The First Jumper (first draft version)

The First Jumper 04: Despair

Gerleesh made it home, although she never remembered the trip.  She almost stepped on two young Tarshen playing a game, and never noticed.  

She came into her quarters, and the walls accused her.  You are not worthy of us, they seemed to say, and she shrank back from them.  The extra room for the child she would never have seemed a precious abomination in her confusion.  She went into the room and shook with sorrow at the hopes and dreams that had died in her pouch, sealing it forever.

She had material she could read or experience, or she could go out to visit with friends.  But she did not want to read, or watch any entertainment.  Her friends would all want to know how the pregnancy was coming.  They would be irresistibly curious, until they found out the egg had died.  Then they would be horrified, and sympathetic, but they would also draw back, as if her personal disaster might be contagious.

“I can’t do that,” said Gerleesh aloud to the empty room, then sat in her comfort rest, staring at nothing.

Some indeterminate time later, she realized there was an alert at the door.  Oh, no, she thought.  I can’t face mother.  She is the one who will be most disappointed.

But the signal continued, and she went to open the door, getting herself looking as presentable as she could.

It wasn’t her mother.

“Gerleesh?”

“Yes?”

“I’m with Management Services.”  The Tarshen worker said this as if it were obvious.  

Gerleesh was puzzled.  “I don’t understand,” she said.  “Why are you here?”

“I’m here to escort you to your new home.”

“New home!  But I don’t have any--”

“Right here,” the Tarshen said, looking at a personal screen.  “I’m supposed to take you to dormitory 1798b.”

“A dormitory!  Why would I move to a dormitory?”

“Something about no longer being eligible for parenting quarters.  This way,” she said, gesturing.

Gerleesh shook so hard, she collapsed.  When she got control of herself a few minutes later, the Tarshen was sympathetic, but also unmoving.

Gerleesh took one last look around the place that had been her home for so many years.  It was horribly cruel that they should do this so quickly after getting the news, but they were efficient, and there was no budging the worker.  Gerleesh knew they were always looking for space in the parenting quarters, but she had no idea they were this urgent about it.

Gerleesh had no personal belongings, other than a bag with a few papers, and the pamphlet the hatching specialist had given her that afternoon.

The worker had a flitter, and in minutes, took her across the city to the public dormitories. Gerleesh would have her own sleeping room, but everything else would be shared with hundreds of others.

Alone in the tiny space that was all she had left, she finally looked at the pamphlet.  It said that surgery to remove a bonded egg so a Tarshen with a damaged pouch was expensive and difficult, but it could be done, with a high probability of success.  It was only available, however, to those who had performed extraordinary service to the Tarshen people.

It then listed the types of service which were acceptable, and Gerleesh was appalled.  They all involved what seemed to be extremely high risk factors, and probably involved changes to her body that would be both permanent and either partially or totally discomforting.

One didn’t seem so bad.  She could be an interstellar explorer, surveying planets for possible colony sites.  That actually sounded like fun, as long as she could get home again.

The thought of moving permanently to another sun was anathema to Gerleesh, as it would have been to nearly all the Tarshen.  Gerleesh, however, worked with those who studied the results of the recent flares.  She knew what had been happening to the plants and animals, but she also had talked to the physicists who studied the binary.  

One of them had told Gerleesh that the flashes were getting progressively worse, and the star that had most recently flashed was very close to going nova.  When Gerleesh asked what that meant for the plants and beetles, she was told to calculate the effects from a flash a million times brighter, that went on for a month.

Looking at the pamphlet, Gerleesh realized that they only had one position available.  They didn’t actually need someone to do fifty years of underwater mining, outfitted with gills.  Nor did they actually need someone to spend thirty years inside an active volcano.  Nor any of the other things, which now seemed almost absurd.  

“We need explorers,” Gerleesh said to herself.  Finally, she had something positive to look forward.  “I am perfectly suited for it, since I have not had a child yet.”  She looked down at the commitment.  It required ten years of training, followed by five years of exploration.    Fifteen years, and she could have her child.

She slept poorly that night, and was so confused she almost went to work in the morning.  Instead, she went over to the Exploration Group, which was conveniently just a short walk away from her dormitory.  

On the way, she looked up again at the binary, which was just rising.  Some time soon, it would explode, killing their entire world.  The physicist hadn’t been able to tell her when it would happen, but they were pretty sure it would happen in the next thousand years.  It could theoretically happen at any moment.

Gerleesh stopped at the doors to the big building and shook for a moment.  She wanted her friends.  She wanted her mother.  Then she realized that absolutely nothing would make a difference in her situation, or that of her people.  She needed to be able to have a child, and her people needed a new home.

She took a deep breath, and went in.  

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