The Menace of Faint Warnings
Joanni was in that state of mind where everything irritated her: inanimate objects she bumped into irritated her; ugly colors within the ship irritated her; sounds did the same. The love of her life with a will of his own irritated her the most. Close behind in the rankings were the members of the ‘offer the poor girl advice’ peanut gallery. And none of this could she escape as she hurtled through space so far away from home.
The relationship that was meant to last through time ended after a disastrous dinner Chipman had planned for just the two of them in private Dining Room D. She had dressed for the occasion quite formally; the captain ran in late from a briefing on the increasingly unusual instrument readings on the bridge and in engineering. He was distracted throughout, and the situation deteriorated into a lecture by Joanni later in the evening in her quarters. She had drunk too much out of nervousness. She was furious at not being able to bend him to her will, with his refusal, as she saw it, to at least try any and every path forward.
“Oh, this is convenient! Tell me, how does it work? You’re on the ship, always. You can’t love anyone off the ship, because you’re always on the ship. But, you can’t love someone on the ship, either, can you? Doesn’t look right. Even if they’re not crew members under your command because you’re responsible for them. So you can never love anyone, is that it? Lovely!”
She threw herself backward onto her bed. Lying there dressed as she was in her finery, she looked like a crumpled butterfly. Some pretty iridescent thing swatted down. But Chipman didn’t feel sympathy for her; rather, he felt he was circumscribing his life for someone who he increasingly realized was not worth it, for someone who would not compromise for him, who wanted it her own way, who really didn’t need him for anything. He was also disappointed in her, disillusioned with her selfishness. The Eridanus was entering dangerous unknown territory; the instrument malfunctions were increasingly ominous, and she could not think beyond her own operatic sentimentality. She was not a serious person, and Chipman felt the need to draw back and reorganize his thoughts, to review what caused him to misread her. And so, that was that.
As for the peanut gallery, Dr. Pissario was not much help on the matter, never missing a chance to offer a cynical remark about Chipman’s former love life or about love in general. Joanni had long ago concluded this sprang from a place of bitterness: the doctor was divorced (for several years now) from a man she still loved but couldn’t live with. Joanni finally snapped at her, shutting her down after one too many snide remarks, “What is your actual problem, Liz, with Tom? That he doesn’t conform to your idea of how he should behave? What bothers you so much about it?”
It was left to Brennan, of course, to make the most succinct and annoying remark about the whole affair. “He wants what he wants. He’s not sitting an examination where points are awarded for the correct answer.”
So, it could be seen as counterintuitive that she had ended up going to Chipman’s closest friend, Engineer Matulis, for advice. She felt he would give it to her straight without an agenda. She had brought coffee and a sandwich down to engineering where Matulis stood staring at the output panels. He accepted her snack (although the situation had not yet been deemed critical, just problematic, he had not left his post for hours) and remained standing to eat her offering, pausing a few minutes to talk. Joanni brought the conversation around to Chipman. The head engineer had no time or inclination for gossip, so, perhaps to get rid of her, he turned to her and said, “A man like the captain—he’s a leader. He needs to be in charge and he needs to feel in control. When a guy like that falls for a girl, he feels he’s losing some of that control. The higher you go in the power structure, the more he feels you don’t need him. He needs to be useful.” Her expression stopped him for a moment. "Nothing’s stopping you,” he continued. “He’s not stopping you; he just wants what he wants.” He took a sip of coffee. “Just wants what he wants. Don’t we all?”
Joanni took a long sip from her own cup of tea. “Well, I’ve made a big mess of things, haven’t I. There must be a slot waiting for me in the diplomatic corps.”
Joanni’s second, and up to this point unannounced, admirer arising from the early rehearsal concerts, Ensign Thornby, the Eridanus’ Assistant Librarian, perceived an opening at this time and summoned the courage to make his move. The young ensign’s argument boiled down to mathematics. “How many women has the captain had, what fraction are you?” he asked. “An insignificant one,” he told her. “You are all the world to me, there aren't other women with me, just you.”
His reasoning held some power in its ability to hurt Joanni’s pride, but not in its ability to persuade her over to his side. ‘You don’t know me,’ she thought. ‘It’s the Oreanians’ image of me that you desire, not the Earthgirl, not the second daughter of an uncredentialed dreamer, but the woman up on the stage, holding her prop with the ennobling light of Oreana shining down upon her.’ As she thought about this, she realized this was exactly the same dynamic that had caused her to fall for Jackie. Her captain, on the other hand, had wanted the original woman, but that woman had become blinded by this same alien light. She had been quick to judge everybody but herself.
During the following strange days when nothing seemed right, Joanni still returned to “her” window and stayed there for long spells, looking out at the stars. She was not uncomfortable about using this gift from her former lover, nor did she find it awkward. She instinctively knew the captain would never approach her there, would never intrude on the privacy he had given her, or take away her view in a fit of resentment. It was a version of chivalry they both understood. They understood these things. It calmed her, but it did not completely eliminate her general feeling of uneasiness as instrument reading failings and unexplained energy drains multiplied in number and scope. Some strange force was affecting the functioning of the ISS Eridanus. The source of this power and the intentions associated with its use so far had not yet been determined, but the indications were of something major and mission critical.
Nothing showed up on the ship’s screens, nothing could be detected by the sensors or via electronic scanning; however, the lights would dim without warning and a low level humming or vibration began that at first could only be heard by those onboard from home planets other than Earth, then by Earthpeople with very acute hearing, then by even those who had been rendered hard of hearing by constant space travel. The animals on board were agitated. Joanni was at her usual post at her window one afternoon when the cabin pressure within the ship became so great, so painful, worse than any migraine, that she thought she was going to suffer an aneurysm. It forced her head down onto her desk; she could no longer open her eyes. Then a blast and a thrust sternward enabled the Eridanus to free herself, and the pressure relented. When the pain ceased and Joanni was able to raise her eyes to look out her window once again, she saw a pale phantasm—how could it be real?—a pale phantasm slowly swirling, with siren-like sonic vibrations and flecks of green brilliance emanating from what at first appeared to be sea creatures, but were revealed to be thousands of feathered, winged creatures forming a slowly turning ethereal barrier to the planets beyond, and to Oreana itself. The ring of birdlike creatures hypnotized her; the apparition was of such beauty—a beauty she had never known before, so fantastic that she thought such beauty must provide the answers to everything she ever questioned.
Image: Uncredentialed desires. Source: Detail from “Flying Birds,” by Kamisaka Sekka. 1909-1910. Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Public Domain. Edited by J. Weigley