Cultural Exchange - part 1

Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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sasha
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Cultural Exchange - part 1

Post by sasha » February 17th, 2019, 3:48 pm


“Excuse me, Secretary…” The Adjutant seemed apologetic, almost embarrassed, to be breaking into her thoughts. “There’s a delegation outside to see you.”

Secretary K’Tahl did not look up from the hologram before her. She clacked her mandibles in annoyance. “Delegation?” she thought. “Delegation of whom?”

“From the village, Secretary,” the Adjutant replied. “Two members of the ruling council wish to see you.”

“Now? They wish to see me now? Why didn’t they go through channels and make an appointment first?”

“They did, Secretary. Last week.”

“Oh, K’rchh,” she muttered in exasperation. “Is it the same two who have been protesting the construction of the landing field?”

“Yes, Secretary, though it’s not the construction itself they object to, it’s the location.”

“Yes, yes… With all the logistical problems we’ve been having, it completely slipped my mind.” Air hissed from her breathing sac as she rose on three of her legs and stretched the other two. “Give them my apologies and send them in.”

Her mental image of the Adjutant winked out as he turned his attention to the visitors, giving her time to refresh herself on the language and customs of the indigenous people. Because the vast majority of them lacked telepathy, their interpersonal communication consisted largely of sounds and gestures, in a language rife with inconsistencies and ephemeral constructs that seemed to become extinct just as she managed to grasp their meaning well enough to use. Then new ones would arise spontaneously, often obscure metaphors alluding to the workings of their own anatomy. She found it baffling, frustrating, and occasionally a trifle offensive.

She was one of many minor Hahnn officials assigned here to administer their affairs after The Great Conflict. It was their task to help them rebuild this world as it had been before the Hahnn armies had intervened in the Pleonites’ attempts to annex the planet as another of their own. Administering these headstrong people in the interim was proving to be a huge bureaucratic headache. And yet, their customs were not lacking in charm. Their visual art was rich and varied, their ancient traditions of music and literature unique and diverse - and a marvelous beverage they called “koko” was unlike anything found on her home world.

The two natives entered the room and made their gesture of obeisance, a fluid bending forward of their bodies. Lacking exoskeletons, there seemed no clear delineation between their thorax and abdomen, which gave them a flexibility her kind lacked. Towering over them, she returned the gesture as best she could without toppling over.

They seemed so small and soft, compared to the rugged insectile forms of the Hahnn. They possessed only four limbs, two of which they used for locomotion, the other two for manipulation. The limbs themselves were rigid, like hers, each with a flexible joint where it joined the body, but possessed only a single bending point roughly halfway down its length. However, these limbs terminated in a structure that compensated for their limited articulation: a cluster of smaller sub-limbs, with multiple joints and an opposing member capable of touching each of the others. It made them enviably dexterous and capable of crafting artifacts of fine detail.

“Good morning, Secretary,” one of them said. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with us.” She guessed this one was the female. Though they draped fabric over their bodies, the female thorax was characterized by two ventral swellings evident despite the tunic. (She never quite got over her horrified revulsion upon learning that these swellings were glands that secreted an ichor fed to their young.)

The other was probably male. Besides lacking the ventral bulges, he was slightly taller, more coarsely featured, and his thorax somewhat narrower at the bottom than at the top – the female’s flared out slightly instead. Their heads were similar, very roughly spherical with a pair of forward-facing eyes and a number of orifices placed about, one of which served the dual purpose of feeding and creating the sounds by which they communicated. Each was topped by a growth of fur. On this male it only wrapped around the sides and back, leaving a shiny dome of hide exposed at its apex. Hers capped the entire structure, and was a different color – a pale flaxen hue, whereas his was dark, flecked with white. It was their custom to crop and trim this growth into various lengths and shapes, though she had observed individuals who seemed to eschew this practice. The lower portion of the males’ heads were often covered with fur as well, though it was common for them to remove it altogether, such as this one did.

When he spoke, it was in a lower pitch than the female’s calls. This was also typical of their sexual dimorphism, she had noted. “It is a great pleasure to see you again, Madam Secretary,” he said with a forward tilt of his head, an attenuated version of the bow he had made upon first entering. She found the elaborate formality in his use of the honorific amusingly quaint, but was pleased by it nonetheless

“It is good to see you again as well, Councilman Taylor,” she buzzed, remembering to use his own title in reciprocation. To the female she added, “And you, Councilman O’Connor.” She unfolded her forelimbs to expose her vulnerable underside in her kind’s gesture of submission and humility. “I trust you are here about the landing field.”

“We are, Madam Secretary,” Taylor replied. “We understand its importance to you and have no desire to impede your efforts to establish reliable supply lines from your home world – but we wonder why it was necessary for you to choose a site with such – spiritual – importance to us.”

She checked an irritated clack of her mandibles. Spiritual? She was unsure of the word’s meaning, and annoyed at being shown, however unintentionally, her own ignorance. “You are aware that our ships’ exhaust is highly…” she groped for the word “…lethal to your kind. The constituents are… volatile… unstable… they emit harmful…”

“Radioactive, Madam Secretary,” the female, O’Connor, interjected. “We understand that your ships operate by nuclear propulsion, so that the radiation from their fuel and exhaust is toxic to us in ways they are not to your kind.”

“Radioactive,” the Secretary repeated. “Yes, thank you, Councilman O’Connor. That is the term I was struggling for.” She wanted to lament the difficulty of communicating in such an awkward medium when she was accustomed to telepathic thought-transference, but thought it better to remain on-topic – and to keep her own insecurities out of view. “The site we have chosen for the ships’ arrival and departure is well away from your own population center, yet readily accessible to it. A catastrophic accident could still have deleterious effects upon your people, but will be much mitigated by the distance. We would have time to take countermeasures before the winds carry the… radioactive… your way.”

“We are most grateful for your concern, Madam, and we thank you for it,” Taylor responded. “But we would like to bring to your attention that there already exists an abandoned facility once used by our own armed forces during The Conflict that could serve your purposes equally well. It is somewhat closer than the site you have chosen, but may already possess some of the infrastructure you require.”

Oh, these people, she thought in exasperation. Unasked, we came to their aid to repel Pleonite aggression – though, admittedly, not entirely out of altruism – and now we own them. It takes more paperwork to govern them than to requisition what I need to build that damned landing field. She inflated her air sac and held it for a few seconds while her impatience died down. “That is true, Councilman, we are aware of that facility and undertook a study some time ago examining the feasibility of recommissioning it. However it was badly damaged in The Conflict, and would require extensive reconstruction to be put back into service. Most of it would have to be torn down completely and rebuilt from scratch. The additional cost of that demolition – not even including removal of the rubble – would put me far over the budget I have been given.”

“We are prepared to do much of that work ourselves – or rather, alongside you,” O’Connor said. “We would be willing to place our resources at your disposal. We could provide you with much of the needed manpower, and could secure construction equipment to haul away the debris. You would retain full administrative rights for the project – and we would provide whatever materials and contract labor your own budget could not.”

An interesting offer, she thought. But from what she’d seen of them, she doubted they would long remain willingly subservient to what amounted to a benign occupation force. While her job was to get them back on their feet, their urge for self-governance had to be kept in check until the Pleonite menace had been permanently defused. Only then could local control be returned to the populace.

Still…

“You mentioned a word…” she began. “Spiritual…”

“You are unfamiliar with it?” O’Connor asked.

“It is in our glossary,” the Secretary answered a bit stiffly. “But its full meaning, its significance, contains subtleties we… that I… find elusive.” She was at once uneasy and relieved to make the admission. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to…”

“Madam Secretary,” Taylor interrupted. He seemed agitated, somehow, but in a positive way, as though trying not quite successfully to suppress some inner elation. Another native would simply say he was excited. “This is precisely what we had hoped to convey to you.”

O’Connor continued for him. “Perhaps you would allow us to escort you to the site and show you the meaning of the word.”

The Secretary’s antennae trembled in confusion. “I have already seen it,” she began. “Many times…”

“Yes, Madam, we know,” O’Connor insisted, “but not in the context we would like to present it. We have a saying here on our world: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. It means that the essence of some things – scenes, places, objects, entities – cannot be adequately described in few words, but can instantly be grasped intuitively when experienced directly.”

Intuitively… another word she was only vaguely familiar with. Against her better judgement, the energetic enthusiasm of these two was wearing down her official reserve. Against her better judgement, she realized she had grown rather fond of them as well, despite their insistent haranguing. She was coming to see this persistence, this dogged optimism, as one their species’ most endearing – if aggravating – traits.

She buzzed in resignation. “Very well,” she said. “When would you like this viewing to occur?”

O’Connor made an inarticulate noise, a loud, sharp expulsion of air – the Secretary believed it was what they called a ‘laugh’. “At your earliest convenience, Secretary!” she exclaimed. “But it must be after dark – at night. Preferably sometime in the following week.”

Her antennae continued their confused trembling. “Why after dark?” she wanted to know. “We go into a kind of stasis during the dark phase.”

“As do we,” Taylor said. “But we hope you will understand why when the time comes.”

She considered for a moment. “Set something up with the Adjutant,” she finally said. “I shall accompany you to the site where you can show me what it is you wish to show me.”

O’Connor made the noise again, and bubbled, “Excellent! Oh, wonderful! Thank you so much Madam Secretary! We shall provide transport – and we’ll even bring cocoa! We know how fond of it you are!”

Koko! “Well,” the Secretary replied in what she hoped was proper use of the rhetorical device they called ‘humor’, “for koko I might be willing to face a Pleonite squadron by myself.”

Taylor and O’Connor both made the noise (though it seemed less spontaneous and more formal than the female’s earlier outbursts), and let the Secretary escort them to the outer chamber to meet with the Adjutant. Alone again, she tried returning her attention to the hologram; but it was not only because her train of thought had been broken that she had lost interest in perusing the most recent cargo manifest from the Hahnn home world.


....part 2 ---> viewtopic.php?f=98&t=32135
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"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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