Warp & Woof: Chapter One
A science-fiction serial
Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.
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And now the first chapter:
Warp & Woof
Chapter One:
Cтрелки
(The Strelki)
Warp
Warp climbed the ship’s levels to the great cylinder of earth, unhooked the labrador’s leash, and felt her joy and his mingle, magnify, and blossom as he sent her running up the field and across the green sky. He laughed with unrestrained glee, as he did whenever she ran the loop of the ship’s agricultural core. When he observed now could be seen but never done. In Laika’s eyes, Warp now hung from his own green ceiling, while she sprinted across the field that stretched along her valley. Each and every soul, no matter man or dog, was confined to the bottom of his loop, no matter where he stood.
The door opened, and Dmitri joined them.
“Laika runs the same path every time,” Warp said, “She knows no other way.”
“There’s never any other way but the one that lies ahead.” Dmitri’s voice was thin and fragile. His eyes followed the dog, revealing the profile Warp had once flattened with a single punch. At the time, they had thought themselves big men. Now, they knew better. “Zasha thinks you’re avoiding her.”
“She has her results.” Warp almost laughed at the idea that he could disappear aboard a ship like Pervoye Strela, like a child concealing himself behind covered eyes.
Dmitri took a deep breath full of loss. “You haven’t gone.”
“The doctors won’t tell me anything I don’t know.” Warp never took his eyes off Laika’s clean, muscular movements, the embodiment of joy. In her presence, nothing else mattered.
“There may be something more,” Dmitri said. “One last adventure.”
Not for the first time that day, Warp thought he heard waves crashing on a shore he’d never known. Laika completed the circuit and trotted down the other side, panting, and he knelt to welcome her kisses.
“We don’t have to wait for our brains to rot,” Dmitri insisted. “We can still do something and do it together.”
Warp scratched Laika behind the ears. “There’s no running away from this.”
“There’s no hiding from it, either. Command wants us as their scouting team. We can get out of these damned ships for once in our lives.”
Again, the unseen ocean rolled. Seabirds cried one to another, and the air of the ship, recycled repeatedly for hundreds of years, smelled fresh. The aroma of grass was no surprise; even Dmitri would smell grass; it was all around them, but Warp smelled salt upon air that buzzed with imagined sounds and felt the mist that lingered after hallucinated waves crashed upon non-existent rocks.
He pressed his forehead to Laika’s. “I can’t leave my girl.”
#
A Persian carpet hung on one wall of Zasha’s apartment, and on another, a screen presented a quote: Being determines consciousness. As this ship resembled the one they’d lost, so this resembled her old apartment, but the places were not the same. Warp knew that they, as people, were no longer the same, either, not after all they’d suffered.
Four cylindrical ships flew in formation. Three still lived. One was now a tomb.
Warp was large and fleshy, and Zasha, thin and pale with a wide, chiseled face. They greeted one another with a hug.
“You’re not going?” she asked.
“Dmitri told me about the offer.”
She offered him a seat at her tea table as her eyes asked the question. Why didn’t you see the doctors?
“They don’t know as much as they claim,” he said. “They’d rid themselves of the last reminders and have us out of sight, immortalized as heroes. That’s their healing process.” He waved his hand to the room. “This is ours.”
She closed a holographic copy of Anna Karenina, and it disappeared into the table. At her command, the quote on the wall disappeared and archival footage of the ancestors appeared in its place. Those who entered the ships and those they left behind had created a remembrance of who they had been. Those memories occupied the apartments like so many domovois or ancestral house spirits. Every citizen had the recordings, but for Zasha, they were an obsession. Her fiance had been the one person to truly understand, and Warp knew they served as a reminder of him as well.
“Immortalized as a hero doesn’t sound so bad,” she said.
“It isn’t real. They offer a mythology you’ll never hear, told to comfort those you leave behind.”
“A eulogy for the dying,”
His eyes focused on something distant. “Laika helps with the seizures.”
The image of a young woman appeared on the wall, dressed in the uniform the Strelki crew wore for their first few years, before the sameness of the voyage created a longing for home that overwhelmed any romanticized view of space travel.
Life is a search for understanding, the woman said. We long to understand who we are, where we belong, and where we’re going. Those answers are rooted in the past and in a place, but they blossom in an unknown future.
Zasha looked at him as if the recording were his fault. “The dog’s a distraction. The time you spent with your mother, that was real. What they’ve called us to do now, that’s purpose.”
Her focus fell fully upon him, and he felt the weight of her unspoken question.
“The hallucinations have started.”
She shook her head, scowling. “It’s too soon.”
“Sometimes, I feel like we’ve already arrived. The grass tickles my skin, and my lungs fill with an air that’s impossibly sweet.”
She reached for his hand, and they sat in silence, staring at the space between them.
#
Warp slept with Laika beside him and dreamed of the deaths of hundreds, and he awoke as their families baked in cosmic radiation. The shields failed; their modified DNA failed; of the nearly five hundred souls aboard Tret'ya Strela, only a handful survived, and now this survivor had surrendered to the brain rot that would take them all.
#
Laika accompanied Warp to the sickbay, her tail wagging with the bliss of the unburdened, its sway growing wide, beating upon her own haunches, and the sound of each swish and thwack chipped and cracked the burden Warp’s heart carried. He knelt beside her as they waited by the door, and she nuzzled his throat with kisses.
He was the only patient waiting when the first doctor arrived. Galina Popov was an olive-skinned woman in her late sixties, and it had been her suggestion that each survivor be paired with a dog. Warp alone had shown interest, and for him, Laika was born.
Instead of inviting him back to her office, they stayed in the empty waiting room, and Popov sat beside him. Her plump hips filled the azure seat, and Warp relaxed in the comfort of her presence.
“You’re holding back,” she said. “I’ve seen inside your brain and always known there was more.”
“Being determines consciousness.”
She waited.
“As my being deteriorates, my consciousness unravels,” he said.
“You’re worried about losing who you are.”
“I already have. Intellectually, you understand that. Emotionally, you can’t fathom the loss.”
She squeezed his hand. “Tell me.”
“Everything.”
“The damage is evident, as is the rate of progression,” she said. “We know what symptoms you can expect and when.”
“Do you know I’ve been hallucinating? Last night, I was on Rodnoy Mir in a field overlooking the sea.”
“You’re not hallucinating.”
“I was there, damn it!”
“Exactly. You’ve detached from an overwhelming present moment and immersed yourself in the memories of another place and time.”
“I can’t remember a place I’ve never been.”
“You’ve spent your entire life on these ships. You know this one every bit as well as the one you lost.”
He discovered he was pacing now, wringing his hands together like he meant to rip the skin from the bone.
“But while you were on this ship, you didn’t know the experience of being planetside,” she said. “You didn’t know the smell of the sea or the feel of starlight.”
“I do now.”
“Yes, you do, and you’re hiding.”
“Why would I hide from something so perfect?”
“You survived when others did not. Your mother didn’t. You worry you’ve abandoned her.”
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
She rose from her chair and placed her gentle hand at his bicep. “We’re not having this conversation, you and I. You do realize that, don’t you? Your reality is the grass and the tickle of pollen upon your nose.” Her fingers left his arm, and she crossed the room. “You’re wrong about one more thing. I know loss. Command wouldn’t send you without medical supervision.”
He watched as she closed the door and left him standing, alone and shaken. Desperate for a sense of grounding, he reached his hand into empty space and felt Laika’s wet nose nuzzle against his palm.
#
Warp walked the empty hallways of the Pervoye, and Laika padded along beside him. She followed as he climbed the stairs, the gravity weakening with every step. Upward was inward as the ship’s rotation replicated the experience of gravity. The lowest decks bordered the hull, but at the top, in the center of the ship, the expansive habitat ran the length of their world. They knelt beside a stream. They wandered among fields of corn, and as they drew close to one end, the ground sloped upward, allowing them to gaze back across the green expanse.
Warp imagined the waves on Rodnoy Mir crashing in the whispered distance, but it wasn’t Rodnoy Mir he imagined.
Laika looked up at him, panting; the illusion of a smile traced the edges of her mouth. He knelt beside her and rubbed her head.
“You didn’t come with us, did you, girl?”
Her tail counted out the seconds.
“I imagined all this just to be back with you.”
She looked down the barrel of the inverted world, barked once, and sprinted away, faster than he could ever follow, but if he was dreaming this moment, then other possibilities remained.
He could fly.
He ran down the grassy slope and leaped into the air, and the ground swept by, beneath him. He overtook Laika, and the hairs on the top of cornstalks tickled the back of his hand.
Laika barked, and Warp cut back and landed gently in the grass. She lay her head over his shoulder and pressed her neck into his.
“I miss you, too,” he whispered.
#
They journeyed back to the outermost levels and the fleet bays where crews spent lifetimes maintaining and rebuilding vessels that never flew. Warp sought out something familiar and found the Lazorevka, and he understood, if not really remembered, that he had flown her to a new world.
A future generation would arrive at their long-awaited objective, but they were close enough now to test its waters, its air, its grass and dirt. Command had sent drones, but they wanted more. They wanted human feet on that distant soil. They wanted confirmation.
Laika whimpered.
“We were never meant to return,” Warp said, “but I found my way back to you.”
She looked up with dark and soulful eyes.
“While we were in suspended animation, those we left behind on the Pervoye aged, some died. By the time I awoke, you must have been gone thirty years.”
Her tail stopped wagging and curled between her legs.
“I’m sorry all we could ever give you was a world in a bottle, because it truly cannot compare.”
He felt the arrival of another presence, like a burst of static in his ear. Laika pressed against him.
Warp, come in, Dmitri said.
“Warp here.”
You’d better get back to base. The doctor wants to run some tests.
“Tell her we’re on our way.” He paused before correcting himself. “I’m on my way.”
With a burst of static, they were alone, and Laika pressed her full weight against him.
“I know, girl,” he said. “I know.”
She whimpered, and her tail thudded against the metal floor.
“This isn’t really you crying,” he said. “It’s only me.”
She squirmed, as if to prove she was real, and placed a paw in his hand. Her eyes were his eyes, staring back with accusation and wide with desperate pleas that came too late. A path chosen long ago could not now be changed. The destination found could not be swapped for another. This place was just a memory, and Laika had become an emptiness in his heart which no dream could fill.
He had nothing left but to wake up.
—Thaddeus Thomas
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Okay, I know Laika was the first dog in space, but her name means 'barker' in russian (I believe). Woof... if this wasn't intentional, please just say it was because that is a great layer that I really liked.
This is a beautiful read and I desperately want more. the dog is a superb touch. i feel extremely wistful now. all due to the emotive writing and delicately placed and balanced contextual tags.
very nice