The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (27 page)

I see nothing.

I have seen nothing for days.

I sometimes check my own eyesight to see if the problem is inside my head.

(I’m so afraid it is inside my head.)

“What’s the news?” I ask, even though I’m no longer sure I want to know.

She pauses.
I turn.
She’s frowning.
It’s an expression I didn’t expect to see on her face.
She’s not someone who lets her emotions near the surface.

I have a clear sense of how terrified she is, and how unwilling she is to admit it.

Although I can’t tell you why I feel that way. I can’t tell you how I know.

I just do.

Something subtle then, something subtle like the things I specialize in.

“The
anacapa
malfunctioned,” she says.
“We’re becalmed.”

Becalmed.
A nautical term, adapted from Earth, in the days before ships sailed the heavens.
In those days, ships sailed the waters, the seas, they were called, and being becalmed was dangerous.

Sailing ships had no engines. They were powered by the wind.
And when the wind was gone, the ship didn’t move.
Sometimes, way out at sea, a becalmed ship wouldn’t move for days, weeks, and the men—it was always men—on board would die.

Some say they died from thirst or lack of food.

But other accounts say that men who were becalmed died because conditions had driven them insane.

“Becalmed,” I repeat, and sink into a nearby chair.
My heart rate has increased.

Leona watches me, as if she’s afraid of what the news will do to me.

She should be.

The Fleet adopted the word “becalmed” because it’s the best way to describe being stuck in foldspace.
The
anacapa
malfunctions, and we can’t get back.
It has happened throughout our history.

Ships get lost, some because they’re becalmed. What no one knows, what no one can figure out, is if they’re stuck in an alternate universe or in the actual fold of space itself.

If there is an actual fold of space.

We don’t know—at least those of us who are in no real need to know.
Coop probably knows. He’s probably doing everything he can.

“Has he sent a distress?” I ask, because I can’t not ask. I have to know, even though I do know.
Of course, Coop sent a distress.
Of course, he’s run through procedure.
Of course, he’s done everything he can do.

“Several,” she says.

“And?”

“No one is responding.” She looks at her well-manicured hand.
“Some believe that our comm system is down.”

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.”

7

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.