Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  “Do they have gender?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I don’t have the eye for male verses female. They’ll have both here. They’re tri-gendered, though. They have a third, asexual gender that is responsible for caring for their young.”

  “Females don’t raise children?” she asked. Jesse shook his head.

  “A family constitutes of a male, a female, and a neuter, if you want to be crude about it. They have a word for it, but it doesn’t translate well into most languages. A breeding pair would never consider procreating without a caretaker. You’ll know them, if you ever see them.”

  “Do they have gendered pronouns?” Cassie asked. “I can’t tell.”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “In English, they’d all be ‘he’.”

  She watched them as they spoke quietly to each other or left in search of other things.

  “It’s amazing what they’ve accomplished,” she said. “Considering they don’t have any dry land to work on.”

  Jesse laughed.

  “It’s amazing what you primates have accomplished, considering how dumb you are,” he answered, rolling his head away when she gave him her wide-eyed look in response. “You know what I mean. You sent people to the moon with explosive propulsion. Imagine how that looks to those of us who were born into a universe that understood instantaneous point-mass translation.”

  Cassie blinked. He laughed again.

  “See what I mean?”

  She chose to ignore him.

  “Whey didn’t they just build islands?” she asked.

  “Lack of plant life that will survive in air,” he said. She frowned and he shook his head. “Wait until you’ve seen the tides. If you don’t get it then, I’ll explain it.”

  Someone returned with food and Cassie accepted a smooth calcium dish with strips of raw sea-meat on it. She prodded it experimentally and found that it had the appropriate fishy texture she’d expected. It was bloody, but not grotesque. She noticed that the Adena Lampak were watching her. She looked at Jesse for a cue on how to eat. He used his fingers, slurping the strips of meat and then tearing them with his fingers.

  Sushi.

  She ate.

  The fish was salty and had an iron flavor that confirmed the source of the red blood. Beyond that, she couldn’t call it familiar, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The Adena Lampak tossed the strips down whole, but she had to eat them in parts, like Jesse. After, they brought her a stone jar with water in it.

  “That will be fresh water,” Jesse said. “Drink as much as you can. You can drink again when we leave, but that’s all you’ll get all day.”

  She was eager to rinse her mouth out, and the quantity of salt she’d consumed was beginning to be overpowering. She drank greedily, then passed the jar to Jesse, who drank at least as much as she had. After, the Adena Lampak settled onto their cots.

  “Sleep,” Jesse said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

  They swam for another two spans of time before the sun set. Cassie’s skin itched and marbled white with salt, but the second tower they stopped at had a surplus of skins that they allowed Cassie and Jesse to take in place of clothing that felt increasingly like cardboard. One of the Adena Lampak they were traveling with even offered to carry their clothes so they wouldn’t have to leave them behind.

  Cassie began to appreciate the quiet community that the Adena Lampak represented. She still struggled to distinguish one from another of them, but they were kind to her, considerate that she needed rest and friendly in their cool way. When the sun set, they stayed at a tower and waited for daylight again, at least three or four days. Cassie slept and ate as she wanted, and one of the Adena Lampak took her to a point under the skin roofing where a cascade of water came down during a rainstorm so that she could wash. The rain was cold, but having clean skin for the next few days meant more to her than she could express.

  She sat with Jesse for hours, watching the fire-lit life that the Adena Lampak lived in the dark hours. They were more confident in the dark than she would have imagined. Many of them, Jesse told her, specialized in hunting in the dark. The predators were different, and many of the schooling water animals - fish was a misnomer - followed the darkness around the planet in streams. The long daylight would bring a bloom of photosynthetic plant life, and the swimming schools were built to chase it, in darkness, until they exhausted themselves. They would find deep water to rest in through daylight, then they would take up the charge again.

  She slept as she wanted, woke in firelight, and found the entire experience intellectually stimulating and restful, even if the Adena Lampak around her were not usually interested in speaking with her.

  The dawn, which took hours to break, was beautiful.

  It felt like her skin was going to rub off. She’d spent three solid days in the ocean, and Jesse told her that he thought the salts were a little more corrosive than the ones on Earth. She was dry everywhere and thirsty constantly, but the garments she had to wear, at least, sheeted water and were dry in minutes. They had another rain storm go by during that second ‘day’, but they’d been in the water and she’d been unable to rinse herself clean.

  Her shoulders ached, but they made steady progress, finally arriving at a huge sea structure the Adena Lampak called Calenna.

  The posts rooted into the sea floor dozens of feet below were building sized. Cassie counted ten, but it was hard to be sure exactly how many of the largest posts there were amid the maze of smaller posts.

  “Wow,” she murmured when they paused and she had her first chance to wipe her eyes and look at it.

  “Calenna pales in comparison to Elsa that was,” the Adena Lampak who had been pulling her said.

  “How do you destroy something like that?” she asked.

  “You haven’t seen the tides,” he answered. She had meant to ask, philosophically, how one could be driven to destroy such an accomplishment, but she didn’t clarify.

  “Speaking of the tides,” another Adena Lampak said. There was a murmur of consensus.

  “They come,” someone said. Cassie rode the waves, looking at the faces around her.

  “How long do you have?” Jesse asked.

  “We would have stayed for a rest, here, if we had made better time,” another of the Adena Lampak said. “But we can only give you an introduction and leave.”

  Another group of Adena Lampak arrived.

  “You bring strangers,” one of them said.

  “He has offered to help,” came the reply.

  “He requests to see the Url.”

  “The Url is very busy,” the first speaker said.

  “He is Palta.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Very well. Return to your tower. We will take them. The tides come.”

  There was a shuffle as the new guard of Adena Lampak came to help Cassie and Jesse swim in, then the old group vanished into the water without a word. Cassie looked back once, but there was no sign of the group that had taken care of them for the last several days. She looked ahead toward the great Adena Lampak city.

  If Cassie had thought that the outposts were complex, they were nothing compared to the city. Her human mind was used to things that existed in a grid structure, mostly a two-dimensional one. The Adena Lampak had a mindset that allowed for a lot of shapes that she would have never considered building. It reminded her of a model she’d seen of an anthill, once. Where they needed stairways, they put stairways. Where they wanted towers, they built towers. The great posts seemed to be the only fixed structure that continued all the way up through the city.

  They were escorted by a silent group of Adena Lampak to a room that was, like all of the Adena Lampak rooms, open to the sea air. Unlike all of the other rooms Cassie had seen, this one had furniture that felt familiar to her.

  There were chairs, and a table, and against one of the rails were a set of chests. The Adena Lampak said something quietly to Jesse and, setting their clothes by the d
oorway, left. He threw himself into one of the chairs.

  “You’re welcome to go through everything,” he said. “They imported some of it, but most of it is local-made.”

  “What is it?” Cassie asked, opening the first trunk.

  “People in the universe tend to come in archetypes,” Jesse said, looking out over the water. “We’ve been sorted.”

  “We’ve what?” Cassie asked, digging out a set of glasses. “What are these?”

  Jesse rolled his head to the side to look at her.

  “Look like goggles.”

  “What?”

  He stood.

  “You expect them to look like ones made by your manufacturing facilities?” he asked. “Not everyone has a nose, Cass.”

  She glowered at him.

  “You expect me to recognize these?” she asked, holding up the strange contraption of spun seagrass and glass. He sighed.

  “You’re going to like them,” he said, fixing them to her face.

  “Yeah, these are going to work,” she said, putting her finger between the glass and her face.

  “It’s because you left the rest of it in the box,” he said, digging through the strange collection to find a collection of rubbery pieces that Cassie never would have guessed went with the glasses. Jesse fitted them to the glasses and then found a jar of paste that he used to seal the glasses.

  “You wouldn’t believe what we missed on the way here, because we can’t see underwater,” he said, tightening things up behind her head.

  “I look like a Victorian inventor,” she said, feeling her face.

  “You’d be surprised,” he said as he stepped away.

  “So…” she said. “I’m just supposed to wear these?”

  “No,” he said. “I just wanted to glue them to your face before you knew what I was doing.”

  “You what?” she asked, tugging at the glasses. He grinned and went to sit again, watching as she wrestled the strings and levers back off, leaving the rubber and glass glued to her face.

  “Gonna kill you,” she muttered, scratching at the seal and finally getting an edge up to peel them off. He put his feet up and stretched.

  “Having fun?” she asked.

  “Gotta do something for entertainment,” he said. “They’re going to leave us waiting here for a while.”

  They spent the rest of the day and the entire dark period in the room. Jesse helped her unpack, turning the space into a much more livable area. They draped skins to give themselves some cover from the sun, and Adena Lampak brought them food at regular intervals, but they didn’t stay. All they would say was that the Url knew that they were there, and to be patient.

  And then the tides came.

  It started a little after dawn. The placid waves below started to kick up audibly and Jesse pulled aside a skin and leaned out over he railing. He waved Cassie over.

  “They can feel it coming,” he said. “I think it kicks up some sand and they can taste it in the water, but I’ve never asked.”

  The extra stories of tower had water licking up higher and higher on them, and Cassie could see the Adena Lampak shifting higher up the towers, abandoning the bottom landings. The waves hadn’t started to crest yet, but they grew more and more severe, even as she watched.

  “What causes that?” she asked. Jesse pointed at the sky.

  “They’ve got a cluster of moons that are just a little bit faster than geostationary,” he said. “Takes them like two months to make it around the planet, from where we stand.”

  “Their months or ours?” Cassie asked.

  “Yours,” Jesse said. “Obviously.”

  She snorted and looked down at the water again. The clear water was quickly turning a murky brown as the waves stirred up the sand.

  “How long does it last?” she asked.

  “A full day, their time,” he said. She looked at him.

  “Seriously?”

  “You want me to explain angular velocity to you?”

  “Shut up.”

  He shrugged.

  “This will be our best bet for when we’ll get to see the Url. If they really do have a war going on, this is about the only time they can let their defenses down.”

  “Where did they find shelter, before they had structures?” Cassie asked.

  “Deep water,” he said. “They don’t remember the time before they had buildings, but anything air-breathing is going to be in danger, trying to make it through this.”

  Cassie took another look down at the waves, thinking that it didn’t look that bad, then turned away as an Adena Lampak, nameless and indistinguishable as ever, brought them a meal.

  A few hours after the waves, the storms started. The day had grown progressively darker, and Cassie had expected one of the placid sea-showers that she’d experienced multiple times already, but now there was lightning and wind stiff enough to periodically spray them with cold, salty mists, despite the fact that they were a hundred feet above the sea. The rain started with a sharp transition and it blew sideways. Cassie and Jesse did their best to secure the skins, but eventually a pair of large Adena Lampak arrived and tied off the skins tight enough to keep the water out, and another brought a stone pan and kindled a fire to light the space. Like at night, someone would return with hunks of blubber of some kind to feed the fire for the next twelve hours, as the storm grew in intensity.

  The towers rocked, and Cassie expressed fears for the outposts, with their single stalk rooting them to the sea floor.

  “This is why they can’t build islands,” Jesse said. “They have to hold up to this, and sand on its own just doesn’t. It always washes away. They know what they’re doing, though. The further away from the equator you are, the worse the storms are. We get the biggest tidal surge, here, but they get ice falling out of the sky, at some of the places they’ve built.”

  “Oh. That makes me feel much better,” Cassie said. Another wall of wind hit the city and the floor shuddered.

  “The Url will see you now,” someone said. Cassie turned to find an Adena Lampak standing in the doorway, water sheeting off of him. Jesse stood and she followed him out of the room and across the walkway into the next room, getting drenched in the short space between contained rooms. There were three more walkways and then a long staircase upwards, and then they stopped. Their guide turned to Jesse.

  “You know the protocols?”

  “I’ve spoken with the Url before.”

  The Adena Lampak nodded and left them. They waited.

  The room was the biggest Cassie had seen since they’d arrived on planet, shaped like a ballroom without a stage. The skins here had been painted or dyed orange and the floor had had something mixed with it to coax the same hue out of it. Pedestals stood at intervals, holding bowls of fire just above eye level, bouncing the light off of the walls and the ceiling to give the entire room a gauzy glow. At the far end of the chamber, there was a cluster of Adena Lampak around a seated pair. They were the first Adena Lampak Cassie had seen who wore any signs of status; clusters of bright stones draped around their necks and fine beads and shells ran down their arms and torsos, forming trailing piles on the floor around them that made faint noises when they moved.

  “The Url,” Jesse said.

  “Which one?” Cassie asked. He gave her a strange smile.

  “You assume the masculine one, don’t you?”

  “What, you want me to prove an American human bias by being surprised that it’s a matriarchal society?” she asked.

  “It’s both of them,” he said. “The Adena Lampak would never trust the executive to an individual. Level-headed as they are, an individual is easier to sway through emotion or manipulation.” He nodded toward the pair. “They’re a mated pair, selected in their youth for their sound minds and a peculiar kind of combative mutual respect that they foster, here. They spend maybe twenty percent of their lives training to become the Url, and they’ll remain Url until one of them dies or they both agree that the next
pair are ready to take over.”

  Cassie watched as they interacted with the crowd around them.

  “Huh.”

  “It’s a system that’s worked for a long time,” Jesse said. “I’ve never heard of a war here, before.”

  “All the populated planets in the universe, and you expect to know the relevant history of all of them,” Cassie muttered. He shrugged.

  “I have favorites.” There was a long pause. “I wish you could have seen Elsa. It was beautiful. The Urls who oversaw its construction were builders. A lot of the new outposts were because of them, and Elsa was…” He sighed. “It’s a loss, to have allowed it to be destroyed.”

  They waited perhaps another thirty minutes as various groups in the room at intervals approached the Url - Urls, Cassie began to think, now - and then left. A tall Adena Lampak with unusually-textured skin turned to face them - old, Cassie wondered, or marked by sickness? - and Jesse took Cassie’s arm and escorted her to the space of floor in front of the Url.

  “Greetings, Palta,” one of them said.

  “Greetings, Url,” Jesse answered.

  “What is she?” the other Url asked.

  “She is human, a largely undocumented race,” Jesse said. The Url turned to Cassie.

  “What have you found here, human?” he asked. Cassie frowned, sensing this was a test. Nothing brilliant occurred to her, so she went with her instinct.

  “Lots of water.”

  The two Urls looked at each other and then zeroed in on her again.

  “Why have you come?”

  She tried to remember Jesse’s answer to that, but sensed that even if she could remember it, it would sound disingenuous. She went with the truth.

  “I love to see things I’ve never seen before,” she said. “Your planet and your people are amazing.”

  They made harmonic noises that originated somewhere deep in their chests and the first one inclined his head to her.

  “What interest do you have in our war?”