Fluency

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  He forgot all that when he finally caught sight of it. Oh, fuck. It was way bigger and way closer than he’d realized. He’d heard news stories of Humboldt squid attacking divers near San Diego—plucking at masks, ripping hoses, tearing skin—but those were supposed to be around five feet long and confined to deeper waters. This thing was easily ten times that size. And it… holy shit… it was watching him. One of its tentacles snaked out and came within inches of his arm.

  He reacted instinctively, lungs burning for air, kicking like crazy for the surface and his board, every bit of the zen he’d gained during the last hour of surfing obliterated. He gasped for air and didn’t bother to look around. He knew he was alone. There was no help for him out here if this freaky misplaced kraken decided it wanted to have him for breakfast. His only recourse was to get to shore as fast as possible.

  He busted his ass to get there, just aiming for sand, half expecting to be pulled under any second. His thoughts raced with the legends he’d heard of ships being destroyed by sea monsters—legends he’d once thought were embellished, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  As soon as he could get his feet under him, he trotted onto the sand, dropped his board, and collapsed. He sat there, panting, and scanned for signs of the creature in the surf. He was so absorbed that when he heard someone softly clearing their throat beside him he leapt to his feet, whirling.

  It was Jane.

  She smiled sheepishly and gestured at the sea. “I’m sorry, Alan. I should have told him not to do that. He’s thrilled to finally meet you and when he saw you were dreaming of the ocean, well, that only fueled his excitement. He didn’t realize how his greeting might affect you. It’s a cultural thing. The Sectilius are not as easily ruffled when they encounter something out of the ordinary.”

  He looked from her to the pounding surf, confused. “What?” He reached out a hand to her arm. “Jane, what are you doing here? What’s going on?”

  “You’re dreaming. You’re in a regeneration basin, recovering. You remember the ship, the slugs, the nepatrox?”

  He took a step back, letting his hand fall away from her. He couldn’t stop himself from looking down at his leg. Suddenly he felt very silly and very unsure.

  He nodded slowly. “I’m dreaming. Of course, of course. That makes sense. Gotta pass the time somehow.”

  He turned back to her. All her attention was on him. He liked that. He felt his lips turn up into a smile. She looked stunning. Her hair glowed in the early-morning sun, whipping around her face in the breeze coming off the water. She wore a long tunic that was pressed against her body by the wind, revealing every wayward curve.

  This was going to be a dream to remember.

  She held up a hand, her lips twitching. “That’s not where this is going, Alan.”

  Jesus. His subconscious mind was a real bastard. Why would he fuck with himself this way?

  “Hey,” he said out loud to himself as much as to Jane as he wrapped his arms around her, “This is my goddamn dream. It’ll go wherever the hell I please.” Her face was turned down. He reached into her hair, tugging gently and lowered his lips to her temple, her cheek, hungrily seeking her mouth.

  “Um, no. It’s not as simple as that.” Her hand came up to cover his lips. “Listen to me, Alan. You were dreaming. But you aren’t precisely dreaming anymore. I’m actually here. We are here.” She removed her hand from his mouth and put some space between them, gesturing at the sea again. A tentacle raised out of the water again and made a limp gesture.

  “What the fuck… is going on here?” He felt queasy and tense.

  She led him to the water’s edge. “Dr. Alan Bergen, meet Ei’Brai, Gubernaviti of the Speroancora.”

  “Greetings. It is an unbearable pleasure to finally interact with you, Dr. Alan Bergen.”

  The voice was deep. And it was inside his head.

  Water lapped at his ankles. The white tentacle remained visible on the surface, rolling with each heave and swell of the sea.

  He felt nothing but disbelief. His thoughts spun in place, stuck in the wrong gear. “I… ah…”

  The voice continued, “We approach now, Dr. Alan Bergen, because Qua’dux Jane Holloway insists upon your input. It strikes me as a futile effort; however, I am bound to comply with every caprice of the Quasador Dux.”

  Bergen turned back to Jane, blinking.

  She had an intense look on her face, gazing out to sea. “What we need are ideas, and you don’t have any, Ei’Brai.” The tentacle withdrew from the surface with a splash and he could faintly hear a disgruntled, crackling grumbling deep in his ear.

  Jane’s eyes narrowed and she turned back to him. “Alan, you have some knowledge of nanotechnology, don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “Wait a minute. What did he just call you?”

  Her lips drew together in a thin line. “That’s not important right now. I want to show you some things, see if you can make sense of them.”

  “No. I think it is important. What did you do, Jane? Are you in danger?” He grabbed her arm, harder than he should have.

  She shrugged him off. “I’m fine. He called me the Quasador Dux because I’ve taken control of this ship. I’m in command now. He works for me.”

  The deep voice rumbled again, inside his head. “I do, indeed. I could not have envisaged a more propitious commanding officer. It is my honor to serve the honorable Qua’dux Jane Holloway. We are here to consult you. Are you prepared to begin advising us?”

  He ignored the gnarly beast for the moment. “You command this ship? What? How?”

  “It’s complicated, Alan. I will explain, I promise. But right now we have a more pressing issue. This ship is swarming with nanites—I’ve already told you that—and they perform many repair functions throughout the ship. They were programmed by the Sectilius to perform those functions, coordinated through Ei’Brai. What the Sectilius didn’t know is that a portion of those nanites were hijacked and re-programmed to attack the central nervous system of every living thing on board in a synchronized strike.”

  Bergen’s eyebrows drew together. “That’s what happened to the crew of this ship?”

  “Yes. And it’s what’s happening to Compton, right now. He’s fighting for his life in the tank next to you. It could be happening to Walsh, Varma, and Gibbs too, out there in the capsule. We need to find a way to turn these things off or reprogram them. I have no way of knowing if the damage is irreparable. I hope not. But there’s no way to know for sure.”

  Bergen opened his hand and gestured toward the sea. “Shouldn’t your buddy out there be the expert on this shit? Why do you need me?”

  Disgruntlement rumbled in his head again. He ignored it.

  “He’s been trying to solve it since 1947, Alan.”

  Alan put a hand to the back of his neck. “Okay. What makes you think I’ll succeed where Cthulhu has failed?”

  She smiled. “You’re not him. You don’t think like he does.”

  25

  Jane felt out of sorts, as if she should be doing something important, though she had no idea what that might be. She’d eaten and found herself wandering the corridors of the ship. Her trajectory seemed aimless, yet she was compelled to continue. She was giving herself a tour of her new domain, layering her own concrete experience on top of the mental map in her mind’s eye.

  The ship seemed different to her now, since her immersion in the Sanalabreum. It seemed shockingly silent, lonely, perhaps even haunted. She half expected to see Sectilius purposefully bustling by as she rounded every corner.

  Alan and Ei’Brai wouldn’t need her for a few hours. She should have slept, but she felt restless. To stay near Alan, she’d been sleeping in the spartan crew quarters within the medical center. They were adequate, but they weren’t intended to be permanent quarters for any crew member, just places to nap during a long, uneventful shift. They didn’t feel… right. She spent as little time there as possible.

  Neither Alan nor Ei’Brai could be
convinced to rest much, either. The two of them were inexhaustible when faced with an intellectual puzzle. They went round and round for hours on end, arguing about how to deal with the rogue squillae.

  Alan had come up with a solution straightaway, but Ei’Brai had rejected it just as quickly, insisting that Alan’s plan was fraught with pitfalls that neither of them could adequately anticipate. So the endless research, analysis and translation had begun. It was draining and frustrating for Jane, because she was forced into the role of translator within a sphere that she knew nothing about.

  Alan was picking up Mensententia quickly, but even a genius immersed in a language wouldn’t be immediately proficient in the complex vocabulary of engineering. Jane had to pull from deep within and all of them had to exercise extreme patience as they learned how to communicate in this complex way.

  Ei’Brai made the link possible, and Alan adapted to Anipraxia quickly. He seemed to like it, though he wasn’t about to admit that because he harbored intense levels of mistrust toward Ei’Brai and his motives. He’d heard the whole story, all the justifications for it, and he hadn’t liked any of it. He had made it very clear that he thought Ei’Brai should have been upfront from the beginning.

  Jane did her best to keep the squabbling between them to a minimum. Since she was the intermediary for nearly every conversation between them, that was a constant role she was forced to play.

  It didn’t help that Alan was still stuck in the Sanalabreum. He seemed to despise being interred there every bit as much as Jane had. He was a restless type, needed to keep moving, keep busy.

  At the moment, Alan was occupied with picking apart lines of computer code and he’d be immersed in it for hours. They’d recovered a single example of the miscreant squillae from Compton’s Sanalabreum and immobilized it for study. Jane downloaded its code under Ei’Brai’s instruction. Alan was studying that code, line by line.

  He’d picked up on the structure and rules of the alien code quickly, drawing parallels to his extensive knowledge of code on Earth.

  He’d riffed, “It’s all just ones and zeros no matter where you go in the universe, Jane.”

  She hadn’t gotten the joke, but she didn’t think he expected her to. Before she could ask what he meant exactly, he was back in it again.

  She’d been walking for some time and he was still at it. She came back to herself and realized she was standing in a deck-to-deck transport. She selected the deck that contained the public and private rooms of the ship’s governing body. Soon she was standing outside the door of the rooms of the Quasador Dux. This corridor was the same dull green as any other on the ship. The door could have been any door on the ship.

  She reached out her hand purposefully to the door control. She knew the woman who had occupied this room, in an unsettling and unearthly way. Jane had seen many of her memories. No, not just seen them. She had, in fact, inhabited them.

  Jane knew what it had been like to be Qua’dux Rageth Elia Hator. Jane knew her favorite places in the ship, knew who her lovers had been, knew what her favorite foods had tasted like. Jane had seen her ferocity in battle, had seen her coping stoically with adversity. Jane knew her—knew that she’d been intelligent, determined, secure in her own abilities and those of her crew. She’d been respected and revered by the majority of the Sectilius onboard. She’d been an intrepid woman. Her loss was a tragedy. These were deep boots to fill.

  The door slid into the ceiling with a near-silent whisper. Jane gasped with surprise and stepped inside the large, sparsely furnished room, mouth still agape.

  Color. A riot of color.

  Each wall had been painted in great blocks of swirling color. The wall opposite the door was particularly stirring. She moved forward to examine the work up close.

  It was painted with wide smears of pigment so thick that there were peaks and ridges within the medium itself. At the top third of the wall, the colors blended from amethyst to azure, thin streaks of vivid, contrasting colors commingling so well that they could only be distinguished at close range.

  There was a break in the painting where the dull green of the wall was exposed, much like a Rothko, and the lower portion of the wall was a study in blues and greens, lighter near the top, gaining depth and mystery as the heavy strokes of darker pigments blended toward the bottom of the wall.

  It was a depiction of dawn over a vast sea. She knew it intuitively, as if she’d been there, as if the experience was personal. She fingered the textured surface with the lightest of touches, thinking. Maybe she had, indirectly. Her own memory was a mixed-up jumble now.

  It seemed like the break between the two paintings wasn’t meant to separate them entirely, only to highlight the contrast. They co-existed. They depicted the same location. They were different realms within the same world, a watery world. Ei’Brai’s home world, she realized suddenly, stepping back and taking it all in again. Water and air.

  Qua’dux Rageth Elia Hator had felt so strongly connected to Ei’Brai that she had felt compelled to create art from the memories he had shared with her.

  Jane flashed on a memory of standing in this room, holding a wide, shallow bowl containing a traditional mixture of mineral clay slurry thickened with a bright blue pigment. There were many more bowls on tables nearby, filled with similar shades as well as contrasting colors that she had painstakingly mixed. Some of them had strong, chemical odors. Others were earthy and pleasant.

  She reached into the bowl, scooping the cool paste into the spoon-shape she made with her fingers. Then, with a practiced hand, she twisted and twined her fingers to release the thick pigment on the wall with special attention to how the paint flowed from each long finger. She went back to that same spot with a new color, arching, extending her willowy body to reach, creating highlights, ridges and valleys, building up texture and color with each stroke.

  She’d been at it for some time. Her fingers were stained, cold, and stiff. The muscles of her arms burned and her back ached, but she took little notice. This was her space and she would fill it with something lovely. She felt content and highly motivated to complete this section before someone interrupted her.

  Her form was still very good, she thought, as she paused, scrutinizing her progress. She frowned when she realized she’d brushed her hand against her brow, smearing her forehead with dark cyan pigment.

  Painting was imbedded in her. She’d practiced this technique since she was a child, had been good enough for formal schooling, but the stars had beckoned to her. She wasn’t fanciful about it. She was thoroughly practical. She could have had a good life as an artist. A safe life. But she’d known she was made for more.

  As the wisps of the memory faded, Jane imagined what might have happened had circumstances been different, had the squillae not destroyed this incredible woman, so that Jane might have met her on Earth as Rageth had intended.

  Jane sighed and turned, realizing that the adjacent wall was not just a depiction of geometric shapes as she’d originally presumed. It, too, was an impression of a place that meant something to Rageth. This painting was more detailed.

  From this angle, she could see that it was a view of Sectilia from her moon, Atielle, where Rageth had been born. Sectilia hung large and low on the horizon, a misty blue-green sphere, dominating the painting. Dawn encircled the planet with a brilliant halo of color—violet and coral and tangerine on a sky that was a slightly different cast of blue than Earth’s sky. It was so lovely, this moon with another world looming in the heavens.

  There were other rooms adjoining this one, including a bedroom, but Jane didn’t have the desire to explore them yet. This room was appointed with plenty of sturdy-looking, simple seating. It was a room meant for social events. Jane approached a piece of furniture that resembled a streamlined, low, modern couch and sat down opposite one of the paintings, still absorbing its details.

  “You have many attributes in common with her,” rumbled softly in her head.

  “That’s very kin
d of you to say,” Jane replied with a wry smile.

  “I do not contrive the assessment to inflate your sense of self. I observe. I do not embellish.”

  “Thank you, then.”

  “Do not compare yourself to her. You exceed the necessary criteria required to perform.”

  Jane looked down at her hands in her lap. “I know you believe that’s true, but entire worlds full of innocent people may be depending on me to get these next steps right. It’s such a heavy weight. I don’t want to fail.”

  He acknowledged that, silently. He felt a similar responsibility. They shared that. It helped, somehow.

  After a moment, he rumbled, “Those other worlds beckon to you.”

  She frowned. “They terrify me.”

  “No. This is not who you are.”

  She saw a face in her mind’s eye and wrinkled her brow. Ei’Brai was summoning a memory that’d been buried deep. She hadn’t thought of Mowan for decades. He was a Nawagi boy she’d met when bushwalking with her parents in Queensland in the months before they had started their new venture on the coast. The two of them had spent more than a week romping in the scrub before it was time to move on. One day, he’d arrived at their campsite and said he wanted to take her to a special place.

  He’d held her pale hand in his warm, dark one and led her across the plain to a rocky outcropping and an ochre pit. He’d told her that the adults in his tribe ground the brightly colored, soft stones with fat to make a paste that they used to paint the body for secret dancing ceremonies that sometimes lasted for days.

  He had picked up a bright orange stone and rubbed it against a flat rock jutting out of the dry landscape, quickly creating a small mound of orange, chalky powder. Smiling, he had pressed his finger into it and drawn his finger from her hairline at the center of her forehead down her nose, over her lips and chin. Jane had chosen a small, yellow lump of ochre and ground it against another stone nearby. She smoothed the powder in stripes over his cheeks.