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.
Ensign Mike withdrew their mycelial filaments from the cracks in the prone caterpillar’s wrinkled skin. The cracks healed and the wrinkles smoothed as the fungal strands pulled out of them, leaving Lys as young and healthy as she’d been before leaving the atmospheric bubble around the Waykeeper launched her into the throes of a premature metamorphosis.
The fungal officer had stopped her metamorphosis, staving off her chrysalis state.
“What happened?” Korvax squeaked, playing his delicate paws up and down Lys’s worm-like body, checking every part of his surrogate daughter, as if she were but an infant and had fallen down, scraping a knee — or whatever was the closest stand-in for that on her body — for the first time. He could find nothing wrong with her, and so he burst into tears of relief and buried his pointy muzzle in the part of her tube-like body that most closely resembled a neck, just beneath her face, and sobbed disconsolately. He was sobbing with relief, but still, he was sobbing. Quite noisily.
“We fixed her,” Ensign Mike said, their mushy voice beaming with pride. “She didn’t want to transform yet, and so we located the hormone that was causing the changes, traced it back to its organ of origin, and palpitated the lymph gland in a soothing way until it calmed down and stopped overproducing unnecessary hormones.”
“Good work, Ensign Mike!” Commander Chestnut chittered with genuine admiration.
“What?!?” Korvax blurted, all wet and noisy like a sneeze since he was still sobbing. “I don’t understand.”
Lys pressed several of her hands against the floor, rotating herself and pushing herself into a more upright position. Her tubelike body bent from a straight line to a jagged swerve. “You don’t need to understand, Korvax,” the caterpillar intoned prettily. “You only need to thank them for saving me.”
“You’re quite right, quite right,” the hedgehog alien chittered. “Of course you are, my dear.” Turning to the toadstool and choking back the last of his sobs — although, it sounded like he’d stored up a few for later — Korvax said, “Thank you most kindly, oh generous doctor, we owe you an endless debt of gratitude. What can I do for you to begin repaying it?” Korvax pulled a scrap of purple fabric off of the pointy end of one of his quills. “This is a particularly fine piece of silk. I’d like you to have it — not as a complete repayment, mind you. I plan to devote myself to repaying you! But as a token, yes, a token to show that I’m sincere and will do whatever I can to repay you for saving my dearest Lys from an early metamorphosis that would most likely have led to an early–” He was going to say ‘death,’ but instead, his voice choked off in a squeak and some of the sobs he’d been saving up started to leak out.
Ensign Mike took the scrap of purple fabric from Korvax’s quivering paw and looked at it somewhat bemusedly. The toadstool didn’t know what to do with a square of silk. They also weren’t sure what to do with all of the words Korvax had said to them about repayments, and one word, in particular, stuck out at them: doctor. They weren’t a doctor. Were they?
Or… if they weren’t a doctor… yet… could they maybe become one? Perhaps that was what Ensign Mike wanted to do — not handle any of the stressful things that happened on the bridge of this chaotic ship, but instead, focus on healing people. Ideally, one at a time. That seemed much more like their natural speed. And The Wanderlust didn’t have a doctor. More than that, a ship on a long-term mission like this was going to need one.
“You have repaid us enough,” Ensign Mike said, their voice plopping like droplets of water on soggy leaves. “We think, maybe, you’ve helped us discover our purpose in life.” Still unsure of what to do with the scrap of purple fabric, Ensign Mike tied the small square around one of their wrists. It looked quite decorative there. It wouldn’t be regulation, but then, Ensign Mike had noticed that a number of the Anti-Ra crew members wore non-regulation ornamentation with their uniforms — such as Ensign Diaz’s necklace of braided reeds or Commander Chestnut’s rows of golden earrings. Ensign Mike liked the idea of wearing an ornament as well, especially one that would remind them of the moment when they realized their calling.
Continue on to Chapter 28…