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LENA WAS WARM AND SAFE and dry. She was lying on the bed in her room instead of on the plinth in the middle of the bridge of the oddest spaceship she’d ever encountered. The crew had moved her once she was asleep before the ship began to extrude tentacles to feed her, remove waste and communicate. From the tone of the captain’s conversation, they were concerned for her privacy. Those umbilicals grew from her bed instead the moment she’d settled properly. The crew were already calling her the Dream Pilot.
It wasn’t really dreaming, or not dreaming in the sense that Lena had ever done before. It was certainly restful, though she wondered if the tendrils dealt with all that. It was not a loss of consciousness, or at least not all the time. She did sleep sometimes, more catnaps than anything, but most of the time she was fully aware and awake, though none of the crew treated her that way. She couldn’t blame them for that, since she’d had no time to explain the whole weirdness that was her big adventure. It was all more what she’d heard grown-ups talk of as an altered state of consciousness. Though her eyes were closed, she knew everything that was going on and where everybody was, through the ship itself. It wasn’t actively communicating everything to her, she wondered if her human brain would even have the capacity to deal with that, but all the things the ship wasn’t keeping shielded, spilled over to Lena, along with the things the ship was trying to communicate. That sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. A little like when her mother had taken her abroad to conferences where any number of languages were spoken, sometimes Lena had needed no translation at all. Through her arm-pad, direct translation at real time speeds had been possible for decades, somehow the nuance of it was lost, the skill for actually learning a language and its subtleties had never been abandoned. Lena, almost always turned this feature of her arm-pad off, preferring to immerse herself in the ebb and flow of a conversation. But she learned as well, the amount of exertion this was for a human brain and sometimes, when she was tired enough to turn her translations back on again, she could see how easy it would be to drown in that same sea.
Now, plugged into the ship, even with an arm-pad still working for her, there was no way she could use that to communicate. There was no frame of reference for the software to grab onto. This creature, this ship was as alien a thing as it was possible to imagine. When Lena couldn’t understand her, she always thought of Arohirohi as a her, she was truly on her own. It didn’t speak to her in words, only feelings or pictures. She wasn’t even sure how it did that. Did Rowie have eyes? Or was she using Lena’s brain to tell her a story of how things were? Lena pondered that Rowie must know where things are, or else how would she know which direction she was going in? And she certainly knew that. It seemed that Lena got bursts of what Rowie was thinking when the ship overflowed with feelings. When they started this journey, the captain and the navigator had taken her through so many star maps it made her brain hurt. All the possible things that could get in their way between here and Proxima and all the course corrections to take, how to manage the heliopause as they left the solar system—it was a good job she enjoyed maths and science. Even allowing for that, the amount of concentrated learning left her tired and low.
On the day they took off, there was a bit of a diplomatic scuffle at the dock as a ship of U.N.O.O.S.A staffers turned up and insisted that docking clamps were applied to the ship—clearly word had got out about Rowie’s slightly unusual nature. Lena saw the whole thing on the ceiling of the cabin. Was the ship using cameras or tapping into the systems of the station and finding the pictures that way? The captain had stomped out onto the dock to face the contingent and had left Fazar in charge as first officer. The moment she’d left, Fazar crept out, while Captain Varma was in heated discussions with the dockside officials. He turned left not right at the edge of the dock, and Rowie knew straight away that she wanted to follow him. He walked to the next docking bay along. It would serve him right if he got left behind, Lena thought. Then she saw someone in the shadows, who suddenly leapt into focus. How far could Rowie see exactly? She was looking via an on station camera, observing the next dock and its dockside. Fazar turned, startled by the person lurking. It seemed they knew each other, or at least he was expecting someone. The lurker wore a set of grey dock overalls. They seemed to chat light-heartedly, none of this camera’s feed had sound, there were obviously some limitations to Rowie’s brilliance. It seemed as if the ship was trying to monitor what the Captain was doing as well as help the poor Boatswain, now left in charge with no first officer. Rowie didn’t seem sure what to show her for a second, but Lena pictured Fazar’s sneer in her mind, and that was where the image went. Except he’d gone. He was walking along the pier to the airlock with the mystery person, then a second later wasn’t there. He couldn’t have doubled back in that time. The air-lock then? Rowie could only gaze at the door from afar. Whatever they were up to, they didn’t want the world seeing. Then the camera feed went entirely black. Rowie had lost the connection, or the camera had failed. Now what? It felt as though Rowie was investigating other systems. Doors, pressure sensors, thermometers. The air-lock door had been closed and locked. It had standard earth atmosphere in it. Okay. Hiding then, whatever they were up to. The door opened and closed and locked again. On their way out, then. No sign of either of them anymore, camera still down. Captain Varma seemed to be at the end of her remonstrations with the officials. The docking clamps it seemed had to stay. And that air-lock was depressurising. Lena supposed that was standard procedure. No point in wasting station resources keeping it pressurised with no-one in it. The first officer was back on camera in the docking bay approaching the departing officials, no sign of his companion, slunk off somewhere no doubt. Fazar seemed to be holding something. A small black case. With the officials sorting to leave between him and Varma he removed something, then threw the case into a disposal chute on the dockside. Then the Captain saw him, surprised and cross seemed to be her reaction, but she ushered Fazar back to the ship as he adjusted his uniform jacket. What the hell was he up to? No good, Lena was sure of it.
The side of Lena’s cabin cleared to reveal a view along the side of the station. The view of the stars was beautiful and was never going to get old. A satellite drifted in the near distance. That shouldn’t be right, they were in way too high an orbit for anything else to be above them. Could she be seeing a satellite below them somehow? She placed her finger on the window where the drifting dot was. Rowie instinctively zoomed in. Now it was clearer the dot was elongated and it was drifting away from the station. Rowie zoomed closer and focused for Lena to see more clearly. Arms, legs, a grey station-suit and no helmet. A bloated face and red eyes stared back at her. She screamed. The grey station suit and the nearest air-lock. It couldn’t be, could it? Before she could process the scene any further, another ship from the far side of the station had chosen this direction to come, for some reason—swapping docks? Whatever the reason, the ship was now in her way and what she’d just seen became as dreamlike as everything else was becoming in her life. But none of her previous dreams had featured murder. She knew she should report it, but the captain had received orders to ship out immediately from the Admiralty and Rowie, being more malleable than other ships, slipped her clamps and sped off into the black.
Lena knew the visual aspects of what Rowie shared with her were a fiction, because she also created things for her and with her when she was bored. There was a rather impressive mind park that they were busy playing in, with trees and verges and a flat grassy field to play on. The last addition was a rather lovely playground of the old-fashioned logs-bolted-together variety. It had a slide and swings and a roundabout so far, but they both knew it was a work in progress. Lena had been thinking about a pond and ducks but every time she started to think about where she was going to put the pond and what shape she’d like it, she got distracted. Her eyes were drawn to a large bunch of joggers. They seemed to be endlessly running the perimeter of her park. All neatly in pairs, like some infant school outing. Why were they there? She certainly hadn’t imagined them. And Rowie, how would Rowie even know what a jogger was?
In the room on the ship where the small child slept, full of translucent pipes, she shuddered slightly.
