Back | Next
Contents

Chapter Twenty

RJ hummed tunelessly as she worked with her plants. The plants seemed to be adapting even to the ship's artificial gravity. At first it had been pretty touch and go, and she had been afraid that she had at last found something her beloved plants couldn't adapt to, but then they had come back like champs.

Not that it really mattered.

The plants were once again beginning to thrive. The longer they were in space the fewer problems the plants would have, till eventually they would be fully adapted even to this most completely foreign environment.

They were truly amazing.

"This one doesn't look so good," Alan said from where he was helping her with the plants. RJ walked across the bunk hall she had converted to a green house to check on the plant. He was right, it didn't look very healthy. Fortunately it was a species she had brought many of.

"Cut it off and we'll eat it tonight," RJ said. Alan cut the plant off at ground level; the plant's roots would stay in the ground dormant for a while as if sulking, and then it would spring up again.

They did this every day, checked the greenhouse and cut off the sickly plants, thus making room for healthier ones. She kept her tree starts in a refrigerator to keep them dormant till she could plant them. They just grew too fast to be contained on the ship.

They had constructed and installed "grow lights" on the ceiling and under the top bunks. They had removed the mattresses from the bunk beds that lined the long, narrow room, made the bunks into planters and filled them with soil and nutrients from the surface of the planet. They covered the surface of the dirt with a fibered mesh made of basically the same fabric the Abornie's clothes were made from and secured the edges. Then they cut small holes in the fabric and planted the plants. The holes would tear larger as the plants grew, but the fabric would still ensure that dirt wouldn't be slopped all over the room and plants disturbed if there was in-flight turbulence or on takeoff.

When the plants had all been small they had watered the beds manually. Now the beds were hooked up to the water recycling mechanism of the ship, and they found that running water through the plants in the middle of the recycling process not only made the plants grow better but also helped to recycle the water faster.

RJ had spent most of the first three months they'd been in space moving from one spot to another in the ship, lying on the floor and concentrating on the picture—whoever it might be—above her, meditating at length on the meaning of life, in particular her own life. On the last day of the third month she had suddenly realized that she was no closer to finding answers than she had been when she had first started her quest, and then enlightenment had flooded into her brain like a cascading waterfall of ice, complete with the chunks.

Nothing mattered.

There actually were no answers.

She couldn't figure any of it out because it wasn't supposed to make any sense. It just was.

The answer was that there was no answer. It was so incredibly simple.

You had to work hard at not trying to figure it out, to just exist, and try to enjoy at least part of the existing. You couldn't actually expect to enjoy much more than a small piece of existing, because mostly being a living, breathing, existing being meant that shit rained on your head more often than not, and you had to take the good when you could and try to whitewash the bad parts so that they didn't seem so bad.

Because you couldn't stop bad things from happening.

Which was why nothing really mattered.

If you actually thought that it did, it was just an illusion, an illusion that kept you going so that you could live out the next totally meaningless day, off into oblivion.

So, being enlightened with the knowledge of the absolute lack of meaning to any of it, she had then risen from the floor. She'd gone directly to her quarters, removed Kirk's eye in its cube from her pocket and the chain from her body and stuck them in a drawer. Then she had gone to take care of her plants. It was none too soon, either, because although Poley and Alan had tried, they really neither one had the talent with plant life that she did. They hadn't known what to do when the plants started to go through shock, and though still alive they had looked sad indeed.

Of course, that didn't really matter, either. Except that she had to pretend like it did because otherwise she wasn't fulfilling her place in the complete farce that was existence.

In these last five plus years she had tried to bring enlightenment to Alan and Poley, but they mostly screwed, carved on huge chunks of wood they had dragged into the hold for that purpose, and looked at her like she was crazy. Apparently the simplicity of it all was more than they could comprehend even when she explained it very slowly and with interpretive dance.

She had let her hair grow down to her ass and kept it braided in one long braid. When Poley asked why, she had tried to explain. "I'm letting my hair grow as a sign of my new understanding of myself and the nothingness I bring to the universe, the unnecessariness of me. The absolute meaninglessness of life, the cosmos, of everything."

"And your hair represents that how?" Poley asked with all the patience of a man talking to a retarded child.

"Because it's growing. I didn't tell it to, and yet it just does, even though it's totally unnecessary for it to do so. I don't need it to protect my head from attack or the elements, but it still keeps growing. Don't you see? It's the embodiment of the truth of nothingness."

He didn't, and he said so, and then once again suggested the cryogenic chamber. He did that a lot. It was all because he was a robot and therefore incapable of comprehending the concepts she tried to teach him. Alan didn't understand because the blood never stayed in his brain long enough for him to comprehend complicated concepts, like that they could never really know anything, and that nothing really mattered.

They seemed to think that she was spending too much time contemplating nothing, that perhaps the lack of activity was making her something less than sane. But wasn't that the way it always was with visionaries? They thought of crap, and other people told them all the reasons why what they thought was inconceivable.

 

Alan went to the kitchen with her to help prepare the evening meal. Which would be what it always was, some ancient packet of food from the ship's stores and some chopped up plant life. He missed fish and meat. The stuff in the packets was supposed to be different stuff, but to his pallet it all tasted mostly the same.

Of course as RJ would remind him—if he dared to say anything about it—the tastelessness of it should remind them of the fact that it didn't really matter.

She truly thought he and Poley didn't understand what she was trying to say, and seemed totally unaware that the things she said were both completely insane and downright trite. Poley said she was working through her issues, whatever the hell that meant. It seemed to Alan that she was mostly walking around the ship doing maintenance work, playing with her plants, and talking to herself way more than could possibly be healthy. He didn't know what was wrong with her, and—unlike Poley—he didn't pretend to, but he did know that there was something wrong.

And she wasn't getting any better.

She would lay down in the middle of the floor anywhere, go to sleep and sleep for two days, then get up and run back and forth, up and down the corridors for a week at a time, barely stopping long enough to eat and take care of her plants. Then she'd sleep again.

She'd go to the ship's workout hall and exercise for three days straight, then not look in the room for a month. There was no pattern or rhythm to what she did. She was living according to her new philosophy that, "nothing really matters, so I don't give a shit."

Alan missed his friend, especially since she was the only one besides Poley to talk to, and Poley could be, well . . . a little mechanical. Alan had run out of programs to review. He had learned to speak the Reliance language in its entirety now, which was good, because the minute the ship had lifted off it had been as if both Poley and RJ had forgotten how to speak his native tongue at all.

He knew way more about weapons and spaceships than he wanted to know. In fact, the more he knew about space flight, the more he wondered why they didn't just blow up or smack into a sun or planet, or why an asteroid or meteor didn't smack into them.

In short he was still enjoying being with Poley, but the whole "flying aimlessly through space" thing was starting to lose its appeal. He wanted to be somewhere instead of feeling as if he were always between places.

Halfway through cooking dinner Poley walked into the kitchen. Happy to see him, Alan walked over to him and kissed his cheek. Poley patted his back, and Alan felt the same warm feeling he always felt. At least Poley was the same. He couldn't have stood it if Poley had changed, too. Unless of course he could maybe be a little more demonstrative.

"RJ, we have entered our own space."

"That's nice," she said without looking up from what she was doing.

Poley sighed. "Do you still want me to chart a course for Derma station? The ship has detected a jumpgate closer. Would you rather I redirected to that one?"

"Whatever." She shrugged. "One place or no place is just as good as any other."

"Fine then," Poley sounded almost snippy. He had told Alan that he was getting tired of RJ's attitude, too. That he was ready for her to snap out of it. "Aren't you even a little excited about a new jumpgate and station much closer? It wasn't there when we left. Aren't you even a little excited about the prospect of exploring this place and maybe finding out what has happened to the New Alliance in our long absence? Whether that station is inhabited by the Argy or the Reliance or New Alliance personnel?"

She shrugged again. "It doesn't matter, it won't make any real difference."

Alan looked at Poley, and Poley nodded and rolled his eyes.

"I know you both think I'm crazy, but if you would just learn to embrace the truth you'd find the absolute peace I have found by just not caring so damn much about anything."

"I'm very excited," Alan told Poley.

"Thanks, Alan," Poley said, glaring at his sister. "You could at least pretend to care, RJ."

"I do. In fact, I get exhausted from all the pretending."

 

Poley sat on the bridge, and Alan sat in the chair opposite him and listened with excitement as Poley explained how close they were to the jumpgate and therefore the end of their voyage.

"We will dock at the station in three days time," Poley said.

"That soon? You didn't tell RJ we were that close." Alan was now even more excited.

"If I had breath I wouldn't waste it on my sister right now. We'd just have to hear some more crap about how three days or a hundred is just as meaningless as forty months, or some such prattling nonsense."

Alan laughed at Poley's joke. "Maybe she'll do better when we get her around other people like her."

"There aren't any other people like her. Well, just one, and I guarantee that running into her wouldn't help RJ. I think that's part of the problem. What she is, I mean. I think there's too much data and she's trying to compress her files. I can simply download files of no importance to some deep memory crystal, and if I later find that the information is completely unimportant, I can delete it. She doesn't have such a system. She has no way to remove things from her memory banks, and I think her brain is too full of knowledge that doesn't compute."

"But she just sounds . . . crazy," Alan said.

"I know. I think going crazy may be how she goes about dumping files," Poley said. He sighed deeply and frowned. "I keep trying, but it still doesn't help."

"What?" Alan asked in confusion.

"Nothing," Poley was obviously thinking. "Calculating" as he sometimes called it.

"What's wrong?" Alan asked.

"Just trying to figure out what's going to happen if the station is filled with hostiles. How is RJ going to handle it? Is she going to go in swinging and blasting, or is she going to try to convert them to her new religion?"

 

 

Back | Next
Framed