The Voyage of the White Cloud

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Becky chewed, then said, “Like the stories of the First Heroes. My teacher called them…” she closed her eyes, as she often did when trying to remember something, “metaphors.”

  “Exactly,” Carolyn said, letting a long breath out. “But different groups of people had different stories, and they fought about which were right. And people who were in charge began to use those stories as a way to make the rest of the people do whatever they wanted. The stories didn’t stop being useful, but they did have bad sides, too.”

  “Why would people fight about the stories? If they weren’t really true?”

  “Well, some people thought they were true. But what I’m trying to tell you is that the stories are important, even when we know they are metaphors. They still make us feel particular ways about the people and things they talk about. And I want you to know that it’s okay to decide for yourself what think about the stories you hear, not to just accept what other people tell you they mean. Do you understand?”

  Becky nodded. “I think so.” She ate the last of her meal, then carefully laid the fork at what Carolyn knew to be a 45º angle on the plate. It wouldn’t be long before Becky knew that, too. “Is it all right if I go and think about Yolanda’s Spider now?”

  Carolyn smiled. “That is definitely all right.” She picked up the plates, careful not to disturb Becky’s arrangement. Her daughter’s rituals gave her days order and meaning, and Carolyn knew how desperately Becky clung to those tiny moments of control. They were her own private mythology that she could probably never explain, and Carolyn just hoped that one day Becky would think about them as carefully as she was most certainly now thinking about stories from generations gone by.

  Chapter 14

  What You've Always Wanted

  “Call me Steve.”

  Keith looked over, unsure what this meant. “Uh, okay,” he said. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Naw,” she said, “I’m not changing anything else. I just don’t like being pigeon-holed into the binary, you know?”

  He didn’t know, but he nodded anyway. Stephanie—Steve, he corrected himself—was always saying things he didn’t understand. It was part of her charm. They were sitting in the darkest corner of the library, as they did most days after school. Keith needed the library time to study. He was struggling with the advanced mathematics course and he knew that if he didn’t complete the material in the 90th percentile, he’d never have a chance at the Academy entrance exam. Still, he set his tablet aside and waited to see if Steve had anything else to add to this nomenclature development.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment and Keith didn’t know what to contribute to the conversation. Despite what she’d said, he wondered if Steve was planning to transition. She had always been what Keith’s mom called a tomboy, and in the last year she’d given up all trappings of stereotypical femininity. Once she’d started showing up to school wearing an old, discarded spacesuit, Keith had really wondered what was going on in her head.

  He’d tried to talk about it once. “You ever think that things didn’t turn out, you know,“ he fumbled for the right way to put it, “typically?” He peeked up at her from behind a problem about zero-g propulsion. “With your body, or your DNA or something?”

  Stephanie, as she’d still called herself then, put down her stylus and frowned. Keith looked over at her tablet and saw a bunch of strange squiggles he didn’t understand. There was a title in text, though, that read Study in E flat. He didn’t know what that meant, either. “I don’t think so,” Stephanie answered after obviously giving the question some thought. “Why?”

  Keith shrugged and tried to fight the flush creeping across his face. “Dunno,” he mumbled and went back to staring at the physics problem.

  “Oh, god,” Stephanie said and pulled the tablet from his grasp. “I am such an idiot. I’m sorry, Keith, I didn’t realize.” She moved over to face him directly and Keith felt his heart rate increase. He didn’t understand why in the past few years being with Stephanie had become so… strange. He knew all about men and women and adolescence and hormones, but this just seemed ridiculous. He’d known Stephanie almost since he was born. And he was pretty sure he didn’t like her like that. Fairly sure.

  “What?” he asked, tamping down the panic and thrill that were competing for mindshare.

  “Are you having, you know, feelings?” she asked, her voice low and intense.

  Keith blinked at her. He couldn’t imagine why she would think that he… oh. She thought he was trying to feel her out, see how she would react, so he could confess some major teenage secret. As if there were anything weird about him that could compete with her everyday self.

  He shook his head. “No. I’m still boring. I just thought, maybe you… Never mind.” He let his voice trail off, then noticed a distant point in space that became immediately fascinating.

  “Oh,” she said and Keith swore he could detect a hint of embarrassment in her voice. It couldn’t be, though. Nothing fazed Stephanie. She was invincible.

  They never talked about it again. Not until that afternoon, when they’d been talking about the ship-wide track tournament, and apropos of nothing she’d asked him to call her Steve.

  “Did your mom get weird when she and my mom split up?” Steve asked Keith. They sat on the edge of the reservoir, feet dangling in the water. Keith couldn’t help noticing that Steve had done something to her chest. She was wearing a loose top and swim shorts, like about half the kids at the water’s edge. But Keith was certain that she used to be a lot curvier than she now seemed to be. He tried not to let her catch him looking.

  “Yeah,” he answered and threw a pebble into the water. “I know they said it was mutual, just one of those things, but Mom seemed pretty sad for a long time after.”

  Steve nodded and stared out over the water. Keith had decided that she must be done with the conversation when she said, “Mine, too.” She kicked her feet, sending splashes of water into the air. Keith watched the droplets hover for a microsecond before floating back down to the surface of the water. It made him think of the time he’d taken a trip to the zero-gravity level in the centre of the ship, how he’d bounced through the room as if he were on a trampoline. He’d been young enough then to be able to just have fun. Now, he’d be too worried about what he looked like, if people would think he was dumb for finding jumping around in weightlessness entertaining.

  He knew swimming was acceptable fun, though, so stood. He could feel a warm breeze on his back, the recyclers pushing out cleaned air from the ducts behind him. “Come on,” he said and leapt off the edge of the platform. He tucked his thin body into a ball and hit the water with a splash that sent a column of water straight up. As it came back down, it spread out and covered Steve in a cascade of drops.

  “Keith!” she squealed and he smiled. That sounded like the Stephanie he remembered. She stood and dove into the water head first, her body an arrow aimed at his heart. She tackled him underwater and they wrestled until they couldn’t breathe, then they floated on their backs looking up at the lights and ductwork of the ceiling.

  “It just doesn’t seem worth it,” she said and Keith knew she wasn’t just talking about their parents. She was talking about all couples. She was talking about love.

  Neither Keith nor Steve knew it at the time, but when their mothers began to become close, they almost killed the relationship before it began. Keith found out years later, long after the relationship ended. He’d started paying more attention to the love stories than the adventure and mystery ones. It was about this time that it started being, not exactly awkward with Stephanie, but different. He knew enough to know that it was mostly just his body chemistry changing, but that didn’t make him feel any better about it.

  “When you and Marie-Claire became a couple,” he asked his mother one evening, “how did you know? I mean, how did you know you liked her like that?” He hated the way he sounded, as if he were just another dumb twelve-year-old. But he
didn’t know how else to ask, and it wasn’t as if talking about his mother’s former partner who just happened to be his best friend’s mom was easy.

  His mother had sighed, but not the exasperated sigh he feared. It was more a dreamy, remembering sigh, which made Keith feel both more and less uncomfortable. “I remember when I was about your age,” she said, “asking my mother about love. ‘How do you know if you’re really in love?’ I asked. She told me that there was no way to explain it, you just know.” She looked at Keith and smiled. “It was the most useless thing I’d ever heard, and I promised myself then and there that I’d never answer a question like that.” She paused and stared at a spot on the wall of their quarters. “The trouble is, it’s hard to explain. And probably different for everyone, anyway. But I’ll try.

  “You know Marie-Claire and I were friends for a long time first?” Keith nodded. Of course, his mother and Marie-Claire had been apprentices at the same time and they often worked together. They got pregnant in the same year and they’d spent all their free time together with their new babies. Keith and Stephanie were nearly as close as siblings. But sometime when the kids were just starting school, something had changed. “I don’t know exactly what happened for her, but I think I always loved M-C. She was the most fun person I knew and anytime I did anything, she was the first person I wanted to share it with. But I never thought of her as a romantic partner, because, well, women aren’t really my thing.” Keith could see that his mother was nearly as embarrassed talking about this with him as he was hearing it. But he couldn’t get out of this conversation now, and the awfulness of it all somehow made it all the more compelling.

  “So, what happened?” he asked.

  His mother shrugged and tried to cover up her nervous laugh with a cough. “Maybe I just got older, maybe I realized that there’s more to life than physical attraction. Maybe my tastes changed, I don’t really know. It felt kind of like a switch was thrown somewhere inside me. One day, she was just my buddy M-C. The next day…” She couldn’t cover the crimson flush that rose up her cheeks. “The next day I wanted something more.” She sighed. “I know this isn’t a good answer, Keith. It’s just a lot more words to say, ‘you’ll know love when you find it,’ I guess.” She stood and walked into the small galley and drew a glass of water.

  “We were really worried about how it would affect you and Stephanie,” she said, still facing the faucet. “We knew there was no pretending that nothing had changed, and we also knew that the odds of us staying together forever were slim. M-C really wasn’t sure—I had to lobby hard to get her to agree to even try.” She laughed then, but it sounded like sadness rather than mirth. She didn’t turn around and Keith guessed that she was crying again.

  “Was it worth it?” He finally asked the question he really needed answered.

  He saw his mother take a deep breath and when she turned he could see that her eyes were red, but the smile on her face was genuine. “Absolutely,” she said.

  Keith walked out of his classroom grinning. Amal, his physics teacher, had just confirmed Keith’s final grade. “I did it,” he said, catching up with Steve as she was leaving her own language class, “91st percentile!”

  “Good job, buddy,” she said and grinned at him. “I knew you’d pull it off. You’re going to make a great engineer.”

  “We both will,” Keith said and frowned as Steve shrugged. “Come on, I know you’ve got the marks.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I just don’t know if it’s what I want to do.”

  “What are you saying?” Keith stopped and reached his hand out to Steve’s shoulder. He grabbed her and she stopped walking and turned to face him.

  “Engineering is your thing,” she said. “You’re going to be great at it, too. I… I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know, okay? Just, don’t push me right now.” She brushed past him and walked off, everything in her body language telling Keith not to follow her. He followed her.

  “But you’re a natural,” he said, his long legs catching up to her easily. “We’d go to the Academy, study together, maybe even work together later. How can you just throw that all away?” He reached out for her again, but this time she batted his hand away and wheeled around to look at him.

  “Things change, Keith,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Can’t you see that? Just leave it alone for now. I mean it.” She turned and walked away and this time Keith let her go.

  What was happening to them?

  They didn’t talk for more than ten days. Keith couldn’t remember if they’d ever gone so long without speaking. He was starting to think that he’d done something irrevocable, that she would never talk to him again. His pain was obvious.

  “What’s going on, sweetheart?” his mother asked. “Did something happen between you and Stephanie?”

  “It’s Steve now,” Keith muttered.

  “Oh,” his mother said, her eyebrows rising. “Is she… uh, is he…?”

  “She hasn’t changed. That’s not the problem,” Keith spat out, wondering if he was telling the truth. “It’s just a name. You know her, she’s always got to be different.”

  His mother looked at him and Keith could feel her trying to figure out what to say. “Sometimes,” she said, her voice soft, “friends go through different stages of closeness. This is a big time for both of you—leaving school, going on to choose a path in life. Soon Steph— Steve will have to think about children, you too, maybe. It’s a crazy time right now. It’s no surprise that things aren’t exactly the same as they’ve always been with you two.”

  “Yeah,” Keith said and peeked at his mother through his hair. He couldn’t tell if she really believed what she was saying, but he wanted to believe it.

  Later that night, he wasn’t sleeping and he heard his mother on the comms with Marie-Claire. He couldn’t hear Steve’s mom’s side of the conversation, but his own mother wasn’t as quiet as she thought she was. He propped the door to his bedroom open and sat against the wall, straining to hear.

  “… he’s terribly upset about whatever it is. It’s as if they’ve split up … No, he didn’t tell me that anything specific happened … She’s moping around, too? … I don’t envy kids these days … I know … You’d think it would be easier to tell them that they’re only making themselves miserable … Yes, I know they have to go through it themselves, I just wish … Yes, you, too.”

  Keith slipped his door closed and lay on top of his bed. So Steve was miserable, too. Why did that not make him feel any better?

  She called him a few days before the end of school ceremony. “I was just going to ask if you were going to the party,” she said over the comms. She didn’t look into the camera, and Keith worried for a moment that she was going to tell him something terrible. “But we really need to talk, I guess,” she finished.

  “Yeah,” Keith said, his stomach clenched. “You want to meet at the garden or something?”

  Steve nodded and looked up. Her eyes were red, not like she’d been crying, but as if she hadn’t slept well in a few days. “Yeah, the autumn garden’s nice. Can you be there in thirty minutes?”

  I would drop anything, he thought. I’d find a way to move the stars if I had to. “Sure,” he said aloud.

  She was there when he arrived. He walked over to where she sat under a large tree. Its leaves were turning and there was a small carpet of yellow and orange around the base of the trunk. She sat in a clearing and was turning a bright orange leaf over in her hand. Keith’s step cracked a branch and she looked up. Keith saw something familiar and wonderful in her face and his throat constricted. Is this it? Is this just knowing when it’s real?

  “Hey,” he said and walked over to Steve. “Can I sit?”

  “Of course,” she said and laughed a little. It sounded forced.

  “Are we okay?” Keith blurted. “I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry. I just… I just don’t want…”

  She put her hand lightly on his arm and he felt his skin almos
t burn at her touch. “We’re okay,” she said. “At least, we are as far as I’m concerned.” She squeezed lightly, then took her hand back. She looked away from him and Keith followed the path of her gaze. The trees were beautiful in this room, he thought. He wondered if he’d ever noticed that before.

  “I know I’ve been weird,” Steve began, “weird even for me.” She laughed and this time it sounded real.

  “Kind of,” Keith said.

  “It’s so embarrassing,” she said, “so typical. End of school rolls around and I go all ‘got to find my authentic self’ on you.” She shook her head. “I feel like such a loser, but what can I say? You get told you have to decide what you want to spend your life doing, it makes you think.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Keith said. “I don’t think that makes you a loser.”

  Steve punched him in the arm. “Like you’d know,” she said but she was smiling. “Anyway, I figured out that I didn’t like who I was. Who everyone was trying to make me be, I guess. I don’t want to be an engineer, Keith. I know that’s not what you or anyone else expects, but it’s the way it is. And since it’s the only thing I actually can control right now, I’m making sure I don’t get stuck in a job I don’t love.” She looked away and all trace of lightness left her. “Especially since I can’t help the rest of it.”

  “The rest of what?” Keith asked.

  “Everything! Life, me, being who I am.” She ran her hands over her head, the short hair unaffected by the touch. Keith waited. “I know it’s out of my control,” she said, “but, god, I do not want to be a mother. But I don’t want to be a man, either. So what am I supposed to do?”