Distant Horizons/Chapter 9

Chapter 9 Eager to explore

All was silent aboard the smuggling ship Distant Horizons. Trisha Shellon awoke in her bed. She stretched out on her sheets. The saw how dirty they were, and she was truly disgusted. She knew that if you have to spend months drifting in space with no communication, personal survival comes before personal hygiene and social acceptance. She herself was perfectly clean. There was water-X-sonic shower onboard for the crew’s use, and Trisha had made sure she had one at least twice a day. She also tried to get in there before Ghai. Ghai spent ages in the shower. When asked why he usually responded sarcastically with I’ve got a big body, and it takes longer to wash. Of course, this had never been true. Ghai often deactivated the gravity generators in the showers and enjoyed floating around weightlessly. He listened to music in the shower, loud jazz and pop from the Modal Nodes and other popular bands. Goodness knew what else Ghai Fek did in the shower, but whatever it was, he did it frequently and for a long time. But her own hygiene was not the problem. It was everything else. With no solar power from nearby stars, and all power being siphoned to the life support and heating systems, all the cleaning droids had run out of power. Although Hando had said they could afford keeping the shower running, he said it would cost too much power to wash clothes and bedspreads. And so Trisha, who normally put on different clothes every time she entered the sleeping quarters, had found herself wearing the same outfit for nearly a month. And the men onboard were no different. Ghoel was lucky. He went around naked. She didn’t know why she expected certain races, such as herself, Shia, and Ghai to wear clothes, and others like hutts, wookies and Ghoel to go around naked. She guessed it was to do with whether private parts were visible or not. At that point, she stopped thinking. And she realized she was not in space. She was here, in probably the weirdest place imaginable. A place where you could change the landscape from a palace to a jungle at will. The core of the Multiverse. What was the Multiverse exactly? She theorized it must be the ultimate collection of everything. One universe is not on its own, but has many neighbours. Many other universes. Trisha remembered looking out of the viewport at the huge celestial castle. Those doors, hundreds of doors. Doors leading into tunnels of light. She knew what they were now. They were portals leading into universes. Each door was the entrance to a universe. Then a horrible reality came over her. One of those doors lead to their universe. One of those doors could bring them back, but was now lost, impossible to find again. If only they had stayed where they were from the beginning, instead of travelling away, changing the landscape, and losing their universe. She glowered at Hando, who was sleeping in the bunk opposite hers. If only you hadn’t lost the kriffing portal, she thought. Then another thought came over her. If only you hadn’t flown into a black hole! She stared at Hando for a little longer, with mixed emotions. She did love him, yes, yet she hated his foolishness. Why did he have to do this? Why did he enter the nebula in the first place? She turned to Shia. Shia would have made the right decision; he would never have gone blind into a nebula. And yet, if Shia had had his way, they would still have this hopelessness about them. They would still be drifting endlessly in space. Nothing would have changed. And although she pondered whether she could accept this, but in the end, she knew that no matter how bad a change was, there had to be a change. Whatever change it was. But there had to be a change. Trisha sat up in her bunk, and peered down towards the floor of the sleeping quarters. It was a long room, with a sliding door at one end and red carpet over a metal floor. The walls were grey and lined with the 6 bunks, 4 of which she and the rest of them slept in. The space for walking was very narrow, but it stretched about 4 metres long, and at the end was a wardrobe and a small transparasteel viewport. And for the first time in months, morning daylight shone through it. She smiled. There was something about this light. It filled her with a spark of power, positive energies, an attitude she hadn’t had in all the time she had been drifting in space. Happiness. Joy. And even excitement. She crawled over the side of her bunk and began to make her was down the ladder to the floor. As far as she knew, everybody was still sleeping. She reached the floor, and suddenly she heard a giggle. She turned around. Shia was moving, twisting and turning in his bed, a grin on his face. He giggled again. Trisha had- of course - seen this before. Shia was a light sleeper, and he always dreamt. He often had terrible nightmares, like the night before they were sucked out of the universe. But mostly, his dreams were pleasant. He often talked in his dreams, and laughed, and even gestured around in bed. Trisha laughed herself slightly, and then turned away. She walked past Ghai. He was a deep sleeper. He had gotten to sleep listening to loud music, and his X-node music player was still blaring away with Jazz music and pop songs. Quietly, Trisha bent over the big Herglic and switched the X-node off. Then she turned to the viewport. The view took her breath away. They had landed in a clearing at the edge of a forest, and the ship was overlooking a cliff. Green roots, vines, shrubs and bushes were growing within the crags of the cliff. The cliff descended, for miles probably, and huge rivers gushed out as waterfalls, but never reached the bottom, turning into vapour way up. Way down, there was a deep jungle, with a canopy filled with birds and other moving shapes, and emergent trees rising above it. In the distance, other mountains and cliffs arose, and rivers flowed down their sides into the great green sea below. Right now, there were no clouds at all, anywhere, and a deep blue sky stretched as far the eye could see, with no horizon, of course, as she had noticed earlier. Heat was beating through the viewport, but Trisha saw no sun up in the sky. Of course, there was none. No sun at the core of the Multiverse. It was these small but in the end significant things which kept reminding Trisha of where she was. Apart from that, she could have been on any planet. This could have easily been Kashyyyk, or Naboo, or Falleen, or the Sanctuary Moon of Endor. Trisha yawned and turned around. Being squeezed like kriff hell by a black hole had made her do that a lot. Or maybe that experience had just made her tired. She opened the sliding door and walked out into the corridor and thought about what she would like for breakfast. Then she stopped. Oatmeal. Trisha shuddered; no way was she eating any more of that foul, disgusting, repulsive Tanaabian crunchy oatmeal. And then she remembered that now was the first time that there was going to be a chance to eat something else. Whatever it was. She grinned, for she was exited, overly exited. She dashed along the corridor. A rabbit droid wandered by, holding a dead sarlacci in its hands. Yes she remembered, that’s what Ghai managed to eat. But she was going to try something better. Something new. At last she reached the hatch of the Distant Horizons, a hatch that had not been opened for months now, and was tightly crammed shut. Trisha took a deep breath. She reached for the panel at the side and took her datacard out of her pocket. She slotted it through the panel. The words Access Allowed written in basic shone up on the small screen. She reached to the button reading open hatch and pushed. Slowly, the rusty oily hatch unsealed and opened slightly. Trisha could see pinpricks of light coming in from outside. The hatch fell open a little more and she could see the plants outside. The hatch didn’t move. She stepped towards the hatch and stood on it with one foot. Slowly, the hatch opened fell down as a boarding ramp, touching the ground. The scenery was breathtaking. She had seen it before through the glazed transparasteel viewport, but seeing it through her eyes only just seemed so much more real. Plus, she could smell the plants, the flowers, the fruit... She continued to stare glakedly. She saw, with her own eyes, her boyfriend Hando change this landscape with a very thought. She concentrated. She imagined her home on Coruscant again. Towers rising. The senate. The Jedi Temple. The Imperial Palace. Speeders zipping through the air. Busy streets. Bustling malls. She opened her eyes. Nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed. She frowned. She would try and ask Ghoel about this when he woke up, but right now, she wanted something else. She strode down the boarding ramp and cautiously put her foot to the earth. It was the same as anything she had felt before. Soil. Simply soil. Soil like on any other planet. She frowned. This place just seemed too normal, too much like anywhere else she had been. She cautiously stepped onto the ground, and looked around at the Distant Horizons. She hadn’t seen the ship from the outside for a long time. It seemed very pale, almost as if it itself were tired, sick, ill. There were scratches all over it. It looked older, somewhat wiser and more experienced. Trisha laughed when she realized she was thinking of a ship as if it were a person. But maybe it is? Trisha gazed away from the ship, and began to walk along the side of the cliff and into the clearing. She took one more look back at the ship. She considered popping back and writing a note to say where she had gone, but she then dismissed the idea. She began to stride off into the forest.