“So,
when should I tell them to arrange the flight for you?” he called after her.
She
stopped and turned, an incredulous look on her face. “What?”
“To
Houston—the Johnson Space Center—for the interviews. You’re the top candidate.
There won’t be much competition. It sounds like it’s yours, really.” He shoved
his hands in his pockets. He shouldn’t have said that—but it was true—so, what
the hell.
“I’d
be glad to consult from here, but I’m not the right person for that job. I can
give you a few referrals of people who would be better suited.”
That
wasn’t the reaction he expected. “You’re wrong. I had a chance to look over the
other files. You’re the only person for this job. You’re the only one with the
kind of stamina, talent, and sheer guts it will take to do this.”
Her
expression was skeptical. “I’m sure it looks like that on paper—”
He
let his frustration bleed through. “Look, they’ve spent months looking at
linguists—we’ve been working with plenty of linguists already, on another,
similar project—and none of them can match your level of natural ability and
experience. Come on! You’re a goddamn living legend in your field—and you’re
what? Thirty-five? Do you know what we’ve been calling you at NASA? We call you
Indiana Jane.”
The
smile snuck back, just for a second.
“Well,
okay—I call you that—but it’s fucking true!”
She
snorted softly and looked away.
He
rolled his eyes. They’d warned him not to curse. “Sorry. You were right when
you guessed I don’t spend much time around women.” He eyed her, and dropped the
exasperation. But he couldn’t stop sounding perplexed. “I don’t understand—why
wouldn’t you want to do this? You’ve already seen most of this planet, why not
go see part of the solar system and an alien space ship, too? I mean, I’d
expect you to be salivating to get into that rocket!”
“You
are.” It was a flat statement, an observation.
“Yes!”
“Are
you going?”
He
rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. “That depends.”
She
shot him a shrewd, evaluating look. “On what?”
“There
are five slots plus a linguist. They’ve got us narrowed down to twelve. That’s
out of an original 108 possible astronauts. They’re still testing us, quizzing
us, deciding. It’s down to the psychs now. The final decision will be soon.
Then the training starts. We have a little over a year to get ready.”
He
watched while a variety of expressions flickered over her momentarily unguarded
features. Some he couldn’t name. Some he recognized. Indecision, for one.
Longing, for another. She hid it quickly, but he’d seen it. She wanted it. She
wanted to go.
He
smiled at her, a slow, rakish smile, in recognition of a kindred spirit.
Her
face went blank and she pushed by him. “I’m sorry you came all this way, Dr.
Bergen. I won’t waste any more of your time. I’ll drive you back to your car and
let you get back to your work. It sounds important.”
“What?”
Damn it—he was chasing after her again and totally clueless about what was
going on.
She
didn’t reply. She was marching, fast, back toward the parking lot.
Heels
and that skinny skirt weren’t made for the kind of flight she was trying to
take on the gravelly path. She stumbled a bit and he caught her arm. She pulled
herself upright and wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“What’s
holding you back? You were born for this mission.”
She
laughed without humor. Her golden-blonde hair was starting to unravel from its
tidy arrangement.
He
still had a hold on her arm. He squeezed it. “That little trip you took to
South America took balls.”
She
cocked an eyebrow at him.
He
shrugged helplessly.
She
shook her head and more hair came loose. “That wasn’t supposed to be me.”
She
seemed steady now, so he dropped his hand away. “What? Your file doesn’t say
anything about that.”
“I
study endangered languages, yes, but mostly among the remnants of the native
tribes of Canada. I wasn’t the one slated to go to Brazil three years ago. It
was one of my students. She was the perfect candidate—excellent language
skills, fearless, always ready for a challenge. But she turned up pregnant two
weeks before she was due to leave. The project was funded. It was important
work. It is so rare to find a tribe so untouched by the modern world. We knew
that the things that could be learned there could potentially rock the
foundations of what we thought we knew about how language forms in the human
brain. We hoped it would—and it did—overturn entrenched ideas about recursion…”
She stopped herself, probably realizing he didn’t have a clue what she was
talking about.
Her
lips were tight as she spoke, “She wanted to go anyway. She wanted to… I
couldn’t let her! The only way to keep her here, to keep her safe, was to go
myself. That’s why I went. My hand was forced. So, I went. I—”
“You
proved what you set out to prove.”
She shuddered. “Yes, but at what cost? Was it
worth the lives that were lost to prove some ancient, pedantic academic wrong?”
*********
When I sat down to
write Fluency, I had several
different things going on in my mind that had converged to set the concept.
First, I remember daydreaming extensively about the elements that I liked about
different science fiction books, movies, and television shows that I had read
or watched in the past.
One of my favorite SF franchises
is Stargate, and an element that I
enjoyed about those shows was that they took place in the present day. Having
our world just outside the Cheyenne Mountain doors made the show extraordinarily
relatable and accessible and allowed the writers to throw in snarky cultural
references. I decided I wanted to be able to do that too.
So, early on I began thinking
about a Space Opera set in the very near future. The next step was to figure
out how to bring aliens into contact with humans when our space program is in
its infancy. I thought about what was within our reach, here in this solar
system, and decided that, unless the timeline I created diverged from our own
more than I wanted, we really couldn’t have ventured much beyond Mars. But what
is just beyond Mars? A huge asteroid belt! Could there be a more perfect hiding
place for an alien space ship?
Then I had to work
backwards. Why was this alien ship there? What was its purpose? I knew already
that I didn’t want this to be a story like Independence
Day or Oblivion--with Earth at
war against a technologically superior alien adversary. That story may eventually
come, but I wasn’t ready to write it yet. I wanted to write something of a
mystery, instead. I wanted it to be unclear, to the reader and to the
protagonist, whether whatever was aboard that ship was a friend or a foe or
something else. So, now that I had my premise, I needed to work on character.
Shortly before I
started development work on the novel in
earnest, I happened to be listening to the radio in the car and there was a
story on NPR about an insanely talented linguist. It was one of those times
when you get home, pull into the driveway, and then just sit there in the car,
still listening, unwilling to miss a moment of the story.
I scribbled the name of
the linguist on a piece of paper, got out of the car, went inside, and
immediately looked him up. I found an extensive article about him in The New Yorker. He’s the kind of
language savant that can learn a new language, from scratch, with no words in
common upon which to base any linguistic foundation. I based Jane’s character
on this guy, and his adventure in the Amazon basin, with a tribe that had no
outside contact with civilization, was the seed I grew her backstory from.
The other characters
fell into place as I continued to ruminate on the dynamics of groups. I knew
that these couldn’t be typical astronauts, because typical astronauts are
unflappable and there wouldn’t be enough conflict to move the story forward. They’d just handle everything sanely and professionally and
react in cool, considered, deadpan fashion, and I’d have a fantasy NASA TV
transcript. I needed explorers who were only bolted together as well as the
rest of us. Also, there was an element in the story that would bring out the
worst in them, just to make things more interesting. I’ve gotten some flak for
that, for building a mission that is a bit different from one that NASA would
have assembled, but honestly, it’s fiction. It’s meant to entertain, not to be
a primer on the real space program, though, to be sure, I did spend a great
deal of time researching capsules, space suits, astronaut food, sleeping in
space, and a million other things about NASA to give the book a flavor of
authenticity.
All in all, I spent
months working out all these details as I finished up another writing project.
Then I took a year to write the book, which isn’t too bad considering I had a
four-year old and nine-year-old keeping me busy at the time. (I’d say, “Don’t
try this at home,” but the reality is, you have to try it at home, and I did.) Then
I took another year to edit, revise and prepare the book for sale. The rest, as
they say, is history.
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