by Jean Johnson
The next set of images were a little confusing. It showed her and Li’eth sitting strapped into seats in a different section, of her touching his head . . . of the others—even her own people—coming close, but being blocked from touching them. Wire mesh, cages, a clear-dome force field, repeatedly they were blocked. And when one of them was allowed to touch them, the image of the Great One snapped to her feet, anger on her face, finger pointing far away, and her abilities flinging the person—the blond, markless man with the long hair—far away, but without harm.
“What . . . ?” V’kol asked. “Mind-speaking . . . she’s a Great One?”
Ba’oul rolled her eyes. “If you hadn’t noticed her knocking over the Salik who tried to attack us, then yes, she’s a Great One. A child, but a Great One.”
“Everyone, please. We have been rescued. We will be going home soon. But,” Li’eth cautioned, “we need to learn each other’s language before we can exchange star-chart information and help them to help us find our home. This woman is going to teach it to me, and she’s adamant about our not being touched while we do so. I have no idea what sort of . . . of holy ritual or power this is, but it’s clear she’s very powerful, so if this woman says, or projects an image, that she can teach me her language, or learn ours, or whatever it takes . . . we will be patient and give her the time to do so. We will follow her rules while doing so, too. Do not touch us, and . . . relax, stay in here, and drink the pouches of electrolyte water they gave you.”
Shi’ol snorted. The Great One who had rescued them had grabbed a bundle of clothes and pulled herself back to the previous chamber, where it was clear she was peeling her way out of her current suit. “That’s not a woman. That’s a child with breasts.”
“They are the same species as us, but they are not V’Dan, Leftenant Superior Nanu’oc,” Li’eth chided her. “Get that through your heads, all of you. They are our hosts, and we will act with as much courtesy, civility, restraint, and common sense as we can muster. And we will not take offense at anything they do or say—or appear like—because we are not them, they are not us, and we are very much dependent upon their goodwill to get back home. They are willing to help us, but we must be patient and polite if we are to find out whatever it is they will bring to our war that will help us to win it. We will treat them as we treat all non-V’Dan, as members of the Third Tier or higher.”
“They don’t even have artificial gravity,” Ba’oul stated, gesturing at their surroundings with the hand not gripping a handle to keep him floating in one place. “And their flight capacity was very rough and nauseating at one point. These are not exactly inspiring predictors of what they can do.”
“That’s because we . . . I don’t know, jumped into some sort of space-tunnel thing during the rough moment. Something they did with this ship has made them feel relaxed enough to not worry about pursuit,” Li’eth explained. “I don’t know what they did, because I don’t know their language, so I am going to help her learn to communicate with us.”
Dai’a eyed him. “Sir, you are a Captain, our highest-ranked officer. Is it wise for a . . . a member of a foreign nation to read your thoughts?”
“I have given that a lot of thought, just now,” he told her, feeling a little grim. “I don’t think we have much of a choice. It may be that however this works, it will require both of us being able to sense each other’s thoughts, mutually. Of the five of us, only I have that ability.”
“Oh. I forgot you were a Great One. Sorry, sir,” she apologized, her voice dipping so low, it was almost a mumble.
“It’s alright. You haven’t remembered because it hasn’t been nearly as useful as I’d like,” he admitted. “Maybe if I’d been the one in the family picked to go into the diplomatic forces instead of the military, or gifted with an ability to read alien minds, not just our own kind . . .”
Voices in the next section drew their attention. The woman with the black hair conferred with the woman with the deep reddish-brown back and forth for a bit, then did something in one of the cupboards. Sighing heavily, the Great One projected another round of thoughts. This time the images were a set of progressions.
In the first series, Dai’a and Ba’oul were selected, while V’kol and Shi’ol waited impatiently. The two were fed packets of food while the dark-haired woman watched carefully, intently. Dai’a and Ba’oul—in the image—started looking unhappy, clutching at their stomachs, rubbing at their arms, and the other woman quickly touched each with an implement, some sort of delivery system for medicine, then watched them with a concerned look until they both looked better after a few moments.
The image repeated, two others were selected—Shi’ol and V’kol—they ate different food-objects, and this time both were happy, and the doctor looked relieved. Then and only then did she offer the same sort of food from the second part to the other two, and carefully watched them with concern, medical device ready in her hand for the slightest show of stomach upset or whatever.
Li’eth blinked. “I . . . think they’re going to make sure their food is compatible with our bodies, and that the two of you will be first, Dai’a, Ba’oul.”
“That would make the girl with the pale skin and black hair their medic,” V’kol said. “Though I guessed as much from these monitor things.”
“Woman,” Li’eth corrected, catching it a few seconds late. “She is a woman, not a child.”
He sent an agreement to their hostess, who had changed into gray trousers and a gray shirt, each very plain-looking but striped down the sleeves and legs with a black and a blue line. She, the black-haired woman, and the long-haired blond man all wore gray clothes with black and blue stripes down the sleeve. The other three, he realized belatedly, were clad in blue with black stripes down their sleeves. Does that mean these three are higher-ranked than the other three?
He didn’t have time to find out. The Great One darted out the forward door, space suit in hand, and vanished for a few minutes. She poked her head through the aft hatch and sent him an invitation-image requesting he join her. Pulling himself by the handles, Li’eth maneuvered into the central corridor. At the far end of the corridor from the cockpit, she had attached restraint straps to opposing walls and gestured for him to join her in working his way into one of the harnesses.
It took a bit of squirming, but once secured, he was able to float comfortably without fear of bumping into anything. That was when she reached for his hands and started to sink her way into his mind. He flinched a little, overwhelmed by her presence, and she jerked in reaction, wincing. She tried again, slowly and carefully. He tried to reach out for her, but this time his gifts lurched, spiking. She jerked her hands free, wincing, then breathed deep herself. Three slow breaths, and she looked calm.
Once again, she reached for him. Her aura was calm, a softly shimmering cascade of calm creams with a hint of soothing, cheerful peach. He didn’t always see in the same colormood hues like what the Gatsugi used, but pastels were gentle and calm, saturated hues were intense and healthy, dull hues were affected unpleasantly by inner emotions or physical ailments. Blue was the normal colormood for happy in Gatsugi terms, calmly pleased in Human ones—close enough to count—but he suspected this light peach was that calm sort of happiness that happened on a really good, easygoing day . . . and he suspected she was projecting it deliberately.
By comparison, his own aura flared and shifted awkwardly. He tried to help. Each time he did, they only got so far before his holy powers surged like a bucking animal. Finally, she pulled her hands free, blew out a slightly irritated breath, and studied him a long moment. He tried to send her a pulse-thought of apology, realizing her aura was now spiking a little, colors changing quickly, though not with any uncontrolled flares, unlike his own.
She winced a little at his attempted apology-pulse, but nodded in acceptance, and thought privately some more. Brown eyes studied his face thoughtfully. Finally, she squared her shoulders, straightened her posture as best she could in the lack of
gravity, and held out her hands, looking rather formal and formidable. Knowing this effort was important, Li’eth placed his hands in hers, placed his trust in the child-looking woman across from him, and tried to relax, to let her do all the work.
That was precisely what she did. She swept into him like a gale-force wind, swirling up, in, around, and all but forced his eyes shut. Li’eth felt like he had to steady himself against the dizziness being evoked. Li’eth abruptly felt like a puppet in her arms, that he was a bodysuit. That she was going to wear him while she worked. No longer able to see the predominantly white-paneled corridor, with its excellent lighting, he found himself in a great, dark, empty place, like a warehouse so vast, he only knew there were walls and a roof because the air was calm, not windblown, and the ground was hard, polished stone.
A cone of light shone down from overhead, its source distant and indistinct despite its strength. All around him—both of them—were scattered bits of clothes. She walked around from behind him, circled him with an intense, studying expression in her brown eyes, then snapped her fingers. A drawer opened in his stomach, tilting out like some sort of built-in bin. It was a little alarming, until Li’eth remembered that this was a metaphor place, not anything representing reality. That, and she had a drawer-bin thing of her own, tilted out from her own lower torso at a touch of her fingers to her upper stomach.
A sweep of her hand sorted the clothes. Some were in her people’s style. Some were in his. They soared around, then dove into each owner’s bin. It felt weird, but Li’eth had no power to resist; she was circling him from the outside, but still controlling him from the inside in a display of multitasking that left him feeling a bit in awe. There were other garments, too, he realized. Ones that felt like Other to him. To her as well, for she flung them out of the pool of light, letting them vanish into the dark.
When the last garment was stowed in place, and he was feeling oddly full . . . she spun rapidly in place, her body jiggling and bouncing. He didn’t have time to take note of anything interesting in those wiggles, though, for around her were several monitor-like images hanging in the air. Dark liquid flung outward from a centrifuge’s mesh basket. Pale solids remained. The darkness felt ill and wrong, the pale felt healthy and right. Sieves appeared, with water that rinsed through the clothes, clean from above, dirty where it went through the sieve. As she spun, the darkness flung out of her body, sucking itself off in a conduit that went into a giant jar. When the “water” ran clear, there was no more darkness, and the images of sorting and sieving and cleansing changed.
Now there were rectangular bricks of hole-scattered objects, absorbent sponges in a mild cream shade. The clothing turned into a sort of blue liquid while the sponge compressed, then the sponge soaked up the liquid, turning more and more blue, the holes filling in with each indrawn breath. After five or six breaths, the sponge was now a solid, smooth brick of homogenized translucent blue, no sign of the coarse sponge texture. The floating images showed her gripping the brick, parting it to show that the interior was smooth and whole, then she pressed it seamlessly back together, whole and strong and stable.
The same thing, Li’eth realized, was happening inside him, under her puppet-master touch. It was imperfect, but when she finished absorbing his clothes into his body, turning them mostly homogenous within the rest of himself . . . he felt better. That was when he realized each piece of clothing was itself a deeper metaphor.
Pants for determination, socks for merriment, military uniform for obedience to duty, formal vestcoat for pride in his lineage . . . they were facets of his personality, he realized. Not literal clothing, but parts of himself, his own inner body as it were. With three deep breaths, he tried to blend and accept the last bits, letting go his last wisps of inner resistance, until his own sponge-brick turned gelatinous smooth.
That earned him a smile and a pulse of approval. She reached out, scooped up his brick-self, and reshaped it into a sphere, with a flattish spot to stand upon. Put it inside of him . . . and then pricked it so that it seeped into every cell of his body, filling him with a great sense of balance, calm, and relief, of a stable strength he had not felt in years. Or perhaps never; the strain and stress that vanished almost made him as dizzy as her initial assault, for as that selfness filled him, when he breathed deep, accepting and blending it into body and soul, he almost wept with how good it felt.
No . . . not good. Centered. All around them were images of giant whirling storms with an eye in the center, and of a Li’eth-shaped dot moving into the center of the storm. A point of calm untouched by the raging winds of existence. A state of being that was vastly preferable to having the bits and pieces of himself scattered all over the place, trampled upon and kicked about by anyone and everyone passing through.
(Centered. Yes. You are now centered. Remember this feeling, this method,) she told him, pulling back her puppet-self. Two deep breaths, and her aura was calm, once again peach-soft.
Looking down at his limbs, Li’eth realized that for the first time in his life since he had started seeing the things, his aura was calm. Calm, steady, and perhaps not spike-bright when it pulsed, but neither pastel-low nor dulled in its intensity. Sensing more was coming, he looked into her eyes again.
She had one more lesson for him. Her own inner bubble, as transparent as glass, peeled away from her physical center, swelling up to encompass her whole self, as if a personal force field were being erected.
It acted like one, too, in metaphor-space. Things came flying her way, bits of foreign clothing, even an old battered boot, but they just bounced off that bubble. It flexed, but it held. It shifted and spun, never breaking under the various blows, for it held, protecting and defending her. She breathed deep and exhaled strong, showing him that it was not so solid that it would suffocate her . . . and layered three more behind it, letting the next incoming boot “pop” the first, only to bounce off the middle one, while the inner became the middle as a fourth moved up behind them. She turned the shield-bubbles as hard and opaque as stone, as fragile but impressionable as paper, as strong as spaceship glass, and as flexible as an elastomer. Showing without words that these shields could have different abilities, different functions, all at a thought.
Cautiously, experimentally, he focused on pushing a bubble of his own outward . . . and felt it giving him relief from the pressure of the others’ minds even as it traveled outward through his body, bumping and molding against hers . . . and then melding and merging with her shield-bubble, until the two were in a great oval. She blinked in surprise and gently extricated herself. Mostly. The shields parted with difficulty . . . and the moment they bumped together, once again, they merged into a single, larger bubble.
She frowned for a moment, then shook her head, visibly choosing to move on. A pair of chairs appeared next to them, facing each other. Gesturing, she urged him to sit across from her, then held out her hands. Li’eth complied. This time, his aura twitched once or twice but did not buck, did not kick, and did not knock her back. And this time, when she took his hands . . . she guided him into closing his eyes, breathing deeply, physically, until he opened his real eyes and stared at her.
In the visions, her hair had been loose and flowing, hanging halfway down her back. In reality, it was coiled and pinned firmly in place on her scalp. Realizing this was reality helped center himself in his own body, to the point where he could feel a little bit of dizziness. It was nothing, however, compared to how calm he felt, how stable inside. Not a tangled mess of locks but a neatly coiled bun. Tidy, like her hair.
(Ready?) she thought at him, pulling his attention away from her curls. At his nod, she tightened her grip on his fingers slightly, then loosened it back to a comfortable level. (We begin.)
He had just enough time to take in a breath, before his mind and hers fell into a sea of images choked with vocabulary, starting with numbers. Binary for ones and zeros, yeses and nos, then progressing to trinary for no-yes-maybe, then a leap to base ten mathema
tics, the counting games each had learned as a child to learn all those numbers, and from there all the other games each had played as a child, counting games, naming games, learning games, cultural-context games. And with each scene drawn up, every single item within each image was identified and labeled.
Blue or black or greenish brown, large versus small, curve, line, corner, grass was this kind of plant-based ground cover, and it was green and thin-bladed, while vesh was that kind of ground cover, soft, fuzzy, broad leaves in a fairly similar shade of green, with words like dirt and soil and sand and clay underneath, with bushes as a broad category that narrowed down part by part, bit by bit, until branches gave way to twigs gave way to leaves gave way to veins and stoma and chlorophyll, only to spool into moss and shuwv upon which bugs crawled and gluks crept, with chiton and antennae and thorax, abdomen, compound eyes . . .
Every so often, she would pause the images and remind both of them to breathe deeply once, twice, thrice, before diving in on the fourth inhale. Early-childhood memories mixed with teen years—and yes, she was learning things about him, but she sent him pulse-thoughts of It will be fine and These things are yours, and will remain yours to speak about along with I am trusting you to keep what you learn of me to yourself as well . . .
Those mental reassurances were pulsed over and over, gentle, repetitive, solid and sincere, a background tempo that was slow and soothing despite the vast speed at which he—they—were learning. The feeling brought up a memory in him, of watching a series of pictures taken of a woman’s face once each and every single day for years upon years, from the very first day when she had gained her first jungen marks, visible on her face and shoulders and throughout her sleek black hair in spotted aquamarine blue, to the day when there was far more gray and white than black among those strands, save for those steady blue marks. Faded a little, perhaps, but still jungen blue.