The Terrans

by Jean Johnson

  “She says they say aloha when they part, not just when they meet each other,” Li’eth said, draining his bottle.

  He set it carefully aside, mindful of Jackie’s words much earlier in the day, that they had to clean up the beach when they were through. The bottles were some sort of super-recyclable substance called plexi, able to be used over and over again. A planet where the roads are paved in solar panels for cheap daily energy needs, he acknowledged silently, where all of their containers are completely recyclable, and their vehicles and power-draining manufactories use water plucked from the far edges of their system to get around with or to tackle any huge energy-requiring function . . . and yet they still don’t have artificial gravity . . .

  Picking up the next one, Li’eth cracked the lid on it. “Thank you for bringing more, by the way. These cooler things taste really good.”

  “I know. I’ve had two,” V’kol admitted. “I think they’re herbal. The husband of the governor said if I had a few, I’d relax. I’m starting to feel relaxed.”

  “This is my third. No, fourth. Had to use the matriarch’s house before opening my third. Jackie’s father recommended them, said he’d join me for a chat while drinking them . . . I think it’s some sort of unspoken ritual or custom they just haven’t explained yet . . . but then his wife’s mother called him away to clean up the roasting pits. I think I like this lu’au thing. Even if it’s named after a bunch of leaves.”

  “They’re a little odd, but they’re ni—” V’kol, paused belching midword. “—ice . . . Oh. Oh! Do pardon me, Your Highness,” he groveled a little. Mock-groveled, replete with an obsequious little bow. “This lowly commoner peon should never have been so crass and vulgar as to belch in the Imperial presence . . .”

  “Oh, please, my mother farts,” Li’eth found himself admitting. “Particularly after eating certain vegetables.”

  Dropping onto an elbow to support his upper body, V’kol’s brows rose. “She does? She admits it?”

  “Oh, no. No no no no no,” Li’eth denied, waving a hand through the air. “No one admits to it. But we all do it. The kitchen staff is simply trained to limit her intake of those specific vegetables . . . but she likes them, so every once in a while, she’ll order a meal with them. When there aren’t any formal evenings scheduled.”

  Twisting farther onto his side, V’kol adjusted his weight on his elbow, sipping at his bottle. He squinted against the sunset glow. “Which vegetables? C’mon, you can tell me . . .”

  “Nope.” He liked that Terranglo word, so he used it again. “Nope, nope, and nope. State secret. I’d have to kill you if you knew. Or just position you behind her.”

  Both men started snickering, at that. Li’eth grinned and . . . belched. And laughed. “Sorry, sorry . . . how crass of me, a pillar of highest society, a son of the Imperial Tier, emanating noxious noises and odiferous fumes when they aren’t supposed to exist, so high . . .”

  “I am very much going to miss this, my friend. You’ll have to go back to being a stuffy, repressed prince.” V’kol sighed. “As one of your leftenant superiors in the military, Captain,” he enunciated carefully, using the Terranglo word-equivalents, “I am, and was, free to associate with you. To laugh about farts and belches and other obnoxious but perfectly normal things. Unfortunately . . . Those days are ending. I’m glad I got to be the friend of my captain. I’m sorry I cannot stay the friend of my prince.”

  “. . . Who says you can’t?” Li’eth asked, bottle paused halfway to his lips.

  “Protocol. I don’t have enough clout to wade through all the layers of the Empire that will slide into place between us the moment we get back home,” V’kol reminded him. “Unless you get shipped out again, and we get reassigned to the same ship, I’ll only ever get to see you again on the vids. As part of the news.”

  “No . . .” Li’eth shook his head. He didn’t like the picture V’kol was painting. His mind ticked over, trying to find a way around it.

  “Yes . . . So . . . this is good-bye, you . . . uhh . . . what was that phrase the copilot uses . . . You bootless tosser! No, no . . . you boot-tosser. That’s it. Boot-tosser. You are one, and a complete and total one,” V’kol added, pointing vaguely at the prince. “I have no idea what that means, but it’s my only chance to be rude to a member of the Imperial Blood. Without being actually rude, because I like you.” He drained his bottle and set it down, then picked up the remaining spare. “I’ll just have to . . . I don’t know . . . fart at the vid in fond memory. Except that’s a rather markless thing to do, and I’m all grown-up.”

  “No, I mean no, you don’t have to go away. I’m not the Heir. I can have whatever friends I like,” Li’eth pointed out. “Vi’alla is the Heir . . . and she’s a stiff little copy of Mother. She follows the book. Prays to all the Saints. Has the blessings of the High Priesthood.”

  “She’s not very good at military tactics,” V’kol stated. That earned him a sharp look from his captain. Looking off across the waves, the gunnery officer shook his head. “I heard about an operation—training exercise, before the war—which she’d tried to pull off as the CO. The official word is that five ships didn’t follow through on time, so it was their fault. I looked over the recordings, and there was no way that could have been pulled off on time. She’s got big ideas, but not enough . . . practicality to see when they won’t necessarily work.

  “I’ve seen it in other officers, too. Following the book, praying to the Saints on all the right holy days, but not a speck of imagination in them. Your sister is not going to know what to do with these Terrans . . . and if she’s like your mother, your mother isn’t, either. No offense to the War Queen.”

  Li’eth shook his head. The sun was setting off to his right, a rich orange light forcing him to keep his head averted so that it wouldn’t give him a headache through the corner of his eye. “They’ll have to listen to them.”

  “Because your precious Book of the Immortal and the Book of Saints say so?” V’kol scoffed.

  “No. Because we’re losing, and Mother is aware of just how badly the Alliance has been crumbling under each and every assault. We need these people. We take them in under the roof of the Empire. Welcome them. Learn from them. And we need to do it fast.”

  “And how do we do that, with a group of First Tiers who insist on praying to every Saint on his or her day, without deviation?” V’kol asked.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered, shaking his head even as he tried to think of the right thing to say. Tipping up his bottle, he swallowed, then lowered it. A burp welled up, and he let it out. Somehow, it brought an idea up to the surface. Not necessarily the greatest idea, but at least it was an idea. “I don’t know. Throw a bunch of Terrans at them. Then throw a bunch more. Fill the whole damned Court with Terrans, all bouncing around, breaking all the rules because they don’t know all the rules . . . until either the Court has to move and learn how to play, or they just . . . They just become obstacles in a guanjiball game.”

  A snerk sound escaped V’kol. “So . . . what does that make your mother? The goal alcove, or the prime mangora root?”

  “I’m more interested in knowing who’s the ball, so I know who to kick around the Court to get things done.”

  Another snort escaped the gunner. “Saints—your sister! Her Imperial Highness, Heir to the Empire,” V’kol snickered in V’Dan. “Ping-ong, thumplethumple BONK!”

  “Bonk?” he asked, curious.

  “Bonk! It’s a Terran word,” V’kol asserted. “It means . . . um . . . the noise thing, when you bump into something hollow. I think.”

  “Ah. Like boop. They have the strangest-sounding language, don’t they?” Li’eth mused, draining his drink dry.

  “. . . I bet they say the same thing about ours,” V’kol stated after a moment . . . and burped.

  Li’eth belched. Both men snickered

  Footsteps chuffed through the sand, and a hand came down to snatch up one of the bottles. Waves of anger and a hin
t of cream . . . oh! Cream is intoxication! Li’eth realized. Just as his pretty Bright Stone called out in a disgusted voice to the others within hearing range on that stretch of the beach.

  “Alright, who the hell thought it was a good idea to give the high-ranked telepath alcohol? Who did it?”

  Li’eth snickered, and flopped onto his back. He reached up and patted her leg awkwardly. “It’s a soda . . .”

  “It’s a wine cooler! Which one of you bootless, modo rats was responsible!” she demanded again in a shout toward the others, before lowering her voice, free hand going to her forehead. “Great. I’m getting dizzy off secondhand drunkenness . . . made worse now because you’re touching me. Amplifying our connection. Great. Just . . . booting great!”

  The Imperial prince, who would never, ever be caught dead in knee-length shorts and a sleeveless shirt within the bounds of his Empire, curled gracelessly over onto his side, laughing almost too hard to breathe.

  MARCH 26, 2287 C.E.

  THE LOTUS, ALOHA CITY, KAHO’OLAWE

  (Do you know . . .) Li’eth broke off with a grunt, unable to continue his question. Lifting a hand to his forehead, he gingerly pinched the bridge of his nose. He was in his approximation of a V’Dan dress uniform, and she was in a very nice dress, black with flowers on the flared sleeves and flowing hem.

  “I told you, don’t use your telepathy,” Jackie muttered under her breath, gesturing for them to turn left to head for the special waiting room that would be their place to relax until they were called to the Council Hall floor.

  “I know. I just forgot,” he muttered aloud.

  “Well, I told you, you’ll want to avoid using your gifts while you’re still suffering from a hangover.” Jackie sighed. “But then, it’s not my fault you sucked down nearly four whole wine coolers last night.”

  “Don’t your people have a saying that gloating from being right is annoying?” he demanded. “Besides, how should I know what I was drinking?”

  “Did you even try reading the label? It’s clearly marked by law if and when a drink is alcoholic,” Jackie told him. She had little sympathy for his plight this morning, because his headache was her headache, thanks to their growing Corsican-twins joy of being a Gestalt pair. Not quite as strong as his, but it wasn’t leaving her at her best.

  “I read enough to know it said Blackberry Blend. It sounded like a harmless fruit drink. Besides, why didn’t you stop me earlier, back before I became intoxicated?”

  “Because I didn’t realize you were getting drunk until I started tripping over things, helping to clean up. Even then, it took me a few minutes and a few bruises before I realized it wasn’t because I was simply tired.” She paused, then added telepathically, deliberately, (Besides, those who know the effects of alcohol on strong telepaths will have reason to trust that you and I aren’t in constant silent contact.)

  “V’shova v’shakk!” he hissed. Struggling with his breathing, he controlled the pain. His biokinesis was still a struggle to activate at will for things like this. Specifically, for things he hadn’t practiced curing. “Pardon my language, but that hurt.”

  “Yes, and all the cameras trained on us are now aware that neither of us can use telepathy with the other without you showing signs of pain,” Jackie stated. Li’eth stopped, which meant she had to stop, too. Raising her brows, she waited for his answer.

  He narrowed his gaze at her. “You planned this.”

  “Definitely not,” Jackie denied. “But I am going to take advantage of it to prove we’re following the rules every step of the way.”

  “Fighting for your career?” he muttered, studying her.

  “Yes,” Jackie admitted bluntly. “What do you think I’m going to do on V’Dan, sit in a corner until I bear your babies? Such things are admirable as ambitions and milestones in one’s life, and one day I should like to have a few children, but my biggest ambitions are off in an entirely different corner. What do you think you would do, here on Earth?”

  He frowned at her in puzzlement. “What do you mean, what would I do here on Earth?”

  “We forgot to discuss that,” Jackie told. Realizing they had stopped in the corridor, a corridor with people passing this way and that, she gestured for him to continue onward with her. “We’ve talked about my going to V’Dan and staying there as if it was some sort of given. But what if it ends up being the other way? What if I returned to Earth, with you in tow? Depending on how things unfold, I could take up a Council seat again, or I could go back to being a translator—I could make a fortune in telepathic language transfers alone, public or private sector. What would you do, as my Gestalt partner, if we ended up back on Earth?”

  “I . . . don’t know. Train my abilities. Maybe try my hand at learning how to transfer languages and work alongside you. But not until the war is won, Jackie,” he asserted, cutting his hand through the air between them. “I will not abandon either the Empire or the Alliance. Not easily. Even if all I can do is pick up a weapon and charge at the enemy, if there’s a chance a single body more will stop them, then . . . let that body be mine. And yours. Even if I don’t want to risk you.”

  She touched his shoulder with a soft, “I know,” before turning him into the waiting room. Only to be gestured forward by the gray-robed aides. Jackie looked at the pair waving her toward the inner door. “What . . . ?”

  “Everyone is here; they’re just waiting on you, miss,” the older of the two women stated. “They want you to take the Oath of Service with everyone else—you can stay here if you like, sir. Someone will come for you when they’re ready.”

  “No, I’m going with her,” Li’eth stated. He looked to Jackie. “Let them watch me as I listen to their oath-swearing. Let them be aware that I am aware of those words.”

  She nodded and held out her hand. He gripped it briefly, squeezing her fingers, and lifted his chin at the door, releasing her.

  “You first. It’s your government.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “. . . Today, I shall do my best to serve well and fully for the entire time I work. I am Jacaranda MacKenzie, and I represent the people of the Terran United Planets.”

  Only because he was standing next to her could Li’eth hear her exact variation on the incredibly long speech which everyone—save only the Fellowship members—had just recited. More or less in unison, like some sort of mass religious ritual, save it was a secular oath. A few voices fell into the quiet at the end, but the chamber was large and absorbed the sound fairly well when the sound pickups weren’t focusing on a specific person.

  Still, as they resumed their seats on the edge of the Council Hall floor, he muttered under his breath, switching to V’Dan to be politely discreet in case anyone seated near them overheard. “Saints above, that things is annoyingly long. Why does it have to be so long?”

  “To groove good habits into our heads. To ensure understanding, which leads to cooperation. And to not be able to claim ignorance of consequences,” Jackie returned, lips barely moving. They were parted on a pleasant smile, a neat trick of ventriloquism.

  Premiere Callan took the podium, commanding their attention. “Thank you for coming here today, on a Saturday. I know a lot of you undoubtedly had other plans. However, in the light of our ongoing and increasing interstellar communication with the V’Dan Empire—predominantly in the areas of exchanging basic scientific knowledge for the specific need of accuracy in measurement conversion and terminology translation between our two different systems—we will soon be able to reach a point of understanding where the real negotiations can begin.”

  Hands raised in the Fellowship seats. The Premiere held up his own hand. Jackie and Li’eth were seated with their backs to the Fellowship, but there were screens placed up high around the circular chamber displaying various viewpoints.

  “Please, hold your questions for the moment; there will be an opportunity for the Fellowship to join these discussions. I can guess what the main questions are. The points of informatio
n we are currently sharing and calibrating are things like . . . how long is a centimeter, a meter, a kilometer, compared to their own units of distance measurement. How many joules of energy does one of their standard-sized engines produce. Do they use base ten mathematics like we do, and do they have conversion programs for binary, trinary, and so forth. We are not giving away our proprietary technological information. We are simply establishing a mutual lexicon of language, where 4.3 centimeters equals one krogg, or something. And no, that is not an official V’Dan word. It is just a word I made up to illustrate the language and information barriers that still exist between our respective branches of humanity.”

  A few members of the Fellowship and the Council chuckled at his dry-voiced denial, but for the most part, the crowd seated in the rounded hall remained respectfully attentive.

  “Once we have established how to convert basic measurements, terms, and labels, we will be able to begin the real negotiations. We are aware the V’Dan are at war; we ourselves were forewarned by the validated precognitives within the United Planets that conflicts with the same enemy are probable, and are preparing for the day that their war might indeed become our war. We are striving our best to hide our star system’s exact location so that this enemy will have to look long and hard to find us.

  “But we have reached out to nonhostile life-forms, and have found that some of them, at least, are very much like us,” Callan continued, looking at the datapad he had set on the podium, which no doubt contained the points he wanted to make in his speech. “The V’Dan are different in many ways socially and culturally, but they and we are the same species biologically.

  “If what our V’Dan guests are saying is true, the Salik—their enemy—sees us as just another source of lunch. To put it bluntly, they eat sentient beings for fun and food. This enemy will not differentiate between the others and us and will not respect boundaries, borders, or other differences. As we ourselves have learned through our history, victory comes when allies with a common cause work to overcome the obstacles and problems in their path. Still, we do not yet know all of the particulars of their war, and it would be foolish to join forces with them without knowing what, exactly, we will be up against.