by Chloe Garner
They started walking, and Cassie once again found herself breathing and walking with the rhythm of the music, motioning greetings to several of the Dinalae that they passed.
“This place suits you,” Jesse said.
“Why is that?” she asked as they rounded a bend out of the park and into the city again.
“This is who you should have been,” he told her.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, realizing that she said it both in English and Dinalae simultaneously. He laughed.
“Jumper, analyst, soldier, orphan,” he said. “You are all of those things, and you’ve thrived like that, if you were none of them, but if you’d been Dinalae instead… This is who you were supposed to be. You wouldn’t have had to shape yourself to adapt, here.”
“A pastel-colored hippopotamus in a leotard?” she asked. He snorted.
“Don’t let them hear you call them that. They think you look like a severely malnourished tree branch. One that’s trying to hide it under an awful lot of straight-woven cloth.”
“To each his own,” Cassie said. He laughed and tucked her hand through his arm.
“Well, which features would you like to get a room overlooking?” he asked. “The park or the city?”
“The city,” she said.
“This way, then, ma’am,” he said. She grinned and he dragged her on down the street, his sense of rhythm jarringly lacking, but made up for by his enthusiasm.
It wasn’t Gana, but walking down the main roads, Cassie saw dozens of species out walking, eating, or just sitting and watching the world go by. A few spoke Dinalae, but she caught fragments of Gana that she could understand, and bits of other languages that only just teased her implant with the hint of meaning.
This was why she jumped.
Jesse let her walk in silence, only motioning at things he thought she might have missed as they went by. Maybe twenty minutes later, they turned into a building and Jesse approached a pair of men sitting on opposing sides of a gameboard of some kind. One of them addressed Jesse in Dinalae.
“Gana, I’m afraid,” Jesse said. “We are looking for accommodation.”
“Happy to help,” the man said. “What are you looking for?”
Cassie’s mind wandered for a moment as Jesse negotiated with the salesman, looking around the vast first floor. Various Dinalae were playing what appeared to be board games, a few of them against foreign terrestrials that Cassie didn’t recognize. Dinalae wandered from match to match, watching and commenting to each other.
“Is this normal?” Cassie asked in Dinalae to one of the men Jesse was speaking with. There was a sparkle in his reply as he realized she spoke.
“Most days,” he told her.
“What is it?”
“Complicated.”
It wasn’t a dismissive reply; there was humor in his tone, if motion could have a tone. She turned to look at the players again, but something about the body language of the two Dinalae men brought her attention back.
“Wait a minute,” she said in Gana. “What room did you ask for?”
“Top floor,” Jesse said. He shrugged with a grin. “Best in the hotel.”
“Not that one,” Cassie said. The men watched her with undisguised humor.
“Why not?” Jesse asked. “We may as well enjoy ourselves.”
She shook her head again, torn between reading the two men and watching the games behind her. The non-language sway of one of the men altered slightly and she grinned.
“It’s the honeymoon suite, isn’t it?” she asked.
She got the equivalent of a pair of matched shrugs and a wink. She grinned harder.
“Pick something else,” she said to Jesse and turned away again.
“Of course,” Jesse said and resumed his conversation. She laughed silently, wondering what a Dinalae honeymoon suite would look like.
Might have been worth letting it happen, just to see, if it wouldn’t have been so awkward. One of the men made a coughing noise, their way of drawing attention to someone who wasn’t watching them speak, and Cassie turned again.
“You two are a handsome match,” he said in Dinalae. Cassie hoped she didn’t blush in reply.
“We aren’t a match at all,” she answered, hoping she got the connotations right to be as friendly as she meant it. He gave her a suggestive shrug - suggestive! - and glanced at Jesse.
“Look like it to us,” he said.
Cassie searched for the words she needed, but couldn’t find them.
“We’re just a pair of tree branches to you,” she finally answered in Gana. He laughed out loud, as did his companion. Jesse looked at her as though he knew the content of the conversation he’d missed, then pulled the electronic strip off of his arm to pay for their lodgings. For a moment, Cassie felt awkward, like a prom date, but she shook it off and turned back to look at the games going on in the room.
She wanted to stay long enough to see what the premise was, but Jesse finished his transaction and they went to a small room off of the main lobby where Jesse punched a few buttons. They jumped up to a large, colorful room with a full-glass wall that overlooked the city and its perpetual sunset.
“The glass will black out when you’re ready for bed,” Jesse said.
Suddenly, Cassie was very tired.
“Yeah,” she said. He nodded.
“Yeah.”
He pointed up the wide stairway.
“I’ve got some stuff to set up for tomorrow,” he said. “Take your pick of the rooms and I’ll get everything put away down here.”
She yawned and made her way up to the rooms, taking the first turn she came to and collapsing into a bed that she never even saw.
She slept late - odd - and woke when Jesse brought her a breakfast of various fruits and grains, everything very nearly in its whole state.
“They don’t really believe in cooking things, here,” he explained, picking at a bowl of what looked an awful lot like light green rice.
“So what are we doing today?” she asked as she ate a fruit she recognized from the day before.
“I got passes to a couple of things today, and there’s a festival later on in one of the outer cities that I think you’ll enjoy.”
“Outer cities?”
“Civilization here is complicated,” he said. “Political boundaries aren’t as simple as on Earth, because the civilized space is so limited. Cities that are aligned to the main city ended up merging with them centuries ago, but they maintained a distinct culture. They have their own religions and their own holidays, even their own days, which means there’s a lot of stuff going on, most of the time, if you’re willing to travel.”
“How far?”
“Five, six miles,” Jesse said.
“That’s the next city over?”
“It was, a long time ago,” he said. “You’ll see.”
She accepted this and finished breakfast.
A new set of clothes had materialized for her, ones in a wrap style that emphasized the shape of her body as she moved.
“You do pick the most skin-tight stuff you can find, don’t you?” she muttered.
“It’s the style here,” Jesse answered. She wasn’t sure if she had intended him to hear her. “If you’re going to speak the language, you have to have the ability to use the same level of nuance as the Dinalae.”
She reconsidered her reply, waving him out of the room for her to change and get ready.
He met her in the hallway in a not-dissimilar set of clothes, all one piece, the kind of clothing that would only be modest on people who were in good shape. Cassie’s body bore the scars of long years of training accidents, conflict on jumps, and something the analysts called jumpers’ marks, a slight texturing on her arms and face that tended to show up after a year or so as a jumper, not to mention the scars from her travel with Jesse, and she was beginning to show signs of age as well. She missed being nineteen.
Jesse seemed oblivious to any discomfort sh
e might have been in, showing as much skin as she was, and leaving as little to the imagination as possible, elsewhere, as he grabbed her wrist and reached across to trigger a jump.
The world flickered and she found herself in a classic amphitheater. The ground hummed with a distant rhythm, but the higher tones Cassie had slept to were missing.
“What do they do here?” Cassie asked.
“Concerts, plays,” Jesse said. She looked around.
“Why do they need a stadium if they don’t speak out loud?” she asked. He grinned.
“Cassie D.C., I believe I have underestimated you again,” he said. She raised an eyebrow at him.
“Sorry, it sounds patronizing to say it out loud,” he said. “They isolate sound here so that they can produce their own music for the performances.”
“They see well enough at this distance?” Cassie asked.
“They have stage voices, too,” Jesse said. The amphitheater was filling with Dinalae mostly, the same kind of mix that had been in the hotel the previous day, with an ever-new population of one- and two-off foreign terrestrials that Cassie struggled not to stare at.
“I wish Troy were here,” she said. It was out before she had thought about it, just a flash of a feeling that took words. Jesse found a pair of seats, much too wide for the two of them, and settled against the stone backrest.
“I don’t care who you are, having friends like him is about the most valuable thing you can have,” he said. Cassie was startled.
“That’s awfully sentimental of you,” she said.
“I can’t decide if it would be more cruel to take him on one jump or none,” Jesse said. Cassie sighed. She’d wondered the same thing.
“He couldn’t,” she said. “He couldn’t just disappear, and they’d never let him come, officially.”
“They would if they thought they could get something out of him,” Jesse said. “But I’d never put him in that spot.”
“No, but for me it’s fine,” Cassie teased.
“Like I said, they’ve surprised me how far they were willing to go.”
Cassie nodded, watching the amphitheater continuing to fill. The sky today was more orange and less pink. She could see the light patterns that indicated where the three suns were, but she couldn’t actually see them. From the hotel, they were visible out on the horizon, like the last moments of sunset captured in an eternal revolution. Cassie had been trying to understand the way the solar system was configured, that morning, and Jesse had explained that the planet was part of what he had called a ‘puddle of debris’ in the middle of an evenly-spaced triplet of stars. The stars had tiny, rocky planets that orbited them, individually, and a long tail of complex gas giants that orbited all three. The only one that was habitable was this one, and only at the poles.
And here she sat, ready to watch a play or a concert put on by the only race in the universe that communicated through dance.
The universe was an amazing place.
Her mind drowsed through similarly silly thoughts for a bit, and then the next thing she was aware of was Jesse elbowing her. She started awake and found the stage at the bottom of the amphitheater was occupied and the entire space was filled with a new, multi-layered music that played over top of the same beat that the ground was transmitting. Cassie blinked hard.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“You fell asleep,” Jesse said incredulously. “You just got up an hour ago.”
She shook her head.
“The food here does a number on me,” she said. “I’m still sleepy.”
Jesse raised an eyebrow at her, but turned to continue watching the play. After a few minutes, Cassie leaned over to him.
“Why did you pick this, if you can’t understand any of it?” she asked. He leaned toward her, eyes on the stage.
“It’s like your opera,” he said. “They’re expressive enough for me to keep up.”
She grinned and leaned back over her knees, trying to catch up with what was going on in the plot. The actors were engrossing, and the plot was complex but not confusing. She was quickly taken with it, not just for what it was, but for how it looked. They clearly had never considered costume, but the motion, simply by itself, was mesmerizing. Cassie tore her eyes away from the stage for a moment to look at the audience all the way around the theater. Almost to a person, the spectators were leaned forward, many scooted to the front edge of their seats, elbows on knees, or equivalent body parts. She noticed that Jesse had his eyes closed, which she found odd, but at the same time fitting. Even the music was enough to tell a story.
She shook her head again, trying to clear the fuzzy feeling of still being half-asleep, and let the story take her attention completely.
They went shopping, meeting up with a concierge who escorted them through some of the highest-end shops in the city, where the staffs were more attentive than Cassie was comfortable with. She found herself looking for places to sit where they might not find her for a few minutes. In the end, though, she was dressed, shod, and accessorized to Jesse’s approval.
“Tell me again why we’re doing this?” she said as they walked out of a shop where they had wound a long, stiff cord around her arm from wrist to shoulder, then attached to it what she was pretty sure the salesman had explained to her was petrified fruit - but that couldn’t be right, could it? - as bangles.
“I told you, you’ll see,” Jesse said. She grunted, flicking one of the teal beads hanging from her elbow.
“Did he really say that I’m wearing raisins?”
Jesse snorted.
“I wouldn’t let them hear you call them that,” he said. “Takes two hundred years to get them like that.”
“Two hundred year old raisins,” she muttered. She had to admit they were pretty, but she didn’t have to admit it out loud.
He laughed and tucked her hand through his arm.
“You don’t have to wear it for long,” he said. “We’re going there now.”
“Where? And why don’t you have to wear anything silly?”
He had bought a few things to go with his original clothing, but no one had pushed him into foot wraps that made him look like his shoes were untied, nor was he wearing any fossilized foods.
“You know the answer to that,” he said good-naturedly.
“Shut up,” she said. She was drawing attention from Dinalae in the street, all of it friendly, but some of it was more open and direct than Cassie wanted to deal with.
“What exactly did you do to me?” she asked. She saw a mischievous smile flicker across his face.
“Probably shouldn’t throw any of that away when you’re done with it,” he said.
“Palta, you talk. Now.”
He grinned.
“You needed to be fashionably dressed,” he said. “And I have something that looks an awful lot like an unlimited budget.”
“What did you do?”
He coughed.
“Petrified glams from Dinal are considered hard currency a few places in the universe,” he said, “if you can make change.”
“I’ve already been mugged once with you, Palta,” she said. “I have no interest in doing it again.”
“Oh, come on. Look how happy this place is.”
“Yes, it’s all song birds and apple jacks,” she said. “How much is this get up worth, in real numbers?”
“Apple jacks?” he asked. “I’m not familiar with that one.”
“Something my mom said. I don’t understand it either. Stop dodging.”
“Almost no one on the planet could afford to dress like that,” he said.
“Why?” Cassie asked. He caught that she wasn’t asking what made the clothing expensive.
“I told you,” he said, nodding his head once, emphatically, with great humor. “You’ll see.”
Another Dinalae acknowledged her openly, this one looking for a polite response. She tried her best and he went on. She hoped she’d lived up to his expectations.
They turned down a wide pathway lined with fruit trees and ornate landscaping and a pair of Dinalae came to greet them.
“Welcome, Palta,” the first said.
“I understand you speak,” the second motioned to Cassie.
“Still learning,” she answered.
“You look lovely,” he said. She thanked him and he motioned that she should walk with him.
“All of our guests are escorted, here,” he said. “Please let me know if anything seems strange that I could explain for you.”
“Jesse,” she said in English. “This is a party, isn’t it?”
“What was your first clue?”
“You will pay,” she growled, and he laughed.
“Don’t tell me they didn’t train you for formal events,” he said.
“Not as a guest,” she said.
“Do you miss your uniform?” he teased.
In truth, she did. It was easy to hide behind it during elite gatherings, just a member of an entourage for a high-ranking officer or politician who had managed to clear a jump for a specific event or invitation. Keep her face flat and military-alert and she could watch all manner of things that were normally inappropriate for direct observation. Jesse had put her on display, instead, where she would be required to observe social etiquette, paying attention to who she spoke to and how much to ensure that she established the right relations and didn’t burn any bridges by mistake.
She growled under her breath again, then addressed her escort in Dinalae.
“I apologize for my rudeness, but I prefer to have sharp words remain private. My friend didn’t prepare me for the importance of your event.”
He laughed.
“Palta always have their reasons,” he said. “Though it has been some time since we’ve seen a Palta here. We were beginning to believe you had gone into seclusion.”
“My race is cautious with our contact outside of ourselves, these days,” she said, stunning herself. Why was she letting him think she was Palta?
The tone of his reply changed, now thoughtful and perhaps a little guarded.
“I’m glad it wasn’t something we did.”