Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  Of course, Sophie’s goosebumps might have been from the thrill of getting her eyes on all this alien stuff. Her hands were curled into self-conscious fists at her sides, aching for an invitation to touch something. She turned her head every way, absorbed in the alien technological landscape. Talis could see the flame of her curiosity, rather than satisfied by the visit, had been fed enough tinder to burn wild.

  “This, counterpart, ship master,” said the alien to their right, sweeping its arm to indicate the being in the command seat. It spoke something else, but the translator pad stayed silent.

  Was that a name? Talis wasn’t sure she could ever mimic the simultaneous clicks and thumping throat noises, even with repeated practice.

  Desperate to make a good impression despite her overwhelming desire to run from that place, she found herself unable to think of simple things like words and sentences. Assuming the translator pads were going to interpret them properly. Remembering the strange bow the aliens made when they parted ways the day before, she turned to the captain and touched the notch at the base of her throat and then her forehead.

  The captain looked sharply to the alien with the tablet, who motioned for Talis to stop.

  “That gesture: not greeting.”

  “My apologies, I should not have presumed.”

  She sincerely hoped she would not spend all her time aboard this unsettling ship being admonished for cultural missteps. At least her capacity to speak had returned.

  “Do like,” it replied, and then crossed its hands at the wrists, folded its elbows in a way that Talis doubted her own joints could allow, and bowed its head.

  Talis began to move, expecting to completely botch the unnatural gesture, but another rustling from the alien captain stopped her again. It unfolded its limbs and rose from its bowl to walk toward their group. It was taller than the others.

  “Not that one, either,” it said.

  In the Common Trade tongue.

  The translator tablet spat it back out in the alien language. At a motion from their captain, the Yu’Nyun crew member holding the device silenced it and stepped away.

  Talis’s heart was in her throat, but she swallowed it back where it lodged out of place along her gullet. She focused on trying to fight the muscles in her face, to keep the surprise from being so wretchedly obvious. The alien captain’s speech was accented with clicks, hisses, and other noises she didn’t have words for. But it was clear.

  The alien stopped an arm’s length in front of them. The four aliens who had guided them through the ship stepped back as though repelled by an invisible force.

  “Captain Talis,” the captain said, bowing its head in a sideways tilt. “Allow me to apologize for the confusion. The gesture you were about to perform was that of subordinate, and of course as commanders each of our own ship, I consider us quite equal.”

  Talis swallowed again, mind racing to find something—anything—to say in a dignified response to the Yu’Nyun captain.

  Sophie stepped out from behind Talis, then repeated the gesture they had been shown. Even managed the angle in her elbows. The alien inclined its head slightly at her. No objections.

  Bless her five times, Talis thought, and, with some progress being made toward a proper conversation, she found her voice.

  “Captain, it is a pleasure to meet you.” Lie. “I am impressed by your grasp of our language.” No lie there. Her formal tone surprised her, but then again, her usual smuggler’s dialect could likely cause offense across cultural barriers. Something about the alien captain’s grasp of the Common Tongue put her on guard, made her careful of her word choice.

  “You flatter me,” the alien replied. “It is a challenging language. The sounds are… well, you hear that they are quite different from our language.”

  “That’s why I’m quite amazed at how well you manage it.”

  “Perhaps one day you will learn our language yourself. I am sure you will exceed my skill if you try.”

  “I would certainly give it my best,” she said.

  This was the most transparent lie yet. After she helped them complete their mission, they could return to the vacuum beyond Peridot’s outer atmo and she’d gladly give their collective rumps a good smack to see them off.

  The captain walked toward the fore of the bridge, the bulkhead of which was dominated by a large window. Talis admired the dizzying view at the top, where no lift balloon impeded their sight. It was after a slight delay that she remembered that the Yu’Nyun ship had no forward viewport. Certainly not of that size. The porthole was, it seemed, an enormous display screen. But unlike the grainy, monochromatic images that passed through the tiny Pre-Cataclysm devices Talis had seen in various temples, precious ’tronics used only to communicate with The Divine Alchemists, the Yu’Nyun ship had one so large and so advanced that they were looking outside the ship as clearly as though they looked through glass.

  She had allowed herself to assume they were in the very forward cabin of the starship, but now realized the projection of an outside scene might come to them anywhere within the belly of the silver beast. The whole vessel made about as much sense as ballast on a boulder.

  “Peridot is quite fascinating to my people,” the captain said, waving one hand vaguely at the scene displayed. “There are very few fragmented planets that we have come to, and no others are home to life.”

  “I hear you’ve gathered a lot of knowledge from across the world,” Talis said, not sure what else to say. “You are likely better educated on the subject than we are.”

  The alien made a small scraping noise in its throat, and Talis twitched involuntarily. It said, “It may well be fair to say that, though as you know we still have questions. We do wish to express our utmost appreciation for your cooperation.”

  “The contract price is a fair expression of your gratitude.” By which she meant, Let’s not forget about that second payment with all this talk of cooperation.

  “Such trivial matters are handled by our Representative of Commerce,” the commander said, almost dismissively.

  Talis smiled. “Would that be the individual I met yesterday?”

  The alien captain bobbed its head and wiggled its fingers as though pressing keys on an invisible piano. “You will meet that Representative again. Let us not dwell on such banalities. I am excited for the coming travel. Have you prepared our course?”

  Sophie hurried to remove the tube that she wore slung over her shoulder.

  Talis nodded and gestured to her. “This is Sophie, our engineer and navigator. May we spread our charts out somewhere?”

  There was a shuffle of alien bodies across the deck, as several seats were cleared at the workstations along the wall. Sophie unrolled the vellum navigation charts across flat glossy control panels that had gone dark at their approach. She fished lead weights from her pockets and placed them in each corner so they didn’t curl back in.

  Talis and the alien captain, joined by two of the bridge crew, gathered around the hand-illustrated charts of Peridot’s skies. There were vellum sheets for both the Cutter and Bone sides of the border that cut through the region, and one chart that was drawn with the current border centered. This last was on top of the pile. Talis smoothed them so that the sheets beneath showed through the top, and adjusted the alignment so they formed one continuous map. Borders from abandoned treaties showed to either side of the latest version. Shipping winds flowed in dotted light gray lines along their fixed dextral courses.

  “We can sneak across the border here.” She put an index finger on the point where a storm center was marked near the dashed line that defined the territory’s edge, halfway between two stations indicated on the Cutter side.

  “‘Sneak’?” The commander tried the word out, with a heavier accent than the rest of its speech, and looked to her. “This word is new to me.”

  “Our territory bo
rders are disputed,” she explained. “There are stations where ships are inspected prior to moving between Cutter and Bone space.”

  “And you believe we would be prevented from entering?”

  “Not you,” said Talis. “From what’s told on the docks, the authorities give you leave to go where you like. But I’m pretty certain our mutual friend, Captain Hankirk, will have sent out an alert that my crew and my ship are not to be permitted passage out of Cutter space. He will have significantly less ability to pursue us once we cross into another territory. Additionally, there is a member of my crew who might encounter trouble on the Bone side, at their crossing station. Passing at this point—traveling through the storm that forces the two nearest checkpoints farther apart—would let us ‘sneak’ through, as I said, without being detected or detained.”

  “I see,” said the commander, and though its face was rigid as a fibernut shell, Talis could tell it was amused. “Sneak. We have a similar concept.”

  The alien said a word in its own language, which sounded like a small army of chickens tripping over each other in a patch of gravel.

  It looked at her, and she realized she was being offered the word to try on her own. As if somehow she could speak from three parts of her anatomy simultaneously.

  She gave it an honest effort, aware of the otherwise silent bridge, and winced at how unlike the model it sounded.

  The alien repeated the word, with its guttural purrs, clacking vibrato, and overlaying hiss. Meaning clearly that she should try again. She felt a bit like a schoolchild being singled out in class for a mistake. But after a few tries they settled on a pronunciation she could handle.

  That’s if she could remember it.

  “Admirable, Captain Talis,” the alien said, quite politely.

  Patronizing her. She would need at least several new bones in her jaw and an extra throat to pronounce the tri-part language, but she thanked the commander for the lesson.

  Satisfied, it returned its attention to the navigation charts.

  “As to the matter of the border passage, I would prefer to avoid the storm and rejoin you on the other side. As you say, no one has impeded our travels before.”

  “If you haven’t been through a storm center yet,” Talis suggested, “it’s quite the experience.”

  “We have,” said the alien, “and it was. Our ship’s systems are impaired in such places. The charged ions in the cloud render our systems unreliable.”

  Talis tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her ear and nodded. It was no disappointment to her. If they didn’t have to fly with the aliens at their backside, so much the better.

  “Fair enough. All right, let’s meet… here.” She pointed to a location just off the edge of Fall Island.

  “Agreed,” said the commander.

  At a gesture, a bridge officer nodded to the commander and entered the information on a live display nearby.

  “When should we expect you to arrive?”

  “About three days, assuming we don’t run into trouble.”

  “We will meet you at your chosen location in three days, then.”

  Sophie caught Talis’s eye and made a small tilt of her head paired with raised eyebrows. Talis remembered what she’d promised the girl.

  “But say we do happen to run into a border patrol,” Talis said, trying to keep it casual, “is there any way we could ­contact you?”

  “Of course,” said the commander, sounding pleased. “We ought to have provided you a means to contact us yesterday.”

  The commander made a gesture with its hand.

  Talis saw Sophie’s shoulders twitch. At least the girl didn’t hop and clap her hands. Admirable restraint. To cover her excitement, she busied herself with rolling up her charts and stowing them.

  A new Yu’Nyun approached with one of the glossy black tablets. This one was dressed at a level of simplicity on par with the four ship escorts but in fabric far more detailed than that of even the bridge crew.

  The alien captain introduced the newcomer, sounding a name with a long breath’s worth of hisses around a clacking consonant at its core.

  Talis inclined her head, and the named alien returned the gesture. It clasped the pad to its thorax, hands crossed over it.

  A suspicion occurred to Talis, and she did not like it. The captain spoke again, confirming her fears.

  “Xe is a skilled interpreter, Captain Talis, as well as a scholar of linguistics. It was xe who provided my education in the local dialect. Xe has read more books from the local cultures than even I, and has interviewed many of the indigenous people during our explorations. Perhaps while you travel, xe will be able to assist in your edification of our language.”

  Words, in any language, drained from her. She had a tiny distracted thought that the aliens had finally made some indication of gender, though she had no idea how ‘xe’ might parallel to anything she was familiar with. But mostly her mind was consumed with the desire to run from the bridge before they could install any more emissaries on her ship.

  She had promised her crew—promised herself—that the aliens would be only a shadow in their wake as they traveled. She inwardly cursed at not having been more direct with her request for a tablet.

  “Forgive me, Captain, but I’m afraid our ship may not be well-suited to hosting your officer. I would be loath to insult—” She caught on the pronoun, unsure of how to shift its use. “—Yu’Nyun sensibilities with our poor accommodations.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” spoke the alien in question. “However, I have traveled in your people’s aircraft on several occasions and am accustomed to their design. I assure you, the underground cities of the Rakkar are far less accommodating, and I was delighted to be hosted even in their spaces.” The words flowed with the cadence of a poem, and betrayed only a whisper of an accent. Scholar of linguistics, indeed.

  No protest would pass, she realized. Ran a few more through her mind anyway.

  “There is also the matter of diet,” she said, grasping at an idea. “I believe our food is unpalatable to your digestive system?”

  “Details.” The captain turned its face away and raised an open hand. It was apparently not fond of details. “Not to worry, Captain Talis. Xe will travel with xist own food supplies, which I promise will not be an inconvenience to your personnel.”

  That was it. That was all she had, except the xenophobia that had inspired her protests.

  These are your business partners, she reminded herself. Make them happy—that’s good business.

  She smiled at the commander and at the linguist.

  “If it is truly no inconvenience, we would be honored to host you aboard Wind Sabre until we rendezvous in three days.”

  Sophie’s eyes were as big as saucers, but Talis couldn’t see past the girl’s shock to tell if it was more of her curiosity or the same crawling revulsion that Talis felt. The commander clasped its hands lightly, as pleased an expression as it would be for a Cutter.

  “Excellent, Captain Talis. You will find xin to be polite company, I am sure.”

  “I look forward to the opportunity to learn more about your people,” she said. This wasn’t actually a lie. It just wasn’t the whole truth, which was that she’d much rather learn it from a book, far away from the aliens themselves. Preferably as they left Peridot and went back home to wherever they came from.

  As the alien guides led them back out of the bridge and back to the ramp that would take them home, Talis chided herself for the animosity she was feeling.

  The aliens were paying good money to get the last piece of their puzzle. If Talis knew the answers they were after, she would have given them herself and sent them on their way that much faster. But her part was to get them halfway there. She’d taken the job, and she’d certainly taken the money, and now the Yu’Nyun were her partners. Had they been Cutter client
s, hosting a representative on their ship would have been a thoroughly reasonable part of the deal.

  It seemed to Talis that Sophie was not suffering the same doubts or discomfort after all. She spoke to the alien nonstop as they walked, bubbling over with questions which Talis knew only scratched the surface of what curiosities must be brewing in the girl’s mind.

  The alien responded patiently, though from what Talis could hear xe was a bit obtuse in their—xist, was it?—answers. Xist accent—the clicks and hisses around the edges where vowels met consonants—was more obvious when xe spoke at lower volumes.

  On the familiar landscape of Wind Sabre’s deck, Dug and Tisker stood waiting for them. Dug’s jaw was set so tight it might take a sally bar to open it. Tisker failed to suppress a quiet exclamation of surprise when the alien ship retracted its ramp and the hatch sealed, leaving the towering slender emissary on their ship.

  The sharp point of a tension headache started up in Talis’s right temple. This was not going to make her crewmen think any better of this contract, or her, than they had when the aliens were going to stay on their own ship.

  But Sophie had no such issues. She was obviously thrilled with their visitor, and in the presence of her exuberance, it was easy to forget that she and Talis had exchanged those heated words the day before. Sophie made quick introductions, making a far better attempt of the alien’s name than Talis would have managed, and then eagerly led their guest below decks to stow xist equipment and foodstuffs.