Flash Fiction: Barnacles

Terrance worked the greyships. That’s what he told boys at the bar.

It wasn’t a lie, and if they imagined he meant something more, like he actually flew them, then that was their fault, not his. Anyway, they were just passing through; they were after exactly the same thing he was.

He filled the fantasies of greyship crew better than one of the genuine, pasty, vacant greyspace jockeys would – they were undernourished and socially underskilled, always staring into elsewhere. They forgot to eat and never talked about anything but the Grey. If you weren’t one of them, you had nothing they were interested in.

Who would want to be with a real greyship crewmember, with that distance and numbness? Ah, but they wanted Terrance... Terrance had the body that manual labour and the gym had granted him. He had the charm of a v-star and the smile to match.

He had originally come to Erewhon Station following a boy. Cameron.

Cam had been looking for work, and when he found it, everything changed.

Terrance was left behind, scraping hulls. He felt a certain affinity with the station that had become his home. The port thrived, but the only permanent residents were a few thousand maintenance and security staff. The station was thirty three kilometres long, conceived as a thriving hub, but its residential areas were vast, hollow, haunted.

Greyships only berthed at Erewhon on the way to brighter stars. While they were in dock Terrance and his fellow hull-monkeys went to work, rappelling down the sides of the mighty behemoths with blowtorches, chemical spray and sickles.

The Grey allowed for faster-than-light travel, but it wasn’t fully understood. It was described as an ocean beneath our level of space-time, and, like an ocean, things lived there; unfathomable things that adhered themselves to greyships and, given time, ate through their hulls.

But in normspace the parasites were inert matter. With the right application of various elements, heat, chemicals, they could be scraped off. It was not a glamorous job. At the end of a shift Terrance would smell of sweat, chemicals and ash; his muscles would be cramped and his eyes puffy despite the mask.

No one appreciated a long, hot shower like a hull-scraper.

That evening, Terrance was too distracted to enjoy the cleansing, steaming water. The greyship Brave Leviathan was in dock, which meant Cameron was here, too.

Terrance towelled his body dry and considered himself in the mirror. He looked deep into his ice blue eyes and searched for motive. He should go to a bar, find someone insignificant and temporary to bring back to his bed, or better yet, just stay home.

But he wouldn’t. He knew he wouldn’t. He would go and see Cameron, even though it would end up with Terrance in tears and Cam attempting some kind of awkward, dispassionate consoling.

They said the Grey changed a person, that once the crew had gazed upon that foreign place their minds became altered by its otherness. They said that greyship crew thought differently, that old motives and emotions were pushed aside by thoughts of the Grey and the new philosophical paradigms that emerged.

The transit companies said a lot of things. They came armed with gigabytes of medical data and excuses, but as long as the crew could fly the ships, arrive on time and on location, the companies didn’t care. They turned a blind eye.

Terrance had watched the change take Cameron; he had felt the distance that grew and grew with each sojourn into greyspace. Eventually the space between them felt greater when they were together than when Cam was off-station. When they broke up, Cam had just nodded, and walked away.

Whenever Terrance saw Cam now, there was some indefinable feeling, scent, aura, that reminded him of the things he scraped from the greyships. And there was something in the depths of Cam’s eyes that studied him.

And Terrance just knew.

Things lived in the Grey, unfathomable things.