Sensory Alterations

by Meyari McFarland

"Tomorrow is going to suck so bad," Tinesha sighed as she headed to bed. "The others better not be mad at me for telling."

  Sleep didn't come once she curled up in bed. The hard bunk felt harder than normal, more like lying on concrete than resting on a dense foam pad topped with Tinesha's most comfortable flannel sheets. She stared at the ceiling for a while, attempting to push the swirling thoughts away. Kalila's purple hijab mixed with Jacob's angry words as he stormed out of the locker room. The smell of irises mixed with the horrible oily taste of the lunch casserole to make Tinesha's stomach roil.

  She shut her eyes and pictured the hydroponic bays. Dim lights, glorious smells, so many colors and textures of plants filled her mind as her body relaxed minutely. Tinesha smiled until Kalila's face appeared in her mind's eye again. When she opened her eyes to banish the surprisingly sharp ache of want the ceiling was blank, white, boring. Her pillow smelled like Tinesha's shampoo. Wishing it smelled like Kalila made Tinesha blush. Wrapping the pillow around her head didn't help Tinesha sleep. Pummeling it into a new shape didn't help. Kicking the blankets off and then pulling them back on didn't help either.

  Eventually Tinesha got up and dressed. The gym was open at all hours so that all the shifts could use it. So were the entertainment centers. There had to be something that would calm Tinesha's racing mind enough that she could fall asleep. Instead of taking the turn that would lead to the gym and entertainment centers, Tinesha found herself going the other direction. She wasn't surprised when she found herself outside of Kalila and Riyad's suite but her cheeks still burned as she pushed the chime.

  "Yes?" Kalila asked as the door slid open.

  She'd taken off the hijab though she had a scarf wrapped around her head. Thick black hair hung in waves around her face, ending just above her shoulders. Kalila blinked to find Tinesha standing there, her face going red to match Tinesha's blush. Without the hijab, Kalila looked older, stronger and somehow sharper, as though the hijab was a sheathe that hid the blade that was Kalila's soul.

  "I um, couldn't sleep," Tinesha admitted when Kalila didn't speak. "So I thought I'd come and ask you if you wanted to do something. They brought in a new VR game, a puzzle adventure one instead of a shoot 'em up. From what Vince said it's really good and you can team up with people to solve the puzzles. I thought… maybe we could play it together?"

  Kalila's breath caught as her blush intensified. She tugged the scarf closer around her head but her smile was wide and delighted as she gestured for Tinesha to come in. Tinesha smiled back at her, her cheeks aching, and slipped into the suite. A whole new set of smells enveloped Tinesha once she was inside. There was a spicy cinnamon scent that Tinesha thought might be spiced cider mixed with paper from the books stacked along the far wall of the room. The warmth in the suite was enough to make Tinesha sweat a little. Apparently Kalila and Riyad preferred hotter temperatures than Tinesha did.

  "I would have to get dressed again," Kalila said once the door was shut. Her scarf slid down onto her shoulders, exposing her hair fully. "I was about to go to bed though, like you, I am not certain that I will be able to sleep. The thought that we have been courting explosive decompression for weeks is quite disturbing."

  "I know," Tinesha complained as she flopped on the couch. It was intensely comfortable, with thick padding and plush green suede covering it. Just sitting in it calmed her spinning mind. "I can't believe that Jacob got away with it for so long. I feel kind of bad about telling on him but so many people could have been hurt or killed."

  Kalila came and sat next to Tinesha, her expression entirely serious as she caught Tinesha's hand in another surprisingly powerful grip. "Do not feel bad for telling. Do not. You must report these things. This is not Earth. If a building fails there then a few may be injured or die. Here, we all will die if the station fails. All threats to the station's structural integrity must be reported immediately. Friendship does not figure into it."

  Tinesha nodded. She knew that Kalila was right but it was hard to override the lessons she'd learned back on Earth. Telling on people was bad, wrong, especially for a woman. Instead of dwelling on the feeling that she'd done something horribly wrong, Tinesha let her thumb rub over the back of Kalila's hand. There were little scars on her knuckles, as if she'd torn them up working with the plants. After a second Tinesha realized that she'd seen those sorts of scars on her cousin, the one who got into huge fist fights every single time he got drunk.

  The thought of Kalila getting into fist fights didn't fit with the demure woman that Tinesha was just getting to know but then they had just met. Tinesha didn't know much of anything about Kalila or Riyad. She had no idea why they'd left Earth, if they had family that they'd left behind or maybe histories that they were escaping like some of her coworkers. Kalila shivered, her eyes locked on Tinesha's thumb as it slowly brushed across her knuckles. Without the hijab framing her face, Kalila truly did look much fiercer as well as years older than Tinesha had thought.

  "I… should put my hijab back on," Kalila said, her expression starting out hopeful and then going resigned when she finished her sentence.

  "If you want to," Tinesha said. "I wouldn't want you to be un-comfortable. You know, I thought that you'd have long hair like Boss Morishita. Short hair looks good on you."

  Kalila ducked her head as if to hide her sudden grin. When she looked through her lashes at Tinesha the impact of her gaze was nearly physical. Tinesha's breath caught in her chest, fluttering nearly as badly as her stomach did. Heat prickled over her skin, making her shiver convulsively. She swallowed down the nervousness, licking her lips as she tried to find something to say in the face of Kalila's flirtatious look.

  They both jumped when the door opened, spilling Riyad into the room and destroying whatever had been brewing between them. Riyad groaned as he kicked his shoes off, leaving them sprawled by the door. He blinked to see Tinesha sitting there but smiled at Kalila as if he saw nothing at all wrong with the two of them sitting together on the couch, holding hands.

  "I am so glad you two reported that leak," Riyad said.

  "Bad?" Tinesha asked as Kalila squeezed her hand to the point the bones creaked. She squeezed back.

  "The boss is putting all new construction on hold," Riyad said. "Jacob admitted outright that his team hasn't been doing full checks of their work, not on the seals or anything else he's done. Morishita wants everyone to double-check every single section and seal. We can't risk any other leaks, even if this one wasn't as serious as we feared when you reported it."

  Tinesha relaxed even more once Riyad said that the leak wasn't as bad as feared. To her surprise, Kalila sighed and slumped against her side as if she'd been just as worried as Tinesha. One second's thought made sense of it. While Tinesha worked outside every day, Kalila had found out that a place she thought was safe actually wasn't. It had to have been terrifying.

  "So it's going to be okay?" Tinesha asked. Riyad's approving expression gave her enough daring to wrap her arm around Kalila's shoulders.

  "Yeah," Riyad said with a huge grin that seemed to have nothing to do with the topic of discussion. "The leak was actually more into the air system and insulation than outside. We would have noticed it much sooner if it'd gone outside. Apparent-ly the venting system's going to get some serious work. They already found four areas where the joints in the piping weren't properly sealed."

  "Thank goodness it wasn't worse," Tinesha said.

  Kalila nodded her agreement. Her hair brushed against Tinesha's shoulder, soft, whispering against the fabric of Tinesha's T-shirt. She snuggled a little closer, tucking her feet up on the couch so that she could lean her head on Tinesha's shoulder. The heat of Kalila's body pressed against Tinesha's side made her fingers spasm around Kalila's shoulder. It was wonderful, perfect, intimidating and so enticing that Tinesha wasn't sure that she'd be able to think straight for days. Riyad grinned again, stretching exag-geratedly.

  "Well, I'm going to take a shower and then get some sleep," Riyad said. "I
'm probably going to be pulling massive overtime over the next week or two. You two do whatever. I'll see you in the morning, Kalila."

  "Sleep well," Kalila replied.

  "Yeah," Tinesha agreed.

  Riyad whistled as he went into the suite's bathroom. The lock light came on as soon as the door shut. Tinesha found herself blushing again, this time from all the possibilities that seemed to exist. This wasn't the sort of excitement that she'd expected when she joined the program, not that she was going to push Kalila away. She just wasn't sure where to go next.

  "Um, do you… prefer girls?" Tinesha finally asked, the nervous-ness cracking her voice in the middle of 'you'.

  Kalila raised her head to look at Tinesha curiously. "Yes. I had thought that you did too. You pay little attention to Riyad and the other men."

  "Well, I do," Tinesha said, her blush intensifying so much that her skin felt two sizes too tight from the heat of it. "I mean, I've always liked girls but um, I never dated any. Some guys in school but it never went anywhere."

  It took a moment but once Kalila realized what Tinesha wasn't saying, that she had no idea what to do next, Kalila started laughing. Her laughter was deeper than the discreet giggles and muffled laughs that happened in public. This was a full sound, rich with amusement as warm as the suite. Kalila leaned her head against Tinesha's shoulder once more, still laughing.

  "I had thought that you had great experience," Kalila chuckled. "You carry yourself with great confidence."

  "I thought you were way more delicate and fragile than you are," Tinesha countered as she squirmed with embarrassment. "We were both wrong."

  Kalila patted Tinesha's thigh, letting her hand rest there. "We will have to spend more time together so that we can learn more of each other. I am… eager to see what other things I was mistaken about."

  "Yeah," Tinesha said, the embarrassment transforming into something like euphoria. "Yeah, I'd like that."

  The sound of water falling came from the bathroom, filling the room much like rainfall on the roof did back home. Kalila's hand was warm on Tinesha's thigh. Her head made a comforting weight on Tinesha's shoulder. Cinnamon filled the air, mixing with Kalila's flower-musk sent.

  Tinesha smiled. This morning she'd thought that she would have to leave, to abandon her hopes for a new life in a new place. Now she thought that maybe, just maybe, things weren't all that bad after all.

  She didn't have the smells of home but if she adjusted to the scents of the station with Kalila's help, Tinesha thought that she could deal with anything that the universe threw at her. At the very least she wouldn't be doing it alone.

  The End

  Afterword

  I'm very happy to release this one for people to read. It doesn't look like it but this story is in the same 'verse as my Muirin stories. It's set so far in the past though that they might as well be completely unconnected.

  It probably shows that I enjoy building complex worlds. This little story is one that grew out of my early world building efforts for Muirin. I hope to tell others over time.

  Part of the joy of building complex words, at least for me, is getting to delve into all sorts of research and creating all sorts of details that never get included in the actual stories I release.

  It's never mentioned in the Muirin stories but they're a colony world, a direct legacy of Tinesha and Kalila's efforts to create new habitats for humanity. During Tinesha and Kalila's era, humanity created space stations between the worlds in our solar system. Later on, they colonized and terraformed as many of our solar system's planets as they could.

  But humanity had grown and the people who grew up in space knew that they could go farther, see more, create more. They created generation ships, essentially space stations with engines, that allowed them to make the long slow journey to other star systems.

  It was a one-way trip and everyone who started out knew that it would be their grandchildren who arrived at the new world. Many ships started out. Some were destroyed along the way. Some found good worlds and settled there. Others found marginal ones that meant that they had to adapt.

  And one ship landed on one world which eventually became crowded so another wave of generation ships went out. Three ships went together and arrived on a marginal planet that they named Morrigan.

  They stayed for twenty or so years but that solar system had a planet with an eccentric orbit. As it neared Morrigan, the gravitational tidal forces made Morrigan unlivable.

  Three women, Chin, Tahira and Ragna, managed to get the one surviving space ship functional. They rescued as many people as they could, which wasn't many, and set off for another solar system.

  The name of that ship? Muirin, which is the name they gave the world they found at the end of the journey.

  There are other colonies that I hope to write about someday and other solar systems where humanity adapted and changed in unexpected ways. For now though, I'm happy that I got Tinesha and Kalila's story out to everyone. They're the ancestors to all the other stories and worlds and characters I intend to tell.

  I hope that you enjoyed the story and thank you for reading!

  Meyari McFarland

  April, 2013