Fluency

10

Jane relaxed her concentration and held back, before speaking. She’d expected to arrive in the casita but instead found herself in a cool place, obscured in shadow. She gradually became aware of limbs moving languidly in hushed, placid darkness.

Just as she registered this, Ei’Brai’s voice rumbled in her head, startling her. “Dr. Jane Holloway, you seek my companionship. I am honored by your presence, gratified.”

“How did I—”

“The mental connection—Anipraxia. It grows stronger. A portion of your consciousness and mine are converging on a single plane, a frequency, if you like. You learn quickly, navigate intuitively. This is auspicious.”

“I was drawn here. I didn’t….”

“Not so. You possess an inquisitive nature. You perceived a need and responded. You arrived here of your own volition.”

She paused. He was right. Oh, God, that’s disconcerting. “What…was that? I felt something.”

“You sensed a minor hull breach. It has been contained. You are quite secure in your present location. There is no need for your attention to the matter. The squillae have been reordered, are containing the breach.”

She would have to trust him on that point. She searched her mind for a translation of the unfamiliar word he’d just spoken. She frowned. The first word that came to mind couldn’t be right. “Shrimp?”

A low, booming sound resonated in her mind and she smiled hesitantly. He…was he laughing?

Information poured into her consciousness. She couldn’t discern if it was from the download he’d given her, as she made the mental connection with the unfamiliar word, or if it flowed directly from Ei’Brai. The boundary between her own mind and his seemed indistinct. Data streamed between them, she realized uneasily.

The veil of darkness lifted. A single, sedentary slug filled her vision. This was somewhere in the cargo hold. She could see it—not as she’d seen them from inside the room that morning—but, oddly, as though she were the wall itself that the slug was clinging to. Ei’Brai focused her viewpoint along a trajectory, zooming in ever closer on masses of swarming minute robots, working in concert. First, she became aware of one group forming a single microscopic layer between the slug and the void.

As each nanite was destroyed by the alkaline slime, another was already taking its place like soldiers on a front line, holding in the atmosphere and allowing the other machines to work unimpeded. Her point of view swung wide, to see others working to reconstruct the hull, micron by micron, protected from harm by the first group as they worked to effect repair. Ei’Brai commanded their movements. When the breach was detected, he removed them from other tasks, redirecting them to resolve the problem.

As she watched, some of the squillae emitted high-pitched sounds and the slug, disturbed, moved away, allowing them to work more efficiently. A thought occurred to her—why not command the squillae to attack the slugs directly and remove the problem outright, rather than repairing the damage they constantly wrought?

Ei’Brai answered, “Under Sectilius law, squillae are confined to inorganic repair except under rare, tightly controlled circumstances. Technology serves life. It does not destroy it. These lessons are rooted in the very foundations of Sectilius culture and law, without deviation, under threat of penalty of strictest nature. The slug population must be dealt with, but the squillae will not perform that duty.”

Jane acknowledged this insight into Sectilius culture, still captivated by the movements of the minute machines.

“They’re sacrificing themselves to keep us safe,” Jane marveled.

“They are machines. Living beings do not make such sacrifices so readily.”

She pulled her attention away from the squillae at work, sobered by the thoughts his comment evoked. “Sometimes they do.”

“You contemplate your progenitor.”

“My father, yes.”

“A rarity among your kind,” he said swiftly, as if he knew.

She felt anger quickening and quashed it down. She did not want him to speak of her father that way—casually, dismissively, but she had to remember her training. “What do you know of my kind? Why are you here?”

“You have many questions.”

She was about to reply, to make demands, when she felt something cool flow over her in the darkness, like an eddy in a pool, sending her spinning. She was suddenly buoyant, lax, and free. She felt herself bob and lift to maintain her position. She’d lost her bearings. “What’s happening?”

“Observe.”

Lights flashed in the darkness—indistinct blobs, darting in the distance, sparking in cycles of magenta and cobalt. Then, she realized—she was seeing through someone else’s eyes.

“My age-mates,” Ei’Brai hummed. “Conveying danger in our most primitive form. Too weak, too small yet to communicate properly. We scattered, but it did not impede our capture.”

She felt some kind of primordial panic, a pulsing squeeze, and frantic motion. She’d lost track of up and down and only knew the instinctive need to flee in random flails to evade whatever was in pursuit. She began to tire. Was she safe?

Her age-mates winked their fear.

She paused, confused, watching as they drew closer in an unnatural clutch, equidistantly spaced in orderly rows and columns. She inhaled with a great, fearful whoosh, preparing to take flight once again, when white light blinded her and she drifted, limp, uncaring, unknowing.

The world went dark again and Ei’Brai’s voice buzzed gently. “I had never known confinement in my short existence. It was an affront. But, like you, I learned much, and quickly.”

The light came on. Too bright. Jane wanted to squint, but her eyes couldn’t do that. Instead, she darted back, trying without success to find some way to shield her sensitive eyes, and came up painfully against hard glass. Somehow she knew that this was like the day before and the one before that. She felt intense, primal loneliness, longing for home, freedom, and age-mates.

A creature came to look at her through the glass. It calmly watched her scrabble and dart, fruitlessly looking for refuge from the painful, artificial sun. It took up residence, like it always did, draping its angular body over the single structure in the blindingly-unnatural, white place.

It waited, like always. For what? What did it want from her? Again and again, day after day, it turned the soothing darkness into a searing blaze and waited. There was no end to the repetition of it.

Stupid, stupid being.

She hated it, hated its shrouded body, its way of moving, always upright, always in a single plane. She especially hated its steady gaze, interrupted periodically by the fleshy folds of skin covering over its tiny eyes.

Finally, she shouted at it—a single, negative bleat of rage. To her surprise, the creature rose. It moved out of her view for the first time and her world plunged into blessed, soothing darkness once again.

She timidly moved forward to peer through the glass. The creature slowly came back and faced her, inches away, but for the partition between them. The fleshy lips parted and she could see stony structures there.

She sensed its pleasure. She felt it, too. It was wonderful. She wanted more.

“That was the beginning,” Ei’Brai murmured.

“That is…a man,” Jane said incredulously. He could never blend in on Earth, yet he was startlingly familiar. He was tall, incredibly slight, with sharp, spare features. His proportions were distorted, every bone longer, thinner.

“Sectilius.”

The man faded into black as they spoke.

“The people of this ship.”

“Yes. A brilliant, prolific race with complex genetic variety. One of few borne of a rare planet-moon combination, both habitable.”

Jane wrinkled her brow. “The Divided.”

“Yes. The moon-race, adapted to the gravity of the low-mass moon, displays this phenotype. The planetary race’s phenotype is far different. A world far larger than Terra gives rise to a shorter, denser form.”

Images and snippets of data illustrating his point flashed through her mind. She was astonished at the diversity of body types that evolved after the peaceful civilizations on both worlds, having communicated for centuries via radio waves, finally developed the technology to routinely traverse the distance and interbreed.

“This man, he was teaching you—”

“To communicate with his kind before I’d learned to properly communicate with my own, yes. A great gift.”

“The Sectilius speak to each other this way?”

“Only rarely. Masters of Anipraxia commit to many years of study. That was one such master—a high priest who devoted his lifespan to unlocking us, preparing us for service. My kind communicate over vast distances, over the span of my home world, effortlessly. I perceive your concerns, but you need not worry, Dr. Jane Holloway. You could not discern another’s thoughts without my assistance.”

He could sense that? Her worry, her fear that he was changing her into something that she didn’t want to be?

“You were taken,” Jane said. “Are you here against your will? Were you a slave?”

“I was taken, yes. Not as a slave. As an exalted guest. Had I evaded capture, inevitably I would have become a savage—a carnivore, consumed only with scrapping for food, grappling for a place within the hierarchy of my kind, struggling to maintain that position for a brief life expectancy. I would not trade my place for that feral existence. Not even now.”

“But why did they do this to you?”

“Do you not take sentient creatures into service on your world? To perform tasks that exceed your own capabilities?”

She wasn’t sure she fully understood what he was asking. She thought she knew what he meant, but cringed, uncomfortable with the answer she came up with. She felt like a school girl, put on the spot by a brilliant teacher that she was eager to please, struggling to think of a clever reply, but coming up short.

“The beast who pulls the cart? The dog who keeps watch over the flock? The cow, whose sole purpose is to manufacture surrogate mother’s milk? Are they not utilized for a purpose, to fill a need?”

She agreed immediately, chagrinned that humans did not consider the animals he mentioned to be sentient. There seemed to be multiple layers of reality that humans were too self-involved to fully realize. It was mortifying. What else were they missing?

“As do I. I am the Gubernaviti.” His voice rang with a smug note of narcissism.

“The governing navigator,” she said hesitantly. “They need you to fly the ship.”

“Just so.”

“They can’t do it without you?”

“Possibly. It is done, but rarely. No other race can perform to the same standard that the Kubodera have set.”

“Kubodera?”

She sensed a physical swelling within him, growing as he spoke, literally puffing with pride. “The princes of the stars. We are harvested from a secluded world by a devout priesthood, tutored and enhanced, groomed from infancy to take our place at the heart of every ship-community. We are capable of multi-tasking at a level no hominid can match, interface easily with binary processors, and are capable of calculating with nearly the same efficiency and accuracy, should such systems fail. We are capable of making longer, more accurate jumps than any hominid species. Eons ago we proved ourselves to be far superior navigators to any other sentient species.”

She felt awkward. What was she supposed to say to that? Did he expect some form of obsequience? Perhaps not, because he went on.

“For this we are adopted, embraced, and revered. In service and in leisure we extend Anipraxia to your kind. It is a great honor to be allowed to join Anipraxia with a Kubodera, to allow my mind to touch yours for our mutual benefit. The mating of minds goes far beyond any connection you have ever known, Dr. Jane Holloway. You sense this.”

She did. She couldn’t help but feel humbled, even as some aspect of her mind railed against his hubris.

And there was more. This encounter with Ei’Brai was very different. It was more than mere conversation. She was becoming more aware of his personality, getting glimpses of his world-view.

She sensed in him an emptiness that he wanted her to fill. There was no need to speak of it, because it was somehow glaringly obvious, pervasive in his every thought. She felt small and vulnerable in the face of it. What kind of commitment had she stumbled into? What did all of this mean?

“Allow me to demonstrate the wonder of it, Dr. Jane Holloway.” His voice was somber, hushed. Could he perceive every fleeting thought? She felt a small measure of shame that she might be hurting him with her reluctance, with her fear.

The darkness burst into life. Stars. Unfathomable numbers of stars in gorgeous, nebulous heaps and clumps flooded the darkness with pricks of light. It was incredibly, undeniably vast.

She turned over and around, stunned by the views in every conceivable direction. “Is it the Milky Way?” she whispered.

“That is what you call it. And more. Far more.”

Her throat ached. It was astoundingly beautiful.

“Choose one and we will go there.”

“A star?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he revealed tantalizing promise in his mind.

A particularly bright star seemed to stand out to her.

“That is not one, but two stars—a binary system. Very intricate. Now take us there.”

“I—”

“Do not contemplate what I ask, what it means, or how it is accomplished. Do not think at all. Merely do. Through me, it is possible. You shall see.”

She mentally grabbed the star and tugged on it, in a way she somehow knew she could. She felt the change before she could see it. Her body shuddered with joy as she was stretched and pulled along. The nearest stars smudged and streaked, while those distant stuck like anchors, and together, she and Ei’Brai surged toward the twin stars. Space and time and breath parted and folded. They were sucked through a short straw and emerged in a haze of blinding dust. Jane wiped her eyes and coughed, laughing too, with delight.

The anchor stars receded. Her eye was drawn to the warmth, the light. Twin suns orbited each other, dancing and spinning and nearly kissing, their white light scorching hot. Their planets flirted with each other in long, lazy orbits, a mechanized waltz that had evolved over eons—over countless destructions and accretions until those that remained could each abide the presence of the others.

How could I know this?

“This system has no sentient life. It is unnamed. What will you call it?”

She couldn’t tear herself from it. “I get to name it?” She felt deeply honored and searched her mind for something appropriate, reverent, reflective of herself and humanity. “Castor and Pollux. They were explorers, like me.” How could she feel such pride in naming a thing that couldn’t possibly be real, but was so utterly lovely that she throbbed with repressed sobs?

He let her linger, for how long, she had no way of knowing, observing from multiple points of view, to take it all in. There were barren rocks of planets. Gaseous planets, their atmospheres thick, nearly liquid, and whirling. Molten planets, endlessly remaking themselves under the friction of immense gravitational forces. Even a frozen planet—white and blue, looking from a distance not unlike Earth, but composed of ice and frozen methane, too far from the suns to feel their warmth.

Finally she turned away from it, sighing. “I cannot express how it feels to see this, Ei’Brai—”

“You need not. I am aware.”

That disturbing reminder again. “Then you must also know that I’m aware that you’re distracting me, deflecting me from what I really need to know.”

The warmth on her back faded. She knew, without looking, that the twin stars were gone.

He was silent and she could sense little of him. He was guarding something.

“Why have you come here, Ei’Brai? What did the Sectilius want from Earth and what happened to them?”

His voice was pitched low, a guttural groan. He uttered four words, and fleetingly unleashed a tsunami of pain along with them, “I mourn them, still.”

Jane recoiled under the onslaught, retreating from him instinctively to the furthest reaches of his mind, just to the tenuous point of disconnection. Regret followed hard on the heels of his misery, trailed by disjointed, chaotic images. Inside and outside of many minds, many viewpoints, she saw what had happened to the Sectilius.

In one moment, everything changed from organized, content symbiosis to some kind of hellish nightmare—as every man, woman, and child within the ship-community was suddenly and irrevocably changed by an unknown agent. Only Ei’Brai had been unaffected. He watched helplessly as his shipmates degenerated over the course of days.

Some became combative, at least at first. Most were simply mindless, unresponsive, until they ceased to function in any normal way and wasted away from thirst and starvation. He frantically assisted the scientists and medics, attempting to animate them with the sheer force of his will. Those individuals managed to hold out the longest, striving valiantly to determine what had happened in order to reverse it, but the discovery of the agent in their final moments hadn’t been enough to save even a single life aboard the vessel.

Her heart wrenched painfully as she plumbed the depth of his agony. All of this had happened many years before. He’d drifted alone all this time, hoping for rescue, never knowing who had orchestrated the devastation. He replayed the events in his mind, looking for the point at which he had failed them, until he nearly went mad from it.

Empathy poured from her without hesitation. He gathered her thoughts and held them to himself like a child who’d just found a beloved lost doll. He seemed to be begging for forgiveness and she gave it freely, seeing no fault in his actions as they’d been displayed to her.

“But why did you stay?” she asked him softly. “Why didn’t you go home? You’re the pilot. Why stay here, alone?”

“It is not such a simple matter as that. I am not the pilot. I am the navigator. I, alone, cannot do what you suggest. The ship-community is a commonwealth. There are checks and balances, as there are in any democratic government. I do not have the authority to move this ship a single exiguumet without the presence of a Quasador Dux or a majority vote of documented citizens to give the order.”

Quasador Dux? Loosely translated, the title meant admiral or general, but there was a distinct emphasis on a scientific component. Possibly, it meant some sort of chief investigator/scientist. The Sectilius leader? Ei’Brai indicated affirmation. “But, they didn’t plan for every possible contingency?”

“There are measures. Elections, under normal conditions. A succession, if necessary, under martial law. Who could prepare for every Documented Citizen to be expunged in a single swipe? Who could foresee such a despicable act?”

“I don’t know, Ei’Brai. I’m so sorry.”

He sighed, an otherworldly, plaintive sound that conveyed his despair without words. “I fear for my brethren—that they may be stranded in isolated pockets of the universe, as I am. We shall all meet dusk before we may commune again, sharing the sight of the silhouette of Sectilia and Atielle against the radiance of their star.”

Jane hesitated, knowing the answers to her questions must be negative, but needing to ask them nonetheless. “Why haven’t they sent someone looking for this ship?”

“Either there is no one left to look, or they simply believe our mission took longer than anticipated.” He was starting to sound less despondent, more in control again, as if she offered him some degree of hope. But what could she offer him besides companionship—and even that, only briefly?

“And there’s no way to communicate?”

“The distance is vast. I will be long dead before any communication is received.”

“The asteroid…do you know…?”

“In less than three orbital revolutions, it will make contact, obliterating this ship. Yes. I, alone, cannot prevent it.”

The reality of that sank in. He was facing certain death, with little hope of reprieve.

She stayed quiet for some time, letting her presence offer comfort without demand, as she thought through all that he’d shared.

“You are not satisfied, Dr. Jane Holloway.”

“Ei’Brai, we need to know why the Sectilius came here.”

“The Sectilius are a pragmatic people. They value science, knowledge, truth, above all else. They have been searching for your world for a very long time. Many Sectilius have given their lives in the search for Terra.”

Jane felt like she was perched on a precipice. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know more. She could see bitter irony in Ei’Brai’s mind. Still, she asked, “Why?”

“Ancient Cunabalistic writing indicates that the population of Terra could be the source of salvation.”