When I laid myself in my bunk in ship’s night, my eyes were heavy and my tongue thick with the unaccustomed language. My head hurt; NABI suggested an analgesic. I feared it was the dreams … I had nothing else to call them, even when I was awake, but the dreams.
But I took the tablet, washed it down with water. I stared at the tiny cabin’s ceiling, listening to the heartbeat of the ship. After a while, inevitably, I became aware that, again, I was in motion through the forest, the cold wind around me. Bootsteps in snow. There was the temple, there was the princess. There was the black bronze bell.
There was light in the temple, and figures moving. I hesitated. Strange voices, strange faces. I wanted to run. Not again, please.
No, I thought, firm. I had spoken to them, sent them my face. No, I will join them, and learn some new thing. Some secret.
Step by step, crunching in the snow, I entered the space to join them.
There they were, amid the pillars of the temple. Round eyes, sharp noses, unfamiliar colors of skin both dark and pale, lighter hair, and it was not the temple anymore, again, but the cramped, hot ship-space. Everything cloth, rough metal, wood. Throbbing mechanical and liquid.
The voices are far, garbled, coming into focus, two layers of sound, the voice in the ear and the voice in the heart.
Invisible and unbidden, I was among them, and for a time I knew their speech as well as I did my own.
“Welcome back, gentlemen,” the man they called the commandant said with heavy sarcasm, pointing at the bench by the door.
The man Mercutio settled on it with an aggressive thump, more than one might expect in free fall, rattling the boards; the man Constans held onto a strap by the door and braced himself in the corner between the cargo hamper and the folding canvas door screen. Mercutio was obvious, brassy, his lusts and hardness plain to me, and repulsive. Constans was shadow in shadow, uncertain. I felt myself falling into his reserve as if it was gravity, and so again I saw through his eyes.
“Sir,” said Mercutio.
“Well, we’ve got a rattle back from that ship out there, and surprise! She sent us pictures.”
“She?” said Mercutio. “So it is a skirt. Good-looking?”
“I’ll let you be the judge of that. She didn’t send us pictures of her skirt, or what’s in it, more’s the pity. And I should say: This is just the face we’re getting sent to put with the voice. Until you lot are on the deck carbines out we don’t know if we’ve got one silly bint or a squad of militiamen ready to cut you all apart. Or some kind of other lie.”
“The suspense,” Constans said all around me, sepulchral, “makes the job worthwhile.” His voice and I were like the deep waters and a little fish.
“Yes, well,” the commandant replied with a look at us two. “I suppose that’s an attitude. Here—look, there she is.”
He gestured at his terminal, and the video played.
I watched through Constans, the shadow, watching the woman, and the woman was me
He leaned forward with interest: his first view of the interior of a ship made by a different world. Perhaps it was disappointing. The feed gave little background detail: the lights were low, and the terminals built in the bulkheads were all on screensaver—butterflies. Whatever he saw could not seem extraordinary. Cleaner, certainly, than the dingy, ancient, well-beaten ship I shared in dreams with him. Spotless, in fact. White metaplastoc paneling. Rounded corners. A few unfamiliar symbols: I had difficulty reading my people’s writing through his eyes.
But the crewman—crewwoman—
Now, I saw through his eyes, swimming in his thoughts, and Hee-young felt far away, and this unfamiliar man from another world filled up my perceptions.
Crewwoman.
Crewwoman? He thought he was making up the word. Ŝipanino? A foreign term and a doubtful one to him. I was a woman, unmistakably, probably not much younger than himself. I had an oval face, black hair with almost a blue sheen, and straight with only a modest wave. I wore it behind her head, tied back with something, and dark eyes, black or dark brown, it was impossible for him to say. My skin was pale as if I didn’t get enough sun, but it still had a warm, rosy tone on the cheeks and a light beige hue overall. My lips were medium pink, almost violet. Nose small. My eyes were narrow over high cheekbones, which he found unusual. However, he had seen people with similar features before, here and there: memory-images of alien cities and landscapes and faces washed over me, disconcerting.
I was foreign in my sight through him, through the dream. I had an intense expression, urgent, and I wore what he at once thought of as something like his own quilted jerkin, but more neatly made: dark blue, unfeminine, closed up somehow but without buttons, with colored patches of unknown significance on the shoulders, and what looked like a name-tape but in unreadable letters. Had he asked, I’d have told him it was a jumpsuit with mission patches. My hands were folded on the workspace in front of me, deceptively fragile-looking fingers. He thought, this Constans thought they looked competent and used to work.
I realized he was trying to decide if I was desirable, weighing the curves and proportions of my face, my hands, my neck. I realized he felt I was.
I looked directly into the optics and visibly took a breath, shoulders rising before speaking, and then the foreignness, the hesitancy of me, was laid plain.
“Commandant of the Falcon Four, I am Sông Hijong. I come in peace with valuable goods and new technology that will bring us closer together. I am a friend from Soribiol who wants to do business, a diplomat from my people, and a gesture of hope for the future. I know you will be alongside me in three days! I have received your message. Please do not damage my ship; we are not violent. I will not prevent your boarding.”
What did I sound like to him? His lips parted, his head cocked as he strained at what I said, and I said it again to him, in my dream, behind his eyes, my voice and his voice and the voice from the monitor. What did I sound like? Ah! The accent was peculiar, careful, and so, so old-fashioned, like someone in a play pretending to be from three hundred years ago.
He found it a little enchanting.
The video clip went to black.
“And that’s all there is to that.” The commandant folded his arms. “It’s on repeat to us, but we’ve not bothered to answer. Let her sweat. You think you can take her?”
Mercutio guffawed. “That stick? I can do one better,” he said. “I can make a woman out of her.” He gave himself a grab. The fish that was me huddled in the bottom of Constans’ mind.
Constans grunted dissent. “Assuming she’s the only one. And didn’t she say in the other message that there was a machine mind?”
Mercutio snorted. “I can outfight a mind in a box, armsman. What’s it going to do, think at me?”
Laughter beat at me, almost blowing the dream away. I clung to it.
“All kinds of possibilities,” Constans said. “It doesn’t have to outfight you. It just has to be smarter, which, if what I read about them in upper-school is true, they all would be. Deadly cunning. Explosive traps. Ceiling-mounted guns run by electric. They say they fought wars on Earth against machine minds, didn’t they, before the Three Ships?”
“They say a lot of things,” Mercutio said. “Fairy-stories.”
“It’s true enough,” the commandant said. “That’s why we don’t make them.”
“Doesn’t have to be a fairy-story on there,” Constans persisted. I felt his genuine concern vibrating all around me. “Play it simple and assume the lie: twenty more just like her, except they’re men with carbines and no mind in a box at all.”
“Quite the pessimist, armsman,” the commandant said.
“It’s saved my life before.” Memories of danger swirled around me, faceless harm.
“Well, we fight our way through all that,” Mercutio said, dismissive, “That wrensie will be the coin in the middle of the tenth-cake for all of us. Pay back all the days of boredom, yah?”
“I imagine Commandant here would rather us get her back to the Station undamaged, wouldn’t you say, sir? Might still need to have her cooperation to guide it in—or the machine mind’s cooperation, if it exists. It might be harder to get if she gets damaged.”
The commandant waved a hand. “Armsman’s right, Warrant. As many of the crew as possible wanted back in one piece, avoiding any stays in hospital, if you don’t mind—for interrogation, one presumes.”
“I can be gentle,” Mercutio grinned. “Promise.”
I felt ill.
Constans shrugged, but the commandant slapped his hand on his desk. “Watch it again,” he said, pointing, “see if you can learn anything about the chamber she’s in, and about her, and then start drilling your men on the muster deck. You’ve got three days and counting.
“To sharpen your minds,” he added, “I’ll tell you a fairy-story. You lot like fairy-stories, sounds like?”
“All day, every day, sir,” Mercutio said.
“I’ll bet you all do, you limp little ĝojas. You talk fairy enough. You ever read boy’s books about ships invading from the stars?”
“Who didn’t,” Mercutio scoffed.
“Well, the idea makes Command itch, and they have their reasons. I heard,” he dropped his voice, “it happened once.”
Mercutio laughed. “Such shit. When?”
“Nobody seems to know. Four hundred years ago, maybe. A ship showed up skulking, hung out by Apollo, in the rings, jumped a pleasure yacht. Some sort of invader, maybe from Earth.”
“What happened?” Constans Sarkis said, adjusting his grip on the strap.
“There was a fight, and we bluffed them off. But they had thousands of sleepers aboard, headed to Iphigenia. Regular armed colony ship.”
“That is a fairy-story,” Mercutio said. “Surprised you believe it, sir.”
“Ah! You remembered the sir, thank’ee.” Sarcastic. “—It doesn’t matter what I believe,” the commandant said. “It matters what Command believes, and Command believes it happened. They consider every inbound hostile, which is why we will be in charge on board in three days, or I hole this thing to pieces. Watch her again,” he said, “and take notes, and get your men drilled. We are out here for business, not play, lads.”
“Sir,” they said.
And the dream did blow away, and I sank into deeper sleep, and for a time, I forgot it.
( … This way to Chapter Five part 2 … ) ( … This way to Chapter Six part 1 … )
( … This way to Chapter One part 1… )
Interesting, the dream/telepathy/...
And is this one going to be more regular now? We are delightfully spoiled.
It occurs to me that maybe the barrel trees aren't a neatly atomic entry in the canon.