115: SAFE

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It’s about 2am on our personal ship schedule, but both the captain and I are awake. I can feel his breathing through his back, measured but not the slow, soft breath of sleep. I reach my arms around him and lay a hand on his hip.

And feel him stiffen, startled, and pull away.

Shit. I wasn’t careful enough. I need to be more careful. Did I do something to remind him of Heli? Am I being pushy? I know he hadn’t been able to say no to her, and yet I keep letting him into my nest, keep putting his wellbeing at risk like this, and now I’ve finally done something that could hurt him. I pull back immediately. Shit. It was just a small flinch, probably nothing important, people flinch all the time, but I absolutely can’t push this man like I can with Tal. I need to be more careful.

But he takes a few calming breaths and seems to change his mind, rolling over and on top of me, knees hemming my hips while his hands seek my wrists in the dark. Like he’s trying to prove something, like it’s his job to rise to the call to action.

It’s not his job. I gently bat his hands away, and he lies back down.

“Sorry,” he says.

Sorry? Why? “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have grabbed you.”

He seems amused by that. “It’s a mixed signal, certainly.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Yeah? Why wouldn’t I be? Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Of course I’m fine. I have no reason not to be fine. “I just like to know you’re doing alright.”

A puzzled silence. “Are you trying to give me therapy? In bed?”

“I wasn’t. But I guess that’s why you’re not supposed to sleep with your therapist.”

“You probably shouldn’t sleep with your captain, either.”

“We are such a HR nightmare.”

We lay in the quiet for a while, until he says, “Is this a problem for you?”

“What?”

“I mean. If you don’t want me stopping by – ”

I can’t help but laugh “Capt – ”

“Don’t. Not here.”

“ – Adin, if I didn’t want you in my nest, I’d tell you to fuck off.”

I think he relaxes a bit at that. But in the dark, it’s a little hard to be sure. “You’re sure?”

“Yes! Why would you think otherwise?”

“Because I just had to remind you to use my name.”

“Out of habit! Not out of some authoritarian mindset. Does it bother you? Being Captain Klees?”

“No. It took some getting used to, but no; not out there. I remember when you were Captain Greaves. In here, though, I just… you do want me here?”

“Yes. Obviously. I don’t know why you would think that I, of all people, would be intimidated by rank.”

“You always took rank seriously with Sands.”

Okay, point. But that was different. I pushed to put Sands in charge because I desperately didn’t want to be, and then I spent months trying to fix my mistake and herd him into being a decent leader. Captain Klees isn’t a mistake, and even if he was, he wouldn’t be my mistake; Sam and I are the only crew who didn’t get to vote. (Not that I’m protesting. I think Captain Klees is a perfectly good choice.) It ws never about rank, in the way that he means it. Arboreans aren’t really raised to expect rank in that way. We have leaders and professionals, of course, responsible for specific duties and with specific decision-making powers related to them, but most decisions are made by groups, by the adults in a cluster reaching agreement. The sorts of leaders I’m used to are either specific professionals with specific jobs (such as biologists who can bar me from walking in certain areas where I might affect the establishment of a new fish school), or whoever the most charismatic and well-trusted adult in the cluster is. And outside of Arborea, I was a student and then an academic, both positions with duties and expected behaviour but not a lot in the way of direct hierarchical oversight. Aside from my mother, Unquestioned Arbiter Of Childhood Behaviour, I’d never had to deal with Sands-style authority before joining the Javelin Program.

No, I don’t have any ingrained respect for captains based on their rank. I probably should, as an astronaut. But I, as has been made abundantly clear with every crisis, was never trained for this. None of us were.

“I never respected Captain Sands all that much,” I admit. “And I didn’t sleep with him, either.” (That had been Sands’ decision, not mine, but Adin laughs, and I don’t tell him that.) “I’m more worried about you, actually. Are you sure you want to be here?”

“Um. Yes? I came to you, I would’ve stayed in my room if I wanted to.”

Yet he flinched away when I touched him. Maybe he just wants company.

“Fair enough. I really, really don’t want to hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” He sounds puzzled. “Is that particularly likely? If this is about Tal, I don’t expect… what’s it you call it, ‘pair bonding’?… from you.”

“No.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that he might think that I’d worry about that. “I just meant with… other things. I don’t want to push you into anything, or upset you, or hurt you somehow.”

A moment of silence, a reply in a significantly colder tone. “I see.” He sits up. “I just remembered, I’ve got some work I forgot to get done.” He climbs out of the nest.

“Adin?” I ask, but he doesn’t stop. “Adin!” I hear his footsteps through the plants, walking away. “Captain Klees?” An airlock opens.

I lie back and stare up into the darkness. What the fuck did I say?!

The next morning, Captain Klees seems fine. We go about our duties. We get closer to Hylara. It’s movie night, and Tinera has us all join in in a Lunari dance party where she convinces me to dance with a chicken. The chicken is not impressed by my dancing ability.

The captain doesn’t come back to my nest for a while, which I think nothing of at first – it’s not like we sleep together all the time – but after a month or so, strikes me as worrisome. If we were in Arborea, I wouldn’t be all that worried. But we’re not. And when you’re having sex with people out-of-culture, there’s a whole extra level of trying to keep track of what means the same thing to you and them and what doesn’t, to avoid miscommunication.

And I’m pretty sure he’s mad at me. Texan sexual politics aren’t my particular niche of sociological expertise, but if you make an offhand remark to a Texan boy and he storms out of your nest and never comes back, that means he’s mad at you, right? I’m pretty sure he’s mad at me.

I corner him one afternoon to ask about it. “Are you mad at me, captain? Did I do something wrong?”

“What?” He seems genuinely puzzled. “No? Why, is there a problem?”

I search his expression. He seems sincere. I guess I was worried over nothing. Maybe he really did just stop coming by because he thought that the captain sleeping with a subordinate was a bad idea.

I relax. “No. Just wondering.”

He nods. “It’s a confined space and we’ve been with a small group for a while. I think it’s stressing a lot of people out.”

“I think the constant threat of random death is stressing a lot of people out,” I shrug. “This group size and space seems pretty normal to me. But Texan prisons were probably a lot more populated than Arborea.” That’s not entirely accurate – my cluster was nine people large, but we were hardly isolated. We shared our node tree with other clusters, and there were festivals and summits, and I spent a lot of time travelling to and living in other countries. Spending years with my cluster and my cluster alone probably would’ve been really stressful, especially in a confined space where there’s nowhere to go and live by yourself for awhile, so I can see where he’s coming from.

But everything’s fine with the captain, so I put the thought out of my mind and get back to work.

Accelerated chickens don’t live long, and Omelette’s body starts to give in the fastest. Eventually, it is time for her to go to that great chicken pasture under the waves. During an extended debate over who actually has to kill the chicken (the extensive database of Earth media contains clear instructions, but none of us have done it before), the Friend leaves briefly and returns with a decapitated Omelette, so, that solves that, I suppose. Captain Klees roasts her with honey and apricots, the non-DIVRs make the usual jokes about how it’d be tastier with lemon, and we get to eat our first actual, fresh, proper roast meat in years.

I’d forgotten what fresh meat was like. I wipe tears from my eyes during the meal. I’m not the only one.

Tinera hoards all the chicken feathers to make ‘a memorial to our good friend Omelette, whose sacrifice we shall always remember,’ and I make the decision to ask no questions. Captain Klees makes stock from the remains, and the guts and post-stock bones are buried among the plant roots, not that we have enough time left in the journey for them to do any good.

The other two chickens call for Omelette at first, but seem to forget their fallen sister mercifully quickly.

New plants come in, old plants die back, graves collect paper flowers which are broken down by artificial rain and then replaced. Sunset’s ferns thrive. My Texan improves to the point where I can sort of get the gist of what most conversations on the ship in Texan are about, I suppose, usually. Sam and Tal double-check all the navigation and astronomy equipment, the doctors start advance preparation on readying the medbay for the influx of chronostasis patients we expect to start reviving within a couple of months, and the rest of us help them haul stuff from storage rings and the other medbay to double the size of the active medbay. Which is annoying. But more medbay is better, I guess.

Not long now, until it starts filling up with strangers. New fellow crew. Fellow colonists. Countrymen, in the new society we’ll build together.

We can’t keep a spaceship together. How are we going to settle a planet?

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