Recording Playback 1.0023.498.x
Speaker and Authorizer: Organizer President, Interstel Councilmember Sy. Blyreena Ekstafor
Rotation 2, Mayak Harvest, 3550
That pseudotherapy session in the bar with Ovlan became the first of many dates. We never truly called them such, never treated our outings between then and graduation as particularly romantic. It was almost an accident, us falling in love. We liked many of the same things: industrial flute jazz, gardening, cooking elaborate meals, eating elaborate meals, and of course, good shows. But who among us doesn’t, really? Our favorites were comedies and cooking shows, and in a rare spark of genius, both genres blended into one, a daring amalgamation we rewatched many times throughout our happy relationship.
But we weren’t only couch potatoes, good jokesters, and foodies. We both shared a deep admiration for the work of the Organizers and the various departments they umbrella. Ovlan of course held a deep passion for the Builders. As a child living in the rural zones outside the capital, Builder-operations funding was the only reason he and his mother had clean water, tenable soil, and a warm home to protect against Panev’s harshest elements. In ages past, our poorest city-states were left on their own come droughts or frost, but decades ago a particularly forward-thinking Builder President commissioned the Rural Habitat Improvement Effort, a coalition driven not by capital politicians, but by city-state leadership. Inflated with funds and resources, Ovlan’s remote home flourished with the installation of bolstered soils and terraforming turf, artificial water lines and a complete weather-shielding grid. As he put it, Builder intervention changed the lives of him and his one thousand and eleven neighbors nearly overnight.
I led a rather different life.
My father was in the Interstel Navy and was honored for discovering six exoplanets, one previously inhabited and, though we wouldn’t know for decades, destroyed by Endri. He was honorably discharged when an airlock malfunction caused one of his lungs to collapse.
This was well before he and my dad, who worked with the Educators, adopted me. The two of them moved in together a month after the accident, my dad more than happy to care for him. Between my dad’s generous Educator salary and my father’s military stipend, we managed a very happy life.
Father’s duty and honor were instilled in me early. He had an enormous passion and respect for life—one of the tenets, in fact, of the Interstel Navy, though I think he had the heart of it long before he signed up. Once, I found a refuse crawler in my room, big as my six-year-old hand. I screamed and picked up a doll’s crest iron (even then, I was a diva), raising it to strike—several times if I had to.
Father came in and stayed my hand. “Bly,” he said to me. “You want to kill this?”
It was an odd question. Did I want to kill the crawler? I wanted it gone, that was certain. It was spindly, with eighteen legs and a chitinous little mouth that made me want to scream again.
But as scary as it was—as horrifying and inStelhari as it was—Father found a glass and captured it, put his hand—bare and exposed!—right over the top to keep it inside, and told me to come with him to the patio.
“There were many times on other worlds,” he said, speaking slowly. He always spoke slowly, taking long, purposeful breaths between every handful of words, and somehow this made everything he said seem wise. Each word was an effort, something that had to be said. “When I was scared,” he went on. “I would see a shadow or a flicker and want to raise my weapon. But I was honor-bound to stay my hand. We were strangers on those planets. Whether bug, or plant, or small creature...we were the intruders. And we wanted to treat them with respect.”
He nodded his head to the patio, and I touched the sensor to open it. The sounds of the capital, I remember them so clearly. So stunningly, impossibly clearly. I have few such clear memories of youth. The ambient laughing and conversation, small figures walking around the lake; the faint smell of wildflowers in season, blooming beneath the Sciences Spire; and its cooling shadow cast across our apartment like a shield from the sun.
My father followed me out onto the patio. “In those moments of fear of other creatures, it was always important to look for the similarities. Do you know what the greatest thing we have in common with alien flora and fauna is? What the greatest thing you have in common with this bug is?”
I looked at the bug. Indeed, so like an alien. “Bleh!” I think I said.
My father chuckled and coughed. “Try.”
The bug was squirming in the glass. It had barely enough space for its legs, and I kept fearing it would bite my father’s hand. It didn’t. “It has legs,” I said, and Father smiled and nodded, encouraging me to keep going. “Eyes, too. And...it doesn’t like being trapped. I wouldn’t want to be in a glass.”
“Why doesn’t it like being trapped?”
“It’s scared,” I said, like a revelation.
My father took his hand off the glass, angled it out over the lake and crowds below. The creature inside scuttled eagerly out, unfurled its iridescent wings, and flew off with a buzzing clamor. It was rather clumsy in the air, bobbing almost cutely. But don’t get me wrong. Refuse crawlers are savage little things.
“Life,” my father said, “is what we have the most in common with every other creature. We all want to live and we become scared when living is threatened. All of us just want to survive and be comfortable, be happy.”
The bug faded to a brown dot, then vanished into a blooming tree.
Years later, I knew Ovlan was someone special when after a night we’d spent together close to graduation, I heard him scream from his kitchen. It was a tight, bloodcurdling thing, and I thought maybe he’d cut himself badly making a romantic breakfast (turned out, he was never the sort, but we got on). I rushed to the kitchen and found him on the countertop, clutching a cabinet knob for dear life, staring down at the floor and screaming, “I let you live, you let me live! Deal? Deal?”
He was hysterical, and I had to scour the floor very carefully to find what had set him off: a snake. A tiny sliver of a thing, no longer than the length of my finger. I don’t think it had even noticed Ovlan. When I saw this, I burst out laughing. I could not stop. The sight of this sweet, boisterous man pinched onto the counter, screeching over a garden hisser, a thing he must have seen a million times living in the fields and plains. He could have poked it with his toe and the thing would have died, and instead he was making a soul pact with it.
“Bly!” he cried, more scared than indignant. “Don’t lose sight of it!” As if it were some scuttler drone and not a tiny, harmless thing.
I eventually recovered and, though I am not a fan of invading crawling entities either, managed to get the thing outside safely. In a way, it reminded me of that beautiful morning with my father and the refuse crawler.
Ovlan came down from the countertop with a look of deep shame. “Is our relationship over?”
“Depends,” I said. “Did the snake seal the pact while I was laughing at you?”
“No, else I might have agreed to get back on the floor.”
“Well, I guess I’ll keep you then.” We kissed, and from then on I was very careful about never showing him anything interesting about snakes.
Just kidding.
I teased him about it all the time. We graduated a week and a half later and, not being able to help myself, I got him one of those trick cylinders with the springy confetti inside. I specifically ordered the one where the large springy was a snake. He didn’t break up with me then, so I knew he probably wouldn’t ever.
Graduated, we could hardly wait to put what we had learned into action. After a modest celebration with our families, we retreated to my apartment and filled out job applications until the early hours of the next day. You could say that we were kind of nerds. But both of our lives had been shaped by Interstel, by the Organizers, by the Builders and Educators and Financers, and all the other wings of our people’s leadership. We wanted desperately to give back, and to help shape the world.
Ovlan—smart, caring, ingenious, lovable Ovlan—he got a job with the Builders ten days after graduating. We celebrated at our favorite restaurant. We got high on fizz and, while high on fizz, literally shouted from the rooftops with joy. He had made it, and in him making it, I had made it. And I knew my time was coming soon. Ovlan and I both knew that not long after his own victory, mine would come.
But it didn’t.
I heard nothing the week after Ovlan’s hiring, or the week after that. Ovlan started his new job and left me with a squeeze of the hand and a promise something would come in soon. He worked a week, two weeks, a month. Two months. Three. All the applications I’d submitted, all the energy I’d given, and nothing. I was so terrified, more than I’d ever been in my life, that I had failed. That I was a failure.
A notification interrupts and pauses the recording automatically, leaving Blyreena a distressed hologram in the air, reliving the trauma of her failure. Was this the face I made when Verity Co. took that cache from us?
I click a button to answer the open line to the cockpit. “Scout,” Kieran says. “Scans have found something. There’s another cache here.”