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CodyLabs — The Nomads: Part 4
#alien #fiction #nomads #sciencefiction #scifi #shortstory #spaceborne #spacecraft #writing
Published: 2020-04-26 07:18:33 +0000 UTC; Views: 1757; Favourites: 14; Downloads: 0
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Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4
“Hey Keeleeticktick.” She startled him by coming up behind. “I need a way to secure my pod to the convoy, while still spinning.”
“Oh?” He was glad to hear that, and turned around. “So you plan to continue traveling with us?”
“Of course I do… Man, where else would I go? …I just need a way to keep my gravity, and stay linked at the same time.”
“Hmm.” He drifted in a small circle, as he thought. “You will need some manner of oiled rotor then. One end of the rotor will not spin, and can be tied to the convoy. The other end you will tie to the center of mass of your spinning tether. Then you can hang a ladder from the rotor down to your pod, and you never need to stop spinning.”
“Great idea. Uh… Do we have a rotor like that?”
“No.” His eyestalks bobbed. “We will have to make one on a lathe. There’s one over on the factory ship, so I’ll meet you there if you’ll bring some material. And I don’t know much about manufacturing, so I’ll have to ask some of the other guys to come help as well.”
“Great. Uh… I guess we could melt down one of the seats I took out of the pod?”
“They are aluminum?”
“Yes.”
“Aluminum wears down. Bring something steel.”
“…There was a turbine in one of the engines. That’s steel.”
“Perfect.”
“Cool.”
They were several hours into the project before one of the other guys spoke up. “You’ve been busy, Missus Fikes.”
“Yeah, I have.” She nodded.
“Ever since you met with her.”
“Yeah… She gave me a lot to think about.”
“Ha ha, yeaaaah, she’s pretty eloquent, Isn’t she?” He laughed.
“Of course she’s good with words.” Another male agreed. “Her brain is the size of three people.”
“What exactly did she get you thinking about, Missus Fikes?”
“It’s just… Things are really different on my world.” She shrugged. “And I know things have to be different out here just because of the way you people work and live, but… Honestly, seeing her closed up in there, being harvested for silk and kids, that was just too far. Kinda messed me up. I really… Really think her entire setup is just plain wrong.”
Many of the nearby men launched into long-winded excuses, or tried to shrug it off, or outright told her to go mind her own business. But surprisingly enough, many of them actually entirely agreed with her, or at least reassured her that things would change once they reached their destination; once they were out of the void, out of danger, and among rings again. A few men got to arguing with each other.
“Yeah, yeah, I know I know.” She waved a hand to try to calm the sudden dispute. “I didn’t mean to make waves, especially when she’s happy where she is, I just… It got me thinking about how unnatural I’ve been living too. And about how I can’t just keep living like you people do, not completely. We’re just… Just very, very different. And I needed to get my gravity back.”
“Women are treated better on your world?” Keeleeticktick asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “I mean yes! I mean… I don’t know.” She tried to concentrate on the lathe. “They were just… They were just treated basically the same way as men. They had all the same rights, the same laws…”
“How’s that possible?”
“It was possible because THEY were basically the same!” She waved a glove. “The women were a little smaller, and a little lumpier, and the men a little hairier, but if they were wearing clothes, especially a suit like this? You couldn’t even tell them apart… The gender roles weren’t ship and sailor, they were more balanced; provider and parent, leader and organizer, hunter and gatherer…”
They found that to be very interesting and very strange. “Missus Fikes.” One of them laughed. “Next you’ll be saying that you’re a woman!”
They all laughed at that.
She chuckled and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’ll be the day.”
“Wait, but seriously though, are you a woman?”
She guffawed at the sheer absurdity of the question, that there should be so little ambiguity that it had taken them almost a year to ask it. But though she laughed, she chose her next words carefully. “If I were?” She asked, and looked up from the lathe to meet their eyes. “…If I weren’t? …Perhaps I ought to teach you a lesson by asking you a question back.” She put a glove on her hip. “If I were a woman, or if I weren’t, would I still be myself? Would I still be the same man, and the same friend? Would you still know your Missus Fikes?”
That seemed to confuse them for a moment. Thilykto seemed to be the most decisive and hasty of them all, for he was the first to answer. “Yeah! Of course! Yeah, you’d still be Missus Fikes.”
Other eyestalks were bobbing now, and the agreement was reached, that their visitor was still himself, different as he was, strange as he was, no matter what he was. They still knew their friend. And many of them took some additional consolation by convincing themselves that he was a man after all and was merely teasing them, for that was just so much easier to accept.
Most of them disliked the direction the conversation had taken, and floated away to find business elsewhere. “Although you know, Missus Fikes.” Keeleeticktick whispered towards her, when they were again alone in the shop. “I wouldn’t try to make a joke of you or subtract from you in any way if I knew which you were… But as your friend, you have to understand how curious I am.”
She smiled with a private sigh. All right. She said in sign language. What’s the sign?
“Woman.” He whispered. He held up two tentacles intertwined, and touched them to his right eyestalk. “Man.” He held up two tentacles straight parallel, and touched them to his left eyestalk.
She crossed her fingers, and touched the right of her visor.
Keeleeticktick stared for a moment in surprise and borderline disbelief, which slowly faded into hesitant understanding and uncomfortable acceptance. Then he gave a brief nod, and turned back to the machine. “…Missus Fikes, you’re a strange man.” He said, loud enough for others to hear. “And you’re a-“
“-A very, very long way from home.” She repeated his old line back with a smile. “Yeah, yeah, don’t I know it.”
“…Actually, I was just going to say that you’re a good man.” He told her. “And a good friend… And if you like… Home might not be as far as you think; It may just be right here.”
“…You could be right.”
And she thought he was, and as she lost her hope that he wasn’t, she was slowly becoming content.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A time passed.
She’d worked her way up to 30% gravity in her pod now, and her muscles and bones were slowly becoming strong again. She could run now, she could jump, even if such a skill was only usable within the 100 square feet of her truncated pod. She could see the definition in her legs again, she could no longer wrap her hand all the way around her wrist, her space suit was getting looser around the torso and tighter around the limbs. Keeleeticktick was once watching her exercising, and asked her how she was getting along health-wise. “I’m feeling great.” She’d said, and meant it.
Their new sun grew ever nearer, glowed ever brighter in the forward starscape. As they passed through the denser regions of the system’s Kuiper belt, asteroids were being located and ensnared in greater and greater numbers. The momentum the fisher’s borrowed from their targets was transferred through lengths of extra-elastic silk to the convoy itself, to help them slow down from their interstellar speeds. Keeleeticktick took her to the telescope one night, and showed her their first clear image of their new world: a brilliantly blue-green gas giant turning in a shallow orbit at a high obliquity, with a wide, dense set of glittering rings that would have put Saturn’s to shame. “It’s beautiful.” She’d said, and meant it.
As for the asteroid fishing, she herself was quickly learning the intimate details of the operation, was even bringing her pod along on fishing voyages so she wouldn’t have to stay behind. One time when they finished reeling in a captured asteroid, she was among the first to climb down the silk to stand on its icy surface. All around her, the nomads were breaking off pieces of ice with their beaks and eating them right there, a primal sort of victory ritual to celebrate the hunt. By their example, she broke off a piece as well. Then she opened her helmet, right there in the void, took a big bite, and closed her helmet again before she suffocated. As the life support roared to keep up, and as she blinked to keep the moisture from boiling off her eyes, she chewed and sucked on the rock. It was gritty and hard, and unbearably grating on her teeth, but she could taste the water trapped in the dust, felt the ice melting on her teeth. Keeleeticktick laughed at the stunt, and asked her how it was. “It’s good!” She’d said, and meant it.
One night the men opened Kinthalikal’s cargo pod, and encouraged her to come out for a bit of exercise while they cleaned her pod and made some adjustments. All the men in the convoy watched and stared as she emerged, spread her anchors and flexed her engines. They fed her a bit of ice and her fuel tanks began to fill, unfurling and inflating with all the elegance of the bodies of jellyfish, all the pride of banners flapping in the breeze, all the beauty of wind catching in the white sails of the great old boats of Earth. Her eyes widened, her hearts contracted, her engines throbbed with pale light, and she glided upwards away from the colony, and through a wide circular orbit around them. As she returned to her pod, two silent hours later, Thilykto whispered that the woman was so beautiful. “Yeah. Yeah she is.” She’d agreed, and meant it.
Rickakticktacka finally finished the fantasy novel he’d been reading. The witch was killed and the Elkakik achieved his purpose, allowing his spirit double to move on to peace in the afterlife, and allowing him to finally fall in love. The queen gave him a princess in marriage, and they set out to make a new life for themselves in the ring beyond the black moon, the land that the witch had once held in a rule of darkness, now free. By the end of the tale she’d learned to better understand the old story-language, not enough to speak it, but enough to listen fully. So when the natives were congratulating the story and retelling the parts they’d enjoyed, she’d finally been able to honestly say “It was excellent,” and mean it.
Then came the day when they were asking for a new story to be told, and she’d volunteered, and stepped up with an old text file of The Lord of the Rings, which she’d found somewhere in the pod’s backup computers. She had a slow and difficult time translating one sentence at a time into the nomad’s language, but they were nothing if not patient. Many times she had to pause to explain things like rivers and mountains and forests, and it took them awhile to get the gist of the need to walk for great distances instead of merely drift, but they were enjoying these new concepts almost as much as the story itself, and they made good progress through the book. Many months later, when Sauron was finally defeated and the Fellowship parted ways and the Hobbits returned home to liberate the Shire, the nomads had cheered. “That was a beautiful story!” they’d said, and meant it.
Months added up into years.
She turned fifty.
And she began to get very sick.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Hey Keelee?” She pointed across the convoy toward the heavy ion engine on the stern of the main tug. That gentle blue electric flame had never once turned off or even faltered in her entire stay, or for many years previous; it was a technology designed for efficiency and endurance instead of speed and power, indeed it was so weak that its thrust was entirely imperceptible on a day-to-day basis. Yet for all the fuel it was saving them by pushing so slow for so long, it had used just that much electric power. Power it got from a nuclear reactor, which stood tall and grey, in full view of every ship in the convoy. “The reactor…” She hesitated to ask, but at some point she had to know. “How much shielding does it have?”
“Shielding?” He frowned at it, then back at her. “…What do you mean…?”
“Ah…” She took a deep, slow breath. “…Oh… Oh dear. Umm… Keelee, I… I don’t know how to say this, because I don’t know what you could do about it, but… I’m pretty sure I have cancer. I need a doctor.”
“Talk to Rickakticktacka. He has some experience.”
“It’s different with humans… We can’t just grow new organs and… And… And surgery won’t work either. There’s bones and… And muscles in the way, and our organs are all crammed real close together, and we don’t ever stop bleeding once we start… I need a human doctor. Earth medicine. Specialized nanobots. And a whole lot of other stuff depending on the results of tests I don’t know how to perform… And I need it soon, and there’s no way I could ever get it in time.”
“…Oh.”
“I’m dying, Keelee… It’s nobody’s fault, and there’s nothing to do about it… And I don’t know how long I have left. Years, months, weeks, I don’t… I don’t know.”
“Oh.”
A nomad’s touch was impossibly soft, and light. Through her suit, she could barely feel a thing as he wrapped a couple tentacles around her shoulder, and his whole body weighed less than fifteen pounds, so when he pulled her close, he was the one who moved and she not at all. But when she returned the hug, and wrapped his body up between her arms and squeezed and grasped for any substance at all, she could definitely feel something there, however slight. Something as flimsy and faint and membranous as an old balloon or a discarded plastic bag, yet at the same time graceful, and soft, and ancient. She could feel a tiny heartbeat vibrating up through his back. She could feel the shaking of his muscles as he wept, could feel a faint pressure from his tentacles curling. A fleshy part of his shoulder was squashed flat across her visor.
And she sobbed too, inside her suit. Her sun screens clattered against the glass of her helmet as she shook. Her heart and her lungs throbbed and pounded against the inside of her ribcage. Her life support pumps roared, and beeped at her for her sudden oxygen usage. Wet tears drifted off her face and contaminated the instruments. A rotary bearing pressed uncomfortably into the fold of her elbow as she squeezed. Her radio crackled with signals from Keeleeticktick, but this entire time, the only actual noise inside her helmet was her own.
The difference between a chemical booster rocket and an ion engine was the difference between she and him.
A chemical rocket burned fast, and burned hard, hard enough to lift great cargoes off the surface of planets. It burned with purpose, and direction, and power, and its fuel drained by the second in a roaring flash of light, strong and bright and loud, loud, loud. But it lasted only a short time. It broke too easily, exploded too easily, required too great a complexity, consumed too much fuel and steered too violently. And in the end it burned itself out, so it detached and floated away, to allow the next stage to carry on.
An ion engine lasts an eternity. It glows dimly in a vacuum, pushes imperceptibly slowly, waits years for the tiniest adjustment, endures unaffected through light and dark, heat and cold and radiation. But it is incapable of great feats. It has no capacity for strength or shock or anything but the most gradual of calculated change. And when it finally fails, at the conclusion of years, it will have failed because its power source has failed. It dies because the surrounding vehicle has broken down or decayed or become something unrecognizable. An ion engine moves so slowly that it is left behind by time and space and the universe itself.
And he would miss her dearly.
He didn’t know why he’d expected her to live until they reached their destination, in only 30 years more. Didn’t know why he’d assumed they would live together in the same family even after that. Didn’t know why he’d once or twice considered her as a companion, had begun in secret to worship her as men always do toward women. Didn’t know why he’d inferred outright indestructibility from her strength, and had assumed she would remain as she had been for ever and ever. Didn’t know why he’d signed ‘happily ever after’ to their story so long before the end.
But perhaps it wouldn’t be entirely sad.
“I won’t sleep, Missus Fikes.” He promised her. “I won’t pause. And I won’t tire. I’ll be there for you your every waking moment. I’ll keep away your pain. I’ll show you all there is to see. I’ll tell you stories. I’ll listen to stories. I’ll show you stars, I could teach you to dance. And when one day you go, I’ll miss you as a closest friend, and remember you longer than lifetimes.”
She tried to wipe her eyes, and gleaned some tiny amusement when her helmet of course thwarted her. “Why Keeleeticktick.” She muttered. “…Is that romance I hear?”
“I hope not… Missus Fikes, thinking of you has taught me to see my people’s romance a little like how you see it. I’ve come to recognize it as not quite noble, and not quite natural, so I think it would be a sorry gift for a dying friend. But I want to make you happy.”
“…You’re a good, good friend, Keelee.”
“As are you, Missus Fikes.”
“…I’ve been thinking. In any time I have left, I think I’d like to write a book.” She said. “A story of all that’s happened to me.”
“…It wouldn’t make a very good story.” He told her. “Nothing really happened, and the ending is very sad.”
“Yeah.” She agreed. “But you know, true stories don’t have to be good stories. And the folks back on Earth will think it’s pretty interesting anyway… Assuming any of you ever built a transmitter large enough to send it to them, that is, ha ha.”
“Transmitters are a bit risky.” Keeleeticktick admitted. “…But you never know. Maybe we’ll be safe enough in our new home to risk a signal or two. Or perhaps Thilykto’s children or grandchildren could deliver it in person? I’ve heard Saturn is quite a scenic destination.”
“It is indeed.” She tried to laugh.
“And we never stay still for long.” He agreed. “So which one of them is it? Which is your star? Which is Sol?” He gestured across the sky. “To which of these worlds shall we deliver your book, Missus Fikes?”
“You know, it’s funny…” She shook her head sadly. “This entire time, I never knew.”
“Pity.”
“…And for what it’s worth, you can call me Charlotte.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Author’s note:
I hope you thought that was interesting. I certainly thought it was.
I am aware that at moments in the story it may appear as if I had been trying to make a statement about mankind, or society, or the state of the world. This is not entirely true. I did not set out to make a point about any human class or sex or construct or current event, my desire was merely to document and explore the operations of a very different race, one for whom I have no particular respect, and whose actions I understand but do not condone.
I say ‘not entirely true’, however, because I write all intelligent beings as similar in spirit; beholden to the same morals, users of the universal emotions, and capable of the same virtues and sins. So, as is the case with most stories, whatever moral you ascribe to the story is probably true in real life as well. I will only say that these long-lived hecka-dimorphic space squids and the human widow who stayed among them have made me think, and I hope they made you do the same.
This was a short story, and it is concluded.
This is part of a larger universe which I am growing, and the Nomads will be seen again, far away.
Feedback is appreciated.
Thank you all for reading, and God Bless you during the difficult nights of your own long journeys.
