Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  Forndala lifted his hands in the air between them, fending her off. “Who would have predicted you’d take the whole damn thing outside of the ship!” he said defensively.

  Then Shu Cresna started chuckling, and the tension dissipated like the air escaping from my ruined exoskin. Soon we were all laughing together.

  After a few more minutes of pleasant conversation, Forndala brought the gathering to a close. “You took our little challenge further than either of us could have imagined,” he said, tilting his head towards the shu, “and your success in the face of great adversity is a testament to your potential. You are a remarkable group of ensigns, and it has been a pleasure having you on board.”

  Then he looked at me. “You’ll have a large mantle to fill when these two are gone, ensign Siris. Now then, we have a ship to run!” He gave a small bow, and he and Shu Cresna took their leave before I could take his meaning.

  “Wait,” I said to Saiara and Qurth. “What did he mean about filling the mantle?”

  “My rotation ends tomorrow, ensign Siris,” Qurth said. “We will not see each other again here on the Gourmand.”

  “You’re saying goodbye?”

  He nodded. “I am honored by the time we have shared together. Perhaps other paths will draw us together. Until then,” he said, spreading his palms in the traditional Arborean valediction, “may your roots grow long and deep.”

  I’d been with Qurth long enough to know that he was not a sentimental person, so I knew he had just given me his most heartfelt display of kinship. Melancholy threatened me at the thought of his leaving, but I was also filled with tremendous gratitude.

  “My deepest thanks to you, ensign Foli,” I said, adopting the same formality to let him know how much I meant it. “You are an inspiration to me, and I look forward to the day when we meet again.” I spread my palms towards him. “May your roots grow long and deep.”

  He bowed low, gave me the slightest hint of a smile, his emerald eyes gleaming, then turned and left.

  Saiara and I were alone. She sat on the bed next to me.

  “And you’re leaving too?” I asked. My voice sounded small and lonely.

  She glanced at the monitor that displayed my vitals and watched the pulse wave of my heart rise and fall. She looked back at me and nodded, her face sad. “My rotation also ends tomorrow.”

  “You saved my life,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “It’s true. But you took the greatest risk, and we couldn’t have succeeded without your knowledge. In a way, you saved all of us.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve followed your lead from the day I arrived. Your brilliance is something I aspire to. I’m not sure… how will I get by without you?”

  “Trust yourself. Every person on this voyage is brilliant, and you’ve earned your place among us. You don’t need to hide in the archives for the rest of your life, Oren. You have a rare courage and strength, and in time, you’ll discover where that strength is needed most, and then you’ll claim your rightful place in the Fellowship.”

  I thought of my parents. “My mother always told me I needed to dream bigger,” I whispered, staring up the inspector oculus, my reflected face shrunken and warped in its pitiless eye.

  Saiara moved closer. “She’s right,” she said. “The galaxy needs you.”

  Then she leaned across me and kissed me on my right cheek. Her lips were soft and moist, compressing the stubble on my face. A loose strand of golden hair hung down and tickled my forehead. I wanted, more than anything I have ever wanted in my life, to turn and meet her lips with my own. But I did not.

  “Where… where are you going next?” I asked when she sat back up.

  “Transcend will announce assignments for rotating ensigns tomorrow morning. I’ll find out then.”

  “Will I see you again?” I touched my fingers to my cheek.

  “I’m sure of it,” she said. “Until then, take care of yourself. You’re the Gourmand’s senior ensign now. There’ll be new young bloods coming on board. You have to make sure they don’t screw up, right?”

  I nodded. “Right. I won’t let you down.”

  She gave me a loving smile, her eyes crinkling, her cheeks dimpling. Then she stood. “See you soon, Oren.”

  I lifted my hand to hers and squeezed. “I hope so, Saiara.”

  She disappeared from sight through the doorway, her footsteps marking a steady rhythm in the corridor outside, until eventually, even the sound of her was gone.

  * * *

  On the last night of my first rotation as an ensign, I sat in Forndala’s quarters, getting ready to share a bottle of a potent distillation he had batched decades ago. He looked at me and smiled as he broke the seal on the bottle. “This is probably older than you are.” I watched with solemnity as he uncorked it.

  “I have been waiting a long time for an excuse to drink this.” He poured two fingers of the amber liquid into our glasses, and held his up to the light, admiring the fluid as he tilted the glass in slow circles. He took a cautious sip, holding it on his tongue for a moment. Then he swallowed and broke into a huge smile. “Drink up, young blood. That was worth the wait!”

  The liquor was warm and strong as it settled into my belly. “That is quite good, dala,” I said. I took another swallow.

  “Damn right. And you’ve earned it. Over the past year, we have taught you everything we can, Oren… Well, everything except how to make vysak as good as this.” He tapped his glass with his finger. “Your rotation here on our faithful Gourmand ends tomorrow, which means you’ll begin service onboard the Transcendence.”

  He paused to take another sip.

  I looked around his room.

  It was an inviting space, cluttered and a little unkempt. There were images everywhere. Hanging on the walls. Propped up on shelving. Lying flat on the table in front of us.

  One of them caught my eye. I picked it up off the table.

  “Is this…?”

  He nodded. “Verygone.”

  The planet Cordelar filled the bulk of the frame. Verygone was a small, red orb in the lower left corner, no bigger than my thumbnail. “I saw it once from orbit,” I said. “A traveler brought me up in his ship. It was incredible. It was also the first time I realized how small it all is. The whole of my life was spent on that tiny moon. It looms so much larger in my memories.”

  “Memory is funny like that.”

  “Wait… I don’t see any settlement lights on the surface.”

  “That’s because there were none. Verygone had not yet been settled when that was taken.”

  “What? How did you find this image? Why do you have it?”

  “I took it.”

  I looked up at him in surprise. “You’ve been to Verygone before?”

  “A long time ago. I was part of the survey crew sent to confirm the moon’s gravitational signature, to prove beyond doubt that it had enough terranium to make it worth the investment of energy and resources necessary to turn it into a productive fuel hub.”

  I looked at the image again with fresh eyes, at the lonely moon where I was born, full of potential for those who know how to see it. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered.

  “We have thousands of images of the moon and the surrounding system,” he said, “but that was one of my favorites. A reminder that even the greatest civilizations are built on the backs of the humblest places.”

  “Thank you,” I said, looking up at him.

  “For what, Oren?”

  “If not for you and this survey you conducted, not only would I have never become an ensign, I might never even have been born.”

  He rubbed his knuckles through his beard, staring off into the distance. He made a quiet sigh of wonder. “The thought that our paths came together because of decisions I was part of back then gives me great happiness.

  “Truth is, I can’t help but think of myself at your age when I look at you. More than three hundred years gone by in a flash, and suddenly I find myself shar
ing a glass of vysak with a youthful version of myself. Where does the time go?”

  “I must be much handsomer than you were, though, right?”

  He let out his huge laugh and smacked his palm on the table. “You and my former self would have been fast friends. Tight as privateers.” He raised his glass. “To the reckless confidence of youth,” he said.

  I raised my glass to his, clinking them together, and we drank.

  When we finished, we set our glasses down, and he poured us each another two fingers. I eyed the liquid with a mixture of eagerness and trepidation. After one glass, I already had a heady buzz.

  “Come on, boy, drink up!”

  “I’ve never been much of a drinker, dala.”

  “That bottle has waited decades for this day. We can’t let it go to waste.”

  I sighed, lifted my glass, and took another swallow.

  “That’s the spirit!”

  He drank again in turn. When he was finished, he wiped his lips with his handkerchief.

  “Oren,” he said somberly.

  “Yes, dala?”

  “Before you leave tomorrow, I need you to hear this: Having you onboard has helped me reconnect with a past that has been too long forgotten. You make me feel closer to the home I left so many lifetimes ago.”

  “I feel much the same, dala. Closer to home when we are together.”

  “I am glad of that, Oren. But we didn’t recruit you just so you could spend your whole life doing the same job you could have done at home. Much as it pains me to say it, it’s a good thing you’re moving on.”

  He held up his hand. “Before you say anything, I want you to know that whatever comes next, I believe in you. You’re a born leader, and it’s time to take the next step. Every ensign must. One day, you’ll earn your place in the Fellowship, and maybe even your own ship.”

  He saw my look of pleased surprise at the compliment and shook his head. “Don’t take that lightly, young blood. Sooner or later, you’ll have to make hard decisions. No easy answers. Be ready for that.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, dala. I don’t know what to say. It’s… it’s been an honor.”

  “Just drink up, Oren,” he said, draining the last of the bottle into our glasses. “Like I said, you’ve earned it.”

  We raised our glasses and drank.

  5 Transcendence

  As an ensign on Transcendence, the remnants of my life in fuel refinement receded away, but I was still hustling as hard as ever, learning every day: how to plot a cross-galaxy target in four-dimensional space; how to fly the close-range recon darts; how to purge and cleanse a plugged waste treatment line; how to repair malfunctioning plasmic shears; how to measure nutrient and acidity levels in a water reservoir to ensure that the microorganisms were healthy enough to purify the recycled water before it reentered the ship’s ecosystem.

  Those were incredible years. No matter how much I learned, there was always some new challenge; someone who knew more than me, ready to push me further or give me a puzzle to solve. Weeks flowed into months. Months piled up to years.

  I saw Qurth just once, in the junction room that connected all of the simspheres. He was engaged in a heated debate with another ensign. I called out to him, but we were too far away from each other, and he did not hear me. When I finished my zero gravity training session, he was nowhere to be found.

  Saiara and I made it a point to meet when we could. Sometimes we ate together, followed by a few games of chronostones. Once I realized that she was a fourth echelon player, a whole level above me, I got over my initial defeat and learned to embrace our matches as an opportunity to improve. Her blend of sharp humor and patient analysis helped me enter deeper into the game.

  Other times, we went for walks in the open center of the voyager ship. A massive cylinder was suspended there in the empty space that marked the gravitational heart of the ship. The cylinder held the largest terranium star I had ever seen, a sun at the center of our world, our whole ship orbiting around it.

  Whenever we walked, we always looked for new paths through the open air arboretum that ringed the wide primary reservoir, the light of the interior sun dappling the fallen leaves and soft loam beneath our feet. Looking out from the trees, we might see kite ships sailing across the surface of the water, or anglers casting for the large sulkfish that swam the deeps, or a pleasure boat lingering just off shore, passengers lounging in the sunlight.

  As the opaque shielding that always covered part of the sun rotated in its orbit, false night crept up the curving inner surface of the ship, swallowing the avenues and structures that hung high above our heads, sending people on that part of the ship into their evening rituals, windows and exterior lights shining like stars.

  There was always something new and beautiful to see, and whenever Saiara took my hand and pointed out some fresh wonder to behold, I stayed silent, sinking into the moment, willing us to hold fast to each other for as long as we could.

  But she’d already received her field connection, which, I must admit, made me envious, and she seemed even busier than I was. As we both drilled further into our studies, our moments together became vanishingly rare.

  Then, three years after I left The Gourmand, my rotation map cycled me into a role that changed everything for me: amanuensis with the pausha of Transcendence, Dar Talericho.

  “Ensign Siris, is it?” She studied me as I stood just inside the threshold of her private workspace. The whites of her eyes were bright against her sable skin and nut brown irises.

  I nodded.

  She was sitting at her desk, my file called up on her hologlass. “And you’re from…” She scanned the information. “Verygone?”

  “Yes, pausha. Born and raised.”

  “No wonder Dala Forn took a liking to you. He gives you high marks.”

  “He’s a great teacher,” I said.

  “He certainly is. And a great officer too. His word carries weight. And he’s not the only one. By all accounts, your first four years here onboard our fair voyager have gone well.”

  “It is my greatest honor to serve as a member of this ship, pausha, and I am humbled to know that others find my presence useful.” Her steely demeanor had me nervous, and I was working hard to maintain the appropriate respect.

  “Have you ever been an amanuensis before?”

  “No, pausha.”

  She tilted her head back, a faint smile around her eyes. “Do you know what the word means? Amanuensis?”

  “I’m to be your assistant.”

  “A glamorous word for an unglamorous job.”

  “I am not a glamorous man, pausha.”

  She smiled a thin smile, crinkling the edges of her eyes. “Even though you will not be showered with glory, the fact that you are here at all is still significant. It means our onboarding process identified something in you that we might call, for the sake of simplicity, ‘leadership potential.’ Dala Forn’s comments here also speak to that.”

  “Thank you, pausha.”

  “Don’t thank me just yet. Potential is not actual. The point of your assistantship is not simply to make my life easier. The point is to give you exposure to the kinds of choices a leader must make, and to give me insight into whether or not you have the ability to realize your potential in whatever form it takes.

  “Do you know what this is?” She touched the trimantium pendant clasped to the blue sash that ran across her chest.

  “The chain link of the Fellowship,” I said.

  She nodded. “All life is bound together, Oren. That belief sits at the root of the Fellowship. And each link has its own role to play in the chain. My hope is that I can help you discover your role, or at least set you on the path towards that discovery.

  “You will have remarkable access to my work and my decisions. You will see things that many others on this ship are not privy to, and your role requires the utmost discretion and unflinching dependability.

  “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be honest w
ith me. If you have an opinion, I am open to it. But this is not an ethics symposium. This is the real thing. You are here to learn, not lead, and in the final reckoning that means you follow orders even if you don’t always agree with them or understand them. Am I clear?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me hear you say it, ensign Siris.”

  “I will do what needs to be done, pausha, without question.”

  She pursed her lips and nodded. “Right then,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

  * * *

  The first time I entered the command center of Transcendence, I stood in the center of the spherical chamber looking around in unabashed wonder. There was too much to take in at once. Moving images flickered all around me, curving along the inner surface of the sphere, climbing up above my head, dancing beneath my feet. It was the whole ship, seen through a thousand vieweyes.

  I recognized some of the places. Here was an aerial perspective of the large reservoir at the core of the ship. There was the junction hall that connected the simsphere hives, drumons guiding ensigns alone or in clusters towards different spheres, each one providing access to a near-infinite variety of immersive training simulations. And over here was an external feed of The Gourmand as it coupled with the main ship. The bulk of Transcendence filled the rest of the frame, making The Gourmand seem like an insect burrowing into the flesh of a giant.

  There were countless other views that I didn’t recognize; so many places on the ship I had never been to. I saw what looked like a planet hovering in a sealed room, satellites orbiting around it, tiny people walking on the ground beneath it. Before I could make sense of that, my eyes were drawn to a crowd of people, hundreds standing together in circles, holding hands, heads lifted up, eyes shut and mouths open wide, as if they were singing or shouting. I lingered on them for a moment until the fluttering of verdant greenery drew my eye away. It took me a moment to realize that this particular vieweye must have been blocked by thick ferns. A breeze was rustling the plants, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of something beyond the foliage, something mystifying, shimmering and silver.