Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1)

by Meg Pechenick

  “Your Vardeshi is progressing rapidly. Khavi Vekesh can see that as well as I can. Exceptions can be made.”

  Praise from him was so unexpected that my stock of conventionally polite replies deserted me entirely. I sat in a silence that felt slightly foolish, wondering if someone had adjusted the temperature control in the lounge. An hour ago, when I walked in, I’d thought it was cold. Maybe I’d depleted the contents of my thermos more than I thought I had. Finally, feeling that banality was preferable to continued silence, I said, “It’s hard to feel like I'm making any progress when I still make so many mistakes.”

  He nodded once. “I have friends on some of the other ships hosting human representatives. They’ve passed on a few errors that put yours into context.”

  I laughed, relieved to be in familiar territory. “I know what you mean. My friend from training just messaged me asking what he’s been doing wrong.” I related Scott’s anecdote.

  Hathan said, “He’s been saying that to his hadazi?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Repeatedly. And publicly.”

  “What ship?”

  “The Seynath.”

  The suvi looked briefly thoughtful. Then he said, “Well, I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. His face was perfectly controlled. If it hadn’t been, I would have been almost certain that he had just made a joke.

  A burst of laughter from the bar, where Vethna and Khiva were standing, drew our attention. Hathan continued watching them after I’d lost interest. I found myself studying his profile, or what I could see of it in the dimness of the alcove. A shadow fell across his face. It hid his eyes, but I could tell from the set of his mouth that he was contemplating an irregularity in the otherwise smooth running of the ship. I recognized that expression because it was the one he generally wore when he was speaking to me. I wondered what he was thinking.

  I said, “If you really think anyone here would like to hear me sing, I’d be happy to oblige. But not tonight.”

  “Next time, then.”

  “Sure.” I thought I could safely agree to that. “What about you?” I ventured to ask. “You haven’t sung anything tonight.”

  Hathan said, “I prefer to wait for inspiration.”

  The song ended a few moments later, and he rose, nodded to me, and made his way to another of the platforms. An instant later Zey flung himself down on the cushions beside me and grabbed a handful of fruit from the bowl my original seatmates had left behind. “So? What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve been holding out on me. You have a beautiful voice.”

  “Really?” He looked pleased. “I always thought it was pretty ordinary.”

  “I don’t think it’s ordinary at all,” I said. “Get yourself a leather jacket and some ripped jeans and you’ll have it made on Earth. An instant star.”

  “Actually, I was thinking of taking up acting.”

  “Still, it’s good to have a backup plan.” I glanced over at the bar. “Hey, is something going on with Vethna and Khiva? They look pretty checked out. Your brother was watching them a minute ago.”

  Zey didn’t ask which brother. “They’re on rana,” he said dismissively.

  He was right. The following morning I saw that there was a distinct violet cast to Vethna’s and Khiva’s skin, rather than the blue undertones I had come to expect. Zey had told me the purple tint was the signature of a rana hangover: that, along with a general listlessness and malaise. I didn’t think much of it at the time, as Zey had explained that rana could be used to enhance any sensory experience, not just the Listening. The next week, however, I was serving at officers’ dinner when the topic came up again.

  I had been out of the room briefly on an errand to the galley. I returned with the flask of wine Ahnir had requested just in time to hear Daskar declare, “I’m cutting him off.”

  “Aren’t you being premature, Doctor?” said Khavi Vekesh. “It’s a long mission. Anyone can overindulge.”

  Ahnir finished opening the flask and passed it to me. I stepped forward, eyes deferentially lowered, to refill the empty glasses on the table. Hathan said, “Occasional overindulgence is one thing. This is something else. I’ve noticed it as well.” He shifted his glass so that I could reach it more easily.

  Vekesh nodded and turned to Saresh. “Hadazi?”

  Saresh appeared to be studying the color of the wine remaining in his glass. He said soberly, “I’ve already warned him about it. Twice.”

  “I see,” said Vekesh. “Then it appears that we have no choice. It’s unfortunate, though. We run the risk of creating a bigger problem than we solve. Cutting him off may alienate him further, and he’s a good engineer.”

  Hathan said, “He’s better when he’s not on rana.”

  “Agreed. Doctor, you have my permission to speak to Rhevi Vethna in the morning. I’d like all three of you to monitor his temperament until he’s had a few weeks to adjust to the change. And it should go without saying that any illicit rana use should be reported to me immediately.”

  When Ahnir dismissed me a few minutes later, I had to fight the urge to seek Zey out and tell him what I’d overheard. The conversation I’d witnessed would have been better suited to the privacy of a senior staff meeting than a dinner with attendants. It was entirely possible that Vekesh had chosen that venue specifically in order to test my discretion. If I breathed so much of a word of what I knew, I would lose the privilege of serving at the weekly formal dinners—which, now that I was able to follow portions of the dialogue, were finally getting interesting. I knew my charge was to keep silent. I went to the lounge and began setting up the senek things. Zey came in after a while and asked how the dinner had gone. “It was fine,” I said. “You know. Boring.” Vethna arrived sometime later. I noticed that he was the one to go to the cabinet and take down the small black rana jar from the shelf where I’d left it. I also noticed that he was the only one to partake.

  It was an odd position to find myself in, the possessor of privileged knowledge about someone I didn’t like—and who clearly didn’t like me. I didn’t have enough context to know how serious a rana addiction was, and the senior officers hadn’t seemed overly concerned, but I knew the situation was more complex than that of a simple substance addiction on Earth. In cutting off Vethna’s access to rana, Daskar would also be cutting off his access to the primary form of Vardeshi entertainment. He would no longer be able to participate in the Listening. The other crew members were bound to notice that fact, and they would probably guess the reason, which meant his punishment would be not only isolating but mortifyingly public. The little I knew of Vethna suggested that he was proud and irritable in more or less equal measure. He wasn’t going to take it well. Part of me thought that it served him right for making snide comments about Blanks, but another part felt—against my will—a little compassion for Vethna.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I was right. Vethna didn’t take it well. He wasn’t at early briefing the following day. As I made the round of my morning duties, I did my best to avoid his usual haunts, knowing he was likely to be ill-tempered and in search of an easy target. That strategy worked until lunch, when, inevitably, we found ourselves at the same table. In short order he castigated me for addressing Sohra with the wrong honorific, picked a fight with Zey over an imagined slight, then flung down his kevet and stormed out. A brief thoughtful silence followed his departure. I didn’t look over at the higher-ranking table.

  “What the hell?” said Zey. He picked up his own kevet and went back to his lunch, looking remarkably unfazed by the unprovoked attack.

  “He’s off rana,” Khiva said.

  “Well, then he’d better get back on it.”

  She shook her head. “He’s not off it by choice.”

  The look that passed among the three of them was so swift I would have missed it if I hadn’t been watching for it. I interpreted it to mean that the topic wasn’t one to be pursued within the
hearing of senior officers. An instant later, Khiva asked Sohra an innocuous question about a recurring glitch on her flexscreen, confirming my theory. Later, though, when I made my way to the lounge in the pre-dinner recreation hour, I found Sohra and Zey discussing Vethna’s predicament in low voices. They were curled up in one of the curtained platforms. I ducked my head in and asked if there was space for another. This, I’d learned, was the social convention for requesting entrance to an alcove. If the occupants didn’t wish to be disturbed, they would answer in the negative, regardless of how much space was actually available. Sohra beckoned me in.

  She was saying quietly, “When I stopped by engineering this morning to reprogram one of the sensors, I asked him a simple question, and he lost his temper. I thought . . . I didn’t know what to think. I thought he was just being Vethna.”

  “He was,” Zey replied. “The undiluted version. I liked him better on rana. At least it kept him civil. Most of the time.”

  Sohra traced the outline of her gold sigil with a slender forefinger. “Khiva says Daskar told him he has to stay clean at least until we get to Arkhati.”

  “That’s . . . six weeks from now.” Zey made a face. “I don’t want him gunning for me for the next six weeks.”

  “The irritability won’t last long. The drug will be out of his system in a couple of days; the withdrawal symptoms will be gone in a week or so.” Sohra said in response to my curious look, “My brother went through it a couple of years ago.”

  “Vethna’s been taking rana even on days when there isn’t a Listening, right?” I said. “Why would he do that? What’s the point?”

  “It feels good,” Sohra said simply. “It’s a mild intoxicant. Combined with senek, it makes you feel relaxed. Euphoric.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “If you take it too often, you start to feel like you’re . . .” Sohra looked to Zey for assistance, then belatedly realized that he wasn’t in a position to offer any. He smiled slightly. It was the most cynical expression I’d ever seen him wear. “Like you’re seeing the world through a cloud,” she went on. “It dulls your senses—only a fraction, but enough to slow down your reflexes a little, make you less decisive. The Fleet takes it seriously, because when things go wrong out here, they go wrong fast, and a delay of a few seconds can mean the loss of an entire ship.”

  “So how hard is it to stop the addiction?”

  Sohra said, “It typically isn’t that hard. But the more you take, the harder it is. And Vethna was taking a lot of it.”

  I frowned. “Why would one person take more than another?”

  “There’s a spectrum of abilities even among latents. Vethna is a latent, but he’s on the weaker side. He has to use a little more rana than the rest of us to get the same effect. So his intake was higher even before he started taking it on days when there wasn’t a Listening.”

  Vethna continued to act sour and peevish for the next couple of days, and I continued to avoid him. After that, though, it was just as Sohra had predicted. He seemed to come to terms with his situation. He stopped complaining about it, at any rate. The other crew members acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary. I had already discovered that this was a defining trait of the Vardeshi—the instinct to smooth over others’ embarrassment by pretending to take no notice of it. Where humans might have mocked, Vardeshi conveniently looked away. I had had cause to be grateful for their discretion many times in my early days on the Pinion. I was sure Vethna was grateful for it too.

  My second month on the Pinion drew to a close. I settled more securely into the round of my days. I was now fielding so many letters from fellow Strangers that the questions were beginning to repeat themselves. Dr. Sawyer suggested that I publish my advice in the form of a newsletter to be distributed to the entire List. I drafted the first edition—a melange of cultural advice, essential vocabulary, and thoughts about home—and sent it to Kylie and Rajani for review. They responded with unfeigned enthusiasm. Kylie especially approved of the newsletter’s title, which I’d debated internally for a long time before selecting “A Little Strange,” a joke I suspected (or hoped) would fly over the heads of the older generation. Rajani suggested a new section featuring Earth food cravings and humiliating moments from a guest columnist of the week. I quickly made the edits. In the absence of guest content I slotted in my own answers: queso and margaritas and my determined attempt to open the storage room that was actually an airlock. I sent the updated document to the entire membership of the List before I could lose my nerve. I included an invitation to opt out. No one did.

  My friendship with Zey was becoming a solid and tangible thing, but it was no longer my only connection to my crewmates. Sohra and I had begun to talk a little more openly about the differing visions of love and romance offered by our two cultures. She told me about her fiancé, whom she scarcely knew, as he had been two years her senior at the Institute and they had met only a handful of times. One night she went so far as to show me the memory crystal containing his image, which she kept wrapped in a piece of silken fabric inside an ornate wooden box in her quarters. I cradled the crystal reverently in my hands. Pale blue and about the size of a walnut, it was faceted like a gemstone. When my skin warmed its surface, it projected into the air a holographic image of a young man with gentle features and striking silver hair. “He looks nice,” I said. “Kind, I mean. He looks like a good person.”

  “I think he is.”

  I passed the memory crystal carefully back to her, and she began wrapping it again in its square of silk. Still turned away from me, she said softly, “It does work, you know. Our way of doing things.” She paused. “Most of the time.”

  “Those sound like pretty good odds to me,” I said.

  I had told her a little about the vagaries of dating and partnering within my own culture, making sure to contextualize it as only one of Earth’s many cultures. Sohra understood the desire to choose one’s own partner; she said there were a few Vardeshi, a very few, who rejected the traditional arranged marriage in favor of finding their own mates. But it seemed to trouble her that there was no safety net in place for me, no discreet network of matchmakers and parents waiting in the wings, poised to take action should the search fail to yield a suitable candidate. “What happens if you don’t find someone?” she had asked.

  I shrugged. “Then you don’t find someone.”

  “Isn’t it lonely?”

  “We have friends, family, coworkers. Other people in our lives. But yes, it can be very lonely.”

  She twined a strand of dark hair around her finger, a gesture so humanlike it took me by surprise. It was rare to see a Vardeshi indulge in an unnecessary movement. “That sounds awful. I can’t imagine spending my whole life alone. I don’t think I could stand it. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice companionable marriage? At least you’d have someone to share your days with. Another voice at the table.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. It’s not like there are a lot of dating services on Earth that advertise nice companionable matches. If there were, I don’t think they’d make much money. Most people are looking for something more. Not fireworks and rainbows, necessarily, but a partner who chooses you for who you are. Marriage is complicated enough as it is. It seems to me that to have the slightest chance of succeeding, it ought to begin with love.”

  “Not just with love. With passion. Infatuation.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And everyone expects this?”

  “I’m not sure ‘expects’ is the right word. But most of us hope for it.”

  She shook her head.

  “You think we’re crazy,” I said lightly.

  “Not crazy. But perhaps . . . you ask too much of the universe.”

  Conversations like that one were still rare, but that they happened at all was encouraging. That exchange in particular called to mind a phrase from the message with which the Vardeshi had broken their twenty-five years of silence: Bright sh
ards of yourselves. My crewmates were beginning to show me those same bright shards of themselves, and I was beginning to piece them together. I told myself that, if the Vardeshi never permitted me to know them any more deeply than I did at this moment, it would be all right. I was content. It didn’t matter that with every passing moment we drove deeper into the darkness and Earth fell farther behind.

  One evening a few days after my conversation with Sohra I was granted another uncurated glimpse of my shipmates. It was the hour designated for the evening senek ritual, a time when the fitness center was typically deserted. It had taken me some time to overcome my fear of using the fitness center, as most of its apparatus was bewildering to me. The room was full of sleek and complicated machines that were in no way analogous to the standard equipment found in an Earth gym.

  Early on in the mission, Khiva had offered to show me how they worked. I chose the simplest one I could find: an elevated circular platform with a simple control panel set into the wall beside it. Khiva told me to step onto the platform and passed me a pair of what looked like minimalist high-end sunglasses. These turned out to be a fully immersive virtual-reality visor projecting an obstacle course that consisted of a series of colorful platforms floating freely in the depths of space. I craned my neck to look down over the edge of the first platform. The darkness and simulated stars seemed to go down a long, long way. I lifted the visor. Khiva was adjusting the controls.

  “What gravity setting do you want?” she asked.

  “Gravity?” I repeated.

  “I’ll make it a little lighter than the Pinion’s standard gravity. Hold still.” She snapped a harness around my waist. “All right, now you can move.”

  I pulled the visor into place again and looked out at the floating platforms. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Run. Jump. Try not to fall.”

  I took a couple of tentative steps forward, my hands outstretched, expecting at any moment to collide with the wall I knew was there. I felt nothing. I lifted the visor and found myself still standing at the precise center of what I belatedly recognized as an omnidirectional treadmill. “Oh. I get it.” I backed up a few steps, then started to run. When I reached the edge of the first platform, I took a flying leap and landed on the second. I successfully negotiated three more platforms before I misjudged a gap and plummeted into empty space. Stars streamed past me on all sides. “How do I stop it?” I gasped.