Thank you for all the reviews! This story is the result of reading this darn
book twice in a row...so I had to get it out of my system somehow...hope it
turns out well.
~Catspaw
FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER
Chapter Two
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"I may boast...I comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was
spoken. Whilst I improved in speech, I also learned the science of
letters...and this opened before me a wide field for wonder and delight."
~Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
*********************
Her eyes flutter and then open.
Great yellow orbs...a human would have compared them to those of a cat, but of course she had never seen a cat.
These walls were different, not so close and not so dark. And not cold at all.
Around her, little lights, colored red and blue and green, blinked on and off.
Machines, she knows. Not-alive. But not dead, either; death is a quality of
life. You must be alive first to be dead.
She slips out of bed, hugging the blanket around her shoulders. It isn't cold here, but she isn't taking any chances.
A voice calls to her; a funny fat man stands behind her. He speaks again and she does not know the words to tell him that she doesn't understand him.
He lets out a great breath. He sounds mad, out of patience. Like Him. She cowers, and he is immediately taken aback. She does not understand the words themselves, but she comprehends the feeling behind them.
This is not Him. She doesn't need to be afraid of him. He isn't a friend, but he will not hurt her.
She relaxes and allows the funny fat man to lead her back to bed.
******************
"Dr. Phlox says our visitor may have amnesia," said Archer. The senior staff, standing around the table in his ready room, shared glances with each other, except for T'Pol, who kept her eyes fixed on her captain.
"So what does that mean?" asked Trip. "We can't figure out where she comes from, or what?"
"Well...no, Trip, we don't know," replied the captain. "She's awake, but she can't speak and she doesn't understand English or Denobulan at all. There's nothing in the Vulcan database or the Starfleet database that's anything like her."
Dr. Phlox and Archer had agreed that they wouldn't reveal the woman's strange physiology until they knew more about the situation. It wasn't readily apparent to the naked eye that nearly every single one of her organs and limbs was of a different species. The doctor actually had spoken with a good deal of admiration after examining the woman further. "She's put together in such a way that all of her organs are working with great efficiency. It is most likely that she has never been sick a day in her life and never will."
"Captain Archer and I think that we should try to teach her your language," chirped the doctor. "It may be the shock of being trapped in a small freezing lifepod for days has caused some trauma in her memory and cortical abilities."
"I'll do it," said Hoshi. Archer grinned.
"Who else would I choose?" he asked, and Hoshi blushed. "Besides English lessons," he added, "we think it would be a good idea for someone to show her around the ship. I don't know how similar her culture is to ours, but she might see something like she knows and jog her memory." He looked around at his senior staff, expecting Trip or Travis to volunteer, but to his great surprise Malcolm spoke up.
"I can help with that," he said. "Maybe I can help Hoshi as well; I taught my sister how to read when she was four."
Trip, for some reason, looked highly amused by the current proceedings. "What's up, Malcolm?" he asked. "You never want some alien runnin' all over the ship, no matter who they are. And now you're showin' one around?"
The lieutenant's eyes narrowed slightly. "I highly doubt the captain wants her to learn to speak like a down-home hillbilly Yankee," he shot back.
"Okay, that's enough," said Archer. "I hope that Yankee crack doesn't include me," he added sternly to Reed.
"No, sir."
"All right then. Ensign Sato, Lieutenant Reed, you're both on light duty for the time being. I expect your extra time to be used for educating our guest. Dismissed." They filed out. Archer caught a mutter from Trip as he passed him on the way out, "Damn snotty Brit, doesn't even know Yankees are northerners. Prob'ly thinks we're still Colonials, for gosh sakes..."
Archer rubbed his temples and wondered if this sort of headache ever happened on Vulcan ships. Probably not. Vulcans never invented pecan pie, after all. He caught Malcolm's sleeve as the lieutenant passed by, the last one out the door.
"Malcolm, why do you want to do this? I have to agree with Trip; you don't like having anyone not from the crew walk all over the ship."
The lieutenant's brow furrowed. "I don't really know, sir," he replied haltingly. "I suppose I feel somewhat sympathetic towards her. After the experience Trip and I had in the shuttle..." He shook his head. "I don't know. I just feel it is something that needs to be done, something that I must do."
Archer clapped the smaller man on the back. "Well, I for one applaud the initiative. You and Hoshi will be great teachers, I'm sure."
"Thank you, sir. I'll certainly try." Reed turned and abruptly left, practically
speedwalking out the door. Archer sighed and wondered if he'd ever manage
to get the man to act normally around him.
***************
"Door," said Hoshi. "This is a door." Malcolm inwardly sighed and opened and closed the door again.
"Door," repeated the alien. She pointed at the lieutenant, who hastily stifled a yawn. "Mak-um!"
"Good! Who am I?" Hoshi pointed at herself.
"Hosee. You are Hosee."
"Very good!" cried Hoshi. Malcolm tried not to yawn again, and smiled, amused by how much the normally white-knuckled linguist was getting into this. He'd asked earlier why couldn't they just talk and let the alien pick it up. Hoshi had given him a scathing scowl. "You have to know some basics to know that it's a language in the first place. She's like a baby now; she has to relearn the fact that sounds can mean objects around her."
"So what do I do?"
"You help me get that into her head. After all, we don't know what her old language was like. She might be telepathic and communicate entirely with emotions for all we know. Or she might use body language."
So here he was, opening and closing a door or gesturing to a bed or a wheel or who knew what else. He felt rather like a child himself, learning the language along with the alien. Phlox had told them that the alien's visual abilities seemed to be more or less comparable with humans; she saw the same colors, although he said her visual acuity was much sharper than the average human. So Hoshi had procured from somewhere a set of cards with each color of the rainbow on them.
Right now she was holding them up. "Red," said the alien. "Green. Boo. Yella. Ornge. Green. Pah-ple." Hoshi smiled. She did not speak in baby talk, which Malcolm heartily appreciated. He could remember feeling rather insulted as a small child when people did that to him.
"Who am I? Name?" asked the alien. Hoshi raised her eyebrows and glanced up at Malcolm, who shrugged.
"Do you want a name?" he asked, looking into the woman's cat eyes.
"Name." She pointed to herself. "Mak-um. Hosee," pointing to each of them in turn, and then herself again. "Name?"
"What are some good names, Malcolm?" asked Hoshi. Both women stared intently at him. Hoshi mouthed, She doesn't remember her own!
"Er...Elizabeth, Jane, Anne...err...Catherine..." For some reason a rhyme he had once known about Henry the Eighth's wives kept running through his head. "Er, er...Hermione, Parvati...Lavender...Minerva..." Stop with the Harry Potter! he told himself firmly.
Hoshi laughed. "I read those too when I was a kid," she said lightly. "Do you like any of those names?"
"Amata," said the alien suddenly, her face lighting up. "Amata...called Amata..."
"Your name is Amata?" asked Hoshi. "That's a pretty name."
The alien- Amata- seemed suddenly confused. "Not name...called Amata."
"A nickname, perhaps?" asked Malcolm, but she did not seem to know. They had figured out that a funny little jerk of her shoulders meant 'no' and right now her shoulders looked as though they were going into spasm.
"Do you want us to call you Amata?" asked Hoshi.
She thought about this for a long minute, then nodded (something she'd picked up from them in the last few hours). "Amata...is name. Now name."
"Okay," said Hoshi, and then looked at the clock on the wall. "Oh! I promised T'Pol I'd get her some translations by now! Malcolm, can you take her to get something to eat in the Mess Hall? I'll meet you there."
He nodded, rather helplessly, and wondered what had gotten into him when he'd volunteered for this. Those eyes of hers had plagued his vision all last night and this morning, ever since she'd come on board, and he wasn't sure why. He smiled at Amata and offered his hand.
"Let's go to the Mess Hall and get some food," he said, rubbing his belly. "Is your belly hollow?" he added, smiling inwardly. "Hungry?"
They left Sickbay and went into the hallways. "This is a hallway," said Malcolm; Hoshi had told him earlier to talk whenever he did anything so she would pick up on the language. "It's, er, it's what we use to get around in the ship. There's turbolifts, too. In fact, we have to get on a turbolift. I guess you could say the turbolifts are vertical transportation and the corridors, er hallways, are horizontal transportation." He waved vertically and horizontally as he said the respective words.
"Mal-kum," said Amata carefully. "Hallway. Turbolift." He thought for a moment she was asking a question, and then realized that she was just repeating his words. He kept talking, stopping when she pointed at something.
It made for a slow journey. At one point, Trip walked by, grinning moronically at the odd duo as Malcolm explained a diagnostic keypad the best he could in simple language to someone who didn't remember anything whatsoever about technology.
"Don't tell her all our ship secrets now!" he said goodnaturedly. Malcolm pointed and said, "Trip!"
"Drip," she repeated but looked at Malcolm. Trip doubled over in gales of laughter, and stopped when she said, "Drip, Mal-kum, that is Drip."
"Yes, he is DDDDrip," replied Malcolm, laughing himself. Amata didn't understand the joke but she joined in the laughter. "No, actually he is TTrip. Not a drip. He's a damned Yankee, but he's all right." Trip looked appeased, and even joined in the attempt to explain various parts of the ship's corridors. Malcolm noticed with curiosity that she wouldn't go near Trip, and only answered his questions if Malcolm repeated them.
Hoshi was not in the mess hall yet when they arrived, so Malcolm took her through the line, pointing out all the different things to eat and letting her take whatever she wanted. Again, she wouldn't speak to anyone else in the mess hall except for him, until Hoshi arrived.
"She's probably just nervous around others," said Hoshi when Malcolm mentioned it. "She's learning amazingly fast, though; I'm sure she'll get over it."
That was true; by the end of the meal, Amata had begun to speak in simple sentences. Hoshi and Malcolm spoke about everything and anything, and she seemed to simply absorb the language. When Hoshi left her with Malcolm to go and report to the captain, the little translator was positively beaming, sure she had found someone with a talent for language to rival her own. Malcolm took her back to sickbay, per Phlox's orders, and explained to Amata that she had to rest now, to get better from her ordeal in the little shuttlepod.
He sat by her side until she went to sleep.
****************
Humans. She knows something of them now. She knows how to express herself somewhat.
He never taught her language. All she knew was what He said over her head. Talehjg amata dhguh, dhu shabta habbat.
Concepts, only. She could wait to know what He said until she knew more words. She didn't know how to say them in her new friends' language.
There was another word she'd learned today.
She had seen him first of all, before the darkness had fallen over her eyes.
He was a friend.
Friend.
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A little more action soon, I promise. Thursday, probably. Sooner if I get the
time. Tell me if this is worth continuing.