by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
Captain Carroway, unsurprisingly, was the first to arrive in the multi-purpose room after hearing Mike’s distraught cry. The Norwegian Forest cat’s fluffy mane of fur was rumpled with sleep, and her ears skewed sideways, showing she was already annoyed. Probably because she’d just been woken up. But possibly also because the sound that had woken her was Mike’s voice, and she very obviously did not like the mushroom.
A Tri-Galactic Union captain, by regulation, should not show favoritism among her officers, which included expressing distaste for their very existence. But Mike understood that these were unusual, trying circumstances, and even a Tri-Galactic Union captain was basically just a person, underneath the title, uniform, power, and responsibilities. And of course, people are allowed to have feelings and preferences. Mike couldn’t blame her for not liking them — Vossie clearly didn’t like them, and she’d been best friends with Vossie for many, many years.
Unfortunately for Mike, the toadstool had memories of those years — memories of being, vicariously, her best friend. And so, even if Mike couldn’t fault the cat for disliking them… The situation made the toadstool extremely sad when they thought about it.
Mike tried not to think about it.
“What happened here?” the irritated Norwegian Forest cat snapped.
“Lt. Cmdr. Vossie inserted the alien neural transmitter into his interface and then immediately collapsed,” Mike explained from where they were kneeling on the floor, still cradling the unconscious rabbit, Vossie’s head resting softly on their mycelial beard.
“You let him insert that blasted contraption directly into his own brain?” Captain Carroway meowed, fangs practically dripping with judgment.
Could Mike have tried harder to stop Vossie? The mushroom wasn’t sure. They wanted to believe the captain was reasonable and fair… They wanted to make allowances for her and how difficult this trip clearly was for everyone, but Mike just didn’t see how they were supposed to have stopped a superior officer who was hell-bent on making a bad choice.
If anything, trying harder to stop Vossie might merely have led to the rabbit doing this alone when no one else would have been there to see him collapse. The ship was small enough that he couldn’t have gone unnoticed, lying on the floor unconscious and occasionally twitching, for very long. But surely, that would have actually been worse than this outcome, right?
Mike didn’t think this was a good time for arguing with the captain, though, so instead, they resorted to merely reporting solid facts that might actually be helpful: “His pulse and breath are still strong.” As the ship’s unofficial doctor, this was actually Mike’s area of expertise. The mushroom allowed some of the infinitesimally thin mycelial threads of their bushy beard to penetrate Vossie’s skin, testing their way through his body, tasting the state of the rabbit’s physical health in this moment.
Mike felt a dizzying confusion, reading Vossie’s body at a cellular level like this; they had more knowledge of how the Morphican’s body should feel and work than any other individual’s, including their own mushroom body. But Mike had that information from a different angle, filtered through Vossie’s own intellectual and emotional proprioception, and right now, that previous knowledge seemed to be mostly getting in the way.
It didn’t matter how Vossie had felt about how his body should work. Not right now. Right now, what mattered was figuring out what was wrong and making sure the alien neural implant wasn’t causing irreparable damage. Ascertaining whether the implant could be safely removed.
While Mike was lost in a sea of knowledge — both past and present — about the Morphican’s vital statistics, Captain Carroway was meowing away at them, saying all kinds of things that the mushroom couldn’t focus on right now. A lot of them sounded vaguely like questions.
One sentence did stand out, because it synergized so well with exactly what Mike had been thinking: “Can it be removed without hurting him?” the Norwegian Forest cat meowed, gruff and gentle at the same time, because she was angry, but she also cared deeply about all of her crew — but especially Vossie, who she’d known the longest.
Captain Carroway knelt down beside the collapsed rabbit and the distracted mushroom tending to him. Mike tried to ignore her.
There was something very strange happening inside Vossie’s body. It tasted blue and metallic to the strands of Mike’s mycelia threading through the rabbit’s body, and it very clearly originated from the neural port in Vossie’s brow. Was it a hormone? An electrical wave of some sort? A chemical that the alien neural implant was releasing?
Mike didn’t know. The mushroom wasn’t actually a doctor, just a repository of information that had been stored in the Wanderlust’s computer systems, which happened to contain a lot of medical data, in case of emergencies. And even if Mike were a trained doctor, they weren’t familiar with any training that would help a doctor to identify what was going on in their patient’s body by tasting it with their mycelia.
Mike would wrestle later with the idea that they were a fraud, playing the part of ship’s doctor and therapist. Right now, Mike brushed their beard up close to the area around the implant on Vossie’s brow, feeling out the connection it had made with the rabbit’s own neural port, and trying to staunch the flow of whatever that… strangely delicious… metallic-blue flavor was…
It couldn’t be good for Vossie, could it?
And yet, the rabbit suddenly opened his brown eyes, a peaceful look spreading across his face. The ever-present tension had washed right out of Vossie.
“What are you doing?” Vossie asked Mike, reaching a paw up to feel the mycelial threads of the toadstool’s beard that had melded right into his head around the neural implant. The question was oddly lacking in rancor, just expressing genuine curiosity.
“You collapsed,” Mike explained, bewildered and reluctantly withdrawing their mycelia now that the intervention seemed unnecessary.
“You’ve revived him,” Captain Carroway rumbled. “Good.”
Mike didn’t want to argue with being given credit for Vossie’s revival. Not right now. Not when everyone had so recently been so very, very mad at him. But honesty and truth were core tenets of the Tri-Galactic Union belief system. They were both essential to the execution of good quality science.
“I don’t think I did anything,” Mike admitted, their beard mycelia now completely withdrawn. The mushroom already, oddly, profoundly missed that metallic-blue taste. What had that been?
More of the crew was standing around and watching now from the edges of the multi-purpose room — Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee were on the side of the room closest to engineering; the two canines looked like they’d been interrupted in working on engineering problems. Korvax, Lys, Melbourne, and Werik were crowded in the mouth of the hallway that headed back toward the bridge with doors to the barracks rooms on either side; the hedgehog and white cat were blinking like they’d just woken up, but Werik and Lys looked like they’d been awake, possibly serving on the bridge in some form or another.
That only left Cmdr. Chestnut unaccounted for, so the golden-mantled squirrel had likely stayed on the bridge, specifically because everyone else had hurried away.
Oddly, Cmdr. Chestnut was the only officer that Mike would have welcomed seeing at that moment. The golden-mantled squirrel embodied everything that a Tri-Galactic Union commanding officer should be — ironic since he’d been Anti-Ra before this voyage and not Tri-Galactic Union at all. But Mike trusted the squirrel to be kind and patient — to truly listen to an officer, even when it looked like the officer had done something wrong.
Mike hadn’t done anything wrong. Had they?
The other Morphican on the crew, Werik, came forward and knelt down beside Vossie. “Your meditations were coming along so well… What is this?”
“Meditation is not a substitute for proper medication,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie said, uncolored by any particular emotion, as he angled himself for getting up.
The other rabbit straightened himself quite suddenly, as if Vossie’s words had been a slap to his face. “We’ve been working together for a year, and that’s what you really think?”
“Yes,” Vossie said, pushing himself off the floor and back onto his long back feet. “All your strategies for managing emotions are no better than previous centuries’ nonsense about sleep hygiene that got thrown at animals who had actual medical problems blocking them from getting proper sleep. And I don’t need your nonsense anymore–” Vossie touched the alien implant on his brow, beneath his long ears. “–I have this.”
Ensign Werik nodded sharply, restraining his emotions quite well for a Morphican who’d just had his entire philosophy and way of life insulted by a superior officer while trying to substitute nonsense for proper emotion management. “When you’re done with this mistake, I’ll be waiting,” Werik said before disappearing back down the central hallway of the Wanderlust. The other animals standing in his way moved aside to let him past.
Captain Carroway tried to take Vossie’s arm, but the rabbit shook her paws away, insisting through the gesture that he didn’t need any steadying on his feet.
“I’m fine,” Vossie said. “There was just a moment of adjustment when the device turned on. I should have been lying down, in case that happened. I see that now. But thanks to Mike–” The rabbit smiled warmly in a measured way at the toadstool. “–no real harm was done.”
These were not the ‘thanks’ that Mike wanted, but Vossie’s smile still melted the knots out of all their deepest mycelial tangles.
“Alright,” Captain Carroway said, turning toward the rest of the crew still watching this spectacle, “I think everyone can return to their stations or whatever else you were up to now. Everyone’s alright here. Show’s over.”
Mike wasn’t sure that was true. However, the way that Vossie was calmly standing with his front paws held together behind his back and his long ears up tall was reassuring.
The Morphican didn’t look like the strangely addictive metal blue flavor flooding through his body was doing any harm. Even so, Mike would feel better — as the ship’s doctor — if they knew what it actually was.
Most of the other officers shuffled back out of the multi-purpose room, except for Korvax who used the space as his kitchen. The hedgehog seemed to be taking the excuse of having been woken up to mean it was time to start cooking breakfast and was scurrying around the edge of the multi-purpose room, picking persimmon-like fruits from some of the shrubbier bushes that Lys had been growing there.
Before the other officers got too far away, Captain Carroway called after Lt. Lee to come back. The Papillon returned from the direction of the engine room with his pretty butterfly-like ears spread wide, unsure of what to expect.
Addressing the Papillon and the newly-re-cyborgified rabbit, the Norwegian Forest cat meowed, “I know that your report, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, mentioned having acquired this device somehow on Spindle Reef — though, your explanation of how was noticeably vague — and that you planned to give it a full examination before even considering actually using it as a replacement for your…” The cat harrumphed in a grumbly way. “…well, your previous one. So, did you have either Lt. Lee or Lt. Diaz look at it? They are the ship’s engineers.”
“And as such, they were both quite busy,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie said in a clipped tone that didn’t quite cross into being snippy. He was too much in control of his emotions for that. He was so very, very in control of his emotions that it was almost ostentatious. “So, no, I did not. I have a longer history of experience as a Tri-Galactic Union officer anyway and certainly the most experience with neural implants–” The rabbit’s eyes darted toward the toadstool in the room in a way that managed to fall just short of seeming guilty. “–except for Ensign Mike, I suppose. So, I examined the device myself to ascertain its safety.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” Captain Carroway meowed, her tone making it abundantly clear that Vossie wouldn’t like what she had to say next, “I think you’re a little biased in this matter, and I’d like to have Lt. Lee give the device a look.”
“Very well,” Vossie sniffed. “But it would be disruptive to the treatment that it’s providing me if it were removed at this point, so he’ll have to do the examination while leaving it in place.”
The Papillon dog looked mighty uncomfortable with how his two superior officers were talking about what he hadn’t done, what he should do, and how he should do it. He very much looked like he would have preferred to have returned to the engine room with Lt. Diaz.
Captain Carroway sighed and frowned. A frowning Norwegian Forest cat is quite a sight. The fullness of her mane, the skew of her ears, and the impressive width of her whiskers — it all added up to making her look like some kind of ancient god, displeased with the foibles of the mere mortals around her. “You really should have consulted with me first, before committing to this course of action,” she meowed.
“I told him that,” Mike volunteered, but none of them deigned to acknowledge the toadstool in that moment.
“I did put all the necessary information in my report,” Vossie insisted, unperturbed. Nothing could perturb him now. Not anymore. Not now that he had a device — any device, an alien device, who cares! — jammed back in his head.
“Just have Lt. Lee give it a thorough looking over,” Captain Carroway meowed. “I’ll expect to see a report waiting for me–” She turned toward the pretty little Papillon dog. “–about the projected safety of Vossie using this device, when I wake up for real this morning. For now, I am going back to bed. It’s too early to drink coffee, and my day doesn’t start until I have coffee.”
The Norwegian Forest cat stormed off.
Continue on to Chapter 11…