Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (31 page)

“Do they need us to stop rotation?”

She sent the question to them, in Chinese. They’d long since adopted the non-strictly-phonetic characters of the Mandarin script aboard Home, adapting it to new idioms to accommodate 70 languages. As a writing system it was far better than Prelaunch English, and it had taken nearly a generation to replace all the signage and labelling they’d Launched with.

The monitors flashed with the reply back, in Mandarin, something like
Our ships must be at rest for us to dock
. Soraiya wondered if their pilots lacked the skill or their craft the fuel to do it otherwise. Now that it was up close, they could all see the FTL vessel was barely bigger than one of their unused dropships. How had these people crossed so much space so quickly in a craft like that? She knew the engineers aboard Home were burning to know. But she seemed to be one of the few worried about what these people wanted from them.

“Very well then,” said Captain Rodriguez. “Let’s prepare for zero-G.”

The signal went throughout Home, and everyone who was awake—which was all except the newborns and young children, given the excitement over seeing people from Earth—scurried to carry out emergency measures rarely used. Loose items were stowed; sick bay patients and the infirm were assisted to secure beds and chairs; children corralled; and many just grabbed on to bolted-down handrails, unable to tear themselves away from the newsfeed from the bridge.

In twenty minutes they were ready and Home’s thrusters slowed its rotation until they lost all sensation of weight; the following three hours as the FTL craft manoeuvred, coupled, and achieved hard seal seemed to last forever and yet take no time at all.

Once the Home technicians gave the thumbs-up on the lock between the two craft, the captain asked Soraiya to let the new arrivals know they would be beginning rotation again. Soraiya did; there was a long pause before the other crew responded, in the affirmative. As Home resumed rotation, the pull of gravity returned. Soraiya wondered, fleetingly, if this were how it felt to enter a planet’s atmosphere and feel its welcoming strength. She knew it wasn’t; but the desire to feel it put a lump in her throat.

Captain Rodriguez now turned to Dr. Mak. “How long?”

“Depends on what they’re carrying,” came the doctor’s answer. “Could be a few days, could be weeks. We may have to figure out how to feed them while they’re quarantined, given the size of their ship.”

Soraiya eased her grip on the armrests of her workstation. Why had she been clenching them? She breathed out slowly. Now the newcomers were here and would be dealing with the captain directly, her part in this was likely done.

For the first few days, she was right about that. The captain took linguists when he went to meet with the strangers separated by the airlock, since they could barely understand the versions of English and Mandarin the visitors spoke. And scanning them for disease, despite their apparent protestations they were “clean” (was that really what they were saying?) proved difficult, as the equipment Dr. Mak used for this had never been fitted to the airlock before, and the process took much longer than it should have. “Probably not taking long enough,” the doctor confided to her in her bunk room after the third day of quarantine. “But everyone wants to welcome them aboard. And they keep asking for our research.”

At that Soraiya’s stomach went cold. She offered him more tea. “Why do you think that is?”

He shrugged. “They seem in a great hurry.”

So, it seemed, was Captain Rodriguez. He called her to a meeting on the fourth day of quarantine when she had been rereading the last signals they’d received from the four other generation ships. The one that had been ahead of them, the three behind them, each separated by hundreds of days of travel. For safety, the Prelaunch thinking had been; but while the ships did not then share in the same disasters on the journey by being too close, it meant they were nearly powerless to come to another ship’s aid when communication ceased. She thought perhaps there would be something in those communiqués that would shed light on this new arrival; but if there was, she was missing it.

Captain Rodriguez asked her to join him at the airlock. She had to tear her eyes away from the faces she saw through the porthole on the door. There were three people she could see there, from the shoulders up, in white and grey uniforms. A man and a woman glanced at her when she looked in on them. The other seemed to be a man with his back to the portal, communicating with the other ship.

One of Home’s linguists, Enrique Hoffman, was with the captain. “Officer Courchene,” he said with a nod. “I’m having trouble making out what they’re saying, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.”

She smiled. “What do you think they are saying?”

“They keep asking about fuel, I think, in addition to some other things about food and questions about us.”

“Captain, if you would be so kind as to type a message to them?” she said.

“Right.” He sent a text in Mandarin to the people in the airlock.

The man who’d been facing away from them turned as the woman alerted him to Captain Rodriguez’s message. He began addressing the P.A. link in the airlock, and his voice came through clearly on the Home side. She ignored the sound, the decibel level falling within the range she could barely hear, what most people used for a conversational tone. Instead she read the stranger’s lips through the porthole. The accent and constructions were odd, but that wasn’t the problem. Listening to his pronunciations were what seemed to be causing Hoffman trouble. The shape of the stranger’s consonants were sharper, and his distorted vowels muted, however, when you watched the words he shaped. Soraiya had been reading lips to help her carry on a conversation since before she could read, with or without her long-since recycled hearing aids.

Making out what the man on the other side was saying still wasn’t easy. “It’s like a mix of Prelaunch English and Portuguese,” she said. “He does want to fuel his ship, they’ve used up more than they expected and he wants to know… how much of, of certain elements we’ve found on They Are To Be Respected.”

“Of course,” said Captain Rodriguez. Soraiya tore her eyes from the stranger’s face and looked at the rotational captain’s. His bearing was upright, he seemed almost to vibrate in his well-worn uniform, and while his mouth was set his eyes shone. “They think we have begun to colonize the planet. Perhaps they think we are merely an outpost.”

Soraiya nodded. She hadn’t seen any words to that effect from the visitor but she felt the captain had guessed correctly.

“How long did Dr. Mak say the quarantine should last?”

“Twenty-one days,” said Hoffman. “He wanted to be able to scan for—”

“Let’s see if we can shorten that.”

Soraiya’s eyes widened. “Sir, what about the risk?”

“I feel the risk to them may be greater. Their life support may depend on that fuel, and I’m not sure we have what they need on Home.”

There was more to the captain’s words than he was saying. But she realized, he also knew she was watching him.

When the quarantine was ended five days early the newcomers were welcomed into a celebration the likes of which had not been seen aboard Home for a generation. The eight strangers were treated to a feast of all the foods Home could muster; and their stores of rice, dried fruit, nuts, legumes, bread, chicken, pork, and precious spices, even salt, were opened. Two of them, a man with ruddy skin and short, space-black hair and a handlebar moustache, and a woman with brown-black hair, light brown skin and freckles, seemed somehow different from the other six, four men and two women. Soraiya noticed the six seemed to defer to the man and woman, and let them speak for the group more often than not. How long did these people serve as rotational captains, she wondered? If the journey from Earth had been so short, how would such behaviour become the norm? She wanted to ask Past Captain Makwa about it, but she was sitting too far away.

In the raucous gathering with a view to the observation deck, everyone sat on mats and shared plates and bowls with the newcomers, who clearly seemed at turns amused, awed, surprised, and confused, as They Are To Be Respected rose and set.

Soraiya could not hear anything against the conversation all around her; and the spikes of laughter or whoops of excitement hit right in the high-decibel, high-pitch range she heard quite well, and they seemed to erupt out of nowhere, to her; and the sound hurt.

The Earth captain had many questions for Captain Rodriguez, and Soraiya noticed him asking something about meeting in private, away from the noise. She couldn’t hear the rotational captain’s response, and only caught the nod of his head; his face was directed at the stranger’s. But a few minutes later, both stood as if to go get something to drink. But after they got to the edge of the huge room, they kept walking.

Soraiya managed to catch Past Captain Makwa’s eye, receiving a big smile in return, which faded when Soraiya stood and seemed unwilling to speak. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, it was bad enough feeling like she was missing everything said by people when she wasn’t watching them. But then she noticed two of the other visitors had left their mats, and another was carefully rising and working his way through the crowd. The remaining four, including the woman who seemed to be a co-captain, remained, laughing and trying to speak with the inhabitants of Home.

Makwa and Soraiya moved to the exit and once in the hallway, closed the door.

“You seem worried,” said Makwa.

Soraiya nodded. “I think the visitors want something from They Are to Be Respected.”

“Fuel, eh? I don’t know what their ship runs on but I hear they were asking for our data from the molecular scanners.”

“Do any of our dropships still work?” A practice drill was one thing, but Soraiya had never thought about whether it would actually be possible to use one of the vehicles.

Makwa sucked her teeth. “One, for sure. When I was younger my dad worked on the modifications they made, before we got here. There might be a couple, but a lot of them had parts he’d said we needed to add thrusters to maintain orbit.”

“I think we should take a look.”

“Should I call someone?” Soraiya knew that meant alerting Home’s authorities. But then Captain Rodriguez would receive the feed as well. And she didn’t want to look foolish. Doubt gnawed at her.

Makwa put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk, eh? Just see.”

Soraiya nodded.

Together they followed the labyrinthine hallways that lined the outer shell of Home, leading to the dropship bays. Only one had not been abandoned and repurposed for farming. And as soon as they got there, they found the door locked.

Soraiya tried her passcode; her clearance as current command crew was high enough to override.

As the door slid open, two of the strangers noticed them and leapt at them. Soraiya pushed Makwa back and blocked the entrance. They seized her and dragged her through. The door closed and Past Captain Makwa was left outside. Soraiya knew she had clearance to open the door as well; but she hoped her friend would instead sound the alarm and bring help.

The man and woman who gripped her arms roughly didn’t give her time to worry about that, instead hauling her through to the hangar, where she beheld a terrible sight. Captain Rodriguez lay splayed on the floor, eyes staring at some unseen corner of the room. Unfamiliar packs of equipment with the same logo as the Earth people’s uniforms lay nearby.

“What did you do?” she shouted, pulling against her captors.

The leader of the others put his hands up in a placating gesture—though the expression on his face was hard—and gestured to Captain Rodriguez as he spoke. She couldn’t fathom some of the words and expressions he used, but one of them seemed to mean “asleep for a time.”

Soraiya was about to retort when the shipwide klaxon blared. She winced at the sudden noise and strained to cover her ears. The two strangers pulled her to the open hatch of the dropship. The captain raised a circular device that glowed violet at its periphery and shouted above the sound of the alarm, indicating Captain Rodriguez again. What would his crew do to the inhabitants of Home, she wondered? Surely Makwa had gotten word to the rest of the crew in time?

The captain signalled to the two holding her and they dragged her aboard the dropship in its launch blister. A fourth person was already at its helm, trying to understand the ancient controls. The captain tapped at the insignia on Soraiya’s uniform and then at the pilot’s seat. She set her jaw. They all trained on the ship’s system, once every 365 days. So while the old writing and displays seemed odd, she knew the routine and they were reasonably sure the ship would still work.

She shook her head.

The captain nodded curtly to one of her captors, who released her arm roughly and disappeared out of the craft. A moment later he returned, dragging Captain Rodriguez’s body. The crewman put his hand on the helpless man’s throat and squeezed, then looked to his captain. The Earth captain turned back to Soraiya and stared at her.

What had Rodriguez hoped to do? Show off the dropship? Take them to the surface, against everything they had practised since arriving—take nothing, send only drones to the planet, leave as much untouched as possible? So they had meant to continue for at least a generation, until they began to understand more about They Are To Be Respected. But some burned with curiosity to go down themselves. Soraiya felt that same wild hope flare up as she struggled to decide what to do, how to save the captain without compromising what Home was here to do.

There was no other way. “All right!” she shouted, tugging herself to the pilot’s seat but keeping her eyes on the captain’s face. After a long few seconds, he looked to his crewman and gave an order; the man released Captain Rodriguez’s throat.

He gave a order to one of his companions and the man wrote a message in Mandarin on his communicator and showed it to her:
We need elements from the planet to make—
and here there was a new character Soraiya had never seen
—for fuel. Is this ship in proper working order? If it has been sabotaged, you will be held responsible.
The threat was clear.