The Ithaden’s Slave

by Daniella Wright

  His voice trailed off, in some kind of phantom sadness. But to his credit, he recovered quickly. “Eight months ago, from your perspective at least, you were taken from your timeline. Not by me, I should add for all that it’s worth. You were part of an Ithaden initiative to restore the Third Sun timeline and, by extension, save the human race. My hope was that knowing that, knowing you would help save your planet, would make the whole thing somewhat more…palatable to you. But the truth is, what happened to you still happened against your knowledge or your will.”

  He stopped there, a worried look on his face.

  He could hear her heart thumping on her chest, Kate realized, thumping so hard she felt like she was having a heart attack. Running her fingers through her hair, she took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t anticipated that possibility, the possibility of having been a victim of sexual assault. Still, actually hearing the words wasn’t easy.

  Her eyes flew briefly to her steak knife. If he admitted he’d done it, if he admitted he was the one…could she go through with it? Could she hurt him? The notion of trying to cause him any kind of pain felt as wrong and inconceivable as the notion of him ever doing anything to hurt her. But shouldn’t she do something, react in some way if he confessed? It’s not like she could carry on having dinner with her assaulter…

  After a few moments of deliberation that felt like eons, Sid started talking again. Gradually, Kate was able to take her eyes away from the knife and direct her gaze back at him. There would be no stabbing him tonight after all.

  It was a lab experiment. Her whole pregnancy, as it turned out, was an effed up, alien lab experiment like some kind of bad 90’s sci-fi movie. The nice dinner and flirty mood of the last hour now but a distant memory, Kate found herself pacing up and down the cockpit.

  She needed somewhere to think, somewhere away from Sid — and although he had offered to relinquish his quarters, it felt wrong being in his private space without him (plus, remembering their previous cosiness on the couch and at dinner only angered her at that point). So here she was, alone at the bridge of an alien ship that could travel through space and time, parked at the bleak end of the Earth’s future. No, that wasn’t entirely correct, she realized, not the alone part at least. She wasn’t alone. She was carrying a child, a half-alien child. A child she had no say on its conception. Or rather, his conception? Hers? It was still difficult for Kate to think about it in non-abstract terms.

  These white flashes of the weird room, the bizarre medical equipment in her dream, it all made sense now. As Sid explained, she had been injected with the DNA of an Ithaden royalty, a prince, so that she could carry a human-Ithaden child to term. A human-Ithaden child that would then be taken away from her and sent to the future, to be raised as the Third Sun.

  “All for the glory of Ithaden empire…” Kate found herself thinking out loud. There was still something missing; a motive, her motive. Because at some point after getting pregnant, if the footage she’d seen was any indication of her mental and emotional state, she must have decided she wanted to keep the baby. To carry on with the plan. But why? Miracle baby or no miracle baby, her home planet would still be torched by the Xerrks. How would her pregnancy save the Earth? Wrapped up in thought, she pulled out the captain’s chair and sat down. Her hands went to the sleek, white board. After a second, the touch-screen surface came alive, providing her with a ton of information and options in Ithaden.

  “I would be careful,” Sid’s voice came from the door, not exactly threatening but matter of fact. “This whole ship, from the front-door to this console, is gene-coded to recognize you and follow your orders. I can override them, of course, but let’s not get stranded on some backwater, prehistoric moon while we figure it out.”

  With a sigh, Kate turned around to face him. Of course he couldn’t leave her completely unsupervised with the navigation console of his ship, despite her request for privacy. She wouldn’t either. Although the gene-coding thing did explain why the front door opened so easily for her back in Yardley, Pennsylvania, what felt ages ago…

  Kate was really tired. So tired, she wasn’t even that angry at Sid anymore. She wanted to solve this, really solve it once and for all. Fill in all the missing pieces of her abduction and the time she’d lost. And then, maybe, who knows, get some sleep?

  “Thank you for telling me the truth. And for giving me some time to process it,” Kate said, dragging the word “some” on purpose to show she wasn’t fully ready to play nice yet. “You still haven’t told me though: why did I, or rather, the Kate you showed me on that footage being all merry and jovial with you and your crew, decide to keep this child?”

  Sid sat on one of the co-pilot chairs, his hands rubbing his coppery scalp, his human illusion shield now gone again. He looked tired too. He already looked tired when she first stormed into the door, Kate remembered, but there was nothing she could do about it at that point. This whole situation needed to play out, if they were ever to reach a point where they could converse as equals, or enjoy each other’s company even.

  “At the Time Agency we call it a.. I guess you could translate it as ‘Quantum Reset’, in English,” Sid said. “The idea is basically that the Universe doesn’t like paradoxes. It has a tendency to correct them, by removing the part of the timeline that contains them. Think of it like an organism fighting off an infection, or a plant allowing certain leaves to wither and fall so that the rest of it can thrive… You giving birth to your child, a half-human child, for all intents and purposes would undo the human extinction. And, taking into account all the impact humanity has had in other alien races, this would create a very big paradox.”

  After studying enough probability lines, the Time Agency concluded that if Kate gave birth, and then the child was safely delivered to the Ithaden at the appropriate time when the Third Sun was originally supposed to emerge, it should be enough for the Quantum Reset.

  “Which means, Ith-rassil,” Sid added, his blue eyes now soft on Kate’s face, “that you decided to keep this baby because it would reset a timeline where the Earth was never destroyed by the Xerrks. I always thought that was very heroic of you. The crew did too — and by the way, none of them was involved in the, well, experiment to get you pregnant. So bear that in mind when you encounter them or, shall I say, encounter them again. To them, you are a long-lost friend and comrade. Some of them may even want to hug you,” Sid said, quite curtly.

  His tone wasn’t lost on her. She was beginning to see now that she had a life here, in that bizarre house-spaceship hybrid. That he, and evidently his crew as well, were actually fond of her. Quite probably she was fond of them as well… Which begged the question:

  “Why erase my memory then? Why dispatch me back into my old life, with no recollection of any of the things that had happened to me? No recollection of my pregnancy? Whose brilliant idea was that?”

  Kate sounded more hurt than angry now, she realized. Perhaps she was. Did they think she wasn’t trustworthy enough? How could they rob her of that choice?

  “We didn’t have any great choices left,” Sid said, getting up from the chair and interrupting her stream of thought.

  The bulk of his true form was still a bit distracting, as he stood there with his toned back turned on her, seemingly studying the readings on a screen that took up most of the wall. Studying probability lines, Kate realized. She forced herself to focus her gaze at the cursive Ithaden symbols on the screen instead of his body and his muscles, well-defined though they may be.

  “The Xerrks were closing in on us,” Sid continued after a while, his hands clasped behind his back. “Their Telepaths, an elite order of consultants to the Xerrks King who purportedly can hear the Universe itself think (less foolproof than reading probability lines on a screen, if you ask me, but still efficient enough to cause us harm), caught wind of the Ithaden operation to restore the timeline. We took a couple of seemingly random trips, to try and confuse them. ‘Throw them
off our scent’ like you used to say. But no matter what we did, there was always an 89% probability that they would end up finding you and…destroying your pregnancy.”

  His hand was clenched into a fist now, shaking just slightly, but enough for Kate to notice. It wasn’t so long ago after all, that her own hands were shaking after having had an impossible day. Thoughts of her dad and how he’d tried to console her at that dinner table, now literally hundreds of years ago, filled her with a deep sadness. Any remaining anger evaporated.

  “I can’t imagine I was happy with those odds,” she offered. It was a friendly nudge, to keep the story going. But it was also a way to show Sid she understood, at least to a degree, how difficult it must have all been for him as well. The future of his people was also still at stake, after all. That’s clearly why he seemed so invested in her pregnancy, wasn’t it?

  “You definitely weren’t happy with the odds, no,” Sid replied with a small, sad chuckle. He turned around to face Kate, his green metallic skin becoming ever so slightly iridescent in the light. He walked slowly toward her, so as not to alarm her — as if anything could alarm her at this point. “It was all my fault, Ith-rassil,” he said kneeling in front of her at the captain’s chair, his right hand tentatively finding her left knee. Kate didn’t try to move, or remove his hand. The more exhausted she was, the harder it became for her to keep a physical distance from Sid, she realized. To deny that uncanny draw she felt towards him… His body wasn’t as warm now as before, but his touch was still pleasant, calming.

  “I should have never spoken to you in Ithaden when you confronted me on the street. That created an anomaly the Xerrks Telepaths caught. Here, let me show you.” And with that, Sid stood up abruptly and extended a hand to Kate. Tentatively, she took it.

  They walked toward the navigation console, where he fumbled for a few seconds with just one hand before Kate realized he was still holding hers with the other. She let go. He didn’t seem to notice though. He was clearly busy searching for something among the stream of Ithaden numbers and letters on the console.

  “Here, see these red lines? The ones that break the flow of the code?” Sid said, pointing out to a sequence on the screen. “These are small temporal anomalies. Not severe enough to cause a paradox or a Quantum Reset, but perceptible enough for the Telepaths to pick up. A human on Earth in 2019 understanding Ithaden, a language that is not supposed to exist for another two thousand years, that’s a temporal anomaly. When I spoke to you in my native tongue, the part of your brain that had recollection of learning the language was activated. And the whole point of wiping your memory in the first place,” Sid said with a sigh, his eyes now lowered, “was so that the Xerrks couldn’t pick up on that anomaly and find you. You and the baby. That’s what you wanted as well.”

  After scrolling through the console’s archives, Sid hit play on a video source. Once again, Kate saw herself on the screen. She was lying on a bed, her head weirdly encased in that golden substance that acted as a protection vest when they time-traveled earlier. Sid was towering above her, along with another humanoid alien. Kate was no expert in extra-terrestrial species at that point, but they looked enough alike for the other alien to also be Ithaden, although his scales were milky white.

  Kate didn’t seem scared surrounded by the two aliens. She seemed sad, but determined.

  “We’ve been through this,” she heard herself say. “The numbers just don’t add up. I don’t like this either, erasing my memory, because I know me, the old me. If I don’t remember what happened to me, I might do something stupid. Well, it will seem like the smart move to me at the time. That’s why you need to keep an eye on me, make sure I’m still, you know, pregnant.”

  Sid, the Sid on screen, was silent and stiff. The white-scaled Ithaden though placed his hand on her forehead.

  “You be safe. This statically is the most viable way for the Xerrks not to find you. We will extract you at the first sight of trouble, you know we will. And in the meantime, we will try to fend them off, conceal your signal. Now, relax, Kate Stoltz, this won’t hurt at all…”

  Present-time Kate, the Kate who was on the other side of all this, couldn’t help but laugh ironically. The sound of her laughter clearly caught present-time Sid off-guard, making her realize she had some explaining to do as well.

  “I’m sorry. But if I’m being honest, you and Snow-White on the screen there didn’t do such a great job after all. You know, the reason I came to find you wasn’t so much because I met you and you gave me that note. It’s because of what happened afterwards.”

  Taking a deep breath, Kate told Sid everything about the weird-looking spies who started following her the next day after their encounter. The news seemed to shake him to his core… Kate didn’t know it was possible for him to turn any more green than he already was.

  It must have been more than an hour now since Sid stopped talking to her. (Although it was becoming exceedingly tricky to calculate the passage of time inside that ship with no windows or clocks, the pang of hunger in Kate’s belly was an indication that dinner must've happened at least three hours ago.) He just completely shut down after hearing the news of the Xerrks agents following her all over Great Neck Gardens. His attention was solely focused to reading the probability lines on the screen and punching some digits here and there, the only noise coming out of his mouth some mumbled words in Ithaden every now and then. Kate couldn’t get all of it, but the words she could understand would make even her usually potty-mouthed sister blush.

  Sid was angry alright. She understood that, hence she’d decided to stay out of his way and let him figure out their next steps. After one hour of awkward silence however, Kate had had enough.

  “I need to know what’s going on,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Talk to me, Sidanav.”

  Hearing her say his full name, seemed to jolt Sid out of his trance.

  “I’m sorry. The truth is, I’m not the best Analyst on the ship. That would be Ror, well, Snow White, as you called him,” he said giving her a poignant look. “I tend to go for the aggressive strategy by training, so now I’ve been struggling with having to come up with the safest course of action we can take, given all the data. It’s very counterintuitive for me, for the way I usually think. And I’m not particularly fond of the solution I’ve found either.”

  The solution was to go home. Kate’s home that is, back in 2019. After running dozens of different scenarios, that ranged from Sid making humanity aware of aliens a couple hundred years too early to Kate convincing her parents to lock her up in a mental facility where she would be safe from the Xerrks (“You would be, though. At this point, their agents are not sophisticated enough to risk infiltrating any human organization, all they can do is observe — and not very discreetly, as you pointed out.”), the safest course of action was to simply go back to the moment before Kate and Sid met on the street and make sure the conversation in Ithaden never took place.

  The logistics of meeting their former selves gave Kate quite a headache, but Sid assured her it would be simple enough. For him, a time-traveler, seeing himself would be enough to know that something’s wrong and a sign that he should just drop everything and leave. The future Sid (or, really, the Sid of right now) would then interact with the Kate of back then, giving her the note but speaking to her in plain English. Telling her just enough to pique her curiosity and make her take the trip to Yardley, Pennsylvania… but not enough to create any temporal anomalies and alert the Xerrks. Theoretically, the two timelines then should merge and they could get back to the ship with all their memories of what had happened intact. Theoretically being the key word here, Kate mused later. Because in reality, nothing went according to plan.

  It all started fine. Just like last time, Sid helped her get settled on the chair and get fitted with the protective vest from that strange, golden material.

  “It’s called ‘Ith’. It’s our planet’s main resource, we’ve built our whole civilisation around it. Like yo
u very smartly pointed out last time I told you all this, it’s why we call ourselves ‘Ithaden’,” he said while rolling the material out over her body.

  With the liquid Ith shield in place, Kate was able to relax. She waited for Sid to dim the cabin lights and for existence to become heavier, like last time…Only it didn’t. The only thing that did happen, was Sid swearing even more in his language. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Kate saw him unstrapping from his chair, getting up and punching the wall. Repeatedly.

  It took her a couple of tries to unstrap herself from the chair without his help, but she figured it out eventually. Sid’s fist was still on the wall. He wasn’t exactly punching it anymore but he was not letting go either; he just stood there, clearly lost in his anger. Operating more on instinct at this point, Kate ran away from the cockpit and toward his quarters. After a few furtive looks around the dimly lit space, she found what she was looking for: his calming black tea, still surprisingly warm in his mug. She grabbed it and ran back to him. She found him crouching on the floor now, his head between his hands.

  “I’m sorry, I…I didn’t mean to scare you, Ith-rassil,” he said, his eyes now looking at the verge of tears. Seeing him like that upset her deeply.

  “Don’t be silly, you didn’t scare me off. I just thought you could use a cup of this tea,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes and attempting a small smile. “I know it has helped getting me through this day when I was livid with anger before, so I thought, you know…” Her voice trailed off, distracted by an actual tear that seemed to be running down Sid’s cheek. Strangely enough, it evaporated straight away. He returned the small smile.