Valence (Confluence Book 4)

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Tinor also recorded all kinds of parameters about the environment—light levels, temperature, salinity—and took many samples from the seafloor, so that she could replicate an aquaculture environment if that was ultimately what would be needed.

  As they walked back toward the ship, Tinor settled into step next to Jane. “We will have several different options. The easiest will be if Lira takes to synthesized food. Other options include genetically modifying a sectilian land plant to feed her or starting an aquaculture project either inside Pio’s habitat or nearby. Would it be possible for me to move my living quarters to the Oblignatus so that I won’t have to waste time going back and forth?”

  Jane smiled. The girl Tinor had been was all but gone. A grown woman stood in her place—confident, driven, ready to serve her community. “Of course. I think that’s a fine idea. You’ve done excellent work today. Thank you.”

  Tinor looked pleased. “Who will be the Quasador Dux of that ship?”

  “That’s a good question. I’ll be discussing that with Pio over the next few days. I’ll let you know as soon as I know.”

  “All right,” Tinor said gravely. Then, in a fit of exuberance, she turned cartwheels and raced ahead.

  There was still a little child left, it seemed.

  18

  February 15, 2018

  Five months after Jane Holloway’s Global Announcement

  ZARA BEGAN to dream in Mensententia. She sometimes caught herself thinking in Mensententia. She’d even accidentally used some of the alien words in mundane situations.

  She’d once told her mother “Casgrata” instead of “Thank you,” prompting the necessity to lie about wanting to learn Italian. It seemed to work, but her mother had given her some strange looks. Another time, she’d replied “Scaluuti,” when a friend had greeted her in the hallway at school. The friend looked at her oddly, then brightened with recognition and replied with the same salutation. Now it was commonly heard in the halls of her school—a sort of secret handshake.

  It was weird to have instigated something that even popular kids thought was cool. Of course, none of them knew she’d been the one to start the movement, so she remained in obscurity. She didn’t care. Knowing it was working was enough.

  There were tens of thousands of shares of her original Instamat post, hundreds of sites and message boards and forums linked to her websites, and many other sites now hosted the download. It had quietly blown up among adolescents, but it was another three weeks before the adult segment of the population even seemed to notice it was happening.

  Then it made the news. The report she saw said someone had uploaded the file from Atlanta, Georgia. She hoped that no one would be able to dig any deeper into where it had originated. But even if they did, it was too late to contain it. Kids and adults everywhere were learning Mensententia. She followed a few public online groups where people posted their progress and provided peer support if anyone had questions or problems with either getting the software to work on their system or the language itself. Most people were enthusiastic and completely engaged with learning it. True to what Jane had said, anecdotally at least, adults seemed to have more difficulty with the language, but many were pursuing it anyway.

  Neither her dad nor her mom ever brought it up.

  She assumed that they thought she didn’t have access to it because they monitored her Web use. They still hadn’t discovered the laptop. They didn’t know she used Instamat. They also didn’t know she stayed up late every night learning the language.

  She started staying up even later after she learned the word Swarm. The definition chilled her. There were giant bugs out in space that could systematically strip an entire planet clean of all living things—even if there were people there.

  Then rumors started cropping up on the Web that a Ukrainian astronomer had detected something quirky in the vicinity of a distant star system called Epsilon Eridani. Something that he said he had tracked over time and seemed to be moving toward Earth. It wasn’t a comet. It wasn’t anything anyone recognized, but it was so far away that it could be anything or nothing. Zara studied the articles with an obsessed passion, but she couldn’t glean anything meaningful from them. They were all so frustratingly vague and used terminology that she researched to endpoints that led her nowhere. The mainstream media were silent on the topic, but she wasn’t sure that meant anything. It terrified her. It could be made up. But what if it wasn’t?

  Suddenly learning Mensententia wasn’t just a game. She was driven now more than ever. She began to wonder what she could do to protect Earth from those things or anything else in the universe that might want a piece of her world. It didn’t seem like just learning a language was enough anymore. But what could she do? What could any single person do?

  It haunted her. Her stomach hurt all the time. She wasn’t sleeping well. She constantly had headaches. Going to school everyday seemed pointless, everything seemed pointless except learning the language. But she was thirteen. Just a thirteen-year-old girl.

  Her dark skin mostly camouflaged the purplish circles under her eyes that a lighter-skinned girl might have sported, but frankly nothing could cover up her grouchy disposition from being tired all the time. She became more reckless and holed up in her room with her illicit laptop all the time. Her parents seemed to attribute that behavior to simply being a teenager. At least they knocked before they came into her room, giving her time to hide the computer, but it was becoming increasingly tempting to simply defy them. But she didn’t. Because they had more power than she did. She knew that. They wouldn’t understand even if she told them everything.

  When her friends asked her if she was the one who’d uploaded the language software, she scowled and said no, but that she was glad someone had finally done it. That put an end to those conversations. She didn’t join in when other kids talked about learning the language in her presence, not even her online friends. She didn’t dare. It would be too risky for her dad if anyone guessed it had been her. She just listened, comparing their experiences to her own.

  It might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, but at least it seemed like the language being out there kinda helped people focus on something positive. The whole world was learning about the language now, and there were lots of news stories reporting on that. It gave her some hope—it seemed a lot better than conspiracy theories, though those still existed too. Some people thought that it was all a hoax, but how could something this complex be a hoax? People were stupid.

  And what was Jane doing out there? Did she even wonder how Earth was faring after she dropped her info bomb and went off to the stars? When would she come back and give them all more guidance? Would she be able to protect them from horrible things like the Swarm?

  “Better get that chicken in the oven if we’re going to eat before midnight,” her dad observed.

  “Oh.” She looked back down at the limp, raw chicken and the huge kitchen scissors in her hands. It was her night to cook, and tonight she was making roasted chicken and cauliflower. It had once been one of her favorite meals to make. She used to enjoy being given this little bit of responsibility. Now it just felt like a chore. It was time consuming and kept her from what was really important.

  “Where did you go, just now?” her dad asked, chuckling, from his spot at the counter bar. He was there to supervise and help, if needed, but his laptop was open, like always.

  She grimaced. “I don’t know!” She struggled with the scissors some more and remembered why she’d stopped to rest. Her hands hurt. She was trying to cut the backbone out of the chicken, but her hands were not that strong. She looked over her shoulder impatiently. “Can you cut this?”

  Her dad made a comically grossed-out face. He hated chicken on the bone and raw meat in general, but he did the job for her, then washed his hands three times.

  She finished the initial meal prep and had time to kill until she could do the next steps. She was so tired and didn’t know what to do with herself whi
le she waited, so she walked around the peninsula and leaned against her dad. He wrapped an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. She felt safe in his embrace. She could pretend her world wasn’t so scary for just a few minutes.

  She reopened her eyes drowsily and slowly refocused. Dad hadn’t shut his laptop or changed the screen. It was displaying that same Mensententic soup of symbols that she’d seen before, swimming in and out of focus. Overlaid was another application in a small window off to one side with a numbered list. Each item on that list was a string of Mensententic symbols. One was highlighted, and her father moved the cursor around until one of those symbols came into focus, then clicked on it.

  But these strings of symbols were nonsense. They were completely unrelated words. What was he doing?

  She frowned and watched the symbols on the screen herself. She could read many of them now, unlike the first time she’d seen them. Daddy moved his finger around on the trackpad intently. He was probably looking for the next symbol in the sequence he had there in that little window.

  As the viewpoint shifted, she saw that he was zooming in and out of various parts of the word cloud. She could see now that the central core of the symbol cluster was where the language-learning file was located, along with what looked like an index and a few other files that were meant to introduce concepts that might be alien to other cultures. It was a different way of organizing files than any she’d seen before, but it made sense to her. Instead of presenting grids, or lists, it allowed clusters of related ideas to be found together. It wasn’t how a human would do it, but that was the point. Sectilians surely thought differently and organized things differently, but it all made sense if you learned the language first, which was precisely what Jane had told them to do.

  Had her dad skipped that part or not found it yet? It was all right there, but he was stringing these nonsense symbols together instead—for what purpose? It didn’t make any sense. Couldn’t he see that there was a pattern? Or was he trying to find something very specific? It didn’t really seem like he knew what he was doing.

  She looked up at him quizzically.

  His eyes were heavy lidded. His posture was slumped. He looked tired and defeated. She didn’t like seeing him like that. And when she thought about it, she realized he’d looked like that for weeks. She wondered what he knew. He didn’t return her gaze for a moment, as he kept looking into the cloud for the next symbol in his sequence, methodically clicking on each one.

  Then he inhaled sharply. He seemed to wake up and realize that she had seen his screen, which he was normally extremely careful to prevent. He blinked a few times. His mouth opened to speak, but then closed again. He slowly reached out to close the laptop and looked down at his hands, silently, like he was just very tired. She knew that feeling well.

  The first timer went off.

  She straightened and went back around the peninsula.

  “What was that timer for?” he murmured.

  “Time to start the rice.”

  She poured the premeasured water into the pot and turned on the stove. The mood between them was strained all of a sudden. She felt weird. Her heart was beating fast and her hands moved jerkily. She was terrified, but she had to say something to him. She had to. The moment had come.

  “Daddy—”

  “I—”

  They spoke at the same time and then stopped, staring at each other warily. She wondered if he was as scared as she was. He looked like it. She waited to see what he would say.

  He grimaced. “I just made a mistake. I’m really not supposed to bring this home, much less let you see it, baby girl. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

  “You’re tired, Daddy. It’s okay.”

  He shook his head. “Not okay. If I could just make some sense of this…” He slapped his hands lightly against the edge of the countertop and came around the peninsula to hover over her.

  She sniffed and turned to grab the scissors to open the rice packet and the flavoring packet. She was breathing shallowly. The urge to run upstairs and hide in her room was strong. Instead she poured in the rice and they both watched the pot as she stirred the contents and waited for it to boil.

  “Daddy,” she whispered, “I can make sense of it. If you don’t know where to start, I can show you. I can show you how it works.”

  She glanced up at him. He looked like he’d been smacked across the face.

  “What are you talking about?” he said sharply.

  She blurted out, “It’s just that the words you’re putting together are nonsense, Daddy. They don’t mean anything. I don’t think it works like that.”

  He searched her face like he didn’t know what she was saying—like she was just as enigmatic as the software he was trying to decipher.

  Then he seemed to deflate all at once, all the energy animating his body going out of him. He put a limp hand up to his face and rubbed at the five-o’clock shadow bristling there. “You’ve been… Where? How?” He shook his head. “Damn it. It doesn’t matter. Show me what you think you know.”

  They went back around the peninsula together. She showed him the center of the cloud. “Yes, we looked there first,” he said impatiently. But when she clicked on the symbols for the language-learning software in the right sequence, the familiar start window came up. He looked startled. His lips pursed. “I suspect you’re familiar with this part,” he said.

  She nodded and went back to the main screen. Then she showed him some of the other parts and translated what they were for. He grabbed a notebook and scribbled furiously, nodding and asking her to slow down so he could meticulously copy the alien symbols.

  They forgot about the rice until it boiled over, hissing and sputtering, making a burnt smell and a brown mess all over the stove. Zara went back to turn the heat down and clean up the mess. She felt self-conscious, because her dad was watching her with a look of indecision on his face. Suddenly he grabbed his phone and went into the family room at the back of the house. She could faintly hear him talking to someone. He alternated between sounding contrite and persuasive, but she couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying.

  Mama wandered in and clucked at the mess on the stove, but helped her wipe it up and then cracked the oven door to see how the chicken was doing.

  Daddy came back in. He looked excited. “Okay. Okay. You and me, baby girl. We’re going to the lab to show them what you just showed me.”

  “What?” Mama looked from Zara to her dad and back again.

  “Well, it looks like our daughter has been learning Mensententia,” Dad said.

  Her mother looked shocked and a little angry. “She what?”

  Daddy shook his head. “Cilla, just let it be for now. I think she’s going to be a big help. We’ll shake out the details later.” He went to the hall closet and grabbed his jacket and Zara’s. “Let’s go.”

  Mama narrowed her eyes. The second timer went off. “What about dinner? I think this can wait twenty minutes so you can eat a few bites.”

  Daddy frowned but ultimately agreed.

  That night, Zara became the youngest employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  19

  JANE STOOD on the beach for a long time watching Alan, Ron, Jaross, and Ryliuk assist the pligan workers as they placed the last of the new hull scales on the Speroancora with a crane suspended from the nearest Tree structure. Both ships glittered like polished obsidian in the pale sunlight.

  The Speroancora didn’t look like a ship that had nearly been a total loss. It looked magnificent. And if Alan’s calculations were correct, the ship was stronger and safer than ever before.

  They would be leaving very soon.

  She had wound a piece of fabric around her head and neck, but the wind still worked some pieces of her hair free and lashed them against her cheeks until they stung. She put her head down and tramped across the beach to the ramp leading into the Oblignatus.

  Pio greeted her warmly as soon as she stepp
ed inside. And through her, Huna, Tinor, and Pledor sent a welcoming “Scaluuti!”

  This ship was a twin to her own. It had the same dimensions, same configuration, and same drab color scheme, but a completely different energy. Whereas Jane’s predecessor had commissioned colorful murals for some of the public spaces, testimony to Rageth’s love of art, this ship was bare of unique decor, though the remnants of the lives of the sectilians who had died here so long ago still lay scattered around everywhere Jane walked. No one had taken time to tidy this ship up yet. Thankfully, Pio had removed the bodies long ago, just as Brai had, using armies of squillae. The new Qua’dux would finish the clean up in their own way. They would probably want to catalog many of the instruments and devices and put them away carefully, just as her crew had.

  Jane loosened her head wrap as she boarded, but didn’t remove it. The core of the ship was cooler. She made her way there quickly. Rageth’s memories of her first time aboard the Speroancora flitted in the back of her mind, triggered by the appearance of the bare ship.

  She saw Lira first. The shaggy sea cow snuffled against the barrier of Pio’s habitat as though wanting to be petted, then turned away to look up, her curled tusks scraping against the glass as she went.

  Pio appeared, descending slowly to the level of the gangway Jane stood on. Pio was longer and more slender than Brai. Her shimmering, silver-and-gold-gilded limbs twined around her body, gossamer fins undulating along her mantle. Enormous cobalt-blue eyes, surrounded by a milky white sclera glittering with aquamarine iridescence, turned on Jane. Jane had always thought Brai was lovely to look at, but Pio was breathtaking.

  “It is time to decide, isn’t it?” Pio asked warily.