by B. V. Larson
After so many organ replacements, so much reconstruction, and with fifteen or twenty biomechs floating under his tides of fat, he still could neither walk far nor sleep well nor think as sharply as he once could. But he had little need for any of those things. In these latter years, his grip on Tarassis had tightened. He had power greater than any captain before him. The entire ship operated very well with only his slightest input.
Any crisis seemed like child’s play to him now. A threat here, an assassination there, and the waters always smoothed.
Still in his entry area, the captain forced himself to stand erect. The sight of his office usually soothed him. The entry carpet on which he stood, for example, was the skin of some alien beast that had been textured by the week-long chewing of primitive synth laborers. From this piece of carpet, stunned visitors would gape at his vast office, which was inside a transparent blister on Tarassis.
To approach Captain Stattor’s gleaming desk, one had to step onto the thermoplast floor where, underfoot, one seemed to stand in the outer void. Beyond that thin layer of lead-impregnated compressed glass, stars and billowing gasses swirled in their frozen glory. The trail of stars and the galactic core had long been called the Milky Way by Earthers.
The impressive chamber had a practical purpose. When one came to arrange business with the captain, to ask his aid or intercession, one felt without footing, suspended in space. Behind Captain Stattor at his desk, through the transparency, the frozen hub of the galaxy hovered around him like an aura. In those moments, when officials came to plead, he most felt like the emperor he had become aboard Tarassis.
But now he hobbled to his specially designed chair, sank into it and felt it adjust to him. The arms moved to caress and comfort him, and the back supports began kneading his flesh to aid his circulation.
He rummaged through one of his desk drawers, pawing through his pharmaceuticals for something to help with his legs. They had been tingling since he’d awakened.
Additionally, his right shoulder felt bruised for some reason and his hands had been trembling for several days. Did this signal anything? His grand moment?
There were so many disorganized medications in the drawer that he gave up and knocked it shut. He leaned back and tried to breathe deeply, tried to objectify the pain—it didn’t work.
Phlegm rattled in his throat. He coughed, swallowed, and thought of food. It was always easy to think of food. He so loved to eat, to chew and churn his tongue through the stringy meats and syrupy desserts of spiced flavor... the sensation could be nearly orgasmic.
He had eaten with Usko Imani many times, long ago, in better days. Her lovely hands and delicate fingers had one time wrapped like the vines of flowers around his tender parts.
A twinge shot through his guts.
He thought of food again. Aside from his psychonauts finding some usable alien technology, he loved nothing more than sweet creams slicking the insides of his cheeks or the oily spiciness of rare meat burning across his tongue. In the privacy of his opulent residence, he would sometimes hold in one fatted hand a cluster of exotic fruit, crush it, and lick the juices from his skin. He adored these moments.
His stomach rumbled and burned.
He wondered what Usko Imani’s health was like. How long ago had he imprisoned her? Seventeen... eighteen years? She’d been at the White Flowers labor camp for a long time. Probably seventeen years.
The average life span at that place was six years, but Usko Imani—she had proven her toughness once again.
Something tickled in his throat. As he coughed it up and re-swallowed it, needles of pain arced from his chest out through his arms.
From his cluttered desk drawer he picked up the handiest vial of tablets. They were familiar-looking; he dry-swallowed two.
Deep breath. Focus.
He reached, without looking, toward the antique intercom to press the call button. He wanted to call First Officer Chisolm, his chief aid to ask if Usko had arrived—but his hand missed the box completely. It fell through empty air.
The intercom had been moved?
Yes, it had.
Chisolm had rearranged its position on his desk without asking permission, and now the captain had to turn, stretch, and endure the pain of reaching farther.
Stattor remembered mentioning two days prior that it sometimes hurt his arm to reach across the desk. So Chisolm had taken it upon himself to move it to the corner of the desk nearest Stattor’s right hand where it was closer—but the angle was all wrong.
And he hadn’t sought approval for the change.
Worse, Stattor noticed, in its current position, it also blocked his view through the curved thermoplast of the Orion Nebula, which he’d renamed the Stattor Nebula. That was his personal monument, visible even from old Earth. When he turned his chair toward it, he now could only see its upper right wisp.
What had that idiot Chisolm been thinking?
Stattor fumbled his numb fingers over the row of buttons and hit CALL.
“Come.”
A disguised door in the front of his office irised open, and his chief of staff entered. He was a small, thin man and his pale flat eyes were expressionless blanks. His uniform was crisp, but his cap never seemed to rest on the exact center of his head. Despite looking like anyone’s kindly uncle, First Officer Chisolm would silently arrange anything the captain requested. He would do so without question, without comment—no matter how much cruelty or viciousness were required.
As usual, a bright layer of perspiration ran across Chisolm’s forehead.
“Yes, Captain?” he said quietly.
“The intercom,” Stattor said, raising his eyebrows and putting an apologetic smile on his face. “I reached for it, and... I found it had been moved.”
Chisolm audibly swallowed twice. “If it caused you any inconvenience, Captain, it was my ignorance, and I beg your forgiveness. I thought it might be more—”
“Is Usko Imani available?”
“Yes, Captain.” Chisolm’s flat eyes glittered with fear, but at this shift in the conversation, a ray of hope entered his face.
“Where is she now?”
“She arrived two hours ago. She’s being cleaned up.”
The captain smiled pleasantly at Chisolm. “Bring me the dispersal list. I want to get that out of the way before I see her.”
“Yes, Captain.” Chisolm nodded with his words and quickly departed. The disguised door closed behind him.
Again, Stattor gazed at the repositioned intercom. It completely ruined his view of his nebula. This troubled him because this could be an intentional slight, disguised as a “favor”—one of the most insidious kinds of disobedience.
There were few pleasures left in his life, and the precise view from his desk was one of them. Chisolm should have asked.
He leaned back in his formchair and it adjusted to accommodate him. Lately he had felt more comfortable alone, nothing like the Errit Stattor of the old days.
In his thoughts he saw Usko Imani, as she’d been when he’d last seen her. That had been several years before he’d ordered her arrested and later imprisoned at White Flowers, which was a radiation-soaked mining camp on the rim of Tarassis. The namesake whitish crystalline growths weren’t flowers, of course. They were the mineral deposits of radioactives.
At White Flowers, lowlifes and criminal humans worked side by side, raking obscure ores out of shallow tunnels. Usko had been attractive once, so perhaps she’d been put into sexual services. That would help answer questions as to her longevity.
And now, today, Stattor would have the chat with Usko he’d planned for two decades—with some modifications.
Ghostly silent, Chisolm returned and moved across the carpeted entry area onto the transparent floor. He laid the paper list precisely in front of Stattor. The captain had once hinted that paper made of real cellulose coordinated with the décor more appropriately than hovering tri-vid images; thus he got specially manufactured paper.
“Captain,” Chisolm said, his words barely audible above the sound of his breathing, “if I have displeased—”
At the slightest motion of Stattor’s hand, Chisolm retreated and disappeared from the office, silent as air.
Distracting idiot.
Stattor re-imagined Usko Imani’s face as he’d once looked down into it, the single time they’d made love.
He remembered those minutes more clearly than he remembered the day he made himself the leader of United Tarassis. He remembered her hands and her lips. He remembered the way she laughed and the way, that one time, her hands had touched him.
He fingered the paper list, letting his thoughts drift to the early years when she and Stattor and a handful of others had struggled to crush the rebellious guests, breathers and crew who dared oppose them. The seizure of power… it was a glorious time.
She’d been unswerving in her loyalty and as idealistic as she was beautiful. In the end, after the degenerate peace council had granted their petition, the ruling core of United Tarassis had moved to secure total power. They’d taken what was useful from every deck and sold off the rest. Soon, with most of the colony’s wealth, United Tarassis simply bought the government, turning the colonist councilmen into powerless figureheads.
The captain remembered the day of the council’s final decision in their favor, but only because he and Usko had later celebrated alone. Without expecting it or knowing what it would lead to, they’d made love for the first and only time.
He had been different then—thin, of course, and aggressively healthy. The future of Tarassis was still wide open, and in the unknown he foresaw the richness of possibility.
Stattor’s eyes stopped on the intercom. He wondered what else Chisolm might have been doing lately without his permission. What else might he be “moving around”?
The captain gazed at the paper list lying in front of him... the dispersal list... the names of those who no longer functioned effectively in the framework of a fully unified colony.
Coming from every deck and station in life, these were the names of the unreliable. Those who were potentially dangerous. Once he had signed off on the list, they’d be systemically apprehended and shot into the core of the great ship’s fusion reactor.
Here, aboard Tarassis, nothing was wasted. Their component molecules would separate and give up their energies to provide heat and comfort. Despite their disruptive intentions, they’d enable the ship’s probing of distant worlds to go on uninterrupted.
He scanned the names. It was his prerogative to put a check mark beside the name of any person he decided to exempt from execution. He routinely dismissed the sentences of a few nobodies, mechanics usually, to give the impression of mercy.
Halfway down the first column... Commander Dallen’s name stood out to him. He was a mining and materials strategist, the spouse of Neva Savvan.
Stattor paused.
Dallen’s name had been put on preemptively, in case the commander had exhibited irritation with Stattor’s occasional use of his spouse—but Dallen had apparently accepted the situation, a wise and loyal decision.
Stattor exempted him with a check mark. For now.
Second column... Arios Blodian... He was on the list? Still alive after all these years? Stattor had lost track…
Of course he remembered him from more than twenty years ago. Back then, Stattor, Blodian, Usko, and a dozen other core members had worked for the same goals, for the unification and advancement of the crew. But then....
Stattor vaguely remembered ordering Blodian to be confined for some reason or other—but the recollection was hazy. And now Blodian’s residence counselor was asking for his dispersal.
He turned his chair to face the galaxy-smeared void. The old days always seemed warm and fragrant in memory, and for a few moments now, his chest loosened as he thought of them. He breathed easier.
Arios Blodian had been one of the inner members until.... The reason was gone from his memory, but he did recall one evening in particular, sitting with Arios beside a recycling pool. It was closest thing Tarassis had to a lake. The dark water rippled with fish, and the wastewater was choked with algae.
The sky-panels overhead had operated perfectly in those days. The growing purple light to one’s left paling to a creamy yellow on the right. They’d been discussing the construction of external probe-labs like the one in which Stattor now sat and meditated on Blodian’s fate.
Usko had been there at the time, and he remembered her breaking the stillness—she had come up from the edge of the pond, laughing and carrying a thick bouquet of colorful weeds.
How strange that he should remember such details, from so long ago and so far away, from such an ancient evening.
Stattor took up a pencil and started to place a check mark next to Blodian’s name. For old times’ sake, if nothing else. For the memory of sitting beside that brackish water. Besides, how many years could Blodian have left? He would be slow and gnarled by age. He couldn’t still have the fire he’d had in the old days. Back then, the man took on the most dangerous of schemes. He’d force them to succeed through courage alone.
The intercom chirped.
Without looking, Stattor reached for it—but his hand dropped through the air again, touching nothing.
He cursed and glared at the machine. Chisolm had irritated him twice now, in a single day.
Stattor reached to the correct spot and hit TALK.
“What is it, First Officer?” he snapped.
Chisolm’s voice was very small. “Usko Imani has arrived, Captain.”
Stattor inhaled deeply. His guts rumbled. His stomach seemed home to barb-finned eels. He caught his breath as shooting pains went from his back into his neck and arms.
What would she think of him? Would she recoil at his obesity? Would she see through to his discomfort? Would she be gray and withered and unrecognizable?
Stattor tried to calm himself by turning and gazing at the churning hub of the galaxy which lay frozen before him. It took decades for the perspective to noticeably change even at the great velocity they were flying through space. Traveling between stars was like crossing a dark ocean which was forever shrouded in darkness. Each planet was smaller than an island in comparison, tiny, fragile motes of matter in an unimaginably vast expanse of cold void.
As he hesitated, he felt some grand thing coming near. He’d had this feeling before, several times just today.
His heart fluttered. He could almost touch the strange presence now, it was so close—
Chapter FIFTEEN
Stattor turned slowly to face the hidden door. Usko Imani would appear there. He positioned his feet beneath his weight, braced his hands on his desk, and stood. Instantly, his knees protested, but he ignored that.
Before he spoke to the intercom, he thought of her lips and her hands, of how she had once looked at him and how she’d once touched him.
“Send her in,” he said at last.
In the final seconds before the door opened, he was already feeling oppressed by the heaviness of his body, by the rolls of fat pressing up against his throat, and the growing weight of his head on his neck. A dozen pains sparkled upward from his ankles.
The door irised open.
Usko Imani had once been a square-shouldered athletically built woman with straight black hair—a woman whose footing had been as solid as her belief in Stattor and the unification of the colony under United Tarassis. As long as he’d known her, he’d never suspected that she’d experienced a single doubt about what she was doing or her purpose in the world.
When it came to her belief in unifying Tarassis, she’d never hesitated, whatever the cost.
But she hesitated today.
In the doorway, she stood stooped and gray-skinned. She was deeply lined, and what was left of her hair was a thin shag of frizz across parts of her scalp. She still wore her black prison clothes, though they appeared to have been just washed and pressed. They clung to her body and reve
aled her bony joints.
The person who stood on the carpeted area, staring at the transparent floor before her, resembled Usko Imani only in the most ghostly way.
“Please,” Stattor said. He gestured toward one of the chairs arrayed before his desk.
By design, these chairs were perched on glass above the countless stars. The effect was disconcerting even to those who’d sat there numerous times.
She looked around. She stared for a moment at the glowing galactic hub behind Stattor.
Then, as if remembering where she was and what she’d been commanded to do, she tentatively moved into the room . She placed her feet on the transparent floor as though she might fall through. She stopped part way across.
“I haven’t seen the stars in years,” she said. Her voice was low and gravelly.
A moment later she moved herself forward again. She sat down slowly, staring at the stars glowing under her feet.
She looked up and allowed her gaze to meet his.
Stattor smiled. “It’s been a long time, Usko. Do you know how many years it’s been since we’ve seen each other?”
“In my work,” she said, “I lose track of time.” The right corner of her mouth did not move when she spoke. She folded her knobby hands in her lap.
“A very long time.” Stattor lowered his mass into his chair. The pain in his ankles was replaced by a compression ache in his spine. “A long time…” he repeated as he exhaled. “Nearly twenty years, I believe.”
“I didn’t know that.” Then, after a hesitation, she spoke again. “I never expected to see you again.”
“Life is mysterious. Grand and mysterious, and I’ve been feeling the need to tie up the loose ends of my life.” He paused and nodded at the stars around him. “Up here, apart from the crowded decks of Tarassis, it’s easy to forget one’s past—but today I’m remembering it. Do you remember Arios Blodian? I was also thinking of him today.”
Her old face showed some surprise. “Arios? Of course I remember him. Is he still alive?”
“I was thinking of the time the three of us were at the recycling pond. It was evening. You were laughing and coming up from the shore carrying colorful weeds. I have a very clear memory of that.”