by B.J. Keeton
***
Ceril hated his quarters.
It wasn't that they weren't nice. They were. The room was just nothing special. The room was big enough, and it had a similar layout to the Phase II dormitory he was supposed to share with Swarley at Ennd’s. The problem with this room was that Ceril had no roommate to fill the extra space. The room was pretty empty, except for his bed, a desk, and a trio of chairs in one corner. He assumed it was so that Recruits could study together, or visit each other.
But he was alone, and he didn’t know anyone. Having extra chairs and no one to fill them made Ceril homesick.
If he understood Roman correctly, none of the Recruits had roommates. Ceril was sure there was good reason for it, but after years of Phase I and living with a roommate, a good reason didn’t make his quarters any less lonely.
As Ceril examined the room, he found his uniforms hanging in the closet—three identical sets of full-body fatigues. They were dark blue, maybe even black, and had a zipper going from the crotch to the neck. They looked like they would be a little big on him.
His name was on the right breast. Only it wasn’t patched or embroidered like the rest of the uniform’s decoration. It was displayed on a tiny, flexible screen. When he touched it, it just felt like the fabric of the fatigues. As he watched, the text on the screen rotated between CERIL and RECRUIT. He figured that once he picked a path of study, it would rotate between MEDIC, SCHOLAR, or SOLDIER, too.
He smiled as he watched his name and rank rotate in and out. Maybe being a technomage wasn't going to be so bad.
As he flicked between the uniforms, he saw a dress hanging behind the fatigues. Not a dress. A robe. It was thin, but surprisingly heavy. There was no zipper anywhere, which gave him the impression it had been made to pull over his everyday clothes—probably the fatigues. The robe, like the fatigues, had patches and insignias on the sleeves. It even had the rotating nametag screen. Ceril liked the robe far more than he did the fatigues, so he pulled it over his head and noticed a heavy hood. He pulled it over his head and looked around the room.
No mirror. He sighed because he was sure that he looked like a villain from a cheesy holovid, and he wanted to see it. He let out a low “mwahahahahaha” to complete his mental image of himself. His playful megalomania was interrupted by a high-pitched trill that came from the desk in the center of the room. The paging system at Ennd’s used the same sound.
“Answer,” he said.
A holographic bust of Roman appeared above the desk. The bearded man’s eyes fixed on Ceril, and he smiled. “Making yourself right at home, I see. How do you like your quarters, Ceril?”
Ceril snapped the hood from his head and he moved closer to the desk. “They're fine, sir. Thank you.”
“I'm glad to hear it, Ceril,” said Roman. “I just wanted to make sure that you had everything you needed.”
“I think so, sir,” Ceril said.
“Very well, then,” Roman said. “Your itinerary for the next month of orientation has been sent to your tablet.” As he spoke, a section of the desk’s surface peeled away to reveal a portable computing tablet. “If you have any questions, please ask.”
“I will,” said Ceril. “Thank you, sir.”
“Have a good evening, Ceril,” said Roman.
“You, too,” Ceril replied, but Roman's image had already faded.
Ceril plopped down on his bed. From where he lay, he could see out of the room’s single window. Just having a window meant his quarters were on the outside edge of the ship, near the hull. He put his arms behind his head and stared outside.
There wasn't a lot to see, though. A constantly shifting series of colors blurred outside the window and whipped around the hull. Ceril remembered something Roman had said during his lecture earlier that day. “Don’t be frightened just because you look out the window and don't see stars.”
He hadn’t thought anything about it before. In the classroom, the window that opened onto hyperspace just seemed like a wall of the room, a fixture as normal as the paint in his grandfather’s kitchen. Now, Ceril could see why Roman had thought to give them all that warning. Alone, looking out the window of a spaceship and actually being unable to see space was disconcerting. More than that, Ceril thought that seeing those splotches of bright color whirling around was a little scary.
He broke himself away from the mesmerizing window, and found his bag in the rear of the closet. He smiled as he placed the picture of Gramps dead center on his desk.
He hated that he hadn’t been able to talk to Gramps about being recruited as a Charon. After this summer and the sword, he wanted to see how Gramps would react to finding out that those old stories weren't just stories. He couldn't wait until next summer to tell Gramps all about it. Well, he hoped it would be next summer. That’s the way Ennd’s had always worked. You went to school during the fall and winter, and you went home during summer. He had just assumed the Inkwell Sigil worked that way, too. He would have to ask Roman about that sometime.
Surely, Roman hadn’t meant they would live onboard for six years with no breaks.
Had he?
At least Headmaster Squalt had said he would contact Gramps to tell him that Ceril had been recruited. I wonder when we’ll get to call home, Ceril thought. Can we call home from a spaceship? Ceril pondered that momentarily, and assumed that he could. They had, after all, just opened a door and walked onto the ship. Why wouldn’t they be able to make calls, too?
Ceril reached for the tablet and collapsed with it back on the bed. It was a typical tablet like the ones he had gotten used to using at Ennd’s. The device was bigger than his hand or a PDA, but smaller than most of the books on Gramps' shelf. It was thin and not heavy at all. He tapped the screen twice, and it came alive.
Immediately, he could see the entire schedule Roman had said would be there. Ceril didn’t even bother reading through it. After the day he just had, just shut the tablet off and tossed it on the desk. The tablets at Ennd’s were sturdy, and he knew this one could take a quick toss like that. However, he was surprised when the tablet was just about to land on the desk, it stopped in midair. It bobbed up and down a couple of times, and then the desk reached up and grabbed it out of the air.
Ceril blinked. The desk had become…not solid for a moment. Blobs or tendrils of liquid desk had wrapped themselves around the tablet and pulled it to the surface. Then the desk absorbed the device, so that the only item on its surface was the picture Ceril had just sat down.
Ceril blinked. Part of his mind knew that what he had just seen was real, that the desk’s behavior was just another piece of technomage engineering, but the exhausted side told him that he just needed to sleep and to disregard it. He listened to the side that told him to sleep.
He got up to turn off the lights, but couldn’t find a switch. That was when he realized that his room, like the classroom, was being illuminated entirely by the colorful glow of hyperspace through the window. It wasn’t like starlight or moonlight. The shifting colors were different from anything he had ever seen. Ceril just shook his head in amazement.
He undressed and fell asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.