Becalmed Read online

  “I know,” I say.

  Leona frowns at me and even though I don’t know her, I can read her expression. Shut up. Let me talk. I’m your advocate. Let me advocate.

  “You want to tell me why he didn’t?” the woman asks.

  I shrug one shoulder. I don’t honestly know. I haven’t talked to him. Since I got back, the entire Fleet’s been attacked. We’ve moved, been hit, then moved to foldspace. I suspect the captain’s been busy.

  “Are you sure it was him who ordered me back?” I ask.

  “Enough,” Leona says. “We can talk all night, but until we have facts, I can’t help you. And I need to know what you want. I know what they want. They want to test you.”

  She’s looking at me, and her eyes hold no emotion at all. Only a few people can effectively do that. She’s clearly learned it over the course of her career. She doesn’t know what to think of me, and she doesn’t want me to know that.

  She wants me to think she’s on my side.

  As if I know what my side is.

  “I can block the tests,” she says.

  My heart leaps as she says this, but I dry swallow yet again. I am afraid of the tests. I am afraid of what they will reveal. I am afraid of what they won’t reveal.

  “Why don’t you study my case,” I say, sounding calm and logical, which I am not, “and then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “We need to take her out of the residential wing,” the woman says. “She’s dangerous.”

  “We don’t know that,” Leona says.

  “We can assume,” the woman says.

  Leona turns back to her. Leona’s expression changes, from that flat look she gives me to something akin to anger. Only I’m not sure that emotion is real either.

  “From my understanding,” Leona says, “she’s been here for days. If she was going to snap, she would have already. Lock the doors, post a guard, put some kind of monitor on her. But leave her here. You know as well as I do that familiarity provides comfort.”

  But the apartment isn’t familiar.

  Well, part of it is. The furniture, the mementos that I have brought from previous trips, my bedding, my clothing.

  But the view from the portal—it’s unfamiliar, and bound to become more so.

  If I don’t have to look outside the ship, I might feel better.

  “Do you have portals in the evaluation ward?” I ask the woman.

  “Yes,” she says.

  So outside lurks here, there, in any place they’d take me.

  I let out a shaky sigh. “Then I’ll stay here.”

  As if the decision is sane.

  As if I am.

  As if I would know the difference.

  ~ * ~

  They all leave me, Leona who is off to do research, the three medical personnel. They’ve posted guards, just like Leona told them to, and they made a point of letting me know. The guards—both big, muscular men—displayed the laser pistols attached to their hips and gave me a stern look.

  The warning was clear. If I tried to leave, they’d shoot.

  If I tried to leave.

  Which I’m not going to do.

  Maybe they’re the ones who aren’t thinking. I’m the one who locked myself in my apartment. I’m the one who has hidden from everyone I love.

  My twin sister Deirdre has left me increasingly urgent messages, using her technical skills to override the protections I’ve put on my private communications. She is worried, she says. She has heard horrible things, she says. She wants to see me, she says.

  Too bad. I don’t want to see her.

  I don’t want to see anyone.

  Not even Coop.

  Jonathon Cooper, our captain. My former husband. He looks like a captain of the Fleet should. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark haired, handsome, and oh, so intelligent.

  We married young and I was going to have a thousand babies, or maybe the acceptable two. But the babies never happened. Every time I got pregnant, I had to go planetside on some mission or another, and every time, I lost them.

  The prenatal unit offered to harbor the fetuses for me, so that my risky job wouldn’t have an impact on my children, but Coop didn’t like the idea. For a man who has attached himself to a machine—loving the Ivoire more than anyone, anything else—he has very old-fashioned views about children. He believes that a child housed in a fetal unit will not have the warmth and compassion, the ability to bond with others, that regular humans do.

  He might be right; Lord knows, he’s shown me a lot of studies, all from the Fleet, all from various points in our history, all very scientific.

  I know this, but I also know that gestating a child in the woman is no guarantee either. The fetus gets exposed to whatever the woman gets exposed to, and sometimes that exposure is toxic or strange or just plain terrifying.

  Dry, dry sand. Heat so extreme that my skin aches. The blood has dried on my skin and it stinks, rotting, even as it’s attached to me. But I cannot get it off. I don’t have the water to drink, let alone any to clean myself. I don’t have—

  I stand up. My face feels flushed, my skin tight with dried blood.

  I don’t want to remember.

  I put my hands on my cheeks. I was thinking about Coop. Coop and the babies that never were, and our perennial argument, and the way that he looks at me, even now, as if I have broken his heart.

  We still love each other. But we are no longer in love with each other. If we ever were in love with each other.

  I think we were in love with the idea of each other. Coop is a bona fide hero, a man who rushes in when he should hang back, who has saved countless lives, who always puts others first and rarely thinks of himself.

  I’m the intellectual, the collected one, the one who thinks before she acts—who thinks in many languages before she acts. Coop has always been intrigued by my skills, my ability to make myself understood, to put myself in the place of another culture, another person, to become someone I’m not, even if only for a few minutes.

  There is too much Coop to subsume into another human being, even for a moment. I’m beginning to understand that there is not enough me, and perhaps that’s why I can completely vanish into another perspective, because mine is so fragile, so very frail.

  Or is it? Coop always says I have a firm core. He may be right. That may be why I am still here—alive, one of three survivors. But that might also be why I can’t remember, why I feel my brains leaking out of my skull, why my memory skips as if it were a rock skimming a clear mountain lake.

  I am standing in the middle of my apartment, back to the portal, in foldspace, guards outside my door, my memory gone. I am here because my former husband still loves me too much to sacrifice me for the good of the ship, even though he makes up other reasons. Ancient regulations versus new regulations. Silly, that. He just can’t abide sending me to the middle of that planet, as the war has heated up, a war we started.

  Twenty-four died.

  I survived.

  Along with two others.

  Whom I can’t remember.

  Just like I can’t remember what happened to everybody else.

  ~ * ~

  “Something odd is happening here,” I say to Leona. I’m looking out my portal at foldspace. At least I think it’s fold-space.

  I recognize nothing out there, and neither does my computer. When I catch a moment, a moment when I can concentrate, I use my apartment computer, trying to figure out where we are. I have to use the information stored on the computer itself; the ship has cut me off. I can’t get into any systems, even informational ones.

  The message system doesn’t even work properly. If I want to send a message to anyone other than the medical evaluation unit or Leona, I have to send it through the approval system. Someone else will listen to my complaints, read my notes, see my anxious face.

  Rather than let that happen, I don’t send messages.

  Not that I feel like communicating anyway.

  “Yes, someth
ing odd is happening,” Leona says. “You’re essentially imprisoned in your own apartment.”

  She sounds offended by this, which strikes me as strange. I’m not offended. I turn.

  She’s sitting at my table, her own portable notebook on her lap. Her dark hair is up, and she’s wearing a formal tunic with matching pants.

  “I’m not talking about me,” I say, sweeping a hand toward the portal. “Something odd is happening on the ship. To the ship. I don’t know where we are.”

  Her expression freezes as if I’ve said something wrong.

  “Is this something you’re not supposed to tell me?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I forgot, that’s all. You can’t access the news.”

  Shipboard news is an outside system. I’ve never really paid attention anyway, except when I need to for my work, and even then, I’m not really watching. I’m listening—not to what’s going on, but to how it’s expressed.

  I am the ship’s senior linguist, a position as important as the captain’s in its own way. Strange that I haven’t thought of that since I’ve come back. I haven’t identified myself as a linguist at all. I haven’t missed the interplay of languages, the way that the same sentence in one language can mean something completely different when translated word-for-word into another.

  Context, subtext, word origins, emotions, all contained in one little phrase, one little word. The difference between “an” and “the” can alter meaning dramatically.

  And it’s my job to know these subtleties in every language I specialize in. It’s my job to understand them in the new languages I encounter. It’s my job to make sure we can all communicate clearly, because the basis of diplomacy isn’t action, it’s words.

  Words, words, words.

  “You’ve gone pale,” Leona says. “Do you need to sit down?”

  “No.” I walk back to the portal. It’s space-black out there— not quite total darkness. The universe has its own light, and it’s lovely, most of the time. But usually you can see the source— the star in the distance, the reflection off clouds protecting a planet’s atmosphere.

  I see nothing.

  I have seen nothing for days.

  I sometimes check my own eyesight to see if the problem is inside my head.

  (I’m so afraid it is inside my head.)

  “What’s the news?” I ask, even though I’m no longer sure I want to know.

  She pauses. I turn. She’s frowning. It’s an expression I didn’t expect to see on her face. She’s not someone who lets her emotions near the surface.

  I have a clear sense of how terrified she is, and how unwilling she is to admit it.

  Although I can’t tell you why I feel that way. I can’t tell you how I know.

  I just do.

  Something subtle then, something subtle like the things I specialize in.

  “The anacapa malfunctioned,” she says. “We’re becalmed.”

  Becalmed. A nautical term, adapted from Earth, in the days before ships sailed the heavens. In those days, ships sailed the waters, the seas, they were called, and being becalmed was dangerous.

  Sailing ships had no engines. They were powered by the wind. And when the wind was gone, the ship didn’t move. Sometimes, way out at sea, a becalmed ship wouldn’t move for days, weeks, and the men—it was always men—on board would die.

  Some say they died from thirst or lack of food.

  But other accounts say that men who were becalmed died because conditions had driven them insane.

  “Becalmed,” I repeat, and sink into a nearby chair. My heart rate has increased.

  Leona watches me, as if she’s afraid of what the news will do to me.

  She should be.

  The Fleet adopted the word “becalmed” because it’s the best way to describe being stuck in foldspace. The anacapa malfunctions, and we can’t get back. It has happened throughout our history.

  Ships get lost, some because they’re becalmed. What no one knows, what no one can figure out, is if they’re stuck in an alternate universe or in the actual fold of space itself.

  If there is an actual fold of space.

  We don’t know—at least those of us who are in no real need to know. Coop probably knows. He’s probably doing everything he can.

  “Has he sent a distress?” I ask, because I can’t not ask. I have to know, even though I do know. Of course, Coop sent a distress. Of course, he’s run through procedure. Of course, he’s done everything he can do.

  “Several,” she says.

  “And?”

  “No one is responding.” She looks at her well-manicured hand. “Some believe that our comm system is down.”

  I’m an expert in the comm system. I have to be. Because if the comm techs are incapacitated, someone from the linguistic staff still has to communicate to others. So my technical training—my mechanical training, to use another old Earth term—is in comm systems. I’m as good (maybe better) than Coop’s chief communications officer.

  And no one has called me.

  Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard any announcement. Not because Coop couldn’t leave me behind, but because another emergency superseded mine.

  Maybe I’m forgotten, a byproduct, something the junior members of the staff must deal with until the regular members have time to think about me.

  “I have comm system expertise,” I say, again, because I can’t not say it.

  “I know,” Leona says.

  But she says no more.

  “When did the anacapa malfunction?” I ask.

  She looks at me, as if I should remember. I don’t remember.

  “We were outgunned,” she says. “The Quurzod were right behind us. They fired as we engaged the anacapa. We suffered a lot of damage, and that’s when they think the drive malfunctioned.”

  This does not reassure me, which irritates me. Apparently I’d been hoping for reassurance.

  “We don’t know?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “It’s hard to do assessments out here. They want to go to a base, but no base is answering. We have limited equipment, limited supplies. We’re on rations—”

  She stops herself.

  I stand up again. I’m like a child’s toy—up, down, up, down. I can’t stay still for a moment.

  “We don’t need to be on rations,” I say. “We have enough supplies to last years.”

  Then it’s my turn to freeze. We have enough supplies to last years if we know where we are. If we know where we’re going. If we know we can get resupplied.

  “They think no one will find us, don’t they?” I whisper. “They think we’re on our own.”

  She nods. Just once, as if nodding more than once would be too much acknowledgement, would make us complicit in something.

  “They don’t know where we are, do they?” I ask.

  She shrugs, but it isn’t a casual gesture. It’s a frustrated gesture.

  Shrugs are part of communication. The nuances of shrugs are something I have learned over time.

  “They need me,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “They do.”

  But she doesn’t move, and she doesn’t say any more. She’s eloquent in her silences.

  They need me, but they haven’t come for me. They believe I can’t help them, because I’m somehow damaged, because I’ve done something wrong.

  “Is that why the medical evaluation team came?” I say. “To get me back to work?”

  She looks at that manicured hand again. She doesn’t reply. Is that a no? Suddenly, for all my training in subtlety, all I’ve learned about reading gestures, I can’t tell.

  Finally, she takes a breath. She was steeling herself to talk with me. She isn’t sure I should hear this, but she’s going to tell me anyway.

  “Do you know why the Quurzod came after us so vehemently?” she asks.

  “No.” I don’t remember much after staggering into that village, after someone gasped, pulled me aside, touched my caked skin.
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  I collapsed, and woke up on a bed, hooked up to an IV, liquid applied directly into the veins because I couldn’t drink on my own. I woke up later in the hospital wing on the Ivoire, refreshed, no longer burned, my skin smooth and clean and my mouth no longer dry.

  I have no idea how I got there, only that I did.