Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  Jo wondered what knowledge they had. Had they given him a blood transfusion as she suggested?

  The commander went on. “I owe you an apology. I have not been wholly honest with you, and it has become apparent to me that I haven’t been wholly honest with myself.”

  Jo wasn’t quite sure how to react to this. She wondered if this was some kind of last confession of a guilty soul before the commander died. That wouldn’t do at all, especially when she thought she might be able to make a difference, if only they would let her. She decided to be deferential. “What have you hidden from me?”

  The commander continued to speak, but he was starting to sweat, and Jo realized how much effort he was expending to speak with her. “How much do you know about Kree religion?”

  “Not much. I know that Timcree are a superst—” Jo caught herself.

  The commander finished the thought with only a hint of irritation. “…a superstitious people.” He fell silent for a minute, and Jo wondered if her interview was at an end.

  “Outsiders might think this, yes. I’m ashamed to say I’ve thought such things myself. I have been accused of being a Gravlander in a Kree body.” He moved his lips in what Jo thought might be a smile, but his sanguine face and obvious pain made it more of a grimace.

  The commander went silent again as he gathered his strength. “What looks like superstition to outsiders holds the Kree together. The galaxy has been hostile to the Timcree. Does it surprise you that the Kree would rather not see themselves as the leftovers of a society that is better? Our distrust of outsiders is hard-earned and thick. Should it surprise you that we think ourselves superior to humans? It’s a spiritual response to our rejection—a protective mechanism. Our separatism has helped us survive for hundreds of years. Where others would have died out, the Timcree still exist.”

  The effort to speak had clearly worn the commander out. He paused here and rested, letting his words sink in. I’m not welcome. Just being here breaks their taboo. Until this point, Jo had thought the Timcree fear of her presence was merely a kind of stranger fear. Now she understood it to be much more.

  The Timcree’s place as something other than human wasn’t a mere nod to their differences. “The same reasons that you attacked the Gallant and wouldn’t take the radiation shielding from the prince are the same reasons my presence is a problem.”

  Commander Kolas nodded slowly.

  Jo contemplated the Timcree woman across from her and saw her disdain in a new light. She also started to get an inkling of the difficulty of the situation. She guessed that any treatment she gave would be seen as exalting the humans above the Timcree—a way of reinforcing the fear that the Gravlanders were superior. Jo wondered how far the taboo went. She indicated the pregnant woman, who blanched at the gesture. “If she got sick … if I treated the baby, would it become taboo?”

  Kolas nodded. “Something like that.” Sweat beaded on the Timcree’s forehead. “You will learn more as you go, but yes, a child cured by a Gravlander would be tainted by the very cure that helped them.”

  Jo felt a lump rise in her throat. This is a total mess. How did you end up here? You’re such a fool. “I see. I assume you have a plan?”

  Kolas nodded again, slowly. She could tell he was almost spent from the effort to talk with her. The two words came as a whisper. “Train … Ardo …”

  6

  The Epidemic

  Six weeks into her apparently futile efforts to train Ardo Tanith in the basics of modern medicine, Jo’s hands started to shake. She felt desperately lonely, wholly convinced that she was making a mess of it all. She still hadn’t treated a single Timcree for so much as a hangnail.

  In the meantime, the epidemic had reached and passed a tipping point. The disease had gone from a chance happening for the few to a regular occurrence that had affected many households. The average Timcree had started to take note. Panic hadn’t yet taken hold, but unless something changed, Jo was sure that it wasn’t far behind.

  Today, she sat meekly in the corner of an ancient med bay, watching as Tanith took lessons from a Timcree healer. It galled her to no end to sit in the corner and watch. What she really needed to be doing was treating the patients spread out in front of her, but she couldn’t do that.

  It had taken her nearly two weeks after her arrival to put together that Tanith had been training to become a healer before Kolas had brought her to Korg Haran. Apparently he had been working as an apprentice for over five years. Jo—who had only studied medicine for four—was expected to somehow blend into this process of education. The problem was that her student wasn’t a clean slate. He came with a whole raft of backward and downright dangerous superstitions that could cost patients lives, and he wasn’t always amenable to changing them.

  If Jo were honest, Tanith seemed to be an eager student—although even that was hard to determine for her. He certainly made an effort to understand her Gravlander ways, but the language barriers between them drove Jo to distraction. They seemed to have made little progress on teaching him anything medical, and Jo had no hope things would improve anytime soon. Most of their time was wasted on trying to help Tanith understand the basics of English.

  The healer worked in a room that started out with twelve beds but now held fifteen. Tanith and the man flitted back and forth, half the time doing things like taking a patient’s pulse, which might have been put to good use if the other half of the time wasn’t wasted on nonsense like chants and incense. Jo was so frustrated that she had come to a place where the smell of cloves, cinnamon, and a whole host of other aromatic spices made her nauseous.

  What did I think was going to happen? Was I going to waltz in here and become the pirate queen of the Timcree? The unquenchable loneliness had given her time to think—perhaps too much time. As soon as he had healed enough to walk, Commander Kolas had returned to his ship and departed on his next voyage of trade and discovery. No one else in his clan spoke effective English. That left Jo with Tanith and six weeks of frustration. All she wanted was a simple, easy conversation.

  After her violent and chilly reception, Jo had been kept confined to Kolas’s quarters for almost four weeks. Finally, two weeks ago, she had started going with Tanith while he trained. At first Jo had worried about some kind of dramatic response to her presence in the public spaces of the mashed-together ball of Timcree ships, but she was completely mistaken. At least on the surface, no one threatened her at all, and as far as she could tell, no one threatened Tanith, either. Whatever happened when she first came aboard had apparently been left behind. Now she just felt invisible, as most of the Timcree ignored her completely.

  A funny rattling sound brought Jo back to the present. The Timcree healer had just thrown an odd set of irregular dice on a low table next to a very ill patient. He picked through them, muttering to himself before prescribing a spiritual treatment for what looked like a painful set of lesions that had appeared on a young man’s skin overnight. It was one symptom of a hundred random symptoms that Jo had seen in the two weeks she had been in the room to observe. The healer then went on to treat the same lesions with a dermal regenerator. In any contemporary hospital, the device would have been shunned, but when compared to the chanting, it seemed cutting edge.

  As she watched this display of superstition mixed with reasonable medicine, Jo wasn’t sure how much further she could go in her attempts to train Tanith. One thing that she had learned from her six weeks in Korg Haran was that the Timcree loved their chanted prayers. They had a chant for every occurrence.

  When done, the healer pronounced his judgment and treatment plan to Tanith. At least, that’s what Jo suspected from the few words she could comprehend. Then he reached over and took Tanith’s hand and placed it on the raw, newly-grafted skin. The ill Timcree winced but held his cry as the caregiver was admonished by the healer. Tanith nodded respectfully, then answered with a short, “Pa.”

  As soon as it was finished, Tanith turned and waved her toward the door. Jo
stood and quietly slipped out. Tanith joined her a moment later.

  “Come,” he said quietly. “There is something I must show you.”

  Tanith hurried down a set of corridors, in a direction Jo had never taken before. She was soon wholly at his mercy, with no idea how to return to the more well-used portions of the mash that made up Korg Haran.

  Jo never ceased to be amazed at the ability of the Timcree to tolerate disrepair. At one point she and Tanith crossed a narrow walkway, whose gravity field created a drop at least thirty feet down to the bottom of the vessel. Sometime long ago, the railing had been sheared off. Tanith crossed without a thought. Jo, not willing to be left behind, gritted her teeth and followed, palms warm and damp, feet cold.

  Eventually Tanith stopped before a door. In the weeks since she’d arrived, Jo was beginning to get a better read on how her Timcree hosts expressed emotions. Something in the wideness of Tanith’s eyes and the set of his shoulders told Jo that he was both proud and excited to show her what he had found. Hands clasped behind his back, feet spread a little wide, he waited while she caught up to him.

  “This place is good place for us. For you, me to make Timcree well.”

  Trying to hide how out of breath she felt, Jo just nodded. Tanith turned and keyed the door.

  The space on the other side of the standard-size sliding hatch turned out to be much larger than Jo anticipated. She stepped into a low steel-walled room whose bluish lights flashed and flickered as they lit. Tables, also steel, sat in tight rows over a grated floor. Along one wall ran a long bronze-colored window that Jo guessed to be one-way blast glass. Jo looked quickly between the window and the room and caught her breath. Stepping back to the door, she looked out into the corridor and this time noted the small cell-like doors that lined the outside wall.

  Jo froze, feeling the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. As she turned back, she crossed her arms under her chest, as if they would provide some protection from the history of this space. She moved slowly around the room, noting that the tables had all been welded to the grate below. She squatted next to one table, whose left leg bore the scars where magnetic ankle bracelets had rubbed the steel raw. Considering how bright the steel was, Jo didn’t dare think what the shackles had done to the occupants of the table.

  Standing up, she had no doubts they stood in the workspace of a sweat-ship. Tanith might as well have suggested they set up shop in a mausoleum. Drifting in international space, these ships had existed outside the reach of the law, at least until the Empire decided to put an end to the practice some two hundred and fifty years prior. Even then they had proven nearly impossible to find without an informant inside an operation. Many of the slaves had been human, some Timcree.

  Jo stole a long glance at the mirror at the end of the room. Just looking at it made her stomach squirm. Behind it, wholly inaccessible, the manager would sit. On this side, the workers toiled at a wide variety of menial tasks, almost all of them highly repetitive and often toxic or dangerous. The annual mortality among the workers on such a ship was thought to be something like ten to fifteen percent.

  Tanith must have noticed her looking at the window. “Yes. That where you sit.”

  The comment dragged Jo out of her horrified reverence and back to the present reason she stood in this room. “Pardon?” she said loudly.

  Tanith clearly didn’t understand the word or the question. He tipped his head slightly.

  Jo struggled for a moment with how to explain and then remembered the expression of surprise and distaste she had heard from the Timcree in Kolas’s household. “Prouk spenk?”

  Tanith only tipped his head more. Correcting her Kree, Tanith said in a low tone, “Prouk sbank.” He held his confused look for a moment before he spoke. “You not happy?”

  Jo shook her head. “No! Absolutely not. First, this is a horrible place. Does this place not have besh? Isn’t it poisoned?” As far as Jo could gather, besh represented all the bad stuff that could happen to the Timcree if they broke a taboo.

  Tanith raised his thin eyebrows. If possible, he looked even more confused. He spoke slowly. “No, no besh in this place.”

  “Why? Didn’t Timcree die here? Weren’t they killed here?”

  Tanith shook his head. His voice sounded easy. “No. Not Timcree ship. Workers all humans.” He even gave her a slight smile, a habit wholly unnatural to the Timcree but one Tanith seemed to be adopting when he tried to communicate with Jo.

  Jo didn’t know what to make of that. For a moment she shuddered.

  Tanith, thinking he had eased her concerns, continued forward with his introduction. He waved her back toward the door they had entered. “Come.”

  Jo followed in his wake, still completely uncomfortable with the whole idea but not sure if she had a rational reason or if this was just one of those irrational animal instincts. Tanith was right; the room could work as an isolation ward. It had the advantage of being far from other inhabited spaces. At least it has that going for it. She could still remember how her hand shook the first time she used a scalpel to intentionally cut into the skin of another human being. Maybe it’s something like that. I’m just spooked by it.

  Tanith led her back down the corridor the way they had come. A short way along, he moved off through a side passage full of steel doors, all of which had been forced or blasted open. One of them had been so badly damaged by an explosion that it was warped in its frame with an opening only a meter or so wide. All along the way, the walls had dark brown spots and patches that Jo at first thought might have been rust, until she saw a distinct handprint. Tanith stopped and turned to the right, where a small steel door stood open leaning on a single remaining hinge. Stepping inside, Tanith and Jo faced a long, blank glass wall that reflected their images when the dim lights of the control room flickered on.

  Tanith waved his hand over a dark panel near the control board, and the lights in the workroom flicked back to life.

  Jo looked around, confused. “How is this supposed to work, Tanith? How am I going to treat patients from here?”

  Tanith stepped over to one of the control panels near the window. He picked up two semi-clear plexi-fiber masks. Putting one on, he gestured for Jo to put on the second one. Jo looked at the device, which was so ancient that it still had a boom mike.

  Verbal input? Mother of God, how old are these things? I bet they have no cerebral interface.

  When the mask was on, Jo felt like she was seeing double. Her own eyes looked through the lens and saw the control board, the large window, and the room beyond. On the other hand, she also saw an image of herself. She faced Tanith, who turned and looked into the room. The half bright image in front of her eyes turned with him. Jo reached out and held on to the desk. She closed her eyes as her mind tried to decide which image matched reality.

  She took a deep breath. Well, at least I understand what Tanith is getting at. Out loud, she said, “Tanith, this will never work.”

  Tanith put his hand on her shoulder and stated matter-of-factly, “This will work. You tell me what I do, and I make patients better.”

  Jo stepped back, removing herself from Tanith’s touch. She took in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and tried to rub away the sudden pounding in her head. She tried to sound as firm as she could without raising her voice. She could feel the tension straining her throat. “No, it won’t. I have to be in the room with the patients if I am to treat them.”

  Tanith cocked his head to one side, his lean arms resting on his hips. “You no treat Timcree, Josephine. You treat them, they get besh.”

  The blunt revelation that even Tanith thought that she was some kind of spiritual plague for the Timcree broke that dam of frustration that had been building in Jo for weeks. Her breath became erratic, as if her lungs didn’t want to accept it any longer. Her shoulders heaved once, twice, and then shook, and she wailed.

  Tanith clearly had no clue what to do with the woman in front of him. At first he stepped back, then he tr
ied patting her on the back from a distance, as if she were somehow scary. When the gesture didn’t seem to soothe Jo, he stopped and slowly walked out of the room, leaving Jo lost and alone on a wide, uninhabited stretch of Korg Haran.

  Sometime later, the crying burnt itself out. Jo couldn’t say exactly how long, maybe an hour. Everyone always said that crying was supposed to make you feel better, but Jo decided that was total bullshit. If there was an opposite of cathartic release, this was it. Lost and entirely alone on a derelict sweat-ship, completely surrounded by uncaring and unfeeling Timcree, Jo sat without the energy to move, chewing on the nub of her own self-pity.

  The loud tick of something small scurrying across the floor far too close caused her to jump. She turned her head and saw a black rat with a long pink tail frozen not more than a few inches from where her left hand rested on the deck plating.

  Jo screamed and bolted to her feet.

  The rat fled.

  Jo burst into tears. Frustration that she was crying again only made her cry all the harder.

  No longer pinned to the floor by the black void inside her, Jo wandered aimlessly back the way she had come. Her lostness in the vast hulks of Korg Haran didn’t really bother Jo as much as she thought it might. Even with the Timcree around, she already felt completely alone. Actually, being by herself felt truthful in some weird way, and it just seemed to remove a bunch of obstacles that only rubbed that loneliness in her face. Jo stopped. She considered just sneaking away to hide forever. Korg Haran had huge portions of unused space. It wouldn’t be that difficult.

  It was the thought of her medkits left in Tanith’s old room that kept her threading her uncertain way back toward habitation. She couldn’t stand the thought of the Timcree pawing through them and dividing her things—the Ghost Fleet’s things, she corrected herself—for themselves.