by Lucia Ashta
“Hold on,” Ilara said. “Where’s the water? I see plenty of things I imagine are foodstuffs, but where’s the water?”
“Oh. It’s right here,” Dolpheus said, holding up several containers of the stuff.
“Uh, how many of those are there?”
“Plenty,” he said. “I count seven, even one to spare.”
“Um, no. Nothing to spare. Are you sure that’s all there is?”
Aletox spoke up, “There’s enough for all of us. I made sure of it. Seven full containers.”
“Well, in that case, our number one problem just became water.”
“How so?” I said. “We have enough, and I’m pretty sure being in the middle of hostile territory when we don’t even know how we’re going to leave the transport machine is worse.”
“No, it’s not. Because if that’s all the water we have, we’ll be lucky—very lucky—if we manage to survive long enough to get out of this desert. You’d better start praying now that we ended up landing close to one of the edges instead of smack in the middle of it. Because the Sahara is huge. Huge. It’s not just desert, there’re also lots of rocky dry areas, emphasis on the dry. And we’ll need a shit ton more water than that if we don’t intend to die of thirst.”
“I don’t understand,” Kai said from his seat. “That’s enough water to last a few weeks.”
“Maybe on Origins it is, but not on Earth, and certainly not in the Sahara Desert on Earth.”
“Really?” I said. “As if we needed another complication.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry to say it, but this is definitely one really big complication.”
Dolpheus sank heavily into his seat. “How long will the supply we have last us?”
“I don’t know. If we drink sparingly, only drinking what’s necessary to survive and not to quench thirst, I’d guess we might have three days in this heat, maybe a little more. If everything goes well and we’re lucky and we’re close to one of the bordering inhabited countries, we might make it out of here alive. But if we’re in the middle of the desert, well, then... I don’t know. The Sahara Desert is so big it would take us far longer to traverse than our water stores will allow.”
Great, I said to Dolpheus. Just great. As if we needed more to deal with.
I know. The day just keeps getting better and better, he said.
Well, who knows? Maybe things will actually go well and smoothly for us for once.
Aye. Maybe, he said. I knew neither one of us believed it. I didn’t think there’d ever been a time in my life when everything went well and smoothly, certainly not since my mother left me. And Dolpheus hadn’t had it any easier than I had.
“From the looks on your faces,” Ilara said, “I guess we’d better hope for a miracle.”
“What’s a miracle?” Kai asked, sounding hopeful. “And how do we go about getting one?”
Ilara smiled, and I thought it was the most beautiful smile a woman could possibly have. “A miracle is when it seems impossible that something might happen, all the odds against us, and then bam, out of nowhere, a surprise. The impossible becomes possible, suddenly and inexplicably.”
We’re quite skilled at proving the impossible possible... Dolpheus said.
Hell yes we are, I replied, and Dolpheus rewarded me with a big, sandy smile. Even standing above him I could make out sand in the stubble of his beard.
Maybe we can do this after all.
You know us, I said, We’ll give it all we’ve got.
“So a miracle’s a bit like faithum?” Kai asked. “Doing what shouldn’t be possible but is? Like people who do faithum?”
“Is faithum like magic?” she asked back.
“I don’t know what magic is, we don’t have that word. But faithum is doing what’s beyond what most people believe possible. It’s working with the constructs of all life to create new possibilities.”
I liked Kai’s explanation of faithum. I really liked it. Because what he’d just described was what Dolpheus and I managed most days. We didn’t believe in the limits others imposed upon us. We didn’t believe we couldn’t do the things most other Oers thought they couldn’t do. We regularly tapped into the—what had Kai called them?—the constructs of life. We’d managed to tap into the matrix of all existence upon O as well as the matrix that formed our bodies. We did it regularly when we needed to transport. And Dolpheus and I’d recently managed to manipulate the matrix of a force field, and I’d even managed to dissolve crystalline handcuffs. All by working with the energies that already existed all around us to create new possibilities, new paths.
Olph, maybe we’ve been doing faithum all along and never realized it, I said. I’d always wanted to do faithum, I’d just thought that was something beyond what we’d managed to do. But as Kai described it, Dolpheus and I’d done faithum. Lots of times.
I don’t know Tan, maybe. But if ever there was a time to believe in ourselves and our abilities to bend and shape and move beyond the possible, it’s now. We’re on a fucking different planet, bro.
“So then, yeah,” Ilara was saying, “it sounds like faithum is like magic. If one of us could do magic, it’d be a lot easier to get out of the Sahara Desert. But magic isn’t real. Even miracles are rare and unforeseeable.”
She looked at me as I grinned.
“At least that’s what I thought... Can you do magic? Or faithum as you call it?” she whispered, awe already coloring her voice. “Is that a thing on Planet Origins? Is magic real? I guess if you can transport from one place to another on your own, that would be magic. So, can you do magic or faithum? Or can’t you?”
My grin grew. “Maybe.”
7
“Don’t be cocky, Tanus,” Aletox said, ever the voice of pleasantry and hope. “Don’t go filling the Princess’ head with stories you can’t live up to.”
“Hey.” Dolpheus rose to my defense before I could tell him not to. Each passing moment made me realize how little Aletox’s opinion of me mattered, regardless of the chance that he might have fathered me. If he was my father, there was little, if anything, of him in me. I’d make sure of it.
Dolpheus continued, “You have no idea what Tanus is capable of, and let me tell you right now, it’s a hell of a lot more than you, no matter what you think, even if you can design capsules that fling us violently through space.”
It’s okay, Olph, I said. Let it go. Remember that we don’t want to piss off Vikas vipers if we can avoid it. He’s not worth it.
Dolpheus respected my wishes and didn’t say another word, but his jaw was clenched against Aletox’s insults.
“Put a muzzle on your servant,” Aletox said. “Or I will.”
Damn. He was insufferable. “You’ll show my Arms Master the respect he deserves.” Or I’ll make you, I left off, even though I meant my silent threat. We might need Aletox to fly us out of here, but we didn’t need him as much as he might think. There were lines I wouldn’t allow him, or anyone else, to cross, and the urgency of our circumstances did little to alter that.
“Arms Master,” Aletox said, chortling, “As if that title means anything.”
“Can we just get going already?” Ilara interrupted. “I think we have bigger things to deal with than Aletox’s poor attitude. I’m anxious to see if we survive the day.” In her own subtle way, Ilara’d put Aletox in his place. Princess or not, the woman could use her tongue as a weapon, the smoother her words, the more she achieved.
“Aye, let’s do this,” Lila said, although it looked like the very last thing she wanted to do.
But she-dragons didn’t quit easily, neither did Dolpheus and me nor did Ilara. And Kai’d already proven more resilient than I could’ve hoped.
We’d drag Aletox along if we had to, and if he didn’t want to come, fuck him.
I examined our food supplies. “Ilara, should we take all of this? Will we need less food while on Sand if we need more water?”
“No, we still need food too. But water comes f
irst. Water before food. Let’s bring everything we have, as long as it’s not too much to carry.”
“Lila,” I said. “Do you think you’ll be able to carry a bag?”
“Of course I can,” she snapped.
“And you Kai?”
“I’m not even going to deign to answer that question.” This voyage across space had definitely brought out a side of Kai I hadn’t seen before.
“Ilara?”
She smiled.
I wouldn’t bother asking Dolpheus, and I wouldn’t bother asking Aletox, but for different reasons.
I grabbed the bags from their pocket in the supply panel and turned to toss them as I usually would. My throw was wobbly and off the mark, and none of the others, not even Dolpheus, managed to catch the bag aimed at them. “I guess we’ll have to do things a bit differently to accommodate our current limitations.” I circled the cabin, skirting the mess on the floor, picking them up. Bending over was more difficult than I expected.
I spoke to Aletox stiffly, “How long will it take for us to feel and behave normally again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh no. You owe us more than that. You’ve traveled in this machine enough for your body to grow used to it. What’s your guess, so we can plan out our survival?”
He crossed one leg over the other and put his hands over his knees. “Space travel affects every person differently. I really don’t know. It could last hours, or it could last days, or more.”
“Wonderful,” Dolpheus said. “More good news. The sooner we get out of this thing, the better. Because I don’t think I can take another piece of good news without doing something about it.”
He stood and joined me. I was already doing my best to load up each bag, fumbling a bit as I went.
Ilara unclasped her harness and stood slowly. I stopped what I was doing to watch her. I didn’t care if I felt as if I might fall over too. If she needed me to catch her, I’d leap across space to do it, even if it didn’t achieve the results I wanted.
She smiled a small smile at me that danced across her eyes. By the oasis, I could live in these smiles she kept offering me.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll wait until I’m steadier before I do anything.”
I nodded, took one more long look at her that had nothing to do with worry that she might keel over, and resumed packing.
“We’ll have to do something about this vomit,” she said.
“Why? Don’t we have more important things to worry about?” Kai asked. His voice was even. He’d joined us in the attitude of putting our focus where it’d make the most impact.
“Sure, Kai. We have really big things to address, though worrying’s never been my style. Better to move forward and let things happen instead of worrying about what might or might not be. There’s enough shit in this world—well, in any world I’d imagine—without adding worry to the mix.”
“So why think about the vomit? It’s not that big of a deal, right?”
“Right. Except for this. Imagine how long it might be before we’re able to return to this hellish spaceship. Then remember how hot it is outside. Now consider that the sun will bake whatever’s inside this thing the entire time we’re gone. And everything inside will be trapped, cooking, becoming more... fragrant. I don’t know what cooked throw-up smells like on Origins, but I can tell you that on Earth, it’s not pretty.”
“I see your point, truly I do. The return trip will be bad enough without adding foul odors to the mix.”
“My thought exactly.”
“So how do we clean it up? Are there cleaning supplies on this thing?”
“No need,” Ilara said before Aletox could answer, if he even planned to. His look implied that he was supremely bored with our amateur attempts to survive interstellar travel and exploration.
“I’ve been in enough bars to’ve learned that the easiest thing to do is sop it up with something, sawdust usually, but sand’ll do, then just sweep it out the door.”
“That’s a good idea,” Kai said. “It makes it easy.”
“Yeah. It looks like it all ended on the floor once gravity resumed—”
“Except for what’s on my pants,” Lila said.
“Too bad you’re wearing a lab suit instead of mutable clothing, huh?” Ilara jabbed, probably remembering how much grief Lila’d given her when she first transported from Sand to Origins and into my arms. At that time, she’d been wearing what she called jeans. Whatever the woman wore, she looked delicious in it.
Lila didn’t smile at Ilara’s jab, but she said, “Fair enough.” What? Had interstellar travel changed everyone’s attitudes? Kai and Lila’s? I liked the changes in both of them.
“Kai, do you think you could help me so Lila doesn’t have to move just yet?” Ilara asked.
“Sure,” he said, and stood as carefully as she had.
By the time they finished sliding the sand across the floor with their boots, collecting what we needed to dispose of by the door, ready to be pushed outside, Dolpheus and I finished packing up the food and water.
“What about a medical kit of some sort?” Ilara said, peering over my shoulder.
“Aletox?
“In the compartment in the top of that panel you have open.”
I found it and added it to my bag. “Is there anything in here we could use to help you?” I directed my question at Aletox, who still looked like he might pass out again at any time, but I didn’t turn to address him. I didn’t want him to misinterpret my attention for caring.
His answer was so long in coming that I finally did turn around to look at him; he avoided my eyes. He said, “No, there’s nothing in there that can help me.”
His words made me pause. Was there something going on with him beyond the effects of a bumpy jump across space? Because he was definitely hiding something.
“What about anything to shield us from the sun?” Ilara asked him, oblivious to the situation or pretending to be. “Extra clothing or cloth, tarps, umbrellas, blankets, anything.”
“I don’t know what half of those words mean, but no. Nothing like that.”
“How about anything else that could be useful we might not have thought of or mentioned? Is there anything else in this space ship that might support our survival?”
“No. That’s it.”
“All righty then,” Ilara said, arms akimbo. “Then there’s no reason to delay that I can see. Unless I’m missing something?”
Shaking heads around the capsule.
“So how do we hide this thing when we leave it?”
“That’s a very fine question, Your Majesty,” Lila said. “How indeed.”
I looked at Dolpheus. This was something we’d never done before. It was something I didn’t know if we could do.
But that had never stopped us from trying a single thing before.
8
Dolpheus looked at me and I looked at Dolpheus.
“You guys are doing it again, aren’t you?” Kai said.
“Doing what?” Ilara, standing next to me, asked. The only ones still seated were Aletox, stretched out in a relaxed posture which defied the urgency of our predicament, and Lila, who perched on the edge of my seat, gathering the strength to move.
“Mind speaking,” Kai said with a trace of admiration that reminded me that as soon as we had the chance, I’d like to teach him a bit of what he too was capable of.
I wished Kai hadn’t mentioned that Dolpheus and I were capable of mind speaking, because the only one of us that hadn’t absolutely known was Aletox. Although I realized I was likely fooling myself. Aletox knew plenty of things he shouldn’t have any way of knowing. Surely he might deduce that Dolpheus and I could mind speak, especially since we’d done it in front of him. Just because he couldn’t hear what we said—I hoped!—didn’t mean much with a mind as sharp as his.
Besides, Dolpheus and I were skilled at transporting, something few Oers could do. To transport capably, one had to ove
rcome any limiting thoughts and maintain a belief that everything was energy, including the human body, which could dissolve and reappear somewhere else, across the universe even, as Ilara’d proven. Thoughts and words were energy as well. From transporting, something Aletox claimed he’d taught me even though I had no memory of it, extrapolating that we could extend our thoughts beyond our own minds was easy—if you believed it could be.
That was the problem with the vast majority of Oers. They were hesitant to believe anything the monarchy didn’t tell them they should. This capsule housed a large portion of the minds on Origins—or not on O at the precise moment—capable of surpassing the limitations the Royal Court tried to impose. All of us, except for Kai, could transport, and I was certain he’d be able to as well, once I had the chance to teach him.
He might even be able to learn to mind speak, even though these things were best learned when the mind was younger, less set in its beliefs. And I still held out hope that this Ilara would be my Ilara and that she’d remember how she used to sneak into my thoughts to surprise me. It was a game between us, and I missed hearing her throaty laugh in my mind when I finally discovered her there, teasing, waiting. The greatest vehicle of arousal was the mind.
Ilara put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right, Tanus?” she asked. And suddenly I remembered myself, that I was perhaps supposed to be answering Kai’s question about mind speaking.
“Aye, I’m well.” But was I? Hell no. My calves were starting to tremble.
“So... where’d you go just then?” Kai asked. “Where you still mind speaking with Dolpheus?”
Dolpheus answered for me. “No, we weren’t mind speaking at all. We already know what needs to be done. The only question is: Will we be able to do it?”
“Do what exactly?” Ilara sounded suspicious.
“Why, make the transport machine disappear, or at the very least, disguise it so it’ll somehow avoid detection of course.”
Ilara and Kai’s faces settled into an identical expression, eyes round and wide, jaws slack. Ilara said, “You can do that? With magic? Faithum?”