Excerpt: Bubbler

Kas woke irritably, blinking and rolling his eyes against the brightness of the lights and the acceleration pressure of the perflourocarbon filling the room. As always, his first thought was angry: it’s not water.

He frowned. Why are the lights on?

Maith’s voice filled the room, drifting from the speakers as she helped him loosen his netting.

“Ser Joans will not awaken, young master Salipoor. He is having a nightmare. Shall I touch him?”

Kas looked across at his soon-to-be-erstwhile bunkmate, a standard-type human still twitching and straining against his netting, veins in his reddening face beginning to swell. Do, he signed with an affirming nod, slowly squeezing a breath of the fluid from his lungs.

She turned, swimming the short distance across the room to rescue the frightened young sleeper. Kas grumped at the body sheath she’d taken to wearing while Cayleb Joans was aboard and might see her – not for modesty, to which she’d never been conditioned, but for the young human’s comfort. Maith was modified, but was modeled after them, the standard type most common across the Dominion, though small and pale and lithe and perfect…so much more like Cayleb than himself, though Cay was darker than either of them by many shades.

He brooded and watched her trying to wake the dry-breather. A bubbler like himself, unable to breathe real water, but from a whole race where such a thing was considered normal…

Mom?
He was little again, maybe seven, trying to walk to the duty station where his mother usually sat her shift watching monitors. The hall was familiar, but reverted in memory to gargantuan scale. He moved his feet, always sure and steady in the familiar rotation, but now they only drifted in the strange, not-quite-weightlessness of an absurdly heavy medium.
He was afloat, and baffled. Mom?
He couldn’t speak. His throat was full of water. His lungs were full of it, his sinuses, his ears.
He panicked, but he couldn’t scream.

“Ser Joans. Cayleb Joans. You must wake, ser Joans. You are safe. You are not drowning, ser Joans.”

Maith managed to get the netting off him, and free him into the room. He immediately bobbed to the ceiling just a little too near the door, where he might have bobbed up into the real water, though there was still no danger; he’d have to take the netting off the hole, go through it, and then turn himself upside-down for his lungs to begin to empty of the oxygenated fluid fast enough to matter. Even so, she followed him up to help him calm down, though the rap on his skull when he impacted the ceiling did more than the soft drone of her voice.

Kas began to sign irritably. Maith’s voice translated over the speakers, freakishly morphing into Kas’ own.

“My master asks: What’s wrong with you, Cay? By the damned, there’s only one chamber fitted for us on this bottle, so unless you want to sleep up on the command decks, you need to stop it!” Kas rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his webbed hands before he continued. “And before you think you’re going to try that, those are full of crew running around doing ship stuff, and they’re too busy to have you sprawled underfoot. Damned! Take care of him.” She translated the last as well as all the rest, though it was directed to her.

He let go of his own net and drifted up as well, though not as fast as Cayleb. Standard humans were lighter than Hydrans, and could hardly stand more than superficial pressure changes. Yet I’m the handicapped one, he though bitterly. He sucked his lungs full before he opened the door netting and bobbed up into the next room, leaving Maith to take care of Cay. He heard her switch back to her own voice to sooth him, dutifully treating him to the dressing Kas usually received himself. The light shining up from the bedroom below lit this room. Kas could feel the lesser weight of true water around him, the difference in the way it stuck to his skin. He breathed out just a little of the PFC fluid to make some room and felt it running slowly down his chin and chest and crotch, headed surely for the slightly sloped floor which would drain it back into the bedroom for reprocessing.

Real water, he thought. He knew it wasn’t really from Hydra’s seas, but was carefully constituted to be a clean and healthy approximation, plus a few harmless agents to help the life support system. In here it was cool to his skin, comfortable. He tasted the salt on his tongue as he breathed it in carefully, just a shallow breath to savor, though he didn’t pull it in far enough to reach his lungs. Real water. This is what my father is breathing in his room. He set his jaw and closed his inner lids, then slowly slid his true eyelids down over the nictitating membranes, swallowed reflexively. My father, Ra Salipoor Den, statesman and exemplar of our planet’s people…appointed Delegate for the planet of Hydra to the Federal Dominion Collegium, and last of the great gen Salipoor but for me, Den Salipoor Kas, his handicapped, bubbler son. Alas, how the mighty have fallen.