Some few orbital completions ago, I brought my gnomic grandmother on board the mummyship. She looks like a cross between Esmeralda from "Bewitched", Ruth Gordon and Bjork. I rescued her out of the nursing home. Alzheimer's, they said she had. Her spells and catatonic lapses have become more frequent. I knew, in truth, that she was actually travelling along a complex vector, her mind touching different times and places, some of which she had never visited bodily.
She's now our xenobiologist. I could think of no one more qualified. When I was a young larva, visiting for the summertime, I heard her talking to someone. I thought it was my grandfather. But when she called me over to the screen door, she pointed to a small shape "Look here, Sparky, see that?"
"It's a bug."
"Look closer. See?" I approached slowly and looked. It had six legs just like an insect, but it clearly wore a helmet topped with telescoping antennae. Within, it had a little face with intelligent, inquisitive eyes. On the whole, he was shiny and metallic. "He comes around every once in a while. I told him you were going to be here. And he remembered." She waved the tip of her finger at him.
My grandfather siting in his chair, drinking beer and watching golf on tv called out, "What are you doing over there? Who are you talking to?" The little bug guy zoomed off, faster than the eye could trace. He seemed to bundle up like a silver bullet first. She gave me a look that said explicitly, "Don't tell anyone. This is our secret."
My grandfather gave me a stern look. "Don't encourage her," he said.
She also claimed to see wormlike shapes that hover over her bed. This creeped me out and reminded me of Lovecraftian, etheric, nameless things. "Don't worry. They're my guardian angels." It was conversations like this that got us labelled the oddballs of the family. One time, when I was tripping on acid, I could have sworn that the bug guy was trailing me, zipping along at the edge of my vision.
It's no wonder they had her put away as soon as it became convenient to do so. I didn't know where she was, having lost touch with my family in a fit of depression. I had stopped calling and I guess they figured I wanted to be left alone. I had already started becoming a mummy of a sorts, spending a lot of time alone, getting drunk and stoned by myself and losing all vigilance and care for the world and the people in it.
When I become a Spacemummy, this changed. It inverted my values, made me less attached to the world and yet more empathic to it. I discovered a series of missions, unfinished projects and bad karma to work on.
When I got to the facility, I found her standing in a corner of her room looking out across it. Her hand was up, touching her nose. She was frozen like that. I thought this might be the way she calls her guardian spirits.
I didn't tell her who I was and she didn't seem to care. She just allowed me to walk her out of the institution and straight into the mummyship. I could have been one of her bugfriends coming to rescue her. She came around and met everyone in the ship. She has a certain affection for the Burroughs simulation avatar, though he scarcely cares for her. She thinks the yoyo flipping Mormons are "Good boys." When she met Isis, she whispered in my ear, "I hope you're not sharing this woman." I fell down on the floor and lay there convulsing for a while.
I thought she was going to expose me. She looked at me from her height of 142 cm (that's about 4 foot 8 inches) and smiled, "I know your secret, Mister Mummy." But then, she didn't say any more. She just gave me a knowing look.