Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  “But I thought Keepers can’t die,” I said to Kostas now. I knelt down near her and Una. Una’s parts were still flickering, but very, very slowly, and the overall shape of her wasn’t moving at all. A section of her abdomen seemed to be completely missing, and I counted only four, slowly pumping hearts….

  Nellie rushed over and stood above me and Kostas. “I—I have my medical scanner,” Nellie said, her words a stumbling tremor. “It has an extensive emergency-aid database—can I—can I do something for them?”

  “It’s too late—she has suffered explosive dismemberment injuries,” Kostas replied in a small voice. “She has lost one of her heart parts. We cannot find and collect and repair her parts in time—they are scattered in the anomaly. Some Keepers are looking for her parts; the rest are working on creating another field around the cube so this disaster doesn’t happen again. If they fail to find Una’s matter, Keeper hearts are very complex, and it would take far too much time to make a replacement heart for her.”

  “We can help!” Nellie said.

  “No, I’m sorry, you cannot.” Kostas’ hands were holding one of Una’s now.

  I grabbed Una’s other hand—at least I thought I was grabbing it. I couldn’t really feel it against mine. I felt a whisper of air along my palm—maybe.

  “But what about her other hearts—can’t they compensate?” I asked.

  Kostas’ head shook fast, her dark hair finally hiding part of her sad profile from my gaze. “Keepers need all their hearts—they’re not really separate organs. They work in conjunction. These are Una’s last vibrations. I am trying to…make them count,” Kostas finished, her voice cracking.

  “Una, I’m so sorry!” I said. “I’m so sorry I never got to know you, but you’re so needed. I wish you could stay. You’ve done so much—you all have.” I glanced at Kostas, but her gaze was still down on Una.

  My eyes went back to her, to where what seemed to be her blood was spilling out of her abdomen in a liquid-crystal stream. “Is there nothing I can do?”

  A whisper now—in my head.

  …You have already done. Kindness. Strength. Thank you, Lydia…. Goodbye, Kostas, my special child. It is finally my time for one place….

  I felt Una’s hand seem to jerk—and then seem to harden. “No! What’s happened?”

  “Una has passed,” Kostas said in a trembling voice. “Death is partly a release for the Keepers. It is the only state when Keepers will remain in one place—the place where they’ve died. I’ll try to feel happiness that Una is finally at total rest because she is finally completely still.” Kostas’ words didn’t seem to work on herself: tears slipped from her eyes….

  “I’m so sorry, Kostas,” I said, my right hand reaching for her forearm and gently squeezing it.

  Her dark eyes were still on Una’s lifeless, immobile form. “Una was the first Keeper to mind-link with me….” Kostas’ words must have been too much for her—she stood up now, very sharply, and turned her back to everyone else in the room, including all of the other Keepers. “Many more Keepers are injured here. Butu really needs blue water.” Kostas glanced over her right shoulder at where Geena was working with Brayburn as they tried to lift a Keeper to a more comfortable position against one of the walls.

  “Chen,” Kostas said, “keep Butu calm by talking—or thinking—about anything. He will link with you. Geena, Brayburn, Nellie and Bill, please go to the kitchen. Devin is there and he will give you the proper food and medicine for the Keepers. They will need days to rest and heal.”

  Geena nodded fast, then ran out of the room just as Chen reached for Butu. And an instant later, Kostas transported to somewhere else, taking Una’s body with her.

  *

  I remained in the room with the wounded Keepers and Chen for I didn’t know how long, while Geena and my other crewmembers ran in and out of the room, carrying water, medicine and food.

  I repeatedly knelt down and tried to make the Keepers as comfortable as possible on the floor, which wasn’t easy; there weren’t enough cushions in the room for all of the Keepers. Many of them mind-linked with me, in and out. They spoke to me only a little then, but I could have sworn I felt sharp bouts of their pain….

  I looked over at Chen. At some point, he’d rolled up one of his white sleeves; his Keeper-tinged arm was out in the open now, and one of the Keepers had a hand pressed there. Chen was talking, explaining something mundane about a flying maneuver he often used on the Demeter, but the Keeper’s glossy, clear eyes seemed to be intent on Chen’s face.

  Kostas finally returned; she had more Keepers with her, who immediately began rushing around the room toward the wounded.

  “The Keepers will take over now,” Kostas said. And she seemed to have recovered from her sadness before: her face and back were in her usual quite-straight state. “We have paused in our work on the cube. It has turned out to be a more dangerous design than we thought. We will be stuck here several more days so this deadly disaster doesn’t happen again.”

  If she had said that last bit to me before the disaster happened, I would have been upset at her words because they meant I would be stuck here for even more days with my damaged ship—but now I was glad that Kostas had told me about the delay because that probably meant the Keepers would proceed more carefully around the cube.

  I certainly didn’t want to see death on this ship again.

  *

  “Gary, I feel like complete shit,” I said later on.

  Gary and I were in my cabin, and I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my face in my hands.

  “I was so focused on the damage to my ship—and now the Keepers have damage to their bodies, and Una is dead. I feel like my priorities were so screwed up, and I’ve been so damn selfish—I was only thinking about my ship. My being here made them rush! I had no idea of the huge danger.”

  “We’re not Keepers,” Gary reminded me. “We’re apes with very functional opposable thumbs and lots of tools. And we’re also very mortal. Selfishness has been built into us from millions of years of evolution—behaving selfishly is how animals survive…. Lydia, I hate hearing you beat yourself up like this. I don’t think you should have witnessed all of that in the lounge—”

  I whipped my hands from my face. “Yes, I should have! It made me realize that things are worse than I thought. When I thought the Keepers were all-powerful—it was easier to avoid dealing with them, to run away, because I thought they could do everything themselves. But now I see that they may actually need us.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we stayed,” Gary said.

  I nodded up at him; then I stood. “I guess while we’re waiting to hear more from the Keepers, it’s back to business on this ship. Geena and the others—it looks they’re going to be busy for days tending to the wounded, which means we’ll have to take care of feeding ourselves here.”

  *

  My prediction turned out to be correct: when I walked into the Monument’s kitchen later, Kostas told me that the Keepers would need to eat a lot over the next few days in order to heal. And because of the mess with the cube and some important maintenance they had to do on the Monument, they couldn’t spare any workers to make meals for the Keepers. Geena and her gang would now be full-time Keeper-cooks.

  Kostas stood in the middle of the Monument’s kitchen now, training my crew on how to properly prepare food so the Keepers could assimilate it. They didn’t chew the way Earth animals tended to chew: the Keepers mostly gummed their food so their many small, mostly invisible teeth could absorb nutrients and disperse them into their organs, which meant that what the Keepers ate had to be in a mushy state.

  The Monument’s kitchen contained special appliances for preparing Keeper food, and Kostas had written English words on electronic tabs and stuck them to the appliances so my crew could work in the room more easily.

  Kostas said now, “We’ve begun doing this around the ship, including on the bridge, for when you finally start your real training there.�
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  Kostas was looking at me, but being trained was the last thing I wanted to think about now. My head was spinning, and if I didn’t eat something soon, I would need medical treatment…. I didn’t eat anything now, however. I felt sick to my stomach over what had happened to the Keepers—I suddenly remembered the dimensional sickness.

  “Kostas,” I said now, “until this accident, I didn’t feel sick like I did on Rintu with the dimensional sickness. I’m feeling twinges now though….”

  “Me too,” Bill said. He was standing over by one of the silver, Keeper grinding machines, shoving one of the loaves of blue bread inside it. He normally had quite a lot of color in his face, but his profile was quite sallow-colored now.

  Kostas glanced at him, then at me. “I’ve mentioned that we made some adjustments to the Monument in preparation for your being here, to make you more comfortable, but so many Keepers in one place around you will still sometimes have effects we won’t be able to mitigate. I apologize for that. The wounded were at a low energy-state before, but they’re now building their strength back up while they’re residing quite close to this room.” She pulled her silver device from one of her worksuit’s pockets. “I’ll make some adjustments to this room. Hopefully, this terrible event won’t happen again.”

  “And I hope it’s not a common occurrence…. Is it common?” I asked.

  Kostas’ head shook from side-to-side rapidly. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as that since I’ve been with the Keepers.” Her chest beneath her red worksuit seemed to be moving too fast. She suddenly spun away from me and walked over to Brayburn to instruct him on how to use one of the kitchen’s moistening machines.

  I sighed as I watched them. Then I said, “I hate to make more work or problems for anyone, but I’m going to need to eat something. Can I just help myself?”

  Her back to me still, Kostas’ right arm shot out in the direction of the pantries. “Take whatever you want—and maybe bring food back to your crew on the Demeter?”

  “That’s an excellent idea, Kostas—thank you,” I said, moving closer to her and smiling at her, but she only nodded back at me, her posture not as straight as her usual stance.

  *

  “I know I’ve had difficulties with her and the Keepers, but I really hated seeing her like that,” I said later on in the Demeter’s dining room.

  Chen and Nellie had helped me carry a bunch of the blue-bread loaves, jars of nut butters and berry jams, and a basket of fresh fruit back to my ship. Dozens of my crewmembers had filled the dining booths and were now eating the food, but the mood in the room wasn’t exactly jubilant.

  Shirley was sitting in the booth across the aisle from me, and her eyelids were swollen and lined with red, apparently from crying. “It’s like everything’s falling apart now,” she said in a weak voice.

  “Don’t think like that,” Steve said fast. He was across from her, and his eyes were on the top of her head. He sighed finally, then went back to staring down at his training workbook.

  I really needed to review mine too, especially the video of Kostas’ lecture session earlier, but, I couldn’t work anymore right now….

  I felt a hand grab my right hand—it was Gary.

  He was sitting beside me, and now his other hand stuffed a piece of the blue bread into his mouth. “Did the Keepers make this with that blue water we had on Rintu?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “It’s really quite good,” Chen said as he chewed, from across the table. Surprisingly, his white sleeve was rolled up like it had been when he was in the room with the Keepers. A patch of sparkling skin was visible below the edge of Chen’s sleeve, but he didn’t seem to notice, and neither did May beside him. Maybe they were getting used to it….

  I wasn’t, though, and that was because I still felt really bad that the damage to Chen had happened at all. I also still kept forgetting to ask Kostas for more information about potential treatments for Chen’s arm. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t my place to ask; Chen had been around Keepers and Kostas a lot today, and, as far as I knew, he’d said nothing to them about his arm….

  “So, what will you all do for the rest of the day?” I asked at the room now, trying to inject an energetic note in my voice, but failing when it only came out tired-sounding anyway.

  “I don’t know,” Chen said in response.

  And May added: “We’re really feeling like we don’t have a purpose anymore.”

  My eyebrows rose; then I frowned at the two of them. “Please don’t say that. Though, actually, I’m glad you brought it up: I keep hearing that same sentiment going around this ship, and to be honest I don’t want to hear it. You saw that room, Chen…it was terrible. We all have a purpose and something to contribute. Part of my reticence in getting involved with the Keepers and workers again is I don’t want any of you to feel inferior to their technology or whatever. Our ship still matters, and so do we.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, Lydia.” May was nodding now. “But, if we’re not shipping in space on a schedule, I have nothing I must do. I’m suddenly seeing how big a part of my life working has been. It is my life. I even found my husband there.”

  She was sitting on the side where Chen’s normal arm was, and now his normal arm lifted her hand, brought it to his mouth and kissed it.

  I couldn’t help smiling; nevertheless, May’s feelings and the feelings of my other crewmembers on this latest issue were bothering me: morale had somehow fallen into the toilet. And I didn’t know how to yank morale out from the bowl.

  *

  As the day passed, I realized May was right and her words held the key: we all needed to keep working—that was our normal state of existence. Maybe we were normally overworked, a.k.a. workaholics. But that was who we were as people: we had chosen a stressful, on-the-go life because it suited our personalities.

  It seemed that, for my own reasons, out of irritation at the way I had lost control of some things and out of worry over my crew, I had been holding back from really embracing what we were doing on The Keeper ship and what we were supposed to do in the near future.

  I said this to Gary when we were in my cabin later. We had just spent some quality bed-time together then showered together.

  We lay on our damp backs now on my bed, staring up at my dark ceiling.

  “Lydia,” Gary finally said, “maybe we can’t have one foot in and one foot out anymore. Things have gotten too serious.”

  “I know,” I said, on a frown.

  He turned over onto his side, facing me. “I’ve been thinking that we should probably spend more time in the Monument, eating there, maybe even sleeping there—when Geena came back before, she said Kostas told her they’d be needed around the kitchen and lounges for days. Geena’s face was flushed, but I got the feeling it was in a good way. It’s something new, a new environment—isn’t that why a lot of us are traveling out in space so much?”

  I flipped onto my side toward him now, studying his face, the warm color and shape of his mustache and mouth in the room’s cool darkness. “We often seem to think along the same lines. Babs told me we’re made for each other.”

  He pointed up at the air as he said, “Babs is a very smart lady.” Then his hand reached forward and slid over my bare hip.

  *

  It’s true that “sleeping on it” will often give you a perspective that you didn’t have while you were awake. It’s also true that not having a consistent time-frame to live in can drive you crazy, but it’s also freeing to be able to eat, sleep and work at oddball times—when you feel like it, in other words.

  Gary and I slept for hours and hours in my cabin that day, and when I woke up, I felt better than I had in days. No matter Kostas’ claims that wearing worker-suits could increase life spans, I had seen what happened to poor Una, and that reminded me of how true the “life is short” cliché really is.

  Clearly, there was so much that needed doing now with the Keepers, and it was time for me to fac
e this.

  *

  It did help when my crew and I finally got the new red worker-suits, which fortunately had quite a few differences compared to the old orange suits. The new ones were easier to get into and out of: you just stepped into the attached red boots, and the suit would automatically slowly slide up and over you as you coaxed up the material; then you just had to close up the front. The new suits also were more comfortable because they weren’t so stiff, and the attached boots had more of a cushiony slipper-sole that would comfortably conform to wherever you stepped.

  When my crew and I were finally all dressed in the new worksuits and standing inside a meeting room with Kostas, I was staring down at the buttons on the sleeves of my suit. I had only barely used the arm-controls on the old suits months ago, but that wound up not mattering: Kostas now said that the new suits worked differently too.

  “We’ve rearranged how energy flows through them, and we’ve added some more functions. These suits have an improved internal self-cleaning function, and they can more readily recharge from their environment. We workers usually have devices with us—you will each also receive a device to use. But we’ve added a few more emergency controls to the suits, in case of the loss of a device. And we’ve also changed from using only ridges in the suit material to using buttons for your controls too, as you can see on the wrists of your suits.

  “The red buttons are transporter controls; there is also a transporter ridge higher up the sleeves. The personal transporting naturally cloaks the individual being transported. Personal transporting works similarly to the dimensional traveling of a ship; as your workbooks have explained and as we explained in your first training class, dimensions, which are often connected by dimensional streams—dimensions and their streams exist throughout the Omniverse, though the streams aren’t all over it. There are emptier pockets between streams, which can even mean billions of miles with no streams, and which also means traveling will probably take up more real time in the pockets—movement won’t necessarily be instantaneous there, though it will still be quick in Keeper ships, compared to human ships.