The Voyage of the White Cloud

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Separating the crew from the rest of society was, she admitted, a drastic act. But the captain was right—over time, most people would be able to live their lives without ever really thinking about the reality of their precarious state. By separating the function of the ship from the function of society, both should be able to focus more on their own needs. It was a clever—if inelegant—solution.

  But what a challenge finding replacements was proving to be. Liisa had resigned, as had the cartographer that Sheelagh had just chosen. It was not the situation she was accustomed to finding herself in. She reviewed the few applications once more—it was well past four times by now. As usual, the issue was not in the candidates’ abilities. The Academy produced plenty of scientists and engineers, and Sheelagh had learned over the years that most of the crew positions could easily be picked up on the job by any well-educated person. The problem had always been personal suitability—and that was now even more difficult to address. If only more people were like her, Sheelagh thought, then this wouldn’t be an issue.

  She knew she was contemplating it long before she really began to accept that it was a real possibility. Sheelagh did not embrace change well—she had worked on crew selection her whole adult life, the idea that something else might be more fulfilling had always been irrelevant. This was what she did and that was all there was to it. But the idea that she could be segregated in a small area of the ship, with only a few other people she would ever need to deal with… the sheer predictability of that kind of life filled her with longing. It was her idea of paradise.

  As for the work, it would be fine, she knew. She’d had to become reasonably conversant with all the crew positions, and she felt that she could probably be competent at some of them. Stellar cartography was most likely the best choice. Maybe she would even come to find the idea of mapping the stars exciting. Though it wasn’t excitement she wanted. It was routine. A lack of interruptions. Schedule. Predictability. Solitude.

  She told herself that she hadn’t made a decision, that she wasn’t about to abandon everything she had ever known and lock herself behind a door. She told herself that it wasn’t happening even as she packed her few belongings and steadfastly refused to find a suitable candidate for the stellar cartographer. But when Rhea called, demanding that she finalize the crew roster, she couldn’t hide the truth from herself any longer.

  “I believe I’ve found all the replacement crew members,” she said. “But there is one opening I’m afraid that you will have to fill.”

  Chapter 18

  Scent of the Trees

  Takara longed for the wind. She had heard about it when she was child, but hadn’t really understood what it meant until she saw it in a story from old Earth. It wasn’t important to the plot, just a moody shot of a leaf blowing down the street, but it captivated Takara. To feel the air moving on her face, strong enough to carry a small animal away—it was all she dreamed of. She spent hours in the arboretum, where the tiniest breeze blew from the atmospheric processors located nearby, lying on her back with her eyes closed, waiting for the touch of the air on her skin. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

  “Plenty of people don’t love their work, Tak,” Simone scowled at her friend over bowls of soup at the canteen. “That’s why they call it ‘work.’ You’ve got to just pick something, or the council will choose for you and you really don’t want that.”

  “Why not?” Takara said, only partly to bother Simone. She’d been Tak’s closest friend since Simone and her mother had moved into the quarters three doors down, and their friendship had always been based on mutual annoyance as much as anything else.

  Simone grunted then slurped her soup. The sound drove Tak crazy. “How do you think they get people to do the shitty jobs? If you can’t make up your mind—poof! You’re the new toilet unblocker.”

  Takara laughed. “They have machines for that.”

  “You sure?” Simone said, looking at Tak through the fringe of frizzy hair that covered her eyes.

  Tak shrugged. “Maybe I’d like unblocking toilets. It’s useful, I’m sure there’s a real sense of accomplishment you get when you clear out a load of shit.” She couldn’t keep up the pretence any longer and started to laugh. She could see Simone trying not to join but it didn’t take long before they were both laughing. An old lady a few tables over made a disgusted noise at them which only set them off even harder. Tak’s stomach hurt by the time they managed to get themselves back under control.

  “Seriously,” Simone said, “you do need to think about this. There’s got to be something that interests you, at least a little. You said you used to hang out in the arboretum—why not be a gardener or something?”

  Tak shook her head. “I don’t like the dirt.”

  “What about a botanist, then? Something in hydroponics?”

  “You need Academy training for that.” Both of them knew that Tak’s school history wasn’t going to get her in the Academy. The best she could ever hope to do was start some job at the bottom and work her way up internally.

  “I’m trying to help you out here,” Simone said, all traces of their laughing fit gone. “There are only a few days left before you need to put in your apprenticeship requests. If you don’t come up with something on your own, I’m going to have to do something drastic.”

  “Like what?” Tak asked, rolling her eyes. “Tell my mom?”

  “Nope,” Simone said, a nasty grin forming on her face. “I’ll sign you up for childcare.”

  Tak’s eyes got large. “You wouldn’t?”

  Simone shrugged. “If you don’t want to clean up shit one way or another, you’d better pick something.” Before Tak could say anything more, Simone stood up and took her bowl to the cleaning station. She left the canteen without another word.

  She wouldn’t really do that, would she? Tak was terrible with kids. She didn’t like them, they didn’t like her. She hadn’t even liked other children when she was one, it was one of the reasons she spent so much time by herself with the trees. Maybe Simone was right, maybe she should try to find something in gardening. Surely there was an entry-level job there that she could do.

  She took her lunch dishes to the cleaner and headed back to her quarters, determined to choose something. Really, how hard could it be?

  Tak’s mother was home when she arrived. “Is everything okay?” Tak asked. Her mother was rarely home during work hours.

  Candace shook her head. “They’re rerouting the phase inducers or something.” Tak thought her mother was oddly proud of her lack of understanding about the systems on which she worked. “Whatever it is, we can’t take any of the filters out while it’s happening, so we all got sent home. It’s no holiday, though, because we’ll all have to work doubles once the whatsits is done with.” She rolled her eyes. “You’d think they could come up with a better system. I mean they have to do this every half year, and every time it’s as if it’s never happened before. Total panic.”

  “Sure,” Tak said. She’d listened to her mother rant about the management of the sector where she worked more than a few times. It was the main reason Tak had vowed not to end up on the environmental team. Though she was starting to wonder how much of it was just her mother’s personality. She had the feeling that it wouldn’t matter where she was, what work she was doing, her mother would find something to complain about.

  Tak knew that Candace was a fundamentally unhappy person and it was her own greatest fear that she would end up just like her mother. Like Tak, Candace had not excelled in her early education and hadn’t been Academy material. Of course, that wasn’t anything to be ashamed of—less than 10% of graduates went on to the Academy. But now that Tak was at the age to be entering the workforce it had become clear to her that there wasn’t much available for a normal person. It was all scut work, cleaning up literal or figurative shit. And Tak knew from a lifetime of living with Candace that cleaning up shit just wasn’t all that rewarding.

  She went i
nto her small room and shut the door. She pulled up the list of available entry-level positions in Blue Sector. There was nothing new on the list, and she’d already discarded all of them as boring at best or totally unsuitable at worst. She wondered how hard it would be to change sectors. People did it—Simone and her mother had come from Yellow. But Simone’s mom was on the bridge crew, which was why they moved. Tak knew there was nothing special about her that would make a manager pick her over someone local. She scowled. There had to be more to life than this. But in all her eighteen years, she’d never quite figured out what that might be.

  “Did you get the stuff?”

  “Yeah,” Simone’s friend Emil whispered, even though there was no one anywhere near them. Tak, Simone and Emil were well hidden in the hollow of a cedar bush in an out-of-the-way corner of the arboretum. And it was the middle of the night. No one was going to catch them. Emil pulled a large bottle of slightly murky liquid from a bag and held it up.

  “Are you sure this stuff is safe?” Tak asked.

  “Oh come on,” Simone said, grabbing the bottle and twisting off its cap. “It’s the same stuff they serve at that bar all the tradies go to. Angela next door is always coming back from there all drunk and stupid. It’s fine.” She fixed Tak with a stare that was equal parts derision and self-justification. She slugged back a healthy amount and managed not to cough or sputter. “See,” she wheezed. “Fine.”

  Tak laughed but took the bottle. She took a tentative swig and was surprised at how not completely horrible it was. “I think this is a sipping drink,” she said, handing the bottle back to Emil.

  They got through about half the bottle before they really slowed down. By then, the liquor was starting to take effect and Tak noticed that Emil was leaning on Simone, looking half asleep. She nudged the two of them and said, “We better do something or you’re going to pass out.”

  “Any suggestions?” Emil asked.

  Tak frowned. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure,” Emil shrugged.

  “How did you know that you were different from everyone else?” Emil had transitioned before Tak had met him.

  “I never saw it that way,” he said, pulling himself up to try and focus. “It wasn’t that I was different from other people so much as I wasn’t the person people saw when they looked at me. I never felt out of place or anything, but I just wasn’t the little girl other people expected me to be.” He shrugged again and reached out for the bottle. “It probably helped that one of my teachers was living as a man, so I didn’t have to figure out what I was all on my own. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for the first person on the ship to decide that there was something wrong with his body.”

  “It’s not like there’s a shortage of things that are wrong around here,” Tak said, taking the bottle from Emil.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I mean it’s horrible being stuck on this ship, being forced to have babies, having so few options in life. On Earth people had the freedom to choose what their futures would be. Here… we’re just slaves to some future world we’ll never see.”

  “You’re not thinking about how things really were on Earth,” Emil said. “Pollution, poverty, war, disease. There’s a reason we left, Tak.”

  “That’s what they tell us,” she countered. “We don’t know that any of that is true.”

  “Sure,” Simone said, “this is all just a big conspiracy to make us do boring jobs we hate, right?”

  “Maybe it is. How would you know?“ Tak said.

  “Hey, you know what we should do?” Simone said, a gleam in her eye.

  “What?”

  “We should go and sneak onto the bridge! My mom took me once but they never showed me anything important. I bet we could get in there now and find out what’s really going on. That would show them.”

  “Simone,” Emil said, “I don’t think we could sneak into the canteen in our current state. As it is, we’re going to be lucky to get back to our quarters without getting caught.” He shook his head. “Besides, what are we going to see on the bridge anyway? Stars? Some complicated console for flying this thing? Big deal. We’re stuck here regardless of why they left in the first place. All we can do is make the best of it.” He picked up the bottle, now getting close to empty. “To making the best of it.” He took a swig and passed it over to Tak.

  “Yeah,” she said and drank.

  “Okay, so our choices are limited. I get that. And yeah, it blows airlock that we’re going to get stuck with boring jobs that no one would ever want to do. But there’s more to life than your job.”

  “Are you really sure that’s true?” Tak asked Simone, slowly licking the drug-laced fruity pop. Emil’s connection was really good. “Really, who do we know that has anything interesting going on besides work? And having a family doesn’t count.”

  Simone frowned while absently sucking on her own drugstick. It made her look like a sulky baby. “I mean,” she said around the stick, “just because no one we know can be bothered to make something of their lives doesn’t mean it has to be the same way for us. At least we know everything we do is pointless.”

  “Oh right, that’s a big help.” Tak sighed.

  “Sure it is,” Simone said. “You don’t think that our moms thought that they would be doing work that a robot could do better? You don’t think they thought that raising the next generation of space babies wasn’t going to be the most fulfilling thing in the universe? Of course they bought all those lies, just like almost everyone we know buys them, too. It takes a special understanding of things to see past all that.” Simone nodded thoughtfully and Tak had the momentary thought that if she’d been more interested in academics, Simone would have made a pretty good teacher. She had that self-important, smug look down pat.

  “Right,” Tak said, smirking. “You and me, we’ve got a monopoly on the truth. As if.”

  Simone frowned. “Still, I’m right about one thing at least: we don’t have to be defined by our jobs. We can do other stuff, be who we want. That’s the trick of it, though.” She got in close to Tak’s face and Tak was too high to think about moving out of the way. She wondered for a moment if Simone was going to kiss her, but then she just kept talking. “What do you want to do? If you had a choice, if this was old Earth. What would you do?”

  Tak knew it was the drug but at that moment she felt like that question was the most important thing anyone had ever said to her. What did she want? Who was she, really?

  She thought about it for what seemed like a long time. Finally, she said, “I don’t know.”

  Simone nodded. “Exactly,” she said, as if that answered some eternal debate. “Exactly.” She pocketed her drugstick, punched Tak in the arm a little too hard, then walked away.

  Tak sat in her quarters, eating a sandwich. She’d been sober for two days now, but Simone’s question still bothered her. It was hard to think about what she wanted, when she’d spent her whole life with her options so limited. She tried to imagine herself as an old woman—what would she like to remember about her life? She couldn’t come up with much.

  The only moments she cared about now were getting high with Simone and Emil. It wasn’t much of a life goal, but spending time with them was fun. She liked the way she felt when she didn’t have to think so much, and she liked being with them. It was like a cool breeze on her skin. Even when they were mean, it was fun.

  She didn’t have an artistic inclination—she couldn’t draw, didn’t have the patience for music and reading. She liked watching stories, but didn’t see herself as a filmmaker. It wasn’t something she could make a living at anyway, even if it did appeal. As for any job she’d really be able to get… the last thing she imagined ancient Takara thinking fondly about was some menial grind day in day out.

  And that left family, and she knew that wasn’t it, either. She couldn’t manage to make herself care about children or grand-children, it just wasn’t in her. She knew tha
t she was no intellectual genius, and so her only real value on this ship was as a step along the way—a link in the human chain from old Earth to new Earth. She wasn’t so dumb that she didn’t understand the importance of survival, she just couldn’t bring herself to care about it personally. What difference could one person make, anyway?

  Maybe she could spend her life just doing whatever job she got stuck with, then having a good time in her off hours. People had done that for centuries, if the stories she watched were accurate. Sure, she couldn’t run off and have an adventure in Thailand or meet some amazing new person at a baseball game, but surely there was a way to enjoy herself here. Even if it just meant making sure that Emil never lost contact with his supplier.

  She finished her sandwich and sat back in her chair. Was it so wrong to want some joy out of life? Why should people whose interests naturally aligned with the requirements of shipboard life get all the fun? It wasn’t fair. “Life isn’t fair,” her mother always said, but why did it have to be that way? Wasn’t it just another way of giving up? Tak wasn’t ready to give up, not yet. Not when she was just about to have the most freedom she’d ever get.

  Tak couldn’t remember how long it had been since she had been to the arboretum during the day. It was strange to see other people there, strange to not be worried about making too much noise or disturbing the plants. It made her feel simultaneously like a real adult and like she was a kid again. She walked along the path, looking at the trees—they were so different from each other. The thin, fragile willows, the tough-barked elm. So many she couldn’t even name. It was funny, for someone who spent so much time here, she knew very little about the trees. She climbed her way up the little hill, remembering how she used to run up this path when she was young. It had seemed like a mountain to her then, she used to pretend she was climbing to the top of a peak on Earth. Funny, she never specified which Earth…