Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge
“You should take the boys from them, raise them instead. Would be happier for them.”
Jooyun was stacking charcoal in a shallow metal pan on legs out in the garden while Shyow and Awisun fetched food from the kit-chin and laid it out on a wooden table nearby.
“Wish it was that easy,” he grunted.
For her part, Awisunn sighed and opened a beer bottle. “I won’t lie, big fella. That thought has crossed my mind more than once today. It’s not easy to do though.”
“We’d get in a lot of trouble,” Shyow nodded.
“Mm. You say. These Po-lees. Like…I try to understand. Like Given-Men, but not?”
“They make sure we follow the rules,” Shyow explained.
“And who makes rules?”
“Here? We do, collectively. We pick from among ourselves, and they debate.”
Jooyun nodded. “Kinda like the lodge, Yan.”
“Hm. And lodge rules say, can’t take children even if parents bad at being parents?”
“More like…we’d have to convince the lodge that it’s the right thing to do first,” Shyow explained. “And they have to see for themselves.”
“So basically, if we wanna rescue my brothers then we have to—” Awisun paused and cocked her head, listening. “Goddammit. I think Mother’s given up on her nap. Change of subject.”
“Should give gods more respect, Awisun!” Yan chided her.
She paused, then sighed. “…I know. I’m sorry.”
“Eh. Gods are strong. Know when to let you get away with it, yes?”
“Tell that to Sister Leoneida,” Jooyun mumbled.
“Whose sister?”
Jooyun paused “…Never mind.” He took one of those little magic-sticks the Humans had out of a pocket and made fire with it from only a rolling flick of his thumb. It was just a tiny round gentle flame, but when he touched it to the charcoal it spread quickly.
“You teach us to make that magic?”
“In time, sure.” Jooyun pocketed it again. “It’s like a lot of magic, you need to know other stuff first.”
“Even for that?” Yan asked.
“Even for this.”
Amanda pushed the kitchen door open and joined them, but she couldn’t resist looking back through the window to check that her sons hadn’t…Yan didn’t know. Hadn’t burst into flames or been ripped apart by a Yshek in the hand of heartbeats since she’d last seen them.
All that had changed was that the tall boy was wrapped in Vemik’s tail and held off the ground while laughing, while the other was lying belly-first on the ground. Both of them were making strange marks in Vemik’s ‘sketchbook.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Awisun asked her. The words were small polite ones, but there was frost on them.
“Uh…no. You know how it is, strange bed, strange room…” Amanda couldn’t stop glancing back through the window.
“You just need to relax. Right, Yan?”
Yan thought about it for a second. [“…I think your mother needs a good fucking,”] he suggested in People-words.
Amanda stood confused as Awisun, Jooyun and Shyow all started giggling.
[“Please! Please, be my guest!”] Awisun waved a hand at her mother, who looked completely lost. [“Whatever works!”]
Yan needed no further encouragement. He turned and gave Amanda his biggest, toothiest, most unmissably inviting grin and flexed his muscles for her as hard as he could.
She did give him a look-over. It was more shocked than interested, sadly, but it was a start. Yan had conquered colder women in his time. He liked a challenge!
For now, she cleared her throat and vanished back into the house, giving him strange looks with those weird sky-hued eyes she and her daughter shared.
She would need more charming. Meanwhile the boys seemed fun…maybe they should come outside and play? Yan thought they needed that, somehow. They could toss Jooyun’s ‘football’ around. Something…gentle. Humans were tough but also mostly a lot smaller than a man of the People, and Vemik was maybe a bit too excitable for any wrasslin’.
Or not. Vemik could be gentle, too.
And maybe the more they persuaded those boys there was another way to live, the freer they would be when they were grown.
Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Darcy
Darcy hadn’t even known about Erebor until only two days previously. It was a real, honest-to-god Area 51 like the conspiracy theorists had always liked to imagine about the air base near Roswell.
That was just a benign testing facility. This was…
It was a mad scientist’s laboratory full of aliens and alien technology, whirling around an alien gas giant on an alien moon under the forge glow of an immense red alien star. The people walking its halls were an eclectic blend of military, civilians and extraterrestrials.
And they’d prepared a whole lab just for her.
“Really? A whole lab? This is a space station, isn’t space a premium?”
The man giving her the tour, Warrant Officer Lee, gave her a shrug. “The Entity has been our wild card more than a few times. Which is a problem because we barely understand what it is. Brass says we devote resources to it…” he shrugged. “Besides, space isn’t as limited as you’d think. Mrwrki was built for a whole Kwmbwrw Great House, and apparently the Kwmbwrw like to have plenty of elbow room. We could fit twice as many people on this thing before we started to get tight.”
He gestured for her to enter the office fully. “Afraid you’re right next to one of the supply lines for Nanofactory C,” he said. “Might get noisy in here during a build cycle, but we insulated the walls as best we could. Nanofac D and the fusion plants to power it are going in downstairs too, so you might hear construction noises through the deck.”
“We have nanofactories here?” Darcy toured the room. It was basic, spartan, in need of a few personal touches, but she’d had smaller and dingier offices.
“Yup. If you need to use one for a project, the man to talk to is Lieutenant Brandt. You even get some personal time on them, way down the priority list after experimental equipment and prototyping.”
“What can a nanofactory make?” Darcy asked.
“B, C and D can make pretty much anything that’s metallic, plus circuitry. Plastics, polymers, ceramics and organic or volatile compounds need the specialist sub-modules on Factory A. That baby can build whole ships.”
“So, say, if I wanted some potted plants…?”
Lee chuckled. “Easier to order them from Earth, frankly.” He indicated the wall behind Darcy’s desk. “But that wall there is covered in ET-tech. We call it Wallpaper, it’s kind of a 3D screen. Room, load up my office wallpaper.”
The wall shimmered and fuzzed, and Darcy took a step back in surprise. It was like she was sitting in some executive high-rise office with a sweeping view of downtown…somewhere. She didn’t recognize the city, only that it must be on the west coast. Sunset was blazing a fiery trail in the water behind the buildings, glinting off an impressive bridge to the north-west and warming the wooded mountain slopes to the north.
The most impressive part, however, was that it was flawlessly three-dimensional. As she walked around her desk, near objects moved and were occluded by the frame as though she was looking through a pane of glass at something that was really there.
“That’s…a neat trick,” she managed.
“Ain’t it?” Lee grinned. “Anyway. Let me introduce you to your work setup.”
He indicated a door in the corner. “Through there’s the server farm hosting our captive slice of the datasphere. It’s kinda like alien Internet except…well, very different. Some of the way it works is downright weird.”
“What’s the biggest difference?” Darcy asked as she sat down.
“Ehh…I’d need all day to explain and I don’t understand it much myself,” Lee confessed. “The biggest difference is the Internet is just a network. From your perspective, the important bit is that the Internet can’t support digital sapient life forms. Datasphere can.”
“So…that’s my fish tank the Entity can live in.”
“Sure. The computer on your desk handles the rest. We even kitted it out with a volumetric field emitter, so it can project 3D objects. The Entity mostly communicates in images, emoticons and plain text, but for you it might break out something new.”
“…This is weird as all hell.”
Lee shrugged. “Hey, we could put those words over the front door around here,” he said. “But…okay, yeah. Even by our standards, counselling a…thing like the Entity, well…yeah. That’s a new one alright. If it’s any consolation, that means you’re already the most qualified person in the world.”
Darcy resisted the urge to scoff. “Gee, thanks.”
Lee chuckled. “I’ll let you get settled in. Get to know the interface, read the documentation we prepared for you. We’ll try to get in touch with it tomorrow, I guess. And…brace yourself. Something tells me this one’s gonna be interesting.”
He left her in peace. Darcy looked around her new office for a time, taking in the room and the anachronistic view behind her. With some experimentation and a trawl through the Wallpaper library she managed to find a view that better suited her in the form of a warm limestone patio with garden furniture on it, and beyond that an orchard of orange trees. She fancied she could actually feel the sunlight warming her back.
Too bad she wouldn’t be able to go out there and recline for real. But just looking at it was comforting.
She opened her documents folder, and began reading.
Date Point: 15y5m5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Julian Etsicitty
“I can’t believe you put the moves on Amanda, big guy.”
Yan grunted. “Why not? Meant what I said. She needs real man.”
Xiù was teaching Allison and the boys the basics of Baguazhang on the lawn while Vemik watched, having given up almost as soon as they started. His body was just built for a completely different kind of gymnastics and he figured that out immediately. Amanda had returned to the guest bedroom, overwhelmed by her migrane.
“I mean…look,” Julian leaned in an muttered under his breath. “You ain’t wrong…really ain’t wrong…But I don’t really think that’s gonna fix the problem we’ve got.”
“Problem is what, exactly? Start from start.”
“A few things. Biggest one is she’s smothering the kids. She smothered Allison so hard she ran away, joined up with, uh, I guess we’ll say a really bad tribe, and uh, never went back.”
“Smother. Like…heavy weight on them?”
“…Yeah. But not like if you throw a werne on top of a boy and make him carry it back. You have to do that to make them stronger, right? This is more like…smothering their soul.”
“Ah.” Funny how that noise was common between species. “All give give give, no teach how to take, how to give in turn. Mother keep baby on breast, doesn’t let them play.”
“Yeah. Afraid to lose them like she lost Allison, I guess…and she still doesn’t understand why she lost Al in the first place.”
Yan’s tail twitched in the way it did when he was thinking good and hard. He watched the boys move on to learn how to catch, then watched them try to play keepaway from Vemik; that didn’t work, as he jumped high in the air, caught the ball, then leaped onto the roof and trilled down at them for a bit before leaping down tail-over-top and landing between them both. He grinned, flexed for them, then slammed the ball to the ground so hard it bounced clear over the roofline. It was exactly the right thing to do, too; playful showboating was charismatic and the boys were drawn to him because of it. Both Yan and Vemik had a charm that seemed to work wonders on kids, actually, and attracted crowds of them every time they visited the park.
Julian tended to the grill while they both thought about the problem.
“Problem with her man is what?” Yan asked, eventually.
Julian shrugged and turned the frankfurters over, the very last of his cheat meals for the week. It had taken him a few minutes to explain to Vemik that a frankfurter was not used when somebody wanted to frankfurt, nor was a burger used for burging…though Xiù had promptly shot him down on that one and insisted that it was now. The sizzle caused Vemik to flick his ears and sideways-amble over in the hope that dinner was ready…Yan gave him a Look and he reluctantly want back to gently roughhousing with the boys.
“That one’s more complicated, and I’ve never met Jacob,” Julian said. “Allison says he’s…a hard man. Take, take, take. Expects everything to be just how he wants it, doesn’t know when to give.”
“There are gods involved too, yes?”
“Yeah, but that’s a huge mess. Jacob and Amanda promised to be with each other forever, and promised that before God. They’ve broken that promise.”
Yan hissed and shook his head. He no doubt took that revelation a hell of a lot more seriously than either of the two idiots were doing, but this probably wasn’t the time or the place to introduce Yan to the concept of casual sacrilege.
“This feels like Singer work,” he said at last. “Sometimes, women get lost in the Giving, need other women to help them let go.”
…Julian had to admit, that was a better idea than any that were floating around in his own head right now. The Singer’s job, or at least a huge part of it, was handling family conflicts and matters of spirituality. Hers might just be the perfect opinion to ask.
Yan grinned and tapped Julian on the forehead, not quite hard enough to hurt.
“I say something smart, yes?”
Julian chuckled and shook his head. “You did! Maybe don’t Sky-Think too much, though. Wouldn’t wanna hurt yourself…”
Yan hooted and casually picked Julian off the ground with his tail, which wrapped around Julian’s waist like a hairy python.
“Hey—!”
A bare moment later, Julian was upside-down, shaken a few times, then dumped unceremoniously into the grass. By Yan’s standards that was the equivalent of rolling his eyes and giving an affectionate middle-finger.
“I not shame you in own hut, Sky-Brother, in front of women. But don’t worry. I not sky-think too much, so you feel useful!”
Julian snorted, and picked himself up. Yan roughly dusted him off and pulled him into a brief crusher of a hug, one fierce enough to smash all the wind out of Julian’s lungs.
So, a “gentle” apology, then. The biggest consequence to having slabbed up so big and having become a man of the People was that Yan didn’t treat him like something breakable and magical anymore. Julian didn’t mind. In a strange way, that was how Yan showed respect.
“Anyway. I think for you, you think for me,” He let go and let Julian regain his breath. “We need Giving to make right for Taking bull. Sixteen thou-sand pound, you say.”
“Ayup. I think some gesture of goodwill is more important than the money, though. The money’s covered. And if I know farmers, I know they’ve got hard work they need done that they haven’t gotten to yet. Which would be good exercise for you two anyway, don’t want the low gravity making you weak.”
“Hmm.” That was another noise Ten’Gewek and humans had in common, though the Ten’gewek version was slightly open-mouthed on account of how they didn’t have noses. “Some things, easier to make right than others.”
Vemik chimed in from the grass. “We take boys to farm too, maybe!” He had both Ramsey and Tristan thoroughly pinned and squirming, but neither of them seemed upset. To the contrary, they were laughing as they tried to escape.
Yan nodded along which sent hypnotic waves down his crest. “Is good idea!”
“We’re gonna have to conspire against Amanda, then,” Julian pointed out.
Yan furrowed his brow for a moment. “Con-spire. Means…Ah. No. I understand. But why conspire? She bring problem to you! Take what she owes!”
Julian shook his head. “If only it was that easy. The cops would see that as a kidnapping…uh, stealing her children. A bad Taking, by our ways. We’d get in big trouble.”
“Hmm,” Yan grunted again and settled into deep thought.
Julian tended to the meat on the grill some more. The truth was, they were kinda stuck. Amanda was the boys’ mother, and that didn’t change just because she was a heavy-handed cloying smog of a parent. What was right, unquestionably, was to give the boys a day or two out from under their parents’ looming shadows. What was legal however, was a very different matter. If Julian was any judge, her boys were about the only thing in her life that Amanda had any control over; she wasn’t about to surrender that control without a fight. Even a badly pecked hen like her had a line in the sand.
Then there was…whatever the phone call was about. Xiù was indoors dealing with it while Allison took a break and got her gear together for her first day on the job out at Chiune Station. A break that she was, Julian guessed, absolutely desperate for. She needed simple problems she could solve with a little creativity and the right tools, not…this.
“Gao,” Yan said, quite abruptly.
“What about them?”
“Gao women good with children, I see in ‘park.’ Humans trust, too. Vemik, me, too big. Scary sometimes. Need you, say is okay to Gao women. Amanda…too scared.”
“But she might be more receptive to a Gaoian…” Julian finished for him. “Interesting idea.”
“Re-cep-tive. Hmm. Yes. Maybe. If lodge-rules say we can’t take boys, we get her to give boys. Find somebody she trust.”
Julian grinned. A name and a furry face had just come to mind. “…Yan, I think I know just the man.”
“Who?”
Julian didn’t get the chance to answer. Xiù emerged from the house looking…pensive. No, troubled.
Julian lowered his spatula. “Baobei? What’s up?”
“The thing with the court’s finished,” she said, “But I just checked our emails, and, uh…”
“What?”
“There’s a very formal message from one Jacob Buehler. He’s at the array in Chicago, catching the morning passenger jump.”
“…He’s coming here.”
“Yeah.”
Yan rolled his neck, producing a cascade of satisfying clicks. “Small man,” he predicted.
“Everyone’s small next to you, Yan,” Xiù pointed out.
“Yes,” Yan said, then grinned and tensed his body. Tendons and muscles like massive shipping cables fought for room under his thick, leathery hide. “What is word? Exactly.”
Julian smirked and flexed his own thick arm. Once upon a time he’d never have imagined himself packing on muscle like he had. Ignorance and prejudice had turned him off the idea. Now…well, he was an impressive slab to say the least, no point denying it. What harm was there in being damn proud of all his hard work? The girls certainly hadn’t ever objected.
A slow grin spread across Xiù’s face, the one she always wore right before she cracked an awful joke. “Oh. Right. You’re right, we have him out-gunned, don’t we?”
Julian snorted at the pun, which flew clear over Yan’s head. He’d ask about it later, probably. “Al always said her dad’s a bully,” he said. “I think we can turn that against him.”
Xiù considered it for a second then nodded, looking much less anxious.
“I’ll go give Al the good news,” she said. She bounced up on tip-toes to give Julian a kiss, then headed for the garage. “Don’t let the franks burn!”
“I won’t!” She was the master chef and Julian was but the lowly grillmaster. He enjoyed watching her go for a second, then discreetly turned around and rolled them over, chuckling to himself.
“You know just the man?” Yan prompted.
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. A holy man. A source of advice on spiritual matters, very wise.”
“Hmm. Sound important.”
“He is. His name’s Gyotin.”
Date Point: 15y5m6d AV
Akyawentuo, The Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm
The Singer
There were new Humans, working in and around the bunker. They had Yan’s blessing to be there, but…Well, the Singer didn’t know them, and they hadn’t properly introduced themselves. When they had arrived, Jooyun had helped them share their names with the tribe but aside from that they stood apart and rarely came to speak or share meat.
They’d done the least that was expected of them for politeness, and that was it. Some of the Given-Men were getting itchy about that. Yan had promised that the memory of him and what he’d done to the last Given-Man who defied him would keep them in line, but Given-Men were Given-Men. They looked after their tribes, that was what the Gods had touched them for. If they tasted a threat on the wind…
Well. The humans would be forced to kill them in self-defence. They had rifles, the Given-Men did not, and the Singer had seen what rifles could do for herself. And that would be the end of the good will between their peoples.
In Yan’s absence, however, a strange thing had happened. She was the Singer of his tribe, and his niece as well. She carried his weight when she spoke, as well as the weight of simply being a Singer.
So, she put a day aside to speak to the Humans. It was a long walk to the bunker, after all. She would hunt on the way back, to re-blood herself and touch the male side of her nature again. She’d been neglecting that half of a Singer’s life of late.
Things had sprung up around the bunker like mushrooms. They were a lot like huts, but made of some strange sky-fabric. It wasn’t clay or sticks or hide: it was as hard and as sturdy as wood, but it had no grain and was oddly coloured. Plas-tic.
The heart of their camp was a number of broad, flat plastic planks on steel legs. Tables. Two hands of them, covered in weird tools and little bits of things and tiny, flimsy bags made from clear plastic.
She hooted a greeting-call at them at the edge of their clearing, as was polite. Work stopped, but she was pleased to see that they didn’t rush to hide anything or put anything away. Instead, one of them waved the rest back to their work and came to meet her.
She strained her memory for a name. Nee-mesh, or something like that. Nimesh. He was small, slim and neat and unlike the other Human men the Singer had met, the hair on his face was sleek and short.
[“Welcome!”] he managed in clumsy people-words. She smiled and replied in English.
“Hello. I brought food.” She hefted a basket—several jars of the eldest Singer’s preserved stew. It was hearty, delicious stuff that could fill any hungry belly.
Nimesh’s teeth shone in a genuine smile. “Ah! Thank you. Please, come in.” He stepped aside and escorted her toward the tables and plastic huts. “Did you bring enough for yourself, or would you like some of ours?”
“Usually, we trade. Human food is…interesting. Very strong taste.”
“Trade, right. I remember. Ah…food’s here, ladies and gentlemen. Courtesy of…I’m sorry, you’re a Singer, am I right?”
“Yes. Singer of Yan’s tribe.”
The Humans downed tools and made her feel welcome. Chairs were fetched, clean water was produced from somewhere, a shallow metal bowl was filled for the Singer with something that tasted truly strange in a delicious way—car-bon-are-a—and they sat down to share meat together like neighbors should. She knew it had a pas-ta in it so she would need to eat only a little, or else be prepared to fart all night long.
Still. It was delicious. Rich, warm, creamy and filling. She didn’t need to eat much to feel satisfied, either.
“Is interesting, this work you do?” she asked.
“Engrossing!” Nimesh replied, and she put that word in her pouch for later. It was a new one. “We’re sorry we haven’t shared it yet, there’s just so much. We want to be sure we don’t get anything wrong.”
One of the others—a skinny woman whose shirt was so soaked with sweat that the Singer wondered why the poor thing didn’t just take it off for comfort—spoke up around a spoonful of the stew.
“The music!” she said. “We keep finding more and more of it. I don’t think you could listen to all of it in a year.”
“Did you want to hear some?” Nimesh offered.
The Singer smiled at him. “Yes! Please. But we should talk first. Some trouble with Given-Men.”
The Humans looked at each other, and the Singer relaxed. Their expressions told her they really didn’t want anything bad to happen. These were gentle people.
“Nothing bad,” she hastened to add. “Just…Tribes worry. They not understand what you do, why you do it. Good if we can see more, I think. Pro-fess-or Hurt could help, yes?”
“When he’s back, I’m sure he will,” Nimesh said. “He’s away for another, uh…three days?” he checked with the others, who nodded.
“His second interview on That Show is tonight,” the sweaty woman said.
Singer couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why you hurt yourself, trapped in wet bag?”
“Uh…sorry?” The Human blinked at her. “I mean…Uh, I don’t understand what you mean.”
“That.” The singer pointed at her soaking garment. “Why suffer?” she pointed in turn to some of the men, who weren’t wearing shirts. “See? More nice.”
For some reason, the Human’s face turned an impressive shade of bright red, like a healthy man’s crest. “It’s…Uh…”
Nimesh spoke up. “It’s a weird foible we have.”
“Foible.” The Singer considered the word. She didn’t need to ask what it meant, she got that from when and how he said it, but it rolled strangely forward then back in the mouth. “So, no good reason why?”
The woman cleared her throat. Her face was starting to return to its normal shade. “Not really. Some human tribes think it’s rude for a woman to bare her chest.”
“Oh. Your tribe thinks that?”
The woman laughed. “Stupid, isn’t it? But, that’s how I was raised. And trust me, it’ll feel great when I put a dry one on later.”
“I don’t know stupid. Seems…unfair. Men get to be dry, you not? But, I see this with other Humans too. Awisun, Shyow, they wear more too.”
One of the men chuckled. “Hey, you’re in prestigious company there, Claire. Wearin’ clothes just like a famous person.”
“Jooyun, he only smart Human I think! He wear running shorts. Very small! Like loincloth!”
“Whew.” Claire fanned herself with a hand. “And here I thought the climate was hot.”
Singer didn’t quite follow the words but the meaning was clear enough. Jooyun was pretty to look at, in a strange, tall and strong way.
The other men found it funny too. There were laughs, the stew was finished off, and they drifted back to their work in ones and twos.
“Offer stands,” Claire said. “I could show you some of the music. And it’s nice in there. We have this thing called air conditioning.”
The Singer stood up. “I know air conditioning. Make air cold and dry, yes?”
“Hell yeah it does. That okay, Nim?”
Nimesh nodded and that was that. Blessing given. Humans were very casual about such things, sometimes.
Claire sighed the moment they were inside one of the plastic huts and the cool air washed over them. Singer wasn’t terribly fond of it; the coolness was nice but it was always too dry, and that made her mouth sticky and her skin itchy. Claire, though, flapped her drenched shirt then shrugged and opened a metal box next to a bed. In a few breaths, she’d quickly swapped out the soaking cloth for a dry one and made a happy noise.
“Much better,” she said, then grabbed one of the ‘tablet’ tools Humans were so fond of. She sat on the bed and tapped on it for a few seconds.
“Here. I think this is their version of your dawn song. The words are different, but…well, here.”
She tapped again and singing filled the hut.
She was right. It was the song for the dawn, but different. The Singer sat on her tail and listened intently as three voices danced around each other like blown leaves. She’d only ever sung the song for dawn on her own, and while Singers did have songs they sang together at meetings or for special rites, the way they sang them was…very different. They would pull notes together that weren’t the same, but which when held could make the air shimmer. Like weaving a cloth.
These other People, when they sang, tied the song around itself. Probably the Humans had words for it, they had words for everything.
In fact…now that she listened, was that a man’s voice?
“…I hear a man singing,” she said.
“Yeah. The lower notes, right? He shows up a lot. We think he was like…a male Singer, kind of. He had tattoos like yours.”
That was…wrong. It had to be. Didn’t it? A Singer’s role was to stand across the gap between man and woman, between Give and Take. To do it, a woman had to become more like a man. She had to learn their ways, learn to think and behave like them. It wasn’t easy—to a one, Singers were chosen from the little girls who preferred to play like the boys.
It was hard to imagine a boy who would play like the girls and go the other way. What would a man who was more woman-like even do for his tribe?
…Besides be a Singer, maybe? Hmm.
“Was he…did he look more woman-like?” She asked.
“Ohh yeah. We’ve nicknamed him Freddy.” Claire laughed, then petered off when the Singer just gave her a blank look. “…Yeah, you wouldn’t get that joke. Sorry.”
“Freddy is a Human name?”
“Yes, a shortened version. He was a very popular singer from many years ago. He was very manly, and a little feminine at the same time. Died young.”
“You don’t know this one’s real name?” The Singer asked, and waved a finger to show she meant the song they were listening to.
“Not yet. Don’t worry, we aren’t being disrespectful. Freddy was loved when he was alive.”
“…Can I see him?”
Claire turned the tablet around. The Singer was used by now to the thought that the tablets could make pictures that looked as real as life. It had taken a lot of thought, and some patient explanation from Professor Hurt that no, the tablet didn’t have tiny people in it. It just…remembered how things looked, and could weave them back to life from nothing but light. That was an unbelievable magic, but Humans treated it like it was an ordinary part of life.
“Freddy” was tall and his legs were strangely straight, more like a Human’s than the People of the forests. They weren’t strong and thick, and he’d be terrible in the branches because of it. Jooyun and Wawsh were much stronger. Even Heff had him beat!
He was a Singer though. A senior one! He had three rows of tattoos around his eyes and another across his upper lip, and his crest was woven with interesting bits of metal and bright colorful stones. He wore the marks of a rite of manhood, the marks of a singer who had seen two hands of babies through the birthing…he even had the tattoo of one who had sung the moonless night, from dusk until dawn. That was a truly sacred ritual.
“How long ago was this?” she asked.
“Generations. Your people had a story about the volcano—uh, the [high-forest-place]—spitting fire long ago?”
“Yes.”
“Before that.”
The Singer sighed and stared at the tablet a while longer. The words were so different she couldn’t really hear them well, they just slipped off her ears. But she knew this song intimately. To hear it sung by a man…
Suddenly, there was a powerful ache in her heart. She gave Claire the tablet back. “…Three days, you said. Before Professor comes back?”
“That’s what he said. It might be longer, something might come up, but he loves his work. He’ll be back as soon as he can be, I bet. Might be sooner than three days if he can.”
“…I tell Given-Men. Maybe we get to hear songs together, see things you found. Without Yan here, they need reminding sometimes.”
“I’ll get some things ready for you. Um…it was nice to meet you. It’s been weird, working over here when you guys were over there and not…y’know, getting to know you.”
The Singer trilled. “Humans do many weird things. Like wear wet shirt!”
Claire laughed. “Yeah. Yeah we do…But hey, some of your ways are weird to us.”
That caught the Singer’s curiosity. “Like what?”
“Well, you guys hate water, right?”
Singer dismissed that with a flick of her tail. “Humans loving water is strange.”
Claire laughed again, and stood up. “Hey, if you want to look around the bunker I can probably arrange that with Nimesh…”
“No. Not today. Later, when the Given-Men are here and you have time to make ready, yes?”
“That’s fair. By the way, that stew was amazing, do you have the recipe?”
Singer shook her head. “Is eldest Singer’s secret. I will tell her you like, though.”
The heat and moisture hit them like a whipping branch as they stepped outside and the Singer sighed relief. She’d been getting too cold in the air conditioning-ed hut. Claire sighed and put her hat back on. “Back to work, I guess,” she said.
They exchanged final thank-yous and parting words and the Singer flung herself up easily into the nearest Ketta for the return trip to the village.
She had good feelings about what the Given-Men would say.
Date Point: 15y5m6d AV
That Show With Steven Lawrence, New York City, USA, Earth
Daniel Hurt
“Well, last week I promised he’d be back, and here he is darkening our door again, please give another warm welcome to Daniel Hurt!”
Dan was feeling more comfortable on the stage now, though the nerves were still there. Steve had promised all week that the second of his two-part appearances was going to involve a more serious critique of his methods and objectives by people who were actually qualified to pick him apart.
He was looking forward to it.
The crowd was just as warm and eager to see him as last time, though there’d been an incident just before they’d gone live: Three or four people had stood up at the back and started chanting before being removed by security. Tension was a fact of life, there was no use in trying to escape it. Besides, if people like that wanted to shut him up…well, a lot of the time they needed to tell people who he actually was first, which was basically free publicity. It was amazing how many protesters had never learned about the Streisand Effect.
They didn’t matter. The people who mattered were going to engage Daniel in hopefully civil, hopefully informed discourse and he’d either defend his position or else he’d be introduced to a better one. Really, it was a win-win.
“Daniel! Daniel!” Steven welcomed him back onto the stage with a handshake and a grin. “How’re ya feeling? Got your boxing gloves? Got your ‘Eye of the Tiger’ playlist going on?”
Daniel settled into the front-of-stage seat for the *n*th time in his career and allowed a small chuckle. “I’m excited! This should be enlightening…”
“So, you’re familiar with your two critics today, we have Gina Bailey of the American Extraterrestrial Culture Institute—“ he waved to the discussion table stage right where Gina was waiting. She and Daniel knew each other of old, and had a robust relationship founded on having yet to find a single thing they held in common. He quite liked her in fact, though the feeling was decidedly not mutual.
“…And Doctor Trevor Hills, president of the First Contact Society.”
Daniel had never locked horns with Hills before. He’d read a few of the man’s articles and blog posts in preparation for this meeting, but had struggled to find anything he could really sink his teeth into and rip apart. A lot of what he said was…alluring, but founded first and foremost in idealistic fiction rather than in the daily realities that Daniel had run into when interacting with the Ten’Gewek in the real world.
There was polite applause and Daniel gave them both a courteous nod.
“You had the stage pretty much all to yourself last week,” Steven commented. “We got a lot of messages about that, how we should have cross-examined you some more, not let you have it all your own way…”
“I’m glad to see you listened!”
“So…run us through in your words what this is all about,” Steve challenged him. Daniel nodded and figuratively ran a finger through his mental filing to pull out the card he needed.
“At the core, our disagreement is over whether or not our intervention with the Ten’Gewek should have ended once they were safe and protected. As everyone knows, I’ve been involved in actively educating them and introducing them to…well, everything. The galaxy, the species in it, the nature of the war that almost killed them and so on.
“My critics,” he continued, and gave a small bow toward Bailey and Hills, “have raised many different objections, ranging from accusations of imperialism or even slavery, to the more…mm…staid suggestion that if we must interact with the Ten’Gewek at all, it should be calculated to interfere with their development as little as possible, and that my approach has simply been too aggressive.”
Steven nodded and consulted his prompt cards. “Now…you’ve said yourself that most of the objections you’ve heard are things you’ve worried about yourself.”
“That’s right.”
“Could you give us an example?”
This one was kind of a crunch time. Daniel had anticipated the question, but he’d only managed to narrow down his replies to a shortlist of three. Now it was time to choose one.
“…If you ask an average person to name the most dangerous human invention ever, most I think will mention a weapon of some kind. The nuclear bomb, or the AR-15, the AK-47…But the most dangerous things we’ve ever invented by far are all ideas.”
Steven inclined his head politely, and Daniel explained himself. “What’s a rifle? It’s a piece of metal. Somebody has to want to pull the trigger. What gets a person to that moment? What persuades them to take a life? Ideas do. Now…” He paused, cleared his throat and picked up the little glass of water resting in front of him. “…A lot of the ideas we’ve grappled with over the years are incredibly dangerous. Some of them have literally rocked the foundations of Western civilization, even threatened to topple us.”
He took a sip and continued. “There are people sitting at home right now thinking things like ‘so what? Western civilization was built on inequality and exploitation and it deserves to fall’ and that just proves my point. The right idea can persuade somebody that the best thing that could possibly happen is the total collapse of the country they live in, the mass rejection of its ideals, and the punishment of its living citizens for the crimes of their dead ancestors. Ideas are dangerous, so very dangerous…and here I am, merrily introducing our ideas to the Ten’Gewek.”
“You make it sound so irresponsible.”
“Under other circumstances, I’d even agree that it is,” Daniel said. “But…well, the real world isn’t Star Trek. High-falutin ideals like the Prime Directive are nice for a TV series, but they broke it all the time in the show. And the real world is a lot messier than a script writer’s office.
“The biggest problem is that the Ten’Gewek are intelligent. Devastatingly so. They learned our language so fast, the paper we’re drafting on that is going to blow linguist’s minds. They picked up a lot more than we deliberately taught them, I can tell you that. And the thing about a language is that it defines the shape of how you think, and the degrees of freedom you have to think with in the first place. Just by saving their species, we freed their minds. That is a terrible responsibility, and there’s no shying away from it.”
Steve nodded, then gestured toward his other guests. “Well. That’s your opening argument. Let’s get you on the rack, shall we?”
Daniel grinned and stood up. “Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s.”