Bright Shards

by Meg Pechenick

  “Max and I have an understanding. He looked the other way provided I promised not to offer it to the Vardeshi—which I would never do; I’m not a total idiot—and I promised to bring him back any interesting substances I ran across on the way. I already have a canister of senek with his name on it. And a bottle of Vardeshi whiskey. He’s not worried about an upset stomach. Small price to pay for a taste of—what did he call it?—alien hooch.”

  I shook my head. “It would never even have occurred to me to try to bring something like this on board. And if it had, I never would have asked Max for help.”

  “I know. You’re too innocent.”

  “How did you know he was the right one to ask?”

  She waved a hand, wafting perfumed steam toward me. “I saw him smoking a joint in the gardens during the first week of training.”

  “Still, weren’t you afraid you’d be thrown out of the program if they found it?”

  She laughed. “You were always worrying about that. It’s a lot less likely than you think. Remember, we were selected for this mission over everyone else on Earth. All seven billion of them. Do you have any idea how much it cost to train us? The worst anyone would have done was give me a light scolding. And pocket it for themselves. So are you just going to hold that thing, or are you going to smoke it?”

  I looked doubtfully at the vaporizer pen. Kylie laughed again. “You do realize, don't you, that you’d have to travel for three months to reach a place where smoking it is illegal? You’ll never have a better chance than right now.”

  My final objection was halfhearted. “What if it triggers some kind of environmental alarm? Like when we burned the popcorn?”

  “It won’t.”

  She spoke so coolly that I had to laugh. “You’ve already tried it?”

  “Once. I had to be sure it worked. Didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  “Believe me, you haven’t.”

  I’d been high a few times in college and once or twice in grad school, but it had been a while. My first drag resulted in a paroxysm of coughing. Kylie, watching me, laughed until tears came to her eyes. I laughed too, when I got my breath back. I only took a couple of hits: enough to relax, not enough to dim the lucidity of my thoughts. Then I lay back in the warm water and closed my eyes, giving in to the heightened sense of awareness conferred by the drug. Here we were, the two of us, humans together, impossibly far from home. I’d resented Kylie a little at first for taking away my uniqueness. I’d known even then how irrational that was. Now I found myself realizing how lonely I would be without her. All the references effortlessly understood, all the shared laughs and eloquent looks. When would I be in the company of another human? I found myself almost hoping I would encounter Fletcher Simon on Vardesh Prime. There was a profound solitude in being the only one of my kind among aliens, even ones as familiar as Zey and the others now were to me. I couldn’t ever be known by them as deeply and completely as I was right now. At least, I amended, not until the Council rescinded its ban on human participation in the Listening.

  The first album had ended and the water was beginning to cool down when Kylie asked, “Are you afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of going out there again. Of being alone with them.”

  I had to smile, so precisely did her question parallel my thoughts. “I’m not afraid of them. But yeah, I’m afraid of going out there again. When I launched the first time, I thought I knew what to expect. Now I know I don’t.”

  “Good,” she said. “If you thought anything else, you’d be an idiot.” She hesitated. “You’re sure you made the right decision? Turning down the Echelon ship? I know what you told Tavri. But this is me asking.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “You know I would have gone with you. If you’d asked.”

  I looked at her. She went on, “You think I'm still angling for Vardesh Prime. I’m not. I would have gone home with you too, if you needed me to. If you had asked.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  After another brief silence I asked her, “So what about you? Are you going to be all right here on your own?”

  “It’s different for me. There will be other Strangers passing through Arkhati. The next wave will be here in a couple of weeks. I won’t be alone, not like you.”

  “I won’t be alone,” I said. “Not like I was before.” I knew I was reassuring myself as much as her.

  I slept in Kylie’s bed that night. I didn’t explicitly ask if I could, but she didn’t look surprised when I appeared in her doorway holding my pillow and blanket. She simply shifted over in the bed to make room for me. Attempting to settle down in my own room, I had been surprised by a longing for her that was intensely physical while at the same time being completely nonsexual. We didn’t talk to each other. We didn’t even touch. I simply lay beside her in the shared warmth under the blankets until the rhythm of her breathing lulled me to sleep. My rest that night was more refreshing than it had been in a long time. There was a strangeness to Vardeshi bodies, a composite of their slightly different odors and temperatures and breathing rates, which was so faint as to be almost imperceptible. I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but it seemed that my body was. Even in repose, I had been ever so slightly on the alert every night that I spent on my own. With Kylie there, no more than an arm’s length away, I could finally relax. It was my animal self, as Dr. Okoye would have called it, recognizing one of its own kind at long last.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Life on the Ascendant was different from life on the Pinion. Suvi Ekhran—or Reyna, as she insisted I call her outside of duty hours—made sure of that. If I had expected her to abandon her Echelon practices wholesale for those of the Fleet, I quickly learned the error of my ways. She lost no time in implementing a number of new and stricter protocols. At the end of the first month, Zey and Sohra and I sat in the Ascendant’s lounge and tallied up all the changes. “No more free access to rana,” Sohra said. “I think that’s an improvement.” The Ascendant’s supply of rana was now locked securely away in the medical clinic, a shift at which Khiva took personal offense. So, bizarrely, did Zey. “But you don't even use it,” Sohra pointed out. “Why should you care where it’s kept?”

  “It’s the principle. The new policy is patronizing. Typical Echelon. At least the Fleet gives us credit for a little self-control.”

  “That didn’t work so well for Vethna, did it?”

  There was a tightness in Sohra’s voice. I glanced at Zey. He must have heard it as well, because when he spoke again, it was in a softer tone. “I know you’re thinking about your brother. But this policy wouldn’t have helped him. Even on an Echelon ship, he could have gotten rana anytime he wanted it. They were selling it in Downhelix. Hell, they were selling it in the Atrium.”

  “I know. Still, this makes me feel safer.”

  “In that case, you must love the mandatory ranshai practices.”

  The accusation drew a reluctant smile from Sohra. “I’d like them more if they were a little later,” she admitted.

  Echelon officers were required to be in a state of perpetual combat readiness. Reyna had assessed the crew’s ranshai skills and declared them sadly out of practice, with the predictable exceptions of Hathan and Ziral. “What about me?” Zey had said indignantly after she gave her verdict. “I took down Khavi Vekesh. That has to count for something.”

  “Well, how was your individual session with her?” Sohra asked.

  “Not good,” he admitted. “She’s even smaller than I am. You wouldn’t think she’d be so strong. Or fast.”

  All crew members were now required to attend daily ranshai practice for an hour beginning at five-thirty in the morning. The policy had initially included rest days, but the outcry from the crew had been so strident that the rule had been hastily amended to allow two absences per eight-day week. I was sure the amendment was Hathan’s touch, though the announcement had come from Reyna herself. I had begged to be exempted from the drills.
“I’m clumsier than you can possibly imagine. Clumsy even for a human, I mean. I have no coordination and no fighting skills. So unless you really want to embarrass me, please don’t make me go. I’ll work out in the fitness center at five-thirty every day. I’ll do whatever you want. Just, please, not ranshai.”

  Reyna had replied coolly, “There’s no question of your participating. As a complete novice, you would only be an impediment to our drills. And you could be seriously hurt. It’s stipulated in your contract that we can’t make unreasonable demands on your time or energy. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you want to show solidarity by scheduling your own workouts to coincide with our practices.”

  As far as I was concerned, I had already done my part for solidarity by securing us the Ascendant. The thought of committing to a regular five o’clock wake-up call was hardly enticing. However, it was the perfect pretext for watching the drills, so I gritted my teeth and set my alarm back another hour. I was instantly rewarded. Watching Reyna in action was riveting. She was the smallest figure on the practice mats, but unquestionably the most powerful. Her slightest movement conveyed skill and confidence. If she had been matched against Vekesh, she would have beaten him handily. As I watched her fling Saresh across the room without perceptible effort, I felt a grudging respect for the Echelon. Their training methods were clearly effective. And I couldn’t deny that I felt safer knowing she was on board expressly for my protection. The crew continued to complain about the mandatory workouts, the more so when they began sporting purple and gray bruises, but even I could see that they were improving.

  The unfortunate side effect of the mandatory group practices was an increased demand for the Ascendant’s two showers in advance of morning briefing. This was particularly hard on the lower-ranking crew, because even when we took care to reserve slots ahead of time, a higher-ranked officer’s request took precedence. More than one junior crew member was written up for tardiness after being unexpectedly bumped down the shower queue. When Sohra and Khiva brought the unfairness of the system to Reyna’s attention, she said dismissively, “Take shorter showers. On an Echelon ship the slots are eight minutes long.”

  “That explains the smell,” Zey had muttered when Sohra recounted the exchange. He had taken an immediate and wholehearted dislike to Suvi Ekhran. She had singled him out for a uniform violation the day after we launched from Arkhati, and he was convinced that she felt some animus for him in particular. Sohra and I pointed out that he was hardly alone in being reprimanded. I myself had been admonished twice, for formatting a report incorrectly and for arriving late to evening briefing. My lateness had nothing to do with the shower schedule. I was still learning to navigate the Ascendant’s unfamiliar passageways, and I’d simply gotten lost. Our reassurances had no effect. Zey insisted that the ahtziri had it in for him, and after a few attempts to persuade him otherwise, Sohra and I mutually decided to let it go.

  “All right,” he said now, with an air of finality. “The night-duty schedule. That’s one change you can’t say anything good about, so don’t even try.”

  “I won’t,” Sohra assured him. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

  The night-duty schedule was Reyna’s least-popular innovation. To her military-trained mind, it was beyond reckless that we all kept the same hours and that there was no designated crew member on duty during the nights. She immediately instituted a watch system that assigned everyone on board a seven-hour overnight duty shift roughly twice a week. The on-duty crew member was required to be awake and in the axis chamber, the command hub of the ship, for the duration of the shift. Everyone else was annoyed at having to do it. I was annoyed because she wouldn’t put my name on the roster. “Let me take my turn,” I pleaded. “Everyone else has to.”

  “No,” Reyna said immovably. “I’ve seen your medical reports. The others can do without a few hours of sleep here and there. You can’t. Rhevi Daskar agrees with me, and so do your Earth physicians. There’s no use in arguing.”

  “But it’s not fair,” I said lamely.

  “It’s perfectly fair.” She tilted her head and looked at me in puzzlement. “I don’t understand you. You’re already wasting hours every day cleaning a starship. You’ve made yourself subservient to us in a way you had no need to do. Isn’t that enough? Why torture yourself more?”

  This was a common theme of our conversations. I quickly discovered, or rather Reyna informed me, that her mission on board wasn’t only to keep me safe. The Echelon had agreed to send me to Vardesh Prime on a Fleet ship, but there was still the return trip to Earth to consider, and while they might not be able to force me onto one of their own ships, they could conceivably still talk me onto one. Reyna was under explicit orders to win me over to the Echelon’s way of thinking if she possibly could. Twice in our first week on the Ascendant, she cornered me and interrogated me about what she considered my inexplicable devotion to the Fleet. “Can’t you see that the Echelon is offering you an opportunity to make a real and lasting contribution to the alliance?”

  I said defensively, “I think I’m already making an important contribution.”

  She took my objection entirely in stride. “You’re right. You are. Or, rather, you have. When Reyjai Vekesh first suggested that the Fleet take you on as an employee, even at the lowest level, everyone in our territories thought he was joking. Three months later, no one is laughing. You’ve proven that your kind is compatible with mine. No rational person still questions the ability of humans and Vardeshi to work side by side. You’ve accomplished what you set out to do. So why spend another minute folding uniforms and scrubbing the galley? Any Vardeshi with a pulse can do novi work.”

  “I’ve learned more about your culture in three months of novi work than I would have in a year as a passenger on an Echelon ship,” I said. “I don’t want to sit around watching other people work. I want to help them. And so do you, or you wouldn’t be in the Echelon.”

  “That’s different. I’m a soldier. This is my work. You’re a cultural ambassador. Talking and thinking and writing is yours. Or it would be, if you weren’t spending all your time washing dishes and cleaning floors.”

  I shrugged. “I’d rather wash dishes and clean floors on a ship with my friends than go to dinners and give lectures on a ship full of strangers.”

  “Yes, you've made that clear,” Reyna said dryly.

  “Then why are you still trying to change my mind?”

  “Because you’re a major player in the alliance. For now. The exchange will be over in nine months, and things are going to move very quickly after that. The Echelon can help you position yourself to take advantage of those changes, if you let us. But we can’t help you if you insist on clinging to the Fleet.”

  “I’m not a major player in the alliance,” I protested.

  “Tavri said you were modest. She didn’t say you were ignorant. You must know how important you are.”

  I didn’t feel like contesting the point further, and anyway I had a sneaking suspicion that she was right. I tried a different argument. “You’re talking like the alliance is a done deal. Like it’s sure to go forward. But we’re only a couple of months into the exchange. And Earth was on the verge of pulling out just a few weeks ago.”

  “That was posturing,” Reyna said dismissively. “Your people never would have gone through with that threat. If you’d been killed, it would have slowed the progression of events, not stopped them. It’s a lonely universe. Neither of our races wants to go back to being the only ones in the room. We have too much to offer each other. The technological advances may be all on our side, but you have a myriad of cultures, a planet rich in resources, and several billion laborers and consumers. No, the alliance will go forward. The Echelon is certain of it. You should be looking ahead to the next stage in your diplomatic career. I can guarantee that the rest of your peers are doing exactly that. Your friend Kylie included.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone bette
r qualified than Kylie. She’ll probably be ambassador to Vardesh Prime one day.”

  Reyna studied me, her black eyes quizzical. “You have no ambition.”

  “Not the kind you’re talking about, no.”

  “Are there other kinds?” she asked seriously.

  I wanted to dislike her. It should have been easy. She was a harsh critic, ready to point out with cold precision any error, however slight, in my execution of my duties. But whatever Zey might claim, I found her treatment of the Ascendant’s crew to be remarkably fair. Clear rules and predictable consequences were a welcome change from the poisonous atmosphere of fear I remembered from Khavi Vekesh. I couldn’t even find fault with her dogged attempts to talk me out of staying on the Ascendant. There was no malice in them. She was simply carrying out the task she had been assigned.

  And she was assiduous in her attention to the other areas of my work as well. When she discovered how pathetically little I actually knew about the structure of the Fleet or the operations of its ships, she declared herself my tutor. My afternoons, which had previously been spent working on vocabulary notes or writing reports home, were now devoted to slogging through excerpts from a document I suspected was the foundational text on Fleet history assigned to incoming Institute students. After months in an immersion environment that required constant verbal interaction and minimal writing, my speaking and listening skills far outstripped my reading. For anyone else on board, the texts would have been elementary. For me, they were impenetrable. I would have given anything for a printer; I ached to highlight and scrawl notes and draw arrows. I could do all those things on the flexscreen, but it wasn’t the same. Every passage took hours to decode. Despite what I had told Governor Tavri, I had been beginning to feel somewhat more than proficient in Vardeshi. Now I was confronted yet again with proof of my incompetence. It was a humbling reminder of exactly how much I still didn’t know.

  When I finally completed a segment of the readings, Reyna and I would meet to discuss it. After I read the complete text aloud, she would question me about the content until she was satisfied that I fully understood it. I dreaded my first meeting with her, but I found her to be a surprisingly patient teacher. She didn’t mind being asked for the definition of six or seven words out of every ten. She didn’t object to spending three hours discussing a single page of text. If anything, the reverse was true. The surest way to irritate her was to gloss over gaps in my understanding—or to reveal my frustration with my slow progress. I quickly learned not to give voice to my irritation in front of her. As befitted her military background, she had no sympathy for complaining.