Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part Three

DaSilva sat alone the next morning at breakfast, not really eating and not really thinking. He looked up briefly when Spencer sat down at the other end of the table, but then said nothing. Finally, after taking a drink of his juice, he grimaced and said, “I think I stayed planetside too long—this juice tastes like oil.”
“It is oil,” Spencer chuckled. “They call this juice, hot cereal, and toast, but it’s really oil, oil, and oil. It’s infused with nutrients, but everything’s artificially constituted—mainly out of soy and vegetable oil. It’s what you get when you’re on rotation—why ship the good stuff up here? In a few weeks, we’ll be on planetside rotation and it’ll seem like heaven after this.”
DaSilva laughed obligingly at this, then studied Spencer for a while before making another overture. “What were you doing on C’bathos?”
Spencer shrugged. “I had a job re-fitting engines, but really I was there to get away from home.”
“First time away?”
“No. Just restless, you know. Getting out into space felt like shaking everything off for a while.”
DaSilva nodded. “I hear that.”
“And you?”
DaSilva took a long drink of his oil, grimacing again, and then shrugged. “Just another delivery. I take long runs for a while, build up a little cushion, and then spend it all someplace nice.” He laughed. “Ever been to SeaCap Station?”
Spencer shook his head.
DaSilva smiled in a way that was faintly disgusting, but did not elaborate.
Spencer rolled his eyes and turned back to his cereal. “Is that your next stop, then?”
“Nah. I’ve got another few runs to make. SeaCap’s expensive. I’ll probably spend my next vacation out on a border colony. A little money and a few souvenirs from home make you a regular celebrity out there.”
Spencer nodded, smiling.
DaSilva tried to pick up on it, saying, “So, C’bathos isn’t the furthest you’ve been?”
But Spencer had finished breakfast, and he picked up his tray. “What’s your itinerary?” he asked abruptly.
“Itinerary?” DaSilva laughed. “I haven’t had one of those in a while.”
Spencer’s forehead wrinkled. “I thought you had a delivery to make.”
“That stuff’ll keep for a while. Besides, who knows when Pathways’ll get around to issuing me a code. I could be here for a while.”
“Yeah, about that: what happened to the one you had?”
DaSilva caught the sarcasm in Spencer’s voice and responded in kind. “I guess I lost it. You know, when someone’s chasing you at high speed through a Lepinski depression, you throw out anything that’s slowing you down.”
They both laughed, but it was perfunctory, forced.
“Well, if you’re here for a while, why don’t we work on your Ojira for a while?” Spencer offered. “You can’t turn down free labor, can you?”
“No, I suppose I can’t. Thank you.”
“Sure. No problem.”

Hawking having already freed Spencer up from the duty schedule, there was nothing to stop Spencer and DaSilva from spending the whole morning—about five and a half hours all told—repairing burns, pits, scars, streaks, and scalds from the outer hull of the Ojira. Half of them had stories behind them, which lengthened the work out, but many of them were purely incidental to the dangerous nature of the long space haul—and the scars were so old that Spencer didn’t go ten whole minutes at a time without reminding DaSilva where neglectful pilots went when they died.
Jimenez joined them an hour before they broke for lunch, his own ship recently refitted with an engine they could not talk about in front of DaSilva. DaSilva suggested they race the two ships, but Jimenez politely declined and said, “I’m not sure if the engine they fitted me with is supposed to shoot me across the solar system or just pop like a balloon and kill me. Better to find out on my own.”
When they broke for lunch, DaSilva and Jimenez headed for the mess, but Spencer said he was going to take a nap, so they split up. Spencer grabbed a sandwich from the cooler in the shop. Then he headed for Ecksel’s office.

“Now listen, Spencer, I’m not going to make you any promises, and I certainly don’t want you to think you have to tell me every detail about everything that ever happened to you—just anything you think might be relevant. I’m going to call this therapy, but that’s just so you still get paid for sitting around on your ass for a while telling me stories, okay?”
Spencer nodded.
Ecksel was parked in his office chair, a small terminal on a swing-arm slung up next to him; he had a cup of coffee steaming on a little table, and his sock-feet were parked on a little stool. He looked comfortable.
Spencer decided to get comfortable, too. He got up from the chair he was sitting on and moved to the couch, stretched out, and propped his head on a cushion.
“I’ve had black-outs all my life,” he began.
Ecksel listened intently.

I’ve had black-outs all my life. My parents would call them seizures, but that was just their way of trying to understand them. I wasn’t unconscious, comatose, or catatonic—I was simply acting without memory of what I was doing.
To the observer, I was acting with complete clarity. I appeared deliberate and aware of my surroundings. Frequently, my actions had a positive impact on others—as with this latest episode with Corsi—but I have to stress that to this day I remain completely unaware of my actions during these black-outs or even my intentions. I can’t claim that rescuing Corsi was an act of honor or selflessness because I don’t know how or why I did it.
The best comparison I can draw is to sleepwalking—although even that one is a stretch. I do know that I have woken up sometimes with a sense of well-being and calm; other times I have woken up feeling sick and lonely and frightened. Some have speculated that I felt upset or frightened on the occasions that I was interrupted or woken up prematurely. I can’t attest to this, since I know so little—and only second-hand—of how I spend this ‘lost’ time.
My mother says that I experienced two of these black-outs at school when I was very young. I don’t remember them—I only remember being sick a few times, and I can’t recall time missing that early on. However, I had an episode when I was eight years old that I remember with much greater clarity. I’ll give you the short version of that one.
We lived on Kiyos which, as you know, was a mining colony. I used to attend school in a pressurized facility near the center of the town. I was in school one day, and there was a practice evacuation. Just when the signal was given, I blacked out. I had a dream that time—nothing like what actually happened—which I will tell you about later. When I woke up, I was being transported to the medical facility. Not the school’s medical facility, the one in town. My mother was in the transport with me, and I realized that it was much later in the day. I asked her what had happened, and she said that I had saved someone’s life. I went to sleep again, and when I woke up I was at home. My father was there, and it was morning, and I realized he was not going to go to work, and that made me happy.
My parents explained to me then what had happened.
Our school facility had a detachable module for evacuations. It was like a large transport, and all the children would board it in emergencies. Then it would roll away from the school until the crisis had passed. It was important that we board the module quickly and that it detach correctly to maintain pressure within the module—otherwise, the module would de-pressurize and we would all suffocate.
Just as the signal was given for the practice evacuation, I apparently stood up and announced to everyone that there was a seal breach, and that we should remain where we were. My teacher was upset at first, not only because I was counter-manding instructions, but also because everyone in the classroom obeyed me almost unthinkingly. He took me by the hand and told me to remain at the end of the line, and he instructed the other students to line up. Then I fell to the floor and began shaking, and he contacted the administrative team to cancel the drill.
A few moments later, the seal breach became critical, and the detachable module was compromised. Alarms went off, and the man at the outer door only just had time to uncouple the module and seal the school in order to prevent a massive decompression. Had anyone been on the module, they would have been caught outside and most likely killed.
I heard all of this second-hand. I do not quite believe it myself.
The only part I know about first-hand is the dream, which I will tell you now. I have had similar dreams many times since, both during my black-outs and during normal sleep cycles. I do not pretend to know what it means, although if you are familiar with it, the history of Kiyos might suggest an interpretation.
I was standing in the school, looking up through a skylight that didn’t actually exist in the classroom, and I saw ships—alien ships, or at least ones I had never seen before—firing great bursts of green light into the surface of Kiyos. I knew why they were there, and surely enough, the ground soon began breaking up, until I was certain that Kiyos would soon cease to exist.
The same dream has come to me many times—and it always prominently features these ships I have never seen before, as well as the destruction of my home. When I lived on Kiyos, it was Kiyos being destroyed. When I lived on Serpeset, it was Serpeset. It is always the same.

Spencer stopped for a minute, taking deep breaths, and then he turned to look directly at Ecksel.
“Now you tell me, Dr. Ecksel: Kiyos, Serpeset, C’bathos … what do these three places have in common—besides that they are all places I have lived?”
Ecksel kept a stone face and said simply, “They are all places that no longer exist.”