Presque Vu
Note: It's a bloody mess. And of course, written because I have so much time on my hands with NaNoWrimo and Vetren'iy. Thoughts? Very first draft, very confused?
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Recollection didn’t come easy to him. Like déjà vu, it came capricious. But he didn’t have déjà vu--and never had.
What he recalled came more often in dreams.
“What can you see?” A feeble voice asked, “Can you see me there?”
He closed his eyes. The narrow alley, dim, dwindled into smog-laden streets. What would happen always seemed nearer than what had come before. Sometimes he thought he’d lived backwards, and there was something he was always forgetting, something he’d already done.
“Am I alive? Am I alive, Fletch?”
With a startled jerk, he woke, slumped against read-out screen, bridge grey-lit. Scrolling numbers blurred under his gaze. Eighteen-hundred hours. And perhaps just a dream. This wasn’t Earth, afterall--no Earth dreams on sleek Avdotya, no dreams at light speed darting into eternity.
Fletcher didn’t have déjà vu. The cool dim of space, star-shot and void, recalled nothing. He’d never travelled interplanetary, never seen night but from the dull-domed sky on Earth, never thought that night could be so long, so light. Nadezhda lay ahead, hopeful colony for a hopeful straggle of Earth-weary.
Struggling with stinging eyes and creeping shadows, Fletcher rose, shoulders cramped, face felt thick.
He sometimes forgot. Inept habit for a 2nd class liutenant, escorting colonials to the unknown. But he preferred it that way. Nadezhda and Capt. Waverly’s crew and colonials, lightyears into past and a moment’s ping from Earth--that stood ahead. No past. He tried not to look at it too closely. His memory pulled tricks on him, light-illusions--it tried to say he’d seen what hadn’t happened.
“Am I alive, Fletch?”
He cursed thickly.
For an hour, he paced, halting every now and then to glance over read-outs, halting to be certain things were still there.
“Are you going to tell now, Fletcher? Are you going to tell me before I tell…”
Boots broke space-thick still, clanged up service-steps. Startled, Fletcher wheeled.
“Hey Fletch.” Kolya peered in, round-faced sleep crumpled. “My turn, I think?”
“Sure…sure, Kolya,” he nodded towards the port glass. “Still dead-black, still on course.”
With a distrait smile, Kolya took his place, blinking owlishly at the scattered numbers, bewildered over computation. “’Night,” he murmured.
But Fletcher was down steps and gone before the sound left Kolya’s lips. Hours he slept. And hours he watched, taking Kolya’s place on narrow bridge, slouched over dim-lit screens and scrolling computations. It was easy to forget--déjà vu couldn’t recall what he didn’t know.
It was more difficult to forget what came ahead.
“Are you going to tell now, Fletcher? Are you going to tell me before I tell…”
It was Damian that caught him sleeping--only once, slumped sideways over hard-backed seat. Damian, senior liutenant--jet-browed, features faltering on the ironic, he had that dispassionate personality that bled through feeling and came out the other side unchanged.
It only left its stain.
“Awake there, Fletcher?”
“Drifted,” murmured Fletcher, scattered, words still running through his mind that no one had said. “Sorry.”
“Hey, if you could see ahead, right?”
For a moment, Fletcher wavered, response caught on doubt. See ahead meant a dozens things. If…
“If,” he said, “Hey, if I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“If,” smiled Damian--something more than flippant nonchalance in his voice. “Don’t fall asleep. I don’t want to worry Waverly.”
He loitered, off-duty and curiously blasé while talkative. Another month, Waverly had said. A month and we make land, so to speak.
“A month,” said Damian, “Can you believe--a whole month, and Earth a month behind? They’ll know if we make it alive by now.”
“How?” Fletcher asked dully.
“Seeing ahead.” Damian leaned languid into hatch, flipped-up. “They’ve got to have managed the precog. crisis by now.”
“…How?” Fletcher found himself repeating stiffly.
“Consolidated, you know. Last contact said they’d found the sort; Presque vu, isn’t it? see ahead, not back. Caught them before they jumped planet…continents were lining up…”
Fletcher stopped listening.
“I’m off in two,” he broke in finally, “Andrei’s got the next watch.”
He slept again, all dark, no dreams. He woke and forgot he missed the dawn.
“If?…” Damian began catching him off-duty, always the half-winked taunt.
None too soon for Fletcher, Nadezhda loomed, its violet-cast sun at nadir from planet-side.
Nadezhda turned out to be more ironic in truth than report. Hope, said its name--hope for Earth-weary colonials, for fools. A spit of land on a spit of a planet surrounded by an ocean that might just as well have been spit for all the good it did anyone. Fletcher watched it, wider, nearer through port-glass until the hiss of water reverberated through the hull, and screeching atmosphere’s pressure let them through.
No one turned out to meet them. Nothing but water and rock lit eerie by phosphorous.
Waverly was a steady, honest-hearted man, common sense edged with thoughtless loyalty. He might have been blind to some things; he might have refused to doubt for a foolish honor’s sake. But he knew his crew for what they were worth, and he knew and cared for the bleak band of cols. from Earth’s layered, smog-traced cities.
In another month, the jagged-rock coast of Nadezhda’s only continent held a base. Half-enclosed for colonials, guarded against vaporous air and wind trailing choking phosphorous, the thing perched, white and lucid over black-top waves and glimmering stone.
“No one,” remarked Damian, “Forsaken sort of place. Hopeful. Saw this coming?”
“Waverly must have--who wouldn’t?”
Damian shrugged. “Just us.”
Schedules changed. Fletcher slept less. But an odd, bitter taste lingered in his mouth; and more odd, he seemed to meet Damian around every corner. If, was still the hail.
Careless flippancy--did he think it meant more?
Pointedly diligent, Fletcher avoided day shift and worked hard into the night. The sky turned bloody with dusk…and never quite faded into black, bruised all 14 hours of Nadezhda’s night and the oceans looked as much like a desert through the observatory as they did from sealed-off shore. Captain Waverly let him be--he did his job, kept his watches, stood nights no other officer from the Avdotya would have taken even for a free ride home.
“No word from home,” Kolya muttered, every wan, bruised morning. “No word, Fletch. D’you think it’s good?”
Fletcher shrugged with vaguest reassurance. His sleep-deprived thoughts ran circles; easily walked tracks of unchanging routine. Dulled, he needn’t worry over memories, over lack, over the shifting shadows just beyond thought, and a voice.
“Are you going to tell now, Fletcher? Are you going to tell me before I tell…”
He woke after a week dodging sleep and contact, head against observatory glass, slumped to the side of the tapered telescope. Damian stood over him.
“Tired, I guess? ‘Tried to tell you.”
Fletcher shifted and slipped, face half-numbed. Light through observational glass reflected violet off the ocean, blurred his sight.
“God…” He twisted stiff arms, neck tight, aching-- “What the Hell do you want? I…”
“Captain Waverly noticed you missed breakfast.” With a shrug, Damian offered a hand, flippant grin barely a falter at the edge of his mouth. “He said to get some damn sleep because he’s got twenty-five other half-alert men in need of some work. His words, not mine.”
“But hey,” he ignored Fletcher’s refusal to accept assistance, pulled his hand, “You have now, right? sleep on duty again.”
“I’m going to bed,” Fletcher said thickly.
He didn’t like his subconscious any more than he liked Damian, memories tangling up with dreams and bleeding through alien sunsets. Fatigue - it was only fatigue, he insisted violently.
“I hope so.” Damian slipped into his seat. “Be back in 10 hours, right?”
He didn’t answer. Damian couldn’t resist.
“And if you could?” he called, flippant.
Fletcher jerked ‘round, clarity snapping through his reason.
“If--” he snapped, “I’d damn well be locked tight as the ship’s hull. Locked and looking when I couldn’t see. Fighting bloody wars before they happen…fighting with arms pinned down and my head cut open for idiots to-to-- ” he broke off.
“Hell,” said Damian blithely--but deeper wariness eddied in his gaze. “Not that serious, is it?”
Three seconds, and he’d staggered around the corner, running. I’m tired. Fatigue. Can’t think.
He told himself there was a reason he’d said anything. Tired. He just needed his bunk--a few hours…
Dreams had drowned his sleep on Earth, always a shadow waiting in the room for his eyes to close and his reason to flip its switch for the night. Earth dreams, he’d thought. Earth with its sky-stacked cities and patchwork green; Earth with its spaceports now and its fallow plains. Earth knew him--too much power to anything or anyone, knowing.
Let God know, if he lived somewhere up in space or out of it. Fletcher ran. Let God know. Space was void.
“I’m running away,” whispered the small voice, “I know it’s a long way. I only wanted to ask.”
“Ask?” he’d said--ask to know if it would work, ask to know if life lingered at the other end.
“Ask because you care. Is it a good idea, Fletch?”
And other words, mingling, pulling up past and present and…
“Am I alive, Fletch?”
It wasn’t Earth maybe. His dreams followed…flickering in and out of light-flecked blackness, haunting silence on Waverly’s Avdotya shuttle…and now--
Fatigue slid apprehension aside; drowned reason. Again, light blurring vision, voices asking anxious what he couldn’t say--tell! It was going to happen again--hearbeat in his head pounding--again and again. And he couldn’t remember. They couldn’t know it. God please…they couldn’t know. I’ve forgotten.
“Am I alive, Fletch?”
Still, voices asking, always asking. His throat burned. I forgot. God. I forgot.
When he woke it was grey, steel walls sheened with ashen sunrise. Split-second panic lanced his reason, throat constricted, perspiration down his brow stinging sight.
But the sun was wan, washed-out rim lined violet. This was Nadezhda, not Earth.
“I can’t,” he said aloud to hear it, voice hoarse. “I can’t. I can‘t.”
Stiff-backed, neck aching, he stumbled into the mess hall. Morning on Nadezhda quivered on the edge of dusk ‘til noon, grey light and bruised sun a watery disk over ocean’s vapor. The sleep-crumpled colonials wove in and out of narrow-tabled hall desultory, mingling with Waverly’s crew, whispers, laughter a hollow buzz dancing off steel supports and glass windows.
Something vague hovered at the edge of his mind--conveniently, he dismissed it. Bad intuition. Not déjà vu--nothing behind but dreams.
But the buzz hovered on a shrill note, shrill for urgency, maybe, shrill in his nervous ears.
“Oy! Fletch--” someone called from across the hall, “Fletch! Hell--been dead?”
“Night watch.” He didn’t look up.
“Ouch. ‘Didn’t hear then, I guess?”
Andrei, wiry-framed and animated, slipped into line ahead of him, flicked a hand in his face. “Hey--been out of the loop, right?”
“Bloody--” Fletcher jerked back, “Yes. What--”
“Oy, you need some sleep. Hell. Comunique, you know, from home?”
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