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“SHOW ME WHERE YOU CAME from Rowie...”
The question occurred to Lena as they were working one morning. Even though she’d been on board for nearly a month now, everything still seemed so new. Was she piloting? It didn’t really feel the same as the things Lyn did. Lena didn’t know half the jargon for a start, but on the other hand, there was only one person telling the ship where they’d like to go. For all their naval procedures and ranks, all the crew were doing was organising and looking after the living people on the ship and monitoring what the ship was doing in real-space. There was a lot of calling out speeds and headings and a lot of aye, aye captain going on, but other than the captain checking in on her to occasionally ask whether they were on course or not and how she felt, really she could be driving the whole ship on her own.
That was if she was influencing the steering at all. At the start of the journey, the captain had said where they were going, Lena had told ARohirohi and she knew straight away where that was. Once they were underway, the captain had done a lot of checking and double checking with flashy 3D star projections that they’d even put a pink chevron on to represent where they were and which direction they were heading. Lena loved reading the maps, loved the expert poring over them, both the captain, and Lyn had a pair of gloves they put on to interact with the map and draw on it. It was beautiful but largely empty between the solar system and Proxima, where they were headed. Lena liked it best when they expanded the map to navigate via other stars farther away. Then it felt as if they were going somewhere.
Though she liked looking at it, Lena had no need for the map at all. She only needed the idea of where they were going to communicate it to the ship, and everyone knew it. The captain had taken time one day to explain the whole map and how the gloves worked, but Lena suspected she and the whole crew were compensating. It made them all slightly edgy, though no-one said anything.
“You know where I come from—” Lena’s statement elicited a series of images in her mind, her own or from Rowie, she wasn’t sure. All the places she’d lived with her mother, all the places she’d been lifted from, settled then uprooted again. As she’d started to put out tendrils and rootlets, to explore, find friends, start to orient herself, she’d be lifted again and moved on to her mother’s next placement. After a few years, untangling tendrils and snapping rootlets just hurt too much and she started to protect herself, keeping herself safe, keeping her own company, finding solace in books. If she was a plant, now she felt like one in a pot that her mother listed in her itinerary of stuff to move every couple of years when she had a new position.
“I kind of meant Earth, Rowie, but you make a good point.” She sighed heavily and sat on her bunk. “What about you, though? We were talking about you. Where did you come from?” Lena got an image of the salvage vessel that had found the abandoned ship and towed her back to Earth. She knew those images were probably classified by now. “Oh okay, now I know where they found you, but where did you come from before that?” For her pains this time, Lena got an outburst of images and swirls and lines, blooms of colour and billions of what she assumed were stars, blurring past and morphing into new forms with too many facets difficult to look at. Then those facets exploded into fractals, each with faces and even the colours of those were vibrating in Lena’s head. There were sounds too, from barely audible dolphin squeaks to gargantuan cetacean basso rumbles that vibrated every bone in Lena’s body. When the smells began Lena thought she might be sick. Every aroma and taste she’d ever experienced passed in an instant, then strange churning combinations of some, then all of them and finally, delicate, beautiful, simple things she’d never smelled before, crashing through a million new but mundane smells, to an awful fetid hell of rot, bubbling with new combinations of gut-wrenchingly awful at every turn.
“Stop!” And the experience did. The room returned to its usual white with calming blobs of colour and a stark absence of any odour at all. Her nose was numb, even though its receptors had really felt none of it. “I guess I’m not cut out for understanding where you’re from. It’s okay.” Lena stared hard at the ceiling till her eyes lost focus. She couldn’t sleep now, not after all of that, she thought of reaching for her book instead. Within its two electronic pages were the Guttenberg library—every book ever written by humans, from the greatest masterpiece to the worst dross, it was all there. Lena had a penchant for 19th century adventure stories: Treasure Island was her current go-to. She reached for her book, which chimed to announce an update or a message. That was odd, since they had only been in patchy radio contact with Earth, which seemed to have created some consternation among the officers. “Rowie? Have you been peeking?”
“Ping-ping,” said the book.
“Huh.” Lena fluffed her pillows and sat back against a beautifully person-shaped headboard. It had adapted as the journey had progressed, and now made as good a seat as anywhere. She opened the book, but it was not the page she’d left it at. “Did you lose my place, Rowie?” But it wasn’t even the same book. Her reader opened on the frontispiece of a book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.
