The ship seemed different to her now, since her immersion in the Sanalabreum. It seemed shockingly silent, lonely, perhaps even haunted. She half expected to see Sectilius purposefully bustling by as she rounded every corner.
Alan and Ei’Brai wouldn’t need her for a few hours. She should have slept, but she felt restless. She’d been sleeping in the spartan crew quarters within the medical center to stay near Alan. Those were adequate, but they weren’t intended to be permanent quarters for any crew member, just a place to nap during a long, uneventful shift. They didn’t feel…right. She spent as little time there as possible.
Neither Alan nor Ei’Brai could be convinced to rest much either. The two of them were inexhaustible when faced with an intellectual puzzle. They went round and round for hours on end, arguing about how to deal with the rogue squillae.
Alan had come up with a solution straightaway, but Ei’Brai rejected it just as quickly, insisting Alan’s plan was fraught with pitfalls that neither of them could adequately anticipate. So the endless research, analysis and translation began. It was draining and frustrating for Jane, because she was forced into the role of translator within a sphere that she knew nothing about.
Alan was picking up Mensententia quickly, but even a genius immersed in a language wouldn’t be immediately proficient in the complex vocabulary of engineering. Jane had to pull from deep within and all of them had to exercise extreme patience as they learned how to communicate in this complex way.
Ei’Brai made the link possible and Alan adapted to Anipraxia quickly. He seemed to like it, though he wasn’t about to admit that, because he harbored intense levels of mistrust toward Ei’Brai and his motives. He’d heard the whole story, all the justifications for it, and he didn’t like any of it. He made it very clear that he thought Ei’Brai should have been upfront from the beginning.
Jane did her best to keep the squabbling between them to a minimum. Since she was the intermediary for nearly every conversation between them, that was a constant role she was forced to play.
It didn’t help that Alan was stuck in the Sanalabreum. He seemed to despise being interred there every bit as much as Jane had. He was a restless type, needed to keep moving, keep busy.
At the moment, Alan was occupied with picking apart lines of computer code and he’d be immersed in it for hours. They’d recovered a single example of the miscreant squillae from Compton’s Sanalabreum and immobilized it for study. Jane downloaded its code under Ei’Brai’s instruction. Alan was studying that code, line by line.
He’d picked up on the structure and rules of the alien code quickly, drawing parallels to his extensive knowledge of code on Earth.
He’d riffed, “It’s all just ones and zeros no matter where you go in the universe, Jane.”
She hadn’t gotten the joke, but she didn’t think he expected her to. Before she could ask what he meant exactly, he was back in it again.
She’d been walking for some time and he was still at it. She came back to herself and realized she was standing in a deck transport. She selected the deck that contained the public and private rooms of the ship’s governing body. Soon she was standing outside the door of the rooms of the Quasador Dux. This corridor was the same dull green as any other on the ship. It could have been any door on the ship.
She reached out her hand purposefully to the door control. She knew the woman who had occupied this room in an unsettling and unearthly way. Jane had seen many of her memories. No, not just seen them. She had, in fact, inhabited them.
Jane knew what it was like to be Qua’dux Rageth Elia Hator. Jane knew her favorite places in the ship, knew who her lovers were, knew what her favorite foods tasted like. Jane had seen her ferocity in battle, had seen her coping stoically with adversity. Jane knew her—knew that she’d been intelligent, determined, secure in her own abilities and those of her crew. She was respected and revered by the majority of the Sectilius onboard. She’d been an intrepid woman. Her loss was a tragedy. These were deep boots to fill.
The door slid into the ceiling with a near-silent whisper. Jane gasped with surprise and stepped inside the large, sparsely furnished room, mouth still agape.
Color. A riot of color.
Each wall had been painted in great blocks of swirling color. The wall opposite the door was particularly stirring. She moved forward to examine the work up close.
It was painted with wide smears of pigment so thick there were peaks and ridges within the medium itself. At the top third of the wall, the colors blended from amethyst to azure, thin streaks of vivid, contrasting colors commingling so well that they could only be distinguished at close range.
There was a break in the painting where the dull green of the wall was exposed, much like a Rothko, and the lower portion of the wall was a study in blues and greens, lighter near the top, gaining depth and mystery as the heavy strokes of darker pigments blended toward the bottom of the wall.
It was a depiction of dawn over a vast sea. She knew it intuitively, as if she’d been there, as if the experience was personal. She fingered the textured surface with the lightest of touches, thinking. Maybe she had, indirectly. Her own memory was a mixed-up jumble now.
It seemed like the break between the two paintings wasn’t meant to separate them entirely, only to highlight the contrast. They co-existed. They depicted the same location. They were different realms within the same world, a watery world. Ei’Brai’s home world, she realized suddenly, stepping back and taking it all in again. Water and air.
Qua’dux Rageth Elia Hator had felt so strongly connected to Ei’Brai that she felt compelled to create art from the memories he shared with her.
Jane flashed on a memory of standing in this room, holding a wide, shallow bowl containing a traditional mixture of mineral clay slurry thickened with a bright blue pigment. There were many more bowls on tables nearby, filled with similar shades as well as contrasting colors that she had painstakingly mixed. Some of them had strong, chemical odors. Others were earthy and pleasant.
She reached into the bowl, scooping the cool paste into the spoon-shape she made with her fingers. Then, with a practiced hand, twisted and twined her fingers to release the thick pigment on the wall with special attention to how the paint flowed from each long finger. With a new color, she went back to that same spot, arching, extending her willowy body to reach, creating highlights, ridges and valleys, building up texture and color with each stroke.
She’d been at it for some time. Her fingers were stained, cold, and stiff. The muscles of her arms burned and her back ached, but she took little notice. This was her space and she would fill it with something lovely. She felt content and highly motivated to complete this section before someone interrupted her.
Her form was still very good, she thought, as she paused, scrutinizing her progress. She frowned when she realized she’d brushed her hand against her brow, smearing her forehead with dark cyan pigment.
Painting was imbedded in her. She’d practiced this technique since she was a child, had been good enough for formal schooling, but the stars had beckoned to her. She wasn’t fanciful about it. She was thoroughly practical. She could have had a good life as an artist. A safe life. But she knew she was made for more.
As the wisps of the memory faded, Jane imagined what might have happened, had circumstances been different, had the squillae not destroyed this incredible women, so that Jane might have met her, on Earth, as Rageth had intended.
Jane sighed and turned, realizing the adjacent wall wasn’t just a depiction of geometric shapes as she’d originally presumed. It, too, was an impression of a place that meant something to Rageth. This painting was more detailed.