Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1)

by Meg Pechenick

  While I was working my way through all that, he sipped his espresso and said reflectively, “To be candid, though, I think there was another reason they brought me in. To make certain the whole thing wasn’t a very, very well-executed hoax.”

  I thought for a moment. “The language. You asked them to speak their own language. To see if they could.”

  He nodded.

  “It seems to me,” I said, “that anyone with the technical expertise to fake an entire spacecraft landing on Earth could probably mock up a plausible artificial language.”

  “Oh, certainly. And I have no doubt there were personnel examining every detail of the landing, and as much of their craft as they allowed us to see. But the language angle would have been an easy one to overlook. After all, they had already demonstrated that they spoke excellent English. There was no real need for them to speak their own tongue in front of us.”

  “They might have refused out of principle,” I said. “Believably, I mean.”

  “They might have. But they didn’t.”

  “So what did you think?” I asked.

  He nodded at the computer. “Why don’t you tell me what you think?”

  I played the recording again, struck by its musical quality. I had studied Mandarin in college, and the likeness, to my ears at least, was unmistakable. “Do you have any longer samples? Any with multiple speakers?”

  He opened another file, this one nearly a minute in length. I played it a few times, then slowed it down to eighty-percent speed to listen again. I started counting on my fingers. “I can hear—what? Seven distinct tones? Eight?”

  He smiled slightly. “Nine, actually.”

  I blew out a dismayed breath. “Wow. There are three different speakers on this one, yes?”

  “Correct.”

  “Their tones all sound effortless. Crystal clear. The vowels are pretty easy . . . The consonants are a little trickier. Actually, some of them sound a little bit like Mandarin. But a human could make them. And did I hear an ingressive? Talking while breathing in?”

  His smile deepened. “Yes.”

  I played it a final time. “I mean . . . Do I think a human could create this recording? Absolutely. Do I think three humans got together and concocted this very technical sample of a fake language and then learned it perfectly? Absolutely not. We talked about conlanging last semester. I know people have built artificial tonal languages for fun, but . . . These guys just sound too good. If you called me in and asked me to construct a fake alien language, I would have gone with something that sounded way more glamorous to a non-linguist and was way easier to speak. I think this is the real deal.”

  “So do I.” He paused. “Do you think you could speak it?”

  I played the first recording again. Then I took a stab at repeating it.

  “Congratulations,” he said lightly. “You just said ‘You do me too much honor’ in Vardeshi. Quite comprehensibly too.”

  I stared at him. This last revelation on top of the others was almost too much to take in. “You . . . know what it means.”

  “Of course. I’ve spent the last twenty-five years building a TrueFluent program for Vardeshi. If you accept my invitation, you will be the first student ever to use it. After myself, that is.”

  “The first . . . But how? How is that even possible?”

  “The program is a secret. As far as the government knows, it’s still a work in progress. They have their own linguists working on a similar program, of course, and for all I know, they have succeeded. But somehow I doubt it. When I sold my share of TrueFluent to Watson, it was on the condition that he keep the algorithms confidential.”

  Something else came clear to me. “This is why you dropped out of the spotlight all those years ago.”

  “Yes. I needed solitude—plausible, unquestioned solitude—to construct the software. The language is immensely complex, and I’m not a programmer by training. I finished the work perhaps ten years ago. Since then, I’ve been improving my own command of Vardeshi. I am confident that the program works reasonably well. I’ve never had anyone else to test it on, you see. Until today.”

  “But why now? And . . .” I hesitated. “Why me?”

  He took a moment before answering. “I suppose because . . . and this is perhaps the great vanity of my life . . . I had always believed that when the Vardeshi returned—and I do think they will return—humanity would be in need of someone who could speak their language. And I wanted it to be me. I spent three hours in a room with them, and it was the pinnacle of my life. I have lived richly, but nothing else has ever approached the feeling I had that day. I have spent twenty-five years waiting—expecting, truly—that my phone would ring again. I couldn’t bear to think that someone else would get that call. So I kept it to myself. I held it close.”

  I waited, watching his face. In the gilded air of his afternoon garden I thought I could guess the end of the story, but I had just enough grace to let him tell it.

  “I’m old, Avery,” he said simply. “I waited and I grew old. Ten years ago—five, even—I would have been ready. But my day is passing. I still believe they will come. But now I think that I will be the one who trained the first human speaker of Vardeshi. The conversations I dreamed of, the meeting of minds, human to Vardeshi, in our words and in theirs . . . I will never have that now. But perhaps you will.” He paused. “So what do you think?”

  “Yes,” was all I could say. “Of course. Yes. But I still . . . There are others you could have asked. Some of them were here today. Any one of them would have said yes in a heartbeat. You know that.”

  He nodded. “I know. It helps, of course, that you speak Mandarin already. The tonal aspect of Vardeshi won’t be a sticking point for you. But there is more than linguistic skill involved. The first human to speak freely to the Vardeshi needs to be someone with humility. Kindness. Patience. I see all those things in you. I believe the human race could have no better representative. For some time now I’ve been waiting for the right moment to say so. This one seemed as good as any.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Finally I cast my mind back to a few minutes ago and essayed the Vardeshi phrase again, haltingly: “You do me too much honor.” Which seemed, in the end, to be the exact right thing to say.

  Of course it had to be done in complete secrecy. Professor Sawyer was intensely protective of his life’s work. There existed only one copy of the Vardeshi TrueFluent program and two backups, stored on three separate non-networked computers in three different safes. All of them were kept in his house. He wouldn't hear of transferring the program to any of my devices for practice elsewhere. If I was going to learn Vardeshi—and I was—it was going to be on his terms, which meant on his patio, or on the threadbare old sofa in his sitting room.

  It was still early enough in the semester that I was able to drop most of my course load, keeping only the two classes required to maintain eligibility for my scholarship. I attended those often enough to keep reasonably current with the material, skimmed through the readings in the student center after classes for maximum visibility, and was at the professor’s house by noon each day. From noon until six o’clock I immersed myself completely in TrueFluent Vardeshi. At six I would collapse, engulf a superb vegetarian dinner prepared by the professor and Seline, and return to the tiny three-bedroom apartment I shared with two classmates, Erica and Sophie, to lie in front of mindless TV until my brain finally shut itself off for the day.

  Despite my time in the student center, there were questions about my sudden disappearance from the courses required for second-year students. My graduate program was small, and any such absenteeism would have been conspicuous. I had done well in the first year; not first in the class, maybe, but close to it. Now I was enrolled in a mere two classes and barely clearing the failing mark in both of them. Questions were inevitable. To preempt them Dr. Sawyer invented an independent study that involved transcribing and analyzing several hundred hours of voice recordings that had
been languishing in a drawer—on casette, no less—for more than a decade. His colleagues, accustomed to farming old data and new graduate students for potential publications, accepted the fabrication without blinking. My classmates envied me or they pitied me, but they didn’t ask questions, either.

  There were moments when I wished I was doing something as mindless as transcribing old recordings of regional American English. I had learned Mandarin with ease; it took time and concentration, but that was all. I worked at it and I learned it. It didn’t drill down into my dreams and jolt me awake in a sweaty, trembling panic at three o’clock in the morning. Vardeshi was different. I gave it everything I had for six disciplined hours each day, nine hours on weekends, and after three months I had gained almost no ground. As I had predicted, the phonology wasn’t the problem: the vowels were effortless; the consonants took only a little practice. The tones were harder. As with any tonal language originating on Earth, a shift in spoken intonation—from a querying “Hello?” to a curt “Hello.”—conferred a total change in meaning. Instead of “tentative hello” or “irritated hello,” it was “tentative hello” or “kitten.” The four tones of Mandarin had been easy for me to distinguish, but Vardeshi had nine, and two pairs were giving me particular trouble. They were simply too alike. There was also a complex system of honorifics, so that a sentence spoken to one’s social superior looked vastly different from the same sentence spoken to one’s inferior. And the verb conjugations were bewildering. Altogether it was stupefyingly hard.

  My one reprieve came in the form of the writing system, which was an alphabet: twenty-eight compact, clean, elegant letters and nine tone markings. The samples of authentic written script in Dr. Sawyer’s possession, culled from the gifts the Vardeshi had given us upon their arrival, consisted mainly of a sheaf of poems by their most celebrated writers. The language they contained was far beyond my reach at present. To hone my literacy skills I studied Dr. Sawyer’s transcripts of his audio samples. When I mastered the alphabet he had me transcribe them again on my own. After that, I could read the poems aloud, even if I couldn’t understand them.

  I was glad I found reading so intuitive, because it was the only thing that was. Every day, every hour of my study of Vardeshi was an exercise in frustration. And humility. I had always been conscious that my linguistic gifts were modest. It was impossible to attend a small, exclusive linguistics-driven graduate school and not know it. I had conquered Mandarin, but I had classmates who had waltzed with ease through Japanese, Arabic, Russian, and more, sometimes simultaneously. Still, I liked to think that even they would have been—albeit briefly—rattled by Vardeshi. After three months, I could carry on the simplest of conversations, nothing more. And Dr. Sawyer still had to stop me and correct every other word.

  My respect for him had deepened in proportion to my growing understanding of exactly how difficult Vardeshi was. Somehow he had learned it. Alone. With no one to correct him, no one to pare a sentence down to its core elements, no one to offer examples perfectly tuned to his level of study. He had done it with only a computer, a few recordings, and a handful of poems. I had known from the start that his talents exceeded my own, but by the time I had been studying Vardeshi for several months, I knew that he was the real thing. A virtuoso. A genius. Had he been anything less, he would have failed. I still wasn’t sure how he had done what he had. The more I knew about Vardeshi, the less possible it seemed to me that he could have learned it successfully in solitude from such a limited store of material.

  Over dinner one day I said, “I don’t understand how you even had enough language to build the TrueFluent program. You said you were in the room with them for three hours. That can’t possibly be enough source material. But you have a Vardeshi lexicon that’s—well, not complete, obviously, but extensive. Where did it come from?”

  “In between the first communication and the last, there was a span of—oh, about eight months. Toward the end of that interval we recorded some radio communications traveling to and from the Seynath, the Vardeshi ship that eventually visited Earth. Enough, as you say, to assemble a working lexicon. Personally, I think they allowed us to hear them as a sort of challenge. To see what we would do with their language. If there was anything we could do. There wasn’t, of course, not in such a short time. But I had twenty-five years with it, and that proved to be enough.”

  I shook my head. “But you were alone.”

  “Not quite,” he said. “One of the Vardeshi who visited here was, I believe, in favor of opening a diplomatic channel between our worlds. You know his voice well—he’s the principal speaker on my private recordings, as well as the two public ones.”

  “Novak Takheri,” I said.

  “Yes. When I asked for samples of their speech, he guided the conversation, and I think he deliberately gave me the building blocks I would need to deconstruct the language. Introductions, simple questions, basic declarative sentences. A primer of sorts, really. I felt . . . it may be hubris, but I felt that he and I connected in some way. There was some likeness of minds.”

  I imagined Dr. Sawyer twenty-five years ago: silvery blond hair, mild blue eyes, those gentle, self-effacing English manners. He must have seemed familiar to them; accessible, even. I didn’t think it was hubris. It made perfect sense. I said so, and he seemed gratified.

  Before I went home that night, I listened to the recording again, the one he had referenced. It had sounded impossibly complex to me three months ago, but now I could comprehend nearly every word. Dr. Sawyer was right. It was a lesson. What is your name? What is your profession? Where is your home? Where are you now? Why have you come here? Whoever Novak Takheri was, he wasn’t the one who had made the decision to sever all contact with Earth. I was certain of that. And certain as well, now, that I hadn’t imagined the faint sadness in his voice when he said good-bye to our people on behalf of his. Perhaps he was simply waiting out the long years of silence, like Dr. Sawyer, with an eager heart.

  I found it difficult to gauge the passage of time in northern California, with its eternal amber cool, but suddenly it was December and time for me to fly home to New England for Christmas. I had wanted to cancel the trip. Vardeshi had taken hold of me with an almost hypnotic possession, and the thought of two weeks without those strange yet intimately familiar voices was repellent. But Dr. Sawyer was adamant. “You must maintain a pretense of normality,” he insisted.

  “I don’t know what normality means anymore. I’m secretly learning an alien language. Nothing about this is normal.”

  He smiled. “A pretense, I said. Think of my career, if nothing else. As far as the government knows, the TrueFluent program is still incomplete. I should have informed them the moment I finished it. I’m not technically authorized to teach you a single word of Vardeshi. If anyone finds out that I have, my files will be confiscated, and your access will be cut off, perhaps permanently.”

  I sighed. “You’re right. I just . . . don’t want to let it go.”

  “It’s for the best. You need a break. Two weeks to recharge. Think about something else. Go to a movie. Sleep. Come back refreshed and ready to work. This may help to lift you off your plateau.”

  I made a face. “You said the plateau was in my head.”

  “I lied,” he said dryly. “Go home.”

  I did. I flew in late, took a taxi home from the airport, and crept upstairs in the dark. Crawling into my childhood bed that first night, three thousand miles removed from the inexorable march of new words across Dr. Sawyer’s laptop screen, I sank into deep, longed-for, restorative sleep as if into deep water. Not even the ticks and groans of the ancient furnace, laboring to keep the cold of a Vermont winter at bay, could hold me on the surface for long.

  In the morning I drank coffee with my parents, my first cup with their third, dodging their needling questions about my course load. Their worry was palpable. I couldn’t blame them; one glance into the kitchen mirror had shown me how pale and tense I’d grown in the last few
months. Dr. Sawyer had been right. My pretense of normality was cracking. My father made lukewarm jokes about spending more time out in the California sunlight; my mother flatly ordered me to drop the independent study, as it was clearly more pressure than I could handle. I swallowed the rest of my still-scalding coffee and went to take our old golden retriever, Major, for a walk. Not for the first time I wished I had a sibling. A second target might have served to diffuse somewhat the concentrated beam of their anxiety.

  I continued my pattern of avoidance in the days that followed, spending the brief hours of pallid daylight skating on the frozen lake or hiking in the woods around our house, and the evenings drinking bourbon with friends I hadn’t seen since high school ended. Within a few days I had lost the haunted look. My parents began visibly to relax. On the night before I flew back to California I stayed in. We cooked dinner together, and afterward my father built a fire in the wood stove in the living room. I sat on a blanket on the hardwood floor, glass of wine in hand, Major’s head a comfortable weight on my knee. My mother broached the topic of academic pressure again, more cautiously this time. I pacified her with promises to re-evaluate my course load. I didn’t like lying to her. I liked even less how easy it was. I had always been a terrible liar. But then I had never needed anything as desperately as I needed Vardeshi.

  Two weeks was long enough, but only just. A day more would have been too long. I drove directly from the airport to Dr. Sawyer’s house. He had the laptop and headset ready for me. And, mercifully, the espresso.

  It appeared that the holiday had been precisely what my mind needed to fit together some of the pieces of Vardeshi that had been giving me the most trouble. I didn’t scramble so much as vault off of that first plateau. There were others still to come, in the spring that followed, but I had finally acquired some momentum, and I was feeling again what I hadn’t felt since tackling Mandarin years ago: the deep, rich, private satisfaction of finding a message where there had been only static. Vardeshi was becoming accessible to me. I was beginning to hear it, to really hear it, and better yet, to listen for it—to anticipate rather than react. When I went home for Christmas I caught perhaps one word in eight of all but that first and simplest recording. By March, it was one word in five. By June, one in three. And then my courses ended for the summer and I was absolutely free, for three glorious months, to do nothing but swim and run and fall headlong into Vardeshi.