118: VIEW

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“Klees to Denish,” the captain says into his radio, “we’re at the site and starting work. It’s just matching the colours, right? Over.”

“Yes, Captain. Each plug in the same colour socket. They only fit the right way up, cannot go wrong. Over.”

“Roger that, ‘Nish. Over and out.”

The cables themselves aren’t little flimsy shoelace-like things. They’re each about as thick as my wrist. I assume that most of that is shielding and reinforcement, to prevent any delicate wires from breaking or shorting or whatever. I pull the one I’m holding, a heavy cable ending in a lavender-coloured plug, and find it has enough give to reach the sockets, which is a relief. I pass it through to Captain Klees.

“You’ll have to match the colours,” I tell him. “About a quarter of these look the same to me.”

“You’re colourblind?”

“Yep. Pre-Neocambrian trichromat.”

“Huh.” He lines the plug up with a socket and forces it in with a single, sudden shove. “What exactly does that – ?”

“Three colour receptors – red, green, blue. I’m missing the fourth. I can’t tell purples apart very well.”

“You don’t see purple?”

“Well, I think I see purple. You’d probably consider me not to see it. But I know that plug you just pushed in is purple. Tal’s lips are purple; a very different purple to the plug. But that plug and this one,” I say, grabbing another cable, “look the same to me.”

“Aspen.”

“Hmm?”

“Do… do you think that Tal’s lips are only one shade of purple?”

“They are, right? They can’t be – ”

“They are not.”

“Taproot and stars, what do they look like?”

“The top lip is a blush purple, and the bottom is a much brighter… I’d call it a cherry purple?”

“No!”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Fuck, I hate kes tattoos so much more now!”

“You hate Tal’s tattoos?”

“Of course! They’re awful!”

“Well, they… yeah, they are kind of awful.”

We fit a couple more plugs. It’s not particularly challenging work, but I find myself on edge, expecting something to go wrong. Some mechanical failure, some wayward arc of electricity, some rogue bit of programming to detach another ring or something. It’s a stupid thought – we’re no more at the mercy of the ship’s various safety hazards up in the Tube than we are down on the rings – but. New environment, I guess.

“How are you doing?” I ask the captain.

“Are you really trying to therapise me right now?”

“No, it was just a friendly question. Pretty sure I’m a terrible therapist.”

“You’re not a terr – ”

“Yeah, I am. Lina’s better at it than me; Tinera’s better at it than me. And Tinera’s go-to approach to problems is to immediately explore the viability of stabbing. I’m a sociologist, and that’s not – that’s not the same fucking thing. I don’t think I’ve even met a therapist in my whole life. Oh, wait, there was the psych assessment we had to do before getting approved for the Javelin program. But looking at the people who got approved, I think he was even worse at his job.”

“Well, you’re a good friend.” Captain Klees takes a plug from me in both hands and lines it up with its socket. “We all need that more, I think.”

“No, I’m… I’m pretty certain we all need professional therapy.”

He chuckles, a sound which echoes around the near-silence of the Tube. He shoves the plug in, and I look around for another.

“So do you guys not have mental health professionals? In Arborea, I mean?”

“What? No, of course we have them. I just didn’t know any. The node next to our node had a couple. But most people just go to their cluster when they have problems, they only go to a professional if it’s something serious that needs treatment. We had a big fire awhile back, and my brother Rose got trapped and nearly died, and Ash – that’s Rose’s mother – saved him, but just barely. Ash was pretty traumatised, and after awhile he took the boys – they were just babies then – and went to the next node to get some help to deal with it. Came back three months later much better. He still goes over every now and then, for psychological advice. Well. He was still doing it at the time we left Earth, I mean.”

“You have a brother? You never mentioned a brother.”

“Rose and Gooseberry. Twins. They were a lot younger than the rest of us, so hanging out with them was more like babysitting. I was a lot closer to Fir and Shia. Did you have siblings?”

He shakes his head. “Just me and the parents. Then me and the girlfriend and kid.”

“That is so weird. It doesn’t matter how much I study other cultures or how many countries I visited, tiny families will always be weird to me.”

“Most of what we do is probably weird to you.”

“A lot of it, yeah! The culture on this ship is just so… well…”

“So fucking Texan?”

“Yeah! So fucking Texan!”

“My mum used to say that all the time. Dad would say, ‘honey, you decided to become a Texan’. But I guess you had no idea of the population of this ship when you signed up.”

I shrug. “I knew it wasn’t going to be very Arborean. So it’s on me, I guess. Texan is as good as anything else.”

“Within a couple of generations, I’m sure our colony will be something incomprehensible to Texans. Given the environment, probably something more Lunari. Maybe something more Martian.”

“Mars has the incredibly ancient culture of Korea backing them. And if we turn out anything like Luna’s convict labour state, it means we lost. Maybe our grandchildren will be something completely new.”

“Yeah, maybe. I mean, if there’s alien life down there, that’s probably going to affect something.”

“Depends what it is. If it’s algae and we live in domes, it might not be all that culturally relevant. I guess we’ll find out.”

“Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow, when we send Sam’s radio message!” Captain Klees grins.

I roll my eyes. “I reckon Tal’s still holding out for aliens with a radio down there.”

“Ha. Ke probably is. Too much old scifi.”

“Yeah.”

We lapse into a silence as we work, nervous and tense. Of course it would be stupid to expect intelligent aliens down there, obviously. We’ve detected no radio signals or anything. It would be ridiculous.

But.

I can’t wait to get this done, and that stupid radio broadcast done. Then we can get close enough to get a good telescope image. Then pull into orbit. Then rouse the old crew. Then… well, I guess the entire visible future is a list of things I can’t wait to get over and done with. So that’s fun.

“Denish to Captain,” a voice calls over the radio. “Tal is getting signal from the aft engine. Whatever you just plugged in is the right one. Over.”

“Klees to Denish. We still have…” he peeks through the gap to my side… “five unplugged plugs here. Are they important? Over.”

“I do not know. They may be for systems we are not using, or they may be backups for something, or they may be important cables for something we will need and do not know it is broken. There are many systems on this ship that the AI is supposed to check. Over.”

“Alright, we’ll plug everything in while we’re up here. Better than having to come back later. Over and out.”

He doesn’t look happy about the decision. I wonder if the cramped, unfamiliar environment is getting to him. His hands are shaking a little – neurostims, or nervousness?

“These clearly aren’t things that we need right now,” I point out, handing him another plug. “I can come back later with Tal to – ”

Captain Klees makes an annoyed sound as he pulls the plug from my grip, but otherwise doesn’t respond.

“What?” I ask.

He seats it with a shove. “Aspen, you have got to stop treating me like I’m made of glass.”

“I don’t treat you like you’re made of glass!”

“Yes, you do. You have since I first woke up. I thought this kind of thing would stop when I got elected captain, but you weren’t there for that vote, I guess.” He reaches for another plug; I go to get one.

“Well, I’m sorry if I care about the welfare of my crewmates!”

“You’re never this careful with ‘Nish, or Tiny, or Tal. But you seem to think that every little trial is going to cause me lifelong psychological damage.”

“That’s not true,” I lie, lamely. I feel my cheeks flush as Captain Klees raises an eyebrow.

“Is this why we stopped sleeping together?” he asks.

Huh? I knew it! I knew there was some weird Texan social signal I missed there! “We stopped sleeping together because you stopped coming to see me,” I point out. “You can come see me at any time.”

He makes an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “I stopped coming to you because I got sick of being treated like I’m made of glass!”

“Well, I’m sorry if I insulted your fragile ego trying not to hurt you!”

“Aspen, what the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean, hurt me? If I didn’t want to be there, I wouldn’t have been there. As I think I proved quite neatly by not being there.”

“I know that, I just – ”

“And yet you still find plenty of situations to treat me as some fragile thing that can’t take more stress than worrying about whether a loaf of bread is going to rise properly.”

“I do not!”

“You wouldn’t have suggested that Tiny leave a job half-done and that you should come back with someone else.”

“Tiny’s hands wouldn’t be shaking like bushleaves in a storm either.”

He scowls at his hands. “Yeah, well, medication has weird effects. Hand me the plug.”

I do. “And Tiny hasn’t been through the kinds of things that you have.”

He frowns at me. “Aspen, you lived on Luna. You cannot possibly believe that she’s had an easier life than me.”

“She has over the past few years.”

“How so? We’ve all gone through the same disasters. She was endangered by Sands as much as I was. She’s got this experimental life-extending genetic engineering thing in her as well. She – ”

“She didn’t suffer under Sands’ command as much as you did!”

He sighs. “This is about Heli, isn’t it?”

“No, forget I said anything. You don’t have to talk about her.”

“What makes you think I wouldn’t want to talk about her?”

“Because you’ve never, once, mentioned her in therapy. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sorry.”

“Back to treating me like glass, I see.”

“I don’t think that respecting someone’s – ”

“You want to know why I don’t talk about Heli in therapy, Aspen? You want to know the deep, dark, traumatic reason that I never talk about her?”

“You don’t have to – ”

“It’s because she’s not all that important. What happened with Heli sucked, but it didn’t bother me nearly as much as you all seem to think it should.”

I open my mouth, and close it again. I don’t really have much to say to that. But that’s fine, because Captain Klees goes on speaking.

“Everyone seems to think that oooh, noo, poor Adin was subjected to such horrible sexual violation, it must be so ruinous and tragic, but it’s not. I’m not happy about it, obviously. I wish it didn’t happen. But if you asked me to make a list of the horrible things that happened to me that I wish didn’t, in order of severity? Heli wouldn’t even be on the first page. You know what memories wake me up in the middle of the night? Hanging from this ship over the vast vacuum of space, unable to communicate with the crew while you cut holes in my space suit. Denish holding me down in a depressurising ring so I don’t flinch and lay open an artery when Lina drills a chip out of my arm using no anaesthetic and modified power tools. Me and Cherry, my little girl, trapped in the tunnel we called home at the time by floodwaters, while our food and water supply dwindles and I know it’s a coin toss whether the food or the floodwater disappears first and that if either of us get an infected cut or something from that floodwater we’re basically doomed, because no one is coming for us. Not some handsy scientist with a drug supply.

“Heli was funny! She was creative! She was usually considerate in matters that didn’t involve entitlement to the bodies of people she thought she could control! In fact, there are actual relationships I had on Earth that I regret more! Cherry’s mother never put an unwanted hand on anyone, she was just a dramatic person who made home a stressful place to be, and you know what? I disliked my time with her more than Heli! How fucked up is that? ‘Hello there, high school sweetheart, mother of my only child who gave years of her life to our little family, I’m sorry but I like the rapist more than you’. You know what emotion I feel about Heli? Guilt, that I can’t hate her and be as traumatised by her as you all seem to expect me to be. That’s why I never talk about her with people. I can’t play that role, I’m sorry. Which is fucked, because her behaviour was evil. A lot of people would’ve been really badly hurt by it. The fact that I’m not one of them is luck, it doesn’t make what she did any less evil. So by not being all that bothered I feel like I’m… betraying her hypothetical victim somehow, the person she could have gotten, by acting like her actions weren’t the worst thing ever. I don’t know. It’s a stupid reaction because she’s dead, it’s not like she can hurt anyone now. But still.” He shrugs again.

“Everyone hates her because of what she did to you! That doesn’t make you required to – ”

“No.” He shakes his head. “If it were about me, Tinera would’ve consulted me when she found out instead of running off to start a fistfight. So would everyone else who tried to hit her. That didn’t help or protect me; that wasn’t about me. That was people seeing a rapist and indulging in a chance to hit them. The only person who did anything helpful was Sands, who confined her so she couldn’t hurt anyone and promised to deal with the issue properly once the more critical issue was dealt with. And then he tried to murder me and half our crewmates over an unrelated matter. I don’t talk about Heli because I can’t hate her half as much as the rest of you do, and I have to. It’s not fair to the rest of the crew not to.”

“It’s not – what are you talking about? Everyone here supports you, Captain. Are you worried people are going to, what, judge you for grieving wrong or being incorrectly traumatised? Even if they did, fuck ‘em! You were her only victim on this ship, right? And she’s dead, and can’t hurt anyone else. What’s their stake in this, beyond your welfare?”

He takes the final plug from me. “People don’t take kindly to those being tolerant of rapists, Aspen, even dead ones.”

“You were her victim, not them! What’s it to them?”

He gives me a pitying look. “Aspen. We’re Texan convicts. Do you really think I’m the only rape victim on this crew?”

He turns and shoves the last plug into place. The radios on our hips crackle to life. “Hey, guys,” Tal says, “whatever you just plugged in managed to reconnect – ”

And then a pipe explodes.

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