Midway: Chapter 41

  “There you are…”   

  It was a week later and after some searching, Dhika had finally found Johannes alone in the darkened zero gravity bubble.  Earlier that day had been the joint funeral service in the arboretum for Alissa and Uzodimma.  She’d seen Johannes there and had wanted to talk to him afterwards, but he’d disappeared before she’d had the chance.  “Why did you go dark?” she asked.  They had yet to have a formal funeral service for Tycho.

  “I wanted to be alone,” was all he said.  “What do you want?”  He seemed to be at least making a halfhearted attempt to mask how much her presence was an intrusion.  His body appeared completely limp, and he was just spinning around ever so slowly near the centre of the bubble.  The filaments weren’t deployed, so she reached behind the airlock and grabbed one of the small compressed air guns.  Using its soft jets of air, she slowly moved over to Johannes and then halted her motion with some puffs in the opposite direction from the air gun.  He seemed to ignore her approach.

  “First of all” she said gingerly, “I wanted to thank you for your endorsement.  I don’t think Seth is very happy about it, but… well, thank you.”

  “You deserved it,” Johannes answered despondently, “but don’t read too much into it, and don’t worry about Seth.  Mahr and I have arrangement.  I support you, and she supports Seth.  So… don’t be hard on her when she does.”  K’uuna had dropped from the race early on.  With him and Sun Jung expecting a new child on the way he decided that he didn’t want to tempt the extra responsibilities.  That left only Dhika and Seth, and two authority figures to each sing the praises of one or the other.

  “Right…” Dhika acknowledged, shaking her head.

  “What?”

  “You know what?   I don’t want it either.”

  “Don’t want what?” Johannes asked.

  “I don’t want to be the new captain!”  She exclaimed as she flailed her hands in the air, and then put her face in her palm.  Her body inadvertently began a subtle rotation in response to the flailing of her arms.  She rubbed her face with her hands and then looked off into the distance in front of her, deep into the emptiness of space and the many visible stars.   Some redness appeared around her eyes as some parts of her wanted to cry while other parts forbade it.  “I just lost…” she sniffed, “my best friend… and my lover…  I have no idea how to even begin to deal with that, or what my life is now… my job is one of the few things that I still have in my life that makes any sense, that I understand, and that has stayed the same through all of this, I don’t want to upend a whole other part of my life too right now!!”

  Johannes reached over and pulled her towards him.  He put both arms around her and embraced her.  Their different motions combined into a unified slow multi axis tumble.   “I know… wait, what?  Anaru was your lover?”  In the midst of all the information streaming out of Tycho on the bridge that day, Johannes had missed it when he’d revealed that little tidbit.   At the time it had been the least of his concerns.

  “Yes…” Dhika nodded, sniffling and still looking out into space.

  “Oh, I didn’t know that…” he started gently rubbing her back as he embraced her. “I’m so sorry…   I’ll support you whatever you choose, of course.”  His concern for her had momentarily distracted him from his own depression.

  Dhika pushed away suddenly, and wiped the tears away from one of her eyes and flung small orbs of tear slowly across the expanse of the bubble.  The two slowly drifted apart from each other at equal speeds.  “Dammit Johannes, did you really have to shoot him in the fucking heart??  Couldn’t you have just shot him in the gut or something?   Or… or in any of his four fucking limbs!?”

  “Dhika…”   Johannes looked away, off into the stars.  “You know Dhika… after you left, Tycho started trying to convince me to kill him.   In the end he begged me Dhika, he begged me, to kill him.  He was my son Dhika, I loved him.  I loved him in a way… well, that you couldn’t understand without having children of your own.

  “Dhika,” he continued, “Everything I knew and had ever been taught made me believe that Tycho should have been treated the way we treated Uzodimma, that he should have just been quarantined from the rest of the ship to avoid him endangering the rest of us.  When we did it to Uzo I was thinking that to give him anything less than the kind of comfortable life the rest of us might find tolerable would be to punish him out of a sense of vengeance, and that vengeance was a primitive drive best abandoned.   I kept hearing the Earth expression in my head: ‘early intervention if possible, rehabilitation where not, and quarantine when all else fails.’  

  “I was taught just as you were, that treating criminals poorly only lessened our own moral standings, and that treating any person as something less than us only morally lessened ourselves.  I was taught to understand that when rehabilitation was impossible, it was for our sake that we quarantined, for the selfish sake of us as a society, and for the sake of everyone else who can control themselves and live within the rules of civil society.  I was taught that for those who simply couldn’t, it wasn’t their fault and that they didn’t deserve punishment.  I was taught that we could only justify taking away their natural liberties for our own protection if we treated them humanely in the process.   We impinge on their natural liberty to do whatever they please, in the interest of the collective will and the ability of the rest of us to live in a law-based, safe and stable civil society.  It is on this basis that we quarantine, and likewise why we’re bound to make those we must quarantine as comfortable as possible, to avoid as much as possible it being a punishment.

   “Dhika, Tycho never felt at home on this ship.  He had an existential and literal claustrophobia simply living here, in being here on this ship at all, out in the deep void.  It was only horribly magnified by the terrorizing he suffered when he was young, with the abuse that ultimately led him to murder.  There was never enough room for him to ‘get away’ from his problem, and worst of all he could never know any other life or existence.   That is why he risked everything to try to redirect us to another planet, just in the faint hope of escaping what he considered to be the prison of this ship.   Even if it took forty years and he would be an old man when the time did finally come, it was the only possible way off of this ship for him.  The thought of being locked into his quarters afterwards, of having his world reduced so much further still than it already was… that prospect was truly horrifying for him.

  “He begged me to kill him Dhika, to spare him that fate.  He promised that despite himself, he would try again, that he would find a way.   He swore he could never simply accept his fate and just give up, that he would spend every minute of every day, trying to figure out how to escape and try to redirect the ship again.  He told me that the more time went by, the more desperate he would become, and the less concerned he would be with the lives of the rest of us.  I believed him.  In a life which he knew provided him no meaningful choices whatsoever, he was absolutely determined to exercise the only choice he could; to rebel.  The only choice he could meaningfully make, the only consequential one left to him, was to rebel against the ship and to rebel against the mission and its founders; to rebel against those who created his reality, no matter what it cost the rest of us.

  “He begged me to spare him the indignity of imprisonment, and while I believe that that was primary in his mind, I also choose to believe that on a deeper level, he did not wish to wind up being responsible for more suffering and calamity on this ship.  I like to think that some part of him still cared about us, that some part of him still wanted to save us, even if from himself.  I choose to believe that when he begged me to kill him; he was begging me to help him pay his life debt to all of us, for what he saw himself doing in the future.”  Dhika didn’t speak; she had nothing to say.   She’d finally bumped up against the far side of the bubble and stuck to it after her clothes happened to catch on one of the small Velcro circle on its surface.

  “I’ve given this a lot of thought Dhika,” Johannes continued, himself finally reaching the opposite end of the bubble and likewise sticking to its surface, “and I’d like to ask you something… but first I need to tell you a story.  It’s the story Tycho told me while you were still unconscious on the bridge that day… a heartbreaking story which led the man you loved and thought you knew, to do the things which he came to do.  I think you deserve to know, and I think it might allow you to understand what drove him to do what he did, which I’m sure still confounds you.  It’s also my hope that it will make you more likely to grant my request.”

   

  And so, Johannes told her everything, from the beginning to end, everything which Tycho had revealed to him while she had still been unconscious on the bridge.  He told her about his ‘father’s’ reckless cloning and conditioning experiments and the true origins of Tycho and himself, the full extent of Tycho’s childhood abuse, and about all the factors which led to his wife’s suicide.  It was his hope that her understanding would lessen the pain resulting from Tycho’s motivations being so mysterious to her beforehand. She was quiet for a long time as she listened, and early on had pulled herself off of the wall and jetted over to beside Johannes as she attempted to process the information he was providing.  She was a strong woman; she was a lot like her mother and grandmother, and she was clearly trying to integrate the new information into what she already knew, as opposed to attempting to find a way of denying any of it.

   “And that’s all of it Dhika,” he concluded.  “Now you know everything I know, and I won’t presume to tell you what to do with this information.  Obviously I can’t stop you from revealing the entirety of it to everybody… it’s up to you whether or not you disclose anything at all.”  Dhika didn’t say anything.  She just floated aimlessly, trying to process everything she’d heard.

  “There is one more thing though Dhika, but it’s… it’s more of a solemn request than about informing you of anything…  Before this all started, I heard you several times mention that you wanted a family, that you wanted to marry and have your first child… I can only assume that part of you not wanting to be captain is… at least in part having more freedom to do just that?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that since, well… well since, but yes, I… I suppose it is.”

  “I want to suggest… that you have and raise a third clone, one more time.”  Johannes turned away from her; he was ashamed of his request.   “I need to believe… that there is not something fundamentally wrong with our DNA.  I need your help to prove that Dhika, I need your help to prove that this wasn’t all just Tycho’s fault, or my father’s fault… or my fault.  I won’t be around much longer… I want another of us to be raised by you specifically, and to be sheltered from all of the misery and… and psychological warfare which all three of us have been subjected to.  My… my father was obviously quite troubled in his own way… and he pushed me to one extreme in response, and then pushed Tycho to the other extreme.  I need your help to create a version of us which is a healthy balance somewhere in the middle between those two extremes.  I want him to see this ship and mission for what it is and to be able to see through all of the dogma, but also to not be afraid of it or feel oppressed by it.

  “Plus,” Johannes cautiously added, “this would allow you in some small, albeit unusual way, to get your wish of having a child with Tycho.  I, I know it’s not exactly what you had in mind, but… it’s also a way you can help him heal in a more profound way than you ever could have with the Tycho you knew.  He… we, just need to be loved, to be supported and nurtured without lies or expectations.  There’s no one else on this entire ship who I would ask this of, no one else I would trust to do it right… not even my own daughter.”

  Dhika took this request with far less ease and collectedness than she’d initially absorbed the facts Johannes had presented to her.  She finally looked at him with an expression which was a mixture of several emotions.   She was touched by Johannes’ expression of trust and his wish to give his ‘genetic corporation’ yet another chance to ‘get it right,’ but she was also taken aback at the morbid proposal he was making, and with the unfairness of making such a request of her, especially at a time like this.  

  Despite what he had done, she still loved Tycho.  And Johannes was right, she did wish that she could have saved him somehow.  She was oddly taken with this unorthodox idea about being able to save him now in such a twisted way.   She became strangely distressed over how much she immediately found herself wanting to, how much sense it seemed to make to her, and the way in which despite not being able to admit it to herself yet, she had immediately decided to acquiesce as soon as Johannes had made his strange proposal.  She left without saying a word.