Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1)

by Meg Pechenick

  I thought, He sent his son. Dr. Sawyer was right. I said, “My teacher will be glad to know this.”

  The commander made an abrupt dismissive gesture. “Enough. This one.”

  Platinum hair and gray exchanged a swift neutral glance. Then Novak Takheri’s son said, “Khavi. As I said before, her technical skills—”

  “Are irrelevant. What, so the others are experts in their medieval technology? It won’t help them to learn our systems. Two days on this planet and I’m already tired of speaking their primitive language. Six months of it would be intolerable. This one at least can understand us. I’ve made my decision.” And in English he repeated, “This one.” He glanced down at my file. “Eyvri . . . Alkhat.”

  And so, half disbelieving, I was selected—grudgingly—for a role so historic I could hardly take it in. I was going to Vardesh Prime.

  The interview appeared to be over. The three Vardeshi officers said their farewells to Councillor Seidel and went out with another Council member. The commander didn’t look in my direction again; the gray-haired one acknowledged me with a little jerk of the chin that I was to learn was the Vardeshi equivalent of a nod. Saresh actually said good-bye to me, and I glowed a little at the fact that he said it in Vardeshi. I answered in kind, guessing at the honorific. I would have liked to ask him whether it was correct, but I couldn’t, because they were already gone.

  Naturally, Councillor Seidel wanted a full translation of the Vardeshi portion of the conversation. When I’d recounted it to his satisfaction, with reference to a recording furnished by Stefan, I said, “They were surprised. They didn’t expect me to speak Vardeshi. It wasn’t in the file you gave them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Council was not prepared to stake the reputation of Earth scholarship on the claims of one isolated and possibly delusional scholar. Surely you don’t think Sawyer was the only linguist working to deconstruct Vardeshi.”

  “No,” I said. “He was sure there were others.”

  “There were. Many of them. Yet no one else was able to do what Sawyer did. We weren’t about to advertise the presence of Vardeshi speakers on Earth without conclusive proof that his program worked.”

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t been able to talk to them?”

  “We would have ended the interview. It would have been embarrassing for us, but not fatal. Fortunately it didn’t come to that.”

  “Did you think it would?”

  Councillor Seidel looked thoughtful. “Truthfully, Avery, I had no idea.”

  It quickly became clear to me that essentially the entire Villiger Center had been in a state of suspended animation pending the outcome of the day’s interviews. Now that the decision had been made, the wheels began to turn, and I had the sense of an incredibly complicated mechanism shifting smoothly into action. All the Council members and their assistants were busily engaged with their phones and laptops as the councillor walked me out of the interview room. In the atrium he passed me off to Elena, who was radiant with barely suppressed pride. “Congratulations, Avery! I knew they’d choose you.”

  I found myself grinning in response. “I guess they liked the sweater.”

  “Did you see the blond one?”

  “Saresh? It would have been hard to miss him.”

  “Your training schedule has just been finalized. I have it here.” She gestured with her tablet. “If you’d like to get some coffee, we can look over it together.”

  We made our way to the second-floor café, procured the ubiquitous espressos, and settled ourselves at a table. Elena placed her tablet between us. “This is your schedule for the next two weeks. The commander of the Pinion—that’s the translation they gave us for the name of their ship—would like to leave for Vardesh Prime as soon as possible. Typically our representatives will be training for four weeks at the Villiger Center, but half that time is allocated to a starter course in TrueFluent Vardeshi, so your schedule has been accelerated. Your departure date has been set for two weeks from tomorrow.”

  I skimmed through the schedule in mingled awe and dread. “This is intense. Medical training I understand, but hand-to-hand combat? And what’s this one . . . covert signaling through kinesics? How much of this do they expect me to learn in two weeks?”

  “As much as you can. Let’s look at tomorrow.” I obediently paged backward. “You start every day with combat training,” Elena explained. “It’s a modified form of Krav Maga—Israeli self-defense. Next you have an hour of medical training. Then gear and menu prep. After lunch, you’ll spend an hour with your designated contact person on Earth.”

  “Learning covert signals,” I said.

  “Creating them, actually. Then you have a break for a workout, followed by a session with a psychologist. Finally, dinner and recreation time.”

  “That’s two hours of workouts a day,” I observed.

  “They want you in peak physical shape when you launch. It’s good that you’re already a runner. That was a point in your favor when you were still competing with all the special-operations people.”

  “Do I get any days off?”

  I was joking, but she answered me seriously. “The day before you ship out is a designated rest day. That time is set aside for you to see your family and talk to your friends before you launch.”

  I stared at her, suddenly horrified. “Oh my God. My parents. They have no idea where I am. I haven’t even—I can’t believe I haven’t even thought about them since I got here.”

  “It’s all right,” she reassured me. “They know where you are. The councillor called them as soon as you arrived. We’ll be flying them in next week.”

  I scarcely heard her words. At the thought of my parents, a cold weight had settled in my stomach. What was I going to say to them? They had been shocked when I announced my intention of living abroad in China. My mother had rallied impressively, but I had seen the fear behind her eyes. The day before I flew out, we had stood in the kitchen and hugged for a long time. Then we had said our good-byes: true good-byes, final ones, just in case something didn’t go according to plan. They had been guardedly pleased when I made my way to California, but I knew they still resented the thousands of intervening miles. Now I was going away again, farther than any of us could imagine. The Vardeshi had issued an invitation to cross the dark void between our worlds, and they had issued it to me. And I was going to accept it. In my mind, the decision shone with crystalline clarity. But my parents weren’t going to see it that way. They were going to be scared, and hurt, and angry, and they were going to tell me not to go.

  And I was going to go anyway.

  “Avery?” Elena prompted gently. “Are you all right?”

  I sighed. “I’m fine. But I think I need to call my parents.”

  “They should be awake by now. I’ll find you a private room and set up the call.”

  The conversation went more or less as I had expected. My father’s anger was less troubling than the silence from my mother. After I explained how I had earned a place on the List, and what I had been asked to do, she said quietly, “I knew there was something wrong, the last time you came home. You seemed . . . flat. Drained. This is why.”

  “This is why,” I agreed.

  “Is that how Vardeshi makes you feel?”

  “No. That’s how failing at Vardeshi made me feel."

  “And you’re really the only person who can talk to them? The only one in the world?”

  “The only one apart from my teacher,” I said.

  “I know you want to learn more about these people. But do you really have to go all the way to their planet to do that? They have spaceships. They can come here. A hundred of them are already on their way. Won’t they need translators?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I wasn’t asked to do that.”

  She sighed. “Avery . . . You’ve led such a quiet life. Now, for the first time, you’re caught up in something big, something important. Private
jets, training in Switzerland—I know it must be intoxicating. Flattering. But forget for a minute that you’d be the first human on Vardesh Prime. Forget about making history. Put all of that aside and tell me: Do you actually want to do this? Do you want to live on a spaceship for twelve months? With strangers? Because that’s what this means. And I’m worried that you’re too caught up in the drama of it all to see how lonely you’re going to be. And that by the time you realize you’ve made a mistake, you won’t be able to turn back.”

  “It’s not a mistake,” I said. “This is what I want. And I’m ready for it. The ship. The loneliness. Everything.”

  After a pause she said, “How do you know you’ll be safe?”

  “I don’t. I can’t. I have to make a choice: trust them or don’t trust them. I choose to trust them. Look, Mom, they’re a thousand years ahead of us. They have technology we can’t even imagine. If they wanted to . . . abduct us or kill us or whatever, they wouldn’t ask for volunteers. They’d just do it. That’s not why they’re here.”

  There was silence on the line. Then she said, “I can’t protect you out there.”

  “I know.”

  Another silence.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “I know.”

  After ending the call, I sat alone in the conference room for a few minutes. Telling my parents I was leaving had brought the reality home to me in a way that nothing else had, not even coming face-to-face with the Vardeshi themselves. My thoughts drifted back to that meeting. It had been so brief that I hadn’t really absorbed it. Now I pictured them again: the three officers, so disquietingly human, and yet with that unplaceable strangeness about them. But was the strangeness really there, or had I only imagined it? If I hadn’t already known they were Vardeshi, would I have noticed anything amiss? I would, I decided, but not from their appearance—absent the uniforms, of course. It would have been the air of slightly irritated forbearance, of superior abilities held firmly in check. I recognized the feeling from high school: the collective longing for the slowest student in the class to produce a credible response so that everyone could finally move on. Elena was right. They were definitely smarter than us.

  She was right about Saresh, too. He was handsome, startlingly so. Oddly, though, it wasn’t his face that lingered in my mind but that of the gray-haired officer, Novak Takheri’s son. I could still see the measuring look in his light eyes, still feel the adrenaline charge of the moment when he leaned over to speak to his commander, inadvertently giving me the proof I needed to know that Dr. Sawyer’s labor—and my own—had not been in vain. I remembered with a twinge of dismay that he had thought I was in the interview room by mistake. Even after he’d heard me speak his language, he had argued against my selection. The khavi had overruled him. Would he hold that fact against me? Did the Vardeshi hold grudges? I had no way of knowing. But I did know that, if we were going to be sharing close quarters for the next six months, I would have to find some way to persuade him that he had been wrong about me. I hoped it wouldn’t be hard to do.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The following morning my training began in earnest. At eight o’clock sharp I walked into the room indicated by Elena to be the martial-arts studio. I’d never taken any sort of self-defense course before, and I was nervous, but the instructor—an Israeli woman named Davnah—quickly put me at ease.

  “In two weeks we won’t be able to do much more than develop your situational awareness,” she explained. “But even a little training is better than none. Dangerous situations unfold in seconds, not minutes. If you can block a single blow, or notice someone approaching you in a threatening way, you may gain enough time to cry out for help or reach for a weapon. Of course, if someone means you real harm, you probably won’t do more than slow them down. And we don’t know anything about the physical capabilities of the Vardeshi. All we know is that their size and proportions are roughly equal to ours.”

  “I’ll bet they’re stronger than they look,” I muttered.

  Davnah put me through twenty minutes of conditioning and then modeled some basic punches and kicks on a punching bag. I imitated her moves as best I could. Next she demonstrated, with slow and exaggerated gestures, how to escape from an assailant who grabbed one around the neck from behind. This was more challenging still. My movements were too cautious, and my hands kept slipping, or my intended blows missed their targets.

  After a few minutes, Davnah excused herself and stepped out into the hallway. When she came back in, she was followed by two burly young men in workout attire. “All right,” she said. “Let’s try again. Blindfolded, this time.”

  Something about the blindfold and the presence of masculine attackers transformed the exercise. My heart was racing, and I was sweating, and the men—while not unnecessarily rough—weren’t overly gentle either. I knew I’d have bruises tomorrow. I didn’t care. The shock of strange male hands closing around my throat heightened my concentration. I began to react more aggressively to the attacks. Eventually I succeeded in breaking their grip, although not consistently. When Davnah finally removed my blindfold, I read the satisfaction in her face.

  From self-defense I moved on to medical training. It was from the instructor, a young doctor named Anton whose blond good looks rivaled those of Saresh, that I learned the first concrete facts about the ship that was to be my home for the next year.

  “The Vardeshi have provided us with some basic information about the environment of their home planet,” Anton told me. “Their shipboard environment is engineered to match that of their home as accurately as possible. Luckily for us, their planet is a remarkably close match with Earth. But there are a few things you need to be prepared for. Their sun is a little brighter and bluer than ours, so you’re going to have to gauge your comfort level with their shipboard lights. You can dim the lights in your cabin, but you may need to keep a pair of sunglasses on hand for when you’re moving around the ship.

  “Also, their gravity is two percent higher, so your workouts are always going to feel like you’re sweating off a couple pounds of holiday weight. The oxygen is a trace lower, but it’s within the range of what’s safe for humans. Over the long term, even such a slight difference may become a concern, so we’ll be sending you with a couple of different devices to manage your oxygen intake. One is a battery-powered oxygenator to install in your cabin. That will pump a little extra O2 into your air so that your levels can regulate while you sleep. The other is a pocket-size handheld dispenser. It looks just like a standard asthma inhaler. You’ll carry it around with you at all times and take a puff anytime you feel light-headed. We’ll send you with a couple dozen of those. Each one is good for about a month.” He had both pieces of tech with him, and he demonstrated their use.

  “So far we’re looking at pretty minor changes to the conditions your body expects. Adjusting to the length of the Vardeshi day will be a bit more difficult. The Vardeshi clock has twenty-seven hours, each one just a little shorter than an Earth hour, so it works out to essentially a twenty-six-hour day. You’re going to have to work to adapt, and your body is going to fight you. My advice is to treat it like jet lag: get on their schedule the minute you go aboard, and don't let yourself sleep at odd hours until you’re pretty well acclimated. That being said, you should aim for an early bedtime in general. I’d like to see you getting nine or ten hours of sleep a night. You’re going to feel tired in ways you can’t even imagine yet. Remember, your body will be working overtime to adjust to all of these changes, on top of all the conscious work you’ll be doing in assimilating to an alien culture. As of now, every fourth day on your calendar is marked as a rest day—work is off-limits. You’ll gauge whether that’s enough or too much time as you go through the year.

  “You’ll need to pay close attention to how you’re feeling at all times. I’m sending you with a full medical kit and a first aid manual, as well as a database of common human ailments and cures. We’ve been informed that there will be a Vardeshi
physician aboard your ship. I’ve included copies of everything for her as well. If you start to feel sick, act immediately. Don’t ignore anything—not even something that seems minor, like a cough or a sore throat. Get the meds you need, hole up in your quarters, and rest. The Vardeshi will tell you the same thing. They’re worried about exposure to their people, but I’m worried about you. Your first duty is to keep yourself alive. There are no hospitals and no human doctors out there. You’re on your own.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’m starting to get that impression.”

  “That being said, we’ll be monitoring you as closely as we can from here. Before you launch, I’ll be injecting you with a couple of subcutaneous transmitters—one here,” and he turned my hand over to indicate the underside of my wrist, “and one somewhere more discreet. Don’t tell anyone about that one.”

  “Why do I need two—oh. In case they dig the first one out?”

  “Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “The transmitters will continuously record your vital signs and transmit them to Earth on the back of any messages you send us. If I start to see trends that worry me—inadequate sleep, weight loss, elevated stress hormones—we’ll work together to identify the problem and find a solution.

  “Now let’s talk about preexisting conditions. I have the results from your arrival tests; I just need to confirm them with you.” He skimmed through documents on his tablet. “You’re in excellent health, which makes my job a lot easier. I see that you’re a runner. You’ll want to keep up your routine using whatever exercise equipment they maintain aboard their ship. It looks like you’re allergic to dust and mold—which shouldn’t be a problem on a spaceship—and you wear corrective lenses. I’ll send you with plenty of extras. You’re currently taking a hormonal contraceptive . . . I’d like to switch you to the continuous version. Make your life a little easier—menstruation is one logistical problem you won’t need.

  “Speaking of the reproductive cycle, I’m under orders to inform you that you’re absolutely forbidden to engage in sexual contact of any kind with the Vardeshi. We don’t know enough about their biology yet to understand the risks. If that changes, we’ll be sure to notify you.”