What’s in Front of You
‘You’re not alone,’ the captain had reassured her as the body of Ensign Thornby was placed on a stretcher and carried out of the shuttle hangar, but when Joanni came to in her sickbay bed, she was alone. The room was empty and her whole body hurt. As she raised herself up to lean on her elbow, her injured arm gave out with a stab of pain and she fell back down. Brushing away an errant strand of hair that had fallen across her face, she poked herself in the eye with the cast that enveloped her right hand, and the horror of the past hours flooded back into her consciousness. She lay there as hot tears wound their way down her temples, disappearing into her untidy hair. Dr. Pissario walked in at that moment to check on her.
“Tom . . .” Joanni croaked out. She needed water.
“Mouth open,” Pissario replied, inserting the drinking tube of a water bottle into the young woman’s mouth. After a few silent moments, she removed it. Joanni could have drunk more. “The captain has just gone back on duty; he’s been sat here most of the time. Quite devoted. What have you done to him?” Liz smiled gently, but Joanni did not yet have it in her to form any expression on her face.
In truth, Chipman had not spent his entire non-duty hours at her side. As soon as he had seen that Joanni was attended to and sedated, he paid a visit to Palladin in the brig, accompanied by Lt. Commander Samuel even though he had dismissed his science officer with a curt, “I don’t need an escort.”
The Deputy Ambassador was weakened by his unsuccessful stunt—still defiant, yet somewhat distracted—perhaps more concerned with his fellow Pargysonians’ plans for him than with any punishment to be meted out by ISEA. The two officers got little information out of him. At one point, Palladin wiggled both his thumbs in front of Chipman’s face, mocking him. “I guess no more sweet love songs sung for you, Captain. It would be hard to play . . .”
The captain threw a hard punch, hitting Palladin squarely in the nose, breaking it, knocking him down. He hauled him up by his collar and slammed him against the wall, leaning against him to pin him there. He then proceeded to take the Palladin’s right thumb in both his hands and bend it backward, dislocating it, before Samuel could pull him off his tormentor and call Security back into the cell. The bleeding Pargysonian was taken to sickbay and Chipman went back to his quarters to wash off and cool off.
Eventually he returned to Joanni’s side and watched her sleep. After a few minutes, as if she could sense his presence, she opened her eyes and managed a weak smile.
“I thought I’d lost you there for a minute,” Chipman said.
“Well, then you could have made love with anyone, anytime with no one to criticize or ask questions.”
“Damn, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Just stop . . .” Tears began to well up in her eyes again. Her chin trembled, making it difficult to speak. “It’s all my fault with this stupid clesig thing; I know it is. I hate it. Serves me right if I can never play again.” She swallowed hard, struggling for composure. “Matt dead . . . Palladin . . . a spy.” She swallowed again. “And now I hear you beat him up. Are you in trouble?”
“Who told you that?”
“Brennan.” Brennan was in the adjoining room. She had stopped by to visit her friend, stepped out when the captain returned, and was now talking to one of the nurses.
“Since when does anyone believe anything Brennan Vela says?” he half-joked as a ploy to avoid a direct answer. Then, more seriously, he continued. “Look, you can’t hold yourself responsible for some senseless, unprovoked hate in the psyches of other people, so stop thinking like that. You’ll heal and you’ll be playing again before long.”
“I won’t play “Hyaline Skies” again. It was Matt’s favorite song; it’ll be buried with him.”
Chipman sat in silence for another minute or two, then he got up to go back to the bridge. Joanni sighed and softly declared, “We’ve all been buffeted about by love, Captain,” before she fell back to sleep.
Ben Samuel walked back into sickbay a few minutes later to check on Palladin’s condition. He saw Brennan still standing with Nurse Ellis, but ignored them. Dr. Pissario just then entered the room, on her way to check on Joanni. Samuel motioned the doctor over to him and filled her in on what had transpired in the brig. “He was pretty hot. Did quite a number on Palladin.”
Dr. Pissario said, “I know . . . I’ll check in with him, see if he needs . . .”
Brennan overheard this and interrupted, tilting her head toward the patient in the next room. “She regulates him better than any drug, Doctor.”
A little over a week after the upheaval onboard, Joanni finally received a communication from her sister, Lillian. It was brief: their mother had died shortly after the Eridanus departed for Oreana. The cause of death was listed as chronic wasting disease, for the simple reason that the COD line on the official form needed to be filled in. It had taken this long for the message to be received due to the distance to be traveled and perhaps for Lillian’s emotions at being left alone to handle her family’s affairs to be brought under control, though the latter explanation could have been merely conjured up by Joanni’s guilt. Joanni felt completely alone, separated from her family now in spirit as well as in reality, burdened by her lack of responsibility as much as Lillian was burdened with a surfeit of it. Her grief was blocked by this sense of guilt; she was too involved in her internal world and her own desires. She was always thinking in terms of the captain sacrificing for duty rather than succumbing to paradise, but Joanni had willingly sacrificed her duty to her mother for the paradise of having an intergalactic adventure. An adventure in the hope of what? Knowledge, insight? In the hope of having a life changing experience? She had lost her father and now her mother, probably her sister; a young admirer sacrificed. She was now free from any further desire for exploration and also, sadly, free of optimism for her future.
Chipman came to see her with his own news. Palladin had managed to commit suicide while under surveillance by using some Pargysonian contrivance to stop the blood flow to his heart.
“The Pargysonians will not be happy with us,” was Joanni’s only response.
“At the moment, I think they’re too distracted by the destruction of their avian security ring and this spy failure to be hot on our heels, but we’ll have to deal with them on our return from Oreana.”
Then she told him about the message from her sister. She seemed fairly calm and detached from it, did not seem able to express grief which concerned him. He hesitated to leave her in this state, but it was obvious she wanted to be alone to process this unwanted information.
The prime emotion Joanni was feeling at that moment was not grief, but the old hiraeth. She recalled her travels with Jackie, how she had so often sat looking out her hotel window thinking about the lush wet vegetation of summer camp nights with Lillian. Now she would waste more time staring out yet another window, no longer with a sense of longing to return to something, but with the knowledge that that something was forever lost.
Walking down the corridors of the Eridanus, careful not to brace herself with her mostly healed thumb and wrist if she stumbled against the walls when the ship made a sudden sideways movement, Joanni stopped in front of the Deck 6 Rec Room, which housed her favorite piano and which had served as rehearsal hall and performance venue for her past clesig mini concerts. No one was taking a break at this time, so the room was empty. She walked in and sat at the piano, motionless for a time, then put her hands on the keys. Ensign Thornby had once sat beside her here while she played and had picked out a few notes in a supposed accompaniment (an indulgence she had allowed him so as to be kind). She wondered if his fingerprints remained on the keys. Still she did not move and no one came in to disturb her.
Joanni decided to give her mother what she had always wanted: a gift given too little, too late, but at least now given ungrudgingly. Her fingers started to pick out the strains of an old classic nocturne, tentatively at first as her thumb and wrist were still wonky; then louder, finally raw with emotion, filled with mistakes yet mesmerizing. People stopped in the corridor to listen, but dared not go in. The captain came down the hallway, prompting others to continue on their way. He too was captured by the sound of music centuries old. Amazed that she had always downplayed, almost scorned, this hidden talent. He understood the tribute Joanni was paying to her mother, a parting nod to her that her daughter was indeed the pianist she had always envisioned her to be, the notes providing a lens through which he too could imagine her as such, and imagine, in some far-off sense, her mother.
As the last soft notes sounded, Joanni hung her head over the keyboard, tears falling on the black and white keys as the music faded away. She heard the door open behind her. Turning, she saw Tom and ran to him, throwing herself on his chest without a word. She broke into sobs that could not be contained. When had he wanted anything more than command of his ship, Chipman thought. Yet here was this girl who he loved, who seemed to be continually floating amongst dark forces and he never wanted to protect anyone as much as he wanted to protect her.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, we’ll work things out together; no shame in that. We’re approaching the next solar system, Oreana; we’re almost there.”
“I don’t care about Oreana,” Joanni mumbled against his wet shirt.
He put his fingers under her chin and raised her face to his. “I think you do. Look what’s ahead of us. Just don’t look back, look what’s in front of you. It’s not just potential; it’s not dreams; it’s real.”
They stood holding each other in silence, then Tom continued. “You’re not the end of the line, you’re a continuum: your father’s dreams, your mother’s desires. In approximately twenty-three hours, we will enter the next solar system in this galaxy. We’re almost there. Focus on what’s ahead—we’re going to Oreana.”
Image: My mother’s dream. Source: Detail from “Meisje aan de piano,” David Bles. 1863. The Hague. Rijksmuseum. Public domain.