The Harm That Will Surely Follow
The captain and Joanni walked down the corridor to the transport tube platform for the last time in silence. Joanni’s darkening vision and slight trembling were not symptoms of fear, however; she felt remarkably calm, resigned. All had agreed to her proposal—two months of debriefings here on Border Starbase 19 and at ISEA headquarters, followed by a six-month training course on Earth resulting in a likely multi-year assignment as cultural attaché or attaché without portfolio on an ISEA vessel. Her success in this endeavor, and her eventual assignment to the Eridanus, would be scooched along by the power of her Oreanian connections. That Tom Chipman would remain alive and captain of the Eridanus was to be left to chance. That their feelings for each other would be strengthened not diminished by this absence was to be left to their hearts. Joanni was mentally calm, if not physically so, not only because of her agreement to the terms of the proposal, but because of her acceptance of the harm that might follow from it. She both accepted and well understood the risk of the attempt. But attempt it they must.
They stood alone on the platform; Chipman himself would handle the controls. They had grasped their last moments of privacy. Joanni knew that Tom was holding a tight rein on his feelings, that he wanted to keep their parting short. He had the capability to be cold-blooded when he needed to, she thought.
“Sometimes I think I’m a very strong person who’s very helpful to you; sometimes I feel completely at your mercy,” she told him.
“Why is that?” he asked her softly.
“Because, if the powers that be took all my heart’s desires and fashioned them into a man, that would be you. That’s what I recognized when I first saw you.”
Chipman was willing to tolerate some emotional release as a necessity, but felt it was best to make the cut quick and clean. Nevertheless, he looked down at her and said, with complete truthfulness, “It’s the same for me.”
Her throat was so tight now, so constricted, she could barely get the words out; she thought she might choke. She looked straight into his eyes, trying to burn his image onto her retinas, to capture every moment of the present and hold it close before it evaporated.
“Godspeed, the Eridanus; Godspeed, her captain and crew,” she said quietly.
She turned and stepped into the transport cylinder, the familiar disinfectant smell assaulting her senses, and closed her eyes. The door slid shut. The captain walked over, set the coordinates to Platform#3-B.Starbase194916, and pressed down the switch. The canister whirled and whirled and then stopped and the door slid back open. It was empty. Chipman sat down on the platform, his forearms resting on his knees and stared at the floor for some time. Then he got up and returned to his duties.
Two months had now passed; the debriefings were over and Joanni was about to exit the last transport canister connected to the last starbase station along her journey. She was about to set foot on Earth for the first time (for any meaningful length of time) in almost three and a half years. The trip from ISEA headquarters to station to station to station to this last transport platform had been a tedious one, but now she was back on Earth.
Joanni made her way through planetary security, and after pushing, with difficulty, through glass double doors after glass double doors that were automatic but temporarily inoperable, emerged into the natural light and fresh air of home. Brennan was right (as she always was): the memories Joanni carried of her green and lush childhood were romanticized ones. On returning, she was struck by how dirty and dilapidated everything was. Perhaps it was just the main space transportation depot, but traveling on yet another shuttle to the hyper-rail service which would carry her to the training center, the landscape that flashed by her window remained the opposite of her memories—dull, dry, abandoned. The energy had dissipated, gone elsewhere, leaving a vague disquiet. She felt like a playing piece in a game of checkers: jumping from station to station until she reached the GreenRail service platform where she would catch the last conveyance to take her to the ISEA training school where she would spend the next six months and earn her credentials. The sign above her head flashed silently: next northbound train: twenty (20) minutes. She kicked the litter away from the bench behind her and sat down. The platform was empty except for two women down at the other end, so she had the time and security to think. It was all she had been doing for the past several days of travel. She had not been thinking of her immediate future, however, but about her past.
Joanni had heard rumors before she left Oreana that the Primora was in danger of being replaced, and just before debarking the Eridanus for the last time, had gotten a surprise: a long-delayed message from Ganhokeet informing her that the Primora had been removed, overthrown. She was seen as having been too accommodating in the signing of the mutual cooperation treaty, and too taken with the alien visitor; too weak and open-minded, especially in terms of the treaty—the open spaces of doubt in the Primora’s mind had become too large for others to accommodate or to tolerate. Also, the great Scuta had tragically and inexplicably died, and it was taken as a sign. One not to be ignored.
The sign flashed again: next northbound train: ten (10) minutes. She thought about her captain, fulfilling his destiny doing what he loved. She thought about her future with him. Could two souls continue making love when their bodies couldn’t? She thought about her future. What was her ultimate destiny? Discovering the clesig, returning the clesig, ultimately losing the clesig? In a world drowning in destruction, to create?
She looked up at the sky and thought about how, when people she loved had died, for a time afterward, she would look up into the sky and feel their presence up there, looking down as if they were still with her, but so far away. She now felt that the Eridanus, if that was to be her destiny, was farther removed from her, further beyond even the souls who had already left her, further away up beyond the sky than anything else she could imagine.
“Sweet dreams, my beautiful captain, my lovely ship,” she said to no one but the pigeons scavenging among the litter.
Image: A doubt, a love so large. Source: “On the Horizon the Angel of Certitude, and in the Somber Heaven a Questioning Eye,” plate four from To Edgar Poe. By Odilon Redon, France, 1882. The Art Institute of Chicago. CC0 Public domain. Edited by J. Weigley