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Learning to Love Yourself

Summary:

Baran and his shipmate, Theo, have landed their ship in an alternative universe where just about anything might happen. In fact, the oddest things do happen, including Baran meeting his otherworldly doppelganger, which turns to out to be far more interesting, and enlightening, than he thought possible. Can Baran learn to get over his hang ups and learn to tell Theo how he feels by learning to love himself first?

Read the Beginning:

"I have a signal from ground," Theo reported from the systems and logistics station. "Standard format -- looks like we've got a welcome."

"Copy," Baran replied. He was concentrating on the upcoming insertion into atmosphere from high orbit and while piloting he couldn't spare much attention for chatting. His sharp blue eyes and big steady hands moved across the read-outs and instruments, nudging where necessary and monitoring position and velocity, stresses and temperatures, with half an eye for the weather display. Coming nine days out across multiple parallel universes only to bounce off the atmosphere because he blew the insertion angle would be embarassing at best.

Theo would never let him live it down, assuming they survived.

He was peripherally aware of Theo's voice on the other side of the control cabin. He'd be talking to groundside logistics, sending them their cargo manifest and beginning negotiations for trade. He and Theo had been flying together for almost eight years now and he knew his partner was good at his job and would make them the best profit possible, along with good rates for fuel and maintenance. Baran's job at that moment was to get them down in one piece so that they'd need as little maintenance as possible.

Signals were within the standards for this chapter -- they didn't seem to've gone bouncing off into some weird page where everyone rode elephants or where swatting a mosquito would get you a life sentence. Those always sucked vacuum, especially if the locals weren't inclined to give bore ship crew a break for not knowing the rules.

Bore ships never went very far out of the solar system, just enough to get past the gravitational distortion limit so the drive would work without any unfortunate consequences. No one had yet worked out how to travel between star systems in anything less than generational time frames, which made trade with the far colonies rather problematic. But the bore ships let Terra trade with itself.

The multiverse had been popularly described as being like an infinitely thick book, each universe a physical page within the book. The Yuen-Ortiz drive let ships "bore" a hole through the pages. Not that they actually left a hole behind or anything -- the populist explanations didn't make a lot of sense if you stretched them too far, but they were good enough for the average person to get a vague notion of what was going on.

Unfortunately, navigating was still crude and it was impossible to hit a specific page by anything other than luck. A good navigator -- with updated software and data -- could come close pretty consistently but that was the best anyone could hope for.

Baran and Theo were hoping that this page was close enough to the one they'd been shooting for that their cargo of new medicines, with formulas and samples collected and traded from thousands of pages, would have enough value to make them a good profit.

Chances were good that they were. Pages within the same "chapter" -- the term for any group of pages near enough to the target page to differ only in relatively minor ways, from the spin of an electron to the name someone chose for their baby through fashions and food and music and anything else which made worlds different but not weirdly or significantly so -- tended to have similar needs and wants. Unless Schrodinger had really been working overtime here, this should be just one more of a cluster of universes where medical advancement had been back-burnered at a crucial time, and where imported meds and medical technology were eagerly sought.

Trade and logistics was Theo's worry, though. Baran's job was to get them reasonably close to their target and he was pretty damn good at it. They made it into the atmosphere with a minimum of jolting and began the longer, smoother trip down to the spaceport.