“Today we begin altitude training with slow, easy movement over the surface,” Ilika said at breakfast.
Boro moaned, then forced out a smile.
“I’ve seen you master your body’s reaction to altitude, day by day, lesson by lesson. Remember, hull excursions will be very rare. It may never feel wonderful. We just have to be able to do it in a pinch.”
“I decided, on that first day, I was going to be okay with it,” Boro declared.
“I almost look forward to it now. Almost.”
“Does everyone else feel ready for a little motion?”
The others nodded, some a bit slowly.
For this exercise, Manessa created five seats side by side at the front of the ship, a unique one for Mati in the middle. Boro and Kibi took the ends and let Sata and Rini surround their handicapped friend.
The ship had been moving slowly over the dunes at a hundred meters for several minutes when Rini noticed Kibi getting tense. With her jaw clenched, she remained silent.
Ilika, at the pilot’s station, didn’t see or hear any complaints, so he increased the altitude to two hundred meters.
Rini saw Kibi start to squirm a little, and heard her breathing become more rapid.
Ilika increased the altitude to three hundred meters.
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 26
Suddenly Kibi started screaming and fighting to get out of the safety bar.
Finding it impossible to break by sheer strength, she began wiggling upward to extract her legs.
Rini started yelling to Ilika and trying to grab Kibi, but she was in a panic and didn’t respond to his touch. Others soon noticed and joined in yelling.
Within seconds Ilika had the ship on the ground at a dead stop.
At that same moment, Kibi burst free and jumped down onto the sand. “I can’t do this any more!” she yelled, staggering backward. “It feels terrible!
I’m sorry! I need to feel the ground under my feet!” She started crying, turned, and ran into the dunes. “I just can’t! I’m sorry . . .”
Ilika watched in shock from the open hatch as Kibi disappeared over a dune and the sound of her sobbing was lost upon the breeze.
The other crew members gathered around their stricken captain at the bottom of the ramp, gazing in the direction Kibi had gone.
“Do you want us to help you find her?” Sata asked.
Silence lingered for a long moment.
“Finding her is not a problem,” Ilika eventually said. “But I have to figure out what I did wrong . . . and if there is any way I can fix it.”
Boro put his hand on his captain’s shoulder. “Maybe . . . you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That would be bad,” Mati said, leaning on Sata. “That would mean only Kibi could fix it.”
Ilika thought for another long moment. “Yeah.”
A very glum captain and partial crew accomplished little for the rest of the day. They picked at some food that Sata put on the table, then sat on the nearby dune tops and scanned the terrain for their friend as a cool breeze whispered across the silent desert.
Ilika clearly did not intend to follow Kibi, and the others slowly began to understand why as they shared thoughts and memories. They agreed that Kibi had been carefully holding in whatever was bugging her. No one could think of any hint Kibi had given that she was unhappy, other than her parting words as she disappeared into the dunes. These they quoted to Ilika
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 27
whenever he asked, but little meaning could be found in them other than the obvious.
It feels terrible! I need to feel the ground under my feet!
Rini made dinner, and they ate knowing they needed nutrition, but no joy was shared, nor any of the usual excitement about evening videos and games.
Again they sat on the dunes until the sky and land darkened, then one by one crept into their cabins.
The next morning, the remaining four crew members found their captain curled up in blankets in the sand outside the ship. They sat with him silently as he stretched and rubbed the grit out of his eyes. “My cabin just felt too empty last night,” he explained.
After getting a little breakfast, they all sat together on a dune and scanned the desert.
“I wonder where she is . . .” Mati pondered aloud.
Rini pointed. “She’s about a thousand meters in that direction.”
They all looked at him.
“Well . . . I am the watch!”
Ilika smiled weakly. “I looked too.”
After a long silence, Mati spoke. “Ilika, I have a question. If one of us started feeling the same thing Kibi felt . . . no one is that I know of, but just if
. . . what should we do about it? I mean, what could we do to get over it, so we wouldn’t wind up running away like Kibi did?”
Boro spoke first. “I realized something last night that might help.”
Ilika nodded for Boro to share his thought.
“Kibi is . . . how do I say this . . . always full of feelings.”
Everyone else nodded agreement.
“From what she’s said, she used to be super-impulsive, like that one role in our attitude training.”
Sata chuckled at the memory.
“Slavery taught her some self-control, of course. Whips are good at that.
But now . . . I think she’s letting her old ways come back. No one’s . . . you know . . . whipping her.”
Ilika laughed without humor. “Yeah. Feelings can be used as sources of
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 28
information, or we can let them be our masters. I watched Kibi closely on our journey, just like I did with Toli and Buna. I thought she had it under control.
Maybe I was wrong. But to Mati’s question . . . if someone tells me they are having trouble with something, we can talk about it, break it down into tiny steps, think of little exercises we can do, all sorts of things. We’re not in a hurry, and this isn’t a race. We’re all in it together.”
“I think she’ll come back,” Sata said.
“Thirst and hunger will drive her back soon,” Rini added. “She’s not going toward the mountains where she could find water, maybe food.”
Ilika
nodded.
As the minutes of the day slowly passed, Ilika discovered he had an even bigger problem. He started overhearing comments from the others about professions they might want to follow back in the kingdom of their birth.
On a dune top in the late afternoon, after several deep breaths to fill himself with courage, Ilika said what he knew he had to say. “If you think Kibi’s departure somehow ruins the crew, you are, of course, welcome to leave. I will be returning to the stars that are my home, with whoever has the courage to learn the lessons needed to be my crew. If Kibi — or any of you —
can’t handle it, can’t learn to use your feelings as guides instead of masters, then you must like slavery more than you realize. In that case, you wouldn’t like Satamia, or any other part of Nebador, where all members of the Services do their work with joy in their hearts because they choose to, not because any force, including their own emotions, makes them do it.”
The four remaining students sat silently for a few minutes, then filtered away to walk in the dunes or poke around in the galley for dinner fixings.
The location where the Manessa Kwi had come to rest after the last training flight, and the surrounding dunes, were quiet as a graveyard that evening. No one seemed to want to talk to anyone else. Boro went out for a walk alone in the evening light. Mati sat down at her station and did an easy simulation. Sata took a long, hot bath and then sat on a dune as the sky darkened.
Rini was the only one who reassured Ilika with a smile that he wouldn’t be
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 29
returning to the stars alone.
The captain of the little golden ship again brought blankets out and curled up in the sand to sleep.
Deep Learning Notes
Humans are naturally born with a wide variety of personality temperaments.
Those who tend to act impulsively on feelings are very good at some things, such as social leadership, but tend to be weak team members of a crew that must deal with non-social reality. It was not the fact that Kibi felt terrible on the moving ship that put her into this group, but the fact that she ran away.
Ilika explained that the members of the Nebador Services “do their work with joy in their hearts because they choose to.” This is called “surplus motivation,” and it happens when people like something enough to do it. The other kind, “deficit motivation,” is when people act because they need to earn money, avoid punishment, or (like Kibi) are driven by their own emotions.
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 30
