Lost In Translation

by Edward Willett

“You said yourself we cannot fight the Commonwealth. But what if the Commonwealth were to fight itself? There are many strains, many stresses. There are long-buried hurts and fresh new offenses. Race can be played against race. When the time is right, the humans will provide us with some new insult, some new outrage, and the Commonwealth will crack like a rotten branch. Then we will take our revenge: on the humans, and on the Commonwealth. Then only the strongest will survive—and the strongest will be S’sinn!” Kitillikk waited for Lakkassikk’s response. If she had judged her S’sinn aright . . .

  “If this can be done,” he breathed at last, “then we must do it, though it take years!”

  “So it will,” Kitillikk said solemnly, while inwardly cracking her wings with glee. “Before we can even begin, we must enlist allies—powerful allies. The Supreme Flight Leader . . .”

  “She will never agree!” Lakkassikk protested. “She has detested this war from the beginning, though she’s fought it well enough. She will be glad the Commonwealth has ended it.”

  “Then she will be glad when the Commonwealth grinds us underfoot!”

  “Flight Leader!”

  “I’m sorry.” Kitillikk put just the right amount of contrition in her voice. “I mean no disrespect. Nevertheless, it will be a challenge to all of us to help the Supreme Flight Leader see the dangers of the course she pursues. As I was about to say, we need powerful allies to accomplish that. I have those I can contact within the traditional hierarchy, but within the military . . .”

  Lakkassikk’s ears pricked. “I can help there. I know many military Wing and Flight Leaders who will help. They will find this intervention in our affairs as intolerable as I do.”

  “Then select a few, those you consider most trustworthy and most useful to us. Approach them discreetly. I will do the same within the traditional hierarchy. We will arrange a meeting—somewhere out of the way, and quiet. And thus we will make the first few wingbeats of a long journey.”

  “My honor is yours, Flight Leader!” Lakkassikk bowed and spread his wings loosely before her.

  Kitillikk’s blood pounded in her ears again, but not from the silverwine. She had indeed begun a long journey—but longer and far more daring than even Lakkassikk knew, for at its end lay the Great Hall of the Flock: and, clasped around her neck, the Bloodfire Collar of the Supreme Flight Leader.

  She slid from the shikk, pulled Lakkassikk to his feet, and pulled him to her, fur to fur, her wings wrapped around his folded ones. “Let us seal our pact, Wing Leader,” she breathed into his ear. “Fly with me.”

  His breath came hard and fast. “It’s so far to the surface . . .”

  Kitillikk laughed. The military mind was so unimaginative. “There are other ways to fly, Lakkassikk,” she said, and proceeded to prove it.

  Only three days after the Commonwealth decree, the humans returned. Their ships appeared in orbit, their shuttles descended, and garrisons and guard posts and arms depots went up all along the river that marked the border, matching those the S’sinn had established in anticipation of the humans’ return. What the Commonwealth thought of those warlike preparations Jarrikk didn’t know, or care. The border was not far from the city, because of the Commonwealth’s insistence that the humans be granted the place where their original colony had stood: where, Jarrikk hoped, they had found the unburied skeletons of their original colonists still lying among the burned remnants of their tents and buildings. Across the river’s deep gorge, S’sinn and humans glared at each other with mutual hatred.

  Among the S’sinn was Jarrikk, in defiance of Kitillikk’s direct orders. He didn’t care. He despised her for her submissive response to the Commonwealth decree; he only continued his daily visits to her fortress because of Ukkarr’s training, training he now wanted more than ever so he could fight the humans as soon as possible. The rest of his time he spent at the border. After being chased off a couple of times by Hunters from the nearest S’sinn garrison, he found a hidden place on the rim of the gorge from which he could watch a human guard post, and for days now he had been returning there to watch them build their ugly buildings, to listen to their harsh shouts—and to dream of flaying the skin from their still-living bodies.

  Kitillikk’s orders to stay away from the humans had come shortly after he had first started watching them, when he had made the mistake of telling her. “The time will come,” she said. “But not for years. Concentrate on preparing for your coming-of-age. Concentrate on becoming the best Hunter you can be. Then, when we strike back at the humans at last, you will be ready.”

  He said nothing, but he kept going back to the river gorge. By the treaty, the humans could not cross that gorge; if they did, they were fair game. That was what he awaited.

  And then one day, as Jarrikk sat on his rocky ledge in the sun and enjoyed the warmth as much as he allowed himself to enjoy anything anymore, he heard the sound of one of the humans’ incredibly noisy motors starting up. Then a second motor roared to life, and two brightly colored objects rolled out of one of the guard post’s buildings, one blue, one red. Jarrikk focused prey-sight on one of them, but that didn’t help much: he still had no idea what it was—until a human climbed into the ungainly harness hung beneath the huge triangle of blue fabric, and the whirling thing on its tail spun even faster, and the whole contraption lifted into the air, followed a moment later by the other.

  Jarrikk gaped at them. So these were the artificial wings he’d only heard rumors of before! And then he laughed. If you could call them wings. Powering through the air, pushing aside thermals and ignoring eddies, no grace, no beauty . . .

  Unbidden, the memory of his dead brothers rose up, of Kakkchiss riding the air so perfectly in control, slipping aside at the last possible instant as Jarrikk dove on him, and his bitter amusement gave way to a fury and grief that threatened to choke him. The pain of it nestled between his hearts like a knife blade driven to kill. These monsters, these humans, dared to foul the air with their choking exhausts and their stiff, unnatural wings, when they had torn from the sky the likes of Kakkchiss?

  The Commonwealth and Kitillikk could go to flightless hell: this could not be borne!

  And with that thought Jarrikk leaped into the sky and rose up over the gorge, high above the humans’ crude machines, puttering around in circles far below; and from five hundred lengths above them, he focused his prey-sight on the metal spine of the lead craft, and with a shriek of defiance and rage, folded his wings and dove.

  In the few seconds of his descent, he heard humans from the outpost shouting a warning to the circling aircraft, but not even Kakkchiss could have avoided that dive; at the last instant, almost too late, Jarrikk’s wings snapped open. He crashed heavily and painfully into the bright blue fabric of the wing, but he was strong, and young, and angry, and he drove upward again with huge rent streamers of cloth in his claws, while below him the wing, its spine broken, crumpled and dropped, tumbling its squalling rider into the thundering white water below.

  Jarrikk soared up and over the human outpost, circled once, staring down at the upturned faces of the humans, pink and black and brown, that shouted and screamed at him, and contemptuously dropped the shredded fabric of their crude craft onto their heads. He spread his wings to glide back across the river—and the second machine surged up out of the gorge, and lightning-bright beamer fire scorched across the fur of his belly, a hide’s-depth from disemboweling him.

  The pain snapped Jarrikk out of whatever world of grief and anger he’d been inhabiting, and he suddenly realized what he’d done: and that below him, a hundred humans were running for their weapons, or already bringing them to bear. He sideslipped as another beamer snapped at him, and dove for the gorge, dipping far down into it to avoid direct fire from the camp, then turning and beating strongly upstream, toward the S’sinn garrison, hoping the artificial wing would follow him. If the Hunters saw another youngling being pursued by the murderous humans, no Treaty would protect the aliens from S’sinn wrath . . .<
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  Jarrikk discovered the flaw in his plan within a hundred beats: the human machine flew faster. And as his wings started to tire, the machine’s earsplitting engine roared on unabated.

  So he couldn’t outrun the machine—so what? He’d bet his fangs he could outfly it.

  Another beam slashed by, and he decided he’d better try.

  First he swept up and up, then caught himself and dropped, expecting the human to fly right under him. Instead he found himself staring straight into the human’s eyes over a hundred lengths as the machine climbed steeply toward him, closer than it had been yet. Jarrikk had to catch air clumsily and snap sharply right to avoid presenting an unmissable target. That gave him another idea and he tried to circle around behind the machine, but it seemed to almost turn in place, though at least for a moment he was far enough behind the human to avoid being shot.

  Only for a moment, though. The circling had brought him far over the forest on the human side of the river; he abandoned his turn and dove for the gorge again. There! Up ahead, where it narrowed! His youngflight had flown that rocky maze at speed a hundred times, Kakkchiss always in the lead, laughing as his wingtips brushed rock. No human brute in a clumsy machine could fly through there the way Jarrikk could.

  And then something else caught his eye, and he bared his fangs in a ferocious grin. A lone patrolling Hunter wheeled in the air on the other side of the gorge. Just what he wanted . . .

  Towering rock walls leaped upward at him, the opening between them looking impossibly small at this speed and distance, but he knew he could fit between it, he’d done it often enough. A beam slashed by on his left, another on his right. The Hunter will have seen that, he thought. The human fool has bought his death—and I’m all but safe—

  Agony lanced his left wing. The stench of burning hair and flesh filled his nostrils, then his wing collapsed, the membrane ripping. He flailed out of control, fluttering down and down until he hit the river in a geyser of spray and pain.

  The last thing he saw was the human flyer’s bright red wing blotting out the sun.

  Chapter 4

  Katy sat in the big upstairs playroom of the orphanage, staring out at Earth’s strange blue sky, as she had done almost every day for two years.

  Every day was just like the one before. In the morning she would get up, and dress and wash herself, and use the bathroom, and eat her breakfast; but she wouldn’t talk, not to the other children in the orphanage, not to plump, rosy-cheeked Mrs. Spencer, not to tall, gaunt Mr. Piwarski, not to the various government officials who paid her visits, not to the many different doctors and therapists she’d been carted off to over the months, sometimes spending days or weeks in strange white rooms with mirrors all around. It didn’t really matter; wherever she was, she sat quietly, day after day, and stared at nothing.

  To Katy, the world all these people moved through seemed a strange gray place that had nothing to do with her. Her world was all taken up by the hole in her heart, by the black pit that had formed the day the bad things came out of the sky and tore away the love she’d always felt flowing from her parents.

  “Poor child,” she’d heard Mrs. Spencer say once, as she showed yet another child welfare officer the orphanage’s saddest case. “She’s waiting for her parents to come back.”

  Katy could have told her she was wrong, if she’d wanted to. Katy knew they would never come back. If she were waiting for anything, it was for the bad things that had ripped her parents from her heart to come and take her away, too. Maybe they would take her wherever her parents were, and the hole in her heart would be filled.

  But though she watched the sky every day, not once did she see that funny rippling, or the silver ships, or the bad things with wings. They’d only wanted her parents; they didn’t want her.

  Still she waited. Most of the time she thought about nothing at all, because without her parents’ love, nothing really mattered. Her mind kept swirling aimlessly into the hole their love had left behind, like water going down a black drain. Someday, she thought, she would drop right through that hole and never come back.

  Through the window she could see not only the sky, but also the pale gray road that led to the orphanage, a long lane arched over with big trees, all turning gold now as another winter approached. Now a black floatcar came down that lane, circled the drive in front of the orphanage, and settled to the ground.

  A figure emerged, taller than most men and much bigger around, wearing a blue spacesuit with a shiny silver backpack and helmet. But it wasn’t one of the bad things that had taken away her parents, so Katy ignored it and looked back up at the sky.

  A boy playing with magnetic blocks looked out the window just then and jumped up, sending the blocks clattering across the floor, snapping together at random. He ran out into the hall, yelling, “Mrs. Spencer! Mrs. Spencer! There’s an alien coming up the walk!”

  Other children ran after him, pounding down the stairs, their excited voices rising back up in a wash of sound that quit suddenly as Mrs. Spencer said something sharply. And then came a knock on the downstairs door.

  Karak-kak-aka-ka-isss ar ?Ung!, Master of the Guild of Translators, 117th leader of the most respected organization in the Commonwealth, one of the most gifted and skilled empaths in the galaxy, tried to rearrange his tentacles into a non-chafing configuration inside the ridiculous humanoid-shaped watersuit he had to wear on Earth, and wondered if any of the froth-brained humans he could sense inside the orphanage would ever get around to opening the door.

  After a lot of scurrying noises transmitted clearly by the helmet’s exterior microphones, one of them finally did: a woman he took to be the Mrs. Spencer his research staff had informed him was the orphanage’s director. He rather towered over her, and could feel her fear (and more than a little disgust) as she looked up into his beaked, tentacle-encircled face. It was just as well, he thought, that she could only get a hint of it through the UV-shielding faceplate. “I’m here to look at Kathryn Bircher,” he said. Ithkarites were the only race in the Commonwealth whose mouth-parts were flexible and ears sensitive enough to allow them to learn the spoken languages of the three races—four, now that the humans had been added—of the Commonwealth that used sound to communicate. It was a skill very useful for running a multiracial organization such as the Guild. Karak wondered, however, if other Ithkarites’ mouthparts hurt as much as his did when he spoke a human language—and it didn’t seem to matter which one. He’d learned French, Mandarin, German, Spanish, Japanese, and this one they called English, and all of them involved serious strain to his vibratory muscles.

  “She’s not well,” Mrs. Spencer said. “You’ll frighten her. Go away.”

  Karak stuck his three right motive/support limbs (encased in the watersuit, they looked like a single leg) into the door to keep her from closing it on him, then pushed it open with his top left manipulators, the tips of which, encased in the watersuit’s glove, gave him the semblance of a three-fingered hand. With his top right manipulators, he opened the carry-pouch on his belt and held out a piece of paper. “I’m afraid I must insist.”

  While she read the letter from the Director of the Government Services for War Orphans and Veterans’ Dependents, he stepped into the wood-paneled hallway and stared back at the wide-eyed children peering at him around the corner where the hallway entered the kitchen. They radiated only curiosity and shyness. He wondered how long it would be before Mrs. Spencer taught them her fear and disgust. And they would be the first generation of humans to grow up in the Commonwealth. It made his mission that much more urgent.

  Mrs. Spencer, lips tight, held out the paper. “Keep it,” Karak said. “It is for your records.” He looked around. “The child?”

  “This way.” Mrs. Spencer tucked the letter into the pocket of her apron and led him up the stairs, which creaked alarmingly under the combined weight of him and the fifty liters of liquid circulating through the watersuit. She showed him into a bright, cheerful playroom. At t
he window, ignoring the toys all around her, sat a little blond-haired girl, staring out at the sky. “Katy,” said Mrs. Spencer. “There’s someth—someone here to see you.”

  Karak crossed the floor, its boards groaning under him, and touched Katy’s head with his gloved manipulators. Before he even reached her he knew what he would find; the touch confirmed it. She was an empath, all right—an empath locked in feedback, all her abilities turned inward, chasing her own thoughts and emotions around and around twisted neural pathways. The trauma of her parents’ deaths had trapped her in an endless emotional loop. And she’d been that way so long that when he touched her she almost pulled him into the black whirlpool inside her head. It was just as well he’d come himself: she was strong enough, and traumatized enough, to be dangerous to a lesser empath.

  After a moment he pulled his hand away and turned back to Mrs. Spencer. “Mrs. Spencer, this child is suffering bondcut.”

  “Nonsense! She’s perfectly healthy.”

  “Bondcut is not a disease; it is a trauma suffered by empaths when someone with whom they are emotionally linked dies in their presence.”

  “Empaths? Katy’s not—”

  “Yes, she is. And she must come with me. I’ve shown you my authorization . . .”

  “But if she’s not well, she needs—”

  Karak would have liked to have let his impatience into his voice, but he still didn’t know humans well enough to be able to mimic such emotional nuances. “What she needs, Mrs. Spencer, is the company of fellow empaths, in the Guild of Translators. As the letter states, the Commonwealth Treaty permits us to draft—”

  “You mean kidnap!”

  “—any individual who shows possibility as a Translator. If you will be so good as to pack her things . . .”

  Mrs. Spencer gave him a look he didn’t need empathy to interpret, then walked over to Katy, giving him a wide berth, and took the girl’s hand gently. “Come along, Katy. You have to go with this . . . person.”