16
Heat
Rolling up to the front of the biohab, she checked on Roan again, tucking the coat around him, checking the roller’s body heat regulator was keeping him warm from underneath, and stepped out of the roller, naked. She staggered to the door, the wind whipping her skin, the prickles sparking all over as she made her muscles answer her, made them move toward safety. There was no chance of her carrying Roan, or even dragging him very far, which niggled as a worry in the back of her mind. What if this happened somewhere she didn’t have a roller?
The door opened for her. She passed inside.
The crew were at a meal. Her sense of time gone; she couldn’t have guessed which one. There was a moment of complete silence, as they took in her naked body, glimmering shiny patches interspersed with red scrubbed areas where she’d tried to clean herself.
Cooley was up and moving toward her, first of all of them.
“Captain Black Bear,” she said. “Flicker, stat.”
Cooley was next to Kal. Her hand reached out, about to touch her, when Flicker screamed, “Stop!”
Kal jumped. The rapid breaths she’d already been taking made the shock of noise give her heart an unpleasant double beat.
“Don’t touch her,” Flicker said, her voice low and aggressive. “Protocol.”
Cooley took a reluctant step back.
“Everyone else stay in your seats.” Flicker approached Kal, stopping a meter away. Pacing around her, she stepped over the place where Kal had trod on her way in. “You shouldn’t have come in like this, Kal. You should have stayed outside.”
“Why,” Kal whispered.
“What’s on you? Where did that come from?”
“I…” Kal cleared her throat. “I don’t know. We were…” the thought of trying to describe what happened in front of everyone made Kal’s words fail her. “Roan needs help. In the roller.”
Flicker nodded. “Everyone out,” she said, without turning back to look at any of them, not taking her eyes off Kal for a second. “Remain in your rooms until further notice. Take what you need to stay for a while.”
Kal couldn’t take her eyes from Flicker’s burning ones, though she wanted to see a friendlier pair. Flicker’s reaction wasn’t what Kal needed. She’d hoped for reassurance, a bustle out the door to help Roan, laughter even. Not immediate concern for the worst, which was what Kal feared.
“Flicker,” she murmured, so the others, who were gathering their things—food and drink, Kal imagined, all they’d need to hibernate away from her and Roan—wouldn’t hear. “Is it bad? Is it something bad?”
Flicker licked her lips, chewed on them. She shook her head. “Is he like you?”
Kal nodded. “He’s unconscious, but he’s breathing okay.”
“Did you see what did this?”
Kal shook her head. “We were together in the roller, in a hollow…and then, I felt energy. Like it was pulsing around us, electricity, while we were connected, and I didn’t recognize it. We both got knocked out, somehow, when…” She trailed off. “I woke up, covered in whatever this is. Please go look at him.”
“You’ve contaminated the biome, Kal.”
“Then take me out and clean me.” Kal felt tears gather behind her eyes. Flicker was looking at her as if she were a thing. “But help him.”
“Can you walk on your own?”
Kal nodded.
“Turn around and walk back out. Don’t touch anything except the ground with your feet. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Flicker punched the door panel to open it. Kal passed through, back out into the cold. She tried to step exactly where she’d stepped before.
Outside, the wind bit as hard as before, but Kal was numb to it. She led Flicker to the side of the roller where Roan was, but when she looked back, Flicker wasn’t there. The door was shut. Kal’s throat closed in fear. Had she been expelled? What was happening?
She put her hand against the door of the roller. It opened. She climbed onto Roan’s lap. His head still lolled back and to the side, where she’d positioned it. The coat covered him. She curled up on top of it and him and slid the door closed.
He was warm. She felt her deep chill melt slowly, outside in, as she shared his body heat. Stroking his arm where it stuck out from the coat, she soothed herself sliding her fingers over his smooth arm, as she had petted the coat of her horse when she was young, to calm down.
“Roan,” she said. “It’s not good. It’s not good.”
She tucked her head into the hollow between his chest and arm and let the tears come.
Later, she couldn’t tell how long, a light made her open her eyes. She had fallen asleep. The roller was in a new place, in a structure she had never been inside before. She could see a dark ceiling through the clear roof of the roller. How had they transported the roller without waking her? All she could see was light around the sides, encircling the roller. Abruptly she remembered the source of the warmth beneath her and looked at Roan in a panic. His mouth was open, his breathing regular and even. Reaching up, she felt his brow. He felt cool enough, not too cold, but not feverish.
Something exploded in front of her. With a sharp exhale she jerked her face away from the screen of the roller. A rumbling sound thumped everywhere around her at once. When she allowed herself to look out, she saw it was water, or another kind of liquid, jetted at the roller from all angles.
They must be in some kind of decontamination tank. Kal covered her eyes with her hands. Didn’t they care that Roan was unconscious? This was more important to them, because Kal had walked in naked and half-covered in a mysterious substance?
Kal breathed, trying to remember protocols. They were doing the right thing. It hurt to be the focus of it, to be on the other side, again, of their fear of the plague of otherness, of alienness, of transmission.
Once the spraying stopped, there were many other steps. Kal lost track of what they were doing outside the roller. She ignored it. She drank water cubes and wiped Roan’s face and huddled with him until it was over.
At last, it was silent. The door away from them, on the other side of the roller, opened. Kal could see a figure in full biohazard gear standing next to it. The figure made a come here gesture. This was all too familiar.
Kal crawled out. Her legs were numb, but she willed them to work. When she emerged and stood trembling next to the roller, she couldn’t see who was in the suit. The figure gestured her toward a smaller tent-like box within the building. She walked toward it unsteadily. Someone else stood just outside the box. They must both have their reflective visors down, because Kal couldn’t see either of their faces. The second figure pointed in. Kal stepped through flaps. The floor surface of the tent was strange and rubbery. A whirring sound behind her indicated a sealing of the entrance. She darted glances around the inside of the small room she was in, fearful of what would pass for decontamination here. Then the spraying started.
Although she tried to cover her face from the liquid at first, eventually she gave up. The sprays were rhythmic, so she did get a chance to breathe at regular intervals, and the flat nozzles, or whatever they were, rotated from so many different angles she couldn’t predict where they would go or protect herself from them. At first she thought it was water, but whether it had never been water or had changed to something else later, she didn’t know and soon ceased to care. It was hard to stand after a while, but laying down wasn’t a good option either as the spraying also emitted from the floor.
The biohabbers were paranoid and liked to torture her, she decided halfway through. This wasn’t science. This was obsession, or revenge.
By the time she was so water-logged it had begun to feel like torture, the spraying stopped. She sneezed. So much water had gone up her nose her throat hurt and itched. Swaying in place, she struggled to swallow. She knew it wasn’t close to over.
The baths. The light room. Something like a sauna. Kal had never been so assaulted by heat and lig
ht and water and steam in her life. Her whole body had pruned and begun to peel by the end. Eyes swollen, throat thick and scratchy, she endured, waiting for it to be over. When she fell asleep, during the portion where they had her lay on a hard table under what felt like a sunlamp, reminiscent of that other time, the only pleasant part of the whole ordeal, they woke her up again. She didn’t know why, unless it was to punish her.
Was this the price paid for sex on Demeter? she thought wildly at one point. She’d studied history. Were these biohabbers some strange throwbacks? Had she and Roan broken a cardinal rule?
Maybe her mind wandered there because the more likely alternatives were scarier.
Kal feared she had been inhabited.
Some other presence had occupied her; taken over him.
If that were true…
If that were true, this treatment would be only the beginning.
The very last step was the worst. They darted her, like a wild animal. It took a matter of seconds for her to lose consciousness, only long enough to feel the sting of their suspicion, worse than the sting of the needle.
Kal was so tired of waking up in strange places she wanted to scream the instant her eyes opened. She was in a clear cube, made of the same gel-like material as the windows of the biohab. Contained inside it, strapped down to a chair shape made of the same substance, she looked around. In a similar cube next to her was Roan. He was awake. She smiled for the first time in what felt like months, though it must have been only hours. Her lips cracked and she tasted blood. Like Sasha, she thought. An attempt to bring her finger to her lip reminded her that her arms were strapped down.
Roan was looking forward. She followed his gaze.
Three people sat at a table, well away from the cubes. This was the strangest place Kal had seen yet. Everything was formed of the hard gel, even the chairs and table where the three people sat watching them.
Kal blinked her swollen eyes and tried to see who they were through the slight distortion of the gel. Sasha she identified first. She gave a deep sigh of relief to see her in this room. Next to her was Cooley. Next to Cooley was Flicker.
Instead of Sasha before a tribunal, it’s me, Kal thought. I’m the one on trial.
“Captain Black Bear,” Cooley said, loud and clear. “Are you all right?”
Roan looked over at Kal for the first time. She wanted to look at him, speak to him, gauge his thoughts and state of being, but it seemed she wouldn’t have the opportunity. He was blurry. Through the gel his features looked expressionless. Kal looked back at the table.
“Why am I restrained?”
“For your own safety.”
Kal thought this over. “For our safety? Do you think we’re going to electrocute you? Is that why all this gel-form?” She had noticed there was no metal, nothing conductive in the space.
Cooley seemed to speak with reluctance. “It’s possible something electrically transmissible was exchanged between you and Roan. It’s possible it could be transmitted to someone else.”
Kal said, “Whatever happened, if it was something, it left. Whatever presence, or electrifying force, if you want to call it that, was gone by the time I regained consciousness. I don’t believe there is any risk to anyone else.” Kal kept her voice as low and authoritative as she could through the swollen thickness of her throat.
Flicker spoke. “Roan told us you were having sex in the roller when this took place.”
Kal blinked a few times, wishing she weren’t strapped to a gel chair with her hair streaming down all over, wearing a paper outfit. This was no way to converse with anything like authority.
“That’s correct.”
“At what point did you feel the presence of something beyond the usual? Had you had sex before?”
Kal wanted to look at Roan but she thought it would look suspicious. These are my peers, she reminded herself. “Yes.”
“Had something like this happened before?”
“No.” Kal searched for something to say before they asked another question. Before it felt too much like an interrogation. “I can’t be sure it was anything out of the ordinary. It’s possible it was something as mundane as a lightning strike.”
She saw the three confer. Kal took the chance to look at Roan, try to exchange some message. He wasn’t looking at her.
Captain Cooley said, “You were covered in a strange substance that you attempted to remove from both of you, using water cubes. Dr. Flicker’s analysis has revealed it’s a mucin-like substance unfamiliar to her but similar to excretions by terrestrial snails. This would indicate some further aspect to the matter than a lightning strike.”
“I can’t be held responsible for all the strange substances on Demeter. This is all new, to all of us.”
Sasha spoke for the first time. “What do you think happened, Kal?”
Kal gulped at Sasha’s use of her name. Sasha sounded like herself, looked like herself, as much as Kal could see. Was it the old Sasha?
Kal found she couldn’t respond right away. She wished she could talk to Roan. Or to Sasha, alone.
“I can’t describe it under these circumstances. I want us released back to our rooms where I can talk one-on-one with Sasha.”
As soon as Kal saw the three’s reactions, she knew what she had said was a mistake.
“We’ll make that judgment, in the best interests of all of the inhabitants of this planet,” Cooley said.
“Why don’t you ask Roan?” Kal said. She tried to control her breathing. The gel box seemed to be shrinking in on her. “He’ll tell you the same.”
“Morra, you have something to add?” Cooley asked.
“Yes, captain,” someone said.
Kal’s eyes widened. She looked around the room, to see where the voice came from.
“Did you sense the same thing Captain Black Bear did?”
“No, captain. I believe Captain Black Bear had an unusually powerful reaction to our coupling and briefly passed out as a result.”
Slowly turning her head toward Roan, Kal tried not to believe her ears or eyes.
“How do you explain the strange substance?” Flicker asked.
“Some cubes of lubricant were scattered around the roller during the time of our intercourse. These were flattened or punctured as a result of our movements and coated our bodies as a result. Captain Black Bear may not remember this due to her loss of awareness.”
“Why would Kal lose consciousness while you were having sex?”
Kal was vaguely aware it was Sasha’s voice asking this question. Kal couldn’t take her eyes from the blobby figure that was Roan, or was supposed to be Roan, in the cube next to hers.
“I don’t know, Captain Sarno. I can only say her airway was not restricted, in the positions we were in, and she appeared perfectly fine before it happened. It may have been spontaneous vagal inhibition during orgasm.”
Kal’s mouth was dry.
“Captain Black Bear said you lost consciousness as well.”
Roan’s shape appeared to smile and shake his head. “I fell into a deep sleep. I don’t know why she thought I was unconscious. As you saw, I awoke easily when you tried to rouse me.”
“You went to sleep when Kal was passed out?” Sasha said, her voice sharp.
“As I said, she lost awareness for only seconds. Then she snuggled up to me and went to sleep herself. I saw no need for concern at the time.”
“You disagree with Kal’s assessment of events, then. You outright contradict them.”
Roan appeared to ponder. “I believe it had been a long time since Captain Black Bear had experienced an emotional and physical connection this intense. It was overwhelming. It may have fired all her synapses in a way that felt unfamiliar and strange, even frightening. I don’t discount her experience. It wasn’t my own.”
Kal closed her mouth.
“I see,” said Captain Cooley. “Captain Black Bear, is it possible Roan’s description is a more accurate one? That there was no supe
rnatural, for want of a better word, or unknown life form influencing or affecting events?”
Kal swallowed, her sore throat and thick tongue as raw as if they’d been tenderized with a metal hammer. “It’s possible.”
“I’m sorry, speak up please?”
“It’s possible!” Kal said, louder. If Roan, if whoever it was next to her, was trying to get them out of trouble, she thought the best thing was to agree.
The captains and Flicker again conferred. Flicker got up and left the room.
Neither Roan nor Kal spoke while she was gone. Sasha and Cooley talked quietly to each other, occasionally glancing over at the cubes. The minutes stretched, for Kal, into what felt like hours. Flicker returned. She wore partial biohazard gear, with the headpiece removed.
She spoke in an undertone to the captains. Then aloud. “I found evidence of smashed lubrication cubes in the roller,” Flicker said. “They match the material analyzed from your skins.”
Cooley said, “With the supporting evidence, we find Roan’s explanation plausible. You’ll be released back to your rooms.” She gave a brief nod.
“Thank you,” Roan said.
Kal didn’t say anything.
When he spoke, it wasn’t Roan’s voice she heard. She didn’t know why the others hadn’t heard the difference. The voice coming out of the figure belonging to Roan was not his own. She had heard the voice once before, inside the Land.
It was Mech.
Back in her room, Kal lay on her bed, stunned. She tried to remember what had happened in the roller. She thought about when she’d sat in Roan’s lap, giving him water, cleaning him. She thought what the electricity had felt like, what the gathering of an energy outside themselves had meant. Whether everything Roan said could be true.
Or if Mech had inhabited Roan and said it all for him.
Kal rolled over on her side. She clutched her stomach.
Call of Worlds Page 17
