[ Table of Contents | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter ]
She woke up abruptly. She was in a room-sized-room, maybe 12 or 14 square meters, lying on a padded bench. She was still wearing the overly-friendly suit, although without the part that went over her head. It was light and she wasn't alone. There was another woman in the room with her. She was a little shorter, a little older, a little plumper than Leia, with long hair done up in a complicated braid and wrapped around her head. When the other woman saw that she was awake, she smiled and offered her a cup of water. Leia drank it down and offered it back with raised eyebrows, trying hard not to be distracted by the woman's very upturned -- but in a cute way -- nose. The woman apparently understood; she refilled it and handed it back again. Leia chose to see this as a positive sign; some form of basic communication had been established.
The woman asked her a question, paused, asked a question in what Leia was reasonably certain was a different language, paused, tried a third time, then waited, frowning. Leia tried English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Japanese, although by that point, she wouldn't have understood any reply anyway so she quit, too. More disturbing than the failure to identify a common language was the cadence and rhythm the woman used across all of them: Leia had never heard any language quite like it. The woman dimmed the lights and a starfield was displayed in the air between them. Which was very cool, and Leia did try to figure out where Sol was in the display. She felt backwards and guilty at being the kid who can't find the US on a map, but it didn't help. Leia wasn't entirely certain she was looking at the Milky Way. How could she even know what the Milky Way looked like from outside? She wondered if she was supposed to be adjusting some controls that she didn't know about, like with the suit. She sighed, and the woman brought the lights up and looked at her, frowning slightly.
Leia could just imagine the puzzle she presented.
"So now that we've rescued you, where would you like us to drop you off?"
"Uh, dunno. I'm from Earth."
"Really? Where's that?"
"Not really sure, actually."
"Really. That's kind of a problem, because you're taking up space, we're having to clothe you, feed you, etc. and we'd just as soon return you wherever you came from so we can go about our business of saving people and whatever else it is we do to those guys with the car crash communications."
"Sorry. Can't really help you out there."
Pity they couldn't have that conversation. Maybe there was a telepath around somewhere. Why didn't they have this problem on Star Trek? Although it wasn't obvious how having Troi around would help the situation. And where was a Babel Fish when you really needed one? Or a universal communicator, or a magic teaching device, or whatever.
The woman shrugged, pulled out a package that looked like a deluxe version of what Leia had had earlier, expertly opened it and handed it over. Lots of colors in this one; looked like a mixed vegetable stir fry. Tasted like a mixed vegetable stir fry with a very light sauce, just a bit salty and about as sweet; no sour flavors at all, or even as much bitter as you'd get with cabbage or broccoli. Leia ate it, and the woman handed her a second box, this time square browned pieces on the same starchy potato-like stuff she'd had before. The square browned pieces could have been tempeh. Then again, they could have been just about anything.
While Leia was finishing her meal, a door opened and her rescuer looked in. He spoke briefly to the woman, which did not appear to be particularly satisfying for either of them. More shrugging, a big smile that was clearly intended to be encouraging but had the opposite effect, and he was gone again.
The woman gestured for her to come over. She demonstrated using a stylus on a screen. Leia's best guess was she was writing. The woman handed the stylus to Leia, but Leia decided enough was enough. There were priorities here. Leia pointed to herself and said, "Leia", then pointed at the woman and raised her eyebrows. The woman grinned, pointed to herself and said, "Esifwu", or at least, that's what Leia repeated back. The woman corrected her, which sounded exactly the same. They both shrugged. Leia pointed to where her rescuer had briefly come to the door and looked expectantly at Esifwu. After a puzzled pause, Esifwu made an "Ah," sound and said, "Radmer". Leia repeated, "Radmer", Esifwu nodded and smiled, then turned back to the stylus, where Leia wrote her name and repeated it. After a few minutes, Leia gathered that Esifwu wanted her to draw or write and say what she was drawing or writing. Or something. Maybe this would be the universal teaching device, once she entered enough information? Then again, with her luck, Leia thought, this was some anthropologist's PDA and she was just entering all the field notes herself. Yay.
It wasn't like she had anything better to do.
After rattling through the alphabet, upper and lower case, her full name, the months of the year, the days of the week, the names of the planets, the names of all fifty states and their capitals and a variety of other pointless information, Leia started drawing. She started with a smiley faced stick figure, backtracked through basic shapes, tried a few shakey conic sections, and was startled that the screen went from a light grey background which she was drawing on in black, to bright red. She said, "Red", and was prompted with a series of other colors. Then much better versions of shapes and on and on and on. The screen displayed several different things before Leia realized they were doing numbers. And after that, she could have sworn she was using Rosetta Stone.
She'd always been the kind of kid to sit quietly in a corner and read or play a computer game for hours on end, forgetting to eat, pee or sleep. Esifwu got through to her by turning off the screen somehow, which made Leia extremely cranky. Esifwu thought that was hilarious, and shoved packages of food at her. After lunch, Leia would have happily returned to the screen, but Esifwu shook her finger at her in what was even more universal than Leia would have suspected, and pulled her by the hand out the door, down a hallway so short it was more like a foyer, and into another tiny room that smelled like old sweat. Leia wrinkled her nose. Esifwu grinned, shrugged, and started demonstrating a complex piece of machinery. It wasn't an elliptical trainer. It wasn't a stepper. It wasn't a trainer. It wasn't a rowing machine or a Nordic Track. However, it would have felt right at home in the basement of any middle class person with aspirations to fitness, and Leia half-suspected this device could be found in a more expensive brand of gym than the one she usually went to. With a sigh, Leia climbed onto the machine when Esifwu directed her to and tried to make a go of it. Esifwu slapped her own forehead, stopped the machine, and started taking Leia's suit off.
Another universal: no working out in street clothes. Or, in this case, no working out in the space suit, probably because of risk of chafing. Or something. Esifwu handed her a pair of what could have been trendy pajamas somewhere (or somewhen) Leia had never been (yet), and would certainly have been considered plausible loungewear for the extras on a cheap science fiction flick. Esifwu started to turn her back on Leia, then stopped and helped her get out of the suit, first, which was good, because as far as Leia was concerned, it was completely seamless and fastener-free. But Esifwu did something and it peeled open. Fast. Wow.
Once in the pajamas, Leia got back on the machine and tried again. Esifwu hung around to showed her some adjustments which made Leia extremely breathless, and then made sure Leia understood how they worked. Then Esifwu pointed at a blank wall and waved at it, and looked at Leia, who looked blankly back at her. Esifwu rolled her eyes, pantomimed exhaustion, gestured to the controls that turned the machine off, then lifted Leia's hand and waved it at the blank wall. Ah. This was how Leia was supposed to tell Esifwu she was done? Presumably. Leia grinned back at Esifwu. She'd traveled enough places to know that thumbs up, thumb and forefinger in an oh and most other got-it gestures were ambiguous even on Earth. Satisfied, Esifwu left Leia to her exercise.
Leia thought briefly it was a pity she couldn't have continued work on the screen while exercising, but after her warmup, she was working too hard to think straight anyway. After an unknown number of days lying around in the dark, it was a relief to have a physical outlet.
Eventually, Leia decided enough was enough, slowed the machine down and then stopped it, and waved at the wall. Esifwu came back and showed her the showers, got her a differently styled outfit than the workout wear (but which would otherwise have fit nearly any general description of the workout wear, up to and including suitable for extras on a bad science fiction flick), then took her back out to a third room with a table. They were still eating out of the boxes, but they were all sitting down at the same time to do so. Five people showed up, but not Leia's rescuer. The three unfamiliar folk (two men and one woman) all tried out their repertoire of unfamiliar languages on her, shrugged, smiled and did their best to make her feel welcome, then proceeded to almost entirely ignore her while talking avidly with each other. Leia did what she usually did at a dinner party: try to make some kind of sense of the relationships between the other people without making any particular effort to participate herself. By the time dinner was over, she'd concluded that Esifwu and one of the men had been intimate at some point in the past and were working through the stiff-friends-but-increasingly-okay-with-it phase. The other woman was interested in that man, but was trying very hard to keep it low-key to avoid making Esifwu uncomfortable. The other man just wanted to talk shop (well, Leia really had no idea what they were talking about, but that's what people looked like when they were totally engrossed in what they wanted to talk about and completely missing anything else happening around them) and was annoyed whenever he was unsuccessful at keeping the rest of the crew on topic.
Because clearly, that's what these people were: crew. And Leia was in space, with no idea in hell how she'd gotten here, or how she was ever going to get home, completely dependent upon more distant strangers than she could ever have imagined. She wouldn't be alive if these people hadn't hauled her out of her kidnapper's cell, suited her up, kept her from being turned to pink paste on the floor (or ceiling, or walls, or whatever) and transported her to an undamaged ship. But here she was, fed, exercised, and entertained, with some hope that some day, she might understand some of the language(s) being used around here.
Clearly, this is why science fiction movies, television and books skipped right over this stuff. It wasn't much fun to live. She could only imagine anyone interested in it as entertainment. Being shown to an enclosed sleeping pod a couple hours after dinner, for example? Not very adventurous. Leia did, however, make a point of remembering where it was and how to access it. Not that it mattered; once she'd been shown one, she realized she'd been seeing these everywhere else she'd been on the ship. She was betting any of them were fair game for sleeping in, and dozed off comparing the experience to the various hostel bunk beds and Japanese hotels she'd stayed in, what seemed like a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Could be worse. That garbage compactor in the Death Star, for example. This was a much higher quality rescue.
Spot a broken link or other problem? E-mail me. Have fun.
[ Table of Contents | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter ]
Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 10, 2012