My first meal on the Pinion felt exactly as excruciating as the first lunch at a new school. By the time I had navigated us back to the mess hall, with a stop by my quarters to retrieve the cooler bag containing my food, the other crew members had already gathered and were eating their meals. As I entered, carrying my neatly packaged lunch on a tray, there was a noticeable hitch in the flow of conversation and the soft clatter of cutlery against plates. For an instant I stood frozen at the intersection of nine different gazes, some indifferent, some unfriendly.
With an equally noticeable effort, the crew of the Pinion collectively went back to what they had been doing before I arrived. There were three tables in the mess hall, but only two of them were occupied. I followed Zey to a pair of vacant seats at the nearer table, trying not to drop anything on the way. Maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to veto Max's idea about eating in my quarters.
I put my tray down and settled onto the low stool beside Zey. Opposite me was the dark-haired programming specialist, Sohra, who smiled warmly when I caught her eye. At the other end of the table were the man who'd called me a nivakh—Vethna?—and the operations officer, Khiva. Vethna met my curious look with a challenging stare. I glanced away quickly. He didn't like humans, or he didn't like me, I wasn't sure which. It was a question to be answered. Later. I fixed my eyes on my tray and didn't look up again until I'd finished the turkey and avocado sandwich and the fruit salad—no honeydew, extra mango—that Max had packed for me. Still unsatisfied, I emptied my bag of trail mix directly into the yogurt that was meant to have been my afternoon snack and devoured that too. When I tore open the bag of trail mix something fluttered out of it: a scrap of paper. I picked it up. It was a handwritten note. Food is life, it said. Bon appetit. Max. I smiled.
As the signals of satiation reached my body, I began to relax. I'd let myself get too hungry. I was going to have to be careful about that. I looked around the mess hall with renewed interest. It was a trove of cultural data, from the fine wood grain of the table—real or synthetic?—to the oddly shaped Vardeshi cutlery to the food itself. Zey had left some of his portion untouched, and I studied it curiously. It looked like black rice with green stew ladled on top of it. Pushed to one side was what I took to be a garnish, thin slices of something yellow and radish-like. None of it looked especially appetizing to me, but my companions had eaten heartily. As I watched, Zey picked up the long-handled triangular spoon next to his plate and scooped up another bite. "What is that?" I asked.
"A spoon," he said thickly through the mouthful of food.
I laughed. This triggered another of those little pauses as everyone at my table—and probably most of the people at the next one—darted quick assessing looks in my direction. I tried to ignore them. "No, I know what a spoon is. What are you eating?"
"Oh. It's—" He rattled off a couple of words I didn't recognize.
"I have no idea what that means."
Sohra spoke up. "It's a cooked grain. And a soup with vegetables and . . . a type of seed that's high in protein."
I pulled out my notebook and lifted it inquiringly. She took it and the pen I handed her and began to write. "Are you vegetarian?" I asked while she worked.
"When we're starside we don't eat much meat, but it's for practical reasons, not philosophical. Meat is harder to process and store, and it can't be produced on board ship." Sohra nodded at her plate. "All of this was grown in the Pinion's hydroponics bay." She passed the notebook back.
"Hydroponics?" I said to Zey. "I don't remember seeing that."
"We can swing by before the evening briefing." He rose and picked up his tray. "Let's go. We have a lot to do."
I followed him into the galley, where he showed me the waste disposal, the water tap, and the basin designated for my dirty dishes. When we'd cleaned up, we headed for the cargo holds, into which my gear had been deposited seemingly at random by Vethna and Ahnir. Organizing my equipment took all afternoon. My medical supplies had to be transported to the clinic, my food to the galley, and my personal items to my quarters. It would have taken at least a full day to carry the crates by hand, but Zey taught me how to use the hoverlifter, which looked like a thin metallic sled. It was placed on the floor and loaded with heavy items, then activated by touching a control on one edge, at which point it rose slowly to waist height and hovered in place. When aloft, it could be steered through the air with the lightest touch.
Afterward, as promised, we stopped by hydroponics. The bay was long and narrow, and every inch of it was filled with Vardeshi plants in orderly profusion. They climbed the walls and burst out of elaborate tiered hangers extending from floor to ceiling. My imagination had conjured the lush greenery of an Earth hothouse, but as I stood looking around in amazement, I couldn't spy a single green plant. Instead I saw strangely shaped leaves and vines in a hundred shades of blue and red and gray. The warm air was heavy with fragrances, some sweet, some astringent, all unfamiliar. We had only been in the room for a few moments when something made me sneeze. I turned to Zey and saw my own panic mirrored in his face. He grabbed my elbow and dragged me bodily out into the corridor. I had been right about one thing: the Vardeshi were stronger than they looked.
"That was a bad idea," he said when the door had closed behind us. "I never should have taken you in there. I'm calling Daskar."
"Don't," I said quickly. "Not yet. I think I'm all right. If I were having an allergic reaction, the symptoms would be getting worse. Just give me a minute."
He frowned and tapped a command into the screen on the cuff of his left sleeve, but did as I asked. I fumbled through my bag and extracted the EpiPen Anton had instructed me to carry at all times. Then we waited. For good measure I took a couple of puffs from my handheld oxygen inhaler. When it was clear to both of us that I wasn't going into anaphylactic shock, Zey heaved a sigh of relief. "Sigils, that was close. I could have gotten you killed. Both of us, actually—if you die on my watch, my father will flay me alive."
I smiled. "He'd have to do it intergalactically. Isn't your father on Vardesh Prime?"
"He'd find a way. He'd get my brother to do it."
"Saresh? He seems so nice. I don't think he could flay anyone."
"Hathan could," Zey said grimly.
"I still think he doesn't like me," I said. "This morning, in the axis chamber, he didn't even look at me."
"He wasn't ignoring you. He's a navigator. We were getting ready to leave orbit. He was doing navigator stuff." Zey looked back at the door of the hydroponics bay. "Promise me you won't go in there again. Please."
"I promise I won't go in there again," I said wistfully. My glimpse of Vardeshi flora had been tantalizingly brief. There must be some piece of technology, either in my gear or in the Pinion's medical supplies, that would let me explore the room safely. Maybe Daskar could refit an oxygen mask to filter out pollen. If nothing else, I could borrow a pressure suit and breathe canned air.
We weren't technically late for evening briefing, but we were the last to arrive, and it would have been impossible to enter the axis chamber discreetly in any case. No one commented on our near-lateness, but as we took our seats I saw Hathan, who was seated across from us, fix Zey with a look of cool reproach. Zey ignored him, apparently absorbed in accessing the meeting agenda on a thin semitransparent tablet he seemed to have conjured into existence while I'd been looking the other way. I glanced around. Most of the others were holding similar tablets, but a few people seemed to have accessed computer interfaces built into the surface of the conference table. Saresh, sitting to my left, was one of them. As I watched, he flicked the fingers of his right hand, and an array of luminous orange and white glyphs slid down the table and came to rest in front of me. I recognized it as a digital copy of the agenda in front of him. "Thanks," I whispered. His answering smile was brilliant and swiftly gone.
I was expecting Khavi Vekesh to call the meeting to order, but to my surprise it was Hathan who spoke first. He made a few brief remarks related to navigation before calling on Rhevi Vethna to report on the engines. I lost the thread of Vethna's speech almost instantly. My attention started to drift. I looked around the table, caught by the strangeness of the assembly. My eyes wandered from one attentive face to the next, from one sigil to another, all of them perfectly visible because the hands they decorated were perfectly still. Humans at a meeting of this type would have fidgeted, checked their messages, sipped their coffee, or taken notes. Someone would have tapped his foot; someone else would have shifted in her chair. The collective immobility of the Vardeshi was a bit unnerving. I felt even more disquieted when, halfway through the meeting, I ventured to retrieve my water bottle from my bag. Ten pairs of eyes swung around to stare at it. After drinking, I set the bottle carefully down on the floor and left it there until the meeting adjourned. It probably didn't help that its lurid turquoise finish was the brightest thing in the room.
One of the last items on the agenda was an update on my novi training. As the end of the meeting approached, I steeled myself to ask Hathan to speak more slowly. His questions to the other crew members had been crisp and concise, and I hadn't been able to parse more than half of them. To my relief, however, he directed all his inquiries to Zey. I was accustomed by now to the rhythms of Zey's speech, and I was just able to keep pace as he narrated the events of our day. Laid out so simply, our achievements sounded a little meager. Was that really all we had done—wandered around the ship, signed me up for a shower, and shifted some crates around? I repressed a sigh.
Zey had finished talking and I'd just begun to relax when Saresh said, "Novi Alkhat, would you like to add anything?"
"No," I said, too quickly. He and Zey both laughed. I hurriedly corrected myself. "I mean, no, sir. Hadazi."
"Tell us what you think of the ship," said Khavi Vekesh.
He spoke lightly enough, but I knew a command when I heard it. "It's . . . very beautiful," I said. "And very different." Everyone seemed to be waiting for more, so I added, "Everything is much more . . . natural?"
"Organic," Saresh murmured.
"Right. More organic than on an Earth spaceship. Not that I've been on any of those. I like my quarters. And all the designs in the hallways."
"And the showers," Zey added. Someone snickered. I was almost positive it was Vethna.
"They're nice," I said defensively. "But the computer system is . . . intimidating."
"Well, your people are still working with electronics," Ziral said, and several people murmured knowingly, as if that explained a great deal. I looked down at the luminous symbols on the table in front of me. Until this moment I hadn't known they weren't powered by electronics. What did the Vardeshi computers run on, then? To my mind the words computers and electronics were synonymous. We must seem like such troglodytes to them.
"How was hydroponics?" Sohra asked.
The question was innocent enough, but at the mention of hydroponics, Zey tensed slightly. In the silence that followed Sohra's words, a number of people trained critical looks on him. The one I noticed was Hathan's. Just as during my initial interview, it was the movement of those arrestingly light gray eyes that drew my attention. I'd had a moment to study the suvi's features covertly earlier in the meeting, searching for a resemblance to the other two Takheris. If it was there at all, it was too subtle for me to detect. Hathan's face was narrower, his features sharper than those of his brothers. I had also decided that the reason he'd made so little impression on me at our first encounter was that his expression disclosed nothing of his thoughts. "You took her to hydroponics?" he said quietly.
"I asked to see it," I said.
Hathan glanced at me, then returned his attention to his brother. "That was an ill-considered risk." Again the tone was mild, but the admonition was clear.
"Did anything happen?" Daskar inquired.
Zey hesitated, so I answered for him again. "I didn't have any kind of allergic reaction. But we didn't stay very long. We . . . thought better of it. I won't go there again until we know it's safe."
That answer seemed to be satisfactory, at least for the present. I hoped Zey wasn't going to be scolded again in private. The error in judgment had been mine as much as his, and I desperately needed him on my side.
The meeting adjourned, and Zey explained that there was an hour of recreation time allotted to all crew members before dinner. "I'm going to go work out," he said. "Will you be all right on your own?"
"Oh, yeah. Fine." I waved a hand airily. "Have a good workout. I'll see you later."
I watched him walk away. It was all I could do not to run after him. Where was I supposed to go? Not back to my quarters. I knew that if I went there, I wouldn't emerge again until tomorrow morning. I wandered around a little and eventually found my way to the lounge, a dark, intimate space that reminded me of Dr. Okoye's office. Its most striking feature was an enormous viewport running the entire length of one wall. A standing bar invited people to take in the view over their refreshment of choice. The opposite wall housed several little raised platforms screened by filmy hangings and scattered with colorful cushions and rugs. I settled myself down in one of them and attempted to read through my notes from the day. Concentration was elusive. My memory kept flinging random images from the preceding hours into the foreground of my mind. I abruptly gave up, tossed the notebook down, and went over to stand in front of the viewport, leaning my elbows on the bar. I had followed enough of Hathan's navigation report to know that we had already left Earth inconceivably far behind. All at once I felt utterly lost. There was nothing beyond the transparent barrier but featureless black and a distant impersonal glitter of stars. My world, my home, was gone as if it had never existed.
I took a deep breath. Then I went back to the platform where I'd left my things, retrieved my notebook and pencil, and carried them over to the viewport. I opened the notebook to a fresh page and wrote in Vardeshi, slowly and carefully, A story has a thousand beginnings, but only one ending. It was the opening line of Divided by Stars, my favorite late-90's Vardrama, the one I had quoted on Dr. Sawyer's patio. The expression had fascinated me in childhood because it was one of the only things we knew for sure that the Vardeshi actually said. I could vividly recall the triumph I had felt upon realizing, several months ago now, that I could translate it into the original without having to think about it. I wasn't sure why it had come to me now, but the words were comfortingly familiar.
From behind me came the metallic hiss of the door opening and closing, followed by the sound of footsteps. Expecting Zey, I turned around and was startled to see Hathan approaching instead. "Suvi," I said, and saluted. He did the same. We stood at an awkward impasse until it dawned on me that he was waiting for me to lower my hand. I dropped it hastily. "God. Sorry. I'm new to this."
"It's all right." He came over to stand beside me. "What do you think of the view?"
"It's, uh . . ." I tried and failed to find a tactful substitute for what I was actually thinking. "Empty."
"Yes." Hathan looked down at my notebook page. "There's a saying about that, actually, if you're starting a collection."
"Really? Do you mind?" I offered him my pencil.
He took it—in his left hand, I noticed—and wrote another sentence beneath mine. I filled in the English where I could, then handed the pencil back for him to complete the translation. His English handwriting, I saw with admiration but no surprise, was as neat and compact as his Vardeshi.
"'To the wanderer,'" I read aloud, "'one step into the desert is the same as a hundred; the sailor, an hour out of port, beholds a trackless ocean.' That's perfect. That's just how I feel."
The suvi corrected two of my tones. Then he said, "It isn't just you. And it isn't just the first time. Going into the dark always feels like losing something."
"Well, it's good to know it's not just me." I hesitated for a long time over my next words. Then, feeling that I owed it to Zey, I forced them out. "I really did ask to see hydroponics. That wasn't Zey's fault. I hope he isn't in trouble because of me."
"If you're asking whether he'll be disciplined, the answer is no. But it was a mistake. Yours as much as his."
The reprimand was gently delivered, but shame flooded through me all the same. "I know," I said. Then, remembering that one stolen breath of perfumed air, I smiled in spite of myself. "It was a wonderful mistake."
Hathan walked me to the mess hall, which I appreciated, because I wasn't sure I would have found it on my own. I ate dinner with Zey and Sohra at the same table where we'd sat before. The mess tables, Zey told me, were segregated by rank; as a novi, I would be eating all of my meals at this one. Max had packed me a salad and a cup of instant soup. I ate the salad first. I knew it was a luxury; I had only a few days' worth of fresh produce in my stores. I hardly tasted it. Fatigue had set in all at once. It felt like someone had crept up from behind and draped me in a weighted blanket. Zey and Sohra were deep in conversation on the other side of the table, but the words slid over and past me, a current of sound with no meaning attached. I ducked my head and ate. When I had finished the salad, I took my soup cup into the galley, where Ahnir, the ship's cook, was busily stacking dishes and wiping down surfaces. I asked him diffidently if there was any hot water available, as I hadn't yet had a chance to set up my own equipment. He produced a carafe of steaming water and stood watching impassively while I filled my cardboard cup to the level marked on the side. I thanked him, returned to my table, and sat cradling the soup in my hands. Warmth equaled comfort, and since I couldn't shower until tomorrow night, and couldn't curl up under my blankets until after I'd cleaned up my dinner things, the meager heat of a cup of instant miso would have to suffice.
I didn't look up when someone slipped into the empty seat beside me, but I recognized the hadazi by a glint of platinum hair even before he said, "How are you doing, Avery?" He spoke in English, which was a small kindness, but desperately needed.
"I'm done," I said.
Saresh nodded. "Do you want to go home?" The words were level, uninflected, and I had the sense that he would accept any answer with equanimity.
Even through my exhaustion, I had to laugh a little. "I'm not quitting. I just need a good night's sleep."
"You've earned it," he said. "You did well today. The crew are impressed."
"With me?"
"Is that surprising?" He sounded amused.
"Well . . . kind of."
"Why?"
Now I did look at him. "Because I can't do anything. I can't do the stuff you guys can do."
"No one expects you to. You're not here to calibrate the engines or read a star chart."
"Okay, but how about a clock? Or an email? I'm talking about the easy stuff. The basics."
"You're learning them."
"Not as fast as I should. We didn't get through half of our assigned tasks for today. And every problem I solve creates three new ones." I sighed. "Not very impressive, if you ask me."
Saresh nodded. "Keep in mind that most of us had never even seen a human in the flesh before this morning, let alone spoken to one. The others had no idea what to expect—and we've all heard some terrible stories. Some of the crew thought you were going to be essentially a sort of . . . overgrown pet."
"A nivakh," I muttered.
"Yes."
"They thought that even after I was promoted to novi?"
"Some people assumed that Khavi Vekesh was being wildly optimistic—or looking for an easy in with the pro-alliance factions. I think it's now clear to everyone that whatever his reasons, his instincts were sound. You've only been here a day, but you can already find your way around the ship. You can ask questions and follow instructions. You've shown yourself to be inquisitive, courteous, adaptable. That may not seem like much to you, but it's well beyond what most of us expected."
"Ah," I said. "So what you're saying is that you set the bar really, really low."
"You could say that." He smiled. "Don't worry, it will be higher tomorrow. We're quick learners."
I started to say something like "I believe it," but it turned into a yawn.
I found my way back to my quarters with only one wrong turn. As the door hissed shut behind me, I heaved a sigh of relief. The first day was over. I changed into my pajamas, washed up in my tiny bathroom, and settled down on my little bed, which appeared to slope slightly downward from the outer edge to the inner one. I'd been planning to unwind with a little music, but as it happened, I didn't need it. With my shoulder pressed against the wall, I could faintly feel a deep pulsating hum that I imagined to be emanating from the ship's engines. I had no idea how Vardeshi propulsion actually worked. It didn't matter; whatever its source, the vibration had a tranquilizing effect. I pulled a fleece blanket over myself and fell asleep more or less instantaneously.