by Malka Older
There is a pause after he finishes, then the president sways, signaling her intention to speak. “For such a momentous occasion,” she croons, “we will need to discuss with the high council.”
During the pause while the council is called, Flur cannot help fretting about their deadline. Why wasn’t the council there from the beginning, if they are needed? Will she and Tsongwa need to make their presentations again? At least her political diagrams have been partially validated, although she is still not clear on the relationship between the president and the high council, or either of them and what Mission Control has been calling the Senate. Apparently the president does not have as much direct decision-making power as they thought.
There is further singing to cover, or emphasize, the entrance of the high council, and under it Irnv points out some of the more important council members. She seems to have a tragic tale about each of them. There is a woman who lost most of her family in a storm, another whose parents abandoned her as a child. The leader of the council, surprisingly, is male; his wife drowned two days after their wedding. Unable to continue murmuring about how sorry she is, Flur is reduced to nodding along and trying not to wince. She wonders if Tsongwa, a few feet away, is getting the same liner notes from Slanks. Looking at them she guesses he is, but between the oxygen mask and the face covering, it is impossible to read his expression.
Extensive discussion follows. Flur loses concentration in the middle of hour two, and can no longer follow the foreign syllables except for occasional words: “haste,” “formality,” “foreign,” “caution.” Dazed and unable to recapture the thread, Flur shifts her attention to body language instead, trying to figure out who is on their side. The president doesn’t seem engaged, putting a few words in now and then but otherwise looking at the pool in the floor or at the walls. Then again, no one else is showing fire or passion either. The discussion takes place in a muted, gentle tone, councillors lounging in their hammocks, occasionally dismounting to dip their lower extremities in the shallow lavender pool. She wonders if they are showing respect for the president’s tragedy. It is when she catches the president actually wiping a tear away from the corner of her large eye that she leans over to Irnv.
“Maybe the president is, um, a little distracted?” she asks.
Irnv looks back at her but says nothing, and Flur hesitates to interpret her facial expression.
“She seems quite…” Flur notices another tear slip down the furrows in the president’s faded-leaf face. Thinking of her lost family, she is wrung by an unexpected vibration of sympathy. “Maybe she could use a break?” What Flur could use now is a moment to talk to Tsongwa in private, to strategize some way of moving this along.
She wasn’t expecting her comment to have any immediate effect, but Irnv leans forward and says something to someone, who says something to someone else, and a moment later everyone is getting up from their swings. Flur cringes, but maybe it’s for the best; they certainly weren’t getting anywhere as it was.
“We will take a short refreshment break,” Irnv tells her. “Come, I will show you the place.”
They file into a corridor beside Tsongwa and Slanks. Flur tries to exchange glances with Tsongwa, hoping that however the refreshment is served, it will allow them some tiny degree of privacy to talk, even if only in their limited sign language. Food would be nice too, but since the breathing apparatuses they are wearing make eating impractical, their suits are fitted with intravenous nutrition systems. They won’t get hungry until they’re long dead of oxygen deprivation. Flur is wondering how to explain this to Irnv in some way that will make their refusal of refreshments less impolite when Tsongwa and Slanks turn off the corridor through a small opening draped in purple. Flur starts to follow but Irnv catches her arm with her three serpentine fingers.
“Not in there,” she whispers. “That’s the men’s side.”
They take a few more steps forward and then slide through an opening with crimson curtains on the opposite side of the corridor. The space is smaller than Flur expected, and there is no one else there, but in the far wall is a row of curtained, circular passages, like portholes. Irnv gestures Flur toward one, then wriggles into the cubbyhole beside it. After a moment of hesitation, Flur pokes her head into the hole. Inside is a low space, a small nest with cloth and cushions everywhere and a shelf with several small jars holding different items: violet straw, green powder, ivory slivers the size of a thumbnail. Flur pulls her head out, but the drape has already fallen in front of the Irnv’s opening. Flur crawls into her own nook, lets the curtain down behind her, and leans her head back against the unsettlingly soft wall.
It is so obvious she doesn’t even want to whisper it into her comms (although Tsongwa is probably doing just that at this same moment, on the men’s side), because surely they’ve figured it out by now: Eating is a social taboo. That’s why they cover their mouths all the time. Of course they hadn’t mentioned this during the previous discussions, any more than earthlings would have said, “By the way, we don’t discuss defecation.” Fortunately, because of the intravenous nutrition and the assumption that they wouldn’t be able to eat alien food, no one at Mission Control brought the matter up during protocol discussions for the trip. Flur wonders what the reaction would have been. Embarrassed silence? A quick, mature resolution of the question and no more said about it? Giggles?
Even though she’s not going to eat (she does take samples from each of the jars for her specimen cases), Flur finds the isolation soothing. She would like to sit in this cozy womb, silently, for at least ten or twenty minutes, breathing slowly and remembering why she’s here. Instead she talks to Mission Control.
“How long would it take for us to get back without that canal?” Flur asks the air in front of her nose.
“We calculate walking would add another hour to the journey,” answers Winin, the desk officer assigned to her earpiece. “That’s with no obstacles or disruptions of the sort that might come from visitors from outer space walking through a major city.”
“So about two and a half hours total,” Flur muses.
“You’ve still got some time,” Winin assures her.
“Yeah, but we’re coming up on the limit we gave them.” Flur lowers her voice, wondering how sound travels among these cubicles.
“Well, you can find an excuse to extend that, if you have to. How does it look?” Winin asks, as though she hadn’t seen and heard everything that happened herself.
“Can you patch me in to Tsongwa?” A moment later she hears his voice.
“… very interesting, how many things we did not foresee.”
“It is, it’s fascinating. I think we can consider that alone a success, a complete validation of the need for this expensive face-to-face visit in addition to all the other communication.”
Flur is a little surprised to hear the Mission Director. So Tsongwa went straight to the top during his break. She clears her throat. “Hey Tsongwa, how’s the food on your side?”
He lets loose his surprisingly relaxed chuckle. “We’ll have to ask the lab techs later,” he says.
The Mission Director is not interested in small talk at this juncture. “Now that I’ve got you two together, what do you think? Can we get the agreement signed today?”
There is a moment of silence, and Flur realizes that, through the layers of alien building material and empty alien atmosphere that separate them, she and Tsongwa are feeling exactly the same thing.
“It seems unlikely,” she offers, at the same time as he says, “I doubt it.”
The Mission Director lets out a whoosh of breath. “Well. That’s a shame.”
“It’s not a no,” Tsongwa clarifies. “They need more time.”
“Maybe if we could talk to someone else,” Flur says, looking for some hope. “The president doesn’t seem up for it right now, with all she’s been through.”
She’s hoping that Tsongwa did not get the full tragic history and will have to ask what she means.
Instead he says, “Actually…” He pauses to order his thoughts and in that pause Flur hears a rustling and then her name called, very softly, from the other side of the curtain.
“Gotta go,” she whispers, and then slides out of the cubbyhole.
Irnv is reclining in a hammock-harness outside the cushioned wall of nests, still within the women’s area. Her face covering is loosened and hanging down below her chin, and although Flur is careful not to stare at the dark purple, circular mouth, she finds she is already acclimatized enough to be shocked. The orifice seems to be veiled on the inside by a membrane of some kind, and doesn’t fully close. Struck by the curiosity of the forbidden, Flur wishes she could see how they eat.
“Do we have to get back now?” she asks, wondering too late if she should thank her host for the food she couldn’t ingest.
“We have some time still,” Irnv says. “I don’t know how you do it, but here we usually relax and socialize after eating.”
“It is … like that for us too,” Flur says, wondering if she is right about the translation for ‘socialize.’ Following Irnv’s graceful nod, she climbs into the hammock next to her and tries to put a relaxed expression on her face. Where is everyone else? They must have designated special eating rooms for the aliens and their handlers.
“Flur,” Irnv says, and Flur snaps out of it. “What does your name mean?”
Rather than try to define a general noun, Flur takes out her palm screen and presses a combination she had pre-loaded. “Like this,” she says, holding it out to Irnv as the screen runs through hyperphotos of flowers, all different kinds.
“Ahhh,” Irnv strokes the screen appreciatively, stopping the montage on a close-up of a wisteria cluster.
“And you?” Flur asks, trying to keep up her end of the socializing.
Irnv looks up, her head tilted at an angle that is so clearly questioning that Flur begins to trust her body language interpretation again. “Your name,” she says. “What does it mean?”
“Star,” Irnv replies, with a curious sort of bow.
“Oh, I thought star was ‘trenu,’” Flur says.
“Yes, trenu, star. Irnv is one trenu. A certain trenu.”
Flur finds herself tilting her head exactly the way that Irnv did a few minutes ago, and Irnv obligingly explains.
“Irnv is the name of your star. Your … planet? We tried to pronounce it like you, but this is our version.”
Terre. Earth. Irnv. But “pronounce it like you?” They have only been in contact for a few years. How old is Irnv?
“And your family?” Irnv asks, while Flur is still turning that over. “Where are you from?”
“An island,” Flur says, one of the first words she learned in Cyclopan. She takes her palm screen back and brings up globes, maps, Ayiti. She hadn’t prepared anything about her family, though. “Many brothers and sisters,” she says. She thinks of the video that was made for the launch party, presenting a highly sanitized version of her backstory, and wonders why nobody thought to load that into her drive. Maybe it wouldn’t translate well; their research has not pinned down the alien version of the heartwarming, life-affirming family unit. “We used to raise chickens,” she says, unexpectedly, and quickly pulls up a picture of a chicken on the screen, and in her mind, the memory of chasing one with her brothers.
Irnv blinks her single eye. “They are all well? Your brothers and sisters?”
“Well?” It’s a hard concept to define. The pause feels like it’s stretching out too long. “They’re fine. We’re just fine.”
A beat. “And how were you chosen for this?”
“Oh,” Flur says. These are all questions they should have prepared for. She can’t imagine, now, why they thought the conversation would be all business all the time. “Well, I went to school, and there were … competitions.” She can’t remember the word for tests. “And then more school.”
Irnv is nodding, but Flur reads it as more polite than comprehending, and she’s trying to remember the words, find the right phrase to explain it, how it’s not just written tests, but also character, leadership qualities, sacrifices, observations by instructors and mentors, toughness, drills …
“… happy to have you here,” the alien is saying, with seeming earnestness.
Flur rouses herself back to her job. “We are very happy to be here too,” she manages. “But we will have to go home soon, and we would really like to complete this agreement. For the future.”
Irnv leans back in her hammock. “We hope so. But it is a very short time.”
“It is,” Flur agrees, with as regretful a tone as she can summon. “The president…” she trails off, delicately.
“The president is a great woman,” Irnv says, in a tone that sounds to Flur very close to reverence.
“She is,” Flur agrees, disingenuously. Pause, effort at patience. “Perhaps it’s not the best time, though, with all she’s been through recently.”
Irnv looks confused, then understands. “You mean the loss of her family? But that wasn’t recent, that was many years ago.”
Years ago?
It takes Flur a moment to recover from that, and when she does Irnv is looking at her curiously. She puts out her hand, and the supple, red-purple fingers curl around Flur’s arm. Flur is shocked to feel their warmth, faintly, through the protective space suit.
“I think she will agree,” Irnv says. “It will take time. We can’t rush.”
“Of course,” Flur answers, still feeling the pulse of warmth on her arm, though by then Irnv has removed her hand. “We go,” the Cyclops says, sliding the scarf back over the bottom of her face as she stands.
They are not the first ones back into the meeting room, but it is still half-empty. Tsongwa and Slanks aren’t there yet, and Flur wonders what they might be talking about in the men’s room. She decides to put her time to good use.
“Irnv,” she says gently, getting her attention from a conversation with another alien. “That—that face there?” Flur nods at the first one in the series, the two-tone blue and lavender portrait. “Is that like the fountain in the middle of the city?”
Now that Flur has seen Irnv’s mouth she finds she can better interpret the movement of the muscles around it, even with the mask covering it. She is pretty sure Irnv is smiling. “Yes, yes,” she says, “you are right, that is another example. She is the founder of our city. After starting this city she was visited by very great tragedy. In her sorrow she wept, and her tears, different colors from each side of her eye, became the canals that we use to navigate and defend our city.”
Flur is trying to figure out how to phrase her follow-up questions—does she probe whether Irnv understands it as a myth and exaggeration, or take it politely at face value?—when she notices Tsongwa has come back in with Slanks, and nods to them.
“It is in her honor,” Irnv continues, “that we now make the tear tracks on our faces, to represent her learning, sacrifice, and wisdom.” She runs her fingers along the deep grooves in her face.
“You … do that? How?” Flur asks, trying to sound interested and non-judgmental.
“There is a plant we use,” Irnv says. “But when one has really suffered, you can see the difference. As with her,” she adds in reverential tones as the president enters the room, and Flur can see that it is true, the wrinkles in her cheeks are softer and have a subtle shine to them.
“That’s … impressive,” she says, feeling that admiration is the correct thing to express, but then the president begins to speak.
“Very regretfully,” she begins, her eye not nearly as moist as Flur had expected, “the time our visitors have with us is limited by their technology, and unfortunately we will not be able to settle this question on this visit.”
Flur’s hammock shudders with her urgency to speak, even as she catches Tsongwa’s warning look.
“However, we look upon it favorably,” the president goes on. “We will take the time to discuss it here among ourselves, and converse a
gain with our good friends soon.”
Flur is about to say something, to ask at least for a definition of ‘soon,’ a deadline for the next communication, some token of goodwill. It is the Mission Director’s voice in her ear that stops her. “Stand down. Stand down, team, let this one go. We were working with a tight time frame, we knew that. And it’s not over. Great job, you two.”
The positive reinforcement makes Flur feel ill. Irnv’s face, as she turns to her, seems to hold some wrinkles of sympathy around the mouth-covering mask and her cosmetic tear tracks, but all she says is, “We should get you back to your ship as soon as possible.”
The return trip, indeed, seems to pass much more quickly than the journey into the city. Less constrained by the idea of making a good impression, Flur takes as many hyperphotos as she can, possibly crossing the borders of discretion. Noticing that they are taking a different canal back (unless they change color over time?) she scoops up another sample. She even pretends to trip in the forest to grab some twigs, or twig analogs. Irnv says little during the walk, although Tsongwa and Slanks appear to be deep in discussion. Probably solving the whole diplomatic problem by themselves, Flur thinks miserably. When they find their ship—it is a relief to see it again, just as they left it, under guard by a pair of Cyclopes—Flur half-expects Irnv to touch her arm again in farewell, but all she does is make the double-hand gesture of welcome, apparently also used in parting.
“Irnv,” Flur asks quickly. “How old are you?”