Becalmed (4 page)

I’m an expert in the comm system.
I have to be. Because if the comm techs are incapacitated, someone from the
linguistic staff still has to communicate to others. So my technical
training—my
mechanical
training, to use another old Earth term—is in
comm systems. I’m as good (maybe better) than Coop’s chief communications
officer.

And no one has called me.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard
any announcement. Not because Coop couldn’t leave me behind, but because
another emergency superseded mine.

Maybe I’m forgotten, a byproduct,
something the junior members of the staff must deal with until the regular
members have time to think about me.

“I have comm system expertise,” I
say, again, because I can’t not say it.

“I know,” Leona says.

But she says no more.

“When did the
anacapa
malfunction?”
I ask.

She looks at me, as if I should
remember. I don’t remember.

“We were outgunned,” she says. “The
Quurzod were right behind us. They fired as we engaged the
anacapa.
We
suffered a lot of damage, and that’s when they think the drive malfunctioned.”

This does not reassure me, which
irritates me. Apparently I’d been hoping for reassurance.

“We don’t know?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “It’s hard
to do assessments out here. They want to go to a base, but no base is
answering. We have limited equipment, limited supplies. We’re on rations—”

She stops herself.

I stand up again. I’m like a
child’s toy—up, down, up, down. I can’t stay still for a moment.

“We don’t need to be on rations,”
I say. “We have enough supplies to last years.”

Then it’s my turn to freeze. We
have enough supplies to last years if we know where we are. If we know where we’re
going. If we know we can get resupplied.

“They think no one will find us,
don’t they?” I whisper. “They think we’re on our own.”

She nods. Just once, as if
nodding more than once would be too much acknowledgement, would make us
complicit in something.

“They don’t know where we are, do
they?” I ask.

She shrugs, but it isn’t a casual
gesture. It’s a frustrated gesture.

Shrugs are part of communication.
The nuances of shrugs are something I have learned over time.

“They need me,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “They do.”

But she doesn’t move, and she
doesn’t say any more. She’s eloquent in her silences.

They need me, but they haven’t
come for me. They believe I can’t help them, because I’m somehow damaged,
because I’ve done something wrong.

“Is that why the medical
evaluation team came?” I say. “To get me back to work?”

She looks at that manicured hand
again. She doesn’t reply. Is that a no? Suddenly, for all my training in
subtlety, all I’ve learned about reading gestures, I can’t tell.

Finally, she takes a breath. She
was steeling herself to talk with me. She isn’t sure I should hear this, but
she’s going to tell me anyway.

“Do you know why the Quurzod came
after us so vehemently?” she asks.

“No.” I don’t remember much after
staggering into that village, after someone gasped, pulled me aside, touched my
caked skin.

I collapsed, and woke up on a
bed, hooked up to an IV, liquid applied directly into the veins because I
couldn’t drink on my own. I woke up later in the hospital wing on the
Ivoire,
refreshed, no longer burned, my skin smooth and clean and my mouth no
longer dry.

I have no idea how I got there,
only that I did.

“The Quurzod came because of you,”
she says.

I look at her.

“We lost twenty-four,” she says. “They
lost more.”

I cannot move. “How many more?”

She shrugs—oh, so eloquent. Not
frustrated this time, but an I-don’t-know shrug, an
is-an-exact-number-really-important? shrug. “You tell me.”

I have to force myself to
breathe. “You’re saying it’s my fault?”

“I’m not saying anything,” she
says.

But she is. Oh, she is.

Because I am responsible for
communications, language,
diplomacy.

If we went in twenty-seven
strong—and we did—that means we went in as a team. A planetside team usually
has thirty, but I remember—(do I? Or am I making this up?)—that we lost three
because they couldn’t stomach the Quurzod.

Not that the Quurzod are so
different from us. We haven’t discovered any aliens in our travels—not true
aliens, anyway, not aliens in the way that we define them, as sentient
creatures who build and create and form attachments like we do. We’ve found
strange creatures and even stranger plants, but nothing like the human race.

Although we have found humans
throughout our centuries of travel. Thousands and thousands of humans. Each
with different languages, different skills, different levels of development.

But exactly the same—emotional,
callous, brilliant, sad— capable of great good and great violence, often within
the same culture.

The Quurzod—the Quurzod, oh, I
remember the briefings, snatches of the briefings at any rate. They make an art
out of violence. They kill and maim and do so with great relish. When they
committed genocide against the Xenth, they did so with psychopathic
glee—killing children in front of parents, torturing loved ones, experimenting
to see what kind of punishment a human body could take before it had enough and
simply quit.

The stories distressed my team.
Three couldn’t face the Quurzod.

It makes no sense. If I started
this, then that was all the more reason to leave me behind. We’re taught from
childhood that sacrifices are necessary.

We travel in a fleet of ships 500
strong. We split off for various missions, and sometimes we sacrifice an entire
ship if we have to. An individual life—one of at least 500 lives on the
Ivoire
alone—means less than the mission.

The mission: to provide
assistance throughout the known universe. We are the good guys, the rescuers;
we are the ones who make the wrongs right. We do what we can, interfere if we
must, help when we’re needed.

And when we make mistakes, we
make them right.

We don’t run.

It seems like we ran.

“I want to talk to Coop,” I say.

Leona shakes her head. “Not until
you can tell us what happened.”

“Then I should let the medical
evaluation unit run their tests.”

Her head shaking becomes more
pronounced. “You can’t. We need truth here, not legal tricks.”

“Tricks?” I say. “They’ll be
using equipment, running diagnostics—”

“Asking you questions, putting
memories in your head.” She runs her hand over her notebook. “We’ll wait until
your own memories return.”

She looks at the portal, then
back at me.

“After all,” she says dismally. “We
have time.”

~ * ~

Sometimes
I sleep. The body demands it, and when it can no longer function without sleep,
I doze wherever I am.

I have fallen asleep on the
divan. I love the divan. I have put it in the center of my living area, where
most people have group seating. But I never hold meetings here.

I used to study on it let words
dance around me as I spoke them. They’d turn red if I pronounced something
wrong, and they’d vanish if spoken correctly. I loved word dancing. I loved
study.

Now I lie on the divan and I
stare out the portal at all that nothing, not thinking at all. Words don’t even
run through my head. I know I’ve been thinking, but I cannot articulate what
the thoughts are.

Yet as I fall asleep, I know I am
asleep. I feel the divan beneath me, note that the apartment is a bit too cold,
think I should tell the apartment’s system to adjust the heat. Or I should grab
a blanket from the bedroom. I should be comfortable.

But I am not. I claw my way
through a pile of stinky, sticky flesh. Arms move, legs flop, a head turns
toward me, eyes gone. I force myself not to look I am climbing
people
and I know that if I
don’t I will die.

I jerk awake, shudder, trying to
get the images from my head. Leona wants me to remember.

I don’t.

I get up and take a blanket off
my bed. Then I stop and look at the wall, the only wall I have decorated.

An old blanket—a quilt, to use
the proper term—adds color to the room. Pinks and reds and glorious blues,
mixed together in a wedding ring pattern. The quilt has been in my family for
generations, given, my mother said, to an ancestor as the Fleet embarked from
Earth itself.

I don’t know for certain because
I’ve never tested the quilt. I keep it out of harsh light. It’s preservation
framed, done by my grandmother, and its beauty should remind us of tradition,
of homes we’ll never see again, of family.

I have cousins on other ships in
the Fleet, family, some distant in corridors down the way. We are not close. My
sister has a daughter, and if I never have children, this quilt will go to her.

I wrap the blanket around myself
and walk back to the divan. I recline on it again, look out the portal, see
that brightly lit blackness, threatening starshine, but not delivering it.

And—

I’m still climbing. The sunlight
beats down on me, the heat nearly unbearable. I’ve been praying for the wind to
stop since I got here, but now that it has, I want it back, if only to get rid
of the insects and the stench.

I am the only one alive. I do not
want to look but I do
—
faces, eyes especially, eyes glazed over and an odd white. Blood everywhere.
I climb, standing on people, and if I look up, lean see an edge to the pit I am
in.

I stop, listen, hear only my
ragged breathing. If I can hear it, someone else can hear it too. Someone
lurking out there. Someone who will
—

I can’t do it this way. There is
no comfort in this apartment, in these rooms. If this is a memory, then I do
not want to be alone with it.

If it is a nightmare, I want it
banished.

If it is an example of how I will
live from now on, I cannot. I will not. I will die before I continue like this.

I contact Leona. Her face appears
on my wall screen, looking concerned. I do not give her time to speak.

I say, “I’m going to have the
evaluations.”

And then I sever the link.

~ * ~

The
guards escort me to the medical unit. I’m not used to being escorted. I’m used
to leading. But these two men, both bigger than me. walk beside me, brushing
against me, making it clear that I’m in their power.

They lead me down one of the main
corridors in the ship, so it’s wide enough for people to pass us. Everyone who
does averts their eyes, partly because I no longer look like me, and partly
because I’m being escorted.