Fluency

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Blood rushed in Jane’s ears. She noticed a humming or buzzing in her head, barely perceptible at first. The pitch started as a soft, low clamor, climbed slowly, then crescendoed in a high-pitched, frenzied crash that would have knocked her down if she’d been holding herself upright against gravity. As it was, she just floated there with one hand gripping a hand-hold, bewildered.

  Was that panic, fear, or… what? She darted a glance back. Bergen wasn’t smiling anymore. Walsh stared straight ahead and didn’t meet her gaze.

  Minutes went by. Nothing happened. Had they come all this way for nothing? Were they being snubbed at the door? Still, they waited. No one spoke.

  She felt drowsy. Thoughts burbled slowly through her brain, not quite reaching their logical conclusions. How long had they waited? Jane’s eyes drifted shut and she jerked, sending herself spinning. She scrambled to make it look like it was intentional.

  Bergen extended an arm toward her, his brow furrowed. “Steady, Doc.”

  She wrapped her fingers around his arm and squeezed. She knew he couldn’t actually feel it, but that didn’t seem to matter.

  She heard a rumbling, metallic creak and righted herself quickly. What had appeared to be a solid wall parted into seven or eight subdivided, swirling pieces, retracting before she could count them. A momentary, faint puff of atmosphere blew her body back a few inches, but her grip on the handhold stabilized her. Inky blackness extended before her, with no hint of anything visible, no sound.

  “They have a flair for the dramatic, I’ll give them that,” Bergen muttered.

  She should have shushed him, reminded him of his training, but she was held captive, breathlessly waiting for something to happen.

  One tiny light flickered to life above her head, just inside the opening, casting a pale, greenish glow. She watched, transfixed, as another one came on just beyond it, then another and another. The small lights slowly brightened, one by one, beckoning down a long corridor.

  She gasped involuntarily. So much space. She wanted to run through that space like she’d run over beaches and fields and forest floors as a child. That was her first thought. Fast upon it came her second.

  There was no one there.

  2

  Bergen arrived just as the class was breaking up, uncomfortably pulling on the tie he knew was too messy and shrugging in the jacket that didn’t fit quite right. They’d sent him to Stanford to meet with a linguist named Jane Holloway, to talk her into coming to Texas for an interview.

  He’d told them to send someone else, but they were vetting eight other linguists at the same time and the pencil-pushers were busy. He’d done his undergrad at Stanford, they reasoned. They had something in common. Based on her profile, they insisted she was the most promising candidate and would be the easiest one to sell on the mission. Well, they were wrong.

  Two women stood behind the podium in the small lecture hall, engaged in a hushed but heated conversation. One, a well-upholstered blonde, was perfectly coifed and primly decked out like a librarian in a long, narrow navy skirt and matching tailored jacket. She had pearls at her throat and pumps on her feet. She broadcasted uptight law-student vibes. She was in the process of laying out an argument, though he couldn’t tell what they were discussing. He imagined it was a dispute over grades. She was probably terrified to take home a B to daddy. It really was too bad she wasn’t showing more leg.

  The other woman appeared to be standing her ground, but seemed taken aback, uncertain. She was more of a granola type. She must have grit in there somewhere, though, based on her file. She was trim, athletic; she looked good in tight jeans and hiking boots, that was for sure.

  This could be an interesting afternoon.

  It was an old-school name, Jane. It brought to mind all kinds of interesting word associations. He’d been wondering, the whole drive up from Pasadena, what kind of Jane she would turn out to be. Jane of the Jungle—that was for sure. He wouldn’t mind playing Tarzan to that Jane, but that would be pretty unprofessional and could screw up his chance of going on the mission. Not worth it.

  He cleared his throat to get her attention.

  Jane Goodall. Hm. Maybe. She’d lived all over the world, in a lot of remote places.

  She didn’t look much like a Calamity Jane, just now.

  Jane Fonda? Eh. Nope.

  The other chick would be more the voluptuous Jayne Mansfield type, if she’d just loosen up a bit.

  The throat clearing didn’t faze them, so he moved forward, extending his hand to the taller, dark-haired woman. He might as well rescue her. “Dr. Holloway. We spoke on the phone. Dr. Alan Bergen.”

  She seemed taken aback and shook limply.

  “People usually call me Berg,” he said nonchalantly.

  She shook her head and turned to the other woman for direction.

  “You do remember our appointment?” His gaze flicked to the blonde.

  The blonde beamed a bright, friendly smile at him, her lips coated in a dark raspberry shade that complemented her clear, rosy complexion and large, grey eyes. She stuck out her own hand and said cheerfully, “Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Bergen. I’m Jane Holloway. I’ll be right with you.” She ushered the young woman toward the nearest door. “Amy, let’s talk about this again on Friday after class, once you’ve had some time to think through what I’ve said, okay?”

  He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, feeling foolish for having made such a blunder. She was a professor—of course she dressed the part. Why had he expected her to look like she was about to set off on an expedition?

  He didn’t relish looking like a fool right off the bat when this interview was so important, but her expression didn’t betray a hint of reproach and she didn’t seem to be overly amused by the blunder, which was a relief. He made a mental note to berate whoever had neglected to put a photograph in her file.

  Holloway turned abruptly, the brilliant smile returning. “Okay, Dr. Alan Bergen, what’s this about? I assume you’re here to try to convince me to go out in the field again,” she said brusquely, gathering up a few things around the podium and heading for the door. He scrambled to join her as she called over her shoulder, “Are you with OTP, ELP, or one of the religious-affiliated organizations?”

  “OTP?”

  “Oral Traditions Project.” She stopped on a dime. His momentum kept him going for a moment, out of sync with her completely. She scrutinized him skeptically. “You don’t know what OTP is? Who are you? You’re not a linguist, are you?”

  He huffed. “No. I’m an engineer.”

  Her expression became troubled and she gazed at him like he’d sprouted a horn in the middle of his forehead. “An engineer?”

  “Yes. Aeronautics. I did my undergrad here, actually. Only set foot in this building once, I believe, before today.”

  “What do you want with me?” She seemed perplexed, but resumed her forward bustle. He followed her down a few flights of stairs and she finally stopped moving once she reached a claustrophobically tiny office. The space was crowded with a desk, credenza, and three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, jammed neatly with books. An enormous, half-dead tropical plant was propped against the door, holding it open. The single unoccupied chair in the room did not look like it afforded the kind of leg room he needed.

  The situation set his teeth on edge. He was completely out of his element. His suspicion that NASA had set up this little side-mission as a clever way to test him grew exponentially. “Well, it’s not me, obviously. It’s the government.”

  She moved a stack of books from the chair to a corner of her desk and gestured for him to have a seat. “Our government has no interest in nearly extinct languages. They barely have a grasp on the one they use.”

  A laugh burst from him. Was she trying to be funny? Her narrowed eyes refuted that hypothesis. “No, I guess they don’t. This would be a unique opportunity—something no one’s done before.”

  She settled herself behind the desk and finally shifted all her attention
to him. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  He had no desire to be shut up in that nanoscale room and couldn’t see his way to smoothly shutting the door with that damn monster plant in the way, anyway. The hallway outside was busy with loitering students who might overhear. This was the part he was uncomfortable with—how to get Holloway to Houston without exposing too much. Finesse was not something he excelled at.

  He thumbed behind himself. “Why don’t we go get some coffee? Talk about this someplace more private. You said on the phone that you had a couple of hours free.”

  She drew herself up, her palms flat on the desk, a quizzical look on her face. “Let me get this straight. You’re an aeronautics engineer who wants to talk to me, alone, about a unique opportunity to work for the U.S. government?”

  He folded his arms and leaned back against the door jam, shrugging. “Yep.”

  “Your ID, sir?”

  He hesitated.

  She was expectant, cooler, more business-like. “You must have some kind of government ID.”

  He pulled out his wallet and forked over the ID.

  “JPL? NASA?” She looked intrigued.

  “Jet Propulsion Labs.” He added, nodding enthusiastically, “It gets weirder.”

  That seemed to settle it for her. She tapped his ID on the edge of her desk a couple of times, eyeing him thoughtfully. Then she grabbed a purse, deftly pulled out a set of keys, and brushed past him, keeping his card just out of reach.

  She crossed the hall and stuck her head into another office. “Sam? I’m off to have coffee with an enigmatic engineer. If I’m not back by four to reclaim his credentials, please use this to track down my killer.”

  She disappeared inside. Muffled laughter and whispers emanated from the room. He held back, completely off-balance.

  She reappeared, without his card, and broadcast a warm smile. “I’ll drive.”

  She had good taste in coffee. The shop was busy, so they got the coffee to go, got back in her car, and drove off. She drove away from campus and pulled over at the entrance to the Stanford Arboretum. Her instincts were good. There were no other cars.

  “So how many languages do you speak?” he asked, an attempt at small talk as they strolled down a neglected, overgrown path.

  “A lot more than most people. How many do you speak?” Her eyebrows were raised and her tone was teasing.

  “Some people might argue that engineering terminology is a language all on its own,” he countered, aiming for a joke. It fell short.

  Her lips curved in amusement. “I wouldn’t be one of those people.”

  “Just the one, then.”

  She nodded and sat down on the steps in front of an ancient mausoleum, taking a sip of her coffee. “I feel like I should apologize for not noticing your arrival sooner. I’d just been blindsided. My most promising student just announced her intention to take off across country to get married and have babies before finishing her degree.”

  “Oh,” he said, frowning.

  Concern deepened the creases around her eyes. “That might have been a make or break moment in her career.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t have the drive.”

  She shook her head. “What she doesn’t have is confidence in her own abilities—a problem afflicting a great deal of American women, unfortunately. It makes it too easy for them to make choices they’ll regret later. How many women work with you at JPL? Is it split 50/50?”

  He furrowed his brow under her questioning gaze. He’d heard colleagues talk about the difficulties in recruitment, but he’d never given the topic much thought.

  “And the women you do work with—are they any less capable?”

  He glanced at her and realized she didn’t expect an answer.

  “Okay, Dr. Bergen. There’s no one for miles, as far as I can tell. I think we can drop the cloak and dagger act. Tell me why you’re here to talk to me today.”

  He stood there, awkwardly, unsure of where to begin. “Well, you know a lot of this stuff is classified, so I’m going to have to ask you to sign a nondisclosure agreement before I leave.”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  He never got to talk about work outside of the JPL compound except in the broadest of terms, so this was going to be a rare treat. He decided to just launch straight into it. “In 1964, the first Mars probe, Mariner 4, captured something unexpected in a handful of its photographs. There was an unknown object in the Greater Asteroid Belt. That object turned out to be an alien spaceship.”

  He paused to see how she would react to that statement. She appeared to be taken aback for just a moment, then quickly brought herself under control.

  His hand went reflexively to the back of his neck. The jacket pulled tight across his shoulders and through the arm. He was getting too warm, so he slipped it off and took a swig of coffee. “They weren’t that surprised to find it, really. They’d seen one alien craft before. That’s my job, actually. I head a team that analyzes the remains of a ship that crashed in the desert in 1947—at Roswell.”

  He probably shouldn’t have told her that. “Since then, every Mars mission’s real purpose is to get more images of that ship. Hell, that’s why they built Hubble, just to keep an eye on it. We call it the Target. Oh, they analyzed soil samples on Mars, ran atmospheric studies, et cetera, but every probe, rover, and satellite packed the highest quality photographic equipment of its era, for surveillance purposes.”

  She nodded slowly, like she was digesting that information, and took a long pull from her coffee.

  He rubbed his hands together. “There aren’t too many people who know about it, but I’m sure you can imagine—everybody that does has got a theory about the ship and why it’s there. Some think it’s a relay station for some kind of communication network. Others think it’s watching Earth from a safe distance—that kind of speculation kicks everyone’s paranoia into high gear. Quite a few, myself included, think it’s abandoned. Here’s what we do know: in over sixty years of near-constant observation, the Target has never moved under its own power. It has maintained a stable orbit with no apparent outside interference. We haven’t observed a single resupply.”

  She seemed expectant, curious, so he kept talking. He was pretty sure he was giving up more information than he should. “There’ve been long-term plans to send a mission to the Target for decades. They couldn’t send anyone in 1964. We hadn’t even walked on the Moon yet—but let me tell you, that jump-started things. Forget the Cold War and the Russians. This has always been about the Target.

  “They set small goals, in order to develop and master the technology that’d be needed. Each disaster was a huge setback—Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. The Target wasn’t going anywhere, so they kept pushing things back. Just to explain the scale we’re talking about here, Dr. Holloway—Mars is anywhere from 30 to 250 million miles away depending on how the orbits line up. On a good day, the Target is 185 million miles away, minimum.”

  Her eyebrows shot up.

  “Yeah. So, while any kind of mission into space is inherently dangerous, they didn’t want this to be a guaranteed one-way trip. So, they waited. But we can’t put it off anymore. We have to go now.”

  “Why now?”

  He sighed and sat down on the step next to her. “A NASA astronomer recently discovered there’s an asteroid on a collision course with the ship. The asteroid’s got an unusual orbit, thrown off by Jupiter’s gravitational pull. Earth’s orbit and the Target’s orbit only line up every 28 months, so we’ve got two shots, just two launch windows, before it’s obliterated. NASA wants you for the first mission, the Alpha Mission, to assess what’s there. If necessary, they’ll send a second mission to tow the Target into one of the Lagrangian points for further study.”

  “Why not just let the asteroid call their bluff, if someone’s there? Doesn’t that eliminate the threat?”

  “The threat’s only a small part of this. It’s the fucking holy grail of technology and knowledge about what else i
s out there in the universe. We need to bring this thing home and spend lifetimes studying it, reverse-engineering it.” He shrugged. His enthusiasm was showing.

  She smiled a half smile and scrutinized him with an inquisitive look, “Well, that is some incredible story. Tell me what this means to me, exactly. Why is NASA looking for linguists? Why me?”

  “I would think the need for a linguist is obvious. We need someone who can attempt to communicate with whoever or whatever is there, if there is someone there. And if there isn’t… well, there’s still going to be the need to decipher and document a new language. The focus has been on finding a linguist who has actual field experience learning languages from scratch.”

  “It’s called a monolingual field situation, a scenario where there’s no common language to build from. It’s pretty rare. On Earth, anyway.” She shook her head and blinked, for the first time showing disbelief.

  “You’re one of the very few who’s done this kind of thing before. Under some pretty difficult circumstances.”

  She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Yes. I have.” She rose and started walking again.

  He followed. Something had changed. Her mood was different. The curious, teasing air had evaporated. Now she seemed serious, almost melancholy. She paused in front of a creepy, marble monument surrounded by rusted wrought iron and a sea of broken black and white tiles. It towered over the two of them. Probably seven feet tall, it depicted an angel, kneeling upon a funeral altar, shrouded by its wings, head buried in its arms, weeping. It made something prickle in the back of his brainpan, and he didn’t want to turn his back on it when Holloway moved on.

  “So, when should I tell them to arrange the flight for you?” he called after her.

  She stopped and turned, an incredulous look on her face. “What?”

  “To Houston—the Johnson Space Center—for the interviews. You’re the top candidate. There won’t be much competition. It sounds like it’s yours, really.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. He shouldn’t have said that—but it was true—so, what the hell.