Jesus, had that been his attempt at flirting? Punching her? How old was he, six?
He realized he was standing with a fist extended halfway toward her. They both looked at it for a while, then Cal quietly cleared his throat and said, “One potato.” He stacked another fist on top of the first. “Two potatoes.”
He continued climbing with his hands. “Three potatoes, four. Five potatoes make a bunch and so do… Shizz, wait. I mixed up two different songs,” he said.
Loren was watching him with growing concern. He dropped one hand to his side and turned the other into a backward jab over his shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. It’s an Earth thing. I should go check on Splurt.”
“Uh, yeah,” said Loren. She backed toward the door. “I’ll go see what’s going on up front. Shout if you need me.”
“I will,” said Cal.
Loren hesitated just inside the kitchen. “Make sure you do. OK?”
Cal nodded. “Oh, yeah. I will. Sure. I mean, totally. I will.”
She hung there for a moment, as if she was going to say something else, then turned and slipped out into the corridor. Cal drew in a breath like he was going to call after her, but couldn’t find the words to say. He let the air out as a long sigh.
Then he thonked himself on the forehead with the palm of one hand, mumbled something about ‘fonking potatoes,’ and turned to the cupboard with the hole in the front.
“Splurt? Buddy, you in there?” he asked, approaching the cupboard door and peering through the hole into the dim interior. “Everything OK? Sorry I didn’t come check up on you earlier. It’s been kind of a crazy day.”
Cal couldn’t see enough through the hole, so caught the door by the ridge at the top and eased it open.
There was a puddle on the cupboard’s bottom shelf. It was a thick, viscous green puddle, with two eyes floating in it like a couple of eggs yolks. They gaze forlornly upward at the bottom of the cutlery drawer, unmoving.
“Splurt? You OK, pal?” Cal asked. “You look kind of… flat.”
Splurt’s eyes rolled laboriously until they met Cal’s. A small bubble rose through the thin layer of Splurt’s pancake-shaped body and popped on the surface like a sigh.
“Hey now,” said Cal, gently scolding him. “What’s all that about? Where’s my happy little guy?”
He shuffled back and beckoned to him. “What are you even doing in there, anyway? Come on out.”
Splurt burbled again, then oozed over the edge of the shelf and plopped unceremoniously onto the floor. He lay there, eyes down, his body a congealing lump of green grease against the cupboard’s footplate.
“Are you sick?” Cal asked. He looked up. “Kevin, is Splurt sick?”
“One moment, sir, and I shall consult the Bumper Book of Illnesses Found in Shapeshifting Entities of Unknown Origin.”
Cal blinked. “You have one of those?”
“Just my little joke, sir,” said Kevin. “There is, to the best of my extensive knowledge, no such text.”
“Oh,” said Cal. He looked down at Splurt, then back at the ceiling. “So, is—”
“I don’t know, sir. That’s rather the point I was trying to make, albeit humorously,” Kevin explained. “I’m afraid I do not know if Splurt is sick.”
Cal gave Splurt a gentle prod with a fingertip. A thin strand of him stuck to Cal’s finger like snot, then snapped back with an elastic splat. Another bubble sighed its way up from somewhere inside him.
“I mean, does he look well?” said Kevin. “No. But then, I’m no expert.”
“Do we know where to find an expert?” asked Cal.
“We don’t even know what he is, sir—an obstacle which I fear would rather hamper our search,” Kevin pointed out. “The closest we have to an expert on Master Splurt is you.”
Cal bit his lip. “Jesus. That’s a terrifying thought,” he mumbled, then he slid his hands under Splurt and gently lifted him off the floor. “Up we go, little buddy. You hold on now.”
He hurried to the table, Splurt drooping off the sides of his hands and oozing between his fingers. Once there, he flopped him over onto the tabletop so his eyes were pointed upward. As Cal watched, they rolled over again so they faced down.
Cal stood back, his hands on his hips. “Shizz. What do I do now?” he wondered. “I’m the expert. I’m the expert.”
He said the words a few more times with different emphasis, in the hope this would somehow make it true and magically level-up his knowledge.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t.
“OK, so what do I know?” he asked him. “What does Splurt like? What does he like?”
He snapped his fingers. “Wait. Got it.”
Bending, Cal addressed the slimy pancake. “Hey, buddy! You up for a game of Hide and Seek?”
Splurt loved Hide and Seek. He was also, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the greatest Hide and Seek player in the Universe, thanks to his ability to become anything and anyone on the ship at will, and his complete inability to make a sound.
Once, he’d fooled everyone by lying on the engine room floor and transforming himself into another identical floor, just a fraction of an inch deep, and positioned exactly atop the original so that nobody could tell the difference.
It had taken a week to find him. Even then, they only discovered him because Cal had threatened Kevin with a hard reboot if he didn’t show them the security camera footage of the entire ship from the day the game had started.
Yes, if the galaxy ever held a Hide and Seek Olympics, Splurt would be guaranteed the gold, silver, and bronze. Or whatever weird alien metals the medals might be made out of, at any rate.
Now, though, he didn’t so much as shudder in acknowledgment at Cal’s suggestion.
“I’ll let you hide first,” Cal said. He waited for a response, but got none. Still, he knew the little guy wouldn’t be able to resist once he got going.
Cal covered his face with his hands. “One. Two. Better get going, buddy,” he encouraged. “Three. Four.”
He peeked out through his fingers. Splurt remained on the table, eyes down.
“Shizz. No? OK,” Cal sighed, dropping his hands. He clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “What else do you like? What else?”
Space Charades? That was a possibility, although Kevin would insist on joining in, everyone would fall out, and Cal would vow—for the fifth time—never to play the stupid fonking game again, before storming off in tears.
No, he’d been stung once too often by Space Charades. That, unlike Splurt, was off the table.
What else?
What else?
Cal’s eyes fell on the food replicator. A big, beaming smile lit up his face. “Of course!” he said. He felt himself relax, safe in the knowledge that everything was going to be fine.
“Just you wait right there, buddy,” he said.
Splurt did nothing to indicate that he’d heard, but showed no interest in going anywhere, anyway.
Cal skipped across to the machine standing upright in the corner. “Give me twenty-five of your finest Spit Nibbles,” he said.
His stomach whimpered. Cal patted it fondly, as if reassuring a frightened animal. “Actually,” he told the replicator. “Better make that fifty.”
Eleven
Loren and Mech stood side-by-side on the bridge, watching the colors on screen. They had exhausted the limits of Mech’s sensors. The ship’s, too, after an infuriating conversation with Kevin in which they had to remind him several times what the sensors were, and then explain exactly what they wanted him to attempt to sense.
Everything had come up blank. All readouts agreed there was something out there around the ship, but they were all a bit perplexed as to what it might actually be. Mech and Loren stuck with their original hypothesis that it was the Sentience itself, and they all agreed to leave it at that.
All attempts to find out where they were going had also failed. All they knew was that they were traveling at speeds far beyond anythi
ng they’d attempted before, and that they hadn’t yet—to the best of their knowledge—crashed into anything.
While the second point was comforting, the first gave them cause for concern. The ship was holding together for now, but this level of warp was going to start taking its toll soon. Nothing could sustain these speeds for long.
Although, that said, the ride was exceptionally smooth, with only a vague background vibration alerting them to the fact that they were moving, at all.
But moving, they were. Kevin may not have been able to tell them where they were going, but he could confidently tell them they no longer were where they’d been.
“And this is it when it’s weakened,” Mech remarked, watching the Sentience’s dance of color and light. “No wonder those fonks want to get their hands on it. No saying what they could do with this much power.”
“Maybe they’d blow each other to pieces,” Loren said.
“Yeah, maybe. And half the galaxy with it.”
Loren sat in her chair and tapped a few buttons, trying to determine if she had any control yet. She’d checked half a dozen times already, and had been disappointed each time. Mech, who didn’t really want to consider the implications of Loren blindly piloting a ship at superwarp, had been somewhat relieved.
This time was no different.
“Nothing,” Loren said.
“Aw,” said Mech, side-eyeing her. “That is a real shame.”
They stood and sat in silence for a while, the shimmering glow altering the sizes of their shadows on the back wall.
It was Loren who eventually spoke.
“You think Cal’s OK?”
Mech shrugged. “Sure. I mean, he’s infuriating, he never shuts up, and sometimes I want to punch his head clean off, but I guess you could do worse.”
“Uh, no. Not like that. I wasn’t asking…” Loren fumbled. “I mean do you think he’s feeling OK. He seems kind of, I don’t know, on edge.”
Mech turned. “Can’t say I noticed.”
“It’s nothing major. Just little things,” said Loren. “At the restaurant, he got really angry with the waiter, and then it was like he couldn’t string a sentence together.”
“The restaurant where you didn’t go for a date?”
“Not a date date,” said Loren, parroting Cal without meaning to. She shook her head in a way that suggested she wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Normally, I wouldn’t say that the man has a lot on his mind, because he ain’t got a whole lot of mind available to begin with, but… I guess he does. He just found out that in this timeline he grew up to be a genocidal monster, and that his home planet is now so fonked-up that it produced a dude called ‘Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds.’”
Mech glanced in the direction of the door. “I guess that kinda thing is gonna have an effect. Even on someone as brain-dead and shallow as him.”
Loren ran her fingers through her hair, then tightened her ponytail. “You’re right. I hadn’t even thought about any of that. Someone should go talk to him.”
Mech nodded absently.
“You think?” said Loren. “Someone should probably talk to him.”
Mech continued to nod. He realized Loren was staring at him.
“What, me?”
“He listens to you,” Loren said.
Mech scowled. “When? Name me one time.”
“I’m not saying he ever does what you say,” Loren clarified. “But he listens. He takes it in.”
“Then ignores it.”
“Then ignores it, granted,” said Loren. “But he takes it in.”
“Why don’t you go talk to him?” Mech demanded.
“Because it wouldn’t do any good,” Loren said. “You know what he’s like, he’s not going to tell me he’s hurting. He’ll make a joke about it and insist that he’s fine.”
“And you think he’ll tell me?”
“Maybe. Yes,” said Loren. “That’s what guys do when they get together, isn’t it? Discuss their feelings, share their problems, help each other?”
Mech’s frown deepened. “Have you ever even met any guys?” he asked. “If you had, you’d know that shizz don’t happen.”
“I could talk to him if you like, ma’am,” said Kevin.
“Fonk, no,” said Loren, a little too quickly. She smiled. “I mean, we need you keeping an eye on…” She gestured at the ship in general. “But thanks.”
“Very well, ma’am,” replied Kevin, sounding a little put out.
Loren gazed up at Mech. “Please. Talk to him.”
Mech groaned. “I don’t know…”
“If you talk to Cal, I’ll go talk to Miz.”
Mech thrust out a hand. “Fonk. Deal,” he said. “But leave a note so that when you come back in pieces, we know what you want us to do with them.”
Cal sat at the kitchen table, licking clean a plate that had, until recently, held Spit Nibbles.
Once he was sure he’d collected every last crumb, he set the plate down beside Splurt’s equally empty one and belched quietly.
“God, those things are amazing,” he said. He traced a finger across his plate, just in case his tongue had missed anything. “I can’t believe you didn’t want any.”
Splurt continued to lie flat on the table, his eyes down. Cal leaned back in his seat, cradling a stomach swollen by twenty-five Spit Nibbles. And then swollen further by twenty-five more Spit Nibbles a few minutes later.
“Seriously, you don’t know what you missed,” Cal said. He said it as brightly as he could manage, given his worry about Splurt, and the regret he could already feel building over the whole eating-fifty-Spit-Nibbles-in-one-sitting thing.
Splurt didn’t react. No ripple. No wobble. No bubble.
Nothing.
Cal leaned his elbows on the table and looked down at his blobby little pal, all spread out like a puddle of slime.
“What is it, buddy?” he asked. “What’s wrong? You’ve got to pull yourself together, Splurt. I can’t lose you. Not you, too.”
His head flopped down. His voice became a mumble.
“I could really do with having you back to your old self, Splurt. Not having the greatest time of it of late, I’ll be honest. You know, it’s great that everyone on Earth’s alive—thumbs up to that. It’s just, I think they’re all kind of fascists now, which is… Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s kind of a fonking downer.”
He shifted awkwardly on the bench.
“And the things that people say I did… The other me, I mean. But, you know, still me. He killed a lot of people. Like, a lot. The Earth guys all seem to have liked him, but you know when some Darth Vader fetishist who calls himself the ‘Enslaver of Worlds’ is singing your praises, you’re probably batting for the wrong team.”
He sighed. It was a heavy sigh, as if the very act of expelling the air took some great physical toll on him. “I was a good kid. Hell, I was adorable. I mean, not you adorable, obviously, but still pretty sweet. Rosy cheeks. Twinkling eyes. Skinned knees. The works. And I was nice, you know? The old lady who lived across the street? I used to rake up the leaves in her backyard.”
He shrugged. “For money, obviously, but I did a good job, and my rates were super low. Like, too low, now that I think about it. I mean, a dollar for three hours work. How is that fair? It’s exploitation, is what it is.”
Cal realized he was getting off track, and swerved back onto it. “But I did it, and I didn’t complain. Because I was a good kid. So, how come a good kid became what he became? How could that smiling, skinned-kneed, criminally underpaid yard raker commit fonking genocide? And not just once! Once I could maybe forgive.”
He thought about it.
“No, I couldn’t forgive once, either. Even one genocide’s too much. But, still. How could he do it? How? Because if he had it in him, then so do I, Splurt. So do I. Because he’s me. Or I’m him. Or…”
He unleashed another of those sighs, this one s
upported by a groan of frustration. “Whatever. The point is, I didn’t think I was capable of anything like the things he did, but I guess I am. I guess I must be.”
Cal sniffed, screwed the heels of both hands against his eyes, then let them drop back onto the table. “Anyway. Like I said, it’d be really great to have you around, pal. So let me know what I can do to help.”
The edge of the puddle closest to Cal rippled, just faintly. A thin tendril of slime snaked out and crept across the table toward him. As it reached him, the end of the snake became four little fingers and a thumbnail-sized palm and clutched him gently by the tip of his thumb.
Cal’s voice, when it came, was low and hoarse.
“Thanks, buddy.”
On the other side of the kitchen door, Loren stood listening, having stopped on the way to Mizette’s room. From the bridge behind her, she heard the clank of footsteps, and quickly gestured for Mech to stay back.
“It’s, uh… Maybe give him a few minutes,” she whispered, then she tiptoed past the kitchen until she reached Miz’s door.
Taking a deep breath, Loren raised a fist and knocked.
Back on the bridge, Mech hurriedly retreated and closed the door.
“Who is it?” Miz demanded.
“It’s me,” Loren replied. She felt it was probably unnecessary to add, “It’s Loren,” but found herself adding it, anyway.
Miz’s reply was short and to the point.
“Ugh.”
“I, uh, I wanted to find out how you’re doing. Both of you, I mean. Is Tyrra OK?”
“Fine.”
“She’s fine?”
“Well, she’s, like, either totally catatonic or basically just crying all the time, but yeah.”
“Oh. OK,” said Loren. She brought her face closer to the door. “It’s just… that doesn’t sound fine.”
The door opened suddenly, just enough for Miz’s head to fit through. She didn’t look quite as angry as Loren had been bracing herself for. Then again, Loren had been bracing herself for a tornado of furry fury that would instantly tear her apart. Miz wasn’t quite at that level, but her expression, demeanor, and the way all the hair was standing up on her collar suggested she wasn’t far off.
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