Zaliel
It had been a few weeks since Zaliel had faked her own grizzly murder to get a rise out of Amanda and no retaliation had occurred. In fact, Amanda was more attentive and helpful both at work and in their apartment than usual.
She’s definitely plotting something, she thought. But, as the days went by and nothing happened, Zaliel slowly started to forget, falling back into the comfortable rhythm of sleep, work, and rest. Rhythm was good. As a scientist, she liked accurate predictions. It allowed her to feel as though the universe operated on a consistent, reliable schedule.
Pulsars were her favorite: like stellar lighthouses, they spun quietly in the sky. Compact stars, they emitted beams of electromagnetic radiation from their poles. Some were crazy fast, rotating in milliseconds while others spun at the leisurely pace of a few seconds. She had studied them extensively before joining Starfleet and the Academy had only encouraged her to pursue that passion.
The hardest part was the cultural stuff. Soft sciences be damned, people were unpredictable messes that no reliable model of certainty could be devised.
As a Trill, Zaliel often felt uncertain with Humans. Though they were very similar to her physically, they were also very different, with gestures and phrases that she wasn’t prepared for—and neither was her translator.
Fortunately, Amanda was a good teacher of Human custom, even if she drank and fraternized a little too often for Zaliel’s taste. That was okay, she was fine with that; even if the most Zaliel could manage was living vicariously through Amanda’s stories of daring and dating, that was “okie-dokie” as long as she had her routine of sleep, work, and rest.
That wasn’t to say Zaliel was uninterested in sex, romance, and really wild things. Rather, those concepts were complex and difficult to manage. People were unpredictable and handling them took two key components that she lacked: the confidence to act and the will to be vulnerable. It was only in those extreme moments, when the music was just right and the energy of the crowd crackled like electricity, that she felt like it was possible to let go of timidity and embrace primal liberation.
Despite what she might feel in those moments, there existed this underlying anxiety that what she had would never be interesting to them. Oh, certainly there were people solely interested in her for her spots—her parents were quick to warn her again and again, even years after she had moved to Earth. Despite Earth’s post-scarcity utopia, there were still objects of scarcity—and non-Human partners were one of them. She had expressed this concern to Amanda once who laughed and sang loudly that she should just, “FLAUNT IT GIRLFRIEND;” whatever that meant.
But all these things she thought and felt and experienced never seemed to be a priority. She didn’t travel all this way to go out and party. She did it to—why am I here?
“I dunno,” Amanda said. They were at their usual table in the holo-booth café. “Why is anyone anywhere doing anything?” she asked, waving a hand to sweep the entire café, or perhaps universe .
“I mean,” Zaliel paused for a moment, “From a cosmic perspective we—,” but Amanda shook her head like a worldly professor teaching her new apprentice.
“You’re thinking too big, when you should get small: all carbon-based life is built on the principles of cellular reproduction: cells live and thrive, eventually becoming specialized components of a larger organism, until finally we have you and me.”
“Uh-huh,” Zaliel nodded, a hot cup of tea in her hands.
“From birth, an organism’s goal is to reproduce before they die. You exist because the chain of life stretches back and back and back to the moment the first proteins came together to make the first organism; ultimately, you exist to make other versions of yourself and/or ensure the continuation of social constructs which permit life to thrive, such as serving in Starfleet and giving me the rest of your Danish.”
“I appreciate your ‘or,’” Zaliel said, her cheeks having pinked during their conversation. She slid her Danish toward Amanda, who did not pick it up right away.
“It’s true,” Amanda replied quickly and earnestly. “While primitive cultures might hold certain expectations for their different or divergent genders, we know that those so-called roles only served to oppress and constrict. We,” she said firmly, gesturing to include Zaliel, “know better; you don’t have to have kids to be valid, damn whatever expectations anyone else has for you.”
“But you just said that my purpose is to uphold social constructs which promote life. Isn’t my position on children in conflict with that?” Zaliel asked in a voice she hoped was academic. She hadn’t expected the lecture to become so personal—or maybe she did, in the hopes Amanda would sooth the gnawing feeling in the back her mind, the hopes she dashed when she left Trill—but she also knew and trusted Amanda enough to go down this path without fear.
“Hell! No!” she slapped the table with each punctuation. “Because you also have free will and a life of your own. When we talk about this stuff from a group perspective, of course we say, ‘evolution demands we reproduce whether we like it or not;’ however, when we consider an individual we have to endow them with certain rights, otherwise women would be nothing more than brood-sows and men little more than sperm factories.” She picked up the Danish, signaling that she had made her point. “And I’m not entirely unconvinced of the latter.”
“Okay, so, from an individual perspective, why am I here? What’s my purpose?” Zaliel asked, trying to steer the conversation back to her original existential question.
“The fuck if I know,” Amanda replied, her mouth full as she chewed on the Danish greedily. “But seriously, only you can answer that, Z,” she added after a moment of reflection and hard swallow, chased with orange juice. “We can answer your relationship to the universe from a biological, chemical, physical, and spatial perspective and none of those explanations defines why you are you, or why you feel the way you do.”
Zaliel took a sip of her tea. “How do you answer those questions about yourself?”
Amanda smiled broadly. “I don’t.”
“You don’t think about your place in the cosmos?” Zaliel asked, raising her best academic eyebrow.
“Presently? Pasadena, California, Earth, Sol, Sector 001, Beta Quadrant, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, Observable Universe.” She picked at the Danish as she listed each cosmological factor aloud, gently pulling it apart so the frosting, cheese, and pastry were more or less separate. The display reminded her of children who pulled the wings off flies; Zaliel pushed the uncomfortable thought away while Amanda went on:
“Here we have a dissected Danish, each piece delicious in its own right, but we don’t eat just the frosting, then filling, then pastry right? No, I mean we could,” she added quickly, “But for this argument, we don’t. So,” Amanda took a deep breath, “Your existence is really the intersection of a lot of things. First, we have the Universe,” and she set the pastry on the table between them. “This is the physical reality you live in. Then we add all the beauty and horrors that culture provides.” Here she added the filling, squishing it haphazardly onto the flaking crust. “Finally we have—,” but Zaliel interrupted and added, “And I’m the frosting, right? Sweet of you to say.”
“Nope!” Amanda exclaimed, triumphant . “The sugar would be entropy; the slow decay of the cosmos—which would be a much better analogy if tooth decay were still a thing.”
“Tooth what?”
“Never mind that. So, do you see what I’m saying about you?” Amanda asked, retrieving a fork from the table’s dispenser.
“You didn’t say anything about me, just environmental factors,” Zaliel protested.
“That’s the point,” she said, cutting a piece of Danish. She was kind enough to offer the first piece to Zaliel who waved it away.
Zaliel leaned back, took a long pull from her teacup, and said. “I don’t matter.”
“To me?” Amanda smiled. “The world, Z, but cosmically? No one does, not really. You know this better than anyone, right?”
“Proton decay means eventually yes, all matter in the universe becomes less than nothing; not even black holes will remain.”
“And that’s why I don’t worry about this stuff,” Amanda chewed, a hand in front of her face. With a swallow she added, “Because you taught me not to.”
Amanda’s last sentence on the topic haunted Zaliel for the rest of the day. She stared at her terminal, the cursor blinking quietly, steadily, like a pulsar in the evening sky. She sat half-paying attention through meetings, speaking only when directly addressed. At the end of a seemingly unending day, she lay on her bed, now staring at the ceiling; a projection of stars as they would appear over her parent’s home, light years away. The room’s speakers piped the sweet sounds of rural insects and animals from Trill.
“Maybe I’m homesick,” Zaliel said aloud. She glanced at a clock on her nightstand, did a little math, and sighed. “Computer,” she called.
A pleasant chime informed her to continue.
“Call,” she paused for a moment of thought, which became a feeling of doubt, settling on guilt. She thought about talking to her dad; he had a way of unwinding the knot in her stomach that made her miss the only other world she’d known. But, it was more than that tonight. The thought of a quaint country cottage filled with her father’s paintings and mother’s technical manuals
It was years since she had been there last and though her parents kept in regular correspondence, now that she had graduated, the steady stream of messages slowed. Zaliel opined if this was just part of becoming an adult: parents and children alike withdraw into their own lives. Considering they spent eighteen years raising her, Zaliel figured they could use the break. Maybe, she reasoned, maybe I shouldn’t call for this—at least until I know what to say.
**
That night, Zaliel’s dreams were scattered and disturbing. She woke often, spun enough to create electricity, and sweat through two sets of pajamas. The effect was to leave her useless the next morning; a zombie who stumbled into the apartment’s common area, blearily barked at the replicator with a horse throat, and stalked back to her room without so much as a glance to the couch for fear she might catch Amanda’s worried face looking back at her.
She didn’t care, except she did, but she also didn’t all at once. Entropy was going to consume everything anyways, right?
Fuck it.
And so, feeling as though she had been dragged backwards through an entire hedge maze, Zaliel sat on her bed for a good mope. She sat, taking long dregs of coffee, and feeling sorry for herself.
A chime alerted her to an incoming call. She looked, sighed, and gave the command to accept it.
“Z? Are you coming?” Amanda shouted over the sounds of music and talking. It was audio-only, which was a little unusual, but Zaliel was grateful Amanda couldn’t see her.
“Coming where? Work? I’m taking a personal day,” she yawned.
“Yeah, duh, because it’s Sunday, Zaliel,” her roommate replied. “You slept through Saturday.”
Zaliel blinked several times and looked at her clock: Sunday. That explained why her mouth was so dry and head felt like sludge. “What’s Sunday?” she asked, trying to remember what she might have agreed to that would demand an early rise.
“It’s either the last or first day of the week, depending on who you ask,” she shouted. “But that’s not important right now. It’s Donavan’s Birthday Party slash cookout slash get your spotted ass over here before I end my career because I drowned this man in the atrocity that is a vinegar-based barbecue sauce.”
“Huh?”
“You, Zaliel, me Amanda. Sunday plans, Raleigh.”
“I’m not—,” she looked at her clothes hanging on the bar of her open closet; the party dresses she had because she liked them, but rarely saw the light of day. She could feel them calling to her, a chance to break out of the cycle: sleep, work, rest—where rest meant to read, or watch, or idly scroll through holos of cute animals. She heard the sounds of silverware scrapping and wine glasses tapping, and laughter. Come with us, they called. Come be who you’ve always wanted to be.
Zaliel wanted to go, to be like Amanda, but the allure of her bed was too strong, like a Siren it pulled her down, down, down into the depths of slumber. The dreams took her, the dresses gathered dust, and Amanda, well, Amanda was pissed.
“You totally ditched me,” Amanda said the next morning on the walk to work. The pair strolled in the cool San Francisco morning. “James Donovan is, by far, the most boringest man on this planet—possibly in this entire sector—and I had to endure him alone.”
“Why didn’t you talk to someone else from the department?” Zaliel asked, feeling both ashamed and defensive. She didn’t want to leave her friend in the lurch, but she also didn’t appreciate Amanda’s sharp tone.
She rolled her eyes and gave Zaliel an annoyed look. “They were smart enough to bring their partners; I was the only one flying solo—except Donavan himself so guess who he spent the whole party clinging to.”
Zaliel frowned. “He wasn’t, um, inappropriate was he?”
“Ha! Not unless you call cooking a steak well-done and slathering it with vinegar ‘inappropriate.’”
Zaliel had observed over the years that Amanda had several very specific and passionate positions about food. She didn’t always understand this, but Amanda’s food fury made her smile.
“I don’t know what that means,” Zaliel admitted, “But, to be clear, you’re upset at Donavan because he cooked a streak?”
“No, Z, I’m upset with you because we had a deal and you slept through an entire weekend and came out of it looking worse than when you went in.” She placed a hand on Zaliel’s arm and stopped so they could look each other in the eye. “What’s going on with you?”
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“Bullshit,” Amanda pressed. “You haven’t done that in years.” She lowered her voice, “Not since—,”
Zaliel hushed her quickly. “Why yes, ensign, that’s an excellent idea,” she said a little too loudly as a pair of officers walked by. When the cost was clear, she dropped to a hushed tone. “I, um, I’m not sure,” Zaliel admitted under the weight of Amanda’s gaze. She clung to the strap of her small leather satchel and unconsciously brushed a hand over it, feeling for the weight of her big PADD, hypo, and few odds and ends she sometimes needed. Their presence was familiar, stabilizing.
“The existential questions, your mood, the whole pigeon thing,” Amanda pressed.
“That was an accident,” she replied flatly. “I thought they could talk. Like penguins.”
“Parakeets.”
“Whatever,” Zaliel sighed with exasperation.
Amanda offered a sympathetic smile. “You know you can talk to me, right?”
“I will—once I know what to say.” If they had been somewhere more private than the Headquarters Concourse, maybe Zaliel would have sat with Amanda and picked at her emotions until they figured out what it was, if anything specific, that was bugging her. But, they were in public and there was too much noise and too many people. Zaliel nodded again, turned, and walked smartly to the security checkpoint, leaving Amanda standing alone among all the noise.
Amanda shook her head. “What am I going to do with her? Maybe Ben’s right: hiking or something new to shake things up that’ll—OH HEY MIGA!” uhg, what a weirdo.