“Dress up,” I said. “Go out. Get drunk.”
Kylie clinked her glass against mine. “Good answer.”
If she still resented my earlier outburst, she gave no sign of it. I was grateful for her forbearance. She would have been within her rights to make things awkward for me for a while. I had expected that. Instead, she topped off her glass and told me to choose the dinner music while she lit the camp stove. We made risotto and drank more wine. After dinner, we got dressed for our first night out on the starhaven. Paradoxically, since I had fewer options to choose from, I was slower getting ready than Kylie.
“Finally,” she said when I came downstairs at last. “I thought you were never going to take off that uniform.”
I grinned. “That’s a good line. You planning on using it tonight?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.” She studied my outfit appraisingly. “I think you need another necklace.”
“I think you need my leather jacket.” I ran back up the stairs to get it. As I was on my way down again, my flexscreen lit up with a message from Zey. Hearings are over for Sohra and me. We’re going to the Atrium to celebrate. Meet us?
The relief that crashed over me was dizzying. Seeing my crewmates last night had reinforced my longing for them; crossing paths briefly and publicly was almost worse than having no contact at all. I’d been toying with the thought of messaging Zey, but I’d been wary of straying into clingy girlfriend territory. What was the protocol in a situation like ours? We weren’t on the Pinion anymore. Arkhati was an enormous floating city with ample entertainment and social options. Maybe he would want to be left alone. Now, with clear evidence to the contrary glimmering in my hand, I didn’t stop to question the rush of exhilaration I felt. I texted back immediately, On our way!
Downstairs, I passed the jacket to Kylie, who slipped it on at once. “You have your drinks?” she asked.
I patted my bag and heard the clink of bottles within. “Right here.” As we went out the door I said, “Okay if we meet up with some of my friends from the Pinion?”
“Yeah, great. They can show us around.”
We stepped out into the hallway. Officer Nerev had been replaced by another member of Kylie’s security detail, a young dark-haired man who studied the directions Zey had sent and then led us toward the Atrium. “You sure have a lot of security,” I said to Kylie as we walked.
She said matter-of-factly, “So do you.”
“I do?” I looked around. “Where?” There was no one near us in the corridor save for Kylie’s guard and a couple of men in Fleet uniforms who had paused to look at something on one of their flexscreens. Neither glanced up as we passed them.
Kylie shrugged. “Seshan says they’re keeping a low profile for now, gauging the level of anti-human sentiment on the starhaven. You won’t see them until you need them. But you can be sure they’re there.”
We found Zey and Sohra at a stall on the upper tier of food and drink stands, one that served senek and beer and offered a commanding view of both the lower tier and the marketplace below. I introduced Kylie, who offered greetings in rapid if ungrammatical Vardeshi. My crewmates already had drinks in their hands. After making their acquaintance, Kylie turned to the stall owner and ordered herself another of the same, which seemed to take all three Vardeshi equally by surprise. The owner glanced pointedly at me. “Just one?”
“Just one,” I confirmed. At Zey’s puzzled look I explained, “I just had my allergy test. By this time tomorrow, I’ll be able to drink with you guys. I hope.”
“What else did they test?” Sohra asked.
I pulled my flexscreen and a beer out of my bag. “I’ll show you. You can tell me what to try first.”
I hadn’t known whether Kylie would mix well with my Vardeshi friends—combining groups was a risky enough proposition even when everyone involved was the same species—but conversation flowed easily among the four of us. As I would have expected in someone immersed in a difficult language without adequate time to study the essentials, Kylie’s speech was laced with technical flaws, but they didn’t impede her ability to communicate. She lost no time in finding points of connection with both of the others. She remembered seeing Zey at the Villiger Center on my last day of training, and upon hearing his surname, she linked it to his father’s with admirable speed. Senator Novak Takheri had been a member of the original group of five representatives sent to Earth to make first contact twenty-five years ago. When Sohra mentioned a member of her graduating class at the Institute who was serving on the Black Moon, Kylie knew that name too and had a story to share. I felt a faint trace of envy as I watched her easy rapport with my crewmates. I told myself firmly that this was Kylie’s particular gift. She excelled at making quick connections with strangers. She had done it with me at the Villiger Center, and she had undoubtedly done it with the crew of the Black Moon. In her six months on Arkhati, she would be asked to do it countless more times. It was her job, and if she was good at it, so much the better for the alliance. All the same, I felt a slightly guilty satisfaction at each error in tone or verb tense. Language was my area of specialization, and while I knew Kylie might have been equally proficient given my year-long head start, I saw no reason to let that fact cloud my triumph. I knew my own speech and writing were still far from perfect—it would have been hard to think otherwise when my crewmates, mainly Hathan, continued to point out mistakes with maddening regularity—but I also knew how far I’d come. Three months of complete immersion had done their work. And my idioms, thanks to Saresh, were perfectly on point. An unexpected side effect of the Listening had left me with a complete stock of Vardeshi idioms and him with an extensive collection of American pop-song lyrics.
For the most part we talked about the exchange. The other three seemed fairly current on exchange-related gossip, and listening to them made me realize how thoroughly insulated I’d been from everything beyond the walls of the Pinion. It was quickly clear that no one else among either the Strangers or the Vardeshi on Earth had a story to match mine for drama. “You’re still the celebrity,” Kylie assured me. Nevertheless, there had been some intriguing developments, and I’d missed all of them. Inevitably, there had been a few dropouts. Seven humans and three Vardeshi had quit the program, all within the last month. Replacements for all ten were currently en route. I didn’t recognize any of the departing participants’ names. Most of them had simply failed to conquer their environment shock, but one of the humans had suffered a total nervous breakdown and had to be evacuated for health reasons.
“He was already a month out,” Sohra said. “That has to be the longest medical evacuation in history.”
“And the most humiliating,” Zey agreed.
Additionally, a Vardeshi delegate had changed her stance on the alliance after seeing the living conditions on Earth and asked to be discharged on ethical grounds. “Where was she stationed?” I asked.
“Hyderabad,” said Kylie.
I bit my lip. “Damn.”
“What’s wrong with Hyderabad?” Sohra asked.
“Nothing. It’s just . . .” I looked at Kylie.
“Have you been to India?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted.
“I have. And, honestly, I think it’s one of the best places they could have sent a delegate. It’s all of humanity crammed in together and jostling for your attention. It’s thrilling and colorful and sometimes terribly sad.” Seeing my frown, she said firmly, “You can’t cherry-pick the good parts of Earth and leave the bad ones behind. That’s the nature of the exchange. It’s all or nothing.”
“Which representative was it?” Zey asked Sohra. She said a name. He waved dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. She’s South Continent. They’re all soft.”
“Aren’t you from the South Continent?” I asked.
He grinned. “Yeah. But Fleet makes you tough.”
“Remember who you’re talking to,” said Sohra.
Kylie punched my shoulder lightly.
“Avery was tough to begin with.”
Still disheartened, I said, “It’s not like we lied. We never said we were perfect.”
“It’ll be fine,” Zey insisted. “What’s one person out of a hundred?”
“But does she still get a vote at the end of the year?”
“Probably.” Kylie grinned. “But so do we.”
We lounged against the railing with our drinks, watching as the artificial dusk deepened and the lights came on. Each shop or stall had its own form of illumination, some as muted and natural as starlight or candlelight, some garish as any neon sign in an Earth metropolis. The scene was lit from above, too, by the soft glow of the banners. I watched in fascination the endlessly exotic parade that passed beneath our vantage point. The number of uniforms, both Echelon and Fleet, dwindled as the proportions shifted: fewer workers headed home, more evening revelers. Vardeshi going-out clothes still tended toward the dark and formal, at least to my eyes, but I saw shades of purple, indigo, and orange mixed in with the gray and black, and some more daring looks interspersed with the typical jumpsuits. The women favored tops that were high-necked and conservative in front but strappy and barely there in back. I saw plenty of exposed shoulders and arms and the occasional gauzy blouse over little or no underclothing. People seemed to clothe their lower bodies more modestly, and I looked dubiously at the length of leg visible between my boots and skirt before deciding not to let it bother me. Kylie’s skirt was even shorter than mine, so there was solidarity, of a kind. Both genders of Vardeshi wore vests, some long and flowing, some cropped just below the arms. A number of these featured strikingly high collars or complicated fins on the back that made me think perhaps the Vardrama costumers of past decades hadn’t been as far off as I’d thought.
I was thrilled to observe a couple of women who were unmistakably pregnant, their round bellies accentuated by bright sashes of the type Kylie and I had admired in the marketplace. And there were children: the first Vardeshi children I had ever seen. They clung to their parents’ hands or peered around from behind their legs at us, wary and shyly inquisitive. They were quieter than human children would have been, and so ethereally beautiful, with their brilliant eyes and drifts of pale hair, that I recalled another of our nicknames for their people: Ice Angels. I could hardly take my eyes off them.
After an hour or so, Zey abruptly drained his drink and set his glass down. “All right. Enough people-watching. Let’s hit Downhelix and find some real bars.”
“Downhelix? Is that a place?” I asked Sohra.
“It’s a slang word for the lower levels of the starhaven, just above the docking bays. It’s a little . . . edgier than the Atrium.”
“If you’re up for that,” Zey said innocently.
Kylie finished her drink and slammed the empty glass down next to his. “We’re up for anything.”
As the four of us wandered through Downhelix, security personnel in tow, I looked around with eager interest. I hadn’t believed that any place designed by the Vardeshi could rival the seedier and dingier quarters of a major Earth city, but in Downhelix they had made a credible attempt. The district was a maze of dimly lit bars that spilled unpredictably into each other. Some were walled off and uninviting, their interiors hidden behind grimy viewports. Others were bounded only by a half-wall and disgorged their seats and tables into the corridor, forcing us to pick our way around them. I peered into one doorway after another, seeing more of the unearthly blue and green lights I’d noticed on the docking levels. The clientele themselves looked unexpectedly well-dressed and sober. I didn’t see anything that looked recognizably like a dance club, but we did pass by one purple-lit den in which shadowy bodies moved in an odd undulating pattern. A distinctly percussive thumping emanated from within. Zey quickened his pace. I looked over at Sohra. “Rana club,” she said quietly.
“You mean everyone in there is high on rana? That’s allowed?” In addition to facilitating participation in the Listening for latent telepaths, rana was also a mild intoxicant which clouded thinking and slowed reaction time. Due to its addictive properties, it was strictly controlled on Echelon ships. The Fleet took a more permissive approach, but excessive use was strongly discouraged. Rhevi Vethna, the Pinion’s engineer and one of my least favorite crewmates, had been cut off completely after one too many episodes of conspicuous overindulgence.
“Not exactly,” Zey said. “The starhaven tries to close them down. But every time they shut one down, another one opens up somewhere else.” His tone was contemptuous. I thought I understood why. It must be infuriating to see others making such perverted use of a substance meant to unlock a door forever closed to him as a Blank.
At a seemingly random establishment, he stopped and waved us inside. I looked at the illuminated sign beside the door. “The Gravity Well. Why this one?”
Sohra tapped the next line on the panel. “Why else? Cheap whiskey.”
“Some things really are universal,” Kylie said.
We entered and found an unoccupied length of bar to lean against. Zey went to order drinks for himself, Sohra, and Kylie. A little self-consciously, I took another beer out of my bag and opened it. The hiss of escaping carbonation turned a few heads. Someone a little farther down the bar said knowingly in Vardeshi to his companion, “Earth beer. She can’t drink ours.”
“I can tomorrow,” I called back to him. He stared, then grinned wolfishly and saluted me with his glass.
When Zey returned, he had the drinks in one hand and a fistful of what looked like large sequins in the other. He distributed them carefully among us. “Is that money?” Kylie asked.
“Not really. They’re bar coins. You get a couple whenever you buy food or drink somewhere that allows gaming.” Zey indicated the table near us, where three men in Fleet uniforms were engaged in a game that involved stacking glass discs on long metal rods, one I’d seen my crewmates playing on the Pinion. “They’re specifically for gambling. They’re standard across the starhaven, so you can redeem them for food and drink anywhere that has game tables.”
I turned the little metallic chip over curiously in my fingers. It was smooth and flat, a bit like a guitar pick. “Can you exchange them for units?”
“No, and they only work on Arkhati, so when people leave, they hand off any extras to someone who’s just arriving.”
“What’s the point?”
“There’s no point. They’re just fun.”
“They’re poker chips,” Kylie said.
This revelation confirmed something I had long suspected, which was that the Vardeshi, while in many ways highly conservative, were keen players of games. Players and spectators, it seemed; they drifted over to observe each other’s prowess at the various tables as casually as denizens of a casino. Much like the free circulating movement I’d noted at the music concerts on the Pinion, social groups seemed to drift apart and reform, their members joining other tables at will. Zey and Sohra were almost immediately drawn into the rods-and-discs game. Kylie and I played a couple of rounds of the simple dice game I’d learned in my first days on the Pinion. Then she produced a deck of cards from her bag and began to shuffle them. Instantly our table was the focus of intense interest. Kylie looked up at the three strangers, two men and one woman, who had dropped onto stools around our table. Calmly she dealt them in. She proceeded to explain the rules of poker in English. I clarified a few points in Vardeshi. As I was talking, I saw several of the onlookers exchange knowing looks, which I took to mean they had identified me.
To my complete lack of surprise, I emerged as the worst player at the table. Looking back to the long-ago evening in the Pinion’s mess hall on which I had introduced Zey and Hathan to poker, I didn’t think any of the others demonstrated Hathan’s instant command of the game. There were frequent halts to discuss rules and strategy. However, all three of our Vardeshi challengers were quick learners with keen competitive instincts. I lost four successive hands and all of my bar coins. “No pressure, but the reputat
ion of the human race rests with you,” I said to Kylie as I trickled my last few coins through my fingers onto her stack.
She snorted. “It would be a sad day for humanity if that were true.”
I vacated my stool, which was instantly claimed by one of the people who had been looking eagerly over my shoulder, and made my way to Zey’s table. I watched his game for a while, finding it just as perplexing as I had the first time, before a young white-haired man in a Fleet uniform invited me to play a round of dice. “I don’t have any coins left,” I said apologetically.
“No problem. If you lose, you can get my next round.” He smiled. His eyes were startlingly dark, like Zey’s, beneath that bright hair.
I looked down at his right hand, noted the lack of a gold sigil, and realized that there was a distinct possibility that I had just been flirted with. When I met his eyes again, his smile had broadened. My sigil check hadn’t been especially subtle. I grinned back a little self-consciously. “Sure. Why not?”
I didn’t perform much better at dice than I had at poker, but it didn’t seem to matter. The insignia on my opponent’s collar told me he was a novi too, and we quickly fell to trading stories. I told him about my struggle to operate Vardeshi tech and the shock of stumbling upon a Listening for the first time. He told me about the bitter rivalry between the senior novis on his own ship and the coolant leak that had contaminated the remaining stock of senek several days out from Arkhati, rendering the entire crew twitchy and irritable. We commiserated about late officers’ dinners that ran up against early briefings. I didn’t ask him his name. He didn’t ask me what it had been like to be demoted and imprisoned. He didn’t let me buy him a drink either, although I reminded him that that had been our agreement. “I only said that to get you to play,” he explained. I was grateful when Sohra came by and wordlessly deposited a glittering handful of her winnings on the table in front of me. I won the next few rounds, possibly by design, before my new friend claimed the entire stack with a lucky toss. “How long ago did you graduate from the Institute?” I said suspiciously.
Bright Shards Page 6