Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(23)

Shouldn’t I have felt something? he asked himself. But when he asked one of the cargo ship’s crew if it was natural to feel nothing out of the ordinary, the man laughed. “It’s natural to turn green and live on soda crackers or dry toast for a week, that’s what’s natural.”

“That didn’t happen to me at all, and this is my first voyage.”

“You must be heroically lucky. Like all the idiots in the stories, who get the help of some fairy because they pulled a thorn out of the fairy’s ass, or something like that.”

Dabeet assured him that there was no fairy—or fata, or djinn, or leprechaun.

The man smiled at that. “Well, nausea or not, work at getting your space legs. It takes several years to stop lurching around like a drunk. Though children may learn faster. Good luck.”

In the shuttle from Earth to the Moon, there had been a strict requirement that everybody stay belted in. In the cargo ship, there was room for him to move around and practice flying. He wouldn’t arrive in Fleet School without being competent enough at zero-gee to avoid the scorn of the other kids.

It was only as the cargo ship approached its docking station alongside Fleet School that it occurred to Dabeet that there was no reason for him to have a natural immunity to space sickness. It was one of the crewmen on the vessel, who kept asking him if he was in any kind of distress. “Are you sure this is your first space voyage?”

“I think I would have noticed,” said Dabeet.

The man laughed. “I guess so. But everybody feels nauseated the first time they go into freefall. The human body just isn’t designed to feel OK like that. The kids raised out in the belts, in the Miner families—they get over it when they’re infants. They learn to float and grab before they can walk. But you’ve lived your whole life on Earth.”

“As long as I can remember,” said Dabeet. “I have a very good memory.”

“You remember being a baby?” asked the man.

Dabeet smiled, and the man clapped him on the shoulder and floated away. But the question bothered him. What was his earliest memory? Was it possible that he had once lived in space? Perhaps Mother didn’t even know about it. But if he had been in space as an infant, would he still be acclimated to freefall?

If Graff was telling the truth—a huge if—then there wasn’t time for him to have lived in space. So was there another reason he might be immune to the nausea of freefall?

Being Amerindian might be part of it. Didn’t they use some norteamericano tribe to build skyscrapers? Navahos? Or was that just the code-talking in World War II? No, it was Iroquois, mostly Mohawk, who worked on skyscrapers, because those were the Native Americans who lived near Manhattan during the early days of skyscraper-building. And it wasn’t that they weren’t afraid of falling, it’s that they learned from an early age not to show fear.

Besides, this wasn’t about fear of falling. This was about being in freefall, which is something which, on Earth, you don’t live through, because it means you already fell from a high place. You fall from a skyscraper frame, you don’t have time on the way down to the ground to even notice whether, in addition to terror, you’re also feeling sick to your stomach.

Dabeet had never heard of Amerindians having some kind of immunity to motion sickness or freefall nausea—and he would remember, if he had ever read it. He also had never heard that everyone was susceptible to it. In fact, he knew that in the old days of ocean-going ships, some people never got over seasickness completely, even on the largest, most stable ships, while others quickly adapted.

But that was the point. They adapted. They felt the nausea, and then they got over it. Did anybody not feel the nausea?

Me. I don’t feel it. Yet my balancing organs function properly—I don’t fall over or bump into things. So I’m sensing all the balance issues that other people feel. I’m simply not bothered by them.

Why am I fretting about this so much? Why is this capturing my thought?

Because there’s something important about this. Some question that is answered by my immunity to freefall nausea.

Dabeet closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift. His immediate thought was that closing his eyes should have made the discomfort of freefall worse—it was well known that the best self-treatment for seasickness was to focus on the distant horizon, not the pitching deck or the nearby waves. And dancers were able to remain vertical through long spins by focusing on a single point and finding it again the moment they could whip their heads around on the next spin. Yet closing his eyes had no effect on him.

He allowed a piece of music to enter his mind. He had long ago learned to enter a meditative state by rejecting his own conscious control of his thoughts. He had noticed that when he became aware of music playing in the back of his mind, it was a fully-scored orchestra or mariachi band or pop ensemble, all the instruments playing with all the rhythms and harmonies. But as soon as he tried to take conscious control of the music, or even follow it closely, thinking about it, all that fullness faded and what was left was the single melody line of his attention.

So he had trained himself to let his mind go, without consciously controlling his thoughts, and resist the temptation to examine those thoughts closely. He needed to let the music come up from his unconscious and continue to move forward in its fullness, its intricate interconnectedness, and be aware of it without paying attention to it.