Fallen From Stars - SEONG HEE-YOUNG (Part 2)
(Chapter 1, part 2)
Hello, Hee-young.
The voice echoed all around her. “Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”
There were many screens alight that had no numbers, lines, or columns and data flows, but instead had flowers, and butterflies on them, slowly moving their wings, or flicking themselves into flight.
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere, pleasant, not quite male nor female. “I am NABI,” it said.
Nabi. “Butterfly”. That explained the butterfly on the screens, if not much else. “Where am I? Why is it so cold?”
“You are aboard the Yi So-yeon. You are in the center segment. You are in the habitat section. You are on the cryodeck. You are in cryopod seven. You have awakened. And that is why it is so cold.”
She didn’t recall sitting, but she was doing it, her elbows on the sides of the open chamber. Her hair floated around her head in a black cloud, slowly descending to her shoulders. She looked down at herself. The folds of ice cream (Cryosol, her mind suggested, a word that she knew without knowing why) had almost all blown away; it evaporated as she tried to touch it, the stickiness was whisked off her skin in a cloud of vapor sucked away by the laboring air-filtration system, and she was in the coffin or bathtub, or bed, her skin dry, no residue remaining.
Yes, a bed.
She was dressed in a blue jumpsuit with soft blue boots on her feet. She put her hand on the pillow, feeling the deep mark her head had left. I’ve been asleep a long time …
She felt dizzy, as if gently falling backward. Nothing seemed to have much weight. All the exposed surfaces had frost. She lifted her hands and let go … they fell slowly into her lap.
That can’t be right.
Or was it?
Sensors were all over her exposed skin, and a battery of sensors, like a headset, was clasped around her ears and the back of her head. She unsteadily removed them, pulling them off to fall away limp like damp, rubbery dodecapus suckers, and the anxious monitors stopped worrying about her vitals one after another.
No weight. But I wouldn’t have any. I’m in free fall. No, we’re decelerating. One-tenth g? We’re arriving.
Arriving.
“I’m on a spaceship. I was asleep … where’s the rest of the crew?”
“Can you get up? There are handholds.”
“I think so. I’ve been asleep.” She grasped the handholds. Why am I so light?
I thought that already. I’m in free fall, almost. I’m in space.
Her fingers felt cold, numb, tingling.
“Can you feel your hands?” the voice asked.
“A little.”
“Wait a minute then.” Did the voice sound anxious? “Flex them, slowly. I do not want to you to lose your grip, to get hurt.”
“I feel like I’m still asleep. I’ve been sleeping, haven’t I?”
“Yes, you have.”
“How long?”
“You have been asleep for one hundred and six years, two hundred and forty-seven days, ship-time, Seong Hee-young. One hundred seven years, one hundred and nine days, observed time due to relativistic compression.”
Words floated up into her mind, bubbles from deep water, and came out on her tongue, bringing thought and memory like ravens with them. “We were going ten percent of the speed of light.” A fact carried out in a bird’s bill like a meaningless treasure.
“For a long time, Seong Hee-young.”
I’m on a starship.
Thirst took her.
“I need a drink of water.”
“If you leave the cryopod, you will find water in the nutrition rack.”
A voice from nowhere, from everywhere, like a voice coming from a tree in a wood.
More knowledge.
“NABI-ya, you’re a computer.”
“I am the ship’s computer,” the voice agreed. The urgent medical panels, the sensors all removed and silenced, were quiet, their warnings folded up into light and replaced by images of butterflies flowing by, clinging to flowers, beating their wings before dropping from the blooms again. Pleasant purple blooms.
She nodded (Did it see her? Surely. Did it understand the gesture? Surely.) and pulled herself lightly out of the pod. She felt like a feather and pulled herself through the air. There was a tall, narrow, black metal panel in the wall with white symbols—
영양 랙
—which conveyed nothing to her at first until the ravens passed through her mind again, and brought back reading.
Nutrition Rack.
She laid her hand on the panel, and pressed gently, and released. It popped open with a click. The Nutrition Rack. The first food and drink for them when they woke up.
The subtle deceleration force brought her to the deck with a slow bump. Instinctively, she held a handle on the wall and pulled open the rack, extending the better part of a meter into the room. It was lined with slender, soft packets with more writing and plastic water bottles. She carefully unstoppered one bottle and put the tube in her mouth. It tasted cold, cold, cold, and oddly flat and stale.
The first food and drink for them …
“I am Seong Hee-young, and I am on a ship in space,” she said, experimenting with that information.
“We are decelerating,” the computer said patiently. “And I am manuevering. We will enter orbit around Ipijeneia in ninety-nine days and seventeen hours. I began to wake you at the 110-day mark. It has taken several days to revive you.”
“Ipijeneia, NABI-ya,” she said dreamily. The name was thick and clumsy and fairy-tale but somehow familiar. “What is that?”
“It is the world you are going to,” the computer answered. “We have traveled to reach it for a long time.”
“A hundred and seven years.”
“There is a protein shake in the next tube, Hee-young-ah,” the computer said. “You need it.”
She tore the end off with her fingers shaking. It smelled of fruit, and she discovered she was hungry, greedily consuming it, then opened another.
The empty tubes fell from her fingers, she knew not where, like arrows shot blindly, and she tasted the pale, light fruit on her tongue, smelled it on her lips and her fingers. Unknown but familiar. A taste that said childhood, and grandma, and smelled like cobbled streets and sea winds. She steadied, a rush of balance coming to her mind and hands. More memories, fluttering past. A memory of a story of a princess. The princess wore a white and blue hanbok and lay on a bed, and the bed was in a temple and the temple was in a forest, and black ravens and white swans flew overhead as she slept in it for a hundred years.
( … This way to Chapter One part 1 … ) ( … This way to Chapter One part 3 … )