by Paul Lucas
At first, I was surprised we could land at all, as I had just begun to understand how helistats worked. They were essentially enormous balloons with propellers attached, much like the blimps I had read about on old Earth. Would they not be constantly blown about by the wind, I thought, especially if they tried to sit still on the ground? But then I learned they were far more advanced than the old 19th-century zeppelins. Their compartmentalized gas bladders had an inner membrane which actually held the lifting gas, in this case helium. These bladders were inflated when the craft needed lift, and be compressed and evacuated when the craft needed weight, such as when it landed. A "dynamic buoyancy" system I'd heard it called, far too heavy and complicated until lightweight composite materials and computer controls made them possible.
On one refueling stop three weeks out we were approached by natives near a small lake that fed into a larger river. At first, I mistook them for baseline humans, until Lerner pointed out their deep golden skin, pointed ears, and general lack of body hair. Minor details to me, but enough for my husband’s people to classify them as a separate “race.” Lerner called them the Fae, so named because of their superficial resemblance to creature from old Earth legend. They were very friendly--they had met KN helistats before--and apparently all possessed a flexibility and agility that bordered on the superhuman. For our amusement one warrior climbed a tree without using hands or feet, undulating up and around the narrow trunk like a snake. The Fae lived among the trees of the forest surrounding the lake, hopping and swinging from trunk to branch to outcropping, feeding off of foliage and birds. They used only simple tools and the only clothing they believed in were straps and belts to hold their carved wooden implements.
It was in spending the night with them that I got my first true taste of what it must be like to be a KN explorer, to meet peoples I had never before even dreamed existed. Talking and laughing through our translator-boxes with the Fae around the campfire that night, I gained a new respect for my husband’s former profession even as I grew to cherish an alien people I would only know for eight hours.
The helistat crew that ferried us proved very helpful and easy going. Along with my husband, they spent the month and a half of the trip helping to coach me about life in the KN, where I would be spending a quarter-year of my life. Whenever they weren’t on duty, at least one of them would take the time to teach me about things such as cities and eating utensils and telephones and, most of all, about money.
The last proved to be the most difficult concept of human society for me to comprehend. Oh, I could understand the basic concepts and the math of it just fine. But money, as a way of life, seemed insane to me. The humans had lived with it all their lives, so to them it was second nature. But I came from a culture where most important resources were shared more or less freely. If a person needed something, was it not in everyone’s best interest to see that they get it? A hunter with a better weapon catches more food for the community. A woodworker with the proper tools makes better furniture for everyone to use. A Shaman with the appropriate plants makes more effective medicines and poultices.
Myotans do claim some things as our own, mostly luxuries, and we trade for newer and better things, but necessities are never up for negotiation. The whole community helps when the flint knapper needs to find the proper rocks or when the orchard-tenders need help keeping scavengers away. What they do ultimately benefits every individual.
But not with the humans. To a person from the Known Nations, every item and service in the world ultimately has a money value attached to it. If a person cannot pay, they cannot get that item or service. If they cannot afford a vehicle or public transportation, they walk. If they cannot afford clothing, they go naked. If they cannot afford food, they starve.
Madness.
And worse yet, they use colorful strips of paper or, even more confusing, abstract numbers in a computer file as go-betweens for hard goods. Would not straight trade be so much simpler in many cases? If a woodworker wanted food, for example, why didn’t he just give the food provider some of his work in trade? Why did he have to earn this “money” first and then go trade it for food?
Added to this were all sorts of even stranger concepts. Interest, taxes, equity, liquidity, stock fluctuations, bonds, gross profits, net profits and more. How could they keep track of it all?
I rarely thought of my husband’s people as truly alien anymore, except where this ‘money’ was involved.
Still, I managed to learn enough about human-style finances to barely get by while I was in my husband’s homeland. For a few months, anyway. It caused me no small anxiety as we approached the borders of the outermost nation, Zalon.
Neither my husband nor I, nor any of the crew, were prepared for what greeted us as we touched down in Elysium, Zalon’s main support base for helistats. The landing field was thronged with people, many of them toting cameras of various makes and models. As soon as Lerner and I appeared in the helistat’s doorway to disembark, we were overwhelmed with shouts and questions and the blaring lights of more than two hundred cameras.
So many people! There were more humans on that tarmac than Myotans in our entire community. And yet they were only a tiny proportion of a single profession, reporters of news. They jostled and shoved each other, shouting and yelling to have their questions heard over their fellows. I hovered very close to my husband, feeling very much like a wobbly foal surrounded by a slavering wolf-pack half a thousand strong.
It was the first time I truly began to comprehend the scale of the Known Nations, a civilization with five hundred million citizens.
Uniformed humans called police appeared at our side and helped us push our way through to a waiting land vehicle. Once inside a representative of the Outland Exploration Commission drove us to our hotel, apologizing for the “media blitz,” as she called it.
The next few days were a blizzard of press conferences and interviews, many of them very bewildering and exhausting. Both my husband and I were very confused by all this, but when an interviewer showed us a recent issue of Outland Explorer magazine, Lerner began to understand. Over the next several weeks, after he made a number of telephone calls, he explained it to me in a way I could eventually understand.
The magazine had as its cover the photo Lerner had taken of me the night when we first met, which had been included as the Sword of Thorena’s mission inventory. News of our courtship and Mating had just reached the KN a few months before, and had been the feature article in the magazine, one of its most popular issues in its fourteen-year history.
So much of what explorers discovered or brought back from the Outlands were abstract, or worse yet, depressing. The discoveries and first contacts were exciting in their own right and they brought much knowledge, but there was little for the average KN citizen to identify with, to connect with. One discovery seemed to blur into another.
Then the story broke of how a sophontologist stationed deep in the Outlands had won the love of a native "beauty"--the magazine’s words, not mine--and had married her. But, get this, she wasn’t human. It was a romance that crossed all the lines, of distance, of culture, of species. That, the people could identify with. One interviewer said our story was almost Shakespearean, whatever that meant.
Outland Explorer ran the article on us with the title, “The New Face of the Outlands,” focusing on interviews with various Myotans a helistat crew conducted passing by the Tower a few weeks after we were officially Mated. The original author thought the article would get one-time play in one newspaper or another, probably ranking a few inches as a human-interest story. Instead, “OutEx” paid him many thousands of credits and made it the centerpiece of a feature article.
And then a week before the Dream of Milthrai reached the borders of the KN it entered radio range with the KN’s outermost communications outpost and announced that we were coming. The timing was too good for the magazine to pass up. It used all of its considerable influence to muscle up a media frenzy centering
on our arrival.
But all the media attention did have a positive effect. Lerner had been afraid his back-pay would not be able to cover the living expenses and the cost of our medical consultations. But almost as soon as we landed we were inundated with offers and endorsements. We not only ended up with enough money to cover all our expenses while we stayed in his homeland, but we had more than enough to cover all future visits we could expect to make.
After the seemingly endless interviews the tours began, sponsored and advertised heavily by various commercial interests. First was Borelea, the last surviving remnant of the old Borelean Empire, now a progressive democracy. We saw the old Imperial palaces standing just a brisk walk from ultra-modern shopping complexes and industrial parks. Next came the nation with the name of Destiny, the technological leader of the KN and Borelea’s only real challenger for dominance of the KN alliance. Destiny was dominated by the Church of the Sphere, which saw the Builders as the divine agents of the humans’ God. The nation was home to the Great Library, the greatest treasure in all of the Known Nations.
The Great Library was the only building I ever encountered that rivaled the Tower in sheer impressiveness. It was over a kilometer cubed with many projecting towers and ramparts, made of one solid block of UTSite like the Tower. Inside, on long-enduring synth-paper, were exact replicas of over a million old Earth books arrayed on shelf after shelf on a hundred different levels.
After the Great Library, we visited Teranesia, a nation composed of a thousand-plus islands in the vast Diamond Sea, a body of water that rivaled Earth’s Pacific Ocean in size. On one of its remotest islands, Malachon, both the Spider Swarms and the entrance to the Underworld were discovered thirty years before. The Underworld Discoveries sparked the KN’s current Age of Exploration. After Teranesia we swept through the other, lesser nations, all the monuments, curiosities, parks, entertainments, and parties blurring together.
Finally we ended up back in Zalon, the newest and most technologically limited of the Known Nations. It was formed just twenty years earlier by an ambitious Outlands warlord, who immediately joined the KN’s loose alliance as soon as his territories were pacified. It was thousands of kilometers further into the Outlands than the other Known Nations, and was the logical place to build the first great explorer helistat base at the city of Elysium.
All this touring took over half of our three-month stay in Lerner’s homeland. It was a breathless and exciting six weeks which I would not have traded for anything, but I was very glad to settle down for the rest of our stay with Lerner’s human family; his mother Siobhan, father Hiroko, and much younger teen-age sister, Helena. Meeting them was perhaps the most tense moment of my visit to the KN, but thankfully they welcomed me into their home graciously.
It was only after things calmed down a bit after that we finally go to see fertility experts. Thanks to our unprecedented coverage by the media, we had over a dozen clinics vying for us to see them.
As expected, our options for having a child of our own were limited, but not totally restricted. Adoption, artificial insemination, and cloning were what we had to choose from. We had a many long, intimate, and sometimes very strained discussions of what to do. Eventually, after much agonizing, we decided to wait. We were both young and could afford to put it off for a number of years yet. Lerner, though eight years my senior, was a male and therefore had no time limit on his fertility. And I was barely twenty at the time; I had at least another decade yet in which I could get pregnant without worrying about age-related complications. We would return to the KN in the future, when in all likelihood we would opt for embryonic cloning, as that would be the closest we could get to truly having children of our own.
Lerner’s family was wonderful in their support. As among my own people, my husband’s union with me did not meet with universal approval. Our critics and detractors were few but very vocal, winding up almost every day on newscasts, Net chat rooms, columns in the paper or on occasion leading sign-toting protesters at the places where we toured. I so feared that Lerner’s family would be among these.
It did not start off well. His father and sister were very accepting, but his mother at first was cold and quiet around me. It took her a while--and much cajoling by her family--to eventually open up around me. I learned toward the end that she hadn't been resentful of my being non-human, but by the fact that I had taken her son so far away from her. But she told me that in the end she came to realize how happy I made Lerner, and what else could parents really wish for their children? What else really matters in this life?
After that, she insisted I call her Mom.
And in her I saw much of what made Lerner who he was. In truth, all of them were what made most good people who they were: a loving family.
TWENTY
Personality Magazine (PM): What are your impressions of the KN so far, Mrs. Lerner?
Gossamyr Lerner (GL): Your lands are very exciting and fascinating, but a little overwhelming. I am still getting used to seeing so many people all at once.
PM: Not used to crowds?
GL: Not on such a scale. Only three hundred and twenty live at our Tower, and we gather all together only rarely. When my husband took me to a--what is it called?--to a soccer game last week, the stadium was filled with over 40,000 people. 40,000! More than a hundred times all of my people combined, and that is only a tiny fraction of the people who live here in the Known Nations. As I said, it can be a little overwhelming.
PM: I imagine it must not help to find yourself a celebrity.
GL: I still find the idea of “celebrity” to be a very bewildering concept. I do not understand what I have done to deserve such attention. I am only my husband’s Mate.
PM: But that’s just it. People seem to really adore how you and Mr. Lerner fell in love against all odds. You two do make an off-beat and cute couple. My own teen-age daughter just put up a poster of you two in her room.
GL: That is...interesting. Not everyone here thinks so highly of us, though.
PM: It has been reported that you two have had trouble with anti-xenosex protestors.
GL: Yes. They have showed up at almost all of our scheduled appearances, waving their wooden signs and shouting hateful things at us. At first they upset me greatly, and once I made the foolish mistake of trying to argue with them.
PM: They upset you only at first?
GL: My husband eventually pointed out that they were only a small portion of the people who would come to catch a glimpse of us, and that most of the humans we talked to expressed pleasure at seeing us together.
Besides, it is not the first time my husband and I have had to endure hatred because of what we did. I only had to get used to it coming from alien faces.
--condensed from “Gossamyr Lerner: The Interview”, by Aryel Rozhenko, Personality Magazine, November 544 issue, PandoraNet Media, Kylea
* * *
My ears involuntarily twitched in the direction of the door as I detected my husband’s footsteps approaching our apartment. Lerner had a certain human-heavy rhythm to his footsteps that were unmistakable to my Myotan hearing.
The corridor outside was fairly quiet, as at mid-afternoon most of our neighbors were tending to the orchards under the watchful eye of our hunters armed with human guns. The Xique attacks had tapered off dramatically in the last few days, leading many to hope that the mysterious hunters had called off their unknown vendetta against our people.
I hurriedly hobbled about, making sure everything was in its proper place. The crutch was the same one I had used three years ago after I broke my ankle the day we were Mated. As I hurriedly shoved the last of the cooking utensils out of sight I lit the human-made candle on our eating mat with a minor fire-spirit. The candle was a human custom, not a Myotan one, that I hoped my husband would appreciate.
Lerner pulled aside the privacy curtains to our apartment, blinking in confusion. “Goss? What’s going on?”
The main room of our apartment was dimly lit, t
he only illumination was the gentle glowing coals of the central hearth fire and the candle. Our large woven eating mat was freshly-scrubbed and neatly laid out with our nicest wooden bowls and human-made metal eating utensils. At its center stood a thick earthen-ware pot, steam slowly rolling out of the seam of its fitted cover.
“I have kept your early-day meal hot for you,” I said, trying to sound casual.
Lerner pursed his lips. “Goss, Windrider said you were supposed to rest.”
“I was bored. Besides, it was my turn to cook. Are you displeased?”
He shook his head. “Of course not. Just surprised.” He took his accustomed place at the mat. “Smells good. Is that what I think it is?”
I kneeled opposite him, ladling the contents of the pot into his bowl. I took care not to scoop up the fist-sized, fresh-from-the-hearth-fire stone at the bottom that was keeping the contents warm. “One of your favorites. Dhaki stew with leeks and elbow-plant roots.” He began stirring his bowl with interest. “This time I tried mixing in some afghuri leaves and some corhus bark into it. I do not think it came out badly at all.”
His stirring slowed and eventually stopped as he frowned into the bowl’s contents. “What is wrong?” I asked.
He put down the bowl. “Why do you always have to do this, Goss?”
“Do what?”
“Experiment. Take chances with the food.”
I did not understand why he was suddenly so upset. “I like to try new things, as you well know, Lerner. I admit that not everything I have cooked has come out well, but please, at least try it.”
He stood, his voice rising with him. “I’m so sick of this! Why can’t we just have a normal meal? Why do you always have to take some kind of chance with it? Why are you always willing to risk everything on a heartbeat’s notice? Don’t you have any consideration for me? Skies of Earth, why do you always have to be so goddam reckless?”