Once upon a Chimera, part 1

Once Upon a Chimera

Kaela pushed the unappetizing synthesized protein glop around her plate. If she tried, she could almost imagine the green bits were parsley from back home, and that the small brown chunks were really wild rice, but it just wasn’t true. The synthesizer had failed, yet again, to duplicate “rosemary chicken on a bed of grains” that she had ordered. Her attempts to relate the bits of colored protein on her plate to anything familiar were a futile effort to humanize the crud that had no flavor save that, faintly, of lemon. Rather than being appetizing, it reminded her of the disinfectant they issued for pod-cleaning. 

Inspection on Thursday, she thought.

She hated inspection. It felt like a violation of privacy – what little privacy you could have on a spaceship, anyway. What did they think, that you’d be able to stash a ray gun under your bunk? And always, they mussed her uniforms searching her wardrobe. Kaela was particular about her uniforms. She folded them the same way, every time – arms in, fold the body into thirds vertically, fold in half horizontally, backwards, the collar flat. And another thing, the uniforms were all standard-issue space gray. Why couldn’t they have uniforms in cobalt blue, or hunter green – anything to compliment her shiny brown hair and blue eyes. Boring space gray like everything else in the ship – bleh!

What she wouldn’t do for a vanilla latte. She thought back to when she’d been taken by the Ickteri, sitting in a coffee shop, reading for her class, just another of the “colonists” selected for their apparent hardiness and reproductive capabilities; no doubt she was abducted for something as obscure as her hip circumference or breast milk production capability. Like some giant alien cattle breeding experiment, only it hadn’t worked out quite that way….

She’d been a college student, communication studies, junior year. She still regretted not getting her degree, ridiculous as it sounded. Here she was, light-years away from ol’ Terra Firma and she regretted not having a piece of paper from Ohio Northern University. The silly things that you miss, she thought. A fat lot of good a communications degree does you when aliens abduct you from your home planet. 

The future “colonists” had been knocked unconscious with some type of anesthetic gas dispersed in massive quantities in several cities, then were hand-selected by the Ickteri for the colonization of their recently terra-formed planet in the Zeldon system, so far from Earth that she couldn’t comprehend it, even now. 

Hyper-sleep, a wretched headache, and an uncomfortable sensation of being someplace “alien” when she awoke. They called the planet Prima. At first, it was mass chaos among the colonists, the difficulties of hacking out a leadership system, determining work assignments, finding suitable shelter, foraging on the surface of a new planet, testing to see what was edible… only a few died.  Anything with spores was out of her diet, forever. And the hunting. Ugh.

Kaela far preferred not knowing where her meat came from after doing the gutting, blooding, skinning, plucking, tanning, curing, and all the other tasks associated with killing living things. She sighed. Still, she’d have rather had a roasted hunk of rockrat any day over whatever this glop on her plate was.  She poked a large off-white piece of something with her fork and it jiggled. Ew.

Ltec walked by the cafeteria, waving a purple-skinned hand at her, a gesture she’d taught him. Kaela smiled back. They were still friendly. She’d had her fling with him, her first “alien” encounter. It had been… interesting… The Ickteri looked mostly humanoid: two eyes, though solid black without pupils, two ears, though tapered and longer than human’s were, two purple-skinned arms, two purple legs, two…. well… it had been interesting, anyway.

Kaela pushed her chair back and stood up. A few Ickteri looked up from their quiet conversation, but said nothing to her. Mostly, each of the species kept to themselves, even on a small ship like hers where there wasn’t a large crew to interact with. She sighed again, walked to the dish station and dumped the glop into the disposal.  She had to report in later, but for now, her time was her own. At least until 27.50. She shook her head. Even when she got used to space travel, purple-skinned companions, and learning an alien language, she’d still never gotten used to their accounting for time, clinging instead to her Earth methods of telling time. She checked her chronometer on her uniform sleeve to reassure herself.

How far her reality had come from the days where midterms and finals were her biggest trials to being dumped on Prima and having to learn simply to survive.  A regression from computers, technology, and cell phones to hand-chipped axes, grinding grain with a pestle and mortar, and skinning rockrat for food…

They had been there 2 Standard when the Ickteri had found what these human cattle of theirs were truly capable of. The humans organized an attack, albeit humble, with spears, rocks, nets of braided rockrat hide strips… There were casualties on both sides, but by sheer force of numbers, the Ickteri had their entire recon party wiped out. Then they stood up and took notice, deciding to integrate the humans into their exploratory parties, the advance scout ships that were probing “the reaches of the known universe” and all that crap. Kaela sighed. It was all beaurocratic bullshit, no matter what species.  Cannon fodder is what we were called in the old days, she thought.

The Ickteri had separated the remaining humans into little groups on each ship to minimize a chance of them organizing again, and regrettably, Kaela had been assigned as bunkmate to Annabelle, some snivelly bible-thumper from the Midwest who asked her one day whether she would go to hell because she couldn’t confess her sins to her priest anymore.  Kaela had summoned up her best compassionate face, pointed out the porthole into the vastness of space and asked Annabelle whether it really mattered anymore, they were already IN Hell. Annabelle had started crying, and Kaela marched to the Ickteri “Resources Specialist” and immediately asked to be reassigned to a technical survey crew ship.  (Kaela had assigned all the Ickteri officers her own titles that she could relate to, not their complicated rank and file that they created.)

So here she was, 3 Standard had passed and now she was so absorbed in the Ickteri language that she even thought in it instead of her birth-language of English.  She supposed that communications studies did come in handy, after all. When it came down to it, the universal concepts of physics, the laws of gravity and non-verbal communication were pretty similar no matter what star system you came from. She laughed ironically. 

She was now a technical analyst on the survey ship that she called The Chimera.  It had an Ickteri name related to their own mythology, a god-figure with characteristics of a great clawed beast. A Chimera was the closest Kaela could come to an equivalent, and the Ickteri’s name for the ship was too long and complicated to use in routine conversation anyway.  Kaela’s job was to reconcile the data that the Ickteri collected from their probes, or on the more hospitable planets, their recon parties. Sounded interesting, but what it meant to her really was simply lots of data entry of endless rows of numbers, running reports on it all, filtering the results by an established set of parameters, and handing a completed report to her Ickteri supervisor. She hated it, but anything was better than being stuck on an undeveloped planet skinning rockrat with a stone knife and listening to Annabelle preach about how it was the woman’s duty to propagate the human race while kept captive in alien territory until their triumphant return one day to Earth.

The Ickteri should’ve taken more humans like Annabelle, Kaela thought. The Ickteri’s original idea of a human's purpose was not far from Annabelle’s everyday reality. Pregnant and barefoot in the… wilderness? There wasn’t a proper kitchen for light years. The Ickteri had initially regarded them as no more than canaries in the coal shaft – abandoning their chosen humans on a barely terra-formed planet to see if they could survive. It was shameful.  

Well, humans had done far worse in the name of civilized progress, she supposed.  And Ltec had been quite entertaining as a new plaything for a while. But on the whole, the entire Ickterian race could go to Annabelle’s Hell. It sounded like a terrible place. Personally, she’d rather be at home reading a mystery novel in her hammock drinking that vanilla latte!

Well, no use complaining now. Maybe she’d go to the hothouse – it always made her feel better to be surrounded by green things that absorbed her breath and happily put oxygen back out into the air. When she was first on the ship she used to have nightmares that they’d run out of oxygen. Something about being in a huge vacuum just freaked her out a bit.

Walking down the hallway to the hothouse she tried to imagine what she’d be doing if she was still on Earth. Probably she would be grinding her way through grad school, eating cheap noodles and riding her bike to campus to save gas. Maybe Brian would’ve proposed when he got back from Peace Corps in Jamaica. Maybe she would’ve accepted. Then again, maybe not. 

She’d never been in a hurry to get married and pop out a bunch of munchkins like Annabelle was programmed to do. She craved that sense of freedom, of free choice, of adventure. Well, she had her hands full of adventure now!  Here she was on an alien spaceship so far from Earth that she doubted she would ever go “home” and yet she was bored to death. How contradictory.

She wondered if her mother had missed her, if anyone on Earth had actually known what happened to them, the "missing." It was like some Christian end-of-the-world film she’d seen once where the “good” folks were disappearing and the only ones left were the non-believers. Although the analogy wasn’t a perfect fit, it was somehow appropriate. She wondered what the government had told the public. Certainly there had been a cover-up, some kind of explanation when the gassed citizens of major population centers woke up and found a good chunk of their populace missing. She wondered what post Peace Corps Brian was doing. He felt like a dream half-remembered.

Kaela herself had never really believed all that hype about Roswell, New Mexico and Area 51 and all that. Sure, she had believed in government deception, but about far more mundane stuff like the true nature of the national deficit, the real motivation behind all the wars that were waged in the name of democracy and the government’s predictable stance that presidential elections were never rigged. Her wildest conspiracy theories had never even touched on alien life adbucting innocent citizens out of major metropolitan areas. The kind of routing and rather boring stuff that her conspiracy theories had been made of were nothing even close to her reality that an unknown alien species in giant transport ships gassed the citizens of free cities of the world and dropped them onto a primitive planet among a million rockrats.

There was no telling what amazing planets their ship passed; Kaela never saw them, except from the portholes in low orbit as an immense shape so overwhelming that she could scarcely encompass the sheer enormity. Some had whirling asteroid belts, or swirling gas clouds, or erratic lightning storms over gaseous oceans, violent volcanic eruptions or frozen ice cores, pockmarked faces from countless impacts, or enormous cavernous gashes into their surfaces that belied the imagination, but she only ever saw them through the windows as though it was nothing more than an infrequent movie that played different scenes in every solar system punctuated by long views of countless stars.

For her, it was the difference between going to a zoo and seeing real animals living and breathing, copulating and shitting and all the other things that made them “real” as opposed to going to a taxidermist’s display and seeing them recreated in life-like settings; their carefully arranged limbs, haunting glass eyes and permanently frozen expressions.  She never understood how people could sit in a living room with heads mounted on the walls, lifeless eyes staring endlessly. It gave her the heebie-jeebies.

The walk had gone by quickly as Kaela refected, and suddenly the hothouse door was before her. She pressed a hand to the pad outside the double doors and let herself into the warm, moist air that smelled of growing things, of life, and rich, musty soil. The best gardening that Kaela had ever done at her apartment was to keep a straggling houseplant alive, barely, since she only infrequently remembered to water it. But here on The Chimera, she had come to know each of the plants in the collection, and had even suggested the quarantine policy for all new specimens after a particularly nasty orchid weevil nearly wiped out all the exotics they’d picked up in the Stelgarr System. 

The plants felt somehow closer to her than anything else in this strange life she'd come to inhabit. She marveled in every flower, and tended to every wilt spot. She wandered between the rows, taking in the warm and comforting smell of life. If only she could deal solely with plants and not people, she chuckled. A startled pair of eyes looked at her through the leaves of a Crysolis Palm - bright green and inquisitive. The eyes. The palm tree was slightly less inquisitive. She nearly jumped out of her skin - no one was ever in the hothouse!

“G’eckt!” She exclaimed, then feeling ridiculous, quickly added “I’m sorry, you startled me. Hello, I’m Kaela.”