Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  She bustled off, leaving Mikal to traipse between the two cabins assigned to the three of them. When it seemed that he had his patients as comfortable as it was possible to make them, and the pails were handy for the use they were intended, he took a few minutes to go to the galley and quickly eat the midday meal as it was served. Captain Lomen and some of the crew inquired after his charges—the ship’s personnel seemed perfectly aware of the state of health of all the passengers.

  “You have experience of sailing then,” one of the crew-women ventured to say to Mikal from across the table. “Since you’re not sick and don’t expect to get sick.”

  “Enough experience to have gone through sea-sickness and made it to the other side,” he replied simply, without filling in any further details.

  He had no intention of talking about his two years on the planet Borhq which was where he had done his sailing, and been sea-sick. Also, he was not about to explain the mysteries of the translation nodes—how, for example, once a person who had a node had gone through motion sickness, he was immune to that illness for the rest of his life. Nor was he going to talk about Kati or Jocan; he had no intention of revealing to anyone that he already knew perfectly well that Kati would be back on her feet in two or three days—two being more likely since her node was a granda.

  Instead, he asked the crew-woman about the weather they could expect in the coming weeks of the trip. Weather, he well knew, is an abiding topic of conversation for sailors in all places and at all times. He had no trouble leading this sailor into a speculation of the storms that they might meet.

  He did not stay long in the eating area, excusing himself as soon as he had eaten, to go and check up on his patients. Of whom one was napping fretfully, while the other one had reached the “let’s not have anything sloshing around in the stomach”-stage. He cleaned up the spatters after Kati had finished emptying her stomach contents into the pail beside her bunk. He wiped her face with a rag soaked with some of the water in the skin that the medic had left him. He insisted that she drink a bit of the water so she would not dehydrate. He took the pail to the head to empty and rinse it.

  While he was doing these tasks he was thinking of the services that had been performed for him lately. First, on Gorsh’s ship when Kati’s friends, the teenage girls, had looked after his physical needs while he had been in a drug-induced stupor, and had done so kindly and gently. Then, when he had fallen into Guzi’s unexpected trap in the Temple of the Sons of the Sun, in River City, when Mistress Sye had looked after his comatose self, and had taught Kati how to do so, too. And that had been after Kati and Jocan had bodily carried him back to Mistress Sye’s Inn through the sewers! Finally, on Dorn’s boat, Loka and Kati had looked after him until he had awakened from his coma.

  Taking care of a pail of vomit seemed like a small payment for such a great debt to whatever positive powers the universe had spawned to protect him. True, he did not have much experience of hands-on nursing, but he’d manage—certainly until Kati was better and could help him with Jocan’s care. He thought, with a grin, that his Borhquan grandfather would have been proud of him.

  The way events had unfolded—it was all quite fascinating.

  Mikal was intelligent enough to recognize that he had been guilty of inattention, when on slave-ship Captain Gorsh’s home world. He had been taken captive on a busy city street in the middle of the afternoon. The attackers must have telegraphed their intent in some fashion; he ought to have been ready to pick up on that, ready to put up a fight, to have at least made enough of a ruckus that some planetary enforcer would have had to take notice and write up a report, which later would have provided a clue to his disappearance to those who would be even now searching for him. He had been trained to be alert in situations like that. He had been questioning the wife of a known slave-trader. Doing so was to ask for unkind attention from her husband’s associates. Of course he had known all that; that was why he was the one doing the job. He had been trained to deal with the “expected unexpected”; that was simply a portion of his work.

  The trouble had been, and he could now admit this to himself, that his mind had not been on his work. Besides, he had been in a reckless mood, almost suicidal; he recognized that, now, with annoyance. It had been months since the break-up with his wife, Lashia, but the ache of it had still been tearing him apart, destroying his self-esteem, and making him question both his desire, and his right, to live. Would not a man as flawed as he seemed to be, be better dead, he had been asking himself. A part of him had considered getting captured by the criminals that he was trying to bring to justice, a fitting fate for an arrogant fool such as he seemed to have been. To die from a criminal’s blaster shot had appeared to be a suitable and, yes, a romantic end to his misery!

  He could chuckle ruefully at those feelings, now, but they had been real enough at the time. Of course, what he had narrowly averted was a worse fate, that of having his mental controls stripped from him and, consequently, blabbing to Gorsh and company everything that he knew about the doings of the Peace Officer Corps. Since he had been a trusted Agent in the Corps for some years, he did know secrets; it would have been worth Gorsh’s while to empty out his brain before slitting his throat. But things had not come to that, and now he was thoroughly motivated to make certain that they never would.

  His escape from Gorsh’s ship seemed almost miraculous to him, whenever he dwelled on it. He had no memory of having been taken aboard the craft, and no idea of how much time had passed between his capture and the escape. Kati had told him that he had not been long in the prison room with her, the teenage girls, and the children. He had been there only days, she had said, but it was certainly possible that he had been kept elsewhere on the ship before that. What he did know, however, was that the drug that Doctor Guzi had been administering to him, the mind-tangler or tangle-juice—appropriate monikers, those—had been slowly eroding the mind locks that had been set on him through his node, to keep classified information about The Peace Officer Corps from leaking out under interrogation.

  The mind-tangler appeared to have other effects, too, when used for a prolonged period of time. He was sure that the drug shot into his hand by the mechanism in the false beacon in the Temple of the Sons of the Sun had been mostly, if not completely, tangle-juice. He had lost consciousness very quickly that time, too; he knew of no other drug that was quite so fast-acting. What he had realized after coming out from under that dose, on Dorn and Loka’s boat, was that a lot of his mental anguish had left him during the coma; the pain and guilt with which he had been tormenting himself had mostly melted away. Although, perhaps he had been ready to let go of that emotional muddle, in any case? He had work to do; no matter that Kati and Jocan were willing partners in their joint enterprise, as a Federation Peace Officer, the ultimate responsibility for the conduct of the whole operation was his.

  Kati had been a source of amazement for him. She was what Federation citizens termed a Wilder, a human from a world outside the ken of the Federation. In her case, her home planet had to be pretty far out of the Federation’s reach since Gorsh had used the navigation skills of a captive Xeonsaur to make his trip there; unfortunately for Kati, and the children she was keen to bring out of slavery, that meant that there was not much hope of them ever returning home. Mikal had been dealing with the inhabitants of the Fringe planets throughout his working life so he well knew that these outsiders to the Federation were as intelligent and resourceful as the citizens of the worlds in the centre of civilization as he knew it. The criminals that he tried to bring to justice, sometimes succeeding, were often annoyingly clever and shrewd, worthy opponents all. And those who, on their home worlds, opposed them, usually were smarter yet, bright enough to understand, among other things, that sordid crime was nothing to base a society on. Thus, it was not Kati’s intelligence and resourcefulness that surprised him; it was the enthusiasm with which she had thrown herself into conditions that were brand new to her. She had been snatched
willy-nilly from an orderly life—snatched from her son-- and tossed into a situation in which much was being demanded of her. She had every right to be upset, angry at fate for treating her thus. Cira in Delta had been right: if Kati had crawled into a hole to bawl her eyes out, that would have been her right, and perfectly understandable. She had done no such thing; instead, she had met every challenge that she had had to face, with a cheerful demeanour and a plan for action. How could he, Mikal, for whom this was his job, do any less than what she was doing?

  He sat down on the empty bunk in Kati’s cabin, leaving the doors between the two cabins open. Jocan was tossing in his bed restlessly while Kati, in hers was now sleeping quietly. She had emptied her stomach and accepted a small amount of water to replace the liquid that she had lost; now that crazy node of hers was probably working overtime to get her system adjusted to shipboard existence. Mikal found himself watching her while a smile played about his lips; he was feeling tender towards this new travelling companion of his. Was that then why the issue of Lashia was receding into the background of his mind? Had Kati begun to fill the yawning chasm that the divorce had torn into his heart?

  He had better not make any assumptions about her availability to him, however. Wasn’t that what had been his mistake with Lashia, after all? He had made too many arrogant assumptions, believed that he could make her be what he wanted her to be. The fact that she had made the same mistake on her side did not excuse him, and he had an obligation to learn from his mistakes. Men were attracted to Kati; he was not a blind man.

  “Take the burly Captain Lomen, for instance,” he muttered to himself, half-aloud. “The way he looks at her, all she’d have to do is give him permission, and he’d sweep her off to the captain’s cabin and make passionate love to her. And, damn him, he’d be really good for her!”

  A noise from Jocan interrupted his thoughts. He got off the bunk and rushed across the hall into the other cabin. He grabbed the pail, reset it on the floor where he thought it would do the most good, and grabbed hold of the lad’s shoulders to help him direct his spewing into the pail.

  *****

  “What! Mistress Kati! You’re up and about already?”

  Captain Lomen stared at Kati as she emerged onto the deck from the narrow stairway that led to the passenger cabins. It was the third day of the voyage and so far, the weather was holding; the sun was shining although it was barely above the horizon at this early hour.

  “Yeah, it’s me alright, and I have left my bed. I have stopped retching; I have drank water and kept it down. When the morning meal is served, I intend to eat at least a little bit, and to keep it down. I have come up to breathe some fresh air, heartlessly leaving Mikal to nurse Jocan, who is still very sick and no doubt wants to murder me out of sheer envy.”

  “Hah! You must be well on the way to recovery to make such a long speech!” The Captain walked over to where she was standing a little unsteadily and took her elbow to gently guide her steps to the railing.

  “Here, breathe in the sea air and gaze upon the ocean in all its vast glory. Feel free to hang around until the meal time; they’ll be serving it shortly. I’ll tell the deck crew to keep an eye on you; you look a little shaky still.”

  She was shaky. But it was better up here in the clean air than it had been in her cabin which still reeked of vomit—her own vomit, but hers did not smell any better than anyone else’s. Then there were the other sick-rooms: Jocan’s, Evo’s, that of Susana and Mea, plus that of a fellow named Ren. The ship’s medic had given Mikal and Ren’s brother, Con, the use of the last empty guest room for the duration, since sleeping in a room with an ill person could be grim indeed. But Mikal had spent most of his waking time tending to her needs, and Jocan’s, and now, in the clean air, Kati wondered how he had been able to stand it.

  Well, she would help him with Jocan, just as soon as she had eaten and gained back a bit of strength. Right now she was weak as a baby, so weak in fact that she had been very grateful for the Captain’s steadying arm as he had guided her to the railing. She who was so determined to be independent and self-reliant! Well, sea-sickness appeared to be a great equalizer of sorts, but now she was finished with it. According to the granda, now that it had a handle on the way the ship’s motion affected her body, it could compensate.

  “Motion sickness is very different from the initiation sickness that I had to allow you to experience after the implantation,” the granda had explained to her. “The two may feel the same to you, but the initiation sickness is a kind of an immune reaction in which the body objects to the growth of the nodal network into its systems. Over the many pairings I have lived through, I have learned ways to mimic the human nervous system so well that a new host no longer attacks me as a stranger. However, in your case I did not bother with that trick, since we both were safer with Guzi and Gorsh unaware of my actual location. With motion sickness, however, I have to familiarize myself with the way your particular body reacts to the way the ship floats upon the waves, just the same as if I was an ordinary node, but once I know what exactly is going on, I can stabilize your physical functions whenever you need the help.”

  “So, no recurrences?” she had asked.

  “No recurrences. Absolutely. Not even in the worst storm.”

  That had made what she did have to suffer much easier to bear. Now, here, in the morning sunshine, she could even feel pity for the poor nodeless sick folk down below; some of them had days left yet to suffer, and no guarantees that the first bad weather would not make them ill again.

  Down in the ship’s dining room, next to the galley, she discovered that many in the crew had already heard about her quick recovery. They teased her good-naturedly about how, since she was so resistant to sea-sickness, they would make her an honorary crew-member and put her at the top of the list for work details as soon as the bad weather set in. However, they also gave her some good advice about returning her body to health. Several sailors told her not to eat much at this first meal, but to allow her digestive system to return to function slowly. As it turned out she could not have overeaten anyway; one little bun, a small chunk of meat, and a piece of dried fruit washed down with water filled her belly. It also improved her energy-levels considerably; suddenly the notion of going back to the passenger area and relieving Mikal from his vigil in Jocan’s cabin was no longer distasteful.

  “You better go to the galley and grab some food,” she told Mikal on entering the cabin where Jocan was groaning in his bunk.

  Mikal rose from the other bunk in the tiny room; there was only a narrow aisle between the two beds, room for one person to stand comfortably, and no more. The room also contained a pair of upper bunks but since the passenger count was small they had been left closed up against the walls, leaving the cabin a little less claustrophobia-inducing than it would have been at a busier time of the year.

  “I think I’ll take advantage of your offer and do so, before they close shop.” He stretched as much as it was possible to do so in the small space and yawned. “And, if you can handle it here for a short time, maybe I’ll take a quick stroll on the deck. Haven’t had the chance for a while.”

  He nodded towards the boy on the bed.

  “I fed him the broth that Miri, the medic, brought; let’s hope he keeps at least some of it down. So far, so good. The water skin is on the other bunk; if he retches try to get him to replace the fluid he lost, otherwise, don’t give him any unless he asks for some. I guess that should about cover it; Miri’s with Susana and Mea, should you run into trouble.”

  Kati backed out of the room to let him out; he gave her a warm smile as he slipped by her. For one crazy instant she had the feeling that he would have liked to have crushed her in a hug, but that must have been just her imagination working overtime.

  She curled into a sitting position on the bunk opposite Jocan, located the water skin at the head of the bunk, and found there, also, the two books that she had bought in Delta. So Mikal had been whiling the boring
moments of nursing by deciphering the local writing! That was interesting! The two of them had discussed the topic while they had still been in Delta, waiting for The Seabird to sail, and she had told him about the conclusions that the granda had helped her to reach.

  When she had told him about the way the writing seemed to be built up in phrases rather than in words built from sounds, he had, at first, seemed to have had trouble with the concept. Apparently he was, as Kati was, used to a sound-based notation system, and, as he had pointed out, he did not have the benefit of a node as experienced as the granda was.

  “Even two or three previous life experiences can sometimes make a difference,” he had explained. “My mother has a node that has been in the family for three lifetimes, and every now and then she’ll come up with a comment that’ll surprise the rest of us. Like: ‘Well Great Aunt Naini would have done such and such under these circumstances and my node wants me to try it’. It can be a little disconcerting considering that Great Aunt Naini has been dead for almost as long as my mother has been alive.”

  Mikal, however, was a quick study, and once Kati had explained the idea, showing him how the chicken-scratches in the school reader corresponded with the activities shown in the pictures, he had grasped the notion.

  “Aha. Your saying that this mark under this picture means something like: a child is walking. Then the next picture is of the same child walking, but also blowing bubbles at the same time. And here, under it, we have the glyph for ‘a child walking’, but attached to another glyph, presumably meaning ‘a child blows bubbles’. So the combined glyph would be read as ‘a child blows bubbles as he walks’. Right?”

  “That seems to be the general idea,” Kati had responded. “A person who is good at it can do it very fast, of course; the likes of you and me have to figure out each glyph as we go along.”

  “That’s all right.” His grin had been infectious. “We’ll just make like we’re school children all over again.”