Connection - 12 (Surprise! Different POV)

~1154

Meanwhile… from EVEREN’S POINT OF VIEW *everyone gasps*

Everen stretched her sore muscles on the infirmary bed. Its crisp, white sheets had so rarely seen use in the several years it’d been since they’d all awoken from stasis. Well, not everyone had awoken. The people that had just been sent to colonize the planet were still asleep. Only the “useful” people were awake. Everen always felt like she’d been woken up to early. She knew that she was very necessary, as the ship’s only connection to Earth, but everyone else awake was so precisely chosen for their usefulness. Everen felt like a tool rather than a person, a phone rather than something that should have to be kept alive with precious food, water, and oxygen.

Janna, the acting nurse, was looking over some complicated sheet of numbers that gave Everen a headache. Janna was a rocket scientist, like the large majority of the people who were awake, but she also knew a bit about nursing, so she acted as the on-flight nurse. She didn’t mind: she got to use the infirmary as an office, and since it was rarely needed, her books and papers had collected in a haphazard mess across the room.

Janna was also Everen’s friend, as was most everyone on board. She found she had a lot of free time to do what she did best: socialize.

“Do you think about Earth often?” Everen asked, staring up at the ceiling.

The scratching of Janna’s pen halted. “Of course I do,” she said. Everen heard the flipping of a sheet of paper and the scratching continued. “My whole past was there. All of our pasts were there. All of human history was there. If I ever think about the past in any sense but the very smallest of time increments, I think about Earth.”

Everen soaked that in for a moment.

“But if you mean do I think about the people who are currently living there? I’m not sure,” Janna said. “I can’t imagine the society that exists there now. All the intricate ways it might have changed. I can’t imagine what the people look like now. I know it’s only been a couple hundred years, but that’s enough for society to change radically several times over.”

“I could tell you, if you want,” Everen offered. “Kerra talks about how different things are all the time.”

“No, no. I prefer to think of Earth as I left it. Earth as I knew it. Let me live in my ignorance of change. Let me pretend that all the people I’ve loved are still alive somewhere. That these hundreds of years never happened. It certainly feels that way to me.”

Everen chewed on her lip, considering. “Were there a lot of people you left behind,” she asked hesitantly.

Janna sighed. “Yes, there were. I tell myself to not think of them so much, but how can I not? Going to space… it was my dream. But it was a dream that cost me everything.”

Everen paused, then, her voice barely a whisper, asked, “Would you do it again?”

At that, Janna was quiet. Everen waited. She had nothing but time on this ship. The sheer boredom could have made her either insane or very patient. Everen had chosen to become as patient as she could manage. Every day stretched her patience more, but it always held.

“Yes,” Janna finally murmured. “Yes, I’d do it again.” Everen could hear the pain in her voice.

Just then, the door burst open in the way that doors to infirmaries only do when something awful has happened. In staggered two engineers, carrying the limp body of the head political scientist, Wallen Tallow. His shirt was soaked with blood and sticking out of his back was… one of those triangular rulers. Everen didn’t know what they were called. Were they just called triangles? Mathematicians have no creativity, was the wild thought that ran through Everen’s head.

“Move!” the engineer in front shouted at her, and it was like she had become unfrozen. Her body snapped off the bed before she could even think of it, and Wallen’s body was dumped unceremoniously onto the bed, face down. Janna had bolted up straight and was already pulling on some gloves.

“What happened?” finally stammered out.

“I don’t know,” one of the engineers said grimly. “We found him alone in a closet like this. I don’t understand who would have done this.”

“Give me some space,” Janna commanded.

Everen thought this was the perfect opportunity to slip out the door. But she didn’t go far. She didn’t like Wallen very much, but she didn’t want him to die. But that triangle had been stuck deeply into his back, and Everen didn’t like how pale his face had been. She hadn’t even noticed if he’d been breathing.

So Everen waited. She heard a lot of indistinct noises coming from the infirmary that she didn’t understand. At one point one of the engineers wrenched open the door. Before he could take a single step out, however, Everen heard Janna’s panicked voice say, “Wait! Don’t go! What am I thinking? It would take over 24 hours to wake her up from stasis! We don’t have that time. We don’t have any time. What am I doing? What am I-” and the engineer had shut the door again.

A short time later, the door opened again, more slowly , and an engineer stepped out, his eyes unfocused and red. Everen raised an eyebrow at him in question and he just shook his head and walked briskly away, toward the captain’s office.

Everen cautiously pushed her way back into the infirmary. Janna had found her way back to her desk and had buried her head in her hands. Janna released a broken sob and Everen looked away, ashamed to see such a powerful woman brought this low. The other engineer was sitting on the ground, his hands pressed to his eyes.

Everen didn’t want to look at Wallen. Or rather, she didn’t want to look anywhere near the bed that held that body that used to be Wallen. Everen knew there was a reason that everyone else in the room were covering their eyes, and Everen didn’t want to see it. She crossed to where Janna sat, and lightly rested her hand on the nurse’s back.

At her touch, Janna’s body wracked with another sob, and she blubbered, “I- I couldn’t- I didn’t save him. I couldn’t- I didn’t- I tried. But I couldn’t do it. I- I- I-” she hiccupped.

Everen rubbed her back gently, but found she couldn’t do anything else to help the poor woman.

“I never thought this would happen to me,” Janna moaned. “I’m barely a nurse. I didn’t want to be a nurse. I- I- I…” She trailed off into quiet sobs.

Everen left then. She was a mess of emptiness, numbness, guilt, fear, suspicion, and other, unknowable emotions.