Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  “I don’t like it nagging me about my homework, but I don’t want Josephine to kill it,” said Carl.

  “Will you all stop being so melodramatic?” said Josephine.

  The lights stopped flashing. But the Goldfish’s eyes stared blankly ahead. I found I was holding my breath.

  “Come on . . . ,” whispered Josephine. Perhaps everyone’s melodrama was getting to her.

  There was a very long pause.

  “Kids!” the Goldfish crowed. “Whoo, boy, howdy, do I feel fantastic.” It swirled around us in an exultant circle. “My, my, would you just look at all that calculating power! Hey, Helen! Nice talking to you!”

  “Are you talking to each other?” I asked.

  “We just had a very nice exchange of data, yes,” confirmed the Helen. “I enjoyed learning about medieval crop rotation.”

  “And you are one impressive operating system, ma’am!” said the Goldfish, dashing around in happy zigzags. “Hi there, little guys,” it said indulgently to the tiny spider robots as they climbed over themselves to intercept it and crawl over its sides. “Hey, quit it,” it added as they formed themselves into a pair of wiggling arms on either flank. “That tickles.”

  “You see,” said Josephine to the rest of us.

  “It seems okay,” said Noel.

  “And if I were to say . . . math?” Carl said casually.

  “I’d say you need to work on the difference between dependent and independent variables, buddy,” said the Goldfish sternly. “You could do so well if you applied yourself.”

  “It is still you,” cried Noel. I think he’d have hugged the Goldfish if it had stopped moving for one second. Instead, it darted almost into Josephine’s face.

  “Josephine!” it bellowed at her. The piglet woke up with an alarmed squeak and dived under Dr. Muldoon’s workbench. “That baccalaureate won’t earn itself, you know. Don’t just stand there! Let’s do science!”

  “I have my Captain’s permission to reenter normal space,” the Helen said.

  “Then let’s go for it!” rejoiced the Goldfish.

  “Please do,” said Dr. Muldoon, who was now on her hands and knees trying to retrieve the piglet.

  “If you’ll hold still for one second,” said Josephine, chasing the Goldfish about with the harness.

  Lena stepped into the Goldfish’s path, and caught it without apparent effort. Josephine had to climb on a stool to fit the harness so that the two little propulsors fitted neatly on either side of its tail.

  Meanwhile, hyperspace faded to black. The stars emerged, shifting through the spectrum of colors, and oh, there were so many of them now, so many that it was a long time before I could pick out the bright one that must be the sun.

  A shadow drifted past the windows, across the expanse of starlight. It made me jump—for a moment, it was as if there was something alive out there, swimming in the dark. Then another dark shape tumbled through the light from the Helen’s window and I realized it was just a lump of ice or rock, part of the Oort cloud that envelops the solar system.

  We were a very long way from home.

  “You should be able to operate the propulsors—” began Josephine, and then we all ducked as the Goldfish did operate them, and catapulted sideways at tremendous speed.

  “Not inside!” groaned Lena.

  “I’m OKAY!” yelled the Goldfish, bouncing off the wall and knocking various important scientific things over. The little robots scurried to pick them up, crawling over anyone who happened to be in the way.

  “There, there, Ormerod,” crooned Dr. Muldoon, cradling the frightened piglet in her lap and shooting the Goldfish an annoyed look.

  “Sorry,” said Josephine, pushing rebellious tendrils of hair out of her face. “Let’s get you outside,” she told the Goldfish.

  She hurried the Goldfish to the airlock and opened the inner set of doors. The Goldfish jigged impatiently inside the chamber, still chattering away, and then the inner doors closed and the outer doors opened, and the Goldfish popped into space.

  The first thing it did was fire its propulsors and go into a violent, flailing tailspin that carried it off into the darkness, bouncing off bits of floating debris, so far off into the distance that we could only just see its glow. Josephine sucked her teeth anxiously.

  But then the Goldfish eventually worked out how to control its thrusters, and it flew back to hover outside the window. I got the impression it was saying something, but we couldn’t hear what.

  “I should have given it voice transmitters,” said Josephine, slumping a little.

  “That would have been wise,” agreed Lena.

  “You can next time,” I said. “This is only a trial run, right?”

  Josephine smiled at me.

  “It says this is a very interesting experience, and it hopes Thsaaa is making notes for their extended essay,” volunteered the Helen.

  The Goldfish bobbed outside in the void, then swooped away.

  “I hope it knows where it’s going,” said Carl.

  “I think it’s going around the ship,” I said.

  “Let’s follow it,” said Noel.

  “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” said Dr. Muldoon pointedly, so we all hurried out of the lab and ran down the corridor into the elevator. We reached the upper deck just in time to see the Goldfish soaring through the shadows of the Oort cloud and then vanishing overhead.

  So we raced back to the passenger lounge, where the windows were huge.

  “I can’t see it.” Josephine was worrying. “It wouldn’t have gotten stuck on anything . . . oh.”

  Christa was there, curled up in a chair and playing listlessly with her tablet. We all stopped as if we’d run into a massive barrier of awkwardness and resentment, except for Thsaaa, who couldn’t get a handle on anyone’s facial expression.

  “Helloooooo,” said Thsaaa as Christa glowered at us across her tablet.

  Christa shrugged. “I saw your little toy bobbing past the window,” she remarked.

  “I have no association with it,” said Thsaaa. “Also, it is an educational device. Albeit a most annoying one. Josephine has adjusted it to operate in space.”

  “Space,” sneered Christa. “I guess it’s pretty exciting for kids.”

  “There are many adult astronauts in human history,” said Thsaaa, going increasingly confused shades of orange. “I thought they liked it.”

  “Purple, black,” I hissed, gesturing at her.

  “Ohhhh,” said Thsaaa, shutting up.

  “Don’t you have your own deck, Christa?” asked Josephine. “Or is this thing where you barge into places no one wants you pathological?”

  (Josephine and I had to sleep in the supply closet at Beagle Base after Christa drove us out of our room, and we didn’t even get to keep the supply closet very long.)

  “This is my dad’s ship,” said Christa, sitting up. “That makes it mine too, all of it, and that means I can go wherever I like.”

  “All right,” said Josephine levelly. “Stay.”

  And then we all stood around in silence for a bit and looked at her.

  Christa bounced to her feet and stalked out, muttering, “Like I want to hang around here.”

  “Come on, Thsaaa, you read Alice’s book, you know what Christa did,” Carl said once she’d gone.

  “I thought, as this is a voyage of reconciliation, perhaps she had made amends,” said Thsaaa.

  “Well, she hasn’t.”

  “She is here on the ship with you. We are all former enemies.”

  “She was even worse than you guys,” said Carl, which was neither diplomatic nor true, seeing as to the best of my knowledge Christa had never blown anything up or killed anyone. But at least at that moment, it felt kind of true.

  Then the Goldfish came sailing past the window like a kite, and so we all decided not to bother about Christa anymore.

  I actually felt jealous of the Goldfish getting to fly about in space, which is pretty ironic cons
idering what happened to me later.

  But of course if I could have known about that, I’d have been banging on Rasmus Trommler’s door, begging him to take us home.

  5

  So we were plunging farther and farther into the deep reaches of space, and none of us had anything much to do. Except for Josephine. Who apparently had everything to do.

  “Do you think Mr. Trommler’s ever going to let me fly you?” Carl asked the Helen while we played an idle game of Space Ping-Pong. We’d rigged up a net across the lounge and were floating on either side of it, lunging off the walls and ceiling after the ball. We’d come out of hyperspace into Alpha Centauri’s planetary system. There was a new sun far ahead and, much closer, a pale turquoise gas giant, looming within a band of silvery rings. And somewhere behind that was the distant dot that was Aushalawa-Moraaa.

  We were twenty-five trillion miles from Earth. I supposed there really was no chance Mum would ever be able to catch up.

  Meanwhile, Noel was being helpful by taking Ormerod for her morning walk around the Helen and Thsaaa was probably writing up their extended essay.

  “Maybe, like, the last thousand miles?” suggested Carl without much hope. We hadn’t seen Mr. Trommler in over a week.

  “He is so busy, and his work is so important,” said the Helen apologetically. “I don’t like to bother him.”

  “Maybe on the way back,” I said as cheerfully as I could, which wasn’t very cheerfully.

  Carl looked at me. “You okay, Alice?” he asked.

  The fact was, I wasn’t okay. The fact was, I’d been crying. And of course someone asking me if I was okay was lethal, because it set me off again.

  “Aww, hey,” said Carl awkwardly. He swooped over the tennis net and hugged me. Of course he didn’t stop moving when we collided, so we bounced softly off the floor and drifted back toward the ceiling.

  “So what’s up?” he asked as we tumbled slowly through the air, past the windows full of stars. He hadn’t let go. It was pretty nice.

  “I guess I’m homesick,” I mumbled into his shoulder.

  “Really? Because, sure, we’re a long way from home, but you got through all that time on Mars and I don’t remember you crying except when we’d nearly been eaten by the Vshomu swarm, so . . . are you sure that’s it?”

  I sniffed and hesitated and eventually I told the truth. I said, “It’s Josephine.”

  Carl waited.

  “I thought we were friends,” I went on. “But . . . but now I don’t know.”

  “She has been acting weird,” said Carl. “I mean, like, weird even for her.” He patted my shoulder. “So, I mean, she’s not just being weird with you.”

  “She’s always too busy to do anything,” I said. “So I’ve kind of stopped trying. But I went to Thsaaa’s cabin yesterday. I wanted . . . just to hang out, I guess. Thsaaa had the door open, and I could hear a harmonica. Two harmonicas. They were both in there, with the harmonica she gave Thsaaa and the Paralashath they gave Josephine. And she was composing music and Thsaaa was composing on a Paralashath. Human-Morror fusion art, you know. It was nice. But . . .”

  It felt like such a petty thing to get upset about, but here we were, supposedly best friends, two of a handful of human beings hurtling through the emptiness of space, and when she had a little sliver of time away from the lab, she spent it with Thsaaa and not me.

  I felt ridiculous for doing it, but I crept away before either of them saw me.

  “I guess you’ve just got to talk to her,” said Carl.

  “I guess,” I conceded, though the prospect left me feeling even more worried. “But she’s never on her own. . . .”

  “Well, never mind anyway,” said Carl kindly, patting my back. “At least I’m talking to you, right?”

  This was very nice but threatened to make me cry some more, and then the Goldfish swam in.

  “Hey kids, have you seen Thsaaa?” it asked brightly. “I want to check their Paralashath Appreciation homework, but I think they might be hiding in the refrigeration unit again. Aww, Alice! Why the long face?”

  “No reason,” I muttered, detaching myself from Carl.

  “C’mon, Alice!” urged the Goldfish. “With good friends and good imagination and trigonometry, there’s nothing we can’t solve! Say, I know a lot of songs I bet would make you feel better!”

  “No, thank you,” I said, getting a bit watery-eyed again at the “good friends” thing.

  But the Goldfish was already jigging about in the air, singing.

  “Turn that smile upside down,

  Act all goofy like a clown,

  You’ll feel so good, you just can’t lose,

  When you calculate the hypotenuse.

  Doo, doo, doo-doo doo . . .”

  “STOP IT!” I shouted. The Goldfish did stop, eyes flashing in confusion.

  “She’s upset with Josephine,” said Carl. “It’s not a trigonometry situation.”

  “You and Josephine?” said the Goldfish in cheerful disbelief. “No way! You’re pals, you’re buddies, you’re a team!”

  “Oh, Carl!” I said in despair.

  Carl looked abashed, but neither of us knew how bad this was about to get because the next thing the Goldfish said was “Say, let’s get this all straightened out right now!”

  And to my horror, it shot off toward the door.

  “Goldfish, no!” I cried, plunging after it.

  “Doo, doo, doo-doo doo . . . ,” the Goldfish sang as it flew.

  Carl followed me. But the Goldfish was awfully fast with its new thrusters, and much better at maneuvering through the ship’s lobbies and passages. I bounced off a wall and into a flower bed in my haste, and Carl knocked into me, and the Goldfish’s lead on us got even longer.

  “Stop, Goldfish, please!” I yelled.

  We were too late. The Goldfish rocketed all the way to Josephine’s cabin. The doors slid open as Carl and I somersaulted up. Weirdly, I thought I heard Josephine saying my name even before the Goldfish called out, “Say, what’s up, Josephine?”

  What was up, technically, was everything.

  Josephine was hanging upside down against the ceiling, in the midst of all her strange favorite objects: a miniature Oort cloud of stones with holes in them, the cat statuette, her new harmonica and the Paralashath Thsaaa had given her, the ancient cushion, the Christmas star, and of course a roll of duct tape—Josephine never went anywhere without that. She was holding a book—a tatty paper book, not her tablet—and reading aloud to the Helen.

  “I wish I could manage to be glad!” the Queen said. “Only I never can remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and being glad whenever you like!”

  “Only it is so very lonely here!” Alice said in a melancholy voice; and at the thought of her loneliness two large tears came rolling down her cheeks.

  So that was why I’d heard her say my name. Josephine was doing impressively different voices for the Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass Alice and the White Queen.

  “What’s happening?” the Goldfish pressed.

  “Er,” said Josephine. “Nothing? I’m just taking a break. Dr. Muldoon said I had to,” she added unhappily. “We didn’t find anything in the Oort cloud samples yet.”

  “Aww, that’s too bad,” the Goldfish sympathized.

  “No such thing as a failed experiment,” Josephine said, moodily kicking at the ceiling.

  “So what’s this word on the grapevine about you and Alice falling out?” asked the Goldfish.

  Josephine came right side up. “Did you say that?” she asked me.

  “No!” I cried. But I felt, suddenly, that it was too late to go back.

  “I didn’t say that, I didn’t want it to come zooming down here. But . . . you’ve been acting funny with me,” I said, bobbing up to join her on the ceiling.

  “I haven’t,” said Josephine. She looked so genuinely surprised, I realized that whatever was going on, she’d truly thought she’d been doing a dece
nt job of hiding it. “I don’t have a lot of free time. If I don’t ace these exams . . .” She trailed off.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I have to focus on what’s important.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “There you go, gang! Isn’t friendship super?” said the Goldfish, completely missing the nuances.

  “So everything’s fine,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Josephine.

  “Well, okay,” I said wanly. I drifted toward the door. So I’d go, I thought. And everything would carry on the way it was, but at least we wouldn’t actually have had a fight.

  Except suddenly I couldn’t do it. I spun back around.

  “It isn’t fine. It feels the opposite of fine. What is it with you? Are you okay? Is something bothering you? You could tell me. Or have I done something?”

  There was a long silence. It felt like long enough for starlight to chase across the galaxy, getting fainter and fainter and colder and colder. Josephine’s mouth fell slightly open.

  “Have you done something?” she repeated, in a quite different voice, raw and rough. “You’re really asking me that?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was still hanging there in midair, but it felt as if I was falling.

  “Aww, guys,” said the Goldfish anxiously. “Let’s calm down a moment here. I’m sure if you take a deep breath, and hug—”

  “I’ll, um, I’ll leave you guys,” said Carl. “But . . . we can hang later? . . . Both of you?”

  He squeezed my arm, but neither Josephine nor I replied. Josephine blinked several times. “Yes, Alice, you’ve done something. Do you remember a book called Mars Evacuees?”

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t seem to remember how my voice worked. I thought it had hurt enough when she’d said the book was too melodramatic.

  “This is why I wasn’t going to say anything,” Josephine went on wearily. “I mean, it’s done now. You can’t unwrite it. Everyone’s already seen it.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. It came out like a whisper. “I thought I wrote you as . . . amazing. People who’ve never met you think you’re amazing. I just . . . it was all true.”