CW: grief, disassociation, presumed death of a child

“Why give water to a goose at dawn if it is being slaughtered in the morning?”

                  – Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor, Papyrus St. Petersburg 1115 (ca. 2000-1750 BCE)

~~~

The light seared into my eyes like a knife. I closed them again. They weren’t much use anyway.

There was no such thing as the being they had showed me: a long, sinuous body rippling with feathery gold protrusions, claw-like limbs clicking on the floor as it slid around me. Its — face? head-pod? — had filled my vision briefly; midnight-blue fronds projecting from its chin and brow tickled my face as it bent over me. Then it had receded, offering a glimpse of a bare, metallic room before the light resumed its torture.

Darkness was cool, darkness was orderly and less painful and very, very welcome.

~~~

This time, the light hurt less. I thought it was because the light source was gentler, but who knows. I probably had a concussion. I had definitely been hallucinating, before. In any case, I was able to brace my elbows against the soft mattress to —

Wait a minute. I blinked a few times, bringing the room into focus. My implants were glitching slightly but finally came through.

This was not the escape pod.

It should have been. There hadn’t been any planets in range of our scanners when I ejected. And yet, here I was, on a bed — no, it wasn’t a bed, it was soft and yielding and heated from below, but it was also round and slightly concave, like a big nest. It was set into a little niche in a room that defied all logic. Everything was lined in rough, veined stone in so many different rich and vibrant colours, broken by flowing wooden sculptures that rose directly out of the floor. It was so alien, and yet it was familiar — I saw a food restit unit set into one wall next to a water fountain, a refresher cabin in a corner, its sliding wall opaque and showing images of a rainforest. Birdsong piped in from the speakers and the scent diffusers used wet leaf and petrichor.

Struggling up, I crawled to the edge of the — bed? nest? — and peeked out. The wall I hadn’t been able to see before had a large window nestled in between stone of a deep red veined with silver, looking out onto the same rainforest displayed on the refresher cabin. Huge purple leaves dripped with water and bright blue vines snaked around rust-coloured trunks.

I leaned back into the niche, my arms trembling from supporting my weight for, what, five seconds, ten? I felt shaky all over. I looked down and saw that various cuts and abrasions had been tended with some sort of transparent film. I caught a movement in the corner of my eye — something gold and blue and slightly fuzzy — but when I turned my head — ow — there was only the smooth wood-panelled walls of the sleeping niche.

Okay. This wasn’t the escape pod. It very definitely wasn’t Heart of Lions, as the — oh.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep from heaving. The image, now it had risen, seemed seared into my brain, playing on repeat. Heart of Lions hanging in space, its blue-and-red cylinders shuddering and shedding sensors and dust catchers like a dog out of the rain, then breaking apart as though giant hands had taken hold of each end and pulled.

Had there been other escape pods among the debris? Had the crew made it? As clear as that last moment was imprinted on my mind, the minutes before it were fuzzy, a confused salad of impressions — the blue light of the “Brace for Impact” alarm, the ear-splitting blare of “Abandon Ship”; corridors, the cold, hard feel of the door-wheels under my hands, running, yells, more alarms, the open escape pod. There had been voices but no-one near enough to board the pod with me.

I doubled over, trying not to weep, unsure of why I didn’t want to.

A warm, feathery-soft hand on my back. A rumbling voice: “Hush, little one, everything is all right, now.”

I yelped; I flinched back; I hit my head on the ceiling of the niche. Either my brain was still rattling about after the concussion or I hit the sweet spot on the crown of my head, because everything went black once more.

~~~

The third awakening was as surreal as the other two. The person sitting in the bed-nest in front of me was huge. Not just tall, but broadly built, their features large: wide, flat nose, wide, thin mouth. Skin the colour of gold; large eyes, eyebrows and long, flowing hair all of a matching midnight blue. I smiled a bit at that affectation, before my throat closed in grief. There was a machinist, Tamiut, who had dyed all their hair the exact shade of their storm-grey eyes. How slowly had they died? How fast?

Hands the size of portholes gently patted my shoulder. Their movements were both quick and graceful, like a zero-g dancer’s. Oh. Touch. Did that mean they were real? “There, now, little one. You have had quite a time. Rest, and then there will be food.”

The surface of the nest shifted as they eased out of it.

“I’m Amenau,” I called, carefully scrambling upright. My voice was hoarse and raspy. “What’s your name?”

They blinked, tucking their chin in. “Your mouth is not made to make the sounds.” They licked their lips. “Come when you feel rested. It is safe, here.”

What-? My mouth was perfectly fine. It was the same as theirs.

~~~

When the niche stopped rotating too badly whenever I sat up, and getting up on all fours felt a little less like my limbs were made of jelly, I carefully crawled out into the room. I could move my limbs, and I could stand, though I needed to lean against the cool blue-and-gold-veined stone of the nearest wall to stay upright, but—

What?

The stone was warm. Not cool, warm, just a little over body temperature. So was the rough green stone under my feet. Maybe the niche’s heating unit extended a little outside?

As I considered this, my host appeared at my elbow, their chin jutting out as they smiled. They took my arm and helped me across the room to one of the wooden artworks and I saw the top had been smoothed and hollowed for seating. As we walked, the rock under my feet went from warm to cool to warm again.

Once I had settled onto the tree limb, or root, or whatever it was, my host left and came back with a restit-unit container filled with something made to look like noodles cooked in broth, though the restit machine hadn’t gotten the colour quite right, nor the smell. Still, it smelled heavenly.

They beamed at me. I took the box, searched the sides and top for the attached eating implements.

“You’re not hungry?”

Not hungry? It felt like someone had hollowed out my insides with a spoon. “I, uh, can’t eat this with my hands.”

They looked down at their hands in puzzlement, then tucked their chin in again in consideration. “Ah.”

They came back with a spork. I ate as slowly as I could make myself as they pottered about, running their hands over the tree limbs, wiping down the restit. As I savoured the almost-right taste of food, I felt eyes on me. It wasn’t my host, who was humming to a knot in a branch. Twisting around, I saw a little — slug? Snake? It was long and it was fuzzy, with frond-like yellow fur and tiny blue antennae-like protrusions where its face might be. It had no visible eyes, but its scrutiny was weighing. It looked like the thing my brain had created the first time I woke up — maybe it was. Maybe my concussed brain had had trouble computing size or something, thought it was bigger that it was. I reached a trembling hand out to it, but it flowed to the underside of the branch and disappeared with an echo of clickety sound.

“Is something wrong?” My host was back at my side, hovering.

“I thought I saw…” My brain froze for a moment, both blank and over-full, and I went back to eating, trying to sort the impressions and questions in my head. Priorities: who – covered, but not convincingly – what, when, where, and why. Oh. Powers That Be, why?

“Did— did anyone else make it?” Okay. Not was what I was planning to say, but, sure. Yes. Important question.

They blinked. “Make it? The nutrient reconstitution device made it.”

“I mean, from the ship. Did anyone else make it off the ship?”

“You were alone in your vessel.”

“I know! I…” I took a deep breath. “We were on a ship. A big ship. Heart of Lions. There were 120 of us. It— it was destroyed. I made it to an escape pod and I guess — I guess I landed here?” Right. Here. Shouldn’t I find out where here was?

They dipped their head. Did that mean ‘yes’? I went with ‘yes.’

“But there were other escape pods. Other— “

“Other people.”

I nodded, hoping they understood. The way their eyes hooded, their head drooped, I suppose they did.

I swallowed against the stone in my throat. “So I’m alone.”

“Eat,” they told me softly, patting my shoulder and meandering off, leaving me to my grief.

~~~

My host was — odd. They moved with careful, languid grace, but the rest of my senses never quite synched. Their hand felt too narrow and heavy and soft, their footsteps were a click-click-shhhh to my pad-pad-pad. They wore a sheath-like dress of the exact same shade as their golden skin that moulded every detail of their body and left you guessing about all of it, their feet bare on the stone floor. When I asked about clothes to replace the rags I wore, they tucked their chin in and blinked and eventually came back with three shirts and a single boot.

They were kind and solicitous and completely clueless. And there was nothing for me to do. To be honest, the first few — days? Meals appeared at fairly regular intervals (though I always ate them alone) but the lighting was constant. I tended to crawl into the nest whenever my eyes grew heavy, which was pretty often, at first. Sometimes I would wake up with my host curled around me, but it never got weird. At least, not weirder than waking up on a planet whose name you still didn’t know because there were too many questions to ask and you somehow asked every one of them except the right one, with a person whose name you didn’t know either curled around you like a mama-cat around its kittens.

Once I could stay awake for more than a few hours, though, I felt restless. I was an environmental sysadmin. I spent my shifts checking that the recyclers ran smoothly and the temperature and humidity levels were at optimum and that the bacteria tanks were happy and producing enough oxygen. When my shift was over, I watched “And the Universe Shall Be Yours” and holomovies with dogs in them (don’t ask, it was a bet, I still have 95 of them on my list.) Or I made little wire-and-bead trees if I had the supplies. Named the new bacteria strains that popped up occasionally in the tanks — the first was Bob, of course; the newest was Bartholomew. Both in B-Tank, which was the most prolific for some reason. A had only ever produced a single Anastasia.

You know. I kept busy.

Here, there was nothing to do. I asked about comms and got a hanging head. I asked about the rainforest outside and got told, in incredulous tones, “Outside is too dangerous, little one. You are not equipped.” I asked about the escape pod and was told it was mostly recycled by now, though they dropped the black box in my lap.

Were those ever black? This one was electric blue, about the size of my fist, happily blinking yellow and green to show that my position was being transmitted within a ten-parsec radius and the information from the escape pod had been stored. There had been no planets, stations or other bodies capable of sustaining life within a ten-parsec radius of where Heart of Lions had been destroyed.

I found myself constantly toying with it, picking at the data port, the indicator lights, the data port again. I finally put it into a knot of one of the furniture-limbs, and told my host to take it away from me if I ever rooted it out. Then I more or less bounced off the walls for a couple of cycles. Sometimes literally.

I found out which parts of the living area were warmed and which were kept cool (it had nothing to do with the colour of the stone). My host liked to lounge on the floor or sprawl across the wooden furniture or whatever it was, rotating according to a pattern I never deciphered. I found my own favourite floor spots, managed to fashion one of the three shirts into a skirt or something, tore and braided the rest of my uniform into a long braid I had no use for, tried to braid my own hair but found it was still too short. I searched for the exit to the room, all the walls, the windows, the floor, the refresher, the back of the nest. I searched again, but this time with a rag from a shirt to poke in the slits between the stone slabs.

My host only observed me with a baffled expression as I paced, rested, braided, unbraided, rebraided while they curled up languidly on whatever surface they found most comfortable at the moment. Maybe they were cold-blooded? I had taken some basic biology courses once. I remembered almost nothing of them.

Humans were not cold-blooded.

I think by the end of the fifth day — three-meal-cycle, whatever — they knew everything they could possibly have wanted to know about B-Tank and its mutations, C-Tank and how finicky it was about temperature, and how lovely A-Tank had been behaving since the pH-balancer was replaced. They knew all about “And the Universe Shall Be Yours” – Petir’s infatuation with Kelaudye,even though she was married to Temsa, who was her uncle (which she didn’t know). And, of course, all the real-life gossip from aboard Heart of Lions which, let’s be honest, was just as entangled as the one from the show we all watched religiously, but with slightly less incest.

They started bringing me things, probably out of sheer desperation: infopads in a language I couldn’t read, board games same, a pair of knitting needles and three clews of yarn (baby-blue, baby-pink and violent orange), strips of fabric to braid, socks (none of them matching), paints but no paper or brushes, fake flowers.

It took me 27 tries to learn to knit. The flowers, I wove into one of the tree-limbs along with little braids of fabric and yarn. I caught the little fluffy slug-thing peeking out between them on a few occasions.

I managed to pool several games together to make one snake-board. I taught my host to play, and they trounced me after the fifteenth game. I made sock puppets and recreated the children’s books I used to read to my niblings for my host, who smiled and twitched their hands with delight.

I did not ask where I was. I did not ask what my host did when they weren’t in the room. I did not try to leave. All of that required so much more energy than knitting and unraveling, than braiding and decorating, than trying to figure out strategy in a game I had always been terrible at. 

~~~

They caught me crying.

No, they caught me weeping. I can’t tell you why I never cried in their presence, always finding some place they weren’t — the refresher cabin, the nest. I have no trouble crying in front of people. The therapist on Heart of Lions, a nice man called Hetepu with a mole at the corner of his mouth, had seen me wail often enough, as had any of my bunkmates. As had Tamiut of the grey hair and eyes. But this felt private. Or maybe rather it felt that I was invading their private space enough as it is, without polluting it with emotions they might not comprehend.

That day — we were both awake at the same time and the last meal had come after sleeping and had definite breakfast vibes, so it was day, dammit — they found me in the refresher.

They knelt down beside me and I felt their feathery touch on my shoulder and it was too much. I leaned in, enveloped in softness that tickled at my neck and nose, breathing in their odd scent of sea and dry earth and shuddered and gulped and snuffled and screamed. It felt like the cold floor of the refresher was a nest and I was engulfed in its warmth as it flowed and tightened around me. I cried and cried until my heart was empty and my head was nothing but fuzzy static.

“What is this noise you make, little one? Why do you lose so much water? Are you ill?” The gentle, rumbling voice had echoes of lullabies in it.

“I miss them,” I mumbled into the feathery warmth of their dress. (That made no sense. It hardly mattered. Nothing made much sense, these days. Being alive made no sense.) “I miss them so much.”

“Hush, little one. You are no longer alone. We are no longer alone.” Their voice caught, the rumble turned to keening. I looked up into the dark azure eyes.

“Where are your people?” It wasn’t the first time I had asked. It was, maybe, the first time I meant it.

“Far away.”

They looked so lost. I reached up and stroked the incredibly soft, wispy hair, marveling again at its deep blue colour.

“What happened?”

They settled down and held me close. “We were a colony, about 70 of us. We were” — they tucked their chin in and held me closer — “aunts and uncles? Ommers? And sons and daughters and children. Niblings.” They gazed far out into the distance. “A meteor shower took out our instruments. We made it here, but the environment was wrong. By the time we figured out how to survive, they were gone. The last — a little one, one of my own clutch. I saw them hatch, and I saw them take a last breath. I was too late. I could save myself, but not them. So tiny.” Their breath caught and I found myself hugging them as hard as I could. I hadn’t watched as my crewmates died, one by one. I hadn’t seen Tamiut slowly asphyxiate in the dark of space. I could, somewhere in the depths of my brain, convince myself they were still alive and happy somewhere.

At least we had each other, now.

~~~

We were on a space-station. Which explained, really, why my host was horrified about me going outside. Awful hard to breathe in space. As the crew would have —

Nope, not going there.

What’s more, we were on a human space-station, as evidenced by the refresher and restit unit. Not – whatever my host was. Somebody who used tree limbs as furniture and slept in a nest and had hot and cold spots in the home they had built on a human space station and whose child was born in a clutch.

Except there was no sentient alien life.

Right?

Right. Xenobiology 101, which was one of my required courses before I was allowed to sit with the quiet kids and play exclusively with the very specific cocktail of bacteria that kept people alive in space.

So. Obviously human. Just weird human.

Today I cared. Tomorrow I wouldn’t. What difference did it make? Right now, I stared at the rainforest simulation in awe. I mean, everybody had some sort of simulation window on Heart of Lions; at home people had whole walls, but they had never looked quite so real. And so big! Someone had even taken the time to add a layer of glass to the simulation — it would reflect the room when the light outside shifted, rain pearled on its surface. It felt almost like glass under my hands. This was expensive stuff, not what you would expect on a station. It was so wonderfully synched with the smells, too.

I wanted to go and explore the rest of the station, see if the communications array still worked. But whenever I suggested it to my friend, they got such a look of horror on their face that my heart bled, all over the floor. I tried to explain that we could contact their people, but they let their head hang back, throat bared. We had been together long enough by then that I recognised it as a sign of distress, and so I dropped the subject, soothing them and stroking their soft blue hair.

I still hadn’t found the exit to the room, though I started looking again. And felt. I even sniffed at the walls. They were so sad, when they noticed, but they didn’t prevent me from trying, at least. I think they understood the fine line between begging me to stay and preventing me from leaving.

I tried to follow the tiny slug-cucumber-plushie whenever I caught a glimpse of them, but they were too quick for me. Look at me. Too slow to catch a furry slug.

One day when I was trying a pattern — I never really made anything when I knit; I only had three clews, so I spent my time experimenting to see if I could figure out patterns — and cursing at the fraying orange yarn, I noticed the click-click-sssssh of my friend’s steps. But instead of settling down beside me as they usually did when I knit, they placed something at my feet.

“Can you repair it?”

I counted my stitches to settle where I was in my mind and put away my needles. I picked up the mess of wires and computing gel and turned it this way and that. Several of the connections had corroded and the gel in the packs was a sickly-looking orange. Whatever it was, it was dead.

“No.”

They dipped their head. “Is this an important piece, little one?”

I glanced down at the technological tangle in my hands. “Of what?”

“This is part of the communications array.”

Oh. Well, that wasn’t good. “No idea. Are all the gel packs this colour?” I pointed to one to make sure they knew what I was talking about.

“They are. Is this bad?”

I nodded. “They deteriorate over time. They need to be renewed regularly.”

“Do you know how to renew them?”

“No. I specialise in environmental bacteria. I have no idea what these need; they live in a sealed environment and don’t require or produce oxygen. Unless there’s some sort of lab here?”

The blank look I got resulted in all the time until the next meal being taken up in trying to describe a laboratory.

Finally, my friend sighed. It was a bad habit they had picked up from me. “No. Nothing like what you describe.” They turned to the gel packs again. “Which are worse?”

I pointed out the various levels of decay. “They should all be bright yellow. Have you seen this elsewhere?”

They brushed a hand against one of the packs.  “Some red. A lot of orange, deep orange. No yellow.” My eyes widened and my chest constricted. Ever solicitous, they shifted and stroked my face. “Shhh. Tell me again, Amenau, how did Temsa take Kelaudye’s revelation of her love for Petir?”

I took a steadying breath and tried to recall where we were. “Well, remember, he had cheated on her with Petir’s cousin, so she had that to hold over him. And they — the cousin — was pregnant, so…” Thank the Powers That Be for soap operas. I don’t think my friend really understood the relationships, but that didn’t stop them from being an avid fan of whatever I could remember of “And the Universe Shall be Yours”.

And it kept me from thinking too hard about the fact that the station around us was dying.

~~~

I was running out of material from “And the Universal Shall Be Yours” and frantically making up my own when my friend came to me one day. They sat down in front of me and put their head against my side. I petted them absently. We spent a lot of time touching each other, soothing each other, reminding each other that we were not alone.

“They are here,” they told me sadly.

“Who?” I tried not to hope.

“Your friends.”

My friends? They weren’t making sense. My friend was here. My friends were dead. I made to get up but they hugged me tight. “They are coming, little one. I am leading them here.”

My heart was racing and my skin tingling in anticipation, but I made myself sit still and hold my friend in my arms. “Come with us,” I begged. I was delirious, caught in a fantasy. We weren’t going anywhere.

“Oh, little one. I can’t.”

Then the lights shorted out and when they came back online, I wasn’t home anymore.

The room was a bare metal cube bristling with sensors and projectors and forcefield units. The refresher/restit corner was real, but stark metal rather than glass and porcelain. The nest area was, of all things, a worktable of some sort with broken computer consoles, though there were traces on the floor where a bed might once have been. The windows were walls of black-eyed projectors.

But most devastatingly, my friend was gone.

The tears, never far from the surface, made tracks down my face as the world receded around me. I didn’t react when a ceiling panel clanged down near me and a ladder extended.

Hunh. Ceiling. Made sense for a holoroom, I guess.

There were voices, noise, people in protective clothing. And then —

“Tamiut?”

No. Tamiut was dead, dead with Heart of Lions. But here was someone with their silver eyes and silver hair and kind smile. Their hands felt real in my own, warm and dry, but my friend’s hands had felt real, too. Wait. No. My friend’s had felt wrong, not like hands. But they had felt real.

“Amenau. Oh, Amenau, we thought you were dead!”

I found myself in an embrace; a normal, very human hug, and it jarred – a ghost hug, this wasn’t what hugs were anymore.

The world shifted sideways again as more people crowded me, dead people, with the hearts of lions and voices that were too loud. Other people shouldered them away and assaulted me with beeping things. I found my knitting, it had been real, truly real, and I held on to it for dear life while Tamiut held my other hand, squeezing it and smiling encouragingly.

They asked me questions but words were not making any sense. They were very, very kind.

Soon I was bundled up the ladder and into a place of pipes and mesh flooring; I knew this, somehow, only in different colours. Was I home? No, home was gone, home had been broken in half by gravitation and solar winds; home had disappeared in a wink only a few moments ago.

A hatch? A hatch. I didn’t remember walking. We dropped through. I walked, conscious of it now, and words were starting to make sense again, although sentences weren’t.

“…some sort of holographic resort, but it was abandoned ages ago. We’re still trying to analyse the gravitational currents that brought your pod here, it’s wild…”

With the return of words, what I was seeing slowly appeared less disjointed. Instead of pipes, and a door, and deck plates, and another door, it was all coming together to form a corridor with rooms. Everything was depressingly dingy. They were hustling me, their grip hard on my elbow. Why?

I turned my head, caught sight of something gold behind a half-open door. I stopped. It rippled slightly. It did, didn’t it?

I wrenched myself away and ran through, ignoring the cursing behind me. I stopped short.

There were several creatures. There were not several creatures. There were the corpses of several creatures. They looked like my little fuzzy cucumber friend, only about the size of — no idea. Bigger than most animals I had ever seen live. The dry air of the station had preserved them, their long bodies seeming slightly deflated, the golden fur-feathers a dusty, faded beige. The movement of air from my entrance disintegrated several of the fronds on the nearest creature, revealing wires trailing from their body to the nearest computer console.

Tears stung my eyes once more. This was their family, then. My friend had been real. Where were they?

Concerned crewmembers gently tugged me back. “We’re not supposed to disturb them. The rescue ship has called the nearest university, they’re sending xenobiologists to study them.”

“Where are they?”

“Come, Amenau. Everything’s dead, here.”

No. My friend had been alive, alive to mourn their family, their little hatchling. I ran away.

I wasn’t very good at running anymore. There hadn’t been that much space in our little home, though I suppose I could have exercised more if I had really wanted to. But my rescuers were trying to be careful of me, so I ducked and dodged and peeked into every room I could.

I found them. It must be them. Their fronds were vibrant gold and lapis-blue, quivering in surprise as I barreled in. They were attached to a portable unit of some sort that was plugged into a console. In a corner of the room, a tiny corpse lay rolled up in a little nest of some of my knitting. I had wondered where those pieces had gone.

I threw myself against them and it felt right. “You were really there, weren’t you?” I asked.

“Sometimes.” The voice came from the console along the wall. “But my strength fades faster if I move. The mobile unit cannot sustain me. Soon integration will be complete.”

Integration into a dying computer. A disintegrating station. No.

“Come with me,” I begged again. “We’ll find you another computer to integrate into. A healthy one. You won’t be alone.”

“Oh, little one.” Their tail came up and brushed lightly against my cheek. “I am too far into this one. I cannot reverse the procedure. Will you ask your companions to leave the simulation room running?”

“Please,” I was sobbing now, my hands digging into their fronds. They were soft and warm and home.

“Hush, little one. You will see your niblings again and tell them stories with socks. Look, your friends are afraid for you. You must go with them.”

“They’re sending xenobiologists — maybe they will be able to help?”

They tucked their head-pod back in a gesture that was achingly familiar. “It will be too late. I am finishing integration as we speak.”

I looked over to the sad little corpse in the corner. Something clicked. “How big would your child be now?”

Their head dipped and a tiny holoprojector on the console projected a cucumber-like fuzzy slug-snake. My shy little friend, who skittered away whenever I caught sight of them.

“You said you couldn’t save them, but… I’ve seen them. In the room. They’re skittish. I think… Maybe the integration worked.” A tiny little life that had made itself a tiny little holographic body.

“Why would they not come to me?”

I shrugged. I could barely figure out the thought processes of my 3- and 5-year-old niblings. Baby fuzzy snakes were beyond me. “Maybe the simulation confused them? Maybe your appearance did?”

They turned their head-pod to consider the tiny body. They used the talon-like appendages along their belly to skitter forward slightly — click, click, shhhh as their body slid across the tiles. “They live?”

“For now.” My voice was shaking. “As long as the computers hold.”

“Amenau.” It was Tamiut, whispering intently in my ear. “This is so far beyond our pay grade it’s not even funny. You’re not well. Whatever you’ve been eating, it didn’t have all the necessary nutrients, and you’re dehydrated and your cortisol levels are crazy high. I forget what cortisol’s good for but the medics are worried. You can tell from the way they frown at their scanners.”

I tried to shrug them away but my friend gently nudged me towards the assembled crewmembers. Some were ghosts, some new. Some with beeping scanners, some with their hands on sidearms, eyes large and pupils tiny in their fear.

“Go home, little one. I have everything I need right here.” They turned back to their child. “Oh. Yes. Everything.”

~~~

The ship that rescued me was called Sense of Storms. It was currently the locus for a very agitated discussion between the crew and the Xenobiology Department of somewhere or other.

I was in the room because it concerned my friend, and I had insisted on listening in. I did. I didn’t like it.

My brain was a clew of baby-pink wool and my knitting needles were click-clacking merrily. I had access to more colours, now, but I always came back to baby-pink, baby-blue and vibrant orange. The sound reminded me of my friend’s footsteps — click, click. No shhhh, though.

I was surrounded by my ghosts who, it turned out, were quite real. Heart of Lions had managed to send out an SOS before… before. Those who had made it to escape pods had been rescued within three days. Two of my bunkmates had been reassigned to another ship and the third was still in medical. But Tamiut and a colleague from Environmental Systems whose name will come back to me eventually were pressed against me, cocooning me in warmth. A few faces I remembered but could not place were with them, too. It was nice.

Someone grunted above me. “C-Tank’s gone acid again.” It was my boss. I guess. I was supposed to have gone to the facility where my bunkmate was, but I was still here because one day I had been following my ghost colleague – Petir, like in “And the Universe Shall be Yours”, how could I forget? –  and they were complaining about oxygen output and I could tell that A-tank had mutated and wasn’t happy with the textbook settings so, running on automatic, I had adjusted the sugar levels. After a lot of yelling – after which I fled to my bunk for two days, listening to the click-click of needles – the boss had tracked me down and dragged me away to look at C-Tank, because they had been ready to simply dump A and requesting a replacement bacteria culture was a ton of paperwork. So now whenever the captain grumbled about babysitting and clinics and home, my boss told them that they could bugger off or try breathing carbon monoxide.

“Amenau. C-Tank’s gone acid again.” Oh. The present. Boss. He wasn’t nice, really. He never thanked me and he growled whenever I nattered on too much. But when my mind wandered off, he would stash me where I wouldn’t make trouble and he made sure there were people to touch me because he didn’t like it much himself. People touched me a lot, in those days, and it helped, but it was also wrong, wrong, wrong.

Like now. Tamiut was bumping my shoulder. Right. Boss had said something, and though it wasn’t a question it needed an answer.  “Cameron likes it a bit acid. ‘S okay as long as it doesn’t go into purple,” I told my knitting. It was a little cardigan for my nibling. I make things now, things I give away and don’t have to unravel.

“And I need you to come look at A, it’s off its feed.”

I nodded. Then I made an effort and looked up and smiled. “Picky eaters.”

“Yeah. Don’t forget.” He turned and marched away to his console, which was his way of saying my brain had been wandering again and he was worried.

Focusing on those words had made it a little easier, now, to pick the words I wanted from the hubbub on the bridge. But I had been gone too long, nothing the xenobiologists were saying made sense.

“What’s Ludothèque Holomonde?” I asked Tamiut.

They squeezed my shoulder again. “How much did you get?”

“The station died.” I hunched my shoulders and picked up my knitting again. “The technology wasn’t compatible.”

“With ours, yes,” Tamiut agreed, and there was something in their tone. “But the station – you remember it was supposed to be an amusement park for asteroid miners in the system? Holobooks, hologames, holoretreats, holospas. But the mining company went bust, so they abandoned it.”

 I nodded.

“Well, the holographic technology and the file formats are proprietory, and they aren’t compatible with anything we have. So the xenobiologists are trying to get in touch with Holomonde to set up a projection room in their department. But they want money not just for setting up, but every time it runs. It’s getting political.”

I had understood all the words, and I knew I would remember them. I would figure out what exactly they meant later. Still – “Why?” Why a projection room? Why bother?

Tamiut’s smile was sweet and sad. “It turns out the data storage system wasn’t proprietary or organic; the xenos managed to get a hold of a bunch of units and, Amenau, they made backups of everything.”

Backup. Backup of my friend and their warm, feathery hugs, of the way they tucked their chin in, of their shy little child.

“So, my friend is safe?”

Tamiut was quiet. I pet their hand absently. Their skin was smooth, warm. It wasn’t right. It was perfect, too.

“We don’t know yet,” Tamiut said, finally. “Nobody understands the technology your friend used to integrate.”

I thought of Petir and Kelaudye and Temsa, and snake boards, and sock puppets, and knitting. I thought of how all their fronds had trembled when I told them about the shy little creature I had espied. I thought about Tamiut and my colleague Petir and the improbability of gravitational currents.

“But there’s hope?” I asked finally.

They hugged me. “Yes, Amenau. There’s hope.”

I nodded and returned to my knitting.

I needed to make some socks, next, so I could tell stories to a tiny gold-blue cucumber-slug.

___

Copyright 2025 Sonia Focke