Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book One)

Chapter One

"Here it is." Dr. Sawyer turned the screen toward me. "Listen to this."

I listened while he played a file, audio only, a few seconds in length. It was a recording of a language. The quality wasn't ideal, but I knew at once that I'd never heard it before. It was clipped, staccato, yet somehow elegant. I liked it. "Again?" I said when it was done.

He played it a second time. I looked from him to the screen and back again: the avuncular white-bearded face over the shabby Hawaiian shirt. There was an intensity to his gaze that I'd never seen there. Finally I said, "It's tonal. But that's all I know. I don't know where it's from."

"Farther than you think," he said simply.

And with those words something clicked into place. I stared at him, doing a rapid mental calculation. Twenty-five years ago he had been in the prime of his career, a professor in the white-hot field of exploratory linguistics at NYU. In New York. Where a certain very newsworthy encounter had taken place.

"Can you play it again?" I said cautiously.

He obliged. Into the silence that followed, staring at his laptop screen, at a file that was indeed more than twenty-five years old, I said, "It's them."

He nodded.

I still couldn't take it in. "The Vardeshi."

"As we call them," he said. "It's a rough approximation. They're polite enough to let it stand. But I would expect no less of them. In person they're tremendously courteous."

I said weakly, "I think I'm going to need that espresso."

The initial encounter between humans and Vardeshi had indeed been universally publicized, as had every incremental step leading up to those first titanic alien footfalls on Earth soil. In 1993, the year of my birth, a long-range satellite picked up an audio transmission originating from outside our solar system. The quality was poor, but the English was impeccable and the message unequivocal: we had been discovered.

"We call ourselves the Vardeshi," said the iconic voice with its light, unplaceable accent. "We are a race of peaceful explorers. You are the first fellow sentients we have encountered among the stars. We have been looking for a long time."

The speaker asked our permission for a small group of Vardeshi representatives to travel to the edge of the Sol system in order to conduct radio communication in real time. The governments of Earth debated for a few weeks before coming to a nearly unanimous resolution in favor of the proposal. From there, events moved with remarkable swiftness. Only a few months elapsed between the receipt of that first transmission and the touchdown of the first Vardeshi ship on a hastily assembled landing platform outside of the UN headquarters in New York City.

The five Vardeshi representatives who stepped out of their spacecraft and into the glare of our flashbulbs looked like humans who had accidentally wandered out of an anime convention in full costume. They had two arms and two legs apiece, properly distributed. They appeared to have two genders. They were a few inches shorter than us, and a fraction slimmer. Their eyes were set a bit wider, their foreheads a bit higher, their ten fingers (and presumably ten toes) elegantly long. Still, any one of them alone could have passed for one of us. It was only in the aggregate that their strangeness became apparent.

They wore simple, practical gray and gold jumpsuits. Their hair ranged in length from a close crop to an elbow-length mane, and in color from brilliant white through dull gray to inky black. Their eyes were gray or blue or black. Their skin was pale, with blue undertones, and it was presumed that their blood was blue as well. Each of them sported an intricate decoration like a tattoo, black overlaid with gold, on the back of his or her right hand. They carried themselves proudly, but their manner was gentle, reserved, almost courtly. Some people found them off-putting, claiming that their resemblance to us placed them squarely in a non-technological uncanny valley. Others-many others-found them very beautiful. And there were those who insisted that the likeness was too good, that they were actually human, and that the whole thing was a smoothly orchestrated hoax.