Kathrine Schoening's Journals

Having a dream come true in the same event that struck a primal fear within Kathrine. It was a heady experience that caused massive cognitive dissonance and sent her head spinning. In short, she could barely stand up and her head hurt. A lot.

She wasn’t the first human to watch Earth fall away with a speed that their technology hadn’t managed yet. But she was the first non-military, non-governmental person to do it. She was an experiment, and she knew it. If she did well others would follow. If not, the idea of humans taking their first step out of their solar system would die a swift death.

Doing something new scared her, it always had. So she jumped into things with both feet otherwise she never would have entered the competition that earned her a spot on the X’hra, and she would never have left the München-Salzburg Habitable Zone for a rare place at university in Greater New York.

Each and every risk had paid off. This one most of all.

Sitting in the curved window of her suite, a tiny room that barely fit the slightly bigger than normal single bed but also boasted a private bathroom, Kathrine watched her world dwindle to the little blue dot a 20th-century scientist had talked about. She couldn’t remember their name. She was a political science major, not a historian or scientist.

The first few rotations, not days as that was an Earth Term that got her confused looks, were spent being shepherded around the ship. Each rest period her head was spinning with names and faces that were so far away from human they didn’t even trigger the dissociation of the uncanny valley. She was never going to keep it all straight in her head.

Once again sitting in her suite, this time looking out at a teal planet with subtle white rings. With a calming breath she drew out the precious, slightly scuffed, book bound in black, her mother had bought when she had found out she was pregnant with Kathrine. A hold-over from days long past when cutting down trees wasn’t a Capital Offence.

She remembered the story well. Her mother had found the book wedged between two triple-hand books. On her tenth birthday, her mum had handed it over and made Kathrine promise she would save it for something special. A once in a lifetime story for a once in a lifetime event. In the end, it was for a book destined to last several lifetimes.

Setting an equally precious pen to priceless paper, she began to write. The words flowed easily. Descriptions of the species she had met followed a rough sketch of a ship’s map and a hierarchy of the crew.

It became habit. At the start of each rest period, she would write a little. Building a story of people and places that a generation ago would have been quickly shuffled onto the science-fiction shelves and ignored by most. But this was her life. She was following in the footsteps of Marco Polo, Columbus, Vespucci, and Cook. Reading their stories on her tablet connected her to home and to a history that she had been mostly ignorant about.

= + =

Weeks later X’hra settled into orbit around a planet that was home to an outlying colony of the Tsai, one of the founding members of the Federation. The Tsai had been the ones to discover the slowly dying Earth and offer her people a lifeline, a connection to a Federation of alien worlds and peoples that spanned the galaxy. The first rotation after they arrived, Xaer, the Captain and a member of the Tsai, came to her door.

“Mistress Kathrine, would you join me on the surface?”

As a joke, someone had fed the translator-bot Jane Austen. It got old very fast.

“Thanks, Captain. Give me a second?” She could hear the glitch of the translator as it struggled to figure out the colloquialism. “A moment.” She said instead. “To get ready.”

“Of course.”

Politely he closed the door to allow her what privacy was available.

The surface was another wonder amongst a trip of wonders. Little black book clutched in hand, she followed Captain Xaer. The book a safety blanket against the weird and wonderful. Every spare second, of which there were few, she scribbled notes and recorded photo numbers so she would know which beauteous or extraordinary sight went with which note or page of writing.

She was going to run out of pages long before she ran out of things to write about.

Xaer led her into yet another building. All of them glowed where the local double sun hit the pink rock along the graceful curves of the architecture that Earth hadn’t been able to spare the resources for in a century or more.

The promise of the Federation was that Earth would be able to create art and architecture once again.

This building was different though. Instead of the wide, sweeping public buildings where she had endured hours of meet and greets, the room Xaer had pulled her into was small and dark. Intimate, where the other buildings had been coldly official.

Rows and rows of shelves were crammed into the space.

“It is a shop of knowledge and learning,” Xaer explained. He waved a dainty talon at the book she had been clutching all day. “Your record keeper is almost full. You should get another.”

It was a capacity for kindness that the Tsai hadn’t shown before. Whether through a need to hold to professionalism while working, or just uncertainty about the human who had been dropped amongst his crew, he had always been coolly polite, but also distant.

He left her to browse, but only after pressing a pay card into her hand. Going on his own way, he disappeared down an aisle of books on astrophysics. She wandered off, winding her way through stacks on everything from history to fiction to children’s hologram discs.

In the very back of the shop, two bookcases were filled with blank notebooks, some looked almost the same as hers would have looked two decades or more ago, while others were just stacks of paper tied together with string. Still more were bound in everything from leather to thin sheets of metal unlike anything she had seen before.

Running her fingers across the smooth bindings, she eventually settled on one that was the new and unused twin of her current journal. Turning the little book over in her hands, she sighed and pulled two more down. She didn’t know when she would have a chance to buy a new journal, she would just have to find a way to pay Xaer back for the expense.

Having made her purchase, she went back out into the sun to wait, soaking up the fresh air and bright light after weeks in the recycled environment of the ‘ship and a lifetime in the carefully controlled habitats of Earth.

“Have you had sufficient time?” Xaer appeared beside her. For such a tall creature, covered in so many chinking scales, he could move quietly when he wanted. Or perhaps the sounds of so many people, something that had started to fade from memory on the quiet and sparsely populated ship, had covered his approach.

“Yes, thanks.”

They fell into easy conversation as he led her back to the spaceport. They were only scheduled to stay for the movement part of a rotation. She grinned to herself. With the artificial conditions on the ship it was easier to use their jargon instead of the Earth terms.

= + =

The months and years, or partial orbits and orbits, passed quickly. One wondrous planet followed another. She filled her journals and more besides, with tales of the unbelievable things she saw. Some planets weren’t as kind to Kathrine as the first had been, the inhabitants scared of the newest members of the Federation, who were still shaking off their war-torn past.

The fear of outsiders was a sadly familiar experience. Her fellow students at university in Greater New York had reacted with similar suspicion as the people of Bishque. But for every planet that feared her, there were three that welcomed humanity with curiosity and generosity. Offering knowledge and resources to fix the mistakes her people had made.

The six and a quarter Earth years, or five Federation Orbits, that the mission lasted passed seemingly unnoticed. The time lost to the wonders of an ever-expanding universe. She missed home in a distant obligatory sort of way, but the constant distraction of the trip meant it was a far off consideration.

It was only watching her home planet grow out of the darkness of space that a strong pang of homesickness struck, but Kathrine wasn’t hiding in her suite this time. She stood on the deck of the X’hra surrounded by friends instead of strangers.

= + =

Her homecoming was almost as crazy as her departure had been. While the latter had been a whirlwind, it had seemed as if the time between being contacted about winning the worldwide competition to join the X’hra to going through training to watching the Earth fall away had been only minutes, if not seconds.

Her return was slow motion snippets of time. The slow growth of the little blue dot into a planet filled to bursting with people. Stepping out of the landing pod for the last time to see her mother waiting for her with tears in her eyes and Xaer standing at her back as a close friend instead of a coldly distant stranger. Her mother looked the same but different. Old, Kathrine realised with a pang. Not just older, that she had expected, but old. The formal greetings and press interviews followed in a slideshow of makeup people and lights invasive questions and images from her own records.

It only slowed down, or sped up, to a normal pace when she was settled in her mother’s living room with a cup of tea and her mother’s calm presence.

“I finally found a use for it,” Kathrine said into the silence, holding out the now very ragged book that had spawned twelve others in the end.

Her mother was the first to read it, accepting it carefully. Or really, Xaer was the first. He had enjoyed seeing how she viewed his universe and added notes and his own observations. They were for herself and her family to get a glimpse into her time away. It was her story.

Until her mother interfered.

Two weeks after arriving home, the bell rang through the small apartment. Kathrine didn’t want to answer it. The press had figured out where her mum lived and had been trying to catch her. So far she had avoided them.

“Kitty can you get that?” Her mum’s voice rang out from the kitchen. She was up to something, Kathrine was only ‘Kitty’ when her mum wanted something or was trying to trick her.

That didn’t mean she didn’t knowingly walk into whatever it was. The man on the other side of the door was a stranger. Neatly pressed suit and crazy hair.

“Hello?”

“Ms Shoening? My name is Pieta. May we talk inside?” He smiled benignly.

“No. Who are you?” She wasn’t convinced he wasn’t press.

“I am a publishing agent with Maulwurf and Vokal. Mrs Shoening sent us your book.”

Her book? What. Oh. That book.

“Please come in. Excuse me for a minute.” She left him in the living room to join her mum in the kitchen. “How dare you.” She hissed.

“The story deserves to be read.” was all she said before shoving her back into the living room, full tea tray in hand.

= + =

“Ms Shoening?” Pieta’s voice echoed down the phone line six months later. “I am calling to discuss a second print. The first sold-out in less than a day and the Federation has already agreed to the sale of the materials for a run of twenty thousand….