And didn’t that open a whole can of worms that I wasn’t quite ready to dive into.
Uncomfortable.
That was one of the things we hadn’t talked about and continued not to talk about. We were both nominal grown-ups, healthy, who liked each other, and we were confined in a small space very close to each other in all sorts of ways. Shared dormitory, right? And yet neither of us suggested a really obvious way of passing the time. Reluctance? Awkwardness? Or was Tekura uneasy about my handicap?
Or was it just me?
I was working in the hydroponics section, the one that helped refresh the air and provide us with fresh veggies for our journey, and I nearly dropped my pH meter when the whoop-whoop-whoop of the alarm sounded.
I sprinted for the bridge, but Tekura was there ahead of me. ‘A small ship of unknown origin has set off a repeating beacon. No other details,’ she said. ‘I’ve contacted the authorities. What do we do now?’
‘We go to their aid.’
‘We what?’
‘It’s the Law of the Sea. The nearest vessel to a vessel in distress is obligated to render assistance.’
‘That’s your Uncle Jayden, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the right thing to do.’
I peered at the ship’s display then jabbed at my doodad so hard I lost my grip on it, but I caught it after it bounced off the deck. ‘Two, three hours, maybe less, we’ll be there.’ What sort of vessel would be all the way out here? It was millions of kilometres from the asteroid belt. No prospector in her right mind would be in this part of space. A smuggler? A schoolies trip gone badly wrong?
Mystery.
Nothing happens fast in interplanet travel, so we kicked back with the Go board. I practised my calmness while being slaughtered.
A few hours later Tekura lifted her head. ‘Uh-oh. The distress call. It’s loose on the Stream.’
‘We’re live? Spy eyes are all the way out here?’
‘News sellers are looking for any news everywhere, all the time.’
It took me a minute or so, but my doodad showed me that a couple of spy eyes had picked up the distress call and had beaten us to the drifting vessel. Tekura interfaced my doodad with the ship’s display so I could get a better view. It was a battered-looking spaceship of unfamiliar design but looked even older than the Port Vila. It was both rolling and yawing, and it wasn’t a good sign. No captain would allow a ship to tumble like that if she had a choice.
My hands hurt and I realised that I was gripping the armrests of my chair really, really hard.
‘It’s Palmeenee.’ Tekura was staring up and away to her right, making that twirly index-finger motion that I’d been told meant some serious data diving. ‘War refugees.’
Wow.
Humanity has met very few alien species in our push into the universe. The Palmeenee were one of them and, as alien species go, they were about as alien as they come.
A Japanese exploring team found the Palmeenee world circling Kepler-186 and must have been overjoyed. Yorokobi was reasonably Earth-like, except for the lack of just about any dangerous animals or plants. It was such a paradise it took nearly a hundred years before the settlers realised that the planet was already home to an intelligent species. The Palmeenee hadn’t been noticed earlier because there weren’t many of them — and they kept to themselves, mostly in underground settlements. They were smart — incredibly so in areas like social dynamics — but they had no real curiosity and so never sought out the newcomers to their world. Even after first contact was made and a linguistic bridge set up, they weren’t hungry for interaction. Trade, commerce, exchange of ideas didn’t interest them. Dancing, swap meets and speed dating weren’t even on the table. They weren’t aggressive, and any dealings were almost painfully polite, but they left humanity to itself.
Strange.
The earliest contact did come up with one stunning fact, though — the Palmeenee had been a spacefaring species but had given it up ‘a long time ago’. When the settlers had got over a bad case of the WTFs, they pressed the Palmeenee, who just mumbled vaguely about how they’d had enough space travel and couldn’t see any point in going further.
Which made them the perfect collateral damage when the war spread to that quadrant. Neither the Blues nor the Greens avoided Palmeenee settlements when trying to smash each other. Casualties were high, but the Palmeenee never retaliated, which meant they continued to be overlooked and continued to take casualties.
Some of them, though, had had enough.
The Palmeenee ship shouldn’t have made it this far. It looked as if it was made for short hops, and from the signs of damage on it, it had been caught in at least one skirmish. The Port Vila’s AI managed to edge us alongside so Tekura and I could rig up a connection to bring the refugees into one of the cargo bays.
Describing alien species is tricky because they’re alien. Which sounds stupid, but it’s actually profound if you think about it. For a start, their biology works in different ways from ours. They’ve sprung from different origins, after all. And as for psychology and behaviour, that’s spawned all sorts of research. Careers have been made out of trying to make sense of Palmeenee minds. Still, we make the mistake of assuming that aliens behave like we do. I guess we’re trying to find some basis for connection in the grand human way.
But if I’m getting all philosophical, I say that there must be a few things that all life shares, and valuing self-preservation is one of them. If your home is being crushed by a disaster — and it doesn’t matter if it’s natural or something else — then you’re going to want to get out of there, fastest. You’ll want to look for somewhere else to live, somewhere that’s safer. And — here’s where I could be going out on a limb — most intelligent species seem to have some sort of regard for their offspring. They want to protect them, help them grow up and live a decent life. That has to give you even more motivation to get the heck out of a war-torn planet.
Sensible.
Physically, it’s hard not to compare the Palmeenee to crustaceans of some kind. Insects, maybe? They have eight limbs and a hard exoskeleton at least. They spend a lot of their time with their spine arched back and the forelegs raised. These are their manipulators as they have sets of opposable claws. When upright like this, they can get to a couple of metres tall. I’ve heard them compared to praying mantises or scorpions, but now that I was seeing them up close I scrapped those comparisons. The Palmeenee were simply something else.
And they smelled like bread. Warm, fresh bread. Mmm.
Their contact with humans had taught them a few things. One of the taller Palmeenee pressed forward as a spokesperson. It — I wasn’t going to even guess which of the four sexes the spokesperson was — tried a few languages in its whistling, clicking voice before settling on English. ‘We have hurt. We have injured. We ask your help. Please. Please.’
A full-scale tourist spaceship would have a doctor on board, maybe two, and a nice shiny clinic. All the Port Vila could offer was a first-aid cabinet.
Tekura went into a near-constant Stream trance, diving for information on Palmeenee physiology and the best way to render first aid, working side-by-side with the Palmeenee spokesperson. I helped by finding blankets, bringing water, mopping up bright-red Palmeenee blood, sorting through our supplies to see what food would be acceptable, stopping Palmeenee trying to access the rest of the ship, and even holding Palmeenee down by their raspy shoulders while Tekura and the spokesperson went to work.
We had no anaesthetics that were effective on Palmeenee, so I found out what the Palmeenee sound of agony was, something I wish I could scrub from my memory.
Look, it was grim. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t, so if I’ve edited out some of the more awful parts, you’ll understand. The stuff about the injured Palmeenee kids, particularly.
Tekura accessed the Stream in a way that made me jealous for about the billionth time in my life. She was even able to grab a few words of Palmeenee to help calm and reas
sure our guests. Me? I couldn’t handle my doodad while I needed both hands to help carry a wounded Palmeenee, or shift pallets, or drag useful items from the Palmeenee ship to ours. I was dumb labour, mostly, but doing the best I could. How could I not?
All I could do was slap in a course for Mars, the nearest port. Get them there quickest and they’d have the best chance of surviving.
Time went blurry in the urgency. I don’t know when Tekura dragged our Go board down from the bridge, but she found time after reading an article by one of the early settlers on Yorokobi.
I now know what excitement looks like among Palmeenee. When Tekura and I presented the board, there was a lot of straightening and tapping front claws together, almost like applause. Five of the little ones clattered over to us and the spokesperson had to herd them away to let us through. When we reached the spokesperson he/she/it/jher bowed. ‘We are honoured. Will you take black?’
While just about all of the able-bodied Palmeenee clustered around, Tekura beat the spokesperson three games in a row. The spokesperson bowed. ‘You play well.’
Tekura bowed in return. ‘So do you.’
‘We learned from the settlers on Yorokobi. Playing Go with them was good.’ His/her/its/jher upper body rose and twisted from side to side. ‘Do you know what happened to them?’
‘The settlers?’ Tekura bit her lip, riffling through the data in front of her. She went pale. ‘None of them are left.’
Silence fell in the cargo bay, a stillness it hadn’t had since the Palmeenee arrived. Eventually, the spokesperson tapped his/her/its/jher chest with a claw. ‘Go is a worthwhile product of your civilisation. War is not.’
Soon, Go became the centre of Palmeenee activity in the cargo bay. As a distraction and a time filler, it was a winner. The Palmeenee organised tournaments and league tables in a way so complicated that my doodad gave up analysing it.
I found out something, too, that made me feel even warmer towards the Palmeenee. They had no access to the Stream. No implants, no doodads, no curiosity, remember? I had a whole bunch of Streamless buddies, and they were as alien as I sometimes felt.
Irony.
By this time, the Port Vila was well on its way to Mars and it was surrounded by a flock of spy eyes. All of the news dealers, looking to make a buck out of selling news to the universe, were desperate to know what was going on inside our vessel. Vultures? Scavengers? Bottom-feeding slime suckers? Honest workers? Who could tell?
One of the mid-size Palmeenee pushed a cup of water into my hands and herded me away from the chaos. He/she/it/jher took me to the corner of the cargo bay and waited until I slumped onto a stool before bustling off. I sipped and got my doodad to cast a display. The Port Vila was trending hotter than hot on the Stream, swamping just about everything else in the news sphere. Billions were talking about us, offering opinions, making promises and threats, wanting to proposition us, demanding to know our motives and how we felt about it all. I was even on a T-shirt.
We were the biggest thing in the solar system.
As tired as I was, I had to laugh. Without trying, we’d achieved something that half of humanity desperately wanted. We were scaling skywards, we were bobbing up at the top of news feeds, we were bumping celebrity weddings aside. Anyone who saw themselves as up to date with current affairs had to know about us. The history of the Port Vila was being searched as we worked. Even our backgrounds were being picked apart. I shied away from that. It took an effort, but I honoured the promise I’d made to Tekura not to probe about her family, even though there it was being kicked around the news sphere. I won’t say I wasn’t tempted, but then I saw that she had her arm around the tallest Palmeenee and she was helping him/her/it/jher to some bedding against one of the bulkheads. She was humming a song, gently, softly, as she eased the Palmeenee to the blankets.
I killed the screen of temptation, picked up a broom and started sweeping up old Palmeenee scales. Before too long I started humming, too. After that it was a short step to soft shoe shuffling a little, side to side, as I swept.
‘You can do better than a broom for a partner,’ Tekura said.
I jumped. I hadn’t seen her draw near.
She held out a hand. I gave the broom to a junior-sized Palmeenee, who stared at it, and then Tekura and I were in each other’s arms, dancing. We had no music, but it didn’t matter much. For a few moments, our exhaustion disappeared and for a moment that was a bubble in time, instead of being caught up in a refugee emergency we were enjoying an end-of-year schoolies interplanetary trip.
‘You can dance,’ Tekura murmured.
My head was on her shoulder. She smelled good. ‘You sound surprised.’
‘Pleased, is all.’
‘The Palmeenee are staring at us.’
‘Let them stare.’
‘They’re good starers.’
‘We’re good dancers.’
Tekura and I shuttled between the bridge and the cargo bay that was now the Palmeenee sickbay and living quarters. We must have spent a little bit of time in the mess, feeding ourselves, I guess.
Our refugee rescue blew up a political storm. For years, the Earth government had backed away from taking sides in the whole Green–Blue war, but it was facing a general election in a couple of months’ time so we became hot stuff. Real-time constant polling was showing that the government had been losing popularity for ages. It’d been in power for a decade and it looked as if people wanted a change, so the Palmeenee refugee situation was an opportunity for the government to show how strong it was. Commentators were frothing at the mouth and barking about keeping these aliens out, wanting to send them back to where they came from, and the government bigwigs were quick to respond.
Commentators? Who are they? As far as I can tell they’re people who work totally from a ‘no evidence at all’ basis and simply say whatever comes into their head. Trouble is, people — and governments — listen.
Incredible.
Tekura was cynical. ‘Okay, Mr Naive,’ she said over a rare moment when we were drinking cups of coffee at the same time. I didn’t want to start yawning as I thought I’d never stop. She had dark circles under her eyes from tiredness. ‘Let me explain it to you. Xenophobia is fantastic for governments. They can use it.’
‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ I was sitting down and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get up again. My head was made of iron and the table was a massive magnet pulling it down.
‘Can be, but that doesn’t stop them using it. It’s the classic us-and-them ploy. They’re going to come and grab our jobs from us. They have a different way of life from us. Our culture/heritage/breakfast cereal is going to be taken away from us by them.’
‘That’s stupid.’
‘Yes. Yes it is. But it serves those who need to use it, like for elections. They manipulate the truth, keep it from people, and so xenophobia grows. The best way to overcome xenophobia is to share knowledge, to share the truth.’
‘I thought we were going to be heroes, coming to the rescue like that.’
‘Looks like we rescued the wrong ship for that.’
Mars wouldn’t let us dock at Deimos Station.
I let the ship’s AI put us into orbit while I scrambled to find Tekura. As usual, she was in the middle of a knot of little Palmeenee while trying to understand what one of the big ones was getting at and keeping an eye on the worst of the injured. Not far away, the Go tournament raged in silence.
You know, one of the more amazing things about the Palmeenee was how quiet they were. If this cargo bay was full of humans it’d be full of chaos. Noisy, too. The Palmeenee went about their suffering quietly. Maybe that was part of the problem. Too quiet for their own good? I’d hate it if that was how things worked.
Tekura’s eyes went wide. ‘They what?’
‘The government back on Earth says that we can’t bring the Palmeenee refugees into port. Deimos Station is closed to us.’
Tekura rubbed one of the little Palmeenee behind its
ear plates. It jumped up and down and squirled. ‘What are we going to do, Captain?’
I looked behind me, but then I realised that Tekura was being serious. I rubbed a hand over my face. How long had it been since I’d had a shower?
‘Damien?’
Tekura was still waiting for an answer. ‘We’re going to follow the Law of the Sea,’ I said. ‘The Palmeenee refugees are owed assistance at the nearest port of call — and Deimos Station is the nearest port of call.’
I tried arguing with the authorities. I cited international, interplanetary and interstellar law. I tried to lean on their humanity, but I couldn’t find any. The government authorities controlled passage through Deimos Station, and they were standing firm.
I may have shouted a bit, too.
After kicking things and punching things and storming around for a while, I had an idea. Businesses down on Mars hated the way the Earth government controlled who could and couldn’t land on Mars. In fact, most of the businesses on Mars hated the whole idea of government, but that’s another matter. I had a sneaking suspicion that some of these mavericks might not mind breaking the government embargo — if there was a profit in it. And hosting a bunch of alien refugees and then selling media access to the highest bidder, could be a once-in-a-lifetime jackpot, enough to make company chairpeople dizzy.
So I had to wheel and deal with a whole bunch of people who were expert wheelers and dealers. After five minutes, my head hurt. After ten, I wanted to blow them all up. After thirty, I was in a dead zone and automatically playing one off against the other.
This was going to take some time.
The Palmeenee spokesperson asked for an update, wanting to know what was going on, but it wasn’t through curiosity. It was through worry. While I could provide info, though, I couldn’t supply explanations. Why were we still in orbit? What was taking so long? Why were the Palmeenee still suffering?
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