LJ Cohen
Varna bit back the urge to click her tongue in distress as she studied her tall, barrel-chested boss. Ambassador Berwick’s voice, so well suited to vid broadcasts and important speeches to even more important people, felt far too large for her small cubicle. She struggled to keep her throat relaxed and her overvoice silent.
“Your participation is essentially a formality,” he said, leaning over her desk and smiling.
Despite her discomfort at being in his spotlight, it was hard not to smile back. Berwick had a charm that came across as both well-practiced and genuine, almost childlike in its enthusiasm.
“You’re not technically part of the diplomatic team and the actual negotiations will take place after the welcoming ceremony. So, what do you think?” he asked.
She clasped her hands under the desk to keep from fidgeting. Varna had worked at the Embassy long enough to know it didn’t really matter what she thought. His direct presence here made her assignment to the mission merely seem like a request instead of genetic expediency.
What did she think? Varna clamped her teeth down. After a lifetime of struggling to pass in Human society, she thought this was a massive mistake. But you didn’t just say that to Earth’s most high-ranking inter-planetary Ambassador. Hell, Berwick probably spoke more of her grandparents’ native Tuvlun than she did, and he didn’t even have the properly shaped palate. She didn’t realize she was tapping the tip of her tongue against the high arch of her mouth until the hollow echo of her anxiety filled the room. She snapped her mouth closed before the clicking could annoy him.
“What about my assignments?” She glanced across the piles of perma-paper scattered across her desk.
Berwick raised the bushy eyebrows that framed his steel gray eyes.
Varna’s ears thrummed. What a stupid question, but she had to find a way out of this. She wasn’t really Tuv, no matter what a gene-scan might show. Her grandparents had turned their backs on their native culture in the clearest way they knew how: they raised their only son—her father—to pursue some bizarre version of a Human life in Tuv skin. As far as she knew, the few other Tuv refugees on Earth had done the same. She shook her head. How much harder it must have been for that first generation. At least she could pass, even if most of the time, she felt like she failed at being either Tuv or Human.
“You’ve been released from Human Resources until further notice.”
She shook her head at his unintended irony and swallowed the braying laugh that always betrayed her Tuv heritage. Tall for an Earth woman, taller even than Berwick, most of Varna’s differences remained internal, including the double set of vocal cords that let her voice call out tones her mother complained sounded like a cross between an owl and a cat in heat.
“I’m looking forward to working with you, Varna,” Berwick said, glancing at the nameplate on her desk, trying to puzzle out the pronunciation of her last name. She didn’t know why she bothered to hold onto that one vestige of her heritage. Everyone mangled it anyway.
“Just use Vee. It’s easier than the full formal version.” Her nervous laugh filled the small work cubicle. It rang overly loud to her sensitive ears, but it was the best she could do, despite years of speech therapy and coaching. “Even I have trouble sometimes.” Her grandfather’s lessons echoed in her memory: Put others at ease. Don’t call attention to yourself. Fit in. Your job is to dress, walk, and speak like an ordinary Human.
“So how do you pronounce it?” Berwick leaned forward, his eyebrows raised in an expression of curiosity.
Was he really interested? Or did he just need to know she had enough Tuv in her genome to fulfill the Tuvlun envoy’s demands? She would have to pay attention to the more subtle tonalities in his voice to tell the difference between Berwick-the-person and Berwick-the-Ambassador. Her Tuvlun senses were very out of practice.
“I’m afraid you don’t have the range to hear it exactly the way a Tuv might, sir. This is as close as I can get.” She took a breath and let air vibrate the small, thin vocal cords she worked so hard to silence. Her family name emerged as something partly spoken, partly sung, and partly pure vibration she could feel against the sensitive membrane in her ears.
Berwick winced and took a step back.
Heat rushed to Varna’s face in a completely Human response to embarrassment. “I’m so sorry, Ambassador!”
He put his hands up and shook his head. “No, not at all. The attaché warned me we would all need auditory filters for the formal meetings. I just didn’t think I would need them quite yet.”
Looking down at her cluttered desk, she wondered how she could possibly escape. She was no diplomat. Unlike her wandering fore-bearers, Varna had barely even left the solar system, and her grandparents, native Tuvlun stranded on Earth, rarely spoke about their home. “Sir, I really think …”
“That you’re not the woman for the job? That you’ll cause a diplomatic incident? That we should choose someone else?”
She dropped her gaze to the floor. Yes, yes, and yes. To all of the above.
“Your supervisors think very highly of you, you know.”
Sure. That and a trans-pass could get her to the moon and back. She lifted her eyes to his face again and swallowed past the lump in her overly long throat. “There are others a lot more qualified. Sir.”
He sat at the edge of her desk and leaned in. “So my advisers tell me.”
Varna hadn’t expected that. Her face heated again and the blood beat against the inner membranes of her ears like the pounding of drums.
“The Tuv will only meet with us if the delegation contains someone who can claim Tuvlun heritage. Fortunately for us, you were already working in my Embassy, with full security clearance and the freedom to accompany me in the time window we have.” He smiled. “Besides, I have a feeling about you, Varna.”
Not that it mattered, but she tried one more time. “Look, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m no diplomat. I’m an assistant to an assistant …”
He waved down her objections. “None of us ever do,” he said, a far-away look on his face.
Berwick’s vulnerability surprised her, though it could just be a diplomatic maneuver—something to put her at ease. Should she tell him her grandparents got practically thrown out of the Tuv trade guild and off-planet?
“Don’t worry, my attaché will get you up to speed. Welcome aboard.” He gave her a slight bow and left her office without shaking her hand. She didn’t know if that meant anything.
*
They might as well have been on any in-system transport with its small and featureless rooms, and the bland, institutional food. No sense of movement accompanied the terrible dislocation Varna felt. For the most part, she tried to keep to herself in her tiny cabin except for the mandatory meetings and daily briefings.
Slouching low in her chair in the conference room, she listened as the ranking general complained about the newly established Tuv trading base so close to Earth’s only major nexus point. Berwick’s second-in-command insisted the placement simply allowed for a face-to-face meeting and that the Tuv didn’t pose any military threat.
Besides, allying with the Tuv promised to give Earth access to a whole series of new nexus points. That alone, the diplomats argued, made the risk worth it since the Tuv had resisted every offer to trade until now. The same set of facts made the general and his small military contingent twitchy.
Each side presented its best-and-worst-case scenarios, then everyone in the cramped room looked at her as if she had some insider knowledge of the Tuv grand plan. Varna wanted to shrink her too-tall body, silence her too-resonant voice, and hide in her cabin until it was all over.
Berwick barely said more than a few words to her. He had his own team of advisers and seemed to be frowning in concentration whenever she saw him.
She knew it probably irritated the rest of the mission the way it had always irritated her mother, but Varna spent a lot of time humming deep in her throat to try and soothe her nerves. It wasn’t easy overriding a childhood where she was taught to hide all outward evidence of her Tuv roots. In a strange way, she felt like she was betraying her grandparents.
Every possible moment, she poured over the ceremony wording to make sense not only of her role, but of the whole formal presentation. Parts of it felt like a debate, other parts like a wedding. The exchange of trade agreements seemed simple, but the heart of the ceremony included the offering of official gifts. The diplomats argued every day over what they should present to the Tuv.
They had also prepared a short speech for her to give in Standard and in Tuvlun. Many of the Tuv words didn’t make a whole lot of sense even when she had the computer take its best shot at translation. Her grandparents had been the last Tuv to seek asylum on Earth. The language database had to be woefully out of date.
Only a brief announcement warned them they’d docked before the external ports turned transparent again. The nexus point wasn’t all that impressive to look at. A series of gantries and scaffolding floated at odd angles to one another, sprouting from a dot in space that Varna’s eye skipped over, no matter how hard she tried to look at it. The Tuv had the largest nexus network in this part of the galaxy and they were suddenly willing to share it with Earth. No wonder the Embassy jumped at the opportunity.
Varna stared out at the field of stars beyond the nexus, but she had no way of knowing which was her adopted sun and which might have been her Grandparents’ long lost home star.
“What am I doing here?” she asked.
“Remarkable, isn’t it?”
Varna yelped in surprise, her overvoice ringing the room. Ambassador Berwick winced and covered his ears.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” she said.
“My fault. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He rubbed at his temples.
After the flurry of activity on their way to the rendezvous, it seemed strange seeing him in a quiet moment and without several men and women at his side. At least one from the diplomatic team and one from the military group had flanked him at all times, like an angel and devil on his shoulders. She wondered which was which.
He frowned, patting his pockets. “Here they are.” He drew out a set of tiny filters. “We haven’t had a chance to fully field-test them. Shall we?”
She looked at him, drawing her eyebrows together as he fitted them to his ears.
“Go on. Say something in Tuvlun.”
She took a deep breath and recited one of the lines from her script, watching the Ambassador’s face carefully, but he didn’t react.
“Excellent,” he said, nodding.
Well, at least she could get through her speech without sending her own delegation screaming out of the ceremony.
“For what it’s worth, I appreciate your part in this.”
He appeared as confident as ever, but his voice had a ringing overtone that betrayed his nerves. She didn’t think she would have noticed before spending hours and hours retraining her ears with the Tuvlun language simulators. “Sir?” But he had gone before she had a chance to say anything else.
*
The next time she saw the Ambassador, he stood, dressed in formal gray and silver, in the entry to the large chamber where the Tuv delegation had created a meeting hall. Berwick paused at the edge of the cold, white room, its floor bare but for the red and gold lights that winked in the shape of a curved runway leading to where their Tuv counterparts stood. The rest of the Earth delegation waited at the perimeter, military honor guard and the Ambassador’s staff alike. She kept her eyes on Berwick. What was he waiting for? Varna started humming, but cut off the buzzing sound at a shake of his head, wishing she had something to do with her hands.
The room fell silent. Even the Earth delegation stood completely motionless. Varna still had not looked up from her study of the floor. What if they wanted someone more obviously Tuv? From what she’d been able to piece together from childhood, her grandparents had been permanently exiled from their homeworld. She never knew why. What if their failure reflected on her? Her spindly arms hung at her sides, wrists poking out from the sleeves. She clicked her tongue rapidly against the roof of her mouth. This was such a mistake.
Berwick met her eyes and smiled. He had such a large presence it seemed wrong that she stood taller than he did. When he finally gave her a nod, she stumbled forward on wobbly legs. He walked beside and slightly behind her, holding the box containing the gifts the staff had finally agreed to offer. She wasn’t even sure what had ended up in the container. The Ambassador should be the one in front, not her. She struggled not to glance back at him and focused on her feet and on not tripping along the way to the dais.
Forcing her head up, she nearly gasped aloud at her first good look at the waiting delegation. The Tuv representative stepped forward from a group of five others. He looked like her grandfather must have before the years on Earth had aged him and stooped his body. Standing nearly seven feet tall, with a long neck and thin oval face, he towered over even her. His round eyes, nearly black, almost all pupil, were as impossible to read as her grandparents’ and her father’s had been. Dark green robes flowed over a black form-fitting bodysuit that accentuated his lean limbs. She wondered if that’s what she looked like to her Human friends and co-workers—a walking, talking scarecrow.
“Daughter of Tuv, be welcome here. I am the Speaker.” She recognized the words from her studying. His voice rumbled through her. Her grandmother’s voice had sounded like that and Varna realized how flat, how empty Human voices seemed in comparison. The Speaker turned to Ambassador Berwick and folded his lanky torso into a bow. “She is well chosen.” His Standard rang through the room in multiple octaves simultaneously, but all the members of their delegation had filters in place. At least no one winced.
The Speaker clasped his arms together and waited. A long silence fell. Now what? Varna had an almost irresistible urge to say something, say anything to fill the void, but she forced herself to be still. The Speaker studied her for several uncomfortable moments before unlacing and relacing his fingers.
The silence stretched out until she practically vibrated with tension. Her hands shook. He was supposed to say something. This was not what she had practiced. Sweat trickled down her back and she glanced back at the Ambassador. He nodded, his face composed. A soft hum rose from the Tuv side of the room. It resonated against her thin second ear drum and she shivered with the collision of the familiar and the strange. She wiped her palms against the soft material of her formal robes.
Just a formality. Just a formality. She looped the Ambassador’s words over and over in her head in a calming mantra.
A young Tuv girl stepped forward from behind the Speaker, holding a smooth, seamless white box. Varna let her shoulders relax. This had to be the exchange of official gifts. They were back on the script. The girl stroked the box with the slender fingers of her right hand. All the fingers measured the same length, even the thumb. Varna looked down at her own hands, the fingers almost like her mother’s. Her own thumbs seemed impossibly squat and clumsy next to the girl’s.
The box unfolded itself, revealing four small, triangular compartments, each filled with a glass vial. Perfume? Something to drink? What was she supposed to do?
The girl set the open box on a waiting table and drew out one of the vials. The liquid inside swirled a dark purple that was nearly black. “Please, you will hold?” she asked, her Standard awkward and halting. Varna could sense Berwick somewhere behind her. Surely he would intervene if this were dangerous.
Varna reached out and took the vial in her right hand. The crystal caught the light and splashed rainbows against the chamber walls.
The girl reached out and gripped Varna’s left forearm. She plucked the stopper from the bottle with her other hand and squeezed a single drop of fluid over their crossed wrists. A shadow the color of dusk rose between them. Varna tried to step back. The girl hissed a warning she couldn’t translate and gripped even tighter.
“A gift to awaken Tuv senses,” the Speaker said, first in Standard, then in Tuvlun.
Varna relaxed and peered into the darkness. Sheets of color burst into her vision. She blinked furiously, trying to clear her eyes, but the brightness bloomed everywhere, creating her own personal aurora borealis. The room came back into view and the light show faded. The girl nodded, placed the stopper back in the bottle and plucked it from Varna’s hand, sliding it back into the box. She chose a second vial. Red liquid shimmered inside.
Varna took a deep breath and nodded as one drop hung from the stopper. It slowly sheeted off to splash on their skin. A humming started at her feet. Her bones thrummed with it and her entire body vibrated. The hairs on her arms fanned out. In the distance, she heard what sounded like tolling bells, one peal overlapping with another and another until the whole room rang. The inside of her mind formed a cathedral. Varna’s breathing sped up. Tears welled up in her eyes when the last of the echoes faded away.
She barely felt the girl taking the red vial and giving her another. This one glowed a deep night sky blue. Scents she didn’t even have words for triggered memories long locked inside. Her father’s cologne brought his face into focus. He held her hand with his, impossibly long fingers curled entirely around her small, stunted ones. “When will my fingers grow right, Daddy?” she asked. Other scents crowded out his answer. She smelled the special steamed bread from her childhood, pungent with a spice her grandmother could never replicate on Earth after her small store from home ran out.
Tastes bloomed on her tongue: The first time she tried chocolate and gagged on the bitterness. The odd combinations of sweet and spicy she always craved. Each taste burned with a color in her mind, each color rang with a clear tone. Her body felt distant, impossibly large and microscopic at the same time. She fell into the heart of a nexus point, except it blazed with light and swelled larger and larger as she got closer to it.
The bright crash of breaking glass brought time and space rushing back. Varna swayed on trembling legs, her hands empty. Cerulean liquid from the dropped vial pooled at her feet. She stared into a distorted mirror of herself. The young Tuv woman looked back. “What … how … ” She wasn’t sure what language spilled out. It didn’t matter. The words rolled around her mouth. They had shape and texture. She could taste their meaning.
She blinked her blurred vision clear, looked up into the Speaker’s deep eyes, and dropped into a well of sadness, of patience measured across lifetimes and by the slow shift of constellations across silent space. He reached his free hand out toward her, hesitantly, the arc of its movement asking for permission, for forgiveness.
Images of her grandparents filled her mind with memories clearer than her Earth-dulled senses had ever captured. Her very Human eyes filled with tears. “Thank you for this gift,” Varna said. The Tuv words she used felt right, full of nuance that any Standard form of gratitude would have lacked.
“It is your birthright, daughter of Tuv, too long delayed,” the Speaker said. Again, the Tuvlun echoed with additional meanings. Guilt and regret hummed in the air like the lowest string of a harp. Her grandparents were the ones exiled, the ones who broke faith with their own people. What would he have to be guilty about?
Ambassador Berwick fidgeted behind her. The whisper of his clothing rasped like sandpaper against her ears. The entire delegation shifted in growing restlessness. Before she could take the box from him and offer their gifts in turn, the Tuv girl turned to the Speaker. At his nod, she snatched up a sliver of glass from the floor at her feet. It winked in her fingers. Varna stared without moving as the girl grabbed her hand again in an unshakeable grip, the sharp glass trapped between them, cutting into both their palms.
Varna gasped. Pale blood, Tuv and partly Tuv, seeped from their joined hands for a moment before the pain blossomed. It was a shared pain. And out of it emerged a third language—not Standard, not Tuvlun, but something deeper than either could have been alone.
The girl reached for the fourth vial and collected a single drop of their mingled blood. A silence larger and colder than space blanketed the room. The blood pounded in her head. Distant shouts reminded her she wasn’t alone. She looked up and a ring of security men pressed too close, assembling a cordon around the Ambassador. She could taste their fear, their desire for weapons locked on the ship under diplomatic seal.
“The sharing is complete,” the girl said, capping the vial, her words limned with fatigue and triumph.
Ambassador Berwick stood, the sealed box still in his hands. Tension vibrated across his shoulders. “We have come here in the spirit of peace, Speaker.” His words purpled with anxiety and reproach. He did not meet Varna’s desperate gaze.
“I swear, she has not been harmed,” the Speaker said, meeting Berwick’s gaze with his own.
Berwick turned his head to look at Varna. She nodded. It was the truth. The small cut would heal cleanly.
The Ambassador ordered the Earth security to stand down. Practiced discipline dimmed their burnt-orange aura as they took parade-rest positions by the chamber door, leaving her and the Tuv girl isolated in the center of the room. The girl bowed and retreated with the rest of the Tuv delegation, until only the Speaker remained.
He studied the Ambassador. “Thank you,” the Speaker said. “The nexus maps are downloaded into your ship’s mainframe.”
Berwick frowned, his thick eyebrows pulling together. The waiting delegation relaxed in a symphony of sighs and rustling fabric.
“This gift honors us all,” the Speaker said. Varna tasted his anguish, sharp and pungent on her tongue.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
“You will,” the Speaker answered. “Your grandparents did.”
“My grandparents?”
The Speaker smiled and bowed to her. “They have returned to us in you.”
Something eased in the back of her throat. “They weren’t outcasts?”
“No. Never.” The truth in his voice filled the room with the scent of baking bread and the lost spices her grandmother had mourned. “They are honored for their choice, as you will be.”
Her cut palm tingled where her strange, confused DNA had mixed with that of the Tuv girl, creating something new, something alive with possibility that Varna had no name for in either language.
“Now do you understand?”
When she exhaled, her breath hummed like the buzz of late summer bees. She closed her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. Her grandfather had pushed his son to mimic the culture around him to the point where he couldn’t even speak passable Tuvlun. It was never out of shame, but out of duty. Out of sadness. Out of love. So that someday, his granddaughter could return, bringing something new to their people.
She glanced back at Ambassador Berwick still clutching the delegation’s official gifts, confusion and jubilation competing for his expression. “Was it … is it worth the cost?” she asked, her voice cracking.
The Speaker opened his palms and his fingers spread out like the spokes of a wheel. “We will not know for many turns, child.”
She looked down at her own too human fists. “Why?”
“It has been our way since our fore-bearers touched the stars.”
“You ask too much,” she said, her heart breaking for her grandparents’ sacrifice.
“We ask for your forgiveness.”
The room sang with silence. Varna unclenched her hands. The glass splinter tumbled to the floor. “Now what?”
“Daughter of two worlds, you will always have a place of honor here, if you choose to stay.” The Speaker took a step closer.
Berwick’s indrawn breath was as loud as a shout. “She is a citizen of Earth, under the protection of the embassy.”
She glanced between the two representatives, one Human, the other Tuv, feeling pulled between them. “Do all of us return? Or are some always lost, children of neither world?”
The Speaker averted his face. “We try to be worthy of their sacrifice. And yours.”
“You ask too much,” she said again, softly, her heart aching for those scattered sisters and brothers.
“The choice is yours,” Berwick whispered, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder.
Both men waited as Varna listened to the mixed blood sing in her veins.
***
Lisa Janice (LJ) Cohen is a poet and novelist, blogger, local food enthusiast, Doctor Who fan, and relentless optimist. LJ lives just outside of Boston with her husband, teenage sons, two dogs (only one of which actually ever listens to her) and the occasional international student. Her debut novel, The Between is available in all the usual places. You can connect with LJ via her blog: http://ljcbluemuse.blogspot.com and her website: http://www.ljcohen.net.