Becalmed Read Free Page A

anyone, anything else—he has very
old-fashioned views about children. He believes that a child housed in a fetal
unit will not have the warmth and compassion, the ability to bond with others,
that regular humans do.
     
    He might be right; Lord knows, he’s
shown me a lot of studies, all from the Fleet, all from various points in our
history, all very scientific.
     
    I know this, but I also know that
gestating a child in the woman is no guarantee either. The fetus gets exposed
to whatever the woman gets exposed to, and sometimes that exposure is toxic or
strange or just plain terrifying.
     
    Dry, dry sand. Heat so extreme
that my skin aches. The blood has dried on my skin and it stinks, rotting, even
as it’s attached to me. But I cannot get it off. I don’t have the water to
drink, let alone any to clean myself. I don’t have —
     
    I stand up. My face feels
flushed, my skin tight with dried blood.
     
    I don’t want to remember.
     
    I put my hands on my cheeks. I
was thinking about Coop. Coop and the babies that never were, and our perennial
argument, and the way that he looks at me, even now, as if I have broken his
heart.
     
    We still love each other. But we
are no longer in love with each other. If we ever were in love with each
other.
     
    I think we were in love with the
idea of each other. Coop is a bona fide hero, a man who rushes in when he
should hang back, who has saved countless lives, who always puts others first
and rarely thinks of himself.
     
    I’m the intellectual, the
collected one, the one who thinks before she acts—who thinks in many languages
before she acts. Coop has always been intrigued by my skills, my ability to
make myself understood, to put myself in the place of another culture, another
person, to become someone I’m not, even if only for a few minutes.
     
    There is too much Coop to subsume
into another human being, even for a moment. I’m beginning to understand that
there is not enough me, and perhaps that’s why I can completely vanish into
another perspective, because mine is so fragile, so very frail.
     
    Or is it? Coop always says I have
a firm core. He may be right. That may be why I am still here—alive, one of
three survivors. But that might also be why I can’t remember, why I feel my
brains leaking out of my skull, why my memory skips as if it were a rock
skimming a clear mountain lake.
     
    I am standing in the middle of my
apartment, back to the portal, in foldspace, guards outside my door, my memory
gone. I am here because my former husband still loves me too much to sacrifice
me for the good of the ship, even though he makes up other reasons. Ancient
regulations versus new regulations. Silly, that. He just can’t abide sending me
to the middle of that planet, as the war has heated up, a war we started.
     
    Twenty-four died.
     
    I survived.
     
    Along with two others.
     
    Whom I can’t remember.
     
    Just like I can’t remember what
happened to everybody else.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    “Something
odd is happening here,” I say to Leona. I’m looking out my portal at foldspace.
At least I think it’s fold-space.
     
    I recognize nothing out there,
and neither does my computer. When I catch a moment, a moment when I can
concentrate, I use my apartment computer, trying to figure out where we are. I
have to use the information stored on the computer itself; the ship has cut me
off. I can’t get into any systems, even informational ones.
     
    The message system doesn’t even
work properly. If I want to send a message to anyone other than the medical
evaluation unit or Leona, I have to send it through the approval system.
Someone else will listen to my complaints, read my notes, see my anxious face.
     
    Rather than let that happen, I
don’t send messages.
     
    Not that I feel like
communicating anyway.
     
    “Yes, something odd is happening,”
Leona says. “You’re essentially imprisoned in your own apartment.”
     
    She sounds offended by this,
which