by F P Adriani
“Fuck!” Gary finally said, his face flushing so hard that sweat slid over his forehead. His eyes lifted to mine, and I read the “I’m sorry” in them.
I nodded at him, but I was too nervous to be annoyed with him: we’d all chosen to go off of Kostas’ path, so getting lost was all of our faults.
*
We remained in that room with the white boxes for a little while, talking about what the fuck to do, but we didn’t cross the boundaries of where any of the boxes were. Something about them bothered me—maybe something was coming off them that I was subconsciously sensing. After a brief while, the others said they felt something too.
“It might be interfering with our signals to the others,” Gary said.
“Well, we’re not going across the boxes,” I said now, “so I guess it’s back to the stairs.” Fortunately, they were still there to go back to.
We moved down the stairs now, while we continued using our communicators to try to contact the others. I also called Kostas’ name numerous times, but still nothing happened, except the stairs kept going down—then all of a sudden the left side of the stairs disappeared—and Gary began sliding toward the hole there.
The rest of us rushed forward to grab him, but we were too late: he fell over the edge, with me screaming his name as he disappeared into the darkness.
*
The rest of my crew grabbed me right before I could jump into the hole after Gary. I was still screaming, but when I finally stopped for an instant to take a breath, I heard Gary’s voice: “Lydia—Lydia—I’m here!”
“Where!” I shouted, my eyes struggling to see him in the gaping darkness. “It’s so dark—I can’t make out anything.”
A mirthless laugh from him. “I don’t know where I am. You can’t see me, but I can see you up there. Unfortunately, there was a lot of heat when I fell—part of my suit got burned—”
I moaned in worry now. “Are you all right?! Use your suit’s medical controls!”
“I’m working on it,” he said. Then, after a moment: “I’m feeling it—I got hurt on my side, but the medicine seems to be going there. Shit—it hurts….”
“Oh Gary,” I said, and I began crying, which I did not want to do in front of my crew, but this was Gary….
Babs grabbed onto my hands, and Chen laid one of his hands on my back as he stretched his neck forward so he could look into the hole. “Is there something you can use there to reach us? My arm—my arm is stronger than it used to be,” Chen said, and my eyes jerked around to him, in surprise. “If you throw me something,” he continued to Gary, “I think I can pull you up—”
“No need—” Gary said “—Kostas just talked to me!”
“Tell her to come get us already!” I shouted.
“She’s on her way,” Gary said, and though his voice was shaky, I could hear a smile in it, too.
*
“I’ve trained many people on this ship, and no one has ever wandered off on their own and fallen into a charger hole,” Kostas snapped at us.
We were in a lounge room near the kitchen. She had transported us to here, and a robed Keeper was looking over Gary—at least her head in her orange robe was moving over where he was lying on a cushion-top table. His worksuit had been burned off on the right side of his abdomen, and the Keeper lifted a flickering hand to near there.
Now Kostas snapped at Gary directly: “There were too many of you on the stairs. They’re programmed to spin to different parts of the ship—though at least that you fell off them and into a hole, I was finally able to locate you. The hole had been turned off. But it was still very hot. If you had fallen a few feet to the left, you would have been char-broiled.”
“I’m sorry!” Gary said, lifting the back of his head from the table. “It isn’t wonderful from my end, you know—ouch!” He had yelled that at The Keeper.
“What are you doing to him?” I said, starting to rush over to him.
But Kostas raised an imperious hand. “Let Tursh medicate him.”
“He did use his suit on himself,” Babs said to Kostas.
“And it’s a good thing he did and that he did it right. His injury would have worsened.”
“Where did I fall?” Gary asked, squinting through the pain that Tursh was apparently causing him. I had to grit my teeth; I was so upset at so much….
Kostas’ gaze fell on her hand-held device as she worked it. “Just like you make use of battery power, so do we have a type of battery set-up. Gary fell into one of the empty charger holes we use for the batteries.”
“Well, how the hell were we supposed to know you had such dangerous things on this ship?” I said, flinging an angry palm at the air.
“Most things on here are NOT dangerous,” Kostas said. “You happened to reach one thing that is. And you did that because you didn’t follow instructions—”
“But we did follow them,” I snapped. “You’ve told us before that we can look around and that the ship would prevent us from going somewhere we shouldn’t.”
Kostas’ lips twitched and her slowly widening dark eyes locked onto me. “You’re right. I did say that. I meant it in the context of that part of the ship—by the kitchen, meeting rooms and hangar, but I should have been clearer. I made a mistake, just like I made a mistake in saying Jim should come on your ship. It was a stupid idea.”
I pulled an astonished face. “Where did that come from?”
“It is the truth,” Kostas said, and I could have sworn her voice shook. “As I’ve told you before, the Keepers are very powerful but not all-powerful. They—we make mistakes and can’t see everything. Some things are murky because of a combination of physical phenomena—or for whatever reason. We do our best; sometimes that’s just not enough. But had Jim not been on your ship, we wouldn’t have had to rush you toward this training.”
*
Unlike Kostas, I wasn’t so sure that anything was really her fault, but as I silently waited for Tursh to finish helping Gary, I did begin regretting so much, including ever getting involved with the Keepers again….
Gary was still lying on the table—flinching and just generally looking very uncomfortable. My heart was going crazy.
I wanted to grab Gary, but Kostas spoke again: “This time, let me be clear: do not go wandering about ever again in areas of the ship you have never been to before. Use your READOUTS if you’re lost, and look for any danger symbols. I’m surprised at all of this—really. Common sense—I’ve said many times that we’re busy being focused on the cube. We don’t have time to babysit.”
“Well, excuse us,” I snapped through shaking lips. Babs’ face had turned red, and Gary’s had turned really red.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “I got over-eager; then I almost got over-heated. But, don’t worry, Kostas, because I won’t be wandering around on here again anytime soon.”
“Well,” Kostas said as her back straightened more, “one good result of this is that you will all never again forget the Keeper symbol for EXTREME DANGER that was carved onto every stair riser.”
*
“I think she dislikes me now,” Gary said to me when we were finally left alone together in the lounge.
I pulled a face at him. “I think you’re imagining things. I know she was annoyed, but I doubt she has feelings of whatever kind toward any of us.” Gary was sitting up now, and I was bent over, examining his bumpy wound. It was about the size of my hand, and Tursh had covered it with a clear bandage of artificial human skin. “Kostas did say that if you keep taking the Keeper medicine, your wound’ll be mostly healed in a few days, and when she said that, she almost smiled.”
Gary frowned down at my fingers on his skin. “She wasn’t looking my way then, though.” He grabbed my hand, said, “Hey, come here,” as he pulled me closer, to his face.
I kissed him then, gingerly throwing my arms over his shoulders. I couldn’t get any closer to him without pressing against his wound, so I used my hands and my mouth to tell him how worri
ed I had been—and how happy I was that most of my worrying had wound up being for nothing.
*
Later, when my crew and I were eating in the Demeter’s dining room, I stopped chewing for a long moment and took a careful look around the room. But I wasn’t looking at my people then—I was looking at the structure of the room itself. It was a long, warmly decorated area that I knew well, and it provided a comforting, safe feeling, just like the rest of my ship.
At the same time, I saw now that there was probably nothing new for me on my ship; it was a well-known quantity, both in how it had been built and in my feelings toward it. There were some wacky, intriguing things that could—and did—happen on here. But, there probably weren’t as many wacky intriguing things compared to what could happen on the Monument.
I thought of that amazing bridge, the levels of it and the lights and the oddball decorations from species I had never met and would never meet. Or maybe….
“What are you thinking about?”—Gary’s voice.
My head turned to him on my right. His uninjured side was facing me, and he was wearing a brown shirt over it. I glanced down there anyway as I spoke: “I’m thinking that there are dangers everywhere—especially if we behave rashly. But, that bridge….” Slowly now, I shook my head on a wistful sigh.
Gary’s lips pursed together. “Yeah. I keep trying to, well, imagine us there…and then I like what I see in my head.”
“I still can’t get over the engine rooms—or maybe I should say room-engines,” Steve said in an astonished voice, his workbook in one hand and a mug of something hot in his other hand. He was sitting at the table on the opposite side of the room; Shirley, Chen and May were with him. Geena was at my table. Babs hadn’t come to dinner.
I wondered where she was; then I shrugged it off and gave Gary’s leg beside me a protective little squeeze. When he smiled at me in a reassuring way, I finally went back to enjoying my food.
*
The next day, I stood in a meeting room waiting for Kostas to arrive, my right hand holding one of Gary’s hands and my left hand adjusting my worksuit’s attached underwear, to make it more comfortable against my butt. The workers had given Gary a new red suit; beneath it, he was still wearing that Keeper bandage….
Kostas finally walked into the meeting room, and she began talking to me and my crew straight away. If she was still annoyed with us, she didn’t show it as she said, “Gary’s accident yesterday is an extreme case of suit-damage that requires extensive repair. But if there are ever any problems with individual suits being minorly damaged or just feeling sluggish in their operation because of a loss of energy somehow, you can coordinate one suit with another to compensate. This will increase your overall energy through a feedback mechanism of improved power-pack efficiency, because the suits assume there’s probably an emergency. Here is how you activate this failsafe….”
As Kostas continued speaking, my eyes drifted around the room to my crew, who, surprisingly, looked comfortable in their worksuits and like they were ready for anything that this new day would throw at them.
Kostas had said earlier that nearly all of the other workers were working on the final push on dismantling the cube, except for Devin.
He came into the room now, holding a large black box in his arms. He laid it on the dark floor and opened it, then began giving the small gray devices inside to me and my crew.
These devices looked different than the ones Kostas and the workers used: theirs had ridges on the sides; ours were smooth on the sides. Fortunately, the gray devices wound up being quite straightforward to operate; they had duplicate functions with respect to the suits, but the devices could also do some things the suits couldn’t.
When Kostas was done explaining a more finicky aspect of the devices, I asked her, “Will we get to see the bridge again today?”
“Yes, when we’re done here. We think your engineering crew should continue looking at the engine controls they started looking at yesterday. But if you’d rather they join you on the bridge, that’s your choice, Captain Zarro.”
Her eyes were on me, but I shifted mine toward Karen and Steve, raising my eyebrows their way. “So?” I asked them. “Where do you want to go?”
“Captain,” Karen said, a jolt of eagerness in her voice, “you should see it there—it’s wild, because there’s almost nothing to see inside the ‘engines’ themselves. The rooms where the engines supposedly work look empty—and they’re so silent! It’s very, uh, Zen—Steve agrees.”
Her head turned to him, and he nodded whip-fast. “Oh yeah—the equipment outside the engine rooms is complex, and well, intimidating, but the empty engines are what’s so fascinating. It’s not a normal power and propulsion system. Kostas can correct me here,” he glanced at her, then down at his workbook in his hands, “but it seems like Keeper ships are ‘propelled’ by directly using a generic form of energy from mass or matter that’s disassociated—like the ships access that ‘pure energy’ the workers have mentioned. Forget reaction-mass rocket flight—you only need energy to do the work of moving a Keeper ship through the dimensional streams or in the pockets between them. You can take in that pure energy somehow and use that, or as long as you have some type of mass to use, you’ll have energy that way, like via mass-energy equivalence.
“The most basic way I can think of to describe it is: the generic energy made available to a Keeper ship is almost like the fuel itself, and that fuel-energy leads to massive vibrations—to being able to use omnivelocities.” Steve let out a hard breath now. “It will take us a lot of time to learn the many details here….”
“You have clearly learned quite a bit already, but you do not have to learn everything,” Kostas said. “Not even all of the Keepers can operate their ships. It’s something they must learn over time, too. We want you to be familiar with this ship right now—that’s all.”
“To be honest,” Steve said, blushing, “I’d like to get more than just familiar with it. When can I?”
“We shall see when you’re ready,” Kostas said, and she was looking at Gary when she said it, who was blushing.
And, I knew my man: he was blushing because he was very embarrassed.
*
When my usual bridge crew and I reached the bridge area, there were more robed Keepers on the upper bridges compared to yesterday—and I assumed there were more Keepers today because they were now able to move more of their attention from the cube to the Monument.
Kostas took me and my crew to that same forward area of the bridge. The equipment on the left side was still sporting labels; however, some of the equipment was usable today.
Now Kostas said to the five of us, “I hope you’ve all been reviewing the dimensional maps and all of the omnivelocity information we’ve taught you, and everything else that’s been programmed into your workbooks.”
I nodded at her fast; so did my crew.
Then Kostas walked over to one of the lit-up consoles on the left side of the room and began going over how to read the velocity-profile diagrams and numerical data on the screen. “This is a simulation,” she said. “I’m going to set up a fake flight scenario, and then show you how it should be worked out. I’ll be doing this on all of the equipment that’s turned on today.”
She moved from one console to the next, pushing at various buttons and explaining what she was doing, while we stood close to her, and watched and listened.
She repeated that whole process several times, and it went on for so long that I lost track of how long we’d been on the bridge—not that time made sense on the Monument now in general. But my aching body began feeling tired of standing on the bridge and watching Kostas’ demonstrations.
She finally said that one or two of us at a time would now work at the consoles. “Lydia and Shirley first.”
Shirley pressed a hand to her chest, her blue eyes jerking toward Gary then fixing on Kostas. “Me?!” Shirley asked.
“Yes,” Kostas replied. “You all hav
e your individual strengths, but you and Lydia are quicker at improvisational thinking. The rest of you are better over the longer-term.”
“It seems you know us well,” Babs said, her eyes on Kostas.
Kostas’ dark-haired head seemed to nod. Her hands motioned toward me and Shirley. Then I pressed a reassuring hand against Shirley’s back, and we began this new, hands-on stage of our training.
And it really did seem that Kostas knew us; other than a few slip-ups in our interpretation of a velocity profile’s upper and lower boundaries, Shirley and I both did everything right—though of course there was little to do at this point because actually flying the Monument was much more complicated. Still, I felt glad that I’d started out on the right foot.
Chen’s turn was after mine, and when he walked up to one of the consoles, I noticed that he was using his good arm to rub at the long red sleeve on his other arm. “I really want to be physically involved today, but my arm’s been itching since last night.”
My eyes widened at him; then they whipped to Kostas. “Is there a problem?”
Kostas’ head shook a “no” at me. “No problem we can see.”
“I wouldn’t exactly phrase it like that,” I said, a little sharply.
A low, almost inaudible sigh from Kostas. “The Keepers have explained to Chen what his options are. We can regrow a human arm for him. But there are risks with the arm growth and attachment, especially because we will need to remove what he has now.”
“Um,” Chen said, his left hand firmly grabbing onto his right arm, “I think I can live with the one I’ve got, at least for now….” His eyes wandered over the rest of us from the Demeter and finally landed on me. “Lydia, what do you think I should do? What would YOU do?”
