That views foldspace.
Nothingness.
Becalmed.
But the dreams are gone as if they have never been. As if a mere attempt to enter the room has taken the memories from my head and made me feel more human.
I clean up, then I clean the apartment. I find a language in the database, an old language, a dead language (or so they think) and I proceed to learn it, word for ancient word.
I am digging in for forever, when my door chirrups. A preprogrammed signal, the only one I've put in my door's system.
For Coop.
My breath catches. I don't want to see him. I do want to see him. I want him to go away. I want him to tell me everything.
I go to the door, but do not open it. I engage the comm. “You're supposed to be running the ship."
"I am,” he says. I recognize that tone. It's constrained—his captain's tone. His I'm-not-alone-so-don't-bother-me-with-personal-stuff tone. “I'm coming in."
He's captain. He can override any command on this ship.
I step back, run a hand over my hair, check my blouse. I've been dressing like a professional ever since I came back, ever since I started my new language, even though I never thought I'd see anyone again. I need the pretense.
I need to think I'll have a use again.
He comes in, and waits as the door closes behind him.
I'm always startled at how much older he looks. Not that command has aged him, although it has, it's just that I remember the boy I fell for, the handsome dark-haired boy full of promise, and now that boy has become a man—a powerful man—who stands before me.
He's wearing his black uniform with silver piping, the everyday uniform, nothing special. He would look normal if it weren't for his hair. He hasn't tended to it in days, and it has grown long, brushing his collar, making him seem almost unkempt.
"They say you're refusing treatment,” he says.
I can't tell if this visit is compassionate or a ship problem. I can't tell if he's here because he's my former husband and still my friend, or if he's here because he's the ship's captain, or both.
I'm not sure I should be able to tell.
"I went to them for help, but I can't go in the treatment rooms.” It sounds crazy. I sound crazy. But I'm beginning to come to terms with that. I think I am crazy.
"The doctors say you're claustrophobic,” he says. “That's why you can't go in. You've never been claustrophobic before."
I look at him, a denial about to cross my lips. Then—
—the bodies pile on top of me. I'm drowning in them, afraid to move, afraid not to move, my head wedged in a slightly angled position. I catch some air, but not much. Enough, apparently, to keep me breathing, even though I feel like I'm being crushed.
I curse and realize that I'm sitting down. Coop is crouched before me.
"What was that?” he asks.
I tear up. I blink, hoping that he won't notice. “The memories,” I say. Then I take a deep breath, determined to change the subject. “Why are they letting you in here? What if I'm dangerous?"
He smiles. “You're not."
"The medical evaluation unit thought I was."
"They're wrong,” he says.
"You don't know that,” I say. “You can't know that."
"You got brainwashed in a month planetside? You've a firm core, remember? No one can brainwash you. That's why you're such a good linguist. You can keep your sense of self while understanding others."
"Anyone can change,” I say. My heart is beating hard. “They think I killed twenty-four people."
He has taken my right hand. He holds it gently, and rises just a little so that he's not crouching any more. He sits beside me, like a shy lover, but there's nothing romantic in his posture.
"Twenty-four people died,” he says. “And you didn't. That's what we know."
"Why didn't you leave me there?” I ask. “That's protocol."
"I wasn't about to leave you there,” he says.
I look at him. I don't know how to respond. So I say, “You should let me look at the communications array."
"I'd love to,” he says. “But I can't. Not until we know what you've done."
"What do the others say?"
"They say you abandoned them.” His voice is harsh. “They say you left everyone to fend for themselves."
"I would never do that.” The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them.
This time his smile is real. “I know,” he says. “I think they're lying."
* * * *
Quurzid, the language the Quurzod speak, is a mixture of six different languages we've encountered in this sector. Only the Quurzod have toughened up the words, shortened the syntax, added guttural sounds and some glottal stops that none of the other languages have.
Yet the Quurzod language flows, like music, even with the harshness. Almost because of the harshness—atonal and oddly beautiful, spare, austere, and to the point.
I can hear the Quurzod talking all around me, even though I am not with them. I am sitting in that awful testing room. Coop walked me inside, his arm around my back. His presence reassures me, even though it shouldn't, even though we shouldn't get along. We're not a couple any more.
Yet some vestiges of couplehood remain.
Coop has left—he's on call, which means if I need him, and he's not handling some emergency, he'll come. But my sister sits outside this room. My twin sister, Deirdre.
We no longer look alike, she and I. We've lived our lives so differently that what once looked identical now just looks familial. If I had lived her life, I would look like her—heavier, settled, smile lines around her mouth. Her hair flows around her face, and her eyes are soft.
Deirdre waits for me in the waiting room, even though she knows this might take a day or more. She doesn't care. She acts as if I'm dying of some dread disease, and for all we know, I am. Some mental disease.
I have already settled onto the floor of this strange room, but it hasn't curved around me yet. It's waiting for me to give the go-ahead. Because I balked the first time, I get an extra five minutes to reconsider my choice.
I'm not going to change my mind.
The Quurzod whisper around me. If I close my eyes, I'll be able to see them. They met us on a broad plain, the sun setting behind them. It was a dramatic and powerful introduction, the sky blood-red as the light died.
The Xenth warned us that the Quurzod would be dramatic. The Xenth warned us that the Quurzod would lie.
My arms are pressed against my side. Something has punctured the skin in my wrist. My eyes flutter open for a moment, and it becomes clear that the room has absorbed me.
My breath catches in complete panic. My heart races. I want to claw myself out, I want to climb, I need to—
—get out. Escape. I could die in here. I will die in here if I'm not careful. I will disappear and no one will know what happened to me in this bloody silence, this stench, this heat and the pressure and the horrible horrible—
"No,” I whisper. It takes me a moment to realize I whisper in Quurzid. Unlike most human languages which use simple words, often words of one syllable, for no, Quurzid uses seven syllables for no—a long, complicated word, one that requires a lot of effort to speak correctly. You can't involuntarily finish the word “no” in Quurzid, like you can in Standard. “No” in Standard slips out. In Quurzid, you know what you're saying by the third syllable, and you can leave the word unfinished.
The Quurzid word for “no” is the most deliberate word for “no” in any language I've encountered.
And that's the word I spoke. A deliberate word, one that shows I do not now—or ever—want to revisit those memories.
For a moment, I imagine screaming for help, thinking of escape, like they told me to, so that the room will release me. But then I will see my sister's face as I leave, filled with disappointment and fear and concern.
My sister, the caretaker, knows that she will be responsible for me, becau
se she can't not be responsible for me, no matter how much I try to keep her out.
I close my eyes as the whispers start again, the Quurzod, talking among themselves as they stood on that ridge. They were half naked, only their arms and legs covered with some kind of paint, a bit of armor across their genitals. The women as well as the men are bare-chested. They show no shame in revealing their bodies, unlike some cultures we've encountered.
Unlike the Xenth.
The Xenth should have been the musical ones. Their language is all sibilants intermingled with soft “ch” sounds and the occasional sighing vowel. But the effect isn't musical. It's creepy, as if something is hissing with disapproval or anger.
Three of our people quit at the prospect of facing the Quurzod, but it was the Xenth who terrified me. The Xenth with their too-thin women, wearing long sleeves and high-neck collars and tight pants that sealed at the ankles, even in the heat. The Xenth, whose men looked at me as if I were not just dressed improperly but suggestively.
I wore a uniform that covered everything except my neck, and I considered coming back to the ship just so I could get the proper clothing. But our Xenth hosts assured me there was no time. They wanted us to broker some kind of resolution to a fight between them and the Quurzod, a fight over a genocide that had occurred a year before, a fight that could—in the opinion of the Xenth—lead to planetwide war.
We had studied everything, or so we thought. Sixteen different cultures existed on the only continent on Ukhanda. Sixteen different cultures with only two that had the military might to dominate—the Quurzod and the Xenth. The Xenth controlled the plains, but the Quurzod held the mountains. They also controlled most of the airways, giving the Xenth the seas. Both had space flight, but the Quurzod used it to their own advantage.
How the Xenth contacted us, I am not certain. They didn't contact the Ivoire. They contacted one of the other ships in our Fleet, and decisions went up the chain of command. The Ivoire got involved because of me. Because I am—was—had been—the best linguist in the Fleet.
My heart twists. I open my eyes. The room is the color of that twilight, blood red and gold, with shadowy figures lining the walls. My stomach turns.
I can't do this. I can't do it. I can't.
But if I don't, I'll die.
I have no idea if the words I'm thinking come from the meeting or that horrible memory of the bodies or come from now. I hate the way my arms press against my sides. I shift, and am surprised that the floor shifts with me. I can—if I want—pull that thing from my wrist, the thing that is going to keep me hydrated and nourished, and flee this place. Go on my own, figure things out by myself. Live my own damn life.
Alone.
Becalmed.
I take a deep breath.
I have never fled from a battle in my life.
I force my eyes closed and let the memories overtake me.
* * * *
I came to the meetings late. Linguists from the flagship, Alta, had flanked the diplomats, talking with the Xenth long before I arrived. I got study materials and cultural documents one week before my first meeting, and that meeting was with the Xenth.
The Xenth's capital city, Hileer, was a port city. The buildings on the bay had glass walls facing the water, but deeper inland, the buildings had no windows at all. The Xenth built backward—or what I thought of as backward—the tallest buildings by the view with the rest getting progressively shorter the farther away from the water we got. Only doors had glass, and then only a small rectangle, built at eye-level, so that the person inside could see who knocked.
The buildings of state, where the parties and balls and ceremonies were held, stood bayside, but the buildings of government, where the actually governing occurred, were single-story structures miles from the waterline.
The ceilings were low, the doorways lower, and the interiors too dark for my taste. They were also both chilly and stuffy, as if the air got recycled only rarely. Add to that the hissing, scratching sound of the Xenth language, and for the first time in my long and storied career, I felt a distinct on-sight aversion to the people I was meeting.
I had to work to smile, work to touch palms—their greeting—work to concentrate on their words, instead of their shifting eyes that were as much a part of their communication as hand gestures were to some cultures. I did learn to understand the eye shifts, but try as I might, I could not add them to my personal repertoire. I apologized in advance, and the Xenth seemed to understand.
I had no real diplomatic importance to them. I was there to listen, learn, and discover all I could about the Quurzod.
The Xenth had asked for help with them.
What the Xenth told us that afternoon is this: Their quarrels with the Quurzod went back five hundred years. Initially, they had border skirmishes that caught almost no attention. Neither the Xenth nor the Quurzod cared much about their shared borders.
They did care about the seas, and sea battles between both countries had become legendary, but rare. Usually the ships passed each other in international waters, threatening, but not following up on the threats.
But travel became easier, as both sides built roads, discovered their own personal air travel, and slowly conquered space. Neither group were nation-builders, at least initially. They didn't want to conquer the other side and take their land. But no one could define exactly what land belonged to whom on those shared borders, and as travel became more commonplace, so did the border skirmishes, which led to many deaths, which led to formal armed hostilities, which led to full-scale warfare at least a dozen times in the past 250 years.
Another culture, the Virrrzd, negotiated the first peace treaty for the Xenth and Quurzod, and it held (tentatively) for thirty years. Then the border skirmishes started up again, along with raids into each other's territories.
The raids went deeper and deeper, growing more and more violent, until the Quurzod committed an out-and-out massacre, killing every single Xenth man, woman, and child within one hundred miles of what the Quurzod believed to be the border.
The Xenth immediately called for another peace conference, demanding reparations. The Quurzod came, and as both sides made actual headway, Quurzod along the border died hideously.
The Quurzod claimed that they were attacked by an illegal chemical weapon, long banned on Ukhanda. The Xenth claimed that the Quurzod's own building materials had an adverse reaction with chemicals the Xenth used for land cultivation. The Quurzod deaths, the Xenth claimed, were caused by their own greed in gobbling up the land.
The Fleet arrived just as the war along the border was about to escalate again. The Alta contacted both sides and offered to broker a deal between them. Only the Xenth took the Alta up on it.
The Quurzod were too busy burying their dead. Or so we were told.
Claims, counterclaims, historical arguments so detailed that even the locals did not understand all of them. The Fleet managed to hold off hostilities by patrolling the border with our own people. We have small fighters that we used to fly over the disputed area, keeping both sides away. We had maintained that position during the months of negotiation.
Finally, the Quurzod agreed to talks, so long as there would be no activity along the border during that time. No chance for backstabbing, or so they said.
My team would go in three months in advance of the diplomats. We would become as Quurzod as possible, learn their culture, their traditions, their rituals. We wouldn't go native—we had learned over the years that too many cultures had found the attempt to go native as deep an insult (or perhaps a deeper insult) than failing to learn the language.
So much of communication is nonverbal. Eye movements like the Xenth had, hand gestures found in so many Earth cultures, smiles or lack thereof in a series of cultures in the previous sector. These things could make or break a delicate negotiation.
I'd heard rumors—impossible to substantiate without talking to the Quurzod themselves—that Quurzid had a four-tiered structure. The fi
rst was a formal tier, for strangers within the Quurzod culture. Extremely polite, with its own sentence structure and vocabulary. The second was the familial tier for family and close friends, informal in its sentence structure with a private vocabulary, often known only to the family/friends themselves. The third was street Quurzid, offensive, abrupt, and as violent as the culture. Again, a different sentence structure and vocabulary. Used in threatening situations, among the criminal classes, and by the military in times of war.
Finally, there was diplomatic Quurzid, which bore almost no relation to any of the other forms of Quurzid at all. So far as I could tell, diplomatic Quurzid evolved as a language to speak to enemies, without giving them any insight into the Quurzod at all.
The Virrrzd were the ones who figured that out, which was why they could successfully broker the original deal with the Xenth. But the Virrrzd were unwilling to get involved this time—the conflict between the Xenth and Quurzod had taken such a nasty turn that the Virrrzd were afraid for their own safety.
The Virrrzd knew both formal and diplomatic Quurzid, but not street or familial Quurzid. We felt—the linguists, the diplomats, the Fleet—that the only way to settle this dispute between the Xenth (who had only one language in only one form) and the Quurzod was to quite simply learn to communicate fully with the Quurzod.
Which was why my team got sent in.
* * * *
I surface to sibilants (whisper, whisper, hiss, hiss, hiss) and shudder as I open my eyes. The room is dark and has folded around me. I can't really see anything. My heart pounds. I have no idea how much time has passed.
I'm supposed to get lost in the memories, and maybe I am lost, but it doesn't feel like the kind of lost I expected. It's almost as if I'm having a conversation with someone else, not reliving the past. Not like—
—clawing, climbing, reaching, bodies rolling beneath my feet, shifting against my hand, the feel of dried blood on my cheek, the cold flesh under my palms. That's lost. I'm lost. I'll never survive—
I'm holding my breath. I have to make myself breathe and as I inhale the breath sounds like a sob. The air has a faint tinge of rot—is that what this place does? It mimics what happened?—and I think it'd be so easy to escape, so easy to leave—
Asimov's SF, April/May 2011 Page 31