Symbiosis Chapter 4

Rianya had already resolved that her life would be a series of adventures the day she and Tom married, but she hadn’t quite imagined the last several surprises, from landing on Earth, to nearly losing Zalara to body snatchers, and self-imposed exile inside an icy moon.

She paced a few steps, crossed her arms across her chest and glared at Tom. She placed one hand to her face and plunked down in the chair across from him. She looked through her fingers at his familiar jade eyes and the permanently round pupils that had captivated her from the first day they met.

“When did you hear this? When were you going to tell me about it?” In her mind’s eye she watched herself staring out a ship’s window into the empty blackness of space.

“Quixote’s message. I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you all morning but there’s just no other--”

“Tom, you promised we were going to stay on Earth!” Her frustration almost exploded like a bomb and a bubble of ire rose in her chest.

“Don’t get excited, Love, we’re going to Earth, I promise. But there’s a problem on one of Eta Cassiopeia’s planets. They need a comprehensive science ship and experienced crew.”

“I can’t live in a space ship, Tom. It’s not fair to me or Zalara.” She watched him pick up his coffee and enjoy a drink of it, closing his eyes and smiling. Did he hear what she’d said? She had a hard time with speaking human when her brain was occupied with something else. Maybe he didn’t understand.

“You haven’t heard the whole story yet.” Rianya wasn’t sure what part of the story would make a difference, but perhaps she was overreacting.

“I spent year…” Rianya stopped and calmed herself but her nails still jabbed her palms. Tom didn’t deserve to be spoken to so rudely. She’d agreed to follow him wherever he went, even that meant onto another spaceship. This was her burden, not his. “I spent last year stuck in this moon study biology. Now what I going to do? I want go back Earth and work at San Diego zoo town.”

“Eta Cassiopeia is 19 light years from here. We passed it, sort of, on the way to Beta Hydri, looking for the molecules.” She’d only heard two words that he said.

“Beta Hydri, my sun. Does that mean we going Kinnae?” Her heart jumped at the chance to visit her family and bring Zalara to her birthplace. Then she sighed. “Two years?”

“Well, that’s not necessarily the case. Quixote said they’ve finished testing the propulsion system needed to increase our speed so instead of 24 months it’s only 26 weeks or so, less than seven months, hypothetically. A new ship just finished construction and is being tested. That’s less time than we’ve been here on Enceladus.”

“We’re going to Kinnae? On the new ship? It’s been, um, three years.” Her heart speed up and those strange tears welled in the corners of her eyes. Tom nodded and pulled her a little closer to him. She didn’t wait for him to close the gap but instead jumped on him, throwing him back against the cushions and burying  her face in his shoulder.

“I’m not certain about the ship yet. We have to go to Eta Cass first,” he reminded her. She didn’t care. She rubbed her face against him like a cat, enjoying the rough alien texture of his afternoon face against her smooth skin.

“I don’t care, that will make it all worthwhile.” She sat back and looked at him, then reached out as if she were going to smack him on the cheek. “You let me think and worry those bad things!” She sat back on his lap and turned her head but try as she might the smile wouldn’t come off her face.

“This is the happiest I’ve seen you in a long time,” he said.

“This is the happiest I’ve been in a long time. Thank you, Tom, thank you.” Zalara would be five years old by the time they arrived. Zalara wouldn’t recognize her mother’s family, but would they even recognize her?

“We’re officially going to pick up the science team, but we can stay a little while.” He stretched around her to reach for his coffee again but she wasn’t about to get off of him. She just wanted to hang onto her dear man and communicate the joy in her heart with their special telepathy they’d developed over the years.

She pushed him back again on the sofa again and buried her face in his bronze hair; she almost bit one of his ears for some pointless reason! After living with humans for three years she’d gotten used to their looks, and Tom’s ears were just part of his charm, but she was still thankful Zalara hadn’t inherited them.

~~~

Captain Jackson, Rianya, and Zalara took their last walk through the underground mall of Enceladus on their way to the surface station. Zalara bounced and begged to see the Aquadome one more time before they departed, so the three of them took a slight detour on the way. Tom stopped briefly at the office to leave their access chips, check the schedule, and check the cargo manifest for their personal effects.

Titan

“I think you’ve learned a great deal of our language, Captain,” said the Kiian fellow who managed the Enceladus visitor’s office. Tom’s wife thought human ears peculiar, especially his, but the Kiians’ put humans to shame.

“Not by a longshot, Mr. Sof, but thank you.”

“We will miss all of you here in Hershel. Enjoy Titan.” Jackson gave the short fellow a nod of respect and said goodbye in the Kiian language.

Having said their goodbyes the night before to new friends and educators, researchers and doctors, they left their short term freight and baggage for the valet and took the vacuum tube to the Surface Docking Station.

The SDS, as they called it on Enceladus, was not a large building just for the sake of efficiency. Earth ships visiting any planet in the system were all designed to dock with a ventral port that matched the dorsal port on the stations. Specifications were standardized throughout the solar system, from Luna to Mars, Jupiter’s Galilean moons, Titan of course, Enceladus, Dione, Uranus’ moon Miranda and Neptune’s moon Triton.

“Well, it’s a good twenty hours,” the human female behind the counter let them know. “Titan is in opposition to Enceladus right now. But the seating is all double wide recliners in compartments, two per. Plenty of time for a relaxing, sleeping, watching some entertainment. You are welcome to eat with the crew at mealtimes,” she added. Tom hadn’t thought about the length of this short journey. A day’s travel was the blink of an eye to him. Eating with the crew, well, it was only for one day. Without prejudice he was looking forward to being a captain again, in charge of his life instead of at the mercy of the universe.

They joined the other dozen or so passengers watching the ship dock on old fashioned monitors, functioning as designed, but far from modern by the standards of 2165. Behind the ship was the blackness of space but also the beauty of Saturn. From their southern location on the little moon, Saturn was ever present in the sky, alas invisible while in the station or underground. Of course throughout the mall shops and offices hung large monitors feeding the view of Saturn to the inhabitants, but for the most part, a mostly static view was not much better than a painting.

Rianya and Zalara remained particularly quiet in their narrow compartment, not made large enough for more than a 48 hour trip to anywhere. After watching a modern film and taking a brief walk around the passenger deck, they stopped at the observatory to watch as they passed out of the rings and into deeper space towards Titan. Countless millions of stone sized crystals and house sized chunks of rock and ice floated in a harmonic balance with the planet, swirling in orbit above the ship as far as the eyes could see looking towards the golden striped ball of the planet. In the other direction, a black unknown vacuum full of dark energy and cosmic rays would be their next journey.

They awoke to the electronic bell of their ship informing them Titan was up shortly for docking. They headed back to the observatory to see the incredible moon, larger than Mercury, glowing orange with a heavy nitrogen atmosphere and methane clouds that obscured the surface features.

“It looks like Saturn without stripes,” Rianya said.

“Yes, but it has an amazing surface. You can’t breathe the air, it’s mostly nitrogen, and the clouds aren’t water vapor, either.”

“We can’t go outside on this one either.”

“Yes, we can, but you need to wear an environmental suit,” Tom said with a grin on his face. “It’s actually not as cold as Enceladus. You can almost fly there; just enough gravity to keep you from floating away, a little more than Luna.”

“I liked the Luna colony.”

“I miss seeing Earth,” Tom said. “The views from Luna Landing, incomparable. Do you remember going to Luna, Zalara?”

“No,” was the short succinct answer. He touched the top of her head which was just at his hand now. Her hair was as thick, soft and as glossy as her mother’s, but she’d not inherited the seal brown color; it was a light chestnut bronze that matched his own. He stepped just a little closer to her and mused that she had never been a blend of the two of them, but distinct features that were unmistakably either Human or Kinnae, and the two didn’t mix the way a tall man and short woman often had medium height kids.

Titan’s exotic red smog nearly blocked out the view of Saturn. The clear glass structure of the surface colony allowed incredible views of the unusual terrain. Its characteristics were unlike Enceladus; Titan offered hydrocarbon lakes and a few craters, but was primarily smooth, unlike the slushy snow ball.

“Tourism?” Rianya asked as they passed an interesting shop in the space port. Posters of people paragliding, hiking in space suits on the surface, a rover with a dozen people inside crawling up a knoll.

“Titan has an atmosphere. We should all go out and--”

“No. The last time we went moon exploring she almost died, and you too.”

“That was different,” Tom said.

“No.” Tom looked at Rianya, relenting when he saw her plum colored eyes with lacy pupils. He turned away and looked at the travel posters, scratched at his head and nodded.

“You win. But what if we go out with a group of people who know their way around, we won’t go alone, and, well, I’ve been here before, out there, not just the space port here. Think it over?”

“No promises,” she said. Tom had come to know her well enough over the years to know that meant they’d be out exploring tomorrow.