Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book One)

Chapter Seven

It was after seven o'clock, much later than I'd realized, when Zey and I finally said good night. Stefan and a security officer were waiting outside to escort him back to his ship. Elena walked me to dinner. "I take it things are going well?" she said.

"I guess so," I said dubiously. "Zey's great, he was really helpful, but there's just too much material to cover in one day. It'll take months to get through all of it."

"Just think how the other Strangers must feel."

I shook my head. "I can't even imagine. They're braver than I am."

"Says the woman who's about to leave on a solo mission to a new planet," Elena said lightly. "Are you going straight to the dormitory after dinner?"

"I'll probably check out the assignment lists first. I told Kylie I'd meet her at eight."

"Don't stay too long," Elena said. "You have one more appointment today."

"What? How? Meeting with Zey was the last thing on the agenda. There's nothing left to do. Except launch."

"It's a surprise." She smiled at me. "Don't worry, it's a good one."

I ate a pleasant solitary dinner in the dimly lit dining hall. The hour was late, and the room was empty save for a few support staff finishing their meals in a far corner. The quiet was a balm to my nerves after a day spent chasing meaning back and forth from one language into another. I had forgotten how draining the first immersion into a new language could be. All my days would be like this now; every conversation, no matter how simple, would be a negotiation.

At eight o'clock I went to meet Kylie. It took me a while to find her. The corridor outside the dining hall was thronged with what looked like the entire membership of the List, all milling around chatting with their friends while they awaited their assignments. Eventually I found Rajani, Kylie, and Scott huddled with several others from the first wave of arrivals. Kylie nodded to me but didn't say anything. She looked tense. While I was trying to think of something encouraging to say, there was a stir at the front of the crowd. A staff member had arrived with a sheaf of neatly typed pages, which he began taping to the wall. There was a general drawing back to give him space and then a convergence when he'd finished. "Do you want to fight your way in?" I asked Kylie.

"No point, is there? We'll know in ten minutes anyway."

It was significantly longer than ten minutes before the crowd dwindled enough for us to make our way up to the front. After people found their names, they stayed close, hunting for their friends' names, blocking the view of those behind them. There were cries of triumph and exclamations of disappointment. Finally the commotion subsided as people began to drift away. I went up with Kylie to look. Somehow I'd forgotten that I was still part of the List; it gave me an odd jolt to see my own name in the first space, with Vardesh Prime written next to it. Next to the List was posted an enormous two-dimensional map of the section of Vardeshi territory that lay between Vardesh Prime and Earth. Every starhaven that would have human occupants was marked and named, and the routes of the ships had been drawn in and labeled as well. I knew the map intimately—I, along with Kylie and Rajani, had spent most of an evening poring over it after the Vardeshi had released it to the Villiger Center a few days before—and I could have sketched in the Pinion's route from memory. It spanned the entire breadth of the map. I found it thrilling, and a little disturbing, to see my journey laid out in such visual terms. The right-hand side of the map, where Earth was, was dense with the routes of orbit crawlers and short-range vessels. As the eye tracked left, past the cluster of starhavens within a few months' travel of Earth, the map grew steadily emptier. The Pinion's flight was a solitary line running on and on, leaving all the other markers behind, until it reached Vardesh Prime at the very margin of the paper.