Becalmed Read online

  How the Xenth contacted us, I am not certain. They didn’t contact the Ivoire. They contacted one of the other ships in our Fleet, and decisions went up the chain of command. The Ivoire got involved because of me. Because I am—was—had been— the best linguist in the Fleet.

  My heart twists. I open my eyes. The room is the color of that twilight, blood-red and gold, with shadowy figures lining the walls. My stomach turns.

  I can’t do this. I can’t do it. I can’t.

  But if I don’t, I’ll die.

  I have no idea if the words I’m thinking come from the meeting or that horrible memory of the bodies or come from now. I hate the way my arms press against my sides. I shift, and am surprised that the floor shifts with me. I can—if I want— pull that thing from my wrist, the thing that is going to keep me hydrated and nourished, and flee this place. Go on my own, figure things out by myself. Live my own damn life.

  Alone.

  Becalmed.

  I take a deep breath.

  I have never fled from a battle in my life.

  I force my eyes closed and let the memories overtake me.

  ~ * ~

  I came to the meetings late. Linguists from the flagship, Alta, had flanked the diplomats, talking with the Xenth long before I arrived. I got study materials and cultural documents one week before my first meeting, and that meeting was with the Xenth.

  The Xenth’s capital city, Hileer, was a port city. The buildings on the bay had glass walls facing the water, but deeper inland, the buildings had no windows at all. The Xenth built backwards—or what I thought of as backwards—the tallest buildings by the view with the rest getting progressively shorter the farther away from the water we got. Only doors had glass, and then only a small rectangle, built at eye-level, so that the person inside could see who knocked.

  The buildings of state, where the parties and balls and ceremonies were held, stood bayside, but the buildings of government, where the actual governing occurred, were single-story structures miles from the waterline.

  The ceilings were low, the doorways lower, and the interiors too dark for my taste. They were also both chilly and stuffy, as if the air got recycled only rarely. Add to that the hissing, scratching sound of the Xenth language, and for the first time in my long and storied career, I felt a distinct on-sight aversion to the people I was meeting.

  I had to work to smile, work to touch palms—their version of shaking hands—work to concentrate on their words, instead of their shifting eyes, which were as much a part of their communication as hand gestures were to some cultures. I did learn to understand the eye shifts, but try as I might, I could not add them to my personal repertoire. I apologized in advance, and the Xenth seemed to understand.

  I had no real importance to them. I had no real diplomatic importance in that room, anyway. I was there to listen, learn, and discover all I could about the Quurzod.

  The Xenth had asked for help with them.

  What the Xenth told us that afternoon is this:

  Their quarrels with the Quurzod went back five hundred years. Initially, they had border skirmishes that caught almost no attention. Neither the Xenth nor the Quurzod cared much about their shared borders.

  They did care about the seas, and sea battles between both countries had become legendary, but rare. Usually the ships passed each other in international waters, threatening, but not following up on the threats.

  But travel became easier, as both sides built roads, discovered their own personal air travel, and slowly conquered space. Neither group were nation-builders, at least initially. They didn’t want to conquer the other side and take their land. But no one could define exactly what land belonged to whom on those shared borders, and as travel became more commonplace, so did the border skirmishes, which led to many deaths, which led to formal armed hostilities, which led to full-scale warfare at least a dozen times in the past 250 years.

  Another culture, the Virrrzd, negotiated the first peace treaty for the Xenth and Quurzod, and it held (tentatively) for thirty years. Then the border skirmishes started up again, along with raids into each other’s territories.

  The raids went deeper and deeper, growing more and more violent, until the Quurzod committed an out-and-out massacre, killing every single Xenth (man, woman, and child) within one hundred miles of what the Quurzod believed to be the border.

  The Xenth immediately called for another peace conference, demanding reparations. The Quurzod came, and as both sides made actual headway, Quurzod along the border died hideously.

  The Quurzod claimed they were attacked by an illegal chemical weapon, long banned on Ukhanda. The Xenth claimed that the Quurzod’s own building materials had an adverse reaction with chemicals the Xenth used for land cultivation. The Quurzod deaths, the Xenth claimed, were caused by their own greed in gobbling up the land.

  The Fleet arrived just as the war along the border was about to escalate again. The Alta contacted both sides and offered to broker a deal between them. Only the Xenth took the Alta up on it.

  The Quurzod were too busy burying their dead.

  Or so we were told.

  Claims, counterclaims, historical arguments so detailed that even the locals did not understand all of them. The Fleet managed to hold off hostilities by patrolling the border with our own people. We have small fighters that we used to fly over the disputed area, keeping both sides away.

  We had maintained that position during the months of negotiation.

  Finally, the Quurzod agreed to talks, so long as there would be no activity along the border during that time. No chance for backstabbing, or so they said.

  My team would go in three months in advance of the diplomats. We would become as Quurzod as possible, learn their culture, their traditions, their rituals. We wouldn’t go native— we had learned over the years that too many cultures had found the attempt to go native as deep an insult (or perhaps a deeper insult) than failing to learn the language.

  So much of communication is nonverbal. Eye movements like the Xenth had, hand gestures found in so many Earth cultures, smiles or lack thereof in a series of cultures in the previous sector. These things could make or break a delicate negotiation.

  I’d heard rumors—impossible to substantiate without talking to the Quurzod themselves—that Quurzid had a four-tiered structure. The first was a formal tier, for strangers within the Quurzod culture. Extremely polite, with its own sentence structure and vocabulary. The second was the familial tier for family and close friends, informal in its sentence structure with a private vocabulary, often known only to the family/friends themselves. The third was street Quurzid, offensive, abrupt, and as violent as the culture. Again, a different sentence structure and vocabulary. Used in threatening situations, among the criminal classes, and by the military in times of war.

  Finally, there was diplomatic Quurzid, which bore almost no relation to any of the other forms of Quurzid at all. So far as I could tell, diplomatic Quurzid evolved as a language to speak to enemies, without giving them any insight into the Quurzod at all.

  The Virrrzd were the ones who figured that out, which was why they could successfully broker the original deal with the Xenth. But the Virrrzd were unwilling to get involved this time— the conflict between the Xenth and Quurzod had taken such a nasty turn that the Virrrzd were afraid for their own safety.

  The Virrrzd knew both formal and diplomatic Quurzid, but not street or familial Quurzid. We felt—the linguists, the diplomats, the Fleet—that the only way to settle this dispute between the Xenth (who had only one language in only one form) and the Quurzod was to quite simply learn to communicate fully with the Quurzod.

  Which was why my team got sent in.

  ~ * ~

  I surface to sibilants (whisper, whisper, hiss, hiss, hiss) and shudder as I open my eyes. The room is dark and has folded around me. I can’t really see anything. My heart pounds. I have no idea how much time has passed.

  I’m supposed to get lost in t
he memories, and maybe I am lost, but it doesn’t feel like the kind of lost I expected. It’s almost as if I’m having a conversation with someone else, not reliving the past. Not like—

  —clawing, climbing, reaching, bodies rolling beneath my feet, shifting against my hand, the feel of dried blood on my cheek, the cold flesh under my palms. That’s lost. I’m lost. I’ll never survive—

  I’m holding my breath. I have to make myself breathe, and as I inhale the breath sounds like a sob. The air has a faint tinge of rot—is that what this place does? It mimics what happened?—and I think it’d be so easy to escape, so easy to leave—

  Only to live in my room forever. Forever slipping, dreaming, hiding from my own brain, my own memories.

  I close my eyes and force myself back inside, force myself to breathe—

  ~ * ~

  —the hot dry air. A small headache has formed between my eyes. The Quurzod are not cordial, although we’ve been here for weeks. My host family will not talk while I am in the room. I hear them whispering when I am nearby, and I strain to listen. But they use formal Quurzid whenever I’m around.

  Fortunately, my team fares better. They have made recordings of Quurzid in all its glory, marking what they believe to be familial Quurzid and what they believe to be street Quurzid.

  No Quurzod will tell us the difference. Once the Quurzod figured out that we wanted to know the entirety of their language, they stopped treating us like guests and started treating us as if we were Xenth.

  Except for Klaaynch. Klaaynch is thin, reedy, beautiful according to our culture—long blond hair and classic features— but strange to the Quurzod, whose features are thicker, hair generally a dark, almost orangish red. I cannot quite tell how old Klaaynch is. She’s one of those girls who looks the same at thirteen as she will at twenty-three.

  I’m guessing she’s eighteen or so, very curious, with a gift for language. She already speaks some Standard poorly, learned through overheard snatches of discussion.

  She reminds me of myself. All ears, wanting to know what everyone is saying, no matter what language they speak.

  Her family won’t host, so she watches me from afar. I eat in the prescribed visitor restaurants, and stay in the visitor hotel when I am not with my host family. The Quurzod agreed to host families, but balked at overnight stays, and frowned on sharing meals. “Host” is not really a good term for what they’re doing, but we have no other. They are sharing as much as they can.

  Klaaynch cannot sit with me in a visitor restaurant, and I cannot go to a Quurzod-only place. Sometimes she sits beneath one of the arching trees that mark every intersection. I have learned to eat outside in the visitor restaurants, at the table closest to the tree. Klaaynch and I talk, or try to, and she has promised me she will teach me familial Quurzid.

  She says in diplomatic Quurzid (the only Quurzid I know fluently), They cannot tell me who my friends are. They cannot determine whom I care about and whom I do not. If they try, I shall challenge them.

  I admire her reasoning.

  And her courage. She wants to step outside her culture and learn other cultures. She wants to become more than who she is.

  Is this what Coop says he saw in me? This desire for knowledge, the desire to add to the core by reaching beyond the training, beyond the culture?

  I sit and murmur to Klaaynch, not knowing that her face—

  —is the first one I see, rolling toward me, eyes open, mouth gone, as if someone cut it away, those cheekbones crushed, her hair wrapped around her neck. She is buried just above me, thrown on top of me, her blood on my skin—

  ~ * ~

  I gasp, and this time I am thinking of escape long before I vocalize it. I claw the floor, the needle poking my skin, the darkness holding me. I climb out and crawl toward the door, nearly there when Jill reaches me. She drags me out of the room as if she’s dragging me out of that pit.

  I stumble and fall against Deirdre who asks me what’s wrong, asks me to talk to her, asks me what I need.

  “Leona,” I say. “Please. Find Leona.”

  And then I pass out.

  ~ * ~

  And wake in one of the hospital beds, like I found myself in after they rescued me on Ukhanda. Leona is there, but not there. She flits in, she flits out. She won’t talk to me in the medical wing. She forces me to wait until I am well enough to sit in a conference room without any medical equipment at all. She is even going to bring the chairs.

  She knows that I know. She doesn’t know what I know. Just that I know.

  And I ache because of it.

  I ache.

  ~ * ~

  Cultures do not invent languages and traditions overnight. They evolve over time. And while some linguists believe that the language comes before the culture, I believe that the language serves the culture.

  Think of a culture that has developed four different languages, each with a prescribed purpose. The Xenth, who wear formal clothing and have precise traditions about who may have windows and who may not, who may look to the left and who may not, have but one language, without much more complexity that most human languages. Twenty-eight letters, millions of words, a simple sentence structure followed in infinite variations.

  But the Quurzod, who wear little to no clothing, and have windows everywhere, and few walls in their homes, the Quurzod divide the world with their language. Language is forbidden to some, and embraced by others.

  Language is not just for communicating, but also for protection. Protection of the culture, protection of the family, protection of the Quurzod traditions, whatever they might be.

  And whatever they might be, they are precious to the Quurzod.

  In my excitement to learn, I forgot about strictures and structures and barriers. I forgot that language conceals as well as reveals. I forgot that protections exist for a reason.

  And I forgot what it is like to be young and curious and different from everyone else.

  I forgot.

  I grew up in a culture that embraces difference, celebrate diversity, and loves outsiders. A culture that believes itself superior to all others, yes, but in an open-minded way, a way that allows curiosity, a way that states the more we learn, the better we are.

  I forgot that not everyone sees the universe as broadly as we do.

  I forgot that not everyone has seen the universe.

  I forgot that not everyone is allowed to see the universe.

  When we finally get to our private conference room, I tell Leona that she no longer has to defend me. I caused the crisis with the Quurzod. I should have been left behind.

  I should have been left to die.

  She wants me to explain that, and I do, because I owe her that much. I explain, but haltingly. I do not want to slip into the memories again. But someone has to understand.

  Someone has to know.

  Besides me.

  ~ * ~

  Children absorb language. They are born without it, but with the capacity to learn it. Some lose that capacity as they age, or let it atrophy or never really had a great capacity for it at all. But others never lose the ability to absorb language, and consequently, they crave more and more of it.

  They want to learn—or maybe they need to learn.

  I have always needed to learn. Sounds and syntax are like symphonies to me, and as much as I love the old symphonies, I am always searching for new ones.

  Klaaynch needed to learn too. And if all I had done was teach her Standard, we would have been fine. But she wanted to teach me the glories of Quurzid—all of Quurzid—and I wanted to learn.

  She might have gotten away with teaching me some familial Quurzid. She was right; no one could choose her friends for her.

  But street Quurzid—it was beautiful and complex and revealing, a culture in and of itself, one that revered violence and anger as a way of life. Each word had degrees of meaning depending on how it fell in a sentence, as well as what tone the speaker used (High, low? Soft, loud? Quick, slow?), and eac
h meaning had nuances as well. Street Quurzid was one of those languages that would take weeks to learn and a lifetime to understand.

  I was thinking that after I completed my mission as the linguistic diplomat at the peace conference between the Xenth and Quurzod, I would stay on Ukhanda and study street Quurzid. I would spend the rest of my life immersed in the most complex language I had ever heard.

  Maybe I mentioned that to someone. Maybe I had merely thought it. Maybe my intentions were clear to people whose language was so complex that my language must have seemed like a child’s first halting sentences.