Chapter 14

Chapter 14

T hree glasses of water later, Primula wondered if this was a good idea. She should probably go back to bed. If Trafford knew she’d been ogling some other man’s equipment, he would have left her for sure.

Then again, he was fifty lightyears away, and she’d probably never see him again. If he was even still alive…

“I see you started without me,” Daedalus said as he entered the room. He held up a bottle of what looked like real champagne. “But I guarantee there’s nothing in the galley that can rival the captain’s secret wine stash.”

She took the bottle from him. It really was champagne. “Where did you get this?” she breathed. Even on Earth, she’d never been able to afford the good stuff. Here in the Colony, where the price of Earth alcohol was astronomical, she’d still had to confine herself to a small bottle of fizz a week.

“The captain’s secret stash. I found it my first week flying this tub. The shipping magnate who owned this stocked it with all the best Earth food and drink when he sent it to the Altan System, and the salvage crew who sold it to Eden stripped it of everything that was left before we got it, but the original owner must have been a smuggler or something, because I’ve found three secret compartments they didn’t notice since I’ve been here. The captain’s private wine cellar is in my quarters. I was feeling around in the dark for a light switch and found the switch to open the secret cellar instead. I don’t know much about Earth wines, so I hope this is okay. If not, I can grab a different bottle.”

She’d never had more than a glass or two of wine. Trafford said alcohol made her even more stupid than usual, so she’d always tried to avoid drinking, instead of learning more about the stuff she shouldn’t have. So she pasted on a smile and said, “I’m sure it will be fine.”

Pop and glug and clink…all sounds she hadn’t heard since before she left Earth, but in her middle of the night madness, complete with monsters, it seemed like the time to do something crazy. She gulped down a big mouthful of the bubbly wine. The flavour hit her like a knife up the nostrils – sharp and fizzy, with a thousand different flavours all rolled into one. Then it burned her throat all the way down.

If this was what real champagne tasted like, she wished she’d drunk more of it when she was still on Earth. No matter what Trafford said.

But Daedalus was staring at her, as if he expected her to say something.

“Wow. That’s way better than the fizz from Forge,” she said.

“Noted. I guess I won’t be ordering any next time I’m in the Colony,” he said. He took a careful sip from his glass. “Now, I’m not much of a wine connoisseur, so if that’s what you woke me up to talk about, I should probably go back to bed before I bore you with my ignorance. But if you want to talk about the monsters in your nightmares, I’m all ears. I adored horror movies as a teenager, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the creature features. So, what’s keeping you up at night?” He sipped his wine again.

Primula just shook her head. “You won’t be interested in my nightmares, then. Trafford isn’t a monster. He’s just a man. A man I used to date before I ended up on the Genesis , and came here to the Colony.”

Daedalus perked up. “What happened to him? Did you kill him, and now you’re fleeing from justice? I’m sure he totally deserved it, by the way. What did you do with the body? Did you feed it to your fish?”

Primula almost spat out her champagne. “No, no, no! Of course not! I couldn’t kill him! I loved him. I was waiting at the space elevator dock to go back down to Earth to be with him when the explosion happened. I was talking to him on the comms, only the comm lines were cut along with the space elevator, so I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

“If he’s not a monster, why are you having nightmares about him? Is he screaming as he dies horribly, and you can’t save him? That’s survivor guilt, incidentally, and you can get counselling to fix that. My mother was a baku, as well as a therapist, so I kind of grew up knowing far more about dream interpretation than any kid should. Then again, I also never had recurring nightmares, because Mum wouldn’t have stood for it, which is why they fascinate me so much. Tell me more. There must be something monstrous about this man.”

“He wasn’t a monster. I mean, sure, he could be grumpy and annoying at times, but most of the time that was my fault. I’d do something stupid, then he’d get angry, and I’d spend so much time smoothing things over again, sometimes I’d forget what I’d done to set things off in the first place. But I was never game to ask, because that would only set him off again. Plus, he’d always remind me about it next time I did something stupid, and there was always a next time.” She drained her wine glass and set it down sadly. “Well, until the space elevator exploded and there wasn’t, I guess.”

“So why are you having nightmares about him, then?” Daedalus tipped the bottle and topped up her glass, then his own.

Primula sighed. “I keep dreaming about our last conversation. The one that got cut short by the explosion. I was so nervous and excited. I was going to establish the first aquaponics farm on Mars. It wasn’t even meant to be me, but everyone else further up the list didn’t pass the medicals for space flight, or couldn’t spare the time off work or family for the trip, until only I was left and I couldn’t say no. Trafford just said it was stupid of me to agree, when we both knew I couldn’t do it. If no one else had ever done it before, then there was no way I’d succeed. But…I thought I wanted to try. And seeing as no one else could do it, I wanted to take the chance. Because maybe, just maybe…I could. Just once, I wouldn’t be worthless or useless or stupid, and I’d be able to do something to make Trafford proud of me. But I got scared, and I knew that the chances were slim that I’d succeed, and if I did, I’d lose him…he was all I had left. I lost my dad in a boating accident when I was at university. A freak wave flipped his boat over and they never found his body, though the other guys got rescued. I got into fish biology because of him, and when I lost him…I started working with freshwater fish, so I wouldn’t have to go to sea. I never expected I’d end up going to space instead…and there I was, looking down on Earth, at how much water there was, and I got scared, so when Trafford told me to come home, it felt like the right thing to do. I would have stepped into the space elevator car and given up on all of it…except for the explosion. The explosion is the last thing I remember before I woke up in hospital in the Colony.” Tears blurred her vision. “He was waiting right there, at the bottom of the space elevator for me to come back. If I’d had just one more minute, I would have told him to wait for me. That he was right, and I couldn’t do it, and I was coming back down to him. I don’t even know if he’s alive. If he’s dead, if the explosion killed him, then it’s my fault. I’m the reason he was there that day.”

“Who told you that you were worthless, useless, and stupid?” Daedalus’s words cut through her sobs like a blade made of ice. The way Trafford’s voice would go before he exploded.

Primula swiped at her eyes and sniffed so she could speak. “Trafford did. But he was right. I was so early in my career, I’d never done anything, and the things I did do were so stupid.”

“Dead or alive, Trafford is a twat. A colossal twat. Did your work colleagues believe you could do the job?”

Primula sniffled. “Well, yes. I think so. It was more that none of them could, so it fell to me. I was just the least bad choice.”

“Is it any different to the fish farm you’re setting up on Delta now?”

She squirmed. “Well, yes. The Mars system was just a prototype, an advanced variation on the hydroponics system they were already using. The fish survived just fine in space, but they refused to breed in low gravity, so none of the systems were sustainable. My research looked at how well fish navigated through a magnetic field, and I started a selective breeding program for fish with poor navigation skills. The good navigators went into an Earth-based breeding program for restocking restored rivers, but all the rejects came to me. After a few generations, we sent some breeding pairs up to a space station. And for the first time ever, fish spawned in space. That wasn’t my project, it was someone else’s, but she found out she was pregnant two weeks before launch, so I got her spot for Mars. We were the Fish Fluffers, the only girls who could get fish to perform in space.

“The fish at Exodus Station were Generation IV. They were born on a space station, had never even been to Earth and would probably get lost even if they did. While there are some magnetic fields on Mars, the fish were being sent to regions where the fields were faint. The fish I have now…I don’t even know what generation they are. Genesis didn’t have stasis pods for fish, and I was already asleep in a stasis pod myself, so they couldn’t ask me for advice, so they just…left the fish in the tanks, much like the hydroponics systems, to grow and be maintained automatically during the journey, until we all woke up. These fish could be generation L or LXX, depending on how long we were travelling. I honestly don’t know.”

Daedalus whistled. “Fifty generations of fish, selectively bred to get lost easily? It sounds like you’re breeding stupid fish.”

“They’re not stupid. They’re as smart as any other fish. It’s just they don’t have the innate ability to sense and navigate in magnetic fields, which makes them perfect for space stations or planets which don’t have strong magnetic fields. They can’t get lost in an aquaponics farm. They just swim around the system, doing their thing, not worrying about which way is north, or what season it is, or whether they should be migrating and where to. They just keep swimming.” She sighed. “Trafford called them stupid, too. I was jealous of them, some days. I mean, they always had purpose. Even when they were stupid and useless on Earth, they had a place to be where they were perfect, in a fish paradise just for them.”

Daedalus gave an exaggerated yawn. “I was really getting into your story, all about the fish, and you had to bring Schr?dinger’s twat into the conversation. If there’s anything worthless and useless in the universe, it’s definitely him. Not even worth talking about.”

Primula couldn’t believe her ears. Maybe they’d drunk too much wine. Sure enough, the bottle was empty. Way too much wine. “I think you mean Schr?dinger’s cat. A thought experiment about a cat…”

“No, I definitely mean Schr?dinger’s twat. The useless gaslighting arsehole who you don’t even know is alive or dead. The one who didn’t want you to succeed, by the sound of things. I hope he is dead. I hope the whole space elevator fell on his head and squished him flat. A flat, twat pancake.” Daedalus grinned.

“Trafford wouldn’t like being called that. He said vaginas smelled like fish, and he hated fish.” Maybe that was why he’d always wanted to fuck her in other places so often. “He didn’t like pancakes much, either.”

“I don’t care what Schr?dinger’s twat would have liked. In fact, I’m glad I never met the man, because I would have hated him on sight. What manner of man hates fish? A monster, for sure. Which brings us back to your nightmare. You know how to get rid of it, don’t you?”

Primula shook her head miserably. “I’ve tried everything. I still can’t stop dreaming about him. I sometimes even hear him when I’m awake, too.”

“Have you tried changing the conversation? If you could go back to that time and place, what do you wish you’d said? Or he’d said? If it was up to you?”

“I can’t change the past. That’s why I keep having the dream!” she wailed.

“But if you could. What would you do differently?” he pressed.

“I don’t know!” she exploded. “I wish I’d agreed to head down earlier, or not gone at all, so neither of us would have been there for the explosion, and we’d be living happily together on Earth, right now. Or maybe I wish instead of staying to persuade me to come home, he’d dumped me, and left, so he’d have gotten away safely before the explosion. I still would have gone back to Earth to get him back, of course, but at least he would have lived. Or if I’d seen the explosives in time to warn someone, so the explosion never would have happened, and the space elevator would still be working. I could have gone to Mars and come back and everything would be fine. Instead, I’m out here, and the only thing in my life I have any control over is my fish and they’re all I have.” Now she really was getting emotional, and she didn’t want Daedalus to see her cry again, because this time, she was sure she wasn’t going to be able to stop.

“Try to give your dreams a different ending. Next time you have that nightmare, think about how you’d make it different, and remember that ending when you go to sleep. Pretty soon, that’s exactly what you’ll get – the ending you want, and you won’t have that nightmare again,” Daedalus said.

Yeah, right. “I’ll try,” she said as she hurried out.

“Let me know if you need any help. I’d be happy to help you any time you want.”

His voice wafted after her, as soothing as the smell of fresh-baked bread. But it had to be an illusion. Nobody baked bread in space, and until someone invented time travel, changing the past was impossible, too.

But if she made it to her bunk fast enough, Lothario the meowl might still be there, and she could pat him until he purred and she drifted off to sleep.

That was the only happy ending she could envision right now, and it sounded good enough to her.

It wasn’t until she’d started to drift off to sleep that she remembered the monster owl, and how she’d been so busy talking about Trafford, she’d forgotten to tell Daedalus about the owl.

She blew out a breath. She’d tell him tomorrow.

And then, in the back of her mind, she wondered if he really was right about Trafford being Schr?dinger’s twat. If only she could forget about him as easily as Daedalus said.

Lothario the meowl chirped, as if in agreement, and snuggled closer.

“Yep,” she mumbled, before sleep claimed her once more.