She grinned at the jaw-hitting-floor reaction of everyone in the wardroom as they saw her, and gave a little nod of satisfaction. That had, evidently, been the reaction she had dressed for, a ‘stun all beholders’ glamour.
It certainly stunned Harry Alington. He was quite lost for words, which just made Silvie laugh when he was introduced.
‘You’re like a little boy,’ she commented, and suddenly started jumping up and down with one hand in the air like a child desperate to get adult attention so that he could show off how clever he was. ‘Oooh! Oooh!’
Harry burst out laughing too. He had, indeed, been hoping to impress her and was so excited about meeting her that it was hard to stand still. But Silvie was already moving on, bright eyed with interest at meeting other new people.
Her first encounter with Dan was even less dramatic. As with the majority of people she had met aboard ship, he was broadcasting nothing more than happy excitement at meeting her, along with honest admiration. Part of that admiration was for her elfin beauty – he was a human male, after all – but most of it was for her courage in coming into human space as she had, so very alone and so very far from home. He wanted her to know that if there was anything that he could do to help or protect her, he would be right there. And she did know that, without it needing to be said, and grinned happily back at him.
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘I like you too.’ And then, moving on, she met the skipper of the Fleet patrol ship, a gangling young woman who gazed at her with undisguised awe.
‘Goddess – twenty four!’ Silvie responded, incomprehensibly unless you were aware that she and Shion were keeping score of the various reactions people had on being introduced to her. Then she had a hug from a laughing Martine, happy to share her own maternal feelings towards the vulnerable young girl. ‘You’re right,’ Silvie said, turning to Shion with a beaming grin, ‘it’s brilliant here! Bonkers…’
‘…but fun!’ Shion finished with her, and they both laughed.
With Shion at Silvie’s elbow they got through pre-dinner drinks with no more than a burst of hilarity around Silvie as people tried to explain to her why they were spending a few minutes standing around sipping fruit juice and non-alcoholic champagne instead of just sitting down getting on with the food.
‘But,’ she said, looking around at them in perplexity, ‘not one of you is actually enjoying it, so what’s the point?’
Buzz came over at the explosion of laughter, chuckled himself when the reason for it was explained, and obligingly abandoned the pre-dinner socialising ritual, suggesting that they took their places at the table.
And it was at that point that the event de-railed.
‘It’s been fun,’ Silvie said happily. ‘But I’d rather go to the gym now.’
Buzz did not hesitate.
The wardroom itself had been sparkled by a team of riggers ensuring that every surface gleamed. Buzz’s own silver dinner service had been fetched from the hold and polished by hand, as had the crystal tableware. The menu had been very carefully selected to suit Silvie’s tastes, and Mako Ireson had been busy in the galley cooking special dishes for them. All the Fourth’s senior officers and many of the juniors were there for the occasion, all in dress uniform and wearing whatever honours they had. There was to be a four-course celebration menu, to be followed by toasts and a speech of welcome to their guest of honour. It wouldn’t be a long event – even formal dinners in the Fourth never lasted for much more than an hour – but a great deal of effort had been put into it. The guest of honour waltzing off to the gym just as the meal was about to start was definitely not on the agenda.
‘No problem,’ said Buzz, and meant it, which Shion could see almost as clearly as Silvie herself.
So, Shion took Silvie off to the gym, leaving the dinner party to proceed without them. There was, it transpired, a flickball match on in the gym which Silvie wanted to see. It wasn’t a particularly special match, just one in a series of games which were part of the current squadron tournament. Even so, they played a high speed, highly skilled game because this too was part of shipboard training. Taking part in freefall agility or freefall team sports training was rated as an approved activity for standby watch time, and encouraged as it all helped towards overall fitness and freefall dexterity in operations. They had quite a crowd, too, at least for aboard ship – more than fifty people had turned up to cheer them on, almost filling the little observation platform.
They made room for Silvie and Shion, though, with some surprise but with some cheers when Shion explained that Silvie would rather watch the match than go to a dress dinner. She enjoyed it tremendously, too. At a technical level she was fascinated by the speed and skill of the players, commenting that they were even more agile than reef adapts on her own world. Emotionally, though, it was even more enjoyable as the watchers were keenly caught up in the match with surges of excitement whenever either side came close to a goal and explosions of joy when they actually scored. Silvie was yelling with the rest of them, cheering both teams impartially and leaping up and down with the supporters at the final whistle. At pretty much the same moment, Buzz was solemnly raising a glass and asking them all to toast their guest of honour ‘absent from our table but not from our hearts’.
They did so, and Davie looked around at all of them and laughed.
‘This is why you’re so good at exodiplomacy,’ he told Alex, with a gesture which included everybody at the table as they resumed their seats. ‘Because you really don’t mind, do you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Alex, and looked at Buzz, who smiled confirmation.
‘All we want,’ he said simply, ‘is for her to be happy.’
Silvie was certainly that, though over the course of the next three days, if anyone had been counting, they could have recorded a hundred and seventeen instances of the quarian saying something inappropriate.
Nobody was counting, though, and nobody really minded. Of course it was embarrassing; red faces and hoots of laughter were just normal wherever Silvie happened to be around the ship.
The significant thing there was that they were just normal. It helped that many of the crew had been involved in exodiplomacy before so they were able to accept that it was going to be bewildering and challenging in unexpected ways. It helped, too, that they were all in it together. By day two, the few people who hadn’t yet been embarrassed by Silvie were having their legs pulled about there being something wrong with them. Whenever anything particularly excruciating was revealed it would immediately be put on the notice board, with a top ten listing which was constantly being updated by votes. Alex was happy with that. As a coping strategy it was infinitely better than the panic which had gripped many of Davie’s people on the Stepeasy. Silvie herself certainly didn’t mind it. She was baffled by the whole concept of embarrassment and struggling even to recognise a wholly alien emotion, but she liked humans laughing. Just for a moment or two, she said, all the jangling confusion of their thoughts would be subsumed in a wave of merriment like a flash of bright colour.
Then on the fourth day, something amazing happened. Shion had been going around with Silvie all the time, never more than a couple of metres away from her. When they talked together it was nearly always in that half-comprehensible shorthand that was so frustrating for outsiders. During the last couple of days it had been noticed that Shion was also flashing numbers using finger-signs so fast they needed slo-mo for humans to be able to read them.
She was, they knew, attempting to teach Silvie about concepts of privacy and embarrassment, both so alien to her psychology and culture that the Diplomatic Corps had long since given up attempting to get quarians to understand them. Davie had done his best too, without success. Now it was Shion’s turn, using the rapport the two of them had established on sight.
On day four, Silvie was just about to make a comment about the engineering officer’s need to go to the lavatory when she picked up a finger signal from Shion, stopped herself and laughed, miming draw
ing a fastener over her mouth.
Shion cheered. It was a momentous event – the first time ever that any quarian had accepted a warning that what they were about to say was inappropriate and stopped themselves from saying it.
‘I don’t understand it at all,’ Silvie admitted to Alex, when they met on the command deck a little later. ‘It’s bewildering anyway to see that someone is uncomfortable because they need to defecate – even very small children ought to know better than that. And surely the right thing to do in that situation is to express concern and prompt them to go and relieve themselves. I just don’t understand why humans want to keep bodily functions secret, that’s just silly. But Shion said to comment on it would be anti-social factor seven so I treated it as a secret and sent him a private message instead.’ She smiled radiantly as she observed, ‘Everyone seems very pleased.’
Alex laughed, not least at the irony of her disclosing so blithely the private matter she had refrained from commenting on earlier. It would obviously take a while before she got any kind of handle on concepts of personal privacy. Still, the fact that she had taken her cue from Shion was a vital step forward in developing more effective communication. And they were learning too. Everything that Silvie did and said was being watched and analysed both by the official exodiplomacy team and unofficially by every member of the crew.
The fact that this was all going on in Silvie’s full view made it very much something that was being done with her rather than to her. She found it useful too, commenting that it was amazing to see how little the humans understood about her, even when she thought she’d explained things really clearly. On the whole, it would be fair to say that she was learning rather more quickly than they were. Within a few days, a quick flick of Shion’s fingers would cue her in to the fact that what she was about to say would be considered inappropriate by humans, and even though she couldn’t understand why she would trust Shion and refrain from commenting.
The big test came on day eight of the trip, when she was taken into the interdeck lounge and introduced to their civilian passengers.
To Alex’s surprise, Kelesha Endenit and Colonel Sungh remained oblivious to the fact that there were aliens aboard the ship. They’d both met Shion and encountered Davie without noticing anything unusual about them, and neither of them had a clue that the ship was currently hosting the quarian ambassador.
True, both passengers spent all their time cocooned on the interdeck, with none of the usual command deck feed and notice boards. They were in their own little world down there, with Mako Ireson organising schedules for them. Neither of them were the least trouble, really. Both were glad of the opportunity to catch up with work and work-related reading, so occupied themselves for the greater part of the day. When not at work they seemed perfectly content to sit in the lounge watching the stars go by and chatting with whoever else was there. Silvie had been kept away from them during her first week on the ship, but she was keen to try out her newly acquired social skills so encounters were arranged at times when each of the passengers was in the lounge without the other.
The first encounter, with Kalesha Endenit, passed off remarkably well. Alex could see a little tension in the background as Attaché Desmoulin and Mako Ireson were on standby to jump in with a cover story if things did not go well. As it was, they needn’t have worried. Silvie seemed quite enchanted with the Living Daylight activist, gazing at her with a fascinated expression. Kalesha Endenit was undoubtedly the first human she’d ever met who took no interest in her whatsoever. She was polite, responding to the introduction with a friendly nod and ‘pleased to meet you’ but she wasn’t struck in the least either by Silvie’s spectacular silver-haired beauty or her compelling charisma. Kalesha had travelled to enough worlds not to be surprised by even the most bizarre hair styles or fashions. Nothing about Silvie penetrated her own overwhelming absorption in the issue of social lighting. She was currently buzzing with indignation over an article she’d just read and already composing a rebuttal letter in her head, so gave Silvie only enough attention for common courtesy. After a couple of minutes, in fact, she excused herself, heading back to her desk without giving Silvie another thought. She would never know that she had been introduced to the quarian ambassador.
The meeting with Colonel Sungh, on the other hand, was farcical. He had the usual heterosexual male reaction on being introduced to her, which Silvie had by then learned to treat as a secret, however little she understood why humans were so confused and confusing about it.
Unfortunately, she was less prepared for the very peculiar feeling she could sense in him. She was, by then, starting to recognise the funny pink feeling which Shion identified for her as embarrassment, and she knew it wasn’t that. She knew it wasn’t fear, either – an emotion she had also had to learn to recognise in humans as quarians had no adrenal reactions and didn’t experience fear in the human understanding of it, at all. This was something new and deeply weird even by human standards. After a moment or two gazing at him in bewilderment, Silvie glanced at Shion with an evident hope that she would provide some enlightenment. Shion gave her a smile and said ‘yearning’ in Pirrellothian.
Silvie looked back at the Colonel with concern.
‘What is it you want?’ she asked, because that was what she couldn’t see, only a formless but all-consuming mix of wanting and regret. ‘Can I help?’
Then in the next moment she picked up on the tiny clues of his glance at Shion, a brief look in the direction of the fighter bays, and an involuntary curve of his hand as if he was handling flight controls.
‘But why don’t you just ask?’ Silvie queried, and turning to Shion, ‘You’d let him fly a fighter, wouldn’t you?’
Shion looked at the SDF colonel, who flared bright red at this exposure of a desire he would not have admitted to for worlds.
‘I, uh, wouldn’t… it’s just …’ he gestured incoherently and Shion burst out laughing.
It had been a while since she’d succumbed to a full-on fit of the giggles. They were rare, but when they happened they were unstoppable. It could take a good quarter of an hour to get her calmed down to the point where she could even try to explain what was so hilarious. Whatever it was, it never seemed that funny to anybody else. This, today, would turn out to be because in that moment it had been like looking in a mirror, seeing just the same longing to fly in the middle aged SDF officer that she’d felt herself as a child. None of her human friends would get why that was so hilarious to her. To Shion, though, it was a moment of exquisite glee, and once she’d given way to that burst of pure joyous laughter she rode it like a surfer on a tsunami.
On this occasion, though, she took Silvie with her. In the same moment Shion dissolved into hoots, Silvie gave a little shriek and was immediately laughing her head off as well. As the affronted colonel stood staring at them, there was nothing that could be done but to get them away as quickly as possible and swing in fast with the cover story and apologies.
This led, some time later, to Alex going down to the interdeck himself. Colonel Sungh had requested a meeting with him at his convenience. Alex was anticipating having to deal with a complaint about the conduct of one of his officers, and some awkward questions too about how Silvie, introduced as a civilian researcher, had known what he was thinking about.
In the event, however, Colonel Sungh had apparently accepted the explanation that Silvie was a subject involved in research about the potential of using espers on warships to assist in search and rescue operations. The fact that he had believed that the Fourth would be engaged in such research said a great deal about how out there he already believed them to be. At any rate, he was satisfied with that explanation and didn’t want to make any complaint.
‘The thing is, captain,’ he said, once they were settled in the little interdeck office and Banno had done his usual stunt of whisking in with coffee almost before they’d sat down. ‘I don’t want to be any trouble to you, naturally, and I wouldn’t have asked, but sin
ce the cat is out of the bag, as it were…’ he gave the skipper a self-conscious smile, ‘I was wondering whether I might ask if it might be possible for me to be given the necessary clearance and permitted to pilot one of your swarms – even if only in simulator mode.’
Alex was relieved that the request was so reasonable – and entirely understandable, too, he felt. Colonel Sungh was, after all, a fighter pilot, and the swarm class fighters carried by the Fourth were the only ones in service which had had their stabilisers removed so that they could function with all the agility their designers had intended. It needed superb piloting skills to handle them like that, which was why the Fleet and SDF had resorted to putting stabilisers on them in the first place, but there could hardly be a pilot worthy of the name who wouldn’t leap at the chance to have a go at flying a swarm with the stabilisers off. Alex felt a little embarrassed himself that neither he nor any of his officers had thought to offer that to the SDF colonel.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, without hesitation. ‘Actually, I’d be perfectly happy to give you full nine ack alpha clearance so you can…’
He broke off as the colonel immediately held up his hands with a look almost of panic.
‘No – please!’ he said, and at Alex’s look of surprised enquiry, ‘Thank you, but with all due respect there are things I would rather not know. I mean…’ he gave the skipper an apologetic look, ‘Frankly, sir, I have a horrible suspicion about what you’re really doing here and I would be very very grateful if you would continue to allow me to keep well out of that.’
Alex, well aware of the impact it would have both on the colonel’s career and reputation if it got out that he’d been involved in any way with a hunt for the Space Monster of Sector Seventeen, gave an understanding nod.
‘Not a problem,’ he assured him. ‘So – nine ack beta, then.’ Nine ack beta clearance meant admission to certain specified secrets on a need to know basis. ‘And we’ll clear you to fly the swarms.’ Normally that would be something which Shion would handle, but her responsibilities for Silvie had taken over from every other duty. ‘Our Mr Vergan will organise that for you, all right?’
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