by Zara Zenia
She raised her head as she heard the door open, outraged. He knew he wasn't allowed in here without her permission! She started to stand up to tell him so, grabbing the branch to defend herself, but as she straightened up, she realized the Ra'hom standing in front of her, surprisingly close, was not Kay.
It was the red one. The Perita Occidens.
"What are you doing in here?" she demanded, brandishing the branch. "This is my home! You're not allowed in the habitats!"
The Ra'hom didn't flinch at her anger. He seemed rather amused by it, honestly.
"Pardon me," he said—and he must have been using Kay's language because the computer translated it perfectly. "I was simply curious. You left the party so early. I wanted to ask you a few questions."
"Where's Kay?" she asked suspiciously, and when he answered with only a puzzled expression, she corrected herself. "Ingenuus Oriens. The Curator."
"Oh, back at the party," the Ra'hom replied with a dismissive shrug, stepping toward her. "He is quite popular right now, as you can imagine. He is finally going to get that place among the Peritas he has wanted for so long."
Jewel felt her heart sink lower, disappointment bitter on the back of her tongue. It wasn't that she wanted him to chase after her. But the indifference stung. When had he stopped caring that she was upset? Had he ever cared at all?
"Forgive me—we have not been introduced," the Ra'hom said. "I am Shkre'te'tire e Zeze."
The translator reshaped the words in her mind, telling her he was Owner of the Nicene Star, Visionary of the Telabet Accords, Silver Wit, Champion of the Ancient House of Bright Leaves, Silence of the Black Desert. The last title rang a bell. That was part of Kay's name as well.
"I'm going to call you Zee," she declared, lowering the branch a little. "My name is Jewel."
Zee frowned.
"A curious title," he said. "Did you collect many faceted precious stones on your home world?"
"No," she said. "And I'm not really interested in explaining. Could you leave?"
Zee ignored her, stepping past her instead to examine her house with mild curiosity.
"How interesting," he said, looking down at the broken vase. "I wonder if they will allow you to have all of this at your permanent exhibit. It is really a fascinating window into a primitive culture."
"I'm not primitive," Jewel insisted, irritated. "I'm talking to you right now. We're literally standing in proof that my culture is an advanced society with mass production and global trade."
He cast her and her tree branch club a disbelieving glance.
"Whatever you say, Collector of Faceted Stones."
"It's Jewel. Just Jewel."
"Jewel," Zee repeated, putting an odd emphasis on the word as he turned to face her again, his hands folded in front of him. "You and the Curator seem close."
"Is that surprising?" Jewel asked. "You banished him to an empty ship on the fringes of space and I'm the first intelligent life he's seen in months."
"It is surprising just how close you seem to be," Zee said casually. "That display at the end of the demonstration was quite daring. A bit indecent, some would say. The older Peritas were calling it obscene, actually."
"It was a dance," Jewel said, her face heating. "What do you care?"
"Oh, I do not," Zee assured her with a casual laugh. She felt the table bump into her back and realized as he moved closer that she'd been unconsciously backing up. "What does it matter to me if the Forever Shamed debases himself with animals? If anything, it makes his punishment all the better. So desperate for company that he'll cling to anything remotely intelligent."
"I'm not an animal," Jewel growled. "I'm just as intelligent as you."
"What surprises me," Zee continued without dignifying her response, "is that you would allow him to use you in that way. I mean, considering what he's done to you. Kidnapping you, turning you into entertainment for the Peritas, selling you to the home world for his own advancement. Perhaps humans are different, but such behavior would not elicit affection among the Ra'hom."
"It's not like that," Jewel said defensively, gripping the branch tighter. "This whole thing was just so the Peritas would help convince the Council that I'm in an intelligent being. Once the Council recognizes humanity as people with legal rights, he's going to take me back to Earth."
Zee tilted his head with a puzzled frown.
"And what do you imagine you'll find there?" he asked.
"My life," she said, not liking the question. "My home. Everything I left behind when the ship stole me."
"You do not understand how space travel works," he said.
"Kay said the same thing," Jewel said, sudden worry curling in her gut. "What do you mean? What don't I understand?"
"Are your species familiar with the concept of relativity?" he asked. "How relative time is affected by speed and gravity?"
"Yeah," Jewel said hesitantly, trying to remember how it worked. "I mean, they talked about it in school. It's not exactly something that comes up in day to day life, you know."
"Well then, allow me to refresh your memory in the simplest terms possible," Zee said with patronizing kindness. "Every object causes a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity. The more massive the object, the greater the distortion, and the more powerful the gravity, the faster you need to be moving in order to escape that gravity. The faster you move relative to a gravitational body like, say, your home planet, the more difference there will be between the time you observe and the time your planet observes. This is called time dilation."
Jewel felt cold, her stomach twisting painfully. She tried to wrap her head around it, but part of her which had already guessed simply refused to accept it.
"What are you saying?" she whispered.
Zee chuckled with the patient look of a parent explaining to a distraught child that Santa wasn't real.
"You have been moving at near light speed since you left Earth," Zee replied. "You have crossed intergalactic voids and passed incredibly massive stellar bodies. You have been traveling this way for months. Now, I don’t know the specifics of gravity as experienced by your planet, but I can hazard a very educated guess based on your species’s life expectancy that everyone you ever knew is dead."
Jewel's knees gave out. She sat down hard on the floor, the branch landing beside her with a clatter. She struggled to breathe, sucking in huge, shaking breaths that seemed to do nothing for how her head was spinning.
"There, there," Zee said, crouching to look at her. "There is no point in panicking. They were probably all gone before you even woke up on this ship. The Diviner would have kept you in storage for years just processing your data and preparing your habitat. Did you think it just created all of those plants out there from thin air?"
"How long?" Jewel demanded, shaking. "How long have I been away from Earth?"
"Oh, I do not know," Zee scoffed, unconcerned. "Several decades, at the least. Bordering on a century, I am certain."
A century. She'd missed a hundred years. Christ, the United States was only two hundred! It might not even be there anymore! They might have joined a planetary government or blown themselves all to hell in a nuclear war, or caused an extinction event through unchecked climate change and knocked themselves back to the agrarian age. Humanity could be living underground, farming mushrooms while the surface recovered from a deadly solar flare or the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, for all she knew.
They could have achieved technological singularity and stopped living on the physical plane entirely. Or everything could still be more or less the same, but as unrecognizable to her as today would be to someone from 1917. And in the months it would take her to get home, even if she left right now, another hundred years could pass. She'd be a time traveler from the past, a living relic from the 1800s stumbling into 2017.
"But," she wheezed, overwhelmed, her hand finding the branch again. "He promised—"
"Yes, well, he lied," Zee said with a shrug. "We do th
at. He never had any intention of taking you back there anyway. You are too valuable a specimen. Regardless of the Council's decision on your relative intelligence, a habitat is being prepared for you on the Ra'hom home world at one of our most prestigious zoological institutes. There, you and your species can be safely studied for the rest of your natural life. And, of course, used as entertainment and education for curious young Ra'hom about the wonders of the natural universe. Judging by tonight, the trained human shows are going to be spectacular."
She swung the branch at him, a wild and unmeasured strike, and he ducked away. Jewel sprinted past him and ran out of the cabin, out of the Earth habitat, carrying the stick with her. She didn't know where she was going until she was back at the party, moving through the startled guests, looking for Kay.
She spotted him talking to another pair of tall Ra'hom. He looked up when he saw her coming, an annoyed frown on his face.
"There you are," he said impatiently. "You scared that Perita half to death. They demanded to go to med bay in case you were diseased—"
"Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded. He drew back, confused.
"What?"
"Why didn't you tell me about time dilation?"
His eyes widened as he realized what she was talking about.
"A hundred years!" she shouted. "You've stolen a hundred years from me! Everything I ever knew was gone before I even woke up, and you didn't tell me!"
"There was nothing I could do about it," Kay tried to explain. "I did not want to upset you."
"Bullshit! You just wanted me to cooperate!" Jewel shouted, teary-eyed. "So you could throw your little party and get back to your life, knowing I would never get back to mine! Knowing you were going to send me to homeworld to live in a zoo for the rest of my life! None of it ever meant anything to you except as a way to control me!"
"It was not like that," Kay pleaded, coming closer, his hands outstretched. "I care about you. But I had to do it this way for your own good. You would not have understood."
"I would have understood!" Jewel snapped. "I'm not stupid! How many times do I have to say it? How many tests do I have to take? How many times do I have to fuck you before you see me as an equal?"
Kay stepped back like she'd slapped him, his eyes wide.
"I was always already your equal," Jewel snarled. "But fine. You all want to see what animals humans are? I'll show you!"
She raised the branch and swung it around her head with a furious yell, a grim satisfaction in the way the Ra'hom scrambled away from her. She ripped the decorative curtains down and smashed tables of food and anything else that looked remotely smashable. She took wild swipes at anyone who came near her, swearing like a house on fire. It wasn't grand or intimidating. It was a petty temper tantrum and she knew it. But how pathetic it felt couldn't stop her from doing it. She'd never felt so helpless in her life. Even this could do nothing, would change nothing. She had no control at all.
Eventually, someone tackled her, she wasn't sure who, and slapped a sedative patch on her arm. She was out before she could even swing her stupid cave man club again. She slept, anger slipping into a terrible, intractable despair. There was nothing anyone could do. She would never go home again.
Chapter 14
Someone tore the patch off her arm, a sting like a ripped off Band-Aid, and she began to wake up.
She was lying face up on a white plastic platform, angled so that she was partially sitting up, like sleeping in a recliner. The bench folded out of the wall next to her, which seemed to be made of the same white plastic. As she came around, head throbbing, she sat up. The small square room around her was all made of the white plastic, except for a clear plastic wall opposite the bench. She didn't have to be a genius to recognize a cell. She took a moment to get her bearings and make sure she could stand without falling over, then she stumbled over to the clear wall, banging on it loudly.
"Hey!" she shouted. "Hey, someone come let me out of here!"
No one answered at first. She couldn't see much outside the cell. There was just a blank wall across from it. If she looked sideways far enough, she thought she could see a chair and a console like a helm. That worried her.
Then she heard footsteps and looked the other way to see a Ra'hom climbing up from a lower deck. She recognized it at once as Zee. He was carrying a mug of the weird sweet substance Ra'hom liked to have with breakfast.
"Hey!" she shouted at him. "Let me out. Where's Kay?"
"Back on the Diviner, I imagine," Zee said with a yawn, disinterested. He walked right past her to the console, sitting down and beginning to make adjustments to the controls.
"We're not on the Diviner?" Jewel asked, fear beginning to roll in her stomach.
"No," Zee replied. "We are on my private ship. I brought it with me in the Peritas vessel's storage bay so that I could leave as soon as I had what I needed."
"Once you'd stolen me," Jewel guessed, anger simmering under the fear.
"You are clever," Zee said indulgently, not even looking her way, focused on his work. "Can you guess what I want you for?"
Jewel was silent, unsure but unwilling to admit it.
"Come now, it should be obvious," Zee mocked her. "It is the same reason the Curator wanted you. The power, pet. When I present you to the Council, I will be promoted to their ranks immediately."
"But Kay discovered me," Jewel said. "They know that."
"They know a known traitor wants to present them with a new intelligent species," Zee corrected her. "A species the Peritas now know to be crazed and violent, thanks to your display back on the Diviner. And then you stole this ship and tried to escape. Luckily, I captured you. And now I am going to present you and your species to the Council as an immediate threat to Ra'hom kind. A barbarian from a savage planet that is even now beginning to explore their local system. Who knows how long we have before they come for Ra'hom with all their savagery? A gripping story, do you not you think?"
"But it isn't true!" Jewel said, horrified. "I'll tell them!"
"And who will believe you?" Zee said with an amused laugh. "You are just an animal, after all."
"You'll start a war!" Jewel shouted, slamming her fists on the glass. Then she closed her eyes, realizing that was exactly what he wanted. "But why would you care about that? Starting wars is what you do."
"War can be incredibly profitable if you do not make the mistake of fighting in it," Zee said mildly. "The Council is going to want my firsthand experience with your species when they move to exterminate you."
"This is the first time either of our species has ever found other intelligent life," Jewel said through gritted teeth. "We might be the only advanced societies in the universe. And you're going to make us kill each other."
"Well, you are hardly advanced." Zee scoffed. Jewel knew there was no point in trying to convince him. She sank down, crouching with her head against the glass, eyes closed. She heard him stand again and walk past her.
"Make yourself comfortable," he said. "You're going to be in that cell for a few months. And whatever resentment you have toward me, you should try to let go of."
She looked up to glare at him. Like hell she’d be letting go of anything.
“It is going to be a long few months,” Zee said. “And I am the only one on this ship. I am curious to see how effective a comfort animal you humans make. The sooner you learn to enjoy it, the easier it will be for both of us. Who knows? We may discover a reason to keep your species around after all.”
Jewel stared at him, horrified beyond words, but he only smiled and turned away.
Then he was gone, vanished off to the lower decks again. Jewel took a deep breath.
Okay, she thought. Priority one, escape. Priority two . . . I'll figure it out when I get there.
If there was one thing she had learned about the Ra'hom, it was that they would constantly underestimate her. There was a way out of this cell. She would find it. She would find a way to neutralize Zee. And then she would
figure out how to control this ship and . . . fly it back to the Diviner? Back to Earth? Away from here, anyway.
She got to work examining every square inch of her cell. The bench folded seamlessly into the wall. With some work, she might be able to rip it off its hinges. But that would be noisy and time-consuming. She couldn't reach the ceiling, but she had a feeling if she could, she'd find that those ceiling panels moved. Ra'hom were not climbers. It seemed to be a big blind spot for them. She just needed to find a way to get up there.
As she contemplated this, she couldn't stop her thoughts from wandering to what Zee had said. She didn't know how long she'd been out, but the Peritas had probably already told the homeworld and the Council about the dangerous, frightening humans. Were they already planning an attack on Earth? Was fear of humans spreading even now? She had to stop it somehow.
She was the only one who could. The only one who even wanted to. She couldn't go back to Earth. She had to go to the Ra'hom home world and talk to the Council and convince them she wasn't dangerous. Right. Because an alien in a stolen ship bursting into their center of government didn't seem dangerous at all. They couldn't even speak her language.
Whatever. She'd worry about that when she was loose. She was still contemplating the bench, wondering if she could loosen it from the wall a little at a time and then stand it up against the wall so she could climb it to reach the ceiling. No, that was dumb. It'd never reach. She groaned in frustration.
"I need a drink," she muttered.
A familiar chime sounded, and an alcove opened in the wall holding a cup of water. A smile spread across Jewel's face. Ra'hom were idiots.
After requesting approximately a hundred glasses of water, one at a time, without removing the previous glasses from their alcoves, she had successfully created what amounted to a climbing wall. The alcoves, spread all over as the computer searched for unoccupied sections of wall from which to produce the glasses, had formed a convenient ladder right up to the ceiling.