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LENA STARED AT THE ceiling in what was definitely now her cabin. Uncle Richard had been installed in a new one just down from her. She didn’t dare commune with the ship, she felt like she’d just spent the past two hours talking about a friend behind her back and she felt wretched. She also knew that communing with the ship wasn’t really a thing either, that ARohirohi could hear anyone, perfectly well any time she chose. But it still felt like the worst kind of betrayal.
Blobs of faint colour drifted across the ceiling, morphing into one another, transmuting endlessly. Lena knew the ship was generating this. To calm her? Console her? Reassure her? It was so difficult to say. None of her life thus far, or any of her adults had prepared her for making a new friend out of an alien life form. To be fair, none of the grown-ups knew what the hell was going on there either. The Navy types saw Arohirohi as a new kind of military advantage, the scientists saw her as a fascinating experiment that she had no sense of fear in experiencing in real time, and the doctor just saw her as a potential threat. The doctor had spent a great deal of time explaining to her by analogy to huge wild animals, how relationships between small frail humans and huge behemoths might wind up. The huge elephant could be your best friend, though it would never believe you were an elephant too and it could very easily crush you against a wall while it was trying to scratch an itch without even noticing. Doctor Fuller seemed to have a very bleak, unfeeling view of the universe, perhaps based on a career fighting germs, viruses, and self-replicating genetic memes. He seemed to be a beautiful, Black, compassionate giant of a man, but he was very much of the idea that the universe was out to get him somehow. For her part, Lena had always preferred the stories about elephants grieving for each other for decades or turning up to their human friends’ funerals.
She knew she’d gotten herself into something huge. This whole thing was more massive than anything she could have imagined, but it felt on the same massive scale as myths and fairy tales. Everyone else on the ship sensed the power and potential she had, like a dragon of old. Dangerous. Disruptive. Deadly. Lena was sure that all those things could be true as well, but that wasn’t what she saw. Was she the only one who saw a real person? Well, a being anyway. Arohirohi had a personality, thoughts, a sense of humour, for god sakes, was she the only one who got that? Did no-one else? Was she going to be a proper member of the crew, or were they just treating her as an interface: a patch to be applied to the software, a translation matrix between languages?
And why was she already going, in her head at least? The last thing mother had said to her, in what was in turns a scary, impenetrable, interesting, and ultimately boring meeting, was “You don’t have to go.” It almost seemed like caring when it was said like that. Like she didn’t want her to go. Lena knew better than that of course. For her mother, the scientist, it didn’t really matter if she went or not, the science was the thing. Stating Lena didn’t have to go, was just that—a statement. She had no skin in the game. Lena scrunched her eyes shut.
Why did it feel like she was being squeezed? She wasn’t just imagining it, there was a definite force being applied to the outside of all of her at once, except her head. Like a very deliberate all over hug. She didn’t want to open her eyes in case it stopped, or she got the shock of her life like on the bridge when she’d found all the tubes coming from everywhere. Although, she’d gotten over that by now. Doctor Fuller still hadn’t. He had no satisfactory explanation for what the tubes were even doing, let alone how. He just knew that they’d all travelled faster than the speed of light, twice and that everyone should have been harmed considerably—jam was the word the doctor had used—and nobody had been. He’d said that Lena was the picture of health.
The other thing was, no one had asked Arohirohi what she wanted to do, mostly because no one really believed she had a say. And Lena knew if she didn’t ask, no one else could. She sighed and opened her eyes again, “What are we gonna do Rowie?” The pastel lights on the ceiling morphed and changed and Lena fell asleep.
