Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1)

by Meg Pechenick

  I picked up the tote bag that contained my laptop, spiral notebook, and pens. I wasn’t sure exactly what form my novi training would take, and I wanted the freedom to type, hand-write, or sketch as the situation required. I nodded to the Strangers. “You’ll be fine, guys. Scott, remember to adjust your seventh tone if it comes after a third. Kylie, try not to reverse your demonstrative pronouns. I’ll see you tonight.

  “So what’s he like?” I said excitedly as Elena led me down the hall.

  “You’ll have to tell me. I haven’t met him yet, I just got a message that he’d arrived. It’s down this corridor, second door on the right. I’ll be back at noon to bring you to lunch. Good luck!”

  I took a deep breath, smoothed my hair nervously, adjusted the strap of my bag, and opened the door. This was it—my first encounter with a crewman from the Pinion since becoming one myself. I was suddenly acutely nervous. What if he had some impenetrable regional accent? What if I couldn’t parse his descriptions of Novi duties? What if he didn’t like me? Khavi Vekesh clearly hadn’t, and he’d only been in the room with me for five minutes. I was going to be closeted with this Zai or Zhey or whoever for an entire day. And the year that followed it. I had to make him like me. Somehow.

  The individual who met me was the least intimidating of the Vardeshi I’d seen thus far. For one thing, he was smaller than any of the others, a full head shorter than me. He looked younger too—scarcely out of his teens, though I had yet to learn how their ages mapped onto ours. His features were elfin, delicate; he had wide dark eyes, the characteristic high forehead, and a pointed chin. A shock of artfully spiky silver-white hair stood out from his head like a halo. He studied me with frank curiosity. I liked him immediately.

  “Hey,” I said by way of greeting.

  He shook his head, placed his right hand on his chest, giving me a clear glimpse of a tattoo similar to the other ones I’d seen, and said, slowly and clearly, “Zey.”

  I laughed and explained in Vardeshi, “‘Hey’ means ‘hello’ in English.”

  “Vai,” he breathed. I recognized the word, an exclamation of surprise which appeared in several of Dr. Sawyer’s recordings. “You really do speak Vardeshi. I didn’t believe it.”

  “I speak a little.” I held out my hand. “I’m Avery Alcott.”

  “Eyvri,” he repeated carefully, taking my hand and shaking it like someone who’s had the procedure described to him but never seen it. He gave my name the same Vardeshi lilt I had heard from Khavi Vekesh; I liked the sound of it. “My name is Zey. Zey Takheri.”

  “Takheri? Really?” The shock of hearing that particular surname snapped me back into English.

  Zey stared at me, dismayed. “My name . . . angers you?”

  “No!” I said hastily, returning to Vardeshi. “No, no. I’m not angry, just surprised. One of the officers who interviewed me was named Takheri as well.”

  “One? You mean two. You met both of my brothers at the interview.”

  “Your brothers,” I repeated.

  “Saresh and Hathan.”

  I frowned. “I met Saresh. He didn’t give his family name. He’s a Takheri too?”

  Zey nodded. “He’s the oldest. Then there’s Hathan.”

  “About my height? Gray hair?”

  “Right. Then me.”

  “Huh.” I looked again at the bright hair and fine features. “I guess I can see the resemblance to Saresh. But Hathan doesn’t look anything like you.”

  “Saresh and I look like our father,” Zey explained. “Hathan looks like our mother. If you saw us all together, you’d understand.”

  “Are you sure . . .?” Still unconvinced, I took out my notebook. We spent a few convoluted minutes sketching out family trees and confirming my translations of father and brother. Over the course of the discussion, we oscillated between languages, finally settling on Vardeshi liberally salted with English as the most conducive to communication. At last I gave a resigned shrug. “Okay. You’re telling me that Novak Takheri—the same Novak Takheri who recorded the messages sent to Earth twenty-five years ago, yes?”

  “And visited,” Zey said. “On the Seynath.”

  “Right. That same guy has three sons, and somehow all of them ended up on the same ship, on the same mission? How is that even possible?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be possible?”

  I fumbled for words. “On Earth . . . First of all, we wouldn’t put three people from the same family on a ten-man ship. If there were an accident . . .”

  Zey waved a hand dismissively. “We do that all the time. Space travel is difficult. Long trips, huge distances. It’s commonplace to send families starside together.”

  “Okay, but even so, how did all three of you end up on this particular mission? Bringing the first human to Vardesh Prime? It’s a pretty”—I wanted to say “historic” but settled for—“important mission. Wasn’t there a lot of competition?”

  “We didn’t know we’d be chosen. The Echelon only made the final decision a couple of months ago.”

  “The Echelon,” I repeated.

  Zey explained that the term referred to the governing body on Vardesh Prime. “It could have been any number of ships,” he went on. “We knew we’d be hosting a human, but that was all. And also I think my father might have pulled some strings. He’s a senator. Oh, and Saresh wasn't even assigned to the Pinion. He was transferred here at the last minute, just before we launched from the last starhaven. He was originally supposed to stay on Earth. So it would have been just me and Hathan.”

  I had to smile at the image of Saresh on Earth, earnestly trying to understand why most of the women (and some of the men) he spoke to instantly grew flustered and incoherent. Maybe that was why the Echelon had pulled him out of the program. I also had to admit, grudgingly, that what Zey was telling me was starting to make sense. To be selected as the spokesperson for an entire planet, Novak Takheri would have had to be a prominent figure. It followed that he would have the political connections to engineer an advantage for his own children when the time came to choose a ship to ferry the first human back to Vardesh Prime. It also made sense—given his manifest belief in the promise of further contact between our people—that he would have taught his children to speak English.

  Zey was grinning at me. “Do you have any other questions about my family?”

  “No. . . Wait. Do you have any sisters on board?”

  His laugh was so infectious that I couldn’t help joining in. It was the first time I saw—or heard—a Vardeshi laugh. To my overwhelming relief, he sounded exactly like a human, although unlike us, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut and wrinkled his nose. I had been mentally readying myself to accept some eerie alien facsimile of laughter, but the familiarity made things much easier.

  “Let’s get started,” he said when he’d recovered. “We have a lot to get through in just one day.”

  I opened my notebook. “Tell me what I need to know.”

  Zey turned out to be a veritable fountain of (somewhat haphazardly organized) knowledge about life aboard the Pinion. The first and most important thing he taught me was the name and rank of everyone aboard. We started at the top and worked our way down. The title of khavi, as I already knew, translated to commander or captain. Each ship had one khavi. Then there was the suvi, or second-in-command. Some ships had more than one of these; the Pinion, being small, had only one. Next came rhevi, which was similar to lieutenant. This was the most common rank. Lastly, there was novi. “I’m a novi,” he explained. “The lowest-ranking person on the ship.” He brightened visibly. “Until tomorrow. Then it’s you!”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I’m just excited that I get a rank. And a uniform.”

  There was one more title, Zey explained, but it had no obvious analogue in English. The Vardeshi word was hadazi. We talked around it a bit and settled on mentor or monitor. The role of the hadazi was to provide guidance and support for the other members o
f the crew, particularly the younger ones. Serving as hadazi wasn’t obligatory; officers could apply for the role or be recommended for it. It was a temporary title, typically held for a single year by those transitioning from suvi to khavi. The hadazi wasn’t directly within the chain of command, but in dire circumstances he could step into a position of authority either above or below the suvi, as the khavi decreed.

  “Huh,” I said. “Sounds vague.”

  When I had written everything down, and Zey had checked my Vardeshi script, we added names. “Khavi Vekesh,” Zey said. “His first name is Reyjai, but you’ll never use it.”

  “Vekesh.” I wrote it down. “I met him. The one with the black hair.”

  “Next is Hadazi Takheri. That’s Saresh.”

  “Oh, good.” I was relieved. “He seemed friendly.”

  “He is. We’re lucky. He’s a good hadazi—and I don’t just say that because he’s my brother. He’ll help you. Then Suvi Takheri.”

  “That’s Hathan?”

  “Right.”

  I looked at my notes. “Hadazi Takheri. Suvi Takheri. And you’re Novi Takheri? This is . . . unseemly.” I was going to need a word for ridiculous.

  “It’s really not that bad. You can just call me Zey. And for the others, most of the time you’ll just use their titles. That’s what we do for superior officers.” Zey sighed. “Which is everyone.”

  Next we ran through the rhevis: Ziral, Daskar, Khiva, Vethna, Sohra, Ahnir. I dutifully wrote them down. “You’ll meet all of them tomorrow,” said Zey. “And then there’s me. Novi Takheri. And you.”

  “Novi Alcott,” I said.

  “Novi Alkhat,” he repeated, his accent transforming the name.

  I wrote it out carefully in my still-tentative Vardeshi hand: Novi Eyvri Alkhat. A new name. A new identity. There was a rightness about it that went bone-deep, even though I had never heard it before that moment. Maybe, I thought, this was the person Dr. Sawyer had awakened when he played that first recording on his patio all those months ago. Maybe Avery had been fading imperceptibly into Eyvri all along. I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow to become Novi Alkhat. I wanted to be her today. Now. I wanted to put on that uniform and see my humanity recede in the white lights of my bathroom mirror. The long slow turning away from my own kind that had begun last year in California was now complete. I was ready to leave. I had the language, the gear, the skills, the uniform, and the title. All I had been missing was a name.

  By the end of that morning, I had amassed several typed pages of notes and a sheaf of hastily drawn sketches. Zey talked fast, and I had kept pace with him as best I could, but I knew I’d missed a lot. Every other line was starred or underlined or had IMPORTANT written next to it. Zey’s official mandate was to introduce me to my novi duties, but we spent most of the morning talking about Vardeshi culture and, more specifically, how to show proper deference. There seemed to be an appalling number of ways to give unintentional offense. Zey took it on himself to steer me clear of them as best he could.

  “Although,” he said cheerfully, “I’m sure there are lots of things I'm forgetting.”

  I sighed. “Well, if you see me doing any of them, stop me.”

  Before the morning was done, I had learned the correct way to greet a Vardeshi, which was not unlike a salute—posture straight, left arm folded behind the back, right hand held vertically beside the face, fingers together, palm facing in.

  “It’s to show the other person your house sigil,” Zey explained. “See?” He extended his right hand to me, palm down. I hadn’t wanted to risk offense by asking about the decoration earlier, but now I inspected it closely. An intricate symbol had been painted or tattooed in crisp, bold strokes onto the back of his hand. It was about two inches across and roughly circular in shape. The color of the ink was dark blue, not black, as I’d thought previously. Another, more delicate version of the same symbol had been overlaid on top of it. The second symbol didn’t look like paint. It looked like gold. I wondered how it had been affixed to his hand—some kind of adhesive?

  “They’re beautiful,” I said. “What are they made of?”

  “The first one is a special type of paint. It’s painless to apply, but it never fades or rubs off, and it can’t be removed. It’s designed to last a lifetime. The second one is a precious metal, similar to your gold or silver.”

  “It’s metal? Is it uncomfortable?”

  By way of reply Zey flexed his hand. “It moves with your skin—see? The alloy is designed to be flexible.”

  “What are they for? Do they mean something?”

  “The ink sigil is the symbol of your birth house. Everyone gets that one when they reach adulthood. You don’t get the gold sigil until your marriage has been arranged.”

  “Wait—you’re married?” I said.

  “Not yet. Just engaged.” He grinned. “You sound surprised.”

  “You seem . . . young.”

  “I’m older than I look. I’ve had my ink sigil for nine years. I’ve had the gold one almost that long. I probably won’t get married for another few years, though. That’s pretty typical for us.”

  “Did you say your marriage was arranged?”

  He nodded. “All Vardeshi marriages are. Well, you get the occasional love match, but those are incredibly rare. One in a thousand, maybe.”

  I was writing furiously. “Hang on. Okay, I’ve got that. Tell me more about the sigils.”

  “If you’re marrying into a higher-ranked house, you take the symbol of that house. If not, you keep the symbol from your own house.”

  “Yours are the same,” I observed.

  “Takheri House is ranked pretty high.”

  “How many houses are there?” I began sketching the symbol in my notebook.

  Zey put his hand flat on the table to give me a clearer view. “Nineteen ancient ones. There are probably thousands now, but everyone can trace their ancestry back to one of the Nineteen, so we still wear those sigils on our hands. Takheri House is one of the originals,” he added with an unmistakable note of pride.

  “Okay, so when you greet someone, you look at their sigils and they look at yours, and then what happens?”

  “The person from the lower-ranked house lowers their hand to their side, to show their palm. The person from the higher-ranked house closes their hand into a fist. That completes the greeting. If your houses are equally ranked, or you’re from the same house, no one has to lower their hand. Unless one of you married into that rank and one didn’t.”

  “So someone who married into Takheri House would have to defer to you, if they were from a lower . . . birth house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Even your wife?”

  “Even my wife.”

  I frowned. “Isn’t that a little divisive?”

  “Not really. Not now, anyway. A thousand years ago, when the caste system was still in place, your sigil dictated your entire life. They don’t have that kind of power anymore. Now they’re just glorified ornaments. And the ritual is just a social reflex. A relic.”

  I looked down at my own unmarked right hand. “So what about me? What am I supposed to do?”

  “Just drop your hand for everyone,” said Zey. “You don’t have a birth house, so you’re unranked. You defer to everyone.” He paused. “Oh, sigils. That’s not going to be a problem, is it? You’re not offended by that? Because it really is just a custom.”

  “I’m not offended,” I assured him. “Honestly, it makes things simpler. I don’t have to try to memorize nineteen different symbols overnight. And anyway, I’m already deferring to everyone. I’m a novi. That's what we do, right?”

  “That’s right.” He sounded relieved.

  “A minute ago, when you were upset, you said, ‘Oh, sigils.’ Is it a curse word?”

  “Yeah. We have a lot of swears about sigils. Sigils and emblems, by the nineteen ancient sigils, sigils of our forefathers . . . Come to think of it, they’re all about sigils.”

/>   “Those are swears?” I said. “They don’t sound very . . . profane.”

  “I guess it’s all in the way you say them,” Zey said.

  At noon I went to the dining hall for lunch. Kylie intercepted me just inside the door and dragged me over to our usual table. She was practically vibrating with excitement. “Scott was wrong!” she crowed. “They are fairies! I saw that little Pixie you’ve been talking to. He’s adorable! I want one! I want to scoop him up and carry him around in my pocket. Do you think if you finish out the year you get to keep him?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know about that, but I do think they sent him on purpose. They must have been worried I’d be scared off after the interview. Now I know there’s one person on the ship who’s friendly.”

  I went to assemble my lunch, tote bag tucked securely under my arm. I felt intensely protective of my few pages of scribbled notes. When I returned with a full tray, Rajani had joined Kylie at the table. “How was the exam?” I asked.

  Rajani shrugged. “Fine.”

  Kylie dipped a French fry in mayonnaise. “Ours were fine. Scott thinks he completely tanked his.”

  “Where is he?” I looked around.

  “Probably off brooding on his own somewhere. He said he was sick of listening to people talk about Simon.”

  “Who’s Simon?” I said blankly.

  “The prodigy—I told you about him, remember? He’s on Level Two of the TrueFluent program.”

  “Already?” It had taken me a month to reach Level Two. I knew for a fact that none of the other Strangers was anywhere near it. “Still, the first level is the easiest, and he’s had two weeks—”

  “One week,” said Rajani. “He arrived last Friday.”

  “Oh. That’s . . . really fast.”

  Kylie said around the straw of her soft drink, “Scott thinks he’s going to wreck the rankings. Push everyone else down. Someone’s going to get stuck on an orbit crawler who wasn’t before, and Scott thinks it’s going to be him.”

  “What do you guys think?”

  Rajani speared a tomato with her fork. “Honestly? I think that if this Simon is as good as everyone says, he deserves to be at the top.”