The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  “Okay,” said Korie. “That’s the bad news. Let it sink in. Live with it. Clutch it to your hearts and let it become a part of you. It’s unjust and you have every right to be angry. I’m angry. But we have work to do, and anger can be useful. This ship needs refitting. Take your anger and use it. Pour it into your work. You’re going to need it.

  “Now, here’s the terrible news. We’re not getting a decontamination berth. The admiral wants to decommission the Star Wolf and let the rest of the fleet cannibalize her for parts.”

  The crew’s reaction was everything Korie had hoped for. Loud cries of disbelief. “No!” And: “They can’t!” And even: “That’s not fair!” Chief Engineer Leen stiffened in shock, his expression ashen. Someone slammed a hand against a bulkhead, punching a hole in the foam panel. Under other circumstances, Korie would have docked the woman’s pay; but he’d done the same thing himself once, and he understood the emotion.

  “That’s how I feel about it too,” agreed Korie to their stunned faces. He nodded at them, a gesture of partnership. He looked out across the cargo deck; several of the crew were unashamedly crying. Others were still waiting hopefully for him to say something that would make it all right. But the only thing he had to give them was his anger, and he didn’t know if it would be enough. He was about to step over a line. One more didn’t matter. Korie took another breath and waited until the room fell silent again. “I know what you did out there.”

  He paused softly, for effect. “And so do you. And what you did can’t ever be taken away from you. In the tough days to come, hold on to that thought. Nobody could have done better; could have performed more bravely or more professionally. I am proud of each and every one of you. And so is Captain Hardesty,” he added that last almost as an afterthought. It was probably a lie, but it didn’t matter. Captain Lowell had told him never to lie to his crew, but that didn’t matter anymore either. “You hold on to that thought,” Korie spoke slowly and evenly and firmly. “You did well. I say so. As far as I am concerned, this is the best damn ship in the Fleet. And you are the best damn crew.

  “And I am telling you now that we are—if for no other reason than to honor the memories of every good man and woman we lost this last time out—but also for the sakes of our reputation and our self-respect—we are going to prove it. No matter what it takes.

  “We’re going to decontaminate this ship ourselves. We’re going to bring this ship back online. Clean and green, a hundred percent! Three times over. And we’re going to report for active duty, whether we have a captain or not! We are not going to let them pull the plug on the Star Wolf. We earned this name, we’re going to keep it.”

  He paused for effect. “And anyone who says no can walk home!” He waited just long enough to let the laughter subside; there wasn’t very much, but it was enough. Their mood was shifting. “So, who’s with me?” he demanded. “Who’s as angry and determined and willing as I am to prove the admiral wrong?” The cargo deck echoed with the sound of the question. Korie looked across the room and waited for a reaction. The moment was too intense; for him, for all of them; he couldn’t take it. He glanced down at his hands gripping the railing and took a long deep breath, then raised his eyes to them again.

  For a long moment, nothing happened. The crew glanced from one to the other, uncertain. No one was ready to be the first. And yet, the room was filled with possibility—like a beaker of cold water at the threshold of freezing, needing only a seed crystal to trigger the process. Korie waited, almost praying, waited for the seed to happen....

  And then, Brik rumbled something. A few of the crewmembers around him turned to stare. The Morthan repeated it, louder. Now, others were turning, their mouths opening to ask. Brik said it a third time, almost roaring, and this time the whole room heard it clearly: “Failure is not an option.”

  And then... beside the big Morthan, Helen Bach began to applaud. Slowly at first. Clap. Clap. Clap—

  And then others picked it up. First one, then the next. Tor. Jonesy. Goldberg. Green. Stolchak. Williger. Ikama. Saffari. Cappy. MacHeath. Reynolds. Candleman . . . and finally, even Chief Leen unfolded his arms and—despite his still-foul expression—began to clap slowly and powerfully. Behind him, the other members of the Black Hole Gang began to applaud as well. And then the whole crew was applauding as hard and as loud as they could. Cheering. Shouting. Chanting.

  Korie felt it first in his eyes. Then in his gut. And then the feeling came slamming into him so hard, he nearly staggered with the impact. He looked from one face to the next with unashamed pride. He let the power of their shared emotion overwhelm him; he savored the moment. The joyous noise filled the cargo deck.

  In that moment, Korie realized just how deep his feeling was for this ship and this crew. He looked down at them with gratitude and wonder, meeting their eyes, one after the other. He saw his own determination reflected back at him. He stood amazed and awestruck. And finally . . . he allowed a slow smile of appreciation to spread across his face.

  When at last the noise subsided once again, Korie lifted up his hands from the railing just the smallest amount; just enough to indicate he had one thing more to say.

  “Thank you,” he acknowledged. “Thank you. Now I know why you’re the best. You can’t be defeated. No matter what happens, no matter where or when, you can’t be defeated. Not by anyone.” He leaned out over the railing, almost as if to touch them. “I am so proud to serve with you,” he said. “I want you to know, it’s real easy to be proud when everything is working right. That’s so easy, anyone can do it. But it takes tremendous courage to stand this tall when there’s no agreement in the physical universe. That’s the real test of a crew. And I want you to know, I have never been as proud of you as I am right this moment.”

  He lifted one fist high, a gesture of victory. Then, lest he kill the moment by overworking it, he turned and left. Their thundering cheers filled the cargo deck. He could hear them all the way back to his cabin.

  Zaffron

  When he was sixteen years old, Jonathan Thomas Korie realized that his adoptive father did not have the financial ability to send him to college. He did not resent the man for that; he recognized that his father had done the very best he could in what had to have been for him a very difficult situation. But neither did he feel any great sense of affection. He wondered about the whole business of familial love. The way it was portrayed in the popular entertainments bore very little resemblance to his own experience.

  It seemed to the young Korie that his adoptive father often held himself apart, acting like a dispassionate researcher studying the development of an interesting specimen much more than a parent with an emotional commitment. He was a reserved and distant man in any case, and Jon Korie often felt that their communications were across some vast experiential gulf that he could not bridge no matter how hard he tried. After a while, he’d stopped trying.

  The circumstances of Jon Korie’s birth were unclear, his father was unresponsive about the details, and although Jon still felt a profound sense of loss and alienation—as if there were some part of humanity that he had never connected to—he had come to accept that this was the way his life was and the way it was always going to be for him.

  Occasionally, during his youth, he had caught his father looking at him as if he were some kind of alien being. Sometimes he wondered if other people could see that difference too. He’d never had many friends in his life. He’d never understood why; he had always assumed that there was something wrong with him, something that everyone else knew, but no one was allowed to tell him. Perhaps that was why Admiral O’Hara seemed to regard him with such coolness.

  In the solitude of his teen years, he had often wished he could be just like everyone else; life would be so much simpler; but then one day, while random-walking through the databases, he’d found a quote from Nobel Prize winner Rosalyn Yalow. Shortly after she’d accepted her award, a reporter asked her, “What’s it like to be so smart?” and she had rep
lied, as if it were no great matter, “It’s very lonely.”

  Young Jon recognized the truth of that remark instantly—the moment was an epiphany for him. He sat there staring at the display panel feeling a cold chill of recognition crawling up his spine. It was as if she had sent a message down through the centuries, aimed specifically at his own sense of difference. She had been talking about everyone who stood taller than the rest of the species.

  Later, in pursuing the thread of interest, he found other quotes that inspired him. Daniel Jeffrey Foreman, inventor of the Mode Training, had once said, “When you stand on a chair in a roomful of midgets, you become first a god, then a target, and then, if you survive long enough, simply a landmark.” At first, Jon Korie saw in that remark only a cynical disregard for the rest of humanity, and dismissed it from his mind; or rather, he tried to—but the image of the man standing on the chair stayed in his mind, and he began to realize that Foreman had been saying much the same thing that Yalow had—that excellence of any kind is a very lonely condition.

  It wasn’t genius—it was sentience. Jon Korie knew that much. It had something to do with “the technology of consciousness,” a term he kept encountering in various places. What set people apart was not their intellect, but their alertness, their ability to interact with the domains they existed in.

  According to one of the essays he’d stumbled across, most people walked unconsciously through their lives. The subroutines of their existence were the sum of the person, there was nothing greater. And this thought stuck with young Jon too, haunting him. He didn’t understand it fully, and the idea that there might be something more to life that he might not be experiencing troubled his thoughts.

  Korie’s adoptive father, for all his lack of demonstrative affection, was neither stupid nor uncaring. He routinely audited his young son’s forays into the information tanks. Although it took many years for Jon to discover it, not every random walk he took was totally random. Many of the items that popped up on the display seemed to be aimed directly at the youth’s immediate experience.

  After a while, Jon became aware of a repetitive pattern of references to something called the zyne, an evolution of the Mode Training that focused specifically on the disciplines of personal consciousness. The insistent quality of the references left Korie feeling as if he was being nagged by the universe. While most of the references were historical, more than a few were contemporary, indicating that the zyne was still held in very high regard by those who had taken the time to investigate its practice.

  Jon discovered that zyne seminars and workshops were commonly available, and after downloading several lectures by the local master Zaffron, and being impressed by both the man’s wit as well as his insight, he asked his father if he could sign up for an introductory course. To his surprise, his father immediately assented.

  The zyne master Zaffron was a fairly ordinary-looking man—until he started speaking, “This isn’t about answers. It’s about questions. Having the right question will succeed every time; having the right answer will succeed only when the right question is asked. And how often does the universe ever ask the right question of you?

  “This is an inquiry into the nature of consciousness. What is it? What do we do with it? Are we really conscious at all? What does it mean to be a human being? We’re not going to answer those questions in this inquiry; we’re only going to suggest possibilities for you to consider—it’s like shopping for a new jacket; if it fits you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t fit, thanks for trying it on. The distinctions will stay with you anyway and will still be useful.

  “Let me underline that. Distinctions are the way we map the universe. Some of our maps are accurate, some are not. But even those that are not accurate can be useful if they still support us in producing results. So this isn’t about designing the most accurate map as much as it is about designing the most useful one.” And then he added with a wry grin, “You will find as we go, however, that accuracy is extraordinarily useful.” Jon got the joke.

  “Here’s the point of the inquiry,” Zaffron continued. “Follow this carefully: The asking of questions creates possibilities. The creation of possibilities gives you choice. The existence of choice is the prerequisite to freedom. Without choice, you have no freedom. Without possibility, you have no freedom. So, in here, we are asking questions to create freedom of being.”

  At first Jon Korie found the material puzzling and of no relation at all to the questions he’d been struggling with in his own life. But the paradigm—the construction of the whole logical structure—was so enrolling, he found himself compelled to pursue the study to its logical conclusion.

  Some of the seminars considered the nature of knowledge. “What do we know? How do we know what we know? And what do we really do with our knowledge? Do we use it—or do we merely use it to explain why we’re not producing results? What is it that we don’t know? What is it that we don’t know that we don’t know? You see, real wisdom doesn’t come from what you have been taught. It comes from what you have experienced. True knowledge comes from what you discover when you actively engage in the processes of your life. It has nothing to do with what you have memorized.” The young Jon Korie puzzled over that one for a long time—the joke was that he did not begin to understand it until after he had experienced it.

  Some of the seminars considered the nature of communication. “True communication is not simply an exchange of mutually agreed upon symbols. It is the recreation of the essential experience.” The zyne master said to him, “If you are a human being, you cannot listen beyond your own self. You will always hear your own self talking, interpreting, judging, explaining, and you will do that so loudly that you will never hear what anyone else is really saying at all. You have to listen to the speaking of the other self if you want to hear what’s really being said.” Korie puzzled over that one an even longer time. Eventually, he learned to recognize the great gulfs of distance across which human beings tried to reach each other, and how any communication at all was ultimately an act of courage.

  Some of the seminars considered the nature of effectiveness. “Commitment is the willingness to be uncomfortable. Yes, you’re going to be stopped in life, over and over and over again. If the universe doesn’t create obstacles for you, you’ll create them yourself. But being stopped only turns into failure when you abandon your intention.” That one he understood, he thought. “Listen, if there’s a turd in the punch bowl, it doesn’t help to add more punch. You want to notice that when something doesn’t work, you probably go back and do more of the same thing that wasn’t working before—and it’s absolutely crazy to expect it to produce a different result!”

  And some of the seminars merely considered the way the mind worked. “If you think there’s something wrong with you, that’s normal; there’s nothing wrong with you. But if you’re sure there’s nothing wrong with you, I promise you there is something wrong with you.” The young Korie knew that lesson was for him. He sat up straight in his chair and leaned forward attentively.

  “Listen to me, Korie,” Zaffron said, pointing to him and startling him even more awake. “Before you were born, you didn’t know you weren’t the whole universe. So you didn’t know anything. You just took up space. And that was okay while it lasted. You had no problems. Everything was taken care of for you. And then you were born and that was okay for a while too, different but okay, and everything was still taken care of for you, for a while at least; and then one day you found out that you weren’t the whole universe—and you still haven’t recovered from the shock of that discovery! That’s your problem!

  “When baby realizes that mommy is not an extension of baby, that the world does not behave the way baby thinks it should, baby doesn’t just get upset—baby goes crazy. Baby wonders what’s wrong with me? Baby wonders what do I have to do to fix it? And the rest of your life is spent trying to fix something that isn’t broken.

  “That’s the joke! You’re not broken. That fee
ling that something is wrong with you—it’s normal for every human being. It’s hard-wired into the human condition. Trying to fix it when it ain’t broke—that’s the crazy behavior. When you stop trying to fix yourself, that’s when your life starts working—because you’ll have hundreds of thousands of extra hours in which to accomplish something useful.”

  Jon Korie mulled over that one for a long time. He understood it not just as a concept, but as an experience. He heard it in his soul. He recognized the behavioral loop in his life that had kept him feeling stuck. But even as he acknowledged the truth of it, he still wondered about the effect he produced in others. Was it his imagination or did people really hold themselves apart from him? And then he had to laugh at himself for thinking that thought. It was more of the same.

  He concluded the seminars in a state of exhilaration and confusion. He felt different about himself. He felt different about the people in his life and his relationships with them, even his father. As if a light had suddenly been turned on in a dark room, the young Korie abruptly understood just how much his father really did care about him, even though he could never express it the way Jon thought he should.

  After that particular course, he returned home determined to forgive his father for his distant reserve; but when he opened his mouth to speak, what came out instead was an apology. “Dad—I’ve been a jerk. Please forgive me. I’ve been blaming you for the way I feel. But it’s not your fault. It never was. It’s mine. I know you love me. You wouldn’t have let me sign up for the zyne if you didn’t.” That was the one time that his father took him in his arms and held him close. And that was the only time that Korie ever let his father see him cry.

  But even as Korie reveled in the delicious sense of self-empowerment—and even as he wondered how long it would last—at the same time, he now felt even more profoundly out of place. Where before he had felt he was in the middle of a maze that he had no control over, now he felt as if he were the Minotaur in that same maze and that was even more maddening. If he was the monster at the center, why couldn’t he control it?