Pearl Anniversary
Content Warning (click to expand)
violence
by Deneffew Gordon
Waking Captain Grflrm out of a dead sleep means taking your life in your hands. No hyperbole. The captain hadn’t answered two pages and three door chimes, so the executive officer — a Delebian with abnormally long tentacles around his face — nodded for me to go in. I’m one of the few humans on the crew, and therefore one of the only ones quick enough to wake the captain without being disemboweled. And in a crisis, well, we all have to risk disembowelment now and then.
I lowered the lights as I entered. The captain is Baric, and Barics are nocturnal by nature. Except for the obligatory company desk, the cabin had no furnishings, only piles of wood shavings. His sleeping den had been converted from the wardrobe, and stood on the far wall. “Captain?” I caught my voice trembling. “Captain? It’s Lieutenant Bakker. We need you, Captain.”
No response. Naturally. I crept up to the sleeping den. His brown fur moved as he breathed. He slept with his paws over his face, his shoulder protruding slightly through the open door.
I reached out and gave the shoulder a poke.
The captain roared. I leapt back just as his three-inch claws swiped.
“Captain, you’re needed,” I called over the sound of his angry snorts.
The captain’s enormous frame reared up inside the sleeping den. His snout and teeth emerged into the light, snarling.
“Captain! Wake up!” I shouted. If he didn’t awaken fully but got to his feet, I wouldn’t be fast enough to get away before he mauled me.
The captain hesitated. He blinked twice, and then shifted to a company-approved posture. “What is it, Lieutenant?” he asked groggily, his mouth barely moving. Barics make human speech sounds down in their throat.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” I said, “but it’s an emergency.”
He squeezed out the narrow door and stood over me, smelling faintly of ammonia and musk as he instinctively scratched behind his ears with his front claws. “What’s wrong?”
I wanted to run for the door, but I held my ground. “The guests of honor, sir,” I said. “They’re unhappy.”
• • •
On newer ships, there’s an override. On regular cruises, the guests of honor are brought on board a few days early and coached. In other careers, illusions don’t assault you on a daily basis.
The Pearl was designed for human passengers, which is why there are so few human crewmembers on board. Unlike the alien crewmembers, the dozen or so of us who are there to give the passengers a human to interact with also get caught up in the illusions the neuro-holo net continually puts out. The illusions occur in all the public spaces, affect every human within line of sight, and feel completely solid and real. It can be a very confusing job.
When there’s no guest of honor, the walls, floor, and ceiling are a checkerboard of tiny holographic projection surfaces. The V.I.P. section today had long metal blades pointed ominously at anyone brave enough to walk through the corridor. Illusory humans continually appeared and hurled both insults and objects at us. I instinctively dodged as a butcher knife spiraled toward my head. Captain Grflrm, who couldn’t see it, didn’t even blink.
The Pearl was one of the company’s first ships, launched in its first year in business, and by today’s standards fairly primitive. Nonetheless, it was selected for the company’s special 30th Anniversary promotion — deeply discounted tickets were sold to married people celebrating their 30th anniversary, and one lucky couple was selected at random as the guests of honor. Our pleasure cruises are all designed around the guests of honor, of course. Normally they’re star athletes, popular artists, porn stars, and other types of celebrities the company can be sure will fill a ship full of lower-class passengers who want to experience what it’s like to be in the guest of honor’s inner circle.
The captain pressed the buzzer on cabin #1.
Up the corridor a few doors, an ugly woman with a pointed hat appeared, pointing at me and cackling. As I stared, her eyes turned to flame and snakes emerged from her throat.
“Another illusion?” the captain asked.
I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the hag.
“Ignore it,” the captain said. “It can’t injure you.”
“Yeah,” I said, “But it can still hurt.”
I was still staring at the hissing snakes when the cabin door opened. An elegant woman of about 50 stood there, tawny hair immaculately styled into a severe helmet around her angular features — features that oddly resembled the illusory hag.
“Good evening, Mrs. Aberforth,” the captain said, his neck stretching oddly as he struggled to minimize his accent. “I’m Captain Grflrm. This is Lieutenant…”
“Bakker,” I supplied.
“…Part of our hospitality crew,” the captain said. “We were wondering if we could speak to you and your husband.”
Mrs. Aberforth arched a carefully trimmed eyebrow. “Of course,” she said, stepping aside.
We had been in space for less than a day, and already the front room of the cabin had developed two personalities. One couch stood immaculately clean. The other had a suitcase on it with a man’s clothing exploding out of it. Half the table shone as if freshly polished, the other half contained tipping piles of memory cards and beaten-up writing styluses under a pile of dirty dishes and crumbs. “Wilbur, the captain is here,” Mrs. Aberforth called out.
Mr. Aberforth emerged, unshaven, from the bedroom, wearing only a bathrobe that he hadn’t bothered to tie, his white-hair-covered belly protruding out in front of his stooped form as he shuffled along. “Oh, my,” he said, “this really is an honor.”
I nudged the captain and pointed at my face, pulling my mouth back into a smile. The captain cocked his head to study me before figuring out what I meant. He pulled his own mouth back into what approximated a smile, but never quite got past the “pained grimace” stage.
“Mr. and Mrs. Aberforth,” the captain said, “the reason we came here is, well, why don’t you like each other?”
When I remembered to pry my face out from behind my palms, the Aberforths still stood flabbergasted. “Please bear with the captain,” I said. “Barics express things very differently from humans.”
Mrs. Aberforth forced a smile. “Of course.”
“Captain,” I said, “maybe if we explain the nature of the problem…”
“Ah, yes, yes,” the captain said, shifting his enormous weight from foot to foot. It’s uncomfortable for Barics to stand for long periods of time, but it was important to the company that the captain not be seen inviting himself to sit on the floor in front of passengers. “The Pearl‘s neuro-holo network creates illusions based on your unique, specific psyche.”
The Aberforths nodded blankly.
“And right now,” the captain roared, “all the guests are hiding in their cabins afraid you’re going to attack them again!”
I threw my hands up and tried again. “Your hostility toward each other, the fact that you’re unhappy, it’s creating violent and frightening illusions. We’d like to help you—”
Mrs. Aberforth rounded on her husband. “See? I told you that attitude of yours would be trouble.”
“Me?” Mr. Aberforth protested with a cruel chuckle. “You’re the one who’s the Ice Queen of Neptune!”
“Enough!” the captain roared. Both Aberforths glared at him. He twisted his mouth into his faux smile again. “Now, the upshot of this is that you’re both in danger of ruining this cruise for everyone, if you don’t cooperate.”
Mrs. Aberforth folded her arms defiantly. Mr. Aberforth spoke first. “What do you need us to do?”
The captain let a growl grow in his throat before he ordered. “Join me for breakfast!”
• • •
The captain looked like he wanted nothing more than to curl up in his sleeping den and fade into wake-me-on-pain-of-death immobility. Instead of a chair, he sat on a raised platform at the captain’s table, his back to the enormous windows. His place had been modified to hold two long troughs of food and water right at the edge of the table. The end result was that when he sat up to speak, he towered godlike over everyone else in the room, and when he stooped over to eat the effect was one of a giant, snarling animal crawling onto the table to steal your meal.
Mrs. Aberforth picked politely at her eggs and pancakes. Mr. Aberforth shoveled serving after serving into his mouth at such a rate I wondered if he was competing with the captain. I sat to the captain’s right, my own plate perilously close to the water trough.
The captain reared up to a sitting position again, strips of raw meat hanging from his teeth. “So tell me, Mrs. Aberforth. How did the two of you meet?”
The question was right out of our passenger counseling handbook. He’d probably spent the night reading it. The objective was to help defuse a fight between two passengers by getting them to think back to the good times.
“It was an arranged marriage,” Mrs. Aberforth said. “Our parents wanted to merge their business interests, but the shareholders kept voting down the mutual takeover bids.”
The insides of my palms suddenly seemed a much better thing to be staring at.
“Humans still do that?” the captain asked.
“No,” I said, not looking up. “The couple still has to consent.”
“She wasn’t so bad looking back then,” Mr. Aberforth said.
I looked up in time to see Mrs. Aberforth shrug. “He had a large house. It’s not like I was going to have a hard time avoiding him. Plus, finding a man my family approved of had proven surprisingly difficult.”
The captain looked at me pleadingly. The next question in the playbook was supposed to be, “What first drew you together?” but clearly in this case even the captain realized that would be a misstep.
“Were there good times?” I asked.
Mr. Aberforth stopped eating. They both looked at each other. “No,” they said in unison.
The captain rose sharply, shoving the table so hard that my plate was replaced by his trough. “Bakker! Make them like each other!”
• • •
Fortunately, the non-human crewmembers realized the fire raging through the corridors on B-deck was an illusion before I ejected the passengers in life pods. Unfortunately, I had already activated the fire-suppression system and did damage to furniture and equipment equaling about ten times my annual salary.
I went down to the computer core to tell the captain what I had done. I found him sitting in front of the primary neuro-holo net interface, all four paws wrapped around it. It was about the size of a human, a simple box molded into the floor, with several steel control cables snaking out of it. The captain had the larges cable in his teeth, gnawing.
“Captain, I was just fooled by an illusion and pulled the foam-and-water release on B-deck. I’ve got 120 guests I need to relocate and it’s going to require a refit of a good chunk of the deck.”
“That’s O.K.,” the captain said through the cable. “After this cruise I’m ordering us into spacedock anyway. We have to have a manual override installed on this bloody thing.”
Newer ships are required by law to have a manual override, but older ships didn’t have to be retrofitted and the company, of course, was loath to spend the money doing so.
“We have a cruise scheduled right after this one for that fantasy roleplaying company,” I said.
“I’ll cancel it! This is a safety issue!” the captain roared, spitting out the cable. “This damned thing is tougher than a diamond in a quartz vein!”
“Can we interrupt the individual projectors?” I asked.
“We’d finish about the time we dock.” The captain stood up. “What is with that couple anyway? Why are they still married?”
I shrugged. “Unhappy couples stay together for a lot of reasons. Financial security, a belief that divorce is wrong, or just habit.”
“Habit,” the captain said. “They’re in the habit of hating each other and it just hasn’t occurred to them they’d be happier ending it?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “Humans do a lot of dysfunctional things, and getting out of one dysfunctional situation, we often just put ourselves right into a similar one.”
“Humans are stupid then!” The captain leaned against the neuro-holo net interface and tried to tip it over, his snout contorting with the effort. It was built into the floor, and wasn’t going to move without taking the deck with it.
“Human intelligence is pattern-oriented,” I said, moving over beside the captain and making a token effort to help him push. “Familiar patterns, even unpleasant ones, are comfortable for us. Doing something that would actually be better for us is frightening and unknown, so we fall back into the pattern.”
“They’re comfortable hating each other,” the captain said.
“Essentially, yes,” I said. “You do know this isn’t moving, don’t you?”
“Then push harder,” the captain said.
“But see,” I said, “You’re doing the Baric equivalent right now. Your default is to push until something gives. You’re smart. You can respond differently if the situation calls for it. But, still, you fall into a default pattern.”
“It makes me feel better,” the captain grunted.
“Exactly,” I said. “I’ve seen how Barics interact. Always snarling and snapping. For us, that’s hostility. For you, you’re enjoying it. Different creatures are just comfortable with different things. Even being miserable.”
“When Barics snarl and snap, we don’t make all the passengers panic!”
Actually, they did, but I didn’t tell the captain that. “Well the Aberforths are like human Barics, then.”
“Not Baric enough!” the captain roared.
I laughed. “Maybe not. It certainly wouldn’t hurt their marriage any if they were more Baric.”
The captain stopped pushing and twisted his head to look at me. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said. “That’s probably the best advice anyone has ever given me.”
“What?”
“I need to speak to the Aberforths!”
He ran out of the room on all fours, and the loud crash of a food cart told me he’d rounded the corner into the passenger cabins with his usual grace.
• • •
I wish I had been there for the captain’s conversation with the Aberforths, because I’m sure it was glorious. Imagine trying to convince a couple like that to enjoy their hostility more. That’s Baric logic.
But within an hour the corridors and common areas had become a carnival of dunk tanks, pie throws, and shooting contests — all with faces of the various guests as the targets. As passengers began emerging from hiding they found images of their spouses just waiting to be abused in some way or another. And soon, the sound of mirth began to fill the decks of the Pearl once again. Passengers everywhere began to take playful shots at their beloveds.
I found the Aberforths in the V.I.P. recreation room, laughing, as each built a funeral pyre around a screaming illusion of the other at the stakes.
“Lieutenant Bakker!” Mrs. Aberforth called out to me. “You simply must try this!”
Mr. Aberforth tossed another bundle of wood on his fire and also turned to me, grinning. “I’ve never had so much fun in all my life!”
I nodded to them and continued my rounds. Captain Grflrm shuffled up behind me as I stepped into the next corridor. “Are the humans enjoying themselves, Lieutenant?”
“They are, sir,” I said. “Amazing what a change in attitude can do.”
“Well, then,” the captain said. “You probably ought to kick me.”
“What?!”
The captain turned around and bared his furry hind quarters, lifting his tail so I’d have a better shot.
I laughed. The damned neuro-holo net had fooled me again. It wasn’t the captain. It was an illusion of the captain.
But I kicked him anyway.
About the author and the piece (click to expand)
Deneffew Gordon tells us this piece was written to a very specific prompt with the intention of including it in the program book for a science fiction convention, but the con opted to go with a different story instead. It subsequently racked up another 10 rejections before being trunked, and was pulled out of a 13-year hibernation just for us. Gordon is a fan and occasional writer and poet from California.
©2026 by Deneffew Gordon. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.