Call of Worlds

by K. D. Lovgren

  They must have put the weighted blanket on her to help her sleep.

  This space was a different room, with an oval-shaped door much like the door on a sea-faring ship with a lip below. The door looked stiff and made from a different material than the walls. She was in one of the bubble rooms, as she now thought of them. One foot dangled down, trying to find the floor. It was still there. Using her hands to support her, she pushed herself up from the bed like doing a body press. Her body sprung up with such enthusiasm her feet didn’t even touch the floor until she landed on it a millisecond later. It was as if she had Gunn’s arms and power and had tried for a gymnastic dismount from the bed to the floor. Which she didn’t and hadn’t. Her stomach flopped around, discontented.

  Creeping now, like a hesitant biped who didn’t trust this walking experiment, she grabbed on to a chair she almost didn’t see, because it was translucent, and a translucent desk, which she found by squinting her eyes looking for more nearly invisible objects. She made it to the door. With a queasy uncertainty, she fitted her fingers into an indentation and tried to slide it left. The door slid open easily.

  Another step. Standing in front of the doorway, looking out at the exam room where she’d been before, she realized something consciously for the first time. Deep down, she feared she was a prisoner.

  Like Sif.

  She had to remind them about Sif.

  When would Sasha and the others be here?

  Could she trust these people?

  You’re in quarantine, she reminded herself. That’s why that door out of the exam room is probably locked.

  7

  The Tableland

  Why did she have to be alone?

  Kal put her hand on what looked like a comm. “Hello?” Her voice was not trustworthy. It sounded faraway, not hers.

  “It’s me,” she said. “Captain.” It was enough. She had to sit down. After some stumbling around she found her way back to the long bench and pinned herself there.

  A crinkling sound came over the comm. A voice. “I’ll suit up and come in. It’ll be five minutes.”

  Kal nodded, helpfully.

  She rested her elbows on her knees and her head in the cradle of her linked hands.

  Kal stared at the floor. A room full of the non-colors of white and clear was not grounding. It was the reverse of space, but not its cure.

  The door opened. Kal swung her head up more sharply than she’d intended. She put her hand on her neck, where she’d strained something.

  Flicker, even in her biohazard costume, was a friendly face. “Had a good sleep?”

  “I dreamed,” Kal said.

  Flicker pulled over a translucent chair and sat near Kal, facing her. She took her hand and looked at the back of it and the palm. Pinching Kal’s thumb, she looked to see the color and speed of the blood rush in, under the skin.

  “You’re pretty well oxygenated, from what I can see. Tongue?”

  Kal stuck it out. Flicker pincered it between her polymer-tasting gloved fingers. Sensing she would retch if it went on much longer, Kal tried to pull it back. Flicker let go.

  Another pinch, on the back of Kal’s hand “You’re still dehydrated. You need to get on our water. Sip a little bit at a time, all day long. I’ll give you a water pack for your back. The tube will run right up to your mouth, just like a suit. Remember to keep drinking.”

  “I want out,” Kal said.

  Flicker nodded in a resigned fashion. “They all do.”

  All your prisoners? Kal’s paranoia thought. She squashed it down. Unable to keep some form of protest in any longer, she burst out, “Why don’t I have any windows? Why can’t I see anyone?”

  “I know,” Flicker said, her face creased in sympathy. “It’s awful. This space is pure pragmatism.”

  “It isn’t,” Kal said. “This isn’t how to recover.”

  Flicker nodded. “I meant pragmatic for a first gen biohab, not for recovery from isolation and long stretches in space.”

  “I need my crew,” Kal muttered.

  “We’ve had contact.”

  Kal’s eyes snapped up. “When do they get here?”

  “Fifteen more days.”

  It seemed like forever now. Kal had the uncomfortable feeling of being on the wrong side of time. She’d never felt that way before. Maybe in the portal, though her mind skittered away from that thought. It seemed to stretch against her now instead of being handily at her beck and call, willing to shorten or lengthen according to her wishes. The wrongness had started on the ship, and it seemed it would continue here.

  Flicker squeezed Kal’s shoulder. “Everyone gets a little wrong when they’re first here. Everyone. Don’t let it rattle you too much. You’ll acclimate.”

  “I need to see the outside. I need to walk on the earth. The…the ground.”

  Pursing her lips, Flicker considered. “You’re weak.”

  “I’m not. I’m strong. I need to touch earth.”

  “You can’t just yet. You must be in an exosuit. No Demeter-touching. I’m not crazy about the idea of you trundling about out there in this state, even in an exosuit.”

  “The suit will help me if I get in trouble.”

  “You’d need at least two attendants.”

  “One for each arm?” The too-familiar sense of being under a foreign authority, a frequent occurrence in her youth, brought out Kal’s rebellious side, easily accessed when she wasn’t in control.

  “In case they need to carry you,” Flicker said.

  “With this grav, I’m sure only one could.”

  Flicker regarded her with a professional skepticism. “Kal, are you going to be a difficult patient?”

  “Not as long as we agree I’m not a patient, but a crew member in extra-planetary transition.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain Black Bear.”

  “All right, then. Get me out of here.”

  “I’ll help you into your exosuit.”

  Kal wanted to say she could handle it, but wasn’t sure she could, so kept her trap shut. She’d won her point and was inwardly overjoyed. “Where are my packs?” Kal looked around, worried. She’d forgotten the packs until this moment.

  “Your exosuit, the packs, and their contents were run through decontamination and Mythian radiation. Like sunlight,” Flicker said with a smile, “to get them clean by Demetrian standards.”

  Kal grimaced at the memory. “Where are they then?”

  “I put the packs in your sleeping room while you were out. Under the bed. The exosuit is in the locker outside this door.”

  So she couldn’t get the suit herself. “Were you the only one who handled them?” Normally, Kal was better at being subtle when she was worried. As a new transplant, she clearly didn’t have the inner chill to fake it. She’d have to try to be more careful than this.

  “Yes,” Flicker said, with a slightly bewildered expression. “I handled it all. I do all the decontamination, since I’m the specialist for both people and objects.”

  “Okay,” Kal said. “Okay, fine.”

  “Do you have a change of clothes?”

  Kal looked down. She was wearing the stretchy top and bottom she had been dressed in yesterday. “I packed one, yeah. Where’s my uniform?”

  “In the locker, so it could be properly stored.”

  Kal nodded, trying to control her responses.

  “It’s also normal to have moments of panic and anxiety,” Flicker said. “The oxygen levels in the biohab are low for us, to be like the outside. It doesn’t serve us to delay the adjustment, we found. We supplement oxygen when absolutely necessary, and briefly during transition. It turns out it only delays the inevitable to do anything else. Lower ox numbers make the brain a little desperate for a while. It plays tricks. Knowing that helps us have confidence we’ll be back to our usual thought patterns soon. I’ll adjust the ox of your exosuit, too.”

  Kal met Flicker’s eyes fully, for the first time since Flicker had come in. Some residual part of K
al wanted to trust her. A more recent incarnation of herself heard warning bells everywhere.

  “That’s the only reason I thought it might be better for you not to exert yourself today,” Flicker said, her suit-covered arms folded in her lap. “You know best what helps you. I know a bit about acclimating to Demeter.”

  “Let’s get the suit on,” Kal said brusquely, not wanting Flicker to have time to change her mind.

  Flicker nodded to herself, as if she’d done the best she could. “I’ll get it.”

  Kal looked out the door while it was open and saw the room outside this one was part of her quarantine, too. It was an airlock, she thought. Like the airlock where Noor got asphyxiated.

  Crap. Sif. She still hadn’t spoken to them about her, reminded them. Or did they remember? Had they done something with Sif already? They would wait, wouldn’t they? Kal was captain of the Ocean. Decisions should be run through her. If they had done anything with Sif, her prisoner, she would know for sure they were trying to undermine her authority. Yes. This would be the definitive answer to their intentions.

  Sif could be in the very next quarantine room to this. Hadn’t Flicker said “we” and “us?” Like there was more than one person in quarantine?

  Thinking of Sif one thin layer of biohab material away made Kal’s blood pressure ratchet up until she felt it in her floating eyeballs. These fools. They didn’t know what they were dealing with. Sif might have acted normal and benign, just to get off the ship. They didn’t know her cunning. Her complete amorality. Or her ability to use charm to lower defenses. Sif would have them thinking Kal was the enemy, Kal the danger.

  That was probably why Roan and Tess hadn’t been to see her. Sif had them all wrapped around her finger already. Maybe Sif even lied about the Carys. Said Kal had been downloaded into, by Rai, and had scapegoated Sif to get the attention off herself.

  They would believe it, of course. Sif was convincing.

  Kal would have to be cunning, too. If Flicker really was going to let her out, it was just because she wanted all to seem normal. Lull Kal into a state of acceptance. The two attendants would be keepers, so she couldn’t get away. Kal must not give any hint of her understanding of what was really going on. She must act as if they were all in this together, as if she believed they were trying to help her.

  They probably wouldn’t let Roan and Tess be the two who went with her. She’d made too much of a connection with them, before. No, that would be too risky. Who would accompany her? Flicker and Cooley?

  Flicker reentered the exam room holding the exosuit in front of her like a body, helmet head and all.

  Kal decided to leave her strange stretchy clothes on instead of changing into her own, to speed up the process. Assisting her silently, Flicker helped Kal get into the suit. Or try to. Kal’s foot missed the suit the first three times she tried to get it in. Her foot wanted to float away, too. It was as if this were her first time putting on an exosuit. With dogged determination Kal aimed her foot for a lower spot that she thought it should go and shoved. Her whole leg went in.

  With a grunt of frustration, which came out more like a squawk, Kal backed it out a little so she could get the other foot somewhere in the vicinity of where it needed to be.

  By the time she was fully encased in exosuit, Kal was ready to punch someone, preferably Flicker or Cooley. Flicker appeared to sense her mood and kept quiet. She took Kal’s wrist and led her out of the door into the quarantine antechamber. When she coded out of this room, the air pressure changed. Kal could finally see out through the doorway into the rest of the biohab. In the middle distance of the wide span of the huge biohab room she’d first come into on the roller, she saw Roan and Tess, suited up in those strange padded outfits such as Roan had worn yesterday, with no helmets or assistive devices she could see. They were in conversation, stopping abruptly when they saw her. She stepped out awkwardly after Flicker. It was like some parody of a debutante ball, Kal presented to society in her finest exosuit.

  Roan and Tess wore smiles of welcome. Kal marched forward, robotic in her movements to try to avoid making a mistake.

  “Hey, stranger,” Roan called. “What’d you do with Kal?”

  “Kal got swallowed by an exosuit,” Tess said. “It’ll throw her back up soon.”

  A brief flash of fear in Kal’s eyes as she looked at Flicker. Had Flicker ratted her out? Flicker made an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

  “It took her in and won’t let her out. These exosuits like to digest their prey slowly,” Roan said.

  They were in reach now, and Tess and Roan both grabbed onto her, part hug, part huddle. A corner of Kal’s mouth threatened her equanimity, wanting to betray her with emotion. Her certainty about the conspiracy against her wavered.

  They hitched her to themselves, each with an arm through hers, and frogmarched her to the faraway door to outside. There was light everywhere. Kal couldn’t tell where the light came from, her eyes dazzled again. She searched for windows, but they were to the door before she could be sure what was what. Every time she blinked she saw bursts of stars and zigzags of light. Tess slammed down Kal’s light visor before she coded out of the exit. Blinking, Kal had a moment to be grateful for the thought before the even brighter brilliance of outside assaulted her.

  Hauling her outside as if she were something to be disposed of, they dragged her along, an overinflated balloon trailing in their wake. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. Kal heard the door suction shut behind them and she looked up, mouth agape, at the sky of Demeter.

  She didn’t know where they were going. She didn’t care. With the light visor down, she had just enough protection to bear to look at the sky. Was the sky’s color because of her visor or the sky itself? It was golden. Was it the sunset? Dawn?

  Now they had her in the roller. This time she was shoved between them, on the front bench. The driving bench. Tess operated the roller. Kal couldn’t see how.

  They rolled like the wind away from the biohab. Not in the direction they’d come from the Ocean, Kal thought, though she wasn’t certain. She left her nauseated stomach somewhere back in the biohab. She was light. She was free.

  Surrounded by gold, they raced away. The waves of grass were high and got higher the further they flew, until they were plowing through a two-meter high forest of grasses, like a snowplow through powder snow offering little resistance. A tunnel created by the roller rolled out beneath and around them, the roller a magic carpet sliding through a tunnel of riches. Flying through gold, below and above, Kal’s heart soared. For once, it wasn’t because of the light gravity.

  On and on, so far Kal wondered if they were abducting her.

  The roller angled up now. They had been ascending an incline so gentle she hadn’t noticed until now, when it increased sharply. The steeper it got, the faster the roller went, until they were near vertical. Kal’s breath caught. They popped over the edge of something with a great leap. Kal’s buoyant heart was left now, too, in the golden tunnel behind.

  A wide tableland stretched out before them, short-cropped, with vistas all the way around. The roller came to a gliding halt.

  They lifted her out. Roan pulled; Tess pushed and crawled through Roan’s side behind Kal. Kal wobbled on her feet when they let go, trying to turn and see everything at once. Huge gray shadows in the far distance, glimmering like deep, upside down bowls, curved like tidal waves without a crest. Charred flaxen sky, the yellow ocean-like grasses beneath it undulating as if they were sending messages, blowing away, away, toward someone else far from here. Kal wanted to get in the roller and follow the wind, roll away to the horizon’s edge. With her head lifted, peering at the limit of her vision upwards, she saw the pale bone curve of a moon and then, with a gasp, saw a second. One was near full, the other a scooped rind.

  A flurry of movement, she was aware of something happening, forces against her.

  Roan and Tess, whom she’d forgotten about, close up now, crowding her.

  I
t almost felt like they were punching her—gently—but definitely punching.

  She punched back.

  Before she understood what was happening it was a free-for-all, struggling and pushing and kicking, and Kal was on the ground, fighting with a rush of energy and determination. Roan tried to pin her, but she got on top of him and held him down by the throat while Tess tried to pull her off by the leg. In a flash, Kal’s position over Roan reminded her of Sif, choking her, and she let go, allowing Tess to yank her where she would.

  Fighting in lower grav was fluffy and less likely to hurt, Kal found. She’d been hitting and kicking hard but hadn’t seemed to faze anyone in the slightest. Was this why they wore the padded clothes? To attack her?

  Almost as soon as she’d tasted the wave of adrenalin and energy, Kal lost it. She collapsed back on the ground, feeling Demeter beneath her, its energy thrumming as hers drained away. Roan held Tess back, who looked about to jump on her.

  “We got her,” Roan said.

  “Look at her. It didn’t take much, did it?” Tess said.

  “I guess this Ocean crew isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.” Roan dropped to his knees next to Kal. “I thought they were going to be a challenge. Bring in a little healthy competition. The legend dies here.”

  Kal slapped at him with what she had left. Her breath finally caught, she felt around with her mouth for her water tube and sucked on it. A rush of cool H2O was manna.

  Once, back on the rez, Kal had run a marathon, without training overly much beforehand. This was worse.

  “Captain Cooley tried to tell us,” Tess said. “The deprivation. The loneliness. It’s sucked the life out of her all right.”

  “Come on, Tess,” Roan said. “Give her a little credit. She did get the ship here. Against all odds. Captain didn’t think she had it in her.”

  “Don’t say it in front of her,” Tess said. “We don’t want her to get off on the wrong foot with the captain.”