We had fallen into the habit of spending our evenings together whenever the rest of the crew engaged in a Listening, which happened once every four or five days. At first we played card games from Earth and dice games from the Vardeshi territories. Shortly after I surfaced from my environment shock, however, there came a night when Zey pushed the deck of cards away. “Not tonight. I’m not in the mood.”
I returned the cards to their box and slid it into my bag. “What’s wrong?”
“I just . . .” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving its spikes in even greater disarray than before. “Sometimes I just . . . hate this.”
“Hanging out with a human,” I said sympathetically. “I know. We’re pretty lame.”
He threw a die at me. “Not that. Knowing there’s a Listening going on and I can’t be a part of it. Not now. Not ever. It doesn’t matter how much I want it. It’s like I’m standing in front of a locked door, and everyone else has the key.”
“But aren’t there other things you can do? Other activities? Music concerts and . . . poetry readings?” I tried to infuse the words with enthusiasm, but even to my ears, they sounded feeble.
“It’s not the same. The Listening is at the core of who we are. It’s how we connect with each other. Ask any Vardeshi what defines us, and they’ll say the Listening, no hesitation. Saresh is lucky. You must have noticed how people treat him.” He hesitated. “And how they treat me.”
Vethna’s insult had found its mark, then, even if Zey hadn’t given him the satisfaction of reacting to it. Aiming for lightness, I said, “Hey, from where I’m sitting, being despised by Vethna is a good thing.”
“It isn’t just Vethna. Being a Blank is humiliating. People pretend it doesn’t matter anymore, but it does.” Absently he rubbed the gold sigil on the back of his hand. “When my parents went to find me a match, it took them twice as long as it did for Hathan. And Saresh? He could have had anyone he wanted.”
“But they did find someone,” I said gently.
“Sure. Another Blank. Latents and Voxes won’t marry us, did you know that? They’re scared that we’ll contaminate their children. And even after we’re married, it won’t be the same. People act like . . . like there’s something missing. Like it isn’t a real marriage if you can’t share a Listening with your partner. They pity us. I hate that.”
“You know,” I said, “there are a lot of people on Earth who would tell you it’s a good thing not to be able to read your partner’s thoughts.”
“I’m starting to think I was born on the wrong planet,” Zey said gloomily.
I picked up the dice—including the one that had landed on the floor—and handed them back to him. “Well, I can’t solve all the social problems of Vardesh Prime tonight. But I can solve ours. Earth has plenty of entertainment, and you don’t have to be a telepath to enjoy any of it. I still think it’s weird that there aren’t any hobbies designed for Blanks.”
“We just don’t think that way.” Zey had explained that the various forms of Vardeshi entertainment—music, storytelling, and some poetry and theater—tended to take place on a small scale. Performers were nearly always acquainted with all of their listeners. The experience was intimate and immediate and often enhanced by rana, and it wasn’t recorded, ever. To the Vardeshi, distributing the recording of an event to strangers who hadn’t been present for it was unheard of. It was the relationship between artist and audience that gave a performance its power. Listening to an unknown singer or storyteller held no appeal. “We do have the equipment to make recordings,” Zey had said. “But we don’t use it like you do. We use memory crystals to record images, or voices, but they’re private keepsakes. And we would never spend the time and money to put together a performance like the ones you’ve told me about.”
“What about our recordings, though?” I said. “Didn’t you guys all learn English from our TV shows and movies?”
“Not directly,” he said. “Our linguists analyzed your broadcasts for information about your grammar and lexicon. But I don’t think they recognized them as entertainment. I’ve never heard of anyone actually watching them. When I learned English, it was from textbooks and audio clips.”
“That seems like a waste of a perfectly good resource,” I said.
“You know we’re pretty divided on the subject of humanity. English is still an elective at the Institute. Some people are against it being offered at all. Scrubbing the language of cultural content was the only way to make them happy.”
I’d been weighing the possibility of showing him some of the media I’d brought on board. Abruptly I made my decision. “Come on. Let’s go watch a show.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Why not? We’ll go to my quarters. Everyone else is in the lounge.”
“Isn’t that against the rules?”
I considered the question. “Why would it be? We won’t be speaking to each other in English, just watching old recordings of other people talking. Vekesh’s stupid policy doesn't say anything about that. And if you like any of my shows, we can talk about them in Vardeshi. The only part we have to say in English is the names.”
“I guess you’re right.” Zey sounded dubious. “It’s something to do, at least. Something new.”
He continued to be skeptical until the moment the opening credits rolled on the first episode of the first show I selected, at which point his face transformed. I had never seen anything like it. As a lifelong consumer of video media, I had long been inured to all the subtle cues television used to heighten the emotions of its viewers—music, lighting, camera angles—but to Zey it was entirely new, and he took to it like it had been made for him. He watched in childlike wonder, his face illuminated by the blue flicker of the screen, until I paused the episode and said, “What do you think?”
“I love it! I want to keep watching.” He paused. “But I have no idea what’s going on.”
It took us a little while to identify his genre. Comedies bewildered him, with their hailstorms of cultural references, and he had no context for dramas that explored the nuanced conflicts of contemporary human life. The genre he preferred, although at first I was hesitant to introduce it, was Vardrama. He was rapt and wide-eyed as I played the first scene of Divided by Stars. The show was widely acknowledged as dated, but was still respected for its evenhanded portrayal of humans and Vardeshi alike. As the episode progressed, setting up the predictable doomed romance between a human woman and a Vardeshi man, he was so enthralled he kept forgetting to breathe. As the ending theme swelled, he whispered, “Are there more like this?”
“Oh, yeah.” I tapped the sleek silver hard drive connected to the laptop. “It’s all here. There are thousands of hours of TV stored on this device. The show you were just watching has . . . let’s see, about a hundred more episodes.”
“More stories about Sirran and Zoe?”
“It’s all the same story. It just keeps going. I’m a little jealous, actually. You have quite a ride ahead of you.” I gave him a sidelong look. “If you want to keep watching, that is.”
By way of a response, Zey leaned over and pressed the command to play the second episode.
He followed the story easily, and while I’d feared he would take offense at our clumsy depictions of his people—the early costumes and makeup were shockingly inept—he just laughed at them. We watched three episodes that night. Within a week, we had polished off the first season. The last night ran a little late, but Zey wouldn’t hear of waiting another day for the conclusion. The next morning at breakfast there were indigo shadows under his eyes. He leaned his head on his hand and said bleakly, “It just can’t happen. I can’t believe they’ll recall Sirran to Vardesh Prime. Not when he’s finally going tell her how he feels.”
“Vardesh Prime? You mean Greater Vardesh?” I was enjoying pointing out the factual inaccuracies in the show nearly as much as Zey was enjoying watching it. Given the paucity of their source material, the writers had done better than one m
ight expect, but the show was still riddled with errors. They all were. It was inevitable for a genre built entirely on the strength of two radio transmissions and one brief face-to-face encounter.
“They won’t. They can’t. Can they?”
“I don’t know,” I said teasingly. “But you’ll find out in another two months.”
“Two months?”
“Sure. I had to wait a whole summer to find out what happened next. I figure you can start season two when we get to Arkhati Starhaven. It’s only fair.”
“Nothing in my world or yours is ever fair,” Zey intoned. It was Sirran’s closing line, still recognizable in translation. I laughed.
“What are you talking about?” Vethna had sat down with his tray just as Zey finished speaking. He sounded irritable. He usually did when he was speaking to one of us.
“Nothing,” Zey said flatly.
“Watch your tone, Novi. I asked you a question.”
“It was a cultural reference, sir,” I said. “It would take a long time to explain.”
“This cultural reference wouldn’t involve speaking unauthorized English, would it?”
“No, Rhevi.” I had to remind myself that it was true. As agreed on the first night, we had been policing our language use as strictly as if Vekesh himself were in the room with us. No one could find fault with anything we had said to each other. And the khavi’s rule, as I had pointed out to Zey, only applied to the language spoken between me and the others. It made no provision for recorded media. I tried not to dwell on the fact that that angle might not have occurred to Vekesh, as the Vardeshi had no equivalent form of entertainment.
Vethna still looked skeptical. I got up and went to make another cup of coffee in the hope that he would lose interest while I was gone. When I returned to the table, Sohra had arrived and was asking him about a recurrent error in the self-diagnostic for one of the engines. I was glad he’d been distracted, but I knew better than to think he’d forgotten what he’d overheard. I was reasonably sure by now that no Vardeshi ever forgot anything. And Vethna’s manner toward me had only grown more abrasive over the past weeks. If he thought he’d caught me in some error, however small, he would store it away until he found an opportunity to use it.
Zey waited until we were alone in the axis chamber, setting up the senek ritual, to pick up the thread of our conversation. “You’re not really going to make me wait two months, are you?”
“Nah.” I grinned at him. “Maybe a day, though. There’s no Listening tonight. We should probably make an appearance in the lounge. If we keep spending all our free time alone in my quarters, it’s going to look weird.”
“I don’t care how it looks.”
“All right, one episode,” I conceded. “But then we should stop by the lounge.”
“Whatever you say,” Zey said glibly. To neither of our surprise, we didn’t end up making it to the lounge that night.
I found it both absurd and utterly natural that a twenty-year-old television show about fictional Vardeshi should turn out to be the catalyst for my first real friendship with one of their people. There was no doubt that that was exactly what it was, though. Our double fellowship as novis and Blanks had laid the groundwork for closeness between me and Zey, but something had been lacking. Now it felt as if a final necessary piece had been slotted into place. Suddenly we had private jokes and a topic of conversation that didn’t involve cleaning something. The sudden emotional richness overwhelmed me. I fell into it, just as I had fallen into instant intimacy with the Strangers. The rational side of my mind knew I was growing too dependent on him; I should be building relationships with other crew members as well. I didn’t care. I needed a friend. And I knew he needed one too.
For a couple of weeks everything seemed to be going smoothly. I carried out my novi tasks in the mornings with only occasional mishaps. In the afternoons I made notes and word lists and worked through my incoming messages, which were beginning to accumulate. Most of them made for amusing reading. Now that the other Strangers were in transit to their placements—or, in some cases, had already arrived—I was starting to receive frantic pleas for advice and translation help. At first these came only from the dozen or so Strangers I’d thought of as my particular cohort at the Villiger Center. I laughed aloud the first time I received a missive from Kylie addressed to Hadazi Alkhat. Gradually, however, word seemed to spread, until I was fielding inquiries from people I’d never met in person. Answering their letters was time-consuming, but I didn’t mind it. Their questions were fascinating. And it was encouraging to feel like I had something useful to contribute to my fellow Strangers, even if it was as minor as explaining that the words for help and seduce sounded virtually identical save for a slight tonal variation on the third syllable, so the reason Scott was receiving odd looks was that he’d been asking his hadazi on the Seynath if she’d like to take things to the next level. I laughed again when I read that letter. At least I hadn’t been going around asking people on the Pinion if they wanted to get busy. As far as I knew, anyway.
Not all the missives cluttering my inbox were quite so entertaining. At regular intervals the Villiger Center batch emailed the Strangers a collated summary of major Earth news. As Councillor Seidel had predicted, there had been more anti-alliance protests. Pro-alliance groups had begun staging rallies of their own, most of which dwarfed the anti-alliance ones in scale and impact. One of these had turned bloody when a card-carrying member of God’s Green Earth drove a pickup truck into a march in Houston. Miraculously no one had been killed. Still, I felt sickened by the image. After reading that particular letter, I began scanning the subject lines of my incoming messages and deleting unread any which looked to be news-related. As far as I was concerned, the ugliness of Earth could stay exactly where I’d left it.
To my immense relief, I finally had some notes to send home that weren’t exclusively linguistic in nature. I was beginning to be allowed little incidental glimpses into Vardeshi culture. One evening I attended a music concert in the lounge. I sat with Ziral and Sohra on one of the little veiled platforms against the rear wall. I was wearing jeans and sandals and had a couple of beers in a stainless steel thermos beside me. My two companions were sharing a flask of wine and a bowl of sugared fruit. It was a little like being at a music festival. The effect was heightened by the fact that an enormous panel built into the Pinion’s outer hull had been retracted to reveal that most of the lounge’s ceiling was in fact a single enormous viewport. We were literally sitting under the stars.
The performers—mainly Saresh, Daskar, and Ahnir, though others joined them intermittently—sang and played their various instruments interchangeably and with ease. The latter comprised a slender stringed instrument like a mandolin, a flute that looked like it had been carved from animal bone, and a delicate spiral frame strung with tiny silver bells. Sometimes one of them sang alone, sometimes two or three or all of their voices joined together, weaving over and around each other in melodies as poignant and haunting as any I could have imagined. I couldn’t understand the words they were singing, and Ziral explained that the form of Vardeshi I was hearing was archaic.
“Are these old songs, then?” I asked.
“Most of them were written close to a thousand years ago,” said Sohra.
“Can you understand them?”
She smiled. “Of course.”
Of course, I thought ruefully. Why write songs in the vernacular? That would have been too easy. I took a fortifying gulp of beer and told myself firmly that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t follow the lyrics. For the first time in my life—perhaps in any human’s life—I was listening to music from another world. It was an extraordinary gift to be permitted to hear it at all.
Over the course of the evening I observed that the audience circulated as freely as the musicians. The occupants of my little dais had changed several times over the course of the last hour. Ziral had gone to sit with Ahnir when he left the stage, and Zey had taken her place
until Saresh persuaded him to join the singers. Khiva had joined me and Sohra for a few songs. Then Daskar had called Sohra up to sing a harmony she knew especially well. Her place had been taken by Hathan. Khiva had gone to stand at the bar with Vethna. Now Saresh and Zey were beginning a duet; Ahnir was playing the mandolin and Sohra had taken possession of the bone flute, providing a lilting counterpoint that soared above their voices, touching down lightly on the melody from time to time. I leaned back against the wall, thinking how much they looked like any group of human musicians. They watched each other with the same intentness, they traded the same quick smiles and knowing glances. Probably the first human-Vardeshi musical collaboration wasn’t far off. But the lyrics, if there were any, would have to be written in English.
“You should sing,” said Hathan.
I was startled out of my reverie. “What?”
He nodded to the impromptu stage across from us. “Earth has produced some beautiful music. I’ve heard a little in your radio transmissions. Why not showcase some of it tonight? Aren’t you always telling us you’re here as a cultural emissary?”
“Are you being serious?”
“I am. I think the crew would appreciate it.”
“I’m not the most talented of singers,” I said. It was true. I had a tolerable singing voice. I thought of it as a backup singer’s voice. I could carry a melody or a harmony, and the result was fairly pleasant, but no one had ever fallen over himself to offer me a solo.
“We’d rather watch a halfway competent performance than listen to a recording, no matter how brilliant. You must have learned that about us by now.”
“Would it even be allowed? The only songs I know are in English.” He said nothing for a moment, and I added quickly, “I’m not trying to make trouble. That was a serious question.”
Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1) Page 20
