have any protection now, and I almost said something as a warning.”

  “What stopped you?” Shirley asked me.

  “Well, we don’t have perfect protection here either.”

  “Matt told me he feels redundant—like they’re so powerful on here, why would they need him to protect anything?”

  “Is that what he said?” I frowned a little. And a silence fell between the three of us at the table.

  Many of my crewmembers were in the dining room now, including Gary, but he had wanted to sit and talk with Steve. They were in a booth farther up the room, and Shirley and Geena were facing them. Shirley’s eyes seemed to keep going to that other table. I glanced over my left shoulder, and Steve caught my eye. He raised his hand at me slightly, smiling my way; then his hand sort of faltered as his eyes moved in Shirley’s direction—

  The clicking sound of a glass toppling over—my head whipped back to Shirley and Geena. Shirley was using a cloth napkin to mop up her spilled iced tea. I looked at the wet tabletop; I looked at her; then I looked at Geena, whose mouth turned down a bit as her brown eyes locked onto mine.

  I said in a careful voice, “Is something going on?”

  “No!” Shirley said, her blue eyes jerking up at me now. “What do you mean? Everything’s fine, Captain Lydia.”

  Geena shrugged at me. “Just the usual stuff’s going on.”

  I didn’t believe either of them, but I wasn’t going to press them on the issue either: I generally wouldn’t pressure my crew to confide in me on their personal issues, and it seemed something personal h
ad been going on.

  My head turned away from Shirley, my eyes roaming over the other crewmembers in the room; we were due to meet Kostas in about an hour.

  “Well,” I said now, standing up and looking down at Shirley and Geena, “I’m going to pop into my cabin for a little while. I’ll see you two in the hangar later.”

  When I walked away from the table, I stopped at Gary’s and Steve’s table.

  “Hello there, Lydia,” Gary said, smiling up at me, his mustache tilting up on one end.

  I laughed a little at the teasing look on his face; then I turned to Steve. “I know things have been crazy, but have you had a chance to check out the Rodrum in Nozzle 1?”

  Steve shook his head from side-to-side on a frown. “I’m really sorry, Captain. I overslept and, well, my head’s been hurting all day. I took a headache remedy, but the damn thing didn’t work.”

  “You should ask the workers to give you something.”

  “There don’t seem to be any around compared to on Rintu—it’s strange,” Steve said.

  I nodded, slowly. “I said the same thing to Kostas before. She said there are only sixteen on the Monument, other than her and Jim, and half of them are coordinating with the Keepers on the cube.” I frowned now. “That reminds me that I want to ask her about that. Anyway, I’ll see you later?”

  I had said that last bit to Gary, and now he grinned up at me and said, “Always.”

  *

  Later, when my crew and I were finally standing in the hangar, waiting for Kostas to show up, my crew began talking about Andrea and John.

  “It doesn’t seem right—messing with their heads,” Cal from my cargo bay said, his ruddy face frowning. He was standing beside Geena, who, going on her sagging cheeks, appeared to be quite down in the dumps now. But then Jim hadn’t come back onto the Demeter since we’d docked inside the city-ship, and I hadn’t seen him around there today either….

  “It seems like what’s going on is something really important, or else the workers wouldn’t have taken those measures,” Nellie said to Cal. “They didn’t do that to us after Rintu. But, I admit things have gotten a bit scary now. I hope I’m up to this.”

  “What if tomorrow we all decide we aren’t? Can we really just leave then, Captain?” Cal said as I walked closer to him and Nellie.

  “I’ll do my best to make sure that happens, if we change our minds.” I raised my voice now, so all of my crew could hear me: “Let’s give this some more time. Maybe our decision will increasingly seem like it was the correct one.”

  I began hoping that time would come for me, too, as we followed Kostas through the city-ship on a more extensive tour, which didn’t seem as worker-official as I’d thought it would be: Kostas didn’t only take us to areas that she said we would be training and eventually working in; she also took us to a very relaxing-looking, stone-walled living area, containing numerous floor cushions and ceiling-high racks filled with colorful plants; and then there were the ship’s marble-lined bathing facilities, which weren’t anything like the spartan ones in the Rintu mountain. It seemed The Monument was the equivalent of a Keeper Luxury Liner.

  “Oh my—I love this!” Geena exclaimed when we were finally standing in the center of an enormous kitchen area. There were long, sparkling counters and enormous silver cupboards that rose all the way up to the very high ceiling. And then there were the kitchen’s seven pantries, filled with bushels of fruits and vegetables and numerous loaves of what Kostas said was blue bread.

  “It’s highly nutritious and we cut it into pellets and dry it for snacking on,” she added.

  “It sounds like they’d be good candidates to keep as emergency rations in the worksuits,” I said.

  She fixed a wide-eyed look onto me. “That’s an excellent idea.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t been without emergency food on me ever since Rintu. I keep petrified health crackers in my captain’s belt.” I slapped my middle where my little cracker stash was in my red belt. “That reminds me—when will we get worksuits?”

  “One of the other workers is testing the programming on them,” Kostas said. “They will be ready by the end of today.”

  “What is today?” Shirley asked. “I’m very confused by the time on here—I mean, we’ve got our ship’s Earth time, but I’m feeling that slight dimensional disorientation. Though it’s not nearly as bad as it was on Rintu.”

  “You’ll get used to being on here and will stop having any disorientation,” Kostas said. “Just like with the new suits, we have made some slight changes in this ship’s science in preparation for your staying with us.”

  “Oh, thank you!” Shirley said on a smile.

  “I know we just ate, but I’m feeling hungry again,” someone else said. There were a few murmurs of agreement in the room.

  Kostas looked over the crowd of us. “Actually, I was going to suggest we take some fruit and eat it in one of the garden areas. After that, we will begin instructing you on Keeper science in the meeting rooms. Captain Zarro, you’ll have to split your crew into three parts, and I’ll leave it your discretion who will be in your group, which I will teach.”

  I nodded at her. “So, where are these gardens you mentioned?”

  “We will take an elevator-type mechanism to the top of the Monument. We keep the natural areas there, so they will receive a lot of direct starlight. The natural areas are very large spaces.”

  Kostas wasn’t kidding: when we finally reached one of the gardens, it felt so spacious as I walked around inside it, I began forgetting I was on a ship. Only the very top of the garden revealed its true nature; I could see the dark of space and the faint motions of the anomaly’s particulates swirling above us.

  “This is definitely beautiful,” Gary said from beside me as he chewed on an orange-colored apple. His eyes were on a tall tree with cherry-red bark and tiny, very-delicate blue blossoms. The tree’s arms seemed to extend to the very top of the garden, as if they were reaching up into space. Visually, there was no cover over the garden; apparently, it was encased in a completely transparent field. I thought I would begin to feel sick because there didn’t seem to be any protection from space, but, something about the plants around me was very soothing.

  I took deep breaths, exhaled in long sighs….

  “You look completely relaxed and happy,” Gary said in a soft voice. “I haven’t seen you like this in a long time. I wish I could see you like this more often.”

  “I wish I could feel it more often. I didn’t expect this here—”

  “You will find many unexpected things in the days ahead,” Kostas said as she came up on my other side.

  Babs had been trailing behind her, but now she walked ahead of Kostas, to touch one of the ground plants across from us.

  “I know this species, lavonda paradisa,” Babs said, her fingers touching the plant’s fine, sapphire-blue fronds. Her head jerked over her shoulder. “How is it here? It’s not supposed to grow anywhere but on the Paradise Moons—it needs extreme root-heat and molten components, so it grows from deep within the crust there inside magma pools.”

  Kostas pointed at the lavender-colored, crumbly material beneath the plant. “We have the proper base.”

  Babs turned all the way around to us, her mouth dropping open. “The average lavonda root-length is 1500-feet long! Surely the earth on this deck isn’t that deep.”

  Kostas’ face changed ever-so-slightly—into an almost smile. “We have a larger collection of lavonda down the path. I’ll explain some of the science….”

  Kostas began walking along the gray, earthen path, and Babs followed her.

  Gary and I watched them for a moment; then Gary looked upward, toward space. “Every time I think they can’t surprise us anymore, they do.”

  “I guess that’s why we’re still hanging around them,” I said, on a sigh.

  *

  Of course, that wasn’t the only reason we were with the Keepers now: we had work to do, important work
, work that was supposed to save the universe. When I thought about that, a part of me couldn’t believe it; the other part wanted to laugh, especially that anyone would think I had some importance to the universe. But Kostas had insisted.

  And when I and twenty more of my crewmembers were finally sitting in one of the meeting rooms and Kostas was standing at the head of it, holding a small silver device in her hands, she repeated how important our intersection with that warring species’ path was, only, this time, she added that she was sorry everything was so rushed.

  “As I’ve told you, we thought the crisis would be years from now, but then we recently recalculated it and realized we had miscalculated; we now believe the deadline is weeks from now.”

  “You believe or you know?” Chen said. He and May were sitting in chairs on my left, but Gary was between me and Chen. I had assigned Steve to another class and Karen to the third one, so every one of our classes would have a higher level engineering-person present; Gary was that person for my group….

  Kostas was speaking again, and her eyes were right on Chen this time: “Based on calculations we’ve done, we estimate we have only weeks to achieve as much as possible to fix the problem. We’ve added files of pertinent information to your workbooks. And we’re recording each of these classes, so you can all freely rewatch them on your workbooks at your leisure.”

  I wished the workers had thought to put desks in the room: I was now on-top-of-my-knees balancing one of the flat, silver, digital workbooks Kostas had given us to write on, which was quite similar to the type my engineering crew sometimes used.

  My workbook’s silver stylus was in my hand now; I quickly wrote, Don’t forget to ask Kostas about my fuel situation!! on my workbook’s pale screen. Then I glanced to my right: Babs was there, and Cambridge was behind her and beside Shirley. The rest of my crew were scattered around the room, in haphazard ways, apparently so some of them could stretch their legs more in front of them. I wished I could do the same, but I felt like I had to act all tense and captainly while I was in an official learning environment, especially an official Keeper learning environment….