by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Voyage of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
As soon as Captain Carroway could, she ducked out of the festivities, dragging Lt. Cmdr. Vossie along with her. Unasked, Ensign Werik followed along. Captain Carroway led the two Morphicans to her quarters. In addition to allowing her to grab a moment of privacy here and there, her quarters seemed like the best place for her to have private conversations with a subset of her crew.
Once they were in the room, door closed behind them, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie sat down on the small couch where Commander Chestnut had sat earlier. The contrast gave Captain Carroway a pang in her heart — this was the person she was supposed to be consulting with about how to run her ship. Commander Chestnut had been an extremely lucky find, but he wasn’t supposed to be here.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie was supposed to be sitting on that couch. The two of them — Norwegian Forest cat and artificially enhanced alien rabbit — were supposed to be in here, discussing crew shifts and mission plans together. Instead, Captain Carroway had to ask her friend about his health and mental stability. That wasn’t the conversation she wanted to have with him.
“How are you feeling?” Captain Carroway asked her former first officer as gently as she could. Gentleness wasn’t her forte, but she could apply it when called for. She could easily be gentle to Vossie — her best friend of many years — when he was struggling and fragile, even when she was having one of the weirdest, most draining days of her life herself. The Norwegian Forest cat might not have had a chance to talk to her friend before now, but she’d been keeping a close eye on him throughout the rank ceremony and memorial services. He was still one of the most stoic officers she’d ever seen, even though he must be simply overflowing with emotions.
The alien rabbit put a paw to his bandaged head and laughed. Captain Carroway wasn’t sure she’d ever heard Vossie laugh before. It sounded strange and hollow.
“How am I feeling, you ask? How am I feeling?” From any other person, the tone Lt. Cmdr. Vossie used would have sounded measured and nearly emotionless. From him? It was heartbreaking. The subtle stressing of his words, the slight quaver in his voice. He never sounded this emotional. Never. “I’m feeling everything, all kinds of feelings that should be kept under control. I feel jealous of that squirrel for taking my post as first officer!” Again, Vossie spoke with such equanimity that it would almost have sounded like he was lying about feeling anything at all, except that Captain Carroway knew him so very well. “But also,” Vossie continued, “I’m glad you have the support you need. I’m filled with joy that you’re pulling off this bizarre blending of crews, against all odds. Joy for you. Sadness for me. I’m glad for you and also enraged for myself that Commander Chestnut seems to be such an extremely competent first officer.”
Captain Carroway didn’t think that anyone in the history of the universe before had ever said they felt enraged with so little emotion put into their tone of voice. And yet, she didn’t doubt for a second that Lt. Cmdr. Vossie was indeed furious. He had every reason to be. And while losing his computer implant had robbed him of emotional control and immediate access to his informational databanks, it wouldn’t have made him any more likely to lie. He was still the same person, just without the guardrails that he was used to using.
“Those feelings all sound extremely normal,” Captain Carroway meowed to her friend, smiling faintly.
“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” Ensign Werik chimed in. The other rabbit alien was holding one of his own ears in his paws, twisting and fidgeting with the end of it. His other ear stood up tall though. “Morphicans lived for thousands of years without computer implants. We don’t need them. They’re a convenience, not a necessity.”
Captain Carroway gestured to the couch, indicating that Ensign Werik should sit down beside Lt. Cmdr. Vossie. He did so. And she sat down in the comfortable chair across from them.
“I only scratched the surface when I described those emotions. I’m filled with far more emotions than I can even identify or understand, let alone describe. Terrible, horrible emotions. I’m not myself without my implant. You should strip me of my rank,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie concluded, nodding to himself like he’d found the correct answer to a very difficult problem.
“That’s ridiculous,” Captain Carroway meowed. “Having emotions isn’t a crime, and your rank belongs to you, not your computer implant.”
“No,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie observed wryly, “my computer implant is an ensign now. What do you get when you subtract ‘ensign’ from ‘lieutenant commander’? That’s what I should be.” Vossie didn’t laugh at his own joke. Instead, the rabbit-like alien sighed deeply at the whole situation, whistling a little between his buck teeth. It was very strange for Vossie knowing that his computer implant was walking around The Wanderlust, being an officer in its own right now. He wondered how he and Mike would get along — would it be weird to talk to his implant as a person? Weirder than it was for anyone else to talk to the fungal person? Oh, goodness, his thoughts were getting away from him. Vossie couldn’t trust himself to think straight right now. “Fine, but you should at least put me on a leave of absence and confine me to the barracks for my own and everyone else’s safety.”
“That’s also ridiculous,” Captain Carroway said softly, starting to feel a little annoyed by her friend’s dramatics. “You know this ship will need every single one of us working together if we’re going to survive such a long voyage home, and for all of your objections, you’re clearly still controlling your emotions better than most people do. You’re feeling them, yes, and you’re not used to that, but they’re not controlling you. You just have to work a little harder than usual, that’s all.”
“I can’t function without my implant,” the injured Morphican complained.
Captain Carroway gestured at Ensign Werik and said, “He functions.” Then narrowing her green eyes pointedly at Vossie, the Norwegian Forest cat said, “You can too. I won’t settle for less than your best. And you know it.”
“My best,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie echoed, followed by another bark of hollow laughter.
“The best that you can manage,” Captain Carroway clarified, “given your situation.”
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie looked down at his paws, folded in his lap. He frowned. Then he nodded. “I will do my best.”
Captain Carroway knew that appealing to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s better side would work. That rabbit was almost entirely his better side. That’s why she loved him. They both believed in tightly controlling their own emotions — him simply because he was a Morphican, and her because she’d found that large felines fared very poorly if they let themselves display too many feelings to all the dogs around them in the Tri-Galactic Union. It was one of the first things that Carroway and Vossie had bonded over back when they first met in the Tri-Galactic Union Naval Academy.
“Have you talked to… Mike… yet?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie asked hesitantly. He seemed to dislike saying the fungal officer’s name.
“No, I haven’t really had a chance,” Captain Carroway meowed. “Have you?”
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie shook his head sharply. He looked very uncomfortable. Captain Carroway supposed that having your own brain implant become a separate person must be a little like having your diary come to life and announce it wanted to be its own person now.
“Are you worried that Ensign Mike will have memories of yours? Will know personal things about you that you want kept private?” Captain Carroway asked.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t trust himself to say anything. He didn’t want to hear the quaver in his own voice. It was easier to pretend that he hadn’t been changed by losing his implant — at least to himself — if he stayed quiet.
“I will talk to Mike about that,” Captain Carroway said. “Talking to him was next on my list of things to do.” She smiled fondly at her friend. “It came after checking in with you.”
Turning to Ensign Werik, who was looking increasingly unsure about why he’d come along for this meeting, Captain Carroway said, “Please continue offering any support that you can to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie. This is clearly a difficult transition for him, and I’m sure we both appreciate your help greatly.”
Ensign Werik smiled brightly. This rabbit seemed to have no reticence about expressing his emotions, and he seemed much less troubled by the blending of the two crews than his canine and reptile-bird compatriots. Captain Carroway supposed that his people — natural Morphicans — were probably less threatened overall by the conflict over Lupinia. Ensign Diaz was a native Lupinian, well, at least half so, and Ensign Risqua was a being without a welcoming homeland who had made a home somewhere in between the two worlds that should have claimed her.
The Morphicans, on the other paw, had a homeworld they could return to much more easily. Even if they would be in the minority there without computer implants, it was still the world they’d come from, and they would find community there.
And then there was Mike…
No homeworld. No similar beings. No previous precedent. No clue what exactly Captain Carroway was dealing with regarding them…
After a few pleasantries to wrap up the meeting, including assurances that Ensign Werik would continue teaching Lt. Cmdr. Vossie about how naturalist Morphicans controlled their emotions — which sounded like it mainly involved meditation, herbal supplements, and fidget toys for stimming — Captain Carroway sent away the pair of Morphicans, telling them to send Ensign Mike to speak with her right away.
Continue on to Chapter 15…