Adept

I’d always been good at learning.

The trick was taking in everything you could about an experience and distilling it down to little bits of reliable information. Classical logic and argumentation were always based on those irreducible pieces, if I remembered my one philosophy class properly, Aristotle had called them ‘axioms’.

On Earth, I’d been an okay student. But I’d never actually given too much thought to how I learned. School felt just a bit more like a habit than an education. You could still learn that way, sure. But under ideal circumstances, you’re not just showing up, but intently processing what you’re taught. High school was pretty far from ideal though. Teachers were split between (if you were lucky) ‘only’ thirty students, and the pace of each subject is metered by a dozen different logistical concerns.

Now? I was in a classroom of one and the stakes were a lot higher.

It still felt like school though, which was honestly a relief. Getting this far had taken a toll on me. I still couldn’t move my left wrist quite the way I wanted to, even if the wound had sealed up weeks ago, and that wasn’t even my worst stab wound. The long hours I spent with Tasser learning to talk again went a long way toward resting up.

Sasat was a maddening language. According to Tasser, it was widely thought to be a mess. But they said the same thing about English back on Earth, and I got by just fine on that. Still, learning ‘Starspeak’ from scratch was exhausting.

The first three months had been nothing but basic vocabulary and grammar. Tasser had distilled some useful phrases for me to lean on like, ‘what does that word mean?’ or ‘what is a similar word?’ That was how I learned every single word that couldn’t be demonstrated with a picture. It was just endless comparisons to phrases or concepts I knew a little bit better.

‘Gense’ means run, but faster than normal. Okay, so ‘dash’.

‘Nagros’ means run, but a bit slower than ‘gense’ . Okay… so ‘jog’?

The lessons consumed my life. For months on end, I poured myself into the alien equivalent of kindergarten.

There was one main difference though, I was cheating.

I’d always felt good at learning, it just came naturally to me. I liked trying to understand new things.

And I had the last new thing I would ever need.

Psionics.

I’d felt a bit silly using the word the first few weeks, but tapping into the construct in my mind wiped that feeling. I could feel the fuzzy clouds of the alien minds around me. And it was so exhilarating, I didn’t care what I called it.

I’d created something inside my own consciousness. I hadn’t even realized when I did, and even now I could barely remember what I’d been thinking when I made it.

Continually, Tasser and I had tried to have conversations about my mental creations. He hadn’t been too keen on the discussion, at least not while I still couldn’t conjugate verbs. I was positive the psionic constructs were some facet or application of the alien Enumius abilities, but my company had so far disagreed.

But we were talking superpowers.

Tasser and Nai knew the science behind it, and I could appreciate the scientific attitude they held about the fantastic Enumius abilities. But to me? They were functionally superpowers.

I wasn’t the only one capable of creating matter from nothing. And while they had no way of confirming this, I knew at least one other alien had possessed something similar.

After five(ish?) months, I’d gotten endless experience listening to Starspeak. I was passable enough in the language, if perhaps not completely fluent, to understand some of that same theory with my alien custodians. But until very recently, I hadn’t had the speech skills to back up my ears.

Which is why in the last few days, Nai wasn’t keeping her usual distance from me. She’d been hanging around, scrutinizing me. She didn’t like me, and my starting to be vocal about Enumius abilities had put her on edge.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Farnata said coldly.

“Oh for sure,” I agreed. “But it works! I don’t remember this stuff normally; I have to use what I built.”

“You haven’t built anything though.” Nai insisted.

“But something is clearly letting me remember all this.”

“After how much time Tasser has spent teaching you, I hope you remember it. Otherwise my opinion of your people would slip even lower.”

I resisted the urge to flip her off, partly because I knew I should be magnanimous, but more because I knew I’d have to explain the gesture, which would defeat the purpose.

“Quiet,” Tasser said. “The less you distract him, the quicker you can get through your hour. Besides, this test is supposed to be under sterile conditions.”

Nai just snorted.

I kept my pen moving while I talked, “She’s exacting, Tasser. She’s trying to make the test run long so it starts eating into our Enumius time. She doesn’t want to teach me any more than she has to.”

Both aliens gave me something of a surprised look, a very different expression on both their faces, but those were actually pretty easy to learn.

“That’s just immature.” Tasser said, while Nai muttered under her breath, “How did…”

“You told me so,” I reminded her. “Six weeks ago.”

“How did you understand me? You didn’t know what I said then.”

“No, but I remembered the words,” I bragged. “I just recorded the exact sounds psionically, and translated the hard way later.”

“That’s not a real word,” Nai said.

I shrugged. She had me there. Daniel had reacted similarly, but my label fit.

The Farnata was adamant about psionics not being real, but I knew better. I’d been careful not to antagonize Nai, but if I ever needed to, I could bother her with the knowledge I could track her on a radar in my head.

Of course, that wasn’t strictly true right now. Nai was still mostly shrouded from detection, but it was getting easier to detect her again. Either I was getting sharper or the mirror I’d put in her head accidentally was growing weaker.

I hadn’t had much occasion to hone the radar though. Nai and I were the only Enumius on base, though there had been two that stopped by a couple months ago. They’d come late at night and hadn’t stayed.

At first I’d been concerned it was more Vorak, but when I’d talked with Ase Serral, he’d assured me they’d been Farnata.

But in lieu of really dissecting the radar, I’d focused more on the other creations already in my head, as well as making a few new ones.

The vast majority of my work had been put into the mental journal. Journals. Compendiums.

In the few days he’d been with me, Daniel’s pieces in my mind had all retained some sort of self-awareness. Enough that, given nothing else to do, they’d made small notes or records in my mind. There were thousands of notes, on a thousand different topics.

Biological barriers and the likelihood of risk, conservation of energy with Enumius powers, how to measure time on a new planet, the difference between my abilities on their own and what Daniel had been able to do inside my head…it was just endless.

Even if I hadn’t read them all, they were at least organizable by topic. A few of them even stitched together to form larger cohesive whole messages.

And once I’d seen how much Daniel had managed to store in my mind, I’d leaned into it. The journal had first started as just that, an abstract little book in my head complete with wire spiral spine. But the fundamental mechanism wasn’t dependent on that. It was for recalling information expressible in two dimensions. Text, images, anything you could record on a plane.

Every time Tasser taught me a word, I’d saved it in my compendium. I could recall it as easily as trying. Even if I didn’t know its meaning, after I’d learned the alphabet, I could store the letters for each word and fill in the definition later.

The reason I’d gotten so much better at listening than speaking was because I never had to ask for what a word meant twice. I could just check the dictionary I was building in my head.

“…There,” I said. “Finished.”

Tasser got up from his seat and took up my test and started comparing the answers to his answer key.

Ninety-six questions, divided into groups of twelve, simple sentences with not so simple answers. The first time I’d taken one of these, I thought it was weird that there was an answer key at all since the answers came in the form of whole sentences. It took some getting used to, but small variations in the grammar of each sentence prompted the answer to take on a slightly different form.

In English, the test would have been about six different corners of linguistic agreement; spelling, grammar, tense, conjugation, plus a few more I was probably forgetting. In Starspeak, it was all bundled under an umbrella term called ‘achka’ . Form.

The other half of Starspeak proficiency was ‘romah’ , meaning thrust, or cogency. It dealt with the interpretive side of language, metaphor, idioms and the like.

Today’s test was strictly on form though, and I knew I’d pass.

“Ninety-four,” I said when Tasser turned to the last page of his answer packet.

He finished tallying up my responses and nodded. “Ninety-four. That’s more than proficient. You left the other two blank.”

“I didn’t know how to answer them,” I said. “Usually I’d take a stab anyway, but the way the certification was described…”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re fourteen points over the minimum you needed,” Tasser said. “Get going with Nai. I’m going to file these and meet you when you’re done with Nai.”

That was that. I was officially recognized as a Starspeak speaker. Starspeaker. Yeesh, Caleb.

I didn’t really know what, or who, really made it official, but I’d been told there was a little pin for the achievement.

But still, my favorite part of the schedule had arrived with my least favorite alien on the base.

That might have been a little uncharitable to Nai, she hadn’t barbecued me after all. Yet.

I was on a two-week schedule, although there weren’t seven days to each week, but eight, and each day wasn’t twenty-four hours. More like fifteen-ish. But it was winter on the planet right now, so my estimate might have been a bit short.

And every sixteen days, I sat down with Nai and made sure I wasn’t about to kill myself by accident with my Enumius powers.

Trouble was, Nai…didn’t like me. Didn’t trust me.

In the wake of the Vorak attack on the base, Nai had stalked me like a hawk. Ready to make sure that I didn’t slip away for even a minute. And since I hadn’t been able to clock her on psionic radar, her presence had startled me enough to startle her as well. There were only so many times I could watch her reflexively conjure a handful of her cosmic-teal fire before I started to worry on principle.

And I’d been worried from the second I met her.

I knew why. I’d tried to shoot her when we first met. Luckily for me, I’d failed. But I might have also made her gun explode. Technically it would have been Daniel though. That didn’t really seem like a compelling argument though.

Regardless, antagonizing the alien capable of cooking me with a stray thought was a bad idea.

It was one of the reasons I felt okay focusing more on the psionic portion of my abilities. Nai hadn’t liked it at all when I’d talked about recreating my kinetic bomb.

She’d even nixed the idea of something on a smaller scale, mainly because she had no confidence I could reduce the scale. I hadn’t even practiced my flashbangs.

Truth was, while I was advancing swimmingly with my psionic creations, the improvements to my tangible ones were less than commensurate. I was hitting a wall.

When Daniel and I had first figured out the ability on the run, our limit had been three, maybe four flashbangs before I needed a heavy snack and a long nap. To say nothing of what Daniel had needed.

The last time I’d practiced, I was running out of steam after just one or two more than my original limit. Months later and I hadn’t managed to do more than six in one day, and I’d only done so once.

So today, I was planning on a repeat of last time. I wanted to talk theory and figure out what I was doing wrong.

“I wasn’t planning on trying anything destructive today,” I told her. “I’ve just got questions, and I don’t want to freeze so as long as you’re okay with it, we can stay indoors.”

The Farnata still headed outside though. “I have not been sleeping well, so I'm in a foul mood. If you’re worried about the cold, I’m going to be cutting loose.” She certainly couldn’t do that inside.

Nai and I walked out of the base’s main building and trudged through the shallow snow. Thankfully, it wasn’t a windy day. But winters on planet Yawhere were brutally cold anyway.

We walked toward the makeshift firing range the Casti had cleared out for the day. It was the best place to practice tricks that could bring down walls. More than a few Casti heads turned our way. Between the novelty of seeing ‘the strange new human’ and whatever reason Nai was popular among Casti, I knew there would be a small crowd of distracted Casti soldiers and technicians soon.

“Tell you what,” I said, teeth chattering. “I know you’re not eager to deal with me for the full hour, so why don’t you burn whatever you want for half the time, and I’ll just stand in the shack under the heat lamp. Then we go back inside for the rest of the time?

Nai narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously, a disturbingly familiar face to see on an alien.

“…Alright fine.”

I nodded without further ado and ducked into the warm shack.

Casti were freaks of nature. It was below zero, and most of them were still wearing ordinary clothing. Not a single one of them joined me in the shack.

It might have been on account of the spectacle though.

Nai had scared me from the moment I first laid eyes on her. My psionic radar had gone crazy, back when I still had no idea what it did. And she’d summoned up a torrent of fire that was strongly evocative of a dragon .

My fears had been justified many times over when I’d watched her sink pillars of alien flame into the ceiling of a massive mountain tunnel and collapse the whole thing behind us.

But oddly enough, with the exception of those two moments, Nai had been very reserved with her fire while we’d fled from the Vorak. Even I had been able to tell she wasn’t in great condition.

But Nai had more or less been on R&R for the last few months, discounting whatever Ase Serral got her up to. Even if she still seemed perpetually exhausted, evaluating just based on her Enumius abilities?

She was recuperated.

And it was something to behold.

The firing range had several bundles of stone wool, or something akin to it, for use as targets. But for Nai, there was a whole concrete pillar set up today.

After she tossed around a few small wisps of fire to warm up, she called forth flames so quickly and narrowly it was more like a bolt of lightning. The bolt of flame twisted like a drill for all of a heartbeat before Nai made a motion with her hand and the bolt followed the motion, burning straight through the pillar like it was butter.

It left a glowing orange hole for a moment before Nai started cutting into the pillar from every side with tight twisting coils of flames like whips. It quickly became apparent that Nai was pacing herself. She was hewing away as little from the pillar as possible with each strike. If she wanted to, she could engulf the whole pillar at once and reduce it to slag. But she was trying to find the unblemished spots and see if she could sneak in a new mark on its surface.

One by one, the glowing gouges built up and her strikes started overlapping, fresh glowing scars crossing over the fading older glows.

She ended up wrapping up a little early. She still had a few minutes when she swept out her arm and a massive tornado of vibrant teal flames immolated what was left of the pillar in seconds. She sustained the fiery vortex, letting it grow more than twice the height of the pillar. More ordinary colors crept into the edges of the fire as it grew larger and larger, orange and yellow.

When she was finally finished, the entire tornado went out all at once. Like someone had shut off the gas valve fueling the whole thing. Which, in a sense, she probably had.

Nothing remained of the pillar. Just a scorched shallow pit in the ground where it had stood.

The Casti onlookers started applauding, another human gesture I hadn’t been prepared for. Every time I thought I was getting used to the strange alien similarities, something new surprised me.

Nai took a few moments before catching my eye through the shack window and beckoning me with a crane of her neck.

I followed her briskly, ignoring the Casti that noticed me for the first time.

“Nothing more to see,” Nai said. “It’s fun to watch but you have assignments.”

The onlookers didn’t linger and neither did we. Nai might have been slinging fire, but I got the feeling even she wasn’t immune to the cold like the Casti were.

We wound up back inside the living building attached to the rest of the complex. It was mostly bunks and lavatories for all the Casti soldiers, but there was a recreational room on the third floor with a few tables and couches for off-duty Casti soldiers, or a couple aliens about to crunch an Enumius lecture.

Nai sat opposite me at the table, trying a bit too hard to look aloof and scrutinizing at the same time.

“You’ve got questions.” Not a statement.

“Yes,” I said. “For starters, why are you so convinced that my psionics aren’t Enumius?”

“I won’t pretend your ‘psionic’ junk is ordinary, I don’t know how it works for you. But Enumius make…we create. Since you’re not creating anything, whatever it is, it’s not Enumius related.”

“But I can make some things,” I said, summoning an inert chip of metal between my fingers. “Being able to make solid things and being able to make mental things can’t possibly be unrelated.”

Nai visibly hesitated at that before glancing at the clock to see how much more time she was ordered to work with me.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know. My orders are to make sure you’re not going to blow yourself up, so quit asking about the mind stuff.”

Well fine.

“How come I can’t make more mass?”

“You probably can, just not yet.”

“How quickly will—”

She cut me off, “Every Enumius is different, but we all have mass and energy limits. Inert mass is easier to make than energetic mass, so the more energetic you make something, the less of it you’ll be able to make.”

Nai had just spent half an hour torching a block of concrete bigger than sasquatch. Fire was energetic, and she’d made a ton of it.

“…So your limit must be… immense.”

Nai didn’t even have to nod. She just gave a frigid stare at me just oozing with satisfaction.

“I read what you said happened on this ship that delivered you to Korbanok. You were only on the ship for a few weeks, and Korbanok itself for a few days.”

I nodded carefully. I hadn’t realized she would know about that. But I should have. She and Tasser were old friends.

“And you weren’t Enumius back on your home—” she trailed off for a second, “ before . You weren’t Enumius?”

“No.”

“So you hadn’t been empowered long before we… met? ”

I felt like I was about to stick my foot in a bear trap. Talking with Nai about the moments we’d tried to kill each other seemed like it was the first step toward repeating the event.

“Uhh…a few minutes, actually. The first thing we— I materialized were a few pebbles that helped me get out of the cell the Vorak had me in. I ran into you right after getting out.”

“That means you were making combustibles less than a week after activating your abilities. That’s highly unusual.”

“What are the implications of that?”

“Probably that you’ll improve slowly. Basically, you did the developmental steps out of order, and if you want to improve you’ll have to go back and cover the steps you missed.”

“What steps are you talking about? It’s like you’re being intentionally vague.”

She gloated silently at me.

This time I did flip her off.

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

I did my best to return her wordless gloating expression.

She ignored me and instead reached into her winter jacket and tugged out a small medallion. Holding it in one hand, she held out her other hand and sat silently for a moment. In her empty hand, there were a few sparks as matter emerged from nowhere. A perfect copy of the medallion formed in her empty hand.

She put both of them in her hands and wrung them together a few times, shuffling the two between her hands. After mixing enough for me to lose track of them, she put both on the table and slid them toward me.

“The most critical step you probably skipped is learning how to perceive what you create. Tell me which one I materialized.”

Picking up both of them, there were minute differences in the texturing to them, but without having inspected the original beforehand, that told me nothing.

After about thirty seconds of floundering, one of the medallions began to warm to the touch.

Okay, “This one.” I said, “How did you change the temperature though?”

“I made it so that I stayed aware of it. So I could just add some hotter new material. The heat diffuses to the whole thing, and it warms up.”

“So you couldn’t just add heat to the matter, you had to create new matter carrying the heat?”

She nodded, “It doesn’t work any other way.”

“How did you ‘stay aware’ of it after you made it? What does that mean?”

“It means I can still perceive it. It’s an extra sense that comes from being Enumius . There’s several different kinds of senses that most Adepts can get.”

“Wait, that sounds familiar…” I said. It was a different language, but sure enough, I did a quick comb through my compendium and found an early note from Daniel about the first specks we’d made. He mentioned that he’d ‘felt’ where he created the ones we’d shattered the glass with, even after we’d conjured them.

“So you can perceive this thing,” I asked, holding up the warm medallion, “without seeing it, or anything else.”

“Yes.”

“Shut your eyes, show me.”

Nai scowled, but put a hand over her eyes while I waved the medallion in the air back and forth. She kept a finger pointed at it the whole time. I dropped the coin back to the table with a huge grin behind my air mask.

“That doesn’t remind you of anything?” I said.

“No,” the Farnata replied.

“Let me remind you. Get up, walk around the room.”

“You can’t give me orders,” she spat.

“Sorry, wasn’t trying to.” I said. I’d used the wrong form. Imperative instead of eliciting.

I scooted my chair back from the table, covered my eyes and focused every ounce of attention I had on my psionic radar. Daniel had shown me how to filter what kind of minds it was sensitive to, amongst other adjustments. Nai was still invisible to my radar, but even an invisible person left footprints. It was difficult to focus on the ever so faint disturbance Nai made as she walked around the room.

I was technically tracking the mirror hiding her, rather than her own register on the radar.

But I was tracking her. And I pointed right at her as she moved around.

It only worked when I was close to her like this, but it was more than enough to demonstrate the parallel.

"On the road...when we stopped and the camoflauging Vorak was there. You did the same thing." Nai recalled.

I uncovered my eyes smugly. “ That’s psionic,” I said. “There’s this…construct I made in my head, and one of the things it can do is track Enumius that are close to me. Tell me that doesn’t sound like one of those extra senses.”

Looking troubled, Nai sat back down. “It’s…possible,” she conceded. “But you still don’t have the fundamental tools necessary to progress.”

“Give me the short version then, I know you’re gone as soon as we’re out of time.”

Nai once again gave me her favorite scowl, and materialized two gray metal orbs between her fingers, each one the size of a large marble.

“What’s the difference between these two?” she asked, setting them in front of me.

Inspecting the two marbles, they were visually indistinguishable, but when I went to pick them up… each one felt different.

I looked to Nai, expecting her to elaborate, but she wasn’t ready to offer any more information.

I rolled my eyes. Fine, if she wanted to play petty, I could play ball. I wasn’t too proud to learn.

“They’re made of different materials.” I guessed, “You made them to appear identical but with unique compositions.”

“Obviously,” Nai said. “But how could you tell the difference then?”

I stared blankly at her, “What? You can just feel it. They’re different textures.”

Nai shook her head, “They’re not. Their exteriors are identical, down to the micron.”

“They feel different though, how is that—” I shut my mouth as soon as I realized the word ‘possible’ was about to be spoken. I’d gotten in the habit of hesitating when it came to ‘possible’.

What was a better question then? How did I feel the difference?

“I don’t know how.” I admitted.

“Check these then. What do you notice?” Nai materialized two new orbs, the first two crumbling into less than dust, leaving absolutely nothing at all.

Just like the first two, they were identical in appearance. But when I picked them up, I could tell they were the same material this time. And…oh that was just bizarre.

Something was different about the two orbs. It was in how their mass was distributed…the weight seemed like it should have felt a little different in my palm, but I couldn’t quite grasp how I was intuiting the information. They weighed exactly the same, but their weights felt differently distributed?

“Compare this one too.” Nai said. She rolled a third one over to me and I picked it up. The third marble was just like the first two with regard to material, shape, and weight…but it had a ‘thin’ spot.

Oh that was just bizarre, and my particular bar for strangeness had been hiked so ludicrously high already… One side of the sphere felt thinner than the rest, like there was a cavity in the marble, a few millimeters below the surface, not even leaving a mark on the outside.

That clarified the sensation I got from the other two as well. They had differently shaped cavities on their interior’s too, one was perfectly centered on the center of the marble, and the other deformed around it like a donut.

I was somehow feeling the inside of each marble.

“It’s called ‘tactile cascading’. Almost every Enumius can do it. Your sense of touch can spread through whatever you’re in physical contact with.”

At first I thought Nai might elaborate, “And?”

“And what?”

“Well it actually seemed like you were being helpful for a moment,” I said, holding up the three marbles.

Nai didn’t even miss a beat before dissolving the marbles back into nothing.

“There you go.” I said, just when I thought she might be ready to give me the time of day. “If I ask some questions, will I get any answers, or will you mumble something about security again?”

“That depends if your question would put our security at risk.”

“How far can this ‘tactile cascade’ reach?”

“Depends on the Enumius.”

“How far can yours reach?”

“Far.”

“You said ‘most’ Enumius can do this, how many is ‘most’?”

“Seven out of eight.”

“…How many people is that total? How many people are Enumius?”

That question got Nai’s attention, because she didn’t visibly answer right away. Usually if she wanted to shut me down, she’d do so immediately. Sometimes even cutting off my question.

“Depends on the alien. I’m not talking about my people, only you could tell us about your people, which just leaves the Vorak.”

“So how many Vorak are Enumius?”

“Information like that fluctuates span to span,” Nai said. ‘Span’, it was some longer unit of time, I’d estimated about a decade, but the lack of common units was something I knew Dyn was hoping to cover with me soon. “Sometimes it goes up and down a few points, but I recall the average being close to one in ten.”

“That’s a huge number isn’t it? There must be billions of Vorak out there,” I said.

“Obviously, but not every Enumius sharpens the ability.” The word ‘ability’ in Starspeak was actually ‘enumat’. It alliterated, sounding funny to my ear. “For many, being Enumius just means never needing utensils for meals, or always having a small item handy.”

“I’m getting off topic,” I realized. She’d started giving me too much information. She only did that when she didn’t care if I knew it or not. “Why is tactile cascading so important?” I asked.

“Because it’s critical in being able to comprehend the composition and structure of what you make. The better you understand what you’re making beforehand, the more easily you’ll be able to make it.”

“When I try to make the flashbang, I don’t really know what’s burning in it. I just know what it needs to do…” I said slowly.

“You’re improvising then. You’re so focused on what you want the creation to do, that you don’t control how it winds up doing it. That lapse costs energy, precision, even distance. No wonder you can’t make more.”

“I can practice it then? Just by picking things up and learning how to feel what they’re made of?”

Nai nodded, “Yes.”

“How did you learn this stuff?” I asked.

“My mother taught me the basics second hand,” Nai said. “The rest I learned the hard way when I joined the Naxoi .”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this Enumius stuff,” I admitted. It was one of the first words I’d ever added to the journal.

“Tasser told me the meaning of Starspeak’s name,” I said. “What does Enumius mean?”

“It’s a loanword from an old Casti tongue. Literally, it means ‘super-able’. It was adapted to describe the strange aliens far more ‘able’ than the Casti they first met.”

Super-able.

Huh. I understood the implications of the word a little better now.

“Adept,” I repeated.