Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 11

Thank You.

Yeoman.

We reached the final frontier today.

Again.

No one wants to be the first to say it out loud, so it's one of those things where we have cake and beer and everyone mouth-smiles at each other while our eyes are all, does anyone even know what is going on anymore? As in, this is cool, for real it is, but seriously, what the h.e.l.l.

I'm on the observation deck looking at it. The last world. Am I excited? Sure I am. Even if this is the seventeenth time we've been here. I'm excited. I guess we're still searching. Technically, I think we'll always be searching. As long as we are on this ship, have these uniforms on, we are searching. For something. Nothing wrong with that. But the thing is, to be honest, lately it has started to feel less like searching and a bit more like, I don't know, wandering.

Monday:.

Monday mornings they announce the crew members for the week's away team, and it's always the same: our captain, the XO, the medic, the security chief, the ethnographer, and an unnamed yeoman.

This week's yeoman: me.

Also: the yeoman always dies.

Information that would have been useful to know before I accepted the position.

They said, here is your new uniform.

They said, oh yeah, you get a pay raise.

They said, hey, how about a promotion? And I said, yes, yes, I've wanted to be a yeoman ever since I was a kid. To go down to the surface with the bridge officers. To wear that new uniform, get that little bit of extra money in the check.

They said, yes, yes, that's what it's like. They said, it's even cooler than you think. They said, great, great, good good, all good, congratulations.

No one said anything about dying.

Galactic HR a.s.signs me a Coping Specialist.

We meet over breakfast in the nonofficers' mess.

He orders a Denver omelet, a bowl of cereal with two percent milk, an English m.u.f.fin, grapefruit juice, coffee, and a Yoo-hoo.

"You shuh haf fomefing," he says, mouth full. He swallows a big lump of starch, washes it down with milk from his cereal bowl. "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."

"How old are you?"

He says he's twelve, but if I had to put money on it he's ten, ten and a half, tops.

"Anything you want to talk to me about?" he says, stuffing a forkful of egg and bell pepper in his face.

"I'm good," I say.

"Fuit yourfelf," he says, chewing with mouth open again. A little piece of scrambled egg falls out.

I watch him eat way too much way too fast. When he's done, he wraps his English m.u.f.fin in a napkin for later and hands me his card, tells me to call him if the whole meaningless-death thing starts to b.u.m me out.

"Or if you start to experience fear-of-death symptoms," he says.

I ask him what a fear-of-death symptom might be.

He thinks about it for a second.

"Pretty much just fear," he tells me. "Also, extreme fear."

"Here's the thing," I start to say. I want to tell him that I'm married, that in less than three months I'll be a father, that dying this week would really throw a wrench into my family planning. I want to say all of it, but for some reason, I can't. So instead, I tell him he has a little piece of ham on his shirt.

"Score," he says, and pops it into his mouth.

Over dinner that night, I try to figure out how to explain it to my wife.

"They posted the list this morning."

"And?"

"You're looking at the newest member of the away team," I say.

"Yeah?" she says, reaching to take my hand.

"Yeah," I say, pulling my hand away.

"Wait, I thought this is what you wanted?"

"I'm the yeoman."

"Oh," she says. "Wait, what does that mean?"

"I'm probably going to die later this week."

"So, no movie night?"

"I am serious."

"So am I. I love movie night."

"I'm the yeoman," I say, raising my voice. "Do you know what that means?"

She shakes her head.

"The yeoman always dies."

She puts her fork down and doesn't say anything for a while, just sits there running her hand over the horizon of her pregnant belly.

"There's a small insurance policy," I say. "I got a packet from Human Resources, let me go get it."

When I come back into the room with the folder, she's putting on her coat.

"Um?" I say.

"This is bulls.h.i.t. We are not living off a death benefit." This isn't how she talks usually, but then again, she's twenty-eight weeks pregnant. She is not messing around. "I'm going to see the captain."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," I say. "You can't do that. You're not even wearing pants."

"You are not dying for this new job," she says, and she's right. It hurts to admit it. "I love you, but yeah, I said it. Your new job sucks. This sucks. Living in a converted closet sucks. You even kind of suck. The only thing that doesn't suck is this baby that we are going to have."

"You know, some people would be happy about this. It's a promotion."

She just looks at me like, who do you think you are talking to.

"Okay," I say. "I'll talk to him."

That night I lie awake, staring out into the cosmic background radiation, trying to figure out what I could possibly say to the captain that would make him think I'm worth saving.

Tuesday:.

We're in the transporter bay. We beam down. Such a weird feeling. I wonder if anyone else is as excited as I am, but then I realize how dumb that is. Of course they aren't. They do this three times a week, and they're all bored of it. They're management. Comfortable. Lazy, really. Ever since they inst.i.tuted free soft serve in the officers' dining quarters, the captain's Lycra has been looking a bit tight around the middle. It's hard not to notice.

As we're dematerializing, the captain starts in with the monologue.

You can tell when he's going to start with this nonsense, because he sucks in his stomach a little. He always does this in the transporter because we're not allowed to move during molecular calibration.

And then he gets that off-into-infinity look. It's the Age of Science Fiction, he says. Everyone stares straight ahead.

We have reached the point where our knowledge of the world now exceeds our ability to believe it, to believe what we are seeing, to believe what we are able to do.

He has a way of speaking in italics.

What we are capable of has caught up to, and even surpa.s.sed, our intuition about what should be possible. We have surpa.s.sed ourselves. And even though I've heard this monologue five thousand times over the ship's speakers, and even though I know it was written by the ship's speechwriter, I can't help but feel just a little inspired, to remember just a little bit of what I felt, looking at the poster in the recruiting office that day, when I signed up for duty, imagining what it would be like to explore the universe.

And then we rematerialize on yet another world populated by sentient goo, and there's green glop everywhere, and it's oozing, which is how the glop procreates, and in the process of oozing, it makes a kind of groaning sound, and overall the whole planet smells like sulfur and even though it's hard, I try to remember that each and every place in the cosmos is an opportunity for discovery and that each and every life-form is a treasure and a marvel and a wonder, and I take out my Life-Form a.n.a.lyzer so that we can catalog this wondrous, marvelous, slimy goop.

On the surface, we look to the captain for his plan.

"Meet back here in an hour?" he says, shrugging.

Everyone mumbles agreement and wanders off. The medic heads for the lip of a nearby crater formation, pretending to look at readings on his handheld. Security chief says he's going for a run. The XO is working on her resume. She should have her own ship and everyone knows it. Instead, she's stuck as number two for the drunkest captain in the fleet.

The captain strolls off, practicing a new monologue he thought up in the shower this morning.

That leaves the new ethnographer and me. She doesn't look thrilled, but out of protocol introduces herself.

"Lieutenant Issa," she says, a little stiff. She holds her hand out like she's hoping I won't actually shake it so she doesn't have to touch me. She says she's going to head over to a nearby cave and see if she can learn anything about the mating process. "You can follow me if you want," she says.

I watch Issa collect slime samples for a while, with a very serious look on her face, but that gets boring so I wander over toward a nearby rock formation. There are weird noises coming from behind it. I look back at Issa to see if she hears it, too, but she's focused on her work, so I keep going toward the noise, edging around to behind the rock.

I hear what sounds like the captain, groaning. He's in trouble.

My muscle memory kicks in. I find a foothold in the boulder and hoist myself up onto the rock, just like we did in training. I land, ready to strike. I see the captain. He's down on the ground, shirtless, wrapped in some kind of slime, covering his face and mouth like a mask.

I jump down on top of him and with both hands and all my strength manage to wrench the slime off his face.

The captain jumps up. Actually, he sort of jumps up and back and off whatever he was crouching over, and now he's standing, flushed, with a wild look in his eyes and a fistful of goop in each hand.

"What the h.e.l.l?" he screams at me.

I wasn't expecting thanks from the captain, no, but certainly not this.

That's when I notice that next to him is what appears to be a little sculpture that the captain has formed with his hands, out of goo. A little goo-person.

Oh.

The captain recovers his composure a bit, straightening out his uniform. "You didn't see anything, yeoman," he says, but not in a menacing, abuse-of-rank way. Even now, getting caught doing whatever it was he was doing, he's a little charming. Pervy, but still charming. I guess that's why he's captain. "Let's keep this between us dudes," he says, and winks at me.

I say yes sir.

"It's just," he says, looking off into s.p.a.ce. "It's not as easy as it looks. Wearing this uniform."

"Doesn't look easy at all, sir."

"Gets a little lonely out here," he says, and for a second I think he might be moving in to hug me. Instead, he reaches down and picks up a handful of goo and sort of fondles it in his palm. "You married, yeoman?"

"I am."

"Is she hot?"

"Sir?" I'm searching for an appropriate response, but he says never mind, so I turn and leave him alone with his goo-woman. Or maybe not alone. Who am I to judge? Maybe she brings him some comfort out here, out at the edge of this tired rerun of a galaxy.