Omphalos
Page 3
It was a quite different sight that greeted her now. The bars were straight again, but every single one, whether it began on ceiling, floor or wall, was pointed directly at Chamonix, tapering gently until they met in two bunches, one at her navel and one at the small of her back. They glistened with her vital sap.
The hybrid felt a sudden thrill. Like worshippers, bending to me. As they should.
She frowned at the hint of megalomania in her words. Strange thought, that one. Strange experience too. To metamorphose the room so thoroughly had been far beyond her waking powers, yet she had done it in her sleep, if sleep it had been. Perhaps hallucination was a better word. And her parents: did they truly live on inside her, as separate entities, or had she merely been talking to herself? She had no experience on which to base a theory.
“What am I?”
Her words echoed hollowly, and no answer came.
II
The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy.
– Jim Rohn
Gypsy Cumberland was waking up whether she liked it or not. The warm blanket of her dream was already fraying about the edges, the unwelcome knowledge that she could not remain here nestling in her mind.
Still, her imagined surroundings were so secure that a part of her stubbornly believed they could be made permanent, if only she could execute the correct mental manoeuvres. She stood with her mother in a small room with a carpeted floor and glass walls. The room appeared to double as the carriage in a rollercoaster; they followed a track that rose and fell, rushing through bubbling water and spray before reaching back up towards the heavens. She felt almost no sensation of motion – proof, perhaps, that this was not real.
Not necessarily, she decided. This could be the doing of anti-grav technology like the Matans have.
This line of thought proved to be a mistake. The idea of the aliens reminded her of where the Bona Dea was, and nudged her a step closer to wakefulness. Already she could feel the pillow beneath her cheek, the duvet about her body.
Gypsy turned to her mother. The older woman hadn’t spoken yet, but Gypsy could feel the reassurance and love she radiated.
I think I can take you with me if I concentrate hard enough. Isn’t that how dreams work? Everything’s a little blurred, lacking in details, so if I can just bring you into focus…
She looked into her mother’s eyes, knitting her brow as she zoomed in and added detail to the grey irises.
Good girl, said the elder Cumberland. Let’s jump together. 1 … 2 … 3!
But Gypsy arrived in her bedroom alone. When she opened her eyes, the only face she saw was that of her teddy bear, perpetually smiling.
She lay for several long minutes, trying to hold onto the sensations of the dream, but finding them bullied into submission by the brute force of reality. One arm lay trapped beneath her body; it tingled unpleasantly when Gypsy pulled it free. Her right leg threatened to cramp, forcing her to jerk it straight. When she turned her head, she found her cheek to be stuck to the pillow.
Distantly, she wondered why.
* * *
The time was 12:03, if Gypsy’s bedside clock was to be believed. Late, even by her standards. How had that happened? She didn’t have the headache that usually greeted her when she badly overslept.
Ah! Of course…
She’d delayed going to bed last night on account of the scheduled gravity outage, instead floating uncomfortably in a harness fixed to her wall, hair swirling about her face like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Quite an irritating break in the routine, that had been.
No, she thought sharply. No, not necessarily. I think I remember that, and I think it happened last night, but how can I be sure? Remember, Barrier One! There’s no reason to believe I’m not on Earth.
Gypsy could hide from reality when awake almost as effectively as while asleep. In the weeks since her mother died, she had struggled briefly to come to terms with the loss, before reversing course and retreating into the first stage of grief – denial. This she could do better than most, using her own unique brand of logic to create three barriers between her and having to face the unacceptable truth. Upon the faces of these barriers she had painted her fantasies.
Barrier One was founded upon the idea she and her mother were back home on Earth, their voyage aboard the Bona Dea successfully concluded. Whatever memories she might have of her mother’s sacrifice back on Gatari, she told herself, were dreams or delusions, brought on by the stress of their adventures. Indeed, any of her memories might be dismissed as dreams. Within Gypsy’s personal rulebook, only the things that had happened to her since waking had to be accepted as irrefutably real.
This was an impossible illusion for most of the crew to maintain, but not for Gypsy. Her bedroom had been transferred wholesale from England to the Bona Dea; there was no way of telling where she was, just so long as she never left this room and the small bathroom cubicle in one corner.
Almost no way of telling. Actually, there were four chinks in her armour, only three of which were easy to handle. Firstly, the floorboards in the centre of the floor creaked appreciably more quietly than they had back on Earth. The solution here was obvious – she simply avoided that part of the room, hugging the walls as far as possible when she moved about. Secondly, the holo-box outside her window showed a slice of English suburbia on a seven-day loop. All very well and good, but if she happened to glance out of that window and saw something she’d seen dozens of times before – like that old man who dropped his cap every Wednesday morning, or the dog who sniffed furiously at a particular lamppost – well, then the truth would be revealed, and Barrier One would lie in ruins. Here again, the solution was obvious. Gypsy kept her curtains drawn at all times. Thirdly, a light thrumming was often audible through the walls – a normal sound on board an operational spaceship. Fortunately, Gypsy’s headphones could be tuned to block this intrusion. All she had to do was keep them on.
The fourth potential pitfall, however, was not so easy to dodge. Every day at lunchtime, one of her crewmates would visit, bringing her fresh food and taking away the remains of yesterday’s offerings. Often her clothing would see a similar renewal.
This visit alone was insufficient to shatter Barrier One; after all, her friends may simply be visiting her and her mother on Earth to reminisce about old times. Unfortunately, her visitor would often say something which definitively placed them aboard the Bona Dea, still trawling the depths of the Centaurus Arm. Gypsy couldn’t ask them not to, not without sounding crazy, so she was entirely at the mercy of their conversational whims.
Hence the need for Barrier Two. If her fantasy of being back home didn’t hold up to scrutiny then she had another to fall back on. Maybe, she told herself, her mother had survived the Zakazashi after all. True, her body had been brought back aboard the Bona Dea, had been wrapped carefully and placed in Natalia Preciado’s quarters, now transformed into an icy morgue. Dr. Little would doubtless have studied her closely for signs of life and found none.
But doctors made mistakes, didn’t they?
Yes, Gypsy would tell herself. Mum may just have been in a deep coma. She may have woken up from it last night. Even now, she could be right next door, waiting to give me a lovely surprise. Yes, all I need do is just open the door…
Of course, Gypsy would not open the door, as she knew full well in the rational part of her brain what she would find there. She could fool some of herself some of the time, but all of herself none of the time.
Sometimes Dr. Little would schedule a psychiatric session with Gypsy, during which her mother’s death would invariably be established as a present reality. Gypsy dreaded those talks, but couldn’t bring herself to refuse – to do so might hurt the doctor’s feelings. Unthinkable.
So Gypsy had a third barrier, one which she felt should be unbreakable. Life after death. Surely the universe could not be so cruel as to deny its children the chance to see their loved ones again. In time, mother and daughter wou
ld be reunited in Paradise.
Such a comforting, unfalsifiable vision should surely have filled Gypsy with peace, but thinking about it made her uneasy. Every time she had to rely on Barrier 3, she felt a vortex of uncertainty opening within her. She doubted whether the afterlife really existed, and … there was something else too, something she pulled away from each time it danced about the fringes of her conscious thought.
Today, though, there should be no need to go anywhere near the third barrier. No counselling session was scheduled, and she’d dealt with her navigation duties (an automatic Barrier 1 breakage) yesterday afternoon. Rising, Gypsy went through her dressing ritual, selecting her blue outfit for the fifth day in a row. Blue was the colour of sadness, and an unsurprising choice given her circumstances. She was aware that her repeated usage of this outfit was beginning to produce an unpleasant odour, but there wasn’t much Gypsy could do about that; this felt like a blue day, so she wore blue.
Once fully decked out in azure, it was time for breakfast. Gypsy seated herself on the floor with her back to the bed, drew out her box of cereal bars and selected one that appealed to her. After tapping the bar seven times with her index finger, she unwrapped it and began to eat, taking miniscule bites to reduce the risk of choking.
What should she do today? Watching a few Star Trek: Romulus episodes might be nice, but she could never remember which ones had curse words in them. When she encountered those, Gypsy had to perform purifying prayers in response.
That’s a thought. I’ve got a bit of a prayer backlog. Why not try and make some headway? Two hundred and thirty-three Our Fathers this morning and another two hundred and eighty-eight in the afternoon, then the standard seven at bedtime – that’ll leave me with only two thousand two hundred and fifty-three outstanding. A few more days like that and I’ll be caught right up.
“Let’s get to work.”
Retrieving her rosary beads, a white plastic set that had come free with a Sunday School session in her girlhood, Gypsy skirted around the room until she reached the window and knelt before it. There was a church in that direction; she could have seen the cross that surmounted it if she drew her curtains back.
For a time, Gypsy had managed to curb the excessive praying that had been a feature of her life on Earth, but she had quickly reverted after the loss of her mother. After all, she told herself, she was asking for life from apparent death – a miracle. Those were God’s speciality. It had to be tried.
Gypsy’s prayers held no profundity, nor did she experience the spiritual enrichment of the truly religious. For each bead of the rosary, she spoke the Lord’s Prayer in her mind, the words soon losing all meaning as her attention wandered.
… deliver us from evil amen our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil amen our father who art in heaven…
There was a small gap in her curtains, through which Gypsy could see a section of blue sky. There was the merest sliver of white visible as well. The edge of a cloud. Had Gypsy seen it before? It looked familiar. If she had, then she was looking at a holographic projection, she was still aboard the Bona Dea, and Barrier 1 was breached. But it was such a small amount that she could see, the merest hint of a puffy edge. Surely that could belong to any cloud.
She strained for certainty as the empty prayers droned on in her head.
* * *
Gypsy had barely returned the rosary beads to their home below her bedside table before there came a knock at the door. She started, giving a small yelp of surprise – she hadn’t heard anyone approaching. This would be one of her crewmates with her lunch and dinner.
Or Mum. It could be Mum. We’re back home, this is England, she’s either downstairs cooking or this is her at the door.
Yes.
Gypsy picked up her handpad and activated it, bringing up some advanced maths puzzles. She couldn’t look out of her door once it was open, as the view if she was still aboard ship would differ from what she might expect at home – her mother’s quarters in the first case, a corridor and staircase in the second. Thus, it was necessary to approach the door backwards, like Perseus when he fought Medusa. The handpad would give her an excuse to avoid looking at her visitor without seeming too strange or rude.
She groped for the door handle, found and turned it. A little push, and the door swung outwards.
“Come in.”
“Don’t mind if I do. How’s my favourite moth of prey today?”
It was Annie. Gypsy felt a simultaneous rush of excitement and tension. As much as she adored Annie, the technician was dangerously talkative, and had inadvertently broken Barrier One on seventeen of her past twenty-two visits.
“H-Hi, okay I guess, thanks for visiting, what have you been doing lately?” No, bad question! “Have you been writing?” Yes, that’s safer.
“Ha, I wish! No time for it with all the work we’ve been doing keepin’ the ship in shipshape shape. I still found the time to rustle you up a couple plates of green stuff, though.”
“Thanks…” No need to panic, she didn’t specify which ship. She might be working on a new one here on Earth. We’re on Earth. Yes. Earth, Earth, Earth, Earth, Earth.
Gypsy kept her eyes fixed on her pad, tapping it occasionally to make it look like she was working. Still, she could peripherally see Annie enter the room with a tray bearing two plates of food, which was indeed primarily green. The redhead set it down on Gypsy’s desk and picked up yesterday’s tray.
“Any beaut-ificent rainbow clothes to swap out?” Annie’s tones were flattened somewhat by their passage through Gypsy’s headphones, but her flippant good cheer sounded a trifle forced, a trifle strained.
“Not today.” She knows I keep wearing this outfit; other people notice stuff like that. Trying to make a polite point about hygiene? Probably.
She doesn’t understand.
Annie moved back to the doorway, but didn’t pass through, instead hovering with uncharacteristic uncertainty.
“Soooo … you’ve been using your quantum goggles lately, I see.”
“Erm, maybe.” There was no reason why she shouldn’t have done, but Gypsy felt herself tense up as she wondered where Annie was going with this.
“Thought so. I noticed the KSD monitor showing some little interference patterns last night. I always know you’re playing with the goggles when I see ‘em.”
Again, mercifully, there had been no mention of which KSD Annie had been monitoring.
“I think that can happen when I go back and forth between viewing the septiņi and trīspadsmit particles. There was a design flaw – my goggles are quite old. Some particles get reflected. I’ll stop using them if there’s a problem.”
“Lordy, no, it’s no problem. I kinda like it, makes me think of you.”
“Thanks.”
There was another long silence. Gypsy looked at her pad and wondered why Annie wasn’t leaving.
“Are you okay, buddy?” the redhead asked at length. “Do you need anyone to talk to?”
“Oh, fine thanks. A bit busy right now, but perhaps next time we see each other we could talk a bit, or the time after, maybe?”
“Sure, all you gotta do is call. What’re you working on? Plotting the way Kerin-wards?”
No! She’s blown it! Annie’s question had destroyed Barrier One. Gypsy felt a violent surge of resentment and anger. Why couldn’t she just have left? Hot on the heels of this knee-jerk reaction crashed a tidal wave of guilt – how could she blame Annie, who was only trying to help?
This double punch was nothing new for Gypsy. Over the years, anger had become coupled to guilt in her soul, such that she seldom felt the former without the sting of the latter. Anguilt, she called this unpleasant double emotion. Anguilt churned within her as she mumbled an affirmative and watched Annie go.
Still, the fact that she’d been shunted to Barrier Two did let her do some things differently. She slipped off her headphones, a relief for sweat-soaked ears, which now began to ring quite pleasantly. The centre of her carpet was also no longer off-limits. Gypsy made a point of walking over it and listening to the boards give their muted creak. She drew back her curtains and looked outside. It was somewhat overcast, being a Friday.
Okay, so I’m not on Earth. That’s disappointing, but I’ve still got Barrier Two between me and … trouble. Mum’s probably waking from her coma right now; next, she should go on to Medical where they’ll want to run tests on her, then back to me this evening.
I should pray more to make sure. One hundred extra Our Fathers. And another hundred as penance for thinking bad thoughts about Annie. Plus fifty more to be on the safe side: two hundred and fifty.
Wait. One hundred then one hundred then fifty … that’s a 2:2:1 ratio, and 221 is a multiple of thirteen. Let’s add another hundred. Three hundred and fifty. Yes.
These additions meant that she now had a prayer backlog of two thousand eight hundred and ninety-one, somewhat more than she’d started the day with. She resolved that she’d get back to work straight after eating.
* * *
In fact, Gypsy had barely begun her first post-lunch circumnavigation of the rosary beads when her wristband beeped. Incoming call. Glancing down, she saw that it was from Professor Sandra Rivers.