The Occasional Diamond Thief

by J. A. McLachlan

  “That is not for you to ask,” she says coolly.

  I flush. They never reveal a vision to the subject, I know that. A person cannot know her future. But this is crazy, a vision about me. She must be mistaken.

  “We hope, while you’re doing it, you’ll teach our Select to speak the language.” The Adept glances at Agatha, “and translate for her until she is proficient.”

  “I have school…” It’s useless to argue. If they’ve had a vision, they’ll get me there whatever it takes. I am going to Malem. I picture my father’s face before he died. What if I come home crazy and sick with fevers, too? I want to throw up. I swallow hard.

  “Dean Harris will be told we have contracted your services and you’ll resume your studies when you return. Perhaps you will only accompany our Select there and return with the ship.” The Adept’s voice is calm, soothing. I immediately feel reassured. I look away from her, fighting the false emotion, and catch Agatha watching me.

  “Did they see us both? In the vision?” Why wasn’t Agatha taught Malemese if they knew she’d be going?

  “Only you. We hoped the choice of Select would become clear. And it has. The Select herself said we must ask of her what is asked of you.”

  “I can’t go. My mother’s sick!”

  “Our fee for your services will cover her medical expenses. A priority will be placed on finding her a compatible heart. When you return, your tuition and residence at the college will be covered until you graduate. You will have no further need to steal. And you will never do so again.” The last sentence is said in the same calm tone, but with a firmness that hits me like a whiplash. The Adept is done with my delays. She is accustomed to being obeyed.

  For this reason alone I want to refuse her. If only there was some way I could. But they have me trapped. My family, my education, my future: nothing will be left if I refuse.

  “Come with me to Malem, Kia,” Agatha says softly. “It will be alright. It is God’s plan, not ours.”

  I close my eyes. I am beaten.

  “It is settled, then,” the Adept says. She rises to leave. As if it is an afterthought, she adds, “That secret you are keeping, child. You must carry it with you to Malem. It will be important there, I think.”

  Chapter Ten

  The clay tiles of the footpath are warm against my bare feet as I walk through the flowers and redgrass toward the mansion. Imported marble columns rise at regular intervals from the front of the verandah, which is made of burnished Earthoak to match the huge double doors. The roof is tiled in a soft beige with gold inlays that catch the sun and carry the rich look of the marble onto the roof.

  I approach slowly, squinting as the sun blazes off the gold embellishments on the doors. The windows flanking them are opaque and glitter golden even in the shaded recess of the porch. The door opens easily to my touch; I enter with the confidence of a proprietor.

  The interior is full of light and utterly empty. No ornaments, paintings or furniture mar its impersonal beauty. I breathe in the clean smell of fresh-cut wood, of new paint and sunlight through glass. My bare feet slap lightly on the warm, blond hardwood floor as I pass from room to room through frosted doors which open by themselves ahead of me.

  In the third room I hear the faint sound of laughter. I pause. Am I trespassing upon another occupant?

  With every step I take the laughter increases in volume, intentional now, directed at me.

  It echoes from wall to wall in the barren house. I turn slowly, trying to determine which direction it’s coming from. I dread meeting the source of that sardonic laugh, yet I’m compelled to move forward. As I approach each frosted door I hold my breath, waiting in horror as it opens before me.

  A second voice joins the first, this one crying. It frightens me more than the laughter, though I don’t know why either sound should frighten me. I should have expected it, I think. The two are inseparable; how did I forget that? My own thoughts make no sense to me. I move on.

  The house with all its opulence no longer holds any allure. The white sunlight that filled it minutes ago as though the sun itself were trapped inside has faded away, leaving only a weary dullness to the air. Menacing shadows reach from the walls toward the centers of the rooms as I walk through them. Gloomy, I think. Gloaming: that other word for dusk. The time of tricks of sight. The time of thieves.

  The two sounds, laughter and weeping, echo from every wall, seeking me, willing me onward. The last pair of frosted doors opens and there they are, as I knew they would be.

  My father lies sobbing in his bed, his dark, emaciated arms reaching out to me.

  “Give it back, Akhié. Give it back!” he weeps, his outstretched arms imploring. His eyes are vacant. He stares right through me, seeing someone else even as he cries my name. I am not real to him; I have never been real to him.

  Owegbé’s laughter increases, drowning out Itohan’s weeping. “Everything in this house is yours!” she cries, contemptuous and amused, sweeping out her arm to encompass the empty rooms. “Nothing! Nothing is yours. You have earned nothing!” She throws back her head and laughs, the sound bouncing off the bare walls, louder and louder, deafening…

  *****

  I wake with a gasp, my heart pounding. There’s a dry, hot feeling behind my eyes like I want to cry. The cool recycled air of the ship, with its bitter, metallic musk, fills my nose and mouth and lies cold and heavy in my chest.

  I sit up, hugging my knees, and pull the blanket around me. “Not real,” I whisper to myself. The dream is not, but this is real: I am on my way to the planet that killed my father.

  “I won’t stay on Malem,” I mumble under the covers. “I’m going back with the ship.” My mother’s dream-laugh taunts me even as I say it.

  To drive it from my head, I think of Etin. The last time I saw him, he was coming off the Homestar after a run. I was waiting there, to tell him the O.U.B. had hired me to translate for them and I’d be going off-planet.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Various places.” I made a vague circular gesture with my hand as we walked toward the transport offices where he had to check in. I had just come from there, checking out. The ship was waiting for me, but I’d insisted on talking to Etin before leaving.

  “They’re going to pay for Owegbé’s transplant.”

  He stopped. “Kia, that’s not your—” I could see it in his face, his concern for me, and it warmed me. But I couldn’t let him try to argue with me. He didn’t know everything, and I hoped he never would, so I cut him short. “They’re paying the rest of my university fees when I get back, too.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “I know that’s not why you’re doing it,” he said. “You should tell her, Kia.”

  “I can’t.” I waved toward a ship across the ’strip. Agatha stood in the open door, waiting for me. “We’re leaving now.”

  “So soon?” He bent and hugged me tightly. “Thank you,” he whispered into my ear. “Come home safe.”

  That was a good moment. It carried me through boarding and liftoff. I thought of it while I held my ears to deaden the terrible scream of the drives just before my first leap, and in the hours of vomiting afterward. It even made up for the pilot’s surly refusal to speak to me after I threw up on his boots.

  Thank you. Come home safe. I have done something right at last. Etin is proud of me.

  The memory barely has time to cheer me before the sardonic laugh from my dream returns, carrying another memory, of Agatha knocking on the door to my room to tell me I’d received an incoming ’cast. One look at her face and I didn’t want to hear it, but I followed her to the comset anyway. The Adept, her face as expressionless over the ’net as when she handed out my sentence, informed me that my mother’s body had rejected her new heart. She is dead.

  I never said goodbye. We never got the chance to…I don’t know…stop being angry at each other? I was so sure the O.U.B.’s money would solve everything, I decided to wait to see her till I got back. />
  I get up and wash my face, determined to set aside both the dream and the memory. A glance at my workstation tells me it’s the middle of the night. I shrug. It’s always the middle of the night in space. I order the comp on, choose one of my language programs and plug the ’phones in my ears. When I return I’ll get an implant. I can afford one now.

  The ship is quiet except for the subliminal vibration and the low, persistent hum of its drive, which has begun to sound like the murmur of unpleasant voices. It’s no bigger than the Homestar: a two-man operation—captain and engineer—with a cargo bay, rooms for a couple of passengers, the caf, the cockpit, the com room, and the drive. It makes me feel claustrophobic, this tiny shell we’re hurtling through space in. I focus on the voice in my ears, speaking Kandaran. I intend to learn it on this trip. Perfectly.

  Three hours later my head is spinning, but I’ve learned the regular verbs. That’s because there are so few of them. I yank the ’phones from my ears and head to the caf, a cramped little room with cold metal walls on all six sides. I hate the place. It makes me feel like a worm, a small black slug caught inside a tin can, living off the contents. But it’s time for Agatha’s morning language lesson, and the caf is the only eat and meet space on this ship. My head aches from lack of sleep, but Agatha can’t afford to miss another lesson. It took two weeks after I learned of my mother’s death before I resumed her language lessons, and only because she tried to wish me good morning and instead asked me to dance.

  Agatha’s already there, sitting on a metal bench at the metal table, her head bowed over a bowl of hot porridge. When she looks up I say, meanly, “You can pray all you want, it’ll still be porridge.”

  “I like porridge.” Agatha picks up her spoon and smiles through the steam rising from the bowl. She’s been sickeningly nice to me since the day of the transcast.

  “If you spent as much time studying…” I let the sentence hang while I give my order to the wall dispenser. She knows how hopeless she still is in Malemese.

  I drink my juice, trying to decide what fruit it’s supposed to taste like, and carry the rest of my meal to the table. “Describe what we’re eating,” I suggest as I sit down.

  Agatha gets a cornered look on her face, which annoys me. I push my protein patty around on my plate as she stumbles through two sentences. I don’t know which is worse, the food on ship or having to listen to Agatha mangle Malemese grammar. I’m losing a semester of education for this? I want to scream.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Agatha complains the third time I correct her grammar.

  “It will, when you know it well enough to think in it,” I tell her with a confidence I no longer feel. “Languages only make sense from the inside.”

  “Oh! Like people.”

  “People don’t make sense at all.”

  Agatha smiles. “They do from the inside.”

  I grind the patty into my plate. She’s changed the subject again. All she has to do is learn one language. That’s all. One. And if she doesn’t learn it by the time we get there, I’m stuck by my agreement to stay with her and translate till she does.

  “You,” I snap.

  Agatha groans.

  “Tell me.”

  “There are four separate words all meaning ‘you’. One is used between spouses,” she ticks them off on her fingers. “Another is for family members and close friends. The third is for everyone else who is Malemese and the last is for non-Malemese. I wonder why they have that distinction? They don’t see many off-worlders.”

  “Languages change. Their ancestors used the fourth ‘you’ for strangers, people from other villages. But there’s so little habitable land on Malem that eventually the villages merged into one city. The fourth ‘you’ almost disappeared from the language, until off-worlders began to come.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  I did some research, I think. Didn’t it occur to her to learn something about the place she’s going? Like that it’s a cold, wet world, the opposite of Seraffa’s semi-arid desert. I packed my warmest jumpsuits but I only have two—it seldom gets cool enough on Seraffa for long sleeves. And that there’s only one continent surrounded by water, and no natural life-forms on the land. Everything—plants, animals, birds—was brought there with the colonists over a century ago. She could have learned that much, at least, but there’s no use saying it now.

  “I helped a couple of Malemese at an Immigration Investigation. They went to work on a farm and I visited them a couple times.”

  “They emigrated? I thought the Malemese never emigrated?”

  “They wouldn’t talk about it. Not even at the Investigation. They were almost turned down because they wouldn’t give a reason for wanting to emigrate, but in the end there were no real grounds to refuse them.”

  “What were they like?”

  “Reserved. Very religious.”

  Agatha smiled.

  “It isn’t the same religion as the O.U.B.,” I warn her.

  “It’s all the same God.”

  “Is that what the Adept thinks?”

  For the first time Agatha brings the subject back to language lessons. “Each of the four ‘yous’ has three declensions plus singular or plural, and can be masculine or feminine depending on the final letter. You forgot to ask me that.”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  “And each one must be said with the proper inflection to indicate the power differential.”

  “The power differential?” Agatha’s little frown appears.

  “It’s about respect. Who’s due it from whom. Older from younger, say, or royalty from commoner. It’s very important.”

  “What if I get it wrong?”

  “Don’t. It’s an FTA—a face threatening act.” Even without linguistics, Agatha should understand that concept. It must be part of their training in reading expressions. “The rules of courtesy are very strict on Malem. For example, in order to request something of someone else, the speaker must have more authority than the person he or she asks.”

  “Will I be able to ask questions?”

  “Questions, yes. Favors, no. Until you establish your own authority.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Very carefully, I think.”

  Agatha is quiet, considering it.

  “How many languages do you know?” Maybe I can show her similarities between the grammatical structures. I only half listen for her answer. What I’m really waiting for is an opportunity to ask about Malemese diamonds. But it has to come naturally.

  “Two.”

  “Two?” It takes me a moment to remember my question. “Two? I thought the Select were taught languages?”

  “I had so much trouble with Central Ang they didn’t give me another.”

  “You had trouble with Central Ang?” I stare at her, till I realize my mouth is open, and shut it.

  Central Ang was developed for interplanetary use. It’s stripped of all complexity in order to make it accessible to everyone. There are no irregularities in its verbs, its nouns, its formation of plurals and possessives; no declensions; no synonyms; no multiple spellings or pronunciations. Its vocabulary is limited to the essentials necessary for tongue-tied tourists and cybermail—and that’s all it’s good for. It doesn’t have the complexity needed to exchange ideas, or the subtlety required in negotiations, or the warmth and humor that create friendship. But at some fundamental human level where the fear of not being understood touches us all, Central Ang ties the human universe together.

  “You can speak Central Ang?” I ask, in Central Ang.

  “Yes I can,” Agatha replies in the same language.

  “And Edoan.” I revert back to the language we’ve always spoken together.

  “Edoan is my mother tongue. I was brought to Seraffa as a child.”

  “What about your parents’ language?”

  “I never knew my parents. They died when I was very young. My father was an
Adept, so I was raised in the Order.”

  “That’s it? Edoan and Central Ang?”

  She looks at me without blinking. The O.U.B. do not repeat themselves; they expect you to listen the first time.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t learn languages before I agreed to teach you?”

  “Because I can. I did learn Central Ang,” she says, breaking their rule about repeating.

  She means it. At least she appears to—she is a Select.

  I stand up, avoiding her eyes. “Work on your vocab. I’m going to work on my…my Kandaran…I brought it with me…” I’m babbling, and Agatha can’t help seeing it. Just get out, I think. Out of here, now. “We’ll meet later. After supper….”

  The door slides shut behind me. No one can see me but still I hold myself back, the sound of my footfalls on the metal floor even and casual, all the way to my room. Agatha might not know the extent of her linguistic incompetence—hard as that is to believe—but the Adept did. She had to have.

  I’m not here to teach Agatha Malemese.

  Why am I here?

  Chapter Eleven

  Balancing my fork on one prong, I give it a quick twist. It twirls in a brief moment of gracefulness then wobbles and falls noisily onto the table. I lift it, balance and spin it again.

  Where is Agatha? She was supposed to meet me here an hour ago for her language lesson. In a week we’ll reach Malem, and she still can’t say a single sentence without making some cultural-linguistic gaffe.

  We’ve kept up the pretense—at least I have, because the alternative terrifies me—that I’m here to teach her Malemese. And that’s what I mean to do, as best I can. That’s all I mean to do. Whatever else the Adept has in mind, whatever was in that dream she mentioned, she can forget it.

  But teaching Agatha is impossible. “They’ll know what I mean,” she says when I correct her, as if language isn’t even necessary.

  I give the fork a savage twist. It spins wildly to the edge of the table and clatters onto the floor. Where is she? I grab my plate and cup, retrieve the fork, slam them all into the slot for used dishes, and stomp down the narrow, claustrophobic corridor to find her.