Chapter 23: Passing Time in Study
Paulie and the others stayed there for a little while longer in contemplative silence before Jakiikii spoke up, her voice breaking the horror of the moment with its raspy undertones.
“I think maybe we should take a break from this?” It was phrased as a suggestion but spoken as a question.
Paulie didn’t respond to her, he was still too caught-up thinking about what Mack had said. ‘Millions.’ the miriamiam man had whispered. ‘Maybe Billions?’. Paulie felt another pang of the same disgust and hatred in his core that he had felt when they had discovered the comatose bodies of hundreds of humans in Ooounoo’s criminal fortress, but he set it aside. He needed to come up with a plan of action, something to stop the tide, to stem this flow. But how would he convince Mack to put together some kind of task force to go and get revenge.. No, not revenge. Justice. True justice.
He grinned savagely and turned his attention back to his surroundings as he heard Jakiikii speaking again.
“Yes, precisely.” She said, nodding her head a little toward Mack. “He needs more practice on it anyway.” She turned towards Paulie now and cocked her angular head, her little slash of a mouth turning down slightly on the sides as she gazed toward him with a mixed expression.
He nodded back a little jerkily. “Yeah.” He wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about but felt like agreeing was the correct response. It must have been as she smiled now and nodded her head once slightly.
Two of her eyes turned back toward Mack as her head stayed pointed at Paulie. She spoke, her low and husky voice reverberating from somewhere deep in her chest cavity as she did so. “Okay, that is settled then. While you keep looking through the data, Paulie and I will go and do a little more language work.”
Paulie’s smile faded as he finally realised what he had unwittingly agreed to. Language lessons, language lessons in an alien script older than human civilization itself. He hated it, he had been a slow study of language in school. Math and science he grasped easily enough, they were logical and straightforward. They had rules and laws that they obeyed. He shook his head a little, languages were a different beast. Every rule had an anti-rule. Every meaning could be twisted by context and even the spellings and pronunciations could change based on the situational use of them.
Paulie had nearly failed his writing classes in school for that reason. He liked to read stories, but he hated having to come up with the ideas on his own. Too much mucking about in his own head, and he had even less reason to hang about in there now than ever. No, he preferred to stick to purely logical pursuits. He looked toward the roof above, past the strangely textured, sound-muting ties and the buzzing fluorescent lights. Up and up into the great expanse of heaven itself and asked god or the devil or any powers at the universe’s command to send an asteroid to destroy this place or horror and profane alien knowledge.
It seemed as though his silent pleas to the universe for a stray meteor to obliterate the library were to be unanswered as Jakiikii grabbed his hand and led him smilingly away from Mack and the safety of the small command center he had made in this island of forgotten data.
He followed her a little sullenly, dragging his feet as she led him down first one corridor then another all the while cursing the universe silently. At some point Mursk had fallen in behind them and was speaking over his radio in untranslated medagoonian speech. The clicks and whistles of it made his ears twitch. The insectoid alien sounded like a giant cicada at times, the shrill tones almost reaching a painful threshold for instants as his warbling native tongue spiked through the otherwise quiet air of the library.
Objectively he understood the value of learning to read the de-facto common alien tongue of the greater galactic community, but at the same time he was not looking forward to more hours and hours of drudging through the intricacies of this mature alien language. A language that had already been ancient when mankind was still discovering how to grow food in the dirt. A small smile crossed his lips, at least he didn’t have to learn how to speak it. It seemed that many species were incapable of making similar types of speech patterns, and so each race learned their native species tongue as it was most comfortable to do so and just trusted in the biomancy-magics of the jargon worms to do the bulk heavy lifting where speech was concerned.
This made him glance toward Mursk again though. And not for the first time he wondered why they did not use the jargon worms. He decided to just outright ask the man, the worst he could do was say it was not for him to know.
So as they turned another hall into a larger open space full of tables and old-fashioned datastacks, Paulie turned and asked him. “Mursk, why don’t you have a jargon worm?”
Mursk stopped talking over his radio and spoke something quickly, seemed to stop as he realised his mechanical translator was not on, and then tapped a button on the wrist of one of his many power armoured arms. As if to prove the point of the lack, Mursk shook his head and muttered a curse at the device before responding.
“Incompatible biology.”
That was all the man said, Paulie opened his mouth to ask more but the suited alien had already turned off his translator and gone back to berating whomever it was on the other side of the connection.
Paulie felt a little pang of sympathy for whatever the poor devil on the other line had done, whatever it was it seemed to have really pissed the royal guard off. His wings flitted in anger and the antennae atop his insectoid head rose and fell like the fingers of a man drumming out his frustration upon a table or desk. His movements were jerky, almost bird-like, Paulie was getting a headache just watching the alien so he looked away.
Jakiikii and Paulie moved into the room, the termaxxi woman beckoning him to follow. He did so, seating himself at a nearby table as she went to go and grab a pair of handy data tablets from a nearby terminal station.
As she handed him one he pressed a small button on its side, the small device was very similar in principle to many of the ones he might have seen back home on Earth, just much more advanced. For one, the screen was a sort of three-dimensional projection and not a flat 2D screen. Jakiikii had once told him something about being able to project images directly onto one’s retinas but he had no idea how such a thing could be achieved with all the strange alien biologies he had seen.
But regardless of his understanding or not, the screen did its thing. It flickered grey and white then seemed to glow a subtle blue before it came to life, lines of strange falling lines of orange alien characters flowing across and down it. They seemed to almost hover in the air above it slightly, but if he turned the device the illusion was broken somewhat. Again, he was able to pick out several numerals, some of the alien text and a few basic words. But the vast majority of it was still garbled nonsense to him. Complex orange symbols that seemed to flit and dance with their own strange life as he stared dumbly at it. The page wobbled slightly as if alive due to the strange nature of its projection.
Then Jakiikii prodded his shoulder with one of her lower arms, “Alright. Like the last time, navigate to the setting and features and sync it with your wrist communicator.”
She watched as he tapped the familiar tabs on the screen. They were recognisable now that he had done this a few times even if he could not really understand the meaning of the text yet, he tapped through the menu and then paused again, unsure. She reached over and helped by making an indication towards a symbol that he was not sure was correct. But as he pressed it the screen flashed blue again and then changed.
Suddenly it was in English, the words as distinguishable as any he might have encountered before his abduction. He nodded his head.
“Thanks, I forgot the last one again.”
Jakiikii nodded. “Yeah, I noticed that.” She just chuckled as he ducked his head slightly, one foot kicking the air slightly in mild frustration already. Continuing on, she gestured at her own screen and then scooted her chair closer to his. “Okay, here, navigate to the learning center application.” He did so, pressing the strangely colored icon and watching as the screen seemed to fall away most disconcertingly.
In its place was a deep hollow, the sides lined with innumerable smaller icons that he could zoom into and inspect at will. He followed her instruction as he navigated to a basic language learning course and double tapped on it to run the program. There was a brief warbling tone and then a funny jingle like you might hear at a carnival before the program loaded.
The screen thanked him for choosing Englam Softworks Unlimited for all his learning needs and he skipped the short disclaimer. It was a small waiver stating that Englam was not responsible for any misuse of its learning programs and any use was limited strictly to the basic design of its software. So far he had not found a way he could break the program, it seemed as simple as a calculator.
Jakiikii had him practice some simple symbol recognition. Some of the strange alien characters looked very similar to English letters. The language was different from English though, enough that he struggled to put words together into complete thoughts. The way it was read was much different from the manner in which he spoke, and despite the best intentions of Jakiikii he struggled to understand even the less complex structures.
After about another twenty minutes of stumbling he tossed the datapad down with a clatter and sat back in the chair with his arms crossed. “Oh this is hopeless.” He grunted, his face twisted into a mask of annoyed frustration.
Jakiikii tapped her chin with the fingers of one of her middle pair of arms. “No, it is not.” She said bluntly, two of her eyes rolling themselves at him. He shook his head but she continued unabated. “You need to learn. I had to learn, Mack had to learn. This is just what it is, Paulie. I need you to try, okay?” She leaned into him a little and said, "For me?” he just sighed.
“Fine. I will keep trying, but know that I am doing this under protest.”
She chuckled again. A deep, throaty sound. “Fine, protest noted and denied. Just try for a little while longer, don’t get mad. If you get stuck then ask me for help. I promise that I will do what I can without doing it for you. When we get done with the next lesson we can take a short break, okay?” Her words struck a chord in his heart, her genuine concern or perhaps the promise of a reprieve. He dove back into the program with redoubled effort in spite of his self-reservations.
Paulie tried, he really did. But language arts had never been his strong suit back on Earth, and he was not getting any better here on Gike. He muddled through for another dozen pages or so before he paused, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and he noticed that two of Jakiikii’s eyes had flipped around to peer behind them.
Paulie turned his head and started slightly as he noticed that Mursk was standing just behind them, peering at his device through the gap between them from only a pace away.
Mursk seemed to notice them both staring suddenly and gave a twitch. His mandibles moved and then he spoke, the autotranslator of his suit speaking in its normal tinny fashion. “Apologies. I was just curious, it has been some time since I participated in these learning programs and I was just curious if they had changed much or not in all that time.” he ducked his body forward into a sort of bow as if apologising for intruding and Paulie waved it off.
“Hey no problem, man.” He stopped and looked back at him fully now, turning at the shoulder to get a better look at Mursk. “Hey, out of curiosity, and if it is not impolite of me to ask.. but how old are you?”
The mendagoonian royal guardsman straightened and then tapped his chest with two arms while his antennae seemed to rise as if in pride. “I am one of the youngest guards to join the program and pass out of my generation. I was aged sixty-eight years recently.” The insectoid man chittered proudly as he said it, clearly it was an accomplishment worthy of note.
Paulie nodded slightly and did the mental math. An Earth year was nearly two-point-six galactic standard years he had discovered, and so that would make the alien even younger than Paulie’s own thirty-two years.
“You are only twenty-six Earth years old.” Paulie mused aloud. It was pretty incredible really, the man was barely an adult, at least by the standards of a human. It made him wonder if Mursk’s people matured faster than humans or if he was just a true exceptional case.
Paulie got an idea all of the sudden and smiled.
Jakiikii frowned. “Uh oh, what is it now? You have that look again, Paulie.”
He smiled more innocently this time and shook his head once. “Whatever do you mean, love?” She punched his shoulder hard enough to sting a little and he winced. “Ow, hey.”
“I am serious, every time you get that look on your face you always end up running face first into some new scheme, like a jeavl trying to sneak into the treat jar.” She shook her head slightly, all six of her flexible petal-shaped eyestalks focused on him as he opened his mouth and then closed it.
Turning to Mursk, he decided to just go ahead and ask. “Mursk, you have the ear of your superiors right?”
The big, armoured bug made a hand gesture meaning yes. “I do have some authority in my area, yes. But I am not a known confidant of the monarch, like you.”
Paulie snorted at that. “Okay, first thing’s first. I am no confidant, I just happen to know her because I saved her kids is all.”
“Yes, the royal star children, a most noble action. And the main reason why I fought so hard to be assigned to your detail specifically.” Mursk said proudly, Paulie got the impression that he would have been puffing out his chest had he the ability to do so.
Well, that was certainly interesting. Paulie filed that tidbit of information away for potential future use as he nodded his head. “Yes, and you are the best man for the job. Of that I am certain. But the point still stands, you are in an important position.. technically speaking anyway. I was curious if you had the ability to get me in touch with Ishion?”
Mursk blanched. “Ishion, the royal prince?”
Paulie nodded.
Mursk seemed to shrink a little and Paulie was worried for a moment that he might have overstepped their growing friendly bond, but after another moment the powersuited alien made that same gesture of assent.
His long, featherlike antennae bobbed in the air. “I will. Yes, I will do that. I am sure that I can make a connection happen for one such as you, you already have repertoire with the prince. I will put in a call through the channels and see if I can arrange a meeting.” Paulie waved a hand to tell the alien that he didn’t need a meeting per-se. He just wanted to make a call, but it was too late. Mursk had already stepped away and around a nearby corner, his dexterous clawed hands tapping over his suit’s internal computer faster than Paulie’s eyes could process.
He heard a low rumble next to him and turned to see Jakiikii shaking her head. “I have a bad feeling I know what you are up to. It won’t work, and even if it does, are you really ready to go to war with these people?”
Now it was Paulie’s turn to look unsure of himself. He hugged himself a little and rocked back and forth as he tried and failed to suppress memories that he wished he could not remember. But it was futile, the parasite had shredded many of his comfort memories first, leaving just enough fragments for him to realise what he had lost while leaving his traumatic childhood and abduction wholly untouched. The creature had laughed at him as it did so, telling him he would be left with only the memory of happiness so that his torment would be all the sweeter.
He turned back to the woman he loved and gave the best answer he could think of at that moment, the only answer he could really live with.
“Somebody has to.”