Becalmed (8 page)

The Virrrzd were the ones who
figured that out, which was why they could successfully broker the original
deal with the Xenth. But the Virrrzd were unwilling to get involved this time—
the conflict between the Xenth and Quurzod had taken such a nasty turn that the
Virrrzd were afraid for their own safety.

The Virrrzd knew both formal and
diplomatic Quurzid, but not street or familial Quurzid. We felt—the linguists,
the diplomats, the Fleet—that the only way to settle this dispute between the
Xenth (who had only one language in only one form) and the Quurzod was to quite
simply learn to communicate fully with the Quurzod.

Which was why my team got sent
in.

~ * ~

I
surface to sibilants
(whisper, whisper, hiss, hiss, hiss)
and shudder as
I open my eyes. The room is dark and has folded around me. I can’t really see
anything. My heart pounds. I have no idea how much time has passed.

I’m supposed to get lost in the
memories, and maybe I am lost, but it doesn’t feel like the kind of lost I
expected. It’s almost as if I’m having a conversation with someone else, not
reliving the past. Not like—

—
clawing, climbing, reaching,
bodies rolling beneath my feet, shifting against my hand, the feel of dried
blood on my cheek, the cold flesh under my palms. That’s lost. I’m lost. I’ll
never survive
—

I’m holding my breath. I have to
make myself breathe, and as I inhale the breath sounds like a sob. The air has
a faint tinge of rot—is that what this place does? It mimics what happened?—and
I think it’d be so easy to escape, so easy to leave—

Only to live in my room forever.
Forever slipping, dreaming, hiding from my own brain, my own memories.

I close my eyes and force myself
back inside, force myself to breathe—

~ * ~

—the
hot dry air. A small headache has formed between my eyes. The Quurzod are not
cordial, although we’ve been here for weeks. My host family will not talk while
I am in the room. I hear them whispering when I am nearby, and I strain to
listen. But they use formal Quurzid whenever I’m around.

Fortunately, my team fares
better. They have made recordings of Quurzid in all its glory, marking what
they believe to be familial Quurzid and what they believe to be street Quurzid.

No Quurzod will tell us the
difference. Once the Quurzod figured out that we wanted to know the entirety of
their language, they stopped treating us like guests and started treating us as
if we were Xenth.

Except for Klaaynch. Klaaynch is
thin, reedy, beautiful according to our culture—long blond hair and classic
features— but strange to the Quurzod, whose features are thicker, hair
generally a dark, almost orangish red. I cannot quite tell how old Klaaynch is.
She’s one of those girls who looks the same at thirteen as she will at
twenty-three.

I’m guessing she’s eighteen or
so, very curious, with a gift for language. She already speaks some Standard
poorly, learned through overheard snatches of discussion.

She reminds me of myself. All
ears, wanting to know what everyone is saying, no matter what language they
speak.

Her family won’t host, so she
watches me from afar. I eat in the prescribed visitor restaurants, and stay in
the visitor hotel when I am not with my host family. The Quurzod agreed to host
families, but balked at overnight stays, and frowned on sharing meals. “Host”
is not really a good term for what they’re doing, but we have no other. They
are sharing as much as they can.

Klaaynch cannot sit with me in a
visitor restaurant, and I cannot go to a Quurzod-only place. Sometimes she sits
beneath one of the arching trees that mark every intersection. I have learned
to eat outside in the visitor restaurants, at the table closest to the tree.
Klaaynch and I talk, or try to, and she has promised me she will teach me
familial Quurzid.

She says in diplomatic Quurzid
(the only Quurzid I know fluently),
They cannot tell me who my friends are.
They cannot determine whom I care about and whom I do not. If they try, I shall
challenge them.

I admire her reasoning.

And her courage. She wants to
step outside her culture and learn other cultures. She wants to become more
than who she is.

Is this what Coop says he saw in
me? This desire for knowledge, the desire to add to the core by reaching beyond
the training, beyond the culture?

I sit and murmur to Klaaynch, not
knowing that her face—

—
is the first one I see,
rolling toward me, eyes open, mouth gone, as if someone cut it away, those
cheekbones crushed, her hair wrapped around her neck. She is buried just above
me, thrown on top of me, her blood on my skin
—

~ * ~

I
gasp, and this time I am thinking of escape long before I vocalize it. I claw
the floor, the needle poking my skin, the darkness holding me. I climb out and
crawl toward the door, nearly there when Jill reaches me. She drags me out of
the room as if she’s dragging me out of that pit.

I stumble and fall against
Deirdre who asks me what’s wrong, asks me to talk to her, asks me what I need.

“Leona,” I say. “Please. Find
Leona.”

And then I pass out.

~ * ~

And
wake in one of the hospital beds, like I found myself in after they rescued me
on Ukhanda. Leona is there, but not there. She flits in, she flits out. She won’t
talk to me in the medical wing. She forces me to wait until I am well enough to
sit in a conference room without any medical equipment at all. She is even
going to bring the chairs.

She knows that I know. She doesn’t
know
what
I know. Just that I know.

And I ache because of it.

I ache.

~ * ~

Cultures
do not invent languages and traditions overnight. They evolve over time. And
while some linguists believe that the language comes before the culture, I
believe that the language serves the culture.

Think of a culture that has
developed four different languages, each with a prescribed purpose. The Xenth,
who wear formal clothing and have precise traditions about who may have windows
and who may not, who may look to the left and who may not, have but one
language, without much more complexity that most human languages. Twenty-eight
letters, millions of words, a simple sentence structure followed in infinite
variations.

But the Quurzod, who wear little
to no clothing, and have windows everywhere, and few walls in their homes, the
Quurzod divide the world with their language. Language is forbidden to some,
and embraced by others.

Language is not just for
communicating, but also for protection. Protection of the culture, protection
of the family, protection of the Quurzod traditions, whatever they might be.

And whatever they might be, they
are precious to the Quurzod.

In my excitement to learn, I
forgot about strictures and structures and barriers. I forgot that language
conceals as well as reveals. I forgot that protections exist for a reason.

And I forgot what it is like to
be young and curious and different from everyone else.

I forgot.

I grew up in a culture that
embraces difference, celebrate diversity, and loves outsiders. A culture that
believes itself superior to all others, yes, but in an open-minded way, a way
that allows curiosity, a way that states the more we learn, the better we are.

I forgot that not everyone sees
the universe as broadly as we do.

I forgot that not everyone has
seen the universe.

I forgot that not everyone is
allowed
to see the universe.

When we finally get to our
private conference room, I tell Leona that she no longer has to defend me. I
caused the crisis with the Quurzod. I should have been left behind.

I should have been left to die.

She wants me to explain that, and
I do, because I owe her that much. I explain, but haltingly. I do not want to
slip into the memories again. But someone has to understand.

Someone has to know.

Besides me.

~ * ~

Children
absorb language. They are born without it, but with the capacity to learn it.
Some lose that capacity as they age, or let it atrophy or never really had a
great capacity for it at all. But others never lose the ability to absorb
language, and consequently, they crave more and more of it.

They want to learn—or maybe they
need to learn.

I have always needed to learn.
Sounds and syntax are like symphonies to me, and as much as I love the old
symphonies, I am always searching for new ones.

Klaaynch needed to learn too. And
if all I had done was teach her Standard, we would have been fine. But she
wanted to teach me the glories of Quurzid—all of Quurzid—and I wanted to learn.

She might have gotten away with
teaching me some familial Quurzid. She was right; no one could choose her
friends for her.

But street Quurzid—it was
beautiful and complex and revealing, a culture in and of itself, one that
revered violence and anger as a way of life. Each word had degrees of meaning
depending on how it fell in a sentence, as well as what tone the speaker used
(High, low? Soft, loud? Quick, slow?), and each meaning had nuances as well.
Street Quurzid was one of those languages that would take weeks to learn and a
lifetime to understand.

I was thinking that after I
completed my mission as the linguistic diplomat at the peace conference between
the Xenth and Quurzod, I would stay on Ukhanda and study street Quurzid. I
would spend the rest of my life immersed in the most complex language I had
ever heard.

Maybe I mentioned that to
someone. Maybe I had merely thought it. Maybe my intentions were clear to
people whose language was so complex that my language must have seemed like a
child’s first halting sentences.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this. I
convinced Klaaynch to take me to one of the violence pools—a gathering site
where the Quurzod train. They live in those places, not in their homes, not in
their streets, not in their restaurants or their places of business, but in
their violence pools.

Violence pools are little mobile
communities. They exist as long as they need to. If they get discovered by
outsiders, they move.

Small buildings, assembled out of
sticks and cloth, appear, then disappear as needed. They form a circle around a
flattened area, and in that flattened area, lessons happen.

Most of the lessons are in things
we consider illegal. How to kill someone with a wide variety of weaponry. How
to kill someone with sticks. How to kill someone with fists alone. These are
not military lessons, which we also provide, but lessons in survival.

Quurzid, for all its complexity,
does not seem to have a word for “murder.”

Lessons here are proprietary.
Outsiders cannot see them. I did not observe the violence pool during lessons,
although I heard about them. The worst, according to Klaaynch, were the
defensive lessons. Because if you failed, you would get injured. If you had
trouble learning why you failed, you would get injured in the same way
repeatedly. If you flinched as someone came at you after you had already been
injured once, you were taken off the roster until your psyche healed. If you
flinched again after your return, you were relegated to non-violent
work—talking, writing, science, mathematics—all of which were seen as inferior.