Lost In Translation

by Edward Willett

  “Karak,” Karak supplied.

  Mrs. Spencer ignored him. “It will be all right, Katy.”

  She took Katy to her room to pack (with the maximum number of banging noises), and Karak returned to the hallway to endure the continued stares of the other children. He wondered sourly, as he watched them, if, after he’d taken Katy away, Mrs. Spencer would use him as a threat to maintain discipline. “You do that one more time, young one, and the monster from the stars will come and get you just like he got Katy!”

  Mrs. Spencer came down with Katy and a small suitcase. Karak took the suitcase, thanked Mrs. Spencer just as if she deserved it, and led Katy out.

  As they went down the walk he heard Mrs. Spencer remark loudly to someone that if Katy hadn’t been happy in the orphanage with other children, she certainly wouldn’t be happy God-knew-where with only monsters for company, and how could the government sign a treaty that let things like that kidnap little girls, and as Karak opened the door of the black floatcar and Katy climbed inside, he heard Mrs. Spencer starting to sniffle about how brave Katy was being . . .

  “Spaceport,” he told the floatcar, and it lifted and drove away.

  He had what he’d come for—and he was more than ready to leave Earth and its Mrs. Spencers behind.

  Katy heard Mrs. Spencer talk about how brave she was being, too, but Mrs. Spencer was wrong. Katy wasn’t being brave, because she wasn’t scared. She just didn’t care. About anything.

  The alien didn’t speak as they drove to the spaceport; unlike human adults, he seemed to have no need to talk unless he had something to say. She liked that—as much as she liked anything.

  At the spaceport, they boarded a ship very different from the one that had brought Katy to Earth. Inside the main airlock’s massive outer hatch were seven different inner hatches, each a different color and marked with strange symbols. Karak led Katy through a green hatch and down a short corridor to a complex of rooms like the inside of a little house, with a kitchen, a multileveled living room space without any furniture but with lots of cushions spread around on the blue-carpeted floor, and four bedrooms, each with its own tiny bathroom.

  Karak took Katy’s suitcase into one of the bedrooms. When he came out he said, in that funny, squeaky voice of his, “This is where you’ll stay for the next few days. Right now you are the only human on the ship, so you’ll be alone here. The kitchen will automatically prepare food for you three times a day in that compartment.” He pointed at a shiny black rectangle in the kitchen wall. “Whatever you don’t eat will be automatically removed from that same compartment.” He touched her head again, and when he removed his three-fingered hand, spoke more gently. “I know none of this matters to you right now. We’re going to fix that, Katy. We’re going to make you better.” He went to the door, turned, and said, “Welcome to the Guild of Translators,” then went out. The door slid shut and sealed behind him.

  Katy lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  She didn’t know, or care, how many days had passed when the door opened again and Karak reappeared. She had eaten several times, and slept, but there were no timekeepers in the apartment.

  She looked up at him as he came in, but didn’t say anything. He touched her head again, then led her silently out of the ship.

  At the top of the loading ramp, Karak stopped and looked down at the small, silent figure by his side. “Commonwealth Central,” he told her, hoping for some reaction. Garish lights of pink and blue glistened off the mirror-black wet pavement surrounding the ship, their reflections pockmarked by the icy rain dropping from the night sky. He felt nothing from her in any way related to the excitement he might have expected in a young one brought so many light years from home, but he did sense a faint spark of resentment as rain blew in under the overhang protecting the ramp. Of course, he thought; she’s dressed for the warm weather she left on Earth. She’s cold.

  The resentment flared and died like a burning bit of straw, leaving her as inert to his empathic senses as a lump of wood, but he had felt it: no doubt of that. “So, there’s life in there yet,” he said to her. “As I knew. Come; you’ll soon be warm.” That earned him a faint glimmer of surprise, probably that he had guessed she was cold. Feeling better about the child than he had since he first sensed her pain in the orphanage’s playroom, he led her down the ramp as an egg-shaped silver groundcar rolled across the pavement toward them on fat blue wheels.

  He felt more surprise from her, as short-lived as her earlier resentment, when the egg split open to reveal another human in its padded pink interior, a boy a few years older than her. Her reaction pleased Karak, but that pleasure faded as he slid in beside the boy and helped Katy in after him. Jim Ornawka was as strange a case as Katy. He was the only confirmed empath Karak had ever run across, in the Guild or out of it, who had the ability to completely block him out. All empaths could hide their emotions to a certain degree, but never completely, and never from someone with the skill and power of a Guildmaster. But Jim could do it—and did, constantly. Whereas other empaths were normally as open with their emotions as non-empaths, and had to concentrate to block, Jim claimed, and the facts seemed to indicate, that his natural state was blocked and he had to concentrate to open himself up.

  So far the Guild researchers had failed to find anything within the structure of his brain or his genetic material that explained his unique ability. A non-empathic S’sinn scientist employed by the Guild had suggested dissection, but of course that was out of the question while the boy was alive; though if he became a Translator, his body would be available for autopsy and further research upon his death. Barring disease or accident, however, that time was yet many years away.

  Karak suspected even dissection would not find the answer, that the boy’s mysterious ability arose from something in his equally mysterious past. Jim had been found wandering the streets of a very rough port city on a mostly military planet, selling his body for food. His very blankness had drawn the attention of a passing Translator; someone like Jim, who could not be read, stood out in a crowd as much as or more than someone broadcasting the strongest hate or anger.

  For more than a year now, Jim had been in training to be a Translator. Karak had heard nothing but good reports about his abilities and commitment. Yet the eerie emotional dead space that surrounded him still bothered Karak every time he had dealings with the boy.

  He noticed Jim watching him, and nodded from Jim to Katy. Jim looked at the girl, and showed his teeth in the alarming human expression that Karak still found hard to believe conveyed friendliness instead of aggression. “Hi! I’m Jim,” Jim said.

  Katy ignored him. The boy closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and blinked at the girl before looking at Karak. “I can’t read her at all. It’s like she’s not even there.”

  Now you know how we feel around you, Karak thought. “Did you not feel her momentary surprise when she entered the car and saw you?”

  “No, Guildmaster . . .”

  “You must learn not to let your own emotions cloud your perceptions of others. The surprise was faint, but it was there. And so is she. Deep inside.”

  The car began to roll, the bumps of the road translating to a slow up-and-down motion inside that always made Karak think of the way his spawnhome swayed when storm-waves lashed the sea-top. “I read all the material you gave me on bondcut, Guildmaster, but I never thought it would be like this,” Jim said. “It’s—frightening.”

  “It is. And I hope you will never suffer from it.” Though you may have already, he thought. Perhaps that explains what happened to you . . . “However, it is not always this way. Katy is an extreme case, because she has suffered without any treatment for a very long time. There has been no one to pull her out of the void left by her parents’ death. It’s like a wound that has abscessed; it has closed up and trapped her inside. It must be lanced: the poison drained, the wound opened to dry and begin to heal.”

  “But . . . Guildmaster, ho
w?”

  “I will show you. You have an important role to play. We will begin the process tonight, when we reach the Guildhall.”

  Jim turned his gaze back toward the girl, his eyes bright with . . . interest? Sorrow? Karak wished he knew.

  He settled back for the short trip to the Guildhall.

  Katy kept her own gaze on the floor, hearing and understanding everything, yet feeling as if they talked about someone else entirely, someone of absolutely no importance. Vaguely, she hoped they might be able to help this Katy they spoke of, but she doubted it, and the hope slid away into nothingness almost as soon as it formed.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later they stopped, and the car split open to disgorge them in front of a huge stone building like an ancient fortress, lit by more of the pink-and-blue lights. They entered through an oval doorway that slid up at their approach and down behind them, and crossed a dim hall through which their footsteps echoed, then went down a long, arched corridor of white stone, lit by pink-glowing lamps on long black cords, passing closed oval doors to either side. The chill air smelled faintly of cinnamon and roses.

  At a cross-corridor they turned right, climbed a long flight of stairs, and a short distance down another corridor came to a door larger than any they had passed. The spicy/floral scent grew stronger. Karak took something from his watersuit’s belt and pressed it to the door’s surface, and it opened to reveal another large, egg-shaped chamber, this one lined with black stone pricked with tiny lights, and floored with a glassy substance that glowed pearly white with its own inner radiance.

  Encircling it were aliens.

  The surprise, and even a little fear, that flared in Katy this time lingered for several seconds before the emptiness smothered it—but she heard Jim, close behind her, draw in a sharp breath. “Guildmaster, I felt her! And then . . . then she just went away . . .”

  “We’re going to bring her back, Jim,” Karak said. “All of her. All of us.”

  All of us? Katy looked around. Karak, in his blue watersuit. A thing like a giant insect whose meter-spanning wings filled the air with a thick drone, and whose four golden eyes seemed to glow more than they should be able to just by reflecting the dim light of the room. A trio of tiny winged humanoids, no bigger than Katy herself and much more slender: blue-skinned, naked, and sexless. A reptilian creature with legs as big and gnarled as tree-trunks, who glistened with green-black scales from head to foot, whose hands ended in long, curved claws painted the red of fresh blood and whose slit-pupiled, yellow eyes never blinked. A dull-black four-metre sluglike thing in thick gooey mud inside a big glass-walled aquarium on wheels. And a . . .

  . . . a . . .

  She hadn’t clearly seen the last figure in the dark room when they first came in; darkness seemed to be its friend, almost swallowing it up. But now it stirred, and spread leathery wings, and Katy spoke for the first time since her parents died.

  She screamed.

  The sound echoed inside the stone-walled room, magnified, and seemed to feed on itself. Katy screamed and kept on screaming, mindlessly, fear rising out of the dark pit in her heart on the black leathery wings that had taken her parents away and now were in this room with her . . .

  “Quickly!” Karak shouted above the noise. “Jim, you must help us! Reach out to her . . .”

  “But I’m not a projective . . .”

  “The rest of us are. But we’re not human. We need your emotion. Katy needs it.”

  “But what?” Jim cried. “What emotion?”

  “Love!” Karak shouted. “Let us feel your human love, Jim, and we will make Katy feel it. Hurry!”

  Katy felt herself slipping finally, once and for all, into the black pit of emptiness—and welcomed it. Her own screaming faded to a faint echo in her ears, then disappeared. The room faded from her awareness. Numbness gripped her body. Blackness reached up for her, and she reached out for it. Blackness had taken her parents. Maybe she would find them inside it . . .

  But there in the dark, with the last gray light fading around her, something touched her: something not of herself, something that didn’t belong in her disappearing world, something warm, and hot, and alive . . .

  . . . something human.

  Katy didn’t want it. She wanted the numbness, the darkness, the nothingness. She didn’t want to think, she didn’t want to feel. Feelings hurt, not just her feelings, but other people’s feelings. She didn’t want to hurt. Why couldn’t they just leave her alone?

  But the faint touch returned, like a gentle caress, and strengthened, and the darkness lightened, at first just a little, and then a lot, and then suddenly it was like the night the bad things attacked and the sky rippled and filled up with bright silver and flashing lights, only this time the light was warm and red, like a campfire. She felt as if she were being buoyed up by a hot wave, a wave that poured into the pit of her soul’s emptiness and covered it with steaming water, hiding it from view.

  Katy stopped screaming. She stared at the batlike alien that had startled her, and said, “Bad thing! Bad thing! You took my parents!” And then she burst into tears and, without even thinking about it, turned and buried her face in the cool blue fabric of Karak’s watersuit.

  Jim patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, and she felt the same fiery sense of humanity that had brought her back. Karak touched her head gently. “So,” he said. “Welcome back, little one. Welcome to your new family.”

  Katy wept even harder, feeling everything, feeling too much, feeling not only her grief but Karak’s concern, the little winged humanoids’ hot bright happiness, the almost frightening single-minded interest of the giant insectoid, the analytical satisfaction of the reptilian, the benign disinterest of the slug in the glass box, and worst of all, the faint, not-quite-hidden distaste and resentment of the bad thing. She didn’t want to feel any of it, and she sobbed not just because of the loss of her parents, but because she knew that never again could she hide herself away from her feelings, or anyone else’s, that whatever all these monsters had just done to her, she could never change it.

  They’d made her one of them.

  Chapter 5

  Jarrikk flitted in and out of consciousness for a long time—how long, he had no way of knowing. Afterward, bits of memories stayed with him, memories of shouting, of lifting, memories of flying—no, of being flown—memories of faces, curious, horrified, angry—and then, memories of dreams, horrible dreams, dreams of Kakkchiss fluttering helplessly into the forest, his chest a smoking ruin; dreams of Yvenndrill spinning down, his lifeblood a trailing red stain against the sky; dreams of Llindarr crashing into the trees, wings ripping, bones splintering and bursting through his skin; and most of all, dreams of little Illissikk, butchered and headless, his skin drying on a rack in the human camp.

  In some of those dreams, Jarrikk felt the beam slice through his own neck, and saw his own body violated by the humans’ knives, and the agony should have brought him awake screaming and flapping, except somehow he couldn’t wake up, and sometimes he thought they had cut off his wings and he would never fly again—the worst nightmare of all.

  Finally he did wake up, and found out his nightmare had come true.

  He woke over a period of days, coming to consciousness to find himself tended by healers who never seemed to look at him, who treated him almost like the humans had treated Illissikk, turning him on his shikk like a slab of meat, never speaking to him, never meeting his eyes. He tried to talk to them, when the haze of drugs and pain would let him, but they never answered him, never even seemed to hear him, until he wondered if something had gone wrong with his throat and he’d become mute, or if all this were just another bad dream.

  But then one day he opened his eyes and felt fully awake for the first time, his wings still immobilized, his body still bandaged and sore in every part, but his brain, finally, in fully working condition, so that he remembered what had happened, remembered the human shooting him, and remembered crashing into the water. War! he though
t with grim satisfaction. We must be at war again. Kitillikk, Lakkassikk, they won’t have let this go unavenged . . .

  He raised his head from the shikk and looked around the room. To his right, two glowing blue globes on silver pillars pulsed in time with his heartbeats; otherwise the room was empty, a closed door beyond the flashing blue globe the only opening in the blank walls.

  A chill went through him. Windowless? Doored? Only prisoners were kept in windowless rooms with doors. But he couldn’t be a prisoner, could he?

  Could he? For attacking a human?

  Space is limited, he told himself. We must be fighting again. The hospital needs all its rooms for war injuries. Someone had to be put down here, and since I was unconscious . . .

  But if space were that limited, there would be others with him in this large, echoing room, and there was no one; no one but himself.

  Then the door opened.

  The S’sinn who entered stopped when she saw Jarrikk looking at her, then nodded once and crossed to him. He stared at her with something approaching dread. He’d been expecting a healer, or, if he really were a prisoner, a Hunter; maybe even Kitillikk herself, eyes aflame with fury at his stupidity; but not this, not a female wearing a gold collar embossed with the jet-black outline of a S’sinn holding a glowing blue gem in its claws.

  Not a priest!

  “Jarrikk,” said the priest as she came to stand beside his shikk. “I am Iko.”

  “Am I dying, Mother Iko?”

  The priest stared into his eyes. “You are already dead, Jarrikk.”

  One of his hearts skipped a beat, causing one blue globe to flash briefly red and beep a warning before resuming its pulsing at a much faster rate. “Mother?” Jarrikk said faintly.

  “You were badly wounded, Jarrikk. The healers saved your life; they could not repair your wing. You are flightless.”