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.
Considering the fact that his death sentence hadn’t been lifted by any of their activities so far, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie was surprisingly cheerful as he and Mike explored the Sidiian ship’s mess hall. The rabbit chatted merrily with the chefs as they helped him select foods he’d find palatable. Vossie stuck mostly to vegetable dishes. Mike, however, filled their food pouch (because you can’t just use plates in zero gee) full with various toasted and braised insects which all proved delicious. The toadstool hoped that Lys would be gathering a lot of these varieties to keep on Sojourner’s back, so that Korvax could cook them too.
Everyone aboard the ship seemed to be Sidiian — just geckos, geckos, everywhere. Mostly their scales all had mottled coloring somewhat similar to Dr. Eol’s. Though, Mike noticed that occasionally an individual’s coloring seemed to shift. At first, Mike thought it was a trick of the light, but then the mushroom saw one of the Sidiians accidentally rip their food pouch open, leading to crunchy, crispy insects floating about everywhere, needing to be cleaned up. The Sidiian who’d made the mistake turned a definite shade of purple — a sort of royal mauve. So, Mike concluded that the geckos probably only changed color in response to particularly strong emotions.
Mike was torn as they ate — wanting privacy to talk to Vossie about all their concerns, but also, enjoying watching the rabbit so much in his element. Because Vossie was absolutely in his element, being the archetypal Tri-Galactic Union officer. The rabbit was learning about Sidiian rituals and culture, while simultaneously sharing tidbits of information about his own Morphican culture. It was exactly what Vossie had wanted from joining the Tri-Galactic Union. Everything Vossie had always dreamed of… exploring far away parts of the universe and connecting with newly met societies. If only it hadn’t all come with so many unexpected catches.
After their meal, Mike and Vossie were shown to their rooms. The quarters were small but comfortable, right next to each other.
Perhaps Mike should have tried to talk to Vossie then, as they both retired to their rooms. But the toadstool was tired and overwhelmed. They’d been through so much in the last few hours. And if Vossie didn’t feel a pressing need to talk about it — if the rabbit wasn’t concerned — then maybe Mike didn’t need to be either.
The toadstool slept lightly, wrapped in their hammock, their mind swirling from all the events of the day. All the new knowledge. The troubling new revelations.
Mike began to worry that if they couldn’t get some proper, deep sleep, they wouldn’t be any help with research tomorrow. And of course, that worry made it even harder to drift off to sleep.
So, when the door to Vossie’s chamber opened, Mike was wide awake to hear it. Wondering what the rabbit was doing up, the toadstool launched out of their hammock and opened the door to their own chamber too.
What Mike saw was a sight that had been growing more and more familiar — Vossie’s eyes were unfocused, floating in the hallway outside of their rooms. The rabbit was sleep-walking. Well, without gravity, sleep-floating. At any rate, Vossie was unconscious but moving about, awkwardly, clumsily. Perhaps extra awkwardly because of the lack of gravity. He didn’t have the muscle memory for navigating zero gee without the involvement of conscious control. So, he kept pedaling his long back feet uselessly, like he expected a floor to materialize under them. Mike was surprised the rabbit had managed to get out of his hammock and open the door to his room in this state.
“Let’s get you back to bed,” Mike said to Vossie, flashing back on all the times throughout the rabbit’s youth when they’d done the same as a disembodied voice in Vossie’s head, simply whispering sweetly about how the young Morphican needed his sleep. Of course, Vossie had been awake at those times.
The toadstool reached out gently and tried to guide the sleeping rabbit back into his room, but Vossie fought back, twisting away from Mike’s touch. “No, no,” the rabbit said, although he didn’t seem to wake.
His symptoms were getting worse. He hadn’t spoken in his sleep before now.
A thought struck Mike — a terrible, wonderful, horrifying, intriguing thought. What if it wasn’t really Vossie speaking? If the Hyphaic was a mycelial infection, then maybe Vossie wasn’t sleepwalking at all. Maybe when he was asleep, his body was simply easier for the Hyphaic to control. And as the Hyphaic grew stronger, it was able to more than merely sleepwalk a little… now it could puppet Vossie’s body into talking. If that were the case, then maybe Mike could learn something by talking to Vossie in this state.
“Okay,” Mike said. “You don’t want to go back to bed. What do you want to do?”
“Research,” Vossie said. His eyes were still unfocused. He was still asleep. But it could still be him — Vossie didn’t want anything more right now than to cure himself of the Hyphaic. So, research would be uppermost in the Morphican’s mind, even while sleeping.
“You want to do research?” Mike prompted, hoping to get Vossie talking again. “Tell me about the research.”
Further down the hall, a Sidiian came out of another room and gave the mushroom and rabbit floating there a strange look before heading away in the other direction.
“Cure,” Vossie said. “Cure plague.”
The rabbit’s voice slurred a little, and his eyes were still unfocused, but the answer was what Mike expected from Vossie. He might be asleep, but he was still himself. Or so Mike thought, until Vossie said, “You’re our best hope.”
That wasn’t Vossie.
Mike didn’t want to be able to tell it wasn’t Vossie… Mike wanted to be able to believe that Vossie believed he could rely on the toadstool; that the rabbit saw Mike as his best hope. But Mike knew better.
Vossie believed in research teams working together. Vossie believed in the force of societies devoting resources to complicated problems. Vossie knew that the Sidiians had been working on curing the Hyphaic for years, and Mike had only just learned about it.
Vossie didn’t believe Mike was his best hope.
So who did?
The Hyphaic?
Was Mike talking to the Hyphaic?
“What do you mean?” Mike asked, their voice hollow like an old mildewy log rotting in the depths of a forest. “How am I your best hope?”
Vossie’s eyes cleared, and he shook his head, flapping his long ears about in the zero gee, like he’d just woken up from a confusing dream. “What? Did you say something? Why am I out here?”
“You were sleepwalking again,” Mike said, their voice catching like a broken branch too tangled in all the other branches of the forest canopy to actually fall to the forest floor. “But this time… This time you talked.”
“What did I say?”
“You said you wanted to cure a plague.” Mike wrapped their arms tightly around themself, and all their mycelial beard hairs scrunched up, all curly tight. “But it wasn’t you.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t me?” The rabbit frowned in consternation. “That sounds like me.”
Mike didn’t really want to elaborate, but they insisted, “It wasn’t you. It was the Hyphaic talking through you.”
“You sound ridiculous,” Vossie said, brushing the toadstool’s concerns aside like they were nothing.
“That’s the second time today that you’ve called me ridiculous,” Mike said, their voice gone hollow again. “But I was right about being the same species as the Hyphaic, and I think I’m right about this.”
“Okay, so, you’re saying that the Hyphaic can talk and it’s also trying to cure a plague?”
“Yes.”
“That’s an awfully big coincidence.”
Mike shrugged. They didn’t know what else to do.
By now, the toadstool and rabbit had a small audience of geckos gathering at either end of the hallway they were in to listen. Mike and Vossie weren’t being especially loud, so the toadstool suspected that the gecko who’d noticed them earlier had reported that the ship’s visitors were hanging out in a hallway having a strange confrontation.
Dr. Eol worked her way through the other geckos and floated up beside Mike and Vossie. At about the same time, Mike began to feel a strange, drifting pull. There was suddenly a sense of downward. Everyone began sinking towards one of the walls that now seemed to actually be a floor.
“Gravity,” Vossie said, nose twitching and lights on his implant flickering. “That means the ship is accelerating. Where are we going?”
If Mike had a heart, it would’ve started racing. “Orbital adjustments?” the toadstool asked in a rush. “It’s just standard orbital adjustments, isn’t it?” It had to be. This Sidiian vessel couldn’t be trying to leave the system with them while the Wanderlust was too busy to notice.
The Sidiians were allies, right? Weren’t they?
But the Wanderlust was just one vessel. How much could an entire sector’s worth of space-faring geckos care about an alliance with a single displaced ship? It would be nothing to the Sidiians to betray the Wanderlust’s trust.
And Mike had the horrible feeling that they’d just become the linchpin in a crisis that was way bigger than the Wanderlust.
Dr. Eol didn’t answer Mike and Vossie’s questions. She just said, “Come on. We have work to do,” and gestured for the two of them to follow her.
Continue on to Chapter 17…