---Starborn---
---Brunhilda’s perspective---
I’m sitting in the Commonroom with every member of Triple M, Plus Ultra and Elysium as well as a selection of gardenworlder crew.
Björn (the massive great big bear man historiographer from Nova Fennoscandia) and Lilith (the tiny folklorist from the cloud cities of Venus, in the Sol System, with skin, eyes and horns all modded to make her look more Demonic) are talking to Strik, one of the newest additions to the crew, an archaeologist from a gardenworld species who look like 1.5m tall, Humanoid owls.
He has a nervous manner to him and looks like he’d suit a giant pair of old fashioned specs over his enormous eyes to really tie the whole weedy nerd look together(!)
Thran is nestled cosily between Emiko and Xon, for all the world like she didn’t obliterate three of my thoracic vertebrae the other day(!)
Not that it’s her fault… but… well, I’d definitely be lying if I said that being slumped against that pillar, unable to move and barely able to breathe while I listened to everyone else behind me trying to manage that tank of a woman through her rampage wasn’t one of the most traumatic things that’s ever happened to me!
That’s definitely a large part of why I’m going to have to leave this pushing-off party early!
Oh… speaking of which…
I check the time.
I lean over and kiss the top of Dormouse’s head before, half under my breath, saying “Gotta go… see you later…”
Mouse smiles up at me and answers “Alright… good luck!”
I stand and attempt to make my way out of the room as stealthily as is possible when you’re a 90kg, 190cm pillar of muscle, topped by a plume of bright gold hair(!)
I really don’t know how Victor does his stealth act so well when he’s taller than me, heavier than me, more muscular than me and with almost as eyegrabbing a hair colour(!)
All attempts at stealth are entirely thwarted when I find my way blocked by an enormous great big, cold weather predator!
“What place going, Mummymummy!?” pants Sam, excitedly, jumping side to side and drawing every eye in the room.
“I’ve just got somewhere I need to be, buddy… you don’t need to come…” I answer, nervously trying to prevent this from turning into a scene.
“Sam coming! Sam coming too, Mummymummy!” he responds with joyful obliviousness.
“No, that’s…” I start before reconsidering “…alright… fine, Sam… you can come…”
“Yaying!” he declares, adorably, before clearing my way.
We step out into the Triple M corridor and, once the door is closed and I’ve looked around for prying ears, I say “Alright, buddy, if you want to come, I need to take your translator for a bit… I’ll give it back to you before we come back, OK?”
“Okaying, Mummymummy!” he responds without question, turning his head to allow me to take it more easily.
I smile and reach out to deactivate the disc.
He shudders a bit and then gives a happy bark.
I beam and begin making my way through the ship, Sam at my heel.
Having crossed the bridge, made my way up a few flights of stairs, along a few walkways and down a few corridors, I find myself at the door of an office.
It is labelled with the name of the man who claimed it a month or two ago ‘Dr Marc “King-of-the-Squirrels” Fischer, Psy.D.’
I take a deep breath. With my left hand, I give Sam a scritch between the ears and, with my right, I knock.
“Come in…” answers a deep voice.
I open the door and am greeted by the back of a dark haired man, a few centimetres shorter than me but noticeably more muscular, looking out of the window at the slowly receding speck that is Thrulj.
He turns to greet me, revealing handsome, Eurasian features, a close trimmed beard and a scarlet streak modded into his medium length hair.
He smiles with all the welcoming warmth of a long separated friend.
“Hello there Ms Arran! Would you like to come in? Oh and I see you’ve brought a friend!”
---Marc’s perspective---
The tall, blonde woman steps uncertainly into my office, followed by her big old doggo!
My eyes quickly scan him for a translator but see nothing.
I gesture around and invite “Sit wherever you want to… or don’t… I don’t mind if you wanna stand or sit on the floor or anything…”
She frowns “Why… would I sit on the floor?” speaking English with a Starborn accent.
I wave my hand in a gesture of ‘don’t worry about it’ before answering “Only if you wanted to, it’s an offer, not a recommendation(!)” with a smile.
She nods and glances around.
She sees the couch and points to it, eyebrows raised.
I gesture to it with an upturned palm, smile and nod.
She sits down and her dog lies by her foot.
“You can have him on the couch with you if that would make you more comfortable… don’t worry about the fur, it’s gonna get cleaned later anyway!” I offer.
“Oh… OK, if you’re sure… Sam, up.” she says, patting the space next to her.
Her big old pupper looks like he’s just had his entire year made by the treat of being allowed on the couch as he jumps up and lays his head across his mistress’ lap!
She, nervously, runs her hand from his head down the fur of his back.
I pull a chair up to face the pair and sit.
“So…” I beam “…we’ve seen eachother around but I don’t think we’ve ever actually been introduced; I’m Marc ‘King-of-the-Squirrels’ Fischer, you can call me whatever you like, and I’m one of the ships two therapists… before we go any further, are you comfortable? Would you like the door locked? Privacy field up?”
She nods and I verbally give the orders to the room.
“Anything else you’d like? Water? Snacks?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Alright then…” I smile “…What would you like me to call you? Ms Arran? Brunhilda?”
“Most of my friends call me ‘Samus’.” she shrugs.
“OK, Samus. Before anything else, I need to tell you that everything you say in this room will be kept strictly confidential… the only exceptions would be if you say something that causes me to believe that you might be a danger to yourself or others. I’m gonna ask you questions, I’m not gonna offer you solutions. I may make notes on my holo every now and then, please ignore that as much as possible! Is there anything else you’d like to know about how therapy works?”
She pulls a considering expression and shakes her head.
“Great!” I smile “Now, if you don’t mind me asking, is there a reason you specifically requested me?”
“Oh, well…” she frowns “…it was just because the other choice was your wife and, don’t take this the wrong way but… your wife’s a bit too… erm… sexy…? Figured it would be distracting to the whole therapy vibe!”
I give a hearty, genuine laugh as I say “*hahahahaha* I can’t argue with you there(!)” not pointing out that she misunderstood my question and that I actually just meant ‘is there a specific reason you wanted therapy’ “She’s a helluva woman and I’m one hell of a lucky guy! Very mature of you to think about that, though!… I’m glad this ugly mug is less distracting for you(!)”
She quips “I can tell you’re handsome… you just have a bit too much penis for my taste(!)”
“Alright, noted!” I grin before rephrasing the question she misunderstood “So, what made you seek therapy, Samus? I’ve been on the ship for a couple of months, now. Did something happen or did you just decide?”
Her left hand keeps moving over the massive dog on the couch with her as she thinks for a few moments.
Eventually, she responds “I’ve been thinking about it since that planet with the dinosaurs… I blew up at Victor over how he behaved to Tuun before we went down there… I realised at the time that it wasn’t entirely reasonable… that, while Victor had been a bit of a prick, all he had actually done was remind me of someone I have 27 years of pent up resentment for! The way he responded to my criticism made it very clear to me that he was not Callum ‘Púca’ Arran! He wasn’t my dad… No matter how wrong my dad was, he would never have admitted it! He would have just sulked and not spoken to us until the proximity of living aboard a spaceship together forced us to reconcile!”
“Alright…” I nod “…so you were thinking about it… what made you decide?”
“Well… you know about Thran’s rampage?” she asks.
“I do.” I confirm, not breaking confidentiality as, though I heard about it from the woman with the build and hair colour of Misty Luggins (though, definitely not the personality) in one of her sessions, I also heard about it from many other places and this woman was there. It would just slow the session down to play ignorant.
“So… she… she broke my back…!” she frowns “…It was horrible! I couldn’t do anything! I was so certain that I was going to die in that bar… I don’t blame her (honestly, what kind of morons decided to administer a drug that depends so heavily on weight, body fat percentage and metabolism while only actually measuring for weight!?) but it was still… I mean… you can see I’m a big, strong woman, can’t you?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“I definitely wouldn’t pick a fight with you!” I answer, honestly.
“Well, she just… knocked me aside! It was like I wasn’t even there!!!… I always knew she held back, when we fought in the gym, but… now I’ve got some idea of how much she was holding back! And then I had to try and work out how the attempt to subdue her was going while I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe and couldn’t turn to look the right way… Anyway, while my spine was being regenned, I had some time to think… I realised that, if I’d died in that club, none of my shit would ever have got resolved… I didn’t like that…”
“I see…” I say, sympathetically “Well… thank you for telling me all of that, Samus… I can see it wasn’t easy for you!”
She nods with a joyless smile, still comforting herself by scritching her (currently well behaved) pupper.
“Would it be alright for you to tell me about the experience of growing up, Samus? You mentioned you had some negative feelings for your dad?”
She considers for a few moments before asking “How much do you know about the Terran Starborn community, Dr Fischer?”
I know a little but “Assume I know nothing at all… tell me about them?”
She spends a few moments getting her thoughts in order then starts “So… as soon as the price of interstellar capable ships fell to the point that, while still not cheap, they weren’t so expensive that they were only attainable by a government or the unethically wealthy… around the middle of the 23rd Century… people from all over the early UTC were able to become voyagers of the stars. We’re only a fraction of a percent of the total Terran population but there’s still a lot of us… There isn’t any group of Terrans not represented among the Starborn but there is a disproportionately high representation of Earth’s traditionally itinerant and nomadic people groups, like the Scottish and Irish Travellers, Dom, Romani, Kochi, Tuareg, Moken, Camminanti, Turkana, Orang Laut, Skøyere, Sama-Bajau… for obvious reasons! A lot of Terrestrial people are also surprised by the overrepresentation of mountain and Arctic peoples like the Nepalese, Tibetans, Sámi, Eskaleut etc… that’s just ’cause of what they tend to call the ‘Great Overcorrection’, when they started geoengineering Earth in the late 21st Century, eventually got to the point where they’d regreened all of the places that they’d desertified, refrozen all of the glaciers and icecaps they’d melted, deacidified and deplasticked the oceans they’d polluted and captured all of the greenhouse gases they’d emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution… then decided to keep going! Decided to keep irrigating the deserts, keep building up the icecaps, keep lowering the sea level, keep rewilding huge sections of land with fauna brought back from extinction… I mean, in terms of liveable land, Earth made out of that deal like bandits! Every scrap of irrigated desert could support enormous numbers of people! Likewise for most of the raised sea floor (though, for that, it usually took a few years for the salt to wash out before anything could actually grow there)… but, if your ancestors lived right next to an expanding glacier that crushed their home, you’d understandably take a dimmer view of resetting the Earth to the state it was in, eight or nine thousand years ago, when the first stone buildings were being built and no one had invented writing…” she gives a pensive pause here but I don’t interrupt so she continues “…yeah, so, over the centuries Earth offered those displaced by the reset priority in choosing where they’d like to be resettled and a lot of them took it… the problem is that their choices were often being resettled in coastal lowlands, regreened deserts or cities… so a lot of them decided that, if they were going to be uncomfortably upheaved anyway, they might as well go Starbound… For mostly cultural… (or maybe historical?) reasons there are very few Resurrectees, Uplifts or AIs among the Starborn… it’s a bit of a Sapiensfest…”
She stops here so I prompt “What cultural/historical reasons are those?” genuinely curious.
She thinks for a moment then responds “I guess… because producing them was so expensive for so long, they tended to be very well looked after and much less likely to find themselves at such a loose end that packing it all in and joining up with a Starbound ship at the local docks looked appealing! By the time that wasn’t the case anymore I guess a mistrust of them had, sort of, entrenched itself in Starborn culture. I mean… it’s not like there are none but… they’re rarer than in the general population… Doesn’t help that, for all those people descended from mountain and Arctic folk, there’d be the feeling that Earth was made more hospitable for Neanderthals and Denisovans at their expense…”
“That’s all extremely fascinating, Samus!” I say, honestly “…I feel like you’ve given me a solid education on the Starborn!… Do you want to tell me about what it was like for you growing up, now?” conveying with my tone that, if that’s not what she wants, I’m happy to keep listening to her giving me a history of her culture.
“I just need to give a tiny bit of more recent background. Is that alright?”
I smile and gesture for her to go ahead.
“So… before the War, Starbound folk mainly supported themselves two ways (legally, anyway): Freight hauling and data carrying. Freight hauling is exactly what it sounds like… Data carrying was necessary because we didn’t have FTL coms, so the main way data (like videos, letters, songs, articles, etc.) produced on one planet would make their way to another was by being loaded onto a physical drive, flown there and synched with the local internet. It was far cheaper for the UTC to farm out that work to the Starborn than to maintain the infrastructure they’d need to do it themselves, and getting a few months worth of operating expenses in exchange for hauling a drive with a few petabytes of data on it from one planet to another was an excellent revenue stream for us (not that I was around at the time)! So, my dad was a Starborn, 21 years old at the start of the War… he met my mum in the latter half of it. She was disqualified from military service because of a medical condition but she wanted to do something. Her mum suggested joining up with the Merchant Navy which, at the time, included practically all Starbound vessels not directly operated by the government or military. The Starborn were exempt from conscription because the UTC realised that our expertise in navigating space made us vital to the War’s logistics efforts.”
“So… your mom got put on your dad’s ship?”
She nods “He was 25 and the Captain of the Black Cat, she was 19 and a raw Merchant Mariner recruit from Neu Rheinland, textbook Wartime romance(!) I’m told she shadowed him to learn how everything worked and before either of them knew it they were registering their marriage on Nova Britannia… my mum got her cycle unpaused as soon as the War was over and, soon after that, she was pregnant with me. She had another girl and two more boys after me… I didn’t really understand why it was happening, until I was older, but I remember our quality of life being really good when I was very young and seeming to decrease as a function of time… Now I know that it was because planets were getting hooked up to the galnet and hauling data physically through space was becoming less and less necessary, year on year. We were having to rely more and more on just freight hauling to support ourselves. The ‘Great Betrayal’, we called it… The UTC had been glad to have us in the War but, now, they didn’t need us anymore… that’s how I saw it, when I was old enough to have that kind of opinion at least.”
“And… is it still how you see it?” I ask.
She screws up her face, considering for a while.
I smile “There are no right or wrong answers here! What’s important is how you feel… Please, don’t worry about my opinion on anything!”
Eventually she manages “I guess… yes and no? Like… I get that FTL coms are an amazing leap forward in tech history! I get that denying trillions of Terrans instant communication across thousands of lightyears of space to supplement the traditional lifestyle of a few tens of millions of Starborn would be ridiculous. The UTC even offered us aid… but…”
“But?” I prompt, gently.
“I guess…? One of my dad’s crew put it to me like this; she was Romani, so her people had a longer history of transience than most… she said ‘The problem with any solution offered by settled peoples to issues faced by nomads is that they, fundamentally, view itinerance as an illness, a disorder, a perversion of the rightful way of being, which is to find some land somewhere and build a house there. This colours all of the solutions they propose. They seek to help us by curing us of (what they see as) the ‘disease’ of our wandering.’ She told me, over the centuries, the UTC have made a dozen or so, semiserious attempts to give the Romani a planet… a ‘Nevvo Drom’… always with some support but never enough… most Romani are quite tepid on the idea of settling down like that. A lot of ‘Well… I wouldn’t oppose it but I definitely won’t live there myself.’ and ‘Why would you do something like that?’… I really strongly identified with that! I didn’t want to find a planet and just live there for the rest of my life! I liked having a new set of sights to see, foods to taste and songs to hear every few weeks! I hated the idea of selling off the Black Cat and living in a house! I just wanted them to find some way of letting us keep voyaging!”
I nod “And there’s nothing wrong with that!”
Her face turns sombre as she says “Well… then we get to the crimes…”
“Ah… the crimes?” I ask, without injecting any judgment into my voice.
“Yeah… it’s one of the strongest arguments for the idea that there is something inherently deranged about being a traveller… crime rates are provably higher among travelling communities. There’re lots of reasons; being part of a wandering group forces you to be extremely close with other members of your community… which is lovely… and definitely the part I miss most… the flipside is, it promotes an extremely strong ingroup bias, an ‘us against the universe’ mentality, a ‘we got ours, fuck everyone else’ attitude… there’s also the fact that, by the time the wheels of justice start to turn, you’re usually somewhere else… and the fact that you can see the opulence that certain people live in, compared to you, so it’s very easy to convince yourself that they probably won’t miss some stuff… The Starborn have a (partially deserved) reputation… people would see us put in and nudge eachother ‘Hey, there’re Starborn coming, better lock up your valuables(!)’… that always made me feel like shit! Sometimes they didn't even need to say anything… just looked me up and down and clutched their valuables close to let me know they'd judged me as 'less than'!… Of course, when it comes to petty smuggling, it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s a victimless crime! Just a bit of harmless contraband that someone else will ship if we don't!”
“I can see you have some regret over this…” I say, sympathetically.
She nods “It was always the biggest source of strife in my parents' marriage… my mum would see my dad coming back with a bunch of obviously stolen goods and, without fail, there’d be an argument! Always the exact same one. I could recite that argument, beat for beat, by the time I was 10… she eventually got sick of it and walked off the ship with my siblings, when I was 14… I can still see her beckoning me to follow… I didn’t… I stayed with my dad… I didn’t want to lose her… but I wanted to leave my home less. That was the last time I saw her… half a lifetime ago!”
At this point she sniffs and her eyes get visibly moist. Her dog gives a sympathetic whine and nuzzles into her stomach.
“That must have been incredibly hard for you… I can’t imagine!” I answer, mostly truthfully. I lost a parent in my teens too, but under very different circumstances. I don’t think the experience of a father dying is comparable to that of a mother leaving.
“*sniff* Yeah… after that, I became the resident wet blanket… always pointing out ‘this is a crime, isn’t it?’, ‘this is wrong, isn’t it?’ and finally, when I was 18 ‘these will hurt people, won’t they?’ My dad gave me the same answer he always did; ‘I know’ then spouted off some vague nonsense about his god’s will! That was enough! I turned him and his entire crew… my entire family… over to the authorities… I testified at their trial… I looked them all in the eyes as I violated the inviolate omertà!… They all got 15 years in medium security, my dad got 25… our ship got impounded… and I lost my home and everyone in the universe who cared about me… the prosecutors offered me a choice… I could take the bounty and walk… they’d give me amnesty for all the crimes I’d confessed to being party to or… they recommended I voluntarily admit myself to minimum security for a rehabilitation course. I took the second option but not for the right reasons…”
“What would ‘the right reasons’ have been? What were yours?” I query.
She snorts “The right reasons would have been ‘this is what’s best for me’, mine were more along the lines of ‘I deserve to be punished’… Now I know that the idea of prison as a place of punishment is a few centuries out of date but I didn’t, at the time… After I was admitted there were months of near catatonic depression before I was finally convinced to engage with any of the rehabilitation programmes. Eventually, I was convinced to take a look at the correspondence courses available from the local uni… ‘Terran Security Officer’ caught my eye… 4 years later, 23 years old, a new name and a clean certification of fitness to enter society, I was shown into a room on my way out of the prison… they offered me a pick from a group of puppies (apparently, having a companion animal is associated with lower rates of recidivism) I picked out this guy…” she gives her dog an affectionate pat “…Someone quipped that ‘Samus picked out a samoyed! Maybe you should call him Sam(!)’ and so I did… we kicked about Terran Space for the next few years… did a bit of bounty hunting… then, I found myself on Gateway, looking at an advert for employment aboard a gardenworlder ship… been most of a year since then… it sort of feels like I’ve got a family again…”
I smile and answer “Alright, Samus!… You’ve given me a good, solid idea of who you are and where you’ve been… let’s do some therapy, shall we?”