FSF, March-April 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  Slowly her mind, fuzzed with dehydration, returns to a measure of alertness. The bag deflates until it is nothing but a limp rag in her hand. Following the Firster's example again, she sets it on the “ground” and, employing its winglike bits, it burrows swiftly out of sight. What in hell was that thing? she thinks, then decides that she does not right this moment wish to know. She touches the Firster on cos thigh. “Urrióñene, hwehbállu,” she manages [I thank thee, buddy-my-equal]. “Sorry I was rude earlier."

  "K'háss'hul,” replies the Firster [Nothing, nada, forget it, no worries], with an offhand wave of cos tail. Then, on mountainous impulse, co sweeps her up in cos furry silver arms and licks her all over her face and neck with cos ridiculously phallic blue tongue. When co lets her, gasping, go, she is startled to see tears welling from the sides of its enormous golden eyes.

  "Aw, don't cry,” says Pink. She lifts her hand and wipes away the tears. “Everything will be all right, I promise."

  "Slídhadhrup feared thou wert dying,” blubbers the mountain. “Slídhadhrup knows not what to do for to rescue a dying one."

  "I'm not dying, Slídhadhrup,” says Pink firmly, hoping it is true. “I'm just a little weak, that's all. But the water you brought me really, really helped, and I had a dream just now. I think it was an ürye. It came to me and told me to go toward the yellow.” She points toward the gilded area of the Tangles’ horizon. “I think that's where we'll find Úüv'élleblét/immo. Or it, us."

  * * * *

  11. Earlier than the Middle of the Story, but after the Fwét'het Discussion (We're Sorry, but This Is How the Tangles Work).

  Pink is sitting in the big media room on Ring Five with the rest of the Orientation Class, plus Andréa Sévigny, who is having a mother's second thoughts about permitting her daughter to go on the class trip without her. It is the final class meeting before the big embarkation to Shiphome, and Shipnet drones are floating around recording everything for historic and P.R. purposes. Present are the two Ambassadors from Station to the Concordat Security Council, the Honorable Dvorah Franzheim and her Sixther partner, Awéwet [Honored] Píttu/Háttra'Tümüta/fü; linguists Borm and cos partner Nandi Ziomek, the class's official chaperones; Gerda Rappesdottir, the scary Concord Station P.R. Chief, with her Fourther partner, sweet lilac-eyed Fást/Hahánno'Unésta/fü; and the two Station Security reps who will be accompanying the class, Alexella Sanhueza and her Seconder partner, huge Chiriósso/Vevbróta'Dyéñe/fü.

  Gerda the P.R. lady has taken center stage and is saying, “If any of you people screw this up I will kill you with my bare hands.” Somebody waves. “What?"

  It is Mitch. “Can we take vids?” he drawls. “WorldNet's already beatin’ down mah door and I need to know what to tell mah agent."

  "Recording equipment of any kind is forbidden on Shiphome,” says Gerda, “as well you know, and the transportation and discovery of same will result in your immediate dismissal from this community and deportation back to Earth.” Mitch smirks but subsides. Americans, she thinks. “Other questions?"

  Sven stands up, the better to show off his two and a fifth meters of height. Sven is a platinum blond, ruggedly handsome, with ice-blue eyes, and he is dressed in worn navy blue jeans and a stained embroidered artist's smock, from which his sculptor's powerful arms and hands protrude veinily. He says, “Will we be permitted to tour the Archaics while we are visiting Shiphome? Will we be permitted to experience the Tangles?” He has a very deep voice.

  "No,” says Gerda.

  A brief toilet break is called. Pink finds it difficult to stand, and is glad when her mother appears at her side. Doctor Sévigny says, “Are you all right, ma chérie?” Pink replies, “Bien sûr, maman,” [of course, Mom], and tries not to fall over. Pink is wearing a smart emerald silk suit, a necklace of black cultured pearls, and high heels dyed to match the necklace. Her orange dreadlocks have been pulled back from her face a trifle, and she has a lot of fluorescent makeup on, the effect of which is slightly spoiled by the enormous peacock feather hat she is wearing. “Don't worry about me, maman,” adds Pink into her mother's shoulder (they are nearly of a height). “What could happen with Borm as chaperone?” And they both laugh in not-entirely-mock consternation.

  The break is soon over. When the class has reassembled, little, old, blonde, exquisitely dressed Ambassador Franzheim says in her soft, cultured, riveting voice, “I need hardly remind you all that this is an historic occasion. For the past twenty-two years of this Station's existence, the Human staff has been assigned D'/fü partners by Shiphome. As a system, it has worked on the whole very well.” She smiles up at her partner, and Awéwet Píttu, one of the few Sixth Cyclers Pink has ever seen, smiles down at her D'/fü-style: lips pursed, dark violet eyes aglow with love and humor. Like all Sixthers, Píttu is short, only a bit over two meters tall, and winged, cos mane curiously liquid in appearance, like strands of blondish mercury. Pink thinks, And I'm going to be stuck with a stupid Firster! Then shame floods her, and she hangs her head.

  "However,” Ambassador Franzheim continues, “as the United Nations Security Council winds down what we all hope will be its final session of debates on the Shiphome-to-Sol System immigration question, Shiphome has agreed to invite you, the first Orientation Class of 2200, to meet and find your D'/fü partners on their own home ground, as it were. Awéwet Píttu?"

  Politely Awéwet Píttu places cos hands upon cos chests, the D'/fü equivalent of a bow, opens and closes cos silver-blond wings, and says, “All of my fü hope that you will feel yourselves as welcomed by our beloved Ámash/Bórmwu as we have felt welcomed by you here.” Co has a glorious, mellifluous triple-voice, underscored by a faint, sweet scent not unlike that of a Madonna lily Pink once smelled in the gardens of the Catholic girls’ school she attended as a child; and at cos first words the assembled class is enthralled. “It is my singular honor to convey to you a personal message from Shiphome's guiding council, Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü.” Co pronounces the honorific HASS-droov-MYAY-myay-myay, which (recalls Pink) means “The Many In One."

  Gasps are heard all over the room, because everybody knows that direct Seventher communication with Humans is vastly rare. The Net-drones make a tight circle around the assembly, like sharks sensing prey. Ambassador Píttu gestures, the lights in the meeting room dim, and a holo springs up at the center of the meeting table.

  The figure revolving slowly in the holo scarcely resembles a D'/fü at all. The Seventher measures a mere meter and a quarter from end to end, a height Pink herself has not enjoyed since she was five. The ürye's torso is faintly furred, and cos scent organs appear as pale lilac ovals scattered over the surface of cos translucent skin, through which Pink can see Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü's internal organs pulsing. In place of two arms and two legs co possesses four clusters of tentacles, not round like rats’ tails but flattish and flexible. And like the seraphim witnessed by the Jewish prophet Isaiah, the ürye possesses two pairs of wings: one above (that is, one wing-pair issuing from the Seventher's upper shoulders) and one below (the second wing-pair issuing from the base of cos spine).

  But Sútchdhu's eyes are pure D'/fü. As Pink watches each set come around, new beauty assails her, though afterwards she cannot remember the color of any of them. One face's eyes appear supernally calm; looking into them, Pink feels her fears of the trip melt away. Another face's eyes seem sharply assessing; Pink feels herself quail as their gaze appears to fall upon her. A third face is alive with such mischief that Pink giggles. A fourth glows with such passionate love that Pink feels her cheeks burning in response. And a fifth face's eyes are so sad Pink struggles to keep from bursting into tears.

  But when the sixth face comes around, Pink feels a chill pass up her spine and the hairs at the back of her neck stand erect. For the eyes of this face are closed tight, their lids silver ovals, the only parts of the creature's body that are not translucent. Yet when they turn in her direction, Pink knows beyond the shadow of a doubt t
hat they are seeing her. This is a holo, she reminds herself. A recording. They can't be seeing you.

  The face of the ürye with the closed eyelids revolves on, and she is free again. She peeks around the table. Everybody in the meeting room, Human and D'/fü, is standing as still as a statue, attention entirely absorbed by the image floating over the center of the table. Nobody is twitching. Nobody is farting. Nobody is doing or saying anything. And inexplicably, there is no sound issuing from the recording at all, but nobody seems to notice except her.

  Suddenly Pink is afraid again and she does not know why.

  Pink sits in her seat at the table in the petrified room, not looking at the holo, wondering why she of all those present cannot apparently hear any sound from the recording. She thinks of how Catherin Castleton, the WorldNet commentator who accompanied the First Human Expedition to Shiphome in 2117 (before skipflight, before Concord Station, before anything), described the ürye she met as “fairylike, in the oldest sense of the term” and (in one of her final recordings, when she lay dying of supercancer in a D'/fü healing annex) as “saints"—not selfless warriors of the Good, like the holy women Pink tried to emulate in her early years at school, but (Castleton explained ramblingly) “ones set apart” from normal spacetime, “whose experience and conception of reality is radically different” from anything a Human or even most D'/fü could understand.

  "I am convinced,” Castleton said, “that ürye'te exist only periodically in spacetime,” about which a sarcastic professor in Pink's secondary school Physics class once remarked, “So who doesn't?"

  Pink peers up at the holo again. Slowly the creature in the holo revolves, and then Pink gets the uncomfortable feeling of eyes behind her—not ürye'te eyes, but some other's. So she turns in her seat, and there, standing not a meter and a half away, is a thin, thin, tall old sunburnt Caucasian woman with a snubby nose and freckles and short white hair and beautiful green eyes saying, “Ne sortis pas! Ne sortis pas!” [Don't go! Don't go!]

  "Pourquoi non, mémé?” Pink responds [Why not, Granny?], for she sees no reason why she should be respectful to an unsolicited vision addressing her in the French familiar form. She notices then that the crone is wearing some kind of uniform, tattered a bit, but with a slightly altered Concordat sigil affixed to one shoulder: Human and D'/fü hands joining, supporting not the Earth between them, as in the sigil she knows, but the Milky Way galaxy. This gives her such a strange feeling that she nearly misses the next thing the old bat says: “Parce que si tu sortis, tu n'auras ni mari ni les enfants, mais l'univers seulement!” [Because if you go, you will have neither husband nor children, but only the universe.] “Décides!” [Decide!]

  There is a disjoint; a snapping. Pink jerks. The holo of Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü is gone. There is all around her the odd sound of grownups weeping. The elderly Englishwoman is looking very, very thoughtful. Mitch the class bad boy is sitting with a stunned expression, chewing on his cuticles. Handsome Sven has fallen forward onto the meeting table, his ice-blue eyes tightly shut, leaking tears out of their edges. Ambassador Franzheim and Awéwet Píttu are moving around the table, bending over this one solicitously, whispering in the ear of that one. Nandi and Borm, the chaperones, are nowhere to be seen, and all the StationNet drones are hovering near the ceiling, recording lights conspicuously OFF.

  At the front of the room, Gerda the P.R. lady is in fierce sotto voce consult with her partner, Fast, and the Security team, and Gerda being Gerda, this means that her voice can be heard all over the noisy chamber, saying, “What the [slang term for sexual congress] do they expect us to do now? Look at these people! They've been traumatized, and they're [slang term for sexual congress] due to leave in half a [slang term for sexual congress] hour, for Buddha's sake!"

  "Juliana?” At first Pink thinks it is the crone back again, and she flinches, but it is only her mother the exozoologist, crouching near her chair. “Oh, maman,” Pink says, and for the first time in a very long time flings herself into her mother's arms and hugs her close. “She warned me not to go!"

  "Who? Who warned you not to go where?"

  "The old lady,” Pink replies. “She warned me that if I went on the class trip today, I would be given the universe but denied a husband and children."

  "An old woman appeared to you?” Pink nods. “And she told you you must choose between the universe and a family?” Pink nods. An odd look comes over Andrea Sévigny's face.

  "Maman,” says Pink, “I think that the ürye, or maybe Awéwet Píttu, did something to us.” Pink points with her chin across the room, to where Ambassador Píttu is stroking the hair of a sobbing, bull-necked young military type whose name, Pink recalls vaguely, is Vanya.

  "So it would appear,” says the exozoologist. “And to answer the question on your face, no, I experienced nothing extraordinary beyond witnessing the holo of a Seventher with the most exquisite voices imaginable speaking incomprehensibly in Adult Mánafut."

  "Pardon.” The Sévignies turn and give Ambassador Franzheim identical looks of mutually protective belligerence. She blinks. “I'm sorry. May I speak with you?"

  "No,” says Andrea Sévigny, at the same time Pink says, “Okay.” Pink hesitates, then, but seeing her mother clamping lips tight, Pink throws caution to the winds. “Ambassador,” says the elf-stork. “Was this some kind of test? Was that really an ürye who spoke with us?"

  The trim old blonde woman nods. “Disorientating, I'm afraid. But thrilling, thrilling! History is made here once more! Did you, too, Miss Sévigny, have a numinous experience during Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü's message?"

  "I'm not sure,” replies Pink, partly because it is the truth, and partly because she is unwilling to admit that she does not know what “numinous” means. So she tells Ambassador Franzheim all about it.

  As Pink relates her vision, the Ambassador's eyes grow brighter and brighter and more and more intent. When Pink is finished, Franzheim says, “And what is your response, Miss Sévigny? Will you choose les enfants et un mari or l'univers? Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü is waiting for your answer."

  * * * *

  12. Well on the Way to the Middle, Now. (Yes, This Is Rather a Long Story, But It Will soon Be over, You'll See).

  The journey to Shiphome from Concord Station on the skipship Bifurcated Androgyne takes, relativistically speaking, no time at all. Most of the time that elapses during the trip is taken up with getting the twenty-four classmembers and their chaperones aboard; settling everybody into their seats along the walls of the communal passenger bay; seeing to passenger hydration ("Nipple's on the wall"); putting the Human passengers to sleep so their untrained monkeybrains won't interfere with the slédhdha/máttawi [skiptrance, mystical skipunion] of the sledh [six-member skipcrew, three D'/fü, three augmented Human]; and revving up the impulse engines so the Androgyne can get far enough away from Station to cause no untidiness when the skipshift occurs. Elena Belicista, a particle physicist from Spain, explains to Pink that the ship is driven by “what we in Spain call an NVAC drive."

  "NVAC? What's that stand for?” asks Pink.

  "No Viene Al Caso," says the physicist, a motherly middle-aged woman who, despite possessing similarly glossy black hair and similarly snapping dark eyes, is as approachable as Velasquez-Villareal is terrifying. “Which means in English, Beside-the-Point."

  The skip is uneventful. Pink closes her eyes, having taken off her shoes and hat and permitted her seat's webbing to envelop her snugly; and the next thing she knows Borm is saying, “Look, wee powerful Human friends, look!” The webbing has dissolved, and there, filling the bay's realtime holoscreen, is Shiphome, with yellow Rigel Kent and its red dwarf partner Alpha Centauri B hanging not far off in the close, star-smeared distance. (The third partner, Alpha C, is too far away for easy notice.) Pink cannot speak at first; it is all too thrilling and beautiful for words: Shiphome, Ámash/Bórmwu, the artificial living planet in which the Damánakíppith/fü have traveled the galaxy fo
r thousands of Human years.

  "Madre de Buda,” whispers the particle physicist.

  The Androgyne's impulse engines chug onward. It takes about an hour to come within docking distance of the satellite, and long before then Shiphome has ceased to resemble a perfect, glowing, featureless, iridescent pearl and has been revealed as coated with three thousand years’ worth of accretions, add-ons, and detritus: some resembling Human-comprehensible huts, waystations, tracks, and portholes, others incomprehensibly writhing with cilia, or puffing with balloonlike attachments that expand and collapse at regular intervals, or fluttering, fluttering, fluttering in the solar winds. Closer still, and Pink is able to point out to the physicist spacesuited D'/fü applying starglop in wide shining smears to the shining hull. “Star glop?” says the Spaniard.

  "Plasta de las estrellas,” manages Pink, who knows just enough Spanish to get by. “It's a kind of biomedicine and growth stimulant some of the unésta'te make to help heal Shiphome's skin when it gets burned or punctured."

  Belicista observes her with bright eyes. “How strange it must have been for you these past few years, on this Station all alone with only your mother and other adults and los centauros."

  "It's been okay,” says Pink, wishing this part of the conversation were over. As if sensing this, the woman does not speak again, and they sit in silence watching the living planet grow larger and larger and larger until it is swallowing them and the Androgyne and the universe beyond.

  * * * *

  13. Third Interlude: Beside the Point.

  The old woman peers out from the protective cover of the tanglefern, watching her younger self snore. Borm was right, she thinks, smiling. There is a grammar to mammaries.

  In her hand she cups the thing with which she has intended to slay the past. She is still not sure she will use it. If she does, then sleeping Pink will never know the worlds upon worlds which the old woman and her sledh have found, explored, mapped. She will never know the excitement of observing sentient races in their infancies, adolescences, maturities, or of being the first to welcome the three who have joined the Concordat. The old woman smiles again, thinking of Sister Skylark. The Flex!tibb, the Údh, and the Háharaháhahárraha do not resemble in the slightest the crew of the Beatific Vision, or, for that matter, the crew of the Indolent Tesseract, her own vessel. How very provincial of us to have always assumed that alien sentients would have faces, she thinks wryly.