Alien Tongues (34 page)

But when the intensity of the pain subsided, two unexpected facts became clear.  First, my skin was still more-or-less its normal honey color.  Maybe somewhat more pinkish, but certainly not reflecting any scalding.  Second, the acceleration had ceased.  Then a third fact also became apparent – no rockets were firing.  So we had to be now in free space, out of the death spiral of the quick-matter.  It didn't take much thinking to realize that the first three accelerations had raised us into consecutively higher orbits, and that the third one had provided escape velocity.  Against all laws of physics I knew, a series of blasts from the trailer's immense rockets had thrown my little cabin out of the gravity field without burning it up.  But then it occurred to me that we had at the time been free-falling into quick-matter.  What laws of physics applied in such a state?

My clothes were soaked in sweat as if I had just stood in a warm shower.  No, it wasn't only sweat, I realized, shaking my head.  It was still intensely hot in the cabin, but cool air was forming white vapor above me.  I looked over at the console to see Ben still seated there.  He was working on his sketch.  I called to him, and he came over and unfastened by harness with a sharp tug.  My immediate action was to walk over to the console and note that we were on a fair course.  Just then I didn't care much where.

I turned back to Ben.  His shirt was a little damp in places.  I hugged him tightly for about a minute, not caring what I smelled like.  As he had been taught, Ben gave my shoulders a gentle squeeze, off and on, during the hug.  Releasing him, I stripped off my clothes and led him by hand to the shower room.  There I got him to soap me all over, something I rarely bothered to ask him to do.  Usually I don't want the physical distraction, but this time I needed to feel his big hands all over me to keep reminding me I was alive and unhurt.  I had him dry me down, which was more usual – the heavy way he rubbed my skin left a wonderful glow.  I signaled him I wanted my night-shirt, which he got from a closet and pulled over me.

Suddenly I was exhausted.  I had Ben carry me to the console where I dutifully checked we were heading somewhere of relevance.  Endless messages had poured in and were continuing to pour in, to which I gave a blanket reply that both tractor and trailer were lost and that I was headed to the nearest station in the cabin.  I was going to rest and would give a full report when I awoke.   Ben carried me to bed and I told him to get in beside me.  I turned away from him and made him wrap his big body around me.  Oh Galaxy, I felt so safe like that.  I lost consciousness.

I think I awoke twelve hours later, still both of us in the same position.  I raised his forearm to my nose and breathed in the scent, recalling our shocking brush with quick-matter.  Had Ben's actions saved us?  It seemed unbelievable.  In fact it
was
unbelievable.  Yet he had been at the console, and virtually certain death had been avoided.  Never had I felt so alive, never had I felt so tingly all over and inside my body, intensely aware of the big, furry chest against my back.  I wanted to lie there for hours and celebrate our deliverance with this joyful physical closeness.  But I knew the real world was waiting for me at the console, and it would not be waiting patiently.  I got up and pulled on a jump-suit.  Ben also rose and went off to make me breakfast.  I opened an instant coffee from the refrigerator and walked over to the console.

To whom should I reply first?  It should really be the CEO of my trucking company, who personally wanted to talk to me, but I wasn't ready to stomach that.  Of course, both Al and Jo had left frantic messages, poor dears.  Let it be Al, I thought.  What I needed most was a boost and he could be depended upon to read that need.

When Al's face appeared on the screen I could see how concerned he was.  But when he saw my looking my normal, unblemished self, the obvious relief allowed him to beam a welcome smile that gave me the illusion that everything was fine.  I had just lost cargo worth the real estate of a large Central town, but Al was the type who could help me stop beating myself up about it.

"My Heroine!" Al exclaimed.  "Now how can I call myself one of your lead suitors?  You must be getting offers from young princes in the Centre Strip.  How does it feel to be a mega-star, Honey?"

"Al," I said with a very long 'a'.  "I appreciate any attempt to boost my morale, but that sounds like it's bordering on sarcasm."

Al's huge grin suddenly switched to a look of surprise.  "Baby, don't tell me that I'm the first thing you've looked at since you woke?  Deary, I am sooooo flattered!  You haven't even stopped to see the news yet?"

"No, what happened?"

Al burst out laughing, a mixture of genuine mirth and theatrics.  "What happened?  What happened!  My Little Pilot First Class,
YOU
happened!!  The whole of the Inner Disc has been watching your battle with quick matter over their breakfast and lunch.  For certain they will see a more extended version to help digest their dinners."

"Al, don't joke with me please.  I'm still feeling very fragile."

"My Darling, were you hurt?"  My last reference suddenly created concern in his voice. I assured him there was nothing physically wrong and I was only talking about nerves.  Expressing further appropriate concern, he continued, "Sweetie, this is no joke I can assure you.  Much as I am thrilled to be the cros occupying your time at this moment, I think it's only fair I let you study the news.  You simply have to see it for yourself."

"Is there video?" I ask in surprise.  It was difficult to imagine anything really newsy without video, but what could they be showing?  I watched Al's head do a slow but very pronounced nodding.  Oh yes, he was saying, there is video to end all video.  I felt my cheeks on fire.

"We have no idea who did it, " he continued, "but someone sold your cabin feed to the Center Network.  It then got syndicated.  Real, life-and-death drama.  Every second is being gorged upon in chat-shows from Light to Dark.

It occurred to me that now hundreds of millions of people had already watched my period of insanity, screaming profanities at Ben.  Perhaps I should never return from space.  Was there somewhere in the Outer Disc I could go where no one would recognize me?  I told Al I would watch the news and call him again later, refusing his suggestion that we should watch together.  That concept was out of the question.

Ben had brought my breakfast on a trolley.  I had felt hungry earlier but now I felt sick.  Could I bear to watch the news?  Damn it, everyone goes a bit insane sometimes.  And I was faced with perhaps the worst kind of physical agony – who could really blame me?  I was just a working, single fem, nobody special.  Every day we see someone do something crazy in a news segment and we forget about it.  How about the billions of people whose naked pictures you could find, even ones of them having sex?  The one good thing about embarrassing stuff – there is just too much of it everywhere about too many people to make any real difference.

So, heart in mouth, I steeled myself to turn on the news.  Among the headlines, it took only a moment to find, "Escape from Quick Matter – A Pilot's Incredible Story."  Wincing, I opened it to find one of the most famous Center Network cros anchors, Ed Row, hosting the story.

"We've all seen movies about quick-matter," he began.  "Some of them are horror stories, others are science fiction about traveling to an alternate universe.  But until yesterday, no one had entered a quick-matter's deadly vortex and lived to tell the story.  This is the story of Meg Moon, a First-Class Pilot of Gold Wings, employee of Nebula Fleetlines, fem from the Dust Belt, and survivor of a visit to the funnel of QM81 – a previously unmapped QM of which she could have had no inkling until caught in its death-spiral."

My first feeling of relief came from this last statement.  It was already being acknowledged that the quick-matter was unmapped, removing any doubt that something I had done had caused me to miss it.  Ed Row then introduced a panel of "experts" who he said would be providing commentary to the story.  One of them was Professor Joy, leading authority on the mathematics of QMs.  Wow.

"Panel," he told them, "I'm just going to go straight to the video taken within the cabin.  I'm afraid the soundtrack is no help as all we can hear is the roar of the engines, the starting of which had woken Meg from a nap.  But each of you has told me that, in your area of expertise, it's clear what is going on here.  So I'm going to ask you in turn to walk us through this video, OK?"

Now I felt a dramatic lightening in my chest.  No soundtrack.  Even though people could see my face and ridiculous actions, they could not hear my curses.  How easy were my lips to read?  It seems the panel was OK with the arrangement.  A celebrity cros medical doctor was asked to take up the commentary from when I first sat down at the console.

"Watch her stare at all those screens.  You can just tell she is approaching what they call in cognitive science the "moment of synaptic resonance."

Ed Row jumped in.  "That's what popular science calls the "Brain Bang", isn't it?"

The doctor laughed indulgently. "Yes, Ed, that expression has a sort of intuitive appeal, doesn't it?  I mean, what we're talking about is something machines are not wired to do.  Machines operate in logical sequences , so they are not so good at inspiration.  What the brain can do is suddenly pull together seemly unrelated material by finding some entirely new pattern which just happens to a new situation.  A leap of logic, a brainwave – we have many expressions for it.  Our brains have sections for language, for mapping, for face recognition, even for moral decisions.  During this so-called "Brain Bang" we somehow see a solution which gets its source from a whole cluster of these sections."

"Yes, got you."  Ed seemed worried the doctor was going on too long and losing their audience.  "Jill."  He turned to a fem psychologist.  "Meg is now grasping her mal's shirt.  What's going through her mind here?"

I'm telling him he's a stupid ape, I thought, but luckily you can't pick that up.  The fem replied, "I think that's a sure sign of the Brain Bang.  She's desperately trying to communicate to the mal that he must follow her instructions.  She's excited with her discovery, but she also knows this is going to be very tricky with a mal."

"And can you explain whys she needs the mal to help?"

"I will do that," interrupted the expert, older fem engineer on the panel.  I think she was one of the main architects of the last Gold Wing series.  "But let's wait until he sits at the console – it'll be clearer then."

I could not believe what I was hearing.  An alternative story was being dubbed onto my silent movie.  We watched Ben pull me out of the control chair and carry me over his shoulder.  Surely I'm found out now, I thought.  Much of my beating on his back was not visible, but a number of thumps were.

Ed and several of the panel chuckled at that sequence.  "That's truly amazing, isn't it?" Ed exclaimed.  "Doctor, please help us!"

"Well, such gravity fields can have strange affects upon our central nervous systems," came the reply.  "sometimes, it can temporarily paralyze parts of the body.  It seems that Ms Moon has at that moment lost the full use of her legs and at the least cannot trust herself to walk in such an accelerating environment.  Her mal, who has much thicker thighs and calves, seems still to be functioning normally."

"And the signals to the mal's back?"  Signals!

The older fem engineer interrupted again.  "It's clearly a sequence of controls he is going to operate for her," she explained.  "I think you can see… left, right, left, left, right, left….again, we will see this more clearly when the mal is at the console."

Now I just gazed, wide-eyed and open mouthed, as if I were part of the breakfast audience.  After all, I was listening to the experts.

Ed Row reached round to his back as a kind of demonstration.  "Blows on the back – the sort of sequence you're going to remember pretty well for a short while, still feeling it!  And of course we're dealing with a mal here – you need to be creative if you want them to memorize something."

There was a murmur of agreement from the panel.  I found I was now slowly eating my breakfast as I watched.  The screen was now showing Ben jamming the buckle on my harness.  Of course, someone said I had instructed him to do that and then strongly tested it when he stood back.  Once he was seated at the console, I shouted my orders to him, as loud as I could above the noise of the rockets.  The psychologist noted how I was putting all of my energies into shouting my instructions, a frail fem pushing herself to the limits of endurance.  Though I was hardly frail, I did somewhat appear so on the screen.

Now the engineer went through the sequence I was obviously instructing Ben to follow, repeating the pattern I had tapped on his back.  It was now clear, she explained, why it had to be the mal at the console and not the pilot.  With his much greater reach, he was able to pull the levers with the precise timing necessary.  When the console had been designed, for instance, no one had ever imagined trailer and cabin rockets being fired simultaneously, but for this unique maneuver it was essential.  The mal was acting like my extended arms, and it was my torrent of words that controlled him.

It was Ed who asked the obvious question.  If a mal doesn't communicate verbally, how could he follow my words?  There was a silence.  Then the cros doctor said slowly, "Well, you see, Ed, mals understand a lot more than we usually give them credit for.  And I suspect Ms Moon has been training hers to do small jobs around the ship.  He could probably follow simple instructions very well."