Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book One)

Chapter Ten

When I awakened ten hours later to the clanging of my phone alarm, it was with a raging thirst and a nearly complete sense of disorientation. I fumbled for my water bottle, which I found on the floor next to the bed. For a couple of minutes I just sat there in the dark. More than anything I wanted to pull the blankets over myself again and go back to sleep. Some of yesterday's naïve excitement had dissipated, and in its place came apprehension. I now knew that even the simplest task—in this case, checking the time on my bedside display—would be dauntingly hard. Break it down into steps, I told myself. Turn on your phone light. Find your notebook. Find the page with the clock words. Turn on the panel. Figure out what time it is.

It took a few minutes, but eventually I established that my hasty mental calculations of the night before had been more or less correct; my phone alarm had woken me about an hour before the morning briefing was due to start. Today I would have to learn how Vardeshi alarm clocks worked, assuming they existed. It would be more efficient to set a recurring alarm tied to shipboard time than to continue relying on guesswork, with its inherent risk of error. I washed up, dressed in the same uniform as yesterday—another item on today's list was procuring more uniforms—and went to the mess hall in search of a hot drink. There was no one in the galley, but a little judicious poking around revealed the same carafe Ahnir had shown me the day before, half full of recently heated water. I mixed up an instant cappucino and headed for the axis chamber. I'd decided that I didn't care whether the Vardeshi gave me odd looks. On Earth we drank coffee at morning meetings, and as Dr. Sawyer had reminded me, the cultural exchange went both ways.

As soon as I entered the axis chamber, I saw that it wouldn't be a problem. At each seat around the table—except for mine—was a small rectangular tray carved from a dark stone that looked like slate. On the tray was a tiny cup and plate and a delicate silver spoon. The cup and plate looked as fragile as eggshells, and their iridescent surfaces caught the light and refracted it in tiny rainbows. I leaned closer for a better look. They appeared to be made of blown glass. I saw that each plate held a few round pastel-colored pellets. Candy? I wondered. Or medicine? I heard the door hiss and looked up to see Zey enter the room carrying an elaborate silver vessel that reminded me of a Russian samovar. "Wow," I said. "What's all this stuff?"

He placed the silver vessel carefully on the table beside the seat that belonged to Khavi Vekesh. "The morning senek ritual."

"Senek?" I'd heard the word on Dr. Sawyer's recordings. We knew it was something edible, but not much more than that.

"It's a drink. Like coffee." He nodded to my thermos.

"It wakes you up," I said.

"The opposite, actually. It calms us down."

"Why?"

"Our ancestors were predators. Their most active times were dawn and dusk. Twice a day our brains still release a hormone that makes us restless and hyperalert. Good for hunting, not so good for sitting in a meeting. There's a chemical in senek that counterbalances that hormone. It helps us relax."

"What about those?" I pointed to the tiny pastel balls.

"Those are just sugar. The different colors are for different flavorings."

I scanned the table and saw that no two assortments of sugar pastilles were alike in number or color. "You know everyone's preferences by heart?"

"Of course. The senek ritual is novi work. I do it every morning. Tomorrow I'll show you how to do it, and then we can take turns." Now that I was listening for it, I could hear that there was something odd about the cadence of Zey's words. They sounded clipped, hurried, as if he were feeling anxious—or as if he'd had one too many cups of coffee.