Aurora had almost fallen completely into the long quiet when she noticed the eyes. Brown eyes with flecks of green, familiar in a very distant way - a background detail of a memory accompanied by a wince of distaste. The eyes, intently staring into hers, were masked in hardness but there was something of herself in them. She mirrored their intensity back - a force of exertion her body had nearly forgotten. This force became her new centre, a passion. An ocean of life welled up under unstoppable pressure. As her gaze penetrated the hard mask, the eyes flinched and jerked away.
Aurora screamed.
From her fog she recognised she was in a new place. Two men exchanged glances. One retreated and the other came forward. She recognised in him an old friend although his exact identity was obscured. The recognition brought a happiness. A pulse.
“Aurora?”
“Ka-ka-kals.”
“Okay Aurora,” said her friend with a golden smile. “You are going to be okay now.”
“Thank you.”
“It is okay now Aurora. Please you rest.”
The other man came over and looked at her hesitantly. “What are we going to do with her?” he asked with purposeful dispassion.
“What to do?” shrugged her long ago friend, raising his eyes to confront the brown green gaze of the other man. “What to do August-la? Ahh.”
Aurora turned her head weakly to watch the other man stalk away and felt she did not like him but that she felt drawn to him. A pulse.
Many moments passed like his. Aurora wasn’t sure how many. It was as if time had only tentatively come into being - like a random old acquaintance who might leave again at any opportunity. With time came pain, an ache. It was this long ache without beginning or end that held her together. Ache held her muscles to her bones, her movements to her muscles, and her mind with her body. One was the slight ache of simulated gravity that pulled her toward the floor and allowed her to haul her emaciated self from one side of the cramped living quarters to the other, over and over again - this ache held her insides together with the outside. There were others.
“Do you need some help?” The irritating man, August, always asked her in the same doubtful tone.
“If you don’t care, why do you keep asking?” Aurora grimaced as she pulled herself steadily forward into the ache. She had only recently recovered her speech.
August shrugged, “have it you own way.” As he once again went glowering off, he paused to look back and for a moment Aurora saw disappointment in his face. So he would ask again, soon, with the same feigned lack of interest, and again she would tell him to bugger off. She began to look forward to it.
Occasionally she let him help her, and she enjoyed his graceful movement as he positioned her in the physio equipment. August had a way about him that told her he was confident with women. The way he placed her foot into the webbing. The way he steadied her hand to practice her grip. It was sexy, which was an out of the hat feeling for her. Her first reaction was to resent him for it. She had made her own way, thank you, further than any man. But she found herself succumbing to the feeling. Wouldn’t it be fine to just let herself go? Kalsang was sleeping or meditating. August’s face was so close. She looked into his eyes.
“August Bridges?”
“Yes.”
The dream ended abruptly. Aurora scrambled away like she had been cosying up to a death adder. How could August be August Bridges? And Kalsang Kalsang? The only two persons she knew for sure were dead. Besides Xiao Li. And she remembered seeing her too.
“Are you okay?”
August, August Bridges, reached over towards her. Aurora reacted as if he were a zombie about to grab her. She hit him with the extinguisher they had been using as a dumbbell and, panicking, looked desperately for a place to hide. She pushed past August, holding his head and disoriented, and leapt into the airlock corridor. On the other side Kalsang was standing up to greet her, smiling in a way that seemed suddenly menacing. August was coming behind her, Kalsang in front. Ghosts. She was surrounded. Then she spotted the emergency lock-down levers on the airlocks for both ships and pulled them in turn without thinking. Panels slammed into place, almost catching August’s arm, which he jerked back at the last second.
Their heads hovered there, looking through the view portals from either side, while Aurora held her knees and hyperventilated.
What was going on? Nothing made sense. Did souls go to heaven in space ships? It seemed a slow way to go about it. Kalsang, there was some logic for his presence, but August Bridges? That was just weird. It was a dream. It had to be. A dream. A dream she could deal with, but this was too long and drawn out to not be something else.
“Aurora,” said the intercoms, two voices saying her name at once.
“Aurora, what did I do to frighten you?”
“Aurora, please you be peaceful, okay?”
“You lot can’t exist. It isn’t possible.”
Aurora sat there, determined to wait them out, while they took turns telling her the most unlikely tales. Kalsang, making his way back home from a failed station at the edge of the solar system hooking up with August, who’d been camped out on Mercury after surviving a missile hit. And the both of them picking her up like some hitchhiker on the way back to Earth. She was surprised her imagination could cook this up.
She waited and waited. August Bridges? The feelings she was about to give into. She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t even want to imagine that. The smarmy asshole who was behind every disaster in her life. Twisting her words to mean the opposite in front of the whole world. Pretending to be her friend. The guy leading the charge to bulldoze the remnants of life of Mars, of a whole planet, when they didn’t even know if it existed or not. If he had just backed off, would she have? Would Xiao Li still be alive? She couldn’t bear to think of it.
Aurora fainted into her exhaustion but awoke from sleep to find herself still in the dream, and hungry, and feeling alone. She saw her Dad tapping on the portal, inviting her to leave. She opened the latch into Kalsang’s ship and sat down beside him while he meditated, hugging him and weeping. She could feel August’s eyes following her as she did.
“I can’t take this Kalsang.”
“It’s okay Aurora. It is just like this way. Please relax.” And he took her hand in his and leaned into her. The simple gesture made her feel protected.
“I am happy you are alive,” Aurora said, “even if you are just in my head.”
Kalsang gave her a comical look that was reassuringly typical of him. “Thank you. I am happy to be alive here with you.”
After that Aurora tried to let things be as they were. She unlatched August’s door and he didn’t eat her head, but her guard was up, and she insisted on doing her exercises alone after that. She sensed that this hurt him, but he kept up a good front. He didn’t deserve that much from her, but as the days passed she began to suspect he was less an evil man and more the idiot she had first pegged him as. Too much of a wanker to realise his own impact on others. Aurora found she couldn’t really hate him, which was disheartening.
One night she dreamt about them together.
They were floating, enclosed tightly together in a wicker basket, beneath a dozen variously colored weather balloons they’d somehow cobbled together. Below them stretched Antarctica - a frozen empty mass bordered by mountains whose names she knew. It was freezing and the only thing to do about it was to hold to the warmth in each other. She didn’t want to be anywhere else in the universe until the basket scraping against the gravelly ice interrupted and they disembarked, heading separate ways.
“What do you think of him Dad?”
“You could do worse, Darl.”
She woke without memory but with a sense of sadness and loss. As her eyes opened she fought back the daily panic, twisting around searching for landmarks to steady herself and seeing only walls.
Pulling off the sleep webbing holding her along the wall, she rotated her feet slowly down to the floor, pushi
ng lightly from a brace until the nanohooks in her stocking gripped the carpet. Kalsang and August were hanging from the walls opposite her like sideways bats, still sleeping. With tentative steps she made her way to the nearest view screen showing the Earth at normal magnification and reached out to trace her fingers in circles carefully around the vivid blue planet. It felt bigger than yesterday and the day before and the day before that. The display announced that they were now one month away from arrival. Halfway back to the Earth from Mars. The voyage so far had seemed like a dream, but suddenly it seemed they were progressing to a destination. Aurora flattened her palm against the Earth’s projected centre and closed her eyes.
Wheatbelt Wallaby wandered up into the stars trying to pick her place among them, with the other sisters. You would think with all that space it would be easy for her to find a spot not taken, but it wasn’t so. There wasn’t much of any place to rest.
“Can you feel it?” a grating voice disturbed her reflections. She ignored August while contemplating the oddness of her thoughts and feeling the distance that still lay between her and her planet. She ignored him until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to leave of his own accord.
“I can,” he continued, taking Aurora’s dismissive shrug as his cue. “I felt it a little on the Moon. The distance I mean. I thought I understood a little about Outlanders, but then I was still too close to the Earth. Anytime I could just open a skylight and see it. So brilliant - so serene. You could almost reach out and touch her. Every month, for a few days, we would pass through Her magnetotail and the static electricity would stand my hair up on end. Any day I could climb on the Ferry and, in a few days, be back. After I was lost out there. I’ve never felt so lost. I can really feel Her even though it’s only a picture. I can, can’t you?”
It was true. The small blue and white ball drew Aurora in, tugging together the pieces of her ‘self’ from their random places - calming the endless sea inside of her. She pressed her palm deeper into the Earth’s power and felt her body jerk involuntarily.
“You can feel it can’t you? Can’t you? Scientists can’t measure it - such a subtle force - ground down the whole goddamn Second Wave. Such biologically sentimental creatures we humans are, but not for long - not for long. If we can reach other Earths.”
“Leave me alone!”
Of course, he took this personally.
“Hey. Where am I going to go? It’s driving me crazy locked up by myself for months. Now I finally have some company but with your brooding and our monk friend there distant and muttering away, what kind of company is that? It feels more alone than when I was alone. All I want is some companionship. Can’t you just give me something? Anything damn it?” August bent over hyperventilating.
“I, I’m sorry. It came out wrong.”
“Okay. Okay.” He sighed and steadied himself against the railing. “You think? I, I don’t get it. I get it, believe me, I do. I’m barely holding myself together too. But I need to talk, to be with you.” He started to tear up. “I just need to.”
Aurora reached over and hesitantly stroked August’s back, feeling the bones protruding through his depleted skin. “It’s okay.” She ignored her first impulse to pull back and pressed softly into his back. Even that light pressure moved him away in the light gravity until he slid into the wall. He felt so delicate, as if her hands would push through him like a tissue. Funny she hadn’t noticed that, he’d seemed so strong when he was helping her. He shivered and tightened himself.
Aurora ran her fingers up and down August’s back, exploring the ridges and depressions, as with the plains and cliffs on Mars and the long scrubby fields of home, she felt stories there. The thin frailty of his skin scarcely containing the life within it. What he said was true. She felt in his vulnerability, his exposure to the void around them, that in that way his story was the same as hers.
For a few moments, it seemed that Wheatbelt Wallaby had found an open spot in the universe. Her star, while alone, could only wander, but the line connecting her to another star contained a story, and a story contained all the rest.
“Thank you.”
She felt him tense up when he said it, like he was unfamiliar with the words. She dropped her hand and left him.
Kalsang walked in with a handful of vitabars. “We should have breakfast together?”
They sat chewing quietly, their minds intent on the rationed morsels, as they reverently watched the Earth light beaming down on them.
Their days fell into a routine as the voyage meter slid past three quarters of the way home. Aurora felt increasingly grateful to wake up into the simple narrative of three travelling companions. Two men. Kalsang, unfailingly kind and attentive, but who was remote in his self-possession. August, brittle and abrasive, but who was, in a way which was not entirely unwelcome, drawn to her. Kalsang and August and Aurora. Mates. Of a sort.
The intense blue and white presence of the Earth continued to grow subtly in the neuroview, and Aurora felt herself come together bit by bit. The effect was not subjective, she felt it in her body. They were becoming by small increments more whole as the planet grew before them. It was a scientific phenomenon. As August had said, it happened with everyone, but nobody knew why.
Aurora was coming home and that meant she was getting better. The moods of her shipmates also began to improve as they continued. The tension between Kalsang and August seemed to dissipate. The relief of being able to predict their healing in this linear way, from moment to moment, produced a background of pleasant euphoria. Her recovery was accompanied by Kalsang’s peacefully murmured prayers - the first sounds she heard as she awoke and the last sounds into which she would drift as she fell asleep.
August, with the spark coming back to those brown green eyes, could be quite the larrikin, although Aurora kept her guard up against his charms. That she found him attractive in anyway was still too disturbing. How could she contemplate any connection with August Bridges? Any man on Earth would have been preferable, and she hadn’t let them in either. Even extending an olive branch of friendship seemed at times to be going too far.
Aurora watched August while he slept, snoring lightly. She wondered at his ordinariness, the fragility he had shown her before reburying it, and the warmth that was somehow developing between them. Aurora had hated him but somehow had never been able to dismiss him. Aurora decided that what she had always found impressive about August Bridges was that he never would quit.
Up in the sky, Wheatbelt Wallaby wondered about her star sisters out there, in the Pleiades and back on Mars. Would she ever catch up with them? It would be good to hang out and be beautiful together. To have people admire them. Spending too much time with the brothers was starting to grate.
As tomorrow became tangible, the mood began to harden. The shell of the ship became more like a prison and the distance between them and getting home became increasingly intolerable. The space within the linked ships seemed to shrink, rations became insufficient, and the smells were intolerable. Arguments broke out, some even started by Kalsang. This was a well-documented phenomenon but anticipating it didn’t make Aurora feel any better.
She increasingly retreated into sleep as the depression began to bite. As she slept, the events of the day merged with her dreams as her mind shifted seamlessly between worlds and times. She dreamt about Dad dying again and awoke back in her webbing, yearning for the clarity of the darkness. She was afraid, and the feeling did not sit well with her.
She walked to the galley and dragged a cup of coffee from the beverage hose. Kalsang was there, mashing his vitabars into strange conical shapes and lining them up on a console.
“Torma,” he said and added no explanation.
She reached over and flicked one of the little towers off the console. Kalsang reached over and flicked her on the forehead. They traded expressions of mock anger, and Aurora blinked first.
“Karma,” he said in a serious voice.
Aurora reached across him, grabb
ed the flicked bar out of the air as it rebounded off the floor, and stuffed it in her mouth.
“Torma,” she mumbled.
Kalsang giggled as Aurora, issuing sprays of crumbs, failed to contain herself. She spat out the remains into her hand and made a show of reforming the squishy mass into a cone and placing it back on the console.
“Hmmm,” Kalsang inspected the result, “needs work.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Okay for now. You are just beginner”. Kalsang rolled his eyes.
“You got that right.”
They sat and regarded each other with affection. Then Kalsang stood up, grabbed her by the ears and touched his forehead to hers. “We are going home,” he said before heading off towards the toilet.
“Yes. We are.” Aurora took a drag of coffee from the hose, leaned back and admired the blue planet hanging on the wall console. “Yes, we are.” She mostly felt happy, for want of a better word, being around Kalsang. There was no possibility of rejection, and more importantly, no hint of clinging. He loved purely, and it made her feel safe.
August was in another category. When Aurora finished her coffee, she stood up out of her webbing to stretch and looked around to see him standing in the doorway watching her intently, as ever.
“What’re you looking at?” Her false annoyance was ruined by an involuntary blush.
“You.”
“You must be desperate. Can’t you look at other girls for a change.”
Ten Directions Page 41