After several days of focused lessons, Ilika arranged for another training session.
“Take us up, Mati. Nice and easy, over the dunes at three hundred meters.”
After a few moments, Mati calmly said, “Boro, please give me level two thrusters.”
“I don’t think so!” the engineer said in a firm voice. “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not the captain.”
“Oh . . . what’s the use!” Mati said, whining. “No one ever listens to me
. . .”
“Somebody do something!” Sata screamed.
“I’ll save us!” Rini boomed, standing up. “I’ll pilot the ship!” He strode to the pilot’s station. “And if the engineer won’t do his job, I’ll do that too!”
“Do it quick!” Sata said hysterically.
Kibi yawned and leaned back in the steward’s chair with her hands behind her head. “What’s all the fuss about? None of this matters. Me and my passengers have plenty of ale to drink and we don’t care what the rest of you clowns do.”
“We’re going to crash!” Sata yelled.
“Oh, shut-up,” Boro said. “You’re not the captain!”
“I give up . . .” Mati said. “You can be the pilot, Rini, or anyone else who wants to be. I don’t care.”
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Kibi yawned again. “This is so pointless.”
“Exercise over,” Ilika said with a huge grin.
Laughter poured through the open hatch of the deep-space response ship where it sat in its usual place on the sand.
Around the oval table in the passenger area, the laughter and snickering lasted several more minutes before Ilika could begin a halfway-serious discussion.
“Manessa . . . would have to . . . take over . . . again . . .” Rini managed to say between chuckles.
“It was funny,” Sata said, grinning, “but it also felt terrible to be so impulsive.”
“Because you’re normally so thoughtful,” Boro said with admiration. “And I hated being . . . what was it called?”
“Anti-authority,” Ilika replied.
“Yeah, that. My fingers were almost moving toward the engine controls even when I was refusing.”
“Mati, you had a tough role,” Ilika prompted.
“Yeah, being resigned to failure is sort of the opposite of being a real pilot.
It felt like being a slave again.”
The others nodded with understanding.
Ilika looked at his steward. “Nice touch with the ale, Kibi.”
“Gave me a good excuse to feel invulnerable!”
Ilika laughed. “Rini, how did you like being over-confident?”
“It was sort of fun . . . until I looked down at Mati’s console and saw all those symbols and controls . . .”
Mati grinned back at him.
“Okay,” Ilika began, “same simulated flight, but give your role sheet to someone else . . .”
The last debriefing of the day, just before dinner, consisted of each student sharing which dangerous attitude he or she was most prone to have in real situations. Resignation to failure came up more often than any other, and considering their past lives as slaves, Ilika was not surprised. Sata leaned
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more toward over-confidence, and Ilika knew the next part of their training would be very good for her.
The following morning, an overcast sky and a fresh breeze greeted them, and they could see rain over the barren, treeless mountains to the east. Not a drop, however, landed on the dunes.
“Every day for the next six days, we’ll do a simulated flight right after breakfast. At breakfast, you will all take a pill. Some of those pills will give you an altered state of consciousness that will be very obvious to you, and you will need to determine, along with your commander, if you can do your jobs in that state. Some pills will make you incapable of doing your jobs, but you won’t realize it. However, other people will see it. And finally, a few pills do nothing.”
The five crew members looked at each other and frowned.
“The altered states last about an hour. After debriefing and lunch, we can all go back to regular studies with no ill effects.”
The students quickly learned that feeling sick to their stomachs did not entitle them to go off-duty. It merely caused Kibi to get them a bowl from the galley. If she was already having trouble, Ilika fetched the bowl.
Boro, with some experience under his belt in a real situation, instantly reported when he could not focus his eyes on his controls. Mati and Sata both had a little more trouble admitting they couldn’t do their jobs because of vision problems.
Both Boro and Kibi, on different days, were slow to realize that the complete lack of any sound on the bridge wasn’t because everyone was meditating. Incapable of hearing commands, they went off-duty.
Everyone knew something was wrong with Rini when they got old weather charts from some planet in another solar system. He, however, looked happy as a clam. Kibi had her head in a bowl, so Ilika guided Rini to the passenger area and strapped him in, with orders to stay.
On another day, everyone was wondering why Kibi was searching the passenger area with a wrinkled brow and a mission bracelet. They understood when she mimicked for them the snarling sound she was hearing. With Ilika’s nod, she decided she could stay on-duty, but continued to glance behind
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herself often.
On the fourth day, Ilika finished his breakfast and sat down at the steward’s station. “Kibi, instead of a pill, you have command. Same easy simulated flight, so just get some experience at spotting problems in your crew.”
It was an altered state of consciousness for Kibi just to take the command chair for the first time. She needed to do very little because everyone had the steps of the simulation memorized. But when she noticed Sata sitting on the floor tapping at invisible controls on the back of her chair, Kibi doubled over with laughter.
Ilika smiled from the steward’s station.
“Navigator, go off-duty and get some pinkfruit juice,” Kibi finally managed to say.
“Why?” Sata asked, a puzzled look on her face.
At that, the rest of the bridge howled with laughter . . . except Rini who was busy hanging his head over a bowl.
Boro’s most challenging hour came on the last day while Kibi was still in command. He went to make the power level changes that Mati requested, and discovered he had no feeling in his fingers.
Kibi came over and they discussed the problem. Since Boro could still control his muscles, and could see from colors and numbers when he had successfully touched the right symbols, they decided he could continue his work.
After the series of simulations was complete, and they had made great progress at their other lessons, from base eight mathematics to low-level altitude training, Ilika called for a day off. The cheering and clapping that greeted his announcement told him it was not a day too soon.
The three girls sat on the top of a dune watching the boys play tag among some bushes below. The sky was again clear, but the air had become cool and a stiff breeze picked up sand and pushed it over the slip-face of the dune.
“What’s it like sharing a cabin with Ilika?” Mati asked with a subtle smile.
“Very sweet,” Kibi said. “We don’t always do anything, but he loves to comb my hair and just touch. Most nights he curls around me and I fall
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asleep.”
Sata was grinning but didn’t say anything.
“I guess . . . I love him . . . and nothing could make me want to leave.”
Finally Sata couldn’t hold in her secret any longer. “Boro and I are eating dinner together on the lower deck!”
Kibi
smiled.
Mati snickered, then said, “We’ll ask Ilika to start a video or something for the rest of us.”
“Is Rini ever sweet these days?” Sata asked, looking at Mati.
“He smiles at me, but we’ve been so busy. I don’t think anything’s gonna happen until . . . you know . . . I get my knee fixed.”
“Have you asked him to spend any time?” Kibi asked. “Rini’s shy. He might need you to break the ice a little.”
“You think so?” Mati asked with a thoughtful look.
Kibi and Sata both nodded.
Deep Learning Notes
Aviation pilots (and crash investigators) recognize five dangerous attitudes that can easily lead to an accident:
- Anti-authority: “Don’t tell me what to do!”
- Impulsive: “Do something, anything, quickly!”
- Over-confident/Invulnerable: “It won’t happen to me! I’m different!”
- Macho/Competitive: “I can do it! I’m better than him!”
- Resigned to failure: “What’s the use? We’re all going to die!”
All of these dangerous attitudes are SOCIAL processes, based on relations with other people. Cars, boats, aircraft, and starships all move, each in their own way, according to the laws of PHYSICS. Even though good relations and communication among the member of a crew are very important, it is a big mistake to think that any kind of social process will affect the laws of physics.
Altered states of consciousness can be caused by emotions, illnesses, and
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drugs. Just like in the story, some are easy for the affected person to see, others are not. Because of the 5 dangerous attitudes above, altered states of consciousness in a crew often go unreported. It takes a good leader or captain to create an environment in which his crew members feel safe reporting these things. All-male crews, as we usually have in our world, tend to allow some dangerous attitudes, and altered states of consciousness, to persist.
In our society, members of crews who work closely together are usually not allowed to have intimate relationships. By allowing such relationships, what level of maturity is the Nebador Transport Service requiring in its deep-space response ship crews?