Molly Fyde and the Land of Light

WE HAVE A DRENARD ON THE SHIP WITH US. HER NAME’S ANLYN, BUT DON’T WORRY, SHE’S A FRIEND. SHE SAVED MY LIFE. SAID WE’D BE SAFE ON DRENARD AND THEY’D STOCK US UP WITH FOOD AND FUEL_

The screen stayed blank, the cursor flashing. Her mom seemed to need some time to digest the news. Molly really wanted to jab the enter key a dozen more times and get the “kissing” sentence off the screen. She felt like Cole could see the sweat beneath her hair, then worried her mom was gonna be angry at them for having an enemy alien on the ship.

Her stomach knotted up with worry, impatient for a response.

When her mother finally typed out her reply, Molly realized she hadn’t been queasy enough.

I NEED TO SPEAK WITH THE DRENARD. ALONE. AS SOON AS POSSIBLE_

2

“Should I go wake her?” Cole leaned forward, his hands on the armrests of his seat. Molly couldn’t tell if he was eager to help or just feeling the urge to get away from the nav computer before it said something even more peculiar.

She looked from the screen, to Cole, then back again. Shrugging, unable to make sense of anything herself, she whispered, “I guess so.” Her voice sounded weak and feeble to her own ears, as if temporarily stunned.

Cole crawled out of his chair and padded away, leaving Molly alone with the computer once again. She reached for her keyboard, partly obliged to keep her mother occupied—not sure what the passage of a few minutes might feel like to a consciousness that could compute billions of operations a second—but also in an attempt to alleviate some of her confusion.

MOM_

She wasn’t sure how to phrase what she felt, so finally settled on being completely honest: YOU’RE SCARING ME_

I’M SORRY. IT ISN’T LIKE THIS IS EASY FOR ME. I_ THERE IS SO MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU, TO CATCH UP ON. THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, WE WEREN’T EVEN SURE IF YOU WOULD LIVE FOR A YEAR. AND I WAS VERY SICK. EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU ARE JUST FACTS GIVEN TO ME LATER. I’M SORRY, IS THE DRENARD THERE YET?_

NO, COLE IS WAKING HER UP. WE’RE ON A NIGHT SHIFT. AND HER NAME IS ANLYN _

VERY WELL. PLEASE INTERRUPT ME AS SOON AS ANLYN IS THERE. WHAT I WANTED TO EXPLAIN EARLIER IS THAT MY WORLD FEELS VERY STRANGE RIGHT NOW. STRANGER, PERHAPS, THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE. I HAVE MY THOUGHTS, AND THEY SEEM LIKE A WAKING DREAM. LIKE I’M IN A DARK ROOM WITH MY EYES CLOSED, ALONE WITH MY MEMORIES_

Molly heard someone stomping through the cargo bay. She peered around her seat and saw Cole heading her way, Anlyn in tow. The young alien had on one of Cole’s oversized shirts as a nightgown, and was wiping sleep from her eyes.

Holding up a hand, Molly urged Cole to stay back for a moment. She felt guilty for delaying her mom’s conversation with Anlyn, but she needed to hear more:

THEY COME SO FAST, MOLLIE. I HAVE TO TRY AND OCCUPY PROCESSING CYCLES BY DOING OTHER THINGS IN THE BACKGROUND. ALL I HAVE FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS THE TEXT YOU INPUT. JUST WORDS IN A VACUUM. I’M JUST AS SCARED AS YOU ARE, SWEETHEART, AND SOME OF THE THINGS I KNOW ARE TRULY AWFUL. NOT ANYTHING I WANT TO BURDEN YOU WITH RIGHT NOW. IS ANLYN THERE?_

SHE JUST WALKED UP_

Technically, it was the truth. She turned to Anlyn, only to find her friend standing just beyond the boundary of the cockpit, her face rigid and expressionless.

“I’m so sorry!” said Molly, scrambling out of her seat and sickened by her thoughtlessness.

Anlyn hadn’t been in a cockpit since she escaped the Darrin system, where she’d been chained to a flightseat and forced to pilot a ship as a slave. In all the excitement over her mom, her friend’s fears had slipped her mind. She pushed past Cole to turn Anlyn away, but before she could get to her, the young Drenard stepped over the boundary, crossing the threshold.

“It’s fine,” Anlyn said softly. She held both hands out in front of her as she crept forward, almost as if probing for obstructions. “As long as the engines are off.”

“Are you sure?”

Anlyn nodded, her face aglow in the cockpit’s constellation of  lights and readouts. Looking around, her eyes eventually settling on the radio set into the dash. “Cole said you need me to talk to someone?”

Molly was unsure what should be revealed. She hated lying, but the truth would take hours to relate. She decided to leave it up to her mom to explain it however she liked.

“That’s right. You’ll have to communicate with—” Molly paused, realizing how little she knew of Parsona’s young crewmembers, even after two weeks of living together. “You’ll have to talk using the keyboard. Can you read and type? In English?”

Disappointment flashed across Anlyn’s face. “Not much,” she admitted. “Enough to fly, mostly indicators and alarms.”

Of course, Molly thought. Why teach a slave pilot to read anything else? She turned back to the nav computer, a surge of guilty relief washing over her. There had been enough secrets lately—translating the conversation would keep her from not knowing what was going on. And assuming the worst.

She leaned over her seat and typed:

ANLYN SPEAKS ENGLISH, BUT SHE CAN’T TYPE OR READ MUCH OF IT. I’M GOING TO HAVE TO INTERPRET_

There was almost no pause before the reply came:

SHE DOESN’T NEED TO RESPOND, SHE JUST NEEDS TO READ ALONG. TELL HER TO PRESS A KEY ONCE THE TWO OF US ARE ALONE. AND PLEASE GIVE US PLENTY OF TIME_

MOM, SHE CAN’T READ ENGLISH_

THAT’S OKAY, DEAR. I SPEAK DRENARD_

••••

Cole and Molly retired to the lazarette. He had suggested they wait the conversation out in her room while discussing their plans, but Molly seemed too anxious to sit still. She had grabbed some tools and crawled into the thruster room—the center reactor was still having intermittent issues ever since they backed into that asteroid in the Darrin system.

Cole didn’t have much room to argue since he’d been the one flying at the time.

Holding a medium spanner out in the air, he waited for Molly to reach up and grab it. “Can our nav screen even display Drenard?” he wondered aloud. “I don’t even know what Drenard looks like, do you?”

“Not a clue,” Molly said. Her voice leaked out from below the center thruster’s reactor, tinny and muffled. A hand came up holding a power screwdriver; Cole took it and slapped the electric wrench in its place. “I don’t see why it couldn’t display it, though,” Molly continued. “That screen can show star charts. Any language is just a bunch of pixels.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Cole. He put the screwdriver back in the tool pouch; below, he could hear Molly wrestling with an overly tightened bolt. “Hey, maybe we should let Edison have another go at that.”

“I like knowing my own ship, smarty pants. Besides, Edison would have to pull the floor beams out just to get down here. Probably why it’s still acting up.” Molly pushed her upper body out of the hole and looked back at Cole. “The question we should be asking ourselves is why we had to leave the cockpit if Mom is talking in Drenard. It’s not like either of us could follow what she’s saying. And how does she know Drenard in the first place? I always heard the language was a complete mystery, even to the Navy.”

She left her doubts in the air and went back to work, her head disappearing below the decking.

Cole felt relieved to hear some of his cynicism rubbing off on Molly. Prior to recent and unfortunate events,