Warp & Woof: Chapter Six
A sci-fi 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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Now let’s read Chapter 6.
Warp & Woof
Chapter Six:
Pодной Mир
(Rodnoy Mir)
Warp
The Lazorevka dominated the camp like a great, blue insect. Inside, replicated wallpaper decorated every available flat surface, and a Persian rug hung from one wall. Warp wondered if these touches had always been the intent or if Command had merely used them to lure the survivors with a sense of the familiar. In the end, all six had agreed to make the journey and with them, the only representative from Pervoye, Doctor Galina Popov.
Popov led Warp and Zasha to Lazorevka’s medical bay and tested them both for contamination and contagion. Warp told her about getting lost in his memories and how it was a remembered version of her who talked him back to reality. He thought she might like that even in a dissociative state he couldn’t help but listen to her advice.
She huffed and said he was only dreaming.
“I wasn’t dreaming when I saw Laika.”
She cleaned the probe. “Laika?”
Warp glanced at Zasha, to see if she would say anything. She did not.
“Saw her. Heard her. Felt her. We ran together through the grass.”
Her brow knit together for the briefest moment. “If you see her again, I need you to tell me.”
“I tell you everything.” He flashed her a smile that was meant to reassure. “Does it mean something, my seeing her?”
She reviewed the numbers. “We’ve been awake for months, and your hallucinations didn’t start until today. I think your experience has more to do with us being planet-side than any symptom of your illness.”
Light from outside played against the walls of Lazorevka’s bay, the central hub of the ship. “Zasha’s made a discovery.”
Popov cleaned the probe. “Yes?”
“Not a discovery, a theory,” Zasha said. “My findings are still preliminary.”
Popov brushed a blade of grass from Warp’s hair. “Your minds are still coping with everything you’ve been through, including the new reality of being in the starlight and open air. All your experiences will feel new and strange, but that’s to be expected.”
They exited the ship. Equipment on the surface, along with a satellite in orbit, probed the planet, recording seismic movement, atmospheric fluctuations, and radiation. Flora and fauna were, again, Warp’s responsibility. One species of winged creatures moved in a murmuration the way starlings did on Earth; so, for now, he called them starlings or (generically) birds, knowing they would prove to be neither.
He looked out over the field in the direction they had come. There stood Dmitri, repeatedly thumping a handheld scanner with the butt of his palm.
“I knew I was getting a bad reading.”
“What is it?” Warp asked.
Dmitri shelved the scanner. “According to this, you’re still out there.”
The doctor said something Warp couldn’t hear and climbed down the ramp. At her apparent command, Dmitri repeated himself. “The scanner says Warp and Zasha never came back.”
He showed Doctor Popov the readings on the scanner. She set it for Warp’s signature and aimed the device directly at him. It chirped, and she smiled.
“But you get similar readings outside the camp?” she asked.
Dmitri led her out into the field, in the direction Warp and Zasha had gone. Warp tried to follow, but Popov waved him back to camp.
“Your presence will only confuse the results.”
Popov was older than the rest of them, but no older than Warp’s mother had been. As weird as it was to think about, he knew now his mother had been young enough to marry again. She’d had more years ahead of her than he had behind him. So, why had Popov come? Once the last of the crew was buried, if she found her way home again, eighty years would’ve passed. Maybe more.
He ached to ask why she would have done such a thing. Instead, he said, “What do you think you’ll find out there?”
“An atmospheric anomaly,” Popov called back. “Now stay inside the camp. I’m serious about this.”
“Should we be worried?” Dmitri asked.
“I’ve ordered the others back to camp,” Popov answered. “They’ll do as I say.”
Again, Warp saw a reflection of his mother.
Why did you come?
His question remained unspoken, and Popov disappeared beyond the rise as the tall grass swallowed her passing. He turned and found Zasha, waiting. Her fierce eyes darted, exploring his face. Then her fierceness mellowed into something softer, something kind.
“I almost stayed behind,” she said. “I came because of you. Unlike the rest of us, you found something on Pervoye. You found healing in Laika, and I thought maybe that’s what I needed. I almost changed my mind and told Dr. Popov I’d take a damn dog, but I didn’t. I refused the dog because I didn’t want to heal. Healing meant letting go, and I couldn’t do that. The only thing I wanted was to be alone and to remember until the poisoning took my mind.”
“But you came.”
“Because of you,” she said and cupped his face. “You had Laika when I had nothing, and you let her go to come here. If you could do that, if this place gave you that much hope, then I could come, too. You promised me something would change, that Rodnoy Mir would be different.”
“I didn’t promise you anything.”
“In choosing to come, you did,” she said, “and now I want you to promise me something else.”
He could still feel the heat of her touch upon his cheeks. “I don’t understand. What can I promise?”
“Don’t let them take the planet from us. They’re not ready for what they’ll find, and it’ll scare them. Fear makes people irrational. Stupid.”
“What will they find?”
She shook her head, but it seemed more an expression of disappointment than ignorance. “Promise me.”
“No one’s taking the planet from you,” he said. “They can’t.”
Zasha stepped away from him and looked toward the ocean in the direction Dmitri and the doctor had gone. Alone, Warp walked into the endless grass, in the direction Dmitri and Popov had gone. When he topped the rise, he saw them kneeling beside a body covered in grass, not buried in it but connected to it, blades growing into its skin.
The body was his own.
Thoughts left him. The land around him wiggled and rocked. Above, in the white sky, birds, like vultures, circled. One swooped in low, examined the scene before him, and with a cry, dismissed the others. They left the heavens empty with their passing except for the swaths of blue that traced their paths.
Warp heard a song, one his mother used to play when days were long and her glass was empty. A woman’s voice held sustained notes that undulated into silence; her words spoke of death and the nothing that waited beyond the grave. We can hold back the ineluctable, she’d told him, but nothing waits forever.
Popov and Demirti moved toward another grassy mound, another body woven into the earth, and this one, he knew, was Zasha’s.
He stumbled, and the world went black.
#
Warp straightened from his huddle-against-the-cold to witness the thunder of frost-laden clouds. The train came like beasts herded nose-to-tail into the great barn of the Nikolayevsky station. The engine’s white breath filled the massive expanse as if the ceiling were an engineered sky birthing a roiling storm. Beneath the false weather, immense arched windows cast golden rays, brilliant, like the genesis of life at God’s own word.
A dog whined inside the luggage car.
The mist, solidified from his breath, rose like a veil between him and the stowed dog. At the edge of the train, where the tracks hid beneath the platform and the car, he placed his gloved hand on the luggage car wall and watched the door slide open and porters file out with baggage marked for Moscow.
A guard stepped out of a carriage and blew his whistle. Summoned, the passengers bustled out. Warp, skirting by the wealthier cars, saw a woman slip through the crowd. She turned to look at him, and tucked within all that fur, it was Zasha who smiled at him. She spoke but the distance and the noise stole away her words. Then a guard held his hand out to her, and she stepped into the compartment.
Warp followed. A porter checked the ticket Warp didn’t know he carried, and directed him onboard. He settled in next to Zasha.
“Where are we?”
“Moscow,” she said.
That sounded reasonable. It sounded right. They were leaving the city for a trip into the country
“Did you feel it?” she asked. “When you lay in the grass beside me, did you feel it move?”
Such a strange question, he thought, but somehow it also made sense. There had been something. It seemed so long ago now that they’d lain together in the grass, but he had felt something large and dark move within the world beneath them.
As he had then, he placed his hand over hers.
“You can’t let them take it from us,” she said. “Promise me.”
#
Warp awoke to daylight and grass. Dmitri and Popov stared at him, their faces distorted. Gasping and confused, he told himself he’d had a seizure but knew that was a lie. No seizure ever felt like this. A scurry of insects ran along his spine and in between his toes. Green forms blurred at the edges of his vision, but through the odor of must and decay, he clung to reality and reality clung to him.
His vision went black in one eye, washing Dmitri away, leaving only Popov whose hands darted in and out of view. A thousand tiny cuts played upon his nerves. His struggles only drove them deeper. Clouded lungs wheezed, bags of sharp and puff-tailed seeds. His veins undulated beneath the skin. He felt them move, like snakes writhing their way to his heart.
Popov knelt over him; a flame blazed upon her scalpel, blood peppered her face. They rolled him onto his side and lifted him; the stench of decay fell away like a sheet, slipping from his body and tumbling away with the wind.
He slept but did not dream, nothing he could remember. He awoke aboard the ship, doors closed, the hum of activity muffled, but he felt human movement, hurried and bemused. A heaviness covered him, and he couldn’t move. He breathed deep and realized that Popov had given him a neural block. It spared him most of the pain from his injuries. When he sought out those injuries, they entered his awareness. Maybe not all of them; he never got that far. The sheer quantity overwhelmed him.
A tear crept down his face, one he could not wipe away.
— Thaddeus Thomas
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