Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1)

by Meg Pechenick

  “Does that mean I did all right on the tests?”

  “Apparently you did very well.” I felt an intense rush of relief, which subsided a little when Stefan qualified, “For a civilian, that is. In any case, you did well enough to keep your name on the short list for the homeworld. Pending success in the real test, that is.”

  “The real test?” I asked, although I was fairly sure I knew what he meant.

  “The Vardeshi themselves need to meet you and give their approval. They have final say over who visits their planet. If they don't like you, it doesn’t matter if you can recite Vardeshi Shakespeare. You’re not going to Vardesh Prime.”

  “So when—” I started.

  Stefan raised his hands. “Sometime this afternoon! That’s all I know. They’re meeting with half a dozen people before you, and more afterward. It all depends on how long those earlier meetings run.”

  “Who?” I asked eagerly. “Who’s ‘they’? How many of them? And when are they landing?”

  He gestured to a glass door cleverly inset into the panel of windows near our table. “Actually, if you’d like to step outside, we should be able to see it. They’re scheduled to touch down any minute now.” I was out of my seat before he had finished speaking.

  It was the most profoundly surreal moment of my life thus far, standing on the terrace of a converted Swiss hotel, espresso cup clutched tightly in one hand, the other shading my eyes as I stared up into the brilliant autumn sky. For a very long time nothing happened. I started to wonder whether anything would. Could all of this—the private plane, the endless tests, the beautiful facility—be some kind of incredibly elaborate hoax? My eyes began to water. The glare was so bright I had to look down.

  Stefan, beside me, seemed totally unconcerned. He took out his phone and read through some notifications, sent a few texts. Finally he looked up and pointed. “There it is.”

  And suddenly I saw it too: a tiny fierce shining in the blue depths of the sky impossibly far above us. It was no larger than an airplane at its cruising altitude, but it moved with a swift light grace no Earth craft could match. I tracked the line of its descent with disbelieving eyes. As it approached, I was able to make it out in greater detail: a slender avian shape with a smooth metallic skin that gleamed like chrome. It drifted lower, hovered for a moment, then settled gently onto the grassy field behind the training complex, alighting precisely in the center of the white painted X that marked its landing zone. I belatedly realized that it was much, much smaller than I’d thought: roughly the size of the private jet on which I had flown to Switzerland. “Is that their ship?” I said. “It looks tiny.”

  “I think it’s some kind of landing craft. Their main ship is still in orbit.” Stefan touched my arm. “I have to go. Finish your breakfast. Elena will take you to your next meeting. She’ll be your handler from now on. If you need anything, or have any questions, she’s the one to ask.”

  “Sure. Fine.” I didn’t look at him. My eyes were fixed on the landing craft. I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Not a hoax, then. I stood motionless, watching, until a glimmer of movement caught my eye. A rectangular panel slid back into the wall of the landing craft. Then a narrow ramp unfolded from within, extending downward to rest on the grass. Three figures, dark slender silhouettes in the morning light, came down the ramp one after another. They looked human enough, or they would have, if not for a certain indefinable fluidity about their movement that triggered a warning somewhere in the primitive reaches of my mind. When they stopped moving, the strangeness dissipated at once. The ramp began to retract. I saw Hans Seidel and two others—Council members, I assumed— crossing the lawn to intercept the strangers. There were handshakes, greetings that seemed amicable. I kept watching until the little group had vanished into a wing of the training complex. I heard again my own blithe, arrogant words of the day before. Put me in a room with them. I had asked for this. I had ached for it. Now it was here, and I had never been so afraid in my life.

  A few minutes later a young blonde woman named Elena joined me at my table. She greeted me with a handshake and a warm smile, explaining in beautiful Swiss German-accented English that I was essentially in a holding pattern until my meeting with the Vardeshi. “You need to be accessible—and alert—whenever they decide to call for you. But you’re a valuable resource, and your time here is too precious to waste. We’d like you to spend the morning working with the instructors who will be running the other candidates through TrueFluent Vardeshi.”

  “Dr. Sawyer is the real expert,” I said. “He wrote the program.”

  Elena nodded. “Once he’s released from custody, he’ll be in charge of language training.”

  “Do you have any idea when that will be?”

  “Not for a few more days, from what I’ve heard.”

  The rest of the morning passed more quickly than I would have expected. The half dozen or so experts who had been brought in to supervise the TrueFluent program were an odd mix of academic linguists—I recognized one or two names from my desultory skimming of last semester’s course readings—and seasoned military language instructors. They had clearly all been working around the clock to develop a functional understanding of the structure of Vardeshi, and they immediately began asking questions about exactly the aspects of its grammar that had given me the most trouble. The discussion was demanding, but the opportunity to hear—and speak—Vardeshi was exactly what I needed. I’d been wishing Dr. Sawyer had allowed me to keep my own copy of the program. Now I had full access just when I most needed it. As the conversation became more technical, I started playing snippets of the recordings to isolate an example of the structure under discussion or to confirm my own intuition. With every phrase my confidence grew a little. All you have to do is talk to them, I reminded myself. Just talk to them. You can do that. Who cares what they look like? It’s what they sound like that matters.

  We broke for lunch at noon. Elena and I went to the second-floor patio café and sat together at a table in the shade. I had been glad to be left alone yesterday, but I was grateful for her presence today. She made undemanding small talk, successfully (and, I was sure, deliberately) distracting me from my steadily mounting worry about the encounter to come. Her phone lay between us on the table, but she didn’t so much as glance at it until an alert sounded as we were finishing our meal. Then she picked it up and read the notification. “The meeting before yours has just started. That means they’ll be ready to see you in about an hour.”

  “Great,” I said. “I have time for a shower.”

  We returned to my dormitory. It was empty, just as it had been that morning. I wondered where the women whose voices I had heard the night before had gone. Were they in the running to travel to Vardesh Prime as well? Had they already had their interviews? I managed to tamp down my anxiety for the time it took to scrub myself rapidly but thoroughly with the neutral soap provided and blow-dry my hair. Afterward, though, as I stood in my tiny room, wrapped in a towel, I felt a surge of panic. No one had told me what to wear. I was going to the most important meeting of my life, and I didn’t even know the dress code.

  I had left the door to the hallway ajar. I jumped as a tentative knock sounded. It was Elena. “Avery?” she called softly. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure. I’m in here.”

  “I came to tell you that—” She stopped, seeing my expression. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t—” I gestured blankly at my closet. “This is going to sound idiotic, but . . . I don’t know what I’m supposed to wear.” As soon as the words were out, the hot, tight feeling in my chest began to ease. We both started to laugh. There was no mistaking the relief in her face. I wondered if she’d been expecting me to have some kind of breakdown.

  “Let me look at what you brought,” she said. “I’m sure we can find something.” She pulled open the top drawer of my dresser.

  “What about all the people before me? What have they been wearing?”<
br />
  “Uniforms, mostly.”

  “Oh Jesus,” I muttered.

  Elena laughed. “It’s all right. They know you’re a civilian. I’m sure they’ll be interested to see typical human clothing.” She held up a royal blue cardigan. “What about this?”

  “Whatever you decide.”

  Before long she had assembled an outfit on the bed. I put it on mechanically and cast a cursory glance at the mirror above the dresser. “I think I’m ready.”

  “No makeup?” She sounded surprised.

  I shook my head. “I don’t wear it. It takes too much time. And, anyway, I never learned to put it on. I’d look like a three-year-old in her mother’s lipstick.”

  Elena smiled. “In that case, yes, you’re ready.”

  As we walked across the green and up the steps to the main complex, I asked, “Have you seen them up close? What are they like?”

  “I’ve been in the room,” she said. “I haven’t spoken to any of them. It’s true what everyone says—they do look human. But their energy is different. They’re very . . . I don’t know. Calm, but poised. Watchful. I get the feeling that they’re holding something back.”

  “Like they’re secretly dangerous?”

  She shook her head. “More like they’re secretly really, really smart.”

  “Oh,” I said ruefully. “That’s not a secret. They’d have to be smart. Their language is practically impossible.” I knew Dr. Sawyer would have scorned such a vapid remark. “So, there are three of them?”

  “Yes. All male. All around our age—late twenties, early thirties. That’s how they look, anyway.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My understanding is that they’re senior officers on the ship that will carry our delegate back to Vardesh Prime.”

  “So they’re not diplomats.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then the Vardeshi are letting the crew of the transport ship choose the first human to visit their homeworld? Isn’t that kind of odd?”

  “From what I’ve seen, the Vardeshi approach to the whole program seems to be incredibly low-key,” Elena said. “They feel that we’re already doing the bulk of the selection work for them by identifying the hundred human representatives. Whoever is chosen will be living with this crew—very intimately too, because the ship is apparently tiny—for six months in each direction. They want it to be the best possible fit. The simplest way to do that is to let the crew members themselves decide.”

  “What do they look like?” I knew it was a superficial question, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “They look like us. But they’re all different. Their coloring, their hairstyles, everything. And one of them is . . .” She hesitated. “Well, you should probably know. One of them is just unbelievably striking. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.”

  “Really? Good to know.” I remembered my question from before. “Have they interviewed any other women?”

  “Not yet, but there will be one or two this afternoon, after you.”

  “Maybe do me a favor and don't warn them about the really attractive one.”

  She laughed, but I noticed that she didn’t promise anything.

  “Exactly how small is their ship? Is it just the three of them on board? God, that would be awkward.”

  “From what I overheard, the ship has a crew of nine or ten.”

  “Still awkward,” I said under my breath.

  “Most of them are waiting in orbit. The three highest-ranking officers are the ones who came to Earth.”

  “Nine or ten,” I repeated. “That’s . . . not at all what I was imagining.”

  “I think we’ve all been imagining a lot of things wrong,” said Elena.

  She had led me to a glass-walled atrium. One side was in fact the exterior wall of the building, and it offered a view of a sunlit courtyard below. I went over and stood in front of the glass, looking down, for the few minutes that remained to the hour. I wasn’t afraid any more. I wasn’t anything. I couldn’t think. My mind seemed to have switched itself off.

  I didn’t think I had been standing there very long at all when Elena touched my shoulder. “Avery? You can go in now.”

  I turned around. I looked at the door she indicated: white, of course, in a white wall. I walked through it.

  And there I was.

  And there they were.

  The room that lay beyond the door was the twin of any number of rooms I had seen over the last day and a half: clean, white, and silent. A number of people were already there, seated around a long conference table. On one side sat the humans. I recognized Councillor Seidel: he nodded a reserved greeting. Stefan sat beside him. The others looked vaguely familiar—other members of the Council, perhaps, and their support staff.

  On the other side of the table were the Vardeshi.

  I didn’t look at them directly until I’d sat down in the chair indicated by the councillor. Then I straightened my back, took a deep breath, and looked up. They were gazing at me expectantly. I didn’t want to appear rude—perhaps staring was as inappropriate in their culture as it was in ours—but for a moment I simply looked at them. I had to.

  Elena had been right; they looked like us, and they looked nothing like us. They wore simple gray and gold uniforms identical to the ones their predecessors had worn. Their skin was pale, but was that due to the blue undertones, or to all those sunless months aboard their ship? Their right hands were decorated with elaborate black and gold symbols similar to the ones we had seen on their previous visit. My Mandarin-trained eye saw at a glance that no two designs were the same. The man in the center looked to be about my height, five foot six, or slightly taller. His eyes were black. His hair was black too, and cut short, although he’d left it a little longer in front. It was actually quite a trendy look on Earth at the moment. I wondered if he knew that, or cared. I knew nothing of Vardeshi facial expressions, but if I had to guess at his, I would have called it aloof, with a trace of boredom. The officer on the right was smaller and slighter. His eyes were pale gray, almost white, and his hair was gray as well, disconcerting on someone who looked to be scarcely my own age. He studied me briefly, then his gaze flicked down to the sheaf of papers on the table before him. On the left sat the man Elena had described. He was the tallest of the three. His hair was platinum blond, and he wore it long, well below his shoulders. His eyes were the most dazzling sapphire blue I’d ever encountered outside of, well, any number of guilty-pleasure Vardramas. The angles of his face would have guaranteed him a successful career in modeling if he’d felt any desire to remain on Earth. He also looked to be the friendliest of the three. This impression was confirmed when he was the first to speak.

  “Avery,” he said, in flawless English with only a trace of accent. “Thank you for coming. My name is Saresh. I’d like to ask you some questions to evaluate your suitability for the program.”

  And he proceeded to ask me some fairly generic questions about my interest in the exchange, my educational background, my experiences traveling overseas, and so on. Perhaps he had been told to start with simple questions in order to put the candidates at their ease. Whatever the reason, I was glad of it. My mind buzzed with anticipation. This was the moment everything had pointed toward. When should I say the first actual words? And what would they be? And, most importantly, would they be understood? If Dr. Sawyer was less than the genius I took him for, it would all have been was all for nothing. If his interpretations were incorrect, if his inferences had been a shade less than perfect, not one word I spoke would be intelligible. What he had done, learning a language alone, in a vacuum, was either sheer brilliance . . . or total, unmitigated folly.

  There was a momentary silence between questions. The gray-haired officer, who had been paging through my file without paying any discernible attention to the conversation, leaned over and said quietly to the black-haired one, “Khavi, this is strange. Six hours of soldiers and scientists, and now they show us this girl with no technica
l expertise who’s on the verge of failing out of a linguistics program. What’s the point? Is it a mistake?”

  And I laughed.

  I couldn’t help myself. The relief that washed over me was overwhelming. Because he had spoken in Vardeshi. And I had understood every word.

  The temperature in the room instantly dropped ten degrees. “I’m sorry,” I said hastily, as they all stared at me, humans and Vardeshi alike. “You’re not wrong. My grades last year were terrible. Because I spent all of last year learning Vardeshi.” I said it directly to the officer who had spoken, in his own language.

  The silence that followed my words was absolute, and it went on for a discomfitingly long time.

  Finally the platinum-haired one—Saresh—said, “You . . . are the first to speak to us in our own tongue.” I felt a thrill of triumph; he had answered me in Vardeshi.

  I nodded. “I think there are only two of us who can.”

  “Who taught you?” This from the dark-haired commander. I recognized the title of khavi from Dr. Sawyer’s files.

  “A human named Alistair Sawyer. A language . . . expert? A linguist. He met the first Vardeshi who came to Earth. He has been”—I faltered—“to design . . . a computer program for learning Vardeshi.”

  “Designing,” the gray-haired one corrected.

  “Designing,” I repeated. “I am his first student. I have only practiced with him. Until today.”

  The commander said, “Your accent is very . . . aristocratic.” He didn’t sound pleased.

  “I learned from recordings. Old messages. There was a man . . . he spoke slowly. Clearly. You sound like him, actually.” I nodded to the gray-haired man. “Novak Takheri?”

  All of them exchanged glances. Another unfathomable pause followed. Then the man I’d addressed said slowly, “We should sound alike. Novak Takheri is my father.”