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"You are panicking again," observed Radmer calmly. "The questions you ask have answers. Some are easy; some are not. We had not thought to ask these questions, but now they have been asked, Hazard's crew is able to find solutions. And we will get help from others as well."
Radmer's misunderstanding was hands down the most calming thing he could have said or done. He wasn't stewing over what she might be capable of, or what she might have been a party to in her past. He was just making sure the current problem got passed along to the right people, who would find a way to manage it. Leia quit hyperventilating and her shoulders relaxed. His mouth quirked in a half smile, and it then occurred to her that he might have intended her to think he'd misunderstood her. No, it was a left half-smile, not a right half-smile. Probably not contempt.
Radmer watched her face as she thought that all through, then made that dismissive gesture that she was starting to think of as so characteristic of him, the one that said something very interesting that needed to be thought through had just happened, but now was not the time. "I do not think I would understand the way you think even if we'd grown up as brother and sister, speaking the same language."
That made her grin. "Is that good or bad?"
"It's interesting! If you want me to ignore you, very bad. But if you want my attention, you have it. Always."
"Did I just make a lot of work for you?"
"It's work for Esifwu right now. After she has done what she does, she'll tell us what we need to do."
"Are we almost to Andal?"
"Yes, but we do not have an specific arrival date or time; we can delay for a little while with no consequences. I expect Esifwu will announce a change to the expected arrival time within an hour or two. I have the same kind of role she does, but for my section: make plans, adjust plans, deal with the unexpected. My team can deal with delaying distributing gear. We try to pass out equipment close to when and where it will be needed, to minimize the chance it will be lost or used inappropriately." Leia tried to imagine what an inappropriate use might be. X-ray vision goggles? Flash-bangs used for April Fool's? Camouflage gear used to stalk a crush? I've got several people who handle security on and off ship, for people and equipment. I'm sure Esifwu will have a lot of questions for them, but unless they ask, I won't get involved. I often have a great deal of time with no particular work to do. Occasionally, I have a great deal of work and no time to do it in." He shrugged, then leaned forward and spoke very quietly. "I can think of a way for us to pass the time."
"Didn't we go down this path yesterday?"
"No. Yesterday I invited you back to my room to show you your equipment. Today, I am inviting you back to my room to show you my equipment. I hope this important difference survives translation."
Leia thought about that for a minute. She was feeling a lot better today. The extra sleep had helped.
"Even allowing for translation time, you are thinking about this a lot," he observed. "I was expecting laughter."
"I've been --" Leia started to answer.
A man Leia did not recognized walked up behind Radmer and whacked him on the back of the head. Radmer rolled his eyes and leaned back to say, "Dulak. I see you could still use a little work on your social skills."
"I'm learning to adjust to the level of competence of the person I'm interacting with, Radmer." Turning to Leia, he nodded and said, "Hello. We haven't met. I've been told your name is Leia, and that you and ship-mind have a new language available for translation. Quick work." He sat down next to Radmer, clearly intending to stay. "How'd you meet my friend here?" Dulak took this opportunity to elbow Radmer in the ribs, to remove any possibility of confusion regarding who he was talking about. Radmer shrugged, and waited for Leia to answer.
"I'd just gotten out of a room too short to stand up in, and was looking for something to wear, when he showed up, shoved me back in the room and found me a survival suit. Which was a good thing, because the gravity was starting to fail."
"In a float-up or fall-down way?" Dulak asked.
"Both, alternating."
"Not good. I take it that was the car-crash-sound ship we sent three fighters to shoot at. You came back in the shuttle?"
Leia shrugged and looked at Radmer, who said, "Yes. She had not been in space before and the ship-to-ship transfer was a ... surprise."
Dulak looked stunned. "Where are you from?"
"Earth. I know that is not helpful. I can't tell you coordinates."
"What do you mean," Dulak started to ask.
Radmer interrupted, "She doesn't know. Not a signatory system, and the team is still working on breaking the encryption on the car-crash-sound systems. No guarantee her system will be documented, even then."
Dulak looked at Leia with shock and pity on his face. "That is uniquely horrible." Radmer and Esifwu had been kind and had made sure she got what she needed - safety, clothing, food, sleep, something to calm her down, something to occupy her time. But Dulak was the first person to say anything out loud about how painful her situation must be. She'd been embarrassed at how backward she must seem, but at the same time, realized she could not in any way be considered responsible for that. Otherwise, she'd felt like the elephant in the middle of the room: no one wanted to say anything about or to her, for fear of the possible consequences, or to avoid being assigned responsibility, or whatever. Except all the nerds who were busy being fascinated by the elephant, look, feel the ears, check out the trunk, get a load of those legs.
"Yes," she agreed fervently. "Yes it is. Thank you for saying so."
He peered at her, probably trying to figure out if she meant anything other than the what she said, if she were being sarcastic, or joking. He nodded abruptly, then turned to Radmer. "Who is helping Leia adjust to whatever you have in mind for her until you figure out where she's from and she decides whether she wants to go back there or not."
"Esifwu sat her down in front of a learning interface, which is how we are able to talk to her." Dulak shook his head, turned to Leia and said, "You are amazing," then turned back to Radmer and indicated he should continue. "Esifwu had not realized she was from a non-signatory and this was a first-contact. She knew Leia's language was not shared or recognized by any of the people who talked to Leia, but expected ship-mind to identify Leia's language and home-planet, and that transporting Leia home would be integrated into our itinerary in the usual manner." Upon hearing this, Dulak scrubbed his face with both hands, then turned a woeful look of apology towards Leia. "After Leia got enough language into ship-mind to support translation, I got her an ear-piece, so she wouldn't have to --"
Dulak cut Radmer off with a string of profanity. "You were making her learn our language in order to get anything? That's obscene."
Radmer shrugged. "I agree."
"How long since the car-crash-sound grabbed you, Leia?"
"I don't know. I'd been there for at least a few days when Radmer got me off the ship. I have no recollection of being grabbed, and most of that time it was dark and I was trying to sleep. Could have been a few days. Could have been several. I've been here," Leia paused to count, lost track, shrugged. "Twenty days? Thirty? I don't remember. I had no way of keeping track."
"Twenty-seven," said Radmer.
"Someone is keeping track," observed Dulak. He turned his full attention to Leia, "I came over here to introduce myself because it's unusual for Radmer to so publicly display his interest in anyone, and even more unusual for the response to be so ambiguous. One of my jobs on Hazard is to notice an unpleasant situation developing before it forces us to transfer personnel off the ship until things cool down."
"You think he's harassing me?!" asked Leia, shocked.
"Not anymore!" retorted Dulak. "But it looked weird yesterday, and it looked weirder today, and you spent from after lunch yesterday until breakfast this morning in his space. That's training scenario one for Sexual Relationship With Unbalanced Expectations."
"We didn't have sex," stated Leia.
Dulak leaned forward and said, "I don't know how things work where you're from. But believe me when I say, when you share ship-space with people all day, every day, for years at a time, not having sex can be more of a problem than having sex. Even really bad sex." He leaned back again, turned to Radmer and said, "Picked yourself a hard case this time, didn't you?" Then he winked, and turned back to Leia. "If you have anything or anyone you want to talk about, and you don't feel comfortable talking to Esifwu or Radmer or any other friends you are making, never hesitate to contacat me through ship-mind. My team and I are actually trained to help people get through difficult situations, as opposed to being trained to make policy, or deploy technology. Not that I'm naming any names here. But you seem to be doing well, and I'm impressed by what you've accomplished so far. Anyone that can get to Esifwu and Radmer in under a month is clearly capable of dealing with anything they are likely to encounter on Hazard. But I'm here for you. With lots of support personnel, including women, if you don't want to talk to a man." He stood up, looked down at Radmer indecisively, gave Leia one last smile, and walked back to where he had been eating lunch with coworkers to clear his place.
"You were about to say something when Dulak came over and hit me on the head," Radmer reminded Leia.
"And I have no idea what it was, but it was in response to you pressuring me to come back to your room with you to have sex, and I think I'm going to adjust my answer. No, I'm not going to go back to your room with you and look at your equipment. I'd like to stay right here and talk."
Radmer grinned at that. "That was not passive! Wonderful!"
Leia rolled her eyes. "How long have you known Dulak?"
Radmer was surprised by the question. "He joined us about ten years? Fifteen? I'm not sure. I've known him for maybe fifty years."
Was that a translation problem? Leia pulled her screen up and went over the words with ship-mind, along with the time-units. It wasn't possible to be exact; Leia could tell ship-mind approximately how long a second was, but NIST was somewhere that they weren't. Also, no sun rising and setting, no planets circling Sol. If the conversion was off, it was percentages, not multipliers. Wow. The longevity option mattered, if she wasn't going directly home. Radmer was watching over her shoulders. "You're worried about converting time-units? Why?"
"Fifty years is most of a life where I come from. I wanted to make sure I understood you correctly. And that reminds me. Esifwu said I could live a lot longer, too."
Radmer was having trouble with the idea that fifty years was most of a life. A lot of trouble. He finally managed to ask, "How old are you?"
"Thirty-one years." Let ship-mind deal with translating that. Radmer looked slightly ill. She decided that as long as he was dealing with the same kind of staggering culture shock she was, she could make a few other observations. "She also said my fertility could be turned off and on at will. Where I come from, women my age are starting to think it's use-it-or-lose-it time when it comes to having babies. Is there someone on this ship that can adjust the advice to me personally so I don't make some choice I later regret? I'm betting if you live for centuries, women can have babies for centuries, but I'd sort of like to know. I was willing to put it off indefinitely, but you keep making all these tempting suggestions, and I'm sure you aren't thinking about the same possible consequences that I am."
Radmer gulped and stared. "I am now. And I think we should have you talk to someone on Dulak's team. This is more than any one person should have to walk around worrying about, and Esifwu and I are not doing a good enough job helping you." He uttered one more word that Leia had not heard yet, and which ship-mind did not translate. When queried, ship-mind offered the general category of: most obscene, consult native speaker for appropriate usage. That one might be useful to learn.
Radmer had entirely switched gears from playfully trying to convince her to come up and see his etchings to must-see-therapist now. It was the work of seconds, not moments, to reach Dulak and arrange for them to go talk to someone as soon as they could walk over to their room. And Radmer seemed to think she should not be sent to talk to this person, whoever it was, but that this was something they should do together. "Why are we going to see this person together? Or do you really not have anything else to do?" asked Leia. It seemed a little early in their not-a-relationship to be going in for couples counseling.
Radmer just looked at her as if he had no idea what she was talking about, and was reconsidering his assessment of her sanity and/or intelligence. She decided not to press the point too strongly. After dropping their dishes off, he reached for one of her hands and held it as they walked out of the dining room, which felt a little strange, but reassuring. It felt reassuring enough for her to ask him a question. "How old are you?"
He squeezed her hand and replied, "I'd rather answer that question after you are sitting down, with someone in the room who has some idea how to guide this conversation."
"What's so complicated about telling me how old you are? I already know the longevity stuff can extend lifespan by multiples. And I know whatever answer you give me I won't understand because I haven't been able to exactly match my time units to yours. But order of magnitude shouldn't be that hard."
When Leia had woken up on the other ship, she had been, literally, naked: no clothes, no shoes, no watch. Certainly she did not have secreted about her person somewhere the exact definition of, for example, a second. That is, she knew it had something to do with an atom, but not which element, or whatever that element might do under whatever conditions, much less how many of those events added together equaled a second. Like anyone else who learned to count one-and-two-and for lightning and thunder, she had an approximate length of second. Like anyone accustomed to working out, she knew her resting heart rate. From those, ship-mind and Leia had cobbled together a conversion from her seconds, minutes, hours, days and years to the units used by Target Language. She had done a sanity check based on the ship-day, which felt to her longer than an ordinary day, but only by perhaps two or three hours. When Radmer replied and ship-mind translated to two hundred seventy-five years, she understood the reality might as easily be two-fifty or three hundred. The error bar on his age substantially exceeded her actual age. No wonder he'd wanted her to be sitting down.
"Do you have children?" How could you not ask, right? But at the same time, as soon as the words left her mouth, Leia would have gladly stuffed them back in, and stuffed herself into the nearest, dark corner. Naked, in the dark wasn't this freaky.
"You just cannot wait! Yes, I have two children. Yes, they are both older than you. Leia, we don't let people your age off planet unescorted. We know anyone under a hundred is impulsive. Everyone's impulsive, but it takes that long to have had enough kinds of unpleasant social interactions to keep thinking with integrity in the face of a string of dangerous surprises. Minimum age to get on Hazard is double that. You must have rules of a similar nature at home; every society does."
"We do. Driver's license at 16; voting and serving in the military and legally responsible at 18; can drink alcohol at 21. The rules to give consent for sex are even more variable and they've been changing lately. That's where I live. Other places have different rules for alcohol, or voting, or driving. And the legally responsible one has gotten strange. More and more young children are being tried as adults when they commit serious crimes." It took a while for the explanation to catch up, and at that point, they were entering Amable's room.
By the time they arrived in Amable's room, Dulak had already delivered a precis; Amable was finishing reading it as they entered. "I am so pleased to meet you, Leia. Thank you for putting so much time and effort into sharing your language with ship-mind and with us so we can have this conversation."
Amable's greeting suggested that Dulak had primarily delivered an update, and Amable had been monitoring Leia and her activities for some unknown period of time, possibly dating back before her arrival on Hazard. Had Leia been in Amable or Dulak's job, that's what she would have been doing. They sat. They were offered food, which they declined, and beverages, which they accepted. Leia was hoping that Amable had slipped a little something into her drink; she'd take just about anything at this point just to cut the shakes. Whether Amable had, or whether drinking something warm and sitting down was calming, or whether just being in Amable's presence was calming, Leia's incipient panic attack receded, leaving her a little space to think about something other than finding a nice dark corner to curl up in. Possibly while screaming.
Amable had all kinds of reassuring information. She started by pulling up the second, more thorough medical check Esifwu had done and item by item, going over what Esifwu had done to her and why, and what optional procedures were still available. Radmer just sat there and listened with her, refusing to let go of her hand. Amable did not seem to find this at all odd. For each of the yet-to-be-decided items, Amable asked her specifically if she wanted to make the decision now. She wanted an explanation on each item Leia wanted to delay on; delay based on wanting to know more led to immediate further information from ship-mind, Amable herself, or someone Amable contacted. On the fertility question, satisfying Leia's concerns about the impact of longevity treatment and the lack of other people from Earth for comparison led to contacting someone not on Hazard. Leia did not want to speculate on the cost of that. While she could try to think about it in terms of gee, how do you calculate the time zone on that, that lline of thought just brought up unanswerable questions about how does this ship get from point A to point B without us aging and dying even with longevity treatments and what does that have to do with relativity and how does that affect a phone call to someone on another ship, or planet or wherever the hell they were?
But as long as it was on someone else's calling plan, Leia was prepared to wait on the technical explanation.
Droning through a lot of informed consent stuff was mind-numbing in a relaxing way. Hey, it can't be that bad; there are no insurance forms to fill out and we don't need to get prior approval for any of the procedures. Not only is it an outpatient procedure, there's no cutting and no apparent side-effects. It seemed impossible and therefore suspicious, but Leia strongly believed that was just reflexive cynicism.
Once they were through the list, Leia had that relaxing feeling of relief that comes with finishing a background task that had been hanging over one's head. She hadn't realized she was worrying about it, but she had been, in the bad worry way where she wasn't even sure how to get to the point where she could start on the project, much less finish it. She also had a burbling feeling of happiness, knowing she could have sex and not worry about the consequences and, weirdly even better, the biological clock had been squelched for centuries.
Amable then spoiled all her fun by taking a deep breath and saying, "The next bit, I'm afraid, is a lot tougher. Your arrival and continued presence on Hazard, while welcomed and valued, is anomalous. While your impression of us must be highly informal, to put the best face on it, most crew go through an extremely rigorous intake process. We know where they're from. We know how old they are. We know all their little quirks of personality. Most of that information is available to all other crew at will, before and after the decision is made to add them to our space-faring family. While you've been working at an amazing pace, and have included a substantial amount of personal information along the way, and have been willing to share that with us, quite a lot of what we normally collect from prospective crew is, shall we say, missing."
Amable gave her a while to listen to the explanation. Once she caught up, Leia said, "You'd like me to fill out a job application? Background check form?"
The laugh was delayed, inevitably, but it did happen.
"Yes! It does not have to be filled out right this instant. Would you be willing to work on it with ship-mind over the next several days as part of the language translation/cultural assimilation process?"
"Yes." No pressure there. Yikes.
"And now we finally arrive at the question that prompted you to come to me." Leia looked confused. "Age?" prompted Amable. Oh, yeah. Right. That. What's a couple hundred years between friends? "I expect Radmer would like a definitive decision on whether we're sending you down-planet at the earliest safe opportunity. As you know, that won't happen for a while, as Andal is our next call. We won't leave anyone on Andal, even if they want to stay. If at some point we are able to return you to your home planet, and you want to do so, we will of course transport you there as quickly as we can. Until then, or if you choose not to return to your planet of origin, you constitute such a unique case that ignoring the age rule is just one small piece of a very interesting puzzle. As long as we believe we can keep you safe, and as long as you are not a threat to Hazard, its crew or its mission, you are welcome to stay with us." She paused, then added, "That application is not a formality. The information needs to be available to all of us." Amable addressed her last remarks to Radmer. "I know Leia's age is a shock. Try not to be too much of a bigot about it. If you couldn't tell, maybe it doesn't matter that much. She's definitely displayed the capacity to remain calm in the face of a series of dangerous surprises, and she's not too stupid to recognize the dangers."
"Just too stupid to recognize how long it's going to take to recover from them."
"We're not doing any better," shot back Amable.
"Hey. I'm still here and I understand you." To make the point, she said it in Target Language, which had the desired effect of getting their immediate attention. Assuming she really desired that.
"I didn't mean to imply that you are stupid," apologized Radmer.
"When you're right, you're right," Leia said in English, not sure how to translate it. Ship-mind apparently didn't do much better, because Radmer mostly looked confused. "I know you did not mean to imply I'm stupid. You are right, that I'm trying to ignore the aftermath, and it's not working very well for me."
Amable interjected, "I think it's working great, personally. You might need to revise your expectations. Both of you. However, right now we probably need to let Esifwu's call come through."
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012