VOLUME NINE: MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
“Drifting: life’s meaningless without goals”
It’s quiet.
We’ve been drifting in space now for a few days, our next destination uncertain, our nerves on edge, our doubts and concerns growing. Venus has changed us all, some far greater and far more obvious than others— Chandra the most, by far, although I’ve noticed that Amy hasn’t been “herself” either, whatever that means. If what she says is true, then this has been the second time she forced herself away from that paradise, back into the dreary world of clouds, cold, and shadow, where nothing good or pure ever exists, only its dim reflection. None of us have any idea what she was like before her first visit, but if her present condition is any indication, we probably would not have recognized her. Sometimes I wonder if the person in the mirror is really me, or merely a “potential” me.
There is now a twenty-fifth member of the crew, the only male among us, and I believe, the most frightening and awesome person I have ever met— more so because he is so subdued, so very subtle and quiet that he can’t help but radiate a certain energy, an essence, a life-force even beyond Rachel’s. Miracle introduced him as Oris Pendragon, first and last to hold that office, and she spent many hours trying to adjust him to our world, and us to his. We learned that he was old, very old, insurmountably ancient, and equally powerful, last of the true Wizards— or Art-wielders, as he calls it. He came from a land called Numenor, which was once a glorious continent of Gaea, but was destroyed, leaving few survivors. I’m not sure how, but when he speaks, we can all understand him in our own native language. Riene theorized that it must have something to do with a tower her ancestors built, or a curse, and that people born before that time must not be affected by it.
Idiots.
He makes all of us look like idiots.
Every one.
There were several things Oris understood that I didn’t think someone like him would, and just as much he couldn’t grasp that I thought was perfectly clear. He seemed intimately familiar with the ship and worked his way around as if he had built it, and also easily acquainted himself with the kitchen, the bathroom, the gymnasium, library, and laboratory. That it flew through space didn’t seem to concern him; it felt like something very ordinary to him. Of our food, he only seemed interested in bread, cold meat, cheese, some fruits and vegetables native to Gaea, and wine. However, he seemed puzzled by our baths and our beds, our windows and our eating utensils (he ate everything with his bare hands), our rooms and our clothes.
For example, a conversation I overheard: “Mirari,” (which is how he addressed Amy), “I give you great thanks. I cannot understand the way you live, and your ship is strange to me. Oh no, not its construction, for those with the mind for it could imbibe the Craft and create vessels of even greater design. Nay, I speak of your daily customs, which must seem commonplace outside of my alien experience. You give me a bath that the King himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed soft as clouds, but when I rise, I must dress myself as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so you can see Deep Heaven as clearly as the darkest night, but I lie in it alone with no more honor than a prisoner. Your people eat strange, tasteless food but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as a halo. In all the ship there is warmth that might put one in mind of terrestrial paradise; but no glory, no splendor, no might nor bard nor majestic craft. You seem to me to live neither like a rich woman nor a poor one; neither like a lady nor a nun. Mirari, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. When the construct designed for the reparation of devices has left, it will be time for us to open counsels to each other.”
I got out of there as soon as I could, the hairs on my head standing bolt upright. I suppose the Pendragon could sense things like that. Naja tried robbing him in his sleep, but he sat up at once, as if he had been merely lying down, and commanded her to leave, which she had little power to resist. It also seemed no strange thing to be surrounded by green-skinned people, crazed women with six arms, anthromorphic beings, and everything else our eclectic menagerie might have, but he was stunned when he heard what Chandra’s purpose was:
“In Numenor old, scarce were dens of prostitution, yet I was not blind to their presence or their function. Yet even in their darkest corners there was honor made. The eons have weathered away this small prestige, and I have been prepared for evil changes, but never in all my years would I suspect a whore designed, by birth, for indiscriminate lechery and perversion. You have the falsest woman yet in your fellowship, Mirari. The cold marriages of Sulva depend entirely upon dolls made to imitate flesh and warmth; here now I see their personification among you.”
“Lord Pendragon,” Amy said in her defense, “she is not in control of her actions. It is said that sometimes destiny chooses our paths for us, and here it has worked its fell hand. True, an outside force designed her that way, but she has a mind and a heart of her own. The lady is virtuous enough once you get to know her.”
“If she were under my authority, I would have her head and be done with it,” he gestured. “Yet she is yours, and I shall only give you council. I am also concerned with the actions of the other women of this vessel. The Felinis I may dismiss from judgment since their discourse is necessary for continuation of the species, but have the others not cast aside proper marriages and honored lords to congregate with their own sex? Have the practices of Sulva spread so far, or have the great laws bent during my long exile?”
“It is not within my authority to say, even though I may carry Solomon’s ring,” she replied. “These unions may very well be my fault for encouraging their close quarters over a long time. Two people may learn to love each other if they spend enough time in one another’s company, even if they are enemies.”
“You speak truthfully. I have answered your question only because you asked it of me. However, office or no, my greatest concern is directed to those two who have so blatantly refused such an open invitation. Much as I may normally oppose a union, theirs is crucial to our survival. How has it come to pass that they ignored so many blatant signs? Can even this destiny you speak of fail?”
“Men and women have grown doubtful and uncertain of themselves since your day. There is time yet, Lord. And they have progressed so far since I first met them. Like all humans, they make the greatest strides in times of adversity. Perhaps one last calamitous push is all they need. But we are straying too far; we must discuss more immediate concerns. After all, since you have arrived, I have come that much closer to my goal.”
“Indeed.” I couldn’t bear to hear anymore and went walking, to clear my mind and to keep myself busy. For the longest time, none of us attempted to continue with our daily lives and hobbies. I believe we are all still stunned by what we witnessed on Venus— and the actions we performed once her spell robbed us of our senses. For once I could not roll my eyes in disgust and feign chaste superiority over one and all: I too succumbed. So, at last I understand why people obsess over sex and sexuality, though it has cost me dearly for the knowledge. Maybe I’ve been a little too hard on Chandra. Anyway, during these days of stillness, the Pendragon toured our ship and met all the crew. I gave him a wide berth and tried not to look like an idiot, but I doubt everyone else was so considerate.
“Wh-what do you want?” Kate Shepherd stood staring at the Pendragon cautiously as he slipped into the hallway, silently and invisibly despite his size and the color of his robe. Friedrich Nietzsche once said that “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”; I think Kate must’ve been experiencing this as the two beings stood still in Middle of Nowhere. I watched them from afar and had to forcibly remove myself in order to continue my journey; otherwise I might have stood paralyzed beyond the flow of time, as HE did when he was in exile, or Kate had been for that one little moment. I can’t imagine what a person must be feeling when they leap away from time’s flow, nor would I want to. In any case, the Pendragon finished his impromptu study and made a gesture that apparently freed Kate from his spell.
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster,” he warned her, melting her with his liquid-crystal eyes. Kate broke free, slipping to the floor, muttering about sensations I’d never heard of before picking herself up and moving along. I get the feeling that he looked into her mind during those long seconds and knew her in a way even more intimate than Allegra could claim. It wasn’t until an hour later when I learned he had also been quoting Nietzsche, which stunned me into a stupor.
He interacted more fully with the crew a day later, when life seemed to be at its lowest. The old man was wandering around, either completely aimless or else on some high quest that none of us could fathom, and slipped into the garage, which I had been keen on entering myself, seeing as how things were so dull around here and I needed something to occupy myself. I knew for a fact that he was aware of my presence— he seems to know exactly where everybody is at every time of day— but I was prepared for the surprise this time. Thankfully, I wasn’t at the foremost of his thoughts: he was, as I suspected, more interested in the maintenance crew.
“What have we here?” he stated, tapping his glowing staff on the floor. I could see nothing but heard everything: I was in hiding, for what good it did me. “What secrets have passed from the smelting-pots of elder days, what charms and concoctions have the epochs of recent years given us? I espy a craft that can replace limbs. And thee…” He paused. Rebecca spoke next. She had been in there a lot; sometimes I forget that she can modify things like weapons and tools.
“What about me?” she said, her voice shaky. Poor woman. Everything stopped in the garage, and I held my breath. I could hear the Pendragon gasping slowly and quietly, like he was preparing to sing or yell and needed a show of force to brace his audience, but nothing came from it. That startled me more, if that makes any sense.
“Nothing. For now, I hope. One among you will shortly be the cause of great discord. She will betray all the hours save two.” The Pendragon stumbled away in silence— and I mean that literally; he was leaning heavily against his stick and clutching the wall for support, his reddish face fairly pale, his eyes blazing as he caught his breath. I might have forgotten to mention, but…he makes prophecies sometimes. Don’t ask. I watched as he left the garage, and slipped inside after a moment. Eve, Mink, Kyrie, and Rebecca were all resuming their work on some new contraption that would be of use to us, and it was clear from the look in their eyes that they had been stricken by the Muses. I stood watching them until Kyrie noticed me and waved.
“Hey babe, number five is here.” Eve looked up from her work and grinned; she was covered in grease and oil, but still looked fairly beautiful, I guess. She approached me, looking into my eyes, and I stared back, wondering what this was about.
“Great timing. You come to help us out?”
“With what?” I replied. She pointed to a desk, and what looked like a large operating table with scraps strewn around. There was an ambiguous metal skeleton on the slab, presumably their project, the metaphorical canvas still white and eager for shape.
“Oh, just a secret project of mine. I’ve been toying with the idea ever since I lost Zeta. Come on over and check out the specs. You’d be perfect for my new crew.”
“Your crew?”
“Yeah,” she said as I joined them. “Once I feel I’m good and ready, I’m gonna open up my own shop. I won’t just be fixing things; I’ll be making them, as well. Mostly custom jobs, of course.”
“What should I do?”
“You see that thing that looks like a large hand? Yeah, that. I’m gonna need your tiny fingers to get in there and regulate the energy flow from up here. Mink, see those big metal plates over there? I need you and Kyrie to weld those here…and here. Becks, give her a blow torch, will ya?”
“Why both of us?” Mink said.
“See how big this is gonna be? I need a strong Yun and a skilled Pyrosian to pull it off. God, I’m lucky! I got the best crew in the universe right here!”
“So what’s this going to be again?” I asked as I booted the pseudo-hand’s power up. It didn’t look like anything: even skeleton was being generous.
“Let’s call it an advantage for the time being,” Eve replied.
“She says that because she doesn’t even know,” Rebecca said as she handed Mink a blow torch, a face guard, an apron, and gloves. “She just started putting something together and asked us to help. I don’t mind, of course: it’s good to be modifying parts again. Takes my mind off a lot.”
“I think Helios 2 affected our creativity and sexuality,” Kyrie said. Eve smiled at Mink, nudged her, and resumed her work, I following with renewed zeal. Rebecca was my partner and we were mainly responsible for making sure that the machine had the right amount of power in the right places. Eve and Kyrie traded ideas at a ferocious speed, like they were in a competition to see who could outsmart the other, and Mink was our muscle and gofer, filling in whenever we needed an extra pair of hands. Before I knew it, three hours had passed and we had earned our first break, but when I sat back and stared at our handiwork, it still looked like a formless lump of scrap. Eve and Kyrie were smiling, though, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks. Whatever.
……
I don’t get other people. I mean, I know I’m some construct created for the sole purpose of repairing and maintaining spacecrafts, and I’m not supposed to understand how the human mind works, but I’ve been up and running for eighteen years, quickly going on nineteen, and you tend to pick up things when you’re around long enough. Going on this voyage helped me with this more than you know— I really became human. First off, although I am loathe to admit it, I’m a little worried about Chandra. I mean, Venus really changed her, too, and now that I’ve had a taste of her life, I can understand her a little more. But she’s been hanging around Amy a lot, either to seduce her or seek guidance, and Amy’s changed so much that I’m actually worried about a woman I used to despise. Neither of them are the same person. I’m a little frightened when I look at them. But whatever.
Eve’s got me puzzled the most. I had to use the bathroom one night and I heard her making love to Kyrie as I was walking back to my room. It wasn’t any of my business, but didn’t she and Mink have a special connection? I mean, I don’t know why I should be worried— Mink and Shana are close, right, and one less rival out of the way… Urgh, there I go again. This is confusing. What’s worse is that a day later, I saw Eve and Mink heading into the same room, muttering about taking a shower together. Ugh. I questioned my teacher about it and she chalked it up to heredity. It seems her mother was a regular heat-breaker back in her heyday, and all that sleeping around finally cost her in the end. You’d think that Eve would know better after hearing about this, but…like I said, I just don’t understand people. Or Yuns and Pyrosians, for that matter.
I’ve been seeing less and less of Valti. I wonder why that is. I mean, don’t get me wrong: the woman’s insane, I think, in a pleasant sort of way. She’s nice to Rebecca and the twins, but it’s kind of nice not having her around to freak me out. I did catch her saying something to Kay and Tee one day, though: something about an experimental process that could separate them from each other. It was all science-fiction, something she would definitely try— her or that insane lover-mentor of hers, Rebecca’s deceased mad scientist father. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what could’ve possessed him to give his daughter those wings, or to make Valti sprout arms, or to keep a vial of every living creature’s genetic coding lying around. I knew I couldn’t ask Rebecca, and I couldn’t very well forget about it (it plagued me when Eve didn’t have anything for me to do), so I asked the only other person who I thought might know something about it.
For a man two meters tall that can carry his voice across the entire ship and gives off a radiation like sunlight, the Pendragon was amazingly difficult to find. Amy said that “if he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be,” but suggested I keep looking, as he was “bound to show up”. I decided to ask her while I was at it, but all she did was grasp her foot and say she didn’t know. There was a distant look in her eyes, like she was trying to look at something at the edge of the universe, and she felt cold as I touched her. I was about to get Fuuka when she recovered and said she was all right.
“But one idea does come to mind,” she stated as I left, so quietly that I almost missed it. “All life is a pursuit of knowledge and happiness. Professor Hill must have been working for some higher goal back then. Perhaps he crumbled under the weight of his own revelations.” In any case, he certainly wouldn’t be around to give the twins their own individual bodies, and he wouldn’t be able to make Valti normal again.
Now that’s something that even Rachel could never do!
There was at least one certain positive outcome from our trip to Venus. Fuuka, along with everybody else, came back a changed woman, but she diagnosed her change in medical terms, and came to a very shaky, very striking conclusion. Whatever had been debilitating her (or whatever would) had completely passed, gone away forever like a bad dream. She checked herself five times before she arrived at this conclusion, and after taking a few hours to come to terms with this information, she announced it to the ship in no steady terms. I know what happiness is, but I wasn’t familiar with joy until now, yet what I saw there convinced me it was a real thing, and far different from the casual word I know. Fuuka was frightened to death and yet wonderfully at peace, as if some dreadful task of hers had been completed by somebody she never even knew. I think I understood what she was feeling, but…
Anyway, she hypothesized that it was the work of Helios 2 that cured her. Whether it was the air, the water, the food, or some magic woven into the world, she was restored and stronger than ever: much stronger, in fact, than many of her race are wont. I’m not saying she could match Athena, or even Mink, but she’s far more energetic now than she used to be, and of course, more enthusiastic. She made merry during our long stages of Nothing and spread her cheerful virus all around the ship. She played with me and made love to Athena for hours on end. But more importantly, she had hope anew: not for herself, but for Alan Suing, Shana’s brother.
“So if you’re cured,” Shana logically concluded when she heard the news, “then does that mean…uh…maybe…”
“There could very well be a cure out there for your brother after all.” She cast her somber Kitsune’s eyes upon Oris, and he cast his upon hers, an abyss also gazing. “One could hope. Lord Pendragon, dare I hope that Helios 2 played some part in this?”
“But of course,” he replied quietly. “How can you help but acquire a stronger health after setting foot upon that blessed realm? And so it was with the forbearers of Man: that they who left Paradise behind did not easily find death. Though none of your number will achieve such longevity, having but a taste will cure diseases that may normally confound the best of us.”
“Then we must go back, for one among us has a brother who is as close to death’s door as I once was.”
“Sounds like a destination to me,” Aseria smiled. Oris squinted his eyes and furrowed his bushy brows, glaring with cool disapproval.
“Nay, none of us are permitted to return there now. Not a soul among us will ever set foot upon Perelandra’s blessed shores.”
“But we have to go b— ”
“I know your mind, good doctor,” he stated, brows arching in a firmer glare. “But tell me, were we to return, what remedy would you seek? What nostrum would you select from Perelandra’s cornucopia to repair the damage done? You know not, and our chances of returning are still impossible. But there is hope yet, always hope so long as the fruit of the tree still bears seeds.” For once his words had an obvious connotation to them, and our eyes fell upon the living staff he carried, the one Amy said he plucked from a branch deep in Venus’s womb. He gently pinched one of the staff’s leaves, and we all understood what he meant.
“So then…” Shana started to cry and ran up to the old man, but she couldn’t make the distance; he rebuked her with a gesture.
“The leaves of this Tree are not to be used lightly. If it were my council, we would spare them for greater peril, and indeed, we shall face them before journey’s end. Not for nothing did I ensconce on this ship. But I am merely a servant and will take my predecessor’s words before my own.” He bowed to Amy, who might have stammered and blushed under such pressure. That measureless, glassy expression in her eyes remained even in this casual setting, and without hesitation, she made it so.
“Then it is agreed. We have our destination. We will see Epitaph. But understand this, Singing Cherubim: thy brother will see death soon or late, and no potion can save him from that fate, nor any Craft I am aware of, save the Creator’s divine will. And by sparing him, other lives may be forfeited. The weight of your consequences must rest on your shoulders, as mine are upon mine.” He left without saying another word, not even to prophesy. A chill ran up my spine and I approached Shana, to comfort her. What a useless gesture: she was beyond comfort and consolation now.
But Mink watched me try before going away. She had something to work on.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Preview of next chapter
Shana: We’re going to Epitaph… We’re going to cure my brother!
Fuuka: Kami-sama willing.
Valti: Hey, what’s going on here? Did I miss something!?
Shana: EEK!! D-don’t sneak up on us like that!!
Valti: Hee hee hee.
Fuuka: Where’d you come from, anyway? And where have you been?
Valti: Oh, just a little place I like to call THE FUTURE. Oh yeah, I’ve been there.
Shana: Oh, brother, here we go. Do tell. (Sarcasm!)
Valti: You probably won’t believe me even if I tell you, but…in the next chapter…the Dauntless gets overrun…BY GHOSTS!
Shana: EEK! Stop doing that!!
Fuuka: Is this one of those “obligatory ghost ship” chapters? Well, it did happen in Tenchi Universe and Irresponsible Captain Tylor…
Valti: Bwahahaha!! Your expansive anime knowledge can’t save you this time! It’s a creepy and a kooky, an eerie and a spooky time in the next chapter, “Haunted Dauntless: unwelcome visitors from beyond the grave!”
Shana: Darn it, why does this stuff always happen in science-fiction stories?!
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