Everything on Laak'sa is fast. Mother staunchly insisted that it's the same on any planet. Not v-2445, Little Blob's home world that has no native name. Everything is slow and easy there. But Mother says everywhere else is as fast as life on Laak'sa. I don't know if that's true. My world was a small metal ball rolling through the universe. It took time to get anywhere new, even when we'd wormhole. There are moments of hustle on any ship, when an alarm goes off, or if I'd overslept and had to get to the de-con chamber for it's daily cleaning before Dad got around to inspections. But nothing is exactly fast in a tin can. It's not a fast life. Mother always said I was going to grow up lazy if I didn't get "home" and "learn how things really work".
I wanted to live on Laak'sa. "If you want to kick me out so bad, kick me out there."
Mother was horrified. Even Dad shook his head.
"What? What's so wrong with that?"
I was sitting there, ready and waiting to jump. Dad was next to me, trying not to look like he was going to cry. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. Ashnahta. If they wanted me gone, that was fine. But not once did I get a reasonable excuse as to why I couldn't just live with her.
"But she's my only friend."
Mother walked away then. Dad patted my shoulder and started talking about inter-species relationships and I got so mad that he still wouldn't think of them as a tribe that I stormed out and wouldn't listen to the rest.
Little Blob was my tribe. Ashnahta was my tribe. Hell, even grumpy old Xavier was my tribe. I belonged in the tin can. Or on Laak'sa. Or even the Ehkin home world. They could drop me off there.
Ashnahta always told me I was not a human. She didn't say it in a mean way. She just meant I was different. "We have space people who live away from Laak'sa. Born on the rocks, like you." They call their space ships and stations rocks, like meteors. It makes more sense to me than calling ours a "ship". I have seen pictures of ships on Earth. They sail on water and are shaped like bananas. I live in a circle of metal that rolls through space...like a meteor. I never shared that revelation with Mother. I doubt she would have appreciated it.
"What happens when they come home?" I asked Ashnahta. I did not know at the time that I'd be leaving. It puts a whole different spin on the conversation looking back now.
"We think they are odd. They come home to get a wife and to settle a family before they leave again."
"They don't stay?"
"Why would they? They live in rocks."
I lived in a rock. I always had. I always thought I would. Was I going to be treated like the Qitani treat their space travelers?
"When you jump, your body will not like it," Dad said for the hundredth time.
"I know."
"It'll be like our jumps without gas, only worse since you have a ship as a point of reference for your mind. And you're going to feel sick as a dog for about a week. Like you're trying to catch up to yourself."
"I know."
"And then it'll feel kind of like it's all slamming in to you."
"And I'm to lay there and let the doctors take care of me and wait it out and do exactly as I'm told."
Dad gave me a small smile. "I sound like a broken record, don't I?"
I shrugged. Who knows?
He sighed. "Oh, Jake." He patted my leg through my gear. "I can't believe this day has come. I'm really going to miss you, you know."
"You don't have to send me away."
"I'm not. I'm sending you home."
"It's not..."
He held his hand up. "It is. You just don't know it. Your mother and I...we didn't ever mean to put you in this place. What a crappy childhood. If we had only understood what it would mean..."
I did not want to hear anything like that. "I had a good childhood."
He gave a sad laugh. "Playing with wires and robots? That's not a childhood. You should have been making mud pies and catching frogs. You should have had detentions and gotten your hair pulled. You should have skinned your knees and caught fire flies and ridden a bike and learned to swim and..."
"Dad, it's fine." I hate that he felt so bad about it all. I don't feel like I missed out on anything. I honestly don't. I never have. "Who wants to get their knee cut and catch bugs? It sounds horrible."
"And that attitude right there is exactly why you have to go."
I'm not going to lie. I was sure I wasn't really going to miss Mother all that much. I know she loves me. I know she has always wanted the best for me. And I know she was put in an impossible situation having me on the first deep space scientific mission that had any real chance of succeeding. I know these things because I've heard them all my life. But for years, I'd felt that she was ready for me to leave. I never held it against her. I just didn't plan on missing her. Dad, though...
I was determined not to cry for many reasons, the biggest one being that I was almost sixteen and I was convinced that I had past the point in life where crying was okay. But that meant I couldn't look at Dad while we waited. I couldn't think about our card games. I couldn't think about him slipping me some wine the crew made or his terrible jokes or him helping me pretend I ate my veggie mash when it was Mother's turn to cook or... I couldn't think about any of it. So I turned my mind to think about the jump.
The process of jumping relies on human tech that's had significant Qitani adaptations. Every family has a history that they pass down, even Little Blob and his kind. It's important. Mine is that my parents are smart and figured out the wonder of wormholes. Oh, they weren't the ones to find them. They weren't even the ones that figured out how to plot and plan where they came and went. I only made the mistake of pointing that out once. "And what good did that do any of them? Honestly, Jakey, I thought HuTA was teaching you better than that!"
Nothing, that's what good those other discoveries were. So humans knew what wormholes were and where they went. That's all fine and dandy. It wasn't until Mother, Dad, and the rest of the geeks and squeaks in my clan that humans figured out how to use them. They weren't the first to hop through. They were more important than that. They were the first to hop through and live. They were the first to hop through one and keep going. They were the first to keep going while sending information back to Earth. They didn't find the mountain, but they did climb it again and again. That's how Dad always put it.
The ship we used was the key. We had the only one in existence. It still seems silly to me that when this ship succeeded, more didn't follow. But Dad says we were laying the foundations, while the ones Earthside were working on the more long term plans. "We are forging ahead here, while they are building bases to take off from there." Luna base was completed before Mother and Dad left, but the Mars base was only started. Mother assured me it was not only completed, but heavily populated. I said something about it being quite an accomplishment in only fifteen years. "Will you never understand deep space travel?" she said back in that disgusted voice she used whenever I said something incredibly stupid.
Will I ever understand? Probably not. I don't get it. I never have. I can't understand why it was only fifteen years for us, and nearly eighty for them back on Earth. "But I'm a teenager. I was conceived on Earth sixteen years ago. The same Earth."
"It's relative," my father would try and explain. Dad was the only one with patience for the question. "Time is relative."
HuTA was no help. It spit out the textbook explanation and I ended up doodling Little Blob with a mustache on my holotab. HuTA has no emotions, but sometimes I would swear he learned to get annoyed. The closest anyone has come was actually Xavier. "Boy, we're flying so fast that time doesn't have a chance to catch up."