Call of Worlds

by K. D. Lovgren

  “Thanks.”

  Flicker made a sour face and coded herself back into Sasha’s room.

  Kal began the process of checking on each of the Ocean’s travelers, as she’d told Sasha she would.

  Chyron was first. Roan was with her and doing many of the things Flicker had done for Kal when she first arrived. Were they all trained in this care except for her? She really was neither fish nor fowl.

  Chyron looked dazed. She didn’t have the extreme nausea Kal could hear, the retching on each side of Chyron’s rooms.

  “Kal. You’re here. And I’m here. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Thanks, Chyron.” Kal felt the glow she thought she’d get from a group hug on Demetrian soil. “How are you?”

  “Glad to be off the pod.” Chyron said this so emphatically Kal knew there must be a lot more to the story. It wasn’t the time to ask for it.

  Going down the row of her old crew who had been on pod one, hearing what they had to say, watching them vomit, and observing their behavior in general left Kal disturbed and upset. They weren’t themselves, any of them. Flicker tried to say it was all the transition to Demeter and prodded Kal about her own landing sickness, but Kal didn’t buy it. She’d known them before. This was more. Something else. The conditions on the pod might have been worse than she imagined. She hadn’t pitied them, only herself, when she was alone on the Ocean. They had each other. They weren’t alone or on the hook for a decade of research, a trillion dollars, and one of the only possible ways back home.

  Instead, they’d been smooshed together, relatively speaking. Was such a short time in close quarters enough to rattle the heads of travelers who’d already made it this far?

  Strangest of all was Sasha, who to Kal’s observation looked worse than any of them. Sasha was the strongest person Kal knew. Anyone could get sick. Something about Sasha’s appearance and demeanor had Kal worried it was more than that.

  13

  Exeunt

  They were a pretty pathetic bunch, Kal had to admit. She still thought Sasha had looked the worst, like she’d been sick before they’d ever landed. Whatever Flicker said, Kal couldn’t believe she herself had looked that bad.

  As the days passed, Kal noticed Sasha was not getting better. Flicker had all the baby Demetrians out and about in their exosuits, as she had Kal, but with Sasha it didn’t seem to be helping.

  Unaware of her surroundings, bumping into people, an empty expression on her face, Sasha was so far from her usual self Kal didn’t even know how to have a conversation with her. When they did speak, Kal sensed distress in Sasha, as if Kal’s presence bothered rather than reassured her.

  Kal and Flicker had a number of conversations—or rather disputes—about this, and Kal raised it with Cooley, too, in case Cooley could get Flicker to take measures, since Kal couldn’t. Cooley must have talked some sense into Flicker, because the next thing Kal knew Sasha was out of her exosuit and in a light suit with a lower-face mask, her eyes and hair and hands free. She was allowed to remove the mask to eat. Kal didn’t see what the point of a mask was then, but she didn’t push it. Flicker said the light suit would help to ground Sasha, assimilate her into a planetary habitat, and help her reconnect with both the half of her crew on-planet and the biohabbers.

  The morning Flicker set her loose like this, Kal was already at the eating table for breakfast, before her morning rounds with Roan. Flicker had forbidden any substantial conversations between Kal and the podders. She said it would strain them when they needed all their energy for rehabilitation. Kal’s questions, and theirs for her, would have to wait. It took some of the pressure of their presence off Kal, which surprised her, how much she didn’t want to talk about everything that had happened. Not yet. Maybe Flicker did know best sometimes.

  Sasha managed to find a bowl of something that looked like oatmeal and brought it over, setting it down one chair away, kitty corner to Kal, who sat at the head of the otherwise empty table.

  One of the symptoms, which was confusingly like the Sasha of old yet disturbingly different now, was her silence. Sasha had always been a person of few words. She’d never been awkward or uncomfortable with her own silence that Kal could tell. Now she looked strained by the silence, yet unable to break it.

  “Sleep well?” Kal said, using a new soft voice she’d acquired for Sasha alone.

  “Oh. I think so. Pretty well. Yes.” Sasha stared at her eating utensil as if it were a foreign object. Kal unsuccessfully tried to keep the look of concern off her face, but Sasha seemed beyond noticing.

  Kal cleared her throat and deliberately dipped her own spoon in her muesli mixture. Flavored with berry juice, it wasn’t too bad. Stirring the contents, she scooped some up and put it in her mouth. Sasha watched her surreptitiously. Soon after, she got some of her oatmeal to her mouth.

  Kal wanted to cry.

  She was getting worse, not better.

  Kal chewed her food, which expanded, tasteless in her mouth, reduced to sawdust. Without thinking she reached out for Sasha’s free hand, rested on the table. She covered it with her own and squeezed. Sasha dropped her spoon. Kal didn’t care. Eyes closed, she held Sasha’s hand and thought of her as she’d been. She even thought of her as she hadn’t allowed herself to, for weeks—in the corridors between the bridge and the Tube, when Sasha had bewitched Kal with her eyes and kisses to get her to the Tube. A pretense, using Kal’s real reactions to fool the biometric sensors, so she could get Kal somewhere without sensors to discuss something endangering the whole mission.

  It had been a monumentally complex sequence of events. Sasha had used Kal’s feelings, the feelings she suspected were there, underneath, and taken advantage of them. What Kal tried not to think about was that if Sasha had been faking her own feelings completely, it wouldn’t have worked. Rai couldn’t be fooled by lying kisses. Biometrics couldn’t be fooled. Could they? Unless Sasha was more cold-blooded and calculating than Kal wanted to consider.

  Sasha had apologized, as soon as they got to the safety of the Tube. She’d been ready to be brought up before an ethics panel. It was a shame Sif was the ethics department. Or it was a convenient coincidence, for Sasha.

  Kal didn’t want Sasha before a tribunal. She had wanted a relationship.

  Sasha made it clear she didn’t, even though Kal had asked her to consider it once they were on Demeter. Sasha hadn’t given what Kal considered a definitive no.

  Now they were here, it was different. Kal was different. And Sasha, most of all, was different.

  Kal had never pitied her, not for one minute since she’d known her. More than anything, it hurt to feel pity.

  With her hand on Sasha’s, squeezing it for all she was worth, Kal pictured Sasha on the bridge, in her proper chair. She thought of her guiding the crew, everything she’d done to get the Ocean safely to the portal. After the jump, when they were all shaken to the core, how she’d reassured them, joked with them, and calmly captained them forward. Kal thought of Sasha telling everyone what to do after the dead body had been found in the park. And of how quickly she’d come up with a plan and executed it, when she suspected Rai was acting against their interests. How well she’d played her part. She thought of her with her suit half-unzipped, her mouth bruised from kissing.

  Kal felt Sasha jump, as if she’d been shocked. Kal’s eyes flipped open, her mind startled and lost, so deep had she been in the other realm of imagination.

  Sasha’s eyes were wide and alert, clear for the first time since she’d gotten off the pod. “Kal,” she said, her voice still hoarse, but hers.

  “I’m here.”

  “What happened?”

  “We made it. We’re here. On Demeter.” Kal smiled, still clutching Sasha’s cold hand. She grabbed the other one. “We did it.”

  “We did?”

  “Yes. You kept us safe. You completed your mission.”

  Sasha exhaled. “Good.”

  Kal could see Flicker in the background, observing. She
didn’t know how long she’d been there. Now Flicker approached, putting her hand on Sasha’s shoulder. “Captain Sarno. You’ve been through a lot. It’s time for some rest, so we can check your sleep patterns.”

  Sasha still looked into Kal’s eyes. “All right,” she said. “Whatever’s necessary.” She got up, dropping Kal’s hands. Before she turned to go, she winked. Flicker shepherded her off, back to her quarters, sending a look back to Kal with a reassuring nod.

  Flicker was clever. By making it sound matter-of-fact, she had been able to get Sasha back to undergo tests. Something had happened. It looked like Sasha had woken up out of a nightmare and seen her surroundings with her own eyes for the first time.

  Kal was limp with relief.

  After a trying few days, Kal was eager to escape with Roan. He’d done his rounds already, without her, but took one look at her in the dining area and jerked his head at her to follow. He grabbed her some portable fred, (what she’d started calling the bread substitute, which had caught on immediately), and something the biohabbers called a bright drink, which they parceled out sparingly. It magically revived everyone who drank it, so they believed. It was a brilliant vermillion and looked almost too vivid to consume. Kal had been allowed it once before. She smiled when he tucked it in his jacket and patted it, nodding sagely, as in, Whatever happened, this will put you right.

  They rolled off like the furies were after them. He took them through the deep sloughs of grass, the golden tunnels, which had their own transporting effect, as if they might be underwater, in the clouds, back on Earth, or anywhere. Only they were here, and here was Demeter.

  It wasn’t until the long swoop upward that Kal realized Roan was taking her back to the original tableland. She looked over at him, uneasy. Tess wasn’t with them, no new inductee into Demeter was with them, and she wasn’t sure it was right.

  “Is this okay?” Place was important, where she came from. Place was separate from time and connected to all time, so where something happened was where it was always happening.

  He looked over. “It’s not?” He braked, which almost stopped her heart, but the roller clawed into the seventy-degree angle they were positioned on without even a little slip backward.

  Don’t look back, don’t look back. “I thought this was for…when you’re new. And Tess isn’t here.”

  “Tess wouldn’t mind.”

  “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  Roan shrugged, looked back, and the roller released and reversed backwards without going two hundred kilometers an hour, for which Kal was grateful. She liked speed, but forward speed, not backwards down the side of a tableland speed. Plus, she liked to be in control. Usually. It had become relaxing for her, to let Roan guide the roller. She’d grown used to someone else being in control, she realized, for the first time ever.

  When they were down in the tunnel again, horizontal, he redirected forward and veered off, around the base of the tableland. She hadn’t been beyond it before. They were headed in the direction of the mountains, though Kal knew by now they were so far away it almost didn’t matter how long they traveled, they would still look just as distant.

  “When will we go to the sea?” Kal asked.

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes.”

  “We could go now.”

  “Isn’t it too far to go in a day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you land near it?” Kal had never understood this.

  “Cooley’s orders.”

  “Is there something in it?”

  “Something in it?”

  “The water.”

  “Of course.”

  Kal had a shiver of anticipation. “Have they sent flyers over it? Scanned?”

  “You know Aldortok. We’ve been limited by a certain radius.”

  “Despite the danger?”

  “What do you think is out there?” he said. “Something big enough to be a danger?” He said it like this was an improbability.

  “Look at all this food.” She waved her hand out over the Vastness. “Something probably eats it. Don’t you think? If there is flora on the ground it will be in the ocean. And something to eat that too. What’s it all for?”

  Roan snorted. “You sound like a colonialist.”

  Kal said, “Take that back.”

  He glanced at her. “Sorry,” he said quickly. “I take it back.”

  She looked ahead to the shadow of the mountains. Their distance made them indistinct, like a watercolor painted against the sky. “Okay.”

  “They’ve been waiting for all of you to venture, you know that.”

  “Yeah, well.” The state Sasha was in, Kal wondered how much help she would be until she was herself again, which Kal wouldn’t say to Roan, out of loyalty. Misplaced? She wasn’t sure.

  “The pod folks are in rough shape, I hear,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts. In response to her eyes on him, he said, “News travels. You and these new guys are the best entertainment we’ve had in ages.”

  “Makes sense.” Kal felt her shoulders slump a little. “They’re not great. I’m not sure why.”

  “You had trouble, too. You adjusted pretty quick.”

  “Did I look as bad as them?”

  He hesitated.

  “Come on, I can take it.”

  “No. You were disoriented and had the same body symptoms we all had when we got here, and the usual paranoia, but you snapped out of it.”

  Kal cringed inside. She’d hoped the paranoia had been imperceptible, only an internal process she’d worked out herself before anyone had noticed. “Was it obvious?”

  “We all had it, Kal. It was a lucky thing we didn’t all murder each other. You’d have arrived to a litter of corpses.”

  “I worried that was what you would find when you opened up the Ocean. Us all dead, except for Sif.”

  “Sif might have been the empress of all if we’d been too weak to fight the paranoia. Or if you were too weak to fight her.”

  “It was close,” Kal admitted. She’d never told any of them that.

  Roan made a yikes face.

  “They’d kill me if they knew how close,” she said.

  “Who would?”

  “I don’t know. Aldortok?”

  “Sasha?”

  “I haven’t been able to really talk to her about it.”

  “Not when she was on the pod?”

  “It wasn’t private very often. I told them initially, after it happened. After that they tried to give me support, keep my spirits up, so we didn’t dwell on it. I don’t know what happened after I landed. Something must have changed. They’re not like they were when I talked to them last, from the Ocean.” Cooley and other biohabbers had taken over communications with the pods once Kal was on Demeter in quarantine. By the time she was up to talking to them, she was out of the habit, and it seemed more important to assimilate than talk to the pods. Plus Cooley had recommended against it.

  “Different how?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it.” Or if she wanted to.

  “You’re worried.”

  “Yeah.”

  Roan glanced over at her. “Are you’re worried they’re sick? Like…like a virus?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not the same kind of problem you had on the Ocean.”

  “I don’t know.” Kal thought for a while. “Sasha is steady. She’s always been that way, since I’ve known her.”

  “She’s not now?”

  “I saw her only briefly.” Kal swallowed. Was it okay? Could she tell him? “She’s not herself yet.”

  “She’ll snap back, like you.” He didn’t look too bothered.

  “What if something got her?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the Carys?”

  Roan was frowning. “The Carys is inside Sif, you said.”

  “The Carys is bad news. Really bad.”

  “You said Rai didn’t think it was possible, jumping from o
ne person to another.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “And you trust Rai.”

  Kal turned her head away, watching the grasses flip by the window at her side. “Rai might not know everything. She doesn’t think like the Carys.”

  “If the Carys could get into someone else other than Sif she would have before now. She wouldn’t be in Sif anymore, right?”

  “Who knows? Why couldn’t she replicate herself, like a virus? She’d have Sif and whoever else.”

  “Then you could all be infected, in theory. Sif knows she is. So it follows all of you would know, too.”

  “Unless the Carys got smarter about it.”

  “If it’s true I guess it’s too late now,” he said dryly. “We could all be infected and not know it. Every human here, right? All because of you?”

  “She hadn’t infected me, or I wouldn’t have fought her like I did on the Ocean.”

  “Unless that’s what she wanted you to think.”

  “You’re making my head hurt,” Kal said.

  “You’re making me think I’m infected with a really bad case of Carys. So who’s worse?”

  “I am, if you put it like that.” Kal squeezed her knees in frustration. “Let’s not talk.”

  “Got it.” Roan didn’t look worried.

  Kal opened her eyes. She must have fallen asleep. Her body was warm and comfy. She looked down. From neck to toe, she was covered in a fluffer coat, such as Tess had made her wear when Kal was fresh out of the exosuit. Sliding her eyes sideways, she saw Roan’s profile. He looked serious, in the way of someone who’d been focused on the far distance for a long time. Blinking, she looked ahead. To her shock, the grasses were lower and the mountains were close. Touchable, almost, solidified into a deep and unhazy reality for the first time.

  Roan didn’t know she was awake. She kept still.

  The days and nights were longer here, because of the size and rotation of Demeter and Mythos in relation to each other. It wasn’t so extreme as to be a terrible adjustment for a human used to the circadian patterns of Earth, but it was enough to disarray sleep patterns. The light was dimmer, which meant they’d been traveling for hours and hours. Not able to get back before nightfall.