Undesired Observation

Some stories, dear reader, ask questions. In a similar way, I think, to the questions of young children. Why does... and how many times will... and when do they... and how do they... and...

and the one that, parent or child, teacher or student, all of us stand on both sides of. How do you know? Do you really know, for certain?

Lopere Usef is a student, and still very young. Lopere happens to stand at a moment in life that comes to us all. That precise moment when life beckons, and asks certain weighty questions.

But before Lopere can begin to answer those questions, dear reader, as you'll discover in this week's story, Lopere Usef must first confront both an unwelcome and an...

Undesired Observation - a story by M. K. Dreysen

Lopere had grown confident of himself. Of the bits and pieces of knowledge that he could gleam from the books and the lessons. Of the physical challenges that he had begun to overcome, and the games he occasionally won as a consequence. His horizons had both shrunk, and grown.

They didn't include strange dreams. Lopere had never suffered from the unusual. Even direct-visualized games and movies had never really bothered him. Lopere's nightmares had been limited to falling, drowning, and failing to pass.

Never a moon-shadowed face, a fog-hoarse whisper, a coarsened phrase as meaningless and weighted as "All that you stand for will be pointless. Your deeds, poisoned. Your words, forgotten."

Lopere woke with the image and the whisper every night running for a week. And then, and probably only because he grumbled into chapel with even fewer hours of sleep than he and his classmates normally did after a marathon gaming session, Lopere decided he needed to mention it to the class counselor.

"I'm not cracking up, am I?" Lopere asked.

"No, Student Usef, you are not cracking up." With the help of the school's medical staff, Teacher Sedario had gone through all of the expected things. Eyes ears nose and throat, pulse weight and heartbeat. Comparisons, the computers and the staff patiently cataloging and measuring against the seven years' accumulated data that the medical logs knew as Lopere Usef, student. "You have, however, made it to a somewhat rare and noteworthy position in the school's hierarchy."

Teacher Sedario waved Lopere around the desk so that the student could see the teacher's screen. "There, your bloodwork shows what's going on. We're going to have to move you and your colleagues to another dorm."

"Why?"

****

Tempre Sedario enlisted the school's chemistry teacher. Both for the obvious expertise, and for the comfort of working with an old friend. They waited to bring in the confirming gas monitors until after the students had been moved, a parade of grumbling teenagers leavened only by the newness of their destination and the rumors flying of why they'd been forced to pack up and change sleeping quarters.

"You still remember?" Omel Abdallah asked over their helmet radio link. The chemist held glass probes in either hand, high and low sensitivity, leads tracing to the portable lab on his back and the faint glow of various analysis program displays shining on the glass of his helmet.

Sedario grunted. He'd taken the swab job, bending over student desks, stretching to get the tops of the doors, kneeling in corners, tracing out the surfaces of student life with silico fibre. "Teacher Reyls claimed it was the stress of finals combined with the effects of the gas. 'Understandable psychological reaction, of course'."

Abdallah laughed at the echoes of their old teacher's voice. "'You'll be right as rain, just as soon as we get you a few nights in clean air'. But he was right, wasn't he? Couple good nights of sleep, and they'll laugh it away. They've been trained to recover from far worse than trace volcanic gases."

Sedario smiled, nodded.

And tried to ignore the memory. Of the shadowed head, disembodied, floating over a mixed sea of sand and scrub grass. "You will turn your fellows to ruin," that voice had said. "They will look to you for guidance and you will show them the route to hell."

Only, Sedario reminded himself, he hadn't. When they'd needed him, when he'd stood at the controls of the Grace and been ordered to turn away from the solar-storm induced famine because the Service needed the hospital ship elsewhere, Sedario had looked at the faces of the bridge staff, and the medical team on the video screens.

And deep into his memory for the face over the desert and the voice in his ears. And he'd turned to the communications team and said, "Turn it off. We're not leaving until the planet is properly stabilized. Essential communications only until I command otherwise."

****

Georg Tavisch volunteered for the radar job. Down in the dorm basement, dragging the sensor unit one patient yard at a time.

The computer built up a model of the ground beneath, so Teacher Tavisch had a nice visual to help pass the time, along with his beloved sonatas. So much of a reminder of Combat Engineer Tavisch's former life.

So very far from the last job, mining a lunar station. Someone else's lunar station, at that, Tavisch had spent the whole time wondering at how very far the worlds had turned that sapper was still a perfectly valid job description.

And, whether he'd have to push the big red button. Engineer Tavisch had held no illusions, not at that point in his career.

He'd had to push the button before. In the heat of battle, where his and his companions lives had depended on the result.

Only, this time, in a welter of confused orders, all of them demanding a result with none presenting an immediate danger, Georg had found himself remembering a sound. A whisper of piano and aria, a line, something about "Dreams, all dreams fill with the screams of the condemned." And so Georg had disarmed the switches and then crawled through the tunnels to render the explosives inert.

The computer's model of the radar waves showed Georg tunnels, faint little fingers probing at the dorm's foundations. Nothing at all like a sapper's construction, except for the results if left unchecked.

****

"Principal Moliere."

"Student Usef. Thank you for coming."

Lopere, anxious, took the seat in front of the Principal's desk. He'd only ever been here, by himself, seven years before. When his father had brought him to the school. "I came as soon as I received your message, sir."

The Principal smiled, an easy and soothing gesture. "I thought we owed you a chance to learn a little more about your nightmares, Lopere. Here, look." The Principal turned his computer screen so that the student could see the model results. "A hazard of our school's location. The volcano has never been so quiet as the original surveyors proclaimed it. Occasionally, the volcano reaches out to remind us of its power over our lives."

Lopere looked away from the screen and at the 'window' behind the Principal's desk. Principal Moliere, unlike the man who'd sat in this chair when he'd had his own nightmare and discussion, preferred to set the video screen to show the stark, very inhuman surface of the planet whose surface the school sheltered far beneath. "But, the gas monitors?" Lopere asked.

"They tell us when there's an acute level of the gases. But trace amounts can build up in our bodies long before the monitors would signal a more dangerous concentration. And, as you've discovered, those trace amounts can have a certain soporific effect."

Lopere looked down at his hands. "Is it..."

"Permanent? No, Lopere. Another week or so, and this will be no more than a memory for you."

"This has happened before? You're sure?"

Principal Moliere weighed his student's worry. And then he nodded. "I cannot promise that the memory will ever leave you. Many of your teachers carry such memories from their own student days."

Lopere saw, very briefly, a strained, almost harried look flash across his teacher's face. "Do you? Remember, I mean?"

Frank Moliere felt the surf wash over his face, smelled salt and burnt flesh and the call of something grasping at him from the deep.

And then, as his heart beat and threatened his ribcage and the sweat ran across his back, Moliere remembered that he'd recovered his platoon, every one of them, even Share Young. She walked away on a creation of synthetic muscle and nerve and bone, but she had walked away, as had all of the others.

Just as Frank Moliere had walked away from the warning phrase of memory. With a feeling of something like triumph, then.

And sorrow, now. "I have my own memories, Lopere. I can't and won't say what your dreams will mean to you. You've a lifetime ahead of you to discover such things. Now, if there's nothing else?"

Lopere Usef took the hint with a nod, and a smile that only barely concealed the sense, not so much of worry now, but confusion at the vagaries of adults.

Frank Moliere waited until Lopere was long gone, and the screen behind him showed something close to sundown, before pulling the bottle from his desk drawer.