The Terrans

by Jean Johnson

“Marks?” V’kol asked.

  “She walked barefoot on the Moon, the one natural satellite that circles Earth. She did so without any kind of pressure-suit.”

  Shi’ol wasn’t the only one to snort in disbelief. Ba’oul beat her, speaking first. “Impossible. If she was barefoot, then she would be dead. An airless moon would be freezing cold in the shade, the ground would be scorching hot in sunlight, and her blood would boil in the absence of atmospheric pressure. Therefore, she did not walk barefoot.”

  “She did. She used the power of telekinesis to envelop herself in a sphere for protection . . . the ability to move things with the mind, to create physical walls of force,” Jackie reminded him. “An ability you saw me using during our escape. She also had had the gift of pyrokinesis, the ability to create and control fires, including not only creating heat but reducing heat, protecting her skin from the sun-heated sand. I could do almost the same as her, but I am not a pyrokinetic, so my feet would get burned in the sunlight and frostbitten in the shade. I am also not a biokinetic, so I could not heal myself of my injuries. I’d have to wear sturdy shoes at the very least.”

  “I have those abilities,” Li’eth confessed. “My fire-calling gift is very weak, but in an emergency, I can light a candle, or a bit of wood or paper . . . and I can heal, but I cannot summon the ability to heal others save in dire emergency. I thought it was simply the will of the Saints that my gifts could be so erratic . . . but now I’m wondering if there is a way to train them to heed my control.”

  Ja’ki nodded. “We’ll work on those. I may not have those abilities myself, but I do know some of the training methods, enough to ensure you at least get a start on getting them under control.”

  “You presume to teach one of our Great Ones how to use his abilities?” Shi’ol questioned her. The blonde’s voice was more skeptical than arrogant.

  “I presume, because from the Terran point of view, he hasn’t had much in the way of training. There are rules about how those with these abilities must behave,” Ja’ki asserted, tapping the table. “He must learn our ways of training so that he can follow our rules of behavior to the best of his ability. I am not here to hurt any of you or to watch you fumble, Shi’ol. I am here to help you navigate our cultures so that both sides achieve the best possible ends for our various goals. That includes training your captain in methods that should hopefully prevent potential problems, which could range from an accidental insult all the way through actual physical harm. Both are things I am certain Captain Ma’an-uq’en would like to avoid, the same as my people.

  “Now, let us get back to these Tlassians,” she stated, and held out her hand again. “Our precognitives—those who can catch brief glimpses of possible future events—saw creatures that looked like this.” She concentrated, frowning softly, and the raptor-thing reappeared, before it shifted into a much more upright stance, with a more slender tail and more muscular arms. The calves thickened, and the thighs lost a good bit of their meat, though not all. “Is that a Tlassian?”

  The V’Dan all nodded. V’kol gestured at it with his fork. “They have three castes; the priesthood have crests running around their skulls, either front to back like a fish fin, or ear to ear, like a balding hairline set halfway back on their skulls, or a sort of cross between the two, a curved peak that starts at the ears and joins at the front of the skull.

  “The crest means they have holy abilities like yours . . . though none exactly like that one,” he admitted, nodding at her illusion. “The warrior caste have flaps of skin alongside their necks, sort of muscular, which they can flex and flare outward in visible warning that you are making them mad. Wise travelers will avoid doing that because they can also spit a nasty, corrosive acid that can dissolve flesh and get into the blood, causing pain all over the body.”

  “Charming,” Robert drawled, eyeing the being in its knee-length shorts and elbow-length shirt, the tail clothed halfway down as well. “And the third caste?”

  “The priesthood is the smallest in number, maybe 10 percent, while the warriors are around twice that, but still relatively modest. The third is the worker caste, and it is about 70 percent of the Tlassian race,” Ba’oul explained. “They are good people, hard workers. No crests, no neck-fringes or acid-spitting.

  “They have a triumvirate for their government, a representative of each caste. The Priesthood dominates in times of peace, the Warriors dominate in times of war, and both must gain and retain the backing of the leaders of the Workers’ caste to get anything done—they are the ultimate bureaucrats, as well as being farmers and factory workers, and more.” The blue-marked man chuckled.

  “I can imagine,” Maria agreed, speaking up from the Terran end of the table. “Any other races?”

  “The Solaricans are the last on the list so far. Locally, in this arm of the galaxy, the K’Katta were the first to achieve interstellar travel,” Li’eth explained. “But the Solaricans come from a homeworld and a star system that is far overhead, well above the plane of our galaxy. They have colonized many sections around the galaxy, but each section is considered independent of the other, though all ultimately answer to the Queen of their kind. Oh, the Tlassians arrived among the Alliance worlds about fifty years before we V’Dan achieved interstellar space, which was two hundred years after the Solaricans and five hundred after the K’Katta.”

  “The K’Katta did not have faster-than-light technology,” V’kol added. “They had artificial gravity, but nothing faster than generation ships. The Solaricans had a very awkward form of faster-than-light, which they refuse to share with the rest of us, though they adopted the V’Dan version shortly after encountering it over two hundred years ago,” he told them. “So they, too, were traveling generation by generation. They have not said for certain, but I believe they have been traveling through space for almost a thousand years.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” Brad stated, flipping a hand at the far end of the table. “But what do they look like? We got giant bugs, lizardmen, frog-octopus people, more amphibians, flying whatsits—”

  “Gliding,” Dai’a corrected him. “They do not fly, they can only glide.”

  “Right. Glide, whatever,” the copilot dismissed. “So on and so forth. So what do the Solaricans look like?”

  “Felinoid,” Ja’ki stated, remembering a mix of the precog’s visions and the vocabulary-based memories of their guests. She let the illusion of the dinosaur fade since it was no longer needed.

  Li’eth nodded. “Like g’ats. You would call them . . . cats, and there lies yet another word of ours which sounds very similar to the version you use in your Terranglo.”

  Ayinda sighed, shrugging. “I give up. Maybe time travel is involved somehow. Because the way our languages have evolved over hundreds and thousands of years suggest that there should not be so many lingering similarities.”

  “I agree,” Ja’ki said. “The language, the very words being used, should have drifted wildly in most cases. Not in all, but most of them should have gone astray over the course of nearly ten thousand years.”

  “We have had ninety-five centuries’ worth of our most formal language, Imperial High V’Dan, being taught in our schools,” Li’eth told her. “Common V’Dan has drifted all over the place into various regional dialects, even to the point where they are now considered different tongues . . . but the mother tongue, High V’Dan, has remained the same. Or mostly the same. A few words have lost their sense of meaning as times and technologies have changed, but most of the words have remained known and stayed firmly the same.”

  “So it is sort of like Hebrew,” Lars offered. “An ancient language with a group of people who learn it as a hereditary inheritance. They have been practicing it for thousands of years.”

  “Or perhaps like Latin,” Ja’ki agreed. “Latin is one of the two backbones for the special naming vocabulary used by scientists, the other being Greek—we don’t teach either as often as our ancestors used to, but the two color everything in the var
ious branches of science.”

  “I will take your word for it,” he told them. “And I shall let the others pick a topic to discuss now, as my food is getting cold.” Forking up some vegetables, he dipped his head, and ate.

  Ja’ki followed suit, picking up her own utensil—until she suddenly scrambled back up out of her chair, fork flying and clattering across the tabletop. “Aah! Spider!!”

  She thumped up against the windowed wall, staring in horror . . . at a tiny, multi-legged dot no bigger than a fingernail that was creeping hesitantly across the table near her plate. Letting out a sigh of disgust, Brad rose from his chair and crossed to her abandoned seat with a muttered, “You are so bootless . . .”

  Gently coaxing the thing to crawl onto his hand, he exited the dining hall, carrying it away. About a minute later, he appeared on the other side of the window, thumped on the glass with his fist, showed Jackie the tiny arachnid—she shuddered and lurched away from the windowpane—and gently deposited the creature onto a leafy plant at the end of one of the multilayered growing stacks.

  “. . . Bootless?” Dai’a asked, confused.

  Ja’ki shook her head, palm splayed across the tops of her breasts, no doubt to quell her pounding heart. “. . . It’s a mild insult. Slang.” Her other hand came up to rub at the bridge of her nose, massaging the frown pinching her tired face. “Something you only get by context.”

  “Slang or not, if you act like that around the K’Katta, you will not make a very good Ambassador to the Alliance,” V’kol pointed out.

  “I can be calm,” she asserted, holding her hand palm out to him. “I can be polite. I just . . . don’t like being surprised, is all. Besides, once we establish solid communication, more Ambassadors will follow—I can’t be an Ambassador to each and every race individually, after all. And I will personally make sure that whoever is selected to be a representative toward these K’Katta is not the least bit arachnophobic.”

  Listening to their conversation, Li’eth made a mental note. If and when they returned to V’Dan, he would make sure she was warned in advance of an approaching K’Kattan wherever possible before encountering a member of that race. She could and clearly wanted to guide his crew away from making diplomatic mistakes; he could and should do the same thing for her side as well.

  CHAPTER 10

  Seven blessed, glorious hours of solid, gravity-assisted sleep . . . and two extra hours on top of that of utter privacy, even if they were split before and after that nap in her quarters, made Jackie feel, well, a lot more Human. A bit of privacy and real sleep seemed to have helped the disposition of the others, too, when they met for food, then parted again to do their own things before their formal introduction via commlink conference.

  The Terrans had uniforms that had been sterilized and brought into quarantine for wearing, and the V’Dan had their single set of formalwear, tailored to a rough approximation of V’Dan military uniforms, plus the casual clothes supplied to everyone to wear. Those were tough, loose-fitting garments that could survive being boiled for five minutes on top of being cleaned by ultrasonic waves sloshing through the wash water. Jackie had pulled Li’eth aside a couple hours early, however, for yet more psi training. In her mind, that was too important to be easily set aside.

  She and Li’eth now sat in cushioned chairs in the garden space, surrounded by faintly droning insects and the rustling of leaves in the artificial, ventilation-generated breezes. The air was warm, humid, and very much like home to her. She had donned heather-gray pants and a matching tee shirt, though later she would be wearing her formal Dress Blacks uniform, black jacket, black pants, silver-gray shirt, and gray and blue stripes down the sleeves and legs. A uniform that thankfully fitted these days.

  (Though I haven’t done this, I’ve had it done to me, so I know the feeling,) Jackie told Li’eth, meaning the use of biokinesis, his “holy healing” ability. (You gather the green and gold energies into a coil, like a scroll instead of a ball, and you wrap it around the injured part of the body to stabilize the wound . . .)

  “There you are! I demand different clo— Why are the two of you holding hands?” Shi’ol demanded, striding up to them with a scowl on her rosette-marked brow. “He has already had his language transfer.”

  Her concentration aggravated out of its centered state, Jackie breathed deeply before answering. Twice.

  “Well? Let go of him!”

  “I told you, Shi’ol, he needs proper training, so that he does not accidentally cause offense. Which you are bordering on doing with your demands. I told you we hold hands to make the lessons go smoother and faster. I told everyone that I wanted an hour of privacy to concentrate on teaching your captain proper psychic protocols and behaviors, before dressing for the first formal interview the lot of you will be doing.” She glanced at the digital numbers on the face of her health-monitor bracelet, and sighed again. “We have an hour and a half before that interview. What is the problem this time?”

  “I demand better-fitting clothes. The waist on this jacket is too long,” the V’Dan blonde told her. She gestured at the fitted, tapered, long-tailed military jacket she wore, dyed red and decorated in gold trim, with cream-colored lapels, matching trousers, and a cream shirt underneath. It was not quite Napoleonic in style, but it had something of that flavor to the design.

  “That jacket was measured while you were floating in null gravity,” Jackie pointed out. “As a result, your spine had lengthened while in zero G. The tailor-bot program tried to compensate for it, but couldn’t tell by how much you’d shrink once you were under the effects of gravity, spun or otherwise. It takes time to manufacture a new set of clothes, so be grateful you have something decent approximating V’Dan Imperial military uniforms. It will simply have to do for now.”

  “That is unacceptable,” Shi’ol stated, lifting her chin slightly. “I am going to have to represent our people to your entire . . . whatever it is you have for a government. I need to be properly attired.”

  Li’eth had been sitting quietly through the exchange, until that. “Leftenant,” he stated quietly, his voice edged with irritation, “I gave you instructions on how to behave. I will represent the Empire. You will remain silent until spoken to and make no attempt to seize authority while we are here. Unless and until the Empress herself grants you that power, you do not have it. Make a good impression.”

  “Besides,” Jackie told her, “this will be a video-based introduction. Any flaws in the garments will not be as readily noticed as if we were present in person. I know Ayinda was helping Dai’a learn how to design clothes with the tailor-bot’s programming system,” she added, gentling her tone. “Since there will be many more meetings while we spend time figuring out where the V’Dan Empire is, and where to return you—by preference, to your capital so that we also can efficiently meet with Her Majesty on the same trip—you will have plenty of time to manufacture clothing that will fit a little bit better. I’d recommend living tailors to do the alterations, since that could be done within the time you have left . . . but we can have no unauthorized, unnecessary visitors while in quarantine. Tailoring clothes by a fraction for a slightly better fit just isn’t necessary enough.”

  “It is Her Eternity, not ‘Her Majesty,’ whatever that word means. You have much to learn about Imperial etiquette,” Shi’ol stated, looking down on Jackie.

  “And you still have much to learn about Terran etiquette. It will be attended to in due time, Leftenant Superior. I know that Maria gave each of you a datapad with basic information on Terran etiquette to study over the last day. As you will need that information sooner than I will need yours, I suggest you study it. Now, if you will kindly take your leave, your captain and I need to get back to his lessons in self-control,” Jackie stated as politely as she could.

  Another long stare, and Shi’ol spun on her heel, and stalked off.

  (I don’t think she’s going to let the matter go.) Jackie sighed. Reaching for Li’eth’s mind was the easiest thing
she had ever done. She attributed some of that to his lack of training and thus lack of shielding, but also because she hadn’t entirely let go of him since first grasping his mind back on the Salik ship. Some of it, though, had to be from how quickly he was fine-tuning his skills. (Shi’ol is going to try to bring up the fact she’s a Countess to sway my people into paying more attention to her than to you . . . and yes, I overheard that as a thought, though I didn’t want to. She’s thinking it rather loudly. It’s very much like trying not to overhear shouting through a thin wall.)

  (I heard it, too, if not as clearly.) Li’eth sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. (More clearly than I ever have in the past, save when my holy gifts fluctuated . . . What’s your strongest drinking alcohol, and do you have it in quarantine?)

  (Drinking alcohol . . . that’d be the Clear 180. Ninety percent alcohol, in fact. It’s stocked as a backup sterilizing agent and a backup makeshift painkiller as well as a beverage. I’ll get you some when this session has ended, a little flask you can carry, and a kerchief or something to apply it with,) she added. She had to breathe deeply a few times to shake off Shi’ol’s interruption (Now, back to using your biokinetic abilities. I can only give you the basics, remember, but I can get you started. We can also get a biokinetic up here who is also telepathic, and see if they can help guide you, either after we get out of quarantine, or maybe from beyond an observation window . . .)

  —

  The dining hall, Li’eth discovered, could double as a conference hall. It made sense, of course, since it was an efficient use of the space. It did require that the table be cleared, scrubbed, and draped with an elegant blue cloth to hide its utilitarian nature, but the real surprise was the screen that dropped down over the observation window, blocking out the view of all those leafy plants and vegetables on their carefully tilted tiers of shelving. His people used projectors, not screens, when they needed a large image. The screen was very broad, it was modestly high, and it divided itself into three repeated images. The logo, he realized, of these people’s empire.