by Linn Schwab
As they passed between what was left of the heavy cruisers’ hulls, Katrina stared at the wreckage and softly said, “Chirp.”
SAFARI 104
Morning sunlight poured into the abandoned structure through gaps in the wall that had partially collapsed. That’s the east wall, Karl reflected as the light warmed his skin. The wall that faces the edge of the forest.
When he opened his eyes, he saw JoEllen sitting cross legged on the floor a few paces away. She was fully awake and staring at him as if she’d been watching him sleep for some time.
“I see your planet spins in the same direction as Earth,” he said. “Either that or I slept through most of the day.” He propped himself up into a sitting position and noticed she was cuddling a rabbit at her chest while tenderly stroking its ears and fur. This intrigued him as it wasn’t a domesticated breed, yet it seemed to be perfectly content in her arms. It made him wonder not only how she’d caught it in the first place, but also how she managed to keep it so docile.
“Who’s your little friend?” he asked, as a grownup might inquire about a young child’s teddy bear.
She answered him with a knowing smile that implied she was too mature for that approach. “I don’t know,” she said, as if to mock him for asking such a childish question. She held the rabbit up to her face so she could look directly into its eyes. “What’s your name?” she asked in a playful tone of voice, then frowned at Karl and said, “He won’t tell me.”
Karl responded with a self-deprecating laugh, and said, “Alright, I apologize for the way that question sounded. It wasn’t my intention to belittle your intellect. But in my defense, I still have no idea how old you really are.”
JoEllen appeared to ponder that question for a moment, as if she was curious to know as well. “How old do I look to you?” she asked.
“Well,” Karl said, pausing to reflect, “it’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone as young as yourself, so my age gauge might be a little rusty. But you remind me of a girl I once kissed in seventh grade, so my best guess would be that you’re somewhere around twelve or thirteen.”
“Twelve or thirteen years?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “That would be Earth years, of course. But based on our observations of your planet’s orbit, one of your years is only two days shorter than ours, so I’d say my guess is still fairly close.”
The thought occurred to him now that he might be able to determine her age if he could find a common link between the two worlds’ calendars.
“Just out of curiosity,”, he said, “do you happen to know what year you were born?”
She pulled the rabbit close to her chest and sadly informed him, “Sentinels aren’t born.”
Suddenly he felt he had a clearer understanding of why she’d told him she didn’t have a family. “Not born, huh. So no mother or father?”
JoEllen looked down at the floor in silence.
“I see,” he said, expressing sympathy. “That certainly explains a few things. I’m curious, though, since you don’t have a family. Who named you JoEllen Robinson?”
She shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know. I can’t remember anything from when I was a baby.”
“So you were a baby at one point,” Karl mused. “That’s somewhat reassuring to know. You said you were eight when you ran away from the academy. Do you happen to know what year that was?”
Once again, she focused her thoughts on trying to recover an answer from her past. After a few seconds, she mumbled a phrase that apparently had stuck in her mind for some reason. “ECHO 4, First Battalion, four Q eleven,” she said. “I ran away in the year five hundred and eleven.”
“So obviously your world doesn’t use Earth’s calendar. Question is, what do your people consider to be year one. It could be the year they arrived at this planet. Or it could be the year they left Earth. Either way, I don’t think we can reach a firm answer. Unless we can find out what year it is now.”
He gave up on the thought and turned his eyes to the rabbit, just as a rumbling of hunger hit his stomach. “I don’t suppose he’s meant to be breakfast.”
She recoiled from him, shielding the rabbit with her arms, then reached behind herself and tossed him an apple. Acting on reflex, he caught the shiny fruit before he even recognized what it was. But the instant he realized what he had in his hands, he raised it to his mouth and sank his teeth in.
“Mmmmh!” he said as the juices touched his tongue. “It’s been so long since I tasted anything this good.” He looked at the rabbit and said, “No offense, little friend, but I’d take one of these over rabbit stew any day.”
JoEllen grinned and set the rabbit down. It hesitated only briefly, then hopped away through a hole in the wall.
“It seems you’ve been busy this morning,” Karl said. “Catching rabbits, and foraging for apples. Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”
“Because,” she said, “you looked like you were tired.”
He tried to loosen up the muscles in his back and his legs, and said, “Believe me, JoEllen, tired doesn’t even begin to describe it. But,” he said, pulling himself to his feet, “I think I can manage to eat while I’m walking. So let’s not waste any more daylight.” He invited JoEllen to lead him outside and took another bite of the apple she’d tossed him.
Side by side they set out in a southerly direction, over open ground covered in knee-high grasses. As they walked, Karl noticed she seemed to be distracted. She kept glancing at the sky as if something wasn’t right.
“You look worried,” he said. “Is something troubling you?”
She looked around at their surroundings, then skyward again. “The sun isn’t as bright as it should be,” she told him.
“Are you sure? My eyes aren’t nearly as young as yours, but it sure seems plenty bright here to me.”
She held her forearm out in front of her, allowing her skin to get a full dose of sunlight. “It should be brighter,” she said. “And the sun usually feels warmer than this.”
Karl looked up and said, “I don’t know what to tell you. There isn’t a cloud in the sky today. But I do know your sun still has a long life ahead of it, so I wouldn’t be too concerned about this. It could just be sunspots, or…” After readying himself, he looked directly at the sun for just an instant. “Okay, I think I know what’s causing this,” he said. “There’s something in between here and the sun. The outer edge doesn’t look quite as sharp as it should, so something must be blocking out some of the light. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, though. Just a dust cloud or something passing through space.”
The explanation seemed to satisfy JoEllen. Afterward they made better progress for a while.
The terrain they were crossing was relatively flat, with occasional small hills spread about randomly, and patches of trees where they could rest in the shade. JoEllen had a knack for locating fresh water. The area was blessed with a wealth of clear springs, so thirst proved not to be much of a concern.
At high sun they stopped at an acacia tree to rest, and snack on some seeds they found nearby. As Karl sat down and leaned back against the tree, he thought he saw a head peering at him through the grass, and wasted no time in alerting his guide.
“Umm,” he said to her, “I think we’re being watched. Are you sure it’s safe for us to be out here?” He remembered the rifles in the building they’d slept in, and wondered if he should have brought one of them along, even though the tranquilizer was probably useless after sitting unused for so many years. But if worse came to worse he could have used it as a club — assuming he still had strength enough to swing it.
Without uttering a word, JoEllen walked toward the intruder, showing not so much as the slightest trace of fear. Karl’s heart raced as he watched her advance until the beast in the grass was just a pace or two beyond her. A sudden lunge could topple her and pin her to the ground, helpless beneath the overbearing weight of her attacker, with powerful jaws firmly clamped around he
r neck. Squeezing. Crushing. Strangling her.
Fearing even the faintest sound might distract her, Karl struggled to keep his breathing restrained. Though her relationship with animals remained unclear to him, he didn’t dare do anything to break her concentration, for fear of placing both of their lives in jeopardy. On pins and needles now, he watched her reach out to some unknown creature concealed within the grass. From its hiding place, a head slowly rose into view, and a nose gently sniffed at JoEllen’s hand. But it was not the type of head to strike fear into Karl, and all at once he was free of his apprehension. He could tell by the length of the animal’s ears that this was clearly not the head of a large carnivore. And when JoEllen finally managed to coax it to its feet, he recognized the beast immediately. Kangaroo.
Sucking in a deep breath now, he tried to relax. Every inch of him was shaking, from head to toe. While it was good to know his adrenal glands were still functioning, he wasn’t sure if his heart could stand up to the abuse.
“That was shear terror,” he complained to JoEllen. “Couldn’t you have just told me what was hiding there?”
She giggled while stroking the animal’s ears. Much like the rabbit she’d been cuddling earlier, the roo seemed perfectly at ease in her presence.
Karl wondered if there was something about their environment that made the animals here so easily approachable. Perhaps there just weren’t any predators around, which might also explain JoEllen’s lack of concern in that regard. “Don’t the animals on this planet fear anything?” he asked her.
“Of course they do. You just have to win their trust.”
“Well, you certainly do seem to have a talent for that. Do you suppose they’d react the same way to me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I could try to teach you, if you want.”
He considered it, but then said, “Perhaps another time. Right now I’m more interested in those buildings you mentioned. I’m still hoping I can figure out what makes your head hurt.”
She left the kangaroo and sat down by Karl’s side. “Do you really think you can do that?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I guess it depends on what we find there. I have some ideas for tests we can try, but we need to have access to the proper components.”
“Like what?”
“Oh … like magnets and wires. Or maybe even an abandoned generator.”
She studied his face as if probing his thoughts, or trying to decide whether she should trust his ideas. “How do you know so much?” she inquired.
“Like I said,” he told her, “I remember everything. Even my grade school science lessons.”
“You said you forgot about butterflies,” she reminded him.
“Perhaps I should have phrased that differently. I guess since I didn’t have a reason to remember them, they just fluttered off to some hidden corner of my mind.” He pointed a finger at the side of her head, and said, “Kind of like what happened with your name yesterday. Since there’s no one out here to call you JoEllen, it wasn’t important enough to remember.”
She gazed at the horizon in contemplation, apparently considering Karl’s explanation. After a moment she said, “I’m glad you came here. It’s been a long time since I had anyone to talk to.”
After a short rest they headed south again, toward a line of trees that seemed forever in the distance. Though JoEllen insisted she knew where she was going, at times Karl wondered how she possibly could. The savannah they were crossing seemed vast and featureless, like an endless wheat field with no tractor paths. He could still see the mountains they’d left behind them to the north, but as far as he could tell, she never once looked back at them, or attempted to line them up with a point on the horizon. It was like she had some sort of innate guidance system that allowed her to patrol the extent of her domain without having to rely on conscious effort.
When the afternoon temperatures reached their peak, a storm began to approach from the west. A cool breeze rolled in ahead of the rain, taking some of the edge off the tropical heat. Karl made a point of observing JoEllen for any signs that she was consciously affecting the weather. To his surprise, she appeared to just ignore it completely, and continued plodding onward through the windblown grass. Yet the storm broke around them to the north and the south, forming a pocket of sunlit sky that followed JoEllen like a natural umbrella. “It won’t rain where we are,” he remembered her saying. Apparently she was right about that.
As evening approached, the storm dissipated, and the terrain they were crossing became slightly hilly. Eventually they came across a barren embankment where the grass had retreated, leaving sandy soil exposed. JoEllen cautioned Karl to be quiet, then carefully crawled to the top of the embankment and peeked overtop at way lay beyond. When he followed her up, she put a finger to her lips and whispered, “Shhhh. Predators.”
With a lump beginning to form in his throat, he swallowed and asked, “Are they dangerous?”
She nodded and replied, “Very dangerous,” then smiled at him and said, “…if you’re a bug or a lizard.”
Unsure if he should feel relieved or not, Karl risked a quick glance over the top of the embankment. The king of the hill greeted him face to face. Both of them flinched and jumped back from each other.
JoEllen rolled onto her back and giggled as Karl recovered from the scare he’d just received. He let out a sigh, then laughed along with her while the king of the hill expressed his displeasure. Apparently every bit as startled as Karl, the meerkat chattered at him in annoyance, though his ranting was far more amusing than threatening. Eventually the rest of his clan appeared, apprehensive yet curious to see the intruders. They were edgy and uncertain, even of JoEllen. It took her half an hour or more just to calm them down.
With the sky growing darker, it became clear to Karl that he wouldn’t be sleeping indoors tonight. While JoEllen attempted to charm the meerkats, he searched around for a tree that might offer some shelter — something with low branches they could stretch out beneath, and a grassy bed rather than meerkat diggings. After finding what he thought was a suitable location, he returned to the embankment and sat down near JoEllen.
Things were different now. The meerkats were hers. Even the alpha male had surrendered. And though they didn’t seem willing to let her hold them, she was able to reach out to them and stroke them with her fingers.
As Karl watched her pet them and giggle at their antics, an impression began to take shape in his mind. “You know,” he said, “I’ve had this feeling for a while that you remind me of someone, and I think I just now figured out who it is. Your way with animals … your interaction with the weather. You remind me of Mother Nature.”
“Who is Mother Nature?” she asked.
“Well … Mother Nature isn’t really a who, she’s more like the personification of the natural world. If she were real, I’d like to think she’d be very much like you. Caring. Affectionate. Easy to trust. When you first told me you could protect me from predators, to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. But after all the things I’ve witnessed today, I’m much more inclined to believe it’s true.”
With the sun having slipped below the horizon, dusk was approaching rapidly now. Karl stood up and brushed the dust from his pant legs. “It’s starting to get dark,” he said to JoEllen. “I was thinking we might sleep beneath that tree over there.”
She glanced at the tree and nodded her approval, then said her goodbyes to the meerkat clan and accompanied Karl to the airy shelter.
“How much farther is this village?” he asked.
“Not much farther,” she said. “We should be there sometime tomorrow.”
He watched her curl up on a tuft of long grasses, then found a spot for himself a few paces away. She fell asleep quickly. He followed soon after. The daylong trek had worn both of them out. As they slept, a gentle breeze rolled in from the west, cooling their skin and enhancing their slumber. Karl was only marginally aware of its presence until a faint rumbling
of thunder awakened him.
Propping himself up, he looked out to the west. What he saw was an eerie glow in the sky, rather than a blanket of shimmering stars. It appeared that whatever was obscuring the sun was also diffusing the moon’s light as well. In the distance he could see an approaching storm, which was steadily masking the glow in the sky as it rolled toward the east across the savannah. Already he could smell the scent of rain, and feel a slight change in the air’s humidity. But this storm’s thunder was spent, it seemed. It would rain, but it would do so in a peaceful manner.
Even in the dim light beneath the tree, Karl could see that JoEllen was fast asleep. Her facial muscles were so relaxed he could tell she was deep in the realm of unconsciousness. The weak clap of thunder that had wakened him had apparently not been enough to disturb her. Would she wake when the rain started falling, he wondered. Or perhaps more importantly … would the rain even fall on her while she slept?
A quick glance skyward provided the answer. Just as before, the clouds were passing to either side while leaving a clear swath in the sky overhead. Yet this time JoEllen was soundly asleep, which suggested she might have been right about something. She’s not the one who’s doing it, he realized. Someone is looking out for her.
LIMBO 105
Commander Michelson rushed into the control room and headed straight for the radar console. Though the windows were still covered with fog, it appeared that the radar was tracking something.
“What have you got?” she asked her controllers.
“Looks like the fog is beginning to thin out,” Tori said. “We’re picking up two contacts on parallel headings, less than two kilometers out. One of them appears to be a Sentinel destroyer. The other looks like it might be a fighter.”
“I.D. on the destroyer?”
Tori nodded. “It’s the Cricket. Isn’t that the ship you gave to Captain Starling?”
“It sure is. Julie, see if you can make contact with them.”
Julie held a finger up and listened to her headset. “They just contacted us, Commander. They’re requesting permission to dock.”