Love and Other Metals

by K. P. Redmond

  The consoles are lit with graphics and soft buttons to control the ship’s systems. There are only a few physical switches, but they are big and important, colored in combinations of yellow and red. Most have safety covers to prevent them from being activated accidently. They have labels like control module disconnect and emergency power off. In other words, don’t touch.

  The seats in here, like in all the weightless areas, are really more like saddles than chairs. They don’t need to support any weight most of the time; they just hold you in one place so you can work. I flash back to the movie Blazing Saddles, which I watched years ago on a whim, wanting to see a western movie. Turns out it wasn’t much of a western. Race jokes, beans and farting mostly.

  The captain’s and first officer’s consoles are at the front, left and right respectively. Katya and I float over to the captain’s console. She sits on the saddle and walks me through the vast set of screens that can be brought up on the displays. She explains that the captain’s station is the only one with a slot for the command token: a small chip that the captain inserts when she boards the vessel and takes with her when she leaves. The brief tour makes me appreciate the sheer complexity of the Allgood’s many systems. I got a new respect for Captain Jemison and First Officer Nastez. “So are you ready to drive this thing?” jokes Katya.

  “Not yet ma’am. Maybe someday,” I reply.

  “Well, don’t let it intimidate you. I know you’ve learned all about spaceships in your coursework; now you just have to learn how it’s put into practice.” Katya has just come off watch so she can’t spend much time with me. She heads out for her well-deserved rest.

  It’s Red Team’s time for the watch, which is me and Nastez. He comes in and sits at the co-pilot’s console while I explore the instructional screens on the engineer’s console. Sometimes I’ll ask a question, sometimes Nastez will lower himself to answer; most times he just gives me a look like are you kidding?

  A few hours go by. Nastez is upside down on the ceiling with a light strapped to his head, digging into an electrical chassis pulled out of its rack. He had said that the chassis got broke last mission, taken out by a solar flare. He’s having a quiet talk with his diagnostic meter as he probes the circuitry. He’s good at talking to machines. Seems to prefer them to people.

  Finally, between him and the meter, they find what they’re looking for. “Hey Yuuta,” he says, looking down at me from above, “go get me one of these. There should be some in the electronic stores in the wayback; just this side of the redoubt.” He flicks down a small plastic bag; I reach out and catch it. I pull the tiny chip out of the bag and use my wristy to magnify it and read the number. The chip is brown and burnt and the numbers are yellowed but still visible.

  I float my way back past the galley, docking chamber and pivot room to the stores area and quickly find the part; I’m back on the flight deck with the replacement inside of ten minutes. Nastez has the new part installed in the chassis within another ten. But he can’t slide the chassis back into the rack.

  “Yuuta, come here,” he says, “I can’t get this unit to slide back in. Get over on the other side and tell me what you see.”

  I release my strap and push off towards him, positioning myself on the other side of the chassis. I don’t got a headlight but I peer into the rack anyways as Nastez tries again and again to push in the chassis; each time the chassis is stopped by something that makes a clacking sound. I look around behind a strut where the sound was coming from.

  “I see it,” I say, “there’s a washer wedged in here. Give me a second.”

  I snake my hand in behind the unit and try to get a grip on the washer; I can’t see in the tight space so I have to go by feel. The washer is too far in to grip but after a few tries I’m able to pry it from its tight little nest by using the fingernail of my index finger. Getting the washer all the way out is the next step but at least it’s no longer wedged in.

  “Ah, good, OK,” I say, happy to finally get the thing moving.

  Thinking I meant OK you can push it in now, Nastez gives the heavy chassis a shove on its railing. It slides in all right, right into the palm of my hand, jamming it between the edge of the cabinet and the back of the chassis. “Yeow,” I cry out, “Not yet! Damn!” My hand is bleeding like a sheep on harvest day, launching a steady stream of big wobbly spheres of blood into the air.

  “You really should be smart enough to not say OK unless it is OK,” he says, contempt on his face. He pulls the chassis back out, then hands me a clean rag to soak up the blood. He keys his wristy: “Katya, come to the flight deck ASAP with your med kit. Recruit Yuuta has a bleeding laceration on his hand.”

  I wrap my hand in the rag while Nastez floats around to catch the messy gobs of blood that have been blooming from the cut. Caught in the slight but chaotic breezes of the ventilation system, the blobs gleefully lead Nastez on a chase around every nook and cranny of the cockpit. After many expletives Nastez perseveres and catches each one in a cloth.

  Katya arrives on deck within minutes, obviously pulled out of a coma, her eyes sleepy and her hair askew from its usual tight bun. It’s actually a good look for her. No way am I gonna say anything about it. Nastez explains what happened to Katya, somehow making it sound like it was my fault.

  “Hmm, nasty,” she says, pulling back the rag to expose the wound on my hand. The bleeding has slowed down but the blood globs continue to grow and threaten to break free from the cut. “You need stiches. Let’s go back to the clinic where we’ve got some gravity. With all this blood, working on it here will make a mess.”

  We float back to the pivot room, me pulling myself along with one arm and she following behind like a protective mom. We take the spoke that leads to the clinic, with me awkwardly pushing myself onto the elevator belt with only one functioning hand. It takes a while but we get there. The clinic is small but well equipped. It smells like medicine. Katya’s tells me to lie on the table. She lays out her equipment and sticks me with a syringe to numb my hand. Her long fingers are gentle inside their purple plastic gloves. Within seconds I can’t feel nothing from my hand.

  “Officer Nastez cut you pretty badly,” she says, as she pulls the needle through my skin in the first in a series of tiny stiches.

  “It was my fault. I said OK when I freed up a piece of metal, kinda to myself, and he was thinking I meant to push the drawer in. Just a dumb mistake.”

  She looks up at me. “No, it wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t take the blame unless you deserve it.”

  “Well, I…”

  “These things happen, just an accident. Nastez doesn’t strike me as a person who would intentionally cut someone, but I don’t think he’s a very good listener either.”

  I nod, happy for the change of tone. “Or he could be Jack the Space Ripper,” I say.

  “Ah. It’s a good theme for a melodrama: The Curse of the Cutting Cosmonaut.”

  “That makes me the damsel in distress, I reckon.”

  She giggles. “This hand is probably going to hurt for a while; there are lots of nerves in this area. I’ll give you meds that will help with the pain.”

  “OK, no big deal. I won’t need much.”

  “Well aren’t you the brave one,” she says with a little giggle. Her teeth are perfect. She should smile more often. But I ain’t going to tell her that.

  “Me? No, not hardly,” I say.

  She finishes up by tying off the stiches and pressing some biotape in a neat little line on top of the wound. She feathers the soft but tough tape in so finely that it almost seems like part of my hand.

  She hands me a small bag of pills and a sippy full of water. “One now, then one every six hours. These should last a couple of cycles. If you need more than that, talk to me, OK?”

  I pop a pill and take a sip. “Yea, OK but like I said, no big deal. It’s just a little cut.”

  She grins. “Carry on, Recruit.”

  I head out of the clinic and up the belt, smiling.
It’s nice to get the attention of a pretty woman, so hurting my hand weren’t all bad, even if she is way out of my league. Most every woman is. By the end of the mission she’ll probably hate me anyways.

  The biotape protects my palm so I can use my hand OK but the ride up the belt is still awkward because my brainpan thinks there ain’t no hand there. Like my arm ends somewhere around my upper wrist. Weird. But I manage, and after a bit I hit weightlessness and everything gets much easier. The pill Katya gave me is even making my last souvenir of Shacktown—my bruised ribcage—feel better.

  I have a little time left on my watch so I head back to the flight deck. But on the way back to the cockpit, Louis is waiting for me in the docking chamber. He’s ain’t his usual goofy self. He’s actually giving me the stink eye. “Sounds like you and Katya really hit it off,” he says.

  “She bandaged my hand. See?” I hold up my bad hand.

  “Yea well I could hear you two laughing up a riot from here.”

  “Uh huh. So what?”

  “I have my own plans for Katya, that’s what.” He moves up close to me, in my face. “And I don’t need you meddling. So stay away.”

  I know I should keep a low profile and just him blow off steam. I know if I had time to think this over I would do something different. The boy is large. But I’ve got steam of my own and it erupts faster than I can think to stop it. Growing up in Shacktown, dealing with the tunnel gangs all my life, I’ve had to learn to fight to survive.

  “Meddling? You think getting my hand sliced and stitched up is meddling? You’re as flatline stupid as anyone Earth or Moon.” I push him on the shoulder, hard. That got him going. He’s red-faced angry and he looks like he wants to crush me but he don’t. He just takes it, looking like Satan on a hot day. That surprises me.

  My move was pretty stupid though, since we’re both weightless. Louis falls backwards towards the far wall. As for me, my body rotates and slams into the bulkhead behind me—I try to protect my face from the hard steel wall with my injured hand but wouldn’t you know the anesthetic chose this moment to wear off.

  Ouch, ouch, and ouch. I say a few other choice words too. But I’m all revved up so the pain don’t stop me—I bring my hands under me and push hard as I bounce off the bulkhead. Louis is already heading back towards me. He looks like he might hit me. I been hit by big guys before and I know what it feels like—I brace myself.

  But he don’t strike. He stops himself. What’s up with this guy? But I ain’t waiting for him to change his mind. I have the momentum and my legs are out between us. My kick catches him on the chin.

  Once again, he don’t try too hard to defend himself. Louis twirls ass-over-head and slams back into the far bulkhead as his feet catch an EVA helmet fastened there. The helmet jumps off of its hook and flies through the open hatch into the galley where it hits a row of ceramic sippies like a bowling ball hitting a set of pins. Bowling is a sport that is really only safe to do when you’re in gravity.

  The racket is deafening as the sippies shatter. Ceramic shards fly off randomly in every direction. The liquids from the containers form up into gooey blobs that scattershot into the air and splatter on every imaginable surface. “Nice work dumbass,” I say.

  Louis hangs there, wordless: me angry and ready to fight, him angry and not fighting and not avoiding fighting. I don’t know how to read him. Actually to be truthsome I don’t feel mad no more and I’m feeling kinda stupid. There we are, eyes locked but not saying nothing, until Nastez pops in to see about the commotion, shouting questions and floating this way and that to survey the damage.

  The chamber goes silent when the captain shows up and everyone is like hoo boy. Her piercing eyes survey the scene, taking in every blob and splatter and shard and blushing male face. She’s not saying nothing, just quieter than anyone should naturally be. I decide to get it over with. “It’s my fault, Captain. Things got out of hand. I pushed Louis. The rest was kind of a…kind of a chain reaction.” Louis looks at his toes, blushing. The captain looks hard at me. Everything, everyone is frozen. It’s a least a half-minute before she speaks.

  “Recruit Yuuta, go to your quarters and confine yourself there, after which you are promoted to Captain of the Head until further notice. Not a good start for you. Apprentice O’Neill you also are confined to quarters until further notice.”

  “Aye, Captain,” say Louis and me in unison. Louis avoids my eyes.

  “First Officer Nastez, front and center,” says the captain. Nastez floats in to the chamber and plants himself with his sticky boots facing her. “You are the officer of the watch, correct?”

  “Aye, it is my watch Captain.”

  “You are aware that having two young males unsupervised and fighting, to say nothing of the danger that flying debris and unsecured equipment in a pressurized spacecraft presents to the lives of this crew, is completely unacceptable, correct?”

  “Aye Captain, it is unacceptable.”

  “I would confine you to quarters also if I could afford to. As it is, I will have to settle for a reprimand to your record and a penalty levied against your profit share. You will submit a report on this incident to the ship’s server by next watch.”

  Nastez blanched. I recon that’s pretty serious, especially the penalty against share. Katya floats in after being interrupted from her sleep yet again.

  “Officer Navolska,” she continues, “you will assist Officer Nastez in cleaning up this goddam mess.” She looks around at all of us with cold fury and shakes her head. “That is all.” She rotates crisply and zips through the pivot room into a spoke with the agility of someone who has been in space a long time.

  Nastez clears his throat, clearly shaken. He glowers at me, now with an actual reason to hate my guts. “All right. We’ve been given our duties. O’Neil and Yuuta, head to your confinements. I’ll be interviewing each of you later. And honestly, what were you thinking?” He shakes his head and sighs. “Katya, you and I will get started with the cleanup. You other two, get out of my sight.”

  This is how I end my first watch aboard the Allgood.

  Confinement. I been sitting on my bunk in this tiny room for a good 24 hours. Katya was allowed to come in to reseal my wound and change the biotape, since my cut had re-opened during the fight and was making a bloody mess. But she didn’t say much—probably told not to. Nastez came in too and ripped me a new one. He now officially hates my guts. I ain’t never felt more alone in my whole life. Except when Pops left.

  I hadn’t noticed the thrumming sound of the carousel revolving around the pivot room when I was here before but now that my ears have attuned to the silence, every little sound is bugging me. It never stops, just a low shoosh shoosh every couple seconds.

  I’ve slept about as much as I possibly can. Now I have to deal with the boredom. The network is cut off in my room so my wristy can’t talk to the ship’s servers. Can’t send or receive messages from Macy and Mason. Nothing to read or watch or listen to and no games to play. Just plain white walls and the maddening, unceasing, never-ending sound of the carousel hub. Argg.

  I’ve been playing my guitar on and off, going over songs I’ve known for years. Just something to do. I don’t need the stupid network to play guitar. Thank god I brought it along. But each song I play gets more melancholy. I got nothing happy to play about. I just don’t belong here. I don’t belong nowhere. Just a fact.

  My hands stop moving and I wonder: how did I end up like this? Why am I always getting in trouble? I think back to my younger, happier days when I had family, living on the ocean. My memory ain’t too good that far back but I remember water—everywhere you looked. And tall buildings and sky. Hard to believe.

  But then the Alliance came in their ship and hoverplanes. People were running this way and that; everyone was afraid. And Pops was away on business. Don’t remember much about my ma; I remember she was worried but tried not to be, I remember her kissing me goodbye and crying and somebody putting me on a plane some woman h
olding me in her lap and getting off the plane in Brazil. It was hot and humid and the airplanes were loud out on the tarmac and the heat made wavy lines in the air.

  But me and Pops left Brazil for Luna a few days later. I think we had to leave or the Alliance would find us. I was only eight. Going to the Moon! I remember feeling so excited I wanted to burst. All Pops would ever say about Ma was that she was a hero and would come to us one day.

  We settled in to a little apartment in Shacktown. Pops was sad, I remember, but he was always working on something. He was going to make everything better. He was always in meetings, always making plans. He helped put together the first asteroid mining mission for the Consortium. They gave him the bracelet as a token of appreciation, made from the first batch of asteroid steel. It was a big banquet over at Tycho, and I walked with him up on the stage.

  I remember his rough face. I remember making fun of him doing his dance with that funny headset on. Not everything is as it seems, he told me. But I didn’t understand until he let me see what he was doing in his virtual world. It was the first time I had ever put on a virtual reality set. I remember him holding a circuit board in his hand—in his virtual world it was like a bluish-green plate with holes and projections as I recall, but my memory could be wrong—and he folded it like paper until it fit into the little box he was designing it for. Then he would pull down a virtual slate and scribble some equations, then the slate would vanish. It was like a game to him.

  With his hands moving this way and the visor and gloves and that bracelet jingling on his wrist, he really did look like a slow-motion dancer. But in the multi-colored wireframe virtual world in which he spent so much of his time, he was a creator, swimming confidently in an ocean of complexity I could not begin to fathom.