Becalmed (7 page)

We no longer look alike, she and
I. We’ve lived our lives so differently that what once looked identical now
just looks familial. If I had lived her life, I would look like her—heavier,
settled, smile lines around her mouth. Her hair flows around her face, and her
eyes are soft.

Deirdre waits for me in the
waiting room, even though she knows this might take a day or more. She doesn’t
care. She acts as if I’m dying of some dread disease, and for all we know, I
am.

Some mental disease.

I have already settled onto the
floor of this strange room, but it hasn’t curved around me yet. It’s waiting
for me to give the go-ahead. Because I balked the first time, I get an extra
five minutes to reconsider my choice.

I’m not going to change my mind.

The Quurzod whisper around me. If
I close my eyes, I’ll be able to see them. They met us on a broad plain, the
sun setting behind them. It was a dramatic and powerful introduction, the sky
blood-red as the light died.

The Xenth warned us that the
Quurzod would be dramatic. The Xenth warned us that the Quurzod would lie.

My arms are pressed against my
side. Something has punctured the skin in my wrist. My eyes flutter open for a
moment, and it becomes clear that the room has absorbed me.

My breath catches in complete
panic. My heart races. I want to claw myself out, I want to climb, I need to—

—
get out. Escape. I could die
in here. I
will
die in here if I’m not careful. I will disappear and no
one will know what happened to me in this bloody silence, this stench, this
heat and the pressure and the horrible, horrible
—

“No,” I whisper. It takes me a
moment to realize I whisper in Quurzid. Unlike most human languages which use
simple words, often words of one syllable, for no, Quurzid uses seven syllables
for no—a long, complicated word, one that requires a lot of effort to speak
correctly. You can’t involuntarily finish the word “no” in Quurzid, like you
can in Standard. “No” in Standard slips out. In Quurzid, you know what you’re
saying by the third syllable, and you can leave the word unfinished.

The Quurzid word for “no” is the
most deliberate word for “no” in any language I’ve encountered.

And that’s the word I spoke. A
deliberate word, one shows I do not now—or ever—want to revisit those memories.

For a moment, I imagine screaming
for help, thinking of escape, like they told me to, so that the room will
release me. But then I will see my sister’s face as I leave, filled with
disappointment and fear and concern.

My sister, the caretaker, knows
that she will be responsible for me, because she can’t
not
be
responsible for me, no matter how much I try to keep her out.

I close my eyes as the whispers
start again, the Quurzod, talking among themselves as they stood on that ridge.
They were half naked, only their arms and legs covered with some kind of paint,
a bit of armor across their genitals. The women as well as the men are
bare-chested. They show no shame in revealing their bodies, unlike some
cultures we’ve encountered.

Unlike the Xenth.

The Xenth should have been the
musical ones. Their language is all sibilants intermingled with soft “ch”
sounds and the occasional sighing vowel. But the effect isn’t musical. It’s
creepy, as if something is hissing with disapproval or anger.

Three of our people quit at the
prospect of facing the Quurzod, but it was the Xenth who terrified me. The
Xenth with their too-thin women, wearing long sleeves and high-neck collars and
tight pants that sealed at the ankles, even in the heat. The Xenth, whose men
looked at me as if I were not just dressed improperly but suggestively.

I wore a uniform that covered
everything except my neck, and I considered coming back to the ship just so
that I could get the proper clothing. But our Xenth hosts assured me there was
no time. They wanted us to broker some kind of resolution to a fight with them
and the Quurzod, a fight over a genocide that had occurred a year before, a
fight that could—in the opinion of the Xenth—lead to planetwide war.

We had studied everything, or so
we thought. Sixteen different cultures existed on the only continent on
Ukhanda. Sixteen different cultures with only two that had the military might
to dominate—the Quurzod and the Xenth. The Xenth controlled the plains, but the
Quurzod held the mountains. They also controlled most of the airways, giving
the Xenth the seas. Both had space flight, but the Quurzod used it to their own
advantage.

How the Xenth contacted us, I am
not certain. They didn’t contact the
Ivoire.
They contacted one of the
other ships in our Fleet, and decisions went up the chain of command. The
Ivoire
got involved because of me. Because I am—was—had been— the best linguist in
the Fleet.

My heart twists. I open my eyes.
The room is the color of that twilight, blood-red and gold, with shadowy
figures lining the walls. My stomach turns.

I
can’t do this. I can’t do it.
I can’t.

But if I don’t, I’ll die.

I have no idea if the words I’m
thinking come from the meeting or that horrible memory of the bodies or come
from now. I hate the way my arms press against my sides. I shift, and am
surprised that the floor shifts with me. I can—if I want— pull that thing from
my wrist, the thing that is going to keep me hydrated and nourished, and flee
this place. Go on my own, figure things out by myself. Live my own damn life.

Alone.

Becalmed.

I take a deep breath.

I have never fled from a battle
in my life.

I force my eyes closed and let
the memories overtake me.

~ * ~

I
came to the meetings late. Linguists from the flagship,
Alta,
had
flanked the diplomats, talking with the Xenth long before I arrived. I got
study materials and cultural documents one week before my first meeting, and
that meeting was with the Xenth.

The Xenth’s capital city, Hileer,
was a port city. The buildings on the bay had glass walls facing the water, but
deeper inland, the buildings had no windows at all. The Xenth built
backwards—or what I thought of as backwards—the tallest buildings by the view
with the rest getting progressively shorter the farther away from the water we
got. Only doors had glass, and then only a small rectangle, built at eye-level,
so that the person inside could see who knocked.

The buildings of state, where the
parties and balls and ceremonies were held, stood bayside, but the buildings of
government, where the actual governing occurred, were single-story structures
miles from the waterline.

The ceilings were low, the
doorways lower, and the interiors too dark for my taste. They were also both
chilly and stuffy, as if the air got recycled only rarely. Add to that the
hissing, scratching sound of the Xenth language, and for the first time in my
long and storied career, I felt a distinct on-sight aversion to the people I
was meeting.

I had to work to smile, work to
touch palms—their version of shaking hands—work to concentrate on their words,
instead of their shifting eyes, which were as much a part of their
communication as hand gestures were to some cultures. I did learn to understand
the eye shifts, but try as I might, I could not add them to my personal
repertoire. I apologized in advance, and the Xenth seemed to understand.

I had no real importance to them.
I had no real diplomatic importance in that room, anyway. I was there to
listen, learn, and discover all I could about the Quurzod.

The Xenth had asked for help with
them.

What the Xenth told us that
afternoon is this:

Their quarrels with the Quurzod
went back five hundred years. Initially, they had border skirmishes that caught
almost no attention. Neither the Xenth nor the Quurzod cared much about their
shared borders.

They did care about the seas, and
sea battles between both countries had become legendary, but rare. Usually the
ships passed each other in international waters, threatening, but not following
up on the threats.

But travel became easier, as both
sides built roads, discovered their own personal air travel, and slowly
conquered space. Neither group were nation-builders, at least initially. They
didn’t want to conquer the other side and take their land. But no one could
define exactly what land belonged to whom on those shared borders, and as
travel became more commonplace, so did the border skirmishes, which led to many
deaths, which led to formal armed hostilities, which led to full-scale warfare
at least a dozen times in the past 250 years.

Another culture, the Virrrzd,
negotiated the first peace treaty for the Xenth and Quurzod, and it held
(tentatively) for thirty years. Then the border skirmishes started up again,
along with raids into each other’s territories.

The raids went deeper and deeper,
growing more and more violent, until the Quurzod committed an out-and-out
massacre, killing every single Xenth (man, woman, and child) within one hundred
miles of what the Quurzod believed to be the border.

The Xenth immediately called for
another peace conference, demanding reparations. The Quurzod came, and as both
sides made actual headway, Quurzod along the border died hideously.

The Quurzod claimed they were attacked
by an illegal chemical weapon, long banned on Ukhanda. The Xenth claimed that
the Quurzod’s own building materials had an adverse reaction with chemicals the
Xenth used for land cultivation. The Quurzod deaths, the Xenth claimed, were
caused by their own greed in gobbling up the land.

The Fleet arrived just as the war
along the border was about to escalate again. The
Alta
contacted both
sides and offered to broker a deal between them. Only the Xenth took the
Alta
up on it.

The Quurzod were too busy burying
their dead.

Or so we were told.

Claims, counterclaims, historical
arguments so detailed that even the locals did not understand all of them. The
Fleet managed to hold off hostilities by patrolling the border with our own
people. We have small fighters that we used to fly over the disputed area,
keeping both sides away.

We had maintained that position
during the months of negotiation.

Finally, the Quurzod agreed to
talks, so long as there would be no activity along the border during that time.
No chance for backstabbing,
or so they said.

My team would go in three months
in advance of the diplomats. We would become as Quurzod as possible, learn
their culture, their traditions, their rituals. We wouldn’t go native— we had
learned over the years that too many cultures had found the attempt to go
native as deep an insult (or perhaps a deeper insult) than failing to learn the
language.

So much of communication is
nonverbal. Eye movements like the Xenth had, hand gestures found in so many Earth
cultures, smiles or lack thereof in a series of cultures in the previous
sector. These things could make or break a delicate negotiation.

I’d heard rumors—impossible to
substantiate without talking to the Quurzod themselves—that Quurzid had a
four-tiered structure. The first was a formal tier, for strangers within the
Quurzod culture. Extremely polite, with its own sentence structure and
vocabulary. The second was the familial tier for family and close friends,
informal in its sentence structure with a private vocabulary, often known only
to the family/friends themselves. The third was street Quurzid, offensive,
abrupt, and as violent as the culture. Again, a different sentence structure
and vocabulary. Used in threatening situations, among the criminal classes, and
by the military in times of war.

Finally, there was diplomatic
Quurzid, which bore almost no relation to any of the other forms of Quurzid at
all. So far as I could tell, diplomatic Quurzid evolved as a language to speak
to enemies, without giving them any insight into the Quurzod at all.