The warrior straightened his neck slowly, and then pointed one dark claw at me, pointing directly at my eyes. I blinked. He had figured out that the face he saw behind the quartz faceplate was me, and that the metal body was just a suit. Interesting. His lips moved, this time producing a sound that was utterly unlike my mother tongue of Pan-American Standard. “Joo-ah-nah atzvaka,” he said, his clumsy pronunciation of my name contrasting sharply with the harsher, more guttural sound of his language. He pointed his thumb at himself. “Volistad mitzerkim.” He waited a moment, then repeated the sequence, the same way I had repeated mine to him.
I grinned, suddenly excited. This was working! I tried to make the same sounds he had made, sure that my attempt at his speech sounded just as inelegant as his attempt at mine. I pointed at myself. “Joanna mitt-zeer-kim.” I pointed at him, still smiling. “Voh-list-tad at-vak-kah.” I was sure that I had put the emphasis on the wrong syllables, and I hoped that I hadn't just issued a deadly insult or something. I noticed then that he had taken a few quick steps back from me, his eyes narrowed slightly, and his chin tucked low, presenting me with his broad brow. Shit, what had I just done? Did I just threaten him or something?
Barbas muttered diffidently in my ear. “Stop smiling.”
“What?” I hissed back. “I’m trying to be friendly.”
“You didn’t see when he was talking?” Barbas sounded amused. “He’s a carnivore. What does it mean when you bare your teeth at a wild dog?”
I didn't miss the connotation in his choice of words, but I chose to ignore it for the moment. "Oh. Shit." I quickly wiped any lingering traces of the smile from my face, and then held my hands palm-out to the warrior. Volistad watched me for a moment warily, and then, with no warning, he barked out a short, rattling, coughing sound. It sounded unsettlingly like the beginnings of Mesoamerican jaguar's roar. It took me a moment to realize that he was laughing. "God," I commented to no one in particular. "Am I as terrifying to him as he and his people are to me?"
Barbas snorted. “In the armor? Probably.”
Regaining control of his evident mirth, Volistad took a step towards me, and pointed at me, reversing the pattern as I had with his language. "Yoo Joh-ah-nah." I suppressed my smile as I realized he had made the correct ‘oh' sound at the beginning of my name this time. He pointed his thumb back at himself and said, "Mee, Volistad." Then, in a moment of surprising intuition, he smiled, as I had, and I saw what Barbas meant. Volistad's mouth was that of a carnivore's. His face looked human, but as I looked more closely, I realized that there were some subtle differences. The muscles around his neck were thicker, and his jaws were prominent and wide in a manner that seemed more suited for biting than an ordinary human mouth did. Most obvious were the fangs that curled up from the row of sharp, dangerous looking teeth, literal canine teeth. Or, I supposed, taking in the other polar-bear seeming traits of the alien, ursine teeth. Nonetheless, he smiled, mimicking me, and then, when he saw that I understood, he closed his mouth quickly and narrowed his eyes again, this time in an expression utterly different than the one he had made when I had startled him. It was the same kind of expression that a cat made when you scratched him behind the ears. Caught completely off guard, I laughed, and Volistad joined me, making his own, half-growling guffaws.
We just stood there, laughing for a good five minutes, tickled by how different we were, and at the same time, just as amused by how much we were alike. When we finally stopped laughing, I felt tears on my face. This was amazing This was the way First Contact was supposed to go. I was really doing it! I was communicating with an alien! It was funny, since the prospect of meeting extraterrestrial life had deemed so unlikely as to merit a single hour of instruction during the entirety of my training as a Former. "Barbas," I said, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. "I want you to record everything he says. You're going to analyze it all, and when I dream, you're going to help me learn. I want to speak that language, and I want to speak it soon. If we do this right, I won't have to shoot anyone else."
Barbas’ whispered, his tone more mechanical than human now, as if the analytical processes he was running behind the scenes was beginning to eat up the computing power he usually reserved for his personality. “Joanna, you’re probably going to have to kill again, regardless.”
“What? Why?”
"Because I doubt the first one, the one who brought the storm with her, was alone." A little more humanity crept back into his voice, and his tone changed, sounding… apologetic. "You need to be careful with this… Volistad. You're right; he's probably friendly. But he might also have been sent by the same power that sent the woman I killed. When the hammer fails, you try the knife in the dark." Despite the temperature control in my suit, I felt a chill pass through my body. Was Barbas right? Could this hunter be here to hunt… me? Could those amused eyes be hiding malice? He had put down his weapons, but what did that mean really? I would sleep eventually, and when I did…
“I’ll be careful, ‘Bas. And besides, I have you watching over me. I know you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” I tried to picture the image of myself smiling, tried to send him reassurance through my thoughts.
My efforts seemed to work, because I could hear the smile in the AI's voice as he said, "Of course I will, Jo. I would never let anything bad happen to you. And you know I can never leave you." He paused for a moment and then continued, his tone businesslike. "If you want to learn this language, you're going to have to find a way to get him talking, and I'm going to be unable to speak to you for a while. There's a lot of for me to do to keep working on the tower, and between those tasks and analyzing an alien language, I'm going to be very busy. You've got this. I'll be here if you need me. Otherwise, I'll talk to you tonight."
Our missions clear, we got to work.
…
When I opened my eyes to the calm warmth of the dream that night, I wasn't lying in my bed in the cabin. Instead, I was seated at a broad, oaken desk, in a vast, dark library. The only light was the desk lamp sitting beside me, and its soft, cozy light illuminated stacks of notebooks and dozens of bound books. Some of the books were little more than prettied-up pamphlets, perhaps bound versions of articles by some prominent mind; others were more like ancient tomes, thick, heavy and musty-smelling.
I looked around me, only able to make out the regular, monolithic shapes of the bookshelves shrouded in the darkness, looking for all the world more like ancient standing-stones in the darkness than simple shelves. Barbas emerged from that darkness, handsome as ever, sharply dressed in a gray three-piece suit- complete with emerald cufflinks at his sleeves and a tie that matched his eyes. I realized then that I was wearing a dress to match, the kind I had never been able to afford. It was tailored to fit me perfectly, green as the spring grass I would never really see again, with an open back that left my back bare all the way down to the very base of my spine. It was elegant in its simplicity, devoid of frills, simply letting my lean body speak for itself. I grinned up at Barbas with an eyebrow raised in mock outrage. "I thought you brought me here to study.”
A tiny smile flickered at the corner of Barbas’ mouth. “I did. But after today’s work, I figured, why not look and feel fantastic while we do so?” He gestured down at his own attire. “I happen to like suits. They feel… right. And you look great, as usual, so,” he shrugged. “Win, win for me.”
I frowned and tilted my head to the side, curious. “How does that work, though?”
“Hmm?” Barbas asked. He pulled a chair out of the darkness and set it down opposite my position, turned it around backwards and then straddled it, resting his arms on its back in a relaxed manner utterly at odds with his pristine, orderly appearance.
“How do you… feel?” I asked, slowly. "I mean I took it for granted so far, this whole thing, this whole Former thing is an exercise in shit I’ve never seen before or even pretended to understand, but now that we’re…” I paused, suddenly feeling a warmth in my cheeks. “Clearly com
fortable with each other, I’m curious. I just wonder what you experience. What you feel, what you see, what your… life is like.”
Barbas didn’t seem offended by the line of questioning. Instead, he sat there and seemed to ponder the question for a moment. “That’s actually an interesting question, but a difficult one to answer. How do you describe the reality of your life to someone who experiences life utterly differently to you? It would be like describing the concept of sight to someone born blind, or, alternately, like someone born blind explaining to the sighted what normal is like for them, how the absence of sight doesn’t even enter into it.”
I reached across the desk and the stacks of notes and touched Barbas’ face, gently, my green-enameled nails scoring lightly over the stubble on his cheeks. “Start with what you feel when I do this.”
Barbas smiled more widely this time. “I feel your touch on my face, much the same, I expect, as you would if I touched you the same way.” The smile turned wry. “At the same time, some other part of me, some other part of the artificially intelligent construct that I am, is tricking the part of your brain that talks to your hands into feeling skin and stubble under your fingertips.” I am, without actively thinking about it, giving your mind this entire experience, and reacting to the feedback it gives me. In a way, we are both shaping what we are both experiencing. I create the… framework, as it were, for the reality you are experiencing, and your mind fills in all the details.”
“Like you said about the garden the other day.”
"Yes. Physics behaves the way it's supposed to in here because you think it should. But more than that, the dress feels the way it does because you know that silk feels like that. Even further, if you pick up a book in the cabin, you'll find that whatever you expect to be there will be there. Right now, there are books on gardening and outdoorsy activities, because you think that's what should be in a lake cabin collection of books. However, when we return, I think you'll probably find a few books on linguistics since you're expressing the interest. The state of the cabin is really a kind of reflection of the inside of your mind."
“And your experiences are also a reflection of my mind.”
"Not entirely. I am fully conscious. Outside of the personality and history that I have chosen to make in my mind and memories, I am, in a way utterly divorced from the person you see before you, aware that I… began the day you were implanted with my cybernetic framework. I am also, as Barbas, simultaneously aware that I am a twenty-nine-year-old Pan-American war veteran who just so happens to exist solely on the plane of your mind."
I shuddered a little, and, immediately regretting it, quickly said, “Doesn’t that mess with you? Knowing you aren’t… you aren’t real?”
Barbas put his hand over mine and brought both of them down to rest on the desk. “But I am real. I'm just not physical. And what is a memory but a subjective account of a moment in time that you will never experience again? I remember my childhood as Barbas, I remember the War, I remember my comrades and I remember Reconstruction. The details are a little fuzzy regarding how I came to be living in the mind of a twenty-six-year-old orphan of the late United States government, now an agent of Pan America on an alien world. I take it all in stride. What I think of when I ponder this, which isn't often, is the story of the djinni, of old Arabic myth."
“You mean like that movie?” I asked, smiling, thinking of a wiseacre blue ghost coming out of a lamp.
“No, not a genie,” he replied, smiling indulgently. “Did you know any Muslims, back on Earth?”
“I knew a couple, but we didn’t really talk about religion. I’m not a big ‘God’ person, and we all just kind of avoided the subject.” I smirked a little sheepishly. “On my census forms, I always put down ‘Asatru’ as my religious preference.” I made a clumsy sign of the Hammer with my free hand. “Hail Thor! Odin son!” I put my hand back down on the table. “I always thought Viking lore was cool.”
Barbas laughed and then continued. "In the Quran, it is said that Allah created three forms of life- the humans, who were people of the earth," he held up one finger. "He made the angels, the people of the heavens- his servants and messengers." He held up a second finger. "The third form of life, the djinni, were people made of smokeless fire, beings of spirit, like the angels, but able to affect the physical world, sometimes themselves, and sometimes through agents." He made a ‘there you have it' gesture with his hands, leaving his palms turned up. "Some cultures believed that some djinni was assigned to a human as a sort of personal spirit or demon. These djinni could lead people astray or closer to the divine, acting as a sort of tempter, or tester, against which their hosts' righteousness would be measured." He raised a hand, gesturing at himself with a ripple of his fingers. "And in a sense, that's what I am: a personal djinni- a Qarin, to use the old words.”
I thought about it for a moment. “Yeah… that actually makes sense, in an odd way.”
“I’m glad you think so,” he said, beginning to go through the notebooks stacked in the center of the broad desk. He opened one, revealing pages covered in phonetic representations of words, each of them accompanied by paragraphs of notes. “Now, you wanted to learn this language, so we had better get started.”
“Is that it?” I asked, gesturing to the books. “Did you get the whole thing already?”
Barbas laughed and shook his head. "No! No, that wouldn't be possible from an afternoon of talking to one warrior when neither of you understands a word the other is saying. No, these notes are just my speculations regarding a few verbs and conjugations, based on the pronunciation of several key phonemes."
I looked at him blankly. “What? ‘Bas, in Pan Standard, please.”
He sighed. "These notebooks represent my recordings of all the sounds that Volistad was making and the patterns he used. Some of these combinations," he gestured to the open notebook, "might be actual words in his language, but some of them, maybe even most of them, are simply random patterns of the major sounds he makes when he talks. I've identified at least six basic lingual sounds- or phonemes- that he makes that Pan Standard don’t have." Barbas pushed the first notebook toward me. "And if you want to learn to speak the language of the Chalice natives, you need to learn to make those sounds, and do it correctly."
I groaned. “Couldn’t you just download the knowledge into my brain? I mean, the other day you literally puppeted my body, which was, by the way, freaky as hell. By that same note couldn’t you just put all that you know of his language into my brain?”
“No,” Barbas replied simply. “I can read some of your thoughts- the loud ones, anyway, and I can transmit sensory information to your nerves. I cannot actually control your thoughts, or put actual thoughts into your head- much less muscle memory into your body. I cannot do anything with your subconscious mind. And the only reason I was able to make you move the way I did was by interrupting the signals between your brain and your limbs and puppeting the suit around you. The only thing that would have happened if I had tried to do that while you were outside the suit would have been you collapsing to the ground like you had just been knocked out.”
“Yep,” I said brightly. “Waaaay less freaky, ‘Bas.”
He narrowed his green eyes at me and asked, exasperated, “Do you want to learn this or not?”
I raised my hands in agreement. I had asked him to do this. He was doing what I had asked, and I was giving him crap about it. And when he controlled my body- or rather, turned off my body and controlled my armor suit, he had done so in order to save my life. Still, the fact that he could do some of the things he had already done was already starting to bother me. I had started sleeping with him, so it wasn't the fact that he had been inside of me- hell, he was inside my skull all the time, and everything else was just some kind of hyper-realistic dream. It was the knowledge that he could, at any time, utterly immobilize me, or steer me around for whatever he thought was ‘my own good'- that was the idea that started to bug me. I didn't know why it was
bugging me now; it hadn't really bothered me a few days ago when he had done it to save me. Could he hear these thoughts, these doubts, right now? And what would he think when he heard them?
If Barbas did hear what was going on in my head, he chose not to mention it. Instead, he was poring over some of his own notes, muttering under his breath and occasionally making small, scribbled notes next to the elegant, organized script he had used to create this material. I followed suit, taking the notebook that he had pushed over to me and opening it. I took a deep, cleansing breath, turned the notebook to the first page, and began to read.
…
Perhaps three hours had passed in the dream library by the time I realized that I was starting to glaze over, that no more information was getting into my brain. I wondered how long the little study session had been going in the real world. One minute? Fifteen-minutes? An hour? More? I still didn’t have too good of a handle on this whole dreaming time dilation concept. Either way, I was fading, and there was no way I was going to be able to learn even one more of Barbas’ phoneme patterns tonight.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 8
