The Lonely Whelk (11 page)

“
I think...” Hazel dragged
in a few lungfuls of air. “I think I’m in space.”

For a moment, she dragged her eyes away from
the marvelous and terrifying sight to look around the little
clearing. A bench was propped against a tree and the grass looked
as though it had been recently mowed. Then the reality of it all
hit her. She was on a spaceship, in space, a million billion miles
from anywhere, and she was wandering around the apparently deserted
ship following the whims of a monkey. And she began to laugh at the
absurdity of it, at the fear, at the terrifyingly real realization
that she was completely alone. But perhaps it was worth it. One
day, if she didn’t die out here, one day she would have quite the
story to tell.

The trees on the path were unfamiliar to
Hazel. Most were green and looked wonderfully thick and healthy,
but some had red outlines on the leaves, and some had solidly
silver-coloured leaves. The branches on the trees varied too. Some
looked as if they had grown naturally, but others appeared to have
been shaped and designed somehow. One tree even looked like it had
a face etched into its bark.

She scowled at it, daring it to say anything
– or to do anything. Then, remembering the monkey around her neck,
she took one more glance at the sky and said, “Okay, monkey, where
to next?”

The monkey chattered and pointed towards a
narrow path leading out of the clearing.

Hazel took a deep breath and strode forward,
and began to hum quietly. It was the song her father had taught
long, long ago:

If you don’t know what to do

Take a step forward

When you don’t know what is true

Or what you’re moving toward

Just take a step forward

And you’ll learn something new.

All she had to do was keep moving, one step
at a time, one minute at a time, and eventually she would end up
somewhere. Good or bad, strange or familiar, it didn’t matter. All
that mattered was that she pave her own way.

At first she thought she was dreaming.

Then she heard the singing. Perhaps she was
imagining it, a long-lost song haunting her from her memory. But
then it got louder; it was a strange, lilting tune, a little less
like singing and more like humming. Holland stood slowly, her feet
still tingling from the aftereffects of stasis. Long jarring bolts
of pain shot up her legs. Her head hurt, and her throat was dry,
and more than anything, she wanted something to drink. She took a
deep breath and pushed the pain from her mind, focusing instead on
the unusual sound emanating from the hallway.

She stumbled forward painfully, and opened
the door to the bridge.

“
Hello!” Holland called.
“Hello! Who’s there?”

The humming noise stopped, and she heard a
reply. It was a female voice, but she couldn’t understand the
words.

“
Hello?” she
repeated.

The voice replied again, this time louder.
It seemed to be coming towards her at a much more rapid pace. Then
she heard the echoing of footsteps from the end of the hallway.
Holland remembered that the effect, built in deliberately by the
ship’s architect, was a safety feature, so that anyone in the
bridge could tell when someone was approaching and have time to
react.

About two minutes later, a young woman
appeared. Flaming red hair fell over her broad shoulders, and a
monkey was draped around her neck.

“
Who are you?” Holland
asked.

“
Hazel,” the woman replied.
She paused briefly, pointing at herself, and then began to speak
again in unintelligible syllables. Holland held up her hand and
interrupted.

“
Hazel. I’m assuming your
name is Hazel, although, since I can’t understand you, I can’t
imagine how you could understand me. I am the Admiral of this fleet
of vessels, and I have a very important question for you: how did
you get on board?”

The woman looked around for a moment,
silent, and then opened her mouth.

“
I suppose it won’t do any
good,” Holland interrupted again. “Since I can’t understand
you.”

Waving her hands and shaking her head, the
woman began to speak loudly. Then, she picked the monkey up from
around her neck and tried to hand it to Holland.

“
I don’t want it,” Holland
said, gripping more tightly to the doorframe. “It’s a...” Then she
leaned forward. The monkey had a small blinking red light behind
its ear. “It’s a shipbot?”

She reached one arm forward and the monkey
scrambled up onto her shoulder instead. “You’re a shipbot! Where in
the name of the goddess’ bloomers did you come from? I thought
Squeak was the only shipbot.” She reached down and grabbed the
monkey’s tail, and flipped open the tip. Inside was a small switch.
She flipped it and commanded: “Translate.”

The monkey began to speak in a robotic
voice, “My name is Hazel and I can understand you but you can’t
understand me and I don’t know how to communicate with you do you
have any idea where we are because I don’t know where I am and I
don’t know how I got here.”

“
Oh, my!” Holland
exclaimed. “What do you mean you don’t know how you got
here?”

“
The monkey can talk?” the
monkey-robot-translator stated in monotone, although the girl’s
face showed extreme surprise.

“
Yes,” Holland replied.
“Now answer my question.”

“
Well,” the
robot-translating-the-girl replied, “I have a tourist shop that
moves around randomly, and somehow it ended up here. But where is
here?”

“
This is my spaceship, the
SIV Whelk,” Holland replied. “We left Sagitta approximately six
hundred years ago.”

“
Oh,” Hazel replied. “Well,
I left Earth about three hours ago, I guess.”

“
Earth?” Holland paused and
put her hand on her forehead. How could this be happening? Maybe
she was hallucinating as an after-effect of the drugs that caused
the extended sleep. “Earth is a model for cultural development,”
she muttered. “I didn’t think its people could leave the surface of
the planet.”

“
We went to the moon,”
Hazel offered.

Holland began to feel light-headed. “I see,”
she said. “I think I need to sit down.”

She began to hobble back towards the
chair.

“
Do you need help?” Hazel
asked.

“
No, I’m fine.” What to do
about a possible stowaway or intruder or invasion or hallucination
or whatever she was… Unfortunately, there were radically different
solutions for each of those possibilities, and Holland barely had
enough strength to stand, let alone fight off an intruder or
invasion. A stowaway she could handle. A hallucination,
well...

“
As long as you’re here,”
Holland began, raising an eyebrow, “and since you seem to be
relatively harmless for the moment, I’m going to put you to
work.”

“
Of course!” Hazel nodded.
“Anything I can do, just let me know. But eventually, I just want
to go home.”

“
I can’t help you do that
until I get my ship under control. The first order of business is
to wake up the rest of the crew.”

“
How do we do that?” Hazel
asked.

“
Follow me.”

The trek to the coffin room was painful.
Every step felt like a massive spike was being driven up her legs,
and the feeling of pins and needles was so intense that she
imagined small stinging insects crawling all over her skin. In
addition, her breathing became short and difficult – she hoped
something wasn’t wrong with her respiratory system.

She reached out to open the door to the
coffin room.

“
This is a creepy room,”
said the girl in monotone robot voice.

Holland looked over her should to see Hazel
gazing at the coffins that lined the walls, each with tubes and
wires reaching out of one end. Holland nodded in agreement. She
also felt – and had since long before she had left on this trip –
that aside from the coffins, the room had a discomfiting feel, as
if the walls were a little too short and the ceiling a little too
wide, like they were standing in a three dimensional trapezoid.

“
I need you to help me wake
up my crew,” Holland said. “Each coffin contains one person, and
each person in this room is crucial to the managing the ship. We
will be arriving at our destination in less than three weeks, so I
need my crew awake and ready to work.

“
I’ve never seen anything
like it.” Hazel wandered over to a coffin and touched it gently
with one hand. Holland had the strong feeling that she was
reenacting a weird dream from her own period of stasis.

“
It’s so strange, so
unreal,” Hazel continued. “I mean, real live sleeping people...
waking from the dead? It’s like a combination of a post-apocalyptic
dystopia and a fairy tale. What if they’ve been infected by an
alien virus and are zombies when they wake up? Or what if they’ve
all had an overdose of whatever you inject them with and are
suddenly super smart or something?”

Holland ignored the speculating and began to
explain the process. “To open the coffins, you begin by turning the
wheel at the end.” Holland pointed to the nearest coffin, and Hazel
obediently walked over to it. The wheel squealed and creaked as it
turned, and the lid began to rise slowly. “The computers have
already started the process of waking them. It takes care of their
med packs and injects them with the necessary chemicals and
nutrients for successful waking. Some people may already be awake
when you open the coffin.

“
Each coffin has the name
of its resident,” Holland continued, “so you will know who they are
when they awake. The first person you wake can help you read them.
After the coffin is open, you will need to switch the med-feed from
the stasis pack to the waking pack. Since, as I said, the computer
has already started the revival process, they should all be waking
up as you open the lids. Few should still be asleep, and those
Nurse Sammy will attend to as soon as she is able.”

“
What is the name of the
person in this box?” Hazel asked.

“
His plaque reads, ‘Pilgrim
Overwall,’“ Holland replied. “He is a good friend of mine, and
after he can walk, he can help you with the others. I am going to
go back to the bridge, to get a few other things done.”

A groan came from the coffin.

Holland hobbled over. “Hello, Pilgrim,” she
said smiling. The skin on her face felt stiff; it had been a long
time since she had smiled.

“
Hey there, Admiral.” His
voice cracked. “Has it been six hundred years already?”

She smiled. “That it has, Corporal. This
woman is Hazel, and she is going to help you wake up the crew. That
shipbot will be translating. I will explain everything later.”

“
Aye, aye!” He gave a very
floppy salute.

Holland smiled and turned to Hazel. “Please
hurry,” she said.

Hazel nodded, wide-eyed, and Holland turned
and left the room.

The walk back to the bridge was just as
painful as the walk to the coffin room had been, but the pain was
changing. The pins and needles had largely worked themselves out at
this point, and now it was mostly the loud, agonizing pain of
muscle disuse. She knew that there were a series of stretches that
were supposed to help this condition, but she didn’t know what they
were and the head nurse on board was still asleep. Besides, she had
far more important things to worry about than sore muscles.

She sank into the chair in front of the
bridge console, sighing with relief. It would be nice to have some
time to sit. She pulled up the ship’s logs. Five, including one of
Hawkings explaining his death, were red-flagged as important; one
was green-flagged as personal. She swallowed, and then selected the
oldest of the red-flagged video logs.

“
Good morning, sis!”
Hawkings’ cheerful face appeared in the monitor. “I probably look
awfully cheerful for a red-flagged video. It’s because... well,
it’s because this morning was horrible, but we still made it
through. We’re all still alive. Can you believe it’s we made it
nearly the full 600 years without a red-flagged video? I have to
say, I’m getting excellent at Jingle Cards, although Lady Mastin
can still beat me most of the time.

“
Anyway, this morning we
went through what we thought was an asteroid belt. It was not.
Instead, it was a series of alien weapons designed to look like
asteroids – a minefield, of sorts, but for ships. Our shields took
quite a beating, and at one point I had to wake up Thompson to have
him do repairs.”

Hawkings’ face grew solemn. “Unfortunately,”
he continued, “we were too late. During the attack we lost power in
Corridors three, five, and seven. Now that the power is back, we
have frozen the bodies so they can be properly cared for when the
ship arrives at the planet. We will also hold a funeral service as
soon as we can.

“
The aliens haven’t come
after us, so we think the field was just a remnant from an old war
that we weren’t a part of – so that is a positive thing, at least.
But it doesn’t make up for the lives of our people that were so
horribly lost. I’m so sorry, Holland.”

The video ended.

The next red-flagged video was the funeral
service. Holland didn’t think she could watch that right now. Her
head ached with the pain that came from holding back tears, and the
deep ache of sorrow permeated her every thought and motion. The
other two videos were the deaths of Lord and Lady Mastin. She
didn’t want to watch those either. Due to the disaster with alien
technology, the voyage had not gone particularly smoothly, and the
colony would suffer for it. Now it was her responsibility to make
the rest of the voyage and colonization go according to plan.