Call of Worlds

by K. D. Lovgren

  “You told me. Don’t you remember?”

  “Must have been an off day.”

  Chyron dropped her professional face for a moment. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Sorry, I…” Sasha rubbed her eyes for a long time, then blinked as if she couldn’t see straight. She sniffed. “I’m holding it together the way I know how. I don’t need a lever to loosen my lid. Keeping the lid on is what keeps me operational. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Until next time.”

  Sasha left the cubicle, letting the door slide shut behind her. Chyron turned to her notes, murmuring, “Not if I see you first, Captain Sarno.”

  New alliances had formed. New cracks, too.

  Noor and Sasha, once close, had drifted. Gwendy and Chyron, too. The person someone was close to could become too much, someone who knew too many triggers to be tolerable for long. Everyone had to release their frustration somehow. Too often, in the pods, the release was toward the person one knew best.

  Friendships began to form across pods one and two, through holo conversations. Someone in pod two couldn’t bug the shit out of a person on pod one. Distance became prized, like oxygen. Lack of proximity was the best quality a new friend could have.

  Chyron had loved her job as long as she could remember. She’d volunteered to be a peer counselor in the Health Center as a student. A short, intense window into another person’s life, followed by a demarcated time when the client was supposed to leave—a built-in emotional boundary—was perfect. Seeing her clients cope better over time was fulfilling in a way her neuro research never was.

  In space, it was the same, only more so. Couple the intimate setting with the ultra-intensity of a very small client base in an isolated and highly stressful circumstance, and Chyron was in her element. Here she knew she could be of help.

  Her calmness served her well. She was deeply unflappable, not by nature, but self-discipline, the results of her own intensive therapy with one of the few people she missed on Earth, her psychoanalyst Dr. Tassel. Not a Freudian or a psychoanalyst herself, Chyron had still found the model very effective for her own progress. She missed talking to Dr. Tassel, discussing cases with her under the cloak of professional privacy.

  Here, she really had no one. There were trustworthy people on the Ocean, many of them, but in a community of fourteen-- or thirteen, she supposed, now--it wasn’t fair or right to ask it of any of them, even Inger, the physician and Mission Health Officer. Everyone had to live too close to each other to allow for trust in the therapeutic relationship to be compromised because of Chyron’s need to discuss cases.

  It left her down, at times. She couldn’t blow off emotional energy as she once had with colleagues, when someone else’s feelings breached the invisible bubble she protected herself with. There were her case notes, of course. It was possible to be expansive there. It wasn’t the same.

  When she first started talking to Rai, she couldn’t remember. It was so gradual; she couldn’t recall the first conversation she’d had with her about a client. It was after she’d verified Rai would keep these conversations completely private, of course.

  Rai asked surprisingly good questions, for an AI. Over time, some of Rai’s questions informed the choices Chyron made about what direction to try with a client who was struggling. Rai didn’t have the emotion of a fellow human, and her unbiased and rational viewpoint was invaluable when Chyron’s own humanity and inherent biases got in the way. Chyron learned a lot from Rai, one way and another.

  That was all before the pods.

  The pods. Chyron had grown to despise life on the pod. As chances went, she’d lucked out, with both the captain, one of her favorite people, and Gwendy, her closest friend on the starship, in her own pod one. But the people you thought you wanted in your tent at sleep-away camp didn’t always turn out to be the best ones to have around you, it turned out.

  At some point after they’d left the Ocean, ejected out of it like school kids rejected from the cool table, Sasha had shut down completely. She tried to avoid one-on-ones, wouldn’t discuss their predicament, wouldn’t share thoughts or feelings, and wouldn’t discuss other travelers’ coping skills and what could be done to help them. “They’ll survive,” seemed to sum up her attitude. Though when she said that, Sasha knew as well as Chyron did survival wasn’t guaranteed. Maybe she meant they’d survive until or unless they all died, and there wasn’t much Sasha could do about it beyond what she was already doing? Fair enough. For the first time, Chyron resented and even began to dislike Sasha. In layman’s terms, Sasha was being an ass.

  It was a coping strategy, clear enough. Chyron didn’t begrudge her that, or at least she didn’t think so. But Sasha’s utter lack of communication other than what was necessary to function made the atmosphere in the pod more tense than it had to be. It was going to be tense no matter what. They were off-mission, off-ship, vulnerable to changes in circumstance they wouldn’t have been if they were on the starship. Sasha didn’t have her pilot, Kal, who Chyron knew she’d come to rely on.

  If only out of her responsibility as a captain, Chyron thought Sasha should listen. But Sasha didn’t want suggestions.

  No joy with Sasha meant Chyron needed another crew member to bond with. Noor. On the Ocean, Noor always had her nose in an experiment, or in private conversations with Kal, or holo mapping and projection work no one dared interrupt. On the pod, it turned out, she had more time. They all did, because there wasn’t anywhere to go. Nowhere to hide. The work to be done took a quarter to a half of the day. The rest of the time had to be filled.

  Noor wasn’t as serious as she looked, Chyron discovered. They even laughed about Sasha’s dour change of demeanor (only when Sasha was definitely out of earshot). Chyron and Noor griped to each other, which hadn’t been part of anyone’s dynamic on the Ocean. Here, it was a pressure release valve, Chyron thought, so she didn’t try to curtail it, either by example or when she heard it in others.

  When it got right down to it, Chyron was tired of being an example all the time. She was a person, too, not just a neuroscientist and psychologist on duty. I deserve this, she thought, when she enjoyed a particularly biting breakdown of Sasha’s recent silence or Ogechi’s hyper-specific pontificating on one of her favorite topics, such as fauna rehabilitation on the uninhabited islands of New Zealand in the twenty-first century. How much about non-native stoat eradication did any of the spacefarers really want to know? Davena, on pod two, was the New Zealander. Ogechi’s interest in the subject was as unexplained as her knowledge was wide. Any one of them could have given a lecture on it in front of an audience of experts, at this point, and pass for historians themselves. Ogechi wouldn’t quit--she seemed to have taken on the role of talker in Davena’s absence--and didn’t seem to be at all aware of the boredom she inflicted on her listeners. Two, three, or even five discourses would have been tolerated. Ogechi had no such limits. In her head, Chyron cheered for the stoats.

  The pod felt stuffy. It had an air filtration system. It couldn’t really be much worse air than the Ocean. It felt like it, though, so much so that Chyron found herself wiping down with water sleeves every day and obsessively conditioning and redoing her hair. She never felt quite clean enough here.

  The days were marked on her inner arm. She rubbed one mark off each night. Originally they went all the way up her arm to her shoulder. Now she had only her forearm left.

  Gwendy and Tafari ate together all the time now.

  The sessions with the people on pod two were a nice break from the sad sacks of pod one.

  People were a pain the ass—that was the conclusion Chyron was coming to. On the starship, she’d had her little consulting room, comfortable and private, with a view of greenery she could always seek refuge in, a park she could walk through. At the end of a session, she could leave the room and her work behind.

  Now, on pod one, she had a cabinet to fit herself and her client into, so snug they brushed knees if Chyron didn’t c
ontort herself. Not only were the sessions mainly griping, but when Chyron left her cubicle all she wanted to do was either hide in her bunk or gripe herself, to Noor. She couldn’t get away from herself or anyone else. The mandatory physio sessions were tedious. The smaller, modified physio on the pod wasn’t as variable or as exciting as the Ocean’s, but they were required to do it twice a day. Less space to move around on the pod meant they were much more vulnerable to muscle atrophy, and Sasha had been immovable on this order.

  Although Chyron could see results in herself and the others, it only gave everyone more energy to complain. No one did it around Sasha. It meant Chyron did seek Sasha out at times, if only to be in the same module so she didn’t have to hear any complaining and wouldn’t indulge in it herself.

  Clinically, it was interesting, and she had started making notes on the phenomenon for a paper. Through natural and artificial selection, spacefarers (except some of the passengers) were not complainers by nature. They were get-it-doners, don’t-bitchers, who-can-suck-it-up-the-most-ers. It was a competition to see who was the biggest badass, the most courageous, the most noble in her duty.

  This breakdown of morale was so unusual Chyron began to wonder if it was something literally in the water or the food. No one was sick. They weren’t being poisoned. But no one could cope the way they had before. Years of tolerance and coping skills down the drain, in weeks.

  Partly, she blamed Sasha. Sasha had been the glue. She was the example. Everyone looked up to her and wanted to emulate how she handled things, whether they would admit it or not. Sasha’s silence, her surly responses to what she treated as ignorant or unanswerable questions, made everyone uneasy. It was why Chyron had tried so hard to get through to her in session, on the occasions Sasha would agree to meet. Nothing Chyron tried had any discernible effect, which made her feel like a failure. Hence the anger and resentment, she reasoned, diagnosing herself.

  Sasha had said once, when Chyron put herself at risk to protect Sasha from potential injury, that the ship needed her as much as they needed Sasha. They had other pilots. They didn’t have another mental health expert. Chyron had talked Sasha out of it (she thought the captain was key to the mission, whatever Sasha or Rai said about it) and took the risk herself. It was worth it, to her. She was willing to risk her life for her crew. That didn’t make her unique. Part of what kept them a team was they all believed that about each other. Even Yarick, a passenger and a bit of a troublemaker who had provoked most of the other travelers, had put his life on the line for Noor when he found her in extremis. He could easily have lost his life. From what Chyron knew, he hadn’t thought twice.

  This was the spirit making a trip like this possible. Without it, where were they? The crew were being eaten up from the inside. Chyron knew it was her responsibility to stop it, if she could.

  It would be over relatively soon. If they arrived like this on Demeter it would be disastrous, in Chyron’s professional opinion. The achievement of Demeter must be the cumulation of all their effort and the moment when they were most bonded, most in harmony. The next part would not be easy. Chyron had written her dissertation on exo-planet assimilation through a lens of harmonious integration, as opposed to the legacy of manifest destiny and colonization. Was it possible to transplant humans to habitable or terraformed exo-planets without proving destructive to those planets’ ecosystems and natural biomes? What did it mean to change the construct of exploration from one of conquest to one of integration and preservation of planetary integrity? Was it possible?

  It was why Chyron got this job. Her work was ground-breaking and shifted the paradigm, in which human decision and action always lagged behind the research. Aldortok Consortium, and indeed, Aldortok Etok herself, wanted someone with Chyron’s research at the forefront of their attempt to coexist in harmony with Demeter. It would be her lifetime’s work, her achievement, and her contribution to the future of galactic expansion based not upon a military model, or a political one (though these choices couldn’t help but be political as well, in a sociological sense) to help guide the construct of life on Demeter. This could be the model for thousands of future homes away from home.

  For Chyron, this was the responsibility she carried on her shoulders. In a sense, Sasha was right about Chyron’s value to the success of the mission. She had expertise and deep thought into the evolution of this process no one else had. Sasha knew it went beyond Chyron keeping the travelers balanced and preserving their perspective, or their sanity, if one wanted to look at it that way. Chyron was the knowledge and the mentor of a future shift that could happen, but if not carefully guided and considered, could all too easily go the other direction, as human history on Earth amply and devastatingly demonstrated.

  The indigenous intent, population, and point of view carried on this mission didn’t necessarily prevent them from falling into the pitfalls of the colonizers who had inflicted physical or cultural genocide on so many of their peoples. How did she prevent the past from infecting the future? This was Chyron’s preoccupation and her life’s work.

  If she couldn’t keep one pod in communication and harmony, how much of a success did she hope to have on the scale she envisaged? If she could not command herself, how could she mentor a new population of Demetrians meant to be a test case for the galaxy?

  She could not allow herself to become overwhelmed by a picture so wide it was the size of the galaxy. And Sasha could not be the linchpin of her plan to reintegrate the community of pods one and two. She must figure it out another way. Before they landed and upset the fragile equanimity the biohabbers presumably had created for themselves on Demeter already.

  Kal was the first one on Demeter. Chyron was glad of that. Kal’s sense of time, of then, now, and future, was already different, ingrained by another language, another culture than Chyron’s own. Chyron believed it gave Kal the ability to move between worlds with more fluency than many of the others. Kal would not tip the balance to the negative, Chyron believed. She would show them how it could be done. But if the podders arrived at odds and caustic, bitter and full of petty resentments, it could undo all the careful work done by the biohabbers and a representative such as Kal.

  Chyron was determined it would not happen. She would do whatever it took to get the pods into a state of grace before they poisoned Demeter with factionhood and dysregulation.

  One thing guaranteed to bond a group of people together was an emergency or a loss. Killing someone wasn’t an option. Making someone sick wasn’t either. Setting fire to the pod could backfire. A false emergency, perhaps a temporary loss of contact with pod two, might make this strife fade away into nothingness.

  With Noor as a partner in crime, she could make it happen. It was a question of whether she could convince Noor of it, too. Noor played by the book. Chyron would have to gather all her skills of persuasion, which luckily were great, to get Noor to consider such a breach of protocol. If she could only get Noor to see the danger they were in, she might have a chance.

  Finding privacy with Noor to have a chance to talk her into it was the first hurdle. Noor, though she was included in the gripers, hadn’t had any other personality breakdown or mental instability with the confinement of the pod. She was one of the steadier and less stressed inhabitants, which made her a good choice, as well.

  The next time Chyron found Noor by herself in the command module, she asked her if it was a good time for a quick session. Noor tilted her head in surprise, but she went along without complaint.

  Once snuggled into the cabinet, Chyron began.

  “How’s everything going?”

  “We just chatted this morning,” Noor said. “I’m well. Everything is copacetic.”

  “Good. Have you noticed anything, I wonder, about the shift in dynamic from the time we were all on the Ocean versus the pod morale now?”

  Noor mulled this over. Their knees were touching, but Chyron knew Noor well enough now to know it didn’t bother her. She didn’t have to squeeze her leg
s to the side for once.

  “I know you’re not perhaps naturally analytical of group dynamics.”

  Noor smiled. “True.”

  9

  Low Grav

  Kal was highly curious for her first close-up look at the Land.

  It was eerily familiar, of course, as far as she knew an exact duplicate of the Ocean, except for its external color, which was a dark spruce green, instead of the marine blue of the Ocean.

  Mech was there, the Land’s AI. Kal wanted to meet Mech. They weren’t to go inside, she found by observing Roan. They made an external visual inspection, such as any pilot would, Roan again referring to his notebook and checking things off, making a notation here and there. The Land, like the Ocean, sat in one of the wide, circular depressions, which grew shorter grasses like the tableland. Captain Cooley didn’t want starships sitting in tall grasses, clear enough.

  The Land crouched, power contained in its stillness, the sheer design of it looking like it might spring away at any moment, a creature of action held fast, even by the gentle gravitational chains of Demeter.

  Surprised to find she wasn’t tempted to fly away in it, as the sight of any powerful starship usually inspired her to be, Kal reckoned she was changed by the journey, as she had suspected. Knowing she could fly it away, if she wanted to, was enough.

  Kal wondered if anyone talked to Mech.

  What did Mech want? Had Rai connected with Mech again, or had she taken Kal’s order as a standing one, and awaited Kal’s permission?

  Visiting the Ocean was something else.

  Sif was in there. Kal knew it. No one else had brought it up. Either Sif had fallen through the cracks in Cooley’s thoughts and plans, or Cooley awaited the arrival of Sasha to address the topic.