Drunk on All Your Strange New Words Read online

  Lydia’s &amp is wearing off and she’s just wondering if it would be such a terrible idea to do another bump when the actress who played Hedda, who has an incredibly striking face and a high musical voice that makes you shiver, speaks directly to Lydia. Now, Lydia isn’t meant to have conversations of her own while working. She’s allowed to be polite and helpful (provided the people she’s talking to are sufficiently important—no chatting to waiters, etc.) but every second she spends talking to someone else is a second when Fitz is frozen out of the conversation. On the other hand, Lydia really wants to talk to the actress.

  “Are you OK?” the actress is saying. Her accent sounds like Minnesota or maybe North Dakota: Lydia’s fascinated by all the different American accents; she stores sound clips of the people she talks to, with the ultimate aim of collecting at least one from each state. She has seventeen so far.

  “Fine, thanks,” says Lydia, unsure why the actress is concerned for her well-being.

  “After your fall, I mean? In the interval?”

  “Oh! Yes.” Lydia has almost forgotten about the fall. When she’s drunk from translating, her memories take on a dreamlike quality and she can easily feel like they didn’t happen. The agency says this is why they urge their translators to keep recordings of everything they do, so they can check back later and clarify their memories. While that aspect of recording everything can be useful, it clearly isn’t the real reason the agency wants them to do it. “How did you see it?”

  “Oh, a whole bunch of people took grabs of it,” says the actress, “so it’s everywhere now.”

  “Shit.” Lydia turned her notes off during the play so she could concentrate and hasn’t turned them back on yet. She should’ve guessed it’d go online. The agency will have words with her over this.

  The actress finds the clip on her scroll and holds it so Lydia can see. Lydia is dismayed that she looks even more foolish than she felt at the time, her large eyes staring gormlessly like a cartoon character. Also she needs a haircut, it’s down around her shoulders and looking messy. She considers changing the color so people won’t recognize her from this clip: the electric blue is more memorable than she would wish.

  “What happened?” says the actress, stroking Lydia’s upper arm. Actors are often tactile people, she’s learned in recent months, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

  “I just felt … tired,” says Lydia. She’s conscious of freezing Fitz out and failing at her job, so she includes him in the conversation, which means it becomes a conversation between Fitz and the actress. Lydia does this reluctantly but at least retains the actress’s attention. (What’s her name? Lydia thought she had the Playbill stacked on her glasstop but can’t find it now. Surely facerec can find her online?) When Lydia is speaking the actress looks at her, not Fitz, and her gaze is magnetic. Maybe it’s just because she’s got that charisma you need to play a leading role on Broadway but Lydia feels like she and the actress might get on well if they could stand by the bar and enjoy a few drinks and a proper conversation. If she ever got to go to things like this on her own.

  But if she was at this party on her own, she’d be out of her depth, wouldn’t she? She doesn’t know how to talk to these people, she doesn’t come from their world—even if she used social cribnotes she’d be struggling to keep up. At least with Fitz around all she has to do is say his words and people listen to her and she belongs here, more or less.

  The actress sees someone else she knows, tells Fitz and Lydia it was so nice to meet them and moves off into the crowd.

  * * *

  Fitz has just been introduced to one of the festival’s key patrons when Anders barges in on the conversation and makes a show of greeting the patron warmly as if he and she are terrific friends, taking her hand and cradling it as if he’s going to kiss it. Lydia gives Fitz her interpretation of the situation, which is that Anders and the patron have met once, twice at most, and the patron barely remembers him. Fitz seems to appreciate her commentary: the Logi don’t do laughter, but he does that psychic quiver that denotes amusement.

  The patron says she’s just raced back from Montreal to catch the last night of the festival, and asks Anders if he’s ever been.

  Anders shakes his head. “I haven’t left Manhattan in eight years.”

  The patron is astonished. “Eight years?”

  “Everything I need is here. It’s a wasteland out there, isn’t it?”

  “Do you mean culturally or literally?”

  “Uh, both, I think.”

  The patron laughs. “It’s not all like Florida, dear boy. The Montreal scene is so much more vibrant than here. You should go.”

  “No thanks. I met a guy at a mixer last week who said his cousin decided to do Route 66 last summer, and their car got stingered and stripped in Oklahoma.”

  “Montreal and Oklahoma,” she explains patiently, “are different places.”

  “What I mean is, everyone out there hates New Yorkers. Everyone knows that.” Anders considers this the final word on the matter. Lydia wonders what he’d make of Halifax.

  “What did you think of the show tonight?” says the patron.

  Anders’ lip twists into an unimpressed curl. “Revivals aren’t my thing. I feel like this slot should have gone to some bold new experimental work. As I said, my background is in devised theater…” And he moves on to talking about his event, aiming his pitch more at the patron than Fitz: evidently her patronage is worth more than Fitz’s. (Lydia facerecs her and yes, her wealth puts her in the top 0.5 percent globally.) The patron keeps trying to steer the conversation in another direction and Anders keeps steering it back, and they both speak over Lydia. Despite Lydia’s skill at simultaneous translation, situations like this are beyond her and she’s relieved when Fitz politely bows out of the conversation as soon as someone else joins it.

  Fitz has to speak to lots of people from publishers, as usual. His dispatches are influential back on Logia, and though the market there for books from Earth is relatively niche, the market overall is huge, so it’s still lucrative if a title breaks through. Ideally these publishers want Fitz to request a translation of their books for his personal use. It helps if he also reads it and likes it, but even if he doesn’t, the fact it’s already translated removes a significant cost and makes it easier for the publisher to sell the book extraterrestrially. If only these publishers knew their efforts would be equally well directed at Lydia herself, since if Fitz is interested in a book, he’ll give it to her to read first and then ask if it’s worth translating.

  As Lydia translates Fitz’s conversations with these people, the language takes its toll on her sobriety and she feels increasingly loose-tongued. The editor-at-large of a major litcast doesn’t look at her at all when Fitz is talking to him, and she has to stop herself from saying You have no fucking respect for me at all, do you. You think I’m just some pond scum they’ve dredged up and put in a shirt. Well, you can fuck right off because—

  Are you alright? Fitz says, directly to her, and Lydia realizes some of her thoughts have been leaking through to him. That’s embarrassing.

  Bit tired, she replies.

  Likewise. Shall we leave?

  Lydia tells him yes, just as soon as she’s used the bathroom, and she moves through the throng to the door at the far end of the room. It’s cooler and quieter in the corridor that leads to the bathroom, which is lined with ornately framed loops of the restaurant’s most famous customers down the years.

  Before she took this job, Lydia never knew she would value time spent on the toilet so much. It’s not that she doesn’t like Fitz—on the contrary, she’s lucked out working for him, many of her classmates ended up in positions that are much more demanding and far less interesting—but when she’s at his side she has no control over what’s happening and just has to react constantly to what others do. One of the few times she can legitimately be away from him is when she goes to the bathroom, and accordingly she always spends longer there t
han she needs to. Either Fitz is too polite to mention this, or he just thinks this is how long it takes. Maybe Lydia’s predecessor did the same thing? Everyone always says how sharp and efficient she was, so probably not.

  Lydia slumps against the wall of the cubicle, rolling her head back and forth, humming tunelessly and very quietly. She closes her eyes.

  Her head snaps up. Bloody hell, Lydia, don’t fall asleep on the toilet.

  When she leaves the cubicle she splashes some water on her face and looks at herself in the mirror, forcing her slack facial muscles into a smile. She just needs to hold herself together long enough to walk back through the function room, find Fitz, then go downstairs to the car and bosh, that’s the festival done. She steps into the corridor—

  And Anders is there, leaning against the wall outside the bathroom. “Hey,” he says.

  This fucking guy. “Alright,” Lydia replies; doesn’t stop, keeps walking back to the function room.

  “Listen, I didn’t get a chance to properly talk to your boss earlier—”

  “Because you got distracted by someone more important, yeah, I noticed.”

  He laughs lightly. “But seriously, I really do think he’d be interested in the concept I’m working on—”

  “Oh right, she didn’t agree to back your devised theater event thing,” she says flatly, “so you’re coming back to Fitz. Got it.”

  “So what would be cool,” he continues, undeterred, “is if you and me and him could find a quiet place downstairs, and then maybe—”

  At this moment Lydia walks through the door to the function room and almost collides with the actress who played Hedda, who’s walking through in the other direction. “There you are,” the actress says, her face lighting up in a way that pleases Lydia greatly.

  “Yeah,” she replies stupidly. “Here I am.”

  The actress jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “I just saw Fitzwilliam over there all on his lonesome and I wondered—”

  “Shit,” says Lydia, peering across the room, “sorry, did you want to talk to him? I was just—”

  “No, I was hoping to talk to you actually.”

  Lydia is thrilled to hear this. But—bugger, what’s her name? Facerec did eventually pop up with it, after the actress had gone to talk to someone else, but Lydia’s forgotten it now. She tries to retrieve the search—

  “Excuse me,” Anders says to the actress, annoyingly not using her name, “I loved you in the play—”

  “Thank you,” the actress replies.

  “But this young lady and I were in the middle of a conversation and—”

  “No,” says Lydia, “actually we were done.”

  “I was midsentence.”

  “Yes, but I’d stopped listening,” says Lydia, walking away across the room. The actress walks with her, trying not to laugh.

  “Look,” says Anders, following, “I don’t get why you’re being so obstructive—”

  “Because I don’t bloody like you and I want you to go away.”

  The actress is no longer suppressing her laughter.

  “Right,” says Anders, “you fat fucking bitch, tomorrow I’m getting in touch with your employers and I’m reporting you—”

  “Oh, report this.” Lydia wheels around and punches him in the face, sending him flying. His head smacks into the table where the free wine is, jolting it backwards and knocking over glasses, and then he drops to the floor. Luckily it’s well past midnight and most of the free wine has already been drunk, so very little is spilled.

  Lydia turns back to the actress, who’s gawping at the scene in alarm, and finally her name comes up in Lydia’s glasses. It’s Neve. Of course it is. She knew that.

  IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

  On the hopper from New York to Manchester Lydia listlessly flicks through her feed, not opening anything, just looking at an endless stream of headers, previews and images.

  @JUICELINE / Why Gen ((O)) Teens think your favorite Transformers film is problematically cyberphobic / TR91

  @SKINNYDIP / We got a sneak peek at the new G17 human rights reform bill! SPOILERS AHOY / TR86

  @DEADPLANET / What the fuck lives at the heart of Australia, and why? This zoologist has answers that may surprise you / TR77

  What’s that last one doing there? Her truthiness filter is meant to be set at 80, regardless of whether a post has a good Chime score. The bloody thing always resets to default if you don’t keep an eye on it. She corrects her settings and then flicks to her personals.

  @Dubi80Du / Got a hyperwave nutrient bath installed in my bed and it has CHANGED MY LIFE / TR82 / SPONSORED

  @Agger4nn / Disappointed by the reaction to my apology yesterday so yeah I’ll be closing down this identity and opening a new circle / TR84

  @NemoZemo62 / making a cinnamon babka LIVE here in 20 mins, mirroring it on the veearr if you want to try some for yourself! / TR94

  She hasn’t seen anything about the Anders incident since yesterday, which means either no one is talking about it anymore or the filters she set up are working: she doesn’t care which. As she scrolls she wonders when she last saw anything from someone she’s met in hardspace. Back home she really valued her hardspace connections on account of her interface nausea syndrome—those were the people who’d remember to include her and not do everything in veearr. But she’s not made any friends like that in NYC (she can’t even find any INS support groups, which seems nuts), and her friends from back home have drifted to the edges of her circle and rarely get pushed at her anymore. The other connections she’s accumulated are people she can happily talk to on main, but doesn’t feel she could ask any of them to talk on private. And if she doesn’t feel like talking on main, she doesn’t exist—so her interactions have become very superficial.

  The feeds aren’t giving her the distraction she craves, so she tries books, vids, pods, actives—she even attempts to lose herself in that cube-stacking puzzle game she wasted whole days on as a kid. (Once she placed #4 on the daily global leaderboard. She was eleven years old, and nothing has ever felt as satisfying since.) But her brain is still snagged on going over the events repeatedly as if this will change them. This is a waste of time and energy, because it will not change them, but try telling her brain that.

  So she attempts to get drunk—properly drunk, on complimentary booze. She only has to double-tap the armrest and the runner comes down the aisle with the tray: the perks of going first class. Fitz paid and she didn’t ask how much it cost. She never knew anyone who could afford intercontinental travel when she was growing up. She’d known a few who’d come from the tropical deadzones—but none of them could afford to go back, or would have wanted to.

  She can’t remember the last time she got drunk—when she gets a night off, she prefers to spend it sober—so she expects her tolerance for alcohol to be very low. Yet she feels barely anything. She wonders if something in her biology has changed in the course of her work and she can no longer get drunk. But then, she also heard something once about how the hopper companies put a sobering drug in the air-conditioning to stop you getting lairy. So you can down as many free drinks as you like but after a point it stops having any effect.

  Lydia tries to sleep, but cannot. Her brain goes through the events again in the hope they’ll turn out differently this time.

  * * *

  The day after the Anders incident Lydia had a horrendous hangover, naturally. Translation hangovers are different from alcohol ones. It feels more like having a mild flu—drained of energy and full of weird aches. Also the body doesn’t know how to react, because human bodies were never meant to do any of this, so it produces excesses of various chemicals in an effort to cope, and you have to deal with all that going through your system too. On top of this she’d been doing &amp. This was the state Lydia was in while trying to come to terms with what she’d done at the reception.

  Surprisingly there was no note from the agency about it when she woke up. She expected one to arrive sometime in
the morning, but it didn’t. She blocked all her other feeds without looking at them, a display of extraordinary willpower on her part: news of the incident was bound to be doing the rounds to some degree. She decided to pretend it was one of those hazy dreamlike memories, adopting the demeanor of a child who wasn’t really aware of having done anything wrong. Perhaps everyone else wanted to forget about it too. Perhaps no one would mention it, and if they did she could act all surprised before going Wait, it’s starting to come back to me … oh god, I can’t believe I did that! Etc, etc.

  In fact she remembered the incident vividly. The moment before she punched Anders she felt very drunk, but when her fist connected everything jolted into crystal clarity. And while she felt bad for having embarrassed herself and Fitz and caused a scene, she didn’t feel bad about the act itself because Anders was totally asking for it. If she’d punched him on the street at night and no one had seen, she’d have felt satisfied and gotten on with her life.

  In the immediate aftermath Lydia was ushered away and the haze of drunkenness slid over her perceptions again, leaving the punch as a point of perfect focus in her impressionistic mental image of the evening. She dimly remembered telling one of the staff what a lovely event it had been as she and Fitz left the restaurant. She didn’t much recall arriving back at the residence.

  Lydia lay in her room at the residence throughout the morning and into the afternoon, afraid to get up and face whatever awaited her. Around two o’clock, three people—two human, one Logi—arrived at the residence. She recognized one of the humans, who was from the local branch of the translation agency. The Logi was a member of embassy staff, the other human was her translator: Lydia had met them both before but couldn’t remember either of their names. The translator was called … she wanted to say Ben? She’d failed to make friends among the other translators. Lydia sensed some resentment, like they all preferred her predecessor and blamed Lydia for her absence, though none of them ever said this or even implied it. Some said her predecessor was the best student the New York School of Thought Language ever had, so Lydia avoided raising the subject because it made her feel a total fraud, a mediocrity stepping into the shoes of genius. She couldn’t imagine how disappointed everyone must be in her after this incident.