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Leia had always been a creature of routines. It wasn't that she tried hard to establish routines. She didn't own an alarm clock, and only set phone alerts if she had to get up at an unusual time to catch a flight. Unless she was very absorbed in what she was doing, she tended to eat her meals at the same time every day, and she often ate the same thing for each meal. In some ways, her new life was a massive disruption. After decades of cereal for breakfast, nothing like cereal in her life any more. On the other hand, that had happened before when she traveled, and was unable to find her usual foods and instead adopted a new routine for as long as she was in that place -- and every time she returned thereafter.
For the first few days, she thought of her new life as a vacation. Like a lot of vacations, the first day or so had been rough. Instead of hours waiting on the tarmac on O'Hare, there had been hours in a dark, cramped cell - which was still substantially larger than the space available even in first class across the Atlantic on the better carriers (but less, rumor had it, than a private jet). Instead of being in a car accident in the course of the cab ride to the hotel, her first space ship was destroyed around her. Instead of the air bag and seat belt (which might or might not have been functioning or available in the cab) saving her, a weird suit had saved her. And instead of being pulled out by a hot guy in a fire fighter's outfit, she had been rescued by a hot guy in a similar weird suit that looked a lot sturdier. Instead of passing out on the gurney to the hospital, she passed out in space, being moved from ship to ship.
While the new ship was even smaller (as near as she could tell, having been in three rooms and one hallway/foyer, four counting the facilities which she did not) than the previous ship, everyone had the right number of legs. At this point in her comparison, Leia wondered if she should worry about how upset she had felt at seeing people walking around on five legs instead of two. Did that make her a bigot? She'd never hesitated to express her disapproval of people who went south to take a cruise and complained about the color of the people they met while ashore. She'd despised people who complained about not understanding the local language, but how was she any different? And why was the lack of apparent symmetry the part she kept getting hung up on?
Well, for one thing, she was pretty sure her local bricks-and-mortar bookstore didn't carry phrase books for whatever these people were speaking. Amazon might. You just never could tell with them. But how would you search for it if you'd never heard of it?
After a while, she started thinking of it as a really crazy intense Junior Year Abroad that she had failed to prepare for adequately and must work extra hard to catch up. Not that she had had a Junior Year Abroad. Grants, scholarships and the absolute minimum amount of borrowing had paid for her college, which had not included a lot of travel, at least not until she'd accepted the internship at the CIA.
She started picking out individual words at the dinner table. She was even able to read some of the words on the food packages. Best of all, she could read all the labels in the exercise room and the facilities, which helped her avoid making embarrassing mistakes. Further embarrassing mistakes, anyway. The screen had gotten into some amazingly detailed pictorial scientific explanations and was teaching her math notation. Fortunately, it had also covered enough human physiology to give her the words to explain to Esifwu that her period had started and she needed something for it. This was the first place she had ever traveled where it was utterly impossible to improvise: no paper, no rags, no spare textiles of any sort. Inevitably, there was a dispenser in the loo for all kinds of devices, but she would never have found it on her own.
Every day was a new example (or three) of all the bits that were left out of science fiction (or, for that matter, travel guides). She could understand why this stuff never made it into the entertainment; once you got it, it was boring and invisible. But she'd been in war zones that were less anxiety producing than just getting through the day here.
Her attempts at using her new language skills at the dinner table were less successful. She was sure they didn't mean to be mean, but the laughter her inevitable mistakes engendered was humiliating. No surprise there. Whenever she'd traveled, she'd prepared intensely ahead of time and had no trouble reading signs. But make her talk to someone about anything more complex than ordering off a menu and she would just as soon crawl into a dark hole and starve. She gave them credit for persistence though. They unfailingly chatted with her, however painful it might be for all of them, for several minutes at each meal before descending, as always, into their avid, ongoing discussion. Which she now had enough vocabulary to know was evenly split between engineering and politics. Which was really kind of weird, especially since she suspected it would be a very familiar kind of conversation it she could only begin to understand it. It was especially hard to try to participate when Radmer was part of the small but mostly consistent group; his kind smiles only added to her fear of making a complete ass of herself.
She wouldn't have been surprised to learn there was a war going on and this was a warship, but it didn't seem to be. If anything, she'd hooked up with the spaceways equivalent of an NGO. She could steer the screen to topics she was interested in by not answering questions relating to anything else, or answering only slowly or incorrectly. The screen kept trying to redirect her to what it clearly thought was a reasonable path to knowledge and understanding, but she extracted from it everything she could about economics, politics and history. Eventually, she was frustrated enough by the oversimplified handling of what could have been fairly sophisticated narrative history, and complained to Esifwu. Esifwu looked confused, then came and did something to the screen that looked a lot like a teacher's review of a student's work. After about ten minutes, Esifwu sat down and started really paying attention. After another ten minutes, she came up for air, looked at Leia, and told her to go work out because this was going to take a while.
That wasn't precisely encouraging. Leia really hoped they weren't going to cut off the supply of knowledge. That would really, really, really suck.
Esifwu was still at it when Leia returned, tired, but refreshed from her workout and shower. Esifwu looked up, smiled weakly, and indicated that Leia should get herself something to eat. Esifwu finished what she was doing at the screen and returned it to a mode that Leia was familiar with. Then Esifwu got out a couple beverages that were not water, but smelled distinctly alcoholic, which up until this point, Leia had not yet encountered. Esifwu handed one over to Leia with another forced smile.
Again, the indications of bad news are more universal than one might suspect.
Rather than attempt to reproduce what Esifwu said (pointless, right?), or even a direct translation, which at this point was well beyond Leia's capabilities, here's an approximation of what she understood Esifwu to say.
"So, I want to apologize, because we've really, really, really screwed up here. Let me explain. When we picked you up from the [even in translation, the species name sounded like a multi-car pileup], we were retrieving someone else. Those long-string-of-interesting-profanity-that-Esifwu-refused-to-explain car-crash-folk have a despicable cultural obsession with intelligent zoo specimens, so whenever someone runs across one of their ships built to those specs, we're allowed to use whatever force we deem appropriate to extract people and return them wherever they want to go. Normally, that's simple. In your case, we figured it was just a language thing, and you could work it out with the computer. We left instructions with the ship-mind to let us know if your destination would involve a big change in our plans and did not hear anything so we figured we'd be dropping you off en route sometime soon. We did not instruct the ship-mind what to do if it couldn't figure out where you belonged, or were from, or whatever, so it's basically been spending all this time trying to identify where you are from. It doesn't have the training to do this, so it started with the toddler learning modules, worked its way through all the remedial schooling modules and then basically started you on all the advanced learning modules available. There are some holes in what's available, and for a lot of complicated reasons that involve typical cultural taboos, most of the narrative history is unavailable without special clearance. I've fixed that so you can get at anything you want now, and if it offends you, I'm really sorry and we can put some barriers back in if you want."
Esifwu took a deep breath and took a long look at Leia. Leia had started to suspect something along these lines, although nothing quite this bad. She'd really been hoping Esifwu and the crew were more godlike and omniscient than they were turning out to be.
"I don't know what else to say," added Esifwu. "What do you want us to do with you?"
Leia opened her mouth to answer, but absolutely nothing came out. She finished her drink and tried again. "I have nothing. I am lost. How do I?" But she didn't know how to ask how she could pay for anything, because none of what she had learned so far had anything useful about money or even barter. What little she'd found suggested she'd stumbled into a culture that operated on a gift economy.
Esifwu laughed, looking extremely relieved. "Learn! And teach that damn ship-mind your language. If you know more than one, teach it all of them. Don't worry about mistakes. Teach it everything. Your numbers. Your letters. Everything! You are new! I don't know when we'll find where you come from, but in the meantime, everyone will want to do anything they can for you!"
Leia looked at Esifwu blankly.
"You're from a further-profanity token culture. You don't understand. But you will. You will!"
Leia continued to look at Esifwu blankly, with a touch of, are-you-completely-crazy?
"Ah. This is why you kept trying to get at the politics/economics/history modules. This is a very, very bad way to put it, and if anyone heard me say it to you, I'd be in seriously deep shit. But in terms you can understand: everyone wants to give you as much as they can before you find your own people. Once you find your own people, you'll be giving us stuff. The more people give you when you have nothing, the more you will give back when you have something. The more your people will give. Get it? We know it doesn't always work that way with a token culture. But let's just say that when it does work it works so well, it's worth the gamble all the other times. I mean, everything is worth a gamble, but this is really worth a gamble. Get it?"
Leia closed her eyes tightly and tried to make some sense of it. She failed. She kept coming up with Be the Good Samaritan So You Will Win the Lottery, as if someone had read all that stuff in the Bible about sending your bread out on the water and it returning sevenfold. And took it literally.
Esifwu laughed some more. "Yeah. And that's not a language problem. Everybody from a token culture has a major brain freeze over this one." Then Esifwu stopped laughing, and uttered more profanity, followed by a call to elsewhere on the ship. After a very fast-paced discussion involving a lot of medical terminology that Leia had only learned the day before, Esifwu looked at Leia with a very woeful expression.
"You know I just said we assumed it was a language problem? Now that we know it's not, one of our other assumptions just failed. We only ran a very limited medical scan on you when we brought you on board. We'd probably better do a full scan now, even though we won't really know what we're looking at since we don't have a baseline for you. But nothing went off when we did the limited scan, which usually means you're so similar we can mostly trust the general baseline."
Leia asked, "Will this hurt?"
Esifwu said no, and off they went to a room Leia had presumably been in once before, while she was unconscious.
The scan was anticlimactic, but time-consuming. On the minus side, she had to take off all her clothes. On the plus side, she did not have to hold herself completely still, and definitely not in a claustrophobia-inducing device. On the whole, better than an X-ray, cat scan or MRI. There was some probing and sampling, but nothing as bad as a standard blood draw or even a throat culture. Throughout, Esifwu consulted with the ship-mind and a couple other people on board ship but fortunately not in the room with Leia's nakedness. Partway through the process, Esifwu got a call telling her the upgrades had arrived. After that, the ship-mind was able to do some translating for Leia, which was weird and confusing, because it used her voice to talk to her. Also, Leia's medical terminology had always been weak and wasn't particularly applicable, so a lot of the translation wasn't translated anyway.
Helpful. Not.
At the end of the procedure, Esifwu poked at her a few more times, explaining each time what she was doing. They weren't vaccines, because they were designed to fix existing problems. If Leia understood correctly, they might have been some form of nanotechnology, but it sounded like they were biological in origin. Esifwu seemed to have no concerns about bad side effects, even in a slightly different kind of person. Leia didn't feel particularly different afterwards than she had before. Finally, Esifwu left instructions with the ship-mind to explain some additional procedures to her in the next few days. Maybe something involving longevity.
Whoa. Would it be okay to be lost forever ... if she could live that long? Not really forever, but from the perspective of someone who was almost halfway through her expected lifespan, to be told you could have a dozen more lifespans? Effectively forever, right?
But right now it was time for dinner.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 10, 2012