Well of Souls

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “Because I’m here, now, when I shouldn’t be.” Her eyes slid to the floor and then back to his. “And as you’ve said, I’ve seen a lot of psychiatrists, so I don’t think this is an accident.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  Her gaze was steady, but he heard a slight tremor in her voice. “I think it’s one of two things. Either I told myself I had to be here at this time so it would seem more like your idea than mine…”

  “Or?” Tyvan prompted, though he was impressed. She was right. She had spent a lot of time in the patient’s chair, long enough to do a good piece of self-analysis without any help from him.

  She lifted her chin, pulling her straighter. Her scar gleamed a bright pink in the overhead lights. “Or I have something really important to tell you, and it can’t wait. Or maybe both.”

  “I agree,” said Tyvan. His manner was still calm, but inside he felt a shock of excitement. “Where would you like to start?”

  He saw from the look in her eyes that she was still debating about whether or not to flee. Then she reeled in a deep and tremulous breath then let it out, as if steeling herself. “Look, I’ll be honest with you. I owe you an apology for the way I behaved last time.”

  She paused a half-beat, as if to give Tyvan an opening. Tyvan made no move to agree or disagree.

  “I think it’s safe to say that I don’t like being here,” Bat-Levi resumed, “and I don’t really enjoy you, per se. I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s the way it is. I know that I don’t have to like you. It’s not your job to have me like you.”

  “As I recall, a teacher once told me that if patients liked me, I wasn’t doing my job,” said Tyvan, and he meant that. Patients became anxious when a psychiatrist confronted them with the need for change. No one liked change, and the people who wanted to avoid change avoided him, and in the close quarters of a ship, other people, not his patients, avoided him by association. (Of course, this meant that when he did his job well, he was lonely a great deal. How many people who’d confided their deepest fears and wildest fantasies had paled when he walked into a room? More than he could count: He knew that instant of wild animal panic that sparked in a patient’s eyes too well. It didn’t matter if the encounter was on the street, in a shuttle terminal, aboard ship; a patient’s reactions were, usually, the same. That flicker of surprise followed by fear that was replaced by an uneasy civility: How are you, Doctor? Good to see you. Smiles that were all teeth and too wide, gestures that were too animated. They were all lying, of course. No one was happy to see him outside the office.)

  As if reading his thoughts, Bat-Levi said, “Then I’d think you’d be a pretty lonely man. Ships are roomier than they used to be but not that roomy.”

  “Maybe,” said Tyvan, not wanting to stray too far. His problems were his problems, not hers. “Is this about Anisar Batra?”

  “Yes and no. I’ve been thinking about what you said: about guilt and responsibility. I’ll be honest about Ani. She was my friend, and I can’t imagine how Halak’s going to be able to look at himself in the mirror again. Halak’s got to live with this now every day of his life. I’ll bet that not a day has gone by when he hasn’t rehashed everything in his mind, wondered where he went wrong, what he could have done differently.” Bat-Levi moved her head from side to side, the movement stuttering as if her neck were made of gears that weren’t meshing properly. The right corner of her mouth was taut, twisting her mouth into a grimace. “Every morning he’s alive is another morning she isn’t.”

  “Do you think he got her killed?”

  “Yes, I do. He may not have meant it to happen…no, that’s stupid; I know he didn’t want anything like that to happen to Ani. But it did, and he’s got to feel some responsibility.”

  Tyvan shook his head. “That’s not what I asked. Feeling responsible isn’t the same as being responsible. I asked if he got her killed. You said he did. So you must think he could have done something to prevent it.”

  “That’s like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head on a pin. He could have sent her away.”

  “But Batra was an adult. Don’t you think that was up to her to make a choice?”

  “Adults don’t always know the answers. You don’t expose the people you love to danger, and if you see danger and don’t do something about it, then it’s only right, it’s only just that you should live with your guilt every day of your life. I know it isn’t fair, but life isn’t fair. You do something like that, you should pay.”

  “Even if what happened was an accident?”

  Bat-Levi made an irritable gesture with her good hand: a flick of the wrist. “A lot of the things that people call accidents can be prevented, and Halak should’ve known. Farius Prime isn’t exactly sugar and spice. What the hell was he thinking? He was careless, and now,” her voice thickened and her eyes welled, “now Ani’s dead.”

  “I imagine Halak feels pretty terrible.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  Bat-Levi wet her lips. “No. Halak, he’s hard to get to know. Like there’s this hard shell all around him, and you know he’d like you to break through only…”

  “Only what?” Tyvan prompted when she didn’t continue.

  “Nothing.” And then her watery gaze jerked away.

  Tyvan decided to risk it. “I think you just lied to me.”

  Bat-Levi’s eyes arced back, and Tyvan saw that they sparked with anger. The small muscles of her cheeks danced. A single tear tracked down the scar over her right cheek, but she made no move to wipe it away. Tyvan waited.

  “I hate you,” said Bat-Levi. Her chin quivered, and another tear slid to join the first. “You know, I really hate you.”

  Tyvan nodded.

  Bat-Levi drew in a shuddery breath, used her good hand to smear away tears. “Well, you got me, didn’t you?”

  “What did I get, Darya?”

  “I’m talking about Halak, but…I’m talking about me. That’s it, isn’t it?” she asked then continued, without waiting for a reply, “That’s why I came a day early. This is all about me, my armor, my guilt. This is all about Joshua.”

  Her eyes tracked left, to the floor. Neither of them spoke for a few seconds. The clock ticked.

  “Well,” said Bat-Levi, and then she looked Tyvan full in the face. “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you’ll tell me,” said Tyvan, simply.

  Chapter 15

  Bat-Levi’s day hadn’t started well. She’d tumbled into bed at 0200, tumbled out at 0530, and gulped sour replicator coffee before dashing off to meet Joshua at the slip where the Lion was docked. And now the generator was acting up, and her nose itched. Absently, Bat-Levi brought up her left hand to give her nose a good scratch and was rewarded with the solid thud of her gloved hand colliding with her helmet. She cursed, silently. If Joshua weren’t in such a hurry to get underway, she wouldn’t be in this pickle. She’d never gotten used to EVAs, even though they were required at the Academy because, dollars to doughnuts, put her in a tin can, turn on the air, and she was guaranteed to have to scratch something, every single time.

  Bat-Levi blew out, her hair fluttering away from her forehead, but an errant strand glued itself to her sweaty cheek. She wiggled her mouth, trying to dislodge it. Instead, she only succeeded in getting the hair lodged under her tongue. Damn. She tried spitting out. The hair stayed put. Her own fault: She’d been in such a rush she hadn’t secured her hair before ducking into her suit. And she was practically drowning in sweat. She was always so damned hot in her suit, no matter how low she cranked the temp. She made some pfft-pfft spitting sounds.

  “What’s that?” Joshua’s voice was tinny inside her helmet. “What’s going on down there?”

  “Nothing.” A finger of sweat crawled down Bat-Levi’s back. Hair plastered her tongue. “I’m fine.”

  “You sound grumpy.”

  “Well, I am grumpy,” she said, talking aroun
d hair. She gave up trying to spit it out. “You and your stupid generator.”

  “Hey, this is your baby, too.”

  “My baby.” In vacuum and weightless—and thank goodness for that, because among the many other things she hated about EVAs was how robotic the suits made her feel—Bat-Levi grabbed a handhold and pulled herself over to the panel behind which lay the influx particle siphon of their emissions generator. “I have news for you, Jock-o. While you’ve been hatching your latest scheme, I’ve been sweating it out at the Academy. You didn’t even come to my graduation.”

  “I was busy.” Bat-Levi heard the blip-bleep-blat of controls being keyed in. Joshua was at the helm of their ship, the Lion, while she went below deck, suited up, and cracked the magnetic airlock and hatch of a vacuum containment pod bolted to the ship’s belly. “Besides, I knew I’d see you sooner or later.” More bleats. “Anyway, what could be better than spending time with your baby brother, huh?”

  “Baby brother, my eye. By a whole two minutes, Jock-o.”

  “Hey, two minutes can be an eternity, like now. Are you going to get in behind that panel and tweak that intermix ratio, or are we going to hang out here all day, watching Starbase 32 doing a nice pirouette, way out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Coming,” said Bat-Levi. Joshua didn’t know about Devlin Connolly, and so he couldn’t know that she’d given up a week’s leave on Pacifica with Dev to work with Joshua. But Joshua was the one going full bore after the Cochrane Medal. Joshua had drawn up the specs for a self-replicating nanoparticle emissions generator. The theory was hers, using vacuum energy for fuel. (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle implied that even under conditions where all sources of energy—whether from matter, heat, or light—were removed, random electromagnetic oscillations remained. The most straightforward example of vacuum energy was the Casimir effect. Two metal plates, in close enough proximity, would come together because, as the plates blocked light energy from getting in between, vacuum energy pushed the plates together. Bat-Levi reasoned that if this negative energy, a limitless power source, could be harnessed into an electromagnetic bottle, it could substitute for the present-day warp drives. The energy to power the ship would come from space itself.)

  Joshua made the intuitive leap his twin sister hadn’t: If energy could be removed from space, could this same process open up fissures in space itself, creating gateways to other dimensional spacetime membranes and allow the ship to jump through the openings, like traversing wormholes?

  So their generator: a Casimir sink, on a much larger scale. The generator itself was housed in the vacuum pod in an attempt to keep the ambient conditions as close to the vacuum of space as possible (though not as cold). The glitch was that they still had to use present-day technology simply to move the ship around and to power the initial conversion reaction necessary to siphon away vacuum energy. Hence, the problem: The Lion was equipped with a warp drive, and the tricky part was keeping the intermix ratio of deuterons and antideuterons stable in the face of an influx of additional vacuum energy.

  Bat-Levi manipulated a set of Kelly bolts securing a metal panel over the injectors that controlled the nanoparticle plasma stream. The panel floated free, and she peered inside. The plasma was a dark cobalt blue and flowed like liquid, the way fire behaves in weightlessness.

  Joshua’s voice came again. “Well?”

  “Hang on,” said Bat-Levi. An array of prismatic grids, arranged in two series, deflected the plasma stream, funneling errant particles back toward their central nodal injector point. Each grid functioned independently, and she saw now that one wasn’t self-correcting quickly enough, creating uncontrolled power surges. Bat-Levi pulled a prismatic spanner from her waist and fiddled with the grid’s alignment. “How’s that?”

  “Not good enough. I’m still reading a five percent flux in the energy dispersal pattern. That just won’t cut it, Darya. You know we’ve got to maintain an even pattern of energy dispersion, or else we’ll rip out chunks of subspace.”

  “Heck.” Bat-Levi recalibrated her spanner and tried again. “Jock-o, have you ever considered giving this a little more time? The last simulator run, the generator did that little runaway surge, and this grid is just not cutting it.”

  “Yeah, but only for three-point-four-seven seconds.”

  “Yeah, and plenty long enough for our port nacelle to linearly accelerate twice as fast as the one to starboard.”

  “And I got it back under control. I know; I’m hearing you.”

  “And?” Bat-Levi paused, a Kelly bolt between her fingers.

  “And I don’t want to wait. Darya, you’re shipping out on the Wheedon in two weeks. We won’t get another chance, not unless you stay put.”

  Bat-Levi shook her head then realized Joshua couldn’t see her. “Sorry, Jock-o, I’m not putting off my vacation, even for you.”

  “You have something better to do?”

  Yes. Bat-Levi felt a twinge of guilt. “Let’s just say that I have other plans. Look,” she talked at the canopy over the pod, a habit she noticed all people in suits had: talking up into thin air, “you can do this without me, Jock-o. We’ll play around with the ship today, but if it’s not optimal, then you put it off. Run the test flight when she reads steady across the board.”

  “No. You’re part of this, Darya. I want you with me.”

  Bat-Levi decided not to argue. She checked the ratio of the influx of nanoparticles across the series of prismatic grids. The ratio fluctuated—enough so that Bat-Levi knew she’d have to make manual adjustments along the way. Not good. Maybe she should play with this longer, and to hell with Joshua’s impatience. But she was cooking in this damn suit, and she knew she couldn’t make the thing perfect.

  Working as quickly as her gloved fingers allowed, Bat-Levi bolted the panel back into place. Then she clambered into a small airlock, waited for the lock to repressurize, and scrambled out of the vacuum pod. Battening down the magnetic hatch located amidships, she keyed in her coded combination, waited for the iris to constrict and seal. Then she popped her top. There was an audible hiss, then the relatively cool, dry air of the shuttle hit her face, and she blew out a great breath of relief. Then she pulled the hair out of her mouth and gave her nose a good scratch.

  She spared a peak at the generator through a portal adjacent to the magnetically sealed hatch. All the generator’s indicators were green; the flow of nanoparticles appeared stable.

  After she peeled out of her suit and stowed it next to Joshua’s, she pattered up the gangway amidships to the upper deck. Joshua’s back hunched over the shuttle’s main control console. Bat-Levi squeezed her way forward to an auxiliary monitoring station. The Lion was a modified four-passenger shuttle, twelve meters stem to stern and six meters at its beam. With all that extra equipment crammed onto the main deck, the fit was tight.

  Joshua looked over as she dropped into her seat. “Ask you something?”

  Bat-Levi brought the readings on the nanoparticle emissions generator on-line. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the stability of the particle stream. That damn burp…She fiddled with an injector aperture and changed the collision angle by a tenth of a nanometer. “Fire away. What’s on your mind?”

  “You.”

  Bat-Levi didn’t look up from her readings. By God, this generator was fickle. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You met someone.” Not a question.

  That got her attention. She looked up and swiveled around to face him. For some reason, she felt a wave of embarrassment, as if her twin brother had caught her in a lie. She and Joshua were more than two peas in a pod; her father joked that they were probably as close to being telepaths as nontelepaths got. Yet, close as they were, she hadn’t told Joshua about Devlin. She wasn’t sure why. Privacy, maybe: Her love life was none of her brother’s concern. But the truth was that she felt, vaguely, like she was betraying Joshua.

  Bat-Levi looked into the face she knew almost better than her own. “Yes.”

  Jos
hua gave a contemplative nod. “I thought so. You haven’t been all here, you know? You’ve been a million kilometers away ever since you showed up two days ago.”

  Bat-Levi felt heat in her cheeks. “I hadn’t imagined it was that noticeable.”

  “I know you, kiddo. So what’s his name?”

  “Devlin Connolly.” Just saying the name caused a little tingle of excitement—and longing—to course through her. “Same year as me. He’s shipping out on the Kallman. We’d planned to take a week together before then.”

  “I figured. There’s something,” Joshua stirred the air between them with one hand, “in the middle.”

  “I was planning on telling you.”

  “Darya,” said Joshua, his face serious. His hair was even darker than hers and very curly. He finger-combed a handful back from his high, smooth forehead. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”

  “Well, we don’t usually keep secrets, and…”

  Joshua eyed her askance. “Speak for yourself. There are some pretty nice women I met at the Cochrane.”

  “Really?” Bat-Levi’s curiosity was piqued. She wondered what her parents, dynamic propulsions experts on the Cochrane’s faculty, thought about Joshua’s paramours. “What did Mom and Dad…?”

  “I don’t share everything. So, do you love him?”

  “I think so.” Bat-Levi nodded, relieved to tell someone. “Yes.”

  Joshua reached over and covered her right hand with his left. “It’s okay, Darya. Really. It’s good you met someone.”

  “Yeah?” Bat-Levi felt like crying. “You’ll probably hate him.”

  “Probably. Actually, it’s more likely Mom will. You know what she thinks about Starfleet…” Joshua caught himself, gave a rueful grin. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.” Bat-Levi swiped the wet from her eyes. “And it’s not as if there aren’t problems. You know, being posted to different ships, trying to coordinate leaves.” An Academy truism: Most relationships didn’t survive longer than the first six months after graduation. Bat-Levi wondered if other couples believed they would be the exceptions. She knew that she and Devlin did.