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.
When the time came to say goodbye to their Ollallan hosts, the crew of The Wanderlust lined up in front of the ramp leading up to their open airlock. A group of Ollallans lined up across from them, mimicking the crew’s orderly formation. Captain Carroway felt a burst of pride that her crew was already working together so smoothly. It helped that Commander Chestnut had clearly run a tight ship, so the Anti-Ra officers had been well prepared for blending into a Tri-Galactic Union crew.
Each crew member bid their hosts farewell before turning and walking back into their ship, leaving the Ollallans behind, waving at them with many hands apiece.
Captain Carroway waited until all of the rest of her crew was back aboard to say her own farewell to the Ollallans. The Norwegian Forest cat bowed to them, and they mimicked that gesture as well, bending their snake-like bodies into sinuous curves. Captain Carroway smiled, amused to see how much more impressive a bow looked on an Ollallan body than on her own, or any other body plagued by quite so many limiting joints and bones.
Most of the Ollallans cleared away, having been warned that they should give The Wanderlust a wide berth before her takeoff. But one stayed behind. Captain Carroway’s ears skewed, wondering what the final Ollallan wanted. She had trouble telling the caterpillar-like people apart, but she suspected this one was the same one as she’d talked to at dinner.
“Lys?” Captain Carroway asked.
“Yes,” the Ollallan agreed.
“You should go back into the forest,” Captain Carroway purred. “My ship will be leaving soon, and I don’t want you to be injured by our departure.”
“You won’t leave until Korvax comes,” Lys countered.
It was true that Captain Carroway was still waiting on the hedgehog alien to bring her the computer bank that he’d promised to give in trade for everything The Wanderlust had done for the Waykeeper. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon,” the Norwegian Forest cat meowed. “You don’t have to wait with me.”
Trying to send Lys away felt a little rude to Captain Carroway, but the truth was that the caterpillar’s talk of expecting her green eyes troubled her. There was a mysticism to it that made Captain Carroway uncomfortable, much like Commander Chestnut’s devotion to trees. The golden-mantled squirrel had even insisted on asking the Ollallans if they’d let him take cuttings from a few of their trees to bring with him on The Wanderlust.
While the religious aspect of Commander Chestnut’s feelings towards trees bewildered Captain Carroway, she did have to admit that keeping a live cutting from each of the types of trees they’d encountered here could be scientifically invaluable. So she’d been glad when the Ollallans agreed and helped the golden-mantled squirrel set up a few cuttings in small pots of local soil, along with providing him with instructions on how to have the best chance of keeping them alive during their journey. Besides, a few small glowing plants in the multi-purpose room would really brighten up the place and make it feel more like a home, which was good as they’d all be living there for some time.
“I do have to wait with you,” Lys said, twisting up the finger-like cilia around her mouth. “I have to wait with you if I’m going to be going with you.”
“Coming with me?” Captain Carroway asked, aghast. “Why would you want to come with me? We won’t be returning here… ever. You would never see your home again.”
“I’m ready for that,” Lys said.
Even if the caterpillar alien really was ready to make such a big leap, Captain Carroway wasn’t ready to aid her in doing it. Fortunately, Korvax came waddling up, holding a mechanical device that looked like it must be the promised computer bank. Hopefully, he could talk some sense into his friend.
Captain Carroway reached out for the computer box — it looked quite large and heavy for such a small mammal to carry — but Korvax shied away, holding the mechanical device closer to his chest. “Nuh uh,” he said. “This doesn’t leave my sight — or even my arms! — until we’re on our way.”
“What?!?” Captain Carroway spat, ears flattening, even more aghast than before. Sure, Korvax had joked earlier about wanting to be their guide, but certainly, he couldn’t have been serious.
“We’re coming with you,” Korvax squeaked matter-of-factly.
“The Wanderlust is not a passenger ship,” Captain Carroway argued, but neither the hedgehog nor caterpillar looked even slightly swayed. “Why would you even want to come with us?”
“I’ve ridden this turtle as far as I want to go,” Korvax replied. “I’ve lived among the Ollallans for half of my life. I’m ready to move on now.”
Captain Carroway could at least make sense of that. The hedgehog alien didn’t actually belong here, on this turtle’s back, not any more than she did or any of the rest of her crew. And his small ship wouldn’t be capable of getting him all the way home to the Tetra Galaxy, not from this far out.
The Norwegian Forest cat didn’t really want to invite this vaguely obnoxious hedgehog to join her crew and live in such close quarters with an already questionably stable group. But if he wanted to return to the Tetra Galaxy… She didn’t feel right leaving him behind here either.
Now, Lys was a different question. The Waykeeper truly was her native home.
“Fine,” Captain Carroway meowed, wondering how quickly she’d get a chance to drop Korvax off somewhere appropriate. “You can come and be our guide. But…” The Norwegian Forest cat turned toward the caterpillar. “Lys, you can’t really be serious about leaving your homeworld, your people, and everyone you know behind.”
“It won’t be everyone I know,” Lys disagreed. “I’ll still have Korvax. He’s like a parent to me. At least, from what he tells me of his own people, I think that’s what he’s like.”
“But you’ll never come back here,” Captain Carroway continued insistently. “We’re never coming back. You can’t really want to do this. Can you even understand what that really means — to never go home?”
“It means I’ll be like Korvax,” Lys said. The brownish eyespots on her face seemed to darken, giving her expression an intensity and fervency. “I’ll be an explorer who leaves my own world behind for the joy of discovering other worlds and carrying the story of my own world out into the universe, like a seed, floating on the breeze away from its mother tree.”
For a moment, Captain Carroway was sure that Lys was about to start talking about her own mother and the enigmatic prophecy about green eyes again… but somehow, the words never came. It almost felt like Lys anticipated how unwelcome those words would be and purposely held them back.
Captain Carroway could never have agreed to take Lys away from her homeworld due to some mystical prophecy that must have been sheer coincidence combined with the kind of wishful thinking that leads to assigning our fates to patterns written in the stars.
But…
She could take Lys with her if the caterpillar was making a rational decision.
And Lys seemed perfectly rational.
Like a flea biting her ear, a tiny, prickling, stinging piece of Captain Carroway’s conscience screamed at her that these caterpillar people seemed to have some limited amount of telepathy, and perhaps Lys was using that power to get her way. Could Captain Carroway be sure that she wasn’t being persuaded by an alien pressure inside of her own mind?
She couldn’t be sure. But also, with every passing moment, staring into Lys’s eyes, the danger of that possibility seemed less and less likely. This was simply the matter of a young alien who knew exactly what she wanted.
“I can’t promise to take the two of you all the way back to the Milky Way with us,” Captain Carroway meowed, somewhat confused to find herself folding. “I may drop you both off at the first convenient planet, but–”
“We’ll take it!” Korvax squeaked with elation, his quills puffing up with his excitement. The hedgehog alien didn’t wait for another word and immediately began waddling forward toward The Wanderlust’s airlock.
“Thank you, Captain,” Lys said, bowing her head — or at least, the uppermost portion of her tube-like body — forward respectfully. She waited to begin walking — in her inchworm-like way — up the ramp to The Wanderlust until Captain Carroway took the first step and gestured welcomingly for the Ollallan to follow.
The Norwegian Forest cat led her two strange new guests — not necessarily officers, certainly not yet — straight to the multi-purpose room. She’d need to discuss with Commander Chestnut about where they should sleep. Though, her first thought was that they should be broken up — Korvax in the barracks with the Morphicans and Risqua; Lys in the barracks with Melbourne and the two canines. (Captain Carroway didn’t even notice than in her accounting of the crew, she’d entirely failed to assign sleeping arrangements to Ensign Mike. The toadstool was a whole step more alien than even Lys, and somehow, it didn’t occur to the Norwegian Forest cat to imagine them ever sleeping.)
Captain Carroway didn’t want to find out what would happen if she put someone as annoying as Korvax in the same sleeping quarters as someone with as short of a temper as Ensign Diaz. And she didn’t want to keep Lys and Korvax together. In such a small space with such a small group of people, if all the individuals couldn’t find a way to work together and get along as a cohesive unit, the whole system would fall apart. And there was too much risk of Lys and Korvax keeping to themselves, becoming a disruptively separate bubble inside the larger crew if they stayed together.
“Why don’t both of you stay here,” Captain Carroway told the caterpillar and hedgehog, but Korvax was having none of it.
“Oh, no, no, you need me to get this computer system set up right away!” Korvax squeaked, holding the boxy mechanical device even closer to his chest, the one part of his body that wasn’t covered in quills.
Looking at Korvax now, Captain Carroway wondered whether his quills were even more covered in random bits and pieces of cloth and other baubles than they had been before. Perhaps that had been the Xantrosian’s idea of packing for this journey: sticking everything he’d wanted to bring with him on the ends of his quills.
Lys, on the other paw, hadn’t brought anything with her. Once again, Captain Carroway questioned the wisdom of bringing such a young creature — during the first half of a bimodal life — on a journey that would never return her home. But the flare up of concern settled down quickly, like a flyaway ember, trying to start a fire but being doused with water before its spark can spread.
If Captain Carroway could have seen her own mind from the outside in that moment, she’d have known for sure that Lys was telepathically manipulating her. But she was a cat, and for all their cleverness, they aren’t actually telepathic. So, she remained unaware.
“Fine,” Captain Carroway snapped at Korvax. “I’ll see you to the engine room, and you can work with Ensign Diaz on installing your backup computer so that it meshes with ours.”
“Backup computer?” Korvax asked, surprised and confused. “You think this is just a backup? This is my ship’s core computer bank.”
Captain Carroway blinked. “You stripped your ship of its computer? Entirely?”
“Well, it’s not like I’m planning to come back to it again,” the hedgehog sniffed, unconcerned by the idea of leaving his ship behind without any computer in it.
Captain Carroway sighed. Having Korvax aboard was going to be challenging for her. But then, so was the sentient toadstool. There were a lot of challenges involved with being the captain of a starship that had been flung to the far side of the cosmos. And every one of those challenges was a huge improvement over having died in a rapidly expanding black hole created by her own vacuum bomb. So, she’d take them all with as much composure as she could summon.
“What about me?” Lys asked sweetly as Captain Carroway turned to lead Korvax to the engine room.
The Norwegian Forest cat looked around the multi-purpose room like it would somehow provide an answer for her as to what should be done with the caterpillar. Fortunately, the multi-purpose room actually did provide an answer: Commander Chestnut had left all the cuttings from the local flora sitting on the multi-purpose room’s tables. “Why don’t you see if you can arrange all the potted plants in this room better, see if you can figure out a way for them to be kept that will be healthy for them and out of the way of the crew.” Ideally, they’d really need an arboretum, but The Wanderlust wasn’t big enough for that.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Lys said.
It didn’t take long for Captain Carroway to install Korvax in the engine room, pawned off on Ensign Diaz who looked like she knew exactly what the Norwegian Forest cat was doing: namely, saddling the Lupinian-Xolo with babysitting duties on top of the actual work she was doing.
Then freed from her tagalongs, Captain Carroway made her way to the bridge where Commander Chestnut was sitting in her captain’s chair. It was his right, as the current ranking officer on the bridge. Even so, it rankled Captain Carroway. The golden-mantled squirrel was enjoying the benefits of leadership while she was wandering around with locals who had somehow convinced her to bring them aboard as passengers.
“We’re ready to disembark whenever you command it,” Commander Chestnut chittered. The golden-mantled squirrel looked excited about the idea of getting back on the road — the road home, which was just a giant swath of space filled with an unknown number of obstacles.
The golden-mantled squirrel stood up from the captain’s chair and gestured toward it with his tiny, delicate paws, inviting Captain Carroway to take her own seat. The Norwegian Forest cat obliged and prepared to give the order that would end her first, and potentially most exciting, mission as captain. Because what else were they going to find in the Tetra Galaxy that could compare to this giant world turtle covered in glowing trees and a society of sentient caterpillars and butterflies?
Continue on to Chapter 25…