The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (31 page)

Which was why my team got sent in.

14

I SURFACE TO SIBILANTS (
whisper, whisper, hiss, hiss, hiss
) and shudder as I open my eyes. The room is dark and has folded around me.
I can’t really see anything.
My heart pounds.
I have no idea how much time has passed.

I’m supposed to get lost in the memories, and maybe I am lost, but it doesn’t feel like the kind of lost I expected.
It’s almost as if I’m having a conversation with someone else, not reliving the past.
Not like—

—
clawing, climbing, reaching, bodies rolling beneath my feet, shifting against my hand, the feel of dried blood on my cheek, the cold flesh under my palms. That’s lost. I’m lost. I’ll never survive
—

I’m holding my breath.
I have to make myself breathe, and as I inhale the breath sounds like a sob.
The air has a faint tinge of rot—is that what this place does? It mimics what happened?—and I think it’d be so easy to escape, so easy to leave—

Only to live in my room forever.
Forever slipping, dreaming, hiding from my own brain, my own memories.

I close my eyes and force myself back inside, force myself to breathe—

***

—the hot dry air.
A small headache has formed between my eyes.
The Quurzod are not cordial, although we’ve been here for weeks.
My host family will not talk while I am in the room.
I hear them whispering when I am nearby, and I strain to listen.
But they use formal Quurzid whenever I’m around.

Fortunately, my team fares better.
They have made recordings of Quurzid in all its glory, marking what they believe to be familial Quurzid and what they believe to be street Quurzid.

No Quurzod will tell us the difference.
Once the Quurzod figured out that we wanted to know the entirety of their language, they stopped treating us like guests and started treating us as if we were Xenth.

Except for Klaaynch.
Klaaynch is thin, reedy, beautiful according to our culture—long blond hair and classic features—but strange to the Quurzod, whose features are thicker, hair generally a dark, almost orangish red.
I cannot quite tell how old Klaaynch is.
She’s one of those girls who looks the same at thirteen as she will at twenty-three.

I’m guessing she’s eighteen or so, very curious, with a gift for language.
She already speaks some Standard poorly, learned through overheard snatches of discussion.

She reminds me of myself.
All ears, wanting to know what everyone is saying, no matter what language they speak.

Her family won’t host, so she watches me from afar.
I eat in the prescribed visitor restaurants, and stay in the visitor hotel when I am not with my host family. The Quurzod agreed to host families, but balked at overnight stays, and frowned on sharing meals.
“Host” is not really a good term for what they’re doing, but we have no other.
They are sharing as much as they can.

Klaaynch cannot sit with me in a visitor restaurant, and I cannot go to a Quurzod-only place.
Sometimes she sits beneath one of the arching trees that mark every intersection.
I have learned to eat outside in the visitor restaurants, at the table closest to the tree.
Klaaynch and I talk, or try to, and she has promised me she will teach me familial Quurzid.

She says in diplomatic Quurzid (the only Quurzid I know fluently),
They cannot tell me who my friends are. They cannot determine whom I care about and whom I do not. If they try, I shall challenge them.

I admire her reasoning.

And her courage.
She wants to step outside her culture and learn other cultures.
She wants to become more than who she is.

Is this what Coop says he saw in me? This desire for knowledge, the desire to add to the core by reaching beyond the training, beyond the culture?

I sit and murmur to Klaaynch, not knowing that her face—

—
is the first one I see, rolling toward me, eyes open, mouth gone, as if someone cut it away, those cheekbones crushed, her hair wrapped around her neck. She is buried just above me, thrown on top of me, her blood on my skin
—

***

I gasp, and this time I am thinking of escape long before I vocalize it.
I claw the floor, the needle poking my skin, the darkness holding me.
I climb out and crawl toward the door, nearly there when Jill reaches me.
She drags me out of the room as if she’s dragging me out of that pit.

I stumble and fall against Deirdre who asks me what’s wrong, asks me to talk to her, asks me what I need.

“Leona,” I say.
“Please.
Find Leona.”

And then I pass out.

***

And wake in one of the hospital beds, like I found myself in after they rescued me on Ukhanda.
Leona is there, but not there.
She flits in, she flits out. She won’t talk to me in the medical wing.
She forces me to wait until I am well enough to sit in a conference room without any medical equipment at all.
She is even going to bring the chairs.

She knows that I know.
She doesn’t know
what
I know.
Just that I know.

And I ache because of it.

I ache.

15

CULTURES DO NOT invent languages and traditions overnight. They evolve over time.
And while some linguists believe that the language comes before the culture, I believe that the language serves the culture.

Think of a culture that has developed four different languages, each with a prescribed purpose.
The Xenth, who wear formal clothing and have precise traditions about who may have windows and who may not, who may look to the left and who may not, have but one language, without much more complexity than most human languages.
Twenty-eight letters, millions of words, a simple sentence structure followed in infinite variations.

But the Quurzod, who wear little to no clothing, and have windows everywhere, and few walls in their homes, the Quurzod divide the world with their language.
Language is forbidden to some, and embraced by others.

Language is not just for communicating, but also for protection.
Protection of the culture, protection of the family, protection of the Quurzod traditions, whatever they might be.

And whatever they might be, they are precious to the Quurzod.

In my excitement to learn, I forgot about strictures and structures and barriers.
I forgot that language conceals as well as reveals.
I forgot that protections exist for a reason.

And I forgot what it is like to be young and curious and different from everyone else.

I forgot.

I grew up in a culture that embraces difference, celebrate diversity, and loves outsiders.
A culture that believes itself superior to all others, yes, but in an open-minded way, a way that allows curiosity, a way that states the more we learn, the better we are.

I forgot that not everyone sees the universe as broadly as we do.

I forgot that not everyone has seen the universe.

I forgot that not everyone is
allowed
to see the universe.

When we finally get to our private conference room, I tell Leona that she no longer has to defend me.
I caused the crisis with the Quurzod.
I should have been left behind.

I should have been left to die.

She wants me to explain that, and I do, because I owe her that much.
I explain, but haltingly.
I do not want to slip into the memories again.
But someone has to understand.

Someone has to know.

Besides me.

16

CHILDREN ABSORB LANGUAGE. They are born without it, but with the capacity to learn it. Some lose that capacity as they age, or let it atrophy or never really had a great capacity for it at all.
But others never lose the ability to absorb language, and consequently, they crave more and more of it.

They want to learn—or maybe they need to learn.

I have always needed to learn.
Sounds and syntax are like symphonies to me, and as much as I love the old symphonies, I am always searching for new ones.

Klaaynch needed to learn too.
And if all I had done was teach her Standard, we would have been fine.
But she wanted to teach me the glories of Quurzid—all of Quurzid—and I wanted to learn.

She might have gotten away with teaching me some familial Quurzid.
She was right; no one could choose her friends for her.

But street Quurzid—it was beautiful and complex and revealing, a culture in and of itself, one that revered violence and anger as a way of life.
Each word had degrees of meaning depending on how it fell in a sentence, as well as what tone the speaker used (High, low? Soft, loud? Quick, slow?), and each meaning had nuances as well.
Street Quurzid was one of those languages that would take weeks to learn and a lifetime to understand.

I was thinking that after I completed my mission as the linguistic diplomat at the peace conference between the Xenth and Quurzod, I would stay on Ukhanda and study street Quurzid.
I would spend the rest of my life immersed in the most complex language I had ever heard.

Maybe I mentioned that to someone.
Maybe I had merely thought it.
Maybe my intentions were clear to people whose language was so complex that my language must have seemed like a child’s first halting sentences.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this.
I convinced Klaaynch to take me to one of the violence pools—a gathering site where the Quurzod train.
They live in those places, not in their homes, not in their streets, not in their restaurants or their places of business, but in their violence pools.

Violence pools are little mobile communities.
They exist as long as they need to.
If they get discovered by outsiders, they move.

Small buildings, assembled out of sticks and cloth, appear, then disappear as needed. They form a circle around a flattened area, and in that flattened area, lessons happen.

Most of the lessons are in things we consider illegal.
How to kill someone with a wide variety of weaponry.
How to kill someone with sticks.
How to kill someone with fists alone.
These are not military lessons, which we also provide, but lessons in survival.

Quurzid, for all its complexity, does not seem to have a word for “murder.”

Lessons here are proprietary.
Outsiders cannot see them.
I did not observe the violence pool during lessons, although I heard about them.
The worst, according to Klaaynch, were the defensive lessons. Because if you failed, you would get injured.
If you had trouble learning why you failed, you would get injured in the same way repeatedly.
If you flinched as someone came at you after you had already been injured once, you were taken off the roster until your psyche healed.
If you flinched again after your return, you were relegated to non-violent work—talking, writing, science, mathematics—all of which were seen as inferior.

Klaaynch’s dream of being a linguist was considered odd, and it
was
odd, for the Quurzod.
The only thing that saved her, the only thing that gave her any kind of power and potential, was her ability to fight.

She was considered the best of her generation.

And she proved it.

It took her four hours to die.

I know because I watched.

It was the only time I had been allowed in an actual violence pool during fighting.
I sat behind Klaaynch and her team.
We
sat there, all except the two who escaped.
Klaaynch and her young team.
Me and mine.
Twenty-three lives from the ship, lives I wasted in my attempt to learn the wrong form of Quurzid.
Awnings attached to the small buildings shaded us, but the air was hot—hotter than anything I had ever experienced—and dry.

The Quurzod gave us water.
They gave us something to keep our fluids balanced.
They wanted us to live—at least until the fighting ended.