by TylerRose.
“What do you think?” Julian asked when she’d been silent a little too long.
“I think there have been a lot of lies told in this room. The walls scream of them.”
He chuckled. “Well, yeah. What else can you expect of a room of 300 men from a hundred planets.”
“No women?” she asked.
“There are some. Not many. The Congress is very much a men’s club at the moment. I would like to see more women come in but so many of the planets are male dominated that it’s very difficult for a woman to hold her own and be heard among these bullies. I’m hoping to change that.”
“What would make me qualified to evaluate other planets for membership in the Congress?” she had to question. “I know nothing about the planets and the Congress. I know nothing of the politics behind the lies.”
“Those reasons are precisely what make you qualified, Tyler. You’re not already tainted by this feud or that grudge. You’ve not been paid off or blackmailed. You cannot be. You have enough of your own money that bribes won’t work. No one here knows anything about you. I don’t think you’d give two shits if someone threatened to make public your previous occupation.”
“My clients have been some of the richest and most powerful men on Earth. I know how to deal with them. Seems to me they wouldn’t be all that much different from planet to planet than they are country to country.”
“Likely not,” Julian had to agree.
“It also seems to me that if I was on the application evaluation team, I’d be in a position to promote equality of the sexes,” she said.
He smiled at her. “I was rather hoping you’d say something like that. With your background, you wouldn’t be bowled over, run over or run off by men trying to posture and intimidate.”
She laughed aloud, attracting disapproving stares and glares from those already in the boxes, waiting for the session to start.
“Come on. I’ll show you the Arboretum.”
“Shestna already showed me last night.”
“Did he?” Julian asked as if it was the strangest thing he’d ever heard.
“Yes. Why is it strange?”
“He’s not really one for gardens. He tends to be all business.”
“He wasn’t last night,” she said. “I’ll go up there anyway. It’s a good, quiet place to start reading. I don’t want to be holed up in my room all the time. By the way. How loud can music be before the rooms adjacent to me can hear it?”
“Oh, they won’t hear. Period. They are constructed to be absolutely soundproof.”
“Okay, but how did I hear you at the door? And you hear me?” she asked.
“Because the computer recognizes the common protocol of someone coming to a door and the person inside asking ‘who is it’ and acts accordingly.”
“Good to know.”
“Oh, here’s your card. You need it to access lifts and some rooms. There is no code. Use your fingerprint.”
“Which finger?”
“Any of them. It’s programmed with all ten.”
“Okay, how’d you manage that? I never gave them to you.”
“No. But the computer scanned you in your sleep so I could add you to the station database. It knows your personal energy signature.”
“That’s awfully sneaky,” she glared at him.
“It is how it is, Tyler. The laws and rules are different up here than on Earth. There’s not so much personal privacy.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” she said, taking the card and walking away from him.
She passed Shestna in the aisle, barely nodding at him in her fuming.
“Is she angry?” he asked Julian.
“As she so very often is,” Julian sighed. “She takes everything as a personal affront. You walked in a garden? You? With a woman?”
“A most enlightening walk it was, my friend. She is no common female. Did you know she can communicate with animals from planets she’s never known existed?”
“What do you mean?”
Shestna recounted the story of the Tichou bird warning her that she was walking with a cat. Julian was visibly disturbed by the story even through his amusement.
“Let me know if you notice anything else,” he said, and made his exit.
The Hall was filling up fast and he had work to do while Congress was in session.
Scanning down page after page, Tyler suddenly had a flashing image of Goldie Hawn in the movie Protocol. This really was some of the most inane posturing bullshit she’d ever seen in her life. Half an hour into reading a snippet here and a snippet there, she turned the thing off and went down to the market to walk around and see people actually interacting.
So much on the page but so little in front of her. Day to day, the people cared far less. Protocol, as she’d already learned continent hopping, was for politicians to make themselves feel more important, to boost their own egos, make themselves feel more important than the next person. No one in the market gave a rat’s ass how many fluffs were in a presentation bouquet or how many times the new envoy bowed to the Emperor or the King or whatever.
After a couple hours wandering, looking at the goods and listening to people react to each other, she went to Julian’s office on the top level of the station.
“You look not happy,” he said.
“There wasn’t anything about where to learn this Language of the Landers all the business of the Congress is conducted in,” she said.
“There is a Sistarian education machine we use to put a language into your memory. It’s not one hundred percent perfect, but you can start to use the language within a day of finishing the program.”
“How long is the program?” she ventured skeptically.
“About an hour in a meditative state with headphones and electrodes.”
“What are the alternatives?”
“You can learn it like you learned French in high school.”
He smiled at the face she made.
“I have you scheduled to use the machine tonight at the twentieth hour,” he told her.
“You can have this useless thing back,” she said, handing over the data pad.
“Useless?”
“What is the purpose to knowing any of this?” she asked rather pointedly.
“So you don’t offend your host planet while you’re living there and subject to their laws.”
“If I’m evaluating them and comparing what they say and do to the application they submit, then am I not an outside and objective observer, not part of their society? Protocol is for ambassadors, not analysts. I’ve had quite enough practice entering societies I know nothing about. If I didn’t get my head chopped off in Saudi Arabia, I doubt I will on Planet Hooziwutzus.”
“Well, no. Planet Hooziwutzus doesn’t have the death penalty. That’s planet Whatchajiggy.”
She threw a ball of paper at him. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do. I happen to agree with you. I have to give you the vidpad so I can say I gave you the vidpad. Keep the vidpad so you can show people I gave you the vidpad. You might find it useful for keeping a calendar or a journal.”
“I have a journal already, thank you.”
“Then you can use it for looking up stuff when you need to. Rules, people, places. It’s like carrying around a personal computer.”
“Now that would be handy,” she said, putting it into her back jeans pocket. “So what’s an application look like?”
He brought up the most recent submissions and projected one onto the near wall to read together.
“Is slavery allowed. Will you convert to Ruds. Will you adopt the Landers Language,” she read aloud, then fell silent and scanned more quickly. “This is all superficial bullshit. What about ‘what do you have to contribute to the galactic society’ or some shit like that?”
“My father wrote the application. I can’t exactly go changing it.”
“No, but I can ask while I’m there, can’t I.”
�
�You are free to ask whatever questions you want. However, if they’re not on the form, he’s not really going to care.”
“So he lets in who he wants and doesn’t let in anyone he doesn’t want,” she leapt. “I’m liking this place less and less. See you later.”
He didn’t try to stop her as she walked out. He knew it was a shit system. There simply wasn’t anything to be done about it. His father was in office for another twenty years before the next election and it was unlikely he’d lose that one since he’d already won the last fifty two elections.
“You look very displeased,” she heard, and looked up from where she sat alone in a corner of the Arboretum.
Shestna lowered himself to sit near her feet, to be on her level.
“Nothing you can do anything about,” she replied.
“I may not be able to solve your problem but I’m sure I can help you be less angry about it.”
“Did you talk to Julian?” she asked.
“Should I speak to him before I speak to you? Are you part of his House and he is your protector?”
“Fuck if I know. There are so many other ridiculous protocols around this place that might very well be one of ‘em.”
Shestna laughed. “Yes, there are many ridiculous and unnecessary protocols. I will agree with you fully. Some of the protocols around my own father can seem a bit much; but Voran III is very deep into its own traditions, rituals and way of being. Those who do not perform the required proprieties are sent out of court. No discussions can happen if the ambassador or envoy is refused permission simply for refusing to bow that third time.”
“Or the first?” she shot back.
“A female refusing to bow for him even once? He would probably do his utmost to make her his thirty second wife. He enjoys a difficult woman.”
She laughed. “Thirty two wives?”
“That’s nothing. His father had sixty seven.”
“The Christmas card list must be obnoxious,” she teased.
He smiled and didn’t make the tedium of pointing out they don’t have Christmas. He got her joke readily enough.
“Let’s go make targets explode. You should know how to handle our most common weaponry.”
Target practice it was and he showed her how to turn on and make ready the energy weapon he expected she would carry most frequently. Surprised by how quickly she picked it up, he paid more attention to what he was thinking and what she was doing. Three more rounds with targets and he was satisfied she could hit anything she aimed at within thirty feet.
“Have you had any particular fight training?” he asked. “Hand to hand?”
“Some. Do you think I’ll need it?” she asked.
“I think we should go dancing instead.”
Out of the target practice runs and around a corner into a handball court, he programmed music to play. She recognized it as a version of classical something. No composer she’d ever heard but the instruments were similar enough.
Taking a handkerchief out of his pocket, he blindfolded her.
“Is this normally a part of Voranian dancing?”
“Let go your need to control and manipulate your every situation, Tyler. We are both going to learn something,” he said, securing the cloth with a knot.
He took a step back, took her hand and placed his other on her hip exactly as Thomas would have for a waltz, and began the dance. She knew what to do. While the motions might have been somewhat familiar, the Voranian Waltz being similar enough to some Earth Waltzes, she breezed through turns and footwork exchanges she’d never done before in her life.
Because he thought them.
With the first song over, he let it play into the second and they performed a K’Tran promenade. Without seeing him, without knowing a single step, she did the side by side high knee hop, with the correct foot.
Because he thought it.
The second song done, he gently slipped the cloth off upward.
“Have they told you anything about who you are? What you are?”
“Why? What am I?”
“You will hear the word Doyen. There are two different kinds. Common and Eminent. The common can speak telepathically. Maybe be strong enough to move things. One in several hundred million might be able to teleport short distances. But you? You learn things simply because there is someone else knowledgeable standing next to you. Osmosis. Absorption. You could stand next to someone making soap and learn how to make soap. You could watch someone fly a space craft and learn how to fly that vehicle. Common Doyen do not do that. You don’t need a machine to help you learn languages. You can learn them from anyone standing near you. Anyone who knows that language. Have they said you will have more than one Widening?”
“I’ve been told it’s unlikely but not impossible,” she recalled.
“Which means they are being very cautious. It is true that a thousand things could go wrong. There hasn’t been an Eminent Doyen in some twenty thousand years. Fate, on Gethis, was the last. There were several possible candidates but something happened to each one to burn them out during their first or second Widening.”
“Like what?”
“Records are old and unreliable,” he shrugged. “I understand one went into her Widening without her Adjutant close at hand to help her. She died of it.”
“You are beginning to make me extremely wary, Shestna. What is it you want to say that you cannot?”
“All I can say is that the secrecy and half-truths finally make sense. If you are indeed an Eminent Doyen, then you have a great many enemies. When you sit about in various places like this, focus on listening to the conversations around you. You will learn truths and what you can of those languages. It will help you to be more aware and not dependent on telepathically reading emotions and deceptions. Have you eaten?”
“Not really hungry,” she drawled.
“We will dine together. We should have K’Tran food tonight. I have a feeling you’ll be visiting them. If you don’t want to bother with the protocol, you should at least be familiar with the food.”
Pretty good food at that. Not too outlandishly weird. Meat and potatoes-type menu. She did what Shestna suggested, paying close attention to the conversation at the table next to them. A Voranian couple, the male of whom had nodded acknowledgement to Shestna when he’d seated Tyler.
While she didn’t know the words, she could hear their meanings in her mind through image impressions. Throughout their meal, Shestna would periodically speak a sentence she did not understand. Then during the dessert came a string of words she understood.
“Will you enjoy traveling among the planets?”
She replied in Voranian. “I don’t know yet. I’ll have to do it first and then tell you.”
He smiled at her and spoke in Earth English. “It takes you approximately half an hour to assimilate enough to begin to understand and use a language.”
“Is that good?”
His head moved forward, eyes blinking like he wasn’t sure he’d heard right, and spoke nearly under his breath.
“Tyler, it is unheard of to be able to do this without mechanical intervention.”
“Royal Brother. Engaging another non-Voranian female for personal sport?” the male from the next table said.
Now on his feet to wait while the woman with him put her wrap around her shoulders.
“Indeed not, Royal Brother. Tyler of Earth, this is my brother Dorn and his newest wife. He is our father’s Chief of Security. Tyler is the most recent telepath produced by our host solar system’s only living planet. She is my colleague.”
No hands touched, but she found herself eying the wife with that particular sensation she recognized too readily. Death surrounded the young woman and would be coming for her sooner rather than later.
“A pleasure to meet you both,” Tyler managed to say, and sat silently with her ice water to make the feeling pass.
“Don’t mind him,” Shestna said as his brother departed the restaurant. “He find
s the idea of sexual pleasure outside of one’s own species abhorrent.”
She only gave him a darting waver of a smile that twitched with her disconcertion.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, and put a bite into his mouth.
“She’s going to die,” Tyler said just loud enough for him to hear over the table.
“What? When?”
“I don’t know. I never know when. Or why. I just know she will. Death surrounds her like a cloak. It’s palpable to me.”
He put his fork down, regarding her with the most serious expression yet.
“So you can teleport hundreds of thousands of miles under your own power; you learn by osmosis; and you see a person in the grip of their own mortality.”
“I’ve always had that last one. And, I guess to a degree, the learning. I’ve always picked things up easily if I was interested.”
“Tomorrow I have to go back home for a few days. Will you sign up and attend as many fighting classes as you can during that time? Absorb as much fighting knowledge as possible before I come back.”
“Okay. But why? I thought this was supposed to be the kinder, gentler universe.”
“No one is standing with you to defend you. It seems to me as if they want you to stand alone and be weak and unprotected. If that is true, then you must learn to protect yourself in as many ways as possible. At some point, who and what you are is going to become known and then there will be assassins sent to rid the galaxy of you because they will fear your power and what the ultimate conclusion might be.”
“Would it have been better for me to remain on Earth after all?” she asked.
“You would have learned nothing on Earth. Education comes with a price. Your price is eventually going to be your safety.”
“If all that is true, then why am I not being taught to use my abilities?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You should endeavor to learn what you can about what you can do. Learn it yourself and don’t count on others to decide when to help or teach you.”
She only nodded, knowing she’d already done that. Dessert finished, he took her back to her room.
“You’ve not dressed up the walls?” he noticed first thing from the doorway.
“Why would I?”