Then Sohra said, “Tonight never would have happened under Vekesh. He wouldn’t have allowed it. I’m glad he’s gone. I’ve learned more about Earth tonight than I did in the last three months.”
Her directness took me by surprise, but the others seemed unfazed. Ziral made a comment to the effect that the lowest-ranking crew members, namely myself, Zey, and Sohra, had been the first to sense that something was amiss with Vekesh.
Unthinkingly I answered, “Well, the eagle may have the keener eyes, but the sparrow flies closer to the ground.” It was an odd thing to say for two reasons: first because I’d never heard the idiom before, and second because the words came out in rapid and nearly accentless Vardeshi.
Everyone at the table stared at me. Zey, who had been moving around collecting dinner plates as silently as a shadow, froze in place. Then Hathan said slowly, “What did you just say?”
I looked around at their startled expressions. “I have no idea where that came from. I’ve never heard that expression before.”
“I have.” Saresh looked at each of his brothers, casually ignoring the fact that Zey was supposed to be invisible. “We all have. Our father says it.”
He and I stared at each other. Uncertainly I said, “Is it possible that you . . . sent it to me somehow? During the Listening? Is that a thing that happens with telepathy?”
“Not to my knowledge, no.”
Thinking back, I realized that over the past few days I’d understood a number of idioms I couldn’t recall consciously learning. And there had been that joke of Hathan’s in the briefing. And, a few minutes ago, the proverb whose translation I hadn’t needed. If I’d thought about the change at all, it had been to assume that the weeks of immersion were finally taking effect. But maybe that was wrong.
Even as I was thinking it through, Saresh said, “At odd moments, these last couple of days, I’ve heard snatches of songs. Earth songs. Ones I’ve never heard before. I think . . . maybe they’re yours.”
“Can you remember any of them?” Ziral asked.
He quoted a couple of lyrics. I laughed incredulously. “Yeah, that’s one of mine.” The song was a thoroughly overplayed pop hit from a couple of summers back. I drank some of my whiskey. My hand trembled on the glass. This was more than a faint affinity that lingered for a few minutes and then dissipated. This was a permanent transfer of memory from each of us to the other. It was a tiny change, but a change nonetheless: the imprint of his mind on mine, and my mind on his. Saresh was watching me again. I met his gaze. “I guess the Listening didn’t go as smoothly as we thought.”
“Apparently not,” he agreed. “But if idioms and song lyrics are the worst we have to contend with, I think we’ll be all right.”
Hathan said, “All the same, you’ll need to inform Rhevi Daskar. And the Echelon. And I think it’s safe to say that there won’t be any more cross-species Listenings for a while.”
I turned my glass around, watching the shifting play of light in its amber depths, lost in thought. I had already known that Saresh and I would carry the marks of that night for the rest of our lives, burned indelibly into our skin. Now I knew we were doubly marked. We would carry its traces in our minds as well. I had never been much given to superstition, but as I sat there I had an odd sense of convergence, of the fatedness of things. I pictured Dr. Sawyer and Novak Takheri sitting across from each other in a small white room not unlike those at the Villiger Center, forging the first in a series of links that would propel me twenty-five long years later into friendship with one Takheri son, love with another, and a peculiar yet undeniable kinship with the third. It was like catching another glimpse of a winding path laid out before me, radiant and ephemeral, luring me onward. And all at once I knew in a flash of pure conviction what my answer to the Echelon would be. I wanted to go on. I had set my feet on that path, and I might be shaken and frightened, but I wasn’t ready to turn back. The tidal pull of ivri khedai still drew me forward into the dark. I would follow it as far as it took me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ahnir began arranging the senek dishes. There was something odd about that, but I was so absorbed in my thoughts that it took a moment for the strangeness to register. Then I realized what was wrong: Zey should have been the one to serve the senek. I looked around for him, in vain. He was gone. I had never known him to abandon a task, however menial, when it was only half finished. But that was exactly what he had done. Sometime after I quoted his father’s idiom, perhaps during my moment of shared discovery with Saresh or the introspective pause that followed it, he had left the room.
When dinner ended I set off in search of him. I went to his quarters first, but there was no response when I pressed the call button on his door panel. Either he was ignoring me or he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the mess hall either, or in the lounge, which was nearly empty. Khiva and Vethna were playing a desultory dice game at the bar. Khiva told me she’d passed Zey in the residential corridor a few minutes ago. Vethna sat silently, avoiding my eyes.
I went back to Zey’s quarters and pressed the call button repeatedly. After the third buzz, he opened the door. “What do you want, Eyvri?”
The words stung, though I had been bracing myself for rejection. “Can we talk?”
“I don’t feel like talking.”
“Can I come in, then? You don’t have to talk to me.”
“I don’t feel like company either.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone. But I hope, when you’re ready, you’ll talk to me.”
I waited for him to close the door. He stood on the threshold with his fingers resting on the panel for a long irresolute moment. Then, unexpectedly, he stepped back and allowed me in. I had been in Zey’s quarters many times before, back when we were still watching Divided by Stars. They were nearly identical to my own, but with little ornamentation of any kind. Whether their sparse furnishings denoted a personal preference or a universally masculine disregard for interior design, I didn’t know. In the past, we had sat side by side on his bed in comfortably platonic fashion with my laptop resting on a stool on the floor. I knew from experience that the gray blanket habitually folded at the foot of the bed was impossibly soft.
Not knowing what else to do, I sat down on the edge of the bed, took hold of a corner of the blanket, and began mindlessly folding it over, smoothing out the crease, and folding it again. Zey still hadn’t moved from the doorway. He wasn’t much better at disguising his emotions than I was; he looked as if he was already regretting the decision to let me in.
When I couldn’t stand the silence any longer, I said, “Look, I didn't know what else to do, okay? I was scared. I had to protect myself. The Listening was the only way I could think of to get anyone on my side.”
“I know that.”
“I didn’t want to do it.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
There was another little silence. Again I was the one to break it. “I’m sorry. You’re right. That was a stupid thing to say.”
Zey shook his head. “Saresh said it too. Don’t you see that it doesn’t change anything? It doesn’t matter what you wanted. The Listening worked on you. That door that won’t open for me . . . You’re on the other side of it now. You’re just like the rest of them.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “The door did open for me, you’re right. But it might not open twice. And I’ll never find out, because I’m never going to try another Listening.”
“You might feel that way right now, but that’s an impossible promise, and you know it.”
The temptation to lay the truth before him—to explain exactly what had been revealed during my brief communion with Saresh, and why I was so certain that I would never allow another Vardeshi into my mind—was almost overpowering. The words rose unbidden to my lips. I forced them down. Telling Zey about my feelings for Hathan wouldn’t help either of us. And I couldn’t afford to share my secret with anyone else, least of all another Takher
i. All I could do was repeat, “I won’t do it again. It’s too private.”
“Of course it’s too private!” he exploded. “It’s not meant for you.”
“Do you think I don’t know that? You were there tonight. You heard what Saresh said. He’s never heard of a memory transfer like ours. What if it means something went wrong? Do you have any idea how terrifying that is for me?”
“Do you have any idea how humiliating it is for me?” he shot back. “He’s my brother. How do you think it feels to know you’re carrying a piece of him around in your head? When he tried to Listen to me, there was nothing. Not a whisper. We must have tried a hundred times. And it worked for you on the first—”
He broke off abruptly, clenching his fists and screwing his face up tightly in a way I knew meant he was trying not to cry. I felt an answering ache at the back of my own throat. I didn’t say anything.
After a little while the lines softened in his face and he said again, “He’s my brother.”
He sounded so young and so hurt that I wanted to scoop him up in my arms like a lost child. I knew better than to act on that impulse, least of all because my arm was still healing. I settled for saying, “I know. I’m sorry. It’s not fair.”
Zey sighed deeply. He hadn’t left the doorway all the time we’d been talking, but now he came over to the bed and sat down beside me. “I’m not angry at you.”
“That’s not what it sounds like.”
“All right, I’m a little angry at you,” he conceded.
“That’s okay. At least you’re talking to me.”
“Can I be angry at you and still be your friend? Is that something humans understand?”
“Yeah. We do it all the time. What about you guys?”
He nodded.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” I said. “I know it changes things. But I’m not going to start taking rana and hanging out in the lounge when there’s a Listening. I’m still the same person I was before. I’m still your friend.”
“For now,” he said gloomily.
“What do you mean, for now?”
“Until you go home.”
“Ah,” I said. “In that case, it looks like you’re stuck with me for another nine months.”
Zey had been staring down at his bedspread, apparently examining its weave. Now his dark eyes lifted to mine. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re staying?”
“I’m staying. If the Council and the Echelon will let me.”
“Since when?” he demanded.
“Since . . . oh, about an hour ago. I just decided.”
“You’re sure?”
“Completely.”
“Good,” he said simply. “You should stay.”
The tightness in my chest eased a little. I sent up silent thanks to the universe that he had been willing to talk to me. I didn’t know what I would do without him. I had survived Vekesh’s attack, and I could handle the destruction of my tech. But if I lost Zey’s friendship, I might as well turn around and go home.
Zey swung his legs up onto the bed and stretched them out behind me, then lay back, folding his arms behind his head. Taking the movement for implicit permission to stay a little longer, I settled myself more comfortably against the wall.
He said, “I wish we could just forget everything that’s happened over the last week and watch some TV. But we can’t even do that, because my brilliant brother shoved all your tech out an airlock.”
“You know about that?” I had been dreading breaking the news to him.
“Of course. You should have heard the fight we had over it. If I had my way, he’d be out there right now, picking up the pieces. Preferably without a pressure suit.”
“Did you say that to him?”
He snorted. “Say it? I was trying to drag him to the airlock when Saresh stepped in. Poor Saresh. He always gets stuck playing diplomat. He’s patched up a lot of arguments over the years, but that had to be one of the worst.”
“Are things still bad between you and—the khavi?”
It was an awkward verbal sidestep, and it drew an odd look from Zey, but he didn’t comment on it. “Oh, we’re fine now. One thing about Hathan, he always admits when he’s wrong.”
Back in my room, I contemplated checking the shower schedule, decided against it, and undressed slowly for bed. My last thoughts before sleep were shot through with images of what might lie ahead if the Council didn’t compel me to return to Earth. I wanted to see the snows of Khezendri, and the red forests of Rikasa with its two moons. I wanted to visit Nasthav Province, where the Takheris had grown up, and stand on the shore, looking out across the dark water. If all of that was denied me, I wanted to sit at that table again, drink in hand, listening as the conversation shuttled back and forth in English or in almost-attainable Vardeshi. Next to Hathan, who had heard in my question about ivri avanshekh the ardency of a fellow explorer. He had smiled. I wanted to see him smile again.
In the morning I awakened to an influx of messages from Earth. There was one from Councillor Seidel. I watched it first.
“Avery,” he said briskly, “the Council has reviewed your report, and we’ve reached a decision. If you can possibly stomach it, we’d like you to stay in the field. What the Vardeshi have given you, first through the telepathic contact with your hadazi and now with the Echelon’s offer, amounts to unprecedented access to their people. They seem to feel they owe you something. We’d like you to capitalize on that feeling. In purely practical terms, the Vardeshi have far more to offer us than we have to offer them. You’ve given us an edge we can’t afford to waste. That being said, no one on the Council is dismissing your recent experiences. The imprisonment and the injury are both significant traumas. You’re the best judge of your own physical and mental competence. If you’re ready to come home, just say the word. We’ll welcome you back like the hero you are.”
Well, I thought, that made things easy. I’d suspected the Council would see things in that light, but I hadn’t been sure. It had always been a numbers game; if the pragmatic voices outnumbered the sentimental ones, Earth’s interests would come before mine. Seidel’s take was cynical, but he was right. The Vardeshi could walk away from the alliance at any point with no material loss. The cost to Earth would be far greater. There was no end to the gifts the Vardeshi could bestow upon us if they chose to. Their superior tech had the potential to revolutionize our medicine, transportation, food production, virtually any of our industries overnight. Our best hope of accessing those benefits was to press any advantage they gave us. The Council wouldn’t pull me out for a mere graze on the arm. Idly I wondered how bad the wound would have had to be for them to bring me home.
There was a message from Anton as well. He was less cavalier about my health than Seidel had been. “I don’t like what I’m seeing, Avery. You’ve lost weight, and your sleep patterns are erratic. Frankly, your telemetry is alarming. It’s clear that you’ve been under sustained stress since we initially lost contact with you. And you’ve had more incidents of concern than I’d like to see. Obviously the shooting wasn’t your fault, but if that cut on your hand had become infected, you might have been in real trouble. You need to be more careful. I’m glad to see that your doctor on board the Pinion seems to be relatively capable. I can’t find fault with her treatment of your gunshot wound. But I’d like you to continue sending daily photos for at least the next ten days. And if your sleep and blood-pressure stats don’t improve, you may need to stay on Arkhati Starhaven for a period of observation before moving on. Your exposure to telepathy is another area of concern, but I’ll let Dr. Okoye speak to that.”
I had tensed a little during Anton’s message, but as soon as I saw Dr. Okoye’s face, I relaxed again. She had filmed the message in her office; I recognized the vibrant orange and yellow tapestry hanging on the wall behind her. “I know you’re in the midst of deciding whether to continue with your mission,” she said. “Councillor Seidel wil
l urge you to go on. I’m not going to push you either way. After three months among the Vardeshi, your instincts are better than mine. And you have one extraordinary asset: if the reports of your telepathic contact are true, you’ve seen inside the mind of one of their people. That fact places you so far beyond the realm of my experience, and I think all human experience, that I don’t feel qualified to advise you. But if you want my opinion, here it is. Whatever else you may have gained from the Listening, it gave you a glimpse into the thoughts of one Vardeshi. What did you sense from him? Kindness? Integrity? Sincerity of intent? Did the contact leave you feeling safer than before, or more at risk? Vekesh has given you one point of reference for the character of his people. Saresh has given you another. If you weigh them against each other, it may help to illuminate your path going forward.”
That, I thought, was exactly what had happened last night. The way forward had been illuminated, though not quite in the manner she suggested. I hadn’t arrived at a clean and impartial judgment as to whether the collective honor of the Vardeshi outweighed their capacity for treachery. I had simply realized that I wasn’t yet ready to let them go. I wasn’t sure anyone on Earth would accept my reasoning, if it even merited the term. But I understood now, in a visceral way I hadn’t before, that the life on the line was my own. My reasons were the only ones that mattered.
When I had viewed all the messages from Earth, I sent one of my own to the Echelon. In it I said simply that I had weighed my options and wished to continue on my way to Vardesh Prime as initially planned. I added that my preference was to remain with my original crew—minus Vekesh, naturally. I said our two races were different enough that it seemed wasteful to abandon the relationships I had begun to form. I concluded by stating that the changes implemented by Khavi Takheri had convinced me that the Pinion would be a different ship under his command than it had been under Vekesh. I reviewed the transmission, sent it, and went to the mess hall.
Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1) Page 33
