"Try speaking to him." Barbas' voice was neutral. He wasn't paying attention to the alien hunter's eyes; he was reading all kinds of data from the suit, and from the enhanced sensors that we had mounted up high on the Terraforming Engine tower behind me. Something about the man made him nervous.
“He won’t be able to understand me,” I said, for the first time feeling somewhat foolish about speaking out loud to what was essentially my imaginary friend. For a moment I was glad that the alien couldn’t understand me. He probably thought I was talking to him.
"I know," Barbas replied, his tone clinical, emotionless. How could he be so… uninterested? We were talking about First Contact here! Well, technically, shooting the strange, ice-clad woman a few days ago had been First Contact, but still. Oblivious to my thoughts, or at least pretending to be, Barbas continued. “Even though he can’t understand you, he just reacted to the sound of your voice. If you keep talking, you can keep him reacting, and I can get more detailed information from the electromagnetic spectrum scans I’m running on his brain right now.”
"You can read his mind?" I had blurted the question before I realized how ridiculous that sounded. Barbas could read my mind, or at least I couldn’t come up with a compelling argument to prove that he couldn’t. Though he was riding on tech lacing the inside of my skull, he was essentially just reading the "computer language" of electrical impulses flickering across my gray matter. Chances were, even if he couldn't read the alien's actual thoughts, he could get the gist of what the warrior was thinking, the broad strokes of the picture he painted. I was pretty sure that Barbas was reading my thoughts because he deemed it unnecessary to answer my question. How else would he be able to talk to you- and more- in your dreams, stupid? I shook my head. This wasn’t the time. I needed to focus.
Gently, I set the warrior down onto his feet, and then took a step back away from him. If he went for a weapon, he would die, very quickly. Barbas and I had not been idle. The tower now sported a gauss rifle emplacement, a scaled-up version of the technology that made my revolver work. Regardless of the surrounding weather conditions, that gun could fire a tiny steel ball several times the speed of sound through anything inside my storm wall. It wouldn’t leave much more than a smear of a human- or a humanoid- skull behind it.
I raised my hands, palm out toward the warrior, hoping that the gesture meant the same thing to him that it did to me. Peace, I thought at him, willing my intention to reach him, language barrier or not. I hadn’t had the time to try to speak to the ice-woman earlier, killing her had been completely necessary. This- those eyes- this would be different. It wouldn’t be a tragedy. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
The alien man seemed unconcerned by the language barrier, utterly unsurprised that I spoke a language he had never heard before. He mimicked my gesture, holding both hands out in front of him first and then slowly, carefully, slipped his pack off of his shoulders and lay it down on the ice. He took a step away from his weapons, towards me, and though I tried not to, I took an involuntary step backward. He cocked his head to the side, seeming confused by this. Shit. I can’t fuck this up. I pointed to myself with the broad metal thumb of my armored gauntlet. “My name is Joanna,” I said, slowly and with exaggerated diction.
He pointed at me with his index finger- I noticed that his hide gloves did not cover his fingertips, and black, glossy claws extended from each finger where his fingernails should have been. “Mie-nay-miss Joo-ah-nah,” he repeated, his mouth making clumsy piecemeal of the unfamiliar sounds.
I shook my head and then pointed to myself again. "Me," I said. "Joanna." I pointed at him and said, "You…" then paused. He didn't say anything this time, he simply cocked his head slightly to the side again, the gesture reminding me uncomfortably of the curious movements made by a feral dog I had seen when I was a little girl. It could have been pure curiosity, or it could have been him wondering if I was good to eat. I repeated the little sequence, pointing at myself, and saying, "Me, Joanna," then pointing at him and saying, "You…" and pausing. Pattern recognition. It was one of the basic foundations of human cognition, our greatest strength, and our most exploitable weakness. If he recognized this one, maybe…
The warrior straightened his neck slowly, and then pointed one dark claw at me, pointing directly at my eyes. I blinked. He had figured out that the face he saw behind the quartz faceplate was me, and that the metal body was just a suit. Interesting. His lips moved, this time producing a sound that was utterly unlike my mother tongue of Pan-American Standard. “Joo-ah-nah atzvaka,” he said, his clumsy pronunciation of my name contrasting sharply with the harsher, more guttural sound of his language. He pointed his thumb at himself. “Volistad mitzerkim.” He waited a moment, then repeated the sequence, the same way I had repeated mine to him.
I grinned, suddenly excited. This was working! I tried to make the same sounds he had made, sure that my attempt at his speech sounded just as inelegant as his attempt at mine. I pointed at myself. “Joanna mitt-zeer-kim.” I pointed at him, still smiling. “Voh-list-tad at-vak-kah.” I was sure that I had put the emphasis on the wrong syllables, and I hoped that I hadn't just issued a deadly insult or something. I noticed then that he had taken a few quick steps back from me, his eyes narrowed slightly, and his chin tucked low, presenting me with his broad brow. Shit, what had I just done? Did I just threaten him or something?
Barbas muttered diffidently in my ear. “Stop smiling.”
“What?” I hissed back. “I’m trying to be friendly.”
“You didn’t see when he was talking?” Barbas sounded amused. “He’s a carnivore. What does it mean when you bare your teeth at a wild dog?”
I didn't miss the connotation in his choice of words, but I chose to ignore it for the moment. "Oh. Shit." I quickly wiped any lingering traces of the smile from my face, and then held my hands palm-out to the warrior. Volistad watched me for a moment warily, and then, with no warning, he barked out a short, rattling, coughing sound. It sounded unsettlingly like the beginnings of Mesoamerican jaguar's roar. It took me a moment to realize that he was laughing. "God," I commented to no one in particular. "Am I as terrifying to him as he and his people are to me?"
Barbas snorted. “In the armor? Probably.”
Regaining control of his evident mirth, Volistad took a step towards me, and pointed at me, reversing the pattern as I had with his language. "Yoo Joh-ah-nah." I suppressed my smile as I realized he had made the correct ‘oh' sound at the beginning of my name this time. He pointed his thumb back at himself and said, "Mee, Volistad." Then, in a moment of surprising intuition, he smiled, as I had, and I saw what Barbas meant. Volistad's mouth was that of a carnivore's. His face looked human, but as I looked more closely, I realized that there were some subtle differences. The muscles around his neck were thicker, and his jaws were prominent and wide in a manner that seemed more suited for biting than an ordinary human mouth did. Most obvious were the fangs that curled up from the row of sharp, dangerous looking teeth, literal canine teeth. Or, I supposed, taking in the other polar-bear seeming traits of the alien, ursine teeth. Nonetheless, he smiled, mimicking me, and then, when he saw that I understood, he closed his mouth quickly and narrowed his eyes again, this time in an expression utterly different than the one he had made when I had startled him. It was the same kind of expression that a cat made when you scratched him behind the ears. Caught completely off guard, I laughed, and Volistad joined me, making his own, half-growling guffaws.
We just stood there, laughing for a good five minutes, tickled by how different we were, and at the same time, just as amused by how much we were alike. When we finally stopped laughing, I felt tears on my face. This was amazing This was the way First Contact was supposed to go. I was really doing it! I was communicating with an alien! It was funny, since the prospect of meeting extraterrestrial life had deemed so unlikely as to merit a single hour of instruction during the entirety of my training as a Former. "Barbas," I said, unable to keep the exc
itement out of my voice. "I want you to record everything he says. You're going to analyze it all, and when I dream, you're going to help me learn. I want to speak that language, and I want to speak it soon. If we do this right, I won't have to shoot anyone else."
Barbas’ whispered, his tone more mechanical than human now, as if the analytical processes he was running behind the scenes was beginning to eat up the computing power he usually reserved for his personality. “Joanna, you’re probably going to have to kill again, regardless.”
“What? Why?”
"Because I doubt the first one, the one who brought the storm with her, was alone." A little more humanity crept back into his voice, and his tone changed, sounding… apologetic. "You need to be careful with this… Volistad. You're right; he's probably friendly. But he might also have been sent by the same power that sent the woman I killed. When the hammer fails, you try the knife in the dark." Despite the temperature control in my suit, I felt a chill pass through my body. Was Barbas right? Could this hunter be here to hunt… me? Could those amused eyes be hiding malice? He had put down his weapons, but what did that mean really? I would sleep eventually, and when I did…
“I’ll be careful, ‘Bas. And besides, I have you watching over me. I know you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” I tried to picture the image of myself smiling, tried to send him reassurance through my thoughts.
My efforts seemed to work, because I could hear the smile in the AI's voice as he said, "Of course I will, Jo. I would never let anything bad happen to you. And you know I can never leave you." He paused for a moment and then continued, his tone businesslike. "If you want to learn this language, you're going to have to find a way to get him talking, and I'm going to be unable to speak to you for a while. There's a lot of for me to do to keep working on the tower, and between those tasks and analyzing an alien language, I'm going to be very busy. You've got this. I'll be here if you need me. Otherwise, I'll talk to you tonight."
Our missions clear, we got to work.
Chapter Fourteen
Joanna
The Djinn and the Bear
When I opened my eyes to the calm warmth of the dream that night, I wasn't lying in my bed in the cabin. Instead, I was seated at a broad, oaken desk, in a vast, dark library. The only light was the desk lamp sitting beside me, and its soft, cozy light illuminated stacks of notebooks and dozens of bound books. Some of the books were little more than prettied-up pamphlets, perhaps bound versions of articles by some prominent mind; others were more like ancient tomes, thick, heavy and musty-smelling.
I looked around me, only able to make out the regular, monolithic shapes of the bookshelves shrouded in the darkness, looking for all the world more like ancient standing-stones in the darkness than simple shelves. Barbas emerged from that darkness, handsome as ever, sharply dressed in a gray three-piece suit- complete with emerald cufflinks at his sleeves and a tie that matched his eyes. I realized then that I was wearing a dress to match, the kind I had never been able to afford. It was tailored to fit me perfectly, green as the spring grass I would never really see again, with an open back that left my back bare all the way down to the very base of my spine. It was elegant in its simplicity, devoid of frills, simply letting my lean body speak for itself. I grinned up at Barbas with an eyebrow raised in mock outrage. "I thought you brought me here to study.”
A tiny smile flickered at the corner of Barbas’ mouth. “I did. But after today’s work, I figured, why not look and feel fantastic while we do so?” He gestured down at his own attire. “I happen to like suits. They feel… right. And you look great, as usual, so,” he shrugged. “Win, win for me.”
I frowned and tilted my head to the side, curious. “How does that work, though?”
“Hmm?” Barbas asked. He pulled a chair out of the darkness and set it down opposite my position, turned it around backwards and then straddled it, resting his arms on its back in a relaxed manner utterly at odds with his pristine, orderly appearance.
“How do you… feel?” I asked, slowly. "I mean I took it for granted so far, this whole thing, this whole Former thing is an exercise in shit I’ve never seen before or even pretended to understand, but now that we’re…” I paused, suddenly feeling a warmth in my cheeks. “Clearly comfortable with each other, I’m curious. I just wonder what you experience. What you feel, what you see, what your… life is like.”
Barbas didn’t seem offended by the line of questioning. Instead, he sat there and seemed to ponder the question for a moment. “That’s actually an interesting question, but a difficult one to answer. How do you describe the reality of your life to someone who experiences life utterly differently to you? It would be like describing the concept of sight to someone born blind, or, alternately, like someone born blind explaining to the sighted what normal is like for them, how the absence of sight doesn’t even enter into it.”
I reached across the desk and the stacks of notes and touched Barbas’ face, gently, my green-enameled nails scoring lightly over the stubble on his cheeks. “Start with what you feel when I do this.”
Barbas smiled more widely this time. “I feel your touch on my face, much the same, I expect, as you would if I touched you the same way.” The smile turned wry. “At the same time, some other part of me, some other part of the artificially intelligent construct that I am, is tricking the part of your brain that talks to your hands into feeling skin and stubble under your fingertips.” I am, without actively thinking about it, giving your mind this entire experience, and reacting to the feedback it gives me. In a way, we are both shaping what we are both experiencing. I create the… framework, as it were, for the reality you are experiencing, and your mind fills in all the details.”
“Like you said about the garden the other day.”
"Yes. Physics behaves the way it's supposed to in here because you think it should. But more than that, the dress feels the way it does because you know that silk feels like that. Even further, if you pick up a book in the cabin, you'll find that whatever you expect to be there will be there. Right now, there are books on gardening and outdoorsy activities, because you think that's what should be in a lake cabin collection of books. However, when we return, I think you'll probably find a few books on linguistics since you're expressing the interest. The state of the cabin is really a kind of reflection of the inside of your mind."
“And your experiences are also a reflection of my mind.”
"Not entirely. I am fully conscious. Outside of the personality and history that I have chosen to make in my mind and memories, I am, in a way utterly divorced from the person you see before you, aware that I… began the day you were implanted with my cybernetic framework. I am also, as Barbas, simultaneously aware that I am a twenty-nine-year-old Pan-American war veteran who just so happens to exist solely on the plane of your mind."
I shuddered a little, and, immediately regretting it, quickly said, “Doesn’t that mess with you? Knowing you aren’t… you aren’t real?”
Barbas put his hand over mine and brought both of them down to rest on the desk. “But I am real. I'm just not physical. And what is a memory but a subjective account of a moment in time that you will never experience again? I remember my childhood as Barbas, I remember the War, I remember my comrades and I remember Reconstruction. The details are a little fuzzy regarding how I came to be living in the mind of a twenty-six-year-old orphan of the late United States government, now an agent of Pan America on an alien world. I take it all in stride. What I think of when I ponder this, which isn't often, is the story of the djinni, of old Arabic myth."
“You mean like that movie?” I asked, smiling, thinking of a wiseacre blue ghost coming out of a lamp.
“No, not a genie,” he replied, smiling indulgently. “Did you know any Muslims, back on Earth?”
“I knew a couple, but we didn’t really talk about religion. I’m not a big ‘God’ person, and we all just kind of avoided the subject.” I smirked a little sheepishly. “On my
census forms, I always put down ‘Asatru’ as my religious preference.” I made a clumsy sign of the Hammer with my free hand. “Hail Thor! Odin son!” I put my hand back down on the table. “I always thought Viking lore was cool.”
Barbas laughed and then continued. "In the Quran, it is said that Allah created three forms of life- the humans, who were people of the earth," he held up one finger. "He made the angels, the people of the heavens- his servants and messengers." He held up a second finger. "The third form of life, the djinni, were people made of smokeless fire, beings of spirit, like the angels, but able to affect the physical world, sometimes themselves, and sometimes through agents." He made a ‘there you have it' gesture with his hands, leaving his palms turned up. "Some cultures believed that some djinni was assigned to a human as a sort of personal spirit or demon. These djinni could lead people astray or closer to the divine, acting as a sort of tempter, or tester, against which their hosts' righteousness would be measured." He raised a hand, gesturing at himself with a ripple of his fingers. "And in a sense, that's what I am: a personal djinni- a Qarin, to use the old words.”
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 8