Passages

by Olan Thorensen

  “If he’s really from this Caedellium, we should try to talk with him as much as possible. I confess that even despite the problems I had with him, I can’t believe how much I enjoyed talking with someone else besides you and Alys. How long has it been since that happened? How many months? I hadn’t realized how lonely I felt.”

  A rush of guilt washed over Mark. “I’m sorry, dearest. I never thought what it must be like for you. I’ve been able to speak Suvalu occasionally to at least one person ever since we crossed the border from Frangel.”

  She waved away his apology. “I’m not complaining . . . well . . . I hope I’m not. You’re keeping us alive and dealing with all the details I couldn’t help with. I know I’ve done my part.”

  “You’ve definitely, as you say, done your part, and I think you’re right about Allyr. I’ll look to speak with him tomorrow and will ask Adalan if the boy can spend time whenever he’s not working to help us learn Caedelli. I can offer to pay him a little, though our supply of coin is getting low.”

  The next morning, Mark awoke in his hammock and glanced at the open porthole. Enough light came through to tell him the sun was an hour or less away. Maghen was still sleeping. Sometime during the night, Alys had transferred from her hammock to snuggle with her mother. His smile at seeing them changed to concern when he realized Heather’s hammock was empty. He slid to the floor and put on his boots, accidentally nudging the iron chamber pot in one corner. It sloshed. He had emptied it over the side after he, Maghen, and Alys had used it last night before going to sleep. None of them usually needed it in the middle of the night.

  Must have been Heather, he thought. Good for her.

  He realized his surprise was based on thinking of Heather as someone who’d just arrived from Earth. Yet whatever had happened to her must have included years of existing in a culture where she would have adjusted to things like chamber pots, voiding rooms, and relieving herself outdoors.

  He climbed the ladder to the main deck where crewmen moved about. When he searched for Heather, he found her on the forecastle, facing forward. The seas were calmer than when they’d left Iskadon, resulting in the bow spray not reaching the main deck.

  “Heather,” he said in a loud enough voice to get her attention but not startle her. Still, she jerked to look around.

  “Oh, I guess I’m still skittish.”

  “Completely understandable.”

  There was enough light to see her smile.

  “What a strange feeling. I don’t know what to say and how to start talking with you. It’s been so long since I spoke English, except to myself to keep from going insane when I first arrived here.”

  “What if we start with our names? I’m Mark Caldwell. I was traveling for a business meeting at the Chicago airport. It was supposed to be a four-hour meeting, and I’d have been back on a flight to San Francisco and home the same night.”

  “Heather Chen. I was supposed to change planes in Chicago for Boston. There, I was going to visit the New England Conservatory of Music. I needed to make a final decision on what school to attend the following year after I graduated from high school.”

  “High— How old were you then, Heather?”

  “Seventeen. Well . . . seventeen in a couple of weeks.”

  She didn’t see him shake his head.

  “I was six months past my forty-fifth birthday,” said Mark.

  “Forty-five? You don’t look that old. I would guess mid to late thirties. Of course, maybe it’s the beard or that I have so much going through my mind that my thinking isn’t clear.”

  “No. When I first looked into a mirror here, I appeared around thirty. Whatever the aliens did to me took maybe fifteen years off my looks.”

  “Aliens? You didn’t give them any other name?”

  “I used ‘Hal’ from the 2001 Space Odyssey. Hal was an AI, like the one that talked to us on the spaceship. I didn’t know what else to call them. They were aliens, and I had no idea what they looked like. ”

  Heather chuckled. “I started off calling them orcs when I first woke up and was terrified. You know . . . Lord of the Rings. Then I also tried Hal like you did, but in the movie he was trying to kill the crew, so I switched to calling them eetees. You know. The movie ET. That alien was friendly, so I hoped the ones that grabbed us were the same.

  “But you say you were forty-five. It’s those thingies the eetees put in us, I guess. They’re right that I haven’t been sick since arriving. And I’ve certainly seen humans here who seemed ill.”

  “What about healing from injuries?” asked Mark.

  She looked up sharply. “I take that question to mean you have that effect. It’s nothing the eetees mentioned. I wonder if they didn’t tell me or they don’t know. Anyway . . . yes, things heal fast. I wish I could say it’s a blessing, but it turned out to be a curse. Soon after Halari bought me, he beat me the first time he got mad at me. It surprised both of us when my bruises faded within hours, so he had me beaten again to check it out. Ever since then, he used it to control me once he realized bruises, cuts, and burns would fade, and I’d be the same as before.

  “Once I understood enough Sulakoan, I heard him warn those men and woman beating me to be careful not to kill me or ‘damage’ me too bad. I learned to do what I had to, to stop them from hitting me. The healing turned out to be a prison of its own, a cell with invisible bars that were nonetheless confining. But that’s me. What about you? The same healing effect?”

  “Yeah,” said Mark, “though my bruises took a day or more to disappear, depending on their severity. Even that effect waned a bit after I was stung and poisoned by a local scorpion-like creature. I still seem to heal faster than I remember, but not as fast as when I first arrived. I can’t say for sure the sting caused it, but it taught me that resistance to microbes didn’t apply to poisons.

  “How about other effects?” he asked. “For me, I can’t tell if it’s the nanites the aliens gave me, but my memory is a little better, my eyesight resolves distant objects more than I used to be able to do, and I ‘feel’ stronger than before, though I’m roughly the same size.”

  “Same size, huh?” said Heather. “Well, I was about to ask if they gave you human growth hormone. I always wanted a few more inches and was going to be pissed if you got HGH and not me. As for eyesight, I don’t notice anything different. The most notable change in me is sleeping less. I used to need a good eight hours, even nine, to feel rested. Now, five hours, and I feel the same as eight to nine hours before. Why would these thingies . . . nanites, you called them . . . do that?”

  Mark shrugged. “Maybe they tailored them differently for us. Maybe they didn’t know about all the side effects. Maybe they made different batches. Maybe there are different side effects with different people? Who knows?”

  Mark had a sudden thought. “Hey . . . something occurs to me. How long have you been here?”

  “Not quite three years,” answered Heather. “That’s Earth years, assuming my estimation is right about the differences in year lengths.”

  “Three!” said Mark, surprised. “I’ve been here almost seven years.”

  Heather’s eyes widened. “What the—”

  “Three and seven,” said Mark. “Why such a difference? Did the AI tell you anything about your injuries from the crash?”

  “It said I needed ‘extensive repairs,’” said Heather. “I didn’t like the sound of that. A garage mechanic once told my father the same thing after he rolled his SUV.”

  “That must be it,” said Mark. “The AI told me my injuries were relatively minor. Maybe yours were so bad it took more time to fix you.”

  Heather shuddered. “Not sure I want to think about this. My imagination might bring up pictures I’d rather not see.”

  “Well, that was just a thought. Hey . . . they’re aliens, so who the hell knows what they did, why they did it, and in what time frame?”

  “But seven years? What have you been doing all that time, and how did yo
u happen to be in Iskadon?”

  Mark proceeded to give her an edited summary of his second life, skipping over some details. Still, the sketch took most of an hour.

  “And there you have it. How I went from lying naked on a beach in Frangel to jumping on a Buldorian ship that left the Iskadon harbor yesterday.”

  “You realize that as soon as I can communicate with her, I’m going to check out this cock-and-bull story with your wife. I assume she’s your wife or whatever, and the kid is yours.”

  “She is and so is Alys.”

  “Tell me you didn’t name your daughter after Alice in Wonderland.”

  “At the time, it seemed appropriate.”

  “So, you lived in this Frangel place until the last few months. You were a little skimpy on why you left. Which reminds me, just how far away is Frangel? I saw this planet from orbit but have never seen an actual map.”

  A small puddle of seawater lay at the point of the forecastle where occasional spray made it over the bulwark. Mark dipped a forefinger into the water and drew a crude map on the wooden planking. He pointed to the lower right landmass.

  “This is the Drilmar continent, and here’s Frangel.”

  He next pointed to the Ganolar continent. “And here’s where Iskadon is. This ship is headed for a country call Buldor.”

  “Jesus Christ! Mark. That’s like—”

  She paused while she imagined a map of Earth. “Good lord! Like Spain to Tibet on horseback and several sea legs.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “And with your wife. What’s her name again?”

  “Maghen.”

  “With Maghen and Alys. I’m more impressed with her coming all this way with the kid. You look like you could eat anything that got in your way. In her place, I might have dumped you and stayed put.”

  “Believe me, that was an option. Maghen was firm that we belonged together, but if I’d thought she and Alys would be safer without me, I was willing to leave on my own.”

  Heather shook her head. “Clearly, I’ll want to hear more details from both of you, but for now, where the hell are we going, and what do you expect to do once we arrive?”

  “Adalan, this ship’s captain, says we’re stopping in a Sulakoan city named Bandapara to unload cargo. We’ll all stay hidden on board while this happens, just to be safe. From there, we’ll continue on to Tortut, which is the capital of Buldor.”

  Mark redrew the world map that had begun to dry, and he pointed to the ship’s ultimate destination.

  “After that, I don’t know exactly what we’ll do next, but here’s where I’m going.” He pointed to the island west of all the major landmasses. “This is Caedellium.”

  “Then I guess I’m going there, too,” said Heather. “I’m going to attach myself to you like a barnacle to a wooden hull. No way I’m going back to being the only person I can speak English with and talk about Earth.”

  “I guess I’m counting on your coming with us. Like you, I don’t want to lose the only other person I know of on this planet who’s from home. I thought I’d totally come to grips with a new life here on Anyar, but in only the few minutes we’ve been talking . . . well, I’ll just say I’d consider hauling you with us if you didn’t want to come.

  “Then, of course, there’s the obvious. What would you do if you left us? The only language you speak here is Sulakoan, and I’m confident you don’t want to hang around Sulako. That would mean you’d be starting over from nothing—again.”

  “Okay, so that’s settled,” said Heather, firmly. “I’m sticking to you. Oh . . . and I haven’t said it yet, but I’ll never be able to repay you for getting me away from Halari.”

  “Well, you helped out by keeping him from shooting me while I was dealing with the guards.”

  She grunted. “Now that we’ve sucked up to each other, why specifically are we going to this Caedellium? You said something about the men chasing you?”

  “Like I said, my reaction to the word Amerika seemed to be the trigger, but then one of the men later mentioned there was also a connection to a man named Yozef Kolsko or something like that. I’ve never heard of anybody by that name. He said it involved the island of Caedellium, a place I’d never heard of. That’s all I know.”

  “Pretty slim information on which to base crossing half the planet,” said Heather.

  “Believe me, I’ve told myself that more times than I could count the last few months, but here we are.”

  “So, how do we get to Caedellium from this . . . what . . . Tortut?”

  Mark redrew the map again. “From Buldor, there are possible three routes, two of them by sea going around the continent of Landolin. The other is to sail from Buldor to Landolin, then cross the continent, bottom to top, and find another ship to Caedellium.”

  “I don’t know about you,” said Heather, “but I vote for a single ocean trip, no matter how long. It’s got to take less time, and who knows what’s in this Landolin? Do you know anything about the peoples, the countries, or what goes on there?”

  “Not a thing, and that’s why I also favor the single long sea voyage, as little as I’d look forward to it. However, I don’t see any way to make plans yet for what we’ll do after Tortut. I’ll be talking to the captain, Adalan, to pump him for information. He seems to think his cousin, a man named Mustafa Adalan, will be interested in meeting me. Once we get the lay of the land in Buldor, then maybe we can make some further decisions.

  “In the meantime, there’s a cabin boy named Allyr on this ship. Adalan says he’s from Caedellium, and we’ve run into some luck there. Even though Frangel and Caedellium are on opposite sides of the landmasses in this hemisphere, the two languages are so close there has to be a past connection.

  “Maghen has talked to the boy, and she believes she and I can learn to speak enough Caedelli to get by once we reach the island. We’re going to work on picking up as much of the Caedelli language as we can before we get to Tortut.”

  “Count me in on that,” said Heather. “I’m pretty good with languages. We spoke Mandarin at home as much as English, and I took German and French in high school. Before you ask why, it was because of music. I wasn’t sure exactly which direction I was going, but both languages are important in classical music. I would have taken Italian in place of one of the other two, but my school didn’t offer it.”

  “Okay,” said Mark. “I’ll speak to Adalan about the boy. However, that brings up another issue. I’ve never told anyone about where I come from. How about you?”

  “Do I look insane!? It was bad enough that once I learned a little Sulakoan, I found out some people suspected me of being an evil demon, djinn, spook, or whatever, once they got a look at me. Let’s face it, it’s the eyes. I never saw anything like them in Iskadon. I wasn’t about to add to my problems by telling them, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m not from this planet. I came here on a spaceship controlled by bug-eyed-monsters. And let me tell you about airplanes, cell phones, and robots.’”

  “What did you tell people?”

  “I said I didn’t know where I’d come from. I didn’t think until later that the story might have fed the rumors. I should have made up something. You know, shipwreck, washed ashore, not knowing where home is, that sort of thing.”

  Mark laughed. “That’s the same story I give people. Maybe I could have embellished it more, but most people accepted it without asking many questions. I suggest you decide on a story and stick to it. When you’ve decided what to say, tell it to me, and I’ll see if it sounds okay.”

  “So, you haven’t told Maghen?”

  “No, and I doubt I ever will. Why do it? It doesn’t help anything, and there’s the risk of it changing our relationship. After all, what if you had a boyfriend back in San Mateo, and he told you he was from another planet. The next thing he’d see and hear is the door slamming as you left.”

  “Yeah . . . I guess so, but what if she somehow finds out on her own, and you didn’t tell her?”

&n
bsp; “I’ll deal with that if it happens, which it shouldn’t because you’re the only other person who knows.”

  Mark caught Adalan alone later that morning. The captain agreed to let Allyr tutor them in Caedelli, as long as it didn’t interfere with ship duties. When the boy was told of the agreement, he seemed eager enough that Mark was tempted not to mention paying him. He later relented under Maghen’s glare when she was apprised of the arrangement.

  Bandapara lay a thousand sea miles from Iskadon. The Wicked Woman sailed north, then northwest, and finally due west, always staying within intermittent sight of the Sulako coast. Although Adalan was confident he could out-sail any ship they might encounter, the ocean between the Ganolar and Melosia continents had some dangerous waters. Narthani and the occasional Iraquinik warships could be encountered at any time, and Adalan didn’t want to take any chances.

  The seas and the wind were kind, and they anchored a half-mile from the Bandapara harbor eight days after leaving Iskadon.

  “The harbor can’t be sailed into,” said Adalan. “Too many treacherous rocks and too long a tradition of caution in allowing foreign ships to enter the harbor’s bay. They know we’re here, and as soon as they’re ready, several towboats will come and pull us into the dock. If things go well, we’ll only be here until tomorrow this time. You can come on deck after dark.”

  Adalan never explained the delay, but it was first light of the third day before tugs towed the Wicked Woman outside of the Bandapara harbor. Once again, the captain ordered full sail.

  They had two to three hours each day of Caedelli lessons with Allyr. By the second day of lessons, they knew his last name was Kardyl, and that he, his mother, and a sister had been taken captive during a raid on a Caedellium fishing village named Nollagen in the province of Seaborne. The boy had few memories of his life before the raid, but his mother had continued speaking Caedelli to him, in hopes that someday they would return home.

  “Evidently, his mother and sister are slaves or something of Adalan’s family,” Mark told Maghen. “The boy expects to be declared free after a certain number of years’ service on an Adalan ship. I don’t know the exact relationships yet, but the extended Adalan family owns a number of ships, three of which are under our captain’s ‘authority’ or ‘ownership.’ It’s unclear how it all entwines. The man we’re going to meet, Mustafa Adalan, got rich off a series of raids on Caedellium, and it enhanced the family’s status.”