Fluency

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Bergen was miffed.

  “He was just as surprised as you are, Dr. Walsh,” Jane put in.

  “Would it have killed you to throw something in here to test for it?” Walsh groused.

  “What should I have thrown?” Bergen countered. “This million-dollar instrument or that—”

  Jane placed her gloved hand on the side of his face shield and he went quiet, visibly stewing.

  “Oh, man—that was a rush!” Gibbs sprung up suddenly, his startled dark-skinned face looming close to the opening before he fell back toward the floor and jounced around, out of control—at one point landing squarely on Walsh’s abdomen.

  Walsh let out an “oof,” and scrambled back. “Son of a—someone’s playing around with the settings on this gravity-thing and it’s not funny!”

  Bergen pulled closer, clearly intrigued. “What’s going on in there?”

  “A bouncy-house comes to mind,” Gibbs said, grinning. He righted himself and took unsteady, springy steps back toward the opening, his smiling face bobbing in and out of view. He gestured at Compton. “Ha! Come on in, Pops. Tell us how this compares to the Moon.”

  Compton, always good-natured, snorted. He’d never been on a lunar mission, but had been selected for the astronaut program late in the Apollo era.

  “You okay, Ronald?” Varma asked.

  “Oh, fine, fine.” Gibbs chuckled softly and glanced back at Walsh, who was getting to his feet. “Walsh broke my fall. It felt like a lot more than one G when we fell in. Now it feels like a lot less. It just changed on a dime.” Gibbs would have a feel for the transition if anyone would. He’d been back and forth to the International Space Station three times in his career.

  “Huh,” Bergen uttered, his eyes roving back and forth, analyzing what that might mean about the technology, Jane supposed.

  “They must be observing us,” Jane whispered. She turned to Bergen. “They don’t know what to expect from us any more than we know what to expect from them. They adjusted the gravity when they saw it distressed us—it was a friendly gesture.”

  Bergen looked unnerved. “Either that, or they’re enjoying toying with us.”

  Gibbs’s smile faded. “I like Jane’s idea better.”

  “Me too,” said Varma. She hovered on the lip of the opening, ready to slide in to check on her charges. “Commander, do we move forward now, or regroup?”

  Walsh’s expression was grim. He turned away from the capsule. He raised his pistol. “Forward.”

  One by one they slipped inside, springing uncertainly, cautiously, like kids on their first trampoline, down the hall. Jane reveled in the feeling of gravity tugging on her again, even though the effect was small. She could feel the long muscles in her legs stretching in a way only gravity could replicate and wished she could get out of the suit so she could fully enjoy it.

  She was a little unsteady, a little dizzy, and had some trouble heading in a straight line, but that was expected after such a long exposure to microgravity. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. She’d been told that some astronauts had trouble walking, turning, focusing their gaze.

  Gibbs paused in front of her, made an about-face, and sketched a salute at Compton. “Keep the motor runnin’, the home fires burnin’, and all that jazz, Pops.”

  Compton raised his left hand solemnly. His right hand held his gun.

  They reached the end of the illuminated section of corridor and found that it turned and continued from there into the dark forty-five degrees to the right. As Walsh reached that point, the lights came on in this new section, individually, one by one, revealing a passageway dotted with doors. Jane counted five doors over the next thirty yards. Each door was taller and wider than human scale and segmented into thick, horizontal bars.

  “Anybody else feel like Hansel and Gretel?” Gibbs joked.

  Bergen rolled his eyes. “Birds ate the trail they left.”

  “Didn’t a witch try to eat Hansel and Gretel?” Varma asked. She seemed to realize her gaffe and sent Jane a pleading look. “I wasn’t raised on those fairy tales, you know.”

  Walsh ignored the fairy-tale talk and motioned to Jane, pointing at the wall. “Dr. Holloway, you’re up.”

  Next to the first door he’d come to, there were two complex geometric symbols at eye level. She moved forward to examine them closely and record an image with her digital camera. They were heavily stylized, embossed into the smooth surface of the wall. Something told her they were more than just labels.

  “These were not among the symbols I was shown from the crashed ship in New Mexico. But, based on their location, I think I can deduce—” She pressed the top symbol with a light touch and the door slid virtually soundlessly into the ceiling.

  Walsh moved past her in full military mode, pistol drawn. As he crossed the threshold, the lights in the floor of the room lit up. It was cavernous, subdivided from floor to ceiling by stacks of what appeared to be large plastic crates in meandering rows. It was a storage room.

  Gibbs whistled softly, the sound resonating eerily over the comm. “Damn. Gives new meaning to the word ‘payload,’ that’s for sure.”

  Walsh took long, bounding strides down an aisle. The rest of them filed in. Walsh peered at a symbol stamped into the side of a crate and beckoned to Jane. She snapped a picture of it.

  Bergen waved a small, noisy instrument around a crate. “It’s not radioactive.”

  “The exterior of the container is not radioactive,” Walsh corrected.

  Bergen rolled his eyes.

  Gibbs ambled down an aisle nearby, studiously examining the symbols on the crates. “Jane? Am I seeing this right? Are the symbols on all of these containers the same?”

  Jane hopped over to Gibbs in a few short bursts. She gamboled with him down the aisle for a bit, examining the symbols. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Every symbol on these containers is the same. I have no idea what it means, of course,” she added, in case they were expecting a miraculous insight from her. “Yet.”

  They turned back to join the others. Walsh had gone deeper into the room. Bergen and Varma lingered near the room’s entrance.

  “Will you look at that,” Bergen muttered. Jane turned more fully toward him in time to see him digging his fingers into a recess on the crate nearest the door and lifting up. The top of the container came off.

  “Dr. Bergen!” Varma exclaimed.

  Gibbs made a wry face. “Berg, dude—Walsh isn’t gonna like that you did that.”

  Bergen ignored that and shone his flashlight inside the container. Then he waved the Geiger counter around inside it.

  “Walsh isn’t going to like what?” Walsh’s voice boomed over the comm. Jane turned to see Walsh moving quickly back toward them down the aisle.

  Jane had to agree. These things didn’t belong to them. They hadn’t been invited to examine them. And yet, she shared Bergen’s curiosity and went forward to inspect the contents herself.

  Bergen lifted a corner of the crate experimentally. Dull, sandy-colored crystals shifted to one side.

  Jane wrinkled her nose in bewilderment. Cat litter came to mind.

  “Some kind of mineral ore? A mining operation?” Bergen murmured. He was already scooping up a sample in a small vial and bagging it.

  Walsh stormed up. “Bergen, goddamnit!”

  Bergen didn’t even look up. “Relax. The seal on this one was already broken. We haven’t been exposed to anything. We’re all wearing suits. It’s not radioactive.”

  “We have protocols for a reason. Disregard them again and you’ll spend the rest of the mission guarding the capsule.”

  Bergen’s lips pressed together and he glared at Walsh. “Noted.”

  They filed out silently at Walsh’s gesture.

  Jane moved back into the hall and turned to examine the symbols outside the door again. She pressed the top one, to see if a second touch would close the door. Nothing happened. She pressed the bottom symbol. The door shut with a whisper and barely per
ceptible thud.

  She left her fingers resting next to the symbols for a moment, mentally making a connection between the images and the concepts of “open” and “close” as well as probing within for hidden links to other languages, a practiced mental exercise.

  Abruptly, she could see meaning within the pattern. Comprehension breathed life within her mind—open and close, unlocked from somewhere inside.

  She stumbled back. Her boot caught. She fell on her rump at Gibbs’s feet.

  “Jane?”

  Gibbs lifted her by the arm. She swayed in his grasp, gaping at the symbols that now meant far more.

  She could see into them, like a hologram.

  Open… vastness, yawning… fresh and exposed, loose, lifting up and out, unfurling… expanding, stars and light… communing… forever without end…

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  Her eyes drifted down. A new experience.

  Close… barrier, block… tightly cover, conceal, seal and lock… stifle… dark… inaccessible… halting… murderous, fence, trap, end… End?

  She shuddered and tore her eyes away.

  “Jane, what is it?” Bergen’s helmet skittered over hers, pressing her back into Gibbs.

  She closed her eyes. Her whole body trembled. Couldn’t they see it too?

  The hum was back and it was stronger. There was an unmistakable sensation of vibration and movement. Were there actual bees inside her head?

  Her own thoughts were mired while something else—something that was not her—zipped with glee, probing, searching… Her brain pulsed in response.

  Her limbs were heavy. She wanted to lie down.

  She felt drunk.

  She recalled the first time she’d ever been tipsy with sudden clarity. The bees latched onto that, pushed her toward the memory.

  Control spun away. She went along as an observer.

  She was nine. They were living in Belize. No tourists had come in rumbling, rusty, buses that day to hike the trails. It was a rare free day.

  Jane batted away a slow-flying insect and looked up from the tattered, yellowed paperback that a tall German woman had carelessly left behind the day before. It was a book by a guy named Sagan, about a girl who was smart and curious, just like her.

  She was bored. The daily rain shower would begin soon and she’d be cooped up in the casita for the rest of the afternoon, reading or playing chess.

  Where had her parents gone? They were probably giggling under some tree somewhere. She sighed heavily. She didn’t like it when they left her alone, but they’d come if she yelled and then she’d get a lecture about crying wolf.

  She sat down on the dusty, worn boards in the doorway, fingering the wide cracks, smoothed over by time. She thought she heard a quiet “kyow,” the tell-tale sound of a quetzal in the neighborhood, and picked up her binoculars, scanning the canopy for signs of the bird—its red breast and long, flicking green tail—then the undergrowth for signs of her wayward parents. She saw movement, but that was the cow.

  They said they were trying to make her a baby brother or sister to keep her company, but they’d been saying that for a long time and it hadn’t happened yet. She didn’t see what the big deal was. Why did they need to be alone to do that? It’s not like she hadn’t watched them before when they thought she was sleeping. She’d teased them that they sounded like monkeys.

  She eyed the bottle of clear guaro they kept up on the high shelf. Grown-up drinks, grown-up sex, grown-up stuff was just silly stuff they didn’t want to share. She pulled a chair over to the single wall-mounted cabinet and captured the nearly full bottle. She’d show them. She sloshed it into her small, plastic cup and gave it a taste.

  Ugh. Terrible stuff. But it was warm going down and that was nice. Interesting sensation, actually. She coughed a little and took a more cautious sip and then another. It was a little sweet. It was sharp. Not so different from spicy food and she liked that fine.

  She decided she was mature enough to get it down and turned on the radio. Mom liked to dance to mariachi music when she drank this stuff. By the time her parents got back, arms around each other, smiling, she was smiling too and humming along.

  Humming. Droning. Vibrating.

  It wants something.

  Voices battered against her ears, yanking her back to see Varma, Bergen, Walsh and Gibbs crowded around her.

  She asked them, “Do you see the symbols too? Do you hear the bees? Can you feel them moving? What do they want?”

  “She’s delusional,” Varma murmured. “The stress—”

  “She saved the lives of two men in the goddamn Amazon when she had malaria—this isn’t stress,” Bergen bellowed.

  “We all know her record, Berg,” Walsh said, gruff as usual.

  “She hasn’t been sleeping well for a long time.” That was Gibbs.

  “None of us have—shut up!” Bergen lashed out.

  “It’s not me. It’s something in the ship. I’m fighting…”

  “Fighting what, Jane?”

  She let out a strangled laugh. “Bees? I don’t know. I’m…”

  No. She would not say that.

  What if she gave them what they wanted? Could she appease them? She gazed into the consternated faces of her colleagues, unsure.

  This is completely insane. Am I dreaming?

  There were no options. She closed her eyes and she was back there again, inhabiting her own child-mind with adult eyes.

  Her parents’ faces fell, simultaneously.

  Her mother gathered her up. “Janey—what’s going on?”

  She snorted with laughter that turned into whooping belly laughs. She bounced around within Mama’s grasp and captured her hands. She felt dizzy like she’d been spinning too long and happy, happy, happy. Couldn’t they tell? “I’m dancing. Let’s dance.”

  “Kevin, turn off the radio.”

  Uh-oh. Serious voices. She went still, staring. “Why are you mad at Daddy?”

  “I’m not. Jane, did you drink this?” Mama was pointing at her cup and the bottle of guaro nearby. Daddy seemed sick. He picked up the bottle and sat down heavily in a chair.

  “Ha-ha—you’re just mad ‘cause I tried your grown-up stuff! I like it. It’s good. Next time we go to town, I want to buy some juice. I bet it’d be good to mix it up together!”

  Her mother looked stricken. “Jane, this isn’t good for children. You’re going to feel sick soon.”

  But she didn’t. She just kept feeling good until she felt warm and sleepy, curled up on Daddy’s lap. They kept telling her it was bad, but she didn’t believe them. She dozed off and woke later when she heard them talking, but she stayed quiet in Daddy’s arms, listening drowsily.

  “Dump it out, Hailey,” Daddy said softly.

  “Kev, it’s okay,” Mama soothed.

  “She likes it,” he choked out.

  “She’s nine. She likes every new experience. She’ll forget about it.”

  “What if she doesn’t? What if—?” He squeezed Jane tighter.

  Mama’s voice went very soft, barely above a whisper, but urgent, “She’s not going to be like your mom, Kev. We won’t let it happen.”

  “No. Pour it out. Not… no.”

  There was a sound of liquid splashing in the dust, just outside the door. Then Mama spoke again. “You know, I’ve been thinking. We should move on, find a place where there’s a school, kids her age to play with. Those Swedes last week were talking about snorkeling in the coral reefs in Australia. We have some money saved. We were both lifeguards—we could do that. It’s a tropical paradise, they said. Cost of living’s not bad, they said.”

  “Jane wouldn’t learn another language there.”

  “Not from the locals. Tourists love to talk to her, though.”

  He kissed the top of Jane’s head. “Yeah. They do.”

  She felt warm and safe in his embrace. She didn’t want it to ever end.

  She’d never remembered this part of it before, and no
ne of it with such detail. It was a gift. But she wanted to squeeze him back, tell him things she hadn’t known how to say as a child, warn him that Australia was not the right choice.

  She wanted to change it. She ached to save him.

  Her parents had gotten quiet, then, and she had dozed off.

  The memory faded away.

  But she was still there, in the casita.

  What had that accomplished? There was no tranquility in this silence. Only pain and heartbreaking loneliness.

  Into the roaring stillness of the tiny one-room shack, Jane cried, “Is this what you want? Are you trying to hurt me?”

  “No,” a low-pitched voice buzzed softly.

  It didn’t come from the room around her. It came from inside her head.

  She jumped with dismay. Her mother and father were gone. She could never have them back again like that. The thought made her chest ache.

  She stood in the middle of the room, in the orange EMU, the umbilicus trailing out the solitary door into the rain forest. She could hear the raucous chatter of howler monkeys reaching a climax outside. Something they didn’t like was encroaching on their territory.

  Jane felt the same way.

  She cast around. It was the same faded turquoise walls made of thick planks; the same rough wooden table; the same mismatched, rickety chairs; the same sagging straw bed and small trundle bed shoved underneath. Even Rainbow Bright smiled back at her from the small plastic cup.

  Tears stung her eyes. She refused to shed them, blinking them back. “Show yourself.”

  “I regret that I cannot, Dr. Jane Holloway.”

  She quailed. It knows my name?

  The voice was rich and resonant—it conveyed the impression of male gender, though she knew it could be a mistake to make such assumptions. It created a vibrating sensation in her head when it spoke and that seemed odd.

  Because she liked it, too.

  “Why?” There was anguish in her voice. Damn it. She steeled herself and drew an angry breath. Stay dispassionate, Jane.

  “It is a simple matter. My form would be incongruous in your perceived environment.”

  What? What’s that supposed to mean?

  She stood tall and stiff, demanding, “What do you want from me?”