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.
Korvax bustled about, arranging all of the visitors to his adopted world into seats at the long table, alternated with local Ollallans, so that everyone could talk together while they ate.
The feast proved to consist mostly of sugar-crusted leaves, stewed fruits, and nut casseroles. Commander Chestnut, the two Morphicans, and Ensign Risqua seemed delighted by the fare, and to be fair, everything that Captain Carroway tasted was delicious. However, cats were originally obligate carnivores before humans uplifted them, and plant matter is not their preferred form of food. Canines are often more flexible, being omnivorous, but Ensign Diaz didn’t seem much more thrilled by the feast than either Ensign Melbourne or Captain Carroway. How Lt. Lee felt about the food was something that the Papillon was keeping tightly to himself, being far too polite to express anything but gratitude in front of their hosts.
When Captain Carroway got a moment to watch Ensign Mike, extremely curious about whether the fungal officer ate at all, she spied them trying a variety of the available foods. So apparently, they at least could eat. But she didn’t know how they felt about any of it, because they were a sentient mushroom. The first of their kind. And Captain Carroway had no idea how to read their emotions on their weird, bearded face on the underside of their toadstool cap.
Once Korvax finally settled down and joined the others in sitting down, he sat beside Captain Carroway. Clearly not a coincidence.
“Perhaps you can introduce me to the leader of this lovely… location,” Captain Carroway purred at the hedgehog.
“Oh, there are no leaders here,” an Ollallan on Captain Carroway’s other side said.
The comm-pins that every Tri-Galactic Union officer wore on the breasts of their uniforms were already translating the Ollallans’ speech perfectly. The caterpillar-like beings had been gossiping and giggling more than enough for the translation algorithms embedded in the comm-pins to have already picked up their language.
“Oh?” Captain Carroway asked, trying to express curiosity rather than disappointment. Though she was feeling both. “Then where are they?”
“In the sky, of course!” the Ollallan answered mirthfully, as if any child would know that. Her face with all its complicated, wriggling mouthparts twisted into what must have been her species’ version of a smile.
“This is my oldest and dearest friend here,” Korvax said to Captain Carroway, indicating the Ollallan who had been speaking to her. “Her name is Lys, and I’ve been looking out for her since before she even hatched from her egg. I was friends with her mother even before that.”
“Is your mother… in the sky, Lys?” Captain Carroway asked, wondering if there was some way for her to switch from talking to children to actually talking with adults.
“No,” Lys answered sadly. “My mother dances no more. She died years ago.”
It was strange, Captain Carroway realized, how easily this completely alien being communicated her emotions, in spite of her entirely different physiognomy. It made the Norwegian Forest cat wonder if the Ollallans had a touch of telepathy to them — perhaps only a small, weak amount, just enough to broadcast their feelings.
“I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” Captain Carroway meowed, thinking quickly, trying to figure out how family dynamics worked here. It didn’t sound like it was the same as among most mammals, but then, Lys did sound genuinely sad about her mother. So perhaps, even if the bond between parents and children wasn’t the same with Ollallans as with cats, dogs, and the like, there must be some kind of meaningful connection. “Would you like to tell me about her?”
Lys’s wriggling mouth parts fisted up, and her long sinewy length coiled up like a spring. She seemed uncertain of what to say — or perhaps, whether to say the thing she was about to say.
“Go ahead,” Korvax encouraged his friend. “Tell her. You’ve waited so long.”
“You have green eyes,” Lys said, pointing with a pudgy finger on one of her many stubby hands at Captain Carroway’s face.
The Norwegian Forest cat blinked. She hadn’t expected to be talking about her eyes. But yes, they were green. Bright green. Emerald green. Not unusual among cats, but unusual enough among dogs — who tended to have more of the high-ranking positions in the Tri-Galactic Union — that they’d been commented on enough during her life that they’d become a big part of the captain’s identity. “Yes, I do have green eyes,” Captain Carroway agreed with the alien whose own eyes were more like photo-sensitive brown spots on her translucent skin than actual, fully-formed eyes. “What about them?”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Lys said. “My whole life. My mother told me you’d come. She told me about your green eyes.”
“That’s impossible,” Captain Carroway meowed. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“And yet, you’re here,” Lys replied. “And you have green eyes.”
Captain Carroway couldn’t argue with that. She didn’t know how. She wouldn’t even know where to start.
“And you saved our world, just like my mother told me you would.” Lys’s wriggly mouthparts twisted into that strange smile again. It was a sweet, naive, simple expression, in spite of the fact that it was made from an O-shaped mouth ringed around with tiny finger-like cilia. “And I get to meet you. Again, like she always said I would.”
Now this, Captain Carroway could argue with. And she felt it was an absolute necessity that she do so. “I’m very sorry, but I don’t think we’ve saved your world. Those Zakonraptors, more than likely, will come back, and we can’t stay here to scare them away again.”
“Why can’t we?” Ensign Risqua squawked from farther down the table, breaking into the captain’s conversation. The reptile-bird leaned forward, placing her winglike arms on the table. “It’s beautiful here. Paradise. We could stay, and maybe, if we did, when the Zakonraptors came back, we could find a way to reason with them.”
“I told you that Zakonraptors can’t be reasoned with…” Korvax muttered.
“What about home?” Ensign Diaz woofed, keeping her voice much softer and lower than she had to. She could have barked loudly, but she chose to almost whisper the words to her fellow Anti-Ra. “What about Lupinia? What about fighting to protect it?”
“We were losing,” Ensign Risqua squawked, not matching the Xolo-Lupinian’s volume at all. “This cat who we all call captain now was going to wipe out our entire forces. You want to go back to that?” She spread her feathered arms wide, seemingly encompassing the extent of the Anti-Ra’s losses.
“I want to go back to my family,” Ensign Diaz woofed, un-swayed by her compatriot’s argument. “I want to go back to Wilder’s family and tell them he died fighting for their freedom. I want to go home.”
Lt. Lee’s butterfly-like ears splayed, showing the first sign of discontent he’d allowed himself to express since arriving here. The Papillon woofed, “I want to go home too. My mother won’t know what happened to me. She probably thinks I’m dead.”
Commander Chestnut stood up at his seat, which didn’t make him a whole lot taller, but even so, the golden-mantled squirrel managed to silence the growing uproar with his movement. He caught Captain Carroway’s eye, recognized the look in it, nodded, and said, “Of course we’re going home. All of us are going home. But that doesn’t mean we need to leave the Ollallans helpless when we go.”
After the golden-mantled squirrel’s proclamation, the conversation turned towards strategies for protecting the Waykeeper from potential future attacks. The crew members of The Wanderlust brainstormed possibilities with the Ollallans present and also Korvax, finally settling on a plan that involved stripping parts from The Last Chance and setting up the Ollallans with a lumo-projector and a blazor canon. The blazor canon wouldn’t provide enough firepower to really protect a whole world, but it would add believability to their threats if they used Ensign Mike’s fleet of illusory hologram ships to scare attackers away.
In return for this, Korvax promised to provide The Wanderlust with a complete copy of his ship’s computer records of his travels. Frustratingly, there wasn’t any additional information that the crew of The Wanderlust could trade for from the Ollallans. As it turned out, the Ollallans — and their adult forms with an unpronounceable name that sounded a little like a soaring flute solo — hadn’t really paid attention to the world outside of the Waykeeper while the turtle had flown through the Tetra Galaxy. The Ollallans and their elders were an insulated society, more focused on their own traditions of epic poetry and aesthetic gardening than on the stars that had passed by beyond the bubble of their little, cozy world. Fortunately, Korvax swore that he’d traveled quite a bit through the Tetra Galaxy before discovering the Waykeeper and settling among its people some years ago.
Captain Carroway hoped Korvax’s computer records would be enough to help her crew navigate quickly and safely through this foreign galaxy. She had her concerns… but for the moment, there was nothing she could do about them.
Once the feast ended, with some officers feeling more sated than others, the Ollallans performed a choreographed dance for their visitors while one of their elders with wings like a stained glass window in a church sang in an eerie voice like a haunted woodwind instrument. The dancing Ollallans’ sinuous worm-like bodies writhed in rhythmic patterns matching the song; some of them even spun silk cords, attached them to woven boughs in the ceiling, and spun through the air above the viewers gathered below in intricate acts of aerial acrobatics. It was a beautiful display, and for a brief moment — in spite of her growling stomach, as leaves are simply not a fit food for a cat, no matter how beautifully encrusted with sugar they are — Captain Carroway felt utterly content. She had taken her ship to the far side of an unexplored galaxy, established diplomatic relations with the alien race she’d found there, and now she was indulging in pleasurable cultural exchange with them. This was what the Tri-Galactic Union was supposed to be about.
When the dance came to an end, Captain Carroway hoped to catch a word with the Ollallan elder, but the mysterious winged creature flew away through a gap woven into the braided branches of the ceiling and disappeared without speaking a single understandable word. Truly, the Ollallan elders were like angels — beautiful, unnerving, and unreachable. Captain Carroway wished there would be more time to stay and reach out to them, try to build stronger bridges and learn about their culture in more depth and detail.
But the Waykeeper was traveling in the wrong direction.
The crew of The Wanderlust needed to be heading towards home, and besides, diplomatic connections with a race of butterfly-like aliens who the rest of the Tri-Galactic Union would likely never encounter again were of limited use.
This was a momentary connection; two ships flying past each other in the dark depths between galaxies. A brief brush of a union, infinitely meaningful and valuable, but only for what it was: a single sparkling gemstone of connection. One moment to be remembered, retold, and treasured. Not a relationship that could be ongoing. Because in a linear lifetime, sometimes one moment of connection is all you get, and it has to be enough.
Momentary but momentous.
And through it all — all the dancing, the singing, and the applause (which had to be explained to the Ollallans as it was not a shared cultural phenomenon, but which delighted the caterpillar-like beings once they heard about it, for they each had a whole row of hands to clap with) — Captain Carroway couldn’t stop thinking about what Lys had said about her eyes. Her green eyes. How could Lys have anticipated them? How could Lys’s mother have seen any of this communion between their worlds coming?
These questions itched at the back of Captain Carroway’s mind, but the practicalities of coordinating work between her crew and their Ollallan hosts in order to strip the necessary parts from The Last Chance and build a permanent lumo-projector on the Waykeeper’s back took up most of the space in her brain. Furthermore, The Wanderlust couldn’t tow a broken ship behind her forever. So, The Last Chance needed to be stripped down entirely and divided into parts that would stay with the Ollallans and parts that could be stored on or attached to The Wanderlust. It might prove invaluable to have backup parts later on in their journey. Some things simply couldn’t be replaced with synthesized parts. However, no matter how much Captain Carroway wanted to be a packrat here and bring along as much of The Last Chance along with her as possible, it’s not feasible to break down a whole spaceship and fit all the broken down pieces inside another similarly-sized spaceship. But Captain Carroway kind of wished it was. She didn’t know which pieces — in a month or two or three months — she would regret leaving behind.
It was surreal how Captain Carroway was standing on the back of a giant space turtle, surrounded by the most beautiful paradise she’d ever seen, with angelic, butterfly-like aliens flying in the sky above her… and her mind was crowded with mundane problems, like which officer would be best suited to teach the Ollallans how to use their new lumo-projector and how many backup batteries could be fit into various corners of the rooms in The Wanderlust without making her crew feel constantly crowded during the coming months. It felt like such a waste. She should have been absorbing every last moment of this remarkable place… but she couldn’t. She had responsibilities tying her down, compelling her to keep moving forward, keep moving away from this brief, beautiful moment in time.
Finally, the moment came when all the work was done. The Last Chance was nothing more than a pile of worthless rubble, a mere skeleton of a spaceship, that The Wanderlust would tow back into space and leave floating in the endless graveyard of emptiness that this region of space would become when the Waykeeper flew away in one direction… and The Wanderlust flew away in the other.
Idly, Captain Carroway wondered where the Zakonraptors had flown away to, and whether The Wanderlust would have to deal with them again. Since they’d destroyed Korvax’s homeworld — a place he’d called Xantrosia, during the conversations at dinner — they must have come from inside the Tetra Galaxy and followed the Waykeeper out into this dead space between galaxies. Therefore, The Wanderlust would likely encounter Zakonraptors again, even if not the same ones.
Captain Carroway was not looking forward to that. This voyage home was going to be an ordeal, potentially very dangerous, and without any guarantee that they would ever, actually make it home. She had a good crew, and she was doing what she’d always wanted to do — making grand discoveries and doing amazing things. But at a very deep level, she felt lost and alone out here. She’d never expected to get everything she’d ever dreamed of… but at the cost of being flung to the far side of the universe with innocent lives still hanging on her conscience. Because the more time she spent working with the Anti-Ra, listening to them talk about their homes on Lupinia, the more she felt that the Tri-Galactic Union had been in the wrong. The orders she’d been given were wrong. And the fact that she’d chosen to follow them — a choice that lay directly on her own shoulders, regardless of whatever indoctrination she’d gone through during her years with the Tri-Galactic Union — was fundamentally wrong.
She’d had no right to fire a vacuum bomb into a sun, trying to wipe out an entire nebula filled with Anti-Ra ships. And she wished, fervently, that she could go back in time and take that choice back.
Continue on to Chapter 24…