Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘EEEEK!’ Aleth yelped back at him, which was apparently how the human’s momentary jolt of panic had appeared to their senses, and Alex had to laugh, too. He was still reluctant to let go of the plate, though, not quite understanding how it was just hanging in the air like that.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Marteyl promised, with that motherly assurance warm through her amusement. ‘It won’t fall. It has sensors, gravity control – it will stay where it’s put. You can move it, see…’ she showed him with a gentle grip on the edge of the dish, gliding it about and up and down, and when she let go of it again it stayed put, as solid as if it was standing on a table.

  The weird thing about that was, when he thought about it, Alex realised that such technology was well within the range of human manufacturing. They could even make smart-stuff like this on the ship, if they wanted to, equipping everyday objects with sensors and variable gravity systems. But even as he admired it, he knew that they wouldn’t. There would be safety issues on a starship, for a start, with random stuff stuck in mid-air if the ship came to alert. More than that, though – humans had an innate need for things to be orderly. His own parents got stressy even if people put down a cup which wasn’t on a coaster. He could only imagine their reaction to cups which could be parked in the air, however safe they were assured it was. No… he couldn’t see that one catching on, at least not beyond a brief flare of novelty sales.

  Here and now, though, it was interesting, and so was the meal with which he’d been served. It was indeed a tiny portion, no more than a couple of forkfuls of the extremely nutrient-rich dish. It was far more colourful than he had expected – somehow he still had the notion that all edible seaweed was green – and far more varied in shape, taste and texture than he’d anticipated, too.

  ‘There are two sauces,’ Marteyl showed him the small containers on a condiment tray to one side of the dish. ‘This is sweet…’ a pale green, slightly glutinous ketchup, ‘and this is spicy…’ a golden oil, flecked with tiny red flakes. ‘You put the spicy sauce on the salad and the sweet on the Tarlatto.’ She showed him what she meant, miming pouring the sauces over the meal without actually doing so.

  Alex recalled Silvie’s disgust, eloquently expressed, on the subject of how she’d felt when she’d first seen humans eating. The way they would put bits from various elements on their plate onto one fork and eat them together had appalled her. Even now, she could not bring herself to eat in that mixed up way and would only eat one element at a time.

  Feeling very much like a child being taught table manners, Alex poured the sauces carefully. Then he demonstrated his familiarity with quarian cutlery. One of the talks Silvie had given them had been a lesson in dining etiquette, after which they’d manufactured quarian-style cutlery on the interdeck SEP so they could all have a try with it. It wasn’t difficult to get the hang of, once you’d got used to the idea that there was neither knife nor fork. There were two spatula-like objects instead, both slightly concave at the end like shallow spoons. Quarians ate with them both in one hand, either picking up items with them like pincers or scooping food onto one of the spoons. Either way, you must eat only one type of food at a time. It was okay to alternate, but never to mix.

  Alex sampled the Tarlatto first, and wasn’t keen. It wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t very pleasant either, at least not to his tastes. The ribbons had the texture of pasta, though the orange one which Othol told him was the kelt had an odd, slippery feel. The sweet sauce tasted vaguely nutty but it and the vegetables were so bland that if it had been served to him aboard ship, Alex would have reached at once for some pepper. The salad part of the dish, though, was better. The combination of fresh crispy leaves and crunchy dried ones was more interesting, and the sauce had a bit more flavour to it. Not much, though. This was a hot and sour sauce by quarian standards but it was no more than a mildly spicy vinegar to Alex’s palate.

  He was not the first human to sample quarian food, not by a long way. Samples of various dishes – besides the humorous ones involving bloodweed and plankton – had been taken to the embassy many times. The quarians had passed over considerable information about the kind of food they cultivated and ate, too. The problem for the Diplomatic Corps was that they had not been able to obtain what they considered to be satisfactory, independent confirmation of what quarians actually ate on a day to day basis.

  Their efforts to secure that confirmation had been perceived by the quarians – with some justification – as doubting the veracity of the information they had passed over. After they had expressed their opinion of that in straightforward terms the whole subject of food had become a diplomatic sticky and had not, therefore, been discussed at all for the past forty years.

  If Alex had been thinking in customary diplomatic ways, he would have been rejoicing at that point in the knowledge that he had just achieved more than any previous human ambassador in seeing the food processing systems directly. The fact that the thought did not even cross his mind was proof enough that all the time Silvie had spent preparing him for this experience had paid off. He was fully in the moment, not acting according to any agenda nor ticking off diplomatic accomplishments. He was simply here to explore, to enjoy himself and make friends with the locals.

  And so he did just that. Abandoning the dish with the remnants of food on it – it would, they told him, be cleared away automatically – they moved on to what Marteyl said was a very much more interesting robotics factory. They were joined by some other quarians during the swim between the two buildings, people curious to see the human.

  ‘You’ve been very well trained,’ one of them observed, which reduced Alex to helpless chuckles at the mental image of Silvie teaching him to swim, sit, stay.

  It was true, though. He and the other members of the Fourth had been learning from Silvie from the moment she came aboard, and that had been far more direct training during the long run from Therik. She hadn’t just taught them how to behave here, but how to think about being here, so that they came in with all the frank enjoyment of tourists.

  And, just like a tourist, Alex did not hesitate to turn away from things which didn’t hold his interest. The robot factory might be fascinating to Marteyl, with her particular interest in robotic design, but a very few minutes sufficed to satisfy Alex’s curiosity about it. It was very like a human factory, a production line in which robots were making more robots.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Marteyl, seeing his regret that he couldn’t feel the enthusiasm which she had evidently been hoping for. ‘It isn’t important.’

  Alex gazed at her in surprise and she trilled happily.

  ‘Silvie says we should say that when humans are confused,’ she told him.

  Confused, Alex thought – yes, of course. He’d been feeling two things at once, regret for disappointing her and at the same time a yearning to leave this place and see something more interesting. Silvie would have understood that but it was beyond Marteyl’s ability to identify both feelings in the noisy confusion of a human mind. The fact that she could accept that, acknowledge it and move on, though, was a huge step forward in communication. Before Silvie, any quarian encountering such bewildering, uncomfortable insanity would either leave at speed or be offering psychiatric care.

  ‘Sorry.’ He focussed on his regret for the moment and then turned his mind firmly to what he wanted, looking at her with hope. ‘But could we please go and see a little of the city?’

  They went to see a little of the city. Marteyl parted from them on the way with the lack of ceremony which Alex had come to recognise was normal for quarians. She just swam off – no apology, no explanations, just a cheerful wave and off she went.

  Alex might have worried that he’d lost her goodwill by failing to enjoy the trip to the robotics factory. He might have, if he hadn’t long ago got used to Silvie’s habit of just walking off from situations without even so much as saying goodbye. There might be any number of reasons for Marteyl going off somewhere else, and if one of
those was that she had spent as much time with Alex as she wanted to right now, no problem. Alex himself, after all, had made it quite clear that he didn’t want to be surrounded with an overwhelming group, choosing the three with whom he wanted to spend time, and none of the others had taken offence at being rejected. So he accepted Marteyl’s departure without concern, turning to Aleth instead.

  ‘So – what’s the best thing to see in Ewern?’

  The best thing to see in Ewern was the newly built auditorium. This was not merely Aleth’s opinion; there was such strong consensus about it that it was attracting visitors from around the planet. That had, in fact, been the main reason Aleth himself had come to the city that day, along with a desire to swim in shallow water, much as a human might want to head into the hills for some brisk exercise and fresh air.

  ‘The water in Corfey is quite slow and dark,’ he explained. ‘It does us good to get up in the sunlight and fast currents occasionally.’

  Alex was having to use his wristjets on full power as they went towards the city, and still found that he was being dragged off course a little by the tremendous current surging around the northern tip of the sheltering reef. He could feel it ripping at him, plastering his swim suit to his body all along the right side and flapping it on the left. Unfazed, Alex adjusted the direction of his hands to compensate for the current. Neither of the quarians commented on how well he was swimming and this, Alex recognised, was a good thing. It wouldn’t occur to a human, after all, to comment on how well an alien visitor was walking, unless they were struggling to do so. The fact that his swimming was not worthy of comment meant that he was handling it competently.

  He continued to swim, too, when they entered the city. Quarian buildings were by no means so straightforward as having aqua levels below and air breathing levels above. They were frequently interspersed, with airlock entries, broad swim-tubes, whole levels and parts of levels filled with water. It was warmer than the ocean outside and so perfectly clear that it was almost like swimming in air.

  Alex had expected to find the experience of swimming in a quarian city just magical. He had seen enough holos, he thought, to know what it would look like, and had seen from above that Ewern was very much as he’d imagined.

  Inside, though, was a very different experience. He already knew that quarians liked vivid colours and that their décor often mirrored the natural environment, with indoor reefs and gardens.

  What he had not expected was that it would be so garish. As he swam, Silvie’s opinion of Andrei Delaney’s ship as ‘pretty’ began to make sense to him. Here, too, there were clashing colours, many things which gleamed, a general impression of a tropical garden gone mad. When they swam through an area dominated by huge lurid pink brain-corals and fluorescent orange fronds, Alex found himself wondering if it could really be true that quarian eyes saw the world in just the same way as human ones. There were artworks everywhere, too – strange, convoluted shapes in all manner of materials from shell to gold. Alex could make no sense of them, but they too were vividly coloured and often brightly lit, too, highlighted amongst the cacophony of colours.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ Aleth observed, with a curious look.

  ‘I…’ Alex hesitated, not for the right words but to clarify how he felt before he answered. ‘I have minimalist tastes,’ he explained, and indicated the uniform he was wearing. ‘I like grey.’

  They gazed at him with amazement. They had never heard anyone express such bizarre views.

  ‘Grey?’ Aleth queried, as if not quite sure he could have heard right.

  Alex smiled. ‘I find it calm – unobtrusive,’ he explained. ‘I find bright colours…’ he glanced around him, ‘distracting.’

  Aleth and Othol looked at one another.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Aleth.

  ‘It isn’t important,’ Othol agreed, and they grinned tolerantly at the incomprehensible human.

  ‘I know – bonkers,’ Alex said, and they chuckled agreement.

  The auditorium was a revelation, though not perhaps in the way that the quarians were anticipating. Alex was amazed, but only because it was, to his eyes, a perfectly ordinary kind of theatre-style venue. There was a broad stage, tiered seating and a classic design involving marble pillars and rich fabrics. Alex had seen places like it on many worlds, particularly when well-meaning friends had insisted on taking him to concerts and operas.

  And this was, it turned out, a quarian version of the Opera House on Terale.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Alex was bewildered when Aleth told him that.

  ‘Silvie told us about it in one of her letters home,’ Aleth said. ‘She said the acoustics were amazing.’

  Alex cast his mind back through the fog of befuddlement. Yes, of course. There was an Opera House on Terale, a very unusual building there in itself because it bore no relation at all to their style of outdoor-living architecture. Later, when he checked up on it, he would discover that it had in fact been funded by the Diplomatic Corps, to their design, as part of their remit of sharing League – ie, Chartsey – culture across all their worlds. He would discover, too, that Silvie had indeed paid a flying and unscheduled visit to that venue during a rehearsal. It had been a trivial incident, twelve and a half minutes during which she’d wowed the cast by singing a flawless aria, reduced them to howls of laughter with her comments upon the ludicrous operatic storyline, remarked upon the exceptional acoustics and departed. Evidently, she had mentioned this in one of her letters home. And now, here, a year later, there was an actual copy of the Terale Opera House built in a quarian city.

  Alex felt his brain fizzing a bit over that one. In fact, more than a bit. In all the time Silvie had been with them, it had never occurred to him that what she was learning might impact in any real sense on the planet which was so very far away. But all the time, of course, her letters home had been making their way slowly across the Gulf. And here was the visible result… one of the visible results. A human building on Quarus. Alex couldn’t begin to process how he felt about that, though there was a large and immediate component of alarm. What had they done? What other impacts might they have had on this world, unwittingly introducing elements of human culture which were at best imperfectly understood and at worst, culturally invasive?

  ‘There now, shhhh.’ To Alex’s astonishment, Othol put both hands onto his shoulders and fixed him in a steadying gaze with waves of reassurance… of comfort. ‘It is just a building,’ Othol told him. ‘It really isn’t scary.’

  It was like an adult comforting a child after a nightmare. Defensive dignity arose in Alex but was quelled by amusement.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and, ‘Thank you.’ He gave a wry grin. ‘Headspin,’ he admitted.

  ‘Yes.’ Othol looked a little wry, too, as Alex’s surge of emotion had included spurts of guilt and fear which were really quite painful for a quarian to be so close to. It had taken real courage for him to expose himself to that even further by making physical contact. Fortunately, his soothing concern had worked, calming and quieting the human, but even now Alex’s head was in a whirl. ‘Too much for you,’ Othol observed, giving Alex’s shoulders a consolatory squeeze. ‘You’d better go home.’

  Alex felt a stab of protest. He was enjoying himself so much, and there was so much more that he wanted to see… then he corrected himself. He had been enjoying himself so much. That wasn’t true right now. He had been thunderstruck by the opera house and was feeling profoundly disturbed by it. He might pretend to enthusiasm about further sightseeing and even achieve a superficial level of pleasure, but that disturbed state of mind would still be there, a nagging unease. In that state he was no pleasure at all for the quarians to be around and the only considerate thing he could do was to head back to the ship.

  ‘Good thought,’ he agreed.

  Twenty

  A lot had been happening while Alex had been visiting Ewern. The other members of the team had been having their own adventures, for a start, more
and less successfully. When Alex returned to the ship he found that eight of them were still groundside, three of them on visits to quarian homes while Ali Jezno was giving an impromptu story-telling performance and Ab Abnedido was recorded as ‘in therapy ‘. The progress of each visit was being monitored by a team aboard the ship. Everything they saw and said and did was recorded by suit cams, of course, and was being analysed by an intel team, while others kept an eye on life signs and general welfare. Pilots were standing by ready to pull them out at the first sign of concern, but so far, there had only been routine requests for pick up.

  Buzz, in command of the ship during Alex’s absence, had been keeping track of events groundside too, as well as he could. This had been difficult, though, because of the quarians who came to the ship.

  The first visitors had turned up within an hour of the ship coming into orbit. Silvie had spread the word, it transpired, that people were welcome to visit the ship, so long as there weren’t more than twenty of them at a time. This, it had been agreed, was reasonable.

  There was, however, nothing reasonable about having twenty quarians aboard a frigate. They were everywhere, and they were chaos incarnate. They were sampling food, trying on uniforms, firing off cannon, climbing into people’s bunks and all the other routine ‘ship visiting’ experiences, but at high speed and so unpredictably that they seemed to be everywhere doing everything all at once. Besides that, they played with the tech, turned things on and off, changed settings and in several instances took things to bits to see how they worked. And all the time, of course, they commented freely on the crew, making comments on their emotional dysfunctions which were at the least over-personal and intrusive and in many instances frankly offensive.

  ‘Any problems?’ Alex enquired, coming aboard to the news that they had twenty visitors aboard.