It wasn’t warm.
Kal tried not to yelp but didn’t quite succeed.
The figure got her attention yet again by waving a hand in her face. In one of the brief moments her eyes were open she saw it. She was handed a bottle. Her hand was so frozen with cold she dropped it. Liquid sloshed around the bottom of the tent. Picking up the bottle, the figure presented it to her again, pressing it into her hand without touching her. They made a drinking motion. Kal could barely see, the liquid spraying on her continuously like a carwash for a person. She held it to her mouth and tilted her head back, hoping whatever it was, it was warm.
It wasn’t.
It tasted like the same thing she was being sprayed with. She sputtered and then gulped reflexively, trying to get it over with.
Whatever it was, it had immediate effect. She vomited.
I’m contaminating the decontamination, was all she could think. Was this supposed to happen?
More, worse effects took charge of her body. At the mercy of whatever this substance was meant to do, she gave herself up to it. It was beyond shock or embarrassment, and into survival.
This is what they want to happen, she realized at a certain point, her mind churning. They’re trying to decontaminate me inside and out. Kal didn’t think it was even possible. They sure were giving it the old college try.
Was this revenge for her refusal to go to Sextant?
As the liquid at her feet, now not only poisonous-smelling but partly sewage, rose to her calves, she began to panic. Would they let it rise to the top? Would she drown in a soup of poison, vomit, and shit?
At that moment the liquid began to drain, sucked up by some mechanism Kal couldn’t see, mostly because her eyes stung and wept as if she’d been teargassed.
Thoughts rolled around like marbles in her waterlogged cranium.
What was this place?
Who were these people?
Roan was trying to save me. I didn’t listen. Should have gone to Sextant. Being buried under a metric ton of rubyglass would be better than this.
Had they done this to themselves before they got off on Sextant? On Demeter?
Kal doubted it.
The tent bubble was now empty of liquid. A blast of some gaseous mixture dried the contents of the inside of the tent, including Kal. Would it kill them to make some step of this warm?
Kal was dry and covered head to foot in gooseflesh. Hunched over, still half-blind, she waited for what was next.
This was not how she had imagined her triumphant arrival on Demeter.
She had even pictured a trumpet, or a bagpipe. In the pipe dreams of an hour ago.
The figure touched her for the first time, rotating her around by the shoulder. Kal turned a slow three sixty, swaying. She wouldn’t let herself fall.
Turning away from Kal, the figure fussed at something on the tent. There was now an opening. In a moment of frozen horror Kal thought this would be her introduction to the people of Demeter. “Here’s Captain Black Bear.”
With a physical gust of relief, she saw the tent opened to another tent, another chamber. This one had a table in it.
The figure helped her onto it, guiding her to lie on her stomach. Once she was lying flat, they touched her hair, picking it up, and Kal had another start of fear they were about to cut it off. She felt it laid gently down on her back and breathed out.
She was handed goggles. She put them on, lying with her right cheek against the table, her neck stiff.
The light changed. As she shivered on the table, she thought it was an illusion at first, some mammalian trick of biochemistry convincing her the light had warmth. Slowly she felt it was real. The light brought heat.
It took a long time, so long, for the heat to sink through her body. When it finally did, even to the shivery core, she fell asleep.
A tap woke her, whether five minutes or an hour later she couldn’t tell. Someone was making her turn over. She didn’t care who the figure was anymore, Roan, Captain Cooley, or some stranger.
She was in between worlds, here. The stranger was part of the in between.
Kal was a very special guest on Demeter, that was clear, getting very special treatment.
She baked sunny side up under the light. Nothing had ever felt better.
Against her back beneath her she could feel the warmth held in her dry hair. Her black hair, holding the heat like a warming scarf, soothing her sore muscles.
Hope I’m not being prepared for sacrifice, was her last, lazy thought before she drifted off again.
When she opened her eyes she felt different. Looking down, she saw she was now dressed. Someone had dressed her in unfamiliar clothes.
The figure stood nearby. They gestured at something on the floor. A neatly laid out exosuit, different from hers but in essentials similar.
Rolling her body off the table, cat-like, she stretched and reached for it. The figure helped her. Kal decided they weren’t a bad sort, whoever they were. This was an abrupt reversal from her earlier opinion.
She got on the suit with a leisurely attention to detail.
When she was suited up, the figure nodded. And opened the second door.
Now Kal was awake.
When her suit-clad foot touched Demeter, she felt a shock. It didn’t seem real. It was something she’d dreamed up, conjured out of a fantasy.
Both feet stood on grassland. A lightness inside. Her eyes floated in her skull.
Now her bones were air.
With a turn of her head and upper body she saw a person. Someone she recognized. Roan. He wasn’t wearing a suit.
He had on padded denim trousers, an insulated shirt, an ear-covering cap on his head.
He was smiling.
When he reached her she saw the light in his eyes, greeting her with the gladness of a friend.
She put her hand out, encased by the suit, palm flat. He touched his hand to hers.
They did the same with their other hands. Palm to palm they stood for a long time.
She was here.
The walk to the first biohab was long, so Roan ran back to a vehicle called a roller, parked well out of the way of the Ocean. Kal stood like a museum exhibit in her exosuit, waiting for it to roll up to her. Three other people besides Roan sat inside. Kal recognized Captain Cooley and Tess. The captain and Tess held up their hands in greeting. They looked very happy to see her, which was nice. Kal wondered how long they’d been waiting. The third person was unfamiliar to her. The others called her something that sounded like “Flicka,” which Kal found out later was Flicker, one of two physicians of the eight crew from the Land.
Flicker had her sit down inside the back hatch of the roller, which had a wide seat facing backwards. Kal remained in her suit, in her own miniaturized quarantine, while Flicker used a penlight to look in her eyes and mouth through the visor. She read the bio readout on Kal’s wrist. With a nod from Flicker they all went into action. Kal couldn’t hear them well so conversation was postponed. They latched the back hatch shut, Kal still sitting there, and everyone else climbed aboard. The window panels of the roller sealed them in, and they were off.
Kal was the only one with a view of the Ocean as they rolled away. She thought of Sif inside. The ship was on standby, as it always was unless a special power-down procedure was enabled. Even then, essential systems still ran. Sif would be fine for the time being. Kal needed to explain more fully what had happened and discuss the next step with Captain Cooley and Sasha.
The Ocean was so big it filled Kal’s sightline, until it didn’t, and they lifted out of the giant depression the Ocean sat in. Then it receded faster, Rai and Priscilla and Sif left behind as Kal moved on.
She was scoured and new. Brand new for Demeter, with the scent of the Ocean peeled off molecule by molecule.
She didn’t notice the moisture on her cheek until it dripped onto her neck, a warm line of memory.
My tears are pure enough for Demeter, she thought.
The biohabs
were far, much nearer the Land than they were to the Ocean. They were still a considered distance from the Land. If something disastrous happened to either ship, they would still be in range of the radiation, but it was a risk reasonable to take. Not much choice, at this point. The ships could be relocated. For now it was more important to have them close. Just in case.
Since Kal couldn’t see where she was going, when the roller finally entered a structure, a wide door closing behind them, Kal gasped. The structure was like a building, but an airy, light-filled space with a size she couldn’t immediately judge from the inside. It seemed to be full of air, a cloud made into a biohab. This was much more advanced than what Kal had seen years before in her other portal jump, through Freya to the other habitable planet.
The structure was aesthetically beautiful. The back hatch opened, and people swarmed around her, pulling her up and out.
People. Oh yes. This was what people were like.
6
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Out of the roller, now upright, Kal stood staring around, trying to take it all in. Such a lot of faces. One of the people took her by the hand and led her somewhere. She couldn’t feel the surface she walked on. Inside the exosuit she felt trapped, still separate from these biohabbers. The feeling of distance, of being far away from everyone, persisted. How could she know this was really happening?
It was Flicker who led her. Some of the others fell away. Flicker brought her inside a smaller room, held up an index finger as if to say, Wait a minute, and left Kal alone in the room. Kal couldn’t see behind herself very well but turned her whole body to see a bench behind her and carefully lowered herself onto it.
Though she’d had only a protein drink today, other than the disgusting concoction in the tent, and she’d thought she was empty stem to stern, it felt as if something were bubbling up from her stomach, trying to get back into her esophagus. Her throat burned. She had the sudden horrible certainty she was going to throw up again. With a quick smack to the visor button her face screen slid up, and she vomited at her feet. Her relief at not soiling the inside of her suit was enough for her not to care about the embarrassment of throwing up as her first concrete action in the biohab on Demeter.
Flicker entered back through the door and sealed it behind her. She was fully garbed in a different suit, not an exosuit, Kal thought, more like light, casual biohazard gear. She synced their suits and could communicate in Kal’s ear.
“It’s okay. This is normal. I’ll help you out of your suit. Here’s a bucket if you feel it coming on.” Flicker set the bucket on an examination table along one wall of the room. The walls, as well as the entire biohab Kal had been able to observe so far, were made of a kind of blow-up material on a huge scale, the walls stiff but bubble-like, pushed out in concavities by air pressure puffing them out between their structural webs of support.
Flicker helped her remove her helmet, gave her a cloth to wipe her mouth. They side-stepped away from the mess on the floor. Kal’s whole body felt strange, and her eyes and brain felt weird, like they were floating in her skull, which was unnerving to say the least.
Getting out of the exosuit (and not subjected to chemical assault) felt like shedding a knobbly, inconvenient skin, leaving her light and free, though still strongly inclined to reverse the digestion process.
With a spark of realization Kal snapped to the fact that Flicker, in her suit, was protecting herself against Kal. Kal’s bugs, or the biome differences she brought to these voyagers, were of course suspect. The biohabbers had only been exposed to each other and this planet, no other humans, for the year they had been in transit and the months on Demeter. Kal’s different sets of bacteria or viruses could be dangerous for them, separate from the need to protect Demeter from the same thing, which was always a consideration in a new planetary environment.
Kal tried to sit down on the other end of the bench, but her bum wouldn’t get there. It was as if a force pushed her away from the bench. Only by aiming herself with concentration could she get her seat to settle on the bench with what felt like any likelihood of it staying there. Maybe her exosuit had counteracted some of the effect of the low gravity. In her clothes only, she felt like she might float up to the ceiling if she didn’t consciously choose not to.
Flicker set a cleaner bot on the vomit, and Kal no longer had to look at further evidence of her fallibility.
“You’ll be in quarantine for two weeks,” Flicker said, with the mechanical tone of transmitted audio. “Long enough to make sure you aren’t incubating any of the deadly contagions. We’ll test your blood, your stool, your urine, and culture your skin. If anything shows up that needs to be dealt with, we’ll handle it. You’ll transition to our food, produced here, which will help ensure your compatibility with the biome on Demeter. If you need to go outside, it will be in the exosuit only, accompanied by a biohabber. Do you understand these instructions?”
“Yes,” Kal croaked. Her throat was dry.
“Fingerprint here.” Flicker held up an image on her glove. It looked like part of the glove itself. Kal hadn’t seen this before and squinted at it. She put her finger to Flicker’s palm.
“Thank you.” Flicker’s eyes bored into Kal’s. “You understand the preservation of the biome is essential to our mission.”
Kal cleared her throat to get a better sound. “Yes.” This time her voice cracked.
“I’m going to hydrate you intravenously. The transition dries everybody out. You should normalize in a few days.”
A nod seemed safer. Kal nodded.
“Evacuation is a real pain in the ass at first. It’s better to stay on the liquid diet for as long as necessary, or you could be in real agony. Our systems have to adjust. It takes time. We’re all still on lots of roughage and fiber. Mandatory coffee. It helps.”
A million questions were burbling up in Kal’s head, but the combination of a glassy-eyed, wordless fatigue and her inability to speak normally left her mute.
Flicker dropped some of her professional sternness. “Your circumstances have been unusual. And unfortunate. Would you like a hug?”
Kal didn’t know how much she needed a hug until one was offered. She nodded mutely. Flicker, in her white scary-looking biohazard suit, put her arms around Kal and brought her in tightly, as if Kal were a relative Flicker had missed terribly. A sound emerged, coming from so deep Kal didn’t know it was there until it escaped her mouth, closer to a howl than anything else. A little ashamed, Kal buried her head in Flicker’s synthetic shoulder, but Flicker only squeezed her tighter. Kal put her arms carefully around Flicker’s suit and hugged her back, fiercely.
“You’re all right now,” Flickers metallic voice said. “You’re safe. You’re with friends. You did a good job. We’re all impressed with you.” Flicker incorporated patting, too. “Let it out. It’s okay.” She stopped talking and they stood there, Kal sure she would float up to the ceiling if Flicker didn’t keep holding on, Kal clinging to Flicker as if her life depended on it.
Afterward, she didn’t know how long they had stayed that way. Time had ducked out again. Flicker waited until Kal let go.
Drained of all emotion and all her stomach contents, Kal could barely stand. Flicker helped her climb up on the examination table and lie down. Busying herself with various tubes and monitor dots and needles, Flicker moved around Kal, touching her lightly here and there. Kal felt no pain, not even a little pinch when the needle went in, which was curious. It was like watching a slow-motion dream.
How comforting it was to be attended to. Someone was looking after her. As she stared at Flicker’s face, it sometimes flickered into her Aunt Priscilla’s face. Kal smiled, her lids half closed.
“We’ll move you to a more comfortable bed in a little bit,” Priscilla said. “So far everything looks good. I’ll give you something to help you rest.”
Kal wanted to say she didn’t need anything, she was resting already, but her vocal box didn’t have any words in it.
She hiccoughed instead.
Flicker patted her arm. She spoke into a comm unit to someone outside the room.
After what seemed like a long time, a familiar sort of person came in. He had a wide forehead, sparkly eyes, a quirk to his mouth that promised what he said might be funny. He and Priscilla scooped her up somehow. Kal was floating.
She floated through paradise. The spirit world above her was full of light. Her intestines wanted to creep up to the ceiling. It didn’t feel bad anymore. Kal felt nothing, which was how she knew she was floating up to the spirits. The only sensations were far detached from herself. The joy of joining the people overcame her with bliss.
In this realm there was being. Kal’s being radiated with joy. She walked on to meet the people. First among them was Priscilla, dressed in buckskin, her quillwork bright and intricate on her chest. She and Kal stood together, in the blessing of reunion.
“Not yet, my own dear child,” Priscilla said. “Not yet. ‘The center of the universe is everywhere.’ Remember.”
In a bewildering whoosh of relocation, Kal fell to the bed with a start, her heart thrown inside her body. Eyes open, she fluttered her eyelids to see better, what was around her. Disorienting whiteness. Over-bright, without floor or ceiling or end.
Quick gasps of breath got her brain to think. Her arm hurt. Her lower body was weighed down with lead. She was trapped.
After a second of chest-skipping fear, she investigated. When she cautiously felt around to see what was restraining her, her eyes bleached out by the light and not very useful yet, she found a weighted blanket covering her shoulders, hips, and legs. That was what gave the impression she was strapped down. With a groan of relief, she wriggled it down toward her feet and pulled her toes away, free, with a happiness immediately counteracted by that unsettling helium weightlessness she’d felt before. Why the low gravity should feel this way, when she’d been repeatedly exposed to no gravity in space walks and repair jaunts, she didn’t know.
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