Becalmed Read online

  I don’t know.

  What I do know is this. I convinced Klaaynch to take me to one of the violence pools—a gathering site where the Quurzod train. They live in those places, not in their homes, not in their streets, not in their restaurants or their places of business, but in their violence pools.

  Violence pools are little mobile communities. They exist as long as they need to. If they get discovered by outsiders, they move.

  Small buildings, assembled out of sticks and cloth, appear, then disappear as needed. They form a circle around a flattened area, and in that flattened area, lessons happen.

  Most of the lessons are in things we consider illegal. How to kill someone with a wide variety of weaponry. How to kill someone with sticks. How to kill someone with fists alone. These are not military lessons, which we also provide, but lessons in survival.

  Quurzid, for all its complexity, does not seem to have a word for “murder.”

  Lessons here are proprietary. Outsiders cannot see them. I did not observe the violence pool during lessons, although I heard about them. The worst, according to Klaaynch, were the defensive lessons. Because if you failed, you would get injured. If you had trouble learning why you failed, you would get injured in the same way repeatedly. If you flinched as someone came at you after you had already been injured once, you were taken off the roster until your psyche healed. If you flinched again after your return, you were relegated to non-violent work—talking, writing, science, mathematics—all of which were seen as inferior.

  Klaaynch’s dream of being a linguist was considered odd, and it was odd, for the Quurzod. The only thing that saved her, the only thing that gave her any kind of power and potential, was her ability to fight.

  She was considered the best of her generation.

  And she proved it.

  It took her four hours to die.

  I know because I watched.

  It was the only time I had been allowed in an actual violence pool during fighting. I sat behind Klaaynch and her team. We sat there, all except the two who escaped. Klaaynch and her young team. Me and mine. Twenty-three lives from the ship, lives I wasted in my attempt to learn the wrong form of Quurzid. Awnings attached to the small buildings shaded us, but the air was hot—hotter than anything I had ever experienced—and dry.

  The Quurzod gave us water. They gave us something to keep our fluids balanced. They wanted us to live—at least until the fighting ended.

  I was not allowed to speak, and I did not.

  Around me, Quurzod I had met—most in their teens, some barely adult—fought for their very survival.

  But the match that mattered was Klaaynch’s.

  It took four hours for their best fighters to kill her. A dozen adults against one thin girl. Four hours.

  If she had survived for six hours, she would have lived and been granted favors. One of the favors she wanted was to get permission for me to study street Quurzid.

  Not the violence pools themselves.

  Just street Quurzid.

  And while I did that, she wanted me to teach her Standard. Standard, and all of the other languages I knew.

  She was so marvelous. So strong. So brave. So beautiful.

  But three hours and forty-five minutes in, someone snapped her right femur. She kept fighting, but she had no base, no way to maintain her balance. At three hours and fifty-eight minutes, she fell.

  It took only two minutes to finish her off. The others in her violence pool, those who had been contaminated by me, died that afternoon as well.

  The fighters dismantled the buildings. Beneath the largest was the pool itself. A hollow, empty pit in the ground, designed to hold the losers of any large fight.

  Klaaynch had told me this as we waited for the others to show up. She told me that the pools often were not used, and when the time came to move the violence pool, the actual pool itself got filled.

  This one got filled too.

  With us.

  Most of my team fought back. When it became clear that we would die, they fought. But they were no match for the Quurzod.

  They went into the pool. Then me, then Klaaynch’s friends.

  And finally, Klaaynch.

  No one touched me, except to knock me unconscious. It should have been enough to kill me. In the heat, among the dead, in the dryness.

  I should have died.

  But I did not.

  ~ * ~

  To her credit, Leona does not speak as I tell my story. She tries to keep her face expressionless, but she cannot control her eyes. They narrow, they widen. Several times, she keeps them closed for a few extra seconds, as if she does not want to look at me any more.

  I don’t want to look at me either.

  “The other two, they were right,” I say. “I caused this. I’m why we’re here. Becalmed.”

  Leona does not nod. Nor does she reach out a hand to comfort me. She sighs. “They abandoned their post.”

  They did. They left the Quurzod as the rest of us went to the violence pool. They should have stayed with us, but they thought something might go wrong and they fled.

  I should have told the others to go as well. The mistake was mine, not theirs.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  “The Captain decides that,” she says. “He brought you back.”

  “When he didn’t have all of the information,” I say.

  She inclines her head. She is conceding that point.

  “Tell him I’m ready. He can’t send me back, but he shouldn’t keep me here either.”

  “You’re volunteering for execution?” she asks.

  “It’s the right thing,” I say.

  “I don’t think that’s your decision,” she says. “Not any more.”

  ~ * ~

  They return me to my quarters. The apartment no longer looks like mine. I recognize everything in it, I even remember hanging the quilt, scrunching the blanket on my divan, but the place feels strange to me, like a memory that I have abandoned. The apartment has a dusty odor, as if I’ve been gone for months, which is impossible. First of all, I have not been gone more than a few days, and secondly, the air gets recycled in here. Nothing should smell of dust.

  I make myself dinner and sit in one of the chairs to eat it. Normally, I would play a language quiz or watch an entertainment, but I do neither. I sit and listen.

  The Quurzod whisper all around me. The sound infects me, like the memories infected me. The memories are there, but I no longer slip into them accidentally. Instead, I roll them around in my mind, worrying them, like my tongue would worry a chipped tooth.

  No wonder I blocked them. All those people, dead because of me. Because I did not understand—when I am trained to understand.

  I should have known. I should have figured it out.

  And I did not.

  Not even when Klaaynch said to me that she could chose her own friends. When she said it with defiance, with that glow the rebellious get as they anticipate a fight.

  If the Quurzod so strongly protect the language they use for family and friends, it should have seemed obvious to me that they would viciously defend the language they strove to keep secret. I should have known—maybe I did know—of course I knew.

  And that is why I blocked the memories.

  I didn’t want to remember that feeling—that I’ll-deal-with-it-later feeling—the one I ignored.

  I have been sitting with my plate in my lap for nearly an hour when the door chime sounds. Coop’s chime.

  It does not surprise me. A part of me has expected to see him all along.

  He looks big, powerful, as he comes through that door. His presence is almost too much for the room.

  “Leona tells me you volunteered for execution.” He does not sit. He towers over me. “I won’t do it.”

  “It’s regulation.” I clutch the plate. I have not really moved, except that my muscles have tensed.

  “Regulation is what the captain sa
ys it is,” he says.

  I shake my head slightly. “If that were true, each ship would be a tiny dictatorship.”

  He sits on the divan across from me, balancing on the edge, leaning toward me. “It’s not like you to give up.”

  I look at him. When we met, I predicted the lines that formed around his eyes. But the one that furrows his brow is a surprise; he frowns more than I would have ever expected.

  “I haven’t given up,” I say. Even when I should have. I’m the one who caused this, not him. I’m the one who didn’t die in that pit. I’m the one who climbed out—over bodies, over people I knew. I’m the one who staggered through that desert, to the borders where I knew the Xenth would find me. I’m the one who made it to that village, against all odds.

  I did not give up.

  And I should have.

  “You haven’t thought it through,” he says. “They tricked us.”

  I blink, frown, then get up. I walk the plate to the recycling unit. If I don’t eat that food, someone else should get the nutrients.

  “They didn’t trick me,” I say with my back to him. “I went to that violence pool of my own free will.”

  “Not the Quurzod,” he says. “The Xenth.”

  I turn. I didn’t deal with the Xenth. Most of the negotiations with the Xenth happened before I was brought into the discussions.

  I am suddenly cold.

  He’s looking at his hands. “They tricked all of us.”

  I walk back and sit down. I wait.

  He raises his head. Those lines, those sad eyes.

  “Think about it,” he says. “The imbalance of power that has existed there for centuries. Then, one day, a fleet of ships arrives, a fleet with more power than the Xenth can imagine. And we offer to help.”

  He twists his hands together. He has thought of this for a long time.

  “They ask the initial negotiators, they say—”

  “If we ask you to obliterate the Quurzod, you would do so?” I whisper this in Xenth. I have read the documentation. They did say that, and the initial negotiators wrote it off as a test.

  I believed the initial negotiators. After all, they’re the ones on the ground. They watch body language. They know the culture—or should know the culture. They’re the ones who understand what is going on.

  Besides, the Xenth’s question wasn’t unusual. Every culture we encounter wants to know our limits. Our limits are that we help, we do not engage.

  Unless we are engaged first.

  Coop quotes the line, ignoring my Xenth, which he does not understand. He is used to me muttering in other languages. I have done it as long as he has known me. “We refuse to destroy Quurzod. We spend time studying the situation, and then we offer our diplomatic services to the Xenth. But during the time we studied them, the Xenth studied us.”

  So buttoned up, so formal and proper. Hidden, too, but we should have expected that.

  Only that isn’t my mistake. I wasn’t with the initial group. The initial groups came from elsewhere in the Fleet, and somehow they overcame—or maybe never had—their aversion to the Xenth, and their hissing, sibilant-filled language.

  I, on the other hand, never trusted them.

  But I did trust my commanders. I trusted my orders, figuring they all knew the history, the facts, the personalities of both sides.

  “The Xenth knew,” Coop says. “They knew about the violence; they’ve suffered from it. They accused the Quurzod of massacres, not telling us that this was part of Quurzod culture, that they kill anyone—regardless of nationality—if they violate certain rules. The Xenth made sure we did not know those rules. They sent us in blind.”

  It is so easy to blame another culture. But I shake my head. I believe in mistakes before I believe in deviousness.

  “That can’t be true,” I say. “The Xenth left too much to chance.”

  “They left nothing to chance,” he says. “If we had actually figured out a way to negotiate with the Quurzod, the Xenth would have gained a solid border, some defined territory, an end to a long war. But if we did not find a way to negotiate, if we aggravated the Quurzod, the Quurzod would come after us. They would have engaged us—”

  “And the Xenth’s war would have become our war,” I say. He’s right. The logic is inescapable. It explains my unease. It explains the lack of preparation the Fleet’s diplomatic team gave to my team. The Fleet’s team was tricked.

  I don’t usually believe in the duplicity of other cultures, but this is too big a mistake to miss—at least on the part of the Xenth. And I understand the Fleet’s diplomacy well enough to know that had we understood the extreme violence of the Quurzod, no one would have sent my team in unprotected.

  “The Xenth’s war did become our war,” Coop says. “Only the rest of the Fleet fights it while we wait here.”

  “We don’t know if they’re fighting it,” I say.

  He stares at me. We know. They’re fighting it. And while the Quurzod are fierce on the ground, they are no match for the Fleet in space.

  The Quurzod will fight brilliantly, like Klaaynch did. And then the Fleet will destroy something important, destroy the Quurzod’s balance.

  And they will die within minutes, leaving the Xenth to fill the void.

  Without us, the Fleet will think they have done the right thing.

  I look at Coop. He smiles, just a little, hesitant, more the boy I remember than the man he is.

  “If you knew all of this,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me stay locked in here, with the doubts and the memories?”

  “I suspected,” he says. “I had no proof. I just knew you, and your core, and how you would never, ever betray any of us, nor would you knowingly jeopardize children.”

  “They weren’t really children,” I say softly.

  “They weren’t yet adults either,” he said.

  I nod. I will always carry them—the twenty-three members of my team, and the dozen young friends of Klaaynch, and Klaaynch herself. They died for my curiosity, for my ever-solid core.

  “It would’ve been easier if you executed me,” I say softly.

  He puts his hands over mine. His hands are warm. He says, “Anyone who commands lives with these moments.”

  I shudder. “But I’m done. I’ve made my mistake. I should have known—”

  “No,” he says. “The mistake wasn’t yours. In fact, you have done the one thing that might help us.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “You learned street Quurzid.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know street Quurzid. I know as much street Quurzid as the first contact team knows when it goes into a new situation. A phrase here and there, nothing more.”

  “That’s not what your memory says. Your memory knows street Quurzid. You might not be able to speak it, but you have enough of it to help us.”

  I want to pull my hands from his. I never want to go near street Quurzid again.

  “How?” I ask.

  “When we get back, you can tell the Quurzod in all of their languages how we both got betrayed.”

  “And have them destroy the Xenth?” I am appalled.

  “Yes,” he says so softly that I can barely hear him. This is not the idealistic man I met on Brazza. This man is ruthless, utterly ruthless.

  “But the Quurzod, they’re horrible people,” I say.

  He studies me.

  I wait, but tap my finger ever so slightly. I have lost the gift of patience somewhere. It vanished in that desert.

  “You’re confusing their culture with ours,” he says.

  I flush. I used to say that to him. So young. So idealistic. I would say, One culture cannot judge another until they have a deep understanding of all parts of the culture.

  Including the language, he would say, his eyes sparkling.

  And the history, and the things that have developed that culture. Just because they have evolved a tradition that we disagree with doesn‘t make our position r
ight.

  “It’s not the same,” I say.

  “It is,” he says.

  “The Quurzod murder each other,” I say.

  “So do we,” he says. “You asked me to murder you.”

  “I asked you to execute me, according to our laws.”