The last thing I wanted to do was comm Marshall. No, I take that back, I very much wanted to comm Marshall and tell him to go frass himself. I also wanted to again suggest to him that he take a spacewalk sans e-suit. What I didn't want to do is have any sort of actual conversation with him.
“You agreed to comm him,” Delanna said to me, or at least my memory of Delanna; the Delanna that still lives on inside my head.
“I only said that to make you stop harassing me about it,” I answered honestly as I scanned through the morning news on the terminal set into my kitchen table without actually reading any of it. There is little point in lying to a voice inside your head; even if Delanna could usually tell when I was lying, the memory of her always knows.
“I know that,” she replied, “but that doesn't get you out of doing it.”
“There is nothing he can say that I need to hear,” I said to the rapidly cooling cup of brewkaf on the table.
“You need closure. “
“So you think I should throw him out an airlock?”
“I think he is asking for your help, and you should give it to him.”
“Oh come on, Delanna. He's a piece of space trash.”
“You're not doing it for him, you're doing it for you, and for me. If you help him, you'll be taking the first step to moving on.”
“Maybe I don't want to move on.”
“You need to move on. You need to start dating again. You need to leave this flat to do something other than go to the cafe. You need to be you again. You need to live your life.”
“You know, he's probably not even really dying.”
“What if he is?” she asked, and I could see her standing there in the kitchen, her hands on her hips. She always put her hands on her hips when we would argue and she was getting annoyed. She would also call me by my full name.
“Good!”
“Zane Del Rathi, you are going to comm Marshall and set up another meeting with him! At that meeting you will hear him out without verbally abusing him.”
“Frass him! Quot!”
“Now, Zane. I'm not going to let up until you do.”
“You were never this annoying in life, you know.”
“I have not begun to be annoying. You wait until you try and go to sleep.”
Being unable to get silence in my head, I relented and set up a meeting with Marshall again at the same table of the same cafe for two days later. I at least wanted him to stew a bit longer. Any joy I would have gotten from that was somewhat muted by the fact that he started crying while I was talking to him. I clicked off while he was blubbering.
So again I sat at my usual table, glancing back and forth between the table's terminal and the vague blobs moving through the New London fog outside. Jenna, the waitress, brought me my brewkaf and a plate of baconate breakfast tartlets; she smiled at me.
“She likes you,” Delanna says to me for the thousandth time.
“Why, because she smiled? She's doing her job, not flirting,” I think back at her. I reserve talking to Delanna vocally to the privacy of my own flat.
“She wants more than a bigger tip on the bill, hon, if you know what I mean.”
Before I could think up a reply to that, Marshall walked in, forever in his gray coveralls. He saw me, and rushed over. I ordered him a brewkaf again, although I don't know if he drank the last one of not.
“Zane, thank you for agreeing to meet me again,” he said as he sat across the booth from me. He looked a lot more confident than he did a couple of days earlier. He probably thought he had already won, and, to be fair, he wasn't wrong.
“I am going to hear you out, Marshall, I promise nothing more than that.”
“That's fine, 'cause when you hear what I'm going to tell you, you'll be in,” he said, and snagged one of my tartlets off my plate. I would have protested, but his mere presence was enough to put me off my food anyway.
His brewkaf arrived while he chewed, and he nodded to Jenna, and began to dump packets of sweetener and Creemo into it, “So you know Terra, right?”
I blinked a couple of times, waiting for him to continue. Instead he began to drink his kaf, so I assumed he actually wanted a response, “Source of human civilization, polluted dirt ball only inhabited by rich hipsters and the crazy? I may have heard of it,” I neglected to add that I grew up looking at it through the surface of a Lunar dome.
“Right, the home world of all humanity, and the repository of the wisdom of our ancient ancestors.”
“The exodus was only a few generations ago, Marshall, I would hardly call Terran wisdom ancient. I'm not sure I would even call it wisdom.”
“But humans lived on Terra for thousands of years before that. There is information there that our race has forgotten they even ever knew.”
“Okay, so is there a point to all this?”
“There's a cure there.”
I rolled my eyes, “A cure for what?”
“Reaper disease.”
“Is that what's killing you?” I asked, feeling a small thrill at getting to mention his impending death aloud.
“Yes... I got hooked on it after... after what happened. I stopped last year, but then I started to get the tingles.”
Grim Reaper was first created a hundred or so years before the Terran exodus. It was meant to be the ultimate in addictive drugs. As long as you keep taking it regularly you are fine, provided that you do not overdose or do something stupid to get yourself killed, but if you stop taking it, that's where the problems started.
About sixty percent of people who get hooked on the drug will come down with Grim Reaper Degenerative Illness if they manage to kick the addiction. It first begins to manifest as a tingling in the extremities, hands and feet, and then it spreads inward. If you do not go back on Reaper before that tingling reaches your heart, your whole body shuts down.
Most former reaperheads are driven back to the drug just by the maddening feeling of the constant tingling. I must begrudgingly admit that if Marshall had gotten to the point that he was combing the stream for whacknut theories about an ancient cure instead of just going back on Reaper, then he must be stronger than I thought.
“Marshall, Reaper was originally made on Terra; if there was a cure for GRDI, we'd already know about it.”
“There was a cure, but it was lost. The lab that created the drug also created a cure for the illness. It was kept a secret because they wanted the addicts to stay addicts, that was the key to keeping Reaper the top drug for centuries. I need to find that cure.”
“Or just go back on Reaper,” I said, and sipped my kaf.
Marshall's eyes grew wide, “No, Zane, you don't understand. I can't go back to that. That was was my rock bottom.”
“That was your rock bottom?” I asked, almost yell, “That w-”
“Stop it!” Delanna yelled in my head.
“But-,” I began to mentally protest.
“Go with him, Zane. Agree to help him. You need to forgive him,”
“I need to kill him.”
“You need to move on. Agree to go with him. Get off this planet and back into the ink.”
“I don't want to save him.”
“I want you to try,” Delanna said
“You won't let this go, will you?”
“No, not until you take your life back. Forgiving him, going back into space, moving on with your life. You need this. You're too young to just sit on this planet and mildew in the fog.”
The entire time I had been having my internal dialog, Marshall had been talking to me, unaware that I wasn't really there, “-found where the lab was, and if my guess is right, information about the cure will be in there, so what do you say, Zane? I've got a ship, I just need to fill out my crew. I've got an engineer, but I need a co-pilot. We'll make millions selling the cure to other addicts; you'll not only be saving my life, but the lives of millions of other addicts.”
I was surprised to hear that I was not the only one he had come after for this. I wondered who else he had pissed off and was trying to make amends with by getting them to do work for him. It honestly seemed like an odd way of getting people to forgive you.
“Say yes,” Delanna insisted.
“Fine, Marshall. I'll go with you, but don't think for a minute this means I've forgiven you.”
“No,” he said, looking a little deflated for the first time since he walked in, “I guess... that it was inappropriate of me to even ask that of you before. I'm sorry for that.”
“Good, and were I you, I'd be real careful around airlocks.”
Marshall laughed, and puffed back up a little again. It was the genuine, relieved laugh of a man who just found out his death had been put off for at least a little bit longer. He thought that it was a joke.
“Here, let me give you the access codes to the ship, and come up whenever you're ready,” he said, fishing his datapod out of his coveralls, and tapping on its screen, “I'm going to be down here for a couple more days wrapping some stuff up, but I'll see you up there.”
“Wrapping stuff up?”
“Yeah, don't worry about it,” he slipped his datapod back into his pocket, then grabbed his brewkaf and drained it in one long gulp.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“Thanks for the kaf, Zane, and thank you for helping me. I know I can never make things right between us, and I know it takes nerve asking you to help me, to help save my life, but I really appreciate this. I'll see you in a couple of days, 'kay?”
Marshall slid out of the booth, and quickly retreated before I could change my mind, leaving me along with my empty booths, two kaf mugs, a half full plate of baconate, and my thoughts.
“Thank you, Zane,” Delanna said to me, and I could almost see her then; see her sitting across the booth from me where Marshall had sat moments before, “This is the right thing to do.”
“Being trapped on a spaceship with him sure doesn't seem like a great idea,” I whisper so as to not draw attention from the other diners.
“You'll see, honey, once you do this you'll be to forgive. Once you do that you will be able to move on, to get your life back; maybe even earn some creds. You can't last more than another couple of years on what you have now.”
“I don't want credits, I want you back.”
“I know.”
I sat there staring at the empty seat across from me until Jenna came over and asked if I was okay. She seemed genuinely concerned, which made me wonder if Delanna was right about her. I wondered what she knew about me; I knew that you could see the basic facts of my pathetic story if you fished the stream for my name, what with her have been next in line to run Panda Freight and all.
I told Jenna that I was fine, then quickly approved my bill, with a nice tip for her, and left. I couldn't talk to her then, and since I would be going off-planet with a backstabbing reaperhead, who knew if I would ever see her again anyway.
I went home, packed, and spent one last night in my own bed. In the morning I went and took a shuttle up to Marshall's ship. At the time the only part of me that thought heading off into space with the man I hated most in the universe was a good idea was the part that manifested itself as Delanna, but I went because I believed it was what Delanna really would have wanted me to do; would have done herself if she had survived and I had died.
So if Delanna thought that finding the knowledge of our “ancient” Terran ancestors would some how bring closure to the lonely nightmare my life had become, then that is what I would do. That didn't mean I had to like it.