When dawn light crept into the sky the following morning, Kibi sat cross-legged on a dune overlooking the Manessa Kwi. As soon as she saw Ilika stir, she clenched her jaw, then stood and strode down the sand slope, stopping a few feet away from her captain and lover, and kneeling down in the sand.
Quickly shedding his blankets, Ilika knelt facing her, but did not lessen the distance she had left between them.
“I . . .” she began in a hoarse whisper, “. . . need some water.”
Ilika looked toward the ship and saw Rini sitting at the top of the ramp witnessing the encounter. The lad hopped up and disappeared into the ship, and a few moments later emerged with a cup. Others came out behind him, and soon the entire crew was sitting in the sand facing their missing crew member.
Kibi sipped the water and made humble eye contact with all of them, one by one.
Sata grinned at her. “I’m so glad you’re back, Kibi! Now we’re a whole crew again!”
“Let’s take this slowly,” Ilika said firmly. “Kibi hasn’t yet said why she’s back . . . other than to get a cup of water.”
They could all sense that Ilika was in a no-nonsense mood, and that Kibi wasn’t going to get off lightly.
Everyone remained silent as Kibi finished her water and Boro handed her
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a carton of pinkfruit juice. She opened it and took a sip. “The desert is not nearly as much fun when you don’t have a ship with water, food, and friends.”
Rini chuckled at her honesty.
“I thought of heading west, finding that road, and looking for Buna and Misa, maybe working for my food. But I couldn’t imagine what I’d tell them —
I left my ship and crew, and my true love, because I panicked when the ship was moving?”
Boro
grinned.
“I thought of going into the mountains, hiding my shame in one of those canyons. I know there’s water up there. I guess I could eat lizards or something.”
Mati
smiled.
“For two days I talked to the sand and the scrubby bushes and the little hopping bugs. They all told me the same thing. Either grow up, Kibi, or leave your bones here for us.”
Rini laughed dryly.
“I didn’t feel quite ready to leave my bones. I’m here to ask you guys if maybe . . .” She paused to deal with the choking sensation in her throat. “. . .
if maybe I could have another chance?”
At Ilika’s insistence, after getting a good breakfast of stewed fruit, Kibi spent several hours going on walks with the other students, and listening to what each of them had to say.
Ilika knew what Kibi heard from all the others, because they told him while she was walking with another. Most of it had to do with feelings — what to do with them, and not do with them, if she had any intention of being a member of their crew.
When Kibi returned from a short walk with Mati, the older girl had tear stains on her face and looked ready to crawl into any available hole. As soon as Kibi left with Sata, the others gathered around their pilot.
“All I said was that whenever I look at her now, I think of Toli back in the forest.”
Boro’s and Rini’s mouths opened with amazement at the courage of their handicapped pilot.
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Ilika nodded. “That may be just what she needed to hear.”
When they all finally gathered at the big oval table for lunch, Kibi looked very ashamed and thoughtful.
As Boro helped Sata serve the meal, the mood in the room was as fragile as glass. Everyone knew that nothing could happen, not even a base-eight math lesson, until they knew where Kibi stood.
“Um . . . I was wondering . . .” Kibi said in a slow, painful voice after eating part of her rice and fish casserole, “. . . if maybe there was time for a few more
. . . altitude and motion training sessions . . .”
The other five immediately started clapping, and quickly swallowed whatever they were chewing.
“I think we can find some time . . .” Ilika said, smiling.
The other four nodded.
“. . . but you have to pick our altitudes and speeds.”
Kibi thought for a moment. “That’s fair.”
“And not until your nutrition is back to normal, say . . . tomorrow afternoon.”
Kibi nodded and continued eating.
For the rest of that day, they watched videos that Ilika selected for their themes of overcoming personal problems. When they grew tired of sitting, they ran in the sand as Mati laughed from the top of the highest dune.
Back inside the ship, they gathered around the pilot’s station to watch as Mati nimbly guided a ship or a creature through a simulated three-dimensional world. Kibi cringed every time Mati came close to some obstacle, but bit her tongue when she noticed how the pilot, instead of cringing, was using all her attention to avoid the obstacle.
That night Ilika made love to Kibi with all the passion in his heart, and saw a smile on her face for the first time since her return.
By the middle of the following afternoon, on the front edge of the Manessa Kwi at various low altitudes and speeds, Kibi was learning to breathe and relax, when her body would rather be screaming and running. Beside her, Rini took it upon himself, as the watch, to notice whenever she was tensing up
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or holding her breath. Each time, he would give her a friendly punch in the shoulder and flash her a smile.
Ilika was careful to check with everyone else between flights to make sure they, too, were okay. Boro was never going to love motion at altitude, but he was holding his own. Mati, Sata, and Rini had become completely comfortable on the outside of the ship.
“I’m doing okay, with Rini’s help,” Kibi said from her seat when Ilika came out to talk to them after a five-hundred-meter flight at the fastest speed they had yet experienced. “If I get comfortable with that, do I pass?”
“It’s a good start,” Ilika answered, “but you need to handle eight times that speed, at one hundred meters, which will make it feel like you’re about to run into everything. It will be a serious test of your trust.”
Kibi swallowed. “I want to try it.”
“Now?”
After a pause, she nodded. “The sooner I try it, the sooner I’ll know if I have to get used to eating lizards.”
The other students laughed and Ilika couldn’t help but smile. “The others may want to work up to that slowly.”
“I’ll . . . go alone,” Kibi declared.
Rini looked at her. “I’ll go.”
Mati and Sata nodded.
Boro
moaned.
“On planets a bit more advanced, little children love rides at this speed.
Manessa has made different seats for you that will support your entire bodies under the acceleration you will feel, about twice that of normal gravity. I will take eight seconds to get up to speed, snake through the rocks south of here for a minute, then decelerate slowly. The goal is to NOT react to anything you see or feel. Be completely passive. Just breathe, and you will be okay.”
Ilika made sure everyone was snug in their seats, then went inside and closed the hatch. While whispering a prayer for his brave students, he pushed the flight control forward and quickly accelerated. He threaded through the jumbled rocks, then decelerated over the salt flats on the west side of the desert. After bringing the ship to a stop, he dashed outside almost before
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Manessa could extend the ramp.
Running around to the front of the ship, he looked up at Kibi. To his amazement, she was smiling and a new light sparkled in her eyes.
“That was fun! Can we do it again?”
Ilika looked at Boro.
“I’m okay. It happened so quickly . . . I didn’t have time to worry about it.”
The other three were grinning with delight.
“Maybe I was going about this wrong,” Ilika pondered. “After tasting the joy of fast flying, perhaps the slower stuff will seem easier.”
“And I won’t have to eat lizards!” Kibi declared with a grin.
“So . . .” Rini began thoughtfully at dinner, “. . . you think that if we’d started at the highest speed, it would have been easier for Kibi and Boro?”
“Maybe. But there’s something else that happened. Boro was handling the altitude and motion because he made the supreme personal decision, at the beginning of the training, that he was going to succeed. Mati made that decision a long time ago with Tera. For Rini and Sata, it just wasn’t an issue.
But I think . . . Kibi put off that decision.”
Kibi’s face was a study in guilt as everyone looked at her. “The little hopping sand bugs helped me with that. They reminded me I was free, and in the desert where I wanted to go. So now what? they asked me. Dry up and die right here? Truth is . . . I couldn’t take even one step back toward the ship until I decided, with the huge sky and the countless grains of sand as my witnesses, that I was going to do it, I was going to sit on the outside of the ship and go as fast as Ilika wanted me to go.”
“My teachers often told me,” Ilika shared, “that half the job of learning anything is deciding to.”
Mati nodded her agreement with wide eyes and a smile of understanding.
Deep Learning Notes
The “little hopping bugs” are usually called sand fleas, and are common in most deserts.
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Most deserts in the USA look somewhat like valleys, but are actually called
“depressions” because they aren’t created by water and erosion, as valleys are.
The mountains surrounding them usually contain fresh water, but it can be difficult to find, as it often soaks into the ground before reaching the “floor” of the desert.
Why did Ilika make Kibi listen to each crew member, instead of just talking to her himself?
What meanings were attached to the memory of “Toli back in the forest” that made Kibi cry? Hint: NEBADOR Book Two.
If Mati, while piloting, had cringed (or made some other emotional expression) every time the task became difficult, how would that have affected her piloting?
By making love to Kibi, what was Ilika telling her?
In a medieval society, what is the fastest “ride” that most people ever experience?
What experiences have most of us had that would prepare us for the high-speed, low-altitude training?
The “supreme decisions” that Mati and Boro made earlier, and Kibi finally made recently, do not come very often in life. They are difficult, life-changing, and usually full of unknown possibilities. Dedication to difficult training of some kind, as in this story, is one kind of supreme decision. Making a commitment to a partner/lover/mate is another. What other kinds of supreme decisions can you think of?
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