Chapter 2
Mara
When I wake again, the station is lightyears behind us. I am in a beige bed that is the most comfortable I may have ever slept in. The linen is still crisp even after a night in it, which is unheard of in my experience.
Before I open my eyes, I am assaulted with a series of memories.
My ship is gone.
My mission to bring water to my people is… derailed.
I sit up, not knowing what time of day it is, and also knowing that it doesn’t matter because technically it is any time of day in any number of planets. It is lunchtime, and bedtime, and it is time for a little snack, and it is time to be getting on, and…
“Whoa,” I say as I get caught in a temporal overwhelm.
“It’s alright, pet,” a deep voice says.
Freak appears next to me.
He wasn’t sleeping in the bed. Was he sitting next to it? Watching me sleep? I have a vague sense that he might have been.
“Breakfast time,” he says, very nearly setting me off into another episode. He produces a white bowl and a white bottle and pours something from the white bottle into the white bowl, then hands it to me. There is also a spoon, but that is not what confuses me.
“Cereal,” he says. “With milk.”
I’ve never heard of such food. Seeing it doesn’t help either. I take the spoon and wriggle it about a bit. Some kind of soup, perhaps?
“What is this? Flakes of little… what?”
“Corn,” he says. “And the nutritional excretions of a bovine. Both very good for your health, so I’m led to believe. It’s all fortified with vitamins and minerals.”
I decide to taste a little of it.
It is excellent. It tastes like bland feels, but in a good way. A comforting way. I feel ancestral memories blooming, as if hundreds of those who came before me are pleased by this meal I am consuming.
“Thank you,” I say. “This is good.”
“It is acceptable. The ship’s rations are a little sparse for humans,” he says. He sits on the edge of the bed, still wearing his tight black pants and little else. “I think your escape attempt has made them less generous in the kitchens, if I’m to be honest.”
“Are you going to get some clothes?”
“No,” he says. “They’ll see clothes again now, as long as you can resist yourself from naming my near nudity.”
“Was it easier to just make everyone think you were clothed instead of actually being clothed? How do you do that?”
“Natural talent,” he says.
“Is that why they were experimenting on you?”
I see his face tighten as he confronts a memory he doesn’t want to deal with. I guess I understand that. I don’t like thinking about…
“So… you were sent away as a sacrifice,” he says, changing the subject to the very thing I was trying not to have in my head.
“I really don’t want to talk about it. But I guess it doesn’t matter, because you will just go ahead and read my mind.”
“I can respect your mental privacy if you wish me to,” he says. “But I like knowing what you are thinking, and where you have come from. Besides, I am not really reading your mind.”
“What are you doing?”
“Feeling into what you are feeling,” he says. “Experiencing memories with you, sometimes. To many, a mind feels like an individual thing, but it is not really. It broadcasts as much as it receives, if you know how to tune in.”
“And you do.”
“Yes. It is one of the traits of my species. We are, not to use too offensive of a term, a more advanced species than your own.”
I shrug. I don’t have much ego when it comes to humanity. I know what we are, and what we’re not. And I know wishing things were different doesn’t change anything.
“I’m used to being around aliens,” I say.
“I used to go off world with my dad. He was a trader. A really good one. He opened up all sorts of routes for the colony. But he disappeared on a mission, and then it was just me. They had other traders, but they weren’t as good and a lot of the deals that my dad made ended up being abandoned.
And then, eventually, the ground got dry and they decided that the sun needed to be appeased, and I was selected. ”
Freak is listening to me with patient interest. I feel as though every word I am saying matters to him.
Odd that I haven’t had that experience more often in this life.
When I think of how it felt to speak to people on my colony, I often had the experience of them listening to perhaps a third of what I was saying and then willfully disregarding the rest. My father used to listen to me properly.
It is strange how much this absolute alien reminds me of him in some ways.
“So that ship was intended to be flung straight into the sun,” he says. “You were meant to perish.”
“Yeah. But I did something different.”
“It was always intended to be your coffin,” he says thoughtfully. “I wonder if that’s why the system flooded. If you didn’t go into the sun, they wanted to be sure you’d be removed from existence one way or another.”
“I guess,” I say, a chill running up my spine. I hadn’t thought of it that way, really. I guess I hadn’t thought properly at all, because he’s entirely accurate.
“But even after being rescued from what was intended to be your tomb, you tried to get back to it. You thought there were important things in there. But those things were always going to be destroyed with you. Their loss was inevitable. Yours was not.”
He’s musing out loud more than actually talking to me, I think.
I don’t like to think back to my departure. My friends were suspiciously absent. It was the elders who packed and provisioned the ship, and who allowed me to take some personal effects. I suppose Freak is right. Everything I took was something they were willing to part with.
“They could have programmed the ship to fly at the sun,” he says.
“They did,” I respond. “But, well. Once I took off, I thought, what if I didn’t go into the sun?
What if I just went and found a water source to trade with?
That’s what my father would have done. So I skirted as close as I could to the sun, so they’d think I’d been all burned up, and then I just kept going until I found the station. And that’s when the flooding started.”
“They were going to use water as their backup to end you, when water was what they were short of,” he muses. “Poetic? Or perhaps they didn’t see the irony?”
“Probably not,” I say. “They didn’t see much. The elders are set in their ways. They believed that the rains would return if the proper sacrifices were made. Some of the scholars tried to point out that it was more about heating and cooling patterns, but they were sent to work in the salt mines.”
Freak nods. “Of course,” he says. “Nothing is more threatening to a mad king than someone with a modicum of common sense. I am glad you decided to make your own way in the world, pet. It would have been a true tragedy if I had never had the chance to encounter you.”
“You saved me,” I say. “And thank you. But how? How did you know anything was wrong inside my ship? Was it dripping?”
“I could feel you,” he says. “You were loud, to me. To my mind,” he clarifies. “We were broadcasting on the same frequency, I suppose. Two beings trying to escape traps set for them.”
“I told you about my trap,” I say. “Won’t you tell me about yours?”
I watch his expression close up tight, and I know before he responds that I am not going to hear enough about it to really know anything.
He might be an exotic, rare alien male. But I’ve seen that expression on enough men’s faces to know that it means he’s about to shut this topic of conversation right down.
* * *
Freak
I am not going to tell her about my captivity. I want to be the one to look after her. She does not need to know about the details of my incarceration, or the experiments that were run on me. But she does need to know a few things, and I do not want her to feel shut out of my world.
“My species is relatively rare,” I explain. “And most aliens do not see us in the same ways. What you see of me is not necessarily what the reality is, if that makes sense. Our appearances can be modified by the perception of the onlooker.”
“Sounds almost quantum,” she murmurs.
“It is, in a sense. Our minds and our bodies react differently to reality. That is why I was wanted for research.”
“I see you as being massive and blue and having lots of spikes and claws, and sharp teeth and all muscles,” she says. “Don’t you look like that?”
“I do,” I explain. “At the same time, I also appear to others in different ways. It’s all real. It’s just different kinds of real.”
“That’s so weird,” she says. “So. Wait. You mean, to the people on this ship, you are that man whose name they said on the ledger? Cactus Capricorn Sconeface? Or whatever? You can make anything be anything?”
Her curiosity is endearing. I will not be able to explain my ways in their entirety to her, but there are things she will understand.
“I can shift reality a little bit,” I say “When we are young, we practice on small things, little glitches. Duplicating washcloths, or making socks disappear. Then, as we get older, we start to be able to make bigger changes. The ship has a berth for us, because I decided it did.”
“Wow, so you’re like a space genie,” she breathes. “You can make anything into anything else.”
“I can do some limited things,” I tell her. “I know to you it seems like a sort of magic, but it is a power that can only go so far. The same way you can run, but only run for so long, I can alter reality, but not forever, and not always.”
She nods. “Okay, I get it. I think. Maybe. So this ship, it didn’t have this room until you wanted it to have one, and it has a weird name attached because you’re weird, and you kept me because you felt me, and you’re running from people who tried to quantum torture you.”
“Very good, pet,” I praise her. “That’s a very solid interpretation of what I told you.”
“So now what? Are you going to get vengeance on those who captured you?”
“I already have,” I say.
“Oh, my god. Did you kill them all?”