Elephant's Foot

So now that you’ve found your sunflower, 

You can watch one another grow, 

Even without the ball of fire in the sky. 

• Hajrije Kolimja (1995–?) 

Marya almost fainted of happiness when she saw the giant manta ray. It floated serenely through dark matter on currents made by the opposing magnetic forces of the star and the Crust, brilliantly fluorescent, elegant as velvet curtains in the wind. 

“It’s many little creatures, like a hive mind. Some fish on Earth used to be. And bees on Gliese… they’re kind of like beads on strings of pheromones,” the ship’s captain said from where she sat at the controls, ginger curls escaping her skinsuit where it closed around her head.  

Unprofessional. Just like the bomber jacket she wore over it, and the fake eye she had instead of a proper, functional, surgically fitted one. She was beautiful, though, and charming, so Marya couldn’t summon the will to care.  

The captain smiled, commented, “You like it.” 

They’d last seen the larger universe five hours ago, right before the ship entered the magnetic fold of the Eye and they began the arduous procedure of checking in at the dozen or so checkpoint that lay between them and the star colony. Thousands of glowing pinpricks – pupils without irises or whites or eyelids or lashes – blinked out and replaced by grey walls, dark corridors. Huge and endless and claustrophobic. 

Marya hadn’t needed an alarm to remember when to take her insulin, she’d been so bored. 

“I thought we’d rise through the Crust,” she said. Her eye traced the stingray’s swinging tail – she could see it now, the glitching in its form, the telltale signs of organic cooperation. 

The captain laughed, “Where on the surface is there room for docks and tunnels? That’d mess with the feng shui, wouldn’t it? Better to spit us all up here and make landing pads on the anchors.” 

“Feng shui?” 

A flap of a hand. “Not literally. Points of stability, honey. There are only so many of ‘em. Can’t just drill a bunch of holes in the thing and expect it all to be fine. Get me?” 

“Hm.” She did not. 

They remained that way – captain lounging at the control desk, Marya staring out the viewing panel – long after the stingray colony had passed, darkness redescending. It was a thick, insidious thing, pressing through the cracks between the panels and coating the room in chill. As per standard protocol, all glass panels facing the star were covered. The darkness brought silence – Marya’s hands itched with it. 

“How much longer?” she asked, no louder than a whisper. 

“The crew’s all asleep, hon. So’s everyone below. The Eye’s got curfew – energy saving time, something, something. You should get some, too.” 

“You’re awake.” 

“I sleep when the ship sleeps.” 

The humming below Marya’s feet informed her that it, in fact, was not. Closing her eyes, she let its humming, vibrating heartbeat sink into her, glad for the reprieve it gave her against the suffocating weightlessness suspending her in something just left of reality. 

“I can’t,” she said, finally. 

“Sleep?” 

“Hm.” 

“Oh,” – she heard the captain shift behind her, and one of the implanted golden eyes sleeping on her neck blinked open, swivelled to look at her – “why?” 

Pausing around the grimace the reminder conjured to her face, Marya replied, “There’s a lot to do tomorrow. I have to prepare.” 

“Ah… who is it that sent you again? The Archive? What’s there to do ‘sides…?” The question was left unfinished – the captain didn’t have a frame of reference for what archivists did. 

“Not much, really.” 

This made the captain laugh, and Marya tilted her head towards the noise, aware she hadn’t heard it before, more of her eyes waking in her strain to make out how the captain looked when she made it. 

“Ahh,” the captain calmed with a chuckle and a hiccup, wiping a tear from her eye. “You’re a fun one, aren’t you.” 

Marya blinked, then turned back towards the window, surprised to find a smile curling her lips, “Hm.” 

><

The crew was not all asleep.  

A lamp sat in the middle of the kitchen table down the hall, flickering between orange and red, ushering the shadows further back into the corners of the room where they coagulated into inky cats and spiders, scuttling against the wall, hiding behind chairs and countertops, the four legs of the table. 

All the furniture was drilled into the floor – a necessity when travelling through space, for the very obvious reason known as zero (natural) gravity. Han Suyin was angry about that – just for tonight. As a treat. 

She shuffled the cards, laid out her third game of solitaire. In that cramped room, the lamplight felt scorching – as bright and pervasive as the desert sun, making the inked clouds and suns adorning her skin writhe on her skin in an attempt to get away from it. It threw her off. She misplaced a couple of cards, spent too long staring at a few others, until finally she gave up, groaning, leaning back in her chair. Pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes, she let her tired mind go. A mistake, as it opted for imagining what the next few days would look like, the damp and darkness and mustiness of the Eye’s Undersea.

Constant, bone-deep cold.  

Massaging her temples, she shook her head. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told herself, the same way she did her three-year-old when he was being particularly grumpy. “You’ll get used to it.” 

Sighing, she sank back into the chair, and, after a moment’s deliberation, ordered the cards into a reasonably neat pile. 

“Room for one more?” called a shadow from the door. 

Having first lifted her head in the instinctual reaction of someone who knew, inexplicably, that they were no longer alone, Han Suyin breathed out in relief, smiling.  

“Doctor Lorenzo,” she greeted. “Care for a game?” 

“Of solitaire?” he laughed, attempting to pull a chair out of its drilled in spot in the floor. Failing, he ended up tugging at it awkwardly and, upon remembering, fell into it with a chuckle. “Oops.” 

“I hate it.” 

“The chairs? Or solitaire?” 

“Both, at this point, likely.” 

The doctor hummed. Dark curly hair hid the bright yellow tips of his ears. The golden rims of his spectacles glittered amber in the lamplight. “Either way, we’re one too many for solitaire.” 

“Poker?”

“I’ll bite.” He lifted a finger, peered at her through narrowed eyes. “But no real gambling.” 

Jokingly, as she laid out the cards, “Does Teegarden host cheap stars? Is this exhibit A in front of me?” 

“Ah, no, no,” snorted he, pointed loosely at himself, “this star had a problem. Can’t speak for the others of course.” 

“Ah?” 

“Please, Han Suyin. It’s two in the morning.” 

“Time is relative.” 

“Don’t quote ol’ Einstein at me while I’m half-asleep.” 

“Einstein and everyone since.” 

“Either way, ’s an afternoon sort of fellow, no?” 

Just as the doctor reached a large, long-fingered hand for another card, the lamp went out. No sputtering, no warning whistles; a clean break with existence that freed the corner-bound shadows from their cages and left him and Han Suyin sitting in the boneless dark. 

“Ah,” after a moment, amusement in his chest, the doctor said, “Bedtime, it seems.” 

Han Suyin snorted. Then giggled. Then laughed. Then didn’t stop until tears slipped down her cheeks in hot, wet lines. Drinking them up, her inked garden bloomed. 

><

Kieran Cromwell sat on his bed, opposite a large, blue hologram of the Eye, studying it with sharp, grey eyes. He was in his pyjamas; they’d be sinking to the surface in the first good, polite hours of the morning, yes, but there’d be hours of waiting before they’d be allowed to disembark. He could just as easily deal with any related technical problems in pyjamas as he could in a proper uniform. 

‘But the safety hazards!’ yelled the mini-Lorenzo manifesting in his brain. ‘What if your stupid heat hands make a mistake and you burn yourself alive, huh?’ 

‘I’m not seeing the issue,’ is what he would have said had the real Lorenzo been there. Not because he truly didn’t see – just to enjoy the indignation on the doctor’s face. 

Rightful indignation: no matter his understanding of the risks to his general livelihood, Kieran Cromwell was minimally concerned with their mitigation. 

The hologram Eye opened at a wave of his hand. It revealed its innards – clear to the practiced, chaos to all others, like an animal on a dissection table. He surveyed it with disinterest. The excitement that this one gargantuan machine in space brought to his boyhood had been spent, the sharpness of his disappointed youth dulled.  

He followed the light blue digital representation of energy as it flowed out of the star on orderly, manmade highways – a perverse act, in his case, masochistic for all he knew and understood. Abruptly, he leaned forward, powered the hologram off. 

“Dramatic,” he snapped at himself. 

He found the time; half past two. The captain would still be awake, so would Lorenzo, so would Han Suyin with how frustrated she seemed recently. Marya was an uncertainty. Not that he couldn’t check… 

The captain had tried to get as many (according to her) unnecessary systems removed as possible, but even she had to bend to basic security protocol. 

Flipping open the hatchet at the foot of his bed, he found the Ultimate Light Switch (as he called it in the private space of his mind). A final look at the hologram stand, and the corners of his mouth twitched, lethargic synapses firing off once more, begging to get one more look, just one, come on, please, you know you want to… 

A scoff, a shake of his head. He flipped the switch and the ship filled with darkness – from the bottom up, like flood water. Bringing the covers to his chin, he laid down, resolute. 

“Goodnight.”