The Lonely Whelk

by Ariele Sieling

  The monkey pointed forward, and she followed, doing her best to avoid the low-hanging branches. She stepped over logs on the ground, crushed smaller plants as she stomped them down, and got whacked in the face by trees that seemed to want to destroy her.

  “How much farther are we going?” she demanded. Of course the monkey didn’t reply; he only kept pointing.

  Hazel walked and walked. She was beginning to feel tired… and how far away was she from her shop – from home?

  When they reached a clearing, the monkey began to make chattering noises. Hazel paused, and for no conscious reason, she looked up.

  Above her was a ceiling of windows shaped like octagons and pieced together in a sort of dome. Through it she looked out into the most beautiful sight she had ever seen: the sky. Innumerable stars twinkled in the massive darkness of space that suddenly seemed to weigh on her like a thousand elephants. A closer star burned brightly, but only as brightly as it might look from a distant planet.

  “I think...” Hazel dragged in a few lungfuls of air. “I think I’m in space.”

  For a moment, she dragged her eyes away from the marvelous and terrifying sight to look around the little clearing. A bench was propped against a tree and the grass looked as though it had been recently mowed. Then the reality of it all hit her. She was on a spaceship, in space, a million billion miles from anywhere, and she was wandering around the apparently deserted ship following the whims of a monkey. And she began to laugh at the absurdity of it, at the fear, at the terrifyingly real realization that she was completely alone. But perhaps it was worth it. One day, if she didn’t die out here, one day she would have quite the story to tell.

  The trees on the path were unfamiliar to Hazel. Most were green and looked wonderfully thick and healthy, but some had red outlines on the leaves, and some had solidly silver-coloured leaves. The branches on the trees varied too. Some looked as if they had grown naturally, but others appeared to have been shaped and designed somehow. One tree even looked like it had a face etched into its bark.

  She scowled at it, daring it to say anything – or to do anything. Then, remembering the monkey around her neck, she took one more glance at the sky and said, “Okay, monkey, where to next?”

  The monkey chattered and pointed towards a narrow path leading out of the clearing.

  Hazel took a deep breath and strode forward, and began to hum quietly. It was the song her father had taught long, long ago:

  If you don’t know what to do

  Take a step forward

  When you don’t know what is true

  Or what you’re moving toward

  Just take a step forward

  And you’ll learn something new.

  All she had to do was keep moving, one step at a time, one minute at a time, and eventually she would end up somewhere. Good or bad, strange or familiar, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she pave her own way.

  At first she thought she was dreaming.

  Then she heard the singing. Perhaps she was imagining it, a long-lost song haunting her from her memory. But then it got louder; it was a strange, lilting tune, a little less like singing and more like humming. Holland stood slowly, her feet still tingling from the aftereffects of stasis. Long jarring bolts of pain shot up her legs. Her head hurt, and her throat was dry, and more than anything, she wanted something to drink. She took a deep breath and pushed the pain from her mind, focusing instead on the unusual sound emanating from the hallway.

  She stumbled forward painfully, and opened the door to the bridge.

  “Hello!” Holland called. “Hello! Who’s there?”

  The humming noise stopped, and she heard a reply. It was a female voice, but she couldn’t understand the words.

  “Hello?” she repeated.

  The voice replied again, this time louder. It seemed to be coming towards her at a much more rapid pace. Then she heard the echoing of footsteps from the end of the hallway. Holland remembered that the effect, built in deliberately by the ship’s architect, was a safety feature, so that anyone in the bridge could tell when someone was approaching and have time to react.

  About two minutes later, a young woman appeared. Flaming red hair fell over her broad shoulders, and a monkey was draped around her neck.

  “Who are you?” Holland asked.

  “Hazel,” the woman replied. She paused briefly, pointing at herself, and then began to speak again in unintelligible syllables. Holland held up her hand and interrupted.

  “Hazel. I’m assuming your name is Hazel, although, since I can’t understand you, I can’t imagine how you could understand me. I am the Admiral of this fleet of vessels, and I have a very important question for you: how did you get on board?”

  The woman looked around for a moment, silent, and then opened her mouth.

  “I suppose it won’t do any good,” Holland interrupted again. “Since I can’t understand you.”

  Waving her hands and shaking her head, the woman began to speak loudly. Then, she picked the monkey up from around her neck and tried to hand it to Holland.

  “I don’t want it,” Holland said, gripping more tightly to the doorframe. “It’s a...” Then she leaned forward. The monkey had a small blinking red light behind its ear. “It’s a shipbot?”

  She reached one arm forward and the monkey scrambled up onto her shoulder instead. “You’re a shipbot! Where in the name of the goddess’ bloomers did you come from? I thought Squeak was the only shipbot.” She reached down and grabbed the monkey’s tail, and flipped open the tip. Inside was a small switch. She flipped it and commanded: “Translate.”

  The monkey began to speak in a robotic voice, “My name is Hazel and I can understand you but you can’t understand me and I don’t know how to communicate with you do you have any idea where we are because I don’t know where I am and I don’t know how I got here.”

  “Oh, my!” Holland exclaimed. “What do you mean you don’t know how you got here?”

  “The monkey can talk?” the monkey-robot-translator stated in monotone, although the girl’s face showed extreme surprise.

  “Yes,” Holland replied. “Now answer my question.”

  “Well,” the robot-translating-the-girl replied, “I have a tourist shop that moves around randomly, and somehow it ended up here. But where is here?”

  “This is my spaceship, the SIV Whelk,” Holland replied. “We left Sagitta approximately six hundred years ago.”

  “Oh,” Hazel replied. “Well, I left Earth about three hours ago, I guess.”

  “Earth?” Holland paused and put her hand on her forehead. How could this be happening? Maybe she was hallucinating as an after-effect of the drugs that caused the extended sleep. “Earth is a model for cultural development,” she muttered. “I didn’t think its people could leave the surface of the planet.”

  “We went to the moon,” Hazel offered.

  Holland began to feel light-headed. “I see,” she said. “I think I need to sit down.”

  She began to hobble back towards the chair.

  “Do you need help?” Hazel asked.

  “No, I’m fine.” What to do about a possible stowaway or intruder or invasion or hallucination or whatever she was… Unfortunately, there were radically different solutions for each of those possibilities, and Holland barely had enough strength to stand, let alone fight off an intruder or invasion. A stowaway she could handle. A hallucination, well...

  “As long as you’re here,” Holland began, raising an eyebrow, “and since you seem to be relatively harmless for the moment, I’m going to put you to work.”

  “Of course!” Hazel nodded. “Anything I can do, just let me know. But eventually, I just want to go home.”

  “I can’t help you do that until I get my ship under control. The first order of business is to wake up the rest of the crew.”

  “How do we do that?” Hazel asked.

  “Follow me.”

  The trek to the coffin room was painful. Ev
ery step felt like a massive spike was being driven up her legs, and the feeling of pins and needles was so intense that she imagined small stinging insects crawling all over her skin. In addition, her breathing became short and difficult – she hoped something wasn’t wrong with her respiratory system.

  She reached out to open the door to the coffin room.

  “This is a creepy room,” said the girl in monotone robot voice.

  Holland looked over her should to see Hazel gazing at the coffins that lined the walls, each with tubes and wires reaching out of one end. Holland nodded in agreement. She also felt – and had since long before she had left on this trip – that aside from the coffins, the room had a discomfiting feel, as if the walls were a little too short and the ceiling a little too wide, like they were standing in a three dimensional trapezoid.

  “I need you to help me wake up my crew,” Holland said. “Each coffin contains one person, and each person in this room is crucial to the managing the ship. We will be arriving at our destination in less than three weeks, so I need my crew awake and ready to work.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Hazel wandered over to a coffin and touched it gently with one hand. Holland had the strong feeling that she was reenacting a weird dream from her own period of stasis.

  “It’s so strange, so unreal,” Hazel continued. “I mean, real live sleeping people... waking from the dead? It’s like a combination of a post-apocalyptic dystopia and a fairy tale. What if they’ve been infected by an alien virus and are zombies when they wake up? Or what if they’ve all had an overdose of whatever you inject them with and are suddenly super smart or something?”

  Holland ignored the speculating and began to explain the process. “To open the coffins, you begin by turning the wheel at the end.” Holland pointed to the nearest coffin, and Hazel obediently walked over to it. The wheel squealed and creaked as it turned, and the lid began to rise slowly. “The computers have already started the process of waking them. It takes care of their med packs and injects them with the necessary chemicals and nutrients for successful waking. Some people may already be awake when you open the coffin.

  “Each coffin has the name of its resident,” Holland continued, “so you will know who they are when they awake. The first person you wake can help you read them. After the coffin is open, you will need to switch the med-feed from the stasis pack to the waking pack. Since, as I said, the computer has already started the revival process, they should all be waking up as you open the lids. Few should still be asleep, and those Nurse Sammy will attend to as soon as she is able.”

  “What is the name of the person in this box?” Hazel asked.

  “His plaque reads, ‘Pilgrim Overwall,’“ Holland replied. “He is a good friend of mine, and after he can walk, he can help you with the others. I am going to go back to the bridge, to get a few other things done.”

  A groan came from the coffin.

  Holland hobbled over. “Hello, Pilgrim,” she said smiling. The skin on her face felt stiff; it had been a long time since she had smiled.

  “Hey there, Admiral.” His voice cracked. “Has it been six hundred years already?”

  She smiled. “That it has, Corporal. This woman is Hazel, and she is going to help you wake up the crew. That shipbot will be translating. I will explain everything later.”

  “Aye, aye!” He gave a very floppy salute.

  Holland smiled and turned to Hazel. “Please hurry,” she said.

  Hazel nodded, wide-eyed, and Holland turned and left the room.

  The walk back to the bridge was just as painful as the walk to the coffin room had been, but the pain was changing. The pins and needles had largely worked themselves out at this point, and now it was mostly the loud, agonizing pain of muscle disuse. She knew that there were a series of stretches that were supposed to help this condition, but she didn’t know what they were and the head nurse on board was still asleep. Besides, she had far more important things to worry about than sore muscles.

  She sank into the chair in front of the bridge console, sighing with relief. It would be nice to have some time to sit. She pulled up the ship’s logs. Five, including one of Hawkings explaining his death, were red-flagged as important; one was green-flagged as personal. She swallowed, and then selected the oldest of the red-flagged video logs.

  “Good morning, sis!” Hawkings’ cheerful face appeared in the monitor. “I probably look awfully cheerful for a red-flagged video. It’s because... well, it’s because this morning was horrible, but we still made it through. We’re all still alive. Can you believe it’s we made it nearly the full 600 years without a red-flagged video? I have to say, I’m getting excellent at Jingle Cards, although Lady Mastin can still beat me most of the time.

  “Anyway, this morning we went through what we thought was an asteroid belt. It was not. Instead, it was a series of alien weapons designed to look like asteroids – a minefield, of sorts, but for ships. Our shields took quite a beating, and at one point I had to wake up Thompson to have him do repairs.”

  Hawkings’ face grew solemn. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “we were too late. During the attack we lost power in Corridors three, five, and seven. Now that the power is back, we have frozen the bodies so they can be properly cared for when the ship arrives at the planet. We will also hold a funeral service as soon as we can.

  “The aliens haven’t come after us, so we think the field was just a remnant from an old war that we weren’t a part of – so that is a positive thing, at least. But it doesn’t make up for the lives of our people that were so horribly lost. I’m so sorry, Holland.”

  The video ended.

  The next red-flagged video was the funeral service. Holland didn’t think she could watch that right now. Her head ached with the pain that came from holding back tears, and the deep ache of sorrow permeated her every thought and motion. The other two videos were the deaths of Lord and Lady Mastin. She didn’t want to watch those either. Due to the disaster with alien technology, the voyage had not gone particularly smoothly, and the colony would suffer for it. Now it was her responsibility to make the rest of the voyage and colonization go according to plan.

  She gazed up through the windows into the vast darkness of nothing that surrounded them, in which massive world-eating and world-birthing stars were merely pinpricks in the distance, and sighed. Then, slowly, she opened the last video. It was the one marked personal. It was Hawkings.

  He glanced over his shoulder as he leaned into the camera, and in a hushed voice began.

  “Holland,” he said, “we have received word from Sagitta. Johann has died.”

  Holland hit pause and gasped, a deep gasp of air wrenching through her lungs and throat like a knife. A tear squeezed from her eye, despite her desperate effort to keep her emotions from completely incapacitating her. Johann – dead. Of course, it was bound to happen. How many centuries had gone by during the time that she was traveling near to the speed of light? What kind of life had he had? Had he been married, had other children, lived fully? She had known when they split up that this would happen; she hadn’t realized it would hurt so much. She took another rasping breath and hit play.

  “He died from old age,” Hawkings continued. “He worked as a philanthropist from the money you sent him, and because he had no other children when he died, he donated everything that was left to an orphanage in the name of you and your son. And of course, you’re going to ask – why an orphanage, and not a research facility? It was because he met a young man at one of the orphanages who reminded him strongly of your son, and he felt the money could be spent supporting children just as well one way or another.

  “I’m sorry you’ll be getting bad news when you wake up, but I knew you would want to know. They sent his digital possessions, photographs, letters, etc., in a massive file which I’ve downloaded under your name, and protected with your access code since he had no other living relatives.”

  He paused for a minute, glanced behind
him again, and leaned even closer to the screen. “Sis, I know it’s going to be rough, getting all those people down onto the planet and settled and organizing a governmental system, not to mention surviving in general, but if anyone can do it, it’s you. You’re like a slither-horse in a saltwater stream – you can take any problem the universe decides to throw at you. I love you.”

  The video ended.

  Holland dropped her head into her hands. It was too much. She had barely started and she was ready to quit.

  But he thought she could do it.

  Hawkings was dead. Lord and Lady Mastin were dead. Her own husband was dead. Twenty-eight thousand good people dead. She had so much grieving to do, and not enough time to do it.

  Holland took a deep breath and pushed her pain, her tears, and her emotions as far into the back of her mind as possible.

  “Computer,” she stated clearly. “Begin the waking process for all medical personnel.”

  “Waking process initiated,” the computer replied.

  “Don’t begin any other processes until I give the word,” she ordered. She hoped the computer wouldn’t just start doing things, but Lady Mastin’s voice made her a little nervous.

  “Acknowledged.”

  Her job – she would focus on her job, and worry about being sad later.

  Maxwell strolled slowly from the house to the Globe – he had the rest of the day to complete his assignment, after all, and it was only lunchtime. He linked arms with Maddy and smiled as he enjoyed the pleasant weather.

  “I think it’s a hot dog day,” he said to Maddy. She agreed, of course. She always did. It was like she could read his mind.

  He headed to Dalmatian Park, where the hot dog man sold hot dogs to people and dogs alike. It was always bustling, and he felt home in a crowd of people that didn’t know him. He felt special, knowing that he carried secrets untold to any man (Maddy didn’t count, as she was a woman).