Escaping the Bherg

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Maybe that’s why my relationship with my family improves the more systems I put between us.

I’m in my bunk, staring up at my mother’s face, stretched awkwardly across the bolts in the ceiling. We’ve been speaking for almost eight clix, and if three rotations ago you’d told me that not only could I hold a conversation - with my mother, no less - for that long, but that I’d be reluctant to end it, I’d have named you a liar and a fool. Three rotations ago it sometimes felt like my mother and I could barely make eye contact and hold it.

Rotations. It’s been three local rotations - more, really - since I left the Bherg, and it sometimes still feels like nothing about me’s changed. I still can’t quite bring myself to keep to using the Standard Chronologue. My projector’s still housed in the mechanical Academy watch they gave anyone who passed through. And though our ship’s gravity is light and centrally controlled, my coverings are weighted and firm and can be tightened to exert great pressure, and when I close my eyes my body can almost convince itself its back there, on the Bherg, with its immense gravity and eons of darkness. Home, I suppose some would call it.

“Goodness, you must be exhausted, all those long Turns you’re pulling.” I see she has no problem keeping the Standard Chronologue. “I’ll let you go.” She ends conversations like she does everything, brusque and not quite complete. Not one for sentimental farewells, my mother. 

Of course, neither am I, at that.

Besides, she’s not wrong. I am exhausted, we have been working long Turns. I only meant to close my eyes for a few seconds, but I’ve been running non-stop for a while now, and it's all finally starting to catch up with me. I was planning on staying up for a bit, fixing up the schematics, but I suppose they’ll still be there when I wake.

Just a short rest…

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I’m back on the Bherg. 

It’s dark. An inky blackness, heavy. Suffocating. Distant pinpricks of light scatter the sky. Stars. Twinkling. Blinking, like a million watching eyes.

Blinking, out of existence. They disappear, one by one, leaving the sky above empty and indistinguishable from the ground below.

Bherga is often in darkness. But it’s never complete - there are lights, or fires, and always, always stars.

And I realise in that instant that this isn’t just another winter. I don’t know where in the rotation I am, but I know with deep, gut-wrenching certainty that I could stay here forever, on this turning planet, and still never face the sun. I do not know how or why, but I know it is not there.

The ground beneath me shifts. It moves as if floating, and I lose my footing and land heavily on nothing. The world spirals, and I no longer know if up is up or down is down, or if indeed those words even have meaning anymore.

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And I jerk awake, in bed, held immobile by the heavy pressure of my bed sheets, breathing heavily.

I can already tell I haven’t managed a full sleep.

I’m not sure there’s much chance of me getting any more right now either. Probably shouldn’t bother trying. I’d hate to finally pass out just before I need to get up again.

Maybe I shouldn’t have spent so long on call with my mother last night.

I sigh. A couple clicks of the tongue to release myself from my bonds - sound-secured automation systems went out of style a while ago, it wasn’t easy to track this one down, but I needed something I could control when the rest of my body was temporarily out of commission. And I needed the blanket straps because, well…

I don’t know. Comfort, I guess.

Funny how a girl can spend her whole life trying to escape a place, a people, and find herself sectors away, in galaxies strange and new, clutching them - that place’s sensations, those people’s voices - like a security blanket.

Ha - a literal blanket, sometimes. 

A blanket that could very well smother me to death in my sleep if I’m not careful, and yet I’d still rather take the effort of setting it up anew whenever I shift bunks or ships, just to dismantle and hide it if ever someone risks getting too close to bed, than go without.

I think it was actually the first thing I bought, with my take from our first job. It’s obviously not a standard set-up. I spent the entire run up to that job restless and tired, my work growing increasingly sloppy, and I went aground the moment it was over and we were safely distanced and docked, and hunted the local markets until I found enough materials to improvise what would become the prototype of the system I have now. 

The state of unconsciousness I reached once I’d finished setting that up is maybe the closest to death a being can ever achieve whilst unaided and still alive. It’s a high I’ve been chasing ever since.

Even if I was just violently wakened by bad dreams, the occasional nightmare is nothing compared to the waking hallucinations I ended up living with without it.

Horrific hallucinations. Strange ones, too.

I shiver.

Well, I’m awake now.

I start to sit up.

There’s a photo of my family, framed, that stands on a low table by my bed. It’s there more because I felt it should be than out of some sense of familial love, or duty, or respect.

I look at it now. Me, my mother, my dad, and my older brother.

None of us look happy to be there. It’s an old, old photo - though to be fair I doubt there’s a more recent one out there. Excepting security stills, perhaps. My brother and I are just children, his arm stiff around my shoulders. My dad still has both eyes.

My mother is unchanged though. Consistent through photos and memories and even slightly warped projection calls. Dark, barely wrinkled skin and short, brittle hair.

The Bherg - Bherga, to use its proper name - is a fairly new planet as far as all official designations are concerned: new to the Union, new to communication lines and transport links and migration and tourists and I’m sure a dozen other constructs most of the known universe have long deemed antique. Anyone who can trace their family back just three generations in the intra-planetary census records can call themselves native. Still, the planet was inhabited long before people finally learned how to make ships that could reliably escape its gravitational field. And you can always tell when someone’s genetic line has been on the planet since the very beginning, though the differences are subtle: hands and feet that are slightly wider, flatter, with larger respective prints; long arms and short, wide-set legs; coarse hair that is rarely allowed to grow too long, and thick nails too, that tend to point downwards like claws when not promptly trimmed. Their bodies are built differently, though not in any way that's easy to describe - a little shorter, a little stockier - and the dark skin that is paramount to surviving a Bhergan summer always has the faintest, dullest purple overtones. And the eyes are never, ever even.

My mother is the epitome of a Bhergan native. I take after her completely - my brother does too, there is little of our dad in either of us, in looks at least. 

Maybe that’s why talking to her now brings me so much more comfort than it ever used to. The familiarity of my home planet, a reminder that I’m only different here, amongst these people. Of course, there were plenty of non-native folk around growing up - more people were immigrants than not - but after a while in such a unique environment everyone starts to look the same. No one stands tall under such heavy gravity for long. And the Bherg is one of the few places where a rotation is longer than an orbit. When there are only two seasons - one with sun and one without - it is only natural that everyone’s skin darkens during the summer, and pupils widen through the winters. Bherga changes you, no matter how little time you spend there.

Everyone here is different from me. They stand tall, and their pupils are of equal size, unlike mine, though they tend to be larger than I would assume is standard too. My data set is biased, of course, towards people who spend their time travelling space. But rationale is hardly an effective antidote to loneliness, feeling out of place. Isolated even whilst I’m trapped aboard.

Trapped.

That’s the real reason I was so desperate to escape the Bherg. Every native Bhergan was really just the descendant of some poor soul who’d crashed on the planet by mistake and had never managed to escape. It used to be that absolutely no one ever left Bherga, and even now, dozens of rotations or dozens more Cycles or whatever you want to use later, very few people ever managed. And I didn’t want that to be me, stuck on a planet I was desperate to escape, despite the fact that by all rights it should be my home.

No one willingly joins a pirate crew if any part of them is happy living the life they’re in.

Besides, there was nothing keeping me back.

Maybe my willingness to listen to my mother more, talk to her, was initially born of a need for familiarity, but I think we do just genuinely get along better now. I think that she sees the distance as proof that she no longer bears any responsibility for me, and that lets us talk more openly. She isn’t any more maternal, it’s just now neither of us expect her to be. It’s far from a standard relationship, but…

I don’t think my mother ever really wanted a daughter. Or any child. She wouldn’t mind a close relative, a second niece, or some random mentee, but I think children confuse her. She doesn’t know how to treat them, or what to do with them, and she doesn’t particularly want to learn. People told me constantly that the Academy was a way for me to fulfil my potential, my way off the Bherg, and they were right in a sense. But I know none of that mattered to my mother as much as the knowledge that making me go to the Academy made me their problem, not hers.

No, my mother never really wanted a daughter. But I guess, in the end, I didn’t really need a mother, either. Not when it came down to it. And so our relationship now may not be that of a parent and their child, or even of close family members. But it is close, and familiar. It is that of equals, no matter how unconventional our path to it. I don’t know that it could sustain itself if I ever returned. But that’s a problem for future me - for now I’m happy to live in the present, treasure each hard earned conversation.

Besides, my mother did teach me skills I’m finding useful. The ability to make small talk, carry conversations without paying attention to them, subtly mine people for information. All important skills in the conmans toolkit.

My mother may not have been good at being a mother. But I think it wouldn’t have made a difference in the end. I’d have left the Bherg anyway. It just might have been harder to do so, I could be struggling with real homesickness right now on top of everything else. Or a more restrictive moral conscience, Phaeto forbid.

Nothing would change, in the end, if I’d had to deal with actual parenting. Nothing would turn out easier. Maybe what my mother was really doing, even if she wasn’t aware of it, was teaching me how to survive.

Or perhaps I’m just giving her the benefit of the doubt. After all, absence makes the heart grow fonder.