by Chloe Garner
“Unmovable. Indestructible. And settled. Nothing has changed here for the Gana for a thousand years. The people down in the city come and go, but the Gana have stayed the same.”
“Jesse told you that?” Troy asked. She shook her head.
“Some of it. But it’s written everywhere in the buildings and the culture.” Her expression was distant as she looked out over the city. He and Olivia turned to follow her gaze. The city was beautiful at this distance, bathed in light that would have been sunset, back home, but here it was simply a normal midday. “They built all this,” Cassie continued quietly. “And then they went into their holes underground and up here onto their hill and they let the rest of the universe take it over. They don’t even have political power in their own capital city.”
“Please, come,” a new voice said. All three of them turned around to find a smaller, slighter Gana with a pale complexion and almost no patterning standing with the original pair of guards. “Kron is occupied at the moment, but he has asked me to show you to lodgings. You will dine with his family tonight.”
That sounded much more realistic to Troy, and he took Olivia’s hand as they walked through the archway and into the courtyard around the main residence. The walking stones slowly sunk into the ground as they got closer to the archway, replaced by the intricate patterning of colored stone, glass, and precious metals. Troy felt bad walking on it, but the feel of it said that it was older than he could have possibly guessed. How many thousands of feet had already gone across those fragile patterns, familiar with them to the point of never noticing them at all?
In the courtyard, the pathway narrowed further still, but now it was tiled on either side with slightly-raised, smooth tiles that reflected the sunlight in a subtle palette of deep reds and greens among rich golds that invoked the materials in the buildings themselves. The pathway went wild with nearly-microscopic detail, leading them forward to the central entrance of the family of buildings. He felt Olivia pause as they passed through the archway and he stood with her, overwhelmed and stunned. Their guide paused, turning back to face them.
“Your first time seeing Kable Telk?” she asked.
“Yes,” Troy said.
“It is the greatest royal residence in the universe,” she said. “Take your time.”
They stood.
People lived here. They cooked, they cleaned, they argued, and they made love. To them it was just home.
From the outside, you couldn’t see any of that.
There were windows, but they were shaded or covered in bright red or green glass. There were walkways, but they were shaded by blue metal that reflected the sunlight. Silver inlay seemed to invoke the idea of ivy or some other kind of vine, but something reminded him of the street patterning in the city below: veins, drawing and pushing energy around a central source.
“It’s beautiful,” Olivia said. He nodded agreement.
“It is.”
“If you two are going to get caught up every time you see something you’ve never seen before, I’m leaving you here,” Cassie said, not without humor, and Olivia tugged Troy forward again.
“I want to see inside,” she said.
They followed the slighter Gana - still a head taller than Cassie and at least a hundred pounds heavier, assuming her skin didn’t add a lot more than that - through the doorway of the residence.
The outside had been a master class in color and pattern design.
The inside was white like a confectioner’s dream. The floor might have been marble, frosty, pearlescent white swirling with silver, and the rest of the surfaces were in different textures of white, all of them subtle, like a painter’s trick. The pillars were smooth and reflective, like polished ivory, and the walls felt distant for a reason that Troy couldn’t put his finger on.
The Gana woman led them on down a wide hallway lit though windows Troy could have sworn were red on the outside, then turned. They went up a ramp that swept back away from the front of the building, and there was a rush of fresh air as they reached an open walkway. Olivia skipped ahead a few steps to lean against the wall and look out over the forest around them, then ran to catch up again, taking Troy’s hand.
“It’s beautiful,” she said again. “I can’t believe we’re actually here.”
“I know,” he answered, not sure he actually understood.
“These are your guest quarters,” the Gana woman said, opening a door. “Ajilla will come by soon to see what you might need.”
“Thank you,” Cassie said, standing aside so Troy and Olivia could pass her and go into the room. She said a few more quiet things to the Gana as they got further away, swiftly enough that Troy couldn’t hear her.
The design in the suite of rooms was again different from either the outside or the hallways. The walls were a textured turquoise that was beaded with fist-sized dark-blue gems.
“Are those sapphires?” Troy asked, going to look at them.
“Stay sharp,” Cassie said, going to lean against a wall. The words weren’t spoken with any particularly ominous tone, but it was as if Troy had been called to attention. His admiration of the architecture of Kable Telk was gone and he was facing Cassie, going through everything he’d seen, trying to see what she saw.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Gana don’t eat dinner,” she said. “They’re photosynthetic. Kinesthetic as well.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard that word used like that before,” Olivia said.
“English doesn’t have a word for converting kinetic energy into chemical energy in organic lifeforms,” Cassie said. “Because none of them do it.”
“How does that work?” Troy asked. She shook her head.
“Don’t know the biology,” she said. “But they get offended if you shoot them.”
“That’s not possible,” Olivia said. “Only if you were using an electromagnetic medium in the middle.”
“Lead bullets,” Cassie said, still watching the door. “He spat them out. These guys, they jump off cliffs to get stronger.”
“That violates every principle of physics,” Olivia said. “Start with conservation of energy.”
“That’s a valid point,” Cassie said, but didn’t continue. Olivia had her hands out in front of her, fingers spread with a sort of entranced, scientific fury.
“Really?” she asked. “That’s all you’re going to tell me? Are they nuclear-powered somehow?”
Cassie grinned.
“They’ll bring us a change of clothes,” she said.
“Why?” Troy asked.
“Because we aren’t wearing appropriate clothes for having dinner with the king,” Cassie said.
“Are we in danger?” Troy asked, ducking his head through a doorway to find a glassed window that didn’t look like it opened. In a pinch, they could break it and try to be away before anyone caught them, but it would hardly be subtle. Cassie laughed.
“No. Not yet.”
“What does that mean?” Olivia asked. Cassie’s eyes swiveled away from the door for the first time.
“Because I haven’t made them angry yet.”
*********
“Kron,” Cassie said, putting her hands out in front of her, palms down, and dropping her head. “Thank you for the honor.”
Troy and Olivia, standing at either side, mimicked her motion quickly, then Troy looked around the large room. This was what the outside had promised. A large room with a vaulted ceiling high enough to be in shadow stories over their head, elaborately carved tan stonework, and a giant fireplace. The tables would be too tall for them, but they were made of polished purple, something that might have either been wood or stone, he couldn’t tell. Kron sat in the middle of the longest one with three male Gana on one side and three females on the other. None of them appeared to be wearing anything, but their coloring and the bright patterning in their scales differentiated them.
“How could I not dine with a Palta, when one came to my door,” Kron answered, n
odding back to her. “Please, sit.”
There were guards around the room, but they looked relaxed, as far as guards went. Troy thought the ones outside had been friendly enough, and when he’d mentioned it, Cassie hadn’t argued with him. No one had threatened them, even in a cultural way that he might have missed.
“It’s that they don’t want me here,” she had told him while Olivia had been finishing the significant work of getting dressed. The formal wear for bipeds here was quite elaborate, and for women, it was even more so. Cassie pulled it off with a recklessness that was unfamiliar to Troy, but Olivia looked uncomfortable in the tight binds of multi-colored cloth, and she kept checking the headpiece to make sure it was still on straight.
Troy had asked Cassie how she’d known that the Gana weren’t happy to see her, but she’d just shaken her head.
“I really should take a picture of you two, for posterity,” she’d said with a devious look when Olivia had finally materialized. “Your first time meeting foreign terrestrial royalty.”
He didn’t say that they’d just have to destroy it when they got back, base rules, because she knew it. And she also knew how desperately he would have loved to have exactly that picture.
This was what he had imagined.
Beyond what he had imagined.
There was a secret knowledge that when they got back, Donovan would have found a way to wriggle out of it, and he was going to lose it again, and that knowledge was poisoning much of the fun Troy might have been having with the novelty of being here.
Except for the whole part about Cassie making an invincible species of royal foreign terrestrials very angry.
Part of him, the disciplined soldier, wanted to get himself and Olivia out of there, out of the line of fire for whatever nonsense Cassie was going to get them into. The larger part, the one that had been dreaming of being a portal jumper since he was nine, back when they had shot space rays at each other around the couch, that kid was jumping up and down to see what happened next.
He wondered where the scientist had gone.
Out of force of habit, he found all of the exit paths, unlikely or not, and mapped out the best way to get himself and Olivia out of them, if something went wrong. It was odd that he wasn’t worrying about Cassie at all, but she just inspired that kind of confidence. She’d take care of herself. It was his job to make sure she didn’t need to take care of them.
They took the seats Kron indicated, across the table from him. Troy sat facing the male Gana, and Olivia across from the female ones. He saw Olivia adjust her headpiece again and he tried not to smile. The table hit him mid-chest, even with the tall chair, but Cassie sat with her feet tucked under her, correctly positioned at the table to eat and eye-level with Kron.
“What is the occasion?” she asked when Olivia stopped rustling.
“Why do we need an occasion?” Kron asked. Cassie gave him a quick, dry smile.
“I had once believed that consuming meat was something your lower cousins did. That you considered it somewhat barbaric.”
Kron’s face was impossible to read. Troy had had all manner of training to try to prepare him for that, but it was still shocking to him to lose that key part of communication. The wide mouth with its sharp, protruding row of teeth couldn’t smile if Kron had wanted to. Troy could see that there were no muscles available to pull up the corners of the mouth. The eyes were more expressive, but Kron had almost no motion in his face at all as he spoke. Neither did any of the other Gana across the table from them. They weren’t empty, nor were they inanimate. It was that the subtleties of the conversation were going on with skin shifts on their arms and little motions in their hands.
“Then you have misunderstood us,” Kron said. “A diet of meat is, indeed, base, but we join our guests who must consume food as an act of hospitality.”
“I see,” Cassie said. “Let me introduce my friends. This is Troy, and this is Olivia. I am Cassie.”
“That’s an odd name for a Palta,” Kron observed. She smiled and dipped her head.
“It’s my custom to use it when I am with them,” she said, indicating Troy. “What’s a name?”
It struck Troy for the first time that Jesse probably wasn’t called Jesse, on other planets. He wondered what his real name was.
Kron seemed to consider her statement for a moment, then rolled his head in what Troy guessed was either assent or dismissal.
“This is my family,” he said. “My sons Barnk, Glabe, and James,” he started. Troy was startled to hear a familiar name in the list, but remembered that he’d learned that implants would identify cultural associations with names and translate them if there was a strong enough fit. “And my daughters, Alk, Eld, and Asp.”
“A beautiful family,” Cassie said. “I had heard that Gana didn’t have big families any more.”
“The family of the king should reflect his wealth,” Kron said. “It’s a long tradition of the Gana kings to have big families.”
“It suits you,” Cassie said. Kron moved his head in an ambivalent, preening sort of a way, then waved an arm.
“Bring in the meal,” he said. More Gana appeared from doorways Troy hadn’t noticed, ones that had been artfully hidden in the artistry of the walls, and he reevaluated his escape route. Could he make it to the front door from here? Spatially, he thought he knew where they were, but he wasn’t sure the shortest path was open between here and there.
The table in front of him quickly filled with tools and devices and surfaces, all of which were bewilderingly foreign. There was no knife, no fork, no spoon. Rather, there was an array of multi-colored logic puzzles with wands attached to them on his right, and a pair of chop sticks that might have been confused for drum sticks on his left, made out of the same amazing purple medium as the table.
Gana breezed in and out, moving around each other with a grace that belied their sturdy statures, and gradually one of the surfaces, an inverted bowl with a mirror in the middle of it, disappeared under layers of paint. One of the Gana moved it directly in front of Troy, and another series of Gana used the varied-smelling semi-fluids - sauces maybe? - to cement down small pieces of food. He was guessing that it was food, just as much as he was guessing that the smears of dark red and blue-green were food. They smelled salty and earthy, some were sweet and others potently herbal, and Kron had called it a meal.
And directly in front of him was a strange place to sit improvised art.
The plating took an increasingly artistic shape, though, as the sauces were populated with more and more morsels and the scent became more and more complex. It made him think of the garden in front of the building with its abundance of individual plants.
Cassie was watching him.
“The less you eat, the more formal you tend to be,” she said to him quietly in Gana. “Take your time and watch close.”
He nodded and she winked at him, then turned back to face her own meal, giving a quick nod to Kron and scanning glances at the rest of the Gana.
“Of course, our guest may begin first,” Kron said. Cassie grinned and picked up one of the puzzles, the cobalt blue one, and began working it through one of the miniature pieces on her dome-shaped platter. It seemed to take little force, but great precision. Troy watched quietly as she worked, matching the shape of the utensil to the way that the morsel was crafted and finally pulling it free. She dabbed it casually in the sauce underneath, then put the whole thing in her mouth.
It had to be just as hard to get off of the fork-analogue as it was to get on it, Troy thought, wondering how she was going to detach food from utensil gracefully, but she pulled it out of her mouth clean. With sounds that might have meant approval, the Gana began to eat their own food, carrying on quiet side conversations amongst themselves as they worked. Troy sighed and set his brow, picking up the same cobalt instrument Cassie had used and trying to find the same food particle she’d selected. He wondered how Olivia was doing, but he didn’t want to gawk.
Cass
ie sat quietly for a moment, then took a breath.
“Minan Gartal is looking quite prosperous,” she said.
“A fine gem among cities,” Kron answered.
“The leadership has done quite well, guiding them forward,” Cassie said. Without a doubt, the flicker of a response that Troy caught on Kron’s face was a snarl. Troy was trying to watch what Cassie was doing with her hands and at the same time see what the Gana were doing. The interactions among them seemed like a dance, carefully calibrated to communicate relationships and statuses that Troy knew flew right over his head, but he couldn’t help but try.
The children of a king, the head of an ancient and seemingly irrelevant race, would have little to fight over but nothing to do but fight about it, Troy thought. Or was that human-normative thinking? He’d been warned about it repeatedly, but without direct access to foreign terrestrial culture, it had never been an issue for him. He had had time and cool distance to review his perceptions. Here, those perceptions were based on split-second instincts, and watching the Gana princes and princesses with an eye to compare them to the myth of English or Spanish monarchies that he held in his head was undoubtedly going to lead him to wrong conclusions that could turn out to be critical.
He tried to focus harder.
The females - was it appropriate to call them women? - were mostly quiet, picking delicately at their food with long, narrow fingers. The claws seemed to indicate that they came from a violent or an active past, but as Troy looked more closely, the sturdy build they had inherited from their ancestors seemed to be giving way to a much more refined, fragile relationship with the world around them. He imagined that, unless there was something particularly novel about their skeletal makeup, he could break their fingers without any more force than it would have taken to break a wooden pencil.
The males were still a bit sturdier. Their teeth showed more and their fingers looked less at home on the silly implements. Even there, though, Troy could find signs of softening. They had necks that had likely once been a solid mass of muscle from shoulder to jaw, but were now able to use at least a hundred-eighty degrees of motion. Their eyes had probably been set facing forward, classically predatory, but were now moving forward and out slightly. Their scales shown with an unlikely level of perfection. Even if they regrew, Troy would have expected to see some signs of damage or wear, particularly on Kron, but he saw none.