Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1) by Meg Pechenick

Author:Meg Pechenick [Pechenick, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2018-08-21T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dr. Okoye had been wrong about one thing: there was a honeymoon period. It lasted exactly eight days. On the ninth morning it was as if my body suddenly caught up to what my mind already knew: that my time in this slightly off-kilter world wasn’t a brief sojourn to be endured and forgotten, but a prolonged immersion, with no end in sight. It was as if I had been unconsciously filtering out the unfamiliar elements of my new environment as a form of self-protection, and all at once the filter had been ripped away. Suddenly the differences were all I could see.

The first thing to draw my attention was the lighting. There was a quality to the Pinion’s lights that strained my eyes. I’d already decreased the brightness on my flexscreen, and I did the same for the illumination in my quarters, but I had no control over the lighting on the rest of the ship. Anton had sent me along with a selection of tinted glasses for exactly this eventuality, but they all looked idiotic, and none of them seemed to help much. I left them in their cases and went to bed with a headache every night. The Pinion’s gravity was a shade heavier, too, and the oxygen content of the air was minimally lower than that of Earth. I wasn't in any danger, because the air in my quarters was oxygenated to compensate, but the high gravity and low oxygen combined made me feel sluggish and short of breath all the time. Workouts were particularly hard; Anton’s post-holiday analogy had been a good one. Furthermore, the Vardeshi had minimally better hearing than humans, so everyone’s voice was pitched a bit too low. I found myself constantly asking people to repeat themselves, which was aggravating because everyone assumed the flaw was in my comprehension, not my hearing.

And on top of all this, the clock was different. Those extra two hours wrecked my circadian rhythm. After the first week, I had absolutely no innate sense of time, and I would wake in the middle of the night and squint at the faint blue symbols on the panel by my bed without the slightest idea what they meant. I felt like I was continually recovering from jet lag. Before going to sleep each night, I set two alarms for the morning, spaced fifteen minutes apart, and triple-checked them. The one benefit of the long and draining days was that I climbed into bed each night so deeply exhausted that it didn’t matter what time my body thought it was. I fell instantly into sleep and stayed there, submerged beneath its dark waters, until the shrill klaxon of my Vardeshi alarm jolted me awake.

Almost at once I started to understand what Anton had been trying to tell me: in conditions of extreme stress, immediate physical needs become emergencies. When I was thirsty, or cold, or had to use the bathroom, or needed lip balm, the horizons of my world narrowed to that single burning pinpoint of need.

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