The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  At heart, he was an engineer—or a control freak. He kept trying to make things run on schedule; but even industrial farms had their own rhythms; a farm could be managed only by a person who was willing to be managed by the rhythm of the seasons, and Korie was too impatient for that.

  The other thing that distracted him from full concentration was Carol Jane.

  At first, she was just a co-worker, then later a teammate, and eventually a study partner. It wasn’t until midway through the second semester that he began to notice how beautiful she really was; and then he wondered how he had gone for so long without noticing before. And then... he began to worry how he would ever be able to concentrate on anything else.

  Carol gave no sign of mutual interest, no encouragement at all; yet he couldn’t get her out of his thoughts. He daydreamed about her constantly. He thought of nothing else. She was on his mind in class, at mealtimes, during study hall, during work sessions, in the corridors, in the showers, and even at bedtime—especially at bedtime. He wondered what it would be like to hold her body close to his—to smell her hair and taste her mouth and listen to her soft words and feel their bodies intertwined and fitting together in hot wet passion.

  In his ignorance and naiveté, he constructed baroque fantasies in his imagination. (His favorite involved the two of them, marooned in a tumbling free-fall capsule for a week.) He masturbated himself into painful insensibility thinking of her. It was as if his adolescent hormones, which had lain dormant for so long that young Korie had almost begun to believe that he would never experience a sexual relationship, had suddenly kicked in with an enthusiastic vengeance.

  He waited for the obsession to pass. It didn’t. He waited for some sign from her that she recognized the effect she was having on him. She gave him no sign.

  Finally, he realized he would have to act. He could not go on the way he was; it was driving him crazy. He had become obsessed with Carol Jane; her apparent disinterest in him made it all the worse.

  Young Jon Korie spent long hours trying to figure out a way to speak to Carol Jane about his feelings. He thought about filling her room with roses and love poems; he thought about asking her to take walks with him on the stardeck or go nude-swimming in the free fall tanks. But everything he thought of only seemed silly and naive in the cold light of morning.

  Finally, one day, after a particularly clumsy mistake in the sludge farm, which left him hip-deep in cold stinking muck, he burst out in frustration, “This is all your fault!”

  “Mine?” Carol Jane asked, honestly puzzled.

  “Yes,” he admitted angrily. “I’m so obsessed with you, I can’t concentrate on anything anymore. You had to go and wear that tight shirt today, and I haven’t been able to think of anything else.”

  When she realized what he was saying, she started to giggle; then she started laughing.

  Hurt by her response, Korie stamped away to the showers at the end of the chamber. He peeled off his muck pants, his shorts, his T-shirt, and started hosing himself down. A moment later, Carol entered and took the hose from him. “If it’s my fault you got dirty, then it’s my responsibility to help you clean up,” she said. And then she apologized for laughing. She had been laughing at herself.

  Standing there, naked, still covered with sludge and muck and slime, Korie blinked in confusion. Carol Jane admitted that she had been wondering about Jon Korie since the first day she’d seen him in the corridors. He was so smart, so self-assured, so . . . so alert; and yet, he had seemed totally disinterested in having a relationship of any kind with anyone. Didn’t he know that people all over the station were wondering about him? Had he been disconnected? Was he gay? Was he skeltered? Had he sworn a vow of celibacy? Was he emotionally retarded? Was there some great tragedy in his past? Was he some kind of human machine? Did he care about anything or anyone?

  When Korie realized the great discrepancy between what it looked like on his side and how he was perceived by others, he too saw why she had laughed so hard. He almost smiled himself.

  Carol Jane was peeling off her own shirt and shorts then. “Here,” she said. “It’s your turn to hose me down—”

  The reality turned out to be a lot more fun than the fantasy.

  Showers

  Originally, Captain Hardesty had planned to have Brik’s quarters outfitted with an anti-grav bed/shower built to Brik’s proportions. The unit had either disappeared in transit or had been coopted by some superior officer for his or her own special purposes.

  Brik knew that some humans preferred free-fall sex with multiple partners and his bed/shower unit would have been very useful for that purpose. The thought should have annoyed him, but he didn’t regard the loss of the tube as much more than a minor inconvenience. He didn’t sleep as humans did anyway.

  Instead, he draped himself backward over a rounded frame, which simultaneously stretched his spine and lowered his head below his heart. In that position, he could place himself into a mandala-trance. As a child, he’d been trained to reach the mandala-state by the use of mild hallucinogenic drugs while facing a holographic display of an endless fractal plunge toward an unreachable center. Sometimes it was a dive into fractal immortality; other times it was a dark prowl forward through a doomful environment. Still other times it was a forward flight through a fantastic city or an even more deranged countryside. It had not taken the young Brik long to learn how to achieve transcendence.

  One evening, without the drugs, without the holographic display, he’d closed his eyes and, without even consciously trying, found that he was already visualizing a mandala plunge. It was not the same imagery as provided by the display, but it was recognizably the same kind of unending plunge forward.

  It was as if he was exploring an endless maze of dark corridors and tunnels. The pictures flowed easily into his mind. Upward he was climbing, up the stairs, ducking through a door, forward, to the left and then around a corner to the right, up another long brace of stairs, hurrying now through zigzag corridors, diving across intersections and branching wide avenues, but always upward. Up the stairs, up the ramps, deeper and deeper into the heart of it, but never getting any closer to the center. Whatever it was, whatever lay at the heart of it, he never got any closer.

  But it wasn’t the goal. It was the journey up and in. It took him deep, and finally, he learned how to pass beyond the conscious domains to the inner realms where the soul built its own world. Here was the real power. Eventually, the young Brik learned to trigger the onset of the dreamtime as easily as laying down and closing his eyes.

  But here, aboard the Star Wolf, it wasn’t always easy. Often, he returned to his cabin, filled with inner turmoils. There was so much about these poor soft human beings that he didn’t understand. And it bothered him intensely that he didn’t. It wasn’t that he felt in any way inferior or deprived; but while there was any aspect of their behavior that remained a mystery, he felt vulnerable. If anything was going to hurt him, it was going to come out of one of those unknown places in the human soul. He couldn’t stand that thought. Vulnerability was an intolerable state.

  Curiously, he also recognized that the flaw was in himself.

  On one level, he understood the necessity of vulnerability as part of the nature of transcendence. One must surrender to the universe in order to be part of it; but on another level, he couldn’t. His Morthan training made it impossible. Morthans never surrendered to anything. Not even the universe.

  It was happening more and more often now. Brik kept finding himself trapped in the human dilemma and it left him so frustrated that he couldn’t achieve transcendence of any kind. He would lay silently in the dark, processing each of the day’s troubling events in turn. He stepped through his completion rituals methodically and carefully, examining each moment from every perspective he could imagine—from the domains of right and wrong as well as the domains in which personal judgment was irrelevant. He did this until the moments lost all meaning and became just another set of incidents i
n the flows of personal time. Then and only then could he step past through the flow-stopping event and move on to the next.

  Occasionally he knew doubt. Not of himself. But of the power of the rituals. Sometimes, he felt... that there were things . . . that hadn’t really resolved. It was a troubling thought, one that nagged at him almost every day now. He knew why. Because his completion rituals were almost always about the same kinds of events. It was as if he were trapped in a loop, completing the same incidents over and over and over again. And the thought occurred to him that the reason this incident kept returning in a new guise each day was that there was actually some much larger and darker moment that he had failed to address, and these lesser moments were merely the surface eructations.

  These were the moments in which he felt his strongest doubts. Had his training been flawed? Or had he failed to grasp some part of it? He knew that one could not force transcendence. It arrived only when one cleared a space for it, never when one demanded its presence. On those evenings when Brik felt most frustrated, he retreated to a very private and almost embarrassing escape.

  He went down to the forward showers, set all twelve sprays for as hot and as violent as they would go, stood in the center of the room, and chanted. He hummed. He ommmmmed.

  He let himself relax completely, while the water pounded his chest, while the steam rose around him, and he let a great soul-filling purr resonate throughout his body.

  There was no spiritual reason for this.

  He did it simply because it felt good to submerge.

  He did it because it was sensual.

  The water jets massaged him. The steam drained the tension from his muscles, leaving him limp and enervated. The sound of his own deep note filled his personal universe.

  Abruptly. Someone was here. He opened his eyes.

  Bach. Her mouth a startled O of surprise.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Brik. I didn’t know—” Her glance flickered down, then up again, then down—she flushed crimson. “I, uh—” She turned and left embarrassedly.

  For the first time in his life, Brik felt naked.

  He did not sleep easily that night. It was another one of those moments that refused to complete itself, refused to be assimilated.

  Timmy

  Jon and Carol pooled their accumulated leave and spent five days falling in love. Afterward, neither of them was ever the same again. Korie came back with a glint of knowledge in his eyes and a bounce to his step that let people know that the missing piece had finally been found. Carol came back glowing. Neither of them said a word to anyone, they didn’t have to, everyone already knew.

  The experience of unconditional love transformed Jon Korie. He walked around in a glow of astonishment that life could be so amazing. He became generous and demonstrative in ways that left his colleagues and coworkers shaking their heads in disbelief. Once, he even laughed out loud. He suddenly understood that he was just like everybody else. For once in his life, he really was all right.

  As the days rolled over each other, the relationship deepened. As Jon and Carol learned to deal with problems and opportunities together, they went from being lovers to partners. It was the first of many such graduations. Every new experience gave them something new to share, something new that was uniquely their own. As their partnership grew, so did their appreciation for each other. After a time, they were no longer two, but one with two parts.

  Jon and Carol graduated from the farms at the same time. He went onto the production line where singularity grapplers were assembled; she went into intelligence-engine training lab. As each new HARLIE unit came online, it had to be seasoned under the tutelage of a committee of super-HARLIE units. When the committee finally agreed that the new unit was sane enough to manage the moment-to-moment operations of a liberty ship, it was certified and installed.

  As a result, Carol actually made it into deep space before Jon did; she went on seventeen shakedown cruises, five involving short FTL hops. She took great pride in her striated FTL bars. Korie said he was happy for her, but they both knew that he was deeply envious. If there was one thing he wanted more than anything else—perhaps even more than he wanted Carol—it was the chance to travel among the stars.

  Eventually, they were both promoted again, which they celebrated with a joyous wedding, a tumultuous party (catered by a delirious Bertha Fleischer), and a short frenzied honeymoon; their next assignments began only three days after the wedding.

  This time, Korie found himself installing grappler armatures into actual singularity cages. Because of the accelerating shortage in the higher ranks, he was promoted to crew chief in less than a month, and within three months, he was in charge of singularity assemblies for the whole docking spar.

  The first time he had to install a pinpoint black hole in a singularity cage, he was so terrified of making a mistake that he threw up three times the night before. But his team followed the procedures they had been so carefully trained in and the installation went off perfectly. It was a textbook example. Eventually, Jon Korie signed off on thirty-two singularity installations, more than any other crew chief before him.

  From there he was promoted to networks, and eventually command center installations. By this time, their first child was already in the incubator, and the sperm and eggs for the second and third had already been harvested.

  By the time Jon Korie was twenty-three, he was debugging whole starships. He oversaw sixteen teams and had personally signed off on over a hundred hulls. He and Carol still spent ten hours a week working in the farms so they could shower together afterward. Neither of them realized the reputation they had established until one day, while inspecting a ship, preparatory to its final sign-off, Korie found a cot with its covers turned back in the vessel’s inner hull. The ship’s captain-to-be admitted sheepishly that while he personally was not superstitious, the crew did not believe the vessel could be considered starworthy until Jon Korie and his wife Carol had performed the appropriate ceremonies. Korie was embarrassed by the request; but finally agreed on one condition. The consummation had to occur during hyperstate FTL conditions. It was a remarkable shakedown cruise.

  Admiral Coon was also aboard that cruise. He was so impressed with Korie’s grasp of ship mechanics that he offered him an immediate scholarship to Officer Candidate School. “Because of your high rating on the assembly lines, you’ll be put into an accelerated program. You’ll be serving on a ship in two years; you could be a captain in six.” Without consulting with Carol, Korie accepted immediately—and nearly wrecked his marriage.

  Carol was terrified of that career track for her husband, and justifiably so. She was also angered that he had made the decision without consulting with her; without apparently even thinking of her needs at all. They were about to have a baby; the egg had been fertilized, the embryo was growing, the decanting day was already set, the party was scheduled. They had even made a down payment on a house to be built upon their return groundside. They had planned a whole life together.

  Jon Korie fell to his knees and begged his young wife’s forgiveness. There was nothing he could say, no words of apology that would undo the damage. All he could do was ask her to understand how desperately he wanted to go to the stars. The chance to serve on a starship was something he had been dreaming of all his life.

  Carol Jane Korie was a remarkable woman. She pulled her husband to his feet and slapped his face. She said, “Future starship captains don’t beg. Not to anyone. They make their decisions and stand by them. Now . . . be a captain, tell me what you have decided and ask me to be your partner in this enterprise.”

  And after he did that, she fell into his arms and said, “Do you think I don’t understand your dreams, you jerk?”

  “I was afraid you’d say no.”

  “If I ever said no to you, Jon Thomas Korie—if I ever said anything to keep you from going FTL, you’d never forgive me. We’d never have a partnership again; we wouldn’t have any kind of marriage at all. Yes, I’m a
ngry—but I want you to understand that what I’m angry about is not that you failed to consult with me, but that you didn’t trust our partnership enough in the first place.”

  For a while, Korie wondered if he should turn down the admiral’s offer; he brooded about his selfishness and the terrible hurt he’d inflicted on his wife; the next several days were very uncomfortable. Neither was certain if they had really made up, if the incident was actually resolved, or if they still had work to do to bridge the gap that had suddenly opened up between them.

  A few days later, they went to visit their developing fetus in the nursery. At first Korie was awed by the fragility of the small pink creature growing in the nutrient bottle, he marvelled at its tiny little fingers, but then as he turned his head this way and that, trying to imagine the nature of the child-to-be, he was suddenly struck by its similarity to the protein lumps in the meat tanks. He backed away from the tank, disgusted with himself and horrified to be brought face to face with his own essential vulnerability—where was the spark that turned lumps of meat into sentient beings? Was this all there was to humanity?

  And, unbidden, the answer came to him. It was as if Zaffron was standing there behind him whispering. “Yes, Jon Korie. This is it. This is all there is to a human being. Life is only what you create it to be.”

  Korie felt suddenly weak. He looked to Carol; she had put her face against the warm glass of the bottle and was standing there with her eyes closed and a blissful smile on her face. She was in a place of her own. Unseen by his wife, Korie sat down on a bench and began to weep silently. It was several moments before Carol noticed, and when she did, she didn’t know how to react. She’d never seen her husband like this before.