Don't Quit Your Day Job

“Language is not the foundation of thought. However, once it is learned, language embeds itself into the center of thought, inextricable.”

-from “Philosophy of Translation”, by Najie Jamison

Sylva was not having a great night. She was surrounded on all sides in her apartment by various printed matter that she was going over with a fine tooth comb. It was tedious, boring work, and every time she shifted position on her couch, papers fluttered to the ground, upsetting her careful work flow. Sylva was beginning to hate her apprenticeship.

Not that she minded the idea of learning languages, or of working on theological texts; she liked both of those things. But she was the most junior member of the team, and thus was delegated to the most mundane possible job: error checking. Every text had to be consistent with every other text, and that meant that Sylva needed to cross reference several databases and flag errors as they came up. She was thorough, but not quick, so her work tended to follow her home. She printed it because it made it easier to read, annotate, and flip through, but it also messed up her apartment. The papers also became limp and soggy in the ever-present humidity.

Sylva wished she were out riding her speeder, or even just taking a long shower and heading to bed. Either would have been preferable. She wished she could call up Yan, and chat mindlessly while she worked, but Yan was off planet again, for the second time in three months, and God only knew when she'd be back. Though Sylva loved Yan deeply, and the whole situation was kinda her fault, Sylva wished that she and Yan could actually spend time together, not have whatever this messy, long distance… thing was. At least when Yan got to Anthus they would have an ansible there, so they could still write.

Sylva's phone rang. She jumped, surprised, and papers scattered everywhere, messing up what little organization she had. The phone had slipped down into the cushions of her couch, so Sylva had to dig for it. It was lucky it was ringing, or she may have lost it for good. The caller ID on the number said 'restricted'. That was strange. Sylva answered the phone.

"Hello, is this Sylva Calor?" The voice on the phone's was a man's, but he spoke with an odd cadence that Sylva couldn't place.

"Yes, who is this?" Sylva asked. When she spoke, she could hear the echo of her own voice back. Why was she on speakerphone? That seemed rude.

"Hi, Sylva, I'm Sid Welslak, I'm one of Yan's coworkers."

This could not possibly be good news. This could not be anything good, at all, ever. There was no reason for Yan’s coworkers to be calling her. Sylva leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

"Oh," was all that Sylva could say.

Sid did not seem to pick up from her tone that she knew something bad was coming. He plowed on. "I'm sorry to call you, I know it's late where you are."

"It's fine. Sid, look, I know Yan listed me as her emergency contact. What's the bad news?"

This did give him pause. Sylva drummed her fingers on her cheek anxiously.

"Are you sitting down?" Sid asked.

It was that bad, hunh? "Yes." Sylva's voice was flat.

"There's no easy way to say this, but while en route to the Anthus colony, Yan was kidnapped off the ship she was on."

"Oh."

"I'm sorry," Sid said. "I know that you and her were very close."

"Are. We are close."

There was a momentary silence over the line. "I'm sorry," Sid said again. He didn't seem to have very much to say.

"What are you doing to get her back?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that."

"You can and you will."

"It's classified."

"Sure it is! At least tell me that you're going to do something!"

"I can't-"

"You're not going to even try? Oh my God, oh my God…"

"Sylva, I will do everything in my power to get Yan back," Sid said. His voice cracked. "But right now we have no information on who took her, why, or where. I can't make any promises to you."

"You don't know anything?" Sylva whispered.

"There hasn't been an investigation yet. As soon as we have more information, then we can figure out a way to move forward."

"Did you tell her family?" Sylva thought back to her brief stay aboard the Iron Dreams. They might not be in contact, but someone should tell them.

"No," Sid said. "This isn't public information, and I don't want to get the Guild involved."

"They're her family!" Sylva was approaching hysterics, vacillating between screaming and choked whispers. Sid didn’t seem to change his tone at all.

"They'll be told eventually. Just not right now."

"Why are you telling me, then?" Sylva asked.

"You're her primary emergency contact. Do I need to swear you to secrecy?"

"No." Sylva said no, but what she really meant by that was that she was not planning on keeping this secret in the least.

"That's good. Are you-" Sid sighed over the line. "Are you alright? Is there anything I can do for you?"

"No? I'm not alright? Are you some sort of idiot?"

"Sorry I asked, then."

"Just find her, ok? And tell her family." Before Sylva told them herself.

"We'll do our best. If you need to get in contact with me, you can text my personal phone," Sid rattled off a phone number, and Sylva scrambled to write it down on one of the papers scattered around her.

"You'll keep me up to date?"

"Sure."

"That doesn't sound very reassuring."

"There are some things I can't tell you," Sid said.

"Well, at the very least tell me when you're going to start looking for her, okay?"

"I'll tell you what I can, when I can."

"Fine." Sylva wasn't under any illusions that Sid had any intention of telling her anything, but she didn't have anything else to say to him.

"Like I said, if there's anything I can do for you, please text me and let me know." He was stressing text. Maybe he just really hated phone calls.

"I will," Sylva said. She wouldn't.

"Okay. Again, I'm sorry. Yan is my friend, and I will do my best to find her again."

"I know."

"Bye, Sylva."

"Bye."

Sid hung up the phone, leaving Sylva with just the buzzing silence of her apartment. She stared into space for a few minutes, trying to work over the information she had learned. Despair hadn't hit her, at least not yet, but there were plenty of other emotions swirling around in her head. With Yan, the person Sylva had spent the past eleven years of her life leaning on, gone, Sylva was adrift. But as she thought long and hard about what Sid had said over the phone, a plan began to formulate in her mind.

After all, if there was only one thing that Sylva knew, it was that Yan's family would do a lot more to help her than Sid would ever be able to understand.

Sylva pulled out her laptop and began composing several messages.

Dear Captain Pellon,

This may sound like an odd request, but I would like to take you up on the invitation you kindly extended to me upon my last visit to the Iron Dreams. I have a proposal that may interest you…

"I need to take a leave of absence," Sylva said, her hands on her hips. She was standing in her boss's office in the IKRB building. The office was in the corner of a building, so it had a nice view through two windows of the sunny street below.

"What? Why?" Her boss and mentor, Qwame Brache, looked at Sylva with a shocked expression. "You don't look sick, or pregnant." Brache was not known for her tact. She was sitting at her desk, computer in front of her, and surrounded on all sides by books with sticky notes flying out of them. Although printed books were inconvenient for most everyday uses, people in Sylva's department found them easier to work with than going purely digital- they had their own in house printer to service that need.

"Personal emergency," Sylva said.

"What kind?" Brache raised an eyebrow. "You can't just leave. We're really ramping up on this project, and I have edits that I need you to do on your translation of that Yallow book."

"I can, and I will," Sylva said. "I'm not at liberty to discuss the details."

"If you want more vacation time, you could just say so," Brache said.

"This isn't a vacation," Sylva said. "I really do need to go, and I don't know when I'll be able to get back."

"Sylva, you can't just do things like that," Brache said with a sigh. "This is a job, more than a job. It's your life."

"If you won't let me go, I'll quit." Sylva hadn't budged from her position, frowning firmly at her boss. It wasn't as though Sylva disliked Brache, she just knew that the way to get Brache to do anything was to yell at her until she gave in. That was how everyone else in the office handled her, anyway. If they didn’t, Brache would get sucked away into her own corners of niche interests without ever successfully directing the team she was supposed to lead. In that way, the office tended to be somewhat chaotic, as Brache's own boss, the head of the entire IKRB theological division, and all of Brache's subordinates spent their time navigating around Brache's peculiarities. Brache, when she was an apprentice herself, had been projected to lead the entire IKRB by the end of her career, but had ended up stagnating in middle management. Not that she seemed to mind. She had told that story to Sylva herself, smiling. Sylva thought it had been a very odd introduction to the job.

"Are you really going to do this? We can't afford to be short staffed, Sylva. And this isn't good for your career."

"Look, I'm sorry that I'll be leaving you at a deficit, but I have to go. Some things are more important than my career."

Brache's face lit up, like she had just reached some sort of revelation. "Is this about your girlfriend?"

"How did you know?" Sylva asked.

"Are you getting married?" Brache was smiling. "That's so cute."

"What? No! If I was getting married don't you think I'd invite you?"

Brache's whole face was radiant. "You'd really invite me? That's so sweet!"

"Brache, I'm not getting married. I need to take a leave of absence, yes it's about Yan." Brache looked crestfallen. She looked down at her computer and typed rapidly, ignoring Sylva for a good minute. Sylva was used to this behavior, and she just waited it out, presuming that she was checking the schedules and seeing if she actually could spare Sylva for an unknown length of time.

"Oh. I see," Brache said. "I'm sorry. Is her family holding a funeral?" She was serious now.

Sylva turned around and slammed the door to Brache's office shut. The windows rattled. "She's not DEAD!"

"Well this says-"

"How do you even know about it? Let me see," Sylva demanded. Brache obediently turned the computer screen around so that Sylva could read what she was looking at. It was in some sort of archive of ansible transmissions, and it was a letter addressed to Sid, describing what had happened to Yan. Sylva read it over mutely.

"How do you have access to this?" Sylva asked when she finished.

Brache tapped her nose. "I was at one time slated to head the IKRB, you know…"

"Yeah, and then you got trapped here for lack of ambition," Sylva said. "That doesn't explain it."

"Just because I may not be ambitious doesn't mean I'm not helpful," Brache said. "Or very, very trusted."

"Okay. Whatever." Sylva turned the computer back around.

"So, you want to take a leave of absence to do what?" Brache asked.

"I need to go tell her family," Sylva said. "They haven't been informed yet."

"I'm sure they will be, soon enough," Brache said. "And that's not an excuse, since you could easily send them an ansible message. You don't need time off work for that."

Sylva glared at her. "You can't stop me from going."

"No, probably not. But I do want to know what you're planning to do, so I should know whether to reassign your projects or not," Brache said with a sigh.

"I can't tell you."

"Are you really planning on going after her?" Brache asked. "Is that what this is?"

Sylva blushed. It sounded stupid when Brache said it like that.

"Oh, you are. Hm." Brache shuffled some papers on her desk, a mindless habit of hers that drove Sylva to distraction whenever they were in a room together. "Sylva, I think that you're not prepared for what that could entail.”

"Don't tell me what I can and can't do."

"I'm not, I'm just saying that there are things out in the universe that you have no clue about. There are greater things in heaven and below than any creature can ever know," Brache trilled, quoting some text.

"Please, spare me," Sylva said.

"What makes you think that you can just go out and get her back? I'm sure there's a crack team within the Imperial government that's working on it as we speak, and they have the resources and knowledge that you assuredly don't."

"I don't think anyone is going to try to find her," Sylva admitted. "The guy who told me, one of Yan's fellow apprentices, he sounded like- you need to keep this quiet, by the way," Sylva said, remembering that this was not supposed to be public knowledge. Brache zipped her lips. "Well, he sounded like they were going to give her up for lost. I can't accept that, at least not without trying."

"I get that, but you're just one person, what are you going to do?"

"That's why I need to talk to her family, in person. Her uncle has some sort of deep ties all over the place, I'm sure he could help investigate," Sylva explained.

"And what makes you think that you need to get involved?" Brache asked. "If her uncle does have these ties, and does care as much as you are betting he does, why couldn't he just do it himself?"

"I don't know," Sylva said, "but I have to try. I can't just stay here and feel like- I don't know- like I'm letting Yan die or whatever, and I'm not doing anything to help."

"Are you sure that you meddling won't make things worse?" Brache asked. "You could get in real trouble, especially if you actually start to get involved in the business of the type of people who would kidnap and kill government agents. This isn't something you can just do on a whim, Sylva."

"I don't care," Sylva said. "I'll do what I have to."

"Clearly." Brache's voice was dry. "Look, Sylva, I know a lot of things about the universe. I know a lot of things that I can't tell you, but I can tell you that you don't want to get involved in them. I wouldn't usually say this, but I'm begging you to reconsider. I think that you should leave this up to the experts."

"You could just tell me whatever it is that you know, and then we can move on."

Brache laughed. "There's a reason I'm trusted enough to have ansible archive access, and it's because I don't go telling the Empire's secret business to anyone who asks, even if they have that pouty look on their face."

Sylva tried to straighten her face out, but she was unsuccessful, and just ended up feeling more stupid. "Whatever. You can't stop me."

"You've said that about ten times now. I'll let you have your leave, Sylva, but only because I think you'll be back soon enough."

"Don't say that," Sylva said, feeling crushed that her mentor wasn't confident in her.

"I'll give you a gift, though," Brache said. "You might need it."

"What?"

"You're going to hate this," Brache said. "Let's take a seat."

"Oh my God, really?" Sylva groaned as Brache stood, walking over to the front of her desk and clearing a space among the stacks of books and paraphernalia on the floor. Brache sat down on the floor, and patted the space in front of her. Sylva sat down heavily, crossing her legs. "When you said you were going to give me a gift I thought it would actually be good for a second."

"When have I ever not been good to you?" Brache asked. She held out her hands. Sylva reluctantly placed her palms into Brache's, and their fingers wove together.

Sylva hated meditating. It was a wonder that she even made it into the Academy, her grasp over that fundamental aspect of using the power was so poor. She had made up for it on the written tests, but every second she had to stay in the meditative state was a struggle. Sylva had hoped that joining the working world would leave her free to not meditate, and never touch the power, but she had ended up paired with Brache, who thought it was the most useful collaborative tool on the planet. Sylva was Brache's third apprentice; the other two had gone on to higher positions in the IKRB after their five years were up. Apparently while working with them, Brache had decided that jamming information into her apprentices' heads via meditation was the easiest and best way to get them up to speed. In previous conversations, she had lovingly called Sylva her meditation charity case, since Sylva was so bad at it. Luckily, Brache was an endless well of patience, if nothing else.

Both of them closed their eyes. Brache hummed a simple tune, and Sylva joined in. It was the same few notes, over and over and over. Sylva hated it. She tried desperately to focus on just the act of humming it, the feeling of the notes in her throat, the pattern of the music, but her mind wandered over and over. Distractions danced in front of her just like the light shining in through her eyelids danced in the branches of the trees outside. The power always felt just out of reach, and the more she grasped for it, the less it came to her.

Brache just kept on humming, relentless in her drive to teach Sylva whatever it was that she needed to know. The floor was uncomfortable, the music boring, the temperature in the office not quite right, their hands sweaty as they held them together. Sylva alternated between focusing and relaxing, but neither worked. She shifted her position constantly, probably driving Brache crazy.

After an agonizingly long time, something finally clicked, and Sylva slithered down into that deep well that was Brache's mind. She was more familiar with that than anyone else's. Perhaps some of her teachers at the Academy had come close, but she had been working with Brache day in and day out for months, now, and they knew each other pretty well. Sylva would have never meditated with anyone else. For all that she loved Yan, and for all that Yan loved meditating, Sylva just could not bear it.

It was an uncomfortable feeling. Both Sylva and Brache had disorganized minds, to say the least, but while Brache tended to fixate on random thoughts, Sylva was scattered and would jump from place to place and moment to moment without warning. They were an odd pair, and Sylva never could get Brache to say what had made her choose Sylva to be her apprentice. She supposed after taking on two others and training them up well, Brache knew well enough how to pick an apprentice.

"Stop thinking so fast, you'll jolt yourself awake," Brache said in that internal space. Sylva felt her mouth move, sounding out the words. "Shhh, when will you get better discipline?"

Sylva focused on not moving her mouth when either of them sent a complete, formed thought out into that shared space.

"Not so hard," Brache said, and reached down into Sylva's body to loosen the muscles of her jaw, which had clamped together. "Relax."

"What was it you wanted to show me?" Sylva asked finally, stringing the words together like beads.

"Here's a trick that I wasn't going to teach you," Brache said. "But if you really are going out into the universe, you might need it. Watch me."

Brache pulled up a scene from her memory, and forced it to play at the front of their thoughts. In it, she was a younger woman, dressed in an apprentice cassock that was similar to the one that Sylva wore today. A bald man- glancing at him in the memory Sylva got the information that he was Brache's own mentor, long ago- stood at her side. There was a young man in front of them, a scrawny guy, couldn't have been older than eighteen. All three of them were in some sort of building made of clay, lit by strings of bare lights hanging on wires across the beams of the ceiling. The whole place smelled of smoke, it was heavy and vivid in the memory. Sylva didn't know what type of place this was, or why Brache was here. The memory didn't provide that information to her; possibly Brache was keeping it secret for some reason. Or it just wasn't relevant and Brache wasn't actively thinking about it.

Brache's mentor turned to the young man and spoke. To Sylva/Brache it sounded like gibberish, even in this memory. The man nodded, and the mentor handed him a charge card. Payment for whatever was about to happen. The mentor pointed at the dirt floor, and Sylva/Brache sat down, along with the man. He wasn't a sensitive; that was information that Brache provided. Sylva/Brache took the man's face in her hands, leaning their foreheads together. She could feel his stubble and smell his breath. They stared into each other's eyes.

Then, using the power, Brache reached into his brain. It was a horrible sensation. The man jumped underneath her hands, but she held him down, violently searching for what she needed. The language, the language…

It was a gross violation. It hurt. Even for Sylva, this echoed memory-pain of both Brache and the man traveled back into her body, and she almost cried out. Brache seemed to recall every moment of the scene in agonizing detail, each neural impulse of the man's brain, each spark of a thought, she stole them and pressed them into her own head. How long did it take? There was no way to tell time in this state. It could have been seconds, it could have been hours. How long was it taking Sylva to see this memory? She hated every moment of it, and only the present-Brache's grip on her kept her from falling out of the meditation.

Eventually, it ended. Sylva/Brache withdrew her power and the man collapsed backwards onto the floor. Dried tears tracked through the dust on his cheeks, and he clutched his head, moaning. It was cruel. Sylva/Brache felt almost as bad, but she had come out on top of the situation. Her mentor looked down at her on the floor.

"Did it work?" he asked, still in that strange language, but this time, the neural network that Sylva/Brache had ripped wholesale from the man fired, and the words meant something. She nodded. "Good."

Abruptly, Brache let the memory fall away. Sylva yanked out of the shared space, coming back into her own body with a shiver. Her head still hurt, but it was only a shadow compared to the pain of the memory.

"Shame that you came out of that," Brache said, releasing Sylva's hands and stretching. "I was just about to explain to you how it worked."

"That was horrible!" Sylva cried, then coughed. Her throat and mouth were unbelievably dry. "You should have warned me."

"You never would have gone in with me if I had," Brache said, her practicality showing through. "And you might need to know how to do that."

Sylva frowned. "No."

"Why not?" Brache asked. "It will come in handy, I think."

"It's immoral."

"What? We paid him," Brache said. "Very fair compensation."

"It was torture! And you stole part of his brain!"

"It hurt me just as much as it hurt him," Brache said. "You do get the worst headache for like a week or so afterward. And I wouldn't say stole, just copied."

"Still."

"You are a different person, after that. It's weird," Brache waxed philosophical for a moment. "There's more to language than just language, you know. Especially when you get it like that, you're taking all of the thought patterns that a person's had for their whole life, and you lay them on yourself. It takes a while to grow into it. Like a second layer of skin."

"It's disgusting," Sylva said. "I won't do it." Privately, she didn't even think that she could. She had a much weaker grasp on the power than Brache did. She was privately flattered that Brache even thought that she had the capability to do such a thing, but she knew in her heart that she didn't.

"Then I sincerely hope you won't need to. But take it from me, Sylva, I know more things than you do about the working of the universe. There's a reason I'm telling you this."

"Did you teach this to your other apprentices?"

"No. But I didn't think that they would ever need it. I will admit, I'd be just as happy to see this technique die out. There are better ways to learn, but… " Brache shrugged. "My own mentor thought that it was the most effective way to learn a language. Though I respected him very much, I have to disagree with him."

"He doesn't seem like a very nice person," Sylva said. She rubbed her eyes, blinded by the glare of the sun on the office's windows.

"He had his moments," Brache said. "He could be many things, and he always held me to a very high standard. But perhaps that was what I needed in my youth. Certainly I can't imagine myself for not having him."

"I guess."

"It would be a shame to lose you so early in your apprenticeship," Brache said. "There's a reason why we take you in and keep you for so long. It doesn't do to disrupt that by having you gallivanting off on your own."

"Don't try to keep me," Sylva said.

"I won't. Just promise you'll come back and be my apprentice again, okay?" Brache honestly sounded a little forlorn.

"I'll do my best," Sylva said. She really did like Brache, and she was sorry to leave her hanging like this.

"I'm too old to have the heartbreak of losing an apprentice," Brache said. "And I don't want another one."

"Too tough to eat and too old to lay eggs?" Sylva asked. "What a horrible thing that must be."

"It's true, It's true," Brache said with a smile. She braced her feet against Sylva's and the pair grabbed hands and hoisted each other up. "Are you leaving today?"

"My trunk is packed, my rent's paid till the end of the year," Sylva said. "There is one other favor I'd like to ask of you."

"Oh, no. What?" Brache asked.

"Can you look after my speeder? I don't just want to leave it parked in my yard, just in case I'm not back by rainy season."

"Fine, fine. Keys?"

Sylva fished in her cassock pocket and handed them over.

"I'll ride this baby all over town," Brache said, holding them up and jingling them.

"If you crash it, you're paying me for it," Sylva said.