Starship Doi

by Alex Deva

  The colonel in Bucharest called the Ministry of Internal Affairs again, and asked for a list of all United Kingdom citizens who had entered Romania in the previous twelve hours. He received it in five minutes by email. It contained thirty-three names, points of entry and passport numbers.

  The colonel chewed on his moustache, googled the British Embassy and found a phone number. He called it and identified himself, in English. He explained that there had been a problem with a British national on Romanian soil who might have gone missing, and asked to be put through to the consulate. Ten seconds later, he was holding the phone with one hand and forwarding the list of names with the other. He was told that retrieving the necessary information might take a while, so the colonel asked if the United Kingdom would kindly allow him to visit the embassy and continue the conversation there. His request was graciously granted.

  It took him fifteen minutes to arrive at the British embassy, in an official car with blue lights, screaming siren and a special ops driver. As he opened the door into the consulate main office, he was welcomed by a man and a woman. They introduced themselves and the man said:

  "Did you say the missing person was a teacher of English?"

  "That is what I have been told, yes," replied the colonel.

  "That's very good. He was probably a voluntary, so he must've registered his contact info here in Romania with the UK authorities as he left England."

  "How will you know which one on the list he is?"

  "For starters, we eliminate all the ladies, the children and the elderly, and so we are left with twenty-two individuals. Then, we retrieve their home addresses and mobile telephone numbers."

  "Great. When do we start?"

  "Actually, colonel, we have already started. My colleague called sixteen numbers as of yet, and their owners are all fine, in various places in Romania."

  "Most are right here in Bucharest," added the woman, who was just hanging up.

  The colonel nodded, sat down and waited. The woman made two more calls and crossed two more names off the list.

  He looked at the list and read the next name: Mark Greene. She dialled the number and waited.

  She got the voicemail.

  She dialled again; and again, there was no answer. She drew a small star next to the name and called the remaining three numbers. They all answered and confirmed they were alive and well.

  Without a word, she passed the list to the consulate man.

  "We may have found our man, sir," he said to the Romanian colonel. "I'll look up the name in the exit database I was mentioning earlier." He sat at a computer, opened an application and carefully entered the name and passport number into the system.

  "It'll take a moment for the search results to come through," he said. "Tea?"

  "Thank you, no," declined the colonel.

  Across the room, a phone rang. Someone answered.

  "Mr. Grant, it's for you," she said, addressing the man sat at the computer.

  "Please excuse me," he said, standing up and crossing the room to the telephone. The colonel nodded.

  Mr. Grant identified himself on the telephone and immediately turned his face to the wall. He listened for a few seconds, then said understood and hung up.

  He turned to face the colonel with a strange light in his eyes.

  "Great news, colonel. You'll be happy to know Mr. Greene is alive and well, too. I'm afraid your taxi driver must have misheard his passenger's nationality."

  "Was that him?" asked the colonel.

  "To whom are you referring?" countered the other.

  "Was that Mr. Greene on the phone?"

  "Yes, indeed," said the man. "He noticed his missed calls and called us right back."

  The colonel was silent. He had been a cop for over thirty years. He could smell bullshit from a thousand yards.

  "Of course, colonel, we are going to have to insist that you forward us a copy of the incident report. No need to have it translated, sir; we have our own people," added the man, all smiles.

  "Of course," answered the cop.

  "And now, sir, we would like to extend our thanks and appreciation for the care you are displaying towards Her Majesty's subjects during their stay in your wonderful country."

  The other man took the hint. He saluted and left.

  IV.

  Lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh, Muhammadun rasūlu-llāh...

  The man was bound and bleeding and kneeling and had a bag over his head. His shoulders were twitching, as if he were crying. Left, left, left... left, right... left, right, left...

  Mark woke up with a start. He couldn't see clearly and he had a massive headache. He was sat down someplace, and the first thing he discovered was that he couldn't move his hands or legs.

  He almost panicked for a second, yanking on the bounds to no avail, then started blinking. Slowly, his vision began to clear.

  He was in a round room, gently lit from the walls, about five or six steps across. His wrists were covered with a sort of thick gel, almost like a resin, that seemed soft, but quite impossible to break. He leaned a little forward and saw his ankles glued in the same grey stuff. He was still dressed exactly like in the taxi, with Timberlands, a pair of blue jeans and a light blue shirt. Except the shirt was no longer wet, and he was no longer sweaty.

  He began to take in his surroundings. He looked up at the vaulted ceiling; then he looked down.

  Across the room, at one hundred and twenty degrees from each other, were two seemingly identical seats. Both were occupied. To his left was a young man, maybe around twenty, tall and obviously quite well built, with shoulder-length blond hair that fell into his eyes, clad in woollen pants and a strange shirt made from the same material. He was wearing leather shoes, the likes of which Mark had seen in a BBC documentary about the early Saxons. The young man was slowly shaking his head, but was not fully awake yet.

  To his right, there was a young girl. She was wearing a single garment, like a long dress, made of a rough, dark grey material that might have been flax fibre. She had no shoes at all, and she was wearing a small, wooden cross tied with a string around her neck. She had just come to, and her brown eyes were filled with fear.

  "Hello," called the Englishman. "Are you alright?"

  She blinked, turned left and faced him. Her mouth opened and a stream of words came out. It took Mark a few seconds to realise that she was speaking Latin, and another few seconds to discern that she was praying:

  "...sicut in caelo, et in terra... panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra..."

  Then, the young man opened his eyes and blinked a few times, clearing his vision. He yanked on his wrists and ankles furiously, moving this way and that, trying to set himself free. After a few failed attempts, he looked to his right at Mark and began to speak.

  Mark could not understand a single word that the other said. He waited for a pause in his stream of questions (they had to be questions, based on general intonation -- that, and common sense) and interjected:

  "I can't understand you." Then, he added: "I'm Mark."

  The other listened and measured him carefully from across the room. The Englishman immediately knew he was being sized up.

  "Cooman?" asked the young man.

  Mark shrugged.

  "Pecheneg?"

  He shook his head.

  "Guerrman?"

  Wait. Did he just say "German"?

  "Verstehst du mich?" asked Mark, in hopeful German. The blond man listened, paused, then went on asking:

  "Gaal?"

  "Mark," said the Englishman. He wiggled a finger, trying to point to himself, then enunciated again, clearly: "Mark."

  The girl finished the prayer, with her eyes closed and tears streaming down. She was shivering. Then she started again:

  "Pater noster, qui es in caelis..."

  It's the Lord's Prayer, thought Mark. In Latin! He was about to speak, but the other man looked at her and intervened, frowning:

  "
Pater tuus?"

  The girl stopped, opened her eyes, and stared at the young man to her right.

  He asked again:

  "Ipse pater tuus?" pointing with his head towards Mark, who started wishing he'd actually paid attention in Latin class.

  She shook her head, looked down and started over:

  "Pater noster, qui es in caelis..."

  "Pater in caelis?" asked the blond man, incredulous.

  Finally, Mark caught on. He was asking her about her father, not understanding the God metaphor. He couldn't understand the "father in the sky" part of the prayer. The man spoke Latin, but didn't know the Lord's Prayer.

  And then they all started speaking simultaneously, each trying to understand what had happened, how they had ended up in there, where they were and why, why they couldn't understand each other, how strange the other's clothes seemed to each of them, both men trying to raise their voice above the other two, the young girl praying louder and louder, eyes squeezed tight, tears flowing on her dirty cheeks.

  They felt pricks in their wrists and ankles, and they all fell asleep.

  V.

  Lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh, Muhammadun rasūlu-llāh...

  The man was bound and bleeding and kneeling and had a bag over his head. His shoulders were twitching, as if he were crying. Left, left, left... left, right... left, right, left... left, right.

  Sara.

  Mark woke with a start again. He was in exactly the same place. Nothing seemed to have changed, and other than the phone in his pocket, he had no means to tell the time. He was still bound to the seat, so he had no way to reach his trousers, or nearly anything else other than his own fingers and the gluey resin.

  The blond man was already awake. He was obviously in some pain and he had been waiting for the other two to wake up. Mark watched him with curiosity.

  "Fuck," uttered the blond man, all of a sudden. Then he recoiled, as if saying that rude word had caused him physical pain.

  "Shit," he said again, and he recoiled again. Not in pain, Mark saw. In... surprise?

  Well, there was plenty going on to surprise anybody, that much was certain.

  "I speak... En-glish," went on the young man, amazed at himself.

  Mark was pretty amazed himself.

  "You certainly do, mate. Though you didn't earlier. Are you alright?"

  The blond man was looking at Mark's lips and silently imitating their movements, almost like deaf people when they lip-read. Then he answered:

  "What a fucking headache," he said, this time with more conviction. "Fuck. Where the fuck am I?"

  "I don't know either, but you sure seem cross about it," said Mark.

  "What stupid fucking language. We got a thousand curse words in my language, English only has nine or ten."

  Mark had no immediate reply to that.

  "Why am I here?"

  "I don't know."

  "Where is here?"

  "I told you, I don't know."

  "Is she your daughter?" asked the young man, pointing with his head towards the girl, who was not yet awake.

  "No. She wasn't talking about me," said Mark.

  "She said something about her father in the sky, what does that mean?"

  After debating comparative invectives, Mark thought to maybe postpone religion for another time.

  "What's your name?" he asked instead.

  "Aram. Yours?"

  "Mark."

  "Ah, you said that. I thought you were a Gaul. What are you?"

  "English."

  "What, like the language?"

  "Yeah."

  "How come I'm speaking it if I've never even heard of it?"

  "I truly have no idea, Aram. I, for one, am English so I've been speaking it since childhood. The girl over there was praying in Latin, and you seemed to understand her, for some part."

  "Yeah, I speak a little Latin."

  Mark was afraid of what Aram would say next.

  "To get along with the Romans," Aram finished.

  Oh, shit. Am I having a nightmare? He inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and asked the obvious question.

  "What year is it, Aram?" asked Mark tentatively.

  "Last I checked, it was the year of the consuls Aurelius and Calvinus. Why?"

  "Consuls... as in Roman consuls?"

  "What else?"

  Mark's headache was getting worse. If this is a nightmare, why do I have a headache? I thought you're not supposed to feel pain in sleep...

  The girl opened her eyes wide.

  "...but deliver us from evil, amen," she said immediately.

  And their grey resin bindings suddenly dissolved into nothingness.

  VI.

  Aram was the quickest to stand up, as if he was afraid not to get stuck again. He flexed his arms and neck. He was stiff. Mark stood up too, and quickly crossed the room to the little girl, who was rubbing her wrists and wiping her dirty cheeks.

  "Can you understand me?" he asked, gently.

  The girl looked up at him and answered:

  "Yes." She, too, recoiled in fright and put a hand over her mouth, looking at him with wide eyes.

  "It's alright," he said. "You didn't know this language, and now you do. The same happened to him," he said pointing at Aram, who had just joined them.

  "I want to go home," said the young girl, and then repeated it in her own language: "Vreau acasă".

  "Casa, means house, or home," said Aram.

  "What's your name?" Mark asked her.

  "Doina".

  Aram nodded. "I've heard this name before."

  "How old are you, Doina?"

  She raised one finger on her left hand, and all five on her right; then she made fists, and repeated. Then, she said:

  "Twelve. Twelve?"

  "That's twelve, very good," said Mark.

  "Can I go home? Please."

  "That's a good idea," said Aram. "Let's find a way out of here. I don't like this place."

  "Just one moment," said Mark. Then he turned towards Doina and asked:

  "Doina, can you please tell me what year it is?"

  Aram opened his mouth to speak, then thought again and kept quiet.

  Doina raised her thumb four times, saying:

  "One thousand... one hundred... eleven."

  For a few seconds, nobody said anything.

  "I don't get it," said Aram. "One thousand one hundred and eleven, what?"

  "Years from the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ," recited Doina.

  "From the what now?!" asked the blond in complete confusion.

  "You don't know our Lord, Jesus Christ?" asked Doina.

  "Not really, no."

  "Are you a Viking?" she asked, eyeing him apprehensively.

  Mark was watching to the dialog intently, and again he held his breath waiting for Aram's response.

  "I'm a duck," he said. Or, at the very least, that was what Mark thought he heard.

  "How can you be a duck?" she asked, serious. "Ducks lived many years ago."

  Maybe I've got a concussion and I'm in a coma in the hospital, thought the Englishman. This is just too surreal.

  Then, the young man clarified:

  "Well, I'm an actual Dac, from Dacia, believe me."

  He said Dac, not duck, realised Mark. He means he's a Dacian. From the ancient Roman province of Dacia.

  He looked at his hands. He had read on a website that, if you're having a dream and you look at your hands, you become lucid, and you wake up. Nothing happened. He thought about a TV show he'd seen in England called "Life on Mars," about a man in a coma who woke up in the past. Could his subconscious replicate that situation? Was he maybe in a coma right now? Had that impossible ray been a figment of his comatose brain?

  He decided that, for the time being, it didn't really make a difference.

  "Doina, our friend Aram here is a Dacian -- that's the proper word for people in Dacia, in the language we're speaking. And I am an Englishman. What does that make you?"

 
; "I am Vlach... ian?" she answered.

  That confused both men.

  "Ever heard of Vlachia?" asked Aram.

  "I don't think I have," answered Mark.

  "I live in Belleggrada," continued Doina.

  That did little to help the others' confusion.

  "Well, I've heard of Belgrade," Mark ventured.

  "It's near the old town of Apulum," she finished.

  Aram looked at Mark and they together.

  "Alba Iulia," said Mark.

  "I think I live there too," said Aram. "Only it wasn't very old when I last saw it."

  "What's the last thing you remember?" asked Mark.

  "I was walking on the road down the hill from the castra," said Aram using the Latin word for the fort. "This great light came sort of swiping from above and..."

  "...turned everything into gold," continued Doina.

  "It stopped above other people..."

  "...but passed them on..."

  "...but when it found me, it turned orange..."

  "...then red, then black..."

  "...and then we all woke up here," finished Mark.

  "Yes," said Doina and Aram.

  They went quiet for a moment, aware and amazed that they all seemed to have shared the same experience. Then, Mark had an idea.

  "Aram, when was the last time you saw a Roman soldier?"

  "I met a centurion called Naevius right before the light came," the blond man answered.

  "Well. I don't know when those consuls you mentioned ruled, but I'm quite sure the Romans pulled out of Dacia in the third century."

  "No, you're wrong," Aram said. "The Romans had at least ten centuries stationed at Apulum."

  "I'm not talking about Roman troops," explained Mark. "A century, meaning one hundred years."

  "Even I knew that," interjected Doina.

  Aram was trying his best to understand. "So, three centuries means three hundred years... starting when?"

  Doina obliged immediately: "From the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ."

  "What the fuck is a Lord?" blasphemed Aram candidly, in confusion. Doina turned red and said nothing more.

  "It's a point in time when people started counted years," said Mark, trying to be helpful.

  "What, you mean like ad urbe condita? Since Rome was created?"

  "Exactly like that. Do you know what year it is, ad urbe condita?"