“What did you do?” Daniel asked. “This is a sting? Did you resist?”
“I was in the tank of the ship,” Ceeborn said. “It was dark.”
“Robin needs to see this,” Daniel said. “I don’t know what to do. Not at this stage.”
Ceeborn pushed past Daniel, gathered his hoodie from the floor, scrunched it to find its front-hand pocket. He pulled out the tan case and laid it on his desk. He unclasped the lid. Tenden and Spud circled over. The rivulus looked out, then darted back into the moistened bit of mossy sponge. It was alive and unharmed.
Tenden dove and snatched up the case. He hunched himself over and extended his pointer finger toward the rivulus’s curious, darting eyes. “I’ll carry it,” he said. “I want it.”
Spud yanked at Tenden’s arm for a look, but Tenden ignored him with the wide-eyed focus of a master protector, one having found the ultimate little creature to protect.
“Where did you get it?” Pace asked. “Did you go to the zoo?”
“Robin told me everything about the spray,” Ceeborn said. “It’s spreading and we can’t fix it, no one can. We can stay on this ship, but we’re all going to die if we do.”
Daniel grabbed Ceeborn’s wrist. “No, don’t say that. You don’t have to be sick, or die. This pain will go away. Don’t listen to them. You can come back here. It’ll be just you and me.” He looked around the room. “I know I can fix it all, like a magician. And I’ve made a fix for each of you. Are you ready to see it now?”
“Yes! Open it up, let’s see,” Spud said.
Daniel backed away from Ceeborn and opened a curtain to a stage at the front of the room. Tenden and Spud cheered at what they saw. Pace stayed in his queasy restraint.
Daniel welcomed them up to a dream world stage filled with the most amazing toys and spatial apparatus. Newfangled equipment, life-size gyroscopes, an impregnated wall of varying-sized metallic spheres. And a clear, cylindrical water tank at the front of the room for Ceeborn which was sized for his height plus another half.
Tenden, in his bullish gate, hopped up the three stairs to the stage. He grabbed a bioship model in the shape of a squid. “I’m flying now, boys. Out of my way.”
Spud dodged Tenden and bumped a canister off of its platform stand. Colored marbles spilled on the floor, plinked, and rolled dizzily back toward the seats.
Pace buried his eyes deep into his arms over his desk and hid from the motion.
Ceeborn watched over the boys from his distance as he climbed up the side-mounted ladder of the tank where, from up on its platform, he had the best view of the room.
Daniel circulated, scientific and serious. He tapped on the tank beneath the platform and gestured for Ceeborn to slip in.
“I want to watch you fix them first. I want to see them happy,” Ceeborn said.
“Meet me halfway,” Daniel said as he tapped again.
Ceeborn relented and slipped into the warm, thickened water of his tank, then bobbed up its wall. He folded his arms over its rim, his legs dangling submerged.
Spud sat behind a station’s black-cloth partition. He clicked his tongue in repeated, quickening directional ticks. He angled his head into the reverberations, detecting the bounce back of minute sound waves. He winced with a migraine and pointed to the upper right corner of the cloth. “There it is,” he said.
Daniel revealed an apple-sized metallic sphere from behind the cloth. “Okay, very good.”
He wheeled a supply cart in closer. It had a thick vertical board and, behind its obstruction, he exchanged the metallic sphere for a smaller marble. Spud struggled to exhaustion with his squinting and clicking. The marble couldn’t be seen through the board.
“Ready?” Daniel asked with a teasing smile. He pulled an atomizer from his cart and wafted the air in front of Spud with a bluish haze.
Ceeborn felt a chill from his exposed shoulders through the water to his toes. Daniel, his father, was a genius.
“We inserted a whole new count of SQUIDs in your facial disk,” Daniel said to Spud.
Spud looked through the settling blue mist as his broadened face came alive with awe. He panned his face into the new spectrum world he saw.
“SQUIDs,” Daniel said. “Superconducting quantum interference devices. That’s right. They measure the minutest changes in your body’s electromagnetic field so if you learn to measure it right, you’ll effectively see through objects. You’ll recognize the magnetic disturbances created. And when you’re ready, you’ll see even smaller. Maybe,” Daniel said as he knelt in closer with a childish goad, “maybe even a qubit.”
Spud leaned closer to the board and tried again. The marble was behind the upper left corner. His jaw dropped with the inspired rise of his smile, his realization that he, and his face, his disk, was a gift. He rose from his station and explored the stage, pinging and measuring the wall’s assortment of exposed semi-spheres.
“Go on. I didn’t create it,” Daniel said. “The main torus core of this ship developed the technology. I just put it to your good use.”
The nearby gyroscope apparatus whirled into a painfully high pitch and Spud shuffled away.
Daniel wheeled a cart down the stage’s ramp and knelt in front of Pace’s honeycombed cubicle. “Open your eyes, Pace. I won’t move.”
“I don’t want to play,” Pace said. “Go away.”
Daniel retrieved a fly-weight ball of glimmering metal sheen from the cart’s lower shelf. He held it, rolled it in his fingers, but frustrated, he couldn’t seem to complete its task. “Sorry, hang on,” he said as he picked at two end tabs of the whisper-thin metal wrap. The tabs were stuck against the ball like the lost end of invisible tape. Then he found the loose end tabs, pinched them securely in his fingers and gave the ball a flick. It opened into a half sheet that spread atop Pace’s desk. It was a wrinkled thin film, only microns thick. Daniel snapped it again and it reclaimed its memory shape, a magnetic bodysuit.
Pace pushed up on the arms of his chair to stand. He reached for a feel of the ultra-thin metallic sheet’s luster.
Daniel helped him into the sheet, and at once, it clung to the shape of his body. Across his chest, two illuminated bands, one blue and one red, wavered to find their angle to the floor. Once aligned, the colored bands locked in their horizontal place and glowed.
“This suit counters the effects of your dark magnetocytes,” Daniel said. “For some reason, they changed when you received your booster spray, and now they can’t ground you with the ship.”
Pace shuddered as his body attuned to the axis of the room. He could stand without holding on. His dizziness receded. He closed his eyes, lifted his chin, and went back on his heels. He didn’t fall. He stood grand. “Thank you,” he said, which was more than Daniel asked.
Daniel led Pace on the stage to the straps of a gyroscope apparatus. In no time, the 100-rpm gyroscope didn’t spin too fast for his suited body, but too slow. He kept overshooting his marks in his motion.
Daniel ratcheted up the speed. “On a stable planet, you’ll race on the fields of champions. You’ll run faster, lighter than anyone else,” Daniel said, basking in Pace’s acceptance. “You’re too quick. Fine-tune yourself. Do a little less. Remember, sometimes less is more.”
Pace laughed as he spun. “If less is more, is nothing perfect?”
“Clever. But, no, nothing is perfect,” Daniel said. “And neither are we. We all have to remember who we were. Now, just focus on the motion.” He pushed his cart and moved on.
As rapid as Pace could spin, Tenden endured in his static stress apparatus. His arms and upper chest buffeted against pincers weighted with resistance. A color-coded strain gauge rose into the warnings of yellow.
“You, my friend,” Daniel said as he stopped. “Your arms have nothing to do with magnets, qubits, or cells in your ears. In fact, you’re not even really that strong. You’re just a pure and simple physical deformity of nature.”
Tenden released the pincers. They crashed with a sound that stopped the room. His pride shriveled within the arms of his station.
Then Daniel leaned in with a gentle derogatory smile that struck Tenden to his core. “Tell me, now, do
you
understand?”
Tenden lamented the stares of the others. No one could take or belittle his strength. His power was his own. He stood from the pincers and said, “I am different, but not in the same way as them. But that’s what makes me stronger. And I could blast you all.”
He jumped back into the pincers and heaved. The needle of the gauge shoved straight through to red. He felt the burn. He dropped the mass from the pain his tendons endured. He stepped off his bench and held his sore arms crossed at his front.
“There now, was that so hard?” Daniel asked.
Daniel gestured up to Ceeborn at the rim of the tank. It was time for him to get in. Ceeborn treaded a moment, accepted the remnants of once-happy faces, and then reached onto the platform for a weighted bag. With the bag in his hand, he settled beneath the surface of the water and secured himself into a chair at the bottom where he stayed and draped the weight over his legs. A trickle of air rose from his lips as he breathed with the aid of respirocytes infused in his blood.
A thin cloud of air bubbles rose to the surface, escaping from the outer layer of his clothes. And he stayed there; familiar with the bottom of the cylindrical water tank in his secluded perch at the front of the classroom, and watched over the boys in their seats.
No sooner did he raise his hand to his neck and close his eyes to rest when a shudder rocked the room and its stage. The floor beneath them rolled in a jarring wave. Daniel’s cart spilled. The balls from Spud’s wall popped from their holds and scattered across the floor.
Ceeborn kicked himself back up to the platform, swung his legs over the rim of the tank, and leapt down to the quaking room.
Daniel grabbed him by the arm. “Stop. Where are you going to go?”
“This ship is dying. I can taste it,” Ceeborn said as he pulled his arm free. “Something happened, and no one can do anything to fix it.”
The aftershocks were worse. There was nowhere safe to hold.
The colored stripes of Pace’s suit found their horizontal for his body, but he went down to all fours to be sure. They all stared blindly with the same unease at the buckling of the walls that secreted dying black spores. The classroom door was left open.
“It’s dying,” Ceeborn said. “All of us are, or we will be soon enough.”
“No. I fixed you. I fixed you to live, to be better than me.”
Daniel kneeled with opened arms as the floor shook worse, but Ceeborn fell his way through to the door.
“Tell me,” Daniel said, “Where are you going to run?”
“To her,” Ceeborn declared, “To Meg. She’s scared. And no one should have to die alone.” Then, with a release of the door, he was gone.
Daniel turned wide-eyed back to the boys on the floor. He had nowhere else to go. He looked to Tenden and Spud and urged them with a single word, and they took it. “Go for him now. Run.”
*
Ceeborn ran over the dead and overgrown front grounds of his terraced home. Tenden and Spud followed close behind. Daniel stayed back at the base of the building with Pace at his side.
The crusted foothill had once been flowing sap, a healthy sign of the ship’s continued growth, but was now just a slow-moving force destroying the foundation of the old terraced building. Ceeborn ducked beneath the ends of the orange pipes that descended from the rear bulkhead, and climbed over the twisted roots that staved off the gully’s erosion from its rising level of water.
“How are you going to find her?” Spud yelled ahead to Ceeborn as they ran for the gully.
Tenden wore Ceeborn’s fire-red hoodie. It was tight, but it fit. He ran with his arms in their natural position forward, flexed at his elbows, and both hands in the hoodie’s front pocket. He held on tight to the rivulus case and ran with a solemn oath projected forward from his eyes. Nothing was going to get through him in protection of this precious soul.
“I know where she’ll be,” Ceeborn said.
Gerald Aiden was ahead, balanced atop a berm to the gully, with an arc-welding torch. He sweated to cauterize a hole in the descending orange pipe. His patch redirected the froth that overfilled the collection tanks at the bottom of the gully. He bemoaned the slush at his feet, and with a hopeless burst of the pipe, he quit his efforts and limped off the berm. He leaned against the fence to the rotting bridge, the direct crossing from their terraced building’s hill to a door in the membrane screen on the other side of the gully. He lowered his arc flame as the pipe’s wound spread. He might have stopped the spread of the froth across the bridge for a while, but it would still seep down into the gully, a circulation channel that could send the whole body of the ship into septic shock.
As Ceeborn arrived, with Tenden and Spud behind, Gerald Aiden let them pass through a hole in his fence, not to cross the putrefied bridge, but to roll down into the awful gully. Ceeborn slipped down the bank first, followed by Tenden and Spud, and looked back at his decrepit home.
Aiden stood on its side of the fence and waved him to go on. “You go!” Aiden cried. He was gripped by an unshakable sadness. “You run and make us all free. You run for me, you run for my son!”
Ceeborn looked back up to the height of the bulkhead. The creases of its flesh sweated with a sickened, glistening blackness. He shuddered to think of their instant swamping if the whole of the bulkhead gave way and the ocean tank disgorged its flood down upon them. He slid down the gully’s embankment, but its walls were eroding. Blackened clumps of mud fell from its sides and tangles of roots were exposed as their covering tissue washed away into the rising water.
They fought their way waist deep against the gully’s swell. A dust-filled ball of water rushed past. Ceeborn pressed on upstream toward the next quarter’s bridge, but the rolling waves kept pushing them back. “We have to keep going,” he said. “We can climb up to the doors.”
Spud hesitated in the rising water. A current swept him from his feet and Tenden grabbed him by the arm.
“Don’t get pulled in,” Ceeborn said as he looked up at the sweated bulkhead. “You don’t want to end up behind that wall.” But then he, too, stopped in the rising water. Spud’s facial disk curved into its own natural frown after he recovered from his water’s dunking.