A/N: "Homesick" takes place between I, E.T. and Exodus From Genesis
Idioms and mistranslation are the whole point of this series. Italics are used to represent English poorly translated in one of three ways:
1) Doesn't translate at all so they are spelled/butchered semi-phonetically because that's what Aeryn thinks she's hearing. Over time these spellings might change or improve.
2) Translates but with a different set of words than John used in the English because there's no direct equivalent.
3) The word has meaning Aeryn recognizes, but in context it doesn't make sense, or she doesn't fully grasp John's intention for the phrase.
Words that are not "foreign" to Aeryn, even if they aren't actually Sebacean in origin, are not italicized, to keep the focus on her struggles with John's English.
Officer Sun paused in the doorway of the central chamber, rendered on alert by an unfamiliar sound. A series of wet gasps was coming from the shadows. After a few microts she recognized that it was crying. A strange, hopeless sound that put her teeth on edge. Was someone hurt? Who had hurt them, and why was there no alarm? She eased her pulse pistol from its holster and pivoted around the edge of the door, second hand coming up to steady her aim.
There was no one there but Crichton, sitting in the shadows, a tray on the table in front of him. His head was thrown back, hand pressed to his forehead as if in pain. At the noise of her entrance, he opened his eyes and looked her way, first blearily, then with a jump as the hooman registered the weapon trained on him. "Dammit , Miss Sun, why are you pointing a gun at me this time?" There was a dark color to his tone, but no real fear or alarm. Sun slowly eased off and clicked the pistol back into place.
"I thought something was wrong, Crichton. That you were seriously injured." She approached, still cautiously, to stand over him, scanning for some cause to his distress.
He gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. "No… no. Just home-sick." Crichton waved at her to sit. "Stop looming and pull up a chair."
Unwillingly, she took the seat opposite him, then glared until he started on an explanation. Home-sick . The words made sense separately, but together their exact meaning eluded her.
"It's just the little things, you know? They hit me sometimes. Here I am on the ass end of the universe. I'm an aztronot, an engineer with a dahctrut in the science principles and mechanics of stars and space , not to mention a pilot! But I don't even know how the toilets work, let alone the rest of this ship I'm trapped on."
Sun sorted through this explosion of familiar and unfamiliar phrases, trying to discern the issue. Despite being built like a commando, the hooman was shockingly fragile, physically and apparently mentally as well. It was unsettling to sit there and listen to him sniffle, tears dripping down his face with no apparent sense of humiliation. It had only been a few solar days, was transit madness already setting in?
"A psychotic general is hunting me down for something I didn't do. My frien-" he glanced at her and cut himself off, "-my allies take almost as many shots at me as the bad guys. But what pushes me right over the edge is eating this dren and realizing I'm probably never… going to have chaclut again." He motioned to the tray, empty save some crumbles of food cubes, giving her a weird smile even as more tears beaded up and spilled over.
Crichton had been more volatile since they left behind that little mudball that reminded him of Erp, but this was beyond bearing. Sun had seen soldiers confront the loss of a limb with more stoicism than this male crying over… food? She found herself abruptly fighting the urge to shout at him, to scream about how his frelled-up arrival had taken her entire world from her too, and far more irrevocably. It was as if his lack of self control were contagious. Or perhaps the days spent solely with lesser and unclassified species truly had rendered her irreversibly contaminated.
Mustering the remnants of her once effortless calm, she fixated on the unfamiliar word at the center of his complaint. "Shahklot? You eat it?" It was a pleasant sounding word, and if he weren't being so ridiculous she could even sympathize. Ship days of nothing but prisoner sustenance had all of them fantasizing about favorite foods.
"Chah-co-lot ," he corrected, "It's a dizert ." She shook her head at the new unknown word and he grimaced. "A treat?" That she knew, and nodded. "Made from the beans of a single plant but comes in an infinite variety of forms and flavors. Gearahdeli, Guhdaivah, Snihkurs, heck I'd settle for Hurshees Special Dark right now…."
Crichton had been among them long enough to understand the limitations of translator microbes when it came to proper names and Erp ling idioms. So when he launched into this list of random hooman words, she assumed he was only doing it to be annoying, perhaps to distract her from catching him acting like a toddler. So she stopped trying to understand him and just listened to his voice.
"Troughles, Seez, cohcoh, chacolot kayk, fuhdj …"
Crichton's native tongue always murmured in a soft undulation-even in anger his growling Eengrsh just dove into deeper waves, high with tension then low again with a throbbing edge. His most aimless banter was full of careless, open emotion. It was as unfamiliar to her ears as the flat, plosive rattle of her controlled Standard Sebacean likely was to his. Sun could admit to herself that when it wasn't the middle of a crisis, she rather enjoyed the acoustics of Crichton's voice. If only it weren't generally nonsensical in content.
"You know, you provide me a wihlee when you do that." He broke into her musings with something almost comprehensible.
"What am I doing?" Sun straightened, looking down at herself and then at him. He had rubbed away the wetness, but his eyes were still uncomfortably red-rimmed, turning the ice blue vivid and startling.
"Going all robot and studying me like an insectoid lesser species ." There was a woundedness to the accusation, but since he was right that she was studying him, Sun ignored it, in favor of sorting through the blend of sounds and thoughts from her translator microbes. Collecting foreign words was a long-standing habit of hers, and with Crichton, almost a necessity.
He had actually said "like a bukh". That was a pleasant, concise word, one worth remembering and not difficult to say. But "woohlee"? That was harder, and without translation she could only guess the meaning. From his expression, it was not pleasant. That was one good thing abou Crichton: at least his face was easier to read than a diagnostic panel.
However Sun wasn't in the mood to placate him. "Well, I apologize for my interest," she said flatly. "Are you done here?" She looked down at his plate, the food cubes mostly soggy crumbs now, and rose from the seat. "I could use your help." If he'd been a cadet of ten, the instructors would have whipped him for the pointless show of tears. Since he was too old to correct that way, she thought honest work might distract him from this maudlin collapse into home 'sickness'. It had worked for her.
The man stared at her, hesitating, as if she had said something unexpected. He massaged the wrinkle between his eyebrows, then threw his hands up in the universal expression of frustration and stood up to take his plate to the recycler. "Fine, Officer Sun, yeah. I'm done. What do you need?"
"I'm doing an inventory of the ship. We need to know our supplies and other resources if we hope to stay out of range of Crais' command carrier."
"Hay, that's smart!" Crichton looked over his shoulder at her with an irritating implication of surprise in his tone. "Where do we start?"
"I've already started, but it will go faster with two," she said, leading the way out of the central chamber, toward the closest ladder to the upper tiers.
This was Drone scutwork; even a Tech's time could be better spent than climbing up and down levels, prying open disused cells or forgotten cabinets, and inventorying the contents. But there was only so much solo training Officer Sun could do, particularly with the need to conserve both fuel and ammunition. On this undisciplined crew, barely sufficient to keep the Leviathan running, and distracted by their newly regained freedom, the only other person likely to be making a thorough survey was the Hynerian slug. And he would steal anything of value.
So after a couple ship's days of looping about on pointless patrols, Aeryn Sun had grabbed a data pad and started taking stock. She'd actually been at it almost a weeken by the time she included the hooman , but Moya was a large ship, capable of holding hundreds of prisoners, and there were plenty of areas left to catalog.
Crichton, of course, could not read the pad, much less write on it, so at first he took the lead on rummaging through the chambers, bringing her his finds to categorize and count. There was little of obvious value laying around in the common chambers. Presumably that had already been taken, either by evacuating staff or the Hynerian. But with some effort, they turned up plenty of useful items, just not portable or easily fenced, or else inconvenient to access with only tiny, four-fingered hands and a throne sled. The farther they ventured from core and command, the more they found.
Not everything was identifiable. It took days before Crichton could reliably distinguish spare parts and small devices from scrap and trash. Sun herself didn't always know the purpose of the detritus they piled up in bins and shelves in the maintenance bay. Irritatingly, Crichton asked about every rod and bottle, forcing her to admit her occasional ignorance and then listen to his speculations.
He also had a childish habit of poking at buttons, shaking liquids, and knocking on closed containers as if the contents could be determined by the echo. This particular day, after the hooman set off an alarm on a misused tool for the second time in an arn, Sun shoved the data pad at him in frustration. "No more touching things, Crichton. I'll enter new descriptions, but you can at least do the tallies. Just press here to increment." She showed him how to toggle up and down with quick impatience.
The hooman studied the display with a frown. "But I won't know what I'm tallying, Aeryn!" he protested, but immediately started playing with the pad. "And by the way, why can't I read Sebacean? Is this Sebacean? Or Moya-n? Leviathanese?"
"Translator microbes don't work on written language. But most Peacekeeper equipment has a toggle that will provide audio description of controls. This is a Peacekeeper data pad, so yes, it's Standard Sebacean." She reached over and pressed the trigger to start and stop the read out. "Don't break it, or I'll break you."
Playing with the pad kept Crichton too busy to protest or annoy her more as she steered them toward a Peacekeeper locker she had noticed at the entrance to the cell block on tier 3. The metal torch he'd just failed to blow up with his careless button mashing opened it in microts. "Ah." Aeryn smiled at the familiar contents, left behind by one of the guards.
"Here Crichton, this is almost like your hooman shirt, and I think it will fit." She passed over a white undershirt that looked almost new and more importantly, smelled clean.
"Hyu-man ," he said absently. "Zhaan says it wrong." He handed her the pad, unfastened his beige jacket and shrugged it off, then turned away from her and pulled off his soiled undershirt as well. "And while we're on the subject, it's Errth, not Erp ."
It took Aeryn a moment to register what he was saying, distracted by the sudden appearance of his muscled back, smooth and scarless. She gave herself a strong mental shake, then made herself repeat him. "Hyooman. Hyuman. Earf. Erfh." He was another species. An alien. From a backward planet full of soft, slow, mental deficients. She forced herself to watch him pull the rather snug shirt on. Sun met his gaze squarely, dispassionately, when he turned back around, surprised to find her staring at him. That deep flicker of interest was an illusion. It was only a longing for her old life, for the casual comradery of her unit. He could never offer that, and so the thought of recreating with him must be revolting. He was not a Peacekeeper. He wasn't even Sebacean.
"Yeeh, it fits, thanks…" Crichton looked like he was going to say something more, but she shoved the pad back at him and returned to rummaging in the locker.
There were a couple pulse pistol cartridges shoved in the back under a pair of shoe liners. "Add two to the pistol ammo tally," Aeryn ordered. She tested their charge, frowning at the results.
"Why did you just lick those?" She glanced over her shoulder. The hyuman had his typical expression of confusion. It was tiresome.
"To see how many shots they have left. They're for a pulse pistol. Here." She held them both out at Crichton. "Taste. One is full, the other isn't even half. Poor practice to store cartridges that aren't full. Should have been up on discipline for that.
He stuck his tongue out and licked uncertainly at the end of each cartridge she held. His eyebrows went up in surprise. "That's not bad. Spicy. Like sinamun red hots. It's a lot stronger on the full one, right?" He stuck his tongue out again and touched it with his finger. "Burns a little. It's not poisonous?"
"You wouldn't want to drink it, but no." She pushed the cartridges at him and returned to her task. "Ah, here we go." Tucked in the toe of one shoe liner had been a little pouch with some credit chits. She poured them out in her hand. Not much, but it would buy a few necessities on the right commerce planet.
"Dammit. Aeryn... I got distracted," Crichton said apologetically. "Can you check this tally? Did I add one or two?"
She looked over, "Two, it's fine." There was a writing stick in the locker too, and that gave her an idea. Shoving the coins in her pocket, she closed the locker up again and started writing on the door. "You need to learn some essentials before it kills us. Moya's readouts are typically in Sebacean. Many species in our territory can read it. This is the number one, two, and so on…" she listed the numbers to ten in neat standard script. "Add to the right for tens, hundreds, as far as needed," she demonstrated. "This indicates a negative number, the default is positive, but you can add this symbol after. Use a vertical line and write to the left for numbers smaller than one. Clear?"
He just blinked stupidly at her, so she started to rattle through it again. "Wait, give me that." He pulled the writing stick away and started to make notes in his hyuman script. The numbers were bare and awkward, but not hard to remember. "So base ten, that makes sense, Sebaceans have ten fingers after all. Everything else is backwards, I'm going to have to get used to that." He looked down at the pad, "We have nine pistol cartridges?"
She nodded, relieved that the basics of math apparently would not be hard to teach him. "Technically we'll have seven, though, after I use the low cartridges to refill our pulse rifle. We can amend the tally later. Hmm," she appraised him, "I could show you how it's done. It's time for you to start being useful."
"What have I been the last week - weeken?" he grumbled, waving the tablet at her, "but fine, I live to serve ."
Sun paused at the translation, certain she misunderstood him. He stared back, clearly irritated. It was a sentiment she would expect from a Peacekeeper, so of course he was being sarcastic. She wasn't sure why this sent that quiet, omnipresent wrongness up into the pit of her stomach, but it did, and that made her angry. Gathering up the remaining items in the locker, she led the way back to the maintenance bay, not bothering with a response.
Feedback from readers is the best motivation in the world. Please consider clicking the Review button. I accept anonymous reviews.