Voyager’s Rest Chapter 7

Chapter 7

3Stan's body slammed into 4Card sending them both crashing out of sight behind the telescope in the center of the room. There was a crash and continued swirls of light as they continued to grapple.

The moment had caught me and 4Jum in a state of shock and neither knew what to do next. We stutter stepped away from each other and then closer. I was no combatant and I suspected that neither was he. I pushed myself to move forward in hopes that he would somehow retreat from the scope. I kept advancing and he just stood there. The closer I got to being able to actually reach out and touch him the fuller my fear grew in my chest.

"Move." It was a polite, if not terse statement.

"No." was his only response.

My actions seemed separated from my thought. I was in a fight. There was a part of my brain that couldn't seem to understand that. Close enough now to grab 4Jum, I instead moved to the left of him and attempted to recalibrate the direction and angle of the scope. The thought was he might let me. It was foolish and naive, but hopeful.

I grabbed the calibration dial and 4Jum grabbed onto my wrist. Everything felt rushed. He used his weight to dislodge me and I stumbled back. I stepped back in and his hand pressed against my face. The acts of aggression were awkward and uncertain. 4Jum hadn't done this before either. He and 4Card were engineers working for the academic society, not warriors.

I was afraid of hurting someone and I was afraid of being hurt. Being pushed, however, made me mad. Their choice to betray the concept of knowledge for a loyalty to 10Ant and the institution also made me angry. There was enough emotion and concern for 3Stan that my body acted despite my uncertainty.

Charging forward, I wrapped my arms around 4Jum and we tumbled to the ground.

"What is wrong with you!" I shouted and filled the space with the light of my rage.

"Get off of me!" 4Jum matched my intensity.

In his voice though there was a wavering. He hadn't expected by be on his back. He hadn't expected to be in a physical conflict. He was losing. Which meant, I was winning. It felt, unexpected.

I looked around for 3Stan. From the floor I could see them on the other side of the scope. Apparently they were much more comfortable in the animosity and violence.

3Stan and 4Card were swinging their closed fists at each other with speed and strength. Material was being dislodged from the both of them and spraying in all directions.

If they had said anything to each other prior to the frenzy of attacks they were done communicating with words. It was clear that their conflict would not end until one of them was found unable to continue.

Finding 4Jum again in my vision, he was as stunned as I was by the violence of our compatriots and the energy of spirit to continue the barbarism between us.

"I doesn't matter." 4Jum had a stunned expression as he watched his friend devolve into fury. I had his wrists locked to the floor and my legs wrapped around his waist. Our faces were so close I could have touched his forehead to mine. "The viewing window is gone! It doesn't matter now." His eyes were pleading for me to help his friend who, by this time, was in jeopardy of being seriously damaged by 3Stan.

I had no argument to counter 4Jum and no will to press the question even if I did. Pieces of 4Card were everywhere. The mineral outer material of his body and 3Stan's hung in the air and was illuminated by the electronics in the room and the light coming in from the window. Segments of lattice had been bent and torn from his body and they littered the floor like segments of a child's learning toy. Our systems and body structures are highly resilient to heat, radiation, acceleration and contaminations of all sorts, but physical impacts can dent or tear at the outer lattice of the skin that affects the inner lattice of the internal systems. Physical assaults, even minor ones, can have long lasting consequences.

I rolled off of 4Jum and stumbled through the fog of conflicted air to stop 3Stan's continued aggression. My shout was loud enough to blind us all in the room for a brief moment.

"Stop!"

3Stan turned to me and blinked the rage from his eyes, his fist still ready to deliver one final blow. There was guilt and shame in his expression as he looked back at the battered adversary.

"Help me dial in the scope. It's over."

3Stan shifted his gaze to 4Jum to confirm that he was also subdued. 4Jum's attention was focused only on his injured friend. His gaze through 3Stan and I like we weren't visible to him.

"Ok. Quickly." 3Stan agreed and moved briskly toward the telescope.

The machine was an amazing piece of our technology and given that we had no stars outside our own to examine it was additionally amazing that the resources were spent to build the optic enhancer at all.

The same lattice structure which gave my arm shape was the same natural shape which held the lenses in place as to allow the scope to work. Our world was built on silica crystals grown through attention to the nature of the material. In our bodies it was innate. Our bodies grew and stopped growing based on signals from our central metabolic core. Our engineering used the same principles except that the designs had the signature of intent.

A great genius of our people saw the value of bending light through transparent silica and built the lattice to hold them. The lens that I looked through now was a product of imagination and a dream of seeing farther than those before him. The privilege of looking through this tool to search for an artifact, that may have survived our greatest cataclysm was lost on me at the time. I have since had a great many moments of time to reflect on how fortunate our world had been.

The angle was set and the focus locked. In moments we would see what the others didn't want us to see. An artifact from the void would indicate that beyond the inky blackness of the void in which we could not see beyond, meant that there was explorable space beyond. It would mean that others of our kind could have been blasted off into the darkness and survived. It would mean that settled science, theoretical and philosophical knowledge would all require reexamination. If it had only been that simple we may have found a way to navigate through. The truth is, your existence made everything more complicated, more dangerous.

"Is he going to be ok?" I asked over to 4Jum as he tended over the crumpled figure of 4Card and there was time to wait for the anomaly to pass through the viewing window.

"No! He is not!" 4Jum spat back at me without looking back.

"I, am sorry." 3Stan said with stoic quiet.

"Dissolve yourself and rot your Burc eater!" This time 4Jum did look back at 3Stan. His expression of pure contempt. It looked as if he was about to say more but then turned away and went back to tending his friend.

"I just need to fill my lattice again and I'll be ok." 4Card's voice was dim and shaky.

4Card wanted to take in minerals to strengthen his lattice, but doing so while so much of his body lattice was misshapen would lock to twists and dents into place. He would never be the same. Without sufficient minerals to metabolize within his inner crystal however, his core could shut down. For us, this is death.

"I just need to fill myself." 4Card said with quiet certainty.

"No. Not yet." 4Jum locked his fingers into the lattice of 4Cards chest cavity and pulled the honeycomb back into the original shape or an approximation of the original shape. There were bends in the material that couldn't be pulled straight without surgical engineering tools.

"There has to be a local anatomical engineer near. A call needs to be made. I could make a run, if you tell me the way." I could see the pain 4Card was in and the pain in the eyes of 4Jum looked worse. I wanted to help.

"You would miss the anomaly transit." 3Stan said with little empathy in his voice.

"4Card needs medical service. This is important." I argued.

"So is this! Important enough for him to do that to himself."

"You did this to him!" Shouted 4Jum with anger.

"He got in our way! He chose! He risked! Ignorance over knowledge. He decided and has his consequence." 3Stan had deep resentment in his words. I wanted to hear shame or regret in his voice as well. I made myself believe it was there. Even if my senses could not detect it in the moment.

"Is that what is being taught at the Prima Academy these days? Acquisition of fact over stability?" 4Jum spoke with volume enough for us to hear but wasn't responding to 3Stan directly. He continued to reshape 4Card as best he could.

"You care about the bobble in the sky because you are a scientist. Like we are." 4Card's voice was soft and without emotion.

3Stan ignored him and kept focus on the countdown to having a visual on the anomaly.

"The rest. All the rest. They just want to be safe. Just to be safe." 4Card continued.

I didn't know what he was talking about. The anomaly was large for what it was, but not large enough to cause an impact threat. If it was to crash into the landmass it would barely make an impact great enough to be noticed beyond visible range.

"We need to be, keepers of the safety of others. Not just data collectors. Teachers like you should be more than that." 4Card continued but his voice was quieter now. If it wasn't for the silence in the room he would have been impossible to hear.

"4Jum. I want to help." He didn't respond to me.

I looked up at the countdown clock and it was time. The anomaly would be in sight within moments. I looked into the viewer directly as 3Stan sat at a monitor console. I wanted the directness of the light touching my visual array. I wanted to know, without electronic translation, what was out there that had brought us to this moment.

"It doesn't matter." I heard from 4Jum as the anomaly entered the viewer.

The object tracted slowly from upper left to lower right in the viewer. It was small, filling little more than a tenth of the viewing area. The shape was asymmetrical. There was a long post that reached out from the main body of the thing. The center was flat on one side while concave on the other. The texture for the most part was uneven and dull. It almost looked as if it could be simply a strange shaped, naturally occurring stone. It could be dismissed at first glance. Slowly tumbling it didn't seem to have any clear top or bottom. Any orientation would have been as strange as another. I would have been more excited to see the grayish blob with spiky projections if it wasn't for the growing concern that 4Card was slowly dying on the floor behind me.

"It is clearly a manufactured object. It is a thing that was made." I hear 3Stan's voice, steady and clear.

"It might be a piece of a larger object maybe." I add to the analysis.

"Do you see in the center? A different color from the rest, a higher reflective rate?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes. What is that? What's the make up?"

"Spectrometer says; copper, gold and something else. Something unknown. Something beyond our known elements. I don't know." I had never heard 3Stan dumbfounded, but there it was. He was baffled by this new element unknown to our science until this moment. It wasn't something that occurred naturally on Prima and had never been detected by our science. Uranium.

"What does that mean?" I ask as I watch the anomaly continue to wander off of our viewing area.

"I. I don't know. I don't know what it mean." 3Stan was mumbling to himself as he tried to generate a hypothesis.

"Well. I hope you two have enjoyed your moment of discovery, because there is something more pressing for you to face."

We both turn to 4Jum and 4Card. 4Jum is sitting still next to the crumpled body of 4Card. His expression blank, except for the deep, deep pain that I could only look at for an instant without needing to look away.

"4Card. His heat is gone. He is gone." The words came from 4Jum as fact. They came from him with objective clarity and without the bias of grief or the anger of blame.