Chapter Forty-One

Fauve did not join me for coffee that night. I smelled the stuff when it was made, but when I finished my briefing, it was late. I did most of it from the comfort and privacy of my room. The crew had all kinds of questions, some of them were good ones, some were silly to my ears. But Bonny seemed good enough at keeping them focused that I got through it.

When I was finally done, I went upstairs and found the table empty. The chair was pulled out where Fauve had sat. But it was empty, I knew she’d been there recently because while her parents are good about pushing their chairs back underneath the table, Fauve is terrible about it, therefore she was here after everybody went to bed.

I found a space for me, nonetheless. A cup of coffee in the mug she gave me, prepared the way I like it, and a little note scrawled on some scratch paper torn away from something. “Good luck! And don’t worry!” The note read, she didn’t sign it, but then again by now?

By now she didn’t need to, I sat at the table alone and drank in the quiet. Not many humans seem to appreciate the silence and tranquility of time alone. They’re a furtive, busy people, always go, go, go. As a species they tend not to idle well. Exceptions exist, like Fauve, William, and Rebecca. But for the most part from what I’ve seen they seldom spend even twenty minutes alone with their own thoughts.

Both the Lisa’s I met, struck me that way. Eagerly in search of company, people, and stimulation. I could call them friends, in my way, but could never understand that part of them.

As I sipped the warm dark liquid I thought of everything that had happened to bring me to this moment, not just in the last few weeks. No, I sat listening to the burbling coffee pot as it finished brewing more… I must have just missed Fauve by minutes, I suppose… I thought about the generations that brought us here.

One wrong move by an ancestor, and I would not exist. What if Fauve’s parents hadn’t made just the right choices to meet, fall in love, and mate? What if instead of making her, they’d been arguing that night, a different person might be upstairs now, maybe a boy that [Wolfbeard] had no interest in? The wars and conflicts and travels, the trials and struggles of eons of time in a Universe so vast and large that Fauve and I should never have met, no, not even our species should have encountered one another.

Yet here we were.

Dlamisa do not believe in destiny, only in the inevitability of improbability, that in the vast realm of possibilities, however remote, if something must happen, through physics or chemistry or matter in motion… some improbabilities, a vast string of them, become inevitabilities.

That meant things that could go right, go wrong, and mean the whole damn world to one foolish and sometimes cowardly doctoral student on an alien planet.

I finished my cup and set it down on the glass saucer and picked up the note. The light in the empty kitchen was dim, but the room at least was warm. It felt like minutes of sitting, thinking, fidgeting and trying to mentally prepare myself for the next day.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I checked my datapad, and saw messages from both Lisa and Coach Wills… my finger tapped on first one, then the other with such excitement that I actually read neither of them.

I only typed a response, “Any help you can provide is fine, I would be very grateful.”

For all I knew they’d said no to my request. I could have reopened their messages, I could have reread… no, I could have read them, I should say. But that anxiety about what lay ahead was such that I couldn’t make my finger tap it twice.

On an intellectual, reasoning level I knew that not knowing what they said would not ‘change’ what they said, but as long as I didn’t know at least I had hope it wasn’t a negative.

Foolish? Yes. Unbecoming of a dlamisa, let alone an academic, to embrace ignorance out of fear rather than knowledge, whatever it was? Absolutely.

But at that moment at least, I just couldn’t help myself.

So I put it off. I took my cup to the sink and placed it next to Fauve’s, then before going downstairs I stopped. I went to the note on the table after a hesitant moment, picked it up, and took it with me back to my room. I set it on my shelf with the balloon animal I’d been given the day of my arrest, and lay down to sleep.

I stared into the darkness when the lights were off, over to the place where my things sat, and remained still until sleep claimed me at last.

I awoke with a start several hours later, my alarm was going off and probably had been for at least a little while.

It was nine in the morning, at least I had a few hours sleep, that would do.

I rushed around with frantic urgency even though I had plenty of time, it would take a while for the entire crew of the Red Spark to make it to the University of Louisville stadium. They had things to do, protocols to meet.

If it was one thing I could count on, it was that the protocols of planet Dlamias would be followed to the letter, and even Captain Bonny wouldn’t try to buck those.

The house was strangely empty except for Byron and Boatswain. “We’re ready, everybody else had somewhere to be, something to do with Fauve’s work.” Byron explained, I reflexively looked toward the door, all my impromptu selected equipment was where I left it.

“I see.” I nodded, it was understandable, “Did they take the car?” I asked.

“Yeah, but don’t worry,” Byron jerked his thumb toward the door, “I requested a rideshare van, your budget can handle that, right?” He asked with a chuckle.

“Right.” I answered, it was true enough, between the embassy and the University, in a way I was the luckiest student ever, what student gets an unlimited budget for anything? Not many, that was for sure.

If I’d pushed for it, I probably could have gotten the Earth government to chip in too if I wanted.

“Thanks.” I said, it was still a strange word for me, but I was starting to like the sound of it. There’s something to be said for acknowledging helpfulness.

A horn honked outside and through the windowpane I could see a minivan pull up. “No problem.” Byron remarked, and with that the three of us went to pick up all the supplies and leave the house, with the help of the guards outside, we got it all in one trip, and then we were on our way.

But what we were on our way toward, I thought I knew, but the truth was I had no idea.