Planet 42 Beta

By Lisa Shapter

 

     The return trip did not go so well. I made a mistake plotting my course. The Shoebill’s apparent gravity was disabled by an impact, and my last conscious sight was the floor coming at me, as I wondered if the team on the planet on the inner orbit had sabotaged my ship.

###

     I woke up, and someone was trying to put something over my head. I tried to fight him off, and, unlike most Corpsmen, he did not try to pin my arms: I would have gone for my sidearm if he had. Instead, he let me take in that the inside of the helmet had air, and I instinctively reached to pull it on. While my hands were busy with automatic adjustments and checks, he made the tears at the appropriate catchpoints in my thermals for vitals monitoring. He was only doing his job: he pulled me onto a splayed-out suit, and quickly fastened and sealed all the components, starting with my core. The suit automatically set up its connections and monitoring leads and lit up with healing fields. I was briefly blind while it shut off my optic nerves, so I would not see the visual disturbances caused by running the fields over my eyes. My sight was back before I had time to gasp. With the oxygen and fixes to my injuries the pain in my head cleared, but I lay still and let him finish fastening the suit’s legs and arms as the suit replaced hypothermic cold with warmth,  and let those fields finish their work. The process went faster if I did not try to help.

     The Corpsman’s gloved thumb did the final external checks, touching a pressure switch on my chest and on the side of my helmet. Everything seemed to have a green light, and the suit apparently reported all of my injuries had been treated.

     I was looking through permiglass at what might as well have been the face of a popular young American football captain who has no idea why people admired him: my rescuer was blond, handsome, fair-skinned, and a picture of wholesome, tanned good health. A colony life of regular outdoor exercise in a moderate climate with a mostly vegetarian diet obviously agreed with him. There were care lines on his face, emphasized when he was worried, but they vanished when I smiled at him. He grinned back through his faceplate.

     “Is that better, Magistrate Gestae?” his voice said over the helmet’s output.

     He might as well have said ‘coach’.

     “Much. Nightskyman?”

     “First Lieutenant Vester Coy. I’ll get you into the Spes, and check the tow line,” she, for Coy was her world’s mother, grabbed me in a rescue carry, secure and strong, but not the crushing squeeze most grunts would use. She hauled me into the back of the small craft parked in my ship’s central corridor, sealed the craft’s doors, and, with a disorienting flip and yaw, flew out my ship’s atmospheric door with exactly the neat maneuver for getting through a door designed for people, not scout craft.

###

     I found myself on her main ship’s hospital bed, still in my spacesuit, as she cheerfully went out to do the dangerous check on the towline between her working ship and my disabled one. Another set of healing fields and I was well enough to take the suit off myself and push it into the hopper for processing. The medical computer told me to lie back down, and I agreed: the brief effort had made the edges of my vision turn dark grey. A mechanical arm came down from the ceiling and whirred while the ship’s medical computer looked for the right placement for hydration and monitoring leads. The whole room became glorious in all its utilitarian, rounded-corner white and lilac glory: the ship had boosted the med lab’s oxygen content.

     My rescuer was taking off her suit at the other end of the corridor and singing some ancient song in a weird modality. She sounded happy. I heard her boots thudding up the corridor.

     “How’re we doing, Magistrate Gestae?”

     Again it sounded like ‘coach’.

     “‘Resada’ will do.”

     “OK, Resada.”

     It still sounded like ‘coach’.

     She came over to look into my face. I looked back at her.

     “Your record says you’ve got a husband. It’s just the oxygen and the endorphins,” she cautioned. “It’ll wear off.”

     “I don’t like women,” I assured her.

     “That’s a shame, women are great,” she said, the unthinking opinion of any young man on earth, as though Coy did not remember she was in farspace or the changes done to her.

     I could not get a crush on this woman: I really didn’t like women, and her sunny temperament already grated on me.

     She thumped forward, and I lay in the medlab until I felt the bump of the ship entering atmosphere. I felt for the datatablet she had put on the bedside tray.

     ‘Coy, I thought we were going back to base,’ I typed.

     “I can’t leave my kids right now,” the doorside intercom replied. “I’ve sent a message to your husband.”

     “I’m not authorized to land....”

     “Your record says you are,” Coy said. “I know why you were on that world. Stay with us awhile, rest up, your spouse will come and get you, and you can go to the next world together.”

     I thought about that lovely idea for a long moment. Orders kept us apart. The Exploratory Corp ignores marriages when it gives orders; farspace is too large to see that every pair and group stay together, no matter what their rank or training.

     “I have our ship, Coy.”

     It would be months for Coy’s message to reach my assigned world; it would take months for my husband’s reply to reach here. My ship would need to be repaired. Even if my husband somehow got passage on a second ship, and left the moment Coy’s message arrived, he would take even further months to get here. I did not want to stay here for most of a year. I did not want to become part of this family. I did not want what could never be mine hung in front of my face.

     Her ship lurched and rocked. Emergency fields held me to the bed, and inertial dampeners made it feel like a brief carnival ride rather than a life-threatening danger.

     “This is the Pisces #2456, the Spes, at 27 km. Watch your descent, you’re within the 150 meter minimum,” Lt Coy said, far calmer than I would have been.

     “Climbing to 30 km. Sorry, Spes, sudden decal. We were in the area,” the door-side intercom relayed: Coy had not shut off the piloting room pickup. It was not the voice of my husband, but of one of the guards assigned to be sure I went to the meetings with my perpetrators and that I followed all Corps orders.

     I would have to put up with him needling me about this mission and my past mistakes all the way to the next world, starting with letting my ship connect with an asteroid.

     Of course my guard had not been in the area: this ship had come from a base relaying the message out to my husband. I do not know how my custodian had gotten permission to do it, but he had put the ship in classified emergency mode, and the craft had punched a hole in the universe to get here. In minutes my minder would be standing over my bed, asking why I had smashed up my ship, left the inner world with my assignment unfinished, and how I had been dumb enough to be away from the piloting console while flying through hazards. Nothing was a good reason to him. I curled up in the bed and put my arm over my head. The medical computer noticed my agitation and gave me a sedative.

###

     I woke up to the smell of pancakes, the faint smells of sawdust and clay, and a smell like roses. I was not dreaming. I was lying in a strange, deep soft bed with warm covers drawn up to my shoulders, pleasant flannel bedding, and a perfectly comfortable pillow. Gravity was so close to earth’s that I would have to get out of bed and jump up and down to tell the difference. I could hear the soft draft and crackle of a fireplace; just enough muted wind and rain to make the house cozy; and the sound of someone making tea or tisane with a metal kettle, metal spoons and thick, clay mugs. The table or counter top had some kind of quilted mats or protective covering, nothing had been put down on bare wood or stone.

     “You can’t fool me, you’re awake.”

     I twisted and sat up: my husband was sitting at my bedside, smiling. After years of not seeing him I poked him in the chest: I had dreamed or hallucinated his presence before. The combination of med lab drugs and danger, or an unnoticed microinjury to the brain, made the possibility of hallucination likely. He was here. I threw my arms around him and pulled him onto the bed.

     “I am so glad to see you.”

     Rain kissed me and put his arms around me. He said nothing, he didn’t need to say anything.

     “How did you...?”

     “It’s a long and not a completely happy story,” my husband said, holding me tightly. “Your ship’s emergency beacon reached us before Lt Coy’s message did, and as much as I wanted to blaze here it wasn’t my idea.”

     “Are our guards in the room?”

     Rain nodded.

     “How many of them?”

     “Two,” a gruff voice answered from the direction of the table.

     “And we’re not supposed to leave the two of you alone,” a second voice said. Heavy, booted feet came up to the foot of the bed across a wooden floor. “Sorry,” he added. “You two have a history of....”

     “Conspiracy, collusion, confiscation, and desertion,” Rain said, getting up with another kiss. “I remember. You arrested us,” he patted my hand and said softly, “everything else will have to wait.”

     “Back away, and speak at a normal volume.”

     Rain looked irritated: it was not his way to be sentimental, but he looked ready to half-shout pillow talk in order to embarrass our guards into leaving. I knew what they would do: they would set their faces and stay no matter what we did, not wanting to give us a cover for planning further criminal activities.

     “I hate them,” I said, not caring if my tone was not quiet enough to be inaudible two meters away.

     Rain shrugged, “we earned the Corp’s mistrust. I tried to get you back to base the moment I found you and you sabotaged my ship.”

     “Now what?”

     “We take you back to base,” the guard at the foot of my bed replied.

     “Couldn’t you leave them alone?” a voice said from the table, this world’s commander, Edward Philips. He spoke with the shadow of an order in his voice, although no commander could tell any Magistrate what to do, and our two guards were Magistrates. The guard in the kitchen was saying something. “Out,” Edward said. “Both of you out. I will see to this woman’s welfare while she is on our world,” he saw them both out and followed.

     “I can’t imagine they’ve gone far,” Rain murmured.

     “I’m tired and upset....”

     “I know,” he said softly. “I am, too -- I’ll explain another time.” He bent to take off his boots and pulling back the covers then got into bed with all his clothes on. He put his arms around me. “You have no idea how difficult my life is without you. Every day I wish you were with me, wish I could know what you think, want to talk with you, plan with you. Every day I wish I didn’t have to go to bed alone, eat without you, no matter how many colonists and staff are there ….” Rain let out a deep sigh. “I love you so much I can’t stand being married and barely seeing you.”

     “You took the words out of my mouth,” I said. “I just want to sleep.”

     “Do you want some hot tea? Tisane really, this is the wrong latitude for tea.”

     That sounded lovely, but it would get cold by the time I woke up again. I listened to the drowsy sounds of the fireplace and the weather outside.

     “Sure.”

     He got out of bed. I heard the sound of hot water pouring from a kettle, and he brought two mugs over from the kitchen table.

     “I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything like it, but you get used to it.”

     I took a drink, it was pleasantly hot, and... something naturally sweet like brown baking spices, or maybe sassafras, hearty like a roasted, brown rice tea, a tang that was not sourness or astringency. It all went by too quickly and was too strange to put into words, not while I was this tired. I was glad to have something hot to drink that was not ship’s coffee.

     “So?” I said.

     “We’re together now,” Rain said with a shrug. It was exactly like him to accept the moment for what it was. “Sleep sounds good. I sleep better when I’m with you.”

     I had a miserable image in my mind’s eye of him restless with insomnia, alone in our bed on our world.

     I looked around for somewhere to put the mostly-full cup, and found a windowsill just deep enough for a lantern, a mug, and a book. I already liked these people. I listened to the tinkling coals forming under the firewood and the mild fall drizzle.

     “Is there any way we could stay?”

     “Hmm, that first moment of coming to -- to find someone sitting by your bedside -- can be a surprising one: it sometimes changes lives.”

     Rain jostled the bed, moving to see how close to the window our guards were, then looked at me as if everyone in the universe would love me at first sight, as he had. He went on before I could ask him any question about some bedside memory he did not mention. He had never been ill.

     He settled in by me and took a drink, considering how to say something charged.

     “You made Vester nervous.” My husband observed; his indirectness made me anxious. “She’s a simple soul, she fell in love with her husband when she was sent on a rescue mission after his scout craft. They were marooned on the world, alone together for months.”

     “Then they must understand our story.”

     “Well nobody shot the engine in their story,” my husband replied.

     I shrugged, “just glad to see a friendly face. I was blacking out from ox dep and hyp.”

     I was astonished Rain was not jealous: I worried I sounded insincere. I felt for his hand and felt the same grasp as the hand that took mine the day we married -- on the first day we met. I tried to add up how much time we’d spent together: the stay here to recover and repair my ship might be more than that.

     “You’ll want to make that clear to her before we leave.”

     Rain was bemused, shutting the door on nothing, waiting for my answer.

     It was hard to get used to thinking of that footballer’s frame as female.

     “Her record doesn’t say she’s been to base for the changes I went through,” I said, wondering if I had missed something.

     “Experimental procedure, all of it onworld, pills and medlab visits. It worked: they have two children, one grandchild, two more on the way. Successful colony, even with just the two of them. They could use more people even with their assigned staff.”

     I thought of Coy’s caution and felt a very disturbing reality that I might be able to love more than one person at once. It was just there, clear, with no one in mind. I had dated three people once on earth before I enlisted. It hadn’t lasted long, and they moved on without me. If I did ever want to expand our marriage, Rain would have to want that too, with just the same people. I did not want to marry Coy; instead, I felt sad that I had married too quickly with too little discussion and had too little time being married.

     “Would you... would you ever want to widen our marriage, Rain?”

     “I’d be willing to try,” Rain said, astonishing me. “Do you want to stay here?” he said, with his utter acceptance of what is. “I don’t know these two guys, but....”

     He used a genderless word, but Rain had to mean not our two hosts but the two guards I’d been stuck on a ship with longer than any time I’d spent with him.

     “No, not them. Anyone.”

     “Anyone,” Rain said, leaning back and rolling the word, and all its implications, around in his mind. “Hmm, I’m happy with you, but I trust your judgement in people. Did you have someone, or someones, in mind?”

     He was teasing -- he was not, he was waiting for my answer: who are we?

     “No, I... Oh God, you, must think I’m unhappy with you, or that I’ve met someone else.”

     Rain took a drink of this world’s tisane and set his mug back on the floor. It was a comfortable gesture from when we were first married, when we shared his ship’s one bed. He smiled.

     “No, I don’t think that. And I have no idea if I can love more than one person. I’d be willing to try, if it means staying married to you. It might do a lot of damage to us, but it all depends on who, and how we go about it,” he looked at me, kind, and trusting. My heart ached with how much I loved him.

     “You’re the best husband in the galaxy.”

     “Have you thought about how this might work because we see so little of each other?”

     “Yes,” I said, shifting and resting my head on his shoulder, “but we were together all the time until we got hauled in to base, so I’m not very worried.”

     Rain reached over and rubbed my side, glad I was close enough to touch. He rested his head against mine.

     “If this all goes well,” I said, “I’ll be home in another seven-and-a-half years, minus transit time home from the second-to-last world my abductor had clients on. I’ll make it back for our 18^th wedding anniversary.”

     “All of your children will be grown by then,” Rain said. He sounded sad that the two of us would not raise a one of them together. I knew he was glad that we would have all the years after alone together.

     “How do you stay married to me? I’m never home, I keep sending strangers’ children, and colonial refugees....”

     Rain moved his cheek against me and moved to settle on top of me and give me a long kiss.

     “How do you stay married without me?” he asked, “I so want to be with you, and comfort you, and show them you’re worth infinitely more than how they treated you. I’m proud you’re mine, I’m glad you’re mine, no one in the whole universe has any idea how brave you are, how strong you are, how loving, and how good.”

     “Our guards do,” I answered. “They do a lot of smiling, they keep trying to tell me they’re not warders but friends, and they’ve stayed away after Coy’s husband shooed them out.”

     “Marry one of them,” Rain murmured, thinking to himself. They were the only two other adults permanently assigned to our world; I had not known anyone else on our world who was staying longer than six months, so I had to mean them, or nobody.

     “I think they’re a set, the two of them.”

     “It’d be a marriage on different terms than our marriage,” Rain said, thinking out loud, “unless things change in ways I can’t see with all four of us. It’d be a frontier marriage, now: dedication to the children and construction projects. I’m not sure why people dignify colleagues, or what people on earth would call ‘friendship’, with mutual lifelong vows. I suppose there’s still that tradition from the Starving Times on earth when people would marry acquaintances, fellow refugees, in order to adopt their children, get an extra allotment from the dole, get them an emigration permit, make them eligible for refugee clinics, have someone to watch the children while they gathered water or firewood.... I’ve always thought that was noble and selfless, but I’ve never wanted to do it myself. Have you gotten very fond of our guards?”

     I barely liked them.

     The possibility of a wider marriage rested within me, clear and cool. I was not going to grab anyone’s hand and run for the chaplain’s office once we docked at base; it would be years before we stood at another Magistrate’s desk. The realization came years too early, long before I or Rain felt anything, but it was true.

     “No, Rain. I don’t even know where that came from.”

     “Well,” he said, settling to sleep, “then let’s not worry about it right now. Let’s turn in for as long as they’ll let us. As soon as you’re well and the ship’s vacworthy we’ll have to be on our way in separate rooms for the trip back to base.”

     I tried to stay awake, but the wood in the stone fireplace became coals, the guest room became dark and warm, the wind dropped off, and a gentle patter of rain began to fall on the roof. The softness of the bed invited sleep, as did the familiar shape of my husband’s body against me. His relaxed breathing, his presence, which had always meant I was comfortable and safe, made me drop off into unconsciousness. As my Tito Potosí always used to say, “tomorrow’s worries will have to take care of themselves”.

END